Translated by Nataliya Ogienko
I
How to live
without the sky above your head? In no way. Pushkin - our sky. He can be felt,
seen, but you can’t touch him. In the world there are seldom, but nevertheless
there are miracles. Pushkin - one of such miracles. I think for Pushkin himself
his talent, rather, the gift was a mystery the same as for us. Is it necessary
to explain unexplainable, isn’t it better to take this as a given, sent down
from above. And to read and again return to his sparkling lines, penetrating
and alarming, earthy and detached, frightening by the depth of comprehension of
the incomprehensible , where already not we, but our souls are walking with his
shadow in the backstreets of forebodings and inspirations, living in every his word, in
his poems, wide and irrepressible as the wind in the desert .
II
To see the eternity
and to stay alive among the poets was permissible only to Pushkin. Eternity was
his shadow. Is it good or bad, I don’t know, but that it’s horribly, and not
just horribly, I can only guess. He took the time to make a mystery clear,
trying to get rid of this obsession exactly here on earth, but he couldn’t anyhow.
And Tatyana's letter to Onegin - only a message to the eternity, an attempt to
dissociate himself from his own pain, to pass it to other hands even for a
fraction of moments and to fly high into the sky, where it is easy to breathe
and a soul doesn’t hurt. And it always hurt: and when he wrote, and when didn’t
write, and when he fell in love, and when the love was over. Pushkin never took
anything from anyone, he only gave, he loved desperately and selflessly, but
who knew about it? Only he did.
Pushkin was
an angel who came down to earth where he felt lonely and uncomfortable, and he
was seeking as quickly as possible to return to his home. And his age was
short, but his life appeared as long as eternity.
TOP OF
RUSSIAN PROSE
A game
isn’t a process, not an obsession, but a moment, after which life turns into a
great nothingness, where the power of emptiness gets the highest meaning. You
have only to go to the edge of abyss and to make a step, and you're in the arms
of the bottomless pit, whose name is a madness of Hermann.
Pushkin
doesn’t hide a sympathy for his hero. Wanting to get rid of his own delusions,
from a sizzling passion, he decided to be reincarnated into a countess and to bring
Hermann a key from the fatal mystery. "Queen of Spades" was born in
such a way and a trey, a seven, an ace.
In the
depth of his heart Pushkin believed that once in life it’s possible to win a
lot, but he did not dare to start a game in which there is more mysticism than
hope. And yet one day he took a chance and put it on Hermann, but at the last
minute switched the ace to the lady of peak, leaving no chance for salvation
neither his hero nor himself. Realism with its gray routine triumphed, and it
allowed Pushkin to heal himself from the madness by the cost of Hermann’s
craziness, but the abyss had opened up.
"Queen
of Spades", perhaps, is the most autobiographical work of Pushkin. He
accidentally turned the wasteland of solitude, and in this desolate world his
genius celebrates, and the poet makes relocation of his soul into the soul of
the Golem - Hermann. Asceticism and conciseness of presentation raised to the
rank of the absolute, the line between reality and mysticism erased , and there
is a feeling of authenticity and credibility of what is happening , you
suddenly catch yourself thinking , why not to go in search of a trey, a seven, an
ace to gain long-awaited freedom and peace.
* * *
Stars
have their own grief
akin to
heavenly shadow,
and sun’s
edge, and word’s distance
your glorious
genius sung.
You
multiplied the silence,
gave
wings of glory to oblivion,
the
spirit cheered in your captivity
like a double-headed
eagle.
In the
solitude you found
fields,
and groves, and woods,
gentle
silk of humble winds
and funs
of stingy evenings.
Tell me
how you breathe, sing
in the
blessed eternal emptiness
and how
your soul lives
in the unprecedented
heights.
"DIVINE
COMEDY" BY PUSHKIN
"Eugene
Onegnin" - a novel in verse, or a pre dying note. But Dante isn’t Onegin, Pushkin
isn’t Lensky and Olga isn’t Natalia Goncharova . Although who knows. Why did Pushkin
in "Eugene Onegin" predict his own fate, and perhaps didn’t predict,
but told, and maybe a fate of the poet is a plot of the novel? Who then is the
main hero? Of course, Pushkin and a little bit - time. The poet has its
movement from the future into the present, and from the present to the past.
It turns
out at first there was a duel with Dantes, and then a shot of Eugene Onegin.
So, Pushkin wrote the novel not here, but there, in the dizzying heights, in the
otherworldly reality, where adjutants of the poet played a role of goose
feathers, angels of his genius.
It turns
out that not Dante, but Pushkin organized "a divine comedy ",
creating "Eugene Onegin", the biggest mystification since the time of
Adam . If Pushkin could create such a thing and time has no power over him,
then he is alive and in a minute or two he can appear with a new novel under a
new name. Isn’t a detective story. And
maybe Edgar Allan Poe - it is also the handiwork of Pushkin?
BOTH
INSPIRATION AND PASSION
Pushkin’s
seasons - autumn and winter. Time of reflections, of long evenings, where
loneliness, as Pugachev’s expanse, invades into solitary localities and
dominates, swaggers and drinks on the background of angry clouds and ringing of
a bell in the steppe, fading and darkling under the pressure of the storm,
indomitable and timid, imperious and tender, coming from nowhere and going
nowhere.
In such
hours the heart can’t retell your love, your doubts and anxieties, shout down
the tiredness of deaf silence, it just waits for the good news of memories, and
flaming line pour, season of inspiration and passion awakens in such a way to
bring another’s pain to life and through the plowing of separation to reach your
own soul.
In the
privacy of joy and sadness scarlet triumph in the fabulous colors in the solitude,
and life unbearable life goes away, over the horizon, into the olden days,
behind the impregnable fence, into the prison of the past, and let it be...
When there is harsh wine, fireplace, like a glow of the dawn, and there are no
another concerns any more than to bother the memory and to live these moments
with a violent naive simplicity, comes the power of the God’s gift.
***
What is
Pushkin’s laziness – tiredness because of the plenty of feeling,
because
of the delusion of cares, or perhaps,
just a respite,
a pause
in the maelstrom of future premonitions , where,
breathlessly,
soul of the poet waits for the beginning , when
memories
treat the heart by the snake’s sting, naked
autumn
is outside the window, and a clean leaf doesn’t breathe,
frozen, at
this moment the poet's pen comes alive, and racing on
the snow
surface, and time is at the service of the stationmaster,
and the
yard people stroke the bath to red whiteness,
but what
of it for the poet, runs without tiredness, without a goal
in the
harness of lines on the black soil of inspiration to the morning
star,
just one moment – and he will touch it with his hand, but
the
night goes out, and now the star melts like a snowflake, and the dawn
unbuttons
a collar of the white shirt like a hussar, and drinks
Champagne
with a curly friend, and a maiden – laziness looks
archly,
when the poet touches it with his eyes and immediately
sits
down on the kneels of a friend, and Pushkin, enveloped by jealousy,
leaves the
table and leads the sleeping maiden into the bedroom,
he is
fed up, it's time for the hussars to know the honor.
