1 2 3 4 5 6

It begins like a chapter in that novel, that indispensable tabletop reference work of all our mothers and grandmothers— Jane Eyre:1 The secret of the red room.

In the red room was a secret cabinet.

But before the secret cabinet there was something else, there was the picture in mother's room—The Duel.2

Snow, black sapling branches, two black people are supporting, a third under his arms, taking him to a sled—and still one more man, a different one, walks away, his back turned. The one they are taking away—is Pushkin, the one walking away—is d'Anthes. D'Anthes called out Pushkin to a duel, that is, he lured him out into the snow and there among the black leafless saplings, he killed him.

The first thing that I learned about Pushkin is that they killed him. Then I learned that Pushkin is—a poet, and d'Anthes—a Frenchman. D'Anthes came to hate Pushkin because d'Anthes couldn't write poetry and he called him out to a duel, that is, he lured him out into the snow and there shot him with a pistol in the stomach. And so at three years old, I found out once and for all, that a poet does have a stomach, and—I am remembering all the poets I ever chanced to meet—I worried about this stomach of a poet which is so often not-full and in which Pushkin was killed, no less than about the poet's soul. From Pushkin's duel a certain self was born in me, the sister. I'll go even further—in the word "stomach" there is something sacred for me—even a simple "my stomach hurts" floods me with a wave of trembling compassion that rules out all humor. With that shot they wounded all of us in the stomach.

Goncharova wasn't mentioned at all and I found out about her only when I grew up. A lifetime later 1 fervidly salute that concealment of mother's. A domestic tragedy acquired the magnitude of myth. And in essence there was no third in that duel. There were two: anyone and the one. That is, the eternal dramatis personae of Pushkin's lyric poetry: the poet—and the dark mass.3 The dark mass, this time in the uniform of a cavalry guardsman, killed—the poet. And a Goncharova, like a Nicholas I4—is always available.

* * * * *

"No, no, no—just you picture it for yourself!" said mother, quite without picturing for herself that "you." "Mortally wounded, down in the snow, and he didn't refuse his shot! Ik-aimed, he struck home, and what's more he said 'Bravo!' to himself." Her tone of rapture would have been natural to her, a Christian, if she had been saying: "Mortally wounded, bleeding, and he forgave his enemy! He cast away the pistol and extended his hand." With that tone of hers, she was clearly sending Pushkin and all of us back to his native Africa5 of revenge and passion and not suspecting what lesson—if not of revenge then of passion—she was giving for a whole lifetime to four-year-old, barely literate me.

Mother's bedroom, black and white without a single spot of color; the window, black and white: snow and the branches of the saplings; the picture, black and white: The Duel, where a black deed is accomplished on the snow's whiteness, the eternal black deed of the murder of a poet—by the dark mass.

Pushkin was my first poet and my first poet was killed.

From then on, yes, from then on, since the time in Naumov's picture, when, before my very eyes, they killed Pushkin, and every day, every hour, unceasingly they kept killing my whole infancy, childhood, and youth, I have divided the world into the poet— and all of them, and I have chosen—the poet, have chosen the poet to be among those I defend: to defend the poet—from all of them, however they all are garbed, however they all are named.

There were three pictures like that in our house on Three Ponds Lane: in the dining room—Christ Revealed to the People6 with the ever-unsolved riddle of the utterly tiny and incomprehensibly-near, utterly near and incomprehensibly-tiny Christ; the second picture, above the music shelf in the ballroom—Tartars, Tartars in white robes, in a stone house without windows, killing the chief Tartar among the white columns (The Killing of Caesar);7and—in mother's bedroom—The Duel. Two killings and one revelation. And all three were frightening, incomprehensible, threatening, even the Baptism with people and children the like of which I had never seen, black, curly-haired, aquiline-nosed, naked, filling up the river so full that not a drop of water remained; the Baptism was no less frightening than those other two—and all of them prepared a child very thoroughly for the frightening era preordained for it.

