In Azarivka every now and then mobile communication disappears, and I cannot find the house I need.

Are you looking for Sedakova? Olga? Poet? - The erudition of the village neighbor is pleasantly surprising, after all, Olga Sedakova is usually referred to as "an unknown celebrity." - And I know her, at the neighbor's, Lidia Ivanovna, I once saw her. 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 on the road. And maybe give her some fresh eggs? - Zoya, yesterday's kindergarten teacher, clarifies. And quite emboldened, he admits: - I still don’t understand her poems as well as Yesenin.

I can’t imagine how I will enter the poet I idolize, being late for an hour and with a lattice of chicken eggs. But it is difficult for Zoya to appease the desire to urgently do good to the poet. And it's inspiring.

Azarovka, which already exists in my imagination thanks to the verses dedicated to it ("When the nightingale suffocated like a brother, / bringing down an untidy garden into the pond, / over Lisa, over the best of the local Ophelia"), turns out to be completely different. And the garden is incredibly well maintained, and Ophelia cannot drown in the river. I was sure that Olga Sedakova loves wild nature more than tamed nature. And from behind the lattice fence, a cultivated paradise looks out - from phloxes, lilies, roses and a beautiful apple tree in the middle of neatly growing flowers.

This is a white fill. Bibikhin planted, - says the hostess.

Bite off an apple or take it home as a talisman? Vladimir Bibikhin is a famous philosopher, a humanitarian figure of such magnitude that it does honor to the national culture.

They were friends, she baptized his three sons. He dedicated a seminar at Moscow State University called "The New Russian Word" to her poems.

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 liked to comment on her poetic stay here with the words "Here I will die, and you don’t even know how to heat the stove."

During the year of her orphan absence, everything has become so overgrown that it cannot be passed. Bibikhin said: the first thing to do is not to cut down the thickets, but to plant something. and planted an apple tree. Bibikhin, by the way, was an unusually skillful person, he built a two-story house in the country with his own hands.

Do you have 20 acres? - I measure with my eye the distance of the garden with the Bibikhinsky apple tree in the center, going to the river.

Well, what are you - 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 sheathed with light modern half-logs (the old architraves, of course, are preserved), all decrepitude has been replaced in it, last year - big deal! - changed floors.

For the first serious prize, received by the poet in 2003, the Solzhenitsyn Veranda named after her was attached to the house.

The Solzhenitsyn Prize was awarded to her "for her courageous aspiration to convey the mystery of being in a simple lyrical word; for the subtlety and depth of 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 departed brilliant ones - Averintsev, Bibikhina, Gasparov, Lotman (two were her teachers, one was a 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 meadow flowers so refined that the asters presented by me, despite the hostess's assurances of love for them, seem next to him barbarism. Azarovka is located near the Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve. And everything around it is essentially also reserved, with almost alpine herbs: when 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 with the local hills - nearby Polenovo, visually sung to the whole world, and the famous Tarusa.

After drinking coffee on the veranda, the hostess introduced me to the cat Musset (it was the name he responded best to). A grey, mongrel-striped color (“they mocked him”, will explain the appearance of his torn ears), a springy-thick creature, does not want to recognize anyone in the world but himself. Although Musset is in trouble right now, every evening a local hedgehog comes to the terrace and eats dry cat food in his own way. Sometimes - with the family, as in the dining room. Musset's indignation knows no bounds, they fight, but the hedgehog wins.

Poems and texts about Dante are best written at the dacha in the beloved Azarovka

Just in case, having eaten in the morning, Musset goes to sleep on a table in the garden, between fragments of an old rusty stirrup and a cast-iron pre-revolutionary iron, and we go past him to "Chopin's corner".

There are four corners in the garden, denoting the meanings and currents of Azar's life of the poet. In "Chopin's 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 "Pushkin's 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, for the first time I read Sedakova’s poems in it “You will turn around in the expanded heart of suffering, wild rosehip, oh, wounding the garden of the universe ...”, I realized that life seems to have changed. She replied that she was always amazed at the very possibility of a response. After all, Tyutchev said: "And sympathy is given to us, / As grace is given to us" - that is, rarely. And regardless of our desire.

Near the "corner of Dante" we, returning from the garden to the house, will pass in silence. I will catch her face in the frame of the iPad, and she will walk around the small bust of her beloved poet standing on the pipe (she is writing another work about Dante) with the secret of such contact with him, as if he were alive. For her, sure.

And then, turning behind the house with a round television antenna (there is an antenna, there is no TV), we will sit under a large apple tree strewn with fruits in the "Goethe's 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 "decrease in the human standard." ("In the politics of "political correctness" this "degradation profiteering" is motivated by humanity towards the weak, towards minorities, towards the crippled and etc. One should not set too high or difficult tasks for a person, otherwise you will offend the poor and disadvantaged. And in this case, offend the "rich". Talent turns out to be scolded and offended. Our civilization ceases to respect gifts, as it used to be.") By the way, one of her lectures in the famous Polit.Ru was called "Mediocrity as a social danger."

I will ask her a question of hope: does not our life locked up by sanctions and involuntary transformation from the outskirts of the world archipelago into an independent island bring a chance for a "cultural renaissance" similar to what Bibikhin discovered in the 70s of the XX century? She will answer very wisely: neither openness guarantees the occurrence of something like this, nor closedness. This may or may not happen.

Her generation of poets "after Brodsky" was just "closed", underground, the public knows the names of Leonid Aronzon or Viktor Krivulin much less than Brodsky or Yevtushenko. And it was not happiness for them: not to publish until the change of order. Yes, and after the change of order to be not so audible.

But what definitely seems to her today is noticeable and pleasing is the growing volunteer movement, the enthusiasm 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 (she lived in China as a child, she has a cycle of poems "Chinese journey"), with a portrait of a cat for a children's book, which they are now preparing with an artist they know, with bouquets of meadow herbs, with a quiet light falling from low windows. The house is so clean that it seems that you are 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 with his family, usually lives in this house, and she herself goes to the summer, "Papa'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 dull, there was no shop, offices, only twice a week a truck shop with bread and sugar came. The history of the village is special, before the revolution noblemen-one-palaces lived here, essentially leading a peasant economy, but speaking a little differently, dressing with great attention to their appearance and marrying the same one-yards from neighboring villages. The Soviet government did not touch the nobles of peasant life, but already in the second half of the twentieth century, a subtle, but perceptible difference, given by a high origin, finally dissolved in Soviet children and grandchildren.

In Azarovka, Olga Alexandrovna wrote most of her texts, "and poetry, so almost all." 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 in the winter (it turned out to be easy to heat the stove - from the memory of how her grandmother and aunt stoked her), if she had a car. Because nature understands what it does with a person.

Just makes it better.

And pointing up the hill with his hand, he clarifies that within walking distance is the village of the elite, in the monetary sense of the word, the "new Russians." The holy spring with the icon of the Mother of God "Three Hands", to which pilgrimages both in pre-revolutionary and Soviet times (and she, who was originally a believer, heard many stories about healings), is now pragmatically decorated with a unit for taking water to this very village. But even "with them" nature does something.

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 intellectuals she knew in Europe often assured her that it was "high-flying businessmen" who were the first to feel something new and valuable.

Back in Goethe's Corner, I allowed myself to poke my nose at the poet with an uncomplicated theory of relaxation: life in nature is almost always relaxation, 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 is surprised, - the morning dawn is a hundred times stronger than any movie."

And suddenly he interrupts the conversation with a comment: "A familiar crow has flown in," adding: I generally know all the birds here. “In the “face?” I ask without a joke. “Yes,” she answers. And she adds: “You saw that for some reason the daylily didn’t open today, and it’s already noon. There is something new here every day and hour."

The horizon of her garden ecumene is set by willows across the river, terrace rising 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 all the space around.

In my favorite book about Rembrandt, Journey with Eyes Closed, which I received as a gift, there is an amazing reasoning that we see the world with a vision that is already married to words, but it is important to see the world with a primary, verbal look ... Azarovka returns such vision: "I am silent, disappearing in my mind from my beloved gaze ..."

Olga Alexandrovna Sedakova(b. 1949) - in 1967, along with D. Sedakova, she translated poems in Alice (where the prose part was translated by N. Demurova).

She is the author of the following translations from Carroll:

"How he values ​​\u200b\u200bhis tail",
"Evening food"
"You blink, my owl",
"Lady of Hearts"
"Lullaby",

as well as verse translations in Gardner's Commentary and Supplements (in the 1978 edition)

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

SEDAKOVA Olga Alexandrovna

Born in 1949 in Moscow, in the family of a military engineer.
She graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1973) and postgraduate studies at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies (1983). Candidate of Philological Sciences (dissertation: "Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs", 1983).
1983–1990 - worked as an assistant in foreign philology (INION).
1990–1991 - taught at the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute. Since 1991 he has been working at the Institute of World Culture (Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University), senior researcher at the Institute of History and Theory of World Culture (MSU).
Until 1989 it was not published in the USSR.
She has published (in Russian and in translation) twenty-six books of poetry, prose, translations and philological works.
She published philological studies, essays and criticism in Russian and foreign publications; translations from European poetry, drama, philosophy (English folk poems, T. S. Eliot, E. Pound, R. M. Rilke, P. Celan, Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, P. Claudel, etc.).
Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize (1983), Paris Prize
Russian poet (1991), the European Poetry Prize (Rome, 1995), the Vladimir Solovyov Prize "Christian Roots of Europe" (Vatican, 1998), the A. I. Solzhenitsyn Prize (2003). Doctor of Theology honoris causa (Minsk European Humanities University, Faculty of Theology), 2003.
Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (France), 2005.

