There is no time for everything – Weekend

This summer marks 85 years since the birth and 35 years since the death of the poet, prose writer and playwright Vladimir Kazakov. This is one of the most unusual figures in the underground literature of the 1960s-1980s, the author of strange and charming texts, for whom the absurd became a kind of philosophical pose that allowed him to survive in an era completely alien to him.

Text: Igor Gulin

Little is known about the biography of Vladimir Kazakov. Born in Moscow in 1938, did not receive a higher education, from 1959 to 1962 he lived in Kolyma, changing exotic professions – a gold panner, an explosivesman, a teacher for nomadic Chukchi. However, this typically thaw episode does not seem to be reflected in his work. He began writing in earnest in the mid-1960s. In 1966, he met the living patriarch of futurism, the eighty-year-old Alexei Kruchenykh, and received a blessing from him. His second mentor is the keeper of futuristic archives, philologist, art critic and poet Nikolai Khardzhiev. In the second half of the 1960s, several Kazakov miniatures were published in magazines (amusingly, Rural Youth among them). He had no more lifetime publications in his homeland – neither in the official press, nor in samizdat. But in the early 1970s, Kazakov was discovered in the West. Two books are published in Germany in translation and five in Russian. Since the early 1980s, he has lived as a recluse with almost no contact, and dies in 1988.

Five years after his death, Kazakov’s legacy begins to be published in Russia by the Gileya publishing house, which specializes in the avant-garde. At the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, a small but quite tangible cult arose around his name. In the perception of readers, Kazakov turns out to be one of the main late Soviet heirs of the Oberiuts. But if, for all their complexity, the texts of Kharms, Vvedensky and their friends clearly fit into their era, are read as a reaction to the collapse of the avant-garde and the establishment of Stalinism, then Kazakov’s relationship with his time is much more mysterious.

Almost all his life, Kazakov wrote essentially one text, turning into either poetry, or drama, or prose. From a novel to a poem, from a play to a comic impromptu, replicas, gestures, situations wander. He has a small list of favorite words: clocks, mirrors, windows, steel, tea, guests, riders, ghosts; permanent characters – Madlon, Melik-Melkumov, Matryoshechka. All these are elements of a cross-cutting myth, a kind of super-drama of Kazakov’s creativity – a nightly tea party on the border with the other world, in which the characters dissolve, time ends, reflections rebel, it rains blood, and the language devours itself.

Kazakov was a student of the Futurists, but in this type of writing it is easy to see a semblance of symbolist myth-making in the spirit of Blok or Bely. There is, however, an important difference. The symbolist myth reveals the secret, invisible meaning of the world. Kazakov is attracted by nonsense, the collapse of logic. In every sentence, almost every word, the inertia of expectation breaks down. The tongue from dense tissue becomes porous matter, and an unearthly breeze passes through it.

It is easier to quote a passage than to describe this style. It can be taken completely at random. Here is a fragment of one of the main texts of Kazakov – the novel “The Mistake of the Living”, a kind of surreal remake of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”: “Some person and some people took refuge in one of the stone doorways. Kukulin swiftly rushed past, as time rushes past a stopped clock. He thought, “No, no! I didn’t think … “Time gnashed over the roofs. Everything was so cruel and final that it seemed: now the lanterns flashed – and it would be possible to read the thoughts of the clock …” – hundreds of pages were written by Kazakov in this way or something like this.

The avant-garde genealogy is evident in this letter. It is confirmed by the constant mention of the names of great teachers: Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Malevich, Burliuk, Filonov, Kharms – and of course, Kruchenykh and Khardzhiev. But it is also obvious that it is not a gap, but a certain strange position in relation to this line.

Avant-garde is the art of radical novelty, the future opening up right now. But the future of the avant-gardists ended in the 1930s, and at the moment of this catastrophe, the avant-garde was reborn into absurdity. We can give a brief formula for this transformation: absurdity arises when the utopia breaks off, the energy intended to defeat the sun falls with all its force on the subject himself. Here is the gap between Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, on the one hand, Kharms and Vvedensky, on the other. It was Vvedensky, with his catastrophic sense of language, the scorching “star of nonsense,” who was Kazakov’s main predecessor.

By the time Kazakov entered literature, the avant-garde was already archeology. There were a few last, accidentally surviving dinosaurs, occasionally exhibitions were held, books could hardly be found. In the 1960s and 1970s, some poets and artists, official and underground, tried to restore the tradition. However, the attempts of the “modern avant-garde” looked mostly extremely unconvincing, and Kazakov, unlike his more naive contemporaries, was aware of this.

There was no future, and the present – Soviet or anti-Soviet – did not interest him at all. Kazakov could not be a utopian, but he could not be a witness to the catastrophe, because the catastrophe had already happened long ago, it was someone else’s injury. By his nature, he was not a melancholic, contemplating the ruins of utopia, the unhappy “future-in-the-past.”

Instead of all this, he invented his own bizarre “non-time” and studied its signs from text to text: mirror clocks, sharp blade moments, ghost phenomena. This time does not flow forward or backward, but constantly swirls. Therefore, Kazakov’s texts suddenly break off and endlessly continue each other. Events in them cannot completely happen – a vague threat and a miraculous salvation are always nearby and always postponed. “Eternity differs from the moment – either by color or by nothing.” It seems that such “non-time” was a kind of refuge for this closed and alien to modernity man. Therefore, the supposedly disturbing texts of Kazakov often give rise to a feeling of absurd comfort.

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