The mantel clock struck five times, it was getting light outside. The muezzin sang and the roosters crowed - the capital Kabul was waking up, and Larisa Reisner was finishing a letter to Moscow addressed to the person on whom her fate depended. “I am tired of the south, of the always almost cloudless sky, of satiety and beauty. Still, the best years are passing, and they, too, can be pitiful, especially in the evenings, ”she wrote in 1922 to the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Lev Trotsky, one of the most powerful people of the emerging new Russia. She had been in Kabul for a year together with the Soviet diplomatic mission in Afghanistan. At first, the East fascinated her, but then quickly got bored.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Trotsky and Reisner were lovers - now she asked him for help. She was mortally tired not only of Kabul, but also of her husband - Fedor Raskolnikov, the legend of the red Baltic Fleet, abandoned by the winds of the revolution as an ambassador to Afghanistan. Love burned out, and Fyodor irritated her in the way that an unloved, disgusted man can irritate, who, at the same time, cannot be reproached for - he behaved almost impeccably. But Larisa was infuriated by his every word, every gesture. Worse, he just seemed like a fool to her. Pretentious, limited and pompous. And his literary opuses seemed to her ordinary graphomania.
Larisa Reisner appreciated beautiful deeds and strong men, but she did not forgive anyone for stupidity and mediocrity. The daughter of a professor at St. Petersburg University, she was surrounded by writers from childhood. Even in her youth, she began to write and became an editor - in 1915 her family began to publish the Rudin magazine. Her letter to Trotsky turned out to be as sonorous as other texts. She re-read it more than once - she herself liked the way she wrote. Gumilyov's murderous review - "very beautiful, but mediocre" - fortunately, it never reached her.
Trotsky hesitated to answer, and then she went back to Russia without permission. Saying goodbye to her husband, who did not suspect that forever, she set off on a long journey. The civil war, the patched-over-patched railroad tracks, keeping on parole, and the trains slowly moving forward along the rails - she had time to remember and write down a lot.
She returned to Russia as a celebrity, a "Valkyrie of the revolution" and a symbol of the new time. Other women also fought for the Bolsheviks, but this was not the case - smart, beautiful and heroine. Legends told about her - how she, in a ball gown on the bridge of a destroyer, gave commands to the sailors, and then, in a leather jacket and with a Mauser on her side, led a raid on the rear of the "whites". She was lucky, and general chaos was at hand - without it, such military adventures would not have passed. But in 1918, together with Fedor, she was captured - off the coast of Estonia, the British captured a destroyer in the raid. Under fire from British destroyers, the Baltic sailors, "the beauty and pride of the revolution", were confused, drowned out the steam, and then went into captivity. Raskolnikov returned from it with a damaged reputation. And Larisa was lucky again, luck smiled here too: she escaped from captivity, taking important documents stolen from the British. The revolution attracted her no less than literature. How bright and dangerous men attracted her. She loved risk, she wanted to be in the public eye, she was drawn to fame - love, literature and war merged for her into a single whole. And the train Kabul - Moscow kept crawling from station to station, and she languished in the shabby luxury of a single compartment, wrote, crossed out, wrote again. Indeed, at first, nothing foreshadowed such a rise: literary fame eluded her, she was also unlucky with love. She worshiped Blok, but he did not pay any attention to her. She fell head over heels in love with Gumilyov, almost to the point of madness, ran to him on dates in a dubious semi-brothel hotel, forgetting everything in the world - and he left her, and insultingly. And it would be fine for the sake of Akhmatova, but no - for the sake of an empty and stupid girl with a pretty face. And how she sobbed when a message came to Kabul that her Gafiz, as she affectionately called Gumilyov, had been shot!
Love for Gumilyov was the first, strong and terrible, and then everything spun like in a kaleidoscope: one dearest writer, then there was officer Sergei Kolbasyev, and after that the leader of the Baltic sailors Fyodor Raskolnikov. It was whispered in society that an intelligent young lady was seduced by brute peasant force, but in fact Raskolnikov was the same peasant as she was a peasant woman. The illegitimate son of the protodeacon and the general's daughter unlearned in Polytechnic Institute, dabbled in writing and sat out on rear courses during the First World War, and his bright eloquence, pood fists and tall stature made him a sailor ataman. He was another medium-sized near-literary decadent who followed the Bolsheviks.
Partly the same was Trotsky, whom Larisa met at the front. He was a tireless orator, a prolific publicist, an excellent organizer, and a tireless lover. It seemed to gather in him everything that attracted her in men - intelligence, talent, pressure and human brilliance.
IN European Russia the tracks got better and the train went faster. And then the familiar telegraph poles and suburban platforms flashed by as if Railway was still imperial. At the station, she was met by relatives and friends with a car, which was rare for 1922, but for her it was a familiar routine. Indeed, immediately after the revolution, she and Raskolnikov, who then served as Trotsky's deputy, settled in the personal royal chambers: they slept under the royal blankets and smoked cigarettes of Nicholas II. Returning from Kabul to Moscow, she again got everything she wanted. And the main thing is not even luxury and comfort, which partly even annoyed her, but the stage, the brilliance of spotlights and a heroic role written especially for her.
