The white vision of the museum against the ample blue of the sky. Along the walls of the entryway are double rows of lyceens1 who, because they have been standing there a long time, are leaning against each other back to back, row against row, making each flank look like a many-facedly-two-faced— such a young-faced!—Janus. The first thing in the entry is an old man in a long-skirted fur coat (it is May!). "And where does one remove his coat here?"--"If you please, Your Excellency."-"And you'll give me a coat check? Otherwise something might happen to the coat, a beaver coat, during the ceremony, you see..." It was my father's father-in-law, the ancient historian Ilovaisky.2

The white vision of the staircase, lording it over everything and everybody. In the wing on the right, like a guardian, stands Michelangelo's David, its proportions not human and even not divine—heroic. The guests drift off among the galleries while they wait for the Emperor's arrival. And suddenly—clang, clatter, fright, retreat, shards and streams of silver: my father's eighteen-year-old son-in-law3 has knocked over a tray with Caucasian mineral waters which now gush and shimmer like the springs that gave them birth. Certain now, that it is not a bomb, the old men calm down.

Old men, old men, old men. Medals, medals, medals. Not a brow without a furrow, not a breast without a star. My brother and husband are uniquely-young here. The grouping of young Grand Dukes doesn't count because a grouping is just what they are: a marble bas-relief. Today the whole old-age of Russia seems to have flowed into this place in homage to the eternal youth of Greece. A living lesson of history and philosophy: this is what time does with people, this is what it does—with gods. This is what time does with a man, this is what (a glance at the statues) art does. And, the last lesson: this is what time does with a man; this is what a man does with time. But because of my youth I don't think about that, I only feel a cold shudder.

Old-age, in its main identifying mark, loss of color, overpowers even the impact of gold on your eyes, for this whole old-age is bathed in gold: the older, the golder, the shakier, the shinier, the more lackluster the eye, the more blinding the breast. They too are statues, but of another substance. If the grand ducal youths are statues in their form, statues made of living marble, then the dignitaries are statues in their material, statues of plaster. The rigidit'e4 (there's no exact Russian word) of old hollow bones filled with mortal lime. I will never forget how one of those old men stumbled on the staircase and just lay there, only rotating his head, until my husband, running to him from up above, carefully but firmly set him on his feet, like a doll. By saying "doll" I have named the women. White, identical, with identically-long necks, necks made unusually long by the high collars that squeezed the throat, wearing identically high corsets, with identically high "sweeps" of hair; maybe they are young, maybe they are old, but even when they are young they are old, not old-aged, not even aged, of an age that does not exist in life, the collective age created by the day, the place and the dress, and perhaps also by the even, dispersed, photographic, stereoscopic museum light coming from above... Dolls in all the solemnity, eeriness and attractiveness of those objects that are not at all childish. The threefold whiteness: of the walls, the hair, the ladies, is only the background, only the shoreline to that ceaselessly creeping gold Paktol of braid and medals. And one more striking contradiction: between the newness of the building and the infinite decrepitude of the spectators, between the untouched look of the floors and the infinitely worn-out look of the feet walking on them. Visions (the statues), specters (the dignitaries), dreams (that living, marble flower garden),and dolls... I will boldly state that the statues on that first day of the museum's existence seemed more alive than the people, not only seemed but were more alive, for each of them, cast with lively concern by a master craftsman, had been taken by my father out of the shavings with his own hands, with all the concern of living love, each one had been set down with the help of simple hands, equally-loving, schooled in love, and had been settled in the place prepared for it. And my father had exclaimed at each one: "Excellent!" Whereas it seemed as if no one had loved those dignitaries and ladies and no one loved them now, just as they too had never loved anyone and anything... The real museum, in all the coldness of that word, was not the surroundings, but was within them, they were the museum. But wait: something was alive! In the white cloud of ladies, completely unexpected and even incredible, was a completely separate, independent, dotted skirt! A skirt, just that, over which was a blouse with a "low front." A staunch "woman of the sixties"? An impoverished aristocrat? No, the extremely rich and extremely conservative wife of the most conservative of historians, who had extended her conservatism right up to her trunks,5 that is, who had decided in spite of the instructions ("the ladies will wear white, high-necked day dresses") to take five unessential meters of white faille— and conserve it, not use it. And, in the satisfaction of a duty performed, in the enchanted circle of her dotted skirt's solitude, she raises still higher her meticulously-arranged, haughty, still young head, like a marquise with two natural accroche-coeurs.6 And so strong in me is the attraction to every sort of solitary courage that, although I know full well its murky sources, I cannot help but admire! But the Master of Ceremonies does not. He is casting quick and frequent looks at the object that offends him and is openly-perplexed about where it might be taken and how it might be moved farther away, and he forgets about it only under the influx of another worry : no one is taking his place in line except the merchants' representatives with their beards and their medals, who had lined up the minute they walked in. "Gentlemen, Mesdames... their Royal Highnesses will be right here... Please... Please... Ladies to the right, gentlemen to the left..." But no one listens to him. They are listening to a heavy-set dignitary, a massive man with an intelligent face, who, with fluid and weighty gestures is saying something to one person for everyone to hear, (Witte).7 The merchants' representatives are looking at the White Eagle on Nechaev-Maltsev which he has received "for the Museum."

