The midnight richter flew to her like a horizontal angel. “He was my classmate. N. M. Rubtsov

According to his Note, we set up our lives.

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the text to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart, she was blind from tears - like a white keyboard, placed on the butt. Her sadness seemed a secret. Nobody understood her. To her as an angel horizontal midnight Richter arrived.

What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?

God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost the entire publishing house gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh, and add: “but at the same time these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.

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Andrey Voznesensky
In the virtual wind

My soul, shadow,

I confess you.

Please don't put out my mascara before my due date!

Entered the world

and have not found themselves,

we are only objective shadows of the soul.

December 1997 Andrey Voznesensky

© Voznesensky A.A., heirs, 2018

© ITAR-TASS/Interpress, 2018

© "Tsentrpoligraf", 2018

© Artistic design, Tsentrpoligraf, 2018

Virtual keyboard

According to his note we set up our lives

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the text to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart,
she was blind from tears -
like a white keyboard,
placed on the butt.
Her sadness seemed a secret.
Nobody understood her.
To her as an angel horizontal
midnight Richter arrived.
What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?
God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of the publishing house that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost all the publishing house employees gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh and add: “But at the same time, these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.

“And it was cold for the baby in the den...”

“Pasternak on the phone!”

The numb parents stared at me. When I was in sixth grade, without telling anyone, I sent him poems and a letter. This was the first decisive action that determined my life. And so he responded and invited me to his place for two hours on Sunday.

It was December. I arrived at the gray house in Lavrushinsky, of course, an hour before. After waiting, he took the elevator up to the dark landing of the eighth floor. There was still a minute left until two. Behind the door, they apparently heard the elevator slam. The door opened.

He stood in the doorway.

Everything swam before me. A surprised, elongated, dark flame of a face looked at me. Some kind of floppy stearine knitted sweater hugged his strong figure. The wind moved my bangs. It is no coincidence that he later chose a burning candle for his self-portrait. He stood in the draft of the door.

The dry, strong brush of a pianist.

I was struck by the asceticism and poverty-stricken spaciousness of his unheated office. A square photo of Mayakovsky and a dagger on the wall. Muller's English-Russian Dictionary - he was then chained to translations. My student notebook was huddled on the table, probably prepared for the conversation. A wave of horror and adoration passed through me. But it's too late to run.

He spoke from the middle.

His cheekbones trembled like the triangular frames of wings, pressed tightly before fluttering. I idolized him. He had drive, strength and heavenly inadaptability. When he spoke, he twitched and pulled his chin up, as if he wanted to break out of his collar and out of his body.

Soon it became very easy to work with him. I look at him on the sly.

His short nose, starting from the deepening of the bridge of the nose, immediately went hump, then continued straight, reminiscent of a dark gun butt in miniature. Sphinx lips. Short gray haircut. But the main thing is a floating, smoking wave of magnetism. “He, who compared himself to a horse’s eye...”

Two hours later I walked away from him, carrying in my arms his manuscripts - for reading, and the most precious thing - the typewritten first part of his new prose novel, just completed, called "Doctor Zhivago" and an emerald notebook of new poems from this novel, bound with crimson silk with a lace. Unable to resist, I opened it as I walked and swallowed the breathless lines:

And it was cold for the baby in the den...
All the Christmas trees in the world, all the children’s dreams,

The poems had the feeling of a schoolboy in pre-revolutionary Moscow; childhood was mesmerizing - the most serious of Pasternak’s mysteries.

All the thrill of warmed candles, all the chains...

The poems preserved the later crystalline state of his soul. I found him in the fall. Autumn is clear to the point of clairvoyance. And the country of childhood came closer.

...All the apples, all the golden balls...

From that day on, my life was decided, acquired a magical meaning and purpose: his new poems, telephone conversations, Sunday conversations with him from two to four, walks - years of happiness and childish love.

* * *

Why did he respond to me?

He was lonely in those years, rejected, exhausted from bullying, he wanted sincerity, purity of relationships, he wanted to break out of the circle - and yet not only that. Maybe this strange relationship with a teenager, a schoolboy, this almost friendship explains something about him? This is not even friendship between a lion and a dog, or rather, a lion and a puppy.

