Green ink

The collected works of Evgeny Arkhippov came out

In the Moscow Publishing House "Aquarius" a two -volume "scattered glass" - a collection of the surviving works of Evgeny Arkhippov (1881–1950). A modest teacher and school inspector, who worked for almost all his life in the province-Vladikavkaz, Nalchik and other cities-Evgeny Arkhippov was passionate about poetry, wrote poetry, collected collections of symbolist poets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, conducted a correspondence with writers and left memories of his meetings. His correspondents were Maximilian Voloshin, Arseny Alving, Vasily Rozanov, Andrei Zvenigorodsky, the curious letter of Alexander Blok was preserved in the papers of Arkhippov ("Verse - a dead crystal, which you sacrifice part of your living soul with blood"). Evgeny Arkhippov carefully watched what was happening in the literary life of two capitals. He was a passionate bibliophile, an ideal reader, an expert on Russian poetry.

Innocent Annensky was the favorite poet of Arkhippov. Arkhipov compiled his bibliography and wrote a lot about his idol. Thanks to Arkhippov, the memoirs of Cherubina de Gabriac (Elizabeth Dmitrieva) came to us. The two -volume is completed by the most interesting correspondence of the first wife of Arkhippov with Vasily Rozanov.

During the life of Evgeny Arkhippov, only a small part of his works was published; In Soviet times, it was impossible to hope for the publication of texts so far from socialist realism.

Prepared by the two -volume “Scattered Glass” literary critic and poet Tatyana Neshumova prepared for the press, and fans of poetry raised funds for his publication. In 2011, the Ellis-Lawk publishing house issued the works of Dmitry Usov, a friend Evgeny Arkhippova, prepared by Tatyana Neshumova. Some of the papers of Usov, repressed under Stalin, was lost, the archive of Evgeny Arkhippov, who miraculously survived during the terror, was well preserved. Tatyana Neshumova says:

- The first time I read this name in the article by Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov in the Almanac “Persons” in 1994: he wrote a big article about the forgotten poetess Vera Alexandrovna Merkuryeva. In this article, he many times referred to the memories of Arkhippov about her, and I remembered for the rest of my life her honed formula about Arkhippov: "Mocking, evil and gentle." When I already began to engage in Usov, it turned out that the Usov archive was preserved largely thanks to the efforts of Arkhippov, as well as the papers of Mercury. Then, of course, I read articles about Arkhippov, which other researchers wrote - Kupchenko, and Kotrelev, and Lavrov. But I was terribly sorry that this "beautiful reader", as you say, was practically not presented in printed books, he had two books: before the revolution, he published the Bibliography of Innocent Annensky and a collection of articles about the Russian poets "Mirty crown". After the revolution, he was not published, but did not stop writing. When I saw in the archives how much he rewritten other people's lines, how many articles on non-layering poems-also on the table or for a few interlocutors, I was completely struck by this activity, the prototype of what we used to call samizdat or book art. He made a book amazing in appearance, with an amazing handwriting, with glued inserts, each is unique. Moreover, if we recall that the Cherubina de Gabraka Arkhippov also has a direct relationship ... It seemed terribly unfair to me that Arkhippov was half -forgotten, and wanted to return it to the modern reader.

- He really was a passionate bibliophile, irritation arises in memoirs, even hatred can be said to those who pick up his books, lovingly interwoven. And the biggest blasphemy if there are traces of other people's fingers.

- Yes. A wonderful place is in a letter to Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov, Arkhippov’s first wife: “The guests will come to us soon, and Eugene says:“ Hide Rozanov’s books away because they can ask. ” Yes, indeed, especially for the first years of his book gathering, this was important. Further for him it became fundamentally so that only a circle of elected people would read his own works. And this was not always associated with threats of the Soviet era, but he just wanted him to have a chosen circle of readers. And this circle of readers will now not be large, because the two -volume is a small circulation - 150 copies.

- His papers are amazingly well preserved, given all political circumstances, but, of course, in different meetings. Was it difficult to collect all this together?

Page from the notebook Evgeny Arkhippov

-You probably know that when a person comes to the archive, the doors somehow open in front of him, he begins some mysterious power to lead from one “room” to another. Probably, it was technically the most difficult to make out the papers of Arkhippov, who came to the Moscow collector Torbin, because these papers were filled with water during a fire in her apartment. Imagine green ink, which are blurred with water, and you can only be on the lumen, bringing the grooves to the window ... By grooves, you understand that in the 30s he writes the word "Limos" ("hunger") in Greek, because he does not dare to write it in Russian.

