One of Parnok’s closest Moscow friends was Adelaide Gertsyk, a memoirist, translator, literary critic and poet, whose the only book poems, "Poems", published in 1910. As a child, Adelaide Gertsyk was withdrawn and not prone to expressing feelings; she was far from the life around her and was in some kind of fantastic world, excluding adults, “big ones”. In her youth, Adelaide had a passionate love story with a young man who died tragically, dying literally before her eyes in the hospital. As a result of this shock, she became partially deaf.
At the age of thirty-four, she married Dmitry Zhukovsky, who came from a prominent military family, and the following spring gave birth to the first of her two sons. The Zhukovskys settled in Moscow on Krechetnikovsky Lane and began building a house in Sudak. Adelaide was very fond of this Crimean city on the Black Sea, near Feodosia.
In the pre-war period, the Moscow house of Adelaide Gertsyk became a place where young poetesses gathered. Her sister recalled her two “domestic” roles - on the one hand, she monitored the education and upbringing of her sons, on the other, “with an absent-mindedly affectionate smile, she listened to the outpourings of the girl poet who clung to her. There were several around Adelaide in those years. Since 1911, we have been acquainted with and close to Marina Tsvetaeva: now our second sister Asya, a philosopher and storyteller, has appeared with us. [...]Perhaps Parnok was also a frequent guest of the Gertsyk-Zhukovskys.
Adelaide Gertsyk played important role and in personal life Hotbed these years. In mid-October, while visiting Gertsyk, Parnok met Marina Tsvetaeva, a young romantic friend and called “daughter” of Adelaide Gertsyk.
Adelaide Gertsyk
We learn about the details of this meeting, which had such important consequences, from Tsvetaeva’s poetic memoirs: in January of the following year, she wrote the tenth poem of the “Girlfriend” cycle, addressed to Parnok.
In this poem, Tsvetaeva writes about Parnok, starting from the moment she entered the living room “in a knitted black jacket with a winged collar.” The fire crackled behind the grate, the air smelled of tea and White Rose perfume [“ White Rose"]. Almost immediately, someone approached Parnok and said that there was a young poetess whom she needed to meet. She stood up, slightly bowing her head, in a characteristic pose, “biting her finger.” As she stood up, she noticed, perhaps for the first time, a young woman with short, curly blond hair who stood up in a "gratuitous movement" to greet her.
They were surrounded by guests, “and someone [said] in a joking tone: “Meet you, gentlemen!” Parnok put her hand in Tsvetaeva’s hand “with a long movement,” and “gently” a piece of ice “slowed” in Tsvetaeva’s palm. Tsvetaeva “was reclining in a chair, twirling a ring on her hand,” and when Parnok “took out a cigarette,” instinctively taking on the role of a knight, “he gave [her] a match.”
Later, during the evening, Tsvetaeva recalled, “over the blue vase - how [their] glasses clinked.” When they drank, and their gazes crossed for a moment, she thought: “Oh, be my Orestes!” Judging by the further lines of the same poem, she snatched the flower and gave it to her interlocutor.
Throughout the evening she piercingly felt the presence of her “Orestes”. At some point, hearing Parnok’s soft, deep, hoarse laugh nearby, she asks herself if the woman for whom she already feels love is laughing at her joke. She looked back and saw Parnok take “out of a gray suede bag” with “a long gesture and drop[a] handkerchief.”
When Tsvetaeva met and fell in love with Parnok, she was twenty-three years old, married to student Sergei Efron, and Ariadne, her daughter, was two years old.
Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron
Parnok was her first female lover.
The combination of femininity, boyishness and inaccessibility that she sensed in 29-year-old Parnok was irresistibly attractive to her, not to mention the mysterious and romantic aura of sinfulness that surrounded this woman’s reputation:
And your power-hungry forehead
Under the weight of a red helmet,
Not a woman and not a boy,
But something is stronger than me!
Despite the fact that by the time she met Parnok, Tsvetaeva herself was already a mother, she cultivated in herself the sense of self of a child. Obviously, she never experienced either real passion or the ability to achieve satisfaction in intimate life. And their relationship with Parnok was sadly affected by the fact that Tsvetaeva was extremely closed in her cocoon, as if protecting her infantile purity, and simply could not respond to Parnok’s mature eroticism, which excited and satisfied her.
Many researchers of Tsvetaeva’s work interpret the history of her relationship with Parnok, following a stereotypical point of view, implicitly hostile to this kind of love. They present Parnok as a “real lesbian,” an active, masculine, sinister seducer, and Tsvetaeva as a “normal” woman, a passive, sexually uninterested victim of temptation. This point of view largely corresponds to Tsvetaeva’s own view of this kind of love relationship. In several poems of the “Girlfriend” cycle, she paints Parnok as a “young tragic lady”, with a “dark fate”, over which “like a thundercloud is sin!” Indeed, the decadent aura of Baudelaire's femme damnee excited Tsvetaeva and brought a delightful sense of risk to her love for Parnok, as if she were going on a dangerous adventure, plucking her own personal fleur du mal. .).Baudelaire's collection "Flowers of Evil" includes the poem "Cursed Women."] By giving a decadent literary appearance to her friend, who did not share decadent tastes, Tsvetaeva asserts her purity, at least in poetry. But in that In the very same poem, where she calls Parnok a “tragic lady,” she reveals evidence of her own sophistication, in accordance with her stereotypes, admiring the “ironic charm that you are not him” (“Girlfriend,” no. 1).
It is even more interesting that the poems of the “Girlfriend” cycle testify: Tsvetaeva perceived herself as the personification of the active, masculine (boyish) principle in her relationship with Parnok. Tsvetaeva persistently portrays herself as a boy, a page, a courteous and flattering lover of a powerful creature who is “neither a woman nor a boy”; she sees herself as a knight who strives to perform heroic, romantic and reckless deeds to gain the favor of her mysterious lady. Tsvetaeva’s lyrical self-portrait was justified in real life. She wooed Parnok and succeeded in her courtship, leaving far behind Iraida Albrecht, with whom her lover had had an affair before.
In addition, Tsvetaeva’s poems dedicated to Parnok allow us to trace the growth of her ambivalent feelings as she succumbed to her passion, which threatened her and her appearance of a pure “Spartan child”, which she carefully guarded. She felt that she was losing control of their relationship and was filled with hatred and anger. From that moment on, hostile (and passionate) feelings move her more than love.
Parnok’s feelings for Tsvetaeva formed and manifested themselves more slowly, and they are more difficult to interpret. She immediately recognized Tsvetaeva’s talent, unconditionally fell in love with her gift, carefully raised and cherished it, never ceasing to appreciate it. It is possible that this generous and noble attitude was mixed with a feeling of involuntary envy of the poetic gift of her young friend, but Parnok skillfully controlled her emotions and wisely refrained from direct literary competition with Tsvetaeva.
For Tsvetaeva, Parnok played the role of a muse, and she did it superbly: she inspired her Bettina Arnim (as she called Tsvetaeva in one poem) to new creative achievements, to several of the best poems of the early period. At the same time, she herself gradually began to write more, especially in 1915.
However, avoiding a “duel of willfulness” with Tsvetaeva in the literary sphere, Parnok challenged her in the field of personal relationships, a challenge, if not a provocation, and emerged from this duel a proud and powerful winner.
Sofia Parnok
So, the women challenged each other to a fight, forcing - each her friend - to overcome the usual idea of \u200b\u200bthemselves; they forced each other to take risks. Of course, this did not create conditions for calm, balanced relationships, and perhaps even increased subconscious hostility and mutual claims that are difficult to resolve. And it was like natural disaster when the post-shock state lasts much longer than the earthquake itself. Tsvetaeva felt these consequences and freed herself from them with a terrible effort, surpassing her former love, and Parnok realized what creative seeds Tsvetaeva’s love had planted in her only in the last year of her life, and only partially.
A day or two after the first meeting at the Gertsyk-Zhukovskys, Tsvetaeva makes her first poetic declaration of love for Parnok in a somewhat capricious and perky spirit, as if at first she did not want to realize that she was in love:
Are you happy? - Will not say! Hardly!
And it’s better - let it be!
I think you kissed too many people
Hence the sadness.
