Natalia Goncharova: Life and Art (an Excerpt)

Marina Tsvetaeva and Natalia Goncharova are two of the strongest voices emerging from the Russian cultural tradition of the early twentieth century. Tsvetaeva, now considered alongside other poets like Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak, was a prominent poet of the Russian Silver Age. She maintained correspondence with Pasternak, who deeply admired her poetry, for nearly twenty years. She is known for a verse marked by a sparsity of words, intense shifts, resounding passion and bizarre syntax. Goncharova was at the fore of the Russian avant-garde movement, and in 1910-14, along with her partner, Mikhail Larionov, founded Rayonism, which became one of the first abstract movements in Russian art. She was a member of the experimental artistic group Der Blaue Reiter, alongside artists like Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and her works can be found in museums across the globe, from the Tate to the Guggenheim.

Goncharova currently ranks as one of the world’s most valued female artists at auction, with her piece Les fleurs (1912) selling in 2008 for $10.8 million. Along with many other Russian artists of the time, both Tsvetaeva and Goncharova lived in exile in Europe following the political upheavals of the Russian Revolution. During this time, Tsvetaeva began work on her essay “Natalia Goncharova: Life and Art,” in which she kept detailed accounts of her meetings with Goncharova, her impressions, notes on her studio and on Goncharova’s life in Paris, all interwoven with an extended theory of her art. Joseph Brodsky, an émigré Russian poet and 1991 US Poet Laureate, would later say of Tsvetaeva that “between word and action, art and life, for her there was no comma, no hyphen; Tsvetaeva put an equal sign between the two.” Tsvetaeva’s essay is a vivid example of Brodsky’s claim: it is an intellectual, poetic exploration into the meaning of color and form in Goncharova’s art, and the transcendence of art beyond the border of canvas or rhythm and into observations of the everyday. It also serves as a biography of Goncharova, with emphasis on the moments where the two women’s lives crossed paths.

This short excerpt demonstrates the power of Tsvetaeva’s prose, and allows a glimpse into a previously untranslated essay, with remarkable commentary both on Goncharova’s art and on Tsvetaeva’s perceptions of the value of artistry and its impacts on the surrounding world. It catalogues her first impressions of Goncharova upon their meeting, and provides those interested in the artistic culture of the early twentieth century with a valuable, first-hand historical account.

—Co-translators Isabelle Sinclair and Naomi Caffee, Reed College

I. An alley

It’s not an alley, but a gully. An arm length’s away—a wall: the side of a mountain. Not buildings, but mountains, old, old mountains. (There are no young mountains; if it’s young, it’s not a mountain—it’s a mountain, so it must be old.) Mountains and burrows. She lives in a mountain and a burrow.

It’s not a street, but a gully, or better yet: a gulch. It’s so little like an alley that, forgetting each time and expecting a street—after all, there’s a name, there’s a number!—I skip past it and find myself on the bank of the Seine. So—back again—to search again. But the alley eludes me—the gully evades me! Ask the mountain folk—this way, that way—is this it? No, a building that suddenly breaks apart into a courtyard—big as a square, but no, an entrance gusting with ancient winds; no, it’s just a street, with shop windows, automobiles. It’s gone. Vanished. The mountain slammed shut, swallowing Goncharova and her treasures. I will never find Goncharova now, I will never find myself. To the right, to the left? To Saint Germain, the Seine? Where—what? And in relation to which what is this where?

And suddenly—a miracle!—it can’t be! Or it can, since it is! Is it really her street? How could it not be—this—a narrowing—a gully! Right here, between two houses, as if nothing had ever happened, as if it’s been here all along.

I walk in. The entire alley is encased in iron. To the right, gratings, to the left, more gratings. If you were to run a pole or a stick across it, …—well, the sound would never stop. The instrument of protection, the octaves of fear. Protecting what, hiding from what, behind what…? There are, evidently, things more important than life, and more terrible than death. (A stranger’s secret and a beloved’s honor.)

It’s no longer a gully, but a prison corridor or the winter lodgings of a zoo—but without any eyes, inside or outside. No one behind the bars, nothing behind the bars, there’s only that behind the bars. But—shut inside the prison and zoo, shut out of the zoo and prison—there is air! Wind blows from the gully. Deep inside the gully lives the wind, a god with puffed-up cheeks. The wind lives, but can the wind live, because to live—is to be somewhere, but the wind is everywhere, and everywhere—is to be. But there are places of eternal wind, a whirlpool of winds, a certain building in Moscow, for example, that Blok used to frequent, and where I used to follow in his footsteps—now grown cold. The tracks have faded, but the wind is still there. This wind, perhaps, in one of its comings—in one of its goings—picked me up and chained me forever to this place. A place, where a thing always is—is a dwelling—and what a wonderful word, by the way, at once giving being and duration, a position in space and extension in time; what a spacious, what an extensive word! Thus Russia, for example, is the dwelling place of longing, though you’d no more say that about Russia than you would about the wind: it lives. And yet—it lives! And the wind also lives. It lives at the end of this alley, all the better to blow into the face of those at its beginning.

