Ночь темна… (The Night Is Dark) by Yury Galanskov

The night is dark.
There is a moon.
She is, of course, not alone,
And I am absolutely not lonely,
And just now – the bell rings.
I hear a prearranged knock on the door,
jump up, grasp the handshake,
put on a raincoat,
and we go out
almost
in a downpour of rain.
We go out,
and, it is to be supposed,
we are going to overthrow someone.

by Yury Galanskov
1955 (?)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Ночь темна

Ночь темна.
Луна.
Она, конечно, не одна.
И я совсем не одинок,
вот-вот — и прозвенит звонок.
Услышу в дверь условный стук,
вскочу, схвачу пожатье рук,
надену плащ,
и мы уйдем
почти
под проливным дождем.
Уйдем,
и надо полагать —
идем кого-то низвергать.

Additional information: Ю́рий Тимофе́евич Галанско́в (Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov); 19 June 1939 – 4 November 1972) was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.

Galanskov’s father was a common worker. He studied briefly at Moscow University but was expelled in his second semester for “the independence of his views.” In 1961, as one of the first human rights activists, he helped found the underground journal Feniks (Phoenix), where, in the first number, his own poetry first appeared. The second number, Feniks 66, he published on his own. He was arrested in 1967 and sentenced with Aleksandr Ginzburg to seven years in a severe-regimen camp for assisting in the production of the White Book about the trial of Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel. Beginning in 1969 he was in and out of prison hospitals for treatment of ulcers. He died tragically at the martyr’s age of thrity-three from a blood infection following an ulcer operation.

Galanskov was an unusually courageous, uncompromising enemy of the violence, vulgarity, and hypocrisy of the Soviet system; none of his poetry or essays was ever published in the official Soviet press during his lifetime.

Biographical information about Galanskov, p.954, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Равнодушие (Indifference) by Dmitry Bobyshev

Indifference –
A house
Packed with ice,
Full of snow.
Indifference –
A house
For freezing,
Not for living.
A vault. A plush crypt.
Indifference. A house.
Moldy bread and boxes.
Peels, dead birds, combings, scrapings.
Peer closely – here are also people,
Two-humped people – freaks!
And they kick off from boredom.
And people!
O people are camels!
And virgins are whores.
Peer closely.
But try to enter in,
Only try!
I am like a physician,
I tear out an eye, knock out teeth,
But I will give back!
Indifference.
The coffin. Dead flesh.
House of the dead. Bird feathers.
Broken claws.
Indifference. A house. Indifference.

by Дмитрий Васильевич Бобышев
(Dmitry Vasilyevich Bobyshev)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Равнодушие

Равнодушие —
Набитый льдом,
Наполненный снегом дом.
Равнодушие —
Не для жилья,
Для замораживанья дом.
Погреб. Плюшевый склеп.
Равнодушие. Дом.
Пыльный хлеб и коробки.
Корки, мертвые птицы, очески, поскребыши.
Загляни — здесь и люди,
Двугорбые люди — уроды!
И подохнут со скуки.
И люди!
О люди — верблюды!
И девки — о потаскухи.
Загляни.
Но попробуй зайди —
Лишь попробуй!
Я уподоблюсь врачу.
Вырву глаз, выбью зубы,
А возвращу!
Равнодушие.
Гроб. Мертвечина.
Муравьи и мышиный помет на полу.
Мертвечина.
Мертвый дом. Птичьи перья. Разбитые клешни.
Равнодушие. Дом. Равнодушие.

Additional information: Dmitry Vasilyevich Bobyshev (Дми́трий Васи́льевич Бо́бышев), born 11 April 1936, Mariupol, is a Soviet poet, translator and literary critic.

Bobyshev grew up in Leningrad, where his father died during the blockade in World War II. In 1959 he completed studies at the Leningrad Technological Institute as a chemical engineer and worked in the fiend of chemical weapons. At the end of the 1960s he began working as an editor in the technical division of Leningrad television.

Bobyshev began to write poetry in the 1950s and was first published in the samizdat journal Sintaksis (Syntax) in 1959 and 1960 and then later briefly in Iunost’ (Youth) and Leningrad almanacs. His first collection, Ziianiia (Hiatus), appeared in Paris in 1979, the year he succeeded in immigrating to the United States. His resolution to be a poet was significantly affected by his meeting with Anna Akhmatova, who dedicated the poem “Piataia roza” (The Fifth Rose) to him, though he considers the poetry of Rilke to be his literary wellspring.

