Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gronsky • Story One

Passport

1. Project: “All About Love”
2. Format: a fantasy late-night radio broadcast with a host and live listener calls.
3. Author of the idea and rights holder: Iskandar Kadyrov
4. Age rating: 18+
5. Story One: Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gronsky
6. Genre: Literary radio drama-essay

Teaser

I was his first love, and he — it seems — my last.

Night. The studio line is open. Tonight we speak of the summer of 1928, of the full moon, and of the letter she wished would be the next-to-last.

Announcement

The first episode of the fantasy radio program “Night Call.” The host recalls the one-time premiere of the symphonic drama “TsvetaevaGALA” — A Little About Love, tells of the summer of 1928 and of the letters of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gronsky, while listeners on the phone share what they felt. Not a biography, but the state of a person in love: the sea, waiting, the full moon. A broadcast for anyone who has ever waited for a letter.

About the project

“All About Love” is a literary project by Iskandar Kadyrov about the most mysterious of human feelings. Here, love is not a story with a happy or a tragic ending, but a particular state that one day changes everything around us: time, space, the person, even a voice and memory. Each episode brings two people, one story, and the moment when love becomes a part of great human culture.

Note: This project draws on materials from the show “TsvetaevaGALA” (16+): produced by ANO “Alliance” (2016–2017), under license from Iskandar Kadyrov.

Good evening, or rather good night, dear listeners.

There are hours when the city at last falls quiet, when words grow softer and therefore truer, and conversation goes deeper of its own accord. An hour for philosophy, for long talks and unhurried thoughts spoken half-aloud. Tonight our broadcast is no ordinary one: you are listening to the first episode of the radio program “Night Call.” There is only one rule here. The lamp above the microphone is burning, the studio line is open, and if you feel like saying something at this hour, call. I will hear you.

And here, it seems, is the first call. Good night, you are on the air.

— Good evening.

— Good evening.

— What will tonight’s program be about?

— About love.

— Then I’ll stay.

Thank you. To stay, perhaps, is the best thing one can do on a night like this.

And of course we decided to dedicate this program to one priceless feeling, the one that seems to be spilled everywhere: in the evening light, in music, in the silence of two people at a window. I dare hope it is well known to you.

Tonight we begin a cycle of programs whose heroes will be people known all over the world. Marina Tsvetaeva, Marilyn Monroe, Édith Piaf, Frida Kahlo. Names we are used to pronouncing with admiration, and sometimes with a sigh of compassion. But in our conversations we will try to hear something else. The love that came to them like a tide and filled everything around. They loved and, perhaps, were loved. That is what we shall speak of: a little about love.

By the way, a few years ago I was invited to a philharmonic hall for a symphonic drama, and I confess I went with a slight prejudice. I expected one of those evenings of which there are many: poems, dates, the familiar image of Tsvetaeva that has been so carefully made for us, the image of a woman with a hard and heavy fate.

But the hall showed me something quite different. Or rather, not only that. The world premiere was called “TsvetaevaGALA — A Little About Love.” It spoke of the nature of feelings and the fragrance of time, of the mystery of the poetic gift, and before us appeared another Tsvetaeva: a woman loving and waiting.

And beside her a young poet from Russia, Nikolai Gronsky, very young, eighteen years old. Marina called him Kolyushka, and in that one name, truly, one could hear a whole tender universe.

A strange thing: the letters were not read there. They were lived. A line gave birth to music, music took up the line, light entered as a third voice, and all of it together breathed like a single living being. The Svetlanov Orchestra did not accompany the heroes; it was part of their conversation, a mirror of their hopes and anxieties. Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Ravel, Vivaldi, Satie, Schnittke, and each melody opened one more door in this story.

And the first half put me in a mild artistic shock. The musicians’ attire is a whole separate conversation. We are used to seeing a symphony orchestra differently: the strict black tailcoat, the evening gown, the neat rows of music stands, the solemn, almost ritual nobility of the classics. And suddenly the orchestra does not come out from the wings, as is customary. The musicians enter the hall like ordinary spectators, from all the doors at once, unhurried and relaxed, and walk through the lit organ hall as if on their way to rest on the beach. They are dressed not for a concert but for summer, almost for the shore. All that was missing, perhaps, were inflatable rings and straw hats. Slowly climbing onto the stage, they took their places the way people take deck chairs on a beach. And at the front of the stage stood two lounge chairs.

And here it becomes clear: tonight we are being invited not to a concert. We are being invited into summer.

The organ shimmered with reflections of the sea, and the feeling of summer, of the south of France, of warm air and sunlit water, was almost tangible. It seemed that in another moment the faint kiss of the sea would remain on your lips. Later I learned where those reflections came from: small mirrors lay in water. Fans stirred the water, spotlights scattered light across it, and the whole hall breathed the sea.

This was the brightest, the sunniest, the happiest time in her story. Summer. The anticipation of a meeting. Long walks by the sea that were still only to be taken together.

And you know what was especially strange? I sat in the hall and did not want to know at all how it would end. Perhaps because sometimes we are allowed to see a person happy, and instinctively we want to linger exactly there. Not to ask what tomorrow will bring. Not to look beyond the next turn. Simply to stay in summer.

If you too were in that hall that evening, or if you have ever waited for a letter, call. I long to hear not an account of a performance but what you felt.

I think that is a call. Good night, you are on the air.

— Good evening… I was at that performance. I wasn’t going to call, honestly. I’m just listening to you and… I remembered it all again. You know, I was sitting there and suddenly caught myself feeling so good. Simply good. I was smiling, and I got goosebumps. Not from the tragedy, no. The opposite. I knew it would all end badly, everyone knows. But I was happy with her all the same. It seemed to me that I was waiting for someone myself. And I really didn’t want it to end.

