1 2 3 4 5 6

To Vera Muromtseva,1 one of my same roots.

I

Grandfather Ilovaisky2

Not a collective grandfather like "Grandfather Krylov"3 or "Grandfather Andersen," but a genuine authenticated relative, only not my own kin but one step away.

"Mama, why does Andryusha have two grandfathers and we have only one?" I remember the question, I don't remember the answer, and there most likely wasn't one because mother couldn't answer with the plain truth, to wit: "Because my father, your grandfather, Alexander Danilovich Meyn, a big-hearted and just man, can't help loving or at least petting and bringing gifts to another man's grandchild the same as he does with his own, whereas Andryusha's grandfather, a hardened and already very old man, has all he can manage to love his one and only grandson." And so it happened that Andryusha had "two grandfathers," while Asya and I between us had one.

Our grandfather is better. Ours brings us bananas—and for everyone too. Grandfather Ilovaisky brings nothing but gold pieces, and only for Andryusha, puts them straight into his hand-even past his hand somehow—without saying a word, without even looking, and only on birthdays or at Christmas. Mama takes the gold pieces away from Andryusha then and there. "Avgusta Ivanovna, wash Andryusha's hands."—"But the coin is a new one." —"There's no such thing as clean money." (And that's how it stuck for us children and for good: money—is dirt.) And so grandfather's present for Andryusha was not only no fun but even foul: washing your hands an extra time with the German woman who without any prompting at all scrubbed you to the bone. The gold piece, however, dropped out of sight down into a separate "Ilovaiskian" piggy bank and no one thought about it until it was gold piece day again. (One fine day the whole piggy bank with all the Ilovaisky gold disappeared—ten years' worth—and if someone regretted it, it wasn't Andryusha. So from our earliest childhood gold meant not only dirt but an empty sound.)

Our grandfather comes by for us with his horses and rides us away to Petrovskoe-Razumovskoe ;4 Andryusha's grandfather doesn't give anyone a ride because he never rides himself but always walks on foot. And that's why he's lived to such an old age, say the grownups. Our grandfather brings us home mechanical toys from abroad. Last time, for instance, Andryusha got a little toy boy from Carlsbad who climbs on a wall. But when grandfather Ilovaisky is there, Andryusha, a real live boy, can't move a muscle, as if a spring in him had suddenly broken. After every one of his visits, our old house on Three Ponds hisses and whispers through all its passages and doorways: "Millionaire (Nurse)— Millionar (the Baltic nursemaid)," and together: "Shushushu— Androuscha—little Andryusha—reicher Erbe—wealthy heir..." The words don't make any sense at all for us, a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old; they remain pure magic, the same as grandfather Ilovaisky himself sitting on the bentwood chair in the middle of the ballroom, most often without even taking off his big floor-length coat. He knew all about the cold on the main floor at Three Ponds, because it was his house, the one he gave as a dowry to his daughter Varvara Dmitrievna when she married my father. Grandfather Ilovaisky never went farther than that ballroom and he never sat on the curvy green ballroom sofa, always on a bare chair in the middle of the bare parquetry floor as if sitting on an island. Prodding in the air at the little girl approaching or sitting nearby: "And who's this—Marina or Asya?— Asya—A—ah—ah." Not approval, not surprise, not even conscious recognition. Nothing. But then, we didn't get any feeling from him either—not even fear. We knew that he wasn't seeing us. The two-year-old and the four-year-old and the seven-year-old boy knew that for him we don't exist. And we looked him over just as freely and calmly as the Pushkin monument on Tver Boulevard.5 The one effect he had on us—the same, by the way, as any monument-was a certain gradual, painless, thorough-going paralysis in the room, that released us only at the creak of the front door. If Grandfather Ilovaisky had never left—we would never have moved.

In spring, out onto the scene of our green, poplared Three Ponds courtyard rolled the leather Ilovaisky trunks, the dowry of Andryusha's mother, the beauty Varvara Dmitrievna, the first love, the endless love, the endless longing of my father.

