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“He was my classmate. Andrey Voznesensky virtual keyboard Go to it like an angel horizontal

“He was my classmate. Andrey Voznesensky virtual keyboard Go to it like an angel horizontal

05.03.2020

The final game of the spring 2017 series. The team of Balash Kasumov is playing.

Members

Team of connoisseurs

Elizabeth Ovdeenko
Dmitry Avdeenko
Mikhail Skipsky
Julia Lazareva
Elman Talybov
Balash Kasumov

Viewer Team

Sergey Ginev (St. Petersburg)
Saadat Seyidova (Baku)
Ekaterina Lutova (Saransk)
Olga Zhuravleva (Novosibirsk)
Elena Kondratenko (v. Detchino)
Julia Sharonova (Volgograd)
Alexander Korovin (Krasnoyarsk)
Sergey Smolenyuk (Kostanay)
Maxim Rylkov (settlement of Nizy)
Valentina Semina (Moscow)

Also on the game table "Blitz", "Super Blitz" and "13 sector".

Round 1 (Sergey Ginev, St. Petersburg)

Fragment

Yugoslav actor Goiko Mitic, the famous performer of the role of the Indian. On the screen - a fragment from the movie "Apache". With all these tricks, as you can see, the actor coped easily. And what, according to the actor, was the most difficult for him?

Elman Talybov answers: The most difficult thing for him was to speak German: he was a Yugoslav, and the film was produced by the GDR
Correct answer: He was very athletic and the episodes where he was forced to smoke the Peace Pipe were the most difficult for him. He couldn't stand the smell of tobacco.
The viewer receives 50,000 rubles. Check - 0: 1

Round 2 (Saadat Seidova, Baku)

Must be flying
To play them from the bottom up,
When the secret thrill to the sky
ran through her body,
To her like a horizontal angel
Midnight Richter flew in.

What did Andrei Voznesensky dedicate the poem to?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Cellos
Correct answer: Piano keyboard in white and black. Voznesensky dedicated a poem to birches.
The viewer receives 60,000 rubles. Check - 0: 2

Round 3 (“Sector 13” - Kristina Rogozhina, Brest)

What should the Chinese have like a good knife: if you put pressure on it, it bends, if you release it, it is again straight and strong?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Character
Correct answer: Calligraphy brush end.
According to the voting results, the viewer receives 57,000 rubles. Check - 0: 3

Round 4 (Olga Zhuravleva, Novosibirsk)

Attention puzzle!

Puzzle

Before you is a puzzle by Winfred Wright, invented by him in the 60s of the XX century and received a prize at the World Competition of Intellectual Puzzles. Continue this series and say what helped the author come up with this puzzle?

Connoisseurs take "Club Help". Elman Talybov answers: This is the fight of the clock after a certain time
The answer is correct.
Check - 1: 3

Round 5 (Elena Kondratenko, Detchino village, Kaluga region)

Attention, winner of the competition!

Get Pushkin's profile

In 2011, the All-Russian Poster Competition “Reading is not harmful, it is harmful not to read” was held. Before you is a fragment of the work of the winner Masha Knyazeva. What happens if you finish this work the way Masha did?

Julia Lazareva answers: Pushkin profile
Correct answer: Chargers, wires, modern gadgets - all this often replaces books. Masha finished her work in such a way that it turned out to be a portrait of Pushkin.
Check - 2: 3

Round 6 (Yulia Sharonova, Volgograd)

The photo

Guide-dog

The photo of the graduates of one of the faculties of the University of Cadiz contains 89 portraits. And whose photo on the right have we hidden from you?

Mikhail Skipsky answers: The person to the left of the hidden photo has vision problems. Hidden photo of a guide dog
The answer is correct.
Check - 3: 3

Round 7 (Alexander Korovin, Krasnoyarsk)

Emotional sockets

When we come to Australia or China, they greet us with horror. In the USA and Mexico with surprise, but in Denmark with a smile. And at home they meet us without emotions, one is now in your black box. What is there?

Elman Talybov answers: Socket.
The answer is correct.
Check - 4: 3

Round 8 (Ekaterina Lutova, Saransk)

Vsevolod Meyerhold describes the heroine of one of his articles as a very cautious person. When she cries, her hand holds the handkerchief without touching her eyes; when she pricks her opponent, the end of the sword does not touch his chest. Her embrace is the height of caution, without a hint of ambiguity. Name the heroine of the article.

Elman Talybov answers: Glory
Correct answer: puppet puppet.
The viewer receives 80,000 rubles. Check - 4: 4

Round 9 (Sergey Smolenyuk, Kostanay)

On May 7, 1945, in the states of the 1st Belorussian Front, a package was delivered by courier mail. In addition to secret documents, there were notes of 3 pieces of music that the musicians of the military orchestra had to learn in a day. Name these works.

Ivan Maryshev answers: Anthems of the allied powers during World War II - England, USA, France
The answer is correct.
Check - 5: 4

Round 10 ("Blitz" - Sergey Chevdar, Chernomorsk)

Question 1. This factory was built in Turin in 1923. What products did this factory produce?

Julia Lazareva answers: This plant produced cars, which were then tested on the same track.
The answer is correct.

Question 2. The top of the photograph, in which the author advertises his invention. What invention is hidden?

Elman Talybov answers: Trampoline
The answer is correct.

Question 3. “This is a crazy woman who collects bright rags and throws away bread.” What did writer Austin O Mally say?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Yellow press
Correct answer: Memory.
The viewer receives 90,000 rubles. Check - 5: 5

Round 11 (Maxim Rylkov, Nizy settlement)

If you come back from the fair with pockets full of money, say that you did not earn anything, and if you really did not earn anything, say that it was the best fair in your life. With whom did Sholom Aleichem advise to behave like this, and for what?

Elman Talybov answers: With neighbors so that they don't get jealous and you get satisfaction after a failed fair
The answer is correct.
Check - 6: 5

Game results

Balash Kasumov's team wins the finals of the Spring Series.
Elman Talybov becomes the owner of the "Crystal Atom".
The author of the best question is Saadat Seidova (the question about birches).
Yulia Lazareva becomes the owner of the Crystal Owl.

On this day, Philip Kirkorov celebrated his 50th birthday. Since he often performed at the club during musical breaks, it was decided to award Kirkorov with a special Diamond Owl.

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

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.

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.

* * *

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."

MORNING

(i-e-a-o-y)

Above the misty valley in the blue heights

Clean-clean silver frost.

Above the valley - like the windings of lilies,

Like spouts of swan wings.

The lands are green with copse,

Snowy month pale, summer shine,

In the gentle sky reluctantly grows younger,

Crystalline, the sky turns green.

A shining flock of risen heads

Cools down, flying away into the distance ...

Night blue - there, above us,

The blue of the night crushes dreams!

Lightning like gold in a swamp

Someone casts fiery eyes.

15 Golden laughing eyes!

Hammering thundering nights!

Shouts - all of mother-of-pearl

Stormy azure morning:

Will flow in the bend of the flying

Purple early morning clouds.

N. M. Rubtsov

MORNING

When the dawn, shining through the pine forest,

It burns, it burns, and the forest is no longer dormant,

And the shadows of the pines fall into the river

And the light runs to the streets of the village,

When, laughing, on a deaf courtyard

Adults and children meet the sun, -

Perked up, I'll run up the hill

And I see everything in the best light.

