Someone little is going to live. Decoding “Poem without a Hero” as a prophecy

Fourth edition

Deus conservat omnia
(Motto on the coat of arms of the Fountain House)

Instead of a preface

There are no others, and those are far away...
Pushkin

The first time she came to me at the Fountain House was on the night of December 27, 1940, sending one small passage as a messenger in the fall (“You came to Russia from nowhere...”).
I didn't call her. I didn’t even expect her on that cold and dark day of my last Leningrad winter.
Its appearance was preceded by several small and insignificant facts, which I hesitate to call events.
That night I wrote two parts of the first part (“1913”) and “Dedication.” At the beginning of January, almost unexpectedly for myself, I wrote “Tails,” and in Tashkent (in two steps) I wrote “Epilogue,” which became the third part of the poem, and made several significant insertions into both first parts.
I dedicate this poem to the memory of its first listeners - my friends and fellow citizens who died in Leningrad during the siege.
I hear their voices and remember them when I read the poem aloud, and this secret chorus has become for me forever the justification of this thing.

I often hear rumors about false and absurd interpretations of “A Poem without a Hero.” And someone even advises me to make the poem more understandable.
I'll refrain from doing this.
The poem does not contain any third, seventh or twenty-ninth meanings.
I will neither change nor explain it.
“He’s still pissing, he’s pissing.”

November 1944
Leningrad

Dedication

December 27, 1940
…………………………………
...and since I didn’t have enough paper,
I am writing on your draft.
And now someone else's word appears
And, like a snowflake on your hand then,
It melts trustingly and without reproach.
And the dark eyelashes of Antinous1
Suddenly they rose - and there was green smoke,
And the breeze blew to the family...
Isn't it the sea?
No, it's just pine needles
Mogilnaya, and in the scum of foam
Getting closer, closer...
Marche funebre…
Chopin...
Night. Fountain House

Second initiation

Are you, Confusion-Psyche2,
Fanning in black and white,
Leaning over me
Do you want to tell me a secret?
That Summer has already passed
And you breathe differently in spring.
Don't dictate to me, I hear it myself:
Warm rain hit the roof,
I hear whispers in the ivy.
Someone little is going to live,
Turned green, fluffed up, tried
Tomorrow I'll show off my new raincoat.
I'm sleeping -
she's the only one above me, -
The one that people call spring,
I call loneliness.
I'm sleeping -
I dream of our youth,
That cup that passed by;
I'll bring it to you in reality
If you want, I'll give it to you as a souvenir,
Like pure flame in clay
Or a snowdrop in a grave ditch.

Third and last

(Le jour des rois)*3
Once on Epiphany evening...
Zhukovsky

I'm completely frozen with fear,
I'd rather click on Bach's Chaconne,
And a man will come in behind her...
He will not become my dear husband,
But he and I deserve it,
That the Twentieth Century will be embarrassed.
I took it by accident
For the one who is given the secret,
With whom the bitterest is destined,
He's coming to see me at the Fontanny Palace
Late on a foggy night
New Year's Eve drinking wine.
And he will remember the Epiphany evening,
Maple in the window, wedding candles
And the poem mortal flight...
But not the first lilac branch,
Not a ring, not the sweetness of prayers -
He will bring me destruction.

*Kings Day (French)

Introduction

From the year forty,
It’s like I’m looking at everything from a tower.
It's like I'm saying goodbye again
With what I said goodbye to long ago,
It's like she crossed herself
And I go under the dark arches.

1941 – August
(Besieged Leningrad)

Part one
Nine hundred and thirteen
Petersburg story

Di rider final
Pria dell aurora.
Don Giovanni

Chapter first

The New Year holiday lasts magnificently,
The stems of New Year's roses are wet.
"Rosary" 1914

We can’t do magic with Tatyana...
Onegin

I lit the treasured candles,
To make this evening glow,
And with you, as if you didn’t come to me,
I'm celebrating my forty-first year.
But…
The Lord's strength is with us!
The flame drowned in the crystal,
“And the wine burns like poison.”
These are bursts of tough talk
When all the deliriums are resurrected,
And the clock still doesn't chime...
There is no measure for my anxiety,
I myself am like a shadow on the threshold,
I guard the last comfort.
And I hear a long bell,
And I feel the wet cold
I’m petrified, frozen, burning...
And, as if remembering something,
I'll turn around halfway
I say in a quiet voice:
“You are mistaken: Venice of the Doges -
It's nearby... But the masks are in the hallway
And cloaks, and wands, and crowns
Today you will have to leave,
I decided to glorify you today,
New Year's tomboys!
This one is Faust, that one is Don Juan,
Dapertutto4, Iokanaan5,
The most modest - northern Glan,
Or the murderer Dorian,
And everyone whispers to their dianas
A lesson well learned.
And for them the walls opened up,
The lights flashed, the sirens howled,
And the ceiling swelled like a dome.
It's not that I'm afraid of publicity...
What's Hamlet's garter to me?
What is the whirlwind of Salome's dance to me,
What do I care about the tread of the Iron Mask?
I'm even tougher than those...
And whose turn is it to be scared?
Recoil, recoil, surrender
And atone for an old sin?
Everything is clear:
Not to me, so to whom?
Dinner was not prepared here for them,
And they are not on the same path with me.
The tail was hidden under the coat tails...
How lame and graceful he is...
However
I hope the Lord of Darkness
You didn't dare enter here?
Is it a mask, a skull, or a face -
Expression of sorrowful pain,
What only Goya dared to convey.
Common darling and mocker -
Before him is the most stinking sinner -
Grace incarnate...

Have fun - have fun
Just how could it happen
That I'm the only one alive?
Tomorrow morning will wake me up,
And no one will judge me
And he will laugh in my face
Window blue.
But I'm scared: I'll go in myself,
Without taking off the lace shawl,
I’ll smile at everyone and shut up.
With the one I once was
In a necklace of black agates
To the valley of Jehoshaphat6,
I don't want to meet again...
Are the deadlines close?..
I forgot your lessons
Evil talkers and false prophets! —
But you haven't forgotten me.
How the future matures in the past,
So in the future the past smolders -
A terrible festival of dead leaves.
B The sound of footsteps, those that are not there,
E Along the shining parquet
L And cigars blue smoke.
Y And reflected in all the mirrors
The Man Who Didn't Show Up
And he couldn’t get into that room.
He is neither better nor worse than others,
And But the Lethean cold does not blow,
L And there is warmth in his hand.
Guest from the future! - Really?
He will really come to me
Turning left off the bridge?

Since childhood I have been afraid of mummers,
For some reason it always seemed to me
That some extra shadow
Among them are “without a face or a name”
Got stuck...
Let's open the meeting
On New Year's Day!
Ty midnight Hoffmannian
I won’t spread it around the world
And I would ask others...
wait,
It's like you're not on the list
In caliostras, magicians, lysisks7,
The mile is dressed in stripes, -
Painted motley and roughly -
You …
contemporary with the Mamre oak8,
The age-old interlocutor of the moon.
Fake moans will not deceive you,
You write iron laws,
Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solons9
We should learn from you.
This creature is of a strange disposition.
He doesn't wait for gout and fame
They sat him down in a hurry
In the anniversary lush armchairs,
And carries along the blooming heather,
The deserts have their own celebration.
And innocent of anything: not this,
Neither in another nor in a third...
To the poets
Sins didn’t stick at all.
Dance in front of the Ark of the Covenant10
Or perish!..
What is there! About it
Poems told them better.
We only dream of the rooster crow,
Outside the window the Neva is smoking,
The night is bottomless and lasts, lasts -
St. Petersburg devilry...
You can't see a star in the black sky,
Death is somewhere around here, obviously.
But carefree, spicy, shameless
Masquerade chatter...
Shout:
"Hero to the forefront!"
Don't worry: the big one will be replaced
Definitely coming out now
And he will sing about sacred revenge...
Why are you all running away together?
As if everyone had found a bride,
Leaving eye to eye
Me in the dark with a black frame,
From which the same one looks
Became the bitterest drama
And an hour not yet mourned?

It all doesn’t come at once.
Like one musical phrase,
I hear a whisper: “Goodbye! It's time!
I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow
You are Dove, sunshine, sister!
There are two merged shadows on the site...
After the flat step stairs,
Shout: “Don’t!” and in the distance
Clear voice:
"I'm ready to die."

The torches go out and the ceiling drops. The white (mirror) room 11 is again made into the author's room. Words from the dark:

There is no death - everyone knows that
Repeating this has become boring,
Let them tell me what they have.
Who's knocking?
After all, everyone was allowed in.
Is this a looking-glass guest? Or
What suddenly flashed through the window...
Are the jokes of the young month,
Or is there really someone there again?
Is it between the stove and the closet?
The forehead is pale and the eyes are open...
This means that gravestones are fragile,
This means that granite is softer than wax...
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! - From such nonsense
I'll turn gray soon
Or I'll become completely different.
Why are you beckoning me with your hand?!
One minute of peace
I will give you peace after death.

THROUGH THE SITE
Sideshow

Somewhere around this place (“...but the masquerade chatter is careless, spicy, shameless...”)
The following lines also circulated, but I did not include them in the main text:

“I assure you, this is not new...
You are a child, Signor Casanova..."
“To Isakyevsky exactly at six...”
“Somehow we’ll wander through the darkness,
From here we go back to “Dog”...12
“Where are you going from here?” —
“God knows!”
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote
And alas, Sodom's Lots 13
Deadly taste the juice,
Aphrodites emerged from the foam,
They moved in Elena's glass,
And the time of madness is approaching.
And again from the fountain grotto14
Where love groans in slumber,
Through the ghostly gate
And someone furry and red
Dragged the goat-footed one.
The most elegant and the tallest of all,
Although she does not see and does not hear -
Doesn't curse, doesn't beg, doesn't breathe,
Head of Madame de Lamballe,
And the humble one and the beauty,
You, who tap dance like a goat,
Again you hum languidly and meekly:
“Que me veut mon Prince Carnaval?”

And at the same time, in the depths of the hall, stage, hell or at the top of Goethe's Brocken
She appears on top of her (or maybe her shadow):

Boots trample like hooves,
Earrings ring like a bell,
There are evil horns in the pale curls,
Drunk with the cursed dance, -
As if from a black-figure vase
Came running to the azure wave
So ostentatiously naked.
And behind her in an overcoat and helmet
You, who entered here without a mask,
You, Ivanushka of the ancient fairy tale,
What's tormenting you today?
How much bitterness is in every word,
How much darkness is there in your love,
And why is this trickle of blood
Is the petal on its cheek?

Chapter two

You are more voluptuous, you are more physical
Alive, brilliant shadow!
Baratynsky

Heroine's Bedroom. A wax candle is burning. Above the bed are three portraits of the lady of the house in roles. On the right she is Goat-footed, in the middle - Confusion, on the left - Portrait in the shadows. Some think it’s Columbine, others think it’s Donna Anna (from “The Commander’s Steps”). Outside the attic window, little black boys are playing snowballs. Blizzard. New Year's midnight. Confusion comes to life, leaves the portrait, and she imagines a voice that reads:

The satin coat has opened!
Don't be angry with me, Dove,
What will I touch this cup:
I’ll punish myself, not you.
Reckoning is still coming -
You see there, behind the grainy blizzard,
Meyerhold's arapchat
Are they starting a fuss again?
And around the old city of St. Petersburg,
That he wiped people's sides
(As the people said then), -
In manes, in harnesses, in flour carts,
In painted tea roses
And under a cloud of raven wings.
But he flies with an imaginary smile,
Above the Marina stage prima,
You are our incomprehensible swan,
And the late snob jokes.
The sound of the orchestra, as if from another world,
(The shadow of something flashed somewhere),
Isn't it a premonition of dawn
Did a chill run through the rows?
And again that familiar voice,
Like the echo of mountain thunder, -
Our glory and triumph!
It fills hearts with trembling
And rushes off-road
Over the country that nurtured him.
Branches in blue-white snow...
Corridor of Peter's Colleges15
Endless, booming and straight
(Anything can happen,
But he will stubbornly dream
To those who are passing there today).
The ending is ridiculously close;
From behind the screen, Petrushkin16 mask,
The coachman dances around the fires,
There is a black and yellow banner above the palace...
Everyone who is needed is already in place;
The fifth act from the Summer Garden
Smells... The Phantom of Tsushima Hell
Right here. - A drunken sailor sings...

