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).

Вам, друзья мои, вам, дорогие (To You, My Friends…) by Inna Lisnyanskaya

To you, my friends, to you, my dear ones,
I smile after you though tears:
Don’t be afraid, my friends, of nostalgia –
There is exodus, there is no emigration.

Drawing near to the last right
Under the earth to yearn for the earth
I will never dare call
any country foreign.

Can I await an invitation to a beheading
And not struggle toward the escape door?
There is no impulse in me more outrageous
Than saying goodbye to mourn you.

by Инна Львовна Лиснянская
(Inna Lvovna Lisnyanskaya)
(1978)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Вам, друзья мои, вам, дорогие

Вам, друзья мои, вам, дорогие,
Улыбаюсь сквозь слёзы вослед:
Вы не бойтесь, друзья, ностальгии —
Есть Исход, эмиграции нет!

Приближаясь к последнему праву
Под землёй о земле тосковать,
Больше я никакую державу
Не посмею чужбиной назвать.

Можно ль ждать приглашения к казни
И не рваться в спасительный лаз?!
Нет порыва во мне безобразней,
Чем, прощаясь, оплакивать вас.

Lisnyanskaya published her first poems in 1949. With her first three volumes she established herself a reputation as a competent writer of so-called women’s lyrics; however, her fourth collection, Iz pervykh ruk (At First Hand) (1966), reached a new level of tragic, confessional courage that was strongly chastised by the organs of censorship. This direct clash with the system and the persecution of dissidents (many of whom were her friends) then taking place made her muse ever more tragic and politicized her personal behaviour. Her next book, Vinogradnyi svet (Grape Light), came out ten years later.

Conflict with the system summoned in Lisnyanskaya additional artistic reserves. After helping to produce the semi-dissident almanac Metropol’ in 1979, both Lisnyanskaya and her husband, Semyon Lipkin, withdrew from the Writers Union as a sign of protest against the expulsion of their colleagues. Soon they were published only abroad. Her uncensored philosophical poetry reveals a religious mindset that subtly perceives the suffering of people conditioned by political circumstances.

Biographical information about Lisnyanskaya, p.897, ‘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).

Снег идет (Snow Is Falling) by Boris Pasternak

Snow is falling, snow is falling.
Reaching for the storm’s white stars,
Petals of geraniums stretch
Beyond the window bars.

Snow is falling, all is chaos,
Everything is in the air,
The angle of the crossroads,
The steps of the back stair.

Snow is falling, not like flakes
But as if the firmament
In a coat with many patches
Were making its descent.

As if, from the upper landing,
Looking like a lunatic,
Creeping, playing hide-and-seek,
The sky stole from the attic.

Because life does not wait,
Turn, and you find Christmas here.
And a moment after that
It’s suddenly New Year.

Snow is falling, thickly, thickly,
Keeping step, stride for stride,
No less quickly, nonchalantly,
Is that time, perhaps,
Passing in the street outside?

And perhaps year follows year
Like the snowflakes falling
Or the words that follow here?

Snow is falling, snow is falling,
Snow is falling, all is chaos:
The whitened ones who pass,
The angle of the crossroads,
The dazed plants by the glass.

By Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к
(Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)
(1957)
from Когда разгуляется (When The Weather Clears)
translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France

Pasternak’s poem read by the actor Александр Феклистов (Aleksandr Vasilyevich Feklistov).

Снег идет

Снег идет, снег идет.
К белым звездочкам в буране
Тянутся цветы герани
За оконный переплет.

Снег идет, и всё в смятеньи,
Всё пускается в полет, –
Черной лестницы ступени,
Перекрестка поворот.

Снег идет, снег идет,
Словно падают не хлопья,
А в заплатанном салопе
Сходит наземь небосвод.

Словно с видом чудака,
С верхней лестничной площадки,
Крадучись, играя в прятки,
Сходит небо с чердака.

Потому что жизнь не ждет.
Не оглянешься — и святки.
Только промежуток краткий,
Смотришь, там и новый год.

Снег идет, густой-густой.
В ногу с ним, стопами теми,
В том же темпе, с ленью той
Или с той же быстротой,

Может быть, проходит время?
Может быть, за годом год
Следуют, как снег идет,
Или как слова в поэме?

Снег идет, снег идет,
Снег идет, и всё в смятеньи:
Убеленный пешеход,
Удивленные растенья,
Перекрестка поворот.

Берегись… (Beware) by Marina Tsvetaeva

But for two, even mornings’
Joy is too small.
As you draw inside
Turn your face to the wall

(For the Spirit’s a pilgrim,
Walks alone its way),
Let your hearing drop
To the primal clay.

Adam, listen hard
Over the sources,
Hear what rivers’ veins
Are telling their shores.

You are the way and the end,
The path and the house.
By two no new lands
Can be opened out.

To the brows’ lofty camp
You are bridge and breach.
(God is a despot,
Jealous of each).

Adam, listen hard
Over the source,
Hear what rivers’ veins
Are telling their shores:

‘Beware of your servant:
When the proud trump plays
Don’t appear in our Father’s house
Fettered, a slave.

Beware of your wife:
Casting off mortal things,
When the naked trump sounds
Don’t appear wearing rings.’

Adam, listen hard
Over the source,
Hear what rivers’ veins
Are telling their shore:

‘Beware. Don’t build towers
On closeness and kin.
(Far more firm than her
In our hearts is Him.)

Don’t be tempted be eagles.
King David still cries
To this day for his son
Who fell into the skies.’

Adam, listen hard
Above the source,
Hear what rivers’ veins
Are telling their shores:

‘Beware of graves,
More ravenous than whores.
The dead rot, they are gone,
Beware sepulchures.

From yesterday’s truths
Remain filth and stench.
Give up to the winds
Your earthly ash.’

Adam, listen hard
Over the source,
Hear what rivers’ veins
Are telling their shores:

‘Beware.’

by Marina Tsvetaeva
(8 August 1922)
by David McDuff

Берегись…

Но тесна вдвоём
Даже радость утр.
Оттолкнувшись лбом
И подавшись внутрь,

(Ибо странник — Дух,
И идёт один),
До начальных глин
Потупляя слух —

Над источником,
Слушай-слушай, Адам,
Что́ проточные
Жилы рек — берегам:

— Ты и путь и цель,
Ты и след и дом.
Никаких земель
Не открыть вдвоём.

В горний лагерь лбов
Ты и мост и взрыв.
(Самовластен — Бог
И меж всех ревнив).

Над источником
Слушай-слушай, Адам,
Что́ проточные
Жилы рек — берегам:

— Берегись слуги,
Дабы в отчий дом
В гордый час трубы
Не предстать рабом.

Берегись жёны,
Дабы, сбросив прах,
В голый час трубы
Не предстать в перстнях.

Над источником
Слушай-слушай, Адам,
Что́ проточные
Жилы рек — берегам:

— Берегись! Не строй
На родстве высот.
(Ибо крепче — той
В нашем сердце — тот).

Говорю, не льстись
На орла, — скорбит
Об упавшем ввысь
По сей день — Давид!

Над источником
Слушай-слушай, Адам,
Что́ проточные
Жилы рек — берегам:

— Берегись могил:
Голодней блудниц!
Мёртвый был и сгнил:
Берегись гробниц!

От вчерашних правд
В доме — смрад и хлам.
Даже самый прах
Подари ветрам!

Над источником
Слушай-слушай, Адам,
Что́ проточные
Жилы рек — берегам:

— Берегись…