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(My Encounter with Andrei Bely)1
Dedicated to Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich

I

The Legend That Came Before

A light fire dancing over curls

A breath of wind—of inspiration!2

"Save, O Lord, and have mercy on Papa, Mama, Nurse, Asya, Andryusha, Natasha, Masha and Andrei Bely..."

"All right, since you're saying a prayer for Andrei Bely (Andrei White), say one for Sasha Cherny (Sasha Black)."3

The funniest thing is that Alya's4 nurse did not even suspect the existence of Sasha Cherny (and did he exist then, as a children's poet? the year 1916), that she thought him up herself as i counterweight, a countercolor to Andrei Bely, she invented him out of her woman's good-country good-heartedness and softened i he full first name to a diminutive.

Why did three-year-old Alya say a prayer for him? Bely was not a visitor in our house. But his book The Silver Dove5 was frequently mentioned by name. The Silver Dove. Andrei Bely. A certain Andrei who has a silver dove. And that Andrei is white, belyi, too. And who can have a silver dove if not an angel, and who else, except for an angel, can be named Bely, White? All those Ivanovichs, Alexandrovichs, Petrovichs, and this one is just Bely. A white angel with a silver dove in his hands. It was for him the three-year-old girl said a prayer, placing him, as the favorite, or the most important, in the very last place in the prayer. (We must also pray for angels, especially when they are on earth. Let us remember Wells's poor angel who in earthly, commonplace surroundings was simply not respectable!)

But the name Bely had resounded in our house even before Alya's prayer, long before there was an Alya, and in quite another house, and in quite another way; for it was uttered not by a three-year-old angel, but by my aunt, the wife of my uncle, the historian, Professor Dmitry Vladimirovich Tsvetaev,6 and with an intonation not in the least prayerful:

"The final days have arrived?" she boiled and frothed at my father, who was quietly sitting off to the side. "Now there's even an Andrei Bely popping up and giving a lecture tomorrow. It's not enough to have a Maxim Gorky,7 an Andrei Bely was needed! And then again an Alexander Blok8—(what kind of surname is that? Must be from the Yids!)—who has put "The Beautiful Lady" in print; the title alone tells the tale: shameless! They've written about ladies before, only they didn't put it in print, they hid it in a drawer; at the most it would be taken out among friends. But the worst of it is that he comes from a respectable family, he's a professor's son, Nikolai Dmitrievich Bugaev's.9 Why not Boris Bugaev? But Andrei Bely? Disowning your own father? It seems they've done it on purpose. Are they ashamed to sign their own names? What sort of White? An angel or a madman who jumps out into the street wearing his underwear?" she flared, quivering all over with her diamonds, her hook-like nose and her ceaselessly blinking yellow eyes (a nervous tic).

"Youth, Elizaveta Evgrafovna, youth!" my father answered shortly. "But what is the lecture about?"

"On Symbolism, be so kind as to look at that! It's because they don't know the symbols of faith that they've invented that Symbolism of theirs!"

"Well, I don't see anything so especially harmful in that..." cautiously (the same way as, through necessity, a hand is slipped into the cage of a vicious parrot) put in my father, who was apprehensive of irritating people, and especially ladies, and especially relatives, and especially relatives with a nervous tic (she always quivered—her whole body—like a precariously set up, carelessly bumped, lighted Christmas tree, overloaded with candles and baubles, that threatened every second to come crashing down, flare up and burn to bits). "It's always better than going to political meetings..."

"A student!" the Cockatoo was already shrieking (the nickname came from the hookishness of the nose and the yellowness of the bird's eyes). "They should study, not give lectures, disgracing their fathers!"

"Now, now, that's enough, my dear," put in my good-hearted uncle, coming up just in time to take hold. Uncle Mitya was a distinguished professor, the author of an excellent work about the most boring of Tsars, Vasily Shuisky,10 and Director of the Commercial Institute on Ostozhenka. The pupils of the Institution had nicknamed him "Chernomor"11 because of his small stature, huge black board, dexterity, and extremely reactionary political opinions. "Why are you getting so excited? In their youth some people go in for pretty women and go courting; others go infor symbolism and go reporting, ha-ha-ha! The father is extremely distinguished; maybe something good will come from the son too. And what do you think, Marina? What's better: to dance your led off at balls or read your reports out about Symbolism? But of course, it's still too early for you to..." It was not clear what clear that "too early" belonged with, dances or Symbolism...

