by Lev Ozerov
—BORIS DRALYUK
1 For a brief autobiographical sketch of Ozerov’s early years, see “Ot avtora,” in Izbrannye stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Khud. lit-ra, 1974), 4.
2 Irina Chaikovskaia, “Cherez stikh poznaiu mir i sepia. Interv'iu s Sofiei Kugel, drugom L'va Ozerova,” Slovo-Word 82 (2014): available at http://www.promegalit.ru/public/9647_irina_chajkovskaja_cherez_stikh_poznaju_mir_i_sebja_intervju_s_sofiej_kugel_drugom_lva_ozerova_.html.
3 Lev Ozerov, “Babii Iar,” Oktiabr' 3–4 (1946): 160–63; Ozerov, “Babi Yar,” trans. Richard Shelton, in Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, vol. 2 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 575–79; Ozerov, “Kiev: Babi Yar,” in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 3–12. See also Shrayer, “Lev Ozerov as a Literary Witness to the Shoah in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” in The Holocaust: Memories and History, eds. Victoria Khiterer, Ryan Barrick, and David Misal (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 176–87.
4 See Lev Ozerov, “V nachale bylo ‘Slovo,’” in Strana russkoi poezii: Stat'i raznykh let (Moscow: Lit. in-t im. A. M. Gor'kogo, 1996), 153–56; also in Dver' v master-skuiu. Boris Pasternak. Anna Akhmatova. Nikolai Zabolotskii (Paris, Moscow, and New York: Tret'ia volna, 1996), 191–94.
5 Lev Ozerov, “Stikhotvoreniia Anny Akhmatovoi,” Literaturnaia gazeta 78 (June 23, 1959): 3. See Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 1952–1962 (Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), 776.
6 Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, ed. Lev Ozerov (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1965).
7 See “Lev Adolfovich Ozerov,” in Russkie pisateli. Poety (Sovetskii period), vol. 16 (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, 1994), 89–179.
8 Igor Nepomniashchii, “Vozrozhdenets. O pozdnei lirike L'va Ozerova,” Voprosy literatury, no. 4 (2008): available at http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2008/4/ne6.html.
PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES
THE POETS
ANNA AKHMATOVA (née Gorenko, 1889–1966) was born in Odessa, but her family moved to Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, before she turned one. She began publishing poetry in her late teens, adopting her grandmother’s Tatar surname—Akhmatova. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolay Gumilyov and soon became a key member of his Guild of Poets and of the Acmeist movement that emerged from it. Most of her early poems were love lyrics—concise, delicate, and psychologically exact. In 1921 Gumilyov was shot for allegedly participating in a monarchist conspiracy, and it became difficult, eventually impossible, for Akhmatova to publish her own poetry. From the mid-1920s, she embraced the role of witness to the horrors of her age, horrors that touched her all too closely: her third husband, the art historian and critic Nikolay Punin, was arrested three times and perished in the Gulag, and her only son, Lev Gumilyov, spent more than ten years in the camps. In 1946 the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, at the time attached to the British embassy, visited her in her apartment. Soon after this visit, she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. Ozerov’s 1959 article was the first mention of her work in print in many years. During the 1960s, Akhmatova, by then the only surviving major poet of the Silver Age, was a mentor to Joseph Brodsky and a small circle of his friends. Very tall and stately, always surrounded by visitors and friends, she was painfully aware that her readers revered her not for her recent poetry—much of which they did not know—but for her first books. Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966—the thirteenth anniversary of Stalin’s death.
ANNA ANDREYEVNA AKHMATOVA
A loose-fitting robe, or a housecoat,
or, rather, a coverall
disguises her corpulence—
a gift of the prison queues.
Those used to her slimness
cannot believe
she has grown stout.
It’s Akhmatova, they say,
but not Akhmatova.
“Who’d have guessed
I might end up
waiting day after day
in those long queues outside prisons,
feet swelling,
heart giving up?”
said Anna Andreyevna,
as she passed me a photo
of herself,
straw-thin,
lying on her stomach
and touching the nape of her neck,
the fringe of her little
white cap, with her toes.
Painters never tired
of depicting her poise,
her proud angularity.
The bangs, the hump of her nose,
the tall neck;
her height,
her loftiness.
Somewhere behind her—
a lane in Tsarskoye Selo;
by way of background—
a balcony railing.
The lilac coverall,
with its dark violet folds,
flows, overflows, and iridesces.
Her face is pale
yet lit from within.
“I received this letter.
Please read it aloud.
