| Today Boris Chichibabin would have turned eighty years old Boris Chichibabin is such a large wounded bird, heavily wandering along the pebble shore and vigilantly looking out for “his hunter”, with some tired interest, but without fear. This is how I saw him for the first time; This is how he remained in memory - a huge bent seagull, landing on the autumn Koktebel shore, penetrated by the first cold wind.
The hunt for him never stopped. This was what was amazing. After all, it is almost unthinkable to find a more humane poet. He, like no one else, knew how to enter someone else's soul - whether a person or a nation, in order to understand, to sympathize. He literally got sick of everyone and everything. As if he was called for this by heaven. And in response - first Stalin’s Vyatlag, then many years of silence, persecution, exclusion from the Writers’ Union.
Even in the last years of his life, marked by the publication of books, recognition, and a State Prize, he managed to draw fire upon himself. Because his shrines were subjected to destruction - Russia, culture, poetry, the very naturalness of life, being replaced before our eyes by artificial structures and concepts. Chichibabin remained true to himself and again went against the crowd carried away by destruction:
I am faithful to God alone,
and, bent like a comma,
I'm sawing against the flow,
not coinciding with the multitude.
Naturally, Chichibabin wanted change. But change , not total destruction. And when he spoke out against this destruction, “fierce zealots” (this time democratic) again tried to throw him to the sidelines. “I am a Russian poet,” he told me in September 1992 in Koktebel. “And it’s hard to accuse me of being a defender of those people who persecuted me, or a defender of the empire.” I myself had a hand in its destruction. But, God knows, this is not the kind of destruction I wanted. If anything, I wanted transformation. I wanted a new life to grow from the sprouts of the best that was in our old life. And again we have destroyed everything and are trying to build from scratch the most inhumane, most gangster version of a bourgeois state. Why? Because that’s the concept they have.”
For Chichibabin, the essence of the changes was clear, because he, who had preached love all his life, immediately understood: everything is done without love for a person. And therefore, the scheme, the concept that kills culture, rules again. The bourgeoisie that has arrived is conceptual. Hence his denial of bourgeoisism:
Our scales have not yet fallen off,
but, despite all temptations,
poetry and bourgeois -
principled enemies .
Bourgeoisism, Boris Alekseevich believed, is not just anti-artistic and unspiritual, it calmly betrays the foundations and is capable of cutting people off with rare cruelty for the sake of momentary enrichment, squeezing them into the Procrustean bed of its ideas about “benefit” and “correctness.” Chichibaba’s resistance to this is not accidental (... I’m not sure you can make an American laugh even to your core ). He, a former prisoner and dissident, was offered a new kind of government scheme. What he shouted about at all intersections, in all interviews. But they didn't hear. They didn’t hear, although the name of the poet in those years was known to everyone at least somehow involved in literature.
The circle is closed. And Chichibabin, in order to break through the deafness, wrote: “I was red and never ceased to be, as I was, so I will remain.” We heard. And they unanimously condemned it. It didn’t occur to anyone that he had never been any kind of red. And the most “red” thing in his work is the famous “red tomatoes” from a poem written in 1946 in prison between calls for interrogation. It’s just that the public had a conditioned reflex, like animals in a circus.
One of the tragedies of the end of his life was the split of the country.
Apparently, the demon is leading us uselessly,
in the swirl of lifeless years.
I didn’t move anywhere -
the house remains, but there is no homeland.
Being mortally ill, a few weeks before his death, he nevertheless responded to an offer to perform at the Moscow Oktyabr cinema and concert hall - he came from Kharkov. It was very important for him to read from the stage to the whole country (the television was filming that evening) “Lament for the Lost Homeland”:
I'm crying in the world for the wrong person
which is not in vain
called, arguing with muteness,
empire of evil
but about another, century-old,
whose ringing in the soul is a snowman,
always coming, for whom
we gave our lives.
From frosty soul to hellish heat
shoved naked:
I never left my homeland -
Why was she deprived of it?
Chichibabin considered his homeland to be that part of the vast country that speaks and reads Russian. Finding himself abroad, in Kharkov, separated from Russia, he felt locked in a cage, just like back in 1946. The conflict with the new reality and those who glorified this reality was a foregone conclusion.
It is known that the state, in times of its power, or the elite, replacing a weak state, vigilantly distinguishes between “us” and “strangers” almost exclusively by style. Once you go beyond the bounds of conditioned “iconicity,” you become an outcast. What the poet writes about is of no interest to anyone. It’s interesting how, in what conventional language he expresses himself.
At one time, Andrei Sinyavsky announced that he had purely stylistic differences with the Soviet regime, which infuriated the opposition intelligentsia. They thought that the differences were political. What is the politics in “Walking with Pushkin”? Pure style. Joseph Brodsky explained his misadventures in approximately the same way. Chichibabin also had fundamental stylistic differences with the apologists of the new government. So the poet found himself in an extremely difficult, but absolutely natural for him, situation of social loneliness. In the Soviet years, everything seemed to be clear: there is someone else’s power, but there are also our own, like-minded people, which of course warmed us up. And then the soul was shackled by absolute existential cold.
This is a hard time for us. Our brothers are not our friends.
The world is doomed. There is no way to save him.
And I'm reading Sophocles aloud to you .
That is, when almost everything collapsed, there was still hope for poetry. But the magazines were dwindling before our eyes, the circulation of books was evaporating, the halls were emptying, a new deafness was descending on his homeland, through which, as it seemed to him, he could no longer break through. And then he again, as before, but for the last time, spoke about fatigue and death. He spoke, hoping for immortality, for the incorruptibility of the poetic line:
Some verses will never fade,
Yes, how many of them will remain, however.
I'm so tired! Like a slave or a dog.
Take away my fatigue, Mother Death. Efim BERSHIN |
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