BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'LENIN'S MISTRESS' Lenin's 'Dear Friend' Who Was More Than a Friend By JANET MASLIN
Carolyn D. Janogly/Random House Michael Pearsonv LENIN'S MISTRESS The Life of Inessa Armand By Michael Pearson Illustrated. 278 pages. Random House. $25.95.
They met in 1909 at a Parisian cafe known for its Russian émigré clientele. Inessa Armand, the illegitimate daughter of a French opera singer, had already borne four children, one by her husband's brother, and been exiled to an Arctic prison camp for anti-czarist subversion. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was also someone with an interest in revolutionary activities.
He, too, was married. But his wife, Nadya, "put on weight with middle age, and she had bulging eyes, owing to a thyroid condition that had caused Lenin's sister Anna to comment that she looked like a herring."
In any case, Lenin, who was 39 when he met the 35-year-old Inessa, was so impressed with her commitment to the cause that he arranged for her to have an official invitation to the 1910 Congress of the Socialist International in Copenhagen. They crossed paths again when he asked her to translate his funeral oration for Karl Marx's daughter and son-in-law into French. Soon a French acquaintance would notice that "Lenin with his little Mongol eyes gazes all the time at this little `Française.' "
What could come of this flirtation? Nothing very shocking, what with a Bolshevik social and political climate that deemed marriage a bourgeois institution and fostered debate about sexual liberation. (When Inessa wrote a pamphlet advocating free love, the more puritanical Lenin sent her a 10-point rebuttal.) Besides, Nadya and Inessa would become friends, greatly reducing the transgressive possibilities of the situation. So the title of Michael Pearson's biography of Inessa Armand, "Lenin's Mistress," is a shade naughtier than warranted.
But Armand makes an interesting subject. Using extensive research (and drawing on an earlier and sterner biography by R. C. Elwood), Mr. Pearson presents a woman so strong-willed that even Lenin was impressed. From her turn-of-the-century role (as secretary to the Moscow Society for Improving the Lot of Women) to her position of great influence after the 1917 revolution, Armand did as she liked regardless of the consequences. "Don't tell anyone I have been arrested," she told her 6-year-old daughter, on the first of many occasions when she and her children would pay for her dauntless behavior.
A Victorian-era photograph in the book shows Armand with teenage friends, as she and another young woman thumb their noses at the camera. This was an unusual attitude for its time, and it foretold much about Armand's future. Like most of the other individuals around her, she spoke her mind freely and experienced the turbulence of prerevolutionary times firsthand. "She was no Anna Karenina," Mr. Pearson observes with understatement, but she nonetheless sustained a busy amorous life despite politics and prison.
Armand is a familiar background figure within the tableau of revolutionary events. She was aboard the so-called "sealed train" that gave safe passage to Lenin and his close associates on their return to Russia in 1917. (Mr. Pearson wrote an earlier book on that subject.) In the years immediately before that, Lenin and Nadya lived in peripatetic exile while Inessa was sometimes enlisted to do his bidding in Russia. She followed his wishes at great personal risk.
While Mr. Pearson straightforwardly moves this account through the maze of political infighting that brought Lenin to power, he also emphasizes the gentler side brought out by Armand. "Ilyich," as she sometimes called him, found music boring and weakening, but he liked to hear her play the "Moonlight Sonata." He wrote her in enthusiastic if somewhat stilted terms. ("Dear Friend, I was terribly glad to receive your nice, friendly, warm, charming letter.") And he shared his excitement at new, soon to be historic developments. "It's getting to be a real beauty!" he wrote about the fledgling newspaper Pravda.
After Armand's death in 1920, the rare event at which Lenin wept publicly, her importance in his life would become controversial. "I will tell the world who was really Lenin's wife," Stalin is said to have threatened Nadya when he suspected her of political treachery in 1925. Armand's role in Lenin's life was a problematic aspect of his legend. "She presented a difficulty," Mr. Pearson writes. "The fact that Lenin had a warm friendship with a woman that was not entirely appropriate, and subject to rumor, did not fit the desired image of the nation's leader."
Yet Armand's story could not be eradicated: she belonged to the inner circle of Lenin's time in exile, a group that began to take on mythic importance in Soviet mythology. Even her link to the once-prosperous Armand family was a red flag, so to speak, for historians in the new Soviet Union.
On one occasion, Lenin sent Armand the instruction to "please bring all letters," an indication of how their most private correspondence may have vanished. Some of the remaining, less personal letters met with censorship. But an unguarded aspect of Lenin emerges through his long, turbulent involvement with Inessa, however much it contrasts with the bloody reality of events unfolding around the two of them. "How I laughed over your postcard," he wrote her with playful abandon. "I really had to hold my sides, as they say."