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(Voloshin)1

Itoo, Lauzun, with bands like snow, pure white,

Raised high the cup to greet the rabble.

I too, Lauzun, declared equal in rights

On earth—the woodsman and the noble.2

On the eleventh of August—in Koktebel3—at twelve o'clock noon - the poet Maximilian Voloshin died.

The first thing that I felt reading these lines, after the natural shock of the death, was—satisfaction: at noon, his hour of the day.

And of life? I do not know. It is always time and it is always early for a poet to die, and he is bound up with the years of his

life less than with the seasons of the year and the hours of the day. But in any case at his hour of the day and of nature. At twelve noon, when the sun is at the very zenith, that is, on the very top of the head, at the hour when shadow is conquered by the body, and the body is dissolved in the body of the world—at his hour, at Voloshin's own hour.

And certainly—at his favorite hour of nature, for the eleventh of August (on the new calendar,4 as on the old, the end of July)— it is clearly the noon of the year—the very heart of summer.

And certainly—at his very own hour of Koktebel, that from among all its countless guises imprints itself on us in the guise of

that sun which, like God, looks on you unceasingly and on which you may not look.

This imprint of the Koktebelian noonday sun is on the brow of each person who ever raised his forehead towards it. The imprint of a sun so strong that the tan from it was not washed away by any Moscow winters and strawberry soaps, and a sun so good that notwithstanding all its fifty degrees—from the first day to the last for decades on end—it allowed the poet this twofold symbol of the highest freedom from everything and the highest respect: in uncovered head. As in a temple.

I write and I see: the head of Zeus on powerful shoulders, and on slumbering curls of an incredible waviness, a slender wormwood wreath, a genuine necessity, taken by fools for an affectation of style, the same as his white canvas tunic, about which people (especially the ladies) so long and so heatedly argued: were there or weren't there trousers under it.

Canvas, wormwood, sandals—what is purest and most eternal, and why isn't a person within his rights to prefer what is clean (what is as washable as canvas, as changeable but invariable as sandals and wormwood)—what is clean and eternal—to what is dirty (citified) and contingent (fashionable)? And what is more murderous than what is citified and fashionable—on the shore of the sea, and of a sea like that sea, and on a shore like that shore! My formula for clothing: what is not handsome in the wind is ugly. Voloshin's tunic and wormwood wreath were fair in the wind.

So then, at his hour—at twelve o'clock noontide, a word, by the way, that he would have noted with satisfaction, for he loved the archaism and weightiness of words; at his hour of the day, of nature and of Koktebel. There remains the fourth and main thing: at his hour of essence. For the essence of Voloshin is a noontime essence, and noon, of all the hours of the day, is the most corporeal, material, with bodies without shadows and with bodies that sleep without dreams, and if they do dream—it is one single dream of earth. And, at the same time, the most magical, mythical, and mystical hour of the day, just as mago-mytho-mystical as midnight. The hour of the Great Pan, Demon de Midfi5 and of our modest Russian noonspirit, about whom in my childhood, in the province of Kaluga, I heard with my very own ears: "Lenka, let's go for a swim!" - "I won't go-o: the noonspirit will drag me off."

The magic, the myth, and the mysticism of the earth itself, of the earth's very make-up.

Voloshin's work is also of that kind in which, according to the femininely-brilliantly-direct dictum of the poetess Adelaida Gertsyk,6 there is less of the sea than of the landmass, and more of the shores than of the river. Voloshin's work is corporeal, weighty, well-nigh the creation of matter itself by forces that do not descend downward from above, but are rendered upward by that earth—that is warmed through and through to the core—more —burned up, dry as flint, on which he walked so much and under which he now lies. For this heavy-set man, almost legendarily heavy-set ("seven poods of male beaty,"7 as he would modestly proclaim) was an extraordinary walker, and the sinewy feet in the sandals bore him just as lightly and carried him just as high up as goats' legs carry the goats. An insatiable walker. How many times he and I walked on paths ringing from drought, or without any path at all, on the ridges, right at noon, with uncovered heads, without sticks, without the aid of hands, with a stone in the mouth (they say it decreases thirst, but with us it never decreased the thirst for conversation), and so, with a stone in the mouth, but notwithstanding the stone in the mouth and notwithstanding our constant daily contact— like friends just reunited— in the continuity of conversation and walking— for hours long— summers long— always upward, always upward. The sweat poured and dried up, no, dried up without having time to pour out, the conversation did not dry up— he was an indefatigable interlocutor, that is, that very same walker on the paths of thought and word. A born hiker. And a climber born.

