Lokhvitskaya Mirra (Giber Maria Alexandrovna)

L Ohvitskaya, Mirra (or Maria Alexandrovna, by her husband Zhiber) - a talented poetess (1869 - 1905), daughter. She studied at the Moscow Alexander Institute. Several of her poems were published as a separate brochure (M., 1888); then her poems appeared in various magazines. In 1896 she published the first collection (M., 1896), followed by four more in 1898-1905. The first 2 volumes in 1900 were published in the 2nd edition. Twice for her poems the Academy awarded her half the Pushkin Prize. The name "Russian Sappho" correctly defines the main character of Lokhvitskaya's poetry, all the pathos of which went to the chanting of love. Lokhvitskaya is one of the most prominent Russian poets. Her verse is elegant, harmonious, light, the images are always bright and colorful, the mood is clear, the language is plastic. When the first collection of Lokhvitskaya's poems came out, defiantly breaking off all connection with "ideological" poetry, the young poetess was ranked as a decadent. This is a mistake: in the best period of Lokhvitskaya's work there is not even a shadow of that relaxation, pretentiousness and, in general, morbidity, which are organically connected with the concept of decadence. Lokhvitskaya is full of energy, passionately wants to live and enjoy. Despite the difference in content, Lokhvitskaya's poetry was affected by the same surge of vivacity, which was expressed in a bold challenge to Marxism. Lokhvitskaya does not want to know that whining that characterizes the strip of the 1880s. “I look boldly into the distance,” the debutante declares. A thirst for happiness boils in her, she is ready to fight for it, she has no doubt that she will achieve it, and in rapture she repeats: "I believe you, dreams, spring dreams." Lokhvitskaya's mood is completely alien to public interests. Her ideas about the purpose and tasks of life are completely oriental: she directed all the strength of her impulse exclusively towards love. The peculiar naivety with which she created the apotheosis of passion gives the first collection of her poems great charm. The ecstasy of the first delights of love brightened up the hackneyed motives (spring, the moon, lilacs, kisses of the beloved, the happiness of reciprocity, the sweetness of the first caresses, etc.). With the release of the second collection, the shy coloring of young delights disappears. The feelings of the singer acquire an exceptionally sultry character. "This is happiness-voluptuousness": this is the main motive of the second collection. Next to the pungency, something else begins to creep into Lokhvitskaya's bright mood. If earlier she exclaimed: "Sun, give me the sun," now she declares: "I am sweet and the sun's ray is welcoming and the rustle of secrets beckons me." Suffering begins to attract her; the epigraph of the second collection is "amori et dolori". The farther, the more the bright mood of Lokhvitskaya disappears. Starting from the third collection, in her poems there is much more shadow than light. Much is said about suffering, impotence, death. Former simplicity and clarity are replaced by pretentiousness. The stories are getting better and better. The 4th and 5th collections of works by Lokhvitskaya did not add anything to her fame. Having lost the freshness of feeling, Lokhvitskaya fell into medieval fantasy, into the world of witches, the cult of Satan, etc. There are few purely lyrical plays; a significant part of both collections is occupied by unsuccessful medieval dramas. Lokhvitskaya defines herself thus; "my soul is a living reflection of the skies of the yearning earth." But mysticism did not at all go to the poetic temperament of Lokhvitskaya; I felt spiritual brokenness, loss of life purpose. S. Vengerov.

There is something mystical both in the poetry of Mirra Lokhvitskaya and in her fate. This was noticed immediately after her death. “I expected to die young, // And she died young,” wrote Igor Severyanin, paraphrasing her well-known lines. Mysticism is imbued with her very name - Mirra. In fact, her name was Maria, she became Mirra only in her youth why, it is not known exactly.

Myrrh is a precious incense, an ancient symbol of love and death. Its Greek name is "myrrh". Smyrna, along with gold and frankincense, is one of the gifts brought by the Magi to the infant Christ. As a component, myrrh is part of a complex aromatic composition with the consonant name "miro", used in liturgical practice and symbolizing the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

It is impossible not to notice that the semantic field of the word "myrrh" includes all the main themes of Lokhvitskaya's poetry, to which she remained faithful throughout her entire career.

The peaks are burning in the fire of the sunset,

The soul trembles and heeds the call,

She hears a whisper: “You will enter into eternity

Through the gates of love and death." ("Gate of Eternity") -

she wrote in one of her last poems. Her penchant for mysticism was natural, one might even say hereditary. Her great-grandfather, Kondraty Andreevich Lokhvitsky (17791839), was known as a mystic poet, the author of mysterious "prophecies".

Unfortunately, documentary biographical information about Mirra Lokhvitskaya is very scarce; her contemporaries rarely remembered her. And the external outline of her biography is not too rich in events. The most complete and truthful source of information about her is her own poetry, which reflected her unique personality. Existing biographical information is replete with inaccuracies. Let's try to isolate the most reliable information.

Maria Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was born on November 19 (December 2), 1869 in St. Petersburg in the family of a well-known lawyer at that time, Alexander Vladimirovich Lokhvitsky (18301884).

A.V. Lokhvitsky belonged to the circle of learned lawyers. He was a doctor of law, the author of a course in criminal law and other writings and articles, according to contemporaries, "noted for clarity and talent of presentation." He practiced as a lawyer more precisely, a sworn attorney. His speeches attracted the audience with brilliant dialectics and remarkable wit.

Mother, Varvara Alexandrovna (nee Goyer (Hoer), † not earlier than 1917), came from a Russified French (or German?) family. She was well-read, fond of literature.

On November 30, 1869, the girl was baptized in the Sergievsky All Artillery Cathedral, which was located next to the house in which the Lokhvitskys lived (address - Sergievskaya St., 3). The recipients at baptism were Lieutenant Colonel V.A. von Goyer and E.A. Bestuzheva-Ryumina, wife of Professor of St. Petersburg University K.N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin (on behalf of whom the famous Higher Women's Courses were named). Bestuzhev-Ryumin was a friend of A.V. Lokhvitsky.

The next child in the family was Nadezhda Alexandrovna (18721952) - the famous Teffi.

From her autobiographical stories it is clear that the family had many children, and the age difference between older and younger children was quite significant. It is difficult to find out the exact number of brothers and sisters from church registers, since the family moved from city to city several times (my father graduated from Moscow University, then studied in Germany, taught in Odessa, St. Petersburg and finally returned to Moscow, where he was a sworn attorney); addresses changed within the same city. The years of life of only the elder brother Nikolai (18681933) and the youngest of the sisters, Elena (18741919) are reliably known.

The brother chose the military field, rose to the rank of general, during the First World War he commanded an expeditionary force in France, during the civil war he participated in the white movement, for some time he was commander of the 2nd Kolchak army. Among his many awards are the St. George Cross of the fourth and third degrees; evidence of personal courage. In exile, he participated in various patriotic organizations, was the chairman of the Legitimist Monarchist Society.

Elena Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya is depicted in many of Teffi's autobiographical stories. Nadezhda and Elena - two younger sisters - were especially friendly with each other. Elena also wrote poetry, later, together with Teffi, translated Maupassant, and was a member of a society of dramatic writers. However, she did not consider herself a professional "writer". Until the age of 40, she lived with her mother, then she married the court adviser V.V. Plundovsky. The names of two more older sisters, Varvara Aleksandrovna Popova and Lydia Aleksandrovna Kozhina, are reliably known (their portraits are contained in the Teffi family album). Around 1910, Varvara, having been widowed or divorced, settled with her mother and sister Elena. In the address book, she certified herself as a "writer". In 1916-1917 collaborated in the "New Time", publishing notes under the pseudonym "Murgit", - no doubt taken from Mirra's poem of the same name. In the stories of Teffi, sister Vera is also mentioned.

As for the relationship between the two most famous sisters, Mirra and Nadezhda, they, apparently, were not easy. The bright giftedness of both, with a very small age difference (in fact, two and a half years), led to mutual repulsion rather than attraction. In the stories and memoirs of Teffi, tangible "hairpins" against the deceased sister are not uncommon. Still, it would be unfair to attach too much importance to them. "Two-faced" Teffi, laughing and crying, is true to herself here. Her poetry provides some examples of lyrical sadness, containing recognizable reminiscences of Mirra's poetry and clearly inspired by memories of her.

In 1874 the family moved to Moscow. In 1882, Maria entered the Moscow Alexander School (in the 90s, renamed the Alexander Institute), where she studied, living as a boarding house at the expense of her parents. At the institute, her teacher of literature was the bibliographer D.D. Languages ​​(information that the poet A.N. Maikov taught literature is a gross mistake, in no way consistent with the biography of the poet).

After the death of her husband, Varvara Alexandrovna returned to St. Petersburg with her younger daughters. In 1888, having completed the course and received a certificate from a home teacher, Maria moved there, to her own.

She began to compose poetry very early, she realized herself as a poet at the age of 15. Shortly before graduating from the institute, two of her poems, with the permission of her superiors, were published as a separate small brochure.

