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Max would tell stories about events the way a people tells them, and he would tell about individuals the same way as about whole peoples. The exactness of his description was always beyond doubt for me, as the exactness of every epos is undoubtable. Achilles cannot be other than what he is, otherwise he is not Achilles. A divine measuring-standard of truth lives in each of us; only when he has sinned before it is a person a liar. Mystery-milking, on certain lips, is already the beginning of truth, and when it grows into myth-making, it is— the whole truth. That is how it was with Max in the instance of Cherubina. What is not eiscntial— is superfluous. That is the way you get gods and heroes. Only in Max's stories did people come out like themselves, more like themselves than in life where you meet them in the wrong place and the wrong way, where you meet not them, where they are simply not themselves and are— unrecognizable. I remember Max telling what a little girl had said (the girl had visited a zoo for the first time and was writing a letter to her father): "I saw a Iion-not at all like one."

With Max the lion was always like one. By the way, so as not lo forget. I have under the inkwell from which I am writing, a plate. The tables and the inkwells change, the plate remains. I carried it away in 1913 from Theodosia and have not parted with it since then. It has grown twenty years older in my hands. The plate is frightfully heavy, faiaince, old-fashioned, English, with a brown-on-white border of Greek heroes and English commanders. In the center is a face, a solemn visage in fact: a lion. Actually a whole lion, but because of the size of the head the body has simply disappeared. A mane shading off into a beard, and looking out from under the mane the small white vortices of the eyes. The lion is most like all Max's pictures. That lion— is Max, all Max, more Max than Max. This time, life engaged in myth-making.

A single example based on my living self. On the very first day of my arrival in Koktebel— everyone knows about the precious stones of its shore—there is even a bay designated: Cornelian bay on the first day of my arrival in Koktebel I say to Max: "Maximilian Alexandrovich, what do you think, could you guess which is my favorite stone on the whole shore?" And then an hour later, I hear about myself: "Mama! You know what Marina Ivanovna told me to do? To find and bring her her favorite stone on the whole shore!" Well, isn't it better that way, and isn't it more myself? I was that rough draft which Max instantly polished up.

Max's sharp eye for a person was a collecting lens, collecting —and so, fire-igniting. Everything that was personal, that is, creative in a person, fired up and grew into the largest possible bonfire and garden. Max with his knowledge, experience, talent—did not weigh any individual down. By his insatiability for what was genuine, he forced an individual to be his own self. "When I need my I—I go away; if I come to you—it means I need you."

[...]102

Everything Max taught me, I remember for good. And so Max, by his insatiability for the genuine, forced an individual to be his own self. I know that for young poets with something of their own he was irreplaceable, as also for young poets—without something of their own. I remember at the very beginning of our acquaintance, Alexei Tolstoy103 had a literary evening. Some titled member of the Guards is reading: the moon, a boat, lilacs, a young woman... In answer to this stereotype—a heavy general silence. And Max, stealthily, as if walking on hot coals with his voice: "You have an amazingly pleasant baritone. Do you—sing?"--"Never."- -"You must sing, you absolutely must sing." I swear that there was not the slightest irony in those words: a baritone, in actual fact, must sing.

And there's also the story about the poetess Maria Papper.

"M.I., hasn't Maria Papper come to see you yet?" - "No." - "Well, she'll get to you. She visits all the poets: Khodasevich, and Boris Nikolaevich,104 and Bryusov."-"But who is she?"-"A poetess. The most distinctive trait: huge galoshes in any season of the year. Ordinary men's galoshes, and, coming out of the galoshes on a very thin neck, as if on a matchstick, huge dark eyes, on threads, like a frog's. She always comes in by the back entrance, well before dawn and directly into the kitchen. 'What can I do for you, Miss?'-I'm here to see the master.'-'The master is still sleeping.'—'Then I'll wait.' Seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock. Poets, as you know, rise late. Sometimes the cook, feeling concern, says: 'Maybe I should wake the master up? If your business really very urgent, because it happens that the master sometimes comes out only towards one. Or it happens that he doesn't get up up at all.'—'No, why should you, I'm just fine as it is.' Finally, not able to stand it, the cook brings in the report: 'A young lady is here to see you, a student from the high school or the courses, she's sitting in my kitchen since seven, waiting for something.'Then why, you foolish woman, didn't you show her into the sitting)', room?'—'I wanted to, but she says: I'm fine, she says, just fine right here. I gave the lady tea to drink—drank a cup and filled the lady's up, no harm done.'