***
From an interview with O. Sedakova:

- You are a poet who translates a lot. Was your first translation of the poems of Carroll's "Alice"?
- The first published translation. I have been interested in translating since my school years. I started, I remember, with a Yeats ballad. But I haven't tried printing. Nina Mikhailovna Demurova offered me to translate those poems from Alice that Dina Grigoryevna Orlovskaya did not have time to finish. Working with her, for the first time I met a respectful attitude towards the decisions of another translator: after all, then (and now it has not disappeared anywhere) it was not “copyright” for the text, but “editor's right”. Each editor knew better than the author “how to”. I think of Nina Mikhailovna with amazement and gratitude.

***
From an interview with E. Kalashnikova and N. Demurova, Russian Journal:

RJ: OA Sedakova is little interested in what relates to the biography of translated authors. “I am interested in a person in a state of speaking, I need to feel his almost physical nature, like “cold” - “hot”. It only gives the text itself."

N.D.: O.A. Sedakova is a special case, she has a huge storehouse of knowledge, but she is first of all a wonderful poet, not a translator. And an ordinary translator, even a very talented one, will only benefit if he knows more about the author and his time.

***
Nina Demurova "Conversations about Lewis Carroll"
(Fragments of the book "Pictures and Conversations"):

In the mid-70s, I worked on the “new” Carroll, the second version of the translation of the dilogy about Alice, which was intended for the academic publishing house “Nauka” (series “Literary Monuments”). Unlike the so-called "Sophia" edition of my "Alice", this volume was supposed to be issued with a detailed commentary by Martin Gardner, which included in particular the originals of the poems parodied by Carroll. I was thinking about who to invite for this difficult task: after all, in addition to children's poems, among the works parodied were poems by such poets as Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In the end, I turned for advice to Mikhail Viktorovich Panov, a remarkable scientist and person (who, by the way, wrote a most interesting work on Russian translations of Carroll's ballad Jabberwocky). He called me Olga Sedakova. Now it is well known not only in our country, but also abroad, but in those years it was not printed in our country. I called Olga Alexandrovna, and she readily responded to my proposal. It was surprisingly interesting and easy to work with her - me and "Alisa" were very lucky.

Nina Demurova. We met with the light hand of Mikhail Viktorovich Panov. If I'm not mistaken, did you learn from him?

Olga Sedakova. Mikhail Viktorovich was my university teacher; I studied Russian phonetics with him and for several years participated in his amazing seminar on linguopoetics (until he was banned from teaching at Moscow State University for political reasons). His linguistic genius is still not appreciated; his most peculiar history of Russian poetry, in which the main subject of study was gnotr (this is a word he invented, which should mean something third in relation to meter and rhythm - doesn’t it sound like Carroll?), has not been published. He was the first "adult" person who approved of my writings, both philological (he managed to print my sketch about Khlebnikov when I was 19!), and - what was even more important for me - poetic. At one of his seminars, we also analyzed the Jabberwocks. Mikhail Viktorovich loved the game - linguistic, poetic, he was a real heir to the Russian avant-garde and himself composed "abstruse" phonetic poems and even entire poems, no more - but no less - understandable than "Jabberwocks". In them, too, "someone did something with someone." He couldn't help but love Carroll.

N.D. In those years, your name was known only to a narrow circle of friends and lovers of poetry. Have your poems been published in samizdat? As far as I remember, you started publishing only much later?

O.S. Yes, nothing was printed. No poems, no articles, no translations. The poems went to samizdat and in this way reached the Parisian publishing house YMCA-press, where my first book appeared - in 1986. In Moscow, the first book of poems was published at the end of 1990. At the time we met, not only was I not publishing, but I was "in bad shape." Even my name (as well as the names of other uncensored poets of our generation) was not mentioned in the press. So participation in your edition of Carroll was for me just the first case of legalization (and for many years it remained the only one), in its own way, a "protection letter".

N.D. It seemed to me that translating the original Carroll parodies was not an easy task. And the point is not only that the texts were very diverse both in tone and style, but also in the fact that Carroll himself treated them differently. Not all of them were parodies in the truest sense of the word. Will you say a few words about this?

O.S. It was an unexpected and very interesting task for me. Most of the translations of the parodies were already done by Dina Orlovskaya, and the translations of the source texts had to be brought to them in the opposite direction. In fact, very different - high poetry and didactic school verses. You can talk about parody only in the second case (“Beat your son”, “This is the voice of a lobster”), in the first case, it’s more about some otherness of the texts, about crazy variations on their theme – they, like Alice herself, entered an unimaginable space.
Boris Zakhoder chose a different path - "by analogy": instead of Carroll's "distorted" English poems, he has parodies of textbook Russians. (Generally speaking, for greater similarity, Soviet educational, doctrinal verses should have been parodied here - as was done in school folklore; I remember how we combined the words of our Anthem through a line - and Nekrasov's "Once in a freezing winter time": this is it would be yes! Or take Mayakovsky's slogans, like "The Party and Lenin are twin brothers." That's really space for the game! But for obvious reasons, such a translation-retelling of the world would not have seen then.) For our reader, Zakhoder's path is certainly easier, comic this kind is more familiar and easier. But the path you have chosen I like better. You left Carroll English. In the inverted space was the music of British poetry. I got to convey it somehow - and coordinate it with its shadow likenesses.

N.D. When were you first introduced to Carroll's books?

O.S. I remember "Alice" from a very early age. They probably read it to me. It's one of those memories you can't remember without. I can't say that I really liked her then. It was too different from other early reading (or listening) to traditional folk tales like "Vasilisa the Wise", or Andersen's tales, which I loved most, or, finally, "The Little Humpbacked Horse" and Pushkin's tales. I was frightened by this world, where all the people they meet behave with the heroine not only cruelly, but somehow coldly. In school years, this becomes clearer: the Carroll world is already a world of alienated things and people, like at school, in elementary grades, where for some unknown reason you are forced to memorize various abstract things like declension of nouns or multiplication tables. They demand obedience to requirements that you do not understand, they check all the time, send them somewhere, and the like. This is no longer the world of infancy. This is the world of the student, the educated. I probably didn't have that experience yet when I got to know Alice. But some places were amazing and remembered forever: especially about the growth and reduction of Alice.
By the way, I really liked the English absurd poems in the program of Chukovsky, Marshak (I learned Kharms much later) even in early childhood! English children's poetry is a great gift to Russian childhood.

N.D. Has your attitude towards Carroll changed over the years?

O.S. At a conscious age, I read "Alice" already in English classes at the university. And it was already pure pleasure. Enjoying the speed of thought, the fantastic logic of Carroll, the freedom of his mind from the trivial reality. What in childhood seemed to me unkind, harsh, strange, now appeared simply freed from the usual emotions, as if taken out of the field of emotional and simplest moral - "spiritual" - relations. Such an experiment is very refreshing. For Russian art, which sometimes comes too close to sentimentality and moralizing, such an exercise in purity of imagination, it seems to me, is useful.

N.D. Do you think that Carroll had any impact on Russian poetry - or perhaps even literature in general - of the 20th century?

O.S. I didn't have to seriously think about it. One can answer without hesitation about the English nurseryrhymes: they have largely created and continue to create our literature for children, both poetry and prose. Carroll is harder. An obvious example is Nabokov. His fantasy, his combinatorial imagination for me is undoubtedly marked by the stamp of Alice. This, perhaps, makes many see in him a "non-Russian" writer, too alienated from "soulfulness". Through Nabokov this influence penetrates even further. But in fact, to answer this question, one would need to think more about it.

N.D. What do you think explains Carroll's popularity in Russia?

O.S. I can only assume: this airy irrationality, I would say, this dance of meanings somehow facilitates the perception of the absurdity surrounding us. Russian everyday absurdity is heavy, hopeless, it may seem that it absorbs you like a swamp, but here is such a game. Crazy circumstances are free to play with! That, it seems to me, consoles and pleases the domestic reader.
Ksenia Golubovich, a young writer and English philologist, saw in my prose, in "Two Journeys", a kind of new adventures of Alice. In a strange, impenetrable world, where it is impossible to predict the behavior of oncoming people, the journey of the narrator takes place, which, like Alice, everyone tries to command, examines him, rearranges him from place to place ... And at the same time they themselves look like God knows who - like the Cheshire Cat or Tweedledum. My prose is chronicles, nothing is invented in them, but the world turns out to be really Carrollian. It was probably Carroll who taught me how to neutralize this menacing absurdity - at least in order to describe it. Shake him up and make him dance.

N.D. What is your favorite quote (or scene) from Carroll?

O.S. Humpty Dumpty and all his sayings. Great image!

***
O. Sedakova about the art of translation:

I want to start by saying that I don't consider myself a translator's guild. This is not some proud gesture of dismissal - I respect professionals, those for whom translation is a permanent job, a craft. It just doesn't work for me. I translated quite a lot, and different things, but my tasks were usually some other (sometimes research, sometimes experimental - what B. Dubin called "to solve poetry as such", sometimes - something like an offering, a gift of gratitude to a beloved poet) that is, the task of translation was not translation itself. But the main difference between a professional, in my opinion, is that the very translatability of any text is not a problem for him. The problem is how to do it. And for me, each text is primarily problematic in this respect: will it be translated? Firstly, translation into Russian, in the broadest sense of the word, including our tradition of versification, our rhyming repertoire; then - to my translation, that is, to the possibilities that I personally have. If I feel like I don't, then I don't try. Loving Rilke, in my youth simply drowning in him, I translated only a few of his poems. It would never have occurred to me to translate a whole book by Rilke, as K.P. Bogatyrev did. And so always, with rare exceptions, when it was necessary to earn a living.

