Конец января 1996. Недавно виделись и только что переписывались. 28–го позвонила сестра Марианна, и сразу удар: ты слышал — Иосиф умер. Опустился занавес. Ахнула эпоха. Ушел ее голос.
Знаю: записей много, но живого голоса я и люди моего поколения лишись навсегда. Думаю, как многие, я привык в его голосе слышать свой. А какой это звук без отзвука? Все равно, что перестать отбрасывать тень.
Мы с ним часто ездили вдвоем на берег Тихого океана в Сан-Франциско, на Seal Rock. Суровое место. Ветер, волны, туман; за спиной — чудный город, а перед тобой — бесконечная стихия. Последний раз, когда он выступал в Стэнфорде в 1993 или 94 году, у него тембр понизился, и в нем стал слышаться гул морского прибоя. Я ему что-то в этом роде пробормотал тогда, а он, как всегда, криво усмехнулся на комплимент.
Там, на Seal Rock, в прибое, если сильно захотеть, временами еще можно было услышать его голос. Хотя наверняка не скажу. Давно там не был.
Сейчас взял с полки его сборник 1990 г. — Худлит, Москва — будто его и не прогнали из страны в 1972-м. Отличный томик. Он открылся на "Наброске" — злом стишке (его словечко) именно 1972 года. Иосиф умел давать сдачи. Сейчас особенно актуально.
Холуй трясется. Раб хохочет.
Палач свою секиру точит.
Тиран кромсает каплуна.
Сверкает зимняя луна.
Се вид Отечества, гравюра.
На лежаке — Солдат и Дура.
Старуха чешет мертвый бок.
Се вид Отечества, лубок.
Собака лает, ветер носит.
Борис у Глеба в морду просит.
Кружатся пары на балу.
В прихожей — куча на полу.
Луна сверкает, зренье муча.
Под ней, как мозг отдельный,— туча.
Пускай Художник, паразит,
другой пейзаж изобразит.
____________
На фото (фотографировала моя жена Вики Боннелл) мы с Иосифом. Санта Круз. 1973 г. Тот же Тихий океан. Мы стоим на обрыве. Внизу на пляже снимают голую натуру. Мы наблюдаем.
Joseph Brodsky. California Street, San Francisco,
December 1988
I took this photo in San Francisco on a quiet December (?) afternoon 1988. An old friend and, by then, the latest Nobel Laureate, Brodsky came to San Francisco to give a speech at the Commonwealth Club. We met at Stanford Court Hotel and spent two, maybe three hours in intense conversation about our personal lives, reminiscences, literature, poetry, mutual friends, and of course, his new poetry. After a while, we went out for coffee, to refuel.
We sat at a small cafe outside and continued our conversation, now about his Nobel, the shock of the prize, and what it meant to get so much money in one swoop. Though both of us were by then well established in our new American lives, in our own minds we somehow still figured as "poor immigrants." I remember his answer, offered in his usual semi-dismissive sombre voice. "Money? Now it's just one more thing to be indifferent to." We reminsced about the times both of us were much less indifferent and swapped stories about the roads to enrichment neither of us had taken. One of his stories was about a super-rich girlfriend that he decided not to marry. What was my story — I now can't recall. There probably wasn't one.
On the way back to his room, I asked him to pose for me and my new Pentax camera, with my favoritewide-angle lens. The son of a photographer, he appreciated the camera, played with it a little and took a few shots (none came out well). He and I loved the quirky fog city, traversed it on foot on many occasions, and had a warm spot for its jerky cable car, especially for the fact that it was totally legit to ride on its footboard. An unquestioned taboo in Russia, it gave us a frisson to avail ourselves of a harmless San Franciscan libertinism. I was able to take this shot just as a cable car was crossing behind him.
Back in his room, he pulled out a few pages of typescript with his new poetry. It was an event for me each time I could to hear him recite his new verse — it felt like cold water touching a parched throat. It also felt like hearing my own voice but coming from the depths that I myself could never plumb. What were the poems? I don't remember now but I may still have these unautographed sheets somewhere.
