Photograph of the poet, taken in Odessa by photographer Maslov.

Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (real name Kirienko-Voloshin) is a poet, translator, literary critic, essayist, art critic, artist.

Maximilian's childhood passed in Moscow, where the family lived from 1881 to 1893. At the same time, he wrote his first poems.

In 1893 the family moved to the Crimea. Maximilian's mother bought a plot of land in Koktebel, where the family lived permanently.

In 1897, Maximilian graduated from the gymnasium in the city of Feodosia. In the same year, M. Voloshin moved to Moscow and entered the law faculty of the university.

In 1903, the first publication of poems by M.A. Voloshin.

The first and only record of reading poetry by M. Voloshin was in April 1924 (M. Voloshin read two poems: “The Burning Bush” and “Every day is getting quieter and quieter”).

“With the head of Zeus and the body of a bear,” this is how Valentin Kataev unfriendly, but truthfully, gave an idea of ​​the appearance of Maximilian Voloshin. Like, there was such an aesthetic, mediocre sybarite poet, who fell out of the era and was forgotten by almost everyone. In his time he preached fashionable truths, like Moses descended from Sinai. There was a house left - something like a museum, and a grave, attractive for holidaymakers, where instead of flowers it is customary to bring outlandish sea pebbles. Yes, there was a well-organized official oblivion, for decades Voloshin was not published in the USSR, because he did not fit into a well-planned literary framework. But everyone went, the “pilgrims” went to his Koktebel house and rewrote verses in tune with the soul from four weighty typewritten collections bound in canvas.

Portrait of M. Voloshin by A. Golovin

Today, without Voloshin, mention of the Silver Age is not complete, his poetry collections and volumes of prose are printed, watercolors and memoirs are published, and not only at home. In 1984, the French publishing house "YMCA-PRESS" released an almost complete collection of poems and poems with extensive commentary. Today (June-July 2010), within the framework of the "France-Russia" year, the exhibition "Voloshin in Paris" is opened on Sulpice Square in the French capital. And this is quite understandable - Voloshin considered Paris his spiritual homeland, he lived there repeatedly and for a long time. It is believed that Russian museums are indebted to Voloshin for an excellent collection of new French art, since the collector and philanthropist Sergei Shchukin trusted his taste, erudition and insight. Voloshin's erudition and contacts were immense. He communicated with Balmont, Bely, Benois, Bryusov, Blok, Merezhkovsky, Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Gumilyov, Tsvetaeva, Surikov, Saryan. Let's add here Modigliani, Verhaarn, Maeterlinck, Rodin, Steiner. His portraits were created by such famous contemporaries as Golovin, Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Vereisky, Kruglikova, Petrov-Vodkin, Diego Rivera. For a hundred years now, one of the corners of Paris has been adorned with a sculptural portrait of the poet, made by Edward Wittig. However, Voloshin was not only a poet, but also a translator, literary critic, essayist, art critic and, of course, an artist. He seemed interested in everything in the world, from archeology and geography to magic, the occult, Freemasonry and Theosophy. He owned a colossal library:

Portrait of Voloshin by D. Rivera. Paris, 1916

Shelves of books rise like a wall.

Here at night they talk to me

Historians, poets, theologians.

World war and revolution destroyed the concept of the old and familiar values. “Our age is sick with neurasthenia,” declared Voloshin, who remained Robinson in his own artistic and poetic world, imbued with high morality and humanism. But even an undemanding poet in everyday life had to think about a way to survive. “I decided to go to Odessa to give lectures, hoping to earn money. I had Tsetlins in Odessa, who called me to them.

And so, at the end of January of the chaotic 1919, Voloshin arrived in our city and stopped at 36 Nezhinskaya, with his friends, who were still in Paris, Maria and Mikhail Tsetlin. "I came to Odessa as the last concentration of Russian culture and intellectual life." It was here that the last stop before the Great Exodus was. Against the backdrop of a motley intervention, unemployment, typhus and a half-starved life, the city was flooded with refugees from the Soviet of Deputies: industrialists, financiers, officials, speculators, terry banditry flourished, but cultural life flourished in parallel. Here were A. Tolstoy, E. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, Teffi, G. Shengeli, I. Bunin, V. Doroshevich, T. Shchepkina-Kupernik, A. Vertinsky, I. Kremer. I. Poddubny spoke. Dozens of newspapers and magazines were published. Adalis, Bagritsky, Bisk, Grossman, Inber, Kataev, Shishova, Fioletov, Olesha, Babadzhan gathered for literary evenings.

Voloshin reads poetry at meetings and in clubs, participates in disputes, makes presentations in the Literary-Artistic and Religious-Philosophical Societies, publishes in the press, speaks in the Oral Newspaper of the Union of Journalists, prepares a collection of his translations from E. Verhaarn for the Omphalos publishing house ". He also translates A. de Regnier “with rapture” and communicates friendly with young Odessa poets. Y. Olesha writes: “He treated us, young poets, condescendingly<...>He recited poetry excellently<...>Who did he sympathize with? What did he want for his country? Then he did not answer these questions.” However, Voloshin's answers were: "A person is more important to me than his convictions" and "I have a claim to be the author of my own social system."

Self portrait, 1919

In the tenacious memory of Bunin, Voloshin of 1919 was preserved as follows: "... he speaks with the greatest willingness and a lot, his whole body shines with sociability, goodwill towards everything and everyone, pleasure from everyone and everything - not only from what surrounds him in this bright, crowded and warm dining room, but even, as it were, from all that huge and terrible thing that is happening in the world in general and in dark, terrible Odessa, in particular, already close to the arrival of the Bolsheviks. brown velvet blouse, black pants so shiny and shoes broken<...>He was in great need at that time.” In the funds of the Koktebel House-Museum, there was a photograph of the poet, taken in Odessa by the photographer Maslov.

On the day the Bolsheviks arrived, April 4, Voloshin sent Alexei Tolstoy to emigration, but he himself refused to leave, explaining: "... when a mother is sick, her children stay with her." May Day was approaching and Voloshin decided to participate in the festive decoration of the city, offering to decorate the streets with colored panels with geometric figures and poetic quotes, but the new government remembered his publications in the Socialist-Revolutionary press and removed him from the team of artists.

Portrait of Voloshin by G. Vereisky

I wanted to go home, to Koktebel. Voloshin uses his acquaintance with the chairman of the Odessa Cheka and receives permission to travel to the Crimea. But how? A man of incredible biography, Rear Admiral Alexander Nemitz, comes to the rescue and highlights the only available oak tree “Cossack” with three Chekist sailors, allegedly sent to communicate with Sevastopol.

And behind the city

All in a red frenzy

splashed banners,

All inflamed with anger and fear,

Chills of rumors, tremors of expectations,

Tormented by hunger, fads, blood,

Where late spring slips furtively

In transparent lace of acacias and flowers...

Four days of navigation were not calm, the sea was blocked by French destroyers, and one of the officers landed on a suspicious oak tree. Voloshin spoke to him without an interpreter, introduced himself as a refugee, it turned out along the way that there were mutual acquaintances in Paris, and everything, in general, worked out. The ship reached the Crimean shores, where, for a start, it was still fired from machine guns. At the same time, Voloshin translated Henri de Regnier.

House-Museum of M. Voloshin in Koktebel

There are many impressions about the outstanding personality of the poet and artist. He excited and amazed not only his friends, but even enemies. It's funny that some features of Voloshin during the Civil War can be guessed in Professor Maxim Gornostaev from Konstantin Trenev's highly revolutionary play Love Yarovaya, created in the mid-1920s. Lives in the Crimea, but also appeared in Odessa, the Soviet government issued him a safe-conduct for a house and books. Characteristic features of appearance are a beard and a wild hairstyle. His wife calls "Max". Therefore, the daring revolutionary sailor Shvandya is convinced that this is either Karl Marx, or, in extreme cases, his younger brother. In one of Gornostaev's remarks, Voloshin's motive sounded: “Man has been working for tens of thousands of years. From a half-beast to a demigod, he grew up. He crawled out of the cave on all fours, and now he flew up to the sky. His voice is heard for thousands of miles. Is it a man or a god? Turns out it's all a ghost. We are the same half-beasts.”

Grave of M.A. Voloshin in Koktebel. The photos were taken by S. Kalmykov with an interval of 45 years.

Portrait of Voloshin by Petrov-Vodkin

So, is the unique poet and artist only in the past? Judge for yourself. In Odessa in 2002-2003. two amazing books were published under the auspices of the World Club of Odessans - a reprint edition of the rarest poetic collection “The Ark” (Feodosia, 1920) with a poem by Voloshin and his beautifully published poem “Saint Seraphim”. The memorial plaque was installed in Kyiv, where Maximilian Voloshin was born. More recently, a monument was erected to him in Koktebel.

Voloshin bequeathed his house to the Union of Writers.

Sergey Kalmykov, local historian

Is Maximilian Voloshin worthy of anathema?

Maximilian Voloshin. Self-portrait. 1919

De mortuis aut bene, aut male

Today, May 28 marks the 135th anniversary of his birth, and August 11 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of the famous poet and painter of the "Silver Age" Maximilian Voloshin.

The article below is a revision of my term paper written in 1995. At that time, the personality and work of Voloshin attracted me with their mysteriousness. His poems were then quoted by some clergymen (and, surprisingly, still) are quoted exactly as some kind of spiritual revelation. At the same time, the most profound and authoritative researcher of Voloshin's life and work, V. Kupchenko, called him an occultist, citing sufficient grounds for this. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1995, but to my surprise, Voloshin's personality and work have not yet received a spiritual assessment (from the point of view of holy Orthodoxy). This prompted me to blow off the dust from my typewritten work in order to present here its main provisions.

Maximilian Voloshin attracted people during his lifetime and still attracts people not only as a person with a remarkable intellect, a brilliant poet and artist, and finally, as a great original, but also as a teacher of life. It is very important that he is not the type of the philosopher of modern times, diligently working under the shadow and behind the reliable walls of some university, but the type of the ancient sage, the philosopher in the open.

Here is the impression he makes on some people: “Maximilian Voloshin created a world full of love and brotherhood of people of art, a unique world that one can talk about with envy and delight ...” (Lev Ozerov); “Everyone who has been in this House felt the fabulous atmosphere of universal brotherhood, when personal conflicts are erased and what remains is the unifying one – love for art, nature, neighbor…” (German Filippov). As for the worldview, E. Mendelevich defines Voloshin as a Christian, A.K. Pushkin - as a pantheist, V. Kupchenko, as mentioned above - as an occultist. However, the latter adds: “Having tried on all world religions, Western and Eastern, in his youth, Voloshin returned “home” in his mature years - to Orthodoxy ...”

How does the poet himself evaluate himself? Here are the words from his "Autobiography" of 1925: "My poetic creed - see the poem" Journeyman "... My attitude to the state - see" Leviathan ". My attitude to the world - see "Corona Astralis". The wreath of sonnets "Corona Astralis" was written in 1909. From another "Autobiography" ("Across the Seven Years"), also referring to 1925, we learn that the years of the civil war "are the most fruitful", both in terms of quality and quantity of writing. So, 1925 can be called the time that followed the peak of the flowering of Voloshin's personality. If the poet's worldview had changed by 1925, he would have recorded it, however, to assess his attitude to the world, Voloshin refers us to 1909.

Marina Tsvetaeva reports the following interesting information about him: “Max belonged to a different law than human, and we, falling into his orbit, invariably fell into his law. Max himself was a planet. And we, revolving around him, in some other, larger circle, revolved together with him around the luminary, which we did not know. Max was knowledgeable. He had a secret that he didn't tell. Everyone knew this, no one knew this secret ... "

Testimony of Ilya Ehrenburg: “Max's eyes were friendly, but somehow distant. Many considered him indifferent, cold: he looked at life interested, but from the outside. There were probably events and people that really worried him, but he did not talk about it; he counted everyone among his friends, but it seems he did not have a friend.

The philosophy of life of Maximilian Aleksandrovich sounds quite clearly in the poem "The Valor of the Poet" (1923):

Creative rhythm from the oar rowing against the current,
In the turmoil of strife and wars to comprehend integrity.
To be not a part, but all: not on one side, but on both.
The viewer is captured by the game - you are not an actor or a spectator,
You are an accomplice of fate, revealing the plot of the drama.

Beginning in 1905, Anna Rudolfovna Mintslova, a follower of theosophy, had a great influence on Voloshin. Maximilian Alexandrovich gives in detail what she read from his hand (we can treat such information as we please - it is important that the poet himself valued them very highly): “In your hand there is an extraordinary separation of the lines of the mind and heart. I have never seen such a thing. You can only live with your head. You cannot love at all. The most terrible misfortune for you will be if someone loves you, and you feel that you have nothing to answer ... It will be the most terrible thing for you if someone loves you and sees that you are completely empty. Because it is not visible from the outside. You are very artistic…”

To better understand the poet's relationship to people, it will be useful to consider his relationship to nature. He calls the earth mother, and presents himself as a mediating link between the world of matter and the world of "spirit". Here is Voloshin's appeal to the earth:

I myself am your mouth, silent as a stone!
I, too, was exhausted in the shackles of silence.
I am the light of extinct suns, I am the frozen flame of words,
Blind and dumb, wingless, like you.

