To her a horizontal angel. “He was my classmate

ANDREY VOSNESENSKY. The Man-Orchestra Once dreamed of becoming a conductor, who whistled the First Concerto of PI Tchaikovsky in memory, he himself was a man-orchestra. Language writer, artist, personality of the Renaissance, he anticipated writers with video clips of his oral sketches

“Here he sent his poems to none of us until now, Andrei Voznesensky ...” Particularly valuable to me is that part of the archive, which probably includes most of the publications in periodicals concerning the acute polemic about the poetry of Andrei Voznesensky and his

Lost child. Andrei Voznesensky and Arina Voznesenskaya Interview-short story In the history of our literature, this has already happened: a famous poet, instantly flared up feeling for a beautiful girl he met by chance, secret love, encrypted lines of poetry and a woman,

All rights to the text belong to the author: Andrey Andreevich Voznesensky.
This is a short introduction to the book.In the virtual windAndrey Andreevich Voznesensky

Andrey Voznesensky In the virtual wind

My soul, shadow, I confess you. Please, don't put me out ahead of time! Those who have entered the world and have not found ourselves, we are only object shadows of the soul.

december 1997

Andrey Voznesensky Virtual keyboard

The birch stung in the heart

she was blind from tears -

like a white keyboard,

put on the priest.

Her sadness seemed like a secret.

Nobody understood her.

To her a horizontal angel

midnight Richter flew in.

What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?
God grant that he does not immediately forget us ...
It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter's death. I dictated the last pages of this book to my computer. The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost the entire publishing house was there. There was a tea party. I said that Richter had died. Without clinking glasses, they remembered. It blew like a draft. As if the door of the night had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures between the living, as if they had descended to us from other dimensions along its bridge. The presence of eternity passed through the present life. So the living presence of Pasternak in it 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 consciousness, interspersed with present and future events.
In a couple of years our century will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven. And the Lord will ask: “What have you been doing, the Russian XX century? Killed millions of its 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 shrines of the 20th century, just as the 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, illuminated by a double light. I knew some. Their shadows are in this book.

"And it was cold for the baby in the den ..."

And the baby in the nativity scene was cold ...

All the trees in the world, all the dreams of children,

In the verses there was a feeling of a schoolboy of pre-revolutionary Moscow, childhood fascinated - the most serious of Pasternak's mysteries.

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

The poems later preserved the crystal state of his soul. I found him autumn. Autumn is clear to clairvoyance. And the country of childhood came closer.

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 childhood love.

* * *

* * *

Closed eyelids.

Height. Clouds.

Water. Brody. Rivers.

Years and centuries.

He spared the pride of the audience. 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 the "White Night" was singled out. Livanov named "Hamlet". The unplayed Hamlet was his tragedy, he drowned out this pain with the harassment and swagger of the buffon.

The hum died down. I stepped onto the stage

Leaning against the doorframe ...

Eh, Russia!

Eh, scope ...

Smells like dog

in the sky.

Past the Mars

Dneproges,

masts, antennas,

factory pipes

a terrible symbol of progress

a dog's corpse ...

The description of the First Youth Festival was especially popular with the Olympic audience: One of the poems ended like this:

Rushes into belief

workbench near Moscow,

and I am an apprentice

in his workshop.

But I didn't read it in his presence. These were my first public readings. Sometimes I was jealous of him. Of course, conversations together, without guests, or rather, monologues, addressed not even to me, but past me - to eternity, to the meaning of life, were much more dear to me. At times, a resentment complex kicked up in me. I rebelled against the idol. Once he called me and said that he liked the font on my typewriter and asked me to retype a cycle of his poems. Naturally! But for the child's pride it seemed offensive - how, he thinks me for a typist! I stupidly refused, referring to tomorrow's exam, which was true, but not the reason.

* * *

You also throw off your dress

Like a grove sheds leaves

When you fall in your arms

In a dressing gown with a silk tassel.

(Initial version:

Your open dress

Like thrown leaves in a grove ...)

