Analect 2.687x

31 March 2010. Nicola stretched out at end of bed, one white paw extended towards sunny window. Last night's rain...

A gathering of friends, passover stories. Zoya at end of table, like a small bird with bright eyes, telling Rose (in Russian) about the family's fleeing the Ukraine in 1941, in advance of the Nazis. "We bought a horse...walked alongside with all our belongings..." Also a pesach story, if unintended...maybe the most pointed of them all...

* * *

Olga Leshinskaya, the ballerina. Her role in Kontsert Frontu (Concert to the Front), also stories. A favorite of Stalin (there were those who said it was more), and an exemplary Soviet citizen--an artist of great talent...a survivor...

Analect 2.686x

30 March 2010. Shadow of rain, wet leaves, gray sky...

Tonkaya Ryabina. A Russian song--Slender Mountain Ash. The rowan tree, its small clusters of red berries, set bright against a mantle of snow...

Why do you stand there swaying, slender mountain ash, your head bent down so?

While across the way, on the other side of a broad river, stands an oak, also alone?

And how could I, just a rowan tree, cross over to that oak?
I'd no longer stand bending and swaying...

With my slender branches I'd press against him
And with his leaves whisper day and night

But it's impossible for a rowan to cross over to an oak
To know such a fate--forever alone, swaying...

Analect 2.685x

29 March 2010. Fine mist, two lifeguard girls--Alex and Iliana, bending forward towards small office window, smiling... Later--man with paper cup, held at an angle, his rumpled stocking cap, begging in the rain...

Astrakhan, an Ahiska girl with her child, traditional dress. White head-covering over simple features, pale hair. Peoples of Central Asia, Turkik languages, their migrations brought them west (fleeing the advance of even more powerful peoples). A caravan of horses and yurts, arid landscape, rough hills. Image of princess with high crown--a narrow towered headress, dark silhouette in red against long horizon. An invention of now--video realm, whereas the grandmothers in Soviet-era garb, worn jacket layers, flowered skirts and shawls, deepset eyes and scanty teeth, their arms around a boy, at once tough and uncertain--one lock of dark hair, pommade, combed down over his forehead...

Pesach...

Analect 2.684x

26 March 2010. Sun, with bravo team in next lane--their underwater laps, face-up, like dolphins...

Kupala in modern dress. The village of Pen'kovo, Tverskoe Oblast'... A moonlit evening, down vests and folding chairs. Young boy in skeleton costume--his rosy cheeks under black hood. Woman of middle years, in heavy gray sweater, wreath of daisies over close-cropped hair--holding a book with shiny cover. Ways of regaining the past...

Little girls dancing--children's gait--all movement. Their older sister, her hair decked high...

Floating islands of flowers on dark pond, illuminated by candles...

Analect 2.683x

25 March 2010. Mildly sunny morning, after evening rain. Emory, still bundled up for winter in high lifeguard chair, waving from across the pool...

Two Russian singers, Kontsert Frontu (Concert to the Front), 1942. For the troops--bits of broad comedy interspersed with the remnants of a beautiful oral tradition--as when Lidiya Ruslanova slips in one of those high-energy folk lilts at the end of a line--a lifting of the voice--all is possible. Thus a metaphor as well--Ivan Kupala--once a pagan fertility rite (waters of spring), melded into the Orthodox calendar (John the Baptist), and put on hold in Soviet times, except in these hints and glimpses...

One responds with a whole being...

Analect 2.682x

24 March 2010. Cool bay morning, gull swooping low over pool. Returns.

The children of history. Lidiya Ruslanova, here on back of Soviet truck, the year is 1942. Concerts on the front. Her humble beginnings--a village near Saratov, peasant family, a father who died in the war with Japan, childhood in an orphanage. She began singing in the local parish choir, soon a soloist. Then for the soldiers in the Russian Civil War. Extremely popluar during the 1930s, "she was noted for her peculiar singing voice and timbre, which was a revival of old traditions in which female soloists would perform on festive occasions."

Her performances throughout the Second World War, on all the fronts...songs of encouragement to the troops, who revered her. ("Her rough manners and racy language appealed to the soldiers...") She also became "one of the richest women in Soviet Russia," at one point personally financing two katyusha batteries which she then presented to the Red Army. (Soviet reprise of Kutuzov's adjutants purchasing their own uniforms.)

She was arrested in 1950 (her husband's association with Marshall Zhukov, an opponent of Stalin), but Ruslanova refused to sign a declaration that he was guilty. For which she spent years in the gulag, until Stalin's death--at which point (though barely able to walk) "she returned to singing almost immediately..."

Katyusha...

Analect 2.681x

19 March 2010. Gray dawn, with sun to follow...

The hoopoe returns--Leonard must have left him somewhere nearby, in the fold of a coat, or just behind the desk, upstairs, on a high shelf, where the rows of Roman poets hold forth, with some space for William Stafford and a Swede or two. Translations from the Sanscrit--that's it--brought forth in modern dress, a starry-eyed bird, clear-sighted when near the earth... Whistful...

