Portraits without Frames Read online

  —BORIS DRALYUK

  1 For a brief autobiographical sketch of Ozerov’s early years, see “Ot avtora,” in Izbrannye stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Khud. lit-ra, 1974), 4.

  2 Irina Chaikovskaia, “Cherez stikh poznaiu mir i sepia. Interv'iu s Sofiei Kugel, drugom L'va Ozerova,” Slovo-Word 82 (2014): available at http://www.promegalit.ru/public/9647_irina_chajkovskaja_cherez_stikh_poznaju_mir_i_sebja_intervju_s_sofiej_kugel_drugom_lva_ozerova_.html.

  3 Lev Ozerov, “Babii Iar,” Oktiabr' 3–4 (1946): 160–63; Ozerov, “Babi Yar,” trans. Richard Shelton, in Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, vol. 2 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 575–79; Ozerov, “Kiev: Babi Yar,” in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 3–12. See also Shrayer, “Lev Ozerov as a Literary Witness to the Shoah in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” in The Holocaust: Memories and History, eds. Victoria Khiterer, Ryan Barrick, and David Misal (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 176–87.

  4 See Lev Ozerov, “V nachale bylo ‘Slovo,’” in Strana russkoi poezii: Stat'i raznykh let (Moscow: Lit. in-t im. A. M. Gor'kogo, 1996), 153–56; also in Dver' v master-skuiu. Boris Pasternak. Anna Akhmatova. Nikolai Zabolotskii (Paris, Moscow, and New York: Tret'ia volna, 1996), 191–94.

  5 Lev Ozerov, “Stikhotvoreniia Anny Akhmatovoi,” Literaturnaia gazeta 78 (June 23, 1959): 3. See Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 1952–1962 (Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), 776.

  6 Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, ed. Lev Ozerov (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1965).

  7 See “Lev Adolfovich Ozerov,” in Russkie pisateli. Poety (Sovetskii period), vol. 16 (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, 1994), 89–179.

  8 Igor Nepomniashchii, “Vozrozhdenets. O pozdnei lirike L'va Ozerova,” Voprosy literatury, no. 4 (2008): available at http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2008/4/ne6.html.

  PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES

  THE POETS

  ANNA AKHMATOVA (née Gorenko, 1889–1966) was born in Odessa, but her family moved to Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, before she turned one. She began publishing poetry in her late teens, adopting her grandmother’s Tatar surname—Akhmatova. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolay Gumilyov and soon became a key member of his Guild of Poets and of the Acmeist movement that emerged from it. Most of her early poems were love lyrics—concise, delicate, and psychologically exact. In 1921 Gumilyov was shot for allegedly participating in a monarchist conspiracy, and it became difficult, eventually impossible, for Akhmatova to publish her own poetry. From the mid-1920s, she embraced the role of witness to the horrors of her age, horrors that touched her all too closely: her third husband, the art historian and critic Nikolay Punin, was arrested three times and perished in the Gulag, and her only son, Lev Gumilyov, spent more than ten years in the camps. In 1946 the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, at the time attached to the British embassy, visited her in her apartment. Soon after this visit, she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. Ozerov’s 1959 article was the first mention of her work in print in many years. During the 1960s, Akhmatova, by then the only surviving major poet of the Silver Age, was a mentor to Joseph Brodsky and a small circle of his friends. Very tall and stately, always surrounded by visitors and friends, she was painfully aware that her readers revered her not for her recent poetry—much of which they did not know—but for her first books. Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966—the thirteenth anniversary of Stalin’s death.

  ANNA ANDREYEVNA AKHMATOVA

  A loose-fitting robe, or a housecoat,

  or, rather, a coverall

  disguises her corpulence—

  a gift of the prison queues.

  Those used to her slimness

  cannot believe

  she has grown stout.

  It’s Akhmatova, they say,

  but not Akhmatova.

  “Who’d have guessed

  I might end up

  waiting day after day

  in those long queues outside prisons,

  feet swelling,

  heart giving up?”

  said Anna Andreyevna,

  as she passed me a photo

  of herself,

  straw-thin,

  lying on her stomach

  and touching the nape of her neck,

  the fringe of her little

  white cap, with her toes.

  Painters never tired

  of depicting her poise,

  her proud angularity.

  The bangs, the hump of her nose,

  the tall neck;

  her height,

  her loftiness.

  Somewhere behind her—

  a lane in Tsarskoye Selo;

  by way of background—

  a balcony railing.

  The lilac coverall,

  with its dark violet folds,

  flows, overflows, and iridesces.

  Her face is pale

  yet lit from within.

  “I received this letter.

  Please read it aloud.

  It begins with praise—

  a bad sign! Best to skip that.

  Start farther down.

  They’d asked me for poems.

  I’d sent some—

  my new ones, of course.

