Straight poet

Lev Losev was and will remain an inaccessible role model for me. We are not talking about poetry now: his caustic, intelligent and sometimes touching to a coma in the throat lyrics will forever be remembered - next to other great poems that you mutter alone or vying to quote in a noisy feast.

| | | --- | | Life brought huge blows with broth. So you got to Ultima Thule with his samovar. Chips, dots, everything hasty (bracketed) - everything, it turns out, is useful here for fuel or kindling.Bluish-transparent, pleasant, paternal winds. It pours hot, very hot pours. |

I am now talking about Losev-personality. After all, talent is a matter of chance, the lottery of nature. And the likelihood that a great talent will go to a great person is vanishingly small. And here it is ... Lev Losev's enormous charm was made up of high culture, taste, self-irony, gentle manners, combined with the rigidity of balanced judgments, moral neatness - an infrequent sum of virtues that one would like to consider aristocracy. It was some kind of greeting from Pushkin's time, when it went without saying that the author was first of all a gentleman, and only then a writer. This is also why Losev's poems are characterized by ease and ingenious "amateurism", which in time may turn out to be "higher than the pyramids and stronger than copper." He left the impression of a completely grown-up person; If you think about it, this is no small rarity, especially in an artistic environment.

Medium height, stout, in prosaic and decent clothes and with the same haircut, with strong glasses; connoisseur of food and good liquor; a diligent host, a wit and a master of poetry in case - there was nothing poetic in his appearance, but he lived (at least it seemed to me during our fifteen-year acquaintance) "a direct poet": he did not depend on the authorities, on the people, traveled half the world, enjoyed the "creations of art and inspiration."

I have just mentioned the ending of Pushkin's masterpiece "From Pindemonti", but with its beginning, where Pushkin speaks down of the liberal values ​​​​familiar to him only by hearsay, Losev did not agree and just very "valued" the rights of the free world.

The history of Russia and its present did not inspire any illusions in Losev, and nevertheless he rejoiced at any light here and did everything in his power, "so that a cloud of glory shone over the motherland, so that at least something would come out, it would turn out," for example, he spoke publicly in defense of political prisoners.

Last fall, on our last date, when Lesha was already seriously ill, I, feeling emotional, raised a glass and said that he was obliged to recover, if only because he was the eldest in the lyric workshop and, it turns out, there was no one else. “You won’t wait,” Losev answered me with a smile, referring, in my opinion, not so much to his recovery as to his dubious pleasure to give up the loneliness he had suffered and come to terms with the burden of the poetic patriarchate, albeit conditional.

The Losevs have a beautiful neglected house and a small garden hanging over a giant ravine, along the bottom of which a river flows. A quarter of an hour's walk - the spiers and towers of the campus, across the road - a cemetery. And around - the hills and valleys of New England. And all this meaningful lyrical-philosophical way of life and way of life is the work of a refugee who started in a foreign land from scratch. An impressive victory of man over circumstances.

I always catch myself on the fact that my sorrow is bright and solemn. So, probably, they say goodbye to the winners.