She boldly and openly confesses her love at the beginning of the fourth stanza, and the rest of the poem lists why she loves, concluding with the most shocking and perhaps most important confession:
For this trembling, for the fact that really
Am I dreaming?
For this ironic charm,
That you are not him.
A week later, Tsvetaeva responded with a poem to her first love date with a woman, which she “evocated” in her memory the next day as “yesterday’s dream” and which took place at her home, in the presence of her Siberian cat. The unusualness and novelty of sensations disturbs her, she does not know what to call them, she doubts whether what she is involved in can be called love. She did not understand the distribution of roles; everything, as she writes, was “the devilish opposite.” In her mind, a “duel of willfulness” took place, but she did not know who won:
And yet - what was it?
What do you want and regret?
I still don’t know: did she win?
Was she defeated?
The next day her feelings became calmer. “The look is sober, the chest is freer, again at peace.” And she concludes at the end of the third poem from the “Girlfriend” cycle:
Oblivion cute art
The soul has already mastered it.
Some great feeling
Today it melted in my soul.
At the very beginning of their relationship, Parnok’s behavior seemed cold and aloof to Tsvetaeva. When Tsvetaeva once invited her to her place late in the evening, Parnok refused, citing her laziness and the fact that it was too cold to go out. Tsvetaeva playfully took revenge for this refusal in the fourth poem of “Girlfriends”:
You did it without evil,
Innocent and irreparable. -
I was your youth
Which passes by.
The next evening, “at about eight o’clock,” Tsvetaeva (or rather, her lyrical self) sees Parnok, who, together with the “other,” is riding on a sleigh, sitting “eye to eye and fur coat to fur coat.” She was aware that this other woman, “desired and dear, is more desirable than I am,” but she perceived everything that was happening as if fairytale dream, inside of which she lived as “little Kai”, frozen in captivity of his “Snow Queen”.
Given the turbulent start to this love story, it seems strange that throughout November she did not leave any traces in the biography or poetry of both women. It is possible that Tsvetaeva, who nevertheless remains the only source of information about the initial period of this novel, simply exaggerated the intensity of her and Parnok’s feelings. Perhaps both women were distracted by family concerns: Tsvetaeva was busy with her husband suffering from tuberculosis (at the end of the year he completed treatment in a sanatorium), Parnok was busy with her brother, who returned from Palestine to St. Petersburg in November.
Tsvetaeva’s poem, written on December 5, after a six-week silence, and addressed to Parnok, indicates that passions are running high. The poem is permeated with Tsvetaeva’s boyish swagger, especially in the last stanza, where she decides to compete in the name of her friend with “shining pupils,” that is, she strives to fight her off from “jealous companions” (other friends), it is implied that they are not so purebred:
As if from under a heavy mane
Bright pupils shine!
Are your companions jealous?
Blood horses are light.
As Tsvetaeva put it in a later poem, she understood her friend, realized that her “heart was being taken by storm!”, and this made changes in the development of their relationship. In mid-December, Parnok quarreled with Albrecht, left the apartment on Myasnitskaya, taking her pet monkey with her, and rented a room in Arbat. Soon Tsvetaeva left with Parnok for several days, without telling any of her close friends where she was going. They were concerned, especially Elena Voloshina (Pra), the mother of the poet Voloshin.
Elena Voloshina
Voloshina had known Tsvetaeva for several years and treated her with maternal sympathy and jealous care. Like most of Tsvetaeva’s friends, Pra disliked Parnok and perhaps saw her as a rival.
She believed, or she wanted to believe, that Tsvetaeva was a helpless victim of evil spells. At the end of December she wrote to her friend, sculptor Yulia Obolenskaya:
“It’s a bit scary regarding Marina: things got really serious there. She went somewhere with Sonya for several days and kept it a big secret. [...] This all confuses and worries me and Lilya [Efron], but we are unable to break this spell.”
Tsvetaeva and Parnok were leaving for the ancient Russian city of Rostov the Great. Upon returning to Moscow, Tsvetaeva enthusiastically described the fantastic day they spent there. They started the day by wandering around the Christmas market in their fur coats, strewn with sparkling snow flakes, where they "looked for the brightest ribbons." Tsvetaeva “ate up on pink and unsweetened waffles” and was “touched by all the red horses in honor” of her friend. “Red-haired salesmen in undershirts, swearing, sold [them] rags: the stupid women marveled at the wonderful Moscow young ladies.”
When this magnificent crowd had dispersed, they saw an ancient church and entered it. Parnok’s attention was simply riveted on the icon of the Mother of God in a richly decorated frame. “Having said, Oh, I want her!” - She left Marina’s hand and walked up to the icon. Tsvetaeva watched as the “secular hand with the opal ring” of her beloved, the hand that was “all [her] misfortune,” carefully inserted “a yellow candle into the candlestick.” With her characteristic reckless impulse, she promised Parnok the icon “to steal it tonight!”
At sunset, “blessed as birthday girls,” the friends “rushed” into the monastery hotel, “like a regiment of soldiers.” They ended the day in their room playing and telling fortunes with cards. And when Tsvetaeva got the king of hearts three times, her friend “was furious.”
Already at home, in Moscow, Tsvetaeva recalled in her poems how this fabulous day ended:
How you squeezed my head,
Caressing every curl,
Like your enamel brooch
The flower cooled my lips.
Like me on your narrow fingers
I moved my sleepy cheek,
How you teased me as a boy
How did you like me like this...
Roman reached highest point in the first half of next year. Love for Tsvetaeva eventually inspired Parnok, whose muse had been silent for almost a year, to write new poems, and for the first time since her adolescence she began putting dates on her poems. This indicates a creative revival, an appeal to historical certainty and to facts of an autobiographical nature, which have always been a fruitful source of inspiration for her best poems.
In 1915 - 1916, Parnok continued to be at a crossroads, choosing between her own sources of life and sensations, characteristic only to her, and alien, bookish, but from the point of view of taste, impeccable aesthetic standards, which narrowed her possibilities, not allowing them to be expressed. Tsvetaeva also felt constrained by the same aesthetic norms and the unspoken censorship of the Russian cultural tradition, which did not allow the depiction of real life and, in particular, was hostile to lesbian themes in serious poetry. Her poems dealing with this relationship were in many ways more explicit than Parnok's because she did not write them for publication, whereas Parnok always had publication in mind.
It is possible that it was precisely in compensation for the forced submission to the Puritan literary standards Parnok and Tsvetaeva enjoyed flaunting their love in the literary community. One contemporary recalled:
“Twice I was invited [to the Rimsky-Korsakovs] to such very strange sessions. Marina Tsvetaeva was then considered a lesbian, and there, at these sessions, I saw her twice. She came with the poet Sofia Parnok. Both sat in an embrace and the two of them, taking turns, smoked one cigarette.”
Sofia Parnok
Proud of his poet friend, Parnok introduces her to his friends, including Chatskina and Saker. Since January 1915, Tsvetaeva’s poems have been published mainly in the journal Northern Notes. Since she does not want to receive money for her poems, Chaikina and Saker pay her with gifts and their hospitality.
In the winter of 1915, Parnok's sister, Lisa, came to see her in Moscow. They rented two rooms in apartment building in Khlebny Lane, around the corner from the house where Tsvetaeva lived, Tsvetaeva often visited them. She and Parnok, sometimes together with other female poets, read their poems to each other and told fortunes. According to sister Parnok, expressed in the unpublished “Memoirs,” when she was already an elderly woman, Tsvetaeva did not pay a lot of attention husband and daughter.
Sometimes she took her two-year-old daughter with her, as Ariadne Ephron recalled years later:
“Mom has a friend, Sonya Parnok, she also writes poetry, and my mother and I sometimes go to visit her. Mom reads poetry to Sonya, Sonya reads poetry to mom, and I sit on a chair and wait for them to show me the monkey. Because Sonya has a real live monkey that sits in another room on a chain.”
In her creative work, Tsvetaeva was completely immersed in her feelings for Parnok, and only in January she dedicated three enthusiastic poems to her. In the eighth poem from the “Girlfriend” series, she admires everything about her, focusing on the peculiar features of her appearance. This is the neck “like a young shoot”, “the curl of the dim lips is capricious and weak”, “the dazzling ledge of Beethoven’s forehead” and, especially, her hand:
Absolutely pure
Faded oval
The hand to which the whip would go,
And - in silver - opal.
