Memory, sing

Collection of poems by Maria Stepanova "Against lyrics"

The publishing house "AST" came out of the chosen poems of Maria Stepanova - "Against lyrics." At the request of Gorky, Leo Oborin tells about this publication.

Maria Stepanova. Against the lyrics. M.: AST, 2017

Researchers of poetry in Russia (explicitly - starting with Tynyanov, implicitly - even earlier) thought a lot about the problem of archaism and innovation, about their ratio and combination. The experience of the authors of recent decades, such as Oleg Yuryev, Maxim Amelin, Linor Goralik and, of course, Maria Stepanova, shows how life -giving the poet’s address could be. There is something from geological exploration and mining: modern methods and tools, the gained experience of poetic speaking, insight, perseverance-all this allows you to detect gold-bearing core in the rocks, it would seem, for a long time giving precious contents. It turns out, however, that the wealth hidden in them is only waiting for a new application and brilliance.

The previous chosen one Stepanova - “Poems and Prose in one volume” - was published seven years ago in “UFO”, and the book “Against lyrics” does not coincide with him with a single text, except for one translation from Edward Estlin Cummings, poems for Stepanova fundamentally important. This is the lyrical text of the observer and at the same time the epic text of the narrator, which either identifies himself with “someone” who lived in the “milestone town”, or simply talks about him. The world of a miserable town, where “everyone married / dawn and sunset, all one is silent / dancing to jump and laughed to be raised / keen not immersing in sleep,” - an invariant, unchanging in the private, a folklore world. Stepanova, along with Goralik, is the most serious researcher and folklore caster in modern Russian poetry, although sometimes this gives rise to doubts in his own method. So, at the beginning of the cycle / poems “Spolia”, Stepanova, as it were, summarizes unfriendly criticism to her, bringing it to the extreme: “She is not able to speak for herself”, “Her material / does not want to resist / gives a kiss without love, lies without movement”, “Where I am, put it on the dish / why it speaks in voices.”

“Where is her I” is a question fundamental for Stepanova’s poetics. “I” is the prerogative of the lyrics, and, despite the fact that in recent years many poets abandon this pronoun (more on that below), the individuality for the lyrics remains an indispensable condition. In the speech on the occasion of the presentation of the Stepanova Prize, Andrei Bely in 2005, Dmitry Kuzmin said: ““ I ”Stepanova affirms himself as personal will, and not as the figure of the discourse through the test of the language for strength and plasticity: all levels of the tongue from the vocabulary to the syntax are obediently bent, revealing the limit of dedication prescribed by the grammatics of meanings, and the potential of new ones meanings, but above all - the presence of a bending subject. " Indeed, already in the early cycle of the “female person” it is obvious that something abnormal, non -canonical is happening with the language here. The task of the cycle is the creation of this very “female person”: physiological and domestic experiences (food, illness, shopping) here get height, poems become hymns of sensations. These sensations are ambivalent: a high meaning, high status is obtained, it would seem, low -powered, not worth attention. Hence the lexical disagreement: Stepanova’s different speech registers are available - archaic, vernacular, science, Platonovsky. Excessiveness; Faced with a full -blooded sensation, “I” does not seem to know what to choose and chooses everything at once:

There would be money, I would buy one
I am with the spirits of the tiny glides
Smelled by the night, which would like
She would cooled over her

Not for the drip fluid
Rub the ears, and so that the body,
Twing finely, like a vein under a knee,
From dense greed, Lutelo.

In the future, the question of whether there are important and unimportant, shameful and inconspicuous, low and high topics, will disappear, and throwing/flickering “I” in the layers of linguistic style will remain - and will become decisive for Stepanova. “I” every time goes to the task, trying on different clothes, transforming, masking. Its uncertainty is the key to the interpretation of the name "against the lyrics." This name seems paradoxical, because the book just includes purely lyrical poems. There are no famous ballads like a “pilot”, “wife” or “guests”, nor poems “Prose of Ivan Sidorov” and “Second Prose” with their complex plots, which are a fascinating detective work. The absence of these poems does not allow to track the change that occurred with Stepanova’s poetics by the time the collection “Lyric, Voice” was written. This is what happened. Predly, it seemed as if she had requested a place, knocked out of the text by phonetic ties and truncations (“when my eyes had blue”, “without scattering at the star”), with melodic expansion (“What kind of oven, in which sub-wrap / in the pile of whose bedspreads / other parts, desired where, are the sore ones, / hiding where did you want?”). Now she gained full rights - the epic freed the lyrics.

“Against lyrics”, however, is a cunning name. On the one hand, antagonism here is not only polemic (in the spirit of the “against the method” of Feurame or “against the interpretation” of the beloved Stepanova Umbable), but also geographical: also geographical:

Against the lyrics, on the other side
Flat -lying bay,
There is an invisible shore in the darkness,
There I am in ambush!

This is from the collection "Happiness", which is full of poems written by ancient meters; Before us is a reference to one of the sources of the lyrics and at the same time the promise to win its territory again (“This Africa will be ours!”).

On the other hand, for this, in fact, military operation is necessary. In the collection "Lyrics, Voice" we see what it can be. Philologist Irina Plekhanova, the author of the monograph “On the vitality of the latest poetry”, notes that the “pale” of the whole book ( in the journal version he stands at the beginning, in the book - at the end) “declares a simple rejection of poetry - as a condition for poetic birth again”:

I'll take it and I won't
I am now writing poetry.
I'll take it and I won't
Write poetry for anything.

I'm not Dmitry Aleksanych,
Dmitry Aleksanych died,
I'm not Alexander Sergeych,
Alexander Sergeyich is alive.

Under the person of literature
I seem to be a colorar
It seems I am firing -
Hair head-viors,
Electric flashlight,
Fast and uneven current.

