Leo Rubinstein: Walking

Please understand me correctly. I am not at all an adept of the Paradise of Paradise in a hut and its immediate vicinity. “Close -up, but not offense” is not my positive ideal. I just want to say that children's consciousness is at least mine - in general it was quite deaf to the eternal Soviet “housing issue”. I assure you: there was no more comfortable place than under a round table covered with a burgundy plush tablecloth with a fringe. And I'm afraid it will never be. And nothing more will be found more expanded than a dusty yard with wood sheds and linen ropes. So the problem of some special “street spectacles” never stood.

Although no, not quite so. I remember how painfully I wanted the holiday, how the soul was torn to something unprecedented, going out, so to speak, beyond. And it, coming out, imagine, was found in this boring and monochrome world. In addition to the holidays of the common, like the first of May, when tied girls and boys spilled into the courtyard in the new leaning sandals (whether they are wrong), there were other, unconventional events and spectacles. I will never forget, with what a bated breath, with what anticipation of touching a gloomy and majestic secret I rushed to the call of a kilometer of the wind orchestra heard per kilometer. Why did I, and all of us, love the funeral so much? And road accidents? And the beer stall has fights? And the appearance in the courtyard of someone's new "victory"? And fires? What, tell me, is not a spectacle?

No, it cannot be said that we had no idea about street life in other times and spaces. Still, books and cinema showed us more or less colorful samples of carnival, fairs and other street-flatter elements. Today is the time to admit that the cherished by my dream is still the possession of a real barrel organ in working condition. It would seem that the object of my dreams into the unattainable museum-museum-museum Dali had irrevocably sailed. So no: one of the first and, I must say, the most powerful impressions of Paris, where I got only in the forty-third year of my life, was a living chain on Saint-Michel Boulevard. Alive, alive a barrelman! So, she will once and mine. The main thing is not to melt with hope.

We had no unauthorized from above street music and could not be. The brass band in the park on Sundays is possible, sometimes. The shrill accordion from the open window is please. However, disabled people sang in the trains of my early childhood, but is it music? Continuous flour. Once in the late 70s, I saw and heard a small group of musicians on Pushkinskaya Square. They did not play for long - exactly as much time as the police along the nearest department needed to reach the crime scene. Perestroika began with the permitted Arbat. Gradually singing, playing and jugling Arbat crawled in the center of the capital, but this is another era.

And then some “hot heads” tried to revive the black and white boredom of the city landscape-non-triviality of their own appearance and the dosed eccentricity of everyday behavior. This was an unconditional challenge, at least, it was perceived by the state given to us in our feelings. I remember how terrifying Moscow was in the days of the 80th Olympics. I remember deserted streets and intense anxious longing in the eyes of rare passers -by.

On the deserted, as in a hangover dream, Gorky Street, I accidentally met my friend. “Listen,” she said slightly excitedly, “I was there now, on Pushkinskaya, I saw a classy guy - I walked towards it.” He looked, you know how some character of the Grimm brothers. A stick, on the stick, on the stick, a knapsack. In the hat so funny. " “Great,” I say. -“It's great. He just walked accompanied by two cops. ”

The state itself lulled the problem of street life on its mighty shoulders, arranging for us on holidays, disgusting “festivities”. Everything looked there, like on agitropov posters, only more disgusting: some kind of grunting salute, some hinged fights of suburban teenagers, some kind of chocolate and dangling peppy children who saddled the dad, who were saddled to the extent of yielding dads. Walking, in a word. Folk.

The spectrum of the meanings of the Russian word “walking” is very wide-from the academic-navigable “let's go for a walk” to the sacramental, endowed with shades of obvious or implicit destructiveness “Oh, walked yesterday!”. They walk along the street, walk in the garden, walk at a wedding (and even like), walk "on the buffet", or completely: "Walking with anyone, and so it is a walk."

Everyone walks! And we walk. And we will walk independently from anything.

“The street is bored,” the poet wrote. We can say so. But you can do it differently. The street, even the most deserted and most provincial, is always spectacular and always aesthetically informative. The only question is whether we can distinguish the theatrical, musical and poetic component of everyday street life. Do we know how to surrender to the rhythm of a janitor. Can we find a rainbow in the streams of watering machines. We know how to see the anonymous physiognomy of the first oncoming existential drama. Are they ready to perceive a clumsy inscription on a rusty garage as a poetic revelation.