Marina Tsvetaeva
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Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva and
Ariadna
Marina Tsvetaeva and
son, Georgy
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Marina Ivanovna Cvetaeva) (26 September/8 October
1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet and writer.
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. She was one of the most original of the
Russian 20th-century poets. Her work was not looked kindly upon by Stalin
and the Bolshevik régime; her literary rehabilitation only began in the
1960s. Tsvetaeva's poetry arose from her own deeply convoluted personality,
her eccentricity and tightly disciplined use of language. Among her themes
were female sexuality, and the tension in women's private emotions; she
bridges the mutually contradictory schools of Acmeism and symbolism.
Much of Tsvetaeva's poetry has its roots in the depths of her displaced and
disturbed childhood. Her father was Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor
of art history at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander
III Museum, which is now known as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife, a
highly literate woman. She was also a volatile (and a frustrated) concert
pianist, with some Polish ancestry on her mother's side. (This latter fact
was to play on Marina's imagination, and to cause her to identify herself
with the Polish aristocracy.) Marina had two half-siblings, Valeria and
Andrei, who were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara
Dmitrievna Ilovaisky (daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky). Her only
full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. Quarrels among the children were
frequent and occasionally violent. There was considerable tension between
Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained
close contact with Varvara's family. Maria favoured Anastasia over Marina. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and
distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first
wife; he would never get over her. Maria, for her part, had had a tragic
love affair before her marriage, from which she never recovered. Maria
Alexandrovna particularly disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination. She
wished her daughter to become a pianist and thought her poetry was poor. In
1902, Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. Because it was believed
that a change in climate could help cure the disease, the family travelled
abroad until shortly before her death in 1906. They lived for a while by the
sea at Nervi, near Genoa. There, away from the rigid constraints of a
bourgeois Muscovite life, Marina was able for the first time to run free,
climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games. It should be
noted that there were many Russian émigré revolutionaries residing at that
time in Nervi, and undoubtedly these people would have had some influence on
the impressionable Marina. The children began to run wild. This state of
affairs was allowed to continue until June 1904, when Marina was dispatched
to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to several
changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired the
Italian, French, and German languages. In 1908, Tsvetaeva studied literary
history at the Sorbonne. During this time, a major revolutionary change was
occurring within Russian poetry: the flowering of the Russian Symbolist
movement, and this movement was to colour most of her later work. It was not
the theory which was to attract her, but the poetry and the immense gravity
which writers such as Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok were capable of
generating. Her own first collection of poems, Evening Album, was
self-published in 1910. It attracted the attention of the poet and critic
Maximilian Voloshin, whom Tsvetaeva described after his death in 'A Living
Word About a Living Man'. Voloshin came to see Tsvetaeva and soon became her
friend and mentor.
Anastasia and Marina
She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of
Koktebel (trans. "Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers,
poets and artists. She became enamoured of the work of Aleksandr Blok and
Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until
the 1940s. Describing the Koktebel community, the émigré Viktoria Schweitzer
wrote: "Here inspiration was born." At Koktebel, Tsvetaeva met Sergei (Seryozha)
Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. She was 19, he 18: they
fell in love instantly and were married in 1912, the same year as her
father's project, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, was ceremonially opened,
an event attended by Czar Nicholas II. Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was
intense, however, this did not preclude her from having affairs, including
one with Osip Mandelstam, which she celebrated in a collection of poems
called Mileposts. At around the same time, she became involved in an
affair with the poet Sofia Parnok, who was 7 years older
than Tsvetaeva. The two women fell deeply in love, and the relationship
profoundly affected both women's writings. She deals with the ambiguous and
tempestuous nature of this relationship in a cycle of poems which at times
she called The Girlfriend, and at other times The Mistake.
Tsvetaeva and her
husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two
daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917). Then, in
1914, Efron volunteered for the front; by 1917 he was an officer stationed
in Moscow with the 56th Reserve. Tsetsaeva was to witness the Russian
Revolution first hand. On trains, she came into contact with ordinary
Russian people and was shocked by the mood of anger and violence. She wrote
in her journal: "In the air of the compartment hung only three axe-like
words: bourgeois, Junkers, leeches". After the 1917 Revolution, Efron joined
the White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her
husband. She was trapped in Moscow for five years, where there was a
terrible famine. She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems, including
The Tsar's Maiden (1920), and her epic about the Civil War, The Swans'
Encampment, which glorified those who fought against the communists. The
cycle of poems in the style of a diary or journal begins on the day of Czar
Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the
anti-communist White Army was finally defeated. The 'swans' of the title
refers to the volunteers in the White Army, in which her husband was
fighting as an officer. The Moscow famine was to exact a terrible toll on
Tsvetaeva. Starvation and worry were to erode her looks. With no immediate
family to turn to, she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In
1919, she placed Irina in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that she
would be better fed there. Tragically, she was mistaken, and Irina died of
starvation in 1920. The child's death caused Tsvetaeva great grief and
regret. In one letter, she said, 'God punished me.' During these years,
Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofia
Evgenievna Holliday, for whom she wrote a number of plays. Many years later,
she would write the novella "Povest' o Sonechke" about her relationship with
Holliday, who ended up betraying her.
