analytical language structures and thus hermetic in relation to reality) and the Moscow conceptualist tradition, which represented the languages of Soviet ideology as the primary undisguised reality of the time. Chukhrov questions the notions of avant-garde productivism in relation to the Soviet 1960s and 70s, when the modernizing technologies (i.e. the means of production) and the socialist ethical maturity were separated — a stance that is excellently manifested in works by Moscow conceptualists Kabakov and Monastyrsky. Taras Tkachenko *** You know, I grew up in a normal country Of normal people In the normal 80s Now everyone’s always spying out the danger signs They read the histories like Nostradamus’ book, tracing fingers down the dates. But I will prove — I will show — I will vindicate these years. Take for example, outside Krasnodar my aunt had A watermelon field — an allotment. They, the grown-ups, would take me along for the weeding, But at eight years old I was quite a little worker. Dragging across the beds, Brittle and harsh like the red waves of Mars, The chopper, ever heavier from clods and strings, I would examine the rows of striped skull-caps: Lush Lighter Lush… and so on all around, But in the radial centre — the bald patch of the stalk, As if the sun had beaten into dust, Grasshoppers — began to chirr down and out some Turks. Those acres have gone off into the fourth dimension of time… At the same time there were — Movie halls on wheels, there in the darkness of the wagons for a handful of 15-kopeck coins sinewy Bruce Lee would dragon the mirrors; october processions — banners on conscientious shoulders, crunch, stride, silence in a thick stroke of rowanberry; well-ordered, Procrustean TU and YAK planes (so sternly and sullen stride the captains into the cabins under yellow embossed ceilings); grey shops in the winter, but in the summer — waves carved out of aquamarine, the draught-horses of colossal chess pieces and grandma with her balm of sour cream, til autumn, when like clockwork school comes back, rushes in... The era. The era when they couldn’t pile all of us into the storage units. And they wrote in buses: “A good conscience is the best ticket collector”. Remember? Now I use this quote to provoke hearty chuckles in public transport acquire friends and influence people, However (However) In my whole childhood I lied maybe five times. And if the goose is no comrade to the pig, then — gentlemen, please! Don’t trust false memories!
186 | #10-11 [ Транслит ] 2012 | trans-lit.info
Nothing was falling apart — neither quietly, nor quickly. There were kids, and the grown-ups worked. It was later all sorts of Stalins and facts came out, And urgent historians goggling their eyes Dragged out of the past and into the future The guilt of forgotten grandfathers, swimming in death. So now the Romanov family is dearer to me than my own, Onto every vertical stick I nail a horizontal one, And for any horizontal I find a vertical one, Make dough and dart around among the people — in the green hop with God’s nation. In his analysis “Metaphysics as a ‘natural inclination’ in the village stories of Shukshin,” Mikhail Nemtsev aims to apply Kant’s category of a “natural inclination” towards metaphysics to a typical Shukshin character — the village thinker-autodidact, who tends spontaneously to fall into “musing.” Nemtsev notes, however, that this tendency for protagonists to “fall into thought” in Shukshin’s village stories has in no way been prepared by any socio-cultural infrastructure and, moreover, cannot from the outside even be recognized as valuable or (correspondingly) discursively supported. Thus, the infinitely naïve expression “my soul hurts” is the most correct for Shukshin’s hero to describe what goes on with those people for whom the instruments of subjectivization are limited by propaganda-radio and “good sense.” The drama (sometimes even comicality) of these ill-suited (in a 1960s Soviet village) manifestations of a “natural inclination” to metaphysics lies in the fact that even if it developed somehow on its own, such a metaphysics could not be further socialized in any way, and therefore could only alienate the protagonists from their own organic environment. Anatoly Kaplan Café Yuryuzan a drunken brawl in Café Yuryuzan — the boys started some shit with the cops, and though the cops are former cops the boys could give a fuck some classic fighting words, “Green Label” vodka, the cries of an old beautiful broad, then more boys in a foreign car drove up to fuck shit up, to wreck Café Yuryuzan Lenochka the waitress Lenochka the waitress she’s crying Lenochka they wrecked the cafe, I’m reading poetry at this fancy pick-up Russian meter, very strong tea, a faltering tongue at five thirty a.m., