Russian Garden Gazette

In America, summer begins twice.

The first time is neither by the calendar nor by the movement of the Earth around the Sun. It begins on the last Monday in May, on Memorial Day. Pools open, tables appear on porches, picnics and road trips and open-air concerts start up — and everyone silently agrees: summer has begun.

It ends by agreement too, on Labor Day.

This year American summer was especially lucky. Memorial Day fell on May 25, and Labor Day on the latest date it possibly can, September 7. That made 106 days — more than fifteen weeks. For comparison: last year there was exactly one week less between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

So the summer of 2026 really can be called a very long one.

But Labor Day passed — and the summer stayed.

It was still holding on in the warm days, in greenery that was in no hurry to turn autumnal, in the habit of leaving the house dressed for summer. The calendar said one thing, nature another.

And now the other summer, the astronomical one, has come to an end as well.

On September 22, at 8:05 in the evening Eastern time, the Sun crossed the celestial equator. The autumn equinox had arrived.

Summer gave way to autumn.

But human beings are remarkably fond of dividing continuous time into parts.

We invented years and months, weeks and holidays, the start of the school year and the fiscal year. Nature has no December 31. The Earth does not know that Monday has arrived. The Sun is entirely indifferent to what today is called — Memorial Day, Labor Day, or simply Tuesday.

These boundaries are for us.

They let us stop and say: here is an ending. And now something else begins.

Which is exactly why it is worth looking back at a few September days that have just passed.

On September 20, at sundown, Yom Kippur began — the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish religious calendar. It ended on the evening of September 21.

Yom Kippur closes the ten days between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the Day of Atonement. It is a time of repentance, of prayer, of reflection on the year that has passed and of trying to put right what can still be put right.

And here there is an ancient thought that sounds astonishingly modern. The Mishnah already says: transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur can atone for; but transgressions between one person and another it cannot, until the offender has made peace with the one he wronged.

In other words, you cannot ask God's forgiveness instead of asking another person's.

Before beginning a new circle, a person is invited to stop, look back, and try to repair what can still be repaired.

Almost in the same hours that Yom Kippur was ending, on September 21, the Orthodox tradition was celebrating something else entirely — the Nativity of the Mother of God.

And on the evening of September 22 came the autumn equinox.

Three entirely different calendars fell almost on the same point.

One said to a person: look back.

Another told of a birth.

The third said nothing to us at all — the Earth simply went on along its path around the Sun.

But among these three September boundaries there is one that is especially curious.

On September 21 the Christian calendar proposes celebrating neither a feat, nor a death, nor a miracle.

It proposes celebrating the birth of a girl.

A girl named Mary.

We know perfectly well who she will become.

But on this day she is not yet the Mother of God. Not the Intercessor. Not the woman at the Cross.

She has simply been born.

And here an unexpectedly difficult question arises: why has Russian poetry, which said so much about the Mother of God, said almost nothing about Mary's own birth?

Russian poetry has said a great deal about the Mother of God.

In Lermontov she is the “warm intercessor of a cold world.” In Akhmatova's Requiem she is the Mother at the Cross:

In Pasternak there is Mary with the newborn Christ. In Brodsky, the Mary of the Nativity and of Candlemas, a mother over whom the shadow of her Son's future is already gathering.

The Annunciation, the Nativity, Candlemas, Golgotha… The Mother of God is continuously present in Russian poetry.

Which makes one gap all the more noticeable.

Where is the little Mary?

Not the Mother of God with the Child. Not the Intercessor. Not the Mother at the Cross.

But the child who as yet knows nothing of her own future.

The Nativity of the Mother of God, which the Orthodox tradition marks on September 21, appears in Russian devotional verse, but it barely became a subject of major literature in its own right.

One of the rare exceptions is Mikhail Kuzmin.

In 1909 he wrote the cycle Feasts of the Most Holy Mother of God, which includes a poem called “The Nativity of the Mother of God.”

Kuzmin retells the ancient tradition of Joachim and Anna: childlessness, prayer, the angel's message — and at last:

The plainness is deliberate: Kuzmin is making something close to an old devotional verse, an icon in words.

But then a remarkable thing happens.

Mary is born — and the little Mary almost immediately disappears. The poet is already seeing not a child in Anna's arms but the future Virgin, the Mother of Christ, the Theotokos.

The future blocks out the girl.

And here, unexpectedly, one thinks of Brodsky.

He wrote no poem about the Nativity of the Mother of God. But in his “Lullaby” of 1992 it is Mary who speaks, addressing her child — Christ.

Let us try moving that scene back one generation.

Anna holds Mary.

Years later: Mary holds Christ.

A mother holding a future mother.

And in both cases we know something about the child that the child does not yet know.

We look at the little Mary and we already know: there will be the Annunciation, Bethlehem, Candlemas, Golgotha.

But none of it has happened yet.

There is only a mother and a child in her arms.

Kuzmin wrote that first scene but barely paused on it. Brodsky wrote the second — and turned it into major poetry.

And between them an extraordinary empty space was left: Anna's unwritten lullaby to the little Mary.

Russian poetry created a multitude of images of the Mother of God. But the girl who has yet to become her went almost unnoticed.

Perhaps that is why she is so interesting to look for.

In 1982, in the philosophy faculty at Moscow State University, we were studying Kant. We read the texts, worked through them, took notes, sat the exams. It was all in earnest: Kant is not an author you can get through inattentively.

In that same year, in that same city, Merab Mamardashvili was delivering his Kantian Variations.

There was no way to get in. But there were typed copies. Onionskin paper, the fourth carbon, blind lines you make out half by guesswork.

And so it happened that I came to know Kant twice.

One arrived from the lectern — great, compulsory, laid out in paragraphs. The other arrived from a carbon copy.

