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I know that I have not proven his Germanicism, but I also know why. The Germanicism in him was the wellspring of his blood and the wellspring of his mysticism, secret of the secret and hidden of the hidden wellsprings.

A Frenchman in culture, a Russian in soul and word, a German—in spirit and blood.

That way, I think, no one will be offended.

* * * * *

To that other home of his, to Russia, Max visibly returned. This French, non-Russian poet of the beginning—became and remains a Russian poet. For this we are obliged to the Russian revolution.

"We thought, we are paupers, we have nothing"...

* * * * *

The activity of our acquaintanceship lasted from 1911 to 1917—six years.

The year 1917. Moscow October119 nas just thundered. Koktebel. The tossed, ragged gray hair of the sea. Max. Pra, and I and two officers of yesterday's graduating class, only just released alive by the Bolsheviks from the Alexander Academy of Moscow where they resisted to the final hour. One of them is that Serezha120 who with such zeal on that New Year's night doused the fire with a leaky bucket.

Here are the living records of those days:

Moscow, 4 November 1917.

In the evening of that same day we leave: S., his friend Goltsev and I for the Crimea. Goltsev manages to collect his officer's pay in the Kremlin (200 roubles). Not to forget that gesture of the Bolsheviks.

* * * * *

Arrival in a frenzied snow storm in Koktebel. The gray sea. The huge, almost physically searing joy of Max V. at the sight of Serezha alive. Huge white breads.

*****

The vision of Max on the bottom step of the tower, with Thiers121 on his knees, frying onion. And, while the onion fries, the recital aloud, to S. and to me of tomorrow's destinies and the destinies after tomorrow of Russia.

"And now, Serezha, such and such will happen ..."

And stealthily, almost rejoicing, like a good sorcerer to children, picture after picture—the whole Russian revolution for five years to come: the terror, the civil war, the executions, the barriers, the Vendee, men turned to beasts, the loss of decency, the unleashed spirits of the elements, blood, blood, blood . . .

* * * * *

The 25th of November, 1917, I left for Moscow to get the children with whom I was supposed to return immediately

to Koktebel where I had decided—to live or to die, that remained to be seen, but with Max and Pra, near Serezha who in a few days was supposed to leave Koktebel for the Don.122

Adam. The rydvan. Those same horses. Pra and I embrace one another.

"Only do hurry, Marina, get started right away, throw everything aside, what do things matter, only the notebooks and the children, we'll spend the winter together. . ."

"Marina!—Max's foot on the footboard of the rydvan—but really, hurry; remember that now there'll be two countries: the North and the South."

Those were his last words. I never saw either Max or Pra Igain.

* * * * *

In November 1920 right after the rout in the Crimea, I received a letter from Max, the first one in three years, and the

first thing that I read—was Pra's death. I recreate it from memory.

"On such and such a date, Mama died from emphysema of the lungs. She aged a great deal during the final year, but she kept up her robust spirits; sometimes she would even hum her I lungarian march the way she used to. Her main joy during those final years was Serezha, in whom she found (underlined) a real son—a warrior. Alya's letter also made her very happy, she would go around and brag to everyone—you know, of course, how she liked to brag—'Now there's a godchild! A godchild to beat all godchildren! You, Max—are a poet, and you couldn't write a letter like that!"

A description of the hunger in Theodosia and Koktebel, of corpses, eaten not by dogs but by people, and farther on, about Pra: "During the final months of her life she ate eagles which the old woman Antonida—you most likely remember her—would catch for her on Karadag, covering them with a skirt. The last thing that she ate was eaglet." And, farther on: "Don't be anxious about Serezha. I know that he is alive and will be alive as I have known it from the first minute during all these years."

* * * * *

The 11th of August, 1932, in a tiny shop with all sorts of clutter near the Clamart forest, I see the five volumes of Joseph Balsamo. Eight francs, all five volumes bound. But I have only two francs, with which I am buying the Englishman Andrew Lang's Joan of Arc123—by the way (and naturally so) the best book about Joan of Arc. And to the ringing of midday in the townhall I go home torn between a feeling of betrayal: I didn't liberate Balsamo, that is, my own youth—and of joy: I liberated Joan of Arc from the clutter.

