Portraits without Frames Read online

  Today he offers up

  a new—the ninth, by my count—

  version of his participation

  in the October Revolution.

  (He returns to this topic often

  and seemingly without remorse,

  but it torments him.)

  The version with Hetman Skoropadsky,†

  whose car’s petrol tank

  Shklovsky filled with sugar.

  He charges into his story,

  into history,

  but tires of his own fervor,

  his own intensity,

  and falls silent.

  Then he gets up, firmly

  shuts the door, and—quietly,

  into my ear:

  “In 1921 or ’22,

  Gorky admitted to me sadly

  what Lenin had told him in strict confidence:

  ‘The experiment has failed.’ ”

  Grateful to Shklovsky

  for placing such trust in me,

  I bowed to him in silence.

  We both remained silent.

  Without a word, he raised

  one finger to his mouth

  and looked at me sternly.

  It was past midnight.

  My day with him was over.

  And we had other conversations,

  other years. One day,

  in winter, I bumped into him

  in the courtyard of our building.

  Cloaked in dusk

  and a long coat fringed with frost,

  arm in arm with his grandson.

  We stopped and Shklovsky told me

  quietly, but clearly,

  “Remember, we are on our way out.

  On our way out.” And I recalled

  the seven and a half

  percent, the wall of books,

  all written by a man

  who lived

  in times that were hard to bear.

  1994

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *The three Odessan-born Suok sisters all married prominent Soviet authors. Serafima was first married to the poet Vladimir Narbut, then to Shklovsky; Lydia Suok was married to the poet Eduard Bagritsky (see footnote, p. 59); and Olga was married to Yury Olesha (see the introductory note on p. 100).

  †Pavlo Petrovych Skoropadsky was a decorated Ukrainian general of Cossack descent in the Imperial Russian Army, who became the political leader and military commander (hetman) of Ukraine in April 1918, after a coup d’état. He was removed from power in November of that year and officially abdicated in December.

  NIKOLAY KONRAD (1891–1970) is considered the founder of the Soviet school of Japanese studies. In 1938 he was arrested, along with at least seventeen other important members of the Leningrad Oriental Institute. Interrogated and tortured, he refused to sign false confessions. After fifteen months in prison he was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, near Krasnoyarsk. After about a year of hard labor he was transferred—thanks to petitioning from influential figures—to a sharashka, a special prison where scientists and scholars were treated relatively well and provided with the materials and facilities necessary for their work. Konrad was released in 1941. After Stalin’s death, he spoke up more than once on behalf of dissidents and called for greater cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the West. During the last three years of his life he corresponded with Arnold Toynbee. Mikhail Bakhtin referred to him as one of the three most important of Soviet literary theorists.

  NIKOLAY OSIPOVICH KONRAD

  This isn’t something thirdhand.

  What I’m going to tell you about Konrad

  is clear and definite.

  We met in quiet Kémeri,

  amid the fragrant pine trees of Latvia.

  It was in the house that Nadezhda Pavlovich

  rented every summer

  from a strong and devout family.

  She used to go to the village church—

  something we had to keep quiet about.

  I saw her praying

  and being transformed as she prayed.

  Once she said to me joyfully,

  “Let me introduce you.

  This is my friend, Nikolay Osipovich

  Konrad, a full member of the Soviet

  Academy of Sciences—please love

  and respect him.” “I’ve loved

  and respected him for many years,”

  I said with respectful tenderness.

  I did, of course, know who he was.

  I’d been following his correspondence

  with Arnold Toynbee. I had read

  his essays about Japan.

  Konrad is slim, handsome,

  smiling, and gentle.

  You can see at a glance

  that he’s a man of honor.

  There is honor and dignity

  in every line of his face.

  His smile and the look in his eyes

  disarm

  those who have been brought up on hatred.

  (And have we not all

  been brought up on hatred?)

  He and I walked the length

  of many summer paths and tracks,

  through the forest, by the sea,

  through gardens and among sand dunes,

  and we talked about many things.

  I tried to listen,

  to do nothing but listen,

  and I greatly regretted afterward

  that I had, nevertheless,

  sometimes interrupted. And I regretted

  that I had not

  brought a tape recorder with me.

  There was a seagull

  resting on a wave;

  a crow was cawing sleepily;

  a local electric train

  rumbled by in the distance.

  Still farther away, near Riga,

  a lighthouse was winking.

  There was the flare of a match

  in some unseen hand;

  a damp mist

  spreading over the earth—

  and we two, walking together.

  To my great good fortune

  I was listening to the words

  of a man at the sound of whose name

  the Japanese bow

  or smile and rise to their feet.

