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Miroslav Nemirov. All about Poetry 10

All about Poetry 10
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Miroslav Nemirov

Publication date: December 20, 2000

American poetry

Brodsky argued that she is the greatest in the world in the 20th century.

You have to take Brodsky at his word: he practically didn’t read it.

American love

This phenomenon has flourished in the cultural centers of our homeland since the mid-1950s: dudes, jazzmen, V. Aksenov, I. Brodsky and others. and so on.

Here, for example, is a phenomenon that once, already in the late 1970s, took place with the now famous artist Avdey Stepanovich Ter-Oganyan, which I recount in his own words. One day he sleeps at night and sees a dream in which he was planning to flee to America and for this purpose made his way to Chukotka to his friend Vasya Slepchenko, who allegedly serves in the army on the border, guarding the Bering Strait. Vasya must transport him to the other side. (Vasya Slepchenko actually served in the army during the period described, but not in Chukotka, but near Rostov, in Taganrog.)

And so Ohanyan makes his way there, on deer and dogs, there is sheer horror all around: cold, winter, gray sky, barracks, thorns, soldiers, earflaps, and everything is not even just black and white, but muddy gray-gray, and so . And Vasya is really ready to transport Avdey Stepanovich to the other side, and they have already dug a tunnel and everything is prepared, but that will come a little later, and now, “Here, look how it is there,” says Vasya and hands Avdey the binoculars.

And Avdey looks.

And he sees: there, on the other side, everything is colorful and colorful, the sun is shining, green palm trees are growing, multi-colored cars full of beauties are driving, the Coca-Cola sign is sparkling in alternating red colors, the blue sea is splashing, etc., and so on. etc.

* * *

The picture in the title is for a reason. It is an illustration for a poem by A. Voznesensky (see) from the book “Triangular Pear”, dedicated to his visit to the USA. Here it is:

In the revue
dancer undresses, fooling around...
Roar?..
Or are the spotlights hurting my eyes? He tears off the scarf, the shawl, the tinsel.
How to peel an orange. And in the eyes there is such melancholy as in birds.
This dance is called "striptease". The dance is scary. In the bar there are bald heads and whistles,
Like leeches
The drunkards' eyes filled with blood.
This redhead looks like he's covered in yolk,
Pneumatic comes from a hammer!
The one like a bug -
apoplectic and fearful.
The saxophone howls like the apocalypse! I curse your scale, Universe!
Martian glow on bridges,
I curse
adoring and marveling.
A woman is dancing to the tune of jazz!.. “Are you America?” - I’ll ask like an idiot.
She sits down and smokes a cigarette. “Boy,” he will say, “oh, what an accent you have!
Order me a martini and absinthe." * * *

The theories that Ohanyan and his friends adhered to at that time were ultra-big bourgeois: we need to do everything like in America, and everything will be great with us: this and that, and Cadillacs, and Pollock and Rauschenberg, and jazz, and striptease, and martinis, and absinthe, and the Martian glow on bridges, and not life, but pure Hemingway, who is always with him.

The funniest thing is that it all came true!

Dreams come true!

Striptease as much as you like and everything else too.

It turned out according to Ilf-Petrov: they thought, if they install a radio, happiness will come. There is a radio, but there is still no happiness.

* * *

As for me, after reading this particular poem by A. Voznesensky, I especially disliked it. That's how scared I was of a simple striptease, I started sobbing in horror, what America has come to! He cursed the entire Universe out of grief!

In fact, of course, it is clear that - - -

Ugh! - I came to this conclusion in 1982 and have not changed it since then.

Americaphobia

The author of these lines, unlike either Brodsky or Ter-Oganyan, grew up in the city of Tyumen, where the cultural atmosphere was somewhat completely different, and in the 1980s - and even more so beyond - the attitude towards the United States was completely different.

So: among the intellectuals of the city of Tyumen there was no love for America. Moreover, there was, rather, Americanophobia. At least in the 1980s.

