Russian poet, prose writer, translator, philologist and ethnographer
short biography
Olga Aleksandrovna Sedakova(born December 26, 1949, Moscow) - Russian poet, prose writer, translator, philologist and ethnographer. Candidate of Philological Sciences (1983), Honorary Doctor of Theology of the European Humanities University (Minsk, 2003), since 1991 he has been teaching at the Department of Theory and History of World Culture of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, senior researcher at the Institute of History and Theory of World Culture of Moscow State University.
Born into the family of a military engineer. In 1973 she graduated from the Slavic department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, in 1983 - graduate school at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
She participated in international conferences in Russia and abroad, gave lectures at universities in Europe and the USA, and participated in international poetry festivals in Italy, Great Britain, Belarus, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Since 1996, he has been a member of the board of trustees of the St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute.
Sister - linguist I. A. Sedakova (born 1955).
Creation
Until 1989, she was not published as a poet in the USSR; her first book of poems was published in Paris in 1986.
Connecting various traditions from Slavic ritual songs to European neoclassicism of the 20th century, the lyrics of the poetic cycles “Wild Rosehip” (1978), “Old Songs” (1980-1981), “Chinese Journey” (1986), etc. are marked by a constant spiritual search, always open to new things, never turns away from life, no matter how painful and unattractive it may be outwardly. The most complete editions of what Sedakova wrote are the two-volume “Poems. Prose" (Moscow, 2001) and the 4-volume book "Poems. Translations. Poetica. Moralia" (Dmitry Pozharsky University, Moscow 2010).
She published translations from European literature, philosophy, theology (Francis of Assisi, Dante, Pierre de Ronsard, John Donne, Stéphane Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Heidegger, Paul Claudel, Paul Celan, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound, Philippe Jacotet ), articles about the works of Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov, the poetics of Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan and others, memoirs about Venedikt Erofeev, Leonid Gubanov, Viktor Krivulin, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Averintsev, Vladimir Bibikhin, Mikhail Gasparov, Gennady Aigi.
Confession
Literary prize winner:
- Andrei Bely Prize (1983)
- Paris Prize for Russian Poet (1991)
- Alfred Töpfer Prize (1994)
- European Prize for Poetry (Rome, 1995)
- “Christian Roots of Europe”, Vladimir Solovyov Prize (Vatican, 1998)
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2003) - “for the courageous aspiration to convey the mystery of existence in a simple lyrical word; for the subtlety and depth of philological and religious-philosophical essays"
- Dante Alighieri Prize (2011)
- Prize Master guilds Masters of Literary Translation (2011)
- Prize globe magazine Banner and All-Russian State Library named after M. I. Rudomino (2011)
The lyrics and essays have been translated into most European languages, Hebrew and Chinese.
Alexander Vustin, Pyotr Starchik, Valentin Silvestrov, Victoria Polevaya, Viktor Kopytko, Tatyana Aleshina and others wrote music to Sedakova’s texts.
Main publications
- Gates, windows, arches. - Paris: YMCA-Press, 1986.
- Chinese travel. Steles and inscriptions. Old songs. - M.: Carte Blanche, 1991.
- The Silk of Time. Silk of time. Bilingual Selected Poems. Keele: Ryburn Publishing, Keele Univ. Press, 1994. Ed. and introduced by Valentina Polukhina.
- Poetry. - M.: Gnosis, Carte Blanche, 1994.
- The Wild Rose. London: Approach Publishers, 1997. (Bilingual). Transl. Richard McKane.
- Old Songs of Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House, 1997. Transl. Hamutal Bar Josef.
- Reise nach Bryansk. Wien: Folio Verlag, 2000. Transl. Erich Klein and Valeria Jager.
- Eloge de la Poésie. Paris: L'Age d'Homme, 2001. Transl. Gislaine Bardet.
- Poetry. Prose. Collected works in 2 volumes - M.: N.F.Q./Tu Print, 2001.
- Chinese travel. M.: Grail, 2002.
- Old songs. M.: Locus-press, 2003.
- Poems and Elegies. Bucknell: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2003. Transl. Slava Yastremsky, Michael Nydan, Catriona Kelly, and others.
- Kinesisk Rejse og andre digte. Copenhagen: Borgens, 2004. Transl. Mette Dalsgaard.
- Le Voyage en Chine et autres poèmes. Paris: Caractères, 2004. Transl. Léon Robel, Marie-Noëlle Pane.
- Poetics of ritual: Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs. - M.: Indrik, 2004.
- Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms. Materials for the dictionary. M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet of Yu. A. Shichalin, 2005.
- Journey of the Magi. Favorites. 2nd ed. corr. and additional - M.: Russian way, 2005.
- Le voyage à Tartu. Paris: Clémence Hiver, 2005. Transl. Philippe Arjakovsky.
- 2 trips. - M.: Logos, Steppe Wind, 2005.
- Andrei Bely Prize, 1978-2004: Anthology. M.: New Literary Review, 2005, pp. 156-171.
- Church Russian paronyms. Materials for the dictionary. M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet of Yu. A. Shichalin, 2005.
- Mediocrity as a social danger. Arkhangelsk, 2006; republished in the collection: Mediocrity as a social danger. - M.: Master, 2011. - 112 p. - (Series “Modern Russian Philosophy”; No. 6).
- Apology of Reason. M.: MGIU, 2009 (“Modern Russian Philosophy”)
- Poetry. Translations. Poetica. Moralia. Collected works in 4 volumes - M.: Dmitry Pozharsky University, 2010.
- Apology of Reason. - M.: Russian way, 2011
- Garden of the Universe. - M.: Art-Volkhonka, 2014
- Maria's tears. On the poetics of liturgical chants. - K.: Spirit and literature, 2017
- Poems steps. Selected Poems. - M.: Art Volkhonka, 2017. - 336 p.
Literature about the poet
- Bibikhin V. New Russian word // Literary review, 1994, No. 9/10, pp. 104-106.
- Kopeliovich M. The appearance of Sedakova // Znamya, No. 8, 1996, p. 205-213.
- Averintsev S.“...Already the sky, not the lake...”: the risk and challenge of metaphysical poetry // Sedakova O. Poetry. M.: N.F.Q./Tu Print, 2001, p. 5-13.
- “An action is a vertical step.” Materials about the life and work of the poet and thinker O. A. Sedakova. Arkhangelsk: Zaostrovsky Svyato-Sretensky parish, 2004 (includes the most complete bibliography compiled by the author).