The red slipperette (that was how we talked when we were children) with the heel as high as the foot was long ("My goodness

hut her ladyship's feet were teeny!" oh'd and ah'd Masha the maid), the roll of black lace? the white shawl, its fringe sweeping the ground, the red coral comb. We never saw things like that belonging to our mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn. Corals too: a necklace of seven strands (mother to two-year-old Asya: "Say it, Asya, say 'coral necklace.' ") It would be nice to touch them a minute with your hands. But—you mustn't touch. And those red pear-shaped drops go in ears. And these here with red fire and even wine inside are garnets. ("Say it, Asya, say, 'garnet bracelet.' Bra-ce-let.") And there's a coral pin—a rose. Corals are Neapel, garnets are Boehmen.6 Garnets... granates... pomegranates7... are things you eat. This here is a strange word, blondy—blond lace. From some great-grandmother, from Mamaka,8 a Rumanian lady. No sense to it, just pure magic. ("They say her ladyship was an actress, sang in the theatre," Masha whispers to our Baltic nursemaid. "They say our master was awful grieved without her ladyship."— "Dummheiten,"9 the Baltic nursemaid cuts her off in her deep voice, guarding the honor of the house. "She was just a wealthy daughter, with a wealthy father. And she sang like the birds for her own private pleasure.") A little boy's outfit, warm, made of burning velvet. A boy dressed up like that is called a page, a pazh. (And the black cord with a snakey head they use to hold up a skirt is a pazh.10) And this long knife is called an epee. Failles, moires, fermoirs. Boxes, bandboxes... That—the way all this smells—is patchouly. Andryusha, convinced that there won't be another long knife, whirls around us on a "steckenpferd."11 Timidly I say to mother: "Mama, how... beautiful."- -"I can't find it. And it has to be taken care of because it's Lera's dowry."-"But what silvery snow!"-'"That's naphthalene. So the moths won't eat anything." Naphthalene, moths, dowry, patchouly, there's no sense to it, it's just magic, pure magic.

Later the skeleton of a bicycle appeared in our green poplared courtyard. I say "skeleton" because when I was a little older I recognized its distinguishing marks in the very first of those animals, inordinately-high up, with inordinately-long necks and legs far-removed from the ground, that exist only as a skeleton and in pictures at that (just the same as that kind of bicycle). "An historian's prehistoric bicycle," laughs and even guffaws Guliaev12 the free-thinking student coaching Andryusha to enter the preparatory class of the Seventh Gymnasium and coaching sister Lera, surreptitiously, into becoming his fiancee. It was the first model of the bicycle, bestowed upon, or rather, left to (more simply—abandoned to!) a grandson who had reached the age of serious study by an ungenerous grandfather. For his own use, Grandfather bought a new one. For a nine-year-old boy the most difficult and even impossible thing about that bicycle was getting on it. The second thing was riding on it; his foot reached short of the pedal by almost a yard. The only achievement possible was to sit on it, since the skeleton was three-wheeled, immutably-tenacious and assiduous. Matvei the yardman propelled the bicycle with Andryusha on it around the yard. Asya and I were never allowed up to the sacred Ilovaiskian seat. But we didn't even have hopes. Everything Ilovaiskian in our house, from Valeria's bits and pieces—she was a private school student— to Andryusha's ichthyosaurus, as far as we, merely Tsvetaevs were concerned, was taboo. It was a house of silent orders, bidding and forbidding. Later a rifle of the same vintage appeared in our house. And a telescope of the same vintage. You might say that Grandfather grew out of his things the way a child grows out of his shoes, only in reverse proportion—exchanging bigger for smaller. However, the bicycle, the rifle, and the telescope proved to be his sole legacy to his grandson. The rest (the millions—with and without quotation marks) were inherited by the Revolution.

