Andrey Voznesensky virtual keyboard. "He was my classmate

My soul, shadow,

I confess you.

Please, do not put out my mascara ahead of time!

Entered into the world

and not found themselves

we are only objective shadows of the soul.

December 1997 Andrei Voznesensky

© Voznesensky A.A., heirs, 2018

© ITAR-TASS/Interpress, 2018

© Centerpolygraph, 2018

© Art design, Centerpolygraph, 2018

Virtual keyboard

According to his Note we tuned our lives

Richter was buried in his heavenly dwelling on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head to two pianos with notes by Schubert, and they, as if alive, were wearing silver chains and scapulars. His emaciated, rejuvenated face took on a glow of plaster, and rainbow streaks burned in the gray tie in the early Kandinsky style. There were swarthy hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a thoroughbred dog, closed his eyes, as if inhaling sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked from the wall.

I remember him at Pasternak's feasts. Marble statuary already shone through the athletic youth. But not antique, but Rodin. He was younger than other great feasters - and the owner, and Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of boots or a suit. Nearby was always Nina Lvovna, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak offered me to see Anna Andreevna Akhmatova off, I, pretending to hesitate, conceded this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

His funeral father, in the world a violinist Vedernikov, said precisely and subtly: "He was above us." It was evening. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered over them. “Lord,” the five chanters sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to Thee…” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, a contact with God. He played only by inspiration, so sometimes unevenly.

For me, it was he, always a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when her poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velasquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his teacher of painting, was in Richter's apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum, during a skit, I wrote a text to the tune “Happy Birthday to You!”. And in this text, the figure eight lay on its side and became a sign of infinity.

At the last concerts, on the lapel of his ingenious tailcoat was a miniature Triumph award badge. When I designed this emblem, I had Richter in mind first of all.

At the coffin, his relatives, friends, a series of departing Russian intellectuals, who later become signatures under the obituary, are walking in a sad sequence, and above it are already visible the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally, he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus.

Maybe it was no coincidence that in his apartment two pianos stood side by side. They fly in infinity parallel to the earth, like figures on the canvases of Chagall.

I once wrote poetry to him. Now they sound different.

Birch pricked at the heart,
she was blind from tears -
like a white keyboard,
put on the butt.
Her sadness seemed like a secret.
Nobody understood her.
To her like a horizontal angel
midnight Richter flew in.
What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?
God forbid that he does not immediately forget us ...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of the publishing house that I learned about the death of Richter. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost all the employees of the publishing house gathered there. There was tea. I said that Richter had died. Without clinking glasses, they remembered.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if a night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures between the living, as if they had descended to us from other dimensions along its bridge. Through the presence of eternity in the present life. So the living presence of Pasternak in it is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory lives in us not chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book, I try to record the flow of memories as they crowd into the mind, interspersed with events of today and future.

In a couple of years, our century will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What did you do, Russian XX century? Killed millions of their own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?

“Yes,” the accompanying angel sighs and adds: “But at the same time, these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that have become the national culture of Russia? .. "

And a series of figures will stretch, illuminated by a double light.

Some I knew. Shadows of them in this book.

“And it was cold for the baby in the den…”

"You Pasternak to the phone!"

The numb parents stared at me. As a sixth grader, without telling anyone, I sent him poems and a letter. It was the first decisive act that defined my life. And so he responded and invites me to his place for two hours, on Sunday.

It was December. I arrived at the gray house in Lavrushinsky, of course, in an hour. After waiting, he took the elevator to the dark platform of the eighth floor. There was still a minute left until two. Behind the door, apparently, they heard the slamming of the elevator. The door opened.

He stood at the door.

Everything floated before me. An astonished, elongated, swarthy flame of a face looked at me. Some kind of swollen stearine knitted sweater fitted his strong figure. The wind moved the bangs. It is no coincidence that he later chooses a burning candle for his self-portrait. He stood in the drafty door.

Dry, strong pianist's brush.

