On the eve of the First Revolution his mother suddenly died; she fell asleep over Maeterlinck’s The life of the Bee, which stayed open in her lap, like a dead bird. The same year, fertilized by the semen of death, Darmolatov's first verses appeared in the publication Life and School, which was put out by Saratov's circle of young revolutionaries. In 1912, he enrolled in St. Petersburg's university, where, following his father's wish, he studied medicine. Already, between 1912 and 1915, he was being published in the capital's reviews: Education, The Contemporary World, and the glorious Apollo. At about this time we have to place his acquaintance with Gorodetsky, and with the poet-suicide Victor Hoffman, who, as Makovsky said, had lived as a man and died as a poet, shooting himself with a tiny ladies' Browning through the eye, like some lyrical Cyclops. Darmolatov’s first and undoubtedly best collection, Ores and Crystals, appeared in 1915, In the old orthography and with the face of Atalanta on its cover. “In this not very extensive collection," wrote an anonymous reviewer in The Word, “there Is something of the mastery of an Innokenty Annensky, a youthful sincerity of feeling in the spirit of Baratynski, a certain radiance as in young Bunin. But there is no true fervor in it, no true mastery, no sincere feeling, though no particular weak spots either."
It is not my intention here to concern myself closely with the poetic qualities of Darmolatov, or to enter into the complex mechanism of literary fame. Nor are the poet’s war adventures of any importance to this story, though I confess that certain vivid pictures from Galida and Bukovina during Brusilov's offensive-when the cadet Darmolatov, an assistant medical officer, discovered the butchered body of his brother-are not without attraction. Nor is his Berlin excursion without charm, or his sentimental adventure, which, against the background of the starved and tragic Russia of the civil war, ended with a honeymoon In the hell of Kislovodsk, His poetry, regardless of what the critics say, offers a plenitude of empirical (poetic) facts, which, like old post cards or photographs in a shabby album, testify as much to his travels, ecstasies, and passions as to literary fashion: the beneficent influence of the wind on the marble clusters of caryatids; the Tiergareen lined with flowering linden trees; the lanterns of the Brandenburg Gate; the monstrous apparitions of the black swans; the rosy reflection of the sun on the murky waters of the Dnieper; the spell of white nights; the magical eyes of Circassian women; a knife plunged to the hilt into the ribs of a wolf of the steppes; the spin of an airplane propeller; the caw of the crow in the early dusk; a snapshot (from a bird’s-eye view) of the terrible panorama of ravaged Povolozh; the creeping of tractors and threshers through the golden wheat of the prairies; the black shafts of Kursk coal mines; the towers of the Crimea in the ocean of air; the purple velvet of theater boxes; the ghostly figures of bronze statues flashing amid fireworks; the sweep of ballerinas spun of foam; the splendor of the petroleum flame from the tanker in the harbor; the horrible narcosis of rhymes; the still life of a cup of tea, a silver spoon, and a drowned wasp; the violet eyes of the harnessed horse; the optimistic grinding of turbine engines; the head of the commander Frunze on an operating table amid the intoxicating smell of chloroform; the bare trees in Lubyanka's yard; the hoarse howling of village dogs; the wondrous balance of cement piles; the stalking of a cat following the trail of a winter bird in the snow; grainfields under a barrage of artillery fire; the lovers, parting in the valley of the Kama; the military cemetery near Sevastopol…
The poems dated 1918 and 1919 offer no hint of their place of origin: in them everything still occurs in the cosmopolitan region of the soul, which has no precise map. In 1921 we find him in St. Petersburg, in the somber opulence of the former palace of the Yeliseyevs, in that Ship of Fools, as Olga Forsh says, to which the starving brotherhood of poets without any income or clear orientation had flocked. According to Makovsky, in those birds of God only their lunatic eyes, with a frenzied gleam, were alive. They earnestly tried to look alive, he says, although you couldn't shake the feeling, despite the glaring lipstick of the women, that you were moving among phantoms. Outside, the furious storm was raging, driven by the magnetic poles of revolution-counterrevolution: at the cost of insane daring, Bukhara again fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks; the mutiny of Kronstadt's sailors was crushed in a sea of blood; around the ravaged settlements human shells were dragging themselves-helpless women with gangrenous legs, and children with swollen bellies; when the nags, dogs, cats, and rats had been exterminated, barbaric cannibalism became the mi written law. "Who are we with, we Serapion Brothers?" shouted Leo Lunz. “We are with the hermit Serapion!" As far as he was concerned, Kruchenykh was for mindlessness: "Mindlessness awakens one and gives free rein to the creative imagination, without having to contend with anything concrete," “We are making it possible for our fellow poets to have total freedom in their choice of creative methods, providing.. “ the smithy group added. (Accepted unanimously, with one abstention.)
In a photograph from that period, Darmolatov still has the appearance of a St. Petersburg dandy, with dickey and bow tie. Gaunt, "with eyes staring at the ruins of Rome", with a chin slashed by a dimple that looks like a scar, with lips tightly pressed, his face reveals nothing, resembles a stony mask Reliable documents indicate that at that time the young Darmolatov had already accepted the cosmopolitan program of the Acmeists. This “longing for European culture” was primarily inspired in him by another poet, Mandelstam: both equally respected Rome, Annensky, and Gumilev and devoured them, like sweets, with hysterical greed.
One hot August evening in that same year of 1921, an orgy was in progress at the Yeliseyev palace, which Olga Forsh, with typical feminine exaggeration, called “a feast amid the plague". Their standard fare in those years was salted fish with draughts of horrible samogon, prepared according to alchemical recipes combining methyl alcohol, birch bark, and pepper. That evening "Cassandra" (Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova) was under the spell of one of her prophetic intuitions; from the peak of ecstasy she suddenly fell into a sick depression bordering on hallucination. It isn’t known who brought the news of the execution of the “master,” Gumilev, but it is certain that this news passed like a small, isolated magnetic storm through all these antagonistic groups separated by distinct ideological and aesthetic programs. A glass in hand and stumbling drunkenly, Darmolatov left Cassandra’s table and threw himself in the gaping shabby armchair of the deceased Yeliseyev, next to the proletarian writer Dorogoychenko.
In July 1930, he was staying at the Suhumsky Rest Home, working on translations commissioned by the journal Red News at the suggestion of Boris Davidovich Novsky. At the beginning of his acquaintance with Novsky, there was a distant Berlin encounter in a cafe near the Tiergarten, when the young Darmolatov listened with awe, admiration, and fear to the bold prophesies of Tverdohlebov — in other words, B. D. Novsky, the future commissar of the Revolutionary Naval Committee, diplomat, representative of the People’s Commissariat for Communications and liaisons. They say that in relatively lean times Novsky was his "connection” — a word indicating the complex bond between poets and the government whereby, on the basis of personal sympathies and sentimental debts of youth, the rigidity of the revolutionary line was softened. (Such a bond was greatly entangled and full of danger: if the powerful protector fell into disfavor, all the protégés rolled down the steep hill after him, as if carried by lava set in motion by the scream of the unlucky one.)