Poets and Historians

One cannot understand an historical event merely by accumulating facts.  If this were possible, I would, by now, know what the Russian Revolution was all about.  The trick is to think about an event from multiple perspectives, to use varied theoretical frameworks, analogies, and creative techniques to gain new vantage points on a historical moment or temporary pause in the remorseless flow of time.  The process is akin to therapy.  A patient enters therapy with a single explanation for his or her current predicament.  "Doctor,  I can't form meaningful relationships. Why not?  Because my mother purposefully dropped me when I was a small child and ever since that day I can't trust anyone." It's the therapist's job to apply new interpretations to an old story.  "Are you sure this is what happened?  Is it possible that she merely made a mistake?  And even if this did happen, are you sure this story isn't really a story of liberation from your mother?  Sure, she dropped you, but maybe drop is too strong a word.  Maybe she was trying to get you to take your first steps, trying to make sure you were able to move independently from her."

The possibilities for creative interpretation, story-telling, and even myth-making, are endless.  We use multiple perspectives to get a handle on larger phenomena in much the same way.  Take the case of my analysis of a dysfunctional institution with which I was, long ago, once affiliated.  I always wondered what it was about the place that made it so ungovernable.  The numbers didn't really offer any clear explanation for the chaos.  Since one couldn't merely use statistics to identify the source of the institution's abiding malaise, I was forced to come up with theoretical frameworks to make sense of the fundamental problem.

I started with Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  At first I believed the college was foundering as a result of one or two cynical individuals who had over time gone rogue, eventually eschewing even the lowest common denominators of higher education "civilization," in this case the minimum standards and requirements of accrediting bodies and higher education associations.  I naturally thought of Kurtz who, in the context of higher education, would have said:  "Fail them all.  Let God sort them out."

My next explanatory framework was predicated on archeology.  I often wondered why previous administrators had done so little to provide the university with even a rudimentary system of policies and standard operating procedures to keep things going from one day to the next.  I wondered this, until one day, while working on a brand new system for budgeting and planning, I accidentally uncovered a budgeting and planning model that looked remarkably like my own, although it had apparently been abandoned only shortly after its adoption.  I felt like a petty prince of the Middle Ages, smug in his mud-hut sovereignty, until one day unearthing the ruins of a vast system of Roman roads, aqueducts, temples, and amphitheaters.

It's not that people never got around to creating policies and procedures:  they did so, and in fact they did so over and over again, but time had swept all evidence of their progress away.  In a sense, the university had always been staffed with good people.  It's just that this culture was pre-literate:  no one kept records, and, sadly, even oral tradition had faded away.  We were in a sense like Easter Island.  Although a great people had once lived there, nobody knew how or why the great stone figures had come to exist, or what they were meant to do.

Not believing that Conrad and archeology had fully explained my situation, I turned to the social theorist Jurgen Habermas.  Habermas had authored the idea of a public sphere to explain something about modern politics.  According to his construct, the French Revolution wasn't really a tale of capitalism, although the growth of the bourgeoisie wasn't insignificant to Habermas' theory of Enlightenment. Instead, the French Revolution was the inevitable consequence of the emergence of a public sphere, in which men and women participated in a general dialogue or even debate about what was good for the body politic.  In most institutions, Habermas would explain a lot.  The faculty senate of most institutions really does mirror a public sphere.  The president, or monarch, has a great deal of power, but he or she doesn't rule in a vacuum:  ordinary men and women--the faculty in this case--help to shape a healthy culture by debating policies geared toward the health of the institution as a whole in a public forum.

Viewed from this perspective, this former institution suffered from the complete absence of a public sphere.  At this small institution, all politics were local.  Every decision was a personal one.  The faculty senate did not debate great issues.  Overall, the college was home to an anti-public sphere.  That is to say, even when one might have expected people to move away from their own private, day-to-day interests to a more generalized discussion of issues that threatened the place as a whole, that shift never happened.  Whether the institution was too small for a public sphere, or people weren't properly trained for it, the institution was mired at all times in personal rather than public discussions.  If a student success initiative was being proposed, nobody asked how many students it would help, what the opportunity costs would be, or how success would be measured.  Instead, they asked:  who had the idea, and is he or she my friend?  Would payment for the work go to me or my enemy?  Habermas the theoretician remained relevant, but the college had created an anti-public sphere rather than the ordinary variety.