The evening of the same day, on a visit to A.I. Andreeva,124 I say of the Bolsheviks and writers;

"Voloshin, for example, from their point of view is a clear counter-revolutionary, and they have given him a pension of 240 roubles a month, and, I am convinced, without any request of his."

A.I.:

"But isn't Voloshin dead?" I, in a kind of horror:

"How dead! Alive and well, thank God! He had an attack of asthma, but then he got completely better, I know it very well."

* * * * *

On the 16th of August I read in Pravda: 125

On the 11th of August, at twelve o'clock noon the poet Maximilian Voloshin died in Koktebel—that is, exactly at that hour when I was striking a bargain for Balsamo in the shop in Clamart.

And here are lines from sister Asya's letter: "Max was buried on Yanychary Mountain, high up—the sun rises just above it. It's a continuation of the Chameleon Mountain that falls into the sea, the left boundary of the bay. That's the way he wanted it and it was carried out. He had received a pension and was surrounded by care. And so with the profile going into the sea on one side and the grave on the other—Max has taken his Koktebel into his embrace."

And here are lines from a letter that I received from Father Sergii Bulgakov:126 "About a month and a half ago there was a serious attack of asthma, so severe, that after it, they expected a second one and had no hope of a good recovery. He suffered a great deal, but was striking in his meekness. He left instructions to bury him on the very highest spot. The highest spot there is the so called Holy Mountain (my parenthesis: a Tatar holy man is buried there) to which the ascent is very difficult and in one place extraordinarily so."

And here also are lines from Ekaterina Alekseevna Balmont's127 letter (Moscow):

... "During the winter he was very ill, he would suffocate terribly. Towards spring it got still worse. The attacks of asthma multiplied. In the summer they decided to take him to Essentuki.128 But he developed a cold, complicated by emphysema of the lungs, from which he died in great suffering. He was very meek and patient, he knew that he was dying. He waited for the end very courageously. Around him were many friends, all of them in turn kept watch near him and they were all amazed at him. A day later his face became remarkably beautiful and solemn. I can picture it very well. They buried him according to his wishes in the rock which in its outline so recalled Max's head in profile. There is a view of astonishing beauty from there to the sea.

His house and library were long ago given over by him to the Union of Writers. His friends are sorting through the papers and manuscripts left behind"...

Asya writes Yanychary, according to other sources—on the I loly Mountain, according to a third, in the rock "of his own profile"... There you already have the beginning of myth and in the end, Max proved to be buried on all the mountains of his native Koktebel. How he would have rejoiced in that!

I will present Max Voloshin during the revolution in two words: he saved the Reds from the Whites and the Whites from the Reds, or rather, a Red soldier from the Whites and a White soldier from the Reds, that is, a man from a pack, one from many, the conquered from the conquerors. I know also that his poem "The Sailor" circulated in official broadsides on both fronts, from whence the conclusion that his sailor was not a Red sailor and not a White sailor, but a maritime sailor, a Blacksea sailor.

And just as his sailor—is a genuine sailor, so too the poet Max—is a genuine poet, and the man—a genuine man, who according to all accounts, that is, in the one and only account of inner necessity—had rendered what was due. For his love for solitude—he rendered up eight months in the year of absolute solitude, and from the year 1917 all twelve months; for his love for communality—an indefatigability of heartfelt communication; for his love for poetry—listening to them, for hours and for volumes; for his love for souls—not two-hours-long, but twenty-thirty-year-long conversations, that ended only with the death of the person he was talking with, and perhaps never ended at all? For his love for friends—he rendered action, that is, his whole self, for his love for his enemies—the same.

In this man there miraculously existed a sufficiency for everything, everything most contrary, everything mutually exclusive, such as: the life of a hermit—social life; the joy of life-heroic asceticism. I will say it in images: he was that very holy man to whom on a rock, which rock was he himself, there came a centaur, to heal his paw, which centaur was he himself, under the sun which was he himself.

There was an insufficiency in him for one thing only, rather, one thing only did not seize and hold him: partisanship, a thing certainly not human, not animal and not divine, that destroys in a person the person, and the animal and the divinity.

Not political convictions but a conviction of peace, not a world view, but the making of peace in the world. Myth-making and, in the last years of his life and lyre, the creation of a world— the creating of the world anew.

