Geniuses of the place. Irina Odoevtseva. Summer shoes in a bag

Returning to Russia at the dawn of perestroika, she connected our everyday life with the distant, almost unreal Silver Age. And she also drew a line under this century, passing away a few years later. This is already enough for her name to be inscribed in the history of literature.

"NINETEEN YEARS OF JASMIN"

The sensational memoirs connect Odoevtseva with the Neva and the Seine, but its first river was the Daugava, the Western Dvina, on the banks of which it was born in ... This is where the riddles begin. Reference books give her date of birth as July 1895, but she herself different time I was talking about March or September. And in Petrograd in the early 20s, having entered the creative environment, she reduced herself to six years and wrote in verse about "nineteen jasmine years." Already in her old age, she claimed that she aged herself on purpose in order to get with her husband to a nursing home.

It is difficult to find out the truth - Irina Odoevtseva's metric has not yet been found in the archives.

More precisely, Iraida Gustavovna Geinike, as her real name was. Father Gustav-Adolf Traugotovich was a Livonian German, his mother was the daughter of a Russian merchant. The poetess claimed that her name was Irina Odoevtseva, from which the pseudonym of her daughter allegedly came from. But it is quite possible that Irina-Iraida invented the pseudonym herself: in her memoirs she shamelessly misrepresented dates, names, lines of poetry...

"I write not about myself, but about those whom I was given to know ...". She did it so brightly and with such love that mistakes can be forgiven.

SUMMER SHOES IN A BAG

Her creative nature was torn to the capital. And early marriage in quiet Riga promised the traditional triad "kinder - kuche - kirche". And if it weren't for the First World War... With the approach of the front, the family moved to Petrograd, having bought a large apartment on Basseinaya Street (now Nekrasov Street). True, her husband Sergei Popov got lost somewhere along the way ...

“A good man ... then married his mistress, whose husband shot himself,” she would drop indifferently many years later in her memoirs. Formally, they divorced only in 1921, and communicated later, she even dedicated the first collection of poems "Court of Miracles" to him. But in the boil of the revolution, Irina was captured not at all by family passions.

"I write not about myself, but about those whom I was given to know..."

Performances, concerts, poetry readings went on in a continuous series, despite the war, and then the revolution. It was only in 1918 that the Petrograd intelligentsia discovered that food had disappeared from the stores, the houses had ceased to be heated and illuminated, and the capital was suddenly transferred to Moscow.

But life has become even more interesting!

Irina did not remember what she ate or ate at all. Together with her friends, she ran to balls in huge unheated mansions, fearlessly wandered around the city at night in her mother's fur coat and felt boots, with a bag in which the only summer shoes lay. To stand out from the background of others, she wore a large black bow ( "I'm a little poetess with a huge bow"- perhaps her most famous lines). But even without a bow, she was adorned with red curls and slightly squinting green eyes, because of which she compared herself to a cat all her life.

The father returned to Latvia, which became independent, the mother died of typhus, two dozen guests were moved into their Petrograd apartment, leaving Irina - the "bourgeois woman" - the smallest room. But she never complained, cheered up and encouraged others to the best of her ability. And in any company her bursting laughter sounded.

Some random guest wondered for a long time where they poured it: "This girl definitely pecked, you won't be so cheerful without wine!"

GUMILEV'S FIRST STUDENT

At the end of 1918, she signed up for classes at the Living Word Institute. I went to the first lecture of Nikolai Gumilyov with bated breath: a hero, a lion hunter, the husband of Anna Akhmatova. And she froze: how ugly he is, how he does not look like a poet! Gumilyov sat straight as a stick, and in a wooden voice said that poetry is the same science as mathematics, and that it cannot be learned without reading Kara's multi-volume "Naturphilosophy".

Then it turned out that this was his first lecture in his life, and out of fear he said everything that came to mind.

She decided to show the master her poems, of course, weak and imitative, and he mercilessly scolded them. She cried, decided not to go to Gumilyov's classes, but in the end she admitted he was right and burned the notebook with poems in the stove. And then the day came when the mentor praised her. And a few days later, having met after class, he offered to conduct. By that time, he had broken up with Akhmatova, married Anna Engelhardt and sent his wife and little daughter to their relatives in Bezhetsk.

Since then, the teacher and student constantly walked together. She visited Gumilyov on Preobrazhenskaya more than once. "Write a ballad about me," he once asked; she will fulfill this request much later, in Paris. Another time he predicted: "You will soon be famous."

Gumilyov introduced her to all Petersburg celebrities, from Blok to Mandelstam. And only Akhmatova took up arms against Odoevtseva, until the end of her life called her an intriguer and mediocrity, assured that Gumilyov courted her exclusively in defiance ex-wife: "In fact, he did not love anyone but me."

Gumilyov really perceived Irina more as a friend, and she was not passionate about him: "As a man, he was not attractive to me." But they didn't really believe in it. Anna Engelhardt was also alarmed and, after her husband's death, she considered it necessary to assert her rights: "I am a widow, and she is only the first student!"

Everyone called her the first student of Gumilyov, and Korney Chukovsky even suggested that she wear a poster with these words around her neck.

She herself admitted: “I was always saved by my character. I am by nature happy man. Usually they talk about happiness either in the past or in the future tense. I feel the fullness of life always."

MEETING WITH GEORGY IVANOV

The famous poet Georgy Ivanov in his memoirs made up even more about himself than Odoevtseva. But it was he who helped her become famous. In April 1920, at Gumilyov's apartment, his students read poetry to Andrei Bely, who had arrived from Europe. Odoevtseva's teacher suggested reading "The Ballad of Crushed Glass" - a scary story about a merchant who sold crushed glass instead of salt and was punished for this by otherworldly forces. Moreover, earlier the master rejected this simple, almost childish thing in style, hiding it in a folder called "The mass grave of losers." And now I got it from there...

Odoevtseva, stammering with fear, read it. And Ivanov, who was present at the party, suddenly burst into stormy compliments: "You yourself wrote this?! It can't be! This is what is needed now - a modern ballad!"

He also reproduced praise in the press, after which Odoevtseva woke up famous. Georgy Adamovich recalled: “Who among those who attended then Petersburg literary meetings does not remember on the stage a slender, blond, young woman, almost a girl with a huge black bow in her hair, singsong, cheerfully and hastily, slightly grassing, reading poetry, making everyone smile without exceptions, even people who lost the habit of smiling in those years?

All I had was luck, fun
And the guiding star is fate.
Glory touched fleetingly
My semi-childish forehead...

Now Ivanov was escorting her home. Gumilyov endured this in silence. Yes, and he was fascinated by not personal affairs. And then came August 1921, black for literary Petrograd: first Blok's funeral, then a memorial service for Gumilyov, who was shot and buried in an unknown place. And the following month, Odoevtseva became the wife of Georgy Ivanov.

Many years later, she will write: “If I were asked which of the people I met in my life I consider the most wonderful, it would be difficult for me to answer - there were too many of them. But I know for sure that Georgy Ivanov was one of the most wonderful of them ".

"YOU SUDDENLY WENT OUT, Merry and Alive..."

Ivanov was among those who voluntarily followed those who were forcibly deported from Russia on the "philosophical ship". Abroad, Irina Odoevtseva met those whom she did not have time to recognize at home - Balmont, Igor Severyanin, Sergei Yesenin ... The couple rented two rooms in the center of Paris, having no other worries than taking care of each other. George, true to his habit, did not work. The money that the wealthy Gustav Geinike sent from Riga was quickly squandered by the mismanaged couple. Irina had to take over the maintenance of a small family.

Once in Riga, she proudly declared to the publisher of the newspaper "Segodnya" Milrud: "I am the poet Irina Odoevtseva and I do not write stories!" In Paris, I had to part with pride. From 1926, she abandoned poetry and began to write stories. One of the first, "The Shooting Star", was liked by Bunin, who was stingy with praise, who added in a conversation: "They say that this Odoevtseva charm is so pretty." The stories were followed by novels - "Angel of Death", "Isolde", "Mirror", scolded by critics. Anglophile Nabokov reproached that the author does not know English life (and how should she know?). Milyukov, with all the strictness of the Cadet, declared: "It's time to tell the talented young writer what's next - a dead end." Mark Slonim noted that she "cannot keep on the line separating tabloid literature from mere literature"...

From 1926, she abandoned poetry and began to write stories. One of the first, "The Shooting Star", was liked by Bunin, who was stingy with praise

However, emigrants, especially women, willingly read her novels. She changed herself in a European manner, turning from a curly doll with a bow into a short-haired "lady vamp" from Hollywood films. Nabokov quipped that she did not distinguish golf from bridge - to spite him, she mastered both of these games.

In 1932 her father died, leaving his daughter great fortune. Tired of poverty, the spouses rent a huge apartment in the Bois de Boulogne area, buy furniture and gold, and travel around the world. And this is where longing falls on them - either for their homeland, or for a bygone youth ...

It was during these years that Ivanov wrote his most hopeless poems and scandalous memoirs, because of which many pillars of emigration turned away from him. With the arrival of the Germans, Ivanov and Odoevtsev, like many others, fled from Paris to the south, to the resort of Biaritz, where they continued to live in grand style. Rumors spread that they hosted German officers and drank with them to the victory of Germany. Ivanov then denied this ...

He did not wait for gratitude from the Nazis - they took away a villa in Biaritz, forcing the spouses to huddle in a beach house. The Paris apartment was destroyed by an American bomb, and after the liberation of the capital, they settled in the Angleterre Hotel. Ivanov was nominated for Nobel Prize as the best Russian poet, but without success (soon another Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, received it). From longing, he began to drink - "food is too expensive, and wine is always available."

Years passed, forces and money diminished. They settled in the cheapest hotel, Odoevtseva fell ill from dampness. On the advice of doctors, the couple moved to a boarding house in the southern town of Hyeres, where Spanish emigrants lived out their lives. True to herself, she saw only light here: “Life was good in the nursing home, and even festive…” But Georgy Ivanov’s heart ached from the heat, but for the sake of his wife he stayed in Hyeres.

In his "Posthumous Diary" most of the poems are dedicated to Odoevtseva: "I don't even dare to remember how lovely you were..."

He died in August 1958, having written two testamentary letters before his death: to emigrants and to the Soviet government. Both have one request: take care of his widow, who "never had anti-Soviet views."

