In "Khorosho" ("Good") Mayakovski
gives Kerenski's name and patronymic the feminine ending:
Byt' Kerenskomu bitu i
obodranu!
Uzh my podymem s tsaryovoi
krovati
etu samuyu Aleksandru
Fyodorovnu.
Kerenski will be beaten and stripped of his
belongings!
We shall raise from the tsar's bed
this notorious Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
VN's "late namesake"* plays on the fact that
Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerenski (1881-1970),
the premier in the autumn of 1917, until the October coup d'etat,
when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power, was a "namesake" of the
last Russian Empress, Aleksandra Fyodorovna Romanov, the wife of Nicolas
II. On Mayakovski's part, it was not only in bad taste but preposterous to
make Kerenski sleep in the tsar's bed (the tsar's entire family was
arrested by the Provisional Government and executed in 1918 by the
Bolsheviks).
A little later, Mayakovsky lovingly refers
to Lenin by patronymic:
A v Smol'nom, v dumakh o bitve i
voyske,
Ilyich grimirovannyi mechet
shazhki
And in the Smol'ny,** in meditations about
battle and army,
Ilyich, in his make-up, paces the corridor
with his little steps.
Ilyich (a propos, il is French for "he")
is the patronymic of Ivan Golovin, the hero of Tolstoy's "The
Death of Ivan Ilyich". You can meet the two Ilyichs, Nikifor Lapis-Trubetskoy,
Ostap Bender (the hero of Ilf and Petrov's "The 12 Chairs" and "The
Golden Calf") and a lot of other more or less amusing people in my "All's Well
that Ends Well": http://topos.ru/articles/0907/03_05.shtml (article
in Russian).
*see VN's poem "On the Rulers" (1945)
**the former Smol'nyi Institute of Noble Maidens in
St. Petersburg; the naive (or depraved) reader of Mayakovski can be fooled into
thinking that Lenin was made up as a headmistress
Alexey Sklyarenko