Late declaration of love. This is probably what we should call this note about a poet whose life fits into such a time and geographical period: June 15, 1937, Leningrad - May 6, 2009, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the poems are not absorbed by eternity, but belong to it.
Once upon a time, his book “The Miraculous Landing” (1985) struck me with pure lyricism.
Precisely with naked lyrics, and not with its imitation, not with lyric-epic exercises from the third person of a fictitious mask. From myself, and not from the “lyrical hero”.
The “Leningrad” school of Russian poetry is monotonous.
But above her are Kushner and Brodsky. And Losev.
In 1991, with Tanya Tolstoy, who was flying overseas (we were friends then), I gave him my Paris book.
And for some reason he added, fool, that I don’t need to answer.
But he answered. A few months later in one of his few interviews. After a Nezavisimaya Gazeta correspondent asked which contemporary poets were close to him, I saw my name.
This was an invitation to dialogue. But we were unlucky to talk enough.
We didn’t meet here, but we’ll see there.
"Livshits is a good poet." So briefly, not without jealousy, Brodsky answered Denis Novikov when he mentioned Losev in London.
I'll bet: not just good.
A.Ch.
He said: “And this is basil.”
And from the garden to the English plate -
ruddy radish, onion,
and the dog wobbled, his tongue hanging out.
He simply called me Alekha.
“Come on, in Russian, under the landscape.”
We felt good. We felt bad.
The Gulf was Finnish. It means ours.
Oh, homeland with a capital R,
Or rather, S, or rather, B is intolerable,
our permanent air of order
and soil - disabled person and gentleman.
Simple names - Ghoul, Rededya,
union of Cheka, bull and man,
forest named after Comrade Bear,
meadow named after Comrade Zhuk.
In Siberia, a hawk shed a tear,
In Moscow, a blade of grass ascended to the pulpit.
They swore from above. They farted downstairs.
The porcelain rattled and Glinka came out.
Horse-Pushkin, biting the bit,
this whale race, who glorified freedom.
They gave vobla to a thousand people.
They gave me "Silva". Duska didn’t give it.
And the homeland went to hell.
Now there is cold, dirt and mosquitoes.
The dog died, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new moved into the house hastily.
And nothing, of course, grows
in a garden bed near the former bay.
.
.
THE LAST ROMANCE
Yuzu Aleshkovsky
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You can't hear the city noise,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is silence above the Neva Tower... etc.
There is silence above the Neva Tower.
She turned gilded again.
Here is a woman riding alone.
She flew up again.
Everything is reflected by the moon's face,
sung by a host of poets, -
not just a sentry bayonet,
but there are a lot of piercing objects,
The Admiralty syringe will flash,
and local anesthesia
instantly freezes to the borders
the place where Russia was.
Rigor to face
not only in the womb of a premature baby
but also to his half-father,
drunk in the morning.
Christmas is coming,
dead from lack of trees.
In the land of empty skies and shelves
nothing will be born.
The dead Summer Garden flashes by.
Here is a woman coming back.
Her lips are bitten.
And the Neva tower is empty.
.
.
ACCORDING TO LENIN
Step forward. Two back. Step forward.
The gypsy sang. Abramovich screeched.
And, yearning for them, he lamented,
poured out the zealous people
(survivor of the Mongol yoke,
five-year plan, fall era,
an alien pile of Serbian literacy;
somewhere a Polish intrigue was brewing,
and to the sounds of pas de patinare
Metternich danced against us;
there are still the same potholes under the asphalt;
Pushkin was lost in vain because of a woman;
Dostoevsky mutters: bobok;
Stalin was bad, he is in exile
didn’t share parcels with buddies
and one personally ran away).
What is lost cannot be returned.
Sasha, sing! Work hard, Abrashka!
Who has a shirt left here -
If you don’t drink it, you can at least break the gate.
.
.
...I worked at Kostya. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, and maybe two hundred
transparent young men, plainest girls.
Squeezing through the door with a cold,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
They told me: “Here are a couple of texts for you.”
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unimaginable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
like concrete with reinforcement in it.
These were all fish with fur
nonsense multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I find this nonsense
and indeed it was possible to print it.
It was freezing. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow underneath was pink.
What were they talking about as they walked?
the watchful Morozov eavesdropped,
the same Pavlik who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
the plywood cracked due to the cold,
but they were warm.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And time passed.
And the first number came.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone apart.
Those in the camp barracks are chirping,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital are nodding and crowing,
and the little devils are driven off the cuffs.
.
.
WONDERFUL LANDING
Everything went as usual.
Tormented by longing for Saturday,
people were milling about on the tram;
tormented by longing for compote,
I was dragging myself back from my kindergarten walk.
Suddenly there is a brigade of God's angels,
heavenly miraculous landing
fell into the hell of Leningrad.
Bazooka shook the bushes
around the Hermitage. Hosanna!
The bridges have already been captured
train stations, cafe "Kvisisana".
The prison bars are shifted
grenade and the word of the Lord.
The hostages are a little embarrassed -
some were asleep, some were drunk, some were in their underwear.
Here - Mikhail, Leonid,
three women, Yuri, Volodya!
The car is flying west.
We won, you are free.
The rustling of wounded wings,
dragging along the sidewalks.
Covered the helicopter's departure
detachment with a mortar strike.
But the strength melted like wax,
exhausted angelic company
under the pressure of internal troops,
wandering dejectedly from work.
And we ascended and left,
melted into the dying sky.
Below the lights there are patrols
in Ulyanka, Grazhdanka, Entebbe.
And then it smoulders half the night
sunset's farewell strip
the pontoon we blew up
on the shallows near Kronstadt.
.
.
Eighteenth century, like a pig in a wig.
A golden mess floats down the river,
and in the satin cabin Felitsa
I wanted to move.
An officer invited to catch a flea
suddenly I felt that the perfume was losing power,
drowning out body odors,
the mother fussed and began to puff.
The eighteenth century floats by, floats by,
I just forgot my decorations here and there,
that fell apart under the onslaught of the pustules
Russian wild greens.
Volga huts, a chapel, and a ferry are visible.
Everything was built roughly, with a simple axe.
Scrawled in a notebook with a quill pen
The verse is splintering, scraping the soul.
.
.
AT CHRISTMAS
I'll lie down and unfocus my eyes,
I will split the star in the window
and suddenly I see the area of Siru,
your damp homeland.
At the mercy of the amateur optician
not only double - and double,
and two of Saturn and Jupiter
pregnant with the Christmas star.
Following this quickly flowing
and dried up, even sooner
rise above Volkhov and Vytegra
Star of the Magi, Star of the Kings.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The star will rise above the station building,
and a radio in the general store window
program on request with dances
will interrupt confusedly and,
hesitating a little until he prays
about shepherds, wise men, kings,
about communists and Komsomol members,
about a rabble of drunkards and slobs.
Blind, talkative prophets,
fathers accustomed to the cross,
how rushed these lines are,
walk on a white sheet,
the sunset quickly got wet,
wandering to the far side
and open the doors to the rooms,
long abandoned by me.
.
.
TALK
“We are driven from stage to stage,
And everything goes into Poland’s hands -
Walesa, Milos, Solidarity, Pope,
we have Solzhenitsyn, and even he
Gloomy-Burchsev and quite average
prose writer." “Nonsense, he’s just the last one
romantic". "Yes, but if you subtract rum»,
“Well, okay, what are we taking anyway?”
From the pool of lubyankas and bottles
buddies in commercial comfort
float up into the bright world of large bottles.
“Have you tried the Swedish Absolut?”
I call him “Nightingale”
If you shy away, Sofia will be right there.”
“But, still, a shabby canteen,
where a half-liter is walking under the table,
no, still like a white head,
Westerners don’t take vodka like that.”
"Wonderful! nostalgia for fusels!
And for what else - for informers?
by old whores spreading rumors?
by listening to “Freedom” at night?
according to the jacket? by district committee? by pogrom?
according to the wall newspaper “For cultural life”?”
“Or maybe we should actually drink rum -
This one will definitely knock us off our hooves.”
.
.
And finally, the “Cemetery” stop.
A beggar, puffed up like a bug,
in a Muscovite jacket sitting at the gate.
I give him money - he doesn’t take it.
How, I insist, was placed in the alley
monument in the form of a table and bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
check the list, I’m yours,
please, please respect me.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, no concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm some Mister Twister
doesn't let you get within range of a cannon shot,
under the visor, mockingly, takes it,
no matter what I give, I take nothing.
.
.
MY BOOK
Neither Rome, nor the world, nor the century,
not to the full attention of the hall -
to the Lethean Library,
how Nabokov said viciously.
In the cold winter season
(“one day” – beyond the line)
I look up the mountain
(goes down to the river bank)
a cart tired of life,
a cart filled with sickness.
Lethea Library,
get ready for the reception seriously.
I've been throating it for a long time
and here is my reward for my work:
they will not throw you into Charon's boat,
stuck on the bookshelf.
.
/////////////////////////////////////////
Poet Lev Losev
Having made his debut at the age of 37, at an age that became fatal for other poets, Losev avoided the “fear of influence” characteristic of young talents. He did not know him because he considered influence to be culture, valued continuity and did not see sin in book poetry. Among other people's words, his muse was as at ease as others were among clouds and birch trees. Having entered poetry without scandal and according to his own rules, Losev immediately began with adult poetry and turned out to be unlike anyone else, including - a conscious choice! - Brodsky.
Friends and contemporaries, they looked at the world in the same way, but wrote about it differently. Playing the classics, Losev took Vyazemsky's place under Pushkin. An enlightened conservative, a strict observer of morals, a bit of an old thinker, equally endowed with subtle humor, ironic insight and skeptical love for his homeland. It is necessary to insist on the latter, because Losev was by no means indifferent to politics. Sharing the views of his Vermont neighbor, he, like Solzhenitsyn, dreamed of seeing Russia “settled” according to New England standards: local, good-neighborly democracy, and most importantly, that at least something would grow.
Losev's ideal skipped the romantic 19th century, not to mention the hysterical 20th, without envy, to find a model for itself in the clear sky of the Enlightenment. Laws change people, wit justifies poetry, and everyone cultivates his own garden.
The Losevs had it full of flowers and edible greens. One day a bear came for her after crossing the stream, but he did not destroy the idyll. Made up of smart books and loyal friends, Losev's life was beautiful and worthy. Poems only occupied their place in it, but he always read them while standing.