And it was that one who turned out to be alive.

Kant defined Enlightenment as a person's emergence from the state of immaturity — the very state he is in through his own fault. Not from a lack of intellect, but from a lack of resolve.

Mamardashvili put it more briefly, and more sharply:

A country where thinking for yourself was technically difficult. A university where Kant was studied to a syllabus. And a man who, in that same city, was explaining that Enlightenment is not about learning anything at all.

Understanding that while sitting in a seminar was not easy. Understanding it while reading a blind carbon copy turned out to be very easy indeed.

The main thing I learned from Mamardashvili is the idea of human verticality. That a person, alas, is not the sum of his own achievements. Every day you have to get up and prove to yourself that you are a worthy human being.

He put it almost without words: “Consciousness must be made new every single time.”

Every time. Not once in your youth, not at the moment you choose a profession, not when you collect your diploma. Today. And tomorrow again.

And the other side of the same thought, which is still uncomfortable to sit with: “Evil is simply giving yourself over to the spontaneous drift of things, to the current.”

Not villainy. Not anyone's malice. Just letting yourself float. It turns out that is entirely sufficient.

There is one more sentence of his that expresses this best of all:

It did not reach me at once.

But it reached me.

Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili has remained for me a hero of an Enlightenment still to be carried out. Not a finished project, but an outstanding debt.

And I would rather close not with his words but with a story he liked to tell about Kant.

A doctor comes to the mortally ill Kant. Kant can barely stand and his speech has already become indistinct. The doctor wants him to sit down, but Kant will not sit. By the rules of courtesy a host cannot sit while his guest is standing.

At first the doctor does not understand what is happening — until at last he makes out one distinct phrase in the stream of words:

That is what verticality is.

Not an idea, not a principle, not a chapter in a textbook.

An old, mortally ill man who will not sit down, because his guest is standing.

Summer has ended. But con te partirò, sung by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, is less a farewell than a promise to set out further.

Andrea Bocelli is another September birthday. And he was born on September 22: the very day on which, in the Northern Hemisphere, summer astronomically ends.

And since the music has taken us to Italy — let us stay there a little longer.

On September 20 Sophia Loren marked her birthday.

On September 20 Sophia Loren turned 92.

It is rather hard to explain to anyone who did not live in the Soviet Union what Sophia Loren was there.

She was not simply a foreign film star. Everyone knew her. Even people who could not have named five of her films. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni somehow became almost our own — envoys of an Italy the Soviet citizen rarely saw and yet somehow felt to be very close.

Which is probably why Vittorio De Sica's film Sunflowers — I girasoli — holds a particular place.

Two countries met in it.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni on one side. Lyudmila Savelyeva on the other. An Italian love story — and the Russian earth on which that love was destroyed by the war.

Antonio goes missing on the Eastern Front. After the war Giovanna refuses to believe he is dead and sets off for the Soviet Union to look for her husband.

And she finds him.

But he has another life now. And another woman — the Russian Masha, who saved him as he was freezing in the snow.

Sunflowers was shot in the USSR, including in Moscow; the Soviet co-producer was Mosfilm.

But what matters most in this film are the enormous fields of sunflowers — beautiful and terrible at once. And Loren's face when her heroine understands that a person can be found — and lost all the same.

Today Sunflowers is harder still to watch.

The famous sunflower field and the war cemetery were filmed at Chernechy Yar in the Poltava region of Ukraine. Other Soviet episodes were shot in and around Moscow, and the winter scenes in the village of Gorodnya, Konakovo district, Tver region.

De Sica is said to have chosen the place after seeing a photograph of the church there — a white-stone church of the fourteenth century above the Volga.

A church of the Nativity of the Mother of God.

An Italian director looking for Russian locations for a film about war chose a village from a photograph of a church built in honor of the birth of the very girl we were looking for at the beginning of this issue.

In 1969 Italian and Soviet filmmakers worked together on a film about how war breaks human lives, and how long it goes on after the weapons fall silent.

Probably none of them could have imagined that half a century later this same geography would become the geography of a war again.

And there lies the almost unbearable irony of Sunflowers today: a film made by people from different countries as a memory of a past war has to be watched in a world that has begun speaking the language of military force again — and in which Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Because of that, the endless field of sunflowers in the film now looks altogether different.

For Giovanna, Sophia Loren received the Italian David di Donatello, and Henry Mancini's score was nominated for an Academy Award.

Perhaps this film also explains the particular Soviet love of Italian cinema.

Italians seemed entirely different — loud, beautiful, emotional, free.

And at the same time astonishingly similar.

They loved family the same way. They shouted, quarreled, wept and laughed the same way. They knew the same way what war and loss were.

And so Italy on the screen was abroad — but not quite foreign.

Sophia Loren became one of its most beautiful faces.

Because relations between Russia and Italy began long before cinema.

And before we leave that subject for future issues — seven questions to test it.

After Bocelli, Sophia Loren and Sunflowers, we decided to check: just how much Italy is there in Russian culture?

Fair warning: a great deal more than it seems.

And this is only the beginning.

The architecture of the Kremlin and of Petersburg, Italian opera at the Russian court, Gogol in Rome, Russian painters in Italy, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Diaghilev, Tarkovsky…

The history of Russia and Italy is not two parallel lines. They have been crossing for many centuries.

A small Russian Cultural Garden project — a framing wall around the flowerbed on the entry plaza — has passed another stage.

What is involved is only new outer walls around the existing flowerbeds. The plaza itself, the old walls and the central path to Gagarin all remain untouched.

The project was approved by the Garden's board, and then by the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation. The materials are now before the Cleveland Landmarks Commission.

As for the sunflowers looking out at you from these pages — they bloomed here in 2022. This September there are none in the Garden.