Portraits without Frames Read online

  but the bottom left corner

  is just an underpainting.

  It’s not finished.”

  He walks on.

  He’s a little bent,

  but he pulls back his head

  and sticks out his wedge of a beard.

  “Here you’ve slapped on the paint,

  but you don’t yet know what you’re doing.

  You shouldn’t be showing this to anyone yet!”

  Sometimes he leans into the canvas;

  sometimes he takes a quick step back,

  to look from farther away.

  “Too bad you ran out of time

  or simply didn’t have the will

  to finish this one.

  Just a little something, just here—

  and what a painting you’d have!”

  Konchalovsky is used to praise.

  And he’s something

  of a Renaissance man, strong,

  tenacious, impatient, ambitious.

  “Why are you in such a rush, my friend?

  You’ve already won your share of fame.

  It’s time to be a bit tougher-minded.

  I’m not having a go at you,

  just sharing some thoughts.

  I too sometimes find

  it hard to hold myself back,

  but there’s no other way.”

  And so they went on

  round the whole exhibition.

  The other guests were restless.

  They wanted more fun:

  speeches, toasts, fireworks.

  “You must stay here, of course,

  but I’ll be off now—too tired, hope you don’t mind.”

  Nesterov was accompanied to the front door.

  Konchalovsky held out his coat

  and handed him his cane, as if it were a sword.

  He bowed as he shook Nesterov’s hand,

  but he looked out of sorts,

  perhaps even depressed.

  The old man left—

  and the gushing and babbling began.

  There were speeches, interviews,

  bouquets, loud applause—

  all as first planned.

  But in Konchalovsky something had broken.

  You could see him thinking:

  “I must remember all this,

  everything this old man

  has just told me.

  Do I really not know how to paint?

  I do—

  and I’ll show you all yet.”

  Translated by Maria Bloshteyn

  *Pyotr Konchalovsky was a Russian painter who made his mark in the 1910s as a member of the avant-garde group Jack of Diamonds. During the Soviet period, he painted in the socialist realism mode. His grandchildren are the filmmakers Andrei Konchalovsky and Nikita Mikhalkov.

  NIKOLAY NIKOGHOSYAN was born in 1918 to a peasant family and trained as a dancer. For two years he performed in the corps of the Armenian National Ballet. His father then told him to leave home unless he stopped “this monkey dancing,” and so, in 1937, with little knowledge of Russian, Nikoghosyan moved to Leningrad. There he eventually managed to enter the sculpture department of the Academy of Arts, going on to work both as a painter and as a sculptor. Among the well-known figures he sculpted are the composers Aram Khachaturian and Dmitry Shostakovich. He is still living in Moscow, painting and drawing, though no longer sculpting.

  NIKOLAY BAGRATOVICH NIKOGHOSYAN

  Slow and wise,

  the studio’s weak eyes

  gaze out into the morning

  with an ancient

  Armenian yearning.

  As for the master,

  he is already by the box

  where he stores his clay,

  slapping palm against palm,

  faithful to his heart’s desire

  to make clay surrender its fire,

  to hew the flame of Prometheus

  out of damp, sticky, reddish-brown clay.

  The radio in the corner,

  treasured property

  of thousands upon thousands

  of Soviet citizens,

  hisses and lisps,

  wheezes and occasionally tinkles.

  Soda water bubbles in a mug.

  Nikolay Bagratovich drinks,

  sighs, rolls back his eyes.

  I can hear water

  splashing into his gut.

  He has a raging thirst.

  His hair is white, with dashes of black.

  His eyes give off the evening

  light of Mount Ararat.

  His model is up on the dais.

  Reddish-brown hair, white skin,

  and the neck of a Nefertiti

  from the outskirts of Moscow.

  One moment

  he’s walking around his clay;

  the next

  he’s walking around the woman.

  Quickening his step, breathing

  with effort, now starting

  to choke. Who or what

  is Nikoghosyan fighting?

  Nature? The clay?

  Himself?

  Is he flying high?

  Or been put to flight?

  Is this a battle?

  It’s certainly some kind of duel.

  He takes some clay from the box

  and in quick, casual fury

  molds one lump, a second,

  a third,

  kneads, smooths, and loves them,

  rages, rejects,

  acquiesces, waits, falls silent.

  Is he lost in admiration?

  No, he is deep in thought.

  He’s trying to enter

  the soul of nature,

  as if diving into ocean depths,

  the depths of the moist clay.

  And then back to the surface

  and stillness. “All right.

  Enough for today. Thank you.”

  And he helps his model

  down from the dais.

  Which is not so easy.

  The woman holds her right hand

  out to the master while putting

  her left hand over her soft triangle

  of curling, sparkling,

  reddish-brown hairs.

