Я остаюсь (I Remain) by Nina Berberova

I remain with what was not fully said,
With what was not fully sung, not played out,
Not written to the end, in a secret society,
In the quiet fellowship of the unsuccessful,
Who lived in rustling pages
And now talk in whispers.
They even forewarned us in youth,
but we didn’t want another fate,
And, in general, it wasn’t so bad;
And it even happens – those who didn’t finish
Laughing, didn’t finish dancing take us on trust.

We didn’t succeed, as many didn’t succeed,
For example – all world history
And, as I’ve heard, the universe itself.
But how we cackled, carried in the wind!
About what? And is that important?
They stole the baggage in the station long ago
(So they told us), and burned the books
(So they taught us), the river became shallow,
The forest was cut down and the house burned up,
And the burial mound is grown over
With thistle (So they wrote us),
And the old watchman long ago is not on the job.

Don’t tear form from content
And allow me yet to say in farewell,
That we’ve made peace with our fate,
And you just keep on in a cheerful march
Striding in platoons, showing off to elders.

by Нина Николаевна Берберова
(Nina Nikolayevna Berberova)
(1959)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Я остаюсь

Я остаюсь с недосказавшими,
С недопевшими, недоигравшими,
С недописавшими. В тайном обществе,
В тихом сообществе недоуспевших,
Которые жили в листах шелестевших
И шепотом нынче говорят.
Хоть в юности нас и предупреждали,
Но мы другой судьбы не хотели,
И, в общем, не так уж было скверно;
И даже бывает — нам верят на слово
Дохохотавшие, доплясавшие.

Мы не удались, как не удалось многое,
Например — вся мировая история
И, как я слышала, сама вселенная.
Но как мы шуршали, носясь по ветру!
О чем? Да разве это существенно?
Багаж давно украли на станции
(Так нам сказали), и книги сожгли
(Так нас учили), река обмелела,
Вырублен лес, и дом сгорел,
И затянулся чертополохом
Могильный холм (так нам писали),
А старый сторож давно не у дел.

Не отрывайте формы от содержания,
И позвольте еще сказать на прощание,
Что мы примирились с нашей судьбой.
А вы продолжайте бодрым маршем
Шагать повзводно, козыряя старшим.

Berberova’s father was an Armenian who worked in the Tsar’s Ministry of Finance; her mother came from the landed gentry. In the early 1920s Berberova’s poetry was noted in the literary salons of Petrograd. In 1922, along with her husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, she received permission to leave Russia. At first they lived with Maksim Gorky in Italy and Berlin and then settled in Paris, where they were divorced in 1932. For fifteen years Berberova worked for the Paris Russian newspaper Posledniye novosti and published several novels, the most successful of which was Tchaikovsky (1936). In 1950 she moved to the United States, where she taught at Princeton University until her retirement.

Fame came to her at the age of seventy-two when she published her autobiography, Kursiv moi (The Italics Are Mine). Caustic and unsparing , the book provoked a mixed reaction in émigré circles, but in the USSR it became a coveted item on the literary black market. In 1988 Berberova made a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union; where she discovered that she had become famous in her homeland.

Biographical information about Berberova, p.413, ‘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).

Бывает, поддашься болезни (Sometimes, You Give Way…) by Igor Chinnov

Sometimes, you give way to sickness,
And lie in a hospital so long
Asking for health and life,
And lo, at daybreak, through the silence –

Like a voice from far away
(I don’t know whose and don’t ask)
But it is so full of torment –
More terrifying than those nights in the hospital…

Filled with sorrow, with pain for the whole world
(You look around, crushing your handkerchief)
An alien grief, not from here,
Like happiness, pierces you…

What about you? Your face is distorted,
The muscle on your lip trembles.
You mistakenly thought
That someone answered you.

by Игорь Владимирович Чиннов
(Igor Vladimirovich Chinnov a.k.a Igors Činnovs)
from Monologue (1950)
translated by Thomas E. Bird

