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today’s petrified crap. That suicide was, as Lev Davidovich knew well, the dramatic confirmation that more turbulent times had begun, that the last embers of the marriage of convenience between the revolution and art had gone out, with the predictable sacrifice of art: times in which a man like Mayakovsky, disciplined even to the point of self-annihilation, could feel the disdain of those in power boring into the back of his head, those for whom poets and poetry were aberrations on whom they could perhapsrely to reaffirm their preeminence and whom they could do without when they didn’t need them.
    Lev Davidovich recalled that many years before he’d written that history had conquered Tolstoy, but had not broken him. To the end, that genius had been able to maintain his precious gift for moral indignation and thus directed his cry of “I cannot be silent!” against the aristocracy. But Mayakovsky, forcing himself to be a believer, had remained silent and thus ended up broken. He lacked the courage to go into exile when others did so; to stop writing when others broke their pens. He insisted on offering his poetry to political activity and sacrificed his art and his own spirit with that gesture; he pushed himself so much to be an exemplary militant that he had to commit suicide to become a poet again. Mayakovsky’s silence was a harbinger of other silences that were as painful or more so, in all certainty, to come in the future: the political intolerance invading society would not rest until it suffocated it. “As they suffocated the poet, they are trying to smother me,” the Exile would write, stranded next to the oppressive Sea of Marmara that had been surrounding him for a year already.
    To the end of his days, Lev Davidovich would remember his first weeks of Turkish exile as a blind transit through which he had to move, feeling his way against walls in constant motion. The first thing that surprised him was that the GPU agents in charge of overseeing his deportation, in addition to giving him $1,500 that they said they owed him for his work, maintained a pleasant attitude toward him despite the fact that, once they had crossed into Turkish waters, he had sent a message to President Kemal Pasha Ataturk advising him that he was settling in Turkey only because he was forced to do so. Afterward, it was the diplomats from the Soviet legation in Istanbul who were as cordial as they would have only been to a first-class guest sent by their government. Because of that, in the face of so much faked kindness, he was not surprised when the European newspapers, encouraged by the rumors spread by Moscow’s ubiquitous men, speculated that perhaps Trotsky had been sent to Turkey by Stalin to foment revolution in the Near East.
    Convinced that silence and passivity could be his worst enemies, he decided to take action, and while he insisted on applying for visas fromvarious countries (the president of the German Reichstag had spoken of his country’s willingness to offer him a “freedom asylum”), he wrote an essay, published by some Western newspapers, in which he clarified the conditions of his exile, denounced the persecution and the jailing of his followers in the Soviet Union, and declared Stalin, publicly for the first time, the Grave Digger of the Revolution.
    The change in attitude of diplomats and policemen was immediate and, curiously, coincided with the arrival of new refusals to house him from Norway and Austria, and with the news of what was happening in Berlin, where Ernst Thälmann and the Communists loyal to Moscow had started an uproar against the renegade’s possible acceptance there. Expelled without the least consideration from the Soviet consulate and divested of all protection, the Trotskys had to lodge at a small hotel in Istanbul, where their lives were exposed to the predictable aggressions of their enemies, red and white. Even so, as soon as they arrived, Lev Davidovich sent a telegram to Berlin with