The most interesting evening I spent with Tolstoy was devoted to the plan to translate some Polish poems written during this war. Suddenly detained, Sokolovsky was absent just this one time, so I was able stay at the writer’s house until late at night without an escort.
Tolstoy had invited mostly translators, and a few Russian writers, including Anna Akhmatova, whom I had not met before. A well-known publisher called Tikhonov was also present, an old friend of Gorky, who came across as a modest, quiet man. Gorky’s daughter-in-law was there too. At about ten in the evening we gathered in the large drawing room around a table with wine, superb kishmish (raisins), and other sweetmeats. The heat of the day had passed. It was fresh and breezy.
We established that Tikhonov was prepared to publish the volume, and that it would be divided into three parts: poems from occupied Poland (some of these had reached us via London), poems by Polish writers from London, and poems written within the Polish Army being formed in the Soviet Union. As at the evening in Yungiyul, here too I read the London poems off the cuff.
The atmosphere and the ardor of the Russians’ reaction exceeded my boldest expectations. I can still see the tears in the large eyes of the silent Akhmatova, as I clumsily translated the final stanza of the “Warsaw Carol”:
And if you want Him born in the shadow
Of Warsaw’s smoking ruins,
Better put the newborn
Straight up on the cross.
“The Ballad of Two Candles” and “Chopin’s Homeland” (both by Baliński), and Słonimski’s “Alarm for the City of Warsaw” made a shocking impression. I had to read them all in turn, poem after poem, and was not allowed to omit a single one. In the past, I had very often tried to attract foreigners to Polish poetry, especially French people, with a minimal result; never before had I sensed such receptivity among my audience, never had I managed to evoke such a lively, genuine frisson as among this surviving handful of Russian intellectuals.
Akhmatova agreed to take on the translation of the “Warsaw Carol,” although she claimed never to have translated poetry before. Tolstoy loudly bemoaned that nobody in the Soviet Union wrote about Russia like that, complaining that the only poems being written about their homeland were “cold and artificial.”
That evening I was struck by the vacuum that had arisen in Russia in the sphere of art after twenty-something years of supervised culture; what a hunger for genuine poetry prevailed there. The great tradition, from Derzhavin and Pushkin to Blok, right through to Mayakovsky and Yesenin, seemed to have been broken off, apart from a few survivors of the stature of Pasternak or Akhmatova. But profound, disinterested communication between Poles and Russians is possible, it occurred to me—how easy it was to penetrate each other’s cultures, to infect each other with poetry, the sound of a poem, or to transmit the tiniest little tremor in each other’s language.
Tolstoy scoffed that in Russia nobody knew a thing about Polish poetry, how in general Polish literature was “nothing but Przybyszewski!” He joked that it was thanks to Przybyszewski that he had learned to drink, and that nowadays it was hard for him to imagine what a literary event Przybyszewski had been in Russia in his youth. Tikhonov agreed, saying that as a young man he had once seen Przybyszewski in Saint Petersburg, playing Chopin wonderfully in the hall of a great restaurant, despite being completely drunk, while rambling on about “Chopin...the Bible...Nietzsche...”
“For the young,” Tolstoy repeated, “drinking and discussing Przybyszewski was sheer ecstasy.”
We spent the whole of that evening talking about literature, or rather I did, trying to show that Polish literature has far more to offer than just Przybyszewski. I talked about Słowacki and Norwid. When I started to translate Norwid’s “Fatum” from memory:
Like a wild beast Misfortune came to man
And fixed its dreadful eyes upon him
Waiting
For him to turn aside . . .
Tolstoy was so interested that he helped me to translate it into Russian, wrote it down, and kept it.
I had Norwid’s letters with me and translated the one he wrote to Zamoyski in 1864 about patriotism, which describes it as “a creative force, and not a force for isolating oneself and pushing others away.” He writes that our sense of nationality relies on the force of appropriation but not on the force of Puritan exclusivity.2 Tolstoy went into raptures and insisted that I come back for an evening of Norwid, claiming that he had finally found an apt definition of patriotism.
That evening Tolstoy showed me a fine edition of a Russian translation of Bolesław Prus’s novel The Pharaoh, fairly recently published by Tikhonov, who was there that evening. I asked why this particular book had been so beautifully published.
“I don’t regard it as a very great book,” replied Tikhonov. “Its portrayal of Egypt is operatic and artificial, but,” he added in a whisper, dropping his gaze, “it’s Stalin’s favorite book.”
As for Akhmatova, I had read her poetry many years earlier; I knew she was the wife of Nikolai Gumilyov, a Russian poet shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and also that she had a son, a student who had been arrested and exiled in 1938. The boy was in the eastern languages faculty and had dreamed of going to Central Asia; nobody knew where he had been exiled to, or on what charge. Before the war there was talk of Norilsk, then there was a rumor that he’d been seen at Nakhodka Bay on the way to Kolyma. What was this woman doing, the mother of a convict, in the house of the regime’s most devoted writer?
Then I was told that Stalin had praised one of Akhmatova’s poems; as a result, she was not just tolerated but even protected. In 1946 she was violently attacked by the Communist Party Central Committee and Zhdanov for “refusing to walk in step with the people” and was banned from publishing her work. But then, in 1942, she was still in “the highest care”; apparently on Stalin’s personal orders a special plane had been sent to Leningrad for her when the besieged city was suffering famine.