She dedicated a penetrating poem to his memory:

A tear slips from under tired eyelids,
Coins jingle on a church platter.
Whatever one prays for
He certainly prays for a miracle:
So that twice two suddenly turned out to be five
And the straw suddenly blossomed with roses,
To come home again
Although there is neither "at home" nor at home.
So that from under the mound with grave grass
You came out suddenly, cheerful and alive.

RETURN TO RUSSIA

After burying her husband, Odoevtseva moved to another almshouse - Gagny in the suburbs of Paris. There, at the insistence of a poet friend Yuri Terapiano, she wrote and in 1967 published the first book of her memoirs, On the Banks of the Seine. There she met her third husband.

Yakov Gorbov, her peer, a former tsarist officer, worked as a taxi driver in Paris, volunteered for the French army during the war years, was seriously wounded and captured. His life was allegedly saved by a book that he always wore on his chest and which was pierced by a bullet - Odoevtseva's novel "Isolde" (true, and we only know about this from her). He was treated in a nursing home, and lived in his apartment on Casablanca Street. Irina Vladimirovna settled there, deciding to warm with care last years his faithful admirer. They lived together for a little over three years; in 1981 Gorbov died, she was left alone again. Two years later, a second book of memoirs appeared, which did not arouse interest in France. But both volumes were read avidly in the USSR - along with other contraband dissident literature.

That is why, at the beginning of perestroika, the journalist Anna Kolonitskaya, once in Paris, first of all rushed to look for Odoevtseva. And, finally, she heard a muffled grazing voice in the receiver: "Come, of course, just open the door yourself - the key is under the rug." Odoevtseva was bedridden after a hip fracture and several unsuccessful surgeries. After listening to the guest, she threw up her hands: "My God, you must be an angel! Let me touch you so that I believe."

Anna immediately suggested that she return to her homeland, but it was easier said than done. Alexander Sabov, staff correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta in Paris, who broke through the first publication about the poetess...

In April 1987, the 92-year-old poetess was put on a Paris-Leningrad plane. In the city of silver youth, an enthusiastic reception awaited her, the city authorities allocated an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, provided a pension and medical care. Both books of Irina Odoevtseva's memoirs were published quite quickly - with censorship exceptions, but in such circulations (250 and 500 thousand!), Which could not even be imagined in the West. She hoped to publish her poems and novels, to finish the third book of memoirs, begun in Paris, "On the Shores of Lethe" ...

Listening to political debates on the radio (she did not have a television), she asked with concern: am I really back to witness a new revolution? That's why I preferred to live in the past. Literary critic N. Kyakshto wrote: "She managed to recreate in her house the atmosphere of a literary salon of the Silver or post-Silver Age: young writers, artists, aspiring poets, people who were simply interested in art came to visit her - she opened her heart to everyone, delighted and inspired everyone" .

In recent years, Odoevtseva did not see well, at times she started talking, but she retained her usual love of life. A few weeks before her death, Anna Kolonitskaya (who wrote a book of memoirs about her "Everything is Pure for a Clear View"), at the request of one of her biographers, asked in what order Gumilev lived with his two lovers. Irina Vladimirovna laughed and answered with her unique grazing: "At the same time, Anya! At the same time!"

PS She died on October 14, 1990 and was buried without any fuss at the Volkovo cemetery. Having gone to the banks of her last river, she left us living portraits of her contemporaries, against which her own reflection is almost invisible. Always admired by others, always dissatisfied with herself - maybe she was pleased with just such an outcome:

"I DISAPPEARED. I AM A POEM..."

Irina Odoevtseva

"I'm a little poetess with a huge bow"

Poetess Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva (real name - Iraida Gustavovna Geinike) was born in Riga on July 15 (27), 1895 in the family of a lawyer. She was a member of the "Workshop of Poets" and a student of Nikolai Gumilyov. In 1921, according to her memoirs, she married Georgy Ivanov. According to other information, they officially got married only in 1931, in Riga. In 1922, the poetess emigrated and spent most of her life in Paris. Odoevtseva was familiar with many cultural figures Silver Age and Parisian emigration. The heroes of her memoirs are Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Ivan Bunin and many others. In 1987, Irina Odoevtseva returned to the USSR, to Leningrad. She passed away on October 14, 1990. She was buried at the Volkovsky Orthodox Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

In her youth, and throughout her life, Irina Odoevtseva was an exceptionally strong and at the same time completely charming woman - a thin, graceful blonde. Men admired and adored her, and some ladies of the poetic world did not like her, simply envied her. After the death of her father, a well-known Riga lawyer, Irina Odoevtseva received a significant inheritance. The wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam (according to rumors!) once mentioned that Georgy Ivanov married her because of money. However, Irina Vladimirovna used to say that Nadezhda Mandelstam was the only person whom she did not really like!

The caustic Zinaida Gippius did not speak very fondly of Odoevtseva either. According to Andrey Ardov, one of the greatest experts in the work of Georgy Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva, “Gippius’s obvious dislike for Odoevtseva (who also passed on to her husband) at that time had a lining where as“ uninteresting ””. On December 1, 1939, Gippius wrote from Biarritz to a close acquaintance, the Swedish theosophical artist Greeta Gerell: “I confess to you that I sometimes envy Ivanov and Pigalitsa, rich and worthless, envy, despising myself, as well as herself.” Envy, simple envy.

On April 30, 1920, a literary reception took place in the apartment of Nikolai Gumilyov in honor of Andrei Bely, who arrived in Petrograd. Among those invited was Irina Odoevtseva, and soon the belated Georgy Ivanov appeared. Gumilyov asked Odoevtseva to read her poems. She, excited, did not know what to choose. Then Gumilyov suggested "The Ballad of Crushed Glass". A few months ago, he himself rejected it and hid it in a folder with the inscription "Common Grave of Losers"! But the excitement passed, and Odoevtseva began to read. An eerie story about a soldier who decided to earn extra money on crushed glass mixed with salt and was mystically punished for the death of his fellow villagers shocked those present both with the content and the original form of an extremely simplified verse. “Now every dog ​​will know you,” summed up Gumilyov.

At that reception, when her literary fame came to Irina Odoevtseva, she first saw Georgy Ivanov, who became her love. Nikolai Gumilyov himself introduced Ivanov to Odoevtseva: “The youngest member of the Poets' Guild and the most witty, he is called “public opinion”, he conscientiously creates and destroys reputations. Try to please him." Odoevtseva wrote about their first meeting: “I silently offer my hand to Georgy Ivanov. For the first time in my life. No. Without any premonition." The student fulfilled and even exceeded Gumilyov's advice. Ivanov liked her so much that he, “the destroyer and creator of reputations,” proclaimed the “Ballad” a “literary event” and “a new word in poetry,” and declared Odoevtseva herself the pioneer of the modern ballad genre.

They joined in Petrograd on September 10, 1921, to live together for 37 years, until his last day. Irina Odoevtseva moved from Basseynaya to him at Pochtamtskaya, to an apartment that Georgy Ivanov unwittingly shared with the poet Georgy Adamovich. In the evenings, she climbed with her feet on the sofa, on the left - one Georgy, her husband, in his favorite position, with his leg bent, on the right - the second, Adamovich. She - silently, they - thinking aloud about things deeply filled with mysticism. It fascinated her, she felt attached to the highest spiritual knowledge.

Irina Odoevtseva met Gumilyov, her literary teacher, much earlier, at the Living Word lectures held at the Tenishevsky School. Later, when Irina had already become “Odoevtseva, his student,” as Gumilyov proudly called her, he laughingly admitted what suffering this first “ill-fated” lecture on poetry in his life was for him! Odoevtseva did not consider her poems something outstanding, she never dreamed of fame. Her poem, which ended with the stanza, enjoyed the greatest success:

Neither Gumilyov nor the evil press

Don't call me talent

I am a little poet

With a huge bow.

From the memoirs of Odoevtseva “On the Banks of the Neva”: “How did our friendship with Gumilyov begin? But can our relationship be called friendship? After all, friendship presupposes equality. And there was no equality between us and could not be. I never forgot that he was my teacher, and he himself never forgot about it. I am walking next to Gumilyov. I think only about how not to stumble, not to fall. It seems to me that my legs are incredibly lengthened, as if I, as in childhood, walk on stilts. Wings behind? No, that first day I didn't feel wings or the ability to fly. All this was, but then, not today, not now. Gumilyov then accompanied Odoevtseva home for the first time. She was so nervous that she blushed and was unable to move from horror! “You are nervous, and even too much,” he said then.

They often met, discussed literature, poetry and philosophy. Gumilyov often teased the beginning poetess. Once, going to a literary evening, he said: "I will put on a tailcoat to adequately celebrate Pushkin's triumph." To a surprised look, Odoevtseva continued: “Now it is clear that you have not been to Paris. There, at literary conferences, everyone is more or less in tailcoats and tuxedos.” Odoevtseva thought: “After all, we are not in Paris, but in St. Petersburg. Yes, even at what time. Many don't even have a decent jacket. They even go to the theater in felt boots.” To which Gumilyov smugly remarked: “But I have a London tailcoat and a white satin waistcoat. I also advise you to wear an evening, low-cut dress. After all, you have a lot of them left after your late mother.

Shortly before his death, Gumilyov, after their long conversation, said to Odoevtseva: “I swear, wherever and whenever I die, to come to you after death and tell everything.” This phrase haunted the poetess for a long time, but "he never kept his promise, he did not appear." The small thick parchment album that Gumilyov presented to the poetess at the beginning of her “apprenticeship” did not remain in memory either. The album was bought in Venice and was intended, according to Gumilyov, in order to "record poems dedicated to Odoevtseva there." After Gumilyov's arrest in August 1921, Irina Odoevtseva's relatives destroyed the album along with a draft of his autobiography and all books with signatures. This was done against the will of the poetess for fear of a possible search.

After leaving for France, Georgy Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva lived in Paris. When the Second World War began, both realized that it was dangerous to stay in the capital. They moved to the seaside Biarritz, where they lived without denying themselves anything. She played bridge, hosted parties, he drank.

As time went. One day the Germans requisitioned a house near Biarritz, and in their parisian house bomb hit. Prosperity rapidly declined. “It was still “gilded poverty,” admits Irina Odoevtseva, “and we had little idea of ​​what happened to us, hoping that soon everything would go on as before, and even better than before.” There were grounds for hope: the Germans had been expelled from Paris, the war was over. Georgy Ivanov is declared the first poet of emigration. And since there is no poetry in the USSR, he is simply the first Russian poet. He still wrote easily, just breathed poetry, although he often destroyed what was written. A streak of fame has come for Odoevtseva. She worked hard, writing plays, screenplays, novels in French and receiving increased advances and royalties.