- Medvedeva N. G.“The Muse of the Loss of Shape”: “Memory of the Genre” and the metamorphoses of tradition in the works of I. Brodsky and O. Sedakova. Izhevsk: Institute of Computer Research, 2006.
- Medvedeva N. G.“Secret Poems” by Olga Sedakova. - Izhevsk: Udmurt University Publishing House, 2013. - 268 p.
- Ermolin E. Multiverse. Literary diary. Experiments and tests of contemporary literature. Moscow: Coincidence, 2017. P.153-163.
Why is an apology for reason needed? Does the author perceive everything written as a whole? And how is this whole organized? Translating poetry - study and asceticism? Olga Sedakova talks about the most important things.
In addition to the fact that Olga Sedakova is perhaps the most significant Russian poet of our time, she is also one of the most profound thinkers with a very integral and, in its own way, lonely - at least in Russia - intellectual position.
Evgeny Klyuev that linguistic immigration is not a geographical, but a metaphysical phenomenon. In an era of information chaos and total inflation of words, it does not interfere, but even helps the writer to keep the Language pure, in its primordial breath, as it is given from above.
“Poet, prose writer, translator, philologist, ethnographer...” - encyclopedias introduce her. “Philosopher” does not appear even once in such representations, yet it very much suggests itself, even if Olga Alexandrovna herself never called herself that.
Therefore, in the conversation I wanted to clarify some of the features of the integrity underlying both her poetic and analytical work, and the principles by which this integrity is built.
Olga Aleksandrovna, what you do in all areas of your studies belongs to the range of tasks of philosophy. I would call this a clarification of man’s relationship with the foundations of existence, and poetry as a type of human-forming work.
In my understanding of these subjects, you represent a version of the Christian rationalist tradition, organic rather to Western thought, but even there it was not fully realized - due to the triumph, starting from the Enlightenment, of a narrowly understood “instrumental” rationalism, which left many aspects of human integrity outside.
The poets who were closer to this tradition were Goethe and Dante. In our country, this tradition was represented by Averintsev, who cultivated, in your words, “that new (ancient) rationality,” dating back to Aristotle, which “at the same time resists bad irrationalism and bad rationalism.”
- Let me first comment on your words about “Western thought.”
We are accustomed to link rationalism with the Western tradition and contrast it with the Russian, which is fundamentally different (“Russia cannot be understood with the mind” and the like).
Our writers and thinkers of the last two centuries talked about this so much that Europeans believed them, and they also habitually perceive Russian culture as something else, as some kind of alternative to the rational.
In the responses to the Italian edition of my Apology of Reason, two points aroused the greatest surprise: that reason is defended by a poet (poetry and reason are usually opposed) and that reason has found itself a lawyer in Russia, where least of all this could be expected.
However, this defense of reason in itself was perceived as an extraordinary - although long-awaited, according to reviewers - event. The rationalism (or intellectualism) that is discussed in my book is completely different from what the West is accustomed to in modern times.
The fact is that the classical (developed in Greek antiquity) idea of mind, nous, which largely coincides with the biblical idea of wisdom, was probably more characteristic of Eastern patristic thought (compare in liturgical texts: “Let there be mind, seer of God").
This mind, constituting the spiritual center of man, coincided with the spirit and heart (in contrast to the romantic opposition of mind and heart).
It is this mind, wisdom that sets boundaries for the technical, critical, speculative mind, which does not know a sense of proportion. Modern culture, both Russian and Western, lives by the flat opposition of such “reason” and the “irrational” that rebels against it. This is the situation I wanted to look at - and reconsider.
- Do you have cross-cutting, unifying themes?
- I can say little about my own writings other than what is directly said in them. I did a lot of analytical work and hermeneutics, but I never took this look at myself - analytical, reflective, interpretive.
It is difficult, of course, to believe that a person who can spend weeks understanding, say, the version of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish” and drawing diagrams of its rhythm, writes himself “by ear” and, having written, does not find out what kind of rhythm it is.
But that's how it is with me. The boundary between “one’s own” and “the other” is sharp. It’s as if there is an undiscussable prohibition here: you can’t analyze your own texts, you can’t build projects for the future... Therefore, I’m always interested in hearing the reviews of others: in them I often learn about my texts what I myself don’t notice.
For example, when I said that the two-volume book was not conceived as a single book, I meant a simple thing: it was not written in its entirety, it was collected after the fact.
As a whole, I usually think of small things, such as “Chinese Journey”, “Old Songs”. From prose - “In Praise of Poetry” is planned as a separate book, as well as “Travels”. This is how they were published in France. In our country, the publishing tradition of such small books has, in general, been lost (but Blok’s “Iambics” were published as a separate book!). It's a pity.
The two-volume book was already a belated collection of various things from different years. Now a four-volume work is being prepared, on my part it has already been prepared, the publishing work remains. But it never ceases to seem to me that when there is too much of everything, things interfere with each other.
From the reader’s perspective, I can say that such a collection of different things into one gives a holistic view. One can see that this is one work of understanding in different guises.
- It comforts me very much that you see this. For my part, I see more differences.
- Because you know how it arose.
- Well, yes, in every thing it is important to me where it begins and where it ends. On both sides it is surrounded by pauses. It's like a quantum of meaning and mood. You need to be alone with him for some time, forgetting about everything else.
But the fact that in general it turns out that some common themes, some motives, some images are developing is, generally speaking, not strange. There are things that occupy me all my life.
And it’s not that I don’t leave them - it’s more that they don’t leave me. But I cannot call these elusive things differently than I call them in this prose, in these verses, differently each time - because, I repeat, I am not a theorist of myself.
And yet, you are the bearer of at least two types of views: on the one hand, a poet, on the other, a scientist, senior researcher at the Institute of World Culture at Moscow State University...
- ...on the third side - a translator, on the fourth - an essayist... many sides. Also - some kind of teacher. And teaching and creativity, not without reason, are considered poorly compatible. In the simplest sense, he is a church person. And traditional faith, scientific research and artistic creativity - this, according to the usual view, is generally an explosive mixture.
How do you personally feel that these different sides of you are connected? How do poetry and prose relate to you, which always seemed to me to be organized almost fundamentally differently?
- For my first student philological work, I took Blok’s poems as an epigraph:
So that to the paradise of my overseas songs
Paths have opened up.
Not only “mine”, in general “overseas songs”. Initially, I saw the research as a kind of propaedeutic to understanding artistic meanings.
