Finest hour Cherubina de Gabriak. Life of Elizabeth Vasilyeva

Country: Russia

Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva was born into a poor noble family. The father is a calligraphy teacher who died early from consumption. From the age of seven to sixteen, she suffered from the same ailment, was bedridden, and remained lame for the rest of her life. In 1904 she graduated from the Vasileostrovskaya Gymnasium with a gold medal. In 1908 Elizaveta Dmitrieva graduated from the Imperial Women's Pedagogical Institute, where she studied medieval history and French literature. For some time she studied at the Sorbonne, studied the Spanish Middle Ages. In Sorbonne she met Nikolai Gumilyov, who many times asked Dmitrieva to marry him, she refused - she was the bride of engineer Vasiliev.
Subsequently, Dmitrieva taught at the Petrovsky Women's Gymnasium, published translations from Spanish poetry (Saint Teresa, etc.) in theosophical journals, joined the artistic life of the capital, attended lectures at the Academy of Arts and famous literary meetings at the "Tower" of Vyacheslav Ivanov, where she met Maximilian Voloshin. Voloshin became her mentor, a spiritual connection with him will pass through her whole life. Elizaveta Dmitrieva spent the summer of 1909 in Koktebel, at the dacha near Voloshin, where the joint idea of ​​a literary hoax was born, the sonorous pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriac and the literary mask of the mysterious Catholic beauty were invented.
On one of the days of August 1909, the St. Petersburg art critic and publisher S.K. Makovsky, who at that time was busy organizing the new Apollon magazine, received a letter signed with one letter "Ch". An unknown poetess offered "Apollo" poems that interested Makovsky. The handwriting was elegant, the paper was impregnated with spicy perfumes, the sheets of poetry were arranged with dried flowers. Soon the mysterious stranger herself called Makovsky - and he heard a "charming" voice. Several other poems were also sent. The entire editorial staff of Apollo, and there were such famous poets as Innokenty Annensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolai Gumilyov, Mikhail Kuzmin, unconditionally decided to print poems by an unknown person. Gradually, her appearance, her fate became clearer from telephone conversations and poems. It became known that she had reddish, bronze curls, a pale face with brightly defined lips. She is a Spaniard by birth, a zealous Catholic, she is eighteen years old, received a strict upbringing in a monastery and is under the supervision of a despot father and a Jesuit monk, her confessor. Enchanting music sounded her name - Cherubina de Gabriak. In the exquisite lines of poetry, the melancholy of loneliness was visible, the desire to meet the call of the heart, to find a soul that could be trusted.
Cherubina de Gabriac's success was brief and dizzying. And then she was exposed. Cherubina was exposed at the end of 1909: M. Kuzmin, who found out Dmitrieva's phone number, found out the truth. The translator von Günther forced Dmitrieva to confess to deceit, the secret became known in the Apollo editorial office, Gumilyov’s insulting attack on Dmitrieva led to a duel between him and Voloshin ... As a result, at the end of 1910, another selection of Cherubina’s poems appeared in Apollo, with the final poem "Meeting", signed by the real name of the poetess. The revelation turned into a severe creative crisis for Cherubina de Gabriak. In her farewell letter to Voloshin, she writes: “I stand at a big crossroads. I left you. I won't write poetry anymore. I don't know what I will do. Max, you brought out the power of creativity in me for a moment, but took it away from me forever later. Let my poems be a symbol of my love for you.”
In 1911, Elizaveta Dmitrieva married an reclamation engineer V. N. Vasiliev, took his last name and left with him for Turkestan. Later she traveled a lot, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Georgia - mainly on the business of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy becomes her main occupation for all subsequent years and, apparently, a source of new inspiration. In 1915, Cherubina de Gabriac returned to poetry: in new poems, her former “enamel smooth style” gradually disappears, and a heightened sense of rhythm, original images, a sense of some mysterious, but undoubted spiritual basis of new images and intonations, come to replace. Many of the poems are religious, but no longer Catholic stylizations, but sincere poems, reflecting the search for a path for the poet's own soul, striving for repentance and purification.
In 1921, the poetess, together with her husband, was arrested and expelled from Petrograd, she was primarily blamed for her commitment to anthroposophy. She ends up in Yekaterinodar, where she leads the association of young poets and meets S. Marshak. Together with him, she works on children's plays (the collection of plays was reprinted four times).
In June 1922, he returned to Petrograd, worked in the literary part of the Petrograd Theater for Young Spectators, translated from Spanish and Old French (the main translation work was the Old French story in verse "The Mule Without a Bridle" by Payen from Mézières, completed in 1923 and published in 1934), writes the story for children about Miklouho-Maclay "The Man from the Moon". Leaving work at the Youth Theater, she completes library courses and serves in the Library of the Academy of Sciences.
In 1926, repressions began against Russian anthroposophists, and a year later a search was made in Dmitrieva's house, during which all her books and archives were taken away, and the poetess herself was sent to Tashkent for three years. In exile, she continues to write poetry, the constant themes of which are mystical experiences, loneliness, love, doom, longing for her native Petersburg. In 1927, at the suggestion of a close friend of recent years, a sinologist and translator Y. Shchutsky, Dmitrieva created the last harmless hoax - a cycle of seven lines "The House under a Pear Tree", written on behalf of the fictional exiled Chinese poet Li Xiang Zi
Elizaveta Dmitrieva died on December 5, 1928 from liver cancer in the Tashkent hospital. Poltoratsky, not having lived to the end of the exile. She was buried at the Botkin cemetery in Tashkent.

(1887–1928), Russian poetess, playwright, translator. She was born on March 31 (April 12), 1887 in St. Petersburg in a poor noble family of the Dmitrievs (under this name she published her works until 1909). His father, a secondary school teacher, died early from tuberculosis, which doomed Vasilyeva in childhood and early adolescence to a serious illness (its consequences - lameness - remained with the poetess for life). She graduated from the St. Petersburg Women's Pedagogical Institute (1904-1908), studied for some time at the Sorbonne (1908).

Published since 1909 (own poems and translations). In the same year, together with N.S. Gumilyov, she came to Koktebel (Crimea) to M.A. Voloshin, with whom she came up with the pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriak, under which, starting from a speech in 1909 in the Apollo magazine, began to publish mystical and philosophical poems, full of religious and romantic exaltation and "Spanish" exoticism, introducing into the literature of the "Silver Age" the image of an exquisite beauty belonging to an ancient heraldic family and doomed to seclusion by the will of the despot father. A few months later, the heroine of the hoax (the subject of love not only of Gumilyov and Voloshin, but also - in absentia - the editor-publisher of "Apollo" S.K. Makovsky) was, as a result of her own careless confession, "exposed" and began to write poetry under the name Dmitriev, and since 1911, after marriage, under the name of her husband (most of them were not published during Vasilyeva's lifetime). Then the poetess became interested in anthroposophy, in connection with which she traveled a lot around Russia, also visiting Switzerland, Finland and Germany and making friends with the founder of the doctrine, the German thinker R. Steiner.

