Tomb for Boris Davidovich

The Short Biography of A. A. Darmolatov

In our time when many poets' destinies are shaped according to the monstrous standard model of epoch, class, and environment, and when the fatal facts of life-the unique magic of the first poem, the journey to exotic Tiflis for the jubilee of Rustaveli, or the meeting with the one-armed poet Narbut-are reduced to a chronological sequence without the flavor of adventure and blood, the biography of A. A. Darmolatov, though somewhat sketchy, is not without a lyrical core. Out of the confused mass of facts, there emerges a naked human life.

Under the influence of his father, a village teacher who was an amateur biologist and chronic alcoholic, Darmolatov was fascinated by the secrets of nature from an early age. On their landed estate (his mother’s dowry) in the small town of Nikolaevski, the dogs, birds, and cats lived in relative freedom. In his sixth year, in nearby Saratov they bought him Devrienne's Atlas of the Butterflies of Europe and Central Asia, one of the last valuable works of engraving of the nineteenth century. At seven, he assisted his father in dissecting rodents and performing experiments on frogs. At ten, reading novels of the Spanish-American War, he became a passionate defender of the Spaniards, and at twelve he hid a wafer under his tongue, brought it out of the church, and put it down on the bench before his dumbfounded friends. Reading the texts of Korch, he dreamed of ancient times, despising the present. There could be nothing, therefore, more typical than this provincial environment and this positivistically educated middle class; nothing more banal than this heredity, combining alcoholism and tuberculosis on the father’s side with the melancholic depression of the mother, a reader of French novels. Also on the mother's side was an aunt, Yadviga Yarmolaevna, who was living with them and slowly drifting into dementia-the only respectable fact in the poet's early biography.

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.)

In late December, two days after Novsky's arrest, the telephone rang in Darmolatov's house. It was exactly 3:00 A.M. The receiver was picked up by Darmolatov's groggy wife, a pregnant Tartar with a high, bulging belly. At the other end there was only a terrifying silence that makes one's blood freeze. The woman replaced the receiver and burst into tears. From then on, the telephone in his apartment was muffled by multicolored feather pillows covered with flashy decorative motifs full of the flamboyant noise of Tartar fairs, while beside the desk, burdened with manuscripts, dictionaries, and books that he was translating "for his nerves”, stood a cardboard suitcase, packed and ready for sudden departure. Once, emboldened by vodka, he had even shown this suitcase to a poet-informer: on top of the warm knitted sweater and flannel underwear lay a leather-bound copy of Ovid's elegies in Latin. In those days, the verses of that famous exile must have sounded to him like Pushkin's motto about his own poetic destiny.

At the beginning of the next year, he traveled to Georgia; in May, he published a cycle of poems entitled Tiflis in One's Hands; in September, he was placed on the Writers' Request List and received, through an order signed by Gorky, a pair of trousers, a lined coat, and a beaver hat. (It seems that Darmolatov refused this fur hat because of its "hetman appearance.” Aleksei Maksimovich had insisted he shouldn't be so choosy! In light of all the versions in circulation about this event, it is difficult to know what Gorky really said, but it seems that he made some allusion to Darmolatov’s hot head, and the latter "almost died like one of Chekov's clerks".)

On August 17, 1933, a photograph shows him on the ship J. V. Stalin, among some hundred and twenty writers who had just visited the recently completed White Sea-Baltic canal Darmolatov has turned old overnight, and wears sideburns à la Pushkin. In a white suit and an unbuttoned shirt, he leans on the deck railing, staring into space. The wind blows through Vera Inber's hair. Bruno Yasensky (the second from the left) raises his hand toward the invisible foggy shore. With his hand cupped to his ear, Zoshchenko tries to make out the melody played by the band. The sounds are scattered by the wind and the noise of the water spilling over the floodgate.

His appearance notwithstanding, there are irrefutable proofs that Darmolatov was at this time in the grip of a psychological malady: he washed his hands in methyl alcohol and saw an informer in everyone. They persistently visited him, unannounced and without knocking, wearing colorful cravats, like lovers of poetry, or like translators, bringing miniature Eiffel Towers made of gold tin, or like plumbers, with enormous guns in their back pockets instead of plungers.

In November, he arrived at the hospital, where they treated him with sleep cures: he slept through five full weeks in the sterile landscape of hospital rooms, and from that time on it was as if worldly clamor could never reach him again. Even the terrible ukulele of the poet Kirsanov, on the other side of the partition, was muffled by cotton covered with a thin layer of ear ointment. At the intervention of the Writers Union, he was given permission to visit the town's stables twice a week; they would see him, awkward and heavy, with the first signs of elephantiasis, riding a tame horse from the stables at a trot. Before Mandelstam's departure for Samatiha (where prison and destruction awaited him), he and his wife dropped in to say good-bye to Darmolatov, They found him in front of the elevator in a funny riding habit with a child's tiny whip in his hand. A taxi had just arrived and he hurried away to the stables, without saying good-bye to his childhood friend.

In the summer of 1947, he arrived at Cetinje, in Montenegro, for the jubilee of The Mountain Wreath, fragments of which, it seems, he was translating. Although well on in years, ungainly and clumsy, he stepped lightly over the red silk ribbon separating Njegoš's gigantic chair, which looked like the throne of a god, from the poets and mortals. I who am telling this story stood to one side and watched the uninvited poet squirming in Njegoš's high austere chair; taking advantage of the applause, I slipped out of the portrait gallery in order not to witness the scandal that the intervention of my uncle, the museum curator, would cause. But I distinctly remember that between the poet's spread legs, under his threadbare pants, the horrible swelling was already visible. Before the terrible disease tied him to his bed, he spent the last year of his life quietly, chewing the sweet cud of his youth. He used to visit Anna Andreyevna, and once, they say, he brought her a flower.

POSTSCRIPT

He remains a medical phenomenon in Russian literature; Darmolatov's case was entered in all the latest pathology textbooks. A photograph of his scrotum, the she of the biggest collective farm pumpkin, is also reprinted in foreign medical books, wherever elephantiasis (elephantiasis nostras) is mentioned, and as a moral for writers that to write one must have more than big balls.