Alexander Skidan. Sinusitis perversus

Maxim Amelin. Dubia: Book of poems .- St. Petersburg: LLC Inapress, 1999.

I started to start reproducing here all the cabinet in the “editorial office” of the series: Pictures of the world. Perversus collection: Sergey Anufriev, Sergey Bugaev (Africa), Slava Zizhek, Nikolai Kononov, David Levi-Straz, Brah Lichtenberg Ettinger, Pavel Peppersdrin, Viktor Samokhvalov, Renat Salesl, Andrew Solomon, Viktor Tupitsyn, Olesya Turkina and, finally, editor -in -chief Viktor Mazin. The list, to say, is impressive. However, what is the meaning of his appearance in the book of poems ? By deducting Nikolai Kononov, none of the “cabineters”, as far as I know, is not seen in the manifestation of especially warm feelings for poetry or its popularization (the witty conceptual centers of Tupitsyn and Pastisha Anufriev and Pepperstein are against the background of their critical -artistic activity - frankly episodic, marginal character and more likely to debunk, discrediting, discrediting. in any case, everything says that they were by no means for poetic merits). In addition, it is not clear what foreigners, whose sphere of professional interests is infinitely far from Russian poetry, can be useful with, say, the verdict, whom to print in the Perversus collections, and whoever is not. But they are certainly useful as figures, giving impressive to the publishing project , the application to which - and here we approach the most important thing - is the "collection". This cultural project is built around the once samizdat magazine "Cabinet", whose renome was primarily due to the participation of leading critics and artists of the St. Petersburg scene, as well as the translations of theoretical work dedicated to modern art, philosophy and psychoanalysis. In general, the Cabinet strategy can be described as an attempt to introduce domestic art and art history discourse into the western context. In such a context, the names of the slurry or Brahi Lichtenberg Ettinger look quite appropriate. But, again, what should the traditional fan of poetry, that is, a certain hypothetical reader of Maxim Amelin, is far from the international artistic environment and intellectual fashion?

Apparently, this hypothetical reader must perceive the list placed in the book as a political declaration or, if you like, a symptom that enshrines the new status in the cultural hierarchy: the status of the application . Sensitive to the "new trends" of the Konona, the poet, heading the publishing house "Inapress", accurately felt that the symbolic values ​​of the Poetry Paper, which had fallen in the market, could be artificially raised at the expense of art, primarily interpretation. Poetry ceased to be something self-sufficient, sovereign, as well as many other types of art that not only are no longer able to do without a particular critical support, but are increasingly turning into a commentary on themselves, which are absent, or, conversely, an encyclopedia that outlives themselves before the eyes of techniques. Therefore, the publisher rolled out heavy artillery in the person of intellectuals, whose names, apparently, should give the poetic series the presentation.

An annotation, representing the author in the spirit of the curatorial text for the exhibition booklet, also fits into this strategy: “The classics usually include texts in the Dubia section, whose attribution can cause doubts for one or another reason. The choice of such a provocative name for the book Maxim Amelin poses a difficult question before the reader - poetry at the end of the 20th century, how they are related to the classical tradition. The poet. He offers his talented solution to this problem, nominally remaining in the framework of strict lyric prosodies. Here and the curtsy in the direction of the fashionable mystification genre, it is not clear how it has not yet filled after all the Pavichi and IVF that have damaged the book market, and the reference to the classics, and the supposedly supposedly doubts about the author’s authority, and, of course, the talented solution to the problem (talented in which the author remains but nominally, as well as nominally, as well as nominally, as well as nominally, And phenomenally, faithful to quite conventional "poetry", and all provocation is reduced to flirting with the reader, in no way encroaching on the reading skills of this?). It is unlikely that Kononov can be indiscriminately accused of the dominant - diluted -pastmodernist - ideas according to which art, so as not to lose the audience, is forced to reckon with the prevailing consensus of the taste, whose guides are institutions. He printed the books of Dmitry Vodennikov, Elena Schwartz and his own poets, to whom, frankly, Laureate Amelin is as far as the very spirit of his book is far from the audit of ideology undertaken by the same slurry. Nevertheless, the idle question: would Nikolai Kononov print texts, “whose attribution can cause doubts for one reason or another,” if they were not indirectly signed by the prestigious name of the anti -bucker? As a publisher, preoccupied with a reputation of a poetic series, I understand him; As a policy, counting on something more than getting into the stream, by no means - even taking into account the whole playfulness of the Perversus term included in the name of the series.