In the early 1920s, Vasilyeva, together with S.Ya. Marshak, organized a children's theater in Krasnodar, composing fairy tale plays for him, sometimes in collaboration with Marshak, whose deputy in the literary and repertory part of the Petrograd Youth Theater she became, on the recommendation of the poet, since 1922. “One of the most fantastic and sad figures in Russian literature”, according to A.N. Tolstoy, Vasilyeva has been successfully translating from Spanish and Old French since the 1920s (many of these works of hers still remain unsurpassed) . In 1926 she worked in the library of the USSR Academy of Sciences; in 1927 she was exiled to the Urals, then moved to Tashkent, where, under the name of the fictional Chinese poet Li Xiang-tzu, in a cycle of seven lines House under a pear tree expressed the depth of the anguish of exile.

Vasilyeva E.I. Theater for children(jointly with S. Marshak). L., 1927
Makovsky S. Cherubina de Gabriac. - In the book: Makovsky S. Portraits of contemporaries. New York, 1955
Memories of Cherubin de Gabriac. M., 1989
Vasilyeva E.I. Autobiography. Selected poems. M., 1998
Vasilyeva E.I. House under a pear tree. M., 1998

World literature knows several famous hoaxes: the Scot James MacPherson, who created the Poems of Ossian, an ancient Celtic bard; Chatterton, who wrote poetry on behalf of a 15th-century priest; Prosper Merimee with his "Theater of Clara Gazul" and "Guzla" - Slavic songs that deceived even Pushkin; "Songs of Bilitis" by Pierre Louis, allegedly written by an ancient Greek poetess. A hoax is not just a publication under a pseudonym: a hoaxer creates not only a text on behalf of another person, but also this person himself, endowed with his own biography and character, a person existing (as if existing) in an extra-textual reality.

The history of Russian literature is more like a martyrology: writers were persecuted, executed, sent to hard labor, sent abroad ... There was perhaps only one gaming era in it - the Silver Age. Then the only known Russian literary hoax appeared - Cherubina de Gabriak.

Finest hour of Cherubina de Gabriak

This story began in September 1909, when an unusual letter arrived at the editorial office of the Petersburg magazine Apollon. Envelope sealed with a black wax seal with the motto "Vae victis!" (“Woe to the vanquished!”), mourning edged paper. The letter, in French, is signed with the letter C., and several poems are attached to it. Here is how the editor of the magazine, Konstantin Makovsky, a poet, art critic, nephew of the famous Wanderer artist, and part-time well-known snob and esthete in St. Petersburg, recalled this: what was in vogue then, how many autobiographical semi-confessions.

With my royal dream
I wander alone throughout the universe,
with my contempt for perishable life,
with my bitter beauty.

But they sleep in faded centuries
all those who would be loved,
like me, sadness tomima,
like me, alone in my dreams.

And I will die in the steppes of a foreign land,
I will not break the vicious circle.
Why are the hands so tender
So subtle is the name of Cherubina...

“The poetess, as it were, involuntarily blurted out about herself, about her captivating appearance and about her mysterious and sad fate. The impression was sharpened by the handwriting, extremely elegant, and the smell of spicy perfume that soaked the paper, and the dried tears of the "Mother of God herbs" with which the mourning sheets were laid. There was no address for the answer, but soon the poetess herself called by phone. Her voice turned out to be amazing: I never seem to have heard a more charming voice.

The mysterious poetess (Ch. stood for Cherubina, however, sometimes she called herself "infanta") continued to send poems and call the editorial office. Makovsky: “After much effort, I managed to get something out of the “Infanta”: she really is a Spaniard by birth, moreover, a zealous Catholic: she is only eighteen years old, brought up in a monastery, since childhood she suffers a little from her chest. She let slip about some embassy receptions in the mansion “on the Islands” and about the strictest supervision by the despot father (her mother died long ago) and a certain Jesuit monk, her confessor ... After several more letters and telephone conversations with the mysterious Cherubina, it became clear: she has reddish, bronze curls, her complexion is completely pale, not blood, but brightly defined lips with slightly lowered corners, and her gait is slightly limping, as befits sorceresses.

A large selection of Cherubina de Gabriac's poems was placed in the second issue of the magazine, at the same time throwing out Annensky's poems. (The seriously ill poet was very offended. On November 30, he died of a heart attack.) Meanwhile, communication with Cherubina continued. The entire editorial staff of Apollo was in love with her in absentia and envied Makovsky, the only one who could talk to her on the phone. The artist Konstantin Somov offered to come to her house blindfolded to paint a portrait of a mysterious beauty. They tried to figure out Cherubina many times - they conducted a survey in all the mansions on Kamenny Island, then they were on duty at the station when she was supposed to go abroad, then they sent her an invitation to an exhibition where she had to sign in the guest book. Everything was in vain. The exhibition was visited by the cousin of the poetess, a Portuguese with a strange name, Don Harpia de Mantilla, who remained unnoticed. It was not possible to identify the girl at the station.

Meanwhile, Makovsky admitted: "... I was finally convinced that I had long been fond of Cherubina not only as a poetess." When the girl left for Paris for two weeks, hinting that she was thinking of becoming a nun, and upon her return she prayed all night on the stone floor and fell ill with pneumonia, Makovsky almost went crazy with worry.

Events in the editorial office of the magazine developed in a rather strange way. On November 19, in the studio of the artist Golovin at the Mariinsky Theatre, in the most exquisite surroundings (Chaliapin sang below, and the scenery for Gluck's Orpheus was laid out on the floor), the poet and member of the editorial board Maximilian Voloshin slapped another poet and also a member of the editorial board, Nikolai Gumilyov. Three days later, a duel took place - the last in the history of Russian literature. They were shooting just in the area of ​​​​the Black River, and the pistols obtained with difficulty belonged almost to Pushkin's time. The seconds were Alexei Tolstoy and Mikhail Kuzmin. On the way to the place of the duel, Voloshin's car got stuck in the snow. Gumilyov fired and missed, Voloshin's pistol misfired twice. Gumilyov demanded a third shot, but the seconds refused him. On the way back, one of the seconds lost a galosh.

