This book contains essays about such different times that they could well be called different eras. The era of “Travel to Bryansk” is a late stagnation. Naturally, this report could only exist in samizdat, but even from such publication (that is, from reading among friends), many acquaintances dissuaded me. This is a journey into the “afterlife silence of the provinces.” “Journey to Tartu” is the era of the 90s, its turning point, which, in my impression, occurred after the events of 1993. A journey to the former “our” Europe, which has just ceased to be “ours”. Finally, the third, Sardinian journey, “Opus incertum” is chronologically very close and, unlike the first two, does not speak about “us”. This is a journey, one might say, into blissful freedom from “us.” But no: not quite freedom. As an appendix to the third journey, we publish the text on which we worked with Francesca in fabulous Sardinia: “Elegy turning into Requiem” and a large commentary on it. This application takes us back to the era of the first voyage, to its end. The circle has closed.
What all three journeys have in common is their chronicle nature. All of them were written with some delay, so each one contains two dates: the time of the incident (in the title) and the time of composition (at the end). There is nothing fictional about any of them. Heroes, events, things - everything is as it was. The narrator is not the protagonist of the story (as in the immortal poem “Moscow - Petushki”). Of course, a lot happens to him too - but it happens, as one smart reviewer noted, like what happens to Carroll's Alice. Alice will wake up, and the figures of her dream will be carried away by the wind, like a deck of cards. Nothing fatal happened. Sleep and travel are similar areas of existence.
As for the letter. The ease that I was looking for for prose is not the ease that immediately collapses into swagger, as was the custom in Rus' - I found the key to it in Laurence Stern. By the way, Venedikt Erofeev spoke about his “ Sentimental Journey in France and Italy" as his model.
It remains a mystery and reproach for me why I did not describe in the same way many other wonderful journeys that befell my lot. Travel throughout Austria, for example from south to north and from west to east, or across winter Germany, or through Romanesque France - from Paris through the Massif Central to Provence, or numerous journeys through Rome... I only name long, extensive wanderings. And how many short ones, and how exotic! Apart from laziness, I seem to have no explanation for this silence. But I suggest one more point, less shameful: I undertake to write about travel (as well as about other subjects) when I definitely feel that “a mysterious fingernail has gone through mysteries here.” The Nail of the Mystery of History that makes a mark on your heart. Not just to solve this riddle, but to stay with her longer, to let her talk more - that’s what overcomes my graphophobia.
The first two travels were published (in one book or separately) in German, French, English translations. They came out in Russian as a book later, with a wonderful foreword by Ksenia Golubovich. An Italian volume is being prepared for publication. "Journey to Tartu" was staged in a theater in France. Translated editions of these “Travels” are usually supplied with a large, realistic commentary for the foreign reader who does not know our circumstances. Now, for the Russian reader, a commentary on Bryansk and Tartu would probably be useful. It is partly made up for by the commentary on Requiem. “Everything flows,” as it is said in “Journey to Tartu,” and flows from the memory of subsequent generations.
TRIP TO BRYANSK
(Chronicle without claims. 1981)
To a famous traveler in Petushki, to the sentimental traveler in the South of France, to the unfortunate traveler from St. Petersburg to Moscow and to the pious traveler from Paris to Jerusalem, and to all the great people of this genre, I dedicate my humble experience.
“Let’s write completely impromptu, without pride, and let’s see what happens. Write as quickly as you say, without pretension; how few authors write, because pride always tugs at the floor and forces another to take the place of the first word.”
K. Batyushkov. "Alien: my treasure!"
May 3rd 1817
We have one land
We have one land.
And the swan song
People don't need it!
Poems by the Bryansk poet, set to music there
Only early spring And late autumn make a trip around Central Russia quite poetic. I think so without any malice, not like the Marquis de Custine. What is considered poetic... “And the edge of a dark abyss.” Several weeks of November and March are, after all, a tamed semblance of such an abyss, a rehearsal for that abyss, those waters that someday, as Tyutchev says, will again cover all things.
It's nice to think that they are rehearsing on our plain. “Although from this, however, it does not at all follow that patriotism is born only in bad weather” - “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, Dostoevsky. It’s also nice that, unlike its image or premiere, this weather does not threaten anything other than the blues, colds and interruptions in the daily schedule (and these are all poetic things). In this weather it’s exciting to go somewhere to Starye Bobovichi, like my neighbor. Early on a cloudy morning he will board a regional bus and drive through the meadows, through a cocktail of elements - firmament, abyss, air; The same thing splashes against the windows, the color has faded, the sound has fallen asleep, and the same darkness of the day, the same gray shadows are kneading in his head. Like on a black-and-white TV with a bad antenna, you go and sort out who is alive and who died in Starye Bobovichi.
And what, - looking at the pale lilac hyacinth, a gift from tender Francesca, - what, I think, if such weather falls on eternal Rome? - and I think for a long time, like men at the beginning Dead Souls... - She alone is enough to turn all the forums, colonnades, gardens and arches into a native land of long-suffering. However, Rome is probably not Elysium, and it has its own means for teaching humility... What do we care about Rome, however... In the coming years I will not see him - and this, I find, is better than seeing him like other acquaintances. So I'm not worried about Rome.
You can see a step or two around, and what is peeking out - it would be better for him not to do this. Until we drink ourselves to death, go crazy, or lose our minds, we will not achieve the same view as these walls, posters, street names, rheumatic pavements, cars and trunks. Everything creaks, tears, gets dirty against each other. The mind must withdraw for a long time for such sloppiness to play out.
- Prince, your stocking is down!
A selection of poems by Olga Sedakova with a preface.
... write, sobbing, the word: HELP!
huge for the angels to look at
so that the martyrs can see him,
killed by our consent...
The poems selected for this small publication on , refer to the first half of the 1980s, to that late Soviet world, where living was “boring and scary,” but “being a Christian” did not mean “joining a national religion,” but challenging corruption, cynicism and vulgarity. Poems about faith and fidelity.
These poems may contain allusions that are no longer understandable to a new generation. Such, for example, is “Elegy turning into a requiem” - an elegy for Brezhnev (General Secretary of the CPSU in 1964-1982), turning into a requiem for the country, and in the final lines - into a prayer. Those who lived then also remember the famous “cotton case” (the exposure of unprecedented corruption in the party and government apparatus of Uzbekistan at that time); and projects school reform with enhanced military-patriotic and labor training (“it’s time to teach the future of the country with a vice and a drill...”, “at least put babies to the blank...”); and singles who tried by any means to escape from the Land of the Soviets; and the insanity into which the elderly secretary general fell, having made himself the ruler of Russia for life; and “jammers”, the howl of which was supposed to drown out the broadcasting of Western radio stations...