Larisa Reisner's new lover was Karl Radek, a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and head of the department of foreign relations of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, a small freak and a brilliantly gifted international adventurer who joined the Bolsheviks during the First World War. Radek considered himself a leading specialist in the world revolution and went to Germany to make it. Reisner went with him. The German Communist Party was then very strong, the revolutionary sailors settled in the very center of Berlin, the former front-line soldiers also wanted changes and were ready to support the revolution. But ordinary Germans valued the peaceful and calm bourgeois life so much that they were ready to die for it. After several days of fighting, the German revolution failed.
Larisa Reisner could have died many times - both during the Civil War, and in Afghanistan, and in Germany, but she died a non-violent death, from an illness, returning to Russia and contracting typhoid fever after drinking a glass of raw milk. All the revolutionary youth mourned their goddess. Few people understood then how lucky she really was: she did not soil herself with odes to the White Sea Canal and collectivization, she was not stigmatized along with Trotsky, she was not arrested in 1937, she did not slander her relatives during interrogations under torture and was not shot in 1938- m. But after her, all her men left this life: Radek was shot, Trotsky was killed in Mexico, her ex-husband Raskolnikov, it seems, also fled the USSR, but mysteriously died in Nice. They even killed the inconspicuous Sergei Kolbasyev, her longtime lover, who became a second-rank Soviet writer. Inconspicuous and businesslike, knowing a lot about painstaking organizational work, Soviet functionaries killed everyone who was dear to her and outraged their memory, but Larisa Reisner herself was lucky for the last time.
Life story
She was called the Woman of the Revolution.
“Slender, tall, in a modest gray suit of English cut, in a light blouse with a tie tied like a man,” the poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky described her in this way. - Dense dark-haired braids lay in a tight corolla around her head. In the correct, as if chiseled, features of her face there was something non-Russian and arrogantly coldish, and in her eyes sharp and slightly mocking.
Among the huge number of memories of Larisa Reisner, there is not one that does not mention her beauty. The son of the writer Leonid Andreev, Vadim, admired:
“When she walked through the streets, it seemed that she was carrying her beauty like a torch ... There was not a single man who would have passed by without noticing her, and every third one - the statistics, precisely established by me - burst into the ground like a pillar and looked after us until we disappeared into the crowd ... "
“She was beautiful with heavy and spectacular German beauty,” admitted the poet's wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam.
“Legends have always circulated around Larisa,” writes Larisa Vasilyeva. – It was not by chance that German beauty arose - it seems that its ancestors were Rhenish barons ... They also said that the family of the head of the Reisner family originated from the Crusaders. Opponents of this family assured that the ancestor of the owner of the house was a baptized Jew.
Be that as it may, Larisa's mother, Ekaterina Alexandrovna, nee Khitrovo, was related to the Khrapovitskys and Sukhomlinovs. The revolutionary-minded father, Mikhail Andreevich, lectured for workers, and in 1915-1916, together with his daughter, published several issues of a literary magazine.
“The Reisners published in St. Petersburg,” we read in Alexander Blok’s diary, “the magazine Rudin, the so-called “defeatist” in the full sense, spitting malice to the point of nausea and dirty, but sharp. Mamma wrote under pseudonyms stories that smelled of “furnishings”. The professor (“Baron”) wrote all sorts of political satires, Larissa (like Blok. - Auth.) - poems and articles ... "
"Throughout Soviet culture- literature, painting, drama, cinema - for seventy years the image of a revolutionary woman in a leather jacket, with a revolver in her hand or with her hand lowered into a leather jacket pocket has been passing through for seventy years ... She leads the revolutionary sailors into battle. She stands on the captain's bridge during a terrible battle, not inferior, and sometimes even surpassing the strength of mind and endurance of the strongest men.
The image, though absorbed different women, first of all, was written off from Larisa Mikhailovna Reisner. The beginning of this was laid by Vsevolod Vishnevsky with his Optimistic Tragedy, where he brought Larisa as a female commissar, for he was on a ship whose crew was inspired by Reisner with her speeches.
In real life, however, things looked different. Not a single document, on either side, confirms the fact that Larisa Reisner controlled the actions of the Aurora cruiser on that October night ... She did not climb on the cruiser, but Countess Panina, heading the delegation sent by the City Duma of Petrograd, approached him .. As for Larisa Reisner, she appeared on the revolutionary scene in Russia a little later ... ”(L. Vasilyeva).
... Even before the revolution, Reisner had a close relationship with Nikolai Gumilyov.
Once she dared to show her poems famous poet. Both loved travel and the exotic, they had something to talk about and argue about. A romance ensued. Gumilyov dedicated canzones to Larisa and called her Leri, she poetically, in the Persian manner - Gafiz. His marriage to Anna Akhmatova at that time had already exhausted itself ...