And we were not the only family like that. With very rare exceptions, that is how the whole older generation of Moscow greeted young Symbolism.

And so I carried the name of Andrei Bely away from the rose-colored walls of the Commercial Institute on Ostozhenka to the chocolate-brown walls of our home on Three Ponds, where, whipped up, hidden away, laid down to sleep, the name remained until its time had come.

It was awakened two years later by the poet Ellis12 (Lev Lvovich Kobylinsky, the son of the pedagogue Polivanov, the translator of Baudelaire, one of the most passionate of the early Symbolists, a muddled poet, a human being of genius).

"Yesterday Boris Nikolaevich... I'm going from here to Boris Nikolaevich... How Boris Nikolaevich would like that..."

It was natural that Asya and I, fired with the wish to see Kely, never requested Ellis to introduce us to him, and natural— or perhaps not natural?—that Ellis, who valued our house, the whole world of our house (the poplar courtyard, the small family rooms upstairs, my poems that no one had ever heard, his unchallenged dominion over two children's souls), never proposed it to us. Andrei Bely was taboo. You can't see him, only hear about him. Why? Because he is a renowned poet, and we are secondary school girls in the middle grades.

The fatalism—of Russians—and children—and poets.

* * * * *

Ellis lived in furnished rooms in the Hotel Don on the Smolensk Marketplace; it had a blue sign that resembled a tavern's. Once when we dropped by to visit him instead of going to our high school, Asya ind I found something in his dark room (it was dark from morning on, always dark, with lowered shades—he couldn't stand daylight!—and with two candles in front of a bust of Dante), something that was flying, flying away, was visibly on the point of take-off, of departure. And before we could recover our senses Ellis says: "Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev. And these are the Tsvetaevs—Marina and Asya."

A turn, almost a pirouette, which was instantly repeated on the wall by his shadow made gigantic by the candles, his penetrating glance (a regular jab), his eye, the end of his phrase broken off by our entrance—the man was leaving and nothing could stop him now—and making a bow that resembled a pas of some balletic finale, he says: "All the best. All the very best."

At home when we were going to bed: "Well, we've finally seen Andrei Bely. He said to me: 'All the very best' ' —"No, he said to me 'All the very best.' To you he said, 'All the best.' "No, he said it to you, 'All the best' and to me..." —"Oh well, to you then, 'All the very best!' " (Thinking: you know yourself that he said it to me!)

"All the best" or "All the very best," it was no thanks to him that we met. And the encounter was not repeated. Oddly enough, although I moved in the circle closest to him—Ellis, his friend Nilender, K.P. Khristoforova, the Turgenev sisters, Serezha Solovev, the Vinogradovs, brother and sister13 —I never again met him in my ante-nuptial youth of those years. And I never sought him out. Fate had given one meeting; you mustn't ask for a second. Thank the Lord for that one meeting. It might very well not have taken place.

Of course two years later I saw him often in Musaget,14 but it was just that: I saw him, and most often from behind, the man with a white piece of chalk in his hand dancing circles around the blackboard, then and there mottled from end to end—as if they came scattering from his sleeve!—by the commas, crescents and zig-zags of his rhythmical diagrams so reminiscent of the geometrical diagrams in secondary school that through a natural sense of self-preservation (suppose he suddenly turns around and calls me to the blackboard?) I shifted my gaze from Bely's dancing back to the immobile fronts of Privy Councilor Goethe and Doctor Steiner15 who looked wide-eyed, huge-eyed, or did not look at us from the wall.

And that is how it stayed with me: my first Bely danced in front of Goethe and Doctor Steiner, as once David danced before the Ark in the life of a Symbolist everything is symbol. Non-symbols don't exist.

* * * * *

...But I have one other, still earlier, pre-acquaintanceship recollection, an insignificant one, but worth the telling if only

because of its Turgenevian16 parts with which Bely is doubly linked: as a writer and as a sufferer.