"Finally they meet: 'the master' and 'the young lady.'They look: Khodasevich at Maria Papper, Maria Papper at Khodasevich. 'With whom do I have the honor of speaking?' A mouse voice, everything sounds something like ee-ee-ee: 'I am Maria Pa-apper.' 'What can I do for you?'—'I write po-et-ree-ee-ee...'

"And from who knows where, out comes a huge briefcase, a government-sized briefcase. Khodasevich sits down at the table. Maria Papper sits on the sofa. Ten o'clock, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock. Maria Papper reads. Khodasevich listens. Listens—like a man spellbound! But somewhere inside—of the digestive track or of the soul, in any case, in a place out of reach for scratching— there's an itch. The itch grows and grows. Maria Papper reads and reads. Suddenly, he yawns nervously and jumps up, using his last shreds of strength, seizing his watch:

'You'll excuse me—I'm—very busy—the publisher is waiting for me right now—and I—I'm expecting a friend this minute.'

'Then I'll be going. I'll come again.'

"Set at liberty, Khodasevich suddenly turns kind:

'You have, of course, the basics, but you have to work more on the poetic line...'

'I write all the time ee-ee-ee-even now...'

'You have to write not all the time, but differently...'

'Well, I can write differently...! have...'

"Khodasevich, understanding what is looming up:

'Well, of course you are still young and you have time to... No, no, don't go that way. Allow me to show you out by the front door...'

"The entrance door clicks shut, the master of the house blissfully loosens up the sinews of his arms and legs, and suddenly— like a windstorm, bearing shod hands above her head from the kitchen into the entrance hall—the cook:

'Young la-ady! Young la-ady! Oh what a shame! She's forgotten her galoshes!'

'... You know, M.I., it doesn't always end so well, sometimes those galoshes go flying after her.... Sometimes, especially if it's from an upper story, they fall right on her head, but head or feet, Khodasevich or (modestly)...the same thing happened to me -in a word: a week later a poet is sitting, writing a sonnet... 'Master, hello, master?'-'What do you want?'-'There's a certain young lady come to see you, she's waiting for something since seven o'clock.... We've both had tea twice already.... She's told me the story of her life.... (Embarrassedly) A writing lady.' "

* * * * *

Thus Max raised certain people to the rank of chimera.

Max brought me her book. It was called The Sail.[. . .] 105

Everything that I might have liked, Max hauled in for me like a catch. In his teeth. Like a bear to a baby cub. For every age group Max had a particular image. For my, then, near-childhood, he was a magician and a bear; for my present-day-maturity or whatever it's called-he is a myth-maker, a world-maker and a peace-maker. Max gave everything to his friends, except the continuity of his presence, which, considering the infinitude of his friendships, would have been omnipresence, that is, a physical impossiblity. Among folk tales, I remember Max most of all loved the animal tales, the very oldest ones, the tales of an ancient homeland, allegories-parables. But you can speak about a separate love for the folk tale when the non-folk tale exists. For Max the non-folk tale did not exist, and he would go from some sort of fox story to an instance from his own life as easily as that same fox goes from the forest to its lair.

One thing he was not: a tale-teller in writing. Neither his own folk tale quality nor his folk tale telling went over into his writing. That self, those two selves, he did not present in his writing-writing that was very large in its scope. If that were so, I would not have insisted so much on his folk tale quality. He himself was from a folk tale, was himself a folk tale, the very essence of folk tale, and, in strengthening this image of his, I am doing the same thing as all collectors of folk tales, with this difference, that the collectors write down a tale they have heard, while I write down a tale seen and, together with Max, lived: vecue.

* * * * *

On this French, irreplaceable and non-existent word (we don't say vie vecue—"lived life" and our prozhitoe—"life lived through" already in the completed past doesn't convey the idea) I come to a stop so as to speak about Max and France.

