Prose Poems
SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR
Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Breathing There was a little rain during the night, and now clouds pass across the heaven, from time to time sprinkling slightly. I stand under an apple...
...tall weeds grow on the roofs and in the crevices of the walls...
...First there is a light-blue smoke over the lake, and then, in a while, a shot...
...There, beyond the forests, all the sur-rounding region is stooped and weighed down...
...And if there is something else on earth it remains unknown, can't be seen above the forest...
...Ingvar Igorevich1, saved by a miracle from the knives of his kin, established the Uspensky Monastery here in honor of his salvation...
...Be you man or wild beast, if you see this line over your path-turn away...
...I draw it in with the full force of my lungs, feel that aroma spread through my chest, breathe, breathe, now with my eyes open, now with them closed-and I do not know of anything better...
...Or a truck has backed into a hatch and is loading sacks...
...Lake Segden is round, as though cut in a perfect circle...
...It is forbidden...
...Traditionally Byzantium was referred to by Russians as the "second Rome," while Moscow was the third, and a "fourth there will never be...
...This line means: You cannot walk and you cannot crawl...
...A uniform forest, tree after tree, with not one trunk out of place...
...from disconnected villages, unknown to one another, January 18, 1965 they rise up to a single heaven...
...Lake Segden They don't write about this lake, and they don't talk of it loudly...
...And only by following the dull sound of the cow's bell can you make your way through by the animal's trail, at the midday hour, on a rainflecked day...
...Here are the traces: Someone built a fire...
...The first, it seems, was Rome, and now the third is already Moscow...
...I myself worked at it: They paid 50 kopeks [five cents] for each whole brick, 20 for a half...
...But the evening hell re-sounded, sailed over the village, over the field, over the forest...
...An endearing lake...
...And later a kolkhoz bought both churches for 40,000 rubles-they wanted to construct a six-row cow-shed from the bricks...
...His evil underlings catch the fish, slaughter the ducks from their boats...
...We Shall Attain Great Milk Yields...
...But they have closed the roads to this place so that no one can interfere with them, and here they stock fish and wildlife especi-ally for them...
...the sky, at the lake...
...This, if you will, is the liberty, the sole but most precious liberty which prison deprives us of: to breathe as one breathes here...
...But you enter to discover that not the living but the dead have greeted you from afar...
...they put it out and drove them off...
...the luminous images have been effacted by the rains of decades and are covered with obscene graffiti...
...And people have always been mercenary, and often not good...
...There will be a movie at six, dancing at eight...
...Under an apple tree after the rain one may breathe again, and even live a while longer...
...When you come upon the water, the entire circular enclosure becomes visible to you: the yellow band of sand, the place where the grey reeds jut upwards, where the green turf lies...
...A lake surrounded by forest to the shore...
...It is in the churches...
...Well, I suppose they carried him off to Ryazan," his wife nods from the little porch, cracking sunflower seeds...
...This one is simply under lock, silent...
...a spot of duckweed near the shore, but for the rest, translucent white -and even the bottom is white...
...You can't go to him...
...A cruel Prince, a squint-eyed evildoer has seized the lake: His dacha's over there, his hath house...
...The water so very smooth, sleek without a ripple...
...5 "When there was a children's colony here the lads-they couldn't understand-ruined all the walls, destroyed the icons...
...This was viewed as his own and unique place by Yakov Petrovich Polonsky4, and he ordered that he be buried here...
...3. The grandson of Genghis Khan...
...We seem to understand nothing...
...only rarely has a cemetery been preserved around a church, and even then its crosses are down, its graves are up-rooted...
...I stand under an apple tree, shedding its blossoms-and breathe...
...But there are no onion-domes, and there are no churches, half of the stone wall has remained, and the rest is protected by a plank fence with barbed wire, while over all this antiquity one sees watchtowers, foul scarecrows, so well-known to us, so well-known and at the monastery gates-GUARD...
...Land of my birth A Poet's Dust Now it is the village of Lgovo, but formerly the ancient town of Olgov was situated on this high precipice over the Oka: The Russian people in those centuries, after water, drinking and running, would choose beauty...
...Poem about Peace," "Great Exploit...
...This ringing, which has been preserved for us now only in the old song, raised people up, prevented them from sinking to four legs...