Trees, huts, a horse on the bridge,

Blooming meadow - everywhere I yearn for them.

And, falling out of love with this beauty,

I will probably not create another ...

A. Voznesensky

VIRTUAL KEYBOARD

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

The priest, who was burying him, in the world, the 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.

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.

Current page: 1 (total book has 7 pages)

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100% +

Andrei Voznesensky
In the virtual wind

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

Virtual keyboard

According to his Note we tuned our lives

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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!"

He stood at the door.

Dry, strong pianist's brush.

He spoke from the middle.

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

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 ...

* * *

Why did he respond to me?

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 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 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.

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

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.

Who are they, the guests of the poet?

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

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

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.

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.

* * *

Pasternak is a teenager.

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

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

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

How careful and chaste he was! Once he gave me a pack of new poems, where there was "Autumn" with a golden stanza of Titian - in purity, imbued with feeling and pictoriality:

You also take off your dress
Like a grove sheds its leaves
When you fall into an embrace
In a dressing gown with a silk tassel.
(original version:
Your open dress
Like a grove of dropped leaves ...)

In the morning he called me: “Maybe you thought it was too frank? Zina says that I should not have given it to you, says that it is too free ... "

OK. Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the frank liberties of these lines, allegedly not befitting her age. It seems that she was jealous in a feminine way, jealous of the young passion and power of verse, of his actions beyond his age, of the novel, of his environment. She spoke irritably about the novel.

Pasternak appreciated her early books, and treated her later poems and poems with more than restraint. He gave me a typewritten copy of the "Tashkent Poem" to read, yellowed with time and brown, as if the pages had been burned on the folds. When I wanted to return it to him, he just brushed it off.

“Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin, for example, it just seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, nowhere, publicly or in print, did the great ones show their human irritation to the public. It pains me to read Akhmatova's reproaches in the documentary notes of Lidia Korneevna, how painful it is to read the harsh, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in the memoirs of Zinaida Nikolaevna.

For me, Akhmatova was God. The only special female in this incarnation. "Rosary" I knew by heart, but closer, "mine" was Tsvetaeva. Her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but written by hand in a small, unoblique beaded handwriting, were given to me to read by Elena Efimovna Tager, leaving me alone with them in the office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems spoke to me.

And it is unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. Probably, she was not delighted with the blond recipient of poetry.

How I understood him! I felt like an accomplice. I already had a secret life.

Meeting him coincided with my first love.

She was an English teacher at our school. Our romance began suddenly and landslide. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on winter night benches, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and joyfully yelled: “Hello, Elena Sergeevna!”

And how the heart died with silence on the telephone!

A dreamer, in the past a model for Gerasimov, what did she find in an inexperienced schoolboy?

You're ten years too late
But still I need you,

she read to me. And loosened her black braids.

There was an unconscious protest against the hated order of life in her - these breathtaking meetings in the dark teacher's room, love seemed to us our revolution. Parents were horrified, and we read with her "Jazz" by Kazarnovsky, her former friend, who disappeared in the camp. She brought me old issues of Krasnaya Nov, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. “Leaving once and for all” was her lesson.

I entrusted my acquaintance with Pasternak to her alone, gave her the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She made fun of the characters' long names and patronymics, teasing me with alleged misunderstanding. Maybe she was jealous?

Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk and the theatrics of life. It became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak.

As a habitat, a poet needs a secret life, a secret freedom. Without it, there is no poet.

His support for me was in his very fate, which shone nearby. It never crossed my mind to ask for something practical, like help getting printed or something like that. I was convinced that one does not enter into poetry under patronage. When I realized that the time had come to print poetry, I, without saying a word to him, went to the editorial offices, like everyone else, without auxiliary phone calls, went through all the pre-press ordeals. Once my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. He calls me to the office. He sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, hippopotamus. Looks in love.

- Are you a son?

- Yes, but...

- No buts. Now it is already possible. Don't hide. He's been rehabilitated. There were mistakes. What a beacon of thought! Tea will be brought now. And you are like a son...

- Yes, but...

- No buts. We give your poems to the number. We will be understood correctly. You have the hand of a master, you are especially good at signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write “caryatids ...” Congratulations.

(As I later realized, he mistook me for the son of N.A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Commission.)

- ... That is, if not a son? Like a namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring on all sorts of nonsense. We won't allow it. And I kept thinking - like such a father, or rather, not a father ... What more tea?

But then somehow printed. The first Litgazeta, smelling of paint, with a selection of poems, was brought to him in Peredelkino.

The poet was sick. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager leaning over him. The dark head of the poet pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how excited, how his face trembled! He read the poems aloud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So my affairs are not so bad,” he suddenly said. Of the poems he liked that which was free in form. “Aseev is probably looking for you now,” he joked.

Aseev, ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face resembling a lancet arch, fanatical like a Catholic preacher, with thin poisonous lips, Aseev of the Blue Hussars and Oksana, minstrel of construction sites, reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly soared over Moscow in his tower at the corner of Gorky and the passage of the Moscow Art Theater, for years he did not leave it, like Prometheus, chained to the phone.

I have never met a person who would so wholeheartedly love other people's poems. An artist, an instrument of taste, a sense of smell, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, smelled a line a mile away - this is how he tenaciously assessed V. Sosnora and Yu. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his fiery love. I caught them when they had already passed each other for a long time. How heavy are the quarrels between artists! Aseev always lovingly and jealously found out - how is “your Pasternak”? The same spoke about him distantly - "even with Aseev, even the last thing is a little cold." Once I brought him Aseev's book, he returned it to me without reading it.

Aseev is a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry.

“It turns out that they call you Andrey Andreevich? How cool! We all hit doubles. Mayakovsky - Vladim Vladimych, I am Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilyevich, Kruchenykh ... "-" And Boris Leonidovich? “The exception only proves the rule.”

Aseev came up with a nickname for me - Vazhneshchensky, gave me poems: "Your guitar is a gitana, Andryusha", saved me in a difficult time with the article "What to do with Voznesensky?", directed against the critics' manner of "reading minds". He chivalrously reflected attacks on young sculptors and painters in newspapers.

While in Paris, I gave interviews left and right. One of them came across to Lila Yurievna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev.

- Kolya, Andryusha has such success in Paris ...

The tube was happy.

- Here he talks about our poetry in an interview ...

The tube was happy.

- Lists the names of poets ...

- And where am I?

- No, Kolenka, you are not here at all ...

Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but, probably, the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but she had not heard about Aseev and threw it away. Well, how do you explain it to him? You'll hurt even more.

A break has occurred. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “After all, you endorsed this interview! Such is the order ... ”I not only did not endorse, but I did not remember in which newspaper it was.

After the scandal with Khrushchev, the editor of Pravda persuaded him, and his response appeared in Pravda, where he condemned the poet, "who puts a familiar poetess next to Lermontov."

Later, probably bored, he called, but my mother hung up. We didn't see each other again.

He stayed for me in the Blue Hussars, in Oksana.

In his panorama "Mayakovsky Begins" he named in a large circle next to the names of Khlebnikov and Pasternak the name of Alexei Kruchenykh.

* * *

There is a smell of mice in my manuscript.

The pointed nose twitches, peering into my manuscript. Pasternak warned against getting to know him. It appeared immediately after my first newspaper publication.

He was a junk dealer of literature.

