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| Roman and Youzhny |
Start all the clocks!
Hook up the telephone!
Allow the dog to bark without a juicy bone!
Hmmm... Anybody have a really joyful birthday poem? Please let me know, I’d like to read it the next time I’m at a birthday gathering in honor of a beloved person no longer with us.
Joseph Brodsky was not just the poet and co-founder of the Russian Samovar who would have turned 70 this past Monday, May 24th. He was the man who claimed that the rise of free thinking in the Soviet Union began not with Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but with the series of Tarzan movies that were part of the cache of "trophy films"captured by the Soviets in WWII and subsequently screened all over the USSR. Who authorized that, I’d like to know?! If you have a fresh look at those films, as I have and recommend you do, you may see that they are an object lesson in rejecting the norms of society, retreating to one's individual paradise, living for the present, and returning meaning to language. Johnny Weismuller, as Tarzan, wastes no words: “Jane swim now!” he says. And, of course, "Uhhhh-ee-uh-ee-uhhh-ee-uh-ee-uhhhhhh! (hear it here) as he swings through the air from vine to vine.
Tarzan’s was one lesson Brodsky took to heart. He quit school, went on expeditions to god-forsaken places, devoured every poetic influence he could get his hands on, chased girls, got in trouble with the law, did hard time, emigrated to the United States, taught at Mount Holyoke, became a New Yorker, married a princess, and frequently brooded or laughed in the back corner of the Samovar with friends from all over the world. All while writing poetry and prose, some of which will surely stand the test of time and continue to be read and enjoyed as long as people still do that sort of thing.
On Monday night, the tribute to Brodsky came in poetic and musical forms, from the sound of his own voice recordings to new and old translations of Shelley and Auden, to music by Grieg and Schumann and Bloch. Two Davids, Lehman and Rieff, said neat things about Brodsky. Sunny von Bülow, poor thing, looked in briefly as a mute shade. Vasily Kolchenko performed his own lovely setting of Brodsky’s early “Воротишься на родину” [You come back to your homeland] for bard and acoustic guitar. And with that, more or less, everybody headed upstairs to remember Brodsky in more gustatory fashion. O, the kulibiak (a long pastry filled with cabbage, meat or fish)! O, the shining vodkas and non-alcoholic cranberry drinks! O, the kilometers of salads of every shape, color and form! As Hamlet may or may not have said, depending on which folio we go by, and meaning precisely what, we know not/naught, “O, o, o, o!”
There is always poetry at the Samovar to cheer you up. This Sunday at 6:30pm, for instance, you can have Ina Bliznetsova's poetry delivered directly to your ears by the means of her very own (incredible, earthy) voice. Wishing you had time to brush up on your classical mythology and art history? Let Ms. Bliznetsova evoke it all for you in sculpted stanzas, while you sip ambrosia. Here's a link to some published work.
«We will drown you in a sea of poetry!» Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is reputed to have exclaimed while banging his shoe rhythmically on a conference table at the United Nations. Those words now seem prophetic, at least when it comes to readings at the Samovar. Next up, this Thursday at 7pm, will be Bakhyt Kenjeev. Let's stop right there: Bakhyt. In Cyrillic letters, even better: Бахыт. These are the letters—the big-bellied Б, the velar fricative X marking the exact center of the name, followed by Russia's impossible vowel Ы (known as «yery» with the accent on the second syllable), which even in Russian is never, never supposed to follow «х» but sometimes does anyway—these are the letters, I say, that inspired children's writer Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Suess, to write his immortal work On Beyond Zebra. I feel a great kinship with Dr. Suess' unnamed hero in his journey beyond the letters of the English alphabet. He could be speaking for me when he says:
In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
And look at the realm we've reached: Бахыт Кенжеев. How, with a name like that, could you not become a man of letters? If you understand Russian, or love Russian poetry, or just feel like letting Kenjeev's Mandelstam-edged elegaic sound wash over you before you surface for the third and final time, check out the poems on his website and come to his rare New York City appearance this Thursday.
See the mountain of books artfully arrayed? It was the debut party this past Thursday for author Elena Gorokhova and her memoir about growing up in Russia during what we used to call the Era of Stagnation (Brezhnev, the eyebrows, the-government-will provide-consumer-goods-if-the-people-will-pretend-to-believe-in-Communism, wink-wink, nudge-nudge).
Simon and Schuster, A Mountain of Crumbs' publisher, put on a terrific spread that included the Samovar's famously satisfying pelmeni (meat dumplings in broth), beef Stroganoff, black bread, smoked salmon, herring and potatoes, beet salad...I could go on and on.
Certainly the waitstaff went on and on, continually bringing more tasty treats until long after I faded into the New York night. No crumbs here, folks. Although I was the only plate-licker (see below).
Ernst Neizvestny came! The famous sculptor who during World War II actually died, but then revived to go on to art school, fame and controversy, has a website well worth perusing (you can begin doing so by clicking here). Neizvestny is pictured here with Gorokhova (all photos of this event by Lauren Perlstein). And here are the foothills of Crumbs:
I wish my mother had come from Leningrad, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. Leningrad's sophistication would have infected her the moment she drew her first breath, and all the curved façades and stately bridges, marinated for more than two centuries in the city's wet, salty air, would have left a permanent mark of refinement on her soul.
But she didn't. She came from the provincial town of Ivanovo in central Russia, where chickens lived in the kitchen and a pig squatted under the stairs, where streets were unpaved and houses made from wood. She came from where they lick plates.
Born three years before Russia turned into the Soviet Union, my mother became a mirror image of my motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. Our house was the seat of the politburo, my mother its permanent chairman. She presided in our kitchen over a pot of borsch, a ladle in her hand, ordering us to eat in the same voice that made her anatomy students quiver. A survivor of the famine, Stalin's terror, and the Great Patriotic War, she controlled and protected, ferociously. What had happened to her was not going to happen to us. She sheltered us from dangers, experience, and life itself by a tight embrace that left us innocent and gasping for air.
She commandeered trips to our crumbling dacha — under the Baltic clouds, spitting rain — to plant, weed, pick, and preserve for the winter whatever grew under the rare sun that never rose above the neighbor's pigsty. During brief northern summers we sloshed through a swamp to the shallow waters of the Gulf of Finland, warm and yellow as weak tea; we scooped mushrooms out of the forest moss and hung them on thread over the stove to dry for the winter. My mother planned, directed, and took charge, lugging buckets of water to beds of cucumbers and dill, elbowing in lines for sugar to preserve the fruit we'd need to treat winter colds. When September came, we were back in the city, rooting in the cupboard for gooseberry jam to cure my cough or black currant syrup to lower my father's blood pressure. We were back to the presidium speeches and winter coats padded with wool and preparations for more April digging.
Maybe if I hadn't spent every spring Sunday ankle-deep in cold, soggy dirt, I wouldn't have been so easily seduced by the decadent sound of the English language that poured from the grooves of a record called Audio-Lingual Drills, my tutor's pride. I might have gone to medical school, like my mother, or engineering school, like everyone else. I might have even married a Russian...
NY Times review here. Bony appetite!