The obvious source of his writing in the first years of our meeting, the last years before the war, was indisputably and obviously France. Even if you take only the books that he would j'jve to friends and to me as I was then-. Casanova or Claudel, Axel or Consuelo—not one, during years and years, German or Russian book came to anyone from his hands. Not one story except from the life of the French—writers or historical figures—came to anyone's ears from his lips. His reference was always to France. The turn of the head always to France. That's how he lived, with his head turned to Paris, Paris of the thirteenth century or our own present century; the Paris of streets and the Paris of eras was equally traversed from end to end by him. In each Paris he was at home and nowhere except in Paris, at that hour of his life and in that part of his being, was he at home. (I'm not talking about Koktebel from which later grew—everything.) His movement around Moscow and St. Petersburg, his omnipresence and omniplacement everywhere where poems were read and minds were meeting, was only the re-establishment of Paris. Just as some of us, in any case Russian nurses, turn the Arc de Triomphe into the Triumphal or even the Triuncle Archway and Passy into the Arbat,106 so too Max in those years transformed the Arbat into Passy and the Moscow River into the Seine. The Paris of the past, present-day Paris, the Paris of writers, the Paris of clochards, the Paris of the Parisians, the Paris—of those from Kaluga107 (there was a Paris like that even then!), the Paris of the first written document about it and the Paris of Mistengette's latest song—the whole of Paris, with all its, Paris's, capaciousness was mixed into him. (Did all Max fit into its mix?)

One thing, however, Max did not fit into Paris. You'll see what right now. "M.A., what do you like best of all in Paris?" Max, lightning-quick: "The Eiffel Tower. "-"Really? "-"Yes, because it's the one place from which you can't see it." Max hated the Eiffel in a way that he could never hate a living face. "Do you know, Marina, what rhymes with Eiffel?" And, afraid that I'll beat him to it: "Teufel" (that is, Devil.) I don't have his first book here, but I remember that wherever you open it, Paris is everywhere. It's a rare page that doesn't give us Paris, if not a literal Paris then an allegorical Paris. His first book, a good half of it, belongs to alien territory. In this he resembles the majority of pre-war poets: Balmont—overseas; Bryusov—all histories, except Russian; the early Blok—The Stranger, the west; Bely's Gold in Azure108— the gothic and the romantic. And later: Gumilev—Africa,109 Kuzmin—France, and even the first Akhmatova, Akhmatova of the first book,110 if she does mention Russia it is as a guest—from the land of Love, which in Russia is also the exotic. Only Max's foreignness (except for the "exotic" of Akhmatova) was more modest and more focused.

Now I will add a note of reservation. Just as everything said above: about Max and the world, about Max and people, about Max and myth is certainty, that is, without reservation, that is, as if signed by him and even written by him, so also what follows is only my insight, irrefutable only for me. I have, alas, no one to check it with, for only in him alone would I believe more than in myself.

I said the obvious source of his writing, but there are also sources that are hidden, hidden wellsprings that move under the earth for a long time, nourishing everything on the way and breaking through to the surface—in their own time. Of these hidden wellsprings Max had two: Germany, that never became visible, and Russia, that did become visible—and precisely in its own time. I have already spoken of Max's physical kinship with Germany, that is, the simple presence of Germanic blood. But there was, in my view, also a spiritual kinship, deep, even profound, which—and right here begins the dangerous and very answerable part of my assertions—was not with France. May Max forgive me if I am wrong, but I can't pass it over in silence.

Let's consider it more broadly: we never had a kinship with France. We Russians—are different. We did have and do have a love for France; we had, perhaps still have, and if not just now then perhaps we will have again later—a love affair with her; our relationship with France is enchantment along with non-comprehension, and indeed, not only hers—of us, but ours—of her, for to understand another means to become that other if only for an hour. But we, even tor an hour, cannot become Frenchmen. All the power of the enchantment, its whole source—is in alienness.

Let us broaden the approach, let us approach it above and beyond persons. We are obliged to France for a great deal—Max too was obliged; we do not negate that—I do not negate it for Max; in certain facets of history we correspond, I'll say more, certain facets of French history we sense as our own facets. And more ours than our own.