A hand worthy of a bow,
Gone into silk,
Unique hand
beautiful hand
Four days later, Tsvetaeva wrote the ninth poem from the “Girlfriend” series, which most strongly expresses her passionate love and attraction to Parnok:
The heart immediately said: “Darling!”
I forgave you everything at random,
Without knowing anything, not even a name!
Oh love me, oh love me!
To that winter period Enthusiastic love includes Tsvetaeva’s perhaps impossible, but psychologically understandable desire to have a child with Parnok. She justified such a wild desire by the fact that it expressed a “normal” maternal feeling, but it is not difficult to see in such self-justifications a latent feeling of guilt caused by the pure, non-binding pleasure that she received from her “abnormal” love for Parnok.
This represents a certain cruelty of Tsvetaeva’s fantasy towards her beloved in view of Parnok’s “despair” that she (for medical reasons) cannot have children. Tsvetaeva indirectly realizes mental wound Parnok, when she describes the “elder’s” fear of losing the “younger’s” love and her jealousy of all the men the younger one may date.
Even in the early spring of 1915, Parnok had apparently already begun to “accuse” Tsvetaeva of a hidden desire to leave her, and that she would inevitably do so due to the fact that Parnok would not be able to give her what she wanted most . As one might expect, Parnok's jealousy was directed towards Tsvetaeva's husband, and the very existence of such jealousy revealed weakness in the “black shell” of a friend. Once Tsvetaeva realized that her “caustic and burning lady” was vulnerable, her “will to power” played out. Tsvetaeva's impossible desire soon became an obsession.
On the one hand, Tsvetaeva’s feminine side wanted a child from Parnok, on the other, her “masculine” role was explained by another reason: Tsvetaeva, like Pygmalion in the myth, wanted to reveal to the world the still hidden genius in her Galatea (Parnok). Tsvetaeva’s creative will, yearning to create her friend as a work of art, and so reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s desire for the invention of her friend, Vita Sackville-West, in the novel Orlando, could not help but collide with no less strong will Parnok, thirsty for self-creation. Despite her still modest successes in poetry, Parnok did not want to give up the role of Pygmalion to her young lover. She never allowed anyone to dare to think that he had “discovered” her. The last stanza of the ninth poem of the “Girlfriend” cycle, in which Tsvetaeva asserts herself as the discoverer of the “stranger” (Parnok) for Russian poetry, probably evoked Parnok herself. ambivalent feelings:
Parrying all smiles with verse,
I reveal to you and the world
Everything that is prepared for us in you,
Stranger with Beethoven's brow.
By the end of January, Tsvetaeva’s friends and family had already lost hope of saving her from this passion. “Marina’s [novel] is developing rapidly,” Voloshina wrote to Obolenskaya, “and with such an unstoppable force that nothing can stop it. She will have to burn out in him, and Allah knows how this will end.”
Tsvetaeva seems to confirm this opinion with her poetic recollection of her first meeting with Parnok (No. 10, “Girlfriend”). In the remaining five poems of the cycle, however, there is hostility towards Parnok because of her “damned passion”. These verses suggest that in the spring Tsvetaeva had already begun to recover from her “burns” and therefore felt pain.
Parnok's discovery of Sappho coincided with the beginning of her romance with Tsvetaeva, so it is not at all surprising that her first sapphic imitations are thematically connected with individual moments in their relationship. Poem "As a little girl.." has two addressees, Sappho and Tsvetaeva, and treats three interconnected novels: firstly, Sappho’s romance with Attida, the “little girl” to whom, according to the traditional point of view, this one-liner by Sappho is addressed; secondly, Sappho’s romance with Parnok’s lyrical self “singlely pierced Sappho with an arrow,” and she creatively desired and fell in love with Sappho; and thirdly, Parnok’s romance with Tsvetaeva, who is the “little girl” and Parnok’s lover.
Pierced by Sappho's arrow, the lyrical self reflects on its sleeping friend:
“You seemed awkward to me as a little girl” -
Ah, Sappho’s one-liner pierced me with an arrow!
At night I thought about the curly head,
The tenderness of a mother replaces passion in a frenzied heart, -
In Parnok’s poem, Sappho’s archaic one-liner plays the role of a lyrical refrain, evoking various memories of an intimate nature: “I remembered how I pulled away a kiss with a trick,” “I remembered those eyes with an incredible pupil” - a mention, perhaps, of a date on October 22, when Tsvetaeva had her the impression that “everything is the devilish opposite!” Marina’s girlish pleasure with her “new thing” dates back to this time, when “you entered my house, happy with me, like a new thing: / With a belt, a handful of beads or a colored shoe -.” And finally, the most last memory Parnok, already repeated after this, about Tsvetaeva’s bliss and unmaiden’s malleability “under the blow of love”:
But under the blow of love you are like malleable gold
I leaned towards the face, pale in the passionate shadow,
Where it was as if death had passed like a powder of snow...
Thank you also, sweet one, that in those days
“You seemed awkward to me as a little girl.”
The enthusiastic mood of this poem contradicts the far from harmonious relationships between the friends, which are reflected in two other poems written by Parnok in the winter of 1915: “My window was covered with patterns” and “This evening was a dull fawn.” On February 5, Parnok sent both poems to Tsvetaeva’s sister-in-law, Lila Efron, who asked for them. Neither poem indicates a specific addressee, but both contain details regarding the part of Moscow where Parnok and Tsvetaeva lived during their affair: the Georges Bloch sign (No. 56) was visible from the window of an apartment in a building in Khlebny Lane, where Parnok lived, and the Union cinema, which is mentioned in the poem “That Evening Was a Dull Fawn,” was very close, at the Nikitsky Gate.
Both of these poems can be considered a kind of predecessor of Parnok's mature lyrical element: an interpretation of sapphic love in a non-decadent, slightly romantic, conversational style. Stylistically and thematically, they represent a striking contrast with the stylized and anachronistic sapphic interpretation of a similar theme in the poem “A Little Girl.” The poem “My window is covered with patterns” expresses, as one can easily imagine, one of Parnok’s typical painful moods after a quarrel with Tsvetaeva:
Covered with patterns
My window. - Oh, day of separation! -
I'm on rough glass
I lay my longing hands.
I look at the first cold gift
With desolate eyes
How the ice moire melts
And bursts into tears.
A snowdrift has overgrown the fence,
More frosty and fluffy,
And the garden is like a brocade coffin
Under the silver fringe and tassels..
No one is going, no one is going,
And the phone is cruelly silent.
I'm guessing - odd or even? -
According to the letters of the Georges Bloch sign
In the poem “That evening was a dull fawn,” the city landscape, as in “It was covered in patterns...”, expresses emotional condition girlfriends who quarreled at the end of a love date. The feeling of alienation continues in the cinema, where the friends went at the request of the addressee:
This evening was a dull fawn, -
For me he was fiery.
This evening, as you wished,
We entered the Union Theater.
I remember my hands, weak from happiness,
The veins are branches of blue.
So that I could not touch your hand,
You pulled on your gloves.
Oh, you came so close again,
And again they turned off the path!
It became clear to me: no matter how you look,
The right word cannot be found.
I said, “In the darkness, brown
And your alien eyes."
The waltz dragged on and views of Switzerland -
A tourist and a goat are on the mountains.
I smiled - you didn’t answer...
Man isn't right about everything!
And quietly, so that you don’t notice,
I stroked your sleeve.
The day before Parnok sent these two poems to Lila Efron, Voloshina unexpectedly came to her, whose concern for Tsvetaeva finally forced her to confront the one who, it seemed to her, should be responsible for all her and Marina’s anxiety. Pra left Parnok, understanding a little differently how things were than when she arrived, as she wrote to Obolenskaya the next day: “.. I was with Sonya yesterday and we talked with her for many hours, and there were many failures in her speeches , which offended me, and there were moments in conversations when I was ashamed of myself for talking about her with other people, condemning her, or pronouncing coldly categorical sentences worthy of an executioner.”
