by Lev Ozerov
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.Ӡ
“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.
