Portraits without Frames Read online

  And then one day

  she couldn’t

  manage the stairs alone;

  with two men supporting her,

  she could barely drag her feet along.

  All

  too clear.

  She and I were close.

  She felt

  that she had several sons,

  not just the two she’d lost,

  who had died so young.

  When I am sick at heart,

  when I think I can’t bear it,

  I remember Olga Isaevna,

  who outlived her two sons

  yet never gave up

  being

  a human being.

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky is considered the founder of scientific pedagogy in Russia. Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin was a major symbolist poet from Kyiv; after many years of living abroad, he settled in Koktebel, Crimea, and wrote his greatest poems in the years surrounding the Revolution and the Civil War. Alexey Nikolayevich Bach was a leading Russian and Soviet biochemist and plant biologist. Recent research shows that Voloshin did not actually live on the street, although many people still believe he did.

  †Pavel Yakovlevich Svetlov was an important Orthodox theologian and a professor at Kyiv University; he lost his post after the Revolution of 1917 and was severely persecuted for the rest of his life.

  ‡Eduard Bagritsky (né Dzyubin) was a Jewish poet from Odessa whose heroic lyrics and ballads were popular in the years after the Revolution. Bagritsky’s son Vsevolod was also a poet; he was killed in 1942. Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich began as an Acmeist, alongside Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilyov, and later became a leading Soviet poet and translator.

  §A reference to Faraway Garrison (1950), Gudzenko’s long poem about soldiers in Turkestan.

  KSENIA NEKRASOVA (1912–1958) was born in a village near Perm, placed in an orphanage by her parents, and adopted by a schoolteacher. She worked as a political educator at a factory before being sent to Moscow to further her education by the Komsomol (Communist Youth League). In 1937 the journal October published a few of her poems, and she enrolled at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. During the Second World War, she was evacuated to Kirghizia, where she met Anna Akhmatova, who immediately recognized the originality of her vision, stating that she had only met two women poets in her life: Marina Tsvetaeva and Nekrasova. The fresh, almost naïve quality of her work, coupled with her eccentric behavior, made her an outsider, perhaps even a liability to the Soviet literary establishment. She was not allowed to join the Soviet Writers’ Union, and only a single collection of her work appeared during her lifetime.

  KSENIA ALEXANDROVNA NEKRASOVA

  Ksenia Nekrasova,

  whom I know well,

  is a poem herself—

  a poem just before it is born,

  ready to burst from your soul,

  fluttering on your lips.

  How important it is

  to note down this fluttering,

  indistinct as it is,

  in a school copybook,

  with its squared or lined paper

  and its pink blotter.

  Ksenia looks for all the world

  like a ruffled bird

  gone quiet after a downpour.

  Her poems write themselves

  beneath the heavens,

  but poems, however admired,

  cannot feed you on this earth.

  Today Ksenia Nekrasova

  is well known. But how,

  at first,

  was she to make a living?

  She found her answer—

  one that could have been found

  only by someone very clever

  or entirely naive.

  After the war, occasionally,

  and with a painful grinding,

  the Iron Curtain would part.

  Guests, some of them writers,

  would come from abroad;

  secretary-general

  of the Writers’ Union

  Alexey Alexandrovich Surkov

  would have a chat with them.

  These little chats had certain goals—

  they had to go according to plan,

  and would have done, were it not

  for Ksenia Nekrasova.

  She would show up uninvited

  and ask the guests questions

  that made Surkov squirm and shift in his chair.

  “How do you feel about dictatorship?”

  “Do your writers need socialist realism?”

  “How does the censorship

  work in your country?”

  The secretary-general summoned Nekrasova.

  “Ksenia, why do you ask these questions?

  Your questions are inappropriate. They hinder us

  from establishing cultural ties.

  Is there anything

  I can do for you?”

  “Well, that’s a question

  of another order. I want

  to eat, but food costs money

  and I haven’t got any.”

  “So why didn’t you just tell me straight out?”

  Surkov turns aside

  and fumbles through his wallet,

  fumbles for a long time—

  it isn’t seemly

  for a secretary-general

  to fumble for so long.

  He takes out ten rubles. Nekrasova

  slowly reaches out her hand, aristocratically,

  head turned away; looking aside,

  in condescending silence,

  she takes the money and leaves.

  But then she pauses by the door

  and says, quietly,

  “Don’t worry, I won’t come today

  but I will tomorrow, or the day after . . .”

  “Ksenia, Ksenia Alexandrovna, no, please,

  I beg you, come and see me

  beforehand. Without fail.”