Ilovaisky lived on Little Dmitry Street in a lane by Old Pimen. Asya and I were never in the Ilovaisky house; we only heard about it.13 Father would say to mother: "You haven't been over there for a whole month now, it's the fifth Friday. You must understand: it's insulting. Make an effort, my dear, you have to..."- "That means sitting down in the corner room again and spending the whole evening playing vint."14 And vint, "turntable," is played this way: in the middle of the room stands a vint table, around the table sit guests and they turn it around and whoever did the most turning—won. It's also called "turning the tables" and that's what Lera does with the young Ilovaiskys, when she shuts us out by locking the door. It's a boring game and even frightening because, the way mother tells it, you can't get up from your place or stop until midnight; in the doorway of the corner room stands Grandfather Ilovaisky who doesn't let you. Later, when I've understood that vint is a card game, I will remember mother's saying: "Wenn die Menschen keine Gedanken zum Austausch haben, tauschen sie Karten aus, "15 and still later I recognized those words in Schopenhauer. "What can you do, my dear, you can't remake people and you mustn't offend them..." sighed father, himself deeply indifferent to every table but the willing table.

Andryusha doesn't like to be over at the Ilovaiskys'. There .iren't any children his own age there and he falls straight into the rlnws of Grandfather's second wife, Alexandra Alexandrovna, whom he addresses just that way, using her first name and patronymic. A.A. (nee Kovraiskaia) is thirty years younger than Grand-I :ither and, so the grownups say, is still a beautiful woman, but we think just the opposite, because her face is spiteful: she has a nose with strange pinched-up nostrils and, coming through the pinched-up nostrils, a voice just as pinched. And as for "beauty marks"—beauty marks are just spots, as if she had eaten chocolate and not wiped off her lip. She always goes around in "rooster dress," that is, in a dress with tiny checks, black and white, brown and white, gray and white, that gives you spots in your eyes if you look at it a long time, and you do have to look at it a long time, lowering your eyes under her all-seeing black eyes-just the reverse of his unseeing blue eyes—down to that spotty skirt of hers. She is all tightly pulled in, neatly tucked up, "tiree a quatre epingles"16 as the grownups say, and always "sending out barbs," which, in conjunction with the "quatre epingles," turned her, the way we saw it, into a kind of pincushion.

But A.A.'s children are wonderful. There are three: dark-eyed Nadya, black-eyed Serezha and the very pretty, stout Olya with eyes that in our house they call "forget-me-not."

Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaisky was married twice. The first wife and all three children from the first marriage died. I remember the marvelous faces of those boys in the family album. (In that family beauty was in full bloom!) Of the first family, Varvara Dmitrievna, the beauty I've already mentioned, died last. But death did not come to a stop. In 1905 both the beautiful Nadya and the handsome Serezha (twenty-two years old, twenty years old) one after the other were laid out on the table at Old Pimen. And the last daughter Olya did worse than die as far as Ilovaisky was concerned: she ran off to a man of Jewish descent in Siberia where she married him.

The year 1906. After a long stay abroad, Asya and I, having lost our mother, grown up and grown unfamiliar, returned to our Three-Ponds house. The large ballroom to which nothing had been added during our absence but a colored, half-length portrait of Andryusha's mother (a portrait that was fatal in our mother's life). In the middle of the room is a bentwood chair; on the bare chair, under the dark, lovely gaze of the deceased woman, in the waves of his black fur coat, in the middle of the bare floor as if in the middle of a bare field—is Grandfather Ilovaisky. The stretched-out finger, the leaden, unseeing gaze: "Which one is this? Asya, or...?— Marina—A—ah—ah..." And he did not recognize us not because he had not seen us thus-and-so many years, but because he never saw us at all, not once, that is, he did not connect the face with the name, and he did not connect them because he didn't care one way or the other. And the question about the names (who was who?) was the purely functional reaction of an historian: mettre les noms sur les figures17 — names forgotten then and there—because they weren't historical. Ilovaisky's reactions never went as far as "historical dates," that is, my and Asya's ages. Whether the Marina standing in front of him was five years or fifteen years old—why should it concern him when she was not a Mnishek,18 and he himself was eighty and more winters old!

