THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

deep blue waters.) 72
These lines produce another echo in the third and fourth lines of
"Вариация" ("Сижу, —но все земные звуки—/Как бы во сне или сквозь сон"). They
also introduce the first extended use of water and sailing imagery which fill "Эпизод"
and color "Вариация."
In both poems the separation of the body and soul is compared to setting out to
sea, moving from the solid earth of the shore to a wider world of waves. The poems,
however, are fundamentally distinguished by the final position of the lyric persona. In
"Эпизод" the poet has stepped out of the boat, back onto the shore. He has returned to
his previous state of exhaustion, left only with an indistinct, captive echo of the wind. He
compares his difficult and painful return to that of a snake trying to crawl back into his
discarded skin (lines 60-67). 73
72 Khodasevich revises these lines in the 1927 edition of Путем зерна to read: …Громыхали/Салазки по
горе, но эти звуки/Неслись во мне как будто бы сквозь толщу/Глубоких вод…
73 Another description of this exhausting, repeated return from the pure realm of the soul to the everyday
world is found in Khodasevich’s earlier poem “Сны” (1917). Here the split between the body and the soul
is played out in terms of dream and wakefulness. The lyric “я” urges his soul to break away from the body
in sleep—to learn how to live in another realm. The soul can maintain this freedom, however, only until it
is inevitably awakened and joined again with the body in an unhappy union (нерадостный союз). The
final two stanzas of “Сны” stress the harsh sameness of each waking day, alleviated only by a lingering
reflection of the dream:
День изо дня, в миг пробужденья трудный,
Припоминаю я твой вещий сон,
Смотрю в окно и вижу серый, скудный,
Мой небосклон,
Все тот же двор, и мглистый, и суровый,
И голубей, танцующих на нем…
Лишь явно мне, что некий отсвет новый
Лежит на всем.
Day after day, in the difficult moment of awakening,
I remember your prophetic dream,
I look out the window and see my gray, meager
Horizon,
I always see the same courtyard, both hazy and bleak,
And the pigeons dancing on it…
The only thing I sense clearly is that some new reflection
Lies over everything.
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