How the runners jingle ceremoniously
And the goat's cavity drags...
Past, shadows! - He's there alone.
His solid profile is on the wall.
Gabriel or Mephistopheles
Yours, beauty, paladin?
The demon himself with Tamara's smile,
But such charms lurk
In this terrible, smoky face:
Flesh that has almost become spirit
And an antique curl above the ear -
Everything is mysterious about the alien.
That's him in a crowded room
Sent that black rose in a glass,
Or was it all a dream?
With a dead heart and a dead look
Did he meet with the Commander,
Sneaking into that damned house?
And it is told in words,
How were you in the new space,
How timeless you were -
And in what polar crystals
And in what amber radiances
There, at the mouth of the Lethe-Neva.
You ran here from the portrait,
And the empty frame until the light
It will be waiting for you on the wall.
So you can dance without a partner!
I'm the role of the fatal choir
I agree to accept it.

There are scarlet spots on your cheeks;
You should go back to the canvas;
Because today is such a night,
When you need to pay the bill...
And the intoxicating drowsiness
It’s more difficult for me to overcome than death.

You came to Russia from nowhere,
Oh my blond miracle,
Columbine of the tenth years!
Why do you look so vaguely and vigilantly,
St. Petersburg doll, actor,
You are one of my doubles.
In addition to other titles, this one is necessary
Attribute. O friend of poets,
I am the heir of your glory.
Here to the music of the wondrous master,
Leningrad wild wind
And in the shade of the reserved cedar
I see the dance of the court bones.

Wedding candles are floating,
Under the veil there are “kissing shoulders”,
The temple thunders: “Dove, come!”17
Mountains of Parma violets in April -
And a meeting in the Maltese Chapel18,
Like a curse in your chest.
Vision of the Golden Age
Or a black crime
In the menacing chaos of ancient days?
Answer me now:
really
You once really lived
And trampled the ends of the squares
With your dazzling leg?..

The house of the colorful comedy truck,
Peeling cupids
They guard the altar of Venus.
I didn’t put the songbirds in a cage,
You cleaned the bedroom like a gazebo,
The village girl next door
The cheerful squire does not recognize19.
In the walls of the staircase there are hidden twisted ones,
And on the azure walls there are saints -
This good is half stolen...
All in flowers, like Botticelli's "Spring"
You received friends in bed,
And the dragoon Pierrot languished, -
All those who are in love with you are more superstitious
The one with the smile of the evening sacrifice,
You are like steel to him - a magnet,
Turning pale, he looks through his tears,
How they handed you roses
And how famous his enemy is.
I haven't seen your husband
I, the cold clinging to the glass...
Here it is, the strike of the fortress clock...
Don't be afraid - I don't sword at home, -
Come out to meet me boldly -
Your horoscope has long been ready...

Chapter Three

And under the arch on Galernaya...
A. Akhmatova

In St. Petersburg we will meet again,
It’s as if we buried the sun in it.
O. Mandelstam

That was the last year...
M. Lozinsky

Petersburg 1913. Lyrical digression: the last memory of Tsarskoe Selo.
The wind, either remembering or prophesying, mutters:

Christmastide was warmed by fires,
And the carriages fell off the bridges,
And the whole mourning city floated
For an unknown purpose,
Along the Neva or against the current, -
Just away from your graves.
On Galernaya there was a black arch,
In Letny the weather vane sang subtly,
And the silver moon is bright
It was freezing over the Silver Age.
Because on all roads,
Because to all thresholds
The shadow was slowly approaching
The wind tore posters from the wall,
Smoke danced squatting on the roof
And the cemetery smelled of lilacs.
And sworn by Queen Avdotya,
Dostoevsky and the demoniac,
The city was fading into fog.
And looked out of the darkness again
An old St. Petersburg resident and a reveler,
How the drum beat before the execution...
And always in the frosty darkness,
Pre-war, prodigal and menacing,
There lived some kind of future hum,
But then he was heard more faintly,
He hardly bothered souls
And he drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.
Like in the mirror of a terrible night
And he's furious and doesn't want to
Recognize yourself as a person
And along the legendary embankment
It was not the calendar day that was approaching -
The Real Twentieth Century.

Now let's go home quickly
Cameron Gallery
Into the icy mysterious garden,
Where the waterfalls are silent,
Where all nine will be happy to see me,
How happy you were once.
There behind the island, there behind the garden
Won't we meet eyes
Our former clear eyes,
Won't you tell me again
Death-conquering word
And the answer to my life?

Chapter four and final

Love passed and became clear
And the traits of death are close.
Sun. TO.

Corner of the Champ de Mars. House built at the beginning of the 19th century by the Adamini brothers. It would take a direct hit from an aerial bomb in 1942. A high fire is burning. You can hear the bell ringing from the Savior on Spilled Blood. On the field behind the snowstorm is the ghost of a palace ball. In the interval between these sounds, Silence itself speaks:

Who froze at the darkened windows,
On whose heart is there a “fawn curl”,
Who has darkness before their eyes? —
“Help, it's not too late!
You've never been so frosty
And the night was not alien!”
A wind full of Baltic salt
Blizzard Ball on the Champ de Mars
And the invisible sound of hooves...
And there is immeasurable anxiety,
Who has a little time left to live,
Who only asks God for death
And who will be forgotten forever.
After midnight he wanders under the windows,
Points at him mercilessly
Dim beam of a corner lamp, -
And he waited. Slim mask
On the way back from Damascus
I returned home... not alone!
Someone with her is “nameless”...
Unambiguous separation
Through the slanting flames of the fire
He saw buildings collapse.
And in response, a snatch of sobbing:
“You are Dove, sunshine, sister! —
I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow,
And now…
It's time to say goodbye!"
The place smells of perfume,
And a dragoon cornet with poetry
And with senseless death in my chest
He will call if he has the courage...
He spends his last moment
To praise you.
Look:
Not in the damned Masurian swamps,
Not on the blue Carpathian heights...
He's on your doorstep!
Across.
May God forgive you!

(How many deaths came to the poet,
Stupid boy: he chose this one, -
He did not tolerate the first insults,
He didn't know what threshold
Is it worth it and how expensive is it?
A view will open before him...)

It's me - your old conscience
I found the burned story
And on the edge of the windowsill
In the dead man's house
I put it -
and tiptoed away...

Afterword

Everything is in order: there is a poem
And, as is typical for her, she remains silent.
Well, what if the topic breaks out,
He will knock on the window with his fist, -
And will respond from afar
To the call of this terrible sound -
Bubbling, moaning and screaming
And the vision of crossed arms?..

Part two
Intermezzo
(Tails)

...I drink the water of Lethe,
The doctor has forbidden me to be sad.
Pushkin

In my beginning is my end.
T.S. Eliot

The location is Fountain House. The time is early January 1941. There is a ghost of a snow-covered maple tree in the window. The hellish harlequinade of the thirteenth year has just flown by, awakening the silence of the great silent era and leaving behind that chaos characteristic of every festive or funeral procession - the smoke of torches, flowers on the floor, sacred souvenirs lost forever... The wind howls in the chimney, and in this you can guess very deeply and very skillfully hidden fragments of the Requiem. It’s better not to think about what you see in the mirrors.

...jasmine bush,
Where Dante walked and the air was empty.
N.K.

1
My editor wasn't happy
He swore to me that he was busy and sick,
Secreted my phone
And he grumbled: “There are three topics at once!
Having finished reading the last sentence,
You won't understand who is in love with whom,

2
Who met, when and why?
Who died and who remained alive,
And who is the author, and who is the hero, -
And why do we need these today?
Discussions about the poet
And some kind of ghosts swarm?”

3
I answered: “There are three of them -
The chief was dressed up with a mile,
And the other one is dressed like a demon -
So that they last for centuries,
Their poems did their best for them,
The third lived only twenty years,

4
And I feel sorry for him." And again
Word after word fell out,
The music box was thundering
And over that bottle filled
With a crooked and angry tongue
An unknown poison was burning.

5
And in the dream everything seemed to be
I'm writing a libretto for someone,
And there is no end to music.
But a dream is also a little thing,
Soft embalmer20, Blue Bird,
Elsinore terraces parapet.

6
And I myself was not happy,
This hellish harlequinade
Hearing a howl from afar.
I kept hoping that it would pass
White hall, like flakes of smoke,
The pine needles will rush through the darkness.

7
Do not fight off the motley junk,
This is the old weirdo Cagliostro -
The most graceful Satan himself,
Who doesn’t cry with me over the dead,
Who doesn't know what conscience means?
And why does it exist?

8
Roman carnival midnight
And it doesn't smell. Chant of the Cherubim
The closed churches are shaking.
Nobody knocks on my door,
Only a mirror dreams of a mirror,
Silence guards silence.

9
And with me is my “Seventh”,
Half dead and dumb
Her mouth is closed and open,
Like the mouth of a tragic mask,
But it's covered in black paint
And filled with dry earth.

10
The enemy tortured: “Well, tell me,
But not a word, not a groan, not a cry
The enemy won't hear it.
And decades pass
Wars, deaths, births. I sing
In this horror I can’t.

21
Celebrations of civil death
I'm fed up - believe me,
I see them every night in my dreams.
To be excommunicated from the bed
And the tables are nothing! but no good
Then endure what I got.

Will I melt into the official anthem?
Don't give it, don't give it, don't give it to me
A tiara from a dead forehead.
Soon I will need a lyre,
But Sophocles is no longer Shakespeare.
Standing on the threshold is Fate.

And there was that theme for me,
Like a crushed chrysanthemum
On the floor when the coffin is carried.
Between “remember” and “remember,” friends,
Distance as from Luga
To the land of satin bout22.

The demon got me into rummaging through my hair...
Well, how could it happen?
That everything is my fault?
I am the quietest, I am the simple one,
“Plantain”, “White Flock”,..
Justify... but how, friends?

Just know: they will accuse you of plagiarism...
Am I more to blame than others?
However, it doesn't matter to me.
I accept failure
And I don’t hide my embarrassment...
The box has a double bottom.

But I confess that I used it
Cute ink...
I write in a mirror letter,
And there is no other road for me -
Miraculously I came across this
And I’m in no hurry to part with her.

So that the messenger of an ancient century
From El Greco's cherished dream
Explained to me completely without words,
And with one summer smile,
How I was more forbidden to him
All seven deadly sins.

And then from the coming age
A stranger
Let your eyes look boldly,
To make him a flying shadow
Gave an armful of wet lilacs
At the hour when this blowjob is a thunderstorm.

And the hundred-year-old enchantress
Suddenly woke up and had fun
I wanted it. I have nothing to do with it.
The lace man drops his handkerchief,
He squints languidly because of the construction sites
And Bryullov’s shoulder beckons.

I drank it in every drop
And, with demonic black thirst
Obsessed, didn't know how
I have to deal with the demoniac:
I threatened her with the Star Chamber
And drove her to her family’s attic23 -

In the darkness, under the Manfreds they ate,
And to the shore, where the dead Shelley24
Looking straight into the sky, I lay there,
And all the larks around the world
They tore apart the abyss of the ether,
And Georg held the torch25.

But she insisted stubbornly:
"I'm not that English lady
And not at all Clara Gazul26,
I have no pedigree at all,
In addition to the sunny fabulous,
And July himself brought me.

And your ambiguous glory,
Lying in a ditch for twenty years,
I won't serve like that yet
You and I will still feast,
And I with my royal kiss
I will reward you at evil midnight."

(The howling in the chimney subsides, the distant sounds of Requiem are heard, some muffled groans.
These are millions of sleeping women who are delirious in their sleep).

Just ask my contemporaries,
Convicts, convicts, captives,
And we’ll tell you about it,
How we lived in memoryless fear,
How children were raised for the chopping block,
For the dungeon and for the prison.

Blue lips clenched,
Maddened Hecubas
And Kassandra from Chukhloma
We will thunder in a silent chorus,
We are crowned with shame:
"We are on the other side of hell."

Part three
Epilogue

To be an empty place...

