Portraits without Frames Read online

  ring out in unison:

  “I carried you with me and knew you by heart,

  from the top of your head to the soles of your feet;

  like a summer-stock actor rehearsing his part

  in a drama by Shakespeare, I wandered the streets.”*

  Malraux sat up and swept back the strands

  falling onto his forehead, again and again.

  While Babel paced the stage excitedly,

  and looked askance at us as we shouted and screamed.

  The hall applauded riotously.

  Whom was it applauding—or was it chanting “Bravo” to itself?

  Chanting “Malraux,” then “Babel” to itself?

  There were sopranos, there were basses.

  Babel kept pulling back his cuff,

  pointing to his watch.

  We, the whole institute, then saw them out—

  these two writers, writers of our own time,

  in their black suits; visibly tired,

  they got quickly into the car.

  Malraux elegantly waves his fingers,

  the fingers of a trained conductor.

  Babel nods—methodically,

  impatiently—he’s clearly tired.

  In his eyes are laughter, slyness, a sparkle.

  His large head attracts attention.

  It does not yet foresee

  troubles or grief,

  but in a few years’ time,

  they will be heaped upon it.

  After still

  more years it will be mourned—

  this is what people do,

  but that’s another story.

  March–June 1994

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *A stanza from Boris Pasternak’s poem “Marburg” (1916).

  ALEXANDER FADEYEV (1901–1956) was a novelist, an important literary editor from the early 1930s, and the chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union from 1946 to 1954. His suicide in 1956 occasioned a variety of responses. Boris Pasternak’s was succinct. Bowing before Fadeyev’s open coffin, he said loudly, “Alexander Alexandrovich has rehabilitated himself.” This was at a time when saying that someone has been “posthumously rehabilitated” was a standard bureaucratic formula, a way of informing relatives that it was now officially admitted that someone had been unjustly executed or sent to the Gulag. In his diary, Korney Chukovsky wrote:

  I feel very sorry for dear Alexander Alexandrovich: one could sense a man of stature, a Russian brand of natural genius under all the layers—but, good lord, what layers there were! All the lies of the Stalinist era, all its idiotic atrocities, all its horrific bureaucracy, all its corruption and red tape found a willing accessory in him. An essentially decent human being who loved literature “to tears” had ended by steering the ship of literature into the most perilous, most shameful of waters and attempting to combine humaneness with the secret-police mentality. . . . Conscientious, talented, and sensitive as he was, he was floundering in oozy, putrid mud and drowning his conscience in wine.

  ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH FADEYEV

  The whiter his hair turned,

  the more his red face shone through.

  His voice seemed almost strangled—

  the voice of someone who could not forget

  he had been born

  thousands of miles from the capitals.

  It’s hard to write about Fadeyev.

  “Sasha, may I come in?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  And what an office!

  Most favored of favorites,

  he received phone calls from Stalin.

  He read manuscripts and books.

  He met people.

  He wanted to help them

  and often did.

  But this proved not enough.

  Not that I ever asked him

  for anything myself—

  I kept my distance from bosses.

  But once, during the war,

  we talked for a long time,

  in the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda.

  Fadeyev had come for an evening meeting.

  He and I stayed behind on our own

  and talked the night through.

  “I never finished my Last of the Udegs.*

  The novel was ready, there in my head.

  It was just a matter of writing it down.

  I only needed three to six months.

  But those were hard times:

  the war, the blockade.

  And Stalin sent me to Leningrad.

  I wrote a book

  that was no good,

  because The Last of the Udegs

  was calling me.

  I never gave birth—

  and that was the end of me.”

  Not exactly the end.

  The end came later,

  after the death of Stalin.

  “People were returning from exile,

  calling me a bastard to my face,

  spitting into my eyes.

  The doctors banned me from drinking.

  Cirrhosis of the liver.

  I’m tired of being on presidiums.

  I’m sick of representing

  Soviet writers, fed up with never

  writing, yet being titled a writer.

  Three times I’ve said

  to my beloved Klava,†

  though I’m a married man,

  ‘Let’s go to the Urals.

  I know a little wooden house there.

  We can live there in peace

  and I can finish my novel,

  Ferrous Metallurgy,‡

  about the workers in a steel foundry

  and their director, Kopol,

  and the work records they’ve set.’

  And Klava always replies,

  ‘You’ve got a family, Sasha.’ ”

  The last time I saw Sasha

  was in Klyazma,

  early in the spring of 1956,

  along with Tvardovsky, Lidin,

  Grubian, and Maria Petrovykh.§

  Tall, gray-haired, red-faced,

  Sasha appeared in a black car.

  He was arranging

  for the daughter of his Red Guard commander

  to go to a sanatorium.

  He was hurrying,

  hurrying to do good deeds.

  And then,

  that shot in Peredelkino,

  a shot from a 1919 revolver.

  I have thought a lot about Fadeyev.

  Suicide is never

  for a single reason.

  If someone shoots himself,

  it is always

  for at least a dozen reasons.

  The reasons come together,

  they join up, interlace—

  interlock in an iron grip.

  Klava brought me a great

  heap of Sasha’s letters.

  They overwhelmed me:

  true, living words, cheap

  vulgarity, despair, faith, trembling

  reverence. When I tore myself

  away from these letters,

  I looked up at Klava.

  She was no longer crying;

  her whole face streamed with tears.

  All of her was weeping;

  all of her was a tear.

  When Klava left, she was a tear

  rolling over the face of the earth.

  “Poor Sasha!” Elsa Triolet‖

  wrote in a French obituary.

  Poor Sasha!

  Spoken with pity and compassion,

  pain and respect.

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  *The Udegs are a native people from the far east of Siberia. The Last of the Udegs contains some of Fadeyev’s best writing.

  †Klavdiya Strelnikova was one of Fadeyev’s lovers.

  ‡Fadeyev completed only eight chapters of this, about a twentieth of the huge novel he had planned. The chapters he wrote are generally considered a failure. As Chukovsky wrote in his diary after Fadeyev’s
death, “None of his friends were willing to tell him that his Metallurgy was worthless.”

  §Vladimir Lidin, of Jewish origin, wrote fiction and memoirs. Matvey Grubian, a Yiddish poet, was arrested in 1948 along with other Yiddish writers and members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and sent to the Gulag, where he remained until 1955. Ozerov translated some of his poems, including several about the Shoah. Maria Petrovykh was known to most readers only as a translator; she barely published her own work, but it includes some remarkable love lyrics, many of them addressed to Fadeyev.

  ‖Elsa Triolet was the sister of Lilya Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s muse. She left Russia in 1918 after marrying a French cavalry officer. Her second husband was the poet Louis Aragon, whom she persuaded to join the Communist Party.

  YURY OLESHA (1899–1960) was born in Yelisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi), Ukraine, but his fate and legacy are inextricably bound with Odessa, where his Polish Catholic family settled in 1903. Joining a circle of budding Odessan authors, which included Eduard Bagritsky, Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov—all of whom would gain prominence in the 1920s—Olesha began to publish poetry in 1915. Moving to Moscow in 1922, he debuted as a writer of brilliant fantasies, including the fairy tale The Three Fat Men (1924) and the short stories “Liompa” (1928) and “The Cherry Stone” (1929). But his greatest prose work is the novella Envy (1927), a formally inventive tragicomedy that chronicles a poetically inclined young man’s struggle to fit into the prosaic reality of Soviet Russia. Although Olesha presented the novella as a celebration of the new order, most readers would be hard-pressed to extend their sympathy to anyone other than its charming and utterly superfluous protagonist, Kavalerov. At the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, where socialist realism was declared to be the only acceptable mode for Soviet artistic production, Olesha read a speech in which he identified himself with Kavalerov, in effect condemning himself to exile from the literary establishment. Although he continued to write plays, Olesha found it nearly impossible to publish. For three decades, he poured his thoughts into a genre-defying book that was serialized as No Day Without a Line in 1961, the year after his death.

  YURY KARLOVICH OLESHA

  He yanked at his shirt collar,

  ripping the cloth,

  sending buttons flying.

  “What on earth’s the matter, Yury Karlovich?”

  No answer.

  Just a flash—

  no, a slash—

  from under his brows.

  Those eyes—gray to the point of blueness,

  with a touch of the Black Sea’s greenness

  at evening time on the beach in Odessa.

  The eyes of a sorcerer

  or of Vrubel’s Pan,

  who folds his mighty hands

  but could have borne the earth

  on his shoulders.*

  Yury Olesha kept silent a long time,

  and I too kept silent,

  wondering how to retreat,

  to leave unnoticed.

  A man sometimes needs

  to be alone—

  this can be as important

  as a talk with a friend.

  Finally, he began to pace

  diagonally across the room,

  stooping gravely,

  one hand behind his back,

  the other in the bosom of his torn shirt.

  His eyes slashed

  at me again.

  Then he suddenly stopped

  and stared—

  not at me but somewhere off in the distance.

  “I offered one of the journals

  a new novella, perhaps even a novel,

  and read them a passage.

  Can you guess what happened?”

  A pause. “Were they interested?

  Not for a minute!

  ‘Give us Envy!’ they said.

  ‘Envy’s been published,’ I told them.

  And you ask me, ‘What’s the matter?’

  What’s the matter?” he repeated,

  lifting his heavy chin

  and coming closer,

  very close indeed, face-to-face.