The commonplace fact of his pension of 240 rubles, the pension of enemies, as it would seem, given to an enemy—is not at all commonplace and not at all a fact, but a spiritual act of victory over the very idea of enmity, the very idea of evil.

And so, by the roundabout ways of mysticism, of wisdom, of talent and by the direct effect of example, Max, whom it is somehow strange to call a Christian, so much was he everything, everything else, forced those who pictured him their enemy, not only to forgive an enemy, but even to respect an enemy.

That is why we all, without distinction of party, which he did not distinguish, bow our heads before this hearthfire of Good which is his far off mountain grave, and then, bringing our heads back towards our shoulders, squinting and nonetheless smiling, we look up at his beloved noonday sun—and remember him.

THE FINAL VISION

And my old cloak

I dry in the sun under the rock.

... "When we had joined the others under the rock, we got deeply into talking, and without noticing it, we roamed off into the eastern part of the bay. A familiar figure, which had long since flashed into view, the figure of an old man in a long quilted coat, with along, broad and white beard, in wide straight trousers, wearing tattered antedeluvian shoes, came towards us from behind a turn in the road, carefully feeling out his path with a stick.

"Who's that scarecrow?" I asked the journalist I. Grozny, who was walking with us.

No one answered, but "Klara Tsetkin," a renegade and muddler, who eagerly took part in all the sessions of the Central Committee (the initials for the committee Ts.K.129 literally mean tseluiu krepko "here's a big kiss") was already twittering, saying to the old man:

"Well then, wise old Voloshin, our proletarian best greetings io you; it's been a long, long time!"

Grozny snorted at her and pushed her aside and he, bending over the old man's ear, respectfully announced himself:

"How do you do, Maximilian Maximilianovich! It's I, Grozny."

The old man peered closer, made a tube of his hand by his ear and halted, holding in his other hand a basket with... stones in it.

The journalist, noticing my perplexity, whispered irritably:

"You don't know Voloshin? At one time he made thunder in the whole of Russia, a poet..."

"No, I haven't heard of him." Were they trying to fool me, was that it?

But the old man meanwhile continued:

"I'm not working at my writing just now. They don't print me. They say I've gone senile. I'm working on drawing; sometimes the vacationers buy something, and that's what I live on. And I collect these stones here."

Vasily Vasilevich yawned, cracking his jaws and said:

"Let's get going! What's the point of talking with him..." (Reprinted from The Latest News. Moskvin: "A Pilgrimage among theVUZes.")130

* * * * *

Dear Max, you were fifty-seven years old, and you're presented as an ancient, you were Alexandrovich, and they presented you as Maximilianovich, you were as keen-eared as a fox—they presented you as a deaf man, you were keen-eyed as a lynx—they presented you as a blind man, you were Max—they presented you as Kuzmich, you—read it attentively!—weren't saying a word, and they made you "continue," you gave to the last breath— they made you "sell"... If the author had not stayed his hand, you would, the very next instant, putting out your ear like a shield, have said:

"What's that, sir?"

And nonetheless you're like yourself. In grandeur.

Whether you spoke or didn't speak the words ascribed to you, said what you said that way, or differently, whether you laughed for the last time at stupidity, getting into the role of a senile old man, or simply brushed off the pestering intruders ("Ekh! What's the point of talking with them"...)

—a host of whirlwind visions: the Miller—the Fool in Christ— the Old Man of the Sea—Lear—Nereus—131

—mystification or self-defense, the final game or, for the last time, myth-making.

The rock. Emerging from behind a rock—alone. Coming upon that one—all of them together. Between three deserts: the sea, the earth, the sky—your last apparition before us, coming forward for us, with the staff of a wayfarer in one hand, with objects from among the rainbow's playtoys in the other, with the staff so as to pass us by, with the rainbow so as to endow us with those gifts. And my final illumination about you, from you: those cornelians that you so painstakingly spied out from the pile of ordinary rocks, for decades on end—knowing each one's individual face and loving each one more than all of them— Max, isn't that what you, for decades on end, did with us, from each breast—the gray heap of ordinary rocks—invariably drawing forth that one rock that is beyond price! And the final revelation about you: the face of your heart—is the cornelian, the serdolik, the face of the heart-stone!

That pack that jumped out on you then, served you, because in it there was one word-mongercr, who, noting you down as best he could, inevitably became your rhapsodist.

