Translated material
About pain, will and destiny
One hundred and fifty years ago, Apollon Grigoriev published “The Gypsy Hungarian”
Everyone heard it. In luxurious concert, blatantly obscene, ironic playful and God knows what other versions. Often with distorted words, omissions or additions. It seems she has always been there. Two guitars, ringing, / whined pitifully... / A memorable tune from childhood, / My old friend - is that you? // How can I not recognize you?Now - of course! Regardless of whether the poet's name is remembered. A century and a half ago, in the summer-autumn of 1857, “The Gypsy Hungarian” by Apollon Grigoriev was collecting dust in the editorial office of the weekly “Son of the Fatherland”, along with the rest of the poems that made up the “Struggle” cycle. What is more surprising here? Is it because great poems have been waiting in the wings for more than three months? Or the fact that a magazine intended for the mass reader took them at all? Or the fact that Grigoriev gave “Struggle” to such a publication? One can hardly imagine that a lyrical poem with a dotted, difficult-to-grasp plot will be stretched out over six (!) issues - like an adventure novel, the next portion of which the reader has been greedily waiting for all week.
Most likely, the “last romantic” absolutely did not care how his “confession of a warm heart” reached the public. Realizing himself (once again!) having lost everything, he literally fled from Russia - fortunately, a vacancy turned up as a home teacher in an aristocratic family heading to Italy. The departure happened a few days before his thirty-fifth birthday (July 16) - “the middle of the earthly field.” Dante’s symbolism is reflected in the poem Venecia la bella (written already in Italy), where the slightly modified first line of the “Comedy” appears: The damned vulture of memory deep / Has pierced my heart with sharp claws. / And with a greedy beak the whole soul has been torn / Nell mezzo del cammin di mia vita. Grigoriev changes Dante's nostra to mia - he speaks not about our life , but about his own life. And not because he hopes to reach the age allotted to a person, according to Scripture, seventy. You just need to sharply outline the confessional tone: all this is about me, although I echo Dante (in the epigraph - the lines of “Hell” calling on Beatrice), Hoffmann (a reflection of the short story “Doge and Dogaressa” in the finale), Heine or a gypsy chant.
From the struggle - with his beloved, for his beloved (who, after several years of either play or martyrdom, preferred marriage to a “philistine” to a high and hopeless passion) and, first of all, with himself - one cannot escape with the poems left in St. Petersburg. Venecia... is an attempt to streamline and “decipher” with a series of forty-eight sonnets the bubbling chaos of “The Struggle,” a cycle that lives in verse (polymetry) and emotional contrasts (the enchantment of approaching love; the awareness of its invincibility and one’s own demonic sinfulness; requests for merciful indulgence ; accusations-curses to the angelic heroine, who betrayed the mysterious kinship of souls; blessing to the “traitor”, who remains luminous even after the “fall”; a vibrating hope for a mystical connection with her beloved, who, having rejected the poet, must hear his song - the “incessant response” of a short earthly one. meetings). A hopeless attempt - having removed the differences in meters and intonations, Grigoriev did not want to get rid of either the associative freedom of the story, or the confusion of opposing - not replacing each other, but simultaneous - feelings. There is, however, a sonnet in the Venetian poem that really clarifies the main poem of the cycle - “The Gypsy Hungarian” (into the funnel of which the other seventeen texts, the entire “struggle” of the poet, are drawn): You are still the same before me: I recognize / You in a brilliant white outfit / Among the crowd and noise... Once again I stand / I am in front and, leaning against the stage, / I listen to the Gypsy - your secret / I catch your thoughts in your lowered gaze; / Ready to fall at your feet, I melt / Delight in the decorous bow, in in the decorous coolness / Of speeches - and my head is burning, / And in one beat, I know, our hearts beat / To this song that trembles / With all the power of passion, with all the contralto of Masha... / But you, as it were frightened, you get up, / Hearing the trembling of the rebellious Hungarian woman!
It turns out that the poet once listened to the “memorable tune” with his beloved. That's why You're stamped with a violent hangover and bitter fun! The word “hangover” is not only a tribute to the rhymes of Pushkin’s “Elegy”, where repentance merges with hope (the quoted 41st sonnet is preceded by lines about the heroine, heeding everything, “in which there is power and breadth”: Is freedom and truth a bold word, / Pushkin’s verse or the sounds of a new song ), but also an accurate description of the poet’s current state. Previously, the Hungarian woman prophesied a “hangover” - now she confirms what has happened. And makes the beloved appear again.
