“He was my classmate. A. Bely Andrey Voznesensky Virtual keyboard

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Andrey Voznesensky
In the virtual wind

My soul, shadow,

I confess you.

Please don't put out my mascara before my due date!

Entered the world

and those who have not found themselves,

we are only objective shadows of the soul.

December 1997 Andrey Voznesensky

© Voznesensky A.A., heirs, 2018

© ITAR-TASS/Interpress, 2018

© "Tsentrpoligraf", 2018

© Artistic design, Tsentrpoligraf, 2018

Virtual keyboard

According to his note we set up our lives

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the lyrics to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos standing next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart,
she was blind from tears -
like a white keyboard,
placed on the butt.
Her sadness seemed a secret.
Nobody understood her.
To her as an angel horizontal
midnight Richter arrived.
What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?
God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of the publishing house that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost all the publishing house employees gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh and add: “But at the same time, these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.

“And it was cold for the baby in the den...”

“Pasternak on the phone!”

The numb parents stared at me. When I was in sixth grade, without telling anyone, I sent him poems and a letter. This was the first decisive action that determined my life. And so he responded and invited me to his place for two hours on Sunday.

It was December. I arrived at the gray house in Lavrushinsky, of course, an hour before. After waiting, he took the elevator up to the dark landing of the eighth floor. There was still a minute left until two. Behind the door, they apparently heard the elevator slam. The door opened.

He stood in the doorway.

Everything swam before me. A surprised, elongated, dark flame of a face looked at me. Some kind of floppy stearine knitted sweater hugged his strong figure. The wind moved my bangs. It is no coincidence that he later chose a burning candle for his self-portrait. He stood in the draft of the door.

The dry, strong brush of a pianist.

I was struck by the asceticism and poverty-stricken spaciousness of his unheated office. A square photo of Mayakovsky and a dagger on the wall. Muller's English-Russian Dictionary - he was then chained to translations. My student notebook was huddled on the table, probably prepared for the conversation. A wave of horror and adoration passed through me. But it's too late to run.

He spoke from the middle.

His cheekbones trembled like the triangular frames of wings, pressed tightly before fluttering. I idolized him. He had drive, strength and heavenly inadaptability. When he spoke, he twitched and pulled his chin up, as if he wanted to break out of his collar and out of his body.

Soon it became very easy to work with him. I look at him on the sly.

His short nose, starting from the deepening of the bridge of the nose, immediately went hump, then continued straight, reminiscent of a dark gun butt in miniature. Sphinx lips. Short gray haircut. But the main thing is a floating, smoking wave of magnetism. “He, who compared himself to a horse’s eye...”

Two hours later I walked away from him, carrying in my arms his manuscripts - for reading, and the most precious thing - the typewritten first part of his new prose novel, just completed, called "Doctor Zhivago" and an emerald notebook of new poems from this novel, bound with crimson silk with a lace. Unable to resist, I opened it as I walked and swallowed the breathless lines:

And it was cold for the baby in the den...
All the Christmas trees in the world, all the children’s dreams,

The poems had the feeling of a schoolboy in pre-revolutionary Moscow; childhood was mesmerizing - the most serious of Pasternak’s mysteries.

All the thrill of warmed candles, all the chains...

The poems preserved the later crystalline state of his soul. I found him in the fall. Autumn is clear to the point of clairvoyance. And the country of childhood came closer.

...All the apples, all the golden balls...

From that day on, my life was decided, acquired a magical meaning and purpose: his new poems, telephone conversations, Sunday conversations with him from two to four, walks - years of happiness and childish love.

* * *

Why did he respond to me?

He was lonely in those years, rejected, exhausted from bullying, he wanted sincerity, purity of relationships, he wanted to break out of the circle - and yet not only that. Maybe this strange relationship with a teenager, a schoolboy, this almost friendship explains something about him? This is not even friendship between a lion and a dog, or rather, a lion and a puppy.

Maybe he loved himself in me, who ran to Scriabin as a schoolboy?

He was drawn to childhood. The call of childhood did not stop within him.

He didn’t like it when people called him; he called himself, sometimes several times a week. Then there were painful breaks. I was never recommended to my bewildered family members by first name or patronymic, always by last name.

He spoke excitedly, recklessly. Then, at full speed, he suddenly ended the conversation. He never complained, no matter what clouds overshadowed him.

“An artist,” he said, “is essentially optimistic. The essence of creativity is optimistic. Even when you write tragic things, you must write strongly, and despondency and laziness do not give birth to works of strength.” The speech flowed in a continuous, choking monologue. It had more music than grammar. Speech was not divided into phrases, phrases into words - everything flowed in an unconscious stream of consciousness, the thought muttered, returned, bewitched. His poetry had the same flow.

* * *

When he moved permanently to Peredelkino, phone calls became less frequent. There was no telephone at the dacha. He went to call the office. The night area was filled with the echo of his voice from the window, he turned to the stars. I lived from bell to bell. He often called me when he was reading something new at the dacha.

His dacha resembled a wooden replica of Scottish towers. Like an old chess tour, it stood in a line of other dachas on the edge of a huge square Peredelkino field, lined with plowing. From the other end of the field, from behind the cemetery, like figures of a different color, the church and bell tower of the 16th century gleamed like carved king and queen, toy-colored dwarf relatives of St. Basil.

The order of dachas shuddered under the murderous sight of the cemetery domes. Now few of the owners of that time have survived.

Readings took place in his semicircular lantern office on the second floor.

We were going. They brought chairs from below. Usually there were about twenty guests. They were waiting for the late Livanovs.

From the solid windows you can see the September district. Forests are burning. A car is running towards the cemetery. A cobweb pulls out the window. On the other side of the field, from behind the cemetery, as colorful as a rooster, a church peeps sideways - who would you like to peck? The air above the field is shaking. And the same excited trembling in the air of the office. The nerve of anticipation trembles within him.

To pass the pause, D.N. Zhuravlev, the great reader of Chekhov and the tuning fork of the Old Arbat elite, shows how they sat at social receptions - with their backs arched and only feeling the back of the chair with their shoulder blades. This is him reprimanding me in a tactful manner! I feel myself blushing. But out of embarrassment and stubbornness I slouch and lean my elbows even more.

Finally the late ones arrive. She is timid, nervously graceful, making the excuse that it was difficult to get flowers. He is huge, spreading his arms and rolling his eyes in buffoonish horror: the prime minister, the shaker of the Moscow Art Theater, the Homeric performer of Nozdryov and Potemkin, a kind of shirtless gentleman.

They became quiet. Pasternak sat down at the table. He was wearing a light silver jacket like a French jacket, like those that later became fashionable among Western left-wing intellectuals. He read the poems at the end. That time he read “White Night”, “The Nightingale”, “The Fairy Tale”, well, in a word, the entire notebook of this period. While reading, he peered at something above your heads, visible only to him. The face became longer and thinner. And the light of the white night was the jacket he was wearing.

Prose? Poetry? Like in a white night everything got mixed up. He called it his main book. He delivered dialogues, naively trying to speak in different voices. His ear for the common language was magical! Like a cockerel, Neuhaus jumped up, shouted, winked at the listeners: “Let him, your Yuri, write more poetry!” He gathered guests as he completed part of the work. So I listened to everything he wrote over the years, notebook after notebook, the entire poetic novel, in his voice.

Readings usually lasted about two hours. Sometimes, when he needed to explain something to the listeners, he turned to me, as if explaining to me: “Andryusha, here in “The Fairy Tale” I wanted to emboss the emblem of feeling like on a medal: a warrior-savior and a maiden on his saddle.” This was our game. I knew these poems by heart; in them he brought to the pinnacle his technique of naming an action, an object, a state. Hooves clattered in the verses:

Closed eyelids.
Heights. Clouds.
Water. Brody. Rivers.
Years and centuries.

He spared the audience's pride. Then, in a circle, he asked who liked which poems more. The majority answered: “Everything.” He was annoyed at the evasiveness of the answer. Then they singled out “White Night”. Livanov called "Hamlet". The unplayed Hamlet was his tragedy, and he drowned out this pain with his arrogance and the courage of a buffoon.

