Lev Losev writes a lot and is published in emigrant Russian-language publications. Losev's articles, poems, and essays made him famous in American literary circles. In Russia, his works began to be published only starting from 1988.
Lev Vladimirovich Losev was born and raised in Leningrad, in the family of the writer Vladimir Alexandrovich Lifshitz. It is the father children's writer and the poet one day comes up with the pseudonym “Losev” for his son, which later, after moving to the west, becomes his official, passport name.
Graduated from the faculty of journalism of the Leningrad State University, a young journalist Losev goes to Sakhalin, where he works as a journalist in a local newspaper.
Back from Far East, Losev becomes an editor in the all-Union children's magazine "Bonfire".
At the same time he writes poetry, plays and stories for children.
In 1976, Lev Losev moved to the United States, where he worked as a typesetter-proofreader at the Ardis publishing house. But the career of a compositor cannot satisfy Losev, full of literary ideas and plans.
By 1979, he completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan and taught Russian literature at Dartmouth College in northern New England, New Hampshire.
During these American years, Lev Losev writes a lot and is published in Russian-language emigrant publications. Losev's articles, poems, and essays made him famous in American literary circles. In Russia, his works began to be published only starting from 1988.
The greatest interest among readers was his book on the Aesopian language in the literature of the Soviet period, which once appeared as the topic of his literary dissertation.
The story of Lev Losev writing a biography of Joseph Brodsky, whose friend he was during the life of the poet, is noteworthy. Knowing about the reluctance
Brodsky to publish his own biography, Lev Losev nevertheless undertakes to write a biography of a friend ten years after his death. Finding himself in a very difficult position, violating the will of the deceased friend (their friendship lasted more than thirty years), Lev Losev, nevertheless, writes a book about Brodsky. He writes, replacing the actual biographical details of Brodsky's life with an analysis of his poems. Thus, remaining true to friendship, Lev Losev brings upon himself literary critics who are perplexed about the lack of actual details of the poet's life in the biographical book. Even the unspoken, verbal subtitle of Losev's book appears: "I know, but I won't tell."
For many years, Lev Losev has been an employee of the Russian Service of the Voice of America radio station, the host of the Literary Diary on the radio. His essays on new American books were one of the most popular radio columns.
The author of many books, writer and literary critic, professor, winner of the Northern Palmyra Prize (1996), Lev Losev died at the age of seventy-two after a long illness in New Hampshire on May 6, 2009.
Books by Lev Losev
Great landing. - Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1985.
Privy Councilor. - Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1987.
New information about Karl and Clara: The third book of poems. - St. Petersburg: Pushkin Fund, 1996.
Afterword: A book of poems. - St. Petersburg: Pushkin Fund, 1998 ..
Poems from four books. - St. Petersburg: Pushkin Fund, 1999.
Sisyphus redux: The fifth book of poems. - St. Petersburg: Pushkin Fund, 2000.
Collected: Poems. Prose. - Yekaterinburg: U-Factoria, 2000.
As I said: The sixth book of poems. - St. Petersburg: Pushkin Fund, 2005.
Joseph Brodsky. The experience of literary biography. ZhZL series. - M.: Mol. guards
Late declaration of love. Perhaps this should be the title of this note about a poet whose life fits in such a time and geographical period: June 15, 1937, Leningrad - May 6, 2009, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the poems are not absorbed by eternity, but belong to it.
Once upon a time, his book "The Miraculous Landing" (1985) struck me with pure lyrics.
It is naked lyrics, and not its imitation, not lyrical epic exercises from the third person of a fictional mask. From myself, and not from the "lyrical hero."
The "Leningrad" school of Russian poetry is monotonous.
But above it are Kushner and Brodsky. and Losev.
In 1991, with Tanya Tolstoy, who was flying overseas (we were friends then), I gave him my Parisian book.
And for some reason he added, fool, that I don’t need to answer.
But he answered. A few months later, in one of his few interviews. After the question of the correspondent of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which of the contemporary poets close to him, I saw my name.
It was an invitation to dialogue. But we weren't lucky enough to talk.
We didn't meet here, but we'll see.
Livshits is a good poet. So briefly, not without jealousy, Brodsky answered Denis Novikov when he mentioned Losev in London.
I bet it's not just good.
A.Ch.
He said: "And this is basil."
And from the garden to the English plate -
ruddy radish, onion arrow,
and the dog wobbled, sticking out his tongue.
He simply called me - Alyokha.
"Come on, in Russian, under the landscape."
We got good. We got sick.
The Gulf was Finnish. It means ours.
Oh, motherland with a capital R,
Or rather, C, or rather obnoxious,
our permanent air is order-bearing
and the soil is an invalid and a cavalier.
Simple names - Ghoul, Rededya,
the union of the Cheka, the bull and the peasant,
forest named after Comrade Bear,
meadow named after Comrade Zhuk.
In Siberia, the hawk dropped a tear,
In Moscow, a blade of grass ascended the pulpit.
Cursed from above. Farted below.
The china rattled and Glinka came out.
Horse-Pushkin, biting the bit,
this Kitovras, who glorified freedom.
They gave roach - a thousand people.
They gave Silva. Duska didn't.
And the motherland went to hell.
Now there is cold, mud and mosquitoes.
The dog is dead, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new hastily moved into the house.
And nothing, of course, grows
on a bed near the former bay.
.
.
LAST ROMANCE
Yuz Aleshkovsky
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can't hear the noise of the city
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is silence over the Neva Tower ... etc.
Silence over the Neva tower.
She turned gold again.
Here comes the woman alone.
She flew up again.
Everything reflects the face of the moon,
sung by a host of poets,
not only a watch bayonet,
but a lot of piercing objects,
The Admiralty syringe flashes,
and local anesthesia
instantly freeze to the borders
the place where Russia used to be.
Rigor to the face
not only in the womb of a premature baby
but also to his half-father,
in the morning drunk on the board.
Suitable unpriority,
dead from lack of trees.
In the land of empty skies and shelves
nothing will be born.
The dead Summer Garden glimpses.
Here comes the woman back.
Her lips are bitten.
And the Neva tower is empty.
.
.
ACCORDING TO LENIN
Step forward. Two back. Step forward.
Gypsies sang. Abramovich chirped.
And, yearning for them, mournful,
flooded the zealous people
(survivor of the Mongol yoke,
five-year plans, the fall of the era,
Serbian letters alien bulk;
somewhere Polish intrigue is ripe,
and to the sounds of pas de patiner
Metternich danced against us;
under the asphalt all the same potholes;
Pushkin wasted in vain, because of a woman;
Dostoevsky mutters: bobok;
Stalin was not good, he is in exile
did not share parcels with homies
and one personal escape).
What is lost cannot be returned.
Sasha, sing! Rise up, Abrashka!
Who has a shirt left here -
do not drink away, so at least jerk the gate.
.
.
... He worked at the Bonfire. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, maybe two hundred
transparent young men, unprepossessing girls.
Cold squeezing through the door,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
I was told: "Here's a couple of texts for you."
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unthinkable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
how about concrete with rebar in it.
All these were fish on fur
nonsense, multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I get this nonsense
and actually printed.
It was frosty. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow beneath it was pink.
What were they talking about?
the awake Morozov overheard,
the same Pavlik who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
plywood cracked from the cold,
but they were warm.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And time passed.
And the first number came up.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed, without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone to bits.
Those in the camp barracks chifir,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital squawk and cuckoo,
and the devils are driven from the cuff.
.
.
MIRACULOUS LANDING
Everything went on as usual.
Tormented by longing for Saturday,
people crowded in the tram;
tormented by longing for compote,
trudged from a kindergarten walk.
Suddenly the angels of God brigade,
heavenly miraculous landing
fell on the hell of Leningrad.