In the morning he called me: “Maybe you thought it was too frank? Zina says that I shouldn't have given it to you, she says it’s too free ... ”LK Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the open liberty of these lines, supposedly not befitting her age. It seems that she was jealous like a woman, jealous of the young passion and power of poetry, of his actions beyond age, of the novel, of his entourage. She spoke irritably about the affair. Pasternak appreciated her early books, and was more than restrained in her later poems and poems. He gave me a typewritten copy of the Tashkent Poem to read, yellowed with age and brown, as if burnt on the folds of the page. When I wanted to give him back, he just brushed it off. “Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin at least, it only seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, anywhere, publicly or in print, the greats did not show the public their human irritation. It pains me to read Akhmatov's reproaches in the documentary notes of Lydia Korneevna, how painful it is to read the hard, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in Zinaida Nikolaevna's memoirs. For me, Akhmatova was God. The only special female in this hypostasis. “Rosary” I knew by heart, but closer to “mine” was Tsvetaeva. Elena Efimovna Tager gave me her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but written by hand in small, non-inclined beaded handwriting, leaving me alone with them in the office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems communicated with me. And it is unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. She was probably not delighted with the blond addressee of the poetry. How I understood him! I felt like an 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 landslide. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on the night winter benches, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and shouted joyfully: "Hello, Elena Sergeevna!" And how my heart sank at the silence in the telephone receiver! A dreamer, in the past a 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 loosened her black braids. It contained an unconscious protest against the hated order of life - these breathtaking dates in the dark teachers' room, love seemed to us our revolution. My 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 Novi, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. "To leave once and for all" was her lesson. To her alone I entrusted my acquaintance with Pasternak and gave the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She teased about the long names and patronymics of the heroes, teased me with alleged lack of understanding. Maybe she was jealous? Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk-taking and theatricality of life. She became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak. As a habitat, a poet needs a secret life, secret freedom. There is no poet without her.
His support for me was in his very fate, which shone next to me. It never entered my head to ask for something practical - for example, help to publish or something like that. I was convinced that poetry does not come under patronage. When I realized that it was time to print the poems, I, without saying a word to him, went through the editorial offices, like everyone else, without additional telephone calls I went through all the prepress ordeals. Once my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. Calls me to the office. Sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, a hippopotamus. Looks in love. - Are you a son? - Yes, but ... - No "but". Now you can. Don't hide. He's been rehabilitated. There have been mistakes. What a light of thought! The tea will be brought in now. And you are like a son ... - Yes, but ... - No "but". We give your poems to the room. They will understand us correctly. You have the hand of a master, especially you succeed in the signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write "caryatids ..." Congratulations. (As I later understood, he took me for the son of N. A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Commission.) - ... That is, how not a son? How is the namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring any harmful nonsense. We will not allow it. And I kept thinking - like a father like that, or rather, not a father ... What other tea? But then it was somehow printed. The first, smelling of paint "Litgazeta" with a selection of poems brought him to Peredelkino. The poet was ill. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager bending over him. The poet's swarthy head pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how worried, how his face fluttered! He read the poems aloud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So my business is not so bad either,” he suddenly said. He liked the poetry that was free in form. “You are probably looking for Aseev right now,” he joked.
Aseev, an ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face like a pointed arch, fanatical like a Catholic preacher, with thin venomous lips, Aseev "Blue Hussars" and "Oksana", a minstrel of construction projects, a reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly hovered over Moscow in his tower at the corner of Gorky and the passage of the Moscow Art Theater, for years he did not leave it, like Prometheus, chained to the phone. I have not met a person who so selflessly loved other people's poems. An artist, an instrument of taste, scent, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, smelled a line a mile away - so he tenaciously appreciated V. Sosnora and Y. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his ardent love. I found it when they missed each other long ago. How heavy are the disagreements between the artists! Aseev always in love and jealousy asked - how is "your Pasternak"? The same one spoke about him detachedly - "even with Aseev, the last thing is too cold." Once I brought him Aseev's book, he returned it to me without reading it. Aseev - a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry. “You, it turns out, are called Andrei Andreevich? Great how! We all took a double. Mayakovsky - Vladimi Vladimych, I - Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilievich, Kruchenykh ... "-" And Boris Leonidovich? " - "The exception only confirms the rule." Aseev invented a nickname for me - Vitalshchensky, gave me poems: "Your guitar is a guitar, Andryusha," in a difficult time he saved with an article "What to do with Voznesensky?" He chivalrously reflected in the newspapers the attacks on young sculptors and painters. While in Paris, I passed interviews right and left. One of them came across to Lilya Yuryevna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev. - Kolya, Andryusha has such success in Paris ... The pipe was delighted. - Here he talks about our poetry in an interview ... The receiver was delighted. - The names of the poets are listed ... - And where am I? - Yes, no, Kolenka, you in general ... Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but, probably, the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but did not hear about Aseev and threw it out. How can you explain it to him ?! You will offend even more. There was a break. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “You endorsed this interview! This is the order ... ”I not only did not endorse, but did not remember in which newspaper it was. 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 familiar poet next to Lermontov." Later, probably bored, he called, but my mother hung up. We did not 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.

* * *

Forgot to hang myself

He was an excellent education, he could speak by heart from Gogol, this reserved storehouse of futurists. Like a mossy spirit, an ingratiating ghoul, he quietly penetrated your apartment. Grandmother pursed her lips suspiciously. He was watering, begging and suddenly, if he deigns, he suddenly shouted his "Spring with a treat" to you. This thing, her entire speech with the sounds rare for the Russian language "x", "u", "u", "was noted in the spring, when beauty wanders in ugliness." But at first, it is understandable, he denies, grumbles, pretends, grunts, pretends, rubs his eyes for some reason with a handkerchief of antediluvian virginity, similar to the oiled ends with which drivers wipe the engine. But now the look is worn - it turns out that it is pearl gray, even blue! He tenses, jumps up like a Pushkin cockerel, puts his palm to his lips like a cockscomb, strains his palm, and begins. His voice opens up high, with such an unearthly pure tone, which the soloists of the current pop ensembles are vainly striving for. "Yu-yuitsa!" - he conceives, you are drooling, you see these, like a whirligig, dyed Easter eggs spinning on the tablecloth. “Sludge,” he grunts after him, imitating the slippery clink of crystal. “Zuhrr”, - the barker does not calm down, and your mouth pulls, crunches from candied persimmons, nuts, green Turkish delight and other sweets of the East, but the main thing is ahead. In the voice of the highest agony and voluptuousness, exhausted, standing on tiptoe and folding his lips as if for a whistle and a kiss, he pronounces on the thinnest diamond note: "Mizun, mizyun! .." taking raisins from graceful vases, and the seductive spring melody of Mizgir and Snegurochka, and, finally, that very painful note of the Russian soul and life, the note of traction, of lost illusions that echoed in Lika Mizinova and in the "House with a mezzanine" - this all life exhaled call: "Miss, where are you?" He freezes, without taking his palm from his lips, as if waiting for the recall of his youth - a slender, again gray-eyed prince, again the morning horn of Russian futurism - Alexei Eliseevich Kruchenykh.
He pretended to be a huckster, a thief, a speculator. But one thing he did not sell - his sheet music in poetry. He just stopped writing. Poetry was friends only with his youthful times. With her alone, he remained pure and honest. Mizun, where are you?