However, the life of the country continues in the same circles. And an act dictated by conscience, even seemingly senseless, still remains a “vertical step.”
You burn, invisible flame,
I don't need anything else.
Everything else will be taken away from me.
They won’t take it away, they’ll ask kindly.
If they don’t ask, I’ll give it up myself,
because it's boring and scary.
Like a star looking at a manger,
or in the thicket a small guardhouse,
swinging on blackened chains,
you burn, invisible flame.
You are a lamp your tears oil,
cruel heart doubt,
the smile of someone who is leaving.
You burn, pass on the news
Savior, heavenly God,
that He is still remembered on earth,
Not everyone has forgotten yet.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Two grenadiers wandered to France from Russian captivity.
Their marching clothes are in the dust, and France is also in the dust.
Isn't it a strange thing? Suddenly life settles like dust,
like snow on Smolensk roads like sand in the Arabian steppes.
And you can see far, far away, and the sky is most visible.
- What do You, Lord, want, what do you expect from Your servant?
There is some kind of whip hanging over everything we wanted.
My eyes wouldn't look. Yes, you were told to look, obviously.
And okay. What does not happen above the quiet and rough earth?
At what height does the comet's fatal fire not play?
Get up, poor comrade! There is no trace of soldiers lying around.
We will drink to fidelity to the grave: there is no infidelity beyond the grave.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE UNNAMED MARTYR
- Renounce? that would be funny.
But here they are - and no one else.
Even our rumors won’t reach us,
excluded.
A dungeon is such a dungeon -
until the end of the world.
So that they
has my patience become a lesson?
What a lesson for them - I would like to take a look!
The angels don't seem to wake them up,
not like these, foreign-language ones,
little death among the horde of deaths
V military field. Nobody, alas,
excluded. Nobody through the eyes of the heart
my path will not be repeated. What will they decide there?
from shipwrecks, epidemics...
They scared me too: no one.
What to demand from them. They never
didn’t see how close this sky is,
but the main thing is how to treat sick children
looks like...Loyalty? you have to be a villain
to be unfaithful. Hurry up the chick
I'll trample or kick you in the face
I’ll hit the old mother, but you,
all the hands stretched out to me,
sore hands! Who can do this?
I won't offend you. God. Nobody.
An action is a vertical step.
Another meaning and other consequences
it's not in it.
And do you really need them?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
BARLAAM AND JOASAPH
The Elder from the Desert of Senar...
Russian spiritual verse
1
Elder from the Desert of Senar
The king comes to the house:
he is also a doctor
he is also a reseller of gems.
Having arranged and explored his mind,
they send him a puzzled cry
turn into a fragrant sigh
oh beautiful
about the strange
homeland, sparkling from the holes
life unreliable, mediocre,
like underground laughter in a shack.
There, in his desert, with seeds
The baskets of stars are full of wonderful things.
And calmly at full height
the sower goes over the furrows
inspired repentant tears:
only the flame is seeded into the flame,
and leaf through the book not with their hands,
and they don’t burn lamps over the lines,
but yours, O night, beloved by us,
squeeze out the light cluster.
But any insight
and any look of happiness
he will leave without regret:
this is how a gardener plants, builds, rules -
but the owner enters the garden.
Everyone who has worked for the light will say:
angelic he will interrupt the conversation
and he will go where he is told.
Because up like a pennant
grace lifts the heart,
because there is love and death,
and they are sister and mother.
2
“It’s not strange to me, my wonderful old man,”
says the prince, “even now,
doctor, get me out of this cramped bed,
friend, take me away from inappropriate sweetness.
Am I a ball in a dishonorable game?
in a competition of cowards and crawlers?
The strings are building, the stars are disturbing.
Their strings and stars are worth nothing,
they are all turned away from us.
And I raise my hand
and I touch - and with me
a person tears like bad fabric,
like in a nightmare.
But from the design of their bitterness
I’m not asking: save it! –
the scourge of shame and the sting of tenderness
I'm scarier than them.
I'm more scared, my wonderful old man,
it's time for us to meet,
your thinness, your Heavenly King,
Your quiet king, your diamond.
The wind blows wherever it wants.
Whoever wants to enter the house.
What everyone knows is darker than night.
You alone entered with fire.
Like eyes eaten away by smoke
This is how life doesn’t see and it hurts.
What do I need in your beloved fire?
speaks so much grief?
If you knew which hand
The depth is taking us away! –
oh, what grief, oh, what
grief, full to the bottom.
3
And like the heart of an ancient story,
beats in different languages -
never left
no one missing, mischief
blowing like dust
from the surf generation
gathering a people for Himself -
God of righteousness, God of admonition,
God of the one who will die without You.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
ELEGY TURNS TO REQUIEM
Tuba mirum spargens sonum…
1
The scoundrel steals cotton. During the week
decided that vices and drills
it's time to teach the future of the country,
that is, children. We don't want war.
We don’t want our veins to tremble
who has it?
And those to the noise of the jammer
the madness of the brave is glorified: who is on the ball,
who runs on the waves, who crawled over
along a wire with current, through the cloaca -
one like a finger, with a baby on the hump -
unknown heroes leave
mysterious fatherland, where
the scoundrel steals cotton. caravans,
carriages, trains... White noise...
We are up to our ears in countless raw materials.
Is there a Muslim heaven or nirvana?
in copious cotton; somewhere at the end
there is a future happiness for billions:
the last enemy on the ball will fly away -
and silence, like in the windows of Leonardo,
where the posing person is not looking.
2
But you, poet! classical tuba
will not let you lie; inaudible but rude
war bugle, irresistible bugle
orders through the quarantine outposts:
get up, get up!
I'm like Bertrand de Born
I want to mourn the death of the ruler,
and even two.
I like the Provençal spirit
inspires insolence. Or our neighbor
not worth crying like Plantagenet?
From Finnish rocks to Pakistani mountains,
from the once Japanese islands
and to the planinas, once Polish; far away -
from the depths of the earth, in which not a ray -
the foremother of oil, the breadwinner of concerns, -
to the height where the satellite, chirping,
flies into the trap of a cosmic cavity, -
it's time to cry. And if not about him,
we have something to talk about.
3
But the heart is strange. Nothing else
I can't say. What word
will depict his lamentable paradise? –
Whatever you decide, whatever you plan,
and the darkness overtakes compassion,
like a butterfly, a net, then a needle.
