Nietzsche's umbrella, Lenin's laugh

 

There is a story, jotted down by Lydia Fotieva in her book, Pages from Lenin’s life, about a visit Vladimir Ilyitch made to Paris 1905. He  spoke at a conference with Jaures. The International was alert: Russia was in revolt. Lenin had been in Paris before. He liked the city. In 1910, when he lived for a couple of years in an apartment on 4, Rue Rose Marie, he liked to bike around the city on weekends. He was a fanatic biker, one who knew all about fixing the gears, oiling the chain, keeping his bike in tip top order.

But on June 1^st – or 6^th, the dates differ, Lenin was in the mood for amusement. He’d been to the Opera the night before. Now, Lydia and a comrade took him with them to the Folies Bergere. At that time, the theatre was not just a high class stripper heaven. It was burlesque. Fotieva remembered one vaudeville routine Lenin loved:

“They were showing short scenes of a light genre. I remember one called “the legs of Paris.” The curtain was raised knee-high, showing the legs of people of different walks of life and social standing moving across the stage. There was a workingman, a street-light man, a grisette, a priest, a policeman, a small shopkeeper, a Paris dandy, and many others. The legs were so emphatically typical that there was no mistaking their owners, and you could easily picture the person they belonged to. It was very amusing. Vladimir Ilyich laughed as infectiously as he alone knew how, and he really enjoyed himself that evening.”

The half lowered curtain, the pants legs and bare legs and soutaned legs, the people above them hidden, the guessing as to what legs belonged to what type, and Lenin laughing at the show like any schoolboy. Does history here ball itself into an allegory, or is this just another night on the town?

Derrida, to the disgust of all good positivist philosophers, wrote an essay on Nietzsche that asks us some questions on a philological philosophical matter:

“’I have forgotten my umbrella.”

“I have forgotten my umbrella”

Among the fragments of Nietzsche’s unpublished work, we find these words, all alone, between quotation marks.

Perhaps a citation.

Perhaps it was something taken from (prelevee) some other part.

Perhaps putting it here or there would make it understandable.

Perhaps it was a note to begin some phrase that he meant to write here or there.

We have no infallible means to know where the taking of the phrase took place, on what it could have been grafted later on. We will never be assured that we know what Nietzsche meant to do or say in noting these words. Nor even what he wanted. In supposing that there is no doubt on his autograph, that it was his handwriting, and that one knows what we put under the concept of an autograph and the form of a signature [seing – as in blank check, blanc-seing].”

Derrida is making a serious point non-seriously, or a non-serious point seriously, here. We make large metaphysical and epistemological decisions when we go through the papers of an author, or even through texts in general: our list of procedures,  very much in the line of Gricean implicature, escapE, somehow, the attention of philosophical questioning. Derrida speaks of “hermeneutic somnambulism”.

And then we have the texts of people’s lives, their biographies, their life writing.

I could see classifying Lenin at the Folies-Bergere with Nietzsche’s umbrella – if it was his, if he was the person who lost it – as barely worth comment.

Yet it has attracted comment, both from the anti-communist professionals (while the revolutionaries were suffering in 1905, there was Lenin, laughing diabolically in the lap of bourgeois comfort) and the communist professionals (Comrade Lenin, as well, sometimes enjoyed the people’s humor. Or to generalize this with Stalin’s phrase: "Life has become better, life has become happier").

“Its transparence spreads out without a fold,” Derrida writes, “without reserve. Its appears to consist of a more than flat intelligibility. Everyone knows what “I have forgotten my umbrella” means.”

Lenin’s laughter at the Legs of Paris also seems to be nothing special.

And yet, there is something different about thinking of Lenin at the Folies-Bergere. Rather like thinking of Ho Chi Mihn going to a burlesque house in San Francisco – which he well might have done.

So: there is this anecdote. And there is the person who tells it, who originally wrote it down. Lydiia Fotieva. In 1920, Le Miroir, a French newspaper, took a picture of the Russian leadership in a meeting, and helpfully numbered and named the bigwigs – one of which was Fotieva. Of course, this photograph to us now shows those who are going to die – as Stalin got rid of those who did not die naturally in the next 10 to 20 years. Almost all. Not Fotieva.

Fotieva was associated, at that point, with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, whose secretary she’d been in the pre-revolutionary years in Paris and then in Switzerland. Back then, she’d been toughened by prison terms in Czarist jails. Perhaps that had taken some of the puritanism out of her, enough so that she could enjoy a good vaudeville act. After the revolution, she was Lenin’s secretary, and was a witness to, or a part of the quarrel between Krupskaya and Stalin that figures into numerous stories about Lenin breaking with Georgian before he died.

If these stories are true, why was Fotieva spared a bullet in the neck? Some have called Fotieva an informer for Stalin. Certainly she had good relations with Stalin, even as members of Lenin’s circle began to suspect that he was not good for the revolution. Stalin, according to Robert Conquest, found Krupskaya a problem in the 30s, when he took full command, and even thought about denying that she was Lenin’s final wife – or real wife. He might have meant to nominate Fotieva for that position. In the end, though, this wasn’t necessary. It would have been a bit too messy.

It was a bit messy, too, that Fotieva had been the boss of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda. There might well have been a friendship between the two such that Nadezhda spoke up for Lydia. In any case, during the purge and war years, Fotieva hid like a mouse in the bureaucracy of the Lenin Museum, a demotion but not torture or death in some courtyard or digging in subzero weather.

It had all come out wrong. She must have thought, sometimes. But after Stalin died, she resurfaced, still communist, and when she died the obituary in Tass was signed by Brezhnev and some others.

The Paris of 1905 was a long way away on that September day in 1975 when Fotieva’s body was put in the ground. The legs had long since withered and died, for the most part, during the wars and massacres of the century. The legs of Paris is not a routine, or tableau, noted by the papers at the time. Even books on the Folies-Bergere mention simply tableau put together by Victor de Cottens, the theatre’s art director at the time. One wonders what Lenin made of Mado Minty, one of the stars of the ensemble that year, “la magnifique, la merveilleuse a la superbe pointrine”?

As he and his comrades filed out of the door, into the still luminous night, hailed a cab, and left for the more serious footsteps that would eventually take them to the Finland Station.