It stemmed from numerous, voraciously read works by American authors, by the way - Bradbury, Sheckley, Vonnegut, Scott Fitzgerald, Updike, Heller, Dos Passos, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Pound, etc., and so on, and so on, from which turned out that the USA is the center of world vulgarity, stupidity and philistinism, mired in vulgarity, stupidity and philistinism. And we, sophisticated Europeans, have no choice but to despise America.

Such were the sentiments of Tyumen young people in the early 1980s.

They are the same, however, even now, with the exception that from simple skepticism towards all kinds of Americanism today Tyumen thinkers - Yu. Shapovalov, E. Fedotov, K. Pakhomov, A. Strukov, etc., etc. - moved on to the fact that when they hear the word “America” they simply want to grab a gun; thank God they don't have it. And in the elections they vote for the communists: not out of love for Marx-Engels-Lenin, but out of spite for the CIA and Allen Dulles.

In short, they want us not to have something like the one in the picture in the title (Marilyn Monroe is depicted there in the full color of her splendor). In a way incomprehensible to the author of these lines, they managed to convince themselves that they would really like it if they were lined up in formation, dressed in kerzhaks, sweatshirts and earflaps, and driven to dig trenches and build the Nadym-Vorkuta railway.

Or do they hope that it will not be them who are persecuted, but they who will be persecuted?

* * *

It must be said that the Tyumen youths in America think, in general, quite in the spirit of the classical Russian tradition. In 1980, for example, as an ardent young man, I remember reading some article, I don’t remember what it was about, a classic of Russian literature by N.V. Gogol, but I remember there was the phrase “What is the United States? Carrion!” . Why do I remember this? Because it’s amazing how much I liked this phrase, I readily quoted it: they say, Gogol also wrote - -

Only in the mid-1990s did I begin to think: Gogol, as is known, had never been to the United States at all. It is unlikely that he even knew at least one American. But a priori he knew how it was there in the United States! Dead thing, everything is clear.

29 July 1999, 17.37

* * *

During the 1990s - in Tyumen - this all only grew.

By the mid-1990s, in the city of Tyumen - and this is very advanced, and cutting-edge, and, by the way, one of the few - like Moscow! - extremely prosperous cities of the former USSR - among local intellectuals - educated people with a university education! - such conversations were typical.

They walk, for example, on a summer morning, suffering from a hangover, having at the same time a sum of money, the identities of A. and B.

- Let's have a beer, in that kiosk over there, I know they have cheap Bayern, three-four hundred.

Here the heart of his interlocutor B. - I’m passing on his last name, let everyone know it, Strukov A., the leader of the famous and rather somewhat fashionable rock group in certain circles "Cultural Revolution" - is already torn to shreds:

- What are you talking about?! 3,400! You divide these 3,400 by five point fifteen - what do you get? Six hundred sixty six!

And it begins:

- Do you even know what USA stands for? Read it from back to front! ASHS! Agents and Sixes of Satanism! - the patriot will immediately exclaim, after which for the rest of the day he will have to repent, console him, make excuses and mutter that no, I’m okay, I’m not at all against Orthodoxy and the Russian idea, I am so... I am...

So you have to stay out of harm’s way, so as not to needlessly offend or upset a person, it’s better to keep quiet, grunt, shrug your shoulders, and so on.

What is the matter, oh, extremely tedious.

* * *

Well, after the famous Kosovo epic, anti-Americanism has already become commonplace, and not only in Tyumen.

Well, we will have to speak out on these topics.

Regularly communicating with people like those described in the previous paragraphs, I, who previously treated the United States much like Zanzibar, - well, there is such a country, well, to hell with it, I have enough problems of my own, besides thinking about it ; I, constantly forced by them to choose, are you for America or for anyone who is ready to fight with it to the last drop of blood from Iraq to RNE, I am ultimately forced to choose: I am for America. Without understanding - without having enough really accurate data about who is more right and who is more to blame, I can choose solely by personal sympathy, and whatever one may say, my sympathies are on the side of American Dream, the Bill of Rights, Henry Thoreau, Henry Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Ken Kesey, Talking Heads, political correctness - and against J. Stalin, G. Makashov, Barkashov, Kim Il Sung, General Aidid, Milosevic, Gulag and so on. and so on. and so on.