Marina Tsvetaeva
and Efron
Exile
Berlin and Prague
In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna left the Soviet Union and were
reunited with Efron in Berlin. There she published the collections
Separation, Poems to Blok, and the poem The Tsar Maiden. In August 1922, the
family moved to Prague. Unable to afford living accommodation in Prague
itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University
in Prague and living in hostels, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a
village outside the city. In Prague, Tsvetaeva had a passionate affair with
Konstantin Boeslavovich Rozdevitch, a former military officer. This affair
became widely known throughout émigré circles, and even to Efron himself.
Efron was devastated by the affair (this is well-documented and supported
particularly by a letter which he wrote to Voloshin on the matter). It was
bound to end disastrously, and it did. Her break-up with Rozdevitch in 1923
was almost certainly the inspiration for her great 'The Poem of the End'.
This relationship was also the inspiration for "The Poem of the Mountain".
At about the same time, a more important relationship began: Tsvetaeva's
correspondence with Boris Pasternak, who had stayed in the Soviet Union. The
two were not to meet for nearly twenty years, but for a time they were in
love, and they maintained an intimate friendship until Tsvetaeva's return to
Russia. In summer 1924, Efron and Tsvetaeva left Prague for the suburbs,
living for a while in Jiloviste, before moving on to Vsenory, where
Tsvetaeva completed "The Poem of the End", and was to conceive their son,
Georgy, whom she was to later nickname 'Mur'. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him
Boris (after Pasternak); Efron would have none of it and insisted on Georgy.
He was to be a most difficult and demanding child. Nevertheless, Tsetaeva
loved him in the only way she knew, obsessively. Ariadna was relegated
immediately to the role of mother's helper and confidante, and was
consequently robbed of much of her childhood. However, the child did not
reciprocate. The older he grew, the more difficult and obstreperous he
became.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Paris
In 1925, the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next
14 years. At about this time Efron contracted tuberculosis, adding to the
family's difficulties. Tsvetaeva received a meagre stipend from the
Czechoslovak government, which gave financial support to artists and writers
who had lived in Czechoslovakia. In addition, she tried to make whatever she
could from readings and sales of her work. She turned more and more to
writing prose because she found it made more money than poetry. Tsvetaeva
did not feel at all at home in Paris's predominantly ex-bourgeois circle of
Russian émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-White
poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was
insufficiently anti-Soviet, and that her criticism of the Soviet régime was
altogether too nebuluous. She was particularly criticised for writing an
admiring letter to the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the wake of this
letter, the émigré paper The Latest News, to which Tsvetaeva had been a
frequent contributor, refused point blank to publish any more of her work.
She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Boris
Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Czech poet Anna Teskova, and the critics
D. S. Mirsky and Aleksandr Bakhrakh.
Husband's involvement with espionage
Meanwhile, Tsvetaeva's husband was rapidly developing Soviet sympathies
and was homesick for Russia. He was, however, afraid because of his past as
a White soldier. Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance
from the Communists, he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the
KGB. Alya shared his views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In
1937, she returned to the Soviet Union. Later that year, Efron too had to
return to Russia. The French police had implicated him in the murder of the
former Soviet defector Ignaty Reyss in September 1937, on a country lane
near Lausanne. After Efron's escape, the police interrogated Tsvetaeva, but
she seemed confused by their questions and ended up reading them some French
translations of her poetry. The police concluded that she was deranged and
knew nothing of the murder. (Later it was learned that Efron possibly had
also taken part in the assassination of Trotsky's son in 1936). Tsvetaeva
does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy, nor the extent to
which he was compromised. However, she was held responsible for his actions
and was ostracised in Paris because of the implication that he was involved
with the NKVD. World War II
had made Europe as unsafe and hostile as Russia.
Tsvetaeva felt that she no longer had a choice.