Another way of explaining the university's troubles related to post-colonial theory and the experience of newly independent nations in the 1960s and 1970s.  In the age of colonial independence, observers and participants alike were often shocked to discover that Utopian aspirations of previously subjugated people broke quickly against the rocks of apparently local violence, despotism, and corruption.  Often, newly independent peoples were introduced to governments that competed on equal grounds with the former colonial powers in terms of both cruelty and economic inefficiency. How could this be the case?

Historians continue to struggle with this question. A million people died soon after the birth of India and Pakistan, but who is to blame?  Colonial powers intentionally created many of the divisions that ultimately led to catastrophe in the age of independence.  But it may also be true that many of the new colonial elites were merely emulating the cynicism and indifference of their former colonial masters.  This may have been the trouble with my former institution.  The original evil may have been perpetrated by a select group of bad or self-consciously hypocritical leaders, but eventually many other actors, some of them benevolent in other contexts, learned to emulate their ostensible superiors on the job.  Of course, many actors behave in bad faith on purpose:  they know how and why they are defrauding the system.  But others are merely reflecting the values of their ostensible betters.

Another way to take a bite from the apple of post-colonial theory, was to postulate that the university suffered from an inert or disempowered student body, and that this study body resembled a colonized people prior to independence.  To put matters another way, Belgium was able to mistreat Congolese because these men and women weren't citizens of the motherlands:  poor, uneducated, illiterate, and disqualified from any political representation whatsoever, Belgian officials and businessmen had nothing to fear from even the most extreme forms of exploitation, up to and including torture, enslavement, and mutilation.  Did the same principle hold true for my former employer?  The institution served working-class, African-American students, who had relatively little previous experience with higher education.  Do institutions atrophy without the stimulus of criticism from people empowered by either racial or class privilege to demand more from their teachers and administrators?

Another explanation for the university's ill-health came straight out of the pages of Soviet history.  When we look at the example of glasnost and perestroika, we ask ourselves why the Soviet apparatchik  class didn't rise up and overthrow Gorbachev.  If Gorbachev was threatening to undermine the Party's historical monopoly of power and even subvert the foundations of the Soviet empire, why not depose the man?  The answer hardly makes sense to Americans who who have never experienced anything like Soviet rule, but the simple fact is that for all of their arrogance to ordinary Russian citizens, Communist Party members were conditioned to accept orders, not to challenge them.

This is how the logic of Soviet-style obedience worked at my former institution.  Once, at the beginning of a search process to fill the position of vice president of teaching and learning, a well-placed colleague, one of the campus leaders, came to me in genuine consternation, asking:  "I haven't heard who we are supposed to nominate for the position, have you?"  Although outranking me by several administrative layers, this university apparatchik apparently never thought for a moment that he was entitled to do anything other than try to discern the will of some higher political power.  Perhaps here lay the institution's greatest weakness:  the system of informal authority precluded all forms of independent thinking or local decision-making.  As under Gorbachev, no matter how unhappy they were, not even key academic administrators believed they were entitled act independently to solve problems.

Once, when listening to a colleague complain about the institution's weaknesses, I realized that looking at an institution as dysfunctional can itself be a limiting mode of explanation.  Historians are familiar with this line of thinking.  If we ask, why did the Russian army do so well in the Second World War, we fail to see the reverse of the question, which is equally valid:  why did the Russian army do so badly in the contest, especially in the first phase of the war?  In terms of the ailing university, I urged my colleague to try to approach the problem of the college's weaknesses differently.  Instead of asking about the source of a university's dysfunction, why not ask how it was that the university has persisted in the face of enduring problems?

Educational theorists call this capacity for survival in the face of heavy odds "resilience." Students in the inner city face overwhelming odds.  They may suffer from hunger pangs;  they lack educational role models;  and they may need to overcome violence, both at school and at home.  And yet, despite all of these challenges, many students do overcome these barriers and ultimately achieve real success.  What makes them so resilient?  Perhaps this is the real question that requires an answer.  To return to the case of our troubled university, we knew that the university suffered from a dozen or so different challenges, but ultimately it hadn't collapsed under the weight of its disadvantages.  Instead, it survived.  What ultimately accounted for this resilience?  Were there good-intentioned people holding the place together?  Did the unions offer a measure of stability?  Did the university have a base of support from the local community?  Whatever the explanation, something accounted for the institution's endurance.

