The son and father are Voloshin. The child is an unrecognized genius "I pray for both"

THE CHILD IS AN UNRECOGNIZED GENIUS

…I pray to become a poet.

Autobiography

On May 16, 1877, in Kyiv, on Tarasovskaya Street, in the family of Alexander Maksimovich Kiriyenko-Voloshin and his wife Elena Ottobaldovna, nee Glaser, a son was born, who was named Maximilian. Father was thirty-nine years old, mother twenty-seven. They had no more children. “My family name is Kiriyenko-Voloshyn, and it comes from Zaporozhye,” Maximilian Alexandrovich wrote forty-eight years later in Autobiography. - I know from Kostomarov that in the 16th century there was a blind bandura player Matvey Voloshin in Ukraine, who was flayed alive by the Poles for political songs, and from the memoirs of Frantseva that the name of that Chisinau young man who took Pushkin to the gypsy camp was Kiriyenko-Voloshin. I wouldn't mind if they were my ancestors."

A blind bandura player who suffered because of his love for his homeland and the political orientation of his songs... Well, a very suitable ancestor for a writer who showed rare uncompromisingness during the years of the revolution...

The other is a close acquaintance of Pushkin (according to updated data - Dmitry Kiriyenko-Voloshinov), a poet whose name was especially dear to Voloshin and to whom the future Koktebel resident will dedicate the following lines:

These limits are sacred by the fact that in the evening

Pushkin looked at them from the ship, on the way to Gurzuf...

But all this relationship, as they say, is unidentified. As for the direct ... The poet's father, a collegiate adviser, was a member of the Kyiv Chamber of Criminal and Civil Law. Judging by the few surviving testimonies, he was a kind, sociable person, wrote poetry. By the way, Max's only vague recollection of his father is connected with his recitation of poems - which ones, of course, the child did not remember. Alexander Maksimovich died when the boy was four years old. However, he lived then already separately from the family. Maximilian Voloshin writes very briefly about his ancestors: “My father was never a leader] of the nobility. And he was first a conciliator, and then a member of the court in Kyiv. My grandfather had a large estate in the Kiev province, but I don’t know who he was, and in general I don’t know my father’s relatives at all” (from an undated letter to M.V. Sabashnikova).

The upbringing of the child was carried out by the mother, a strong-willed woman, widely educated, from a family of Russified Germans. Her father was the head of the Zhitomir telegraph district. As M. A. Voloshin recalled: “Maternal grandfather was an engineer and head of the telegraph [th] district (something important). His father was a syndic (apparently a representative of some industrial or commercial corporation. - S.P.) in some Baltic city - either in Riga, or in Libau. And my grandmother’s father did an Italian campaign with Suvorov, and his father was someone’s life doctor ... ”(in another place:“ Great-great-grandfather - Sommer, a life doctor, came to Russia under Anna Ioannovna ”).

The best portrait of the poet's mother, Elena Ottobaldovna, is given by Marina Tsvetaeva, who met her in Koktebel in 1911: “... her hair thrown back, an aquiline profile with a blue eye ... Appearance is clearly of German origin ... the face of old Goethe ... The first impression is posture. Move - give the ruble ... The second, naturally arising from the first: apprehension. This one will not let you down ... Majesty with a small stature ... Everything: a cigarette in a silver mouthpiece, a matchbox made of solid carnelian, a silver cuff of a caftan, a leg in a fabulous Kazan boot, a silver strand of hair thrown by the wind - unity. It was the body of her soul.”

Perhaps this is where Voloshin's "Germanism" noticed by Tsvetaeva: accuracy, even pedantry in habits and behavior, creative perseverance; “with clearly French sociability - a clearly German mode of behavior, with French quantitativeness - the German quality of friendship ...”. Marina Ivanovna even attributes Voloshin’s pantheism to this deep Germanism: “omnidivineness, omnipotence, omnipresence of God, which beamed from him with such force that he himself, and in the neighborhood and us with him, included in the host - at least minor gods ...”, and mysticism: “a hidden mystic ... a secret student of the secret teaching about the secret.”

However, the creative image of the poet is by no means exhausted by “Germanism”: “A Frenchman in culture, a Russian in soul and word, a German in spirit and blood.” A mystic, a pantheist, a European with a Russian soul, "a non-Russian poet of the beginning", who "became and will remain a Russian poet". Let it be so… Well, how does Voloshin himself define “the past of his spirit”? Let us open the Autobiography, which so often comes to the aid of researchers and ordinary readers.

“I was born ... on Spirits Day,“ when the earth is a birthday girl. Hence, probably, my inclination to the spiritual and religious perception of the world and love for the flowering of flesh and matter in all its forms and faces. Therefore, the past of my spirit always seemed to me in the form of one of those fauns or centaurs who came to the wilderness to St. Jerome and received the sacrament of holy baptism. I am a pagan in the flesh and believe in the real existence of all pagan gods and demons - and, at the same time, I cannot think of it outside of Christ. This recognition makes the poet's spiritual world more understandable and close, which Marina Tsvetaeva defined as "coexistence" - well, let's say, pagan mythology, anthroposophical knowledge, Christian esotericism, and much more.

Let's go back, however, to Max's childhood. The very first memories of life: “1 year - Kyiv. Light through colored glass. In February 1878, Alexander Maksimovich was transferred to Taganrog and appointed a member of the district court. Soon his family also moved there. “2-3 years. Taganrog. Country house. Garden. Paved path. Old toy (train). Coal Puppy. With a nurse to the market (found the way). I caught the lizard." Indeed, in Voloshin's house there was a legend about how a tiny child, Max, sitting on the nanny's arms or shoulders, showed her, who took him to the market, the way home, although it was necessary to go through alleys. And one more episode from early childhood: “I left the garden of our dacha, where a naked man was walking. Lost. Cried." Children put either gingerbread or sweets in their mouths. "But before that, nothing tragic." Quiet calm city. "The shadow of the leaves, the sun, the flowers, the silence."

But in the joint life of the Voloshin spouses, far from everything was smooth. It is known that Elena Ottobaldovna, having taken the two-year-old Max, left her husband (it happened in January 1880), moved to Sevastopol, worked on the telegraph. Housing was provided to her by a friend at the Institute of Noble Maidens N. A. Lipina. “I have never lived in my homeland,” we learn from Autobiography. - Early childhood was spent in Taganrog and Sevastopol. I remember Sevastopol in ruins, with large trees growing from the middle of the houses: one of the very first unforgettable picturesque impressions. Sevastopol, as these memories testify, had not yet been restored by the beginning of the 1880s after Crimean War 1853–1856.

From the bottom of memory rises to the surface of consciousness something pleasant and disgusting, joyful and terrible. "Descent ladder. Fisherman's house. Dog Kazbek. The fisherman eats chocolate. I ask. Offers chewed from the mouth. Disgust". Sometimes terribly unpleasant dreams occur: “... the taste of horse chestnut, which fills the mouth. Aversion to pea jelly. The cook Daria, who cooked it…” I remember the sea. “The bathing boys who ran away from the sea across the road. Acute sensation of nakedness, exposure. It's embarrassing and nice."

Apparently, the episodes described by Marina Tsvetaeva in the essay “Living about Living” belong to a later time. Closely communicating with Elena Ottobaldovna in Koktebel, Marina Ivanovna more than once turned out to be a grateful listener of her mother's stories about the childhood of this extremely impressionable, inventive child. Here are some very colorful scenes reproduced by Tsvetaeva: “They lived poorly, there were no toys, different market ones. Lived - beggarly. Around, that is, in the city garden ... - rich, happy, with guns, horses, carts, balls, whips, eternal toys of all time. And the constant question at home:

Mom, why do other boys have horses, but I don’t, have reins with bells, but I don’t?

To which the invariable answer is:

Because they have a dad and you don't.

And after one such pope, who does not exist, there is a long pause and quite distinctly:

Get married.

Another case. Green yard, three-year-old Max with his mother in the yard.

Mom, please stand with your nose in the corner and don't turn around.

It will be surprise. When I say you can, you turn around!

Submissive mother with an aquiline nose against a stone wall. Waiting, waiting:

Max, are you coming soon? And then I got tired!

Now, mom! One more minute, two more. - Finally: - You can!

Turns around. Floating with a smile and thick - a three-year-old intoxicating muzzle.

Where is the surprise?

And I (the inspiration of delight, which he still had) went up to the well - I looked for a long time - I didn’t see anything.

You're just a nasty naughty boy! Where is the surprise?

Why didn't I fall there.

A well, as is often the case in the south, is just a square hole in the ground, without any fence, a square of failure ... Another case. At five-year-old Max, the mother reads a long poem, it seems Maikov, on behalf of a girl listing everything she won’t tell her beloved: “I won’t tell you how much I love you, I won’t tell you how the stars shone then, illuminating my tears, I won’t tell you how my heart died, at the sound of footsteps - every time not yours, I won’t tell you how the dawn then rose”, etc., etc. Finally, the end. And a five-year-old, with a deep sigh:

Ah, what! She promised not to say anything, but she took everything and told it!

The last case of ladies from the end. Morning. The mother, surprised by the long absence of her son, enters the nursery and finds him sleeping on the windowsill.

Max, what does that mean?