Voloshin presents himself as a spokesman, a liberator of nature. This idea is confirmed by the testimony of Andrei Bely: “Voloshin himself, as a poet, an artist of the brush, a sage, who took out the style of his life from the light sketches of the Koktebel mountains, the lapping of the sea and the flowery patterns of Koktebel pebbles, stands in my memory as the embodiment of Koktebel’s idea. And his grave itself, having flown to the top of the mountain, is, as it were, an expansion into space of a self-transforming personality.

What is the idea of ​​Koktebel? Something hidden, enclosed in the depths of matter. And here Voloshin appears as a man who speaks on behalf of nature, on behalf of the earth itself, which is why he called himself: "I am the voice of the inner keys." In his paintings, he exposes the earth - so that the forces hidden in it become visible; rarefies water and air - so that their skeletons (underwater and air currents) become visible. The desire to express the hidden essence of the elements became the need of Maximilian Alexandrovich.

The idea that Voloshin is “the embodiment of the idea of ​​Koktebel” is also expressed by Marina Tsvetaeva, however, in other words, dedicated to the appearance of the poet: “Max was a real child, a product, a fiend of the earth. The earth opened up and gave birth to: such a completely ready-made, huge dwarf, a dense giant, a little bit of a bull, a little bit of a god, on stocky, chiseled like pins, like steel, elastic, like pillars, stable legs, with aquamarines instead of eyes, with dense forest instead of hair, with all sea and earth salts in the blood ... "

Here is the impression in the poem "Maximilian Voloshin" by Georgy Shengeli:

A huge forehead and a red explosion of curls,
And clean, like an elephant's breath ...
Then - a calm, gray-gray look.
And a small, like a model, hand.
"Well, hello, let's go to the workshop" -
And the stairs creak painfully
Under the quick run of an experienced highlander,
And in the wind the linen chiton whips,
And, completely occupying the door frame,
He turns around and waits.
I loved this moment before sunset:
All golden then seemed Max.
He willingly painted himself as Zeus,
He got mad at me once
When I said that in his features
A trace of history with Europe is noticeable.
He was so proud that the silhouette of a rock
Enclosing the blue bay from the south,
It was an exact cast from his profile.
Here we are sitting at a small table;
He puts on a shoemaker's belt
On the forehead, so that the hair does not climb into the eyes,
Leaning towards transparent watercolor
And leads with a brush - and all the same earth,
Tears of rocks and spectra of clouds and the sea,
And the glow of cosmic aurora
Lie down on paper for the umpteenth time.
There was something mysterious about this
From year to year to write the same thing:
All the same Koktebel landscapes,
But in their Heraclitean movement.
So you can suffer when you are
Sick of love for a petty actress,
And I want from a thousand guises
Catch like a real one...
(…)
Everything dilapidated, and he became weaker,
But - like a malvasia, the conversation flows:
From irrefutable paradoxes
The head starts spinning!
Here he laughs at his own wit,
Here he rounds off the phrase with a smooth gesture:
Shining like a child - but look:
Like steel, gray eyes are calm.
And it seems: isn't it all a mask?
(…)
Isn't it a mask?
What the hell mask
When to Denikin, sparkling with anger,
He enters and orders
The poet was released from prison -
And listen to the general!

In this wonderful poem, reality is mixed with myth. As follows from the story of Voloshin himself (“The Case of N.A. Marx”), he sent a letter to Denikin, there was no meeting. Why is fiction needed (I do not claim that it belongs to G. Shengeli)? To make the figure of Maximilian look more spectacular.

Quite a few compared Voloshin with Zeus, with a lion, thereby elevating him to some kind of royal dignity. And in his own poems, he looks impressive, for example:

... And the world is like the sea before the dawn,
And I walk on the bosom of the waters,
And below me and above me
The starry sky trembles…
(1902)

When such thoughts come to someone's mind, one can speak with a high degree of certainty about the illness of the spirit, which is called "charm" in ascetic writings.
Here is a portrait of Voloshin, painted by himself, against the backdrop of the flames of the Civil War:

The people, embraced by madness,
Bangs his head against stones
And the bonds break like a demoniac...
Do not be embarrassed by this game
Builder of the Inner City...
(Poem "Petrograd", 1917)

Next example:
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And with all your might
(Poem "Civil War").

After reading these verses, the figure of the great “builder”, “prophet”, standing between two armies under crossfire, involuntarily arises in our imagination. However, the memoirs of Voloshin himself give a slightly different idea: he simply knew how to get along with both the Reds and the Whites, straighten the appropriate paper in time - so as not to be exposed to excessive danger. I say this not to condemn the poet, but to mark the line between reality and myth.

Testimony of Ivan Bunin: “Voloshin is busy trying to get out of Odessa and home to the Crimea. Yesterday he ran to us and joyfully told us that the matter was being arranged, and, as often happens, through a pretty woman ... I also help Voloshin get into the Crimea through the “Naval Commissar and Commander of the Black Sea Fleet” Nemitz, who, according to Voloshin, is also a poet, “ writes rondos and triplets especially well. They are inventing some kind of secret Bolshevik mission to Sevastopol ... He was dressed like a traveler - a sailor suit, beret. In his pockets he kept a lot of different saving papers, for all cases: in case of a Bolshevik search at the exit of their Odessa port, in case of a meeting at sea with the French or volunteers - before the Bolsheviks, he had acquaintances in Odessa both in French command circles and in volunteer circles. ".

Of course, Bunin is not impartial in his memoirs, but he is not inclined to distort the facts. There is a contradiction: on the one hand, we have before us a stern prophet, on the other, just a clever person.

Alexander Benois spoke about the pretense of Voloshin's appearance: “It is possible that “from the inside” he saw himself differently; perhaps he revered his figure for something imposing and downright "divine." The mask of the Greek deity, in any case, did not stick to him, but it was only a mask, and not his real face.

If we perceive Voloshin's appearance as a work of art, it is natural to ask the question: for what purpose was it created? And the second question: if a mask is noticeable in appearance, maybe all creativity is a kind of mask (as the theosophist Mintslova spoke about at the dawn of it)?

I will quote Alexandre Benois again: “His poems captivated me, but they did not inspire confidence in themselves, without which there can be no genuine delight. I “didn’t quite believe” him when, along the ledges of beautiful and sonorous words, he climbed to the very heights of human thought, from where only one can “talk with God” and where poetry turns into divination and broadcasting. But I can vouch for one thing: Maximilian was attracted to these "ascents" quite naturally, and it was precisely the words that attracted him. They appeared to him in fabulous variety and splendor, giving rise to those ideological selections that intoxicated him with grandeur and splendor ... The irony came from the fact that the plans and goals of Voloshin's poetry were colossal, and the realization of plans and the achievement of goals aroused feelings of a certain inconsistency. Alas, not the prophet by the grace of God, who, from the noblest motives, would like to be one, but the one who is really called to that. And homogeneous with this discord between breakthroughs, between the noble ambition (noble ambition) of Voloshin and what he was given to create, was his whole manner of being, right down to his appearance.

Contemporaries and later researchers of Voloshin's work point to his ability to be imbued with different forms of being, to express what is characteristic of various cultures of mankind. Moreover, his work did not differ in a wide variety of genres and style. If Pushkin, in his all-responsiveness, appears in the richness of his nature, Voloshin - mainly - in the richness of those forms that he reflected, in principle, the same type.

Maximilian Alexandrovich treated creativity mystically and understood it very broadly, embracing all kinds of manifestations of human life: from childbearing, from the manner of dressing, to art, science, religion (understood in its own way: namely, as a product of exclusively human creativity). In accordance with his philosophy, Voloshin saw in him (creativity) the path of matter to perfection, and here he adjoins the Neoplatonists with their abstruse mysticism.

We read in the poet's diary: “In the word there is a strong-willed element. The word is… the essence of will. It replaces reality, transfers to another area... The word is the future, not the past. Every desire is fulfilled if it is not expressed in a word. To prevent its execution, it must be said.

So, Voloshin perceives verbal creativity as a way of real impact on the world, he sees in the word the power of a magic spell. It is no coincidence that such names of poems as "The Spell" (1920), "The Spell on the Russian Land" (1920) appear. Even the words of the poem "Prayer for the City" are more reminiscent of a magic formula than a Christian prayer:

Wandering through the crossroads
I lived and died
In madness and hard brilliance
hostile eyes;
Their bitterness, their anger and torment,
Their anger, their passion,
And every trigger and hand
I wanted to curse.
My city is covered in blood
sudden battles,
Cover with your love
Ring of prayers
Gather anguish and fire them
And lift up
On outstretched hands:
Understand... sorry!

This poem is dominated not by love, but by pride. For a Christian knows that any human truth, according to the word of the prophet, is the same as a rub thrown down on a dunghill. What is "to cover with your love" if not the apotheosis of conceit? The Christian works by the power of God, not by his own. Here, in fact, it is not prayer, but meditation, i.e. self-hypnosis with the subsequent release of the individual will outside.

Voloshin's work is only one of the manifestations of magic in art, which is characteristic of both ancient pagan cultures and modernism. To illustrate this idea, I will quote Voloshin's dialogue with Vyacheslav Ivanov, recorded in the diary of Maximilian Aleksandrovich. Voloshin defines his goal: to absorb nature, to which Ivanov replies: “Well! And we want to transform, recreate nature. We are Bryusov, Bely, me. Bryusov comes to magic. Bely created a new word for this, his own "theurgism" - the creation of deities, this is different, but in essence the same. An ape could transform into a human, and a human will someday make the same leap and become a superhuman.” Voloshin: "Either the creation of a person, or the creation of a work of art - philosophy, religion - I combine all this under one concept of art." Ivanov: “Bely, in his article on Balmont, calls him the last poet of pure art. The last of this period. You may be the first glimpse of the next period."

In the poem "Journeyman" (1917), which was identified in 1925 as a poetic "creed", it is said:

Your daring spirit knows attraction
Constellations of ruling and willing planets...
Yes, releasing
From the power of a small, unconscious "I",
You will see that all phenomena -
signs,
By which you remember yourself
And fiber after fiber you collect
The fabric of your spirit, torn by the world.

Creativity is perceived by Voloshin as a construction of personality stretched out in time and contracted in space. This poem declares the rejection of feelings, will, consciousness - so that "from the depths of silence" a "word" is born. Apparently, he calls non-material individualities “words”. And his goal is to communicate with them and receive information from them.

The poem "Apprentice" concludes with the following words:

When will you understand
That you are not a son of the earth,
But the traveler through the universes,
That suns and constellations arose
And extinguished inside you
That everywhere - both in creatures and in things - languishes
divine word,
Called them to life
That you are the liberator of divine names,
who came to call
All spirits - prisoners, bogged down in matter,
When you understand that a person is born,
To smelt out of the world
Necessity and Reason
Universe of Freedom and Love, -
Then only
You will become a Master.

The word "Master" was chosen by the satanic sect of "freemasons" to name priests of high degrees of initiation. The use of this word by Voloshin is, of course, not a coincidence.

Here is an entry from his diary dated May 28, 1905: “Last Tuesday, the 22nd, I was initiated as a Freemason. Will. Sword hit." In addition, 1905 included an appeal to Theosophy. Diary entry dated July 20, 1905: “Almost nothing was news to me. All the theosophical ideas that I recognize now have been mine for a long time. Almost since childhood, as if they were innate.

V. Kupchenko lists the books that Voloshin was reading then: Esoteric Buddhism, Kabbalah, Voice of Silence, Secret Doctrine, Light on the Path, Christian Esotericism, books on magic, astrology, spiritualism, physiognomy, palmistry, alchemy, history of religions.

In 1913, Voloshin joined the "General Anthroposophical Society", which then separated from the Theosophical Society. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who headed it, strove, like the Theosophists, to find a "synthesis of science and religion", but transferred the emphasis from Eastern teachings to Christianity. The poet takes part in the construction of the "anthroposophical temple" ("temple", as he later called it) in Dornach (Switzerland), but soon escapes from there to Paris. He could not bear any dogmas, including even anthroposophical ones, which is why later in the poem “The Ways of Cain” (1923) the poet writes:

Accepting the truth on faith -
She goes blind.
The teacher drives before him
Only a herd raped by the truth...

He left the anthroposophical sect, but remained faithful to the theosophical teaching, which he valued very highly. He believed that this doctrine stands above any religion and is the key to understanding anything. Maximilian Alexandrovich wrote: “Theosophy calls for the study of occult forces in human nature and, at the same time, recalls that at all times the normal path of moral purification, then spiritual rebirth, enlightenment, and then strength, power, the ability to apply the knowledge of hidden laws for the benefit of humanity."

In all likelihood, Voloshin ranked himself in the 3rd degree - otherwise he would not have become a prophet. Moreover, he possessed not only knowledge, but also power (from an occult, in our opinion, demonic source). There are testimonies of contemporaries about his psychic abilities.

