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My Pushkin (page 4)
So as to finish up about the blue, municipal schools' Pushkin, he was too meager for love: not to be lifted up with effort, not to be embraced sighing deeply, not to be pressed against the invariably Swiss and invariably tight apron—nothing in your hands, nothing for your eyes, as if you had already read it.
Things and books, and then my own children too, and children in general, I invariably loved and do love—also by weight. And even now, hearing a new work being roundly praised: "And is it long?"-"No, a little story."-"Well, then I won't read it."
Andryusha's anthology was indubitably-weighty, it was strained to the seams by Grandson-Bagrov and Grandf ather-Bagrov, and by the feverish mother breathing right into the child's breast, and by all the mad love of that child, and by the bucketfuls of fish caught by the simple-minded young father,49 and "You can't sleep again?" and Nikolenka and all those hunters and borzois50 and by all the lyric poets of Russia.
I took possession of Andryusha's anthology immediately: he didn't like to read, couldn't stand it, and there you had not only
to read but to study and make notes ant put it down in your own words, whereas I was out of school, lire, and for me the anthology was only love. Mother did not take it away from me: if it's an anthology there's nothing premature. All literature is premature lor a child, for all of it talks about things that a child doesn't know and can't know. For instance:
Who rides so late upon his horse
Beneath the stars, beneath the moon?
(Andryusha, to mother's question: "And how am I supposed to know?")
... Why does he hold his hat so carefully?
Because there's a denunciation sewn into it.
A denunciation of the Hetman-villain
To Tsar-Peter from Kochubei.51
I don't know about other children, but since I, out of all the four lines, understood only villain, and since the villain was right in front of me in the vicinity of three names, I came up with— three villains: the Hetman, Tsar-Peter, and Kochubei, and for a long time I could not understand (and even now I still don't entirely understand), that the villain is one person and who exactly it is. For me the Hetman to this day is Kochubei and Tsar-Peter, and Kochubei to this day is the Hetman, and so on, and the three became one, and this one is a villain. "Denunciation" I of course did not understand either, and if they had explained, I would not have understood, would not have inwardly understood as even now I don't understand the possibility of writing a denunciation. And that is the way it stayed: A Cossack is flying along under a nonexistently-bright (dream world!) sky, where at the same time (it never happens!) there are stars and a moon, the Cossack flies along sprinkled by the stars and bathed by the moon—as if on purpose to make him more visible!—and on his head there is a hat, and in the hat an unknown thing, a denunciation, a denunciation against the Hetman-Villain to Tsar-Peter from Kochubei.
That was my first encounter with history and that first historical story was a villainous deed. I'll say more: when during the Civil War I heard the word Hetman (with the addition: Skoro-padsky52), I immediately saw that Cossack who is falling.
But I had still one other anthological meeting with the Tsar Villain: "Who is he?" Once again Mother is saying to Andryuslui: "Well, Andryusha, just who was—he?" And again Andryusha is saying, honestly, drearily and even indignantly: "And how am I supposed to know?" (What a strange world—poetry, where the grown-ups do the asking, and the children answer!) "Well, and you, Musya? Just who was he?"—"A giant."—"Why a giant?"— "Because he fixed everything right away..."
[-.]53
"And who is this Peter?"
"It's-Whoishe?"
"What?"
"I mean, the wondrous guest. 'Long he looks in that direction—Where the wondrous guest has gone...' "
"And what is the name of that wondrous guest? "
I, timidly: "Maybe-Peter?"
"Well, praise the Lord!... (With sudden suspiciousness:) But there are a lot of Peters. Which Peter was it? (And despairing of an answer:) It was that very same Peter who...
A denunciation against the Hetman-Villain
To Tsar-Peter from Kochubei.
You see?"
