The gospel of the jasmine bush analysis. Alexander Kushner

Alexander Kushner (b. 1936)

Tatiana Beck . It's all about perspective.

“In the eyelashes there is a rainbow and a layer of life.

You wake up: the world is shining, illuminated from the corners.

You will outread me from this angle of view.

It’s all about the perspective, and it’s truly new,” -

this stanza from Alexander Kushner’s book “Direct Speech” from the mid-seventies seems to apply to me today directly converted. “You will re-read” - and I, remembering a lot by heart, re-read, fortunately the first real “Selected” of the wonderful poet came out, the creative result of a forty-year journey, at the same time smooth (all the themes and stylistic principles revealed in “First Impression” echo in the last section of the book “From New Poems”) and sharply paradoxical: with unexpected turns, self-refutations and reincarnations.

Joseph Brodsky, whose essay on Kushner prefaces the book, wrote: “Over these thirty years extra years Kushner has come through an extraordinary journey.” Celebrating the phenomenal unity Kushner's poetics, Brodsky says that the poetic means themselves seemed to have chosen Kushner in order to demonstrate, in the thickening chaos of existence, the inflexible ability of language for intelligibility, consciousness for sobriety, vision for clarity, and hearing for accuracy.

“The mechanism and engine of every Kushner poem,” writes Brodsky, “is precisely intonation, which subordinates the content, the figurative system, first of all - poetic meter, - and offers a powerful metaphor, unexpectedly far from any kind of poetry: - This mechanism, or, more precisely, this engine is not steam or jet, but internal combustion, which is, perhaps, the most capacious definition of the form of existence of the soul and what imparts to this engine the characteristic of the eternal.”

The book appears not as a collection of scattered poems thrown into a heap - haphazardly and at random (such a principle is also possible), but as a polysyllabic and clearly structured unity. If Kushner’s first books were not divided into chapters (they were thin collections that we, as a matter of fact, carried in our school bags and read to the holes), then starting from “Voice” (the year 78), each collection, continuing the tradition “Evening Lights” by Fet and “Cypress Casket”
In. Annensky, was built as lyrical novel with chapters, and internal plot, and conscious roll calls. Poems began to cluster - and Kushner was drawn to unite them into nests. By the way, he, who was perhaps the only one in those years who combined the lyrical inspiration of a poet with the serious philology of an essayist, was the first to turn to this mysterious phenomenon - the article “Book of Poems”, first (like the brilliant “Roll Call”) published in the same seventies in “Issues of Literature” was a real revelation for us. Because, probably, it was a revelation for the poet, who at the same time formed his own world and lovingly explored the worlds of others: Baratynsky, the same Fet and Annensky, Kuzmin, Pasternak, Akhmatova. In this article, Kushner wrote: “A book of poems, in my opinion, allows the poet, without resorting to conventional characters, to create a consistent narrative about his own life, to consolidate in poetry the process, the history of the development of his soul, and, consequently, the soul of his contemporary. A book of poems, he emphasized, is an opportunity for a lyric poet to bypass big genre create a coherent story about time.”

Kushner’s “Favorites” became such a coherent and incoherent story about the life of the soul - and not only bypassing prose genres (already in the first book he ironically contrasts himself with them: “A prose writer writes prose for a long time...”), but also bypassing the poem . He is perhaps the only one of the major contemporary poets who never addressed the poem. Moreover, he wrote long poem“Rejection of the Poem”.

Almost all the poems of the first book are titled with an emphasis on locality: “Drawing”, “Cooking Room”, “Juggler”, “Tape Recorder”, “Decanter”, “Vase”, “Fountain”, “On the Steamboat”, “On the Telegraph”. The poet stubbornly opposed the generally elevated global pathos - with unpathetic narrowness, photographicity, and registered gaze. You say at all, And I will - in particular! In the very first poems of Kushner, the great Acmeism itself, suppressed in Soviet poetry by socialist imperial romanticism, again defended its original positions. Kushner’s Acmeist forerunners seemed to be answering the unknown reader with the words of the Assyrians “with spears and shields” from a drawing in a school textbook:

“Are you still swimming?” -

Already in the first book, the poet showed his outlandish love for tiny things, objects, details, minutiae of private life: all these plates, umbrellas, jackets, glasses, drops, pencils, rods and holes and teeth were enlarged by the poet to maximum sizes. At the same time, by the way, from the very beginning Kushner discovered an extraordinary penchant for diminutive suffixes (and he has no random, thoughtless not only words or commas, but also inflections), carrying it through his entire lyrical epic right up to the very last poems. Lord, how many of his poems (I’m not exaggerating: hundreds) of all these notes, spoons, leaves, boxes, curtains, fingers, pencil cases, folds, buttons, sticks, saucers, glasses, spiders, verandas, cabinets, doors, lichens, razors, socks and even musicians! This persistence speaks, on the one hand, of the integrity and forced persistence of the polemical idea and device. I think that in this way the poet first of all emphasizes that in his poems there is “not a great fate, but a domestic one, with a small letter” (that is, precisely the Big one, because in no case is it general), and brings the lessons learned to the point of stylistic grotesquerie in the school of Proust: “Something like a Proustian novel, / only in a different language and not in prose, / but in poetry - that’s what I was doing,” he sums it up in a later poem. But sometimes these endless stylistic litotes begin to smack of inertia, the fatigue of a gesture that unmistakably warms speech, the sweetness of an a priori touching suffix instead of intonation tension, which should be born every time as if for the first time. Or maybe this is colloquial sentimentality, inherent, as we know, in internally tough people? One way or another, coincidences great poets It doesn’t happen, but with Kushner, who said about himself: “It’s you, down to the hundredth part, who clarifies every word,” especially .

Kushner’s craving for simple things is explained not only by “the chill of unbearable pity for objects.” The poet is more complex and crafty. Firstly, he acutely feels that “our little secrets are surrounded by one big one.” Kushner’s relationship with God is a special topic: he either shyly and trustingly calls on Him - “in his heavenly office” (Kushner’s unique irony), then he violently doubts, then he looks for pantheistic synonyms, but in any case, this is the sky above his land Always. Secondly, he loves the image binoculars(this is both a real object and a through-cut metaphor of the poet, that is, a thought born, as he says, in a lucky shirt). The lyrical binoculars, along with a double lorgnette, and a strong microscope, and other optical instruments mentioned dozens of times in Kushner’s poems, give him the opportunity to “adding to volume”, to reverse the scale: “It’s as if we looked through binoculars/ with multiple magnification... “Thirdly, the poet looks at even the most ordinary objects as potential exhibits of a future museum:

I'm telling you: this jacket

It will be like this in a thousand years

Precious, like a toga, like a banner

A crusader who has lost his color.

I'm telling you: these glasses

I'm telling you: this barn...

Bunches of blue-eyed meaning,

In general, images associated with museum, collection, archive, appear every now and then in this book: the idea of ​​living life as a collection is the key to Kushner’s objectivism. Hence his all-out commitment to such unpoetic words as inventory, list, estimate, register, list, income and expense balance. He can even say about universal difficult harmony like this: “Oh, a directory of bounties, a night card index!” Kushner is a passionate and spiritual recorder of chaos particles, searching everywhere and discovering system. I think that the architecture of “the most deliberate city in the world” (as Dostoevsky said about St. Petersburg) structures Kushner’s trembling, delineates his deeply hidden lyrical madness.

It is interesting that in Kushner’s early poems objects are viewed through the powerful and asymmetrical prism of Oberiutism (the influence is implicit, but productive) - was it not Zabolotsky “Stolbtsov” who whispered the following image to his descendant:

The water in the decanter is a miracle of miracles,

A transparent ball caught in its fall?

Or this one:

Fontana furious body

It smoked, it towered, it glittered,

Emerging from a narrow pipe,

It rustled like oak trees...

But later, if we talk about sources, Kushner goes into other depths: first of all, to John. Annensky (the rhythm and tone of “Intermittent Lines”) and to the early Pasternak (“My Sister is My Life” as a formula of lyrical existence). However, any stylistic clues are reincarnated in Kushner’s poetics due to the sharply modern intonation and unique character that unites irrationalism and rationality, confusion and estimate. “That’s why there is such order on the table, in order to hold back the landslide of life,” writes the poet. By the way, is it not from this structuring struggle with the landslide that this poet’s constant craving for anaphora, even in the most passionate improvisations?

So, Kushner is an artist of double magnitude. In an old poem, he designates this feature as a desire “for mountains with wild grapes/ and homemade wine to coexist side by side/ and twinkle at the same time.” The love for small objects, for homeliness, for “comfort” coexists in his poems with an enduring feeling of endless space, the expanse of the seven winds. The fact that “it takes ten days to get to Sakhalin” strangely intensifies the poet’s love for personal and extremely compressed space: “and compress, compress space like a watchmaker’s spring” - note that in this most important metaphor the categories of time and place are identified.

“Our feelings are influenced by the geography of the country,” he will say in the first book, and in later verses he will come back to haunt:

In the names of ships, in the roll call of mysterious places -

All our breadth, all our immeasurable breadth.

How similar this is to a geographical conference!

“Pechora”, “Sukhona”, “Kolguev”, “Anadyr” and “Svir”!

Is it easy to judge from “Vilyuy” that Vilyuy

It represents: a pipe, yes a stern, and a rope! -

so and private life with a name from the vast imperial geography - in reality it was small, concrete, objective and even pitiful: it (the metaphor unfolds further), “with a white bridge and a wheelhouse on a low stern,” walks back and forth many times “following the icebreaker.”

Kushner is a highly ironic and sharp poet, but these qualities of his are never directly revealed, like with regular ironists: one must be able to discern his intellectually caustic smile. Here is one of the earliest verses:

Goddess Flora - passion and bliss,

oh, how much cheerful sarcasm, how much wise humor there is in this garland on the stomach! In general, forced passion, exaltation, “habits” are the objects of Kushner’s eternal hostility and repulsion. He got the worst of both rock, sparkling eyes, and frenzy, and guitar poison, and Moscow revelry. I remember how I was amazed and enchanted when I was twenty years old by a variation on a theme seemingly closed by Pushkin - when Kushner “put in his place” the six-winged Seraphim himself:

He stood up in a Leningrad apartment,

Spreading out among the silence

Six wings, of which four are

“Look, you will wake up the child,” the Leningrader says to the prophet, and this sounds like the unique Kushnerian courage with which he, a freed scribe, in principle friend perceives the entire world culture.