Бывает, поддашься болезни…

Бывает, поддашься болезни,
Так долго в больнице лежишь
И просишь здоровья и жизни,
И вот, на рассвете, сквозь тишь –

Как будто бы голос далёкий
(Не знаю, не спрашивай – чей)
Такой отзывается мукой –
Страшнее больничных ночей…

И скорбью, и болью о мире
(Ты смотришь, платок теребя)
Иное, нездешнее горе,
Как счастьем, пронзает тебя…

О чём ты? – Лицо исказилось,
И жилка дрожит на губе.
Напрасно тебе показалось,
Что кто-то ответил тебе.

Additional information: Chinnov is another poet with no English Wikipedia page. In Latvian his name is written as Igors Činnovs alongside the more Russian form of his name. Below I will give a brief, roughly translated and compiled, account of his biography from the Russian, Latvian or French Wikipedia pages.

He was born in Tukkum to the family of a Russian lawyer. Throughout 1914-1922 the Chinnov family, of hereditary nobility, lived in Russia, then left for Latvia. He studied at the Riga City Russian Secondary School, received a law degree in Riga, and worked as a legal consultant. He published his first poems in the magazine “Numbers”. In 1944, he was deported from Latvia to Germany for forced labour. After his release, he enlisted in the American army and served in France. After being demobilized in 1946, he settled in France.

In 1953 he moved to Munich, where he worked in the Russian edition of the radio station Osvobozhdenie (later Svoboda). From 1962 to 1968, in the USA, he was a professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Kansas. Then at Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University in Nashville until 1976. In 1977 he retired and settled in Florida.

He published several poetry collections: “Monologue” (Paris, 1950), “Lines” (Paris, 1960), “Metaphors” (New York, 1968); “Pastorals” (Paris, 1976); “Autograph” (Holyoke, 1984), etc.
In 1992 and 1993 he came to Russia.

He was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow. His archive is stored at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the cabinet of Russian literature abroad. I. V. Chinnova.

Chinnov‘s early work was influenced by the poetics of the “Parisian note“. His mature period is characterized by great formal sophistication (experiments with dolniks, non-classical combinations of syllabic-tonic meters) and musicality of verse, surreal images. Some critics recognized him as “the first poet of the Russian emigration” after the death of Georgy Ivanov . The poet’s work was influenced by the period he spent in France. He is characterized by elements of surrealism, formal sophistication, lyrics that touch on issues of life and death, faith, and hope.

Chinnov, the son of a judge, lived with his family in Russia from 1914 to 1922. In the 1930s he studied law in Riga and worked there as a legal counsel to different enterprises. From 1944 to 1947 he lived in Germany, and then in Paris until 1953, when he returned to Germany. In 1962 he immigrated to the United States, becoming a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Kansas and Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

An unpretentious, subtle lyric poet, he began to publish his poetry in 1933 – 1934. His first collection, Monolog, was published in Paris in 1950. Chinnov’s lyrics arise from despair at contemplating the horror of suffering and the lack of meaning of the human condition. Indeed, his poems seem at odds with his smiling gentility and courteous generosity.

Biographical information about Chinnov, p.547, ‘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)

Смирение – игольное ушко (Humility Is The Eye Of The Needle) by Yelena Rubisova

Humility is the eye of the needle
And I am a camel, hulking, clumsy.
Go through! Go through! And suddenly everything
Is easy and simple and paradise for us, mortals, ordained.

In the sandy sea the waves are yellow,
Among them I am lost, a desert ship.
O God, let me go through! Let the Will of the Pilot
Henceforth change the set of sail.