Magical realism in Russian. Margarita Meklina writes metaphysical prose: “You don’t have to be a magician to predict...” Prose writer from San Francisco Margarita Meklina, winner of the Russian Prize last year, talks about what impressions she had from the award ceremony, and the literary mores that reign in Moscow, and also about what it’s like for a Russian writer to live in a foreign land and what it’s like to write serious prose today, without any giveaways.
But in the strict sense, only one of my works can be called research work - my PhD thesis, which many years after defense was published in the form of a book: “The Poetics of Ritual. Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs" (M., Indrik, 2004).
However, it is not so easy with it, written in a rigid structuralist language. Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, who was my scientific supervisor, began his speech at the defense by saying that, although all the methodological requirements of “scientificness” were met in this work, in fact it represents the otherness of poetry.
An ethnologist cannot see things that way, he said. He probably meant that all this ritual reality is described as if from the inside, by means of inclusion rather than detachment.
You are right: mixing poetry and prose, poetics “above barriers” is not at all attractive to me. I want to follow its laws in every genre and not go to someone else’s monastery with my own rules.
It is impossible for me not only to write, but also to think, like Tsvetaeva’s “My Pushkin.” Goethe or Dante, with whom I studied a lot, are never “my Goethe” and not “my Dante”: they are not “mine”, I need Goethe as he is, Dante as he is.
I even love genre restrictions - freedom for me lies in other places. To offer an effective metaphor in prose instead of a thought is unacceptable to me.
But my native, original language is figurative. Not the language, but the perception itself. Remember, Natasha in Tolstoy says that Pierre is “red and blue”? I studied discursive presentation for a long time, and with great difficulty.
But all these formal restrictions, in any case, arise at the next step: first, a feeling for the object appears, and only then comes the formalization of this feeling.
- Moreover, these objects - general objects that I always think about - are so elusive that it is difficult to find a genre and even a way of thinking for them: discursive or figurative? And therefore, perhaps, external restrictions even help to somehow “ground” this flickering perception.
- Are they setting it up?
- It’s like they’re sharpening it. But still, every time we get something partial. One perspective of this whole.
That is, there is a certain integrity of understanding and vision and a set of optical means that allow you to look at it differently...
- Of course, through some lenses we will see one thing, through others - another. But I am sure that these things that occupy me are universal - so universal that they can be expressed beyond the boundaries of literature. If I were studying music or painting seriously (and here I am an amateur), I would work with the same semantic units.
They belong to the level that Goethe was probably looking for: something like general morphology. They can be conveyed in plastic images, musical and verbal. And even, perhaps, in mathematical ones.
Speaking of translations. You have a large and varied experience: from, relatively speaking, Theodulf of Orleans to Paul Celan. These translations also add up to a whole picture. Do you select authors for translation based on the criterion of some internal relationship? Or rather, one’s own tasks in the “work of understanding”?
- First of all, this series can be extended chronologically both backwards and forwards. Long before Theodulf - classical ancient poetry: I translated something from Horace, from Catullus, and for many, many years I have been thinking about translating my beloved Sappho. And after Celan - Philippe Jacotet, the last living classic of French poetry.
In addition, I translated not only poetry, but also philosophy: for example, Paul Tillich, his great book “The Courage to Be”; spiritual writings - sermons, lives. In the huge, more than a thousand pages, volume “The Origins of Franciscanism,” I translated a third - everything related to the earliest sources and the writings of Francis himself.
I have never been a professional translator who systematically translates and lives by this work. Yes, you are right: this is the work of understanding. And not only understanding what others have written, but perhaps even more important: understanding the capabilities of the Russian language, your own language. “If Rilke wrote in Russian, what would the Russian language become?”
- This is apparently a way of intensive reading?
- Yes. And expanding speech capabilities, fighting one’s own tongue-tiedness. I chose great poets such as Rilke and Celan not because they were “close” to me, but because they knew how to do something that I could not, that I only had a presentiment of. I caught the space I was missing in them.
- So - at least live their experience partly in your own language?
- Yes, and I believed that this experience was lacking not only for me personally, but also for Russian poetry in general, for the Russian reader. For almost the entire twentieth century, at least since the 20s, we were isolated from world culture. And much of what was done in the twentieth century simply did not reach us; especially since “my” authors were simply banned.
For example, Claudel was impossible to print; Tselana until some time too. For various reasons: some are too religious, some are formalist, some are abstruse and elitist, and so on. And everyone is clearly not “progressive.” My authors never got through this ear of “progressiveness.” I didn’t deliberately choose “reactionary” ones; for some reason it turned out so fatally: it was impossible to publish what I liked.
Of course, in a sense, such transfers are apprenticeships too. Especially in the case of Rilke. I treated Rilke as the best lesson in lyricism. Foreign readers immediately detect a “Rilkovian note” in me. Rilke in general, as you know, was the teacher of our best poets of the twentieth century - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva. Even the young Akhmatova translated Rilke. And this love and discipleship was mutual. Rilke himself, by his own admission, found himself in Russia; and Russian poetry was drawn to him as to his homeland.
With Claudel it’s a different matter: it’s a Gallic, very Catholic element, distant and unusual for us.
- Apparently he is one of those who was more difficult? With such strangeness...
- No. When something is interesting and exciting, it is not so difficult at all. I understood that while working with Claudel, some already automatic habits needed to be decisively abandoned.
If Rilke can be translated with Russian poetic habits, then here it is necessary to radically change both the tone and syllable. And this is also a kind of study.
From Claudel I did not learn either his versification or anything concrete at all: rather the very possibility of a clearer and more definite statement than is usually customary in our poetry. No “colored fog”, everything was in the light of a clear day. And this light does not expose objects, but, on the contrary, reveals all their beauty.
It seemed to me that Russian poetry was simply tragically lacking T.S. Eliot - the most influential post-war poet in Europe. It was very difficult for me to translate it. This dryness, this asceticism towards everything traditionally “poetic”. But at the same time - poetry of a high order, the “new Dante”.
And the last such instructive new poetic experience for me was Paul Celan. The great post-catastrophe poet seems to be the only great poet of this non-poetic era.
All of them, these poets, said what I - at different times in my life - would like to say. This, I thought, is the statement that I would so like to utter: but with my own lips I cannot do it. Therefore, let Rilke or Celan speak through me. A boy musician I knew said at the age of seven: “I would like to write one piece of music: Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony. But it’s already written.” Poems by Rilke or Celan have not yet been written in Russian.