Reference
Lev Losev was born in 1937 in Leningrad, emigrated to the United States in 1976. Abroad he published several books of poetry, published research on “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, on the works of Chekhov, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, with whom he was close friends. For almost thirty years he taught Russian literature at the prestigious Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
On May 6, the poet, writer and literary critic Lev Losev died in New Hampshire at the age of 72. IN MEMORY OF LION LOSEV Those who know this name also know that this is a huge loss for Russian culture. He himself is an amazing and subtle poet; he selflessly dedicated the last decade of his life to the memory of his great friend, Joseph Brodsky. His comments on the texts of I.B. - this is the pleasure and happiness of immersion in a culture that, alas, has barely touched us. The book in the ZhZL series is a monument not only to Brodsky, but also to Lev Losev himself. (A separate lesson is the distance that the author maintained in this book, never allowing himself to pat the genius on the shoulder and even slightly stick out his person. Brodsky’s close friend, whom he also considered one of his teachers, Losev NEVER MENTIONED ABOUT THIS).“Time is an honest man”; the name of Lev Losev will certainly take the right place in the consciousness of reading and thinking Russia, but today this is somehow not very consoling. Very sad. Victor Shenderovich “Lev Losev is one of the smartest and kindest people I have ever seen in my life. We first met in the reception hall of Leningrad University, where we entered when we were 18 years old. He was accepted, but I was not. They often met in literary and poetic companies. He wrote poetry from his youth. Few people knew about this. And he worked in the children's magazine “Koster”, and, by the way, he managed to smuggle his friends’ poems there. He was friends with wonderful poets, with the same Joseph Brodsky, Evgeny Rein, Mikhail Eremen, Uflyand and many, many others. Perhaps his main love in life, besides his wife Nina and children, is Russian poetry. His poems are unlike others: angular, sharp, witty, and at the same time they have a genuine feeling. This is very sad news. Lev Losev is a wonderful person. And this is even more important, in my opinion, and means much more than the fact that he is also a real poet. When you lose a dear person, you think first of all about - See more at:
He said: “And this is basil.”
And from the garden to the English plate -
ruddy radish, onion,
and the dog wiggled, sticking out his tongue.
He simply called me Alekha.
“Come on, in Russian, under the landscape.”
We felt good. We felt bad.
The Gulf was Finnish. It means ours.
Oh, Motherland, with a capital R,
or rather, S, or rather, Er obnoxious,
our permanent air of order
and soil - disabled person and gentleman.
Simple names - Ghoul, Rededya,
union of a check, a bull and a man,
forest named after Comrade Bear,
meadow named after Comrade Zhuk.
In Siberia, a hawk shed a tear.
In Moscow, a blade of grass ascended to the pulpit.
They swore from above. They farted downstairs.
The porcelain rattled and Glinka came out.
Horse-Pushkin, biting the bit,
this whale race, who glorified freedom.
They gave vobla to a thousand people.
They gave me "Silva". Duska didn’t give it.
And the homeland went to hell.
Now there is cold, dirt and mosquitoes.
The dog died, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new moved into the house hastily.
And nothing, of course, grows
In a garden bed near the former bay.
* * *
...worked at Kostya. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, maybe two hundred
transparent young men, plainest girls.
Squeezing through the door with a cold,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
They told me: “Here are a couple of texts for you.”
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unimaginable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
like concrete with reinforcement in it.
These were all fish with fur
nonsense multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I find this nonsense
and indeed it was possible to print it.
It was freezing. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow underneath was pink.
What were they talking about as they walked?
the watchful Morozov eavesdropped,
the same Pavlik who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
the plywood cracked due to the cold,
but they were warm.
And time passed.
And the first number came.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone apart.
Those in the camp barracks are chirping,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital are nodding and crowing,
and the little devils are driven off the cuffs.
Bad rhymes. Stolen jokes.
We ate. Thank you. Like beans
cold ones stir in the stomach.
It's getting dark. Time to go home. Magazine
Moscow, perhaps, take it as Veronal.
There the oaf dreamed of the past,
when our people walked ahead
and crushed the evil spirits with a broom,
and the emigrant's distant ancestor
gifted the village with half a bucket.
Spin it however you want, Russian palindrome
master and slave, read it this way or that way,
A slave cannot exist without a bar.
Today we are passing the bar...
It's good there. There it spreads, layers,
cigar smoke. But there is a Slavist sitting there.
Dangerous. I'll get drunk again before then
that I’ll start throwing my pearls in front of him
and from my colleague I will get it again,
so that he will answer me with vulgarity again...
“A Cossack doesn’t need irony,
you sure could use some domestication*,
no wonder in your Russian language
there is no such word - sophistication"**.
There is a word "truth". There is a word "will".
There are three letters - “comfort”. And there is “rudeness”.
How nice it is to have a night without alcohol
words that cannot be translated,
delirious, muttering to empty space.
With the word “bad” we approach the house.
Close the door behind you more tightly in order to
the spirits of the crossroads did not sneak into the house.
Feet in worn-out slippers
insert, poet, five twisted appendages.
Also check the chain on the door.
Exchange hello with Penelope.
Breathe. Walk into the depths of the lair.
And turn on the light. And shudder. And freeze
...What else is this?
And this is a mirror, such a piece of glass,
to be seen with a brush behind your cheek
fate displaced person.
* * *
“Sorry for stealing,” I say to the thief.
“I undertake not to talk about the rope,”
I say to the executioner.
Here you go, low-brow pro*****
Kanta comments to me on Nagornaya
sermon.
I'm silent.
So that instead of this rust, the fields in the insect pest
Once again the Volga would roll into the Caspian Sea,
If only horses would eat oats again,
so that a cloud of glory shines over the homeland,
so that at least something would work out, it would work out.
And maybe the tongue won’t dry out.
1985-1987
* * *
“I understand - the yoke, hunger,
there has been no democracy for a thousand years,
but a bad Russian spirit
I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
“These rains, these birches,
these groans about the graves,” -
and a poet with an expression of threat
he curled his thin lips.
And he also said, getting excited:
“I don’t like these drunken nights,
the repentant sincerity of drunkards,
Dostoevsky anguish of informers,
this vodka, these mushrooms,
these girls, these sins
and in the morning instead of a lotion
watery Blok rhymes;
our bards' cardboard spears
and their actor’s hoarseness,
our empty iambic flat feet
and the thin trochees lame;
our shrines are offensive,
everything is designed for a fool,
and life-giving pure Latin
A river flowed past us.
That's the truth - a country of scoundrels:
and there is no decent toilet,” -
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so the poet ended suddenly.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
he was skirting something important
and looked as if straight into the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.
S.K.
And finally the stop “Cemetery”.
A beggar, puffed up like a bug,
in a Muscovite jacket sitting at the gate.
I give him money - he doesn’t take it.
How, I insist, was placed in the alley
monument in the form of a table and bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
check the list, I’m yours,
please, please respect me.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, no concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm some Mr. Twister
doesn't let you get within range of a cannon shot,
under the visor, mockingly, takes it,
no matter what I give, I take nothing.
* you sure could use some domestication - “a little training would benefit you” (English).
** sophistication - very approximately: “sophistication” (English).
The most interesting and significant from the Radio Liberty archive twenty years ago. An unfinished story. Hopes still alive. Could Russia have taken a different path?
Ivan Tolstoy: June 15 – poet Lev Losev turns 60. Our broadcast today is dedicated to this anniversary. In it you will hear speeches by Losev's St. Petersburg friends: poet Vladimir Uflyand and historian Vladimir Gerasimov, critics Andrei Ariev from St. Petersburg, Alexander Genis from New York and Peter Weil from Prague, Lev Losev's co-author on philological research Valentin Polukhin from the British University of Kiel, publisher the first books of the poet, owner of the Hermitage publishing house near New York, Igor Efimov, and the writer Tatyana Tolstoy, who is now in Greece. You will also hear a conversation with the hero of the day and his poems, both old and new, unpublished, performed by the author.
On the waves of Radio Liberty is the release “Above Barriers,” which is dedicated today to the poet Lev Losev. June 15th marks his 60th birthday. Lev Vladimirovich was born in Leningrad in 1937 in the family of the poet Vladimir Livshits. He graduated from Leningrad University, wrote scripts, children's poems, and worked as an editor in the magazine "Koster". Author of ten plays. In 1976 he emigrated and very soon made a brilliant university career as an American professor. He teaches at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. One of the leading experts on the works of Joseph Brodsky. He defended his dissertation on the topic “Aesopian language in Soviet literature.” And suddenly, unexpectedly even for his closest friends, Lev Losev appeared in print with his serious, so to speak, “adult” lyrics. This happened in 1979 on the pages of the Parisian literary magazine "Echo", which was published by Maramzin and Khvostenko. The appearance of Losev the poet made a strong impression on Russian poetic circles. Joseph Brodsky immediately called Losev “the Vyazemsky of our century.” I am pleased to say today that in 1980, when I arrived at the Pushkin Nature Reserve, I introduced some of the participants in today’s program to the poems of Lev Losev. I remember their unspeakable surprise and joy at the new voice of their old friend, at the new awe. Almost twenty years have passed since then, Losev published two poetic books in the West - “The Miraculous Landing” and “The Privy Councilor”. Both are in the Hermitage publishing house with Igor Efimov. A year ago, his collection “New Information about Karl and Clara” appeared in St. Petersburg in the publishing house of the Pushkin Foundation. Today, no one doubts that Losev is an honored master of our literature. Lev Vladimirovich - at the microphone of Radio Liberty.
Lev Losev:
All the yarns have unraveled,
again the tow is in hand,
and people have forgotten how
play the reeds.
We are in our polymers
weave a tuft of wool,
but these are half measures
they can't save us...
So I, a meager vessel,
irregular oval,
at Udelnaya station
sat and was sad.
I had nowhere to hide
my soul's work,
and a rainbow of oil
bloomed in front of me.
And having screwed up so much
and having done some work,
I'm behind the fence opposite
looked blankly.
The mental hospital was breathing
the hulls glowed,
and there flashed faces,
voices were walking
There they sang what they had to,
starting to scream
and Finnish swamp
the reed answered them
Now I will read two poems from the second book, from the 1987 book called “The Privy Councilor”. The first poem is called "Levlosev".
Levlosev is not a poet, not a lyre player.
He is a marine painter, he is a Velimir expert,
Brodskist with glasses and a sparse beard,
he is an osipologist with a hoarse throat,
it smells like vodka
he is talking nonsense.
Levlosevlosevlosevlosevon-
onononononononon Judas,
he betrayed Rus', he betrayed Zion,
he drinks lotion
does not distinguish good from bad,
he never knows what's coming from,
at least I heard the ringing.
He is an annophile, he is an alexandromaniac,
Fedorolub, switching to prose,
he won't be written a novel,
and there is an article on an important issue -
keep your pocket!
He hears a ringing
as if someone had been executed
where the straw is supposedly eaten,
but it’s not a bell, it’s a telephone,
he doesn't fit, he's not at home.
And a small poem from the same book, called “Dedication”.
Look, look here quickly:
Above a flock of round bullfinches
Dawn comes with trump cards -
All red.
Oh, if only I could!
But I couldn’t: there’s a lump sticking out
In the larynx, and there will be no lines
About the properties of passion.
And there are two lives as one.
We stand with you at the window.
How about drinking some wine?
I'm kind of chilly.
It's snowy all month in February.
The candle was burning in the Chevrolet.
And on the king of hearts
The hat was on fire.
In the Russian thickets they are countless,
we just can’t find a way -
bridges collapsed, a snowstorm blew in,
The path was blocked with windfall.
There they plow in April, there they reap in August,
there they won’t sit at the table wearing a hat,
calmly await the second coming,
they will bow, no matter who comes -
a policeman on a troika, an archangel with a trumpet,
passerby in a German coat.