When Gumilyov went to the active army, Larisa sent him tender letters:
“... the year is ending. My first year, not like all the previous ones. Dear Gafiz, how good it is to live. This is, in fact, the main thing that I wanted to write to you. Gumilyov answered: “Dear Leri, I wrote you a crazy letter, this is because I love you ...”
In February 1917, Gumilyov came on vacation.
“The famous beauty Larisa Reisner,” Andrey Petrov clarifies, “loved Gumilyov so much that she even agreed to come on dates to a brothel on Gorokhovaya. And when he was shot in the twenty-first, she - already a completely prosperous Soviet matron, the wife of the ambassador in Kabul - like a woman sobbed over the news received from Petrograd, mourning the "bastard and freak."
This quote needs clarification. Shocked by the news of the execution of N. Gumilyov, Larisa wrote to her mother:
“... she didn’t love anyone with such pain, with such a desire to die for him, like him, the poet Gafiz ... a freak and a scoundrel ...”.
Later, Larisa Mikhailovna repeated with confidence that if she had been in Moscow in those days, she could have stopped the execution of the poet.
Just after the break with Gumilyov in 1917, she connected her fate with the revolutionaries, becoming not only the wife, but also the adjutant of Raskolnikov, then the commander of the Volga-Caspian flotilla, later a prominent military and political figure, diplomat, member of the Union of Soviet Writers. At first he was in love with Alexandra Kollontai. But he retired when she drew attention to Pavel Dybenko.
Nikolai Kuzmin in his historical novel"Twilight" is of the opinion that Reisner, on certain grounds, went completely crazy "and became a real psychopath: she even managed to get into Trotsky's train and ride with him on Eastern front. From under the blanket of the "Red Commander-in-Chief" Reisner dived into the bed of the Baltic midshipman Raskolnikov. The revolutionary sailor, who did not fight a single day and only ate herself on her battleships, is now in great demand among bossy erotomaniacs.
Confirms the version of the novel by Leon Trotsky with Larisa and the collection "Encyclopedia of Secrets and Sensations: Secrets of Coups and Revolutions". Here's what it says:
“The biblical temperament pushed him into the arms of artistic, adventurous and strange women. An affair with Larisa Reisner began in the midst of the civil war. During the fighting near Kazan, the Volga flotilla arrived there. On the captain's bridge stood in a requisitioned ball gown "Valkyrie of the Revolution" - the wife and adjutant of Commander Fyodor Raskolnikov.
Larisa was known as a dashing woman even in those days. A beautiful aristocrat, a bit of a poetess, a bit of an actress... They said that she took lovers in the bed of the last empress and cleaned out the palace wardrobe... Tired of battles, she took champagne baths in the captured estates and wrote letters to her relatives - she invited them to stay.
Reisner was a worthy girlfriend of a revolutionary and "knew how to turn any immorality into a feat," as L. Vasilyeva very accurately put it about her.
“The poet Osip Mandelstam told his wife how Larisa threw a party at her place solely in order to make it easier for the Chekists to arrest those whom she invited to visit.”
Here is how Larisa Mikhailovna described her visit to the Winter Palace in the first hours after the October Revolution:
“Where the kings have lived for the past fifty years, it is very hard and unpleasant to stay. Some kind of tasteless watercolors, God knows who and how painted, fashionable modern style furniture ... What sideboards, desks, wardrobes! My God! The taste of a stockbroker "from five decent rooms" with upholstered furniture and an album of parental cards.
I really want to collect all this vulgar human rubbish, put it in a royal fireplace and burn it all together for the glory of beauty and art with a good old Florentine candelabra.
She herself lived quite “royally” at a time when people were starving, and at the same time she frankly said:
“We are building a new state. We need people. Our activity is creative, and therefore it would be hypocrisy to deny yourself what always goes to people in power.
The poet V. Rozhdestvensky told how he visited the “beautiful commissar” together with his friends Mikhail Kuzmin and Osip Mandelstam:
“Larisa lived then in the Admiralty. The sailor on duty led me along dark, noisy and austere corridors. Before the door to Larisa's private quarters, timidity and awkwardness seized us, so ceremonially our arrival was announced. Larisa was waiting for us in a small room covered from top to bottom with exotic fabrics... English books, side by side with a thick ancient Greek dictionary. On a low oriental table sparkled and sparkled the crystal facets of countless perfume bottles and some copper vessels and boxes rubbed to a shine... Larisa was dressed in a kind of dressing gown, stitched with heavy threads...”
In 1923, she suddenly broke up with Fedor Raskolnikov. He worried, wrote letters to her, begging her to return.
“... Who would be so infinitely devoted to you, who would love you so madly in the seventh year of marriage, who would be your ideal husband?”
But all in vain: Larisa Mikhailovna was already connected with another. Her choice caused a general shock: short, bald, bespectacled Karl Radek, with his obviously unromantic appearance, looked especially caricature next to a slender beauty ...
By some threads, Larisa Reisner was also connected with Blok - she tenderly adored him. And even, relying on her feminine charms, she tried to convert him to the revolutionary faith.