"Gentlemen... Gentlemen... Please... Their Royal Highnesses..."

We are all up above already in the gallery where the prayer service will be held. There is a red pathway for the Tsar which feet avoid of their own volition. The clergy is all assembled. We wait. And something is getting nearer, something, most probably, will be here at once because on those faces, agitation is visible like the passing of a wave and so too in the lackluster eyes that flicker as if from the candles carried quickly past them. "They'll be here at once... They've arrived... They're coming!... They're coming!" And as if at the wave of a wand— an expression not only suitable in this instance, but irreplaceable— it happens on its own: the ladies are on the right, the men are on the left, the red pathway is cleared and it is certain that along that pathway, right now, will come, will come...

With a steady, quick pace, with an affable, joyful expression in his big blue eyes, that are just on the point of laughing, he comes, and suddenly—his look, directly at me, into my eyes. In that second I got a look at those eyes, eyes not simply blue, but perfectly transparent, pure, icy, perfectly child-like.

The deep plongeon8 of the ladies; the lively and fluid dipping of a wave.

Behind His Majesty comes, not the Heir, not Her Majesty but:

A cloud of white little girls.. One... two... four...

A cloud of white little girls? But no—in the air

A cloud of white butterflies? An enchanting cloud

Of little girl Grand Duchesses...9

They walk without constraint and just as quickly as their father, nodding and smiling to the left and the right... The younger ones have loose hair, one has golden bangs above her high eyebrows. All of them are wearing identical, shallow-crowned, white hats, big hats with turned up brims, also butterflies! just one more second and they'll fly away... Behind the children, also nodding and smiling, also in white but not hurrying now, with a charming smile on her porcelain face, comes Her Majesty Maria Fyodorovna.10 Now they have passed. Our living wall straightens up.

"Bless, oh Lord!..."

The prayer service has ended. There is His Majesty talking with father, and father is answering, as always barely tilting his head over to one side. Now His Majesty looks over at his daughters and smiles. They both smile. The Master of Ceremonies brings the Moscow ladies forward to Maria Fyodorovna. A dip, a nod. A dip, a nod. There is something subaqueous in those dips. That's how water plants dip on the bottom of Kitezh11... His Majesty, accompanied by my father, has moved farther on. Behind him, as if following the magic pipe of the Pied-Piper, come braid, medals, decorations...

The air is less charged after the prayer service. There is a turning of several heads toward the statues. They name the names of the gods and goddesses... Approving exclamations...

Father's old, ardent admirer, A Russified Italian woman, who had been staying modestly in the shadows the whole time if you can say "shadows" about a place where everything is light --steps out and with the desperation of a great resolution, seizes father by the sleeve:

"Ivan Vladimirovich, you should step outside!" And, like a conjuress, thrice repeats: "Go out and take your place, go out and take your place, go out and take your place!" And, strangely enough, without the least argument, as if he hadn't fully heard the meaning of the words and was heeding only the intonation, my father, as if in a deep sleep, went out and took his place. Barely tilting his gray, round head over to one side as he always did when he read or listened (at that moment he was reading the past and listening to the future), plainly not seeing all the people looking at him, he stood at the main entrance, alone among the white columns, under the very pediment of the Museum, at the zenith of his life, at the pinnacle of his life's work. It was a vision of perfect tranquility.

* * * * *

"Papa, what was His Majesty talking with you about? "-

"'Tell me, Professor,' he said, 'what was that beautiful gallery where we heard the prayer service, the one that was so light and spacious?'—'A Greek courtyard, Your Highness.'—'And why is that particular one, why is it Greek when everything here is Greek?' Well, I started explaining and His Majesty says to his daughters: 'Maria, Nastasia! Come here and listen to what the professor is saying!' Then I said to him: 'Oh goodness, Your Majesty, can what an old professor says really be of any interest to such Jack-be-nimbles?' '

"Papa, His Majesty looked at me!"

