Yuri Bezelyansky
Everyone knows Joseph Brodsky. But few people are Lev Losev, although he is a wonderful poet. Both Brodsky and Losev left and worked in America. But one had a “fate” (harassment, trial), while for the other everything happened relatively calmly, without the “whirlpool of Lubyankas and bottles” (Losev’s line). In the spring of 2009, Lev Losev passed away. Let us remember him with gratitude for what he was.
Lev Losev is a poet for the intelligentsia, for intelligent conversations, disputes and lamentations; it was not blood that flowed in his veins and arteries, but literature, Russian literature. It existed solely in the context of culture. Hence all his poetry - a continuous associative series, half-quotes, half-hints, climbs, a kind of carnival of erudition. Bengal fire of intelligence. Delight of the mind. Feast of the soul. Name day of the heart. There is never a dull moment with people like Losev.
Lev Losev was born on June 15, 1937 in Leningrad. I started composing early.
“In my younger years I bore the name Lev Livshits. But since in those same years I began working in children’s literature, my father, poet and children’s writer Vladimir Livshits, told me: “There is no place for two Livshits in one children’s literature - take a pseudonym.” “So come up with it,” I said. "Losev!" - the father said from the bay.
And here is the poet Lev Losev. It sounds better than the poet Livshits, but a certain split in the soul has arisen: Jewish and Russian:
Are you Losev? No, rather, Livshits,
an asshole who fell in love with excellent students,
in charming nerds
with a speck of ink right here.
Profanity? Losev loved these spicy additives. And at first he was a children's writer and worked for a long time in children's literature, in particular, in the magazine “Koster”. Before that there was a school. An inconspicuous and downtrodden schoolboy. One critic compared him to Nabokov's Luzhin. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Leningrad State University, worked in Sakhalin...
“I started writing poetry quite late, at about 37 years old. In my youth, I only dabbled in writing, and one of the reasons that discouraged all the desire for it was the fact that the most crushing critical blow to my poems was the accusation of being literary. Literary nature, secondary nature - all this was then questionable and aroused suspicion. The circle at the Mining Institute, which included Britanishsky, Gorbovsky, Kushner and others, was considered the best collection of poets in Leningrad at that time. These poets seemed to be the best because their poetry was considered primary. Indeed, they traveled a lot around the country, writing about backpacks, sweat and mosquitoes, about provincial hotels and other primary realities. They were given preference,” said Lev Losev. He was an opponent of “primary realities” and kept following the paths of books and finally found his unique Losev intonation. Starting from classical Russian poetry, he created his own brilliant repetitions, managing to turn textbook lines so that they sparkled with new facets and meaning.
Here are the lines turned inside out: “Love, hope, the devil in the chair/ did not comfort us for long./ What books are published in Tula!/ They don’t publish such books in America!..”
“America” sounded. It was in America that the poet made his pseudonym Losev his passport surname and wrote with undisguised irony and bitterness:
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 human? No, I'm a fragment
Dutch oven shard -
dam, mill, country road...
and what happens next, God knows. 
The critic Vladimir Uflyand recalled that while Brodsky left for America noisily, Losev was very quiet. At the same time, “Lesha Losev, who modestly and semi-secretly left with his wife Nina and two children, even with a beard, looked more like a Soviet pioneer than an American one. I am sure that he was not traveling for happiness. Such people are well-read enough to know that happiness is only where we are not. But in America you can work without fear of earning a prison sentence. The highest literary professionalism and universal knowledge caused Losev in Russia incomparably less trouble than the same advantages caused his friend Joseph Brodsky. Losev artistically knew how to hide them. It is not for nothing that a few years later he wrote the book “Aesopian Language in Contemporary Russian Literature.” A professor of Slavic studies at Dartmouth University, a brilliant literary critic, first appeared on the American continent. He paused for several years and acted as a maestro, a virtuoso of rich Russian poetic text.”
