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BY SPECIAL REQUEST, A POST ON MRS. MAX EASTMAN A.K.A. ELIENA KRYLENKO---COURTESY OF THE LATE ROBERT SCOTT:
Monday, December 17, 2012
Eliena Krylenko: 'Glad to Have Lived
''CHRONICLES OF CROTON'S BOHEMIA
Readers for whom the name Eliena Krylenko is not immediately recognizable may recall that she was Mrs. Max Eastman. Their romantic story began in this fashion:
In 1922, abandoning his financially troubled magazine, The Liberator, Max left Croton to explore the changes wrought in Russia by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Instead of going directly to the Soviet Union, he headed first to an international conference in Genoa, Italy.
It was a fateful detour. In Italy, he would meet the woman who would become his second wife and return to the U.S. with him.
On a second-floor balcony of the luxurious old Imperial Palace Hotel in nearby Santa Margherita, he watched American sculptor Jo Davidson work on a bust of Russian diplomat Maxim Litvinov. From a window on the floor above, four giggling secretaries peered down at the handsome American.
When Eastman looked up, the heads disappeared. A red rose came tumbling down from the window. He picked it up.
That evening as he was standing in his hotel lobby, Max saw one of the secretaries come downstairs “with a skipping step, her hand sliding lightly along the banister. She was not exactly pretty, but looked so jolly, with her short nose, twinkling gray eyes and tiny front teeth, that I watched her with a feeling of reminiscent mirth." READ MORE AT http://notorc.blogspot.com/2012/12/eliena-krylenko-1-when-she-smiles_17.html
PHOTO COURTESY F THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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