Russia (bbabo.net), - He called one wife "mouse", the other - "cat". One led away from a friend, the second - took him away. But who was he in this eternal "hunt" - in love? In this game of cat and mouse? Member? Victim? An executioner?..

And that, I think, and the other, and the third. In one word, he was a Poet.

Women's circle

"I found myself in the family... as a scraper, a favorite. They shook me, spoiled me." He will say: I "grew up in a gyno." So in ancient Greece they called "female halves", distant rooms where husbands hid their beauties from envious eyes. He meant only the environment: mother, grandmother, nanny, older sisters. It seems that they did not take him to the women's bath, like Mandelstam. But skirts, knitting needles, bottles, lipsticks did their job. Hanging out with a "tail" in shops, he began to understand outfits, fashion, and soon he himself turned into a note dandy. Once, when he suddenly fell behind his mother in the store, he did not cry, but, looking around, chose the most elegant and pretty blonde, "with whom it was not a shame to walk the streets," and, scuffing his foot, raising his cap, politely said: "Show me home, I'm lost..."

Women will spend their whole lives as if "seeing off" him: to nurse, pamper, take care of him. He will have a second wife both for a breadwinner (at work during the day), and for a cook (in the evening), and for a nurse (at night, when he was dying of furunculosis in his very hunger). The third wife, almost a girl, while he wrote at night, would fall asleep, clutching his pajamas to her chest - to warm it up for him in advance.

And because of the first, he will be called to a duel.

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Challenging Marietta

He studied at the "yat", in the gymnasium he went to the medal. And I didn’t get it, imagine, because of the “corrupting influence on comrades” - because of the “tongue” caustic. Becoming a student, he went out on the streets of Moscow as a dandy, a fert, a "life-burner". Balls, dances, cards, wine. Collars were worn "under the very ears", trousers were made narrower, and the tops of caps, on the contrary, were inflated so that they could hardly hold on the heads of overgrown boobies. The trick was to have the police take them for officers at dusk, salute them, and then, having figured it out, would spit.

Behind all this, it was not up to the university, he dropped out after the third year. But - shook himself, looked around, spotted again "the most elegant" and, imagine, got married. At 18 years old.

The beautiful Marina Ryndina became his wife. The colonel's daughter, always in a black or white dress, with a golden crown on her head, she drove out to Kuznetsky, leaning back in a carriage on velvet pillows. "Stranger" Kramskoy! On the neck, either a necklace, or, imagine, a living snake - a trained one. In the mornings in her estate, in one shirt, she jumped on a horse and rushed through the fields. Once, when Khodasevich was sitting with a book in the room overlooking the terrace, there was suddenly a monstrous clatter and Marina led her beloved horse into the room. Famously?! But most importantly, she was enchantingly shameless. “He used to come to a literary meeting,” an eyewitness recalled, “he goes straight to the table, in his hands some kind of orchid, throws off his fur coat and sits down at the table naked, well, completely naked! ..”

And because of this - a duel?

Yes, not with a man - with a woman ?!

An elderly lady handed him a note at some dinner party. He took off his gloves, shuffled his foot and read: "You are oppressing Marina. And you are beating her. I challenge you. I offer rapiers as a weapon ..." And the signature is Marietta Shaginyan.

Yes, the future author of righteous books about Lenin and Marx.

“I pretended,” writes the poet, “that I was not surprised: “Is this serious?” “Quite,” the lady replied. Khodasevich knew Shaginyan only by sight, and Ryndina, by the way, did not know her; she only pestered Marina with ecstatic statements about her readiness to defend her "to the last drop of blood." Having hidden the letter, the poet bowed to the second: “Tell me that I don’t fight with young ladies ...” And about three months later the doorman handed him a bouquet of violets: “The young lady brought it, dark, deaf ...” reconciled."

Since then, Marietta, then a solid "confusion" of all sorts of "isms" and really tolerably fenced, will feel sorry for the poet for years. "Ah, poor Vladya! You are dying. It's sad, but true." He "died" because he was "obscure in matters of religion", then because he did not understand the second part of "Faust", then because he did not become a "communist". Saved!

But in the main it turned out to be right: the poet really died, always died.