* * *

In those days - and you saw them

And remember which ones -

I was singled out from the row

A wave of the elements itself.

Pasternak met with Mandelstam at Lenin's tomb. My youthful perception of Lenin copied Pasternak's attitude towards him. Poetry expresses the illusions of the people. We know a historical sadist, in animal delight, who personally chopped off the heads of the archers, but we believe in the Pushkin image. He once said about Stalin: "I have addressed him more than once, and he always fulfilled my requests." Probably, it was about the repressed. Once at the table, he recounted a telephone conversation about Mandelstam, about which the literary swamp gloatingly judged. Stalin called him late at night. We had to talk from the communal corridor. The receiver asked: "How do you assess Mandelstam as a poet?" Pasternak was sincere, he answered positively, though not enthusiastically. The receiver said: "If my friend was arrested, I would protect him." “But he was not arrested for the quality of his poetry,” the poet began, “but arresting him in general is…” They hung up the phone in the Kremlin, Pasternak tried to unite - in vain. The next morning he rushed to Bukharin, who was then the editor of Izvestia, to plead for Mandelstam. He called Stalin "the giant of the pre-Christian era", that is, the Assyrian pockmarked despot.
Stalin was lying in the Column Hall. The center was cordoned off by trucks and soldiers. We, students of Architectural, were given passes to Rozhdestvenka, where the institute was located. I joined a group of guys, and we made our way across the rooftops, across the Kuznetsky Most to Kolonnoy. From the loudspeakers came mourning and cavalry marches, the poems of Tvardovsky and Simonov, the lies of the leaders. Below, tearful crowds swayed, an orphaned empire sobbed. Our faces and hands were red, as if scalded by boiling water. On Pushkinskaya, we jumped into the crowd, and it squeezed us, not allowing us to break. The buttons of my coat were torn off, and I lost my hat. Inside the Hall of Columns, I was struck by the abundance of banners, wreaths, and uniforms. Among them, quite imperceptibly, lay a dry body. Whiskers bristling, he lay on his back, like a beetle crossing its legs on its chest. There is such a breed of beetles - "pretend thief", which pretends to be dead, and then - how to jump! I drove this blasphemous comparison away from me. Then, trying to understand at least something, I will write:

And solemnly over the country,

like a bird of prey beauty

sailed with a red fringe

state mustache.

Then I heard the phrase said by Pasternak: "Before, we were ruled by a madman and a murderer, and now - a fool and a pig." This phrase dampened the enthusiastic attitude towards Khrushchev, characteristic of my peers. Before my eyes, on his order, they slandered and called the poet of crystal purity the enemy of the Motherland. "Even a pig does not shit where it eats, unlike Pasternak" - this was the historical statement of the General Secretary, voiced throughout the country by Semichastny. Now the former speaker revealed the level of the pigsty in which this “pig” was born: “I remember we were invited to Khrushchev in the Kremlin on the eve of the Plenum. Me, Adjubea. Suslov was there too. And Khrushchev said: “In the report, Pasternak must be worked out. Let's talk now, and you will edit it later, Suslov will look - and let's go tomorrow ... “Khrushchev dictated two pages. Of course, with his harsh position that even a pig does not allow himself to shit ... "There was also such a phrase:" I think that the Soviet government will not mind, uh, that Pasternak, if he wants to breathe so much free air, left our homeland. " “You will say, and we will applaud. Everyone will understand. " The poet foresaw this too:

And every day they bring it stupidly

So really unbearable

Photographic groups

Solid pig-like erysipelas.

* * *

They were in our apartment, like in a compotnik,

Products of different spheres are swollen:

Seamstress, student, responsible worker ...

As a child, our family of five lived in one room. Six more families lived in the other five rooms of the apartment - a family of workers who had arrived from the oil fields, headed by a tongue-tied Praskovya, an aristocratic tall family of seven Neklyudovs and Bagira's sheepdogs, the family of engineer Ferapontov, a magnificent, welcoming daughter of a former merchant and a divorced husband and wife. Our communal flat was considered sparsely populated. The sheets were drying in the hallway. At the wood stove amid the kitchen battles, Musya Neklyudova's family earrings shuddered over the kerosene stove. In the toilet, a divorced husband whistled "Bayadere", outraged by the line. I was born in this world, I was happy and could not imagine anything else. He himself, until the thirty-sixth year, before the two-story apartment in Lavrushinsky, lived in a communal apartment. The bathroom was occupied by a separate family, at night, going to the toilet, they walked through the sleeping people. Oh, how richly the kerosene light of the "Svetlana lamps" rhymes with the "years of the construction plan"!

