May 1 - 100 years from the first meeting in Kyiv of the great poet and his legendary wife

... Osip Mandelstam arrived in Kyiv in mid -April 1919 - and in a somewhat unexpected official role for himself - the People's Commissar of the Oblits, or, more precisely, the emissar. He was seconded to Moscow, from the Reform of the Higher School in the People's Commissariat for work in the theater department of the Kyiv province. Together with his brother Shura and Rurik Ivnev, he stopped at the Continental Hotel, once or two read his poems in the evenings.

The culmination of his "emissatism" in Kyiv in 1919 became the carniviously bright celebration of First -time Military District. This day - perhaps the most important and most saturated in his life - has developed of three scattered components.

In the morning-a trip to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the impression is the most depressing: “ ... here is the same“ Extracure ”, only“ forever ”. There is no "holiness" here "

In the afternoon - the Pervomaisian celebrations and a demonstration on Sofia Square, where not only the cathedral and the monument to Khmelnitsky, but also the citadat of the Soviet government were located. Through the efforts of volunteers of avant-garde-artists, writers, artists and musicians-the square, and the whole city, changed to recognition.

Wips with appropriate cases of slogans, hastily painted by studios and studios exter, stretched through the streets. On the same Sofia, next to the horse, but still bronze, hetman Khmelnitsky, a gypsum obelisk stood in honor of the October Revolution. Immediately, nearby, the same gypsum Lenin and Trotsky and narrow plywood “triumphal arch”, through which the horse -powered Red Army pranked and cautiously defiled all conscious citizens. In Khreshchatyk, the gypsum Karl Marx, on the Red Army - the same Friedrich Engels, on the European square - Taras Shevchenko, in front of the opera - Karl Liebknecht, on Contractova - Rosa Luxembourg, and near the Arsenal plant - Yakov Sverdlov, struck by the bourgeois "Spanish".

But Mandelstam, who, most likely, on the bosses of the Tribuna on Sofia, was not impressed by the scarlet figures-one-day-old figures, but the monumental walls of the beautiful cathedral. Showing them, he said to Ivnev: " Believe me, that all this will survive all ."

And in the evening of the same day - the premiere of the play based on the play by Lope de Vega “Fuente Ovehun” (“Ovtiy source”), staged in the Solovtsovsky Theater Konstantin Marjanov. The oppressed Spanish medieval women unanimously rebelled against their oppressors and rapists, and at the very end, carnivorously moving their hips, for no reason shouted: “All power to the Soviets!” Isaac Rabinovich, one of the best students of the exter, was the scenographer of the performance, and one of his two assistants - Nadia Khazina. After the presentation, they also went out to the bow, tasting their Tolik of Success - deafening applause and a heap of cheap Kyiv roses.

It was then, perhaps, Osip saw it for the first time. But that evening the second meeting took place ...

The end of this endless day was the celebration of the 26th anniversary of Alexander Deich, criticism and translator and all from the same Kyiv "taboon". It was noted in the cafe “The Enrages” (“Artists - Writers - Artists - Musicians”), who was in the basement of the very Hotel “Continental”, where the Mandelstama brothers stopped. He went downstairs and was immediately invited to join the campaign, unanimously noisy at the composed tables. Nadia Khazina, the very young artist from the theater, who sometimes threw up the beautiful and full of mocking curiosity brown eyes, sat behind one of them.

Mandelstam was asked to read poetry - and the poet, usually in public a capricious and forcing himself to persuade himself, immediately and willingly agreed. Decich then wrote down: “I read with my eyes closed, sailed along the rhythms ... Opening my eyes, I looked only at Nadia H. ” looked at the poet and she - pupils in the pupils, smiling boldly and mysteriously ...

The heated, they went out into the street (both smoked) - and did not return to the tables. All night they walked along the city, which was quiet after the holiday, went out along the baptisma on the Vladimir hill and, forgetting about gypsum idols and about completely tangible bandits and fears, circled the alleys in the Dnieper, met the dawn over the Turukhan island. And, without silent, they said - about everything in the world.

He made his way to the cold, and the Mandelstamsky jacket migrated to Nadina's shoulders. But he could not cope with his task and how it should not be warmed. It doesn’t matter: every hundred meters a couple stopped - hugged, kissed, whispering ...

Nadezhda herself recalled this like this: “ On the very first evening, he appeared in the“ rubbish ”, and we easily and thoughtlessly converged ... ”. And on May 10, the “turtle” was completed-poems of nothing yet disturbed happiness, where “ a cold one had a tall from a bulk-girl forehead ” and where only “ honey, wine and milk ”.

On the second of May, in the Greek coffee shop, Vladimir McCavesky, the closest Nadine friend and poet from the theologian’s family: more to sanctify the sacrament of love between a Jew, a Calvinist, and a Jew of Orthodox, was clearly not required.

In Kyiv, Mandelstam spent more than three more weeks then. Not earlier than May 24 - and all in the same accompaniment - he returns to the metropolitan Kharkov, where he is busy with a business trip to the Crimea, then still “red”. Soon, however, he returns - together with Shura - to Kyiv, where they again settle in Continental. After they were politely asked from there, the brothers sheltered the cabinet of Nadin's father - the famous Kyiv lawyer Yakov Arkadyevich Khazin.

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Since then, May 1 has become for Osip and Hope their date - as if sacred and completely free from proletarian connotations. Mandelstam recalled her, for example, on February 23, 1926, when he wrote: " Nadyushok, on May 1 we will be together in Kiev and go to that Dnieper mountain then ... "

They also remembered her in the 38th, in the snow west in Samatikha, when on the very morning of May 2, exactly in the 19th anniversary of the Kyiv “engagement”, they were woke up by the enncavedeshniki and separated forever. “ At night in the hours of love, I caught myself thinking, - what if they enter and interrupt now? So it happened on May 1, 1938, leaving behind a kind of trace - a mixture of two memories . "

May 1, 2019 - a centenary of the meeting and acquaintance in Kyiv of the Petersburger Osip Mandelstam and Kievan Nadezhda Khazina. It was love at first sight, inseparable from the topography of Kyiv - the city in which this meeting occurred.

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Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, 19 years old from his 47-year life happily lived with his wife, hope, showing her a harmonious life symbiosis.

He devoted wonderful verses to her - how else?

She-dedicated him to the poems and his memory all her 80-year-old heroic life.

She saved, including in her own memory, the corps of late verses, launched them into Samizdat and Tamizdat, preserved and collected the poet’s archive and transferred him to be stored at Princeton University. In addition, she herself was transferred to the writer: her memoirs are not only evidence of a loved one and not at all an application to the collected works of her husband, but a merciless analysis of the time in which she and Osip Mandelstam had to live, and magnificent Russian prose.

Pavel Nerler , especially for "New"