| Victor Krivulin was one of the key and heroic figures of the St. Petersburg poetic avant-garde. It is impossible to imagine his poetry and fate outside the aura of the Neva capital. Although the future poet was born in the Voroshilovgrad region in 1944, all the main events of his life are connected with the city of Peter. Here, at the age of sixteen, he was introduced to Akhmatova and heard her blessing. Here, in the legendary literary association led by Gleb Semenov, he found friends and like-minded people. Here, at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University, he studied the poetry of Innokenty Annensky. Here he gained fame, at first in narrow, and then ever expanding circles. Here he created a “school of concrete lyrics” and demonstratively - in 1966 - announced his departure from the Komsomol. From here his poems, intense, nervous and indelibly St. Petersburg, went to samizdat and tamizdat: since 1975, Krivulin was published in “Grani”, since 1980 - in Maximov’s “Continent”, in 1981 his first collection was published in Paris - "Poetry". Here, one had to pay for the commitment to freedom and creativity - an “underground” existence, the inability to be heard in the fatherland, major troubles, which the Leningrad security officers were always generous with.
In his homeland, Krivulin was first published in 1985. New times brought him the opportunity to publish widely and the status of a revered master. In recent years, Krivulin has been quite actively involved in social and political activities, publishing bright (and usually harsh) critical and journalistic articles. His main concern remained poetry. Inseparable from love of freedom, devotion to culture, spiritual thirst.
The death of the poet makes us remember his long-ago lines: I’ll take off my hat - it’s useless where to gather, / because there are magnetic storms and prominences everywhere, / and the speaker wheezes, and the working Bach is sad, / because he has children like stray dogs in Odessa - / and infants, and mustachioed, and everything else, both on horseback and on foot... / And therefore I will probably end up hanged. "News Time"
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