In general, many of Kushner’s lines in those years were dull and so stingy with genuine current poetry, but we, young readers, remembered them quickly as marvelous news-aphorisms that miraculously leaked to us. (This is how Bitov’s “Pushkin House” was also read - in censored fragments or in the samizdat manuscript in its entirety.) I quote from memory my favorite - from “Direct Speech” (1975), a wonderful collection about unhappy love, about suppressed dignity, about the happiness of living in spite of everything.

It seemed that the grief had passed.

I'm as crazy as a glass in the closet

Cracked. But hello to you too.

To be unloved! My God!

What happiness it is to be unhappy...

Or again and again:

Tragic worldview

The bad thing is that it is arrogant.

This was a complete coincidence between the poet and the reader, to whom the sorrowful poems gave a colossal charge of strength. It was some kind of secret conspiracy of unknown relatives, which the poet himself knew about: “And a line of poetry goes / between us, like a Masonic sign.”

Thanks to the poet: this is how we survived.

But let's move on. Kushner is a courageous, lyrically daring, stubborn poet. Wasn’t it just outright audacity that he insisted throughout his creative years (contrary to the overwhelming opinion the best contemporaries) on the right of a poet in unfortunate Russia of the twentieth century to write about happy love, about vital bliss, about aesthetic commitment to the gratifying, and sweet, and comfortably warm. How he annoys many people with this, but he doesn’t give up!

In this, poetry and Kushner’s position are extremely close creative destiny Fet, whom critics during his lifetime reproached for his indifference to the “evil of the day,” to social injustice, to the ideological struggle, reproached him for tactless delight and hedonism - against the backdrop of a national tragedy. Fet even responded to such critics in the preface to the first issue of “Evening Lights” in the witty sense that, fleeing from a fire, he jumped into the water, into the river, and they shouted to him: “Fire!” “Of course,” he wrote, “no one will suggest that, unlike all people, we alone do not feel, on the one hand, the inevitable burden of everyday life, and on the other, those periodic trends of absurdities that are really capable of filling any practical worker with civil grief.” . But this sorrow could not inspire us. On the contrary, it is these hardships of life that have forced us, over the course of fifty years, from time to time to turn away from them and break through the everyday ice in order to breathe at least for a moment the clean and free air of poetry.”

However, if Fet placed his “dispute” in the preface, not allowing it into the poems, which are consistently pure, and free, and suggestive, then Kushner, whose poetry is a diary all layers his inner life, his sensual thoughts (he constantly includes in his poems discussions about rhythm, method, pathos and current literary polemics) - he gives similar answers to his opponents - in rhyme. Often his poems resemble a writer’s epistolary addressed to a “silk” (or not at all silk) critic.

Kushner’s focus on fundamental happiness as the psychological dominant of his poetry with an unfeignedly excited intonation was expressed in the book “Voice”, in the middle of the road:

My star!

Trapped in a high nebula

An example of a happy life

I note by the way that the words backing, reverse, underside, lining- are favorites in Kushner’s vocabulary, and this is no coincidence. In his world, everything external has a second - flickering, and hidden, and contrasting color- meaning. Even the “naive” landscapes and still lifes of this poet are always explosively metaphysical.

Kushner - the further, the more insistently (excellent - I repeat - knowing to what extent this traumatizes the heralds of the apocalypse and adherents of “civil grief”) - as if out of spite, he describes to them how he washes a plate with a blue flower, then how he relaxes in a country chaise lounge waiting tea with cognac, then as if on behalf of his beloved he was guarding boiling milk. He, having matured, as a poet and critic in one person, insists on his fundamental “love for objects,” for the chair, for the armrests. However, so
and - almost erotically - he loves wasps, bumblebees, swallows, clouds and the noise of foliage, which (according to the poet’s admission, it was he, at night, outside the window) in the middle of the journey lengthened and shook his, at first clearly regular, verse line, changed the rhythm of his lyrical breathing. Only if in the early poems this polemical love for “one’s own” was directed against totalitarian romanticism, then in the later ones - against the tyranny of “glory and disaster”, associated for Kushner primarily with the victorious by pressing fate and poetry of Brodsky. The dedication to him, included in the final section of “The Chosen” (like the memoirs published in “Znamya” immediately after the death of a friend, and opponent, and triumphant), is filled with pure and high pride in this creative friendship, but also with a painful pride that insists on its separately. I note that Kushner’s individuality in the first books was more organic, more natural - while the individuality that constantly defends itself in picks is inevitably more hysterical and dependent. As if anticipating this test in new contexts, Kushner wrote strange and powerful lines back in the early 80s:

And the star will quickly break its rays against the star,

Than, having lost its separateness, it wants to merge with it into mush.

He didn’t merge with anyone or anything, but if he didn’t break off some of the rays, he transformed them.

I will note one contradiction that has emerged in recent years - and this is not a reproach, but a statement of a living alogism, albeit alien to me (and here Kushner is certainly not isolated: this is a general late paradox of an entire cultural generation). Courageously, and with dignity, and with disgust, the poet ignored direct “malice” (and indeed anger) of the Soviet day, without ever flattering that great style, of which he is proud, even claiming that Apollo will award him a prize -

Because in the age of ideas walking the earth,

Like predators in the dark,

I glorified the white tablecloth on the table

With a ghostly pattern, like watermarks.

Agree. And indeed, let him award - I join Apollo, although, I confess, new Kushner’s self-irony (this kind of it is also possible) seems to me a little more ambitious than the previous one. Or maybe it's a matter of mixing genres? Over the years, our poet began to more intensively introduce album and epigram notes into the fabric of a sublimely serious, lyrical one, and these layers are difficult to integrate into each other. By the way, in a large poem work - remember “Onegin” - this synthesis is quite possible: the poem takes revenge on Kushner for his dashing “refusal”, letting him know that the framework lyric poem They are not ready for any load and sometimes burst at the seams. Dissonance arises.

The poet at the present time, continuing as if to insist on unbiased loyalty to the particular and small (relatively speaking, a tablecloth with a resistive underside), no, no, but it gives a biased rooster, which does not suit him at all. I love Kushner very much and therefore immediately remember the same Fet, who, with all his lyrical audacity and apoliticality in his declining years, was carried away even by admiring messages to august persons - however, without mixing genres, dividing them - for which the revolutionary democrats (also funny idiots!) They scolded me diligently... So I went there too. And then suddenly, in the last verses, the poet falls into the style of an interview from a progressive - as they say, Nashenskaya - newspaper:

I like other people's Mercedes

As I pass, I admire their sparkle.

And the fact that thugs are sitting in them,

So there are always problems with the universe

There are, and not those, but these inconveniences.

My marks in the fields are aesthetic. Firstly, this is already different from what Brodsky said (“but a thief is dearer to me than a bloodsucker”), and in nightmare without imagining how it will please the former regional committee workers. Secondly, the same idea, but much more briefly and strictly, was formulated by Kushner a long time ago and became a catchphrase: “You don’t choose times, / they live and die in them.” We’ll leave admiring Mercedes to the authors of a different school, a different vision, and different priorities. A different perspective and a different one (Kushner’s favorite word) verse fabric. Or maybe there is something here that I misunderstood semi-parody(a la poet A. Tinyakov) on modern type haunted and cynical consciousness, and perhaps what we have here is not a completely autobiographical hero, but a grotesque character? Don't know. I don’t presume to judge definitively. In any case, this is again - the new kind Kushner's self-irony.

Let us return, however, to the main thing, to the best, to what is essentially attractive. There are two poems in the book that are especially remarkable. These are the tragic “Memoirs” of 1979 with a series of portraits (the death of each of the characters is indicated with deadly brevity in parentheses), concentrating the fate Russian intelligentsia XX century. And an almost Zoshchenko sketch of a trade union meeting, “Then you don’t sleep, sorting through...” (late 80s). Both speak to Kushner's enormous potential as a prose poet. These seeds in Kushner’s lyrics of recent years are swelling more and more powerfully, but they still have to germinate fully. Among the new, there are bright poetic experiences that grew on the loamy border with prose - here, in a different turn, Kushner’s early humanity returns, compassionate and attentive: raznochinskaya, unarrogant, full of kinship and equality with all that is.

In one of his recent poems (it’s dedicated to O. Chukhontsev), the poet dreams that “we are all sitting at the table, dressed in semi-shine, in semi-darkness”... Here we again find Kushner’s favorite tablecloth, and bottles of wine, and flowers , and the last swallow, and a beetle crawling on the tablecloth. Oh, how true our poet is to himself, what a strong, albeit antediluvian, lyrical pair of binoculars, what a uniquely charming intonation! And how good (there is happiness with a tragic background, and a free mixture of times, and novelty, and memory, and childish intellectual chatter, and bitter humor - everything that Kushner’s Muse is precious about) is the central stanza in which Pasternak reads poetry:

With a childish expression, more diligently than

This is accepted, a little tipsy,

And we laugh, and everyone likes it so much,

Only Lermontov: “Cheers,” he says, “no poems!”

Without poems and introduction to Lef!”

He listens to Lermontov and Kushner: all right.

["Friendship of Peoples" 1998, No. 8]

ANDREY AREV. WHAT ONCE SHINED IN INK...

(To the 75th anniversary of Alexander Kushner)

If, following the example of Marina Tsvetaeva, we divide poets into “poets with history” and “poets without history,” then Alexander Kushner will reveal himself perfect example creator of the latter type. What is unusual for a Russian in the 20th century is that they didn’t sit on estates. Even Boris Pasternak (according to Tsvetaeva, our main “poet without history”), with his dacha hermitage, was eventually written into “history” - you wouldn’t wish it on your enemy. This could not be done with Kushner. And it’s unlikely to succeed.