1/3 2/3 3/3

This feeling of an “electric flashlight” is something like galvanization. Lyrics, voice-pure conductors: there are no faces, only “hairy-heading”, but they are extremely recognizable. The poet becomes a pure retranstlator - a logical, one might even say, “trend” departure from narrative poetry towards the depersonalization of the poet. It is customary to associate this waste with the poetry of Arkady Dragomoshchenko and further - the American “language school”, but Stepanova committed it earlier than the young followers of Dragomoshchenko. In the essay “A moved person”, which completes the reviewed volume, she was one of the first to postulate almost a common place: the future of the lyrics is to get rid of the author, that is, not from individuality, but from its manifestation as an end in excellence: “The author’s will is then reduced to the work of a team that provides a live broadcast for the experiment; The task is almost technical: switching cameras, changing plans. ” The lyrics, according to Stepanova, approached "to the next final line - where, in order to survive, the poet needs to become a choir." The installation of “against the lyrics” returns us to folklore - a huge machine of natural selection of words that is not interested in individuality. Individuality consists in the ability to get rid of this machine, infiltrate it, put it in your service. This skill is manifested in the title part of the collection "Kireevsky", named after the famous Russian collector of folklore.

Who stores our fences, fading colorful?
Pan Kosmati and gone is arguing, competing.
And it disappeared six, you look and cringe,
And Pan took off Zhuan - not to be distinguished from the goat.

Above, put the roof above, glorify the roof of a new one,
Huts, stuck, dugouts, beaten logs
Go around, obey, give us the concepts -
We will show, we respect, we will pay for everything:

Star blackberry, blue ink in blue,
Forty feathers, forest nuts,
Smoky water with a grandfather beard,
Black furrow, lifelong plowing.

In the "Kireevsky" songs are released to the will, and with the help of extraction - or actualization, the "hotel" of the song path:

Pounded, pounding the light at the gate,
He rolled up, showed:
Sour cream, mother, go to the porch,
Sovereign Sudary, look!

Will insure the sour cream of the Montenegrin,
Source cream Beloboykaya will insist:
I'm not leaning, not a ram of rash,
Not an acute mass of cottage cheese,
Do not equal my business white
With simple -hearted yoke!

So the cycle begins: they say objects, substances. “All things, like people, have bad habits,” we remember from childhood. But the last poem of the cycle again turns the singer into a poet, gives him his own position:

The last songs are going
Fighters of the invisible front:
Come out of the circles
Two or three lines run from captivity,
Are to the meeting place,
Looking around.

How they are stolen,
Do not soak water!
How they feed
They cannot say Russian.
But old, skillful hands
They give out ammunition
To the light with sighted fingers
They are sorting out "Kalashnikov"
Extracted, by gasping, from the wound,
Deeply sowing letters -
And by the morning, bypassing the outposts,
They enter the sleepless city.

And they are silent while the guns rumble.
And they are silent while Musa rumble.

It is unclear whether it is a matter of poetic foreboding, but Stepanova’s next book was really published against the backdrop of the roar of guns. The latter for today, the Spolia collection differs radically from the previous ones. If the early verses of Stepanova were lyrical fragments, records of individual, but holistic experiences; If the verses of “lyrics, voices” and “Kireevsky” were completed songs, then “Spolia” is a report on the collapse of all wholeness and coherence. I will allow myself to quote my own review of “spolia”: “The name ... uniting two cycles of texts is by no means accidental: spheres are not only military trophies (and war is a key motive for both cycles), but also fragments of antique buildings, which were emerged and used in the construction of new, medieval buildings. What made up Stepanova’s skill in previous collections is broken to randomly sit in the relief of new buildings collected from chaotic impressions of recent times. ” The Ukrainian war was the reason for this change. The author, collecting heterogeneous texts in one space, canalizing the signs of aggression and madness, only the installation order remains for individuality - and individuality finally protests against such diminution:

Restaran car, plastic chamomile
Menu with gold letters on the cover
a waitress, bitten in the neck, everything

Who says, how I do not know how to

<...>

Trucker in his cabin, now we will check,
Is it really high, like a tower
And that the light expels the darkness between Vytegra and Lyuban.

Put my hand on me, and I will yield to wish

A close parallel to the device "Spolia" is the poem by Anton Pirirov "Palestine" , also consisting of heterogeneous fragments glued to the collage and meaningful in the end humanitarian, as a way to give a word. The poem Plandov ends as follows: “Cattle or moron, / in many decibel - // Who will figure it out in this text // Many voices / at that, all bad thoughts will dry like dew // Tom under the feet will valid the Earth / Polish teachers will return from gas chambers.” Ochirov is a poet of a completely different background, and quotes in his poem are completely different; The fact that such different authors resort to similar techniques to comprehend the war (and these techniques go back to the time of World War I) speaks of the universal trauma of the perception of war, in whose information field today, with the terrible wars of the 20th century) small scale of military operations, all are involved in one way or another. Fright, hysteria, confusion-all reactions here in a sense are legitimate and subject to analysis. All of them are consistent with a measure common to folklore and “hot” author’s poetry - as you can understand by returning to a poem about the train, which is part of the Kireevsky collection:

On his populated wagons,
Like saved souls in paradise
I walk in the blanket of Kazyonnoye
And excitedly I sing the songs.

This business is much more dangerous
What the guide father believes,
Because a good song
Invariably ascends to a cry.

But there is a difference between a song and just a cry. A scream in the song is controlled - and the more inconspicuous, the more skillful. The book “Against lyrics” in no way comes down to this skill - but it, whatever one may say, is in it, and this confirms the high skill of Maria Stepanova, the poet and singer, who always, in the most “impersonal”, dissolved in the elements, remembers what she does.