Toward entering the university, a visitor comes to see a mentor. On the desk in the office lay large gray volumes of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems. They felt like a hidden treasure in a time when forbidden poetry appeared on green, blue, or red covers made in bookbinding shops. Inside were the thin pages of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva rewritten on a typewriter. Here lay a fully legitimate edition, perhaps Tarkovsky’s fifth collection after the “Big Four.” In those years, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, the son’s voice carried a steady, piercing cadence, the voice of a prophet and poet. Four striking poems used a distinctive vocabulary, yet every word remained Russian; the poems combined passionate energy with depth and achieved virtuoso verbal flair. They seemed destined not only for the literary circle but for a broader layer of readers, the intelligentsia of the time. “With a razor in hand when fate follows us like a madman” was a line that resonated.
“It was brought to me from Cuba”, the tutor explained.
In the USSR, buying a book was nearly impossible, yet it circulated in socialist camp countries where demand was limited. The scene asked about Tarkovsky’s current status. “This book was given to me by a poet in the corridors of the State Publishing House…” he added.
What made this verse so special that it was half-forbidden, and why did the poet receive his first collection Before the Snow only at age 55, during the late Khrushchev era? On June 12, Arseny Tarkovsky turns 115 years old, a man who lived across several eras: from the early poems of the 1920s to the major poetic cycle of the 1970s. And a later moment raises a simple question posed by a curious visitor: Classic or contemporary?
Sometimes familiar verses, even those memorized almost by heart, reveal different tones in a new edition. The cover, format, font, paper, layout, print quality, publication year, and publisher all matter. After noticing this, the narrator began collecting Tarkovsky’s works, mostly from second-hand editions that appeared during his lifetime. A distinct font that had not yet penetrated the paper proved especially appealing in the 1966 Sov-pisov edition of the second collection, Earthly Earthly. The 1974 Hoodlit collection Poems offered a fuller corpus for historical reasons, while the 1987 From Youth to Old Age is valued for the portrait of an aristocratic elder on the cover. The 1962 first collection is particularly scarce because its circulation was small.
Tarkovsky possessed a striking face — one that bore marks of a life’s trials, including a wartime leg amputation and a series of marital separations. This visage is visible in photographs from 1941 in Yoshkar-Ola, and in 1942 when Tarkovsky appears alongside his son, Andrei. The elder Tarkovsky found an analogue in Oleg Yankovsky, as if a certain detached calm surrounded him, reminiscent of Alain Delon’s face combined with a quiet wisdom.
Margarita Aliger wrote in an enthusiastic foreword to Tarkovsky’s 1974 collection that perhaps the highest truth lies in this late arrival to a readership that had become more receptive. The lines were seasoned like fine brandy. It is unlikely that Tarkovsky himself believed this: his first book, Poems of Different Years, was meant to be published in 1946, but following the Akhmatova and Zoshchenko verdict, it was blocked. The poet shifted from a young voice to become a patriarch, his face lined, his voice steady on crutches, and his presence compelling to younger poets who addressed him as “baby.” Then, two years before the master’s death, a song drawn from Tarkovsky’s verses and sung by Sofia Rotaru, So summer passed, appeared on the Soviet stage, proving that such ambitions could be realized.
He became a teacher to wise young poets, among them Larisa Miller, whose impressionist verses influenced the master. He praised Miller’s style as pure and transparent literary Russian that did not require new coinages or regional terms. Miller’s poems, snapshots in a sense, capture landscapes woven with emotion, echoing Tarkovsky Jr.’s film sketches where a similar atmosphere to The Mirror lingers. From the 1942 poem White Day, which underpins the screenplay for a film that became The Mirror, one can glimpse a shared language across generations. The Mirror, shown with the same reverence as the director’s father’s poems, extended its glow to Tarkovskys in cinemas far away. Yet the elder Tarkovsky understood his value well long before: the 1966 collection included Manuscript, a piece dedicated to Akhmatova, a dedication not accidental. Anna Andreevna once wrote of the fate that burns between the lines. In a letter to Anna Andreevna just before her death, he wrote: You have written for all who have suffered in this world in our century and have yet to suffer before us.
A poet’s dedication can be a truly handcrafted line. Once Tarkovsky asked his daughter Marina which poem she would like dedicated to him. The choice was Olive, and the dedication “Marina T.” followed.
Words of affection can appear simple, yet Marina Tarkovskaya, in her memoir Fragments of a Mirror, confessed doubts about certain dedications. She believed the First Dates were not necessarily dedicated to Tarkovsky’s second wife or to the other beloveds, among the seven poems dedicated to various intimate moments. The lines carry personal weight that shifts over time as memories change and interpretations vary.
The passionate lines Tarkovsky offered to his loved ones stand in contrast to the diary fragments of his daughter, which reveal the complexities of his relationships. Letters to his son were a mix of tenderness and urgency. One letter, written when a teenager was growing, recounts a train ride, a mother waiting on the Volga, and a newborn that altered the writer’s sense of time. Another letter expresses concern about the son’s silence and rumors abroad, urging a return to and a continuation of their shared language and heritage.
In a room in the House of Cinema Veterans, Tarkovsky wrote to his son while a Mosfilm executive planned travel to Italy for Andrei. The scene was saturated with fate’s familiar touch — a life marked by public scrutiny, wars, and the weight of power. The circulation of the first book had been halted, and translations of verses from the USSR’s various peoples had complicated the composer’s life.
He was not a dissident. He was a poet who, with an unmistakable prophetic voice, dared to utter a blunt truth: those who call themselves ready to die for singing have forfeited their own word. The poet’s role endures, speaking in a language that transcends a single era and a single moment. The author believes Tarkovsky’s work remains a timeless testament, speaking in the middle of the world and inviting readers to consider roots, connections, and epochs chosen by the poet for his own scale of time.
The author’s view reflects a personal stance that may not align with editorial positions, but it underscores the enduring significance of Tarkovsky’s poetry across generations.