Portraits without Frames Read online

The Moscow suburbs peek from the half darkness

  with a squint, as if reluctantly.

  The spur tracks are a disgrace:

  rubbish, old sheds, heaps of metal, machinery

  left to rust. No one appears to care.

  Though there are flags hanging everywhere.

  We’re on our way to some plenum

  of the Writers’ Union,

  or, as our Uzbek writer calls it, “phlegmum.”

  Paustovsky shivers. He’s pale,

  even bluish-yellow.

  His brows hang over his tired, kind,

  and precisely wrinkled face.

  One of us says,

  “Someone’s getting worked over today.”

  Another adds pensively,

  “It’ll be ‘Off with their heads!’ ”

  and punctuates this with a chop.

  Paustovsky leaps up,

  his wrinkles now crowding around his eyes:

  “Three pillars of cloud,

  and before them—three pillars of fire,

  as the Book of Books states.

  It’s no laughing matter, my friends.

  Forgive me.” He paused,

  then began again: “I’ve decided

  to speak in defense of Dudintsev

  and his Not by Bread Alone.”†

  “No, Konstantin Georgievich!

  Leave that to someone younger.”

  Paustovsky is upset:

  “Who do you mean? Tell me. Who

  can I leave this to?” No one answers.

  “This is a matter for each man’s conscience,

  and I’ve made up my mind.”

  Dense-packed rows

  of clean-shaven faces.

  We hear the usual

  fire and brimstone, each speaker

  uniformly stern, unbending—

  unanimous, as required.

  Some have only just prepared

  for today’s working over;

  others wrote their speeches long ago.

  It can’t be stopped now;

  this has been planned by the authorities.

  And one thing leads to another

  just as a fable leads to its moral.

  It’s dangerous to write about all this,

  and still more dangerous not to.

  Paustovsky did not orate

  or rhetoricize—

  he just pushed a boulder from his soul

  and rolled it away.

  Evidently there are, after all,

  still people in Russia with a conscience,

  a few incorruptibles.

  Yes, thoughtful Paustovsky—

  Paustovsky the angler,

  the landscape painter—

  turned into an ardent speaker.

  When his blaze of passion died down,

  he turned his back on everyone

  and went off to the snowy woods—

  a winter kingdom

  of silent pines and firs.

  He was missing his work—

  he wanted to commune

  with a sheet of paper.

  He didn’t wait for all

  the objections

  to what he’d said. He left

  Moscow.

  The following day

  I saw him in the woods.

  I was afraid to call his name,

  to disturb his solitude,

  but he himself approached me

  in that snowy blueness,

  that feathered, starry silence.

  We didn’t say a word

  about the plenum.

  The wrinkles, which had seemed so severe,

  had now grown smoother, calmer.

  Paustovsky straightened,

  looking up: “I hope this winter sun

  will give back to me

  some of the time

  I misspent so badly.”

  I watched him go,

  leaving the woods,

  walking down the path

  towards the pearls of smoke

  curling so playfully

  over his house.

  And I, too, couldn’t

  stay any longer

  there in the woods.

  July 1994–1996

  Translated by Boris Dralyuk

  *Once a grand estate, Maleyevka became a Soviet Writers’ Union House of Creativity in the 1930s. Among the many writers who stayed there over the years were Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Prishvin, and Nikolay Zabolotsky

  †Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone, about a Soviet engineer stymied by bureaucrats, was published in 1956, during Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw. It became popular in the Soviet Union and attracted attention from the Western press. Soon after, Khrushchev severely criticized Dudintsev, who was then subjected to attacks at a meeting of the Writers’ Union, during which he fainted. Paustovsky came to his defense.

  MIKHAIL PRISHVIN (1873–1954), born into a merchant’s family in central Russia, is regarded as a uniquely perceptive, poetic nature writer. Although he was involved in Marxist activity from the early 1890s, his writings from the Soviet period are programmatically apolitical. He was interested in all aspects of Russia’s past, and especially in Russian spiritual traditions, including those of the Old Believers.

  MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH PRISHVIN

  Surely the nightingale in the garden cannot

  have sung in vain all these thousands of years?

  —M. Prishvin

  I’ve always admired

  this man’s way of life.

  In early spring he’d

  migrate north.

  With his arrival,

  the weather would change;

  with his arrival,

  the hunting season would start.

  Once he was asked

  to talk at a conference,

  at a club hazy with cigarette

  smoke and speechifying.

  “My friends, I want to congratulate you.

  The rooks have arrived—they came yesterday . . .”