Voloshin points out that the system of his worldview is revealed in the wreath of sonnets "Corona Astralis" (1909). These verses exude despair, close to the despair of fallen angels. Here are excerpts:

Pelid gazes sadly into the night...
But he is even sadder and sadder,
Our bitter spirit... And the memory torments us.

Our bitter spirit ... (And the memory torments us)
Our bitter spirit sprouted from the darkness like grass
It contains navi poison, grave poisons.
Time sleeps in it, as in the bowels of the pyramids.

The pain of extra-life insults smolders in us.
Sadness languishes, and the flame sharpens deafly,
And all sorrows unfurled banner
In the winds of melancholy rustles sadly.

But let the fire sting and sting
A melodious spirit strangled by bodies,
Laocoön entangled in knots
Flammable snakes, tensed ... and is silent.

And never - nor the happiness of this pain,
Neither the pride of bonds, nor the joy of bondage,
Nor our ecstasy of a hopeless prison

We will not give up Leta for all the oblivion!

Exiles, wanderers and poets -
Who longed to be, but could not become anything ...

From all sides from the mist they look at us
Pupils of strangers, always hostile eyes,
Not warmed by the light of the stars, nor by the sun,

Stir your way in the spaces of eternal darkness -
In ourselves we carry our exile -
In the worlds of love, unfaithful comets!

The images presented are reminiscent of Dennitsa's path, which, like lightning, fell from heaven into eternal darkness.

The theomachic, satanic beginning sounds in the poem "The Ways of Cain" (1915-1926). At the beginning of everything, Voloshin had a rebellion, this word is called the 1st chapter of the poem. His view of rebellion and rebellion is explained by the testimony of Anastasia Tsvetaeva, who preserved the words of the poet: “Do not forget, Asya, that there are people whose mission is the mission of denial ... Who are allowed to be rebellious all their lives. Riot. But this rebellion may be closer to God than faith. Do not forget that the paths to God are different. And that the way of theomachism, perhaps, is even more true than obedience to God.

In the chapter "Mutiny" Voloshin says this about the theomachist:

He affirms God by rebellion,
Creates - unbelief, builds - denial,
He is an architect
And he sculpted - death.
And clay is whirlwinds of its own spirit.

Theosophy puts the human consciousness at the head of everything, deifying it (“You are only what you think, thoughts are eternal”). Every person is recognized as "his own truth", regardless of its objective content.

Voloshin denies free will in man: “We are imprisoned in the moment. There is only one way out of it - to the past. We have been ordered to lift the veil of the future. Whoever raises and sees, he will die, i.e. will lose the illusion of free will, which is life. Illusion of the possibility of action. Mayan".

The premise - a person does not have free will - is followed by a logical conclusion: no person is responsible for any of his actions. This same conclusion leads to the following conclusions from the poet's diary below: (July 19, 1905) “From the stories about the speeches of Annie Besant. Do not be surprised if a significant and beautiful person commits deeds unworthy of him: spirit often outstrips matter. This is how he kills his shortcomings. From Oscar Wilde: "The best way to fight temptation is to give in to it." “Facts say nothing about a person. Everything is in his will. Never judge by facts and actions. (August 11, 1905) “Buddha asked the saint what he wants to be before reaching final perfection - 2 times a demon or 6 times an angel. And the saint answered: of course, 2 times by a demon. In the Christian understanding, such statements are the justification of evil, the service of evil.

If in the poem "The Ways of Cain" the facts were simply stated, which are the history of the development of civilization, we, albeit with a stretch, could say that this is an objective view of the world, and nothing more. However, Voloshin gives an assessment of the presented facts, actually justifying any rebellion as one of the ways, and, moreover, the most perfect one, of the growth of the human "spirit". Therefore, the cycle "Ways of Cain" can be called an apology for evil (in the Christian sense of it).

In chapter 9, "The Rebel" (originally titled "The Prophet"), the poet's exhortation is:

Enough for you commandments on "not":
All "do not kill", "do not do", "do not steal" -
The only commandment: "Burn!"
Your god is in you
And don't look for another
Neither in heaven nor on earth:
Check the whole outside world:
Everywhere the law, causality,
But there is no love
Its source is you!…

Run not evil, but only extinction:
Both sin and passion are flowering, not evil;
Decontamination -
Not a virtue at all.

Chapter 12, The Thanob, evaluates Christianity:

Christianity was the burning poison.
The soul stung by him rushed about
In fury and writhing, drawing
The poisoned chiton of Hercules is flesh.

The question arises: how, with such assessments, with a claim to self-deification, combined with sophisticated blasphemy, Voloshin could be classified as a Christian? Orthodoxy? We find the answer in the diary: “In the logical area of ​​the mind, I build as many combinations as I like and throw them without regret. Everything is possible here, everything is equally important and indifferent. Brilliance is in diversity and richness. This area is not to be loved. There is no sincerity here, but only combinations and the ability to make them. I feel like a master in this area.”

Voloshin, with the help of logic, could think in various ideological systems, leaving in his mind the core of theosophical teaching. When he lived in Western Europe, his poems bore the stamp of Catholicism, as B.A. Leman: “Maximilian Voloshin is the only Russian poet who managed to understand and convey to us the complex charm of Gothic and embody in Russian verse the intoxication of the mysticism of Catholicism.”

When Voloshin thoroughly imbued with Russia, something from Orthodoxy appeared in the verses. And it's natural. Maximilian felt like a prophet, and a prophet speaks in order to be heard. In order to have a chance to be heard in a country with an Orthodox culture, it is necessary to be imbued with the beginnings (at least external ones) of this culture. This does not contradict Theosophy, since from her point of view, she is above any religion, and can correct any religion - imperceptibly - which Voloshin did in his poems. For example, in the poem "Readiness" (1921), imbued, it would seem, with the spirit of Christian self-sacrifice, there is an idea of ​​karma that is contrary to Christianity:

Didn't I myself choose the hour of birth,
Century and kingdom, region and people,
To go through torment and baptism
Conscience, fire and water?

Voloshin expressed the theosophical idea of ​​the self-development of the human "spirit" either through good or evil, the difference between which is completely relative, in numerous reincarnations in the image of Stenka Razin, popular in Russia, anathematized for his atrocities:

We are infected with conscience: in each
Stenke - Saint Seraphim,
Surrendered to the same hangovers and cravings
We torment with the same will.

Similar thoughts are present in other verses:

Ah, in the most inert and dark
The spirit of the world is captivated!
Driven by the scourge of passions -
Crucified seraphim
Sharpened in flesh:
They are stinged with a burning sting,
The Lord is in a hurry to burn.

There are also poems in which theosophical ideology is invisible (for example, "The Creature" - about Seraphim of Sarov). There is no contradiction here - after all, Theosophy does not set itself the goal of an open struggle against religions. She is for gradual penetration into them in order to subjugate them.

From the testimonies of contemporaries, we know that many treated Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin with confidence and revered him as a teacher of life. Reverence close to religious was highly desirable for Voloshin, because the prophet, what he wanted to be, needs not only to be heard, but also to be believed. We know that Maximilian was called "the peddler of ideas" and "the peddler of friends" (words by M. Tsvetaeva). Religion requires a miracle, and Voloshin gave it - as a psychic, a poet-soothsayer, a penetrating painter, a subtle psychologist. There were people who fell under his charm, his influence. But there were also those who saw the mask of a hypocrite on him. The point, it seems to me, is that, wearing any disguise, outwardly confessing any faith, he remained a Theosophist. Agreeing and imbued with sympathy for the ideas, worldview of any person, he sought trust and found support in this person, remaining, as they say, on his mind. Such behavior is called cunning or cunning.

It also extended to politics. Loudly declaring that in the Civil War he was neither for one nor for the other, but for all at once, Voloshin saw "his own truth" on both sides and was therefore able to arouse confidence in himself. But at the same time, he had his own view of events, being a member of the Masonic lodge Grand Orient of France, which cannot be called apolitical. I will quote the diary (entry dated July 12, 1905): “Yesterday in the Masonic lodge I read my report on Russia - sacred sacrifice”(highlighted by me. - o. S.K.).

Historical cataclysms, skillfully provoked, represent the best opportunity to influence mass consciousness with certain ideas, which was Voloshin's work - to "prophesy". Maximilian Alexandrovich - a poet, an artist, an unusually sympathetic person - is the mask of Voloshin the occultist.

With the seeming integrity of his nature, indefatigability in life, Voloshin resembles, for example, N.K. Roerich, artist, poet, thinker. There is also a difference: Voloshin did not leave any original philosophical (religious) treatise. Perhaps that is why he has so far escaped the fate of E.P. Blavatsky (whom he always revered) and N.K. Roerich, who were anathematized at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in November 1994 - as preachers of theomachy, anti-Christian ideas.

Voloshin has an impact close to religious on many creative people, the best proof of which is the abundance of myths that have grown around this person: Maximilian Voloshin's peacemaking was part of his myth-making: the myth of a great, wise and kind man. His image became - through the efforts of the poet himself and his inner circle - something like an icon, with some clearly postulated characteristic features, so that involuntarily, when thinking about him, images pop up: a lion, Zeus, the sun, a chiton, curls and a beard, mountains , sagebrush and sea. Here is a wonderfully figurative picture that M. Tsvetaeva gives: “Voloshin died at 1 o'clock in the afternoon - at his very “own” hour. “At noon, when the sun is at its zenith, i.e. on the very top of the head, at the hour when the shadow is defeated by the body, and the body is dissolved in the body of the world - at its own time, at Voloshin's hour.

Voloshin's grave - on top of the mountain - to dominate the so-called noosphere. There is no cross on it - such is the testament. Becoming a Theosophist, he denied Christ as the only begotten Son of God. The task of the Church is to bear witness to his renunciation, i.e. anathematize - in order to stop the temptation of his work among the faithful children of the Russian Orthodox Church. This will undoubtedly be a manifestation of love in relation to the poet himself, for the less temptation to produce his work condemned by the Church, the less he will be tortured at the truly Terrible Judgment of God.

about. Sergiy Karamyshev

MAXIMILIAN VOLOSHIN (1877-1932)

M. A. Voloshin differs from other poets of the Silver Age, perhaps, by the greatest artistic amplitude. Seemingly incompatible styles and genres converged in his work: strict sonnets and cumbersome works close to rhythmic prose; quivering love poems and highly complex philosophical poems; symbolist-esoteric revelations and passionate civil lyrics. Voloshin did not belong to literary groups and movements, he went through life "close to everyone, a stranger to everything." He entered the history of literature as a "genius of the place", an artist who recreated in his poems and watercolors the harsh appearance of Cimmeria, the eastern Crimea. His house in Koktebel became, in the words of A. Bely, "one of the most cultural centers not only in Russia, but also in Europe." Prominent poets, artists, actors came here: A. N. Tolstoy and O. E. Mandelstam, V. V. Veresaev and M. A. Bulgakov, N. S. Gumilev and M. I. Tsvetaeva, I. G. Erenburg and E. I. Zamyatin, K. S. Petrov-Vodkin and A. P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva. It was here, on the mezzanine behind a colored panel, that the husband of M.I. Tsvetaeva, lieutenant S.Ya. and in many ways Voloshin's final poem "The Poet's House". The artist lived in the Crimea - a place where the tragedy of national strife was perceived especially sharply. Voloshin is perhaps the only one who left a poetic chronicle of this terrible era.

Creative biography and artistic world of M. A. Voloshin

Maximilian Aleksandrovich Kiriyenko-Voloshin was born on May 16, 1877 in Kyiv, into a noble family. His father, a member of the Kyiv Chamber of Criminal and Civil Court, died when the boy was four years old. The mother, Elena Ottobaldovna (née Glazer), was engaged in raising the child, a well-educated woman with a strong character. From the age of 12, Voloshin began to write poetry. One of the poems was published in 1895, but the poet himself considered the publication of poems in the journal Novy Put in 1903 to be his true literary debut. "and participation in the riots, he is expelled from the students and sent to Feodosia under the covert supervision of the police.

Voloshin does not perceive this as a blow of fate. In the autumn of 1899, he visited Europe for the first time, and a year later he went to the construction of the Tashkent-Orenburg railway. Central Asia, the East, the desert, the "frantically blue sky", fragments of ancient civilizations - all this leaves an indelible mark on the poet's soul (the poem "Desert", 1901). However, Voloshin is attracted to Paris. From an early age he was fascinated by French literature and art. While still a young man, Voloshin outlined for himself a life program based on the desire

See everything, understand everything, know everything, experience everything, Absorb all forms, all colors with your eyes, Walk all over the earth with burning feet, Perceive everything and embody again.

