May 01, 2007

A Lucky Man

Горька судьба поэтов всех времен;

Тяжеле всех судьба казнит Россию...

The poet’s fate has always been bitter;

And the worst fate of all has befallen Russia...

The Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, a friend of Pushkin, penned these prophetic lines in 1845. The list of martyred Russian poets, already tragically long in the nineteenth century, grew to staggering proportions in the twentieth. To this day, a full list of the Russian talents sacrificed has yet to be compiled.

Against this historical backdrop, the fate of Maximilian Voloshin – poet, artist, philosopher and thinker – seems almost lucky. He survived the First World War and the Russian Civil War, was not repressed in the horrific 1920s, and avoided the tsunami that was the Great Terror by pre-deceasing it.

What is more, during a time when private property was being confiscated with relentless zeal, he craftily held on to everything he owned. And right up until 1929 he continued to write whatever he wanted (as a result, in later years, possessing copies of some of Voloshin’s poems from this era could get someone into serious trouble).

Yet Voloshin’s life was certainly not carefree. He suffered illnesses as a consequence of living through the Civil War (1918-1922), weathered attacks by Party critics, insults by neighbors, excommunication from the ranks of the published, and died a premature death. Thus, he can rightly be numbered among the victims of Russia’s “Great Experiment.” From 1928 to 1961, his works were blacklisted from publication. Only in 1977, on his 100th anniversary, did the Soviets allow him into the annals of Russian literature, albeit with some reservations. And only in recent years has his work been extracted from archives and begun to be published in ever-increasing print runs – and not just his poems and paintings, but his articles, diaries, recollections and letters.

Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin was born on May 16, 1877, in Kiev. His father, a jurist, died when Max was four. Yet his mother, a strong-willed and self-reliant woman, Yelena Ottobaldovna (descended from German immigrants who came to Russia under Catherine II), had actually left her husband two years prior. She and Max moved to Moscow in 1883, where they lived with friends. They stayed in the capital until Max was 16. There he wrote his first poems. In 1893, mother and son moved to Crimea, he attending gymnasium in Theodosia, she living nearby, in the village of Koktebel.

After he graduated from the gymnasium, Voloshin returned to Moscow, to study in the legal faculty at Moscow University, ostensibly following in his father’s footsteps. But his “political” activities got him expelled twice. The second time, in August 1900, he was arrested for participating in a nationwide student strike and sent home. From there, he traveled through Central Asia, working on the railroad and in the steppe, coming to the realization that he wanted to devote his life to literature and art: “As Blok had the swamps of Shakhmatova, and Bely had the walls of Novodevichy Monastery, I had in those days the steppes and deserts of Turkestan, where I led caravans of camels.” Voloshin was not to return to the university, instead resolving to leave for the West in order to “absorb all of European culture” and make of himself a true intelligent.

Paris was his finishing school of sorts, where this university dropout transformed himself into an erudite European, an expert in art and literature, a symbolist poet.

Париж, Царьград и Рим - кариатиды

При входе в храм! Вам - солнцам-городам,

Кольцеобразно легшим по водам,

Завещан мир. В вас семя Атлантиды

Дало росток. Пророки и друиды

Во тьме лесов таили Девы храм,

А на реке, на месте Notre-Dame

Священник пел заутрени Изиды.

Paris, Tsargrad and Rome are pillars

At the temple’s entrance. To you, shining cities,

Lying in a ring about the waters,

The world was given. In you, the seed of the Atlantis

Germinated. Prophets and druids

Hid the Virgin’s temple in the deep woods

And on the river, where Notre Dame stands,

A priest said prayers to Isis.

“Lutetia parisiorum,” 1915

This period, which Voloshin called his “wanderings of the soul,” actually found him traveling frequently back and forth between Paris and Russia, and continued until 1912. During this time he made a literary name for himself (his first poem had been published in 1895, his first collection of poetry was published in 1910, and he was published prolifically as a critic); pursued a passionate affair with the artist Margarita Sabashnikova (which led, in 1906, to a short and tumultuous marriage); built a home in Koktebel; witnessed the bloody 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg (“a mystical prologue to a great national tragedy”); and became the instigator and co-author of one of the greatest literary deceptions Russia has known (creating the poetess-seductress Cherubina de Gabriak – in actuality Yelizaveta Dmitrieva – to fool sexist publishers and intelligentsia, which strangely led to a duel with the poet Nikolai Gumilyov). The period ended in 1913 with his “break with the world of journals,” after he – in a speech and in print – criticized the work of painter Ilya Repin. So vehement was the public and literary backlash that, Voloshin wrote, “As regards my articles, all editorial offices were shut.”

