1 2 3

A blizzard stood over Petersburg. Stood—like a whirling top—or a whirling child—or a conflagration. A white force that swept me away.

It swept away all memory of a street and a house and brought me—deposited and left me—directly in the middle of a room: trainstation-, ballroom-, gallery-, dream-sized.

Like that, in out of a snowstorm, out of the white void of the blizzard into the yellow void of a big hall, without any transitions of entranceways and servants' polite remarks.

And there, from one end of the huge room, remote—as through the wrong end of binoculars, enormous—as through the right end—through wide-eyed imaginary binoculars—were two eyes.

A blizzard stood over Petersburg, and in that blizzard, steady as two planets—two eyes standing there.

* * * * *

Standing? No, moving. Bewitched, I hadn't noticed that ilicir attendant body had set out, and I only realize it by the wild pain in my eyes, as if the binoculars were being driven whole right into my eyesockets, rim to rim.

From the other end of the room, steady as two planets, two eyes were moving toward me.

The eyes were—here.

Before me stood—Kuzmin.1

* * * * *

Eyes—and nothing more. Eyes—and everything else. Everything else was very little: practically nothing at all.

* * * * *

But his voice was not here. His voice wasn't keeping pace with his eyes, it was still on its way from the other end of the room—and of life; or maybe I, swallowed up by his eyes, was not keeping pace? My first sensation from that voice was: a man is speaking to me—across a river, and this is a dream, but I can hear him nevertheless, as in a dream— because I have to— I can hear him.

"... We all read your poems in Northern Notes...2 It was such a pleasure. When you see a new name you think: poems, oh, more poems, the oral exposition of feelings. Feelings that for the most part are not one's own. Or the words are not one's own words. But in yours, from the very first line, there was something kindred, a power. 'I know the truth! All former truths— make way!' And we sensed that— all of us."

"And at fifteen I read your 'Man on Lescaut4 —buried with a sword, not a spade!' Or rather I didn't read it, it was recited to me by my would-be fiance,5 whom I consequently did not marry, precisely because he was one— a spade, with a spade beard, and absolutely—

Kuzmin, startled:

"A be-eard? A fiance with a beard?"

And I, consciously startling him: "A beard square as a spade, a rectangular frame around unscrupulously honest blue eyes. Yes. And when I'd found that out from him, that you can be buried with a sword— 'Bury me with a spade— no, never!' And what an exquisite challenge that is to the whole of the old world, to that whole century; 'Manon Lescaut— buried with a sword, not a spade. ' Wasn't it all written for the sake of that line? "

"Like all poems— for the sake of the last line."

"Which comes first."

"Oh, you know that too! "

* * * * *

In Moscow there were legends about Kuzmin. Legends grow up about every poet, and they are always composed out of the same envy and maliciousness. The refrain to the word Kuzmin was "affected, made-up."

There was no affectation: there was the innate elegance of someone utterly unique, the special elegance of his particular bone structure (skeletons, after all, aren't equal any more than souls are!), and there was that uplifted little finger when he drank tea—thus Lafayette, the liberator of America, held his in the 18th century, and so did that most steadfast of poets Andre Chenier,6 when he drank his tea from a tin mug in the Conciergerie—and besides the individual elegance of his skeleton there were traces of a physical tradition, a physical survival of the past, "mannerisms"- inborn.

Once there was u Sevres teacup.

Once there was an 18th-century Frenchman from Martinique— living in 20th-century Petersburg.

As for the "make-up." It was there. Smooth and even, lasting, dark brown, Moorish, Mulatto, the Lord God's. Only he wasn't made-up but— stained, and even— steeped, whether in the infernal coffee of lyrical insomnia, or in the nut-brown liquor of every fairytale, or in an exotic admixture of blood— I don't know. I only know that an evener and browner, browner— and evener— and more natural— color than that of his face I have never seen. Except perhaps on the face of our chocolate house on Three Ponds.

But shining on me from the burnished brown of his gypsy tan there was another inborn radiance: silver. His suit was silver, the surrounding edges of his body's dream-like imponderous and dream-free movements were— silver, the sleeve around his gypsy arm was— silver. Did the sleeve (plain ordinary gray) take its silver from his gypsy arm? Or was that silver the silver of Petersburg? Either way there were two colors, two shades to him— nut-brown and silver— and no third. But he did have— rings. Not on his fingers, or if there were any I don't remember and I'm not speaking about them anyway, and not earrings, though they would have clung to that head as if they'd been soldered on: they were rings of hair. Rising up along the smooth rare diminutive head, from ears to temples, two side curls pressed against his temples in half-rings, near-rings, like those on Carmen,7 or Tuchkov IV,8 or someone caught in a storm.

