How the fates of the children of six poets of the Silver Age developed

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The poets of the Silver Age were not very fond of having children: high poetry and dirty diapers were badly combined. And yet, some artists left the word offspring. And it turns out that their children had to grow up in difficult times. So the fate was difficult for many.

Sons of Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak married the artist Evgenia Lurie. In 1923 the first-born of the poet was born. The son was named after his mother - Eugene, but he was a face like a father. When Eugene was eight years old, his parents divorced. For the boy, parting with his father was a huge grief.

In 1941, Eugene just finished school; Together with his mother, he went to evacuate to Tashkent, there he entered the institute at the Physics and Mathematics Institute, but, of course, he studied, of course, only the course - upon reaching adulthood, he was mobilized.

After the war, Yevgeny graduated from the Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces with a degree in mechanical engineer and continued to serve in the army until 1954. Then he got a job as a teacher at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute and worked there until 1975; in parallel he defended his thesis, becoming a candidate of technical sciences.

After the death of his father in 1960, Eugene devoted his life to studying and preserving his creative heritage. Since 1976 he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of World Literature. During his life, he published two hundred publications about his father and died in our time, in 2012.

Leonid - in honor of Boris Leonidovich's father - was born in the poet's second marriage, with the pianist Zinaida Neuhaus, in 1938. Like his brother, he turned out to be talented in the exact sciences, became a physicist, participated in Sevastyanov's research and was a co-author of many of his works. Leonid Pasternak is remembered as an erudite, with pleasant manners, a gentle person who could recite a huge number of poems by heart and did it very artistically. Alas, Leonid Borisovich died, did not live a little to forty years.

Children of Igor Severyanin

The poet's eldest daughter, Tamara, was conceived in her first unofficial marriage. Tamara's mother was called Evgenia Gutsan, she conquered Igor with an extraordinary golden tint of hair, but they lived under one roof for only three weeks.

After parting with Severyanin, Evgenia married a Russian German. Due to the First World War, the family, fearing persecution, moved to Berlin. There Tamara was sent to a ballet school.

The poet saw his daughter for the first time after the revolution, when he moved to Germany. Tamara was already sixteen, and she turned out to be very similar to her mother. But the poet's jealous wife forbade him to communicate with Eugenia and Tamara, so there was no special relationship between them.

Tamara became a professional dancer, survived two world wars, and during perestroika came to the USSR to pass on materials related to the life and work of her father.

In the second civil marriage, the poet also had a daughter named Valeria - four years before the revolution. The baby was named in honor of Igor's friend, poet Valery Bryusov. When the girl was five years old, her father took her and then already ex-wife, her mother, together with her new wife to Estonia. There he rented all half of the house.

In Estonia, Severyanin married for the fourth time, now officially, and left for Berlin. He did not take Valeria to Germany. She grew up in Estonia, worked in the fishing industry all her life, and died in 1976.

In 1918, in the course of a fleeting romance with Yevgenia Gutsan's sister Elizaveta, a son was conceived. Both the boy and his mother soon starved to death in Petrograd.

She gave birth to a son and an Estonian wife, Felissa. The boy was born in 1922 and he was named Bacchus - exactly like the ancient god of wine drinking. In 1944, Bacchus managed to move to Sweden, where he died in 1991. For most of his life, he did not speak Russian and completely forgot his father's native language.

Son of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov

It would seem that the child of two poets is also destined to become a poet. But Akhmatova's son Lev, born in 1912, is known primarily as a philosopher and orientalist - although he also wrote poetry.

All childhood, Leo was looked after by his paternal grandmother - his parents were too busy with a stormy creative and personal life. After the revolution, they divorced, my grandmother left the estate and went to Bezhetsk. There she rented the floor of a private house with her relatives, but every year the Gumilevs were more and more compacted.

From six to seventeen years old, Leo saw his father and mother, separately, only twice. At school, he did not develop relationships with fellow practitioners and teachers due to his noble origin. He even changed schools; Fortunately, his literary talent was appreciated in the new one.

Akhmatova did not like her son's youthful poems very much, she considered them an imitation of her father. Under the influence of his mother, Leo gave up composing for several years. After school, he tried to enter an institute in Leningrad, but his documents were not even accepted. But I managed to sign up for courses of collectors of geological expeditions in Bezhetsk - geologists constantly lacked working hands. Since then, Leo has constantly traveled in the summer on geological and archaeological expeditions.

However, his further life was difficult. He served in a camp for anti-Soviet sentiments; he starved a lot when he was free. During the war he served at the front. Only in 1956 he was able to return to science. Lev Nikolayevich died in 1992, having lived a long and, despite difficulties, a very fruitful life.

