Love that was not in Russian

It will not be surprising if this small book causes resistance and protest in our culture (which had to be found in himself and the author of these lines). The “drafts” of Sergei Solovyov speak of love as it seems to have not been done in Russian. Yes, this is largely converged against our habits and obviousness, anti -typical anti -which are like Russian literature and culture by semantic movements.

It’s not even a directness of speaking about bodily (this is how it is not new at all). The point - and this is already a new radical - in the meaning that the bodily (and his companion, emotional) is given, in the meanings with which it is saturated.

If the mystics happened, for lack of adequate means of expression of the inexpressible, to talk about the desire of the soul for God with the help of erotic vocabulary and imagery, then Soloviev acts exactly the opposite. He turns into a high culture not just love and eroticism, but physiology. He makes the bodily passion not just a kinship, but completely identical to religious fire, monasticism, ascetic practice, equivalent to them. Love - including (not least) physiologically expressed - becomes the way to the secret foundations of the world, without ceasing to be in the most literal, tangible sense of himself.

I loved you, spreading your knees
speech. Like a recluse
With breath, the candle flame flies.
And you, inexpressible, like Palama.

This is one of those places in which the reader, feeling strong, with all his cultural habits given resistance, thinks: “Oh, no, this is a recluse and a palace in a row with the knee extending-perhaps, still too much.” For Solovyov, in a world arranged according to his vision, this is not only not too much, but with a certain degree of love tension - perhaps the only thing is possible.

The conversation about the erotic he has not just full of echoes of a “high” culture - it is fundamentally conducted by its language. The transition from “low” to “high” without gaps is not even a transition at all, because “low” and “high” in this love speech is one and the same, there are no categories of “height” and “baseness”. More precisely, there is no low - everything is high. Everything related to love and bodily interaction between a man and a woman, for Solovyov by definition, is highly, sacred, mystical. And therefore scary: he puts a person on his very limit, leads him outside.

In a woman for Solovyov, almost all that is concentrated and reaches the highest degrees - or perhaps really everything that exists, but in particular, with regard to relationships with the sacred, with the world -forming forces. In Solovyov’s view, it receives in a woman and in the perception of her man his highest embodiment.

We can say that Soloviev reads world culture through a woman - his focus (okay, lyrical hero) of relations with her. More precisely, it will still be said differently: they work on the hero’s relationship with women, create their world culture and history. “In my papillae, as under a dome, two mazaccos / work,” can say with confidence a lyrical heroine, and Mazacchio, two, here are not only equivalent to the “papillae”, but subordinate to them.

To promote love relations, Soloviev is demanded by the whole world cultural experience - and perhaps even the whole natural story that draws into himself, dissolving the human history. (However, the story as such is not so important: “The whole story is the formation of a Word program, / soon demolished - by default.” History is a thin, easily erased spraying on the essential, archetypal structures of being, of which love is the most important.

We would be mollusks or cephalopods.
Everything is possible - for him, and therefore -
For you, me. I would compose an eclog at the bottom
beads light, and you would have rinsed their mouths
And spit in the Mariana cavity. And noisy
In the ears slightly - in one Sumeria, in the other Etruscan.

Solovyov’s love is not just with the whole body, but - the body is not enough! - The whole world as a giant sensiture, and not only in its present, but also in the past. Everything that existed with the creation of the world focuses in it (in fact, only in it focuses! Nothing more with such force collects all things!), Like sunlight - a lens, up to the burning of everything that will affect, without too differentiating its areas, its spaces and times. All spaces, times, areas reveal within the limits of this task their deep kinship, the inconsistency of their differences, the interchangeability of their elements.

And there are also women, like Balia Vasily -
With a frontal place and a tinsel in the heart.
Vasilisa Blessed Rinpoche.

Whether Christianity, Buddhism is - what's the difference. Yes, at least a Soviet socialist sculpture. There would only be due stress, it will not fail.

And there are women who have at the time of orgasm -
I will not say where -
Little sculpture Mukhina
Freaks in the dark.

This is not even an eclecticism - although yes, Solovyov’s any element flies into the furnace of the sacred fire, everyone burns well, and the one that is more likely burns, best of all. That the needs in these partitions would only be a core fire in which everything burns out in any case.

Yes, in fact, love, according to Soloviev, is - in the literal sense - the creation of the world. Until it began, the earth is visually and empty, and everything is possible until it proclaimed its laws.

Like a darkness. The plumb line glided
rays by ignite the waters of the godless
And he wrote in a hem: “Perhaps -
All ", shifting to the mouse,
And the light flowed to the bottom like sand <...>

(Let us recall: “Everything is possible - for him, and therefore - / for you, me” ... The lover becomes equal to the Creator - and almost to them.)

Solovyov is not ontological in, stronger here - ontology itself is erotic. Eros is the highest and ultimate implementation of being. It seems that God himself, in vain here is not particularly remembered, is one of his names and, perhaps, not even the most accurate.

To what extent such a picture of the world is true - a separate question (I repeat, it causes resistance - but this only means that a resistant reader has a different ontology). In this case, it is important that everything looks like that for the author-and yes, this has not yet been written in Russian.

The bodily reserved passion is for Solovyov a straight path to truth. This last in this case, at least write with a capital letter, but Soloviev does not need to need this word and any of its letters. He knows how truth affects without words - and much stronger than them. Love for him is truth, it with its spontaneity, with its smells and more powerful and eloquent than all speculative:

Well, you, my good, do with me,
I'm not intelligent, mine will
a little ajar for you and smells like a refine
And the hair is swan,
Why are you verifying me
To the difficult, as you say, simple things?

So, why - drafts? It may be, for example, because the method of speaking of love chosen by the poet - ecstatic in its excessiveness, in the constant crossing of the borders carried out (protecting) culture - has not yet been developed, it is in a state of formation, and this little college - a platform for its development, draft, palette. Or maybe, because love cannot be written once and for all, in a complete and approved form: it, bringing to the surface of the possibilities of the world, its secret forces, itself only exists - in a constant difficult birth, as long as it corresponds, re -processes again and again. After all, while she, the Peacemaker and the legislator, lasts - "everything is possible."

It is still necessary to see how the author treats the tasks of expanding language and vision, how he develops them in his recently released “new literary review” book “Her Names” - Soloviev himself, unlike almost game, by his recognition, “drafts”, considers it his main poetic book, like “Adamov Bridge” in prose. An annotation to the “names” has already promises a lot: “According to the author himself, the field of attraction for him is increasingly not literature and - wider - art, but the“ poetics ”of the existence of living matter, rapprochement with the“ inhuman ”, the experience of reasoning on the boundaries of the“ I ””. And it begins with the essay “Man and more. Transition experiments. " Obviously software.

Actually, what is happening in the “drafts”, and there are experiments of transitions, experiments with frightening and entailing others. And even a concuriation on (usually protected by culture) the boundaries of the "I", resistance in which is inevitable. Therefore, “drafts” - difficult reading and not everyone will be accepted. But with expanding borders it always happens.

Sergey Soloviev. Love. Blacks: Book of Poems. -M.: Book Review (Argo Risk), 2016. 96 p. (Book project of the magazine "Air" Issue 74)