“Larisa Reisner, the wife of the famous Raskolnikov, came from Moscow,” recalled the poet's aunt, M. A. Beketova. “She came for the express purpose of recruiting Al. Al. became a member of the Communist Party and, as they say, courted him. Horseback riding, car rides, interesting evenings with cognac treats, etc. were arranged. Al. Al. willingly rode and generally spent time with Larisa Reisner, not without pleasure, since she is a young, beautiful and interesting woman, but she still failed to recruit him into the party, and he remained what he was before meeting her ... »
“Worshiping his poetry, Larisa in her heart hoped for some kind of miracle of becoming a great poetess,” L. Vasilyeva believes. - It was her secret and long-standing dream. Meshala Akhmatova - she reigned supreme. Larisa did not know how to be in the shadow. Loving the poetic world, without becoming the first in it, she slowly moved away from poetry to prose, from prose to essay.
Having contracted typhoid fever after a careless sip of raw milk, she passed away in her thirties, before 1937, which was decisive for many.
“Why did Larissa, a magnificent, rare, selective human specimen, die?” - journalist Mikhail Koltsov was surprised.
What would her life have been like had she lived to see 1937?
One can only speculate about this...
Colleagues and friends called Larisa Reisner a femme fatale, a Valkyrie of the revolution, a meteor. Fate measured her 30 years of life, but during this short period, Reisner managed to leave a bright mark on the history, literature and biographies of many famous people.
Writer and poetess, revolutionary and commissar, she was good everywhere: in the poetic salons of St. Petersburg, in the general staff Navy, on deck warship and on horseback in the mountains of Afghanistan. Larisa Reisner was in a hurry to live, love, create and died in flight, never having grown old.
Childhood and youth
Larisa was born on the night of May 1-2, 1895, but Reisner named May 1 as the official date of birth. Either a tribute to the Baltic roots and Walpurgis Night, or a desire to join international day solidarity of workers.
Larisa Reisner with her parents Larisa Reisner's early childhood was spent in Lublin, Poland, where her father worked as a law professor. After 3 years, the son Igor was born in the family, in the future an orientalist, an expert on India and Afghanistan. Larisa's brother appeared in Tomsk, where the family moved because of his father's work: Mikhail Andreevich worked at a local university.
From 1903 to 1907, Mikhail Reisner taught at a university in Germany, before that (in 1905) he moved his family to St. Petersburg. Larisa with her mother and brother repeatedly visited her father. Larisa Reisner grew up in prosperity and luxury, while the ideas of social democracy, universal equality and fraternity turned out to be close to the family: Mikhail and Igor Reisner were fond of them.
Larisa Reisner with her younger brother Eminent revolutionaries and masters of minds came to visit the St. Petersburg apartment (from 1907 to 1918 the Reisners lived in the house of Duke H. Leuchtenberg). The law professor was familiar with August Bebel and. I also visited the house on Zelenina Street.
In the future, the youthful passion for communist ideas determined the activities of Larisa. In 1912, the girl left the gymnasium with a gold medal and went to the Institute of Psychoneurology: her father taught at the university. But Larisa Reisner could not ignore lectures on the history of political movements: she went through the entire lecture cycle as a volunteer. At the same time, Reisner was interested in literature. Politics and poetry were intertwined in her life forever.
Literature
The debut of Larisa Reisner in literature took place in 1913. A romantic play by an 18-year-old girl called "Atlantis" was published in the almanac "Rosehip". In 1915 in creative biography Reisner, a new page appeared: Larisa and her father published the Rudin magazine, in which “the ugliness of Russian life” was branded “with the scourge of satire, caricature and pamphlet”.
In the 8 issues of Rudin, which were published, the young poetess placed her poems and feuilletons, in which she criticized the Russian intelligentsia. Larisa Reisner, who edited the magazine, in addition to ideological and political articles and pamphlets, gave the pages of the publication to novice writers, paving the way for talented young men and women.
Members of the poetic circle and collaborated with Rudin. The magazine closed in the spring of 1916 due to lack of funds. Larisa Reisner did not leave literary work. She collaborated with the Chronicle magazine and the newspaper New life”, which was edited by .
But the world of literature was too small for Reisner's self-expression, so she threw herself into the abyss of the revolution, becoming her devoted admirer. It was an element in which a woman felt like a fish in water.
Larisa became the commissar of the Baltic Fleet. In an elegant black overcoat, brave and beautiful, she enthusiastically commanded the sailors, risking her life. At the same time, a woman who grew up in bourgeois luxury did not abandon her usual comfort.
Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, having visited the apartment of Larisa Reisner on Admiralteyskaya (formerly the dwelling of the Minister of the Navy Grigorovich), was struck by an abundance of luxury. The "revolutionary Valkyrie" met him in a dressing gown embroidered with gold threads.
In 1917, Reisner was the secretary of the people's commissar. She joined the commission under the executive committee of the Council of Deputies, responsible for the preservation of museum exhibits and art monuments in post-revolutionary St. Petersburg. IN next year, becoming a member of the CPSU (b), Larisa Reisner was appointed commissar of the General Staff of the Navy. Together with an army detachment, she took part in the battles, in the summer of 1918 she went to the rear of Kazan occupied by the White Czechs.
