I cannot be sure it was not again my
fellow traveler, the black-hatted man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with
Dora and our National Poet, leaving the latter to worry forever about all
that wasted water (compare the Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling
maiden who mourns her broken but still brimming jar in one of his own
poems)... (5.3)
In his poem on human tears (1849) Tyutchev
compares tears to endless streams of rain:
Слёзы людские, о слёзы людские,
Льётесь вы
ранней и поздней порой...
Льётесь безвестные, льётесь
незримые,
Неистощимые, неисчислимые, –
Льётесь, как льются струи
дождевые
В осень глухую порою ночной.
Human tears. O the tears! you that flow
when life is begun - or
half-gone,
tears unseen, tears unknown, you that none
can number or drain,
you that run
like the streamlets of rain from the low
clowds of Autumn,
long before dawn...
When Vadim meets Dora near the Pushkin monument ("erected by a
committee of weathermen"), his eyes are full with tears:
I dissolved in tears at once
(though I was farced with pills). Her gentle beautiful eyes were also
wet. (5.2)
And so are his eyes after he parted - never to see her again - with his
daughter Bel:
The aquamarine sky was now silent, darkish and
empty, save for a star-shaped star about which I wrote a Russian elegy ages ago,
in another world. (4.7)
According to Vadim, "heavenly stars
are seen as stellate only through tears" (2.3):
I have never experienced the least urge to commit
suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must
admit that on that particular night on the fourth or
fifth or fiftieth
anniversary of my darling's death, I must have looked pretty suspect, in my
black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian
department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he
walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by
something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is
too much of a coward to make amends:
Zvezdoobraznost' nebesnyh
zvyozd
Vidish' tol'ko skvoz'
slyozy...
(Heavenly stars are seen as
stellate
only through tears.)
Alexey Sklyarenko