Translated material
"We were born not to survive"
Ibsen has a play with the name “Youth Union”, quite satirical: about how young people make a career. And in our 60s, everything was serious, although naive, but clean. Andrei Voznesensky and his friends, those who released the Samizdat almanac “Metropol” and was a bit for this, no one will blame a desire to make a career.
They were not going to live long: “Oranges, applause ... Breaking - immortal! We were born - do not survive, but squeeze speedometers! ” (Andrey Voznesensky). But they lived for a long time <...>
Photo: ITAR-TASS
And it all started with the architectural institute that he graduated, but during the fire a diploma burned down, and Voznesensky realized that this was not his path. “Goodbye, architecture! Burn widely, cowsheds in cupids, rugbies in Rococo! ” He built on paper the temple of Basil Blessed (poem "Master", 1959). “Not the Memory of Judasia you erected the temple, but to the god of fertility, its earthly gifts. Here the dome is coconuts, and pumpkin - dome, and the turquoise of the kokoshniks braided the windows. ”
Voznesensky with a galaxy of the same impudent and young: Evgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and senior comrades Bulat Okudzhava and Yuri Levitansky moved to Polytechnic. They wrote about each other novels and poems: Vasily Aksenov, Ascension, Akhmadulin.
No, the members of the Youth Union, who survived two thaws, one stagnation of the totalitarian type and an autocratic reaction, did not run into dissidentity and did not go to the camps. They didn’t go so far, even Vasily Aksenov and the cheerful skeptic Fazil Iskander, a full -time guru and sage of this union. Voznesensky shared all the illusions of the first thaw: he believed in socialism “with a human face”; He asked to remove Lenin from money, for “he is for the heart and for banners”; He struggled with the cult of things and even invented the term "Alych"; wrote about this very Lenin the marvelous poem “Lonzhumo”, which had nothing to do with terrible reality, but beaten anti -Soviet and realists with irresistible beauty.
Voznesensky sang the mysterious RAM, which turned out to be Zoe Boguslavskaya, was friends with Picasso and Robert Lowell; He, like a friend-optonian Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was allowed to walk abroad. In his youth, he noticed the FBI, but did not notice the KGB. But he wrote: “Where the birch in the fields of empty will throw the leaves under his feet, all transparent, like a bottle, on a black round tray” and “falls along the gland, with heaven in half, snowy regret and for us.”
The young poet, the young Taganka, the play “Antimira” ... How did he learn it so early? “Beautiful Osenerbri fly in the distance, but if they fall to the ground, their persons will be bipped off.” How did he know that the man would bite our reforms, our thaws, our August?
This poet, who resurrected metaphors and the consonant silver age, was a worthy citizen: he did not betray, did not stick to power, did not hypocrite, did not sign letters against the victims of the regime, and supported the Yeltsin reforms. We owe him the first rock opera "Juno and Avos" (1981). And we will take this with us: “Instead of a flute, we will raise the flask to live more. Under the Russian Andreevsky flag and motto "Avos".
But the main thing is that we will need on the way to the third thaw, these are his lines about Ernst an unknown who willingly shares with us: “But above life and death, piercing, like light, we are required by something third, which is allocated by a person. Alarming and spotlights, unlike animals, is the ability to self -sacrifice the only people in people. The only Russia, my only one, the only thank you for choosing me. "
First published in NT No. 16 of May 13, 2013