  Solemnly, distinctly, he pronounced,

  “Please remember—Yury Olesha

  is an unwanted writer . . .”

  And after a pause,

  in a tone that was softer, more tired:

  “I’ve earned the right to despair . . .”

  and he again began to pace

  diagonally across the room—

  silently, sternly.

  Like a prisoner or an exile,

  like in that painting by Van Gogh—

  of convicts going round in a circle

  behind prison walls.

  When his wrath and fury

  began to die down,

  I persuaded him

  to go out for a stroll.

  He needed to let his mind wander,

  as did I—

  this storytelling wizard’s

  fortunate audience.

  We step out of the gate

  and see a van drive up

  to Valentin Kataev’s dacha

  across the way.

  Television technicians

  leap out like paratroopers:

  cameramen, directors, assistants,

  assistants to the assistants,

  electricians, and observers.

  People get tangled in wires,

  stab tripods into the ground,

  loudly survey the buildings—

  weary townsfolk out in nature.

  They visit two or three homes,

  ignoring Olesha—

  who has long ago fallen from favor.

  Into disgrace.

  “Let’s get out of here quick!”

  Yury Karlovich cries

  and turns sharply to the left.

  He marches down the lane,

  at once hunched over

  and throwing back his head,

  as only he could.

  On he walked—he, who had written Envy

  but never envied the rich.

  He had refused to sit on committees,

  to give idle speeches

  in the presence of bosses,

  to join prestigious delegations;

  he had turned his back

  on many other seductions

  for which others had fallen.

  He became the François Villon

  of the Soviet Middle Ages.

  A beggar was more appealing

  to him than a plump grandee.

  Better “no day without a line”

  than a room at an exclusive hotel.

  He wrote for the drawer.

  When I looked at other authors,

  I recalled what they had published.

  When I looked at Olesha,

  I thought of all he hadn’t.

  And then, just as that thought

  entered my head,

  he again brought his face up close

  to my own. He gazed

  at me with those sorcerer’s eyes—

  gray to the point of blueness,

  touched with the Black Sea’s greenness—

  and said, “Yury Olesha—

  an unwanted writer.”

  He articulated each word still more distinctly

  than before. We walked

  silently into the woods,

  and silently out again.

  Twilight’s veil

  darkened.

  Olesha said,

  “I look around,

  and to tell you the truth, my friend,

  I don’t understand a goddamn blessed thing.”

  “Yury Karlovich, please!”

  “Quiet! Don’t even try

  to calm me down.

  I specialize in agitation . . .”

  When we came up to the gate

  of the house where we were staying,

  Olesha threw back his head distractedly:

  “Look—what a starry sky!�
��

  And he began to list the stars,

  which he knew

  intimately,

  not only by surname

  but even by first name.

  June 18, 1994

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Mikhail Vrubel was among the most original Russian artists of his era, whose work is associated with the symbolist and art nouveau movements. He was famed for his depictions of demons, which he painted obsessively. His demonic Pan dates to 1899.

  KONSTANTIN PAUSTOVSKY (1892–1968) was born in Moscow to a father descended from Cossacks and a mother of Polish origin, but grew up in Ukraine. After the October Revolution, which he witnessed firsthand in Moscow, he was drafted into the Red Army, but his regiment was quickly disbanded after one of the soldiers assassinated the commanding officer. Paustovsky spent the Civil War traveling though the south of Russia and Ukraine, staying for two years in Odessa, where he formed close friendships with the city’s literati. He moved to Moscow in 1923, where he became an “official” Soviet writer of novels about industrialization and other approved themes. Unlike many of his colleagues, Paustovsky always behaved admirably, speaking out publicly (along with Korney Chukovsky) in defense of the dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel during their trial in 1965–1966, and supporting Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his quixotic effort to abolish censorship in the Soviet Union. He was also an enthusiastic advocate of younger authors, both as a teacher at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and as an anthologist. Paustovsky’s greatest literary achievement is his multivolume autobiography, The Story of My Life (1945–1963).

  KONSTANTIN GEORGIEVICH PAUSTOVSKY

  These stations bear the names

  of the great men of 1812,

  who chased the French from town

  (wretched times, wretched weather)

  down these very roads.

  We’re going by train

  from Dorokhovo to Moscow.

  It’s a slow, listless day.

  Six or seven of us

  set off from quiet, snowy Maleyevka.*

  No sense in recording our names—

  suffice it to say

  they are names you would know.

  Among them is Paustovsky.

  He sits by the window, dejected.

  His wrinkles cannot accept

  what he sees; they object.

  His stoop is made worse

  by this dejection.

  He feels cold; he closes his eyes

  for a moment,

  but he doesn’t drift off.

  Winter is ending.