On the edge of someone's downfall
and put it on display.
I know from someone unknown
that there is no gloating in its depths -
there a creature comes out to the creature,
rising with the mountain of compassion
to your full height funeral lament.
Here from the state hearse,
covered with official tears
(it would have been like this a long time ago!) – with closed eyes
where the tormented flesh looks,
on a mournful journey?...
Here is Your servant, Lord,
before You. No longer in front of us.
Death is the Lady! what you won't touch
everything takes on a strange hope -
to live finally, differently and completely.
That is a spirit not prepared to answer,
With last light turning towards the light,
completely alone in the mourning wave
floats. Where should we go...
4
Deplorable world! magic dyehouse,
selling colors of hope.
Or colorful clothes like Geryon
instantly whitens hydroperite
a few words: “Behold, destruction awaits...”?
No, you won't see this alive.
Let's pay for what we bury with him.
To your saints, killed like dogs,
buried so as not to be found again,
resignedly, like the stars in the zodiac,
let's go along the common path,
like this one. Without trial and without grave
from Caesar's son to farm laborer
killed, as was necessary,
They have been watching from afar for a long time.
“It was necessary,” we studied, “
to quickly overcome darkness. –
It was necessary. What will be needed
Now let whoever wants to judge.
You, youth, goodbye. You're a ghoul
sucked, sucked and sucked. You, conscience,
It's unlikely that a miracle will heal you:
yes, however, if it hurts somewhere,
no longer here. What can't be saved?
they don't cry about it. You, native speech,
He's probably more beautiful in his coffin,
than you are now. About those who are destined
waved and got what he wanted.
About those
who did not wave, but into the common swamp
entered with neat disgust,
chatting jokes from under the floor.
Those who finished drinking. Who didn't drink much?
but he stole cotton and thereby multiplied
people's wealth. Who didn't make it
but more than that – the one who survived!
5
We already know: power is empty, like a barrel
with a broken bottom. Whatever you put there,
neither a rash nor a rash will make you look fuller
not an inch. At least half the country is in the bag
Yes, in the water, even put the babies next to the blank,
go around half the planet in a tank -
there is no peace. She doesn't dream of peace.
And I dream about what will be at hand,
what should be. Otherwise, who rules here?
Whoever places himself in the middle of the earth,
he will wish that the land remains
no more than under his heel.
Power moves, the pillar of air twists,
from the walls of the frozen Kremlin
into the afterlife silence of the provinces,
to the outskirts, dead on the alert,
and further, to the Mujahideen regiment -
and back, like a reflected wave.
6
What a mousetrap. Oh country -
what a mousetrap. Hamlet, Hamlet,
from generation to generation, to the heir as an inheritance,
like a ring - rock, you are a stone in this ring,
while the stung play is going on,
you, captive spirit, exhausted in it,
look here: it seems worse here.
Here it seems that the parable is Elsinore,
and we came to see the interpretation
hundredfold. For some time now I
to endure beyond measure is abominable,
beyond nauseating. From all sides
rubbish sneaks, rustling its carpet,
and a small strategic dotted line
taps into space: tuba… mirum…
Friends of my learned youth,
Dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!
I know you guys are business people,
you will tell me what I don’t know.
It should be like this:
find yourself an attic
Yes, remember that this is not the first time,
it was worse. For a private person
space spasms are unbecoming.
And who, my prince, thinks about this,
pride destroys the liver
and fiddles with my brains. But who is humble -
lives without asking for change,
but he labors and gathers fruit
of their works. The Empire will fall
will the executioner rise high -
and the cat finishes milking
and the ant will complete its frame.
The world, as it used to be, rests on us.
And the salt of the earth, which is at odds with the world
you are looking for - there is the same Tuba mirum...
- So, Rosencrantz, there is the same Tuba mirum,
there is the same Ghost, insulted by the world,
and the same world.
7
Goodbye, you will be forgotten - and soon,
than us wretches: the future government
swallows the previous one, choking, -
portraits, aphorisms, orders...
Sic transit glory. Then there is silence,
as said.
Not a scarecrow, not a joke
no longer a mesmeric doll,
now you are a spirit, and you see everything as a spirit.
In terrible restored grandeur
and in the ocean of quiet, powerful forces
Now pray, O Lord, for the people...
8
Sometimes it seems to me that I'm standing
by the ocean.
- Poor spellcaster,
did you call us? so now look
what will happen next...
- C'mon, not me, not me!
Fire me. Let someone else.
I don't want to know what sadness
the unprecedented sea is agitated.
“Below” here means “ahead.”
I hate the approach of grief!
Oh, I wish I could take everything - everyone and everything,
or a pine tree, dipping it into Vesuvius,
across the heavens, as someone said, -
write, write a single word,
write, sobbing, the word: HELP!
huge for the angels to look at
so that the martyrs can see him,
killed by our consent,
for the Lord to believe - nothing
does not remain in a hated heart,
in an empty mind, on stingy land -
we can't do anything. Help!
© New Literary Review LLC. Decoration, 2016
Preface
The purpose of this collection is to create a conceptual framework for understanding the evolving, living and pulsating contribution of Olga Sedakova to Russian, or rather to world culture. We present a rich and varied selection of essays, written with passion, dedicated to the work of one poet, while covering the full range of cultural issues addressed by that poet - including some critical issues that faced Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet years. Sedakova’s work provides readers with the opportunity to independently evaluate where Russian culture ended up in beginning of XXI century, peering closely into the past and carefully looking around at current events and moods in neighboring countries and cultures. As Sedakova herself said, essays and philosophical research can indeed have far-reaching consequences, serving as a way to “unravel our historical moment". Although not all essay authors directly set themselves such a large-scale task, all of them do not take their eyes off the world in which Sedakova developed as a writer, and strive to register her relationship with this world and the forms of political, religious, ethical and cultural expression that exist in it .
Why this poet and why at this moment? Let's start with the first question: among modern poets Olga Sedakova stands out for her openness, intellectual power, linguistic erudition and moral courage in her texts and public statements. A Russian-language poet and essayist, she has, however, long since crossed language barriers in a variety of ways. Her works have been translated into Italian, French, Hebrew, Ukrainian, German, Albanian, Swedish, Danish, Polish and English; She is the winner of many awards that came to her from Germany, Italy, France, the Vatican and from Russia itself. She herself translates from Italian, German, French, English and Latin, enriching the Russian language with the work of her favorite poets - from St. Francis to Dante, from Eliot to Rilke, from Claudel to Celan. Now that she is a revered and distinguished poet, translator, scholar and teacher, her quiet and strong voice is increasingly heard in public debate; she often speaks on behalf of those who have been wronged and, more broadly, advocates moral freedom. In this book we want to highlight and reflect on her role as a poet and thinker, offering a close examination of her varied texts and the themes and schools of thought that permeate her work. Our goal is to evaluate Sedakova's contribution to ongoing aesthetic and cultural discussions in Russia and beyond. We invite you to explore the diversity of her work and hope to lay a foundation on which readers, as well as other scholars and critics, can build their understanding.
