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Portraits without Frames Page 5

“We’re not politicians or diplomats.

  Let’s get back to our verse.”

  “Enough of that!”

  he says, not so much

  silencing me

  as emboldening himself.

  I walk away, then look back:

  slowly, almost solemnly

  a couple is walking down Lavrushinsky Lane,

  arms around each other’s waists.

  We didn’t meet for a long time.

  The Volga flowed on as ever;

  the sky above it remained just the same—

  that is, it appeared just the same,

  though there were poets

  who saw more clearly.

  And then we met again in Peredelkino.

  Lugovskoy was in his room,

  working frenziedly. Three books,

  one landmark after another,

  their titles all starting with S:

  Solstice, Spring Blue,

  Sign of the Century. He invited me in

  for a minute and we sat there

  for three hours on end.

  Choking on his own feelings,

  he read from his latest notebooks.

  Dozens of well-sharpened pencils

  stuck up out of glasses

  which, if called upon,

  could serve another purpose,

  since there were bottles there too.

  He lived and wrote greedily,

  with a swing, with a broad sweep;

  he took bold risks

  and wrote words we cherish:

  “I lied much, loved little, let my heart go unheard,

  seduced by cheap fame and the fickle dust of the road.”

  He had not lived to the full, not

  had his fill of life—

  and, in June 1956,

  he felt he must go to Yalta.

  “Why Yalta again?” “I have to.”

  “Stay here, Uncle Volodya!”

  “I need Spring, I need Blue

  very badly.” We part. He turns

  quickly to the car. We part.

  He pulls the door open,

  then slams it abruptly. A frown.

  Decisiveness. The wrinkles on his face

  flicker. A smile. A majestic

  wave of the hand,

  like a king, like a sovereign.

  But the look in his eyes

  is so unexpected it sends

  a shiver down my spine.

  Anyone who can read looks,

  who has seen looks of that kind,

  does not need words

  to understand

  that this was a last look.

  I understood all too clearly

  but did not dare to admit it,

  recalling this look

  only later,

  when a zinc coffin

  was brought to Moscow by plane

  from the deep blue of Yalta.

  I remembered it later,

  when, after many speeches,

  Maya poured cognac

  onto his fresh grave.

  July 9, 1994, Krasnovidovo

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  ALEXANDER TVARDOVSKY (1910–1971) was the chief editor of the important literary journal Novy Mir (New World) from 1950 to 1954 and from 1958 to 1970. As an editor, he is best known for having published, in 1962, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the first legal Soviet publication of a book about the Gulag. As a poet, Tvardovsky is best known for Vasily Tyorkin, a funny, down-to-earth, unexpectedly apolitical narrative about an ordinary soldier in the Second World War; genuinely popular, it is thought by some to have made an important contribution to the fighting spirit of the Red Army. In 1931, during Stalin’s drive to collectivize agriculture, Tvardovsky’s parents and brothers were deported, as “kulaks,” to Siberia. At the time, Tvardovsky was working as a journalist for a Smolensk newspaper, writing articles in praise of collectivization. When one of his brothers escaped and made his way to Smolensk, Tvardovsky had him sent back to Siberia. In 1936 Tvardovsky successfully—and at considerable personal risk—petitioned for his family to be allowed to return, but he was haunted for the rest of his life by a deep sense of guilt.

  ALEXANDER TRIFONOVICH TVARDOVSKY

  Soft locks of fair hair

  windblown

  onto his forehead, into eyes

  of the palest blue.

  You could say his face

  looks like a birch grove,

  but that would be just

  a fanciful,

  all-too-easy

  game with words.

  His face is the face

  of a poet whose heart

  has been hurt

  by the fate

  of peasant Russia;

  the face of a poet

  who knows

  the price of each word.

  It’s a tense face, perhaps

  a stern one, but this makes

  you all the happier

  when a smile appears on it—

  on this stern

  straightforward

  face that is not without

  a certain sleekness.

  Once I saw the sleek

  back of this man,

  in an enlistment office

  in the Sokolniki district.

  He was in front of me

  in the queue. “Please either

  lift up or remove your shirt,”

  ordered the army doctor.

  Tvardovsky hitched up his shirt.

  The doctor gently touched his back

  and said, “I understand.

  I’m not asking whether

  or not you drink. I don’t

  need to. I’m asking if

  you have a bite to eat

  when you drink.”

  “No,” said Tvardovsky. “I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s my methode.”

  I can still hear it:

  not “method” but “methode.”

  That was in spring 1941.

  The war was about to begin,

  but the minutes we had left

  before it

  were kind to us,

  huddling us over a book

  or a new long poem.

  Tvardovsky became a deputy

  to the Supreme Soviet.