In 1889, Mirra Lokhvitskaya began to publish her poems regularly in periodicals. The first publication in which she began to collaborate was the illustrated magazine "Sever", in the coming years she began to publish in several more magazines - "Picturesque Review", "Artist", "Labor", "Russian Review", "Books of the Week" and etc. She usually signed “M. Lokhvitskaya", friends and acquaintances then already called her Mirra. By this time, acquaintance with the writers Vsevolod Solovyov, I. Yasinsky, Vas. Iv. Nemirovich-Danchenko, A. Korinfsky, critic and art historian P.P. Gnedich, poet and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and others.

In the 1890s the Lokhvitsky family regularly spent the summer months in the so-called "Oranienbaum colony" in a dacha village between Peterhof and Oranienbaum.

The impressions of this area were inspired by a number of poems by Lokhvitskaya, as well as her poem "By the Sea".

Next to the Lokhvitskys, the family of the famous professor of architecture Ernest Gibert (18231909) rented a dacha. It was one of the many foreign architects whose fate was connected with Russia. A purebred Frenchman, he was born in Paris in the 1940s. came to St. Petersburg, graduated from the Academy of Arts and stayed in Russia forever. He built quite a lot in St. Petersburg and the provinces. Ernest Ivanovich, as they began to call him in his new homeland, lived a long life (he was buried at the Smolensk Lutheran cemetery, * although by religion he was most likely a Catholic). Over time, he married apparently also a Russified Frenchwoman, Olga Fegin (1838-1900). They had a daughter, Olga Ernestovna, and several sons, one of whom, Evgeny Ernestovich, Mirra Lokhvitskaya married.

The wedding took place at the end of 1891. Later, answering the questionnaire, Lokhvitskaya wrote that her husband was then a student at St. Petersburg University. However, it is possible that they meant the Institute of Civil Engineers, of which E.I. Zhiber was a professor for many years. E.E. Gibert was a civil engineer by profession (so it appears in the directory "All Petersburg"). F.F. Fidler reports that he served in an insurance company. Be that as it may, his work was associated with moving and long business trips.

Approximately a year after the wedding, the young people left St. Petersburg, lived for some time in Tikhvin and Yaroslavl (address: Romanovskaya st., Kuleshov’s house), then Moscow became their permanent place of residence for several years (address: Brilliantov’s house on the corner of 2nd Znamensky and Bolshoy Spassky lanes - now the lanes are called the 2nd Kolobovsky and Bolshoi Karetny).

In the autumn of 1898 the family again moved to St. Petersburg. Permanent address in St. Petersburg - Stremyannaya st., 4, apt. 7.

The poetess had five children, all boys. Three: Mikhail, Eugene and Vladimir were born in the first years of her marriage, one after the other.

Around 1900 a fourth child, Ishmael, was born. By the beginning of the 1900s. includes a comic poem preserved in the poetess's workbook, a poem dedicated to her children, in which she gives a playful description of each of them and speaks in all seriousness about her maternal feelings.

My Michael is a brave warrior, Strong in the battle of life, Talkative and restless, Poisons my life. My Zhenyushka is a clear boy, My corrected portrait, Consonant with my mother's will, Inevitable as a poet. My superstitious Volodya Loves to argue endlessly, But with exemplary courtesy Conquers all hearts. My Ishmael is the son of the East, The rustle of the palm tops, He sleeps deeply all day, Alone at night he wakes. But honor and glory Let me reject sooner Than I will give my horde: Four heroes!

Indeed, according to the unanimous testimony of memoirists, despite the "courage" of her love lyrics, in life Lokhvitskaya was "the most chaste married lady in St. Petersburg", a faithful wife and a virtuous mother. She has few poems addressed to children, but they form an integral part of her poetic heritage. Eugene, Izmail and the last, fifth child, Valery, who was born in the autumn of 1904, received personal dedications.

The first collection of poems by Lokhvitskaya was published in 1896 and was awarded the Pushkin Prize (half, which, however, did not diminish the honor, the full one was rarely awarded). It is widely believed that the venerable poet Apollon Nikolaevich Maikov somehow especially patronized Lokhvitskaya, but no evidence of their communication has been preserved. Moreover, A.A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, the reviewer of the collection, in his recommendatory review says: “After the publication of the collection of Mrs. Lokhvitskaya, the late K.N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, probably personally acquainted with the author, gave the late Apollo Nikolaevich Maikov and me a copy of this collection. Therefore Maykov was not familiar with Lokhvitskaya. Most likely, vague memories that the academic poet was somehow involved in awarding her the Pushkin Prize, as well as the presence of anthological poems on the themes of antiquity, created a myth about some special patronage of Lokhvitskaya from Maikov.

Further collections of poems by the poetess were published in 1898, 1900, 1903 and 1904. The third and fourth collections were awarded an honorary review by the Academy of Sciences.

With the move to St. Petersburg, Lokhvitskaya enters the literary circle of the poet K.K. Sluchevsky. Sluchevsky treated her with great warmth; on his "Fridays" she was always a welcome, albeit infrequent, guest. However, judging by the diaries of F.F. Fidler, and in this close circle the attitude towards the poetess was ambiguous. In general, the circle of literary connections of Lokhvitskaya is rather narrow. Of the Symbolists, the most friendly attitude towards her was, perhaps, F.K. Sologub.

In the circle of friends, Lokhvitskaya was surrounded by a peculiar aura of light love and, as its negative reflection , a fog of rumors and conjectures. Although appearance is not directly related to literature, in her case it played an important, albeit ambiguous role. The classic portrait of the poetess is given in the memoirs of I.A. Bunin: “And everything about her was charming: the sound of her voice, the liveliness of her speech, the sparkle of her eyes, this cute light playfulness ... Her complexion was especially beautiful: matte, even, similar to the color of a Crimean apple.”

Memoirists emphasize a certain exoticism of her appearance, corresponding to the exoticism of her poetry. At the initial stage of her literary career, a spectacular appearance probably helped Lokhvitskaya, but later she also became an obstacle to understanding her poetry. Not everyone wanted to see that the external attractiveness is combined in the poetess with a lively mind, which over time began to reveal itself more and more clearly in her lyrics. The drama of Lokhvitskaya is the usual drama of a beautiful woman, in which they refuse to notice anything other than beauty.

In biographical information there is information that the poetess often and with constant success performed at literary evenings. These her "variety" successes seem to be greatly exaggerated. There are only a few testimonies of such performances in her archive. In addition, she suffered from shyness, visible to outsiders. Wed memoirs of E. Poselyanin: “When she went on stage, there was so much helpless shyness in her that she seemed much less beautiful than on her card, which was placed in all magazines.”

Lokhvitskaya herself recognized this property. So to make her fame dependent on personal charm is wrong.

The question inevitably arises about the nature of Lokhvitskaya's relationship with the poet K.D. Balmont. P.P. Pertsov in his memoirs mentions their "acclaimed romance", which, in his opinion, marked the beginning of Balmont's other countless novels. This information is also confirmed by the diary entries of F.F. Fidler (according to Balmont himself, who readily told the barely familiar collector of near-literary gossip the most intimate details of his relationship with the poetess, a married woman). However, even in the context of Fiedler's observations, there is a suspicion that the poet is more wishful thinking than reporting facts, especially since in many years of frank correspondence with his closest friend Bryusov, he never mentioned anything like that. Many years later, Balmont himself, in his autobiographical essay "At the Dawn", said that only "poetic friendship" connected him with Lokhvitskaya. Otherwise, the relationship of the two poets is surrounded by deaf silence. The memoirists who wrote about Lokhvitskaya do not say a word about this. Those who wrote about Balmont almost never mention Lokhvitskaya. The researchers, based on several poetic dedications, conclude that at some period the poets were connected by intimate relationships, then their paths parted, but the memories of the “bright feeling” remained, later Balmont was very saddened by the death of Lokhvitskaya, dedicated to her memory several poems and named his daughter after her marriage to E.K. Tsvetkovskaya. It seems that all this is only partly true. As for the intimate relationships colorfully described by Balmont, they may not have been.

There is almost no documentary evidence of the communication between the two poets. There is not a single letter from Lokhvitskaya in Balmont's archive; only one of his letters has survived in her archive, which is very official in tone. However, from this single letter one can understand that there were other letters, but, apparently, for some reason they were destroyed.

The "lower limit" of the acquaintance of poets no later than February 1896 is established by a dedicatory inscription on the book (Volume I of Lokhvitskaya's poems) presented to Balmont. By indirect hints, it can be assumed that the acquaintance and certain stages of the relationship were associated with a stay in the Crimea (in 1895 (?) and in 1898). How these relations developed can only be judged by fragmentary references in the correspondence of poets with other addressees and extremely sparing remarks in Balmont's autobiographical prose. But silence is important in itself. With the almost complete absence of epistolary and memoir sources, abundant material is provided by a poetic roll call, captured in the work of both and by no means reduced to a few direct dedications. In any case, Balmont is easily recognizable in the poetry of Lokhvitskaya. From this roll call, we can conclude that the relationship between the two poets was far from idyllic. After a relatively short period, when they felt like close friends and like-minded people, there was a sharp divergence of views - as evidenced by Balmont's critical reviews. There is reason to believe that with his demonstrative disregard for the feelings and reputation of his beloved, he played a very unseemly role in her fate, which caused a strange silence.

The drama, apparently, consisted in the fact that the feeling of the poets was mutual, but Lokhvitskaya, due to her marital status and religious beliefs, tried to suppress this feeling in life, leaving the sphere of creativity for him. Balmont, in those years, carried away by Nietzsche’s ideas about “superhumanity”, striving, according to modernist principles, to merge creativity with life, with his numerous poetic appeals, constantly undermined the unstable peace of mind, which the poetess achieved with great difficulty. The poetic roll call of Balmont and Lokhvitskaya, at the beginning of their acquaintance full of mutual delight, eventually turns into a kind of duel. The consequences were tragic for both poets. In Lokhvitskaya, the result of a dramatic conflict was painful transformations of the psyche (on the verge of mental disorder), which ultimately led to premature death. Balmont, who realized "life-creativity" in immoderate revelry with the abuse of alcohol and, probably, drugs, destroyed his own personality (he began to show signs of the "Jekyll and Hyde syndrome"; many years later, at the end of his life, he was overtaken by mental illness).

Lokhvitskaya's health has been noticeably deteriorating since the late 1890s. She often gets sick, complains of pain in her heart, chronic depression, nightmares (symptoms of the onset Graves' disease, aggravated by emotional distress). In December 1904, shortly after the fifth birth, the disease aggravated, in 1905 the poetess was already practically bedridden. The last period of improvement was in the summer of 1905, at the dacha, then the patient suddenly became sharply worse. She died painfully (see the article by Yu. Zagulyaeva). Death occurred on August 27, 1905. The funeral took place on August 29. There were few people there. The cynically indifferent reaction described by Fiedler, even of those who deigned to honor the memory of the deceased with their presence, testifies to the deep loneliness of the poetess in the circle of writers and the misunderstanding surrounding her. They buried Lokhvitskaya in the Spiritual Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, in the same place, at the Nikolsky cemetery, and buried.

The poetess died at the age of 35. For a long time, pulmonary tuberculosis was indicated in biographical notes as the cause of death, but this is a mistake. The testimonies of contemporaries tell a different story. So, Yu. Zagulyaeva reports a "heart toad", i.e. angina. Even more informative is the diary entry of F.F. Fidler: "On August 27, Lokhvitskaya died in the Bekhterev clinic - from heart disease, diphtheria and Basedow's disease." A medical fact should be noted: the development of Basedow's disease is often the result of some kind of shock or constant nervous tension. The surviving photographs of Lokhvitskaya (one of the last, which can be approximately dated to 1903-1904 on the left) do not reflect the external signs of this disease , it probably progressed in the last period of the poetess's life. Be that as it may, it was already obvious to contemporaries that the physical causes of Lokhvitskaya's death were closely related to her state of mind. “She died early; somehow mysterious; as a consequence of the disturbed balance of her spirit ... So they said ... ”- the poetess I. Grinevskaya, who was friends with Lokhvitskaya, wrote in her memoirs.

Balmont did not show any interest in his beloved throughout her terminal illness, and was not present at the funeral. Most likely, he (as, indeed, everyone else) did not even suspect that Lokhvitskaya was seriously ill and that the “disturbed balance of the spirit” aggravated her painful condition, because. in the last years of the poetess's life, he did not communicate with her herself, but exclusively with her lyrical heroine. In his letter to Bryusov dated September 5, 1905, among the disparaging characteristics of modern poets, there is this: “Lokhvitskaya is a beautiful romance.” In the context of what happened, these words sound cynical (Balmont could not have known about the death of the poetess). Cynicism is also imbued with his collection "Evil Spells", the title of which is clearly borrowed from Lokhvitskaya (the expression is found in her dramas "Immortal Love" and "In nomine Domini", as well as in the poem "Evil Whirlwinds"). However, the death of his beloved, apparently, was a crushing blow for the poet, and even the apparent inadequacy of his reaction rather indicates not indifference, but an inability to immediately accommodate what happened. Eight years after the death of Lokhvitskaya, Balmont confessed to Fidler that he loved her and "loves her still." Subsequently, he perceived his feeling exclusively as bright (cf. his remark in the essay “Crimea”: “Crimea is a blue window The blue window of my happy hours of liberation and youth ... where, in the blissful days of unexpected joy, Mirra Lokhvitskaya experienced a verse with me: “I would like to be your rhyme - to be like a rhyme, yours or nobody's, "- a blue window that no evil spell can extinguish" (K. Balmont. Autobiographical prose. M., 2001, p. 573.)

He did not write anything specifically about Lokhvitskaya in prose, but in poetry he continued to respond to her poems until the end of his life and built a kind of mysticism of love with the hope of a subsequent reunion (continuing the mysticism of love of the poetess herself).

The love story of two poets had a strange and tragic continuation in the fate of their children. Balmont's daughter was named Mirra in honor of Lokhvitskaya (it would be more accurate to say that the poet perceived his daughter as the reincarnation of his beloved). The name of the penultimate son of Lokhvitskaya Ishmael was somehow connected with her love for Balmont. Ishmael was the name of the protagonist of the strange fairy tale composed by her “About Prince Ishmael, Princess Svetlana and Jemali the Beautiful”, in which the relationship of the poets was bizarrely refracted. In 1922, when Balmont was already in exile and living in Paris, a young man, a former Wrangelite, a young poet, Ishmael Lokhvitsky-Giber, came to him. Balmont was excited by this meeting: the young man was very similar to his mother. Soon he became an admirer of the fifteen-year-old Mirra Balmont, who also wrote poetry (her father saw her only as a poetess). What happened next is impossible to understand. Whether the girl rejected the love of the young poet, or for some reason his relationship with Balmont deteriorated, or he simply could not find himself in a new emigrant life, but a year and a half later, Ishmael shot himself. In his suicide letter, he asked to give Mirra a package containing his poems, notes and a portrait of his mother. Balmont reported this in a letter to his next lover, Dagmar Shakhovskaya, who bore him two children. Their daughter, born in the same year, was named Svetlana.

The subsequent fate of Mirra Balmont was no less tragic. Unsuccessful marriage, the birth of more than ten children, monstrous poverty. She died in 1970. A few years before her death, she had a car accident and lost the ability to move.

The fate of the other sons of Lokhvitskaya also developed unhappily. Eugene and Vladimir remained in Russia and died during the siege of Leningrad. The eldest son Mikhail emigrated, lived in exile for a long time, first in France, then in the USA, in 1967 he committed suicide from grief, having lost his wife. Information flashed that another son (obviously the youngest, Valery) lived in Paris in the 70s. 20th century, but nothing more precise can be said.

The grave of Mirra Lokhvitskaya at the Nikolsky cemetery has been preserved. The inscription on the tombstone reads: “Maria Alexandrovna Zhiber -“ M.A. Lokhvitskaya "- Born on November 19, 1869. Died on August 27, 1905." Judging by the location of the burial, it was assumed that the husband would later be buried nearby, but the place remained empty.

In 2012, the relatives of the poetess (her niece I.V. Plundovskaya together with her son N. Plundovsky-Timofeev and his wife Natalya) restored the monument.

"I love the beauty of the sun

And the muses of Hellenic creation,

But I worship the Cross

Cross as a symbol of suffering.

Maybe these are not the best poems of the poetess, but this is the best that could be written on her grave.

The photo was taken from the dedicated Lokhvitskaya VKontakte group (I hope the author of the photo will not be offended that I put it here).

* I express my gratitude to the staff of the Literary Museum of the Pushkin House for providing photographs of Mirra Lokhvitskaya (the photographs are printed in the almanac "Russian Archive"), as well as the researcher of Lokhvitskaya's work, V. Makashina, for indicating the burial place of E. Zhiber, and the researcher of Teffi's work, E. Trubilova, for clarifying the maiden name of Varvara Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya, and L. and S. Novoseltsev for providing information about the fate of the sons of the poetess.

Mirra (also Maria) Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (by her husband Gibert) is a talented poetess (1869-1905), daughter of the famous scientist and lawyer A. V. Lokhvitsky (see). Sister Taffy.

She studied at the Moscow Alexander Institute and even then drew attention to herself with her poetic talent. Several of her poems were published as a separate brochure (M., 1888). Since 1889, she began to publish her poems in the "North", "Artist", "World Illustration", "Russian Review", "Sev. Vestn. ”,“ Week ”,“ Niva ”, etc. In 1896 she published the first collection (M., 1896), followed in 1898 (M.) by the 2nd volume; in 1900 (St. Petersburg) the 3rd volume was published, in 1903 (St. Petersburg) - the 4th, in 1905 - the 5th. The first 2 volumes in 1900 were published in the 2nd ed.

