All the rest - literature

"The lines that are always with me"

Vladimir Morozov: At our house, in the village of Saburovo, Moscow Region, there was a complete works of Jack London. Edition of 1957, all 8 volumes. I read it from crust to crust. "Call of the ancestors", "White Fang" - I remember my children's tears. Later, "Martin Eden", in the words of the classic, plowed me all. What a life! Solid adventure! And what a glory! By that time, I hadn’t beat me properly and I didn’t break the ribs, so I read the luxuriously set scenes of the fight. I have never heard of Martin Eden either. And the lines of Swinburn, which the hero recalls a minute before suicide, attracted only with his beauty.

Tired of eternal hope,

Tired of joyful feasts,

Not knowing fears and desires,

We bless the gods

For the fact that the heart is in a person

It will not forever tremble

For the fact that everyone will flush the rivers

Someday to the sea surface.

At school, I, as expected, wrote poems. And who is not? I tried to sprinkle something and prose. But it did not go very well. Honestly, very not very! What is my creations not enough? Life experience - Martin Eden answered me, and Jack London agreed with him. The hero and the author unanimously convinced me that the writer was making a biography. So, it is urgent to do a biography.

I threw the electrical institute of communications, where my parents were forced to enter, and went to the Sudomekhaniy College. Having finished the first year, he went to practice in Klaiped (Lithuania) to work in the fishing fleet and stayed there for three years.

... and see the star

Above Bushprit bowed ...

Now this star flickered not only Bagritsky, but also to me. Run, a half -bacon, a cranberry, a bims, a cloth and other naval terms sounded like a password for entering another reality. Even the word "Gallean" (ship toilet) evoked dreams of distant wanderings, and not for nothing: after all, it (Galjoen) sailed to us from Holland.

In those days, the Baltic states were called former Europe. The cities there were so different from Russian coziness and suitability from Russian that they shot films about the cornered West in the Baltic states. Although the port part of Klaipeda was not as neat as the city center. But here, giving a ticket, the bus conductor told you thank you, the waiters were polite, and in a port canteen you could buy smoked eel and a glass of fragrant sour cream, not diluted with kefir. What is not a abroad!

Mergaitė was announced in Klaipeda on the dance floor (ladies invite gentlemen). Usually, embarrassed by my thinness and growth (school nickname - Gulliver), I timidly stood against the wall. But the girl comes up and invites. Sorry, I say, I don’t know how to go. And we walk, confidently answers the lady and with a firm hand leads me to the center of the dance floor. Further, the waltz did not work for us, but it's still nice.

The work generously gave me topics. And my naval poems were printed a couple of times in the newspaper "Soviet Klaipeda". And then - several notes. Then our trawler was sent to Tallinn for repairs. Then this name was written with one more "n". Tallinn was the capital of the Soviet Republic, not the countries of Estonia, as now. The republic turned out to be much more Europe than Lithuania. Clean elderly ladies and, leisurely, drank coffee from tiny cups and vana tallinn from completely tiny glasses - an unprecedented spectacle in Moscow sat in small, almost puppet cafes. Through the mighty walls of the cathedrals of Vyshgorod, like lightning through the clouds, the organ chords sprouted.

Lace, stone, be

And become a web,

The sky is an empty chest

Walk with a thin needle!

I later read this at Mandelstam, and did not agree with him. The buzzing space missiles of the cathedrals filled the sky with something unknown, or rather, once heard from his grandmother. But what's next to the poet?

There will be my turn -

I feel the wingpan.

So - but where will it go

Thoughts live arrow?

I did not know where he would go, but the wings on my back were scratched. In Tallinn, Johan Smowul lived, the "Ice Book" of which I recently read. But completely different lines were remembered.

Sail fleet The nobility of the seas,

The highest nobility of the oceans,

Baptized you under the ringing of anchors,

To the akathists of hurricanes.

The engine on our trawler was diesel, my ancestors were peasants and hard workers, but this did not interfere with the feeling involved in the nobility of the seas. Yes, a poor relative, but with my colleagues of past centuries I and my naval friends related an ancient feeling that we also have a knee -deep sea. This feeling is strong when, upon arrival from the flight, we received small but free money. There were enough of them for a while, but you can’t forbid living beautifully. Gradually, we got used to drinking cognac and vana tallinn liquor not from ship aluminum mugs, but with glasses. A selection of my poems (exactly two pieces!) Appeared in the newspaper "Youth of Estonia".

Further - more! A serious woman fell in love with me, already in years (she was 30 years old). A journalist from whom I first heard Gumilyov:

On the polar seas and in the southern,

On the bends of green swells,

Between basalt rocks and pearls

The sails of ships rustle.