Every wind is a sea wind, and when the wind blows, every city, even the most landlocked, is a seaside city. “It smells like the sea”—no, but: it blows from the sea, and we add the scent. And the desert wind—is a sea wind, and the steppe wind—is a sea wind. Because beyond every steppe and every desert—is the sea, the beyond-desert, the beyond-steppe. Because here the sea is like a unit of measure (of the immeasurable).

Every alley, where the wind blows, is a port. The wind carries along the sea, trans-im-ports it. Wind without sea is more sea than sea without wind. The wind in my alley is distinct; it blows in two streams. (A visual: from the Moorish lips of a fat-cheeked god it splits in two, like the coils of a rope [1].) Sea-like, like any wind, and old, like only he is. There are young winds, and—getting younger by the moment—there is everything along the way! (Baby winds, Muscovite!) The wind not only brings in, it also takes in, that is, loses—primordial emptiness. With wind it’s like this: I’m the first to blow, the last to smell. Wind—the symbol of formlessness—is, as I see it, the very form of movement. Its content is its path. This one is old—it was flying to me over 400 years, riding on the coattails of the one from the rule of the Italians, after whom this alley is named, or maybe only his servants [2]. (From a distance it’s hidden.) This one is old, but after it exits my alley it will be even older, since the buildings are very old by now.

I am standing in front of one of these. I too will also never recognize it, although it’s unforgettable. But everything in this alley is unforgettable. If the modern ones are indistinguishable because of their uniformity, the old—because of their distinctiveness. What marks mine out? Its particularity. They are all particular. The commonplace of the particular, the particularity of the particular. Just as, having looked at a hundred unusual plants in a row, you won’t be able to tell them apart; you’ll combine them in your memory into one, as a hundred plants of the same kind, attributing to the one the particulars of all. So it is with this building. And even the number doesn’t help—even 13!—because there’s one streetlight for the entire street, but not across my building. The building not-across from the light is its only feature. The first time I came there was an automobile in front of one of the buildings, and I, from a self-inflicted hopelessness, believed that since it stood there, then it stood specifically in front of my building—so I ordered the house to be mine. (And so it turned out.) But today there is no automobile. What is there today? Myopia? Forgetfulness? So be it, but the main thing is: the impression of the alley, like that of a gully, which is to say, of something bulky, whole. Since it’s not an alley, but a gully, then it’s not a building, but a mountain, to the right a mountain, to the left a mountain, go and find a building. Impenetrable.

But—it must be found. Simpler would be: “Open, sesame!” So the whole mountain—all at once—in all the mountain—all of it—would be Goncharova. But this, I know for a fact, will not happen today. For these sorts miracles don’t just happen; they happen for those who don’t need them—precisely need, that’s all they need. Since I believe a mountain can split open, why should it split open for me? The mountain is “like family” to all those who, like me, are not worth the effort. The ingratitude of loved ones. Some get faith, others—miracles.

And—a miracle! This is the one. So much so, as if to say: here I am. Particular amongst the particular, incomparable amongst the incomparable, all superlative degrees of uniqueness. I walk in. To the right is the doorwoman’s light-filled window—precisely the doorwoman’s: at the door, and what doors!—she, whom I have never seen and whom I am afraid to see: in this kind of building the doorwoman should be at least two hundred years old, and to her my greeting, as to me her farewell, would be incomprehensible. I hurriedly pass by, and at full speed… Where? Everything is uninhabited. What is the most habitable out of the inhospitable? There are houses, where people live. And then there are houses, which live. By themselves. Outside of people. With hallways, stairways, ledges, dead ends, crannies, clatters, footfalls, shadows—with everything, except a human being. Houses where “things are” (— everything, except a human being). Houses that are “inhabited” and, by extension, uninhabited. Houses so alive, or that lived so much, that they simply live further. Like a book that no longer needs either its author, or its readers. The source of life, the storehouse of life, but no longer its playhouse. A house out of play.