I am still inclined to interpret this latter as a deviation from the norm in relation to poetry, more precisely, to its newborn application status. At the end of the last century and until the very recent time, poetry was not just at the forefront of the arts, it rival with philosophy, laying new forms of worldview. Mallarme and Apolliner, Khlebnikov and Vvedensky, Pound and Eliot, Truckle and Tselan: it was the poets who predetermined the intellectual climate of their time. Philosophical thought, not to mention aesthetic search, still addresses their experience as an experience (for) the limit. And then the moment comes (we will call it a “semantic catastrophe”), when the poetry rating is rapidly falling, and the devaluation of the poetic word is not least due to an increase in the average level of versioning - at least in Russia, to the crushing consequences, comparable to the collapse of the orthodox Marxist -Leninsky teaching. As if in a mockery of Rimbao, who called for being "absolutely modern", poets, with the rarest exceptions, begin to sneakly joke and reassign the "Silver Age".

In the case of Maxim Amelin, the quails become a conscious attitude subordinating all the material without a trace. Unlike Kibirov, masterfully mastering the Nekrasov-Blokov’s prosodia and extracting a mass of comic effects from the clash of its pathos lying with foreign lexical rows (primarily bastard Soviet realities), the material of Amelin is a less socially engaged and, so to speak, a demanded branch of traditions: Khraskov, tails, tongues, tail Derzhavin, Bogdanovich, Maikov. But under this noble patina, which allows you to take a beneficial - aesthetically invulnerable - distance in relation to the present, a rather common “constructive principle” is hidden: this is the principle of a romey, based mainly on a pun, inversion and all kinds of beaten inversion of school quotes, as well as the contrast of a solemn, complicated metric drawing, borrowed from ancient, and in the highest degree of frivolous tone (or vice versa). As a result, we have an ironic PalimpSest collage, where words are mocking at each other, illustrating the basics of the theory of intertextuality, perhaps yesterday, perhaps urgent, but degraded into practice into self-tapping and conformism.

"Wine of archaisms" Amelin whips cleaner Krivulin. But if the latter in the seventies turned to exalted Odical intonation in search of a point of resistance to official poetics, then Amelin’s manipulation brushes away to Barkovian, which is deprived of any subversive potential, “lowering” high speech, not contrary to, but in full agreement with the dominant style. The “funny Russian syllable”, which he reanimated by him, is sometimes really funny, but more often gives vulgarity, especially where the poet leaves the cozy soil of stylization and Banbratov addresses, for example, to Mayakovsky. Moreover, this vulgarity, all the more, cuts a hearing, which, it would seem, is more successful than a pun:

Cute, talented, but ... everything was sacrificed to the red word: George Ivanov, and God, and Zarathustra, and Mayakovsky, who served as no more than the reason for the exercise in dentisting a la whol. However, it is pointless to reproach the author for being quite conscious by the credo. Within the framework of the “antique” or “attributive” (see annotation) poetics, he masters his own way, even a little philologically arrogant, a little siblite, a little dandy, a little breter and neo-academicist in the country of the winning Malevich, a little Brodsky, or Kibirov, or the brothers of the Pekchuzhnikovs from A.K. Tolstoy, or Early Zelchenko, who, however, never allowed himself to rhyme "hundred -haired" and "Socrates" and frankly declare that his poems, like everyone else in Russia, are kept on snot.