In 1897, Lokhvitskaya received half the Pushkin Prize for the 1st volume; in 1905, after her death, half the prize was awarded by the academy for the 5th volume. With the light hand of Balmont, the nickname “Russian Sappho” was established for Lokhvitskaya, which quite correctly determines the main character of her poetry, all the pathos of which went to the glorification of love. In terms of talent, Lokhvitskaya is one of the most prominent Russian poetesses. Her verse is elegant, harmonious, light, the images are always bright and colorful, the mood is clear, the language is plastic. By the time of the appearance of the first collection of poems by Lokhvitskaya, which were alien to any “civilian” notes and, in their content, defiantly broke all ties with “ideological” poetry, the young poetess was ranked as decadent.

This is a mistake: in Lokhvitskaya's best period of her work there is not even a shadow of that relaxation, nervous weakness, pretentiousness and, in general, morbidity and extravagance, which are organically connected with the concept of genuine decadence. Lokhvitskaya, on the contrary, is full of energy, passionately wants to live and enjoy, and gives herself up to her impulses with the fullness of an intense feeling. Now that the literary life of the 1890s can be looked at from a historical point of view, it follows, as has already been done in relation to Balmont, to establish a close, organic connection between Lokhvitskaya's cheerfulness and another movement.

Despite the difference in content, the general elation of Lokhvitskaya's poetry was psychologically undoubtedly affected by the same surge of social vigor that expressed itself in a bold challenge to Marxism. Lokhvitskaya does not want to know the whining that characterizes the band of the 80s. “I look boldly into the distance,” the young debutante declares. A thirst for happiness boils in her, she is ready to fight for it, she has no doubt that she will achieve it, and in rapture she repeats: "I believe you, dreams, spring dreams." But, psychologically coinciding with a surge of public vigor in the mid-90s, Lokhvitskaya's mood is completely alien to public interests. The poetess's ideas about the purpose and tasks of life are completely oriental; she directed all the strength of her impulse and thirst for life exclusively in the direction of love. She spoke with complete frankness about "the desires of a fiery soul", about "frantic passion", etc., but the frankness and peculiar naivety with which she created the apotheosis of passion gave him great charm.

The ecstasy of the first delights of love brightened up the hackneyed motives of the collection (spring, the moon, lilacs, kisses of the beloved, the happiness of reciprocity, the sweetness of the first caresses, etc.). Three periods should be distinguished in Lokhvitskaya's eroticism. If even in the first collection there are things that are downright cynical, then the general coloring of it, nevertheless, was imparted by naive grace; "Sweet songs of love" were, moreover, dedicated to the poet's husband for the fact that he brought her "happiness and joy." With the release of the 2nd collection, the shy coloring of young delights disappears. The singer's feelings acquire an exceptionally sultry character. “This happiness is voluptuousness”: this is the main motive of the 2nd collection. Everything in life disappears before the thirst for monotonously understood love, and with complete frankness the poetess tells what her ideal is: “Who is waiting for happiness, who is asking for glory, who is looking for honors and battles, who is craving mad fun, who is tenderness of prayers. And I - all false visions, like the absurd delirium of extinct days, I will give for the bliss of awakening, oh, my friend, on your chest. Describing her love songs, she puts the epithets “my burning, my feminine verse” side by side - and she is convinced that the depth of feeling justifies everything. Along with pungency, something else begins to creep into the bright mood of the poetess. If earlier she exclaimed: "Sun, give me the sun," now she declares: "I am sweet and the sun's ray is welcoming and the rustle of secrets beckons me." Suffering begins to attract her; on the title page of the second collection, the epigraph "amori et dolori" is put up, and in the poem "To My Brothers" even the following thesis is put: "poets are carriers of light, the foundations of a great building. The lot of the poet was and will be - suffering. The farther, the brighter the mood of Lokhvitskaya disappears more and more. With the III collection, she enters the last phase, where the shadows are already much greater than the light. The general tone of Lokhvitskaya's poetry is now gloomy; a lot is said about suffering, impotence, death. Former simplicity and clarity is replaced by pretentiousness. The stories are getting better and better. In the third collection, two "dramatic poems" attract attention: "On the way to the East" and "Vandelin". In the first, the former burning feelings of the poetess are felt; in "Vandelin" "sick dreams" completely dominate.

In the symbolic struggle between the cheerful beauty of the Prince of Double Roses and the product of a foggy dream - the mysterious ghost of the sad knight Vandelin - the ethereal beauty of the latter wins. The collections of her works published shortly before the death of Lokhvitskaya IV and V did not add anything to the fame of the poetess. Having lost her freshness of feeling, Lokhvitskaya fell into medieval devilry, into the world of witches, the cult of Satan, etc. There are few purely lyrical plays; a significant part of both collections is occupied by unsuccessful medieval dramas. There is almost nothing left of the former cheerfulness here. It was replaced by a diametrically opposite desire for mysticism; now Lokhvitskaya defines herself as follows: "my soul is a living reflection of the heavens of the yearning earth." But mysticism did not at all go to the clear poetic temperament of Lokhvitskaya. Clearly felt spiritual brokenness, loss of life purpose. It is difficult to refrain from assuming that the poem contained in the third collection is: “I want to die young, to roll like a golden star, to fly around like an unfaded flower. I want to die young… Let the fire not fade to the end, and the memory of the one that woke up hearts for life will remain” - it was not just a literary work, but a clearly conscious prophetic epitaph.

Lokhvitskaya's poetry is elegant and colorful. Even during her lifetime, she received the name "Russian Sappho". The line "This happiness is voluptuousness" was the motto of the poetess.

In her early works, she sings of love as a bright romantic feeling that brings family happiness and the joy of motherhood. For her first poetry collection "Poems (1889 - 1895)", which appeared in 1896, Mirra Lokhvitskaya was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Academy of Sciences. The poetess dedicated the collection to her husband and included in it poems addressed to her son.
The public exchange of messages in verse and the mutual dedications of Lokhvitskaya and Balmont aroused general interest and only emphasized the halo of the "Bacchante" inherent in Lokhvitskaya. The poet dedicated his best collection Let's Be Like the Sun (1903) to her. However, I. Bunin, who knew the poetess well and highly appreciated her work, spoke about the discrepancy between the real human appearance of the poetess and the image of her lyrical heroine: “She sang of love, passion, and therefore everyone imagined her to be almost a Bacchante, not at all suspecting that, for all her youth, she had been married for a long time ... that she was the mother of several children, a great homebody ...”(Bunin I.A.).
By the end of the 19th century, the popularity of the "Russian Sappho" was constantly growing, criticism found in her poetry already "more sincerity than indiscretion."
In the 1900s, Lokhvitskaya turned to dramatic forms, wrote plays based on medieval subjects, and she was also attracted to eternal biblical stories. The poems of the last years of his life are imbued with mysticism and pessimism, thoughts of suffering and death. Along with fabulous and fantastic motifs, painful visions appeared in her works. Subsequent collections: "Poems. 1898 - 1900", 1900, - "honorary review" of the Academy of Sciences; "Poems. 1900 - 1902", 1903; "Poems. 1902-1904", 1904 - posthumously awarded half the Pushkin Prize). In addition to lyrical poems, these collections included dramatic poems "Two Words", "On the Way to the East", "Vandalin", "Immortal Love", "In nomine Domini" ("In the Name of God").

During the life of the poetess, five issues of "Poems" were published (the last - in 1904). It is widely believed that Lokhvitskaya did not have a significant impact on her contemporary and subsequent literature. Meanwhile, experience shows that this is not the case. The images of her poetry are often played up by other authors. Amfiteatrov wrote about this in the 10s in an article devoted to the analysis of the work of Igor Severyanin: “Although her life was short, she managed to say a few of her words and add a few of her thoughts to the treasury of Russian literature. Then, for a whole decade now, various gentlemen poets have been enjoying themselves with them ... ".V. F. MarkovsaidNowadays: “Lokhvitskaya is a storehouse of prophetic anticipations<...>She was ahead of Balmont by almost ten years with her "To the Sun"<...>Other poets are also heard in her lines. The very first poem of the first book of her poems sounds like a foreshadowing of Gippius, Balmont and Sologub, and in addition, some of the "Soloviev" aspects of Blok. Lokhvitskaya wrote about the rope dancer (and about "loneliness together") before Akhmatova, explained the nature of the naiad before Tsvetaeva, put "rain" and "cloak" in poetry before Yuri Zhivago, used words like "terevinf" before Vyacheslav Ivanov. A follower of Mirra Lokhvitskaya was Igor Severyanin. He created a kind of cult of the poetess, and her name was included in the declarations of the ego-futurists, who called her their forerunner.