  He was a Stalin laureate.

  He was dragged everywhere;

  he was honored everywhere;

  but each summer he would go

  to Siberia

  to see his deported parents

  and come back sad and overwrought,

  hopelessly sodden.

  And only vodka could save him

  and only poems could save him

  from shipwreck,

  from going under for good.

  He never swore by the name

  of his auntie Darya,

  but his aunt Darya’s life

  was the standard

  by which he judged himself

  and judged others,

  and it was with his aunt’s eyes

  that he looked at this earth

  bathed in blood.

  I ask, “What’s going to happen?

  You must know. You’re close

  to the powers that be.”

  He raises his eyebrows

  and those eyes of the palest blue

  look straight at me

  with a look that contains

  something of sorrow

  and something of blame

  and perhaps even of mockery.

  He says nothing.

  And then he takes my hand

  and places it on his back,

  just below the nape of his neck.

  I ask, “What is it?”

  “These questions about Russia,”

  he says, “have turned

  me into a hunchback.”

  And he releases

  my hand,

  not exactly calmly—

 
but he walks off calmly

  without saying goodbye.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  ILYA SELVINSKY (1899–1968) was a poet, prose writer, journalist, and playwright. In his youth, he was the founder and chairman of the Constructivist Literary Center. He welcomed the Revolution enthusiastically and fought in the Red Army during the Civil War. After working at a variety of jobs, he enrolled in Moscow State University and published his first collection of poems in 1926. Selvinsky tried out many different modes of poetic expression, including experimental epic poems and avant-garde dramas in verse. In 1937 he was attacked in the Soviet press for writing “unartistic and pernicious” poems. He fought in the Second World War and was shellshocked twice and seriously wounded. A Jew himself, he witnessed the horrors of the Shoah firsthand and was one of the first to write poems about it, which were published in the leading Moscow literary journals.

  ILYA LVOVICH SELVINSKY

  The Myasnikov Cardiology Clinic

  is on Moscow’s Petroverigsky Lane.

  The founder’s son, also a Dr. Myasnikov,

  also a cardiologist,

  makes the rounds of his patients

  with an air of dynastic pride.

  His doctor’s coat is laundered blue-white

  and is so starched that it rustles.

  A kingpin medic,

  with a pack of assistants

  who trot obsequiously after him.

  He walks over to a patient,

  gives him a charmingly vague smile

  and takes him by the hand:

  “You’ll live to be a hundred now,

  shouldn’t be that hard.

  Just make sure you behave yourself!”

  The illustrious cardiologist

  is pleased by his own words,

  proud of his own wit,

  his egalitarianism,

  and his understanding of people.

  “Is that long enough for you?”

  The patient beams—

  for the first time in twenty-four hours.

  The doctor walks over to a second patient,

  “And you’re another Methuselah—

  you should be displayed in a museum,

  not taking up a bed here.

  Go for a vacation in the Crimea,

  or go and see a ballet at the Bolshoi.

  There’s a good man!”

  The patient is ready to kiss

  the affable Dr. Myasnikov’s hand.

  The entire ward rejoices.

  Then the doctor moves on to Selvinsky.

  He frowns. He is a dark cloud

  hanging over his patient:

  “And how is our poet doing?”

  He straightens up, still

  looking down. Selvinsky,

  with difficulty, props himself up

  on his elbows. Behind his glasses

  his eyes are prickly but kind.

  He takes off his glasses

  and his eyes look younger.

  But the furrow between his eyebrows

  grows deeper, longer, now extending

  from the bridge of the nose

  to the hairline,

  bisecting his forehead.

  “Do I have six more months, Doctor?”

  Selvinsky asks hopefully,

  looking intently into the face

  of the expert cardiologist.

  Dr. Myasnikov stays silent.

  The whole ward goes quiet too.

  “Three more months?”

  whispers Selvinsky.

  His voice sounds disembodied.

  You’d think the ward

  was empty. A gunshot

  of silence. An explosion of muteness.

  Angina, high blood pressure,

  a heart corroded by tyranny,

  by long years of criticitis,

  by a band of scoundrels.

  Selvinsky wants to survive.

  He wants to hope, but there is no hope.

  There’s nowhere for his heart to turn.

  Nothing to do but to watch it fade—

  the cruelest of occupations;

  a boring book’s last chapter—

  “The Final Days.” The patients

  have only one Dr. Myasnikov

  but he has a whole host of patients—

  how can he attend to them all?

  “Soon we will start dying less—

  what kills us now is hopelessness,”

  Selvinsky had written seven

  years before this; his rhyme

  for “hopelessness” was “tenderness.”

  In the way of poets, Selvinsky,

  now a captive in Myasnikov’s

  clinic, had foretold his own fate.