Death
No one could believe in the ridiculous death of a blooming 30-year-old beauty. Larisa Reisner died in February 1926 in the capital. After drinking raw milk, she, her brother and mother fell ill with typhoid fever.
Health undermined by work and personal troubles affected. Reisner's brother and mother survived, but after Larisa's death, her mother, who was on duty at her bedside in the Kremlin hospital, committed suicide. The grave of the "Valkyries of the Revolution" is located on the 20th section of the Vagankovsky cemetery.
Later, fans and friends of Larisa Reisner suggested that an early death saved the woman from the bloody millstones of repression. She would have remembered an affair with the executed Nikolai Gumilyov, friendship with Leon Trotsky, marriage with a defector Raskolnikov, a love affair with the "enemy of the people" Radek.
Bibliography
- 1913 - "Female Types of Shakespeare" (under the pseudonym Leo Rinus)
- 1913 - "Ophelia"
- 1913 - "Atlantis"
- 1917 - "Rilke"
- 1917 - "Gondla"
- 1924 - "Hamburg on the barricades"
- 1924 - "Front" (a book of essays on civil war)»
- 1925 - "Asian stories"
- 1925 - "Afghanistan"
- 1925 - "Coal, iron and living people"
- 1925 - "Portraits of the Decembrists"
- 1926 - "In the country of the Hindenburg"
At different times and different countries standards of beauty have changed a lot. However, the appearance of Larisa Reisner was so bright and impressive that even today her photographs give one impression: a beauty! Graceful figure, regular facial features. But it was not the mannered and defenseless female charm characteristic of the era: courage and recklessness were seen in chiseled features.
This woman fully corresponded to the characteristics of an absolute passionary, according to the definition of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov.
Family and childhood
Larisa was born in 1895 in Poland, was the daughter of law professor Mikhail Andreevich Reisner. Two years later, her brother Igor was born. According to family lore, the Reisners descended from an ancient aristocratic German family whose representatives participated in the Crusades.
The family moved to where Mikhail Andreevich was offered a job: Lublin, Tomsk, Paris. In 1905, the Reisners moved to St. Petersburg. Here Larisa graduated from high school with a gold medal and entered the Psychoneurological Institute, where her father taught. She was the only female listener, and she behaved with classmates so naturally and confidently that young people did not allow themselves any liberties.
Mikhail Reisner was a multi-vector politician. He wrote a highly substantiated treatise on the divine origin of tsarist power, but at the same time he corresponded with Lenin and published the opposition journal Rudin, where he branded the tsarist government. Larisa took an active part in the publication of the magazine: she found sponsors, bought paper, negotiated with printers and censors. Yet a year and a half later, the magazine was banned as unreliable.
Romance with Nikolai Gumilyov
Larisa Reisner wrote pretty good poems in the spirit of decadence that was fashionable in those days. This style in itself was distinguished by some pomposity, which gave those who wished a reason to criticize the work of the young poetess.
The palette is gilded by a thick, transparent varnish,
But he cannot quench his new thirst:
Dreams run without repeating themselves twice
And frantically the hand clenched into a fist.
Zinaida Gippius described Larisa's lyrics as weak and pretentious, and the famous Nikolai Gumilyov called her simply mediocre. The young poetess was so upset by his characterization that she cried all night. However, later a passionate romance arose between them. Nikolai at that time served in the army and was in St. Petersburg for only a short vacation. These two talented people came up with their own love game in oriental style, where Gumilyov was Gafiz, and Larisa was Leri. That's what they called each other in letters.
The poet had a reputation as a lover of women and was known for his ability to offer his hand and heart to everyone, but in relations with Larisa he diligently kept his distance, realizing that this woman would not tolerate his frivolous adventures. However, upon Nikolai's return to Petersburg, she agreed to meet him in a rather peculiar place: in a brothel. However, among the poets of that period, visiting such establishments was considered a sign of fashionable rebellion and self-sufficiency.
Nikolai finally made an offer to Larisa, but she refused precisely for the reason that he met in parallel with others. Although she explained her refusal by her unwillingness to hurt Anna Akhmatova: the relationship of the two poets had long been nominal ... In parting, Gumilyov advised his ex-girlfriend to have fun, but not to engage in politics.
It was February 1917.
A few years later, Larisa wrote about her relationship with Gumilyov: “I didn’t love anyone with such pain, with such a desire to die for him, like him, the poet Gafiz, a freak and scoundrel.”
Larisa Reisner - sailor of the revolution
Against the advice of Gumilyov, Larisa plunged headlong into political activity. The family joined the winners. Larisa's brother Igor became the secretary of Dmitry Manuilsky, one of the Bolshevik deputies. And Larisa herself was engaged in propaganda among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and worked under the supervision of Lunacharsky. As a correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper, she met the leader of a detachment of sailors sent to Moscow. The surname of this sailor was Ilyin, but he participated in the coup under the pseudonym "Fyodor Raskolnikov". He was not a simple man: two higher education and a few foreign languages. These two became husband and wife, while the relationship was somewhat one-sided: Raskolnikov adored Larisa, and she did not want to live together and limit herself in hobbies.