* * * * *

Pushkin was a Negro.8 Pushkin had side whiskers (only Negroes and old generals have them), Pushkin had hair standing upright and lips protruding outward, and black eyes with bluish whites like a puppy has—black in spite of the obvious light eye-coloring in his many portraits. If he's a Negro—then they are black. [Pushkin was light-haired and light-eyed.—M.Ts.]

Pushkin was a Nego the same as that Negro in the Alexander Arcade who stood next to the standing white bear above an eternally dry fountain where mother and I would go to have a look: hadn't it started to run? Fountains run but they never strike you9 and run away (and how could they ever do that?). The Russian poet—is a Negro, the poet—is a Negro and the poet—was struck down.

(Oh God, how it all came together! What poet among those that were and those that are, isn't a Negro and what poet—hasn't been struck down and killed?)

But before Naumov's Duel—for each memory has its own pre-memory, the ancestor-memory, the patriarch-memory, just like a fire ladder that you go down backwards, not knowing whether there will be one more step, the step that always turns up, or like the sudden night sky, in which you discover new, always new, the very highest and the very farthest off stars—but before Naumov's Duel there was another Pushkin, a Pushkin when I didn't know yet that Pushkin—is Pushkin. Pushkin not a memory, but a state of being, Pushkin—forever and fromever. Before Naumov's Duel there was the light of dawn and sunset, and growing out of it, going off into it, the shoulders cleaving it the way a swimmer cleaves a river, there was the black man, taller than anyone, blacker than anyone—with the head tilted downward and the hat in his hand.

The Pushkin monument10 was not the monument to Pushkin (dative case) but simply the Pushkin-Monument, one word containing two equally incomprehensible notions, the one never found without the other, of a monument and of Pushkin. That which is eternal, under the rain and under the snow—oh, how I can see those shoulders loaded down with snow, the African shoulders loaded down and overwhelmed with all the Russian snows!—it stands, shoulders into the sunset sky or into the snowstorm, whether I am coming or going, running away or running up to it, it stands with the eternal hat in the hand, it is called "The Pushkin Monument."

The Pushkin Monument was the goal and limit of a walk: from the Pushkin Monument—to the Pushkin Monument. The Pushkin Monument was also the goal of a race: who can run faster up to the Pushkin Monument. Except that Asya's nurse in her simplicity sometimes shortened it: "And we'll sit a bit—by Pushkin"; which unfailingly provoked my pedantic correction: "Not by Pushkin—by the Pushkin Monument."

The Pushkin Monument was also my first unit of spatial measurement: from the Nikita Gates to the Pushkin Monument— a milepost, that eternal Pushkin milepost, the milepost of "Devils," the milepost of "The Winter Road," the milepost of Pushkin's whole life and of our childhood anthologies, striped and protruding, incomprehensible and accepted.11

The Pushkin Monument was the daily round, just as much a dramatis personae of my life in childhood as the piano or the policeman Ignatev outside the window, who, by the way, would stand almost as unmovably only not so high up: the Pushkin Monument was one of the two—there was no third—daily, inevitable walks—to the Patriarch Ponds—or to the Pushkin Monument. And I preferred the Pushkin Monument because I liked opening up and even tearing open in flight my white suffocating Carlsbadian "topper" from Grandfather, running to it and once there, going around it and then, my head raised, looking at the black-faced and black-handed giant, who did not look at me, did not look like anyone or anything in my life, and sometimes simply jumping around it on one leg. And I ran, in spite of Andryusha's lankiness and Asya's weightlessness and my own pudginess, better than they did, better than everyone, from a pure feeling of honor: run up and then you can burst. I like the idea that the Pushkin Monument and nothing else was the first triumph of my flight.