The province of Tula, the district Tolstoe, near the city of Cherm where Ivan had a talk with the Devil, near the Bezhin Meadow. And there, at someone's nameday party, in a dreamlike white house with a dreamlike black park:

"How rosy you are and healthy, and no doubt you are sensible," sings the hostess-proprietress, gasping from heat and fat. 'And look at my girls: dry like goats and totally mad. Especally Bichetka—it's her grandmother who named her that in mi her eyes and her jumps.17 Well just think, my dear, I am silling in our house in Moscow in the dining room and I hear Bichetka in the entryway on the telephone: 'Please call Andrei Bely to the telephone.' Well right then I pricked up my ears; it's very odd—either Andrei, or Andrei Petrovich, say, but what is this 'Andrei Bely' business, like a convict or a yardman? She stands ;md waits, she waits a long time (he must not be coming) and suddenly, my dear, I don't believe my own ears: 'You are Andrei Bely? Would you be so kind, please, as to tell me what kind of eyes you have? My sisters and I have made a bet...' Then came a silence, a long silence. Well, I think, he's probably dismissing her. Lord knows who he took her for! I'm already on the verge of getting up to explain to that gentleman that she's... that it's her youth, and because she grew up without a father and without any sort of... what shall I say? any intention of... in a word: she's a silly girl who... and suddenly she's started talking again: 'So then gray? Really gray? Oh no, not in the least like everyone else has, like no one else in Moscow and the whole world! I was at the lecture and saw for myself only I didn't know whether it was gray or green... And now I've won the bet... Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Thank you, Andrei Bely, for your gray eyes!'

"She comes flying in to me: 'Ma-ama! Gray!'—'I've just heard that they're grey, and I should have sent you to the Ekaterinsky Institute as Anna Semenova advised me to do...'- 'What do Institutes have to do with it? You know who I was just now speaking to on the telephone? (And she's jumping up and down, up and down, right up to the ceiling. You know, of course, what a tall girl she is and our ceilings in Moscow are low—she's just about to knock her head into the chandelier!) With Andrei Bely, the most famous writer in Russia! And you know what answer he gave me? "I really don't know. I'll go take a look right now." And he went and looked at himself in the mirror, that's why it took so long. And of course they turned out to be gray. You understand, Mama: Andrei Bely, the one who gave the lecture, and there was an uproar, and they whistled something awful . . . Now I'll get acquainted with Blok too. . .' '

The storyteller takes a breath and says in a lowered voice: "Is he a great writer? I don't know. We used to read Turgenev: moral teaching, our own neighborhood... Well, great or not, writer or not, he's a decent person anyway, he didn't give her a scolding, didn't make suppositions, he understood right away—a silly girl... and he went and looked at himself in the mirror... like a fool... Then I asked her: 'And didn't he ask you, Bichetka, what kind of eyes you have? '—'What are you thinking of, Mama, you think he's really interested in what kind of eyes I have? Am I some kind of VIP or something?''

Dear Boris Nikolaevich, fourteen years later in the Berlin Pragerdiele18 when I told you this story, your first question was:

"But what kind of eyes did she have? Bishet? Bichette? A little goat? Gray, most probably? And like this? (He cuts cross-ways through the air) like a real goat has? How old was she then? Seventeen? Tall, like this, like this, like this? Ash blonde? And she jumped in place (he almost knocks over the table) like this, like this, like this?"

("Boris Nikolaevich is demonstrating eurythmics19 to Marina Ivanovna," comes a whisper from the next table.)

"But why didn't she ever write to me? Dear friend, would it be impossible to find her? No? Nowhere? She's dead, of course. All of them, all of them die, or go away. (He looks provokingly all around.) You don't understand! Abram Grigorevich,20 you listen too! A girl with a goat's eyes, Bichette, who was at my lecture..." The publisher, limply: "Which lecture? Here?" He, boring in with his eyes: "Of course 'here'. Because I at this moment am there, because there at this moment is here and there is no other here except there! No other right now except back then, because back then is eternal, eternal, eternal!... It is Fet's now." (Still another of his publishers approaches.) Bely, pleadingly: "Solomon Gitmanovich,22 you listen too. A girl. Fourteen years ago. Bichette, with a goat's eyes, who jumped like this from joy that I answered on the phone what kind of eyes I have... Fourteen years ago. She's now a Valkyrie... Or rather she would have been a Valkyrie... I know that she's dead..."