Let me become like thread, and put anxiety aside,
So the doorkeeper’s hand will lead
Me through the triumphal gates
Of the eye of the needle.

by Елена Федоровна Рубисова
(Yelena Fedorovna Rubisova a.k.a. Hélène Rubissow)
translated by Thomas E. Bird

Смирение – игольное ушко

Смирение – игольное ушко.
А я-верблюд, громадный, неуклюжий.
Пройти! Пройти! И станет вдруг легко
И просто все и рай нам, людям, сужен.
В песчаном море — желтые валы,
Затерян я средь них, корабль пустыни.
О Боже, дай пройти! Пусть паруса углы
Исправит Воля Кормчего отныне.
Дай стать как нить и погаси заботу,
Чтоб провела привратника рука
Меня сквозь триумфальные ворота
Игольного ушка.

Additonal information: The book I reference places Rubisova’s dates as ‘1910(?) – ‘ which seems like a broad estimation with the information available in 1993. There is even now little to no information easily available about her in English so I turned to the French Wikipedia page where she is referred to as Hélène Rubissow with her dates stated as 18 July 1897 – 14 August 1988. Aside from being credited as a poet she is also noted as being a painter, draughtswoman and writer. In truth it seems it is her artwork which has been her most lasting achievement noted by people.

Little is known of Rubisova’s biography. Living in emigration in France she was never famous, but through her modest, diligent poetry she has proven that industry, joined with talent, in the end bears fruit. It was her own hand and not anyone else’s that brought her, in her own expressive image, “through the triumphal gates / Of the eye of the needle.”

Biographical information about Rubisova, p.575, ‘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).

Проходят мимо неприявшие (Those Who Would Not Accept…) by Natalya Krandievskaya

Those who would not accept went past.
They do not recognise the bloodstained face.
Russia: where are those who cried
About love’s mercy?
The pangs have come on now – you are in labor.
But who is with you in your anguish?
Some do the burying, and a censer
Is smoking in a sacrilegious hand.
Others scared away, like crows,
And hearing groans when on the wing,
Hurry in all four directions.
And caw about your nudity.
And who in a frenzy of contradiction
Has not raised his knife above it?
Who heard the cries at the bedside,
And the delirium of prophetic nights?
Well, let it be. In suffering you are not alone,
Flesh that is racked by pain is blessed!
By the bedside of all who have given birth
There is one who keeps watch – the Lord.

by Наталья Васильевна Крандиевская
(Natalia Vasilyevna Krandievskaya)
translated by Lubov Yakovleva

Проходят мимо неприявшие

Проходят мимо неприявшие,
Не узнают лица в крови.
Россия, где ж они, кричавшие
Тебе о жертвенной любви? Теперь ты в муках, ты — родильница.
Но кто с тобой в твоей тоске?
Одни хоронят, и кадильница
Дымит в кощунственной руке.Другие вспугнуты, как вороны,
И стоны слыша на лету,
Спешат на все четыре стороны
Твою окаркать наготу.И кто в безумьи прекословия
Ножа не заносил над ней!
Кто принял крик у изголовия
И бред пророческих ночей? Но пусть. Ты в муках не одна ещё.
Благословенна в муках плоть!
У изголовья всех рождающих
Единый сторож есть — Господь.

Additional information: Natalia Vasilyevna Krandievskaya (Наталья Васильевна Крандиевская) (1888–1963) was a poet and memoirist born in the Russian Empire. She published three books of poetry, a collection of poems devoted to the Siege of Leningrad, and a book of memoirs. Her second marriage was to the writer Alexey Tolstoy. The couple lived in exile together for several years after the Russian Revolution.

Krandievskaya’s first book of verse was published in 1913. Her poetry was highly rated by Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova. Her best book, In the Name of the Evil One, was published in Berlin in 1923. She was at one time the wife of the leading Soviet writer and literary official Aleksey Tolstoy, who had begun his writing career as a poet under the influence of the Symbolists, though he destroyed his single collection of lyrics in 1907. After a long silence she wrote some very powerful tragic poems in a burst of inspiration during the German blockade of Leningrad in World War II.

Biographical information about Krandievskaya, p.169, ‘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).