My lady (love is blind!) I liked my Virshi. She reprinted them on a typewriter, and I, full of hope, went to Moscow to the Literary Institute. But he did not wait for either love or friendship from the selection committee, they did not take me to study at the poet. And they did the right thing, because, as I later found out, in order to write poetry or prose, it is necessary, in addition to the biography, there is also talent. And talent, like money - either it is, or it is not. Then I met the same as me, members of the Writers' Union, unlike me, managed to finish the Literary Institute. The first opuses in the local newspaper, hot disputes behind the bottle, rumors about what kind of frantic earnings have a frantic earnings - and the guys left the institute ready to conquer the whole world. But the world (and that is reluctant) defined them (us!) On a meager salary in many trains, press centers, industry publications. And all because we were not shown in time the clear instructions of Raymon Keno (translation by Mikhail Kudinov).

Take wisdom a pinch

Naivety is a big scrap

A few stars, a little pepper,

A piece of trembling heart

And on the burner of skill

Boil once, and two

And many, many times all this.

Now write! But first

Born still a poet.

Here is such a movie (Keno)! Maybe it should be hung in front of the entrance to the Literary Institute?

After the failure at the Literary Institute, I submitted documents for the company with several other outcasts to the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, where for some reason they took me, although only to the correspondence department. Pure Vesuha saved me from failure and helped to avoid a deuce in the foster exam in English, when on the direct question of the teacher - where did you, my dear, taught the tongue, if you did not learn anything - I began to tell how the foreigner in the cramped cubic of the trawler after the dog shift in the Atlantic Ocean. And in the Bay of Biscay, you know, such storms! Well, how can you not confuse the articles, unions, prepositions and everything else.

And the lines of poems (thank God, not mine, but strangers), they became little by little the hangers of my biography. Not sure if the world will save the beauty, but the poems, one might say, saved me. They briefly and clearly explained much of what I could not understand with the other way. I have not received a good education - a lazy correspondence. Explanatory friends around were not dense. I did not know how to look for standing teachers. He did not engage in self -education and did not know such a word. Yes, I read something, but rather powerless and little. And only the poetic line cursed the shell of my ignorance. So, she easily explained entire layers of domestic history (whether the author wanted or not).

Once mistaken when choosing a road,

They stubbornly walked, looking at their compass.

And their work was great, their steps were strict,

But he led them away from the goal every hour!

This clarified my long -standing, although vague guess that the country in which I had to be born goes there, more precisely, nowhere.

I still repeat these and other verses, as a song from childhood sings a song from childhood. I read aloud when I'm going alone in the car. Silently repeated them to himself, freezing to the bones, when he took refuge in a seal and waited for wild geese. Once in my youth I fell into my hands Baudler's "voyage" in the brilliant translation of Tsvetaeva. This music also settled in my head and from time to time began to sound on its own.

On one unless day, in the longing of inhuman,

Without taking the hardships, under the rattle of anchors,

We set to the ship, and a meeting takes place

The immenseness of a dream with the margin of seas.

What is pushing us on the road? Those - hatred of the Fatherland,

Those are boredom of the hearth, even others - in the shade

Circoy eyelashes of those who left half his life -

Hope to defend the remaining days.

Years later, “hope to defend the remaining days” gradually lost its connection with circeta eyelashes and gained a less romantic direction - to run out of the kind father. Hope to defend the remaining days! In order to ground the “high calm” of Baudelaire, I repeated the common periphery of the famous slogan Nikolai Ostrovsky: “The most expensive man is life. She is given to him once, and she needs to live ... there. "

Among these “explaining the lines in the attic of my memory, a quote from the“ prayer of Daniil of the sharpener ”was dusted. The prose of the eighteenth century was remembered because it sounded like poems:“ ... and covered me with poverty, like the Chermus Sea of the Pharaoh ”(and covered me with poverty, like the Red Sea - Pharaoh). I was not poorer than other scoops, and instead of“ poverty ”hardened. Brahnya, lies.

Once, having returned from the next business trip, I told my son-seeker in what terrible conditions the oil workers and other hard workers of Surgut live-several families with children in a small mobile trailer. (In the article, much less frank than the oral story to his son, the more accurate word "beams" deleted the censors). He told the siphonite in a cold beam like the strokes of all the corners. How difficult it is for mothers to get milk for children. The clusters of these dilapidated frenzy had beautiful names - "enthusiast", "Komsomolets", "pioneer". After listening to one of these stories, the son suggested:

- And you, father, write about it.