Hobbies soon followed: Lev Trotsky became Larisa's new passion. Another smart, outstanding person with powerful charisma. Larisa worked under him in Kazan. After a flash of passion between them, she returned to Raskolnikov.
In parallel, this extraordinary woman found herself in the center of all sorts of adventures. Delivering secret documents, she made her way through hostile territories; the men accompanying her died, she herself was captured, but managed to escape. Assigned to Raskolnikov's flotilla, she strove to interfere in the management of military affairs - it got to the point that her husband was forced to take her off the bridge by force and lock her in a cabin.
Larisa, regardless of the situation, looked smart and elegant, she loved perfume. The sailors of the flotilla treated her ironically: how can this spoiled woman be at the epicenter of the fighting? And they gave her an exam: they put her on a boat and went under heavy shelling, waiting for this beauty to slow down and ask to go back. But Larisa reveled in danger and did not feel sorry for the dead. The sailors themselves were frightened and turned back, while the passenger resented their cowardice.
The most elegant revolutionary
She was never weaned from her love for dresses, on the contrary: in abandoned estates and on the royal yacht Mezhen, they found a lot of all kinds of dresses, from the most exquisite to peasant ones, and they all suited the beautiful revolutionary. Larisa arranged a “fashion show” on the ship, and the sailors, who were already completely in love with her, had no objections. One of these sailors was Vsevolod Vishnevsky - the future playwright, he later sang the image of Larisa Reisner in the play "Optimistic Tragedy".
Larisa perfectly knew how to shoot, she was taught this by Nikolai Gumilyov, an excellent shooter himself. And personally participated in the executions.
By order of Trotsky, the Baltic Fleet under the command of Raskolnikov was to attack the English fleet stationed in Reval. The condition of the ships was bad, they lost the battle, and Raskolnikov was captured and taken to England. Larisa personally participated in his exchange for British prisoners of war.
Larisa lived "to the fullest." She took expensive trophies for herself, drove a luxury car, took champagne baths. Her social circle included both politicians and bohemia. There were rumors that this woman arranged receptions to make it easier for the Chekists to arrest some of her guests. However, when someone told Larisa that Anna Akhmatova was starving, she brought her a huge bag of food.
Afghanistan
In 1921, Raskolnikov was offered the post of Plenipotentiary of the USSR in Afghanistan. Larisa went with him. The main task of the embassy was to fight British influence in the region. Larisa was able to create worthy competition for European diplomacy. She made friends with her beloved wife and the mother of Amanullah Khan, through them she quickly received confidential information and influenced politics.
Here Larisa wrote an undoubtedly talented book "Afghanistan".
While in this country, she learned that Nikolai Gumilyov had been shot. Larisa sobbed for several days, and until the end of her days claimed that if she were in Petrograd, she would definitely save her "Hafiz".
Around that time, Larisa had a miscarriage. After that, she left for Russia and never returned to Raskolnikov. He worried for a long time, wrote letters to her, begged her to return, but in vain ...
Last Passion
Larisa has a new passion: married journalist Karl Radek: a man with the appearance of an outright goner. He was a head shorter than his girlfriend, bald and short-sighted. However, Larisa was attracted to him by an extraordinary mind.
In 1923 Radek was sent to Germany. The USSR provoked an uprising in Hamburg, Radek had to support it, and Larisa had to cover it as a journalist.
Over the next two years, she wrote a number of talented books: about Germany, about the Donbass, about the Decembrists…
Death and memories
This amazing woman repeatedly put herself at risk of dying in battle, but fate decided otherwise.
Upon returning to Moscow, Larisa drank a glass of raw milk and contracted typhoid fever. On February 9, 1926, she died. Thousands of people came to the House of Printing to say goodbye to her.
Leon Trotsky wrote about her: "The appearance of the Olympic goddess, her ironic mind was combined with the courage of a warrior."
Osip Mandelstam in his "Madrigal" dedicated to Larisa compared her with a green-eyed mermaid, and Nikolai Gumilyov sang about her "Ionic curl"...
V.L. Andreev (the son of the writer Leonid Andreev), recalled: “There was not a single man who would have passed by without noticing her, and every third one - the statistics that I accurately established - burst into the ground with a pillar and looked after us until we disappeared into crowd."
Larisa Mikhailovna Reissner (German: Larissa Michailowna Reissner). She was born on May 1 (13), 1895 in Lublin - she died on February 9, 1926 in Moscow. Russian revolutionary, journalist, poetess, writer.
Larisa Reisner was born on May 1 (13 according to the new style) May 1895 in Lublin.
Father - Mikhail Andreevich Reisner, lawyer, professor of law.