Sofia Parnok
Two days later, Parnok wrote a poem that predicts “inevitable death” for the lyrical self on the path that her heart has chosen:
Once again the sign to set sail has been given to us!
We left the pier on a wild night.
Again the heart is a crazy captain -
The sail is heading towards inevitable death.
The whirlwinds of the moon ball started dancing
And the heavy waves tousled the surrounding area...
- Pray for the unrepentant, for us,
O poet, oh companion of all seekers!
Once, in a letter to Gurevich, Parnok described herself as a “seeker” who “spent a lot of time and effort” in search of “effective” communication and a person with whom she could share her life. It seems that already at the beginning of February 1915 she realized that Tsvetaeva would not be that person.
Towards the end of this month, Tsvetaeva also begins to express ambivalent feelings about her relationship with Parnok. The eleventh poem of the “Girlfriend” cycle is simply permeated with the irritation and hostility of a spoiled child. If Parnok suffered because of her devotion to her husband, her fantasy of a child she could not give her, and her flirtation with men, then Tsvetaeva was jealous of Parnok of her other friends and especially of her reputation as a person known for her “inspired temptations,” like mentioned Tsvetaeva in the first poem “Girlfriends”. Tsvetaeva suspected that Parnok was having affairs with others while she was in an affair with her, although there is no evidence of this after Parnok quarreled with Iraida Albrecht. In the eleventh poem of “Girlfriends,” Tsvetaeva reveals her desire to surpass Parnok with the art of betrayal:
All eyes under the sun are burning,
A day is not equal to a day.
I'm telling you in case
If I change...
In the same poem, however, she says that “no matter whose lips she kissed” “in the hour of love,” she remains completely devoted to Parnok, as devoted as the German writer Bettina Arnim was faithful to her poet friend, Caroline von Genderode. In the last stanza of the poem, Tsvetaeva quotes Bettina’s oath of eternal fidelity to Caroline in the phrase: “... - just whistle under my window.”
The stormy relationship continued in the spring at the same time that the lyrical duel between the poet-friends flared up. As before, Tsvetaeva went on the offensive, and Parnok parried the lyrical and emotional “jabs” of her “little girl” for the most part silence, and once a sonnet (“You watched the boys’ games”). Tsvetaeva was oppressed by Parnok with her “damned passion...”, demanding “retribution for an accidental sigh” (“Girlfriend”), but most of all she was angry that she was in captivity of her own thirst, excited by Parnok, “scorched and scorching fatal mouths “, as she (Tsvetaeva) wrote in a poem on March 14th.
Judging by the thirteenth poem in “Girlfriend,” written at the end of April, Tsvetaeva sometimes felt unhappy that she “met Parnok on her way.” She both respected and hated her friend because she
Eyes - someone, someone
They don’t give a look:
Requiring a report
For a casual glance.
Still, in the same poem, Tsvetaeva insists that even “on the eve of separation” - she also predicted the end of the affair with Parnok almost from the very beginning - she will repeat “that she loved these hands / Yours in power.”
This spring, Tsvetaeva considers herself a “Spartan child” who is completely at the mercy of her elder femme fatale, whose name is “like a sultry flower”, who has “hair like a helmet” (“Girlfriend”). Tired of her friend always “demanding an account and retribution,” Tsvetaeva begins to throw stones at Parnok, expressing fear and foreboding that her “heroine of the Shakespearean tragedy” will invariably leave her to her fate. And Tsvetaeva wanted to “extort, at the mirror,” “where is the way for you [Parnok] and where is shelter” (“Girlfriend”).
After one of the frequent quarrels with Parnok, Tsvetaeva gave a thrashing to her friend and all those close to her who, as it seemed to her, were overly burdening her with emotional demands, in a poem written on May 6, which was excluded from the final composition of the “Girlfriend” cycle:
Remember: all heads are dearer to me
One hair of your head.
And go yourself... You too,
And you too, and you.
Stop loving me, stop loving everyone!
Watch out for me in the morning,
So that I can go out calmly
Stand in the wind.
The lyrical flow of Tsvetaeva’s hostile feelings finally evoked a response from Parnok, albeit a very moderate one, in the “Sonnet,” written on May 9:
Did you watch the boys' games?
I rejected the smiling doll.
From the cradle straight to the horse
There was too much fury in you.
Years have passed, power-hungry outbursts
The evil one does not darken with his shadow
In your soul - how little of me it has,
Bettina Arnim and Marina Mnishek!
I look at the ashes and fire of curls,
In hands, more generous than royal hands, -
And there are no colors on my palette!
You, passing to your destiny!
Where does the sun rise equal to you?
Where is your Goethe and where is your False Demetrius?
Based on materials from the book by D. L. Burgin "Sofia Parnok. The life and work of Russian Sappho"
The romance between two women lasted a year and a half, one of whom was a great poet.
The loves of ordinary people remain their facts personal biography, the love relationships of poets leave a noticeable mark on their work. So it was with the romance of two representatives of the Silver Age - Marina Tsvetaeva And Sofia Parnok.
Poet and laureate Nobel Prize Joseph Brodsky considered Marina Tsvetaeva the first poet of the 20th century. As for Sofia Parnok, she was a famous poetess of her time, who was more appreciated as a brilliant literary critic. She became the first in history Russian literature an author who declared a woman’s right to extraordinary love, for which she was nicknamed the “Russian Sappho.”
Fact: Sappho was a poet and writer (c. 640 BC) from the Greek island of Lesbos who taught poetry to young girls in her literary salon. In ancient times, contemporaries called her the “tenth muse” and the muse of Eros for the peculiarity of the themes of her work.
They met when Tsvetaeva was 22 years old, and Parnok was 29. Marina had a dearly beloved husband Sergei Efron and two year old daughter Ariadne, Parnok has a special reputation behind him and several high-profile affairs with women that Moscow was whispering about.
Their ardent love began at first sight and remained in the history of literature with the scorchingly frank Tsvetaevsky cycle of 17 poems “Girlfriend”. Tsvetaeva’s poems dedicated to this relationship were so shocking that they were first allowed to be published in 1976.
Marina and Sofia met on October 16, 1914, and that same evening Tsvetaeva wrote an extremely sincere confession:
I love you. - Like a thundercloud
There is a sin over you -
Because you are caustic and burning
And best of all
Because we, that our lives are different
In the darkness of the roads,
For your inspired temptations
And dark rock.
It must be said that Tsvetaeva’s passionate poetic nature manifested itself from childhood - she fell painfully passionately in love, while the gender of the object of attention was not important, just like its real existence. By her own admission in the autobiographical story “My Pushkin”, as a girl she “fell in love not with Onegin, but with Onegin and Tatyana (and maybe a little more with Tatyana), in both of them together, in love. And then I didn’t write a single thing of mine without falling in love with two people at the same time (with her - a little more), not with two, but with their love.”
Fact: The aroma of same-sex relationships permeated the air of literary and theatrical salons at the beginning of the 20th century - such relationships were not rare and were not considered impossible.
Marina spoke categorically directly about restrictions on the right to choose: “To love only women (for a woman) or only men (for a man), obviously excluding the usual opposite - what a horror! But only women (for a man) or only men (for a woman), obviously excluding unusual native - what boredom!
The lovers behaved boldly - in literary salons The young ladies sat hugging each other and smoking one cigarette. In 1932, in her autobiographical prose “Letters to Amazon,” Tsvetaeva explained what caused this passion: “this smiling young girl meets another me, her: you don’t need to be afraid of her, you don’t need to defend yourself from her, she is free to love with your heart, without a body, to love without fear, to love without causing pain.” The young woman considered her greatest fear to be the fear of “missing the wave. I was still afraid of not loving anymore: of not knowing anything anymore.”
Who were these two? bright women and why were they so attracted to each other?
Russian Sappho
Poetess, critic and translator Sofia Parnok (1885-1933) was born in Taganrog into a family of doctors. The girl had difficult relationships with his father, who, after the death of his mother, quickly married the governess. She graduated from high school with a gold medal, after which she studied at the Conservatory in Geneva and at the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg. After a short marriage to a writer V. Volkenshtein Parnok became known for her romances with women and lyrics dedicated to homosexual themes.
