Not everybody was pleased with the success of the Bolshevik insurrection. As we staggered out into the daylight, blinking and hungover, we saw walls bearing pleas to RESIST THE BOLSHEVIK TAKEOVER! “A bit late for that,” Genya said. We bought all the newspapers. Gorky’s Novaya Zhizn called for a new government that would unite all socialist parties and criticized the SRs and the Mensheviks for walking out of the Congress of Soviets, letting the Bolsheviks have the field. I thought of Father’s letter, criticizing the Kadets for walking out this summer: Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you?

But Pravda—the paper of the Petrograd Soviet, remade from Rabochy Put’—shot back, saying that the people had struck down the tyranny of the nobles in February and now the tyranny of the bourgeoisie was at an end. The Kadet paper predicted that the Bolshevik coup would last a mere day or two before it crumbled under its own ineptitude. “They would know all about that,” Zina said.

Within twenty-four hours, the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land were adopted by the Congress of Soviets, proving that the Bolsheviks had the will to do what the government had endlessly debated but had not been able to accomplish. In a single day, the assembled delegates legislated three basic popular demands: they called for immediate negotiation for peace, without annexations or indemnities; they ordered confiscation of all land from nobility, landlords, and clergy for distribution to the peasants; and they set a date for elections to the Constituent Assembly—November 12, three weeks away. It felt like a dam bursting.


For my part, I was having another revolution. For the first time I lived as others did, standing with my bucket in the courtyard pumping water, using a shared toilet on the landing of the stairway. I stood in line for bread. I often literally sang for my supper, varying my repertoire as seemed appropriate—work songs, sea chanteys, love songs. And I never complained, tried never to show myself as the bourgeois miss. I had finally gotten off Nevsky Prospect, Comrade Kraskin.

But there was one aspect of life on Grivtsova Alley that nobody seemed to notice but me: roaches, fleas, bedbugs. Genya never said a word about the infestation. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend focusing on such trivialities when we had the Future to forge on the anvil of our verse—or vice versa—but it was hard to think about anything else for more than a few minutes at a time when you were being eaten alive by small voracious creatures.

I studied the other women in the queue for water as I moved forward on the plank that crossed the icy puddle in the courtyard. There must be something they did about it that eluded the poets of the Artel. Some secret. But whom to ask? The rangy woman in front of me worked the handle of the pump, briskly filling her bucket. I asked if she had bugs in her flat and what we could do about them.

“Why not read them some poetry?” she said, and the women behind me snickered. She switched out her full pail for an empty one and glanced up into my face. Her demeanor softened. “You don’t know anything, do you, devushka? Not a thing.” She snorted. “Tell those boys to drag the bedding down here and beat the devil out of it. With shoes if you have to. Scrub the place down and put the legs of the beds in kerosene. That’ll fix you right up.” I watched her pick up her pails and straighten slowly under the weight.

Bozhe moi, was that what they were doing? I hoped the neighbors didn’t smoke in bed. Now I was glad we slept in our clothes. It would make for an easier getaway.

Not only were we infested, but everyone smoked makhorka, and Anton spat his sunflower-seed shells right onto the floor, daring me to say something. One cold November day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “All right!” I yelled. “All right! Fine! Beautiful!” And I grabbed everything from the floor, piled it onto the table—papers, shoes, socks, books, shirts, slippers—and swept the room with a savage broom I borrowed from the woman next door. Boiled water on the stove, threw it on the floorboards and into the corners, and scrubbed it with a brush and a scrap of lye soap I had managed to buy. I didn’t care how much the others teased me, calling me “housewife” and “Mama.” It was worth it. All of us were covered with bites and boils. I berated myself for my naïveté. I’d brought books and a silver-handled hairbrush from home but hadn’t thought to bring a towel or soap or, God help me, a set of sheets. Any working-class housewife would have known better.

Genya and Sasha dragged the mattresses, bedding, and divan cushions down to the yard for me and we beat them with slats of wood. Feathers flew. When we brought the clean bedding back to the clean flat, no one said a word. Although I was sure everyone appreciated the lessening of the infestation, they had to feign indifference so they wouldn’t jeopardize their bohemian cachet. Anton pointedly restored the gritty underlayer as soon as he could.

