Portraits without Frames Read online

  SYDIR ARTEMOVYCH KOVPAK

  It was in Koncha-Zaspa

  I first met Kovpak.

  Water in a setting of fresh green;

  fresh green set amid pale blue waters.

  It was ten years after the war.

  A time of the creation of tales and legends,

  of anecdotes and melancholy fables

  and chronicles that did not tell the truth.

  Shakespeare, I think, would have had no time

  for such chronicles. Darker, more difficult waters.

  It was Tychyna who introduced me to him. He

  and Kovpak shared a plot

  and a dacha. Nothing luxurious.

  Modest, even, if you think

  of the fame

  each had won in his field.

  I had heard a great deal about Kovpak.

  I knew that Tychyna was writing

  about him and Rudniev. Tychyna

  was shy. He didn’t like to pester

  his neighbor, nor did he allow

  family and friends to ask questions.

  He would sit for hours

  till Kovpak began to speak of his own accord.

  “Don’t say anything,” Tychyna

  would whisper to me, though I well knew

  how eager he was to learn more

  about Kovpak, about his men and his battles.

  Kovpak was stocky and broad-shouldered,

  slow and obstinate. Eyes that looked sharp

  and mistrustful. A triangular beard.

  And an iron grip. As I learned when we shook hands.

  One of his fingers was twisted—a coiled spring.

  A sliver of flint digging into my palm.

  A moment I will not forget.

  His life story, his obduracy, his whole being

  was there in that handshake.

  His way of speaking was precise, unhurried,

  though his right eyebrow would flicker

  now and again like lightning.

  And so, we were drinking tea

  with Tychyna one June evening,

  eating sausage made by a master

  of the art—Yelena Kuzminivna,

  Tychyna’s mother-in-law, whom he addressed

  tenderly as “Mama.” And we were being served

  by Lydia Petrovna, a schoolteacher, all smiles,

  Tychyna’s friend, Tychyna’s confidante and reader—

  in short, the poet’s wife—

  which may well be the most difficult

  of all occupations for a woman.

  There was, of course, Ukrainian vodka

  on the table—vodka with pepper—

  but no one was forcing it on us.

  They’d have gladly

  filled our glasses—but if you didn’t

  feel like drinking, you didn’t.

  It was hot. We were all drinking

  not vodka, not Ukrainian horilka, but tea.

  Kovpak was not saying a word.

  Silences made Tychyna unhappy—

  he did not like the music of talk to dry up.

  His guests, he felt, were getting bored—

  and that wasn’t right. He threw

  open his arms and, like birds,

  his hands began to flutter, quietly

  beginning a song. As a young man,

  he had worked in a theater and sometimes

  conducted the singers. And away went

  the family trio: Pavlo Tychyna, his wife,

  and his mother-in-law, not just singing

  but pouring out their souls. They sang

  as if this were their way of talking,

  which made it easy for other people

  to join in the song they had begun.

  And so the whole table sang.

  As did the twilit fields

  and the orchard above the water

  and the sleepy pond in the orchard

  and the small cloud with the brassy fringe.

  After the song, we were drinking tea again.

  The song had drawn us together. And then Sydir

  Artemovych Kovpak began to speak.

  He spoke first about the town of Putyvl,

  then about his boys, about the mountain ridges,

  about those long marches through the Carpathians.

  “I promised them rest days,” he said,

  “but not one of us ever knew rest.”

  Kovpak spoke unhurriedly. He was not

  the breed of memoirist (far from uncommon)

  who doesn’t know his own story from other people’s.

  No, this was something else. The facts

  were cruel and simple, and this simple cruelty

  hurt. He tore off a word, as if tearing

  a stone from a roadway, and with his iron

  grip, inserted it into a sentence. Once,

  when he fell silent, I plucked up my courage,

  aware I’d yet to earn the right

  to address this legend, this wartime hero,

  and asked, “Tell me, how did you choose

  your men? How did you study the lads

  who wanted to join your band?” “Study?”

  he repeated, with contempt and fury.

  I could hear him thinking, “Intelligentsia!

  These intelligentsia!” Strange to say, I was not

  embarrassed. I just repeated gently,

  “How did you know, when someone

  found his way to you, whether or not

  he’d been sent there by the enemy?” At that, Sydir

  Artemovych put his weighty hand on my arm

  firmly, demonstratively:

  “All right, I’ll tell you” (a lightning

  eyebrow-flicker, a cough, an intent look)

  “what we did. Men were turning up

  in droves, especially when we were on a roll.

  They would thrust their documents at me,

  but I didn’t trust

  documents. After all, we were at war.

  There were no papers you couldn’t buy,

  steal, or plunder from a corpse.

  No, I didn’t trust documents.

  I would sit down on a log or a tree stump.