By the time he finished, we realized that he was half an hour late for the Commonwealth Club. I had a very vague idea what honor it was to speak before this august body and suggested he cancel the event so that we could spend the rest of the day together. After all, there was still North Beach and Seal Rock, and the great Dim Sum restaurant on Sansome Street... He knew better. We rushed out of the hotel. He jumped into a cab and sped off.
The audience at the Club was patient. Brodsky was only forty minutes late. The MC introduced him by saying that among the presidents, prime ministers, Cardinals, authors, and other notables who had ever spoken at the Club, he was the first one to keep the audience waiting for almost an hour. All laughed, uncomfortably, no doubt. In the end though, I am sure they were all happy he managed to show up. No doubt, the poet laureate made sure that they spent the next hour excited, charmed, and entertained.
This year Joseph would have turned 80. I miss him as much as a quarter century ago when I first learned of his death. I had recently mailed him a pair of Soviet Navy undershirts — they were all the rage among boys in our childhood — wishing him and his wife happy sailing together. He was touched and sent me a post-card with a poem, in English. The verse was addressed to me and invoked my book about our other favorite Joseph, Osip Mandelstam (A Coat of Many Colors). The very language of the poem alluded to an underlying motif in our friendship: the love of English we shared and our life-long dedication to the cause of making it our own. Our friendship, in fact, may have begun back in the 1960s in Moscow over a discussion of Auden’s poetry. He began reciting “Memory of W. B. Yeats” in his vatic baritone, and I finished it for him in my own Muscovite high-pitched voice.
Back in January 1996, I drafted a ditty in response but hesitated to let go of it, afraid of spooking the good fortune of having a poem dedicated to me. He died before I made up my mind. I cherish the postcard...
Valery Chalidze, Vera Slonim Chalidze, Ilya Slonim, Vicki Bonnell, Tanya Litvinov, with the Slonims' dog Mr. Triqué. Moscow 1970-71.
Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze, physicist, legal scholar, and founder of the Human Rights Committee in the Soviet Union, died on January 3, 2018. For unrelated reasons, I could not attend the memorial for him in New York but I recalled a few episodes from our long association, wrote them down and had our mutual friend Jerry Schecter read them at the event. With the first anniversary of his death fast approaching, I decided to publish my recollections here.
* * *
Some seven years apart in age, Valery and I – were brothers-in-law, of sorts. We were married, serially, to the most attractive and smartest young women in Moscow, the Slonim sisters: he, to the younger Vera, I, to Masha. Neither marriage lasted long but enough to produce offspring: his daughter Masha Chalidze and my son Anton Freidin. Both are domiciled in England, both are happy and both have lovely, talented children of their own, second and third cousins all. Our lives were intertwined in other ways... Here, then, are the four luminous moments in the many years of our association.
I. Legal Counsel
Valery Chalidze and Vicki Bonnell. Moscow 1971.
Spring 1971 was when Valery and I first met. He was or was about to marry Vera Slonim, the sister of my, by then, ex-wife, while I was about to wed Vicki Bonnell, my wife of 47 years, and counting. I remember all of us gathered at the sisters' apartment hosted by their parents, Ilya Lvovich Slonim, a well-known sculptor, and Tatyana Maksimovna Litvinov, a translator of, among others, John Cheever. The friendships among all of us, including our in-laws, were much stronger than marriage. I have old photos that document one such moment. After Vicki and I were officially wed, we ran into a problem: Vicki’s visa – she was a US exchange student – was running out, and the authorities refused to extend it. Both of us were aware of the few mixed marriages that ended in forced separation and heartbreak. Chalidze, by then, had already formed the Human Rights Committee and had been dispensing legal advice, gratis, to people who had grievances against and were exasperated by the Soviet system. Though we were friends and practically relatives, on this occasion he received us in his famous room as our legal counsel, in a formal manner – black coat, white shirt and black tie. "An undertaker," Vicki quipped under her breath when we walked in. We knew the place was thoroughly bugged but, according to Chalidze's strategy, openness and transparency was our strength and worked in our favor. Besides, we had nothing to hide. We laid out and then discussed our situation, periodically rolling our eyes at the ceiling where, we assumed, the listening bugs were located. Chalidze’s sage prescription was simple: Vicki was to throw herself at the mercy of the Soviet State, that is to say, she was to cable a petition for extending her Soviet visa to Nikolay Podgorny, the titular head of Brezhnev’s USSR. She was to do so repeatedly. Preferably, once a day. We followed the counsel’s advice.
