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“To see everything, to understand everything, to know everything, to experience everything,” is the poet’s code formulated by Maximilian Voloshin. This susceptibility to the outside world, the inability to limit oneself to the narrow confines of one aesthetic school, was probably the reason why Voloshin occupied a special place among the outstanding poets of the Silver Age. He did not join either symbolism, or acmeism or futurism. Outwardly, he looked a little like a poet: dense, thickset, extremely natural in clothes and in everyday life … Max, as everyone called him, managed to build a completely special world, open to friends and random companions.
A poet and a wonderful watercolorist, Voloshin considered the impressions of real life to be his main school. The life and creative routes of the poet are amazing: Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, all of Europe, the Asian deserts and, finally, the famous Koktebel, forever associated with the name of Voloshin. “Voloshin’s house,” Andrei Bely said, “is a living cast of a unique face, an eternal memory of him.” The creator of this house himself wrote: “The Voloshin house is not me. And the whole team. Collective of artists, poets, philosophers, musicians, scientists. The whole Koktebel with the famous rock resembling the profile of the poet became a monument to Voloshin:
Its wormwood is drunk with my anguish, My verse sings in the waves of its tide, And on the rock that closed the swell of the bay, My profile is sculpted by fate and the winds.
His dates
- May 16, 1877: in Kiev, in the family of a member of the Kiev Chamber of Criminal and Civil Court Alexander Maksimovich Kiriyenko-Voloshin and his wife Elena Ottobaldovna (née Glaze), son Maximilian was born. n 1881: death of father, moving to Moscow.
- 1897-1900: study at the law faculty of Moscow University.
- 1901: listens to lectures at the Sorbonne.
- 1899-1902: travels, paints.
- 1903: builds a house in Koktebel.
- 1910: His first collection, Poems, is published.
- 1917: translates Emile Verhaarn, publishes the collection Iverny.
- 1920-1922: works in the field of public education.
- 1927: Opening of an author’s exhibition at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences.
- 1929: Voloshin’s watercolors are exhibited at an exhibition in Holland.
- 1931: transfers his house to the Writers’ Union
- August 11, 1932: Maximilian Voloshin dies; buried in the Crimea, in Koktebel on Mount Kuchuk-Yenishary, later named Voloshinskaya.
Keys to Understanding
Love for travel
“The earth is such a small planet that it’s a shame not to visit everywhere,” Voloshin wrote to his mother. He traveled and walked around half of Europe and liked to feel like a wanderer. “Half a year spent in the wilderness…was a defining moment in my spiritual life. Here I felt Asia, the East, antiquity, the relativity of European culture.” In this unity, strange to many, his world was forged:
Extinguish in time, drown in space Thoughts, events, dreams, ships … Well, I’m taking away in my wandering wanderings The best of the earth’s obsessions.
Be friends generously
Maximilian Voloshin called himself “a peddler of ideas.” Marina Tsvetaeva, picking up his words, called him “a peddler of friends.” Indeed, it is difficult to name another person as generous with friendship as Voloshin. He loved to give, gave generously: lodging for the night, fresh watercolors, dinner, a thought, a poem, hope. He prevented possible enmity, envy, hostility. Again Tsvetaeva: “He, with his amazement, turned every hand raised to strike into a lowered one, and sometimes even into an outstretched one.” He did it easily and sincerely.
open your house
In the poem “The House of the Poet” Voloshin confesses his love for, perhaps, the main work of his life – the Koktebel house:
The storm subsided. The fire burned down. I accepted life and this house as a gift – Unexpected – entrusted to me by fate, As a sign that I was adopted by the earth.
It is unlikely that mere hospitality can explain such an incomprehensible phenomenon as the fact that in 1924 about 300 people visited the poet’s house, in 1925 – about 400, in 1928 – 625, etc. Among the regular guests are K. Chukovsky, I. Ehrenburg, O. Mandelstam, A. Bely, V. Bryusov and many other poets and artists.
With the whole chest to the sea, straight to the east Turned like a church, a workshop, And again the human stream Flows through the door without drying up.
In 1931, Voloshin donated his house to the Writers’ Union.
Understanding as a human duty
During the First World War, Voloshin openly declares: “I refuse to be a soldier, like a European, like an artist, like a poet … As a poet, I have no right to raise a sword, since the Word has been given to me, and to take part in contention, since understanding is my duty” . The war for Voloshin is the greatest tragedy of the peoples. For him these days “there is no enemy, no brother: everything is in me, and I am in everyone.” This position manifested itself even more sharply in the Civil War, about which Marina Tsvetaeva brilliantly wrote: “He saved the Reds from the Whites and the Whites from the Reds, or rather, the Red from the Whites and the White from the Reds, that is, a man from a pack, one from all, defeated from the winners . And in this choice he is adamant:
And I stand alone between them In a roaring flame and smoke And with all my strength I pray for both.
About it
- Sergey Pinaev. “Maximilian Voloshin, or God Forgetting Himself”. Young Guard, 2005.
Books by Maximilian Voloshin
- “I mentally enter your office. Poems, poems, articles. Eksmo, 2002.
- “The Story of My Soul” Agraf, 2000.