Moreover - I’ll add just in case - according to my ideological convictions, I try to be an Orthodox Christian and more or less a soil scientist, about which see section. article. (But not a Eurasian and not a Slavophile, about which see also a separate article and which both movements, in my opinion, are inventions and Bobchinsky-Dobchinsky’s haste for, as we heard, now fashionable Western theories.)

* * *

In conclusion, I will say the following.

Let me tell you: and if again, God forbid, those who are written about in the penultimate paragraph win, well, here’s a quote - by the way, the key passage of the novel - from one writer who, by no means, can be accused of having a special love for America in in particular and the West in general.

In 1950 (?) in the courtyard of the Marfinskaya special prison, prisoners Nerzhin, personifying in the novel, so to speak, the searching Russian intelligentsia, and the janitor Spiridon, “embodiing,” again, so to speak, the people’s spirit in all its qualities, among which - by the way - and the cunningness not hidden by the author. Both people lived very much under Soviet rule.

“...and, bending down, he breathed hotly from under his mustache into Nerzhin’s face.

- If they told me, Gleba, now: here is such a plane flying, with an atomic bomb on it. Do you want him to bury you here like a dog under the stairs, and cut off your family, and millions more people, but with you - Father Mustache and their entire establishment with the roots, so that there will be no more, so that the people will not suffer on collective farms, on forestry enterprises? - Spiridon tensed, supporting with his steep shoulders a staircase that seemed to be falling on him, and with it the roof, and all of Moscow. - Believe me, Gleba, I can’t stand it anymore, I can’t stand it anymore! I would say,” he turned his face towards the plane, “Come on!” Well! Throw it! Rush!" (A. Solzhenitsyn, "In the First Circle", 1959).

Amphibrachium

K. Vishnevsky: “(from the Greek amphibrachys - short on both sides) - a three-syllable meter, where stress falls mainly on 2, 5, 8, 11, etc. syllables.

Scheme A.

( _ ! _ ) ( _!_ ) ( _!_ ) ( _!_ ) ( _!_ ) ( _! ... and any (but usually no more than four) number of unstressed syllables after the last stress, constituting the clause and not included in the size account.

In the 18th century it was used extremely rarely. V. Zhukovsky introduced it into widespread practice. V. Kuchelbecker, M. Lermontov, A. Fet, A. K. Tolstoy and others turned to him.

The most common form is the tetrameter A.:

Heroes, sea wanderers, albatrosses,
Table guests of thunderous feasts,
Eagle tribe. Sailors, sailors,
A fire song of ruby words for you.
(V. Kirillov, "To Sailors", 1918)

And also three-footed:

The midnight blizzard was noisy
In the forest and remote side.
(A. Fet)" ( Turaev , 1988).

In the 20th century, A. flourished and became one of the most important sizes.

If the 19th century was primarily a century of iambic (well, except for Nekrasov and Nadson, who abundantly introduced trisyllabics, but who were loved not for this (not for poetry at all), but for - - -, and with the exception of Tyutchev, who was almost never knew), then the 20th century became precisely the century of trisyllabic meters - both themselves and the subdivisions resulting from them (see).

And of the three-syllables - amphibrach.

Andrei Bely, for example, one of his most famous - and typical - poems:

Enough: don’t wait, don’t hope,
Scatter, my poor people!
Fall into space and break
Year after painful year! Centuries of poverty and lack of will.
Allow me, O Motherland,
Into the damp, empty expanse,
To weep in your expanse: - There, on the humpbacked plain, -
Where is the flock of green oaks
Worried about the raised budding,
Into the shaggy lead of the clouds, Where Daze prowls across the field,
Rising as a withered bush,
And the wind whistles piercingly
With its branchy flap, where they look into my soul from the night,
Rising from the network of hillocks,
Cruel, yellow eyes
Your crazy taverns, - There, - where there is death and disease
A dashing rut has passed, -
disappear into space, disappear,
Russia, my Russia! (terrestrial A.; July 1908; “Despair”; from the book “Ashes”, from the series “Russia”).

