Portraits without Frames
Page 10
Today he offers up
a new—the ninth, by my count—
version of his participation
in the October Revolution.
(He returns to this topic often
and seemingly without remorse,
but it torments him.)
The version with Hetman Skoropadsky,†
whose car’s petrol tank
Shklovsky filled with sugar.
He charges into his story,
into history,
but tires of his own fervor,
his own intensity,
and falls silent.
Then he gets up, firmly
shuts the door, and—quietly,
into my ear:
“In 1921 or ’22,
Gorky admitted to me sadly
what Lenin had told him in strict confidence:
‘The experiment has failed.’ ”
Grateful to Shklovsky
for placing such trust in me,
I bowed to him in silence.
We both remained silent.
Without a word, he raised
one finger to his mouth
and looked at me sternly.
It was past midnight.
My day with him was over.
And we had other conversations,
other years. One day,
in winter, I bumped into him
in the courtyard of our building.
Cloaked in dusk
and a long coat fringed with frost,
arm in arm with his grandson.
We stopped and Shklovsky told me
quietly, but clearly,
“Remember, we are on our way out.
On our way out.” And I recalled
the seven and a half
percent, the wall of books,
all written by a man
who lived
in times that were hard to bear.
1994
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
*The three Odessan-born Suok sisters all married prominent Soviet authors. Serafima was first married to the poet Vladimir Narbut, then to Shklovsky; Lydia Suok was married to the poet Eduard Bagritsky (see footnote, p. 59); and Olga was married to Yury Olesha (see the introductory note on p. 100).
†Pavlo Petrovych Skoropadsky was a decorated Ukrainian general of Cossack descent in the Imperial Russian Army, who became the political leader and military commander (hetman) of Ukraine in April 1918, after a coup d’état. He was removed from power in November of that year and officially abdicated in December.
NIKOLAY KONRAD (1891–1970) is considered the founder of the Soviet school of Japanese studies. In 1938 he was arrested, along with at least seventeen other important members of the Leningrad Oriental Institute. Interrogated and tortured, he refused to sign false confessions. After fifteen months in prison he was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, near Krasnoyarsk. After about a year of hard labor he was transferred—thanks to petitioning from influential figures—to a sharashka, a special prison where scientists and scholars were treated relatively well and provided with the materials and facilities necessary for their work. Konrad was released in 1941. After Stalin’s death, he spoke up more than once on behalf of dissidents and called for greater cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the West. During the last three years of his life he corresponded with Arnold Toynbee. Mikhail Bakhtin referred to him as one of the three most important of Soviet literary theorists.
NIKOLAY OSIPOVICH KONRAD
This isn’t something thirdhand.
What I’m going to tell you about Konrad
is clear and definite.
We met in quiet Kémeri,
amid the fragrant pine trees of Latvia.
It was in the house that Nadezhda Pavlovich
rented every summer
from a strong and devout family.
She used to go to the village church—
something we had to keep quiet about.
I saw her praying
and being transformed as she prayed.
Once she said to me joyfully,
“Let me introduce you.
This is my friend, Nikolay Osipovich
Konrad, a full member of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences—please love
and respect him.” “I’ve loved
and respected him for many years,”
I said with respectful tenderness.
I did, of course, know who he was.
I’d been following his correspondence
with Arnold Toynbee. I had read
his essays about Japan.
Konrad is slim, handsome,
smiling, and gentle.
You can see at a glance
that he’s a man of honor.
There is honor and dignity
in every line of his face.
His smile and the look in his eyes
disarm
those who have been brought up on hatred.
(And have we not all
been brought up on hatred?)
He and I walked the length
of many summer paths and tracks,
through the forest, by the sea,
through gardens and among sand dunes,
and we talked about many things.
I tried to listen,
to do nothing but listen,
and I greatly regretted afterward
that I had, nevertheless,
sometimes interrupted. And I regretted
that I had not
brought a tape recorder with me.
There was a seagull
resting on a wave;
a crow was cawing sleepily;
a local electric train
rumbled by in the distance.
Still farther away, near Riga,
a lighthouse was winking.
There was the flare of a match
in some unseen hand;
a damp mist
spreading over the earth—
and we two, walking together.
To my great good fortune
I was listening to the words
of a man at the sound of whose name
the Japanese bow
or smile and rise to their feet.