Yes, deserts of silent squares,
Where people were executed before dawn.
Annensky

I love you, Petra's creation!
Pushkin

To my city

White Night June 24, 1942. The city is in ruins. From Gavan to Smolny you can see everything in full view. In some places, old fires are burning out. And in the Sheremetev Garden linden trees bloom and the nightingale sings. One window on the third floor (in front of which is a crippled maple tree) is broken, leaving a black void behind it. Heavy guns roar in the direction of Kronstadt. But overall it's quiet. The voice of the author, located seven thousand kilometers away, says:

So under the roof of the Fountain House,
Where the evening languor wanders
With a lantern and a bunch of keys, -
I echoed with a distant echo,
Inappropriately embarrassing laughter
The endless sleep of things,
Where, witness to everything in the world,
At sunset and at dawn
An old maple tree looks into the room
And, anticipating our separation,
I want a withered black hand,
As if for help, he reaches out.
But the ground hummed under my feet,
And such a star looked
To my not yet abandoned house
And waited for the conventional sound...
It's somewhere there - near Tobruk,
It's somewhere here - around the corner.
(You're not the first and you won't be the last
Dark listener of light nonsense,
What kind of revenge are you preparing for me?
You won't drink, you'll just sip
This bitterness from the very depths -
This is the news of our separation.
Don't put your hand on my head -
Let time stand still forever
This watch is on you.
Misfortune will not escape us,
And the cuckoo won't crow
In our scorched forests...)

And behind the barbed wire,
In the very heart of the dense taiga -
I don't know what year it is -
Became a handful of camp dust,
Became a fairy tale from a terrible one,
My double is coming for interrogation.
And then he leaves the interrogation.
Two messengers from the Noseless Girl
Destined to protect him.
And I can hear even from here -
Isn't this a miracle? —
Sounds of your voice:

I paid for you
Chistoganom,
I went for exactly ten years
Under the revolver,
Neither left nor right
I didn't look
And I have a bad reputation
rustled

...And did not become my grave,
You, seditious, disgraced, dear,
He turned pale, died, became silent.
Our separation is imaginary:
I am inseparable from you,
My shadow is on your walls,
My reflection in the canals,
The sound of footsteps in the Hermitage halls,
Where my friend wandered with me,
And on the old Volkovo Pole27,
Where can I cry in freedom?
Above the silence of mass graves.
Everything that is said in the first part
About love, betrayal and passion,
Free verse dropped from his wings,
And my City is “wired up”...
The tombstones are heavy
On your sleepless eyes.
I thought you were chasing me
Are you left there to die?
In the shine of spiers, in the reflection of waters.
I didn’t wait for the desired messengers...
Above you are only your beauties,
White Nights round dance.
And the cheerful word - home -
No one knows now
Everyone is looking into someone else's window.
Who is in Tashkent, and who is in New York,
And the air of exile is bitter -
Like poisoned wine.
All of you could admire me,
When in the belly of a flying fish
I escaped from the evil chase
And over a forest full of enemies,
Like someone possessed by a demon
How the night rushed towards Brocken...

And already right under me
Kama became frozen and frozen,
And “Quo vadis?” someone said
But he didn’t let me move his lips,
Like tunnels and bridges
The crazy Ural thundered.
And that road opened up to me,
Along which so much has gone,
Along which they transported their son,
And the funeral path was long
Among the solemn and crystal
The silence of the Siberian Earth.
From becoming dust,
…………………………………
Seized with mortal fear
And knowing the time limit for revenge,
Dry eyes downcast
And wringing hands, Russia
Before me she walked to the east28.

Editor's Notes:

1 Antinous is an ancient handsome man.
2 “Are you, Confusion…” - the heroine of the play of the same name by Yuri Belyaev.
3 Le jour des rois - Epiphany Eve: January 5th.
4 Dapertuto is the pseudonym of Vsevolod Meyerhold.
5 Jokanaan - Saint John the Baptist.
6 The Valley of Jehoshaphat is the supposed site of the Last Judgment.
7 Lysiska is the pseudonym of Empress Messalina in Roman dens.
8 Oak of Mamre - see Book of Genesis.
9 Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solon are legislators.
10 Ark of the Covenant - Bible.
Hall 11 - White mirrored hall in the Fountain House (by Quarenghi) across the platform from the author’s apartment.
12 “Dog” - “Stray Dog”, an artistic cabaret of the tenth years.
13 Lots of Sodom (see Genesis, ch.
14 Fountain Grotto - built in 1757 by Argunov in the garden of the Sheremetev Palace on Fontanka (the so-called Fountain House), destroyed in the early tens (see Lukomsky, p.
15 Corridor of Petrovsky Collegium - corridor of St. Petersburg University.
16 Petrushka's mask - "Petrushka", ballet by Stravinsky.
17 “Dove, come!” - church hymn. They sang when the bride stepped onto the carpet in the temple.
18 Maltese Chapel - built according to Quarenghi’s design (from 1798 to 1800) in the courtyard of the Vorontsov Palace, which housed the Corps of Pages.
19 Skobar is an offensive nickname for Pskov residents.
20 Soft embalmer (English) - “gentle comforter” - see Keats’s sonnet “To the Sleep”.
21 Missing stanzas - imitation of Pushkin. See “About Eugene Onegin”: “I also humbly confess that in Don Juan there are two released stanzas,” wrote Pushkin.
22 Bauta - mask with a hood.
23 Star Chamber (English) - a secret court of justice, which was located in a hall where the starry sky was depicted on the ceiling.
24 See Shelley's famous poem "To the Skylark".
25 George - Lord Byron.
26 Clara Gazul is the pseudonym of Merimee.
27 Volkovo Field is the old name of Volkovo Cemetery.
28 Previously, the poem ended like this:
And behind me, sparkling with mystery
And calling herself “Seventh”,
She rushed to an unheard-of feast,
Pretending to be a music notebook,
Famous Leningradka
She returned to her native air.

Poem without a hero
Triptych
(1940-1962)

Fourth edition
Deus conservat omnia
(Motto on the coat of arms of the Fountain House)

Instead of a preface
There are no others, and those are far away...
Pushkin
The first time she came to me at the Fountain House was on the night of December 27, 1940, sending one small passage as a messenger in the fall (“You came to Russia from nowhere...”).
I didn't call her. I didn’t even expect her on that cold and dark day of my last Leningrad winter.
Its appearance was preceded by several small and insignificant facts, which I hesitate to call events.
That night I wrote two parts of the first part (“1913”) and “Dedication”. At the beginning of January, almost unexpectedly for myself, I wrote “Tails,” and in Tashkent (in two steps) I wrote “Epilogue,” which became the third part of the poem, and made several significant insertions into both first parts.
I dedicate this poem to the memory of its first listeners - my friends and fellow citizens who died in Leningrad during the siege.
I hear their voices and remember them when I read the poem aloud, and this secret chorus has become for me forever the justification of this thing.
April 8, 1943
Tashkent

I often hear rumors about false and absurd interpretations of "A Poem without a Hero." And someone even advises me to make the poem more understandable.
I'll refrain from doing this.
The poem does not contain any third, seventh or twenty-ninth meanings.
I will neither change it nor explain it.
"He's still pissing - he's pissing."
November 1944
Leningrad

Dedication
December 27, 1940
…………………………………
...and since I didn’t have enough paper,
I am writing on your draft.
And now someone else's word appears
And, like a snowflake on your hand then,
It melts trustingly and without reproach.
And the dark eyelashes of Antinous1
Suddenly they rose - and there was green smoke,
And the breeze blew to the family...
Isn't it the sea?
No, it's just pine needles
Mogilnaya, and in the scum of foam
Getting closer, closer...
Marche funebre...
Chopin...
Night. Fountain House

Second initiation
O.S.
Are you, Confusion-Psyche2,
Fanning in black and white,
Leaning over me
Do you want to tell me a secret?
That Summer has already passed
And you breathe differently in spring.
Don't dictate to me, I hear it myself:
Warm rain hit the roof,
I hear whispers in the ivy.
Someone little is going to live,
Turned green, fluffed up, tried
Tomorrow I'll show off my new raincoat.
I'm sleeping -
she's the only one above me, -
The one that people call spring,
I call loneliness.
I'm sleeping -
I dream of our youth,
That cup that passed by;
I'll bring it to you in reality
If you want, I'll give it to you as a souvenir,
Like pure flame in clay
Or a snowdrop in a grave ditch.
May 25, 1945
Fountain House

Third and last
(Le jour des rois)*3
Once on Epiphany evening...
Zhukovsky
I'm completely frozen with fear,
I'd rather click on Bach's Chaconne,
And a man will come in behind her...
He will not become my dear husband,
But he and I deserve it,
That the Twentieth Century will be embarrassed.
I took it by accident
For the one who is given the secret,
With whom the bitterest is destined,
He's coming to see me at the Fontanny Palace
Late on a foggy night
New Year's Eve drinking wine.
And he will remember the Epiphany evening,
Maple in the window, wedding candles
And the poem mortal flight...
But not the first lilac branch,
Not a ring, not the sweetness of prayers -
He will bring me destruction.
January 5, 1956
________________

Kings Day (French)

Introduction
From the year forty,
I look at everything as if from a tower.
It's like I'm saying goodbye again
With what I said goodbye to long ago,
As if she had crossed herself
And I go under the dark arches.
August 25, 1941
Besieged Leningrad

Part one
Nine hundred and thirteen
Petersburg story

Di rider final
Pria dell aurora.
Don Giovanni

Chapter first

The New Year holiday lasts magnificently,
The stems of New Year's roses are wet.
"Rosary" 1914

We can't do magic with Tatyana...
Onegin

I lit the treasured candles,
To make this evening glow,
And with you, as if you didn’t come to me,
I'm celebrating my forty-first year.
But...
The Lord's strength is with us!
The flame drowned in the crystal,
“And the wine burns like poison.”
These are bursts of tough talk
When all the deliriums are resurrected,
And the clock still doesn't chime...
There is no measure for my anxiety,
I myself am like a shadow on the threshold,
I guard the last comfort.
And I hear a long bell,
And I feel the wet cold
I'm petrified, frozen, burning...
And, as if remembering something,
I'll turn around halfway
I say in a quiet voice:
"You're wrong: Venice of the Doges -
It's nearby... But the masks are in the hallway
And cloaks, and wands, and crowns
Today you will have to leave,
I decided to glorify you today,
New Year's tomboys!"
This one is Faust, that one is Don Juan,
Dapertutto4, Iokanaan5,
The most modest - northern Glan,
Or the murderer Dorian,
And everyone whispers to their dianas
A lesson well learned.
And for them the walls opened up,
The lights flashed, the sirens howled,
And the ceiling swelled like a dome.
It's not that I'm afraid of publicity...
What's Hamlet's garter to me?
What is the whirlwind of Salome's dance to me,
What do I care about the tread of the Iron Mask?
I'm even tougher than those...
And whose turn is it to be scared?
Recoil, recoil, surrender
And atone for an old sin?
Everything is clear:
Not to me, so to whom?
Dinner was not prepared here for them,
And they are not on the same path with me.
The tail was hidden under the coat tails...
How lame and graceful he is...
However
I hope the Lord of Darkness
You didn't dare enter here?
Is it a mask, a skull, or a face -
Expression of sorrowful pain,
What only Goya dared to convey.
Common darling and mocker -
Before him is the most stinking sinner -
Grace incarnate...

B The sound of footsteps, those that are not there,
E Along the shining parquet
L And cigars blue smoke.
Y And reflected in all the mirrors
The Man Who Didn't Show Up
And he couldn’t get into that room.
He is neither better nor worse than others,
And But the Lethean cold does not blow,
L And there is warmth in his hand.
Guest from the future! - Really?
He will really come to me
Turning left off the bridge?

Since childhood I have been afraid of mummers,
For some reason it always seemed to me
That some extra shadow
Among them are "without a face or a name"
Got stuck...
Let's open the meeting
On New Year's Day!
Ty midnight Hoffmannian
I won’t spread it around the world
And I would ask others...
wait,
It's like you're not on the list
In caliostras, magicians, lysisks7,
Dressed up in stripes, -
Painted motley and roughly -
You...
contemporary with the Mamre oak8,
The age-old interlocutor of the moon.
Fake moans will not deceive you,
You write iron laws,
Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solons9
We should learn from you.
This creature is of a strange disposition.
He doesn't wait for gout and fame
They sat him down in a hurry
In the anniversary lush armchairs,
And carries along the blooming heather,
The deserts have their own celebration.
And innocent of anything: not this,
Neither in another nor in a third...
To the poets
Sins didn’t stick at all.
Dance in front of the Ark of the Covenant10
Or perish!..
What is there! About it
Poems told them better.
We only dream of the rooster crow,
Outside the window the Neva is smoking,
The night is bottomless and lasts, lasts -
Petersburg devil...
You can't see a star in the black sky,
Death is somewhere around here, obviously.
But carefree, spicy, shameless
Masquerade chatter...
Shout:
"Hero to the forefront!"
Don't worry: the big one will be replaced
Definitely coming out now
And he will sing about sacred revenge...
Why are you all running away together?
As if everyone had found a bride,
Leaving eye to eye
Me in the dark with a black frame,
From which the same one looks
Became the bitterest drama
And an hour not yet mourned?