(A respectful, sympathetically-astounded, and just a little bit comical silence. That is how people are silent when they suddenly learn about the death of a person of whom they are hearing for the first time and for whom, then and there, one of those present is grieving.) With a sudden turnabout of his whole body (although it is strange to say of him whole and body seeing how very little that whole was and how very much it was not a body), directing at me the whole bird of his body, Bely says:

"And this Bichette really existed? You didn't... make it up? (Suspiciously and aggressively.) Because I don't remember anything: no eyes on the telephone. Of course I believe you, but... (To those around us.) Because it's extremely important. Because if she existed then that was my destiny. My non-destiny. Just because of that I didn't have a destiny. And I know only now, why I am lost. To what extent I am lost. "

Not knowing what to say and sensing that the girl is already used up, that there remains only Bely's devilment, the publishers and their wives, and the writers and their wives imperceptibly and lightning-fast... do not even go away: they are not there. Studying a crease of the tablecloth as if seeking in it runes, letters, traces, and suddenly throwing up his head and suffusing me with the light of— whatever kind you want, only not gray eyes, eyes that obviously do not see me, Bely says:
"Bichette, Bichette... I remember something, something, something. But... it doesn't fit! I was quite little at the time, I was almost not in existence yet, I simply did not exist..."

1. The two parts of Tsvetaeva's portrait touch on two periods of Bely's life and career which were separated by about twelve years. Tsvetaeva's first glimpses of the man go back to 1910, the approximate closing date of a period which began in 1903: the period of Bely's intense friendship with Alexander Blok and Blok's wife, Liubov Dmitrievna, nee Mendeleeva; and the period during which Bely and Blok emerged as the leading figures of their generation of Symbolism. Both Bely and Blok were born in the same year (1880), a coincidence which both saw as fateful. In retrospect it is certainly tempting to think of the two men's lives as predestined to unfold side by side. They made one another's acquaintance in 1903. In 1904 each of them published his first important collection of poetry: Bely's Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri) and Blok's Poems about the Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame) . Both Bely and Blok, as indeed the entire second generation of Symbolism, were influenced by the mystical poetry and philosophical speculation of Vladimir Solovyov. They were, moreover, heirs to the Symbolist esthetics which had been cultivated by the "old" Symbolists such as Balmont, Bryusov, and Sologub: an intense lyricism intersected by sharp edges of self -directed irony, and an appreciation of the musical aspects of language, of pure sound and rhythm in poetry. Bely proved to be a rabid experimenter with language, while Blok's poetry revealed new levels of musicality and flexibility. Bely and Blok both responded with acute sensitivity to their particular historical milieu, to the suddenly industrialized city and to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Yet the contrasts between them are as striking as the similarities. Bely's prose output, including not only his novels and stories but also his many essays on art and culture and his research on the laws of Russian metrics, is probably more important as a whole than his poetry, whereas in Blok's poetry the rich poetic tradition of Symbolism reached a pinnacle of perfection. Blok was a born lyricist; Bely a gifted (and often intemperate) polemicist and brilliant rhetorician.

During the years from 1903 to about 1910 these differences in temperament and talent were exacerbated by a complicated three-way relationship among Bely, Blok, and Blok's wife. It is not necessary to chronicle all the pathways, detours, and backtrackings which this relationship followed; much of the hostility that arose between Blok and Bely was due to indecision, misunderstandings, and waiting periods while letters crossed back and forth between Moscow and Petersburg. Eventually each of the participants went his own way. Liubov Dmitrievna, estranged from her husband but disinclined to accept Bely's proposals that they be united, pursued the life and career of a professional actress. Blok became infatuated with another woman. At the end of these years he had emerged as the author of an extraordinary series of collections of poetry: Unlooked-for Joy (Nechaiannaia radost'j, 1906; Mask of Snow (Snezhnaia maska), 1907; The Earth in Snow (Zemlia v snegu), 1908; Lyrical Dramas (Liricheskie dramy), 1908; of a set of Symbolist plays-The Stranger (Neznakomka), The Fair-Booth Show (Balaganchik), and The King in the Marketplace (Korol' v ploshchadi) -all from 1906, and The Song of Fate (Pesnia sud'by), 1907-08; and of important articles, essays, and sketches on art and culture. During those same years Bely had written his four experimental Symphonies, two of his best collections of poetry -Ashes (Pepel) and The Urn (Urna), both dated 1909, the novel The Silver Dove, and numerous reviews, theoretical articles, ideological statements, and the like.

