The Seed of Modernism – Weekend

The Palmira publishing house has published the long-awaited favorites of Alexander Mironov, a classic of the Leningrad underground and the most ecstatic poet of the Soviet 1970s.

Text: Igor Gulin

With the publication of poems by Alexander Mironov – a strange story. For anyone interested in the Soviet poetic underground, this is a familiar name. Mironov is a canonized figure, standing on a par with Leonid Aronzon, Sergei Stratanovsky, Elena Schwartz. But, unlike all these authors, his texts turned out to be much less accessible. In the 1990s and 2000s, he published three books that have long become a rarity, and there are not too many poems on the Internet either. Mironov died in 2010. Since then, there has been talk of publishing a somewhat representative collection of his. Now he’s finally out.

Sixteen-year-old Mironov entered the circle of Leningrad literary bohemia in the mid-1960s and immediately gained a reputation as a young genius – at least among his comrades in the Helenukt community – a perky company-group, which was a kind of sixties reincarnation of OBERIU. For the next decades, he leads a typical lifestyle for an underground man: he goes to the famous cafeteria on Malaya Sadovaya, works as a gas boiler operator, is fond of theology, drinks a lot, runs into the KGB, lies in mental hospitals. All this – alcohol and drug intoxication, erotic transgression, social marginality, divine search – fills his poems.

Simplifying a little, we can say that in the Leningrad underground poetry there were two poles: absurdist and metaphysical (in their extreme manifestations, these poles are denoted by the names of Vladimir Erl and Viktor Krivulin; both of them were close friends and constant interlocutors of Mironov). The first presupposes the exhaustion of meaning, the emptiness, or at least the extreme lightness of any word. The second is, on the contrary, the oversaturation of each word with meaning, its connection with huge layers of meaning – historical, philosophical, spiritual. Many authors have vacillated between these poles in one way or another. The peculiarity of Mironov is that he pulls these extremes together, does not seek a compromise, but explodes the opposites.

At the same time, his texts at first glance may seem relatively traditional. The underground often thought of itself as a continuation of the tattered Silver Age, and Mironov is a characteristic figure in this sense. In his poems there are signs of all the key styles of that great era: Akhmatova, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Klyuev, Kuzmin, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Khlebnikov. However, something prevents us from considering these texts as imitations – even infinitely talented and charming. Rather, these are the poems of a man who read all the poetry of Russian modernism and believed it as himself (and also believed the philosophy of that time – Berdyaev, Florensky, Ivanov and others). But the experience that he is trying to articulate is not given to these learned beautiful languages. The modernist super-style is breaking down, losing coherence before our very eyes. It is not destroyed in an act of criticism, entering into a metaposition (which was practiced at that time by Moscow authors of the conceptualist circle). He collapses in ecstasy.

In the best things of Mironov – whether it be intimate lyrics or philosophical poetry, poems about God, about death, about history – the perfect poetic language fails. At the limit of self-madness, the mind plunges into madness, rich meaning turns into nonsense. But when meeting this limit, speech does not stop. On the contrary, it perseveres, wearying itself, feeling its own futility. The crisis of language does not provide a way out of it (“do not even think about living outside the language,” Mironov writes in one of his frankly autodescriptive texts).

This pumping and emptying mechanic is distinctly sexual in nature. In fact, this is an orgasm, and a male orgasm (it is present in poetry and literally; no great poet seems to have written so much about ejaculation). The mood of Mironov’s poems is a kind of metaphysical postcoital melancholy. In his top work, the poem “Autumn of the Androgyne”, it is said: “We are Nothing verbal sperm.” This is a description of what is happening here with consciousness, with language: it reaches the highest tension and splashes out in miserable drops, passes in each text the path from the enthusiastic to the insignificant.

It is impossible to write for so long, it is exhausting. Gradually developing, Mironov’s talent reaches its peak in the late 1970s. Then the crisis begins, lasting about 20 years. At the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, he is experiencing something like a second birth. The poems of the last 10 years of his life are different. They are shorter, tougher and somewhat more original; the affair with the Silver Age is over, there is no more room for other people’s voices. Oleg Yuryev noted a similar thing in one of the best texts about Mironov’s poetry. He wrote that things of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to be dictated to Mironov by invisible spirits – either angels or demons, but he wrote new ones himself. It can be said a little differently: in these later texts, Mironov says “no” to such spirits, refuses to accept them – still standing on the threshold of consciousness – and therefore cuts off his speech as soon as he starts it. These are the verses of a man who is not ready to undergo an ecstatic experience again, rejecting its dangerous charms, but carrying it in himself. And in this abstinence there is a special bitter beauty.

Alexander Mironov. Poetic cycles and monologues. M.; St. Petersburg: Palmyra — T8 Publishing technologies, 2023