According to official documents, she was born on May 1. However, in reality, Larisa was born on the night from the first to the second number - but she chose to indicate May 1 as her birthday in the future. According to one version, this was due to her Ostsee (German) roots - this day is a big holiday celebrated in Germany: Walpurgis Night (from April 30 to May 1). According to another version, she adjusted her date of birth to the International Day of Solidarity of Workers.
Mother - Ekaterina Alexandrovna (nee Khrapovitskaya).
Younger brother - Igor Mikhailovich Reisner (December 27, 1898 (January 8, 1899), Tomsk - February 7, 1958, Moscow), Soviet orientalist, doctor of historical sciences (1953), specialist in India and Afghanistan.
She spent her early childhood in Tomsk, where her father taught at the university.
In 1903-1907, my father taught in Germany, where Larisa also often visited.
Since 1905, the Reisner family settled in St. Petersburg. The house was well stocked.
Larisa's father and brother were fond of the ideas of social democracy (the father was familiar with August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht,), which determined the circle of interests and worldview of the girl.
In St. Petersburg, Larisa graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal, and in 1912 she entered the Psychoneurological Institute, where her father taught.
Reisner's first work was the heroic-romantic play Atlantis, published in the anthology Rosehip in 1913.
In 1915-1916, together with her father, she published the literary magazine "Rudin" (8 issues were published), whose task was "to stigmatize all the ugliness of Russian life with the scourge of satire, caricatures and pamphlets."
Reisner edited Rudin and included a number of poems and harsh feuilletons that ridiculed the mores of the political and creative intelligentsia of the 1910s. A special place in the ideological program of the journal was occupied by criticism of "defencism" (in particular, criticism of G. V. Plekhanov's views on the war), which was considered by the Reisners as a form of opportunism. However, without hiding the ideological and political physiognomy of the magazine, Reisner, as the editor of Rudin, took care to "open the way for young talents." She attracted members of the university’s Circle of Poets (which she herself was a member of) to cooperation in the journal - O. E. Mandelstam, Vs. A. Rozhdestvensky, talented artists S. N. Gruzenberg, N. N. Kupreyanov, E. I. Pravednikov.
In May 1916 the magazine was closed due to lack of funds for its publication.
In 1916-1917 she was an employee of the internationalist magazine Letopis and the newspaper Novaya Zhizn.
In 1917, he participated in the activities of the commission for the arts of the executive committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies, and after the October Revolution, for some time, she was engaged in work related to the preservation of art monuments (in the Special Commission for the Accounting and Protection of the Hermitage and Museums of Petrograd). She was the secretary of A. V. Lunacharsky.
After joining the CPSU (b) (1918), Reisner makes a one-of-a-kind career for a woman - a military politician: in December 1918 she becomes a commissar General Staff of the Navy of the RSFSR, having previously served for several months as a commissar of the reconnaissance detachment of the headquarters of the 5th Army, which took part in the hostilities of the Volga-Kama flotilla.
In 1918 she joined the RCP(b).
In August 1918 she went on reconnaissance to Kazan, occupied by the White Czechs. After the attack by a detachment of White Guards under the command of V. O. Kappel and B. V. Savinkov at the Tyurlema and Sviyazhsk stations (August 28, 1918), she made a reconnaissance raid from Sviyazhsk through Tyurlema to the Shikhrany station (now the city of Kanash) to restore communication between the headquarters and military units 5th Army.
The People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs appointed her Commissar of the Naval General Staff (temporarily from December 20, 1918, permanently from January 29, 1919). From June 1919 to mid-1920, Reisner again participated in hostilities, this time in the Volga-Caspian flotilla, and from the summer of 1920 became an employee of the Political Directorate of the Baltic Fleet.
During his stay in Petrograd in 1920-1921, Reisner took an active part in literary and social life, collaborated with the Petrograd Union of Poets, and made close acquaintance with.
In 1921 she was in Afghanistan as part of the Soviet diplomatic mission, headed by her husband F. Raskolnikov. Larisa's brother Igor Reisner, one of the founders of Soviet oriental studies, was also in Afghanistan. Then she broke up with Raskolnikov and returned to Moscow.
Then, together with Karl Radek, as a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda and Izvestia, she traveled to Germany in 1923, where she witnessed the Hamburg uprising, about which she wrote the book Hamburg at the Barricades (1924). Two more cycles of her essays are devoted to Germany - "Berlin in 1923" and "In the Land of the Hindenburg".
After returning from Germany, she went to the Donbass and after the trip she wrote the book Coal, Iron and Living People (1925).
Reisner's last major work is historical sketches-portraits dedicated to the Decembrists ("Portraits of the Decembrists", 1925).
Death of Larisa Reisner
Larisa Reisner died on February 9, 1926 in Moscow at the age of 30 from typhoid fever after drinking a glass of raw milk. Mother and brother Igor survived. Larisa did not recover from her illness, because at that time she was very exhausted by work and personal experiences.
In the Kremlin hospital, where she was dying, her mother was on duty with her, who committed suicide immediately after the death of her daughter.