  Rudniev and some of the boys would be close by.

  And we would begin. They’d bring me the first of them.

  A question or two. I’d look the man in the eye,

  straight in the eye, and try, slowly, to get inside

  his soul. And I would decide:

  Was he to be or not?

  I’m not one for struggling with archives,

  asking for birth certificates and references.

  I had to make my mind up then and there.

  And I did. And the lads understood.

  If I half closed my right eye,

  they took him to the right—to join our band.

  If I half closed my left eye,

  they took him to the left—

  to say goodbye to life. Five minutes later”

  (a lightning flicker from an eyebrow)

  “—and I would hear a shot. That’s what we did.”

  (Kovpak sighed—a wheeze from deep in his chest.)

  “There was no time. We’d be off again in the morning.

  As for letting him walk free—he knew too much,

  he could betray us. He might be a plant. A spy.

  A treacherous bastard. Or completely innocent.

  A good lad, quick and lively.

  That’s war for you!”

  Kovpak fell silent. We all fell silent.

  And, as before, we went on drinking tea.

  And we could hear a song, rising up

  like smoke from a dying bonfire.

  It sounded like a threesome singing,

  or a group of five, or a hundred, or three hundred,

  or a thousand—pure and captivating.

  And to these strains I thought

  how merciless life is, how often

  it burns up a s
till-unnoticed

  Beethoven, a Pushkin who has not yet revealed himself,

  a Raphael, a Shevchenko, a Shakespeare, a Tolstoy,

  a Chopin, a Rodin, a Stendhal . . .

  That’s war for you. So many slaughtered

  through negligence, through misunderstanding,

  by chance, blindly, stupidly, in too much of a hurry.

  That night, the next day, and for many days

  I thought about that evening in Koncha-Zaspa,

  at Tychyna’s. O Kovpak!

  I can see him clearly even now.

  A portrait-painter’s task is not easy.

  Amid July’s deep blue and green

  this portrait remains unfinished.

  1995

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  THE VISUAL ARTISTS

  VLADIMIR TATLIN (1885–1953), a painter and architect, was a central figure of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s. He was one of the leaders of the Constructivist movement, whose adherents saw art as a purposeful social practice, rather than as a purely individual aesthetic pursuit. Along with Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko, he taught at the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vkhutemas) in Moscow, where he presented the design for his unrealized Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), often referred to as “Tatlin’s Tower.” Tatlin was a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and an accomplished performer on the bandura, a traditional Ukrainian string instrument; he was also an aficionado of urban folklore, including the songs of the homeless urchins who roamed the streets of Moscow and Petrograd during and after the Civil War.

  VLADIMIR YEVGRAFOVICH TATLIN

  Tatlin is playing the bandura,

  singing a drawn-out song—

  a song, he says, fit for a swan.

  He sings in minor and in major keys,

  and, finding no peace

  in life’s storm,

  calls up a storm of his own—

  “On the Black Sea.”*

  Then, tiring of strings

  but still filled with excitement,

  he launches into Khlebnikov,

  “Venus and the Shaman,”

  and seems younger than ever!

  Carried away by “Razin’s Boat,”

  he reads aloud:

  “Lying on his brocade bunk,

  the hetman of wild liberty

  gives free play to his stout bludgeon,

  sends a kopeck rolling free

  on a drunken spree.”

  Tatlin chops the air

  with the edge of his palm

  and, with a smooth turn of the wrist,

  shows

  this kopeck rolling free

  on its drunken spree.

  “Yes, Velimir’s words

  certainly did

  what he told them to do!”

  He reads line by line,

  stanza by stanza,

  and all by heart,

  at times almost singing.

  He walks around the room,

  then sits on the trestle bed,

  knees wide apart.

  In the languorous summer air,

  his massive frame,

  his workman’s hands

  give me hope:

  some have struck lucky in this world—

  true artists—

  and he’s one of them.

  A student of Korovin and Serov,†

  he came at the right time—

  to the Higher Art and Technical Studios

  and much, much more.

  The doorbell rang,

  a neighbor entered—

  another artist,

  but I didn’t get his name.

  He came to collect on a loan.

  “Not yet. I haven’t earned enough.

  You know what they’re like

  in the procurement department . . .

  What do they care about art?

  And when did any of them

  last go hungry?

  If you want, take this sketch

  as collateral. Or this one . . .

  Or that one . . .” “What for?

  My room’s cluttered enough

  with sketches I’ve done myself.”

  “All right then, wait—

  I’ll have the money soon.”

  The neighbor gives up

  and leaves.

  Tatlin treats me to soup—

  thin but fragrant.

  “I threw in some herbs.

  One of my friends, a hunter,

  brought me some immortelle

  from the forest.” Meanwhile,

  he tries to find a bottle.

