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Once upon a time there was a young girl, a modest school teacher, Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva, with a small physical defect—as far as I remember she limped. I know only one incident from her life as a teacher, to wit, the question put to her students by the supervisor of the region:

"Well then, children, who is your favorite Russian Tsar?"

And the students' answer, in unison:

"Grishka Otrepev!"41

In that school-teaching woman who limped there lived a cruel gift, not modest, not schoolish, that not only did not limp, but like Pegasus, did not know the earth. It lived within, alone, consuming and burning. Maximilian Voloshin gave earth to this gift, that is, a sphere of activity; he gave this nameless woman—a name, this dispossessed woman—a destiny. How did he do it? First of all he understood that such and such a school teacher and her poems—steeds, cloaks, swords—did not match each other and never would. That the gods, who gave her her inner being, gave her the opposite to this inner being—an exterior: of face and of life. That here, before his face—was the union, always a tragic union, but here a catastrophic one, of soul and body. Not a union, but a rupture. A rupture that she could not help being conscious of and from which she could not help suffering, just as these women suffered unceasingly: George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Julie de Lespinasse, Mary Webb42 and the other unbeautiful favorites of the gods. The non-beauty of the face in real life, which could not but hinder her gift in the free and independent revelation of her soul. The confrontation of two mirrors: of the notebook, where her soul was, and of the mirror, where her face was and the face of her daily life. The notebooks where she was like herself, and the mirror where she was unlike herself. The cruel private verdict of reason, a verdict that goes back to two opened eyes. I cannot love myself in this form, in this form—I cannot live with myself. That woman—is not I.

All this is the story of Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva between two mirrors: on the wall and on the table, Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva who would be mortally offended—even on an island without a single other human being; Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva all alone, facing herself.

But there is another Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva—with people. Maximilian Voloshin knew people, that is, he knew all their mercilessness, that—human—and especially-masculine demadingness, unjustified by anything, that cruel unjustness that does not look for a soul in a beautiful woman, but from an intelligent woman insistently demands beauty, men intelligent and stupid, old and young, beautiful and ugly, but never demanding anything from a woman except beauty. But beauty—without fail. Beautiful woman are loved, unbeautiful women—are not. Such is the law of the last Samoyed's yurt, directly behind which is the North Pole, and so too in the aesthete's reception room of Petersburg's Apollo magazine.43 Hand on your heart—could the schoolish, modest, lame woman, E.I.D., cover her poems' promissory note? Could E.I.D. hope for the love that her soul and gift could not but evoke? Would they, loving that other self, love her in the flesh? To this I answer: yes. Women and the great, the very great poets, and then again—great poets!—remember Pushkin, who loved an inanimate object—Goncharova.44 So then, only women. But does a young woman think about female friendship when she thinks about love, and does a young woman think about anything else but love? A young woman like that, with poems like that... Consequently, hope for love in that body of hers...was nil; I'll say more: that physical aspect of hers was equal to the hopelessness of love. Let E.I.D. even tomorrow print her poems, that is, make all Apollo in love with them, that is, with her—and let her arrive tomorrow in person in the editorial office of Apollo—just as she really is, limping, in a little hat, with a little muff—all Apollo would feel itself robbed, and would not merely fall out of love, all Apollo would start hating her. From the offended: "But I was expecting..." to the condescending: "What a pity..." E.I.D. must not hear either that "pity" or "I was expecting."

So what then? In the first place, and in the main place: let her have being in her own eyes and have the totality of being. Free her from the middling body—the physical and humdrum body-give her another body: her own. Let her be herself! Give that same soul that is in the poems another flesh, give her the body of that soul. And what kind of body ought this soul to have? Who, what woman ought essentially to write those poems, in essence, did write those poems?

A non-Russian, obviously. A beauty, obviously. A Catholic, obviously. Rich, oh, enormously rich, obviously (a Byron in the person of a woman, but without the lameness), that is, externally happy, obviously, so as in complete disinterestedness and purity to be unhappy in her own way. The luxury of a purely-inner, purely-the-poet's unhappiness in spite of beauty, wealth, talent. The triumph of the very substance of the poet: in spite of everything, through everything, for no reason—unhappiness. And I forgot the main thing: free, obviously, from the fear of her reflected image in the mirror of the reception room at Apollo and in the eyes of her editors.