There was a separate game too, with the Pushkin Monument, my game, this one: to hold up to his pedestal a finger-sized (the size of a child's little finger) white china doll—they were sold in chinaware stores, anyone who grew up in Moscow at the end of the last century knows them, there were gnomes under mushrooms, there were children under parasols—to hold up to the giant's pedestal a figurine like that and gradually letting my gaze move from the bottom upwards to take in the whole vertical granite slope, until my head fell back and away, to compare—the height.

The Pushkin Monument was also my first encounter with black and white: so black! so white!—and since the black one emerged as a giant, and the white one as a comical figurine, and since it was absolutely necessary to choose, right then and forever I chose the black one, and not the white, black, and not white: black thoughts, a black fate, a black life.

The Pushkin Monument was also my first encounter with number: how many figurines like this do you have to put one on top of the other to get a Pushkin Monument. And the answer even then was the same as it still is now: "No matter how many you put..." with the pridefully-modest addendum: "Now, if there were one hundred of me, then—maybe... because I'll grow some more..." And, at the same instant: "But if you have one hundred figurines, one on top of the other, do you get—me?" And the anwer: "No, and not because I'm big but because I'm alive, and they are china-dolls."

So the Pushkin Monument was also my first encounter with materials: iron, china, granite—and the material of which I was made.

The Pushkin Monument with me under it and the figurine under me was also my first object lesson in hierarchy: in relation to the figurine, I am a giant; but in relation to Pushkin—I am myself. That is, a small girl. But a girl who will grow up. I am to the figurine what the Pushkin Monument is to me. But in that case, what is the Pushkin Monument to the figurine? And after tortuous cogitation, the sudden illumination: the monument is so big, that the figurine simply doesn't see it. It thinks: House. Or: Thunder. And for the monument the figurine is so small that the monument likewise doesn't see it. The monument thinks: A mere flea. But me—it sees me. Because I am big and husky. And I'll soon be growing taller.

The first lesson in number, the first lesson in scale, the first lesson in materials, the first lesson in hierarchy, the first lesson in thinking and, the main, object confirmation of all my subsequent experience: from a thousand figurines, even set one on top of the other, you'll never make a Pushkin.

... Because I liked going away from him down the sandy or snowy walkway and coming back—towards his back with the hand, towards his hand behind his back, because he always stood with his back turned: going from him, his back is turned, and going towards him, his back is turned, turned toward everyone and everything, and we were always taking walks behind his back since the boulevard itself, with all three of its walkways,12 came up behind his back and the walk was so long that every time, we and the boulevard would forget what his face was like, and every time the face was new though it was the same face, just as black. (I think with sadness that the last trees before you got to him never did find out what kind of face he has.)

I loved the Pushkin Monument for its blackness—the reverse of the whiteness of our household gods.13 Their eyes were totally white but the Pushkin-Monument's were totally black, totally full. The Pushkin-Monument was totally black, like a dog, still blacker than a dog because the very blackest of them always had something yellow above the eyes or something white under the neck. The Pushkin Monument was black like the piano. If they hadn't told me later, that Pushkin was a Negro, I would have known, that Pushkin was a Negro.

From the Pushkin Monument I also got my mad love for black people, carried through a whole lifetime; to this day I feel the engulfment of my whole being, when, by chance, in a streetcar or some other vehicle, I find myself with a black person next to me. My white piety side by side with black deity. In every Negro I love Pushkin and I recognize Pushkin, the black Pushkin Monument of my pre-literate childhood and of all Russia.

... Because I liked it, that we do the leaving or the coming, but he—always stands there. Under snow, under flying leaves, in the red sky, in the blue, in the murky milk of winter—he stands, always.

Our gods were sometimes, although rarely, moved around. Our gods at Christmastime and at Eastertime were dusted all around with a rag. But this one the rains washed and the wind dried. This one—stood, always.

The Pushkin Monument was my first vision of immutability and invariability.

"To the Patriarch Ponds or...?"

"To the Pushkin Monument!"

At the Patriarch Ponds—there were no patriarchs.

* * * * *

A wonderful thought—to place a giant among children. A black giant among white children. A wonderful thought to pronounce white children the kin of black - to sentence them for life.