According to the recollections of one of her contemporaries, she had “some kind of charm - she knew how to listen, ask a question at the right time, encouraging or confusing with subtle irony - in a word, she was a woman who could be obeyed.”
Passionate rebel
The greatest poet, prose writer and translator Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was the daughter of a professor at Moscow University Ivana Tsvetaeva- founder of the Museum of Fine Arts (now State Museum fine arts named after A.S. Pushkin on Volkhonka). The childhood of the Tsvetaev children was spent in the “kingdom of white statues and old books.” Marina called the museum “our giant younger brother”, because the parents were frantically engaged in its arrangement.
The father was very busy and kind, with his gentleness he smoothed out the violent temperament of the young and talented mother, whose paintings, music and mood filled the whole house. Marina and her sisters and brother were left without parents quite early - she was only 14 when her mother died of consumption, and 21 when her father died. In the future poet, all his life, two different parental characters boiled like an explosive mixture - his father’s devotion to the idea, hard work and his mother’s passionate intolerance.
Each creative personality has its own muse, a stimulus in the flesh, which ignites a storm in the poet’s heart, helping to give birth to artistic and poetic masterpieces. This was Sofia Parnok for Marina Tsvetaeva - the love and disaster of her life. She dedicated many poems to Parnok, which everyone knows and quotes, sometimes without even realizing to whom they were addressed.
Girl with Beethoven's profile
Sonechka was born into an intelligent Jewish family in 1885 in Taganrog. The father was the owner of a chain of pharmacies and an honorary citizen of the city, and the girl’s mother was a very respected doctor. Sonya's mother died during her second birth, giving birth to twins. The head of the family soon married a governess, with whom Sofia did not have a good relationship.
The girl grew up wayward and withdrawn; she poured out all her pain in poetry, which she began to write in early age. Sonya created her own world, into which outsiders, even her previously idolized father, had no access. Probably, from then on, a tragic hopelessness appeared in her eyes, remaining forever.
Live in home became unbearable and gold medalist Mariinsky Gymnasium, she went to study in the capital of Switzerland, where she showed amazing musical abilities, having received an education at the conservatory.
Upon returning to her homeland, she began attending higher Bestuzhev courses. At this time, Sofia began a short-term romance with Nadezhda Polyakova. But the poetess quickly cooled down towards her lover. And this closeness almost ended tragically for the latter.
Soon Parnok married the famous writer Vladimir Volkshtein. The marriage was concluded according to all Jewish canons, but did not withstand even a short test of time. It was then that Sofia realized that she was not interested in men. And she again began to find solace with her friends.
Sappho Pierced by an Arrow
Before the war, the salon of literary critic Adelaide Gertsyk was a haven for talented Moscow poetesses. It was there that the meeting between Tsvetaeva and Parnok took place. Then Marina turned twenty-three, and her two-year-old daughter Ariadne and loving husband Sergei Efron.
A woman entered the living room in a cloud of aroma of exquisite perfume and expensive cigarettes. Her contrasting clothes, white and black, seemed to emphasize the contradictory nature: a sharply defined chin, powerful lips and graceful movements. She radiated an attractive aura of sin as she gently manipulated her husky voice. Everything in her cried out for love - the tremulous movement of graceful fingers taking out a scarf from a suede bag, the seductive look of her inviting eyes. Tsvetaeva, reclining in a chair, succumbed to this destructive charm. She stood up and silently brought a lit match to the stranger, giving her a light. Eye to eye - and my heart raced.
Marina was introduced as Adelaide's named daughter. And then there was the clinking of glasses, a short conversation and several years of overwhelming happiness. Marina's feelings for Sofia strengthened when she saw Parnok riding in a cab with a young pretty girl. Then Tsvetaeva was consumed by the fire of indignation, and she wrote her first poem dedicated to her new friend. Now Marina knew for sure that she did not want to share Sonya’s heart with anyone.
In the winter of 1915, neglecting public opinion, the women went on vacation together, first to Rostov, then to Koktebel, and later to Svyatogorye. When Tsvetaeva was told that no one does this, she replied: “I am not everyone.”
Efron patiently waited for this destructive passion to burn out, but soon went to the front. During this period, Tsvetaeva created a cycle of poems “To a Friend,” openly confessing her love to Parnok. But, oddly enough, her love for her husband did not leave her.
Rivalry
By the time she met Sofia, Tsvetaeva, although she was already a mother, felt like a child who lacked tenderness. She lived in her poetic cocoon, an illusory world that she created herself. She probably had not yet felt passion in an intimate relationship with her husband, which is why she so easily fell into the web of the experienced and erotic Parnok. A woman with lesbian inclinations became everything to her: both an affectionate mother and an exciting lover.But both women were already recognized poetesses, published a lot, and little by little literary rivalry began to arise between them.
At first, Sofia Parnok restrained this feeling, because the first place for her was the satisfaction of carnal desires. But soon Tsvetaeva’s ambivalent attitude towards her friend begins to prevail. In her work of this period, gloomy notes can already be traced in relation to her beloved Sonya. Then Marina still believed that loving men was boring. She continued to indulge in bliss in an apartment on Arbat, which her muse had specially rented for meetings.
A sinful relationship is always doomed. This happened to two talented poetesses. In the winter of 1916, Osip Mandelstam stayed with Tsvetaeva for several days. The friends wandered around the city, read their new poems to each other, and discussed the works of their brothers. And when Marina came to Sonya, “under the caress of a plush blanket” she found another woman, as she would later write, black and fat. My heart was cut with unbearable pain, but proud Tsvetaeva left in silence.
Since then, Marina has tried to forget all the events associated with Sofia. She even accepted the news of her death with indifference. But it was only a mask - it is impossible to escape from memory.
As for Sofia Parnok, after breaking up with Tsvetaeva, she still had several affairs with ladies. Her last passion was Nina Vedeneeva, to whom the poetess dedicated a wonderful series of poems. In the arms of her last muse, Sophia, the Russian Sappho, died of a broken heart. But until the last day there was a photograph of Marina Tsvetaeva on her bedside table...
One of famous poems Marina Tsvetaeva - “I want to be at the mirror, where the dregs are...”.
Parnok Sofia Yakovlevna ( real name Parnokh) (July 30 (August 11) 1885, Taganrog - August 26, 1933, Karinskoye, Moscow region) - Russian poetess, translator.
She was born in Taganrog, into a Russified Jewish family. Father is a pharmacist, owner of a pharmacy, honorary citizen of Taganrog. Mother is a doctor. Sofia is the older sister of the poet and translator Valentin Parnakh and the poetess Elizaveta Tarakhovskaya. She lost her mother early; she died shortly after the birth of her twins, Valentin and Elizabeth. The father remarried the governess. Sofia’s relationship with her stepmother, and even with her father, did not work out. Loneliness, alienation, isolation in one's own own world, were her constant companions. In 1894-1903 she studied and graduated from the Taganrog gymnasium with a gold medal. In 1903 - 1904 she studied piano at the Geneva Conservatory. However, she did not become a musician. Returning to Russia, she studied at the Higher Women's Bestuzhev Courses and the Faculty of Law of the University.
Sofia Parnok was passionate about literature. Translations from French, plays, charades, sketches and the first cycle of poems dedicated to Nadezhda Pavlovna Polyakova - her Geneva... love. Sofya Parnok realized this strange inclination very early, although upon returning to Russia, in the fall of 1907, she married the writer V. M. Volkenshtein (the marriage was concluded according to the Jewish rite). After the breakup of an unsuccessful marriage, in January 1909, Parnok turned her feelings only to women, this theme is very characteristic of her lyrics.
Sofia Parnok began publishing poetry in 1906, when she made her debut in the magazines “Northern Notes”, “ Russian wealth» critical articles written in a brilliant, witty style. Parnok quickly won the attention of readers with her talent, and since 1910 she was already a permanent contributor to the newspaper “Russian Rumor”, leading its artistic and musical theater sections.