I developed new respect for housewives—what a lot of work even the tiniest bit of cleanliness entailed. To wash, you pumped water, brought heavy pails up the flights of stairs. If you wanted it hot, you boiled it on the small stove, and sometimes it tipped over—what a mess. To wash clothes was a monumental task. Anton loathed seeing female laundry strung across the room. The domestic aspects of life must have recalled some childhood indignities for him. He believed somehow he’d emerged full grown from literature via some sort of immaculate mental conception. He held up my newly washed panties for general inspection. “Are these the drawers that launched a thousand ships?”


And yet despite the dirt and the cold, the battle with bugs and the spartan diet, life in our small room was ferociously interesting. We read and talked and argued and read some more. On the shelves, Apollinaire and Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky pressed up against The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Balmont’s translations of Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dostoyevsky faced off with Rimbaud. They even had my little book, This Transparent Twilight.

“I wouldn’t fall in love with just anyone,” Genya said when I’d first noticed, putting his arm around my waist, burying his nose in my hair.

“Baaah,” said Gigo. They snorted and whinnied and oinked. Any sign of tenderness or lust brought mockery from our fellows. Only Sasha tolerated us—like Genya, he hid a romantic heart inside his futurist breast.

The difficulty of maintaining a love affair in a room occupied by anywhere from four to eight talkative poets couldn’t be overestimated. Genya and I slept most nights as chastely as Tristan and Isolde. The frustration! His chest against my back, we furtively made love while the others slept—and God knew whether they really did. If the divan creaked the smallest bit, Anton would call out, “Lo, the turtledove shits on my head!” And I was not by nature a quiet girl in bed. How ironic—in the gold and green room on the Catherine Canal, I could keen and moan, but in this liberated milieu, I had to stifle my cries in a pillow. A wonder that the poor got children at all. Though we knew that coitus interruptus was not the most efficient method of contraception, we didn’t always have the money for preservativy. And if I became pregnant? It would be Genya’s child—the ultimate futuristic improvisation.

But these difficulties and irritations were small sacrifice compared to the camaraderie and improvisation of our artistic life. I felt liberated. I’d made the leap, left my family and that old world behind. No more straddling stools. Such a relief to be wholly myself, to live without lying, to reach out, to try new things, to let curiosity unfold. Every day was an adventure, and I rested my head on Genya’s broad chest every night. He always smelled good to me, of grass and wood.

But still I itched—my hair, my groin, my armpits. I smelled so bad that I sometimes woke myself up at night. I’d never been so dirty in my life. And what would I do when my period came? Everyone in the room would know. I could ask Zina, but she hated me so much.

“Can you smell me?” I whispered to Genya.

“The banya’s right around the corner.” He shifted behind me, pulled me against him, his breath in my ear. I was mortified at his evasion.

The banya… akh, I knew where it was. I went by it every day, a windowless storefront on Kazanskaya Street. I didn’t want to tell him that the idea terrified me. I’d never been to a public banya. I knew they would laugh at me if they knew. What kind of Russian are you? But Father was strictly opposed to them, felt they were unsanitary, breeding grounds for disease. The toilet on the landing was bad enough, but at least you were alone in there.

“It’s not so bad,” Genya said. “Zina can show you.”

“Zina can show you what?” she asked from the table. No such thing as privacy in a Poverty Artel.

Somehow Genya assumed that Zina and I would become friends. What he didn’t know about women. He never realized that Zina had considered him hers, that in her overheated imagination, I had broken up their love affair with my false bourgeois charms and sexual tricks—though Genya swore there’d never been anything between them. She dogged me, trying to diminish me in his eyes, like a little terrier, more aggressive to compensate for her small size. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me, as if trying to figure out where to slip in the dagger. I’d be damned if I would admit my squeamishness to her.


That dull gray November day, people shouldered past me—a man hurrying by with a shabby briefcase, a woman fighting the raw wind with what looked like a huge sack of doorknobs. I couldn’t stand there forever in the cold. I steeled myself and pushed open the battered green door marked ZHENSHCHINY. Women.