I should say so! But then again, oh woe! Just when he was on the verge of starting to clear up, Peter was again thrust into that murkily-twinkling, starrily-moonlit, cossackly-galloping, head-gearly-denunciatory night and, what was even worse, that Peter, who had fixed the boat for the old man and therefore would seem to have done a good deed, has turned out to be that same villain Kochubei and the Hetman. And again he arose crowned by a gigantic question mark-the size of a new moon!-Who? When you hear the name Peter it always means "who?" "Peter" means there is no way of guessing the answer.
But the reverse too: as soon as a question rang out in the poems, right away the suspicion that the poem was about Peter made its appearance.
Why the cannonade and shouts
In the town of Petersburg?54
The answer Peter, plain as day! But just what exactly has he done? because once they do give you a hint, it is the wrong thing, everything that they give as a hint is wrong. And especially wrong, wrong to sheer silliness:
Has Ekaterina borne a child,
Is today her name day,
The wonder-worker-giant,
The black-browed woman?
I didn't understand "borne," I understood only "was born," I never heard about any Ekaterina, Peter's wife, and a wonderworker was Nicholas-the-Wonderworker,55 that is, an old man and a saint who doesn't have a wife. But in poems—he does. All right, a married wonder-worker.
But, Lord, what a relief when, after so many whys and so many obviously-false hints, finally the blessed "that's why"! "That's why the noise and shouts—in Petersburg town."
Only now, going inch by inch through the Pushkin of my youth, do I see how much Pushkin liked the device of the question: "Why the cannonade and shouts?—Who is he?—Who, beneath the stars, the moon?—Montenegrins, what is that?" and so on. If I had been able at that time to believe completely that he really didn't know, I might have thought that a poet of all people is the person who does not know anything, since he even turns to me, a child, and asks. But being a short-tempered child and sensing that it was done on purpose, that he wasn't asking, but knew, and sensing that he was trapping me, and not believing a single hint, I envisaged them involuntarily, each one, line after line, as best I could, in my own way. I envisaged—those poems. I am bound to the historical Pushkin of my childhood by unforgettable visions.
But I cannot help saying from the viewpoint of the person I was then and the person I am now, that the question in poetry is an irritating device, if only because every "why " demands and passes judgment on a "that's why," and thereby weakens the integrity of the whole process, turns the whole poem into an interval, fastening our attention on a final external purpose which poetry ought not to have. An insistent question turns poetry into a riddle and a problem, and if every poem in itself is a riddle and a problem, it is not that riddle, for which the right answer is at hand, and not that problem, to which the solution is in a textbook.
But to compensate, in "The Drowned Man"56 there was not a single question. To compensate, there were surprises. In the first place, those children, that is, we are playing alone by the river; in the second place, we give the father a repulsive name Daddy! and in the third place, we are not afraid of the corpse. Because the way they shout is not scared but happy like this (they sing it, in fact): " 'Daddy! Daddy! Our nets! We've hauled in a corpse!'- 'You're lying, lying, you little devils,' the father growled at them. 'Oh what little brats I've got! I'll fix you, you sneaks—corpse!' "57 That sneaks-corpse was, of course, partly a snake's corpse, a snake which (because it was poetry) was called a "sneak." I say: partly—a snake's, a snake which I never thought all the way through and which, because of its incomplete definition, I shouted out especially loudly, with this intonation: "I'll fix you! You sneak's-corpse!" And then, if they had asked me, they would have gotten more or less the following description: in the ground live the snakes and the corpses, and this corpse is called "sneak's" because it is a little bit snakey-sneaky; it was lying there next to a snake.
I knew snakes because of Tarusa and because of Tarusa I knew drowned men too. In the autumn we settled down for a long long time in Tarusa, until the early black evenings and the late dark mornings, living in our isolated summer house, two kilometers from any habitation, in the sole proximity of the river (a minute's run down to the river for us, a minute's climb up, for them), the Oka. "There's plenty of fish in one river! "-but not only fish, for in summer someone always drowned, most often little boys dragged under the floats again, but often drunk men too, and often even sober ones, and once a whole raft convoy, and then that is also where grandfather Alexander Danilovich58 died, and mother and father went off for the commemoration day, and then stayed because of the will, and although I know that it's a sin, because grandfather loved me more than Asya, and that it's stupid, because grandfather didn't drown at all, but died from cancer...— from cancer, the crab? but after all:
And in the swollen body
Black crabs have sunk their claws!