Biographical information about Bobyshev, p.862, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Когда человек умирает… When A Man Dies… by Anna Akhmatova

When a man dies,
His portraits change.
His eyes gaze out differently, and his lips
Smile with a different smile.
I noticed that when I returned
From the funeral of a certain poet.
And since then I have tested it often
And my suspicions have been confirmed.

by Анна Андреевна Ахматова (Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova)
a.k.a. Анна Андреевна Горенко (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko)
(1940)
translated by Daniel Weissbort

Когда человек умирает…

Когда человек умирает,
Изменяются его портреты.
По-другому глаза глядят, и губы
Улыбаются другой улыбкой.
Я заметила это, вернувшись
С похорон одного поэта.
И с тех пор проверяла часто,
И моя догадка подтвердилась.

The poem read by А. Демидова (A. Demidova).

Akhmatova, whose real surname was Gorenko, is on of the two greatest women poets in the history of Russian poetry. The daughter of a merchant marine engineer, she spent much of her childhood in Tsarkoye Selo, the village outside St Petersburg where the Tsar’s summer palace was located. The regal nature of her work is perhaps in part attributed to this royal environment. Her first books of poetry, Vecher (Evening) (1912) and Chotki (Rosary) (1913; reissued eleven times), brought her critical acclaim. From 1910 to 1918 she was married to Nikolai Gumilyov.

Akhmatova’s poetry, with a few exceptions, is distinguished from that of Russia’s other preeminent woman poet, Marina Tsvetayeva, by its polished form, classical transparency, and thematic intimacy. She wrote comparatively few poems of a “civic” character and, unlike almost any other poet, little or nothing that could be called mediocre. Her poetry, has stood well the test of time, as evidenced by such works as “Mne golos byl…” (I heard a voice…), which repudiates immigration; the patriotic “Muzhestvo” (Courage), which appeared during/World War II; the remarkable “Rekviem” (Requiem); and others.

It is revealing that, despite the personal tragedy of her son’s arrest and persecution during Stalin’s worst purges in 1937-1938, she did not grow bitter but bore her pain with dignity and endurance. In 1946 Akhmatova, along with Mikhail Zoshchenko, fell prey to harsh and unjust criticism in a party resolution “About the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad” in a repressive persecution of the arts led by Andrey Zhdanov. She was not rehabilitated fully until the 1960s. In 1964 she was awarded the Italian Taormina Prize and in 1965 she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. At the time of her death Akhmatova was highly acclaimed both at home and abroad. Her funeral was a farewell to an entire literary epoch (more than half a century) of which she herself was the queen with a very heavy crown.

Biographical information about Akhmatova, p.170, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Клён ты мой опавший (My Leafless Maple Tree…) by Sergey Yesenin

My leafless maple tree, your icy coating,
Why do you stand here bowed, in the white blizzard?

Or did you hear something? Did you see something?
As if you’d gone walking beyond the village confines,

And like a drunken watchman, setting off down the road,
Got buried in a snowdrift, so your legs froze hard?

Like you I’m none too steady either on my pins,
I’ll not make it back from this drinking bout with my friends.

What’s this? A willow tree! And over there’s a pine!
I sing them songs of summer to the snowstorm’s whine.

It seems to me that I’m just like the maple tree,
Only not stripped bare all covered in green.

And in a drunken stupor, shameless and uncontrite,
I embrace a little birch, like someone else’s bride.

by Сергей Александрович Есенин
(Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin)
a.k.a. Sergey Yesenin / Esenin
(1925)
translated by Daniel Weissbort

Клён ты мой опавший

Клён ты мой опавший, клён заледенелый,
Что стоишь, нагнувшись, под метелью белой?
Или что увидел? Или что услышал?
Словно за деревню погулять ты вышел
И, как пьяный сторож, выйдя на дорогу,
Утонул в сугробе, приморозил ногу.
Ах, и сам я нынче чтой-то стал нестойкий,
Не дойду до дома с дружеской попойки.
Там вон встретил вербу, там сосну приметил,
Распевал им песни под метель о лете.
Сам себе казался я таким же кленом,
Только не опавшим, а вовсю зеленым.
И, утратив скромность, одуревши в доску,
Как жену чужую, обнимал березку.

