I Beg You to Hear Me! - Book sample

‘I would like to evoke them all, name by name, but the list has been snatched and is nowhere to be found.’

Akhmatova, Blok, Bulgakov, Esenin, Kharms, Mayakovsky, Pasternak …

I Beg You to Hear Me! celebrates the varied and colourful panorama of Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s.

Through ‘lyrical’ biographies and storyboards in the style of a graphic novel, the writers emerge as comic-strip heroes, living and creating during the turmoil of the early years of the Soviet Union.

u o Y g e IB ! e M r a e to H ncesca Ricci a r F & v o n i h Kiril Boz

This book is printed in a limited edition of 150 copies.

This copy is n.

/150

u o Y g e IB ! e M r a e to H ncesca Ricci a r F & v o n i h Kiril Boz

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Vladislav Hodashevich, detail of Storyboard IV 2

CONTENTS pp. 4–7 I BEG YOU TO HEAR ME! Kiril Bozhinov pp. 8–9 AN EXTENDED FAMILY ALBUM Francesca Ricci pp. 10–41 STORYBOARDS I

Anna Akhmatova & Nikolay Gumilev, Boris Pasternak II

Isaac Babel & Andrei Platonov III

IV

Alexander Blok, Gaito Gazdanov & Vladislav Hodashevich V

VI

Andrei Bely

Alexander Grin & Mikhail Bulgakov

Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Berdiaev & Varlam Shalamov VII

Hylaea: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Hlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh & David Burliuk VIII IX

Osip Mandelstam & Marina Tsvetaeva

Oberiu: Daniil Kharms, Konstantin Vaghinov, Alexander Vvedensky & Nikolay Zabolotsky X XI

XII

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Ilya Ilf & Yevgeny Petrov

Yevgeny Zamyatin, Yuri Olesha & Boris Pilnyak XIII XIV XV

Boris Pasternak & Nikolai Klyuev

Mikhail Bulgakov & Yuri Dombrovski

Marina Tsvetaeva & Lydia Chukovskaya XVI

Sergei Esenin & Osip Mandelstam

pp. 42–46 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 3

I BEG YOU TO HEAR ME! I Beg You to Hear Me! is a compilation based on the lives and works of Russian writers who were mainly active during the 1920s and 1930s.It attempts to ‘translate’ into a visual and written tableau the voices of individual writers or those of a literary group. The variety of written compositions – from the lyrical symbolist poetry of Alexander Blok to the short, satirical stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko - is presented through intense and contrasting colour schemes and collages of words, meanings and onomatopoetic sounds.

There are several main heroes in this project - the altercations between the unique literary voices, their colours, the silences, the epitaphs, the ballads – conjured up at the command of a magic wand gone seriously out of control.

‘I want to evoke them all, name by name, but …’ On the sullen tombstones those names seem to have been borrowing from each other: pass me a consonant, here is a vowel if anybody needs one, how about my date of birth and your date of death - who dares speak of immortality?

Many sang names and of a red sharpness

of each other in their poems, called one another by their real titles: ‘an orphan in a sparkling void’, ‘the terrifying beauty rose’, ‘a reticent master’, ‘endowed with the generosity and of the spheres’ …

Who is being addressed? In what name? In that of poetry? The ‘romantic’ notion of suffering? That allows the omission of titles and ranks such as: Russia, writer, Russian, poet, banned, blue, revolution, red, fear, fuchsia, yell, yellow, world orders, political connotations that weigh as heavily as invisible presumptions.

Perhaps this ‘romantic’ dimension was woven like a thread through the generations of writers, sewing up their wounds, their hunger, the disappearance of family and friends, their own reappearance in settings shrouded by indifferent faces and mechanical salutations.

One develops a certain familiarity with noses, ears, chins, gestures, a lock of hair carelessly hanging in front of an astonished eye, an iambic tetrameter, a tempest of colours imprisoned in a paragraph.

This is not a critical essay - what can one criticise? They didn’t cry loud enough, none brandished menacing fists, starved to death, wore wreathed nooses around their necks. That silence of theirs was too loud a response to a shrieking chorus of responsibilities. Grand themes exceeding various senses of justice, of knowledge, uprightness, morality, of death.

A natural disaster rattled their responsibility. Death, in this instance, is nothing but a noun and a delusion that nothingness has a catalogue of forms and a palette of pigments and shades.

Is it really possible that somebody smashed them on the head, that somebody spat in their face, sneered behind their back, played with their fate?

