I relish the thought of winter myself, though perhaps more in theory than practice. This past winter was particularly bleak in New York, especially January when the ceaseless snow and ice seemed almost unbearable. I vividly recall dragging myself to the G train every day, seven months pregnant, forced into the same clunky boots, staring at patches on the sidewalk, hoping I wouldn’t slip. Ms. Ezersky also cancelled our lessons during that time because she suffered a spinal fracture and needed time to recover. I’ve since realized–by piecing some broken conversations together–that the cause of the fracture was bone marrow cancer.

During those months, I spoke with her fairly often, knowing how much she hates abandoning her busy cosmopolitan schedule for days spent convalescing at home.  She told me in one of these conversations that she had just come back from the tailor down the street. I promptly scolded her for going out in such icy weather when the fracture hadn’t even healed. “What do you want me to do, anyway?” she yelled back. “In Russia, this is normal weather.”

The weeks crawled by and still she wasn’t well enough for our lessons. My son Henry was born in early March. When I called Ms. Ezersky with the news, we set up a time to meet again (finally!), which I somehow squeezed between breastfeeding sessions with the help of my mother-in-law.  I felt an oddly delirious mix of joy and exhaustion as the cab sped over the Williamsburg bridge to her apartment on the Lower East Side. In six years of biweekly visits, I’ve never felt happier to attend my Russian lesson.

I thought she might cry when I told her that Henry’s middle name Alexander was a nod to Aleksander Pushkin. After tea and cake, we picked up where we left off in Eugene Onegin back in September, with the passage about Russian winter. From there, Pushkin goes on to describe a dream Tatiana has–she is walking over a snowy plain, everything covered in ice, when she sees a shaky footbridge. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a bear on the other side of the bridge stretches out his sharp claws.  Nerving herself, she leans on it with trembling hand and with uncertain steps, makes her way across with the bear.

This is where we stop for the day because I need to get home to feed Henry. It is only the beginning of Tatiana’s dream. Tomorrow is Ms. Ezersky’s 82nd birthday; my son will also be six weeks old tomorrow. It is only the beginning of spring.

The word sentimental generally has negative connotations–weak and driveling, pouring one’s heart out in a bathetic way. While this is certainly one aspect of the meaning, the root of it simply means feeling. One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from Derek Walcott, as both a poet and a teacher, is that sentimentality requires bravery. But expressing deep feelings in a way that isn’t overwrought also requires a great deal of skill and attention to craft.

I’m currently reading the fourth chapter of Eugene Onegin with Ms. Ezersky. In one of my favorite passages, Pushkin gently mocks Lensky for writing sentimental love notes in the album of his beloved fiance, Olga, along with little drawings of hearts and flowers. He’s so consumed with her that while they’re playing chess, he takes his own castle with his pawn. Pushkin then goes on to make fun of poets who write down every thought and feeling they have, ignoring line lengths and meter, merely cataloguing everything they see. I can only imagine how horrified he would be by our age of blogs and Facebook, where poets, too, can publish a few sentences about what they had for breakfast and call it a poem.

At the same time, Pushkin reveres his heroine, Tatiana, and allows his reader to be moved by the searingly honest love letter she pens to Onegin–filled with adolescent infatuation and anguish. And even though Onegin warns her about being so forthright and in a sense, childish, there is something incredibly captivating about the letter.

Pushkin somehow manages to straddle the line between conveying real emotion and often undercutting that emotion; the irony comes through in his tone, structure, images and language in a delicate balance of opposites. After teasing Lensky for his love notes, the poet goes on to describe his own experience as a writer–waiting till the sleepy neighbors come over after a heavy dinner,  how he grabs one of the men by the coat-tails, corners him in the closet and forces him to listen to his tragedy. And then, when the guests finally manage to escape, the poet takes a walk in the park and reads his work to birds who fly away.

Poetry writing is, by nature, a lonely, isolating endeavor. Six days into a residency at Vermont Studio Center, I sat in my studio and cried, looking at years and years of work, realizing that I had never put myself fully into it.  Although I had written many poems about fleeting moments or impossible love, I had never written anything to convey the depth of love I feel for my husband after seven years together, or about friends and loved ones, or anything truly lasting about the grief I see and feel in the world around me although I’m constantly aware of these sentiments. Everything suddenly came in a flood and I tried to formulate the feelings into images and words. I’m still learning the craft–and the value of editing–but it’s a start.

She got up to play me several of Alon’s songs, one of which described soldiers strewn on the battlefield as fallen red leaves, evoking the cyclical nature of war and death. His singing struck me as a cross between Bob Dylan and Yves Montand; I noticed from the album cover photo that he had also been very handsome. “Ah…”, Ms. Ezersky sighed, “I remember Sasha coming to one of my birthday parties and singing a satire that had us all rolling on the floor, but he wouldn’t let me record it since the lyrics weren’t finished. He was a great poet and singer! I tried for so many years to preserve his memory, to have his work archived and arrange tributes. What else can you do? “I later attempted to find more information about Alon on the internet but came up with very little. Like Ms. Ezersky, I feel a strong obligation to keep these memories alive somehow and record all the stories that come to me from her as mere fragments and interruptions, but are in many ways the essence of my lessons. Too much, I fear, will be lost when she is not around to share them with me.