Gray-beardcd and gray-headed, like the sea, with a basket in your hands, in wide trousers, which could so easily be, and were, a Greek robe, noonday, a staff, sand—Max, all that could have been then, was—always, will be—always.

Thus you, through the hand of an insignificant note-taker, even before your ascent and union with the elements, are taken up alive into myth.

Clamart, 27 February 1933

119. The Russian Revolution of 1917 passed through two watersheds: the first was in February-March and was a more moderate phase in which liberal politicians ol various parties took part in forming a Provisional Government until elections could be organized; the second began in late October (early November N.S.) when the Bolshevik Party Central Committee decided to organize an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. The uprising paved the way for a new Government of People's Commissars, the seizing of power by Lenin's Bolshevik Party, and ultimately the Civil War.

120. Again "Serezha" refers to Tsvetaeva's husband, Sergei Efron. October-November 1917 was a tumultuous month for Tsvetaeva's family as indeed for most of Russia. Apart from the diary excerpts here, Tsvetaeva's account of those days is found in the prose piece "October in a Railway Car" ("Oktiabr' v vagone"), published in 1927 in Volia Rossii. Sergei Efron's account is found in his "October" ("Oktiabr"') in the periodical Na chuzhoi storone 11 (Prague, 1925), 137-72.

121. Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), historian and French statesman, was the first to essay an objective history of the French Revolution. His Histoire de la Revolution Francaise was published in ten volumes from 1823 to 1827.

122. The River Don was a main area of activity during the Civil War. In the Don Region the White Army was supported by excellent fighters from among the Don Coi-sacks who had enjoyed a degree of autonomy under the Tsars and who were now threatened by the new Communist regime.

123. The writings of Andrew Lang (1844-1912) include seven collections of poetry, three books on folklore and anthropology, and translations of Homer and Theocritus. His chief work as an historian was his History of Scotland. He also produced eight historical monographs, among them The Maid of France, on Joan of Arc, published in 1908. English and American readers will be familiar with the collections of fairy tales bearing Lang's name, each volume of which has a different color in the title.

124. Anna Ilinichna Andreeva (1885-1948), nee Denisevich, was the second wife of the playwright Leonid Andreev. She was one of the very few members of the emigration whom Tsvetaeva considered a good friend.

125. The final passages of "Voloshin" and Tsvelaeva's letters about the piece raise some question about the dates when the work was written. The Letters to Anna Teskova, cited in the first note above and dated October 16, 1932, not only mentions the work as if it were finished but goes on to report that Tsvetaeva had already read the piece aloud. Tsvetaeva was determined to make her view of Voloshin public, and she feared that a piece which took nearly three hours to read aloud would be too long to publish. The text published (with cuts) in Contemporary Notes bears no date. The partial publication in Literary Armenia gives the date as February 1933, that is, about three months after the October letter to Teskova. Another letter to Teskova dated March 7, 1933, sums up Tsvetaeva's winter's work as four poems and the piece on Voloshin. Thus it seems that Tsvetaeva returned to work on the piece after her reading.

126. Sergii Nikolaevich Bulgakov. See note 58 above.

127. Ekaterina Alexeevna Balmont was Konstantin Balmont's second wife. (See note 17 to the Introduction.) Balmont's third wife, Elena Konstantinovna, emigrated with the poet.

128. A sanatorium.

129. The name "Klara Tsetkin" is clearly a literary pseudonym. The historical Klara Zetkin was a leader of the German Socialists. The Russian for "Central Committee" is Tsentral'nyi Komitet. The "interpretation" of the initial letters "ts" and "k" as standing for tseluiu krepko ("here's a big kiss") is evidently some kind of joke.

130. A book entitled A Pilgrimage Among the VUZes: Memoirs of a Member of the Komsomol (Khozhdenie po VUZ-am: vospominaniia Komsomol'tsa) appeared in Paris in 1933, published by the YMCA Press. The author's name, M. Moskvin, is a pseudonym (Mikhail Mikhailovich Tarkhanov [1877-?]). The passage Tsvetaeva quotes, however, is not to be found in the book of this title. The acronym VUZ stands for "higher educational institutions," that is, secondary schools and above. The Komsomol is the Communist Party Organization for youth.