I was struck by the austerity, the impoverished expanse of his unheated office. A square photo of Mayakovsky and a dagger on the wall. Muller's English-Russian Dictionary - he was then chained to translations. On the table was my student notebook, probably prepared for the conversation. A wave of horror and adoration passed through me. But it's too late to run.

He spoke from the middle.

His cheekbones quivered like the triangular skeletons of wings pressed tightly before the flap. I idolized him. It had traction and strength and heavenly ineptness. When he spoke, he twitched, pulled his chin up, as if he wanted to break out of the collar and out of the body.

It soon became very easy with him. I squint at him.

His short nose, starting from the deepening of the bridge of the nose, immediately went in a hump, then continued straight, resembling a swarthy rifle butt in miniature. Sphinx lips. Short gray haircut. But the main thing is a floating smoking wave of magnetism. "He who compared himself to a horse's eye..."

Two hours later, I was walking away from him, carrying in an armful of his manuscripts - for reading, and the most precious thing - a typewritten first part of his new prose novel called Doctor Zhivago, just completed, and an emerald notebook of new poems from this novel, bound in crimson silk lace. Unable to bear it, opening it on the go, I swallowed the breathless lines:

And it was cold for the baby in the den ...
All the trees in the world, all the dreams of the kids,

In the poems there was a feeling of a schoolboy of pre-revolutionary Moscow, childhood was fascinated - the most serious of Pasternak's mysteries.

All the thrill of warmed candles, all the chains...

Poems later preserved the crystal state of his soul. I found him in autumn. Autumn is clear to clairvoyance. And the country of childhood approached.

... All apples, all golden balls ...

From that day on, my life was decided, it acquired a magical meaning and purpose: his new poems, telephone conversations, Sunday conversations with him from two to four, walks - years of happiness and childish love.

* * *

Why did he respond to me?

He was lonely in those years, rejected, exhausted from persecution, he wanted sincerity, purity of relations, he wanted to break out of the circle - and yet not only that. Maybe this strange relationship with a teenager, a schoolboy, this almost friendship explains something in him? This is not even the friendship of a lion with a dog, or rather, a lion with a puppy.

Maybe he loved himself in me, who ran to Scriabin as a schoolboy?

He was drawn to childhood. The call of childhood did not stop in him.

He did not like being called, he called himself, sometimes several times a week. Then there were painful breaks. Never recommended by my taken aback family by first name and patronymic, always by last name.

He spoke in an agitated, reckless manner. Then, at full gallop, he suddenly broke off the conversation. He never complained, no matter what clouds clouded him.

“The artist,” he said, “is inherently optimistic. The essence of creativity is optimistic. Even when you write tragic things, you must write strongly, and despondency and slovenliness do not give birth to works of force. The speech flowed in a continuous choking monologue. It had more music than grammar. Speech was not divided into phrases, phrases into words - everything flowed in an unconscious stream of consciousness, thought muttered, returned, bewitched. The same flow was his poetry.

* * *

When he moved permanently to Peredelkino, phone calls became less frequent. There was no telephone in the country. He went to call the office. The night district resounded with the echo of his voice from the window, he addressed the stars. I lived from call to call. Often he called me when he read his new one at the dacha.

His dacha was reminiscent of a wooden likeness of Scottish towers. Like an old chess round, it stood in a row of other dachas on the edge of a huge square Peredelkino field, lined with plowing. From the other side of the field, behind the cemetery, like figures of a different color, gleamed a church and a bell tower of the 16th century, like carved king and queen, toy-painted, dwarf relatives of St. Basil the Blessed.

The order of the dachas cringed under the deadly sight of the cemetery domes. Now few of the owners of that time have been preserved.

Readings were held in his semicircular lantern office on the second floor.

We were going. They brought chairs from below. Usually there were about twenty guests. They were waiting for the late Livanovs.

From the solid windows you can see the September district. Forests are burning. The car runs to the cemetery. A cobweb pulls out the window. On the other side of the field, from behind the cemetery, motley as a rooster, sideways looks through the church - who would peck? The air is shaking over the field. And the same excited tremor in the air of the office. The nerve of anticipation trembles in him.