But what should her name be? Cherubina was born in Koktebel where E.I.D. was a guest at the time. Once, a year later, in Max's room in the tower, I was holding some kind of petrified tool, brought in by the tide, left behind by the ebb. "And that, what you have in your hands right now, that's—Gabriac. Cherubina look it up on the sand, right out of a wave. And we understood at once that it is—gabriac." -"But what is—gabriac?" —"Why that very root you're holding. It was that root Cherubina came to be named after." —"But where does Cherubina come from?" "From Kerubina, that is the feminine from Kheruvim, only we substituted 'Ch' for 'K' so it wouldn't be entirely from Kheruvim. "I, falling in: "I understand: from a black [chernyi] Kheruvim."45

And so, Cherubina de Gabriac. A French woman with an Italian first name, or an Italian woman with a French surname. An only daughter who lives in a strict family where, if they do write, then of course they don't publish. No honorarium is necessary. She will never come to Apollo. Don't let them try to lollow her tracks—they'll never follow them, and if they do—it's a bad thing for both her and them. The one sure thing: on Sundays she is in church, but not visible, because she sings in the choir. That's all.

How can you put this across—to Apollo, that is, to people, that is, to the whole outside world, put this into their minds? The way things are generally put across: by first believing it. How cm you believe in yourself in that form? Make others believe. A circle. And in that circle, a kindly circle on this occasion, is the gradual transformation of E.I.D. into Cherubina de Gabriac. She wrote something down—she already believed the letters of her new handwriting—the addressee believed in the look of the letters and i ho meaning of the words—E.I.D. believed the addressee's answer, (hat is, the belief of the addressee—of the many-faced addressee, i he oneness of the belief of the many, and in a certain instant—the complete transformation of E.I.D. into Ch. de G.

"Shall we begin, Elizaveta Ivanovna?" —"Let's start, Maximilian Alexandrovich!"

A letter arrived at the editorial office of Apollo. Angular, slanting handwriting. Poems, a woman's. In the sheet is enclosed not a flower but a scented leaf of paper, in the leaf of paper—the leaf of a tree. The address is "Poste restante for Ch. de G."

"A few days later another letter arrived in the editorial office of Apollo— again with poems, and they kept on coming this way, folded now with a leaf of olive, now of tamarisk; and the editors and staff of Apollo continued as they had begun walking around like madmen, in love with the gift, with the handwriting, with the name of the unknown woman who hid her face.

Somewhere in St. Petersburg, across the gulf of family, wealth, Catholicism, girlhood, genius, in a building as unassailable as a fortress, but authentic—after all, it stands somewhere!—lives a young woman. This young woman sends in poems, people answer her with flowers-, this young woman sings on Sundays in church, people listen to her. To see her is impossible, but not to see her—is to die.

And thus the epoch of Cherubina de Gabriac began.

All Apollo fell in love—the names are not necessary since the bearers of some of them are already under the ground—we will take Apollo as a unity, which it in fact was—all Apollo ceased to sleep, all Apollo wanted to get a glimpse of her. They were many, she—was one. They wanted to see, she—to hide herself. And it happened—they saw, that is, they followed up the tracks, that is, they unmasked her. Like a lunatic—they called her forcibly and with that call cast her from the tower of her own Cherubinian castle—onto the pavement of her former existence, against which she was shattered into pieces.

"Elizaveta Ivanovna Dimitrieva—you?"—"I."

I will name only one name—Sergei Makovsky,46 who conducted himself, in Voloshin's words, like an irreproachable knight, that is, was not only not surprised at seeing her, the real woman, but who had the skill to convince her that he knew everything long ago and if he did not show it, it was only in order to let her, E.I.D., reveal herself in Cherubina to the end. For this pure-blooded gesture—a thank-you to Sergei Makovsky.