Once I downloaded the diary of Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov in the e-book, in which I did not expect to meet with Arkhipov or with one of his loved ones, and suddenly Rozanov rewrites the letter of the first wife of Yevgeny Yakovlevich Nadezhda into his diary. A rather bright experience, because when you look for some kind of paper and meet it , this is one, and when you are not looking for to meet with the text and suddenly meet, then this is completely different.

Or at one of the Moscow auctions, I came across a little book that Arkhippov wrote about Innocent Annensky for Eric Fedorovich Hollerbach. Presenting the fate of the Hollerbach, I begin to think what way this book went. She visited the Leningrad OGPU, and then freed herself from this captivity, because the Hollerbach was arrested more than once, or did she survive the owner who died in the blockade, and so she found herself in Moscow?

Riddles surround the arching archive. The widow brought him the main part after the death of Arkhippov to Moscow and handed it to the TsGALI, and part of the archive remained in her arms. The Moscow Book Libe Volodin began to come to her, who took part of the papers to Moscow. He kept his wealth in the attic in Gorokhovsky Lane at friends, then in the early 80s disappeared without a trace. Part of the Volodinsky meeting remained with friends, some fell into the hands of collectors, and some were found in this way: the pioneers came to collect the waste paper, clean the attic, and began to throw out the papers. One of the envelopes (the name of the block was written there) fell not just in a puddle, but under the feet of the philologist Nikita Glebovich Okhotin, who passed along the street. He called the police outfit, the employees of the RGALI, and this part of the arching archive was saved. Such miracles.

- Obviously the intervention of the Higher Forces!

- Certainly.

- The first volume is opened by the poems of Arkhippov. He did not consider himself a poet, called the poet. I think that his modesty is quite justified. Can I call him a poet?

- Preparing for the program, I looked through his poems again to find a poem that I could read from beginning to end and say: I really like it. This search complicated me, although he, of course, has some magical stanzas.

In my soul, where the ash was sleeping peacefully,
Boiling ash swirls.
Take a look, look what I became,
What kind of dreams can not come true.

Or:

You go with Salomeis with a gait
Amid servants and servants.
I have never seen you a meek
Licking the onion.

These separate successful stanzas are completely in no doubt that Arkhippov had a poetic gift. Another thing is which one. Cherubina de Gabrica wrote to him in 1924: "Now only those people who have hearing from loneliness to the limit can hear your poems." In 1938, Arkhippe himself wrote (on behalf of Regina de Crua, he came up with such a character) "A Treaty of the Birth of a Littleness." It seems funny that the formulas from this treatise somehow echoes Harms's famous formula: "The poem should be such that if you throw it out the window, then the glass will break." Arkippov writes: “The verse is a sculpted flame. Every other formula for the verse should be rejected. Hence what is called inspiration, it cannot be a slight gift, it always bears the features of the painful process, in which strict thought, and the onslaught of the approaching elements, recycling, the reigning of rhythms and the fight against them.” And further: "I sit down to rewrite other people's texts to drown out the struggle with the rhythm." Here is the place that Harms reminded me: "The defended poison and thoughts of Khodasevich and Mandelstam, the honed stylet, hidden in their verse , leads Tanatos from insight and chaos to the dark veil of the sanctuary." So the question is simple, and the answer to it turned out to be difficult.

- It is unlikely that Arkhippov would like Harms, because he did not like either futurism or northerner, and in general any hooliganism.

- But curious: 1938, two people with completely different aesthetic addictions at about the same time think about the same and from different sides approach close formulations.

- The main deity in his pantheon, of course, was Innocent Annensky, he belonged to everything written by Annensky, with trepidation. I think that in the two stanzas that you read, Annensky’s voice is also probably heard.

- Of course, Annensky for him is the main figure in a poetic pantheon. Arkhippov himself survived the early death of his mother and a ball of childhood diseases, was an heightenedly sensitive person. Therefore, for him, Annensky is a poet of painful and sophisticated, sharp relationships of horror, beauty, grief. Such enlightenment through pain in Annensky is important to him. In addition, he was, of course, shocked by the sudden death of Annensky in 1909, shocked by his poems, which posthumously published in the book "Cyparis Casket". And I think that he somehow correlated this binopostation: he worked at first life at first in the gymnasium, like Annensky and then in a Soviet school) and a tendency to cabinet classes with a similar “split” of Annensky, who served as the director of the gymnasium. He gathered the first bibliography of Annensky, she published in 1914, he wrote an article about him “Nobody and Nobody”, which was included in the 1915 Mirty crown book. He always internally celebrated the anniversary of the death of Annensky on November 30, devoted poetry to him.

Burned flowers will fall, in front of the portrait
Yours, bending over, beg for sleep.
I have not met you in the world,
Will I see on that?

He writes a very interesting treatise "Religion of the Family" about the hero of the play of Annensky "Family-Qifared".