- Translation experience is also an important existential experience: by translating, a person becomes more plastic.
- Yes, just like the experience of communicating with other languages. One - it seems French - Slavist noted that between Russian classical literature and Soviet literature, among other differences, there is such an important thing: the Russian classics were people of more than one language.
And Soviet writers are monolingual. This has a big impact on writing. Of course, Russian writers of the 19th century could know European languages to varying degrees, but even if they could not write in French, like Pushkin or Tyutchev, at least they read in other languages.
And this communication with other languages, with a different way of expressing things, changes the attitude towards the native language: it frees it, expands it.
The point is not at all that something is borrowed from these languages, it’s just that relations with the native language become freer: easier, more skillful, one might say.
- Apparently, this refreshes the sense of language and, perhaps, the sense of life in general.
- And besides, it exacerbates the feeling of a gap between experience, meaning and verbal expression, between “so it is” and “that’s what it’s called.”
A monolingual person does not have such a gap. He does not distinguish the world expressed in language from the non-verbal world. That’s why our monolingual authors have greater heaviness, cliché, and suppression of language. The tongue is more obedient than they think.
By the way, one of the most frequent reproaches I received (and remains) is “they don’t speak Russian that way,” “that’s not Russian.” I dare to suggest that these defenders of correct grammar and syntax would hardly pass me the history of the Russian language, if such an exam were presented. After all, the Russian language and its history are my linguistic profession.
- What languages do you speak?
- Possess is too strong a word. I read quite fluently in English, German, French, Italian, Polish. I studied classical languages quite seriously, especially Latin, less so in Greek. Thanks to comparative Slavic linguistics, which we studied well at the philology department, and general linguistic training, I can, if necessary, read other Slavic languages.
In the circle where I happened to find myself from my university years, in the circle of Tartu “Semiotics” and the Moscow structural school, it would be strange if someone did not read the main European languages and did not know Latin “to parse the epigraphs.”
Can you say that one of these languages is closer to you than others? As far as I can tell, languages have the same personal relationship as, say, people.
- I don’t know, generally speaking, I like all languages.
And there is no such feeling that, say, some language is cold and repulsive, and some is hot, you want to live in it?
- No. I think the difference for me is different: in some languages I manage to both write and speak, and not just read and listen - these are English and Italian.
I am unable to actively speak German. Tear off the prefix from the verb and put it at the end of the phrase! I can't get used to this. In general, when I studied languages - and all this happened behind the Iron Curtain - I had one task: as soon as possible to achieve the level of knowledge that allows me to read my favorite things in the original. I studied them, in essence, as dead languages.
And the fruits of such study are obvious: speaking modern Italian, I can make gross grammatical errors, but Dante’s language does not give me any difficulties, which amuses the Italians themselves a lot. For them, it’s almost like for us to read “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.”
- You were also transferred a lot. Interesting experience: seeing your words and thoughts translated?
- I never undertake to judge the aesthetic quality of translations of my things.
- We’re not even talking about aesthetics here, but about internal plasticity, about the quality of meanings.
- I am convinced that the real judge of translations is a native speaker. It is he who can say whether these verses turned out in his language or not.
But in any case, he is the bearer of a different point of view. I’m asking a little something else - do you recognize yourself in a foreign language incarnation?
- I'll find out. I'm surprised to find out. Sometimes I even like the translation more than the original. I had very good translators. Naturally, much is always lost in poetic translations; as a translator, I myself can only confirm this. But in our translation and in the Western one, different things are lost. We have requirements for translation that do not exist in modern Europe. According to our tradition, it is necessary to convey the external form of the verse: rhythm, meter, rhyme. They don't do that in Europe. They always translate in free verse.
- Even rhymed poems?
- Yes.
- How amazing. After all, much is lost in the appearance of the text.
- Sometimes everything. Brodsky fought against this; To give his translators a model, he himself translated his poems into English - with rhyme and meter. He liked it, but native speakers didn’t really like it. Because every tradition has its own historical moment.
Regular verse now sounds archaic in Italian or English. Or it belongs to certain - easy - genres: they write in rhyme for children or the lyrics of popular songs, but it seems that it is no longer customary to write serious poetry in rhyme.
However, now strict forms and regular verse are returning - there are such movements in modern European poetry.
But they still translate in free verse. And the skill of translation does not consist in maintaining both the external form and (more or less) “content,” as we do.
But here the translator sacrifices primarily stylistics. Translation style is something impossible, no one will ever write it like that, it arises from the need to fit it to rhyme. This monstrous style appears in translations, under the name of Mallarmé or other most sophisticated authors.
For the sake of obligatory adherence to form, meaning is sacrificed - subtle shades of meaning. In general, in our translation everything comes out much simpler, more banal and stupid.
And Western translators care most about the choice of words, about the subtleties of meaning. And in place of regular verse, they create something of their own - this is still not interlinear, it is somehow organized verse.
I had this idea that different languages are differently receptive to each other's meanings. For example, a Russian text can be transmitted in different languages with varying degrees of approximation. Have you ever had this impression?
- This is an objective fact. Here it is not only a matter of language, but also of tradition. The Russian poetic tradition, the classical Russian version itself, is much closer to the German than to the French or English.
In addition, a very important point in translation is the personality of the translator. It may be more important than language. An interested and sensitive person can convey poetry in a language that is not accustomed to Russian poetry. My happiest translation experiences were when poets translated. Moreover, even those who did not know Russian at all or knew it very superficially.
- Did they work with interlinear?
- With an adviser, I would say. With a person who not only did interlinear translations for them, but could explain a lot more. This is how the German poet Walter Thümler translated me. This is how the wonderful American poet Emily Grossholtz translated it. Her consultant was Larisa Pevear (Volokhonskaya), whose new translations of Leo Tolstoy created a sensation in America.
Larisa is remarkably educated and has an amazing sense of poetry. Emily first heard my reading in Russian and compared it to cash transfers. She felt that something essential was missing from them, and decided to try to convey this missing thing, not knowing Russian. Together with Larisa Pevear, they worked on the translation for a long time. This is rare luck.
Judging by the readers' perception, my book in Albanian was a success. It was translated by the poet Agron Tufa, who speaks excellent Russian. They say the Danish book turned out very good. Its translator, Mete Dahlsgård, is not a poet. She is the best translator of Russian literature in Denmark.