As Boris Paramonov noted, Losev did not need freedom of speech, but the availability of a printing press. Two of his collections were immediately published in the West - “The Miraculous Landing” (1985) and “The Privy Councilor” (1987). And then he continued to surprise readers with his “funny little things.” And finally, in 1997, in his homeland, St. Petersburg, his first poetry collection, “New Information about Karl and Clara,” was published.
What to do - a bad era.
The executioner and the scoundrel are held in high esteem.
The only good thing is war.
What to do, such an era
got it, a bad era.
The other one is not yet visible.
And what should a poet do in this bad era? “Oh muse! be kind to the poet, / let him roam around the buffet, / let him burst into smoke, / give him some horseradish for the sturgeon, / give him a table closer to the window, / so that the decanter lights up yellow / the sunset over his aspic.”
Losev’s theme of Russia and the era sounds with a bitter smile: ““I understand - the yoke, the famine, / there has been no democracy for a thousand years, / but I cannot tolerate the bad Russian spirit,” the poet told me.”
“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.
“Oh, homeland with a capital letter R... our permanent air, decorated with medals...” And the feeling of a sad ending:
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.
In one of his last interviews (Ogonyok, October 2008), Lev Losev told how he sees Russia from the United States - and this view from the outside is very interesting: “In my American memory, a serious shift has occurred - the place of Russia in the consciousness of America is significant decreased, moved away from the center and, perhaps, became provincialized. I arrived at the height of the Cold War, Russia was the number one actor, and now... it has become not only marginal, but one of many. Not as scary as Iran, not as reverent as China, not as crazy as North Korea... So - something like Brazil; Even Venezuela, due to Chavez's obvious stupefaction, is arousing greater curiosity. As for my feeling from her, it strangely coincides with the feelings of Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who leafs through the Soviet press and is surprised at how everything there, in the Motherland, has become gray and uninteresting. It was so festive, think about it! Indeed, compare Russia of the 1920-1930s with Russia at the beginning of the century, when Kuprin was considered a second-rate writer... while in the States Jack London, inferior to him in all respects, was super popular... And suddenly - a terrible dullness, a complete fall, It’s not clear where everything went, it’s not like he went into emigration... Lack of freedom quickly leads to the province of the spirit, to the outskirts of the world; Today in Russia, as far as I can judge, everything is aggravated by the fact that the country seems to be frozen. They didn’t let us go forward, we’re scared and don’t want to go back - we’re trampling in the void, a futile occupation.”
Losev criticized Russian lack of freedom, but continued to admire Russian culture.
Far away, in the land of Scoundrels
and unclear but passionate signs,
Once upon a time there lived Shestov, Berdyaev,
Rozanov, Gershenzon and Bulgakov...
“And Burliuk walked around the capital, / like an iron, and with rutabaga in his buttonhole.” “And at the table, next to the Socialist-Revolutionary, / Mandelstam was conjuring his magic over an eclair.” “Grenade launcher Leva Livshits,” as Lev Losev called himself in one of his poems, enjoyed teaching Russian literature in America. And when I read in the works of young Americans: “Turgenev loves to write the novel “Fathers with Children,” he just smiled into his beard. He himself loved humor with revolutions. Losev's poetry is generally full of puns, paraphrases, aphorisms and the re-casting of old poetic clothes into new ones.
Let's quote the following lines: “How the minutes last, how the years rush madly”... “Saturday came, I didn’t even get drunk”... “The lands where the calendar is without January”... “The places are filled like lotto cards, / and every the passenger looks like something...
And a terrible monument, not copper, but bronze:
It's freezing at dawn
bronze semi-Georgian,
his evil shadow grows longer,
the copper horse turns pale under him.
Look! he shook his finger.
This is Lev Losev. His consciousness was immersed in the context of culture, where he performed his versificatory jumps and antics, as I already noted, funny things. “I’ll take my Jewish passport./I’ll board a Korean plane./I’ll mark myself with the sign of the cross—/and head to my native places in a big way!” “Armed with a bagel and Fet”?.. Yes, he came to Russia. He looked around in surprise. It was with sadness that I caught the trend. And again he left for America, and dreamed:
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 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...
Lev Vladimirovich Livshits-Losev was ill for a long time...