Let us take only the last century and a half. The French Devolution in all its scope: from the Terror to the Temple (one is lor the Terror, one for the Temple, but every Russian finds in the French Revolution his own love), all the Napoleoniad, the year 1848 with the Russian Rudin111 at the barricades, the whole late-day sacrifice of the Commune, even the catastrophe of the year 1870.

Vous avez pris I'Alsace et la Lorraine

Mais notre coeur vous ne I'aurez jamais ...112

-All that is our native history, drunk in with our mother's milk. Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, George Sand and many more and many more—are our native writers, no less than the Russians contemporaneous with them. All this I know, to all this I subscribe, but-all this goes only to a certain depth, that is, is still the surface, only below which begins our real essence, an essence alien to France.

It is all on the surface of the skin, below which begins the blood.

Our family, our kind is our modest and unobtrusive neighbor Germany, with which—even if once, long ago, we loved her in the person of the best heads and hearts of our own country—we never had a love affair. As you never have a love affair with yourself. The heart of the matter is not in the historical moment: "In the eighteenth century we loved France, but in the first half of the nineteenth, Germany"; the heart of the matter is not in history but in pre-history, not in moments, that pass by, but in the blood we have in common with Germany, in our single ancestral homeland, in that wine of which the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam,113 at the very height of the war, wrote:

But I sing the wine of ages-

The source of the Italian speech,

And in the ancient Aryan cradle

The Slavic and the German fief.

A brilliant formula of our union with Germany from birth and forever.

Let us go back to Max. I myself am not satisfied with the verbal assertion of his Germanicism, nor with a reference to even a very strong thing: blood. I know one thing: there was Germanicism. I must be specific: in what. In life? At first glance, no. Neither his vitality, nor his picture painting, nor his picturesqueness, nor his—like wide-ranging love—wide-ranging friendship, nor the quickness with which he came into contact with people, nor his whole external tempo were Germanic. In fact more Burgundian than Germanic. (By the way, Max, except for New Year's, never put wine in his mouth: it wasn't needed!)

Well then—let us begin with the most simple everyday thing —the exactitude, the pedantry even of his habits: "I have this placed there and this here and it will stay here," and then, the passion for work in the morning: the function of work in the morning, and then, the culture of the book, and then, the cult of owning books, and then, the passion for the sun and the repulsion for excess clothing (Luftbad, Sonnenbad!),114 and then his walking mania and—we are on the threshold of important things—his aloneness: eight months of the year alone in Koktebel with his roaring sea and his own thoughts, and then, the active passion for nature, outside of which he physically suffocated, the equality of his ability to sit at the work table (he had outmelted, as he put it, his own Awakum seven times115) anj of njs ability to persist in mountain ascents. Max did not live on the main road, as Russians do, he was neither a tramp, nor, in the popular sense, a vagabond, he was a Wanderer,116 the man who goes forth with a defined goal: to take such and such a peak, and toward the end of the day, or of the summer, purified and enriched, returns—home. And the firmness of his friendships, without a tremor, the time span of his friendships, without limit, his very deep human fidelity, the meticulousness of his study of another person's soul, were all visibly Germanic. He was a friend from the Land of Friends, that is, from Germany. For the sake of clarity: along with a visibly French sociability—a visibly Germanic way of communicating with people, along with the French quantity the Germanic quality in Friendship; right away like a Burgundian but once and for all like a German. Here it is really proper to mention the proven and legendary deutsche Treue,117 fidelity, to which not one people, except the Germanic, can add an acquisitory adjective.

All this concerns ordinary life and living with other people, the most visible life. But more important and more untraceable than life with other people is the life of a person without people with the world, with himself, with God, the life within. Here I boldly assert Max's Germanicism. His profoundest pantheism, the godliness in everything, the god in everything, the god in all places, the pantheism that issued from him in beams of light with such power, that it included Max himself, and, because of our nearness, us too with him, into the pantheon—of at least the minor gods; his profoundest inborn pantheism was visibly Germanic—arch-Germanic and Goethian. Max, whether he knew it or not, was a Goethian, and here, I think, is the bridge to his Steinerism, his most secret realm about which I know nothing except that it was there in him, and was the strongest thing.
He was a hidden mystic, that is, a real mystic, a secret pupil of a secret doctrine about what is secret. A mystic who was hidden understates it—buried.... Never did a single word cross the threshold of his so generous lips, lips made articulate by an overflowing heart. From this I conclude that he was sanctified. I hat essence of his, in reality, was buried with him. And perhaps, some day, over there, on the Koktebel mountain, where he is lying, it will yet appear, placed there by one unknown—the mantle of the Rosicrucians.118

