Jews of October and Marina Tsvetaeva

She was not squeamish, which she herself confessed. Tsvetaeva was not afraid of the impurity of the body in all senses, but always ran from the dirt in the shower. Her diary notes about the first years of the revolution are honest, courageous, filled with pain, horror and love. And very much, like all that this woman touched, are talented.

Do we, contemporaries, have the right to judge people who have sentenced themselves to death? No, I am convinced that it is immoral. Even in such a sinner as Alexander Fadeev, I can not throw a stone. Here he answered the petition of the homeless Tsvetaeva:

“Comrade Tsvetaeva! It is absolutely impossible to get you a room in Moscow. We have a large group of very good writers and poets who need housing.”

A disgusting document, but I cannot force myself to judge Fadeev as soon as I imagine the horror of this man before the consciousness of the impossibility of continuing his life. What can we say about Tsvetaeva herself, Mayakovsky, Yesenin ...

They all lived in times, mercilessly provoking a person to evil. Someone got into the devil's network, someone tried to escape from the trap, someone rebelled against the most terrible and omnipotent time.

Under all circumstances, the great poet was left alone. Joseph Brodsky wrote about this exhaustively exactly:

"The better the poet, the worse his loneliness."

Loneliness is like madness, I will add. Madness of suicide.

Dirty, bloody times have always been a school of misanthropy for pure and courageous souls. 18 year, summer:

"Oh my God! How I hate the village

— writes Tsvetaeva, —

“And how unhappy I am, among cows that look like peasants, and peasants that look like cows.”

Year 19 th:

"The language of the common people is like a pendulum between eating and with ...."

However, the theme of the nation is bottomless. In these notes, I would just like to follow the “Jewish question” in Tsvetaeva’s diary entries, on the basis of the book that appeared in 2002 year: “Marina Tsvetaeva. Notebooks. This question occupies a significant place in her diary.

It always seemed to me that the great insight of Marina named the subject exhausts:

“The ghetto of choice, the rampart and the ditch - do not expect mercy. In this most Christian of the worlds, poets are Jews. ”

However, reading notebooks, I realized that everything is not so simple.

Sixteenth year. The world is relatively calm, with the exception of the bloody 1 World War II. Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“Christ bequeathed all great Judaism his great“ pity ”for the woman. A Jew beating a woman is unthinkable. ”

Curious entry. Tsvetaeva does not write why Christ did not bequeath this to Christians. The Gospel was read by Marina, the Gospel and the Old Testament alone, not the Torah. It is in this, and often only in this, the costs of views on the Jewishness of the Russian, artistic elite. Even the "gentle" views.

Summer 17 year:

“You pronounce the word“ Jew ”as if you were translating it from Yid.”

The rumor of a great poet is unique, but the plague of Bolshevism is close and Tsvetaeva writes on November 15 of the year 1918:

“To my left (sorry, madly beloved Israel!) are two dirty, sad Jews…. The Jewish woman says: “Pskov has been taken!” “I have a painful hope: “Who?!”

Madly Beloved Israel stayed there, in a world without hunger, hardship, death. And here, next to Tsvetaeva, "Two zhidovki", telling in delight that Pskov was taken by the red ones.

Foreignness "Beloved Israel" increases with the development of the revolution:

“When I, somewhere in a public place, are clearly offended, my first word, before I thought:

- I will complain to Lenin!

And never - even if I was quartered - to Trotsky!

- Bad, but yours!

In those hard years they didn’t even know that Lenin wasn’t really “his.” In general, there was no one to complain to the Russian man. Well, not Kalinin with Budyonny or Voroshilov.

Purishkevich is one of the leaders of the Black Hundreds. So what? If she could, Tsvetaeva complained to him:

“My love in politics is Purishkevich. For over his speeches, appeals, exclamations, cries, I immediately laugh and cry. "

And the children of Tsvetaeva, the beloved daughter of Alya (Ariadna) do not want to be Jews: “Alya is someone, in response to a question about her last name:

“Oh no, no, only ½ of my grandfathers were Jewish.”

Not surprisingly, when in the perestroika USSR completely disappeared meat, the average man began to demand the shooting of dogs. They, they say, everything that people intended is devoured.

Hunger took by the throat Russia nineteenth year. In front of Tsvetaeva, her children suffer, tormented by hunger. We read the record:

"I can not forgive the Jews that they teeming with».

There are too many of them, they are too noticeable, like dogs in the USSR. And then there were a lot of dogs in the city then, because impoverished people began to drive them beyond the threshold. It is not only the idea and freedom granted by the Provisional Government. For the "threshold" of the town of Jews expelled and hunger, arranged by the Bolsheviks.

In the nineteenth year, the dogs almost disappeared - they were simply eaten. Only the Jews remained, about whom Tsvetaeva writes. Hunger is able to create and not so with the human psyche.

Still, Tsvetaeva is Tsvetaeva. Her "Love for Israel" does not pass, because at this terrible time it is the Jews who help her to survive, the Jews who "Teeming":

“Mrs. Goldman, the neighbor downstairs, sends huge bowls of soup to the children from time to time - and today she lent me the 3rd thousand. She herself has three children. Small in stature, tender, worn out by life: a nanny, children, an overbearing husband, proper lunches and dinners. Helps me - it seems - secretly from my husband, whom, as a Jew and a lucky man, I - in whom everything in the house, except for the soul, is frozen and nothing in the house except books - no - cannot help but irritate... More R.S. Tumarkin, the brother of Mrs. Tseitlin, with whom I attended literary evenings. Gives money, matches. Kind, sympathetic. And it's all".