28 ноября 1925

The poem read by Павел Севостьянов (Pavel Sevostyanov) with the musical piece ‘Oltremare’ by Ludovico Einaudi

Yesenin was born in a peasant family and grew up in the religiously strict home of his grandfather, who was an Old Believer. He went to Moscow as a youth and studied at the A. L. Shanyansky Peoples’ University from 1912 to 1915 while he worked as a proofreader. Yesenin was perhaps the most Russian poet of all time, for the poetry of no one else was so formed from the rustling of birch trees, from the soft patter of raindrops on thatch-roofed peasant huts, from the neighing of horses in mist-filled morning meadows, from the clanking of bells on cows’ necks, from the swaying of chamomile and cornflower, from the singing in the outskirts of villages. Yesenin’s verses were not so much written by pen as breathed out of Russian nature. His poems, born in folklore, gradually themselves were transformed into folklore.

Yesenin’s first poetry was published in journals in 1914. Still very much a village boy from the Ryazan province when he arrived in the St. Petersburg world of literary salons in 1915, he wrote afterward that “it was as if a Ryazan mare had splashed his piss on the emasculated snobbish elite.” He did not turn into a salon poet; after a night of carousing he would pretend to catch grasshoppers from the fields of the peasant childhood with the silk hat taken from his golden head. Yesenin called himself the “last poet of the village” and saw himself as a foal maddened by the fire-breathing locomotive of industrialisation. He extolled the Revolution, but, failing at times to understand “where these fateful events are leading us,” he diverted himself with heavy drinking and hooliganism.

The roots of the national character of his poetry were so deep that they remained with him during all his wandering abroad. It was not from mere chance that he sensed himself an inalienable part of Russian nature – “As silently as in their turn / The trees shed leaves, I shed these lines” – and that nature was one of the embodiments of his own self, that he was now an ice-covered maple, now a ginger moon. Yesenin’s feeling of his native land extended into feeling for the limitless star-filled universe, which he also made human and domestic: “[A dog’s] tears, like golden stars, / Trickled down into the snow.”

With Nikolai Klyuyev, Vadim Shershenevich, and Anatoly Mariengof, Yesenin was one of the leaders of Imaginism, which gave priority to form and stressed imagery as a foundation of poetry. Yesenin sought friendship with Vladimir Mayakovsky and at the same time carried on a polemic with him in verse form. They were totally different poets. No other poet engaged in such candid confessions that left him vulnerable, though sometimes they were concealed in riotous behavior. All of Yesenin’s feelings and thoughts, even his searching and casting about, pulsed in him openly, like blue veins under skin so tenderly transparent as to be nonexistent. Never a rhetorical poet, he exhibited the highest personal courage in “Black Man” and many other poems, when he slapped on the table of history his own steaming heart, shuddering in convulsions – a real, living heart, so unlike the hearts of playing-card decks that dextrous poetic card sharks trump with the ace of spades.

Yesenin’s ill-fated marriage to Isadora Duncan exacerbated his personal tragedy. He tried to find salvation in vodka and gained a reputation as a hooligan. After writing his final poem in his own blood, Yesenin hanged himself in a room of the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. A story circulated that he was in fact killed.

For the confessional honesty of his poetry he was loved by his fellow Russians. Indeed, it is safe to say that no other poet’s work has ever enjoyed such genuinely universal popularity. Literally everyone read and reads him: peasants, workers, the most sophisticated intellectuals. The secret of his popularity is simple: an extraordinary candor both in his celebration of Russia and in his own self revelations. His grave is perpetually scattered with flowers left by admiring readers – taxi drivers, workers, students, and simple Russian grandmothers.

Biographical information about Yesenin, p.289-90, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Другая планета (Another Planet) by Boris Poplavsky

To Jules Laforgue

With our monocles, our frayed pants,
our various diseases of the heart.
we slyly think that planets and the moon
have been left to us by Laforgue.

So we scramble meowing up the drainpipe.
The roofs are asleep, looking like scaly carp.
And a long-tailed devil, wrapped in a thundercloud,
struts around like a draftsman’s compass on a map.

Sleepwalkers promenade.
House-ghosts with sideburns lounge sedately.
Winged dogs bark quietly;
we fly off softly, mounted on dogs.

Below, milky land glistens.
A train belching sparks is clearly visible.
A pattern of rivers ornaments the fields,
And over there is the sea, its waters waist-deep.

Raising their tails like aeroplanes,
our pilots are gaining altitude,
and we fly off to Venus – but not the one
that wrecks the charts of our life.

A motionless blue mountain, like a nose.
Glassy lakes in the shadow of mountains.
Joy, like a tray, shakes us.
We head for a landing, our lights fading out.