  And even here, in Russia,

  people can see that Konrad

  has a head on his shoulders.

  “After my year in prison,”

  he told me, “when I was sent

  to the camp near Krasnoyarsk,

  I was greatly honored.

  I was placed on a pedestal.”

  A pause, and then,

  with a certain majesty:

  “I was given the job of yardman.

  I tried to do my job well,

  to keep the ground free of snow,

  and the camp’s senior yardman

  once said to me,

  ‘Keep on like this, Konrad,

  and, before we know it,

  you too will be promoted

  to the rank

  of senior yardman.’”

  Nikolay Osipovich fell silent.

  He grinned very sweetly,

  neither appealing for pity

  nor demanding indignant rage.

  The silence in Latvia

  is healing, and deeper

  than can be fathomed.

  A pity I had no tape recorder,

  but my memory

  was recording every word.

  “You’re a splendid teacher,” I say.

  “Have you never thought

  of composing a memoir,

  of writing your own Confessions?”

  “Me! My Confessions! What on earth

  makes you say that?” And then,

  with a smile: “But I have to confess

  I’ve been dreaming for a long time

  of publishing Saint Augustine.

  ‘Which translation?’ I kept thinking.

  The old ones were no good

  and there wasn’t a
new one.

  But if a hunter’s alert,

  a beast will appear before him.

  Not long after the war, a woman

  from Petersburg

  (her name is Sergiyenko)

  sent me her translation

  of the first few chapters.

  Why? What had moved her to this?

  After the blockade winter,

  as the first stunted

  blades of grass began to show through

  and the earth was beginning to breathe again

  after her deep swoon,

  there must have been something,

  some feeling

  that she, who knew Latin,

  just had to express

  and whose presence she could sense

  in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

  And she’d done a fine job.

  It was just what I needed,

  and I told her so.

  She and I signed a contract.

  She finished the translation

  and I liked what she’d done.

  But how was I going

  to publish Saint Augustine

  in our God-denying kingdom?”

  A rhetorical question, of course,

  but Konrad then answered it

  with unexpected simplicity:

  “I thought we could publish

  three Confessions together: Augustine,

  Rousseau, and Tolstoy. The last two

  would shelter the first.

  But time goes on passing

  and—just think—it never returns.

  And my three Confessions

  are still ready

  and waiting for publication.”

  That evening, four of us—

  Konrad, his sensitive

  and scholarly wife, Natalya Isayevna,

  Nadezhda Pavlovich, and yours truly—

  sat listening to the words

  of the blessed Augustine,

  and the walls of the room

  were moving apart

  and the roof kept moving

  higher and higher

  and we four,

  in the quiet of Kémeri,

  were sailing through the many-starred

  and blessed universe.

  Few in this world are such moments

  of true reconciliation.

  The journey continues.

  We say nothing and are without fear.

  Each with a sense

  of our own life,

  we celebrate

  our shared presence.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  YEVGENIA TARATUTA (1912–2005) was born in France. Her father, a Russian anarchist who returned to Moscow in 1917, imbued her with a lasting faith in Prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s principle of “mutual aid.” This faith, she believed, helped her to survive exile to Siberia in the 1930s and six years in the Gulag after the Second World War. During her years of freedom she worked as a translator and as an editor of children’s literature. Robert Chandler, who met her in Moscow, confirms that she remained strong and buoyant into her last years.* As Maria Bloshteyn put it after first reading this translation, “Poetry is both the reason for Taratuta being tortured and her only effective means of defense against the torturers, an illustration of a key paradox of Soviet life.” While under interrogation, Taratuta remembers lines from three poems: “The Song of Far-Sighted Oleg” (1822), one of several poems by Alexander Pushkin on the theme of a poet-prophet confronting a tyrannical ruler; the unfinished “At the Top of My Voice” (1929–1930), the last of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poems; and “The Upas Tree” (1828), also by Pushkin, a bleak poem about a slave sent alone into a desert to fetch some of the poisonous sap of an upas tree, which is so powerful that the slave collapses and dies immediately after his return.

  YEVGENIA ALEXANDROVNA TARATUTA

  Yevgenia Taratuta,

  an exalted being,

  charged under Article 58—

  counterrevolutionary activity—

  landed in the Butyrka.

  They deprived her of sleep.

  They broke the bones of her hands.

  “T.—without your belongings!”

  was how

  they used to summon her from her cell.

  Her investigator, Odlyanitsky,

  was a connoisseur of swear words

  with pretensions to being an intellectual

  and a lover of belles lettres.