Marina will leave him. She will become the wife of Makovsky, editor of the Apollo magazine. Live to be 86 years old. And Khodasevich would then write to his mother: “I am crying for a woman! .. Do you want to confess? I need ... not much: just to taste her kisses again ... to exclaim again:“ Princess! Princess!" And hear in response: "Forever"..."

And then he will write to a friend: "A woman must be kind!"

He will find one - soft and obedient, quiet as a mouse. Even calling her will be "mouse". She will become his second wife.

"Happy House"

Everything is strange in the poet's second marriage. His second wife Nyuta, the beautiful Anna Chulkova, sister of the famous poet Georgy Chulkov, did not "meet" him - she turned up. There was no such thing: they saw, they were stunned, they fell in love. No, we've known each other for a hundred years. She was generally from their company, translated, printed poems under the name of Sofya Beketova. True, she was married, gave birth to a son, then got along with one friend of Khodasevich - Diatropov, then with another, with Alexander Bryusov, brother of the poet Valery Bryusov ...

Nyuta was "in the know" of all his novels, she was almost a "confidante", and then suddenly they somehow quietly agreed. For a long 11 years! He will write to a friend: “I don’t know how love came. I know that I love Vladya very much as a person, and he me too. love the sky.

"He" is a "happy house", their family happiness. Although what happiness is there if from the first days she thought about how to sell her piano and with this money buy him and Vladya a bed, a table and chairs. If "sorrows" began from the first month: cold compresses on the poet's head, hot heating pads - to the feet. She didn't know what her life would be like now. And that, having abandoned her, in his last letter to her before fleeing abroad, on the other hand, he will write: "We are not made for happiness ..."

With Nyuta the Mouse, he will survive two catastrophes: one personal and one general - the October Revolution. She will be called a mouse because, playing with her son, she once sang a children's song: "The five mice dance merrily behind the wall." This game has been going on since that day. On the day of the wedding, they even cut off a piece from the festive cake and put it behind the sideboard, for real mice. But I keep thinking: if she was a mouse, then who was the cat in this game? And in the game? After all, it was he who woke his wife at night only so that she would write down the poems he had just invented. And he stopped her in the street to write down the stanza that came in; for this she obediently offered her back to him.

And when the catastrophe happened, she put up her arms, her shoulders, and her heart ...

Unsuccessful fall of her husband, the vertebrae moved, they put him in plaster, hung him up, and sent him to the Crimea. I couldn't wear socks myself - tuberculosis of the spine. He and so "skin and bones", did not get out of illnesses. It was the "mouse" who saved him, which became his nanny, guide, nurse, cleaner. No, this marriage was still strange. It is impossible to read his letters to her from the Crimea: a mixture of lisping and rage. "You are a good and smart animal, dear mouse," one letter ends. In another he writes: "Sleep, lousy. Eat, nasty. Don't smoke, freak. Don't worry, stinky. Don't run like a cat. I love you."

Well, he was what he was. Angry that he loves, angry that he does not love. But maybe that's why he wrote marvelous poems?

Their "happy house" will collapse. It will collapse from the second, main catastrophe - from the revolution.

Mezzanines and cellars

Nyuta will write about those days: he accepted the revolution "with great joy ... one of the first ... began to be published in revolutionary newspapers and magazines, for which many of the writers hissed at him." In 1919, he himself would say to a poet friend: “Everyone agrees that life needs to be rebuilt ... The Bolsheviks turned history upside down: what was at the very bottom turned out to be at the top, the basement became an attic ... If you don’t like dictatorship landowners and do not like the dictatorship of the worker, then, excuse me, what will please you? Isn't it the dictatorship of the mezzanine? It makes me sick and vomits bile.

And he added bluntly: "I will not go to the communists now, because it is profitable, and therefore vile, but I can not guarantee that I will not go if it becomes risky ..."

For now, he survived. He gave lectures on Pushkin (for a pound of jam a week), worked in the theater department at the People's Commissariat for Education, was in charge of the Moscow office of World Literature, and even, together with Zaitsev, Osorgin, Dzhivelegov, sold books in an "independent" store, where Nyuta, wrapped in countless scarves over a torn coat, stood behind the cash register. As for the cellars, he mentioned prophetically. He had to live in the mezzanine, but in the basement he would be for the first time.

“We spent the winter terribly,” he recalled. “In the basement floor ... in ... a small room, 5 degrees Celsius (luxury at that time). on the stove with wet logs. They ate cabbage soup, illegally bought millet porridge, and tea with saccharin.