The verb заходит means to stop in for a moment, or pass by fleetingly. I feel sometimes, like this is how life is generally spent—slipping in and out. And yet, each moment stands before us, almost soldier-like, as a great imperative to live, remember those who have lived before us, and do what we can to nourish those memories.

I loved you then. My love might flicker as before—/the embers in my soul still live,/but let these feelings trouble you no more./Think not of it, there’s nothing to forgive./I loved you without hope or demands,/often with caution, sometimes suspicion./I loved you so truly, with such tender hands./Let God give you a love like mine has been.

What strikes me most about the poem is its deeply rooted irony—the  force of emotion bubbling beneath a quiet, almost gentle surface. Of course he is wracked with pain, of course he still loves her and damns her with that final twisting of the knife at the end. Eugene Onegin is also ironic but much livelier in many ways—more complicated metrically and moving in and out of feelings and thoughts with a startling agility. Pushkin is a master of life’s delicate ironies, where nothing has meaning without its opposite, and the poet dances on the cusp of light and darkness with each word. I like to think of Pushkin, like Ginger Rogers, dancing it all backwards and in heels.

I wasn’t sure how to respond when Ms. Ezersky asked me what I thought of this operatic take on Pushkin’s lyric. “The singing is beautiful, but it seems melodramatic to me in a way that doesn’t really capture Pushkin.”  She seemed pleased and eager to start our close grammatical study of Eugene Onegin, and a lesson on the double negative.

Pushkin dances, in fact, around his own verse, stepping into the story’s narrative with lyrical asides, establishing an intimacy with the reader, then retreating. We came to the end of chapter two, a real showstopper, which describes Lensky mourning the death of Olga’s father as well as Pushkin’s own thoughts on mortality: “Alas! Upon life’s furrows, in a brief harvest, generations by Providence’s secret will rise, ripen and must fall; others will come in their wake…Thus our frivolous race waxes, is in commotion, seethes, and tombward crowds its ancestors. Our time likewise will come, will come, and one fine day our grandsons out of this world will crowd us too. In the meanwhile, imbibe your fill of it—of this light life, friends! Its insignificance I realize and little am attached to it; to phantoms I have closed my eyelids; but distant hopes disturb my heart; without an imperceptible trace, to leave the world I would be sad. I live, I write, not for the sake of praise; but I’d have liked, meseems, to glorify my woeful lot, so that, like a true friend, remindful of me would be, at least, one sound. And somebody’s heart it will move; and kept by fate, perhaps in Lethe will not drown the strophe I compose.”

I regret my own inability to convey these sentiments and all their complex turns in English as Pushkin did in Russian. And that I’ve had to rely on a prose translation. At least it’s Nabokov’s.

We closed the chapter and toasted Pushkin, with Ms. Ezersky reminding me that we must finish the whole book before she dies.  She saw the tears in my eyes and poured me another glass of homemade wine.  I left my lesson feeling half-drunk, alive.

Yesterday was her 81st birthday. Happy birthday, my dear Ms. Ezersky! Here’s to many more years—we’ve so much left to do.

http://www.vogue.com/voguedaily/2010/01/books-to-russia-with-love-vera-pavlova-and-elif-batuman/.

I expected few people to show up for the event, given that it had fallen on the eve of another major blizzard, and was delighted to see a crowd of enthusiastic Russians shuffle in at the last minute. I was further surprised, not only to hear Ms. Pavlova recite her poems in Russian, but also that they were largely rhymed and metered (I don’t think the recently published Knopf translation comes close to capturing the magic evoked by their original language, though I deeply sympathize with the task of Pavlova’s translator and husband. It strikes me as a problem with most Russian-English poetry translations, and I’ve yet to find, for example, a rhymed translation of Eugene Onegin that even tiptoes around Pushkin’s genius. For those who have only read Charles Johnston’s popular translation, I would strongly recommend Nabokov’s prose translation instead.)

What impressed me most about Vera Pavlova was that she recited every single one of her poems from memory. Her husband, who stood beside her translating each poem into English, added that she had written thousands of poems, all of which she knew by heart. (“Why do I write poems by heart?” she asks in one of the collection’s short lyrics: “Because I write them by heart.”)  A comment she made later in the evening, comparing poetry to ballet, struck me as a particularly elegant analogy, saying in essence that poets, like ballet dancers, must do their exercises at the barre every day, and that poetry should be connected to the whole body and self, rather than functioning as a mere limb. When I saw Ms. Ezersky for my lesson the next week, enthralled with Ms. Pavlova’s memorization, she said “Yes, of course. What poet cannot recite his own poems? It’s like not even recognizing your own child.”