  Some of his listeners then felt ashamed

  of the obscenity of their lives,

  but most just carried on

  with their smoking and shouting

  and grunting and sweating.

  All my life I’ve been reading Prishvin

  the way you drink water from a spring.

  The Russian tongue chose him

  as its faithful champion.

  He was a singer of unvarnished spring,

  spring of light, spring of waters,

  spring of grasses, the spring of mankind.

  I wondered how on earth

  in our day and age,

  somewhere close beside us,

  there could be living such a man as Prishvin.

  And I longed to visit him

  in Dunino village not far from Moscow.

  Wishes come true

  if you wish them enough.

  They come true—though perhaps not right away.

  I had seen Prishvin three times:

  at a publisher’s office, at a celebration

  of his birthday, and just walking down the street.

  And then came something unexpected—

  Fyodor Panferov, editor of October,

  where I was working at the time,

  boomed out at a meeting:

  “Prishvin has just finished writing a story,

  a fairy-tale novel as he calls it.

  Let’s ask him to give it to our journal.”

  No one voiced any objection.

  It must have been a sunbeam,

  a ray of May sun lighting on

  my eyes and my cheeks,

  that lit something within me,

  something that calls up good fortune—

  but not a word did I utter.

  Panferov turned to me:

  “You love oddballs

  and you respect the elderly—

  you’re the man for the job.

  Why don’t you go and visit Prishvin
<
br />   and fetch us his manuscript.”

  Panferov poured himself some vodka

  from a mineral-water bottle,

  downed it in one gulp,

  and followed it with a crunchy pickle.

  Dunino village is all wide-open space,

  meadows where flowers stand tall;

  oppressed though they are elsewhere,

  in Dunino people do as they will.

  Dunino air is transparent;

  the stars there are free to drop by,

  to drop down from their black sky.

  I saw a veranda, gazing out

  with its many window-eyes,

  at the broad fields of Zarechie,

  at the Milky Way streaming up high.

  There—there it stood, framed

  by a pale blue fringe, Prishvin’s

  house, that sound box for true Russian.

  “Is Mikhail Mikhailovich at home?”

  “He must be somewhere nearby,

  maybe walking beside the river,”

  answered Valeria Dmitrievna,

  serene and welcoming. “You can go

  and look for him if you like,

  or would you rather wait here?”

  And so I walked down the green

  slope that leads to the river.

  When the nightingale sings

  in the last days of May,

  it means the silver birch

  is newly in leaf.

  The nightingale sings only

  when it can drink its fill of dew

  from a birch leaf.

  There in the distance—

  a classic picture, the textbook

  image of Prishvin. Settled

  on an old stump, his notebook

  on his lap, his dog Zhulka

  running about nearby.

  I stayed where I was, not daring

  to interrupt a man engaged

  in creative labor. I don’t know

  how long I stood there. In the end

  Prishvin got to his feet, turned

  around, picked up his notebook,

  and slowly set off back home.

  “You’ve come just in time for the nightingales,”

  he said to me. “A good sign!”

  He held out his hand and went on:

  “Now we can plant our potatoes,

  and the bird cherry is in bloom.”

  An awkward pause—and he added,

  “Your face looks familiar.

  Have we met at October?

  My wife would remember,

  she has a good memory.”

  I spent the whole day at Dunino,

  until the twilight turned dark blue.

  Well fed, cosseted,

  all my worries forgotten,

  I then went on my way,

  carrying Prishvin’s fairy-tale novel

  The Tsar’s Road

  in my canvas bag.

  “What a day! What good fortune!”

  I thought, almost weeping with joy.

  “I’ve seen his wind-

  swept face up close.

  I’ve seen his hand, the hand

  that wrote Jen Sheng: The Root of Life,

  Kashchey’s Chain, Drops from the Forest.

  I’ve looked true nobility in the eye.

  How bold it is—and how shy.”

  For the next few days I was the happiest

  man walking this earth. Trembling with awe,

  I laid Prishvin’s manuscript

  on the editor’s table.

  Three days passed. The manuscript was rejected.

  How come? Why? I was not told.

  But when asked to go back to Dunino

  to drop off the manuscript

  along with a bouquet of flowers,

  I refused. Soon after this I left the journal,

  or rather, I was “let go

  at my own request.”

  This was nearly fifty years ago—

  but I feel ashamed to this day, deeply

  ashamed, as if I alone were to blame.

  Reading Prishvin’s just-published diaries

  has brought all this back to me.

  “It was a blow, a real blow,

  a blow that made me fall ill.”

  Prishvin’s response was to submit

  to October, over the years, no less

  than five versions of The Tsar’s Road.

