Death and love in the poetry of Grigory Dashevsky

Ten years ago, on December 17, 2013, the poet, translator, philologist and critic Grigory Dashevsky died, one of the few authors whose poetry’s resonance is still felt far beyond the subculture of readers of modern poetry. Despite the fact that there are very few of these poems, despite the fact that this is poetry that does not at all strive to please, to lead. Over the course of three decades, Dashevsky made an evolution from complicated lyrics, rich in cultural allusions, to almost impersonal, fragmentary poems, consisting of the very last necessary words. I decided to describe this path as a dotted line through several texts – significant, but remaining on the periphery of the attention of critics, poets and researchers who wrote about Dashevsky’s work.

“Odysseus at Calypso (2)”, 1983 –
“Your lips, no longer unclenching…”, 1989

Odysseus at Calypso (2)

He walked, dragging dry dust
the remains of a thin shadow, except
which is only cold at the back
left in the morning from the opening

night into the void, as if
hidden from the light of death
flesh covered with body bent
according to the dream holes

mouth, bosom, hips, ribs, neck,
collarbones – and the shadow is lame
the ashes clung to the joints of the dust,
keeping only the outline of the soul.

In this very early text, the structure of Dashevsky’s poetry of the 1980s is visible more clearly than in more complex and perfect poems. The poems of this time describe not an experience or a reflection, but a situation. A person is located in the world: he sits and listens, stands and waits, lies and tries to sleep, wanders, looking for a way. All this is hard. For Dashevsky, who had been ill since his youth, pain was not just the background of life, but one of the main coordinates of existence. The pain does not allow one to forget; because of it, any position in space feels difficult. It activates boundaries: external – between a person and the world, his skin and air, internal – between body and soul. But boundaries are not absolute. They are complicated by two games – the game of light and shadow and the game of reflections (mirrors, windows, ponds). These games blur and fragment the space available to the eye, they shuffle outside And inside. They seem to make the world an extension of the body, and therefore an extension of pain (in another poem from the 1980s: “the sun eats the eyes, / as if it were smoke / from another fire”).

The formal sophistication of these poems and their difficult syntax serve the same purpose. A poem with all its nooks and crannies is a cast of a situation, or in other words, a map of the unfolding and collapsing space that forms the body, consciousness, and world. The human position here is both passive and tense. It’s an expectation. He is waiting for two things: death and love.

In a late interview “How to Read Modern Poetry” (2012), Dashevsky said: a reader of poetry is like a person waiting for an answer to a question from a doctor or a loved one, looking for signs in everything: yes or no. These two Yes and two No – different, but they are related to each other. Death is inevitable. It is not somewhere far away, but in an easily imaginable, near future. Love does not cancel the end point, it transforms the linear time of movement towards death. Like space, time turns into a complex structure – a play of reflections, shadows and reflections. Thus, you can live in it, you can see the end differently. This arrangement of time is best seen in a small poem that Dashevsky did not include in his lifetime collections:

Your lips, no longer unclenching
my dry hot selves,
until they close, darling,
mine with my “happily, dear.”

Let them allow mine, already taken away,
while still audible, pronounce: know,
I’m happy to know: yours are still unclenched,
let it not be mine, but yours, “farewell.”

“Henry and Semyon”, 1996

Many of Dashevsky’s readers treated to this play, the only one from the poet, with slight bewilderment, they saw in it an exercise in the aesthetics of Sots Art – a joke not entirely worthy of a profound author. Meanwhile, this seems to be one of the main texts for understanding his work.

Plot: former Nazi Semyon decides to become a communist. His comrade Heinrich sees betrayal here. However, the party refused to admit Semyon. Heinrich was in the same situation: he dreamed of joining the fight for the white race, but he was not accepted into the Nazi detachment, and Semyon did not accept him. Heinrich was able to become a member of the movement only when Semyon left it. He never received consent from his friend, and what he did receive did not give true satisfaction. They are in the same position.

This little drama is written in the manner of Russian translations of Greek tragedy. In essence, this is the tragic agon – the meeting and insoluble confrontation of two heroes. Their dialogue directly illustrates the analysis of the tragedy by Rene Girard, a thinker whom Dashevsky translated and whose influence he spoke more than once. The two opponents are mirror images of each other, twins. They are obsessed with the desire to serve a higher bloody goal, but its name (“Nazism”, “communism”) is accidental and empty. In fact, they are fascinated by each other as carriers of illusory completeness. Desire jumps in the system of mirrors and cannot find a way out. Its implementation will be eternal not the sameit lives only by its melancholy, its impossible craving.