Bazooka shook the bushes
around the Hermitage. Hosanna!
Already captured the bridges
stations, cafe "Kvisisana".
The locks of the prison are displaced
grenade and the word of the Lord.
The hostages are a little embarrassed -
who slept, who is drunk, who in underwear.
Here - Michael, Leonid,
three women, Yuri, Volodya!
The car flies to the west.
We won, you are free.
The rustling of wounded wings,
dragging along the sidewalks.
Helicopter departure covered
squad with a mortar strike.
But strength melted like wax,
exhausted angelic company
under the pressure of internal troops,
dejectedly wandering from work.
And we got up and left
melted into the fading sky.
At the bottom of the lanterns patrols
in Ulyanka, Grazhdanka, Entebbe.
And smolders midnight then
farewell strip of sunset
pontoon blown up by us
on the shallows near Kronstadt.
.
.
Eighteenth century, that pig in a wig.
A golden mess floats along the river,
and in Felitsa's satin cabin
wanted to move.
An officer invited to catch a flea,
suddenly felt that the spirits were losing their strength,
drowning out body odors,
mother fussed, puffed.
The eighteenth century floats, floated,
I just forgot my scenery here and there,
that scattered under the onslaught of the forest
Russian greenery wild.
Volgly huts, a chapel, a ferry are visible.
Everything is built roughly, with a simple axe.
Nakaryaban in a notebook with a quill pen
verse splintering, soul scraping.
.
.
ON CHRISTMAS
I lie down, I defocus my eyes,
split the star in the window
and suddenly I see the area siryu,
their raw homeland.
In the power of an amateur optician
not just double - and double,
and the twins of Saturn and Jupiter
fraught with a Christmas star.
Following this, which quickly leaked out
and dried up, even faster
ascend over the Volkhov and Vytegra
Star of the Magi, Star of the Kings.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A star will rise above the station building,
and the radio in the general store window
dance program on request
interrupt in confusion and
slow a little, how to pray
about shepherds, wise men, kings,
about communists with Komsomol members,
about the rabble of drunkards and sluts.
Blind, talkative prophets,
fathers accustomed to the cross,
how these lines are hasty,
go on a white sheet,
quickly soaked by the sunset,
roam the far side
and open the doors to the rooms,
long abandoned by me.
.
.
TALK
“We are driven from stage to stage,
And everything goes into the hands of Poland -
Walesa, Milos, Solidarity, Pope,
we have Solzhenitsyn, and that
Gloomy-Burchsev and pretty average
prose writer. "Nonsense, he's just the last
romantic". "Yes, but if you subtract rum»,
“Well, okay, what are we taking anyway?”
From the pool of Lubyanka and butyrok
pals in commercial comfort
pop up in bright world big bottles.
“Have you tried the Swedish “Absolute”,
I call him "nightingale",
shy away - and Sofia is right there. ”
“But, nevertheless, a shabby canteen,
where a half-liter is walking under the table,
no, after all, like a white head,
so Western vodka is not taken.
"Perfectly! nostalgia for sivuha!
And for what else - for informers?
old whores spreading rumors?
by listening to "Freedom" at night?
by the way? according to the district committee? by pogrom?
according to the wall newspaper "For cultural life"?
"Maybe we should really drink rum -
this one will definitely knock us off our hooves.”
.
.
And finally, the stop "Cemetery".
A beggar puffed up like a bedbug,
in a Muscovite jacket sits at the gate.
I give him money - he does not take.
How, I say, I was put in an alley
monument in the form of a table and a bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
you already check the list, I'm yours,
please, please, take care.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, a concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm Mister some Twister
does not allow a cannon shot,
under the visor, mocking, takes,
Whatever I give, I take nothing.
.
.
MY BOOK
Neither Rome, nor the world, nor the age,
nor in the full attention of the hall -
to the Lethean Library,
how viciously Nabokov said.
In the cold winter season
("once" - beyond the line)
I look up the hill
(goes down to the river bank)
tired life cart,
filled with sickness.
Lethean Library,
prepare to be taken seriously.
I stuck my throat for a long time
and here is my reward for my work:
will not be thrown into Charon's boat,
stuck on a bookshelf.
.
/////////////////////////////////////////
Yuri Bezelyansky
Everyone knows Joseph Brodsky. But few people are Lev Losev, although he is a wonderful poet. Both - Brodsky and Losev - left and worked in America. But one had a “fate” (persecution, trial), while the other went relatively calmly, without a “whirlpool of Lubyankas and Butyrkas” (Losev’s line). In the spring of 2009, Lev Losev passed away. Let's remember him with gratitude for what he was.
Lev Losev is a poet for the intelligentsia, for intelligent conversations, disputes and lamentations, it was not blood that flowed in his veins and arteries, but literature, Russian literature. It existed exclusively in the context of culture. Hence all his poetry - a solid associative series, half-quotes, half-hints, stiles, a kind of carnival of erudition. Sparkler intellect. Pleasure of the mind. Soul feast. Birthday of the heart. With people like Losev, it's never boring.
Lev Losev was born on June 15, 1937 in Leningrad. Started writing early.
“In my younger years, I bore the name Lev Livshits. But since in those same years I began to work in children's literature, my father, poet and children's writer Vladimir Livshits, told me: "There is no place for two Livshits in one children's literature - take a pseudonym." “Here you go,” I said. "Losev!" - from the bay-floundering said the father.
And here is the poet Lev Losev. It sounds better than the poet Livshits, but a certain split of the soul arose: into Jewish and Russian:
Are you Losev? No, rather, Livshits,
an asshole who fell in love with excellent students,
in charming bores
with an ink speck right here.
Profanity? Losev loved these spicy additives. And at first he was a children's writer and worked for a long time in children's literature, in particular, in the magazine "Bonfire". Before that there was a school. Inconspicuous and zatyukannyy schoolboy. One critic compared him to Nabokov's Luzhin. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Leningrad State University, worked on Sakhalin...
“I started writing poetry quite late, at the age of 37. In my youth, I only dabbled in writing, and one of the reasons that discouraged all the hunting for it was the fact that the most devastating critical blow against my poems was the accusation of being literary. Literature, secondary - all this was then doubtful and aroused suspicion. The best collection of poets at that time in Leningrad was considered the circle at the Mining Institute, which included Britanishsky, Gorbovsky, Kushner and others. These poets seemed to be the best because their poetry was considered primary. Indeed, they traveled a lot around the country, writing about backpacks, sweat and mosquitoes, about provincial hotels and other primary realities. They were given preference,” said Lev Losev. He was also an opponent of "primary realities" and kept walking along the paths of books and finally found his unique Losev intonation. Starting from classical Russian poetry, he created his brilliant repetitions, managing to turn the textbook lines so that they sparkled with new facets and meaning.
Here are the lines turned inside out: “Love, hope, the devil in the chair / comfort did not comfort us for long. / What kind of books are published in Tula! / They are not published in America! ..”
It sounded like "America". It was in America that the poet Losev made his pseudonym a passport surname and wrote with undisguised irony and bitterness:
You are Russian? No, I'm the AIDS virus
like a cup, my life is broken,
I'm drunk on weekend roles
I just grew up in that area...
...Are you human? No, I'm a shard
Dutch oven shard -
dam, mill, country road ...
and what's next, God knows. 
Critic Vladimir Uflyand recalled that if Brodsky left for America noisily, Losev was very quiet. At the same time, “Lesha Losev, who left modestly and semi-mysteriously with his wife Nina and two children, even with a beard looked more like a Soviet pioneer than an American one. I am sure that he did not go for happiness. Such people are well-read enough to know that happiness is only where we are not. But in America you can work without fear of earning a term. The highest literary professionalism and universal knowledge brought Losev incomparably less trouble in Russia than the same virtues delivered to his friend Joseph Brodsky. Losev artistically knew how to hide them. Not without reason, a few years later, he wrote the book Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. The American continent first appeared as a professor of Slavic studies at Dartmouth University, a brilliant literary critic. He hesitated for several years and acted as a maestro, a virtuoso of Russian rich poetic text.