His name was Leksey Eliseich, Kruchka, but Kurchonok would have been more suitable for him.

The skin of his cheeks was childish, pimply, always overgrown with gray bristles, growing in neglected tufts, like those of a badly scorched chicken. He was a crappy sprout. Dressed in rags. Plushkin would have looked like a regular in fashion salons next to him. His nose was always sniffing out something, darting out - well, not a manuscript, but a photograph to get hold of. It seemed that he had always existed - not even a bubble of the earth, no, a mold of time, a werewolf of communal quarrels, ghoul rustles, cobweb corners. You thought it was a layer of dust, but it turns out that it has been sitting in the corner for an hour.

He lived on Kirovskaya in a small closet. It smelled like a mouse. There was no light. The only window was littered up to the ceiling, filthy - with junk, bales, half-eaten tin cans, age-old dust, where he, like a squirrel, mushrooms and berries, hid his treasures - book antiques and lists.

All rights to the text belong to the author: Andrey Andreevich Voznesensky.
This is a short snippet for getting to know the book.In the virtual windAndrei Andreevich Voznesensky

Andrey Voznesensky On the virtual wind

My soul, shadow, I confess you. Please, do not put out my mascara ahead of time! Having entered the world and not finding ourselves, we are only objective shadows of the soul.
December 1997

Andrey 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.

“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 walked away from him, carrying in an armful of his manuscripts - for reading, and the most precious thing - the typewritten first part of his new novel in prose called “Doctor Zhivago” and an emerald book of new poems from this novel, bound with crimson silk cord. 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.

* * *

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, the great reader of Chekhov and the tuning fork of the Old Arbat elite, shows how they sat at secular receptions - arching their backs and only feeling the back of the 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 timid, 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.

The hum is quiet. I went to the stage

Leaning against the doorframe...

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, tensely bucking, 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 staging was molasses, but L. V. Tselikovskaya was Juliet, Yu. P. Lyubimov, Vakhtangov’s hero-lover, who at that time had not yet thought about the future Taganka Theater, was Romeo. 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 - lo and behold! - 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." How careful and chaste he was! Once he gave me a pack of new poems, where there was "Autumn" with a golden stanza of Titian - in purity, imbued with feeling and pictoriality:

You also take off your dress

Like a grove sheds its leaves

When you fall into an embrace

In a dressing gown with a silk tassel.

(original version:

Your open dress

Like a grove of dropped leaves ...)

In the morning he called me: “Maybe you thought it was too frank? Zina says that I should not have given it to you, says that it is too free ... ”L.K. Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the frank liberty of these lines, allegedly not befitting her age. It seems that she was jealous in a feminine way, jealous of the young passion and power of verse, of his actions beyond his age, of the novel, of his environment. She spoke irritably about the novel. Pasternak appreciated her early books, and treated her later poems and poems with more than restraint. He gave me a typewritten copy of the "Tashkent Poem" to read, yellowed with time and brown, as if the pages had been burned on the folds. When I wanted to return it to him, he just brushed it off. “Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin, for example, it just seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, nowhere, publicly or in print, did the great ones show their human irritation to the public. It pains me to read Akhmatova's reproaches in the documentary notes of Lidia Korneevna, how painful it is to read the harsh, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in the memoirs of Zinaida Nikolaevna. For me, Akhmatova was God. The only special female in this incarnation. "Rosary" I knew by heart, but closer, "mine" was Tsvetaeva. Her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but written by hand in a small, unoblique beaded handwriting, were given to me to read by Elena Efimovna Tager, leaving me alone with them in the office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems spoke to me. And it is unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. Probably, she was not delighted with the blond recipient of poetry. How I understood him! I felt like an accomplice. I already had a secret life.
Meeting him coincided with my first love. She was an English teacher at our school. Our romance began suddenly and landslide. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on winter night benches, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and joyfully yelled: “Hello, Elena Sergeevna!” And how the heart died with silence on the telephone! A dreamer, in the past a model for Gerasimov, what did she find in an inexperienced schoolboy?

You're ten years too late

But still I need you

She read to me. And loosened her black braids. There was an unconscious protest against the hated order of life in her - these breathtaking meetings in the dark teacher's room, love seemed to us our revolution. Parents were horrified, and we read with her "Jazz" by Kazarnovsky, her former friend, who disappeared in the camp. She brought me old issues of Krasnaya Nov, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. "Leave once and for all" - that was her lesson. I entrusted my acquaintance with Pasternak to her alone, gave her the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She made fun of the characters' long names and patronymics, teasing me with alleged misunderstanding. Maybe she was jealous? Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk and the theatrics of life. It became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak. As a habitat, a poet needs a secret life, a secret freedom. Without it, there is no poet.
His support for me was in his very fate, which shone nearby. It never crossed my mind to ask for something practical - for example, to help get printed or something like that. I was convinced that one does not enter into poetry under patronage. When I realized that the time had come to print poetry, I, without saying a word to him, went to the editorial offices, like everyone else, without auxiliary phone calls, went through all the pre-press ordeals. Once my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. He calls me to the office. He sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, hippopotamus. Looks in love. - Are you a son? - Yes, but... - No "buts". Now it is already possible. Don't hide. He's been rehabilitated. There were mistakes. What a beacon of thought! Tea will be brought now. And you are like a son… - Yes, but… - No “buts”. We give your poems to the number. We will be understood correctly. You have the hand of a master, you are especially good at the signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write “caryatids ...” Congratulations. (As I later understood, he mistook me for the son of N. A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Commission.) - ... That is, if not a son? Like a namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring on all sorts of nonsense. We won't allow it. And I kept thinking - like such a father, or rather, not a father ... What more tea? But then somehow printed. The first Litgazeta, smelling of paint, with a selection of poems, was brought to him in Peredelkino. The poet was sick. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager leaning over him. The dark head of the poet pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how excited, how his face trembled! He read the poems aloud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So my affairs are not so bad,” he suddenly said. Of the poems he liked that which was free in form. “Aseev is probably looking for you now,” he joked.
Aseev, ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face resembling a lancet arch, fanatical like a Catholic preacher, with thin poisonous lips, Aseev of the Blue Hussars and Oksana, minstrel of construction sites, reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly soared over Moscow in his tower at the corner of Gorky and the passage of the Moscow Art Theater, for years he did not leave it, like Prometheus, chained to the phone. I have never met a person who would so wholeheartedly love other people's poems. An artist, an instrument of taste, a sense of smell, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, smelled a line a mile away - so he tenaciously assessed V. Sosnora and Yu. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his fiery love. I caught them when they had already passed each other for a long time. How heavy are the quarrels between artists! Aseev always lovingly and jealously found out - how is “your Pasternak”? The same spoke about him distantly - "even with Aseev, the last thing is a little cold." Once I brought him Aseev's book, he returned it to me without reading it. Aseev is a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry. “It turns out that they call you Andrey Andreevich? How cool! We all hit doubles. Mayakovsky - Vladim Vladimych, I am Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilyevich, Kruchenykh ... "-" And Boris Leonidovich? “The exception only confirms the rule.” Aseev came up with a nickname for me - Vazhneshchensky, gave me poems: “Your guitar is a gitana, Andryusha”, saved me in a difficult time with the article “What to do with Voznesensky?”, directed against the manner of critics “read in mind”. He chivalrously reflected attacks on young sculptors and painters in newspapers. While in Paris, I gave interviews left and right. One of them came across to Lila Yurievna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev. - Kolya, Andryusha has such a success in Paris ... The pipe was delighted. - Here he talks about our poetry in an interview ... The pipe was delighted. - Lists the names of poets ... - And where do I stand? - No, Kolya, you are not here at all ... Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but, probably, the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but she had not heard about Aseev and threw it away. Well, how do you explain it to him? You'll hurt even more. A break has occurred. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “After all, you endorsed this interview! Such is the order ... ”I not only did not endorse, but I did not remember in which newspaper it was. After the scandal with Khrushchev, the editor of Pravda persuaded him, and his response appeared in Pravda, where he condemned the poet, "who puts a familiar poetess next to Lermontov." Later, probably bored, he called, but my mother hung up. We didn't see each other again. He stayed for me in the Blue Hussars, in Oksana. In his panorama "Mayakovsky Begins" he named in a large circle next to the names of Khlebnikov and Pasternak the name of Alexei Kruchenykh.

