Irina Kholmogorova. Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Kozakov

Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Kozakov
Together with Igor Butman, a famous jazz player, Kozakov made a performance based on the poems of Joseph Brodsky

Irina Kholmogorova

Publication date: January 11, 2002

Many years ago , Mikhail Kozakov , who, of course, was once part of the cohort of those who defined the time of Efremov and Efros in the Soviet theater, left for Israel. "For permanent residence." His departure was one of the many symptoms of the end of a (great?) era. And many years have passed since he returned. It looks like "for permanent residence". Having created a small theater in Moscow upon his return, Kozakov called it (probably to better feel the connection with his native land) “Russian enterprise” . One of the performances of the enterprise (and there are several of them) is “Concert for Voice and Saxophone”. Together with Igor Butman , a famous high-class jazz player, Kozakov , a director and actor, made a performance based on the poems of Joseph Brodsky , the great Russian poet of Jewish origin, who completed his earthly journey in New York and was buried in Venice.

You can interview Mikhail Kozakov a thousand times, asking again and again the tricky question: why? Why did you leave, why did you come back? You can get a specific answer and comment on it. You can ask others about this - those who left, those who returned, those who stayed. It’s possible, but this question and answer are equally uninteresting - wife, children, language, mentality... Vanity of vanities... In the entire generation of emigrants of the last wave there was only one person to whom this question could not be asked (but they asked why not back?). Brodsky. He knew a priori and firmly that a person is located not in a geographical area, but in time and space. And it doesn’t matter with what “sign” (that is, in what language) this person thanks fate for the gift of being in this world. “That’s why it’s fate, so everyone can understand.”

I remember a photograph: Brodsky in a village, in a settlement, in a quilted jacket and boots. He stands with his legs spread wide and his hands in his pockets. Thrown almost into prison, dressed in an almost prison padded jacket, the overall clothes of the Soviet twentieth century, it is probably no coincidence that he was shot in such a way that he seems like a giant, calmly towering between heaven and earth. A poet who was never Russian, Jewish, or American. In Leningrad and in rural exile, in New York and Venice, he was always (he was, and did not become after forced emigration) a citizen of the world, an inhabitant of space.

...The two of them come out, Kozakov and Butman, in identical jackets from the early 1960s, in identical caps, vaguely reminiscent of the one in which Joseph Brodsky looks at us from another photograph. Around the neck there are colorful silk scarves; they were worn during the youth of Brodsky and Kozakov, just when jazz melodies and the music of freedom broke through to us again through the Iron Curtain. On the stage there is a desk illuminated by a consumer goods lamp of those years, a chair on the back of which Kozakov will easily, in a homely manner, hang his removed jacket. On the table is a glass of tea in a simple glass holder. Signs of our life. About time and about yourself? Certainly. But very close by is a marble bust from the Roman era...

Brodsky's poetic intonation - emphatically prosaic, full of everyday details and the specifics of society, jargon, humor, and finally - profanity, never prevented him from entering "space in its purest form." It seems that today’s “returned” Kozakov feels the peculiarity of this intonation, knows, following Brodsky: what surrounds us, visible and tangible, are just components of invisible existence, its eternal cycle. And although Kozakov has been reading Brodsky from the stage for a long time, now before us is a performance in which there is a lyrical hero, sometimes as if divided into a musician and a poet, sometimes appearing to us in the harmonious unity of two principles. This lyrical hero speaks of non-political time and non-social space. About space and time, where ancient Greece and Brezhnev’s socialism, imperial Rome, biblical Judea and the American twentieth century are mixed, and where, behind the noise of the eras, the main sound can be clearly heard: “the parka is ruffling a thread.”

Director Kozakov's lucky find was to combine Brodsky's poetry with jazz and Butman's improvisations. “The jazz of the suburbs welcomes us, // you hear the trumpets of the suburbs, // golden Dixieland // in black caps, beautiful, charming, // not soul and not flesh - // someone’s shadow over your own gramophone, // as if your dress was suddenly tossed up// saxophone"... And it doesn’t matter at all that this particular poem, written in 1962, is not heard in the play. All the same, for some reason it suddenly becomes clear that Brodsky’s musical analogue is the saxophone. Bitterness and irony, skepticism and lyricism, hopeless joy and cheerful sadness speak to us in two voices - the Man and the Saxophone. However, Saxophone is also a person, or rather, a lonely human voice, lost in the jungle of freedom and unfreedom of the twentieth century.

The melodious prayer of the ancient Jew, the stoic mental balance of the Roman and the brilliant irony of our contemporary can be heard in the music of this performance. The wise knowledge of how a short stay in the universe will end lies on the languid melodies of the blues... The twist, the dance of the youth of that generation... The autumn cry of a hawk, foreshadowing the end... And inescapable gratitude for the right to breathe and be... And again twist... All together. And there is no need at all for those specific touches of Brodsky’s biography that suddenly invade the performance with a documentary reminder of the notorious trial of the poet. Because everything has already been put in place by history, and at the same time it is well known that “the world will remain eternal. // Perhaps comprehensible, // but still infinite.”

Among the entrepreneurial vulgarity (including some of the creations of M. Kozakov's enterprise), this performance seems to be an aesthetic alien from some, hopefully, not necessarily past times.