("Through the network of diamonds the east has turned green...", 1903 1904) "The earth is such a small planet that it's a shame not to visit everywhere," the poet wrote to his mother at the end of 1901. But it was Paris that truly turned out to be the threshold for him and countries, / Legends, stories and beliefs...", became the birthplace of the spirit, a school of artistic and poetic skill. Voloshin is credited with the following attitude: "Study in Paris, work in Koktebel." In Paris, he, but to his own admission, for the first time "approached painting", developed his own style. The poet feels the need to "go through the Latin discipline of form," and he succeeds. In the technique of versification, he reaches true heights; masters the most complicated art of the sonnet: the parnassian J.-M. de Heredia, whose sonnets Voloshin translated in 1904. The poet enjoys the atmosphere of the capital of France, writes poems that will soon form the cycle "Paris" - a kind of declaration of love to this city, an elegiac song of farewell to the passing youth. According to Voloshin himself, he preferred to study "the art form - from France, the sense of colors - from Paris<...>structure of thought - by Bergson, skepticism - by Anatole France, prose - by Flaubert, verse - by Gauthier and Heredia. "But in the method of" approaching nature, studying and transmitting it "the artist stood" on the point of view of the classical Japanese (Hokusan, Utamaro )". This West-Eastern orientation in its organic creative refraction with deep Russian roots is a rather rare phenomenon in our poetry.

Of all the spiritual and aesthetic diversity of Voloshin's work, two artistic universes can be distinguished: Paris (France) and Koktebel (Cimmeria). However, these two worlds do not exist in the mind of the poet in isolation. They are brought together by a sense of history flowing into "today". It is significant that he feels the "ancient poison of sloppy sadness" of Paris especially sharply.

At the bottom of the yards, under the roofs of the mansards, Where the young Dante and the lad Bonaparte Of their dreams shook the worlds in themselves.

When you read Voloshin's sonnets dedicated to the French Revolution, your consciousness involuntarily transfers them to Russian soil.

With a sufficient degree of convention in the work of the poet, three main periods can be distinguished: early stage, works of the 1900s - early 1910s, marked by symbolist-impressionistic trends, the influence of the occult; transition period, associated with the events of the First World War, the elimination of anthroposophic mysticism; final phase - creativity of the era of revolution and civil war, historiosophical reflections on the fate of Russia, understanding the "tragedy of material culture", the growing influence of the Orthodox religion. The last, post-war decade in the life of the poet does not represent a qualitatively new stage and is a kind of summing up the results of creativity.

"Years of wanderings" - this is the name of the first cycle of the first collection of Voloshin's poems, published in 1910 ("Poems. 1900-1910"). With the same phrase, he himself defines the corresponding stage of his life path.

"In these years, I'm just an absorbent sponge. I'm all eyes, all ears. I wander around countries, museums, libraries: Rome, Spain, Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Andorra ... Louvre, Prado, Vatican, Uffizi .. . National Library. In addition to the technique of the word, I master the technique of the brush and pencil, "Voloshin writes in his autobiography.

The motive of wandering is one of Voloshin's main ones. These are the long wanderings of the poet through the deserts of Asia and the Mediterranean, and spiritual wanderings, the search for truth. The poet perceives his path in inseparable connection with the whole universe, with the history of mankind. In addition to the Parnassians, Voloshin is influenced by the French Symbolists. And in the summer of 1905, he took on the translation of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaern, who also paid tribute to symbolist quests. He also collaborates with Russian symbolists (V. Ya. Bryusov, K. D. Balmont, F. Sologub, and others), publishes in their journals, and participates in many artistic endeavors. However, symbolism is not Voloshin's all-pervading artistic method. In 1910, in the article "Henri de Regnier", he defines his creative style as new realism (neorealism), perceived as a synthesis of traditional realism of the 19th century, impressionism ("realistic individualism") and symbolism. Voloshin is impressed by Repier, whose merit lies in the fact that he gave the verse of the Symbolists a sensual fabulousness, "a leisurely transparency, and new symbols - clarity and tangibility." The Russian poet will for a long time assimilate the creative principle of Repier: "to recreate, to immortalize in himself and outside of himself the fleeing moments", to express the eternal through the fleeting.

But one way or another, the symbolist abstraction and transcendence of the spirit, research in the field of art and philosophy do not turn the poet away from earthly problems. "My spirit is in Russia..." - Voloshin writes, living in Paris, even then, in 1906, feeling that "bloody dreams swirl in the world..." One of his visits to Russia turns out to be especially memorable for the poet: he becomes a witness of the execution of a peaceful procession on January 9, 1905. Voloshin reflected his impressions of this terrible spectacle in the article "Bloody Week in St. Petersburg", written in French. Most of all, he was shocked by the fact that they were shooting at unarmed people, women and children, at icons. The theme of historical retribution, popular indignation seizes the creative imagination of the poet ("Foreshadowing", 1905; "Angel of Vengeance", "Head of madame de Lamballe" - both 1906, etc.). In the poem "Angel of Vengeance" he writes:

To the Russian people: I am the mournful Angel of Vengeance! I'm in black wounds - in the plowed nov I throw seeds. Ages of patience have passed. And my voice is pabat. My banner is like blood.

The object of vengeance in the poem looks extremely vague, vague:

The Sword of Justice - punishing and avenging - I will give it to the power of the crowd ... And in the hands of a blind man It will sparkle swiftly, like lightning, smashing. Their son will kill their mother, their daughter will kill their father.

Already here is the foreknowledge of rampant demonic, from the point of view of Voloshin, the forces of civil war, tearing families apart, the assertion of the identity of the executioner and the victim, the guilty and the punisher. Everyone, Voloshin believes, perceives justice in his own way, and everyone considers his understanding to be the only true and moral one. Therefore, he writes in the article "Prophets and Avengers" (1906), "the idea of ​​justice is the most cruel and tenacious of all the ideas that have ever taken possession of the human brain. When it takes root in the hearts and muddies the eyes of a person, then people begin to kill each other." friend... The crises of the idea of ​​justice are called great revolutions." The poet feels the breath of the first Russian revolution, but gives the impending events a mystical and symbolic character, filling the semantic fabric of his poems with biblical images and reminiscences.

The final stanza of the poem "The Angel of Vengeance" is characteristic. Here are the words of Jesus Christ addressed to one of the disciples: "... return your sword to its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matt. 26:52), as well as the image of the cup with the wine of rage, which made the nations drunk and made insane (Jer. 25:15-16), will acquire a concentrated, symbolic meaning in Voloshin's work:

It is not the sower who gathers the thorny ear of sowing. Whoever takes the sword will die by the sword. Who once drank the intoxicating poison of anger, He will become the executioner or the victim of the executioner.

However, to say that the writer lives at that time only by revolutionary events and politics would be the greatest delusion. Voloshin himself defines the period from 1905 to 1912 as "wanderings of the spirit": "Buddhism, Catholicism, magic, Freemasonry, occultism, theosophy,

R. Steiner. A period of great personal experiences of a romantic and mystical nature. "It was at this time that he experienced an affair with his future wife M.V. Sabashnikova, to whom he dedicated famous poems:" Letter "," Tanakh "," We are lost in this light ... " , "In the workshop", etc. Margarita Sabashnikova, an artist and poetess, becomes for Voloshin a poetic muse, the personification of femininity and beauty that has survived the centuries.It is no coincidence that in the artistic mind of the writer, the earthly woman he loves is associated with the Queen of Ancient Egypt Tanakh, the very one that abolished polytheism in her country and established the cult of the sun god Aton.

Speaking of Voloshin's love poetry, one cannot ignore the philosophical teachings of V. S. Solovyov, which had a significant impact on the poet's worldview. Solovyov's ethics of love, the motive of Eternal Femininity are felt in Voloshin's work in the cycle of poems "Ainori Amara Sacrum" ("Holy Bitterness of Love", 1903-1907) and the poem "She" (1909).

By the mid 1900s. the poet's passion should be timed theosophy - mystical teaching, in which its founder H. P. Blavatsky combined elements of Brahmanism, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as anthroposophy - the Western version of theosophy, which was developed by R. Steiner (in the Voloshin transcription - Steiner). Captured by new ideas, Voloshin feels earthly life as a moment snatched from cosmic time, and the human "I" as a kind of "core" carried in the "corridors" of eternity and periodically incarnated in bodily shells. These ideas are reflected in the poems that make up the small cycle "When Time Stops" (1903-1905):

A new bottom is hiding in the abyss, Forms and thoughts are mixed. We all died somewhere long ago... We are all not yet born.

Rudolf Steiner and his followers believed that a person in his stage of earthly incarnation is an intermediate phase in the evolution of his spiritual "I". Matter is secondary, it has developed from the spirit. The same can be said about the globe: before reaching its present stage, it went through three phases of bodily incarnation, punctuated by a state of pure spirituality. The first planetary incarnation of the Earth is Saturn (Saturnian stage), the second incarnation is the Sun, the third is the Moon. Without knowledge of this anthroposophical concept, it is impossible to interpret Voloshin's poems "Saturn", "Sun" and "Moon" (1907). Echoes of Steiper's teachings are palpable in the poems "Blood" and "The Grotto of the Nymphs" (1907), as well as in later poems: "The Cave" (1915) and "Motherhood" (1917).

A whole set of images of anthroposophical cosmogony contains the poem "Saturn". Here is the almost spiritual state of the Earth at the first stage of its existence (according to Voloshin - "thickening of stellar juice"), and Steiner's idea that spirits of will participate in the cosmic development of man ("a flickering stream of creative numbers and wills"), and the idea of that the Earth and something that preceded humanity consisted first of "will", then of "heat", finally of "light" ("flickering stream") and "sound" ("living tissues of bodies, but the body was sound" ). It is no coincidence that Voloshin's close acquaintance, the theosophist A.R. Mintslova, greatly appreciated this poem. It is with her that the poet passes in 1905 "the mystery of the Gothic cathedrals", which receives a response in the cycle of poems "Rouen Cathedral" (1907). Voloshin highly valued Gothic as a complete expression of medieval culture. As conceived by the poet, the composition of the cycle of seven poems is a symbolic architectonics: "The seven steps of the Way of the Cross correspond to the seven steps of Christian initiation, symbolically embodied in the architectural crystals of Gothic cathedrals."

The wreath of sonnets "Corona Astralis" (1909), according to Voloshin, expresses his "attitude towards the world", which contains a synthesis of religion, science and philosophy. Here, more clearly than anywhere else, one can hear the motif of the antiquity of the human spirit in its connections with the Cosmos. He is immersed in earthly life, but at the same time yearns for eternity:

And he wanders in the dust of earthly roads - Apostate priest, God who has forgotten himself, Following familiar patterns in things.

Voloshin is one of those few who vaguely remembers "as reflections of real life, his wanderings in reversed time." Such people (or prophets) "know so much that they can hardly bear this terrible burden. And the worst thing is that they do not have the opportunity to warn people against the possible future, because they do not believe<...>Here they are the eternal wanderers, walking on the Ahaspheric paths, who pay a terrible price for the transparency of the past and future for them: they are doomed to eternal inner loneliness ... "

The path of proven orbits is closed to us, The harmony of the prayer system is broken... Earthly temples are built for the earthly gods, The priest of the earth will not commune us with the earth.

The poet's pessimism has not so much an everyday-psychological background (a break with his wife) as mystical-anthroposophic outlines. But it is also caused by the realization of the original tragedy of the position of the poet in the world, his eternal earthly disorder. "Corona Astralis" is the message of the mission prepared for him as the Redeemer of human vices and delusions:

Exiles, wanderers and poets - Who yearned to be, but could not become anything ... The birds have a nest, the beast has a dark den, And the staff - begging covenants for us.

From 1906 to 1914, Voloshin lived in Russia, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, spending the summer months in Koktebel, feeling his inner kinship with "a land saturated with Hellenism and the ruins of the Genoese and Venetian towers." Here, starting from 1903, on the very shore of the sea, his house was being built, a shelter for creative inspiration, a kind of Mecca for numerous ministers of art and literature. Ktsheria - so in the old way the poet called the eastern region of Crimea - Voloshin devoted more than 60 poems (the most famous of them were included in the cycles "Cimmerian twilight" and "Cimmerian spring"), eight articles, not to mention watercolors and poetic inscriptions made on them. Cimmerian painting and Voloshin's poetry complement each other. At the same time, the poet's Cimmerian poems are not landscape lyrics, but a "cast of the soul" of these places, an image of today and eternal. The same can be said about painting: it is not just a photographic reproduction of the Crimean exotic. On the one hand, Voloshin's landscapes are concrete and recognizable, realistic in the best sense of the word, despite the conventions of using colors. On the other hand, Voloshin's watercolors are philosophical works that bear the stamp of this ancient country.