There they treat diseases with water and herbs.
No one dies there.
The Lord puts them to sleep for the winter,
in the snow it covers up to fear -
neither fix the hole, nor chop the wood,
no sledding, no games, no fun.
The bodies taste peace on the floors,
and souls are happy dreams.
There is so much heat trapped in the sheepskins,
that will last until spring.
Peter Weil: The place that Lev Losev occupies in our literature and in the literary process is unique. Let me remind you that literature is what is written, the literary process is the circumstances in which what is written is created. These circumstances are difficult in all eras, at all latitudes, not least because the literary people do not treat each other very warmly. It `s naturally. If the definition is true that poetry is the best words in the best order, then how many better orders can there be?
Hence conceit, jealousy, envy, and ill will. And here Lev Losev stands out sharply. Everyone respects him. His literary figure has powerful authority: “But Losev said,” “But Losev doesn’t think so.” One could refer to the solidity and thoroughness of his studies. Nothing like this. Solidity is revealed in the skill, but what solidity does the writer have, allowing himself such liberties in poetry that not every young avant-garde artist would dare. I wonder if there is such a poetic category - authority? If not, let's introduce it for Losev. Once, about two years ago, I asked Joseph Brodsky if he had ever, apart from childhood and adolescence, of course, treated anyone as an elder. He suddenly became serious, thought about it, then said that at some point - to Cheslav Milosz, and all his life, from his youth until then - to Losev. In my opinion, Brodsky himself was somewhat puzzled by his own conclusion. As for literature and poetry, Losev composes poems that are immediately recognizable, unlike anyone or anything. I remember well the first time I read them. The selection, Losev's very first poetic publication, appeared in 1979 in the Parisian magazine Echo and gave the impression of some kind of hoax. I remember the feeling: this doesn’t happen. It does not happen that suddenly, at once, in one fell swoop, a completely mature, virtuoso, strong, and original-minded poet appears. But it seems that I am starting to quote Pushkin’s words. It's nothing you can do. Since the time of Pushkin, who said about Baratynsky “he is original among us, because he thinks,” little has changed. Of course, four decades of Brodsky’s presence in Russian poetry have not been in vain, the poems have become smarter, but while we are usually talking about imitation, the real consequences are ahead. It is all the more amazing how parallel to his great friend, and unlike him, the intellectual poetry of Lev Losev moves in a completely different way. However, this phrase, although it is true, is very incomplete. I really don’t want to reduce Losev’s poems to amazing versification, caustic wit, subtle observations, deep thoughts. Isn't that enough? Few. I read fragments from Losev aloud more often than the poems of anyone else. It's appropriate, it's effective, it's winning. But you mutter his lines to yourself not because you admire them, but because they were written for you and about you. Losev himself tried to identify that elusive, indefinable and indescribable quality that makes poetry real in his poem “Reading Milos”: “And someone pressed his hand on my throat / and let him go again.” Fifteen years ago I read this simple line and I remember it every time I read Losev.
In addition to two or three initial notes
and black logs on fire,
no one will remember me
of what died in me.
And what do you order to commemorate -
the silence of the Russians?
And how do you want me to understand,
that it’s scary to pick up the phone,
and the phone rings.
Or this:
What else is this?
And this is a mirror, such a piece of glass,
to be seen with a brush behind your cheek
fate displaced person.
Here is the formula, one of Losev’s many wonderful formulas - “a displaced person of fate.” This is about himself, of course, but I will also sign if he doesn’t mind.
Ivan Tolstoy: Now a different view from St. Petersburg. Critic Andrey Ariev.
Andrey Ariev: The poems of Lev Losev have seemed unexpected and new in our poetry for two decades now. So it’s easy to admit: it is Lev Losev who has long been the ruler of my fleeting thoughts about the meaning of modern lyrics. Instead of serving divine speech, instead of sweet sounds and prayers, like Khlebnikov:
Both carefree and playful.
He showed the art of touching.
To touch with the clawed paw of a lion, but also to touch with heart and soul. The meaning of this poetry is revealed not by the first, but by the second turn of the key. What is essential in it is the movement that continues from hidden depths. It is not the mystical experience that is important here, but a good knowledge of one’s own nature and nature, the unfortunate fact that something dies in every person all the time, and what is happening resonates with Pushkin:
But happiness plays with me maliciously.
Lev Losev's intuition is an intuition about the incompleteness of human existence, a feeling that is almost dominant in the St. Petersburg artistic tradition. “No one will remember / what has died in me,” writes Losev. We live with half-hearted grief and half-sin, but we don’t give in to despondency and in winter we remember flowers, we even know how to celebrate “less than Christmas,” as the poet wrote in his last romance. And that's what's interesting here. In Losev’s first book, “The Miraculous Landing,” “The Last Romance,” the second poem in order, tells about an unborn baby, about the sad fate of Russia:
Flash Admiralty syringe and local anesthesia
the place where Russia was will instantly freeze to the borders.
Now let's take a look at Losev's latest collection. Completely symmetrical - the second poem from the end is devoted to the same topic. It is called "With a Sin in Half" and has the subtitle "June 15, 1925." A mirror image records a world poetic record: starting with “not before Christmas,” the poet celebrates the day of his “not birth” - on this day, but twelve years later, he was born in Leningrad, remembering that somewhere, in a southern resort town, something happened such.
Then she sat alone for a long time
in the doctor's waiting room.
And the skin of the sofa was cold,
hers is hot
The oilcloth is shiny, the pain is subtle and sharp,
instant - fog.
There was a Jewish doctor and a Russian sister.
Crowd of Armenians
From Turks, photographers, NEP mothers,
dads, punks.
Bronzed tan from apache shirts,
The pants turned white.
Everything in this crowd and in this life is a matter of chance, but according to Losev this is life, only accidents in it are natural, and that’s what we’re talking about. Only on the periphery of consciousness, almost outside of poetry and earth, does his lyrical hero loom:
On a curved dolphin - from wave to wave -
through the darkness and the moon,
an invisible boy blew into a conch shell,
blew into the sink.
The gentle “invisible boy” appears in the poetry of Lev Losev as the face of a seasoned misanthrope. But the hero, I repeat, is precisely this random ghost, not materialized, and therefore an immortal lyrical embryo.
No, just random features
beautiful in this terrible world...
... Lev Losev argues with romanticism in general and Blok in particular. The more random, the more faithfully the poems are composed, the life plan is formed - this is what Losev could say, following Pasternak. The meaning of life is not a priori, and I think that you can think anything,” says Losev.
In his poems one can always hear an invigorating literary echo; they are not pragmatic, not utilitarian, light as calendar leaves, like notes at an emigrant ball
Of course, his wit is often gloomy, smacks of Nekrasov’s hypochondria, but in Lev Losev it is of a playful nature, and therefore is not hopeless, not despondent. In his poems one can always hear an invigorating literary echo; they are not pragmatic, not utilitarian, as light as calendar pages, like notes at an emigrant ball. This is how Khodasevich and Georgy Ivanov wrote outside Russia. The poetry of Lev Losev is all in a cloud of allusions and reminiscences, all supported from time to time by this harmony. That is why he is so openly quotable; poetry without a literary echo for him is like food without salt. And he's right. In order to read the book of Russian history, one must, like Losev, compare it with the Book of Genesis of the Bible:
"The earth
was formless and empty."
In the above landscape
I'll find out the places for my family.
This is how our existence continues, the second day has come and the second verse. And all the poetry of Lev Losev is the unexpected joy of an accidentally extended day.
Ivan Tolstoy: After the critic, a word to the poet. Vladimir Uflyand.
Vladimir Uflyand: I have long been interested in this kind of war, the confrontation between vodka and a writing person. Before my eyes, several people even suffered mortal defeat in this war. And Lesha suffered his first such tactical defeat from vodka when he was about thirty years old. She and the late Boris Fedorovich Semenov said goodbye to Boris Fedorovich’s grandmother. If we remember that Boris Fedorovich himself is twenty years older than us, then what kind of grandmother was she? And the next day, Boris Fedorovich, as if nothing had happened, went to get a hangover with cognac, and Lesha was admitted to the hospital with a suspected heart attack. But since then he has made some very cunning agreement with alcohol: he doesn’t drink until six in the evening, but after six he communicates quite calmly with vodka and with friends. And on his sixtieth birthday, I wrote him this poem:
Friend Lesha!
Having turned seventy,
Respect yourself and your order on this day.
When will six p.m. come?
don't put yourself in trouble
other than dissolving ice in scotch tape,
otherwise there won’t be enough night for them.
And at noon Nina will disturb your sleep,
looking at the lawn with passion.
He will exclaim so loudly that there will be tremors in the distance:
“Well, Lyosha, you and I made it!
The bear ate my slippers, your swimming trunks,
I didn’t eat the bottle that was on the bench,
but drank the rest from it.
His footprints are pressed into the grass!
May God grant him, the furry one, some corrections!
And a soft landing after a corkscrew”
Meanwhile, you will start physical exercises.
And I would like to make a comment about this poem that Lesha and Nina live in a lovely place, surrounded by such huge American coniferous trees. Ninulya planted a vegetable garden, and all sorts of animals come to this garden: deer, a marmot, and sometimes even a bear comes. And the thing is that Ninulya is an absolutely incredible person, she is talented in everything she undertakes, so Lesha simply could not start writing below the level at which he began writing, because next to Nina he could not do this for himself allow. Nina and Lesha will have a golden wedding at the beginning of the next century, and Lesha is also lucky in this. May God continue to do this!
Ivan Tolstoy: The roots of Lev Losev in St. Petersburg, in Leningrad. A word from a friend of his youth, historian Vladimir Gerasimov.