The hum died down. I took to the stage
Leaning against the door frame...

Livanov blew his nose. His swollen undereyes became even more pronounced. But a minute later he was already laughing, because everyone was invited down to the feast.

We went down. They found themselves surrounded, in a blue fireworks display of evaporating models by his father, perhaps the only Russian impressionist artist.

Oh, these Peredelkino meals! There weren't enough chairs. They pulled down the stools. Pasternak led the feast in the rapture of Georgian ritual. He was a cordial owner. He embarrassed the departing guest and handed everyone their coats himself.

Who are they, the poet’s guests?

Tiny, quiet Genrikh Gustavovich Neuhaus, Garrick, with uncouth granite hair, squints with the dry radiance of his mind. The absent-minded Richter, Slava, the youngest at the table, slightly closed his eyelids, tasting the colors and sounds. “I have a question for Slava! Glory! Tell me, does art exist?” – Pasternak asked sobbingly.

“I knew Kachalov’s Jim. Don't believe me? - the thunderous Livanov boiled and poured. - Give me your paw, Jim... It was a black evil devil. Beelzebub! Everyone was in awe. He would come in and lie down under the dining table. None of the diners dared to move a foot. It’s not like touching the velvet fur. I would have grabbed my hand right away. What a joke! And he said: “Give me your paw...” Let’s drink to poetry, Boris!”

Nearby, big-eyed Zhuravlev in a brown pair, like a cockchafer, squinted embarrassedly and tenderly. Asmus thought. Vsevolod Ivanov came in with open-legged, bear-like movements, shouting: “I gave birth to a son for you, Boris!”

The boy Koma sat here and read poetry: “Tulips, tulips, tulips to whom?!”

I remember the ancient Anna Akhmatova, august in her poetry and age. She was taciturn, wearing a wide robe like a tunic. Pasternak sat me down next to her. So I remembered her in half profile for the rest of my life. But even she almost did not exist for me next to Pasternak.

The arrival of Hikmet crashed. The owner raised a toast in honor of him, in honor of the revolutionary glow behind his shoulders. Nazim, answering, complained that no one around him understood anything in Turkish, and that he was not only a glower, but also a poet and now reads poetry. I read furiously. He had angina pectoris and was breathing heavily. Then the hospitable host raised a toast to him. The toast was again about the glow. When Hikmet left, in order not to catch a cold on the street, he wrapped his chest under his shirt with newspapers - ours and foreign ones - there were a lot of them at the dacha. I went to see him off. Events rustled on the poet’s chest, earthly days rustled.

The Gothic Fedin came by, their dachas were adjacent. The William-Vilmont couple went back to the posture of Rokotov’s portraits.

Boris Leonidovich's wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, with an offended bow of her lips, in a velvet black dress, with a black short haircut, looking like an Art Nouveau lady, was worried that her son, Stasik Neuhaus, was supposed to play at a Paris competition in the morning, and his reflexes were evening game.

Ruben Simonov read Pushkin and Pasternak with voluptuous bliss and authority. Vertinsky flashed. The magnificent Irakli Andronikov portrayed Marshak to the Homeric groan.

What a feast for the eyes! What a feast for the spirit! The Renaissance brush, or rather the brush of Borovikovsky and Bryullov, took on flesh in these meals.

Now you look with surprise at the poor decoration of his dacha, at the lineman’s boots that he wore, at the cloak and cap, like today’s poor workers, at the low ceilings - but then they seemed like palaces.

He generously presented to my gaze the splendor of his fellow creatures. We had a kind of silent conspiracy with him. Sometimes, through the drunken monologue of the toast, I suddenly caught his laughing brown conspiratorial glance addressed to me, conveying something understandable only to both of us. It seemed that he was the only one of my age at the table. This community of secret age united us. Often the delight on his face was replaced by an expression of childish resentment, or even stubbornness.

Then the dogs Belka and Strelka, walled up in the satellite, flew across the sky. Pity for them howled in my lines:

Eh, Russia!
Eh, scope...
Smells like dog
in the sky.
Past Mars,
Dneprogesov,
masts, antennas,
factory pipes
a terrible symbol of progress
a dog's corpse is running around...

The description of the First Youth Festival was especially popular among the Olympic audience:

One of the poems ended like this:

Rushes into beliefs
workbench near Moscow,
and I'm an apprentice
in his workshop.

But I didn’t read it in front of him.

These were my first readings in public.

Sometimes I was jealous of him for them. Of course, conversations between the two of us, without guests, were much more valuable to me, or rather, monologues addressed not even to me, but past me - to eternity, to the meaning of life.

At times, a resentment complex kicked up inside me. I rebelled against my idol. One day he called me and said that he liked the font on my typewriter and asked me to retype a series of his poems. Naturally! But this seemed offensive to the child’s pride - why, he considers me to be a typist! I stupidly refused, citing the exam tomorrow, which was true, but not the reason.

* * *

Pasternak is a teenager.

There are artists marked by constant signs of age. So, in Bunin and in a completely different way in Nabokov, there is the clarity of early autumn, they seem to always be forty years old. Pasternak is an eternal teenager, deaf - “I was created by God to torment myself, my relatives and those who are tormented by sin.” Only once in the author’s speech did he indicate his age: “I am fourteen years old.” Once and for all.

How shy he was to the point of blinding himself among strangers, in the crowd, how tensely he bent his neck!..

One day he took me with him to the Vakhtangov Theater for the premiere of Romeo and Juliet in his translation. I was sitting next to him, to his right. My left shoulder, cheek, ear seemed numb from the proximity, as if from anesthesia. I looked at the stage, but still saw him - his luminous profile, his bangs. Sometimes he mumbled the text after the actor. The production was treacly, but L.V. was Juliet. Tselikovskaya, Romeo – Yu.P. Lyubimov, Vakhtangov’s hero-lover, who was not yet thinking about the future Taganka Theater. The scene was illuminated with feeling; their romance, which all of Moscow was talking about, ended with a wedding.

Suddenly Romeo's sword breaks, and - oh, miracle! - its end, having described a fabulous parabola, falls to the arm of Pasternak and I’s shared chair. I bend down and pick it up. My idol laughs. But now there is applause, and without any puns, the audience is chanting: “Author! The author! The embarrassed poet is dragged onto the stage.

Feasts were relaxation. He worked in a galley. Times were scary. Thank God they gave me translations. For two months a year he worked on transfers, “lordly tithes”, so that he could later work for himself. He translated 150 lines a day, saying that otherwise it would be unproductive. Koril Tsvetaeva, who, if she translated, did only 20 lines a day.

From him I also met S. Chikovani, P. Chagin, S. Makashin, I. Noneshvili.

A master of language, in his speech he did not use obscenity and everyday obscenities. But others enthusiastically listened to the richness of the language. “I wouldn’t disdain even an unprintable word.”

He spoke about everything clearly and clearly. “Andryusha, these doctors discovered polyps in my anus.”

Only once did I hear him use the term indirectly. Somehow petty puritans attacked me because I was published in the wrong organ where they wanted. Then Pasternak told a parable about Fet at the table. In a similar situation, Fet allegedly replied: “If Schmidt (I think that was the name of the most low-grade shoemaker in St. Petersburg at that time) published a dirty sheet that was called a three-letter word, I would still be published there. Poems purify.”

How careful and chaste he was! Once he gave me a pack of new poems, which included “Autumn” with Titian’s golden stanza - in purity, permeation with feeling and imagery:

You also take off your dress,
Like a grove shedding its leaves,
When you fall into a hug
In a robe with a silk tassel.

(Original version:

Your open dress
Like leaves shed by a grove...)

In the morning he called me: “Perhaps you thought this was too frank? Zina says I shouldn’t have given it to you, she says it’s too free…”

OK. Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the frank freedom of these lines, supposedly inappropriate for her age. It seems that she was jealous like a woman, jealous of the young passion and power of poetry, of his actions beyond his age, of the novel, of his environment. She spoke irritably about the affair.

