Alexander Ulanov. Culinary

Cooking
Victor Sosnora . Nine books. - M.: New Literary Review, 2001

Alexander Ulanov

Publication date: March 7, 2001

The pigeons will fly in, descend into the pan, and I will pour boiling water over them.

V.S.

“Oh, listen, listen, how insanity / lifts the tail of a comet. / How the night is painful, small, / like a wolfberry, a chimera . ” Probably, this in 1963, and in a poem by a 27-year-old author, could have sent shivers down the spine of many. From the surprise of the epithets: “fat birds wisely pierce / the fish with a bone lip . ” From the colorfulness: “September! You are a nobleman in a Baltic cassock . ”

And Sosnora is also a variety of sound organization, palindromes, imprecise rhymes. Revealing meaning through sound . “Now from you - memory, from you - understanding . ” "Hotba" : the will of the Romans - and the step of the legions. "Reader" : appeal - and proposal. A wide rhythmic spectrum, the use of ancient meters, for example, iambic with a rearranged, dancing stress on the last foot - in the manner of some Hipponactus. Immersion in ancient Greek everyday life ( “I have an invisible jug of wine, / copper, like a lean hunting dog” ). References to myths, including not very well-known ones - about the Bible, for example. The Bizarre Geography of Physicality . “The swan-neck is the gospel, / the head-god is Egypt . ” Deep reflection asking: how to cry a tear? The sorcerer's glossolalia and grammatical freedom. "Where Makar calves to crayfish with hare oink" . Self-irony and the ability to see the unusual in the ordinary. “We’ll fry the water in a frying pan, dip the garlic into it and slurp the sprat to the bottom. / At night we’ll wipe our socks in the wash and, like gods, we’ll run in our socks into the Sunset...” The poignancy of sadness. “There is no need to cry, you, - we will be like the seagulls of Egypt...” Sosnora of that time does not fade even against the modern poetic background (didn’t his rains for repairing plants contain, for example, Eremenko’s mechanized universe with a binocular owl and pine trees, which " screwed from below with bolts"?).

But, apparently, poetry really always continues from where it left off. Sosnora generously uses finds from early Mayakovsky. Or Tsvetaeva: “A tear from the milky seas will not seep into myth. / Thank you for - your, beloved, world...” The cultural gap is so great that to restore continuity we have to move even further - to romanticism, to the 19th century. “Stop, my passion. Stop, life of desires. / I held an extra lyre . ” To the pompous intonations of that era. “The bell of thunderstorms and prophecies will strike, / - I am not afraid / of either death or your immortal glory, - to light a star!” Towards the narrative nature of verse, ballad polyphony. To romantic disappointment. “Only on anniversaries do rednecks prance... There were yakhonts, beryls, diamonds - they became glass . ” Towards obscene irony - quite in the spirit of Heine. “We love butts, they are like the sun! - and near, near / there are young people, and everyone is wearing underpants, and everyone is wearing hair.” .

The melodic variety often veers into romance-pop intonations. There was some gypsyism. "Women are the first to not have a woman's laughter - / to ruin! Threesome with tambourines!" The similarity of words in sound every now and then turns out to be too straightforward. "Raphael's rock! Byron's nonsense! Mozart's mass! Pushkin's punch!" Sometimes it is so intrusive that, when you come across “cutlets in a common cauldron ,” you no longer think about poetry, but about the fact that the cutlets are still fried in frying pans. And overly graphic comparisons sometimes make one recall Gottfried Benn’s thoughts, never translated in the USSR, about why poetry that is loaded to the brim with “how” is bad.

“What destinies / am I developing? / Holy strings / am I breaking!” - is this really an assault on the cosmos of words and work on the extreme limits of the renewal of poetic language , which Vl. Novikov sees in Sosnora? However, his romanticism certainly contributed to the poet’s popularity. Poetry of the 19th century is what was taught at school, what is familiar. Another neo-romantic, Elena Schwartz, is also popular.

So what have we come to? Is Sosnora a transitional author, along with Krasovitsky or Roald Mandelstam, filling the gap between the poetry of the first third of the twentieth century and its further post-Soviet development? No, it’s not that simple, because Sosnora is endowed with the rare ability to metamorphose. So he delves into history and comments on the death of Paul I with an allusion to “Treasure Island” ( “Mikhailovsky Gothic coral!” / Here Stevenson would cry out loud “Piastres!” ). He paints a picture of phantasmagoric Petersburg, ruled by Ivan the Terrible. Peter, “the smartest tadpole” (it’s interesting to compare this with the almost headless Shemyakino statue in Peter and Paul Fortress). History, geography, sculpture, botany are mixed. “Leningrad stood by the sea in Rome, / in it the Neva Horse stood like a gladiolus.” And the ability to omit unnecessary links in the logical chain appears, releasing the image. “There is a move beyond the Pendulum, but suddenly / there is not enough wood for the corpse. / I am strict, the fire, and Rome is burning, / and it is already without frames." . Connections are becoming more extensive. “Don’t wake my acorn at dawn! / The snow has fallen between Astarte’s New Year’s feet...” Semantic shifts are sometimes reminiscent of Vvedensky. “In those towers three female bodies sit / and white breasts eat . ”

It is curious that the romantic excess persists. “I am the sun of tears, a silvery mind, / I lit life like the night of a horse and legs...” Again the gypsies. Again Tsvetaeva: “Live with finances, - / here, / with tickets, according to the letter, / from - to, / uniforms and builders, - / government house!” It's all Gammeln, the Pied Piper should be sent there... In 2000, as if nothing had happened, variations on the theme of world sorrow continue. “How sad it is in this slippery / dirty world - from miracles!” Sosnora's formal searches correspond to the worldview of the early twentieth century, and often even the nineteenth. The universe still revolves around the author's self. “There are too many worlds in this world, / I prefer “I”..." Sosnora takes into account the experience of the poetry of the "Silver Age" - why not take into account the experience of modern poetry, in which sublime clichés have greatly diminished?.. Moreover, Sosnora another feature of this experience is close - the hard-won realization that “There is nothing more immoral for art than correctness of speech . ”

The previous form is clearly narrow in scope for this new content. Anno IVA - 658 lines of dreary iambic pentameter - foreshadows the overdue transition to prose. Prose appears - loose, unscrewed, jangling, intonation much freer than poems. “What is so menthol-like to me? - stick a needle and blow, and the clockwork will play, and they will dance in the glass. Gogol with a belly, with pasta, a fat belly and a thin leg, a weevil. Sales, sales! If the day is archived, it can resume, but " We put paper clips . Sometimes it feels like automatic writing. Maybe we are seeing a meeting between Russian literature and surrealism, which happened only now, and not in the 20s in Paris (especially since the surrealists were very romantic young people)? And Sosnora has a fair amount of all sorts of open bellies full of hair.

“In days of hope, there is 1 letter spider and one Morse code cricket per capita. You see a reliable wall that cannot be penetrated by a single champagne cork. I take the pen with both hands, like a weightlifter, but it is empty, you can make a drawing with your nails on the sand, producing volatility . " This is exactly what Sosnora continues to do - with enormous energy expenditure, through failures and successes. It is doubtful, however, that these successes are noticeable to critics and apologists. Otherwise, apologists would have noticed Arkady Dragomoshchenko, Ivan Zhdanov or Vladimir Kazakov... Most likely, they only see what they are used to: palindromes and romanticism, Khlebnikov and Tsvetaeva.