Vladimir Gerasimov : Near the Obvodny Canal, in the last block along Mozhaiskaya Street, on the corner of Mozhaiskaya and Malodetskoselsky Avenue, I visited him soon after we met. He lived there for quite a long time in a communal apartment. I must say that our entire company, we all lived in the old city at that time, because there was no new city yet, even Kupchino had just begun to be created. And we were all such St. Petersburgophiles, St. Petersburgers, and this city intrigued us very much, causing us many questions about it. As for those two or three dozen generally recognized architectural masterpieces, thanks to which St. Petersburg is considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world, we knew as much about them as we thought was sufficient. But the fact that on these streets, even if they are not at all shiny, even if they are causing a certain melancholy, all the houses have different facades, all are not alike, this made me want to know when it was built, who lived here, what was here earlier. There was nothing beautiful in this house on Mozhaiskaya, and yet I think that it would have been a little more interesting for Lesha and his household to live in it if they had already known then that this house was built in 1874 by an architect with the famous name Nabokov. We didn't know it then. Yes, however, this Nabokov, Nikolai Vasilyevich, had nothing to do with the family that gave the world the famous writer, just a namesake. We also didn’t know that on the next street from Mozhaiskaya, on Ruzovskaya, two wonderful Russian poets, Evgeniy Abramovich Baratynsky and Anton Antonovich Delvig, once lived. By the way, about Delvig. About Delvig and Losev. Although, it would seem, what is the connection between them? And for a long time, Lesha, during the time of our still intense communication, even externally reminded me of Delvig - soft facial features, a rounded chin, glasses with very strong diopters. But it’s not just a matter of external resemblance; you never know who looks like anyone. Anna Petrovna Kern, a famous contemporary of Delvig, Pushkin and other poets, and their friend, writes very touchingly and, in my opinion, talentedly about Delvig. She was on good friendly terms with Delvig. And this is what she writes: “Delvig, I can affirmatively say, was always smart! And how kind he was! I have never met a more kind and pleasant person than him. He joked so sweetly, so witty, while maintaining a serious face, he made me laugh that you couldn’t help but recognize in him true British humor. Hospitable, generous, delicate, refined, he knew how to make everyone around him happy. He always joked very seriously, and when he repeated his favorite word “funny,” it meant that we were talking about something not at all funny, but either sad or annoying for him.” It seems to me that if in this paragraph instead of the name Delvig we insert the name Losev, then otherwise we can not change a single word. Of course, I didn’t share my observations with Lesha and never wrote to him about this, because it would be inconvenient, but since today I’m still speaking for our radio listeners, it seems to me that they will still get a more complete picture about our hero of the day, if I share these observations with them. So, then Lesha and Nina moved to a more spacious apartment, and he doesn’t mention anywhere in his poetry about those places where Lesha and his family lived for the last few years in his homeland, because in those parts it’s simply too much for the eye to see. what to catch. There are these nine- or sixteen-story idiots standing there, with four- and five-story buildings nestling at their feet, like some little dogs. And, of course, there were many very important reasons for their departure from here, but it seems to me that one of these reasons, albeit not the most important, was Lesha’s desire to take his wife away from this landscape, from the landscape that opened from the windows of their apartment, where Nina sat all day long in a rather despondent mood and admired the huge puddle that never dried up under their window. I haven’t been to those places for a long time, but several years ago the puddle still remained in the same place, just like the famous Mirgorod puddle, sung by Gogol.
Ivan Tolstoy: From St. Petersburg to the West. New York author Alexander Genis is at our microphone.
Alexander Genis: Losev, with his cunning rhyme, with his complex patterned rhythm, with his sophisticated verbal play, is a virtuoso scholar of versification. But there are qualities in his poetry that allow it to be read even by those who usually look with hatred at text typed in a column. Losev's poems are interesting at the simplest, philistine level. They are prosaic, narrative, and fascinating. The fundamental contradiction of his work is born of the author’s exceptional loyalty to his hero, or more precisely, to the heroine - his homeland. And in this sense, Losev’s poetry is purely emigrant. The conflict in Losev's poems is determined by the existence of the homeland and the fact of its absence. The loss of the fatherland is a fruitful artistic experience. Nature does not tolerate emptiness, and Losev fills it with his own and not his own memories. He lists Russia, rhymes it, plays with it with clever verbal play. Losev carefully packs native realities into his verse to make it easier to transport Russia from place to place. But where is the ideal, where is the magic crystal of art through which bad reality is transformed into normal? Losev has this too. The poet, tormented by the absurdity of Russian history, secretly preserves a shy image of a reasonable norm, an image that is rare, but still found in the wax museum of his memories.
So that instead of this rust, the fields in the insect pest
Once again the Volga would roll into the Caspian Sea,
If only horses would eat oats again,
so that a cloud of glory shines over the homeland,
so that at least something would work out, it would work out.
And maybe the tongue won’t dry out.
Ivan Tolstoy: Recently, the writer Tatyana Tolstaya visited our Prague studio while passing through from Greece.
Tatiana Tolstaya: It seems to me that Lev Losev wonderfully combines two things. The first is that it openly and for anyone who wants to shows the entire spectrum of Russian literature in which it exists, which is huge. This is from Pushkin, from Derzhavin to Mandelstam and children's poems, which is natural, he came from these children's poems, right down to quotes from various unexpected things, translated things, Dante, whatever. For a literate, intelligent, educated reader, he presents, without hesitation, the entire spectrum of literature. This is often called postmodernism, but, in my opinion, it is simply a good education and a beautiful ability to handle text, this is a literary text. But the narrower one, with which this broad tradition is connected, in my opinion, lies in such a strange position. On the one hand, it comes out of Zabolotsky. And both early and late. He has quotes from the later, again, if you guess it, you won’t guess it. We don’t read much of the late Zabolotsky and it’s customary not to like him, and in vain. And he precedes, strange as it may seem, Timur Kibirov.
Ivan Tolstoy: Tell me, is it possible that serious, real lyrics have such a charge of a sense of humor? In general, is it legal for serious lyrics to be humorous poetry at the same time?
Tatiana Tolstaya: Legal or illegal? It may be illegal. Like all real poetry, it must be lawless. But it is so difficult that few people succeed. There are such humorous, satirical, ironic directions in which people are, for example, Sasha Cherny, a very respected poet (early Sasha Cherny, before the emigrant period). With humor - great, some like it, some don't like it, but in terms of lyrics - stop, the lyrics don't work there. Don Aminado, absolutely beautiful, satirical, if you like, poetry, an attempt at lyricism - stop! Blockage, pink drool. But the opposite sin is high, sublime lyricism, somewhere all up in the clouds, looking at the stars, and there, in these stars, there is only sugar, nausea.
He was a welcoming beacon for many poets in Russia
To cross the sublime with the humorous, not to be afraid to step off the sidewalk and step into terrible mud, to pull out your foot without getting dirty, but only adding to our life experience, and at the same time directing your head somewhere very high, not where cheap stars stand for three kopecks, and where the peaks are, to which we still have to stretch our chins to look - Losev somehow manages to fit on this line. And I would say that it was in this very capacity that he was a welcoming beacon for many poets in Russia. Many tried to imitate him. It didn't work out. You cannot take this gift away, you cannot adopt it, you cannot use it. I know many poets who would like to write like Losev. This is the kind of envy that, it seems to me, says a lot, and it’s a good trait to envy Losev. He may, I may not.
Ivan Tolstoy: When Losev left the Soviet Union in the second half of the 70s, no one suspected that he was a poet. He declared himself as a poet already in exile. You have already seen Lev Vladimirovich in America. Tell me, Losev and poetic behavior are two things together?
Tatiana Tolstaya: I may not know Lev Vladimirovich well enough to evaluate his poetic behavior, but in my opinion, no. That is, his hair does not flutter, he does not run around the house like crazy. And he looks unusually like a gentleman and behaves like a gentleman, in our best understanding, right or wrong, of this word. This is an extremely obliging person, kind, polite, extremely well-mannered, hospitable, kind, indulgent towards the nonsense that, say, drunk guests can indulge in. And communication with him is communication with the old, long-gone and, perhaps, non-existent St. Petersburg world. Somehow, alone, in the wild wilderness of his small state, he maintains the idea that there are such people in St. Petersburg. If you haven't seen them, well, here they are, here they are.
Ivan Tolstoy: Let’s now move on to those who professionally collaborate with Lev Losev. First, a philologist from the University of Keele, Great Britain, Valentina Polukhina.
Valentina Polukhina: In my relationship with Lesha, of course, Brodsky is present like air and light. Lesha was one of Joseph’s closest friends, he is the author of ten of the best articles about Brodsky, and for me he is the greatest authority on Brodsky. In his always brilliant articles, he demonstrates the ability to move away from unambiguous interpretations, from scientific schemes; his articles, like his poems, are surrounded by a huge field of cultural context. And my respect and gratitude to Lev Vladimirovich are immeasurable. But I love Losev the poet no less for his intelligent talent, special lyricism, dry wit and fantastic formal inventiveness. His poems are fascinating with their paradoxical moves. Puritanism is mixed with hidden eroticism, postmodernism with classical harmony, realism with absurdity. Despite the fact that in life extremes are alien to him. A unique gift. Losev is a poet and a person with an impeccable reputation. His erudition is fabulous, his modesty is attractive, his politeness, charm, his nobility are truly aristocratic. And in poetry, and in life, and in articles, Losev is smart and graceful, gentle and sad, witty and wise. And this man, by the will of fate and not at all deserved by me, is my colleague and friend. I couldn't have asked for a bigger or better gift. And on his birthday, I wish him to enjoy his talent and take care of his health. And maybe smile a little more often and not so sadly.
Ivan Tolstoy: I called the city of Tenafly near New York, where the Russian publishing house Hermitage, which published Losev’s first two books, is located. Here is a recording of a conversation with the owner of the publishing house Igor Efimov.
What is the commercial fate of publishing his books?
Igor Efimov: I must say that despite all the difficulties of Losev’s books that we published... We also published a collection of his wonderful essays, which at one time were published in the magazine “Continent” under the title “Closed Distributor”. This collection, two collections of poems and the book “The Poetics of Brodsky”, they are all almost sold out. But they diverge for a very long time. So gradually, I think we recovered our expenses, but this process was extended, as we see, for ten years or even more.
Ivan Tolstoy: For you as a publisher, what is Losev's readership in Russian America?
Igor Efimov: These are mainly Russian people who write poetry, they follow each other very closely, they inevitably take an active interest in each other, and Slavists who teach modern Russian literature, who know Losev the professor very well, Losev the wonderful researcher of Russian literature, and they are interested in all aspects of his work.
Ivan Tolstoy: And now - a conversation with the hero of the day himself. Lev Vladimirovich, there is probably an external reason that you began to publish your poems only after crossing the border in a western direction. But there is probably an internal reason. Can you tell me about the one and the other?
Lev Losev: As for what you call the external cause, this is probably the most obvious. It’s not that I wrote a lot of poems, as they say, of political content, but, one way or another, everything you write is informed, imbued with your worldview, your attitude to reality. So it is unlikely that by its very nature, perhaps, its verbal nature, it would even have occurred to me to propose something for publication in the Soviet Union while it existed and while I was there. But the most important thing is that I wrote quite a bit while living in my homeland, until the beginning of 1976, when I emigrated. As I wrote in the preface to my first collection, “The Miraculous Landing,” I began to write poetry, or at least take seriously what I was able to do, only in 1974, that is, a year and a half before my emigration. Quite simply, not much was written during this time. Quite honestly, hand on heart, I didn’t plan any literary path, any literary future for myself when leaving Russia. As I said, at that time I only wrote poetry seriously for a year and a half or two, and at that moment I absolutely did not want to publish anything I wrote, because I mainly wrote them for such “therapeutic” purposes. It’s not that I intentionally wrote them, but they turned out, they were written, they came to me as a kind of way to survive. And some kind of superstition then told me that publishing them, even just reading them with friends, meant ruining their therapeutic, soul-healing effect. Then, of course, all this belated trepidation gradually evaporated, as the number of poems became more numerous, I began to take a more sober view of this, and, in the end, in 1980, poems were published for the first time in the Echo magazine. But I never looked at it as a career, not in the slightest. More seriously, I can say that, oddly enough, although in general I am rather a pessimist by nature, and I never expect any special joys from the future, but those general ideas about the future that I had when I left my homeland in 1976 year, they came true. Because I didn’t imagine anything particularly concrete and didn’t take anything away in this sense, except readiness for anything. What did I expect? To put it simply - to freedom. And I really got it.