Why is an apology of reason needed? Does the author perceive everything written as a whole? And how is this whole organized? Translation of poetry - study and asceticism? Olga Sedakova talks about the most important thing.

Apart from 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 a way lonely - at least in Russia - intellectual position.

Evgeny Klyuev that linguistic immigration is not a geographical, but a metaphysical phenomenon. In the era of information chaos and total inflation of words, it does not interfere, but even helps the writer to keep the Language clean, in its original breath, as it is given from above.

"Poet, prose writer, translator, philologist, ethnographer ..." - represent her encyclopedias. "Philosopher" is never found in such representations, yet it suggests itself very much, even if Olga Alexandrovna herself never called herself that.

Therefore, in the conversation I wanted to clarify some features of the integrity underlying both her poetic and analytical work, and the principles on which this integrity is built.

Olga Alexandrovna, what you are doing in all areas of your studies belongs to the range of tasks of philosophy. I would call it a clarification of a person's relationship with the foundations of being, and poetry - a kind of human-forming work.

In my understanding of these subjects, you represent a variant of the Christian rationalist tradition, organic rather than Western thought, but not fully implemented there either - due to the triumph, starting from the Enlightenment, of the narrowly understood "instrumental" rationalism, which left many aspects of human wholeness outside.

Closer philosophers to this tradition were often poets - Goethe and Dante. In our country, this tradition was represented by Averintsev, who, in your words, cultivated “that new (ancient) rationality” dating back to Aristotle, which “is simultaneously resistance to bad irrationalism and bad rationalism.”
- Let me start by commenting on your words about “Western thought”.

We are accustomed to linking rationalism with the Western tradition and contrasting it with a Russian, fundamentally different one ("You cannot understand Russia with the mind," and the like).

Our writers and thinkers of the last two centuries have talked about this so much that the 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 the poet defends the mind (it is customary to oppose poetry and reason) and that the mind found a lawyer in Russia, where the least of all this could be expected.

However, in itself, this defense of the mind was perceived as an extraordinary - albeit long-awaited, according to reviewers - event. Rationalism (or intellectualism), which is discussed in my book, is completely different from what the West is used to in modern times.

The fact is that the classical (developed in Greek antiquity) idea of ​​mind, nous, which in many respects converges with the biblical idea of ​​wisdom, was probably more characteristic of Eastern patristic thought (compare in liturgical texts: “Let me be mind, seeing God").

This mind, constituting the spiritual center of man, coincided with spirit and heart (in contrast to the romantic opposition of mind and heart).

It is this mind, wisdom that sets the boundaries of the technical, critical, speculative mind, which does not know the sense of proportion. Modern culture, both Russian and Western, lives by a flat opposition of such a “reason” and the “irrational” that rebels against it. Here is a situation that I wanted to consider - and reconsider.

- Do you have cross-cutting, unifying themes?
- I can say little about my own writings, except for what they directly say. 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 figuring out, say, the versification of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”, drawing diagrams of its rhythm, writes “by ear” himself 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" runs sharply. It’s as if an undiscussable ban has been put 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 that I don’t notice myself.

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 conceive small things, such as "Chinese Journey", "Old Songs". From prose - "Praise of Poetry" is conceived as a separate book, as well as "Travel". They were published in France. In our country, the publishing tradition of such small books, in general, has been lost (and after all, Blok's "Yambs" came out as a separate book!). It's a pity.

The two-volume edition was already a belated collection of different things from different years. Now a four-volume edition is being prepared, on my part it has already been prepared, the publishing work remains. But it never ceases to seem to me when there is too much of everything, things interfere with each other.

From the position of the reader, I can say that such a collection of different things into one gives the wholeness of the view. It can be seen that this is one work of understanding in different guises.
- I am very comforted that you see it. For my part, I see more differences.

- Because you know how it arose.
- Well, yes, in every thing it is important for me where it begins and where it ends. And 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 a while, forgetting about the rest.

But the fact that on the whole it turns out that some common themes are developing, some motives, some images, generally speaking, is not strange. There are things that occupy me all my life.

And it's not that I don't leave them - rather, they don't leave me. But to name these elusive things differently than I call them in this prose, in these verses, each time in a different way, I cannot - because, I repeat, I am not a theoretician of myself.

And yet you are a 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. Still - no, but a teacher. And teaching and creativity, not without reason, are considered things that are poorly compatible. Even in the simplest sense, a church person. And the traditional faith, scientific research and artistic creativity are, according to the usual idea, an explosive mixture in general.

How do you feel these different sides of you are connected? How do you compare poetry and prose, which always seemed to me to be organized in almost fundamentally different ways?
- For my first, still student philological work, I took Blok's verses as an epigraph:

To the paradise of my overseas songs
Pathways opened up.

Not only "my", in general "overseas songs". Initially, I saw in the study, as it were, propaedeutics to the understanding of artistic meanings.

Magic realism in Russian. Margarita Meklina writes metaphysical prose: “You don’t have to be a magician to predict…” San Francisco prose writer Margarita Meklina, last year’s Russian Prize winner, talks about her impressions of the awards ceremony and the literary mores that prevail in Moscow, as well as about what it is like for a Russian writer to live in a foreign land and what it is like to write serious prose today, without any kind of giveaway.

But in the strict sense, only one of my works can be called research work - my Ph.D. Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs” (M., Indrik, 2004).

However, even with it, written in a rigid structuralist language, it is not so simple. Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, who was my supervisor, began his speech at the defense by saying that, although this work meets all the methodological requirements of “scientific character”, 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 within, by means of communion, and not removal.

You are right: the mixture of poetry and prose, the poetics "over the barriers" is not at all attractive to me. I want to observe its laws in every genre and not go to a strange monastery with my charter.

It is impossible for me not only to write, but also to think, like Tsvetaeva's - "My Pushkin". Goethe or Dante, which I have been busy with, never "my Goethe" or "my Dante": they are not "mine", I need Goethe as he is, Dante as he is.

I even love genre restrictions - freedom for me is located in other places. To offer a spectacular metaphor in prose instead of a thought is unacceptable for me.

But my native, original language is figurative for me. Not language, perception itself. Do you remember Natasha in Tolstoy saying 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 already at the next step: first, the feeling of the object appears, and only then comes the formation of this feeling.
- Especially since these subjects - general subjects that I always think about - are so elusive that it is difficult for them to find a genre and even a way of thinking: discursive or figurative? And therefore, perhaps, external restrictions even help in some way to “ground” this flickering perception.

- Set it up?
- As if sharpening. But still, every time something partial is obtained. One view 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 limits of literature. If I were seriously engaged in music or painting (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 a general morphology. They can be conveyed both in plastic images, and in musical, and in verbal. And maybe even in mathematics.

Speaking of translations. You have a wide 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 some internal relationship? Or rather one's own tasks in the "work of understanding"?
- First of all, this series can be chronologically extended 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: it is the work of understanding. And not only understanding what others have written, but perhaps even more important: understanding the possibilities of the Russian language, one's own language. “If Rilke wrote in Russian, what would the Russian language be like?”

- This, apparently, is a way of intensive reading?
- Yes. And the expansion of speech capabilities, the struggle with their own tongue-tied tongue. I chose great poets, such as Rilke, Celan, not because they were "close" to me, but because they were able to do what I could not, what I only foresaw. I caught in them the space I lacked.

- So - at least live their experience partly in your own language?
- Yes, and I thought that this experience is lacking not only for me personally, but also for Russian poetry in general, for the Russian reader. For almost the entire 20th century, at least since the 1920s, we have been 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; Celana until some time too. For various reasons: some are too religious, some are formalist, some are abstruse and elitist, and so on. And all are clearly not “progressive”. My authors did not go into this eye of "progressiveness" in any way. I did not deliberately choose "reactionary", for some reason it turned out so fatally: it was impossible to publish what I liked.

Of course, in a sense, such translations are apprenticeships too. Especially in the case of Rilke. I treated Rilke as the best lesson in lyrics. Foreign readers immediately catch the “Rilkov 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, according to his confession, found himself in Russia; and Russian poetry was drawn to him, as to his homeland.

With Claudel it is another matter: it is a Gallic, very Catholic element, distant and unusual for us.

- He, apparently, is one of those who was given more difficult? With such alienation...
- Not. When something is interesting and exciting, it is not so difficult at all. I understood that, working with Claudel, some of the 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 tone and style. And this is also a kind of study.

I did not learn from Claudel either its versification or anything concrete in general: rather the very possibility of a clearer and more definite statement than is usually accepted in our poetry. No “color fog”, everything 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 in T.S. Eliot - the most influential post-war poet in Europe. It was very difficult for me to translate it. This dryness, this asceticism in relation to everything traditionally “poetic”. But at the same time - the poetry of a high order, the "new Dante".

And the last such instructive new poetic experience for me was Paul Celan. The great post-catastrophic poet seems to be the only great poet of this non-poetic era.