With bitterness, Tsvetaeva remembers the beloved mother's precepts:

“Mom, what is socialism? (Yasya, 11 years old, in 1905, in Yalta.)

- When the janitor comes to play with your feet on the piano - then this is socialism... Oh, I forgot! Passionate love for Jews, proud, defiant, unquestioning (only in 1919 did I learn the word “Jew”) - then in the circle of Sergei Alexandrovich, old monarchist professors - courtiers! “I remember with particular pride—almost boastfully—however, playing at it a little—she insisted that she certainly had a drop of Jewish blood in her veins, otherwise she wouldn’t have loved them so much.”

How strange. Socialism and the Jews. That dreadful, barefoot janitor suddenly spoke with an accent. What to do with a drop of Jewish blood, passed to the Marina from the mother?

But this is just a “drop”. Who is Tsvetaeva in 1919 year:

“Alei and I are at Antokolsky (a poet, a student of Vakhtangov’s studio) ... Antokolsky reads verses to me -“ Prologue to my life ”, which I would call“ Justification of everything ”. But this is not so possible for me, since at this hour I am Russian, I am silent in silence with sharper and more powerful words. We say goodbye.

Got acquainted with Antokolsky through 48 years. He was mastitis, had his own "Volga" with a driver, a cottage, an apartment in a writing house. Tsvetaeva died before living for 50. Where is her grave - is unknown.

In that year, it was difficult for Tsvetaeva to understand that Antokolsky wrote this way, not because he was not a Russian poet, but because Soviet.

But here is a continuation of that theme of maternal love for Jews:

“It’s a pity that people don’t know me when I'm alone. If they knew, they loved. But they will never know, because this is me - just because I am alone. With them I have a monkey flexibility (only in the opposite direction, I repeat conversely motion). Example: with those who love Jews - I hate Jews, with those who hate - I adore - and all sincerely to tears! - Love on the repulsion.

How often did he think that Dostoevsky and Rozanov alone (from high talents in Russian culture) deserve the name of an anti-Semite, since they were consistent theorists of anti-Semitism. In all the other talents of Russia, there is much more misanthropy, contempt for humanity and its people in general, than anti-Semitism. These, deep down, I try, and understand, and forgive.

Lines from “Diary prose” by Tsvetaeva:

“Lord! How many Nozdryovs are in Russia now (who doesn’t defame anyone and how! Who doesn’t exchange anything for anything!) Korobochek (“and how many dead souls are in the city now? - Manilovs (“Temple of Friendship”, “House of the Happy Mother” - Chichikovs (natural speculator!).

But Gogol is not. It would be better the other way around. ”

No, in the same years, hungry and angry Bulgakov wandered around Moscow. It seems that only today the mentioned heroes of “Dead Souls” have appeared so much that no Gogol will be able to comprehend such an attack.

But back to our topic. Here is another amazing recording of Tsvetaeva. It seems that the classic lines about the “ghetto of election” went from the recording of this:

“Thank God I’m not a Jew ... At the very first "Zhidovka" I would have lifted a stone from the pavement - and killed ... Where did I get, from childhood, a sense of persecution? Was I not Jewish in the Middle Ages?

In any case, if I was ever destined to go insane, it would not be the mania of Greatness. ”

Big poets are the chosen people. The great poets of that terrible time exist outside the nations, outside the people. These concepts were too scary. Poets tried to cling to God - it was. Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova - outside of Russianness. Pasternak, Mandelstam - outside of Jewry.

Particular people separate in «ghetto election». "Life - Station",” as Tsvetaeva wrote. Outside the crowd means on the road. Where is unknown. To infinity? And a homeless wanderer is more vulnerable than anyone else. "Val and moat" - do not protect. “The shaft and the ditch” do not allow one to hide from the executioner.

“I don’t need me here. There is impossible ",

- wrote Tsvetaeva in exile. AT "Uselessness and impossibility" this amazing woman, whose name now sounds royally, spent her entire short century: MARINA. She is a star of dazzling brightness, without which the sky of poetry and the culture of mankind is inconceivable.

Jewish fate of the Russian poet.

What records Tsvetaeva in the diary? They could not be different. I would advise everyone to read them who are hoping today for a new, optimistic turn of Jewish history in Russia.

Today in this country, domestic anti-Semitism has reached its peak. The costs of Jewish freedom, ordinary and familiar after the abolition of state anti-Semitism, are to blame.

The same thing happened in the first years following the October Revolution. In our Jewish history, today, as a rule, necessarily takes a copy of what happened yesterday. The same way it began, the same way it will end. The play, entitled “The Jew in Russia,” was performed as a tragedy, but now it is performed as a farce. That's the whole difference.

Apparently, any nation is inclined to forgive itself for any crimes, but it does not intend to forgive an accomplice of its own crimes.

What can we say about ordinary people when such high talents and pure souls as Tsvetaeva could not resist the translation of the word "Jew" on concept "Jew"?

Author - Arkady KRASILSHIKOV