Ivan Tolstoy: Where does the poet Losev celebrate his anniversary?
Lev Losev: I can tell you this with absolute certainty. I will celebrate my so-called anniversary (I don’t attach much importance to this date at all) on the train on the way from Milan to Venice. In the morning I will be in Milan, in the evening I will be in Venice. This is due to my big trip to different European cities.
Ivan Tolstoy: Let me congratulate you on your 60th birthday!
Lev Losev: Thank you very much, Ivan Nikitich!
And at the end of our anniversary broadcast, Lev Losev kindly agreed to read an unpublished poem.
Lev Losev:
I learned to write that yours is Sluchevsky.
I publish in dying thick magazines.
(What decadence, Alexandrianism!
Cavafy could have written something like this,
and the late Shmakov would have translated,
and then the late Joseph would have corrected it).
Yes, and he himself has gained weight that your Apukhtin,
I can’t get to the sofa without shortness of breath,
I drink chamomile infusion instead of tea,
I throw away the unread books,
the smile seems to have been forgotten on his face.
And when they knock on my door with their fist,
when they shout: Sarmatians are at the gates!
Ojibway! Lezgins! goyim! -
I say: leave me alone.
I retire to the inner chambers,
cool gloomy chambers.
.___________________________________________________________
Lev Losev former Leningrader
. .
LEV LOSEV (born in 1937). Since 1976 he has lived in
USA. His poems were published on the pages of magazines
“Continent”, “Echo”, “Third Wave”, in Russian newspapers
Abroad. Author of the book “The Miracle Landing” (1985).
.
.
* * *Under the eaves at the very top
it is unclearly written XY.
The one who wrote this motto
he dared to threaten the heavens.
Crushed like a fortress of enemies,
the dilapidated temple of our decrepit gods.
In heaven for the forgotten people
he kidnapped, the second Prometheus,
not fire, blue light -
The TVs in the huts were lit.
He despised both danger and pain.
His liver eats alcohol
taking the form of an eagle,
but stubbornly he drinks from his throat,
dragging the ladder to the house again,
to add your inscription.
A strong expert in our literacy,
He will put a dashing curl
above the union letter I,
completing your efforts.
The Russian frost does not take him,
does not take away either sclerosis or cirrhosis,
no melancholy, no heart attack, no stroke,
he will continue the phallic cult,
embodied in the Tatar word
with a pig tail at the end.1974
PRONOUNS
Betrayal is in the blood
Betray yourself, betray your eye and finger,
betrayal of libertines and drunkards,
but from other things, God, save me.Here we are lying. We feel bad. We're sick.
The soul lives separately under the window,
Below us is not an ordinary bed, but
rotten mattress, hospital humus.Why am I sick, so unpleasant to me?
it's because he's such a slob:
there are spots of soup on the face, spots of fear
and bloody stains on the sheet.Something still flows in us in impulses,
when we lie with cold feet,
and everything that we lied for our lives,
Now we are presented with a long bill.But you live strangely and freely
under the window, where there is a branch, snow and a bird,
watching this lie die
how painful she is and how afraid she is.1976
“I understand - the yoke, hunger,
there has been no democracy for a thousand years,
but a bad Russian spirit
I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
“These rains, these birches,
these groans about the graves,”
and a poet with an expression of threat
he curled his thin lips.
And he also said, getting excited:
“I don’t like these drunken nights,
the repentant sincerity of drunkards,
Dostoevsky anguish of informers,
this vodka, these mushrooms,
these girls, these sins
and in the morning instead of a lotion
watery Blok rhymes;
our bards' cardboard spears
and their actor’s hoarseness,
our empty iambic flat feet
and the thin trochees lame;
our shrines are offensive,
everything is designed for a fool,
and life-giving pure Latin
a river flowed past us,
That's the truth - a country of scoundrels:
and there is no decent toilet,”
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so the poet ended suddenly.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
he was skirting something important
and looked as if straight into the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.1977
“All the yarns have unraveled,
again the tow is in hand,
and people have forgotten how
play the reeds.We are in our polymers
weave a tuft of wool,
but these are half measures
They can’t save us..."So I, a meager vessel,
irregular oval,
at Udelnaya station
sat and was sad.I had nowhere to hide
my soul's work,
and a rainbow of oil
bloomed in front of me.And having screwed up so much
and having done some work,
I'm behind the fence opposite
looked blankly.The mental hospital was breathing
the hulls glowed,
and there flashed faces,
voices were walkingthere they sang whatever they had to,
starting to scream
and Finnish swamp
the reed answered them.1978
DOCUMENTARY
Ah, in the old movie (in the old movie)
a soldier is shaving in a trench,
there are other suckers around
they mutter their silent noises,
they waddle briskly with their feet,
quickly pick with their hands
and look bravely into the lens.There, on unknown paths
traces of howitzer batteries,
dreaming of chicken legs
a Jewish refugee on a droshky,
there the day goes like this
under the black-white-gray flag,
that every episode is gray.There the Russian Tsar is wasting away in a carriage,
plays sec and bura.
There are only occasional silent gasps
six-inch jura.
There behind the Olsztyn Basin
Samsonov with a businesslike expression
unfastens his holster.In that gray and quiet world
Ivan is lying - an overcoat, a gun.
Behind him is François, suffering from a tic,
Peugeot rolls silently.
....................................................
Another terrible roar will be heard,
we will still see blood red,
We'll see enough yet.1979
He said: “And this is basil.”
And from the garden to the English plate -
ruddy radish, onion,
and the dog wobbled, his tongue hanging out.
He simply called me Alekha.
“Come on, in Russian, under the landscape.”
We felt good. We felt bad.
The Gulf was Finnish. It means ours.Oh, homeland with a capital R,
Or rather, S, or rather, B is intolerable,
our permanent air of order
and soil - disabled person and gentleman.
Simple names - Ghoul, Rededya,
union of Cheka, bull and man,
forest named after Comrade Bear,
meadow named after Comrade Zhuk.In Siberia, a hawk shed a tear,
In Moscow, a blade of grass ascended to the pulpit.
They swore from above. They farted downstairs.
The porcelain rattled and Glinka came out.
Horse-Pushkin, biting the bit,
this whale race, who glorified freedom.
They gave vobla to a thousand people.
They gave me "Silva". Duska didn’t give it.And the homeland went to hell.
Now there is cold, dirt and mosquitoes.
The dog died, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new moved into the house hastily.
And nothing, of course, grows
in a garden bed near the former bay.THE LAST ROMANCE
Yuzu Aleshkovsky
You can't hear the city noise,
There is silence above the Neva Tower... etc.There is silence above the Neva Tower.
She turned gilded again.
Here is a woman riding alone.
Sheflew up again.
Everything is reflected by the moon's face,
sung by a host of poets, -
not just a sentry bayonet,
but there are a lot of piercing objects,The Admiralty syringe will flash,
and local anesthesia
instantly freezes to the borders
the place where Russia was.Rigor to face
not only in the womb of a premature baby
but also to his half-father,
drunk in the morning.Christmas is coming,
dead from lack of trees.
In the land of empty skies and shelves
nothing will be born.The dead Summer Garden flashes by.
Here is a woman coming back.
Her lips are bitten.
And the Neva tower is empty.ACCORDING TO LENIN
Step forward. Two back. Step forward.
The gypsy sang. Abramovich screeched.
And, yearning for them, he lamented,
poured out the zealous people
(survivor of the Mongol yoke,
five-year plan, fall era,
an alien pile of Serbian literacy;
somewhere a Polish intrigue was brewing,
and to the sounds of pas de patinare
Metternich danced against us;
there are still the same potholes under the asphalt;
Pushkin was lost in vain because of a woman;
Dostoevsky mutters: bobok;
Stalin was bad, he is in exile
didn’t share parcels with buddies
and one personally ran away).
What is lost cannot be returned.
Sasha, sing! Work hard, Abrashka!
Who has a shirt left here -
If you don’t drink it, you can at least break the gate.Far away, in the Land of Scoundrels
and unclear but passionate gestures,
Once upon a time there lived Bulgakov, Berdyaev,
Rozanov, Gershenzon and Shestov.
Beard in ancient gossip,
squealed about the latest thingsand, stealthily taking out the medallion,
sighed Kuzmin, the picky one,
over a helpless brown lock
from the muscular chest of a lawyer,
and Burliuk walked around the capital.
like an iron, and with rutabaga in his buttonhole.)
_________________________________________________
* Petersburg, i.e. the encrypted hero of Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero”.Yes, at sunset over the city of Petrov
reddish mixture of Messina,
and under this crimson cover
the red forces are gathering,
And in everything there is a lack, a lack:
paving stones disappear from the pavements,
If you ask for tea in a tavern, it’s not sweet,
in “Rech” every line is a typo,
and you can’t buy wine without sediment,
and the tram doesn't run, twenty,and the grass crawls out of the cracks
Silurian sidewalk.
But this is also a crowd of women
and drank men, flirted,
and at the table, next to the Social Revolutionary
Mandelstam conjured magic over
eclair.And the Socialist-Revolutionary looked busily,
like a barefoot dancer jumped,
and the smell of dynamite was in the air
over a lovely cup of cocoa.PUSHKIN PLACES
Day, evening, dressing, undressing -
everything is in sight.
Where were the secret meetings arranged?
In the woods? in the garden?
Does the bush mean a mouse hole?
a la gitane?
In a stroller, with the curtains drawn over the windows?
but what about there?
How crowded is this desert region!
He took cover - look,
a man walks in the garden with a twig,
on the river the women are busy with canvas,
the decrepit little dove hangs out in the living room in the morning,
does not sleep, ah!
Oh where to find the hidden limits
for a day? for the night?
Where do you take the studs out? take off your trousers?
where - the skirt away?
Where measured happiness will not frighten away
sudden knock
and a boorish grin of complicity
on the faces of the servants?
The village, you say, is solitude?
No, brother, you're being naughty.
Isn't that why this wonderful moment
just a moment?I worked at Kostya. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, and maybe two hundred
transparent young men, plainest girls.
Squeezing through the door with a cold,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
They told me: “Here are a couple of texts for you.”
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unimaginable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
like concrete with reinforcement in it.
These were all fish with fur
nonsense multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I find this nonsense
and indeed it was possible to print it.It was freezing. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow underneath was pink.
What were they talking about as they walked?
the watchful Morozov eavesdropped,
the same Pavlik who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
the plywood cracked due to the cold,
but they were warm.And time passed.
And the first number came.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone apart.
Those in the camp barracks are chirping,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital are nodding and crowing,
and the little devils are driven off the cuffs.FOR CHRISTMAS
I'll lie down and unfocus my eyes,
I will split the star in the window
and suddenly I see the area of Siru,
your damp homeland.At the mercy of the amateur optician
not only double - and double,
and two of Saturn and Jupiter
pregnant with the Christmas star.Following this quickly flowing
and dried up, even sooner
rise above Volkhov and Vytegra
Star of the Magi, Star of the Kings.