Kushner gave the refusal of claims to a personal biography that breaks out of time a minted character:

You don't choose times

Reflecting on Kushner, Joseph Brodsky remarked: “We have been downright corrupted by poetic biographies—mostly of a tragic nature—especially in this century. Meanwhile, a biography, even one extremely rich in events that captivate the imagination, has an extremely distant relationship with literature...”

Your view on what is proclaimed in the public sphere of human activity “ life goals" Kushner expressed it with cheerful simplicity, as if drawing a child's picture:

The one who doesn't dance dances

He knocks on the glass with a knife.

He who does not prance prances

From the stands he waves and shouts.

Who's really dancing?

And who prances on a horse,

Those are tired of these dances,

This is from the collection “Night Watch”, 1966, that is, a time when no platforms were given to the young poet. Kushner hated and still hates prancing around on a publicly ridden literary pegasus – both during the times of forced domination in art by apologists of socialist realism and during the times of the “conceptual” innovators who pushed them off the stands.

Of course, Kushner’s poems live in the life of all of us today and are closely connected with it. But their ideal projection is dictated by circumstances that leave the political context of existence aside:

At the dacha, where there is a river and a field,

Yes, the bush is at my shoulder,

Arrival of President de Gaulle

The secret of Kushner's artistic views is revealed in the statement that closest to life located with its external manifestations is predominantly poetry that does not coincide, and not prose or any other informatively rich type of literature . The core of poetry is lyricism. She is the life plasma of any art. Whether we agree with it or not, this is central to Kushner's aesthetic.

Kushner’s books pose fundamental questions for understanding modern poetry. And first of all, the question of the possibility or impossibility of a poet of the twentieth century after Kolyma and Auschwitz to be inspired by the thought of a “happy life,” albeit with an “unbearable background,” as happens with Kushner.

Instead of a heady readiness for death with a “bullet point” at the end, his poetry is filled with a calm readiness for life, for happy life! An unheard-of, unbearable for art mental balance, “neatness,” as Bella Akhmadulina noted, emanates from him. later books– even stronger than the earlier ones.

Let's take a look at the titles of his collections of the Soviet and post-Soviet era: “Tavrichesky Garden” (1984), “Day Dreams” (1986), “Night Music” (1991), “Flying Ridge” (2000), “Clouds Choose Anapest” (2008) ...What an idyll “in our troubled age”! And he is no more “alarming” than anyone else, the poet noted back in 1976:

Every century is an iron age.

But the wonderful garden is smoking,

The cloud is shining; hug

My age, my farewell fate.

Time is a test.

A kind of light, anonymous happiness shines through Kushner in the most serious, crisis years. Sometimes you can’t even tell who is happy with him and with whom:

This shadow is so beautiful by itself under the bush

The long-eyed lilac, that greater happiness is not needed...

“Poetry is our memory of what life is like in its best moments,” defined Kushner.

Lilac bush, shade, coolness - this, according to him, is the “general plan.” And this is what was revealed to him in this plan:

What a miracle if there is

The one who lit it in our honor

Night many constellations!

And if everything goes by itself

It was settled then, my friend,

More important than about God, Kushner has a question about man, the one who either believes in God or doesn’t. There is “direct speech” about this both in his early poems and in his latest.

It seems that only Kushner, of all the serious poets, could solve with such simple-minded mockery the two-thousand-year-old problem of human “abandonment”, “abandonment” on earth, as he did - and not at all in his youth, but much like in adulthood:

Everything to us is Byron, Goethe, we are like children,

We want to know what Thackeray thought.

God cries, reading in the next world

The lives of unremarkable people.

It is in “unremarkable people” that all the essence of Christianity lies; Kushner’s poems are addressed to them; they are the only ones he still meets on his Vyritsa road:

Do I believe in God or do I not believe in God,

The Vyritsa road knows about this...

Neither in the future nor in the past is there a mystery for Kushner greater than that hidden in the being of the heart individual person among everyday worries. Whether he sits in a chair or on a bench, it’s all the same:

And in the caftan, valor will remain valor and pain,

And in a shabby dark jacket...

Kushner's pain is heartache, the measure of all things. The measure by which harmony itself is determined, independent of the scale and historical significance of events and not determined by them. The wedding of heroes is replaced in this poetry by the love of “inconspicuous quiet brotherhood.”

No “higher goal” will motivate Kushner to call the atrocity a “feat.” No Shakespeare will force you to find sympathetic words to the tyrant:

Shakespeare was mistaken in believing

It’s as if the monsters are tormented by dreams.

Richard the Third - what naivety,

Impressionability, guilt!

Well, what about glory?

“Glory comes to those who are caught up,” Kushner said. It has a bitter taste:

I don’t write about spring anymore because I’m old.

I don’t write about the soul, because the soul has dried up,

Not about death (the nightmare no longer scares me),

Not about glory (that bird flew above us and died)...

So it turns out that it was always suspected: all this glory of the summer dacha on the third platform near Vyritsa is not worth it. That’s why we’ll return with Kushner to the Gatchina road, to the bushes and trees that surrounded it. To the poet who pulled out on her - on a bicycle instead of a Mercedes. For the noise of leaves in Kushner’s poems is the best music, and his gaze is caressed not even by Tsvetaev’s mountain ash, but in Russian spaces in the whirlwinds and darkness of a “twisted bush.”

This is very significant: the main visual image of Kushner’s lyrics is proportionate human nature a bush, or even a thistle (aka Tolstoy’s burdock from “Hadji Murat”):

But I'm not cold. I want your thistle

A lilac-blue eye will blink from the side of the road -

And my ice melted and my wet anger dried up,

And the angry heat cooled down - into lonely doubt -

Enough shouting, perhaps a sigh is needed? –

I stand there, thinking: I feel sorry for everyone inadvertently.

Is your world a sad one, is it good or bad?

It is more difficult to be a man than a prophet.

In every way a mission statement.

The bush is the main metaphor for life. From the bush, like God to Moses, Poetry itself speaks to him:

Gospel of the Jasmine Bush,

Breathing in the rain and turning white in the dusk,

Among the alleys and the ringing of mosquitoes

Says no less than Matthew.

So white and wet, so these grapes glow,

This is how petals fly from a touched wild animal.

You are blind and deaf when you have evidence

We need more miracles besides this.

You are blind and deaf and looking for someone to blame,

And he himself is ready to offend someone.

But the bush will touch you, possessed by a demon,

And you will begin to speak and see.

This sermon was delivered in a happy moment of life, of which Kushner has more than other poets, but not infinitely. For him, like for every thinking creature, death is also “always with him.” No one understands tragedy more deeply than a happy person. Even comparing the poet to a star, Kushner thought - to a target.

The “earthly” in the poems of Alexander Kushner successfully competes with the “heavenly” - this unfading truth of modern lyricism allowed the poet to say more irresistibly than anyone else about the transformation of life by art, about its cultural quality:

What once flashed in ink,

L I T E R A T U R A

Kushner A. Favorites. (Foreword by I.A. Brodsky). St. Petersburg, 1997
Kushner A. Yarrow. St. Petersburg, 1998
Kushner A. Poems: Four Decades. M., 2000

Turbin V. Reflection of reflections.– Friendship of Peoples, 1976, No. 7
Chuprinin S. Alexander Kushner: Dictated by fate. – In the book: Chuprinin S. Close-up. M., 1983
Rodnyanskaya I. Poet between the immediate and the eternal. – In the book: Rodnyanskaya I. Artist in search of truth. M., 1989
Peng D.B. The world in the poetry of Alexander Kushner. Rostov-on-Don, 1992
Zholkovsky A. Poetics at the tea table (“Sugar Bowl” by Alexander Kushner) - “Star” 2012, No. 10.

site dedicated to A.S. Kushner: http://kushner.poet-premium.ru/

A prose writer writes prose for a long time...

A prose writer writes prose for a long time.
He hears our conversations,
He drinks tea with us.
At the same time, such bullets are pouring!
At the same time, as if by chance
He looks at you sitting on the chair.

He, having built his novel in his mind,
He flies home without feeling his feet,
And there the fate of their heroes
Orders like a god.

Sometimes he judges them, sometimes he helps them out,
He hands them an umbrella on time,
First he will bring them together at a party,
Then on the street he will collide,
Feign their surprise.
I don't believe in these coincidences!
Sit, prose writer, quiet and mute.
No one met anyone.

The wave gets darker by night
The oarlock is knocking.
Charon is taciturn
But she is also silent.

Hands stroke the skin,
And the look, as in life, is firm.
The waves roll before her
Cocytus and Acheron.

For a long time such a load
The shuttle did not lift.
The Muse flies screaming,
And she doesn’t even know.

She's dressed up again
Calm, young.
Light and a little cool
The last trouble.

If only I had taken another road
To Compiegne or Paris...
But this one, thank God,
You won't surprise her.

Goodbye to come
A little excited.
But the chest breathes no more often,
Than in Tsarskoye somewhere.

Like any disembodied spirit
Outlined by a stroke
Your path is irrevocable
Checks it with the verse.

She's floating in the fog
Among monsters, past rocks
Just like Modigliani
I drew her.

« Living someone else's life to the end…»

Having lived someone else's life to the end,
Having died in the nineteenth century,
Wiping mortal sweat from my face,
I see mills, huts, carts.

Biographies are so powerful
What hugs are allowed in a day?
Two lovers, two wives, two wars
And a great thought in between. Be useful to us, someone else's experience,
The evening light behind the dusty cavity,
Silence, five or six stanzas for the soul
And the bushes on the road from Vilna.

Even the troubles of great people
They give us an increase in life,
Starry sky, trotting horses
And wine, given its cheapness.

