Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

the Historical Archives program (I lived by them the entire first year) dimmed and, in my melancholy, I began to compose poems, taking up residence in the last row of seats and gazing out of the window, first at the autumn rain, then at the falling leaves and the first snow. My friend Vadim, who also “scribbled,” mercilessly approved the first fruit of my pen, and, strolling along the boulevards from the Soviet Army Theatre to the Rozhdenstvensky Convent, ending up finally in front of the Maly Theatre, we recited our poems to each other, shared the secrets of our hearts, and philosophized. The poems, more andmore often, concerned themselves with fall (”Copper autumn, how prideful you are, my sorceress...”) Re-reading them now, it seems to me that they had been written by some other person. “Only the slithering snakes shed their skins, so that their souls may mature and grow old. We, alas, are no kindred to the snake, trading in our bodies instead of souls.” Vadim loved Gumilev dearly, copying his poems out from the typewritten pages that had been circulating from hand to hand, and he had read to me his “Memory” (memory, you lead our lives with the hand of a giantess as by a stallion’s bridle, you will tell me all about those who had inhabited this body before me) hundreds of times, and so I remembered it by heart. I was not an admirer of Gumilev: his demonstrative Romanticism – the romanticism “of the soul” is like a whorehouse – that of a virginal dreamer, frightened me, but Vadim declaimed him, especially when he had a drop to drink, with such

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