Max, sobbing and yawning:

I, I didn't sleep! I was waiting! She didn't come!

Firebird! You forgot, you promised me, if I behave well...

Okay, Max, tomorrow she will certainly arrive, and now let's go and drink tea.

The next morning - before-morning, an early or very late passer-by could see in the window of one of the white houses ... - forehead into the dawn - an infant Zeus in a blanket, with another head clinging at the foot, also curly ... And the passer-by could hear:

Ma-a-ma! What is this?

Your Firebird, Max, is the sun!”

Tsvetaeva draws attention to the “charming old Maxino “You” of the mother - adopted by him from her, from her address to her mother. My son and mother, already with me, drank brotherhood: a thirty-six-year-old with a fifty-six-year-old (sixty-three-year-old. - S.P.) - and clinked glasses ... with a Koktebel soda drink, that is, simply lemonade.

The poet's widow, Maria Stepanovna Voloshina, recalled that in 1926, the doctor Semyon Yakovlevich Lifshits, doctor of physics from the Moscow Higher Technical School, visited them in Koktebel, who was engaged in the autopsy of "infantile injuries" and arranged peculiar psychoanalytic sessions. Maximilian Alexandrovich volunteered to be the subject of these sessions and allowed the doctor to subject himself to these dubious, as Maria Stepanovna believed, experiments no less than twenty times. S. Ya. Lifshitz was an ardent follower of Freud. Voloshin, who was also familiar with the works of the latter, was always open to everything fresh, new, and interesting. As a result of the sessions, certain “dreams” arose, in which the autobiographical was mixed with the fantastic, the ordinary acquired a surreal tinge.

“Dreams: the most terrible: I saw myself. Ordinary doppelgänger. Another dream: a man leads a boy and a girl, puts them on their knees on a hillock. Makes them lift their shirts, shoots them in the stomach. Dreams of the Revolution. About the past or about the future?.. One can talk for a long time about how important the category of "sleep" is for Voloshin - in the psychophysiological or historiosophical sense. This quatrain comes to mind:

I went out uninvited, I came uninvited.

I go through the world in delirium and in a dream ...

Oh, how nice it is to be Max Voloshin

This playful entry was made in the summer of 1923 in the album "Chukokkala". And he left her at a time that was by no means comic, a mature, forty-six-year-old poet who perceived human fate and world history as a string of dreams, and himself as an interpreter of "other people's dreams." However, let us return to the childhood of the poet.

Presumably in December 1881, Elena Ottobaldovna left Taganrog with her son, nanny - the Czech Nessie - and the dog Leda. With her capital, as she later writes to her son, about a hundred rubles. In Moscow, they initially settled on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya, then moved to Medvezhiy Lane, to an apartment where, according to Max's recollections, the wallpaper was separated "from the wall in delirium." And again - distinct childhood memories, "snapshots" of memory: "Knocking in the head (the owner walks). The puppy was crushed in front of his eyes. In the heat, the patient is transported to Zaichenko's house, in a hood. Vaulted Gates. Remained in the memory of "madness uncle. Uncle Sasha: "You look like Raphael's cherub." Stains on the locker... His horror. Tried to jump out of the window. "To the knife! Cut me!’”. Alexander Ottobaldovich Glaser was really seriously mentally ill. And here is a more pleasant, rather funny, memory: the visit of a family friend, an old man (in the perception of a baby) Orest Polienovich Vyazemsky. Max showed him his first drawings, of course, people. “All the figures had falls. Old man Vyazemsky considered in pince-nez: "Excessive realism" ... "

Elena Ottobaldovna gets a job in an office at the Moscow-Brest railway. Her salary is forty rubles plus eighteen rubles of a pension for her husband plus ten rubles of allowance from the Noble guardianship plus fifty rubles as interest on the amount (about twelve thousand rubles) that Max received as a result of a donation from his paternal grandfather and grandmother - Maxim Yakovlevich, Kiev city treasurer, state councilor, landowner, and Evpraksia Alexandrovna Kiriyenko-Voloshiny.

Somewhere in four or five years - “a child's break with the mother. My mother accuses me of something. In what - I do not remember. I renounce because I know that I didn’t take it, I didn’t do it. "There is no one else" ... The accusation of lying. Anger. Requirement to confess. (Now I remember - I took a small silver matchbox.) From this moment I feel all childhood love relationships are over. For life. After 40 years, when we both forgot the reason, this source of misunderstandings emerges between us in quarrels, and my mother asserts my guilt with the same passion, and I deny it with the same passion, although we both no longer remember the point of the accusation in the same way. Childish, of course, a misunderstanding. But even for an adult Max, relations with his mother, smart, domineering, not disposed to tenderness, will be very difficult to develop.

So, from the age of four, Moscow enters the life of Maximilian Voloshin, “Moscow from the background of“ Boyar Morozova ”. They lived in Novaya Sloboda near Podviski, where it was written in those years by Surikov in a neighboring house ”(“ Autobiography ”). Indeed, the beginning of V. I. Surikov's work on this picture falls on 1881. The artist lived at that time in Moscow on Dolgorukovskaya Street, next door to the Voloshins who had recently moved there, made sketches for the picture, painted sketches. Once, while walking with the nanny, little Max saw Surikov at the easel. This meeting with great art made a great impression on the child. He devoted himself to drawing.

Years will pass, and Voloshin will turn to the artist's work as an art critic. In the course of meetings and conversations with the author of "Boyarynya Morozova", as a result of reflections on his canvases, the monograph "Surikov" will appear, fragments of which will be published in 1916.

Along with drawing, the boy awakens interest in literature, there is an "intoxication with poetry." “He loved to recite, even before he could read,” Voloshin notes in Autobiography. “For this, I constantly stood on a chair: a sense of stage.” The boy knew by heart "Peddlers" by Nekrasov, "Humpbacked Horse" by Ershov, "Branch of Palestine" by Lermontov, "Poltava battle" by Pushkin. Moreover, as Valentina Orestovna Vyazemskaya, who knew him in childhood, testifies, this butuz, “handsome in Russian taste”, “pronounced words in a peculiar way, stretching out vowels, and the expression that he gave to the spoken was so original that all adults listened with interest.” In the summer of 1882, the child himself learns to read from newspaper headlines, so that from the age of five, “independent navigation through books” begins.

Valentina Vyazemskaya was the daughter of the railway engineer Orest Polienovich Vyazemsky, in whose apartment, in Vagankovo, Elena Ottobaldovna settled with her son in the spring of 1883. Max Voloshin was in his seventh year. He has already got acquainted with many books from his mother's library, preferring Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dal to other authors. Even then, the originality of his nature was felt, attracted by the liveliness of character. “I was almost twice his age,” recalls Valentina Orestovna, “... but I had more fun with him than with my peers. He had such an interesting combination of naive rusticity with a sharp mind and powers of observation. He could immediately strike in succession either with absurdity or with wisdom beyond the years of his thoughts and judgments.

Photographs of Max from this period of his life have been preserved, and descriptions of his appearance, made by people who knew him closely, have remained. He was dressed, as a rule, stylishly: in the summer, for example, he wore a sailor suit. Ruddy, freckled (freckles did not spoil him), a talkative child with eyes that were thoughtful, then mocking, then cunning. Loquacious, he, however, knew how to listen to his interlocutor. I liked to look at the pictures for a long time. With enthusiasm he recited "The Battle of Poltava", "Borodino", excerpts from "The Demon", and the words "When he believed and loved" were pronounced with force and persuasiveness unusual for his age. Once, when asked about what he especially likes in Poltava, he answered: “These are the chicks of Petrov’s nest.” And further - to "semi-powerful ruler." However, he, of course, could not explain what all this meant. “It turned out to be very comical, but, in essence,” V. O. Vyazemskaya rightly notes, “in poetry, the charm of incomprehensible, that is, acting not on the consciousness, but on the subconscious, captivates many, and in our time this is what is considered poetry. And his seemingly ridiculous words were profound.

Young Max was very passionate and willingly participated in the competition of reciters, as the same friend of his childhood recalls: “My uncle Mitrofan Dmitrievich ... a man with a strong humorous streak, to provoke him, offered him competitions: who would say better, for example, “Borodino” ... ievich, now you climb on the table. Max Voloshin was just as passionate about food. In this regard, Elena Ottobaldovna had to limit her son, who was already prone to fullness. “It was terribly amusing (but also a little pitiful), - writes V. O. Vyazemskaya, - it was to listen to mother and son talking about this: “Mom, and mom (it was somehow pronounced“ mum ”) ... I want ...“ -“ Well, want it, want it, "- answered quite seriously, without a shadow of a smile, this original woman. For evening tea, he was given 3 slices of bread and 3 pieces of sausage. First (even here a creative vein appeared. - S. Ya.) he ate a slice of bread without sausage, then with one piece of sausage, and, finally, a solemn moment came: Max tried to attract everyone's attention to himself and ate one slice of bread with two slices of sausage.

Valentina Orestovna also remembered Max's aphoristic statements, the well-aimed characteristics that he gave to people. “For example, he personally said about me:“ A cardboard box with a brain. I really was at that time in the period of philosophizing on every occasion. So "with a certain absurdity of form, Max's statement proved his powers of observation."