If this level of complexity attends the analysis of an individual in therapy, or an institution in crisis, what level of complexity attends a major world event such as the Russian Revolution?  In truth, global phenomena require persistent attempts to employ creative explanatory frameworks.  I'm struck by this truth every time I put aside histories of the Russian Revolution and pick up a fictional account of the same event.  It's impossible to overstate the degree to which Serge's novels or Mayakovsky poems tell us what the Revolution really meant.

I think of Joseph Brodsky's explanation of the attitude of poets toward political events.  He said that Anna Akhmatova had sometimes been accused of opposing the Revolution, but that this wasn't accurate.  Instead, Brodsky said that great poets raised themselves above the fray.  They could be neither friendly or unfriendly toward everyday politics, at least when it came to their artistic posture.  Instead, they accepted the age in all its imperfections.  They saw the world from the perspective of God, as St. Augustine might have written, outside of time.   This is why history is too important to be left to the historians.   It's something that needs to be evaluated, diagnosed,  told, mythologized, created, debated, and portrayed frenetically, and on an ongoing basis.  There is probably no single way to explain the meaning of the Russian Revolution, but if there is, it won't be an historian who stumbles upon that meaning.

Special note:  This post is a work of fiction.  Any similarity to any actually existing institution, real or imagined, is pure coincidence.

Mawkish Literary Museums in St. Petersburg

To visit St. Petersburg is to confront its monumental and almost undifferentiated architecture of grandeur. Whether neo-classical, baroque, art deco, or Stalinist, St. Petersburg's vast catalog of historic buildings--most in the process of being architecturally refurbished in some way--seem to resemble one another in their heaviness, height, and scales. And why not? The city was created out of thin air, and unlike Paris or Moscow or almost all other European cities had no centuries-long process of natural and therefore haphazard architectural evolution. Notwithstanding decades of relative decline vis-a-vis Moscow, St. Petersburg remains the imposing capital of its energetic founder, Peter the Great, and his immediate successors, especially Catherine the Great.



St. Petersburg--or at least its "historic heart"--is a city of palaces, governmental buildings, and elegant but intimidatingly large apartment buildings. It's also a city of bridges, canals, monuments, and the great Neva river. Having ironically lost its vitality in the wake of its own historical moment October Revolution, St. Petersburg has somehow evolved into a city of museums. The Hermitage, most famous of all Russian museums, and one of best museums the world has to offer, is the centerpiece of St. Petersburg's obsession with the past. The fabulous State Russian Museum, repository of so much of Russia's unique artistic heritage, is another of the city's most important historical treasures. But it's the smaller cultural museums--not Yusupov's Palace (magnificent site of Rasputin's legendary murder), not the Stroganov Palace (now a wing of the State Russian Museum), not the Menshikov Palace, and not Peterhof or Tsarskoe Selo (just two of the tsar's multiple Versailles-like retreats)--that ought to attract our attention.

At the risk of appearing too sentimental about an unsentimental town, St. Petersburg's greatest museums are perhaps its smallest ones, although one wonders whether cynical tourist authorities have invented a few of these museums to pray on the heightened emotional sensitivity that Russophiles must always feel when visiting the city of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. The Pushkin museum, for example, features five small pieces of wood that Pushkin allegedly collected from the gallows used to execute five friends who died as a result of their participation in the Decembrist Revolt against tsarist tyranny in 1825. Did someone make this up? It seems almost too moving to be true. And should one experience a sense of awe and wonder, or merely check for one's wallet, when one notices a box of cigarettes on Dostoyevsky's desk (at the writer's own museum) on which one of his children has written: "Papa died today..."?

St. Petersburg's many wonderful apartment museums are filled with similar touching if mawkish artifacts. Alexander Blok's museum, which takes up space on the second and fourth floor of a still-in-use apartment building, contains copies of some his earliest publications. Anna Akhmatova, patron saint of suffering in a town that has known more than its share of trauma, has her own museum, which prominently displays the coat of her second husband, who was taken away to die in the gulag, and calls attention to the hallway in which her son was forced to shelter due to the brutal facts of communal living. The museum reminds us that Akhmatova suffered through the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad, saw her son taken away to the gulag more than once, suffered from the Bolshevik execution of the man who had been her first husband, Gumilyov, in 1921. Most affectingly, Akhmatova's museum presents us with her famous letter to Stalin, in which she implores him to release her son from imprisonment, as well as the newspaper articles that viciously and officially denounced her writing following World War II. Of course, the heart of St. Petersburg's literary nostalgia industry is Pushkin House. Here one can see a hundred artifacts and photos of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Belinsky, and all of the other great figures of Russian cultural achievement.