All of them, these poets, said what I - at different times of my life - would like to say. Here, I thought, is the statement that I would so much like to utter: but I cannot do it with my own mouth. So 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 has already been written. Poems by Rilke or Celan have not yet been written in Russian.

- Translation experience is also an important existential experience: when translating, a person becomes more plastic.
- Yes, just like the experience of communicating with other languages. One - I think a French - Slavist noticed that between Russian classical literature and Soviet literature, among other differences, there is such an important difference: Russian classics were people of more than one language.

And Soviet writers are monolingual. This greatly affects the writing. Of course, Russian writers of the 19th century could know European languages ​​to varying degrees, but if they could not write in French, like Pushkin or Tyutchev, at least they could 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 liberates 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 sharpens the feeling of a gap between the experience, meaning and verbal expression, between “it is” and “it is called that”.

A monolingual person does not have such a gap. He does not distinguish the world expressed in language from the world beyond words. That is why our monolingual authors have a greater heaviness, clichédness, suppression of language. The language is more obedient than they think.

By the way, one of the most frequent reproaches to me was (and still is) - "they don't speak Russian like that", "it's not Russian." I dare to suggest that these defenders of correct grammar and syntax would hardly have passed me the history of the Russian language if such an examination were presented. After all, the Russian language and its history is my linguistic profession.

- What languages ​​do you speak?
“I own” is too strong a word. I read quite fluently in English, German, French, Italian, Polish. I studied classical languages ​​quite seriously, especially Latin, less Greek. Thanks to comparative Slavic linguistics, which we studied well at the philological faculty, and general linguistic training, I can, if necessary, read other Slavic languages.

In the circle where I happened to be from my university years, in the circle of Tartu Semiotics and the Moscow structural school, it would be strange if someone did not read in the main European languages ​​​​and did not know Latin, “to parse epigraphs”.

Can you say that one of these languages ​​is closer to you than others? As far as I can tell, there is the same personal relationship with languages ​​as, say, with people.
- I don't know, I generally 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?
- Not. I think the difference is different for me: in some languages ​​I manage to write and speak, and not just read and listen - these are English and Italian.

I can't speak German actively. 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: to reach as soon as possible the level of knowledge that allows you to read your favorite things in the original. I studied them, in essence, like dead languages.

And the fruits of such study are obvious: speaking in 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 reading The Tale of Igor's Campaign for us.

- You were also translated a lot. An interesting experience: to see your words and thoughts in translation?
- I never undertake to judge the aesthetic quality of the translations of my works.

- Here we are not even talking about aesthetics, 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 tell whether these verses came out in his language or not.

But in any case, he is a bearer of a different point of view. I'm asking a little about something else - do you recognize yourself in a foreign language incarnation?
- I know. I am surprised to know. 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 different things are lost in our translation and in the Western one. We have such 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 free breeze there.

- Even rhyming verses?
- Yes.

- How amazing. After all, much is lost in the appearance of the text.
- Sometimes everything. Brodsky fought with 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 - light - genres: they write in rhyme for children or texts of popular songs, and it seems that it is no longer customary to write serious poems in rhyme.

However, strict forms, regular verse are now returning - there are such movements in modern European poetry.

But they still translate in vers libre. And the skill of translation does not consist in, as in our case, observing both the external form and (more or less) “content”.

But with us, the translator sacrifices primarily stylistics. Translation style is something impossible, no one will ever write like that, it arises from the need to fit to rhyme. In translations, this monstrous style disappears, and under the name of Mallarme or other most sophisticated authors.

For the sake of obligatory observance of the form, they also sacrifice meaning - subtle shades of meaning. In general, in our translation, everything comes out much simpler, more banal and more stupid.

And Western translators are most concerned about the choice of words, about the subtleties of meaning. And in place of a regular verse, they create something of their own - after all, this is not an interlinear, it is somehow an organized verse.

I had the 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 had such an impression?
- This is an objective fact. This is not only a matter of language, but also of tradition. The Russian poetic tradition, the classical Russian version itself, is much closer to German than to 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 feeling person can convey poetry in a language that is not used to Russian poetry. I have had the happiest cases of translation when poets translated. Moreover, even those who did not know Russian at all or knew very superficially.

- Did they work with interlinear?
- With an adviser, I would say. With a man who not only made an interlinear for them, but could explain a lot more. This is how the German poet Walter Tümler translated me. This is how the great American poet Emily Grossholtz translated. Her consultant was Larisa Pevear (Volokhonskaya), whose new translations of Leo Tolstoy caused a sensation in America.

Larisa is wonderfully educated and surprisingly feels poetry. Emily first heard my reading in Russian and compared it to cash transfers. She felt that something essential was missing in them, and she decided to try to convey this omission without knowing Russian. Together with Larisa Pevear, they worked on the translation for a long time. This is rare luck.

Judging by the perception of readers, my book in Albanian was a success. It was translated by the poet Agron Tufa, who is fluent in Russian. They say the Danish book is very good. Her translator, Mete Dalsgard, 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 be close 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 by its own means. So what kind of experience is poetic, if it is not touching the foundations of being?
- You see, usually my statements are specific. In this case, I had in mind the widespread confusion when the author considers poems on religious topics "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, the poetic experience for me is nothing but a kind of spiritual life. The well-known German critic Joachim Sartorius even wrote that my writings are not “poetry, as we are accustomed to understand it: it is a kind of spiritual exercise.” It's embarrassing for me to talk about it.

- And how would you formulate the difference between poems on religious topics and religious poems?
- The theme of the poem and its reality is its "flesh", consisting of sounds, rhythms, intonations, etc. - completely different things. On religious subjects, one can write such verses that, with all their flesh, express only rudeness or emptiness. T.S. Eliot at one time introduced such a distinction: devotional poetry and religious poetry.

Devotional - these are poems that our second-hand authors composed and which were published in soul-beneficial reading magazines. 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 theme. But the poems bear the stamp of the direct experience of meeting with the "last things." In this sense, "Hamlet" (which Eliot, however, did not like) is a deeply religious thing.

You once said that you never thought that poetry mattered at all. Apparently, this was also some kind of situational statement? What does the presence of poetry in the cultural field mean anyway, what does it lead to?
- Yes, it's in the "Praise of Poetry". And this should not be taken in general terms. V.V. Bibikhin once said: "Poetry writes in the genes." Even if the poem - a real poem - no one 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.
- Space. 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 sets up the culture as a whole, as a set of opportunities, tensions, intonations?
- Cleans, I would say. If we imagine that the creation (better to say: the appearance) of poetry, catching them out of cosmic noise, stops, it seems to me that this will be dangerous for the life of civilization. Poetry clears the air like a thunderstorm. It opposes chaos, pollution, filling up human space with some superfluous 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 repeatedly said that in today's culture there are many lies and falsehoods, that is, many inauthentic things. But it's not all about lies and falsehood. Is there anything happening right now that you feel is important, something that you can hope for in terms of cultural perspectives?
I think and write about it a lot. In the four volumes, most of the essay will be about just that: about the situation in which artistic creativity is now. About what new opportunities our time contains. What is new it brings - new after all the great achievements of the past century.

Perhaps this will be seen later, when time has passed, when our era moves away from us as an integral entity?
- The artist's task, in my opinion, is precisely this: to catch what his time brings, what depth it has, and not those external and usually unsightly sides that people like to discuss publicly so much. And I feel that, thanks to our time, I can see something that, say, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak could not. Not because I'm more brilliant, but because the times are different. We know something today that we did not know then.

- What do we see that was not visible, say, in the 50s?
- Saying "we", I mean those who are really contemporary to their time. There are always few of them. 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".

Even Leo Tolstoy wrote that mediocre people always talk about “our time”, as if they completely understand it. There is some creative order in every time, but it is not easy to discern because it is hidden. He must be listened to.

What new acquisition do we have after all the great discoveries of the 20th 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 talking 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, alignment of everything in the world on a low level, simplification, homogenization, etc.

But this is the shadow side of what is happening. And its core: a sense of the connectedness of the world, clear as never before. A concrete phenomenon of the universal. It means something and requires 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 ​​in a month.

- So, you see a movement in the direction of the growth of freedom and universal humanity?
- According to the well-known concept of Blessed 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 what is the history of the city of God, in fact, almost did not think. And until I read Augustine more carefully, I thought that this was just a contrast between the temporal and the timeless.

The City of God is outside of time, 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 can hardly notice it. This is the history of small quantities. Small quantities, charged with a huge potential of the future. Like the famous mustard seed. Or grains of salt: "you are the salt of the earth." Salt should not be much, no one eats salt instead of bread, but without salt everything will perish.

And this "other" history always goes with some kind of increment, and not through degradation, like a pagan change of centuries: gold - silver - iron. Our contemporaries will most likely not be able to write such a drama as Shakespeare and even more so Aeschylus, such a novel as 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 the 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.

- Each time consists in some own connection with the foundations of everything?
- Exactly.

Interviewed by Olga Balla

Born in 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 - postgraduate studies 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, participated in international poetry festivals in Italy, Great Britain, Belarus, the Netherlands, 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, the 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, Stefan Mallarme, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke , Martin Heidegger, Paul Claudel, Paul Celan, Thomas Sterns Eliot, Ezra Pound), articles on the work of Pushkin, N. Nekrasov, the poetics of V. Khlebnikov, B. Pasternak, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, M. Tsvetaeva, P. Celana and others, memoirs about Venedikt Erofeev, Leonid Gubanov, Viktor Krivulin, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Averintsev, Vladimir Bibikhin, Mikhail Gasparov, Gennady Aigi. Combining 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) and others are marked by a constant spiritual search, constant openness to the new, never turns away from life, no matter how painful and unsightly outwardly it may be. The most complete editions written by Sedakova are the two-volume Poems. Prose” (Moscow, 2001) and 4-volume “Poems. Translations. Poetica. Moralia” (Dmitry Pozharsky University, Moscow 2010).