It is not surprising that when the children of Orest Polienovich Vyazemsky, who were all much older than Voloshin, were invited by a teacher - a student of the Konstantinovsky Land Survey Institute Nikandr Vasilyevich Turkin, he began to study with Max, to prepare him for entering the gymnasium. The Moscow and Feodosia gymnasiums gave little to the poet, "... longing and disgust for everything that is in the gymnasium and from the gymnasium," he later complained. But young Max was lucky with a mentor. “The beginning of learning: in addition to ordinary grammars, memorization of Latin verses, lectures on the history of religion, essays on topics that are difficult for age”, conversations about spiritualism and Buddhism, about Dostoevsky; Homer's Odyssey, Byron's Don Juan, Poe stories, myths Ancient Greece… Of course, not everything was easy. “Everyone in the house sleeps, except for Max and N.V. (Turkin. - S. Ya), who sit in the next small room, Maxine’s “office”, and study,” Lyuba Vyazemskaya writes to her mother. - ... Some intonations of Max's voice, passing from the most joyful to the most desperate, what are they worth! He is terribly lazy to think and is trying to get around the need to move his brains. However, the main result was still achieved. I owe my "diverse cultural preparation ... to a teacher - then a student N.V. Turkin," Voloshin states in his Autobiography.

Being himself an original and diversified man, Nikandr Vasilyevich Turkin, who later became a prominent journalist and theater critic, was able to appreciate the originality of nature and his student, to notice his attraction to the unusual, bright, fantastic. “Thanks to this, he listened to the reading of Edgar Poe - obviously, with a mixture of horror and pleasure, when Turkin read to him,” believes Valentina Vyazemskaya. - ... Turkin generally wised over him, and from the outside it seemed strange that Elena Ottobaldovna allowed him to do this. One must think that, on the one hand, she was very busy and did not enter into everything, and on the other, that the originality of these relations amused her and she was pleased that the teacher's tricks revealed the extraordinary abilities of the student. However, the question is also what to name and evaluate. Is it possible, for example, to consider the task of describing the Caucasus “according to Pushkin” in ethnographic and geographical aspects as a “focus”? (Let's not forget that the student is only seven and a half.)

At a young age, addiction to the unusual and supernatural looks natural and at the same time somewhat feigned. Sitting down at the table, little Max could stretch out his hands and say: "Amen, amen, crumble, mind you, my place is holy." He avoided some "mysterious" places in the district, cast spells. Once, while playing these same spells, Valerian, the son of the owner of the apartment, lifted him into the air, turning him upside down. Max, however, was confident and convinced others of this, that he flew up thanks to the spirits. “Watching him, we felt that it seemed interesting to him to believe in the supernatural,” Valentina Vyazemskaya expresses her hypothesis, “life with such faith seemed to him more colorful and exciting than ordinary ... But ... next to an eccentric who could be deceived by anything and over whom everyone made fun, already then lived a smart, sober little man who knew perfectly well that he was being fooled, but was silent about it, for life, if you let the mind lead her, seemed to him more boring. The boy loved to be the center of attention, to impress. “Therefore, the question is who led whom by the nose: whether those who teased him, or he those who teased him.” A penchant for acting and hoaxes will manifest itself in Voloshin both in the gymnasium, and later, in the Koktebel "turnkey".

The religious education of Max Voloshin during this period lags far behind the general intellectual. “His mother was an intellectual of a liberal warehouse,” the poet’s second wife Maria Stepanovna would later remark, “and she didn’t need it at all ...” “This whole side did not touch me in childhood ...” - admits Max himself, who was expected by stages of sometimes painful religious and philosophical “wanderings”. At the same time, V. O. Vyazemskaya recalls, “in the morning and in the evening he read“ Lord, have mercy on dad and mother ”and ended:“ both me, baby Max, and Nessie. Hearing this, Valerian began to tell how Max would pray in the future. First: “and me, schoolboy Max, and Nessie”, then: “and me, student M., and N.”, and finally, when he becomes an important person: “and me, state councilor M., and N.“.

Among the most memorable events of 1886 is a meeting at the end of the summer in Kyiv with his paternal grandfather Maxim Yakovlevich Kiriyenko-Voloshin. What he talked about with his grandson remained unclear. It is only known that Maxim Yakovlevich developed a very original concept regarding the etymology of his surname. He argued that "Kiriyenko" comes from the Greek "master", and "Voloshin" is a Zaporizhian nickname meaning "a native of Italy". Well, let's leave these linguistic research grandfather Maximilian Voloshin without comment. Grandmother, Evpraksia (Evgenia) Alexandrovna, a wealthy landowner who had land in the Orenburg, Poltava and Chernigov provinces, was remembered by her grandson as an imperious, devout old woman, in whose rooms lamps burned and crowded hangers-on. One of her prayers began with the words: "Lord, curse ..."

In the second half of May 1887, Voloshin surrenders entrance examination to the private gymnasium of L. I. Polivanov, and from September 1 he starts classes. The children of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy also studied here, on whom the impetuous butuz Max flew somehow in one of the corridors. “Well, you could have killed me with your head!” - joked, catching his breath, great writer. The future poet rushed on - to acquire knowledge, which at the end of the first half of the year was rated as follows: the Law of God - "excellent"; Russian language, French, geography and drawing - "good"; Latin language, calligraphy and gymnastics - "satisfactory".

The Polivanovskaya gymnasium was considered the best in Moscow, but the tuition fee (200 rubles a year) turned out to be too high for Elena Ottobaldovna. I had to transfer my son to the 1st Moscow State Gymnasium. Max takes the exam and enters the second grade. As already noted, Voloshin feels out of place here. Actually, the classic situation was repeated, when the creative mind does not accept the routine system of education. In the "Autobiography" we find confirmation: "These are the darkest and most constrained years of life, filled with longing and impotent protest against indigestible and unnecessary knowledge." Mutual understanding with the teachers was not achieved, as evidenced by Max's mediocre, if not low, marks, including in behavior - punishment, as Voloshin himself later noted, "for objections and reasoning." In the third grade, things went really badly, and the negligent schoolboy was left for the second year. “When I moved to the Feodosiya gymnasium,” Voloshin recalls, “I had annual deuces in all subjects, and in Greek -“ 1 ”. The only "3" was for behavior. What, according to the then gymnasium concepts, was the most lowest score, which this subject was evaluated ... I was full of all sorts of interests: cultural, historical, linguistic, literary, mathematical, etc. And all this came down to me for the inevitable deuce for success. Thus, the external results achieved in the teaching did not correspond to the potential capabilities of the young schoolboy. His reputation suffered. “When the reviews about my Moscow successes were presented by my mother to the Feodosiya gymnasium, the director ... threw up his hands and said: “Madame, of course, we will accept your son, but I must warn you that we cannot correct idiots.”

However, the future poet was very philosophical about bad grades, not considering them a true assessment of his knowledge and abilities. His spiritual level, erudition, inquisitiveness of mind even then distinguished him not only among his comrades, but also among teachers, which, by the way, is confirmed by one of his schoolmates, S. Poletaev: “Voloshin at that time at the age of 14-15 was immeasurably higher than us in his development, erudition and individual thinking. Only now did I understand his discussions and skirmishes with the teaching staff and all the wretchedness of the teachers around us, who could neither understand nor support the novice talent, but who even tried to ridicule him publicly, that is, in front of the entire class. The strong nature of Voloshin, despite his obvious superiority over his comrades, found ways to get along with us, probably often very unpleasant for him, mischievous guys; with philosophical calmness he endured the oppression of teachers who were so clearly inferior in their development and outlook to a 15-year-old man ... "

Not forgetting about his former passions, Max Voloshin acquires new ones. In the autumn of 1890, at the age of twelve, he begins to write poetry, which he later defines as "bad." A tendency to rhyme manifested itself in Max already in early childhood, when he improvised something like: “In laughter, a rich man with one leg lived underground”; or about a birthday: "I know, I know: the sixteenth of May." These abilities, multiplied by keen observation and vivid imagination, could not but develop in the historical and cultural atmosphere in which Voloshin lived. The then outskirts of Moscow, Vagankovo, and the forests of the Zvenigorod district, where the poet had to visit, were perceived by him as “the classic places of the Russian Ile-de-France, where Pushkin spent his childhood in the village of Zakharyin, and in Semenkovo ​​(most likely Serednikovo, the Stolypins’ dacha near Moscow. - S.P.) - Lermontov.” The young man loves to wander alone: ​​“As you go through the forest, some clearing: wilderness, silence, it seems that there is no one but you, and there is no one in the world ...” He spends the summer of 1890 at a dacha in Troekurov, a small village on the banks of the Setun River, in which the remains of an old manor estate and a church built by the princes Troekurov at the end of the XVII - early XVIII century. Absorbing literary and geographical impressions, reading Russian classics, being carried away by Dickens, keeping childhood memories of Sevastopol in his soul, the young man experiences that 35 years later, returning his thoughts to these years, he will express it this way: “I dream of the south and pray to become a poet.”