... in a word, through the glass door of the dining room I can see the spectral pillars of the raised porch, and under them, with the whole river close behind:
From morning on the weather rages,
At night there comes a storm.
And the drowined man knocks
Beneath the window and at the gate.
The snake's-corpse with the undefined, doubled face of grandfather Alexander Danilovich and a drowned raftsman.
But to compensate, that other frightening poem "Vurdalak"59 was not at all frightening, if only because Vanya immediately proves to be cowardly from the first line; by his sweat and pallor from fear he inspires contempt which, as everyone knows, cures you of all passions right up to the strongest of them (in me), the passion of fear. "That must be he, gnawing bones, the red-lipped Vurdalak." Who, as a general rule, gnaws bones? A dog. The Vurdalak is a dog with red lips. And the fool (poor thing) got scared. The whole effect of fright was lost from those gnawed bones that a child cannot help ascribing to a dog. The monster-Vurdalak immediately turns up as that same dog that Pushkin makes appear only in the last line, that is, the dog does not last for a second as a Vurdalak. So that from all the fright only the word Vurdalak remains, that is, the title of the poem. Of course the word Vurdalak is unpleasant (a little slobbering), and the dog itself is not entirely doggy, otherwise it wouldn't be called Vurdalak, and its red lips, visible even at night, are doubtful, and its occupation—to bring its bone right to that grave—is a little revolting, but all that didn't in my eyes at all justify Vanya's fright. Now if Vanya had been walking through the graveyard without any dog-then it would have been frightening. But this way the dog (just the contrary) livens it up. (The same as in Vii60 where only Khoma's being alone with the dead man is frightening and where, with the appearance of the Vii and then of the other viis, the fear is exploded. When there are many— it is always jolly.)
All right, it's a strange, suspicious dog, but Vanya is an obvious, undoubted fool, and a poor thing, and a coward. And what's more—malicious: "Imagine Vanya's malice!" And we do imagine it: that is, Vanya instantly gives it to the dog with his boot. Because he's malicious... Because for a well-behaved child there's no worse badness than to hit a dog: it's better to strike a governess. A malicious boy and a dog—the action is given away by that combination.
And it ended, as always with everything you love—with tears: such a good gray-brown dog, a little bit black, with lips a little bit red, stole a bone in the kitchen and went off with it to a grave so the cook wouldn't take it away, and suddenly some cowardly Vanya came by and gave it to him with his boot. Right into his wonderful, wet muzzle. Boo—hoo—oo...
But the most beloved of the frightening things, the most intimately frightening and frighteningly intimate was—"Devils."61 "Storm-clouds whirl and storm-clouds scurry—All invisible— the moon..."
Everything is frightening from the very beginning: the moon is not visible but it is—there, an invisibility-moon, a moon in an invisibility-hat, so as to see everything and so that it won't be seen. A strange poem (a condition), where all at once you can be (you can't not be) everything: the moon, the rider, the shying horse and—oh sweet fainting—them! because there is no reader who would not simultaneously be sitting in the sled and flying along above the sled, who would not be howling up there in the limitless heights in various voices, and who would not faint down there in the sled from fear of that howl. Two flights: of the sled and of the clouds, and in each one—you are flying along. But over and above the man who rode and the things that flew, I was yet a third thing: the moon—I was the moon that, itself unseen, sees: Pushkin, the Devils above him, and up above Pushkin and the devils—flies along on its way.62
Fear and pity (and also anger, and also longing, and also defense) were the main passions of my childhood and where there was no food for them I was absent. But what a different pity than for the Vurdalak suffused me in the "Devils" and for the devils! The dog I pitied viscerally, with the low and hot sympathetic pity of the womb, with a pity-defense.- kill Vanya, kill the cook, and give the dog the whole cookstove with the frying pans and the cooking pots, and maybe even Vanya himself to eat up. But for the devil I felt a lofty pity, a pity-exaltation, an enthusiasm, just as later on I pitied Napoleon on St. Helena and Goethe in Weimar. I knew that "Is it Brownie that they bury? Make they marriage for a witch?"—was only a manner of speaking, that if they weren't burying anyone, weren't marrying someone, they would mourn and moan anyway, that they are burying that old man and marrying off that young woman so as to mourn and moan better. That
they mourn and moan not because of------, but because they are— they, and they will never be different and cannot be. (In a whisper: because God put a curse on them!) Love for the accursed.
