AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro
lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon
which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated
at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune,
put it back in your face, sir, she said. (1.24)
According to a chronicler (Prince Ivan Mikhaylovich
Katyryov-Rostovski), Marina Mnishek loved a Negro lad even more
than precious stones:
Марина Мнишек была прельстительна.
Бела
лицом, а брови имея тонки.
Глаза змеиные. Рот мал. Поджаты губы.
Возрастом
невелика,
Надменна обращеньем.
Любила плясания и игрища,
И пялишася в
платья
Тугие с обручами,
С каменьями и жемчугом,
Но паче честных камней
любяше негритёнка.
(Maximilian Voloshin, "The Description of Moscow Tsars,"
1919)
Marina Mnishek was the wife of several impostors impersonating
Prince Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. In her suicide note
Marina's twin sister Aqua mentions Nurse Joan the Terrible and Ruby Black, Van's
black wet nurse:
Aujourd'hui
(heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right
to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several
'patients,' in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly
the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to
Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt... Similarly, chelovek
(human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he
is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor
she, but 'a tit of it' as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty
right breast. (1.3)
The black-ruby hands of mental panic and physical pain
tormenting poor mad Aqua hint at Ruby Black:
It was now the forming of soft black pits
(yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of
thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and
physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the
other, plead for death. (ibid.)
In "My Pushkin" (1937) Marina Tsvetaev says that she
always preferred black people to the white. In her memoir essay on
Voloshin, Zhivoe o zhivom ("A Living Word about a Living Man," 1932),
Marina Tsvetaev speaks of her love for Dumas' novel Joseph
Balsamo* (given her by Voloshin):
И книга за книгой — все пять томов Жозефа
Бальзамо Дюма, которого, прибавлю, люблю
по нынешний день, а перечитывала всего только прошлой зимой — все пять
томов, ни страницы не пропустив.
She [Aqua] wanted (and was allowed, bless the hospital
barber, Bob Bean) to have her dark curls shaved to an aquamarine prickle,
because they grew into her porous skull and curled inside.
(1.3)
When seventeen-year-old Marina Tsvetaev first met
Voloshin, her head was shaven:
— А вы всегда носите это?..
— Чепец? Всегда, я бритая.
— Всегда бритая?
— Всегда.
In her essay Marina Tsvetaev speaks of Voloshin's thick curly
hair and aquamarine eyes and compares him to a huge gnom:
Макс был настоящим чадом, порождением,
исчадием земли. Раскрылась земля и породила: такого, совсем готового, огромного
гнома, дремучего великана, немножко быка, немножко бога, на коренастых, точёных
как кегли, как сталь упругих, как столбы устойчивых ногах, с аквамаринами вместо
глаз, с дремучим лесом вместо волос, со всеми морскими и земными солями в крови
(«А ты знаешь, Марина, что наша кровь — это древнее море…»), со всем, что внутри земли кипело и остыло, кипело и не остыло. Нутро
Макса, чувствовалось, было именно нутром земли.
"The huge gnom" brings to mind the hobgoblins whom Demonian minds bien rangés were not apt to
unhobble:
It was owing, among other things, to this
'scientifically ungraspable' concourse of divergences that minds bien
rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a
fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in
support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)
According to Voloshin, there are spirits of fire, spirits
of water, spirits of air and spirits of earth. Marina Tsvetaev had the
feeling that Voloshin himself was a spirit of earth:
Есть духи огня, Марина, духи воды, Марина, духи
воздуха, Марина, и есть, Марина, духи земли.
Идём по пустынному уступу, в самый полдень, и у
меня точное чувство, что я иду — вот с таким духом земли. Ибо каким (дух,
но земли), кроме как вот таким, кем, кроме как вот этим, дух земли еще мог бы
быть!
*Giuseppe Balsamo is the real name of Count Cagliostro
(1743-95), Italian adventurer and impostor.
Alexey Sklyarenko