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I think thStft those of my readers who knew Max and E.O. personally expect from me one other name of hers, the one which I will say at once:

Pra—from "prababushka" [great-grandmother], and great-grandmother not from her age—she was then fifty-six years old— but from a grandiose mystification in which she acted the part of our common great-grandmother. The part of the Lady Chevalier Kirienko (the first part of her and Max's surname) about which, the mystificalion, as so too more generally about the world of the first Koktebel summer, I will some day give a separate, thorough, and entertaining account.

But the word Pra had another origin, not at all in fun— Pramater, the Archmother, the Mother of these regions,

discovered by her eagle eye and tamed by her laboring flanks, the Commander-in-Chief of all our young generation, the Grand Forebear of a Family Line— that never took hold and lived, the Pramater-the Matriarch— Pra.

I will never forget how, at my wedding, in the big parish book, in the witnesses' column, without warning and without restraint, across the whole page— she signed with a flourish:

The Inconsolable Widow of Kirienko-Voloshin.

What the Germans call Einfall ("it popped into my head") was freely and irrepressibly at play in her, and because of this it was not only in one thing that she resembled the mother of Goethe, with whom Max could have said lovingly: Vom - die Fronnatur/Und Lust zum Fabulieren.73

And there is so much I have not yet told! You could do a uhole book about her, for she was that whole book, a whole, real live Bilderbuch74 for children and poets. But quite apart from Elena Ottobaldovna's human and omnivarious signularity, rarity, uniqueness— any woman who has brought up a son by herself merits being told about, even quite apart from the success or failure of that upbringing. The sum of all efforts is important, i.e., he lonely achievement of one person— without all of the many, and thus— against all of the many. And when that lone mother proves to be the mother of a poet, that is, of the highest being that exists after a monk— almost a hermit and always a martyr - every word of praise is too little, even mine.

Where the money came from I really don't know, but in any with a small amount of money, pennies in fact, E.O. buys a piece of land in Koktebel, and not even land, but shoreland. Max Miles his bicycle to the Theodosia secondary school, eighteen kilometers there, eighteen kilometers back. Koktebel is the wilderness. There is only one house on the shore— the Voloshins'; Koktebel itself, i.e., the Bulgaro-Tatar village of that name, is two kilometers away on the main road. E.O. puts the samovar on for the i in passersby and in the evenings she goes out to the deserted shore and howls from her unbearable loneliness. Max is already being published in the Theodosia broadsheet, poetic fame and a line of schoolgirls are already following him:

"Mr. Poet, write something for us!"

Elena Ottobaldovna Voloshin did not marry again. That does not mean that she did not love anyone, it means that she loved Max very very much, more than a lover—more than herself too. Having deprived the son of a father—how could she turn the son into a stepson, her own son into someone else's stepson, and what kind of son at that, without claws and with poems... There were visits from a certain lean, tall horseman; there were shared and, one must assume, very lofty trips on horseback to the mountains. Obviously, there was a last time: "Yes?"—"No!" after which the tall rider disappeared forever beyond the turning. I was told this by the old-timers of Theodosia, and they even gave the name of a certain foreigner. He would have carried her away to his own country. She would have been happy, who knows...but—Maximilian Alexandrovich could not stand that visitor. The old-timer from whom I heard all this said so—Max loved everyone, he welcomed everyone, but with this gentleman things went wrong at once. And the gentleman did not like him either; he even despised him, because there was very little of the male in him: he didn't drink wine, didn't ride, except on his bicycle... And the gentleman was completely indifferent to poetry; he spoke Russian rather poorly, maybe a German, maybe a Czech. But a handsome man! And so M.A. and his mother remained behind, alone without the German, but in complete agreement and with no unpleasant moments.