* * *

There is still darkness around us.

Such an early in the world.

That the square has laid down for eternity

From the crossroads to the corner

And until dawn and warmth

Another thousand years ...

And in a small town

Space, as at a gathering,

The trees are staring naked

Into church bars ...

Do you see, my reader, a boy with a schoolbag, following the rite of spring, her premonition? Everything that happens around is so similar to what is happening inside him.

And their gaze is seized with horror.

Their anxiety is understandable.

Gardens emerge from the fences ...

They bury God.

Such an early, such a stunned feeling of childhood, the memory of a schoolboy in pre-revolutionary Moscow, when everything is full of mystery, when a miracle lurks around every corner, the trees are animated and you are involved in the willow fortune-telling. What a sense of the childhood of mankind on the verge of paganism and the anticipation of other truths! These verses, written by hand, he gave me with others, stitched with the same crimson silk lacing. Everything about them bewitched. Autumn reigned in it then:

As in the painting exhibition:

Halls, halls, halls, halls

Elm, ash, aspen

In unprecedented gilding.

At that time, I dreamed of getting into the Architectural, went to drawing classes, watercolors, was all in the power of the mystery of painting. The Dresden Gallery was then visiting Moscow. Before returning to Dresden, she was exhibited at the Pushkin Museum. Volkhonka was dammed up. The audience's favorite was "The Sistine Madonna". I remember how I was frozen in the hall among the crowd in front of the soaring outline. The dark background behind the figure consists of many merged angels, the viewer does not immediately notice them. Hundreds of spectators' faces, as if in a mirror, were reflected in the dark glass of the picture. You have seen the outlines of the Madonna, and the faces of angels, and the attentive faces of the public superimposed on them. The faces of Muscovites entered the picture, filled it, merged, became part of the masterpiece. Never, probably, "Madonna" has never seen such a crowd. The Sistine was becoming a mass culture. Together with her, the lovely "Chocolate Girl" with a tray, fluttering out of the pastel, ran around the cities and towns of our country on oilcloths and reproductions. "Drunk is strong!" - a visitor to the exhibition at the painting "Drunken Silenus" gasped in admiration behind my back. Moscow was shocked by the spiritual and pictorial power of Rembrandt, Cranach, Vermeier. "The Prodigal Son", "The Last Supper" entered everyday life. World painting and with it the spiritual power of its concepts simultaneously opened up to hundreds of thousands of Muscovites. Pasternak's poems from a notebook with a silk cord spoke about the same, about the same eternal themes - about humanity, revelation, life, repentance, death, dedication.

All thoughts of the ages, all dreams, all worlds.

The whole future of galleries and museums ...

Michelangelo, Vrubel, Matisse, Nesterov were tormented by the same great questions, taking metaphors of the Old and New Testaments for their canvases. Like theirs, the solution to these themes in poetry was by no means modernist, like Salvador Dali's, for example. The master worked with the harsh brush of a realist, in a classically restrained range. Like Bruegel, whose Christmas space is inhabited by Dutch peasants, the poet filled his frescoes with objects of his life and everyday life. And in the center of all the narratives, my mind put his figure, his fate. What a Russian, even Moscow, purebred, he has Magdalena, washing the feet of her beloved body from a bucket! She lived by Chistye Prudy. Her name was Olga Vsevolodovna. He called her Lucy. Very feminine memories of her "Captured by Time" shrillly narrate about the poet's last love and his tragic fate. I always saw his Magdalene as fair-haired, blonde in our opinion, with straight loose hair to the elbows. I knew her, beautiful, stately, with delightedly laughing pupils. And what a prophetic connoisseur of the female heart wrote the following stanza:

Too many hands to embrace

You will spread at the ends of the cross.

Of course, he wrote about himself foreseeing fate. What a long-suffering sigh of disaster! What an admiring sadness in her, the pain of parting, an understanding of human imperfection in the understanding of the gesture of the universe, what pride in the high destiny of a loved one and at the same time a let slip, let slip, betraying herself of female jealousy for someone who gives himself out to people, and not only to her, to her alone ... The artist writes life, writes those around him, his neighbors, only through them comprehending the meaning of the universe. Sanguine, the material for writing is his own life, his only existence, experience, actions - he has no other material. Of all the features, sources and mysteries of Pasternak, childhood is the most serious.

Oh childhood! Dipper of the depths of the soul!

About all forests aboriginal!

Rooted in self-love,

My mastermind, my regent! ..

And “My sister is life” and “The nine hundred and fifth year” are, first of all, the reckless primacy of feeling, the confession of childhood, rebellion, the feeling of peace for the first time. As a child escaped from the care of adults, he loved Lermontov, dedicated his best book to him. It is appropriate to talk about the flow of poetry in his life. In it, in this stream of poetry, what was said once more than once is repeated, it finds a second birth, childhood reverberates again and again, quotations from his previous poems appear through the harsh frescoes.

All the pranks of fairies, all the deeds of sorcerers,

All the trees in the world, all the dreams of children.

All the thrill of lighted candles, all the chains

All the splendor of colored tinsel ...

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

Compare this to the picturesque swirling rhythm of his Waltz with Devilry or Waltz with a Tear, those choking round dances of a childish time:

Splendor beyond strength

Ink and sepia and whitewash ...

Dates, books, games, nougat,

Needles, rugs, horse races, runs.