To send the cables we used the Main Telegraph Office on Gorky Street. I still remember the face of the postal clerk in the window. She was trying to stay impassive, as she read and counted the words scribbled on the cable form, wondering whether to laugh or scream at the hutzpah of the American girl who was directly petitioning the head of the all-mighty USSR. But rules were rules, and the cables were accepted and sent. What happened next is still shrouded in mystery. Vicki never received a response. Alas, Chalidze’s prescription did not work as well as we hoped. Still, we got more time to spend together: she overstayed her visa for a couple of weeks, ostensibly waiting for a merciful response from Nikolay Podgorny. The advice may have helped also in another way – by elevating our case to the "Kremlin level" so that a few months later I was granted permission, unprecedented at the time, to leave the workers’ paradise for permanent residence with my American wife in the United States.
II. Fortune Cookie
Less than a year later, a law professor from Georgetown University Law School, Samuel Dash, visited Chalidze in Moscow. He was impressed. Before saying goodbye, Sam Dash pulled out a piece of his Law School stationary and hand-wrote an invitation to Chalidze to present a series of lectures at Georgetown on the human rights in the USSR. Those were tough times for Soviet dissidents. Emigration had not yet become a real option. What defined the horizon for people like Valery was jail or Siberian exile. Chalidze knew the calculus, and he was ready to face the music (if one is ever ready for an ordeal). As I write this, I recall Vera telling me that they decided to formalize their relationship, in part, for her to have the right, as a spouse, to visit Chalidze in prison. But instead of a prison sentence, Valery received a call from the authorities to pick up his passport for the visit to the US. He must have been stunned. He later told me that while getting his papers, he caught a glimpse of Sam Dash’s invitation sitting on the official’s desk: the Russian word – fake (липа) – was scrawled over it in a thick red pencil.
On Thanksgiving Day 1972, I was at JFK with my friend Joseph Brodsky (like me, а recent arrival in the US, a "refuJew," as he joked over our status) to greet Valery and Vera. In the evening, like seasoned New Yorkers (neither of us was a US citizen then), we broke bread, so to speak, over their first truly American meal: Mushu Pork and Kung Pao chicken at a Chinese restaurant in the Village. There was a lot of excitement over this most American of all the emigre holy communions. We had all known each other back in Russia, and we were delirious to have been able to reconnect in NY. Fate saved best for last. As Valery cracked his first ever fortune cookie, a thin strip of paper fell on the brown oilcloth. It had just four words: “Change for the better.”
Joseph Brodsky. San Francisco. 1973.
With an almost childish smile, Chalidze kept repeating these four words. It seemed he was mentally toying with the idea that he had just received a validation from Lady Fortune herself. Over the years, there were many occasions to recall this omen: when he was taken to visit the Justices of the US Supreme Court, when he started his publishing venture, when he received one of the early MacArthur genius awards (1985), or when he met Lisa, who would soon become his wife, while on a speaking tour in the American West.
III. Press Conference
Fast-forward to December 1972. I was in Washington, staying with Jerry and Leona Schecter, my old friends from Moscow where Jerry used to head the Time Magazine bureau. Chalidze was giving his famous first press conference at Georgetown University on the state of human rights in the USSR. By thenTime Magazine’s Diplomatic Correspondent, Jerry Schecter was going to attend and he took me to the press conference with him.
Jerry and Leona Schecter, with Strobe Talbott (center). Wshington 2010.