  Nekrasova eats what she needs

  with great concentration, then feasts

  at the Writers’ Union buffet.

  She treats everyone. She’s

  having a ball. Ksenia Nekrasova,

  whom I know well,

  reads a new poem.

  Once, after talking her way

  past his secretary,

  Ksenia half opened the door

  and slid into Surkov’s office.

  “I want to read you some poems.”

  “Now? But I’m busy,

  I’m on my way to the Central Committee,

  to an urgent meeting.

  The car’s already waiting.”

  “I won’t keep you. It’s only four lines.

  My poems

  and myself—

  one and the same stuff

  in different forms.”

  “All right, Ksenia, but not now—

  now’s not the time for poems,”

  replied Surkov—and moved toward the door.

  “Only a few more lines:

  And I drank milk—

  goat’s milk—

  one autumn afternoon

  not long ago,

  under a juicy, ruddy linden.

  The huge blue air

  hummed, stricken with the sun,

  grass rustled underneath my feet,

  and, between earth and sky,

  stood I . . .”

  Ksenia read these last lines,

  her elated response

  to milk, air, sun, and grass,

  only to the secretary’s secretary.

  She was watching Surkov’s back

  as he disappeared into the distance.

  As for Surkov’s secretary, she too

  was no longer listening;

  she had calls to make.

  November 8, 1991

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  BORIS SLUTSKY (1919–1986) was born and raised in Ukraine, studied law and literature in Moscow from 1937 to 1941, and served
as a political commissar at the front during the Second World War. He wrote poems criticizing Stalin as early as 1953 and was an important figure in the literary revival after Stalin’s death. He wrote a great deal, well over two thousand poems in the course of his life; a few of the more controversial circulated in samizdat, but more than half became known only long after his death. Slutsky wrote about the war, about the Shoah, about his Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage, about Stalin, about returnees from the camps, about other writers, about almost every aspect of everyday life. What nearly all of his poems have in common is a focus on the specific and a wariness of dogma. His humorous poem “Physicists and Lyricists”—to which Ozerov alludes in his portrait—was one of the best-known contributions to a long public debate in 1959 about the rival claims of poetry and science.

  BORIS ABRAMOVICH SLUTSKY

  Looking after his friends was his vocation,

  his “small area of expertise,”

  as he sometimes put it.

  To save friends and their ladies

  from having to meet in dark

  stairwells or the corners

  of yards,

  he would give them

  the key to his apartment.

  His apartment? Never

  did he possess such a thing.

  His life was nomadic:

  a room, a nook, a cot.

  His apartment? Not his—

  just rented for a year,

  or two years, and

  paid for up front.

  Slutsky’s chambers saw

  physicists and lyricists,

  respected fathers of families

  who had got by heart

  the whole of Stalin’s Short Course;*

  they saw lecturers, learned doctors,

  members of the Academy of Sciences.

  Members of boards

  and colleges of every kind

  would tell their secretaries

  they’d been called to the Central Committee

  (not one of them

  was without influence there).

  Physicists and lyricists

  would take their princesses

  beneath the temporary vaults

  of the homeless Slutsky.

  Among these princesses

  were the secretaries

  of other colleges and boards.

  Some were young, others

  not so young, but all were glad

  to answer the call of friendship

  and absent themselves from their office

  to attend

  some conference or symposium

  or extraordinary meeting.

  For two or three hours

  Boris would make himself scarce.

  He would wander around bookshops,

  preferably secondhand ones.

  He would go to exhibitions,

  museums, editorial offices.

  He would call on David Samoylov,

  Nikolay Aseyev, Leonid Martynov,

  or Lev Ozerov. As agreed

  beforehand, the lovers

  would leave the key

  beneath the plastic mat

  in the corridor. On the table

  Boris would discover

  half-eaten cakes, imprinted

  with the marks of teeth—his

  and hers. He would find

  bottles of all kinds, glasses

  with lipsticked rims, notes

  scribbled on paper napkins.

  Once he read, “Boris,

  you are a great humanist,

  and the heavenly powers

  will reward you. The sins of others,

  sins that are not yours,

  will bring you blessings.”

  And so, after five or six hours—

  not just two or three—

  Slutsky would return home,

  tired but determined,

  primed with news of all kinds

  and longing for solitude.

  He would take out his notebook

  and write down the new poem

  he had been incubating

  between Plyushchikha and the Red Gates,

  between Zatsepa Street and Sokol.

  Then he would

  butter a slice of bread

  and scrape from the pan

  a little

  rather dried-up kasha.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) was first published in 1938. During the following fifteen years, forty-three million copies were printed in Russian alone.