Because of the countless boils (121 by the exact number), which Nyuta bandaged day and night, the poet sat for weeks with bandaged hands.“Without a wife,” Nadezhda Mandelstam would later write, “Khodasevich would not have pulled it out. She got rations, brought them, chopped wood, heated the stove, washed, cooked, washed the sick Vladek ...” As a result, she acquired tuberculosis (his bone tuberculosis later , by the way, will not be confirmed). If we say that Nyuta alone earned money, then the words of her friend will become clear that because of fatigue, she "even blush did not stay" on her cheeks.

And Khodasevich, perhaps, then flashed the thought of flight, of emigration. He was 35. He did not yet know the taste of ashes in his mouth, as Nina Berberova would later say: "I have the taste of ashes in my mouth even from chopped cutlets!"

But I saw the ashes behind my back clearly - the ashes of the house, poems, love.

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A bracelet made of wire

His window overlooked Nevsky on the third floor of the House of Arts, from where the entire avenue was visible. On Nevsky, but in the house of the Nappelbaum sisters, where the "Sounding Shell" poetry studio gathered, for the first time he would hear the poems of Nina Berberova, this girl with a cleft in her upper teeth, who madly excited men. Finally, on Nevsky Prospekt, they went to drink coffee at night in some cellar, "low", when they were alone for the first time.

On that winter evening, he tritely ambushed her when she, in a scarf and felt boots, flew home after classes at the Institute of the Living Word. And suddenly, at the corner of the Astoria, a cry from the other side of the street: "Careful. It's slippery here." “Out of the blizzard,” she recalled, “appears a figure in a pointed fur hat and a long fur coat, almost to the toes. Isn't it scary to run in such darkness?

And she went with him - tall, thin, and light, and, despite the fur coat, graceful. I went to drink coffee.

That is how she remembers the meeting. He writes differently. He really was waiting for her. But on the corner at the Astoria, she got tangled in some kind of wire on the run, and he began to unravel it. A piece of wire is a fatalist! - imperceptibly tore it off as a keepsake, and then made a bracelet out of it for her. Handsome - she wore it!

Finally, after meeting the New Year, 1922, she, again along the Nevsky, will go to him for the first time. He will remember how, clinging to each other, they walked at one in the morning along a slippery, drunken avenue, and from each restaurant a fashionable then song rushed: “Mom, mom, what are we going to do When the winter cold comes? I don’t have a winter coat! ..” He will remember, because that night he will remain with him. “We ... sat until the morning at his window,” he writes. “I felt that I was not what I was. .."

And then Khodasevich will have the last two tasks. Survive and be together. Or vice versa, Nina will write: "to be together and survive ..."

And what about Nuta? But Nyuta, like a zombie, still believed him.

"I'll be back Thursday or Friday," he telegraphed his wife when he left for Moscow with Nina. Maybe he believed that he would return, although he and Nina already had foreign passports in their hands. He has number 16, she has 17. But Chulkova, not knowing this, having received a telegram, stood for two days at the window on the 3rd floor, hoping to be the first to see Vladya riding from the station. “On Friday, Nadia Pavlovich found me doing this lesson and said: “You are waiting in vain, he will not come.” I showed the telegram, but she repeated: “He will not come ...”

And exactly. Two days later she received a letter written by him from the Lithuanian border. "My guilt before you is so great that I don't even dare to ask for forgiveness."

He left for a peaceful, almost well-fed life, showed his “nose” to the Bolsheviks, in whom he had long been disappointed, and bequeathed to his beloved, if you like, only the “sky” above his head, as once. No, he will write to her, call her "little man" again, wryly encourage her that she is "growing above herself", send 10, 15 dollars each (then these were large sums), but it will end up in a couple of years, already in Paris, suddenly asks Nyuta for money - at least a little. "On the third day," he writes, "I was left without lunch..."

This is how this love will end. But love with Berberova will also end. He, who believes in fate, in symbols and signs, may understand this for the first time in a couple of years, back in Germany. When in the Baltic Nina suddenly loses her bracelet. The one made of wire. Rush to swim in the sea - and lose. Bad, very bad sign...