  And what does he answer?

  ‘But can’t we republish

  some of your old ones?’”

  A pause. What can I say?

  “See how they treat me!”

  I’m silent. What can I say?

  “Like some servant girl!”

  “Don’t say that!” I protest.

  “Everyone knows you’re an empress!”

  Akhmatova grows quiet.

  She gets ready to listen.

  So I go on—as best I can:

  “Of course, you are an empress!”

  She fixes her shawl,

  lowers her eyelids,

  lifts her head,

  and though she doesn’t say, “Go on!”

  I do go on—in the same spirit:

  “Who will remember him,

  this fool of an editor?

  But every line of yours,

  whether early or late,

  will be worth

  its weight in gold—

  no, that’s not right—

  it will be beyond price.”

  Without turning her head,

  Anna Andreyevna looks

  towards the speaker,

  who sees

  on her face a fleeting

  light of pleasure.

  Beatitude.

  Everyone on earth—

  shepherd or prime minister, stoker or poet—

  wants to hear

  the word

  they have been waiting

  to hear all their lives.

  As they grow older, people want to know

  that their life

  has not been lived in vain.

  Translated by Irina Mashinski

  BORIS PASTERNAK (1890–1960) was born in Moscow into a family of assimilated Jews. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a prominent postimpressionist painter, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist. The family played host to famous composers like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Scriabin, who inspired Pasternak to pursue a career in music. After a brief stint at the Moscow Conservatory, Pasternak abandoned music and left to study philosophy at the University of Marburg. Returning to Russia before the outbreak of the First World War, he devoted himself more and more to poetry. His innovative, impassioned early collections—and especially My Sister, Life (1922), which features poems written around the time of the Revolution—were seen as watersheds; Osip Mandelstam wrote, “To read Pasternak’s verses is to clear one’s throat, reinforce one’s breathing, renovate the lungs; such verses must be a cure for tuberculosis.” In the 1920s and ’30s, Pastern
ak escaped persecution by the state but wrote little poetry, turning instead to translation and prose. The publication of his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) abroad during the thaw, and his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year, proved calamitous for him personally: he was denounced by the Soviet Writers’ Union and hounded by Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. This may well have contributed to his death from lung cancer on May 30, 1960. Although the date and time of his funeral was not officially publicized, the information spread by word of mouth, and thousands turned out to mourn him as a beloved poet, author, and martyr.

  BORIS LEONIDOVICH PASTERNAK

  Khrushchev’s sevenfold retinue

  were falling over themselves,

  doing all they could

  to disgrace the man.

  But their idea of disgrace

  brought him glory.

  He refused to leave Russia.

  So they demanded

  he leave Moscow

  during Macmillan’s visit

  in 1959.

  Pasternak did not take fright;

  tormented though he was,

  he did not lose his head.

  I saw him

  in those troubled days.

  No. Like a forest or a garden

  before a storm,

  he was prepared to take the hit,

  not out of meekness

  but out of faith

  in life,

  which he had, after all, called his sister.

  Saying farewell, he looked at me

  so intensely, smiled so brightly,

  that I flinched.

  It scared me.

  Pasternak left for Tbilisi.

  With his wife.

  Ten days of February,

  six of March.

  In Georgia, he warmed up

  among his old, faithful friends,

  in Tabidze’s home—

  which is now a museum.

  The worries, grief, and bitterness

  of the preceding days and weeks—

  the dramas, scandals, quarrels—

  wore off. At the sight of Tbilisi

  and its surroundings

  they dropped away from him

  like turbid mountain torrents.

  Tbilisi brought him back to younger days.

  Through distant smoke, through dove-gray haze

  he saw the light of heaven,

  the color blue,

  which he had always loved.

  But would he ever,

  even just once,

  have the chance

  to come back here?

  On the eve of his departure

  he set off early

  to say farewell to Svetitskhoveli.

  He removed his cap and entered the cathedral.

  He felt the breath of the eleventh century.

  Can anyone not love this place,

  the grandeur of this space,

  stretching eastward,

  inspiring thoughts of eternity,

  of the eternal life of the soul?

  This place doesn’t make you feel small—

  it brings you peace.

  Pasternak needed this,

  like air,

  in a world where he was suffocating.

  These four pillars, standing so freely,

  holding the dome up like the sky!

  The reliefs, the carvings!

  Stone, coolness, calm.

  He stepped out, his soul uplifted.

  He looked at the cathedral, then the sky—

  the sky, then the cathedral.

  Saying farewell

  proved difficult.

  But he was glad he had come here.

  When he turned his attention to the earth,

  he noticed people

  looking at him intently.

  All right—let them

  do as they please!

  But one of them, loud-voiced and young,

  came up and said,

  “You’re Pasternak, aren’t you?”