In 1909 Bely met Asya Turgeneva. By 1910 Bely and Asya had decided to go abroad together and this is the point at which Tsvetaeva's eyewitness account begins. The second half of "A Captive Spirit" refers only cryptically to the story of Bely, Blok, and Liubov Dmitrievna; Tsvetaeva simply summarizes what Bely told her one afternoon in a park in Berlin. Why is Tsvetaeva so succinct here when she reports other conversations with Bely in such detail? Perhaps because Bely's written account (already in its second version), the Reminiscences of Blok, had appeared in Berlin in 1922-23. Tsvetaeva's "first circle" of readers in the emigration would already have known the story from the published version or from having been close to the participants as was the case, for example, with Zinaida Gippius, a poet of the first Symbolist generation, who had urged Bely on in his suit for Liubov Dmitrievna and then quarrelled with him, and who was now the doyenne of emigre literature in Paris. Perhaps Tsvetaeva had people like Gippius in mind (i.e., potential anti-Belyists) when she wrote to Vera Nikolaevna Bunina that she had attended Vladislav Khodasevich's reading of his prose memoir on Bely solely to make sure that "there would be nothing malicious said about Bely, i.e.-no lie." Tsvetaeva was exalted by the fidelity of Khodasevich's portrait, so much so, in fact, that her previous reserve about Khodasevich changed to friendship. "And I left," she concludes her description of the reading, "happy, suffused with gratitude and joy." (Letter to V. N. Bunina, N.P., p. 457.) Tsvetaeva herself had begun writing about Bely just a week after his death. Like the letter she wrote after Khodasevich's reading, her letter to Bunina of January 16, 1934, is concerned with the reception liable to be accorded to a prose piece on Bely. "I am now writing about Bely," she informs Bunina, "fa me hante. And since I always anticipate (emotionally) everything, I can already hear the way they will talk, and maybe write too that I am turning into some kind of crybaby." (Letter to V.N. Bunina, N.P., p. 455.) Tsvetaeva was pleased with her final manuscript. "Bely-is a success," she wrote to Bunina "Even more alive than Max because there are no evaluations. Simply - the living man, in his movement and his speech. His monologue almost all the way through.... He is so very much he that I wouldn't have been surprised (and I wouldn't have been frightened!) had I raised my eyes and seen him right there in the room. I believe in posthumous gratitude and I know that he will never do anything bad to me. Only now I have the burning wish that then, in 1922 in Berlin, I myself on my own did not take a step towards him-I only kept pace with him. You will understand that from the manuscript. I now have the feeling that I might have saved that man (??). That too you will see from the manuscript. Of all my listeners I rejoice in Khodasevich. I forgive him everything for his Bely." (Letter to V.N. Bunina, February 26, 1934,N.P., p. 459.)

2. The epigraph is the last two lines of Tsvetaeva's poem "In a black sky-words are inscribed" ("V chernom nebe-slova nachertany"), dated May 14,1918 and included in the volume Mileposts (Versty), Moscow: Kostry, 1921. The Russian reads: "Legkii ogn', nad kudriami pliashushchii,- / Dunovenie-vdokhnoveniia!"

3. Sasha Cherny is the pseudonym of Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg (1880-1932). He began his career by contributing to various humorous and satiric journals in Petersburg. From 1908 to 1911 he worked on the staff of the periodical Satirikon. Later he became known as a writer of poetry and prose for children. Cherny emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1920.

4. Alya is Tsvetaeva's daughter, Ariadna Efron. (See Note 16 to the Introduction.) Alya's nurse may well be the peasant woman from Vladimir, Nadya, humorously portrayed in Tsvetaeva's recollections of Mandelstam, "The History of a Dedication," pp. 125-6. Nadya adored Tsvetaeva's sister, Asya.but she went along with Marina and Alya to Moscow as a second-best choice, remaining with the family until 1920. Tsvetaeva describes her as a "tamed she-wolf . . . eighteen years old, a wolf-toothed smile, angled eyebrows, eyes like coals."