White nymph - under the sad willow Looks into a pond overgrown with water lilies. Do you hear? Distant music blew - These violets are in bloom. Evening is coming. More fragrant The young grass will breathe. Do you believe? .. But the thrill of silence is more understandable, Where words fail. 1899

Nowadays

In a different country

Gate of eternity

autumn sunset

sleeping swan

***

Maria Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya(by husband Gibert - French Gibert; November 19, 1869, St. Petersburg, Russian Empire - August 27, 1905, ibid.) - Russian poetess, signed with the pseudonym Mirra Lokhvitskaya; and N. A. Lokhvitsky. By the end of the 1890s, having reached her creative peak and mass recognition, soon after her death, Lokhvitskaya was practically forgotten. In the 1980s and 1990s, interest in the work of the poetess revived; some researchers consider her the founder of Russian "women's poetry" of the 20th century, which opened the way for A. A. Akhmatova and M. I. Tsvetaeva.

Biography

Maria Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was born on November 19 (December 1), 1869 in St. Petersburg in the family of a lawyer (since August 13, 1874 - a barrister in Moscow) Alexander Vladimirovich Lokhvitsky and Varvara Alexandrovna (nee Goyer, fr. Hoer), a Russified Frenchwoman, woman well-read and fond of literature. Three years after the birth of Mary, Nadezhda (1872-1952) was born, who later entered literature under the pseudonym Teffi.

In 1874 the Lokhvitskys moved to Moscow. In 1882, Maria entered the Moscow Alexander School (later renamed the Alexander Institute), where she studied, living as a boarding house at the expense of her parents. The information that A. N. Maikov was her teacher of Russian literature is erroneous (during these years he lived in St. Petersburg). At the age of fifteen, Lokhvitskaya began to write poetry, and her poetic talent was immediately noticed. Shortly before graduating from the institute, she published two of her poems with the permission of her superiors as a separate brochure. After the death of her husband Varvara Alexandrovna returned to Petersburg with her younger daughters; here in 1888, having received the certificate of a home teacher, Maria moved.

It is known that the sisters, each of whom showed early creative abilities, agreed to enter literature by seniority in order to avoid envy and rivalry. The first, therefore, was to do this Mary; it was assumed that Nadezhda would follow the example of her older sister after she completed her literary career. Lokhvitskaya made her debut in 1888 by publishing several poems in the St. Petersburg magazine Sever; at the same time, the poems “The Power of Faith” and “Day and Night” were published as a separate brochure. Publications followed in the "Artist", "World Illustration", "Russian Review", "Northern Herald", "Nedelya", "Niva". The poetess signed at first as "M. Lokhvitskaya", then as "Mirra Lokhvitskaya"; friends and acquaintances also began to call her exactly like that. By this time the acquaintances of the poetess with Vs. Solovyov, I. Yasinsky, V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, A. Korinfsky, P. Gnedich, V. S. Solovyov. Vsevolod Solovyov was considered the "godfather" of the poetess in literature; the latter, as he later noted more than once, always gave him, as a teacher, "the proud joy of a satisfied feeling." The first fame was brought by Lokhvitskaya's publication of the poem "By the Sea" in the journal "Russian Review" (1891, No. 8). In 1891, Mirra Lokhvitskaya married Yevgeny Ernestovich Zhiber, a civil engineer, the son of a professor of architecture, with whom the Lokhvitskys neighbored in Oranienbaum, where they had a dacha. A year later, the couple left the capital and moved first to Yaroslavl, then to Moscow.

In 1896, Lokhvitskaya published her first collection, Poems (1889-1895), which was an instant success and a year later was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize. “After Fet, I don’t remember a single real poet who would win “his” audience like she did,” wrote V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. A well-known writer in those years (and the brother of a famous theater figure) about his first impression of her poems: “as if the sun had splashed on me.” The first collection, which mainly glorified love as “a bright romantic feeling that brings family happiness and the joy of motherhood,” was dedicated to her husband; included in it were poems addressed to the son. In 1898 the second collection, "Poems (1896-1898)" was published; in 1900 both books were published as a separate edition.

Having moved to St. Petersburg, the poetess, tied to her home and children, rarely appeared in public. She entered the literary circle of K. K. Sluchevsky (which was considered a "poetic academy" at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries), where she was infrequent, justifying her absence by the illness of one of the children or her own malaise. The fact that she was always looked forward to here can be judged by an anonymous entry in one of the magazines: “It’s both annoying and insulting, / Something is not visible to Lokhvitskaya,” dated February 4, 1900. The owner of "Fridays" Sluchevsky, who invariably called Lokhvitskaya "a heartily honored poetess", did not get tired of inviting her, "confirming every time that her place is honorable, next to him." It is known, however, that the circle of literary connections of Lokhvitskaya was narrow: of the Symbolists, F.K. Sologub was the most friendly towards her.

Peak of popularity

By the end of the 1890s, Lokhvitskaya had acquired the status of perhaps the most prominent figure among the poets of her generation, being practically the only representative of the poetic community of her time who had what would later be called "commercial potential". E. Poselyanin recalled that he once asked K. Sluchevsky how his books were going. “Poems go badly for everyone,” he answered frankly. “Only Lokhvitskaya walks briskly.”

At the same time, “they did not envy her success - this little fairy won everyone with the aroma of her songs ...”, wrote V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. He also noticed: Lokhvitskaya did not have to go through "a system of critical misunderstanding." Equally accepted by the literary circles and the general public, with each new work, she “left farther and farther behind her the young poets of her time, although the chaste capons from literature cried out to all the saints of the scopal ship of the press and to the white doves of censorship about the immorality of the young talent." L. N. Tolstoy condescendingly justified the early aspirations of the poetess: “It has charged her so far ... It beats with young drunken wine. It’s leaving, it will cool down and clean water will flow!” There was only one complaint that Lokhvitskaya had to listen to everywhere: it concerned the lack of “citizenship” in her poetry. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Moscow writer Liodor Palmin wrote about it this way: There is a new star on our horizon. Your St. Petersburg Mirra Lokhvitskaya is a small bird, you can’t see it from the ground, and the same Vukol Lavrov reads it and blows bubbles on his lips. He would start publishing it in Russian Thought, but he is afraid of our Midas-Donkey Ears, so that they would not snatch him for the lack of civil protest. You know, Moscow is strong at the back of its head...

The third collection of works by Lokhvitskaya, "Poems (1898-1900)", was published in 1900. This, in addition to new poems, included three dramatic works: “He and she. Two words”, “On the way to the East” and “Vandelin”. In the second of them, the researchers noted autobiographical motives: the story of the poetess’s acquaintance with K. Balmont (he is guessed in the image of the Greek youth Hyacinth), the hero’s marriage to the daughter of a wealthy merchant (in the “role” of E. A. Andreeva - the Greek Komos), the departure of the married couple abroad.

In the fourth collection "Poems. Volume IV (1900-1902)” also included “The Tale of Prince Ishmael, Princess Svetlana and Dzhemali the Beautiful” and the five-act drama “Immortal Love”. The latter was noted as "the most endured and suffered from all such works of Lokhvitskaya"; its plot was fragmentarily prepared by such things as "Farewell of the Queen", "Abandoned", "Seraphim"; “Feast of oblivion”, “He and she. Two words". The researchers noted that despite the fact that autobiographical moments are guessed in the drama, its characters, apparently, are collective, and in the main character, along with Balmont and Zhiber, someone else is clearly guessed. The plot of the drama "Immortal Love" is directly related to the occult; Lokhvitskaya herself was not fond of him, but, as the researcher of her work T. Alexandrova writes (referring to the “magic” experiments of V. Bryusov and the mysterious nature of the “disease” that led the poetess to death), “it can be assumed that she is the object of occult influence turned out to be."

For the fifth collection (1904), M. Lokhvitskaya in 1905 (posthumously) was awarded half the Pushkin Prize. The third and fourth collections at the same time received an honorary review from the Academy of Sciences. In 1907, a posthumous collection of poems and plays by Lokhvitskaya “Before the Sunset” was published, which forced critics to re-evaluate the work of the poetess. Reviewing the book, M. O. Gershenzon, noting that with a few exceptions “plays suffer from nebula, their fiction is artificial and unconvincing, and one feels more impulse than creative power,” discovered the author’s power in mystical vision: Only where Lokhvitskaya tried in her purest form to express her faith, her mystical comprehension, without trying to clothe them in images, there she sometimes succeeded in truly poetic creations.

