The Golden Queen of the North

Indeed, Troianker was loved by many. Once when her apartment was bombed during the Nazi air raids and burnt to ashes, the Troiankers moved to the Hotel Arktika together with many evacuated Moscovites and Leningraders, mostly writers, painters, and actors.

Troianker’s charms could not easily be erased from memory. Forty years af­ter her death, when her granddaughter Alexandra, then an actress at the Moscow Sovremennik Theater and in film, referred to her grandmother in a conversation with men well in their seventies and eighties, the former became genuinely overexcited. In December 2004, she penned the following recollection: “Her life was immensely rich and dense. In addition to her poetic gift she was also a muse, and the muse elicits deep, integral emotions. Most importantly, she had warm and humane relations with everybody. Perhaps because of that, their faces shone when her name was mentioned. It seems to me whoever knew or saw her was in love with her. This was the impact of her concentrated feminine beauty. And to­gether with her astonishing bravery, which never overshadowed her femininity, it made an irresistible impression.”¹¹⁷

Raia captured the poetic imagination of a good many literary men.

There was, though, much better poetry. Apparently Sadofiev dedicated to Raia a number of his unpublished poems, among them “Ne vsiakii mozhet uvi- azat’” (Not Every One Can Link), praising her

character trait—

Firm and languid pace.

As the starting line above the poem.¹¹⁸

After their divorce, Sadofiev portrayed his relations with Troianker in the long poem “Krivoe ravnovesie” (The Crooked Balance), which captured his pain, ir­ritation, and bewilderment, published in Literaturnyi sovremennik. In a 1934 let­ter to Troianker he included the poem “Raike-Liubke” (To Beloved Raia), quite unusual for this strong-willed poet who shunned pathetic lyricism and disdained sentimental metaphysics:

For a poor Sofievka house.

For the joy on a stretched cape

For the orange volume of songs,

For everything I bear in my heart

Tearlessly, in the final days,

Evoke me today.

Among those who adored Troianker was Konstantin Belkhin (1912-43), a Mur­mansk-based war journalist and poet who perished at the front. He is reported to have dedicated many poems from his Laplandia poetic cycle to Troianker, yet his only posthumous publication does not include any dedications. But Troianker’s archive contains at least two poems Belkhin dedicated to Raia, one of them un­derscoring the generosity and gratefulness that Troianker inspired:

I thought my friendship with stars had ended.

I thought that the song’s foliage was falling.

But without thinking whether ’tis early or late,

I say: oh ginger, my golden one!

I catch big stars in a handful,

Avid, I swallow fresh blueness,

And without thinking whether ’tis early or late

I say: thank you ginger, my golden one.¹¹⁹

Anatolii Kuznetsov, a Murmansk-based author of frontline diaries who lived during the postwar period in Zaporizhzhia, left a poetic recollection of one of Troianker’s appearances in a Murmansk bomb shelter, where she recited Rus­sian poetry in front of fear-stricken, exhausted, and desperate town dwellers:

A dozen short-term meetings—

And a lasting light for many years.

In those years of bloody battles

Among poets for me you are the best.

It is calm in the city bomb shelter.

During the bombing, under the “Five-A,”

You recited Blok’s Scythians, Even now I hear the words.

It’s scary, if next to you

There is no friend’s hand.

I have to remember forever

That night and your verse.

Leaving the war Murmansk,

I swear with everything I can swear:

If I am alive, by all means

I will return here with the victory!¹²⁰

Apparently during the war Troianker became one of the central figures in Mur­mansk, if not as a poet than at least as a Kulturtreger, a public figure and inspiring lecturer. Yet her journey—from the Ukrainian shtetl, with its Jewish themes, through Ukrainian rural bucolic poetry to Alexander Blok’s Scythians, with their emphasis on the Eurasian Russo-centric geopolitical myth—pointed to the fragility of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. In her Russian lyrics Troianker abandoned her Ukrainian-Jewish motifs. Her itinerary obliquely signified that neither Jewish nor Ukrainian—ethnic or national—themes had a place in the Russian imperial discourse. Russian poetry gladly accepted her with the voice that was not entirely her own. A Ukrainian-Jewish poetess on state service, she had to suppress her own Ukrainian and Jewish voice and join the imperial cho­rus.

Cherished by war correspondents, soldier-readers of Poliarnaia pravda, and the citizens of Murmansk, the thirty-six-year-old “Golden Queen of the North” Raisa Troianker died of cancer in Murmansk on December 29, 1945, leaving be­hind her sixteen-year-old daughter.¹²¹ When she was hospitalized, she joined the Communist Party and was awarded the “Za oboronu Sovetskogo Zapo- liar’ia” medal (For the Defense of the Soviet Transpolar Region). She was buried in a cemetery that later became the site of the Zashchitnikam Zapoliar’ia Memo­rial (Monument to the Defenders of the Transpolar Region). By the late 1970s there was no trace of her grave. Locals, however, remembered her quite well. Murmansk, where Troianker published her only collection of Russian poetry, considered Troianker a poet of its own. In April 1980, local television featured Troianker’s daughter Elena, her granddaughter Alexandra, and former war nurse Antonina Shabaeva in a television program “And the Rage of the Soldier, and the Courage of the Poet,” as part of the show “The Muse in the Military

Trench CoatT¹²²The Murmansk museum of local history included Troianker’s Russian book of poetry, Surovaia lirika (1942) in its permanent exhibition, plac­ing it next to portraits of World War II heroes and combat weapons.¹²³ In the 2000s, Murmansk e-net journalists on the site Murman Day recorded her birth­day among the most important dates in the city’s history.