Семён Петрович Гудзенко ― Semyon Gudzenko

ГУДЗЕНКО

Мы оба с ним из Киева,
С Тарасовской улицы,
Которая сверху — с Паньковской —
Льва Толстого —
Падает вниз к Жилянской.
До тупика —
Каменным водопадом.
Зелень и камень рядом.
С этого можно начать
Повесть нашего бытия.
Он — в доме пять,
В доме двенадцать — я.
На этой улице жили
Ушинский, Волошин, Ахматова, Бах,
Основоположник нашей биохимии.
Дом, где жил я, принадлежал
Румяному и насмешливому
Поляку Шимону Гонтковскому,
Здесь жил старый священник Светлов,
Гонимый советской властью.
О Гудзенко мне говорили сестры:
— Рядом живет один школьник,
Пишет стихи, как ты...
Встретились мы не скоро —
В Москве, в ИФЛИ,
В институтских коридорах.
Оба ярились в спорах.
Я завершал институт,
Он начинал.
Мы читали друг другу стихи
И, гуляя в Сокольниках,
Говорили о Хлебникове и Багрицком,
О Бабеле и Зенкевиче.
Нас породнила поэзия.
На войну он ушел из ИФЛИ,
Как потом написал об этом.
Сперва был слагателем стихов,
Потом на войне стал поэтом.
Я встретил его на Маросейке —
Перебинтованного, неузнаваемого,
После ранения.
Обнялись, условясь о встрече.
Он ушел в военную газету.
Он и меня позвал в газету
«Победа за нами».
— Писал пейзажи — пиши заметки,
Лозунги, подтекстовки,
А захочешь — поэмы.
Да, очерки о солдатах,
О памятных датах.
Иногда Семен говорил:
— Кажется, ты умеешь... —
Младший хвалил старшего.
Семена ранили.
В госпитале он не вылежал.
«Я был пехотой в поле чистом,
В грязи окопной и в огне,
Я стал военным журналистом
В последний год на той войне».
Красив, непоседлив, удачлив,
Он возникал то тут, то там,
С армией шел, по ее пятам,
В глазах азарт,
Презренье к смерти.
Мы жили как братья,
Приходилось бывать с ним в поездках.
Вещи внесли в гостиничный номер,
Семен поспешает на рынок:
Среди мисок и крынок,
Среди смачного хруста
Свежей капусты,
Среди шипящих жаровень,
Среди серебристых селедок,
Среди медных тазов,
Среди золотистых дынь —
Зелень, песок, синь —
В переборе гитарных струн
Был он весел и юн.
Таков Семен.
После войны
Он бывал в Закарпатье,
Бывал в Туве,
В песках Туркестана,
В дальнем гарнизоне,
И много писал,
И был замечен
Сперва Эренбургом,
Потом Антокольским и Щипачевым,
Удача следовала за ним.
И надо же — старые раны заныли,
Ушиб головы,
Было такое — выпал из «виллиса».
Он и не удивился.
«Мы не от старости умрем,
От старых ран умрем».
Поэтам нельзя говорить о смерти,
Своей, конечно, а не чужой.
Стихами они накликают смерть.
Семен положен в больницу Бурденко,
Чародея и мага нейрохирурга.
Пинцетом проникнуть в мозг! —
Это непостижимо.
Сперва удача, надежда.
Мы приходили
И успокаивали Семена.
— Бобик испекся! —
Он говорил.
Он не желал обманываться,
Не умел обманывать,
Характер поэта,
Повадка солдата.
Я говорил с ним недолго,
По-братски,
И сумел его, кажется,
Не то чтобы успокоить,
Отвлечь на мгновенье,
И он об этом
Сказал матери
Ольге Исаевне.
Каждый день мы стояли внизу
В большом вестибюле
И наблюдали за тем, как сходит
Ольга Исаевна по ступеням.
Сейчас она не одна сходила,
Ее вели под руки двое.
Она едва волочила ноги.
Спрашивать не было смысла.
Мы с ней дружили,
Мать считала,
Что у нее несколько сыновей
Вместо двух рано умерших,
Вместо двух, потерянных ею.
Когда на душе бывает дурно,
Непроходимо порой бывает,
Я вспоминаю Ольгу Исаевну,
Пережившую двух сыновей
И оставшуюся человеком
Среди людей.