In this sinister sweet taiga

People and things are on an equal footing.

I remember celebrating the New Year at his Lavrushinsky. Parsnip shone among the guests. He was both a tree and a child at the same time. Neuhaus' eyebrows moved like a coniferous triangle. The eldest son Zhenya, still keeping the officer slenderness, emerged, as if from a mirror, from a wall portrait by his mother, artist E. Pasternak. The apartment had an exit to the roof, to the stars. One could be afraid of everyone: the dagger on the wall was intended not only for decoration, but also for self-defense. The poems preserved the material and prophetic dizzying mystery of the festival, the Scriabin prelude fireworks.

The lamps blew out, the chairs were moved ...

Masks and mummers move the hive ...

Ragging of blouses, singing of doors,

The roar of toddlers, the laughter of mothers ...

And emerging in the window frame

A draft spirit blowing out the flame ...

There is always a premonition of a miracle in the tree. It is on the tree that the young Parsnip heroine shoots at her seducer. “Admit it, Andryusha, you would like her to shoot for another reason, so that she was political,” he teased me in front of the guests. He did not celebrate his birthdays. I considered them to be the dates of mourning. He did not recognize anniversaries. At one time, he refused the jubilee order and honoring at the Bolshoi Theater. And even then he forbade congratulations. I contrived to bring him flowers the day before or a day later, on the 9th or 11th, without breaking the letter of the prohibition. I wanted to console him with something. I brought him white and scarlet cyclamens, and sometimes purple columns of hyacinths. They trembled like carved - with crosses - glasses of lilac crystal. At the institute, I was enough for a living lilac bush in a pot. How happy he was, how beaming Pasternak, stripping the paper, saw a slender bush in white clusters. He loved lilacs and forgave me the annual trick. And finally, what was the horror of my parents when I, a monkey, refused my birthday and gifts, calmly declaring that I consider this day a mourning day and that life did not work out. Since then I have not celebrated my birthdays. I always run away, hide in Suzdal or somewhere else. “When your country is sad, shameful to have success,” Vysotsky picked up my lines. At that time, of course, I had a hard time with money for a gift, but I could not ask my parents, but earned myself. At that time I became interested in photography. I went to the circle of the House of Scientists. I decided to make a big portrait of him. With the help of the head of the circle, we made an increase. Retouched. And the most important places - lips, eyelashes, tie - she retouched herself. My God, what a terrible portrait it was! Polished handsome. Similar to the swan rugs that were sold in the market. Plus a 1950s-style mats and leatherette edging. But what was to be done - the birthday came. I carried a portrait wrapped in paper from the station along a blizzard. The frost burned my hands. "Andryusha, it's not too late, come back, do not disgrace yourself!" But now he is unwrapping the wet paper. And hums with delight: “This is wonderful. It is similar to the Georgian primitives, to Pirosmani. " His reaction was not a polite compliment. A few days later I saw my portrait, which he hung over his door. It still hangs there, becoming a museum piece. The second copy of it, created by us for safety reasons, I hung in my office.

... The wind blew from the steppe all the more angry and fiercely ...

At the moment when by the breath of alloy

Words are united in a word!

The path is not always clear to the poet himself. He listens to the higher callsigns, which, as a pilot, dictate his route. I do not try to interpret anything in his path: I just write that I saw how what he wrote was read.

Part of the pond was hidden by the tops of alder,

But part of it could be seen perfectly from here

Through the nests of rooks and trees tops.

As we walked along the dam ...

They did not understand him. He hummed offendedly: “Yesterday Kostya Fedin, returning my novel, said:“ Everything is written in crazy language. Well, Russia, in your opinion, is a madhouse ?! "I answered:" You have everything written in mediocre language. Well, is Russia a mediocrity? ”“ On another occasion he confusedly told that he had met one dishonest critic on the path at dusk and embraced him, mistaking him for another. "Then I apologized to him, of course, for saying hello by mistake ..."
Whoa! Well, here's the dam. Have arrived. And the shore of the pond. And they ate the dumped log. These are all quotes from his "Nobel Prize".

What have I done for the dirty trick

Me, the killer and the villain?

I made the whole world cry

Over the beauty of your land.

He still remains a Nobel laureate for me. After all, the letter of rejection, created under pressure, was not written by him, but by his relatives. He only inserted one phrase. And what is a prize for an artist? The main reward for him was the ability to write and the recognition of this forest, people, its land. Today, through the fence, I see a line of pilgrims reaching for the museum. One hundred thousand in five years. Through the efforts of Natalya Anisimovna Pasternak, the comfort of the Big Dacha returned to the house.
Did he play my voice? He just said what he liked and why. For example, for a long time he explained to me the meaning of the line: "You were held by the arms of epaulettes." In addition to the accuracy of the image, he wanted from the verses breathing, the tension of time, a super task, what he called "strength." I was stunned by the recently published love letters of Pasternak to his wife: "Zinusha, nothing compares with you in the world ... everything in the world is nonsense against you, sweet, pure, unparalleled ..." cottages. And here is his last letter to her from Peredelkin in Tskhaltubo: “There were the Livanovs, the artist Vereisky with his wife and the director of the theater. Ermolova P. Vasiliev. Andryusha successfully read his poems. I read it too. We drank ... "The commentary to this letter states:" The Pasternak family archive contains letters and poems of Voznesensky with Pasternak's marks. According to Pasternak's remarks, Voznesensky worked on his youthful poems, offering all new versions to Pasternak's court. Pasternak opened a special folder for them, on which he wrote: "Andryushin's poems." It turns out that he kept my notebooks and letters, on the margins of the poems were his pencil marks. Apparently, he was preparing for the conversation. I had no idea about this. He treated so carefully even the boy. His rewarding cross rewarded the stanza:

You were held by the shoulders

hands of epaulettes!