In this text, comical creatures, seemingly unworthy of sympathy, are possessed by a higher passion – a hopeless expectation of an answer. In this sense, “Henry and Semyon” is a duplicate of one of Dashevsky’s most piercing lyrical texts, the poem “At the Metro” (1990). It has the same theme and a similar structure: the story of a date unfolds as a dialogue between two voices about waiting for the beloved’s answer, her desired one. Yes. Such fascination with the answer is something like a magical captivity to the laws of love. It is impossible to escape from these laws, but you can dismantle their principle and thus leave space for bodily co-presence, possible, as it were, in addition to cruel Yes And No (“Waiting and living is only an excuse / for averting someone unknown, / so that you can keep / your eyes on her that are not eternal.”)

Love frees us from the captivity of death, but creates another, somewhat similar to the first, captivity. To see it, the lover must split up – come out of himself. In “Near the Subway,” a dialogue takes place in the very depths of the human heart. In “Henry and Semyon” such dialogue is external. What unfolded as introspection here becomes a parody. However, the parody gives a better insight into the structure of the situation. Using the example of two Petrushkas, one can tell something more precise and bitter than from one’s own experience: the fundamental state of a person is waiting for an answer, but the answer, even if it comes, does not resolve anything. You are in captivity of a being who is passing judgment on you; it is in similar captivity in you or in some other entity. In “At the Metro” the problem is solved through a revelation that removes the question itself. There is no such blessing in Henry and Semyon.

In the preface to the book “The Duma of Ivan Chai” (2001), Dashevsky spoke about the turning point that occurred in his poetry in the mid-1990s. The poems up to this time were written on behalf of the “idol “I”” – a lyrical subject obsessed with a sense of his uniqueness, the right to a special speech. In the verses of the second period there are only words that belong equally to everyone. Giving up subjectivity does not mean that something objective can be said about things—what they really are. We are in the same fog, a system of illusions about our own existence, but due to the commonality of experience we can describe this fog. For a poet, this means learning to speak on behalf not even of another, but anyone, namerek (as in Dashevsky’s most famous work – the cycle of translations and adaptations of Catullus “Imyarek and Zarema”). The place where the idol of “I” was raised needs to be cleared. This is precisely the task of “Henry and Semyon”. The dismantling of the “I” takes place here in the hidden center of the spiritual space – in the patch of love.

“Yolka”, 1995 – “Bayan’s moan shines like a saber…”, 2007

Christmas tree

In the bunny’s face, in the fox’s treat,
into the stuffy, into the hard inside
Plunge your head into jelly,
Look at others who are the same.

At the glossy target on the other side,
into a timid papier-mâché smile
pour jelly, pour yesterday, pour shadow,
already solidifying.

Interlock your bare fingers in a circle,
stare at the close one, at the varnish glare
to an inept jubilant cry,
slow clicking of heels.

In the 1990s, Dashevsky’s poems changed texture. If the early texts are like crystals, then the later ones are like clots of matter. The former draw a detailed map, the latter illuminate small areas of space. But there is also continuity between them. The poems of the “Ivan Chai Duma” record a certain experience from different angles. It can be described as follows: there is a raw, unformed state of a being (its in itself, to use the jargon of philosophers). This creature is not yet fully human: an embryo, a baby, a sprout (as in the title poem of the cycle, an adaptation of William Blake’s “Wild Flower Song”). But it is doomed to go out into the world, to people. This is not a joyful revelation, but rather a painful metamorphosis. If it’s a holiday, like in “Yolka,” then it’s a holiday full of anxiety. Meeting others is trying on a mask, and this is the only possible acquisition of face. The mask does not protect, but gives shape – makes it visible. When a person finds himself in the public eye, he does not lose his raw “yesterday”, his awe, he carries it within himself, but can no longer remain alone with it, plunge into sweet slumber. From now on, he is the line between the inner warm darkness and the outer cold light. Thus, the experience of the border, which in the poems of the 1980s was the experience of a lonely body and a lonely soul, becomes a social experience. One can say differently: a person is no longer a passive point in space, but a movement, a process.

Waiting for an answer ceases to be the content of life, but both guidelines, love and death, do not disappear. A new attitude arises towards them. It is more difficult to describe, largely because there is simply not enough material for this. Everything that Dashevsky wrote in the 2000s and early 2010s was several poems, several translations – mostly very tiny texts, often one stanza. These small fragments of speech are acts of will. In the same preface to the Ivan Chai Duma, Dashevsky wrote: words of politeness – “hello”, “thank you” – can serve as a model for poetry. The poems of the most recent period are closest to this program. Instead of waiting for someone to say Yesa poet who loves and dies among other people, himself utters words of agreement – to both.

Bayana’s moan shines like a saber
You breathed, we breathed
The saber flew and froze
Breathing you breathing we

The huffing and wailing just stopped
And the chanting stopped and yes
In unquestioning larynxes
The dissected couple

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