Our book comes out at a time when Olga Sedakova’s work is winning an ever wider audience both in Russia itself and not only beyond its borders. For all her visibility in unofficial culture, Sedakova was a poet whom Soviet period almost not published, not counting the prohibited ones European publications; Now more than three dozen of her books have been published in Russia. These are collections of poetry and prose, artistic and theological texts, as well as a dictionary of Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms. In 2010, a four-volume set of Sedakova’s published works was published, numbering thousands of pages, and thanks to the active and large-scale website www.olgasedakova.com, all the contents of this four-volume set are freely available. The site is constantly updated and maintained, with new speeches, interviews and texts written since the 2010 edition, as well as some works translated into French, German, Italian and English.
Thus, the time has come for a detailed book about Olga Sedakova. We set ourselves the goal of showing the significance of Sedakova’s contribution to Russian intellectual life and, moreover, in a broad sense, V humanities. We aim to identify the literary and cultural traditions important to her poetry and to articulate a range of approaches to her work. We have collected essays wide range researchers - representatives of different generations (from those who have just defended their PhD dissertation to famous scientists) and countries (Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, USA, UK). In addition, our authors base their work on extremely diverse theoretical foundations, based on various literary, formal, philosophical, theological, anthropological and linguistic approaches. Consequently, this collection is philological in the broadest sense of the word: Sedakova’s works encourage us to rethink and re-evaluate the philological: that is, the immense possibilities of the word, its ability to carry meaning and change our understanding of life.
This collection is not the result scientific conference; on the contrary, they are new essays written as part of a single research initiative specifically for the collection. Our editorial team addressed a request to poets, translators, philosophers, literary scholars, comparative scholars, as well as Slavic scholars with a broad education. Not all of them, as it turned out, were able to write something for us, and yet the result reflects the diversity of disciplinary approaches and intellectual orientations to which we strived. It also has the depth of scientific thought that Olga Sedakova’s poetry requires. Here again it is worth quoting Sedakova herself, this time explaining why it seems absolutely appropriate to her that the publication of the cycle of poems “Stelas and Inscriptions” (2014) as a separate book includes a long essay about this cycle:
...I would like my book, which includes a small range of poems, to have a high-quality interpretation of the text. And this interpretation is not just a secondary addition. It is necessary in order to create an image in which poetry is born, living next to thought and together with thought.
Creating an image of the intellectual and spiritual world in which Sedakova works—this is exactly the kind of work we asked our authors to do, and this is what we hope our readers will find on these pages.
The collection consists of several sections, which we will now discuss in more detail.
In the first section, Approaches to the poet and poetry, collected essays dedicated to fundamental topics and rhetorical models in Sedakova’s works about herself and the world. These essays highlight the poetological, moral, political, historical, aesthetic, and psychological factors that determine Sedakova’s work, and outline the poet’s characteristic ways of thinking. The first essay by Stephanie Sandler, “Constricted Freedom: On Dreams and Rhythms in the Poetry of Olga Sedakova,” is built on a paradox: noting the inevitable relationship between freedom and constraint, Sedakova argues that it is art that creates the conditions for freedom. Outlining the ways in which Sedakova seeks creative freedom, the essay turns to the works of Susan Stewart, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas and Jonathan Culler to find out what Sedakova means by “history.” Russian freedom" The essay shows that rhythm and genre in Sedakova’s poetry play both a constraining and liberating role. Final part the essay is " careful reading"Sedakova's poem "A Tale in which Almost Nothing Happens", in which the role of a difficult but still surmountable path to freedom is played by a dream.
In the essay “The Poet and the Darkness. Policy artistic form» Ksenia Golubovich asks Adorno: “Is poetry possible after Auschwitz?” (a question that Sedakova herself often asks) - to determine the fundamental ethical premises of Sedakova’s work as a language problem: how to write in a language that seems to have reached a dead end, in the language of totalitarian lies? The answer to this question involves an aesthetic and ethical choice akin to what Paul Celan made when he began writing in German after the Holocaust. Golubovich finds in Sedakova an amazingly productive tautology: the poet creates new meanings without using other resources than those already at hand. Sedakova, the essay claims, creates a new code human interaction: a language that not only mourns the dead and fears the future, but also restores communication between the dead and the living, the survivors and the dead. Golubovich shows that these new post-Gulag, post-Auschwitz and, to some extent, post-ideological concepts became purely “formal” principles for constructing a figurative system, syntax and sound in Sedakova’s poetry.
Philosopher and poet Emily Grosholtz begins her essay “Childhood and Pulsating Balance (Stasis) in the Works of Olga Sedakova” by explaining the metaphorical and cognitive functions of circles in Sedakova’s work. To do this, she turns to philosophy and mathematics, in particular to the representation of compact spaces in topology. From her point of view, gestures of returning to places and people from childhood always revive for the poet what seemed irretrievably lost. Grosholz characterizes the coordinates of Sedakova’s poetic world, relying on the essay “Praise of Poetry.” Turning to the legacy of Sedakova’s teacher Sergei Averintsev, she identifies moments of restored harmony and restored balance in poetic and prose texts from different periods of Sedakova’s work.
Taken together, these three essays that open the collection convincingly show us Sedakova as a thinker whose poetry has philosophical foundations, whose aesthetic philosophy is constantly concerned the most complex problems and does not avoid direct statements on issues of great social significance and in whose texts are developed formal means, in the novelty and boldness of which the aesthetic depth and complexity of poetic statements are revealed.
In the second section, attention shifts to issues of theology and religious thinking. In this section, Poetry and theology, includes four essays that explore the significance of Sedakova’s work as a modern Christian poet and thinker. In these works, religious themes, stylistics and ways of understanding the world come to the fore; the authors discuss models for describing spiritual experience in Sedakova’s poems and essays, and compare her with other poets and thinkers, including those about whom she wrote and whom she translated. The section opens with Andrew Kahn’s essay “Olga Sedakova’s Book of Hours and Religious Lyrics: Reading the Fifth Stanzas.” Showing that the two pillars on which Sedakova’s world is based are poetry and faith, the author focuses on one large text - the poem “Fifth Stanzas”, establishing a connection between prayer and poetry based on the analogy between reading a poem and reading the Book of Hours; important role The essay plays on the analysis of connections with Rilke's collection of the same name. Developing and refining her argument, Kahn explores Sedakova's work with other poetic voices and echoes, the nature of the relationship between original and copy, the significance of beauty as an object of worship, and the need to acknowledge loss in order to find peace.