As Boris Paramonov noted, Losev did not need freedom of speech, but the availability of a printing press. In the West, two of his collections were immediately released - "The Miraculous Landing" (1985) and "Privy Councilor" (1987). And then he continued to surprise readers with his "funny things." And finally, in 1997, in his homeland, in St. Petersburg, his first poetry collection "New Information about Karl and Clara" was published.
What to do - a bad era.
Honored executioner and swindler.
The only good thing is war.
What to do, such an era
got, a bad era.
The other is not yet visible.
And what is a poet to do in this bad era? "Oh muse! be kind to the poet, / let him roam around the sideboard, / let him cut into the smoke, / give him horseradish to the sturgeon, / give him a table closer to the window, / so that the decanter will light up yellow / sunset over his aspic.
The theme of Russia and the era in Losev sounds with a bitter smile: ““I understand - the yoke, hunger, / there has been no democracy for a thousand years, / but the bad Russian spirit / I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
“This is the truth - a country of scoundrels:
and there is no decent closet, ”-
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so abruptly ended the poet.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
something important he was bending around
and looked as if straight into the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.
“Oh, motherland with a capital R ... our permanent air is order-bearing ...” And the feeling of a sad ending:
And the motherland went to hell.
Now there is cold, mud and mosquitoes.
The dog is dead, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new hastily moved into the house.
And nothing, of course, grows
on a bed near the former bay.
In one of his last interviews (“Spark”, October 2008), Lev Losev told how he sees Russia from the USA, and this view from the outside is very curious: “A serious shift has occurred in my American memory - Russia’s place in the minds of America is significantly decreased, moved away from the center and, perhaps, provincialized. I arrived at the peak cold war, Russia was actor number one, and now ... it has become not only marginal, but one of many. Not as scary as Iran, not as revered as China, not as crazy as North Korea... So, something like Brazil; even Venezuela, owing to Chavez's apparent stupor, is of greater curiosity. As for my feeling about her, it coincides in a strange way with the feelings of Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who leafs through Soviet press and wonders how everything there, in the homeland, has become gray, of little interest. It was so festive, think! Indeed, compare Russia in the 1920s and 1930s with Russia at the beginning of the century, when Kuprin was considered a writer of the second rank ... while in the States Jack London, losing to him in all respects, was super popular ... And suddenly - a terrible dullness, a complete fall, it is not clear where everything has gone, they did not go into emigration... Unfreedom quickly leads to the province of the spirit, to the outskirts of the world; today in Russia, as far as I can tell, everything is aggravated by the fact that the country seems to be frozen. They didn’t let me go forward, I’m scared and I don’t want to go back - there is trampling in the void, an unpromising occupation.
Losev criticized Russian lack of freedom, but continued to admire Russian culture.
Far away, in the country of Rogues
and obscure but passionate signs,
there lived Shestov, Berdyaev,
Rozanov, Gershenzon and Bulgakov...
"And Burliuk walked around the capital, / like an iron, and with a swede in his buttonhole." “And at the table, next to the Socialist-Revolutionary, / Mandelstam was conjuring over an eclair.” “Grenade thrower Leva Livshits,” as Lev Losev called himself in one of his poems, taught Russian literature in America with pleasure. And when I read in the writings of young Americans: “Turgenev loves to write the novel “Fathers with Children,” he only smiled through his beard. He himself adored humor with coups. Losev's poetry is generally full of puns, paraphrases, aphorisms, and the transformation of old poetic clothes into new ones.
Here are the lines: “How the minutes last, how the years rush furiously” ... “Saturday came, I didn’t even get drunk” ... “The lands where the calendar is without January” ... “The places are filled like lotto cards, / and each the passenger looks like something...
And a terrible monument, not copper, but bronze:
Freezing at dawn
bronze semi-Georgian,
his evil shadow grows longer,
the copper horse pales beneath him.
Look! he shook his finger.
Such is Lev Losev. His mind was immersed in the context of culture, where he made his versifier jumps and antics, as I already noted, funny things. “I’ll take my Jewish passport. / I’ll get on a Korean plane. / I’ll overshadow myself with the sign of the cross - / and head back to my native places!” “Armed with a bagel and Fet”?.. Yes, he came to Russia. He looked around in surprise. With sadness I caught the trend. And again he left for America, and dreamed:
When I'm old, I'll go to the old south
I will leave if my pension allows.
By the sea over a plate of pasta
days to pass the rest in Latin,
moistening with a tear eye,
like Brodsky, rather like Baratynsky.
When the latter left Marseille,
how steam puffed and how marsala drank,
..................
how the thought danced, how the pen wrote,
how the measured noise poured into the verse of the sea,
how blue the long road was in it,
as it did not enter the admiring mind,
how to live a little...
Lev Vladimirovich Livshits-Losev was ill for a long time...
Joseph Brodsky died on January 27, 1996 at the age of 55. Yevgeny Baratynsky left the world on June 29, 1844 at the age of 44. And Lev Losev died in May 2009, a little short of 72 years old.
Climbing through books. Collapsed. Didn't get there.
Books are too shaky steps.
There is one less scribe on earth. But, as Lev Losev argued, "text is life." But the texts remain. This means that the poet's thought has remained and continues to pulsate, his poetry to rustle, his living things to frolic.
He worked at Kostra. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, maybe two hundred
transparent young men, unprepossessing girls.
Cold squeezing through the door,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
I was told: "Here's a couple of texts for you."
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unimaginable raggedness,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
how about concrete with rebar in it.
All these were fish on fur
nonsense, multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I get this nonsense
and actually printed.
It was frosty. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow beneath it was pink.
What were they talking about?
the awake Morozov overheard,
the same one, Pavlik, who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
plywood cracked from the cold,
but they were warm.
And time passed.
And the first number came up.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed, without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone to bits.
Those in the camp barracks chifir,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital squawk and cuckoo,
and the devils are driven from the cuff.
Stolypin is a pity, speaking historically
and just like that, in a worldly manner,
but sorry for Bogrov with his hysterical
yapping revolver.
Pity the gendarme. It's a pity for Bald
woe to the walking crow.
Pity brought from the police
with too much testosterone
the murderer, who had enough vodka in the morning -
but he doesn’t take it, yes, go to the dog!
And he takes off the pale muzzle
glass pieces protruding from the nose.
The executioner shows pity for the Jew -
let the Jew think that everything is in a dream.
And it's embarrassing to hang around the neck
man in pince-nez.
(At Pasternak's)
All I remember behind this length
almost breaks in a wonderful picture,
where an ice floe piles up on an ice floe,
this favorite picture printed,
where chad creeps over the three-pipe
smoke and dissipates before the end;
then forever he immersed himself
into the abyss, or emerge, without crashing into the rocks,
so the Norwegian flashed in the conversation,
to melt the valves of meaning and connection;
what is my half-childish memory!
where to remember! how to understand it!
All I remember is an icy day
a swarm of excuses, legends, suffering,
the day that crushed me and made me.
4, rue Regnard
Hello, walls that have absorbed the groans of passion,
cough, Russian "fuck" from a smoky mouth!
Let's sit side by side
with this nice housing, two years unmarked,
where everything seems to be flattened monotonous
steam roller.
A person who lived in such an apartment
out of it goes to all four,
doesn't look back
but then turns left
as one queen commanded,
in the Luxembourg Gardens.
In the meantime, in the Odeon Pierrot with Truffaldino
nonsense, dusty mirror ice floe
reflects up close
a round-sided sofa, - rising on flippers,
he reads something in slits
Hello, shutter stanzas brought together,
parallel light painting with the sun in the subtext,
there is a shiver of dust in it.