They were an inseparable pair, and not at all a friendly pair. All of the masculinity, given for two, went to the mother; all of the femininity—to the son, for there was no elementary masculinity ever in Max, just as in E.O. there was no elementary femininity. If later Max displayed miracles of fearlessness and self-sacrifice, it was the human being and the poet who displayed them, not the man (the warrior).75 He displayed these characteristics in the cause of peace (peace by truce), not in the cause of war. The one and only exception—his duel with Gumilev because of Cherubina de Gabriac, a purely defensive duel. The warrior was never in him, which fact particularly galled the warrior-woman in soul and body—E.O. "Just look at Serezha,76 Max, there you are—a real man! If there's a war—he fights. And you? What do you do, Max?"--"Mama, I can't crawl into a shirt with epaulettes and shoot at live people only because they think differently than I do."

"They think. They think. There are times, Max, when you inusi not think but act. Act—without thinking."

"Mama, animals always have times like that—it's called bestial instinct."

So much not the warrior that he never once quarreled with anyone because of another person. You could say of him qu'il n'epousait pas les querelles de ses amis.77

At the beginning of our friendship I often clashed with him on this, crashed—against his inviolable softness. Without a smile now, and as always when he was upset, raising his index finger, even threatening with it: "You don't understand, Marina. He's nn entirely different person than you are; he has a different scale of measure, and it's appropriate for him. And in his own way he is quite right—just as you are—in your way." Just that "right in his own way" was the primary basis of his life with people. It was not pettiness, not indifference of spirit,78 I assert. Not pettiness of spirit, because of everything that was in him there was a magnitude—or there was nothing at all; and not indifference, because in the instant of that halfway place where he stood, his soul divided into two whole and integral souls; he was simultaneously you and your opponent and himself as well, and all this passionately; it was not a divided soul, but an all-encompassing soul, and not indifference of soul but a certain equanimity of his whole being, that sun of midday to which everything is visible in a different and true guise.

There is no point in even mentioning self-interest. When a man does not take a stand on anyone's side, or what is the same thing, takes one on both sides, he is usually condemned by both. After all, from the conclusion: "He is just as right as you"—we, whoever we may be, hear only: he is right and even he is right, inasmuch as there is no equality of Tightness when we ourselves are concerned. By not taking my side or my offender's, or what is the same thing, by taking both his side and mine, he simply remained on his own side, a side that was outside (the field of action and of our vision)—with him and audessus de la melee.79

No man has yet condemned the sun because it shines for other persons too, and even Jesus Navin, who halted the sun, halted it for the enemy too. For Max a man and his enemy constituted a whole: for him my enemy was a part of me. He perceived enmity as union. That is the way he saw the German War and the Civil War, and me with my unchanging enemy—everyone.

One can see it that way only from above, never from the side, never from the thick of it. And that is the way he saw not only other people's enemies, but himself as well, with the person who believed that Max was his enemy, that he himself—was Max's enemy. Enmity, like friendship, demands consent (reciprocity). Max did not give his consent to enmity and thereby disarmed people. He could only stand opposed to a person; only by his own standing up and coming forward could he stand opposed to a person: to the evil that was coming against him.

I think that Max simply did not believe in evil, did not put his faith in its alleged simplicity and persuasion: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..." For him evil was darkness, misfortune, a calamity, a gigantic misunderstanding—du bien mal entendu80 —someone's eternal and our hourly lack of perspicacity, often—simply stupidity (in which he did believe)—first of all and last of all—blindness, but never—evil. In that sense he was a genuine enlightener, a genial oculist. Evil—is a mote; under it—is the good.

Every hand raised to strike a blow he transformed into a lowered and at times even into an extended hand. Thus in a twinkling of an eye he disarmed old Repin81 who was boiling with malice against him, who left him with the words: "Such an educated and pleasant gentleman—it's amazing that he doesn't like my 'Ivan the Terrible'!" And whether it was Repin's attack on him, which did not take place, or my glass—thrown across the whole terrace— at an impudent actress who dared to call Sarah Bernhardt an old face-maker, or, later, the quarrel of the Russians with the Germans, or still later of the Whites with the Reds, invariably Max stood outside: for each one and not against anyone. He knew how to be amiable with a person and with his enemy, and at the same time no one ever felt that he was a betrayer, that he himself—had been betrayed, and at the same time everyone (together and separately as well) invariably felt all his, Max Voloshin's, exclusive devotion to him, for it really was there. His business in life was to bring together and not to pull apart; I know from eyewitnesses that he brought more than one Red, humanly, together with Whites, if only on this ground—that he had save each from the other when the time came. But of this later and louder.