He did not seem to be that kind of person that first time at the ballroom doors of our Moscow house in Three Ponds Lane,8 oh, not at all like that! A ring. I open. On the threshold a top hat. From under the top hat a boundless face framed by a curling short beard.

A furtive voice: "Might I see Marina Tsvetaeva?"— "I'm she."

-"And I am Max Voloshin. May I come in?"— "Certainly!"

We went upstairs, into the children's rooms. He: "Did you read my article about you?"— "No."— "That's what I thought, so I brought it to you. It's already a month since it came out."

I remember names: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Larue-Mardus, Noailles9— an introduction. Then just about me— the first article in my life (and, apparently, the last long one) about my first book Evening Album.10 I remember something about a romanticism of essence outside the romantic tradition, the phrase: "The Duke of Reichstadt, Princess Dzhavaxa, Marguerite Gautier 11 "are the heroes of very young years. . ." and a quotation: "If you have to think— then where's the game?" and an assertion "Tsvetaeva does not think, she lives— in verse," and the main focus of the article, the poem "A Prayer" 12 :

You gave me a childhood better than a fairy tale,

Give me death too— at seventeen!

The whole article was the most unstinting hymn to female creation and to being seventeen.

"It came out a long time ago, more than a month, is it really true that no one told you?"

"I don't read newspapers and I don't see anyone. My father doesn't know even now that I've published a book. Maybe he does know, but he doesn't say anything, and they don't say anything at the gymnasium."13

"And you're attending a gymnasium. Yes, of course, you're wearing a uniform. But what do you do in school?"

"I write poetry."

In the interval of silence, he looks so intently that you might say it was shamelessness if it weren't for the wide, always widening smile of an openly favorable disposition—that makes you openly disposed to favor him.

"And you always wear that...?"

"Cap? Always; I'm shaved bald."

"Always shaved?"

"Always."

"And wouldn't it be possible...that...to take it off, so I could see the shape of your head? Nothing is so indicative of a person as the shape of his head."

"By all means."

But I had not had time to raise my hand when he was already —carefully—like a peasant and like a bear, using both hands—taking it off.

"You have a very fine head, of the most regular shape. I don't at all understand..."

He looks with the gaze of a sculptor or even of a woodcutter—at a block of wood. Incidentally, his eyes were jot for jot like Vrubel's Pan14: two radiating points—and, pleadingly:

"And would it be impossible this very moment to also take off..."

I:

"My glasses?"

He, joyfully:

"Yes, yes, your glasses, because, you know, nothing hides a person like glasses."

I, this time anticipating his gesture:

"But I warn you, without glasses I can't see anything."

He, calmly:

"You don't have to see; it's I who have to see."

He retreats a step and, musingly:

"You're amazingly like a Roman seminarist. Most likely you're often told that?"

"Never, because no one has seen me bald."

"But then why do you shave your head?"

"So as to wear a cap."

"And you're... you're always going to shave?"

"Always."

He, indignantly:

"And is it really possible that no one has ever been curious to Inul out what kind of head you have? The head—why that's—in a poet—the main thing!... And now, let's have a talk."

And that talk—about what I write, how I write, what I like, how I like it—was his complete surrender to another person, attention, penetration, not taking his eyes off the face and soul of another person—and what eyes: bright almost to the point of whiteness, sharp to the point of pain (thus tears come forth when you look at a strong light, only here the light is looking at you), not eyes, but drills, eyes that are really—penetrating. And because they are not bigger, but only more seeing—and more visible. And, seen from the outside: they are two drops of sea water in which the eye's pupil could be burned, behind which could burn—what? nothing; the same drops that remain in your hands when they are carried through the Voloshins' garden at night with shouts: hurry! hurry! the sea is lighting up! Not two drops of water, but two sparks of living sea phosphorus, two drops of living water.

