perfidious, faithful, and confused” as he was. Whose muse will do you justice, The frightening, virtuous, bold, The heart of both light and darkness, The soul of the child and the artist, The wonderful Russian soul? . . . . . . . . . . When, gradually, you unearth Your husband’s most hidden riches, You see that he’s so much worse And better than what you had pictured. That everything you had imagined, All things you’d longed to admire Are trivial, slight, and wretched Compared to this blackness and fire. He was doubly different, desirable, and enigmatic because he was both a man and a Russian—the way Samoilov’s Semyon was both a “man of the people” and a Russian. Eventually, Aliger’s protagonist (perhaps Margarita too) understands that “there is no other path and no other fate” for her, but it is only during the Great Patriotic War, when he leaves for the front and she stays behind to share (as poet and political “agitator”) “the miraculous faith of the Russian people,” that she makes her final commitment and promises to bear him a daughter in his image. “You can give her any name you like.” But it is too late: because he will never come back from the front and they will never have children. The moment of greatest intimacy and true fulfillment (as compared to Babel’s and Bagritsky’s flailing adolescent attempts) is the beginning of the end of the Russian-Jewish First Love. The reason is “blood.” Chased out of Odessa by the Nazis and wandering somewhere in the Tatar wilderness, Margarita’s mother loses her usual “serenity and nobility” and acquires “a frightening, charred resemblance / To those who have no homeland.” Why is that? Are they not at home in the Soviet Union? Staying warm by the stove somehow, Improvising a table to set,