To pass the pause, D.N. Zhuravlev, a great reader of Chekhov and a tuning fork of the Old Arbat elite, shows how they sat at secular receptions - arching their backs and only feeling the back of a chair with their shoulder blades. It is he who makes a remark to me in a tactful manner! I feel like I'm blushing. But from embarrassment and stubbornness I stoop and lean even more.

Finally the latecomers are. She is shy, nervously graceful, justifying herself by the fact that it was difficult to get flowers. He is huge, spreading his arms and rolling his eyes in buffoonish horror: the prime minister, the shaker of the Moscow Art Theater stage, the Homeric performer of Nozdryov and Potemkin, a kind of shirt-master.

We quieted down. Pasternak sat down at the table. He wore a light, silver French-style jacket, the kind that later became fashionable among Western left-wing intellectuals. He read poetry at the end. At that time, he was reading White Night, The Nightingale, The Tale, well, in a word, the entire notebook of this period. As he read, he peered at something above your heads, visible only to him. The face was stretched, thinner. And the glow of the white night had a jacket on him.

Prose? Poetry? As in the white night everything is mixed up. He called it his main book. He spoke the dialogues, naively trying to speak in different voices. His vernacular hearing was magical! Like a cockerel, Neuhaus jumped up, shouted, winked at the audience: “Let him, your Yuri, write more poetry!” He collected guests as he completed part of the work. So everything written by him over the years, notebook by notebook, the entire poetic novel, I listened to from his voice.

Readings usually lasted about two hours. Sometimes, when he needed to explain something to the audience, he turned to me, as if explaining to me: “Andryusha, here in the Fairy Tale I wanted to knock out the emblem of feeling like on a medal: a warrior-savior and a maiden on his saddle.” This was our game. I knew these verses by heart, in them he brought to the top his method of naming an action, an object, a state. Hooves clattered in verse:

Closed eyelids.
Height. Clouds.
Water. Brody. Rivers.
Years and centuries.

He spared the vanity of the audience. Then in a circle he asked who liked which poems more. The majority answered: "All". He was annoyed at the evasiveness of the answer. Then they singled out the "White Night". Livanov called "Hamlet". The unplayed Hamlet was his tragedy;

The hum is quiet. I went to the stage
Leaning against the doorframe...

Livanov blew his nose. His swollen undereyes became even more pronounced. But a minute later he was already laughing, because everyone was invited down to the feast.

We went down. They fell into the environment, into the blue fireworks of the evaporating models of the brush of his father, perhaps the only Russian impressionist artist.

Oh, those Peredelkino meals! There weren't enough chairs. Pulled stools. The feast was led by Pasternak in the rapture of the Georgian ritual. The owner was hospitable. He drove the departing guest into embarrassment, he gave everyone a coat.

Who are they, the guests of the poet?

The tiny, quiet Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, Garrick, with uncouth granite hair, squints with a dry radiance of mind. Absent-minded Richter, Slava, the youngest at the table, slightly closed his eyelids, tasting colors and sounds. “I have a question for Slava! Glory! Tell me, does art exist? Pasternak sobbed sobbingly.

“I knew Kachalovsky Jim. Don't believe? the thunderous Livanov boiled up and poured himself. - Give me a paw, Jim ... It was a black evil devil. Beelzebub! Everyone trembled. He came in and lay down under the dining table. None of the diners dared move their feet. Not like touching the velvet fur. I would grab my hand right away. What a kunshtuk! And he said: “Give me a paw ...” Let's drink to poetry, Boris!

Nearby, the big-eyed Zhuravlev in a brown pair, like a cockchafer, screwed up his eyes, embarrassed and touchingly. Asmus thought. Vsevolod Ivanov came in with a wide-legged, bear-like manner, shouting: “I gave birth to a son for you, Boris!”

The boy Koma was also sitting here and reciting poems: “Tulips, tulips, tulips for whom ?!”

I remember the ancient Anna Akhmatova, the most august in her poetry and age. She was taciturn, in a wide robe like a tunic. Pasternak seated me next to her. So for the rest of my life I remembered her in a semi-profile. But even she almost did not exist for me next to Pasternak.