"The feeling of the stage" encourages him to participate in literary and musical evenings at the gymnasium. Max performs a poetry reading. He is still shy about publishing his own. He prefers the works of his idols, in particular Pushkin. On January 31, 1893, the poet-gymnasium student recites the poem "To the Slanderers of Russia". He is also close to the sentiments expressed by Pushkin in another masterpiece: "The Poet and the Crowd". It is no coincidence that one of the early poetic sketches in Voloshin's "First Gymnasium Notebook" contains their echoes:

Let me be ridiculed by the crowd

Let the light despise me

Let them mock me

But I will still be a poet.

Poet with heart and soul.

And with a steady head

I will go through all these troubles.

I don't care about the opinions of the world -

Empty senseless crowd.

She does not understand the poet's songs,

She does not understand his dreams.

Early, gymnasium poems by Voloshin bear little resemblance to those that lovers of his poetry read today. Although in fairness, we note that prophetic notes sound in the above imitative verses. The image of the poet walking "with an inflexible head" among the troubles and "conflagrations of the world" will be repeated at a new level in poems about Russia and embodied in the fate of Voloshin himself, who took it upon himself to preach goodness to the "senseless crowd" seized by demonism. Of course, the young poet is attracted not only by the civic theme. “And I sing of nature, admiring one,” he admits in one of his poems.

Max's hobby is shared by a narrow circle of his comrades at the gymnasium, in particular P. Zvolinsky and N. Davydov. The poet closely converges with a gifted young man, a student of the Agricultural School, Modest Sakulin. They read their own opuses to each other, talk passionately about great poetry, and even publish handwritten magazines. There is still a long way to go before serious publications. Voloshin's first poem will be published already in Feodosia, in 1895, but the poet himself recognizes his poetic publication in the journal Novy Put (1903) as his true debut.

The summer of 1891, Max Voloshin spends partly at a dacha in the village of Matveykovo, Zvenigorod district, where his relatives Lyamins live, and partly in Troekurovo. Hours of walking, immersion in the world of nature. The entries in the diary are already drawn by the hand of a poet, an artist, a person who will sing the beauties of Italy, Spain, France and, of course, the Eastern Crimea. In the meantime, the landscape of central Russia is being literaryized: “Huge lindens, dark green clumsy, but beautiful oaks, green pines and firs, firs, weeping willows, leaning over the mirror surface of the pond and bathing their sad branches in it ... dilapidated stone buildings, overgrown with hops and ivy and strewn with pink, red and white, strongly smelling dodder flowers, beautiful rice huddle in groups of trees, beckoning rather under their canopy, to the bank of a small river to escape from the scorching heat ... "How can one not recall his first definition of poetry: it is" there is a harmony of the soul with everything around "(recorded on October 12, 1892).

Increasingly, his inherent sense of humor was also manifested. Yearning for communication with peers, he very peculiarly asks his mother to visit relatives in the village of Matveykovo, which is thirty-three miles from Moscow. The young artist begins from afar:

May I, mother, go for a walk?

Only for me, mother, it’s better to come from there by rail.

Come.

You know, mother, it’s not worth going there for one day, it’s already there, you have to live for a week.

So, mom, I'd better go there too?

Come on, just stay away!

When in Moscow, Voloshin often visits his maternal grandmother, Nadezhda Grigoryevna Glazer, who can tell her grandson the bitter truth in the face (“God! How did you get better!”), She is inclined to both ironic and loving to scold.

Meanwhile, some changes are taking place in the fate of Elena Ottobaldovna herself. In the autumn of 1889, she met the doctor Pavel Pavlovich von Tesch, with whom, a year later, her relationship became close. Von Tesh (as his surname was written before the revolution), the father of four daughters, who lived for the last ten years separately from his family, settled with Elena Ottobaldovna and Max in Volkonsky Lane.

This is how Elena Ottobaldovna was remembered by people who knew her closely in the mid-1880s: “... on official occasions she wore a beautifully tailored black silk dress ... usually she wore a Little Russian suit with a gray zipun ... She was a big debater ... she rode on horseback in a men's suit and ... her originality was more striking than her beauty."

And life goes on. Max Voloshin participates in home performances at Sakulin's apartment (stages from Boris Godunov are staged), visits theaters, reads to Dostoevsky ("Humiliated and Insulted", "Crime and Punishment", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Idiot") and Saltykov-Shchedrin ("History of a City", "Pompadours and Pompadours"), writes many poems that he tries to streamline in "Gymnasium notebooks." In the preface to "The Chosen One" (of course, handwritten), he says that he will not stop at these poems, but will go further. The author asks "everyone who will read my poems to write what he considers the best, and then what shortcomings he finds in them ...". And then - a very characteristic order, “so that this notebook is handled with care and not soiled, and most importantly, that you do not write anything of your own in its margins. Critical remarks please write on separate sheets. That's really true: "A small scientist, but a pedant." Maybe Marina Tsvetaeva is right about Voloshin's "Germanism" - thoroughness and accuracy ...

Max again thinks about what poetry is: “In every creation, everywhere, in all nature, even in its lowest manifestations, there is poetry, but only it must be found there ...” And one more conclusion: “The ideal of beauty is nature itself. And people in their arts only try to achieve this ideal, but they cannot ... ”Meanwhile, classes are gaining momentum in the fifth grade of the gymnasium. Among the educational books - "Yugurtinskaya war" by the Roman writer and statesman Sallust Crispus, Xenophon's Anabasis, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's Odyssey, a collection of Latin exercises by K. Pawlikowski and Greek Grammar. Voloshin delves into Shakespeare's historical chronicles, reads Korolenko's The Blind Musician, and translates one of O. Barbier's poems. Among the books of the home library, the most popular are “The French Revolution”, “Martyrs of the Colosseum” by E. Tur, “History of Russia” by A. K. Tolstoy, poems by Byron and Nekrasov, and numerous volumes by L. N. Tolstoy. Max's library is also used by his classmates. In studies, the young man, as before, does not shine: in Latin and Greek - “two”, in Russian - “three”. Elena Ottobaldovna is dissatisfied - she forbids Sunday walks and communication with friends. Nevertheless, the young man firmly decided after the gymnasium to enter the Faculty of History and Philology, and then to become a writer or journalist.

The circle of reading is expanding more and more: Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Schiller's Don Carlos, Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral, Flammarion's In Heaven. About the latter, a diary entry appears (March 5, 1893): “The most interesting thought of this novel is that Flammarion calls the body “the temporary shell of the soul.” This idea will be embodied many times and in different ways in Voloshin's poetry.

However, sometimes it was not up to high matters, since Max's "temporary shell of the soul" was attacked. Professor-biochemist S. L. Ivanov, who studied at the same gymnasium, recalls how he, along with the same tomboys, at the instigation of Voloshin's classmate - Volodya Makarov, lame from birth and, obviously, to some extent mentally unbalanced, lay in wait for a fat and clumsy gymnasium student, pinched his soft spots and scattered. The habits of the "evil children" were soon studied by Voloshin, and retaliatory actions followed. Sergei Ivanov recalled: “... before I had time to pinch him properly, he quickly turned around and gave such a cuff with his palm that I stretched out on the ground. I only remember large round good-natured eyes bent over me and a request to leave him alone in the future. Perhaps this was the only case of "resisting evil with violence" on the part of Max Voloshin; his relations with Sergei Ivanov will remain quite friendly, as with the same Vladimir Makarov.

On March 17, 1893, Voloshin wrote in his diary: “Today is a great day. Today it was decided that we are going to the Crimea, to Feodosia, and we will live there. We're going forever!.. Farewell, Moscow! Now south, south! To this bright, eternally young, eternally blooming, beautiful, wonderful south!” A new, "Cimmerian" era begins in the life and work of Maximilian Voloshin.

ღ Love polygons of Maximilian Voloshin ღ

Voloshin was the most eccentric Russian of the early twentieth century. Everyone agreed in this opinion, with the exception of those who knew his mother ...

I have been waiting for so much suffering
O u t h o u l i t i o n i n t i o n i n t i n o n s o n s h a n c e .
And b o l came, like a t and y and y blue light,
And about the circle of the heart, like a wrist.

W e s o u t
Such burning, tormenting caresses.
C o u t h e r e a s i n t i o n s
A n d e n t i n s p o u n t p o u n t s s o o d e n t o n t o u n t o n o n t o r .

And the heart was made of glass,
I v n m tak t o n k o p e l a n a n :
"Oh, b o l, when d e a n d came,
It always arrives too early."

On May 28, 1877, the future poet Maximilian Voloshin was born in Kyiv. Shortly after the birth of the boy, his parents separated, and Max stayed with his mother, Elena Ottobaldovna Glezer, who raised her son in her own way. Being expelled from Moscow University for participating in the riots, Voloshin decided to educate himself. He traveled widely, visited libraries and listened to lectures in Europe, and also took lessons in painting and engraving. In 1910, the first collection of Voloshin's poems was published under the title "Poems. 1900-1910", which immediately made Maximilian a popular poet and influential critic. In the article "Idols of the Past" we will talk about the love of the poet, as well as about the great literary hoax of Maximilian - the mysterious poetess Cherubina de Gabriak, because of which Voloshin shot with Nikolai Gumilyov on the Black River ...

Long before the Soviet art bosses thought of creating Houses of Creativity, in the Crimea, in Koktebel, there was a unique "summer station for creative people." Here Bulgakov dictated to his wife "Days of the Turbins", Tsvetaeva, Gorky, Bryusov, Petrov-Vodkin, Benois visited.