Walking together across a canyon bride near the Tilden wetlands lake--the two of us--where a quiet morning remains to him filled with sound. I catch them after--he's told me where and when to look. The names, in Latin, understated but always with a certain eagerness......

Phaenopepla...

Analect 2.680x

18 March 2010. Looking for the true meaning of morning... Concerted St. Mary's swim coach instructing tiny competitor on the fine points of endurance...both treading water in lane number seven... (Do the lanes have numbers?)

Or the claims of the poet, in a bookstore somewhere in Russia, printed volume in hand. Rumpled post-Soviet medved' of a man--bear-like, that is, and humble, with that intensity that follows from the love of an almost unattainable lyricism...

Khlebnikov in another age. A book cover with crude lyrical flowers--Zangezi--a bit of France and Africa conjoined. Moskva, 1922...

Там где жили свиристили… There where the waxwings used to dwell...

Analect2.679x

17 March 2010. Hazy sun, and an almost warm spring day. Birds enjoying things, too...

The older Volga, fishing weirs, poles for nets, sometime in the late 1800s... Where every surface seems touched--worn and woven at the river's edge. Figures gathered around a skiff--their stiff poses of an early spring. Heavy Russian coats, belted, an arm wrapped round a riverman's staff--tall and thin diagonal set against a sky of incoming clouds.

It's the scale of each part--this one feels--the size and shape of a piece of wood, or the stones piled carefully into a low wall...

As in the paintings, or Tarkovsky's film--Andrei Rublev, the painter/monk as he "confronts Russian pagans cavorting naked through misty forests." He resists. But later, it's Marfa, the pagan woman, who unties the cords with which they've bound him--and saves the painter from crucifixion...

Analect 2.678x

16 March 2010. Rock Island Refrigerated Dist. truck parked on street, white hood lifted into the air, motor running, repair...

Two young women from Georgia--a Song of Batum, Maia Kalandadze and Nino Komakhidze, standing close side by side. Village women with baskets over their arms--plums and coriander, set against dry hills rising from the sea. A medieval fortress in the distance--the stones for its walls plucked from the same land.

Long faces and sad eyes, as in Arshile Gorky's painting of himself and his mother--A Quiet Garden in Sochi, except that it wasn't Sochi at all, but some unknown village high in the hills. The back country, as Mom used to say, road to Temecula, winding through dry boulder land, dry and hot in mid-summer. The Pala Mission--Asistencia--an old church with adobe walls, worn red tiles. Spanish arch with bells...

San Luis Rey...

Analect 2.677x

15 March 2010. Early pool, cool shadows...

Boris Shtokolov as Ivan Susanin, the legendary peasant martyr hero who led the new Tsar Michael's Lithuanian/Polish pursuers deeper and deeper into the Russian woods, where on a particularly cold February night in 1612 all perished. Glinka's opera based on these events--which premiered in 1835. Nicholas I being in attendance, Glinka changed the title to Zhizn' za tsarya--A Life for the Tsar, but after the 1917 Revolution the opera again became known as Ivan Susanin...

Russian folk melodies throughout...

Analect 2.676x

12 March 2010. Circling jet with heavy wings, two engines each, gray clouds moving towards rain...

Puchezh. A theater group, indeterminate year. Staging or restaging an early Soviet event. Each character distinct in their seeming sameness--a padded jacket with tilted head, the young man in long European leather coat, floppy wide lapels, serious mein. Youthful women wrapped in babushkas. It's cold, as well--hands tucked in pockets or behind backs. Young faces, attentive and ready. At once accepting--and questioning.

A miracle.

Analect 2.675x

11 March 2010. Fistful of sunshine...

A metaphor less fraught...Sergio Leone on the Volga. Here in the form of a rare Isaak Levitan portrait, the figure in a formal white dress (full-cut fabric, one imagines) with an almost invisible corsage high on her lapel. Head to the side--unexpectedly--so that the effect is one of pensivess rather than display. Grays and off-whites, merging. Recalling his landscapes, better known--Vladimirka, for instance, an empty road stretching to the horizon, intersected in the middle distance by an even more undulating path. Far off, a few trees against darkening sky--their sizes and shapes as varying nicely. World of moderation, yet vigorous throughout...

Russian...

Analect 2.674x

10 March 2010. Black crow on pool deck, morning sun. Pointed steps, one by one...

Another go at Repin, Surov's portrait from 1892. Forget it. Yes, Repin was his teacher, but somehow I don't quite believe this kindly face of middle years. Usually warmth in a painting is beguiling, but can it not also be a form of deceit? A covering up? As in the scene from War and Peace, the late-night revel, when Pierre clambers onto the third-floor window ledge, demanding a bottle of rum--if he drinks it, he'll fall, without a doubt--and Anatol Kuragin makes his soto voce aside to their drunken pals, "I'll fool him..."

Good intentions, questionable tactics...

And Brecht? "Und das nasse Ohio wuchts unten..."

Analect 2.673x

9 March 2010. Nicola tucking herself in next to my side, down the bed just at dawn. First light in eastern sky, line of hills...