"The years before the war I spend in the Koktebel retreat, and this gives me the opportunity to focus again on painting ..." - says the poet's autobiography. Cimmerian harmony was destroyed by the outbreak of the world slaughter. A week before the fatal shot in Sarajevo, the poet, at the suggestion of his ex-wife, leaves for Switzerland, in Dornach, to take part in the construction of the Goetheanum (St. John's Church), which was supposed to symbolize the unity of religions and nations. During this period, religious pacifism was the main beginning of the poet's worldview, manifested in the poems that compiled the collection "Anno Mundi Ardentis. 1915" ("In the year of the burning world. 1915", 1916). He is somewhat close to Romain Rolland, who formulated his position in the collection of articles "Above the fight." "Alone among the hostile armies," Voloshin, as it were, absorbs the pains of humanity, the convulsions of the world, feeling both his responsibility - a poet, thinker, humanist - for what is happening, and his impotence. As a militia warrior of the second category, Voloshin was subject to conscription into the army. Not wanting to become a deserter and hide behind the fragile steppes of the anthroposophical temple in Dornach or the National Library in Paris, in the spring of 1916 he went to Russia, and already in the autumn Voloshin was drafted into the army. He officially addresses the Minister of War, refusing "to be a soldier as a European, as an artist, as a poet" and expresses his readiness to suffer any punishment for this. From that moment on, Voloshin never left his homeland. It is painfully difficult for him to perceive the October Revolution and the civil war. Lives in Koktebel, works a lot. His books appear in print one after another: "Iverny" (1918), "Verharn: Fate. Creativity. Translations" (1919), "Deaf-Mute Demons" (1919). The poet becomes a witness of those horrors, the terrible clarity of which strikes us in the poem "Terror" (1921) and other works from the cycle "Strife" (1919-1922).

The book of poems "The Ways of Cain" (1922-1926) is a historiosophical and culturological study of civilization, in which, according to Voloshin, all his "social ideas, mostly negative" are formulated. The artist defines his main principle of world perception (in the sense of cosmic and social): harmony of balances ("Cosmos", 1923), self-born counter-creation, which is the source of the existence of the world, its mode and form. The "world of tangible and stable balances" is doomed to decay, although it retains some hope of salvation. The author of the book is largely based on the theory of Oswald Spengler ("The Decline of Europe"), the pathos of which is the hopeless circulation of history (the idea of ​​"fate-time") and the inevitable death of culture in the face of a mechanistic-consumer civilization. Man's misfortune is that, having picked up the keys to the forbidden secrets of nature, he "transformed the whole world, but not himself." Unlike the ancients, the modern European does not take into account the "moral essence" of the forces of nature. Any machine created by him on the basis of human greed turns into a demon and enslaves its creator ("Machine", 1922). Moreover, each one "... cheap spirit / For the joys of comfort and philistinism" is implied - regardless of whether he is a proletarian or a bourgeois. Human morality, Voloshin notes after M. Maeterlinck and P. de Saint-Victor, has always been considered only with force. Its expression was first a fist, then a sword, and finally gunpowder, with the invention of which mankind rushed to the abyss. It is doomed to become "gastric juice" in the digestion of "a few octopuses" of industry if it does not embark on the path of self-limitation of its selfish interests. Only "personal moral awareness" of everything that happens can resist war and decay, the poet believes, because everyone "voluntarily took on his life and at the Judgment will give his own individual answer, which will have cosmic significance." It is no coincidence that Voloshin's book ends with the apocalyptic image of the Judgment, the vision "inside oneself" of the "sun in the circle of stars" ("Judgment", 1915).

In November 1920, Soviet power was finally established in the Crimea. Voloshin expresses a desire to lecture at the newly opened People's University headed by VV Veresaev. The poet actively participates in cultural construction, takes care of the preservation of historical monuments. He is elected an honorary member of the Russian Society for the Study of the Crimea, and Voloshin shares his knowledge with geologists, archaeologists, volcanologists, local historians. He lives in his Koktebel house, which again becomes a haven for many scientists, artists, writers, artists. Poems are heard again, performances are staged, reports are read, walks around Karadag are arranged. The second wife of the artist Maria Stepanovna Zabolotskaya becomes a reliable keeper of the hearth. But, alas, health deteriorated. Voloshin was very painfully aware of the blow inflicted on him by the orthodox press. The financial situation was also difficult. Only in November 1931, by decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, the poet (together with A. Bely and G. I. Chulkov) was granted a lifetime personal pension. In August 1932, Maximilian Voloshin died.

The poetry of M. Voloshin is wider than any of its perceptions - it is here that the laws and paradoxes associated with this are rooted. His poems about Russia were banned both under the Bolsheviks and under the "volunteers", and for the first time they were performed from the stage in the Jewish literary society of Feodosia. During the life of the poet and in the next five or six decades, his works were distributed "secretly and furtively" in thousands of copies. The poem "Russian Revolution" (1919) delighted such polar people as V. M. Purishkevich and L. D. Trotsky. In 1919, the Whites and the Reds, taking Odessa in turn, began their appeals with the same words from the Voloshin Peace of Brest (1917). All this convinced the poet that "in moments of the highest discord" he "managed, speaking about the most controversial and modern, to find such words and such a perspective that both of them accepted it." However, collected in a book, these poems were not passed by either right or left censorship, since neither one nor the other could accept Voloshin's main statement: "A person ... is more important than his convictions. Therefore, the only form of vigorous activity that I allowed myself was is to stop people from killing each other."

Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin (surname at birth - Kirienko-Voloshin). Born on May 16 (28), 1877 in Kyiv - died on August 11, 1932 in Koktebel (Crimea). Russian poet, translator, landscape painter, art and literary critic.

Maximilian Voloshin was born on May 16 (28 according to the new style) May 1877 in Kyiv.

Father - Kirienko-Voloshin, lawyer, collegiate adviser (died in 1881).

Mother - Elena Ottobaldovna (nee Glazer) (1850-1923).

Shortly after his birth, his parents separated, Maximilian was brought up by his mother, with whom he was very close until the end of her life.

Early childhood was spent in Taganrog and Sevastopol.

He began to receive secondary education at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium. Knowledge and performance did not shine. He recalled: “When my mother presented reviews of my Moscow successes to the Feodosia gymnasium, the director, the humane and elderly Vasily Ksenofontovich Vinogradov, spread his hands and said: “Madame, we, of course, will accept your son, but I must warn you that We can't fix idiots."

In 1893, he and his mother moved to the Crimea in Koktebel. There, Maximilian went to the Feodosia gymnasium (the building has been preserved - now it houses the Feodosia Academy of Finance and Economics). Since the walking path from Koktebel to Feodosia through the mountainous desert terrain was long, Voloshin lived in rented apartments in Feodosia.

The views and attitudes of the young Maximilian Voloshin can be judged from the questionnaire that has come down to our time.

1. What is your favorite virtue? - Self-sacrifice and diligence.

2. What is your favorite quality in a man? - Femininity.

3. What is your favorite quality in a woman? - Courage.

4. Your favorite pastime is Traveling and talking together.

5. A distinctive feature of your character? - Dispersion.

6. How do you imagine happiness? - Control the crowd.

7. How do you imagine misfortune? - Lose faith in yourself.

8. What are your favorite colors and flowers? - Blue, lily of the valley.

9. If you were not you, what would you like to be? - Peshkovsky.

10. Where would you prefer to live? - Where I am not.

11. Who are your favorite prose writers? - Dickens, Dostoyevsky.

From 1897 to 1899, Voloshin studied at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, was expelled "for participation in the riots" with the right to be reinstated, did not continue his studies, and took up self-education.

In 1899, for active participation in the All-Russian student strike, he was expelled for a year and exiled to Feodosia under covert police supervision. On August 29 of the same year, he and his mother leave for Europe for almost half a year, on their first trip abroad.

Returning to Moscow, Voloshin externally passed the exams at the university, transferred to the third year, and in May 1900 he again set off on a two-month trip around Europe along the route he had developed himself. This time - on foot, with friends: Vasily Isheev, Leonid Kandaurov, Alexei Smirnov.

Upon his return to Russia, Maximilian Voloshin was arrested on suspicion of distributing illegal literature. He was transferred from Crimea to Moscow, kept in solitary confinement for two weeks, but was soon released, depriving him of the right to enter Moscow and St. Petersburg. This hastened Voloshin's departure to Central Asia with a survey party for the construction of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway. At that time - in a voluntary exile.

In September 1900, a survey party headed by V.O. Vyazemsky, arrived in Tashkent. It includes M.A. Voloshin, who, according to the certificate, was listed as a paramedic. However, he showed such remarkable organizational skills that when the party left for the expedition, he was appointed to the responsible position of head of the caravan and head of the camp.

He recalled: “1900, the turn of two centuries, was the year of my spiritual birth. I walked with caravans through the desert. Nietzsche and Vl. Solovyov’s “Three Conversations” overtook me here. Asian plateaus and reassess cultural values".

In Tashkent, he decides not to return to the university, but to go to Europe, to educate himself.

In the 1900s he traveled a lot, studied in the libraries of Europe, listened to lectures at the Sorbonne. In Paris, he also took drawing and engraving lessons from the artist E. S. Kruglikova.

Returning to Moscow at the beginning of 1903, Voloshin easily became "his own" among Russian symbolists, and began to actively publish. Since that time, living alternately at home, then in Paris, he did a lot to bring Russian and French art closer together.

Since 1904, from Paris, he regularly sent correspondence for the newspaper Rus and the magazine Libra, and wrote about Russia for the French press. Later, in 1908, the Polish sculptor Edward Wittig created a large sculptural portrait of M.A. Voloshin, which was exhibited at the Autumn Salon, was purchased by the Paris Mayor's Office and installed the following year at 66 Exelman Boulevard, where it stands to this day.

"In these years, I'm just an absorbent sponge. I'm all eyes, all ears. I wander around countries, museums, libraries: Rome, Spain, Corsica, Andorra, Louvre, Prado, Vatican ... National Library. In addition to the technique of the word, I master the technique of the brush and a pencil ... Stages of the wandering of the spirit: Buddhism, Catholicism, magic, Freemasonry, occultism, theosophy, R. Steiner. A period of great personal experiences of a romantic and mystical nature, "he wrote.

On March 23, 1905, he became a Freemason in Paris, having received initiation in the Masonic Lodge "Labor and True True Friends" No. 137 (Grand Lodge of France - VLF). In April of the same year, he moved to the Mount Sinai Lodge No. 6 (VLF).

Since 1906, after marrying the artist Margarita Vasilievna Sabashnikova, he settled in St. Petersburg. In 1907 he broke up with his wife and decided to leave for Koktebel. He began to write the cycle "Cimmerian Twilight".

Since 1910, he worked on monographic articles about K. F. Bogaevsky, A. S. Golubkina, M. S. Saryan, spoke in defense of the art groups Jack of Diamonds and Donkey Tail, although he himself stood outside literary and artistic groups.

With the poetess Elizaveta (Lilya) Dmitrieva, Voloshin composed a very successful literary hoax - Cherubina de Gabriak. He asked her for a petition to join the Anthroposophical Society.

The first collection of "Poems. 1900-1910" came out in Moscow in 1910, when Voloshin became a prominent figure in the literary process: an influential critic and an established poet with a reputation as a "strict parnassian".

In 1914, a book of selected articles on culture, Faces of Creativity, was published, and in 1915, a book of passionate poems about the horror of war, Anno mundi ardentis 1915 (In the Year of the Burning World, 1915), was published.

At this time, he paid more and more attention to painting, painted watercolor landscapes of the Crimea, exhibited his works at exhibitions of the World of Art.

On February 13, 1913, Voloshin gave a public lecture at the Polytechnic Museum "On the artistic value of Repin's damaged painting." In the lecture, he expressed the idea that in the painting itself “self-destructive forces lurk”, that it was its content and art form that caused aggression against it.

In the summer of 1914, carried away by the ideas of anthroposophy, Voloshin arrived in Dornach (Switzerland), where, together with like-minded people from more than 70 countries (including Andrei Bely, Asya Turgeneva, Margarita Voloshina), he began the construction of the First Goetheanum, a cultural center founded by R. Steiner anthroposophical society. The first Goetheanum burned down on the night of December 31, 1922 to January 1, 1923.

In 1914, Voloshin wrote a letter to the Russian Minister of War, Sukhomlinov, refusing military service and participation in the "bloody massacre" of the First World War.

After the revolution, Maximilian Voloshin finally settled in Koktebel, in a house built in 1903-1913 by his mother, Elena Ottobaldovna Voloshina. Here he created many watercolors that formed his Koktebel Suite.

Voloshin perceived the events of 1917 and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks as a catastrophe, he wrote:

It's over with Russia ... On the last
We chatted it, chatted it,
Slipped, drank, spat,
Smudged on dirty squares,
Sold out on the streets: is it not necessary
To whom the land, republics, yes freedom,
Civil rights? And the homeland of the people
He himself dragged out on the pus, like carrion.
Oh Lord, open, scatter,
Send us fire, ulcers and scourges,
Germans from the west, Mongol from the east,
Give us into slavery again and forever
To redeem humbly and deeply
Judas sin until the Last Judgment!

Often he signed his watercolors: “Your wet light and matte shadows give the stones a turquoise hue” (about the Moon); “The distances are thinly carved, washed away by the light of the cloud”; "In saffron twilight purple hills." The inscriptions give some idea of ​​the artist's watercolors - poetic, perfectly conveying not so much the real landscape as the mood it evokes, the endless untiring variety of lines of the hilly "country of Cimmeria", their soft, muted colors, the line of the sea horizon - some kind of magical, all-organizing dash , clouds melting in the ash moon sky. That allows us to attribute these harmonious landscapes to the Cimmerian school of painting.

During the years of the Civil War, the poet tried to moderate enmity by saving the persecuted in his house: first the Reds from the Whites, then, after the change of power, the Whites from the Reds. The letter sent by M. Voloshin in defense of O. E. Mandelstam, who was arrested by the Whites, very likely saved him from execution.

