St Petersburg полностью

A selection of twelve poems by Cherubina appeared in Apollo. Literary Petersburg was abuzz; a young poet wrote to a friend, “Their characteristic trait is frenzied Catholicism; the mix of sin and repentance (the hymn to Ignatius Loyola, prayers to the Virgin, etc.). At any rate, no one has ever written like this in Russian before.”48 Only a few people knew that Cherubina de Gabriac did not exist, that her fiery poems filled with “mystical eros,” as Vyacheslav Ivanov put it, were a hoax.

Every literary hoax has elements of parody. In order to succeed, the hoax must reflect existing trends of the literary scene. Cherubina was invented by the young, erudite poet Maximilian Voloshin and his lover, Elizaveta Dmitrieva. The latter was a twenty-two-year-old teacher of history at a women’s high school in Petersburg, earning eleven and a half rubles monthly, who wrote interesting verse. But the “modest, inelegant and lame” (as Voloshin described her) Dmitrieva had no hope of making the necessary impression on the aesthete Makovsky.

The hoax was intended to mock Petersburg’s symbolist establishment, which dreamed of a new poetic female star in the image described by Marina Tsvetayeva: “Not Russian, obviously. Beautiful, obviously. Catholic, obviously. Rich, oh, incalculably rich, obviously (female Byron, without the limp), externally happy, obviously, so that she could be unhappy in her own pure and selfless way.” Voloshin and Dmitrieva’s Cherubina was “constructed” to those specifications, and that is why their hoax succeeded so brilliantly.

This attack on the prejudices of the symbolists was a risky one. After the game got too complex, and the besotted Makovsky was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, someone revealed Cherubina’s true identity to him. Dmitrieva came to the editor of Apollo to apologize. Many years later Makovsky described the visit:

The door opened slowly, too slowly it seemed to me, and a woman entered, with a strong limp, rather short and plump, with dark hair and a large head and a truly horrible mouth, from which fanglike teeth protruded. She was simply ugly. Or did it seem that way to me in comparison with the image of beauty that I had envisaged all those months?49

A woman poet was not allowed to be ugly, poor, and truly miserable, as opposed to miserable in verse, and so Dmitrieva’s poetic career was soon over. Apollo did run another large selection of her poetry, which it served up with great elan, with artwork by Yevgeny Lanceray. But it was the beginning of the end. The star of Cherubina de Gabriac vanished from the poetic horizon, while Voloshin, still the center of attention, continued to manipulate Cherubina’s name, maintaining as late as 1917 that “to a certain extent she set the tone for modern women’s poetry.” Tellingly, in 1913 two other hoax images of poetesses appeared, as if to confirm the public’s longing for a female voice in poetry: “Nellie,” whose coy poems were written by Valery Bryusov, and the completely parodic “Angelica Safyanova.”

The drama of Cherubina-Dmitrieva was not limited to literature. The sensational incident that followed upon it, never to be forgotten by either Akhmatova or Tsvetayeva, crossed the line between literary games and utter cruelty. Before her meeting with Voloshin, Dmitrieva had had an affair with Gumilyov. Such a relationship was entirely in keeping with the erotically and melodramatically charged atmosphere of the period. Dmitrieva later insisted that Gumilyov had begged her to marry him: “He twisted my fingers and then wept and kissed the hem of my dress.”

But Dmitrieva, in turn, became infatuated with Voloshin, so Gumilyov’s love, according to Dmitrieva, turned to hate. “He stopped me at the Apollo offices and said, ‘I’m asking you for the last time—will you marry me?’ I said, ‘No!’ He grew pale. ‘Then you’ll hear from me.’”50 Soon both Voloshin and Dmitrieva learned that Gumilyov was denouncing her publicly, without mincing words.

On November 19,1909, the poets of Apollo met in the studio of the artist Golovin (the creator of Chaliapin’s portrait in his role as Holofernes), under the roof of the Maryinsky Theater. Present were Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Innokenti Annensky, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Alexei Tolstoy. So were Makovsky, Gumilyov, and Voloshin. Golovin was supposed to paint a group portrait. They could hear Chaliapin downstairs on stage, singing an aria from Faust. When he finished, the stocky, broad-shouldered Voloshin, who weighed at least two hundred pounds, jumped up and slapped tall, pale Gumilyov in the face. After a stunned silence, the only comment came from Annensky, who never lost his Olympian calm: “Dostoyevsky is right—a slap really does have a wet sound.”