Anna Akhmatova's Muse

"Neither despair nor shame. Not now, not after, not then."

"That late-night dialogue turned into the delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows."

"And that door that you left half-open I don't have the strength to slam."

My life story, like yours perhaps, could theoretically be told 100 different ways. But I can only tell my story one way: from the perspective of someone who lost his mother at a relatively early age. If I were to write my memoirs, the memoirs of a Russophile blogger, I'd essentially be telling the tale of my mother's absence. By exiting the story when I was only 14 years old, my mother, paradoxically, became the central figure of my life. The chapters of this tale are fragments of a tragedy, dimensions of loss. Accordingly, I couldn't write my autobiography chronologically. I'd need to write the same story ten times over. In chapter one, I'd describe the delightful evolution of chronic gastrointestinal ailments related to the psychosomatic impact of my mother's departure. The characters--my angry stomach, my self-pitying small intestine, my sorrowful large intestine--would be lively and sympathetic.

In chapter two, I'd describe how my past and present lives never seemed to get along: a long-standing and bitter feud between my hopeful present and devastated past always seemed ready to erupt. Chapter three would be a catalog of worry: the reader, who might well regret the absence of plot points and character development, might nevertheless enjoy a long and leisurely tour of everything in life one can be frightened of if only one surrenders to an all encompassing anxiety about the future. Chapter four, which is really a continuation of chapter three's rich theme, would detail how an ordinary person can, under the right circumstances, move through life despite often crippling levels of cowardice. What of chapter five through ten? Well, truth be told, they are not so cheery as the previous four chapters and are, therefore, too personal to relate. The whole work will have to be fictionalized for this one to come out.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's life story is, objectively speaking, tragic even when measured against the high standards many other famous and not-so-famous Russians previously set in this lamentable category of human achievement. Her first husband, Gumilyov, was executed by the Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges. Her second husband, Nikolay Punin, perished in the gulag, where her son spent the prime of his adult life. Akhmatova self fell victim to a sustained, state-sponsored attack on her poetry and her person. She was called, famously, part nun and part whore, which somehow doesn't now translate in anything one could possibly be ashamed of. No matter--the term wasn't meant as a compliment and she knew it.

The triumph of Akhmatova's life is that, despite one or two regrettable odes to Stalin's grandeur written under duress, she never really compromised with the Soviet regime, either on a political level of at the level of her art. They say that Pasternak was like this: notwithstanding all of the horrors of the Soviet twentieth century, Pasternak didn't let either pessimism or cowardice or fear distort his essentially objective artistic outlook. Is perspective the essence of a poet's genius? Notwithstanding the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, life remains a spectacular mystery, bigger than any mortal's catalog of complaints, no matter how long or grim.

Aside from poetic imperturbability, Akhmatova possessed a powerful imagination. It's in this context, that her complex and artistically charged relationship with Isaiah Berlin should be seen. Berlin, a Russian Empire-born diplomat turned Oxford intellectual historian and philosopher, only met Akhmatova a couple of times. The principle meeting, which caught the attention of the Russian secret police and perhaps led to Akhmatova's ostracism by Soviet cultural authorities, was ill-starred. It was impermissible for Russians to meet with foreigners, and especially foreign diplomats, under any but the most tightly controlled and scripted scenarios. Still, according to the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Dalos' subtle book, The Guest From the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, Berlin emerged from the first meeting with a profound respect for the poet who had once almost personified Russia's Silver Age. And Akhmatova, the artist, came away with something more: a new muse.

In her vivid imagination--which would seem absurd if the poems didn't demonstrate the honesty and profundity of her ideas related to Berlin--the meeting with this "Guest from the Future" had profound personal as well as cosmic implications. This Guest was both her lover and a symbol of the West, which had once again become anathema to Moscow in 1947 . The meeting itself, she told others, inspiring the Cold War. The exaggeration, if that's the right word for it, seems forgivable in the context of artistic creation. In any event, as Dalos demonstrates, Stalin and other leading Soviet authorities did in fact take a direct interest in Akhmatova and Russians then and now seem to accept that somehow Akhmatova's version of events, no matter how poetic or literary, trumps the truth of her detractors.