  “Go on, confess, admit

  that Kassil

  and Kvitko are spies too!”†

  “No!” They struck her on the back,

  in her face. The air

  was saturated

  with the most intimate of curses.

  “No!” She was losing

  consciousness. “I need poetry,”

  she said to herself. She closed

  her eyes; her hair fell

  across her forehead; she switched off.

  “No!” she said to herself. “I am not

  under this man’s command.”

  “Where are you?”

  the man yelled. She was with Pushkin.

  She was reciting “The Song

  of Far-Sighted Oleg.”

  Now Oleg wished for revenge,

  she was saying to herself,

  on the reckless Khazars.

  But the words came out different:

  revenge on the wrecks of stars.

  They struck her on the back,

  in her chest, in her face.

  First it was Pushkin.

  Then, Mayakovsky:

  “At the Top of My Voice.”

  My lines,

  like some

  great aqueduct,

  . . .

  will obstinately

  blast their way

  through time . . .

  And holding

  up my . . .

  . . . . . .

  . . . . . . . . . . . of ever-

  lasting rhyme

  I’ll—

  And then, emphasizing the word “swine”:

  I’ll send

  those turncoats

  packing—

  those poetasting,

  bureaucrasting

  swine!

  “Quite something!” she thought.

  “Mustn’t forget.” And then,

  on the very border

  of consciousness, falling,

  feeling the pull

  of the void, she turned

  to Pushkin again, whispering:

  But one man,

  with a look of command

  sent another man

  to that dark land.

  Yes, there are looks of command;

  there are looks of power

  and commandment.

  There is command of others,

  and there is

  command of self.

  Who sent whom?

  It was quiet in the room.

  The knocking of Taratuta’s heart

  and grinding of her clenched teeth

  could be clearly heard.

  Taratuta might have stayed alive

  without poetry,

  though that is not certain,

  but she would have lost her mind—

  which remains intact and whole.

  Fortress of Russian poetry,

  you stood firm!

  I can’t hold my tongue.

  I can’t bear it.

  I want to shout, “Bravo!”

  The word’s

  bursting out of my heart.

  But I stay

  stubbornly silent.

  The word belongs to a concert hall

  and I can’t shout it out.

  It’s the wrong time,

  the wrong place.

  “But how did you manage,

  Yevgenia Alexandrovna?”

  “Oh, somehow. . .”

  Opposite me, visibly hunched,

  her head to one side,

  sits a


  truly

  exalted being,

  Yevgenia Taratuta.

  1990

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *His poem “Yevgenia Alexandrovna Taratuta” was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 2002.

  †Lev Kassil wrote stories and novels for teenagers and young adults. For Leyb Kvitko, see the introductory note on p. 137.

  THE YIDDISH POETS

  LEYB KVITKO (1890–1952) wrote poetry and prose in Yiddish. He was orphaned early and worked a variety of jobs before debuting as a poet in 1917 with his first book of children’s verse, Lidelekh (Songs), noted for its warm humor, lyricism, and enthusiastic embrace of life—all key features of his poetic legacy. Although Kvitko also wrote satirical verse, an autobiographical novel, and many articles and essays, he was best known as a children’s poet, whose poems—translated into Russian by the likes of Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, and Mikhail Svetlov—were enjoyed by generations of Soviet readers. Kvitko was arrested in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee liquidation sweep, accused of being a traitor to the motherland, and executed on August 12, 1952, the Night of the Murdered Poets.

  LEYB KVITKO

  He understood the language of children,

  of leaves and birds, of water and wind.

  He became a sage, yet remained a child.

  But in times of tyranny

  wisdom doesn’t save the wise,

  nor is a child saved by childhood.

  New times come in the end,

  though always too late.

  Wisdom is once again

  ascribed to the wise.

  And what happened long ago

  becomes current again.

  The house painter’s job is a wonderful job,

  a terrestrial job, a celestial job.

  Hang in your cradle

  between earth and sky;

  high in the cerulean blue,

  move that brush skillfully, do,

  and sing a song

  with neither end nor beginning

  just so your soul can keep singing.

  He came to love his craft—

  the fresh air, the freedom, the light.

  He had begun to make and sing songs

  much earlier

  than he learned to read and write.

  Lidelekh is the book of his beginning.

  It burbles like a brook.

  it sings like a bird,

  it soars higher than the clouds.

  Kvitko speaks to the carriage driver

  and to his horse

  and to the hay that the horse is chewing.

  He converses with the smith

  and his hammer and his horseshoe,

  glowing between hammer and anvil.

  He converses with the villages of Bemba and Dremba,