Canons of the beloved

Four-volume book by Olga Sedakova published

In the Small Hall of the Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad, a modest presentation of Olga Sedakova's sumptuous four-volume book took place. Issued by the Russian Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Science with a circulation of not large and not small in today's ...

In the Small Hall of the Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad, a modest presentation of Olga Sedakova's sumptuous four-volume book took place. Issued by the Russian Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Science with a circulation of not large and not small in modern times - three thousand.

To date, this is the most extensive (though not complete) collection of works by Olga Sedakova. Outside of this publication were narrative prose, lecture courses, poetry and prose for children, a dictionary of Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms and works on Slavic antiquities, published separately and withstood reprints.

The first volume of "Poems" includes almost all the poems written to date. The volume of "Translations" was made up of the actual translations and reflections on the translated authors and texts. Here are transcriptions for children of the gospel Christmas chapters, ancient spiritual writings (fragments of the "Messages" of the founder of monasticism Anthony the Great), stories and parables from the Sinai Paterik, translations of Church Slavonic liturgical prayers, the task of which is to convey to the Russian reader the poetic nature of liturgical texts. There are also great examples of early and Renaissance Italian poetry: the hymns of Francis of Assisi, the sonnets of Dante and Petrarch.

The Poetica volume was largely composed of reflections on the nature of poetry, which were looked at in the light of philosophy, questions of form and poetic technique, a special place among them is occupied by the sound structure of the verse. The Moralia volume contains essays on moral, philosophical and theological topics. Without confining herself to a narrow specialization, Sedakova turns to broad humanism, to philosophy, understood as the ability to recognize the integrity of reality, its deep connection with the mystery of being.

Everything that Olga Sedakova writes is marked by the gift of inner freedom. Its pathos lies in a resolute rejection of the hopelessness and fatalism that the latest art offers to man as the only possible and already comfortable position in its own way. She speaks of the beauty of the mind and the power of happiness - about what, in the author's opinion, constitutes the "formative thrust of art."

Many things included in the four-volume edition have not been published before, only in translations. Some verses and texts were typed from manuscripts.

“Life itself has put me and many people of my generation in the position of a folklore author who reads more than distributes written texts (Sedakova's first book in Russian was published in 1990). In the 1970s, in the attics and cellars of Moscow and Leningrad, we read a lot of poetry, there were many people (and not just authors), then there were records of these readings. Therefore, when we were preparing this edition, five versions of my poem were laid out in front of me - after all, when I read aloud, I improvised ... It was a strange feeling of a text that did not have its canonical form in the publication. Probably, for this I love folklore - it has that power of anonymity, diversity (which has weakened in the author's literature), where each narrator of the text brought something of his own ... I always wanted to write my favorite poems - those that will be loved. Then the mind and heart work differently.”

For the release of the four-volume book, Olga Sedakova's Facebook page was opened, and the site http://www.olgasedakova.com/ was created . This was done largely to help Olga Alexandrovna's readers, who live far from Moscow and St. Petersburg.