Portraits without Frames Read online

when it’s the last time.

  That walk down Chavchavadze Street.

  Titsian’s last autumn.

  Translated by Maria Bloshteyn

  *This portrait was not finished and remained in the rough-draft stage. It was edited and prepared for publication by Anna Ozerova.

  †The poet Paolo Iashvili cofounded the Georgian symbolist group Blue Horns with Tabidze. During the 1930s, like many of his colleagues, he was pressured into denouncing allies and friends. On July 22, 1937, seven months after Tabidze’s death, Iashvili committed suicide at the Georgian Writers’ Union using a gun that Tabidze had given him.

  ‡The poet Simon Chikovani began his career as a member of the Blue Horns, then broke with the group and emerged as the leader of the Georgian futurist movement. In the 1930s he abandoned futurism and wrote verse on approved themes in classical forms. Unlike Tabidze and Iashvili, Chikovani survived the Great Purge of 1937 and served as president of the Georgian Writers’ Union from 1944 to 1951.

  NIKOLAY ZABOLOTSKY (1903–1958) was one of the most original poets of the early Soviet period. In 1928, he and two younger writers, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, founded the OBERIU (Association of Real Art), the last avant-garde grouping in the Soviet Union. In 1938, Zabolotsky was arrested and sent to Siberia; although officially released in 1944, he was not allowed to return to Moscow until 1946. While still in Kazakhstan, he resumed work on his translation of the medieval epic. The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, begun before his arrest. With Ozerov’s support he was able to publish his translation of The Lay. During his remaining years, Zabolotsky was allowed to publish both poetry of his own and a large number of translations, many of them from Georgian. He died of a heart attack.

  NIKOLAY ALEXEYEVICH ZABOLOTSKY

  “What do I want?”

  “Trousers, of course.

  Doesn’t matter if they’re old,

  or who’s worn them before.

  They need to be strong—

  that’s all.

  My own have fallen to bits.

  And put some tobacco,

  the very cheapest,

  in the pockets.”

  So Nikolay Zabolotsky

  went through his needs,

  about to send a letter to his wife

  in the year 1940.

  He was in Komsomolsk,

  on the river Amur.

  Even in this hell

  he knew moments of triumph.

  On the radio he once heard

  a few stanzas from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin

  by Shota Rustaveli.

  Heavens! Was he hearing right?

  No mention, of course, of the translator,

  a poet now in the camps.

  Like it or not, he mastered

  a few different crafts.

  All came in handy:

  patience, silence, competence,

  competence, deftness, silence.

  “Humble yourself, proud man!”

  Yes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

  that’s good advice. Humility

  can stand you in good stead.

  If you want to speak,

  keep silent.

  There are ears everywhere,

  ears and more ears.

  And like it or not,

  you must remember:

  to keep silent in your cell,

  to keep silent in the column,

  to keep silent in the quarry.

  It’s better to listen.

  And if a word tries

  to escape you, don’t

  help it out. First

  an in-breath, and then

  an out-breath. And it’s over.

  No, it’s not over.

  Like it or not,

  one learns

  to mistrust man,

  to mistrust the word.

  Keep silent, but not even silence

  will always help.

  It had been crowded in the cattle truck.

  It had been dark in the cattle truck.

  Terribly cold—

  and nothing to eat.

  Only black,

  soot-covered icicles—

  prisoners’ popsicles,

  cattle-truck toffee.

  Worse still

  is having to meet

  the stare of a criminal

  wanting to hit you with a log.

  “They’ve given me ten years.

  And now I’m going to smash you.

  Smash you hard.”

  And there he was,

  right in front of Zabolotsky,

  about to do away with

  this bespectacled intellectual.

  His mates got in the way:

  “Calm down, brother—not now!”

  Salvation

  brings joy to the heart.

  Within an hour

  the lines had composed themselves.

  Heavens, what do we know,

  what does any of us know

  of the paths of poetry?

  “Forest Lake”—who could have imagined it?

  Composed in a stinking,

  crowded cattle truck.

  So much

  for Mount Olympus.

  Later, when we met,

  he never said one word

  about the camps.

  The master of the high style

  was taciturn, slow

  to respond, as if

  short of words.

  How very little he said.

  And how fiercely he hated

  our native braggarts.

  I first met Zabolotsky

  only after his return from the camps.

  He was considered a goner,

  but his family needed him

  and his friends needed him

  and literature needed him.

  “Greetings, Nikolay Alexeyevich!”

  A pause, a half smile,

  and he quietly held out his hand.

  That was easier for him

  than words. Words, for him,

  had a different purpose.

  “Have you written anything new?”

  I asked cautiously.