.......................................................
The star will rise above the station building,
and a radio in the general store window
program on request with dances
will interrupt confusedly and,
hesitating a little until he prays
about shepherds, wise men, kings,
about communists and Komsomol members,
about a rabble of drunkards and slobs.Blind, talkative prophets,
fathers accustomed to the cross,
how rushed these lines are,
walk on a white sheet,
the sunset quickly got wet,
wandering to the far side
and open the doors to the rooms,
long abandoned by me. .
.
Page 216-228
I worked at Kostya. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, maybe two hundred
transparent young men, plainest girls.
Squeezing through the door with a cold,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
They told me: “Here are a couple of texts for you.”
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unimaginable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
like concrete with reinforcement in it.
These were all fish with fur
nonsense multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I find this nonsense
and indeed it was possible to print it.
It was freezing. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow, and the snow underneath was pink.
What were they talking about as they walked?
the watchful Morozov eavesdropped,
the same Pavlik who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
the plywood cracked due to the cold,
but they were warm.
And time passed.
And the first number came.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone apart.
Those in the camp barracks are chirping,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital are nodding and crowing,
and the little devils are driven off the cuffs.
It’s a pity for Stolypin, historically speaking.
and just like that, in an everyday manner,
but it’s a pity for Bogrov and his hysterical
a yapping revolver.
I feel sorry for the gendarme. Sorry for Lysaya
woe to the wandering crow.
It's a pity that he was brought from the police
with excess testosterone
a murderer who had enough vodka in the morning -
but she doesn’t take it, so go to the dog!
And he takes off the pale muzzle
pieces of glass sticking out on the nose.
The executioner shows pity for the Jew -
Let the Jew think it’s all a dream.
And it’s awkward to hang by the neck
man in pince-nez.
(At Pasternak's)
All I remember about this length is
almost breaks in a wonderful picture,
where the ice floe is piled on the ice floe,
this favorite printed picture,
where a smoke creeps over the three-pipe
smoke and dissipates before the end;
maybe he immersed himself forever
into the abyss, or emerge without crashing into the rocks,
so the Norwegian flashed in the conversation,
the valves of meaning and connection melt;
what is my half-childhood memory!
where to remember! How can you understand!
All I remember is an icy day,
a swarm of excuses, legends, suffering,
the day that crushed me and made me me.
4, rue Regnard
Hello, walls that have absorbed the moans of passion,
cough, Russian “blya” from a smoky mouth!
Let's sit side by side
with this cute home, unmarked for two years,
where everything seems to be smoothed over by monotony
steam roller.
A person who lived in such an apartment
it goes out to all four,
doesn't look back
but then he turns left,
because one queen ordered,
to the Luxembourg Gardens.
In the meantime, Pierrot and Truffaldino are at the Odeon
nonsense, dusty mirror ice floe
reflects close
round-sided sofa, - rising on flippers,
he reads something in the slotted
Hello, shutter stanzas brought together,
parallel light painting with the sun in the subtext,
there is a speck of dust trembling in it.
How freely they spin, take off, and tumble!
But then it starts to get dark, dark,
and you won’t read it anymore.
A puddle of water froze in the entryway of the garbage dump. Snowfall knocks on mica.
The cow is calving, the child is graying, the footcloths are drying, the cabbage soup is boiling.
This life, this way of existence of protein bodies
We live and rejoice that the Lord has sent us a living inheritance.
A black plague hangs over the world, white nonsense is walking around.
Snowflakes have a wonderful symmetry of non-existence and being.
To Columbus
Teach me how to live in the end, I couldn’t learn it myself.
Teach me how to become smaller than myself, compacted into a tight ball,
how to become bigger than yourself, stretching out over half a carpet.
I read your meowmoires, memurra
about contempt for creatures living through the pen,
but acceptable to the teeth.
Walk along the keys, dragging your striped tail,
for better than anything I write is yours.
Lie down on my book - no lashing will follow:
you are more lyrical than Anna, Marina, Velimir, Joseph, Boris.
What they have on paper is in your family.
Sing me your song with Mandelstam's head in your mouth.
I have nothing more to overcome my fear
at the hour when you are gone after midnight and the night is grinning.
“Everything is ahead!”
Sexologists have gone all over Rus', sexologists!
Where before the sexots wandered along the paths,
sexologist, sexologist is coming!
He's in the sweetest Russian honeycomb
will climb in and lick the honey.
The hut is uncomfortable, the street is dirty,
crucian carp died in the pond,
all the women went crazy - they want orgasm,
where can I get it in Rus'?
"Poetry Day 1957"
Squalor and a black hole -
Which? - the fourth, perhaps, five-year plan.
On that day, leftovers were brought to our city
poetry from the Moscow courtyard.
Here, they say, eat. Only we are out of the cage
routine did not appear yesterday...
There is a pine tree in a vacant lot, there is a hole under it,
a sad capercaillie on a lower branch...
In our neo-Cubo-Muscovites it is weak,
in this one - futurism, where the Rhine roars: Rimbaud! -
where the Sphinx is silent, but quartz flickers in it.
There are pockmarks in the eyes from hieroglyphs
Ereminsky, and Brodsky rib
transforms into Elena Schwartz.
Ayny Hotel: invitation
Evgeniy Reina, with love
At night from the street in a tie, hat, raincoat.
On the hotel bed, supine - tie, hat, boots.
Waiting for the conventional knock, bell and generally
from a blonde, a brunette... no, only blondes.
Everything inspires anxiety, suspicion, horror -
telephone, window curtain, door handle.
There is still no other black and white paradise,
and, of course, you will be able to escape there, slip away, sneak away.
The screen is rinsed with a moving cone of light,
we'll dodge, we'll deceive the chase, we'll jump off the bandwagon
under the cover of a tie, hat, raincoat,
to the rhythmic bursts of neon in a glass of scotch.
At home the smoke is like a rocker - the cops are gutting the chests of drawers,
the memoir bastard hisses at each other: don’t touch!
Quiet in the secret hotel, only the thin walls are shaking
from the proximity to the subway, elevated train, and railway.
Untitled
My hometown is nameless,
there is always a fog hanging over him
the color of skim milk.
The lips are shy to name
who betrayed Christ three times
and yet a saint.
What is the name of the country?
These names were given to you!
I'm from the country, comrade,
where there are no roads leading to Rome,
where in the sky the smoke is insoluble
and where the snow does not melt.
In the clinic
The doctor muttered something to me about a kidney
and hid his gaze. I felt sorry for the doctor.
I thought: life has broken through the shell
and flowed, light and hot.
Diploma on the wall. Doctor. His awkwardness.
Oblique hand stitching recipe.
And I marveled: oh, what lightness,
How easy this news turned out to be!
Where are the demons that have been chasing me for centuries?
I breathe new, light air.
I'll go now and get my blood tested.
And I will sign these lines in blood.
In Pompeii
His knees slide in dust and blood.
Lermontov
Poppies are growing at the stadium,
huge, like a dog's mouth,
bared in anger.
This is how Pompeii sprouted!
The wind runs through the poppies,
and fear bends my back,
and having eaten the first saint,
I think: why am I a Leo?
I look around furtively
but there is no return for me from the arena,
and makes me scared
schadenfreude in the Roman master
with black dope in the middle,
with a bloody halo around it.
I wish I could take it in Russian - into dirt and renewal,
plop down into the icy darkness!
Squander everything for the eight of diamonds
one veranda window.
Claws rush out of the concentration camp of time,
belly and muzzle to the ground,
Yes, I could cut it on the crown with an ice ax
namesake in mirror glass.
The night is catching up with me on a bulldozer.
The card doesn't go to me.
The red trump cards are extinguishing on the lake,
gold fades in the window.
Turned on the TV - they blow up the house.
It immediately opened up like a volume,
and the flames of the poor notebook
let's go torment.
It has the agility of a marten
instantly scanned all the pages,
enough food from the table
and the mirrors became hot.
What distance was reflected in them?
What grief was exposed?
What kind of life was consumed by the fumes -
novel? poetry? dictionary? primer?
What was the alphabet in the story -
our? Arabic knots?
Hebrew? Latin seal?
You can't tell when it's burning.
Return from Sakhalin
I'm 22. Snowdrift up to the roof.
“Goat stew” is on the menu.
A worker suffering from a hernia
forgot to fasten his waistcoat,
knocks on me a hundred times a day.
He says: “At the Mechzavod
the machines littered the utility yard.
Machines need care.
There needs to be a big conversation here.”
He is a slave. There is reproach in his eyes.
Then the fixed Vova will come
with a bottle of “Drinking alcohol”,
sentence for murder, now - foreman.
He doesn't want to talk about women
he keeps repeating: “I am a slave, you are a slave.”
The prisoner philosophizes, the prisoner has
the tooth sparkles, the eyelid waters.
Shakes his bald head -
Alcohol burns the soul, even drinking it.
The words resemble a howl.
And this howl, and the turbine howl
drowned out the cry of “Stop!
Who's coming?" when Nina and I
huddled in a half-empty TU,
hung over one sixth.
Khozdvor Eurasia. Turnover
fuel oil rivers and bald ice.
Here and there heaps of frozen
industrial cities.
Thorn in several rows.
Oh, how wonderfully we escaped!
How Nord and Ost moved away!
The frost crackled in the duralumin.
A white tail fluffed up from behind.
Freedom. Cold. The proximity of the stars.
Anything can happen
It happens that the office gets so crowded with men -
The glow of sweaty faces is brighter than the sun.
It happens that a person gets so drunk,
that everything screams to him: “Who are you like?”
“Who do you look like?” - womanish squeals of the choir
motley cows, yards and hens.
“Who do I look like?” - he asked at the fence.
The fence said it could, using three letters.
Where the air is "pink with tiles"
where lions are winged, while birds
they prefer piazzas on paving stones,
like the Germans or the Japanese, to perform;
where cats can swim, walls cry,
where is the sun, gold in the morning
having time and dipping his elbow into the lagoon
ray, decides it’s time for a bath, -
you got stuck there, stayed, disappeared,
Lounging in a chair in front of a coffee shop
and dragged on, froze, split into two,
floated away in a ring of smoke, and - in general
come catch it when you're all over there -
then you will touch the tea utensils loudly
churches, then the wind will run through the garden,
defector, man in a cloak,
prisoner on the run, exit through the looking glass
found it - let them grab the stakes, -
disappeared at the crossroads of parallels,
leaving no trace on the water,
there you turned into a fragile tugboat,
mother-of-pearl clouds over a muddy channel,
the smell of coffee on a Sunday morning,
where is Sunday tomorrow and always.
The city lives, grows, and is built.
Here was the sky, and now there is brick and glass.
You know, even you, the healthy one, won’t get well,
If you run out of time, it’s gone, it’s up.
You'll go out in the morning to the bathroom with cloudy eyes,
turn the tap and a stream will come out
screams, curses, threats, and in the mirror
The fiery-eyed prophet will grin terribly.
Iron, grass
The grass grew while I was sleeping!
