Vladimir Mayakovsky's suicide

Vladimir Mayakovsky's suicide is both a historical death and a concealed turning point in the story: it explains why Mishka wrote a letter that the Count never found, and why the verse in it was not Mishka's own. Later, Mishka recasts the poet's death as a way to understand Russia's readiness to destroy what it has made.

The Death Behind the Letter

The Count is moved by the letter's account of Mishka's walk along Nevsky Prospekt and its romantic-sounding verse. The apparent link to the day Katerina Litvinova first took Mishka's hand, however, is a false lead. The lines were Vladimir Mayakovsky's, from a poem he had delivered while standing on a chair in 1923; Mishka had quoted them rather than written them.

The real cause of both the citation and the letter was Mayakovsky's death. On April 14, the poet shot himself through the heart with a prop revolver. The revelation changes the letter's emotional register: what seemed to be a private recollection of romance was prompted instead by the death of a poet whose words Mishka borrowed to express something he could not frame as his own.

A Letter That Remains Unread

The letter never reaches the Count. After emptying his pockets in Anna Urbanova's room, he knocks it into the narrow gap between a bookcase and the wall, where it remains. That accidental concealment preserves the misunderstanding: the Count can be moved by the verse without knowing either its source or the event that prompted Mishka to write.

The delayed explanation makes Mayakovsky's suicide function as a key to an object already lost from view. Its significance is disclosed not by the letter itself, but by the account of why Mishka wrote it. The distinction between what the Count reads and what the reader later learns turns the hidden letter into a record whose meaning exceeds its recipient's understanding.

Mishka's Interpretation

In a later conversation with Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, Mishka describes a dream in which Mayakovsky appears, recites unfamiliar lines about birch bark shining in winter sunlight, and puts a revolver to his chest. Mishka says that the dream changed how he understood Russian self-destruction. He rejects the idea that Russians destroy their art, cities, and children because they are brutish or indifferent; he interprets the impulse instead as evidence of an unusually strong belief in the power of art, prayer, and human beings.

That interpretation belongs to Mishka, not to an impersonal explanation of Mayakovsky's motives. The story supplies no account of why Mayakovsky chose to die; it shows how his death becomes material for Mishka's effort to make sense of a broader national pattern. Mishka's prediction that Moscow will be burned again extends that argument into the future, leaving destruction both a source of grief and, in his reasoning, a consequence of believing deeply in what can be created.