Of course, Baratynsky is sketchy.
Fet's stylelessness is visible to everyone.
Blok is secretly pedantic in German.
Annensky is in mourning for spring.
Tsvetaevskaya is a fanatical muse.
Akhmatova’s syllable is pompous.
Kuzmin is mannered. Parsnip taste
Lack: talkativeness is a vice.
There is pretentiousness in Mandelstam's lines.
And Zabolotsky is stingy at heart...
What a blessing - even the panorama
Their shortcomings, lined up!

How can I get rid of this nonsense?..

How to get away from this nonsense?
Khodasevich. Psyche. Poetry.
I have nothing to do with it, and the apartment
The summer night is quiet and bright,
And someone else's heavy lyre
My arm will be dislocated: it’s so heavy.

What is he looking for, trembling with happiness,
In a rhymed life is the soul?
Why are the lines hard for her?
So easy that to your sadness
Adds other people's results,
And the more bitter it is, the happier she is?

These eternal bills, calculations, debts
And calculations, calculations.
Drafts covered in numbers.
Our geniuses, martyrs, debtors.
Rhymes, nearby - expenses.

Was he playing cards? Did he borrow it?
It was cloudy, autumn.
The Iron Age is also a despicable metal.
Or planted a grove and counted and counted,
How many spruce and pine trees did you plant?

This life flows so absurdly and quickly!
Show us where to start counting from,
So as not to make mistakes?
Poem does not run away from prose, on the contrary!
The light is autumn and unsteady.

Under the high windows, driven by the storm,

The maple rushes and they fly high above it
Copper leaf triad.
To these hundreds and thousands of yours
Let's add tens.

Again the wild cat is on the heels
It's time to pay the bills
Her looks are getting worse and worse:
Runs forward, presses him to the bushes -
And there will be no mercy.

Anyway, this life is good in the end,
And in debt, and in tears, because she’s fresh!
And obedient rhyme
Running out to the call, and light as a soul,
And the exact number is accurate!

Gospel of the Jasmine Bush,
Breathing in the rain and turning white in the dusk,
Among the alleys and the ringing of mosquitoes
Says no less than Matthew.
So white and wet, so these grapes glow,
This is how petals fly from a touched wild animal. You are blind and deaf when you have evidence
We need more miracles besides this.
You are blind and deaf and looking for someone to blame,
And he himself is ready to offend someone.
But the bush will touch you, possessed,
And you will begin to speak and see.

« You'll come home rustling your cloak…»

You'll come home rustling your cloak,
Wiping the rain from your cheeks:
Is life still mysterious?
Still mysterious.
No need for ghosts, shadows:
It's dark as it is.
Ah, the prose in it is even stranger,
Most mysterious of all.
Life is dear to me, close-up,
Irregularities, chills
And the flaw seen in it,
Like a strong microscope.
The biologist will say, the screw is circling,
That you can't take your eyes off.
- I don’t know if we have a soul,
But in the cage, he will say, there is. And he is even more confused
That he is privy to the secret.
Well, that means we can still live.
Still mysterious.
When you come home, your hand is covered in chalk,
As if propped up
And this night, and this darkness,
And a stone portal.
Marble and granite teach us
Do not remember grievances
But remember how the leaves fly
At the feet of the caryatids.
As the world rocks - hold on!
Isn't it the leaves from your cheeks?
Decided to brush it off, making life
More mysterious still?

While reading the book, I was offended by it…

Who is old, let him write memoirs…

Who is old, let him write memoirs, -

We will not stoop to them.

Puff up, bush, sparkle, headlights,

Whirl, crests of sea waves!

I remember the shine of faded eyes

All those whom I was glad in life,

But I don't remember the conversations

No details, no dates.

And the beauty of antiques

Only speculatively appreciating

(And I don’t need it for nothing!),

I am today's friend.

I didn't like the sixties

Seventies, no

And only swallows - grandchildren

Fetov's nieces, lancet,

And Mandelstam's, the blind.

And the former life is not an example

How success is built

And my dead friend is not a locker,

To open it for everyone.

I am a slave, I am God, focusing

On the meaning of life, the worm and the king,

But I'm not a woodworm,

Living what was of old.

Glory is good in death…

“In death glory is good.

Derzhavin, powerful soul,

He is remembered less and less

He's already a little tired

Even under Pushkin, - funny

I built the phrase, but the essence

I decide to whisper recklessly.

He is edifying, absurd,

But, amazingly,

A crepe is pinned to his verse

Always consciously and boldly,

And among the velvet banners,

And stars and ribbons - not for a minute

He did not forget about death.

He nurtured such a quirk.

Such strangeness is all the same

What is someone else's stutter?

Or the habit of crumpling cloth,

Or a meaningless word

Pull unnecessarily: uh...uh...uh.

And to me, when I read it,

It becomes uneasy:

I burn, I turn pale, I die. Who said that earthly life is dimming?…

Who said that earthly life is dimming?
Archilochus is still drinking, leaning on his spear,
A warrior must always be on alert
To be, therefore, there is a spear and drink nearby,
And thank you for not running!

To see him better in the distance,
We need to remember ourselves as young.
However, having spent life without a spear, lightly,
I'm effeminate compared to him.

And the centuries could not be pushed back one step
His from the hard, hilly Thracian land:
Where he drank is where he drinks now,
Leaning on a spear, the marching cloak is covered in dust;
He drinks wine for poetry and for us!

Here he is, the world's first lyrical poet,
How is it for him! He himself is aware
That there is a Greek epic, but there are no lyricists:
He is neither Homer nor Hesiod.

For a short thing I'll give you a poem,
In twelve swift lines!
He doesn't know it, but he is firm and stubborn.
Or does he know that he is not alone?

And, bending down, he clears his cloak of burrs,
And in excitement I admire him from afar,
And, who knows, in my notebook
Sometimes, maybe in a half-asleep oblivion
He scratches something with a spear.

SECTION COMPILER - SASHA ZHIRNOVA, 9 V, 2014.

From verse. “In the eyelashes there is a rainbow and life is divided…” (collection “Direct Speech”, 1975).

The first collection of poems by A. Kushner (1962).

Alexander Kushner. Favorites. St. Petersburg: “Fiction”, 1997.

This was the name of the section “Notes in the Margins” (“Questions of Literature”, 1980, No. 1); it began like this: “Roll call with predecessors and contemporaries. This phenomenon, despite the bewildered and disapproving reviews of some of the critics, is a natural, natural and inevitable process” [p. 212].

The article “Book of Poems” was published in 1973 (No. 3).

“Rejection of the poem” - verse. from Sat. "The Letter" (1974). Compare: “When I wrote, about thirty years ago, the poem “Refusal of the Poem,” I meant not so much the doom of the poem as a genre (although that too), but rather the impossibility of resuming the epic, resistance to epic consciousness. (“...Let anyone paint broad canvases without us. Gigantomania is in honor. The newest Byron loves the epic. The interlinear book looks like a rebus. We are going to take this fortress, But how can we catch our breath?”). To say this in Russia, especially in the Soviet Union, was all the more important because in the twentieth century there was a clash of the epic and lyrical principles, their almost physically tangible struggle. My youth coincided with her. What was the Soviet government doing in the “ideological sphere”? Encouraging the epic. That’s why Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were chosen as victims in 1946, because a crushing blow had to be dealt to the lyrics.” -

There is information that, like garbage, clogs the brain with its uselessness. By accepting the unnecessary, a person takes space in his head from the important and extremely necessary.

Poetry is a leap over the abyss of human limitations.
The poetic method of cognition is the recognition of things not from the outside, but from the inside.

Humanity is divided by streams of aspirations.

People are still diligently looking for bushes in which they can hide from God, from life as it is, from themselves, that’s why the mugs of lies and deception are so dear to them, bubble illusions, and the truth is so hated.

Purpose is written inside every person with the song of his heart.

Even where one big one gives and another small one receives, equality of greatness is possible. A grateful taker is equal to a selfless giver. And the selfish/arrogant giver is less grateful than the one who takes.
Friendship is equality of greatness.

Someone else's correct answer without correctly posing your own question is an incorrect answer, despite the external truth.

If I seem beautiful to you, don’t believe me, I’m much worse.
If you are amazed by my ugliness, don’t believe me again, I’m better.

We, through our actions or inaction, create the reality in which we live. In fact, there are many realities; in the end, the one whose carriers are the most active wins.

The sighted ones see, but the evil ones hate.

Poetry is not rhyming, not the rules of versification, but a conversation with Genesis. The questioner is always a little Job: daring, having ontological grounds for his daring, a saint and a sinner at the same time, and, most importantly, a holy believer in the goodness of the Creator - like Abraham. The intensity of his questioning is extreme, and only for this reason does he obtain a star that is inaccessible to others who are not burned with thirst.

It's good to be a fool - you always seem smart to yourself.

A person is like a birdhouse - it acquires its true meaning only when a bird settles in it.

There is no need to dress up in humility, because God dresses a person in humility. Whoever has found the truth will also required form- humility. Humility is the clothing of truth. And whoever arbitrarily dresses himself in the clothes of humility in order to appear humble, looks unsightly and makes it difficult for himself to ascend to God.

God is truly needed only by those who cannot be satisfied with humanity. Thirsting for God is the way to find God.

In the Ray, responding to the Call, we give birth to our radiant Song

He who follows the right path, as soon as he takes it, will find his historical fellow travelers.

It is strange that some enter into an agreement with the devil, hoping to “talk his teeth” and receive concessions. This is impossible in principle - by the nature of things. It’s especially strange when supposedly religious people count on this. The devil will laugh cruelly at them. It is impossible to be saved by apostasy.

Sanity is conscience, not intellect. The movement towards sanity is the path to cleansing the conscience.

Only by letting someone else into the heart can you enter yourself. Therefore it is said: whoever says that he loves God but hates his neighbor is a liar.

Today Alexander Kushner turns 75 years old
Andrey AREV

If, following the example of Marina Tsvetaeva, we divide poets into “poets with history” and “poets without history,” then Alexander Kushner will be an ideal example of a creator of the latter type. What is unusual for a Russian in the 20th century is that they didn’t sit on estates. Even Boris Pasternak (according to Tsvetaeva, our main “poet without history”), with his dacha hermitage, was eventually written into “history” - you wouldn’t wish it on your enemy. This could not be done with Kushner. And it’s unlikely to succeed.