In 1924, with the approval of the People's Commissariat of Education, Voloshin turned his house in Koktebel into a free house of creativity (later - the House of Creativity of the Literary Fund of the USSR).

Maximilian Voloshin died after a second stroke on August 11, 1932 in Koktebel and was buried on Mount Kuchuk-Yanyshar near Koktebel. N. Chukovsky, G. Storm, Artobolevsky, A. Gabrichevsky participated in the funeral.

Voloshin bequeathed his house to the Union of Writers.

On August 1, 1984, the solemn opening of the museum "House-Museum of Maximilian Voloshin" took place in Koktebel. On June 19, 2007, a memorial plaque was opened in Kyiv on the house where Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin was born (house number 24 on Taras Shevchenko Boulevard in Kyiv).

The International Voloshin Competition, the International Voloshin Prize and the Voloshin September Festival were established.

In 2007, the name of M. A. Voloshin was given to Library No. 27, located in Novodevichy Proezd in Moscow.

Crimean alien. Voloshin's mysticism

Personal life of Maximilian Voloshin:

In his youth, he was friends with Alexandra Mikhailovna Petrova (1871-1921), the daughter of a colonel, head of the border guards in Feodosia. She was fond of spiritualism, then theosophy, later, not without the participation of Voloshin, she came to anthroposophy.

In 1903 in Moscow, visiting the famous collector S.I. Shchukin, Maximilian met a girl who struck him with her peculiar beauty, sophistication and original worldview - Margarita Vasilievna Sabashnikova. She was an artist of the Repin school, a fan of Vrubel's work. She was known in the artistic environment as a subtle portrait painter and colorist. In addition, she wrote poetry (worked in the direction of symbolism).

On April 12, 1906, Sabashnikova and Voloshin got married in Moscow. But the marriage turned out to be short-lived - a year later they broke up, maintaining friendly relations until the end of Voloshin's life. One of the external reasons for the gap was Margarita Vasilievna's infatuation with Vyacheslav Ivanov, with whom the Voloshins lived next door in St. Petersburg.

In 1922 M.V. Voloshina was forced to leave Soviet Russia, settled in the south of Germany, in Stuttgart, where she lived until her death in 1976, she was engaged in spiritual painting of the Christian and anthroposophical direction.

Soon after parting with Sobashnikova, in 1907 Voloshin left for Koktebel. And in the summer of 1909, young poets and Elizaveta (Lilya) Dmitrieva, an ugly, lame, but very talented girl, came to him.

Voloshin and Dmitrieva soon created the most famous literary hoax of the 20th century: Cherubina de Gabriac. Voloshin invented the legend, the literary mask of Cherubina, and acted as an intermediary between Dmitrieva and the editor of Apollo, S. Makovsky, but only Lilya wrote poems under this pseudonym.

On November 22, 1909, a duel took place between Voloshin and Gumilyov on the Black River. According to the "Confession", written by Elizaveta Dmitrieva in 1926 shortly before her death, the main reason was the immodesty of N. Gumilyov, who talked everywhere about his affair with Cherubina de Gabriac.

Having given Gumilyov a public slap in the face in the studio of the artist Golovin, Voloshin stood up not for his literary hoax, but for the honor of a woman close to him - Elizaveta Dmitrieva.

Gumilyov's second was Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky. Voloshin's second was Count Alexei Tolstoy.

However, the scandalous duel brought only ridicule to Voloshin: instead of a symbolic slap in the face, Voloshin gave Gumilyov a real slap in the face, lost a galosh on the way to the place of the duel and forced everyone to look for it, then fundamentally did not shoot at the enemy. Whereas Gumilyov fired twice at Voloshin, but missed. Voloshin deliberately fired into the air, and his pistol misfired twice in a row. All participants in the duel were punished with a fine of ten rubles.

Opponents after the fight did not shake hands with each other and did not reconcile. Only in 1921, having met Gumilyov in the Crimea, Voloshin answered his handshake.

Elizaveta Dmitrieva (Cherubina de Gabriak) left Voloshin immediately after the duel and married her childhood friend, engineer Vsevolod Vasiliev. For the rest of her life (she died in 1928), she corresponded with Voloshin.

Lilya Dmitrieva (Cherubina de Gabriac)

in 1923 his mother Elena Ottobaldovna died. On March 9, 1927, Voloshin officially married Maria Stepanovna Zabolotskaya, a paramedic who helped him take care of his mother in her last years of life.

It is believed that this marriage somewhat extended the life of Voloshin himself - all the remaining years he was ill a lot, almost did not leave the Crimea and needed constant professional care.

Bibliography of Maximilian Voloshin:

1900-1910 - Poems
1914 - Faces of creativity
1915 - Anno mundi ardentis
1918 - Iverny: (Selected Poems)
1919 - Deaf and dumb demons
1923 - Strife: Poems about the Revolution
1923 - Terror Poems
1946 - Ways of Russia: Poems
1976 - Maximilian Voloshin - artist. Collection of materials
1990 - Voloshin M. Autobiography. Memories of Maximilian Voloshin
1990 - Voloshin M. About himself
2007 - Voloshin Maximilian. “I was, I am...” (Compiled by Vera Terekhina

Paintings by Maximilian Voloshin:

1914 - “Spain. By the sea"
1914 - “Paris. Place de la Concorde at night»
1921 - “Two trees in the valley. Koktebel"
1921 - "Landscape with lake and mountains"
1925 - "Pink Twilight"
1925 - "Hills parched with heat"
1926 - "Moon Vortex"
1926 - "Lead Light"

The image of Maximilian Voloshin is present in the 1987 film “It’s not always summer in Crimea” directed by Willen Novak. The role of the poet was played by an actor.

May 28 (May 16 - according to the old style), 1877, Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin was born (real name - Kiriyenko-Voloshin) - Russian symbolist poet, critic, essayist, artist, philosopher, one of the brightest poets of the Silver Age.

Even during his lifetime, Maximilian Voloshin became a legend. Now the legend has grown into a myth and has been practically forgotten by our contemporaries. Nevertheless, the man-Sun, artist, poet, sculptor, Master Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin is a real figure in the history of Russian literature and Russian art. He was the guardian of the "holy craft". Its traces are imprinted not only in the soil of the Crimea, but also in the soil of Russian culture of our century: in poetry, the art of translation, prose, painting, art criticism, philosophy.

Generously gifted by nature, Maximilian Voloshin could do anything. He had golden hands. A poet and an artist united in Voloshin. He was a Master and looked like a descendant of some ancient tribe of strong men, travelers, artists. There was something solid, reliable, solid, renaissance in him. He was looking for support. Voloshin brought together, combined, formed clusters and nests of workers and creators, rejoiced at meetings and grieved over non-meetings. He believed (and remained in this belief until the end of his life) that a person is a genius from birth, that the energy of the Sun is in him. There was no other such Master and, perhaps, there never will be again on Russian soil...

early years

Maximilian Alexandrovich was born in Kyiv, in the family of a lawyer, collegiate adviser Alexander Maksimovich Kiriyenko-Voloshin (1838-1881) and Elena Ottobaldovna (1850-1923), née Glaser. Father led his family tree from the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks. Mother's ancestors were Russified Germans who came to Russia in the 18th century. As the poet himself believed, he was "a product of mixed blood (German, Russian, Italian-Greek)".

From Kyiv, the Kiriyenko-Voloshin family moved to Taganrog. At the age of four, Maximilian lost his father and was raised by his mother. Elena Ottobaldovna, being an active and independent nature, did not want to remain dependent on her husband's relatives. Together with her four-year-old son, she moved to Moscow, where she got a job and earned money herself for the maintenance and upbringing of Max. Until the age of 16, the boy lived in Moscow, studied at the 1st State Gymnasium, began to write poetry, and translated Heine.

In 1893, Elena Ottobaldovna left the capital due to financial difficulties. For pennies, she buys a small plot of land in the Crimea, near the Bulgarian village of Koktebel. Maximilian and his mother moved to the Crimea. Feodosia with its Genoese fortresses and Turkish ruins and Koktebel first appear in his life: the sea, wormwood, heaps of the ancient Karadag volcano. The whole life of the poet will be connected with Koktebel - nature itself took care of this: one of the mountains of Karadag is strikingly similar to the profile of Voloshin. “And on the rock that closed the swell of the bay, Fate and the winds sculpted my profile ...” (poem “Koktebel”, 1918).

The Koktebel house of the Voloshins was located seven miles from Feodosia. Maximilian, until he finished his studies at the gymnasium, lived in the city in a rented apartment. In Moscow, he studied very badly, getting "twos" and "ones" in all subjects, remained in the same class for the second year. Low scores were given to Voloshin by teachers not for lack of knowledge or interest in learning, but for the fact that he asked too many questions, was too “original” and could not stand a formal, formal approach to the human person. According to the memoirs of Elena Ottobaldovna, who later acquired the status of a family legend, when she handed Max's Moscow report card to the director of the gymnasium in Feodosia, he shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment and remarked that "we do not correct idiots." However, the mores in the provinces were simpler: a capable young man who drew well, wrote poetry and had an undeniable artistic talent was noticed. Soon, Max became almost a local celebrity, he was prophesied a great future and was called nothing more than "the second Pushkin."

In 1897, at the insistence of his mother, Voloshin entered the law faculty of Moscow University. In 1899, for active participation in the All-Russian student strike, he was expelled for a year and exiled to Feodosia under covert police supervision. On August 29 of the same year, he and his mother leave for Europe for almost half a year, on their first trip abroad. Returning to Moscow, Voloshin externally passed the exams at the university, transferred to the third year, and in May 1900 he again set off on a two-month trip around Europe along the route he had developed himself. This time - on foot, with friends: Vasily Isheev, Leonid Kandaurov, Alexei Smirnov. Upon his return to Russia, Maximilian Voloshin was arrested on suspicion of distributing illegal literature. He was transferred from Crimea to Moscow, kept in solitary confinement for two weeks, but was soon released, depriving him of the right to enter Moscow and St. Petersburg. This hastened Voloshin's departure to Central Asia with a survey party for the construction of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway. At that time - in a voluntary exile. In September 1900, a survey party headed by V.O. Vyazemsky, arrived in Tashkent. It includes M.A. Voloshin, who, according to the certificate, was listed as a paramedic. However, he showed such remarkable organizational skills that when the party left for the expedition, he was appointed to the responsible position of head of the caravan and head of the camp.

“1900, the junction of two centuries, was the year of my spiritual birth. I traveled with caravans in the desert. Here Nietzsche and "Three Conversations" by Vl. Solovyov. They gave me the opportunity to take a retrospective look at the entire European culture - from the height of the Asian plateaus and reassess cultural values, ”M. Voloshin wrote about this time of his life.

In Tashkent, he decides not to return to the university, but to go to Europe, to educate himself.

Citizen of the world

In 1901, M.A. Voloshin came to Paris for the second time and connected his life with this city for a long time. Having not received a systematic education as an artist, he willingly draws in the Kruglikova studio, studies painting at the Colarossi Academy, absorbs French literature. The range of his interests extends to all manifestations of modern French culture. His reviews of French events and critical articles are published in many periodicals in Russia.

In Paris M.A. Voloshin communicates with French poets and writers - M. Leclerc, Henri de Regnier, J. Lemaitre, A. Mercereau, O. Mirbeau, E. Verharne, G. Apollinaire, R. Gil, A. Frans, Sadia Levy, M. Maeterlinck , R. Rolland, artists - Odilon Redon, Ory Robin, A. Matisse, F. Leger, A. Modigliani, P. Picasso, D. Rivera, sculptors - A. Bourdelle, J. Charmois, A. Mayol, and also - with T. Garnier, G. Brandes, Khambo Lama of Tibet Agvan Dorzhiev, theosophists A. Mintslova, A. Besant, G. Olcott, anthroposophist R. Steiner, occultist Papus. In 1905, he was initiated into the Freemasons of the Grand Lodge of France, and in 1908 - to the 2nd Masonic degree, in 1909 - elevated to the degree of master, receives the nominal "Charter ...".

Even then, as a very young man, Voloshin outlined a life program for himself, based on the desire

The poet enjoys the atmosphere of the capital of France, absorbs its indescribable spirit, writes poems that will soon make up a wonderful cycle "Paris" - a kind of declaration of love to this city, a feeling of merging with it, an elegiac song of farewell to the passing youth. About the place occupied by Paris, France in the life of the poet, you can read in the memoirs of Voloshin, written by M. Tsvetaeva:

In 1908, the Polish sculptor Edward Wittig creates a large sculptural portrait of M.A. Voloshin, which was exhibited at the Autumn Salon, was purchased by the Paris Mayor's Office and installed the following year at 66 Exelman Boulevard, where it stands to this day.

Voloshin often visits Russia, but not only there. “Years of Wanderings” is the name of the first cycle of the first collection of poems by the poet. Wandering - this word can define the initial stage of his life path.