Up to 600 people lived in a small three-story house, which belonged to the most eccentric person - the poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin! the guest asked Max. "What do they say?" - “They say that you have the right of the first night with every woman who comes to you. That your guests dress in “half pajamas”: one walks around Koktebel in the lower part on a naked body, the other in the upper. Also - that you pray to Zeus. Heal with the laying on of hands.

Guess the future by the stars. Walk on water like dry land. Tamed a dolphin and milk it daily like a cow. Is this true?" "Of course it's true!" - Max proudly exclaimed ... It was never possible to understand whether Voloshin was fooling around or not. I could say with the most serious look that the poet Valery Bryusov was born in a brothel. Or that the madman who shredded Repin's painting "Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan" is very smart.

Max passionately lectured, one more provocative than the other. He enlightened decent matrons on the theme of Eros and 666 voluptuous embraces. Under the guise of a lecture on the Great French Revolution, revolutionary-minded materialistic students were regaled with tales that Marie Antoinette is alive and well, only reincarnated as Countess X and still feels some awkwardness in the back of her head from the ax that cut off her head. At the end, Max turned in his own poems. He was nearly beaten. He was asked: "Are you always so pleased with yourself?" He answered pathetically: "Always!" They liked to be friends with him, but they were rarely taken seriously.

His poems seemed too "ancient", and watercolor landscapes - too "Japanese" (they were appreciated only decades later). Voloshin himself was called a hardworking drone, or even a pea jester.
Even outwardly he was eccentric: small in stature, but very broad in the shoulders and fat, a lush mane of hair hid an already short neck.

In the literary parlors they joked: “Three hundred years ago in Europe, artificial dwarfs were brought out for the amusement of kings. They put a child in a porcelain barrel, and in a few years he turns into a fat, short freak. If such a dwarf is given the head of Zeus and the female lips are made into a bow, it will turn out to be Voloshin. Max was proud of his appearance: "Seven pounds of male beauty!" - and he liked to dress extravagantly.

For example, he walked the streets of Paris in knee-length velvet pants, a cape with a hood and a plush top hat - passers-by always turned to him. Round and light, like a rubber ball, he “rolled” all over the world: he led camel caravans in the desert, laid bricks at the construction of an anthroposophical temple in Switzerland... When crossing borders, Voloshin often had problems: the customs officers seemed suspicious of his fullness, and under his fancy clothes they were always looking for contraband.

Women gossiped: Max looks so little like a real man that it’s not shameful to invite him to the bathhouse to rub his back. He himself, however, liked to start a rumor about his male "security". At the same time, he had countless novels. In a word, Voloshin was the most eccentric Russian of the early twentieth century. Everyone agreed in this opinion, with the exception of those who knew his mother ...

Mother of the original man

As soon as she married Max's father, a respectable judicial official, a recent graduate of the Institute for Noble Maidens, Elena Ottobaldovna Glezer (from Russified Germans) began to tailor her life in her own way. To begin with, she became addicted to cigarettes, then dressed up in a man's shirt and trousers, then she found herself a man's hobby - gymnastics with weights, and then completely, leaving her husband, began to live like a man: she got a job in the office of the South-Western railway. She no longer remembered her husband.

Except perhaps twenty years after his death, at the wedding of his son's friends, Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron, in the column "Witnesses" of the parish book, she waved across the entire sheet: "The inconsolable widow of collegiate adviser Alexander Maksimovich Kiriyenko-Voloshin." It is clear that this amazing lady raised her son in her own way. No wonder she gave him the name Maximilian, from the Latin maximum. Everything was allowed to Max, with the exception of two things: to eat in excess of the norm (already overweight) and to be like everyone else.

Elena Ottobaldovna Kiriyenko-Voloshina with her son Max. 1878

As a governess, her mother hired a circus rider for Max: to teach horseback riding and somersaults to a cheerful “alle-op-la!”. The rest of the knowledge: in history, geography, geology, botany, linguistics - the boy had to absorb from the very Crimean air. Then Elena Ottobaldovna left Kyiv first, then Moscow: she believed that the Crimea was the best place to raise her son. Here you have mountains, and stones, and ancient ruins, and the remains of Genoese fortresses, and settlements of Tatars, Bulgarians, Greeks ... “You, Max, are a product of mixed blood. The Babylonian mix of cultures is just right for you,” said the mother.

She welcomed her son's interest in occultism and mysticism and was not at all upset that he always stayed in the gymnasium for the second year. One of Max's teachers told her: “Out of respect for you, we will teach your son, but, alas! We don't fix idiots. Elena Ottobaldovna only chuckled. Not even half a year had passed when, at the funeral of that same teacher, the repeater Voloshin recited his wonderful poems - this was his first public speech ...

Officially, Elena Ottobaldovna never got married again: she said that she did not want to turn Max into someone else's stepson. But every morning she went for long walks in the mountains with a certain slender rider. When she returned, she called Max to dinner by blowing into a tin pipe. A cauldron with a watery broth of cabbage, tin spoons, a simple wooden table without a tablecloth on a terrace with an earthen floor - from there the whole Koktebel was visible. On the left - the soft outlines of the hills, on the right - the rocky mountain range of Karadag ... Winds and time carved someone's bearded profile on one rock. “What kind of person is immortalized so monumentally, mother?” - guessed young Max. “I don’t know, but this person is probably worth it!” Several years passed, Max matured and let go of exactly the same beard.

True, many believed that he did this in imitation of Karl Marx. Voloshin was at that time a student of the law faculty of Moscow University and participated in student unrest.

Once he even landed in prison and, having nothing to do, sang poems of his own composition for hours. The gendarmes summoned Elena Ottobaldovna and interrogated her about the reasons for her son's gaiety. She said that Max was always like that, and the gendarmes advised him to marry as soon as possible. And soon Voloshin really met his future wife - Margarita Sabashnikova.

The Alabaster Wife

In the bohemian circle, her name was Amora, but still she could not be considered a completely bohemian young lady. She dressed, in any case, in strict skirts and high-collared English blouses. And she didn't have lovers. Maybe she just didn't have the courage... She had just broken out of her father's house, a wealthy tea merchant, to devote herself to painting. She dreamed of boundless freedom, sizzling passions.

The embodiment of all this seemed to Amore Max with his incredible outfits and eternal provocations. He was also bribed by her golden eyelashes and a slightly perceptible “Buryatka” (Amorya was proud that her great-grandfather was a shaman, and carried his tambourine with her everywhere).

The novel began in Paris - both listened to lectures at the Sorbonne. “I found your portrait,” Max said and dragged Amorya to the museum: the stone Egyptian princess Taiah smiled with a mysterious Amorian smile. “They merged for me into a single being,” Voloshin told his friends. - You have to make an effort on yourself to believe: Margarita is from perishable flesh and blood, and not from eternal alabaster. I have never been so in love, but I dare not touch it - I consider it blasphemy! “But you have the good sense not to marry a woman of alabaster?” friends were worried. But Max loved his Koktebel too much! He sent there everything that, in his opinion, was worth admiration: thousands of books, ethnic knives, bowls, rosaries, castanets, corals, fossils, bird feathers ... In a word, first Max sent a copy from the Taiah statue to Koktebel, and then ...

Maximilian Voloshin. Theodosius. 1896

... Having got married, they boarded the train. Three days to Feodosia, then - in a cab along the edge of the sea. Approaching the house, Margarita saw a strange sexless creature in a long linen shirt, with an uncovered gray head. It greeted Max with a hoarse bass: “Well, hello! matured! Looked like a profile on Karadag!” - "Hello, Pra!" Voloshin answered. Margarita was at a loss: a man or a woman? Who is the husband? Turned out to be a mother.

However, the address "Pra" given to Elena Ottobaldovna by one of the guests suited her unusually. Max himself, having arrived home, dressed in the same knee-length tunic, girded himself with a thick cord, put on shoes in dudes, and even crowned his head with a wreath of wormwood. One girl, seeing him with Margarita, asked: “Why did this princess marry this janitor?” Margarita was embarrassed, and Max burst into a happy laugh. He laughed just as joyfully when the local Bulgarians came to ask him to wear pants under the chiton - they say, their wives and daughters are embarrassed.

Bohemian friends of Max reached out to Koktebel. Voloshin even came up with a name for them: “Order of Obormots” - and wrote a charter: “The requirement for residents is love for people and making a share in the intellectual life of the house.” Each departing guest was escorted by a collective song and uplifted hands to the sky. Each newcomer was greeted with a raffle. For example, a man came, he wants to say hello like a human being, but everyone is not up to him: they catch some lady who has run away to the sea to drown herself. "Look for a lifeline!" - Pra booms, not letting go of the eternal cigarette and matchbox made of solid carnelian.

Some pillows and books are flying around the room. Finally, they bring the drowned woman - she is unconscious, but her clothes are dry. Here only the stunned guest begins to understand that everything here is nonsense on nonsense. “Max, for God's sake, next time no comedies,” the guests beg at parting. “Well, what are you, I’m tired of them myself,” Voloshin smiles slyly.

