Dance of approach

Igor Pomerantsev

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Due to my duty, I had to cut AM Pyatigorsky with a razor more than a hundred times. It would be an exaggeration to say that he bravely endured these painful - for me - procedures. No, he simply had no idea about them. I, putting a merciless hand on my heart, experienced not only torment, but also pleasure. With scraps three or four fingers long there was only hassle and no thrill: if I had glued all these scraps together, then the Pyatigorsk macking and becaning would have been enough for a bunch of rams. But I felt real rage when cutting off nonsense that was meaningless for a radio conversation like “You see, dear Igochka...”. True, “Igochka” was followed by conclusions from which a refreshing icy breeze blew. "We are now speaking to you in a language that will become dead...".


In the London edition of “Above Barriers” (Radio Liberty), he created and hosted the “Non-Russian Idea” column. I think that by “non-Russian” he meant an intellectually fearless, obligatory philosophy, or even simpler: philosophy. But let philosophers judge about this. I can talk about the radio theater of Alexander Pyatigorsky, since I happened to be his radio editor and radio director. His style of philosophizing at the microphone could be called a “dance of approach.” Shuffling, wobbling, so to speak, a Charleston, he approaches the essence, well, one knee, the other, a double sheepskin coat, even higher, a little more, now, now he will dance, voice something that neither yogis nor brahmins have ever dreamed of! But he still doesn’t dance. If you want to be perplexed, if you want to be irritated, if you want to understand that truth is not a fumbled tango, but a square dance, a dance, movement, approach.

This Pyatigorsk dance, it seems to me, has an indecently vulgar physiological explanation: our philosopher was cross-eyed from birth. Someone will say: "Poor guy." But he himself will most likely answer: “It depends on how you look...”. Yes, not to us with our directness, but to him with his obliqueness, the world seems unfocused. The duality of truth is revealed only to people with differently directed pupils (“the slanted eye sees far”). They are our mast headscarves. Who knows, maybe without them humanity would never have broken away from mental planimetry.

Sasha and I often walked around London, which he loved for its asymmetry. This city was and remains at one with him. And yet, armed with the vision of his differently sized pupils, I mentally see Pyatigorsky not in London, but in Moscow, as he described himself in the radio essay “My Favorite Cinema”. In the cold winter of 1946, in the basement canteen of the Udarnik cinema, a tall, thin young man chews a piece of bread and sips hot, liquid tea. He listens greedily, generously trembles and devours, devouring with his eyes the space of meanings covered with ripples. Speak, speak, my cross-eyed friend. The film is spinning.