Alexander Lyusy. Geopoetic referendum

Geopoetic referendum
You are beautiful, the shores of Taurida: Crimea in Russian poetry / Comp., preface, notes. V.B. Korobova. - M., 2000

Alexander Lyusy

Publication date: December 13, 2000

My reading of this poetic anthology coincided with my editorial work on the collection “New Ideas in the Methodology of Biology” (prepared by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the publishing house with the mysterious name “Editorial URSS”), which became the reason for a small noospheric introduction.

It is known that during the transition from one level of organization of matter to another, “explosive” bifurcation processes play a key role. As a result of the Big Cosmological Bang, a large-scale (cellular) structure of the Universe was formed. The result of the Big Biological Bang was the emergence of a monolith of life with its multi-level organizational structure and increasingly accelerated development.

The big noospheric explosion - the "Omega point" - corresponds to the spiritual and cultural information level of the organization of living things. From the oral creativity (legends and myths) of the ancient world, the system developed towards the creation of a global information network connecting the monolith of the mind into a single whole.

Just as the Big Biological Bang gave rise to a variety of levels of organization of living things, so the Big Noospheric Bang should give rise to a series of different levels. Currently, we may be observing a new stage of development within the noospheric level - the virtual level, a non-material phenomenon, but one that has a great influence on reality.

The current Russian bifurcation (more precisely: polyfurcation; let it be allowed to use this term of special sciences, actively used recently in the humanitarian dimension) makes Crimea, where “over the black and deaf sea” it is no longer Russia that “breaks off”, a completely virtual phenomenon , requiring comprehension precisely at the noospheric level, using the appropriate terminology. An anthology of the Crimean “cosmopoetic shock,” as one Slavist put it in an application for a report that he wanted to read at the Voloshin House-Museum in Koktebel, but never got there, provides a reason for this.

Having abandoned a strictly “anthological” approach to the collection, which includes poems dedicated to the Crimea starting from the “time of the Ochakovskys,” let us immediately turn to the poem “Bazaar in Yalta” by the compiler Vladimir Korobov, who at one time worked as a gardener in the Yalta Chekhov House-Museum.

O earthly market! The antediluvium of the bazaar,
Screaming rage, sublime life,
The ordinariness of a miracle, the divinity of a gift,
Your meaning is not banal and your style is not hackneyed! Let the planes fly in the sky above you,
Trains rush past, whistling, -
Your device is perfect, like a honeycomb,
Your human vanity is wonderful!

This praise, unprecedented in Russian poetry, which after Pushkin was inclined to engage in a duel with the “surf of the market,” praises the bazaar, albeit an exotic one, contradicts its subsequent comparison with a kaleidoscope. The latter is not only basically an unsecured cosmopolitan handful of pieces of glass, but is also built on the pure play of chance, while the cellular “honeycombs” of the market are subject to more or less knowable earthly laws. Probably, a premonition of deception lurks in the externally imposed identification of vegetable and fruit abundance with the “friendship of peoples”, which is equally subject to adjustment, which is manifested in the rhymes: “eggplants - countries” , “onions - circle” . If we ignore the specific content of the poem, the best manifestation of the laws of the “earthly market” in the geopolitical dimension would be a referendum, but the eggplants turned out to be too green for a free choice of sauce; except that individual bulbs, violating the new passport regime, slip out of the forbidden circle.

There are only two poems in the anthology by Solzhenitsyn Prize laureate Inna Lisnyanskaya, and they are like two opposite vectors of landscape bifurcation of the traditional paradigm “you may not be a poet.” In “For the First Time in Crimea” (1983), the poetess releases “my simple-minded rhymes, like dolphins,” to the freedom of the sea waves , and she herself yearns “along with the mountains, and the sea, and the sky” expelled from here for the “swallow-browed wives, husbands and babies” . And in the message “To Kyiv to Evdokia” (1996) the rhymes do not scatter, but are concentrated, and for a different reason:

If the fur coat came apart at the seams,
I would say: well, let's do without a fur coat.
Well, what about without Crimea? Painful Russian words
To know that they are helplessly rude today.