It all doesn’t come at once.
Like one musical phrase,
I hear a whisper: “Farewell! It’s time!”
I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow
You are Dove, sunshine, sister!
There are two merged shadows on the site...
After the flat step stairs,
Shout: “Don’t!” and in the distance
Clear voice:
"I'm ready to die."

The torches go out and the ceiling drops. The white (mirror) room 11 is again made into the author's room. Words from the dark:

There is no death - everyone knows that
Repeating this has become boring,
Let them tell me what they have.
Who's knocking?
After all, everyone was allowed in.
Is this a looking-glass guest? Or
What suddenly flashed through the window...
Are the jokes of the young month,
Or is there really someone there again?
Is it between the stove and the closet?
The forehead is pale and the eyes are open...
This means that gravestones are fragile,
This means granite is softer than wax...
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! - From such nonsense
I'll turn gray soon
Or I'll become completely different.
Why are you beckoning me with your hand?!
One minute of peace
I will give you peace after death.

THROUGH THE SITE
Sideshow

Somewhere around this place (“...but careless, spicy, shameless masquerade chatter...”) there were also these lines wandering around, but I did not include them in the main text:

"I assure you, this is not new...
You are a child, Signor Casanova..."
"To Isakyevsky exactly at six..."
"Somehow we'll wander through the darkness,
From here we go back to “Dog”...12
"Where are you going from here?" -
"God knows!"
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote
And alas, Sodom's Lots 13
Deadly taste the juice,
Aphrodites emerged from the foam,
They moved in Elena's glass,
And the time of madness is approaching.
And again from the fountain grotto14
Where love groans in slumber,
Through the ghostly gate
And someone furry and red
Dragged the goat-footed one.
The most elegant and the tallest of all,
Although she does not see and does not hear -
Doesn't curse, doesn't beg, doesn't breathe,
Head of Madame de Lamballe,
And the humble one and the beauty,
You, who tap dance like a goat,
Again you hum languidly and meekly:
"Que me veut mon Prince Carnaval?"

And at the same time, in the depths of the hall, stage, hell, or at the top of Goethe’s Brocken, She appears (or maybe her shadow):

Chapter two

You are more voluptuous, you are more physical
Alive, brilliant shadow!
Baratynsky

Heroine's Bedroom. A wax candle is burning. Above the bed are three portraits of the lady of the house in roles. On the right she is Goat-footed, in the middle - Confusion, on the left - Portrait in the shadows. Some think it's Columbine, others think it's Donna Anna (from "The Commander's Steps"). Outside the attic window, little black boys are playing snowballs. Blizzard. New Year's midnight. Confusion comes to life, leaves the portrait, and she imagines a voice that reads:

The satin coat has opened!
Don't be angry with me, Dove,
What will I touch this cup:
I’ll punish myself, not you.
Reckoning is still coming -
You see there, behind the grainy blizzard,
Meyerhold's arapchat
Are they starting a fuss again?
And around the old city of St. Petersburg,
That he wiped people's sides
(As people said then) -
In manes, in harnesses, in flour carts,
In painted tea roses
And under a cloud of raven wings.
But he flies with an imaginary smile,
Above the Marina stage prima,
You are our incomprehensible swan,
And the late snob jokes.
The sound of the orchestra, as if from another world,
(The shadow of something flashed somewhere),
Isn't it a premonition of dawn
Did a chill run through the rows?
And again that familiar voice,
Like the echo of mountain thunder, -
Our glory and triumph!
It fills hearts with trembling
And rushes off-road
Over the country that nurtured him.
Branches in blue-white snow...
Corridor of Peter's Colleges15
Endless, booming and straight
(Anything can happen,
But he will stubbornly dream
To those who are passing there today).
The ending is ridiculously close;
From behind the screen, Petrushkin16 mask,
The coachman dances around the fires,
There is a black and yellow banner above the palace...
Everyone who is needed is already in place;
The fifth act from the Summer Garden
Smells... The Phantom of Tsushima Hell
Right here. - A drunken sailor sings...

How the runners jingle ceremoniously
And the goat's cavity drags...
Past, shadows! - He's there alone.
His solid profile is on the wall.
Gabriel or Mephistopheles
Yours, beauty, paladin?
The demon himself with Tamara's smile,
But such charms lurk
In this terrible, smoky face:
Flesh that has almost become spirit
And an antique curl above the ear -
Everything is mysterious about the alien.
That's him in a crowded room
Sent that black rose in a glass,
Or was it all a dream?
With a dead heart and a dead look
Did he meet with the Commander,
Sneaking into that damned house?
And it is told in words,
How were you in the new space,
How out of time you were, -
And in what polar crystals
And in what amber radiances
There, at the mouth of the Lethe - Neva.
You ran here from the portrait,
And the empty frame until the light
It will be waiting for you on the wall.
So you can dance without a partner!
I'm the role of the fatal choir
I agree to accept it.

Wedding candles are floating,
Under the veil "kissing shoulders"
The temple thunders: “Dove, come!”17
Mountains of Parma violets in April -
And a meeting in the Maltese Chapel18,
Like a curse in your chest.
Vision of the Golden Age
Or a black crime
In the menacing chaos of ancient days?
Answer me now:
really
You once really lived
And trampled the ends of the squares
With your dazzling leg?..

The house of the colorful comedy truck,
Peeling cupids
They guard the altar of Venus.
I didn’t put the songbirds in a cage,
You cleaned the bedroom like a gazebo,
The village girl next door
The cheerful squire does not recognize19.
In the walls of the staircase there are hidden twisted ones,
And on the azure walls there are saints -
This good is half stolen...
All in flowers, like "Spring" by Botticelli,
You received friends in bed,
And the dragoon Pierrot languished, -
All those who are in love with you are more superstitious
The one with the smile of the evening sacrifice,
You are like steel to him - a magnet,
Turning pale, he looks through his tears,
How they handed you roses
And how famous his enemy is.
I haven't seen your husband
I, the cold clinging to the glass...
Here it is, the strike of the fortress clock...
Don't be afraid - I don't sword at home, -
Come out to meet me boldly -
Your horoscope has long been ready...

Chapter Three

And under the arch on Galernaya...
A. Akhmatova

In St. Petersburg we will meet again,
It’s as if we buried the sun in it.
O. Mandelstam

That was the last year...
M. Lozinsky

Petersburg 1913. Lyrical digression: the last memory of Tsarskoe Selo. The wind, either remembering or prophesying, mutters:

Christmastide was warmed by fires,
And the carriages fell off the bridges,
And the whole mourning city floated
For an unknown purpose,
Along the Neva or against the current, -
Just away from your graves.
On Galernaya there was a black arch,
In Letny the weather vane sang subtly,
And the silver moon is bright
It was freezing over the Silver Age.
Because on all roads,
Because to all thresholds
The shadow was slowly approaching
The wind tore posters from the wall,
Smoke danced squatting on the roof
And the cemetery smelled of lilacs.
And sworn by Queen Avdotya,
Dostoevsky and the demoniac,
The city was fading into fog.
And looked out of the darkness again
An old St. Petersburg resident and a reveler,
How the drum beat before the execution...
And always in the frosty darkness,
Pre-war, prodigal and menacing,
There lived some kind of future hum,
But then he was heard more faintly,
He hardly bothered souls
And he drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.
Like in the mirror of a terrible night
And he's furious and doesn't want to
Recognize yourself as a person
And along the legendary embankment
It was not the calendar one that was approaching -
The Real Twentieth Century.

Chapter four and final

Love passed and became clear
And the traits of death are close.
Sun. TO.

Who froze at the darkened windows,
On whose heart is there a "fawn curl"
Who has darkness before their eyes? -
"Help, it's not too late!
You've never been so frosty
And the night was not alien!”
A wind full of Baltic salt
Blizzard Ball on the Champ de Mars
And the invisible sound of hooves...
And there is immeasurable anxiety,
Who has a little time left to live,
Who only asks God for death
And who will be forgotten forever.
After midnight he wanders under the windows,
Points at him mercilessly
Dim beam corner lamp, -
And he waited. Slim mask
On the way back from Damascus
I returned home... not alone!
Someone with her is “nameless”...
Unambiguous separation
Through the slanting flames of the fire
He saw buildings collapse.
And in response, a snatch of sobbing:
"You are Dove, sunshine, sister! -
I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow,
And now...
It's time to say goodbye!"
The place smells of perfume,
And a dragoon cornet with poetry
And with senseless death in my chest
He'll call if he's brave enough...
He spends his last moment
To praise you.
Look:
Not in the damned Masurian swamps,
Not on the blue Carpathian heights...
He's on your doorstep!
Across.
May God forgive you!

It's me - your old conscience
I found the burned story
And on the edge of the windowsill
In the dead man's house
I put it -
and tiptoed away...

Afterword

Part two
Intermezzo
Tails

I drink the water of Lethe,
The doctor has forbidden me to be sad.
Pushkin
In my beginning is my end.
T.S. Eliot

The location is Fountain House. Time - early January 1941. In the window is the ghost of a snow-covered maple. The hellish harlequinade of the thirteenth year has just flown by, awakening the silence of the great silent era and leaving behind that chaos characteristic of every festive or funeral procession - the smoke of torches, flowers on the floor, sacred souvenirs lost forever... The wind howls in the chimney, and in this You can guess very deeply and very skillfully hidden fragments of the Requiem. It’s better not to think about what you see in the mirrors.

Jasmine bush,
Where Dante walked and the air was empty.
N.K.

2
Who met, when and why?
Who died and who remained alive,
And who is the author, and who is the hero, -
And why do we need these today?
Discussions about the poet
And some kind of ghosts swarm?"

3
I answered: “There are three of them -
The chief was dressed up with a mile,
And the other is dressed like a demon, -
So that they last for centuries,
Their poems did their best for them,
The third lived only twenty years,

4
And I feel sorry for him." And again
Word after word fell out,
The music box was thundering
And over that bottle filled
With a crooked and angry tongue
An unknown poison was burning.

5
And in the dream everything seemed to be
I'm writing a libretto for someone,
And there is no end to music.
But a dream is also a little thing,
Soft embalmer20, Blue Bird,
Elsinore terraces parapet.

6
And I myself was not happy,
This hellish harlequinade
Hearing a howl from afar.
I kept hoping that it would pass
White hall, like flakes of smoke,
The pine needles will rush through the darkness.

7
Do not fight off the motley junk,
This is old Cagliostro being weird -
The most graceful Satan himself,
Who doesn’t cry with me over the dead,
Who doesn't know what conscience means?
And why does it exist?

8
Roman carnival midnight
And it doesn't smell. Chant of the Cherubim
The closed churches are shaking.
Nobody knocks on my door,
Only a mirror dreams of a mirror,
Silence guards silence.

9
And with me is my “Seventh”,
Half dead and dumb
Her mouth is closed and open,
Like the mouth of a tragic mask,
But it's covered in black paint
And filled with dry earth.

10
The enemy tortured: “Well, tell me,
But not a word, not a groan, not a cry
The enemy won't hear it.
And decades pass
Wars, deaths, births. I sing
In this horror I can’t.

<11>21
Celebrations of civil death
I'm fed up - believe me,
I see them every night in my dreams.
To be excommunicated from the bed
And the tables are nothing! but no good
Then endure what I got.

<12>
Will I melt into the official anthem?
Don't give it, don't give it, don't give it to me
A tiara from a dead forehead.
Soon I will need a lyre,
But Sophocles is no longer Shakespeare.
Standing on the threshold is Fate.

<13>
And there was that theme for me,
Like a crushed chrysanthemum
On the floor when the coffin is carried.
Between “remember” and “remember,” friends,
Distance as from Luga
To the land of satin bout22.

<14>
The demon got me into rummaging through my hair...
Well, how could it happen?
That everything is my fault?
I am the quietest, I am the simple one,
"Plantain", "White Flock",..
Justify... but how, friends?

<15>
Just know: they will accuse you of plagiarism...
Am I more to blame than others?
However, it doesn't matter to me.
I accept failure
And I don’t hide my embarrassment...
The box has a double bottom.

<16>
But I confess that I used it
Cute ink...
I write in a mirror letter,
And there is no other road for me -
Miraculously I came across this
And I’m in no hurry to part with her.