Лев Озеров, Портреты без рам (1999)

SEMYON PETROVICH GUDZENKO

We were both from Kyiv,
from Tarasovskaya Street,
which rolls
like a stone waterfall
down from Pankovskaya
and Leo Tolstoy Streets
before stopping abruptly
when it reaches Zhilyanskaya.
Verdure and stone,
cheek by jowl—
so begins
the story of our lives.
He grew up at house no. 5,
I lived at no. 12.
Konstantin Ushinsky, Maximilian Voloshin,
Anna Akhmatova, and Alexey Bach
had also
all lived on this street.¹
Our landlord was a ruddy
and sardonic Pole
called Szymon Gątkowski.
The building had also been home
to Svetlov, the old theologian
hounded relentlessly
by the Soviet authorities.²
One day, my sisters told me
about a very talented young schoolboy
whose family lived just down the street.
We met for the first time
there on Tarasovskaya, but it was a while
before we met again—
this time in Moscow, in the corridors
of the Literary Institute.
I was in my last year,
he in his first.
We would stroll through Sokolniki Park,
reciting poems to each other
and talking of Khlebnikov and Bagritsky,
of Babel and Zenkevich.³
Yes, we were brothers in poetry.
He went from the institute
straight to the front,
as he recounted later.
He’d written verse before,
but it was the war
made him a poet.
I ran into him in Moscow, on Maroseyka,
bandaged, unrecognizable.
We embraced
and agreed on a time and place
we could meet again.
He went to work for an army newspaper,
Victory Shall Be Ours,
and asked me to join him:
“You wrote idylls,
now you must write articles,
slogans, captions—
even poems, if you like—
and stories about soldiers,
great battles in history.”
Sometimes, Semyon would say,
“I think you’ve got it . . .”
The freshman praising the senior.
Semyon had been severely wounded
and had left the hospital too early.
“I was a soldier fighting with my comrades
in muddy trenches, under fire;
Then I became a frontline correspondent
to cover the war’s last year.”
Handsome, restless—he seemed so lucky,
showing up everywhere,
going forward with the first of our soldiers,
a spark of daring in his eyes,
and a contempt for death.
We were not family,
yet we were brothers.
I went on trips with him.
Soon as we’d brought our bags up
to our room, Semyon would dash out
to the market. He loved
to wander amid bowls and pots,
amid the luscious crunch of fresh,
crisp cabbage, hissing braziers,
silvery herring, big copper tubs,
and golden melons—
greens, sandy yellows, blues.
He was happy and young
to the sound of guitar strings.
After the war he went to Transcarpathia,
to Tuva, and to the sands
of Turkestan, to the Faraway Garrison
of his long poem.⁴
He wrote and wrote;
Ehrenburg noticed him,
then Antokolsky and Shchipachov.
Success followed him.
But—as fate would have it—
his old wounds began to ache.
A head injury
(during the war
he’d fallen from a jeep).
To him it was no surprise:
“Old age won’t kill us,
Our old wounds will kill us.”
Poets should never speak of death—
not of their own, I mean.
Poems like that tempt fate.
They took Semyon to the institute
founded by Burdenko,
that miracle worker of a neurosurgeon.
Their tweezers touched his brain;
at first—success, and hope.
We came to visit him,
to help and encourage him.
“My bean is baked,”
he said to us.
He didn’t want to be deceived
and could not lie—the way
of a poet, the way
of a soldier. We spoke
for just a while, like brothers,
and though I could hardly
encourage him,
I was able, for a moment,
to distract him. So he later said
to his mother, Olga Isaevna.
We waited every day
in the clinic’s large lobby,
and watched Olga Isaevna
come down the stairs.
And then one day
she couldn’t
manage the stairs alone;
with two men supporting her,
she could barely drag her feet along.
All
too clear.
She and I were close.
She felt
that she had several sons,
not just the two she’d lost,
who had died so young.
When I am sick at heart,
when I think I can’t bear it,
I remember Olga Isaevna,
who outlived her two sons
yet never gave up
being
a human being.

Lev Ozerov, Portraits without Frames (2018)

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk Борис Дралюк

¹ Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky is considered the founder of scientific pedagogy in Russia. Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin was a major symbolist poet from Kyiv; after many years of living abroad, he settled in Koktebel, Crimea, and wrote his greatest poems in the years surrounding the Revolution and the Civil War. Alexey Nikolayevich Bach was a leading Russian and Soviet biochemist and plant biologist. Recent research shows that Voloshin did not actually live on the street, although many people still believe he did.
² Pavel Yakovlevich Svetlov was an important Orthodox theologian and a professor at Kyiv University; he lost his post after the Revolution of 1917 and was severely persecuted for the rest of his life.
³ Eduard Bagritsky (né Dzyubin) was a Jewish poet from Odessa whose heroic lyrics and ballads were popular in the years after the Revolution. Bagritsky’s son Vsevolod was also a poet; he was killed in 1942. Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich began as an Acmeist, alongside Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilyov, and later became a leading Soviet poet and translator.
⁴ A reference to Faraway Garrison (1950), Gudzenko’s long poem about soldiers in Turkestan.