The news of the "duel of the decadents" immediately hit the press and was retold for a long time with endless ridiculous details. Nikolai Chukovsky heard one of these stories more than a decade later: “Gumilyov arrived at the Black River with seconds and a doctor at exactly the appointed time, direct and solemn, as always. But he had to wait a long time. Trouble happened to Max Voloshin - he lost his galosh in deep snow. Without galoshes, he would never agree to move on, and stubbornly, but unsuccessfully, searched for her along with his seconds. Gumilyov, chilled and tired of waiting, went to meet him and also took part in the search for galoshes. The galosh was not found, but the joint search made the duel psychologically impossible, and the opponents reconciled.” Voloshin's nickname, Vaks Kaloshin, was added to this story.

Around the same time, it turned out who the mysterious Cherubina was. Kuzmin appeared to Makovsky and told (according to Johannes Günther, a German poet and translator) that the mysterious “infanta” was the poetess Elizaveta Dmitrieva, who often visited the editorial office. Makovsky called her number - and Cherubina's extraordinary voice really answered him. In the evening she came to visit Makovsky. The editor in love persuaded himself for a long time that it didn’t matter that the fatal beauty was just a simple Russian girl, “even if she turns out to be completely “so-so”, inconspicuous, not at all beautiful”; the main thing is her charm, intelligence, talent, spiritual intimacy ... But the visitor horrified him. “A short, rather stout, dark-haired woman with a large head, an excessively swollen forehead and some truly terrible mouth, from which protruded fang-like teeth, entered the room, limping heavily. She was extremely ugly. It became almost scary. The wonderful dream suddenly sank into eternity, the inexorable, monstrous, shameful reality came into its own. Cherubina's story is over.

Childhood, adolescence, youth of Lily Dmitrieva

Here you should rewind the tape of time back and find out who Elizaveta Dmitrieva was.

Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva was born on April 12 (March 31 according to the new style), 1887 in St. Petersburg. The family was not rich. His father, "a dreamer and a loser", had only one talent - calligraphy, thanks to which he was able to get a job as a calligraphy teacher in a gymnasium. He will pass on a beautiful handwriting to his youngest daughter - as well as illness, consumption, the cause of his early death. The family existed thanks to the mother, who worked as a midwife. (“Mother by father is Ukrainian, both type and face – everything from her is external,” the daughter recalled).

The youngest of three children - at home her name was Lily - grew up very sickly. At the age of seven, after many hours of fainting, she lost her memory and could no longer remember anything about her childhood. (Such fainting spells with memory loss happened to her later. She also had hallucinations - both auditory and visual). At nine she fell ill with diphtheria and became blind for a year. From the age of seven, due to tuberculosis of the lungs and bones, she was bedridden, could not attend the gymnasium, teachers came to her house. At 13, she finally began to walk, but then she limped all her life, reminding herself of Andersen's Little Mermaid ("I'm glad I'm not dumb"). In the same year, she was abused by a family friend. A year later, the father died. The elder sister died of blood poisoning at the age of 24. (“She was still alive when her face began to decompose. There were wounds on her face. Her lips were decomposing. I gave her champagne to drink from a spoon. And I drank it myself.”) The sister’s husband committed suicide the next day.

The Dmitriev family was generally strange. My sister broke lily's dolls, forced her to throw toys into the stove (as a sacrifice to fire). The brother retold the terrible stories from Edgar Allan Poe, threw Lilya from the roof of the hayloft, was going to marry her off to a criminal, at the age of 10 he fled to America, in the gymnasium he decided, together with a friend, “to kill all the Jews” and even managed to cripple one Jewish high school student. Then he had epileptic seizures and was sent to the hospital.

All this heap of horrors, worthy of entering the history of Justine's de Sade "unfortunate virtue", was recorded in Voloshin's diary according to Dmitrieva. The problem is that the further you get acquainted with the biography of the poetess, the more you understand that it is better to believe her stories about yourself only if they are confirmed by some third-party evidence. There are such testimonies about the illnesses and death of the father and sister. Everything else - no. About brother Dmitrieva, for example, it is known that he was a naval officer, commanded submarines and destroyers, participated in the Russian-Japanese and World War I, received several orders. Colleagues spoke of him as a cynical and prudent careerist. Something weakly all this fits with the image of a boy with great oddities, drawn by his sister. Yes, and the fleet of a person who left a psychiatric clinic would hardly have been taken.

Be that as it may, the girl studied well. At the age of 17 she graduated from the gymnasium with a silver medal, entered the Women's Pedagogical Institute, where she attended lectures in two specialties at once: medieval history and medieval French literature. At the same time, as a volunteer, she attended classes at St. Petersburg University, studied the old French language and Spanish literature. Dmitrieva generally had brilliant linguistic abilities: she tried to learn Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. In the summer of 1907 she traveled to Paris, attended a course in old French literature at the Sorbonne. I was carried away by medieval mysticism, especially the figure of St. Teresa of Avila. The first printed poem by Dmitrieva is a translation of the octave of St. Teresa (Lilya wrote poetry from the age of 13).

In 1906, Lilya met and became engaged to a student, Vsevolod Vasiliev (Will). Very little is known about this man, who eventually became her husband. Voloshin described him as follows: “This is a young man of infinite kindness and selflessness, who infinitely loves her. But besides the heart, he has nothing - no mind, no face. And here is how Vasiliev himself wrote about himself to Voloshin, announcing the death of his wife: “Dear Max, thanks for the letter, I am not worth it. Everything that was good in me was from Lily ... ”It seems that this quiet and all-forgiving person played the role of Prince Myshkin in the life of Dmitrieva under the fatal Nastasya Filippovna.

Despite her lameness and ugliness, Lilya Dmitrieva was not deprived of male attention at all. Here is the philosopher Radlov, and some kind of Leonid, and correspondence with a student from Tübingen ... In 1908, Lilya met Voloshin. He immediately drew attention to her: “Lilya Dmitrieva. An ugly face and shining, clear, relentlessly questioning eyes. There are several people in the room, but we speak, already understanding, in front of others and incomprehensible to them. After Voloshin left for Paris, they began to correspond. He sent her his poems, books, introduced her to the works of Steiner, gave gifts: carnelian rosaries, a wreath of Koktebel wormwood. She told him about her not-too-joyful life: she spent several months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Finland, after graduating from the institute she got a job teaching Russian and history at a women's gymnasium. The work was not at all for Dmitrieva: she could not even raise her voice so that blood would not gush in her throat - what kind of discipline is there ... She translated, wrote poetry (“I don’t like my poems, they seem dry to me. I know, I know very well what it is not that, not one expresses what I want. There is nothing more difficult than the impossibility of creativity, if there is an eternal striving for it.")