After the war, when Odoevtseva had no money left from the inheritance, royalties for novels became the main source of her and her husband's existence. They rented a room at the Angleterre Hotel in Paris in the Latin Quarter. One of Odoevtseva's scripts was accepted by Hollywood, the plans were the most optimistic. But the Hollywood contract was never signed. Georgy Ivanov did not work anywhere, wrote poetry only by inspiration, liked to sleep until noon and read detective stories. Nevertheless, as a poet, he was very popular, he was even going to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. Irina Odoevtseva is so reverent about her husband that she received the label of a “shoe wife” from the bilious Bunin.

They had to move to the cheapest hotel, the window of their room looked out into a dark courtyard that looked like a well. Odoevtseva developed a deep cough, and the doctors diagnosed her with consumption. "Only, for God's sake, don't tell Georges," the patient begged. Ivanov, on the other hand, spent days running around Paris in search of money and food. But the food that he still got, Odoevtseva secretly threw away. She was determined to die so as not to be a burden to him. Fortunately, the diagnosis turned out to be erroneous, she only has pneumonia and anemia from overwork. They left her, and from now on the dream of the famous poetic couple is not a chic mansion in Paris or by the sea, but only an old man's shelter in Hyères, in the south of France. And although they did not fit in age (both were not sixty), they managed to settle in it with incredible difficulty. There, Georgy Ivanov wrote his last poems, which were included in the Posthumous Diary, which, perhaps, has no equal in Russian poetry. He was not abandoned by depression and the fear of death, which he feared to the point of despair. But Ivanov will dedicate almost all of his poems to the one he loved before. last day: “I don’t even dare to remember how lovely you were ...” - he wrote about the beginning of their love.

Georgy Ivanov died in 1958 in the same old people's home in Hyères. He died in a hospital bed, which he was so afraid of. Before his death, he wrote a will, in which, turning to emigration, he asked to take care of his widow.

After the death of her husband, Irina Vladimirovna settled in another almshouse, this time near Paris. Only twenty years later she married. Her husband was the writer Yakov Gorbov. Former Russian officer, former civilian French army, even in the prisoner of war camp, having got there seriously wounded, he did not part with her novel Isolde. Moreover, the bullet also wounded the book that he always wore on his chest. Gorbov graduated from two engineering universities in France, but became a Parisian taxi driver and a writer at the same time. One after another, three of his novels, written in French, saw the light of day. Odoevtseva lived with Yakov Gorbov for four years, until his death. And again she was left alone, alone with her manuscripts.

After perestroika, Irina Vladimirovna enthusiastically accepted a rather reckless, as she later admitted, decision to return to Russia. The Union of Writers of the USSR officially invited her to return to her homeland. Odoevtseva accepted the offer immediately, which caused a storm in emigre circles. The emigrants accused her of nothing less than betrayal. And only Andrey Sedykh, Bunin's secretary, said: “Odoevtseva is coming? Ay yes girl, well done!

In Leningrad, Odoevtseva was given an apartment at 13 Nevsky Prospekt, provided medical care, and organized several meetings with readers. She was carefully taken from stage to stage, like a talking relic. Her memoirs were finally published in the USSR in a circulation of two hundred thousand, which surpassed the total circulation of all her books during the years of her life in exile. She still managed to see the publication of her works at home. “I really live here with admiration,” Odoevtseva wrote to her friend Ella Bobrova, paraphrasing a line from one of her poems. Her health was deteriorating, making it impossible to return to the manuscript of the third book of memoirs, On the Shores of Lethe, begun back in France. In this book, Odoevtseva was going to tell "with complete frankness about herself and others," but the book remained unfinished.

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva died in Leningrad on October 14, 1990 at the age of 95. She was buried at the Volkovsky Orthodox cemetery. And the Silver Age is finally in the past.

In her memoirs “On the Banks of the Seine” and “On the Banks of the Neva”, Odoevtseva wrote practically not a single word about herself. These books about contemporaries were written with love, respect, tenderness: “I write about them and for them. About myself, I try to say as little as possible and only what is somehow connected with them ...

…Yes, I admired them. I loved them. But love helps to know a person to the end - both externally and internally. To see in him something that indifferent, indifferent eyes cannot see ... When you love a person, you see him as God intended him.

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva (real name - Iraida Gustavovna Geinike) was born on February 23 (according to other sources, June 25, July 27, November 2), 1895 in the family of a lawyer.

She was born in Riga, above the mouth of the Daugava. It is known that there was no Irina Vladimirovna then, but there was Iraida, the daughter of the barrister Gustav Geinike. She had home teachers, then she studied at the gymnasium, everything was like everyone else - and her first husband, a certain Popov, who did not leave a trace in history, and moving to St. Petersburg, and poetry. When writing poetry became a habit with Iraida, she took the pseudonym of her mother's name and became Irina Odoevtseva.

She was a student of Nikolai Gumilev and married the poet Georgy Ivanov, whom Nikolai Gumilev introduced to her: “The youngest member of the guild and the most witty, they call him “public opinion”, he creates and destroys reputations. Try to please him." The “first student” fulfilled Gumilyov’s advice, and even, one might say, overfulfilled it. Ivanov liked her so much that he divorced his first wife. Ivanov and Odoevtseva married on September 10, 1921, to live together for 37 years.

In 1923, Odoevtseva emigrated from the USSR, and most of her life was spent in Paris. The legacy of Gustav Geinicke went to the winning class, but in Paris it was possible to live on fees. The novels of Irina Odoevtseva were translated into several languages, but no one published them in the USSR. To her, and to Ivanov, who died in 1958, Odoevtseva's words about emigre writers are applicable: "More than bread, they lacked the reader's love, and they suffocated in the free air of foreign countries."

Ivanov devoted all his poems to his wife, who idolized him and wrote about him. Suspecting consumption, she tried to die and refused food so as not to be a burden.

Odoevtseva wrote memoirs. Being an active participant in various literary circles, Odoevtseva was familiar with many cultural figures of the Silver Age and Parisian emigration. The heroes of her memoirs were Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Gippius, Ivan Bunin, Larissa Andersen and many other writers.

Two of her memoirs about the first half of the twentieth century made a splash - "On the banks of the Neva" in 1967 and "On the banks of the Seine", written from 1978 to 1981. “The few jealous witnesses of those years who survived traditionally accused her of distortions and inaccuracies. Nevertheless, both of these books are precious historical documents, even if there are aberrations and too much free play of fantasy,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko said.

A living witness of the era, a participant in the joint handwritten almanac of Gumilyov, Georgy Ivanov, Mandelstam, among others literary heritage left brilliant memories. In Paris, she married a second time, but she lived in poverty. Having learned about her position, the Writers' Union invited Irina Odoevtseva to the USSR. In the spring of 1987, on the waves of “perestroika”, Odoevtseva (who had already buried her third husband, writer Yakov Gorbov) returned to the banks of the Neva. After that, her memoirs, which were published in a huge circulation, were read by all of Russia. The third book of memoirs - "On the Shores of Lethe" - remained unfinished.

Irina Odoevtseva died on October 14, 1990, and was buried in St. Petersburg at the Volkovskoye cemetery.

Text prepared by Andrey Goncharov

"LITTLE POETESS WITH A HUGE BOW".

“Who among those who attended then Petersburg literary meetings does not remember on the stage a slender, blond, young woman, almost a girl with a huge black bow in her hair, singsong, cheerfully and hastily, slightly grassing, reading poetry, making everyone smile without exception, even people , who had lost the habit of smiling in those years, ”recalled the poet Georgy Adamovich. Optimistic, sociable, but not a bit ambitious, Irina Odoevtseva was always in the thick of the then literary "party". Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Bely, and later, in exile - Balmont, Tsvetaeva, Severyanin, Yesenin, Teffi, Bunin and many other "luminaries" of the Silver Age became the heroes of her memoirs - "On the banks of the Neva" and "On the banks of Seine". Irina Odoevtseva knew how to listen well, and she was often told very personal things, almost confessed. And a phenomenal memory allowed her, after many decades, to reproduce every word from the conversations, discussions, and disputes of those times.

Beautiful, charming, always tastefully dressed, crowned with a "huge bow" - an integral part of the "poetic image", looking so young that even five years after her marriage, the law enforcement officers in the casino doubted her coming of age ... Probably, one can understand contemporaries who were it is difficult to take the poet and prose writer Irina Odoevtseva seriously. “Did you write this? Really you? You yourself? .. Excuse me, I can’t believe it, looking at you, ”her future husband, poet Georgy Ivanov, repeated when he heard“ The Ballad of Crushed Glass ”. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, when Odoevtseva made a presentation in his literary salon "Green Lamp", admitted: "I did not expect ...". And Vladimir Nabokov, whom she met in New York, put it most unambiguously: “So pretty, why is she still writing ...”

“I am not writing about myself and not for myself ... but about those whom I was given the opportunity to recognize “On the banks of the Neva,” Irina Odoevtseva emphasized in the preface to her first memoir book. And she kept her word: the book completely lacks both the inevitable chapters of “childhood-adolescence” in classic memoirs and the coquettish narcissism on the topic “great and I”. And yet, I would venture to say that the most charming and lively among the mass of bright heroes of the "Banks of the Neva" was precisely the "image of the author" - Irina Odoevtseva herself, a young girl who in November 1918 came to enroll in the poetry department of the Living Word Institute .

From curriculum vitae, which the poetess herself could not stand (“Neither a biography, nor a bibliography. As a rule, I avoid them,” is all that she wrote in the “Poets about Myself” section of the American anthology of Russian emigration poetry), you can find out that she was born in 1895 in Riga, in the family of a barrister, and her real name was Iraida Gustavovna Geinike.

She wanted to be a poet since childhood. And by the time she entered the Living Word, she already considered herself such, even had a circle of admirers of her poems. One of her early poems - fortunately unsigned - at the first lecture was pulled at random from a common bundle by a teacher, "a real poet" Nikolai Gumilyov.

It was then that he would so often proudly introduce Odoevtseva to his acquaintances: “My student!” That Korney Chukovsky would offer her to hang a poster “Gumilyov’s student” on her back. And at that lecture, the criticism of the teacher was caustic and ruthless; the meter literally “pulverized” the anonymous newcomer. Irina ran home in tears and with the firm intention of giving up poetry forever; later, having calmed down a little, she again undertook to write “in the old style, to spite Gumilyov.” It was then that her ironic poem was born:

No, I won't be famous
Glory will not crown me
I, as for the rank of archimandrite,
I have no right to this.