A new twist in the poet’s fate occurred in 1914-1915. The First World War pierced Voloshin’s poetry like a bolt of lightning. The poet whose work one critic had previously called “less a manifestation of the soul, than works of art,” became like a prophet deeply and sadly swept up by events. In contrast to the militaristic drum-pounding of the majority of poets at that time, Voloshin was filled with sorrow for the violence being exacted on all sides.

Russia’s 1917 revolution and ensuing Civil War (1918-1922) evoked yet another transformation in Voloshin’s poetry. A student of French metier, a European and an intellectual, Voloshin turned his soul and thoughts toward Russia. As a result, his creative work was filled with such poignant words about current events that they penetrated into the hearts of all who read them.

Враждующих скорбный гений

Братским вяжет узлом,

И зло в тесноте сражений

Побеждается горшим злом.

Взвивается стяг победный...

Что в том, Россия, тебе?

Пребудь смиренной и бедной -

Верной своей судьбе.

A mournful genius binds

The warring with a brotherly knot,

And in the crush of battle

Evil is vanquished by worse still.

The flag of victory flies…

But what is it to you, Russia?

Be humble and poor –

Be true to your fate.

“Russia,” 1915

The poet staked his life on his love for his homeland. He did not succumb to the temptation to flee abroad, but lived through all the horrors of the Red Terror, convinced that his country was suffering under a divine judgement – one from which it would emerge renewed.

Доконает голод или злоба,

Но судьбы не изберу иной:

Умирать, так умирать с тобой,

И с тобой, как Лазарь, встать из гроба!

I’ll perish here of hatred or of hunger;

And yet no other fate would I pursue.

Come death, then I would die with you unsundered;

Like Lazarus to rise again with you.

“In the Depths of Hell,” 1922

(Translated by Lydia Razran Stone)

Yet, Voloshin did not stand on the sidelines. He actively participated in saving centers of culture in the Crimea and in the enlightenment work of the new regime. He personally intervened to aide countless individual artists and writers who were being persecuted by the Bolsheviks. He delivered lectures in Simferopol and Sevastopol, participated in the organization of artistic studios, and through several years of striving against bureaucrats, turned his home into Russia’s first ever “house of culture,” where intellectuals gathered from all over the country.

After the revolution, his 25-room house in Koktebel, long an intellectual gathering place, became a refuge for intellectuals who had fallen from grace in Soviet Russia. Most had been thrown out of the lives they had become accustomed to, traumatized by the trials which had befallen them, and were hardly able to make ends meet. Yet, at the “poet’s home,” representatives of the artistic intelligentsia enjoyed a free kinship, away from the turmoil of the big cities, well-fed and carefree, able to converse with like-minded souls and, of course, with their cordial and witty host.

Моей мечтой с тех пор напоены

Предгорий героические сны

И Коктебеля каменная грива;

Его полынь хмельна моей тоской,

Мой стих поет в волнах его прилива,

И на скале, замкнувшей зыбь залива,

Судьбой и ветрами изваян профиль мой.

Heroic dreams of the foothills

And Koktebel’s rocky mane

Have long intoxicated my aspiration;

Its wormwood is drunk on my longing,

My poem sings in the rising waves,

And on the cliff, enclosing ripplets of the bay,

My profile has been chiseled by fate and winds.

“Koktebel,” 1917

In 1923, 60 persons were guests at the house in Koktebel. In 1924, 300. In 1925, 400...

Yet, it was far from an idyllic situation. Soviet reality wormed its way into the poet’s home. The local village soviet treated Voloshin as if he were a bourgeois dacha owner, periodically demanding that he evacuate his Koktebel home. Financial inspectors did not believe that the poet was not renting our rooms and demanded payment of taxes for “keeping a hotel” (his mother had charged for rooms prior to the revolution). Again and again, Voloshin had to appeal to Moscow, finally receiving a personal dispensation from an old friend, Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the People’s Committee for Enlightenment.

В недавние трагические годы.

Усобица, и голод, и война,

Крестя мечом и пламенем народы,

Весь древний Ужас подняли со дна.

В те дни мой дом, слепой и запустелый,

Хранил права убежища, как храм,

И растворялся только беглецам,

Скрывавшимся от петли и расстрела.

И красный вождь, и белый офицер —

фанатики непримиримых вер —

Искали здесь, под кровлею поэта,

Убежища, защиты и совета.

Я ж делал все, чтоб братьям помешать

Себя губить, друг друга истреблять,

И сам читал в одном столбце с другими

В кровавых списках собственное имя.

Но в эти дни доносов и тревог

Счастливый жребий дом мой не оставил.