Once in an interview with Dmitry Bavilsky, you denied poetry the legitimacy of its claims to proximity to sacred experience, insisting that this is a different kind of creativity. This surprised me then, because it seemed to me that poetry in general, and yours in particular and, perhaps, in particular, concerns the sacred, simply through its own means. So what kind of experience is poetic, if it does not touch the foundations of being?
- You see, usually my statements are specific. In this case, I was referring to the widespread confusion when the author considers poems on religious topics to be “religious” or even “spiritual,” and all sorts of claims and ambitions like “I write spiritual poetry.” So this is the answer to such misunderstandings.
Of course, poetic experience for me is nothing more than a kind of spiritual life. The famous German critic Joachim Sartorius even wrote that my writings are not “poems, as we are accustomed to understanding them: they are a kind of spiritual exercise.” It’s awkward for me to talk about this myself.
- How would you formulate how poems on religious themes differ from religious poems?
- The theme of the poem and its reality is its “flesh”, consisting of sounds, rhythms, intonations, etc. - completely different things. You can write poems about religious subjects that express with all their flesh only rudeness or emptiness. T.S. Eliot at one time introduced the following distinction: devotional poetry and religious poetry.
Devotional are poems that were written by second-hand authors and published in magazines of spiritual reading. This is applied, illustrative poetry. Not necessarily bad, but almost certainly mediocre. She doesn't want to be different, because it's not about her. The author sets out - with a pedagogical or some other good purpose - ready-made meanings.
And what Eliot calls religious does not necessarily have a distinct religious plot. But the poems bear the stamp of direct experience of meeting the “last things.” In this sense, Hamlet (which Eliot, however, did not like) is a deeply religious work.
You once said that you never thought anything depended on poetry at all. Apparently, this was also some kind of situational statement? What does the presence of poetry in the cultural field mean, what does it lead to?
- Yes, it’s in “In Praise of Poetry.” And this should not be understood in general terms. V.V. Bibikhin once said: “Poetry is written in genes.” Even if the poem - a real poem - was not heard, even if the author did not write it down, it is important that it happened. It did its job.
- So this is an existential event.
- Cosmic. And it, one way or another, is part of the air and creates the opportunities in which a person lives. We cannot imagine what would have happened to us, who we would have been, if Pushkin’s poems had not been written.
- It turns out that this adjusts the culture as a whole, as a set of possibilities, tensions, intonations?
- Cleanses, I would say. If we imagine that the creation (better to say: the appearance) of poems will stop, catching them from cosmic noise, it seems to me that this will be dangerous for the life of civilization. Poetry clears the air like a thunderstorm. It resists chaos, pollution, and the cluttering of human space with some unnecessary things.
- It is doubtful that poetry will ever disappear, because, apparently, it is an anthropological constant.
- Yes, but there is a lot of talk about the “death of poetry” in our civilization...
You have said more than once that in today’s culture there is a lot of lies and falsehood, that is, a lot of inauthenticity. But it doesn’t all come down to lies and falsehood. Is there anything happening right now that seems important to you, something that you can hope for in terms of cultural perspectives?
- I think and write about this a lot. In the four-volume work, most of the essays will be about just this: about the situation in which artistic creativity now finds itself. About what new opportunities our time contains. What new does it bring - new after all the great achievements of the past century.
Maybe this will be visible later, when time passes, when our era moves away from us as an integral entity?
- The artist’s task, in my opinion, is this: to grasp what his time brings, what depth is in it, and not those external and usually unsightly sides that they so love to discuss publicly. And I feel that thanks to our time I can see something that, say, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak could not. Not because I am more brilliant, but because the time is different. We know something today that we didn’t know then.
- What do we see that was not visible, say, in the 50s?
- When I say “we,” I mean those who are truly contemporary with their time. There are always few of these. People lag behind not only “their time,” but from all times in general; they willingly settle in eternal timelessness. Especially those who like to talk about “modernity”.
Leo Tolstoy also wrote that mediocre people always talk about “our time” as if it were completely clear to them. There is some creative order in every time, but it is not easy to discern because it is hidden. You need to listen to him.
What new acquisition do we have after all the great discoveries of the twentieth century? I would say that in some respects we have more freedom. Freedom in rhythm, for example. Freedom from “realism”. Freedom from the “lyrical self”.
What else? That movement, the shadow side of which is touched upon when they talk about globalism, about planetary civilization. Nothing good is usually said about globalism as the most characteristic and open sign of our time. Mixing and loss of traditions, leveling everything in the world to a low level, simplification, homogenization, etc.
But this is the shadow side of what is happening. And its core: a sense of coherence of the world, clear as never before. A specific universal phenomenon. It means something and demands something. We belong to “world literature” not in the sense that Goethe saw it, but in the most direct sense. A successful thing is read in other languages a month later.
- So, you see a movement in the direction of increasing freedom and universal humanity?
- According to the well-known concept of St. Augustine, there are two simultaneously occurring stories: the history of the city of God and the history of Babylon.
The history of Babylon is always pessimistic. But in fact, almost no thought was given to what the history of the city of God is. And until I read Augustine more carefully, I thought that this was simply a contrast between the temporal and the timeless.
The City of God is timeless, it is eternity, immortality “after everything.” But the Augustinian idea is not so simple. And the City on earth has its own creative, growing history.
Statistically, quantitatively, you hardly notice it. This is the story of small quantities. Small quantities, charged with the enormous potential of the future. Like the famous mustard seed. Or grains of salt: “you are the salt of the earth.” There should not be too much salt, no one eats salt instead of bread, but without salt everything will perish.
And this “other” history always proceeds with some kind of increment, and not through degradation, like the pagan change of centuries: gold - silver - iron. Our contemporaries most likely will not be able to write such a drama as Shakespeare, much less Aeschylus, or a novel like Dostoevsky, but they can do something that neither Dostoevsky nor Shakespeare knew. Something is added and revealed.
In connection with the annoying topic of modernity in a vulgar sense, Alexander Velichansky wrote: “You are not in the world! Man is contemporary only with God.” This is real modernity. And at every moment a person is modern in a new way.
- Does each time have some connection of its own with the foundations of everything?
- Exactly.