Under the inspection of those eyes, I, very uncivilized in those days, get even wilder, I don't hold still and I don't hold anything back: all of it is personal, and all of it is superfluous: about Napoleon, beloved since childhood, about Napoleon II from Rostand's L'Aiglon,15 about Sarah Bernhardt,16 to whom a year before I had dashed off to Paris, whom I didn't find there and except for whom I saw nothing anyway, that other Paris—with N majuscule everywhere—with the capital N on the brows of buildings— about His Paris, about my Paris.

Smiling with his lips but penetrating with his eyes, he listens, in the intervals of my breathing putting in:

"And you never liked Baudelaire?17 And Arthur Rimbaud18 —you know him?" —"I know, I didn't, I never will like him; I love only Rostand and Napoleon I and Napoleon II—and what a mischance that I'm not a man and didn't live then, so as to go with the First to Saint Helena and with the Second to Schonbrunn."19

Finally, in a second when I was totally out of breath and gulping:

"You live here?"

"Yes, that is, not here, of course, but..." "I understand: in Schonbrunn. And on Saint Helena. But I'm asking: is this your room?"

"It's the nursery, used to be, of course, but now it's Asya's; that's my sister—Asya."20

"I would like to take a look at yours."

I take him there. A room the size of a ship's cabin, gold stars on a red field (my choice of wallpaper: I wanted some with Napoleonic bees, but since there proved to be nothing like that in Moscow, I settled for stars) fortunately entirely hidden by the portraits of the Father and the Son by Gerard, David, Gros, Lawrence, Messonier, Vereshchagin21 —right up to the icon stand on which the Virgin was covered over by Napoleon looking at Moscow burning. A narrow couch hemmed in by a writing table. And that was everything.

Max, without even trying to squeeze through: "How cramped it is in here!"
By the way, a peculiarity of that fatness of his that has become proverbial. I never perceived it as an excess of fat, always—as an excess of life, which it in fact was, for he carried it lightly (you want to say: it was what carried him!) and with his seven poods he never aroused laughter, always serious feelings such as love in women, friendship in men, and in both a kind of holy trembling that never let you come close to him, finally, in fully close contact, a great barrier of divine respect, that is, of his divine descent that was also physically represented in the shape of his wonderful cauldron-like stomach.

1. Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1878-1932-his full surname is Kirienko-Voloshin) met Tsvetaeva early in 1911. He had just reviewed her first collection of poems, Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom), a privately printed publication by an utterly unknown author. Voloshin was met a t the door of a house on Three Ponds Lane in Moscow by an eighteen-year old girl with a shaved head and and glasses-a "girl" because she was slill wearing a secondary-school uniform. That was Max's first picture ol Tsvelaeva and the beginning of their friendship, the closing testament of which is yet another picture Tsvetaeva's word portrait of Voloshin, one of the most heartfelt, moving tributes to love, to friendship, and to youth in all of Russian literature. Voloshin had established his reputation as a poet and critic during the first decade of the Twentieth century, writing for the Symbolist periodicals The Scales (Vesy), The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo), and for the magazine Apollo (Apollon), which came to be identified with Acmeism. Voloshin had traveled in Western Europe, lived in Paris and entered avidly into its literary life, and published two collections of poetry, The Seagull and Salomea (Chaika i Solomeia [1909]), and Poems: 1900-1910 (Stikhotvoreniia: 1900-1910). Voloshin and his mother had a house in the Crimea, a territory with which he is doubly linked: first by the house itself which in spring and summer turned into a literary and artistic center; second by his paintings and watercolor landscapes which record the rocky, mountainous countryside of the eastern Crimea. From 1917 Voloshin lived in the Crimea on a permanent basis. His collections of poetry include Anno mundi ardentis: 1915, published in 1916; Demons Deaf and Dumb (Demony glukhonemye [1919]); Poems (Stikhi [1922]); Poems on the Terror (Stikhi o terrore [1923]); and Internecine War: Poems on the Revolution (Usobitsa: Stikhi o revoliutsii [1923]). Voloshin's prose work includes articles devoted to art and culture, and a volume of essays on some of the French writers in whom he tried so hard to interest Tsvetaeva, The Faces of Creation (Liki tvorchestva [1914]). When Tsvetaeva heard about Voloshin's death, she sat down to one of the most intensive periods of work since her years in Czechoslovakia. Tsvetaeva's concentrated, sustained efforts no less than her explicit assent to Voloshin's programmatic views on the inner reality of life and the mythologizing function of memory suggest that it was in the work on Voloshin that Tsvetaeva discovered herself as a mature prose writer. "I am writing to you on the very first day I have free," she tells her friend Ana Teskova, "behind my shoulders is a month of forcible work, maybe even beyond my forces, to wit: at a gallop and without straightening my spine, I wrote my recollections of the poet M. Voloshin, my great friend, and all of ours, from long ago, who died in Russia on the 11th of August" (Letter to Teskova, October 16,1932, p. 101).