Since 1913, she collaborated in the journal “Northern Notes”, where, in addition to poetry, she published translations from French and critical articles under the pseudonym “Andrei Polyanin”. Parnok the critic was highly regarded by his contemporaries; her articles were distinguished by an even, friendly tone and a balanced assessment of the merits and originality of a particular poet. She owns concise and clear characteristics of the poetics of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Khodasevich, Igor Severyanin and other leading poets of the 1910s. Recognizing the talent of a number of Acmeists, she nevertheless rejected Acmeism as a school. Parnok owns (uncharacteristic for her in tone, but indicative of her ideas about art) one of the most striking speeches against Valery Bryusov, “playing the role of a great poet” (1917).
“On duty,” Sofya Parnok often had to attend theater premieres and literary and musical salon evenings. She loved the secularity and brightness of life, attracted and attracted attention not only with her originality of views and judgments, but also appearance: wore men's suits and ties, wore a short haircut, smoked a cigar... At one of these evenings, in the house of Adelaide Kazimirovna Gertsyk-Zhukovskaya, October 16, 1914, Sofya Parnok met with Marina Tsvetaeva. Their romance continued until 1916. Tsvetaeva dedicated a cycle of poems to her, “Girlfriend” (“Under the caress of a plush blanket...”, etc.) and an essay “Mon frere feminine.”
Sofia Parnok’s first collection of poetry, “Poems,” was published in Moscow in 1916 and met with positive reviews from critics, being at the same time a kind of monument to her relationship with Tsvetaeva. Parnok wrote poetry better and better, her images became stronger and more psychologically subtle, but these were by no means poetic times.
After the October Revolution in 1917, Pakrnok left for the city of Sudak (Crimea), where she lived until the early twenties, doing literary “menial” work: translations, notes, reports. She didn't stop writing. Among her friends from this period are Maximilian Voloshin, sisters Adelaide and Evgenia Gertsyk. In Sudak she met the composer A. Spendiarov and, at his request, began work on the libretto of the opera “Almast”.
Returning to Moscow, Sofia Parnok was engaged in literary and translation work. She was one of the founders of the Lyrical Circle association and the Knot cooperative publishing house. She published four collections of poems in Moscow: “Roses of Pieria” (1922), “Vine” (1923), “Music” (1926), “Sotto voce” (1928). The last two collections were published by the publishing house “Uzel”, and “Sotto voce” - with a circulation of only 200 copies. Parnok continued her literary-critical activity after the revolution, in particular, it was she who first named the “big four” of post-symbolist poetry - Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak (1923, in the article “B. Pasternak and others”).
Parnok did not belong to any of the leading literary groups. She was critical of both the latest trends in contemporary literature and the traditional school. Her poetry is distinguished by her masterful command of words, broad erudition, and ear for music (reflected in the rich metrics that influenced Tsvetaeva’s metrics in the 1910s). Her latest collections are filled with conversational intonations and a sense of the “everyday” nature of the tragedy; many poems are dedicated to the theoretical physicist Nina Vedeneeva - “The Gray Muse.”
June 24, 1930 in Moscow Bolshoi Theater The premiere of A. Spendiarov’s opera “Almast” based on its libretto took place with triumphant success.
IN last years Parnok, deprived of the opportunity to publish, like many writers, made her living by translations. Sofya Yakovlevna Parnok died on August 26, 1933, in the village of Karinskoye near Moscow. She was buried a few days later at the German cemetery in Lefortovo. Her work and the history of her relationship with Tsvetaeva have not yet been fully studied, as has the archive, which contains two unpublished collections, “Music” and “Sotto a Voice.”
My love! My demon is crazy!
My love! My demon is crazy!
You are so bony that, perhaps,
Having had breakfast with you at lunchtime,
An cannibal would break his teeth.
But I'm not that kind of rude
(Besides, I'm somewhat toothless)
And therefore, without bothering you,
I will eat you with my lips!
Parnok Sofia Yakovlevna
After all, I sing about that spring
After all, I sing about that spring,
Which in reality is not there,
But like a sleepwalker you are in a dream
You go into a quiet light.
And the music is stingy with words
It’s not just poetry anymore,
And the roll call of our dreams
And secrets - mine, yours...
And now it appears before you,
Through icy crystal
Desert moon blue
Shimmering distance.
Without a staff and a wanderer's knapsack
Without a staff and a wanderer's knapsack
The poet cannot imagine the last path,
But, having left everything, I will go on my way without them.
To the simple porch, to this earth,
Where my voice once sounded brittle,
I’ll come to take a prophetic look.
I'll go into the nursery and open it again
West facing window:
The firmament then burned with the same glow
And the reddened sun set...
And I learned to dream that a hero
Bloody death befits.
He stands, white, pointed,
Like a sugar loaf.
And we're climbing to the top
And we are barely moving.
The road turns in rings -
Behind the turnover is the turnover.
The impatient soul dreams
The gate is already shining.
But the light blinds the eyes, but it’s slippery,
It’s like icy conditions on your feet.
In vain we count how many
There are only a few turns left for us.
We rise in a spiral, but fall,
But we will fall like stones.
Do you hear - crows for carrion
Already flying out of the darkness?
Behind the glass of the window is glass
Behind the glass of the window is glass
Heaven.
The street is clouded
Snow.
Only this light snow -
Not winter.
And where does this snow come from?
Tell me?
Is it poplar fluff?
Scattered?..
And I felt sad, my friend,
For some reason.
Like a summer blizzard
Indeed,
Last bed for me
Steleth.
My voice must be soulless
And the speech is touchingly empty.
The sonnet is completed, the waltz is heard
And the lips were kissed.
An aster flies over the book,
The distance was frozen in the window.
In front of me: “L"Abesse de Castro”,
Cold-fiery Stendhal.
It's nice for lips to be nobody's
I love my deserted threshold...
Why are you coming, whose name is
The winds of all roads carry me?
For the sake of rhyme, I won't lie
I won’t lie for the sake of rhyme,
Don't blame me, venerable master, -
We are from the cradle of different colors:
I can only do what I can.
I am strictly grateful to fate,
What the touchy Muse gave me:
Narrow, but we go our own way.
Both are not your traveling companions.
Gazelles
The pain reliever is your hand,
The white color of magnolias is your hand.
On a winter afternoon, love knocked on my door,
And your hand held the sable fur.
Oh, like a butterfly, on the stem of my hand
Stayed for a moment - no more - your hand!
But it lit what the enemies and I extinguished,
And what was not overcome, your hand:
All the frantic tenderness ignited in me,
O queen of self-will, your hand!
It fell right on my heart (I don’t complain:
Isn't this your heart!) - your hand.
Today is a faster day from the sky
Today is a faster day from the sky
It carried away its cooled ray.
Hospitable starlings
Empty in the gray birch trees.
There is a crunch in the acacia bushes, I would say:
Dry pods click.
But the silence of the estate is too strange
And loud tremors of the heart...
Yes, this autumn is autumn twice!
And just like the foliage rustling,
Each leaf whispers
The tired soul repeats.
Parnok (real name - Parnokh) - Volkenshtein Sofya Yakovlevna -
Russian poetess, translator, literary critic. Author of collections
"Poems" 1916, "Roses of Pieria", "Vine" 1923, translations from
French and German. She often wrote in “sapphic” stanza.
Close friend of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva's cycle is dedicated to her
poems "Girlfriend".
How do they become poets? By God's permission? A game of chance? The willfulness of the stars, whose laughter confuses and confuses the reading of predestination and segments of the path? It’s difficult to say, it’s difficult to see and unravel the tangle of contradictions, no, but something more complex and clear only at that Height that is inaccessible from the Earth, no matter how you stretch your hands to it! How do they become poets? Nobody knows, although thousands of lines have been written about it. I’ll add a few more to the multi-volume epic. About the one who was called "Russian Sappho".
Sofya Yakovlevna Parnokh became a Poet soon after she broke the threads of Love entangling her. Before that, of course, she wrote poetry, and very good ones, and appeared in print with critical literary reviews under the pseudonym Andrei Polyanin... But a real sea of poetry poured at her feet when she let Love go to the free wind, following the Gospel parable: “Let go of the bread to sail on the waters." She painfully let go of what she wanted to keep, perhaps for eternity, with herself and her soul, and received in return a Gift that can put the Creator beyond the brink of sin and sinlessness...
