“Like a madman with a razor”

After I entered the university, I came to visit my teacher. On the table in his office were gray, rather large volumes of poems by Arseny Tarkovsky. An absolute treasure in an age when forbidden poetry appeared on the green, blue or red covers of the bookbinding workshops: inside were the thin papers Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva rewritten on a typewriter. And here – a completely legal publication, perhaps the fifth poet after the “Big Four”. In those years, in the “Mirror” of his son Andrei I heard only Arseny Tarkovsky, the monotonous, but penetrating voice of the prophet, the poet himself. Four striking poems with some special vocabulary, although all the words are in Russian – pathos in them are combined with depth; they were notable for their virtuoso verbal flair, they were destined to go not only to the “ring”, but also to a certain “layer”, as they were called at the time – the intelligentsia: “With a razor in hand when fate follows us like a madman.”
“It was brought to me from Cuba,” my teacher explained.

That is, in the USSR it was almost impossible to buy a book, but it was available in the countries of the socialist camp, where almost no one needed it. How is the situation with Tarkovsky? “This book was given to me by a poet in the corridors of the State Publishing House…”

What was so special about this poem that it was half-forbidden, and the poet himself earned his first collection Before the Snow at the age of 55, in the final years of Khrushchev’s dissolution? June 12 Arseny Tarkovsky is 115 years old and a man of several eras at once: the first poems of the 1920s, the last important poetic cycle of the 1970s. And once on a slightly different occasion, answer the question a lady asked: “Classic or contemporary?”

Sometimes familiar verses, even those you remember almost entirely by heart, are read differently in another edition. Cover, format, font, paper, layout, print quality, publication year, publisher – everything matters. After discovering this feature, I started collecting all of Arseniy Tarkovsky’s collections, of course from second-hand books that came out during his lifetime. A clear trace of the font, which has not yet pierced the paper, turned out to be especially attractive in the 1966 edition of “sovpisovsky” – in the second collection of the poet “Earthly earthly”. The same verses were not so emphasized in 1974’s “Hoodlit” collection “Poems,” but this was a much more complete collection for natural temporal reasons. And the 1987 collection “From Youth to Old Age” is valued for the portrait of an aristocratic old man on the cover. The first collection of 1962 is hard to find – its circulation was negligible.

Tarkovsky had an incredible face – as if his fate, the same with a razor in his hand, left not only scars, but deep grooves on it. Fate manifested itself in his injury – a leg amputated in battle. And three wives, divorce dramas. His face must have been part of the reason. This can be seen in photographs, in particular, in a cap and tunic in 1941 at Yoshkar-Ola, and in 1942 – Tarkovsky. Andrei Tarkovsky found him an analogue only in Oleg Yankovsky – as if Alain Delon had not only a smart, but a wise face.

Margarita Aliger wrote in an enthusiastic foreword to Tarkovsky’s 1974 collection that perhaps the highest truth lies in this fateful, late arrival to a relatively mass readership. The strings were seasoned like good brandy. It is unlikely that Tarkovsky thought so: his first book, Poems of Different Years, was supposed to be published in 1946, but after the verdict on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, it was doomed. As a result, Arseny Alexandrovich passed the stage of a young poet, immediately becoming a patriarch – with a wrinkled face, voice on crutches, expressive appearance of a supernatural sage, with the right to address young poets as “baby”. And then, two years before the death of the master, suddenly, even for no reason, a song based on Tarkovsky’s verses and energetically sung by Sofia Rotaru – “So summer passed” – appeared on the Soviet stage. It turned out to be possible.

And he became a teacher for wise young poets, among them Tarkovsky chose Larisa Miller, whose impressionist poems influenced the master: “The language of his poetry is pure and transparent literary Russian, which does not need neologisms or words for expression. from regional dictionaries.” Miller’s poems are what would be called snapshots today, a snapshot – a landscape woven with emotion, from Tarkovsky Jr.’s film sketches, for example, where there is something in the same “Mirror”. Or Tarkovsky Sr. From the 1942 poem “White Day” (this was the name of the screenplay of the movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, which later became “The Mirror”): “The stone lies next to the jasmine. / There is a treasure under this stone. / Dad is standing on the road. / White-white day. And the mirror appeared, probably, from the same “First Dates”, which was “going crazy with a razor blade”: “I ran down the stairs and / Through the wet lilacs to my possessions / From the other side of the mirror glass.”