It was at this time that Dmitrieva and Gumilyov met. This story is also known only from her words, but at least its beginning looks quite plausible. They first met in Paris, in the studio of the artist - a mutual friend. The meeting was fleeting: we sat in a cafe, wandered around Paris at night. The next time their paths crossed in the spring of 1909, on the tower near Vyacheslav Ivanov. Both young poets listened to Ivanov's lectures on the technique of verse. “He went to see me off, and immediately both of us realized with merciless clarity that this was a “meeting” and it was not for us to resist it.”

"Meeting" grew into a passionate romance. Gumilyov wrote poems to Dmitrieva in an album: “Without embarrassment and without hiding, I look into people’s eyes, I found myself a girlfriend from the breed of swans,” he proposed to her - she refused, referring to her fiancé, “bound by pity for a great, incomprehensible love to me ". Was this another fleeting hobby for Gumilyov, or was it really something serious? Quite possible. By that time, he was probably already tired of the fruitless courtship of Anya Gorenko, who lived in Kyiv (he proposed to her four times, was refused, once she agreed - but soon broke off the engagement, out of grief he tried to commit suicide). Perhaps Gumilyov decided that in the person of Dmitrieva he had found a suitable replacement. There was much in common between them: both wrote poetry, were interested in the technique of versification and French literature. In addition, Akhmatova never shared her husband's exotic hobbies; when he talked about his African travels, she went out into the next room, and Dmitrieva listened to them with pleasure. The famous poem "Captains", written just at that time, he discussed with Lily. Indirect confirmation of this version: Akhmatova, who was rather calm about Gumilev's numerous hobbies, could not stand only Dmitrieva.

At the end of May 1909, the couple in love went to Koktebel. Dmitrieva did not write to Voloshin about her novel. She reported that Gumilyov would accompany her, because she was sick, and so “it was better to go alone.” Everything has changed in Koktebel. A month later, Dmitrieva asked Gumilyov to leave - without explaining the reasons. He immediately went to Odessa - Anya Gorenko was resting there - to make another offer and receive another refusal. Dmitrieva remained in Koktebel until autumn and, in her words, "lived the best days of my life."

Later, she would never be able to really explain - either to herself or to others - the feelings that owned her at that moment. “My biggest love in my life, the most unattainable was Max. Al. (Voloshin). If N. St. (Gumilyov) was for me the flowering of spring, “boy”, we were the same age, but he always seemed younger to me, then M.A. for me was somewhere far away, someone who could not turn his eyes to me, a little and silent. What seemed like a miracle to the girl, happened. I found out that M.A. loves me, has loved me for a long time - I rushed to him all over. It all seemed to me: I want both, why choose! There are two souls in me, and one of them truly loved one, the other the other.

Mysteries of Cherubina

After Gumilyov left, Dmitrieva stayed with Voloshin in Koktebel. It was there, at the end of the summer of 1909, that Cherubina was born - poems were written, a name was invented. Gabriak (or rather, gabriakh) was the name of a grape root found on the seashore, similar to a good-natured devil. Hence - C. de Gabriak. Ch. later had to be deciphered as Cherubina - a rare name was taken from Bret Garth. Spanish and Catholic motifs in poetry appeared thanks to Dmitrieva, who was fond of mysticism and old Spanish poetry. And the details of the appearance and biography of the mysterious beauty were thrown during telephone conversations by the romantically inclined Makovsky himself.

However, although the main mystery was cleared up at the end of 1909, many things remained unclear. For example, who wrote Cherubina's poems? Many contemporaries believed that Voloshin himself. According to Voloshin, "in Cherubina's poems, I played the role of director and censor, suggested themes, expressions, but only Lilya wrote." This, perhaps, can be trusted. Dmitrieva and later wrote - quite independently - good poetry.

Another mystery is why Voloshin needed this hoax at all. On this occasion, various considerations were cited, they referred to his passion for practical jokes (Voloshin and Tsvetaeva proposed to stage a hoax: print her poems about Russia under the name of the poet Petukhov). It is possible that Voloshin simply wanted to laugh at the snob Makovsky, who dreamed that employees would come to the Apollo office in tuxedos and invite ballerinas from the Mariinsky Theater. Tsvetaeva wrote that Voloshin was trying to close the "catastrophic gap between body and soul": the modest and ugly school teacher Dmitrieva and her romantic poems. "Let her be - her!"

It is not clear why Dmitrieva needed to give out her secret to Johannes Günther, who then - through Kuzmin - exposed her? Voloshin recalled that she was "in a nervous, excited state." According to Gunther's story, it turns out that almost by chance, without thinking, she let it slip. But she did not refuse her confessions, on the contrary, she cited evidence.

There is another problem, or rather, two at once. Why did Dmitrieva stop writing immediately after the exposure? After all, everything turned out for her is not so bad. The hoax, after all, could not continue indefinitely. Makovsky did not hold a grudge against her, "behaved like a knight" (Tsvetaeva), published in the tenth issue of "Apollo" a large selection of Cherubina's poems in the design of Lansere, with the addition of a poem signed by Dmitrieva herself. The magazine provided her with work - she was sent texts for translations. Her popularity was enormous - provincial magazines reprinted Cherubina's poems for many years. Akhmatova somehow noticed that during these years in Russian literature a “vacancy for the first poetess” had formed, and Cherubina managed to fill it for a while. Why didn't she want to keep this place? At a meeting with Makovsky, she said: “Today, from the minute I heard from you that everything was revealed, I lost myself forever: that only self, invented by me, died, which allowed me to feel like a woman for several months, to live a full life of creativity, love, happiness. Having buried Cherubina, I buried myself and will never rise again ... "

These oddities are connected with another mystery - the history of the duel. In fact, a lot has been written about the duel itself and in detail, but few indicate its reason. After all, the duel had nothing to do with mystification. Memoirists simply confuse two completely unrelated plots: the Makovsky-Cherubin-Voloshin triangle, and the Voloshin-Dmitriev-Gumilyov love triangle that led to the duel. Both stories developed in parallel in time - but that's all.

According to Dmitrieva's memoirs, in the autumn of 1909 Gumilyov continued to pursue her with offers to marry him, and, enraged by the refusal, "God knows what about me" at the Tower. Dmitrieva complained to Voloshin, then there was a slap in the face and a duel. Voloshin, who knew everything from the words of Dmitrieva, told about the same thing: “Gumilyov talked about how he and Lily had a big affair in Koktebel. All this in very rough terms. The details of this story are reported by Johannes Günther (who played in it the role of either an evil genius, or a simpleton who wanted the best, but it turned out as always). Judging by his memoirs, it turns out that Dmitrieva herself told him about her affair with Gumilyov: Gumilyov promised to marry her in Koktebel, they returned together to St. Petersburg, and there he suddenly lost interest in her. Gunther decided to reconcile the couple in love and arranged a date for them. But Gumilyov, having come to the meeting, said: “Mademoiselle, you are spreading lies that I was going to marry you. You were my mistress. They don’t marry such people, ”and he left.

