What was once the pushkin stood above the yellow, burned field like a black boil. Beriawood is a sturdy wood, we know our carpentry. Benedikt made his way to the poet's remains and looked up at what had been his features, now blistered and blurred by the heat. His sideburns and face had baked into a single blob. On the swell of his elbow lay a pile of white ash with flickering coals, but all six fingers had fallen off.
At the base of the pedestal a scorched corpse was doubled up. Benedikt looked and poked it with his foot-Terenty Yep, those were his teeth.
It smelled of burning. Life was over. Behind the idol's back someone spat and moved.
"Give me a hand, I'll get down. It's too high for me," croaked Nikita Ivanich.
As black as the pushkin, just the whites of his eyes red from the fumes, hairless and beardless, creaking and still smoking, Nikita Ivanich leaned on Benedikt's numb hand and climbed down from the crumbling, seared braces. He spat out some coals.
"Life is over, Nikita Ivanich," said Benedikt in a voice that was not his own. The words resounded in his head, as though spoken in an empty stone bucket or a well.
"It's over… so we'll start another one," the old man grumbled in reply. "You could at least tear me off a piece of your shirt, to cover my privates. Can't you see? I'm naked. What are young people coming to nowadays?"
Lev Lvovich of the Dissidents wandered among the ashes, clutching his shaggy hair with both hands, looking for something in the grass that was no longer there.
"Lyovushka! Come over here. So, where were we?" asked Nikita Ivanich, wrapping his loins in a piece of Benedikt's vest. "I could use a clothespin. What lazy people… Can't even invent clothespins."
"A safety pin!" said Lev Lvovich reproachfully, running over. "I always said: a safety pin! A marvelous, civilized invention."
"There's no civilization, Golubchik. We have to do it ourselves, with our wood one."
"Now that's nationalist claptrap," cried Lev Lvovich. "That stinks of the newspaper Tomorrow. Vulgar spiritualism! It's not the first time I've noticed! It stinks!"
"Listen, Lyovushka, knock it off, will you? Let's retreat, let's soar above the sands. Shall we?"
"Let's!"
The Oldeners bent their knees, held hands, and began to rise in the air. They were both laughing-Lev Lvovich shrieked a bit, as though he were afraid to swim in cold water, and Nikita Ivanich laughed in a deep voice: ho-ho-ho. Nikita Ivanich brushed the soot from his feet-foot against foot, quickly-and dropped a little of it on Benedikt's face.
"Hey, What're you up to?" cried Benedikt, rubbing his eye.
"Nothing!" they answered from above.
"Why didn't you burn up?"
"Didn't feel like it! Just didn't feeeeel like it!"
"So you mean you didn't die? Huh? Or did you?"
"Figure it out as best you can!"
O joyless, painless moment!
The spirit rises, beggarly and bright,
A stubborn wind blows hard, and hastens
The cooling ash that follows it in flight.
Moscow, Princeton, Oxford, Tyree, Athens, Panormo, Fyodor-Kuzmichsk, Moscow
1986-2000
POETRY QUOTED IN The Slynx
Translations by Jamey Gambrell. Most of the poems are untitled.
PAGE
16 Mountain summits: Mikhail Lermontov, translation from
Goethe Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails: Osip Mandelstam, "Insomnia"
17 Spikenard, cinnamon, and aloe: Alexander Pushkin O spring without end or borders!: Alexander Blok
25 Hiccup, Hiccup: based on Russian folk nonsense rhymes
27 On the black sky-words are inscribed: Marina Tsvetaeva
32 Life, you're but a mouse's scurry: Alexander Pushkin
33 The reed pipe sings upon the bridge: Alexander Blok
In the district where no feet have passed: Boris Pasternak
39 From the dawn a luxurious cold: Yakov Polonsky
63 Winter shows its anger stilclass="underline" Fyodor Tiutchev
76 The heart of a beauty!: Verdi, "La donna e mobile," from Rigoletto
86 Not because she shines so bright: Innokenty Annensky
87 The flame's ablaze, it doesn't smoke: Bulat Okudzhava
I want to be bold, I want to be a scoffer: Konstantin Balmont
88 No, I do not hold that stormy pleasure dear!: Alexander
Pushkin You lie in silence, heeding ne'er a sound: Alexander Pushkin
134 But the hand behind your back is stronger: Natalya Krandievskaya
189 O tender specter, happy chance: Natalya Krandievskaya
190 O city! O wind! O snowstorms and blizzards!: Alexander Blok
But is the world not all alike?: Natalya Krandievskaya
202 Bright thoughts ascend: Alexander Blok
206 From the threshold of the gate: Bulat Okudzhava
208 February! Grab the inks and cry!: Boris Pasternak
216 Oh, the moment, oh, the bitter fight: Alexei Khvostenko
223 Our eyes were glued to the tribune: anonymous Soviet poem, c. 1970s
231 Steppe and nothing else: Russian folk song
233 And where is that clearest of fires: Bulat Okudzhava
234 The lamplighter should have lit them, but sleeps: Bulat Okudzhava
241 Beneath a canopy of fetid thatch: Natalya Krandievskaya
242 In the stony cracks between the tiles: Nikolai Zabolotsky Life, you're but a mouse's scurry: Alexander Pushkin Neither fire nor darkened huts: Alexander Pushkin
245 O world, roll up into a single block: Nikolai Zabolotsky
246 Joy, thou beauteous godly lightning: Schiller, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
254 The trepidation of life, of all the centuries and races:
Maximilian Voloshin He who draws the darkest lot of chance: Alexander Blok What kind of East do you favor?: Vladimir Solovyov Is all quiet among our fair people?: Alexander Blok
255 Man suits all elements, every season: Alexander Pushkin
274 My steppe is burned, the grass is felled: Alexander Blok
275 O joyless, painless moment!: Natalya Krandievskaya
Tatyana Tolstaya
Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, Tolstaya worked for several years at a Moscow publishing house. In the mid-1980s, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines and her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the co-host of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal. Both her novel, The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.