  The sculptor cannot deny himself

  the sharp pleasure

  of glancing at this left hand

  and all it cannot quite hide.

  Her Egyptian nipples

  are silent arrows.

  And the master wants to return

  to work, and rejoice in his work,

  that is, to rejoice in life.

  But he is not without self-

  control and he cannot

  unsay what he has said:

  “All right. Enough for today. Thank you.”

  The model screws up her eyes

  a little because of the light.

  A woman of average height,

  her red hair hanging free.

  She steps down. Not

  the neck of a swan, yet

  still, a neck that sings.

  The master watches tensely

  with his temples, with the back

  of his head, as she dresses

  behind the old screen.

  Her dress rustles; its

  buckles and clasps clink.

  She leaves, but the master

  returns to his clay, molds

  it with love, with passion,

  with fury, breathing with effort.

  He is not molding the clay

  but calling to it, calling

  it up into the mountains,

  into the heights. “Nikolay

  Bagratovich,” I say quietly

  after standing for an hour

  in a half-dark corner.

  “Oh, still there, are you?

  You’re a drifter, a dreamer.

  Let’s go upstairs now.”

  The table is already laid—

  flowers. Fresh bread. Mutakh cheese.

  A bottle of Voskevaz.

/>   “Listen to this now!”

  And he launches into a story

  about Ewa Bandrowska-Turska,*

  a new twist

  of fate on every page.

  He reads aloud, but then

  it’s as if he’s slowing down,

  lapsing into silence, thinking

  thoughts of his own.

  And then: “Please excuse me!”

  And he rushes back down

  to the clay he has left,

  to his Moscow goddess

  who has now gone back

  to her communal apartment.

  An hour goes by. I talk

  about this and that with his wife.

  The house fills with the song of clay.

  I hear footsteps, cries, sighs.

  He is not talking to his model

  but calling out to the mold,

  to the mountains,

  calling the clay into shape.

  And he is singing “Kruik,”

  an old song that both pierces

  and lifts the soul.

  And then an exultant

  “Got it! I’ve found you!”

  It’s as if he’s addressing

  his departed charmer.

  He comes up the stairs,

  sits down at the table.

  Pale, tired, happy.

  “She’s caught fire inside.

  Understand? The clay

  has caught fire. The girl

  has come to life. It took

  me a long time. I think

  I’ve done it. The clay has caught

  fire. I saw a spark

  of light from the girl’s eyes.

  Let’s drink to that!

  To that spark!

  Open the Voskevaz!”

  1994

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *Ewa Bandrowska-Turska was a talented and versatile Polish soprano. She toured the Soviet Union many times.

  ANDREY BUROV (1900–1957) was an important architect, but his legacy also included innovative work in theater, cinema, engineering, physics, the chemistry of building materials, and even medicine. After finishing school in 1918, he trained as an artist in his native Moscow, eventually enrolling in the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vkhutemas). During Le Corbusier’s first visit to Moscow in 1928, Burov accompanied him as a translator and continued to correspond with him afterwards, although this could easily have led to his being arrested. In the 1930s he was sent, along with a group of other leading Soviet architects, on a trip to Italy, France, and Greece. What he saw there led him to abandon his Constructivist aesthetic in favor of neoclassicism—a shift that happened to coincide with a general turn in official Soviet culture. In the same decade, he founded an experimental laboratory where he and his wife, Galya Andreyevskaya, a chemist by training, devised ultra-strong and -light building materials. Witty, handsome, charismatic, popular with women, and emboldened by his elite status at a time when architects were revered and well rewarded in the Soviet system, he spoke with exceptional freedom not only about his contemporaries but also about established figures of the past. That Burov was never arrested is surprising; it is possible that those in power hoped that his research in the field of ultrasound and its application in oncological treatment would prolong their own lives.

  ANDREY KONSTANTINOVICH BUROV

  Fanned by the blueness of the bay,

  he strides along the Riga shore—

  a gentleman from head to toe:

  expertly pressed three-piece suit,

  bow tie, cane, hat.

  Or, on another day: shirt flying open,

  a simple village lad,

  bare feet deep in the sand,

  bare head up in the clouds.

  He bends into the wind,

  like Peter the Great in Serov’s painting.

  A just comparison: Burov too is a builder,

  a dreamer, a master,

  or, rather, an architect.

  What is an architect?

  A designer of buildings?

  No, that’s

  not it:

  An architect is one who thinks of man,

  or, rather, of people.

  He is an artist, a philosopher,

  a creator of cosmos.

  The architectonics of the Cosmos

  are his realm. The smallest of huts

  on the tiniest sliver of land

  is a sand grain of the Cosmos.

  And this grain must be beautiful,

  for it is the home of Man.