Ни власть не отняла, ни враг не сжег,

Не предал друг, грабитель не ограбил.

In recent tragic years

Feud, hunger, war

Baptized the people by sword and fire

And raised ancient Horrors from the depths.

In those days, my house, blind and desolate,

Preserved the right of sanctuary, like a temple,

And opened only for fugitives,

Hiding from the gallows or firing squads.

Both the Red boss and the White officer –

Fanatics of irreconcilable faiths –

Sought here, under the poet’s roof,

Shelter, protection and counsel.

I did my best to stop brothers

From ruining their lives, from killing each other,

And in the bloody lists alongside others

I read my own name in one of the columns.

But in those days of denunciations and distress,

Good fortune did not leave my house.

It was not taken by authorities or torched by the enemy,

Not betrayed by a friend, nor robbed by a thief.

“Poet’s House,” 1926

In 1923, Voloshin’s mother, Yelena Ottobaldovna, died at the age of 73 after a long illness. Almost immediately, the void of her loss in the artist’s life was filled by Maria Stepanovna Zabolotskaya, a woman of similar character, but for whom Voloshin developed an abiding love and affection. They officially married in 1927, but were together from 1923 until the poet’s death. And, after his death, Maria Stepanovna became an ardent and dogged curator of Voloshin’s legacy.

By 1923, however, it was becoming clear that the ideologization of every aspect of spiritual life was gaining strength, that totalitarianism was taking root. Critics were raining down attacks on Voloshin in journals and Party newspapers – his modernist and Symbolist past was catching up with him. As a result, publication of several collections of his poems was halted (his last collection was published in 1919). In 1925, the 30th anniversary of his literary activity was noted only by a very short item in Izvestia. An exhibition of his paintings, organized by the State Academy of Artistic Sciences in 1927 was, in essence, Voloshin’s final appearance on Soviet Russia’s public stage.

Collectivization (along with the appearance of a concentration camp for exiled kulaks near Koktebel) and the famine of 1931 apparently deprived Voloshin of any final illusions about a future rebirth of “populist” power. Increasingly, the poet was overcome with feelings of futility, with a constant depression that even led him to consider suicide. In July 1932, after a long battle with asthma, his breathing became increasingly difficult. On August 11, the poet died. He was just 55 years old.

Voloshin’s first poems, written while he was studying at the gymnasium, echoed his love of Pushkin, Nekrasov and Heine. In painting, he valued the Itinerant movement above all others, considering Ilya Repin to be the greatest painter who ever was. However, by 1899, the Impressionists began to make their mark on art, while Gerhart Hauptmann and Paul Verlaine were influencing literature. In 1900, the young Voloshin saw in Symbolism a “step forward” from realism. A bit later, Voloshin began to speak out as a fervent adherent of “the new art,” which had been scorned by the Russian public as “decadence.”

Край одиночества,

Земля молчания...

Сбылись пророчества,

Свершились чаянья.

Под синей схимою

Простерла даль

Неотвратимую

Печаль.

Homeland of loneliness,

All’s as it’s meant to be.

Nation of voicelessness,

Fulfilling prophecy,

Blue sky inscrutable,

Land without end;

Sorrow immutable,

Nothing can mend.

Untitled, 1908

(Translated by Lydia Razran Stone)

At first only tremulously dreaming of becoming a poet, Voloshin envisioned himself becoming an art critic, and so he went to Paris to educate himself. In order to experience and grasp the discordancies and audacity of art, he also decided to become a painter. The development of his eye as a visual artist had a significant impact on his poetry: nearly every critic has noted the vivid fluency of his poems.

Up through 1916, the poet placed special significance on form in poetry, crafting and perfecting it. Thus, Voloshin’s poetry from that era has a bookish frigidity – it is poetry of the head, rather than the heart. This was reinforced by Voloshin’s predilection for poetry from antiquity and the Bible, and especially by his associations with the occult. Since Voloshin’s life at this time was spent mainly between Paris and Koktebel, it is worth nothing that his constant references to myth in his poetry from this period are largely explained by the influence which the Eastern Crimea had on him, entailing ancient recollections not only of distant Theodosia and Kerch, but also the landscapes of this deserted, sun-scorched land.

Тот, кто раз сошел с вершины,

С ледяных престолов гор,

Тот из облачной долины

Не вернется на простор.

Мы друг друга не забудем.

И, целуя дольний прах,

Отнесу я сказку людям

О царевне Таиах.

He who descended from the peak,

From icy mountain thrones,

He of the valley of the clouds

Will not return to space.

We’ll never forget one another.

And kissing the valley dust,

I’ll bring to the people a fairy tale

Of Princess Tiye.