I feel this to be deeply true, yet like most Americans, rarely memorize poems. Perhaps it’s a luxury—we can afford not to—unlike the many Russians, most famously Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam, who had to memorize their poems and burn them at the risk being arrested or worse. Let’s hope we never have to burn our poems, and yet the lack of desire or will to memorize poetry seems like a form of disembodiment to me, as if the thigh bone weren’t quite connected to the hip bone. Although I have studied poetry in several reputable creative writing programs, Derek Walcott stands out as one of the few teachers who required us to memorize Auden or Crane or Hardy each week to recite in class, and sometimes, randomly at parties. To this day, these are some of the only poems I know by heart, along with some Shakespeare I learned in grade school, and a 26-line poem by Lermontov I memorized in Russian for Ms. Ezersky’s 80th birthday party last year (and nearly short-circuited my brain in the process.) But there is April, peeking round the bend, offering us all a chance to celebrate poetry by memorizing it— feeling and being it, rather than just reading and talking and dancing around it.

As a full-time financial writer, avid city dweller and general culture vulture, I often feel that I don’t have enough time for literature and poetry. In my most harried moments, I try to remember something Ms. Ezersky once told me about writing lines of Pushkin on the backs of cancelled checks when she worked as a bank teller so she could memorize them in her free time.  After becoming a librarian in her thirties, she began to host a regular literary salon with her husband on Tuesdays (her one day off), inviting people over to read and discuss underground journals (one of her close friends was, in fact, arrested for reading Doctor Zhivago, which led them to realize that a friend of the family was secretly working for the KGB and keeping them under surveillance.) I asked her how she ever had time to prepare for these meetings since reading was strictly forbidden at work, although it was a library (oh, the torturous irony!) “Ha!” she exclaimed, “we had no time for anything! Life was terrible in so many ways but we stood in the potato lines and pressed the curtains and waxed the floors when we could and sometimes, when one of us would get a can of peas or a new pair of shoes we’d proudly display them on the kitchen table for everyone to ooooh and aaaah. We were so happy to have each other and to be able to share art and literature. Of course, it was also a little bit dangerous.” Back in those days, she wasn’t able to write nearly as much criticism as her current circumstances permit (usually several arts and culture reviews a month for New York’s Russian newspapers) but like most of life, she said, it was manageable. “It’s what we all lived for.”

My husband and I sometimes host a poetry salon along with a few dear friends and very talented poets—and though none of us has been arrested (yet!), I realize how very rare these evenings are and how much I cherish them.  I can’t help but think of the 37-year-old Pushkin on his deathbed, reported to have reached for his shelves and cried “farewell my books, my friends!”  And then, merely, “life is over.” What else can I say? It makes me want to run out, buy a barrel of vodka, roll it down Graham Avenue and have everyone over for a raging, Russian-inspired arts and literature salon. You know the address. Just rap on the door three times—the password’s “Blavatsky”.

At nearly 81, Ms. Ezersky manages to keep a busier schedule than most people half her age as she continues to cover major ballet, film and opera events for several Russian newspapers. (She also takes several international trips a year—anywhere from Bogata to Venice to Bryce Canyon in Utah and only once has complained to me about having to take a vacation in the Poconos—I vill die there!) It astounds me that so little of her work is available in English—apart from the hundreds or perhaps thousands of articles printed in Russian, she has written several books of literary criticism and conducted who knows how many interviews. Only one of her books has been translated into English (at Warhol’s behest)—a suite of interviews featuring Brodsky and Rostropovich among a dozen other cultural figures thrust into exile during the Stalin era. Mr. Warhol never was able to find a publisher for it, but after many months of my pleading, Ms. Ezersky gave me a photographed copy of the translations in honor of our five-year anniversary—one of my most sacred possessions (in addition to an “International Pushkin Society” pin she recently bestowed upon me), though this copy does not include photos from the original book in Russian, including a snapshot of Brodsky in flannels and thigh-high boots, taken at the collective farm he’d be sentenced to in Russia before he left for New York. She showed me this photo only after I said how much I loved the animation in A Room and A Half, depicting Brodsky as an yoked ox in the middle of nowhere.

She also told me that Brodsky insisted on proofing the English translation of his interviews and gave her very extensive notes, which she may have thrown out , though they could be lurking somewhere in that apartment. Oh, Ms. Ezersky, if only you would give me one week in that apartment!

I also met my Russian teacher, Ms. Ezersky, at the Samovar in the fall of 2004, where Ilya Kaminsky was reading from his collection  Dancing in Odessa.  I had expressed some interest in learning Russian and my then-boyfriend (now husband) marched up to Roman and asked if he could help us find the best teacher in the city. Fortunately, he was sharing his table (and horseradish vodka) with Ms. Ezersky. She wrote down her Lower East Side address on a napkin and said “be there”.  When she asked why I wanted to study Russian, I could think of nothing else but wishing to translate Mandelstam, whom I’d been told was entirely untranslatable and had to be read in the original. Ms. Ezersky laughed at me, “Mandelstam is far too difficult for you! We start with the alphabet.”  Since then, we’ve read some Pushkin and Lermontov — no Mandelstam yet (more on that later) but in the meantime…

Stop at the Samovar, down some coriander and dill vodka in Brodsky’s honor and hop on the 1/9 to see this amazing piece of work about memory, poetry, life and death at the Film Forum this weekend. Only 5 days left! http://www.filmforum.org/ Also, please let me know where I can get a copy of “we cannot live without champagne and gypsies”!