  A long pause, a pause

  that dragged on so long

  I began to feel awkward

  about having asked.

  “No!” he said in the end,

  sadly and somewhat confused.

  And—old habits die hard—

  I rose to my feet and declaimed,

  “O soul that never tires of questions,

  breathing a wisdom always incomplete,

  why seek new storms and new impressions

  amid these miracles, amid these living trees?”

  Zabolotsky listened

  and remarked, as if in passing,

  “A poem. The title’s ‘Lodeinikov.’”

  “Yes, I know. Your Second Book.

  May I carry on?” And I went on reciting,

  without his permission,

  shouting, working myself into a frenzy,

  pacing about the room.

  There was the breath of the north

  in his poems, and the breath

  of the south, the life of a market,

  the life of a football field.

  The exiled poet was free once more;

  and listening to his own poems

  as if they had been written by someone else,

  as if just retrieved

  from some safe hiding place.

  I exhausted

  the stores of my memory

  and Zabolotsky went on his way.

  That evening

  he said to his daughter

  over a cup of tea,

  “I thought I’d been quite forgotten,

  but it seems people still remember me.”

  I learned this only recently,

  several decades after we’d met.

  I heard this from Natalya Nikolayevna,

  the poet’s daughter.

  1994–1996

  Trans
lated by Robert Chandler

  NIKOLAY ASEYEV (1889–1963) was associated with the futurists as a young man, and with LEF, an important journal representing the Left Front of the Arts and co-edited by Vladimir Mayakovsky, in the 1920s. Over the course of his life he published around eighty collections of poetry and was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939. His most famous collection is titled Rusty Lyre (1920).

  NIKOLAY NIKOLAYEVICH ASEYEV

  “Blow, kind breeze, blow!”

  was the name he had chosen

  for his dacha on Nikolina Hill.

  His translation of a play

  by Janis Rainis*

  had allowed the celebrated poet,

  blanched now

  by his blue-

  white hair, to build a dacha

  in his last years. Tomorrow

  he will be seventy. I phone

  Vasiliev: “Let’s go and see

  Nikolay Nikolayevich.

  Bright and early, okay?”

  “But the first person we’ll see

  when we get there

  will be that Slutsky of yours.

  No, I’d rather not.”

  So I phone Boris Slutsky

  and ask him instead. “No,”

  he says. “That Vasiliev of yours

  is sure to be there too.”

  “To hell with you all!”

  I say to myself. “It’s Nikolay

  Aseyev, now seventy,

  who’s important today—not you

  with all your petty intrigues

  and your sectarian

  sects and literary sections.”

  “Blow, kind breeze, blow!” is drowning

  in green. It’s calm there

  and cool. I go upstairs.

  The dacha smells

  of pine shavings and sun.

  Aseyev is lying on a wide bed,

  paler than the sheet

  spread over him;

  he finds a blanket too heavy.

  His wife, Ksenya Mikhailovna

  (“Pearl of the World”—

  as he once called her),

  goes off into town, leaving me

  to look after her husband.

  We talk about everything,

  but Aseyev

  finds talking hard work.

  I begin to recite

  all the futurist poems I know:

  Aseyev himself, Mayakovsky,

  Pasternak, Selvinsky,

  and, of course, Khlebnikov.†

  With all his being

  Aseyev listens and keeps listening

  until late in the evening. His wife

  then returns from their apartment

  with a pile of letters and telegrams.

  “A few people phoned,” she says,

  “but no one came round.”

  A silence, broken

  by Aseyev: “For me,

  it’s enough

  to have seen you.

  But we always knew

  we could count on you.

  What more do I need?”‡

  O fame, fame, fair fortune and fame!

  A packed Polytechnic,

  Mayakovsky, posters and rostrums,

  the impassioned disputes, the games.

  Horse races, cards.

  “Aseyev—we want Aseyev!”

  “Bravo!”

  Flowers, smiles, books, folded notes.

  Solitude has to be earned.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *Janis Rainis is the literary pseudonym of Jānis Pliekšāns, a Latvian poet, playwright, translator, and socialist politician. Much official support was given to having the poetry of the Soviet Union’s national literatures translated into Russian. It was supposed that this would help forge a truly Soviet culture transcending national divisions. This hope proved illusory, but the project allowed many Russian writers—often unable to publish their own work—to earn a living. Aseyev was able to publish his own work, but evidently he was able to earn a great deal more, at least this once, as a translator.

  †Velimir Khlebnikov (né Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov) was among the most innovative poets of the twentieth century. He began as a futurist and cofounded the literary movement of zaum (beyond-sense), but his talent could not be confined to any school. Osip Mandelstam wrote: “Every line of his is the beginning of a new long poem. . . . What Khlebnikov wrote was not even verses, not even long poems, but a vast all-Russian prayer book or icon case.”