That was the end of Cherubina. She did not write any more. Perhaps she did write, but no one read her any more, no one heard her voice any more. But I know that there was no end to her friendship with M.V. Of her poems I remember only lines that have survived through two decades of life and memory:

In the sky a red cloak swirls—

I didn 't glimpse the face!

And further:

Even Ronsard's sonnets

Have not unlocked my grief.

Everything that poets said

I've known long since by heart!

And in answer to some kind of bouquet:

And I hate seeing in worldly faces

The face of shameless orchids!

-Akhmatova's image,47 the emphasis—mine, verses written both before Akhmatova and before me—that is how correct my assertion is that all poems that were, are, and will be are written by one mil the same woman—a nameless woman.

And the last thing that I remember:

0, is it so destined that I learn to know

Love and death at thirteen years!

-that both magically and naturally echoes along with my own:

You gave me a childhood better than a fairy tale,

Give me death too—at seventeen!

With this difference—that she says destined (death), but I say— give. It was just as strange and as natural that Cherubina, to whom I, under the direct impact of her fate and poems, immediately sent my own poems, of all of them in her own answering letter marked just these, just these two lines. I remember the narrow, lilac envelope with the angular handwriting and the strong scent of perfume, the Cherubinian envelope and handwriting that affected me, in my innate simplicity, with more of repulsion than of attraction.

Because I for my own part, thrice over: as a woman, as a poet and as a non-aesthete, loved not the proud foreigner in the choir and the choir loft of life, but just the school teacher Dimitrieva— with Cherubina's soul. But of course the heart of the matter for Cherubina was not in my love.

Cherubina de Gabriac died two years ago in Turkestan. I do not know whether Max knew about her death.

* * * * * * *

Why have I lingered so long on this? In the first place because Cherubina was not an incident in Max's life but an event, that is, he himself stopped and lingered with her for a long time, for once and all. In the second place so as to present Max in his true sphere —of women's and poets' souls and destinies. Max in women's and poets' lives was providential, and when as in the cases of Cherubina, Adelaida Gertsyk and my own case they merged, when the woman proved to be a poet, or what is more accurate, the poet—a woman, there was no end to his friendship, care, patience, attention, admiration and co-creation. He was above all a man of being-with. Just as his whole soul—first and foremost—was co-existence, which some people who did not look deeply called a mosaic, and the lovers of learned terms—eclecticism.

That unity in which there was everything, and that everything which was unity.

A couple more words about Cherubina, the last words. When her name was uttered I often heard:

"But of course she wasn't the one who wrote them—Voloshin was, i.e., he revised all of them." And other people would say: "Can you really believe in that mystification? Voloshin was simply writing under a feminine and, you have to admit, a very unsuccessful pseudonym." And no matter how I would argue, or seethe, or gnash—no, there was no poetess Cherubina. It was Maximilian Voloshin—under a pseudonym.

Nothing could be more antithetical than the poetry of Voloshin and Cherubina. Because so like a woman in life, in poetry he is wholly and entirely like a man, that is, a head with five senses of which the greatest is sight. A poet-painter and sculptor, a poet-observer, never a lyricist as a structure of soul. And he was just as unable to write Cherubina's poetry as Cherubina—his poetry. But the fact that these two people were acquainted, that one of them had been writing and publishing for a long time and the other never had, that one—was a man, the other—a woman, even the fact of one and the same wormwood in the poems—inevitably made people claim a much greater impossibility than the co-existence of poet and poet, the equality of a well-known poet with an unknown, the non-essentialness when it comes to poetic strength of masculine and feminine, the naturalness of one and the same wormwood in poems that have one and the same wormwoodian setting—Koktebel, the right of each and every person to the same wormwood, as long as it is wormwood, as long as the wormwood came out varied, and, finally, an independent gift of God which had no need of any revisions except from its own experience. "I would like very much to write the way Cherubina does, but I'm not able"— those are M.V.'s exact words about his supposed authorship.

Max did more than write Cherubina's poems ; he created the real live Cherubina, the myth of Cherubina herself . Not mystification, mythmaking, and not a pseudonym, but the great anonymity of the people, of the myth of the creator. Once he had created Cherubina, Max remained in the shade— from which I now lead him forth by the hand into the broad daylight of my love and grain iule for Cherubina, for myself, for all those whose names I do not know— gratitude.
But then those leaves with which Cherubina folded her poems— olive, tamarisk, wormwood— are really Voloshin's, for they were gathered in Koktebel.