“These years, I’m just an absorbent sponge. I am all eyes, all ears. I wander around countries, museums, libraries: Rome, Spain, Corsica, Andorra, Louvre, Prado, Vatican… National Library. In addition to the technique of the word, I master the technique of the brush and pencil… The stages of the wandering of the spirit: Buddhism, Catholicism, magic, Freemasonry, occultism, theosophy, R. Steiner. A period of great personal experiences of a romantic and mystical nature ... ”, the artist writes in his 1925 Autobiography.

Maximilian Voloshin was interested in everything new and original - in literature, art, philosophy, being. Grain by grain, he collected everything that corresponded to his worldview, which then crystallized into his extraordinary tolerance, visionary lines of poetry, amazing watercolors, original critical articles and lectures. Being an Orthodox person and gravitating towards the Old Believers, Voloshin strove for self-restraint and self-giving both in everyday life and in creativity.

“You have given and you are rich in this, but you are slaves of everything that is a pity to give,” he said, recognizing the House and the library as the only physical property.

“He gave everything, gave everything,” recalled Marina Tsvetaeva.

Margarita Sabashnikova

For all his outward originality and charm, Maximilian Aleksandrovich was deprived of what is called male attractiveness for a very long time. Women preferred to be friends with him, trusted him as a friend, but nothing more. In her youth, even Elena Ottobaldovna often laughed at her son: “What kind of poet are you if you have never fallen in love?” And some of his girlfriends admitted that they would boldly go to the bath with him and allow themselves to wash their backs, not considering this act to be beyond the bounds of decency.

Only in 1903, in Moscow, visiting the famous collector S.I. Schukin Maximilian Aleksandrovich met a girl who struck him with her peculiar beauty, sophistication and original worldview. Her name was Margarita Vasilievna Sabashnikova. An artist of the Repin school, an admirer of Vrubel's work, known in the artistic environment as a fine portrait painter and colorist, as well as a symbolist poet, she won Voloshin's heart. Many critics noted the "heaviness" and "tightness" of Maximilian Voloshin's love lyrics, giving all the praise to his civil poetry. However, in the first years of his meetings with Margarita Vasilievna, he almost became a lyric poet:

On April 12, 1906, Sabashnikova and Voloshin got married in Moscow. Later, looking back at the past, Maximilian Alexandrovich was inclined to consider Margarita Sabashnikova his first and almost only love. Only their marriage was short-lived. According to contemporaries, the spouses did not suit each other too much: their worldview turned out to be different, the tone of Margarita Vasilievna was too edifying. Voloshin, who did not accept teaching, but only companionship, tried to save love from everyday life, but his efforts were in vain. Even outwardly, the Sabashnikov-Voloshin alliance made a strange impression. There is a case when once Max brought his young wife to Koktebel, and a little girl who was visiting Elena Ottobaldovna exclaimed in bewilderment: “Mom! Why did such a princess marry this janitor?!”

A year later, the couple broke up, maintaining friendly relations until the end of Voloshin's life. One of the external reasons was Margarita Vasilievna's infatuation with Vyacheslav Ivanov, with whom the Voloshins lived next door in St. Petersburg. But their romance also did not work out. In 1922 M.V. Voloshina was forced to leave Soviet Russia. She settled in the south of Germany, in Stuttgart, where she lived until her death in 1976 and was engaged in spiritual painting of the Christian and anthroposophical direction.

House of the Poet in Koktebel

In 1903, Maximilian Voloshin started building his own house in Koktebel. His sketches of the project of the house have been preserved. The interior layout is unique - 22 small rooms are all connected by doors so that when you enter the house, you can walk around the house without going outside. But from each room there was a door outside - it was possible to retire and live, as in a cell. The house was originally planned for the convenience of guests, for their relaxation, creativity and mutual communication.

The house was built in two stages. In 1913, Voloshin completed an extension to the house - a double-height workshop made of wild stone with a high bay window. The building, with different rhythms of architectural volumes and windows, surrounded by light blue deck terraces, with a tower-bridge turned out to be surprisingly harmonious, making up a single whole with the Koktebel intersecting landscape. Many pieces of furniture and the interior of the house are also made by the hands of Voloshin himself. Currently, they have a cultural, historical and artistic value.

The phrase "House of the Poet" carries both direct and figurative meaning. This is the residence, the workshop of the poet and artist. And at the same time, the House of the Poet expands to the concept of the World of the Poet.

Voloshin's house is like a ship. That's what they call it - the ship. Haven home? Not only. Above the house is a tower with a platform for observing the stars. Launch pad for the flight of thought. Here the poet felt the connection of the house, the lonely soul and the immensity of the universe. Cimmeria becomes not only the place of Voloshin's physical residence, his place of residence, but also the true homeland of his spirit, replacing wandering, "hunting for change of place."

Here, amid the turmoil of the hot years of the revolution and the Civil War, the tragedies of the first years of Soviet power, M.A. Voloshin managed to create a unique style of life and communication, maintain an atmosphere of hospitality, high culture and true creativity.

brilliant hoax

In 1907, after parting with Sobashnikova, Voloshin decides to leave for Koktebel. Here he writes his famous Cimmerian Twilight cycle. Since 1910, he has been working on monographic articles about K.F. Bogaevsky, A.S. Golubkina, M.S. Saryan, advocates for the art groups "Jack of Diamonds" and "Donkey's Tail". During this period, spending a lot of time in Koktebel, Voloshin remains no stranger to the life of St. Petersburg bohemia: the “omnipresent” Max attends the evenings at the “Tower” of Vyacheslav Ivanov, actively communicates with symbolist poets, participates in the creation of the famous literary magazine “Apollo”.

In the summer of 1909, young poets Nikolai Gumilev and Elizaveta (Lilya) Dmitrieva, an ugly, lame, but very talented girl, came to Voloshin in Koktebel. Maximilian Alexandrovich, unlike Gumilyov and other members of the Apollo editorial staff, immediately felt great potential in the modest Lila and managed to inspire her with faith in her creative abilities. Voloshin and Dmitrieva soon created the most famous literary hoax of the 20th century, Cherubina de Gabriac. Voloshin invented the legend, the literary mask of Cherubina, and acted as an intermediary between Dmitrieva and the editor of Apollo, S. Makovsky. Poems were written only by Lily.

On November 22, 1909, a duel took place between Voloshin and N. Gumilyov on the Black River. Much has been said about the reasons for this duel in studies on the history of the Silver Age. According to the "Confession", written by Elizaveta Dmitrieva in 1926 (shortly before her death), the main reason was the immodesty of N. Gumilyov, who talked everywhere about his affair with Cherubina de Gabriac. Having given Gumilyov a public slap in the face in the studio of the artist Golovin, Voloshin stood up not for his literary hoax, but for the honor of a woman close to him - Elizaveta Dmitrieva. However, the scandalous duel, in which Voloshin acted as a knight - a defender and a "slave" of honor - did not bring Maximilian Alexandrovich anything but ridicule. Leaving Gumilyov’s impartial act unattended, contemporaries for some reason were inclined to condemn the behavior of his opponent: instead of a symbolic slap in the face, Voloshin gave Gumilyov a real slap in the face, on the way to the place of the duel he lost a galosh and forced everyone to look for it, then he didn’t shoot on principle, etc. .d. etc.

However, the duel of poets, despite all the fantastic rumors and anecdotes associated with it, was a serious duel. Gumilyov fired twice at Voloshin, but missed. Voloshin deliberately fired into the air, and his pistol misfired twice in a row. All participants in the duel were punished with a fine of ten rubles. Contrary to newspaper reports, the opponents did not shake hands with each other after the duel and did not reconcile. Only in 1921, having met Gumilyov in the Crimea, Voloshin answered his handshake, but Gumilyov did not consider the long-standing incident settled, and this meeting was clearly unpleasant for him.

Elizaveta Dmitrieva (Cherubina de Gabriak) left Voloshin immediately after the duel and married her childhood friend, engineer Vsevolod Vasiliev. For the rest of her life (until 1928), she, like Maximilian Alexandrovich, was an active member of the Anthroposophical Society, corresponded with Voloshin.

Voloshin: poet, artist

The first collection of poems by M. Voloshin “Poems. 1900-1910" came out in Moscow in 1910, when Voloshin was already 33 years old. Meanwhile, he has long been a prominent figure in the literary process: an influential critic and established poet with a reputation as a "strict Parnassian". In 1914, a book of his selected articles on culture, "Faces of Creativity" was published; and in 1915, a book of passionate poems about the horror of war, Anno mundi ardentis 1915.

In 1910-1914, Voloshin rarely leaves Koktebel. He pays more and more attention to painting, paints watercolor landscapes of the Crimea, exhibits his works at exhibitions of the World of Art.

“... In Voloshin's poetry, in his amazing brush, giving birth to the idea of ​​Koktebel discovered by him, in the whole way of life, starting from the sketch of the house, from the arrangement of rooms, verandas, stairs to the artist's landscapes, his paintings, collections of pebbles, fossils and a peculiar selection of books from his library we get creatively experienced and therefore born for the first time in the life of culture Koktebel. Forty years of creative life and thoughts in Koktebel, thoughts about Koktebel is the culture of open Koktebel, attached to the heights of Western European culture. … M.A. appeared in Moscow, quickly entering into its topic of the day and acting mainly as a peacemaker, smoothing out the contradictions between opponents ...; and then disappeared without a trace either to Europe, where he collected, so to speak, honey from the artistic culture of the West, or to his native Koktebel, where in solitude he transformed everything he saw and heard into that new quality, which subsequently created Voloshin's house as one of the most cultural centers not only in Russia, but also in Europe,” wrote a contemporary of Maximilian Voloshin.

Voloshin called the first manifestations of popular discontent at the beginning of 1905 "rebellion on his knees". In January of this year, Voloshin was in St. Petersburg. He writes the article "Bloody Week in St. Petersburg", an article that, on the one hand, is an eyewitness account, on the other hand, shows the mood of the poet himself. He already understood at that time that what happened in the days of bloody January was the first link in the chain of events of a revolutionary nature. The poet foresaw the end of the empire, although he expressed it, perhaps too pompously, theatrically. In prose, it sounds like this: “Spectator, be quiet! The curtain goes up." In verses written in St. Petersburg in 1905 ("Premonitions"), he says:

The “wanderings of the spirit” take possession of the poet, he is fond of theosophy, self-knowledge, studies the history of the French Revolution, continuing to reflect on the fate of his homeland.

What is the path of history? Voloshin does not know. But he strongly rejects cruelty and bloodshed. War, murder, terror - these means are not justified by any end, and therefore are unacceptable to him. This is the position of Maximilian Voloshin. Throughout his life, she could take on one shade or another, but in essence he remained true to Christian principles, especially strong during the First World War:

World War I

In July 1914, Voloshin left at the invitation of M. Sabashnikova to Switzerland, to Dornach. Here, representatives of different countries, united around Rudolf Steiner, began the construction of the St. John's building (Goetheanum) - an anthroposophical temple, symbolizing the unity of religions and nations.

Subsequently, Maximilian Alexandrovich recalled that on this journey, fate seemed to keep him. He was in time everywhere at the last moment before the start of the world massacre: he boarded the last steamer, jumped on the bandwagon of the last train, and all the doors seemed to slam behind him, preventing him from turning back:

As a militia warrior of the second category, a completely healthy and capable man, M. Voloshin was subject to conscription. His stay in Switzerland, France, Spain in 1914-1916 could be regarded as desertion, evasion of civic duty and entailed the deprivation of Russian citizenship. Voloshin could be considered a "citizen of the world": his work was in constant interaction with the cultural traditions of many countries and peoples, but the fate of the motherland also excited the poet. Not wanting to be called either a deserter or an emigrant, in the spring of 1916 Maximilian Aleksandrovich returned to Russia. He officially addresses the minister with a refusal to serve in the military and expresses his readiness to suffer any punishment for this:

“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 discord, 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." It goes without saying that Voloshin's socio-historical position is compared with Tolstoy's non-resistance to evil by violence. Of course, Tolstoy's teaching is not limited to such non-resistance, it is much broader and more ambitious. In the article “The Fate of Leo Tolstoy” (1910), Voloshin notes: “The formula for universal healing from evil is simple: do not resist evil, and evil will not touch you. Tolstoy spent it in his life consistently and to the end. And further - contritely: "Tolstoy did not understand the meaning of evil on earth and could not solve its secrets."

There is no point in turning Voloshin into a Tolstoyan, but it is quite natural to speak of humanism as the principle that unites them. Only there are times when such a position in the eyes of the majority looks not just ridiculous foolishness, but partly a crime.

What exactly the minister replied to the poet's message is not indicated in any of the known biographies and autobiographies of M.A. Voloshin. Evidently, in 1916 the Russian War Ministry had other things to do than analyze the anthroposophical views of Mr. Voloshin and appeal to his patriotism. It is only known that on November 20, 1916, Voloshin was released from military service by a medical examination and left for Koktebel.

Revolution and Civil War

However, already in 1917, after the Bolshevik coup, the humanistic position “above the fight” taken by Maximilian Alexandrovich did not meet with understanding even among the closest people.