- Okay, I'll write, and then you will wear crackers in jail? I asked.

- Will! - the son answered.

This promise I slyly explained to myself, like permission, Blanche cards. An article for Tamizdat and the plan for escape abroad could appear on this pure sheet. I chose the second. He left a 19-year-old son and elderly parents in Moscow. What does not honor me. And already from New York (when perestroika began and it became possible) wrote a repentant letter to Moscow. Father, a front -line soldier, wounded in the war, and not departing from the TV during ceremonial processions on Red Square, who did not allow him to criticize the authorities, unexpectedly answered me - son, you made the right choice. And, it’s necessary - Yuri Levitansky is already here with ready -made aphorism:

Everyone chooses for himself

Woman, religion, road.

To the devil to serve or the prophet -

Everyone chooses for himself.

... everyone chooses for himself.

I choose too - as I can.

I have no complaints about anyone.

Everyone chooses for himself.

I chose life there. This is a short and capacious word, once had a wide audience. And in the 90s, a newspaper with the name "there" even came out in Moscow for some time.

And he came up with the name Sasha Korobko, a journalist and producer, the son of the secretary of the party organization of the magazine "Soviet Trade Unions", my direct chief Yuri Corbko. Sasha chose his life there in Britain, a few years after perestroika, when they no longer deprived Soviet or Russian citizenship for this and left to visit the historical homeland.

I asked for political asylum there before perestroika, at the end of 1986. (The city of Dusseldorf, West Germany). After that, Yuri Korobko was called to the KGB and the party district committee: how he missed such an internal enemy! A “organs” and “advised” to influence me to influence me and convince me to stop playing in the foreign press. I try to reassure my conscience that they didn’t really shake anyone for me, the “organs” were not up to that: the country was already at a discharge, and the steam locomotive, long ago outdated, left the rails.

Our steam locomotive, fly forward!

In the commune stop,

We have no other way

We have a rifle in our hands.

Let's go to the battle, sons,

In the ranks with the fathers together,

We beat the enemy - one family

Grief with a single revenge.

... we are the children of those who have come

On white detachments

Who left the steam locomotives

And he went to the barricades.

The grandchildren and great -grandchildren of the “those” left both the steam locomotives and all that they could, and did not go to the barricades, but as “shutters” - to Turkey for consumer goods, then to private and security enterprises, later abroad, where, as it turned out, no enemies were found, but you can work normally and earn money without fear of the oblique gaze of the cop at the intersection.

For several weeks, the American authorities checked me in Munich, then sent me to New York. The word there began to mean Russia for me. And then in place of a gloomy diagnosis that nothing will change there, suddenly came hope. But what if they can defend the remaining days there!

In 1987, when I worked in the New York newspaper New Russian Word, there was another selection of Guberman and, among other things:

The empire entered a new round

spirals hanging above the collapse,

and eagerly rewrites a wretched sip

Freedom diluted by fear.

Bright and famously, as always with Guberman! But I was offended by him. In hindsight, patriotism stirred in me. Or just sympathy? How is it possible, because people are trying to change something! I (and many others) wanted a miracle. We believed the words again. The miracle did not happen. Cynic and copper, Guberman was right.

And other people's lines were still rhyme with some new stages in the life of the city and the world, and my life too. A sort of colored shortcuts and stickers on virtual boxes in which memory is stored: 60s, 70s, Russia, America, love, friendship. The diagnosis is a banal and non-hazardous strok-(or poem) centricity. With a raid of light infantility. But here - how lucky. One familiar hunter from my already American village Korinf got out of thicket, because he found his forester, the other saw a flock of geese in the sky, and in the fall they fly only to the south, there is no compass. By the way, in the north of the state of New York, in the Adirondak mountains, where I live, there are places in which the compass is not working-there are shallow iron deposits. And the compass needle goes crazy, from all sides - the north is everywhere.

And poetry? Always ready to read them with kilometers to anyone who has enough patience to listen. Friends forgive this petty eccentricity. And I forgive myself. To some age, a person gets used to himself, a loved one, and is no longer too shy. What is it! Duc, we, tea, races, al, no! At first there was a word - this is for us and about us.

The flow rushes back

If the dam is locked.

We will look east

And go to the west.

Do thousands of young educated people know these lines who leave Russia to the West today? It’s scary to think how many thousands are no longer, and millions of Russians would move to America if Russia had a land border with it.

We will look east

And go to the west.

Ivan Elagin wrote these verses in 1946 in a camp for displaced persons. And I importantly tried on his lines on myself in a warm New York apartment. Well, a defective! What courage should have! - They told me. But I understood that I had reached "courage", since I was not capable of a more direct confrontation with the authorities. Who said Galich more precisely about this!