The Mirror, which was distributed as meticulously as the poems of the director’s father, added splendor to both Tarkovskys in some remote cinemas. But father Tarkovsky knew his worth for a long time: the poem “Manuscript” in his 1966 collection (“I finished the book and put an end to it, / And I could not read the manuscript again. / My fate burned” between the lines, / As the soul changes its shell”), dedicated to Akhmatova published. And the dedication is not accidental: Anna Andreevna said that she had to write about the fate that was burned between the lines. Akhmatova “was a coward, although the angels ruled her hand” – this is how Tarkovsky confirmed her in one of her letters. And in a letter to Anna Andreevna shortly before her death He wrote: “You have written for all those who have suffered in this world in our century and have not yet suffered before us.”

A dedication from a poet is sometimes a completely handcrafted line. Once, Tarkovsky asked his daughter Marina what poem she would like to see dedicated to him. He named it “Olive”. “Marina T.” took place.

Attribution of love words to their interlocutors seems simple, but Marina Tarkovskaya, in her memoir Fragments of a Mirror, expressed her doubts in some cases: she believed that the same First Dates were not dedicated to Tatyana Ozerskaya, Tarkovsky’s last widowed wife and young love Maria Falz, “Forty years As before / Heartbeat in the voice / Footsteps …” Among the seven poems, including “Taken from me at night / Crying for me …”? And “That’s right, the gravel is still crumbling / Under the heel of caution” – under whose heel?

The striking love words of Tarkovsky, according to the same memoirs of Marina, contrast with the difficult diary chapters of his daughter about her beloved father: for example, how did the father look for his second wife in front of his first wife and daughter? the payphone asks what cupcakes to buy him.
I have two important letters to my son. One – to a teenager, the other – Andrei, who in 1983, was consumed by the Soviet authorities, who did not return to the USSR after the filming of “Nostalgia”, probably studied and, of course, initiated by someone. outside.

First: “I remember very well how you were born, dear. My mother and I went to Kineshma by train and from there on horseback to Zavrazhye. The Volga was about to move. We spent the night at the inn and I was very worried for my mother. Then you were born and I saw you and then I went out and I was alone and everywhere cracked and rustled: there was ice in Nemda … “

Second: “Dear Andrei, my son! I am very sorry that you did not write us a single line… I am very disturbed by the rumors circulating about you in Moscow. Here with us you are the number one director, while you are abroad … your talent will not be able to unleash its full potential.

… I feel very old and weak. I will be seventy-seven in June. This is a wonderful age and I fear our separation will be fatal. Come back quickly, son. How will you live without your mother tongue, without your mother nature, without little Andryusha, without Senka?
Papa As, who loves you very much.”

Tarkovsky wrote this letter in a room in the House of Cinema Veterans in Matveevsky, in front of the director of Mosfilm, who was going to take him to Italy to Andrei. I wrote and cried. Fate once again followed “for us” as the same “crazy with a razor in his hand”, which sometimes manifested itself in the form of personal troubles, sometimes – wars, often – power. He destroyed the circulation of the first book, chained the great poet to translations of poems of the peoples of the USSR who broke up with his son (“Oh, Eastern translations, how your head hurts …”).

He was not a dissident, he was a poet who, with that indisputable voice of a prophet, dared to utter a flatterer: “He who calls himself to be shot for singing is deprived of his word.”

That’s why the poet is a poet, to ignore the high signs of the age and the low details of life. The poet is a timeless person who has the audacity and right to say “in the middle of the world”, “direct dictionary of root connections”, “why to any of the centuries” and “he chose a century”. for himself according to his height”. In any case, a poet like Tarkovsky. Seeing the work in the poem: “What’s in it for me? An unfinished block, / Two centuries of labor ahead of me. / Maybe someone will thank you / For my hateful success at night.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.



Source: Gazeta

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