49. A reference to S. T. Aksakov's Family Chronicle.
50. A reference to Lev Tolstoi's Childhood, published in 1852. The main protagonist of the work (in part, Tolstoi's juvenile alter ego) is named Nikolenka Irtenev.
51. Lines from Pushkin's narrative poem about Peter the Great, Poltava (1828).
52. Skoiopadsky (1873-1945)-a general in the Russian army under the Tsars and hetman of the Ukraine from April 29 to December 14, 1918. The following passage in the manuscript is crossed out; "I always saw the galloping Cossack, beneath the stars and the moon, who from someone to someone, carries something—and now he is (Skoro-padsky) [the hetman's name means "quickly falling"-JMK] falling. Beyond that in the whole history of all treacheries and betrayals I did not understand anything: someone to someone something against someone-and there's a Cossack galloping and it is him that they kill."
53. A paragraph is omitted here. Its contents are based on a particular type of possessive adjective formed from proper names for which there is no natural-sounding English equivalent.
54. Lines from Pushkin's poem "Peter the Great's Feast" ("Fir PetraVelikogo"), 1835.
55. Tsvetaeva refers here to a popular saint frequently depicted in icons.
56. A poem written by Pushkin in 1828. A group of children playing near the river see the corpse of a drovned man. Their father wants no trouble and refuses to bury the deceased. Later the corpse returns to haunt the man who refusedhim a decent unive.
57. I have had to change the father's words here so as to prepare for the rest of the paragraph. The father exclaims: "Uzho mertvets!" The word "uzho" is simply a threatening exclamation. Little Marina understands the word "uzho" as a similar-sounding, poetic-"(because it was poetry)" equivalent to the Russian noun uzh which means "snake" (more exactly, a non-poisonous snake, the Coluber or Tropidonotus). I have added the word "sneaks" to the father's expostulation; it jibes with the father's menacing attitude and leads reasonably well into the confusion about snakes.
58. Tsvetaeva's maternal grandfather, Alexander Danilovich Meyn.
59. A poem by Pushkin written in 1834, part of the cycle "Songs of the Western Slavs."
60. A well-known story by Nikolai Gogol, published in his Mirgorod, Part II, in In the story a seminarian named Khoma is obliged to keep watch over a dead woman.
61. One of Pushkin's best-known poems, written in 1830. Tsvetaeva's translation of the poem into French, "Demons," was published in a one-day newspaper put out in Paris on the occasion of the centennial of the day of Pushkin's death.
62. After "... flies along on its way" the manuscript version continues: "I look back, I look into myself, and I see: the ravine, the moon, the lone rider, the devils-what was added after that? Nothing. In the 'Devils' there was everything that I had to love later on, and nothing was missing that later on I might have loved: the poet, space, a stump, a wolf, simple people, and-those creatures, them. . . . Only at that time all of it was still inside me, that is, I was obliged to be the moon, the sled, the wolf; but now all that is part of me: the moon, the sled, the wolf-the poet has become I myself. Cut me open and you'll see that inside me, apart from the moon, the sled, the wolf, the stumps and . . . nothing is there. But then, in each little particle of me-is everything."