A Soviet Dr. Seuss

Kornei Chukovsky's Diary: 1901- 1969, reveals the best and worst aspects of intellectual life in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, the celebrated children's poet, literary critic, Anglophile, and translator lived a rich, varied, and productive intellectual life during almost every phase of the communist experiment in government. Notwithstanding the work of the censures, most of Chukovsky's books and articles eventually found their way into print even during the age of Stalin. Chukowsky was not working alone. Throughout his long career he came into contact with brilliant and original thinkers and artists. On every page of the diary, one is reminded of the richness and diversity of Soviet poetry, prose, and literary culture. On the other hand, Chukovsky's Diary testifies to the enormous and sometimes violent pressure Soviet intellectuals felt from Bolshevik rulers who sought to implement an aesthetically dry and ideologically bankrupt literature of uniformity. Socialist realism, the creed of the Bolshevik cultural hierarchy, thwarted true artistry at every turn. And of course, the brutality of the state often led directly to the death of leading authors and poets, including Gumilyov, Mayakovsky, Babel, Mandelstam, and others.

Chukowsky established himself as a leading figure in Russian intelligentsia even before the First World War. He knew Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Alexander Blok, and most other major cultural and intellectual figures in St. Petersburg prior to the outbreak of war and revolution. In the aftermath of this conflict, Chukowsky maintained an awkward but generally collaborative relationship with the new revolutionary regime. But peaceful coexistence with the Communist Party was not an easy proposition and Chukowsky's journal is filled with doubt and anxiety over the artist's role in socialist society. What was his obligation, if any, to the state and its bureaucracy? To the proletariat class? To the exigencies of art, creativity and individual artistic genius? To the traditions of Russian culture, which sometimes ran counter to the interests of the Soviet Union, especially when the Russian diaspora was involved? To humanity as a whole?

Chukowsky tried to be loyal to the historical mission of the Russian intelligentsia, which seemed at first to be tethered to the health of the world's first socialist state, the USSR. Chukowsky adored Stalin and rhapsodized over the Great Leader and his Five Year Plan, although not even a diary--that intimate expression of personal feeling--can help to clarify whether Chukowsky's ideological stance was dictated by true feeling or a spirit of self-preservation in a violent dictatorship. But sometimes--and perhaps the Ukrainian famine was the first example of this--the intelligentsia's liberal mission seemed to be directly at odds with the state's mandate for grand historical change at any cost.

At times, Chukowsky's battle to reconcile his faith in Russian socialism with his humanistic tendencies and personal friendships is heart-wrenching. Take, for example, his description of his friendship with one of the Grand Old Men of Bolshevism, Zinoviev, who had been politically ostracized and was therefore now writing academic treatises on literary matters. One minute Chukowsky was a close friend and admirer of Zinoviev, the next minute he was being asked by state propaganda to believe that his erstwhile friend was a foreign spy who was engaged in a time-consuming plot to overthrown the government. The Diary suggests that Chukowsky, like many of his peers, veered between belief, unbelief, and fear for his own safety in the event that he looked too closely at the matter. Did Chukowsky write his Diary in the belief that the Cheka might oneday read its contents? It seems likely that he did, at least during the late 1930s and 1940s.

Although Chukowsky compromised with political reality on many different occasions, and probably could not have done otherwise if he expected to survive as a published author, the Soviet Union's answer to Doctor Seuss struggled mightily against the forces of repression and obscurantism in communist Russia. Again and again the Diary reveals the obstacles that Chukowsky confronted into order to limit censorship and maintain some level of integrity in the fight to keep faith with humanism, Russian cultural tradition, and literary freedom.

The forces of Soviet immorality waxed and wained. Chukowsky's biggest shock in this regard came as a result of Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956. In a moment, country's former ideological idol was overthrown and, at least for some, the dictator quickly became the very open symbol of intolerance, brutality, and ineptitude for the children's author and literary critic. In this new age of relative openness--which was not to last indefinitely--Chukowsky more allied himself more closely with the intelligentsia in opposition to official Soviet culture. While Chukowsky's daughter, Lydia, who lost a husband to Stalin's cruelty, pursued this fight much more aggressively than her father, Chukowsky became increasingly opposed to Soviet artistic strictures as he grew older. With little left to fear, and the state abandoning most of Stalin's worst tools of repression, Chukowsky became an advocate for persecuted artists such as Brodsky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn. And as the children's author became increasingly more skeptical about the government's role in the arts, his Diary becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark corners of Soviet history, including the Gulag, the purges, the deportations, the post-revolutionary famine, War Communism, World War II, and the official literary campaigns against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko.