Confession

Literary award winner:

• Andrei Bely (1983)
• Paris Prize for a 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 being with a simple lyrical word; for the subtlety and depth of philological and religious-philosophical essays"
• Dante Alighieri Award (2011)
• Master Guild Award of the Master of Literary Translation (2011)
• Globus Prize of the magazine Znamya and the All-Russian State Library named after M. I. Rudomino (2011)

Named "Woman of the Year" by the Cambridge International Biographical Center (1992). Lyrics and essays have been translated into most European languages, Hebrew and Chinese.

Alexander Vustin, Pyotr Starchik, Valentin Silvestrov, Viktoriya Polevaya, Viktor Kopytko, Tatyana Aleshina and others wrote music to Sedakova's texts.

Major editions

• Gates, windows, arches. - Paris: YMCA-Press, 1986.
• Chinese travel. Steles and inscriptions. Old songs. - M.: Carte Blanche, 1991.
• The Silk of Time. Time silk. Bilingual Selected Poems. Keele: Ryburn Publihing, Keele Univ. Press, 1994. Ed. and itroduced by Valentina Polukhina.
• Poems. - M.: Gnosis, Carte Blanche, 1994.
• The Wild Rose. London: Approach Publishers, 1997. (Bilingual). Transl. Richard McKane.
• Jerusalem Old Songs: 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. Gislain Bardet.
• Poems. Prose. Collected works in 2 volumes - M .: N.F.Q. / Tu Print, 2001.
• Chinese travel. M.: Grail, 2002.
• Old songs. Moscow: 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 pomes. Paris: Caractres, 2004. Transl. L'on Robel, Marie-No'lle Pane.
• Poetics of the rite: Funeral rites of the Eastern and Southern Slavs. - M.: Indrik, 2004.
• Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms. Materials for the dictionary. M.: Greco-Latin Cabinet Yu. A. Shichalin, 2005.
• Journey of the Magi. Favorites. 2nd ed. correct and additional - M.: Russian way, 2005. ISBN 5-85887-211-5.
• Le voyage? Tartu. Paris: Cl?mence Hiver, 2005. Transl. Philip Arjakovsky.
• 2 trips. - M.: Logos, Stepnoy 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 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).
• Apologia of Reason. M.: MGIU, 2009 (“Modern Russian Philosophy”)
• Poems. Translations. Poetica. Moralia. Collected works in 4 volumes - M .: Dmitry Pozharsky University, 2010.
• Apologia 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. The phenomenon of Sedakova // Banner, 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 act is a vertical step." Materials about the life and work of the poet and thinker OA Sedakova. Arkhangelsk: Zaostrovsky Holy 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 Metamorphoses of Tradition in the Works of I. Brodsky and O. Sedakova. Izhevsk: Institute for Computer Research, 2006.

Anna Galperina is talking to the poet, linguist and theologian Olga Sedakova

Memory of Paradise

- Olga Alexandrovna, what was the most vivid childhood impression?

- I'm a bad storyteller. The bad thing about this genre is talking about yourself and in order. I prefer other plots and a different situation: a plot that comes to mind involuntarily. That's what I like to tell - and I get it! Even Tatyana Tolstaya noted my "gift of the storyteller." The prose writer's praise is flattering. And “a little about myself” - no, it won’t work.

Moreover, I wrote about childhood and, of course, better than I could now repeat. I mean the prose "Praise of Poetry". It begins with memories of the earliest childhood, of preverbal experiences, of the first encounters between reality and language.

About infancy: after all, a baby, infans in Latin is “not speaking”. As far as I know, an era of life almost undescribed in literature. Only Leo Tolstoy remembered himself as a baby being bathed. But he does not say anything about the first encounters with the word. Early childhood interests me the most. This is a different world, in which socialization has not yet entered and put everything on its shelves. Psychoanalytic, for example. In the mind of a contemporary (I mean a European contemporary), the themes of trauma, complexes, and suppression are fatally connected with childhood. These are already ready-made frames for a story - even a story for yourself. I don't just dislike this discourse, but it doesn't seem realistic.

The first thing that happens to us even before any trauma is the capture of reality, rich, significant, wonderful. Any thing that catches your eye is seen as a treasure. I still love these treasures. But it is more appropriate to talk about them in poetry or prose of the Proustian type, and not in a "story about yourself." It is strange how many people are left without this memory of paradise. I am sure that this is the experience of every child. What is driving it out?

To be specific, I was born in Moscow, on Taganka, on the street, which has now returned the name of Nikolo-Yamskaya. In my childhood it was called Ulyanovsk.

Taganka, 1950s. Photo oldmos.ru

Most of the time we spent with the nanny Marusya, a peasant woman from the Oryol region, and with my grandmother. Many of my peers had such nannies, girls and women who escaped from hungry collective farms and became housekeepers - which promised a Moscow residence permit in a few years. Sometimes they became, as it were, members of the family - remember the story of Liliana Lungina about Mota, the nanny of her sons? Such nannies meant a lot in the life of Moscow "intelligent" children. They brought us a completely different world, a different language.

Marusya spoke in the southern, Oryol dialect. My grandmother, father's mother - in the northern, Vladimir. Their speech fascinated me more than the “ordinary” language of my parents. Parents went to work, returned late and only on weekends we could be together. But I remember it as if they were always busy. For serious conversations there were a nanny and a grandmother. They didn’t miss me and didn’t “educate” me. I wrote about Marusa (the story "Marusya Smagina"), about my grandmother too. In the mentioned prose, I also speak of the image of prayer (about two different images) that I saw in their faces: how Marusya prayed and how her grandmother prayed.

From time to time I went to visit my grandmother and aunt, and for a long time. They lived in a wooden house in Perovoye Pole, which at that time was not yet part of Moscow. It was a suburban village. And I liked this world incomparably more than the Moscow apartment. I'm not a city dweller.

And in the summer we moved to a dacha in Valentinovka.

Our site was on the corner of Gogol Street and Pushkin Street. Gogol Street was much longer, and therefore, as a child, I thought that Gogol was more important than Pushkin.

My younger sister Irina was born when I was five years old. Now she is a well-known Slavist, Doctor of Sciences.

Olga and Irina

About names, by the way. They called me not by saints. The father was very fond of Tatyana Larina and wanted his first daughter to be like her. But when they came to register the baby (me), the parents saw that all the girls in front of them were registered as Tatyana. Apparently, it was impossible to get far from Onegin, and therefore I became Olga. Then I had to count from another classic work - "Three Sisters". The parents decided that the middle one, Masha, could be skipped. So it turned out Irina.

Neither Pushkin's nor Chekhov's Olga I find in myself any resemblance.

When I was six years old, we went to China: my father worked there as a military adviser. For a year and a half we lived in Beijing, in a closed town for the Soviets. During our time in Peking there is a turning point in relations between China and the USSR. In 1956, a train from Moscow left to the song “Moscow - Beijing! Moscow - Beijing! The peoples are moving forward!” We left at the end of 1957 from a different atmosphere. It was noticeable even to a child. In Beijing, I went to first grade, to a Russian school.

Already in this century, at a poetry festival in Cologne, we met a Chinese poet who emigrated from China and wrote in English. It turned out that he was one of those Beijing children with whom we exchanged gifts over the stone wall that surrounded Sejimin, our town. We were sitting in a cafe in Cologne, and I said: “Look how carefree they (Cologne people) are! They don't know what they're saved from! What would have happened to them if we had not quarreled then! And we began to imagine how Russian and Chinese would become compulsory for them at school, and they would learn our poems by heart ...

“No,” my interlocutor said soberly. “They would have taught another Chinese and another Russian poet.

Is everything different now in Beijing and China? I asked.

“Yes,” the Chinese poet answered me, not wanting to return to his native Celestial Empire. - Everything is different. Just the same people.

He joked like the English.

I also met another boy from my Chinese childhood - in Rome, in a Russian church on Via Palestro. He became an Orthodox priest, and when we lived in Sejimin, he was the son of a military engineer from St. Petersburg. Our common Chinese memories with Fr. George (now he serves in Florence) is even more interesting, but this is a separate story.

And soon she surprised adults by reading all the signs. On one letter, however, I always stumbled: on Ch. And before China, and especially in China, I drowned in reading. As happens in childhood, the world of books and the world around me got mixed up, and it seemed to me that I was living in Leo Tolstoy's "Childhood" and Nikolenka's feelings were my feelings. And that in addition to Marusya, I also have Karl Ivanovich. And that my mother plays the piano like Nikolenka's mother (nothing like that!).

I'm not raising you for you, but for people

We returned to Moscow, to Taganka, and I went to a Moscow school. After Beijing, the atmosphere in the classroom seemed to me like some kind of bazaar: in a Beijing school, discipline was like in a monastery. They put me in a corner there because I touched the white curtain on the window next to my desk without asking. I confess: I love severity - some kind of masochistic love. From the kind of looseness, I feel physically ill. Apparently, Beijing influenced.