"It's a strange house grandfather has," reports brother Andrei who had been living all those years at the Ilovaiskys'. "They heat from downstairs and always at night; if you're barefoot you can't put a foot down, you dance as if you're in hell! And grandfather himself sleeps up in the attic, with the window open in hard frost, and he made Nadya and Serezha do it too, maybe that's even why they died. And he doesn't eat anything, the whole day three prunes and two bowls of oat-flour porridge. And he doesn't sleep all night, and he won't let her sleep, he either writes or he walks around, right up above my head—always back and forth, back and forth. If he stops that means he's writing. I go to the gymnasium—he goes to sleep. I come home to eat—he's already writing again. And what is it he's writing all the time? 'I'll bring it,' he says, 'as far as the very last days.' What very last days is lie talking about, when today, for instance, is the last day, isn't it? and tomorrow it's the last one again! So of course it's possible to go on and never-ever end... And he's healthy!! He still rides horseback even now, and when he blows a horn your ears split! He doesn't sleep himself, but he sends other people to bed. While Nadya and Serezha were still living, their friends would be there waiting, talking or playing some game, and at exactly ten o'clock, at the very stroke, there's grandfather on the threshold in a robe. He comes up and blows out one candle, then another, and so on, until one is left. That one he leaves. And he goes out without saying a word. So it's time for the guests to go home. Well, the guests make a shuffle in the front entryway with their boots so he knows that they've gone, but when he goes off to his loom in the attic they come back again, and that's when they have ihe real party, only it's all hush-hush..."

Grandfather did, however, think up one other question for Asya and me, even two. "You're studying in the gymnasium?" "Yes."—"With what textbook? "-"Vinogradov. (A variant: Wipper.)" A dissatisfied: "Hmm..." But Ilovaisky was of use to me on exams, and more than once. One day when I opened his textbook, my eyes chanced on the following note, down below on the page, in pinpoint print: "In the Pontian swamps Mithrydates19 lost seven elephants and one eye." One eye—I liked that. Lost—but preserved for posterity! I claim that that eye is a work of art! Because what is all art, if not the finding of lost things, the immortalization of things lost?

I started to read more: earlier and later and ancient and middle and modern, and I soon was convinced that I can see everything that he writes: that everything in his writing is an eye, whereas the inevitable class warfare of our Pototskys, Alferovskys and so on, of the liberal secondary schools, has no eyes at all, no faces, only packs of people—and they're all fighting away. But here there were living faces, living Tsars and Tsaritsas, and not only the Tsars: monks too, and scoundrels and robbers!... "You are very well prepared. What sources did you study from?"-"Ilovaisky." The liberal pedagogue, not believing his own ears: "How's that? But his textbooks are completely outdated! (A pause, full of the most various cogitations.) In any case you are thoroughly knowledgeable. And, despite a certain one-sidedness of interpretation, I'm grading you..." Five, I mentally prompt him. I repeated that trick in every gymnasium I entered, and I was entering all the time. And so "Ilovaisky," so hateful to so many generations of schoolchildren, was the source from which I, a schoolgirl in a liberal period, received more than one top score.

Ilovaisky's second question for Asya and me was: "Have you read my Kremlin?"20-"Yes."-"And what do I write there?"-"About Jews."-"And what do I write there about the Yids?"-"You don't like them." (A ghost of a smile and with a certain indescribable afflatus:) "Don't like them!..."

His own grandson, however, was questioned in greater detail - and more slyly. "Tell him that too, and that! A real interrogation! I'm not the one who wrote it after all! Memorize it—is that what I'm supposed to do?" complained Andrei. "I say: 'Germans,' he says: 'Livonians.' For all I care they can be Laplanders! Yesterday he wouldn't let me go for a whole hour!"