* * *

There is a smell of mice in my manuscript. The pointed nose twitches, peering into my manuscript. Pasternak warned against getting to know him. It appeared immediately after my first newspaper publication. He was a junk dealer of literature. His name was Lexey Eliseich, Kruchka, but Kurchonok would have been more suitable for him. The skin of his cheeks was childish, pimply, always overgrown with gray bristles, growing in neglected tufts, like those of a badly scorched chicken. He was a crappy sprout. Dressed in rags. Plushkin would have looked like a regular in fashion salons next to him. His nose was always sniffing out something, darting out - well, not a manuscript, but a photograph to get hold of. It seemed that he had always existed - not even a bubble of the earth, no, a mold of time, a werewolf of communal quarrels, ghoul rustles, cobweb corners. You thought it was a layer of dust, but it turns out that it has been sitting in the corner for an hour. He lived on Kirovskaya in a small closet. It smelled like a mouse. There was no light. The only window was littered up to the ceiling, filthy - with junk, bales, half-eaten tin cans, centuries-old dust, where he, like a squirrel, mushrooms and berries, hid his treasures - book antiques and lists. It had its own poetry, which was not available to me then. I realized this only now, when, compared with my blockages, his little room seems to be the dwelling of a neat man. Sometimes, for example, you would ask: “Aleksey Eliseich, do you have the first edition of Verst”? “Turn away,” he mutters. And through the dusty glass of the closet, as if into a mirror, you see how deftly, rejuvenated, he pulls out a precious pamphlet from under a moth-eaten coat. He took a penny. Maybe he was already insane. He carried books. His arrival was considered a bad omen. In order to live long, he went out into the street, filling his mouth with warm tea and a soaked bun. He was silent while the tea cooled, or mumbled something through his nose, jumped through the puddles. Bought everything. For the future. Pasted in albums and sold to the archive. Even I managed to sell drafts, although I was not of museum age. I was proud when the word "wise man" appeared in the dictionary. He sold Khlebnikov's manuscripts. Straightening them on the table for a long time, he smoothed them out like a cutter. "How old are you?" - businesslike asked. "For three chervonets." And quickly, like a fabric salesman in a store, after measuring, he cut off a piece of the manuscript with scissors - exactly thirty rubles. At one time he was the Rimbaud of Russian Futurism. The creator of an abstruse language, the author of "Dyr Bul Shyl", a poet by the grace of God, he suddenly stopped writing altogether, unable or unwilling to adapt to the onset of classicism. Once upon a time, Rimbaud, at about the same age, also suddenly abandoned poetry and became a merchant. Kruchenykh had the lines:

I forgot to hang myself

He had an excellent education, he could speak by heart from Gogol, this reserved storehouse of futurists. Like a mossy spirit, an insinuating ghoul, he silently entered your apartment. Grandmother pursed her lips suspiciously. He wept, begged, and suddenly, if he deigned, suddenly squealed to you his “Spring with a Treat”. This thing, all her speech with the sounds “x”, “u”, “u”, rare for the Russian language, “was marked in the spring, when beauty roams in ugliness.” But first, of course, he refuses, grumbles, plays the fool, grunts, pretends, for some reason rubs his eyes with a handkerchief of antediluvian virginity, similar to the oiled ends with which drivers wipe the engine. But the look is rubbed - it turns out that it is pearl gray, even blue! He tenses up, bounces like a Pushkin cockerel, puts his palm edge to his lips, like a cock's comb, tenses his palm, and begins. His voice opens high, with such an unearthly pure tone, to which the soloists of today's pop ensembles strive in vain. "Yu-yutsa!" - he conceives, you salivate, you see these painted Easter eggs, like a top, spinning on the tablecloth. “Cluster,” he grunts after him, imitating the slippery ringing of crystal. “Zuhrr”, - the barker does not let up, and it pulls in your mouth, crunches from candied persimmon, nuts, green Turkish delight and other sweets of the East, but the main thing is ahead. In a voice of the highest torment and voluptuousness, exhausted, standing on tiptoe and folding his lips as if for a whistle and a kiss, he pronounces on the finest diamond note: "Misyun, mizyun! .." Everything in this "misyun" - and young ladies with protruding little fingers, ceremonious taking raisins from elegant vases, and the seductive spring melody of Mizgir and the Snow Maiden, and, finally, that very aching note of the Russian soul and life, the note of craving, lost illusions that echoed in Lika Mizinova and in The House with a Mezzanine - this whole unfulfilled life exhaled call: "Miss, where are you?" He freezes, without taking his palm from his lips, as if waiting for the recall of his youth - a slender, gray-eyed prince again, again the morning horn of Russian futurism - Alexei Eliseevich Kruchenykh.
He pretended to be a huckster, a thief, a speculator. But he did not sell one thing - his notes in poetry. He just stopped writing. Poetry was friends only with his young times. With her alone, he remained clean and honest. Mizun, where are you?

* * *

Why do poets die? Why did World War I start? Did the Archduke get slapped? Wouldn't they spank? Would you sleep? Wouldn't it start? Alas, there are no accidents, there are processes of Time and History. “A genius dies on time,” said his teacher Scriabin, who died because a pimple on his lip popped off. Stalin allegedly said about Pasternak: "Don't touch this holy fool." Maybe the matter is in the biology of the spirit, which in Pasternak coincided with the Time and was necessary for that? ..

In those days - and you saw them

And remember which

I was singled out

The wave of the elements itself.