How freely they can rotate, take off, somersault!
But then it starts to get dark, dark,
and you won't read it.
A puddle froze in the hallway of the garbage dump. Snowfall is knocking on mica.
The cow is calving, the child is sullen, the footcloths are drying, the cabbage soup is boiling.
This life, this way of existence of protein bodies
we live and rejoice that the Lord sent us a living inheritance.
Over the world black fad sticks out, white nonsense walks.
In snowflakes, there is a wonderful symmetry of non-existence and existence.
To Columbo
Teach me to live in the end, I myself could not learn.
Teach me how to become smaller than myself, in a tight tangled ball,
how to become bigger than yourself by stretching for half a carpet.
I read your meowmuars, memurra
about contempt for creatures that live by means of a pen,
but acceptable to the teeth.
Walk on the keys, dragging a striped tail,
for the best thing that I write is your.
Lie down on my book - scat will not follow:
you are more lyrical than Anna, Marina, Velimir, Joseph, Boris.
What they have on paper is in your family.
Sing me your song with Mandelstam's head in your mouth.
I don't have anything else to overcome my fear.
at the hour when you are not there at midnight and the night has snarled.
"Everything ahead!"
Sexologists went across Russia, sexologists!
Where before they wandered along the paths of seksot,
sexologist, sexologist is coming!
He is in the sweetest Russian honeycombs
climb in and lick the honey.
It's uncomfortable in the hut, it's dirty on the street,
carp died in the pond,
all the women went crazy - they want an orgasm,
and where to get it in Russia!
"Poetry Day 1957"
squalor and black hole -
which? - the fourth, or something, five-year plan.
On that day, leftovers were brought to our city
poetry from the Moscow court.
Here, they say, eat. Only we are from the cage
everyday life didn't come out yesterday...
There is a pine tree in the wasteland, a hole under it,
a yearning capercaillie on the lower branch...
In our neocubo- Muscovites are weak,
in this - futurism, where the Rhine roars: Rimbaud! -
where the Sphinx is silent, but quartz flickers in it.
In the eyes of the hieroglyphs pockmarked
Ereminsky, and Brodsky rib
transforms into Elena Schwartz.
Ayy hotel: invitation
Evgeny Rein, with love
At night from the street in a tie, hat, raincoat.
On the bed in the hotel back - tie, hat, shoes.
In anticipation of a conditional knock, call, and in general
from blondes, brunettes... no, only blondes.
Everything inspires anxiety, suspicion, horror -
telephone, window curtain, door handle.
Still there is no other black and white paradise
and, of course, it will be possible to run away there, slip away, slip away.
With a moving cone of light, rinsing the screen,
dodge, deceive the chase, jump off the bandwagon
under cover of a tie, hat, raincoat,
to the rhythmic bursts of neon in a glass of scotch.
At home, the smoke is like a yoke - the cops are gutting chests of drawers,
memoir bastard hisses at each other: do not touch!
Quiet in a secret hotel, only thin walls tremble
from the neighborhood with the subway, elevated, railway.
Untitled
My native city is nameless,
fog always hangs over him
the color of skimmed milk.
Mouth shy to name
who betrayed Christ three times
and yet a saint.
What is the name of the country?
They gave you these names!
I'm from the country, comrade,
where there are no roads leading to Rome,
where smoke is insoluble in the sky
and where the snow is not melting.
In the clinic
The doctor mumbled something to me about a kidney
and hid his eyes. I felt sorry for the doctor.
I thought: life broke through the shell
and flowed, light and hot.
Diploma on the wall. Doctor. His awkwardness.
Oblique recipe scribbling hand.
And I marveled: oh, what ease,
how easy this news turned out to be!
Where are the demons that have been chasing me for a century?
I breathe new, light air.
Now I'll go and give blood for analysis,
and I will sign these lines with blood.
in Pompeii
His knees glide in dust and blood.
Lermontov
Poppies grow in the stadium
as big as a dog's mouth
bared with evil.
That's how Pompeii sprouted!
The wind runs through the poppies,
and fear bends my back,
and having eaten the first saint,
I think: why am I a Leo?
I look around furtively
but there is no return for me from the arena,
and causes my fear
gloating in a Roman master
with black dope in the middle,
with a bloody halo around.
Take it in Russian - in the dirt and renew,
plunge into the icy darkness!
Spend everything for the eight of diamonds
one veranda window.
Claws rush from the concentration camp of time,
belly and face to the ground,
Yes, an ice ax would cut on the crown of the head
namesake in mirror glass.
Night catches up with me on a bulldozer.
The card is not coming to me.
The red trump cards go out on the lake,
gold fades in the window.
Turned on TB - they blow up the house.
He immediately opened up like a volume,
and the flame of the poor notebook
went to torment.
It is with the agility of a marten
instantly ran through all the pages,
enough food from the table
and heated mirrors.
What distance reflected in them?
What grief was exposed?
What kind of life was devoured by the cinder -
novel? poems? vocabulary? primer?
What was the alphabet in the story -
our? Arabic knots?
Hebrew? latin print?
When lit, do not disassemble.
Return from Sakhalin
I'm 22. Snowdrift to the roof.
"Goat Stew" on the menu.
A worker who suffers from a hernia
who forgot to fasten his shirt,
knocks on me a hundred times a day.
He says: “At the Mekhzavod
machines littered the utility yard.
The machines need to be taken care of.
We need a big conversation here."
He is a slave. In the eyes of his reproach.
Then the fixed Vova will come
with a bottle of drinking alcohol,
term for murder, right now - foreman.
He does not want about the women,
he keeps saying: "I am a slave, you are a slave."
The convict philosophizes, the convict
the tooth sparkles, the eyelid waters.
Shaking his bald head
alcohol burns the soul, even drinking.
The words are like a howl.
And this howl, and howling turbine
shouted “Stop!
Who's coming?" When Nina and I
huddled in the TU half empty,
hung over one-sixth.
Khozdvor of Eurasia. Turnover
black oil rivers and bald ice.
Here and there heaps froze
industrial cities.
Thorn in several rows.
Oh, how wonderfully we fled!
How the Nord and Ost were removed!
Frost crackled in the duralumin.
A white tail fluffed up behind.
Freedom. Cold. The proximity of the stars.
Anything can happen
It happens that the men in the office are so stuffed -
lighter than the sun, the glow of sweaty faces.
It happens that a person gets so drunk early,
that everything cries out to him: “Who do you look like?”
"Who do you look like?" - woman-like squeals of the choir
motley-cows, yards and chickens-grouse.
"Who do I look like?" he asked at the fence.
The fence said that he could, with the help of three letters.
Where the air is "pink with tiles"
where the lions are winged, while the birds
prefer the paving stones of the piazza,
like the Germans or the Japanese, to speak;
where cats can swim, walls can cry,
where is the sun, pour gold in the morning
succeeding and dipping an elbow into the lagoon
beam, decides it's time to bathe, -
you got stuck there, stayed, dissolved,
collapsed in front of the coffee shop
and dragged on, froze, split in two,
sailed away like a ring of smoke, and - in general
go catch when you are everywhere -
then loudly touch the tea utensils
churches, then the wind will run through the garden,
defector, man in a raincoat,
convict on the run, exit through the looking glass
found - let them grab the stakes -
disappeared at the crossroads of parallels,
leaving no trace on the water
there you turned into a fragile tug,
clouds of mother-of-pearl over the muddy channel,
the smell of coffee on a Sunday morning,
where Sunday is tomorrow and always.
The city lives, grows, builds.
Here was the sky, and now brick and glass.
To know, and you, healthy, will not be healthy,
if you miss the time - it is not there, it has expired.