I still remember one of the topics Chalidze spoke about before the Q&A: the mistreatment of political prisoners in Soviet labor camps. Citing UN nutritional standards, he accused Soviet authorities of subjecting political prisoners to a starvation diet, in effect, torture by hunger. The relevant nutritional data had been circulating in dissident publications for some time, but to hear this well-documented evidence summed up by the word “torture” spoken from a high podium by a well-known Russian dissident, with all of the Washington press corps in attendance, was a whole other matter. The words were like an exploding bomb shell. To this day, I remember the numbers — 800 calories, 1200 calories – as Chalidze delivered them in a calm and thoughtful voice… In case you are wondering what these numbers actually meant, the UN sets the minimum energy requirement for an adult at 1800 kcal.
The press conference was over. Reporters were rushing out to file their stories. I held back to avoid the stampede. The room emptied quickly and suddenly I found myself in the company of a three grim-looking middle-aged portly men in long coats and fedoras. They were unmistakable. Nashi!(out guys), flashed in my mind, as I realized I was surrounded by a clutch of Soviet reporters. I shuddered. At the time, I was beginning the project of translating into English, with Strobe Talbott, the second batch of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 2), and I was anxious to avoid the attention of the Soviet security “organs” (my family was still back in the USSR and could face reprisals). I guess, in their mind, I, too, belonged to an unmistakable species. Before I could slink out of the room unnoticed, one of the fedoras nodded in my direction. Instantly, I was cut off at the path by a tall athletic–looking fellow with a square jaw and a flattened nose. I had not noticed him in the room before. With a carnivorous grin, he he cut me off before I could reach the door, pulled out a camera — it looked tiny in his huge paws — and snapped two pictures of me. Operation completed, he winked at me with a grin, as if saying "it didn't hurt, did it?" and stepped aside. I rushed out, my heart was thumping as if I had just escaped death. The next moment, I felt ashamed: just look at Valery’s fearless, dignified cool, and he was taking on the whole of the USSR! I came to value his temperament even more during the many hours we spent over the years discussing philosophy, law, our ex-wives, and, yes, of course, politics both in Russia and the US. In the end, politics — our views had diverged — poisoned our conversations, although the friendship never broke up. Now, I regret that our political biases, now in retrospect so small, made our contact less and less frequent as the new century dawned.
A few days after the Georgetown press conference, Soviet officials had Chalidze's passport confiscated, informing him that he had been stripped of Soviet citizenship. He never went back, even after Mikhail Gorbachev restored it to him in one of his early perestroika gestures in 1987.
IV. The Federalist
In 1990, a week before Thanksgiving, I was in Washington to give a paper at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (I was already a tenured professor at Stanford then). All of a sudden there was a call from Valery. He had a new crazy scheme (he was a fountainhead of ideas): Will I consider undertaking a translation of The Federalist Papers into Russian? A selection. 55000 words. And the deadline, I asked? It was Christmas. No way, I responded! And agreed. Only later did I find out that the project, which may have been invented by Valery, was supported by Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Bush 41st. The idea was that apart from its distribution in the USSR, George H. Walker Bush would present a copy of the translation as a special gift to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was at the time busy with a radical revision of the Soviet Constitution. The summit was scheduled for the end of July 1991.
I was poor student of American history and because I had never taken it seriously (how could such a young country have history?), I nearly flunked my citizenship exam in 1974 (I though the Boston Tea Party was about "liberty" only to be set right that it was about money, i.e., taxation without representation). Needless to say, I had not the faintest idea what The Federalist was about. But I soon made up for my ignorance. Suffice it to say that working sixteen-hour days seven days a week, translating into Russian gem after gem of the Founding Fathers’ practical wisdom was a most effective intensive course in American constitutional history. I am forever grateful to Valery and our two other well-lettered collaborators, the late Leon Lipson of Yale Law School and Lisa Chalidze, both erudite lawyers, who held my hand, so to speak, as I was digging deeper and deeper into the thinking of those remarkable sages, Hamilton and Madison. It was no less of a struggle to be able to render their thought into my native modern Russian, the language in which political discourse had been poisoned by decades of Marxist Hegelian cant. Lisa's and Leon's help with concepts, constitutional law, and the historical context was invaluable.