Pasternak appreciated her early books and treated her later poems with more than restraint. He gave me a typewritten copy of the “Tashkent Poem” to read, the pages yellowed with age and brown, as if burned on the folds. When I wanted to return it to him, he just waved me off.

“Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin for example, it just seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, anywhere, publicly or in print, did the greats show their human irritation to the public. It pains me to read Akhmatova’s reproaches in Lydia Korneevna’s documentary records, just as it pains me to read the harsh, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in Zinaida Nikolaevna’s memoirs.

For me, Akhmatova was God. The only one in this incarnation is a special female. I knew the “rosary” by heart, but closer, “mine” was Tsvetaeva. Elena Efimovna Tager gave me her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but handwritten in a small, slanted, beaded handwriting, leaving me alone with them in my office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems spoke to me.

And it’s unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. She was probably not delighted with the blond recipient of the poems.

How I understood him! I felt like his accomplice. I already had a secret life then.

Meeting him coincided with my first love.

She was an English teacher at our school. Our romance began suddenly and avalanche. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on the winter benches at night, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and joyfully screamed: “Hello, Elena Sergeevna!”

And how my heart sank at the silence on the telephone!

A dreamer, a former model for Gerasimov, what did she find in an inexperienced schoolboy?

You're ten years late
But still I need you, -

she read to me. And she let down her black braids.

There was an unconscious protest in it against the hated order of life - these breathless meetings in the dark teacher's room, love seemed to us our revolution. Her parents were horrified, and we read with her “Jazz” by Kazarnovsky, her former friend who perished in the camp. She brought me old issues of Krasnaya Novy, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. “Leave once and for all” was her lesson.

I trusted her alone with my acquaintance with Pasternak and gave her the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She made fun of the long names and patronymics of the characters and teased me with supposed misunderstanding. Maybe she was jealous?

Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk and the theatricality of life. She became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak.

As a habitat, the poet needs a secret life, secret freedom. Without her there is no poet.

His support for me was in his very destiny, which shone nearby. It would never even occur to me to ask for something practical - for example, help with getting published or something like that. I was convinced that one does not enter poetry through patronage. When I realized that it was time to publish the poems, I, without saying a word to him, went through the editorial offices like everyone else, without any auxiliary phone calls, I went through all the pre-printing ordeals. One day my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. He calls me into his office. He sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, a hippopotamus. He looks lovingly.

-Are you the son?

- Yes, but...

- No buts. Now it’s possible. Don't hide. He has been rehabilitated. There were mistakes. What a beacon of thought he was! The tea will be brought now. And you are like a son...

- Yes, but...

- No buts. We give your poems in the room. We will be understood correctly. You have a master’s hand, you are especially good at the signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write “caryatids...” Congratulations.

(As I later understood, he mistook me for the son of N.A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Committee.)

-...That is, how not a son? How's the namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring all sorts of harmful nonsense. We won't allow it. And I kept thinking - like such a father, or rather, not a father... What other tea?

But then somehow it got published. I brought the first Litgazeta, smelling of paint, with a selection of poems to him in Peredelkino.

The poet was sick. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager bending over him. The poet's dark head pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how excited he became, how his face trembled! He read the poems out loud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So, my affairs are not so bad,” he suddenly said. What he liked about the poems was that which was free in form. “Aseev is probably looking for you now,” he joked.

Aseev, ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face, similar to a pointed arch, fanatical, like a Catholic preacher, with thin poisonous lips, Aseev of the “Blue Hussars” and “Oksana”, minstrel of construction sites, reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly soared over Moscow in his tower on the corner of Gorky and Moscow Art Theater passage, and for years did not leave it, like Prometheus chained to the telephone.

I have never met a person who loved other people's poems so selflessly. An artist, an instrument of taste and scent, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, could smell a line a mile away - this is how he tenaciously assessed V. Sosnora and Y. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his fiery love. I caught them when they had already missed each other for a long time. How difficult are the disagreements between artists! Aseev always lovingly and jealously inquired - how is “your Pasternak”? The same one spoke about him distantly - “even Aseev’s last thing is a little cold.” Once I brought him Aseev’s book, he returned it to me without reading it.

Aseev is a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry.

“It turns out they call you Andrei Andreevich? How great! We all hit doubles. Mayakovsky - Vladim Vladimych, I - Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilyevich, Kruchenykh...” - “And Boris Leonidovich?” “The exception only confirms the rule.”

Aseev came up with a nickname for me - Vazhashchensky, gave me poems: “Your guitar is a guitar, Andryusha”, saved me in difficult times with the article “What to do with Voznesensky?”, directed against the critics’ manner of “reading in thoughts.” He chivalrously reflected attacks on young sculptors and painters in newspapers.

While in Paris, I gave interviews left and right. One of them came across Lila Yuryevna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev.

- Kolenka, Andryusha has such success in Paris...

The tube was happy.

– Here he talks about our poetry in an interview...

The tube was happy.

– Lists the names of poets...

– Where am I in?

- Yes, Kolenka, you’re not here at all...

Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but probably the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but had not heard of Aseev and threw it out. Well, how can you explain this to him?! You'll offend me even more.

There was a rupture. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “You endorsed this interview! That’s the order...” Not only did I not endorse it, but I didn’t remember which newspaper it was in.

After the scandal with Khrushchev, the editor of Pravda persuaded him, and his response appeared in Pravda, where he condemned the poet “who puts a poetess he knows next to Lermontov.”

Later, probably bored, he called, but his mother hung up. We didn't see each other again.

He stayed for me in the Blue Hussars, in Oksana.

In his panorama “Mayakovsky Begins” he named in a large circle next to the names of Khlebnikov and Pasternak the name of Alexei Kruchenykh.

* * *

There was a smell of mice in my manuscript.

The sharp nose twitches and looks into my manuscript. Pasternak warned against meeting him. It appeared immediately after my first newspaper publication.

He was a literature ragpicker.

His name was Leksey Eliseich, Kruchka, but Kurchonok would have suited him better.

The skin of his cheeks was childish, pimply, always overgrown with gray stubble, growing in neglected tufts, like that of a badly singed chicken. He was a crappy sprout. He dressed in rags. Next to him, Plyushkin would look like a regular at fashion salons. His nose was always sniffing out something, sniffing out something - well, not a manuscript, but a photograph to get hold of. It seemed that he had always existed - not even a bubble of the earth, no, a mold of time, a werewolf of communal quarrels, ghoul rustles, cobweb corners. You thought it was a layer of dust, but it turns out that it has been sitting in the corner for an hour.

He lived on Kirovskaya in a small storage room. It smelled like mouse. There was no light. The only window was filled to the ceiling, dirty - with junk, bales, half-eaten cans, centuries-old dust, where he, like a squirrel, hid mushrooms and berries - his treasures - antique books and lists.

The final game of the spring 2017 series. The team of Balash Kasumov is playing.

Participants

Team of experts

• Elizaveta Ovdeenko
• Dmitry Avdeenko
• Mikhail Skipsky
• Yulia Lazareva
• Elman Talibov
• Balash Kasumov

TV Viewer Team

• Sergey Ginev (St. Petersburg)
• Saadat Seidova (Baku)
• Ekaterina Lutova (Saransk)
• Olga Zhuravleva (Novosibirsk)
• Elena Kondratenko (Detchino village)
• Yulia Sharonova (Volgograd)
• Alexander Korovin (Krasnoyarsk)
• Sergey Smolenyuk (Kostanay)
• Maxim Rylkov (Nizy village)
• Valentina Semina (Moscow)

Also on the gaming table are “Blitz”, “Super Blitz” and “Sector 13”.

Round 1 (Sergey Ginev, St. Petersburg)

Fragment

Yugoslav actor Gojko Mitic, famous performer of the Indian role. On the screen is a fragment from the film "Apache". As you can see, the actor handled all these tricks easily. And what, according to the actor, was the most difficult for him?