Return to the Soviet Union
In 1939, she and her son returned to the Soviet Union. She could not
have foreseen the horrors which were in store for her. In Stalin's Russia,
anyone who had lived abroad was suspect, as was anyone who had been among
the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva's sister had been
arrested before Tsvetaeva's return; although Anastasia survived the Stalin
years, the sisters never saw each other again. Tsvetaeva found that all
doors had closed to her. She got bits of work translating poetry, but
otherwise the established Soviet writers refused to help her, and chose to
ignore her plight; Aseyev, who she had hoped would assist, shyed away,
fearful for his life and position. Efron and Alya were arrested for
espionage. Alya's fiancé, it turned out, was actually an NKVD agent who had
been assigned to spy on the family. Efron was shot in 1941; Alya served over
eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after Stalin's death. In 1941,
Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, while most families of the
Union of Soviet writers were evacuated to Chistopol. Tsvetaeva had no means
of support in Yelabuga, and on August 24, 1941 she left for Chistopol
desperately seeking for a job. On August 26, 1941, Marina Tsvetaeva and poet
Valentin Parnakh applied to the Soviet of Literature Fund asking for a job
at the LitFund's canteen. Valentin Parnakh was accepted as a doorman, while
Tsvetaeva's application for a permission to live in Chistopol was turned
down and she had to return to Yelabuga on August 28. On 31 August, 1941
while living in Yelabuga, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She was buried in
Yelabuga cemetery on September 2, 1941, but the exact location of her grave
remains unknown. There have always been rumours that Tsvetaeva's death
wasn't suicide. On the day of her death she was home alone (her host family
was out) and, according to Yelabuga residents, NKVD agents came to her house
and forced her to commit suicide. These rumours remain unconfirmed. In the
town of Yelabuga, the Tsvetaeva house museum can be visited, as well as a
monument to her. In the museum, Tsvetaeva's farewell note, written just
before her death, can be seen.
Her work
From a poem she wrote in 1913, in which she displays her propensity for
prophecy:
Scattered in bookstores, greyed by dust
and time,
Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold,
My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -
When they are old.
Conversely, her poetry was much admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov,
Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke,
and Anna Akhmatova. Today, that recognition is sustained by the poet Joseph
Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions. Tsvetaeva is primarily a
poet-lyricist, since her lyrical voice remains clearly audible in her
narrative poetry. Her lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected
lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate
their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom, 1910)
and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar', 1912). The poems are vignettes of
a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in
Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style. The
full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly
influenced by the contacts which she had made at Koktebel, and was made
evident in two new collections: Mileposts (Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book
One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922). Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style
emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and
publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for
example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal.
Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological
sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded
further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of
Mileposts: Book One as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are
dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which
again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922).
Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of
Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis
personae within them. The collection entitled Separation (Razluka, 1922) was
to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" (Na
krasnom kone). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written
between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots.
Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The
Maiden-Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar'-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The
Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" (Molodets: skazka, 1924). The fourth
folklore-style poem is entitled "Byways" (Pereulochki, published in 1923 in
the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed
incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language. The
collection Psyche (Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known
cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi
stan, Stikhi 1917-1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.
Subsequently, as an émigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were
published by émigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After
Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris. There then followed the twenty-three
lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" (Derev'ya), "Wires" (Provoda)
and "Pairs" (Dvoe), and the tragic "Poets" (Poetry). "After Russia" contains
the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is
merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire.
In 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote "Poem of the End",
which details a walk around Prague and across its bridges; the walk is about
the final walk she will take with her lover Konstantin Rodzevitch. In it
everything is foretold: in the first few lines (translated by Elaine
Feinstein) the future is already written:
A single post, a point of rusting
tin in the sky
marks the fated place we
move to, he and I
Again, further poems foretell future developments. Principal among these is
the voice of the classically-oriented Tsvetaeva heard in cycles "The Sibyl,"
"Phaedra," and "Ariadne." Tsvetaeva's beloved, ill-starred heroines recur in
two verse plays, Theseus-Ariadne (Tezei-Ariadna, 1927) and Phaedra (Fedra,
1928). These plays form the first two parts of an incomplete trilogy
entitled Aphrodite's Rage. The satirist in Tsvetaeva plays second fiddle
only to the poet-lyricist. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among
Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" (Poezd zhizni) and "The
Floorcleaners' Song" (Poloterskaya), both included in After Russia, and The
Rat-catcher (Krysolov, 1925-1926), a long, folkloric narrative. The target
of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed
against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of
workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The
Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a
house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush
out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones.
Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the
climax." The poem which Tsvetaeva describes as liricheskaia satira, The
Rat-Catcher, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The Rat-Catcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by
some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of
hommage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderatten. The Rat-Catcher appeared
initially, in serial format, in the émigré journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926
whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until
after the death of Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who
saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away
too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric
narratives, The Ratcatcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous
speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to
bathos. Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia"
appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a
"prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic
necessity rather than one of choice.
Translators
Translators of Tsvetaeva's work into English include Elaine Feinstein
and David McDuff. Nina Kossman translated many of Tsvetaeva's long
(narrative) poems, as well as her lyrical poems; they are collected in two
books, Poem of the End and In the Inmost Hour of the Soul. J. Marin King
translated a great deal of Tsvetaeva's prose into English, compiled in a
book called A Captive Spirit. Tsvetaeva scholar Angela Livingstone has
translated a number of Tsvetaeva's essays on art and writing, compiled in a
book called Art in the Light of Conscience. Livingstone's translation of
Tsvetaeva's "The Ratcatcher" was published as a separate book. Mary Jane
White has translated the early cycle "Miles" in a book called "Starry Sky to
Starry Sky," as well has Tsvetaeva's elegy for Rilke, "New Year's," (Adastra
Press 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027 USA) and "Poem of the End"
and "Poem of the Hill." (New England Review). In 2002, Yale University Press
published Jamey Gambrell's translation of post-revolutionary prose, entitled
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922, with notes on poetic and
linguistic aspects of Tsvetaeva's prose, and endnotes for the text itself.
The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set six of Tsvetaeva's poems to
music. Later the Russian-Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a Hommage à
Marina Tsvetayeva featuring her poems. Her poem, Mne Nravitsya (it pleases
me), was performed by Alla Pugacheva in the film Irony of Fate.
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Joseph Brodsky
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"Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a
curve--or rather, a straight line--rising at almost a right angle
because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an
idea higher (or, more precisely, an octave and a faith higher.) She
always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and
expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains
hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique
case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for
us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of
human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its
means, by which it was transformed into the material of art."
Joseph Brodsky
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Poems
Translated by Andrey Kneller
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My poems, written early, when I doubted
that I could ever play the poet’s part,
erupting, as though water from a fountain
or sparks from a petard,
and rushing as though little demons,
senseless,
into a sanctuary, where incense spreads,
my poems about death and adolescence,
-that still remain unread!
collecting dust in bookstores all this
time,
where no one comes to carry them away,
my poems, like exquisite, precious wines,
will have their day!
(1913)
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You, walking past me and racing
After charms that you’ll hardly attain, -
If you knew how much fire is wasted,
How much life is wasted in vain!
And what flames, so heroically rash,
An occasional shade can evoke,
And how my heart was burnt into ash
By this useless gunpowder smoke.
O, those trains leaving terminals nightly,
Carrying sleep wherever they go …
Then again, it’s rather unlikely
That you’d know, even if you would know -
Why my speeches are sharp and brief,
In the smoke of my cigarette, -
How much dark and menacing grief
Is crammed in my golden-haired head.
(1913)
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Meeting
The evening mist appeared above the
town,
Submissive trains sped quickly through the haze,
Clear as the petals of anemones, a face
Flashed in a window, - youthful and round.
A shadow on her eyelids. Like a
crown,
Those golden curls… I hushed myself, amazed:
I understood that with our moans, we raise
The long deceased from underneath the ground.
In valleys of my dreams, I’ve often
greeted
- An apparition in the crowds of the station -
This youthful lady by the window seated.
But why was she so sad on this
occasion?
What did this silhouette seek out and why?
Was she not happy - even in the sky?
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My city’s vastness is submerged in
night.
Away from sleeping buildings, I take flight.
The people that I see think: daughter, wife,-
But I remembered one thing only: night.
A mild, July wind shows me where to
go.
In someone’s house, music’s playing - slow.
Through thin walls of my ribs, - I know -
This wind, up until dawn, will blow.
There’s a lit up window and a poplar
tree,
A flower in my hand, a church-bell’s plea,
This path I take in no one’s footsteps - free,
And this lone shadow, - there is no me.
Golden threads of city lights’ rays.
And in my mouth, - this bitter leaf’s taste.
My friends, release me from the day’s maze.
You’re merely dreaming all of this, dazed.
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You, walking past me and racing
After charms that you’ll hardly attain, -
If you knew how much fire is wasted,
How much life is wasted in vain!
