nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Life of Inessa Armand
by Michael Pearson, author of 'The Sealed Train' & 'Those damned Rebels'
A Personal Note
I first discovered Inessa Armand many years ago, when I was researching The
Sealed Train, Lenin's eight-month rise from poverty to power.
No one knew much about her then because the base sources were
restricted. And as a result - although she became the most powerful woman
in postrevolutionary Moscow - even today hardly anyone outside the small,
acadmic world of Russia historians has heard of her.
I found Inessa fascinating partly because she was a devoted mother of
five children. Further, she had an extraordinary relationship with her
wealthy husband, Alexander Armand, who accepted her revolutionary lifestyle
as well as her decision to live openly with his brother. Finally, she
intrigued me because she was the rumored mistress of Lenin, with
suggestions of a menage a trois with his wife, Nadya.
Inessa was long depicted as an attractive, vivacious woman, fluent in
four languages and a brilliant pianist. Before meeting Lenin, as was
reported, she had been jailed several times and had escaped from exile in
Archagel Province.
However, much of the information then available under Communist rule was
wrong. Sometimes the errors were marginal: Her father was an opera singer,
not a vaudeville comic. Sometimes the errors were more imaginative: Inessa
was said to be a fatherless child brought up within the Armand family by an
aunt employed as a tutor. This, too, was fiction.
What was clear, however, from the letters, then published, from Lenin,
was that she had been very important to him, acting as a troubleshooter, a
confidante, and an organizer, even speaking in his place at conferences.
They were friendly letters, often laced with jokes, but the censors allowed
little that would suggest the amorous realities.
Inessa died dramatically in 1920 at the age of forty-six, succumbing to
cholera after a lengthy, broken journey in the Caucasus, where her train
often came under fire.
For long, she has stayed vividly in my mind. I felt her life would lend
itself to operatic treatment, toyed myself with a novel, but once the
Central Party Archives were opened, offering access to her files - and
Lenin's -- I realized Inessa was an ideal subject for biography.
A few months of her story - her journey back to Russia with Lenin in
April 1917 in the sealed train and the events leading to the Bolshevik
strike for power in November - were told in detail in The Sealed Train, and
I have leaned heavily on that book and its sources for this short period of
the 27 years that I describe.
There is no doubt now that Inessa Armand was Lenin's mistress. Over the
years, however, especially during the frustration of exile, the
relationship went through various phases. At first, she worshipped Lenin,
but in time, though loving him, she came to challenge him. At one stage,
she was barely talking to him; at another, she went into tsarist Russia for
him, knowing she would be jailed.
At times, she played with him, refusing to answer his letters or
replying only to his wife or declining to translate for him passages in his
articles with which she disagreed.
The attempt on his life in 1918 that so nearly killed him sparked a new,
closer stage in their relationship. Days before Inessa died, she admitted
in writing that, together with her children, Lenin - and the cause they
shared - had been her life.
The Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian
calendar in general use elsewhere, was used in Russia until Febrary 1,
1918. I have employed local dates in the country where the action takes us,
giving both dates when confusion is likely.
Inessa, age 15
Inessa with her husband, age 19
Inessa's lover, her husband's youngest brother. He died in Jan. 1909
Inessa with her 5 children in 1910
Inessa in 1920. Shortly before she died. She was now head of the Women's Section of the Central Committee and had the power to make laws within her area. She decreed that all factory committees should include at least one woman. Inessa's face bears the strain of long hours of overwork and illness earlier in the year.
Inessa's coffin, lying in state with a female guard of honor in the House of Unions, once the home of the Moscow Duma. Her coffin lay with a sheath of white lilies addressed "Comrade Inessa from Lenin". At her state funderal the next day, Lenin's visible distress shocked several close comrades.
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Life of Inessa Armand - Lenin's Mistress
