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"I turn the page: Pushkin—my Pushkin, what I always say about him. And the third poem—Goethe, my Goethe, mine since sixteen, Goethe—old, mysterious!—he, of whom I say, judging the present: In the presence of this court Goethe...

"I read only those three poems. I left, carrying away pain, joy, ecstasy—everything except your book which I couldn't buy since nothing of mine had been sold. And a feeling: if there are still poems like that...

"What does there remain for me to tell you, except:

'You are so close to me, so kin to me'...

"The pretext, dear Mikhail Alexeevich, for my letter is to thank you for sending your regards via Mrs. Volkova."

* * * * *

And here—are those eyes:

Two glowing horizons!—no, mirrors!

No—two maladies!

Two volcanic craters,

Two black circles

Charred—out of the ice of mirrors

Off sidewalk stones

Across thousands of miles of hall

—They smoulder—polar circles.

They are terrible! Flame and darkness!

Two black pits.

Like sleepless little boys

In hospitals: Mama!—

Fear and reproach, ah and amen...

A stroke majestic—

Over the stoneness of sheets—

Two black glories.

So know this, that rivers—back up!

That the stones—remember!

That they are rising up

Again, rising in enormous beams

Again—two suns, two craters,

No—two diamonds-Mirrors of the gulf underground:

Two mortal eyes.

(Written and sent to him in June 1921, with the letter.)

I have called this "An Otherworldly Evening."

The beginning of January, 1916, the beginning of the last year of the old world.27 The war at full heat. Dark forces.

We sat and read poems. The last poems on the last fur rugs by the last fireplaces. In the course of that whole evening not one person said the word "front," nor, however close his physical proximity, was the name of Rasputin uttered.

But the next day the lives of Serezha and Lenya ended, and the day after that Sofya Isaakovna Chatskina was already wandering around Moscow, like a shadow seeking shelter, and she for whom all fireplaces were too few grew numb by Moscow's ghostly stoves.

The next day Akhmatova lost everyone, and Gumilev—his life.

But today the evening was ours!

A Feast During the Plague?28 Yes. But in Pushkin's tragedy they feasted on wine and roses, and we—incorporeally, marvelous-ly, like pure spirits—already phantoms of Hades—feasted on words: the sounds of words and the living blood of feelings.

Do I regret it? No. Man's sole duty on earth is the truth of his whole being. That evening I would, honestly, hand placed on my heart, have given up all of Petersburg and all of Moscow for Kuzmin's "so resembles... happiness," I would have given up the happiness itself for the "so resembles... " Some sell their souls—for rosy cheeks, others surrender them—for the sounds of heaven.

And they all paid. Serezha and Lenya—with their lives. Gumilev—with his life. Esenin—with his life. Kuzmin, Akhmatova, I—with life imprisonment in ourselves, in that fortress which is surer even than the Peter-Paul.29

And however victorious worldly mornings and evenings were, and however differently, by the hand of history or the hand of silence, we, the participants in that otherworldly evening, died— our lips' last sound was and will be:

And never for her could earth's boring songs

Take the place of the sounds of heaven.30

* * * * *
—Translated by Marian Schwartz and Richard Sylvester

27. In naming 1916 the last year of the old world, Tsvetaeva implicitly refers to the February-March Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of the new epoch. That Revolution brought in a liberal, constitutional government but was itself overthrown by the radical Bolshevik Revolution of October-November in the same year.

28. Pushkin's verse drama A Feast During the Plague (Pir vo vremia chumy) is one of his so-called "little tragedies" written in 1830. Tsvetaeva was particularly fascinated by the Chairman's song in the drama. She discusses it in her essay "Art in the Light of Conscience" and again in "Pushkin and Pugachev."

29. The Peter-Paul fortress is located on an island in the Neva River, very close to the heart of Petersburg. It was used in Tsarist Russia as a prison for political dissenters.

30. The lines are from Lermontov's famous poem, "The Angel" (1831).