Kushner gave the refusal of claims to a personal biography that breaks out of time a minted character:

You don't choose times
They live and die in them.

Reflecting on Kushner, Joseph Brodsky noted: “We are downright corrupted by poetic biographies - mostly of a tragic nature, especially in this century. Meanwhile, a biography, even one extremely rich in events that captivate the imagination, has an extremely distant relationship with literature...”

Kushner expressed his view of “life goals” proclaimed in the public sphere of human activity with cheerful simplicity, as if drawing a child’s picture:

The one who doesn't dance dances
He knocks on the glass with a knife.
He who does not prance prances
From the stands he waves and shouts.

Who's really dancing?
And who prances on a horse,
Those are tired of these dances,
And these horses are doubly so!

But I'm not cold. I want your thistle
A lilac-blue eye will blink from the side of the road -
And my ice melted, and my wet anger
dried up,
And the angry heat cooled down -
in lonely doubt, -

Enough shouting, maybe
need a breath? -
I stand, thinking: I feel sorry for everyone
inadvertently.
And your world is sad, it’s good
or bad?
It's harder to be human in it
than a prophet.

In every way a mission statement. The bush is the main metaphor for life. From the bush, like God to Moses, Poetry itself speaks to him:

Gospel of the Jasmine Bush,
Breathing in the rain and turning white in the dusk,
Among the alleys and the ringing of mosquitoes
Says no less than Matthew.

So white and wet, so these grapes glow,
This is how petals fly from a touched wild animal.
You are blind and deaf when you
evidence
We need more miracles besides this.

You are blind and deaf and looking for someone to blame,
And he himself is ready to offend someone.
But the bush will touch you, possessed by a demon,
And you will begin to speak and see.

This sermon was delivered in a happy moment of life, of which Kushner has more than other poets, but not infinitely. For him, like for every thinking creature, death is also “always with him.” No one understands tragedy more deeply than a happy person. Even comparing the poet to a star, Kushner thought - to a target.

“Earthly” in the poems of Alexander Kushner successfully competes with “heavenly” - this unfading truth of modern lyricism allowed the poet to say about the transformation of life by art, about its cultural quality most irresistibly:

What once flashed in ink,
It remains forever in the blood.

Latest news from St. Petersburg on the topic:
What once flashed in ink...

Saint Petersburg

On September 15, the St. Petersburg poet Alexander Kushner was honored at the editorial office of the Zvezda magazine.
16:14 16.09.2011 Concrete.Ru

What once flashed in ink...- Saint Petersburg

Today Alexander Kushner turns 75 years old Andrey AREV If, following the example of Marina Tsvetaeva, we divide poets into “poets with history” and “poets
00:47 14.09.2011 St. Petersburg Gazette

March 9 at the Youth Library named after. A.P. Gaidar (Bolshoy pr., 18A) held a festive concert.
13.03.2019 Petrogradsky district

Where is the table, where is the chair, where is the bouquet.

In a caftan, with a lush mustache,
Man with a half-dead rose
He looks at her, not knowing what to do with her.
Inhale the finest aroma
In his head, of course,
Can’t come (whether it’s the case -
Pluck it and bring it to the lady!).
This is how we should behave
So they should be a little careless
Men approach life
To her smothered beauty,
Like this nice officer
(there is no room for reproach here) -
A little awkward, clumsy,
Then what is something other than life
There are: duty and valor, for example.

"I loved - and did not remember myself when I woke up..."

I loved - and did not remember myself when I woke up,
But the name of my beloved popped up in my memory,
Two syllables, as if I knew them from birth,
As if it had become mine overnight;
He stood up, automatically brushing off the blanket.

And the rest ended at the thought of her,
He's not good enough! And again - an obsession.
Loved - and it seemed: to reach the door
It’s impossible without entering into temptation three times
Break up with yourself in front of things.

And the old Norwegian who taught enmity
Our grandmothers' love, from the shelf
Got on the table and read in trouble
More binge drinking than the new ones; fjords and fir trees,
And the hole, and the author's look from under the bangs.

Truly this world is too rich,
He doesn't care about ruined nests.
Oh, what does our condemning glance mean to him!
The letters are burning and the stars are falling,
And frosts creep into the garden.

Loved - and stood by the spring mechanism
Earthly and heavenly as close as later
Didn't happen anymore; not knowing the reasons
And knowledge of quirks; don't trample in the hallway,
And a pass to the chambers, where the chair and bed are.

Loved - and probably love too
Was, that is, rejected, marked, tortured.
What kind of work and stress is this for young people?
Be; old and having endured all this - better.
I envied the birds and creatures of the forest.

Loved - and now also... no, nothing
There's more of this, now everything's alright
Dreams just don’t know yet
That we have awakened and love riddles:
Curtains, and curtains, and gathers, and folds.

Loved... oh, when was that? Forgot.
For a long time. As if in another life or century
Friend, and now for nothing this ardor
It is impossible to understand even wet eyelids:
Well, what’s wrong with that, he loved – and loved.

Bush

Gospel of the Jasmine Bush,
Breathing in the rain and turning white in the dusk,
Among the alleys and the ringing of mosquitoes
Says no less than Matthew.

So white and wet, so these grapes glow,
This is how petals fly from a touched wild animal.
You are blind and deaf when you have evidence
We need more miracles besides this.

You are blind and deaf and looking for someone to blame,
And he himself is ready to offend someone.
But the bush will touch you, possessed,
And you will begin to speak and see.

“What a miracle if there is...”

What a miracle if there is
The one who lit it in our honor
Night many constellations!
And if everything goes by itself
It was settled then, my friend,
Even more wonderful!

Are we the losers? No.
Then everything is a mystery, everything is a secret.
And life is absolutely incredible!
Fire rushing into the darkness!
Even more beautiful because
Which is irrevocable.

Folding your wings

Feasts

Andrey Smirnov

Champagne - two hundred bottles,
Orchestra - eighteen rubles,
Five hundred silver forks
Glasses, plates, knives,
Appetizers, pheasants, turkeys,
Violets from greenhouses, -
Everything is counted down to the penny,
The last footman has been paid.

And the reverse side of the old feast
On glossy yellow sheet
Blinding like the Fontanka at night
With lights in mirror water.
It seemed forgotten, but it surfaced,
It appeared and went from hand to hand.
But who will tell us how it was
It's carefree and fun there!

Dull and boring!
Satire
There is a marble torso on the stairs.
I don't feel sorry for this feast
And a couple, and life - to tears.
I know why it's fussy
Others have left the worlds,
In a tailcoat buttoned crookedly,
Brel Tyutchev to these feasts.

Oh, if only it would languish and flicker,
Attracted to white hair...
I don't feel sorry for this ball
And ardor, and life - to tears,
Her crushes and tubs
With a shabby palm tree in it,
And our yesterday's feast,
And the day before yesterday, yours!

"In a slippery cemetery, alone..."

In a slippery cemetery, alone,
Among the broken slabs, ruins,
Torn marble veins,
Rotten aspens, -
I'm standing at Tyutchev's grave.

Don't move away.
Near Obvodny, among
Factory walls, pressed closely,
Look: almost forgotten
"The All-Consuming Abyss."

So here she is! Unearthly light
Is it a pity to get out through the greenery?
The wrong side of life? Chaos? - No.
Swept away years
Outdated garbage, just a landfill.

What cemeteries we have!
Their desolation -
Giving up life and giving up
From death, two or three bird phrases
There are tattered stumps in the bushes.

In the fields of the afterlife we ​​wander,
Not in purple - dressed in rags,
In a remote way.
Give me a rubber band and we’ll erase it like this:
Not a line from us, not a sign.

Our hundred years
Thousands of years of destruction
They can give you a head start: there are so many troubles
Bombs fell, extinguishing the light,
Calls with devastation at night.

Go to sleep, cool down.
Well, don't plant flowers
On this dust and ruin!
If it weren’t for Tyutchev, maybe
He would have been completely plowed over.

And that's all
Our character and rapture.
And is the Kingdom of God here?
And is it really arrogance that colors the dead?
Is there insincere humility in the poems?

Ask Tyutchev - and he
Through eternal sleep
He waves his hand and shrugs his shoulders.
And it seems: mortal damage
Blessings, between us.

“To be a classic means to stand on the shelf...”

To be a classic means to stand on the shelf
A senseless bust, bristling with collarbones.
Oh Gogol, is this all in a dream, in reality?
This is how they put up a stuffed animal: a snipe, an owl.
You stand instead of a bird.

He wrapped himself in a scarf, he loved to make things
Vests, camisoles.
It’s not like undressing - swallowing a piece
I couldn’t in front of witnesses - the sculptor is naked
Delivered. Is it nice to be a classic?

To be a classic - to watch from the cabinet in the classroom
For schoolchildren; they will remember Gogol -
Not a wanderer, not a righteous man, not even a dandy,
Not Gogol, but Gogol's upper third.

Like Kovalev's nose. Last lesson:
No need to make things up, life is fantastic!
O young men, the dust on your face is like a stocking!
Being a classic is scary, almost indecent.
They don’t hear: they want to go to the ceiling.

“And after the retreat, I can’t think of a head...”

And after the holiday, I can’t keep my head up
Lift from the pillow, still trying to find out
Details about the capture of Khiva.
Why does he need them? After all, he moved
To the region where Khiva is the same empty sound,
Like Tsarskoe Selo.
The linden trees rustled in the window,
And life's sweet delirium, multiplied by foliage,
Death was drowned out by him, her melancholy and wheezing.

And we, having read about how someone died,
We try on someone else's death in secret:
Wouldn't it suit us? Perhaps this is horror
It could have been worse, let's try another one.
I have flickered and died so many times in others,
That he half endured his own death:
Her sleeve was wrinkled and her material was wiped.
When I go out at night, I’ll throw it on like an old cloak.

“The child is closest to oblivion...”