He lit up a cigarette, and his nut-brown face with its raspberry snake of a smile appeared as through a pale blue screen. (And there was a screen somewhere— a smoke-screen. It was January 1916. The war.)

He turned and rested his hand on the low back of the couch, reclining there easily, beautifully as a deer... But suddenly the beautiful reclining ended:

"You— you must forgive me... I've lost someone— he's been here all evening— but I don't see him now— he was just there— but now I don't see him..."

A vanishing vision.

* * * * *

"How did you like Mikhail Alexeevich?" my young host is saying to me, or rather one of my young hosts, because there art-two of them: Serezha and Lenya.9 Lenya is a poet, Serezha is a world traveller, and I make friends with Serezha. Lenya is poetic, and Serezha is not—and I make friends with Serezha. I tell Serezha about my little girl, whom I left in Moscow (our first separation), and that like the merchant in the fairytale I have promised to bring her a pair of red shoes, and he tells me about the camels in his deserts. Lenya is too frail, too tender for me ... a flower. In his hand he is holding a very old edition of The Bronze Horse-man10 the way you hold a flower, lightly drawing back his outstretched hand—itself like a flower. What can hands like that do?

Moreover Lenya obviously must not like me: he keeps balancing me, my simplicity and directness, on Akhmatova's (then!) edge—and it doesn't work; but Serezha doesn't balance me on anything—and everything works—everything clicked, he and I did, from the first minute: his deserts and my daughter, what we loved the most.

My Moscow way of talking must grate physically on Lenya: spasibo—ladno—takoe, "thanks"—"sure"—"all o' that," and he no doubt thinks, "She's a real Muscovite! "—which right away provokes me and makes my Moscowishness even stronger, so that with Lenya, sleek-headed, sharp, sharpened, I with my close-curled head, with my "worsts" and my "dursts," am a little like a Moscow coachman. Now Serezha and I go off to his father's study and there we talk.

"How do you like Kuzmin?"

"He couldn't be better or simpler."

"Well, for Kuzmin that's a rare compliment..."

I am sitting on a white bearskin, he is standing.

"Ah, so this is where you are"—an important older voice. Serezha and Lenya's father, the renowned builder of a famous battleship, a tall, important, ironical, tender, irresistible man, whom I call—to myself-His Lordship.

"Why do poets and poetesses always sit on the floor? Can it really be comfortable? I always think it much more pleasant to sit in an armchair..."

"This way I'm closer to the fire. And to the bear."

"But the bear is white, and your dress is dark: you'll be completely covered with hair."

"If my sitting on llir lloor makes you uncomfortable," I say in a voice that is beginning, to crack, my eyes hot with imminent tears, "then I can sit in a chair!" Serezha, reproachfully: "Oh, Papa!"

"Not at all, not at all! I'm very glad if you find it—pleasant... (A pause). And everyone walks on it..."

"Crime de lese-Majeste! Like walking on lilies."

"When you have sufficiently expressed your sympathy, we can move into the living room and you can read us your poems. Esenin11 is very anxious to see you—he just arrived. And do you know what just happened? But it is a little—bold. You won't get angry?"

I wait in alarmed silence.

"Don't be startled, it's simply—a funny incident. I just now got home, walked into the living room, and there I saw, on the bench, in the middle of the room—you and Lenya, embracing."

I:

"Wha-a-at?!"

He, unperturbedly:

"Yes, arms around each others' shoulders, heads together: Lenya's black nape and your blond curly one. I've seen a lot of poets—and poetesses—but still, I must confess, I was amazed..."

"That was Esenin!"

"Yes, it was Esenin, as I discovered the moment I walked around to the other side of the bench. You have perfectly identical napes."

"Yes, but Esenin is wearing a light blue shirt, and I'm ..."

"That, I must admit, I hadn't noticed; due to all the hair and arms nothing was visible."

Lenya. Esenin. Thick as thieves, inseparable friends. In those two, in their so strikingly different faces, converged, merged two races, two classes, two worlds. But for all their differences, across all their differences, they were poets—and fast friends.