Sofia Parnokh was born on July 30, 1885, in Taganrog, in the family of a pharmacist. Her mother died quite young, after giving birth to twins, Valentin and Elizabeth. Sonechka was only six years old at that time! Her father, Yakov Parnokh, (beginning literary activity, the poetess and critic considered it best to give the surname a more refined form - Parnok, which somewhat reminded her of the name of the legendary Parnassus - the author), a man of rather independent views and a tough character, soon married again.
Sonya’s relationship with her stepmother, and even with her father, did not work out. Loneliness, alienation, isolation in her own world were the constant companions of a cocky, steep-headed girl with a shock of unruly curls and a strange, often self-absorbed look. She played the piano very well, studied diligently, studying difficult scores of operas, claviers, Mozart sonatinas and Liszt scherzos at night. She played "Hungarian Rhapsody" easily. Sonya graduated from the Taganrog gymnasium with gold medal, and in 1903 - 1904 she left for Geneva. There she studied at the conservatory, piano class. But for some reason I didn’t become a musician. Elena Kallo writes about the failed pianist-musician Sonya Parnok: “Undoubtedly, Parnok had musical gift Moreover, we can say that it was through music that she felt the world. It is not without reason that the shock experienced by the sounds of an organ in a Catholic church awakened the creative element in her in her early youth (the poem “Organ”). With the development of her poetic skill, the musicality of her verse became more and more obvious, to which the actual musical characteristics are quite applicable: duration, modulation, change of mode, the rhyme sounds in thirds, then the interval changes, the vibration of a refined rhythm... These properties were manifested not only in her mature life creativity, but much earlier:
Where is the sea? Where is the sky? Is it above or below?
Am I taking you across the sky or across the sea?
My dear?
Low tide. We are sailing, but we can’t hear the oar,
As if we were carried away from the shore
Azure, running back.
It was one o'clock. - Or wasn't it? - There is a coffin in the chapel,
A forehead ennobled by calmness, -
How strangely distant he is!
The memory was covered with autumn leaves.
The wind babbles about joy and yours
Scattered curl.
(1915?)
Sofia Parnok kept music “within herself”. This gave her a lot as a Poet. Returning to Russia, she entered the Higher Women’s Courses and Faculty of Law university. She was also passionately fascinated by another element - literature. Translations from French, plays,
charades, sketches and the first.. helpless cycle of poems dedicated to Nadezhda
Pavlovna Polyakova - her Geneva... love.
Sofya Yakovlevna realized very early on this strange oddity of hers, the difference from ordinary people. “I have never been in love with a man,” she would later write to M.F. Gnessin, friend and teacher. She was attracted and attracted to women. What was it? An unconscious craving for maternal warmth, affection, tenderness, which was lacking in childhood, for which her soul yearned, a certain complex of immaturity that developed into passion and vice later, or something else, more mysterious and still unknown? Irina Vetrinskaya, who has been studying the problem of “female” love for quite a long time, and who has devoted many articles and books to this, writes the following about this: “Psychatry classifies this as a neurosis, but I am of the completely opposite opinion: a lesbian is a woman with unusual developed sense own "I". Her partner is her own mirror image; by what she does in bed, she says: “This is me, and I am her. This is the highest degree of a woman’s love for herself.” (I. Vetrinskaya. Afterword to the book “Women who loved.. Women.” M. “OLMA-PRESS” 2002.) The opinion is controversial, perhaps, but not without foundation, and explains a lot in this strange and mysterious phenomenon - "female" love.
She does not hide her natural inclinations from society and is not ashamed of them - probably, this required considerable courage, you must admit! - Sofya Yakovlevna, nevertheless, in the fall of 1907, shortly after returning from Geneva to Russia, she married V.M. Wolkenstein - a famous writer, drama theorist, and theater critic. A year and a half later, in January 1909, the couple separated on the initiative of Sofia Yakovlevna. Official reason The reason for the divorce was her health - the inability to have children. Since 1906, Sofya Yakovlevna made her debut in the magazines “Northern Notes” and “Russian Wealth” with critical articles written in a brilliant, witty style. Parnok quickly won the attention of readers with her talent, and since 1910 she was already a permanent contributor to the newspaper “Russian Rumor”, leading its artistic, musical and theatrical sections. In addition, she was constantly engaged in self-education and was very demanding of herself. Thus, she could not help but attract the attention of many. This is what she wrote to L. Ya. Gurevich, a close friend, in a frank letter on March 10, 1911: “When I look back at my life, I feel awkward, as when reading a pulp novel... Everything that is infinitely disgusting to me in work of art, which can never be in my poems, obviously exists somewhere in me and is looking for embodiment, and here I look at my life with a disgusted grimace, like a person with good taste looks at someone else’s bad taste." And here in another letter to the same to the addressee: “If I have talent, then it is of the kind that without education I will not do anything with it. Meanwhile, it happened that I began to think seriously about creativity, without reading almost anything. What I should have read, I can’t read now, I’m bored... If there is a thought, it is not nourished by anything other than itself. And one fine day you won’t have a penny to your name and you’ll write fairy tales and nothing else.” Fairy tales did not suit her. She preferred to hone her sharpness of mind in critical articles and music reviews. However, not poisonous ones.
“On duty,” Sofya Yakovlevna often had to attend theater premieres and literary and musical salon evenings. She loved the secularity and brightness of life, attracted and attracted attention not only with her originality of views and judgments, but also with her appearance: she wore men's suits and ties, wore a short haircut, smoked a cigar... At one of these evenings, in the house of Adelaide Kazimirovna Gertsyk - Zhukovskaya, October 16, 1914, Sofya Parnok and met Marina Tsvetaeva.
This is how Marina Tsvetaeva - Efron was seen by her contemporaries at that time: "... A very beautiful person, with decisive, daring, to the point of impudence, manners... rich and greedy, in general, despite the poetry, - a woman - a fist! Her husband - a beautiful, unhappy boy Seryozha Efron - tuberculosis
consumptive." This is how R.M. Khin-Goldovskaya, in whose house Tsvetaeva’s family and her husband’s sisters lived for some time, spoke about her in her diary on July 12, 1914.” Pozoeva E.V. left the following memories: “Marina was very smart. Probably very talented. But she was a cold, hard person; she didn’t love anyone. ... She often appeared in black... like a queen... and everyone whispered: “This is Tsvetaeva... Tsvetaeva has come..."). In December 1915, the romance with Parnok was already in full swing. The novel is unusual and captivates both of them at once. By the power of mutual penetration into each other's souls - and above all, it was a romance of souls, it was like a dazzling solar flare. What was Marina, who was not yet such a famous poet, looking for in such an unusual feeling? Re-reading the documents, research by Nikolai Dolya and Semyon Karlinsky on this topic, I became increasingly convinced that Marina Tsvetaeva, being passionate and powerful by nature, like a tigress, could not be completely satisfied only with the role of a married woman and mother. She needed a consonant soul, over which she could reign supreme - whether publicly, secretly, openly or hidden - it doesn’t matter!
To rule over poems, rhymes, lines, feelings, soul, opinion, the movement of eyelashes, fingers, lips, or some kind of material embodiment - the choice of an apartment, a hotel for a meeting, a gift or
a performance and concert that should end the evening...
She willingly gave Sofya Yakovlevna a seemingly “leading” role in their strange relationship. But only at first glance.
Marina's influence on Sofya Parnok, as a person and as a Poet, was so comprehensive that by comparing the lines of their poetic cycles, written almost simultaneously, one can find common motifs, similar rhymes, lines and themes. The power was unlimited and great. Submission too!
On the pages of a short biographical article, it is not very appropriate to talk about the literary merits and demerits of the works of Sofia Parnok or Marina Tsvetaeva. I won't do that. I will only say that Sofya Parnok, as a lyrical poet, has reached in these poems, dedicated to her painful feelings for Marina and the break with her, such heights that put her on an equal footing with such personalities in Poetry as Mirra Lokhvitskaya, Karolina Pavlova or even Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. Why do I say this?