The only participant in this story who has never commented on it in any way is Gumilyov himself. True, he died at an age when memoirs are not yet written, but he did not spread anything orally. Akhmatova recalled that he avoided even pronouncing Voloshin's name. In the summer of 1921, shortly before his death, Gumilyov ended up in the Crimea. They met with Voloshin and shook hands with each other. Here is the conversation that took place. Voloshin: “If I then considered it necessary to resort to such an extreme measure as insulting a person, it was not because I doubted the truth of your words, but because you considered it possible to talk about it at all.” Gumilyov: “But I didn’t say. You believed the words of that crazy woman…” Aleksey Tolstoy writes the same thing: “He did not and could not utter these words. However, out of pride and contempt, he remained silent, not denying the accusations.

If we accept this version, it turns out that the insults to Gumilyov - partially or completely - are an invention of Dmitrieva. The story she told Gunther is an outright lie, and it is also hard to believe in Gumilyov's persistent persecution after what happened in Koktebel. But in this case, it turns out that Dmitrieva, having played the fatal vamp from Dostoevsky's novels - either Nastasya Filippovna, rushing between Myshkin and Rogozhin, or Katerina Ivanovna, unable to make a choice between Ivan and Dmitry - simply pitted two men in love with her, who almost killed each other because of her. (Gumilyov, in any case, shot seriously and knew how to handle weapons. During the duel, Tolstoy was struck by the “icy hatred” in his eyes.)

If this version is true, it may also clarify what happened to Dmitrieva after the exposure and duel. "N. S. took revenge on me more than I offended him. After the duel, I was sick, almost on the verge of insanity. I stopped writing poetry, for five years I hardly even read poetry; - I never became a poet - I always had the face of N. St. and hindered me." Perhaps, in her later life, Dmitrieva was engaged in expiating her guilt: before Voloshin - by the fact that she refused him, before Gumilyov - by the fact that she refused poetry.

Who was she, Dmitrieva-Cherubina? An unhappy, sick, hysterical woman, easily suggestible and manipulated, whom Voloshin simply used for a grandiose prank? A mythomaniac, an adventurer who played the femme fatale from decadent novels? Among the myths she created is the story of her deceased daughter Veronica, who was buried in Paris. Several poems are dedicated to her. Some biographers seriously found out who the child was from, when he was born. Yes, not from anyone. From imagination. By the way, Dmitrieva was not original in this - Elena Guro also wrote poems about her son, whom she never had.

Contemporaries described Dmitrieva as ugly, but charming, witty, and caustic. But in the photographs, she does not give the impression of being ugly: a round, pretty face, big eyes, an appetizing figure. Rather - attractive, but rustic. Nothing to do with the aristocratic refinement that was required of decadent poetesses and that Akhmatova and Gippius possessed. Probably Gunther gave the most accurate description of her: “She was of medium height, rather small, rather plump, but graceful and well built. The mouth was too large, the teeth protruded, but the lips were full and beautiful. No, she was not pretty, rather - she was extraordinary, and the vibes emanating from her today would probably be called "sex." No wonder so many men lost their heads over her.

There was nothing left of wit, either in poetry or in letters. Just a few parodies. Here is one, to Blok's verses:

I planted my bright paradise
And fenced with a high tyn,
And behind the fence by chance
Mother comes for kerosene.

And slowly bypasses the mother
My gardens, my covenants.
- “After all, cutlets will be overcooked.
It's time for me to wring out the laundry!"

Everything is quiet. Does she know
That the heart is ripening behind the fence,
And that cutlets are not needed,
Who drank heavenly wine.

She was undoubtedly a talented poetess, although not of the first rank. A strange feature of her talent is that she wrote her best poems, reincarnating as another person, Cherubina, a Spaniard Ernu, a Chinese poet. Tsvetaeva wrote about her poems: "The image of Akhmatova, the blow is mine, the poems written both before Akhmatova and before me." Some poems really could well come out from under the pen of Akhmatova:

With quickly removed gloves
Preserved imprint of hands
Black crepe in inflexible folds
He drew a circle on the plates.

In the quiet haze confessional
A timid whisper, someone's speech;
My strict profile is sad
From the rays of flickering candles.

I watch the game of twinkles
According to the minting of dark bronzes
And I do not hear admonitions
What the old priest whispers to me.

Correcting the comb in the braids,
I follow my dreams
All the sins in his questions
So naive and simple.

Life of Elizabeth Vasilyeva

After the "Cherubin" story, Dmitrieva had a chance to live for another two decades. There were enough events in these years of her life, only she leaves a strange feeling of emptiness, and in the end - a genuine tragedy.

After the duel, Voloshin seriously intended to marry Dmitrieva, even began to figure out how to get a divorce from Margarita Sabashnikova, his wife, with whom he had lived separately for a long time. But on the New Year, 1910, he received a "gift" from Lily - a refusal to marry him. She again referred to her fiancé. In February, Voloshin left Petersburg. The next time he and Dmitrieva would meet only in 1916. In the spring of 1911, Vsevolod Vasiliev graduated from the institute, got a job in Turkestan (he was a hydrological engineer), and he and Lily got married and left for Central Asia.

Thus began a new life for Elizaveta Dmitrieva - now Vasilyeva. She wrote almost no poetry. She lived mainly in St. Petersburg, periodically traveling to Turkestan to her husband, but she did not maintain contacts with old acquaintances. In bohemian circles, it was believed that she had gone to the provinces. Anthroposophy became the main occupation of Vasilyeva during these years. In the spring of 1912, she attended lectures in Helsingfors, and since then the teachings of the "Doctor" have supplanted her former love of poetry. Vasilyeva constantly went to listen to Steiner's lectures in Germany and Switzerland, and in 1913 she was appointed guarantor (official representative) of the Anthroposophical Society in Russia. She was engaged in organizational work, translated books by Steiner, edited other people's translations. At the same time, a new serious hobby appeared in her life - Boris Leman (Dix), a poet, mystic, musicologist. It was on him, when leaving St. Petersburg, that Voloshin left Lilya - he and Leman were engaged in some kind of occult practices, possibly hypnosis. They later worked together in the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy gave her peace, whether it gave her happiness is unknown. Her letters periodically break through: “I know that I rejected my path, stood on someone else’s and usurped it. I don't write poetry, no matter how much it hurts me. I died for art, I, who love it with the "pain of a rejected mother", I myself killed him in myself.