However, my father raised me strictly, and I am grateful to him for that. Sometimes I rebelled: “Why can others, but I can’t?” He answered: “Do you want to be like others in everything, or only in this (for example, in the transmission of gossip)?” It remained to agree. In many ways, I didn't want to be "like the others." Or he would say something like, “That’s not your style!” I didn't have any style, and probably don't even now, but the argument worked. Once he revealed his educational principle to me (in response to another murmur): “I am not raising you for you, but for people. To make them feel good with you." He was not a believer, but I am afraid that few believers and church people treat their own children based on this principle.

Then the “big Moscow” began, the Khrushchev microdistricts. We moved from an apartment building at the beginning of the century to Khoroshevka, from old Moscow to some kind of abstract landscape without signs and without history ... The same rootless quarters of boxes were built on the site of my beloved Perov Field.

But I repeat, what is called a biography is answers to a number of obligatory questions: family, place of birth, etc. – is not as important for spiritual life as some random moment, a random glance ... Everything can be decided here.

History of impressions

- Maybe then you will tell your story of impressions?

But it's even harder! You need to think about this in private.

I read with admiration the autobiographical notes of Mikhail Matyushin: in his childhood he notes those very “shots”, “shocks”, from which the artist’s soul later grows: for example, a broken jug in the garbage, which forever fascinated him with the nobility of the ancient form ... So it was with me. And the "shocks of the antique" also struck me. And much more. But you can't tell this in the form of an interview.

If we talk about Christian impressions... My grandmother was a truly believing person - deeply, quietly believing. With her children - Soviet people and atheists - she did not enter into any disputes.

I was simply fascinated by her world, I was drawn to her. She taught me to read Church Slavonic already in childhood, and without this I could hardly have taken up the dictionary “Church Slavonic Russian Paronyms”, because my early memory was full of these strange, wonderful words and phrases: “I don’t even think ...” I remembered them without understanding the meaning. I especially liked their semi-understanding. Grandmother asked me to read the Psalter and akathists aloud to her, and these words sunk into her mind. Then, as an adult, I began to think about their meaning. But there was already something to think about. "The majesty of your glory is not permanent." What is "inconstant"?

How we learned Russian!

- Well, was the school a trauma?

- The school as a whole was a severe boredom, where there was very little interesting for me. All the interesting things I learned not at school. Most of the books. But at school I had friends, and this brightened up the melancholy of uninteresting lessons. I met my oldest friend in fourth grade. She graduated in architecture and is engaged in design. All school years we went with her to exhibitions and museums. She taught me to see plastic.

Maybe the composition of the school curriculum itself was not bad, but ... Especially the Russian language and literature, one could hate them. Russian language! I still can't calm down! How we learned Russian! This is an endless rewriting of grammatical exercises Н and НН ... But you can study the history of a language, talk about its relationship with others, about its dialects, analyze the etymologies of words, talk about the history of the literary language, its relationship with Church Slavonic, about stylistics - all this is not at all comes in the classroom...

In Italy, I saw school textbooks of the Italian language - here they are built in a completely different way! Anyone who studied their native language there has a wonderful idea about it, such as a cultured person should have. In the Italian course of Italian, in general, everything that I have said is stated. And yet - the skills of analyzing language logic.

I think that other subjects can be stated quite differently. In the future, I read - sometimes avidly - books on new physics, biology, even chemistry ... At school, these subjects tormented me. Why is nothing interesting, such that really occupies the mind of any person, not only a physicist or biologist, we are not told to a schoolchild?

In addition, all humanitarian subjects were poisoned by ideology. For example, people who studied history in the Soviet school have an empty or simply wrong idea about it. The concept was simple: everything in the world, starting with Egypt, was preparing our great revolution, and one had to know about every epoch that "the pauperization of the masses grew and the class struggle intensified."

The difference between me and my European friends - I have seen this more than once - is that they know history much better than I do. And harder, and more meaningful. If, for example, in England they study the Victorian time, then the children are taken to a typical Victorian house, they show, they explain how they lived. In England, I saw how in the museum girls and boys “got used to the era”: the girls spun, and the boys did something else in order to feel with their hands what it was like, let’s say, the 16th century. And our history courses, both domestic and world, were just brainwashing, I wanted to pass all this and forget forever. Just like assembling electrical circuits in physics class.

And we will print this after your death

- I composed poetry since childhood, and from the age of 10 I went to a literary studio.

- Did your parents support you?

- Yes, but, thank God, they had no pride in this regard. There was no such thing that, they say, we have a brilliant girl growing up. Even until recent years, they were rather indifferent to it. And I suppose it's good, it's happiness! I have seen how children, on whom parents place high hopes, are deformed under such oppression. At the same time, realizing that I wanted to compose and that I was constantly busy with this, my mother took me to a studio in the Palace of Pioneers on the Lenin Hills. I visited her for five years. There were a lot of funny things... I also wrote about this in Journey to Bryansk. And at that time my poems were even printed - in Pionerskaya and Komsomolskaya Pravda, they gave prizes. Everything seemed to be heading towards a normal career as a Soviet writer, and it was possible to enter the Literary Institute. But I had the sense not to go there (I apologize to those who studied there).

Why did you decide not to go there?

– Because I wanted to learn… I felt my own ignorance.

- Don't they study at the Literary Institute?

– Naturally, I didn’t really imagine the situation from the inside, but for some reason I assumed that if they teach you to be a writer, then it is unlikely that any fundamental knowledge is required for this. I wanted to study seriously "and in enlightenment be on a par with the age." I have always been interested in languages ​​- both ancient and new, and the history of the Russian language. And so it happened: my philological specialty is the history of the Russian language.

However, my artistic differences with the guiding ideological course began earlier. Already in high school, when I began to write non-duty verses, not the same as we were taught in a literary studio, it became more and more difficult to print these verses and, finally, completely impossible. When at the age of 17 I brought another pile of poems to Komsomolskaya Pravda (there was such a poetic section “Scarlet Sail”), the person who had previously willingly taken everything to print said: “And we will print this after your death.” Imagine hearing this at the age of 17! Naturally, these were not at all "protest" or political writings. Simply - it's not that. Idealism, formalism, pessimism, subjectivism… what else? Unjustified complexity. So it became clear quite early that the path to literature was closed to me, but I didn’t really want to go there.

So you weren't ambitious...

- I must have been very ambitious. So much so that it didn’t matter to me whether they published me or not. My ambition was to write a "masterpiece", and what will happen to him next is another question.

- And how did you determine - a masterpiece turned out or not?

- According to my own feelings, first of all. It seems to me that every author knows what he did. Does what he wrote actually exist in some kind of immortal space - or is it just another thing from the assembly line of "literature". The word "masterpiece" I use, of course, conditionally.

Another life

I seriously studied at the Faculty of Philology, at the Russian department, choosing the specialization "language" and not "literature". By this time, ideology did not interfere in linguistics.

The time at Moscow State University was wonderful, the very end of the 60s - the beginning of the 70s. One could hear the lectures of Averintsev, Pyatigorsky, Mamardashvili (all these were electives). We went to the course of O.S. Popova on Byzantine art at the History of Art. I studied at the seminar of the brilliant phoneticist M.V. Panov, and then, when he was expelled (the purge of dissident sentiments after the Prague events began), at the seminar on Slavic antiquities with N.I. Tolstoy.

Averintsev led a "secret" seminar on biblical books at the Gorky Library. From the semantic space that all this opened up, it was breathtaking. We read the Tartu publications, adored Yu.M. Lotman, spoke structuralist jargon.

As a student, I attended a conference in Tartu - with a report on the structure of the funeral rite of the Slavs. The society of philologists, culturologists, philosophers, musicians was more interesting to me than the writer's world. He was a stranger to me - both in his semi-official and in his bohemian, TsDL-lovsky version. After Averintsev! Next to Lotman!

Of course, all samizdat was available at the philological faculty, so already in my first year I read Brodsky - early Brodsky. All of Mandelstam remained samizdat after The Stone, Akhmatova's Requiem, Doctor Zhivago, and most of Tsvetaeva's works. But we all already knew and loved it.

Somewhere in the 70s, a “second culture” began to take shape, otherwise “pre-Gutenberg literature”. Uncensored Literature. I established connections with her, especially with Petersburg circles.

We had common guidelines, we read, watched and listened to one thing - and, accordingly, did not read, did not look, did not listen to one thing either. None of us, for example, watched TV, and a huge part of Soviet culture passed us by (or we passed by it). But I wrote about this circle, about Viktor Krivulin, Elena Schwartz, Sergei Stratanovsky in St. Petersburg, Alexander Velichansky in Moscow. About Venedikt Erofeev, who led a very special, non-literary life and with whom we communicated for many years, I also wrote more than once. My friends - poets, artists, musicians - were rather indifferent to real politics. They went about their business. “I’ve been stuck on Leonardo for a year now,” as Krivulin reported.

And in a sense, it was an interesting historical opportunity to live outside of censorship, outside of publications. But this life was unbearable for many, and they committed suicide - directly, like Sergei Morozov (his book has not yet been published; now it was compiled by Boris Dubin) or indirectly, ruining themselves with binges, like Leonid Gubanov. It's hard to come to terms with the fact that it's decided that you're gone. Whatever you do, whatever you write, you are gone, and even your name cannot be mentioned publicly. I talk about this in "Journey to Bryansk".

