Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend.
Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose by Regina Derieva, translated by various (156 pages, Marick Press, 2019)
Images in Black, Continuous, by Regina Derieva, translated by Frederick Smock (59 pages, M-Graphics, 2021)
December 11, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of the death at age 64 of the poet, essayist, and translator Regina (pronounced with a hard “g”) Derieva. February 7, 2024, marks the 75th anniversary of her birth. Her faithful widower, the iconographer, liturgical artist, and guardian of her work, Alexander Deriev tells me that a Swedish publisher will be bringing out a large collection of her poetry this year; so too will an American publisher of her works in English. Readers may want to take a look at two recent collections of this remarkable woman’s work.
Derieva was not a woman whose life was ever easy. A Russian Jew born in Odessa who later moved to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, then converted to Catholicism, lived in Israel, and spent the last years of her life in Sweden, her childhood and youth were a blending of the sublime and the terrible. In Earthly Lexicon, a collection of her poetry and prose (with a certain unevenness, perhaps due to the different translators who contributed to it), she writes of how her birthplace, Odessa, “became for me a lost Paradise, a paradise from which I had been expelled at age nine.” Leaving was to be “deprived of everything, all at once: the sea, the fruit gardens, the chestnuts and acacias, the alleyways and streets of Odessa.” Instead, she found herself “in the Kazakh steppe” and its bleakness:
The wind there was always marauding, never allowing for a cultural layer to form on the barren spot. There was neither spring nor fall there: with the end of the infernal winter began an infernal summer. It is not incidental that Stalin chose precisely this part of the country for his prison camps, where a human being had no time to live, thinking only of how best to survive.
In her poem “The Road,” she writes of her destination after being on “A train the entire length of the country”:
A wilderness, terrifying. Darkness.
And, here, we have arrived now.
And settled down in the places
of our impending deaths.
Yet what was it that made Odessa paradise? Beyond the sea and the fruit gardens, there were certain events that shaped her. In an essay titled “On Time, Things, and Phenomena,” she writes about her first memory of being taken to the Church of the Dormition by a Ukrainian girl who cared for her. Since Derieva’s parents were atheists and members of the Communist Party, this was without their knowledge. It was, however, to Regina’s delight. “Tightly swaddled, I’m lying on a pew and looking up. There’s no one near me, but I’m not afraid and not crying. Someone is near me, and that is GOD.”
In Karaganda, she may well have come to believe God was not near her. Life on the steppe was not just bad for the weather. She began a life of chronic illness, beginning with tuberculosis. She writes, “Life was always more energetic than I, and even in my thoughts, I was incapable of competing with its hive of activity.” Her Communist father ratted out her dissent to the KGB and tried to have the budding poet committed to an insane asylum. An early attempt at marriage ended when she discovered her putative husband was actually attracted to men. And yet, as they say, she persisted.
Derieva began to publish in the Soviet Union. The books were censored, but they were published. She was even made a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. She met and married Alexander, and they had a son. She was recognized by poets such as Joseph Brodsky, who thought she was great and encouraged her to leave the Soviet Union. And, in the midst of it all, she returned to God, converting to Catholicism in 1990.
Why not Russian Orthodoxy? In “On Time, Things, and Phenomena,” she writes that it “made me uneasy” and that she could never “fathom its depth or perfection.” The Catholic Church struck her as, in the Australian poet Les Murray’s words, “the best poem.” This will likely not satisfy either the Orthodox or the Catholics, but Derieva was not a theologian but a kind of mystic of darkness and light.
The poems in Images in Black, Continuous, translated by American poet Frederick Smock, really capture the darkness of her vision. Some of it is based on her experiences in Israel after she left the USSR. She had gone to Israel because of her Jewish ethnicity. But, having declared she was Catholic on her forms, her family was stateless and stuck for several years. But much of the darkness is not limited to situations. Representative is “The Sum of Blackness”:
The sum of blackness in the world
is much larger than the store of charity.
A man’s own share usually lasts
his whole lifetime,
which is replete with
ineradicable illusions.
Yet even in this volume there is something of the light. In “A Month Later,” part of a series of poems that chronicles her spirit, she writes:
I swim in sins but
am fished out forgiven.
Submerged I weigh little but
redeemed receive full value,
such value as is beyond weighing.
This light and darkness is present in very powerful form in the series of aphorisms and pithy comments titled “The Normal Chaos of Things” in Earthly Lexicon. Some of them are comments on specific places and times. Number 138 reads, “Not all who joined the Communists were bastards, but they all assiduously strove to become so.” Many are universal statements such as 296: “Talent is a mistake of nature that government institutions try with all their might to correct.” Darker still is 199: “All’s well that ends well. Which is not the case for life.”
Yet many are full of practical, spiritual, and even hopeful wisdom, especially for the weak. 217 reads, “A person should be unsteady in faith, otherwise he will not place faith in God.” 300 reads, “Defeat your very self, God will take care of your enemies.” There are 1160 of these, and like the gems of Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, or Chesterton, a great many of them are worth writing down.
The reader of her poems and prose may find himself jarred by the juxtaposition of the darkest vision of the present, the most amusing take on it, and the profound realization that, as she puts it in 1095, “The core of eternity is hidden in the shell of time.” She believed her task as a poet was not to paint a pretty exterior on the world but to capture its interior reality hidden as it was in the grime of the everyday and even the hideous. Poets, she says, “continue to be born and to deal with an actuality that doesn’t bring any sort of special joys.” Yet they keep writing, she affirms, “for Myth, absolutely certain, that any sort of current exists solely for the purpose of swimming against the stream.”
As one of her spiritual and literary heroes, Chesterton, put it, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend. “Even the worst past,” she says in aphorism 929, “has a future.”
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