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Marina Tsvetaeva, detail of Storyboard VIII

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AN EXTENDED FAMILY ALBUM This project has evolved over a number of years – words and visuals are a process of accumulation. These faces have been living with us for a long time, like distant relatives.

Of most of them I knew nothing or very little; of others, I had read their works. Gradually, I was fed more information, briefed on episodes of their lives and given outlines of their personalities – as when flicking through the pages of an extended family album.

I learned their names and, based on the knowledge I picked up along the way – or lacked – I painted over their black and white silhouettes to give them the bolder appearance and louder voice of an instinctive new narrative: the life story we give ourselves within the waves and knots of history, through the absorbing of our experiences, the hurricanes of love and loss, the bliss of friendship and art; all that excites us, all that we endure.

Francesca Ricci London, September 2014

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Above: Two portraits of Anna Akhmatova; Right: Portrait of Mikhail Bulgakov

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I ANNA AKHMATOVA The Seamstress

NIKOLAY GUMILEV Lover from Laos

Can you describe this? Woman, widow, maiden. Stars, lamps, windless nights.

Who am I? Aimless traveller with powdered wig, knight in shining armour lamenting his fate. The prince of greatness. An evil patriarch. I will bless the tyrants feasting on my despair.

Me, you and a transparent profile.

O shadow, forgive me. My imagination keeps the groans of bitter defeat under control.

Neither for wisdom nor for strength do I yearn. Other people’s dreams I will never visit, melting as a delicate candle at dawn.

That dawn as ancient as the world.

Will you go on? Listening for good news, confused, staggering, alone. Burying an age interlaced with rainbows, gasping for memory. And this accurate fatigue hidden in the harmony of words.

Wish is a deformity, the ordeal of a detailed betrayal. On a diamond night the shadows disappeared from my memory. After seven hundred years nothing has changed: shared loneliness, betraying lips, mysterious gloom, the hour of courage, the grace of God. Can you describe my desolate song? The terrifying beauty of bayonets, bullets and Bedouins. The forgotten melody of crimson dew on a delicate brow.

Morning mirrors are laughing at my swollen eyelids. Reflections goodbye, I will always remember your slender lips and meagre talk with the eminence of the Middle Ages that never were.

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The executioner brandishing an axe will not deceive you. Trumpets are ordering us to fight. I’ll die on a bed of roses, crossing myself and praying and saying a mass for my soul.

What am I? The literal art of sensation. All my future actions. A lonely rhinoceros on Lake Chad, an angry tiger from the jungles of Laos. My thoughts are suffocating me.

I am analysing my dreams and playing a flute carved out of palms.

To deceive time with a slow kiss and a whisper, that is an immortal betrayal. As I extend a hearty salutation to all the pendulums, I can tell you many other stories of hidden wonders. About the faithful guardians of your tomb, the happiness of saints, the voice of martyrdom.

Virtue culminates, years later, in the abolition of impulses, in the destruction of irony. Transform me into an apology and avoid every contact with reality.

Obediently, I turned to the wall. Today, I see, you got rid of the usual sadness from your eyes.

Storyboard I

- Anna Akhmatova & Nikolay Gumilev, Boris Pasternak

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IV ALEXANDER BLOK Delirium

indolence, the wonderful charm of my brush is on everyone’s lips.

Midday, on a blue-grey Sunday, in a sad, strange world. ‘Hey poet, church bells are tolling in the distance, on the day of your wedding, your feast, your funeral.’ By day I am a poet, by night a delirium. In a permanent state of thankfulness.

I signal goodbye to the day. Beauty is terrible, everyone will tell you. I shake your hand and wish you good health.

Become historical. Vocabulary thus fabricated the most human word: everybody. Which appears practical and tangible. And then spontaneous. A need, a task, an accident waiting to happen, objectively. The echoes of crying babies and of dogs barking are shadows of primeval tenderness, a breeze of ancient legends. It is time to accept things such as rainbow mist, childhood dreams, lanterns swaying in the blizzard, days of black boredom, timeless nights.

Mosaic of wonderment, the complicity and multiplicity of now, no longer and never.

And countless times we go on living and laughing and talking; this day is like any other day, the problem is solved: all men die.

I said goodbye to the day. It is hard to pretend I am not dead. Bleeding sunset is laughing a magical laughter.

The sky is tired of concealing the thoughts of my compatriots. Do you remember the footsteps fell silent, the voice fell silent, the discourses on the mysteries of various religions fell silent too? In dream, in somnolence, in

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VLADISLAV HODASHEVICH Shade Bring a bouquet of visions when you knock on my door. Shadows, swift shadows, a floorpolisher cannot boast a Bohemian past.