You go out in the morning to the bathroom with muddy zenks,
you turn the tap - a stream will gush out from there
cries, curses, threats, and in the mirror
the fiery-eyed prophet grins terribly.
Iron, grass
The grass has grown while I was sleeping!
Where they drove away while I warmed up, -
smells of warm fuel oil from cracked sleepers,
and neither arrow nor rail is visible in the weeds.
What to do in waking hours? Enough ruff,
a mixture of dead water and bad hoof water?
At the dead end of evolution, the locomotive does not whistle, and rust
keeps crawling, dust keeps accumulating.
Only chu! - the cast-iron chain link swayed,
crackling dirty glass, something rusty clinking iron,
shaking the depot, something got out of it,
looked around and, thinking, climbed back.
Forgotten villages
In the Russian thickets they have no number,
we just can't find the way
bridges collapsed, a snowstorm brought,
the trail was littered with a windbreak.
They plow there in April, they reap there in August,
there in a hat they won’t sit at the table,
quietly waiting for the second coming,
worship, no matter who comes -
constable on a troika, an archangel with a pipe,
passer-by in a German coat.
There they treat diseases with water and grass.
Nobody dies there.
The Lord puts them to sleep for the winter,
in the snow covers up to fear -
neither fix the ice-hole, nor chop wood,
no sleds, no games, no fun.
Bodies taste peace on the floors,
and souls are happy dreams.
So much heat tangled in sheepskins,
that will last until spring.
A star will rise above the station building,
and the radio in the general store window
dance program on request
interrupt in confusion and
slow a little, how to pray
about shepherds, wise men, kings,
about communists with Komsomol members,
about the rabble of drunkards and sluts.
Blind, tremulous prophets,
fathers accustomed to the cross,
how patient these lines are,
wander on a white sheet.
Where is the pink blotter
quiteba the west arose,
there for their heavy gait
Bypass channel stretches.
Sunset hastily wet,
words go home
and open the doors to the rooms,
long abandoned by me.
Having passed the earthly life to the middle,
I was taken to a long corridor.
In a ridiculous dress, pale men
were having a vague conversation.
The bones were rattling. Gases were emitted
and an ax suspended in the air
sullenly chopped off words and phrases:
all hu da hu, yes yo mayo, yes fucking -
the stories of sinners were sad.
One noticed that for three rubles
tonight he blows someone,
but someone, a hairy chest,
and the third, with a twisted head,
exclaimed that the window was closed - blowing.
In response, he heard a vile howl,
depraved, indignant, dull,
but in dirty robes, a convoy entered here,
and I was carried away by the evil spirit.
Wrinkling my brow, I lay in the corner.
It smelled of urine, carbolic acid, and the grave.
I was stuck with a thick needle
they gave me wormwood bitterness.
To the cold iron table
then they pressed me with a long board,
and I was forbidden to breathe
in the darkness of this deserted room.
In response, shrill: "There is nothing to admire."
And he: "Take the heart at the same time."
And she: "Now, first I'll finish the liver."
And my skeleton phosphorescent
broken off, impersonal, discolored,
clumsy frame of thirty-three years.
And finally, the stop "Cemetery".
A beggar puffed up like a bedbug,
in a Muscovite jacket sits at the gate.
I give him money - he does not take.
How, I say, I was put in an alley
monument in the form of a table and a bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
you already check the list, I'm yours,
please, please, take care.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, a concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm Mister some Twister
does not allow a cannon shot,
under the visor, mocking, takes,
Whatever I give, I take nothing.
From Bunin
The rooks will fly, the rooks will fly away,
well, the iron cross stick out, stick out,
make this area cloudy
the quiet light of the passport photo.
Every light breath is a light sin.
Night falls - one for all.
Strokes a soft star paw
the lifeless earth of the cemetery.
From Fet
Crossroads where the rakitka
freezes in a snowy dream,
yes, simple as a postcard,
visibility in the window:
holiday - half a kilo of sausages,
shield on the bottle
and the telly hums something,
the vid is screeching.
After so many years of grief
what will you answer here
to a simple question in Russian:
What's your name?
Or another story like this:
I am, but at the same time I am not,
no health and no coins,
there is no peace, and there is no will,
no heart - there is an uneven beat
yes these pranks pen,
When they roll suddenly
like a pogrom on an empty quarter,
and, like a Jewess to a Cossack,
the brain is given to the language,
combination of these two
fluff sounds light fluff,
and the tongues of fire are beating
around my absence.
Judas thought, hiding
pieces of silver in a bag,
cold calculation and luck
played him again.
Chop down colossal grandmas
and sometimes it happened before,
but something is getting chilly
April nights with us
but the lowlands smell of carrion,
but pricks under the left rib,
but aspens are shaking in the grove,
all thirty, with their silver.
And foolish Judas understood
that there is no corner for him in the world,
comfort throughout Judea
and in the whole universe of heat.
What shines through and secretly shines ...
How, why did you get involved in these games,
in this box-not-rolling?
I don't know where I came from
I remember the rule: take it - go.
I remember my homeland, the Russian God,
corner on a rotten cross
and what a hopelessness
in His slavish, meek beauty.
Corinthian columns of Petersburg
hairstyles softened from lye,
intertwined with smoky, drowsy,
long, slanting rain.
Like a surgeon's knife
from an anesthesiologist's mistake,
under major renovation
house is dying.
Russian sky Burenka
again neither mooing nor calving,
but red-red and massive
Bolshevik holidays.
Goes to the defense parade.
The Kamazov brothers rumble,
and creeps behind them
exhaust scumbags.
My book
Neither Rome, nor the world, nor the age,
nor in the full attention of the hall -
to the Lethean Library,
how viciously Nabokov said.
In the cold winter season
("once" - beyond the line)
I look up the hill
(goes down to the river bank)
tired life cart,
filled with sickness.
Lethean Library,
prepare to be taken seriously.
I stuck my throat for a long time
and here is my reward for my work:
will not be thrown into Charon's boat,
stuck on a bookshelf.
In the cemetery where we lay with you,
looking out of nothing
midday clouds were sculpted,
heavy, voluminous, hefty,
there lived some kind of sound, devoid of body,
either music, or bird drink-drink-drink,
and in the air trembled and shone
an almost non-existent thread.
What was it? Whisper of euonymus?
Or rustled between spruce paws
Indian, or rather Indian, summer?
Is it just the babbling of these women -
the one with the measure, the one spinning but not weaving,
the one with the scissors? Is it chatter
the Connecticut River, flowing into the Atlantic,
and a sigh of grass: "Don't forget me."
On Christmas
I lie down, I defocus my eyes,
split the star in the window
and suddenly I see the area siryu,
their raw homeland.
In the power of an amateur optician
not just double and double,
and the twins of Saturn and Jupiter
fraught with a Christmas star.
Following this, which quickly leaked out
and dried up, even faster
ascended over the Volkhov and Vytegra
Star of the Magi, Star of the Kings.
On the death of Yu.L. Mikhailova
My verse was looking for you.
Vyazemsky
Not a smooth rosary, not a written face,
notches enough for the heart.
All your life under God you were like a bull.
The age is short. God is strong. The bull is fragile.
In champagne country, a rumor was waiting for me.
Here is where our dialogue is broken:
then Vyazemsky gets involved, then Mandelstam,
then the stupid "death-Reims" palindromon.
“What to do - God takes the best,” they say.
Beret? Like a letter or a coin?
Either strong or weak, you were like a brother to me.
God is merciful. Brother is not here.
For the ninth day I have been silent for you,
I pray that you are not forgotten
luminous Rose, colored Ray,
swirling solar dust.
You are Russian? No, I'm the AIDS virus
like a cup my life is broken,
I'm drunk on weekend roles
I just grew up in those parts.
