Portraits without Frames Read online

  one stanza,

  even just one line

  I don’t know.

  It doesn’t have to be yours—

  other people’s will do.”

  There was no paper,

  but Halkin went on writing.

  New poems piled up.

  A terrible burden.

  More dangerous, perhaps, than gunpowder.

  He wrote them down

  on the paper of memory

  and day by day

  his memory grew heavier.

  Poems with sharp elbows

  were elbowing one another

  out of the way.

  But when he’d filled

  his last scrap of memory,

  he met a prisoner

  who knew Yiddish.

  A great rarity. A real find.

  This prisoner

  was a sheaf of paper,

  paper for new lines.

  And then, worn out by the camps,

  Halkin returned home.

  He wrote down what he could

  and his memory emptied

  and new poems

  came flooding in.

  He had come home

  handsome but heavyhearted,

  his eyes

  filled with a sorrow

  that lay beyond the bounds of sanity

  yet still remembered

  youth and a thirst for life.

  When he read,

  he would begin quietly,

  as if to the beat of his heart.

  He would catch fire quickly.

  He would flare up wildly.

  He would stand up on tiptoe

  and then stand on the table

  and then on the windowsill.

  His strength failing, he would

  call out, “Maria! Ma—!”

  And his wife would come running.

  With the help of their son and their daughter,

  she would take him down

  from the windowsill

  and put him to bed, half dead.

  He was still living.

  He was still writing.

  And then he died.

  On the day of his funeral

  a bearded man in a wadded jacket

  came up to me in the cemetery

  and asked, “Are you a relative?

  Or do you know

  any relatives of the deceased

  or, maybe, any close friends?”

  “I’m not a relative.

  I’m a friend. A translator.

  What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve brought with me

  a number of poems

  dictated to me by Halkin.

  I learned them by heart.

  I’m his manuscript.”

  This man’s jacket

  was the uniform of a zek.

  I introduced this man

  to Halkin’s wife and children.

  We sat at the table for a long time

  and talked about Halkin.

  And he dictated many lines—

  the cycle Mayn Oytser

  his posthumous collection of poems.

  This zek read us an unwritten book

  and Halkin came to life in his own poems,

  line by line and stanza by stanza,

  in poems honed by grief

  to a diamond’s sharp

  glitter.

  1990

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *Spassky, a poet, translator, and prose writer, was arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1951.

  SOVIET UKRAINE

  OLEKSANDR DOVZHENKO (1894–1956), a pioneer of world cinema, was born near Chernihiv, Ukraine, into a family descended from Cossacks. His parents were illiterate, but he graduated in 1914 from the Hlukhiv Pedagogical Institute, which now bears his name. He didn’t serve in the First World War because of a heart condition but volunteered for the Ukrainian People’s Army to fight against Soviet forces during the Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1917–1921. He joined a Ukrainian communist party, the Borotbists. When the Borotbists dissolved in 1920, most of the former members joined the Bolsheviks, but Dovzhenko never did. In 1923 he began work as an artist and illustrator in Kharkiv. After moving to Odessa in 1926, he developed an interest in cinema. The films of his Ukraine Trilogy—Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930)—are regarded as masterpieces of poetic filmmaking. However, many orthodox Soviet critics felt that the films’ ideological content was overshadowed by their loving depiction of the Ukrainian land, as well as by their formal daring; writing in Pravda, the party’s official organ, the poet-propagandist Demyan Bedny took special offense at the appearance of nudity in Earth and went so far as to label the film “counterrevolutionary.” Dovzhenko moved to Moscow in 1934 to work at Mosfilm Studios. Although he received two Stalin Prizes in the 1940s, many of his projects from that period did not meet with Stalin’s approval; he channeled more and more of his creative energy into writing fiction.

  OLEKSANDR PETROVYCH DOVZHENKO

  We hadn’t agreed on a date

  or time for my visit.

  I knock. “It isn’t too late, is it?”

  “Come on in. It’s never too late.

  We’ll stir up the twilit hive

  of our thoughts.” He didn’t

  need to think up images,

  they simply rained from him—

  he couldn’t help it.

  Head held high on a deerlike neck,

  hair so white it’s almost blue,

  forehead, nose, nostrils, eyes,

  the deep tan—all in all,

  he could be a carving

  in some local species of wood.

  A plowman? A singer of songs?

  An artist? A keeper of bees?

  His whole life

  is wound round with film stock,

  newspaper condemnations,

  and wretched versicles

  by Demyan Bedny, who wanted

  to raze his Earth to the ground.

  The bell rings. Yury Korneyevich Smolych*

  has come straight from the train.

  He sits down at the table,

  looks round politely, doesn’t speak.

  Oleksandr Dovzhenko says,

  “Demyan wrote himself—

  thrust himself—

  willfully, rudely,

  into the filmscript of my life,

  along with someone else . . .”

