Arseni Alexandrovich Tarkovsky

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Arseni Tarkowski in the mid-1930s
Tarkowski's grave in the Peredelkino cemetery

Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky ( Russian Арсений Александрович Тарковский ; born June 12 . Jul / 25. June  1907 greg. In Jelisawetgrad , Russian Empire ; † 27. May 1989 in Moscow ) was a Soviet poet and translator. He was the father of the film director Andrei Tarkovsky .

life and work

From 1925 to 1929 he studied at the Moscow State School of Literature. From 1924 to 1926 he headed the editorial department of the literary feature pages of the newspaper “ Gudok ”. The writer Mikhail Bulgakov was one of his colleagues there . In 1926 he published his first own poems in a poetry anthology. In 1928 he married Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova. In 1931 he worked for the State Broadcasting Company . When his poem "Glas" was broadcast on the radio there, higher officials accused him of "mysticism". Thereupon Tarkovsky withdrew to a village about 300 kilometers from Moscow and refrained from further publishing his own poems for the next 30 years. He worked as a freelance translator of Arabic, Armenian, Turkmen, Georgian and Hebrew poetry. On April 4, 1932 his son Andrej was born. Daughter Marina was born on October 3, 1934. In the same year his first volume appeared with adaptations. In 1936 he met Antonina Alexandrovna Bochonowa and left his family because of her. In 1940 he became a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR . A close friendship began with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva , which ended with the poet's suicide in 1941. Tarkovsky divorced his wife that year and married AA Bochonowa. Immediately after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in the German-Soviet War in June 1941, he volunteered for the front. He was used as a war correspondent for the army newspaper Bojewaja Trewoga (combat alarm). He was seriously wounded in the war in 1943 and subsequently lost a leg to an amputation . In 1944 he met the translator Tatiana Alexejewna Oserskaja, whom he married in 1951 after divorcing his second wife in 1950. Since 1946 friendship with the poet Anna Akhmatova . Finally, in 1962, in the course of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev , he was able to publish his first volume of his own poems ( Before the Snow ); it contains works from the period from 1929 to 1962. In 1966 his second volume of poems ( Der Erde - Irdisches ) was published. Other volumes of poetry followed, such as Der Bote (1969), Gedichte (1974), Zauberberge (1979), Wintertag (1980), Selected (1982), Verse Various Years (1983) and From Youth to Age (1987).

His son Andrej's films Der Spiegel , Stalker and Nostalghia made his poetry, some of which Arseni performed himself, also known outside the Soviet Union.

He has translated texts by authors such as Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri , Nizami , Magtymguly , Kemine , Sayat Nova , Wascha-Pschawela , Adam Mickiewicz , Mollanepes and Grigol Orbeliani .

Essence and meaning of his poetry

The basic mood of almost all of Arseni Tarkovsky's poems is this very special Russian melancholy: a melancholy of almost mystical intensity, carried by a strong, but indefinite longing. You can also feel it in the films of his son Andrei, especially in Nostalghia , which tells of the melancholy of a Russian poet in exile in Italy. But while melancholy in this film is an "illness leading to death," in the poems Arsenis it appears like an illness leading to life. This lyrical melancholy is on the one hand dark and earthy, on the other hand light and wide like the sky over the endless Russian landscape. There is always autumn in his poems, even if they are about spring or summer. The defining element is the water in all its manifestations, especially in the form of streams and lakes, "the water cold and clear", or as rain on "cloudy, mournful" days, which drums on the roofs and over the face (the Beloved) runs, "as if tears are being paid for". In addition, the earth, or rather: the clod of earth in which the poet feels deeply rooted, the Russian birch forests, also preferred in the rain, when the "drops run off the cold branches". Nature is the mirror of the poet's soul, which is tormented by the one big question that concerns us all: What is the point of the whole theater of life in the face of our mortality? In answering this fundamental question of human existence, Arseni Tarkowski breaks through melancholy and arrives at a wisdom that seems almost Eastern, which is expressed in paradoxes such as this: We have to die, but this is precisely where our immortality is revealed. “I am immortal as long as I live”, begins his poem “Bell Tone”. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus saw it in a very similar way when he wrote about death: “I am, it is not. If he is, I am not. ”We find our immortality only in our finite lives. Touching the infinite in the midst of finitude, being eternal in a moment, that is, being immortal. In one of his most beautiful poems ("Leben, Leben") it says:

                                   "Immortal all. And immortal everything. Do
                                   not fear death at seventeen, not at
                                   seventy. There is only being and light,
                                   neither darkness nor death on this earth.

                                   We have been standing on the edge of the sea for a long time,
                                   I am with those who do." Take nets
                                   When like a swarm draws immortality. "

Works by Arseni Tarkowski in German

About Arseni Tarkowski

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Tarkovsky, Arseni Alexandrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Тарковский, Арсений Александрович (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Jelisavetgrad , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1989
Place of death Moscow