Are you Losev? No, rather Lifshitz,
an asshole who fell in love with excellent students,
in charming bores
with an ink speck right here.
Are you human? No, I'm a shard
Dutch stove shard -
dam, mill, country road ...
One day of Lev Vladimirovich
Moved from Northern and New
Palmyra and Holland, live
it's unsociable here in Northern and New
America and England. I chew
from the toaster seized bread of exile
and every morning I climb the steep
the steps of a white stone building,
where I spend my native language.
I open my ears. Every sound
cripples my tongue or dishonors.
When I'm old, I'll go to the old south
I will leave if my pension allows.
By the sea over a plate of pasta
days to pass the rest in Latin,
moistening with a tear with the eye, like Brodsky,
as, rather, Baratynsky.
When the latter left Marseille,
how steam puffed and how marsala drank,
as the ardent mamsel saw off,
how the thought danced, how the pen wrote,
how the measured noise poured into the verse of the sea,
how blue the long road was in it,
as it did not enter the raptured mind,
how to live a little...
However, what to yawn on the sides.
There is a hill of essays in front of me.
Turgenev loves to write a novel
Fathers with Children. Great, Joe, high five!
Turgenev likes to look out the window.
See green fields in a row.
Trotting run of a thin-legged horse.
Hot dust film over the road.
The rider is tired, he will wrap up in a tavern.
If you don’t eat, it will knock over the scythe there ...
And I'm out the window - and outside the window is Vermont,
neighboring state closed for renovations,
for a long spring dry.
Among the wet hills
what houses are not hidden,
what kind of abode you will not see there:
an unsociable grandfather took refuge in one,
he is wearing a Tolstoy beard
and in a Stalinist paramilitary tunic.
In another lives closer to heaven
who, weaving ornate words,
described with deep understanding
lyrical life of a degenerate.
Having given the studious a lesson,
take a newspaper (stupid habit).
Yep, poetry. Of course, the "corner"
"column" or, syu-syu-syu, "page".
According to Senka, a hat. Senkin jumped
from Komsomol members directly to pilgrims
done. What will they treat us to in ryg-
alovka? Is it okay for the gonoboltsy?
Everything postnenkoe, God's servants?
Bad rhymes. Stolen jokes.
We ate. Thank you. like beans
moving cold in the stomach.
It's getting dark. Time to go home. Magazine
Moscow, or something, take as Veronal.
There, the dolt dreamed about the past,
when ours went ahead
and crushed evil spirits with a broom,
and the emigrant is a distant ancestor
gave the village a half-bucket.
Spin it all you want, Russian palindrome
master and slave, read at least like this, at least like that,
a slave cannot exist without a bar.
Today we walk around the bar.
It's good there. There it spreads, layered,
cigar smoke. But there sits a Slavist.
Dangerously. Until then, I'll drink again
that in front of him I will start throwing my beads
and from a colleague I will again achieve,
so that he again responds to me with vulgarity ....:
“Irony is not necessary for the Cossack,
you sure could use some domestication * ,
not without reason in your Russian language
there is no such word - sophistication" ** .
There is a word "truth". There is a word "will".
There are three letters - "comfort". And there is "rudeness".
How good is the night without alcohol
words that cannot be translated
delirious, mutter empty space.
On the word "bastard" we come to the house.
Close the door behind you more tightly, so that
the spirits of the crossroads did not sneak into the house.
In worn-out slippers of the foot
insert, poet, five twisted processes.
Also check the chain on the door.
Exchange hello with Penelope.
Breathe. Dive into the depths of the lair.
And turn on the light. And wince. And freeze
What else is this?
And this is a mirror, such a glass,
to see with a brush behind the cheek
fate displaced person.
* "you sure could use some domestication"
** sophistication - very roughly: "sophistication" (English)
Refusal of an invitation
On the slope of days, it is more difficult for me to write.
The sound is less and less, but the measure is firmer.
And it did not stick to me on the slope of days
to prop up the policeman.
That's not why I went to hell
over the craft of the back without unbending,
to see with you in the same row
tongue-tied gouging.
You that, what there, to hell, festival!
There are ten of us in the Russian language.
What does it matter to us what will become trash
twist your tongue and foolishly play tricks.
In memory of Volodya Uflyand
You died, and we donate,
but, however, the matter is small.
You slept under a live cat
purring coverlet.
All that is purred in the night
you put it on paper during the day.
A low-browed bastard
already left the hostel.
You gave mercy easily
plants, children, dogs.
And the bastard is already hiding
at the entrance to the garbage can.
Not too much for a poet
in the edge of tassels and sharpenings.
And the cats can't sleep, itching,
everyone is waiting for the return
living heat source.
Since the device is simple:
dangling tongue and tail,
compare myself
I am small with this hair,
with a stinking scab.
Whining, wheezing,
my wet boneless organ
to break the news
come on, shove!
A stump of fear and anguish,
serve for callous pieces,
wiggle, pray!
According to Baratynsky
Miles, a white flock and a black glass,
aonides and a yellow jacket.
To tell the truth, I'm tired of poetry,
maybe you don't need more poetry?
Winged, blasphemous, rubbing,
capitalizing on our misfortune,
deconstructors in the masks of Shisha and Psoy
parsing poems for parts
(and the last poet, watching the horde,
draws a line under Russian poetry
rusty razor on a thin wrist).
In old age, names are forgotten
trying in conversation, like on mines,
don't step on the name, and dumb
a universe where anonymous roam.
The world is not crazy - just nameless,
like this city N where your humble
NN looks into the square of the black window
and sees: the fog is rising.
As long as Melpomene and Euterpe
tuned their pipes,
and the conductor emerged like a seal,
from a bright orchestral hole,
and drifted on the stage, like on an ice floe,
soloist dressed up as a penguin,
and the old chaperon ran
with flyers like an old nihilist
catching with the ear tr-la-la,
at the same time I was staring
into a shimmering pile of crystal,
hanging like a frozen waterfall:
there the last flame died,
and I couldn't save him.
On the stage, the master writhed a man,
the curtain was shaking, the light was flashing,
and music, as if we are a convict,
commanded us, pushed us around,
on stage, the lady broke her hands,
she made a ringing in her ears,
she made a shmon in the souls
and removed sharp objects.
Ambassadors, ministers, generals
frozen in their beds. Silent conversations.
The barmaid was reading "Alitet
goes to the mountains." Snow. He goes to the mountains.
Napkin. Glacier. Marble buffet.
Crystal - wine glasses. Snow jams.
And ice floes decorated with sweets
mountains lay before her with bears.
How I loved the cold expanses
empty foyers in early January,
when the soprano roars: "I'm yours!" -
and the sun strokes the velvet curtains.
There, outside the window, in the Mikhailovsky Garden
only bullfinches in Suvorov uniforms,
two lions with them walk in commanders
with a patch of snow - here and on the back,
Karelia and the Barents puddle,
where does this cold come from,
which is the basis of our nature.
Everything, as our copper creator conceived, -
we have the colder, the more intimate,
when the ice palace melted,
we erected another forever - Winter.
And yet, frankly,
from opera measured surf
it seems to me sometimes with a binge -
Russia needs warm seas!
“I understand - the yoke, hunger,
there is no democracy for a thousand years,
but the bad Russian spirit
I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
“These rains, these birches,
these groans in part of the graves, ”-
and a poet with an expression of menace
curled his thin lips.
And he said, in a rage:
"I don't like these drunken nights,
repentant sincerity of drunkards,
Dostoevsky anguish of informers,
this vodka, these mushrooms,
these girls, these sins
and in the morning instead of lotion
watery block rhymes;
our bards cardboard spears
and their acting hoarseness,
our iambs are empty flat feet
and trochees thin lameness;
insulting our shrines,
everything is designed for a fool,
and life-giving pure Latin
a river flowed past us.