M.V.'s peace-making was part of his myth-making: a myth of the human being, great, wise, and good.

If you can represent each person plastically, Max—is a sphere, the perfect vision of a sphere: the sphere of the universum, the sphere of eternity, the sphere of midday, the sphere of a planet, the sphere of a ball, as which he would jump away from the earth (his way of walking) and from the person talking to him so as once again to give himself into his hands, the sphere of the sphere of the stomach, and even the lightning which in moments of anger flew out of his white eyes was spherical— I saw it myself.

Try to break yourself against a sphere. Try to start a quarrel with Max.

Yes, the earth's sphere, on which as we know the mountains are high, the abysses are deep, but which is a sphere all the same. And indisputably he revolved around some sun from which he lioih took his light and gave off his light. Satellite-ship: with that prolonged, lingering word we convey everything about Max with people— and everything about him without people. The satellite o| each person he met, and tearing himself away from the person nearest him— the satellite of a luminary unknown to us. The apartness and unswervingness of a satellite. That something which eternally stood between his nearest friend and him, and which was perceived by us as a virtually physical barrier, was only the space between a luminary and its satellite, sometimes decreasing, some-limes increasing, not a thumbspan nearer nor a thumbspan farther away, but in sum always the same. That equality of attraction and repulsion which, while binding two heavenly bodies together, makes them inalterably and beautifully different.

* * * * *

Apropos of his planetariness, I remember at the beginning of our acquaintance—a passage without conjunction. In answer to my announcement of my marriage to Sergei Efron, Max sent me from Paris not approval, or at least encouragement—but the most genuine commiseration, imagining both of us to be too genuine for such a false form of communal life as marriage. I, a newly-married wife, boiled up: either recognize me whole, with everything that I am doing and do do (not to mention what I will do in the future!)—or else... And his answer: calm, loving, endlessly-detached, unshakably-confident, ending with the words: "And so, farewell—until the next time our paths cross!"—that is, a time when I would again fall into the sphere of his influence, from which it only seemed to me—I had departed, that is, exactly like a luminary and its satellite. And at the same time—astounding naivete!—in utter purity of heart he invariably imagined that the satellite in people's lives—was he. What has been said is sufficient, I think, to explain why he could never become a hanger-on—either of people then and there or of people here and now.

Max belonged to another set of laws than the human ones, and when we fell into his orbit we invariably fell under his set of laws. Max himself was the planet. And when we revolved around him we were revolving in some other large circle together with him around a luminary that we did not know.

Max was knowing. He had a secret that he did not tell. That, everyone knew; that secret, no one learned. The secret was in his white, smileless eyes, always without a smile—along with the invariable smile of his lips. The secret was in him, it lived in him like that body that was egregious for us, homogeneous with him. I don't know whether he could have given it a name himself. His raised index finger: it's not that way!—revealed the that way with such power that no one ever had any doubts of its existence, even though they did not find out what that way was. It is too easy to explain that secret by his adherence to anthroposophy or by his preoccupation with magic. I have known many Steinerites and a few magicians, and there is always the impression: a man—and the thing that he knows; while here there was a unity Max himself was that secret, just as Rudolf Steiner82 himself—was his own secret (the secret of his own power), which in the case of Steiner was not left behind either in his writings or in his disciples, and which in the case of M.V. was neither in his poems nor in his friends; the self-secret, borne away by each person into the earth.

"There are spirits of fire, Marina, spirits of water, Marina, spirits of air, Marina, and there are, Marina, spirits of earth."

We walk along a barren promontory, at high noon, and I have the distinct feeling that I am walking/with just such a spirit of the earth. For what (a spirit, but of earth) other than what I have right here, who other than this man right here, could be the spirit of earth!