<17>
So that the messenger of an ancient century
From El Greco's cherished dream
Explained to me completely without words,
And with one summer smile,
How I was more forbidden to him
All seven deadly sins.

<18>
And then from the coming age
A stranger
Let your eyes look boldly,
To make him a flying shadow
Gave an armful of wet lilacs
At the hour when this blowjob is a thunderstorm.

<19>
And the hundred-year-old enchantress
Suddenly woke up and had fun
I wanted it. I have nothing to do with it.
The lace man drops his handkerchief,
He squints languidly because of the construction sites
And Bryullov’s shoulder beckons.

<20>
I drank it in every drop
And, with demonic black thirst
Obsessed, didn't know how
I have to deal with the demoniac:
I threatened her with the Star Chamber
And drove her to the family attic23 -

<21>
In the darkness, under the Manfreds they ate,
And to the shore, where the dead Shelley24
Looking straight into the sky, I lay, -
And all the larks around the world
They tore apart the abyss of the ether,
And Georg held the torch25.

<22>
But she insisted stubbornly:
"I'm not that English lady
And not at all Clara Gazul26,
I have no pedigree at all,
In addition to the sunny fabulous,
And July himself brought me.

<23>
And your ambiguous glory,
Lying in a ditch for twenty years,
I won't serve like that yet
You and I will still feast,
And I with my royal kiss
I will reward you at evil midnight."

(The howling in the chimney subsides, the distant sounds of Requiem are heard, some muffled groans. These are millions of sleeping women raving in their sleep).
<24>
Just ask my contemporaries,
Convicts, convicts, captives,
And we’ll tell you about it,
How we lived in memoryless fear,
How children were raised for the chopping block,
For the dungeon and for the prison.

<25>
Blue lips clenched,
Maddened Hecubas
And Kassandra from Chukhloma
We will thunder in a silent chorus,
We are crowned with shame:
"We are on the other side of hell."

Part three

To be an empty place...

Yes, deserts of silent squares,
Where people were executed before dawn.
Annensky

I love you, Petra's creation!
Pushkin

To my city

I paid for you
Chistoganom,
I went for exactly ten years
Under the revolver,
Neither left nor right
I didn't look
And I have a bad reputation
rustled

And not becoming my grave,
You, seditious, disgraced, dear,
He turned pale, died, became silent.
Our separation is imaginary:
I am inseparable from you,
My shadow is on your walls,
My reflection in the canals,
The sound of footsteps in the Hermitage halls,
Where my friend wandered with me,
And on the old Volkovo Pole27,
Where can I cry in freedom?
Above the silence of mass graves.
Everything that is said in the first part
About love, betrayal and passion,
Free verse dropped from his wings,
And my City is “wired up”...
The tombstones are heavy
On your sleepless eyes.
I thought you were chasing me
Are you left there to die?
In the shine of spiers, in the reflection of waters.
I didn’t wait for the desired messengers...
Above you are only your beauties,
White Nights round dance.
And the cheerful word is home -
No one knows now
Everyone is looking into someone else's window.
Who is in Tashkent, and who is in New York,
And the air of exile is bitter -
Like poisoned wine.
All of you could admire me,
When in the belly of a flying fish
I escaped from the evil chase
And over a forest full of enemies,
Like someone possessed by a demon
How the night rushed towards Brocken...

And already right under me
Kama became frozen and frozen,
And "Quo vadis?" someone said
But he didn’t let me move his lips,
Like tunnels and bridges
The crazy Ural thundered.
And that road opened up to me,
Along which so much has gone,
Along which they transported their son,
And the funeral path was long
Among the solemn and crystal
The silence of the Siberian Earth.
From becoming dust,
…………………………………
Seized with mortal fear
And knowing the time limit for revenge,
Dry eyes downcast
And wringing hands, Russia
Before me she walked to the east28.

Editor's Notes:

1 Antinous is an ancient handsome man. up
2 “Are you, Confusion…” - the heroine of the play of the same name by Yuri Belyaev. up
3 Le jour des rois - Epiphany Eve: January 5th. up
4 Dapertuto is the pseudonym of Vsevolod Meyerhold. up
5 Jokanaan - Saint John the Baptist. up
6 The Valley of Jehoshaphat is the supposed site of the Last Judgment. up
7 Lisiska is the pseudonym of Empress Messalina in Roman dens. up
8 Oak of Mamre - see Book of Genesis. up
9 Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solon are legislators. up
10 Ark of the Covenant - Bible. up
Hall 11 - White mirrored hall in the Fountain House (works by Quarenghi) across the platform from the author’s apartment. up
12 "Dog" - "Stray Dog", an artistic cabaret of the tenth years. up
13 Sodom Lots (see "Genesis", ch. up
14 Fountain Grotto - built in 1757 by Argunov in the garden of the Sheremetev Palace on Fontanka (the so-called Fountain House), destroyed in the early tens (see Lukomsky, p.). up
15 Corridor of Petrovsky Collegium - corridor of St. Petersburg University. up
16 Petrushka's mask - "Petrushka", ballet by Stravinsky. up
17 "Dove, come!" - church hymn. They sang when the bride stepped onto the carpet in the temple. up
18 Maltese Chapel - built according to Quarenghi’s design (from 1798 to 1800) in the courtyard of the Vorontsov Palace, which housed the Corps of Pages. up
19 Skobar is an offensive nickname for Pskov residents. up
20 Soft embalmer (English) - “gentle comforter” - see Keats’s sonnet “To the Sleep”. up
21 Missing stanzas - imitation of Pushkin. See “About Eugene Onegin”: “I also humbly confess that in Don Juan there are two released stanzas,” wrote Pushkin. up
22 Bauta - mask with a hood. up
23 Star Chamber (English) - a secret court of justice, which was located in a hall where the starry sky was depicted on the ceiling. up
24 See Shelley's famous poem "To the Skylark". up
25 George - Lord Byron. up
26 Clara Gazul is the pseudonym of Merimee. up
27 Volkovo Field is the old name of Volkovo Cemetery. up
28 Previously, the poem ended like this:
And behind me, sparkling with mystery
And calling herself “Seventh”,
She rushed to an unheard-of feast,
Pretending to be a music notebook,
Famous Leningradka
She returned to her native air. up

New Year's Eve. Fountain House.
To the author, instead of the one they were waiting for,
shadows come from the thirteenth year
under the guise of mummers. White mirror hall.
Lyrical digression - “Guest from the future.”
Masquerade. Poet. Ghost.

I lit the treasured candles,
To make this evening glow,
And with you, as if you didn’t come to me,
I'm celebrating my forty-first year.
But...
The Lord's strength is with us!
The flame drowned in the crystal,
“And the wine burns like poison.”
These are bursts of tough conversation,
When all the deliriums are resurrected,
And the clock still doesn't chime...
There is no measure for my anxiety,
I myself am like a shadow on the threshold,
I guard the last comfort.
And I hear a long bell,
And I feel the wet cold
I’m petrified, frozen, burning...
And, as if remembering something,
I'll turn around halfway
I say in a quiet voice:
"You're wrong: Venice of the Doges -
It's nearby... But the masks are in the hallway
And cloaks, and wands, and crowns
Today you will have to leave,
I decided to glorify you today,
New Year's tomboys!
This one is Faust, that one is Don Juan,
Dapertutto, Iokanaan,
The most modest - northern Glan,
Or the murderer Dorian,
And everyone whispers to their dianas
A lesson firmly learned.
And for them the walls opened up,
The lights flashed, the sirens howled,
And the ceiling swelled like a dome.
It's not that I'm afraid of publicity...
What's Hamlet's garter to me?
What is the whirlwind of Salome’s dance to me,
What do I care about the tread of the Iron Mask?
I’m even tougher than those...
And whose turn is it to be scared?
Recoil, recoil, surrender
And atone for an old sin?
Everything is clear:
Not to me, so to whom?
Dinner was not prepared here for them,
And they are not on the same path with me.
The tail was hidden under the coat tails...
How lame and graceful he is...
However
I hope the Lord of Darkness
You didn't dare enter here?
Is it a mask, a skull, or a face -
Expression of sorrowful pain,
What only Goya dared to convey.
Common darling and mocker -
Before him is the most stinking sinner -
Grace incarnate...

* * *

Since childhood I have been afraid of mummers,
For some reason it always seemed to me
That some extra shadow
Among them " without a face or name»
Got stuck...
Let's open the meeting
On New Year's Day!
That midnight Hoffmannian
I won’t spread it around the world
And I would ask others...
wait,
It's like you're not on the list
In caliostras, magicians, lysisks,
Dressed up in stripes, -
Painted colorfully and roughly -
You...
contemporary with the Mamre oak,
The age-old interlocutor of the moon.
Fake moans will not deceive you,
You write iron laws,
Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solons
We should learn from you.
This creature is of a strange disposition.
He doesn't wait for gout and fame
They sat him down in a hurry
In the anniversary lush armchairs,
And carries along the blooming heather,
The deserts have their own celebration.
And innocent of anything: not this,
Neither in another nor in a third...
To the poets
Sins didn’t stick at all.
Dance in front of the Ark of the Covenant
Or perish!..
What is there! About it
Poems told them better.
We only dream of the rooster crow,
Outside the window the Neva is smoking,
The night is bottomless and lasts, lasts -
St. Petersburg devilry...
You can't see a star in the black sky,
Death is somewhere around here, obviously.
But carefree, spicy, shameless
Masquerade chatter...
Shout:
"Hero to the forefront!"
Don't worry: the big one will be replaced
Definitely coming out now
And he will sing about sacred revenge...
Why are you all running away together?
As if everyone had found a bride,
Leaving eye to eye
Me in the dark with a black frame,
From which the same one looks
Became the bitterest drama
And an hour not yet mourned?

This all doesn’t come up right away.
Like one musical phrase,
I hear a whisper: “Goodbye! It's time!
I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow
You are Dove, sunshine, sister!
There are two merged shadows on the site...
After - flat step stairs,
Shout: “Don’t!” and in the distance
Clear voice:
"I'm ready to die."

The torches go out and the ceiling drops.
White (mirror) hall
again becomes the author's room. Words from the dark:

THROUGH THE SITE
Sideshow

Somewhere around this place
(“...but carefree, spicy, shameless
masquerade chatter...") the following lines also circulated:
but I didn’t include them in the main text:

“I assure you, this is not new...
You are a child, Signor Casanova..."
“To Isakyevsky exactly at six...”
“Somehow we’ll wander through the darkness,
From here we go to “Dog”...
“Where are you going from here?” -
“God knows!”
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote
And alas, Sodom's Lots
Deadly taste the juice,
Aphrodites emerged from the foam,
They moved in Elena's glass,
And the time of madness is approaching.
And again from the fountain grotto
Where love groans in slumber,
Through the ghostly gate
And someone furry and red
Dragged the goat-footed one.
The most elegant and the tallest of all,
Although she does not see and does not hear -
Doesn't curse, doesn't beg, doesn't breathe,
Head of Madame de Lamballe,
And the humble one and the beauty,
You, who tap dance like a goat,
Again you hum languidly and meekly:
“Que me veut mon Prince Carnaval?”

And at the same time, in the depths of the hall, stage, hell or
She appears at the top of Goethe's Brocken
(or maybe her shadow):

Read the poem in full:

Final edition
Triptych
(1940-1965)

Deus conservat omnia 1.
Motto in the coat of arms of the Fountain House

INSTEAD OF A FOREWORD

There are no others, and those are far away...
Pushkin

I often hear rumors about false and absurd interpretations of “A Poem without a Hero.” And someone even advises me to make the poem more understandable.
I'll refrain from doing this.
The poem does not contain any third, seventh or twenty-ninth meanings.
I will neither change it nor explain it.
“He’s still pissing, he’s pissing.”

November 1944, Leningrad

DEDICATION

December 27, 1940
…
...and since I didn’t have enough paper,
I am writing on your draft.
And now someone else's word appears
And, like a snowflake on your hand then,
It melts trustingly and without reproach.
And the dark eyelashes of Antinous 2
Suddenly they rose - and there was green smoke,
And the breeze blew to the family...
Isn't it the sea?
No, it's just pine needles
Mogilnaya, and in the scum of foam
Getting closer, closer...
Marche funebre 3…
Chopin.