Maybe he loved himself in me, who ran to Scriabin as a schoolboy?

He was drawn to childhood. The call of childhood did not stop within him.

He didn’t like it when people called him; he called himself, sometimes several times a week. Then there were painful breaks. I was never recommended to my bewildered family members by first name or patronymic, always by last name.

He spoke excitedly, recklessly. Then, at full speed, he suddenly ended the conversation. He never complained, no matter what clouds overshadowed him.

“An artist,” he said, “is essentially optimistic. The essence of creativity is optimistic. Even when you write tragic things, you must write strongly, and despondency and laziness do not give birth to works of strength.” The speech flowed in a continuous, choking monologue. It had more music than grammar. Speech was not divided into phrases, phrases into words - everything flowed in an unconscious stream of consciousness, the thought muttered, returned, bewitched. His poetry had the same flow.

* * *

When he moved permanently to Peredelkino, phone calls became less frequent. There was no telephone at the dacha. He went to call the office. The night area was filled with the echo of his voice from the window, he turned to the stars. I lived from bell to bell. He often called me when he was reading something new at the dacha.

His dacha resembled a wooden replica of Scottish towers. Like an old chess tour, it stood in a line of other dachas on the edge of a huge square Peredelkino field, lined with plowing. From the other end of the field, from behind the cemetery, like figures of a different color, the church and bell tower of the 16th century gleamed like carved king and queen, toy-colored dwarf relatives of St. Basil.

The order of dachas shuddered under the murderous sight of the cemetery domes. Now few of the owners of that time have survived.

Readings took place in his semicircular lantern office on the second floor.

We were going. They brought chairs from below. Usually there were about twenty guests. They were waiting for the late Livanovs.

From the solid windows you can see the September district. Forests are burning. A car is running towards the cemetery. A cobweb pulls out the window. On the other side of the field, from behind the cemetery, as colorful as a rooster, a church peeps sideways - who would you like to peck? The air above the field is shaking. And the same excited trembling in the air of the office. The nerve of anticipation trembles within him.

To pass the pause, D.N. Zhuravlev, the great reader of Chekhov and the tuning fork of the Old Arbat elite, shows how they sat at social receptions - with their backs arched and only feeling the back of the chair with their shoulder blades. This is him reprimanding me in a tactful manner! I feel myself blushing. But out of embarrassment and stubbornness I slouch and lean my elbows even more.

Finally the late ones arrive. She is timid, nervously graceful, making the excuse that it was difficult to get flowers. He is huge, spreading his arms and rolling his eyes in buffoonish horror: the prime minister, the shaker of the Moscow Art Theater, the Homeric performer of Nozdryov and Potemkin, a kind of shirtless gentleman.

They became quiet. Pasternak sat down at the table. He was wearing a light silver jacket like a French jacket, like those that later became fashionable among Western left-wing intellectuals. He read the poems at the end. That time he read “White Night”, “The Nightingale”, “The Fairy Tale”, well, in a word, the entire notebook of this period. While reading, he peered at something above your heads, visible only to him. The face became longer and thinner. And the light of the white night was the jacket he was wearing.

Prose? Poetry? Like in a white night everything got mixed up. He called it his main book. He delivered dialogues, naively trying to speak in different voices. His ear for the common language was magical! Like a cockerel, Neuhaus jumped up, shouted, winked at the listeners: “Let him, your Yuri, write more poetry!” He gathered guests as he completed part of the work. So I listened to everything he wrote over the years, notebook after notebook, the entire poetic novel, in his voice.

Readings usually lasted about two hours. Sometimes, when he needed to explain something to the listeners, he turned to me, as if explaining to me: “Andryusha, here in “The Fairy Tale” I wanted to emboss the emblem of feeling like on a medal: a warrior-savior and a maiden on his saddle.” This was our game. I knew these poems by heart; in them he brought to the pinnacle his technique of naming an action, an object, a state. Hooves clattered in the verses:

Closed eyelids.
Heights. Clouds.
Water. Brody. Rivers.
Years and centuries.