For Margarita's taste, all this was somehow petty. After all, even the stories about one pajama for two and the right of the first night turned out to be untrue! Perhaps these rumors were spread by Max himself ... So extraordinary, so free from prejudice, in fact he only played the fool or wandered around the mountains with his easel. Meanwhile, vague news came from St. Petersburg about how the Symbolists were building a new human community, where Eros enters into flesh and blood ... In general, it was decided to go to St. Petersburg.

They settled on Tavricheskaya, in house number 25. A floor above, in a semicircular attic, lived the fashionable poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, symbolists gathered here on Wednesdays. Max began to vigorously recite, argue, quote, while Amorya had quiet conversations with Ivanov: that the life of a real artist should be permeated with drama, that friendly couples are out of fashion and worthy of contempt. Once Lydia, Ivanov's wife, told her: “You entered our life with Vyacheslav.

You leave - a void is formed. It was decided to live together. What about Max? He is superfluous and should roll into his Koktebel, walk around there in a chiton, since he is not enough for anything more daring ... Max did not condemn Amorya and did not force him to do anything. In parting, he even sent Ivanov a new cycle of his poems - he, however, responded to them with great harshness.

Only those closest to him knew: Max is not as thick-skinned as he wants to appear. Shortly after parting with his wife, he confessed in one letter: “Explain to me what is my ugliness? Everywhere, and especially in the literary environment, I feel like a beast among people - something out of place. What about women? My essence bothers them very soon, and only irritation remains ... ” ... And Margarita and the Ivanovs did not succeed in“ a new type of family ”.

Lydia's adult daughter from her first marriage - the blond beast Vera - very soon took her place in " triple alliance". And when Lydia died, Vyacheslav married Vera. Gentle Amore could only write endless sketches for the planned picture, in which Ivanov portrayed Dionysus, and she herself - Sorrow. The painting was never finished.
Hoax of the century

Max did not grieve for long. There is no Amory - there is Tatida, Marevna, Violet - a blue-eyed Irish woman who left her husband and rushed after Voloshin to Koktebel. But all this is so, fleeting novels. Maybe only one woman hooked him seriously. Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva, student of the Sorbonne in the course of Old French and Old Spanish literature. Lame from birth, plump, disproportionately large-headed, but sweet, charming and witty. Gumilyov was the first to be captivated. It was he who persuaded Lilya to go to Koktebel for the summer, to Voloshin.

The wedding of Maximilian Voloshin and Margarita Sabashnikova. 1906

In the crowd of guests, Nikolai and Lilya followed Max through the mountains, he stopped every now and then to caress the stones or whisper with the trees. Once Voloshin asked: “Do you want me to light the grass?” He stretched out his hand, and the grass caught fire, and the smoke streamed up to the sky ... What was it? Energy unknown to science or another hoax? Lilya Dmitrieva did not know, but Max's Zeus-likeness struck her down.

And when she saw a stone profile on Karadag, to the right of Koktebel, she was not too surprised: “Voloshin, is this your portrait? I would like to see how you did it ... Maybe, especially for me, you will capture your face again - to the left of Koktebel, under a pair of the first? "On the left is a place for my death mask!" Max exclaimed pathetically. Pra herself smiled encouragingly as she listened to their dialogue. Could Voloshin not fall in love with Lilya after that? Having received his resignation, Gumilyov lived with Voloshin for another week, walked, caught tarantulas. Then he wrote a wonderful poetic cycle "Captains", released the spiders and left.

Voloshin would have married Lila right away, but first it was necessary to divorce Sabashnikova, and this turned out to be a difficult and long matter. Well! The lovers were ready to wait. Under the influence of Max, Lily began to write poetry - more and more on old French and old Spanish motives: about swords, roses and beautiful ladies. It was decided to go to be published in St. Petersburg, to Voloshin's friends, who headed the Apollo fashion magazine. Gumilyov, by the way, was also one of the editors of Apollo. And he did everything to return the envelope with Dmitrieva's poems unopened.

It turned out that he never forgave his unfaithful lover. All this became the plot of a great hoax, invented and staged by Max Voloshin. Once, on a wonderful day Chief Editor"Apollo" Sergey Makovsky received a letter on scented paper with a mourning edge. The motto on the wax seal read: "Woe to the vanquished." The letter contained poems - about swords, roses and beautiful ladies - signed with a mysterious name: Cherubina de Gabriac.

There was no return address on the envelope. “Catholic, half-Spanish, half-French, aristocratic, very young, very beautiful and very unhappy,” the Apollo deduced. Makovsky himself was especially intrigued. “You see, Maximilian Alexandrovich,” he said to Voloshin that evening, showing Cherubina’s poems, “among secular women there are surprisingly talented!”

And soon the mysterious Cherubina called Makovsky, and a dizzying telephone romance began. Not only Makovsky fell in love, who at least heard the voice of Cherubina, but also - in absentia - the artist Konstantin Somov, the poets Vyacheslav Ivanov, Gumilyov, Voloshin (at least he said so), all of St. Petersburg! When Cherubina said on the phone that she was dangerously ill, reports about her state of health appeared on the front pages of the newspapers. When, having recovered, she went to her relatives in France, tickets for the Paris train were sold out in a matter of hours. As well as poison in pharmacies, when Cherubina, returning to St. Petersburg, at the insistence of her Jesuit confessor, vowed to take the veil as a nun. True madness!

The mysterious poetess also had ill-wishers. For example, Elizaveta Dmitrieva, who lived almost as a recluse in St. Petersburg, managed to spread well-aimed epigrams and parodies of Cherubina de Gabriak. It was believed that Lily was simply suffering from jealousy. The vengeful Gumilyov triumphed. And, to make her even more painful, he began to talk everywhere about Dmitriev's obscenity. Voloshin heard one of them and gave Gumilyov a slap in the face. Who would have expected assault from the eternally good-natured, thick-skinned Max ... They decided to shoot on the Black River.

The seconds with difficulty managed to soften the conditions: instead of a duel from five steps to death - the only exchange of shots from twenty steps. Real dueling pistols were hard to find, and so old that they could well remember Pushkin and Dantes. Finally, on a stormy November morning, two shots rang out. When the smoke cleared, both enemies were on their feet. Lucky...


Maximilian Voloshin with his wife Maria. 1925

The police solved this case, having found a galosh of one of the seconds at the place of the duel. The tragedy turned into a farce! No sooner had Petersburg discussed the scandalous details than a new sensation broke out: Cherubina de Gabriak does not exist! Elizaveta Dmitrieva, after listening to another reproach of injustice, let slip: "Cherubina is me." It turned out that the author of her letters to Apollo was Voloshin.

He also wrote the script for Cherubina's telephone conversations with Makovsky. And the disease, and Paris, and the Jesuit confessor, and even the enmity between Cherubina and Dmitrieva - all this was invented by Max. He took everything into account - except that his adored Lily herself would be poisoned by the sweet poison of Makovsky's kneeling love.

They even tried to meet - Makovsky saw how ugly his Cherubina was, and it was all over. But Lily also left Max. She said that she could no longer write poetry, she could not love either - and this was Cherubina's revenge. It seemed to her that she was an impostor, that one day the real De Gabriac would come up to her on the street and demand an answer ...

"Dumbass" are fighting

Since then, Voloshin did not seriously fall in love and did not think about marriage. But his hospitality has now reached some universal proportions! Some kind of terraces and sheds were constantly attached to the house, there were more and more "turnarounds" from summer to summer. Which caused a lot of anxiety to respectable neighbors - the family of the Koktebel landowner Deisha-Sionitskaya. This highly moral lady, in defiance of the "Order", founded the Society for the Improvement of the Village of Koktebel, and the war began!

The beautification society, concerned that the “thugs” bathe naked, men and women mixed up, installed poles on the beach with arrows in different directions: “for men” and “for women”. Voloshin personally cut these poles into firewood. The beautification society complained to the police. Voloshin explained that he considered it indecent to set up inscriptions before him, which people are accustomed to seeing only in very specific places. The court exacted a fine of several rubles from Voloshin. "Dumbass" led by Pra on a dark night staged a cat concert for Deisha-Sionitskaya.

Surprisingly, even in 1918, when leapfrog began in Feodosia with a change of power, the republic of poets and artists flourished just a dozen kilometers away. Here they received, fed and saved everyone who needed it. It was like a game of Cossack robbers: when General Sulkevich drove the Reds out of the Crimea, Voloshin hid a delegate from the underground Bolshevik congress. “Keep in mind, when you are in power, I will do the same with your enemies!” - Max promised the rescued goodbye. Under the Bolsheviks, he launched a stormy activity. Leaving the "brats" on Elena Ottobaldovna, he went to Odessa. He united local artists in a trade union with painters: "It's time to return to medieval workshops!" (For all the absurdity of the idea, in times of famine it turned out to be a real salvation for artists.) Then he set about organizing a writing workshop. He ran, beamed, negotiated with the authorities.

He appeared at the first meeting during the parade: in some kind of cassock, with a Tyrolean hat hanging over his shoulders. With small graceful steps he went to the stage: “Comrades! ..” What followed was drowned out by a wild cry and whistle: “Down with! To hell with the old, dilapidated hacks!” “You don’t understand, let’s explain ourselves,” Max fussed. The next day, the Odessa Izvestia published: "Voloshin is creeping towards us, every bastard is now in a hurry to cling to us." Discouraged Max returned to Koktebel. And since then, he did not like to leave there.