The October Revolution, as well as the events of 1917 in general, are perceived by Voloshin as a catastrophe even greater and closer to his heart than the entire previous world war:

From November 10 to November 25, 1917, ensign Sergei Yakovlevich Efron and his wife Marina Tsvetaeva were in Koktebel. Maximilian Alexandrovich and Elena Ottobaldovna had long-standing friendly relations with the Tsvetaeva-Efron family: Sergey and Marina met in their house in Koktebel, Elena Ottobaldovna was the godmother of their eldest daughter, Ariadna Efron, and Maximilian was an attorney in all family affairs. Sergei Efron, who took part in the anti-Bolshevik uprising in Moscow, clearly sided with the opponents of Soviet power. From the Voloshins, he immediately went to the Don to join the Volunteer Army.

According to the memoirs of M. Tsvetaeva, in those fateful, decisive days for Russia, even the mother reproached Max for his defiant inaction:

“- Look, Max, at Seryozha, here is a real man! Husband. War is fighting. And you? What are you doing, Max?

Mom, I can’t get into my tunic and shoot at living people just because they think differently than I do.

They think, they think. There are times, Max, when you don't have to think, but do. Do not think - do.

Such times, mother, are always with animals - this is called "animal instincts."

Having resisted the authority of Elena Ottobaldovna, an adult 40-year-old man Voloshin deliberately chooses for himself the unprofitable, ridiculous role of a peacemaker precisely when there can be no talk of reconciliation of opponents. On the one hand, he actually stands "between the hammer and the anvil", in the center of a raging element in which there is no mercy for anyone:

And a person who has chosen such a place in history for himself cannot be called a coward.

On the other hand, the position of M. Voloshin during the bloody civil strife is a high example of humanity. Consciously refusing to take up arms, he does not stand in a detached pose of an outside observer. The poet, citizen, man Voloshin, without thinking, does everything in his power to save people who have fallen into the crucible of the Civil War:

In the most difficult years (from 1917 to 1921), Voloshin's Koktebel house was filled with tenants, up to six hundred people stayed with hospitable hosts during the summer. It was a free shelter for scientists, writers, artists, artists, aviators.

“Those who knew Voloshin in the era of the civil war, the change of governments that lasted more than three years in the Crimea, correctly remembered how alien he was to throwing, fright, short-term political enthusiasm. In his own way, but just as stubbornly as Leo Tolstoy resisted the whirlwinds of history that beat on the threshold of his house ... ”, recalled E. Gertsyk.

Voloshin's house in Koktebel - the House of the Poet - becomes an island of warmth and light for everyone. Not accepting either white or red terror, the poet saved both of them: he gave shelter, acted as a defender and intercessor for the Reds before the Whites, for the Whites before the Reds. Often his intercession and participation in the fate of this or that person saved the life of a person condemned to death, commuted the sentence of the court, and prevented the inevitable death of cultural monuments and works of art.

In 1918, the poet managed to save the Koktebel estate of the heirs of E. A. Junge from destruction, where many works of art and a rare library were kept. In January 1919, he takes part in the second conference of the Taurida Scientific Association in Sevastopol, dedicated to the protection of cultural and natural monuments.

In the summer of 1919, Voloshin saved General N. A. Marx, a prominent paleographer and compiler of the Legends of Crimea, from an unfair White Guard trial. In May 1920, when the underground Bolshevik congress, which had gathered in Koktebel, was overtaken by white counterintelligence, one of the delegates found shelter and protection in Voloshin's house. At the end of July, Maximilian Alexandrovich helped the release of the poet O. E. Mandelstam, who was arrested by the White Guards.

On October 3, 1920, Voloshin wrote a letter to the Bureau of the Taurida Scientific Congress (in Simferopol), petitioning for the inviolability of "libraries, collections of paintings, offices of scientists and writers, studios of artists" in Feodosia. “And in the military camp, those few nests in which creative work continues,” he cries, asking to free the gallery of I.K. Aivazovsky, his house and the house of K.F. Bogaevsky, A.M. Petrova, artist N. I. Khrustachev, astronomer V. K. Tserasky.

The success of the active peacemaker Voloshin was due to the fact that Maximilian Aleksandrovich was never afraid of anyone. He believed that the best human qualities, in the end, will prevail over malice and hatred, that love and goodness are higher than bloodshed and strife. Voloshin in every possible way emphasized his apathy in relations with both the red commissars and the white military leaders. His contemporaries noted more than once that Max, by his mere presence, could force the disputants to reconcile, and imperceptibly make the hand raised for a blow lowered and even extended for a friendly shake. He could afford to appear for negotiations in a government office without pants, in a chiton and sandals on his bare feet, with his hair tied up with a strap. And no one dared to call it a pose or foolishness. He was like "above the world", beyond such concepts as "officially" or "decently".

According to contemporaries, Voloshin was many-sided, but not duplicitous. If he was wrong, then always in the direction of a person’s life, and not his death: there are no right, no guilty, everyone is worthy of both pity and condemnation.

There is a legend that during the Red Terror (late 1920), when thousands of people were shot in the Crimea, Bela Kun himself visited the House of the Poet and allowed Voloshin to delete every tenth from the execution lists. And Voloshin crossed out those to whom he had gone yesterday with requests for pardon for opponents of the white regime.

Cimmerian recluse

Despite the constant troubles associated with relations with the authorities, the maintenance of the estate and the economy, in the twenties Voloshin opened a large and serious stage in his poetic work, wrote a large number of beautiful Cimmerian watercolors, about which the artist and exacting critic Alexander Benois wrote:

“There is not much in the history of painting dedicated only to “real” artists, there are works that can evoke thoughts and dreams, similar to those that excite the improvisations of this “amateur” ...”.

During the years of the Civil War, Voloshin created a number of his most famous poems and poems (the cycles "Communication", "Portraits", the poems "Saint Seraphim", "Habakkuk", translations by A. de Regnier). Collections of his poems and poetic translations are published in Moscow and Kharkov.

Veresaev makes an accurate diagnosis:

“The revolution hit his work like a steel on flint, and bright, magnificent sparks rained down from it. As if a completely different poet appeared, courageous, strong, with a simple and wise word ... "

“Neither the war nor the revolution frightened me and disappointed me in nothing ... - Voloshin wrote in his 1925 Autobiography. “The principle of communist economics responded perfectly to my aversion to wages and to buying and selling.”

After the occupation of the Crimea by the Red Army, in 1921 Voloshin worked in the field of public education. He was appointed head of the protection of monuments of art and science in the Feodosiya district, participates in cultural and educational activities of the Crimean national education, teaches at command courses and at the People's University.

In 1922, Maximilian Alexandrovich's health deteriorated noticeably: he fell ill with paleorthritis. Elena Ottobaldovna, having survived the Civil War and famine in the Crimea, also went to bed. She died in 1923. After the death of his mother, M.A. Voloshin officially married Maria Stepanovna Zabolotskaya, a paramedic who helped him take care of Elena Ottobaldovna in the last years of her life.

Perhaps this marriage somewhat extended the life of Voloshin himself. For the remaining ten years, he was ill a lot and almost did not leave the Crimea.

But "Soviet reality" now and then itself invaded the life of the House of the Poet. The local village council treated Voloshin as a dacha owner and a "bourgeois", from time to time demanding his eviction from Koktebel. The financial inspection could not believe that the poet did not rent rooms for money - and demanded payment of tax for "maintenance of the hotel." Komsomol activists burst into the house, calling for donations to Povitroflot and Osoaviakhim, then branding Voloshin for his refusal, which they regarded as a “counter-revolution” ... Again and again they had to turn to Moscow, ask for intercession from Lunacharsky, Gorky, Yenukidze; collect guests' signatures under the "certificate" of the free of charge of their home ...

In a letter to L. B. Kamenev in November 1924, turning to the party boss for assistance in his undertaking, Voloshin explained: “Poets and artists came to me here from year to year, which created a kind of literary- art center. During the life of my mother, the house was adapted for renting out in the summer, and after her death, I turned it into a free house for writers, artists, scientists ... The doors are open to everyone, even those who come from the street.

Finally, in 1925, by the Decree of the Crimean Central Executive Committee, Voloshin's house, as well as his mother's house, located on the same plot of land, were assigned to Maximilian Aleksandrovich. He receives a certificate from the People's Commissar of Education A. V. Lunacharsky, allowing the creation of a free rest home for writers in the Koktebel House. The House of the Poet again becomes the center of the cultural life of the country. In 1925 alone, almost three hundred people visited his house and stayed for a week, some for a month: poets, artists, writers. The entire restless household rested on the shoulders of Voloshin and his wife Maria Stepanovna. Maximilian Alexandrovich was accepted as a member of the Writers' Union, exhibitions of his artworks are held in Moscow, Kharkov, Leningrad, he was elected an honorary member of the Society for the Study of the Crimea, lectures on the history of art, writes memoirs.

But the time of relative prosperity is very quickly replaced by a "black streak": since 1929, Maximilian Voloshin's health has deteriorated sharply. In addition to paleorthritis, asthma worsened. The state of mind of the poet was pressed by a heightened sense of what was happening in the country - the approaching thirties made themselves felt more and more clearly, news of the arrests and deaths of acquaintances came more and more often. The local authorities were ready to change their decision regarding Voloshin's ownership of the Poet's House in Koktebel and subject the artist to socialist "densification". Due to worries about the fate of the House, which could not only be taken away, but also subjected to restructuring, in fact destroying the artist’s favorite brainchild, on December 9, 1929, Voloshin suffered a stroke.

In 1931, M.A. Voloshin gave up ownership of the land and transferred his mother's house and the first floor of his house to the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers to set up a house of creativity there. House of M.A. Voloshin became building No. 1, and the house of E.O. Kiriyenko-Voloshina - building No. 2 of the House of Creativity of the VSSP.

According to eyewitnesses, Voloshin's state of mind in the last year of his life was terrible. The love for a man, by which he lived and escaped during the years of the bloody Russian massacre, did not save the poet himself. In the summer of 1931, a terrible famine broke out in the Crimea and throughout Ukraine, caused by forced collectivization, the genocide of the authorities against their own people. Humanity was not compatible with inhumanity and therefore was abolished as an ideology alien to the proletariat, alien to socialism of the Stalinist type, contrary to the spirit of the dictatorial regime. In this calculated and filtered perception of artistic values ​​there was no place for Voloshin's poetry. Feeling how the last soil that held him is leaving under his feet, the poet begins to think about a way to commit suicide. He tends to “shoot himself” - write a few truthful poems about the “current moment”, say whatever he thinks is necessary and die. There was no longer any strength to row "against the current".

In the summer of 1932, Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin fell ill with pneumonia, did not begin to be treated and died on August 11, 1932, at the age of 56. According to his will, the poet was buried on Mount Kuchuk-Yenishary (later called Voloshinskaya). “At the top of Karadag there is the grave of a Mohammedan saint, and on this peak is the grave of Voloshin, a Russian saint,” local Tatars said about him.

Memory

The house of Maximilian Voloshin - the House of the Poet continued to play a significant role in the culture and literary process of the 20th century even after the owner left. A symbol of free-thinking and free-creation, he attracted creative intelligentsia to Koktebel. At various times, the most famous figures of culture and science worked and rested in the House of the Poet: N. Gumilyov, V. Bryusov, S. Solovyov, V. Khodasevich, O. Mandelstam, M. and A. Tsvetaev, G. Shengeli, K. Chukovsky, I. Ehrenburg, A. Tolstoy, M. Bulgakov, M. Gorky, V. Veresaev, A. Gabrichevsky, N. Zamyatin, L. Leonov, M. Prishvin, K. Paustovsky, K. Trenev, A. Tvardovsky, I. Brodsky, V. Aksenov, K. Petrov-Vodkin, B. Kustodiev, V. Polenov, St. Richter and many others.

Until 1976, his widow Maria Stepanovna Voloshina (Zabolotskaya) lived on the second or third floors of the house of M.A. Voloshin. She preserved the memorial furnishings of Maximilian Alexandrovich's rooms and preserved the House of the Poet, its library and archive.

The name of Maximilian Voloshin was hushed up by the official authorities until 1977, when, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the poet's birthday, a small book of his poems with large denominations was published. For almost sixty years in a cultural environment, his poems were copied by hand and retyped on a typewriter, rare exhibitions of his watercolors aroused great interest.

At the request of M.S. Voloshina in 1975, work began on the creation of the museum, and only on August 1, 1984, the M.A. Voloshin opened the doors wide for visitors. It was another small victory of culture over ideology.

House-Museum of M.A. Voloshin today is one of the most unique museums that have preserved the authenticity of the collection in the memorial building. Almost all the furniture in the House is made by the hands of the owner and is a work of art with paintings, inlays and burning. The house is filled with objects, books and rarities, acquired, donated, brought from abroad. By the will of fate and the efforts of many people, all these things were preserved in the places determined by their owner a century earlier, and together with the archive and artistic heritage of Maximilian Voloshin, today they make up the museum's stock collection, numbering more than 55 thousand items. For Europe, which has survived more than one war, this is the rarest phenomenon in the museum world.