And what flames, so heroically rash,
An occasional shade can evoke,
And how my heart was burnt into ash
By this useless gunpowder smoke.
O, those trains leaving terminals
nightly,
Carrying sleep wherever they go …
Then again, it’s rather unlikely
That you’d know, even if you would know -
Why my speeches are sharp and brief,
In the smoke of my cigarette, -
How much dark and menacing grief
Is crammed in my golden-haired head.
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You walk, somewhat like myself,
Hunched, and not looking up.
I used to lower my eyes as well!
Stop here, passerby, stop!
Having gathered your flowers in a
Bouquet, read the stone by the gate,
It will say - I was named Marina,
And I lived to the following date.
It’s a grave, but don’t treat it as
such
My spirit won’t rise to haunt you
I, myself, loved laughing too much
Whenever I wasn’t supposed to.
My hair was once curled and twisted
And blood used to rush to my face.
Hey, passerby, I also existed!
Do not rush to abandon this place!
Hey passerby, pluck a wild stem
And after that – pick this berry.
No berries are sweeter than
The ones from a cemetery.
Only don’t stand there, sighing,
And please, do not hang your head.
But rather think of me lightly
And afterwards, likewise, forget.
How the sun shines down upon you!
Its rays set the dust aglow.
And don’t let my voice disturb you
And vex you from down below.
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After a night of insomnia, the body
gets weaker,
Becomes dear, but not yours or anybody’s to own.
Just like a seraph, you walk, smiling to people,
And in slow veins, arrows continue to moan.
After insomnia, arms lose their
strength and droop down,
You become equally oblivious to friends and foes.
A whole rainbow appears in each unexpected sound,
And it smells of Florence during wintry frost.
Lips shine sweetly and shadows
appear golden and light
Next to the sunken eyes. The dim evening skies
Have illuminated this image, - and from the dark night,
Only one thing grows darker and darker - our eyes.
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Here, in my Moscow, - cupolas shine.
Here, in my Moscow, - church bells chime.
And tombstones, here, all stand aligned,
Tsarinas sleep there, and tsars.
You don’t know, but in the Kremlin,
at dawn,
The air is lightest – and just here alone!
You don’t know, but in the Kremlin, each dawn,
I pray to you - until dusk.
And you stroll along your Neva
River, slow,
While I stand alone where my Moskva flows.
With my head bowed low, I watch the blurry glow -
Streetlamps in the dusk.
With my whole insomnia, I’m in love
with you,
With my whole insomnia, I am harking you,
While sextons awake in the Kremlin to
Carry out their morning tasks.
But, my Joy, my river – with your
river still…
But, my Joy, my arm – with your arm, I feel,
Will not come together, at least, until
The dawn catches the dusk.
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Two suns are cooling down, - God, I
protest! -
One is in the sky, the other - in my chest.
How these two suns - could my
conscience forget? -
How these two suns were always driving me mad!
Both cooling now, - their rays won’t
hurt your eyes!
The one that burned the hottest is the first to die.
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P.E.
The august day was softly fleeting
Into the twilight’s golden dust.
And noisy streetcars passed by, speeding.
And people passed.
With no intention, absent-minded,
I took a quiet street, alone,
And church-bells sang somewhere behind me
Their quiet song.
I thought of you and I together,
I kept envisioning your pose,
I walked and contemplated whether
To bring a rose.
I kept rehearsing what I’d say.
Alas, I would forget the phrase.
Then - suddenly! - to my dismay! -
That very place.
So dreary, lifeless and immense…
There is the door, - I'm counting floors.
Involuntarily, the hands
Reach for the cross.
I count the stairs on my ascension,
They lead me to some flaming hell.
But there’s no time for contemplation.
I ring your bell.
I felt my arms chilled to the bone.
And I heard thunder, clear and loud.
At last, I called for you. - He’s home,
He’ll be right out.
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Let everything be gone with time, --
The youthful days that I recall.
I won’t forget what bright designs
Adorned those walls.
I won’t forget those lampshade
beads,
And someone’s zealous voices and
Port Arthur’s prints and clocks that beat
High overhead.
The moment was prolonged some more,
And then, I heard your footsteps near,
I heard the squeaking of the door,
And you appeared.
--------------------
At once, I felt a deep attraction.
You bowed, - as simple as a king
Two brown stars, aglow up with passion,
Lit everything.
Your squinted eyes were large and
warm,
You gazed upon my tender face.
O, if you only saw the storm
That just took place.
I struggled like a hero, fearless.
- O just to think, I tried the broth! -
I can recall your quiet whispers,
Your lips were soft.