That's where they drove me while I warmed up -
smells of warm fuel oil from cracked sleepers,
and neither switch nor rail is visible in the weeds.
What to do while awake? Enough with the ruff,
a mixture of dead water and water from a bad hoof?
At the dead end of evolution, the locomotive does not whistle, and the rust
continues to creep, dust continues to accumulate.
Just chu! - a link in the cast iron chain swayed,
crunching dirty glass, clinking something rusty iron,
shaking the depot, something crawled out of it,
looked around and, after thinking, climbed back in.
Forgotten villages
In the Russian thickets they are countless,
we just can’t find a way -
bridges collapsed, a snowstorm blew in,
The path was blocked with windfall.
There they plow in April, there they reap in August,
there they won’t sit at the table wearing a hat,
calmly await the second coming,
they will bow, no matter who comes -
a policeman on a troika, an archangel with a trumpet,
passerby in a German coat.
There they treat diseases with water and herbs.
No one dies there.
The Lord puts them to sleep for the winter,
in the snow it covers up to fear -
neither fix the hole, nor chop the wood,
no sledding, no games, no fun.
The bodies taste peace on the floors,
and souls are happy dreams.
There is so much heat trapped in the sheepskins,
that will last until spring.
A star will rise above the station building,
and a radio in the general store window
program on request with dances
will interrupt confusedly and,
hesitating a little until he prays
about shepherds, wise men, kings,
about communists and Komsomol members,
about a rabble of drunkards and slobs.
Blind, querulous prophets,
fathers accustomed to the cross,
how patient these lines are,
wandering along a white sheet of paper.
Where is the pink blotter
It was quite possible that the West arose,
there behind their heavy gait
The bypass channel stretches.
The sunset quickly got wet,
words go home
and open the doors to the rooms,
long abandoned by me.
Having passed earthly life to the middle,
I was taken to a long corridor.
Pale men in ridiculous dresses
They were having some kind of vague conversation.
Bones rattled. Gases were emitted
and an ax suspended in the air
gloomily chopped off words and phrases:
all hoo yes hoo, yes yo mayo, yes fuck -
The sinners' stories were sad.
One noted that for three rubles
tonight he will blow someone away,
but someone, scraping his furry chest,
and the third, with a crooked head,
exclaimed to close the window - it was blowing.
In response, he heard a vile howl,
depraved, indignant, sad,
but a convoy came in in dirty robes,
and I was carried away by evil spirits.
Wrinkling my forehead, I lay in the corner.
It smelled of urine, carbolic acid and grave.
They stuck a thick needle into me
I was fed the bitterness of wormwood.
To the cold iron table
then they pinned me down with a long board,
and I was forbidden to breathe
in the darkness of this deserted room.
The answer was shrill: “There’s nothing to admire.”
And he: “Take your heart at the same time.”
And she: “Now, first I’ll finish the liver.”
And my skeleton phosphorescently
broken off, depersonalized, discolored,
a gnarled skeleton of thirty-three years old.
And finally, the “Cemetery” stop.
A beggar, puffed up like a bug,
in a Muscovite jacket sitting at the gate.
I give him money - he doesn’t take it.
How, I insist, was placed in the alley
monument in the form of a table and bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
check the list, I’m yours,
please, please respect me.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, no concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm some Mister Twister
doesn't let you get within range of a cannon shot,
mockingly, he takes it under the visor,
no matter what I give, nothing is taken.
From Bunin
Rooks will fly in, rooks will fly away,
well, the cast iron cross sticks out, sticks out,
present this cloudy area
the quiet light of a passport photograph.
Every slight breath is a slight sin.
Night comes - one for all.
Strokes the soft star paw
the lifeless land of the cemetery.
From Feta
Crossroads where the broom is
freezes in a snowy sleep,
yes, simple as a postcard,
window visibility:
holiday - half a kilo of sausages,
there is a shield on the bottle,
and the TV hums something,
The video squeals.
After so many years of exhaustion
what will you answer here
to a simple question in Russian:
What is your name?
Or another story like this:
I am, but at the same time I am not,
no health, and no coins,
there is no peace, and there is no will,
there is no heart - there is an uneven beat
Yes, these pranks with a pen,
When they suddenly roll in,
like a pogrom on an empty block,
and, like a Jew to a Cossack,
the brain gives itself over to language,
the combination of these two
light fluff flutters into the air,
and tongues of fire beat
around my absence.
Judas thought, hiding
silver pieces in a bag,
cold calculation and luck
played along with him again.
Make colossal money
and it happened sometimes before,
but something is starting to feel chilly
April nights are here,
but the lowlands smell of carrion,
but it stings under the left rib,
but in the grove the aspen trees are shaking,
all thirty, with your silver.
And foolish Judas understood,
that he has no corner in the world,
in all of Judea there is comfort
and in the whole universe of heat.
What shines through and secretly shines...
How and why did you get involved in these games?
don't tumble into this field?
I don't know where I came from
I remember the rule: if you take it, go.
I remember my homeland, the Russian God,
corner on a rotten cross
and what hopelessness there is
in His slavish, humble beauty.
Corinthian columns of St. Petersburg
hairstyles softened by lye,
intertwined with the smoky, drowsy,
long, slanting rain.
Like being under a surgeon's knife
from an anesthesiologist's mistake,
under major renovation
the house is dying.
Buryonka of the Russian sky
again neither moo nor calf,
but red-red and massive
Bolshevik holidays.
The defense industry is going to the parade.
The Kamaz brothers are roaring,
and creeps behind them
exhaust stinkers.
My book
Neither Rome, nor the world, nor the century,
not to the full attention of the hall -
to the Lethean Library,
how Nabokov said viciously.
In the cold winter season
(“one day” - beyond the line)
I look up the mountain
(goes down to the river bank)
a cart tired of life,
a cart filled with sickness.
Lethea Library,
prepare for the reception seriously.
I've been pushing my throat for a long time,
and here is my reward for my work:
they will not throw you into Charon's boat,
stuck on the bookshelf.
In the cemetery where you and I were lying,
looking out of nowhere
midday clouds sculpted,
ponderous, lush, cumulus,
there lived some kind of sound, devoid of a body,
either music or birds drinking, drinking, drinking,
and trembled and shone in the air
an almost non-existent thread.
What was it? Whisper of an euonymus?
Or rustled between the spruce paws
Indian, or rather Indian, summer?
Or is it just the babbling of these women -
the one with measure, the one who spins but does not weave,
the one with the scissors? Is it chatter?
the Connecticut River, flowing into the Atlantic,
and the sigh of the grass: “Don’t forget me.”
At Christmas
I'll lie down and unfocus my eyes,
I will split the star in the window
and suddenly I see the area of Siru,
your damp homeland.
At the mercy of the amateur optician
not only two and two,
and two of Saturn and Jupiter
pregnant with the Christmas star.
Following this quickly flowing
and dried, even sooner
rose over Volkhov and Vytegra
Star of the Magi, Star of the Kings.
To the death of Yu.L. Mikhailova
My verse was looking for you.
Vyazemsky
Not a smooth rosary, not a painted face,
There are enough notches on the heart.
All your life under God you were like a bull.
The age is short. God is strong. The bull is fragile.
In the champagne country, my ears were waiting for me.
This is where our dialogue breaks down:
then Vyazemsky will get involved, then Mandelstam,
then the stupid “death-Reims” palindromon.
“What can we do? God takes the best,” they say.
Beret? Like a letter or a coin?
Sometimes strong, sometimes weak, you were like a brother to me.
God is merciful. My brother is gone.
For the ninth day now I have been silent for you,
I pray that you are not forgotten,
luminous Rose, colored Ray,
spinning solar dust.
You are Russian? No, I'm the AIDS virus
like a cup my life is broken,
I'm drunk on weekend roles,
I just grew up in those parts.
Are you Losev? No, rather Lifshits,
an asshole who fell in love with excellent students,
in charming nerds
with a speck of ink right here.
Are you human? No, I'm a fragment
Dutch oven shard -
dam, mill, lane...
One day of Lev Vladimirovich
Moved from Severnaya and Novaya
Palmyra and Holland, I live
It's unsociable here in Northern and New
America and England. I'm chewing
bread of exile removed from the toaster
and every morning I climb steep
steps of a white stone building,
where I supplement my native language.
I hang my ears. Every sound
mutilates my tongue or disgraces me.
When I get old, I'll go to the old south
I will leave if my pension allows.
By the sea over a plate of pasta
pass the rest of the days in Latin,
moistening the eye with a tear, like Brodsky,
like, rather, Baratynsky.
When the last one left Marseille,
how the steam puffed and how the Marsala was drunk,
how the ardent Mamzel saw off,
how the thought danced, how the pen wrote,
as the measured noise of the sea flowed into the verse,
how the long road was blue in it,
as it was not included in the admiring mind,
there was only a little time left to live...
However, why yawn around.
I have a mountain of essays in front of me.
“Turgenev loves to write a novel
Fathers with Children." Great, Joe, A+!
Turgenev loves to look out the window.
See the green fields in a row.
The trotting run of a thin-legged horse.
Hot dust forms a film over the road.
The driver is tired, he will turn into a tavern.
Without eating, he will knock over the mower...
And I’m out the window - and outside the window is Vermont,
a neighboring state closed for repairs,
for a long spring drying.
Among the damp hills
what houses are not hidden,
what kind of monastery you won’t see there:
an unsociable grandfather hid in one,
he's wearing a Tolstoy beard
and in a Stalinist paramilitary jacket.
In another he lives closer to heaven
who, weaving words floridly,
described with deep understanding
the lyrical life of a degenerate.
Having given the studio students a lesson,
We take a newspaper (stupid habit).
Yeah, poems. Of course, "corner"
“column” or, by the way, “page”.
Senka's hat. Senkin jumped over
from Komsomol members straight to Bogomolets
accomplished. What are they serving us in our burps these days?
alovke? Is it acceptable to the people of Gonobol?
Is everything fast, God’s servants?
Bad rhymes. Stolen jokes.
We ate. Thank you. Like beans
cold ones stir in the stomach.
It's getting dark. Time to go home. Magazine
Moscow, perhaps, take it as Veronal.
There the oaf dreamed of the past,
when our people walked ahead
and crushed the evil spirits with a broom,
and the emigrant’s distant ancestor
gifted the village with half a bucket.
Spin it however you want, Russian palindrome
master and slave, read it this way or that way,
A slave cannot exist without a bar.
Today we're going around the bar.
It's good there. There it spreads, layers,
cigar smoke. But there is a Slavist sitting there.
Dangerous. I'll get drunk again before then
that I’ll start throwing my pearls in front of him
and from my colleague I will get it again,
so that he again answers me with vulgarity....:
“A Cossack doesn’t need irony,
you sure could use some domestication * ,
no wonder in your Russian language
there is no such word - sophistication" ** .
There is a word "truth". There is a word "will".
There are three letters - “comfort”. And there is “rudeness”.
How nice it is to have a night without alcohol
words that cannot be translated,
delirious, muttering to empty space.
With the word “bad” we approach the house.
Close the door behind you more tightly in order to
the spirits of crossroads did not sneak into the house.