Pasternak met with Mandelstam at Lenin's coffin. My youthful perception of Lenin copied Pasternak's attitude towards him. Poetry expresses the illusions of the people. We know a historical sadist, in animal delight, who personally chopped off the heads of archers, but we believe in Pushkin's image. About Stalin, he once said: "I turned to him more than once, and he always fulfilled my requests." Probably, it was about the repressed. Once at the table, he recounted a telephone dialogue about Mandelstam, about which the near-literary swamp was gloatingly judging. Stalin called him late at night. We had to talk from the communal corridor. The receiver asked: "How do you regard Mandelstam as a poet?" Pasternak was sincere, he answered positively, though not enthusiastically. The pipe said: "If my comrade were arrested, I would defend him." “But he was arrested not for the quality of his poems,” the poet began, “but in general to arrest is ...” The Kremlin hung up, Pasternak tried to connect - in vain. The next morning he rushed to Bukharin, who was then the editor of Izvestia, to intercede for Mandelstam. He called Stalin "a giant of the pre-Christian era", that is, an Assyrian pockmarked despot.
Stalin lay in the Hall of Columns. The center was cordoned off by trucks and soldiers. We, students of Architecture, were given passes to Rozhdestvenka, where the institute was located. I joined a group of guys, and we made our way along the roofs, across the Kuznetsk bridge to Kolonny. From the loudspeakers came mourning and cavalry marches, poems by Tvardovsky and Simonov, and the false speeches of the leaders. Below, weeping crowds swayed, an orphaned empire sobbed. Our faces and hands were red, as if scalded with boiling water. On Pushkinskaya we jumped into the crowd, and it squeezed us, not allowing us to break. The buttons of my coat were torn off, I lost my hat. Inside the Hall of Columns, I was struck by the abundance of banners, wreaths, and uniforms. Among them, quite imperceptibly lay a dry body. His mustache bulging, he lay on his back like a beetle with its legs crossed over its chest. There is such a breed of beetles - "pretending thief", which pretends to be dead, and then - how to jump! I pushed away this blasphemous comparison. Then, trying to understand at least something, I will write:

And solemnly over the country,

like a bird of prey,

sailed with red fringe

state moustache.

Then I heard a phrase said by Pasternak: "We used to be ruled by a madman and a murderer, and now a fool and a pig." This phrase dampened the enthusiastic attitude towards Khrushchev characteristic of my peers. In front of my eyes, on his orders, they slandered and called the enemy of the Motherland a poet of crystal purity. "Even a pig does not shit where it eats, unlike Pasternak" - such was the historical statement of the General Secretary, voiced throughout the country by Semichastny. Now the former speaker revealed the level of the pigsty in which this “pig” was born: “I remember we were invited to Khrushchev’s in the Kremlin on the eve of the Plenum. Me, Ajubeya. Suslov was also there. And Khrushchev said: “Pasternak needs to be worked through in the report. Let's talk now, and then you will edit, Suslov will look - and let's go tomorrow ... "Khrushchev dictated two pages. Of course, with his sharp position that even a pig does not allow himself to shit ... "There was still such a phrase:" I think that the Soviet government will not object to, uh, the fact that Pasternak, if he so wants to breathe free air, left the borders of our Motherland. “You will say, and we will applaud. Everyone will understand." The poet foresaw this too:

And every day they bring stupidly,

So really unbearable

Photographic groups

Solid pig-like mugs.

* * *

I had a conversation with him about the Snowstorm. Do you remember it? “In the village, where not a single foot has set foot ...” Then the line moves: “In the village, where not one has set foot ...” - and so on, creating a complete feeling of the movement of snow snakes, the movement of snow. Time follows her. He said that the formal task is "ax soup". Then you forget about her. But the "axe" should be. You set a task for yourself, and it allocates something else, the energy of force, which no longer reaches the task of form, but the spirit and other tasks. Form is a wind screw that spins the air, the universe, call it spirit if you like. And the screw must be strong and precise. Pasternak has no bad poetry. Well, maybe a dozen less successful ones, but not bad ones. How different he is from poets, who sometimes enter literature with one or two decent things amidst the whole gray stream of their mediocre poems. He was right: why write badly when you can write accurately, that is, well? And here the matter is not only in the triumph of form, as if not life, not deity, not content is the form of the verse! “A book is a cubic piece of a smoking conscience,” he once said. This is especially noticeable in his "Favorites". At times, some reader even gets tired of the spiritual intensity of each thing. It is difficult to read, but what was it like for him to write, to live it! The same feeling from Tsvetaeva, such was their pulse.
In verse, his "service" rhymes with "the position of the robe." So life rhymed - everything was mixed up in it.

We were in our apartment, like in a compote,

Products of different spheres are swollen:

Seamstress, student, responsible worker…

As a child, our family of five lived in one room. Six more families lived in the remaining five rooms of the apartment - a family of workers who came from the oil fields, headed by the tongue-tied Praskovya, the aristocratic tall family of the Neklyudovs of seven people and the shepherd Bagira, the family of the engineer Ferapontov, the magnificent hospitable daughter of a former merchant and divorced husband and wife. Our communal apartment was considered sparsely populated. The sheets were drying in the hallway. Near the wood-stove, in the midst of kitchen battles, Musya Neklyudova's family earrings trembled over the kerosene stove. In the toilet, the divorced husband whistled "Bayadere", disturbing the queue. I was born in this world, I was happy and could not imagine otherwise. Until the age of thirty-six, until the two-story apartment in Lavrushinsky, he lived in a communal apartment. The bathroom was occupied by a separate family; at night, going to the toilet, they walked over the sleeping ones. Ah, how lusciously the kerosene light of "Svetlana's lamps" rhymes with "years of building plans"!

* * *

All this was in his small emerald verse book with crimson lacing. All his things of that time were reprinted by Marina Kazimirovna Baranovich, the smoky angel of his manuscripts. She lived near the Conservatory, ran to all Scriabin's programs, and just as the breath of the keys distinguishes Richter's Scriabin from Neuhaus's, so the keyboard of her typewriter had its own unique handwriting. She bound the poems into glossy orange, emerald, and mottled-red notebooks and stitched them with silk cord. Let's open this notebook, my reader. Childhood was conjured in her.

Still around the darkness of the night.

Such early in the world.

That the area lay down for eternity

From the crossroads to the corner

And before dawn and warmth

Another millennium...

And in the city on a small

Space, as at a gathering,

The trees stare naked

In the church gates...

Do you see, my reader, a boy with a school bag, following the rite of spring, her premonition? Everything that happens around is so similar to what is happening inside it.

And their eyes are filled with terror.

Their concern is understandable.

The gardens emerge from the fences…

They bury God.

Such an early, such a stunned feeling of childhood, the memory of a high school student in pre-revolutionary Moscow, when everything is full of mystery, when a miracle lies in wait around every corner, the trees are animated and you are involved in palm divination. What a feeling of humanity's childhood on the verge of paganism and anticipation of other truths! These verses, written by hand, he gave me with others stitched with the same crimson silk lacing. Everything about them bewitched. Autumn then reigned in it:

Like in an art exhibition:

Halls, halls, halls, halls

Elm, ash, aspen

Unprecedented in gilding.

At that time, I dreamed of getting into the Architecture School, I went to drawing classes, watercolors, I was completely in the power of the sacrament of painting. The Dresden Gallery was visiting Moscow at that time. Before being returned to Dresden, it was exhibited at the Pushkin Museum. Volkhonka was busy. The favorite of the audience was the "Sistine Madonna". I remember how I froze in the hall among the crowd in front of the soaring outline. The dark background behind the figure consists of many merged angels, the viewer does not immediately notice them. Hundreds of spectator faces, as in a mirror, were reflected in the dark glass of the picture. You saw the outlines of the Madonna, and the faces of angels, and the attentive faces of the audience superimposed on them. The faces of Muscovites entered the picture, filled it, merged, became part of the masterpiece. Never, probably, "Madonna" has not seen such a crowd. "Sistine" became mass culture. Together with her, the lovely "Chocolate Girl" with a tray, having fluttered out of the pastel, on oilcloths and reproductions, ran around the cities and villages of our country. "Drunk is strong!" exhaled admiringly behind my back a visitor to the exhibition near the painting “Drunken Silenus”. Moscow was shocked by the spiritual and pictorial power of Rembrandt, Cranach, Vermeier. "The Prodigal Son", "The Last Supper" were included in everyday life. World painting and with it the spiritual power of its concepts simultaneously opened up to hundreds of thousands of Muscovites. Pasternak's poems from a notebook with a silk cord spoke about the same, about the same eternal themes - about humanity, revelation, life, repentance, death, self-giving.

