NEW YORK, July 2. /TASS/. The only daughter of famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Patricia Thompson has told TASS in an exclusive interview on Thursday that she wants to learn Russian again and obtain the Russian citizenship. She also plans to give researchers the family archive about her father’s life.
"I spoke in Russian until I was five," Thompson, aged 89, said. "I still remember some words that I heard as a kid - ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘thanks’, ‘please’, ‘stop’. However, I want to really remember the Russian language, to be closer to Russia. I have wanted to get a Russian passport for a long time. The process has already started, but then something stalled. And I would really like to have Russian citizenship," she continued.
Thompson has lived all her life in the US. She regularly cuts out articles about Russian from American newspapers and collects them in her private archive.
"Americans have a limited and in many ways distorted view at what is going on in Russia, at Russia’s achievements, including in the social sphere," Thompson, a distinguished professor of Lehman College at the City University of New York and author of more than 20 books, said. "I actually think that Russians are smarter than Americans. Without Russia, we would not have had helicopters, television, as those were invented by [aeronautic engineer ]Sikorsky and [engineer Vladimir] Zvorykin," she added.
The fact that neither US president nor state secretary attended the 70th anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow is deeply upsetting for Thompson. "I felt insulted. This decision was just unacceptable, considering what sacrifice the Soviet Union made for the future peace, including in the US. We could have been all talking in German by now," Maykovsky’s daughter noted.
At the same time, Thompson was surprised US state secretary mentioned Maykovsky in his congratulatory statement to Russians on Russia’s National Day celebrated in the country on June 12. "This year also marks the 90th anniversary of Vladimir Mayakovsky's epic journey through the United States, memorialized in his ‘My Discovery of America’. Mayakovsky's words are a powerful reminder of the importance of people-to-people ties in fostering mutual understanding and respect," Kerry said in a statement. Mayakovsky’s journey in the US is especially significant for Thompson, as that was when he met her mother - Russian immigrant Yelizaveta Zibert.