Night, Fountain House

SECOND DEDICATION

Are you, Confusion-Psyche 4,
Fanning in black and white,
Leaning over me
Do you want to tell me a secret?
That Summer has already passed
And you breathe differently in spring.
Don't dictate to me, I hear it myself:
Warm rain hit the roof,
I hear whispers in the ivy.
Someone little is going to live,
Turned green, fluffed up, tried
Tomorrow I'll show off my new raincoat.
I'm sleeping -
she's the only one above me, -
The one that people call spring,
I call loneliness.
I'm sleeping -
I dream of our youth,
That, HIS past cup;
I'll bring it to you in reality
If you want, I'll give it to you as a souvenir,
Like pure flame in clay
Or a snowdrop in a grave ditch.

THIRD AND LAST (Le jour des rois 5)

Once on Epiphany evening...
Zhukovsky

INTRODUCTION

FROM THE YEAR FORTY,
I LOOK AT EVERYTHING AS FROM A TOWER.
IT'S LIKE I'M SAYING GOODBYE AGAIN
TO WHAT I HAVE BEEN GOODBYE FOR A LONG TIME,
AS SOMETHING CROSSED
AND I GO UNDER THE DARK Vaults.

PART ONE
NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN

Petersburg story

Di rider finirai
Pria dell'aurora.

Chapter first

The New Year holiday lasts magnificently,
The stems of New Year's roses are wet.

We can’t do magic with Tatyana...

I lit the treasured candles,
To make this evening glow,
Don Juan (Italian).

And with you, who did not come to me,
I'm celebrating my forty-first year.
But…

The Lord's strength is with us!
The flame drowned in the crystal,
“And the wine burns like poison 7.”

These are bursts of tough talk
When all the deliriums are resurrected,
And the clock still doesn't chime...

There is no measure for my anxiety,
I myself am like a shadow on the threshold,
I guard the last comfort.

And I hear a long bell,
And I feel the wet cold
I’m petrified, frozen, burning...

And as if remembering something,
Turning half a turn,
I say in a quiet voice:

"You're wrong: Venice of the Doges -
It's nearby... But the masks are in the hallway
And cloaks, and wands, and crowns

You will have to leave today.
I decided to glorify you today,
New Year's tomboys!

This one is Faust, that one is Don Juan,
Dapertutto 8, Iokanaanom 9,
The most modest - northern Glan,

Or the murderer Dorian,
And everyone whispers to their dianas
A lesson well learned.

And for them the walls opened up,
The lights flashed, the sirens howled
And like a dome, the ceiling swelled.

It's not that I'm afraid of publicity...
What; Hamlet's garters for me,
What; I want the whirlwind of Salome's dance,
What; to me the tread of the Iron Mask,
I'm even tougher than those...

And whose turn is it to be scared?
Recoil, recoil, surrender
And atone for an old sin?

Everything is clear:
Not to me, so to whom 10?
Dinner was not prepared here for them,
And they are not on the same path with me.

The tail was hidden under the coat tails...
How lame and graceful he is...
However

I hope. Lord of Darkness
You didn't dare enter here?

Is it a mask, a skull, or a face -
Expression of angry pain
What only Goya dared to convey.

Common darling and mocker,
Before him is the most stinking sinner -
Grace incarnate...

Have fun - have fun
Just how could it happen
That I'm the only one alive?

Tomorrow morning will wake me up,
And no one will judge me
And he will laugh in my face
Window blue.

But I'm scared: I'll go in myself,
Without taking off the lace shawl,
I’ll smile at everyone and shut up.

With the one I once was
In a necklace of black agates
To the Valley of Jehoshaphat 11
I don't want to meet again...

Are the deadlines approaching?...
I forgot your lessons
Evil talkers and false prophets! -
But you haven't forgotten me.

How the future matures in the past,
So in the future the past smolders -
A terrible festival of dead leaves.

B The sound of footsteps, those that are not there,
E Along the shining parquet
L And cigars blue smoke.
Y And reflected in all the mirrors
The Man Who Didn't Show Up

And he couldn’t get into that room.
He is no better than others and no worse.

Z But the Lethean cold does not blow,
And there is warmth in his hand.
L Guest from the Future! - Really?
He will really come to me
Turning left off the bridge?

Since childhood I have been afraid of mummers,
For some reason it always seemed to me
That some extra shadow

Among them “without face and name”
Got stuck...
Let's open the meeting
On New Year's Day!

That midnight Hoffmannian
I won’t spread it around the world
And I would ask others...
Wait,

It's like you're not on the list
In caliostras, magicians, lysisks 12,
Dressed up in stripes, -

Painted motley and roughly -
You…
coeval with the Mamre oak 13,
The age-old interlocutor of the moon.

Fake moans will not deceive you,
You write iron laws,
Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solons 14
We should learn from you.

This creature is of a strange disposition.
He doesn't wait for gout and fame
Hastily I sat him down
In the anniversary lush armchairs,
And carries along the blooming heather,
The deserts have their own celebration.

And he’s not guilty of anything: not this,
Neither in another nor in a third...
To the poets
Sins didn’t stick at all.

Dance before the Ark of the Covenant 15
Or perish!...
What is there!
About it
Poems told them better.

We only dream about the rooster crow,
Outside the window the Neva is smoking,
The night is bottomless - and it lasts, it lasts
St. Petersburg devilry...

You can't see a star in the black sky,
Death is somewhere around here, obviously.
But carefree, spicy, shameless
Masquerade chatter...

Shout:
"Hero to the forefront!"
Don't worry: the big one will be replaced
Definitely coming out now
And he will sing about sacred revenge...

Why are you all running away together?
As if everyone had found a bride,
Leaving eye to eye

Me in the dark with a black frame,
From which the same one looks
Became the bitterest drama
And an hour not yet mourned?

It all doesn’t come at once.
Like one musical phrase,
I hear a whisper: “Goodbye! It's time!
I'll leave you alive.
But you will be my widow
You are Dove, sunshine, sister!
There are two merged shadows on the site...
After – flat step stairs,
Shout: “Don’t!” and in the distance
Clear voice:
"I'm ready to die."

The torches go out and the ceiling drops. White (mirror) room 16 is again made into the author's room. Words from the dark:

There is no death - everyone knows that
Repeating this has become boring,
Let them tell me what they have.

Who's knocking?
After all, everyone was allowed in.
Is this a looking-glass guest? Or
What suddenly flashed through the window...

Are the jokes of the young month,
Or is there really someone there again?
Is it between the stove and the closet?

The forehead is pale and the eyes are open...
This means that gravestones are fragile,
This means that granite is softer than wax...

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! - From such nonsense
I'll turn gray soon
Or I'll become completely different.

Why are you beckoning me with your hand?!

One minute of peace
I will give you peace after death.

THROUGH THE SITE

Sideshow

Somewhere around this place (“...but the masquerade chatter is careless, spicy, shameless...”) the following lines also wandered around, but I did not include them in the main text:

“I assure you, this is not new...
You are a child, Signor Casanova..."
“At Isakyevskaya exactly at six...”

“Somehow we’ll wander through the darkness,
From here we go to "Dog"..." 17
“Where are you going from here?” -
“God knows!”

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote
And, alas, Sodom's Lots 18
Deadly taste the juice,

Aphrodites emerged from the foam,
They moved in Elena's glass,
And the time of madness is approaching.

And again from the Fountain Grotto 19,
Where love groans in slumber,
Through the ghostly gate
And someone furry and red
Dragged the goat-footed one.

The most elegant and the tallest of all,
Although she does not see and does not hear -
Doesn't curse, doesn't beg, doesn't breathe,
Head of Madame de Lamballe,

And the humble one and the beauty,
You, who tap dance like a goat,
Again you hum languidly and meekly:
“Que me veut mon Prince Carnaval 20?”

And at the same time, in the depths of the hall, stage, hell, or at the top of Goethe’s Brocken, She appears (or perhaps her shadow):

Boots trample like hooves,
Earrings ring like a bell,
There are evil horns in the pale curls,
Drunk with the cursed dance, -

As if from a black-figure vase
Came running to the azure wave
So ostentatiously naked.

And behind her in an overcoat and a helmet
You, who entered here without a mask,
You, Ivanushka of the ancient fairy tale,
What's tormenting you today?

How much bitterness is in every word,
How much darkness is there in your love,
And why is this trickle of blood
Is the petal on its cheek?

Chapter two

Or do you see him at your knees,
Who left captivity for your white death?

Heroine's Bedroom. A wax candle is burning. Above the bed are three portraits of the lady of the house in roles. On the right she is Goat-footed, in the middle is Confusion, on the left is a portrait in the shadows. Some people think it's Columbine. others - Donna Anna (from "Commander's Steps").
Outside the attic window, little black boys are playing snowballs. Blizzard. New Year's midnight. Confusion comes to life, leaves the portrait, and she imagines a voice that reads:

The satin coat has opened!
Don't be angry with me, Dove,
What will I touch this cup:
I’ll punish myself, not you.

Reckoning is still coming -
You see there, behind the grainy blizzard
Meyerhold's arapchat
Are they starting a fuss again?

And around the old city of St. Petersburg,
That he wiped people's sides
(As people said then) -

In manes, in harnesses, in flour carts,
In painted tea roses
And under a cloud of raven wings.

But he flies with an imaginary smile,
Above the Mariinsky stage prima,
You are our incomprehensible swan,
And the late snob jokes.

The sound of the orchestra is like from another world
(The shadow of something flashed somewhere),
Isn't it a premonition of dawn
Did a chill run through the rows?

Unlike anything on earth,
He rushes like a messenger of God,
Overtaking us again and again.

Branches in blue-white snow...
Corridor of Petrovsky Collegiums 21
Endless, booming and straight

(Anything can happen,
But he will stubbornly dream
To those who are passing there today).

The ending is ridiculously close;
From behind the screens, Petrushkin's mask 22,
The coachman dances around the fires,
There is a black and yellow banner above the palace...

Everyone who is needed is already in place;
The fifth act from the Summer Garden
Smells... The Phantom of Tsushima Hell
Right here. - A drunken sailor sings...

How the runners jingle ceremoniously
And the goat's cavity drags...
Past, shadows! - He's there alone.

His solid profile is on the wall.
Gabriel or Mephistopheles
Yours, beauty, paladin?

The demon himself with Tamara's smile,
But such charms lurk
In this terrible smoky face:

Flesh that has almost become spirit.
And an antique curl above the ear -
Everything is mysterious about the alien.

That's him in a crowded room
Sent that black rose in a glass
Or was it all a dream?

With a dead heart and a dead look
Did he meet with the Commander,
Sneaking into that damned house?

And it is told in words,
How were you in the new space,
How out of time you were, -

And in what polar crystals,
And in what amber radiances
There, at the mouth of the Lethe-Neva.

You ran here from the portrait,
And the empty frame until the light
It will be waiting for you on the wall.

So you can dance without a partner!
I'm the role of the fatal choir
I agree to accept it.

You came to Russia from nowhere,
Oh my blond miracle,
Columbine of the tenth years!

Why do you look so vaguely and vigilantly,
Petersburg doll, actor 23,
You are one of my doubles.

In addition to other titles, this one is necessary
Attribute. O friend of poets,
I am the heir of your glory.

Here to the music of the wondrous master,
Leningrad wild wind
And in the shade of the reserved cedar
I see the dance of the court bones...

Wedding candles are floating,
Under the veil there are “kissing shoulders”,
The temple thunders: “Dove, come!” 24

Mountains of Parma violets in April -
And a date in the Maltese Chapel 25,
Like a curse in your chest.

Vision of the Golden Age
Or a black crime
In the menacing chaos of ancient days?

Answer me now:
really
You once really lived
And trampled the ends of the squares
With your dazzling leg?...

The house of the colorful comedy truck,
Peeling cupids
They guard the altar of Venus.

I didn’t put the songbirds in a cage,
You cleaned the bedroom like a gazebo,
The village girl next door
The cheerful squire does not recognize 26.

In the walls of the staircase there are hidden twisted ones,
And on the azure walls there are saints -
This good is half stolen...

All in flowers, like Botticelli's "Spring"
You received friends in bed,
And the dragoon Pierrot languished, -

All those who are in love with you are more superstitious
The one with the smile of the evening sacrifice,
You are like steel to him - a magnet.

Turning pale, he looks through his tears,
How they handed you roses
And how famous his enemy is.

I haven't seen your husband
I, the cold clinging to the glass...
Here it is, the strike of the fortress clock...

Don't be afraid - home; not men;chu, -
Come out to meet me boldly -
Your horoscope has long been ready...

Chapter Three

And under the arch on Galernaya...

