Guests At
Satan’s Great Ball.
The Green
Lady.
Posting #1.
“Of
verbal conceit
The
last card has been dealt.
Space,
space,
These
days you are a blind wall!”
Marina Tsvetaeva.
Reading Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences of the
Russian poet-symbolist Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873-1924), I was stunned to
find there her first-ever mention of Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev. Listing her
“meetings” with Russian poets, she puts Gumilev’s name last in the list and
emphasizes his name by the descriptive word: “Never.” –
“So, here is the whole credible report of
my meetings with Bryusov. – Is that it? – Yes, generally speaking, life has not
been overly generous with me on such credibles. Blok – 2 times. Kuzmin – once.
Sologub – once. Pasternak – many times – five, same with Mayakovsky, Akhmatova
– never, Gumilev – Never.”
(Emphasized by Marina Tsvetaeva.)
Considering that, two pages prior to this, Tsvetaeva
writes about three poets, all of them, for some reason, foreigners, whose lives
ended in very strange ways, having come across Gumilev’s name, and due to the
paucity of facts about the others, I decided to check out why those particular
three had been chosen by M. Tsvetaeva. Here is what she says. –
“Under Louis XIV, the poet Gilbert lost his
mind because of lyrical poetry, and swallowed the key to his manuscripts. In
the XVIII century, the Englishman Chatterton – I don’t remember what, – but it
was also because of it [that is, lyrical poetry] that Andre Chenier dropped his
head.”
Of these three I knew only Chenier, who was an
innocent man and a poet, who had his head cut off during the French Revolution.
Many Russian poets wrote poetic tributes to him. The Italian composer Umberto
Giordano composed an opera about him, Andrea
Chenier, first staged by La Scala in
1896.
As for the English poet Chatterton (1752-1770 [sic!]),
he was so profusely talented that at the age of 15 he was able to fool the
literary world by passing off his own pastiches as genuine work of a certain
medieval poet whose name he invented out of nothing, making the literary
critics discuss and admire the previously “undiscovered” genius of the Middle
Ages.
Even though Chatterton’s talent had subsequently been
recognized, the young poet was living in misery, literally having nothing to
eat, and committed suicide by taking poison at the age of 18, to escape from
his plight.
In 1835, the French poet Alfred de Vigny wrote a
three-act drama about Chatterton. Then in 1876 the Italian composer Ruggero
Leoncavallo, the future acclaimed composer of Pagliacci, composed his first opera Chatterton, based on the de Vigny drama.
It is understandable therefore why Marina Tsvetaeva
includes Chatterton among her three foreigners. The impresario of a poetic
evening taking place at the Polytechnic Museum with the participation of Marina
Tsvetaeva, complained about the low money intake.
What happened to Leoncavallo, in this connection, was
a terrible story. Having taken the money for the production of the young
composer’s opera Chatterton, the
promoter of the opera absconded with all the money and there was no opera after
that. Poor Leoncavallo had to wait for another twenty years, when his most
famous opera Pagliacci would make him
rich and famous, after which, in 1896, Il
Teatro Dramatico Nazionale in Rome would finally stage his Chatterton.
The most famous tenor aria in Leoncavallo’s first
opera has these words: “You are the only
one remaining true to me, Oh, Muse of Poetry!”
As a matter of fact, Tsvetaeva observes that the impresario
producing the poetry event at the Polytechnic Museum paid the participating
nine poetesses (Muses) three times less money that had been promised.
Little did Marina Tsvetaeva know in 1925, that is, one
year after she had written her reminiscences of V. Ya. Bryusov, a relative of
one of these Muses would end his life just like Chatterton, unless her memoirs,
or this particular part of them were written in the 1930’s.
The story I will be reconstructing was written by
Tsvetaeva in bits and pieces in the course of ten pages in the third part of
her reminiscences of Bryusov, which she has titled An Evening of Poetesses.
According to Tsvetaeva’s story, there were nine
“poetesses on the poster,” and, as she writes, “only now have I figured it out
– the nine Muses!” Valery Bryusov was supposed to introduce them to the
audience.
Of the nine poetesses, whose evening had been
announced in the Great Hall of the Polytechnic Museum, Tsvetaeva remembered
just four: “Adalys, Benar, Malvina, and Poplavskaya.”
Of the other four (that excludes Tsvetaeva proper) she
remembered the “raspberry-colored beret,” which is by itself suspicious,
considering that everybody knows Tatiana’s “raspberry-colored beret” from A. S.
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Out of the same group of four, Marina Tsvetaeva
recalls that one was dressed in “closed dark” (apparently a closed dark dress).
And one more of them is particularly singled out:
“…I see one tall, feverish, the whole of
her dancing – with her slipper, fingers, rings, sable tails, pearls, teeth,
cocaine in the pupils of her eyes. She was frightful and charming with that
tenth-rate sort of charm which cannot but charm, feeling guilty of being
charmed, and by which I am shamelessly, publicly – charmed.”
What becomes evident from this portrait is that the
nameless poetess in question is a drug addict. I also want to draw attention to
the words “slipper” and “sable tails.” They will become useful later on.
Meanwhile, I must note that on the very same page, the
“raspberry-colored beret” of another poetess loses its Pushkin connection in
Tsvetaeva’s account, turning into a “red beret.”
And also the 1920’s (the year 1921) are magically
transformed into the 1930’s, confirming my suspicions that Tsvetaeva’s memoirs
were written not in the 1920’s as claimed, but in the 1930’s. On that same page
as before, Marina Tsvetaeva continues her “depiction,” if we may call it that,
of yet another poetess of the remaining two:
“Of the visual impressions, apart from the
red beret [sic!] and the consumptive furs [apparently, the so-called ‘charming’
poetess, who, for some reason, has received so much attention from Marina
Tsvetaeva, was quite thin, cocaine and all], what also remained was the
gaminesque sketch of the poetess Benar [that is, of the third one, whom Marina
Tsvetaeva has not described yet] – a little head of Gavroche on the free trunk
of the neck [and that’s it, take it or leave it!] – and of the 1930’s [sic!],
markedly – out-of-place – intolerably-innocent apparition of the poetess
Malvina, stylish down to blue glass beads [sic! No pearls in this picture!]
under the cloudless hemisphere of the forehead.”
On the basis of this depiction I am making the
conclusion that “one tall, feverish, dancing poetess” is in fact the fourth in
Tsvetaeva’s story, namely, Poplavskaya.
On the next page Tsvetaeva calls her P-skaya, praising
this apparently wealthy poetess in the following manner:
“That same P-skaya, as I am convinced,
would have instantly taken her sables off her shoulders had I told her that my
child is going hungry.”
And again, an emphasis on the 1930’s:
“…The beret, the sables. Parting of the
hair a la 1930’s, Gavroche, my under-cassock… If Bryusov hasn’t shortchanged
himself, neither has the audience.”
In other words, even if these memoirs had been written
more or less from memory, they had to be written most likely in the 1930’s,
which is very important.
Only six pages later does the reader find out that Marina
Tsvetaeva had never had a chance to hear any of the poems of the “feverish
furred beauty.”
But this is not true. Marina Tsvetaeva had known her
poems very well, about which later.
To be continued…
***
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