-But the son of Innocent Annensky Valentin Krivich somehow did not really perceive Arkhippov’s interest in his father and did not even answer his letter.

- Yes, Arkhippov was offended by this. But then, in 1928, he met Krivich, the only time in his life was in Tsarskoye Selo, and this resentment faded a little into the background.

- And with Dmitry Usov, he also saw only once.

- Yes, this, of course, is a completely amazing friendship, which began in absentia and lasted 27 years, despite the fact that they met the only time - two weeks in 1928. Usov back in 1915, a student of Moscow University wrote a letter to the Arkhipov, feeling his native soul, Arkhipov answered, and in fact, this correspondence continued until Usov’s death. In 1942, Usov wrote to Arkhippov that he sees in their fate intimacy with Heine's poem:

In the north cedar lonely
It grows on a bare hill.
He is asleep, white cover
He dressed his snow and ice.

He all dreams that the palm tree
In the midday country
Silently one is longing
On a sultry steepness.

(Translation by D.S. Usov)

Indeed, they lived almost all their lives in separation from each other.

- Arkhipov, due to the fact that he lived in the province, few of the famous writers often met personally, but the letter of Blok, correspondence with Voloshin was preserved. Probably, the most interesting part of his heritage is memoir prose and attempts by an autobiography. The reader can immediately see what a huge influence Vasily Rozanov had on Arkhippov. Two times, we have mentioned this name in our conversation. I think that Arkhipov imitated him and sometimes not without success.

- Maybe I did not think about it. I like to think about how Arkhipov was selectively treated to what he was writing about in his memoirs, and who could not tell about whom. Because fate gave him a lot of meetings, he studied at the gymnasium with Florensky and Ern, then he studied with them at Moscow University. In his youth, he worked as a statist at the Moscow Art Theater, saw both Gorky and Chekhov at rehearsals. But he did not write about Florensky, Gorky and Chekhov in his memoirs, and wrote a large memoir essay about Erna. Or he had one fleeting meeting with Balmont and Bryusov, and they fall into his memoir pantheon. In the same way, he described in great detail the only meeting with Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin, who was in 1928, described in detail his room, individual Kuzmin's words, gave his portrait. It was important to him, and that life is in the provinces, among school notebooks, in a sense, as it were, it did not exist for him, it was important for him to feel the poets and philosophers significant for him.

- And thanks to Arkhippov, we can read the notes of Elizabeth Dmitrieva, Cherubina de Gabrica today, because he actually created them from letters.

- This is an important plot in his life. Together with Usov, they open Cherubin, correspond to her, agree to write independent articles about her, and then it turns out that Cherubina is nearby, Arkhipov - in Novorossiysk, she is in Yekaterinodar. In 1921, correspondence was tied, Archippov sends her an article about her, she immediately realizes that this is an absolutely unique reader. He asks him: "Do you want to be chosen by Eugene of my correspondence?" Then she writes him a poem in which there are such lines:

Wherever our meeting was the beginning,
Its end is not here.
You take so little from my heart,
It’s not all that is still.

Cherubin de Gabriac

Archippov writes for her his autobiography "Gypsum mask". In response to his frankness, she slowly from a letter to a letter begins to talk about her life. After the death of Cherubina, Arkhippe, revising her letters, makes up a story about her life, practically not adding a single word from herself. And she sends Arkhippov a confessional story about her novel with Gumilev. In addition, it is very important that Arkhipov from a letter to a letter asks her to send those poems that he does not have. So he made a meeting, the uniqueness of which became clear after the Cherubin was arrested (she was arrested several times in Leningrad as an actor of the Anthroposophical movement), her own archive died and it turned out that Arkhippova had the only collection of her poems. He compiled a book from them that he managed to show her. From Tashkent, already from the exile, Cherubin writes to Arkhippov: "The book, or rather, what you did, however, is wonderful. I look at it as dead eyes."

When Arkhipov goes on his journey to St. Petersburg, Cherubina de Gabrica from Tashkent writes him such verses:

Listen to night dreams,
Do not miss the fallen star.
Through the streets of my invisible shadow
I'll follow you.

Look, I'm so languishing in the desert,
Far from lovely places.
Water in the Neva still remained blue?
Angel has not yet been taken from the hands?

When Arkhipov finds out about the death of Cherubina in 1928, he writes the poem "Assumption", which meets the poem of Cherubina.

Sleep! Water in the Neva
Also omnivorous
Wide and fluid,
Like a dawn in Moscow.

Also the angel is white
Raises the cross.
Genius of passionate places,
Blessed and brave.

Also your house is quiet
On the corner of the channel,
Where the soul was drunk
To catch your verse.

Only inappropriate
I met the waterfrained vodka
Lighting us,
The ones called unrequitedly.

Oh, who knew then
What a dashing grief
He will announce us soon
Black star.