  THE PROSE WRITERS

  VARLAM SHALAMOV (1907–1982) is best known for his Kolyma Stories, a thousand-page cycle of short stories set in the Gulag. He, however, attached at least as much importance to his poetry and to his poem cycle Kolyma Notebooks, which he began writing in 1949, during the last of his fifteen years in Kolyma, when he was working as a medical assistant in relatively tolerable conditions. During the previous twelve years he had been close to death on at least three occasions. Shalamov spent his last years in poverty and isolation and was moved to an old people’s home in 1979. Blind, deaf, and suffering from Huntington’s disease, he went on composing fine poems until his last months.

  VARLAM TIKHONOVICH SHALAMOV

  Forward and to one side,

  like a knight on a chessboard,

  with a knapsack on his back,

  Varlam Shalamov plods on,

  battered by Kolyma.

  Lonely, almost sullen,

  he has the air of a sad

  Russian peasant, or scholar, or writer

  whom life has stung hard,

  whom life has pressed down on

  but not yet utterly crushed.

  Deep in his soul

  there is still strength,

  still

  the will

  to fight fate.

  His wrinkled face is a hieroglyph

  of all he has lived through

  and does not speak about.

  It’s a cold day.

  We go into a café.

  Not much to eat there,

  but at least it’s warm.

  “Varlam Tikhonovich,

  read me some new poems.”

  He turns one ear towards me.

  Without a word he takes off

  his rough, wind-battered knapsack.

  Inside it, a wooden spoon

  hobnobs with crusts of bread,

  notebooks,

  and documents—

  death, after all,

  can creep up on you

  any moment.

  He reads slowly,

  separating each word:

  each word

  ready to drop into the abyss.

  Getting the words

  out is easier

  with pauses for breath.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “No, it’s for me

  to thank you. Who

  nowadays asks anyone

  to read poems?” he says

  hoarsely, with feeling.

  “I’ve got an awful lot

  of them. How

  am I to choose?”

  He reads at random

  jumping from page to page,

  whatever catches his eye.

  Reading aloud, he warms up.

  “All right. Enough of that.”

  Someone brings coffee,

  sausages, bread.

  Steam rises from our cups;

  steam rises from our plates:

  the renowned fragrance

  of a Moscow

  people’s café.

  Shalamov tries not to eat

  too quickly, not to show

  that he is very hungry.

  I don’t ask about Kolyma,

  and he doesn’t mention it:

  as if it hadn’t happened.

  As he eats the bread,

  he holds one hand

  just below his chin.

  Crumbs
fall

  into his palm.

  Shalamov eats them greedily,

  with particular relish.

  His long experience

  of malnutrition

  is apparent.

  This mouth accustomed to hunger

  opens slowly, mistrustfully,

  almost unwillingly, as if in shame.

  Shalamov eats in silence,

  with tried and tested

  deliberateness,

  with meaning, with pauses,

  and to me he seems

  not to be thinking

  about food.

  What is Shalamov

  thinking about?

  How am I to know?

  He returns his notebook

  to his knapsack.

  Out we both go

  into the winter outside.

  “It’s a cold day,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “It’s warm.”

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  ANDREY PLATONOV (1899–1951) is one of the greatest of all Russian writers. His longer works were published only many years after his death, but the short stories he published during his lifetime are no less remarkable. “Fro” is one of the most charming and tender of these. Most of Platonov’s best short stories and short novels have been translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, in collaboration with Olga Meerson and other translators, and published by NYRB Classics and Vintage Classics.

  ANDREY PLATONOVICH PLATONOV

  Platonov is reading aloud,

  reading “Fro”

  in the spacious apartment of Kornely

  Lyutsianovich Zelinsky,*

  just by the Moscow Art Theater.

  “A grand little hut!”

  he said afterwards,

  without a trace of envy.

  Platonov reads with animation.

  I had not heard of Platonov.

  I know nothing of his ways,

  of his way in life.

  “That’s splendid!” I blurt out,

  unable to contain myself,

  when he reads the last page.

  Piercing eyes,

  and on his lips—kindness

  and irony, irony

  and kindness. Wary,

  Platonov says nothing.

  “Yes, but hardly relevant

  to the needs of our time,”

  Zelinsky concludes softly,

  meditatively. Head ever

  so slightly

  tilted to one shoulder, he is all

  heartfelt tenderness, forever

  warm, sweet, and compliant.

  We talk a little more, drink tea

  with sugar, with small bagels.

  And we sit there for a while,