Summer of 1918. Mayakovsky and the Briks spent it at a dacha in Levashovo. They had fled there from the cholera outbreak in the city. The company entertained themselves with mushroom picking and playing cards. It was there that Mayakovsky wrote *Mystery-Buff*.
Guests rented entire dachas or separate rooms in houses and specially built boarding houses. One such boarding house was the dacha at 8 Chkalova Street, officially addressed as Sovetskaya Street, house 7–9, letter D. Today, the house is known as the “Mayakovsky dacha” — despite the fact that the poet never owned it. He spent only one season there.
That summer, another cholera epidemic raged in Petrograd. “An apocalyptic angel poured another bowl on our paradise Sovdepia: a fierce cholera outbreak broke out here. In Petersburg, there were already up to 1,000 cases a day. One can imagine the fury of the Bolsheviks! Clearly, cholera is counter-revolutionary, but it cannot be shot,” Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary.
From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s letter to his sister Olga dated July 15, 1918:
“I live not in Petersburg, but in a village, 50 versts away. When I received your first letter, I called the Briks’ servant to immediately send you money, knowing it was urgent, so I couldn’t write anything for the transfer myself despite all my wishes. At the first opportunity, I wanted to send you a letter, but now no one from us goes to the city, nor do I, because the cholera in Petersburg is terrible. Today I accidentally received your letter (they came to me for my name day) and am answering immediately.”
What Mayakovsky’s dacha life was like and what the poet did outside the city
In the same letter, Mayakovsky briefly describes his dacha “menu”: “They’re feeding me so much milk here (about six glasses daily) that if I grow an udder, tell mom not to be surprised.”
This milk diet was no coincidence. Other products were scarce in the post-revolutionary city, and the cows from the village were always famous among Petrograd residents for their tasty milk. Several years later, in the former estate of the Levashov counts, “Osinovaya Roscha,” an exemplary dairy farm was organized “instead of the former noble amusements.”
But what Mayakovsky remembered about the Levashovo dacha was not only the milk. The poet’s biographer Bengt Jangfeldt calls the village a “real Lyublyandiya,” meaning that it was here that the first, happiest months of the three-way romance between Mayakovsky and the Brik couple took place.
From Bengt Jangfeldt’s book *The Stake Is Life. Vladimir Mayakovsky and His Circle*:
“Lilya, Osip, and Mayakovsky spent the vacation together… In Levashovo, they rented three rooms with full board. Mayakovsky painted landscapes, they picked mushrooms, and in the evenings played cards, but not for money: a certain number of points meant you had to wash Mayakovsky’s razor, a higher number obliged you to chase mosquitoes out of the room in the evening; the harshest punishment was a trip to the station for a newspaper in rainy weather. Between painting, mushroom picking, and card playing, Mayakovsky worked on the play *Mystery-Buff* — a revolutionary extravaganza staged for the first anniversary of the October Revolution.”
Here is how Lilya Brik herself recalled dacha life: “Every day we were fed salted fish with dried peas. Bread and sugar were brought from the city by the maid Polya. Polya baked bread in metal boxes from Bormann’s ‘George’ cookies — rye, scalded, tasty. We went mushroom picking. There were many mushrooms, but only russulas, though beautiful and colorful. We gave them to the kitchen to fry. In the evenings, we played cards, ‘king’… Between landscapes, ‘king,’ food, and mushrooms, Mayakovsky read us the lines of *Mystery* he had just written. He read cheerfully, easily. We rejoiced at every excerpt, got used to the piece, and by the end of summer it turned out that *Mystery-Buff* was finished and that we knew it by heart.”
In early July 1918, Lilya Brik’s younger sister Elsa Triolle visited the dacha. On the steamer *Ongermanland*, she and their mother Elena Yuryevna Berman were preparing to leave Petrograd for Stockholm, emigrating.
“We stopped by Lilya’s. No one was home: Volodya and Lilya had gone together to Levashovo near Petrograd. For mom, such a change in Lilya’s life, for which she was completely unprepared, was a severe blow. She did not want to see Mayakovsky and was ready to leave without saying goodbye to Lilya. I went to Levashovo alone. It was very hot. Lilya, sunburned to blisters, lay in a dim room; Volodya silently paced back and forth. I don’t remember what we talked about or how we said goodbye… A subconscious conviction that someone else’s private life is something inviolable prevented me not only from asking what would happen next, how the lives of the people closest and dearest to me would turn out, but even from showing that I noticed the new state of affairs.”
But the most important part of Mayakovsky’s life at the dacha was still working on new poems and sketches.
“Volodya,” Lilya Brik recalled, “wrote poems constantly — during lunch, walks, conversations with a girl, business meetings — always! He muttered, gesturing slightly on the go. No company disturbed him — it even helped.”
Literary scholar Yevgeny Antipov assessed the role of dacha realities in the creation of *Mystery-Buff* this way: “Most likely, Mayakovsky walked here on foot and composed poems during that time. If this place influenced the creation of the poem, it was exclusively because of the walks. I think there were problems with electric trains during that revolutionary time, and this was the real working state.”
In September, the Briks and Mayakovsky left Levashovo and never returned. In March 1919, the poet moved from Petrograd to Moscow.
After 1918, the boarding house in Levashovo served as a residential building, a clinic, and even a local maternity hospital. Eventually, the Mayakovsky dacha, along with several neighboring houses, was transferred to the Russian Post as a recreation base.
In 2014, the owners decided to sell the plot with buildings for demolition and new construction. However, no buyers were found then or later. Perhaps potential investors were deterred by the monument status that the Mayakovsky dacha holds. In 2016, this status was confirmed again. By the decision of the KGIOP, the building became an object of cultural heritage of regional significance — “Dacha (wooden 2-story).” The building is abandoned and continues to deteriorate. Currently, restoration work is underway.
Sources:
https://paperpaper.ru/sto-let-nazad-v-peterburge-tozhe-busheva/
Photo: Alexey Shishkin
