Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.

And this tenderness was not like That which a certain poet At the beginning of the century called true And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all— It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.

I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.