Further, in the essay “The Art of Change: Adaptation and the Apophatic Tradition in Olga Sedakova’s China Journey,” Martha Kelly examines the Orthodox apophatic tradition as both Sedakova’s theme and a mode of writing: the apophatic impulse—with its discourse of emptying for the sake of filling—shows how late And post-Soviet society could creatively reconstruct their identity throughout the traumatic transition period. Sedakova, says Kelly, in her work offers a unique model of adaptation to a constantly changing world. In Sedakova’s poems we encounter apophatism as an aesthetics that can transform our perception and existence. To prove his thesis, the author of the essay chooses the text "The Chinese Journey", which at first glance may seem inappropriate for an essentially theological argument, but Kelly convincingly shows that the opposite is the case. The essay also serves, in a sense, as a counterbalance to the “Chinese” approach to the same text - an approach that will be outlined in the last section of the collection, in the essay by comparative literature specialist Natalya Chernysh, “Olga Sedakova’s Journey through the Book of Changes.”
Sarah Pratt, in her essay “Destruction of Destruction: the Orthodox Impulse in the Works of Nikolai Zabolotsky and Olga Sedakova,” explores the general philosophical and theological foundations of the work of Zabolotsky and Sedakova in terms of Orthodoxy, focusing on special attention representations of the icon in their texts. Both poets “destroy destruction” - namely the destruction of Orthodoxy Soviet culture– through continuous dialogue between forms of expression in the arts and in the spiritual/religious sphere. Pratt defines the process of constructing consciousness and knowledge through the representation of a specific object - an icon - or the actual physical suffering of Christ; and this is the process that leads both poets to union with the highest truth. It also connects both poets with the previous tradition of Russian metaphysical poetry (Baratynsky, Tyutchev).
Henrike Stahl in his essay ""Bye" This not affected." The Immanence of Transcendence: Poetic Reflections on the Mystical Aspects of Olga Sedakova’s Poetry” develops and clarifies the definition of metarealist poetry proposed by Mikhail Epstein. Stahl draws attention to the fact that in Sedakova’s texts, poetry is rooted in transcendental experience. She focuses on the formal side of Sedakova's poetry, which includes, according to Stahl's broad definition, the representation of the poetic subject, the use of orchestration of sounds and poetic rhythm, and the creation of a system of symbolic imagery that runs through all the poems and poetry collections. For Stahl, these formal aspects of poetry, like its themes, bring to it a spiritual, even mystical experience; her study allows us to see points of convergence between figures of speech and figures of the divine in our human life. Stahl's conclusion about mystical experience echoes the idea of the materialization of religious knowledge in Sarah Pratt's essay, the apophatic theme in Martha Kelly, and the connection between poetry and prayer in Andrew Kahn.
Essay of the third cycle – Reading contexts: languages, cultures, sources– focused on the languages, cultures and sources of Sedakova’s poetry. They explore her relationships with other people, other places, other cultures - past and present - and thus trace Sedakova's dialogue with the Russian poets who influenced her work; her connections with the European poets she translated; her response to traditions that seem far from Russian culture, but have become important for the poet - for example, ancient Chinese. The author of the first essay, Ilya Kukulin, called his work “Stylization of folklore as a memory of Europe: “Old Songs” and “Songs of the Western Slavs.” Comparing Sedakova’s “Old Songs” with Pushkin’s “Songs of the Western Slavs,” Kukulin compares the cultural and political problems solved by each of these poets. Although they are separated by more than a hundred years, the lives of both are marked by moments of historical and cultural crisis. Sedakova wrote “Old Songs” during an unprecedented period high voltage between conditionally Russian and European worldviews (1980); her response to this end times rhetoric cold war began to look at Russian culture as an original culture and at the same time European in its core, and, as Kukulin most convincingly proves, only in the context of this comparison do you begin to understand how European is the worldview of the cycle of poems, which at the same time are so deeply rooted in the Orthodox folk culture. Kukulin's essay presents a subtle philological analysis of "Old Songs" in a broad cultural and historical context.
Further in this section, Vera Pozzi’s essay “The Poetic Anthropology of Olga Sedakova” is presented. Dialogue with Sergei Averintsev and Boris Pasternak." Pozzi foregrounds the pervasive sense of openness to the other, the repeated discovery of possibilities for freedom, happiness and hope. Critical texts by Sergei Averintsev about man and mind and poetic views Boris Pasternak’s emphasis on “life” and “novelty” became, as shown in the essay, an integral part of Sedakova’s artistic worldview. This vision manifests itself in the poems as an awakening of genuine anthropological experience.
Maria Khotimskaya returns us to the theological foundations of the previous section, considering them in a linguistic context. In his work " Semantic vertical: Church Slavonic word and poetics of translation in the work of Olga Sedakova" Khotimskaya establishes connections between Sedakova’s extensive translation practice and creative development her poetry. Based on history Church Slavonic language As a model for expanding the semantic potential of language and culture, Sedakova speaks of translation as a way of discovering new poetic possibilities. She translates selectively and often enters into lively dialogue with foreign poets and literary traditions, including the works of Dickinson, Rilke and Celan. In her essay, Khotimskaya carefully reads Sedakova's translations of these three poets and shows how these translations, in turn, are reflected in Sedakova's own poetic practice. Bringing together Sedakova’s thoughts on the art of translation, her works on Church Slavonic linguistic and cultural heritage, as well as her poetic dialogue with mentors and favorite poets, the author of the essay combines an analysis of Sedakova’s translations with studies of individual poems and comes to conclusions about the variety of forms of her poetic growth.
This section on contextual reading ends with Natalya Chernysh’s essay “Olga Sedakova’s Journey through the Book of Changes” - a deep comparative reading. Chernysh chooses The Book of Changes (I Ching) as a starting point for thinking about how Sedakova perceives and interprets classical Chinese culture in her works, especially in The Chinese Journey. In Sedakova's texts, Chernysh discovers surprising and eloquent similarities with the Chinese cultural tradition and shares insightful thoughts about the role of classical Chinese culture in the work of this poet. The fact that Sedakova lived in China in her early childhood has been known for a long time, but Chernysh is the first researcher who thoroughly and in detail tells how exactly Chinese culture is manifested in her work. In addition, the essay also touches on the little-studied aspect of the reflection of non-Western traditions of visual and verbal arts in Sedakova’s work.