  That final s hangs in the air.

  A pause. A silence.

  Instead of a surname—

  a finger upraised

  and frozen in place.

  Smolych coughs and looks around.

  Dovzhenko’s cheeks are red

  as poppies. He flares

  with restrained fury. No sign

  of tiredness or age.

  He sits down, adopts the pose

  and tone of a narrator:

  “And then, many years later,

  Demyan and I were neighbors

  in a well-known hospital,

  and he, who’d called my film a kulak fable,

  comes up to me and says

  (I did nothing to prompt him):

  ‘I just don’t know

  why I abused your splendid Earth . . .

  I’ve never seen

  a better picture in my life . . .’ ”

  A pause, artfully prolonged.

  “What do you think

  I said to him then?”

  Dovzhenko continues.

  Smolych and I say nothing.

  Dovzhenko rises, paces about again—

  and says, “Nothing. I said nothing.”

  He was in form.

  Getting the better of his inner storm,

  he then brought us back to the Desna,

  to the enchanted Desna River,

  to quiet willows in the water’s blue,

  a sleepy day out fishing,

  the gold of sunset,

  and the bright colors of a country fair.

&nbs
p; “Where are they off to, in such joyful hurry—

  the merrymakers at the fair?”†

  Dovzhenko took us back

  to his grandfather Semyon,

  told us about his final years

  and how he died

  with a smile on his face—

  a smile that stayed on his face!

  But then, he didn’t live to see the famine,

  collectivization’s “dizzying successes”‡—

  let alone Chernobyl,

  which happened in the quietest of places,

  in the kingdom of fish,

  in the realm of the birds,

  on the earth of Ukraine,

  under the shadow of Shcherbytsky and Gorbachev.

  Dovzhenko too did not live

  to see Chernobyl.

  That Desna, that Pripyat,

  and that long-ago Chernihiv

  remain forever his. “I think

  that’s all I have to say about Demyan.

  Yes, I said nothing . . .

  It’s all so long ago, so far away.

  As for Sashko—he did his bit too:

  my smiling persecutor,

  that all-too-prolific playwright,

  Korniychuk of the white teeth—

  that favorite of Stalin.”

  Two mentions of Stalin

  in a single evening. Time to move on.

  Time for some tea. I hear

  Yulia Ippolitovna

  calling us. On seeing her,

  Dovzhenko beams. Oh, Dovzhenko!

  That deerlike neck.

  That clear-eyed gaze.

  That longing for what never

  came into being, for what

  slid away, like evening light.

  Having suffered so much,

  having drained the cup of misfortune—

  what grace!—

  he didn’t live to see our times,

  and—what luck!—

  he cannot see what has become

  of his enchanted Desna.

  May–June 1993

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Yuri Korneyevich Smolych was a Soviet Ukrainian author who wrote in a number of genres. He was the chairman of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union from 1971 to 1973.

  †This is a quote from Dovzhenko’s script for Earth.

  ‡A phrase used by Stalin.

  PAVLO TYCHYNA (1891–1967) was one of the great Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century, as well as an important and controversial political figure. He was born into a schoolteacher’s family in the village of Pisky and received his education at the district school, entering the Chernihiv Theological Seminary in 1907, where he met several other aspiring poets. He began publishing poems in 1912. His first collection of verse, Clarinets of the Sun, appeared in 1918 and won him instant recognition; in these poems, Tychyna blended symbolist poetics with the forms and themes of Ukrainian folklore, pioneering a new style he called “clarinetism.” The first years of Soviet rule, which proved disastrous for Ukraine, were remarkably productive for Tychyna, who released one innovative collection after another, including Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (1920), The Plow (1920), In the Cosmic Orchestra (1921), and The Wind from Ukraine (1924). These works reflected a fiercely independent spirit, as well as a deep love for his native land. In the 1930s, however, Tychyna began to publish dogmatic poetry that conformed with the demands of socialist realism; he was rewarded with prominent positions in the Soviet administration of Ukraine. Tychyna spoke out against the Ukrainian national revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and was condemned for many years as a conformist who betrayed his countryman, as well as his own poetic gifts.

  PAVLO GRYGOROVYCH TYCHYNA

  I come in the morning

  to a spacious room in the Hotel Moscow

  overlooking the gray, compartmentalized

  cube of the Council of Ministers.

  The morning is dismal.

  Tychyna wants to talk

  but doesn’t.

  He slouches, fusses about.

  I know what this means.

  He points up at the ceiling,

  at its four lofty corners—

  a finger to his lips,

  eyes full of anguish.

  He takes a leaf of paper, writes out a question.

  And I reply—on the same leaf.

  He nods his head in silence,

  asks other questions.

  I keep replying. The page

  is now written all over.

  Tychyna burns it

  over an ashtray.