You were torn and dared,

hussars and poets ...

Gennady Aigi recently told me that Boris Leonidovich advised him to find me and help each other, making his way into literature. I was not aware of this covenant, but I always mentioned and praised Aigi wherever possible. It felt like. For a long time, none of my contemporaries existed for me. The gradations between them were ridiculous. He - and everyone else. He himself honored Zabolotsky. As a member of the board of directors of the joint venture, he once saved the "Country of Muravia" from being spread. He considered Tvardovsky the greatest poet, which weaned me from school nihilism. It was hard not to fall into his force field. One day after student military summer camps, I brought him a notebook of new poetry. Then he was preparing his "Favorites". He remade poetry, took up arms against his early uninhibited manner, took away only what was close to him now. About my poems, he said: "There is relaxedness and imagery, but they are on this side of the border, if they were mine, I would include them in my collection." I beamed. Pasternak himself would have taken them! And he came home - he decided to quit writing. After all, he would take them into his, which means that they are not mine, but his. I haven't written for two years. Then went "Goya" and others, already mine. "Goya" was scolded a lot, there were several miscellaneous articles. The softest label was "formalism." For me, "Goya" sounded like "war".

* * *

* * *

And since early childhood

I am wounded by a woman's share ...

His attitude towards women was both masculine and youthful at the same time. He had the same attitude towards Georgia. He collected material for a novel about Georgia with the heroine Nina, the period of the first Christians, when worship of the moon god organically passed into the rituals of a new culture. How sensual and natural are Georgian rituals! According to legend, Saint Nina, in order to make the first cross, folded two grape vines crosswise and tied them up with her long cut hair. In him, the pantheistic culture of the early period passed into the strict spirituality of the late culture. As in life, these two cultures coexisted in it. In his correspondence with the Georgian schoolgirl Chuka, daughter of Lado Gudiashvili, love, closeness and trust in her world shine through. Until now, in Gudiashvili's studio, under glass, like a relic in a museum, a golden coffee cup gleams, which the poet's lips touched. He loved these halls hung with canvases with Bagration's parquet flooring, where a tall, white-headed artist, weightless as a sheaf of light, wandered from picture to picture. The canvases were lit up as he passed. He glided over them like a smile. Pasternak's face painted in lightning graphics on the wall acquired Georgian features. I received Georgian culture from his hands. The first poet he introduced me to was Simon Ivanovich Chikovani. It happened at Lavrushinsky. I was struck by a secret fire in this quiet man with sunken cheeks over his everyday double-breasted jacket. Boris Leonidovich enthusiastically buzzed about his impressionism - however, impressionism for him denoted his own, designated by himself concept - it included both Chopin and Verlaine. I looked at the two artists in love with each other. The conversation between them was sometimes incomprehensible to me - it was the speech of initiates, servants of a high order. I was present at the sacrament, where Georgian names and terms seemed to be symbols of a ritual that was inaccessible to me. Then he asked me to read poetry. Ah, those rhymes of childhood ...

To the ringing of trams, stupefying,

the clouds leaned over.

“Odurev” was clearly from the Parsnip arsenal, but he liked not that, but that the clouds were leaning on their elbows. In the children's lines, he discerned the visual behind the sound. Simon Ivanovich pursed his thin pale lips and, smacking his tongue, lingered on the line in which the girl flashed and where

... to the clouds

the balcony was raised with a supplication.

This was my first public discussion. Then for the first time someone else was present at his conversations with me. Loyal to the murdered Paolo and Titian, he introduced me to the translations too. For me, the first poet to be translated was Joseph Noneshvili. And Georgia, with the hands of Noneshvili, put flowers on Pasternak's coffin on the day of the funeral. Several times, recollecting myself, I tried to start a diary. But every time, with my disorganization, I didn’t last long. I still cannot forgive myself for this. Yes, and these hasty recordings disappeared in the turmoil of constant travel. Recently, my family, sorting through the trash of papers, found a notebook with a diary for several days. In order to somehow convey the excitement of his voice, the flow of his lively daily speech, I will give at random several pieces of his monologues, as I wrote them down then in my youthful diary, without correcting anything, omitting only the details of my personal plan. He spoke sobbingly.

* * *

To the bride's house until the morning

Wandered in with a talisman ...

The matchmaker pava sailed

Winding the sides ...

The next day he called me. “So, I explained to Anna Andreevna how poems are born. The wedding woke me up. I knew that this was something good, I was mentally transported there, to them, and in the morning it really turned out to be a wedding ”(I quote from my diary). He asked what I thought about poetry. The freshness of the gray morning, the youthfulness of the rhythm splashed in them. But to me, a student of the 50s, the words "matchmaker", "friends" seemed alien, archaic; "Best man" echoed with "chauffeur". I probably only confirmed his own doubts. He dictated another option to me on the phone. “Now what you say is old-fashioned. Write it down. No, wait, we'll remove the matchmaker now. In the sense of best men it will become even better, since the place will be more specific: “Cross the depths of the courtyard ...” ”Maybe he was improvising on the phone, maybe he remembered a draft version. As such, these verses were printed. I remember the editor was apprehensive about the line: "Life is also only a moment ... only a dream ..."