  But what do poets want with clairvoyance?

  It just gets in the way.

  I consider myself immeasurably enriched

  by my friendship with this mighty poet.

  He called me his younger brother

  and did

  much good

  he did not remember.

  1990

  Translated by Maria Bloshteyn

  SEMYON GUDZENKO (1922–1953) was born into a Jewish family in Kyiv. Along with Pavel Kogan, Alexander Mejirov, David Samoylov, Konstantin Simonov, and Boris Slutsky, he is a member of a generation of Soviet poets whose names are forever linked with the Second World War. The lines Ozerov quotes in his portrait were dear to virtually all of Gudzenko’s contemporaries, as well as to Soviet citizens of succeeding generations.

  SEMYON PETROVICH GUDZENKO

  We were both from Kyiv,

  from Tarasovskaya Street,

  which rolls

  like a stone waterfall

  down from Pankovskaya

  and Leo Tolstoy Streets

  before stopping abruptly

  when it reaches Zhilyanskaya.

  Verdure and stone,

  cheek by jowl—

  so begins

  the story of our lives.

  He grew up at house no. 5,

  I lived at no. 12.

  Konstantin Ushinsky, Maximilian Voloshin,

  Anna Akhmatova, and Alexey Bach

  had also

  all lived on this street.*

  Our landlord was a ruddy

  and sardonic Pole

  called Szymon Gątkowski.

  The building had also been home

  to Svetlov, the old theologian

  hounded relentlessly

  by the Soviet authorities.†

  One day, my sisters told me

  about a very talented young schoolboy

  whose family lived just down the street.

  We met for the first time

  there on Tarasovskaya, but it was a while

  before we met again—

  this time in Moscow, in the corridors

  of the Literary Institute.

  I was in my last year,

  he in his first.

  We would stroll through Sokolniki Park,

  reciting poems to each other

  and talking of Khlebnikov and Bagritsky,

  of Babel and Zenkevich.‡

  Yes, we were brothers in poetry.

  He went from the institute

  straight to the front,

  as he recounted later.

  He’d written verse before,

  but it was the war

  made him a poet.

  I ran into him in Moscow, on Maroseyka,

  bandaged, unrecognizable.

  We embraced

  and agreed on a time and place

  we could meet again.

  He went to work for an army newspaper,

  Victory Shall Be Ours,

  and asked me to join him:

  “You wrote idylls,

  now you must write articles,

  slogans, captions—

  even poems, if you like—

  and stories about soldiers,

  great battles in history.”

  Sometimes, S
emyon would say,

  “I think you’ve got it . . .”

  The freshman praising the senior.

  Semyon had been severely wounded

  and had left the hospital too early.

  “I was a soldier fighting with my comrades

  in muddy trenches, under fire;

  Then I became a frontline correspondent

  to cover the war’s last year.”

  Handsome, restless—he seemed so lucky,

  showing up everywhere,

  going forward with the first of our soldiers,

  a spark of daring in his eyes,

  and a contempt for death.

  We were not family,

  yet we were brothers.

  I went on trips with him.

  Soon as we’d brought our bags up

  to our room, Semyon would dash out

  to the market. He loved

  to wander amid bowls and pots,

  amid the luscious crunch of fresh,

  crisp cabbage, hissing braziers,

  silvery herring, big copper tubs,

  and golden melons—

  greens, sandy yellows, blues.

  He was happy and young

  to the sound of guitar strings.

  After the war he went to Transcarpathia,

  to Tuva, and to the sands

  of Turkestan, to the Faraway Garrison

  of his long poem.§

  He wrote and wrote;

  Ehrenburg noticed him,

  then Antokolsky and Shchipachov.

  Success followed him.

  But—as fate would have it—

  his old wounds began to ache.

  A head injury

  (during the war

  he’d fallen from a jeep).

  To him it was no surprise:

  “Old age won’t kill us,

  Our old wounds will kill us.”

  Poets should never speak of death—

  not of their own, I mean.

  Poems like that tempt fate.

  They took Semyon to the institute

  founded by Burdenko,

  that miracle worker of a neurosurgeon.

  Their tweezers touched his brain;

  at first—success, and hope.

  We came to visit him,

  to help and encourage him.

  “My bean is baked,”

  he said to us.

  He didn’t want to be deceived

  and could not lie—the way

  of a poet, the way

  of a soldier. We spoke

  for just a while, like brothers,

  and though I could hardly

  encourage him,

  I was able, for a moment,

  to distract him. So he later said

  to his mother, Olga Isaevna.

  We waited every day

  in the clinic’s large lobby,

  and watched Olga Isaevna

  come down the stairs.