Feet in worn-out slippers
insert, poet, five twisted appendages.
Also check the chain on the door.
Exchange hello with Penelope.
Breathe. Plumb into the depths of the lair.
And turn on the light. And shudder. And freeze
What else is this?
And this is a mirror, such a piece of glass,
to be seen with a brush behind your cheek
fate displaced person.
* “you sure could use some domestication”, - “a little training would do you good” (English)
** sophistication - very approximately: “sophistication” (English)
Declining invitation
In my declining days it becomes more difficult for me to write.
The sound is becoming less and less frequent, but the measure is becoming ever firmer.
And it was not fitting for me in my declining days
to support the policeman with oneself.
That's not why I went to hell,
without straightening your back over the craft,
to see you in the same row
tongue-tied goofball.
What the hell kind of festival are you talking about?
There are at most ten of us in the Russian language.
What do we care if it becomes trash?
to twist one's tongue and foolishly play tricks.
In memory of Volodya Uflyand
You died, and we are walking away,
but, however, it’s a small matter.
You slept under a live cat
purring blanket.
Everything that was purred during the night
you wrote it down on paper during the day.
A low-brow bastard
I was already leaving the dorm.
You gave mercy easily
plants, children, dogs.
And the bastard is already hiding
in the entrance behind the trash can.
It's not too much for a poet to live
in the edge of flails and sharpenings.
And the cats can’t sleep, they’re itching,
everyone is waiting for him to return
source of living heat.
Since the dog's device is simple:
tongue and tail dangling,
I'll compare myself
I'm small with this fur,
with a stinking scab.
Whining, wheezing,
my wet organ without bones
to grind the news,
go ahead, go ahead!
A stump of fear and melancholy,
serve for stale pieces,
wag, pray!
According to Baratynsky
Miles, a white flock and a black glass,
aonids and a yellow jacket.
To tell the truth, I'm tired of poetry,
Maybe we don’t need any more poetry?
Winging, blaspheming, holding hands,
profiting from our misfortune,
deconstructors wearing Shisha and Psoy masks
dismantling poems for parts
(and the last poet, watching the horde,
draws a line under Russian poetry
a rusty razor on a thin wrist).
In old age people forget names,
trying to talk like mines,
don't step on the name, and don't
a universe where anonymous people roam.
The world is not mad - just nameless,
like this city N, where is yours truly
NN looks into the square black window
and sees: the fog is rising.
As long as Melpomene and Euterpe
tuned their pipes,
and the conductor emerged like a seal,
from light orchestral wormwood,
and drifted on the stage as if on an ice floe,
soloist dressed up as a penguin,
and the old lady attendant was running
with leaflets like an old nihilist,
catching with your ear the trill-la-la,
At the same time I was immersed in my gaze
into a shimmering pile of crystal,
hanging like a frozen waterfall:
there the last light died,
and I could no longer save him.
On stage the master made a man pose,
the curtain was shaking, the light was blinking,
and music, as if we were prisoners,
commanded us, pushed us around,
on stage the lady broke her arms,
she made a ringing in my ears,
she caused trouble in souls
and confiscated sharp objects.
Ambassadors, ministers, generals
froze in their beds. The conversations stopped.
The barmaid was reading "Alitet"
goes to the mountains." Snow. Goes to the mountains.
Napkin. Glacier. Marble buffet.
Crystal - wine glasses. Snow jams.
And ice floes decorated with sweets
with bears in front of her lay the mountains.
How I loved the cold spaces
empty foyers in early January,
when the soprano roars: “I’m yours!” -
and the sun strokes the velvet curtains.
There, outside the window, in the Mikhailovsky Garden
only bullfinches in Suvorov uniforms,
two lions walk with them in commanders
with a splash of snow - here and on the back,
Karelia and Barents Puddle,
where does this cold come to us from,
that is the basis of our nature.
Everything is as our copper creator intended -
with us, the colder it is, the more intimate it is,
when the Ice Palace melted,
We have forever erected another one - Winter.
And yet, frankly speaking,
from the operatic surf
It seems to me sometimes from a drinking binge -
Russia needs warm seas!
“I understand - the yoke, hunger,
there has been no democracy for a thousand years,
but a bad Russian spirit
I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
“These rains, these birches,
these groans about the graves,” -
and a poet with an expression of threat
he curled his thin lips.
And he also said, getting excited:
“I don’t like these drunken nights,
the repentant sincerity of drunkards,
Dostoevsky anguish of informers,
this vodka, these mushrooms,
these girls, these sins
and in the morning instead of a lotion
watery Blok rhymes;
our bards' cardboard spears
and their actor’s hoarseness,
our empty iambic flat feet
and the thin trochees lame;
our shrines are offensive,
everything is designed for a fool,
and life-giving pure Latin
A river flowed past us.
That's the truth - a country of scoundrels:
and there is no decent toilet,” -
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so the poet ended suddenly.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
he was skirting something important
and looked as if straight into the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.
The last one in this sad year
I came across a thought like a mouse to a cat...
I climb back onto my pole,
I let her run to the east,
but where can she master the Atlantic! -
I'm not strong enough, talent.
My lemming! Deadly weight of water
if he piles it up, it will have to be salty,
and the ray of a lonely supernova
will reach out to her like a straw.
Talk
“We are driven from stage to stage,
And everything goes into Poland’s hands -
Walesa, Milos, Solidarity, Pope,
we have Solzhenitsyn, and even he
Gloomy-Burcheev and quite average
prose writer." - “Nonsense, he’s just the last one
romantic". - “Yes, but if you subtract the “rum”.” -
“Well, okay, what are we taking anyway?”
From the pool of lubyankas and bottles
buddies in commercial comfort
float up into the bright world of large bottles.
“Have you tried the Swedish “Absolute”,
I call him “nightingale”,
If you shy away, Sofia will be right there.” -
“But still a shabby canteen,
where a half-liter is walking under the table...
no, still like a white head,
Westerners don’t take vodka like that.” -
"Wonderful! nostalgia for fusels!
What else - about informers?
by old whores spreading rumors?
by listening to “Freedom” at night?
according to the jacket? by district committee? by pogrom?
in every phrase I would polish the parquet to a shine,
the Chapters would be empty and full of mirrors,
and in the Prologue there would be an old doorman,
would say to me “master” and “yours”,
would say: “There is no package yet.”
And while the parquet in the Paragraphs sparkled,
mirrors, not too much, but rococo,
the windows would reflect, and in each window,
or rather, in the mirror reflection of the window,
steam would rise above the frozen river
and people in soldier's cloth would hurry,
the hospital would be visible across the river,
and the letter would arrive before Christmas.
And the End would be far from the Beginning.
Russian night
Plowing of lust. Threshing
passions. Sabbat. Smoke break on the pillow.
Physiology is kind of a trap.
“Yes, and geography is destiny.”
They fell apart. Now the time has come
so that the burden may be brought forth from the seed,
to get involved in a new tribe:
flame on the banner and - in the stirrups!
Thus erupts on a languid night,
dark passion, worthless blast furnace,
my country with smoky breath,
there is an empty place behind the straw.
That's what I'm doing today, word-breaking
like rattling empty dishes,
I drag it behind me like my guilt,
into its inevitable unnameable.
Son of God, have mercy on me.
Since childhood
The nightmare of Arzamas, no, Moscow,
no, St. Petersburg, spread out on his face,
he thinks, but only with bone marrow,
cerebellum liquefied with fear.
The child feels sorry for his own body,
tears, eyes, fingers, nails.
He senses the nature of mayhem
nature, cleansing people.
Years pass. In full camouflage
August comes to finish the old man,
the rays stuck out obliquely,
but it got dark, disappeared, you know something happened,
sad something happened)
collective farms pass it through,
empty fields and houses,
bury yourself where the vines bend over the pool,
where in the pool there is time and darkness.
Poems about romance
We know these Tolstoyan things:
with a beard bound in ice,
from a week's absence in Moscow
return to an unheated house.
“Light the fireplace in the office.
Give Voronoi millet.
Bring me a glass of wine.
Wake me up at dawn."
I'll look at the frosty fog
and start writing a long novel.
It will be cold in this novel,
chapters will end “suddenly”:
there will be someone sitting on the sofa
and suck on a long shank,
the spruces will stand, angular,
how the men stand in the yard,
and, like a bridge, a small dash
will connect two nearby dates
in the epilogue (when the old people
they will come to the cemetery by the river).
Dostoevsky is still young,
only there is something in him, there is something.
“Not enough money,” he shouts, “not enough money.
I would win five or six thousand.
We'll pay our debts and in the end
there will be vodka, gypsies, caviar.
Oh, what a game it will begin!
Afterwards the old man will fall at our feet
and read in our timid hearts
the word FEAR, the word CRASH, the word DUST.
Sadness and melancholy. Sing, Agasha. Drink, Sasha.
It’s good that it sucks under the heart...”
Only us description of the landscape
will save you from such a binge.
“The red ball was burning out behind the forests,
and the frost was certainly getting stronger,
but the oats sprouted on the window...”
It’s okay, we ourselves have a mustache.
It’s not the schema-monk who will save us, the unsociable one,
We'd better look in the mirror.
I am the unchanged Karl Ivanovich.
I kiss your children good night.
I teach them geography.
Sometimes short of breath and sloppy,
I wake you up, coughing in the night,
praying and blowing on a candle.
Of course, not a big bird,
but I have something to be proud of:
I did not fornicate, I did not lie, I did not steal,
I didn’t kill - God have mercy -
I'm not a killer, no, but still,
oh, why are you blushing, Karl?
There was a certain Schiller in our region,
he healed my thaler.
There was a duel. Jail. The escape.
Forgetting about the damned Schiller,
verfluchtes Fatum - became a soldier -
the smoke of battles and the thunder of victories.
There they sang, there they shouted “hurray”,
They drank beer under the linden trees,
There they put ginger in gingerbread.
And here, like a liver from cirrhosis,
the logs swelled from the frost,
Eternal Siberia on the windows.
The wind is blowing through the basement.
For your children's name day
I glue the house (no cola
you haven't, old comedian,
I wouldn’t mind going to this house myself).
Please take a look, Nicolas.
We will insert a candle inside the cardboard
and carefully strike a match,
and the windows are delicate mica Cold
Eyelids and lips close in harmony.
a place of oblivion.
Mercury freezes like a guard on duty -
no divorce.
As it turns out, emptiness
nature endures
for what is left to decay
under alumina,
no memoirs can capture,
no chromosomes.
If only there were no violins, if only there were no sobs
cellos,
we would be completely bruised, we would
bastardized...
The wind is blowing like a thieves,
the clouds are mealy.
With a squeal they wind one
with the handle of the security officers
scary frozen trucks
and gramophones,
to drown out the sounds of rifles
and Persephone's cry.
School № 1
Belly pop in a wide swoop
he censes behind the corpse cart.
The twisted bandit babbles:
“I didn’t shoot, I swear to Allah.”
Light pours into the breakdowns,
lingers on children, women,
their rags, their brains, their intestines.
He is looking for God. There is no god.