This is the truth - a country of villains:
and there is no decent closet, ”-
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so abruptly ended the poet.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
something important he was bending around
and looked as if straight into the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.
The last one in this sad year
I got a little thought, like a mouse to a cat ...
I climb back on my sixth,
I let her run to the east,
but where can she master the Atlantic! -
strength is not enough, talent.
My lemming! The deadly weight of water
pile - it will be salty,
and a beam of a lone supernova
reach out to her like a straw.
Talk
“We are driven from stage to stage,
And everything goes into Poland's hands -
Walesa, Milos, Solidarity, Pope,
we have Solzhenitsyn, and that
Gloomy-Grumbling and rather average
prose writer. - "Nonsense, he's just the last
romantic". - "Yes, but if you subtract the" rum "". -
“Well, okay, what are we taking anyway?”
From the pool of Lubyanka and butyrok
pals in commercial comfort
emerge, into the bright world of big bottles.
“Have you tried the Swedish “Absolute”,
I call him "nightingale",
shy away - and Sofia is right there. -
“But still a shabby canteen,
where a half-litre walks under the table ...
no, still, like a white head,
so Western vodka is not taken. -
"Perfectly! nostalgia for sivuha!
And for what else - for informers?
old whores spreading rumors?
by listening to "Freedom" at night?
by the way? according to the district committee? by pogrom?
in each Phrase, I would polish the parquet to a shine,
in the Chapters it would be empty and many mirrors,
and in the Prologue there would be an old porter,
would tell me "master" and "your-stvo",
would say: "There is no package yet."
And while the parquet in the paragraphs sparkled,
mirrors, not too much, but rococo,
windows would reflect, and in each window,
or rather, in specular reflection window,
steam would rise above the frozen river
and people in soldier's cloth would rush,
the hospital would be visible across the river,
and the letter would have been received by Christmas.
And the End would be far from the Beginning.
Russian night
The plow of lust. Threshing
passions. Sabbat. Pillow break.
Physiology is like a trap.
"Yes, and geography is destiny."
They got stuck. Now the time has come
to bring the burden out of the seed,
to get involved in a new tribe:
the flame on the banner and - in the stirrups!
So it erupts in the weary night,
dark passion, worthless blast furnace,
smoky breath my country,
the place is empty behind the straw.
That's what I am now, word-breaking
as if rattling empty dishes,
I drag her along like my fault,
into its inevitable unnameable.
Son of God, have mercy on me.
Since childhood
Nightmare Arzamas, no, Moscow,
no, Petersburg, flattened prone,
he thinks, but only with the bone marrow,
cerebellum liquefied with fear.
The child feels sorry for his own body,
tears, eyes, fingers, nails.
He feels the nature of chaos
nature, cleansing people.
Years pass. in full camouflage
August comes to finish the old man,
the beams stuck out obliquely,
but it got dark, disappeared, to know something happened,
something sad happened)
Collective farms pass it through themselves,
empty fields and houses,
bury yourself where the vines bend over the pool,
where in the whirlpool is time and darkness.
Romance Poems
We know these Tolstoy things:
with a beard bound in ice,
from a week-long Moscow absence
return to an unheated house.
“Light the fireplace in the office.
Give the crow millet.
Bring me a glass of wine.
Wake me up at dawn."
I look at the frosty fog
and sit down for a long novel.
It will be cold in this novel
chapters will end "as suddenly":
will someone sit on the couch
and suck on a long forelock,
will fir-trees stand, angular,
how the men stand in the yard,
and like a bridge, a little dash
connect two distant dates
in the epilogue (when the old people
they will come to the cemetery by the river).
Dostoevsky is still young
only there is something in it, there is something.
“Not enough money,” he shouts, “not enough money.
To win thousands would be five or six.
We'll pay our debts, and in the end
there will be vodka, gypsies, caviar.
Ah, what a game will begin!
After the old man thumps at our feet
and read in our timid hearts
the word FEAR, the word CRASH, the word DUST.
Sadness-longing. Sing, Agasha. Drink, Sasha.
It's good that it sucks under the heart ... "
Only us description of the landscape
will save you from such a binge.
“The red ball burned out behind the forests,
and, of course, the frost grew stronger,
but the oats sprouted on the window ... "
Nothing, we ourselves with a mustache.
Not a schemnik will save us, unsociable,
We'd better look in the mirror.
I am the unchanging Karl Ivanovich.
I kiss your children for the night.
I teach them geography.
Sometimes short of breath and sloppy,
I wake you up, coughing in the night,
praying and blowing on a candle.
Certainly not a big bird
but I have something to be proud of:
I didn't fornicate, I didn't lie, I didn't steal,
did not kill - God have mercy -
I'm not a killer, no, but still,
oh, why are you blushing, Carl?
There was a certain Schiller in our region,
he healed my thaler.
There was a duel. Prison. The escape.
Forgetting about the damned Schiller,
verfluchtes Fatum - became a soldier -
battles smoke and thunder of victories.
They sang there, they shouted "cheers" there,
they drank beer under the lime trees,
they put ginger in the gingerbread.
And here, like a liver from cirrhosis,
logs swollen from frost,
Eternal Siberia on the windows.
The wind is blowing through the cellars.
For your children's birthday
I glue the house (no cola
you don't have, old comedian,
and he would not mind in this house).
Please take a look, Nicolas.
We will insert a candle inside the cardboard
and carefully strike a match,
and soft mica windows Cold
Eyelids and lips close in harmony.
place of oblivion.
Mercury freezes like a guard on duty -
no divorce.
As it turns out, the void
endure nature,
for what is left to smolder
under clay
no memoirs can capture,
no chromosomes.
If not for violins, if not for a sob
cello,
we'd be completely pissed off, we'd
fucked up...
The wind is swaggering, like a thug,
cloudy clouds.
With a screech wind one
pen security officers
scary frozen trucks
and gramophones,
to drown out rifle claps
and the cry of Persephone.
School № 1
Belly pop wide swoop
censors behind a corpse truck.
The twisted bandit babbles:
"I didn't shoot, I swear by Allah."
The light pours into the breakdowns,
lingers on children, women,
their rags, their brains, their intestines.
He is looking for God. There is no god.
Poet Lev Losev
Having made his debut at the age of 37, at an age that became fatal for other poets, Losev avoided the "fear of influence" characteristic of young talents. He did not know it because he considered influence to be culture, valued continuity, and saw no sin in book poetry. Among other people's words, his muse was as at ease as others among the clouds and birches. Having entered poetry without scandal and according to his own rules, Losev immediately began with adult poems and turned out to be unlike anyone else, including - a conscious choice! - Brodsky.
Friends and contemporaries, they looked at the world in the same way, but wrote about it differently. Playing the classics, Losev assigned himself the place of Vyazemsky under Pushkin. An enlightened conservative, a strict observer of morals, a little old-fashioned, equally endowed with subtle humor, ironic insight and skeptical love for the motherland. The latter must be insisted on, because Losev was by no means indifferent to politics. Sharing the views of his Vermont neighbor, he, like Solzhenitsyn, dreamed of seeing Russia "settled" according to the New England standards: a local, good-neighborly democracy, and most importantly, that at least something would grow.
Losev's ideal skipped the romantic 19th century without envy, not to mention the hysterical 20th, in order to find a model for itself in clear sky Enlightenment. Laws change people, wit justifies poetry, and everyone cultivates his own garden.
At the Losevs it was full of flowers and edible greens. Once a bear came after her, crossing the stream, but he did not destroy the idyll. Composed of smart books and true friends, Losev's life was beautiful and worthy. Poems in it occupied only their place, but he always read them standing up.