And still, not easier,

Our century tries us up -

You can go to the square ...

Dare to go out to the square

At that appointed time?!

I could not. What a square is there! In Russia, I was not too opened with friends. What if one of these decent guys will drink tomorrow and tell someone about my words? Going to the square I have a thin gut. I am a humble person, fearful. I could not. And Natasha Gorbanevskaya was able. “For your and our freedom” - one of the slogans of a short (in a few minutes, has not yet been tied) demonstration on August 25, 1968 against the invasion of the countries of the School in Czechoslovakia. Seven not only went to the square, but, knowing that they were waiting, they became right at the frontal place. Unfortunately, I was not familiar with Gorbanevskaya and I call her Natasha only because in 2013, a few weeks before her death, this way turned to her when we exchanged a pair of messages on Facebook, where, by the way, I admitted that I also love her for this short verse.

In my native twentieth century,

where there are more dead than coffins,

My unhappy, forever

Unrequited love

Among these Goyevsky pictures

funny, anxious and weak,

How after the whistle of reactive

Jericho pipe.

The heretical image, in power is unlikely to inferior to the biblical. I understand that many of the poems in my Small gentleman's set are imprisoned by didactics and now the non -daily realism. To justify, I will bring Verlaine (Pasternak's translation). Although (it seems, I got caught again!) This is to some extent the instruction, instructions again. About how the verse should be. What to do, I searched and found instructions where I could.

Let him blurt out a foolish

All that is in the thuds of the miracle

The dawn will bell him

Everything else is literature.

I apologize, but mostly literature seemed to me the beautiful poems of Brodsky, although something liked and remembered from the first reading. It is possible that my congenital (literally) and the ineradicable (severe case) dandy prevented me from mastering the lines that required mental effort and erudition. It so happened that from poems I basically need strong emotions, tears, tragedies, a clear challenge, and sometimes an equally clear call. So the tipsy merchant demanded something from the restaurant orchestrate for the soul.

And everything remained there behind the white white, after that January Arctic Day.

О как я жить решилась, как я смела, ведь мы давно условились вдвоем.

Но тот, кто с августа запомнил сквозь рупора звеневший голос мой,

зачем-то вдруг нашел меня и поднял.

Со снега поднял и привел домой.

Как в притчах, позабытых и священных

пред путником, который изнемог,

он стал передо мною на колени и обувь снял с моих отекших ног.

Высокое сложил мне изголовье, чтоб легче сердцу было по ночам

и лег в ногах окоченевший сам

и ничего не называл любовью.

Может быть, стихи Ольги Берггольц – не самый лучший пример для противопоставления Бродскому. Но в них не только чистая красота, не только драма и трагедия, а еще и нечто большее, что останавливает тебя, как удар грома.

Как в притчах, позабытых и священных...

Здесь не только блокадный Ленинград, не только о жизни, о смерти и о любви. Но еще и о том, какое богатство из опыта и наследия старших поколений – все наше кровное по праву рождения, вдруг отняли у нас, конфисковали и уничтожили хозяева и строители новой жизни, которая оказалась куда хуже давно ушедшего в прошлое крепостничества. РАБЫ НЕ МЫ! – писали мелом на доске на курсах для малограмотных. Описка по Фрейду. Ведь надо бы – РАБЫ НЕМЫ, то есть безголосы. Душу живу" изъяли при обыске не только у людей образованных.

Не возьмешь мою душу живу.

Так на полном скаку погонь

Оборачивающийся и жилу

Перекусывающий конь...

Эти строки Цветаевой, как и она сама – яркий образ, образец, символ независимости. Тут, извиняюсь за прозаизм, позиция автора. Да, слово "позиция" как-то неловко применять по отношению к поэзии. Может, это рудименты советской школы, которую я закончил аж в 1956 году? Нам столько толковали об "идейном содержании", а так называемые "художественные особенности" отодвигали на второй план. И вот теперь я сижу на двух стульях, не знаю, что важнее, фигурально говоря, – музыка или позиция. А что, если – когда как? Вот строки Набокова, датированные 1944 годом и написанные в Кембридже, штат Массачусетс.

Каким бы полотном батальным ни являлась

советская сусальнейшая Русь,

какой бы жалостью душа ни наполнялась,

не поклонюсь, не примирюсь

со всею мерзостью, жестокостью и скукой

немого рабства — нет, о, нет,

ещё я духом жив, ещё не сыт разлукой,

увольте, я ещё поэт.