That evening Akhmatova was sitting under a lamp, wearing a modest dress, in between a sack and a light habit, made of very poor material; her slightly graying hair was smoothly combed and tied with a colored scarf. She must once have been very beautiful, with regular features, a classic oval face, and large gray eyes. She drank wine and spoke little, in a slightly strange tone, as if half joking, even about the saddest things. Once I had read out the Polish poetry, we asked her to recite some of her own for us. She agreed willingly.
She declaimed a few passages from her as-yet-unpublished “Leningrad Poem.” All those present treated her with the greatest respect, giving me to understand that she was a great Russian poet. The verses she recited in a strange, singsong tone, as another Russian poet, Igor Severyanin, used to, contained none of the optimistic propaganda or praise for the Soviet Union and Soviet heroes that even Tolstoy sank to time and again, with his “stern and just” Soviet knights. But her “Leningrad Poem” was the only work that moved me and gave me a brief evocation of what the defense of the starving, devastated, heroic city must have been like.
Akhmatova’s poem began with memories of youth: difficult metaphors, commedia dell’arte, peacocks, violets, lovers, and a maple tree with yellow leaves in the window of the former Sheremetyev Palace, and ended with Leningrad cold and hungry under bombardment, besieged Leningrad. I never forgot the lines about the hungry little boy who during the bombing, in early spring or late fall, brought her some travinki (blades of grass) that had grown between the cobblestones.3I was eager to get to know her better, to see her on her own, and go further into her world, but I didn’t dare. Once already an innocent visit that I had made to a woman, without Sokolovsky as my escort, had had very tragic consequences. I have retained a memory of Akhmatova as someone “special,” with whom contact was difficult because of a certain affectation, or perhaps she just had a more singular manner. I felt as if I were communing with a wounded person trying to mask her wounds, defending herself with that affectation. Her poem—she then recited more of them—is linked with my memories of the Russian symbolists and sometimes of Rilke. Before 1914 Akhmatova had lived in Paris, where she was a friend of Modigliani. Many of his letters and drawings which she had kept were destroyed during the siege of Leningrad.
The evening at Tolstoy’s went on until three or four in the morning. We spent a long time saying goodbye outside the writer’s house, under the crowns of the spreading trees. Tolstoy was in full flow, talking about the old days, about Russian writers from before the revolution, and about Remizov, to whom, as he put it, he owed everything, as far as feeling for the Russian language was concerned. He mentioned Rozanov and his passionate sensuality, like that of old Karamazov. “I like to leave the bathhouse, get in my sled, and feel the frost nipping my face as I savor some sweet grapes,” Rozanov had told the young Tolstoy.
Tolstoy told his stories artfully, and he had an excellent memory, but in talking about Rozanov, he only captured a single aspect of the writer, the one most closely related to himself, as if he hadn’t noticed his tragic split personality.
We parted, promising to meet many more times. At dawn I reached the apartment at the edge of the city, where thanks to a helpful intermediary from Poland I had found a bed for the night.
A couple of people were already filling the room with loud snores.
The impression stirred by the poetry, and the wish to hurry up the translations and have them published in Russian prompted me to remain in Tashkent for another day. I got permission to occupy a room in the main hotel reserved for the commander in chief. I had with me a few cans of corned beef, some real tea, and even some sugar—all I needed to hold a feast, by local standards.
I invited some of the people who had been present at Tolstoy’s house. They were going to bring a few of their friends, who also wanted to hear the Polish poetry. But at the last moment my plan failed to materialize. Akhmatova sent a message to say she was unwell, Yakhontov, one of the best known Soviet declaimers of poetry (who lived in the same hotel), suddenly had to go somewhere. I received the same sort of refusals from the other invited guests, who only the night before had so warmly agreed to come and see me. I suspected “diplomatic” illnesses—an official ban.
Evening came, and I was alone in the room, when suddenly a young woman came in. She introduced herself as a friend of Tolstoy, and she had been informed that I was going to read some poetry, but clearly the instruction cancelling the gathering behind my back had not reached her. Tall and slender, with fair hair as light as down, she had subtle, pedigree features and a strikingly natural manner. Seeing that she had come alone, she wanted to leave at once, but I made her stay. We sat on a narrow stone balcony overlooking the street, where there were two old poplar trees. We spent the evening together on that balcony.
Once again I experienced that rare, so very Russian, instant contact with someone whom I had never met before, and will probably never meet again.
I read the poetry just for her, translating it into Russian, then reading it in Polish, and again I felt the same acute, wonderful reaction. She didn’t say a word but just kept asking for precision, for the sound of a word, for an exact rendition of the meaning in Russian. And then suddenly she said: “So you have already found ways to express what you have endured . . . though we . . . have not yet . . .” and fell silent. She dropped her gaze, and the corners of her mouth were trembling.
“You know what’s happened to Leningrad. I’m from there, it’s my city—now it’s a heap of rubble. Do you know what it’s like in a city where two million people have died as the result of bombing, cold and hunger? I have nowhere to return to now. Our young Soviet intelligentsia no longer exists—they’ve all perished, especially the Leningrad intelligentsia. After the Finnish war there was no family that hadn’t lost a son, a husband, or a father—the entire burden of the Finnish war was borne by the Leningrad district, and now all the rest have died on the front, the university students were all sent to the front in the first dreadful months of the German attack . . . I feel alien here in Uzbekistan, there’s nothing to connect me with this country, but I have no home to go back to, none of the people who mattered to me from my generation is still alive.”
We talked for a long time, and it felt as if we had always known each other. We parted late that night on the narrow, dusty hotel balcony.
from Józef Czapski Inhuman Land
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