Vaults. Caves. Either you prop yourself against a wall, or you leave for good. The house is not built, but excavated. Hands did not do the excavating. I stand, as if at a crossroads. Move right—you’ll lose your horse. Move left… left. [3]

The courtyards of old houses. Not paved by people, but by giants who played. I’m a stone, you’re a stone, I’m larger, you’re even larger, I’m a clump, you—a mountain. A foot recognizes nothing, it’s constantly being deceived. I’m a clump, you—a mountain. I—a crag, you—nothing. Nothing is what they call a pit. A pit is the place they left without finishing the game. And I have to walk along this crest. There are many such places. So, from the mountain and into the pit, from the pit and up the mountain…—a passage! A crack of light. Alas, it hides its light to the last second. All the wildness of gas rushes into the gully. It flows from above—endlessly. I entrust myself to the walls that know where they lead and lead I—don’t know. I know only this: under my hand—a flank, and under my foot—a river. What used to be a river. I follow the bends of the river, like the bends of a shoulder…

A stairway. The steps—for they must be called something!—are wooden. At the first lifting of the foot—the foot, of all things the foot—will recognize the never-before-experienced steps of the pyramid. If the giants paved the courtyard, then they must have piled up the stairway too. Playing with blocks, here—blocks. I’m higher, you’re higher still, I’m a crag, you—nothing. Traces of that same game, fun for them, terrifying for us. (That’s how the Bolsheviks had fun, while we were scared; that’s how the grown-ups have fun, while the children…[4]). The wood of the steps is bound—bound with iron. If you look carefully—there’s no end to what you’ll see, because god knows what isn’t in old wood— a series of paintings, framed in iron. Goncharova climbs up to her place on a series of the old masters, the oldest of them—time.

Landing after landing, at each one a chasm—a window. There is no glass and never was. For jumping out. Recollecting the words: “higher is impossible, because there is nothing higher,” I don’t count the floors. Floors? Epochs. On this kind of stairway even the most fleet-footed climb for a hundred years.

A painting, much looked-upon, a stairway, much climbed—looking and walking in the footsteps of all those before me, my trace (gaze)—the last; I am the last point on this surface, its last stratum. The steps are obviously worn down from walking, not obviously built up. What the foot took away, the footprint gave, what the foot bore away—the footprint inscribed. The strata of footprints, like shadows on a wall. This is why old houses live so long, nourished by all of life, the life that’s brought in. This kind of house can stand for ages, not as a living reproach, but a living threat to the slowly growing, the overgrowing, the not overstaying. There’s no overtaking the past. Endure today, I won’t outlast you, endure through all that has stood, withstood.

That’s why guests take so long to climb such a stairway, and their hosts wait so long. The top. The very one beyond which there’s no going, for there is no more. Translating into time—the end of 400 years, over which this house has stood, that is, today’s date—the 9th of November, 1928—the final hour and moment of this day. At this very second—the end of history.

Several hundred years ago, in this building there lived the greatest poet of France. [5]

II. The Workshop

First: light. Then: space. After all darkness—all light, after all constriction—all space. If not for the roof—a desert. As it is, a cave. A light-filled cave, the end goal of all underground rivers. At a glance, a verst, at a verse—endless…[6] The end of all Hades and hells: light, space, peace. After this world—the next.

A worker’s paradise, my paradise, and, like paradise, naturally, it is not guaranteed. In the emptiness—in the silence—of the morning. Paradise is first and foremost an empty place. Empty—spacious, spacious—peaceful. Peaceful—bright. Only emptiness imposes nothing, it doesn’t displace, it doesn’t exclude. In order for everything to be, it is necessary for nothing to be. Everything doesn’t tolerate something (like “could”—“what is”).—But Mayakovsky’s is a paradise with chairs. Even with “furniture.” [7] The proletarian thirst for materiality. To each his own.

A desert. A cave. What else? Oh, a deck! There is no first wall, there is only—to the right—glass, and behind the glass, wind: the sea. In the evenings, after work, when the hand rests and in comes the guest, the glass wall, sea-like, disappears behind another, which pours in. [8] Like silk, or no—like yellow. In the evenings, in Goncharova’s studio there rises a different sun.

