by Lev Ozerov
“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.