The Voice Over

If one believes that our true home is not here but in the open sky, any one thought will come up against the cemetery and move along it like a runway. I like to picture it like the cemetery in Rome whose name can be translated as the heterodox cemetery, Cimitero Acattolico. There are stone pines, and cypresses, and quiet sluggish cats, and an old city wall, and an Italian (farsighted) sky. Persephone’s pomegranates ripen, splatter, and spill their seeds over the footpaths. There lie people with strange fates—those who died far away from home (and if everything other than heaven is a foreign land, we will all meet the same fate). Young women (“beloved wife of so and so”—of twenty-two, twenty-six, nineteen years and six months, February 6, 1842). Young children (“Wordsworth attended the christening,” the stone says) and grown children (“son of Goethe,” the stone says). Keats, Shelley, Viacheslav Ivanov (representatives of the vertical). And behind them, and in front of them, and together with them—all-all-all, all the epithelium of the past and present, hoping (or not) for the resurrection of the dead. Fourth-rate writers, third-wave emigrants, no-name Germans and Danes, old Russians and new Romans. Kôitiro Yamada, born in Hiroshima (“of Aki Province”), died in Rome thirty-three years later—on the fifteenth of January, 1883. Shiny thickets of acanthus. A stone boy in tall boots. “Thy will be done.” “Zum Licht.” “Harmony, harmony was your last sigh.”

“Sacred

To the Memory of Robert

The eldest son of Mr. Robert Brown,

of the City of London, Merchant.

Who unhappily lost his Life at Tivoli by his

Foot slipping, in coming out of Neptune’s Grotto,

on the 6th July 1823.

Aged 21 years.

Reader Beware

By this Fatal Accident

a Virtuous and Amiable Youth has been

suddenly snatched away in the bloom of Health

and pride of Life!

His disconsolate Parents are bereaved

of a most excellent Son,

His Brothers, and Sisters have to lament

an attached, and affectionate Brother,

and all his Family and Friends

have sustained an irreparable Loss.”

“Under this stone

rests the body of the former psalmist

of the Imperial Russian Mission,

Aleksandr Rozhdestvenskii”

“Artillery Captain

Sergei Aleksandrovich

Zakhar’in. 1881–1944”

“Her soul was pleasing to God.

To the unforgettable dear daughter

Anna Khristoforovna Flerova.

Born in Rome August 13 1877

Died April 12 1892.

Rest until the joyous morning, dear child.”

“Here lies buried the red army soldier

Danilov Vasilii Danilovich.

A faithful son of the Soviet people,

a fighter for the partisan cause in Italy.

Born in 1919 in Kaluga,

died tragically January 6 1945.

VASSILY DANIELOVICH, 1919 ✝ 6 J 1945”

Richard Mason

Though on the sign it is written:

“Don’t pluck these blossoms”—

it is useless against the wind,

which cannot read

 

2013

Translated by Maria Vassileva

NOTES

IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY

The title of this essay alludes, with a polemical twist, to a phrase from Boris Pasternak’s 1931 poem from the cycle Waves, in which he declares “falling into unheard-of simplicity like into heresy” as a culmination of a poet’s career.

1.  From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Valerik” (1840).

2.  From Daniil Kharms’s sketch “Four Illustrations” (1933) included in his cycle Accidents.

DISPLACED PERSON

1.  Grigorii Dashevskii, “Kak chitat’ sovremennuiu poeziiu,” in his Stikhotvoreniia i perevody (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2015), 143–56.

2.  This formula belongs to Marina Tsvetaeva; it first appeared in her notebook in 1921 and was later used many times in her works and letters.

3.  An opening line from the Kontakion of St. Seraphim of Sarov.

4.  A Nanai hunter who, in 1906 and 1907, served as a guide for Vladimir Arsenyev’s expeditions in the Russian Far East and later became a character in two of his books that describe these expeditions, one entitled Dersu Uzala (1923). In 1975, a film of the same name came out, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

5.  From Osip Manselstam’s poem “No, never have I been anyone’s contemporary” (“Net, nikogda, nichei ia ne byl sovremennik,” 1924).

6.  From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s narrative poem A Cloud in Trousers (1915).

7.  Il’ia Kukulin, “Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 50 (2001): 452–53; see also Kukulin, Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi (Ekaterinburg; Moscow: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2019), 308–309.

8.  Clones of prominent Russian writers are among the characters in Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (1999).

TODAY BEFORE YESTERDAY

1.  A reference to the film project Dau (directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky), which was in the works for many years and was released in 2019.

2.  An image from the opening of chapter XIV of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Terrible Vengeance” (1831).

3.  A line from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), a retrospective vision of the 1812 Napoleon invasion of Russia.