Besides the glass side, the right side, there is the left. Wooden or stone? (I heard something about an annex.) In an old house even wood—is stone. (Pre-implementation of age-old material: old leather, turning into bronze, old wood into bone, clay into copper, the faces of old women and the dead—into anything you can think of, except flesh.) Not wooden and not stone, like the third, with which a wall of canvases converges (canvases that face away)—a wall of crosses. The wooden crosses of canvas frames. The same as the courtyard’s cobblestones, as the stairs’ cubes, they are up to the sky, they are waist-deep (only there are no blanks, not one “nothing!”)—perhaps those same giants played and, having finished playing, pushed them against the wall, facing away from the eyes: the evil eye. I don’t believe in different spirits; there is one power, there is one game. It’s all about measure. Chaos, playing, doesn’t play out and outplays itself:

But you grew rough, invincible,
And a flock of ships sinks… [9]

A row of finished canvases—the creation of the completed creative impulse, the seventh day. There are many seventh days in the life of Natalia Goncharova, here, before one’s eyes, facing the wall—facing away. Many seventh days—always in the past, never in the present. The creating creature differs from the Creator by the fact that, after the sixth, there is immediately the first, again the first. For the seventh is not granted to us here on earth—it can only be granted to our things, not to us.

The floor. If from the spaciousness and light arises the impression of a desert, then the floor is entirely a desert, the desert itself. That’s not to speak of its objectlessness (nothing, except the bare essentials there is nothing)—the physical feeling of sand, from shavings under one’s feet. Shavings, from boards being planed. Not even shavings,—wooden dust, pollen—like sand—which brings about silence. What’s quieter than earth? Sand. (I know of singing sand, whistling under one’s feet, like torn silk; the sand of other ocean coasts, but—silence is not the absence of sound, it is the absence of excess sounds, the presence of indispensable noises—the noise of blood in one’s ears [a mosquito-like ze-ze-ze], of wind in the leaves, and, at this very moment, as I stand at the entrance to the workshop, the noise of water turning over in the steam heating—in the enormous stove, in the thermal sun of this desert.) Desert and—an oasis! To the right, along the glass wall, the entire sandy strip—in color! I look below—clay bowls full of paint: from the same little brown cup—and each time a different flower! Flowers, like on children’s paintings or seen from above, in forest glades: all are round, flat, some are on the edges, others on the very bottom—not one oasis, but a row of oases, of little colored islands, seas, lakes. A sea for the tiny, a sea from a saucer. From such tiny depths come such masses (canvases). Everything about this is superhuman: godlike!

A cave, a desert, and—are all these clay pots and bowls not just a dream?—this pottery. [10] How nice it is, when it harmonizes like that!

The first time I saw the workshop it was the middle of the day. Back then the gully was a corridor, one of the innumerable corridors of an old building, of Paris. And the workshop—in the heat—was like a foundry. The patience of glass under the sun’s intolerance. Glass under the endless beating of the sun. Glass, every point of which is incendiary. The sun scorched, the glass was tempered, the sun scorched and smelted. I remember dripping sweat and the shirtsleeves of friends, planing some board. My first studio of Goncharova’s—the very embodiment of labor, in the sweat of the brow under the first sun. In such heat it’s impossible to eat (to drink is in vain), impossible to sleep, to talk, to breathe, all you can do is the one and only thing that’s always possible—since it’s forever necessary—work. And it’s not the glass that is smelted, but the brow.

I remember, during this same time—somewhere off to the side—a balcony, which later vanished. Under it were roof posts—a Paris of Goncharova’s making, and above it, on it, was one of Goncharova’s suns, directly overhead, and myself below it. I have never had a better experience—nor one as blazing hot—in my life. The landing disappeared with the sun, and to step out onto it from the studio right now, in January, is just as impossible as summoning that same sun. But it will return, and we will return with it.

A cave—a desert—pottery—a foundry.

Why out of all of Paris did Goncharova choose precisely this building? The artist richest in colors chooses a building all in one color: time; the founder of a new epoch in painting—a building, where the floors measure time by epochs; perhaps the most modern of artists—a building, the contemporaries of which have slept for over 400 years. Goncharova and ruins, Goncharova and a building to be demolished. “A subsidized contract”? Extraordinary dimensions, even for a workshop? The Latin Quarter? Yes, yes, yes. That’s what the acquaintances will say. And so will say—who knows—maybe even Goncharova herself. And here is what the building says.

In order to overcome fear in the face of my silence, it is necessary to be the loudest, fear in the face of my sleep—the most vigilant, fear in the face of my age—the youngest, fear in the face of my past—the very future! “I will be a light in the darkness, I will be adornment to the grey in bright colors, I will fill the quiet with loud cries, I will fortify the ruins…”

Or even: “I will spy upon the dark, I will eavesdrop on the quiet, I will learn from the antiquated.”

Or: to answer silence—with silence, sleep—with sleep, age—with the ages.

To overcome myself with my very self, that is, not to overcome at all.

The first—a child, the second—an apprentice, the third—a sage. All three together—the Creator.

Force for force—this is the answer of the old building.