And even here, in Russia,
people can see that Konrad
has a head on his shoulders.
“After my year in prison,”
he told me, “when I was sent
to the camp near Krasnoyarsk,
I was greatly honored.
I was placed on a pedestal.”
A pause, and then,
with a certain majesty:
“I was given the job of yardman.
I tried to do my job well,
to keep the ground free of snow,
and the camp’s senior yardman
once said to me,
‘Keep on like this, Konrad,
and, before we know it,
you too will be promoted
to the rank
of senior yardman.’”
Nikolay Osipovich fell silent.
He grinned very sweetly,
neither appealing for pity
nor demanding indignant rage.
The silence in Latvia
is healing, and deeper
than can be fathomed.
A pity I had no tape recorder,
but my memory
was recording every word.
“You’re a splendid teacher,” I say.
“Have you never thought
of composing a memoir,
of writing your own Confessions?”
“Me! My Confessions! What on earth
makes you say that?” And then,
with a smile: “But I have to confess
I’ve been dreaming for a long time
of publishing Saint Augustine.
‘Which translation?’ I kept thinking.
The old ones were no good
and there wasn’t a
new one.
But if a hunter’s alert,
a beast will appear before him.
Not long after the war, a woman
from Petersburg
(her name is Sergiyenko)
sent me her translation
of the first few chapters.
Why? What had moved her to this?
After the blockade winter,
as the first stunted
blades of grass began to show through
and the earth was beginning to breathe again
after her deep swoon,
there must have been something,
some feeling
that she, who knew Latin,
just had to express
and whose presence she could sense
in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.
And she’d done a fine job.
It was just what I needed,
and I told her so.
She and I signed a contract.
She finished the translation
and I liked what she’d done.
But how was I going
to publish Saint Augustine
in our God-denying kingdom?”
A rhetorical question, of course,
but Konrad then answered it
with unexpected simplicity:
“I thought we could publish
three Confessions together: Augustine,
Rousseau, and Tolstoy. The last two
would shelter the first.
But time goes on passing
and—just think—it never returns.
And my three Confessions
are still ready
and waiting for publication.”
That evening, four of us—
Konrad, his sensitive
and scholarly wife, Natalya Isayevna,
Nadezhda Pavlovich, and yours truly—
sat listening to the words
of the blessed Augustine,
and the walls of the room
were moving apart
and the roof kept moving
higher and higher
and we four,
in the quiet of Kémeri,
were sailing through the many-starred
and blessed universe.
Few in this world are such moments
of true reconciliation.
The journey continues.
We say nothing and are without fear.
Each with a sense
of our own life,
we celebrate
our shared presence.
Translated by Robert Chandler
YEVGENIA TARATUTA (1912–2005) was born in France. Her father, a Russian anarchist who returned to Moscow in 1917, imbued her with a lasting faith in Prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s principle of “mutual aid.” This faith, she believed, helped her to survive exile to Siberia in the 1930s and six years in the Gulag after the Second World War. During her years of freedom she worked as a translator and as an editor of children’s literature. Robert Chandler, who met her in Moscow, confirms that she remained strong and buoyant into her last years.* As Maria Bloshteyn put it after first reading this translation, “Poetry is both the reason for Taratuta being tortured and her only effective means of defense against the torturers, an illustration of a key paradox of Soviet life.” While under interrogation, Taratuta remembers lines from three poems: “The Song of Far-Sighted Oleg” (1822), one of several poems by Alexander Pushkin on the theme of a poet-prophet confronting a tyrannical ruler; the unfinished “At the Top of My Voice” (1929–1930), the last of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poems; and “The Upas Tree” (1828), also by Pushkin, a bleak poem about a slave sent alone into a desert to fetch some of the poisonous sap of an upas tree, which is so powerful that the slave collapses and dies immediately after his return.
YEVGENIA ALEXANDROVNA TARATUTA
Yevgenia Taratuta,
an exalted being,
charged under Article 58—
counterrevolutionary activity—
landed in the Butyrka.
They deprived her of sleep.
They broke the bones of her hands.
“T.—without your belongings!”
was how
they used to summon her from her cell.
Her investigator, Odlyanitsky,
was a connoisseur of swear words
with pretensions to being an intellectual
and a lover of belles lettres.