The fact is that, in my opinion, Parnok, as a Poetess of considerable magnitude, still unsolved by us today, with her poems, was able to express the essence of the Spirit of the Poet, namely, that He - if true, of course - then owns all the secrets human soul, regardless of gender, age and even, perhaps, accumulated life experiences. Here is one of the poems written by Sofia Parnok in 1915, at the height of the romance, in the “Koktebel summer”, when their painful romance was added to the burning feeling of Maximilian Voloshin for Marina - a sudden and rather complex feeling (encouraged by Marina, by the way):
Quirks of treacherous thoughts
The greedy spirit could not overcome, -
And so, out of a thousand hired ones,
You gave me the night.
Indifference taught you
The dashing art of love.
But suddenly, accustomed to prey,
Your embrace trembled.
A mad look, touched by melancholy,
A sullen, jealously clenched mouth, -
By tormenting me, you are taking revenge on fate
For my late arrival.
If the researchers had not precisely identified the addressee of this poem - Marina Tsvetaeva, then one would think that we're talking about about a loved one, a beloved man... But what's the difference? The main thing is that the person is Beloved...
They took risks, but were not afraid to shock society; they spent the Christmas holidays of 1914-15 together in Rostov. The family of Marina and her husband, Sergei Efron, knew about this, but could not do anything! Here is one of E. O. Voloshina’s letters to Yulia Obolenskaya, which somewhat characterizes the nervous situation that developed in the Tsvetaev-Efron house.
(*E. O. Voloshina was a close friend of Elizaveta Efron (Lili), the sister of Tsvetaeva’s husband. - author) Voloshina was worried about how Sergei Efron would react to what was happening: “What did Seryozha tell you? Why are you scared for him? (...) It's a bit scary about Marina: things got really serious there. She went somewhere with Sonya for several days, kept it a big secret. This Sonya had already quarreled with her friend, with whom she lived together, and rented a separate apartment for herself on Arbat. This everything confuses and worries me and Lilya, but we are not able to break this spell.” The spell intensified so much that a joint trip was taken to Koktebel, where the Tsvetaevs had spent the summer before. Here Max Voloshin falls unrequitedly and passionately in love with Marina, as already mentioned. There are endless proceedings and disputes between Marina and her friend.
Sofya Parnok experiences pangs of jealousy, but Marina, having shown her “tiger essence” for the first time, does not submit to timid attempts to return her to the channel of her previous feeling, which belonged only to them, the two of them. That’s not the case!
Marina, changeable, like a true daughter of the sea, (*Marina - sea - author.) encouraged Voloshin's courtship, suffered with all her soul and worried about her husband, who left for the front in March 1915 with a hospital train. She wrote to Elizaveta Yakovlevna Efron in a frank and warm letter in the summer of 1915: “I love Seryozha for the rest of my life, he is dear to me, I will never leave him anywhere. I write to him every day, sometimes every other day, he knows my whole life. ", only about the saddest things I try to write less often. There is an eternal heaviness on my heart. I fall asleep with it, I wake up with it."
“Sonya loves me very much,” the letter continues, “and I love her - it’s forever, and I can’t leave her. The tornness of the days that must be shared, the heart combines everything.” And a few lines later: “I can’t hurt and I can’t help but do.” The pain of having to choose between two loved ones did not go away and was reflected in both creativity and uneven behavior.
In the cycle of poems “Girlfriend,” Marina tries to blame Sophia for leading her into such “love jungle”... She tries to break off the relationship, makes several drastic attempts. To Mikhail Kuzmin she describes the end of it this way: love story with Sofia Yakovlevna: “It was in 1916, in the winter, I was in St. Petersburg for the first time in my life. I had just arrived. I was with one person, that is, it was a woman - God, how I cried! - But this is not important! She never wanted me to go to the evening. (a musical evening at which Mikhail Kuzmin - author) was supposed to sing. She herself couldn’t, she had a headache - and when she has a headache... it’s unbearable. I didn’t have a headache, and I really didn’t want to stay at home.”
After some bickering, during which Sonya declares that “she feels sorry for Marina,” Tsvetaeva takes off and heads out for the evening. Having been there, she soon begins to get ready to return to Sonya and explains: “I have a sick friend at home.” Everyone laughs: “You say that as if you have a sick child at home. Your friend will wait.”
I thought to myself: “The hell with it!”
And as a result, the dramatic ending was not long in coming: “In February 1916 we parted,” Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in the same letter. - “Almost because of Kuzmin, that is, because of Mandelstam, who, without finishing an agreement with me in St. Petersburg, came to Moscow to negotiate. (*Probably about the novel - the author) When I, having missed two Mandelstam days, came to her - the first absence in years - another woman was sitting on her bed: very big, fat, black... We were friends with her for a year and a half. I don’t remember her at all. That is, I don’t remember. I only know that I will never forgive her for not stayed!"
A kind of monument to Sophia’s tragically cut short love was the book “Poems,” published in 1916 and immediately remembered by readers, primarily because Sophia Yakovlevn spoke about her feelings openly, without silence, half-hints, or encryption. It’s as if she painted a captivating portrait of a Beloved Person, with all his harshness, tears, breaks, sensitivity, vulnerability and all-encompassing tenderness of this captivatingly passionate soul! The souls of her beloved Marina. Girlfriends. Girls. Women. There was the now famous:
"I'm looking at your profile again, your cool head
And I sadly marvel at your strangely close features.
Something happened that could not have happened:
There was no room for two of us on the way.
Oh, the strength of these blunt and short fingers,
And under the straight eyebrow this wildly motionless eye!
Repentance, say, a tear watered,
Did you water it or fog it at least once?
Isn’t that why the enmity in us was mutual?
And a hundred times more passionate than love and truer than love,
That we found a double in each other? Tell me,
Didn’t I execute you, my brother, by executing myself?
("Again I look at your profile, cool-headed...")
Love had to be let go. And she let go. She lived with past memories, melted them into poetry, but around her there were new friends, new faces: Lyudmila Erarskaya, Nina Vedeneeva, Olga Tsubilbiller.
Parnok wrote poetry better and better, her images became stronger and more psychologically subtle, but these were by no means poetic times. The October Troubles broke out. For some time, Sofya Yakovlevna lived in the Crimea, in Sudak, and did literary “menial” work: translations, notes. Reports. She didn't stop writing.
In 1922, in Moscow, with a circulation of 3,000 copies, her books were published: “Roses of Pieria” - a talented stylization of the lines of Sappho and Old French poets. And the collection “Vine” in which she included poems from 1916 to 1923. They were received by the public seemingly well, but somehow the hungry and ruined Russia had no time for poetry, and the public was refined, understanding the rhythmic stanzas, thoroughly “There are no others, others are far away”...
Sofya Yakovlevna's life was difficult and hungry. In order to somehow survive, she was forced to do translations, lessons - they paid a pittance - and gardening.
Love gave her strength. God sent her, a sinner, people who adored her and were devoted to her in soul - such as physicist Nina Evgenievna Vedeneeva. Parnok met her a year and a half before her death. And she died in her arms. She dedicated the most heartfelt and lyrical lines of her poems to Nina Evgenievna. But while dying, she incessantly looked at the portrait of Marina Tsvetaeva, standing on the nightstand, at the head of the bed. She didn't say a word about Her. Never after February 1916. Maybe she wanted to suppress love with silence? Or - strengthen? No one knows.
Shortly before her death, she wrote the lines:
"Now, without rebelling, without resisting,
I can hear my heart beating
I'm weakening and the leash is weakening,
Tightly knitting us with you..."
"Let's be happy no matter what!" (Excerpt)
At the beginning of the poem there were two barely distinguishable capital letters: "M.Ts." So she said goodbye to her Beloved-Friend, not knowing what She said when she heard about her death, in June 1934, far away in a foreign land: “So what if she died, you don’t have to die to die!” (M. Tsvetaeva. “Letter to the Amazon”).
Her awkward, little Marina, her “girl friend,” was, as always, imperious - merciless and harsh in her judgments! But is it right? In the end, only those who were previously loved just as much are hated greatly...
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*Sofya Yakovlevna Parnok died on August 26, 1933, in the village of Karinskoye near Moscow. She was buried a few days later at the German cemetery in Lefortovo. Her work and the history of her relationship with Tsvetaeva have not yet been fully studied, as has the archive, which contains two unpublished collections, “Music” and “Sotto a Voice.”
** Texts used are Internet publications of works by N. Doli and S. Karlinsky, as well as the author’s personal library.