A. Akhmatova

In St. Petersburg we will meet again,
It’s as if we buried the sun in it.

O. Mandelstam

That was the last year...

M. Lozinsky

Petersburg 1913. Lyrical digression: the last memory of Tsarskoe Selo. The wind, either remembering or prophesying, mutters:

Christmastide was warmed by fires,
And the carriages fell off the bridges,
And the whole mourning city floated

For an unknown purpose,
Along the Neva or against the current, -
Just away from your graves.

On Galernaya there was a black arch,
In Letny the weather vane sang subtly.
And the silver moon is bright
It was freezing over the Silver Age.

Because on all roads,
Because to all thresholds
The shadow was slowly approaching

The wind tore posters from the wall,
Smoke danced squatting on the roof
And the cemetery smelled of lilacs.

And sworn by Queen Avdotya,
Dostoevsky and the demoniac,
The city was fading into fog.

And looked out of the darkness again
An old St. Petersburg resident and a reveler,
How the drum beat before the execution...

And always in the frosty stuffiness,
Pre-war, prodigal and menacing,
There was some kind of future hum...

But then he was heard more faintly,
He hardly bothered souls
And he drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.

Like in the mirror of a terrible night
And he's furious and doesn't want to
Recognize yourself as a person

And along the legendary embankment
It was not the calendar one that was approaching -
The Real Twentieth Century.

Now let's go home quickly
Cameron Gallery
Into the icy mysterious garden,
Where the waterfalls are silent,
Where all nine 27 will be glad to see me,
How happy were you once?
That rebelliousness rose above youth,
My unforgettable and gentle friend,
I only had a dream once,
Whose youthful strength shone,
Whose grave is forgotten forever,
It was as if he had never lived at all.
There behind the island, there behind the garden
Won't we meet eyes
Our former clear eyes,
Won't you tell me again
Death-conquering word
And the answer to my life?

Chapter four and final

Love has passed and things have become clear
And the traits of death are close.

Corner of the Champ de Mars. House built at the beginning of the 19th century by the Adamini brothers. It would receive a direct hit from an aerial bomb in 1942. A high fire is burning. The sound of the bell ringing from the Savior on Spilled Blood can be heard. On the Field behind a snowstorm is the ghost of a palace ball. In the interval between these sounds, Silence itself speaks:

Who froze at the darkened windows,
On whose heart is there a “fawn curl”,
Who has darkness before their eyes?

“Help, it's not too late!
You've never been so frosty
And the night was not alien!”

A wind full of Baltic salt
Blizzard Ball on the Champ de Mars
And the invisible sound of hooves...

And there is immeasurable anxiety,
Who has a little time left to live,
Who only asks God for death
And who will be forgotten forever.

After midnight he wanders under the windows,
Points at him mercilessly
Dim beam corner lamp, -

And he waited. Slim mask
On the way back from Damascus
I returned home... not alone!

Someone with her “without a face or name”...
Unambiguous separation
Through the slanting flames of the fire

He saw. Buildings collapsed...
And in response, a snatch of sobbing:
“You are Dove, sunshine, sister! -

I'll leave you alive
But you will be my widow
And now…
It's time to say goodbye!"

The place smells of perfume,
And a dragoon cornet with poetry
And with senseless death in my chest

He will call if he has the courage...
He spends his last moment
To praise you.
Look:

Not in the damned Masurian swamps,
Not on the blue Carpathian heights...
He is on your doorstep!
Across.
May God forgive you!

It's me - your old conscience
I found the burned story
And on the edge of the windowsill
In the dead man's house
I put it -
and tiptoed away...

AFTERWORD

EVERYTHING IS OKAY: THERE IS A POEM
AND, AS CHARACTERISTIC, IS SILENT.
WELL, AND WHEN THE TOPIC BREAKS OUT,
HE WILL KNOCK ON THE WINDOW WITH A FIST, -
AND WILL RESPOND FROM A FAR
TO THE CALL OF THIS SCARY SOUND -
BURLING, MOANING AND SCREAMING
AND THE VISION OF CROSSED HANDS?...

PART TWO
TAILS

...I drink the water of Lethe,
The doctor has forbidden me to be sad.

In my beginning is my end.

...jasmine bush,
Where Dante walked and the air was empty.

The location is Fountain House. Time: January 5, 1941. There is a ghost of a snow-covered maple tree in the window. The hellish harlequinade of the thirteenth year has just flown by, awakening the silence of the great silent era and leaving behind that chaos characteristic of every festive or funeral procession - the smoke of torches, flowers on the floor, sacred souvenirs lost forever... The wind howls in the chimney, and in this you can guess very deeply and very skillfully hidden fragments of the Requiem. It’s better not to think about what you see in the mirrors.

My editor wasn't happy
He swore to me that he was busy and sick,
Secreted my phone
And he grumbled: “There are three topics at once!
Having finished reading the last sentence,
You won't understand who is in love with whom,

Who met, when and why?
Who died and who remained alive,
And who is the author, and who is the hero, -
And why do we need these today?
Discussions about the poet
And some kind of ghosts swarm?”

I answered: “There are three of them -
The chief was dressed up with a mile,
And the Other is dressed like a demon, -
So that they last for centuries,
Their poems did their best for them,
The third lived only twenty years,

And I feel sorry for him." And again
Word after word fell out,
The music box rattled.
And over that bottle filled
With a crooked and angry tongue
An unknown poison was burning.

And in the dream everything seemed to be
I'm writing a libretto for Arthur,
And there is no end to music.
But a dream is also a little thing,
Soft embalmer 29, Blue bird,
Elsinore terraces parapet.

And I myself was not happy,
This hellish harlequinade
Hearing a howl from afar.
I kept hoping that it would pass
White hall, like flakes of smoke,
The pine needles will rush through the darkness.

Don't fight off the motley junk.
This is old Cagliostro being weird -
The most graceful Satan himself,
Who doesn’t cry with me over the dead,
Who doesn't know what conscience means?
And why does it exist?

Roman carnival midnight
And it doesn't smell. Chant of the Cherubim
The closed churches are shaking.
Nobody knocks on my door,
Only a mirror dreams of a mirror,
Silence guards silence.

And with me is my “Seventh” 30,
Half dead and dumb
Her mouth is closed and open,
Like the mouth of a tragic mask,
But it's covered in black paint
And filled with dry earth.

The enemy tortured: “Come on, tell me.”
But not a word, not a groan, not a cry
The enemy won't hear it.
And decades pass
Torture, exile and execution - I sing
In this horror I can’t.

And especially if you dream
What should happen to us:
Death is everywhere - the city is on fire,
And Tashkent in its wedding blossoms...
Coming soon there about the true and eternal
The Asian wind will tell me.

Celebrations of civil death
I'm fed up. Believe me
I see them every night in my dreams.
Separate from the table and bed -
This is still nonsense, but it’s worthless
To endure what I got.

Just ask my contemporaries
Convicts, "stopyatnits", captives,
And we will tell you,
How we lived in memoryless fear,
How children were raised for the chopping block,
For the dungeon and for the prison.

Blue lips clenched,
Maddened Hecubas
And Kassandra from Chukhloma,
We will thunder in a silent chorus,
We, crowned with shame:
"On the other side of hell we..."

I'm not afraid of death or shame,
This is a secret writing, a cryptogram,
This is a prohibited technique.
Everyone knows which edge
Sleepwalking I step
And which house I'm heading to.

But there was that topic for me
Like a crushed chrysanthemum
On the floor when the coffin is carried.
Between “remember” and “remember,” friends,
Distance as from Luga
To the country of satin bouts 32.

The demon got me into rummaging through my hair...
Well, how could it happen?
That everything is my fault?
I am the quietest, I am simple,
“Plantain”, “White Flock”...
Justify... but how, friends?

Just know: they will accuse you of plagiarism...
Am I more to blame than others?
However, it doesn't matter to me.
I accept failure
And I don’t hide my embarrassment...
The box has a triple bottom.

But I confess that I used it
Cute ink...
I write in a mirror letter,
And there is no other road for me -
Miraculously I came across this
And I’m in no hurry to part with her.

So that the messenger of an ancient century
From El Greco's most cherished dreams
Explained to me completely without words,
And with one summer smile,
How I was more forbidden to him
All seven deadly sins.

And then from the coming century
A stranger
Let your eyes look boldly,
To make him a flying shadow
Gave an armful of wet lilacs
At the hour when this blowjob is a thunderstorm.

And the hundred-year-old enchantress 33
Suddenly woke up and had fun
I wanted it. I have nothing to do with it.
The lace man drops his handkerchief,
He squints languidly over the lines
And Bryullov’s shoulder beckons.

I drank every drop of it
And demonic black thirst
Obsessed, didn't know how
I have to deal with the demoniac:
I threatened her with the Star Chamber 34
And she drove to her own attic 35,

In the darkness, under the Manfreds they ate,
And to the shore, where Shelley is dead,
Looking straight into the sky, I lay, -
And all the larks of the whole world 36
Torn the abyss of the ether
And George 37 held the torch.

But she insisted stubbornly:
"I'm not that English lady
And not at all Clara Gazul 38,
I have no pedigree at all,
In addition to sunny and fabulous,
And July himself brought me.

And your ambiguous glory,
Lying in a ditch for twenty years,
I won't serve like that yet
You and I will still feast,
And I with my royal kiss
I will reward you at evil midnight."

PART THREE
EPILOGUE

To be an empty place...
Evdokia Lopukhina

Yes, deserts of silent squares,
Where people were executed before dawn.

Annensky

I love you, Petra's creation!

To my city
White Night June 24, 1942. The city is in ruins. From Gavan to Smolny everything is at a glance. In some places, old fires are burning out. Linden trees are blooming in the Sheremetevsky Garden and the nightingale is singing. One window on the third floor (in front of which is a crippled maple tree) is broken, leaving a black void behind it. Heavy guns roar in the direction of Kronstadt. But overall it's quiet. The voice of the author, located seven thousand kilometers away, says:

So under the roof of the Fountain House,
Where the evening languor wanders
With a lantern and a bunch of keys, -
I echoed with a distant echo,
Inappropriately embarrassing laughter
The endless sleep of things,
Where, witness to everything in the world,
At sunset and at dawn
An old maple tree looks into the room
And, anticipating our separation,
I want a withered black hand,
How he is reaching out for help.
But the ground hummed under my feet
And such a star 39 looked
To my not yet abandoned house
And waited for the conventional sound...
It's somewhere there - near Tobruk,
It's somewhere here - around the corner.
You're not the first and you won't be the last
Dark listener of light nonsense,
What kind of revenge are you preparing for me?
You won't drink, you'll just sip
This bitterness from the very depths -
This is the news of our separation.
Don't put your hand on my head -
Let time stand still forever
This watch is on you.
Misfortune will not escape us
And the cuckoo won't crow
Our scorched forests...

And behind the barbed wire,
In the heart of the dense taiga
I don't know what year it is
Became a handful of camp dust,
Became a fairy tale from a terrible one,
My double is coming for interrogation.
And then he leaves the interrogation,
To two messengers of the Girl Without Nose
Destined to protect him.
And I can hear even from here -
Isn't this a miracle? –
Sounds of your voice:
I paid for you
Chistoganom,
I went for exactly ten years
Under the revolver,
Neither left nor right
I didn't look
And I have a bad reputation
She rustled.

And not becoming my grave,
You, seditious, disgraced, dear,
He turned pale, died, became silent.
Our separation is imaginary:
I'm inseparable from you,
My shadow is on your walls,
My reflection in the canals,
The sound of footsteps in the Hermitage halls,
Where my friend wandered with me,
And on the old Volkovo Pole 40,
Where can I cry in freedom?
Above the silence of mass graves.
Everything that is said in the first part
About love, betrayal and passion
Free verse dropped from his wings,
And my City is “wired up”...
The tombstones are heavy
On your sleepless eyes.
I thought you were chasing me
Are you left there to die?
In the shine of spiers, in the reflection of waters.
I didn’t wait for the desired messengers...
Above you are only your beauties,
White Nights round dance.
And the funny word is lady -
Nobody knows now
Everyone is looking into someone else's window.
Who is in Tashkent, and who is in New York,
And the air of exile is bitter -
Like poisoned wine.
All of you could admire me,
When in the belly of a flying fish
I escaped from the evil chase
And over a forest full of enemies,
Like someone possessed by a demon
How the night rushed towards Brocken...
And already right in front of me
Kama became frozen and frozen,
And “Quo vadis?” 41 someone said
But he didn’t let me move his lips,
Like tunnels and bridges
The crazy Ural thundered.
And that road opened up to me,
Along which so much has gone,
Along which they transported their son,
And the funeral path was long
Among the solemn and crystal
The silence of the Siberian Earth.
From what has become dust,
Seized with mortal fear
And knowing the time limit for revenge,
Dry eyes downcast
And wringing hands, Russia
Before me she walked to the east 42.