Lenya would visit Esenin in the country; Esenin did not budge from Lenya's side in Petersburg. And that is how I see their two heads tilted together on the bench in the living room, in a fine boyish embrace which immediately transforms the bench into a schoolbench. (Slowly, my thoughts walk me around it:) Lenya's black-headed sleekness, Esenin's dense tufts, curls, Esenin's cornflower-blue eyes, Lenya's almond eyes. How good when each encloses—what opposes. It is satisfying, like a rare and full rhyme.

Lenya left behind a little book of poems—such simple poems that my heart contracted: I had seen only his aesthete's exterior— and believed it—and of him I had understood nothing.

* * * * *

I am sitting in that great yellow desert (because of Serezha's camels?) of a room and I am reading my poems, or not reading-reciting them. I began to read my poems from a notebook only after I stopped knowing them by heart, and I stopped knowing them by heart when I stopped reciting them, and I stopped reciting them when people stopped asking me to, and they stopped asking me to in 1922—the year I left Russia. From a world where my poems were as necessary as bread I came into a world where no one needs poems, neither my poems nor any poems, where poems are needed like—dessert: if anyone—needs—dessert...

* * * * *

First I read my battling Germany: 12

You have been handed to the world as its prey,

And your enemies are countless.

And yet how can I abandon you?

And yet how can I betray you?

And where could I use the wisdom

"An eye for an eye, and blood for blood"?

Germany, my folly!

Germany, my love!

But how could I reject you,

My Vaterland, so hard-pressed?

Where lean-faced Kant

Still strolls in Konigsberg,

Where Geheimrat Goethe,

In another forgotten town,

Walks through a garden with a branch in his hand,

Cherishing some new Faust.

But how could I cast you down,

My German star.

When I've not been taught

To love half-way, when

It isn 't spurs I hear ringing

In your sweet songs,

When for me St. George is most a saint

In Freiburg on the Schwabenthor.

When I spend my rage on something more

Than the sight of the Kaiser's moustache—

When I swear I love you,

Germany, to the grave!

There is nothing more magical, nothing

Wiser than you, fragrant land,

Where the Lorelei combes out her golden hair
High above the eternal Rhine. * [*These lines are printed now for the first time. 1914-1936.-M.Ts.]

1. Tsvetaeva met Kuzmin in January 1916 during a visit to Petersburg. She had been invited to the city by the people associated with the literary magazine Northern Notes (Severnye zapiski), in which some of her poems had appeared. It was her first separation from her beloved three-year-old daughter Alya, and her first introduction in person to the literary life of Russia's capital. Her reputation, however, had preceded her. She was twenty-three years old and the author of three volumes of poetry: Evening Album (1910), The Magic lantern (Volshebnyi fonar'), 1912, and The Poetry of Youth (lunosheskie stikhi), which was unpublished. Tsvetaeva's description of her visit and her portrait of Kuzmin is the only example in the present volume of Tsvetaeva's early prose. From 1917 to 1922, when she emigrated, Tsvetaeva kept a series of notebooks containing her diaries, records of key events, and drafts of letters, poems, and the like. Some of this material later found its way into print in the Russian-language periodicals of Prague, Berlin, and Paris. Almost the whole of "An Otherworldly Evening" dates back to this period, not to 1916, but to June 1921 when Tsvetaeva saw a copy of Kuzmin's new poetry collection, Otherwordly Evenings, in a Moscow bookstore. She read three of the poems, returned home, and sat down to write a letter to Kuzmin, recalling their meeting and praising his poems. The letter was drafted (and possibly remained) in a notebook; thus it survived until 1936, when Tsvetaeva heard that Kuzmin was dead.

The news of another poet's death set Tsvetaeva to work as had also been the case with the news of the death of Voloshin in August 1932, and of Bely in January 1934. Tsvetaeva left the old letter as it stood, including the poem dedicated to Kuzmin which had accompanied it. She wrote only a few new pages in 1936, seeing that evening and meeting through the lens, as it were, of twenty years. Her final vision from that distance , was darkened by many deaths and endings. But poetry had survived, for, now as then, Tsvetaeva saw poets as beings belonging to another world and therefore ultimately immune to history. Among them, Kuzmin was doubly associated with the vital spirit of song because he was both a poet and a musician.