Neither Gumilyov nor the evil press
Don't call me a talent.
I am a little poet
With a huge bow.

Nikolai Gumilyov, noticing the absence of a bright, memorable girl at the lectures, once caught up with her in the corridor and asked her to "be sure to come next Thursday." Soon she became his favorite student, moved from the Living Word to the Gumilev Literary Studio. The teacher argued with the quoted lines of the student: "I predict you - you will soon become famous ...".

This happened in April 1920, when at one of the literary receptions Irina read her Ballad of Crushed Glass. An eerie story about a soldier who decided to earn extra money on crushed glass mixed with salt and was mystically punished for the death of his fellow villagers shocked those present both with the content and the original form of an extremely simplified verse. Odoevtseva was declared the pioneer of the modern ballad genre; she subsequently wrote several more. “Now every dog ​​will know you,” summed up Gumilyov.

He respected in his beloved student her unwillingness to imitate anyone: against the backdrop of a host of "mushrooms-podahmatov" Irina Odoevtseva remained herself. And yet, probably more than Odoevtseva's poems, Gumilyov valued her company, her "ears always ready to listen to me." He told her about his childhood, about traveling to Africa, about the war, about the difficult relationship with Anna Akhmatova - about everything. And she enthusiastically listened and memorized every word. They had a common sense of humor, which allowed them to joke and fool around together. Once, during the October demonstration, Nikolai Gumilyov dragged Odoevtseva into a rather risky masquerade for those times: he was in a mackintosh, she was in a plaid "Scottish" coat, speaking in English with passers-by, they portrayed a foreign delegation. Could take for spies!

But their relationship, very trusting, never developed into true friendship: he remained a meter, she was an admiring student. And even more so, there is no reason to talk about love, although some biographers carefully look for hints of “something did happen” in Odoevtseva’s memoirs about Gumilyov and in his poems dedicated to her. Irina Vladimirovna herself, already at a venerable age, in a conversation with a Russian literary critic, denied all the rumors: “If only ... I would have said so. As a man, he was not attractive to me.”

And Irina Odoevtseva met her love on the same day when literary fame came to her - at the aforementioned reception at Gumilyov's: “I silently give my hand to Georgy Ivanov. For the first time in my life. No. Without any premonition."

They married in 1922 and left the country the same year. Separately: Irina went to her father in Riga, George - on business in Europe. We met in Paris, in exile.

The book "On the Banks of the Neva" was a huge success, which inspired Irina Vladimirovna to write the second part of her memoirs, dedicated to the life of poets in exile. In the preface, she writes: “I agree with Marina Tsvetaeva, who said in 1923 that from a country in which her poems were needed like bread, she ended up in a country where neither her nor anyone else’s poems are needed. Even Russian people in exile have ceased to need them. And this made poets writing in Russian unhappy.”

Konstantin Balmont, whom Mayakovsky began to “throw off the ship of modernity”, and his brothers in emigration completed this work; Igor Severyanin, who was paid a "pension for silence" by the editors of one newspaper; Marina Tsvetaeva, who admitted before returning to the USSR that emigration "kicked her out". Many of the confused, desperate people of the literary circle, which was a kind of "serpentarium of like-minded people", found consolation precisely from Irina Odoevtseva. She did not lose her natural optimism in emigration and was ready to listen and provide moral support to everyone. So, she canceled a trip to visit in order to listen to Severyanin, who brought her his new, no longer needed poems. It happened that her help was quite material: once Irina won back the lost money of Georgy Adamovich in the casino, who, however, immediately lost it again. Ivan Bunin talked for a long time with Odoevtseva about a variety of things and once told her a heartbreaking story from his childhood: in severe frost, he gave a gymnasium overcoat to a beggar boy, fell seriously ill and swore to his mother "no longer be kind." Odoevtseva was shocked; Bunin, laughing, admitted that he made it all up: “You listened to me so touchingly, touchingly ...”. But Irina Odoevtseva is condescending to all her comrades in exile: "More than bread, they lacked the love of the reader, and they suffocated in the free air of foreign countries."

She herself, living in France, in parallel with poetry begins to write prose. Her first novel, The Angel of Death, was published in 1927 and evoked enthusiastic responses from both readers and the reputable foreign press: “... The exquisite and charming aroma of the novel cannot be expressed in words,” wrote The Times. “On the book of Odoevtseva lies the unmistakable stamp of a very great talent. We even dare to put her on the same level as Chekhov…” (“Gastonia Gazette”). Irina Odoevtseva wrote several more novels: "Isolde", "Mirror", "Abandon Hope Forever", "Year of Life" (not finished).

The novels of Irina Odoevtseva were translated into several languages, but were never published in her homeland. Given this, the Canadian poetess Ella Bobrova in her monograph about the writer retells the plots of the books in detail, gives large quotes - and this is quite enough to make a burning desire to read them. It is possible that Russian publishers, who do not seem to be in poverty, will someday get their hands on the works of Odoevtseva.

After the war, when Irina Odoevtseva lost her father's inheritance, fees for novels became the main source of her and her husband's existence. Georgy Ivanov did not work anywhere, wrote poetry only by inspiration, liked to sleep until noon and read detective stories. Nevertheless, as a poet he was very popular, he was even going to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. And Irina Odoevtseva was so reverent towards her husband that she earned the label of a “shoe wife” from the bilious Bunin.

After 37 years life together she wrote about her husband that she could not fully understand him. He seemed to her "strange, mysterious" and "one of the most wonderful" people she met. And Georgy Ivanov dedicated poems to his wife about the beginning of their love:

You did not hear, and I did not repeat.
It was Petersburg, April, sunset hour,
Radiance, waves, stone lions...
And the breeze from the Neva
Arranged for us.

You smiled. You did not understand,
What will happen to us, what awaits us.
Bird cherry blossomed in your hands ...
Here is our life.
And it won't work.

Georgy Ivanov died in 1958 in the city of Ieres in southern France. Twenty years later, Irina Vladimirovna again married the writer Yakov Gorbov, with whom she lived for four years, until his death. And she was left alone again.

The memoirs of Irina Odoevtseva appeared in the USSR in the early 1980s - first as underground, "dissident" literature. After perestroika, when it became possible to travel abroad, the journalist and writer Anna Kolonitskaya went to Paris with the sole purpose of finding Irina Odoevtseva, if, of course, she was still alive. Many emigrant writers with whom Kolonitskaya spoke were not sure about the latter. She had already lost all hope when she suddenly found herself the owner of Odoevtseva's phone: "I am Anna Kolonitskaya, I am nobody, I really love your poetry and want to see you." - "Come, just do not forget to get the key from under the rug by the door."

A Soviet journalist found the ninety-two-year-old poetess chained to a chair after a hip fracture. However, Irina Vladimirovna enthusiastically accepted a rather reckless, as Kolonitskaya later admitted, proposal on her part to return to Russia. Anna promised to do everything possible for this. Upon her return to the Union, she published in Moscow News and Literary newspaper» essays about Irina Odoevtseva. There was a wave of memories in the press, and the poetess was invited to return to her homeland. She accepted the offer immediately, which caused a storm in émigré circles. In April 1987, on a Paris-Leningrad flight (Odoevtseva objected to Kolonitskaya’s proposal to take the train: “Anna, I still fly beautifully!”), The poetess returned to the city of her youth.

In Leningrad, Odoevtseva was given an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, provided medical care, and organized several meetings with readers. Her memoirs, republished in the USSR in a much larger circulation than in exile, were a success. “I really live here with admiration,” Irina Vladimirovna wrote to her friend Ella Bobrova, paraphrasing the refrain line from one of her poems. Then the enthusiasm of the Soviet leadership dried up, the publication of Odoevtseva's poems and novels was carefully put on the brakes, the elderly poetess was cut off from the literary world. Her state of health was deteriorating, making it impossible to return to the manuscript of the third book of memoirs, “On the Shores of Lethe,” begun back in France. In this book, Odoevtseva was going to tell "... with complete frankness about herself and others."

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva died in St. Petersburg on October 14, 1990. And the Silver Age is finally in the past.

Olga Kuchkina. Essay "Over the Pink Sea".

The moon rose above the pink sea,
A bottle of wine was cold on ice.
And languidly circling couples in love
To the mournful rumble of the ukulele...

Winter 1920. Cold and hungry Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, but the new name has not yet taken root. In the gathering twilight, a pretty woman in a fur coat, hat and felt boots hurries along the uncleaned streets. In the hands of a bag with summer - instead of ballroom - shoes. When he takes off his fur coat, under it will be found a luxurious Parisian dress, inherited from the deceased mother. When he takes off his hat - a big bow in his hair.

Irina Odoevtseva came to the ball. About herself, she will compose a playful:

Neither Gumilyov nor the evil press
Don't call me a talent.
I am a little poetess
With a huge bow.

In fact, Gumilyov told her: "You have great abilities."

Under the name of Irina Odoevtseva, Rada Gustavovna Geinike, the daughter of a wealthy Latvian bourgeois, the owner of a tenement house in Riga, was included in Russian literature.

In St. Petersburg, people of her circle lived in spacious, unheated apartments - in contrast to Moscow, where everyone was packed. They wore beautiful clothes - the remnants of former luxury. They received free heavy, wet bread, snuff and stone soap.

Irina Odoevtseva, starving, like everyone else, does not think about hunger. She lives on the merry balls that were arranged in spite of everything; meetings at the House of Writers, where everyone could be fed walrus stew and where poetry was read; a literary studio where poetry reigned. The main feeling that owns it is a feeling of happiness.

Leaving two years later from St. Petersburg abroad for a while and not yet knowing that forever, she will sit on her bed at night and say loudly three times, like a spell: “I will always and everywhere be happy!”.

"Gumilyov's student" was Odoevtseva's second title.

Beginning in the summer of 1919, Nikolai Gumilyov taught classes at a literary studio. Charming Odoevtseva among the studios recently. The recognized master of poetry, who headed the workshop of poets, by that time had separated from his famous wife Anna Akhmatova and married the unfamous Anna Engelhardt. However, he exiled his wife Anya, who adored him, along with her little daughter to the city of Bezhetsk, to relatives, and he himself led a bachelor lifestyle.