The arrival of Hikmet crashed. The host raised a toast in honor of him, in honor of the revolutionary glow behind his shoulders. Nazim, answering, complained that no one around understands anything in Turkish, and that he is not only a glow, but also a poet and now reads poetry. I read vigorously. He had angina pectoris and was breathing heavily. Then the hospitable host raised a toast to him. The toast was again about the glow. When Hikmet left, so as not to catch a cold on the street, he wrapped his chest under his shirt with newspapers - ours and foreign ones - there were a lot of them in the dacha. I went to see him off. Events rustled on the poet's chest, earthly days rustled.

The Gothic Fedin came in, their dachas were side by side. The William-Vilmont couple ascended to the posture of Rokotov's portraits.

The wife of Boris Leonidovich, Zinaida Nikolaevna, with an offended bow of her lips, in a velvet black dress, with a black short haircut, similar to the ladies of Art Nouveau, was worried that her son, Stasik Neuhaus, should play at the Paris competition in the morning, and his reflexes evening game.

Ruben Simonov read Pushkin and Pasternak with voluptuous languor and authoritativeness. Vertinsky flashed. Under the Homeric groan, the magnificent Irakli Andronikov portrayed Marshak.

What a feast for the eyes! What a feast of the spirit! The Renaissance brush, or rather, the brush of Borovikovsky and Bryullov, took on flesh in these meals.

Now you look with surprise at the poor decoration of his dacha, at the lineman's boots that he wore, at the raincoat and cap, like those of today's poor hard workers, at the low ceilings - but then they seemed to be palaces.

He generously presented to my gaze the splendor of his fellows. We had a sort of silent conspiracy with him. Sometimes, through the intoxicated monologue of the toast, I suddenly caught his funny brown conspiratorial look addressed to me, telling me something that only we both could understand. It seemed that he alone was my peer at the table. This commonality of secret age united us. Often the delight on his face was replaced by an expression of childish resentment, and even stubbornness.

Then the dogs Belka and Strelka, immured into the satellite, flew across the sky. Pity for them howled in my lines:

Eh, Russia!
Ah, scope...
Smells like a dog
in the sky.
Past the Mars
Dneprogesov,
masts, antennas,
factory pipes
terrible symbol of progress
a dog corpse is rushing about ...

The description of the First Youth Festival was especially successful in the Olympic auditorium:

One of the poems ended like this:

Rushing into belief
workbench near Moscow,
and I'm an apprentice
in his workshop.

But I didn't read it with him.

These were my first readings in public.

Sometimes I was jealous of him for them. Of course, conversations together, without guests, or rather, monologues addressed not even to me, but past me - to eternity, to the meaning of life, were much more dear to me.

Sometimes a complex of resentment kicked up in me. I rebelled against an idol. Once he called me and said that he liked the type on my typewriter, and asked me to reprint a cycle of his poems. Naturally! But for children's vanity it seemed offensive - how, he considers me a typist! I stupidly refused, referring to tomorrow's exam, which was true, but not the reason.

* * *

Pasternak is a teenager.

There are artists marked by constant signs of age. So, in Bunin, and in a completely different way in Nabokov, there is a clarity of early autumn, as if they are always forty years old. Pasternak is an eternal teenager, not a rumor - "I was created by God to torment myself, relatives and those who are tormented by sin." Only once in poetry in the author's speech did he indicate his age: "I am fourteen years old." Once and forever.

How blindingly shy he was among strangers, in the crowd, how, bulging tensely, he bent his neck!..

Once he took me with him to the Vakhtangov Theater for the premiere of Romeo and Juliet in his translation. I was sitting next to him, to his right. My left shoulder, cheek, ear seemed to be numb from the neighborhood, as if from anesthesia. I looked at the stage, but I still saw him - a luminous profile, bangs. Sometimes he mumbled the text behind the actor. The production was treacle, but L.V. was Juliet. Tselikovskaya, Romeo - Yu.P. Lyubimov, Vakhtangov's hero-lover, who at that time had not yet thought about the future of the Taganka Theater. The scene was lit up with feeling, their romance, which all of Moscow was talking about, ended with a wedding.