"Did he really, did he look at you?"

"Word of honor!"

Father, philosophically: "Anything can happen. A person does have to look at something." And, transferring his look from me to mother's last portrait, in which she so resembles Byron: "Well, he opened the Museum."

And looking away even farther off it the other female guiding genius and thereby completing by going back into the past the arc of spiritual continuity, he said with all the force of creative and aged gratitude:
"Did that beautiful woman, that Mycenas, whose mind was known throughout Europe, who was sung by poets and glorified by painters, Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya,12 did she ever think that her dream of a Russian museum of sculpture would be destined to become the heritage of the son of a poor village priest, who until the age of twelve had never even seen a pair of boots..."

1. The "lyceens" (from the French "lycee") would be students at an imperial secondary school, the approximate equivalent of a gymnasium (see note 13 to "Volo-shin") in the age levels and training of its students. It is not clear which lycee is involved in the dedication ceremony. Possibly it is the famous lycee at Tsarskoe Selo founded by Alexander I and famous for Pushkin's presence there in the first class to complete the program of studies.

2. Dmitry Ivanovich flovaisky (1832-1920), the grandfather of Tsvetaeva's half-brother Andrei and half-sister Valeria, is described at length in "The House at Old Pimen." He completed his studies at Moscow University in 1854, and was the author of historical monographs and of a well-known series of textbooks for secondary schools on general and Russian history.

3. Tsvetaeva's husband, Sergei Yakovlevich Efron (1893-1941).

4. French. "Rigidity." The closest Russian equivalents would probably be zhestkost' or negibkost', which mean "hardness," "toughness" and "inflexibility."

5. This is Alexandra Alexandrovna, the historian D. I. Ilovaisky's second wife. The trunks which she uses to store fabrics and other goods play a crucial role in "The House at Old Pimen."

6. An arrangment of the hair known in English as "love curls."

7. Sergei Yulevich Witte (1849-1915), count and Russian statesman. He was responsible for the successful building of the Trans-Siberian railroad. He served as Prime Minister in 1905-06 and championed the granting of a contitution. Nicholas II dismissed him in a fit of Conservative reaction.

8. French. Literally "a dive." Tsvetaeva is referring, of course, to the women's curtsey.

9. Tsvetaeva's "butterflies" are the four daughters of Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, each of whom had the title "Grand Duchess," in Russian velikaia kniazh 'nia.

10. The Dowager Empress, mother of Nicholas II and wife of the previous Emperor, Alexander III.

11. Kitezh is a legendary city mentioned in Russian folk tales and in the metrical folk epics known as byliny. The legend of Kitezh was especially popular among the Russian dissident sectarians, who had broken with the official Russian Orthodox Church. In thek stories the town is said to have sunk down into the earth during the invasion in the thirteenth century of Baty, a Mongol infidel, and to have been covered by a lake. Only specially privileged people can hear the bells ringing in the Church towers of the submerged city. In another story, the folk hero Hya Muromets is said to have freed the city from the Tatar horde. The name Kitezh appears in Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Bunina regarding her work on her autobiographical prose. It stood for the whole of the lost past, of pre-Revolutionary Russia, of the two or three preceding generations, and of her own childhood. The writing of an eyewitness account was, in Tsvetaeva's metaphorical vision, both a descent underground and a journey to the bottom of the sea, that is a "realization" of the Kitezh image. (See the letter to V. N. Bunina, August 6, 1933, N. P. p. 411; and August 24,1933,N. P., p. 423.)

12. The Princess Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonskaya (1792-1862) showed an unusual ardor for intellectual and cultural preeminence. She belonged to the highest social circles in Russia and had been a brilliant figure in the salons of Prague, Paris, Vienna, and Verona during the decade after 1812. In 1824 she settled in Moscow where she became the center of educated and artistic society. In 1824 she conseived the plan of founding a society for the construction of a national museum which would make the monuments of classical antiquity available to Russians, i.e., a museum very much like the one finally completed through Professor Tsvetaev's efforts in 1912. Volkonskaya was friendly with
Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Prince Vyazemsky, Baratynsky, Venevitinov, Shevyrev, and others among the leading writers of that epoch. In 1829 she left Russia and went to Rome where she died in 1862, having converted to Catholicism.