Swan Lake

Drew and I leave Moscow in less than a month. . . for good.  Perhaps we will return sometime for a visit, but never again to live, as we have for the last seven years.  In his farewell remarks to a gathering of Anglo American School of Moscow parents last week, Drew spoke of "symmetry," of beginnings and endings being in balance, bookends that define time and experiences.  Intentionally and intuitively, we find ourselves placing bookends neatly on our Moscow shelf, as we repeat activities we did when we first arrived.

Last Friday night we attended a performance of Swan Lake.  It is the final ballet we will see in Moscow, and it was the first we experienced when we arrived.  It is my absolute favorite!  From the orchestra's first haunting notes, I'm transported into the world of Odette and Odile, Prince Siegfried, and Von Rothbart, an evil sorcerer. The ballerinas' white feathered tutus and head-dresses, along with their meticulous imitations of a swan's delicate, vulnerable, yet powerful movements, trick my senses into believing that they are real.  At one point, the stage is enveloped in total whiteness as 25 swans dance as one.

Beyond the grandeur of the performers, their dancing, costumes, the setting, story and emotions ranging from hope to despair, it's the music that holds me in a magical trance.  How did Pyotr (Peter)  Tchaikovsky, how does any composer, create such brillance out of what is only the mist of an idea, floating invisibly over the surface of a lake or the top of a tree, just out of reach?


I remember contemplating this same question a couple of years ago as I visited Tchaikovsky's home in Klin, 85 km northwest of Moscow.

The hugeness of his talent hung in each room of the house like the portrait that greeted us as we entered the door.

Among the facts, stories and intricacies of Tchaikovsky's life, our guide, Felix, shared an insight that hinted at an answer to my question.  "Tchaikovsky," he said, "moved from Moscow to Klin to escape the noise of the city. In the noise, he could not hear the music.  It was here, in the quiet of the countryside, that he would walk through the fields, among the cows, and hear the music in his head."  Was it nature, or the solitude that nature provides that allowed the elusive mist, the first notes of a composition, to edge into his thoughts?  I picture him running back to his writing desk, dodging a cow here or there, to empty the music onto paper.

 Only Tchaikovsky, of course, knew how his creativity grew from idea to reality. As a listener of the ballet he created 136 years ago, I sit transfixed until the final note, grateful for the opportunity to be surrounded by his music, watching the dancers interpret it on stage.  The shimmering blue, gold and black curtains close; the music stops.  The rhymthic clapping, the trademark of Russian audiences, pounds its approval.  I attempt to capture the curtain call on video, a lasting memory tucked snugly inside the bookend.

 





          

      

Haikus Written in Russia but not in Russian (Spring)

At the beginning of autumn and winter, I wrote haikus about scenes in the park across the street from our apartment building.  As spring is budding out all over Moscow, it's time to add to the collection.  This season seems so fleeting, slow in coming but speedy in its growth. Before it seques into summer, I want to savor the freshness of each spring morning as I walk among the new leaves.  Please join me, once again.

seat of solitude

extends an invitation

in haste I decline

            hidden among branches

              gifts left for melodic songsters

    by adoring fans

              mirror of water

              multiply morning's glory

              in quiet grandeur

            symphony of life

            cresendos into being

            joyful voices all

scent of Russian spring

fragile as newborn petals

lives in lilac's heart

Haikus © Twylla Alexander 2011 

Victory Day - 2011

On May 9th, for the last seven years, I know exactly where I've been - Gorky Park, Moscow.  I go to honor the last of a generation of Russian veterans who served in the Great Patriotic War.  The weathering of time has softened once youthful faces, creating an aura of kindness, gentleness, and a deep wisdom born of painful memories they endured and I can scarcely imagine.

Refer to earlier story written about
"The Lady in Red."

Who were these people 70 years ago, when the war was brewing, but had not yet transformed their lives, snatched up their dreams, dictated their futures?  How did they, how does anyone faced with years of violence, starvation, fear and death cope?  Beyond handing them a bar of chocolate or a red carnation, how could I ever appreciate the medals on their chests and learn lessons from their stories?  I needed a personal connection.

Sitting at a small wooden table, removed from more boisterous gatherings of veterans lifting glasses and proposing toasts, a man sat quietly with a bouquet of flowers lying before him and a young man standing behind.

 The medals pinned to the lapels and chest of his black suit gleamed in the sun.  I took a chance that the young man might speak English.  I introduced myself; the veteran rose from his chair to shake my hand.  "His name is Pytor (Peter) Mikhailovich Striganov, and I am his grandson," the younger one explained with a broad smile.  I gave Peter a carnation and asked if I could take their picture. Andrei, a Russian friend, joined us and added to the grandson's limited English, to translate pieces of Peter's war story.

"He was 17 when he enlisted.  He was forced to go.  He did not want to.  He told the soldiers who came to their farm, 'No, I cannot leave my mother and 5 sisters.  They need me to work, to make money, to help take care of them.'  Five hundred other men enlisted from his town; my grandfather is the only one who survived the war.  He is 86 now, will be 87 in August.  He was an officer in the tank division on the front lines.  He was shot one time.  He was, also, a spy.  He would go in the enemy rear and capture German officers and bring them back for interrogation.   One time a German officer tried to escape capture from my grandfather.  He pulled the pin on a hand grenade and my grandfather got the grenade from him and stopped it from going off." (Exactly how this happened was unclear in the translation.)  "He gagged the officer, tied him up and took him back for interrogation."