«<…>Her spirit was too weak to develop a comprehensive mystical idea; she moves in this Tyutchev world with touching helplessness and strives to express the huge vague feeling that fills her. - M. Gershenzon. Herald of Europe, 1908

Illness and death

In the late 1890s, Lokhvitskaya's health began to deteriorate rapidly. She complained of heart pain, chronic depression and nightmares. In December 1904, the illness worsened; the poetess (as the obituary later said) "at times looked at her situation with great pessimism, wondering, after terrifying bouts of pain and prolonged seizures, that she was still alive." For the summer, Lokhvitskaya moved to a dacha in Finland, where "under the influence of the wonderful air, she felt a little better"; then, however, it was necessary not only to transport her to the city, but also to place her in a clinic, "in order to give complete peace, not achievable at home." Lokhvitskaya died painfully: her suffering "took on such a terrifying character that I had to resort to injections of morphine." Under the influence of the drug, the patient spent the last two days of her life in oblivion, and died in her sleep on August 27, 1905. On August 29, the funeral of the poetess took place in the Spiritual Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra; there, at the Nikolsky cemetery, she, in the presence of only close relatives and friends, was buried.

The most accurate information about the cause of death M.A. Lokhvitskaya gives in his notes F.F. Fiedler: "On August 27, Lokhvitskaya died in the Bekhterev clinic - from heart disease, diphtheria and Basedow's disease." - Fidler F.F. From the world of writers. 2008

Information often cited in biographical notes that the poetess died of pulmonary tuberculosis is erroneous. Yu. Zagulyaeva's obituary mentions chronic angina pectoris, which is consistent with Fidler's data. Contemporaries have repeatedly expressed the opinion that the death of the poetess was directly related to her state of mind. “She died early; somehow mysterious; as a consequence of the disturbed balance of her spirit ... So they said ... ”, - the poetess I. Grinevskaya, who was friends with Lokhvitskaya, wrote in her memoirs.

Family and personal life

Maria Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was born into the family of lawyer Alexander Vladimirovich Lokhvitsky (1830-1884), a scientist, author of works on jurisprudence, who was called one of the “most talented poets of the tribune of his time” and Varvara Alexandrovna (née Goyer, French Hoer, died not earlier than 1917 ). On November 30, 1869, the girl was baptized in the Sergievsky All Artillery Cathedral, which was located next to the Lokhvitsky house; the godparents at baptism were Lieutenant Colonel V. A. von Goyer and E. A. Bestuzheva-Ryumina. Three years later, Maria's younger sister, Nadezhda Alexandrovna (1872-1952), was born, who later became known as Teffi.

The family of A.V. Lokhvitsky had many children, and the age difference between the older and younger children was significant (their exact number was not established). Maria's brother Nikolai Alexandrovich Lokhvitsky (1868-1933), a general who during the First World War commanded a corps in France, participated in the White movement in the Civil War (and for some time commanded the 2nd Kolchak army) gained fame. Teffi often mentioned her sister Elena (1874-1919, by her husband - Plandovskaya), with whom she was very friendly. Elena also wrote poetry, later, together with Teffi, translated Maupassant, was in a society of dramatic writers, but did not consider herself a professional writer. The names of two more older sisters are known - Varvara Alexandrovna (in the marriage of Popova) and Lydia Alexandrovna (Kozhina).

In 1891, M. A. Lokhvitskaya married the civil engineer E. E. Zhiber, the son of the Russified Frenchwoman Olga Fegin (1838-1900) and Ernest Ivanovich Zhiber (1823-1909). The latter was born in Paris, came to St. Petersburg in the 1840s, graduated from the Academy of Arts and remained in Russia, where he was, in particular, a professor at the Institute of Civil Engineers. The poetess dedicated her debut collection to her husband; meanwhile, some of her early poems pointed to some kind of secret love, unhappy or unrequited. It was noted that “some material for reflection” on this subject is provided by the fact that Lokhvitskaya met N. L. Gondatti, a researcher of Siberia and the Far East. If you believe the memoirs of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, when asked if she loves her fiancé, Lokhvitskaya resolutely answered “no”, although she immediately added: “But I don’t know. He is good... Yes, of course, I love him. This is the threshold we girls have to cross. Otherwise, you will not enter into life. However, as T. Alexandrova notes, this evidence cannot be unconditionally accepted: in his memoirs, Nemirovich-Danchenko treated “the facts quite freely.”

Lokhvitskaya and E. Zhiber had five sons: three - Mikhail, Evgeny and Vladimir - were born in the first years of marriage, one after another; Ishmael was born in 1900, Valery - in the autumn of 1904. It is known that the poetess gave all her time to children; her attitude towards them can be judged by a comic poem, where each is given a brief description (“My Michael is a brave warrior, strong in a life battle ...”).

Alias ​​history

There is a legend (not documented), according to which, when dying, Maria's great-grandfather Kondrat Lokhvitsky uttered the words: "the wind blows away the smell of myrrh ..." and Maria decided to change her name after learning about the family tradition. From the memoirs of the younger sister, it follows that there is at least one more version of the origin of the pseudonym. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya recalled that all the children in the family wrote poetry, and this occupation was considered “for some reason, terribly shameful, and as soon as someone catches a brother or sister with a pencil, notebook and an inspired face, they immediately begin to shout: - He writes! Writes! Out of suspicion was only the oldest brother, a creature full of dark irony. But one day, when, after the summer holidays, he left for the lyceum, fragments of papers were found in his room with some kind of poetic exclamations and a line repeated several times: “O Mirra, pale moon!”. Alas! And he wrote poetry! This discovery made a strong impression on us, and, who knows, maybe my older sister Masha, having become a famous poetess, took the pseudonym “Mirra Lokhvitskaya” precisely because of this impression. - Taffy. Autobiographical stories, memoirs.

Meanwhile, as T. Aleksandrova notes, the mentioned line is a distorted translation of the beginning of the romance "Mira la bianca luna ..." ("Look, here is a pale moon ..." - Italian), mentioned in I. Turgenev's novel "The Noble Nest". The researcher noted that Masha Lokhvitskaya, who studied “Italian” singing at the institute, could also perform this romance; thus - borrow a pseudonym from here, regardless of the story with the brother's poetic delights described by Teffi. The fact that “the line represents not only the literary name of the future poetess, but also the motif of the moon, which is often found in her” (“Sonnambula”, “Union of Magicians”, etc.), according to the researcher, indirectly testifies in favor of this version.

Relations with K. Balmont

Lokhvitskaya and K. D. Balmont met presumably in the Crimea, in 1895. Rapprochement was predetermined by the common creative principles and ideas of the two poets; soon "a spark of mutual feeling flared up", which was realized in poetic correspondence. Balmont in the poems of the poetess became "Lionel", a young man with curls "the color of ripe rye" and eyes "greenish blue, like the sea." "Literary novel" Lokhvitskaya and Balmont received scandalous publicity; it has been repeatedly implied that both poets were physically close. P.P. Pertsov, referring to their "acclaimed romance", notes that the latter "laid the foundation" for other romantic hobbies of the poet.

Balmont himself, in his autobiographical essay "At the Dawn", claimed that only "poetic friendship" connected him with Lokhvitskaya. Subsequently, it became impossible to document either confirm or refute this: despite the fact that there are a significant number of poetic mutual dedications, only one letter from Balmont Lokhvitskaya, restrained and cold, has survived. It is known that the poets met infrequently: for most of the period of their acquaintance, Balmont was abroad. As T. Alexandrova later wrote, “Lokhvitskaya honored her duty as a wife and mother, but was unable to extinguish the flame that had not been extinguished in time.”

After the next departure of Balmont abroad in 1901, personal communication between them, apparently, ceased, and the poetic roll call grew into a kind of duel of an increasingly sinister and painful nature (“His onslaught corresponds to her pleas, his triumph - her despair, threats - horror, and in her nightmares the key expression is repeated in different ways: evil spells”). “A painful struggle with oneself and with midday charms” not only constituted the essence of the poetess’s late lyrics, but, as many believe, served as the main cause of deep depression, which largely predetermined her early death.

Balmont was not present at the funeral of Lokhvitskaya and soon after the death of the poetess, with deliberate disdain, spoke about her in a letter to V. Bryusov. In addition, in his collection, and called: "Evil Spells", created immediately after the death of Lokhvitskaya, he continues to mockingly respond to the images of her poetry. Nevertheless, he obviously took the death of his beloved very hard; in memory of her, he named his daughter from his marriage to E. K. Tsvetkovskaya, and, apparently, saw in her some kind of reincarnation of the poetess. The daughter from a relationship with Dagmar Shakhovskaya was named Svetlana (this is the name of the heroine of a short poem by Lokhvitskaya “The Tale of Prince Ishmael, Princess Svetlana and Jemali the Beautiful”).

F.F. Fidler, talking about the meeting with Balmont at the end of 1913 (8 years after the death of Lokhvitskaya), reports the following: About Mirra Lokhvitskaya "<…>Balmont said that he loved her and still loves her: her portrait accompanies him on all his travels ... ”- Fidler F.F. From the world of writers.

Character and appearance

There are few memories of M.A. Lokhvitskaya, which was due to several reasons. Closed and shy, the poetess rarely went out, justifying her seclusion with household chores, illnesses of children, and later - worsened health. Many of those with whom she maintained friendly relations belonged to the older generation and died before her (K. K. Sluchevsky, Vs. Solovyov, A. I. Urusov), leaving no memories. Her relationship with her peers was not easy, and if Bryusov and Gippius openly expressed their antipathy to her, then others showed in their memoirs, at first glance, inexplicable restraint: for example, people who knew her better than others wrote almost nothing about the poetess: Teffi and Balmont (who throughout his life kept a portrait of Lokhvitskaya on his desk).