Apparently, under the influx of such “helpless rudeness,” Gennady Frolov in his “Crimea” is trying to raise “from the grave,” like a battalion commander from a trench, the shadow of the post-Petrine temporary worker of the 18th century, Minikh, who once, during a retaliatory raid on Crimea, burned down cities and villages “ "swallow-browed" people - and killed half of his own army. The compiler believes that the anthology he collected challenges Maximilian Voloshin’s assertion that “the attitude of Russian artists towards Crimea was that of tourists viewing places famous for their picturesqueness” (article “Culture, Art, Monuments of Crimea”). However, the mentioned example of a coarsened “tourism” trying to historiosophize is even more unsightly, and, perhaps, dangerous, than the former abundance of “exclamation marks in poetry” , “like in pictures - skinny Yalta cypresses . ” There is a discrepancy between metaphoricality and the modern information level, which gives rise to false virtuality.

An example of the latest expression of superficially enlightened “loyalty” to local realities is the expression “Tatar Taurida,” casually thrown into Tatyana Bek’s nostalgic nocturne about marginal eternity” lying on the ruins of the Union “ . After all, Tavrida is a purely Russian invention; only Crimea can be Tatar.

By the way, when I called my brochure published in Simferopol in 1991 about the literary Columbus of Crimea, Semyon Bobrov, “The First Poet of Taurida,” I was also reproached. It was expressed by one prominent defender of the Crimean Tatar people, who left for a while the path of Scandinavian studies (where he, in particular, brought to the attention of the academic reader how the Crimean Khan agreed with the King of Sweden to fight the “Moscow Ukrainians”) in order to quickly work for the mass reader based on early Soviet historiography, something like the Crimean version of Mein Kampf, which became a textbook in local national schools. The staid “Varangian” said that in the title I criminally ignore the works of medieval Crimean Tatar poets written in Arabic script (which my opponent, by his own admission, also does not speak). All of this (and “Seven Planets” by Seyid Muhammad Riza, and current newspaper pearls) are phenomena, conventionally speaking (the levels are different) of the general Crimean, but not Tauride, for Taurida is a rather closed mythologeme, capable, naturally, of interacting with other mythology, but on the basis of stylistic consistency. Inside it, there are also possible rediscovery columns that have already been discovered in a different context.

The longer I read the modern section of the anthology, the more often I returned to Voloshin’s article (despite the fact that many quotes from this “Ukrainian poet”, as it turns out from some new sources, are very actively used by ideologists of various nationalist trends). “It is difficult to consider the fact that several great Russian poets visited Crimea as tourists or travelers and that wonderful people came here to die from tuberculosis as an introduction to Russian culture . ” Mikhail Sinelnikov, in his collection of poems that turns into a completely noospheric, in our understanding, mini-poem, seems to echo these, of course, controversial words, rhyming ancient mythologies and realities with the latest environmental problems:

I knew this sea, I realized the deity
Elderly, sick,
I forgot you, hugging him,
Falling asleep in the heat. Here the feluccas faded in lilac smoke,
Triremes disappeared
And always, and always cheated on him,
And they did not know faith. I won't get any live fish anymore,
Gems and mussels,
As if the shadows passed into the blue of the blue
Odysseus and Ovid. Maybe I was born for this day.
Lies against the headboard
And for the first time it loved me
And - the last love.

Such platonic love, although not yet burdened by geopolitics, was at one time anticipated by Osip Mandelstam, whose “Black Sea, swirling, makes noise / And with a heavy roar approaches the head.” The motif of “lying hills” , giving rise to an endless chain of associations and transformations, grows in the poem “Cape Chameleon”, where the Crimean cape turns into Thermopylae, Japanese shallows, or (out of Voloshin’s context, but in accordance with the reader’s interests of a friend) a Norwegian fiord. And in the poem “Crimea,” which realistically reproduces the rather bleak landscape of a new building with angry dogs that “swallowed their ears and tail ,” where an “unfamiliar word” and laughter sting in the back, Sinelnikov unexpectedly and inevitably uses the key lexeme, which no longer means superficial, but a qualitative shift in consciousness, similar to the breaking of the circle of “eternal return”:

Time was taken in full measure,
You won't have time to save souls...
And to Allah from the gray hut,
By changing the composition of the noosphere,
Guttural speech soars.