Joseph Brodsky died on January 27, 1996 at the age of 55. Evgeny Baratynsky left the world on June 29, 1844 at the age of 44. And Lev Losev died in May 2009, just shy of 72 years old.
Climbing through books. Collapsed. Didn't make it.
Books are too shaky steps.
There is one less scribe on earth. But, as Lev Losev argued, “text is life.” But the texts remained. This means that the poet’s thought has remained and continues to pulsate, his poetry rustles, his living things frolic.
.___________________________________________________________
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 sharp 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 board 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
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 men drank, 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
Many art historians have tried to unravel the characters of the late Oleg Tselkov. They surrounded him tightly so that he could not get out of their creepy company. And he, having gotten used to them, began to give their ugliness even some touching features. He hugged powerful torsos with wind instruments, tickled with the wings of butterflies that fearfully settled on their ears or apoplectic heads.
These types were prone to both aggression and sentimentality, fell into depressive loneliness due to a tormenting inferiority complex, grasping at any ambitions, even imperial ones. And they multiplied rapidly against the backdrop of the catastrophic deintellectualization of humanity. And the poet Lev Losev interpreted them better than others.
He inherited his love for poetry from his father, Vladimir Lifshitz, who had not only a strong professional hand, but also a playful adventurer. I enthusiastically recited his sonorous poems praising the Spanish Republicans as a child. And Sasha Mezhirov told me how Lifshits published a risky acrostic poem in an army newspaper. The first letters of the poetic lines secretly formed the phrase “The Leningrad Front will not forget its poet Vladimir Lifshits.” And this mischief-maker invented the non-existent English poet James Clifford, who allegedly denounced not ours, but, on the contrary, orders alien to us.
His father's rebellion also manifested itself in his son's poetic experiments. He felt like a professional and enjoyed it. His verse was thick, the rhymes rang. And he was not afraid to make fun of himself or his comrades, as, for example, in the poem “The Company of Eros”:
“Our colonel, bourbon, / smelling of cognac and boots, / not to unstick the bud of love / with impatient hands, begged us. / The soldiers went AWOL / and returned, filled with filth, / to the tent where, like Solomon, / the grenade launcher Leva Lifshits slept. / And he rattled: “The lips are pomegranates, the honey is / her words. But they contain a sting..." / And what he inserted into the grenade launcher / flew into the distance, but did not hit the target."
Losev was able to write both himself and his time with the help of a brilliant poetic technique, in some cases no worse than his man-made idol Joseph Brodsky, and sometimes even socially sharper, more sophisticated. I also love many of Brodsky’s poems. But the most worthy poems do not justify unworthy actions. And he insulted us, the sixties, saying that we threw stones only in the permitted direction.
The emigration to the United States in 1976 of the little-known Lev Losev, who worked for 13 years in the children's magazine Koster, was silent. Just as quietly, after graduate school, Leva got a job teaching Russian literature at Dartmouth. He invited Alexander Kushner and me to his college, we met in a friendly manner and read poetry to his students. By tacit agreement, we did not touch upon my relationship with Brodsky, who could not forgive me for the fact that he was released from exile precisely because of my letter: he was humiliated that he should be grateful to someone.
But Losev admits how chilling even telephone conversations with the hero of his future Zhezel book had a chilling effect on him: “The hypnotism did not consist in the fact that I fell into some kind of trance, dregs and unconsciousness. On the contrary, the happiness of a conversation with Joseph consisted primarily in the clarity of the conversation, “illuminating all corners of consciousness.” Only after hanging up the phone, not immediately, sometimes much later, did I remember that Joseph never answered such and such questions that seemed important to me. Moreover, I didn’t ask them, although I was definitely going to ask them. I cannot explain this other than by the supernatural ability to block topics that are uninteresting to him, Joseph, in the mind of the interlocutor.”