In 1918, Vasilyeva and Leman left the hungry Petrograd for the South, to Ekaterinodar, where Vasilyev somehow found himself. The city was in the hands of the whites. To earn money, Vasilyeva and Leman got a job in the OSVAG of the Volunteer Army. In fact, it was counterintelligence, but they were engaged in cult enlightenment work: Leman lectured and wrote articles, Vasilyeva translated the foreign press. In 1920, Ekaterinodar was occupied by the Red Army. The Vasilievs and Leman did not emigrate, they remained under the Bolsheviks. Vasilyeva found a job in a bookbinding workshop. Her main business was the creation in Yekaterinodar of the Children's Town for homeless children. She did this together with Marshak, whom fate also threw to the South in those same years. Marshak and Vasilyeva organized a children's theater and wrote a dozen and a half plays for it (including the famous "Cat's House"). They created a poetic studio "Ptichnik" in the city. During the war years, Vasilyeva began to write again, and in Yekaterinodar, new reasons for inspiration appeared. She dedicated love poems to the lawyer Fyodor Volkenstein, and in general an atmosphere of general love or enthusiasm developed around her. Two young poetesses from the studio surrounded Vasilyeva with care and adoration, and Marshak's wife was jealous of her husband and forbade them to meet.

It soon became unsafe to stay in Ekaterinodar. In 1921, the Vasilievs and Leman were arrested, but they were quickly released. In the summer of 1922, together with the Marshak family, they returned to Petrograd. Marshak was invited to work as a head coach at the Youth Theater. He took Vasilyeva as his deputy. Their children's plays were staged in the theater. However, two years later, Vasilyeva went to study at library courses, and after they finished, she got a job at the library of the Academy of Sciences.

Upon returning to Petrograd, Vasilyeva and Leman resumed their anthroposophical activities, heading the local branch of the society. In 1923, the persecution of anthroposophists began: they were denied re-registration of the society. I had to go underground, concentrating work in circles led by Vasilyeva and Leman. Relations with Leman by that time had completely gone wrong, Leman got married, and Vasilyeva met her last great love - orientalist Julian Shchutsky. He was ten years younger than her. Vasilyeva's last love poems are addressed to Shchutsky. She was engaged in Petrograd and translations from Old French, translated the "Song of Roland", published a book about Miklouho-Maclay. In 1926, Vasilyeva even decided to publish (for the first time since 1909) a collection of her new poems - Heather. But the matter never came to publication.

In April 1927, Leman and Vasilyeva were arrested. At first, they were charged with anthroposophic activities, but then the story of involvement in OSVAG surfaced. In the summer, Vasilyeva was sent to the Urals by stage. In Sverdlovsk, after a month in prison, she was allowed to go into exile in Tashkent, where her husband lived.

Here, in warm and well-fed Tashkent, Vasilyeva yearned for her native city - she even asked Voloshin to work on reducing the term of exile (“Will I ever return to my city, where is all my heart? Here I die”). In August, Shchutsky arrived for a month - on the way to Japan, where he was sent on a business trip. He persuaded Vasilyeva to a new hoax - to write poems on behalf of the exiled Chinese poet Li Xiang Zi ("the philosopher from the house under the pear tree" - a pear really grew in the Vasilyevs' house).

On the table a blue-green bouquet
Peacock feathers...
Maybe I'll stay for many, many years
Here in the desert...
“If you stepped on frost,
This means that strong ice is close ...
What has to come will come!

These were the last poems of Cherubina-Dmitrieva-Vasilyeva. The poetic path, which began with one hoax, ended with another. In Tashkent, Vasilyeva was seriously ill. Doctors could not make a diagnosis for a long time, and finally it became clear that it was liver cancer. On the night of December 5, 1928, the poetess died. Before her death, she told her husband: "If I had stayed to live, I would have lived in a completely different way."

Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva was born into a poor noble family. The father is a calligraphy teacher who died early from consumption. From the age of seven to sixteen, she suffered from the same ailment, was bedridden, and remained lame for the rest of her life. In 1904 she graduated from the Vasileostrovskaya Gymnasium with a gold medal. In 1908 Elizaveta Dmitrieva graduated from the Imperial Women's Pedagogical Institute, where she studied medieval history and French literature. For some time she studied at the Sorbonne, studied the Spanish Middle Ages. In Sorbonne she met with, who many times asked Dmitrieva to marry him, she refused - she was the bride of engineer Vasiliev.

Subsequently, Dmitrieva taught at the Petrovsky Women's Gymnasium, published translations from Spanish poetry (Saint Teresa and others) in theosophical journals, joined the artistic life of the capital, attended lectures at the Academy of Arts and famous literary meetings at the Tower, where she met with. Voloshin became her mentor, a spiritual connection with him will pass through her whole life. Elizaveta Dmitrieva spent the summer of 1909 in Koktebel, at the dacha near Voloshin, where the joint idea of ​​a literary hoax was born, a sonorous pseudonym and a literary mask of a mysterious Catholic beauty were invented.

On one of the days of August 1909, the St. Petersburg art critic and publisher S.K. Makovsky, who at that time was busy organizing the new Apollon magazine, received a letter signed with one letter "Ch". An unknown poetess offered "Apollo" poems that interested Makovsky. The handwriting was elegant, the paper was impregnated with spicy perfumes, the sheets of poetry were arranged with dried flowers. Soon the mysterious stranger herself called Makovsky - and he heard a "charming" voice. Several other poems were also sent. The entire editorial staff of Apollo, and there were such famous poets as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolai Gumilyov, unconditionally decided to print poems by an unknown person. Gradually, her appearance, her fate became clearer from telephone conversations and poems. It became known that she had reddish, bronze curls, a pale face with brightly defined lips. She is a Spaniard by birth, a zealous Catholic, she is eighteen years old, received a strict upbringing in a monastery and is under the supervision of a despot father and a Jesuit monk, her confessor. Enchanting music sounded her name - Cherubina de Gabriak. In the exquisite lines of poetry, the melancholy of loneliness was visible, the desire to meet the call of the heart, to find a soul that could be trusted.