From now on, Irina Odoevtseva takes her place in it.

They live in the neighborhood. He is in house number 5 on Preobrazhenskaya, she is on Basseynaya, in house number 60. He often accompanies her after class. The following dialogues take place between them:

Gumilev: I followed you several times and looked at the back of your head. But you never turned around. You must not be very nervous and not very sensitive.

Odoevtseva: I'm nervous.

Gumilyov: I was wrong. You are nervous. And even too much.

Walking, they covered fifteen versts a day. Then they went to him, sat by the fireplace, looked at the fire. The 19-year-old poet loves to ask, the 34-year-old poet loves to answer. They talked about everything and everyone. About Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Kuzmin, Severyanin. Names that sound like a silver bell, and there was Gumilev's circle. She entered him. He entered.

On Christmas Eve he will ask her to write a ballad about me. She will fulfill the request in Paris, in 1924, when he will already die in the dungeons of the Cheka, accused of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, which did not exist:

On the deserted Transfiguration
Snow swirled and the wind howled.
I knocked on Gumilev's door.
Gumilyov opened the door for me.
There was a stove in the office.
It was getting darker outside the window.
He said "Write a ballad
About me and my life.

Not very smart Anya Engelhardt after the death of Gumilyov will not find anything better than to say: I am a widow, and she is just the first student.

We leave out the degree of closeness between the teacher and the student. We only know that one day, walking with him, Odoevtseva will see opposite side the streets of a hurried man, tall, thin, with a surprisingly red mouth on a matte-pale face and bangs reaching down to his eyebrows; lively, mocking eyes sparkle under black, sharply defined eyebrows. Tearing off his head a checkered, similar to a jockey cap, he will shout: "Nikolai Stepanych, I'm sorry, I'm flying!" And disappear from sight.

But I'm afraid that he will die first
The one with the alarming red mouth
And falling bangs in the eyes,

Osip Mandelstam, his friend, will write about him. At one time they even had business card for two: "Georgy Ivanov and O. Mandelstam" - this idea came to Mandelstam.

He will be wrong. His friend will die later. In exile. Mandelstam himself - earlier. At the camp hospital.

Gumilyov will introduce Georgy Ivanov to Irina Odoevtseva: “The youngest member of the guild and the most witty, he is called “public opinion”, he creates and destroys reputations. - And he will offer: - Try to please him.

“Probably, he will make fun of my youth, my bow, my poems, my burr, my freckles,” Irina Odoevtseva will think. Two or three random encounters will lead nowhere. And she will decide that he, with his snobbery and causticity, is not to her taste.

The winter will pass. In early spring, Gumilyov suddenly announces to her: “And Zhorzhik Ivanov likes you. - True, it will immediately cool the possible ardor: - But do not hope. He is a lazy and unloving boy - he will not look after you.

On April 30, 1920, a reception was held at Gumilyov's apartment in honor of Andrei Bely, who had arrived in St. Petersburg. Three students read poetry. Among them is Irina Odoevtseva. A belated Georgy Ivanov appears. Gumilyov makes Odoevtseva alone read again. She is a coward and does not know what to choose. Gumilyov offers "The Ballad of Crushed Glass". But he himself rejected it a few months ago and hid it in a folder with the inscription "Common Grave of Losers"! She no longer worries. There is nothing to worry about. She has already died, and the dead have no shame. Georgy Ivanov does not take his eyes off her.

And the incredible happens. He, "the destroyer and creator of reputations," proclaims the "Ballad" a "literary event" and "a new word in poetry." In dozens of handwritten prints, "Ballad" is distributed throughout St. Petersburg. The author is declared "the hope of Russian poetry." Now she does not understand how she could be indifferent to him. He and only he is in her thoughts. She burrs, he lisps - maybe this is fate?

Gumilyov asks her not to marry Georgy Ivanov. I don't know if it's a joke or seriously.

It was believed that Georgy Ivanov was fluent in poetic form and the content slips away. Poems were declared empty, because life seemed devoid of suffering - the food of poetry. Petersburg bone, he did not let anyone into his inner world, always looked prosperous, total irony created a barrier.

The reputation of a ruthless wit played a role. His memoir prose - "Petersburg Winters" and "Chinese Shadows" - is not understood and not accepted. Resentments and quarrels followed. Akhmatova did not want to hear more about him.

What does he write, in particular, about Akhmatova?

“She is an all-Russian celebrity. Her fame is growing. A cigarette smokes in a thin hand. Shoulders wrapped in a shawl shudder with coughing. Tired smile: it's not a cold, it's consumption...”. Desire to offend?

About the meeting at night on the bridge: I thought that the security officer, it turned out - Blok. Blok asked: “Did you get millet?” "Ten pounds." - "That's good. If it’s cool to cook with sugar too ... ”Following the author’s text:“ Gifted with a magical gift, kind, generous, extremely honest with life, with people and with himself, Blok was born with a “ragged skin ...”.

About the death of Gumilyov - a conversation with the futurist and cocaine addict Sergei Bobrov, close to the Cheka, when he, “twitching his nasty muzzle of an aesthete-criminal, said, by the way, carelessly, as if about a funny trifle: “Yes ... This is your Gumilyov .. To us Bolsheviks, this is ridiculous. But, you know, he died chic. I heard first hand. He smiled, finished smoking a cigarette ... ".

Is there something offensive in these descriptions? Isn't every word saturated with pain and love?

Memories write about the dead. Georgy Ivanov wrote about the living. Living people see things differently. Discrepancies - assessments and self-assessments - hurt the living.

He said about himself: "the talent of double vision", which "distorted life." Double vision - lyricism and mockery. closed person, mockingly fenced off from the world, hiding his own spiritual wounds.

The warnings of Nikolai Gumilyov did not help. Irina Odoevtseva and Georgy Ivanov are deadly in love and can no longer see life without each other. From now on, not Gumilyov, but Georgy Ivanov escorts Odoevtseva home.

He was married. He married in 1915 or 1916 a French woman named Gabrielle. The Frenchwoman studied with the sister of the poet Georgy Adamovich Tanya. Adamovich owned the idea: his friend Georgy Ivanov marries Gabriel, and Nikolai Gumilev divorces Anna Akhmatova and marries his sister Tanya, Gumilev's girlfriend at that time. Exactly half of the strange plan was realized. Gabrielle gave birth to Georgy Ivanov's daughter Lenochka, after which she divorced him and left with her daughter for France. Georgy Ivanov became free.

On September 10, 1921, Irina Odoevtseva marries him. She will live with him for 37 years until his last day.

Even when he is gone, she, who knew him inside and out, will think of him as an extraordinary creation of nature. “There was something very special in him,” she writes, “indefinable, almost mysterious ... He often seemed to me not only strange, but even mysterious, and I, despite all our spiritual and mental closeness, became a dead end, unable to understand it, before it was complex and multifaceted.

Happy is the husband who is so appreciated by his wife. But how could a person of such a warehouse experience permanent happiness? Where does alcoholism come from then?

Having released two wonderful memoirs - "On the Banks of the Seine" and "On the Banks of the Neva", having drawn magnificent literary portraits of her contemporaries, Irina Odoevtseva managed to leave herself and her marriage in the shade. "About our with him common life it’s hard for me to write - it touches me too closely, and I can’t stand writing about myself, ”she will say, and this is not a phrase.

“I will always and everywhere be happy!” - she once ordered herself and stubbornly kept to the chosen path.

Irina Odoevtseva moved from her Basseynaya to his Post Office, to an apartment that Georgy Ivanov shared with another Georgy - Adamovich. During the day, Adamovich wandered around the rooms, desperately bored. "God, what a bore!" was his usual exclamation. Both Georges did nothing for days on end. She did not understand how and when they work. Gumilyov taught her to work in poetry, akin to the work of a laborer. And these assured that poems are born by themselves and nothing needs to be done specially.

One fine day, over morning tea, her husband will suddenly say “wait, wait” and say out loud:

Fog... Taman... The desert listens to God,
How far to tomorrow!
And Lermontov alone goes out onto the road,
Ringing with silver spurs.

She will tremble. “The fact that these brilliant poems were created here, in my presence, instantly,” she admits, “it seemed to me a miracle.”

At dusk, at the hour between the dog and the wolf, she climbed with her feet on the sofa, on the left - one Georgy, husband, in his favorite position, with his leg bent, on the right - the second, Adamovich, she was silent, they - thinking aloud about the things performed mystics. It fascinated her, she felt attached to the highest spiritual knowledge.

Georgy Ivanov's business trip to Berlin was aimed at "compiling the repertoire of state theaters for 1923."

It was 1922. On August 21, Blok's coffin was covered with flowers at the Smolensk cemetery.

Georgy Ivanov will put forward his version of Blok's death. “He died of the Twelve, as others die of pneumonia or a ruptured heart,” he writes, meaning fatal mistake Blok, who accepted the revolution.

Two weeks later - a memorial service for the executed Gumilyov in the Kazan Cathedral.

Gumilyov once offered Odoevtseva an oath: whoever dies first will appear to another and tell that he was there. Gumilyov did not keep his oath: he never appeared to her.

A young couple decides to go abroad. The business trip was penniless and generally fake. But then you could get the most fantastic papers. He had the right to renew his Lithuanian citizenship: his father's estate, where he was born, was in the Kovno province, in Lithuania. However, it seemed to him that becoming a Lithuanian, at least with a passport, meant betraying Russia.

He said goodbye to Mandelstam: “Enough, Osip ... Soon everything will end, everything will change. I'll come back...". “You will never return,” Mandelstam replied.

He sailed on a merchant steamer to Germany in the summer of 1922. His wife does not accompany him. She referred to her Latvian citizenship, and her registration is being delayed. Thank God, in two weeks the documents are ready, and she will go by train - first to Riga, where her father lives, and a month later - to Berlin.

She is alone in Berlin. The husband is in Paris, visiting his first wife and daughter Lenochka. The second wife is not jealous. She enjoys being abroad, she is free and can do what she wants. She has a bedroom and a reception room in a German boarding house. She enjoys her days. In the morning - shopping, after lunch at the restaurant "Bear" or "Foerster", in the evening cafes, "refugee collection points", as she calls with a laugh.

Again balls, again meetings with poets, Severyanin, Yesenin, a sanatorium in Braunlage, in the Harz, skis, sledges, mountains in Brocken, where you can feel like a Brocken witch, moving to France, to Paris, life in the very beautiful city peace.