All thoughts of ages, all dreams, all worlds.

The whole future of galleries and museums…

The same great questions tormented Michelangelo, Vrubel, Matisse, Nesterov, taking metaphors of the Old and New Testament for their canvases. Like theirs, the solution of these themes in verse was by no means modernist, like Salvador Dali's, for example. The master worked with a stern brush of a realist, in a classically restrained range. Like Brueghel, whose Christmas space is inhabited by Dutch peasants, the poet filled his frescoes with objects of everyday life and everyday life around him. And at the center of all the stories my mind placed his figure, his fate. What a Russian, Moscow even, chistoprudnaya, he has Magdalena, washing the feet of her beloved body from a bucket! She lived near Chistye Prudy. Her name was Olga Vsevolodovna. He called her Lucy. Very feminine memoirs of her “Captured by time” poignantly tell about the last love of the poet and his tragic fate. I always saw his Magdalene as fair-haired, blonde in our opinion, with straight, loose hair up to her elbows. I knew her, beautiful, stately, with enthusiastically laughing pupils. And what a prophetic connoisseur of the female heart wrote the following stanza:

Too many arms to hug

You will spread at the ends of the cross.

Of course, he wrote about himself anticipating fate. What a long-suffering sigh of disaster! What an admiring sadness in her, the pain of parting, understanding of human imperfection in understanding the gesture of the universe, what pride in the high destiny of a loved one and at the same time let slip, let it out, betrayed female jealousy for the one who distributes himself to people, and not only to her, to her alone ... The artist paints life, paints those around him, his neighbors, only through them comprehending the meaning of the universe. Sanguine, the material for writing is his own life, his only existence, experience, deeds - he has no other material. Of all the features, sources and mysteries of Pasternak, childhood is the most serious.

O childhood! Ladle of spiritual depth!

O all forests aboriginal!

Rooted in self-love,

My inspirer, my regent!..

Both “My Sister is Life” and “The Nine Hundred and Fifth Year” are, first of all, the reckless primacy of feelings, the confession of childhood, rebellion, the feeling of peace for the first time. As a child who escaped from the care of adults, he loved Lermontov, dedicated his best book to him. It is appropriate to speak of the verse flow of his life. In it, this verse flow, what was said once is repeated more than once, acquires a second birth, childhood echoes again and again, quotes from his former poems appear through harsh frescoes.

All the pranks of the fairies, all the affairs of sorcerers,

All the Christmas trees in the world, all the dreams of the kids.

All the thrill of warmed candles, all the chains,

All the splendor of colored tinsel ...

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

Compare this with the picturesque swirling rhythm of his "Waltz with Devilry" or "Waltz with a Tear", those gasping round dances of childish times:

Magnificence beyond strength

Ink and sepia and white...

Dates, books, games, nougat,

Needles, rugs, jumps, runs.

In this sinister sweet taiga

People and things are on an equal footing.

I remember meeting the New Year with him in Lavrushinsky. Pasternak beamed among the guests. He was both a Christmas tree and a child at the same time. Neuhaus's eyebrows moved like a coniferous triangle. The eldest son Zhenya, still keeping an officer's harmony, came out, as if from a mirror, from a wall portrait by his mother, the artist E. Pasternak. The apartment had access to the roof, to the stars. Anyone could be afraid: the dagger on the wall was intended not only for decoration, but also for self-defense. Poems preserved the real and prophetic dizzying mystery of the festival, Scriabin's prelude fireworks.

The lamps were blown out, the chairs moved...

A hive of masks and mummers is moving...

The flow of blouses, the singing of doors,

The roar of the little ones, the laughter of mothers ...

And emerging in the window frame

The spirit of the draft blowing out the flame...

There is always a premonition of a miracle in the tree. It is on the Christmas tree that the young Pasternak heroine shoots at her seducer. “Admit it, Andryusha, you would like her to shoot for a different reason, so that she would be political,” he teased me in front of guests. He did not celebrate his birthdays. He considered them dates of mourning. Did not recognize anniversaries. At one time, he refused the jubilee order and honoring at the Bolshoi Theater. And even then forbade congratulations. I contrived to bring him flowers the day before or the day after, on the 9th or 11th, without violating the letter of the prohibition. I wanted to do something to comfort him. I brought him white and scarlet cyclamens, and sometimes purple columns of hyacinths. They trembled like carved - in crosses - glasses of purple crystal. At the institute, I was enough for a living lilac bush in a pot. How happy he was, how Pasternak beamed when he undressed the paper and saw a slender bush in white clusters. He adored lilacs and forgave me my annual trick. And finally, what was the horror of my parents when I, a monkey, refused my birthday and gifts, calmly declaring that I consider this day mourning and that life did not work out. Since then, I have not celebrated my birthdays. I always run away, hide in Suzdal or somewhere else. “When your country is sad, shameful to be successful,” Vysotsky picked up my lines. Of course, I had a hard time with money for a gift to him at that time, but I could not ask my parents, but I earned it myself. At that time I became interested in photography. I went to the circle of the House of Scientists. I decided to make a big portrait of him. With the help of the leader of the circle, we made an increase. Retouched. Moreover, the most important places - lips, eyelashes, tie - she retouched herself. My God, what a terrible portrait it was! Polished handsome. Similar to the swan rugs that were sold in the market. Plus a 1950s-style passe-partout and leatherette edging. But what was there to do - the birthday came. I carried a paper-wrapped portrait from the station down the snowy road. The frost burned my hands. "Andryusha, it's not too late, come back, don't disgrace yourself!" But here he is already unfolding the wet paper. And enthusiastically buzzes: “This is wonderful. It looks like Georgian primitives, like Pirosmani.” His reaction was not a polite compliment. A few days later I saw my portrait hung by him above his door. It still hangs there, becoming a museum exhibit. I hung a second copy of it, created by us for safety reasons, in my office.

... The wind blew more and more fiercely from the steppe ...

At the moment when the breath of the alloy

Words are united in a word!

The path is not always clear to the poet himself. He listens to the higher call signs, which, like a pilot, dictate his route. I am not trying to interpret anything in his path: I am simply writing what I saw how what he wrote was read.

Part of the pond was hidden by the tops of alders,

But part of it could be seen perfectly from here

Through the nests of rooks and trees, the tops.

As we walked along the dam ...

He was not understood. He buzzed offendedly: “Yesterday, Kostya Fedin, having returned my novel, said:“ Everything is written in crazy language with you. Well, what do you think, Russia is a madhouse?!” I answered: “Your everything is written in mediocre language. Well, Russia is mediocrity?'” Another time he embarrassedly told that he had met a dishonest critic on the path at dusk and embraced him, mistaking him for another. “Then, of course, I apologized to him for saying hello by mistake ...”
Tpr-r! Well, here is the dam. We've arrived. And the shore of the pond. And they ate a fallen log. These are all quotes from his Nobel Prize.

What did I do for a dirty trick,

Me, the killer and villain?

I made the whole world cry

Over the beauty of their land.