  “No, no, I’m not Pasternak,”

  he answered, horrified,

  and took off in a hurry—

  yes, almost at a run,

  like Pushkin’s Eugene

  from the Bronze Horseman.

  “You Pasternak?”

  someone was shouting after him.

  Without looking round,

  he replied, “No, no, you’re wrong.”

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  TITSIAN TABIDZE (1895–1937) was a celebrated Georgian poet whose work was rendered into Russian by some of the top Russian poet-translators, making it famous throughout the Soviet Union. The son of a village priest, Tabidze went to university in Moscow, where he was influenced by the Russian symbolists. When he returned to Georgia and settled in the capital city of Tbilisi, he cofounded the Georgian symbolist group Blue Horns. Tabidze quickly became one of Tbilisi’s most recognizable citizens—a tall, blue-eyed man, who always wore a red carnation pinned to his shirt or lapel. He befriended Boris Pasternak when the latter visited Tbilisi in 1931; this warm friendship would last for the rest of his life. Tabidze was among the targets of several articles published in the Soviet press in 1936 that attacked formalism in the arts; unlike many of his colleagues, he did not bow to this criticism but defended himself. In October 1937, Tabidze was arrested and, in prison, tortured to death. In The Literature of Georgia, Donald Rayfield writes that he “is said to have stood up to interrogation and to have named only the eighteenth-century poet Besiki as his accomplice.”

  TITSIAN IUSTINOVICH TABIDZE*

  Spring was in full swing.

  Titsian! I glimpsed him

  strolling ahead of me

  through city gardens

  now in full bridal bloom.

  I saw the gestures, the gait,

  a particular way of looking—

  and I knew it was him. Himself.

  But how can I describe the man?

  Blue eyes, heavy eyelids,

  a child’s cheeks, round face,

  bangs over a high forehead.

  I was elated, knocked sideways,

  drawn into his fate.

  In his buttonhole was a red carnation.

  A citizen of Rome—

  or was he Lorenzo de’ Medici?

  The spirit of a Renaissance man.

  An Oscar Wilde? A Dorian Gray?

  I wasn’t walking behind him—

  I was being drawn inexorably in his wake.

  And then—Paolo Iashvili,†

  and the smoke from Titsian’s cigarette.

  And then

  they were three—Pasternak

  was there too. Together,

  these three were my emblem

  of good luck, the embodiment

  of true friendship. In the hall

  Titsian read a poem—

  in Georgian, then in Russian.

  Lines I recognized at once—

  “It’s not me who writes my poems;

  it’s they who write me

  as if writing a story,

  while life carries on beside them.”

  Elatedly, with gusto,

  he went on reciting

  his own poems, as orchestrated

  by Pasternak. And these next lines, of course,

  I knew too:

  “What’s a poem? An avalanche. It exhales,

  blows you away, and buries you alive. That’s

  what I call a poem.”

  What luck. I saw all three of them.

  All three at once. And ever afterwards,

  if I happened to see one

  or two of them,

  I always saw all three—

  the fullness of a friendship

  that lasted throughout those years

  and still has not left the heart

  even though all three

  are gone forever,

  although. . .

  As open as an outlet to the sea,

  he never hid his
thoughts. He spoke

  freely, unguardedly, as poets do.

  People like him are loved, but not

  by envious courtiers,

  slanderers, executioners,

  smooth-tongued informers,

  and members of the nomenclature.

  The poet may disdain and mock

  these schemers—

  but their ways are artful,

  their craft invisible,

  as Simon Chikovani,‡

  who hated worthless words,

  once put it to me.

  Why, indeed, waste words,

  when it was all too clear

  how Titsian, faced by slander,

  did not know where to turn;

  how quickly he kept losing

  the hope and calm

  we tried to offer him.

  He melted like a candle,

  more swiftly than a candle. The era

  of suspicion had set in.

  Those now cast

  as enemies of the people

  had to pass

  through each circle of hell:

  hurt, indignant protest, resignation,

  incomprehension, anger, and despair.

  He would not leave his home,

  so I went to call on him.

  How could I

  distract a victim from his secret fears,

  how relieve the tension

  of waiting, waiting for the end,

  for footsteps on the stairs,

  arrest, and public shaming?

  There was no deceiving Titsian.

  Knowledge, foreknowledge,

  foreboding worn to a thread

  by which his life was hanging.

  But wise-child Titsian

  was glad to see me

  and gladder still

  of the chance

  to read me poems,

  new, unpublished poems.

  Poems that might have been

  a dream, a prophet’s vision.

  We talked poetry; his wife,

  Nina Makashvili, joined in.

  Titsian brightened, but wilted

  as we parted. He walked

  me to the middle of the bridge

  and, with a sad smile, said goodbye.

  Sometimes, the heart knows