Suddenly Romeo's sword breaks, and - oh, a miracle! - its end, having described a fabulous parabola, falls to the handle of our common chair with Pasternak. I bend down, I pick it up. My idol laughs. But now there is applause, and beyond any puns, the hall is chanting: “Author! Author! The embarrassed poet is dragged onto the stage.

The feasts were a respite. He worked in galleries. The times were terrible. Thank God that they gave translation. For two months a year, he worked translations, the "master's tithe", so that later he could work for himself. He translated 150 lines a day, saying that otherwise it was unproductive. Koril Tsvetaeva, who, if she translated, only 20 lines a day.

I also met with him S. Chikovani, P. Chagin, S. Makashin, I. Noneshvili.

A master of the language, in his speech he did not use obscenities and everyday obscenities. On the other hand, he enthusiastically listened to the linguistic richness of others. “I wouldn’t disdain even an unprintable word.”

He spoke about everything clearly and clearly. “Andryusha, these doctors found polyps in my anus.”

Only once did I hear from him an indirect designation of the term. Once petty puritans attacked me because I was published in the wrong organ, where they would like. Then Pasternak told a parable about Fet at the table. In a similar situation, Fet seemed to answer: “If Schmidt (it seems that was the name of the most base St. Petersburg shoemaker of that time) issued a dirty sheet, which would be called a three-letter word, I would still be printed there. Poems cleanse."

greetings from the northern sisters..."

But she is calm and sleepless,

without answering, it grows above me.

^ IN MEMORY OF VLADIMIR VYSOTSKY

Don't call him a bard.

He was a poet by nature.

Lost little brother

popular Volodya.

The streets of Vysotsky remained,

left a tribe in the "levi-ostrich",

from Black to Okhotsk

the country remained unsung.

Around you for fresh turf

the ever-living crowd grows.

You so wanted not to be an actor -

to be called a poet.

To the right of the entrance to Vagankovo

the grave was dug vacant.

Covered Hamlet Tagansky

earth Yesenin shovel.

The rain puts out the wax candles...

All that remains of Vysotsky

tape packaging

carried away like live bandages.

You lived, played and sang with a smile.

Russian love and wound.

You won't fit in the black frame.

Your human limits are tight.

With what emotional overload

you sang Khlopusha and Shakespeare -

you talked about our, Russian,

so that it ached and splintered!

Scribes will remain scribes

in perishable and coated papers.

Singers will remain singers

in the millions of people's breath ...

You will probably soon forget

who lived in a short land.

History will not wake up

the broken cry of a chansonnier.

They bring you candles in the abyss.

And the rain extinguishes them, knocking,

drop by drop for each candle

for every drop - a candle.

Where I have not been present for the last days,

through the backwoods of life downtrodden -

as if you are in the mouth of forebodings,

passing into a sea of ​​events.

All that mourned comes true disastrously.

At night, parting with a friend will be seen.

Feeling has the opposite effect.

In the morning you will arrive - there is no him, friend.

Morning comes with a crowing.

Oh don't fly that plane!

It's like writing a requiem first

and then everything goes like clockwork.

All my disputes fall on tails.

Thinking is dangerous.

I just think that you will cut yourself, -

God! - ran in with a cut finger.

Okay, if only it was foresight.

The very thought is devastating.

Just don't think before you fly!

Don't doubt your soulmate!

Don't doubt, don't doubt

in the very last dog in the world.

Feeling bring her back from the confusion -

so as not to see bluish nails -

I was walking along the bed of some river,

driven by sadness. When I woke up

time has grown dark. Leaves were heard

"We are thoughts!"

Steam rose from the tributaries of the river:

"We are feelings!"

I got lost, which was unfortunate.

Steppe began. Walking became difficult.

Gopher peeking through the periscope

underground and impenetrable forces.