(One of the poems that “marked,” as they wrote then, “the turn of aesthetes and decadents to public issues and the problems of the people’s difficult lot.” Neo-populism: Blok was there, and then, for example, Gorodetsky appeared at the same time, and here is Klyuev with Yesenin, and here Illiodor with Grishka Rasputin, and all this in half with Khlysty (the same “Silver Dove”), with Roerich, with Blavatsky and Steiner; an interesting mess has brewed - for details, see Blok , Yesenin .)

* * *

But option A. is already from the end of the 20th century. Kushner:

To be a classic means to stand on the cabinet
A senseless bust, bristling with collarbones.
Oh Gogol, is this all in a dream, in reality?
This is how they put up a stuffed animal: a snipe, an owl.
You stand instead of a bird. He wrapped himself in a scarf, he loved to make things
Vests, camisoles,
It’s not like undressing - swallowing a piece
I couldn’t in front of witnesses, - naked as a sculptor
Delivered. Is it nice to be a classic? To be a classic - watch from the closet in the classroom
For schoolchildren: they will remember Gogol
Not a wanderer, not a righteous man, not even a dandy,
Not Gogol, but Gogol's upper third. Like Kovalev's nose. Last lesson:
No need to make things up, life is fantastic!
O young men, the dust on your face is like a stocking!
Being a classic is scary, almost indecent.
They don’t hear: they want to go to the ceiling. (1978) * * *

You also need to rummage through the rest, but not before that.

* * *

Here they can refute me with numbers: A. did not have any special role in the 20th century, these are my personal inventions.

I don’t have anything against numbers, and I even keep dreaming of getting M. Gasparov’s book, where these numbers are, but in this case I agree: well, maybe, yes, maybe it’s fiction. Because, in general, I personally like A. the most of all sizes and it’s comfortable - so I praise it.

* * *

Here is an example of the above.

In the furious spring of 1988, we - the author of these lines, Yu. Shapovalov, V. Bogomyakov, and other people - are rapidly moving from Yu. Shapovalov's house along the Central Square of Tyumen towards the Vostok store, where, according to rumors, the Azerbaijani cognac "Three Barrels" was thrown out ". We have at least 18 barrels of money.

- Eh! Amphibrachium let's go! - exclaims one of the walkers.

- Why amphibrachium? Amphibrachium, as far as I can see, is such a ceremonial, solemn size,” answers another.

- Ha! - the first one answers, being pleasantly amazed that his interlocutor knows not only the word “amphibrachium”, but also the features of this size. Usually he has to communicate with his comrades using the words, at best, “cool” and “nice,” and more often, in general, “fuck you.” - It’s solemn and ceremonial - that’s a fact, but there’s such pomp there, you know, like at the parades of Paul the First: as if skipping.

* * *

Finally, what the author of these lines especially loves about A. is that it is best suited for transformation into a dolnik. It’s enough to skip there, add a syllable there, and - - -

And so the jumpiness characteristic of A. increases even more, a downright swing appears, and at the same time there is also a naturalness: unevenness and raggedness, characteristic of everyday speech. While maintaining (exclamation marks) solemn, ceremonial, sublime, etc. syllable.

An example from myself:

What a beautiful bra you have, my dear!
What a white one! And crispy! Really like snow!
What prickly laces on top! stars, holes!, -
What a contagion they promise of rapture and bliss! How great it is, my dear, that you are wearing checkered stockings;
This makes me all good and thoughtful;
And the white summer fills me to the very top,
And the present already dissolves into the future, And the white summer is empty, huge, slow, -
Like hitchhiking alone from Kharkov to Khabarovsk,
How - you can compare - it was great for Gregor and Mendel
Life between the pea beds is all about floundering... Nadym, July 1988

The first line here is an almost completely pure amphibrachium (though in pentameter, which is already rare, and, however, with a spondee in the last foot, which is also not typical for classical examples); well, and then there is a vibration around the amphibrachic base, deviating to all three-syllable and even two-syllable meters; If anyone is interested, let him do the calculations himself.