...If you call out from one shore (but you won't call out, so that they don't notice you), only a faded echo will reach the other...
...The supervisor, too, is amused: "he's been given his liberty, that means " 1. A Ryazan prince of the 13th Century...
...It reminded one that it was necessary to put down petty earthly cares, to relinquish an hour, to relinquish one's thoughts-to eternity...
...I cease to hear the whirring of motor-cycles, the bleating of radios and record-players, the tambourining of the loudspeakers...
...In these stones, in these belltowers, in these our forbears placed all that was best in them, all their understanding of life...
...And no matter where you wander in the field, in the meadows, far from any place of habitation -you are never alone: Above the forest wall, the loosely gathered haystacks, and the very arc of the planet there always beckons to you the cupola of the belltower, now from the Lovetsky Hills, then from Liubichi, and from the Gavrilovsky...
...Here, however, the ironic reference seems to be to Communism rather than to Christianity...
...So what if this is but a tiny garden hemmed in and caged by five-story apartment houses...
...He's in the zone...
...This is the line of temporal power...
...Keep at it, Vitka, once again, don't let up...
...You can't go to Polonsky...
...Near the roads in pine groves armed militia-men sit in protected ambush...
...Across marsh after marsh there can be seen on a clear day far off, 35 versts2 away on a similar high spot, the tall helltower of the Monastery of Ioann Bogoslov, The superstitious Baty3 spared them both...
...Where is it...
...A long way off...
...And a poster: "For Peace Among Peoples !"-a Russian worker holds a little African in his hands...
...Running up to the foot of hillocks, ascending knolls, emerging like white and red tsarvenas upon broad rivers with slender, chiselled, diverse bell-towers, raising up above our thatch and wood everyday life, doing all this, they from far, far off nod to one another...
...4. Polonsky (1819-98) was a minor, late Romantic poet whose verse is characterized by a pure if somewhat too facile lyricism.5...
...But they took the bricks apart poorly: It was all bits The New Leader and pieces with cement...
...You wander about in the silent forest, you circle about and seek to work your way bit by 'bit to the lake-you won't find it, and there's no way to ask: They've frightened the people, there's never anyone in the forest...
...The crosses have long ago been knocked over or bent...
...2. 0.6629 of a mile...
...There's the place where one would like to settle forever There one's soul, trembling like the air, would course between water and sky, and clean, profound thoughts would flow...
...A crypt was dis-covered under the church, a bishop was buried there-he himself was all bone, but his robe was whole...
...On the church porch sit barrels of lubricant, a tractor is backing towards them...
...A decrepit monument...
...Not just the apple tree, but even the grass around it grows lush after the rain-and there is no name for that sweet spirit with which the air is suffused...
...In that church, machine tools hum...
...And all the roads to it are blocked off, as though they led to a sorcerer's castle...
...And when it has scarcely glittered to you, between huge tree trunks, when you have still not run up to it, you know all the same: You will love this little place on earth all your life...
...Two of us pulled at the robe, but we couldn't tear it apart" "But tell me now-according to the map the grave of Polonsky the poet is here...
...Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Breathing There was a little rain during the night, and now clouds pass across the heaven, from time to time sprinkling slightly...
...Or, in church after church-clubs...
...an uncared for cupola gapes at you with its skeleton of rusted ribs...
...Well, what's there to look at anyway...
...The lake looks at the sky...
...Traveling Along the River Oka Passing through the country roads of central Russia you begin to grasp the key to the peaceful Russian landscape...
...over all the roads hangs a sign forbidding entrance, a simple mute line...
...And besides, whatever else may exist is here unnecessary, superfluous...
...We all always think that our spirit will fly above the grave and gaze about over the quiet expanses...
...The closed-off forest...
...And be-tween the wooden guardhouses at the en-trance a supervisor in a long shirt explains to us: "There was a monastery here, in the second world...
...The closed-off water...
...There is no nourishment on earth, no wine, nor even a woman's kiss which is sweeter to me than this air, this air overflowing with blossoming, with dampness, with freshness...
...A deserted lake...
...Al-though-"Wait a minute"-the supervisor turns to his wife-"Didn't they dig up that Polonsky...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