102. The translation omits several paragraphs at this point.

103. Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1883-1945), a distant relative of Lev Tolstoi, is known primarily as a prose writer. In 1907, however, he published a collection of poetry and took an active part in various literary circles connected with Symbolism. Tolstoi emigrated in 1919 but in 1923 he returned to the Soviet Union, where his books became very popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his most ambitious projects was an historical trilogy on the Revolution and Civil war, Khozhdeniia po mukham, usually referred to as The Road to Calvary in English.

104. The name "Boris Nikolaevich" refers to Andrei Bely, whose real name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev.

105. A short passage is omitted here containing a sample Papper poem.

106. The Arbat is the name of a street in Moscow and also of the district around the street. It is often compared to the Left Bank in Paris. Here, however, it is rather comically equated with Passy, a near suburb of Paris.

107. Kaluga is situated on the elevated bank of the River Oka, 188 kilometers to the southwest of Moscow.

108. Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880-1921) is generally considered to be the greatest among the Symbolist poets. Both Blok and Andrei Bely belonged to the second generation of Symbolism and their biographies are closely intertwined. (See the first note to "A Captive Spirit.") "The Stranger" mentioned by Tsvetaeva refers to Blok's famous poem "Neznakomka" (the title might be translated as "The Unknown Woman") of 1906 and more generally to the poetry Blok wrote between about 1904 and 1907. Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri) is the title of Andrei Bely's first collection of poetry (1904).

109. The poet Nikolai Gumilev (see note 50 above) made three trips to Africa.

110. Akhmatova's first book (if Tsvetaeva in fact means us to understand that term quite literally) is Evening (Vecher), published in 1912.

111. The short novel Rudin by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was first published in 1856. Rudin is a fictional character, but his political views and personality are intended to stand for an historically real type of the Russian intelligent. The scene of Rudin's death in Paris during the Revolution of 1848 first appeared in the 1860 edition.

112. French. "You have taken Alsace and Lorraine but you will never have our hearts." The catastrophe to which Tsvetaeva refers was the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans in 1871 (not 1870). The territory was returned to France in 1918.

113. Tsvetaeva refers here to Mandelstam's poem "The Menagerie" ("Zverinets").

114. German. "Airbath, sunbath!"

115. The priest Awakum Petrovich (1620/21-1682), known simply as "Awakum," founded the Russian Old Believers, a dissident religious group which opposed certain changes in Orthodox beliefs and ceremonies introduced by the sevenleenth-century Patriarch Nikon. Remarkably perseverant in his religious convictions and in his work, Awakum continued to encourage his co-believers by his writings, which were produced under extremely difficult conditions in exile and in prison. His Life (Zhitie), written in 1672-75, is considered the first Russian autobiography.

116. The italics here indicate that Tsvetaeva left the word Wanderer In German so as to emphasize the particular connotations connected with German life and culture

117. German. "Germanic loyalty."

118. The origin of the so-called Rosicrucian brotherhood goes back to the writings of Johann Valentin Andrea, a seventeenth-century writer and religious propagandist. Andrea was the author of the Fama fraternitatis, published in Cassel, Germany, In 1614, which purported to give the history of a secret society founded two centuries earlier by a German noble known as "Prater roseae crucis," the "Brother of the Rosy Cross" who had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. The following year a second document appeared, The Confession of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (Confessio fraternitatis R.C. eruditos Europae), which stated the founder's name to be Christianus Rozenkreutz, opposed the Catholic Church and the practice of Alchemy, and propound religious reforms which would transcend the divisions within Protestantism and be based on practical Biblical piety. This second work was more markedly apocalyptic. The name of the order and its symbology was taken over by various secret societies. After about a century had passed the Confession and the Fama became linked with Freemasonry which took Rosicrucian ceremonies and usages not only from the writings of Andrea but also from writings directed against the movement.