It did not take long to realize why The Federalist had never been translated into Russian. The hardest was the elucidation of the concepts that had received short shrift in Russian political thought, dominated as it was, first, by the French and, later, German traditions (Rousseau, Hegel, Marx), with very little space left for the Anglo-Saxon political thought, such as that of John Locke. It is little exaggeration to say that American political discourse had no equivalent in Russian and had to be invented. It emerged in the course of the continuous back–and–forth I had with Chalidze, as we both poured over the translation, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, article by article, culminating in the rendering of the US Constitution into what I hoped was plain Russian (our volume of The Federalist ended with the full text of the U.S. Constitution).
That December 1990 and well into January 1991, our phone lines for voice and fax machines (the Internet had not yet been popularized) hummed non-stop between my home Berkeley, California, and his in Benson, Vermont. I don’t know if Valery ever became a US citizen, but I have no doubt that in a deep sense, both of us became American in the process of preparing this volume: there is no immersion more profound than the rendering of another’s complex thought into your native tongue. At the end, I felt confident enough to write an introduction for the Russian reader.
Our American Federalist in Russian was finished sometime in February or March 1991. A year later, when the Soviet Union was no more, and Mikhail Gorbachev was its president emeritus visiting U.S., I was at a reception for him at the house of George Schultz at Stanford. Nikolay Nikolaevich Vorontsov, who was also there (he had served as USSR Minister of Natural Resources in Gorbachev's government), introduced me to his former boss. I tried to press my signed and leather-bound copy of the Russian Federalist into his hands. Gorbachev took the book, turned it over, looked inside it, then at me, and shot: “But I already have a copy.” Then, noticing my long face, he graciously took it, thanked me, passed it on to his aide, and reqarded me his radiant Gorbie smile. I was disarmed.
The Russian edition of The Federalist Papers: Selected Articles
I still do not know if Gorbie or his associates had found the volume helpful as they were revamping the USSR Constitution in the summer 1991. Regardless, their efforts soon became irrelevant. In AUguest 1991, the USSR, de facto, ceased to exist. Still, there was a great demand for the Russian Federalist in Moscow of the new post-Soviet Russia. Every time I visited there (and I often did in the 1990s), I took a batch of copies. The press run of ten thousand was soon depleted. I gave away my own last copy to Sergey Nikolaevich Yushenkov, a liberal Duma Deputy, who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 2003. I know the Russian Federalist was used by the legal scholars who shaped the Russian Constitution of 1993, among them, my friend Viktor Leonidovich Sheinis. Oh what a waste of effort, the reader might say, given the authoritarian regime that now rules Russia! Yes, you have a point. The stratospheric rise in oil prices in the early 2000s turned out to be a greater driver of change in Russia than the ideas of The Federalist. But ideas —a renewable resource, unlike oil —take a long time to sink in and take effect. But they do, with time, as they have over the last three centuries of Russian history. I am confident that my Russian countrymen will have opportunities to benefit from The Federalist in the not so distant future, as they have benefited from the commitment to the rule of law – the common denominator for the opposition in Russia today — that Valery Chalidze, in one of his “crazy schemes,” planted in Soviet soil in the 1960s. Or in 1970 when he founded, along with Andrei Sakharov and others, the Soviet Union’s Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. He made a difference, as Gorbachev recognized while he was launching perestroika, and his legacy will continue to influence Russian legal and political thought and practice for many years to come. R.I.P.
Как у Зощенко, моя
«жизнь начинается в понедельник» — после пиров, когда голова еще идет кругом.
В пятницу был прием в
Стэнфордском гуманитарном центре с леткой руки бесподобной Габриеэллы Сафран.