From most books about Brodsky one gets the feeling that the consciousness of their authors is still blocked from many questions hanging in the air. True, Losev has a poem in which he nevertheless breaks through to the confessions of his hero, lifting the veil over what he preferred to remain silent about. And it becomes clear why he did not come to die on Vasilyevsky Island and why he never visited Israel. Brodsky did not want to feel like either a Russian or a Jew; he tried not to belong to anyone. He conquered the feeling of belonging that frightened him with the obligation to be grateful to someone. But this victory became his tragedy.
Having read Losev’s “post-Brod” poems, I was stunned by the author’s skill and the culture of the verse, while lax graphomania was rampant both throughout Russia and in the Russian diaspora.
Losev, looming unsteadily on the outskirts of the new Leningrad poetry behind the backs of Gleb Gorbovsky, Evgeny Rein, Dmitry Bobyshev and the just emerging Brodsky, managed to gain sharpness and stereoscopicity, learning from them, but not disdaining the experience of the sixties, with whom the Leningraders, if not at enmity, they preferred not to mix. They tried to free themselves from the journalisticism characteristic of us and from romanticism, they proposed instead of a monument to the victims of Babyn Yar (Yevtushenko) to erect a monument to Lies (Brodsky), and resurrected the sarcasm of the Oberiuts. It was a rebellion against overt citizenship, against allyship and co-creation with an audience that was met with a slightly arrogant attitude on their part.
They contrasted the open smile of the sixties with a skeptical grin. But both of them seriously developed the form, despite the difference in content and energetic design. And they contributed to the revival of interest and love for poetry.
“Well, Petrov, his last name is Vodkin, / but his first name is simply Kuzma, / how did this happen? It turns out that I am woven / into this canvas. And our canvas, / like winter, / without end. Having weaved our daily work, isn’t it time for us to rest? Finish it. / We tried a lot of drinks, / still the best are vodka and tea.”
These poems by Losev seem to have no civic orientation. But there is a freedom that draws you into its dizzying funnel, there is an invitation to enjoy unbridled mischief.
Losev loved to shock: “Is an agnostic pleasing to God, / who does not know in any way - / whether to hang a coat on a nail / or a mattress for a fat body?” He could also act out - of course, by the standards of that time: “The hut is uncomfortable, the street is dirty, / the crucian carp died in the pond, / all the women went crazy - they want an orgasm, / and where can you get it in Rus'!” Or: “Here a woman stands - like a cabinet / poster both outside and inside, / and until the morning three / pygmies from Lumumba’s torment leaned against her.”
He was an indispensable participant in the sickeningly serious Slavic symposia - Mr. Loseff with a neat beard, somewhat similar to the minister of the Provisional Government. But don't be fooled by his Oxford knot ties in later photos. No matter how he dressed, there was something yellow-jacketed about him. And he could not say: “Brodsky’s shadow adopted me...” He has his own place in poetry.
Leo loved to play with words, sometimes, perhaps, excessively, but always sharply and lively, but he did not use it for unworthy reasons. He was not just a technician, but a super technician. And a super-techie with a spark of God - and a strong reserve of conscience.
From martineting
and hazing
evasive ones are growing
half-men.
But no matter how much you want
cock them
there are lads with a spark -
don't put them out!
And in Leva Lifshits,
grenade launcher,
in the Jewish personality,
there is no subterfuge!
He was bespectacled
but so strange
with your makarik
wrote poems.
The world in them is not Moskhovo,
and communal,
Soviet-Boschian,
vasisual!
And there were women
Which ones did you fall in love with?
but uwomen
got it from them.
Almost the Central Committee
false humanoids,
Tselkovsky grown up
coelcovoloids.
But in these monsters
amidst tyranny,
seeing the future
he didn't get lost.
And believed in butterflies
sentimentality,
delivered the stupid people
from their mentality.
shove with hair
at Mr. Loseff!
And not the professors -
American -
I welcome you to it
bickering!
Evgeniy EVTUSHENKO
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 ran over 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 through 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 like 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,
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 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 renovations,
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
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 is this festival?
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. Conversations fell silent.
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 don't have enough strength, talent.
My lemming! Deadly weight of water
if he piles it up, it will be a little 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? according to the 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,
they put ginger in gingerbread cookies.
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.
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 someone dear, 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).
