Maximilian Voloshin

Apprentice
A piece of poetry is born
from helplessness, necessity, uneasiness,

oncentration.

There is a single path for art and spirit

Restriction of oneself.
To learn to feel

You must renounce

The joy of live experience,
Renounce the feelings

For sake of concentration of the will,

And then renounce will-power

for sake of the detachment

of the consciousness.

When even consciousness inside yourself you will be able to extinguish,

Then,

From the depth of silence

A word

Will born containing in itself

The whole totality of consciousness,

will-power, feeling,

All the vibrations and the shining of the life.

But you must know: by every new
Attainment

You kill a part of life that might be possible for you.

The art is alive

By lively blood of victims sacrificed.

You will become a Traveler

On the prophetic crossroads of the Middle Asia

And Western seas

To make your reason burn in forges of knowledge,

In order to experience being son and orphan,
And muteness of the abandoned earth.

Your soul will go through torment and baptizing

By passions moisture,

Through unreliable deceptions

Of the celestial appearances

in the reflective mirrors of the earthy waters.

Your mind will disappear

In the forest of the conflicting feelings,

Among black flames, among wildfires of the world.
Your daring soul will know the gravity

Of ruling constellations and willing planets

In this way, becoming liberated

From power of the small, forgetful self,

Youll see that all phenomena
Are signs,

Through which you recollect yourself,

Collecting thread by thread
The fabric of your spirit,

which by the world was torn apart.

When you will understand

That you are not the baby of this Earth,

But traveler through universes,
That signs and constellations

Have been arising And dying inside of you.

That everywhere in creatures and in things
There is the word of God,

Which has summoned them into being.

That you are liberator of the divine names

That came to give another name

To spirits-prisoners whove stuck in matter substance.

When you will understand that human beings born
To melt the world

Of the necessities and reason

Into the universe

Of love and freedom.

Then only

You will become the master.

1917

translated by Evgenii Buziatov, 2014