Free 1913 by Florian Illies

translations, but, unlike Stalin, Bukharin proves to be successful with the nanny, for which the former will never forgive him (and for which Bukharin will one day have to pay with a bullet in the head). Even Trotsky drops by once: ‘I was sitting next to the samovar at the table in Skobelow’s apartment […] in the old Habsburg capital,’ writes Trotsky, ‘when, after a brief knock, the door suddenly opened and a stranger walked in. He was short […] thin […] pock marks covered his grey-brownish skin […] I couldn’t see even the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes.’ It was Stalin. He fetched himself a cup of tea from the samovar and went out as quietly as he had come in. He didn’t recognise Trotsky – luckily, for in one of his articles he had already labelled him a ‘gimmicky athlete with fake muscles’.

    In that same February of 1913, as Stalin and Trotsky see each other for the first time, a man is born in faraway Barcelona who will later murder Trotsky, on Stalin’s orders. His name is Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández.

    On 23 February, Josef Stalin is arrested on the street in St Petersburg. Dressed in women’s clothes and a wig, he is running for his life. His attire has nothing to do with carnival fancy dress or any special predilection for women’s clothing. The revolutionary is in Russia illegally, and has stolen the clothes from the wardrobe of a musical benefit performance for
Pravda
which was raided by police. They apprehend the limping fugitive and rip the gaudy summer dress and wig from his person, revealing Stalin. He is recognised and exiled to Turukhansk in Siberia.

    In turbulent Vienna there is an affair that stuns even the Viennese. Alma Mahler, the most beautiful girl in Vienna, with a legendary waist and a generous bosom, newly widowed after the death of the great composer and still dressed in mourning, falls for Oskar Kokoschka, the ugliest painter in Vienna, a brash provocateur who walks around with his trousers hanging low or his shirt unbuttoned, and whose most famous painting is entitled
Murderer, Hope of Womankind –
he means every word. But almost as soon as he captures the beautiful young widow’s heart, he gets scared. Not of her – but of his potential love rivals: ‘Almi, I don’t like it when other people can see your bare breasts, whether in night-dress or frock. Cover up the secrets, my secrets, of your beloved body.’ Hardly anything in the Vienna of 1913 was as unabashedly sexual as the letters and affair between Kokoschka and Alma Mahler – by day Alma was able to pursue her social life as the city’s First Widow, holding receptions and salons in her apartment. But by night Kokoschka asserted his rights. He could only work if he could sleep with her every night, he told her, and she becomes obsessed with his obsession. The day when she is supposed to sit for him, in the house belonging to the Mools, her parents-in-law, she drags him into the neighbouring room and sings a heartbreaking rendition of Isolde’s
Liebestod
. She throws herselfinto the affair with operatic totality. Kokoschka is no longer able to paint anything but her. Mostly naked, her hair cascading wantonly over her shoulders, blouse open, he paints her as wildly and violently as he loves her. Impatient that it’s taking too long, he throws away his paintbrush and paints with his fingers instead, using the palm of his left hand as a palette and scratching lines into the mounts of colour with his fingernails. Life, love, art: all one great battle.
    When Kokoschka isn’t painting Alma alone, he is painting Alma and himself: for example, the
Double Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma
. He calls it the ‘Engagement Picture’. He wants to marry her, hoping to capture her for ever. But Alma is cunning. She can only marry him, she explains, once he creates an absolute masterpiece. Kokoschka hopes that this engagement picture will be his masterpiece. By the end of February he is