Brodsky's trial was the last attempt to clarify the relationship of power with a free poet. Those who were younger were already dispensed with processes - they were simply not mentioned. This, as it turned out, is a more effective method to finish off the poet. Many couldn't stand it.

Of course, life in the "underground" cannot last long. We need openness, we need fresh air.

And underground destinies are as black as underground rivers... (V. Krivulin).

What I say, many whisper, others think...

- Did you fall into this circle in your student years?

“Even in high school. It is difficult to trace how people met. It was a completely spontaneous process, as well as samizdat, which, after all, was not organized by anyone.

And when I was once summoned to Lubyanka and asked how samizdat works, I honestly told them that I didn’t know. And no one knew. But thanks to samizdat, it was possible to understand the real taste of the readers: what they did not like, no one would reprint, multiply - also at some risk to themselves.

Samizdat is, in fact, a practical expression of the reader's love. Not the author, but the reader assumes the role of the publisher. And when readers of my poems came to me in samizdat lists - and by the end of the 70s there were already many of them - it always amazed me.

Just imagine, a huge machine is working: the press, censorship, television - and suddenly from somewhere, from the Far East, a reader appears with my reprinted book! Sometimes still artistically bound and illustrated. I was sure that this is precisely the power of art: you can’t cope with it, because you need to cope with its reader. As Dante wrote: "What I say, many whisper, others think, etc."

90s

– But now there is no such “request”? Why?

- I do not know. Let someone try to write what, in fact, in the very depths, people are waiting for - then we will see if the old dove mail samizdat will work.

- Didn't it happen that with the beginning of perestroika, what was once forbidden began to be called good literature?

- The fact is that the real, good things that were created in the 70s never came to the surface: there was some kind of shuffling, new authors appeared, not at all those who were banned. Or from the forbidden - their "grassroots" layers: sotsart, various parodic movements. But serious things are still not known.

Who didn't come out? Who do they not know?

- General knowledge about uncensored poetry, in my opinion, ends with Brodsky. Everyone knows him, future generations know much more in other countries than in our country. I personally taught the course "Russian Poetry after Brodsky" twice at the University of Wisconsin and at Stanford.

And I did not have the impression that I was talking to people who had no knowledge and ideas about this. We didn't start from scratch. Teachers and students already knew something, many of their authors were even included in the program of the course of Russian literature, diplomas and dissertations are written about them. Here are some names.

For example, a large two-volume work by Alexander Velichansky has just come out. Did they talk about him in the 90s? Died a year ago in Leningrad

She is a rare, great poet. Does this represent the reader who is called "broad"?

There were twelve authors in my course, a separate lecture was devoted to each, starting with Leonid Aronzon, the same age as Brodsky. All these poets are very serious, but something happened here, some kind of failure occurred, and the literary space was filled with completely different names, other interests, other works.

But where is this point? Why did this crash occur?

- I won't dare to say. It's boring to understand. But at some point, it was decided to consider something very specific as “modern” and “relevant”. In fact, there was no regulation here.

- Can it exist at all - this regulation?

- God forbid, there should be freedom of opportunity, as it was in samizdat: readers themselves read and choose what they like. And of course, the “second culture” itself ended with the era of liberalization. Everything seemed to be allowed and people dispersed, scattered. But it was by no means forbidden literature that won. Strange as it may seem, they won the lower classes of Soviet culture, second-class socialist realism.

– But this does not cancel the existence of other culture and music. And does it not turn out that now she is again in some kind of underground?

- Yes, all these years it has existed not in the underground, but in the shadows. With great noise, worthless things pass, and serious things remain - almost like in Soviet times - unnoticed. But, as far as I feel, the air of the country is changing, there is another request.

Self-made teachers

- Who influenced you the most?

Yes, there are very, very many. In this regard, my case is rather unusual: many of my acquaintances characterize themselves as self-made men (or women), as people who have made themselves. And with me everything was just the opposite: I had teachers from my school years, the best teachers you can imagine! I have always felt like a person worked out by many hands, starting with my first piano teacher, Mikhail Grigoryevich Erokhin. And although he understood that I would not be a pianist, he initiated me into the very depths of art - a beloved art, not a craft - he gave me some books to read, and asked such, for example, tasks - to play this piece, go to the Pushkin Museum or to the Tretyakov Gallery and see such and such a picture. He himself studied at the Conservatory School for Gifted Children, where G. Neuhaus taught.

Apparently they were well trained. Neuhaus took care to make these young pianists not winners of international competitions, but musicians in a serious sense. They knew poetry and painting very well. I think he taught me more in poetry than in the notorious literary studio. I understood what composition is. It was he who read Rilke to me for the first time, translating from German. And Rilke became the main poet of my youth. To read it in the original, I began to learn German. And to read Dante - Italian.

Later, at the university, I had amazing professors - Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy, with whom we studied Slavic antiquities: both pagan archaism and the Slavic church tradition.

It was a school. Nikita Ilyich, the great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy, was born and raised in exile and returned to Moscow after graduating from the gymnasium in Belgrade. In it, we eagerly peered into another world - the world of that Russia, which no longer exists. He was a strict positivist in science, and in everyday life he loved an eccentric. Imagine: Father Georgy Florovsky taught him the Law of God!

There was Mikhail Viktorovich Panov, a phonetician, a truly great scientist. He had a completely different direction, he was a spiritual child of the classical avant-garde, he adored Khlebnikov and the experiments of the 1910s and 20s, he himself loved the language game. At his seminar on linguopoetics, we dealt with the relationship between pictorial and poetic form. I also have prose about him - “Our teachers. On the history of Russian freedom.

Averintsev

But the most important teacher for me was Sergey Averintsev. And the same chorus: I wrote about him, and a lot, and I don’t want to repeat what was said. And, of course, the role of Sergei Sergeevich as a Christian preacher is incredible, his impact on our then enlightened society is enormous.

– So he lectured and preached at the same time?

– Can you imagine that in the 70s it was possible to read sermons from the pulpit? People were afraid to wear a cross. His lectures were a sermon, of a completely different kind than those of our subsequent "spiritual enlighteners." He always avoided direct moralizing, he did not consider his listener a child or a complete ignoramus to teach him: he carried away the beauty and power of Christian thought. Many thanks to him came to the church. Thanks to other current preachers, it is just right to escape from it.

It was not popularization, but a joint work, deep, meaningful, modern, connected with the latest discoveries of biblical studies. He gave the necessary quotations from the Latin and Greek Fathers in his own translation. He could create a school in classical philology, and in biblical studies and in the general theory of culture, as they say, Geisteswissenschaft. All this is now as if not in demand. And this is a tragic fact. Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev is a great gift to the entire Russian culture. It seems that she cannot accept this gift yet.

I feel like his student, but not in poetry, but in thought. For me, he was a tuning fork by which I checked the train of thought. This required overcoming our habits of illegal generalizations, irresponsible statements. Processed, precise thought - that's his school. He said: "Ask yourself again and be ready to answer the question that may arise to this statement"

It is also surprising in him that, as a classical philologist, he loved modern poetry. After all, usually the classics do not feel it, this is a strange world for them. From him I learned about European poets of the 20th century - about Claudel, Eliot, Celan.

O. Dmitry Akinfiev

But here I can’t say: I wrote about him. I never found a way to write about it. Everything that I love in our church is connected with his image for me. The relationship with the spiritual father is a special area. Talking about it without profaning is no less difficult than talking about inspiration. My spiritual father is Archpriest Dmitry Akinfiev, in recent years the rector of St. Nicholas in Khamovniki. We met when I was in my early twenties. Then he was the pastor of another church. And until his death - and he died three years ago - he was my spiritual father. He really changed my mental composition, and in such a way that I myself did not notice how I became a different person.

- How did you meet?

You could say it's by accident. As a child, my grandmother took me to church, but during my school years I didn’t even think about it. And then, when I began to “really” write poetry, at the end of school I was again drawn to the temple.

I cannot say that I experienced any kind of conversion, like those that are sometimes told about. It seemed to me that I was not completely outside, and I would not, as I decided for myself, completely inside. But gradually I came closer and closer to a serious participation in church life. At first, it was more of an artistic experience: I loved singing, the beauty of worship ... But I went more and more often, and, on the advice of my grandmother, I began to confess and take communion - at the age of 19. Which priest to do this, I didn’t care.

And finally I met Father Dimitri. I must admit, I never thought that I needed a spiritual father: I considered myself a poet. Well, what spiritual father can Baudelaire or Pushkin have? Everyone solves his own problems, I thought, who can help me? But here, there is no other way to say it, God gave me a spiritual father. And in his face I recognized the deepest Orthodoxy that I love, and which, in fact, is very rare ...

He was called the "Moscow elder", referring to the special gift of clairvoyance (which he was very reluctant to discover). At his funeral (there were more than a hundred Moscow priests), one simple old woman said loudly: "He was a kind and modest priest, but the Communists tortured his father." Once, in my presence, he explained for a long time to some woman that it was better for her not to go to Communion if she was not ready. And this woman walked away from him completely joyful and said: “It was as if she had received communion!” Such is the power of presence. Having talked with him about almost nothing, each time I returned with a feeling of this, as it were, communion, as it were, forgiveness of sins. Tradition is a personal transmission from hand to hand. This is a meeting.