  So Andrey Konstantinovich Burov

  said to me

  on the shore of the bay,

  with young bronzed bodies and the sky

  for background. I sensed at once

  his boldness, his inborn joy

  and desire for perfection.

  It was Shklovsky who brought us together.

  Oh, they were quite a pair!

  Two inveterate monologuists

  in dialogue on the shore.

  I listened to their conversations

  like a preschooler,

  embarrassed by my ignorance,

  my inarticulate muteness.

  Seizing hold of each other,

  they unraveled spool

  after spool of unforgettable talk.

  I’d won a lottery!

  To listen in while they discussed

  Picasso and Matisse,

  Mayakovsky and Chaplin,

  Einstein and Eisenstein,

  Yesenin and Aseyev,

  Le Corbusier, the Curies.

  Where in the world

  had they gotten their hands

  on such knowledge?

  As for politics, they preferred

  silence to argument—

  they valued their time.

  Film clip: Shklovsky moves toward me,

  grabs me by a button,

  and whispers loudly,

  “Andrey can do just about anything—

  understand? And he truly would,

  if only they’d let him. . .”

  Shklovsky finishes his sentence

  but not his thought,

  and runs off to the water.

  As was his way.

  He dives under the waves,

  and I wait and wait

  until his bald head

  bobs up again, shining,

  rejoicing in the sun—

  a buoy, a wise buoy.

  End of clip.

  It wasn’t only on the Baltic coast

  I saw Burov but also in Moscow, in Sukhanovo,*

  in his kitchen, and in the park.

  I called him “Groundbreaker Burov”—

  he liked this.

  He showed me his projects

  and told me of the problems

  of architecture in our time.

  He had a high-caliber stride.

  He surveyed the landscape

  from beneath his wide palm,

  knowing how to develop

  the wildest terrain.

  Burov had traversed both hemispheres,

  ransacking France, Italy, and Greece

  with his eyes.

  He described the Parthenon

  so precisely and succinctly

  that I saw and felt it

  long before I set foot in Athens.

  He met Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier.

  He made it his mission

  to build a new Moscow

  while preserving the old one—

  not to argue with history

  but to continue it.

  He knew what he was living for,

  who he was building for.

  How can I put it more simply?

  People—he believed—

  need more than living quarters.

  They need homes to live in.

  He would have done it all,

  if only they’d let him. . .

  Instead

  we built all those boxes—

  timidly, at first
, as if in fear,

  then piling them mindlessly

  one atop the other.

  Then we began to pride ourselves

  on our achievements.

  We had created a new architecture

  we called “Khrushchevian.”†

  And all the architects agreed,

  voting obediently, submissively.

  But Burov’s angry voice

  broke through: “I can’t,

  I won’t

  accept what you call

  ‘architecture.’ ”

  This was in the Academy of Architecture,

  of which he was a member.

  “Your buildings look like prisons.

  I won’t stand for it.

  I don’t belong here.”

  To this he added a few words

  I shouldn’t quote, stormed out,

  and slammed the door.

  And then he founded a laboratory

  to work on materials no one had ever seen,

  with secrets known to him alone.

  What they were I’ll never know,

  but it seemed that Russia needed them.

  Even the authorities acknowledged this,

  if not all our scientists.

  Burov’s new work was classified,

  but Burov himself

  remained unchanged:

  the same bold gestures,

  the same intransigence.

  He didn’t spare his heart,

  but a heart needs care—

  if not from someone’s friends and family,

  at least on the part

  of the person himself.

  He did nothing small

  or petty, his whole life a grand

  expenditure of time and energy.

  Work, cognac, wives,

  music, the road, the theater,

  crises, cards, parties.

  He left too early.

  In his obituary, “a group of comrades”

  swore to cherish his image

  until their final breaths.

  Pitiful promises!

  If only they had cherished

  not just his image

  but the man himself . . .

  They won’t see his like again.

  July 10, 1994–1996

  Translated by Irina Mashinski

  *The Soviet Union of Architects resort in the Moscow suburbs.

  †In the Soviet Union, the 1960s saw a boom in the construction of low-cost apartment buildings, The slang term for these stylistically unimpressive structures was “Khrushchoby,” derived from the name of Nikita Khrushchev.

  MUSIC, THEATER, AND DANCE

  SERGEY PROKOFIEV (1891–1953), one of the great composers of the twentieth century, was originally favored by the Soviet regime but in 1948 became a primary target of an official campaign against formalism and obscurantism in music. This campaign was led by Andrey Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s most notorious henchmen, whom Stalin had placed in charge of the Soviet Union’s cultural policy. The Zhdanov doctrine affected all the arts, from literature to ballet; among its other prominent victims were Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Dmitry Shostakovich. Prokofiev and Stalin passed away on the same day, March 5, 1953.