In animated Russian, Peter added, "I am still healthy.  No smoking, no drinking.  I walk one kilometer a day."

Andrei asked Peter to sign a book, Victory Day by James Hill, filled with photos taken of many of the veterans who return to Gorky Park on May 9.  In the two years since the book was published, several of the veterans in the photos have died.  After signing it, Peter announced, "I will be back until I am 100!"

As long as he and other veterans return, so will their families, friends and strangers like me, grateful for the connection to these inspiring people . . . who remind us of the devastations of war and the fragility of peace.  

    

The Disappearance of my Latest Posting!

IF you are looking for my latest posting, "Victory Day - 2011" - wondering whether you imagined seeing it a few days ago, then POOF, it was gone. . . you are not suffering from a rare form of "blogitis."  You're absolutely correct; it was there and then disappeared.  Your guess is as good as mine as to where it is hiding, or better yet, vacationing.  The worst case scenario is that it has been kidnapped by a corrupted blog engineer who is holding it and thousands of other blogs hostage in a cramped digital jail in Mexico.
The Google Team assures its faithful bloggers that our postings, which vanished during a maintenance procedure last Wednesday, will reappear.  I'm still waiting, trying not to worry.
I will give the Team two more days to locate and return my posting, then will have to assume that my worst fears are realized. . . it's gone for good.  Then I'll do my best to reconstruct it.  In the meantime, if you happen to find it hanging around another blog, be kind enough to redirect it to this address.             

Marina Tsvetaeva - Russian Poet, Her Voice Now Heard

Last week I stood in a room in Marina Tsvetaeva's (tsva-TI-va) Moscow flat. Sunlight poured through a window, across her writing desk, onto her chair, the bookshelf behind, and finally to the wood floor at my feet.  Galina, our guide, opened a book of Marina's poetry and began reading.

There's a window lit, -
Shining all the time.
Maybe they just sit
Or perhaps, drink wine.
Maybe two embraced
And it doesn't end,
In every single place,
There's one, my friend.

Not from candles or lamps, the lights arise:
But, from sleepless eyes!

Window - parting woe
Window - meeting glee
A hundred candles glow
Or maybe - only three. . .
Then, it starts anew
And I can't find peace.
In my house, too,
There is one like this.

Pray, I beg you, friend, for the sleepless place,
For the window's blaze.
(translation by Andrey Kneller)

She closed the book and said, "These floors, these walls remember her voice, her quiet footsteps where she wrote in the early morning, then opened her door to the day's problems."

I followed Galina, along with the other participants in the tour of "Russian Poets of the 1920s and 30s," to the next room of the Marina Tsvetaeva Memorial Flat and Museum Cultural Center.

A trunk, child's table with chairs, wrought iron white crib, stuffed animals, book - a reconstructed setting, period pieces, symbolizing lives lived here almost a hundred years ago.  Galina continues,  "Marina and her husband, Sergey Efron, had 3 children - a son, Gregory, and daughters, Irina and Alya.  During the famine following the Revolution, Marina sent Irina to a state orphanage where she heard there was more food.  Tragically, she was misinformed. Irina died of malnutrition."  Galina opened the book and read of the depths of Marina's guilt and sadness.

Two hands lightly lowered
On a child's head!
I was given two little heads
One for each.

Both of them,
Clenched in frenzy, with all my might,
Grabbing the older one from darkness---
I could not save the younger one.

Two little hands to caress, to smooth
The tender curly heads.
Two hands---and now one of them
Overnight became empty.

The fair one---on a thin little neck
Like a dandelion on its stalk,
I have still not grasped
That my child is in the earth.
-(translation contained in book by Lily Feiler, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell)

From room to room, poem to poem, we learned of this woman's life.
A woman ~
*whose early years were lived in an upper class family, attending European schools
*whose adult years, 17 of them, were spent in exile due to her and her husband's anti-Bolshevik sentiments
*whose work was shunned by established Soviet writers upon her return to Russia
*whose writing was banned from publication in Russia until the early 1960s
*whose husband was executed as a spy
*whose daughter, Alya, was imprisoned in a camp for 8 years
*whose life was ended, by her own hand, as she lived in poverty

In the Russia of today, Marina is regarded, in the words of our guide, as "one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century."  I can only shake my head in wonder at History's repetitions, as it invariably  finds value in voices once silenced.  Is it only with time, perspective and elimination of fear that writers such a Tsvetaeva and contempories, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelshtam  can be heard?          

Marina's poetry is a testament to her life, to a time of upheaval, of life-altering choices, of events beyond her grasp to control, when her writing was likely her most constant and consoling companion.  She wrote through the intensity of her joys and despairs, her losses and final loneliness.  In the truest sense of a lyric poet, she expressed her deepest emotions as if a lyre were sounding each syllable.

Before leaving Marina's home, Galina stopped in one last room, opened her book and read.

My poems, written early, when I doubted
that I could ever play the poet's part,
erupting, as though water from a fountain
or sparks from a petard,

and rushing as though little demons, senseless,
into the sanctuary, where incense spreads,
my poems about death and adolescence,
-that still remain unread! -

collecting dust in bookstores all this time,
(where no one comes to carry them away!)
my poems, like exquisite, precious wines,
will have their day!
-translation by Andrey Kneller

 Marina's poems have found another reader in me. . . and now in you.

Marina Tsvetaeva
1892-1941