Interviewed by Olga Balla
In 1967, Olga Sedakova entered the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and in 1973 graduated with a diploma thesis on Slavic antiquities. The apprenticeship relationship connected her with S.S. Averintsev and other outstanding philologists - M.V. Panov, Yu.M. Lotman, N.I. Tolstoy. Her philological interests include the history of Russian and Old Church Slavonic languages, traditional culture and mythology, liturgical poetry, and general hermeneutics of poetic text. Feeling that in the era of the Iron Curtain and information blockade the ability to read in other languages was essential, Olga Sedakova studied the main European languages. This helped her in the future to earn money by reviewing the latest humanities literature (from 1983 to 1990 she worked as a referent on foreign philology at INION) and translating “for herself and her friends.” Translations from European poetry, drama, philosophy, theology (English folk poetry, T. S. Eliot, E. Pound, J. Donne, R. M. Rilke, P. Celan, St. Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, P. Claudel , P. Tillich, etc.), made without thought of publication, have been published in recent years.
Olga Sedakova began composing poetry from the first years of her life and quite early decided to “be a poet.” From the moment her poetic world acquired certain outlines (formal, thematic, ideological), it became obvious that this path radically diverged from official literature, like the paths of other authors of this “post-Brod” generation of Moscow, Leningrad and other cities: V. Krivulin , E. Schwartz, L. Gubanova (with whom she had a personal friendship). In the “second culture” of the 70s, there were not only writers, but artists, musicians, thinkers... There was an intense creative life, which only partially came to light during the times of liberalization.
Not only poetry, but also criticism, philological works of Olga Sedakova were practically not published in the USSR until 1989 and were assessed as “abstruse”, “religious”, “bookish”. The rejected “second culture” nevertheless had its own readership, and a fairly wide one. Olga Sedakova’s texts were distributed in typewritten copies and published in foreign and emigrant periodicals.
In 1986, the first book was published by YMCA-Press. Soon after this, poems and essays began to be translated into European languages, published in various magazines and anthologies, and published in book form. At home, the first book (“Chinese Journey”) was published in 1990.
To date, 57 books of poetry, prose, translations and philological studies have been published (in Russian, English, Italian, French, German, Hebrew, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Ukrainian, Polish).
At the end of 1989, Olga Sedakova traveled abroad for the first time. The following years are spent in constant and numerous trips around Europe and America (participation in poetry festivals, conferences, book salons, teaching at various universities around the world, public lectures).
Since 1991, employee of the Institute of World Culture (Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University).
* Candidate of Philological Sciences (dissertation: “Funeral rites of the Eastern and Southern Slavs”, 1983).
* Doctor of Theology honoris causa (Minsk European Humanitarian University, Faculty of Theology, 2003).
* Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic (Officier d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française, 2012).
* Academician of the Academy “Sapientia et Scientia” (Rome, 2013).
* Academician of the Ambrosian Academy (Milan, 2014).
Born into the family of a military engineer. In 1973 she graduated from the Slavic department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, in 1983 - graduate school at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
She participated in international conferences in Russia and abroad, gave lectures at universities in Europe and the USA, and participated in international poetry festivals in Italy, Great Britain, Belarus, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Since 1996, he has been a member of the board of trustees of the St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute.
Creation
Until 1989, she was not published as a poet in the USSR; her first book of poems was published in Paris in 1986. She published translations from European literature, philosophy, theology (Francis of Assisi, Dante, Pierre de Ronsard, John Donne, Stéphane Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke , Martin Heidegger, Paul Claudel, Paul Celan, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound), articles about the works of Pushkin, N. Nekrasov, the poetics of V. Khlebnikov, B. Pasternak, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, M. Tsvetaeva, P. Tselana and others, memoirs about Venedikt Erofeev, Leonid Gubanov, Viktor Krivulin, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Averintsev, Vladimir Bibikhin, Mikhail Gasparov, Gennady Aigi. Connecting various traditions from Slavic ritual songs to European neoclassicism of the 20th century, the lyrics of the poetic cycles “Wild Rosehip” (1978), “Old Songs” (1980-1981), “Chinese Journey” (1986), etc. are marked by a constant spiritual search, always open to new things, never turns away from life, no matter how painful and unattractive it may be outwardly. The most complete editions of what Sedakova wrote are the two-volume “Poems. Prose" (Moscow, 2001) and the 4-volume book "Poems. Translations. Poetica. Moralia" (Dmitry Pozharsky University, Moscow 2010).
Confession
Literary prize winner:
- Andrey Bely (1983)
- Paris Prize for Russian Poet (1991)
- Alfred Töpfer (1994)
- European Prize for Poetry (Rome, 1995)
- “Christian Roots of Europe”, Vladimir Solovyov Prize (Vatican, 1998)
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2003) - “for the courageous aspiration to convey the mystery of existence in a simple lyrical word; for the subtlety and depth of philological and religious-philosophical essays"
- Dante Alighieri Prize (2011)
- Award Master of the Guild of Masters of Literary Translation (2011)
- Globe Prize of the Znamya magazine and the All-Russian State Library named after M. I. Rudomino (2011)
According to the list of the Cambridge International Biographical Center, she was named “Woman of the Year” (1992). The lyrics and essays have been translated into most European languages, Hebrew and Chinese.
Alexander Vustin, Pyotr Starchik, Valentin Silvestrov, Victoria Polevaya, Viktor Kopytko, Tatyana Aleshina and others wrote music to Sedakova’s texts.
Main publications
- Gates, windows, arches. - Paris: YMCA-Press, 1986.
- Chinese travel. Steles and inscriptions. Old songs. - M.: Carte Blanche, 1991.
- The Silk of Time. Silk of time. Bilingual Selected Poems. Keele: Ryburn Publishing, Keele Univ. Press, 1994. Ed. and itroduced by Valentina Polukhina.
- Poetry. - M.: Gnosis, Carte Blanche, 1994.
- The Wild Rose. London: Approach Publishers, 1997. (Bilingual). Transl. Richard McKane.
- Old Songs of Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House, 1997. Transl. Hamutal Bar Josef.
- Reise nach Bryansk. Wien: Folio Verlag, 2000. Transl. Erich Klein and Valeria Jager.
- Eloge de la Po?sie. Paris: L'Age d'Homme, 2001. Transl. Gislaine Bardet.
- Poetry. Prose. Collected works in 2 volumes - M.: N.F.Q./Tu Print, 2001.
- Chinese travel. M.: Grail, 2002.
- Old songs. M.: Locus-press, 2003.
- Poems and Elegies. Bucknell: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2003. Transl. Slava Yastremsky, Michael Nydan, Catriona Kelly, and others.