The writer Varlam Shalamov left the following memories: “A young woman, the hope of literature, a beauty, a heroine of the Civil War, thirty years old, died of typhoid fever. Nonsense. Nobody believed. But Reisner is dead. She was buried at the 20th plot at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
Mikhail Koltsov pathetically asked: "Why did Larisa, a magnificent, rare, selective human specimen, die?"
In his memoirs My Life, Leon Trotsky recalled Reisner thus: “Blinding many, this beautiful young woman swept like a hot meteor against the backdrop of the revolution. With the appearance of the Olympian goddess, she combined a subtle ironic mind and the courage of a warrior. After the capture of Kazan by the whites, she, under the guise of a peasant woman, went to the enemy camp for reconnaissance. But her appearance was too unusual. She was arrested. A Japanese intelligence officer interrogated her. During the break, she slipped through the poorly guarded door and disappeared. Since then, she has worked in intelligence. Later, she sailed on warships and took part in battles. She devoted essays to the Civil War that will remain in literature. She wrote with equal vivacity about the industry in the Urals and about the uprising of the workers in the Ruhr. She wanted to see and know everything, to participate in everything. In a few short years, she grew into a first-class writer. Having passed unscathed through fire and water, this Pallas of the revolution suddenly burned down from typhus in the calm atmosphere of Moscow, before reaching the age of thirty.
Valkyrie of the Revolution Larisa Reisner
Personal life of Larisa Reisner:
Larisa Reisner had a very stormy personal life, consisted of love affairs with very famous personalities and historical characters.
In 1916-1917, she had a stormy romance with, which left a deep mark on her life and work. Under the name of "Hafiz" the poet is bred in Reisner's Autobiographical Novel, though not published during her lifetime. The meeting of Larisa and Nikolai took place in 1916 in the restaurant "Halt of comedians", where representatives of St. Petersburg bohemia gathered. It was always noisy and cheerful here: they drank expensive wine, read poetry, argued about politics. She took the hobby of her husband Nikolai Larisa calmly, since this happened many times. Larisa's attitude towards Gumilyov was extremely emotional and exalted.
During the First World War, Gumilyov was in the ranks of the army. Larisa at that time was in St. Petersburg. The romance of Larisa and Nikolai turned out to be short-lived - it soon became clear that, in parallel with Reisner, the poet had a love relationship with Anna Engelhardt, whom he married in 1918.
Nikolai Gumilyov - Larisa Reisner's lover
She was in a long-term relationship with Sergei Kolbasiev, a famous Russian and Soviet sailor, marine prose writer and poet, jazz enthusiast (he was one of the promoters of jazz music in the USSR).
Sergei Kolbasiev - Larisa Reisner's lover
In 1918 she married the commander of the Volga military flotilla, the famous Russian revolutionary Fyodor Raskolnikov.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, who visited the couple several times, said that Raskolnikov and Reisner lived truly luxuriously in hungry Moscow - "a mansion, servants, a superbly served table."
Fedor Raskolnikov - husband of Larisa Reisner
In the early 1920s, when Raskolnikov was the head of the Soviet diplomatic mission in Afghanistan, she broke up with him (although Raskolnikov did not give her a divorce) and returned to Moscow, where she became the lover of Karl Radek. After a joint trip to Germany in 1923, she also parted ways with Radek.
Karl Radek - Larisa Reisner's lover
During her stay in the Donbass, she had a relationship with the first secretary of the cluster party committee in Gorlovka, A. I. Bradulov.
Bibliography of Larisa Reisner:
1913 - Female types of Shakespeare (under the pseudonym Leo Rinus)
1913 - Ophelia
1913 - Atlantis
1917 - Rilke (about the work of the German poet)
1917 - Gondla
1923 - Hamburg auf den Barrikaden. Erlebtes und Erhörtes aus dem Hamburger Aufstand
1924 - Hamburg on the barricades
1924, 1928, 1932 - Front (a book of essays on the civil war)
1925 - Asian stories
1925 - Afghanistan
1925 - Coal, iron and living people
1925 - Portraits of the Decembrists
1926 - In the country of the Hindenburg
1926 - Eine Reise durch die deutsche Republik
1928 - Collected Works. T.1-2
The image of Larisa Reisner in culture and art:
Larisa Reisner became the prototype of the female commissar depicted in the play Optimistic Tragedy by Vsevolod Vishnevsky. The play was filmed, the main role was played by the actress.
An enthusiastic attitude towards Reisner, who considered her "embodied charm", gave him reason to call Larisa main character his novel Doctor Zhivago.
I. Kramov wrote the book Morning Wind about the life of Larisa Reisner.
In the fourth trilogy of the "Eye of Power" cycle by Andrei Valentinov, written in the genre of alternative reality, there is a character Larisa Mikhailovna, nicknamed "Gondla" ("Gondla" is a play by Nikolai Gumilev; Gumilev associated Reisner with Leri, the heroine of the play).
Larisa Reisner is mentioned more than once in the novel The Other Way (2015).
Featured in the 2017 biopic series.