Decide for yourself

Of course, every person who comes to a new world for him - to the church and Orthodox world - thinks that everything needs to be learned properly, and he himself demands instructions. And I also had such a mood, maybe not to the same extent as others, but I also demanded some decisive instructions from Father Dimitri. To which he told me: “Decide for yourself, why should I tell you this? What do I know that you don't know?" He knew a lot. The abyss between my knowledge and his has always amazed me.

And yet, oddly enough, he reconciled me with the earth. I had a tendency to spiritualism, to the rejection of everything earthly, everything carnal, to the extreme. It happens in youth. But Father Demetrius inconspicuously showed me how ugly this is, how there is no gratitude to God for everything created in this. That in such "asceticism" there is no goodness, no love. Quietly and gently, he reconciled me with the material world, with ordinary life. Imperceptibly... He loved beauty. Once the old women drew his attention to the "local cult": young people came to one icon with candles and performed some strange ritual actions. As it turned out, they believed that this icon "helps in love." Father, kick them out! - demanded candlesticks. Father Demetrius seemed to have listened to them, began to slowly approach them ... he suddenly stopped and turned to the guards of piety: “Look how beautiful they are!” Needless to say, the old women did not understand him. Beautiful!

Gradually I saw that art and church life could be close, as in Dante's time, and that this gave art a different depth and breadth. Gradually, I realized this as a creative topic.

Thank God, I was trusting and listened to him, because it was possible not to hear all this and not perceive anything. He did not enjoy such fame in intellectual circles as Fr. Alexander Men. He was a traditional priest, his father was a village priest who died in the camps, so he can be said to be the son of a saint. He is a child of the persecuted Church, a Church for which many superficial things have ceased to be important, but what is very important - I would say, in a new way is important - has become something that is really serious. Father Demetrius called it heart. Not what the person did, not what he said - it was important for him what kind of person a heart. Because, as they say, everything comes from the heart.

Other church people I met in my youth—his peers and even older—were like him in this. After all, persecution was also a cleansing of the Church from external things. And it is especially sad that this invaluable experience has been forgotten, and the new Orthodox begin to trifle and calculate what to “observe” and what “not to observe”.

What were those people like? Were they offended by the Soviet regime? Did they protest?

“They were very peaceful people. Naturally, their relations with the Soviet authorities were clarified even before the camps. In these people one could feel – one might call it that – a conciliar spirit, the spirit of the Cathedral of 1717. There was no stylization, archaism. I must say, they did not really trust the new people who came to the church, because after such an experience that they experienced, they were afraid of the “Komsomol members” ... And only with very few people did they establish contact. And therefore, people who come to church might not really meet with those who have always been there, with those who really endured all these years, with confessors. The inhumanity that became our norm in the Soviet years is present in the church today. And the Soviet craving for power. And Christianity is on the side of the downtrodden, not the strong.

Second Life

At the very end of 1989, for the first time, I found myself abroad, in three countries at once: in Finland, England, Italy. By this time I had published the first collection of poems in Paris, in the YMCA-press (1986), poems began to be translated and included in anthologies. That's why I ended up in all these countries. And all subsequent years in my wanderings I was guided by poems: where something came out, they invited me there. This first exit behind the "Iron Curtain" changed so many things that the future could be called a "second life" or even, as Elena Schwartz said, "life after life."

- What were the feelings? Miracle?

– We were very fond of the world of European culture and knew a lot about it in absentia. Averintsev, who also ended up in Europe late, could be a guide to many European cities. He, without seeing, knew these places and their history better than the locals. And suddenly she is in front of you - this Platonic reality, consisting of only names! M. L. Gasparov, when he was in Rome for the first time, did not want to get off the bus. He was afraid of a real meeting with what he had been thinking about all his life. But I also wrote a lot about this turning point, and it’s boring to retell myself.

When English journalists asked me: "What do you feel when you first come here?" Distrust, wariness, the feeling that our world is a world where you are under surveillance and you can be called to account at any time and without any reason - all this was useless here.

From that time on, a different life really began for me. In the 1990s, I probably spent half of my time traveling. Sometimes I lived for quite a long time in different places. When I was invited as a visiting poet (poet in residence) to the University of Kiel in England, I lived there for two trimesters - from Christmas to July. This is a completely different, not touring, not tourist acquaintance with the country. I also lived in other places. Not only in Europe, but also in America. In Sardinia, where for two years I was a guest of the university and lived for four months a year. It's not so easy, it's also a school.

– What exactly is difficult?

- Start with language. We did not know living languages. We studied living languages, like Latin, just to read. When I arrived in England, I realized with horror that I did not understand a word of what they said, not a word! I asked them to write or speak slowly. And I studied English since childhood, and read a lot in it. And every time I had to use this language not just to explain myself somehow, but to work, to lecture in English and Italian.

- How? If you didn't even understand at first? How did you cope?

– It is easier to speak than to understand. The main thing is to be understood. I was understood. And then they learned to understand - they gave recordings of real pronunciation lessons, regular abbreviations of sounds, when takem means take them. Not so with Italian, it was just easier for me to understand it than to speak it. I heard live Italian in Moscow. Back in Soviet times, I had an Italian girlfriend who taught Italian language and literature at the university, so I knew what living Italian was, in contrast to living French and living English.

Art, art and relevance

When I first walked the streets of London, it seemed to me that I was not walking on the ground, it was some kind of levitation. Then, of course, you see things closer, you see other sides, you understand that there are difficulties and dangers there. I constantly visit the same countries, and I see how the old Europe disappears, the edge of which (not yet united Europe) I managed to catch.

– What is the reason for this? Is there some kind of unification going on all over the world?

– Before our eyes there is a historical turning point, a new Great Migration of Nations. I read somewhere that every third person is now a migrant. Not necessarily a migrant from India to London, even within the country there is a continuous movement of people. Once European life was sedentary, and now it is over. Newcomers will no longer become locals. However, Simone Weil wrote about the loss of roots even before the era of resettlement.

Once in Rome, on the street, I met a Korean priest and Korean nuns, we talked to them in Italian. They studied in Rome and invited them to go together to Assisi. When we were passing through Florence, I suggested: “Let's go to that Dante temple where Beatrice is buried?”. And they say: “Who is this?”. They were taught everything related to the church Catholic culture, but they did not hear about Beatrice. These are the new Europeans.

What about contemporary art? Misfortune. Last summer, at the international Berlin Poetry Festival - and this is one of the most prestigious festivals - I saw this contemporary poetry in all its glory ... Among the twelve invited authors, only three wrote poems in words - everything else was Sound - Poetry.

So, sound recording?

- Yes, they made sounds - they screamed, squeaked, beat some pots. That's when I realized that the end is approaching! End of the European world.

fears

- Fear of the audience and of public speaking, is it there and was it here and in general? How do you break yourself?

I don't have that fear and never have. Maybe because as a child prodigy I used to go out in public. But I don't like it at all. I, apparently, after all, am not an artistic person, because success does not bring me such joy as artists and poets-artists.

Somehow we ended up in Finland with Bella Akhmadullina and performed together in Helsinki. I saw how she just filled with life when she heard the response of the audience. Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov also admitted that if he does not read in public for a week or two, then he starts starving. I don't and never have. I don't want success and I'm not afraid of failure. My fear and my delight is elsewhere.

– What are you most afraid of?

- I do not know. Or I won't say.

The result is not the author

- Is your four-volume book final?

- I hope not. Firstly, not everything that I have already written was included in it. Secondly, I hope to do something else.

Generally speaking, the result is summed up not by the author, but by someone else. The one who sees what the author does not see. The author does not see much. He does not cease to be the author - that is, the person responsible for the text. The feeling of exactingness obscures all others, you see only what has not been possible, what needs to be corrected ... The whole is seen by the one who stands in the place of the addressee of this letter - the reader. It was only thanks to music that I was able to find myself in the place of the addressee of my own compositions. When I listen to music written to my poems by Alexander Vustin and Valentin Silvestrov, only then do I hear own words. Only then do they say to me- and sometimes surprise with what they report.

The work is completed in another. Teresa Petit wrote that she feels like a brush in the hands of God, and He paints with this brush for others. An artist, a poet, is also something like a brush, and they write with this brush not for him. His work, his inspiration, is completed in another person and in a completely different place.

Photos by Anna Galperina and from open sources

Olga Alexandrovna Sedakova

Olga Alexandrovna Sedakova was born in Moscow on December 26, 1949 in the family of a military engineer.

In 1967, Olga Sedakova entered the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and in 1973 graduated from it with a thesis on Slavic antiquities. Not only poetry, but also criticism, the philological works of Olga Sedakova were practically not published in the USSR until 1989 and were evaluated as “abstruse”, “religious”, “bookish”. The outcast "second culture" nevertheless had its readership, and quite a wide one. Olga Sedakova's texts were distributed in typewritten copies, published in foreign and emigre periodicals.
In 1986, the first book was published by YMCA-Press. Shortly thereafter, poems and essays began to be translated into European languages, published in various journals and anthologies, and published as books. At home, the first book (“Chinese Journey”) was published in 1990.
To date, 27 books of poetry, prose, translations and philological studies have been published (in Russian, English, Italian, French, German, Hebrew, Danish; a Swedish edition is being prepared).
Since 1991, a member of the Institute of World Culture (Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University).
* Candidate of Philological Sciences (dissertation: "Funeral rituals of the Eastern and Southern Slavs", 1983).
* Doctor of Theology honoris causa (Minsk European Humanities University, Faculty of Theology, 2003).
* Author of the "Dictionary of difficult words from worship: Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms" (Moscow, 2008).
* 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).