Perhaps the most striking (but at the same time, as noted later, almost certainly idealized) portrait of the poetess was created in his memoirs by Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, with whom the young Lokhvitskaya developed a trusting relationship: ... She was born and grew up in a dull, draining unhealthy juices from countless bedsores Petersburg, - and the whole seemed like a wonderful tropical flower, filling my corner with a strange aroma of another land more blessed by heaven ... It seemed like a soul that was not at all related to the boring and meager, measured way of our life. And it seemed to me: the young poetess herself warms herself in uncontrollable impulses of inspiration, becomes intoxicated with the real music of freely flowing verse.

As V. Nemirovich-Danchenko recalled, she “was not a proud and greedy seeker of the strange and obscure, instead of the original, she did not invent, did not perform magic, covering up the lack of beauty and sincerity with the incomprehensible and wild. It was immediacy itself, a light that shone from the heart and did not need any prisms and screens ... ".

Spectacular appearance largely contributed to the growth of M. Lokhvitskaya's popularity; she, as noted, "subsequently ... became an obstacle to understanding her poetry." According to T. Alexandrova, “not everyone wanted to see that the external attractiveness is combined in the poetess with a lively mind, which over time began to reveal itself more and more clearly in her lyrics. The drama of Lokhvitskaya is the usual drama of a beautiful woman, in which they refuse to notice anything other than beauty.

There is information that the poetess was successful at literary evenings, but it is also known that these performances were few and constrained. Recalling one of these evenings, E. Poselyanin wrote: “When she went on stage, there was so much helpless shyness in her that she seemed much less beautiful than on her card, which was placed in all magazines.” A neighbor and friend of Lokhvitskaya, Isabella Grinevskaya, recalled meetings with the poetess at artistic evenings, but she did not indicate whether Lokhvitskaya took any part in them, except for the audience: “We met with her at the evening at Yavorskaya. This interesting actress knew how not only to play on stage, but also to receive guests, giving them the opportunity to express themselves. An impromptu concert was created on a small stage. Some of the guests spoke. By chance, I found myself next to Lokhvitskaya, who was completely unfamiliar to me then, except for her name and some poems. ”, She recalled.

As many of those who knew Lokhvitskaya personally noted, the "Bacchic" nature of the poetess's work was in complete contrast with her real character. The author of unusually bold for her time, sometimes openly erotic poems, in life she was “the most chaste married lady in St. Petersburg”, a faithful wife and a virtuous mother. At the same time, as T. Aleksandrova notes, in the circle of friends Lokhvitskaya was surrounded by "a peculiar aura of universal light love." Lokhvitskaya is one of the few about whom the usually caustic I. A. Bunin left the most pleasant memories. “And everything about her was charming: the sound of her voice, the liveliness of her speech, the sparkle of her eyes, this cute light playfulness ... Her complexion was especially beautiful: matte, even, similar to the color of a Crimean apple,” he wrote. V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina recalled their relationship in this way, paraphrasing what she heard from her husband: He met in Moscow, and then became friends, with the poetess Mirra Lokhvitskaya, Teffi's sister. They developed a tender friendship. He always admired her, remembering a snowy day on the street, her in a smart fur coat covered with snow. She was considered almost a Bacchante, as she wrote poems about love and passion, and meanwhile she was a homebody, mother of several children, with a very lively and sensitive mind, who understood the joke. - Muromtseva-Bunina V. N. Bunin's life.

Bunin himself stated: the poetess, who sang passion, in everyday life is “a big homebody, lazy in the oriental way: often she even receives guests lying on the sofa in the hood, and never speaks to them with poetic languor, but on the contrary. Chatters very sensibly, simply, with great wit, observation and wonderful mockery. The writer often visited the house of the poetess, "was on friendly terms with her" and remarked: "we even called each other by diminutive names, although always as if ironically, with jokes on each other." Bunin left little documentary evidence of this friendship. It was noted, however, that the image of Lokhvitskaya, captured by the writer in his memoirs, organically fit "into the gallery of unforgettable female images of his artistic prose" (it can be assumed that it is reflected in the story "Light Breath", in a number of Bunin's poems, as well as in some features of Lika in " Life of Arseniev).

Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, talking many years later about how married life destroys talent, found a certain pattern in the fact that the life of the poetess "... ended early, suddenly and tragically." And yet, he wrote, - ... I still can not remember her indifferently. Unable to - years have already passed - to reconcile, I will not sin in saying - with a great loss for our literature. Every time I read her poems, I see her in a cozy hotel room, in the corner of an olive velvet sofa, curled up like a kitten under the uneven fire of a brightly blazing fireplace. Under this light, it seemed, a flame lit up in her lovely eyes ... I hear her nervous, tender voice ... Stanza after stanza sounds, captivating me and often Vl. Solovyov into a magical poetic dream. To what bright worlds she was able to take those who listened to her! And how charming everything was, and the shimmering face, swarthy, southern, golden! .. I was not at her funeral. I wanted her to remain in my memory the same joyful fragrant flower of a distant sunny land, abandoned in the dull everyday life of the frozen north.

You. Iv. Nemirovich-Danchenko.

Creativity Analysis

The early poems of Mirra Lokhvitskaya did not differ in formal novelty, but, as it was later admitted, “the assertion of a purely feminine view of the world was fundamentally new in them”; in this regard, it is Lokhvitskaya who is considered the founder of Russian “female poetry” of the 20th century, who paved the way for A. A. Akhmatova, M. I. Tsvetaeva and other Russian poetesses. As M. O. Gershenzon wrote, “Lokhvitskaya’s poems were not appreciated and did not penetrate the large public, but those who love the delicate aroma of poetry and the music of the verse, they were able to appreciate her wonderful talent ...”. In a review of the posthumously published collection Before Sunset (1907), Gershenzon wrote: First of all, Lokhvitskaya's verse is charming. The whole play succeeded relatively rarely for her: she definitely did not carry out her poetic idea and often embodied it when it was not yet clear in herself. But a single stanza, a single verse often achieves classical perfection in her. It seems that none of the Russian poets has approached Pushkin to such an extent in terms of purity and clarity of verse as this woman poet; her stanzas are remembered almost as easily as Pushkin's.

Gershenzon M. O., Bulletin of Europe, 1908.

You also noted the natural musicality of the poetess's verse. Nemirovich-Danchenko: “Each line glowed with a beautiful, purely southern passion and such penetration into nature that even the great poets in the honorable corner of the Russian Parnassus did not have. She was already fully tech-savvy even then. She had nothing to learn from the versifiers, whom we often called the laurels of true poetry. She, more than anyone, was distinguished by a musical ear and, running her eyes through the lines, heard poetry.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, where Lokhvitskaya was characterized as “one of the most outstanding Russian poetesses”, confirmed: “Her verse is elegant, harmonious, light, the images are always bright and colorful, the mood is clear, the language is plastic.” At the same time, it was noted that despite the fact that the poetess was considered by many to be decadents, in reality, Lokhvitskaya did not have “a shadow of that relaxation, nervous weakness, pretentiousness and, in general, morbidity and extravagance” that were associated with decadence; on the contrary, she was filled with a thirst for life, expressing the desire to enjoy and surrender to "your impulses with the fullness of an intense feeling." There were also opposite opinions: AI Izmailov saw in Lokhvitskaya's talent "a natural slope towards decadence", which was facilitated by "good theoretical knowledge of the occult." Her "imitations of mystical spells perfectly capture the spirit and tone of the creations of an old folk fiction," the critic noted.

S. A. Vengerov noticed in the poetess’s work “the same surge of social vigor that was expressed in a bold challenge to Marxism”, noting immediately that “Lokhvitskaya’s mood is completely alien to public interests”: The poetess’s ideas about the purpose and tasks of life are completely Eastern; she directed all the strength of her impulse and thirst for life exclusively in the direction of love. She spoke with complete frankness about "the desires of a fiery soul", about "frantic passion", etc., but the frankness and peculiar naivety with which she created the apotheosis of passion gave him great charm.

S. Vengerov, ESBE

Meanwhile, T. Alexandrova, noting that Lokhvitskaya was not only a “singer of passion”, but also a mystic by nature, cited the lines as an example: ... I hate the color red

Because he is cursed.

It contains the crimes of many years,

In it is the execution of bygone times ...

“This was said even before the first Russian revolution, which Lokhvitskaya did not even have time to see. In essence, this poem alone was enough for the poet not to be published under Soviet rule,” the researcher notes.

