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  • Devillet
  • Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (bio)
    —translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler

I happened upon a devilletwith the body of a child.Thin and scrawny like a gnat;his face was sharp, and shy, and old.

His body trembled in the rain;his fur was dark and ruffled.It was a sorry sight; I fearedthis devillet might snuff it.

“Love! Love!” I hear all round me.But love’s beyond me, out of reach.Pity, though, can sometimes grip me,and so I caught the little creature:

“Come, come, come into the warm.Why hang about here on the street?No, no, don’t bristle, don’t take fright—I’ll give you sugar lumps to eat.”

“Sugar,” he roared. “Don’t be a fool.I’ll have some soup, a plate of veal.I’m moving in with you for good.I’ll have a proper meal.”

His voice was rich and resonant—a masculine, caressing bass.It was really quite indecent—so deeply out of place.

His bluster put my back up—I’d only been trying to help.So I started to turn my back onthis wretched devil-whelp. [End Page 127]

He wrinkled up his little face;he let out a feeble groan.I felt another tug of pity—and dragged the devillet home.

I looked at him in lamplight:a vile mix, an ancient child.“I’m sweet, I’m sweet,” I heard him say;I let him be, grew reconciled.

And soon I felt quite at home,sharing my home with a devillet.at noon he frolicked like a goat;by evening he looked dead.

Now he’d strut about like a man;now he’d rely on womanly wiles;and when it rained, he smelt of dogand licked his fur beside the fire.

For years I’d longed for this or that;whatever I had, it was never enough.But now my home almost came to life,as if growing a coat of fluff.

All was joyless, but all right,tender and sleepy, in the dark.Life was dully sweet with a devillet:child or old man—what did I care?

He was like a decaying mushroom—ever softer, frailer, sicklier.Sickly sweet and very tenaciousand stickier, stickier, stickier . . .

Until we were not two, but one.Now here I am, part of his heart.And on rainy days I smell of dogand lick my fur beside the hearth.

1906 [End Page 128]

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (1869–1945) and her husband, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, were among the founders of Russian Symbolism; together they ran one of the most important salons of the time. Always flamboyant, Gippius liked to shock—both through her behavior (e.g., insulting her guests and wearing male clothes) and her poems, which she called personal prayers but others saw as blasphemous. In the early 1900s, she and her husband instigated what they called The New Church, an attempt to forge links between the intelligentsia and the Church. Hostile to the October Revolution, in late 1919 they left for Paris, founding the literary and philosophical society The Green Lamp.

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler is the author of Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin (Hesperus Press, 2009). His translations of Vasily Grossman and co-translations of Andrey Platonov were published by NYRB classics. He has edited anthologies of Russian short stories and Russian magic tales for Penguin Classics. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has recently completed an Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin Classics, 2014). His translation of stories by Teffi will be published by Pushkin Press in summer 2014 in a collection entitled Subtly Worded.

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