The crucifixion of the Poet

"Shouldn't you open the truck?" - he will say to Berberova in Paris on the morning when she leaves him. She was afraid that he would kill himself, but she left anyway. She left by the rules. She honestly said that she was leaving “to no one”, cooked borscht for three days, and darned her socks. And she left everything in their "gypsy life" to him. Furniture, a lamp, a teapot, even an embroidered rooster on the teapot. On the street I turned around, found my window on the 4th floor. The poet stood in it to his full height in striped pajamas, and his hands, leaning on the frame, seemed to her like a crucifix.

It was April 1932. Exactly ten years ago (tic to tick), in April 1922, he said those words to Nina: "to survive and be together." Alas!Today, in the book market, she is more famous than Khodasevich - a fact. But we are learning more and more about her that you can’t erase from memory. "During the occupation of France, Berberova stayed in Paris," writes Roman Gul, "and wrote a poem about Hitler, in which she compared him with Shakespeare's heroes." She called her friends to cooperate with the occupiers, she said about the Germans that with them "finally she breathes freely." And when in 1989 she visits the USSR, where we almost carried her in our arms, then, returning to the USA, to Brodsky’s question, well, somehow, she will answer: “I looked at this crowd and thought: machine guns would be here! .." He, too, then not a big fan of what was happening, could not stand it: "Nina Nikolaevna, you can't do that!" - "What is impossible?" she frowns in response...

Khodasevich will not know any of this. He will die a month before the Germans enter Paris. Next to him will be his last wife, Olga Margolina, from whom two years later there will also be only ashes left: she, a Jewess, will be burned in a concentration camp by those whom Nina praised for "ordnung" - for order.

In the last hour, dying of liver cancer, he, not even green anymore - brown from pain, weighing 49 kg, with gray hair, with two weeks of bristles (he didn’t put his teeth in), after waiting for his wife to come out for a minute, he will tell Nina , bursting into tears: "To be somewhere and not know anything about you! .. I only love you. All the time about you, day and night. You know. How will I be without you? Where will I be? Well, it doesn't matter. Now goodbye..."

This is how she writes. Believe or not believe? Do not know. There were no witnesses to this.

I don't believe in earthly beauty

I don't believe in earthly beauty

And I don't want the truth.

And the one I kiss

I don't teach simple happiness.

By tender human flesh

My knife is holding

scarlet harness:

Let me kiss your shoulders

Wings will sprout again!

The way of the grain

The sower passes along even furrows.

His father and grandfather followed the same paths.

The grain sparkles with gold in his hand,

But it must fall into the black earth.

And where the blind worm makes its way,

It will eventually die and grow.

So my soul goes the way of grain:

Having descended into darkness, she will die - and she will come to life.

And you, my country, and you, its people,

You will die and live, having passed through this year, -

Then, that wisdom alone is given to us:

Everything that lives should follow the path of grain.

In front of the mirror

Me, me, me! What a wild word!

Is that one over there really me?

Did mom love this?

Yellow-gray, semi-gray

And omniscient like a snake?

Is it a boy, in Ostankino in the summer

Dancing at country balls, -

It's me, the one who with every answer

Yellowmouth inspires poets

Disgust, anger and fear?

Is he who in midnight disputes

All the boyish invested agility -

It's me, the same one

For tragic conversations

Learned to be silent and joke?

However, it is always in the middle.

Fatal earthly path:

From an insignificant reason to a reason,

And you look - lost in the desert,

And their own traces can not be found.

Yes, I'm not panther jumping

Driven to a Parisian attic.

And Virgil is not behind, -

Only there is loneliness - in the frame

Truth-telling glass.

Monument

The end is in me, the beginning is in me.

I have done so little!

But still I am a strong link:

This happiness has been given to me.

In Russia new, but great,

They will put up my two-faced idol

At the crossroads of two roads

Where is time, wind and sand...

Everything is not accidental in the life of poets. Three years later, the cemetery where he was buried will be bombed by the British. Uprooted earth, not a single grave: gaping holes, cracked monuments, angels with broken wings. Only the grave of the poet will be untouched. 30 broken tombstones and among them - his cross. Also crucifixion. Crucifixion - over death. Everything is correct, it should have been so, for poetry and poets are immortal.

But why, when I read his poems, it always seems to me that ash creaks on my teeth, the bitter taste of the ashes of loss? ..

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