2. The epigraph is taken from Tsvetaeva's play Fortuna (1919), the title of which refers to the female personification of Fortune. The play's main protagonist is Armand Louis de Gontaut Biron, due de Lauzun (1747-1793). In the final act of the play Lauzun awaits his execution and gives a soliloquy on the events leading to the French Revolution and the Terror (Fortuna, in Sovremennye zapiski 15 [Paris 1923],

145-46). The hidden message in Lauzun's soliloquy is the similarity Tsvetaeva discerned between the French and the Russian Revolutions, their antecedents and evolution. By using the epigraph from Lauzun's speech, Tsvetaeva points to the breadth of Voloshin's own historical vision and its expression in his poetry. In Tsvetaeva's portrait, Voloshin emerges as a spiritual and pragmatic egalitarian who recognizes the rights of opposing social and political groups, a quality Tsvetaeva includes in her characterization of Lauzun.

3. Koktebel is located some twenty kilometers to the southwest of Theodosia on the eastern shore of the Crimean peninsula. The immediate environs are flat, but the location is protected from the winds by a chain of low mountains which surround it on the north and northeast. As Tsvetaeva's description makes clear, the area was something of a wilderness when the Voloshins settled there. It is now a vacation place and has been renamed Planerskoe. The Volosliin house is a museum.

4. Until the Revolution the Julian calendar was standard in Russia. It lagged behind the Georgian calendar used in Western Europe by 12 days in the nineteenth century and 13 days in the twentieth. Using the old calendar-(the two are often indetified in English as "Old Style" Or "O.S." and "New Style" or "N.S.")-Voloshin's death would have occurred on July 30th. Tsvetaeva disliked the change in the calendar and still more the abandonment of the old orthography and the introduction of a modernized spelling system. She continued to use the old dates on letters to some of her correspondents, labeling the old style dates as "Russian," and she insisted on having her poetry printed using the old alphabet system.

5. French. "The demon of noon."

6. Adelaida Gertsyk's single book of poetry, Poems (Stikhotvoreniia), was published in Petersburg in 1910. Very little information seems to be available about Gertsyk. Her full name is Adelaida Kazimirovna and her married name Zhukovsky. She had two sons, Daniel Dmitrievich and Nikita Dmitrievich. During the war she lived on Krechetnikov Lane and had a small circle of friends, many of them female poets like Tsvetaeva. Gertsyk's sister, Evgenia Gertsyk, gives some information about Adelaida in her memoirs, Vospominaniia (Paris: YMCA, 1973), pp. 12-15, 141-64. The volume also includes a set of letters from Gertsyk and her husband, Dmitry Evgenevich Zhukovsky, to Lev Shestov, and a remark from the author that she intends to write a separate memoir about Tsvetaeva. Unfortunately that intention was never carried out.

7. Seven poods equals 252 pounds or about 115 kilos. I have retained the Russian measurement to preserve the number seven. Tsvetaeva very frequently organized biographical and autobiographical data using the numbers seven and ten. And the sum of the two, i.e. seventeen, became a significant autobiographical boundary when Tsvetaeva looked back on her history and development.

8. Tsvetaeva grew up in a one-story wooden house with an entre-sol which formed two stories at one end. It was located at 8 Three Ponds Lane in Moscow, in a neighborhood just over one kilometer to the northwest of the central Kremlin. The house is described at length (but rather unclearly) in the memoirs of Tsvetaeva's sister, Anastasia Tsvetaeva. See her Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1971), pp. 46-52.

9. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) began her artistic career as a singer. Her first book, published in 1819, was Marie, Elegies and Romances (Marie, Elegies et romances), and was followed by five other collections of poetry between 1825 and 1843. Her oeuvre includes several collections of prose stories, a volume of personil correspondence, and a novel, Eight Women (Huit femmes [1845]). She is considered an early poet of French Romanticism and a precursor of the modern masters, Rimbaud ami Verlaine. The name Larue-Mardrus refers to Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1875-1945). By the time Voloshin wrote his review she had published two collections of poetry: Fervor (Ferveur) [1902]), and The Figurehead (La Figure de proue [1908]). She published anothn collection of poetry in 1930, some eleven novels between 1922 and 1945, and several volumes of biographical and autobiographical writings. Anna-Elizabeth de Noailles (1876-1933) was considered France's greatest woman poet during her lifetime. Her early collections include The Myriad Heart (Le Coeur innombrable [1901]), The Shadow of Days (L'Ombre des jours [1902]), Dazzling Sights (Les Eblouissements [1907)), and The Living and the Dead (Les Vivants et les morts [1913]). Her prose is of particular interest here because Tsvetaeva translated her first novel New Hope (La Nouvellt esperance [1903]). The translation appeared in four installments in the Petersburg journal Severnye zapiski 9-12 (1916). De Noailles wrote two other novels, one of them, The Enraptured Visage (Le Visage emerveille [1904]), in the form of a nun's diary of love.

10. Evening Album is Tsvetaeva's first collection of poetry. It appeared, printed at the author's own expence, in October 1910, in which month (N.S.) Tsvetaeva turned eighteen. The book is devided into three parts: Childhood (Detstvo); Love (Liubov'); and Only Shadows (Tolko teni).

11. The Duke ol Reichstadt (1811-1832) was the son of Napoleon I. He is also known as The Eaglet (L'Aiglon), the title of a play by Edmond Rostand of which he is the subject. The Princess Dzhavakha is the heroine of a novel by that name (Kniazhna Dzhavakha), written by Lidia Alexeevna Charskaya (1875-?), the author of many historical novels and novellas for young people published in Petersburg during the first deeade or so of the twentieth century (not all the editions bear a date). Marguerite (lautier is the consumptive, self-sacrificing heroine of La Dame aux camelias, first published as a novel by Alexandre Dumas, Fils (1824-1895) in 1848, and later turned into a play which premiered in Paris in 1852.

12. "A Prayer" ("Molitva") has five stanzas of four lines each in four foot iambic meter. It is marked "Tarusa, 26 Sept. 1909," that is, Tsvetaeva's 17th birthday, O.S. The poem begins "Christ and God! I long for a miracle, / At once, right now, at the break of day! / O let me die while / The whole of life is like a book to me."

13. The Russian government adapted the Latin-derived, German term Gymnasium to designate private and state-administered secondary schools which met certain, fairly strict, standards. Girls were allowed to attend schools set apart for females beginning in 1870. The basic program lasted seven years. After completing it students were eligible to teach in elementary schools. An optional eighth year would allow successful graduates to enter without special exams the "Women's Courses" (zhenskie kursy), a program of higher education set apart for women in lieu of entrance into the regular, all-male universities. The young Tsvetaeva entered the first (beginning) class of the 4th Gymnasium in Moscow in the autumn of 1901 when she was nine years old. Her studies were interrupted, however, by her mother's serious illness and a trip abroad in hopes of finding a cure during the years 1902-1906. When Tsvetaeva returned to Moscow after her mother's death in July 1906, she had a difficult time settling down to schoolwork. She spent the school year 1906-07 in a boarding school in Moscow, the Gymnasium of von Derviz. She was suspended from that school in spring 1907. The following fall she entered the Alferova Gymnasium. During 1909-10 she was studying in yet another school, the Briukhonenko Gymnasium. In the course of her secondary education she would have had obligatory courses in religion, Russian language and literature, mathematics, geography, history, natural history and physics, and handicrafts, with electives among such subjects as German, French, drawing, Latin, and Greek. By her own admission she spent all her school time after 1906 writing poetry. She never entered a university.