Vagabonds and orphans grimace like Charlie Chaplin and warm their hands by the fire. In the middle of a churning desolation, I reassemble the former symmetry of my intimate hell.

Rapacious vowels and gaping syllables shake the earth with loathing and fear in their glances.

Sensibly I march among my verses, devouring this dreadful spaciousness. My epitaph is inhaled by the air. Memory is capricious. Time leads my rustling footsteps from one emptiness to yet another, like mud splashed by a tyre.

A poet is well aware that something has changed in the Epiphany. For example: another chance tugs at my sleeve. Words, words, friends, sense. Same same same wave of the chance encounter between a hallucination and a guess.

Hysterical winter night on a railroad station.

I am leaning on a mirror conversing with my

Storyboard IV - Alexander Blok, Gaito Gazdanov & Vladislav Hodashevich

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gigantic eye and wear an invisible mantle. Silver raindrops march with footsteps of madmen, of drooling vandals, of bloated lackeys.

Grimaces run amok with knives tucked into their belts. The tortured days are screaming, moaning, fidgeting, roaring, prancing, step dancing. Return the essential part of violence to its sender. All proceeds according to plan: the sun will shine and then go by.

Again and again. He took, he said, he sat and asked the bush for advice regarding the drinking of a cup of tea. I desire many things: lame words, a million bloodstains, battered proverbs, the gargoyles of Notre Dame, Zarathustrian Jack Londons … beautiful people are disappearing, life and death are unfounded rumours.

Mister God, you stroke your beard as if you are tough and omnipresent. I am your son’s thirteenth apostle. My soul doesn’t have a single grey hair and I’ll behead all of your constellations after playing a nocturne on the hissing drainpipes.

Time to dissolve this intolerable routine, in the wings the candelabras are splitting their guts with laughter. I married a violin and ended up selling freshly squeezed juice to pimps and whores.

Prologue Written as a last attempt to fall down the stairs. Praise my every move, louder, I leap, shrill, wait in ambush. Suddenly my old self appeared to my young self, perhaps to others too. Pull my ears, dear barber. I am as pure as a hallucination.

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VELIMIR HLEBNIKOV Outlines of Human Kindness I march through a forest of symbols. Master, maker, Magus, prophet, general of an army made of songs. Twilight wanderers announce the impending Persian night with terrible trumpets. A jury of jongleurs commands the procession of creative minds.

I think I am very smart, as comfortably settled in my century as in an armchair. The outlines of human kindness have vanished forever.

Ploughing through suburban obligations, wounded mathematicians are charming the truth.

My tender sight, where is your blade, your hungry gallows, your malicious muzzle? I cherish my last day like a sweet-smelling flower. One day I will grind myself to dust.

Inspired, fearless, forgotten.

Of course, after waiting and suffering much better than anyone else.

Avoid yesterdays. Be brave and foolish. Time understands surprises. Mood wrote a love letter to consciousness: accept my proposal or else!

Suddenly I was fourteen years of age. In the empire of the mind, smiling gods impaled the sun. The shepherds of humanity are playing bagpipes at the congregation of universal labour.

Memory is shifting the moments from my past like chairs in a living room. Monkeys, as annoying as a toothache, were elected as presidents. Forever, always, everywhere.

Storyboard VII - Hylaea: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Hlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh & David Burliuk

VIII OSIP MANDELSTAM Cultivated Absurdities

insomnia delivers the names of Homer’s sailing ships. From my own eyelashes I am suspended.

I am from nowhere, a martyr of light and shade, lover of sounds and illicit pleasures. I know every hymn of praise and every meaningless solemnity by heart.

Haunted by a few chance verses, with the aftertaste of sadness and smoke, my life abounds with iron tenderness.

Empty, disturbing dreams. Morning is tapping on the window. Outside the day glimmers like a maniac. I recite my goodbye with a wet throat and a dry soul, but don’t worry, I’ll be back, my birth is yet to be.

In the middle of pure-white poverty, I got drunk on cultivated absurdities.

Sir, magnanimous brother, don’t apologise for every phrase. I converse with epochs, meowing and snivelling and whimpering and remembering the dampness of the earth in my veins. My sadness is infinite.

We inhaled expensive cigarettes. The best darkness ever is made of rubber. How many watchmakers do you know? Carpets, forests and cushions converse as literary people do: a certain amount of knowledge caresses the ears with Mediterranean colours.

Perhaps this is the beginning of madness.