Thus, the entire corps of Cheryubinin texts came to us exclusively thanks to Arkhippov.

- Perhaps the modern reader will surprise or amuse the magnificent, elaborate style of Arkhippov. He perceived the entire mythology of Russian symbolism very close to the heart and tried to match it. He was the perfect reader of the Golden Fleece magazine.

- Both the “golden rune” and “Apollo” ... The groves of epigraphs in almost every composition and in every poem that he decides to be placed in his book ... Of course, we must tune in to such an old reading in order to read his works. But, it seems to me, memoirs and autobiography are read easily, not like articles or poems. Articles and verses in this sense are more difficult, here it is necessary to tune in thinner.

A postcard sent by E. Arkhippov A. Zvenigorodsky, 1945

- How can a person with such views, absolutely not corresponding to the Soviet era, to a man who intertwined Annensky into brocade and ignored everything that was happening in social life, was generally able to survive? How did he live the Stalin years?

We are inside the first part of the "divine comedy", inside the hell of the Soviet

- This is always a lot who will pull his happy, he was lucky. There is no law here. Но, может быть, то, что он оказался в провинции, то, что он перестал печататься, жил просто советским школьным учителем, сыграло свою роль. Хотя и здесь не обошлось без кривых поворотов и скачков. В 1929 году Архиппова обвинили в газете, что он якобы служил при царском дворе, чего не было, его немедленно уволили из школы, он потерял работу и не сразу восстановился. Ему пытался помогать Волошин: он написал Луначарскому. Письмо Луначарского с резолюцией "прекратить безобразия в отношении Архиппова" потерялось в советских канцеляриях. Тогда за Архиппова вступился советский писатель Федор Гладков, с которым они в Новороссийске в начале советской власти пересекались. Вот это сыграло роль, и Архиппов опять стал школьным учителем. Более того, он даже получил орден Ленина, что совсем необычная вещь для школьного учителя...

Он постепенно старел, должен был распродавать свое книжное собрание. Один за другим уходили самые близкие друзья. Обступающая глухота, необходимость зарабатывать кусок хлеба и невозможность спокойно заниматься тем, что ты хочешь, и единственная связывающая с большим миром ниточка – переписка с его университетским другом, замечательным поэтом и интересным чудаком князем Андреем Владимировичем Звенигородским. В этой переписке меня больше всего умилило, что Звенигородский уже в послевоенные годы послал Архиппову таблицу, которую составлял 7 лет: он записывал первую строчку какого-нибудь классического стихотворения, вспоминавшегося ему, когда он просыпался, и день, когда это случилось. Потом эту таблицу послал другу, чтобы тот вспомнил авторов этих стихотворений. Несколько лет Архиппов изучает эту таблицу, к концу жизни он уже не всегда помнит некоторые стихи или их авторов. И кажется, что для него это самое важное переживание послевоенных лет. А о войне он ничего не написал, в переписке военных лет он игнорирует войну, хотя ужас, что было, конечно.

– Вообще игнорирует советскую жизнь в своих записях.

- Yes. Потому что хочется построить "мир иной" и жить в этом мире, и невозможно описывать ад, в котором ты находишься. Для того чтобы выразить свое отношение к советской действительности, Архиппов в литературной анкете, которую в начале 30-х годов он рассылал друзьям, спрашивает: можно ли сейчас перечитывать Данте? Перечитываете ли вы Данте? Подразумевается, конечно, ответ, что мы находимся внутри первой части "Божественной комедии", внутри ада советского.

– Двухтомник вышел тиражом 150 экземпляров – очень печально, это свидетельство падения читательского интереса и к поэзии, и к истории русской литературы, и вообще к книгам как таковым. Но, с другой стороны, очень трогательно, что этот двухтомник выйдет на средства читателей. По-современному говоря, метод краудфандинга был использован для того, чтобы собрать деньги на его издание…

– Я воспринимаю это как чудо. Потому что мне за месяц удалось собрать значительную сумму денег. Нашлось столько людей, которые поверили в то, что эти книги для них могут быть интересны.

– Подозреваю, поскольку вы уже произнесли имя князя Андрея Звенигородского и в самом двухтомнике есть намек, что его наследие заслуживает внимания, что вы теперь готовитесь к третьему подвигу: после Усова и Архиппова – выпустить уцелевшее собрание князя Звенигородского?

– Это моя мечта. Я сейчас занимаюсь тем, что составляю книгу воспоминаний и дневников Льва Владимировича Горнунга, знаменитого своими фотографиями Ахматовой, Пастернака, Тарковского. А к Звенигородскому я мечтала бы приступить, но сложность заключается в том, что большая часть его архива находится у частных лиц, и эта часть не всегда доступна.