Yuri Kublanovsky on the wrinkled Cape Chameleon, changing only its color and local monetary units, “the sun burned with the fire of cremations . ” The flow of associations that survived under such an eschatological sun, framed by a “brood of silky, timid butterflies ,” was brought together into a qualitatively new whole by leadership from afar - not even from Russia:

And only somehow it was spinning in my brain,
that evil is coming with might and main
its quantity has become denser,
and the lackeys surrendered Kosovo.

A purely metaphysical riddle: can the quantitative consolidation of evil lead to a qualitative leap in good? But the rhyme with the conjunction “and” is a godsend. There are “and”, albeit with “toadies”, which means the topic is not closed.

If Mandelstam’s Russia was just “breaking over the Black and Deaf Sea,” then Lyudmila Abaeva tries to consider the very essence of this cliff, covered with the quiet “Ukrainian night”:

They searched the waters of the Black Sea with a beam
and the watchmen hid in the night
not dogs, but ships, but warships
novices with a trident and sword.

Against this background, it is striking that even now a Russian poet in Crimea is able to experience quite cozy homely moods, as evidenced by the experience of Ilya Falikov:

My sweet tear on the fly
stirring with construction saliva,
the swallow carries away this note
into the yellow mouth of the baby above me.

Poetic tears and geopolitical saliva are the main components of the honeycombs and cells of the current “tourist” Crimean geopoetics (this term is an obvious synonym for the concept of “noosphere”).

The anthology-referendum on the basis of a single mandate gives a voice to a number of Crimean poets. Here Vladimir Grachev expresses completely noospheric regret:

Peace and the kingdom of silence
Under the shadow of a dormant park.
Are you sleeping, pineies?.. I'm sorry,
That I won’t see your dreams.

Maybe this is the Crimean poetry sprouting from within that Voloshin dreamed of (which, it seems, refracted Leo Tolstoy’s dreams of a real writer rising from the midst of the people)? But in this case, the very mentality of those who decided to “live in a remote province by the sea” not only in imperial, but also in more remote post-imperial times, should have sounded more clearly in the anthology and without exotic restrictions.

Korobov doesn’t know what incredible collisions this quatrain from Grachev went through - and, as a result, what role it played for the formation of the intra-Crimean poetic “we”:

We are not sand - it is more free-flowing.
We are not water - it is always different.
We are dust when the beam illuminates us.
We are not a period, but only a comma.

In the 70-80s, the activities of the KGB in Crimea were particularly literary-centric. Vladimir Kupchenko, a Voloshino scholar and the first director of the Voloshin House-Museum in Koktebel, spoke about one case not so long ago on the pages of Russian Thought (a long search in the Poet’s House, when government officials first decided to cross its threshold, coincided with a revealing feuilleton in the Krokodil magazine) ). Maybe the time will come for an instructive study from both a sociological and cultural point of view - how many stars on shoulder straps did the circulation of one photocopy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel “Cancer Ward” or a tape cassette with Alexander Galich’s songs bring here? The personal diary seized from Grachev became for the security officers a regional substitute for the diaries of Mikhail Kuzmin and, it seems, gave rise to no less a chain reaction of less high-profile “cases”. A few years later, the authorities that tirelessly monitored the poet became interested in his line “We are dust...” no less than imported samizdat. The manuscripts of many aspiring poets, through their mediation, then ended up in the editorial office of the newspaper "Krymsky Komsomolets", where a pogrom feuilleton of the same name with a "subversive" line in its decadent decadence was published as a sign of the beginning of another regional hunt for witches and poetic manuscripts (one of the characters in the feuilleton, by the way, was also the compiler of the anthology under review). Fortunately (at least for the poets who received such attention), perestroika, which was only initially accompanied by increased pressure on the ground, had already begun, and everything was limited to feuilleton.

Be that as it may, Voloshin’s behests are coming true, and Russian-Crimean virtuality now meets the local virtual noosphere. Now Crimea in Russian poetry will be an eternal geopoetic referendum with its letter of freedom and law.