Why are these fires burning on the bright sun’s surface?
No, already they fly and crawl and whisper –
They are dragonfly people, they are butterflies
as light as tears and no stronger than a flower.

Toads like fat mushrooms come galloping,
carrots buck and rear and quiver,
and along with them toothed plants
that cast no shadows are reaching for us.

And they start to buzz, they start to crackle and squeak,
they kiss, they bite – why, this is hell!
Grasses whistle like pink serpents
and the cats! I won’t even try to describe them.

We’re trapped. We weep. We fall silent.
And suddenly it gets dark with terrifying speed.
Frozen rain, the snowy smoke of an avalanche,
our dirigible no longer dares to fly.

The insects’ angry host has vanished.
And as for us, we have stretched out to die.
Mountains close us in, a deep blue morgue shuts over us.
Ice and eternity enchain us.

by Борис Юлианович Поплавский
(Boris Yulianovich Poplavsky)
translated by Emmet Jarrett and Richard Lourie

Другая планета

С моноклем, с бахромою на штанах,
С пороком сердца и с порочным сердцем
Ехидно мним: планеты и луна
Оставлены Лафоргом нам в наследство.

Вот мы ползем по желобу, мяуча.
Спят крыши, как чешуйчатые карпы,
И важно ходит, завернувшись в тучу,
Хвостатый черт, как циркуль вдоль по карте.

Лунатики уверенно гуляют,
Сидят степенно домовые в баках,
Крылатые собаки тихо лают.
Мы мягко улетаем на собаках.

Блестит внизу молочная земля,
И ясно виден искрометный поезд.
Разводом рек украшены поля,
А вот и море, в нем воды по пояс.

Вожатые забрали высоту,
Хвост задирая, как аэропланы,
И на Венеру мы летим — не ту,
Что нашей жизни разбивает планы.

Синеет горный неподвижный нос,
Стекло озер под горными тенями.
Нас радость потрясает как поднос,
Снижаемся с потухшими огнями.

На ярком солнце для чего огни?
Но уж летят, а там ползут и шепчут
Стрекозы-люди, бабочки они,
Легки, как слезы, и цветка не крепче.

Вот жабы скачут, толстые грибы,
Трясясь встают моркови на дыбы,
И с ними вместе, не давая тени,
Зубастые к нам тянутся растенья.

И шасть-жужжать и шасть-хрустеть, пищать,
Целуются, кусаются — ну ад!
Свистит трава как розовые змеи.
А кошки! Описать их не сумею.

Мы пойманы, мы плачем, мы молчим.
Но вдруг с ужасной скоростью темнеет.
Замерзший дождь, лавины снежной дым.
Наш дирижабль уже лететь не смеет.

Пропала насекомых злая рать,
А мы, мы вытянулись умирать.
Замкнулись горы, синий морг над нами.
Окованы мы вечностью и льдами.

Additional information: Борис Юлианович Поплавский (Boris Yulianovich Poplavsky) (24 May [6 June] 1903, Moscow – 9 October 1935, Paris ) was a poet and prose writer of the Russian diaspora (specifically the first wave of emigration).

Jules Laforgue (16 August 1860 – 20 August 1887), who the poem is dedicated to and who is mentioned in the first stanza, was a Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called “part-symbolist, part-impressionist”. Laforgue was a model for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, including for Renoir’s 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party.

In 1919 Poplavsky emigrated with his family to Paris by way of Constantinople. He began to publish his poetry in émigré journals in 1928 and possessed a unique charm that became a legend among Russians abroad. His first book of selected poems Flagi (Flags), was published in 1931, subsidized by a wealthy patron of the arts. The circumstances of his life were extremely harsh; he lived in poverty and died from an overdose of heroin that was more likely an accident of his mystical searching than a suicide. Immediately after his death he was recognized as one of the most remarkable literary talents in emigration and was described in the loftiest tones by such eminent critics as Vladislav Khodasevich and Dmitry Merezhkovsky.

Poplavsky wrote under the diverse influences of Baudelaire and Apollinaire, James Joyce, Aleksandr Blok, and Mikhail Lermontov. If his early lyrics tend to be surrealistic, his later verse is more mystical, permeated with the questing religious spirit of Dostoyevsky, expressing profound loneliness, but always musical. He was first published in the USSR in the magazine Ogoniok in 1988.

Biographical information about Poplavsky, p.417, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).