I can recall your hair was softer
Than fur, and then, - most dear and nice! -
Those wrinkles that arose from laughter
Beneath your eyes.
Forgot it? - I will not forget it,
You sat right there - and I was here.
What strength it took for me to bare it,
To sit so near –
And let out rings of smoke,
suppressing
My nervousness and showing peace.
It was becoming so distressing
To sit like this.
We spoke about the letter “yat,’”
Old alphabet and weather patterns.
Another meal as strange as that
Will never happen.
The lights were dim. I turned
around,
And laughing, I surprised myself:
“Eyes of a pure-bred, loyal hound.
- Dear sir, farewell.”
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With no intention, absent-minded,
I took a quiet street, alone,
This time, no church-bells sang behind me
Their quiet song.
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I’ll conquer you from any land and
from any sky,
For the forest is my cradle and it’s where I’ll die,
Because, here, on this earth, I stand - only on one foot,
And because I’ll sing for you - like no other could.
I’ll conquer you from any epoch,
from any night,
From any golden banner, from any sword in a fight,
I’ll chase the dogs off the porch, toss away the key
For, in this night, a dog is less loyal than me.
I’ll conquer you from all others and
from that one too,
I’ll be no one’s wife, - you’ll be no one’s groom.
I’ll win the last battle, - hush! - and pull you aside
From the one, with whom, Jacob fought all night.
Till I cross my hands on your chest,
- I’m cursed! -
And until that day, you’ll remain - just yours,
This is why your wings aim for the upper sky, -
For the world’s your cradle and it’s where you’ll die!
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They thought – just a man!
And forced him to die.
He is dead. The end.
- Cry for the angel, cry!
Before the fall of night,
He praised the evening splendor
Three waxen lights
- Superstitious - tremble.
He emitted bright light;
On the snow, strings smoldered.
Just three candles shine –
For the sun-holder!
Oh, will you look - how
His eyelids are flattened!
Oh, will you look - how
His wings have been shattered!
People pray with the priest.
He reads the selection…
- The poet lies, deceased,
And celebrates resurrection.
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This night, I wander, all alone
outside, -
A sleepless nun, a homeless traveler! -
I have the keys from all the gates tonight
Of this unique, and one and only capital!
Insomnia has pushed me into town,
- How stunning you appear, O dusky Kremlin! -
This night, I kiss the boisterous and round,
The hostile, warring planet on the temple!
The muggy wind blows straight into
the soul.
And not the hair arises, but the fleece!
This night, alone, I pity, one and all, -
Those who are pitied presently and kissed.
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Where does such tenderness come
from?
These curls that I stroke with my hand
Aren’t the first that I’ve stroked, and I
Knew lips that were darker than yours.
Stars rose in the sky and faded,
Where does such tenderness come from? –
And glowing eyes also rose and faded
Right next to my own two eyes.
And I used to listen to greater
hymns
In complete darkness, at night,
Betrothed - Oh, tenderness! -
On the chest of the singer himself.
Where does such tenderness come
from,
And what do I do with it, you, sly,
Adolescent, vagabond singer,
Whose eyelashes couldn’t be longer?
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I stare into the mirrored glass, -
All hazy, drowsy and foggy, -
To ascertain where you will pass
And where you’ll stop for lodging.
I look and see: An old ship’s mast.
There, on the deck, you’re standing…
You, by the clouded train… The vast,
Green fields, at night, lamenting…
The evening countryside in dew,
There, ravens soar in flight…
--My dear one, I am blessing you
To go where you decide!
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I like the fact that you’re not mad
about me,
I like the fact that I’m not mad for you,
And that the globe of planet earth is grounded
And will not drift away beneath our shoes.
I like the fact that I can laugh here loudly,
Not play with words, feel unashamed and loose
And never flush with stifling waves above me
When we brush sleeves, and not need an excuse.
I like the fact that you don’t feel
ashamed
As you, before my eyes, embrace another,
I like the fact that I will not be damned
To hell for kissing someone else with ardor,
That you would never use my tender name
In vain, that in the silence of the church’s towers,
We’ll never get to hear the sweet refrain
Of hallelujahs sung somewhere above us.
With both, my heart and hand, I
thank you proudly
For everything, - although you hardly knew
You loved me so: and for my sleeping soundly,
And for the lack of twilight rendezvous,
No moonlit walks with both your arms around me,
No sun above our heads or skies of blue,
For never feeling - sadly! - mad about me,
For me not feeling - sadly! - mad for you.
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