A tragicomic story happens in France. Georgy Adamovich arrives. They are engulfed in nostalgic memories. And suddenly, Adamovich's wealthy aunt offers her nephew money for an apartment so that the friends can again settle together. Everyone is looking forward to new happiness. Find: Four large rooms in a smart new home with a patio and pigeons. Adamovich appears with the money and for some reason is terribly nervous. Georgy Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva cannot understand what is the matter. The explanation comes late: he is playing and has already lost some of the money. He begs Odoevtseva to go with him to Monte Carlo and sit at the card table instead of him: you will win, you won once and saved a man's life! Indeed, there was a case.

Someone in St. Petersburg lost government money and was about to shoot himself. Irina Odoevtseva, acting like a somnambulist, went, won back the loss and returned all the money young man. This time, she firmly refuses. Adamovich, however, manages to persuade her. The three of them board the train and go to Monte Carlo. On the way, Adamovich squanders money, confident in the happy hand of Odoevtseva. They go to the gambling hall, and she wins back part of the amount. The next day the same thing is repeated. The winnings are growing. But when she is ready to win back everything, Adamovich abruptly removes her: himself. And everything goes down...

Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who left Russia, occupy apartments in Paris on Rue Colonel Bonnet. They wish to see Georgy Ivanov with his wife. The hostess points a monocle at the guest. The guest remembers a whitened and ruddy face without relief, a flat forehead, a big nose, cloudy-swampy colorless eyes, narrow, twisting lips, dyed hair, most of which is fake. For Georgy Ivanov, everything is unimportant - he loves Zinaida Nikolaevna, with her masculine sarcastic mind and decadent manners. Zinaida Nikolaevna pays him the same. She calls him "a poet in a chemically pure form."

Georgy Ivanov is appointed permanent chairman of the "Green Lamp", founded by the Merezhkovskys in the name of saving, if not the world, then Russia, or at least its branch - the Russian emigration. The first meeting - February 5, 1927. Reports are made, replicas are heard, sometimes sharp as blows of a sword. Taffy interrupts the arguing: "That's enough, now let's get down to literary business, let's talk about novels, who is divorcing whom, who is going to marry whom and who is cheating on whom."

Russian emigration resembles a ball of snakes. The constant closeness of Irina Odoevtseva and Georgy Ivanov is a support for the two of them. They live on a monthly pension sent by her father. In the autumn of 1932, Gustav Geinicke asks his daughter to visit him, he dies.

After the death of her father, Irina Odoevtseva becomes a rich heiress. The sadness of orphanhood cannot be avoided, but Georgy Ivanov is nearby.

They rent an apartment in a fashionable district of Paris, near the Bois de Boulogne, they start a luxurious setting and a lackey, they buy gold. And sadness.

“Sickness for the homeland is a long-exposed trouble,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, another emigrant not beloved by Georgy Ivanov.

Russia is happiness. Russia is light.
Or maybe there is no Russia at all ...

Georgy Ivanov gazes intently at the features of a Russian, a new Homo Sovieticus who fled from Soviet Russia, trying to catch the outlines of a new community: “Materialism - and a heightened sense of the irrational. Marxism - and a kind of romanticism. " Strong Russia"- and "bless fate for our suffering." The denial of Christianity is "salvation in Christianity" ... Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky ... ".

World War II comes to France. Staying in Paris is dangerous, they move to Biarritz, live by the sea, they can be classified as local cream, they get into the newspaper secular news, she plays bridge, gives parties, he drinks.

In his letter, four years before his death: “I am a former drunkard, from the consequences of which I am stubbornly, but not particularly successfully treated” (food is expensive, only wine is cheap, but ...) ”.

Big troubles start with a little misunderstanding. One of the friends will describe to Georgy Adamovich the high-society lifestyle of a couple he knows. Georgy Adamovich - at war, letters go for a long time, when he receives a letter, the Germans will occupy France, and he will decide that Irina Odoevtseva and her husband arrange all the amusements for the German generals. The rumor will fly around the Russian diaspora. They will turn away from them. It is especially insulting that Kerensky, who visited them with his wife and kissed and baptized them every time they parted, would turn away.

Bought gold stolen. The Germans requisition a house in Ogrette near Biarritz. A bomb will hit a Parisian house and destroy it. Prosperity is rapidly depleting.

“It was still “gilded poverty,” admits Irina Odoevtseva, “and we had little idea of ​​what happened to us, hoping that soon everything would go on as before and even better than before.”

There were grounds for hope. The Germans have been expelled from Paris, the war is over, people are celebrating the victory, Georgy Ivanov is declared the first poet of emigration. And since there is no poetry in the USSR, he is simply the first Russian poet. He still writes easily, he breathes poetry, although he often tears up what he has written - so as not to be tiresome in self-repetitions. A streak of fame is also coming for Odoevtseva. She works hard, writing plays, screenplays, novels in French, receiving increased advances and fees.

They rent a room at the Angleterre Hotel in the Latin Quarter. One of Odoevtseva's scripts was accepted by Hollywood. Plans - the most rosy. But the Hollywood contract will never be signed. Georgy Ivanov is informed that America is going to submit him for the Nobel Prize - "if the political situation is favorable." The situation is not favorable. The award is given to the French writer Martin du Gard.

They move to the cheapest hotel. The window of their room overlooks a dark courtyard that looks like a well. She has a deep cough, doctors diagnose: consumption. “Only, for God's sake, don't tell Georges,” the patient asks. Georges runs around Paris all day looking for money and food. The food that she does get, she secretly throws away. She decided to die so as not to be a burden to him.

The diagnosis turns out to be a mistake. She has pneumonia and anemia from overwork. She is being looked after. From now on, their dream is not a chic mansion in Paris or by the sea, but only an old man's house in Hyères, in the south of France. They put in incredible effort to get there. And although they are not suitable for age, they manage to settle there. The garden with rose bushes surrounding the house seems to them like paradise. But it turns out that southern climate harmful to Georgy Ivanov. He suffers from high blood pressure. And they are forced to leave the shelter. Settle in the "Russian House" in the suburbs of Montmorency, north of Paris.

- No, you are mistaken, dear friend.
We lived then on another planet,
And we are too tired and we are too old
And for this waltz, and for this guitar.

The famous romance was written to the verses of Georgy Ivanov.

No one else could reproach him with a too prosperous life and the absence of suffering.

In the book “My Italics”, Nina Berberova wrote about him: “G.V. Ivanov, who during these years wrote his best poems, having made from personal fate (poverty, illness, alcohol) something like a myth of self-destruction, where, having stepped over our usual boundaries of good and evil, permitted (by whom?), He left far behind all the “damned poets” who really lived ...

Portrait of the poet by Berberova: "Bowler hat, gloves, stick, handkerchief in side pocket, a monocle, a narrow tie, a slight smell of a pharmacy, a parting to the back of the head.

They will return to "blasphemous Hyères," according to Georgy Ivanov. There he will write the last verses that form the Posthumous Diary, which has no equal in Russian poetry. Almost everyone will turn to the one whom he loved until his death. “I don’t even dare to remember how lovely you were…”

He died in a hospital bed, which he had always feared.

“If I were asked,” Irina Odoevtseva wrote, “which of the people I have met in my life I consider the most wonderful, it would be difficult for me to answer - there were too many of them. But I know for sure that Georgy Ivanov was one of the most remarkable of them.”

The “little poetess with a big bow” will live 32 years without him and die in Leningrad in 1990.

Published in abbreviation.

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Poetess.

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva (real name - Iraida Gustavovna Geinike) was born on February 23 (according to other sources, June 25, July 27, November 2), 1895 in the family of a lawyer.

She was born in Riga, above the mouth of the Daugava. It is known that there was no Irina Vladimirovna then, but there was Iraida, the daughter of the barrister Gustav Geinike. There were home teachers, then a gymnasium, everything was like everyone else - and the first husband, a certain Popov, who did not leave a trace in history, and moving to St. Petersburg, and poetry.

When writing poetry became a habit with Iraida, she took the pseudonym of her mother's name and became Irina Odoevtseva.

She was a student of Nikolai Gumilyov and married the poet Georgy Ivanov.

Georgy Ivanov was introduced to Irina Odoevtseva by Nikolay Gumilyov: "The youngest member of the workshop and the most witty, they call him "public opinion", he creates and destroys reputations. Try to please him." The "first student" fulfilled Gumilyov's advice, and even, one might say, overfulfilled it. Ivanov liked her so much that he divorced his first wife. Ivanov and Odoevtseva married on September 10, 1921, to live together for 37 years.

In 1923, Odoevtseva emigrated from the USSR. Most of her life was spent in Paris.

The legacy of Gustav Geinicke went to the winning class, but in Paris it was possible to live on fees. The novels of Irina Odoevtseva were translated into several languages ​​- only in the USSR no one published them. To her, and to Ivanov, who died in 1958, Odoevtseva's words about emigre writers are applicable: "More than bread, they lacked the reader's love, and they suffocated in the free air of foreign countries."

Ivanov dedicated all his poems to his wife. She idolized him, wrote about him. Suspecting consumption, she tried to die, refusing food so as not to be a burden.

Odoevtseva wrote memoirs. Being an active participant in various literary circles, Odoevtseva was familiar with many cultural figures of the Silver Age and Parisian emigration. The heroes of her memoirs are Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Gippius, Ivan Bunin, Larissa Andersen and many others.

Furor was made by two memoirs about the first half of the twentieth century - "On the banks of the Neva" (1967) and "On the banks of the Seine" (1978-1981). “The few jealous witnesses of those years who survived traditionally accused her of distortions and inaccuracies. Nevertheless, both of these books are precious historical documents, even if there are aberrations and too free play of fantasy” (E. Yevtushenko).

A living witness of the era, a participant in the joint handwritten almanac of Gumilyov, Georgy Ivanov, Mandelstam, among other literary heritage, left brilliant memories. In Paris, she married a second time, but she lived in poverty. Having learned about her position, the Writers' Union invited Irina Odoevtseva to the USSR. In the spring of 1987, on the waves of “perestroika”, Odoevtseva (who had already buried her third husband, writer Yakov Gorbov) returned to the banks of the Neva.

Memoirs, which were published in a huge circulation, were read by all of Russia. The third book of memoirs - "On the Shores of Lethe" - remained unfinished.

She was buried in St. Petersburg at the Volkovskoye cemetery.

"LITTLE POETESS WITH A HUGE BOW".