Those who grew up under the Pushkin Monument won't give preference to the white race, and I so expressly prefer the black. The Pushkin Monument, jumping ahead of events, is a monument against racism,14 for the equality of all races, for the primacy of each one— if only it has given us a genius. The Pushkin Monument is a monument to black blood that has poured into white, a monument to the intermingling of bloods, like monuments to the mingling of rivers, a living monument of the mingling of bloods, of the merging of national souls— of the most widely-separated souls, and, it would seem, the most unmergeable. The Pushkin Monument is a living proof of the baseness and moribundness of the racist theory, a living proof of its exact opposite. Pushkin is a fact that overturns the theory. Racism, before its coming to birth, is overturned by Pushkin at the very moment of his birth. But no-earlier: on the day of the wedding of the son of Peter the Great's Blackamoor, Osip Abramovich Hannibal, to Maria Alexeevna Pushkina.15 But no— still earlier: on the day, unknown to us, in the hour when Peter for the first time fixed a black, bright, happy, and frightening glance on the Abyssinian boy, Ibrahim. That glance was the order to Pushkin to be. So that the children who grew up under the Falconet Bronze Horseman in Petersburg,16 also grew up under a monument against racism— for geniuses.
A wonderful thought, to make Ibrahim's great grandson black. To pour him in iron, as nature poured the great grandfather in black flesh. The black Pushkin is a symbol. A wonderful thought to use the blackness of sculpture to give Moscow a shred of Abyssinian sky. For the Pushkin Monument clearly stands "under the sky of my Africa." A wonderful thought to use the tilt downward of the head, the thrust forwards of the foot, the hat taken off the head and brought up behind the back, the tilt, the thrust, the hat of a bow— to give. Moscow, under the poet's feet, a sea. For Pushkin does not stand above a sanded boulevard, but above the Black Sea.17 Above the sea of the free element18 — Pushkin of the free element.

1. A mysterious and frightening red room figures in the opening pages of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847).

2. The actual title of the painting is "Pushkin's Duel" (1884). The artist was A. A. Naumov (1840-1898), a minor painter known primarily for two paintings connected with Russian literature: "Pushkin's Duel" and an earlier canvas, "Belinsky before his Death" (1882).

3. The phrase "dark mass" attempts to capture some of the connotations of the Russian chern', which means "rabble," and which has the same root as the word meaning "black"—chernyi. Tsvetaeva plays on the common root and the shifts in meaning: "Duel', gde na belizne snega sovershaetsia chernoe delo: vechnoe chernoe delo ubiislva poeta-chern'iu" ("The Duel, where a black deed is accomplished on the snow's whiteness: the eternal black deed of the murder of a poet-by the dark mass"). Later the colors are reversed. Black is assigned to Pushkin because of his African heritage and the color of his statue. White stands for the mass of writers of lesser merit. "The Duel," incidentally, is painted in colors, but Tsvetaeva may have seen a black-and-white reproduction.