14. The artist Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910) is one of the most accessible painters of his epoch. He was trained in Russia and in 1905 became a member of the Academy of Art in Petersburg. He took many of his subjects from mythology, fairy tales, the Russian byliny, legends, and classical literature. Vrubel illustrated the works of Lermontov, designed theater drops, and executed wall paintings and icons in the Church of Saint Kyrill in Kiev. His painting, "Pan" (the Greek mythological figure) is dated 1899.

15. The French dramatist Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) is the author of several well-known plays including The Distant Princess (La Princess lointaine [1895]), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Both Cyrano and his next play, L'Aiglon, created by Sarah Bernhardt in March 1900, were tremendous popular successes and were shortly followed by the official accolade of Rostand's election to the French Academy in 1901.

16. Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923-stage name of Rosalie Bernard) was one of the nineteenth century's best-known actresses (rivalled only by Eleonore Duse). She made her debut in 1862 as Iphigenie at the Comedio Franchise. In 1877 she made a triumphant world tour in Victor Hugo's Hernani. The Duke of Reichstadt and Hamlet are considered two of her most successful performances.

17. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the French poet, is well known for his complex, exquisite poetry which introduced a new esthetic into literature, and also for his critical essays on literature, art, and music.

18. An extraordinarily precocious poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891 ) completed his poetic career at the age of 19. After that he led the life of an adventurer-traveler. His work, which influenced Verlaine and the Symbolists, broke with all traditions of poetic practice and explored radically new means of expression.

19. Saint-Helena was the island to which Napoleon I was finally exiled after he failed to defeat the European coalition marshalled against him at Waterloo in 1815. He died on the island in 1821. Napoleon II was recognized as emperor after his father's second abdication in June 1815, but his mother, Marie-Louise, fled with her son to Austria. The boy spent the rest of his life in the palace of Schonbrunn outside Vienna, the residence of the Emperor Francis II of Austria.

20. Asya (or Asenka) is Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1894-1975), Marina Tsvetaeva's younger sister. Tsvetaeva's account of her jealousy of Asya during their early years (especially in "Mother and Music," "The Devil," and "My Pushkin") seems deliberately heightened, or perhaps their relationship improved with time, for all descriptions of Marina's and Asya's adolescence and early womanhood indicate a warm sympathy between the two sisters. Anastasia certainly regarded Marina as her idol: she tried her hand at writing very early and, like Marina, married young. She produced two books of lyrical prose, Kingly Meditations: The Year 1914 (Korolevskie razmyshleniia: 1914 god), published in 1915, and Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (Dym, dym i dym), published in 1916. Her marriages ended tragically. She first married Boris Trukhachev (died 1920). In a letter to Bunina, Tsvetaeva says that Asya married a second time and that her husband and son both died in 1917. (See her Letter to V. N. Bunina, Aug. 19, 1933, N.P. p. 417.) Anastasia's memoirs (Vospominaniia, cited above) recreate something of of the physical setting and spiritual-intellectual atmosphere in which both she and Marina grew up. Particularly valuable are the details of the girls' stay and schooling abroad In Italy, France, and Germany, and the memories of early childhood which contrast in important points with Tsvetaeva's account and thereby throw into relief the mytholotilrul framework of Tsvetaeva's prose.

21. Gerard, David, Gros, and Messonier were French portraitists of Napoleon and painters of historical canvases in which the French Emperor and his family figured. Actually, there are two artists named David linked with Napoleon: Pierre-Jean David (1788-1856), the so-called David of Angers, and Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), who was named first painter after Napoleon became Emperor. Lawrence (1769-1830), an Englishman, was sent in 1818 to Aachen and Vienna to paint the allied victors of the Napoleonic wars. In her memoirs, Tsvetaeva's sister Anastasia reports that Lawrence's portrait of the Duke of Reichstadt taken when the boy was about nine years old, was among Tsvetaeva's collection. The Russian artist Vereshchagin (1842-1904) was actually an anti-militarist whose battle scenes portrayed the horrors rather than the glories of war. In 1893 he painted a set of canvasses on Napoleon's Russian campaign. Despite their anti-Napoleonic spirit they were used as illustrations for the French Comte de Segur's account of the Russian expedition.