Asti Spumante, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the ginger aroma of English girls, the fumes of Rolls-Royce …

MARINA TSVETAEVA Sigh My life is Adorned by I quote the the kind of

one of fiction beyond fantasy. visions with prophetic eyes, formulas of the flowers - that’s poet I am.

The scars are multiplying, the winter smells of Florence. I have no use for beauty, a cross without a name stands above my head, above my sorrows one century and a half old. Here Marina would have liked to whisper: ‘I write to you with my finger on the sand, let loneliness embrace you before I vanish like a sigh.’

I swallow dead air, O serenades of deception, serenades of devotion, listen to the rustling of lush meadows, to the crystal tinkle of glasses.

My name rhymes with a playful crime, I am a Hindu widow burning on a pyre with a smile of inspiration. To others I pray to become intimate with ghosts. Myself still the same, loitering and forgotten. Like wonders and words. Like things comprehended and empty-handed. The traces of the arrows grin with a pleasing efficiency.

My collection of spaces hangs like a black coat on a hook. In the opposite corner,

A sudden nowhere sprang into existence.

Rows of dummies covered in dust, covered

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Storyboard VIII - Osip Mandelstam & Marina Tsvetaeva

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in dust, their hair smelling of wind, beheaded my lordly anguish. Double jesters, predatory demons, readers of newspapers, I have no use for beauty. There will be no singing, there will be no dancing.

Standing in front of the twenty-first century, uneasy, tormented, I’ll end my days hiding behind the casual sounds of my poems.

IX DANIIL KHARMS Superstitious Granny

Pushkin’s children and pulled Gogol by the nose. He bit off a friend’s ear, tore the arm off another, spat in their faces and hit them with a primus stove. Then unbuttoned his jacket, scratched his belly and continued his battle with meanings they made him feel truly uncomfortable.

He should be given an emotional confirmation for having developed certain kinds of boredom. Becoming is a nuisance. Legends sneaked their way into mental hospitals and made everyone aware of their true absence. Now, try calling me mad. After all, knowledge is poetry, not mysticism.

There was a big-eared man who one day decided to go mad and starve himself to death. Prior to that he stuffed himself with mushy peas and died, then leaned out of the window and thanks to his excessive curiosity fell and smashed himself to pieces.

Gradually man sheds his form and evolves into a sphere. And, once a sphere, man discards his earthly desires.

He solved equations with two unknown quantities while whacking someone over the head with a cucumber. He smashed Karlov in the chops and Alekseyev in the teeth, he tore off Petrov’s head, threw Charms off a roof, chucked kerosene over Mishkin and set him alight, then slammed Pushkov in the gob, struck a gentleman with a brick, bashed Senka across the chops too and tore off Fedka’s right ear with a poker.

I was born in a coffin, surrounded by nymphs and satyrs and the palm-shaded melody of a Hawaiian guitar. Philostratus is my name, author of Lilliputian ballads and formulas for the construction of non-existent objects.

KONSTANTIN VAGHINOV The End of a Dream

Under the green light of evening lampshades my nanny read me The Downfall of Humanism.

Between the thick folds of the Middle Ages, between horror and desolation, mother combed my hair, patted my cheeks and gave me a kiss.

He flung a granny to the floor.

To famous people he did damage too: called Jean-Jacques Rousseau a superstitious purist, pinched Tolstoy’s bum, beat up

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I am not dogmatic, I am far from stupid. I live in heroic times with a dead sun and mythological beasts dividing people into necessary and unnecessary.

Storyboard IX - Oberiu: Daniil Kharms, Konstantin Vaghinov, Alexander Vvedensky & Nikolay Zabolotsky

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XVI SERGEI ESENIN I Grew Old and Wise My name is a curse. God, dear Saviour, I’ve become a vision. Teach me to dream of lilac sunsets and sailing moons. Lost in thought, I smile a forbidden smile.

Good luck, village dreamer, barefoot roamer, absorbed in unfaithfulness, you’ve forgotten your home. Don’t you feel sorry for all the discarded handshakes, for the scarlet afternoons, for all the autumns of your life?

Exist, real me and never regret. The muscles learn bad habits by slowing down their train of thought and become an adequate, good-for-nothing instance.

And smile and smile. I am everywhere, the eternal passer-by remembering, with tender trepidation, all those sorrows, the everyday passion of ambitions, the Holy Trinity. I softly kiss all the things I’ve dreamed about.

So free, so gifted and almost myself.

Where is my happiness? I am in love with my dear past, hey, Don Juan, who can you trust? The blizzard is begging and sobbing, you damned coward married to a birch-tree.