I went out to sea. And there was the sea

like a repetition of a forgotten engraving -

phantasmagoria for an amateur! -

waves of people were clusters of grief,

in the chorus of the drowned, utopias and pestilence

the city fluttered with electric moths,

the corpses of history, as from a laxative,

washed away by the expanse of love and reproach.

My sea was fed by the river.

The feeling preceded the event.

The round sea is put on the river,

like a crown of a noisy summer on the trunk,

or a glove on the boxer's hand,

or on the flute Mozart is sad,

or on the soul of the body a mask -

feeling was the root cause.

"Friend, we are at the mouth with you,

in the mouth of forebodings -

where the river merges with the mundane,

drink from the mouth!

You see, the coins are blinking in the sky.

The stars are called.

These coins were thrown by Gagarin,

to go back to heaven..."

What was it? Mirage over the abyss?

Or closed with the soul of the world?

What kind of dog this twist -

to feel, or rather, to be the cause? ..

And those around me suffer with me.

You live honestly to the end.

And from our confused days

two stitches appeared over the vein,

thank God, over it.

And the more the hand tans

and the hand will lean back in happiness,

more and more clearly appear on it

two calm and slippery laces.

DIFFERENCE

It doesn't look like anything!

You trample on your coat with your boots.

You don't look like a rabid cat.

You don't look like anything.

Your tenderness is not like tenderness.

You throw cups on the floor, on the table.

You don't look like an armless Venus.

You don't look like anything!

For this without reproach,

and even though

I call you my life.

Everything doesn't look like anything.

Brother is not like brother

pain doesn't feel like pain.

The hour is different from the hour.

He is different from you.

The sea is like no other.

Rain is not like a sieve.

Do you keep going? God!

You don't look like anything.

Nothing like the silence of freedom.

Water is not like hot skin on the cheeks.

The towel doesn't look like

to the flowing

water from the cheeks.

And it doesn't look like hell at all.

hook on the door.

What kind of Russian are you?

you don't like poetry?

You people are rotten

and they are fireflies.

How narrow are you?

if the heart is not a brother

every non-Russian song,

where the verbs hurt...

Is it from the cradle

have you been in love

to the pedigree rhymer

patronymics after names?

Like a millionth breath

married names:

Maria Illarionovna,

Zlata Yurievna.

You, timid, call out

from the names of times,

as if you call Kitezh

from the depths of Ilmen.

Like sorrow with hope

call from the window

bell-outside place:

Olga Igorevna.

These holy poems

relatives composed aloud,

like family pearls

bequeathed in names.

What is the music of moaning

reflected fate

and family and history

take it to the hill?

Like an anesthetic

from the crystal dream

name - Anastasia

Alekseevna...

I don't believe in your

feeling for home.

You can't love yourself

out of hatred for others.

When I hear your selfish squeal,

I understand how right I am.

Non-existent in literature

we are taught to live according to our charter.

Between the hammer and the anvil

I'm slouching over the weight again.

Again the cursed horseshoe

bring happiness to someone.

^ THE NUN OF THE SEA

I see you at noon

between baked apples,

and in the morning I will run

nun of the sea in a furry hood

you are standing on the beach.

You are passionate like prayers

read kilometers.

Your triangular rabbit

endless separation threshes like cutlets,

but does not subdue the blood.

In vain you lengthen the hungry

distances.

The desire is growing.

No matter how you have the sea, it is still not enough.

Oh sport! you're a devil...

When the storm tosses the boxes

with champagne

silverheads - like a cam under the stomach,

naked nun reckless,

throw yourself under them!

pale under the sun,

you will come out of the cascades.

Then you will tell someone, returning to the cities:

"Who did you love? The sea..."

And tell him everything.

During the kiss

grows a beard.

Grabbed my heart again

scattered birch crowd

lingering keyboards,

put on the butt.

As if the keys were peeled off,

lagging behind, the birch bark trembles.

And everything that you can't fix in life

bursts through her.

Do you remember those verticals?

The wrong side of the copper mushroom

with the name "hare lip"

turned green like pedals.

How publicly alone

the fate of the chosen ones of the regional,

magpie feather on the road

again, like keys, dropping!

