The revitalizer of the world

On February 1, 2021, Viktor Koval died, whose pen belonged to the first caricatures in our newspaper. The image of Ivan Ekonomov , pictures for the “ nurse ” - the work of his talented hands and mind. We publish the words of memory written about the artist Ilya Kukulin .

Viktor Koval, a wonderful poet, a virtuoso artist-graph and a brilliant master of poetic performance, died-probably one of the best authors who worked in this genre in Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th-early XXI centuries. With his work, he-along with D. A. Prigov-clearly or implicitly paved the way for many bright modern poets-performers in the range from Dmitry Strotsev to Osminkin’s novel.

In childhood, an incredibly charming coal was a demanded child-artist. He starred in at least ten Soviet films, including well -known ones - “Rumyantsev’s case”, “Vasyok Trubachev and his comrades”; In the film "Friends" based on the stories of Nikolai Nosov, even one of the two main roles played. An adult Koval wrote poetry, songs, painted pictures to the humor department in the perestroika “light” and recorded rock tracks with Vyacheslav Butusov and Georgy Kasparyan. True, Butusov’s album “The illegitimate Alchemist Dr. Faust is a feathered snake” to Koval’s poems (and in one of the songs - and with his vocals) will still be recovered on the Internet without mentioning the name of the author of the songs. In the “light”, the drawings of Koval gave the magazine not only political, but also aesthetic radicalism - but, it seems, few people paid attention to the name of the artist there.

Back in the mid-1970s, Koval began to work in a “duet” with a bard (later-also a famous journalist) Andrei Lipsky, who wrote a number of songs for his poems. As Mikhail Aizenberg quite rightly remarked, the songs of Koval and the Lipsky mid-1970s clearly anticipated the social art absurdism of the songs of Boris Grebenshchikov and Anatoly Gunitsky in the late 1970s-the 1980s. Moreover, the song of Koval and Lipsky “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel”, who brought the Soviet Army style to the point of absurdity and also written in the mid-1970s, could be considered the first foreshadow of the movement, which later became known as “Russian Perestroika Rock”.

In copyright reading - or, more precisely, in his view, playing - Koval’s poems are gained as if the fourth dimension. Fortunately, relatively many video recordings were preserved, and shortly before his death, Koval managed to record a large cycle of his works - with recitative singing and dancing, as expected, for the Arzamas website.

Koval in life was very fond of those who knew. But few knew him. Too few, when comparing the scale of talent with the degree of fame. L. N. Tolstoy, as you know, said about one of the tales of N. S. Leskov: "If it were not for the excess talent, it would be better." The “excess” of talent, the incredible wealth of self -realization was also characteristic of Koval - like Leskov. I would like to hope that brilliant artistry and diversity of talents will not become an obstacle to the path of at least the posthumous recognition of Viktor Koval.