“[There] is all this narrowing to a now in which there’s only room for effect, not enough room for cause—and so no duration in which to experience personal accountability.”

But you, are you Christians?
So be it, you are Christians.
At night one could be.

Sound rises. That is a law. I live in this law. I do not
                        want to make anything
                        that rises. These words

Black bars expanding
      over an atomic-yellow ground — feelers retracted —
the monarch lay flat on the street

  Is it because of history or is it because of matter,
mother Matter—the opposite of In-
  terpretation: his consort: (his purple body lies
shattered against terrible

Then two juncoes trapped in the house this morning.
  The house like a head with nothing inside.
The voice says: come in.

  When I caught sight of them, the secret lovers,
I had been watching the pink-edged white blossoms
  in the garden below

The truth is this bad been going on for a long time during
                                                                         which
they both wanted it to last.

Meet me, meet me whisper the waters from the train
    window and the small
      skiff adrift

For some of us the only way of knowing we are here at all, going
across and going down,
exquisitely temporal though at no point believable; fragile; tragic.

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.