Говорили аспиранты, бывшие и нынешние, и коллеги. Много смешного и трогательного. А в субботу мои
бывшие аспиранты (теперь-то они все от первой до последнего — профессура)
устроили в мою честь однодневную конференцию.
Вот это было чудо! Какие они все
разные, как ярко они высвечивают прошлое и настоящее, и как они свободны! С каждым хотелось говорить заполночь!
Потом
был обед, выступали друзья и коллеги, с которыми я прошел все большие вехи -- от первых моих классов в Стэнфорде до Москвы 1980-х и 90-х, до Бабелевского фестиваля, до последних семинаров по Анне Карениной, Бабелю и Мандельштаму. Пришел даже один из самых моих первых студентов (теперь в Стэнфорде заведует институтом)!
Друзья мои, я был тронут до глубины души
— до самой до глубины! Спасибо!
Конечно, многих не доставало. Многие уже там, другие — далече. Хотелось бы всех поименно назвать...
Последним говорил
О.Э. Мандельштам, хотя губами шевелил я. Вот дословно:
Я к величаньям
еще не привык.
Только стихов
виноградное мясо
Мне освежило —
случайно — язык.
***
Пунктуация — моя.
ГФ. Прилагаю программу
Фотографы. Стр. 1 -- слева: Anne Nesbet (2014); стр. 1 -- справа (2015) и стр. 2 (1973): Victoria Е. Bonnell; последнее (2014): Andrei Ustinov
News flashed the other day the death of Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina at the age of seventy-three. Growing up in Moscow, I remember her name cropping up among the poets who occupied the grey zone between the permitted and the impermissible: she could publish some of her poetry, the other, her muse’s contraband, she could voice at public recitals and enjoy its circulation in literary samizdat. That’s how most Russian intelligentsia lived then – in two worlds at the same time – call it schizophrenia or split personality, or double-think. A true poet, she embodied her age, warts and all, and the decades after Stalin’s death were nothing if not the age of poetry.
Inflected and melodically variable, the Russian language gives poetry an extra ordinary expressive force, further amplified by poetry’s mnemonic potential. If you happen to live under a repressive ideocracy like the Soviet Union, you are likely to resort to poetry as a preferred medium of public expression, since verse is easily memorized, harder to pin down as protest, and leaves little material evidence. Of course, mass terror under Stalin left little room for such niceties, but once Stalin died and the Soviet party-state abandoned mass repression, things changed, and poetry, for one, could really thrive.
The state-controlled publishing could not contain the burgeoning youth culture of Soviet baby boomers, and the minimal – and for that reason infinitely titillating – lifting of the skirt of Soviet censorship, rather than satisfy, only whetted the appetite for free expression. For us, who belonged the post-WWII generation, shaped by Nikita Khrushchev’s Stalinization campaign, cold war, and its other, “peaceful coexistence” (a grudging admission of the impossibility of the “last and decisive battle” against capitalism), this toying with the ideological hemline wreaked havoc with our imagination and set our minds on fire! Grim and sclerotic as the Soviet empire was in its decline, it became a Garden of Eden for poetry – and a purgatory, not to say a minor inferno, for the poets themselves. Some, like Brodsky, were exiled or jailed, others went through torments of hell in trying to combine the imperative of remaining true to their calling with the relentless and crushing pressure to conform. That was the cup that Akhmadulina, twenty and otherworldly beautiful in 1956, drank to the dregs.
In the sixties, I was too green and too much of a young snob to take seriously the poetry of my older contemporaries. Joseph Brodsky was the sole exception, but then, he never published in Soviet press, had gone through a crucible of a trial, incarceration in a mental hospital, and exile up north. Besides, the word had it that Anna Akhmatova herself bestowed the mantle of the Silver Age Heir Apparent on Brodsky’s shoulders. She knew a thing or two about legends, and remarked with her usual sardonic sense of humor about Brodsly’s persecutors: “Oh what a biography they are creating for Joseph!”
