Poet Dmitry Vodennikov spoke about “new sincerity” in poetry and politics

— Dmitry, a good poet cannot hang in emptiness, I thought that since you were included in the anthology “Strophes of the Century” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, it means you were familiar with him, with other masters of the sixties.

– No, I wasn’t friends with Yevtushenko, we didn’t know him. It’s just that Evgeniy Aleksandrovich understood that making an anthology only from the authors of his time known to him and those who came after him was not real work, not real stanzas of the century. I remember both volumes were heavy, like coffins – they were hard to carry when the publishing house issued them. The second volume was made by a team of compilers – and they, naturally, knew much more about the new poetry of the 80s and 90s. As for the sixties, I was barely acquainted with Bella Akhmadulina. I came to her, and on business. The first is quite tragic – it was necessary to raise money for the poet Nina Iskrenko, who was dying of cancer. I was 25 years old then. Later I talked with Akhmadulina, including about my poems. She was an amazing person. Of course, I found her at an advanced age, but I came to record an interview for Radio Rossiya. She says: “I think you write poetry.” I answered: “Yes.” I had the texts with me, but I definitely wasn’t going to give them to her. But she asked.

And then there were only wired telephones – today’s youth will not understand how we managed without mobile phones. I returned to my parents’ house on Kashirskoye Highway, which is far from Povarskaya, where Akhmadulina lived. And suddenly my shocked stepmother comes out and says: “Bella Akhatovna called you.” I’m calling back. I hear on the phone: “Dmitry, these are the kind of poems that need to be written now!”

But all this cannot be called communication or friendship; I’m sure she wouldn’t recognize me in a couple of months if we met on the street.

Although I – regardless of this conversation and assessment – loved her very much and, having woken up recently, tried to remember one stanza:

A serene light answered me

and indicated light or laughter,

that still young and tender

I will step on the shining snow…

More precisely, I couldn’t remember what “gentle” rhymed with—could it really be with “serene”!

— What is the “new sincerity” in poetry, to which critics classify you?

— The concept of “new sincerity” has now gone to journalists, it is often used. But in fact, it was invented by Dmitry Prigov – as a game, and not as a term related to life. And then Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich (a journalist and poet) and I—I was 25, he was younger—declared, tired of the misunderstood postmodernity, that we would be “new sincerity.” We declared that we needed to create documents of life, not poetry, that we would write texts paid for by our own destiny.

I belong to this “new sincerity.” I also belong to the group that includes Ksenia Sobchak or Vladimir Putin (the term is understood as the ability to say what you think is necessary, although someone may not like it), but we all relate to her now.

— One of your books was called “Men, too, can fake orgasms” — do you generally like to misbehave in poetry?

– Yes, it was pure hooliganism from the category: “We are all a little bit of a horse” by Mayakovsky. When I published this book at OGI, I was nearing thirty, and the adults around me really didn’t like this step. They suggested changing the name, but I argued (we’ll omit the details – we’re not talking about physiology). I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t dare to do this now—I’m fifty-five.

—Which of your poems is the most famous?

— I have two or even three of the most famous ones. First:

It’s so smoky in here

and the light is unbearable,

that you can’t even distinguish your hands –

who wants to live in such a way as to be loved?

I want to live in such a way as to be loved!

Well, since you are not worth living at all…

I often tell this, but Anna Akhmatova once walked through Tashkent with Ranevskaya during evacuation, and the film “Foundling” had just been released, and the boys were running and shouting: “Mulya, don’t irritate me!” Akhmatova said: “It’s probably hard.” “It’s hard, but you probably also have your own Mulya,” said the great actress in turn. Akhmatova either called “Clenched her hands under a dark veil…” or some other poem. But each of us has our own Mulya.

So I don’t like the one quoted above, but the other two: “Draft. Because poems don’t grow up like decent children” and “So that’s what this summer was all about.”

— You act as a teacher (advisor/coach) for young poets. How would Mayakovsky or Vadim Kozhinov react to attempts to teach how to write poetry? Both of them believed that it was impossible to teach writing poetry.

“I’m definitely not a coach, but a teacher.” And my students are hardly “young” – they are from 25 to 50.

It’s not useless to teach, unless you do it like this: “Now we’ll write in iambic, and now we’ll write a tonic poem or free verse.” I never told my students to write a poem as assigned. I offered to give four paragraphs of text – a summary of the future work; I helped the student find a topic, his personal key that opens the door to his own texts.

And you can also teach to see the weak points in the work, the lines scattered like a spruce tree on the dirt, so that you can either get through it. Teach to see that this is not a strong stone road.

— If aliens kidnapped you and asked who the most popular poet in Russia today, would you answer: “Vodennikov”? There is no one nearby, no one will check – you and the little green men are alone.

“I would never answer that way.” God bless them, the aliens. Let’s think about the moment of death: soon you will fly along the corridor, and no matter how your consciousness crumbles, at that moment the most brilliant quatrain will come.

Let’s imagine that it can be written down or whispered. I once decided that I would take the quatrain with me; I would not be sorry that I would not leave it to my loved ones, to humanity, or, more precisely, to the nurse acting in the role of this humanity.

And then let there be neither me nor these lines. Then it won’t matter whether you’re first or thirteenth. When the “sound” comes, that is happiness in itself. So I won’t talk about poetry with green men, but I’ll ask you not to sew extra hands on me and I’ll try to make friends with them.

— In the USSR, the most popular poets were also songwriters; today this method of “earning money on the side” has practically disappeared. Has anyone tried to perform your poems on stage?

— I don’t think the word “part-time job” is correct. Soviet songs, specially written by Voznesensky, not written by Akhmadulina for the stage, but taken for songs, are actually classics.

No, my poems were not sung, especially since my poems left me for ten years, they just upped and left in 2011. They returned in 2021 – at first I didn’t even understand what happened, although there were other turning points: I almost died, I loved, I started writing essays…

But nothing compares with the roar of the return of poetry, when the walls move apart, the world changes, just as in a television studio, at the will of the director, the colors change, the light panels rotate and shimmer.

— A poem written today can go viral if it is not sung by a stage star or read by the on-screen son of a bandit in Balabanov’s film, as happened with the simple lines: “I found out that I have a huge family…”?

— Has anyone ever sung “Don’t leave the room…” by Brodsky? (Laughs.) So anything is possible – if the text and its author have a special fate in store.