At our first meeting, he gave me a ticket to the WTO, where he was to read the translation of Faust. This was his last public reading. At first he stood in a group, surrounded by dark suits and dresses, his gray peeped through them like an embarrassed opening of the northern sky through the trunks of trees. A radiance betrayed him. Then he quickly sat down at the table. Chaired by MM Morozov, obese, who grew out of the Serov curly little boy - Mika Morozov. Pasternak was reading while sitting, wearing glasses. The golden curls of the fans froze. Someone took notes. Someone shouted from a place, asking to read "Witches' Kitchen", where, as you know, the original texts of witchcraft slander were introduced into translation. In Weimar, in the archives, you can see how the freemason and thinker Goethe studied works on cabalism, alchemy and black magic. Pasternak refused to read The Kitchen. He read poignant passages.

They will not hear the following songs, * * * In Weimar, in the homeland of Goethe, located on a hill, a large volume of the Goethe palace of an inexplicable secret composition is associated with the tiny vertical volume of the house of his youth, which, like a garden figurine, stands alone in the lowland, in the distance. In high water, the waters sometimes come up to it. With its heartfelt urge, a large palace is turned to a small one. This world law of attraction has reached a reserved point in the composition of the white ensemble of the Great Vladimir Cathedral and the vertical pearl on the Nerl, located in the lowlands. When you pass between them, you seem to be permeated by the light currents of mutual love of these snow-white masterpieces, facing each other - big to small.

The sea dreams of something tiny

Kind of like becoming a caliber bird ...

Also, the giant gray massif of the house in Lavrushinskoye was cordially turned to the Peredelkinskaya dacha.
A dozen years later, a complete translation of Faust was published in Goslite. He gave me this heavy cherry tome. He signed books with no fuss, and after thinking it over, more often the next day. You were dying for a day from waiting. And what a generous New Year's gift awaited you tomorrow, what an understanding of another heart, what an advance for life, for growth. Some words were erased with an eraser and rewritten from above. He wrote on Faust: “January 2, 1957, in memory of our meeting at our home on January 1. Andryusha, the fact that you are so gifted and subtle, that your understanding of the age-old continuity of happiness, called art, your thoughts, your tastes, your movements and wishes so often coincide with mine, is a great joy and support to me. I believe in you, in your future. I embrace you - your B. Pasternak. " Exactly ten years earlier, in January 1947, he gave me his first book. This inscription was for me the most generous gift of fate.

* * *

The artists leave

without hats, as if to a temple,

to the humming grounds

to birches and oaks ...

I have known him for fourteen years. How many times have his words lifted and saved me, and what bitterness, pain is always felt behind these words. ...

Andrey Voznesensky

In the virtual wind

My soul, shadow,

i confess you.

Please, don't put me out ahead of time!

Entering the world

and those who have not found themselves,

we are only object shadows of the soul.

December 1997

Andrey Voznesensky

Virtual keyboard

We set up our life according to his Note.

They sang Richter in his heavenly dwelling on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He was lying with his head to two pianos with Schubert notes, and on them, as if they were alive, silver chains and icons were put on. His thinner, rejuvenated face took on a gleam of plaster; rainbow streaks in the style of early Kandinsky burned on a gray tie. There were swarthy hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a thoroughbred Great Dane, closed his eyes, as if inhaling sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked from the wall.

I remember him even at Parsnip's feasts. Through the athletic youth, the marble statuary was already visible. But not antique, but Rodin. He was younger than other great feasts - and the owner, and Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of a shoe or a suit. Nina Lvovna was always there, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to see Anna Andreevna Akhmatova off, I, pretending to hesitate, yielded this honor to Slava. They will meet there now.

The father who sang it, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: "He was above us." It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors, the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard were visible. He hovered above them. "Lord," the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, "We send you Glory ..." For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only for inspiration, so sometimes it was uneven.

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

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian the same way 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 a skit, I wrote the lyrics to the melody "Happy Birthday to You!" And in this text, the eight lay on one side and became a sign of infinity.

At the last concerts on the lapel of his ingenious dress coat was a miniature "Triumph" award badge. When I designed this logo, I meant Richter first and foremost.

At the coffin, his relatives pass in a sad line, friends - a line of leaving Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him are already visible the invisible figures of those to whom he will now join.

Finally, he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master, Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that two grand pianos stood side by side in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like figures on Chagall's canvases.

Once I wrote poetry to him. Now they sound different.

The birch stung in the heart
she was blind from tears -
like a white keyboard,
put on the priest.

Her sadness seemed like a secret.
Nobody understood her.
To her a horizontal angel
midnight Richter flew in.

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

God grant that he does not immediately forget us ...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter's death. I dictated the last pages of this book to my computer.

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

It blew like a draft. As if the door of the night had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures between the living, as if they had descended to us from other dimensions along its bridge. The presence of eternity passed through the present life. So the living presence of Pasternak 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 consciousness, interspersed with present and future events.