He spared the audience's pride. Then, in a circle, he asked who liked which poems more. The majority answered: “Everything.” He was annoyed at the evasiveness of the answer. Then they singled out “White Night”. Livanov called "Hamlet". The unplayed Hamlet was his tragedy, and he drowned out this pain with his arrogance and the courage of a buffoon.

The hum died down. I took to the stage
Leaning against the door frame...

Livanov blew his nose. His swollen undereyes became even more pronounced. But a minute later he was already laughing, because everyone was invited down to the feast.

We went down. They found themselves surrounded, in a blue fireworks display of evaporating models by his father, perhaps the only Russian impressionist artist.

Oh, these Peredelkino meals! There weren't enough chairs. They pulled down the stools. Pasternak led the feast in the rapture of Georgian ritual. He was a cordial owner. He embarrassed the departing guest and handed everyone their coats himself.

Who are they, the poet’s guests?

Tiny, quiet Genrikh Gustavovich Neuhaus, Garrick, with uncouth granite hair, squints with the dry radiance of his mind. The absent-minded Richter, Slava, the youngest at the table, slightly closed his eyelids, tasting the colors and sounds. “I have a question for Slava! Glory! Tell me, does art exist?” – Pasternak asked sobbingly.

“I knew Kachalov’s Jim. Don't believe me? - the thunderous Livanov boiled and poured. - Give me your paw, Jim... It was a black evil devil. Beelzebub! Everyone was in awe. He would come in and lie down under the dining table. None of the diners dared to move a foot. It’s not like touching the velvet fur. I would have grabbed my hand right away. What a joke! And he said: “Give me your paw...” Let’s drink to poetry, Boris!”

Nearby, big-eyed Zhuravlev in a brown pair, like a cockchafer, squinted embarrassedly and tenderly. Asmus thought. Vsevolod Ivanov came in with open-legged, bear-like movements, shouting: “I gave birth to a son for you, Boris!”

The boy Koma sat here and read poetry: “Tulips, tulips, tulips to whom?!”

I remember the ancient Anna Akhmatova, august in her poetry and age. She was taciturn, wearing a wide robe like a tunic. Pasternak sat me down next to her. So I remembered her in half profile for the rest of my life. But even she almost did not exist for me next to Pasternak.

The arrival of Hikmet crashed. The owner raised a toast in honor of him, in honor of the revolutionary glow behind his shoulders. Nazim, answering, complained that no one around him understood anything in Turkish, and that he was not only a glower, but also a poet and now reads poetry. I read furiously. He had angina pectoris and was breathing heavily. Then the hospitable host raised a toast to him. The toast was again about the glow. When Hikmet left, in order not to catch a cold on the street, he wrapped his chest under his shirt with newspapers - ours and foreign ones - there were a lot of them at the dacha. I went to see him off. Events rustled on the poet’s chest, earthly days rustled.

The Gothic Fedin came by, their dachas were adjacent. The William-Vilmont couple went back to the posture of Rokotov’s portraits.

Boris Leonidovich's wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, with an offended bow of her lips, in a velvet black dress, with a black short haircut, looking like an Art Nouveau lady, was worried that her son, Stasik Neuhaus, was supposed to play at a Paris competition in the morning, and his reflexes were evening game.

Ruben Simonov read Pushkin and Pasternak with voluptuous bliss and authority. Vertinsky flashed. The magnificent Irakli Andronikov portrayed Marshak to the Homeric groan.

What a feast for the eyes! What a feast for the spirit! The Renaissance brush, or rather the brush of Borovikovsky and Bryullov, took on flesh in these meals.

Now you look with surprise at the poor decoration of his dacha, at the lineman’s boots that he wore, at the cloak and cap, like today’s poor workers, at the low ceilings - but then they seemed like palaces.

He generously presented to my gaze the splendor of his fellow creatures. We had a kind of silent conspiracy with him. Sometimes, through the drunken monologue of the toast, I suddenly caught his laughing brown conspiratorial glance addressed to me, conveying something understandable only to both of us. It seemed that he was the only one of my age at the table. This community of secret age united us. Often the delight on his face was replaced by an expression of childish resentment, or even stubbornness.