- Kinesisk Rejse og andre digte. Copenhagen: Borgens, 2004. Transl. Mette Dalsgaard.
- Le Voyage en Chine et autres po?mes. Paris: Caractéres, 2004. Transl. L?on Robel, Marie-No?lle Pane.
- Poetics of ritual: Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs. - M.: Indrik, 2004.
- Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms. Materials for the dictionary. M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet of Yu. A. Shichalin, 2005.
- Journey of the Magi. Favorites. 2nd ed. corr. and additional - M.: Russian way, 2005. ISBN 5-85887-211-5.
- Le voyage? Tartu. Paris: Clémence Hiver, 2005. Transl. Philippe Arjakovsky.
- 2 trips. - M.: Logos, Steppe Wind, 2005.
- Andrei Bely Prize, 1978-2004: Anthology. M.: New Literary Review, 2005, pp. 156-171.
- Church Russian paronyms. Materials for the dictionary. M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet of Yu. A. Shichalin, 2005.
- Mediocrity as a social danger. Arkhangelsk, 2006; republished in the collection: Mediocrity as a social danger. - M.: Master, 2011. - 112 p. - (Series “Modern Russian Philosophy”; No. 6).
- Apology of Reason. M.: MGIU, 2009 (“Modern Russian Philosophy”)
- Poetry. Translations. Poetica. Moralia. Collected works in 4 volumes - M.: Dmitry Pozharsky University, 2010.
- Apology of Reason. - M.: Russian way, 2011
Literature about the poet
- Bibikhin V. New Russian word // Literary Review, 1994, No. 9/10, pp. 104-106.
- Kopeliovich M. Sedakova’s phenomenon // Znamya, No. 8, 1996, p. 205-213.
- Averintsev S. “...Already the sky, not the lake...”: the risk and challenge of metaphysical poetry // Sedakova O. Poems. M.: N.F.Q./Tu Print, 2001, p. 5-13.
- “An action is a vertical step.” Materials about the life and work of the poet and thinker O. A. Sedakova. Arkhangelsk: Zaostrovsky Svyato-Sretensky parish, 2004 (includes the most complete bibliography compiled by the author).
- Medvedeva N. G. “Muse of the loss of outline”: “Memory of the genre” and metamorphoses of tradition in the works of I. Brodsky and O. Sedakova. Izhevsk: Institute of Computer Research, 2006.
In Azarovka, mobile communications disappear every now and then, and I cannot find the house I need.
Are you looking for Sedakova? Olga? Poet? - The erudition of a village neighbor is pleasantly surprising; after all, Olga Sedakova is usually referred to as an “unknown celebrity.” - I know her, I saw her at my neighbor’s, Lydia Ivanovna’s, once. And I read poetry. Is she a good poet?
In my opinion, the best.
Olga lives on the other side of the river. My husband will take you to her now. Take apples for the road. And maybe I should give her some fresh eggs? - yesterday’s kindergarten teacher Zoya clarifies. And having become completely emboldened, he admits: “I still don’t understand her poems as well as Yesenin.”
I can’t imagine walking into the poet I idolize, an hour late and with a grill of chicken eggs. But Zoya finds it difficult to suppress the desire to urgently do good for the poet. And it's inspiring.
Azarovka, who already exists in my imagination thanks to the poems dedicated to her (“When the nightingale suffocated like a brother, / collapsing an unkempt garden into a pond, / over Lisa, over the best of the local Ophelias”), turns out to be completely different. And the garden is incredibly well-kept, and Ophelia will not drown in the river. I was sure that Olga Sedakova loved wild nature more than well-groomed nature. And from behind the lattice fence, a cultivated paradise looks out - from phlox, lilies, roses and a beautiful apple tree in the middle of neatly growing flowers.
This is a white filling. Bibikhin planted it,” says the owner.
Bite off an apple or take it home as a talisman? Vladimir Bibikhin is a famous philosopher, a humanitarian figure of such magnitude that he does honor to the national culture.
They were friends, she baptized his three sons. He dedicated a seminar at Moscow State University to her poetry entitled “The New Russian Word.”
Bibikhin brought her to Azarovka, where she did not appear for a year after the death of her aunt, the mistress of this house, who loved to comment on her poetic stay here with the words “Now I’m going to die, but you don’t even know how to light a stove.”
During the year of her orphaned absence, everything became so overgrown that it was impossible to get through. Bibikhin said: the first thing to do is not to cut down the bushes, but to plant something. And he planted an apple tree. Bibikhin, by the way, was an unusually skillful person; he built a two-story house in his dacha with his own hands.
Do you have 20 acres? - I measure with my eye the distance of the garden with the Bibikha apple tree in the center that goes towards the river.
Come on - 40. Grandma and aunt used to plant potatoes here. And the previous owners even had cattle...
The house, built at the beginning of the 20th century (“The owner built it and went to the First World War”), has already grown into the ground, but is sheathed with light modern half-timbers (the old platbands, of course, have been preserved), all the decrepitude in it has been replaced, last year - big deal! - changed the floors.
For the first major prize the poet received in 2003, the “Solzhenitsyn Veranda”, named after her, was added to the house.
She was awarded the Solzhenitsyn Prize "for her courageous desire to convey the mystery of existence in a simple lyrical word; for the subtlety and depth of her philological and religious-philosophical essays." She is not only a poet, but also a major philologist, thinker, one of the best - the remaining of the brilliant ones who have passed away - Averintsev, Bibikhin, Gasparov, Lotman (two were her teachers, one was her friend).
On the Solzhenitsyn veranda there is an archaeological map of Sardinia, where she taught, a child’s drawing of some unimaginable rooster, a map of the world, apples in a basket and a bouquet of such exquisite meadow flowers that the asters I gave, despite the owner’s assurances of her love for them, seem next to him barbarism. Azarovka is located near the Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve. And everything around him is essentially also a protected area, with almost an alpine composition of herbs: when his nieces come, they study botany in the meadows.
The village appeared from the “amazing beauty” of these places by her grandmother and aunt, who once came here to visit friends. They, accustomed to a flat plain, were delighted by the local hills - nearby, visually praised throughout the world, Polenovo, the famous Tarusa.
After drinking coffee on the veranda, the hostess introduced me to the cat Musset (that was the name he responded best to). Gray, mongrel-striped in color (“they mocked him,” the appearance of his tattered ears will explain), a spring-thick creature, does not want to recognize anyone in the world except himself. Although Musset has problems now, every evening the local hedgehog comes to the terrace and eats dry cat food in his own way. Sometimes - with the family, like in the dining room. Musset's indignation knows no bounds, they fight, but the hedgehog wins.