Elman Talibov answers: The hardest thing for him was to speak German: he was Yugoslavian, and the film was produced in the GDR
Correct answer: He was very athletic and the hardest part for him was the episodes where he was forced to smoke the Peace Pipe. He couldn't stand the smell of tobacco.
The TV viewer receives 50,000 rubles. Check - 0: 1

Round 2 (Saadat Seidova, Baku)

You probably have to be flying,
To play them from bottom to top,
When there's a secret thrill to the sky
ran through her body,
To her as an angel horizontal
Midnight Richter arrived.

What did Andrei Voznesensky devote his poem to?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Cellos
Correct answer: Piano keyboard in white and black. Voznesensky dedicated a poem to birches.
The TV viewer receives 60,000 rubles. Check - 0: 2

Round 3 (“13 sector” - Kristina Rogozhina, Brest)

What should the Chinese have like a good knife: if you press on it, it bends, if you let it go, it’s straight and strong again?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Character
Correct answer: The end of a calligraphy brush.
Based on the voting results, the viewer receives 57,000 rubles. Check - 0: 3

Round 4 (Olga Zhuravleva, Novosibirsk)

Attention, puzzle!

Puzzle

Here is a puzzle by Winfred Wright, invented by him in the 60s of the 20th century and received a prize at the World Intellectual Puzzle Competition. Continue this series and tell me what helped the author come up with this puzzle?

Connoisseurs take "Club Help". Elman Talibov answers: It's the clock striking after a certain time
The answer is correct.
Check - 1: 3

Round 5 (Elena Kondratenko, Detchino village, Kaluga region)

Attention, competition winner!

The result is a profile of Pushkin

In 2011, the All-Russian Poster Competition “Reading is not harmful, but not reading is harmful” was held. Here is a fragment of the work of the winner Masha Knyazeva. What will happen if you finish this work the way Masha did?

Yulia Lazareva answers: Pushkin's profile
Correct answer: Chargers, wires, modern gadgets - all this often replaces books. Masha finished her work in such a way that it turned out to be a portrait of Pushkin.
Check - 2: 3

Round 6 (Yulia Sharonova, Volgograd)

Photo

Guide-dog

The photograph of graduates from one of the faculties of the University of Cadiz contains 89 portraits. Whose photo on the right did we hide from you?

Mikhail Skipsky answers: The person to the left of the hidden photo has vision problems. Hidden photo of guide dog
The answer is correct.
Check - 3: 3

Round 7 (Alexander Korovin, Krasnoyarsk)

Emotional outlets

When we come to Australia or China, they greet us with horror. In the USA and Mexico with surprise, but in Denmark with a smile. And at home they greet us without emotion, one is now in your black box. What's there?

Elman Talibov answers: Socket.
The answer is correct.
Check - 4: 3

Round 8 (Ekaterina Lutova, Saransk)

Vsevolod Meyerhold describes the heroine of one of his articles as a very cautious person. When she cries, her hand holds the handkerchief without touching her eyes; when she stabs her opponent, the end of the sword does not touch his chest. Her embrace is the height of caution, without a hint of ambiguity. Name the heroine of the article.

Elman Talibov answers: Glory
Correct answer: Puppet doll.
The TV viewer receives 80,000 rubles. Check - 4: 4

Round 9 (Sergey Smolenyuk, Kostanay)

On May 7, 1945, a package was delivered to the states of the 1st Belorussian Front by courier mail. In addition to the secret documents, there were notes of 3 pieces of music, which the musicians of the military orchestra had to learn within 24 hours. Name these works.

Ivan Maryshev answers: Anthems of the Allied Powers during World War II - England, USA, France
The answer is correct.
Check - 5: 4

Round 10 (“Blitz” - Sergey Chevdar, Chernomorsk)

Question 1. This plant was built in Turin in 1923. What products did this plant produce?

Yulia Lazareva answers: This plant produced cars that were then tested on the same track
The answer is correct.

Question 2. The top part of the photograph in which the author advertises his invention. What invention is hidden?

Elman Talibov answers: Trampoline
The answer is correct.

Question 3. “This is a crazy woman who collects bright rags and throws away bread.” What did the writer Austin O Malley say?

Dmitry Avdeenko answers: Yellow press
Correct answer: Memory.
The TV viewer receives 90,000 rubles. Check - 5: 5

Round 11 (Maxim Rylkov, Nizy village)

If you return from the fair with your pockets full of money, say that you didn’t earn anything, and if you actually didn’t earn anything, say that it was the best fair of your life. With whom did Sholom Aleichem advise to behave this way and why?

Elman Talibov answers: With your neighbors so that they don’t get jealous and you get satisfaction after an unsuccessful fair
The answer is correct.
Check - 6: 5

Game results

• Balash Kasumov's team wins the final of the Spring Series.
• Elman Talibov becomes the owner of the Crystal Atom.
• The author of the best question is Saadat Seidova (question about birches).
• The winner of the Crystal Owl is Yulia Lazareva.

• On this day, Philip Kirkorov celebrated his 50th birthday. Since he often performed at the club during musical breaks, it was decided to award Kirkorov a special Diamond Owl.

Greetings from the northern sisters..."

But she is calm and sleepless,

without answering, it grows above me.

^ IN MEMORY OF VLADIMIR VYSOTSKY

Don't call him a bard.

He was a poet by nature.

We lost our little brother -

People's Volodya.

The streets of Vysotsky remained,

there is a tribe left in the "Levi Ostrich"

from Cherny to Okhotsk

the country remained unsung.

Around you behind the fresh turf

the ever-living crowd is growing.

You wanted so badly not to be an actor -

to be called a poet.

To the right of the entrance to Vagankovo

grave dug vacant.

Covered Hamlet of Tagansky

Yesenin's shovel earth.

The rain puts out the wax candles...

All that remains of Vysotsky,

tape packaging

They are carried away like living bandages.

You lived, played and sang with a grin.

Russian love and wound.

You won't fit in a black frame.

Human boundaries are too small for you.

With what mental overload

you sang Khlopushka and Shakespeare -

you were talking about ours, Russian,

so that it pinched and pinched!

Scribes will remain scribes

in perishable and coated papers.

Singers will remain singers

in the people's sigh of millions...

You'll probably soon forget,

that he lived on a short earth.

History won't wake up

the ragged cry of the chansonnier.

They bring you candles across the abyss.

And the rain extinguishes them by knocking,

for each candle - a drop,

for every drop - a candle.

Wherever I have been in recent days,

through the backwaters of a downtrodden life -

as if you are at the mouth of premonitions,

turning into a sea of ​​events.

Everything that is mourned comes true in a disastrous way.

At night you will see separation from a friend.

The feeling has the opposite effect.

When you arrive in the morning, his friend is gone.

Morning comes with crowing.

Oh don't fly that plane!

As if a requiem is being written first,

and then everything goes like clockwork.

All my disputes fall on tails.

Thinking is dangerous.

Just thinking that you will cut yourself, -

God! - she ran in with a cut finger.

Okay, if only this were foresight.

The very thought causes ruin.

Just don’t think before you fly!

Do not doubt your soul friend!

Don't doubt it, don't doubt it

in the very last dog in the world.

With a feeling, bring her back from the slurs -

so as not to see bluish nails -

I was walking along the bed of some river,

driven by sadness. When I came to my senses,

time has darkened. Leaves were heard:

"We are thoughts!"

Steam rose from the tributaries of the river:

"We are feelings!"

I got lost, which was unfortunate.

The steppe was beginning. It became difficult to walk.

The gopher looked out with a periscope

underground and unawakened power.

I went out to the sea. And there was that sea-

like a repetition of a forgotten engraving -

phantasmagoria for everyone! -

waves of people were clusters of grief,

in the chorus of the drowned, utopias and pestilence

the city fluttered with electric moths,

the corpses of history are like a laxative,

washed away by the expanse of love and reproach.

My sea was fed by the river.

The feeling preceded the event.

The round sea is put on the river,

like the crown of a noisy summer on the trunk,

or a boxer's glove on his hand,

or sad Mozart on the flute,

or a mask on the soul of the body -

the feeling was the root cause.

"Friend, we are at the mouth with you,

at the mouth of premonitions -

where the river merges with the worldly,

drink from the mouth!

See, the coins are blinking in the sky.

The stars are called.

Gagarin threw these coins,

to return to the sky..."