Then the dogs Belka and Strelka, walled up in the satellite, flew across the sky. Pity for them howled in my lines:

Eh, Russia!
Eh, scope...
Smells like dog
in the sky.
Past Mars,
Dneprogesov,
masts, antennas,
factory pipes
a terrible symbol of progress
a dog's corpse is running around...

The description of the First Youth Festival was especially popular among the Olympic audience:

One of the poems ended like this:

Rushes into beliefs
workbench near Moscow,
and I'm an apprentice
in his workshop.

But I didn’t read it in front of him.

These were my first readings in public.

Sometimes I was jealous of him for them. Of course, conversations between the two of us, without guests, were much more valuable to me, or rather, monologues addressed not even to me, but past me - to eternity, to the meaning of life.

At times, a resentment complex kicked up inside me. I rebelled against my idol. One day he called me and said that he liked the font on my typewriter and asked me to retype a series of his poems. Naturally! But this seemed offensive to the child’s pride - why, he considers me to be a typist! I stupidly refused, citing the exam tomorrow, which was true, but not the reason.

* * *

Pasternak is a teenager.

There are artists marked by constant signs of age. So, in Bunin and in a completely different way in Nabokov, there is the clarity of early autumn, they seem to always be forty years old. Pasternak is an eternal teenager, deaf - “I was created by God to torment myself, my relatives and those who are tormented by sin.” Only once in poetry in the author’s speech did he indicate his age: “I am fourteen years old.” Once and for all.

How shy he was to the point of blinding himself among strangers, in the crowd, how tensely he bent his neck!..

One day he took me with him to the Vakhtangov Theater for the premiere of Romeo and Juliet in his translation. I was sitting next to him, to his right. My left shoulder, cheek, ear seemed numb from the proximity, as if from anesthesia. I looked at the stage, but still saw him - his luminous profile, his bangs. Sometimes he mumbled the text after the actor. The production was treacly, but L.V. was Juliet. Tselikovskaya, Romeo – Yu.P. Lyubimov, Vakhtangov’s hero-lover, who was not yet thinking about the future Taganka Theater. The scene was illuminated with feeling; their romance, which all of Moscow was talking about, ended with a wedding.

Suddenly Romeo's sword breaks, and - oh, miracle! - its end, having described a fabulous parabola, falls to the arm of Pasternak and I’s shared chair. I bend down and pick it up. My idol laughs. But now there is applause, and without any puns, the audience is chanting: “Author! The author! The embarrassed poet is dragged onto the stage.

Feasts were relaxation. He worked in a galley. Times were scary. Thank God they gave me translations. For two months a year he worked on transfers, “lordly tithes”, so that he could later work for himself. He translated 150 lines a day, saying that otherwise it would be unproductive. Koril Tsvetaeva, who, if she translated, did only 20 lines a day.

From him I also met S. Chikovani, P. Chagin, S. Makashin, I. Noneshvili.

A master of language, in his speech he did not use obscenity and everyday obscenities. But others enthusiastically listened to the richness of the language. “I wouldn’t disdain even an unprintable word.”

He spoke about everything clearly and clearly. “Andryusha, these doctors discovered polyps in my anus.”

Only once did I hear him use the term indirectly. Somehow petty puritans attacked me because I was published in the wrong organ where they wanted. Then Pasternak told a parable about Fet at the table. In a similar situation, Fet allegedly replied: “If Schmidt (I think that was the name of the lowest-class shoemaker in St. Petersburg at that time) published a dirty sheet that was called a three-letter word, I would still be published there. Poems purify.”

How careful and chaste he was! Once he gave me a pack of new poems, which included “Autumn” with Titian’s golden stanza - in purity, permeation with feeling and imagery:

You also take off your dress,
Like a grove shedding its leaves,
When you fall into a hug
In a robe with a silk tassel.

(Original version:

Your open dress
Like leaves shed by a grove...)

In the morning he called me: “Perhaps you thought this was too frank? Zina says I shouldn’t have given it to you, she says it’s too free…”

OK. Chukovskaya recalls that Akhmatova also took up arms against the frank freedom of these lines, supposedly inappropriate for her age. It seems that she was jealous like a woman, jealous of the young passion and power of poetry, of his actions beyond his age, of the novel, of his environment. She spoke irritably about the affair.