One of them was the rarest

incomprehensible again.

Probably should be flying

to play it from bottom to top.

When the secret thrill to the sky

ran through her body -

to her like a horizontal angel

midnight Richter flew in.

Her for this, glaring askance,

the woodcutter will fall to the ground.

At the Conservatory on goats

she screams like a human.

What is for non-equipment,

to her - like a saw and axes.

Would you rinse your fingers

after the game, after the game...

curtained sunsets,

maybe a day behind the scenes

another time in the world?

Why are you like this to me

with endless legs

from here to Taimyr?

Glasses are filled

drained glasses

and glasses raised.

For what? For our secrets.

For what they guessed.

Why are you like this to me?

What am I indulging in

your stupid antics?

You would have batogs ...

In public, a taratayka,

and nearby, quieter exhalation,

why are you like this to me?

Slightly protruding vertebrae

like a snow-covered road.

Do not "write", do not "call" -

stay like that, for God's sake...

When we talk to you

in the mouth - like mint languor,

I am a genius if I am worthy

call you and be yours.

I love pine air!

Sentimentality - from the evil one.

Breathe separation into yourself to chills,

before acupuncture, before acupuncture...

Thread a branch into each needle,

put a tree into each branch,

insert your homeland into every tree -

and you will understand why it is so sharp.

CREATOR

I visited the artist after my death

along with a passing local devil.

The rooms were empty like frames

that without a picture.

But from one came Tchaikovsky.

Remembering empty halls

with a tall guest, with a round hairdo,

I walked like with a black balloon.

Tchaikovsky was approaching from under the door.

A woman in a chair was sitting outside the door.

40 portraits surrounded her.

Thought that preceded creation

made a sign that we should not interfere.

How strenuous is the work of a model!

Easels worked on it on tripods.

I learned in their all new designs

restless and lonely character -

then a nail, then three eyes, then a trophy bayonet,

how he loved her at that time!

Didn't find satisfaction

thought that preceded creation.

Above the radiator

spinning Tchaikovsky, interpreted by Gena

Christmas. The ball begged him to the sky

release. A storm blew up in the sky.

The cloud smelled like a bag of apples.

Everyone has already felt it:

as if they ventilated the room -

thought that preceded creation,

the passion that preceded creation,

the anguish that precedes creation,

shook buildings and trees!

The thought in the form of a woman sat in an armchair.

There was a smile, there was no body.

The thought of a dog licked my knees.

The alley stood with the thought of the sea.

The thought of a stepladder, exciting, turned white -

there is a crossbar in it that was missing,

the thought of a rib was present.

The consumer society came together.

The thought of an apple rolled off the plate.

The thought of you was on the bedside table.

"How he loved her!" - I thought.

"Yes" - answered from the front

the bewildering darkness of creation.

Here is the backstory of their relationship.

Went out as a student. There were few years.

The age of genius is that he is a genius.

She believed, so she understood.

How jealous he is of her, having departed!

Try showering in his bathroom-

the shower takes shape.

Their romance does not last for outsiders.

flipped double sided

Chaikovsky. There were moans in the melody

Antonov apple trees. Like a thought about a creator,

autumn was. The house was caulked.

The ball rubbed against the lime on his cheek.

The thought of me turned on Tchaikovsky,

according to old memory, over greenhouses.

He put it in sixty-four.

The guests didn't get into it.

"Everything was justified, half-naked master,

what did you promise me in the rough walls

angry eclipse of a bald ball,

elbows of black triangles.

The sea was dubious.

Dubious raspberries dried up.

Only one thing was certain -

the thought of the meaninglessness of creation.

The idea of ​​blackthorn bloomed on the terrace.

Thank you, master modern!

What am I? Thought clause?

A stylus that was washed off with a rag?

I didn't ask to be created!

But drowned out my talking room

Matter. Garden. Tchaikovsky, perhaps.

The apples were falling. The motherfuckers were crying.

There were apples - row with a shovel!

I took these apples on my knees

apple fall, apple fall.

I took off my shirt. On bare shoulder blades

bludgeoned like cold fists.