Poetry of Akhmatova

Below are a few snippets from Anna Akhmatova'a collected works. Akhmatova was one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Her poetry is lyrical, intensely personal, and devoted, above all, to theme of love.

I love you like forty fond sisters.

Never mind that you are insolent and evil,
Never mind that you love others.
Before me is the golden lectern,
And beside me is the gray-eyed bridegroom.

But save my letters
So that our descendants can decide,
So that you, courageous and wide,
Will be seen by them with greater clarity.
Perhaps we may leave some gaps
In your glorious biography?
Too sweet is earthly drink,
Too tight the nets of love.
Sometime let the children read
My name in their lesson book,
And on learning the sad story,
Let them smile slyly...
Since you've given me neither love nor peace,
Grant me bitter glory.

He spoke of the summer, and he also said
That for a woman to be a poet was--absurd.

If you are placed at my feet,
Sweetheart, just lie there.

The boy said to me: "How this hurts!"
And I pitied the boy so...
Just a short time ago he was content
And had only heard about sorrow.
But now he knows everything, the same
As you who are older and wise.
It seems as if the pupils of his dazzled eyes
Have contracted and dimmed.

I thought: it's impossible to love a loose woman
As if she were a bride.

When the cold came,
You trailed me impassively,
Always and everywhere,
As if amassing the tokens
Of my indifference. Forgive me!

I've learned to live simply, wisely,
To look at the sky and pray to God,
And to take long walks before evening
To wear out this useless anxiety.

The quiet is cut, occasionally,
By the cry of a stork landing on the roof.
And if you were to knock at my door,
It seems to me I wouldn't even hear.

My silent house is empty and unfriendly,
Through one window it peers at the woods.
In it someone was cut from a noose
And afterwards the body was cursed.
Whether he was melancholy or secretly happy,
There remains only death--the great victory.
On the worn, red plush of the armchairs
His shadow flickers occasionally.

Insomnia, you are with me again, again!
I recognize your fixed countenance.
What is it, my outlaw, what is it, my pretty one,
Do I sing so badly to you?

He made a charcoal mark on the left side,
The place he would shoot
To release the bird, my anguish,
Once more into the empty night.

How the night of ecstasy exhausted me,
How the morning of breathed ice.

Darling, don't crumple my letter,
Read it through, my friend, to the end.

Only children love like this,
And then only the first time.

The longing is impure,
the devil's snare.
Whiter than anything on earth
Was her hand.

When you have spent the pennies of delight
With your sweetheart
And your surfeited soul
Feels sudden disgust--
Don't come to me in my triumphant night.
I won't know you.
And how could I help you?
I don't cure anyone of unhappiness.

He will get a whole lifetime of poems,
The prayer of my arrogant lips.

The gloating mockery of disciples,
And the indifference of the crowd.

My lucky, rich inheritor,
Welcome to my legacy.

And how could I forgive her
The delight of your enamoured praise...
You see, for her, so fashionably nude,
It's fun to be sad.

The everlasting is rosy and dry. There are clouds
Crudely sculpted in the cooling sky.

The Mother of Gd will spread her white mantle
Over this enormous grief.

Lets go into a church--we will watch
A funeral, christenings, a marriage service,
Without looking at each other, we will leave...
What's wrong with us?
Or let's sit on the trampled snow
Of the graveyard, sighing lightly,
And with your walking stick you'll outline palaces
Where we will be together always.

A mother's fate--glorious anguish,
I was not worthy of it.

And so it happened: imprisonment
Became my second home,
As for the first, I don't dare
To remember it, even in prayer.

It's good that you forgive,
You weren't always so kind.


I know you won't be able
To remember much about me, little one:
I didn't scold you, I didn't hold you,
I didn't take you to Communion.

You say--my country is sinful,
And I say--your country is godless.
If the blame were ours--
Everything could be redeemed and repaired.

Like a burden henceforth unnecessary,
The shadows of passion and songs vanished from
my memory.
The Most High ordered it--emptied--
To become a grim book of calamity.

And the body no longer commemorates
the anniversary of its grief.

Forgive me that I ignored the sun
And that I lived in sorrow.
Forgive, forgive, that I
Mistook too many others for you.

Some idler invented the idea
That there's something in the world called love.

Only heaven's blue is inexhaustible,
And the mercy of God.

You are like a sinner turning his eyes,
Before death, to the sweetest dream of paradise...