A child is closest to nothingness.
He is still haunted by illnesses,
He tends to sleep and oblivion
To the unsteady infant songs.

The darkness still licks him,
Sneaking up to the headboard like a wolf,
Smoothing out the glimmers of the mind
And adults smearing their faces.

He's still in a white lace haze
And cloudy, he’s still swaddled,
And in linen and linen foam
His rosy moments are drowning.

Foggy from the edge of existence,
So they lie in death, as he did in life,
Relaxed without self,
It is our living pity and reproach.

He's still rocked, he
What he remembers about unconsciousness, he will forget.
He is watching his eternal sleep.
Look closely at him: they are about to wake him up.

“Control. The darkness outside the window is purple..."

Tests. The darkness outside the violet window,
No worse than ink. And two options
Divided class. And you don't know the answers.
I still have neither courage nor talent.
No adult grin, no life experience.
If you take out a textbook, they will shame you and take it away.
Has anyone ever been to the vast motherland,
Like a little schoolboy, so threateningly abandoned!

Perhaps those years had a special impact
Longing and chills? I don't think so, however.
Ah, childhood is always cool-headed
The look is sculpted with severity and confusion.
And I wake up in the darkness of midnight
From mortal melancholy and blinding light
Those lamps on cords, their milky whiteness,
And this abandonment squeezes my heart.

And all our troubles are grown-up:
Checks and failures, involuntary trembling,
Tremors of love and even a date -
All this is not worth that children's test.
We just forgot. But the little schoolboy
He paid for us until he grew up,
And the triangle trembled in his fingers.
Today, as an adult, he couldn't stand it.

Visit

I also visited
The area where the light
A ray of light to me in my youth,
Where is the willow flooring?
Springed under my foot.
There is no strength to recognize her.
I lost the key to it.
There was no such thing
Hollows and railings
Berezovykh, and steep -
Their appearance confused me.

So that's it! No
That swamp and flowers and no signs,
And no traces.
And a trace of youth
Melted and caught a cold.
There were no bushes here!
Oh who's twenty years old
Did he change the land for us?

Unrecognizable face
Earth - and it’s so sad,
It's like a glacier slid down
And layer upon layer grew.
And those films and books
Monstrous skeleton!
And your children's diary,
Gone into the Mesozoic!

Elegies are alien
To our habits, to us
And there is no direct need
Digging out all the trash
Retired
And collect those years
Details: pickaxe
You'll come across a skeleton
That life and enmity.

In the magazine "Crocodile"
Diplodocus is walking
As a symbol of formidable forces,
Similar to a bag.
But maybe that's all
The view would be worse
For us just that
What the heart values.

There is a card where you are
With a friend from many years ago
Filmed by an amateur.
The passages are blocked.
Foggier than that light.
Paler than the Garden of Eden.
You can see the rut there,
That the heavy rain washed away.
So - you were in heaven,
But apparently I forgot.

I am "Confession" by Rousseau
I just re-read it.
It's so overgrown
Everything has a new meaning in it,
That I didn’t recognize the books
Its pages, parts.
So many new faces!
Envious people, singers,
Sluts, cheated.
Tell me, expert of people,

Did you paste it in?
But the shine of the fields is even
And the glue is invisible.
And there is among the pages
Such that it is quite
Could be entered
Tolstoy, in another country,
Where there is snow and feather grass.
Trembling eyelashes
The fervor of heartfelt truth.

I visited too.
Probably in our age
Change quickly
Features of swamps and rivers;
Look: the rear has been blown up.
The collapse of your soul.
Man is unable to
Slow down hard running
Lawns and roots.

I remembered Muscovites,
Those who feel sorry for Arbat.
But the bank and the stream
Those streets are not stronger
And stone naiads.

Who would have thought that the landscape
Passes like love
Like youth, like a mirage, -
He sees our horror
And a raised eyebrow.
Memorial letters,
On white - gold,
Guide book,
Chewing stale verse,
Can not see. Spurge
Antiquities
He doesn't know. Goodbye!
This is not our fault.

The meadows are sliding into death,
Like a fringed tablecloth.
Perhaps die -
Come to your home
Without turning on the light
Without catching your foot
No table, no stool.

It's getting dark. Friends
Less and less. Happy that
That I lived with all the sadness,
Without making problems
From the difference blind
Between someone and yourself,
Was so much more important
A sign of community
Still inherited
From pre-war days

And today's old women,
That they were walking shoulder to shoulder,
In T-shirts and shorts,
Under the sticky red,
With garlands in hands.
Oh poplar fluff
And a heavy swing of copper!
After all, childhood is a rumor
And vision, not fear.

I fought my way through
But I didn’t find the meadow.
Come on and we'll leave
Easy as he left.

You thought you'd surprise
A set of changes
accumulated by you,
But the bushes are wet
They don’t know what to compare with
Faded features
Your faded appearance
Sentimental scenes
They are ashamed that you
It must be anyone.

And you know, I’m even glad
I to this: our world -
Not a nature reserve; stock
Its changeable; holes
Don't patch; but
New for those
Who won the lotto
Your number is later than us,
Whose whispers and laughter
You hear at a late hour.

In the wagon

The belt on the suitcase creaked,
The spoon clinked in the glass,
Ray after beam stretched along the wall.
What are they about? Don't know. Nothing.
Buckles and clasps shook.
Dresses and boots swayed.
The lampshade winked and blinked.
The carriage groaned and crackled.
The shelf was swaying and swaying.
Some kind of cord was struggling for a long, long time
On the wall with a metal hook.
What are they about? Don't know. Nothing.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, the logs have been unloaded.
By eight, by eight, by eight, no, at nine exactly.
It’s all a whim, it’s nothing, forgive me, it’s all nonsense.
Try this: yes - yes, and no - so no.
Oh, these knocks, creaks, bustles,
I gave in to these persuasion,
I bowed and agreed with fate,
Persuaded by buckle and shackle.

“I don’t like the East, I don’t understand...”

I don't like the East, I don't understand
Love for deserts, heat and carpets,
To its stones, with ornaments around the edge,
To his flowery, insinuating speeches,
To his poems, in which not a word
Either a rose or a gem,
And the purple haze of Pavel Kuznetsov
In museums I am all the more saddened,
That these dreams are miraculous, alien
I don’t dream, and I secretly realize
Your own inferiority, seeing how others
They find paradise while living in that land,
Where I am is only heat and dusty haze.
The East is rich, and these lines are pathetic
He won’t read it, and he’s too lazy, and, thank God,
The chill won't hurt the East.

I have a friend, he was born
In Moscow, but chose this sweet captivity,
It rang out in the cheekbones, completely transformed
And it became like your Tajik or Turkmen.
Nationality is a strange concern
She passes. Heart clinging
To another land, loses count,
The ligature also believed in a different pattern.

And I, looking closely at other lines,
Looking for an example for myself in other people's poems,
I look: they are sprinkled with sand,
Dry, solid, creaking on the teeth,
And they praise the steppe and demand courage.
The soul resists becoming a grain of sand.
Oh, leaves for her, and clouds, and moisture,
From the balcony on the night of a flying swift!

Lace

Cloth blanket from the display case
They pulled back and the lace appeared
Patterned, in air bubbles.
Something like foam or snow.
And to the air of the seventeenth century
We crouched on bent arms.

The lace attracted my friend.
It's not that I prefer sackcloth,
But this luxury is not about us either.
About Richelieu, who ruined Saint-Mars.
The collar on the chopping block is like steam.
Take it off and they will execute you now.

But still, how to breathe! In the world
There is nothing cooler than these loops,
You name it, whatever you call it.
Patterned acupuncture.
But even in poetry the air element
The most important thing, both in thunderstorms and in love.

The verse is based on exhalation and inhalation,
Love is on them, and every shift in the era.
Remember how the garden breathes at night!
These punctures, gaps, gaps,
Cry-filled shudders.
What are our lives doing? They see through.

Let's come to our senses. Do you seem tired?
Let's throw a cloth blanket
On lace - and lace exactly the same
The song will be cut short, like a titmouse’s song,
When a rag is thrown onto the cage:
It’s day outside the window, but for the songbird it’s night.

"There was fog. And in the fog...

Ya. Gordin

There was fog. And in the fog
Like the shadows of the grave
The British walked two steps away from the French,
Without noticing other people's ships.

Nelson was nervous: he missed Bonaparte,
He rushed to Alexandria, trampled at the walls of Syracuse,
Too much excitement
He invested in this matter: the Frenchman was missed.

Just imagine: no fog this night!
The French fleet was identified, shot, scattered, defeated.
And then - nothing from the crazy step and plan,
No pyramids.

Nothing at all. No empire, no Austerlitz.
And the twelfth year, and the epic novel - forgive me.
O fog! Homeless suspended moisture particle,
It's good that Nelson met you on the way.

In history I like phantasmagoria, forfeits,
Everything that historians are so ashamed of in it.
They want to put options on a rigid chain,
And she goes to the ship and gives them a hundred days right away!

And because for them it is not art, but science,
He doesn’t reach into his pocket for an insult.
Maybe she's a torment
But not boredom. I went out into the yard and took a closer look: fog.

Folding your wings

The butterfly will fold its wings,
And its color will match the tree bark.
Who can find her?
There is no butterfly.

Ah, ah, ah, woe to us, woe!
The wings will coincide at all points: no cracks, no seams.
Like a Greek choir
Stanza and antistrophe.

How rich we were, but we lost everything!
If you wanted to return this shine, you wouldn’t be able to.
Where is your palace? Blind man, you walk, stumbling in sorrow.
Oedipus the King.

Joy folded its wings
And he looks with his other, melancholy side.
What did the soul value?
It became pure flour.

And the handwriting changes
And, bending over the line,
You are not catching a butterfly, but a pathetic, withered leaf,
Appearing like a butterfly at hand.

And time grows dark.
Where are its streaks, velvety fabric and canvas?
Turns into darkness
You can barely discern life, the pattern of the road in the fog.

