Portraits without Frames
Page 6
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,