5. Bely's novel, The Silver Dove, appeared in serial form in 1909 in The Scales.

6. Dmitry Vladimirovich Tsvetaev (1851-?) was the fourth son in the Tsvetaev family. The eldest son, Peter Vladimirovich, became a priest like his father; the second son, Fyodor, became a secondary school supervisor; the third son was Tsvetaeva's father, Ivan Vladimirovich, professor and museum director. Tsvetaeva and her sister Asya hardly knew their two older paternal uncles. Uncle Fyodor died before the sisters had any memory of him. Uncle Peter visited the house on Three Ponds once bringing a doll for Marina but apparently unaware of the existence of little Asya. (Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Memoirs, pp. 23, 34.)

7. The name Maxim Gorky is a meaningful pseudonym. The surname Gorky means "bitter." The writer's real name was Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868-1936).

8. Alexander Blok's surname is German. His paternal grandfather was Johann von Blok; he came from Mecklenburg, Germany.

9. Nikolai Vasilevich Bugaev (1837-1903) was professor of mathematics at the University of Moscow from 1866 until his death. A specialist in the analysis and theory of numbers, he was renowned in his field and was one of the founders of the Moscow Mathematical Society. Andrei Bely's real name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev. When, in 1901, Bely's "Dramatic Symphony" seemed certain to be published-(it was actually the second "symphony" he had written, but it was the first to appear in print)-the young author decided to adopt a pseudonym so as to distance his career from his father's. The elder Bugaev was then serving as Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the university , whereas Bely moved in literary circles regarded as decadent and even outrageous among the university's upper crust. Guided by his friends, the Solovyov family, Bely chose the name under which Ms "Second Symphony" eventually appeared in 1902 as also everything he published after that date.

10. Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky (1552-1612) reigned as Tsar of Russia from 1607 to 1610 during the so-called "Time of Troubles." Dmitry Ivanovich Tsvetaev's opus was entitled: Tsar Vasily Shuisky and the Place of His Interment in Poland: 1610-1910 (Tsar' Vasilii Shuiskii i mesto pogrebeniia ego v Pol'she, 1610-1910), Moscow-Warsaw, 1910.

11. Chernomor is a dwaif-sized lecher in Pushkin's narrative mock-epic poem Ruslan and Liudmila (1820). Chernomor's beard is so long it has to be carried around on a pillow by a train of attendants. Once off the pillow it entangles and trips its owner.

12. Ellis, pseudonym of Lev Lvovich Kobylinsky (1874-1947), was one of Bely's closest friends in Moscow. It was he who gave the name "Argonauts" to Bely's circle of writers and students. According to Anastasia Tsvetaeva, she and Marina met Ellis through their family friend, Lidia Alexandrovna Tamburer. (See note 32 to "Voloshin" and the prose piece, "The Laurel Wreath.") Ellis became a frequent visitor at the Tsve-taev house in the spring of 1909. He praised Marina's translation of L'Aiglon and encouraged her writing. The young Tsvetaeva was evidently intrigued by the man; she wrote a poem about him entitled "The Magician" ("Charodei"), cited by Anastasia (Memoirs, pp. 318-22). Ellis's translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal with an (originally French) introductory article by Theophile Gautier and with a preface by Valery Bryu-sov appeared in Moscow in 1908. In 1911 the new Symbolist publishing house, Musaget, brought out Ellis's first published book of poetry, entitled Stigmata.