Meteorology. Reason. Time. Intestines.

Exactness. Voices in this slithered blindness said: willy-nilly you close your eyes. Good evening, good night. It is painful to remember those distant dreams.

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Storyboard XVI - Sergei Esenin & Osip Mandelstam

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) One of the bestknown Russian poets. Akhmatova’s work ranges from lyric poems to intricate and longer compositions such as Requiem (1935–1940), her masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. In 1921 Akhmatova’s former husband Nikolay Gumilev was executed for his alleged role in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions, accused of counterrevolutionary activity.

ANDREI BELY (1880-1934) Novelist and poet associated with the Symbolist movement.

Son of a mathematician, his novel Petersburg was mentioned

by Vladimir Nabokov as one of his four favourite prose works.

While living in Berlin in 1922, he published Glossolalia, ‘a poem about sound’, where he attempted to explore the origin of human language. His essay Rhythm as Dialectic in the Bronze Horseman was mentioned by Nabokov in his novel The Gift.

ALEXANDER BLOK (1880-1921) The most important Russian poet of the first two decades of the twentieth century, usually associated with the Symbolist movement. Often used colours mixed with various rhythmic patterns to evoke ISAAC BABEL (1894-1940) the variety Short-story writer, journalist and of themes in scriptwriter. Author of two short-story his poems. collections, The Odessa Tales and Red Disillusioned Cavalry, the latter based on Russia’s by the social military campaign against Poland in 1920, and political developments in postwhich Babel witnessed. Babel collaborated revolutionary Russia, he stopped writing with Sergei Eisenstein on the script of during the last three years of his life.

Bezhin Meadow. He was arrested, tortured He was married to Lyubov Mendeleev, the and shot during the Great Purge of the daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri late 1930s.

Mendeleev.

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YURI DOMBROVSKY (1909-1978) The author of two major novels, The Keeper of Antiquities and The Faculty of Useless Knowledge.

Between imprisonments and exile, Dombrovsky spent most of his life under supervision by the authorities. For over twenty years he lived in exile in today’s capital of Kazakhstan, Alma-Ata. He was arrested four times and assaulted and beaten up on several occasions in public, which led to his death from an internal haemorrhage. Dombrovsky was also a translator of Kazakh literature and wrote extensively on a variety of literary and artistic topics.

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891-1940) The author of The Master and Margarita and several other novels, plays and collections of short stories. For the last seven years of his life, he lived with his second wife Elena Sergeyevna(thought by many to be the model for Margarita). The staircase leading to their Moscow apartment was covered in graffiti inspired by various scenes from the novel, before being painted over in 2005 by the disgruntled neighbours.

LYDIA CHUKOVSKAYA (1907-1996) Writer and poet mainly known for her novel Sofia Petrovna, describing life during Stalin’s great purges.

She was a close friend and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko.

SERGEI ESENIN (1895-1925) One of the most well-known Russian poets of his time, achieving instant fame with his first collection of poems, Ritual for the Dead.

He married Isadora Duncan in 1922, and after travelling around Europe and the United States together for a year, they separated before his return to Russia. He committed suicide at the age of 30.

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This publication is the offspring of a multimedia exhibition held at dalla Rosa Gallery, London, in 2011, which combined reproductions of pocket-sized portraits, comic-strip panels and voice recordings.

All original artworks are mixed media on paper, various sizes. www.francesca-ricci.com

www.kirilbozhinov.com

Quote on back cover: from Requiem by Anna Akhamtova (1935–40) Book design: Normal Industries & Francesca Ricci Printed by: Ex Why Zed, Cambridge Special thanks to Giovanna Paternò of dalla Rosa Gallery, Rose Issa, Jana Gough, Philip John Jones, Graham Day and Jonathan Wood.

© Kiril Bozhinov (text) & Francesca Ricci (images), 2014 All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission.

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This book is printed in a limited edition of 150 copies.

This copy is n.

/150

‘I would like to evoke them all, name by name, but the list has been snatched and is nowhere to be found.’

Akhmatova, Blok, Bulgakov, Esenin, Kharms, Mayakovsky, Pasternak …

I Beg You to Hear Me! celebrates the varied and colourful panorama of Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s.

Through ‘lyrical’ biographies and storyboards in the style of a graphic novel, the writers emerge as comic-strip heroes, living and creating during the turmoil of the early years of the Soviet Union.

u o Y g e IB ! e M r a e to H ncesca Ricci a r F & v o n i h Kiril Boz