How many colorful butterflies floated up to the eyes and seduced:
And the tropical heat, and Paris in purple smudges!
And the soul died -
Yes, a voice whispered to me: “You’re looking in the wrong place!”

Ah, ah, ah, look more closely,
Looking around and again plunging into yourself.
Maybe love is here somewhere, only in folded form,
Perched, wing on wing, silently loving?

Maybe good, if true, then on the sly.
Completely secret, it is completely dark.
It won’t leave even a crack,
So that someone can see how perfect it is.

Maybe it’s because the butterfly folded its sultry wings,
It is also our fault: we came too close to it.
Let's move away - and Princess Brambila will flutter and wake up.
In colorful dust!

«…»

September sweeps with a wide broom
Bugs, spiders with webs through them,
Tormented butterflies, shriveled wasps,
On the broken wings of broken dragonflies,
Their round lenses, binoculars, glasses,
Scales, spacers, thick pollen,
Their antennae, paws, hooks,
Frills that were flattering.

September sweeps with a wide broom
Chitinous garbage, lace outfit,
As if the director of ballet greenhouses
He woke up and blew away his dancers.
September sweeps out of the yard with a broom
Over the field, over the river and further into the darkness,
Cuffs, fasteners, cloaks, fans,
Hopes for happiness, cambric, fringe.

Farewell, my joy! To the wasp cemetery,
To the beetle dump, to the horsefly graveyard,
To the kingdom of Pluto, to dried tears,
To the faded, flower-filled Elysian fields!

Sound wave

"On the other side of love, on the other side of death..."

From the other side of love, from the other side of death
Tosca sees a completely different pattern:
Not this disastrous one, but like a watercolor one,
Easily and cheerfully running into the open space.

O heartache, for a moment show the inside out,
Like a poplar with leaves turned upside down in the wind,
Like a cloak open, like a hem, a fugitive
Suddenly forcing you to press your coat with your hand.

Ask for a breath, for a scent from the sea into the garden
The invigorating freshness of the waves hitting the cape,
So that the even word blows us away like a breeze -
And we saw its fuzzy meaning.

“Winter shows us an icy curtain there...”

There, winter shows us an icy curtain,
Sharpened in spring; there is a blanket shining;
There is a silver braid, all in knots;
There - the tablecloth has slipped and the fringe is shining
Its glass; and dripping from the balcony;

There you can see the brush; there is a fine comb;
There is the skeleton of a tubular, cranked organ;
There is an eagle's claw launched into the snow,
Walrus tusk, dog tooth, ram horn;
There is an icy skin, like the skin of a banana;

The candle has floated; columns capital
It seems to be in the garden; under it is a piece of a column -
A block of soaked ice, laid in bed,
Entwined with frost - so entwined with hops
Ruins somewhere in green Lombardy.

All this melts, sticks together, floats.
You and I are walking in the ruins of winter.
A certain culture, set in ice,
He says goodbye in tears and gives a crack.
And we breathe in the March air, like love.

“Not about love - about a high rustle...”

Not about love - about high rustling
There is one deaf leaf in the foliage,
As if delirium in deep unconsciousness -
And you can’t calm it down, you can’t even it out.

Not about love - about a stray strand,
About a quiet sigh that suddenly escaped;
Not about love - about mystery and guesswork,
But so dark, so ghostly, my friend.

Not about love - about valor and duty.
What kind of stanza does Corneille suggest to us?
Not about love - about a sigh and a slip of the tongue,
About the cold, about the glass in the closet.

Even at night they are being carried out on a stretcher,
And the star's shine hangs by a thread,
And he keeps beating, crouched, veined,
And it rustles like a vein on a temple.

“Such brilliance - no need for any floral Nice...”

Valery Popov

Such shine - no need for any floral Nice.
It is impossible to sit indoors in the spring.
And I say to the starling: “Fly if you are a bird!”
And lilacs: “Please, if there are lilacs, then bloom!”

The person is dissatisfied: still bad with meaning
Life; there is nothing to help a person, but it’s good
With a starling and a lilac hanging like a hat
And it breathes sinlessly, thoughtlessly, freshly into his face.

And if they took those to the left and those to the right,
All the same, even in tears, he would have joined the majority,
For whom life, even if it is pain and poison,
That is a happy pain, the rays flood the foliage!

“Like maple and rowan growing at the threshold...”

Like maple and rowan growing at the threshold,
Growing up on the doorstep of Rastrelli and Rossi,
And we distinguished Empire from Baroque,
How did you eat from pine trees at that age?
Well, what about the false classical style?
There's something funny in a toga, in the fog
Condensed, looking at cars,
Is the commander standing in a sheet, like in a bathhouse?
And we take convention for granted.
Firstly, habit. And they explained to us
In infancy this cheerful strangeness,
When they brought us here by the hand.
And these mighty copper folds,
Stuck to the body, excuse me, to the uniform,
They lie down in such impeccable order,
What in childhood inspires confidence in the world,
The desire for fame. From whatever point we
They didn’t bother to look – it was still a sight for sore eyes.
Especially if the leaf is spinning
And autumn, like a banner, stands in the distance.

“If the pebbles are in two piles of disputes...”

E. Nevzglyadova

If the pebbles are in two piles of disputed
We will arrange them according to their different colors,
There will be more whites than blacks.
Martial, there is no point in being despondent.
If this is what happened to you in tough Rome,
Believe me, it’s exactly the same in Leningrad.
Where all day long under icy winds
The stones show off in a wet outfit.

The rustle of someone else's conversation can be heard.
The colonnade is curved, like in Rome.
Here they bloom near the Kazan Cathedral
Tragic roses in heavy makeup.
Happiness is here! theatrical gesture
The shadow slides over the buds and tangles.
Martial, let others go to Paestum,
Famous for the double bloom of roses.

“And a dusty haze, and the distance in a halo...”

And the dusty haze and the distance in a halo
Evening sun and a grove in the fog.
The artist works so quietly in the field,
What does a field mouse find in your pocket?

Alas, her body is funny and pathetic.
And, disgustedly taking it out of his pocket,
He hides his smile. For the Lord God
It is still flattering and strange to be accepted.

He thinks: if only in a gray jacket,
Worn, smeared with oil paint,
He would have poked his head in too, smart and nimble,
In a wide pocket for warmth and affection, -

Will they scream and tremble when they discover him?
Will they strangle you, warm you up? Will they be released?
For meekness, for the fussy-frail appearance,
For devotion to this dusty field?

Wave

Wave in lace,
Breaks, bends, twists,
Molded curls,
Repeated jumps and motives;
Wave with fringe,
With a pediment on a lush top
Over the expanse of the sea.
Shine, Borromini, Bernini!

And the roar and the hum.
Casual, elegant, high.
To the sky, shielding myself from the splashes with my palm,
looked:
And in the sky - baroque!
Clouds are floating:
Garlands, pilasters, railings.
What hand
Bizarrely blinded them like that?

Scientist,
I don't need your efforts:
The source is clear to me
And the origin of styles!
Like a storm or calm,
Without asking you how the weather is,
The style is changing.
Art is freedom!

From the trends in it,
Borrowings and influences
Even more fun. When there is no wind, we will fall asleep,
We'll wake up with a roar.
Oh, wish fulfillment!
I'm sitting at the table.
Uneven breathing and disruptions
Heart problems - the rhythm makes you shake,
Turning thoughts like stones in the surf.

Plot backbone
Set aside, with his lack of freedom
And boredom. So,
I like what is called "meaningless"
ode.
Crash lines
The poet is sometimes powerful, sometimes powerless.
But this vice
It is sustained and productive:

He is called to reveal
Confusion and fatigue
So that we can evaluate
The higher the inspiration could be.
Like waves on rocks
Like a crumbling mass.
And I'm so tired
That there is no need to pretend.

We've been given a head start -
About ten years: we grew up later.
Take names dear from past times:
We are older, but younger at heart And the string is strong
It’s clamped on the neck, but still...
But still a wave
And ours - on the exhale too.

“What, is life fun?” -
So they will ask in a strange and absurd way.
"Life is better than being
I could, but worse than I could
I wanted to,” - at the gate
I will answer from the afterlife,
Where the shadows stand
Waiting for tired guests.

What, can I come in?
The lights and halos will be dimmed.
We're better than we are
They could, but worse than they could
I wanted to. Walk
Sedately, like in the Hermitage?
To tell the truth,
I don't crave the future life.

I am these poems
He wrote, contrary to Heraclitus:
Like the same sins
Entered these stanzas, by appearance
Similar friend
On a friend, although in Leningrad
I finished them, remembering the south in the north,
And I started in Crimea, leaning against a chalk balustrade.

I remember: love,
It seemed like there would be no end
How hard, in the blood,
To hopeless titanic torments,
And into this wave
He rushed around, looking for a distraction.
And suddenly it turned out that my pain was shorter in length,
Than a poem.

I'm ashamed in my life
Confessions, in poetry, more and more often
I seem to myself
A monster with a burning eye,
Ruined life
For yourself and your loved ones and again
Popping up high
For the wet, precise word.

Reader and friend!
What to do with a sound wave?
It rolls - and suddenly
Gives me away completely, -
And here it is at hand
Yours, with fluttering and trembling,
I'm dying and fading on the dry white page
With all my truths and lies.

What could be the body
Frozen pitiful and jelly?
But I flew by
For a long time, this is my sound in separate Divorces, turns,
Out of touch with his own life.
But, apparently, in verse
There is something of blood and mucus.

I'm ashamed that I
I have your attention.
And is it yours?
Hidden life is not a shudder,
Not a mortal impulse
Not waves in a blinding dress?
Having humbled disgust,
Throw me into the sea like a crab!

We lived with you
At one unprecedented time,
And the general surf
He hit us on the chin and crown,
And the years passed
You can't turn back the lines of poetry.
You are a book and a blanket
Under your arm - and you leave the beach.

But here, aside
Having learned that I am dying and freezing,
Comes for me
And drags you back into the abyss -
Wave in curls,
Repeated jumps and motives,
Cool times
Salty and yet – happy!