Son of Eduard Bagritsky

Poet Bagritsky was married to one of the Suok sisters. In 1922 their son Vsevolod was born. When Seva was fifteen, his mother was sentenced to labor camps for trying to intercede for her sister's arrested husband. Earlier, he lost his father, who was seriously ill with asthma.

In his youth, Vsevolod studied at the theater studio and wrote for the Literary Gazette. A scandalous story belongs to the same time: he published a little-known poem by Mandelstam, passing it off as his own. Vsevolod was immediately exposed by Chukovsky and his mother.

During the war, they refused to call on Bagritsky - he was very short-sighted. Only in 1942 did Vsevolod get sent to the front, however, as a war correspondent. A month later, he died during the assignment.

Balmont's children

Constantin Balmont was one of those poets who readily multiplied. The first wife, Larisa Galerina, gave birth to his son Nikolai in 1890. At the age of six, he survived the divorce of his parents and spent almost the rest of his life with his mother in St. Petersburg. Moreover, his mother did not at all devote her life to her son, she got married - the journalist and writer Nikolai Engelgardt became Kolya Balmont's stepfather. Nikolai Gumilyov married the younger sister of Nikolai Balmont after a divorce from Akhmatova. Kolya had an excellent relationship with his stepfather.

After grammar school, Balmont Jr. entered the Chinese department of the Faculty of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University, but a year later he transferred to the department of Russian literature. But Nikolai could not finish his studies.

As a young man, he began to write poetry, entered the student poetry circle. Kolya was fascinated by his father as a poet, and when in 1915 Konstantin returned from Paris to St. Petersburg, he temporarily moved to live with him. But the poet did not like his son very much. Disgust caused literally everything, but most of all, probably, the fact that the son was mentally ill - suffered from schizophrenia.

At the end of 1917, the Balmont moved to Moscow. Three years later, Konstantin left for Paris with another wife and little daughter Mirra. Nikolai stayed. For some time he was helped by the ex-wife of Constantine, Catherine, but in 1924 the young poet died in the hospital from pulmonary tuberculosis.

From Ekaterina Andreeva, a translator by profession, by the way, Balmont Sr. had a daughter, Nina. She was born in 1901. When Nina was a baby, the poet dedicated a collection of poems "Fairy Tales" to her. Even after the parents divorced, Constantine's relationship with his daughter remained very strong and warm, they corresponded until 1932.

With her future husband, artist Lev Bruni, Nina met at the age of eleven. Lev was seven years older, so at first there was no question of any love: they chatted when he stayed for lunch, sometimes played in the country. But after four years everything changed, Nina began to perceptibly mature, and Leo realized that he wanted to marry her. Immediately after graduating from Nina's gymnasium, the young people got married.

Regarding her husband, Constantine admonished Nina in a letter: "You should not give your inner sacred independence to anyone, in any case." The marriage was happy. Bruni admired his wife all his life, left many of her portraits. Alas, early marriage, the children did not allow Nina to develop one of her talents, which seemed so promising to her father.

When she got married, Nina did not know how to do anything at all around the house. The morning after the wedding, Leo asked if she would prepare breakfast. Nina happily agreed and asked what he would like. Having learned that the eggs were scrambled, she took out the eggs and began to chop a hole in the shell. Lev had to take matters into his own hands and for a long time in the family it was he who cooked. Then it became impossible - he left for a long time to work. And Nina, amid the horrors of the civil war and lack of food, had to learn - not only to heat the stove, but to do literally everything around the house, including caring for the cattle. “I am stunned, I’m getting hysterical,” this is how a young woman defined her condition.

Nina gave birth to and raised several children and, early widowed, never married. She became a researcher of her father's creativity, lived long and even happily, in her opinion, and died in 1989. Nina Bruni-Balmont became the prototype of the main character of the book "Medea and Her Children" by the writer Ulitskaya.

The third wife of Konstantin Balmont was Elena Tsvetkovskaya, a student of the mathematics faculty of the Sorbonne. She gave birth to her daughter Mirra in 1907 - in honor of the poetess Maria Lokhvitskaya, who wrote and became famous under the name of Mirra. At the age of eight, Mirra moved with her parents to Russia, but not for long. After the revolution, she went with her parents to France. Under the pseudonym "Aglaya Gamayun" she wrote poetry in her youth, she got married twice. At the age of sixty-two, she was in a car accident, as a result, she was paralyzed and died a year later from insufficient care.

Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya gave birth to two more children, George and Svetlana, to Balmont. Almost nothing is known about them.

But it seems that in the lives of famous people, mothers have always played more role than children. For example, mothers of outstanding artists - good geniuses and guardian angels of their sons - can be considered genius for one result of their labors.