  Another page. Ashes.

  Tychyna carries the ashtray out.

  I hear the thunder of water in the toilet bowl.

  What did those pages contain?

  Nothing unusual,

  nothing terrible.

  Persecution under the guise

  of official canonization,

  phony praise, masking

  ill will, from the press.

  Tychyna’s frustration with literary

  affairs in Ukraine.

  And Sashko, Stalin’s new favorite,

  now to be called

  not Sashko but Korniychuk.*

  Tychyna says,

  “I’m the hostage—he’s the favorite.”

  I respond,

  “I’m the artist—he’s the sybarite.”

  Tychyna takes me by the hand,

  squatting democratically,

  bending his knees so that he’s lower

  than his interlocutor.

  Is this modesty?

  Considerateness?

  In any case—

  the gesture elevates his fellow man.

  A finger to his lips,

  he points to the skirting boards—

  a few whispered words.

  Confused, a little embarrassed, I recite,

  hoping to mute

  our mutual sadness:

  “My friends, why should I care

  whether I’m the first poet, or the last?”†

  A pause.

  Then, very quietly, Tychyna says,

  “Thank you for remembering.

  I thought everyone had forgotten.

  You’ve brought me great joy . . .”

  And I think to myself,

  “He’s made it into the books,

  but he is still unread—

  and hence misunderstood.

  Misunderstood and condemned.

  For what?

  For his faith in ‘the single

  family of mankind,’

  his faith in the power of thought—

  for his gentle soul.

  People call him a petty cop,

  a holy fool in a general’s garb.

  No matter!

  Blows once rained down on Byron and Heine,

  and now they rain down on Mayakovsky and Tychyna,

  and on the life they lived,

  on their whole era.

  No matter!

  The sun’s clarinet still sounds,

  the plow bites into the ground,

  and the wind blows from Ukraine . . .”‡

  Pavlo Grygorovych

  suggests we leave the room.

  We go downstairs.

  In the elevator, he exchanges bows

  with the deputies here for their session.

  We catch a taxi

  and ride to Timiryazevsky Park.

  In the fresh air, among the trees

  he becomes animated, even cheerful.

  What trust in the world!

  He’s open as the sea.

  Something childlike,

  unprotected, shows through:

  “The blue has fanned my soul,

  my soul has dreamt up the sun . . .”§

  In this empty spot, after

  looking around, he raises,

  then lowers his right hand.

  “That’s how we vote. All day.

  It tires the hand

  far more than writing.”

&nbs
p; He raises, then lowers

  his left hand. “That’s

  for balance. One’s hands

  should share the burden equally.

  We get good exercise, and we sing praises.

  How we love to sing praises!”

  Tychyna leads me

  from room to room:

  “There’s something I want

  to say. In confidence.”

  We go out to the balcony.

  He gazes up,

  looks down,

  and listens carefully.

  He has wonderful hearing.

  (I’m not surprised:

  in the mid-thirties

  he spent many nights on a suitcase

  packed with dried bread and a few clothes,

  ready for anything.

  “Oh, poverty and need—

  when will they finally end?”‖

  The mid-thirties,

  back in Kyiv.)

  “Do you remember the thirties?”

  A pause.

  “The Holodomor . . .

  Those who survived—lost all peace.

  All peace—all sense of life.

  And with no sense of life—what’s there to write?”

  A smile lights his pale face

  as a thought takes him elsewhere.

  “I’ve never loved a single thing

  the way I love the blowing wind . . .

  Driving wind! Devilish wind!”¶

  Oh Pavlo Grygorovych! Pavlo Grygorovych!

  Where are you? Who

  can I talk heart

  to heart with now?

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Oleksandr Korniychuk was a Soviet Ukrainian playwright whose work conformed to the demands of socialist realism and won him official favor. He was the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic from 1947 to 1953—the year of Stalin’s death—and again from 1959 to 1972. Tychyna held the post in the interim. Stalin called him “Korniychuk,” and everyone followed suit; see Ozerov’s poem on Dovzhenko on p. 162.

  †From Tychyna’s poem “I Will Say It for All” (1922).

  ‡An allusion to three of Tychyna’s most important books, Clarinets of the Sun (1918), The Plow, and The Wind from Ukraine.

  §The opening lines of an untitled lyric poem, written when Tychyna was sixteen.

  ‖From Tychyna’s “They Paid Me a Visit” (1919).

  ¶The opening lines of Tychyna’s ballad “The Wind from Ukraine” (1924).

  SYDIR KOVPAK (1887–1967) was a Ukrainian partisan leader during the Second World War, twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. By 1943 he had two thousand men under his command; his most famous military action was known as the Carpathian Raid. His second-in-command, killed by the Germans in 1943, was Semyon Rudniev. Before the war, Kovpak had served on various party committees in the town of Putyvl.