In the last section, Models of cognition, ways of reading, although it is not directly dedicated fine arts, yet special attention is paid to the influence of a rich visual imagination on Sedakova’s poetic inclinations and mindset. The authors of these essays, which are philosophical, cultural and literary studies of Sedakova’s poetry, find out how she perceives the world around us and what methods of poetic transmission of this perception are characteristic of her. In the essay “Topography of “Other Terrain” in the Works of Olga Sedakova,” Ketevan Megrelishvili examines the ontologically distinct category of “other” in her poetry. She identifies the topographical contours of an alternative spatial world and, through careful analysis of the phonetic and rhythmic elements of the poems, shows how travel to find this “other terrain” creates a formal tension within the structure of the verse. “Another terrain” consists of repeated images (in particular, a garden, a house, a threshold, a heart, a dream). And although in these images one can see the points of intersection or contact of the “other” world or place with real familiar places, in the poems there is a kind of verbal incompleteness, understatement, so that the “other terrain” is always only outlined, but not fully described.
The second, philosophical in approach, essay by Alexander Kutyrkin is called “The Guest at the Door (the poetry of Olga Sedakova).” Raising a decisive question - about the horizon of claims of Sedakova’s poetry - Kutyrkin undertakes a search for an answer along the path of phenomenological reading, “from within” poetic reality. Revealing the internal dimension of Sedakova’s poetic texts in fundamental quantities - such as memory, childhood, creation - he attempts to determine inside story her poetry, in which she sees the coordinated growth of two personal principles(in the abstract they can be understood in terms of “the author’s intention,” on the one hand, and the reader’s understanding, on the other) and their friendly meeting scheduled for a certain milestone.
In his philosophical essay "If This Isn't a Garden: Olga Sedakova and the Unfinished Work of Creation," Benjamin Paloff reflects on what he calls "the unfinished work of creation." His essay shows that Sedakova's poems insist on uncertainty and mystery as components of what we call “knowledge.” He considers Sedakova’s work in the broader context of Christian humanism, including parallels with the work of Czeslaw Milosz, as well as the philosophical and literary critical works of Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Charles Taylor and other authors. Thus, the essay returns again to issues of knowledge and faith that are significant to a wider audience than believers themselves. The poet's attention to the unspoken becomes a positive and creative epistemological position. With particular emphasis on the genre of elegy and on the image of the Garden (of Eden and Gethsemane), Paloff traces the ways in which reason and faith serve each other. His essay brings together several themes and approaches that appear repeatedly in the collection: the philosophical charge of Sedakova’s poetry, her position as a Christian thinker and connection with the sources of faith and knowledge. In addition, Paloff does an excellent job of describing the poetic cross-talk generated by her poems, including potential parallels to American poetry.
Finally, we are pleased to present David Bethea's afterword, "On Olga Sedakova and Poetic Thinking." Bethea offers a bold and unexpected approach, viewing Sedakova's poetry and prose as a way for the survival of verbal expressive means in a world that is becoming, in his words, “increasingly post-literary.” He reflects on the possibilities of cultural survival, comparing evolutionary theories Darwin and Lamarck in line with the Russian philosophical tradition. Bethea takes Mandelstam's poem "Lamarck" as a starting point, defining Sedakova's typical lyrical hero as the opposite of the heroic personalities of other poets and thinkers; however, her character has the inner resilience to win the “evolutionary struggle for survival.” “This,” he concludes, “is literally the organic form in which a consciousness worthy of survival arises. It’s not “about” life, it’s life.” Like many other authors in the collection, Bethea admits to the intention of theoretically substantiating the intellectual aspirations of Sedakova’s texts. And just like them, he is not satisfied simple description the significance of her work; instead, he charts a path through which one can come to understand how reading and reflecting on Olga Sedakova's poetry can enrich the ongoing humanistic dialogue between our diverse cultures.
At the end of the collection we offer the reader Chronology And Bibliography. It includes published books by Sedakova herself and texts about her mentioned in the collection. We hope that this bibliography, together with the essays presented here, will be useful to our readers as a foundation on which everyone can build their own interpretations of both Olga Sedakova’s individual writings and the themes and patterns that define her work.
Authorized translation from English by Evgenia Kanishcheva
Sedakova O. Experience and the word (interview given to Ksenia Golubovich) // Text and tradition. Almanac. T. 1 / Ed. E. Vodolazkina. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2013. P. 416. How broadly “our historical moment” itself and the approach to unraveling it is understood is clearly seen from Sedakova’s remarks in the essay “Blessing of Creativity and Parnassian Atheism” (2000): she describes here a skeptical mindset that can effectively block aesthetic novelty, but refuses to idealize the past. In the present, she notes, a person thinks: “So much has already been said, almost everything! What else can our poor contemporary add to this great sum?” Nobody seems to be arguing that our time – artistic time – is meager, impoverished, as if it has lost its way. But even in eras that did not recognize themselves as so hopelessly poor, the relationship between culture and new creativity was not without conflict. After all, the phenomenon of new inspiration is a shift of everything present and the past, a shift that is sometimes very decisive, in which there is a risk of loss and which a superficial glance may not distinguish from destruction. What is preserved and continues in a truly new experience is not forms and canons that have become habitual, but the very tradition of human inspiration” // Sedakova O. Four volumes. M.: Russian Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Science, 2010. T. 4. P. 334.
Sedakova O. Our reader does not understand modernism [Interview with Evgenia Korobkova] // Evening Moscow. 2015. No. 3 (January 14). S. 5.
Olga Sedakova
(To “Three Journeys”)
This book contains essays about such different times that they could well be called different eras. The era of “Travel to Bryansk” is a late stagnation. Naturally, this report could only exist in samizdat, but even from such publication (that is, from reading among friends), many acquaintances dissuaded me. This is a journey into the “afterlife silence of the provinces.” “Journey to Tartu” is the era of the 90s, its turning point, which, in my impression, occurred after the events of 1993. A journey to the former “our” Europe, which has just ceased to be “ours”. Finally, the third, Sardinian journey, “Opus incertum” is chronologically very close and, unlike the first two, does not speak about “us”. This is a journey, one might say, into blissful freedom from “us.” But no: not quite freedom. As an appendix to the third journey, we publish the text on which we worked with Francesca in fabulous Sardinia: “Elegy turning into Requiem” and a large commentary on it. This application takes us back to the era of the first voyage, to its end. The circle has closed.