There is one more answer: the self-preservation of artist-Goncharova. The notorious “Tour d’ivoire” in Goncharova’s tune. [11] The building is a stronghold (not for nothing was it all in one color: to protect it from the ravages of time). Noises don’t make it here, and people don’t really come here. “Visiting”—with such a street, such a yard, such a staircase—is it visiting? This fear and darkness will only be overcome by necessity. (You do not visit acquaintances so much as their rugs, their floors…)

The rest won’t make it here or won’t find it. The rest will get tired. They will stay behind.

And also: the game. Such power was at play here, in the yard’s cobblestones, in the wall’s fissures, in the stair’s chasms, the power of a creative game, that Goncharova, with her colossus-boned works—the reproach of one critic: “These aren’t even paintings, they are cathedrals!”—is simply akin to this building. Time has made it this way, that is, the natural course of things. As it is now, it’s as if not a hand has touched this house. Nor has it even touched Goncharova herself—nothing has but the hands of nature. Goncharova didn’t build herself, and no one built Goncharova. Goncharova lived and grew. The labor of such a life is not in brushstrokes, but in growth. Or a brush: growth.

Goncharova has a neighbor: a little French boy who adores drawing. “However many times I went out onto the staircase: ‘Bonjour, Madame!’—and the show-and-tell begins.—He lies in wait.—It’s still only just scribbles, but he loves them passionately. Maybe, something will come of this…”

An accident? The same as Goncharova and the building. Like Trekhprudnyi lane, building 8, and Trekhprudnyi lane, building 7, to which I will now turn. About the boy: if he were to know who this “Madame” was, and if Nathalia Goncharova, in twenty years, were able to say: “If I only knew then who this boy was…”

1. Here the archaic Russian word arap (translated variously into English as “Arab,” “Moor,” “negro,” or “blackamoor”) likely refers to Abram Petrovich Gannibal (c. 1696–1781), the African great-grandfather of the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Gannibal was the subject of Pushkin’s unfinished novella “The Moor of Peter the Great.” The “fat-cheeked god” likely refers to Stribog, the ancient East Slavic god of wind.

2. Goncharova’s studio in Paris was located on the rue de Visconti—a street named after the French architect Louis Tullius Joachim Visconti (1791-1853), who was descended from a family of renowned Italian curators, scholars, and architects. Notable family members include Ennius-Quirinus Visconti (1751-1818) and Giovanni Battista Antonio Visconti (1722–1784).

3. This passage refers to a well-known episode from East Slavic folklore, in which the mighty bogatyr (knight) Ilya Muromets finds himself at a crossroads next to a rock face with a mysterious inscription: “If you turn to the left, you’ll lose your horse; if you turn to the right, you’ll lose your life; if you go straight ahead, you’ll survive, but you’ll forget yourself.” This legend also inspired the famous 1882 painting Bogatyr at the Crossroads by the Russian artist Victor Vasnetsov (1848-1926). The directions Tsvetaeva uses in the text are inverted, but the meaning remains the same. Additionally, the Russian word for horse, kon’, refers to the chess piece known in English as the “knight.” See the motif of the unequal game with which she continues.

4. Tsvetaeva was intimately aware of children’s suffering as a result of the political upheavals of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Civil War. During a period of widespread famine in the spring of 1920, Tsvetaeva placed her youngest daughter, Irina Ephron, in a Moscow orphanage, where she died of starvation at the age of two and a half.

5. The French poet Jean Racine (1639-1699) spent the final nine years of his life on the rue de Visconti—not in building number 13, where Goncharova’s studio was located, but in a dwelling encompassing present-day numbers 24 to 26.

6. A verst is “a Russian unit of distance equal to 0.6629 mile (1.067 kilometers)” according to Miriam Webster’s dictionary.

7. Refers to lines from the 1918 avant-garde play Mystery Bouffe, written by the Russian poet and revolutionary Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in commemoration of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. In one early scene, a weary carpenter arrives in heaven and is denied a chair to rest in; later scenes envision a paradise “crammed with furniture,” where living is made easy by “fashionable” electric wiring. Readers might also keep in mind another instance of chairs as a revolutionary motif, in Ilf and Petrov’s novel The Twelve Chairs (1928), which was published in the same year as Tsvetaeva’s essay.

8. The Russian word kist’ refers to both a paintbrush and the human hand; this is one particularly significant instance of Tsvetaeva’s untranslatable wordplay.

9. Tsvetaeva is quoting from the 1824 poem “To the Sea” by Alexander Pushkin.

10. Goncharova’s last name comes from gonchar’, the Russian word for potter.

11. Goncharova’s note: (ivory tower—fr. )