The monthly paper Kremlin with its one editor, collaborator, subscriber, and distributor—Ilovaisky. (He brought it around personally to relatives and friends.) He did, however, have occasion to feel the censor standing over him, for in 1905, after three advance warnings, the Kremlin was closed, for the open and irascible criticism by the historian Ilovaisky of the historic action taken by the last Tsar of Russia in October 1905.21 I remember this entry in mother's young diary (around 1895):

"I was at a lecture by D.I. on the summoning of Mikhail Romanov to the Tsardom,22 given in the presence of the Imperial Family. In Ilovaisky's presentation it came out that Mikhail Romanov was elected to the Tsardom for his utter insignificance. Daring, but with members of the family present—awkward." He proved his fearlessness and thorough-going disregard for everything that did not once and for all manifest itself as truth and duty in an epoch more demanding of answers than 1905. "And speak the truth to Tsars with a smile."23 I never saw a smile on Ilovaisky's face, ever. I doubt that the Tsars saw it either. But they heard the truth.

The Kremlin, of course, was subsequently allowed again and D.I. went on inundating the houses of his vassals with it. The one thing remaining from my one visit to the Ilovaiskys' home is the memory of the Kremlin in the deep window recesses, mounds that reached to the top window sash and not allegorically but physically cut the inhabitants and visitors off from God's daylight and his world. Please keep this room, a half basement with Godu-novian24 vaults, in mind.

He was a handsome elderly man. Good-sized, broad-shouldered, straighter than a gunbarrel at ninety years old, straight-nosed, with the side part and curls of a Turgenev and his same beautiful brow under which were large, icy, penetrating eyes, except that in real life the eyes looked at you like lead.
I close my eyes and I see: our small Three-Ponds entryway, in the doors of the main entrance an elderly man in an enormous fur coat, in front of him the quakingly timid maid who ten years long could not get used to him. "Masha's your name? Well then, report to your master that the gentleman from OId Pimen has come. He's brought the Kremlin."

1. The name of Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva (the wife of Ivan Bunin) is indissolubly linked to Tsvetaeva's mature autobiographical writing. It is appropriate, therefore, that her name stands at the beginning of Tsvetaeva's four-part prose masterpiece. Vera Nikolaevna's uncle was the Chairman of the first Russian State Duma. She grew up in Moscow and was a contemporary of the Ilovaisky children who were linked to the Tsvetaev family by Professor Tsvetaev's first marriage (see note 2 below). She had also been a friend of Tsvetaeva's half-sister Valeria. Tsvetaeva first discovered the connection in May 1928. "I am still under the impact of your letter," she wrote to Bunina, "the House on Three Ponds [i.e., the Tsvetaev house-JMK] -a common cradle-I couldn't believe my eyes! The first thing I saw was: raspberry red velvet, on top of that an album, in the album a small face. Bare arms, exposed shoulders. The first thing I heard was: 'Vera Muromtseva' ... I was growing up abroad and you were visitng the house when I wasn't there. I don't remember you in the house, but I remember your name. You lived in it as a sound. 'Vera Muromtseva' is my early childhood." (Letter to V. N. Bunina, May 5, 1928, N.P, p. 400.) It was because their common roots went back to the years of girlhood that Tsvetaeva used Vera Nikolaevna's maiden name in the dedication. Then too, Tsvetaeva and Vera Nikolaevna's husband, Ivan Bunin, were not on friendly terms in emigration-yet another reason for using the name Muiomtseva. " 'Vera Muromtseva.' 'Bunin's wife.' You understand that those ate two different people, unacquainted with one another," Tsvetaeva writes, "... I am writing 'to Vera Murom-tseva,' I am writing HOME." (N.P., p. 401.) Vera Nikolaevna's next letter fired Tsvetaeva's memory with yet another name-Nadya Ilovaiskaya, who was to figure so prominently in the prose five years later. "Your letter is utterly astonishing," Tsvetaeva writes. "You write me about Nadya Ilovaiskaya, for the love of whom-no, simply FOR WHOM I suffered-let me remember!-foi a year, a year-and-a-half . . . 'Nadya Ilovaiskaya' is my whole self at ten years old: AN ABYSS .. . First "Three Ponds,'next 'Nadya Ilovaiskaya' -you are stepping into me with giant steps, with the steps of the soul." (Letter to V.N. Bunina, May 23, 1928, N.P., p. 401). Later, in August 1933, with the autobiographical work that was to become "The House at Old Pimen" already underway, Tsvetaeva wrote to Vera Nikolaevna with a list of ten questions about the Ilovaisky household. Vera Nikolaevna answered there. And in late August Tsvetaeva read a copy of Vera Nikolaevna's own memoir on the family, "At Old Pimen," which had been published in 1931. Tsvetaeva borrowed Bunina's final line to close her own memoir and she may well have chosen her final title under the impact of Bunina's work. Tsvetaeva fervently and repeatedly acknowledged the importance both of Bunina's information and her encouraging friendship; the letters to Bunina give a clear view into Tsvetaeva's prose workshop and a perspective on the whole decade of 1928-38.