It begins with praise—
a bad sign! Best to skip that.
Start farther down.
They’d asked me for poems.
I’d sent some—
my new ones, of course.
And what does he answer?
‘But can’t we republish
some of your old ones?’”
A pause. What can I say?
“See how they treat me!”
I’m silent. What can I say?
“Like some servant girl!”
“Don’t say that!” I protest.
“Everyone knows you’re an empress!”
Akhmatova grows quiet.
She gets ready to listen.
So I go on—as best I can:
“Of course, you are an empress!”
She fixes her shawl,
lowers her eyelids,
lifts her head,
and though she doesn’t say, “Go on!”
I do go on—in the same spirit:
“Who will remember him,
this fool of an editor?
But every line of yours,
whether early or late,
will be worth
its weight in gold—
no, that’s not right—
it will be beyond price.”
Without turning her head,
Anna Andreyevna looks
towards the speaker,
who sees
on her face a fleeting
light of pleasure.
Beatitude.
Everyone on earth—
shepherd or prime minister, stoker or poet—
wants to hear
the word
they have been waiting
to hear all their lives.
As they grow older, people want to know
that their life
has not been lived in vain.
Translated by Irina Mashinski
BORIS PASTERNAK (1890–1960) was born in Moscow into a family of assimilated Jews. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a prominent postimpressionist painter, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist. The family played host to famous composers like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Scriabin, who inspired Pasternak to pursue a career in music. After a brief stint at the Moscow Conservatory, Pasternak abandoned music and left to study philosophy at the University of Marburg. Returning to Russia before the outbreak of the First World War, he devoted himself more and more to poetry. His innovative, impassioned early collections—and especially My Sister, Life (1922), which features poems written around the time of the Revolution—were seen as watersheds; Osip Mandelstam wrote, “To read Pasternak’s verses is to clear one’s throat, reinforce one’s breathing, renovate the lungs; such verses must be a cure for tuberculosis.” In the 1920s and ’30s, Pastern
ak escaped persecution by the state but wrote little poetry, turning instead to translation and prose. The publication of his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) abroad during the thaw, and his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year, proved calamitous for him personally: he was denounced by the Soviet Writers’ Union and hounded by Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. This may well have contributed to his death from lung cancer on May 30, 1960. Although the date and time of his funeral was not officially publicized, the information spread by word of mouth, and thousands turned out to mourn him as a beloved poet, author, and martyr.
BORIS LEONIDOVICH PASTERNAK
Khrushchev’s sevenfold retinue
were falling over themselves,
doing all they could
to disgrace the man.
But their idea of disgrace
brought him glory.
He refused to leave Russia.
So they demanded
he leave Moscow
during Macmillan’s visit
in 1959.
Pasternak did not take fright;
tormented though he was,
he did not lose his head.
I saw him
in those troubled days.
No. Like a forest or a garden
before a storm,
he was prepared to take the hit,
not out of meekness
but out of faith
in life,
which he had, after all, called his sister.
Saying farewell, he looked at me
so intensely, smiled so brightly,
that I flinched.
It scared me.
Pasternak left for Tbilisi.
With his wife.
Ten days of February,
six of March.
In Georgia, he warmed up
among his old, faithful friends,
in Tabidze’s home—
which is now a museum.
The worries, grief, and bitterness
of the preceding days and weeks—
the dramas, scandals, quarrels—
wore off. At the sight of Tbilisi
and its surroundings
they dropped away from him
like turbid mountain torrents.
Tbilisi brought him back to younger days.
Through distant smoke, through dove-gray haze
he saw the light of heaven,
the color blue,
which he had always loved.
But would he ever,
even just once,
have the chance
to come back here?
On the eve of his departure
he set off early
to say farewell to Svetitskhoveli.
He removed his cap and entered the cathedral.
He felt the breath of the eleventh century.
Can anyone not love this place,
the grandeur of this space,
stretching eastward,
inspiring thoughts of eternity,
of the eternal life of the soul?
This place doesn’t make you feel small—
it brings you peace.
Pasternak needed this,
like air,
in a world where he was suffocating.
These four pillars, standing so freely,
holding the dome up like the sky!
The reliefs, the carvings!
Stone, coolness, calm.
He stepped out, his soul uplifted.
He looked at the cathedral, then the sky—
the sky, then the cathedral.
Saying farewell
proved difficult.
But he was glad he had come here.
When he turned his attention to the earth,
he noticed people
looking at him intently.
All right—let them
do as they please!
But one of them, loud-voiced and young,
came up and said,
“You’re Pasternak, aren’t you?”