Born in 1875, Mikhail Alexeevich Kuzmin studied music at a conservatory in Petersburg. His first published work, a play and a set of sonnets, appeared in 1905. His novella Wings (Kryl'ia), published in 1906, gained him immediate notoriety, for it dealt with homosexual love between men. Between 1907 and 1921 the novella went through several editions and was warmly discussed and debated in the press. Kuzmin's first collection of poetry was a mucli more important literary event than the epatant novella. The volume Nets (Seti), 1908, contained several cycles of poetry; among them the "Alexandrian Songs" ("Aleksandriiskie pesni") were remarkable for their extraordinary dis-^ play of free verse, a form little used in Russian poetry until then, and of which Kuzmin proved himself a master. Kuzmin's career began at the high point of young Symbolism, but he soon displayed traits which linked him with the poetics of Acmeism: a fondness for three-dimensional things, an elegant sensuality, and a vivid awareness of past culturs. In 1912 his second book of poetry Autumn Lakes (Osennie ozera) appeared, followed by a third collection, Clay Doves (Glinianye golubki), in 1914. A collection entitled The Pathfinder (Vozhatyi, a word which fascinated Tsvetaeva and on which she writes in her prose piece, "Pushkin and Pugachev") appeared in 1918, followed by a tiny volume, For Two (Dvum), 1920, and another collection of poetry, Echo (Ekho), 1921. The collection of poems which had inspired Tsvetaeva's letter finally appeared in printed form in 1923. It seems likely that Tsvetaeva had read a handwritten version, for the place where she had found Kuzmin's new work was the Writers' Bookshop on Leontiev Street, a cooperative enterprise which sold and exchanged handwritten "books" when printing facilities were lacking during the difficult years of the Civil War. The year 1923 saw the publication of still another collection by Kuzmin-Parabolas (Paraboly). And in 1929 Kuzmin's poetry turned in yet another innovative direction-to wards surrealism,-with A Trout Breaks the Ice (Forel' razbivaet led), containing poems written between 1925 and 1928. The first publication of Kuzmin's music and songs was in 1910 in a volume entitled The Chimes of Love (Kuranty liubvi), a rather charming production with thirty-six pages of text, seventy pages of music, and four sets of drawings, half by Sudeikin and half by Feofilaktov. The work has four parts named for each of the seasons. In each part a set of characters are assigned songs which form a kind of quasi-dialogue, something like a short opera. Another of Kuzmin's works, The Woodlet (Lesok), 1922, is a set of poems to be spoken to music. The volume has three parts, each named for an author-Shakespeare, Hoffmann, and Apuleius (Kuzmin was the translator of works by Shakespeare and Apuleius). After Wings, Kuzmin went on to write other novels and short stories. One of his prose works deserves mention for its correspondence with Tsvetaeva's reading preferences during the period of her friendship with Voloshin, namely, The Marvelous Life of Joseph Balzamo, Count Cagliostro (Chudesnaia zhizn' Iosifa Bal'zamo, grafa Kaliostro), 1919. Kuzmin wrote several short dramatic works and is the author of essays on literature, painting and drawing, and the theater. Many of Kuzmin's works, including Wings, the "Alexandrian Songs," and "A Trout Breaks the Ice," are available in Mikhail Kuzmin, Selected Prose and Poetry (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980).

2. Northern Notes (Severnye zapiski), a literary and political monthly, appeared in Petersburg from 1913 through the first issue of 1917. Its editor was F. A. Demidov until about the middle of 1914, when 1.1. Rostoropov assumed the editorship.

3. The first line of Tsvetaeva's untitled poem, dated October 3, 1915, and published in Northern Notes, No. 7-8 (1916). ("la znaiu pravdu! Vse prezhnie pravdy-proch'!")

4. Manon Lescaut is the main female protagonist of the novel by L'Abbe Pre-vost (1697-1763), which has come to be known by her name. The novel made its appearance in the seventh volume (published in 1731) of Prevost's Memoirs of a Gentleman Who Retired from the World (Memoires d'un homme de qualite qui s'est retire du monde). The definitive edition is dated 1753 and has the title The Story [or History] of Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut (Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut). The kernel of the novel's plot is the passionate love of des Grieux and Manon Lescaut and their utter rejection of any moral conventions and scruples. Their defiance of social and religious norms was regarded at the time as so extreme that the book was twice seized, in 1833 and 1835. Eventually Manon Lescaut must undergro criminal deportation to Louisiana, where she dies. Des Grieux follows in despair. He does not bury her with his sword, however, as Kuzmin's poem would have it, but digs her grave with his hands.

