.
The literary legacy of Vera Lourie is contained in five notebooks, where the handwriting traces the path of her life. By her own admission an “inexperienced poet” she filled her pages with the fears of the unknown, her loves and sorrows, her memories, her daily thoughts. In many ways the notebooks are more a diary than a collection of poetry, and the presentation of the poems is chronological rather than thematic. They are simple poems mostly the work of a young girl in her twenties. They are much to her teacher, Gumilev, and with few exceptions they emulate his clarity of diction and thought his rhyme schemes, meters and rhythm. The vast majority of the Russian poems were written between 1921 and 1924 when Vera was first a member of the Sounding Sea-Shell in Petrograd and then involved with the circles of Belyj and Xodasevic, Baxrах, and Osorgin in Berlin. Since 1924 she has been largely cut off from the world of Russian poetry, both in the Soviet Union and in exile. Thus her more recent Russian poems are something of a time machine returning us to the simpler days of Acmeism. The poems are not “about the symbolic, nor the cosmic,” but about one life of a young girl, separated from her homeland, confused, fearful, lonely. Someone longing for love and finding poetry as her only faithful companion. Vera, when she has returned to poetry intermittenly over the past sixty years, has done so at times of great emotion and stress, sharing in her poems and with her poetry her intimate thoughts on love lost or unrequited. It is the sad, melancholic female voice, that those who love Russian music know so well.
Vera’s first notebook dates to Petrograd in 1920–1921. In these early poems two themes emerge: death and love. The poet on sleepless nights is frightened by the unknown, by the future with its inevitability of death. The execution of Gumilev had a profound effect on the poet who tried to reject the finality promised by death.
“I’ll never see you,”
I don't believe those words!
The prospect of death frightens her “not with hell’s horrors” but by the though, that burning lips will never again brush her forehead.
The poet is frightened and her images of the Last Judgement, cemeteries and graves haunt her dreams and sleepless nights. Her refuge is the world of imagination, fantasy, fortune-telling, the world of romantic dreams and expectations. How grateful for a few brief moments when:
You caress my hands with your life,
I like to lie here and be still,
To know, there is nothing between us,