“Tiye,” 1905
(Tiye was the wife of the Egyptian King Amenhotep III)

The inauguration of “Cimmeria” in poetry (which is what the poet called his home region, derived from the Ancient Greek word for Crimea) was yet another of Voloshin’s contributions to Russian culture. One of the recognized masters of the sonnet, Voloshin also became a pioneer of Russian free verse and “scientific poetry” (see his Putyami Kaina); he gifted an entire suite of superb poems to his beloved Paris, and elaborated the infrequently seen genre of poetic portraiture (Oblik cycle).

Voloshin accepted the revolution with open eyes, without illusions: as if it were a great inevitability, punishment for the sins of a decayed monarchy. “I did not fear war or revolution,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and neither disturbed me; I expected both for a long time – and even worse.” He also apparently predicted early on the dark fate which awaited the Russian intelligentsia, that it would “come undone” in the cyclone of revolution. In contrast, he predicted, the West “would survive, without destroying its culture.”

“I constantly sense,” Voloshin wrote, “the intellectual lie which covers the true reality of Revolution.” In 1919, he foretold Stalinism, predicting Russia would again have a unitary, monarchical government “independent of whatever we might desire.”

As a result of what he witnessed, beginning in 1917 Voloshin’s poetic palette changed. It was already “another” Voloshin who wrote poems about revolution and civil war. It was a man who, first, was painfully affected by what had befallen his country, and, second, whose thoughts were both deeper and wider-ranging. The poems resonated with people’s spiritual need, strumming the most sensitive strings of both political camps. During the most horrific years of the Civil War, Voloshin found a point of view that was understandable both for the Whites and the Reds, rising spiritually “above the fray.” There are countless stories of how Voloshin, arriving at this or that bureaucratic office (once, interceding in a naval standoff) would begin by declaiming poetry, win over his interlocutors, then leave with the all-important official paper and stamp.

To some extent, this position above the fray stemmed not just from the poet’s personality, but too from his religiosity – the need to evaluate events through the perspective of eternity. Having tried out the religions of both East and West as a youth, in his later years Voloshin returned to Orthodoxy. In the last period of his life, he repeatedly addressed the fate of religious devotees in his poems: “Protopop Avvakum,” “Saint Serafim,” “The Legend of Monk Epiphany,” and “Vladimir Mother of God.”

And Voloshin’s poetic appeals for reconciliation resonated. In Russia, after all, a poet has always been more than a poet. The Whites reprinted his poems in leaflets; the Red declaimed them from stages. In fact, Voloshin became the first samizdat poet in Soviet Russia: beginning in 1918, his poems about the revolution were circulated in typescript copies by the thousands.

Voloshin was not only a poet and translator, an artist, a literary, artistic and theatrical critic; he was also a very engaging personality. A most interesting conversationalist, he had a light humor. A sensitive listener, he was patient and understanding, and therefore his friends numbered in the tens and hundreds. Among these were people of the most opposing views. Only Voloshin, striving always to find the good and creative in all people, was able to tie these people to himself. At the same time, the poet always retained his independent opinion of everyone: between him and his friends, despite any closeness, there was a certain line that was not crossed. “Everyone’s friend, but a stranger to all,” is how he described himself.

The overwhelming majority of his acquaintances remembered him with feelings of deep respect, awe and love. Few personages from the Russian Silver Age have had so many memoirs written about them. Authors include: Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, Ivan Bunin, Vikenty Veresayev, Sergey Makovsky, Yuri Olesha, Georgy Paustovsky, Alexey Tolstoy, Anastasia and Marina Tsvetaeva, Ilya Ehrenburg and many, many others – more than 100 appreciative memoirs.

Fate was kind to Voloshin, insofar that his archive was preserved with rare completeness, surviving even the 1930s – so fatal for Russian culture – and the occupation of the Crimea by the Germans in the Great Patriotic War. To this we are indebted mainly to Voloshin’s widow, Maria Stepanovna (who died in 1976). Nonetheless, given the history of the past century, this is something approaching a miracle.

For many years the treasure trove of Voloshin’s literary legacy was hidden under a bushel. It was not until the end of the 1980s that a stream of material began to flow out to readers via journals and books. Thus, only today, 75 years after his death, is the world truly discovering the many facets of the artist and poet known as Maximilian Voloshin. RL

ADDITIONAL READING

Barbara Walker’s Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle examines how Voloshin was the glue in one of the few Russian literary circles of the Silver Age that did not disintegrate under pressure from without or discord within. It is an excellent biography of Voloshin and the Silver Age. (Kansas, $39.95)

May 01, 2007

A Lucky Man

See Also

Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle

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