Note Anna Akhmatova.
“Seventh” – Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich. The author took the first part of this symphony by plane from the besieged city on September 29, 1941 - Editor's note.

‹STROPHES NOT INCLUDED IN THE POEM›

What are you muttering, our midnight?
Parasha died anyway,
The young mistress of the palace.
It smells like incense from all the windows,
The most beloved curl has been cut off,
And the oval of the face darkens.
The gallery is not completed -
This wedding idea
Where again under Boreas' hint
I am writing all this for you.

And behind the right wall, from where
I left without waiting for a miracle,
In September on a stormy night -
An old friend does not sleep and mutters,
That he wants more than happiness
Forget about the king's daughter.

I'm going towards the vision
And I fight with my own shadow
There is no more merciless fight.
My shadow is striving for eternal glory,
I stand at the outpost like a guard
And I tell her to go back...
…
…
As they say in Moscow now.
I want to trample underfoot
The one that glows in a light frame,
Impostor

There are no wings above her shoulders

October 1956, Booth

Believe me or don't believe me
Somewhere here in a regular envelope
With calculation of total death
A crumpled leaf flashes by.
It is not hidden, but encrypted,
But the whole world is disenchanted by them
And it is reasonably based on it
Nothingness is an invisible stream.

I haven't forgotten these yet,
I forgot, imagine, forever.
I forgot that the name
I don’t dare say them now,
So powerful is the radiance above them,
(Turned into marble, into a cameo)
Turned into a banner and honor.

I didn’t spin in the ballrooms of Europe,
I painted rock deer,
Gilgamesh you, Hercules,
Geser Nepoet, amifopoete,
You were already an adult at dawn
The most distant countries and faiths.

College girl, cousin, Juliet!…
You can't wait for the cornet,
You will go to the monastery secretly.
Your tambourine is silent, my gypsy,
And the wound has already turned black
It's under your left nipple.

There are expensive shadows around him.
But the words of prayer are in vain,
Greetings from sweet lips in vain.
And shines in the diamond night,
Like one vision of temptation,
That mysterious silhouette.
And with the touches of a Byzantine
With them there is the Harlequin killer,
And in local terms - master and friend.
He looks as if from a painting,
And under my fingers there are harpsichords,
And immense comfort all around.

You will arrive in a black carriage,
These Tsarskoye Selo horses
And the teamha l’anglaise
For a moment they will remind you of childhood
And the rejected inheritance
…

Like the memory of “Narodnaya Volya”.
It’s already up to the Hot Field,
Probably just a stone's throw away.
And my prophetic voice falls silent.
There are even worse miracles here,
But let's leave - I don't have time to wait.

And already, drowning out each other,
Two orchestras from the secret circle
Sounds are sent into the swan's canopy
…
But where is my voice and where is the echo,
What is the salvation and what is the hindrance,
Where am I and where is only the shadow?
How to escape from the second step...

That's the trouble, oh dear,
Next to this one is another one,
You hear a light step and a dry one,
Where is my voice and where is the echo,
Who is crying, who is drunk with laughter -
And which shadow is the other?

1 God preserves everything (lat.). In the final version of “A Poem Without a Hero,” the footnotes, indicated by numbers, refer to Akhmatova’s “Editor’s Notes” at the end of the poem.
2 Antinous is an ancient handsome man. – Editor's note.
3 Funeral march (French).
4 “Are you, Confusion-Psyche” - the heroine of the play of the same name by Yuri Belyaev. – Editor's note.
5 Kings Day (French).
Le jour des rois (French) – Epiphany Eve: January 5th. – Editor's note.
6 You will stop laughing
Before dawn comes.
7 Why do my fingers feel like they're bleeding?
And does the wine burn like poison?
8 Dapertutto is the pseudonym of Vsevolod Meyerhold. – Editor's note.
9 Jokanaan – Saint John the Baptist. – Editor's note.
10 Three “k”s express the author’s confusion. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
11 The Valley of Jehoshaphat is the supposed site of the Last Judgment. – Editor's note.
12 Lysiska is the pseudonym of Empress Messalina in Roman dens. – Editor's note.
13 Oak of Mamre - see Book of Genesis. – Editor's note.
14 Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solon are legislators. – Editor's note.
15 Ark of the Covenant - see the Bible (Book of Kings). – Editor's note.
Hall 16 – White Mirror Hall (works by Quarenghi) in the Fountain House, across the platform from the author’s apartment. – Editor's note.
17 “Dog” - “Stray Dog” - an artistic cabaret in the tens (1912-1914 before the war). – Editor's note.
18 Lots of Sodom - see Genesis. – Editor's note.
19 Fountain Grotto - built in 1757 by Argunov in the garden of the Sheremetev Palace; was destroyed in the early 10s. – Editor's note.
20 What does my Prince Carnival want from me? (French)
21 Corridor of Peter's Collegiums - corridor of St. Petersburg University. – Editor's note.
Option 22: Across the Neva for a nickel on a sled. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
Petrushka's mask - "Petrushka" - ballet by Stravinsky. – Editor's note.
23 Option: Goat-legged doll, actor. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
24 “Dove, come!” – church hymn; sang when the bride stepped onto the carpet in the temple. – Editor's note.
25 Maltese Chapel - built according to Quarenghi's design in 1798-1800. in the courtyard of the Vorontsov Palace, which later housed the Corps of Pages. – Editor's note.
26 Skobar is an offensive nickname for Pskov residents. – Editor's note.
27 Muses. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
28 In my beginning is my end. T. – S. Eliot (English).
29 Soft embalmer (English) – “gentle comforter.” See Keats's sonnet "To the Sleep". – Editor's note.
Soft embalmer (English) – “gentle comforter.” See Keats's sonnet "To the Sleep". – Editor's note.
30 Elegy. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
31 Unable to publish stanzas IX-XVI, Anna Akhmatova replaced them with lines of dots in the manuscript of “The Run of Time.”
The missing stanzas are an imitation of Pushkin. See “About Eugene Onegin”: “I also humbly admit that in Don Juan there are two missing stanzas,” wrote Pushkin. – Editor's note.
32 Bauta - in Italy - a mask with a hood. – Editor's note.
33 Romantic poem. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
34 The Star Chamber is a secret court in England, which was located in a hall where the starry sky was depicted on the ceiling. – Editor's note.
35 The place where, according to readers, all poetic works are born. – Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
36 See Shelley's famous poem "That's the Sklark." - “To the lark.” – Editor's note.
37 George - Lord Byron. – Editor's note.
38 Clara Gazul is the pseudonym of Merimee. – Editor's note.
39 Mars in the summer of 1941 - Approx. Anna Akhmatova.
40 Volkovo Field is the old name of Volkovo Cemetery. – Editor's note.
41 Where are you going? (lat.)
42 Previously, the poem ended like this:
And behind me, sparkling with mystery
And calling herself “Seventh”,
She rushed to an unheard-of feast,
Pretending to be a music notebook,
Famous Leningrad woman
She returned to her native air. -

In terms of the number of interpretations, Akhmatova’s last poem has surpassed the most mysterious works of Russian literature, but the mystery of this unique text has not been resolved, even now, when Akhmatova’s “Notebooks” and all of her “Prose on the Poem” have been published.

There was something unspeakable, apparently, in Akhmatova’s own attitude towards this text - as if it was not she who ruled over him, but he over her. When one of her friends whitewashed and bound one of the first versions of “A Poem without a Hero,” and then returned it to the author in a dressed-up state, Akhmatova responded with the following verses:

And you came back to me famous,
A dark green twig twisted,
Graceful, indifferent and proud...
I didn't know you like that once,
And that's not why I saved you
From the bloody mess then.
I won't share my luck with you,
I do not rejoice over you, but cry,
And you know perfectly well why.
And the night goes on, and there is little strength left.
Save me like I saved you,
And don’t let me into the bubbling darkness.

The poem saved Anna Akhmatova for twenty difficult years and released her into darkness only in the late autumn of 1965, on the eve of her twenty-year presence in the author’s life. That same fall, Anna of All Rus' suffered her last heart attack, from which she was never destined to recover.

Year of writing: 1940-1965

But instead of who she was waiting for, on New Year’s Eve, shadows from the year 13 come to the author in the Fountain House under the guise of mummers. One is dressed up as Faust, the other as Don Juan. Dapertutto, Iokanaan, northern Glan, the murderer Dorian come. The author is not afraid of his unexpected guests, but becomes confused, not understanding: how could it happen that only she, the only one of all, survived? It suddenly seems to her that she herself - as she was in 1913 and as she would not want to meet before the Last Judgment - will now enter the White Hall. She forgot the lessons of the talkers and false prophets, but they did not forget her: just as the future matures in the past, so the past smolders in the future.

The only one who did not appear at this terrible festival of dead leaves was the Guest from the Future. But the Poet comes, dressed in a striped verst - the same age as the Mamre oak, the age-old interlocutor of the moon. He does not expect magnificent jubilee chairs for himself, sins do not stick to him. But his poems told about this best. Among the guests is the same demon who sent a black rose in a glass in a crowded hall and who met with the Commander.

In the carefree, spicy, shameless masquerade chatter, the author hears familiar voices. They talk about Kazakov, about the Stray Dog cafe. Someone is dragging a goat-legged creature into the White Hall. She is full of accursed dance and ceremoniously naked. After shouting: “Hero to the forefront!” - the ghosts run away. Left alone, the author sees his looking-glass guest with a pale forehead and open eyes - and understands that gravestones are fragile and granite is softer than wax. The guest whispers that he will leave her alive, but she will forever be his widow. Then his clear voice is heard in the distance: “I’m ready for death.”

The wind, either remembering or prophesying, mutters about St. Petersburg 1913. That year, the silver month cooled brightly over the silver age. The city was disappearing into fog, and in the pre-war frosty stuffiness there lived some kind of future rumble. But then he hardly bothered the soul and drowned in the Neva snowdrifts. And along the legendary embankment, it was not the calendar century that was approaching - the real Twentieth Century.

That year, an unforgettable and tender friend stood over the author's rebellious youth - a dream he had only once. His grave is forever forgotten, as if he never lived at all. But she believes that he will come to tell her again the word that conquered death and the answer to her life.

The hellish harlequinade of the thirteenth year rushes past. The author remains in the Fountain House on January 5, 1941. The ghost of a snow-covered maple tree is visible in the window. In the howling of the wind one can hear very deeply and very skillfully hidden fragments of the Requiem. The editor of the poem is dissatisfied with the author. He says that it is impossible to understand who is in love with whom, who met, when and why, who died and who remained alive, and who is the author, and who is the hero. The editor is sure that today there is no need to talk about the poet and a swarm of ghosts. The author objects: she herself would be glad not to see the hellish harlequinade and not to sing amid the horror of torture, exile and execution. Together with her contemporaries - convicts, "stopyatnitsa", captives - she is ready to tell how they lived in fear on the other side of hell, raised children for the chopping block, dungeon and prison. But she cannot leave the path that she miraculously came upon and not finish her poem.

On the White Night of June 24, 1942, fires burned out in the ruins of Leningrad. Linden trees are blooming in the Sheremetevsky Garden and the nightingale is singing. A crippled maple grows under the window of the Fountain House. The author, who is seven thousand kilometers away, knows that the maple foresaw separation at the beginning of the war. She sees her double going for interrogation behind barbed wire, in the very heart of the dense taiga, and hears her voice from the lips of her double: I paid for you with pure cash, I walked under a revolver for exactly ten years...

The author understands that it is impossible to separate her from the seditious, disgraced, sweet city, on the walls of which is her shadow. She remembers the day when she left her city at the beginning of the war, escaping an evil pursuer in the belly of a flying fish. Below she saw the road along which her son and many other people were taken away. And, knowing the time of vengeance, overwhelmed by mortal fear, with dry eyes downcast and wringing her hands, Russia walked ahead of her to the east.

Retold

Categories
- Dogs
- Cats
- Cat care
- Pets
- Free birds
- Birds
- Bird breeding
- Poultry
- Cat diseases
- Dog diseases

Popular