Maximilian Voloshin in Koktebel. 1927

In 1922, famine began in the Crimea, and the Voloshins had to eat eagles - they were caught in Karadag by an old neighbor woman, covering them with a skirt. Everything would be fine, but Elena Ottobaldovna began to noticeably surrender. Max even lured a paramedic for her from a neighboring village - Marusya Zabolotskaya. Marusya looked like the only inorganic element of this all-tolerant house - too ordinary, too angular, too crowded. She did not draw, did not compose poetry. But she was kind and sympathetic - she treated local peasants for free and took care of Pra until the last day.

When the 73-year-old Elena Ottobaldovna was buried in January 1923, faithful Marusya was crying next to Max. The next day she exchanged her ordinary dress for short linen trousers and an embroidered shirt. And although at the same time she lost the last signs of femininity, she became similar to Pra. Could Voloshin not marry such a woman? From now on, Marusya took care of the guests.

This house has become for bohemia the only island of freedom, light and celebration in the ocean of gray Soviet everyday life. And there were songs, and raising hands to the sky, and jokes, and an eternal battle with adherents of a dull order. Instead of the swept away story of Deisha-Sionitskaya and Voloshin, the Koktebel peasants were now at enmity - the same ones who ran to Marusa for free treatment. One day they presented Max with a bill for sheep allegedly torn apart by his dogs. The Workers' and Peasants' Court ordered Voloshin, under the threat of eviction from Koktebel, to poison the dogs.

What was it like for him, who had never hurt a fly in his entire life?! The thing is that Koktebel has become a popular resort and the locals have adapted to renting rooms to summer residents. And Voloshin, with his exorbitant hospitality, spoiled the whole business. “It’s not communist to let non-residents live for free!” - the peasants were indignant.

However, the financial inspection to Voloshin had the exact opposite claim: they did not believe in the free "station for creative people" and demanded payment of tax for the maintenance of the hotel. On August 11, 1932, at 11 am, the fifty-five-year-old Voloshin died.

He bequeathed to bury himself on the Kuchuk-Yenishar hill, which limits Koktebel on the left, just as Karadag limits it on the right. The coffin, which seemed almost square, was placed on a cart: the weight was such that the horse stood up, not reaching the top. For the last two hundred meters, friends carried Max in their arms - but the promise once given to Lila Dmitrieva was fulfilled: wherever you look, both to the right and to the left of Koktebel somehow turned out to be Max Voloshin.

Having been widowed, Marya Stepanovna Voloshina did not change the Koktebel order. She received poets, artists, just wanderers in the house. The payment for living was still love for people and making a share in intellectual life ...

Ekaterina Sweetheart

Apparently, Alexander Stalyevich Voloshin, nicknamed the "sugar loaf" in the Kremlin, was not always as bald as the Russians used to see him on television. Grannies at the entrances usually say about such people: “It’s because I got married early, my dear.”

And he really got married at 18. The marriage, however, subsequently broke up, and Voloshin finally went to work. However, a child remained from the marriage. Son. Ilya Alexandrovich. The young man, who is now 27 years old, is fond of business and computer technology. The result of these hobbies was a huge scandal that broke out a couple of years ago. It turned out that the son of the father-progenitor of Chara-bank participated in the scam. However, Ilya Alexandrovich did not follow the beaten path and did not build financial pyramids that had set the teeth on edge. Voloshin Jr. brought to the aid of the Internet.

I must say that Ilya's childhood was far from cloudless. He was born to two poor students. There was a catastrophic lack of money in a young family: Alexander's mother, an English teacher, could not throw a lot, and the 19-year-old spouses did not have the opportunity to earn money. So the family ate absolutely “like a student”. To prevent beriberi from little Ilya, Voloshin's friends, who served somewhere in the North, sent parcels with cranberries to Moscow.

The family rented a room in some creepy communal apartment. Alexander Voloshin studied at the Institute of Transport Engineers, and the scholarship was his only income. As his former classmates said, once the future head of the presidential administration, out of lack of sleep and oversight, threw a fifty kopeck instead of a nickel into a subway machine, thereby depriving the family of almost a day's food. Experiences were - for a week ...

Alexander Stalievich began to earn decent money after he met Boris Berezovsky in the late 80s (later it was BAB who betrothed a friend to the Kremlin). Then Ilya got vitamins, and branded sneakers, and new felt-tip pens. However, he saw little of his father, as he went headlong into business. Alexander Stalievich helped his friends register cooperatives, provided legal support, and compiled the necessary documents. At the same time, he opened the AK&M news agency, which is still alive today. But the most significant business projects of Voloshin Sr. were Chara-Bank and the famous AVVA - All-Russian Automobile Alliance. If you make a pyramid of citizens whose money disappeared at the same time as the bankruptcy of these enterprises, then its top will rest against the moon ...

But, as we have already said, Ilya did not increase any spiritual joy or home warmth from his father’s financial successes. A few years after the divorce, his mother settled in Europe. The father remained to live in the same apartment with an elderly mother, a teacher (he lived there until the Kremlin appointment, then moved to a government dacha), was always busy at work. Ilya spent time on planes between Europe and Moscow, and no wonder computers became his best friends.

At school, he did not shine with special talents, he did not win at the Olympiads, he was not the soul of society. On the other hand, he skipped classes with pleasure, apparently spending his free time on preparing the ground for creating his future virtual business. In IRC (Internet Relay Chat - a program that unites thousands of chats), in the #carding chat, where the main topic is credit cards, Ilya made a virtual friendship with a certain Maxx (it seems that this person chose his nickname in honor of the famous porn film production company of the same name). The virtual porn creature was able to speak Russian, which is why, in fact, the friendship happened. We started talking, then and there, well, Maxx offered Ilya to earn some money.

Part-time work was reduced to a very standard scheme. Maxx stole credit card numbers from #carding visitors (much easier than hacking online stores, where there are several degrees of protection), bought various junk online, paid from someone else's account. Purchases were sent to Moscow through a courier service. Ilya took purchases from the courier office and sold them. He cashed, so to speak, virtual money. Easier nowhere.

True, after some time the scheme failed: the owners of credit cards noticed a leak of money, became worried, turned to the right place, and Ilya was caught red-handed during the next visit to the office of the courier service.

One of the Kremlin officials, speaking of Alexander Voloshin, issued the following tirade: “Voloshin is in some sense of the word “frostbitten”. Frostbitten with a plus sign. If he believes that some decision is correct, then, without thinking about the consequences, he will order it to be executed. For example, if it occurs to him that it would be right to rebury Lenin at night, he will readily go for it. And it's better not to think about what will happen in the morning. In any case, he is not afraid of responsibility for his decisions. Ilya took the best from his father: not afraid of responsibility, he wrote a confession (at one time it was published in the Versiya newspaper):

to the Prosecutor of Moscow
From Ilya Alexandrovich Voloshin,
February 26, 1976 year of birth,
native of Moscow
registered at:
...
Sincere confession:

“In fact, I live at: ... tel. ... I have had access to the Internet since the spring of 1996. Approximately 1.5 months ago, on the IRC channel (efnet) #carding, I met a Russian-speaking Internet user using the pseudonym Maxx. 2 weeks after we met, I received an offer to work together. After the instructions, my duties included receiving and clearing the goods that would come to my address and name. I was aware of the current scheme: Maxx looked for numbers of Visa and Mastercard credit cards on the #carding channel, after which he looked for online stores on the Internet and ordered computer components to be delivered to my address ... "

They say that Voloshin Sr. scolded Ilya for the fact that he had tarnished his name at the wrong time, against the backdrop of a difficult political situation. And both, they say, were very worried - each for his own reasons. Ilya, they say, after this incident was exiled to his mother, abroad, away from sin.

And history, of course, hushed up.

The poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin, who was expelled from the university, surprised his contemporaries with the versatility of his interests. The creator, who knew how to conclude the passions raging inside, within the framework of the poetic genre, in addition to painting and poetry, wrote critical articles, was engaged in translations, and was also fond of astronomical and meteorological observations.

From the beginning of 1917, his bright life, full of turbulent events and various meetings, concentrated in Russia. The literary evenings held by the writer in the house he personally built in Koktebel were repeatedly attended by his son, Nikolai, and, and, and even.

Childhood and youth

Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin was born on May 16, 1877 in Kyiv. The poet's mother Elena Ottobaldovna was a strong-willed and original woman. Shortly after the birth of her son, she separated from her husband. In Max, the woman wanted to bring up a fighting character, and the boy grew up, as Marina Tsvetaeva later said about him, “without claws”, he was peaceful and friendly to everyone.

Maximilian Voloshin in childhood with his mother

It is known that in Koktebel, where Voloshin moved with his mother at the age of 16, Elena even hired the surrounding boys to challenge Maximilian to a fight. The mother welcomed her son's interest in the occult and was not at all upset that he always stayed in the gymnasium for the second year. One of Max's teachers once said that it was impossible to teach anything to an idiot. Less than six months later, at the funeral of that same teacher, Voloshin recited his wonderful poems.