Cherubina de Gabriac's success was brief and dizzying. And then she was exposed. Cherubina was exposed at the end of 1909: M. Kuzmin, who found out Dmitrieva's phone number, found out the truth. The translator von Günther forced Dmitrieva to confess to deceit, the secret became known in the Apollo editorial office, Gumilyov’s insulting attack on Dmitrieva led to a duel between him and Voloshin ... As a result, at the end of 1910, another selection of Cherubina’s poems appeared in Apollo, with the final poem "Meeting", signed by the real name of the poetess. The revelation turned around for Cherubins de Gabriac severe creative crisis. In her farewell letter to Voloshin, she writes: “I stand at a big crossroads. I left you. I won't write poetry anymore. I don't know what I will do. Max, you brought out the power of creativity in me for a moment, but took it away from me forever later. Let my poems be a symbol of my love for you.”

In 1911, Elizaveta Dmitrieva married an reclamation engineer V. N. Vasiliev, took his last name and left with him for Turkestan. Later she traveled a lot, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Georgia - mainly on the business of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy becomes her main occupation for all subsequent years and, apparently, a source of new inspiration. In 1915, Cherubina de Gabriac returned to poetry: in new poems, her former “enamel smooth style” gradually disappears, and a heightened sense of rhythm, original images, a sense of some mysterious, but undoubted spiritual basis of new images and intonations, come to replace. Many of the poems are religious, but no longer Catholic stylizations, but sincere poems, reflecting the search for a path for the poet's own soul, striving for repentance and purification.

In 1921, the poetess, together with her husband, was arrested and expelled from Petrograd, she was primarily blamed for her commitment to anthroposophy. She ends up in Yekaterinodar, where she leads the association of young poets and gets acquainted with. Together with him, she works on children's plays (the collection of plays was reprinted four times).

In June 1922, he returned to Petrograd, worked in the literary part of the Petrograd Theater for Young Spectators, translated from Spanish and Old French (the main translation work was the Old French story in verse "The Mule Without a Bridle" by Payen from Mézières, completed in 1923 and published in 1934), writes the story for children about Miklouho-Maclay "The Man from the Moon". Leaving work at the Youth Theater, she completes library courses and serves in the Library of the Academy of Sciences.

In 1926, repressions began against Russian anthroposophists, and a year later a search was made in Dmitrieva's house, during which all her books and archives were taken away, and the poetess herself was sent to Tashkent for three years. In exile, she continues to write poetry, the constant themes of which are mystical experiences, loneliness, love, doom, longing for her native Petersburg. In 1927, at the suggestion of a close friend of recent years, a sinologist and translator Yu. Shchutsky, Dmitrieva created the last harmless hoax - a cycle of seven lines "The House under a Pear Tree", written on behalf of the fictional exiled Chinese poet Li Xiang Zi

Died Elizaveta Dmitrieva December 5, 1928 from liver cancer in the Tashkent hospital. Poltoratsky, not having lived to the end of the exile. She was buried at the Botkin cemetery in Tashkent.

She was ugly and sickly, besides limping. Her life was not easy. But she went down in history as a beautiful poetess of the Silver Age. Her star rose in the poetic firmament of Northern Palmyra in 1909 and blew up the public with her rebelliousness and sensuality. “The image of Akhmatova, the blow is mine, the poems written both before Akhmatova and before me,” Marina Tsvetaeva gave such an assessment of the poetess’s poems.

She was admired in absentia and inspiredly quoted, although she did not like her poems. “I don’t like my poems, they seem dry to me,” the poetess said. “I know, I know very well that this is not the one, none of them express what I want. There is nothing harder than the impossibility of creativity, if there is an eternal desire for it. Nevertheless, all of Petersburg was talking about her, and there was a reason for that ... …

In editorial mail, the editor of the St. Petersburg art magazine Apollo, poet, critic, son of the famous Wanderer artist Sergei Makovsky, discovered a mysterious envelope - sealed with a black wax seal with the motto "Vae victis!" ("Woe to the vanquished!"). The letter was written in French, signed with the letter Ch., and several poems were attached to it. Makovsky read poems that immediately fascinated him with personal semi-confessions.

The stranger, as it were, involuntarily blurted out about herself, about her captivating appearance and about her sad fate. The impression was intensified by the paper with a mourning edge on which it was written, and the dried tears of the “Mother of God herbs” with which the sheets were laid, and the smell of spicy perfume that soaked the paper, and an extremely elegant handwriting. Makovsky felt bewitched. And when the mysterious poetess called the editorial office, and he heard her charming voice, the poet realized that he had fallen in love ...

Calls and letters to the editor continued to arrive. The initial "Ch" was deciphered as Cherubina - a wonderful name! Makovsky nevertheless managed to lift the veil of secrecy that shrouded a stranger with such an exquisite name, who called herself the Infanta.

“After much effort, I managed to get something out of the “Infanta”: she really is a Spaniard by birth, moreover, a zealous Catholic: she is only eighteen years old, she was brought up in a monastery, she suffers a little from her chest from childhood,” Makovsky recalled. - She let slip about some embassy receptions in the mansion "on the Islands" and about the strictest supervision by the despot father (her mother died long ago) and a certain Jesuit monk, her confessor ... After several more letters and telephone conversations with the mysterious Cherubina, it turned out : she has reddish, bronze curls, her complexion is completely pale, no blood, but brightly defined lips with slightly lowered corners, and her gait is slightly limping, as befits sorceresses.

Locked the door to my abode

forever lost key,

and black angel, my guardian,

stands with a flaming sword.

But the brilliance of the crown and the purple of the throne

not to see my longing,

and on the girl's hand -

unnecessary ring of Solomon.

Won't illuminate my dark gloom

rubies of great pride ...

I accepted our ancient sign -

holy name of Cherubina.

After the publication of Cherubina's poems in the second issue of the magazine for 1909 - at the same time, the works of Innokenty Annensky were pushed aside, which the poet was very offended by, communication with her continued. All the editorial staff envied Makovsky - only he talked with a foreign beauty on the phone. “The whole Apollo fell in love ... the whole Apollo stopped sleeping, the whole Apollo began to live from letter to letter, I wanted to see the whole Apollo,” Tsvetaeva recalled. There were many, she was alone. They wanted to see, she wanted to hide…”

Oh, how many times, in the hours of insomnia,

Get up brighter and livelier

The radiance of rainbow windows

My incredible churches.

Burning with sinless candles,

Blazing with golden glory,

There, under the patterned brocades,

There was an oak lectern.

And from candles and from sunset

Alela vermilion pages,

And the herbal ligature was compressed

Interlacing of words and birds of paradise.

And I remember I opened the book

And I saw in the letters

Gabriel's mad exclamation:

"Blessed are you in women."