What was it? Mirage over the abyss?

Or has he closed himself off with the soul of the world?

What kind of dog-eating is this?

smell, or rather, be the cause?..

And those around me suffer with me.

You live to the end frankly.

And from our confused days

two stitches appeared above the vein,

thank God, over her.

And the more the hand tans

and the hand will fall back in happiness,

appear more and more clearly on it

two calm and slippery laces.

TALK

It's like nothing else!

You trample your coat with your boots.

You don't look like a mad cat.

You are like nothing else.

Your tenderness is not like tenderness.

You throw the cups on the floor, on the table.

You don't look like armless Venus.

You are like nothing else!

For this without reproach,

and despite the fact

I call you my life.

Everything is different.

Brother doesn't look like brother

the pain doesn't feel like pain.

The hour is different from the hour.

He is different from you.

The sea is like nothing else.

Rain is not like a sieve.

Are you still continuing? God!

You are like nothing else.

The silence of freedom is like nothing else.

Water is not like hot skin on your cheeks.

The towel doesn't look like it

on the flowing

water from your cheeks.

And it doesn't look like captivity at all.

hook draped over the door.

What kind of Russian are you?

Don't you like poetry?

People are rotten to you,

and they are fireflies.

How narrow you are

if your heart is not a brother

every non-Russian song,

where the verbs hurt...

Really from the cradle

have you ever been in love

in the genealogical rhyme book

patronymics after names?

Like a millionth sigh

married names:

Marya Illarionovna,

Zlata Yurievna.

You, timidly, will call out

from the names of times,

as if calling Kitezh

from the depths of Ilmen.

Like grief with hope

will call from the window

bell-unearthly:

Olga Igorevna.

These saintly poems

the relatives said out loud,

like family pearls

bequeathed in names.

What kind of moaning music is this?

reflected fate

and family and history

take it out on the hump?

As if under anesthesia

from a crystal dream

name - Anastasia

Alekseevna...

I don't believe in yours

feeling for home.

You can't love your own

out of hatred for someone else's.

When I hear your selfish squeal,

I realize how right I am.

Non-existent in literature

we are taught to live according to our own rules.

Between a rock and a hard place

I'm slouching again.

Again the damned horseshoe

I will bring happiness to someone.

^ NUN OF THE SEA

I see you at noon

between baked apples,

and in the morning I’ll run-

nun of the sea in a furry hood

you are standing on the shore.

You are as passionate as prayers

you read kilometers.

Your triangular rabbit

endless separation threshes like cutlets,

but it does not subdue the blood.

In vain you prolong your hunger

distances.

The desire is growing.

No matter how much sea you have, it is still not enough.

Oh, sports! you're a devil...

When the storm throws boxes

with champagne

silverheads are like a fist in the gut,

naked nun reckless,

throw yourself under them!

Turning pale under the tan

you will come out of the cascades.

Then you will tell someone, returning to the cities:

"Who did you love? The sea..."

And you will tell him everything.

During the kiss

the beard grows.

I grabbed my heart again

scattered crowd of birches

broaching keyboards,

placed on the butt.

It's like the keys have come unglued,

lagging behind, the birch bark trembles.

And everything that cannot be corrected in life,

she bursts into tears.

Do you remember these verticals?

The reverse side of a copper mushroom

with the name "cleft lip"

turned green like the pedals.

How publicly lonely

the fate of the regional darlings,

magpie feather on the road

again, like a key, dropping!

One of them was the rarest

incomprehensible again.

Probably you have to be flying,

to play it from bottom to top.

When there's a secret thrill to the sky

ran through her body -

towards her with an angel horizontal

midnight Richter arrived.

For this, looking askance at her,

The woodcutter will fall to the ground.

At the Conservatory on trestles

she screams like a human.

What is for non-equipment,

to her - like a saw and axes.

You should rinse your fingers

after the game, after the game...

The sunsets are curtained,

or maybe a day behind the scenes,

another time in the world?

Why are you like this to me?

with endless legs -

from here to Taimyr?

The glasses are filled,

glasses drained

and glasses are raised.

For what? For our secrets.

For making a wish.

Why are you like this to me?

Why am I indulging

your stupid antics?

They'd kick you...

In public - a chatterbox,

and nearby - quieter than an exhalation,

Why are you like this to me?

The vertebrae are showing slightly

like a road hidden by snow.

Don't "write", don't "call" -

be like this, for God's sake...

When we talk to you,

in the mouth - like mint languor,

I'm a genius if I'm worthy

call you and be yours.

I love pine air!

Sentimentality is from the evil one.

Breathe separation into yourself to the point of chills,

before acupuncture, before acupuncture...

Thread a branch into each needle,

Thread a tree into each branch,

thread your homeland into every tree -

and you will understand why it is so caustic.

CREATOR

I visited the artist after his death

along with the accompanying local devil.

The rooms were deserted, like frames,

what without a picture.

But from one of them I could hear Tchaikovsky.

Remembering the empty halls,

with a tall guest with a round hairstyle,

I walked as if with a black balloon.

Tchaikovsky was approaching from under the doors.

A woman sat in a chair outside the door.

40 portraits surrounded her.

The thought that preceded creation

made a sign that we should not interfere.

How intense is the work of a model!

Easels worked on it on tripods.

I recognized in their ever new designs

restless and lonely character -

now a nail, now three eyes, now a trophy bayonet,

how he loved her at that time!

Didn't find satisfaction

the thought that preceded creation.

Above the radiator

Tchaikovsky was spinning, interpreted by Gena

Rozhdestvensky. The ball begged him to the sky

release. There was a thunderstorm in the sky.

The cloud smelled like a bag of apples.

Everyone has already felt this:

as if they were ventilating the room -

the thought that preceded creation,

the passion that preceded creation,

the melancholy that precedes creation,

buildings and trees were shaking!

A thought in the form of a woman was sitting in a chair.

There was a smile, but there was no body.

The thought of the dog licked my knees.

The alley stood with the thought of the sea.

The thought of the stepladder, exciting, turned white -

there is a crossbar in it that was missing,

the thought of the rib was present.

The consumer society was gathering.

The thought of the apple rolled off the plate.

The thought of you was on the nightstand.

"How he loved her!" - I thought.

“Yes,” answered from the front

the bewildered darkness of creation.

Here's the background to their relationship.

Came out as a student. The years were few.

The age of a genius is that he is a genius.

She believed, therefore, she understood.

How jealous he is of her, having walked away!

Try taking a shower in his bathroom -

the shower takes his shape.

Their romance does not last for strangers.

Turned over double sided

Chaikovsky. There were moans in the melody

Antonov apple trees. Like the thought of the creator,

It was autumn. The house was caulked.

The ball rubbed its cheek against the lime.

The thought of me turned Tchaikovsky on,

according to old memory, above the greenhouses.

He staged it in sixty-four.

Guests did not penetrate into this.

"Everything was justified, the master is half naked,

what did you promise me in the rough walls

an angry eclipse of a bald ball,

elbows of black triangles."

The doubtful sea beckoned.

The dubious raspberries have dried up.

Only one thing was certain -

the idea of ​​the meaninglessness of creation.

The thought of the blackthorn blossomed on the terrace.

Thank you, master of modernism!

What am I? Thought slip?

A stylus that was washed off with a rag?

I didn't ask to be created!

But drowned out my talking room

Matter. Garden. Tchaikovsky, probably.

The apples were falling. The labukhs were crying.

There were apples - shovel them!

I took these apples on my knees

apple fall, apple fall.

I took off my shirt. On bare shoulder blades

They hit me like cold fists.

I laughed under the apple fall.

There were no apple trees - the apples fell.

He tied the execution shirt with his sleeves.

He filled it with fruits like a basket.

It was heavy, it moved, it smelled.

A woman was sitting in a man's shirt.

I created you from fallen apples,

from the dust - great, homeless!

Under the right squirrel, squinting to one side,

a mole stuck like a dark grain.

From snow apples so in the yard we

we blind a woman. So on my knees

we sculpt our favorites. To the lady of the house

I supposedly introduced you as a guest.