He is still a Nobel laureate for me. After all, the letter of refusal, created under pressure, was not written by him, but by his relatives. He inserted only one sentence. And what is an award for an artist? The main reward for him was the ability to write and the recognition of this forest, people, his land. Today, through the fence, I see a line of pilgrims reaching for the museum. One hundred thousand in five years. Through the efforts of Natalya Anisimovna Pasternak, the comfort of the Big Dacha returned to the house.
Did he give me a vote? He just said what he liked and why. So, for example, he explained to me for a long time the meaning of the line: "Epaulette hands held you by the shoulders." In addition to the accuracy of the image, he wanted from the verses of breath, the tension of time, the most important task, what he called "strength". I was stunned by Pasternak’s recently published love letters to his wife: “Zinusha, nothing compares to you in the world ... everything in the world is nonsense against you, sweet, pure, unparalleled ...” How short-sighted I was, how boyishly I saw in her only a big mistress dachas. And here is his last letter to her from Peredelkino in Tskhaltubo: “There were the Livanovs, the artist Vereisky with his wife and the director of the theater. Ermolova P. Vasiliev. Andryusha successfully read his poems. I also read. We drank ... "The commentary to this letter states:" Letters and youthful poems of Voznesensky with Pasternak's notes have been preserved in the Pasternak family archive. According to Pasternak's remarks, Voznesensky worked on his youthful poems, offering all new versions to Pasternak's judgment. Pasternak kept a special folder for them, on which he wrote: "Andryushin's poems." It turns out that he kept my notebooks and letters, in the margins of the poems were his pencil notes. It looks like he was getting ready to talk. I didn't suspect it. He treated the little boy with such care. His encouraging cross rewarded the stanza:

They held you by the shoulders

epaulette hands!

You were torn and dared,

hussars and poets...

Gennady Aigi recently told me that Boris Leonidovich advised him to find me and help each other, breaking into literature. I did not know about this covenant, but I always mentioned and praised Aigi wherever possible. It felt like. For a long time none of my contemporaries existed for me. Ridiculous were the gradations between them. He and everyone else. He himself honored Zabolotsky. As a member of the board of the joint venture, he once saved the “Country of Ants” from being torn apart. He considered Tvardovsky a major poet, which weaned me from school nihilism. It was hard not to get into his force field. Once, after student military summer camps, I brought him a notebook of new poems. Then he prepared his "Favorites". He reworked poetry, took up arms against his early uninhibited manner, selected only what was now close to him. About my poems, he said: "There is looseness and imagery here, but they are on this side of the line, if they were mine, I would include them in my collection." I beamed. Pasternak himself would have taken them! When I got home, I decided to stop writing. After all, he would take them in his, which means they are not mine, but his. I didn't write for two years. Then went "Goya" and others, already mine. "Goya" was criticized a lot, there were several odd articles. The softest label was "formalism". For me, "Goya" sounded - "war".

* * *

In the evacuation, we lived beyond the Urals. The owner of the house that let us in, Konstantin Kharitonovich, a retired machinist, wizened, nimble, shy when he drinks, once took away his brother's wife, the immense Siberian Anna Ivanovna. Therefore, they lived in the wilderness, never signed, fearing a formidable avenger.
We lived hard. Everything that was brought was exchanged for food. My father was in the Leningrad blockade. They said he was injured. Mother was crying when she came home from work. And suddenly the father returns - thin, unshaven, in a black tunic and with a canvas backpack. The owner, solemn and embarrassed more than usual, brought on a tray two glasses of vodka and two slices of black bread with white squares of chopped lard - "with a rescuer." Father sipped the vodka, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, thanked us, and gave the fat to us. Then we went to see what was in the backpack. There was a dull yellow can of American stew and an artist's book called Goya. I didn't know anything about this artist. But in the book, partisans were shot, the bodies of the hanged were dangling, the war was writhing. The black paper loudspeaker in the kitchen spoke about the same thing every day. Father with this book flew across the front line. All this was connected in one terrible name - Goya. Goya - so the evacuation trains of the great migration of the people hummed. Goya - this is how the sirens and bombs moaned before our departure from Moscow, Goya - this is how the wolves outside the village howled, Goya - this is how the neighbor lamented, having received a funeral. Goya... This music of memory was recorded in poetry, my first poems. Of course, a different rumble, and a parent language, and my future fate were recorded in the verses - but the canvas was still from childhood impressions.

* * *

Due to a broken leg in the Kama region, Pasternak did not participate in the wars. But he voluntarily went to the front, was shocked by the people's element of those years. I wanted to write a play about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, about a schoolgirl, about the war.

And since from early childhood

I am wounded by the female share ...

His attitude towards a woman was both masculine and youthful at the same time. He had the same attitude towards Georgia. He collected material for a novel about Georgia with the heroine Nina, the period of the first Christians, when the worship of the god of the moon organically passed into the rites of a new culture. How sensual and natural Georgian rituals are! According to legend, in order to make the first cross, St. Nina folded two vines crosswise and tied them with her long cut hair. In him, the pantheistic culture of the early period passed into the strict spirituality of the later culture. As in life, these two cultures coexisted in it. In his correspondence with the Georgian schoolgirl Chuka, the daughter of Lado Gudiashvili, love, closeness and trust in her world shine through. Until now, in Gudiashvili's workshop, under glass, like a relic in a museum, a golden coffee cup gleams, which the poet's lips touched. He loved those halls hung with canvases with Bagration's parquet, where the tall, white-headed artist, weightless as a sheaf of light, wandered from picture to picture. The canvases were illuminated as he passed. It slid over them like a smile. The face of Pasternak on the wall, executed by him in lightning graphics, acquired Georgian features. I received Georgian culture from his hands. The first poet he introduced me to was Simon Ivanovich Chikovani. It happened back at Lavrushinsky. I was struck by a secret fire in this quiet man with hollow cheeks over an everyday double-breasted jacket. Boris Leonidovich enthusiastically buzzed about his impressionism - however, impressionism for him denoted its own concept, designated by him - it included both Chopin and Verlaine. I looked at two artists in love with each other. The conversation between them was sometimes incomprehensible to me - it was the speech of the initiates, ministers of a high order. I was present at the sacrament, where the Georgian names and terms seemed to be symbols of a rite inaccessible to me. Then he asked me to read poetry. Ah, those rhymes of childhood...

To the sound of trams, stupefied,

the clouds rolled over.

"Odurev" - it was clearly from Pasternak's arsenal, but he did not like this, but the fact that the clouds leaned on their elbows. In children's lines, he discerned behind the sound - the visual. Simon Ivanovich pressed his thin pale lips and, smacking his tongue, lingered on the line in which the girl flashed and where

… to the clouds

a pleadingly raised balcony.

This was my first public discussion. Then for the first time someone else was present during his conversations with me. Faithful to the murdered Paolo and Titian, he also introduced me to translations. For me, the first translated poet was Joseph Noneshvili. And Georgia, with the hands of Noneshvili, placed flowers on Pasternak's coffin on the day of the funeral. Several times, after a moment's thought, I tried to start a diary. But each time, with my disorganization, I did not last long. I still can't forgive myself for this. Yes, and these hasty records disappeared in the turmoil of constant moving. Recently, my family, sorting through the rubbish of papers, found a notebook with a diary of several days. In order to somehow convey the excitement of his voice, the flow of his lively daily speech, I will cite at random several pieces of his monologues, as I wrote them down then in my youthful diary, without correcting anything, omitting only the details of a personal plan. He spoke out loud.

