Недавно, раскрыв одну из рильковских “Элегий”, читаю:
“Посвящается княгине Турн-унд-Таксис”. Турн-унд-Таксис? Что-то знакомое! Только
то было: Тур. Ах, знаю: башня в плюще!
Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies while visiting Princess Marie of
Turn and Taxis (née princess of Hohenlohe) at her family's Duino castle
on the Adriatic sea. Marie was married to Alexander Turn and Taxis, a
member of the family's branch that in the early 19th century settled in Bohemia
and became strongly connected to Czech national culture and history. After his
duel with Demon d'Onsky marries a Bohemian lady (who wanted Demon's
recommendation for a job in the in the Glass Fish-and-Flower department in a
Boston museum, 1.2).
Marina Tsvetaev's poem Novogodnee ("The New Year's," 1927) is her
last, "posthumous," letter to Rilke (who died in the last days of 1926). Zeus,
Castor and Pollux are mentioned in it:
Не поэта с прахом, духа с телом,
(Обособить —
оскорбить обоих)
А тебя с тобой, тебя с тобою ж,
— Быть Зевесовым не
значит лучшим —
Кастора — тебя с тобой — Поллуксом,
Мрамора — тебя с
тобою, травкой,
Не разлуку и не встречу — ставку
Очную: и встречу и
разлуку
Первую.
The twin brothers Castor and Pollux or Polydeuces, the Dioskouri, are
the sons of Leda whom Zeus seduced in the guise of a swan. When Dorothy
Vinelander ascends in a lift of the Bellevue hotel in Mont Roux, Van kisses
Ada's neck "like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus:"
Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada
glanced at Van - and he - no fool in amorous strategy - refrained to comment on
her 'forgetting' her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair. He did
not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token,
awaited her planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing
that in a moment she would say to her accursed companion (by now revising, no
doubt, her views on the 'beau ténébreux') as the lift's eye turned red
under a quick thumb: 'Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!' - and
instantly flitting back, like Vere's Ninon, she would be in his
arms.
Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he
pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting
like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening.
'We'll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake
up, don't bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose -' and, with the burning sap
brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached the sky!) she
danced three fingers on his wet lips - and escaped. (3.8)
In her poem Marina Tsvetaev says that she lives in Bellevue (a suburb of
Paris):
В Беллевю живу. Из гнёзд и веток
Городок.
Переглянувшись с гидом:
Беллевю. Острог с прекрасным видом
На Париж —
чертог химеры галльской —
На Париж — и на немножко дальше…
The Bellevue hotel is patronized by
wealthy Rheinlanders:
When he reached at long last the whitewashed and
blue-shaded Bellevue (patronized by wealthy Estotilanders, Rheinlanders, and
Vinelanders, but not placed in the same superclass as the old, tawny and gilt,
huge, sprawling, lovable Trois Cygnes), Van saw with dismay that his watch still
lagged far behind 7:00 p.m., the earliest dinner hour in local hotels.
(3.8)
In Poema Lestnitsy ("The Poem of a Staircase,"
1926) Marina Tsvetaev compares the water splashed out by some lodger
from a window (or running down the back staircase when it is washed?)
to the Rhein falling from the Alps:
Откуда -- узнай-ка! --
Последняя шайка --
Рейн,
рухнувший с Альп, --
Воды об асфальт
Двора...
In her poem Marina Tsvetaev says that
every staircase in a house where people do not sleep at night is a
waterfall to hell (vodopad v ad):
В доме, где по ночам не спят,
Каждая лестница - водопад
в ад.
In Marina's pronunciation the phrase quatre à
quatre (rushing up or down stairs) sounds like
katrakatra:
Then he clattered, in Lucette's wake, down the cataract
of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please,
children not katrakatra (Marina). (2.5)
Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children
went upstairs. 'Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go
upstairs,' she thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands
progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their
first dancing lesson. 'After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.'
The same slow heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps,
and the staircase was silent again. 'Old-fashioned qualms,' said
Marina. (1.5)
The children of Demon and Marina, Van and Ada are full brother and sister.
But officially Van is the son of Demon Veen and Marina's twin sister
Aqua, and Ada is a daughter of Daniel Veen (Demon's first cousin) and
Marina (1.1). In her last note poor mad Aqua calls herself "eye-rolling
toy:"
Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this
eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr
Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring
bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels,
Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble
one day, no doubt. (1.3)
Marina Tsvetaev committed suicide in Elabuga on August 31, 1941.
Alexey Sklyarenko