Max was the real breath, birth-child, exhalation of the earth. The Earth opened up and gave birth to a man like this one, fully formed, a huge gnome, a drowzing giant, a little bit bull, a little bit god, on sinewy legs, as smooth-turned as lathed wood, resilient as steel, resistant as pillars, with acquamarine instead of eyes, with a drowzing forest instead of hair, with all the salt of the sea in the earth in his blood ("But do you know, Marina, that our blood— is an ancient sea...") with everything that boiled and hardened inside the earth, boiled and did not harden. The inner core of Max, you felt it, was the inner core of the earth.

Max was indeed one born of earth, and his whole gravitation toward the sky was precisely the gravitation toward the sky—of a heavenly body. In Max there lived a fourth element forgotten by everyone—the earth. The element of the continent: solid land. Mass lived in Max; you might say that this unique phenomenon was in fact the phenomenon of the earth's mass, thickness, denseness. Of him, as of mountains, you could say: massive. Even his physical mass was a massive block in some way uncleavable and unfissurable. There are celestial aeroliths. Max was—a terrestial monolith. Not composite, but coalesced. The unit was created from everything. Perhaps only a geologist could speak of Max as he really was. Even his skull, with that incredible, inexhaustible energy of growth that was hard to call hair, was as physically perceptible as the surface of the earth's sphere, which for some reason burst forth with such abundance just here. Never did hair evince so visibly that it belongs to the kingdom of growth. Among plants only mint, wormwood, and camomile grow the way that hair grew, everything that is thick, dense, springy grows that way, but hair doesn't. It does, but not among the inhabitants of our meridionol zone; it does, but for a whole nation and not for individuals; it grows, but black—never fair. (It used to grow fair, but only among the gods.) And that twist of wormwood in his hair, of which I have already spoken, was only the natural extension of that head of hair, its innate completion and outer limit.

"Three things curl, Marina: hair, water, leaves. Four, Marina: flame."

Of flame. A story. Someone from among Max's passionate admirers the first year of my acquaintance with Max told me almost in a whisper that:
...at certain moments of his intense concentration—a flame came out of him—from the ends of his fingers and the ends of his hair—real, burning flame. And once, behind his back, when he was sitting and writing, a curtain burst into flame.

73. German. "From my mother [came] my cheerfuldisposition/ And a pencliunl for inventing stories."

74. German. "Picture book."

75. The Russian here is "muzh (voin)." The word "muzh" in the meaning "man" is rhetorical and archaic; it connotes not only full male adulthood but also an earned dignity. Tsvetaeva's parentheses seem to equate "muzh" with "voin," that is "warrior," or "military man."

76. Serezha is Sergei Efron (1893-1941), Tsvetaeva's husband. He was trained in an officer and fought with the White Army forces against the Bolshevik Red Army in the Civil War.

77. French. "He did not espouse his friends' quarrels."

78. The Russian original is "ni malo, ni ravno-dushie," that is, a hyphenated spelling of malodushie and ravnodushie, the exact meanings of which are "cowardliness" and "indifference." The translation of the passage deviates from exactness so as to capture something of Tsvetaeva's paranomasia. By disconnecting the prefixes Tsvetaeva emphasizes the common root in four key words, malodushie, ravnodushie, dvoedushie ("two-facedness"), and a neologism vsedushie (meaning something like "all-embracingness ol soul"). The shared root is -dokh-dukh-dykh-, meaning "soul," "spirit," and "breath."

79. French. Almost untranslatable. "Above and beyond the chaos."

80. French. "Some misunderstood good."

81. Ilia Efimovich Repin (1840-1930) studied drawing and painting at the Petersburg Academy of the Arts and eventually became a member of the Academy in 189.1. During the height of his activity in the late 1870s and 80s, however, he was one of the so-called Peredvizhniki (The Itinerants), an anti-academic association of more or less "realistic" painters. Repin gained wide repute for his individual and group portraits, and for the genre scenes of peasant life to which he lent the dimensions of monumental works. He was also interested in historical painting. His "Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan" was painted in 1885. Voloshin must have viewed and evaluated the painting somewhat later, since in 1885 he was only eight years old.

82. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)-German philosopher and occultist, founder of Anthroposophy. For more information on Steiner see the first note to Tsvetaeava's portrait of Bely, Andrei Bely, "A Captive Spirit."