“Who among those who attended then Petersburg literary meetings does not remember on the stage a slender, blond, young woman, almost a girl with a huge black bow in her hair, singsong, cheerfully and hastily, slightly grassing, reading poetry, making everyone smile without exception, even people , who had lost the habit of smiling in those years, ”recalled the poet Georgy Adamovich. Optimistic, sociable, but not a bit ambitious, Irina Odoevtseva was always in the thick of the then literary "party". Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Bely, and later, in exile - Balmont, Tsvetaeva, Severyanin, Yesenin, Teffi, Bunin and many other "luminaries" of the Silver Age became the heroes of her memoirs - "On the banks of the Neva" and "On the banks of Seine". Irina Odoevtseva knew how to listen well, and she was often told very personal things, almost confessed. And a phenomenal memory allowed her, after many decades, to reproduce every word from the conversations, discussions, and disputes of those times.

Beautiful, charming, always tastefully dressed, crowned with a "huge bow" - an integral part of the "poetic image", looking so young that, even five years after her marriage, law enforcement officers in the casino doubted her coming of age ... Probably, one can understand contemporaries who were it is difficult to take the poet and prose writer Irina Odoevtseva seriously. “Did you write this? Really you? You yourself? .. Excuse me, I can’t believe it, looking at you, ”her future husband, poet Georgy Ivanov, repeated when he heard the Ballad of Crushed Glass. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, when Odoevtseva made a presentation in his literary salon "Green Lamp", admitted: "I did not expect ...". And Vladimir Nabokov, whom she met in New York, put it most unambiguously: “So pretty, why is she still writing ...”

“I am not writing about myself and not for myself ... but about those whom I was given the opportunity to recognize “On the banks of the Neva,” Irina Odoevtseva emphasized in the preface to her first memoir book. And she kept her word: the book completely lacks both the inevitable chapters of “childhood-adolescence” in classic memoirs and the coquettish narcissism on the topic “great and I”. And yet, I would venture to say that the most charming and lively among the mass of bright heroes of the "Banks of the Neva" was precisely the "image of the author" - Irina Odoevtseva herself, a young girl who in November 1918 came to enroll in the poetry department of the Living Word Institute .

From the biographical information, which the poetess herself could not stand (“Neither a biography, nor a bibliography. As a rule, I avoid them,” that’s all that she wrote in the “Poets about Myself” section of the American anthology of Russian emigration poetry), you can find out that she was born in 1895 in Riga, in the family of a barrister, and her real name was Iraida Gustavovna Geinike.

She wanted to be a poet since childhood. And by the time she entered the Living Word, she already considered herself such, even had a circle of admirers of her poems. One of her early poems—fortunately unsigned—was pulled at random from the common bundle at the first lecture by the teacher, the “real poet” Nikolai Gumilyov.

It was then that he would so often proudly introduce Odoevtseva to his acquaintances: “My student!” That Korney Chukovsky would offer her to hang a poster “Gumilyov’s student” on her back. And at that lecture, the criticism of the teacher was caustic and ruthless; the meter literally “pulverized” the anonymous newcomer. Irina ran home in tears and with the firm intention of giving up poetry forever; later, having calmed down a little, she again undertook to write “in the old style, to spite Gumilyov.” It was then that her ironic poem was born:

No, I won't be famous
Glory will not crown me
I, as for the rank of archimandrite,
I have no right to this.

Neither Gumilyov nor the evil press
Don't call me a talent.
I am a little poet
With a huge bow.

Nikolai Gumilyov, noticing the absence of a bright, memorable girl at the lectures, once caught up with her in the corridor and asked her to "be sure to come next Thursday." Soon she became his favorite student, moved from the Living Word to the Gumilev Literary Studio. The teacher argued with the quoted lines of the student: "I predict you - you will soon become famous ...".

This happened in April 1920, when at one of the literary receptions Irina read her Ballad of Crushed Glass. An eerie story about a soldier who decided to earn extra money on crushed glass mixed with salt and was mystically punished for the death of his fellow villagers shocked those present both with the content and the original form of an extremely simplified verse. Odoevtseva was declared the pioneer of the modern ballad genre; she subsequently wrote several more. “Now every dog ​​will know you,” summed up Gumilyov.

He respected in his beloved student her unwillingness to imitate anyone: against the backdrop of a host of "mushrooms-podahmatov" Irina Odoevtseva remained herself. And yet, probably more than Odoevtseva's poems, Gumilyov valued her company, her "ears always ready to listen to me." He told her about his childhood, about traveling to Africa, about the war, about the difficult relationship with Anna Akhmatova - about everything. And she enthusiastically listened and memorized every word. They had a common sense of humor, which allowed them to joke and fool around together. Once, during the October demonstration, Nikolai Gumilyov dragged Odoevtseva into a rather risky masquerade for those times: he was in a mackintosh, she was in a plaid "Scottish" coat, speaking in English with passers-by, they portrayed a foreign delegation. Could take for spies!

But their relationship, very trusting, never developed into true friendship: he remained a meter, she was an admiring student. And even more so, there is no reason to talk about love, although some biographers carefully look for hints of “something did happen” in Odoevtseva’s memoirs about Gumilyov and in his poems dedicated to her. Irina Vladimirovna herself, already at a venerable age, in a conversation with a Russian literary critic, denied all the rumors: “If only ... I would have said so. As a man, he was not attractive to me.”

And Irina Odoevtseva met her love on the same day when literary fame came to her - at the aforementioned reception with Gumilyov: “I silently offer my hand to Georgy Ivanov. For the first time in my life. No. Without any premonition."

They married in 1922 and left the country the same year. Separately: Irina went to her father in Riga, George - on business in Europe. We met in Paris, in exile.

The book "On the Banks of the Neva" was a huge success, which inspired Irina Vladimirovna to write the second part of her memoirs, dedicated to the life of poets in exile. In the preface, she writes: “I agree with Marina Tsvetaeva, who said in 1923 that from a country in which her poems were needed like bread, she ended up in a country where neither her nor anyone else’s poems are needed. Even Russian people in exile have ceased to need them. And this made poets writing in Russian unhappy.”

Konstantin Balmont, whom Mayakovsky began to “throw off the ship of modernity”, and his brothers in emigration completed this work; Igor Severyanin, who was paid a "pension for silence" by the editors of one newspaper; Marina Tsvetaeva, who admitted before returning to the USSR that emigration "kicked her out". Many of the confused, desperate people of the literary circle, which was a kind of "serpentarium of like-minded people", found consolation precisely from Irina Odoevtseva. She did not lose her natural optimism in emigration and was ready to listen and provide moral support to everyone. So, she canceled a trip to visit in order to listen to Severyanin, who brought her his new, no longer needed poems. It happened that her help was quite material: once Irina won back the lost money of Georgy Adamovich in the casino, who, however, immediately lost it again. Ivan Bunin talked for a long time with Odoevtseva about a variety of things and once told her a heartbreaking story from his childhood: in severe frost, he gave a gymnasium overcoat to a beggar boy, fell seriously ill and swore to his mother "no longer be kind." Odoevtseva was shocked; Bunin, laughing, admitted that he made it all up: “You listened to me so touchingly, touchingly ...”. But Irina Odoevtseva is condescending to all her comrades in exile: "More than bread, they lacked the love of the reader, and they suffocated in the free air of foreign countries."

She herself, living in France, in parallel with poetry begins to write prose. Her first novel, The Angel of Death, was published in 1927 and evoked enthusiastic responses from both readers and the reputable foreign press: “... The refined and charming aroma of the novel cannot be expressed in words,” wrote The Times. “On the book of Odoevtseva lies the unmistakable stamp of a very great talent. We even dare to put her on the same level as Chekhov…” (“Gastonia Gazette”). Irina Odoevtseva wrote several more novels: "Isolde", "Mirror", "Abandon Hope Forever", "Year of Life" (not finished).

The novels of Irina Odoevtseva were translated into several languages, but were never published in her homeland. Given this, the Canadian poetess Ella Bobrova, in her monograph about the writer, retells the plots of the books in detail, gives large quotes - and this is quite enough to make a burning desire to read them. It is possible that Russian publishers, who do not seem to be in poverty, will someday get their hands on the works of Odoevtseva.

After the war, when Irina Odoevtseva lost her father's inheritance, fees for novels became the main source of her and her husband's existence. Georgy Ivanov did not work anywhere, wrote poetry only by inspiration, liked to sleep until noon and read detective stories. Nevertheless, as a poet he was very popular, he was even going to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. And Irina Odoevtseva was so reverent towards her husband that she earned the label of a “shoe wife” from the bilious Bunin.

After 37 years of marriage, she wrote about her husband that she could not fully understand him. He seemed to her "strange, mysterious" and "one of the most wonderful" people she met. And Georgy Ivanov dedicated poems to his wife about the beginning of their love:

You did not hear, and I did not repeat.
It was Petersburg, April, sunset hour,
Radiance, waves, stone lions...
And the breeze from the Neva
Arranged for us.

You smiled. You did not understand,
What will happen to us, what awaits us.
Bird cherry blossomed in your hands ...
Here is our life.
And it won't work.

Georgy Ivanov died in 1958 in the city of Ieres in southern France. Twenty years later, Irina Vladimirovna again married the writer Yakov Gorbov, with whom she lived for four years, until his death. And she was left alone again.

The memoirs of Irina Odoevtseva appeared in the USSR in the early 1980s, first as underground, "dissident" literature. After perestroika, when it became possible to travel abroad, the journalist and writer Anna Kolonitskaya went to Paris with the sole purpose of finding Irina Odoevtseva, if, of course, she was still alive. Many emigrant writers with whom Kolonitskaya spoke were not sure about the latter. She had already lost all hope when she suddenly turned out to be the owner of Odoevtseva’s phone: “I am Anna Kolonitskaya, I am nobody, I really love your poetry and want to see you.” - "Come, just do not forget to get the key from under the rug by the door."

A Soviet journalist found the ninety-two-year-old poetess chained to a chair after a hip fracture. However, Irina Vladimirovna enthusiastically accepted a rather reckless, as Kolonitskaya later admitted, proposal on her part to return to Russia. Anna promised to do everything possible for this. Upon her return to the Union, she published essays about Irina Odoevtseva in Moscow News and Literaturnaya Gazeta. There was a wave of memories in the press, and the poetess was invited to return to her homeland. She accepted the offer immediately, which caused a storm in émigré circles. In April 1987, on an airplane flight Paris-Leningrad (Odoevtseva objected to Kolonitskaya's proposal to travel by train: "Anna, I'm still a great flyer!"), the poetess returned to the city of her youth.