При всей моей любви к стихам Набокова, это не запоминается. Потому что, по-моему, вышло коряво. Но мне нравится – сразу видно, за что автор и против чего. И, главное, я тоже против того же самого, что и Набоков. Какой бы жалостью душа не наполнялась! Увольте! И не уговаривайте!

Помню, какой разгромной критикой (кажется, в журнале "Континент") ответили в свое время Карабчиевскому на выход его книги "Воскресение Маяковского", где он походя отважился помянуть о холодности Бродского. Пусть гений и лауреат, но руки прочь от нашей святыни – это уже идолопоклонство. По-моему... Мне ближе Цветаева. Вот, начинается просто с зарисовки: деревня, солдаты, поезд. И, вдруг, сквозь все это:

Чем прогневили тебя эти старые хаты, -

God! — и для чего стольким простреливать грудь?

The train passed and howled, and soldiers howled,

And he dusted, dusted the retreating path ...

Нет, умереть! Никогда не родиться бы лучше,

Than this plaintive, pity, hard labor howl

О чернобровых красавицах. — Ох, и поют же

Today the soldiers! О, господи, Боже ты мой!

Конечно, не всякий раз поэту удается так напрямую ухватить Бога за бороду, и я великодушно на этом не настаиваю. Хотя не только согласен с Карабчиевским, но рискну пойти дальше. По-моему, "На независимость Украины" за Бродского мог бы написать кремлевский идеолог Владислав Сурков. У Суркова в должностной инструкции четко обозначено – хвалить империю. При всей красоте стиля, при всей музыке стихов классика, его великодержавное тьфу (!) разом на всех "меньших братьев" мог бы разделить с ним любой мирно почивающий в канаве российский алкаш – только вот разбуди его, и патриот, еще не успев опохмелиться, тут же выскажется по поводу хохлов, западенцев и бандеровцев. What? Хохлы хотят жить по-своему? А нас они спросили?

Где вы, грядущие гунны,

Что тучей нависли над миром!

Слышу ваш топот чугунный

По ещё не открытым Памирам.

...Сложите книги кострами,

Пляшите в их радостном свете,

Творите мерзость во храме, —

Вы во всём неповинны, как дети!

Брюсов написал это более века назад. Гунны охотно приняли приглашение, и все, кто хочет знать, давно знают, что потом случилось. Теперь российские власти взывают к тем же гуннам, к таким же. В России они отечественного производства, подготовленные к своей высокой миссии, точнее, изготовленные с помощью тотальной пропаганды. Сегодня гуннов настойчиво приглашает и Запад, там они выходцы из Третьего мира. Правительство Обамы буквально открыло для них южную границу. Что творят в Европе беженцы с бомбой в кармане и без бомбы, может увидеть своими глазами всякий русский путешественник. И похоже, что гунны уже не грядущие. Они прибыли на место назначения (назначенного судьбой?) Устаревший глагол "грясти" (грядет, грядущий) не имеет прошедшего времени. Потому возьмем слова, близкие по смыслу — "пригрясти, грянуть". Гунны уже грянули! А мы сетуем, что, мол, российская история идет по спирали. Но посмотрите на Запад. Так что, и у нас, и у них строки Вячеслава Иванова "Топчи ИХ РАЙ, Атилла!" можно слегка переиначить:

Топчи НАШ РАЙ, Атилла.

И топчут. И топчущих все больше. О чем и предупреждал когда-то Владимир Соловьев:

Как саранча, неисчислимы

И ненасытны, как она,

Нездешней силою хранимы,

Идут на север племена.

Каковы будут конечные результаты этого пока еще мирного завоевания, – имеют смелость гадать лишь те авторы, которые не боятся нарушить почти тотальные и тоталитарные законы политической корректности. Надежней еще раз спрятаться за Брюсова.

И что, под бурей летучей.

Под этой грозой разрушений,

Сохранит играющий Случай

Из наших заветных творений?

Бесследно все сгибнет, быть может,

Что ведомо было одним нам,

Но вас, кто меня уничтожит,

Встречаю приветственным гимном.

На этой оптимистической гимно-ноте пора и заканчивать. Поэтому вернемся к тому, с чего, собственно, все и начиналось – строки, как вехи, юношеское "сделать бы жизнь с кого". Выбор давно сделан и жизнь тоже. Как говорится, не просто едем с ярмарки, а уже и подъезжаем к "дому". Но любопытно взглянуть на вешки, расставленные на пути, и по ним вспомнить прошлое.

Everyone chooses by themselves.

Щит и латы. Посох и заплаты.

Меру окончательной расплаты.

Everyone chooses by themselves.