Akhmadulina, suffer as she did, could not come close: her poetry was permitted and not, pace Osip Mandelstam bequest, "stolen air." True, she had a front seat in “the little orchestra of Hope, conducted by Love,” as the chansonier Bulat Okudzhava described the true poets of his generation (they may have lost faith but still could love and hope). But for me and my Bohemian milieu, the world of poetry was dominated, not by orchestras, not even the much admired chamber orchestras (Rudolf Barshai and Adrei Volkonsky) but by the great solo players of the Silver Age. Tsveateva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mayakovsky (grudgingly), each had an oversize and fulfilled destiny and each was wrapped in a personal myth capable of enchanting their “grandchildren’s” generation. And that is who we were. Just think, we used to joke, Akhmadulina shared only two syllables with the regal Anna Akhmatova. Two syllables did not cut it.
But then, not long before my emigration from Russia, I had the occasion to change my mind. The transformation occurred in a Moscow theater while I was watching a hybrid feature film documentary with what for me was an unlikely title: Sport, Sport, Sport (1970). What moved me to the quick was a poem that Akhmadulina herself recited in her tightly wound girlish contralto. It was a voice-over of the final segment of the film. Directed by the celebrated Elem Klimov, with the original score by Alfred Shnitke, a star-studded cast, and containing the first ever in Russia tiny clip of the Beatles, the film was all the rage in Moscow when it was released into theaters in the spring of 1971.
The final segment with Akhmadulina’s voice-over consisted of a two-minute close-up of the great Ethiopian runner, Abebe Bikela, shot, no doubt, during one of his interminable marathons. The clip itself was slow-motion, decelerated to make Bikela’s strides coincide rhythmically with the iambic pentameter of Akhmadulina blank verse, itself resounding over a faintly audible organ continuo of Schnitke’s score. As Akhmadulina's voice receded, Schnitke's organ gained force until it crested over the film's finale. Seldom have any three celestial bodies been in a better alignment!
“Behold a man who has commenced his run,” Akhmadulina’s voice was reaching deep into the subliminal (and not so subliminal) desire to defy the boundaries of the constricted Soviet space,
way back, when dawn broke over
the whole universe; can’t calculate how many centuries
he has been running far and yon. Toward a blessed
and important goal. What triumph drives him on
to keep transcending space? …”
Вот человек, который начал бег
давно, когда светало во вселенной,
не вычислить, какой по счёту век
бежит он вверх и вдаль. К благословенной
и важной цели. Что за торжество
манит его превозмогать пространство?
What a surprise it was to locate this clip on Youtube!
A few months later, in September 1971, I found myself transcending space, first on board an Aeroflot flight to London, then, a few hours later inside what I took for a Heathrow Airport movie theater but what turned out to be a PanAm 747 that, despite its girth, whisked me effortlessly across the Atlantic to JFK and into my wife's embrace.
* * *
My sole personal encounter with Bella Akhmadulina took place some seven years later in 1978, when she came to the Bay Area as part of a poetry tour of the United States. She had an appreciative audience at UC, Berkeley, but was nervous and visibly upset during the recital, a poor match, I then thought to myself, to Brodsky, who had not long ago cast his spells in the same auditorium and like a rock star held everyone in thrall for two hours. We agreed to meet for a nightcap. She was accompanied by her husband, a theater artist, Boris Messerer; I came together with Lithuanian poet and scholar Tomas Venclova, who had known her for years and who had just escaped from the Soviet Union and was then teaching Tartu Semiotics as a Regents Professor at my alma mater. Now, over three decades later, I have a vague memory that Czeslaw Milosz joined us later when we were about to break up or shortly before I left the gathering. He had just been awarded the Nobel Prize and must have felt he had an obligation to honor a fellow poet and visitor from behind the Iron Curtain (see Post-Script II).