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

And the Lord will ask: “What have you been doing, the Russian XX century? Killed millions of their 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 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, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some. Their shadows are in this book.

"And it was cold for the baby in the den ..."

"Pasternak to the phone for you!"

Numb parents stared at me. As a sixth grader, without telling anyone, I sent him poems and a letter. This was the first decisive act 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 Lavrushinskoye, of course, in an hour. After waiting, he took the elevator to the dark landing on the eighth floor. There was still a minute until two. Outside the door, apparently, they heard an elevator slamming. The door opened.

He stood in the doorway.

Everything floated in front of me. The surprised, elongated swarthy flame of the face looked at me. Some kind of swollen stearic knitted jacket wrapped around his sturdy figure. The wind stirred his bangs. It is no coincidence that he later chooses a burning candle for his self-portrait. He stood in the draft of the door.

Dry, strong pianist's brush.

Struck by the asceticism, the beggar expanse of his unheated office. A square photo of Mayakovsky and a dagger on the wall. Müller's English-Russian dictionary - he was then chained to translations. On the table huddled my student notebook, probably prepared for the conversation. A wave of horror and adoration passed over me. But it's too late to run.

He spoke from the middle.

His cheekbones quivered like the triangular skeletons of wings pressed tightly before flapping. I idolized him. There was thrust, strength and heavenly inability in him. When he spoke, he twitched, pulled his chin up, as if he wanted to break out of the collar and out of the body.

It soon became very easy with him. I look at him on the sly.

His short nose, starting with the deepening of the bridge of the nose, immediately went humped, then continued straight, resembling a swarthy rifle butt in miniature. Sphinx lips. Short gray haircut. But the main thing is a floating steaming wave of magnetism. "He, who has compared himself with a horse's eye ..."

Two hours later, I walked away from him, carrying in an armful of his manuscripts to read, and the most precious thing - the typescript, just finished first part of his new novel in prose called Doctor Zhivago, and an emerald notebook of new verses from this novel, bound in crimson silk lace. Unable to resist, I opened it on the go, I swallowed breathless lines:

And the baby in the nativity scene was cold ...
All the trees in the world, all the dreams of children,
All the thrill of lighted candles, all the chains ...

In the verses there was a feeling of a schoolboy of pre-revolutionary Moscow, childhood fascinated - the most serious of Pasternak's mysteries.

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

The poems later preserved the crystal state of his soul. I found him autumn. Autumn is clear to 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 childhood love.

Why did he respond to me?

He was lonely in those years, rejected, exhausted from persecution, he wanted sincerity, purity of relations, 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 in him? It's not even the friendship of a lion with a dog, or rather, a lion with a puppy.

MORNING

(u-e-a-oh)

Over the misty valley in the blue heights

Pure - pure silver frost.

Over the valley - like the twists of lilies,

Like the outflows of swan wings.

Lands turn green with copse,

The snowy month with a pale summer glitter

In the tender sky, reluctantly youths,

Crystal glass, the sky turns green.

A shining flock of risen heads

It cools down, flying away into the distance ...

Night blue - there, above us,

The blue of the night crushes with dreams!

Lightning like gold in a swamp

Someone will cast fiery eyes.

15 Laughing eyes like gold!

The thundering nights with a hammer!

Will shine, - all from mother of pearl

Stormy azure morning:

Will flow in the bend of the flying

The early morning clouds are purple.

N. M. Rubtsov

MORNING

When the dawn, glowing across the pine forest,

It burns, burns, and the forest does not sleep anymore,

And the shadows of the pines fall into the river

And the light runs to the streets of the village

When, laughing, deaf in the yard

Adults and children meet the sun, -

Recovering my spirit, I'll run up the hill

And I will see everything in the best possible light.

Trees, huts, a horse on the bridge,

Blooming meadow - everywhere I miss them.

And, having stopped loving this beauty,

I probably won't create another ...

A. Voznesensky

VIRTUAL KEYBOARD

We set up our lives by his Note. They sang Richter in his heavenly dwelling on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He was lying with his head to two pianos with Schubert notes, and on them, as if they were alive, silver chains and icons were put on. His thinner, rejuvenated face took on a gleam of plaster; rainbow streaks in the style of early Kandinsky burned on a gray tie. There were swarthy hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a thoroughbred Great Dane, closed his eyes, as if inhaling sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked from the wall.

I remember him even at Parsnip's feasts. Through the athletic youth, the marble statuary was already visible. But not antique, but Rodin. He was younger than other great feasts - and the owner, and Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of boots or a suit. Nina Lvovna was always there, graceful and graphic, as black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to see Anna Andreevna Akhmatova off, I, pretending to hesitate, yielded this honor to Slava. They will meet there now.

The priest who sang it, the violinist Vedernikov in the world said precisely and subtly: "He was above us." It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors, the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard were visible. He hovered above them. “Lord, the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, - We send you Glory ...” For the first time these words sounded literally.

Once I wrote poetry to him. Now they sound in a new way.

The birch stung in the heart

she was blind from tears -

like a white keyboard,

put on the priest.

Her sadness seemed like a secret.

Nobody understood her.

To her a horizontal angel

midnight Richter flew in.

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

God grant that he does not immediately forget us ...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter's death. I dictated the last pages of this book to my computer.

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

It blew like a draft. As if the door of the night had been opened.