Stikhomor, or New Atlantis

The authorities guessed: the harshest reaction to poetry is complete silence. Mandelstam's prophecy

The century will fade away, the culture will fall asleep, the people will be reborn...

O. Mandelstam. "On the nature of words"

You loved Mozart in vain...

O. Mandelstam. "Lamarck"

*And into the swollen body

Black crayfish have dug in...*

A. Pushkin. "Drowned"

1

Once upon a time, in 1921, in the article “Word and Culture,” Mandelstam wrote with hope that the revolution liberated culture and asked for it as a daughter, that the revolutionary state made culture its religion, its church and its advisor. After which the word became flesh and bread, the world was divided into enemies and friends of the word, and the state realized its deepest cultural hunger. “You need to scatter wheat on the ether ,” Mandelstam responded to this, after which (already in 1927) he added: “Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution .”

There was no complete trust in how the state was coping with this new role for itself even then: “Compassion for the state that denies the word is the social path and feat of the modern poet” (“Word and Culture”).

And soon the illusions were completely dispelled. A man, and especially a poet, was covered from head to toe by a monstrous shadow and enveloped in the viscous pyramidal wool of a new social architecture, reminiscent of Assyrian or Egyptian. Only much worse, because from the Assyrian captives, swarming like chickens underfoot, no one demanded praises addressed to the torturers and executioners.

“If a true humanistic justification does not form the basis of the future social architecture, it will crush man, like Assyria and Babylon, ” Mandelstam then implored in “Humanism and Modernity” (1923), and everything was in vain, in vain: it did not lie down, crushed (swarm under yourself stove as much as you like!).

From here to the slap-epigram and to the prophecy “Lamarck” - although it’s still 10 years, it’s only one step:

*We live without feeling the country beneath us,

Our speeches cannot be heard ten steps away...*

The autarkic system, which closed its borders to citizens, robbed them of the present, stole the future and encroached on the past, received its best indelible mark in these verses.

Stalin was so pleased and amused by these poems that he gave the author another five years of life and only when they had expired did he allow him to die in order - with the “crowd and herd” due to him.

2

The current time is not as bloody as under Stalin, but even more Assyrian and more “vertical”. The current vertical of power has guessed (what Stalin could not): the harshest reaction to poetry and to the truth is not silencing them or banning them, not executing talkers, but complete silence, absolute silence, ignoring, among other things, What else will others say about this: “shallow, Emelya, the caravan is moving…”

New ideologists and propagandists (and propaganda in such a vertical state is the opposite and opponent of culture) have a harder time, because unlike Stalin with his state plans, famines and craters , they have already realized that it is more profitable for them to switch from pseudo-socialist rails to pseudo-capitalist ones, because there are no barriers to personal enrichment and consumption.

The second convenience is that you don’t have to worry about maintaining the level of fear in the country. Citizens can have any opinions and judgments - well, let them frolic as much as they want in their virtual environment. And if someone doesn’t notice how they have gone too far, and especially if someone is transported to real life, then for such “absent-minded” people there will always be a small “gulazhek” with pocket ombudsmen for a million souls.

High poetry, pure and sublime, for centuries and every second held the world on its Atlantean shoulders and held it together, making the lives of so many cleaner and better. And here before our eyes is her sacral core, her pearls are shelled like a seed, and peeled through the lip along with the peel!

Well, you may no longer want to smell a country that professes such a culture.

You can, as before, love it and continue to carry it under your heart and in your heart, but not because “no one else has seen it,” and especially not because “you can only believe in it.”

3

It seems that the most terrible (mind me!) Mandelstam's prophecy - about spider deafness - is beginning to come true. We are rolling head over heels down Lamarck’s amphibious staircase moving upward, and the shaggy spectacle of a frivolous union and a triumphant coitus of verbal vulgarity, nouveau riche rudeness and barbaric power, all these postmodern suckers and gadgets are by no means another “decline of Europe”, but an attempt at an extraordinary and unannounced murder of poetry .

With the current vectors of education and through the clearings of “scientific” (expertise) and “cultural” (propaganda) verticals, the inexhaustible world of the ciliate slipper with its incomparably ingenious vacuoles is already clearly visible.

When already dead poets are being killed anew and the prisoners-poets of today are being rotted on spider bunks, is there really no one to grab the skewer from the sheath and rush at the shaggy one, no one to stand up for the honor of poetry, for the honor of culture, for the honor of nature itself?!

This was the true purpose of poetry, and without it a return to the ocean - to truths and to proto-letters - seems almost inevitable. When we came to the shores, for millions of years we went up from the unambiguous “before” culture, but back, to ringlets and barnacles, we descend quickly and on a different, contrary, thrust - from “lack of culture.”

The continent of culture goes under water, but not with the heroic suicide of the “Varyag”, but with the retreat of the coastline and the fragmentation of the firmament into an archipelago. He still protrudes above the barbaric abyss with hundreds and dozens of island names dear to the reader’s heart, he still breathes the last millions of reader’s heartbeats.

But the readers of Pushkin and Mandelstam are the sailors of the ark or, go deeper, the inhabitants of Atlantis. The water can keep coming and coming, and it’s time for them to learn and be able to live under blooming and salty, under oil-contaminated and such viscous water!

Authorities will change and leave, waters will close and open. The evil frozen at the poles can melt and flood the plains and lowlands. The archipelago of culture can shrink and thin out, sending yesterday's islands and hills underwater. But the mountain sun above and the deep magma below, having united, will evaporate and shorten the water column. And the moment will come when, stretching out and shaking off everything in silt, streams and shells, the birthplace contours of museums and forums will appear from the water, when the Alps and Himalayas will embrace and close into new Gondwana and Atlantis.

No matter how long the stichomor and the flood last, it will subside, and the swamp will stink, drying out, and all the larks, all the nightingales, all the goldfinches and all the tsutsik-sparrows will shake themselves and sit again on their branches.

And then again it will be possible to follow the poet’s lead:

*…Is wine healthy? Are furs healthy?

Is there a healthy sway in the blood of Colchis?*

And poetry, music, painting, science - all culture, once thrown from a cliff into the abyss with stones around its neck - will push off from the bottom and gently float up.

The readers did not even notice how they became amphibians and that the unsinkable miracle of poetry did not leave them:

*...Eternity has already fallen on the glass

My breath, my warmth... And everything that is prophesied, “... will begin forever*”!

Con amore! For our love!