  ‡The original plays on a Russian saying (“Here is harmony, here is order”) and on the title of Aseyev’s collection of poems Lad (Harmony), which was published in 1961.

  KORNEY CHUKOVSKY (né Nikolay Korneychukov, 1882–1969) was one of Russia’s greatest children’s poets, translators, and men of letters. He was born in St. Petersburg to a young peasant woman and her Jewish husband, whose family refused to allow him to marry outside his religion. Chukovsky began his career as a journalist in Odessa, where he and his mother moved while he was still in school, and served as a foreign correspondent in London from 1903 to 1905, having taught himself English. He remained an avid Anglophile for the rest of his life. Upon his return to Russia, he immersed himself in the literary scene, translating Walt Whitman and other Anglophone poets, as well as writing lively and penetrating essays on the leading Russian writers of the day, including the poet Aleksandr Blok, who was a personal friend. Between 1907 and 1913, the young Chukovsky flourished as a writer and intellectual; this period also happened to see the final flowering of prerevolutionary Russian culture. After the Revolution, Chukovsky, who was a leftist and remained in the Soviet Union, concentrated on translation and children’s poetry, for which he is now best remembered. In 1962 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

  KORNEY IVANOVICH CHUKOVSKY

  Mother reads me the tale

  of The Crocodile.*

  She tells me of Uncle Korney.

  I search for this Uncle Korney

  in The Crocodile’s lines.

  So, for the first time

  in my life

  a living author comes alive—

  alive to the roots of his hair,

  merry, unruly,

  really and truly.

  And here he is, right here.

  He’s walking my way

  down a very wide lane

  that’s grown used to him—

  to his tall, stately frame,

  to the gray wing of hair

  propped up on his brow,

  under which sit the two

  cunningly smart,

  trustful, and pert

  eyes of the sovereign

  of childhood’s domain—

  what we might call Mind’s Eyeland.

  He holds out his hands—

  both as long as can be,

  dancing and free:

  “The blanket skedaddled,

  The sheet flew down the street.”†

  These words echo now

  in my thoughts:

  anket—kedaddled,

  eet—oo—ow—eet . . .

  The hands that chased

  that blanket and that sheet

  are now outstretched

  to me.

  Fate’s gift.

  “How young you look today,

  Korney Ivanovich!”

  I call out.

  Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky

  freezes

  in a deep bow from the waist,

  his right hand touching the ground.

  Almost a circus act.

  He straightens up, glares

  with a smile that is also a scowl—

  something no one else can quite do—

  and then, with enthusiasm,

  proclaims,

  almost declaims:

  “What a wonderful sur-prise

  old age turns out to be!”

  And at that moment there was

  probably nothing

  in the world more wonderful

 
; than old age—

  with Chukovsky’s seal of approval.

  It had taken half a minute

  for him to straighten up,

  for the question mark

  to become an exclamation mark.

  Severity turned to bewilderment,

  bewilderment—

  to self-mockery.

  (Chukovsky was so smart

  he didn’t have to voice

  what his eyes said loud and clear:

  “Old age—how vile!”)

  And then, brightly:

  “Let’s get some tea!”

  His politeness rings

  and tinkles

  like a teaspoon in a glass.

  “Drink up, tomorrow there won’t be

  any tea like this.

  There may be better tea,

  but not tea like this.

  This tea is unique—

  you can’t fake it.

  Here—take it!”

  How seductively

  he proffered me that cup!

  He knew how to drink tea.

  How expertly he cracked

  that hard, dry pretzel,

  which, between his fingers,

  looked just like an ornate initial letter.

  “Come by again at five tomorrow.”

  I come at five exactly.

  “Forgive me, poor sinner that I am,

  but you will have to wait,”

  I hear Chukovsky say

  from his office.

  “I’m just about to place the period

  at the end of a volume

  of my articles from 1907 to 1913,

  the very best of all

  the things I’ve managed to write,

  ever, in all my life.”

  Arms raised to the heavens:

  “I thank the heavenly powers!”

  And two months later,

  at that same five o’clock,

  I climb the same stairs,

  having received an invitation

  to the same tea, the same conversation.

  Although it’s not my first time here,

  I feel nervous.

  I hear a voice

  that is uniquely melodious,

  charming, and tender:

  “Forgive me for not coming down.

  I’m busy, a very important moment,

  I’m placing the period

  at the end of my volume

  of articles from 1907 to 1913.

  Please wait, I’ll be done any minute.

  I’ve never managed to write anything

  finer than these articles.”

  Arms raised to the heavens.

  A smiling Korney Ivanovich

  turns toward me.