We met at some dive on the north side of the campus, and the nightcap quickly evolved into a liquid supper in the Russian style. Akhmadulina complained bitterly about a minder from the Soviet consulate who was at once fawning and insulting to her and whom she blamed for her foul mood at the Berkeley poetry reading. She drank a trifle too much, and I remember being surprised by the quiet and indulgent smile with which her husband observed her progress with the bottle. Like a sand clock with its communicating chambers, the emptier the bottle became the more high-strung Akhmadulina grew. I recall saying to myself then that this was what Marina Tsvetaeva must have looked like in some cheap Parisian bistro or other some forty years earlier. A comparison with Nastasya Filippovna from The Idiot, too, crossed my mind. The conversation got jerky and moved in spurts. Filling a tense pause, I ventured to pipe in something about how much I was touched by her poetry in the 1970 film and how much she opened my eyes to the beauty and spiritual depth of athletics (a former boxer, I had valued sports for the ecstasy it afforded me in the ring and its utility in self-defense, but never spirituality or aesthetics). To my surprise, she took offense and with a touch of hysteria in her voice dismissed me, along with my heart-felt compliments.
I backed off. She looked like a wounded animal – a human animal, as she was also drowning in alcohol and self-pity. I sipped my drink in silence. For the first time, it occurred to me that even a star like Bella Akhmadulina, precisely because she was a star, had to live with fear, contempt, self-loathing, and then again, with more fear, contempt, and self-loathing. Now, eleven time zones from the Kremlin, she was yet again reminded by a petty clerk from the Soviet Conuslate in San Francisco of her bondage to the state, and along with, all the innumerable lacerations she had ever endured. Oh what she had to go through for years and years, this marathoner with a tense girlish contralto, as she tried to safeguard her integrity while taking care not to cross the red line marked by the jealous and ever-vigilant party-state! The following year, she summoned enough courage to join the uncensored underground almanac Metropol. Her husband did the design for the volume. With a lot to lose, as it must have felt then, they chose defiance, at last.
I now wonder, if her reaction to my heart-felt praise may have been prompted by something else. Was she, perhaps, considering defection or some other desperate act and wished to talk it over with her old friend Tomas Venclova and felt constrained and irritated by my presence? Tomas, if you read this and remember that evening, please let me know. But one thing is clear now. In her generation’s “little orchestra of Hope, conducted by Love,” hers were some of the most memorable solos.
Stanford. December 1, 2010.
Postscript I. Looking for a Youtube link to Okudzhava's song, I came across a clip recorded not long before Okudzhava's death in the company of Bella Akhmadulina. She embaces Okudzhava and reminds the audience that the song was dedicated to her. Here is the clip:
These are the quietest days of August. Even close friends do not respond to emails. What a perfect time for a coup d'état, as in 1991, or a quick trial and execution of one's political opponents, as in 1936, or, if you think that bad things happen only in Russia, diving headlong into a "European War," as in 1914.
Once, reflecting on exile and middle age, my friend and fellow-émigré, Joseph B., came up with an image for history: Clio as a serial killer on a rampage, hunting people down from the blue yonder with its high-power rifle. Mayakovsky saw his "pen an equal to a bayonet," so why not replace Clio's stylus with a sniper rifle? Vermeer, at the dawn of the age of celebrity, thought the trumpet of fame made more sense than Clio's iconic quill for recording history (his "Artist in His Studio"). We, children of the twentieth century, can just as easily take away her trumpet and place in her hand a rifle with a scope instead (the picture below is of Roza Shanina of the WWII fame). The itinerancy of exile - mused my friend then, as he was trying to make virtue out of necessity - was an efficient way of ducking Clio's fire. I imagined a bird's eye view of the two of us on a map scurrying for cover... He himself just lived long enough to see the age of static borders go the way of the steam engines and communism. What would he have said seeing death raining from the sky over lower Manhatten on 9/11? He lived in plain view of the World Trade Center.
By this poetic calculus, August should be treated as a month when the Muse of History is at its stealthiest. So, as you lounge by the pool, imaginary or real, with a cold tall drink in hand, mental or otherwise, nodding off over a new novel etched on your iPad or Kindle, watch out for Clio - and take cover! As in August 1991, 1936 or 1914, nobody knows where she will strike next - or when.