4. Tsvetaeva refers here to Natalia Nikolaevna Goncharova (1812-1863), Pushkin's wife, and to the Emperor Nicholas I (1796-1855, reigned from 1825). In his youth Pushkin provoked the displeasure of Tsar Alexander I by writing a series of anti-Tsarist political poems. He was exiled to the south (the Crimea and the Caucasus) from 1820 to 1824, and then, from 1824 to 1826, to a family estate named Mikhailovskoe. When Pushkin returned from exile he was summoned to an interview with the new emperor, Nicholas I. Nicholas made a show of friendliness and took upon himself the duty of censoring and approving the poet's works for publication. This "paternal" interest on Nicholas's part soon proved more irksome than the usual official censorship; it placed Pushkin under the close supervision of one Count Benckendorf, who was the head of the newly-formed Secret Police. Pushkin's marriage to Natalia Goncharova in February 1831 made matters worse, for Natalia Nikolaevna was a rather frivolous society beauty who was much admired by the Tsar. At the beginning of 1834 Nicholas made Pushkin a Kammerjunker (a subtly insulting "honor" since the office was usually reserved for much younger, less distinguished men), a dignity which brought his wife closer to the court circle and to its social functions. Goncharova became the subject of a rumored liaison with a young protege of a Dutch diplomatist, the Baron George d'Anthes. The rumors grew in intensity and viciousness; Pushkin began receiving written "announcements" of his cuckoldry. Finally, after many attempts to halt the rumors, Pushkin sent a challenge to d'Anthes which admitted of no delay or compromise. On January 27, 1837, the duel took place. Pushkin was badly wounded by his opponent and died shortly thereafter. It is unlikely that Goncharova was actually unfaithful. By marrying her, however (and Tsvetaeva certainly sees the marriage in this light), Pushkin in effect put his honor and fate at the mercy of a spiritually and intellectually vacuous milieu into which he was drawn by his wife's popularity at court. Behind the court, moreover, loomed Nicholas I, who wielded such immense power over Pushkin's life and work. The relationship between Pushkin and Nicholas I is important in two other works by Tsvetaeva, the cycle "Poems to Pushkin" ("Stikhi k Pushkinu"), six poems written in 1931, and in the prose work "Pushkin and Pugachev."

5. Pushkin's great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal, was of Ethiopian origin. Pushkin expressed his pride in his African heritage in a famous line in Eugene Onegin: "Under the sky of my Africa" ("Pod nebom Afriki moei"). Tsvetaeva refers to this line in the first poem in her cycle, "Poems to Pushkin": "The Russian classic is rather fine / Who called the sky of Africa / His own" ("Neduren rossiiskii klassik, / Nebo Afriki-svoim / Zvavshii").

6. Tsvetaeva refers here to a famous canvas by the Russian painter A. A. Ivanov (1806-1858), the exact title of which is "The Messiah Revealed to the People "("lavlenie messii narodu"), 1837-57. The painting depicts the meeting between Christ and his precursor, St. John the Baptist, at the River Jordan. John baptizes Christ and the heavens open and declare Christ to be the Son of God. Tsvetaeva refers to the painting a few lines later on as "The Baptism." The meeting between Christ and St. John is commemorated in the Russian Church on the feastday known as "The Revelation of God" ("Bogoiavlenie").

7. Possibly the painting with that title by the neo-Classicist Vincenzo Camuccini (1773-1844), dated 1793 (or 1797, the sourcebooks do not agree). Tsvetaeva's description of the painting is too brief to establish with certainty whether or not it matches Camuccini's canvas. "The Murder of Caesar" presents the group of assassins in the left-center foreground while onlookers observe in the right background. They are all wearing togas, most of them white. Camuccini's use of light is rather interesting. The illumination begins with a kind of dark area on the exreme left, turning to chiaroscuro surrounding the assassins, and then brightening to full illumination on the right. One curious feature of the canvas which connects neatly with Tsvetaeva's focus on the Pushkin monument, is the presence of a monumental-sized statue of a male figure just behind the conspirators, and two other toga-draped statues in niches in the background above the onlookers.

8. As Tsvetaeva states in her footnote, Pushkin did not have features we would usually associate with a Negro. He had reddish hair and blue eyes. One of Pushkin's biographers, Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky, has the following to say about the poet's African descent: "He called himself 'a hideous descendant of Negroes,' and liked to explain his sensuality by his African blood. But it must be observed that Cannibal [Mirsky retains the Russian spelling of the name—JMK] was not a Negro in the technical, anthropological sense of the word-he was an Abyssinian. He belonged to the race which Deniker calls Ethiopian, and which is distinguished by the curliness rather than the friz-ziness of its hair. Though often jet-black, their features are rather like those of the Arabs. But on the other hand, the practice of slave hunting may have infused into them a certain proportion of purely Negro blood." D.S. Mirsky, Pushkin (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963), pp. 4-5. Tsvetaeva would have rejoiced in the change from "Negro" to "Black" since it is the poet's blackness that matters to her.