2. "Grandfather llovaisky" is Dmitry Ivanovich llovaisky (1832-1920), a wellknown historian, author of history textbooks for secondary schools, writer and publisher of a politically conservative periodical, The Kremlin. Dmitry llovaisky married twice and had two sets of children. His daughter by his first marriage, Varvara Dmitrievna llovaiskaya, married Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, Tsvetaeva's father. Varvara Dmitrievna died young, leaving Professor Tsvetaeva with two children, Valeria (1883-1966) and Andrei (1890-1933). Dmitry Ilovaisky's first wife died and llovaisky married again. His new wife was Alexandra Alexandrovna nee Kovraiskaya, who bore him three children, Nadya, Sergei, and Olga. Ilovaisky's children from his second marriage were about the same age as Valeria Tsvetaeva. Nadya Ilovaiskaya, Valeria Tsvetaeva, and Vera Muromtseva (Bunina) were all of about the same generation, about ten years older than Marina, who was born in 1892 of her father's second marriage.

3. Ivan Andreevich Krylov (c. 1769-1844), Russia's greatest writer of fables.

4. An outlying district of Moscow, something like Paris's Bois de Boulogne.

5. A large iron statue of the poet Pushkin by the sculptor A. M. Opekusru'n placed in 1880 on one of Moscow's wide, tree-lined boulevards. The Pushkin monument figures prominently in "My Pushkin."

6. German. "Bohemia."

7. Russian has one and the same word, granaty, to mean both garnets (the red semi-precious stones), and the fruit pomegranates, a coincidence Tsvetaeva exploits by making her four-year-old alter ego recognize only the latter meaning, thereby preparing for the link between the trunks and the Hadean captive, Persephone, established later in the prose work.

8. Mamaka was the grandmother of Ivan Vladimirovich's first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna. According to Anastasia Tsvetaeva's memoirs, Mamaka was still living in the house at Three Ponds in 1891 or 1892.

9. German. "Foolish notions."

10. Another important homonym. Here the word pazh brings together the red-colored velvet and the reference to the snake.

11. German. "Hobbyhorse."

12. Alexander Pavlovich Guliaev was Andrei's second tutor. Anastasia describes him as of medium stature with thick fair hail, moustache, and beard, and blue eyes. She also mentions his loud laugh. He seems not to have succeeded in becoming Lera's (Valeria's) fiance.