  All empty. “I’ll go,”

  I tell the master.

  “Really—are you sure?

  It won’t set you back too badly?”

  “I got my stipend yesterday,”

  I declare weightily.

  It’s quiet on Maslovka Street.

  The heat’s unrelenting.

  The vodka isn’t cold.

  We drink a glass apiece

  and snack on stockfish

  in dreary silence. “Oh, what’s

  got into us!” says Tatlin.

  And he begins to sing

  the long-forgotten songs

  of orphaned urchins:

  “There’s a drugstore on the corner

  Love can really kill a man

  All the other fellas scold me

  ’Cause I’ve fallen for a dame

  And they’d beat me black and blue

  If I gave them half a chance.

  Too bad this song’s not more cheerful

  Don’t think the worse of me—it’s from when

  I was young.” A pause. Tatlin stares out the window.

  “Got a mama, got a papa?

  You’re on easy street.

  Me—only a stepmother

  And not a thing to eat.

  If you draw one hundred two,

  You run free—go have your fun!

  But I drew the number one—

  Now I’m done for. Done for. Done.”

  Another pause. We both stare

  out the window—

  at the blue sky whistling

  through the greenery.

  We stare and stare.

  Tatlin picks a plank up from the floor,

  plucks a brush from a carafe,

  takes his palette from the shelf,

  and bends over the plank . . .

  He stays that way a long,

  long while, engrossed.

  Head resting on my arm,

  I drift off quickly, inhaling the fragrance

  of linseed oil, mixed with a faint

  scent of stockfish. I awake at dusk.

  “That’s right!” the man

  who dreamed up the Letatlin ornithopter‡

  says gently. “That’s how the young

  should sleep. Here, try this cranberry

  liqueur. Drink and don’t think.”

  I drink and don’t think.

  “You see what happened

  while you were napping?

  To tell the truth, I myself

  don’t quite know what to make of it.

  We’ll sleep on it.

  Morning knows best.”

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *A reference to “Storm on the Black Sea,” a composition by the famed Ukrainian bandurist and ethnographer Gnat Martinovich Khotkevich.

  †Konstantin Korovin was an important Russian impressionist painter who worked mainly as a stage designer after the turn of the century; he moved to Paris in 1923 and continued to produce set designs for theaters around the world. Valentin Serov was a major Russian painter and member of the World of Art movement (see the introductory note on Mikhail Nesterov on p. 198); he was known for his portraits and historical scenes.

  ‡Letatlin is a portmanteau of the Russian verb letat' (to fly) and the inventor's surname.

  MIKHAIL SOKOLOV (1885–1947), born into a working-class family in
Yaroslavl, was a painter and graphic artist. He was exhibiting his work in Moscow by the time he was nineteen. He served as a sailor in the Baltic fleet and was a fervent supporter of the Bolsheviks in 1917, but he was not politically active after the Revolution, returning instead to art. During the 1920s he exhibited and taught across the country. After the official imposition of socialist realism in the 1930s, he was labeled a formalist and deprived of work. In 1938 he was arrested. During his seven years in the Gulag, he drew richly detailed and evocative landscapes on small scraps of paper, which he enclosed in letters to his family and friends. Four years after his release, he died of stomach cancer.

  MIKHAIL KSENOFONTOVICH SOKOLOV

  One look is all it takes:

  you will never forget

  this man’s face.

  His beard surges like a wave

  from his neck and chin.

  Breeding, lineage:

  the gaze of an eagle,

  the gait of an artist.

  “A master!”

  people would say.

  The painting turns into a wall,

  the wall—into a painting.

  In Kolyma,

  in Tayshet, with nothing

  to draw on

  or with,

  he continued to realize

  his visions, on scraps

  of paper I now

  wonder at through

  a magnifying glass.

  Yes, what can’t you find there?

  Sleds speeding down a hill,

  a kayak race,

  undulating snowdrifts,

  a sunset over fields near Oboyan,

  the upper Volga,

  a wedge of cranes,

  crowds of people . . .

  A loud summons

  from the officer: “Sokolov!”

  Then, more softly:

  “Mikhail Ksenofontovich!”

  During the course

  of the interrogation,

  the officer lays out

  primed canvases, already framed,

  with sets of brushes, paints of every color.

  Sokolov shuts his eyes,

  but the smell of the oils

  tortures him.

  (“No, no, snap off my arms,

  crush my collarbone—

  but not this, anything but this!”)

  The officer commands him

  to open his eyes—wider, wider.

  Despite himself,

  Sokolov’s eyes begin to cast

  onto these canvases

  unrealized plans,

  newly conceived themes,

  portraits that would never be.

  “Name the conspirators

  in your secret organization,

  and you’re free.

  Then you can paint