9. An almost untranslatable play on three verbs having the same foot: bit' "to strike" or "to hit"; ubit' "to kill"; and zabit' "to begin running" or "to start up," said of a fountain. Since it was impossible to work some equivalent of "strike" or "hit" into the reference to the fountain, I have used the expression "strike and run" or "hit and run," playing on the double meaning of "run" The Russian reads: "Kak tot negr v Aleksandrovskom passazhe . . . kuda my s mater'iu khodili posmotret': ne zabil li? Fon-tany nikogda ne b'iut (da kak by oni eto delali?), Russkii poet—negr, poet-negr i poeta-ubili."

10. The Pushkin monument is a full length statue of the poet sculpted by A. M. Opekushin and erected on the Tver Boulvard in Moscow in 1880. In 1950 the monument was transferred to the opposite side of the square which now bears the poet's name.

11. The lines cited in the footnote are from Pushkin's well-known poem "Devils" ("Besy"), 1830, and "The Winter Road" ("Zimniaiadoroga"), 1826. Tsvetaeva's comment: "Pushkin is speaking here about a post used to mark miles" is not entirely redundant. The word versta means "milepost" and also designates a specific measure-ment-a "verst" or 3,500 feet-that is, the intervals marked by mileposts for the benefit of travelers.

12. The Tver Boulevard was divided and had a pedestrian walkway in the middle as well as sidewalks on both sides.

13. Tsvetaeva probably has in mind the bust of Zeus, described as standing in Professor Tsvetaev's study in "Voloshin," and mentioned in Anastasia Tsvetaeva's memoirs.

14. Tsvetaeva was writing in 1936; she was well aware of the rise of Hitler and the threat of Fascism.

15. Maria Alexeevna Pushkina was Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal's second wife. Here and elsewhere Tsvetaeva relied for her information on two excellent scholarly volumes on Pushkin, Vikenty Vikentievich Veresaev's (the pseudonym of V. V. Smidovich,

1867-1945) Pushkin in Life (Puskin v zhizni), two volumes, 1926-27. The opening pages of the work contain a diagram and a discussion of Pushkin's family tree and ancestors. (For Tsvetaeva's reading of Veresaev see her Letter to V. N. Bunina. May 4, 1928, N.P.,p. 399.)

16. The Bronze Horseman is the most famous piece of sculpture in Russian literature and an outstanding work of monumental art. It presents a rearing horse on which Peter the Great rides, his hand extended imperiously towards the River Neva. The dynamism of the horse and its rider, and also the pedestal, which has the shape of natural rock, were extraordinarily innovative. The monument was the last piece of work by the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet (1716-1791), considered one of the eighteenth-century masters of classical sculpture. Most of his works depict classical or allegorical subjects. In 1766 he was summoned by Catherine II to Petersburg to execute the colossal statue of Peter. He was very dissatisfied with the recompense she gave him and he returned to Paris in 1778 or 1781 where he devoted himself to scholarly and editorial work.

17. Tsvetaeva envisions Pushkin (in his sculpted representation) as standing by the Black Sea in order to prepare for the introduction of Pushkin's poem "To the Sea" ("K moriu"), an important phrase of which, "Farewell, free element," appears below. Pushkin composed "To the Sea" as a valedictory to the Black Sea when he was leaving Odessa in 1824. The inspiration for the poem is also connected with Pushkin's reading of Byron, whose name appears in the poem. The name of the Black Sea, of course, corresponds perfectly to the color symbolism developed in the prose work.

18. The phrase "the sea of the free element" is a variation on the opening line of Pushkin's poem "To the Sea": "Farewell, free element" ("Proshchai svobodnaia stikhiia"). The variation on Pushkin's line itself becomes a "theme" which Tsvetaeva varies as the work proceeds.