* * *

Here he was speaking on August 18, 1953, on a bench in the public garden near the Tretyakov Gallery. I returned then after a summer practice, and for the first time he read to me "White Night", "August", "Fairy Tale" - all the things of this cycle. - Are you waiting a long time? - I was driving from another area - there was no taxi - here was a pickup truck - I'll tell you about myself - you know I'm early in Peredelkino - early stormy spring is strange - the trees still do not have leaves, but they have already blossomed - the nightingales have begun - it seems banal - but I wanted to somehow tell about it in my own way - and here are a few sketches - though it’s still too dry - like a hard pencil - but then I need to rewrite it again - and Goethe - there were several places in Faust that were so incomprehensible to me sclerotic - goes there is blood then it becomes stiff - blockage - kh-kh - and it breaks off - there are eight such places in Faust - and suddenly in the summer everything opened - in a single stream - as before when "My sister is life" "Second birth" "Certificate of protection" - at night got up - a feeling of strength, even a healthy person would never have believed that it was possible to work like that - send poetry - though Marina Kazimirovna says that it’s impossible after a heart attack - while others say it’s like a medicine - well, don’t worry - I’ll read it to you - listen - But a telephone conversation through weeks yu: - An idea came to me - maybe Pasternak sounds better in the translation - the secondary is destroyed by the translation - “My sister is life” the first cry - suddenly, as if the roof was blown off - the stones began to speak - things acquired symbolism - then not everyone understood the essence of these poems - now things are called by their proper names - so about translations - before when I wrote and I had complex rhymes and rhythms - translations did not work out - they were bad - translations do not need the power of forms - lightness is needed - to convey the meaning - content - why was it considered weak translation of Kholodkovsky - because they got used to the fact that bad and translated and original things were written in this form - my translation is natural - how beautifully Faust is published - usually books scream - I'm glue! - I'm paper! - I'm a thread! - and here everything is perfect - excellent illustrations by Goncharov - I will give it to you - the inscription is already ready - how is your project? - a letter came from Zavadsky - he wants to stage "Faust" - - Now tell me honestly - "Separation" is worse than others? - No? - I deserve your good attitude, but tell me straight - well, yes, it’s the same in Spektorsky - after all, the revolution was the same - Stasik is here - he came with his wife - he has insomnia and something with his stomach - and “Fairy Tale” is for you does not resemble the Chukovsky crocodile? - - I want to write poems about Russian provincial cities - such as the obsessive motif of "city" and "ballads" - the light from the window on the snow - they get up and so on - such rhymes de la rue - they served the tsar - then October - it will turn out very well - now there are a lot I write - everything is in draft - then I will finish it - because in the very times of the rise - teasing myself with the charm of individual pieces - As far as I know, these verses were never written.

To the bride's house until the morning

Wandered with talyanka ...

The matchmaker swam with a plow,

Turning the sides...

Called me the next day. “So, I explained to Anna Andreevna how poetry is born. The wedding woke me up. I knew that this was something good, I was mentally transported there, to them, and in the morning it really turned out to be a wedding ”(I quote from the diary). He asked me what I thought about poetry. They splashed the freshness of a gray morning, the youthfulness of the rhythm. But to me, a student of the 50s, the words “matchmaker”, “friends” seemed alien, archaic; "best man" went around calling from the "chauffeur". I probably only confirmed his own doubts. He gave me another option over the phone. “Now about what you're saying - old fashioned. Write it down. No, wait, we'll remove the matchmaker now. In the sense of the best men, it will even get better, since the place will be more specifically indicated: “Having crossed the depths of the courtyard ...” ”Maybe he improvised over the phone, maybe he remembered a draft version. In this form, these verses were printed. I remember the editor was apprehensive about the line: “Life is also only a moment ... just a dream ...”

On our first meeting, he gave me a ticket to the WTO, where he was to read the translation of Faust. This was his last public reading. At first he stood in a group, surrounded by dark suits and dresses, his gray peeping through them like the confused opening of the northern sky through the tree trunks. The radiance betrayed him. Then he quickly sat down at the table. M. M. Morozov presided, corpulent, grown out of Serov's curly-haired boy, Mika Morozov. Pasternak read while sitting, wearing glasses. The golden curls of the fans froze. Someone outlined. Someone shouted from a place, asking to read the "Kitchen of the Witches", where, as you know, the original texts of witchcraft slander were introduced into the translation. In the Weimar archive you can see how the freemason and thinker Goethe studied works on cabalism, alchemy and black magic. Pasternak refused to read The Kitchen. He read poignant passages.

They will not hear the following songs, * * * In Weimar, Goethe's homeland, the large volume of Goethe's palace, located on a hill, of an inexplicable secret composition, is connected with the tiny vertical volume of the house of his youth, which, like a garden figurine, stands alone in a lowland, in the distance. In high water, water sometimes approaches it. With its heartfelt desire, the big palace is turned to the small one. This world law of attraction has reached a reserved point in the composition of the white ensemble of the large Vladimir Cathedral and the vertical pearl located in the valley on the Nerl. When you pass between them, you seem to be pierced by bright currents of mutual love of these snow-white masterpieces facing each other - big to small.

The sea dreams of something tiny,

Kind of like becoming a caliber bird...

Likewise, the gigantic gray array of the house in Lavrushinsky was cordially turned to the Peredelkino dacha.
A dozen years later, a complete translation of Faust was published in Goslit. He gave me this heavy cherry volume. He signed books without hesitation, but after thinking it over, more often the next day. You've been dying for days. And what a generous New Year's gift awaited you tomorrow, what an understanding of another heart, what an advance on life, on growth. Some words were erased with an elastic band and rewritten from above. He wrote on Faust: “January 2, 1957, in memory of our meeting at our house on January 1st. Andryusha, the fact that you are so gifted and subtle, that your understanding of the age-old continuity of happiness called art, your thoughts, your tastes, your movements and wishes so often coincide with mine, is a great joy and support for me. I believe in you, in your future. I embrace you - your B. Pasternak. Exactly ten years earlier, in January 1947, he gave me his first book. This inscription was for me the most generous gift of fate.

* * *

I have been sick a lot in recent years. The bullying got him. I visited him at the Botkin hospital. Brought the Forsyte Saga to read. He conscientiously read and joked, returning: “While you are reading it, you could write your book ...” He wrote to me from Botkinskaya: “I am in the hospital. Too often these cruel diseases began to repeat themselves. The present coincided with your entry into literature, sudden, impetuous, stormy. I'm terribly glad that I lived up to it. I have always loved your way of seeing, thinking, expressing yourself. But I did not expect that she would be able to be heard and recognized so soon. The more I am glad of this unexpectedness and your triumph ... So all this is close to me ... "Then, in the hospital, he presented his photo:" Andryusha Voznesensky in the days of my illness and his wild successes, the joy of which did not prevent me from feeling my torment ... " What shame seized me for my healthy heart, legs, skis, for my age and the horror of the impossibility of transferring this to another life, dearest to me! ..

The artists are leaving

without hats, as if in a temple,

into the buzzing grounds

to birches and oaks...

I have known him for fourteen years. How many times his words lifted me up and saved me, and what bitterness, pain is always felt behind these words. ...