You have just said the most important thing. Tonight we are not speaking about how this story ended. We are speaking about how a person feels when she loves. Thank you.

And here is another call. Good night.

— Good evening. I was at the performance too. And afterwards I also bought the book. But mine is different. I suddenly caught myself envying Gronsky. No, not because he was young and talented. But because he received those letters. When you read them, you understand: a person can be happy simply because someone is waiting for him. And one more thing. For some reason we are used to judging love by how it ended. But the truest thing sometimes happens before the finale. That summer wasn’t only on the stage. It’s in the book, too.

Yes. I bought that book too, “A Few Heartbeats,” the correspondence of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gronsky. I read it at night, a little at a time, the way one reads letters addressed to someone else. And here is what struck me: the summer that the theater showed through light and music is told in the letters in her own words.

The seaside town of Pontaillac. A full moon, enormous tides, and an invitation to come exactly on those days. Her name day, with champagne and grapes, and his letter, which she read, understood three-quarters of, and kissed. “The month of the last falling stars, my favorite.” A twelve-hour walk through the pines to the Wild Coast, where everything around her seemed endless, “as in love.” And the words spoken in the midst of the dunes: “Today I did not live — I was.” Imagine: a woman stands by the ocean, face to face with the whole world, and understands that only now does she truly exist. And then the promise of days when no one would be able to find them, because “we will be everywhere.”

This is the woman I met that evening. And I wanted you to meet her too.

And he? Who was this young man to her? He came to her in early 1928 to ask for her books, which could no longer be bought in the shops. And the first thing she felt was gratitude: it turns out that someone, after all, needs her, even if only in the form of her own books.

He came from a family of émigrés: his father a scholar and a member of the State Duma, his mother a gifted sculptor. He himself had left Russia as an eleven-year-old boy. He studied law, but truly belonged to poetry, which he never published in his lifetime.

At first there were walks through the Meudon woods, the cinema, literary evenings, lectures, trips to Paris.

“My companion and my guide

Along the darkness of the Meudon woods,

Thank you for walking at my side:

For the stars, the moon, and the sun.”

Then she left with her children for the summer, and the meetings broke off, but the correspondence began. Almost daily, over three months. In those letters they became for each other now lovers, now friends, now mother and son, now teacher and pupil, and each name was a little too tight for what was happening between them. She called him “dear Kolyushka” and with every letter wrote more boldly.

“This September will never come again,” she wrote to him. “I want it with you, with all the strength of my soul.” She promised to send money for the ticket and asked him to test himself: to come only if this September was as necessary to him as it was to her. Clear days and moonlit nights, roads, sands, “the sound of the word OCEAN” — all this was waiting for him by the sea.

And he answered her with letters just as ardent. About a storm that had come to him straight from her. “Thunder strikes more often than my heart,” he confessed.

On the twenty-seventh of August she writes to him: “Whatever you do, don’t take a ticket for just one week; I wouldn’t even have time to rejoice in you.” Come, without fail, by the night train, as we did. And she adds: “How I wish this letter were the next-to-last!” One more letter, and words would no longer be needed. She wanted to say all this to him.

On the twenty-eighth of August he replies that he will leave on Saturday evening or Sunday morning, if a train can be found. It is twenty past one at night, he writes, and he had better not write anything more today.

And on the twenty-ninth she sends him what is perhaps the most impatient of her letters. “I will meet you in any case.” And one more line that takes the breath away: “You will arrive on the very night of the full moon.”

There is a melody of Ravel’s that does not change by a single note. It only repeats, louder and denser, until the whole orchestra gathers around it as around a fire. So it was in that half of the performance. Everything moved toward a single peak and kept growing, and could not help growing: the full moon, the tides, the night train, letters that were not yet the last. The first half ended with Ravel’s Boléro. The final chord, and the power of the orchestra was staggering. It was the apogee of the summer, a summer of love and hope.

She was still waiting. He could still come. The summer was not yet over.

And after the interval came a different weather. The orchestra returned in its usual black, but now the familiar had turned bitter. The heavy, half-dark hall seemed to grieve with Marina. He did not come. A rain-wet station, fallen leaves: we had been told all this in advance, without a single word. And the small broken mirrors no longer reflected the sea. They glimmered, cold and far away, like the stars of unfulfilled hopes.

The first of September, nineteen twenty-eight. She goes to meet the train. The train arrives. People step down from the train, but he is not among them. And soon a letter is brought. She looks at the envelope, sees that it is thick, and knows everything at once. “The first letter that I, holding it in my hands, was not glad of.”

But here is what is remarkable. Having read it, she does not reproach him. She writes: “You acted as someone greater.” Not the harder way, but the more painful one, and therefore the greater. And she adds that all of it is fate. “Carry your grief as you carry your love — in silence.”

And at the very end came the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. Music after which you want not to applaud but to be silent for a long time.

The telephone is ringing. Good night, you are on the air.

— Tell me… did she love him after all?

Allow me not to answer at once.

Six years later, when Nikolai Gronsky was no more, she would find for this story a single line: “He loved me first, and I loved him last.” First and last. Between them lies an entire life, and a summer, and an ocean, and a train she waited for so much.

So what was it? Love? Or only the foreboding of love?

I don’t know. But listening to her letters, I still think…

And still, it was love.

This was Night Call. May the light kiss of the sea and the bittersweet aftertaste of drama stay on your lips. Good night.