The best place to write poems and texts about Dante is at the dacha in your beloved Azarovka.
Just in case, having eaten his fill in the morning, Musset goes to sleep on the table in the garden, between the fragments of an old rusty stirrup and a cast-iron pre-revolutionary iron, and we walk past him to “Chopin’s corner.”
There are four corners in the garden, indicating the meanings and currents of the poet’s Azarov life. In the “Chopin Corner,” where on a thin chimney stands a small bust of the composer, taken by Olga Alexandrovna from her children’s piano, we just stood there. In the “Pushkin corner” with sea buckthorn, reminiscent of the color of olive leaves, and thuja, similar to cypress (“It is important for me that Greece is felt around Pushkin”), we sat on white garden chairs, and I remembered how I bought Bibikhin’s book in the store and, Having first read Sedakova’s poems in it “You will unfold in the expanded heart of suffering, wild rose hip, oh, wounding garden of the universe...”, I realized that life seemed to have changed. She replied that she was always amazed by the very possibility of a response. After all, Tyutchev said: “And compassion is given to us, / Just as grace is given to us” - that is, rarely. And regardless of our desire.
Near "Dante's Corner" we will walk silently on our way back from the garden to the house. I will catch her face in the frame of the iPad, and she will walk around the small bust of her favorite poet standing on the pipe (she is currently writing another work about Dante) with the secret of such contact with him, as if he were alive. For her, definitely.
And then, turning behind the house with a round TV antenna (there is an antenna, there is no TV), we will sit under a large apple tree strewn with fruits in the “Goethe corner” (again with his bust) and talk for an hour.
I will not forget her words from the article “In search of a “new nobility” about the modern “lowering of the human standard.” (“In the politics of “political correctness” this “speculation on lowering” is motivated by humanity towards the weak, towards minorities, towards the crippled and etc. You cannot set too high or difficult tasks for a person, otherwise you will offend the poor and deprived. And in this case, the “rich” are insulted and offended. Our civilization ceases to respect gifts, as it was before.") By the way, one of her lectures at the famous Polit.Ru was called “Mediocrity as a Social Danger.”
I will ask her a question of hope: does our life, locked under sanctions and our involuntary transformation from the outskirts of the world archipelago into an independent island, not hold a chance for a “cultural renaissance” similar to what Bibikhin discovered in the 70s of the 20th century? She will answer very wisely: neither openness guarantees the occurrence of something like this, nor closeness. This may or may not happen.
Her generation of poets “after Brodsky” was precisely “closed”, underground; the public knows the names of Leonid Aronzon or Viktor Krivulin much less than Brodsky or Yevtushenko. And this was not happiness for them: not to publish until the system changed. And after a change of formation, they won’t be so audible.
But what definitely seems noticeable and pleasing to her today is the growing volunteer movement, the passion of young people for doing all sorts of selfless good deeds.
After the garden we go to a house with gray-blue and coffee floors, a stove, a towel, an icon of the great martyr and victorious George, written by her at the age of 19, with poems depicted in Chinese characters (as a child she lived in China, she has a cycle of poems “Chinese journey"), with a portrait of a cat for a children's book, which they are currently preparing with an artist they know, with bouquets of meadow herbs, with quiet light falling from low windows. The house is so clean that you feel like you're in a movie, especially when the door swings open into the garden where white and lilac gladioli are blooming.
But her friend, a Belarusian artist, and his family usually live in this house, and she herself goes to the summer house, “Daddy’s House,” on the small terrace of which I manage to see in detail a table with an ashtray, a lighter, cigarettes and a lantern: “Everything is written here.” .
Social life in Azarovka has always been rather deaf; there was no store or office; only a truck store with bread and sugar arrived twice a week. The history of the village is special; before the revolution, noblemen lived here, who essentially ran peasant households, but spoke a little differently, dressed with great attention to their appearance and married similar single-yarders from neighboring villages. The Soviet government did not touch the nobles' peasant life, but already in the second half of the twentieth century, the subtle but perceptible difference set by high origin was finally dissolved in Soviet children and grandchildren.
In Azarovka, Olga Aleksandrovna wrote most of her texts, “and poetry, almost all of them.” In the city she “accumulates ideas,” but here, in silence, without being distracted by anything, she writes.
Azarovka is the best place in the world for this. She would have lived here even in winter (it turned out that it was easy to heat the stove - from the memory of how her grandmother and aunt used to heat it), if she had a car. Because nature understands what it does to a person.
It just makes it better.
And pointing his hand up the mountain, he clarifies that within walking distance there is a village of the elite, in the monetary sense of the word - “new Russians”. The holy spring with the icon of the Mother of God “Three-Handed”, to which people made pilgrimages both in pre-revolutionary and Soviet times (and she, initially a believer, heard many stories about healings), is now pragmatically decorated with a unit for drawing water into this very village. But nature also does something “with them”.
At first it was something terrible. But life in Azarovka changes them, as people, for the better.
In general, the bourgeoisie is a cultural class,” she says. And she recalls that intellectual acquaintances in Europe often assured her: it is “high-flying businessmen” who are the first to sense something new and valuable.
Even in Goethe’s corner, I allowed myself to approach the poet with a simple theory of relaxation: life in nature is almost always relaxing, nature is a place of weak effects. It’s not like watching a good movie - a kind of session of cultural hypnosis and strong influences. “Wow, weak,” Sedakova marvels, “morning dawn is a hundred times stronger than any movie.”
And he unexpectedly interrupts the conversation with the comment: “A familiar crow has flown in,” adding: “In general, I know all the birds here.” “In the face?” I ask without joking. “Yes,” she answers. And she adds: “Did you see that for some reason our daylily didn’t open today, and it’s already noon. There’s something new here every day and hour.”
The horizon of her garden ecumene is set by the willows across the river, which rise in a terrace into the sky. For her, they are willows, one of the most frequent images of her poems (“Motherland! My heart cried out at the sight of a willow”), with them she correlates and measures the entire space around.
In my favorite book about Rembrandt, “Traveling with Closed Eyes,” which I received as a gift, there is an amazing argument that we see the world with vision, already married to words, and it is important to see the world with a primary, literal look... Azarovka returns such vision: “I remain silent, disappearing in my mind from my beloved gaze...”