Serov's drawing of Pushkin, imagined on a bench in a park (Mikhailovskoe?), from 1899. The artist was 34--a good year to tackle the very icon of Russian literary culture. Casual, light touch throughout--but not unstudied. How many Madonna's in that upward gaze? And yet the effect is one of youth--self-assured, but more pensive than cocky. Wind in the trees, line of distant hills...a Russian setting to be sure.

Talking about Sargeant--with Midgette, half a century ago. The same questions--a discipline of immediacy, lost in all forced resolution. Bonnard's sustain--he'd begin from the motif, which, once registered, could endure a lifetime...

Almond tree in early spring...adding that touch of...

Analect 2.672x

8 March 2010. Natasha in yellow chair, curled up in one dark ball. The queen of fur, lifting her head for a furtive caress... Her small pink tongue...

Alexander Sergeevich, in exile at Mikhailovskoe, where Arina Rodionova, his old nurse, will of an evening share fairly tales and legends in her own Russian tongue (the poet had heard them before, of course, but only in courtly French), thereby (as he phrased it) "making up for the defects in his accursed education..."

Last night: Sergey standing at Tatiana's shoulder, his every gesture defining the cadence of a song. Count Sheremetov's setting for a poem, also from Pushkin--one of the most seemingly simple--Ya Vas Lyubil...

I loved you once, love still perhaps...

Analect 2.671x

5 March 2010. Sun pops in window at 7 am, annunciation...

And why not? A Mari girl (this is a guess) in national costume. But how can there be a national costume for a people who worship the trees the stars? Every living leaf carries a note...

As when, last night, we distribute small sheets of plain white paper, cut swiftly on zinc, to be held in the fingers of each hand, pulled taut across the lips--a home-made kazoo. Smiles all round as we try the sound (chorus to Jesse Fuller's San Francisco Bay Blues), hard to tell if the experiment really works--for half the fun is in imagining so... No way to know, unless you are there...

A water bird, Kostroma, early spring...

Analect 2.670x

4 March 2010. Possible sun, moments of cloud.

The claims of the 19th century, as put forth by Serov and Repin--two Russian wanderers in the realm of paint. The bravura brushwork--Valentin Serov--flashy until the crunch, when a fine-tuned draftsman appears, setting all in order. A little too much so, perhaps--the knowingness of a hand inserted into a lapel, or the turn of a wrist on a woman lounged on a divan--a knowingness that knows we know as well--as if the full-embodiment of a culture could be indicated in these social minutiae. And yet, the sheer skill--and a willingness to take it all on--as in his portrait of Glinka, amply holed up in bedclothes, manuscript in hand... A Farewell to St. Petersburg, perhaps... Zhavronok, the Lark, "melodically gloomy to the point of melancholy..."

His portrait of Mamontov's daughter, Girl with Peaches...

Analect 2.669x

3 March 2010. Gray, with touch of blue. Sheets of water on downhill streets, last night's rain...

Winter, somehwere near Rybinsk. A town on the Volga, once a fishing village in the province of Yaroslav. Coat of arms--a standing bear, halberd on shoulder. Below, mirrored steps extend into river, where a pair of fish set face to face--sturgeon and sterlet--recall that past.

Mother and child on a frozen road, car trouble, heavy coats. Distant trees hover in winter fog. A small figure, opposite (za mashynoj) sets off on path.

Songs unwritten, songs not yet sung...

Analects 2.668x

2 March 2010. Gray gull against darker gray clouds, swooping low. Rain...

Masterskaya. A workshop or studio, but here more on the order of an office, in a provincial town from the time of Chekhov. Shelves oveflowing with books and pamphlets, stacked this way and that--records of a sort. Moody light. Young woman on lower rung of ladder--imagined as Aunt Ruth, while closer to us, Osher, my father--the cap, the Russian shirt, a characteristic forthrightness, time of uncertainty...

Standing by the counter in Walters, decades hence, in a California beach town. Orders for shirts and shoes, Stacy Adams, Van Heusen, their sizes running this way and that--broken lots--fitted carefully onto varnished plywood shelves, small white cardpaper tags on the outer fold: trousers small/medium/large. Pulled one by one with a deft tug, the stack unchanged...

Doves under the eves, evening call...

Analect 2.667x

1 March 2010. Moist gray morning air. Unidentified pickup lodged in front of house: small toothpaste tube on corner of dash, acrylic blanket tossed in back, along with some hard-to-read cds. As opposed to small child in wide blue and white striped hood, hand in her mother's, crossing street to Harding school. Morning rites.

On the Banks of the Great Volga, 19th century photographs by Mikhail Bukar'. A Tatar man, dated 1872, from the Saint Petersburg Collection of Russian Nationalities. (Stary vopros: whose Russia, whose nationalities?) Long kaftan with narrow vertical stripes, green and white, black, off-red, strangely homogeneous. His undergarment, a reddish-oxide print, vivid and open shapes. A kind of allegory of space--the containment from without, freedom from within.

Are their Tatar songs the same?