You handed out apples to all the guests.

And she spoke in black soil.

There stood the apple tree savior,

my shy sensation.

Among the sofas, eyes asked:

"Senza!"

How do you know, smiling,

in a shirt, like in a short dress,

that, having forgotten yourself, you fall in love, you throw off your shirt

and you'll roll like balls on the ground!..

Above the bus stop

the cloud smelled like a bag of Antonovka.

The ball flew away. It was windy in the world.

Farewell, accidental creation!

Have you spent the night in the creator's dacha?

on the loneliness of thorny sacks?

1-1 flashed through your mind:

"Thank you for what you give."

that I became part of yours,

sea ​​and land, garden in Tarusa,

thank you for what you give,

that I didn’t live like a little mouse,

that I didn’t double-deal with you, time,

even when you give me a cookie,

and for the furious blows,

even for reaching the handle,

even for this poem,

Font: Less Ahh More Ahh

My soul, shadow,

I confess you.

Please don't put out my mascara before my due date!

Entered the world

and those who have not found themselves,

we are only objective shadows of the soul.

December 1997 Andrey Voznesensky

© Voznesensky A.A., heirs, 2018

© ITAR-TASS/Interpress, 2018

© "Tsentrpoligraf", 2018

© Artistic design, Tsentrpoligraf, 2018

Virtual keyboard

According to his note we set up our lives

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the lyrics to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos standing next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart,
she was blind from tears -
like a white keyboard,
placed on the butt.
Her sadness seemed a secret.
Nobody understood her.
To her as an angel horizontal
midnight Richter arrived.
What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?
God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of the publishing house that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost all the publishing house employees gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh and add: “But at the same time, these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.

“And it was cold for the baby in the den...”

“Pasternak on the phone!”

The numb parents stared at me. When I was in sixth grade, without telling anyone, I sent him poems and a letter. This was the first decisive action that determined my life. And so he responded and invited me to his place for two hours on Sunday.

It was December. I arrived at the gray house in Lavrushinsky, of course, an hour before. After waiting, he took the elevator up to the dark landing of the eighth floor. There was still a minute left until two. Behind the door, they apparently heard the elevator slam. The door opened.

He stood in the doorway.

Everything swam before me. A surprised, elongated, dark flame of a face looked at me. Some kind of floppy stearine knitted sweater hugged his strong figure. The wind moved my bangs. It is no coincidence that he later chose a burning candle for his self-portrait. He stood in the draft of the door.

The dry, strong brush of a pianist.

I was struck by the asceticism and poverty-stricken spaciousness of his unheated office. A square photo of Mayakovsky and a dagger on the wall. Muller's English-Russian Dictionary - he was then chained to translations. My student notebook was huddled on the table, probably prepared for the conversation. A wave of horror and adoration passed through me. But it's too late to run.

He spoke from the middle.

His cheekbones trembled like the triangular frames of wings, pressed tightly before fluttering. I idolized him. He had drive, strength and heavenly inadaptability. When he spoke, he twitched and pulled his chin up, as if he wanted to break out of his collar and out of his body.

Soon it became very easy to work with him. I look at him on the sly.

His short nose, starting from the deepening of the bridge of the nose, immediately went hump, then continued straight, reminiscent of a dark gun butt in miniature. Sphinx lips. Short gray haircut. But the main thing is a floating, smoking wave of magnetism. “He, who compared himself to a horse’s eye...”

Two hours later I walked away from him, carrying in my arms his manuscripts - for reading, and the most precious thing - the typewritten first part of his new prose novel, just completed, called "Doctor Zhivago" and an emerald notebook of new poems from this novel, bound with crimson silk with a lace. Unable to resist, I opened it as I walked and swallowed the breathless lines:

And it was cold for the baby in the den...
All the Christmas trees in the world, all the children’s dreams,

The poems had the feeling of a schoolboy in pre-revolutionary Moscow; childhood was mesmerizing - the most serious of Pasternak’s mysteries.

All the thrill of warmed candles, all the chains...

The poems preserved the later crystalline state of his soul. I found him in the fall. Autumn is clear to the point of clairvoyance. And the country of childhood came closer.

...All the apples, all the golden balls...

From that day on, my life was decided, acquired a magical meaning and purpose: his new poems, telephone conversations, Sunday conversations with him from two to four, walks - years of happiness and childish love.

* * *

Why did he respond to me?

He was lonely in those years, rejected, exhausted from bullying, he wanted sincerity, purity of relationships, he wanted to break out of the circle - and yet not only that. Maybe this strange relationship with a teenager, a schoolboy, this almost friendship explains something about him? This is not even friendship between a lion and a dog, or rather, a lion and a puppy.

Maybe he loved himself in me, who ran to Scriabin as a schoolboy?

He was drawn to childhood. The call of childhood did not stop within him.

He didn’t like it when people called him; he called himself, sometimes several times a week. Then there were painful breaks. I was never recommended to my bewildered family members by first name or patronymic, always by last name.

He spoke excitedly, recklessly. Then, at full speed, he suddenly ended the conversation. He never complained, no matter what clouds overshadowed him.

“An artist,” he said, “is essentially optimistic. The essence of creativity is optimistic. Even when you write tragic things, you must write strongly, and despondency and laziness do not give birth to works of strength.” The speech flowed in a continuous, choking monologue. It had more music than grammar. Speech was not divided into phrases, phrases into words - everything flowed in an unconscious stream of consciousness, the thought muttered, returned, bewitched. His poetry had the same flow.

* * *

When he moved permanently to Peredelkino, phone calls became less frequent. There was no telephone at the dacha. He went to call the office. The night area was filled with the echo of his voice from the window, he turned to the stars. I lived from bell to bell. He often called me when he was reading something new at the dacha.

His dacha resembled a wooden replica of Scottish towers. Like an old chess tour, it stood in a line of other dachas on the edge of a huge square Peredelkino field, lined with plowing. From the other end of the field, from behind the cemetery, like figures of a different color, the church and bell tower of the 16th century gleamed like carved king and queen, toy-colored dwarf relatives of St. Basil.

The order of dachas shuddered under the murderous sight of the cemetery domes. Now few of the owners of that time have survived.

Readings took place in his semicircular lantern office on the second floor.

We were going. They brought chairs from below. Usually there were about twenty guests. They were waiting for the late Livanovs.

From the solid windows you can see the September district. Forests are burning. A car is running towards the cemetery. A cobweb pulls out the window. On the other side of the field, from behind the cemetery, as colorful as a rooster, a church peeps sideways - who would you like to peck? The air above the field is shaking. And the same excited trembling in the air of the office. The nerve of anticipation trembles within him.

To pass the pause, D.N. Zhuravlev, the great reader of Chekhov and the tuning fork of the Old Arbat elite, shows how they sat at social receptions - with their backs arched and only feeling the back of the chair with their shoulder blades. This is him reprimanding me in a tactful manner! I feel myself blushing. But out of embarrassment and stubbornness I slouch and lean my elbows even more.

Finally the late ones arrive. She is timid, nervously graceful, making the excuse that it was difficult to get flowers. He is huge, spreading his arms and rolling his eyes in buffoonish horror: the prime minister, the shaker of the Moscow Art Theater, the Homeric performer of Nozdryov and Potemkin, a kind of shirtless gentleman.

They became quiet. Pasternak sat down at the table. He was wearing a light silver jacket like a French jacket, like those that later became fashionable among Western left-wing intellectuals. He read the poems at the end. That time he read “White Night”, “The Nightingale”, “The Fairy Tale”, well, in a word, the entire notebook of this period. While reading, he peered at something above your heads, visible only to him. The face became longer and thinner. And the light of the white night was the jacket he was wearing.

I imagine a distant time,
House on the Petersburg side.
The daughter of a poor steppe landowner,
You are on a course, you are from Kursk.

Prose? Poetry? Like in a white night everything got mixed up. He called it his main book. He delivered dialogues, naively trying to speak in different voices. His ear for the common language was magical! Like a cockerel, Neuhaus jumped up, shouted, winked at the listeners: “Let him, your Yuri, write more poetry!” He gathered guests as he completed part of the work. So I listened to everything he wrote over the years, notebook after notebook, the entire poetic novel, in his voice.