13. For information on the importance of Vladimir Ottonovich Nilender (b. 1883) in Tsvetaeva's biography see note 85 to "Voloshin." Some of Nilender's translations were published long after the events of 1909-1911 to which Tsvetaeva refers here. Sophocles's Tragedies, co-translated by Nilender and S. V. Shervisny, appeared in 1936; in 1943 Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound was published. The latter translation was done in collaboration with Sergei Mikhailovich Solovev (1885-1942), whom Tsvetaeva here calls Serezha Solovev, another friend of Bely's youth, a member of the Argonauts and one of the younger generation of Symbolists. Sergei Solovev was the grandson of the well-known historian whose name he bore, Sergei Mikhailovich Solovev (1820-1879), and the nephew of the poet and philosopher, Vladimir Solovev (1853-1900), whose poetry and thought was probably the single most important influence on the second generation of Symbolists and especially on Bely and Blok. Sergei Solovev studied classical philology at the University of Moscow. His first collection of poetry, Flowers and Incense (Tsvety i ladan), appeared in 1907. Several others followed, all bearing the stamp of Solovev's interest in classical mythology, ancient history, and the Bible. In 1913 Solovev passed through a spiritual crisis which led him to formally accept the Orthodox Church. Solovev's later writings include a study of Goethe, Goethe and Christianity (1917), a translation of the Aeneid in collaboration with Valery Bryusov, translations of Seneca's tragedies and of works by Shakespeare, Mickiewicz, the poet Heredia, and others. He also edited and annotated the poetry of his uncle, Vladimir Solovev. Tsvetaeva particularly admired those among Solovev's works she called "skazki," that is, "tales"; they are the subject of a poem in the third section of Evening Album: "Solovev's Tales" ("Skazki Solov'eva"). Marina and Asya met Serezha Solovev through Anatoly Vinogradov (1888-1946) and his sister Nina. The Vinogradov family had a summer house not far from the Tsvetaevs' house in Tarusa. During the winter Marina and Asya sometimes visited them in their Moscow apartment. After the Revolution Anatoly became a library administrator and a popularizer of literary culture. He is the subject of Tsvetaeva's humorous, very biting prose piece "The Intended." (See the notes to that work.)

14. Musaget was the name of a publishing house founded just a few months before Tsvetaeva's fust visits there in 1910. In 1909 important shifts took place among the writers and editors of the main literary periodicals in Moscow and Petersburg. One result was that the Muscovite young Symbolists were left without the advocacy of a dedicated publisher sympathetic to the literary and pedagogical aims ol the movement, Emilii Medtner, a friend ol Bely's and the brother ol a well-known composer, Nikolai Medtner, founded his new publishing house, called Musaget, at the end of 1909. The name Musaget comes from the Greek mous-agetes, meaning "leader of the Muses" and referring to Apollo. The new venture was to publish three types of writing: literature, philosophy, and mystical thought. Many members of Bely's circle, the Argonauts, were involved in the house and had their works published there. In 1912, Musaget sponsored a new periodical, Works and Days (Trudy i dni), which began as a bimonthly and appeared somewhat irregularly during the next five years. Bely was one of its main organizers and chief contributors.

15. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) originated and expounded a synthetic philosophy which combined certain aspects of nineteenth-century German thought with theosophy and the occult. Termed a "spiritual science" by its founder, the new teachings bore the name Anthroposophy. Born in Hungary, Steiner was educated in Vienna. Between 1890 and 1897 he studied and edited Goethe's scientific writings. Steiner's first major work, The Philosophy of Freedom (Philosophie der Freiheit), appeared in 1896. From 1897 to 1900 he was editor of the Literature Monthly (Monatschrift fur Litterature). In 1902 he became lecturer and general secretary of the Theosophical Society's German branch. After a conflict with the leading theosophist, Annie Besant, in 1907, however, Steiner withdrew from the society and developed his own esoteric thought which in 1913 he named Anthroposophy. After the First World War Steiner established an anthro-posophical center called Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland; the movement spread from Germany and Switzerland to many other countries. Steiner saw the process of evolution as progressing through various bodily organizations into which pure spirit is successively reincarnated. The spiritual sphere commands a vast "cosmic memory." Future evolution requires that spirit must regain an ascending path by transcending matter and comprehending its own universality. Bely became acquainted with Steiner's teachings through a rather mysterious contemporary, one Anna Mintslova. During 1909 he read the theosophical works of Annie Besant and some of Steiner's writings. See Horace L. Friess, "Rudolf Steiner," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, Vol. 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 12-14.

16. Tsvetaeva refers here not only to Ivan Turgenev, but also to the landscape so frequently used as the setting of his works, the provinces of Tula and Orel.

17. Bichetka is a Russianized version of the name Bichette, which in turn comes from the French biche, meaning "doe" or "hind."

18. The Pragerdiele cafe in Berlin was a favorite meeting place for Russian emigres, especially writers, editors, and publishers, for whom the place served as a kind of literary marketplace.

19. Eurythmics was a form of dance exercise. Steiner included eurytheics as part of the basic discipline of education in Anthroposophy.

20. Abram Grigorevich \ishniak was the owner of the Russian publishing house in Berlin named Helikon. (See Note 14 to the Introduction.)