13. Tsvetaeva did visit the flovaisky house when she was older. "I was in the Ilovaiskys' only once," she writes to Bunina, "with my father after my mother's death, but their spirit lived in ours." And a few weeks later, "I see the house at Old Pimen, which, by the way, I was inside only once, in one room, in one of the room's corners, the darkest one, from which I contemplated the piles of The Kremlin halfway up the window which looked out into the garden, in which I would have liked so much to be ... (A small room—downstairs, maybe Nadya's? The illumination, because of the thickness of foliage was green, subaequeous: the light of the city of Kitezh .. .)" (Letter to V. N. Bunina, August 6,1933, JV. P., p. 409; and August 24,1933,N. P., pp. 422-23.)

14. Tsvetaeva's juvenile alter ego transfers to the unfamiliar name of the card game the meaning of its homonym, vint, meaning "screw," "spiral shaft," or "propeller," and imagines a spinning table.

15. German. "When people don't have any thoughts to produce, they produce a pack of cards."

16. French. Literally: "Pulled out on four pins," the expression actually means: "Impeccably groomed."

17. French. "Attach names to faces."

18. Tsvetaeva refers here to her namesake, Marina Mnishek (1588-1614), the daughter of a Polish magnate who was voevoda of Sandomir. During the Time of Troubles (the beginning of the seventeenth century), there appeared in Poland one Grigorii Otrepev who later came to be known as the first False Dmitry (see note 41 to "Voloshin"). Otrepev established his headquarters in Mniszek's castle and became infatuated with Marina. Eventually Otrepev entered Moscow and assumed the throne. Marina Mnishek married Otrepev in March 1601, and was crowned in May of that year. During the celebrations, however, Otrepev was killed in an uprising directed against the Poles and Lithuanians in the capital. Mnishek eventually was released to return home. Instead she recognized another Pretender (the so-called second False Dmitry) as her dead husband and the rightful Tsar. When the second Dmitry was murdered in December 1610, she found another ally in the Ataman I. M. Zarutsky, who supported the claim of Mnishek's son Ivan (born in January 1611) to the Tsardom. The three were eventually brought to Moscow. There Zarutsky and little Ivan were executed. Mnishek died in prison at the age of twenty-six.

19. The name of six kings of Pontus, the most famous of which was Mithridates VI, knows as "the Great" (131-63 B.C.), who fought three wars with the Romans and was finally defeated by Pompey.

20. A political and literary newspaper edited and published by D. I. llovaisky. It appeared from 1897 through 1916 at the rate of about two issues per year, most of the issues being double or even triple numbers. From the year 1908 the masthead read: llovaisky's Kremlin.

21. Beginning in January (see note 35 below) 1905, Petersburg was the scene of a series of demonstrations, strikes, and rallies in opposition to Nicholas II and his government. The Tsar responded by making some concessions to the liberal opposition. Meanwhile pro-Tsarist, right-wing parties rallied their strength, and the left-wing revolutionaries managed to convoke a Soviet of workers' deputies which met in the capital. On October 17, Nicholas signed a manifesto which promised to change Russia into a constitutional monarchy. The Manifesto of October 17 provided for a state consultative assembly, the State Duma, to be elected on the basis of a fairly wide franchise; it announced that all laws would henceforth and without exception be subject to the approval of the Duma; it guaranteed basic civil liberties including freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly, and freedom from arrest.

22. Mikhail Romanov was summoned to the Tsardom by a national assembly (zemskii sobor) convoked in 1613. He was proclaimed Tsar on February 21 of that year, an event which brought the wars, upheavals, and civil strife of the Time of Troubles to an end. The Romanov dynasty ruled until 1917.

23. A famous line written by the poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816), which enunciates the poet's conception of his civic responsibility.

24. A reference to Boris Godunov (1552-1605), who became Tsar of Russia during the Time of Troubles, and also to Pushkin's play of that name. In Pushkin's presentation, Godunov is burdened with guilt for the crimes he commits to gain the throne. Tsvetaeva means to link the vaults with the retribution that overtakes Godunov and, eventually, the Ilovaiskys.