In Leningrad, Odoevtseva was given an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, provided medical care, and organized several meetings with readers. Her memoirs, republished in the USSR in a much larger circulation than in exile, were a success. “I really live here with admiration,” Irina Vladimirovna wrote to her friend Ella Bobrova, paraphrasing the refrain line from one of her poems. Then the enthusiasm of the Soviet leadership dried up, the publication of Odoevtseva's poems and novels was carefully put on the brakes, the elderly poetess was cut off from the literary world. Her health was deteriorating, making it impossible to return to the manuscript of the third book of memoirs, “On the Shores of Lethe,” begun back in France. In this book, Odoevtseva was going to tell "... with complete frankness about herself and others."

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva died in St. Petersburg on October 14, 1990. And the Silver Age is finally in the past.

Olga Kuchkina. Essay "Over the Pink Sea".

The moon rose above the pink sea,
A bottle of wine was cold on ice.
And languidly circling couples in love
To the mournful rumble of the ukulele...

Winter 1920. Cold and hungry Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, but the new name has not yet taken root. In the gathering twilight, a pretty woman in a fur coat, hat and felt boots hurries along the uncleaned streets. In the hands of a bag with summer - instead of ball - shoes. When he takes off his fur coat, under it will be found a luxurious Parisian dress, inherited from the deceased mother. When he takes off his hat - a big bow in his hair.

Irina Odoevtseva came to the ball. About herself, she will compose a playful:

Neither Gumilyov nor the evil press
Don't call me a talent.
I am a little poetess
With a huge bow.

In fact, Gumilyov told her: "You have great abilities."

Under the name of Irina Odoevtseva, Rada Gustavovna Geinike, the daughter of a wealthy Latvian bourgeois, the owner of a tenement house in Riga, was included in Russian literature.

In St. Petersburg, people of her circle lived in spacious, unheated apartments - in contrast to Moscow, where everyone was packed. They wore beautiful clothes - the remnants of former luxury. They received free heavy, wet bread, snuff and stone soap.
Irina Odoevtseva, starving, like everyone else, does not think about hunger. She lives on the merry balls that were arranged in spite of everything; meetings at the House of Writers, where everyone could be fed walrus stew and where poetry was read; a literary studio where poetry reigned. The main feeling that owns it is a feeling of happiness.

Leaving two years later from St. Petersburg abroad for a while and not yet knowing that forever, she will sit on her bed at night and say loudly three times, like a spell: “I will always and everywhere be happy!”.

* * *

"Gumilyov's student" was Odoevtseva's second title.

Beginning in the summer of 1919, Nikolai Gumilyov taught classes at a literary studio. Charming Odoevtseva among the studios recently. The recognized master of poetry, who headed the workshop of poets, by that time had separated from his famous wife Anna Akhmatova and married the unfamous Anna Engelhardt. However, he exiled his wife Anya, who adored him, along with her little daughter to the city of Bezhetsk, to relatives, and he himself led a bachelor lifestyle.

From now on, Irina Odoevtseva takes her place in it.

They live in the neighborhood. He is at house number 5 on Preobrazhenskaya, she is at Basseinaya, at house number 60. He often accompanies her after class. The following dialogues take place between them:

Gumilev: I followed you several times and looked at the back of your head. But you never turned around. You must not be very nervous and not very sensitive.

Odoevtseva: I'm nervous.

Gumilyov: I was wrong. You are nervous. And even too much.

Walking, they covered fifteen versts a day. Then they went to him, sat by the fireplace, looked at the fire. The 19-year-old poet loves to ask, the 34-year-old poet loves to answer. They talked about everything and everyone. About Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Kuzmin, Severyanin. Names that sound like a silver bell, and there was Gumilev's circle. She entered him. He entered.

On Christmas Eve he will ask her to write a ballad about me. She will fulfill the request in Paris, in 1924, when he will already die in the dungeons of the Cheka, accused of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, which did not exist:

On the deserted Transfiguration
Snow swirled and the wind howled.
I knocked on Gumilev's door.
Gumilyov opened the door for me.
There was a stove in the office.
It was getting darker outside the window.
He said "Write a ballad
About me and my life.

Not very smart Anya Engelhardt after the death of Gumilyov will not find anything better than to say: I am a widow, and she is just the first student.

* * *

We leave out the degree of closeness between the teacher and the student. We only know that one day, walking alone with him, Odoevtseva will see on the opposite side of the street a man in a hurry, tall, thin, with a surprisingly red mouth on a matte-pale face and bangs going down to his eyebrows; lively, mocking eyes sparkle under black, sharply defined eyebrows. Tearing off his head a checkered, similar to a jockey cap, he will shout: "Nikolai Stepanych, I'm sorry, I'm flying!" And disappear from sight.

But I'm afraid that he will die first
The one with the alarming red mouth
And falling bangs in the eyes,

- Osip Mandelstam, his friend, will write about him. At one time they even had a business card for two: "Georgy Ivanov and O. Mandelstam" - this idea came to Mandelstam's mind.

He will be wrong. His friend will die later. In exile. Mandelstam himself - earlier. At the camp hospital.

Beautiful, charming, mscarlet and pretty, with a childishness that was not lost even in extreme old age, with invariable bows, handbags, gloves, fur coats. Even in extremely difficult times, cheerful and positive. This is Irina Odoevtseva. The last poetess of the Silver Age...

Her real name is Iraida Gustavovna Geinike. Born in Riga in the family of a barrister. She had an ordinary childhood with home teachers, gymnasium, first love. Unusual were only the early awareness of himself as a poet and the appearance of the heroine of silent films. So Georgy Adamovich recalled her: “Who, from those who attended Petersburg literary meetings at that time, does not remember on the stage a slender, blond, young woman, almost a girl with a huge black bow in her hair, singsong, cheerfully and hastily, slightly grassing, reciting poetry, making everyone smile without exception, even people who had lost the habit of smiling in those years.

And, indeed, it was not always taken seriously. The first offense was inflicted by the “real poet” Nikolai Gumilyov, when he ridiculed a self-confident girl who already had a circle of admirers of her poems. Then the future husband, the poet Georgy Ivanov, hearing “The Ballad of Crushed Glass” tirelessly repeated: “Did you write this? Really you? You yourself? .. Excuse me, I can’t believe it, looking at you. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, when Odoevtseva made a presentation in his literary salon "Green Lamp", admitted: "I did not expect ...". And Vladimir Nabokov, whom she met in New York, put it most unambiguously: “So pretty, why is she still writing ...”

And she, having started writing early, earned the “title” of N. Gumilyov’s “best student”, becoming his friend and best listener.He respected in his beloved student her unwillingness to imitate anyone: against the backdrop of a host of "mushrooms-podahmatov" Irina Odoevtseva remained herself. And yet, probably more than Odoevtseva's poems, Gumilyov valued her company, her "ears always ready to listen to me." He told her about his childhood, about traveling to Africa, about the war, about the difficult relationship with Anna Akhmatova - about everything. And she enthusiastically listened and memorized every word. They had a common sense of humor, which allowed them to joke and fool around together.

She gave us amazingly romantic poems, created a special genre of ballads, and wrote a number of novels.Already her first novel, Angel of Death, aroused undoubted interest among both readers and fellow writers. This is a story about a teenage girl who has not yet parted with childhood, but guesses what lies ahead. This is the story of her soul, her conflicting desires and thoughts. After the publication of Angel of Death, the American press wrote: "This is a novel of youth, full of dreams, horror, charm, rare charm. It is light and at the same time extremely meaningful ... Odoevtseva created a thing of unforgettable beauty. "The novel Isolde, like other prose experiments of Irina Odoevtseva, did not leave indifferent either compatriots who found themselves abroad or the foreign press. With its title, it refers the reader to famous medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde - a love story that is as strong as life and death. This echo colors the story. Vladimir Nabokov outlined the plot in a few strokes: "The famous break of our era. Famous dances, cocktails, cosmetics. Add to this the famous emigrant anguish, and the background is ready. "Fate, which cannot be avoided, its blind blows that destroy ordinary and understandable life, the world seen through the mysterious eyes of a woman - all this the reader finds in the exquisite and whimsical work of Irina Odoevtseva.

Having become the wife of the great poet of the Silver Age - G. Ivanov, having lived with him for 37 years of marriage, she wrote about her husband that she could not fully understand him. He seemed to her "strange, mysterious" and "one of the most wonderful" people she met. To her, a romantic girl with a bow, we owe the appearance of Ivanov's best poems:

And how could I, oh, judge for yourself,
To look into your eyes and not go crazy!

I do not say - believe, I do not say - hear,
But I know: you are now looking at the same snow

And my love looks over your shoulder
To this snowy paradise where you and me

***

Atomized by a million tiny particles
In the icy, airless, soulless ether,
Where there is no sun, no stars, no trees, no birds,
I will return - by reflection - in a lost world.

And again, in the romantic Summer Garden,
In the blue whiteness of Petersburg May,
I'll pass silently through the deserted alleys,
Embracing your precious shoulders

Yu.Annenkov. 1922

And, the most important merit of I. Odoevskaya is her memoirs “On the banks of the Neva”, “On the banks of the Seine”, on the villages of which she presented to the whole world and Russia as one jewel after another living portraits favorite poets: Mandelstam, Blok, Georgy Iv A nova, as well as many others, including Zinaida Gippius, Merezhkovsky, Adamovich, who lived first in Russia and then in exile. Optimistic, sociable, but not a bit ambitious, Irina Odoevtseva was always in the thick of the then literary "party". Irina Odoevtseva knew how to listen well, and she was often told very personal things, almost confessed. And a phenomenal memory allowed her, after many decades, to reproduce every word from the conversations, discussions, and disputes of those times.

With her books of memoirs, she returned to Russia all the friends who died far from their homeland. In the preface to the first book, On the Banks of the Neva, she clarifies: “I write not about myself and not for myself, but about those whom I was given to know” and asks readers to love and remember them.
These books are among the best lyrical memoirs of the 20th century and amaze with the author's natural ability to forgive those who did not like her too much.

N. Gumilyov, G. Ivanov and even E. Yevtushenko dedicated poems to her:

She was such a beauty
that is impossible to resist
and still touches me
a strand is taken from under her beret.
That strand tickles temptingly,
and boldly jump into the depths
that photo
I would like to,
as in an inaccessible country ...