Pasternak appreciated her early books and treated her later poems with more than restraint. He gave me a typewritten copy of the “Tashkent Poem” to read, the pages yellowed with age and brown, as if burned on the folds. When I wanted to return it to him, he just waved me off.

“Akhmatova is very educated and smart, take her articles about Pushkin for example, it just seems that she has only one note,” he told me at the first meeting. But never, anywhere, publicly or in print, did the greats show their human irritation to the public. It pains me to read Akhmatova’s reproaches in Lydia Korneevna’s documentary records, just as it pains me to read the harsh, documentary pages dedicated to Anna Andreevna in Zinaida Nikolaevna’s memoirs.

For me, Akhmatova was God. The only one in this incarnation is a special female. I knew the “rosary” by heart, but closer, “mine” was Tsvetaeva. Elena Efimovna Tager gave me her poems in manuscripts, not even on a typewriter, but handwritten in a small, slanted, beaded handwriting, leaving me alone with them in my office for half a day. The relationship between the gods did not concern me. Poems spoke to me.

And it’s unlikely that Zinaida Nikolaevna cared so much about my morality. She was probably not delighted with the blond recipient of the poems.

How I understood him! I felt like his accomplice. I already had a secret life then.

Meeting him coincided with my first love.

She was an English teacher at our school. Our romance began suddenly and avalanche. She lived in a hostel on Ordynka. We kissed on the winter benches at night, from under which the ubiquitous third-graders emerged and joyfully shouted: “Hello, Elena Sergeevna!”

And how my heart sank at the silence on the telephone!

A dreamer, a former model for Gerasimov, what did she find in an inexperienced schoolboy?

You're ten years late
But still I need you, -

she read to me. And she let down her black braids.

There was an unconscious protest in it against the hated order of life - these breathless meetings in the dark teacher's room, love seemed to us our revolution. Her parents were horrified, and we read with her “Jazz” by Kazarnovsky, her former friend who perished in the camp. She brought me old issues of Krasnaya Novy, which were thrown out of the school library. A mysterious world loomed behind her. “Leave once and for all” was her lesson.

I trusted her alone with my acquaintance with Pasternak and gave her the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to read. She made fun of the long names and patronymics of the characters and teased me with supposed misunderstanding. Maybe she was jealous?

Beautiful adventurism was in her character. She instilled in me a taste for risk and the theatricality of life. She became my second secret life. The first secret life was Pasternak.

As a habitat, the poet needs a secret life, secret freedom. Without her there is no poet.

His support for me was in his very destiny, which shone nearby. It would never even occur to me to ask for something practical - for example, help with getting published or something like that. I was convinced that one does not enter poetry through patronage. When I realized that it was time to publish the poems, I, without saying a word to him, went through the editorial offices like everyone else, without any auxiliary phone calls, I went through all the pre-printing ordeals. One day my poems reached a member of the editorial board of a thick magazine. He calls me into his office. He sits down - a kind of welcoming carcass, a hippopotamus. He looks lovingly.

-Are you the son?

- Yes, but...

- No buts. Now it’s possible. Don't hide. He has been rehabilitated. There were mistakes. What a beacon of thought he was! The tea will be brought now. And you are like a son...

- Yes, but...

- No buts. We give your poems in the room. We will be understood correctly. You have a master’s hand, you are especially good at the signs of our atomic age, modern words - well, for example, you write “caryatids...” Congratulations.

(As I later understood, he mistook me for the son of N.A. Voznesensky, the former chairman of the State Planning Committee.)

-...That is, how not a son? How's the namesake? Why are you fooling us here? Bring all sorts of harmful nonsense. We won't allow it. And I kept thinking - like such a father, or rather, not a father... What other tea?

But then somehow it got published. I brought the first Litgazeta, smelling of paint, with a selection of poems to him in Peredelkino.

The poet was sick. He was in bed. I remember the mournful autumn silhouette of Elena Tager bending over him. The poet's dark head pressed heavily into the white pillow. They gave him glasses. How he beamed, how excited he became, how his face trembled! He read the poems out loud. Apparently he was happy for me. “So, my affairs are not so bad,” he suddenly said. What he liked about the poems was that which was free in form. “Aseev is probably looking for you now,” he joked.