5. It is not clear whether Tsvetaeva is referring here to Ellis or to Nilender. Nilender is most likely. (See Note 85 to "Voloshin.")

6. Andre Chenier (born 1762) was not not known as a poet during his lifetime. When the French Revolution gathered an ominous momentum, he founded the anti-Jacobin Journal de Paris, which he used as a tribunal publicly protesting the excesses of the period. Arrested while attempting to visit some friends who had already been taken prisoner, he refused to defend himself before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was executed on the seventh Thermidor in the Year II (July 25,1794), just two days before the fall of Robespierre. In prison he reworked some of his early, unpublished poetry, and wrote new works, including Iambs (lambes), and The Young Captive (La Jeune captive). On the way to be executed, he and his friend Roucher recited the first scene of Andromaque. Chenier's works-what he had written in prison and his earlier poetry, including Elegies, Bucholiques and Odes-were made public only in 1819 and then only in a partial publication. Chenier was thus discovered by early French Romanticism. However, Chenier is generally considered a late neo-Classicist. He translated from Greek and found a genius and charm in the works of writers like Anacreon and Sappho, which had been neglected by his older contemporaries.

7. Carmen is the heroine of the novella Carmen by the French writer Prosper Merimee (1803-1870). It was first published in 1845. The Spanish beauty Carmen combines the most diverse traits such as perversity and innocence, kindness and cruelty, passion and coldness. She is finally murdered by one of her lovers, Don Jose, when she refuses to give up her freedom and follow him. Thereby she becomes a female archetype of individualism and freedom. Tsvetaeva was fascinated by the wildness and passion of Merimee's Carmen as also by Mariula, a gypsy whose similar traits are mentioned briefly in the course of Pushkin's poem "Gypsies."

8. A. A. Tuchkov IV (1777-1812), a Russian major general, was killed at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic invasion and Franco-Russian struggle of 1912. Tsvetaeva mentions him in the poem "To the Generals of the Year 1912" ("Generalam dvenadtsatogo goda"), written on December 25, 1913, and first published in the first number of Northern Notes for 1915. The lines are:

Oh, on a half-effaced engraving,

At one magnificent moment,

I saw, Tuchkov the Fourth,

Your tender face.

Akh, na graviure polustertoi,

V odin velikolepnyi mig,

la videla, Tuchkov-chetvertyi,

vash nezhnyi lik.

9. Serezha and Lenya are Sergei and Leonid Kannegiser, sons of a well-known engineer whose Petersburg apartment was one of the intellectual gathering places for artists, poets, students and scholars. Leonid, a poet, assassinated the head of the Petrograd Cheka (the so-called "Extraordinary Commission," the initials of which were "Ch" and "K") in August 1918. He was caught, arrested, and executed later the same year. A memorial volume devoted to Leonid Kannegiser containing a partial account of the assassination, notes on the young Kannegiser, and a selection of twenty-three of his poems, was published in Paris in 1928, and entitled Leonid Kunnegiser: 1918-1928.

10. Pushkin's famous poem of October 1833 dealing with the work of Peter the Great.

11. Sergei Alexandrovich Esenin (1895-1925) is probably the most popular poet in the Soviet Union. He was born in a peasant family and made his reputation partly as the poet of the peasant village and its pre-revolutionary way of life, and partly thanks to his colorful, bohemian existence. In January 1916 Esenin was a relative newcomer to Petersburg (then Petrograd). He had come to the city in 1915 and had made contact with some of the main literary men of the time, including Sergei Gordetsky, Blok, and Bely. Esenin's first poem, "The Birchtree" ("Bereza") was published in 1914 and his first collection, Radunitsa, in 1916. See Gordon McVay, Esenin: A Life (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976).

12. Tsvetaeva conceived of Germany (the true Germany) not as a political entity, but as a culture. She had grown up in the cultural Germany of Goethe, Holderlin, and Heine. Therefore she refused to join her contemporaries' patriotic anti-Germanism during World War I. In 1919 she expressed her loyalty once again in the prose piece "On Germany" ("O Germanii"), published in Days, December 13,1925.