From the storeroom

In memory of Akhmatova

1. “The wave gets darker at night...”

The wave gets darker by night
The oarlock is knocking.
Charon is taciturn
But she is also silent.

Hands stroke the skin,
And the look, as in life, is firm.
The waves roll before her
Cocytus and Acheron.

For a long time such a load
The shuttle did not lift.
The Muse flies screaming,
And she doesn’t even know.

End of free trial

A thing among other things and in combination with them forms a community of independent things, each of which can freely dispose of itself. Uniqueness, self-sufficiency and self-relationship of things, phenomenological multiplicity of being - this is another aspect of metaphorical intention. In other words, in metaphor as a means of poetics we glimpse not so much the reality of the One as the reality of multiple being. In this case, metaphor is the clearest phenomenological confirmation of the personalistic structure of the world. It is no coincidence that the name of the character is assigned to heroes in art.

Vvedensky’s poem “I’m sorry that I’m not a beast” expresses this two-aspect, multidirectional intention of metaphor:

“I’m scared that when I look at two identical things I don’t notice that they are different, that each lives once.

I’m scared that when I look at two identical things I don’t see that they are trying hard to be similar” (51. P. 184).

“I’m scared” is a consequence of the finitude of human existence.

“We will sit with you wind on this pebble of death...

It’s difficult for me that I am with minutes, they have confused me terribly” (51. P. 183).

Hence the experience of transcendence, or rather, an attempt at transcendence, the desire to be different, to become every thing, that is, to discover another in oneself, to become another self.

“I also have a claim that I am not a carpet, not a hydrangea” (ibid.).

Metaphor as a way of being of things in artistic experience knows its ontically specific forms and techniques. Thus, in the novel, the characters are isolated and identified, actualized in metaphorical relations of contact and distance, they interpret each other, repeat and at the same time withdraw into themselves, become isolated, personalize. In particular, provoking the semantic integrity of the “main character” in a novel (or several main characters) only in the system of characters occurs due to their metaphorical correlation with minor characters, double characters or, conversely, antagonist characters, with special intermediary characters, and finally, with the direct point of view of the author (60. P. 73131). There are also pictorial, plastic, and musical metaphors. Ludwig Wittgenstein gives a diagram of visual metaphor in “Philosophical Investigations,” calling it “the memory of the head” (38. p. 278). This is a drawing of a head in which you can see both the head of a hare and the head of a duck. “Two in One” is a diagram of visual transformations and differences. A pictorial metaphor, more clearly than a literary one, reveals not the spatial, but the temporal nature of the metaphor. The relationship of a thing with other things and with itself is not spatial, but temporal in nature. To enter into a metaphorical relationship means to get into certain time, time of experience. The game of differences and similarities into which an object is drawn into in a metaphor is a way for the object to clarify its own, to search for its own integrity. As G. Amelin writes, “metaphor as an integral event does not deal with identification various items, but with the difference within one object, the difference between the object and itself. More precisely, the point of similarity of two different objects is the point of dissimilarity of the object with itself... The object begins to last, to pass time, makes splits in time” (39. P.268).

Based on the “head memory” principle, the following are built famous paintings Salvador Dali, like “The Invisible Man”, “The Slave Market and the Invisible Bust of Voltaire”, “Portrait of Mae West”, “Metamorphosis of Narcissus”, the painting “Bottle Woman” by Rene Magritte, “The Librarian” by D. Arcimboldo (XVI century) and many others paintings But this is not the only way of pictorial metaphor. Dialogical metaphorical provocation of a thing on a canvas is carried out in different ways: by transferring it into an alien subject context, with which it enters into syntactic relationships, for example, “Six Appearances of Lenin on the Piano” by Dali or the once scandalous painting “Lunch on the Grass” by E. Manet, into an unusual light and color environment, transformation of the contours of a thing, deformations, a system of shifts. In fact, shift is another name for metaphor, since it presupposes movement, the movement of a thing from the “about” mode to the “per” mode, where it appears unknown and unexpected (50). Even at first glance, such a non-metaphorical genre of painting as still life, in its historical development, reflects the fate of a thing in its antinomic artistic realization– to stand between the general and the individual, the universal and the unique (40). Wherever a thing enters into close syntactic relations with its environment, it lives in repetitions and differences, transformations and references.

Cinema knows its “crowded verse series” (Yu. Tynyanov), its methods of metaphor. Montage allows you to transfer action or states from objects to objects, the game of shots establishes a purely cinematic correlation, where things do not go one after another, but as if instead of each other, standing in someone else’s place, thereby provoking semantic formation. A classic example is the montage of the beating of a workers’ demonstration with footage of the massacre in the film “Strike” by S. M. Eisenstein. Tynyanov describes the film metaphor as follows: “Now, if after a frame in which a close-up of a man in a meadow is given, there will be a close-up shot of a pig walking right there - the law of semantic correlation of frames and the law of timeless, extra-spatial meaning close-up will defeat such a seemingly naturalistic motivation as the simultaneity and single-space nature of the walk of a man and a pig; as a result of such alternation of frames, the result will not be a temporal or spatial sequence from man to pig, but a semantic figure of comparison: man-pig” (41. P. 334).

An unusual angle moves a thing from its place, angles change continuously - the thing constantly moves, the relationships between things and people on the screen are constantly rearranged. The meaning is being rebuilt. The meaning comes during the "re". Cinema, more than any other art, has the ability to move, displace, transfer, replace - to provoke things into self-actualization.

We are accustomed to using stable art-historical terms such as allegory and symbol, grotesque and simile; today we vying with each other to talk about simulacrum. But all these paths have one ontological basis - the relationship, the structure “from... to...”, and the latter is a “transition”, “transfer” of meaning from something to something, in a word, a metaphor. It is metaphor, as a noetic way of being of artistic experience, as the founder of the relationship that is the ontological basis, the foundation of the entire set of artistic tropes.

In particular, a symbol is a metaphor whose final destination is unknown. Metaphor - transferring a place to another place, relocation, rearrangement, dragging, eternal moving from place to place. A person who carries a burden on his shoulders, for example, furniture when moving to another apartment, lives at this time in a state of metaphor. Where he takes her is seen quite clearly, but this does not eliminate the inappropriateness of what is happening and does not give hope for final settlement. The new location is given in advance as the new transfer point. The symbol reinforces the metaphor. It is also a transfer, but where exactly is not clear at all. This is a transfer in all directions at once. A symbol always symbolizes something, but that something is unknown. Therefore, we are trying to unravel, decipher the symbol. A simulacrum differs from a symbol in that it is a transfer to nowhere, a sending to nothing. Therefore, it does not require decryption at all. Simulacrum is an apophatic construction, which cannot be said to mean nothing. It means precisely nothing, symbolizes nothing, it can be everything, that is, nothing. A simulacrum is an absolute metaphor and an absolute way of life in the “re” mode.

If with a symbol, comparison, simulacrum, metamorphosis, metaphor is, so to speak, on the same horizontal axis, being its fundamental basis, then with metonymy it forms, as it were, a perpendicular. In linguistic terms, these are the axes of selection and substitution. Roman Jakobson gave metaphor and metonymy a fundamentally polar nature of relationships that permeate not only speech and language, but also art and, in general, any semantic process in individual or collective consciousness (54). It is metaphor that makes metonymy artistic. Metonymy identifies an object, calls the whole by its part. But the formation of the whole in its part, the search for a thing to have its “true face”, its “otherness” is ensured by metaphor. Metaphor in artistic experience provokes a metonymically represented thing to imagine the unrepresentable, introduces the thing into distinguishing itself, and carries out a dialogue with it.

In the history of metaphor, the persistence of one ontically specific type of metaphor is striking. It deserves mention, if only because it has this history, and also because it reveals artistic experience from an unexpected side. Let's call this type of metaphor “cultural natural”. It is characteristic of all arts, of architecture with its floral ornaments, for painting with its bio and zoomorphism, for sculpture, which draws its source of form from nature, for literature and cinema. For example, great amount poetic metaphors have one constant, rooted in the past type of formation - the transfer of states and properties belonging to the “world of nature” into the “world of culture” and vice versa, more precisely, the discovery of one in the other, so that their boundaries are problematized. This type of metaphor is so constant that all the complex dynamics of undifferentiated poetic work, the tense and sublime mental game of verbal manipulation, real experience, which naturally does not divide objects into classes, may even seem to be a shockingly stereotypical realization of the underlying primitive scheme. Moreover, judging by various autobiographies of poets, such realizations bring them the deepest satisfaction. Alexander Kushner, having pronounced “The Gospel from the jasmine bush...” (35. P. 172), probably experienced enormous satisfaction. Or Zabolotsky, when it seemed to him that “Like little Hamlet, the grasshopper is crying” or “The forest chapel has already fallen silent” (42. P. 191, 183) (“the cultural type of metaphor permeates all of Zabolotsky’s work”). Or Pasternak, who witnessed “a stormy meeting // Trees over the roof shingles” (31. P. 180). Or Khlebnikov, who saw the head of Nietzsche in the walrus, and Ivan the Terrible in the rhinoceros, and for whom “seagulls with a long beak and a cold blue eye, as if surrounded by glasses, have the appearance of international businessmen, which we find confirmation in the innate art with which they pick up water thrown to the seals on the fly” (43. P. 186187). Or, finally, Horace, concluding that “As the leaves on the branches change along with the years, // The old ones will fly around everything, so are the words in the language” (44. P. 344). And Horace will not be the most ancient author in this series. Moreover, what is being compared and what is being compared with can change places. If Zabolotsky compares the forest with a chapel, then Mandelstam compares the organ with a forest: “The pointed forest of the organ,” although it also has “The trunks are sinuous and bare, // But still harps and viols.”

Mandelstam has both a “colonnade of a grove” and a “grove of porticos” at the same time (19. P.67, 38, 230). For certain artists in certain eras, the frequency and degree of originality in the implementation of this type of metaphor are different. But the important thing is that it is almost everywhere, no matter what direction the author belongs to, no matter what aesthetics he professes.