The fifths rattle sharply, / They pour out sounds in fractions... / The sounds whine and squeal, / Like groans of agony. “They whine... like groans” is a crude tautology, but it is this (no less than the frantic pressure of ear-piercing alliterations, the phonetically expressed transition from fun to hangover) that “portrays” the rapturous anguish. What kind of grief? Spit and drink!/ You twist it, twist it/ With a string of grief!/ Drown the melancholy into the sea. The poet seems to sing along with the Hungarian woman, almost merges with her reckless hero, but at the same time notices what this music is made of: Here is a walk through the Basques / With careless daring <...> Too much... and the fifth again / Aches and howls; / Blood rushes to the heart, / The head is on fire.
Musicology bursts into a complaint that has already been heard before: The evening is stuffy, the wind howls, / Like a yard dog; / The heart aches, aches, aches, / Like a sore tooth (not just Heine’s “toothache in the heart”, but also the “yard dog” will emerge then in the Venetian night) <...> The wind is howling more and more, / The rain is knocking on the windows... / My heart is aching, my heart is aching, / My head is burning. In the “evening” cry, out of bodily illness grew delirium about the death of a loved one: I loved you with such a silent passion, / That at least once I am worth an answer... / Have pity on me. // Don’t promise me the happiness of meeting/ In the best side.../ Here is at least the sound of experienced speech/ Let me hear. The Hungarian woman moves from fixing this pain to rocking an emotional swing: down (magical “meaningless” muttering) - up: Chibiryak, chibiryak, chibiryak, / With blue eyes, my darling! With those “eyes full of azure fire” (Lermontov), over which Vladimir Solovyov and Blok will dream.
The height is unbearable. Shut up, don’t whine,/ Burst the evil fifth!/ Don’t remember them,/ I know them without you. // I should at least look at them once/ Directly, clearly, boldly.../ And then die/ - It’s not a big deal. And head over heels downhill, tearing passion to shreds and playing the fool, fusing despair, the actor’s “presentation” of despair and mocking laughter at the “wetness” ingrained in the soul. How can one really not love?/ This is no good!/ But that one has the strength to live,/ One must marvel! // Get ready and die,/ He won’t come to say goodbye!/ People will begin to interpret:/ This is no good! The highest law and petty-bourgeois morality fit into one word, the confused (neither living nor dying) martyr winks gingerly: Why wouldn’t it be good,/ Roughly speaking?/ So just give it all up.../ It’s really bad! And with the same simple merchant talk - about the most terrible thing, about the lost will and mighty destiny, they rage about the snake that entangled and tied my hands and feet, / On sleepless nights / I sucked out my heart.
How it hurts, or how it hurts, / The heart hurts - it aches... / That’s what the fifth says, / That the basso is howling. The pitiful, childish babble will not allow itself to be drowned out by the frenzied roar of the erotic dance ( The sounds are all filled with, / The softness of kisses. / The sounds are full of screams, / Passionate shudders ), it will respond either with a roar, or with the whisper of a new insanity, pushing the last one into the light - damned and shameful - the truth. Bassan, bassan, bassana,/ Bassanata, bassanata,/ You were given to another,/ Without return, without return...
And that's all. What's the matter? you are mine! / Does he love like me? - neither courage that destroys “conventions”, nor faith in “selective affinity” will help. Eh, life, my life... / Hold your heart close to your heart! / There will be no sin on you, / And let people judge me, / God will forgive me. God will forgive - but here it’s all the same: No return, no return... No matter how hard you explain how strong the fatal love was. Is it so? And it was not possible to destroy her - one was destined to burn in the ugliest chaos of the gypsy paradise, which became hell. Go away, go away, / Bright vision - but the ghost does not leave. Dear friend, forgive me, goodbye, / Goodbye - be healthy - and the ghost is here. One hope is for the evil quint, who once frightened her . Maybe it will help? And if not, there is one last option.
Let the sounds whine more and more painfully, / So that the heart quickly / bursts from torment. The poet had to suffer for more than four more years. No one expressed this happy horror in Russian more terrible and more authentic than the affected declaimer Apollo Grigoriev - the pain of unsatisfied love, a sinking will, a damned fate.