The captivating Cherubina de Gabriak was actually a modest teacher, whose name was Elizaveta Dmitrieva. She was born on April 12, 1887 in St. Petersburg into a poor noble family. Her father died early from tuberculosis. The same disease, due to which she was bedridden for many years, after which she developed a lameness, tormented Dmitrieva as well.

But serious illnesses - Elizabeth suffered from memory loss, auditory and visual hallucinations, and after suffering diphtheria went blind for a year - did not prevent her from studying brilliantly. She graduated from the Vasileostrovskaya Gymnasium with a gold medal, and in 1908 from the Imperial Women's Pedagogical Institute in two specialties: medieval history and medieval French literature.

At the same time, Dmitrieva attended lectures at St. Petersburg University on Spanish literature and Old French, after which she studied for a short time at the Sorbonne, where she met the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who fell in love with her. A close friendship with the poet Maximilian Voloshin began in the "Tower" with Vyacheslav Ivanov, who ran the famous St. Petersburg literary salon. In Koktebel, at Voloshin's dacha, the joint idea of ​​a literary hoax was born...

And then the fairy tale came to an end. The poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who found out Dmitrieva's phone number, found out the truth. Translator von Günther forced Dmitrieva to confess to deceit, the secret became known in the Apollo editorial office, Nikolai Gumilyov’s insulting attack on Dmitrieva led to a duel between him and Max Voloshin ... As a result, at the end of 1910, another selection of Cherubina’s poems appeared in Apollo , with the final poem "Meeting", signed by the real name of the poetess.

“A short, rather stout, dark-haired woman with a large head, an excessively swollen forehead and some truly terrible mouth, from which fang-like teeth protruded, entered the room, limping heavily,” Makovsky, shocked by the revealed truth, described the meeting with the exposed Cherubina. “She was extremely ugly. It became almost scary. The wonderful dream suddenly sank into eternity, the inexorable, monstrous, shameful reality came into its own.

But in this description, the deeply disappointed poet, no doubt, exaggerated. Dmitrieva was not a beauty, but there was nothing ugly in her appearance either. Moreover, she possessed intelligence, talent, spiritual wealth and radiated strong female vibes, irresistibly attracted to herself, and it was not for nothing that she was surrounded by numerous admirers. Maximilian Voloshin and Nikolai Gumilyov proposed to her several times, but she did not want to be Dmitriev's wife and refused both suitors.

“My biggest love in my life, the most unattainable was Max. Al. (Voloshin), the poetess admitted. - If N. St. (Gumilyov) was for me the flowering of spring, “boy”, we were the same age, but he always seemed younger to me, then M.A. for me was somewhere far away, someone who could not turn his eyes to me, a little and silent. What seemed like a miracle to the girl, happened. I found out that M.A. loves me, has loved me for a long time - I rushed to him all over. It all seemed to me: I want both, why choose! There are two souls in me, and one of them truly loved one, the other the other.

Why did Max Voloshin need this hoax? In general, he was prone to practical jokes. So, he offered Marina Tsvetaeva to publish her poems about Russia under the name of the poet Petukhov. Perhaps the poet wanted to laugh at Makovsky, who was distinguished by snobbery - he dreamed that visitors to the editorial office would come in tailcoats and bring ballerinas from the Imperial Mariinsky Theater with them.

It seems that Tsvetaeva came closest to the truth when she wrote that Voloshin was trying to eliminate the “catastrophic gap between body and soul”: the modest and ugly school teacher Dmitrieva and her romantic poems. "Let her be - her!" If so, then it is, in our opinion, a noble idea. Another question - what is the depth of disappointment after falling from such heights? Doesn't it hurt too much?

Dmitrieva was in a lot of pain. She suffered, sinking into the depths of despair. “Having buried Cherubina, I buried myself and will never rise again,” the poetess admitted. And in her farewell letter to Voloshin, she wrote: “I am standing at a big crossroads. I left you. I won't write poetry anymore. I don't know what I will do. Max, you brought out the power of creativity in me for a moment, but took it away from me forever later. Let my poems be a symbol of my love for you "...

In the dark field - only hard heather,

yes feather grass - silver yarn;

I've been standing at the crossroads for a long time

where no one will show you the way.

But in the sky the starry path doubles,

to flow like a river again...

Teach me how to pray

to your outstretched right hand

touch with a weak hand.

In 1911, Elizaveta Dmitrieva married the land reclamation engineer Vsevolod Vasiliev, an infinitely kind, modest, selfless person who loved her devotedly and wholeheartedly, took his last name and left with him for Turkestan. Later, she traveled a lot, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Georgia - mainly on the business of the Anthroposophical Society.

Anthroposophy becomes her main occupation for all subsequent years and, apparently, a source of new inspiration. “I know that I abandoned my path, embarked on someone else’s and usurped it,” the poetess admitted in a letter. “I don’t write poetry, no matter how painful it is for me. I died for art, I, who love it with the "pain of a rejected mother", I myself killed him in myself.

During the period of repression against Russian anthroposophists, which began in 1926, Vasilyeva's house was searched, during which all her books and manuscripts were taken from her. And the poetess herself, after a month in prison spent in Sverdlovsk, was allowed to leave for three years in exile in Tashkent, where her husband lived. Her poems, written in exile, are filled with mystical experiences, loneliness, love, doom, longing for her native Petersburg...

“Will I ever return to my city where all my heart is? Here I am dying,” she wrote to Voloshin. It so happened that the poetic path of Elizaveta Vasilyeva also ended in a hoax - at the suggestion of a close friend of recent years, a sinologist and translator Yuri Shchutsky, who ended up in Tashkent, Vasilyeva created a cycle of seven lines “The House under a Pear Tree”, written on behalf of the fictional exiled Chinese poet Li Xiang Zi .

House under the pear...

house in a foreign country.

Even in deep sleep

Listen to your heart

It's about me!

A star-studded evening

The time of the invisible meeting.

The poetess did not live to see the end of her exile. She was seriously ill, and the doctors could not determine what was wrong with her for a long time. In the end, a terrible diagnosis was made - liver cancer. Death came on the night of December 5, 1928. Before her death, the poetess confessed to her husband: “If I had stayed to live, I would have lived in a completely different way” ... And he wrote in a letter to Max Voloshin, announcing the death of his beloved wife, who came at the age of forty-one: “Dear Max, - Thanks for the letter, I don't deserve it. Everything that was good in me was from Lily ... "

I understood the branches of apple trees,
Their gesture is giving and humble,
Almost touching the ground
Wing bend.

Like solar power
For a moment your fiery flight
Stopped in earthly roots
Frozen like a fruit.

Rip it off and it will tell
Falling on a swarthy palm,
What is the solar fire in it,
What earthly heaviness is in it.