“No, no, I’m not Pasternak,”
he answered, horrified,
and took off in a hurry—
yes, almost at a run,
like Pushkin’s Eugene
from the Bronze Horseman.
“You Pasternak?”
someone was shouting after him.
Without looking round,
he replied, “No, no, you’re wrong.”
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
TITSIAN TABIDZE (1895–1937) was a celebrated Georgian poet whose work was rendered into Russian by some of the top Russian poet-translators, making it famous throughout the Soviet Union. The son of a village priest, Tabidze went to university in Moscow, where he was influenced by the Russian symbolists. When he returned to Georgia and settled in the capital city of Tbilisi, he cofounded the Georgian symbolist group Blue Horns. Tabidze quickly became one of Tbilisi’s most recognizable citizens—a tall, blue-eyed man, who always wore a red carnation pinned to his shirt or lapel. He befriended Boris Pasternak when the latter visited Tbilisi in 1931; this warm friendship would last for the rest of his life. Tabidze was among the targets of several articles published in the Soviet press in 1936 that attacked formalism in the arts; unlike many of his colleagues, he did not bow to this criticism but defended himself. In October 1937, Tabidze was arrested and, in prison, tortured to death. In The Literature of Georgia, Donald Rayfield writes that he “is said to have stood up to interrogation and to have named only the eighteenth-century poet Besiki as his accomplice.”
TITSIAN IUSTINOVICH TABIDZE*
Spring was in full swing.
Titsian! I glimpsed him
strolling ahead of me
through city gardens
now in full bridal bloom.
I saw the gestures, the gait,
a particular way of looking—
and I knew it was him. Himself.
But how can I describe the man?
Blue eyes, heavy eyelids,
a child’s cheeks, round face,
bangs over a high forehead.
I was elated, knocked sideways,
drawn into his fate.
In his buttonhole was a red carnation.
A citizen of Rome—
or was he Lorenzo de’ Medici?
The spirit of a Renaissance man.
An Oscar Wilde? A Dorian Gray?
I wasn’t walking behind him—
I was being drawn inexorably in his wake.
And then—Paolo Iashvili,†
and the smoke from Titsian’s cigarette.
And then
they were three—Pasternak
was there too. Together,
these three were my emblem
of good luck, the embodiment
of true friendship. In the hall
Titsian read a poem—
in Georgian, then in Russian.
Lines I recognized at once—
“It’s not me who writes my poems;
it’s they who write me
as if writing a story,
while life carries on beside them.”
Elatedly, with gusto,
he went on reciting
his own poems, as orchestrated
by Pasternak. And these next lines, of course,
I knew too:
“What’s a poem? An avalanche. It exhales,
blows you away, and buries you alive. That’s
what I call a poem.”
What luck. I saw all three of them.
All three at once. And ever afterwards,
if I happened to see one
or two of them,
I always saw all three—
the fullness of a friendship
that lasted throughout those years
and still has not left the heart
even though all three
are gone forever,
although. . .
As open as an outlet to the sea,
he never hid his
thoughts. He spoke
freely, unguardedly, as poets do.
People like him are loved, but not
by envious courtiers,
slanderers, executioners,
smooth-tongued informers,
and members of the nomenclature.
The poet may disdain and mock
these schemers—
but their ways are artful,
their craft invisible,
as Simon Chikovani,‡
who hated worthless words,
once put it to me.
Why, indeed, waste words,
when it was all too clear
how Titsian, faced by slander,
did not know where to turn;
how quickly he kept losing
the hope and calm
we tried to offer him.
He melted like a candle,
more swiftly than a candle. The era
of suspicion had set in.
Those now cast
as enemies of the people
had to pass
through each circle of hell:
hurt, indignant protest, resignation,
incomprehension, anger, and despair.
He would not leave his home,
so I went to call on him.
How could I
distract a victim from his secret fears,
how relieve the tension
of waiting, waiting for the end,
for footsteps on the stairs,
arrest, and public shaming?
There was no deceiving Titsian.
Knowledge, foreknowledge,
foreboding worn to a thread
by which his life was hanging.
But wise-child Titsian
was glad to see me
and gladder still
of the chance
to read me poems,
new, unpublished poems.
Poems that might have been
a dream, a prophet’s vision.
We talked poetry; his wife,
Nina Makashvili, joined in.
Titsian brightened, but wilted
as we parted. He walked
me to the middle of the bridge
and, with a sad smile, said goodbye.
Sometimes, the heart knows
