Letters to a stranger           Viktorina Savelieva. March 2021

  It is like in a train: long way ahead, it is nothing to do, and you are starting to communicate with your stranger-neighbor with a thoughtful face, which inspires to a conversation. 

Something like this. Below you could see the face of one Russian woman  Struyskaya, whose portrait inspired many people, and I am writing letters to her.

     Fedor Rokotov     Alexandra Struyskaya. 1772

Nikolay Zabolotsky
 

The Portrait

Translated by Christopher R. Fortune

Poets, you should love painting!
For it alone
Can portray on canvas
Signs of an unsettled soul.

Remember how Struiskaya,
Draped in satin, looked at us
Out of Rokotov's portrait
From the depths of the past?

Her eyes were two clouds,
Half-smiling, half-weeping,
Like two lies,
Veiled by the mist of failure.

Two riddles came together,
Half-rapture, half-fright,
A touch of mad tenderness,
An expectation of mortal pain.

When darkness descends,
And a thunderstorm threatens,
Her lovely eyes will glimmer
From the depths of my soul.

Original Russian text