What all three journeys have in common is their chronicle nature. All of them were written with some delay, so each one contains two dates: the time of the incident (in the title) and the time of composition (at the end). There is nothing fictional about any of them. Heroes, events, things - everything is as it was. The narrator is not the protagonist of the story (as in the immortal poem “Moscow - Petushki”). Of course, a lot happens to him too - but it happens, as one smart reviewer noted, like what happens to Carroll's Alice. Alice will wake up, and the figures of her dream will be carried away by the wind, like a deck of cards. Nothing fatal happened. Sleep and travel are similar areas of existence.
As for the letter. The ease that I was looking for for prose is not the ease that immediately collapses into swagger, as was the custom in Rus' - I found the key to it in Laurence Stern. By the way, Venedikt Erofeev spoke about his “Sentimental Journey through France and Italy” as his model.
It remains a mystery and reproach for me why I did not describe in the same way many other wonderful journeys that befell my lot. Travels throughout Austria, for example, from south to north and from west to east, or through winter Germany, or through Romanesque France - from Paris through the Massif Central to Provence, or numerous journeys through Rome... I only name long, extensive wanderings. And how many short ones, and how exotic! Apart from laziness, I seem to have no explanation for this silence. But I suggest one more point, less shameful: I undertake to write about travel (as well as about other subjects) when I definitely feel that “a mysterious fingernail has gone through mysteries here.” The Nail of the Mystery of History that makes a mark on your heart. Not just to solve this riddle, but to stay with her longer, to let her talk more - that’s what overcomes my graphophobia.
The first two travels were published (in one book or separately) in German, French, and English translations. They came out in Russian as a book later, with a wonderful foreword by Ksenia Golubovich. An Italian volume is being prepared for publication. "Journey to Tartu" was staged in a theater in France. Translated editions of these “Travels” are usually supplied with a large, realistic commentary for the foreign reader who does not know our circumstances. Now, for the Russian reader, a commentary on Bryansk and Tartu would probably be useful. It is partly made up for by the commentary on Requiem. “Everything flows,” as it is said in “Journey to Tartu,” and flows away from the memory of subsequent generations.
OS October 10, 2012TRIP TO BRYANSK
(Chronicle without claims. 1981)
To the famous traveler to Petushki, to the sentimental traveler in the South of France, to the unfortunate traveler from St. Petersburg to Moscow and the pious traveler from Paris to Jerusalem, and to all the great people of this genre, I dedicate my humble experience.
“Let’s write completely impromptu, without pride, and let’s see what happens. Write as quickly as you say, without pretension; how few authors write, because pride always tugs at the floor and forces another to take the place of the first word.”
K. Batyushkov. "Alien: my treasure!" May 3rd 1817
We have one land
We have one land.
And the swan song
People don't need it!
Poems by the Bryansk poet, set to music there
1. WEATHER
Only early spring and late autumn make traveling through central Russia quite poetic. I think so without any malice, not like the Marquis de Custine. What is considered poetic... “And the edge of a dark abyss.” Several weeks of November and March are, after all, a tamed semblance of such an abyss, a rehearsal for that abyss, those waters that someday, as Tyutchev says, will again cover all things.
It's nice to think that they are rehearsing on our plain. “Although from this, however, it does not at all follow that patriotism is born only in bad weather” - “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, Dostoevsky. It’s also nice that, unlike its image or premiere, this weather does not threaten anything other than the blues, colds and interruptions in the daily schedule (and these are all poetic things). In this weather it’s exciting to go somewhere to Starye Bobovichi, like my neighbor. Early on a cloudy morning he will board a regional bus and drive through the meadows, through a cocktail of elements - firmament, abyss, air; The same thing splashes against the windows, the color has faded, the sound has fallen asleep, and the same darkness of the day, the same gray shadows are kneading in his head. Like on a black-and-white TV with a bad antenna, you go and sort out who is alive and who died in Starye Bobovichi.
Have you read poetry or prose, or scientific works, or theological books by Olga Sedakova? I think that it is unlikely that many will answer in the affirmative.
Meanwhile, Olga Sedakova has been publishing since 1989, and she has published about 40 books in Russian alone. And more translations. And the first collection was published in Paris in 1986.
Sedakova has been writing poetry since childhood. She is a laureate of various awards. So why do people know so little about her?
Maybe Sedakova rarely appears in public? The media doesn't write about her?
Try typing her first and last name into a search engine, and you will find many links to her interviews and speeches.
And people confuse the poet with the actress Anna Sedakova.
Why is this so?
Maybe people have stopped loving poetry? I don’t think so, because for centuries they loved and loved, and now they suddenly stopped loving. I still remember how the girls en masse copied poems by Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva into notebooks and memorized them. At the same time, did they really write a lot about Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva in newspapers and magazines in the 70s and 80s?
Probably the fact is that Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva wrote poems about their feelings - about falling in love, about love, about jealousy, about suffering, and Sedakova’s poems...
It's hard to say what, but they are not about love.
VISIT CARD
Unhappy
who talks with the guest and thinks about tomorrow's business;
unhappy,
who does a job and thinks that he is doing it,
and not the air and the beam guide them,
like a brush, a butterfly, a bee;
who strikes a chord and thinks
what will the second one be like?
the fearful and stingy one is unhappy.
And even more unfortunate
who does not forgive:
he, crazy, doesn't know
like a tame stork emerges from the bushes,
like a golden ball
takes off by itself
into the sweet sky above the dear earth.
Sedakova’s poems are spoken about only in the most enthusiastic tone and most often she is compared to Dante.
Well, what can I say? I have long noticed that there is less and less adequacy in people.
But God bless them, with the poems - let’s say they don’t resonate with me, but they also write about Sedakova as the successor of Likhachev and Averintsev, i.e. she is the new Conscience of the Nation.
We are an interesting people - we cannot live without the Conscience of the Nation. I think we made the right decision this time: Sedakova is 68 years old: she will last for a long time.
IN in this capacity Sedakova today reflects on the attitude towards evil in the Russian tradition.
I’ll tell you right away, comrades, that our traditions of attitude towards evil are the most disgusting. It turns out that we do not distinguish between good and evil.
For example, Stalin is evil, and Europe is good. Got it? He who doubts is evil himself.
« I just wanted to show the deep origins of a tolerant and even friendly attitude towards evil. Here the tradition is much longer, although education in the spirit of “Soviet moral dialectics” played its role. I wouldn’t even say that this non-discrimination is the fear of calling evil evil, abstaining from such judgment.
