Gleb Morev. 65 years of solitude

65 years of solitude
Gleb Morev

Publication date: March 1, 2000

N. Punin. The world is bright with love: Diaries. Letters: Comp., preface. and comment. L.A. Zykova. - M.: Artist. Director. Theater, 2000.

Recently I presented to the readers of Russian Journal a wonderful book of poems by Vladimir Shileiko, an Assyrian scholar and the second husband of Anna Akhmatova. Now is the time to talk about the third - the diaries and letters of Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin (1888-1953) have been published. Feeling writing as a personal dominant, Punin neglected a brilliant university career for a career as an art critic, no less brilliant: having made his debut in 1913 in the best Russian magazine of the pre-revolutionary decade - the aesthetic Apollo, Punin immediately became one of its most prominent authors. “I am the one who somehow especially knows words and has his own thought,” wrote 26-year-old Punin. His thought, as recorded in letters and diaries, is devoted primarily to himself and therefore, in essence, tragic. “No self-confidence, no respect, no interest - this is life; who would say that it lacks bitterness and loneliness, I would add, for true loneliness <...> in the discrepancy that can exist between the organism and the environment environment" - Punin's true drama is revealed behind the modernist reflection. He is invariably lonely. And in August 1917, during the days of the Kornilov revolt, when he went to bed with a loaded revolver, thinking about possible death, while “his circle” sympathized with the counter-revolutionary general; and after the October revolution, when he collaborates with the Bolsheviks, enthusiastically asserting futurism, losing his former friends from Apollo, becoming one of Lily Brik’s lovers and involuntarily accepting praise (“The smartest man I’ve ever met in Soviet Russia”) from the untalented Lunacharsky; He is different, but equally painfully alone in the Stalinist Union of Artists, and in the besieged Leningrad littered with corpses, and in the university, bled white by repressions, and, finally, in prison and camp. This is the famous “loneliness together” in the verses - in the “fifteen-year battle,” as Punin called his life with Akhmatova (“for our relationship, all existing terminology is extremely ridiculous”).

The published volume (unfortunately, disfigured by amateurish notes and skittish notes) contains quite a few unique documents from Punin’s archive (letters from Malevich, Tatlin, Pasternak), but it is the publication of his correspondence with Akhmatova and confessional diary entries regarding their relationship that makes the publication of the book an event , inevitably becoming a sensation. Without this evidence, of course, no future biography of Akhmatova is now imaginable, and we can confidently assume that deconstructors of the Akhmatova myth will discover a lot of (in)valuable things here.

Punin himself, dreaming of living “without a biography, in work, in articles - it would be better (biography ruins),” rightly believed that Akhmatova made his life “secondary.” The book of Punin’s diaries and letters (one of the rare in terms of intellectual level and factual richness of evidence of the central Russian experience of the twentieth century in the twentieth century of the perception of the tragic “on that scale and in that obviousness and everyday life” when evil becomes banal) corrects this aberration and in this sense rehabilitates him a “disastrous” biography, which, according to the poet’s words, is a guarantee of immortality.