Aseev, ardent Aseev with a swift vertical face, similar to a pointed arch, fanatical, like a Catholic preacher, with thin poisonous lips, Aseev of the “Blue Hussars” and “Oksana”, minstrel of construction sites, reformer of rhyme. He vigilantly soared over Moscow in his tower on the corner of Gorky and Moscow Art Theater passage, and for years did not leave it, like Prometheus chained to the telephone.

I have never met a person who loved other people's poems so selflessly. An artist, an instrument of taste and scent, he, like a dry, nervous greyhound, could smell a line a mile away - this is how he tenaciously assessed V. Sosnora and Y. Moritz. He was honored by Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Pasternak was his fiery love. I caught them when they had already missed each other for a long time. How difficult are the disagreements between artists! Aseev always lovingly and jealously inquired - how is “your Pasternak”? The same one spoke about him distantly - “even Aseev’s last thing is a little cold.” Once I brought him Aseev’s book, he returned it to me without reading it.

Aseev is a catalyst for the atmosphere, bubbles in the champagne of poetry.

“It turns out they call you Andrei Andreevich? How great! We all hit doubles. Mayakovsky - Vladim Vladimych, I - Nikolai Nikolaevich, Burliuk - David Davidich, Kamensky - Vasily Vasilyevich, Kruchenykh...” - “And Boris Leonidovich?” “The exception only confirms the rule.”

Aseev came up with a nickname for me - Vazhashchensky, gave me poems: “Your guitar is a guitar, Andryusha”, saved me in difficult times with the article “What to do with Voznesensky?”, directed against the critics’ manner of “reading in thoughts.” He chivalrously reflected attacks on young sculptors and painters in newspapers.

While in Paris, I gave interviews left and right. One of them came across Lila Yuryevna Brik. She immediately called to please Aseev.

- Kolenka, Andryusha has such success in Paris...

The tube was happy.

– Here he talks about our poetry in an interview...

The tube was happy.

– Lists the names of poets...

– Where am I in?

- Yes, Kolenka, you’re not here at all...

Aseev was very offended. I mentioned him, but probably the journalist knew the name of Pasternak, but had not heard of Aseev and threw it out. Well, how can you explain this to him?! You'll offend me even more.

There was a rupture. He shouted in a whistling whisper: “You endorsed this interview! That’s the order...” Not only did I not endorse it, but I didn’t remember which newspaper it was in.

After the scandal with Khrushchev, the editor of Pravda persuaded him, and his response appeared in Pravda, where he condemned the poet “who puts a poetess he knows next to Lermontov.”

Later, probably bored, he called, but his mother hung up. We didn't see each other again.

He stayed for me in the Blue Hussars, in Oksana.

In his panorama “Mayakovsky Begins” he named in a large circle next to the names of Khlebnikov and Pasternak the name of Alexei Kruchenykh.

* * *

There was a smell of mice in my manuscript.

The sharp nose twitches and looks into my manuscript. Pasternak warned against meeting him. It appeared immediately after my first newspaper publication.

He was a literature ragpicker.

His name was Leksey Eliseich, Kruchka, but Kurchonok would have suited him better.

The skin of his cheeks was childish, pimply, always overgrown with gray stubble, growing in neglected tufts, like that of a badly singed chicken. He was a crappy sprout. He dressed in rags. Next to him, Plyushkin would look like a regular at fashion salons. His nose was always sniffing out something, sniffing out something - well, not a manuscript, but a photograph to get hold of. It seemed that he had always existed - not even a bubble of the earth, no, a mold of time, a werewolf of communal quarrels, ghoul rustles, cobweb corners. You thought it was a layer of dust, but it turns out that it has been sitting in the corner for an hour.

He lived on Kirovskaya in a small storage room. It smelled like mouse. There was no light. The only window was filled to the ceiling, dirty - with junk, bales, half-eaten cans, centuries-old dust, where he, like a squirrel, hid mushrooms and berries - his treasures - antique books and lists.

Andrey Voznesensky

Virtual keyboard

According to his Note, we set up our lives.

