Elena Grodskaya. Crystal soup

Crystal soup
Andrey Nikolev (Egunov A.N.). Elysian joys. - M.: OGI, 2001. - 64 p.

Elena Grodskaya

Date of publication: October 16, 2001

“My soul is an Elysium of shadows,” Tyutchev wrote in the 19th century . One can imagine the half-grin (very sad) of Andrei Nikolev as he read these lines. What in Tyutchev’s case “torn and sang”, was dying and could not die (“As souls look from on high / At the body abandoned by them”), in Nikolev’s (in life - Andrei Egunov, 1895 - 1968) became “metaphysical melancholy” in quotes, death during life.

Life skillfully played along, one might say, played giveaway: uncertainty, not to say oblivion, two arrests (see the preface to the book by Gleb Morev ).

Nikolev’s poetry also plays tricks with the philologist. Morev writes about “centon games with school classics.” One of the most expressive examples of “attitude to words” is this: “the bodies of past non-shadows, / the delirium of youth in a tangle.” The translation of the textbook Pushkin into muttering and “women's babbling parks” occurs, I would like to say, with brilliance, if “brilliance” in relation to Nikolev would not be an inappropriate word. His voice is muffled, sound halftones predominate. Intonation √ like that of a half-asleep person (not yet asleep or not quite awake).

The relationship is impressive not only with the “golden age” (“not the iron age,” according to the poet), which was for the classic Egunov (“classic” in the literal sense of the word: he graduated from two departments of Petrograd University - classical and Slavic-Russian), maybe more real than his own, twentieth, but also with his younger brother - silver. “A building has collapsed here for my soul,” wrote Nikolev (who is generally partial to lofty, tried-and-tested vocabulary), and the same would like to be said about all his poems, the air of his poetry, which is in amazing correlation with the previous, relatively speaking, Blok’s time ( Blok Nikolev sent his first poems). The fact is that the frequency of use of words that are phantom and by the middle of the twentieth century have lost their “color and smell,” like “joys and sufferings” (“Joy, oh Joy-Suffering, / Pain of unknown wounds!” - sang Gaetan of the same Blok), It seems to me that it gives reason to talk about the game, of course, but also about some commemorations of “great Russian literature” (a myth, but also a reality for any pre-revolutionary writer). It cannot be said that Nikolev’s commemoration is magnificent and accompanied by loud funeral marches. “We once cried not like today,” he just sighs melancholy. The word “God” is also from the St. Nicholas dictionary, and again it is regrettable that “if there is God, then only from the rear.”

I’m not sure that Nikolev’s poetics are entirely ironic. In my opinion, one can also read a completely romantic sadness about the fact that “yes” to “all this heavenly order” is not always “yes.” Nikolev's muse is both a park and a completely sublime creation.

Clouds like variegated brocade,
drink and fight and shout:
It’s good that we have a lot of East,
in the East there is always more God,
and in the orphanhood of Europe wretched,
there yea we are always narrow-minded
kissing the hand under the echo.
May we be saddened by our fate,
Oh, hiding place, oh, seduction,
to excessive attraction!

It is this “towards an excessive attraction” that unites Nikolev with the golden, and silver, and in general with any classical age. He speaks of the “old moon,” and his repetition of “moons, moons, moons” rings, the sound is stringy, without melancholy.

In Nikolev’s poems, as I already said, “the building” of “long-gone days” has collapsed. But if the Oberiuts turned the philosophical abstractions of their predecessors inside out, Nikolev did something slightly different. He plays the same flute, but presses different frets. Move the light source and the shadows move differently.

And you can “hear” anyone in his poems. Brodsky ? Please!

The traveler notices the completely unnecessary:
a horse bone and an abandoned boot,
in the crevice there are two lizards and moss,
and baked hotter than from outside.

A very familiar inversion.

Like the moon, Nikolev is close and far, avant-garde and very classic. His poems are "almost like a promise / of something." Elysian joys? Don't know.