Vyach also wrote about the mystical side of the gift of the poetess. Ivanov. Noting the integrity of Lokhvitskaya's poetic nature, which, in his opinion, was a rare example of ancient harmony in modern man "... and treated Christianity ... with the soft tenderness of an undivided pagan soul standing outside, responding to it with all its natural, healthy kindness", he considered the poetess not "a bacchante of the insanely luxurious, godlessly carnal bacchanalia of late paganism", but a "true bacchante". Ivanov wrote: “As a true Bacchante<она>harbored a fatal polarity of worldview. Passion meets death, and pleasure - suffering. To the same extent that the poetess was inspired by the beauty of voluptuousness, she was attracted by the demonic horror of cruelty. With bold curiosity she stops over the abyss of torment; the Middle Ages breathes on it the haze of its diabolical obsessions; frenzied, she feels like one of the sorceresses who have experienced the hellish fun of the coven and the fire.

Bifurcation in a different plane was noted in the work of M. Lokhvitskaya and A. A. Kursinsky. He believed that the poetess was "... high above the dumb vale of worries and sorrows and lived as if in another happiest world, where everything is beauty and bliss, an endless, crystal-sparkling fairy tale," which made many people seem "distant and alien." Meanwhile, according to the critic, her "burning dreams were nourished by universal sorrow for unattainable happiness, she heard heavenly choirs, but was heard through the dull ringing of the earth's monotonous tunes", and the creative motive was the desire "to bring the visible sky to earth, and not in the desire get off the ground."

A. I. Izmailov, who believed that Lokhvitskaya was “the most prominent and ... the only, if we apply a strict and serious point of view, Russian poetess,” wrote: “Fiery, passionate, feminine-elegant, sometimes too nervous, almost painful in her poems , but always individual, it was a strange combination of earth and sky, flesh and spirit, sin and aspiration upward, local joy and longing for the “bliss of an unearthly country”, for the coming “kingdom of holy beauty”. The absence of strong and equal places her clearly first among women's poetry. Calling her a singer of "... burning, burning, languishing passion", the critic noted that even with the change of mood in her subsequent books, readers and critics "did not forget the first, brightly colored impression", which "remained dominant". Izmailov recalled that many noted the "one-sidedness of Lokhvitskaya's muse", which over the years only became more definite. In his opinion, the love lyrics of the poetess made "sometimes a somewhat painful impression"; it often showed a "painful nervous break...".

E. Poselyanin, calling M. Lokhvitskaya the largest figure among the poets of the new generation, put her above I. Bunin (“not bright enough”), K. Balmont and A. Bely (“... they give among a heap of incomprehensible chaotic creations only a small number of slender and sometimes beautiful things"). According to the writer, Lokhvitskaya "possessed one of the hallmarks of a true talent - an extraordinary clarity of content and definiteness of form." Recognizing the ideological narrowness of the poetess's work (“Torment and joy, cries of sadness and cries of delight of a loving, eternally inflamed female heart”) and mentioning reproaches addressed to her in “exaggeration, in an overly burning flame of passion”, Poselyanin remarked: She was one of the first women, who spoke about love from a feminine point of view as frankly as only poets, for their part, used to talk about it. But no matter how you look at this immediacy of her poetic confession, there was great sincerity in her, which created her success, together with a sonorous, brilliant form that was extremely in tune with the mood of this poem. - E. Poselyanin. Resounding strings. 1905

Recognizing that in Lokhvitskaya’s poems “... a rebellious, searching, unsatisfied, partly pagan heart beat,” Poselyanin clarified: “But this, for the most part physical, passion reached high impulses of self-denial.” Lokhvitskaya, as he believed, who unwittingly paid "tribute to the mystical aspirations of the people among whom she was born", nevertheless "in the field of ontology ... managed to bring the most sublime and poetic element: love that never dies and blossoms in full and perfect power in eternity." It was noted that this opinion is especially interesting because it belongs to the author, who became famous for spiritual books on the history of Orthodoxy: “It is characteristic that the Poselyanin does not consider the mysticism of Lokhvitskaya’s love to be dark - he clearly sees its bright sides ...<Его заметка>- a good argument against enrolling the poetess in the ranks of the "priests of darkness",” wrote T. Aleksandrova.

Love Theme

Lokhvitskaya's poetry, elegant and colorful, was devoted almost exclusively to romantic feelings. The line: “This happiness is voluptuousness” became a kind of motto for the poetess, about which some critics spoke only of “Russian Sappho”. “All her work is subordinated to the theme of female love; sometimes there are historical motifs. Masterful poems are rich in images and comparisons, their structure is determined by parallelisms, they are not narrative, imbued with romance, eroticism, they express the acceptance of the world as a principle - both in relation to the beloved and to death, ”said V. Kazak (“Lexicon of Russian Literature XX century").

In her early works, the poetess sang love as a bright romantic feeling, the path to family happiness and the joy of motherhood. Gradually, the themes of her works narrowed; “a sinful passion, bringing discord into her soul” invaded the life of her lyrical heroine; plot appeared in love lyrics. The appearance of the “Bacchante” halo over the image of Lokhvitskaya was largely facilitated by her “literary romance” with K. D. Balmont. As S. Vengerov wrote, - Three periods should be distinguished in Lokhvitskaya's eroticism. If even in the first collection there are things that are directly cynical, then the general coloring to it, nevertheless, was imparted by naive grace; "Sweet songs of love" were, moreover, dedicated to the poet's husband for the fact that he brought her "happiness and joy." With the release of the second collection, the shy coloring of young delights disappears. The singer's feelings acquire an exceptionally sultry character.<…>With the III collection, she enters the last phase, where the shadows are already much greater than the light. The general tone of Lokhvitskaya's poetry is now gloomy; a lot is said about suffering, impotence, death. Former simplicity and clarity is replaced by pretentiousness. Plots are becoming more refined ... - ESBE, M. Lokhvitskaya.

The last years of the creative life of M. Lokhvitskaya were marked by decadent moods. A poem already included in Volume III:

“I want to die young, golden, roll like a star, fly around like an unfaded flower.

I want to die young...

May the fire not fade to the end, and the memory of the one that awakened hearts for life remains.

It was subsequently recognized as a "clearly realized prophetic epitaph." As the popularity of the "Russian Sappho" grew, criticism found in her poetry already "more sincerity than indiscretion." In volume IV, published in 1903, not a trace of recent passion remained. Poems with appeals to the beloved, written by this time, the poetess did not include here. But here there is a premonition of imminent death; in some poems, Lokhvitskaya mentally said goodbye to the children, bequeathing to them Christian ideals and the search for a way "to the gardens of the living God."

M. Gershenzon, tracing the short path traversed by the poetess through the collection “Before Sunset” (1907), noted: if in her early poems the motive expressed by the appeal prevailed: “Hurry, beloved! My oil is burning!”, then in later things the poet’s soul seemed to become “quieter and deeper; behind passion, behind the colorful veil of being, a mysterious connection of phenomena was revealed to her - as if the walls were parted and the gaze penetrated into the mysterious distance. A. Izmailov wrote that Lokhvitskaya "knew the secret of true beauty, and she sang beautifully, sincerely and boldly that Song of Songs, which no poetess had sung before her in Russian."

Meaning

Mirra Lokhvitskaya, who had a huge success in the late 1890s, noticeably lost popularity by the end of her life: “the cold ridicule of the legislators of literary fashion, the petty nitpicking of critics and the indifference of the reading public, who did not even honor their former favorite with fresh flowers at the funeral, were addressed to her” . The last echo of Lokhvitskaya’s lifetime glory was the fascination with her work by Igor Severyanin, who named his fantastic country “Mirrelia” in honor of the poetess, but (according to T. Aleksandrova) the immoderate enthusiasm of the “king of poets” did not contribute to an adequate understanding of her poetry.

In the Soviet period, the name of Lokhvitskaya was firmly forgotten, both at home and in the Russian diaspora; critics convicted her of "limitedness, triviality, salonism, vulgarity." For more than ninety years, M. Lokhvitskaya's poems have not been published in separate editions. The statement turned out to be widely disseminated: “For the future Anthology of Russian Poetry, it will be possible to choose 10-15 truly impeccable poems from Lokhvitskaya ...” (which had a less well-known continuation: “... but the attentive reader will always be excited and captivated by the inner drama of Lokhvitskaya’s soul, captured by her in all her poetry").

The situation began to change in the 1990s. The English Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994) noted that Lokhvitskaya's role in women's poetry "still awaits a balanced and fair assessment" and that her "influence on contemporaries and later poets is only beginning to be recognized." The American Slavist V.F. Markov argued that "her" burning, feminine verse "definitely deserves attention and rehabilitation", and "it was Lokhvitskaya, and not," she taught women to speak "". He also called Lokhvitskaya "a storehouse of prophetic anticipations." Modern researchers of the poetess's work recognize the validity of the reproach regarding the "narrowness" of the poetic world of Lokhvitskaya, but note the undoubted depth of the latter. As Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote, "its depth was a sunny depth, full of light, and therefore did not seem like a depth to an unaccustomed look."