Richter's funeral was held in his heavenly home on the 16th floor on Bronnaya. He lay with his head towards two pianos with notes by Schubert, and silver chains and icons were put on them, as if they were alive. His thinner, younger-looking face took on the glow of plaster, and his gray tie glowed with rainbow veins in the style of early Kandinsky. There lay dark hands with a golden tint. When he played, he threw his head up, like a purebred Great Dane, and closed his eyes, as if he was inhaling the sounds. Now he closed his eyelids without playing. And a young red-haired portrait looked out from the wall.

I remember him at the Pasternak feasts. The marble statuesque quality was already visible through the athletic young man. But not antique, but by Rodin. He was younger than the other great guests - the owner, Neuhaus, and Asmus, but even then it was clear that he was a genius. His genius seemed natural, like the size of his shoes or his suit. Nina Lvovna was always nearby, graceful and graphic, like black lace.

When Pasternak invited me to escort Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, I pretended to hesitate and gave up this honor to Slava. Now they will meet there.

The priest who performed the funeral service for him, the violinist Vedernikov in the world, said precisely and subtly: “He was above us.” It was getting dark. Through the open balcony doors one could see the Kremlin cathedrals and Nikitsky Boulevard. He hovered above them. “Lord,” the five singers sang the canonical words of the funeral service, “We send Glory to You...” For the first time, these words sounded literally.

His Note was a mediator between us and other worlds, contact with God. He played only out of inspiration, which is why sometimes he played unevenly.

For me, it was he, who had always been a lonely genius, who became a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia. She lived on the Richter scale. And when its poet, Boris Pasternak, was buried, it was Richter who played.

It was natural for him to play in the Pushkin Museum for Velazquez and Titian, just as for our contemporaries. And it is quite natural that the exhibition of the forbidden Falk, his painting teacher, was in Richter’s apartment, in his house.

On his 80th birthday at the Pushkin Museum during the skit party, I wrote the text to the melody “Happy Birthday to You!” And in this text the figure eight lay on its side and became the sign of infinity.

At his last concerts, there was a miniature Triumph award badge on the lapel of his brilliant tailcoat. When I designed this logo, I had Richter in mind first and foremost.

At the coffin, a sad line of his relatives and friends pass by - a line of departing Russian intellectuals, who will later become signatures under the obituary, and above him one can already see the invisible figures of those whom he will now join.

Finally he will meet, as he dreamed, with his master Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus. Perhaps it was no coincidence that there were two pianos next to each other in his apartment. They fly in infinity parallel to the ground, like the figures in Chagall’s paintings.

I once wrote him poetry. They sound different now.

The birch tree pierced my heart,

she was blind from tears -

like a white keyboard,

placed on the butt.

Her sadness seemed a secret.

Nobody understood her.

To her as an angel horizontal

midnight Richter arrived.

What Note will reach us from his new, different, virtual keyboards?

God grant that he doesn’t immediately forget us...

It so happened that it was in the editorial office of Vagrius that I learned about Richter’s death. I was dictating the last pages of this book onto the computer.

The phone rang and told me the sad news. I went into the next room. Almost the entire publishing house gathered there. There was tea drinking. I said that Richter died. Without clinking glasses, they commemorated.

There was some kind of draft. It was as if the night door had been opened.

Then, already standing at the coffin, I clearly felt the presence of other figures among the living, as if along its bridge they had descended to us from other dimensions. The presence of eternity was visible in the midst of present life. Thus, Pasternak’s living presence in her is much more real than many who seem alive.

Memory does not live in us chronologically. Outside of us - even more so. In this book I try to record the course of memories as they crowd in the mind, interspersed with events of today and the future.

In a couple of years, our age will give its soul to God. The soul will go to heaven.

And the Lord will ask: “What were you doing, Russian 20th century? Killed millions of your own, stole, destroyed the country and temples?”

“Yes,” the accompanying angel will sigh, and add: “but at the same time these unfortunate defenseless people, Russian intellectuals, created the shrines of the 20th century, just as previous centuries created their own. And how did they create the Moscow Art Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, paintings by Vrubel and Kandinsky, the ritual of poetry readings that became the national culture of Russia?..”

And a series of figures will stretch out, illuminated by a double light.

I knew some of them. Their shadows are in this book.