Readings usually lasted about two hours. Sometimes, when he needed to explain something to the listeners, he turned to me, as if explaining to me: “Andryusha, here in “The Fairy Tale” I wanted to emboss the emblem of feeling like on a medal: a warrior-savior and a maiden on his saddle.” This was our game. I knew these poems by heart; in them he brought to the pinnacle his technique of naming an action, an object, a state. Hooves clattered in the verses:

Closed eyelids.
Heights. Clouds.
Water. Brody. Rivers.
Years and centuries.

He spared the audience's pride. Then, in a circle, he asked who liked which poems more. The majority answered: “Everything.” He was annoyed at the evasiveness of the answer. Then they singled out “White Night”. Livanov called "Hamlet". The unplayed Hamlet was his tragedy, and he drowned out this pain with his arrogance and the courage of a buffoon.

The hum died down. I took to the stage
Leaning against the door frame...

Livanov blew his nose. His swollen undereyes became even more pronounced. But a minute later he was already laughing, because everyone was invited down to the feast.

We went down. They found themselves surrounded, in a blue fireworks display of evaporating models by his father, perhaps the only Russian impressionist artist.

Oh, these Peredelkino meals! There weren't enough chairs. They pulled down the stools. Pasternak led the feast in the rapture of Georgian ritual. He was a cordial owner. He embarrassed the departing guest and handed everyone their coats himself.

Who are they, the poet’s guests?

Tiny, quiet Genrikh Gustavovich Neuhaus, Garrick, with uncouth granite hair, squints with the dry radiance of his mind. The absent-minded Richter, Slava, the youngest at the table, slightly closed his eyelids, tasting the colors and sounds. “I have a question for Slava! Glory! Tell me, does art exist?” – Pasternak asked sobbingly.

“I knew Kachalov’s Jim. Don't believe me? - the thunderous Livanov boiled and poured. - Give me your paw, Jim... It was a black evil devil. Beelzebub! Everyone was in awe. He would come in and lie down under the dining table. None of the diners dared to move a foot. It’s not like touching the velvet fur. I would have grabbed my hand right away. What a joke! And he said: “Give me your paw...” Let’s drink to poetry, Boris!”

Nearby, big-eyed Zhuravlev in a brown pair, like a cockchafer, squinted embarrassedly and tenderly. Asmus thought. Vsevolod Ivanov came in with open-legged, bear-like movements, shouting: “I gave birth to a son for you, Boris!”

The boy Koma sat here and read poetry: “Tulips, tulips, tulips to whom?!”

I remember the ancient Anna Akhmatova, august in her poetry and age. She was taciturn, wearing a wide robe like a tunic. Pasternak sat me down next to her. So I remembered her in half profile for the rest of my life. But even she almost did not exist for me next to Pasternak.

The arrival of Hikmet crashed. The owner raised a toast in honor of him, in honor of the revolutionary glow behind his shoulders. Nazim, answering, complained that no one around him understood anything in Turkish, and that he was not only a glower, but also a poet and now reads poetry. I read furiously. He had angina pectoris and was breathing heavily. Then the hospitable host raised a toast to him. The toast was again about the glow. When Hikmet left, in order not to catch a cold on the street, he wrapped his chest under his shirt with newspapers - ours and foreign ones - there were a lot of them at the dacha. I went to see him off. Events rustled on the poet’s chest, earthly days rustled.

The Gothic Fedin came by, their dachas were adjacent. The William-Vilmont couple went back to the posture of Rokotov’s portraits.

Boris Leonidovich's wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, with an offended bow of her lips, in a velvet black dress, with a black short haircut, looking like an Art Nouveau lady, was worried that her son, Stasik Neuhaus, was supposed to play at a Paris competition in the morning, and his reflexes were evening game.

Ruben Simonov read Pushkin and Pasternak with voluptuous bliss and authority. Vertinsky flashed. The magnificent Irakli Andronikov portrayed Marshak to the Homeric groan.

What a feast for the eyes! What a feast for the spirit! The Renaissance brush, or rather the brush of Borovikovsky and Bryullov, took on flesh in these meals.

Now you look with surprise at the poor decoration of his dacha, at the lineman’s boots that he wore, at the cloak and cap, like today’s poor workers, at the low ceilings - but then they seemed like palaces.

He generously presented to my gaze the splendor of his fellow creatures. We had a kind of silent conspiracy with him. Sometimes, through the drunken monologue of the toast, I suddenly caught his laughing brown conspiratorial glance addressed to me, conveying something understandable only to both of us. It seemed that he was the only one of my age at the table. This community of secret age united us. Often the delight on his face was replaced by an expression of childish resentment, or even stubbornness.

Then the dogs Belka and Strelka, walled up in the satellite, flew across the sky. Pity for them howled in my lines:

Eh, Russia!
Eh, scope...
Smells like dog
in the sky.
Past Mars,
Dneprogesov,
masts, antennas,
factory pipes
a terrible symbol of progress
a dog's corpse is running around...

The description of the First Youth Festival was especially popular among the Olympic audience:

Dance of bottles
blouses, breasts -
it's in Butyrki
shaving whores.
Almost zero hair
will to zero -
you won't go out anymore
on holiday...

One of the poems ended like this:

Rushes into beliefs
workbench near Moscow,
and I'm an apprentice
in his workshop.

But I didn’t read it in front of him.

These were my first readings in public.

Sometimes I was jealous of him for them. Of course, conversations between the two of us, without guests, were much more valuable to me, or rather, monologues addressed not even to me, but past me - to eternity, to the meaning of life.

At times, a resentment complex kicked up inside me. I rebelled against my idol. One day he called me and said that he liked the font on my typewriter and asked me to retype a series of his poems. Naturally! But this seemed offensive to the child’s pride - why, he considers me to be a typist! I stupidly refused, citing the exam tomorrow, which was true, but not the reason.

* * *

Pasternak is a teenager.

There are artists marked by constant signs of age. So, in Bunin and in a completely different way in Nabokov, there is the clarity of early autumn, they seem to always be forty years old. Pasternak is an eternal teenager, deaf - “I was created by God to torment myself, my relatives and those who are tormented by sin.” Only once in the author’s speech did he indicate his age: “I am fourteen years old.” Once and for all.

How shy he was to the point of blinding himself among strangers, in the crowd, how tensely he bent his neck!..

One day he took me with him to the Vakhtangov Theater for the premiere of Romeo and Juliet in his translation. I was sitting next to him, to his right. My left shoulder, cheek, ear seemed numb from the proximity, as if from anesthesia. I looked at the stage, but still saw him - his luminous profile, his bangs. Sometimes he mumbled the text after the actor. The production was treacly, but L.V. was Juliet. Tselikovskaya, Romeo – Yu.P. Lyubimov, Vakhtangov’s hero-lover, who was not yet thinking about the future Taganka Theater. The scene was illuminated with feeling; their romance, which all of Moscow was talking about, ended with a wedding.

Suddenly Romeo's sword breaks, and - oh, miracle! - its end, having described a fabulous parabola, falls to the arm of Pasternak and I’s shared chair. I bend down and pick it up. My idol laughs. But now there is applause, and without any puns, the audience is chanting: “Author! The author! The embarrassed poet is dragged onto the stage.

Feasts were relaxation. He worked in a galley. Times were scary. Thank God they gave me translations. For two months a year he worked on transfers, “lordly tithes”, so that he could later work for himself. He translated 150 lines a day, saying that otherwise it would be unproductive. Koril Tsvetaeva, who, if she translated, did only 20 lines a day.

From him I also met S. Chikovani, P. Chagin, S. Makashin, I. Noneshvili.

A master of language, in his speech he did not use obscenity and everyday obscenities. But others enthusiastically listened to the richness of the language. “I wouldn’t disdain even an unprintable word.”

He spoke about everything clearly and clearly. “Andryusha, these doctors discovered polyps in my anus.”

