Russian Silver Age poetry translation series, 46/?
Alexei Lozina-Lozinsky (lo-ZEEN-uh-lo-ZEEN-ski) (1886-1916) was a man with a deeply unfortunate life. The critic M. L. Gasparov described him as “someone who was less well-remembered by his contemporaries for his poetry than for his likeness and for his death, and was cleanly forgotten by their descendants. He worked out his original style, with its grim-disjoined bravado, only in the last years of his short life.”
Descended from the nobility of the Podolsky governorate, Alexei’s full legal surname was not just double-barrelled but quadruple-barrelled: Lubich-Yarmolovich-Lozina-Lozinsky. His mother died of typhus when he was two. At the age of nineteen, he lost his leg: while hunting, he carelessly tossed his loaded gun into a boat, and it discharged into his knee, destroying it and leading to amputation. He was a student rebel who took part in revolutionary movements and was arrested three times. But he also struggled with depression, and twice attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest.
His third suicide attempt, on November 5, 1916, was successful. He gave himself a fatal dose of morphine, and, accompanied by a volume of Paul Verlaine’s poetry, he took notes on his sensations until the very end. He was not yet thirty years old.
Probably due to the efforts of his brother Vladimir, a high-ranking priest (protoiereus) in the Russian Orthodox Church, who would later be canonized as a saint, he did receive a Christian burial.
This short poem, written less than a year before his death, speaks of his depression, but also of the power of music. I took the liberty of using an eye-rhyme rather than a true rhyme in the last verse.
* * *
Oh, tiles that ring the air
In that long moonlit hall!
I lay down dying there,
In a silent broken fall,
Severe so were the sounds
The darkened organ played,
So many the old wounds
I had as there I lay.
Alexei Lozina-Lozinsky, December 1915; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, September 9, 2019.
Tamara Vardomskaya 