Reference
Lev Losev was born in 1937 in Leningrad and emigrated to the United States in 1976. Abroad published several books of poetry, published studies on the "Lay of Igor's Campaign", on the work of Chekhov, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, with whom he was close friends. For almost thirty years he taught Russian literature at the prestigious Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
On May 6, the poet, writer and literary critic Lev Losev died in New Hampshire at the age of 72. IN MEMORY of Lev Losev Those who know this name also know that this is a huge loss for Russian culture. Himself - an amazing and subtle poet, last decade he selflessly dedicated his life to the memory of his great friend, Joseph Brodsky. His comments on the texts of I.B. - this is the pleasure and happiness of immersion in a culture that, alas, almost did not touch us. The book in the ZhZL series is a monument not only to Brodsky, but also to Lev Losev himself. (A separate lesson is the distance that the author kept in this book, nowhere allowing himself to pat the genius on the shoulder and stick out his person at least a little. Brodsky's close friend, whom he also considered one of his teachers, Losev NEVER MENTIONED ABOUT THIS). “Time is an honest man”; the name of Lev Losev will certainly take the right place in the minds of reading and thinking Russia, but today this is somehow not very comforting. Very sad. Viktor Shenderovich “Lev Losev is one of the smartest and kindest people I have seen in my life. We first met in the reception room of Leningrad University, where we entered at the age of 18. They accepted him, but I didn't. They often met in literary companies, poetic ones. He wrote poetry from his youth. Few people knew about this. And he worked in the children's magazine "Bonfire", and, by the way, he managed to smuggle his friends' poems there. He was friends with wonderful poets, with the same Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Rein, Mikhail Eremen, Uflyand and many, many others. Perhaps his main love in life, besides his wife Nina and children, is Russian poetry. His poems are not like others: angular, sharp, witty, and at the same time there is a genuine feeling in them. This is very sad news. Lev Losev is a wonderful person. And this is even more important, in my opinion, and means much more than the fact that he is also a real poet. When you lose a dear person, you think first of all about - See more at:
He said: "And this is basil."
And from the garden to the English plate -
ruddy radish, onion arrow,
and the dog wobbled, sticking out his tongue.
He simply called me - Alekha.
"Come on, in Russian, under the landscape."
We got good. We got sick.
The Gulf was Finnish. It means ours.
Oh, motherland, with a capital R,
or rather, C, or rather, Yer obnoxious,
our permanent air is order-bearing
and soil - an invalid and a cavalier.
Simple names - Ghoul, Rededya,
the union of a check, a bull and a man,
forest named after Comrade Bear,
meadow named after Comrade Zhuk.
In Siberia, a hawk dropped a tear.
In Moscow, a blade of grass ascended the pulpit.
Cursed from above. Farted below.
The china rattled, and Glinka came out.
Horse-Pushkin, biting the bit,
this Kitovras, who glorified freedom.
They gave roach - a thousand people.
They gave Silva. Duska didn't.
And the motherland went to hell.
Now there is cold, mud and mosquitoes.
The dog is dead, and the friend is no longer the same.
Someone new hastily moved into the house.
And nothing, of course, grows
On a bed near the former bay.
* * *
... worked at the Bonfire. In this dim place
away from the race and editorials,
I met a hundred, maybe two hundred
transparent young men, unprepossessing girls.
Cold squeezing through the door,
they, not without impudent coquetry,
I was told: "Here's a couple of texts for you."
In their eyes, I was an editor and a beast.
Covered with unthinkable rags,
they are about the text, as Lotman taught them,
judged as something very dense,
how about concrete with rebar in it.
All these were fish on fur
nonsense, multiplied by lethargy,
but sometimes I get this nonsense
and actually printed.
It was frosty. In the Tauride Garden
the sunset was yellow and the snow beneath it was pink.
What were they talking about?
the awake Morozov overheard,
the same one, Pavlik, who did evil.
From a plywood portrait of a pioneer
plywood cracked from the cold,
but they were warm.
And time passed.
And the first number came up.
And the secretary wrote out a chervonets.
And time passed, without ceremony with anyone,
and it blew everyone to bits.
Those in the camp barracks chifir,
those in the Bronx are fighting cockroaches,
those in the mental hospital squawk and cuckoo,
and the devils are driven from the cuff.
Bad rhymes. Stolen jokes.
We ate. Thank you. like beans
moving cold in the stomach.
It's getting dark. Time to go home. Magazine
Moscow, or something, take as Veronal.
There, the dolt dreamed about the past,
when ours went ahead
and crushed evil spirits with a broom,
and the emigrant is a distant ancestor
gave the village a half-bucket.
Spin it all you want, Russian palindrome
master and slave, read at least like this, at least like that,
a slave cannot exist without a bar.
Today we walk around the bar...
It's good there. There it spreads, layered,
cigar smoke. But there sits a Slavist.
Dangerously. Until then, I'll drink again
that in front of him I will start throwing my beads
and from a colleague I will again achieve,
so that he again responds to me with vulgarity ...
“Irony is not necessary for the Cossack,
you sure could use some domestication*,
not without reason in your Russian language
there is no such word - sophistication"**.
There is a word "truth". There is a word "will".
There are three letters - "comfort". And there is "rudeness".
How good is the night without alcohol
words that cannot be translated
delirious, mutter empty space.
On the word "bastard" we come to the house.
Close the door behind you more tightly, so that
the spirits of the crossroads did not sneak into the house.
In broken flip-flops of the foot
insert, poet, five twisted processes.
Also check the chain on the door.
Exchange hello with Penelope.
Breathe. Slap into the depths of the lair.
And turn on the light. And wince. And freeze
…What else is this?
And this is a mirror, such a glass,
to see with a brush behind the cheek
the fate of the displaced person.
* * *
“Sorry I stole it,” I tell the thief.
"I promise not to talk about the rope" -
I say to the executioner.
Here, whining, low-browed pro *****
Kanta comments on me and Nagornaya
sermon.
I am silent.
So that instead of this rust, fields in the insecticide
again the Volga would roll into the Caspian Sea,
horses would eat oats again,
so that a cloud of glory shines over the homeland,
so that at least something would work out.
And the tongue won't dry out.
1985-1987
* * *
“I understand - the yoke, hunger,
there is no democracy for a thousand years,
but the bad Russian spirit
I can’t stand it,” the poet told me.
"These rains, these birches,
these groans in part of the graves, ”-
and a poet with an expression of menace
curled his thin lips.
And he said, in a rage:
"I don't like these drunken nights,
repentant sincerity of drunkards,
Dostoevsky anguish of informers,
this vodka, these mushrooms,
these girls, these sins
and in the morning instead of lotion
watery block rhymes;
our bards cardboard spears
and their acting hoarseness,
our iambs are empty flat feet
and trochees thin lameness;
insulting our shrines,
everything is designed for a fool,
and life-giving pure Latin
a river flowed past us.
This is the truth - a country of villains:
and there is no decent closet, ”-
crazy, almost like Chaadaev,
so abruptly ended the poet.
But with the most flexible Russian speech
something important he was bending around
and looked, as if right in the district,
where the archangel with the trumpet died.
S.K.
And finally stop "Cemetery".
A beggar puffed up like a bedbug,
in a Muscovite jacket sits at the gate.
I give him money - he does not take.
How, I say, I was put in an alley
monument in the form of a table and a bench,
with a mug, half a liter, hard-boiled egg,
following my grandfather and father.
Listen, you and I are both impoverished,
both promised to return here,
you already check the list, I'm yours,
please, please, take care.
No, he says, you have a place in the alley,
there is no fence, a concrete bucket,
photo in an oval, lilac bush,
there is no column and no cross.
Like I'm Mr. Some Twister
does not allow a cannon shot,
under the visor, mocking, takes,
Whatever I give, I take nothing.
* you sure could use some domestication
** sophistication - very roughly: "sophistication" (English).