Only once did I hear him use the term indirectly. Somehow petty puritans attacked me because I was published in the wrong organ where they wanted. Then Pasternak told a parable about Fet at the table. In a similar situation, Fet allegedly replied: “If Schmidt (I think that was the name of the most low-grade shoemaker in St. Petersburg at that time) published a dirty sheet that was called a three-letter word, I would still be published there. Poems purify.”

How careful and chaste he was! Once he gave me a pack of new poems, which included “Autumn” with Titian’s golden stanza - in purity, permeation with feeling and imagery:

You also take off your dress,
Like a grove shedding its leaves,
When you fall into a hug
In a robe with a silk tassel.

(Original version:

Your open dress
Like leaves shed by a grove...)

In the morning he called me: “Perhaps you thought this was too frank? Zina says I shouldn’t have given it to you, she says it’s too free…”

OK. Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the frank freedom of these lines, supposedly inappropriate for her age. It seems that she was jealous like a woman, jealous of the young passion and power of poetry, of his actions beyond his age, of the novel, of his environment. She spoke irritably about the affair.

Pasternak appreciated her early books and treated her later poems with more than restraint. He gave me a typewritten copy of the “Tashkent Poem” to read, the pages yellowed with age and brown, as if burned on the folds. When I wanted to return it to him, he just waved me off.

“Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin for example, it just seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, anywhere, publicly or in print, did the greats show their human irritation to the public. It pains me to read Akhmatova’s reproaches in Lydia Korneevna’s documentary records, just as it pains me to read the harsh, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in Zinaida Nikolaevna’s memoirs.

For me, Akhmatova was God. The only one in this incarnation is a special female. I knew the “rosary” by heart, but closer, “mine” was Tsvetaeva. Elena Efimovna Tager gave me her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but handwritten in a small, slanted, beaded handwriting, leaving me alone with them in my office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems spoke to me.

And it’s unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. She was probably not delighted with the blond recipient of the poems.

How I understood him! I felt like his accomplice. I already had a secret life then.

Meeting him coincided with my first love.

She was an English teacher at our school. Our romance began suddenly and avalanche. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on the winter benches at night, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and joyfully screamed: “Hello, Elena Sergeevna!”

And how my heart sank at the silence on the telephone!

A dreamer, a former model for Gerasimov, what did she find in an inexperienced schoolboy?

You're ten years late
But still I need you, -

she read to me. And she let down her black braids.

There was an unconscious protest in it against the hated order of life - these breathless meetings in the dark teacher's room, love seemed to us our revolution. Her parents were horrified, and we read with her “Jazz” by Kazarnovsky, her former friend who perished in the camp. She brought me old issues of Krasnaya Novy, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. “Leave once and for all” was her lesson.

I trusted her alone with my acquaintance with Pasternak and gave her the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She made fun of the long names and patronymics of the characters and teased me with supposed misunderstanding. Maybe she was jealous?

Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk and the theatricality of life. She became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak.

As a habitat, the poet needs a secret life, secret freedom. Without her there is no poet.

His support for me was in his very destiny, which shone nearby. It would never even occur to me to ask for something practical - for example, help with getting published or something like that. I was convinced that one does not enter poetry through patronage. When I realized that it was time to publish the poems, I, without saying a word to him, went through the editorial offices like everyone else, without any auxiliary phone calls, I went through all the pre-printing ordeals. One day my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. He calls me into his office. He sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, a hippopotamus. He looks lovingly.

-Are you the son?

- Yes, but...

- No buts. Now it’s possible. Don't hide. He has been rehabilitated. There were mistakes. What a beacon of thought he was! The tea will be brought now. And you are like a son...

- Yes, but...

- No buts. We give your poems in the room. We will be understood correctly. You have a master’s hand, you are especially good at the signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write “caryatids...” Congratulations.

(As I later understood, he mistook me for the son of N.A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Committee.)

-...That is, how not a son? How's the namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring all sorts of harmful nonsense. We won't allow it. And I kept thinking - like such a father, or rather, not a father... What other tea?

But then somehow it got published. I brought the first Litgazeta, smelling of paint, with a selection of poems to him in Peredelkino.

The poet was sick. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager bending over him. The poet's dark head pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how excited he became, how his face trembled! He read the poems out loud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So, my affairs are not so bad,” he suddenly said. What he liked about the poems was that which was free in form. “Aseev is probably looking for you now,” he joked.

Aseev, ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face, similar to a pointed arch, fanatical, like a Catholic preacher, with thin poisonous lips, Aseev of the “Blue Hussars” and “Oksana”, minstrel of construction sites, reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly soared over Moscow in his tower on the corner of Gorky and Moscow Art Theater passage, and for years did not leave it, like Prometheus chained to the telephone.

I have never met a person who loved other people's poems so selflessly. An artist, an instrument of taste and scent, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, could smell a line a mile away - this is how he tenaciously assessed V. Sosnora and Y. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his fiery love. I caught them when they had already missed each other for a long time. How difficult are the disagreements between artists! Aseev always lovingly and jealously inquired - how is “your Pasternak”? The same one spoke about him distantly - “even Aseev’s last thing is a little cold.” Once I brought him Aseev’s book, he returned it to me without reading it.

Aseev is a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry.

“It turns out they call you Andrei Andreevich? How great! We all hit doubles. Mayakovsky - Vladim Vladimych, I - Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilyevich, Kruchenykh...” - “And Boris Leonidovich?” “The exception only confirms the rule.”

Aseev came up with a nickname for me - Vazhashchensky, gave me poems: “Your guitar is a guitar, Andryusha”, saved me in difficult times with the article “What to do with Voznesensky?”, directed against the critics’ manner of “reading in thoughts.” He chivalrously reflected attacks on young sculptors and painters in newspapers.

While in Paris, I gave interviews left and right. One of them came across Lila Yuryevna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev.

- Kolenka, Andryusha has such success in Paris...

The tube was happy.

– Here he talks about our poetry in an interview...

The tube was happy.

– Lists the names of poets...

– Where am I in?

- Yes, Kolenka, you’re not here at all...

Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but probably the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but had not heard of Aseev and threw it out. Well, how can you explain this to him?! You'll offend me even more.

There was a rupture. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “You endorsed this interview! That’s the order...” Not only did I not endorse it, but I didn’t remember which newspaper it was in.

After the scandal with Khrushchev, the editor of Pravda persuaded him, and his response appeared in Pravda, where he condemned the poet “who puts a poetess he knows next to Lermontov.”

Later, probably bored, he called, but his mother hung up. We didn't see each other again.

He stayed for me in the Blue Hussars, in Oksana.

In his panorama “Mayakovsky Begins” he named in a large circle next to the names of Khlebnikov and Pasternak the name of Alexei Kruchenykh.

* * *

There was a smell of mice in my manuscript.

The sharp nose twitches and looks into my manuscript. Pasternak warned against meeting him. It appeared immediately after my first newspaper publication.

He was a literature ragpicker.

His name was Leksey Eliseich, Kruchka, but Kurchonok would have suited him better.

The skin of his cheeks was childish, pimply, always overgrown with gray stubble, growing in neglected tufts, like that of a badly singed chicken. He was a crappy sprout. He dressed in rags. Next to him, Plyushkin would look like a regular at fashion salons. His nose was always sniffing out something, sniffing out something - well, not a manuscript, but a photograph to get hold of. It seemed that he had always existed - not even a bubble of the earth, no, a mold of time, a werewolf of communal quarrels, ghoul rustles, cobweb corners. You thought it was a layer of dust, but it turns out that it has been sitting in the corner for an hour.

He lived on Kirovskaya in a small storage room. It smelled like mouse. There was no light. The only window was filled to the ceiling, dirty - with junk, bales, half-eaten cans, centuries-old dust, where he, like a squirrel, hid mushrooms and berries - his treasures - antique books and lists.

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According to his Note, we set up our lives.

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the lyrics to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos standing next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart, she was blind from tears - like a white keyboard, placed on the butt. Her sadness seemed a secret. Nobody understood her. To her as an angel horizontal midnight Richter arrived.

What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?

God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost the entire publishing house gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh, and add: “but at the same time these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.