“Go on, confess, admit
that Kassil
and Kvitko are spies too!Ӡ
“No!” They struck her on the back,
in her face. The air
was saturated
with the most intimate of curses.
“No!” She was losing
consciousness. “I need poetry,”
she said to herself. She closed
her eyes; her hair fell
across her forehead; she switched off.
“No!” she said to herself. “I am not
under this man’s command.”
“Where are you?”
the man yelled. She was with Pushkin.
She was reciting “The Song
of Far-Sighted Oleg.”
Now Oleg wished for revenge,
she was saying to herself,
on the reckless Khazars.
But the words came out different:
revenge on the wrecks of stars.
They struck her on the back,
in her chest, in her face.
First it was Pushkin.
Then, Mayakovsky:
“At the Top of My Voice.”
My lines,
like some
great aqueduct,
. . .
will obstinately
blast their way
through time . . .
And holding
up my . . .
. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . of ever-
lasting rhyme
I’ll—
And then, emphasizing the word “swine”:
I’ll send
those turncoats
packing—
those poetasting,
bureaucrasting
swine!
“Quite something!” she thought.
“Mustn’t forget.” And then,
on the very border
of consciousness, falling,
feeling the pull
of the void, she turned
to Pushkin again, whispering:
But one man,
with a look of command
sent another man
to that dark land.
Yes, there are looks of command;
there are looks of power
and commandment.
There is command of others,
and there is
command of self.
Who sent whom?
It was quiet in the room.
The knocking of Taratuta’s heart
and grinding of her clenched teeth
could be clearly heard.
Taratuta might have stayed alive
without poetry,
though that is not certain,
but she would have lost her mind—
which remains intact and whole.
Fortress of Russian poetry,
you stood firm!
I can’t hold my tongue.
I can’t bear it.
I want to shout, “Bravo!”
The word’s
bursting out of my heart.
But I stay
stubbornly silent.
The word belongs to a concert hall
and I can’t shout it out.
It’s the wrong time,
the wrong place.
“But how did you manage,
Yevgenia Alexandrovna?”
“Oh, somehow. . .”
Opposite me, visibly hunched,
her head to one side,
sits a
truly
exalted being,
Yevgenia Taratuta.
1990
Translated by Robert Chandler
*His poem “Yevgenia Alexandrovna Taratuta” was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 2002.
†Lev Kassil wrote stories and novels for teenagers and young adults. For Leyb Kvitko, see the introductory note on p. 137.
THE YIDDISH POETS
LEYB KVITKO (1890–1952) wrote poetry and prose in Yiddish. He was orphaned early and worked a variety of jobs before debuting as a poet in 1917 with his first book of children’s verse, Lidelekh (Songs), noted for its warm humor, lyricism, and enthusiastic embrace of life—all key features of his poetic legacy. Although Kvitko also wrote satirical verse, an autobiographical novel, and many articles and essays, he was best known as a children’s poet, whose poems—translated into Russian by the likes of Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, and Mikhail Svetlov—were enjoyed by generations of Soviet readers. Kvitko was arrested in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee liquidation sweep, accused of being a traitor to the motherland, and executed on August 12, 1952, the Night of the Murdered Poets.
LEYB KVITKO
He understood the language of children,
of leaves and birds, of water and wind.
He became a sage, yet remained a child.
But in times of tyranny
wisdom doesn’t save the wise,
nor is a child saved by childhood.
New times come in the end,
though always too late.
Wisdom is once again
ascribed to the wise.
And what happened long ago
becomes current again.
The house painter’s job is a wonderful job,
a terrestrial job, a celestial job.
Hang in your cradle
between earth and sky;
high in the cerulean blue,
move that brush skillfully, do,
and sing a song
with neither end nor beginning
just so your soul can keep singing.
He came to love his craft—
the fresh air, the freedom, the light.
He had begun to make and sing songs
much earlier
than he learned to read and write.
Lidelekh is the book of his beginning.
It burbles like a brook.
it sings like a bird,
it soars higher than the clouds.
Kvitko speaks to the carriage driver
and to his horse
and to the hay that the horse is chewing.
He converses with the smith
and his hammer and his horseshoe,
glowing between hammer and anvil.
He converses with the villages of Bemba and Dremba,