Although the writer from 1897 to 1899 was a student at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and regularly attended lectures, he already acquired his surprisingly versatile knowledge on his own. From the biography of the publicist, it is known that Maximilian never managed to get a diploma. Expelled for participating in the riots, the guy decided not to continue his studies and engage in self-education.

Literature

Voloshin's first book, Poems, was published in 1910. In the works included in the collection, the author's desire to know the fate of the world and the history of mankind as a whole was clearly traced. In 1916, the writer published a collection of anti-war poems "Anno mundi ardentis" ("In the year of the burning world"). In the same year, he firmly settled in his beloved Koktebel, to which he later dedicated a couple of sonnets.

In 1918 and 1919, two of his new books of poetry were published - "Iverny" and "Deaf and Dumb Demons". In each line, the hand of a writer is invariably felt. Particularly colorful are Voloshin's poems dedicated to the nature of the Eastern Crimea.

Since 1903, Voloshin has been publishing his reports in the journal "Vesy" and the newspaper "Rus". In the future, he writes articles on painting and poetry for the magazines "Golden Fleece", "Apollo", the newspapers "Russian Art Chronicle" and "Morning of Russia". The total volume of works, which to this day have not lost their value, is more than one volume.

In 1913, in connection with the sensational attempt on the painting "and his son Ivan", Voloshin spoke out against naturalism in art by publishing the pamphlet "About Repin". And although after that the editorial offices of most magazines closed their doors to him, considering the work an attack against the artist revered by the public, in 1914 a book of articles by Maximilian "Faces of Creativity" was published.

Painting

Voloshin took up painting in order to professionally judge the fine arts. In the summer of 1913, he mastered the tempera technique, and the following year he painted his first sketches in watercolor (“Spain. By the Sea”, “Paris. Place de la Concorde at night”). Poor quality watercolor paper taught Voloshin to work immediately in the right tone, without corrections and blots.

Painting by Maximilian Voloshin "Bible Land"

Each new work of Maximilian carried a particle of wisdom and love. Creating paintings, the artist thought about the relationship of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire) and about the deep meaning of the cosmos. Each landscape painted by Maximilian retained its density and texture and remained translucent even on canvas (“Landscape with a lake and mountains”, “Pink twilight”, “Hills parched by heat”, “Moon whirlwind”, “Lead light”).

Painting by Maximilian Voloshin "Kara-Dag in the clouds"

Maximilian was inspired by the classical works of Japanese painters, as well as the paintings of his friend, the Feodosia artist Konstantin Bogaevsky, whose illustrations adorned the first Voloshin collection of poems in 1910. Along with Emmanuil Magdesyan and Lev Lagorio, Voloshin is today considered to be a representative of the Cimmerian school of painting.

Personal life

Fullness, combined with small stature and a rebellious mane of hair on his head, created a deceptive impression in the opposite sex about Voloshin's male failure. Women next to an eccentric writer felt safe and believed that it was not shameful to invite a writer who did not look like a real man to rub his back with him to the bathhouse.

Throughout his life, Voloshin used this delusion, replenishing his amorous piggy bank with new names. The critic's first wife was the artist Margarita Sabashnikova. Their romance began in Paris. Young people attended lectures at the Sorbonne, at one of which the writer noticed the girl, like two peas in a pod, similar to Queen Taiah.

On the day they met, the writer took the chosen one to the museum and showed her the statue of the ruler of Egypt. In letters to friends, Maximilian admitted that he could not believe that Margarita - real man from flesh and blood. Friends in response messages jokingly asked the amorous poet not to marry a young lady from alabaster.

After the wedding, which took place in 1906, the lovers moved to St. Petersburg. Their neighbor was the popular poet Vyacheslav Ivanov. Symbolists gathered in the writer's apartment every week. Voloshin and his wife were also frequent guests. While Maximilian enthusiastically recited, argued and quoted, his missus conducted quiet conversations with Ivanov. In conversations, Margarita repeatedly stated that, in her view, the life of a true artist should be permeated with drama and that friendly couples are not in fashion today.

During the period when Vyacheslav and Margarita were just beginning to have romantic feelings, Voloshin fell in love with the playwright Elizaveta Dmitrieva, with whom he composed a very successful literary hoax in 1909 - the mysterious Catholic beauty Cherubina de Gabriac, whose works were published in the Apollon magazine.

The hoax lasted only 3 months, then Cherubina was exposed. In November of the same year, who at one time introduced Dmitrieva to Voloshin, under Maximilian impartially spoke out on the side of the poetess, for which he immediately received a slap in the face from the author of the poem "Venice".

As a result, an ugly lame-legged girl became the reason why Voloshin and Gumilyov had a duel on the Black River. After a scandalous duel, during which miraculously no one was hurt, Maximilian's wife informed her husband, immersed in a pool of amorous passions, about her intention to divorce. As it turned out later, Ivanov's wife invited Margarita to live together, and she agreed.

In 1922, a famine began in the Crimea. The publicist's mother, Elena Ottobaldovna, began to noticeably fail. Max lured paramedic Maria Zabolotskaya for his beloved parent from a neighboring village. It was this kind and sympathetic woman, who stood beside him during his mother's funeral, that he married in March 1927.

And although the spouses did not succeed in having children, Maria Stepanovna was next to the writer both in joy and in sorrow until his death. Having been widowed, she did not change the Koktebel order and also continued to receive wandering poets and artists in Voloshin's house.

Death

The last years of the poet's life were full of work - Maximilian wrote a lot and painted with watercolors. In July 1932, asthma, which had long bothered the publicist, was complicated by influenza and pneumonia. Voloshin died after a stroke on August 11, 1932. His grave is located on the mountain Kuchuk-Yanyshar located a couple of kilometers from Koktebel.

After the death of the eminent writer, the sculptor Sergei Merkurov, who created the death masks, and, took a cast from the face of the deceased Voloshin. The writer's wife, Maria Zabolotskaya, managed to preserve the creative heritage of her beloved husband. Thanks to her efforts, in August 1984, Maximilian's house located in the Crimea received the status of a museum.

Bibliography

• 1899 - "Venice"
• 1900 - "Acropolis"
• 1904 - “I walked through the night. And the flame of pale death ... "
• 1905 - "Taiah"
• 1906 - "Angel of Vengeance"
• 1911 - "Edward Wittig"
• 1915 - "Paris"
• 1915 - "Spring"
• 1917 - "The Capture of the Tuileries"
• 1917 - "Holy Rus'"
• 1919 - "Writing about the Tsars of Moscow"
• 1919 - "Kitezh"
• 1922 - "The Sword"
• 1922 - Steam
• 1924 - "Anchutka"

Corporations willingly hire the offspring of influential officials. The son of the former head of the presidential administration and chairman of the board of directors of RAO UES, Alexander Voloshin, works at Konversbank, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, at Gazprombank. Children are not hired to please their parents, say the banks.

One of the clients of Conversbank told how he ran into Voloshin Jr. in the bank's office. “He is so similar to his father in appearance and manner. Later they confirmed to me that this is really him, ”says the interlocutor of Vedomosti.

Ilya Voloshin, 29, has been working as Vice President of Converse Bank for six months. “Once I came to Rosbank to get a loan for my business. They recommended contacting Konversbank,” Ilya Voloshin describes the history of his employment. What kind of business the banker managed to build, it does not apply. So he got acquainted with the chairman of the board of Conversbank, Maxim Druzhinin, who involved Voloshin in his team. Druzhinin, according to him, in Voloshin was attracted by his London education and extensive connections that could provide the bank with an influx of customers. Voloshin Jr. is an experienced financier. Back in 1996, he worked as a securities trader at the Eurotrust bank, then at the AK&M news agency, founded by Voloshin Sr. “He was not a workaholic, but he did not allow liberties,” the agency employees agreed. Vice-President of the Investment Promenergobank Vladimir Talaver notes that Voloshin Jr. is characterized by attentiveness and the ability to build “interesting business schemes”. “We are satisfied with his work as vice president for client business,” Alexander Antonov, chairman of the board of directors of the bank, assured.

Corporations and banks willingly hire the offspring of high-ranking parents. The son of the current prime minister, Pyotr Fradkov, works as deputy director of the Far Eastern Shipping Company. Sergei Ivanov, the son of the Minister of Defense, is a vice-president of Gazprombank, the same post at VTB is held by Sergei Matvienko, the son of the governor of St. Petersburg. The Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Russian Agricultural Bank is Arkady Kulik, the son of the former Deputy Prime Minister and well-known deputy […]

How much they pay the children of officials, the bankers do not say. The remuneration of the vice president for client business of a medium-sized bank the size of Converse is $150,000 per year plus a bonus, states Igor Shekhterman from RosExpert. But the issue of compensation for the “wedding general” is always decided on an individual basis, he warns.

A close acquaintance of the Voloshin family says that Voloshin Sr. did not participate in the employment of his son: “He did not interfere in this, and in general I doubt that he knows well about the bank where Ilya works.” “I decide these issues myself,” Ilya confirms.

VTB does not comment on the situation, and a representative of Gazprombank said that the bank is satisfied with the work of its vice president. “Kinship ties are not among the criteria for hiring,” concludes a representative of the bank.

Vasily Kudinov, Ekaterina Derbilova