  He himself, of course, was to blame. How

  could anyone else have been wrong?

  And he, the author, was grateful to everyone

  who had prevented The Tsar’s Road

  from being published.

  I keep dreaming these dreams—each image

  more dismal than the one before it:

  I’m on a train, the scent of flowers wafts around me,

  I get out at the wrong stop and walk along the riverbank,

  I jump in but can’t swim back to the shore.

  “Over here, over here!” shouts Prishvin,

  but I can’t hear him.

  I wake up. The lilac is in bloom.

  There are new leaves on the silver birch,

  the nightingale drinks dew

  from a birch leaf and sings.

  Surely the nightingale

  cannot

  be singing in vain?

  August 1993, Moscow-Krasnovidovo

  Translated by Maria Bloshteyn

  VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY (1893–1984), who was born in St. Petersburg to a Jewish father and a Russian mother, became a leading formalist literary critic and one of the most revered intellectuals of his era, as well as an accomplished prose stylist and legendary raconteur. A supporter of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, he had an uneasy relationship with the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October Revolution, but he soon reconciled himself to Soviet rule. He was a firsthand witness to—and participant in—the Civil War in Ukraine, a story he recounts in his memoir, A Sentimental Journey (1923).

  VIKTOR BORISOVICH SHKLOVSKY

  When he enters your flat,

  he makes his presence felt—

  spinning on his axis,

  smiling and pert,

  a smile on his lips,

  a smile on the back of his head!

  He offers you his hand—

  his surprisingly soft hand,

  which pulls yours down

  like an old doorbell

  on a string. No one today

  remembers those doorbells.

  Softness and sharpness.

  The corner of a sphere.

  He surveys the flat.

  Words tremble on his lips.

  He’s in no rush to get them out—

  they might offend.

  Finally, they break free:

  “You no longer have a bed.

  My congratulations.

  You’ve replaced it with a bunk.

  My congratulations.

  One can refuse all earthly

  comforts, but not books.

  Now we must get rid of the bunk.

  The next step’s a hammock.

  My congratulations . . .”

  He pauses for a moment,

  then launches in on me again

  with renewed strength:

  “A hammock! But we’ll have to think.

  Where can we put the hooks?

  There’s no space on the walls!”

  Shklovsky rejoices:

  “Can’t even see the walls!

  My congratulations!”

  Freeze-frames, one after another.

  Shklovsky waves his hand,

  walks over to the bookcase

  and glides along the spines.

  Like the Buddha, he has sixteen hands,

  all reaching out to the shelves.

  He snatches the book

  he needs

  and opens it

  on the required phrase,

  which immediately enters

  his speech, as if

  it had been waiting
there

  many years

  and finally struck lucky.

  He reconciles everything—

  his world is reconcilable.

  His world is rationally built.

  The quotes he chooses cling to one another,

  well montaged;

  but he doesn’t trust them

  and, one after another,

  he closes the books.

  Shklovsky departs

  as abruptly

  as he had arrived—

  noisily spinning on his axis,

  smiling and pert.

  An hour later he phones:

  “We must finish our talk. Come.”

  I come, find him sitting

  with his cane in the corner

  and—“I’m sorry, still busy”—

  dictating to his wife

  (one of the three Suok sisters,

  Serafima Gustavovna*) the end

  of yet another article—this time,

  only a hundred lines. And another,

  yet another,

  is already breathing

  down this second one’s neck.

  One paragraph slips from his hands

  like a sliver of soap;

  another writes itself.

  He finishes, gets up, and walks

  across the room, diagonally, back and forth,

  so energetically, it’s as if

  he’s getting ready for the shot put

  or the hundred-meter sprint.

  Then he subsides

  and sits down by my side,

  rubbing his famed bald head

  with his soft palm.

  “You know, I realized

  some seven and a half percent

  of my potential, but I was conceived

  for better than that” (pause)

  “I was conceived for a full

  one hundred and twenty.”

  It hurt

  to hear this. How I pitied

  that poor seven and a half!

  “What do you mean?” I tried

  to contradict him.

  “What do you mean, Viktor Borisovich!

  Are you feeling all right?”

  I walk over to the wall—not

  a shelf but a wall—of his books.

  “A single person—you!—

  wrote all this. Not bad,

  wouldn’t you say?” A glimmer

  of a smile, and then again:

  “I see myself more clearly.

  There are things inside

  that you will never see.

  Life turned out strangely:

  seven and a half percent

  of a grandly conceived life.”

  He avoided the word “genius,”

  but allowed himself “grand,”

  “huge,” and so forth.

  He’s talking about life.