– What is the reason for such fear?
– A general picture of the universe, in which it is assumed that good is powerless and only evil has some kind of power. If good wants to do something, then you cannot do it without the help of evil. Because goodness in the Russian tradition is represented in the image of, say, Prince Myshkin - a big difference from the European one, Western tradition, where, starting with Dante, we see a completely different picture - good is strong.
- This is exactly Russian cultural tradition– not to believe in the power of good?
- Of course not. I just didn’t have the opportunity to study other cultures so closely. You can imagine this in other places, closer to the East in the opposition West - East, or to the South in opposition North - South. That is, to those areas where ethics are slightly different.
– That is, what remains, for the most part, is the shadow side, the attachment to evil, the disbelief that good has power?
– To cope with the universe, which seems to be evil and unfriendly in nature.
– Does this explain the fact that the current Russian consciousness so fiercely protects Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, two, apparently, of the bloodiest Russian leaders?
- Certainly. I first published a version of a work about evil in the Russian tradition, about friendship with evil, almost 10 years ago. I wrote at the end about admiration for villains, for villainy without any “but”. Not as they used to say: Stalin killed many, but did this and that, but about admiration simply because he, as they now say, was “cool”, was ferocious and merciless. Then they objected to me: what are you saying? And now we see that a cult of cruelty as such is emerging, a cult of villains who are chosen from history and worshiped. Of course, not at the official level, but we are talking about the canonization of Malyuta Skuratov, Beria, and everyone who became famous only for their villainy.
“But you can always find something positive.” They say about Beria that he headed the atomic program and without him Soviet Union there would be no bomb in the confrontation with the United States. Yes, they say, he is cruel, well, that’s good, because someone else might not have achieved anything.
– When they say that only in an evil, merciless way can something be achieved, this is a rather moderate position. But now they don’t discuss what Malyuta Skuratov actually did that was good. They say that he was simply a merciless villain, and it’s good - he helps one evil to cope with another evil, because the whole world is evil and it is necessary to deal with it in this way. Romanticization of anger.
-Now you say scary thing: the cult of evil as such begins, a person begins to think that evil is good.
– I have described relationships with evil, when they justify it, they say that there is something good in it or that it was needed for something. But the apogee is when evil is glorified as evil, as correct behavior in the world. This is a very recent thing, this hasn’t happened yet.
– Is this a temporary deviation or a logical development of the centuries-old tradition that you spoke about, that is, a stable phenomenon that will only strengthen?
“I hope he has no future.” But how long this may last is difficult to predict. It had never come to the point of glorifying a villain as a villain before. It literally appeared in recent years. Because here, I think, there are not only cultural and geographical oppositions, such as West - East, South - North, but also the environment. There is an underground world, criminal circles, lumpen in the worst sense, and they have such ideas about the universe: if you don’t deceive, if you don’t kill, you won’t get anything. The very bottom of society, which exists in every society, comes out, but nowhere is they given the right to publicly affirm their faith.
– I once talked with sociologist Svetlana Stevenson, who wrote the book “Gangs of Russia. From the Streets to the Corridors of Power” - about how the gang ethics of the 90s became institutionalized and spread to the whole society. You're talking about something similar.
– It is a fact that the ethics of punks, the lower classes, outcasts of society is becoming practically official. Official circles still don’t behave like that, but they give the floor to all these Motorolas and Surgeons - that’s who the people should now be proud of. That is, there are social changes here, not only a property of culture.
– You said that Stalin’s work is not dead, it continues. Do you have any idea who can end this and how?
“I think there won’t be recognition by the majority for a long time.” In Germany, the majority for a long time did not want to admit what happened under Nazism. There must be some kind of decision made in a legal way: what did not take place in 1991 was in the rather ridiculous form of a trial of the Communist Party - nothing was said, nothing was done. Some kind of decision - well-founded, detailed, evidence-based - about what happened not only under Stalin, but since the revolutionary coup of 1917. Who should prepare this, think about what happened? Of course, the intelligentsia and intellectuals."
Of course, intellectuals. Oh, you rednecks, go to the stall! What right do any Surgeons have to talk to Motorolas? Only the Sedakovs have the right to speak.
« There is a certain moralism at the core of Western culture. Very clear distinctions between good and evil, which caused resistance among Russian thinkers. They always criticized Western jurisprudence, legalism and rationalism. This typical triad, according to Russian thinkers, characterizes the West. Then individualism will be added to it.
And we must feel. It's not like that with us. We must be sensitive, flexible, etc. How is it so easy to decide - here it’s good, here it’s bad. This difference was noticed not only by Russians, but also by Western thinkers who were interested in this. That here some fundamental difference occurs between the attitude towards evil, between moralism. One of my favorite authors of the 20th century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian and martyr killed for resisting Nazism in Germany, wrote in his diary: “The Russians beat Hitler like that, probably because they never had our morals.”
The Russians were so immoral that they beat Hitler! I’m somehow confused: good conquers evil, as Sedakova herself proved? If Hitler is evil, then Russians are good - so why are we immoral again?
« The important thing is that Western thinkers and theologians very often engage in self-criticism in this regard. Here too big difference between Russian and Western traditions. Russian is not self-critical. And I am ready to perceive any criticism as open hostility. The West does not wait for anyone to call it legalistic and rationalist from the outside. They will call themselves».
Yes, self-criticism: “We are too good! Not like these Russians.”
« ...there is such a side in the Russian attitude towards evil that can be called eastern in comparison with the western. And you can call it southern compared to northern. Our usual opposition is “West - East”, while all over the world they discuss “North - South” in the same sense. Oddly enough, the Russian northern, in a geographical sense, civilization fits under the “south”. Because this flexibility, breadth, uncertainty is “southern”. North - he is tough, he loves rules».
Sedakova is ready to refute even the fact that Russia is in the north. Russia is Africa. Those who are at the same latitude with us are in the North, but we are still in the South, because we are immoral and cannot distinguish good from evil.
This is what we have today as the Conscience of the Nation.
As Americans like to say in movies, if I were paid a dollar for every negative statement about the Russian people that I have read and heard since about 1987, I would have long ago become a millionaire.
But I grew up with a different attitude towards the people, just like Sedakova. We were taught that the people are always right. And I still believe in this.
That’s why people don’t learn Sedakova’s poems by heart - they don’t find anything in her except arrogance, disguised with words about God. Why does a person who considers himself much better than his people need any public? She has a group of admirers and sycophants - that’s enough for her.
So they will not meet with the people to the benefit of both.
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