I laughed under the apple fall.

There were no apple trees - apples fell.

He tied the shirt of the executioner with his sleeves.

He filled it with fruits like a basket.

It was heavy, moved, smelled.

there was a woman in a man's shirt.

I created you from fallen apples,

from the ashes - great, homeless!

Under the right squirrel, squinting to the side,

a mole stuck with a dark grain.

From snow apples so in the yard we

we blind the grandmother. So on my knees

we sculpt our loved ones. mistress of the house

I introduced you as a guest supposedly.

You handed out apples to all the guests.

And she spoke in black earth.

There was an apple savior,

my shy sensation.

Among the sofas, the eyes asked:

"Senza would!"

How do you know, smiling,

in a shirt, as if in a short dress,

that, forgetting, fall in love, throw off your shirt

and like balls on the ground you will roll! ..

Above the bus stop

the cloud smelled like a sack of antonovka.

The ball flew away. The world was windy.

Farewell, unintentional creation!

Did you spend the night in the creator's cottage,

on the loneliness of prickly strongholds?

1-1 flashed through your mind:

"Thank you for what you give."

that I happened to be a part of you,

sea ​​and land, gardens in Tarusa,

thank you for giving

that I did not live as a mouse-norushka,

that I didn’t double-deal with you, time,

even when you give me a cookie,

and for the frenzied blows,

even for having reached the handle,

even for this poem,

Andrei Voznesensky

Virtual keyboard

According to his Note, we tuned our lives.

Richter was buried in his heavenly dwelling on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head to two pianos with notes by Schubert, and they, as if alive, were wearing silver chains and scapulars. His emaciated, rejuvenated face took on a glow of plaster, and rainbow streaks burned in the gray tie in the early Kandinsky style. There were swarthy hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a thoroughbred dog, closed his eyes, as if inhaling sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked from the wall.

I remember him at Pasternak's feasts. Marble statuary already shone through the athletic youth. But not antique, but Rodin. He was younger than other great feasters - and the owner, and Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of boots or a suit. Nearby was always Nina Lvovna, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak offered me to see Anna Andreevna Akhmatova off, I, pretending to hesitate, conceded this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

His funeral father, in the world a violinist Vedernikov, said precisely and subtly: "He was above us." It was evening. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered over them. “Lord,” the five chanters sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send glory to you ...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, a contact with God. He played only by inspiration, so sometimes unevenly.

For me, it was he, always a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when her poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velasquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his teacher of painting, was in Richter's apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum, during a skit, I wrote a text to the tune “Happy Birthday to You!”. And in this text, the figure eight lay on its side and became a sign of infinity.

At the last concerts, on the lapel of his ingenious tailcoat was a miniature Triumph award badge. When I designed this emblem, I had Richter in mind first of all.

At the coffin, his relatives, friends, a series of departing Russian intellectuals, who later become signatures under the obituary, are walking in a sad sequence, and above it are already visible the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally, he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Maybe it was no coincidence that in his apartment two pianos stood side by side. They fly in infinity parallel to the earth, like figures on the canvases of Chagall.

I once wrote poetry to him. Now they sound different.

Birch pricked at the heart,

she was blind from tears -

like a white keyboard,

put on the butt.

Her sadness seemed like a secret.

Nobody understood her.

To her like a horizontal angel

midnight Richter flew in.

What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?

God forbid that he does not immediately forget us ...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned of Richter's death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost the entire publishing house gathered there. There was tea. I said that Richter had died. Without clinking glasses, they remembered.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if a night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures between the living, as if they had descended to us from other dimensions along its bridge. Through the presence of eternity in the present life. So the living presence of Pasternak in it is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory lives in us not chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book, I try to record the flow of memories as they crowd into the mind, interspersed with events of today and future.

In a couple of years, our century will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What did you do, Russian XX century? Killed millions of their own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?

“Yes,” the accompanying angel sighs, and adds: “but at the same time these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that have become the national culture of Russia? .. "

And a series of figures will stretch, illuminated by a double light.

Some I knew. Shadows of them in this book.