41. Grishka Otrepev, better known as the first False Dmitry, claimed to be the son of Ivan IV, called "the Terrible," and succeeded in becoming Tsar of Russia during the Time of Troubles. Relatively little seems to be known about him. His full name was Grigory Bogdanovich Otrepev and he was born sometime in the seventeenth century. He was generally supposed to have been living in a Polish monastery before he plunged into the morass of politics and is thus depicted in Pushkin's Boris Godunov.

42. Both George Eliot (1819-1880) and Charlotte Bronte (1816-1885) are well known to English-speaking readers. Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776) was the devoted friend of the philosophe D'Alembert. She became known as a writer only after her death thanks to the publication of two sets of superb letters, the first to the Comte de Guibert, published in 1809, and a second volume, Lettres inedites a d'Alembert et Con-dorcet (1887). Mary Webb (1881-1927) was a writer of novels set mainly in Shropshire, England. She first received recognition upon the publication of Precious Bane in 1924; before that work appeared she had produced four novels and a volume of essays.

43. Apollo, a superbly designed and produced journal devoted to painting and ilir other arts, appeared in Petersburg from 1909 through 1917. It must certainly rank as one of the most beautiful and excellent magazines of all time. It contained reviews and analytical essays on painting (with full color and black-and-white reproductions), articles on theater and the dance, surveys and reviews of Russian and foreign literature. Each monthly issue printed a selection of poems and fiction in a division called "The Literary Almanach" ("Literaturnyi Al'manakh") which was later published as a separate volume.

44. Tsvetaeva refers here to Natalia Nikolaevna Goncharova (1812-1863), Pushkin's wife.

45. The substitution of "Ch" for "Kh" and "b"for "v"make "Kheruvim" (originally an old Hebrew word which designates one of the orders of angels) sound Italian. Tsvetaeva interprets the first substitution as an attempt to transfer to the name "Cherubina" the connotations of the Russian word "chernyi," meaning "black," which begin* with the same "ch" sound.

46. Sergei Konstantinovich Makovsky (1877-1962), poet and art critic, was the editor of Apollo (N. N. Vrangel and M. K. Ushkov served as co-editors at various points in the magazine's life and an enthusiast of French Impressionist painting. He emigrated after 1917 first to Prague and then to Paris. The memoirs of Evgenia Gertsyk (the poet Adelaida Gertsyk's sister) give a somewhat different version of the genesis and demise of Cherubina de Gabriac. According to Gertsyk Apollo magazine held a poetry evening for new poets. Dimitrieva's unprepossessing appearance caused Sergei Makovsky to treat her and her poetry disdainfully. When Cherubina de Gabriac's poems arrived in the mail, however, Makovsky was enthralled by the rather unusual, Catholic motifs, the name of the poet, and the hints about her mysterious but aristocratic origins. Gertsyk mentions Voloshin's love of mystification, his distaste for literary snobbism a la Makovsky, and his courtly, gallant defense of women poets, all of which, combined with a genuine enthusiasm for Dimitrieva's fine poetry, led to the deception. According to Gertsyk, the surname came from the name Gabriok, belonging to some kind of ancient devil or imp; Max added the aristocratic "de." The whole combination would give Dimitrieva's assumed name the amusing meaning: "An Angel from a little Devil." Gertsyk says that Makovsky and his colleagues were furious at Voloshin when the deception was unmasked — so much so that Voloshin left Petersburg and went to Paris, Later in her portrait, Tsvetaeva mentions a duel between Voloshin and Gumilev over Cherubina. Perhaps it was that event which forced Voloshin to leave the country.

47. Tsvetaeva must have in mind the brilliant, often ironic psychological images of Akhmatova's early poetry. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in Petersburg in 1912. Cherubina de Gabriac's poems first appeared in the "Literary Almanach," Apollo 2 (November 1909), 3-10.