It turns out that war can only kill by the fact that it has been declared.
Thus, the First World War killed the poet Vasily Komarovsky without even calling it to his fields. Yes, and where to look for him – a psychopath, a sick flower, a cuckoo.
He even strangely enters the circle of the then-young, but future legendary pre-war poets, sideways. It will be located in a strange place – to the right of the cuckoo children. He sits on a snow-covered bench that Innokenty Annensky likes to sit on in Tsarskoe Selo (they came to see this bench at night, these poets, strange collapses, castrated like birds or flowers that do not exist themselves), sits, reads poetry aloud to himself.
Young Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Gorodetsky, Mandelstam, Georgy Ivanov are standing in winter coats and overshoes, a little scary. Maybe the ghost of Annensky? But no. He’s quite an independent nocturnal.
I wonder what you were reading then? Something from the poems of the deceased who loved to sit on this bench all his life?
i love winter
Yes, the load is heavy…
even from its smoke
Don’t go to the clouds.
Or is it yours?
Glad it snowed today! And winter silence
There are no barriers in a calm heart.
Branches everywhere looking out the high window
And white light – which I’m glad about.
The unsuccessful ghost of Annensky will turn, Gumilyov will approach him: “Vasily Alekseevich, you? .. I did not know.”
The ghost will introduce itself to the others: “Komarovsky”.
In general, this whole scene with an unexpected trip to Annensky’s workbench reminds Teffi (and also scolded: they say, he condensed everything, invented) the textbook story “Femme Fatale”.
“To the knight, who sees her outside the ball and speaks solemnly about aesthetic eroticism from the standpoint of an erotic aesthetic, he suddenly says, trembling with all the feathers on his hat:
“Let’s go to church, dear, let’s go to church, quick, quick, quick.” I want to pray and cry before dawn.
The church is closed at night.
The lovely gentleman offers to sob on the porch, but “he” has long since disappeared. He knows that he is cursed, that there is no escape, and obediently bows his head, burying his nose in a fur scarf.
– Whereat?”
That’s why I want to ask: why? Well, why did they come to Tsarskoye Selo from the Tsarskoselsky railway station at night to look at the bench of the deceased Annensky?
And why is Vasily Komarovsky sitting there and reading aloud (and why alone?) verses that currently do not fit any of our attributions?
I don’t know why they got stuck. It’s understandable why. Vasily Alekseevich has a good and painful reason for this. He’s crazy.
“I went crazy a few times and thought I was dead each time; When I die, I’ll probably think I’m crazy,” he once said.
And he honestly warned of the inevitable madness that lay before him in this thin, weary, fur coats and hats in the snowy, deaf, and desolate poet’s park of the night.
“How can you not be afraid to sit here alone at night?” – Georgy Ivanov will ask him (by the way, maybe he is the one who invented this whole scene – they say he invented a lot in “Petersburg Winters”).
– No, when I’m healthy, I’m not afraid of anything. Except for the thought that the disease would return, Komarovsky answered him in a low, hoarse, wooden voice. There was also a wooden handshake. It’s like automatic.
Nikolai Gumilyov knows what this strict man is talking about: Vasily Komarovsky is an insanely insane. He gets angry when he is sick; when healthy, the eccentric is full of good nature. He has “enlightenment” now, so he walks. (“Actually, I mostly live in the hospital.”)
Big, strong, broad-shouldered.
And in poetry it hides behind a harmonic sound, “singing”.
I started like everyone else – and with a young zeal
He was loved and praised. Love went up in flames
The house stood on the sand – and did not survive.
Then putting a limit on your imagination,
Peter, I traded foggy and carbon monoxide,
For a daily walk along the boulevard.
Here in stone huts – hospitable shelter
For the orphan widows’ revolution.
Every evening is spent in friendly conversation.
Enjoy the freedom – it won’t happen twice!
There are only two successful lines in this text: “Love passed through the fire, the House stood on the sand – and did not survive.” There are such successful lines in the poetry of the Silver Age: however, they are all drowned in a poem that never ends like a fire or a longing. And I had to add. Leave a good place – and all.
Bryusov did this once, and this is now his most famous work. Akhmatova was frightened, and we do not have a perfect monostiha: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
But if you can’t write in one line, you don’t have the power, you don’t have the capacity, then get two, okay. Here is Komarovsky:
I trembled, strong and weak,
I trembled and sang and trembled.
Is it great? So leave this verse. It’s like a separate poem. But unfortunately. There are many more words before that: “And his son. But the wisdom of the tomb tasted the ashes. And the joy of stealing needles. saints. What did he eat there? What are such cheerful-sounding stings?
Although in the “long” verses Komarovsky, through tears, luck easily smiled.
* * *
Where are the copper faces of Tiberius and Sulla?
Reminds me of the gloomy feast,
With the last scent of the last mignonette
The dense smoke of autumn entered all the gardens,
Muddy gilded accents everywhere.
And the frightened cries of black swans
Thin ice opened on gray shores
Above the new tremor of deep purple waters.
I look: on an island in the middle of a pond
Gray-haired harpies flocked from everywhere
And flap your wings. Let go while you can?
………………………………………. . ………………………..
And the lilac night weighs me down…
The lilac night is like this: it can be nothing but a burden. And less and less power. Without a final reseda, Count Komarovsky is unbearably ill. Doctors just shrug: How is he still alive? And his heart is very weak, and he can pass out from any little thing: for example, from an unexpected sound (a window slam or a shot) or simply from the sight of blood. And worst of all – with this fear and fainting, a real, long and not at all lilac disease can come back to life – and it returns.
And here there is no more noise, no blood from a finger – there is a whole war. Disaster.
This was the final blow. The war struck Vasily Alekseevich like a mosquito, without even calling himself.
Strong nervous shock, exacerbation of the disease; a clinic for the mentally ill in Moscow; And now, September 7-8, 1914 Vasily Alekseevich Komarovsky dies.
As Nikolai Punin wrote, “From a violent fit of madness from heart palsy”. “She committed suicide in a mental hospital in the fall of 1914,” Anna Akhmatova will explain in her old age. However, Anna Andreevna could find out about Komarovsky, as she often does.
And I know, beating death gently,
It will bloom again according to the leaves.
And hardened by this snowy sadness,
The earth will thaw, the grass will sprout.
…was born on April 2nd. He died in September. All these are moon intervals, ghost bridges: from winter to spring, from Indian summer to real autumn. He himself was at such a limit. Either Annensky’s ghost or Gogol’s lunatic.
April 1 – do not trust anyone. April 2nd – you are dying but you think you have lost your mind. Born to “say two or three words” (this is what Punin is), reciting Annensky’s poems to oneself on a winter bench, exhausted by dark violence, smiling in childlike enlightenment, killed by mortals. fight before a single shot is fired and completely hardened.
Source: Gazeta
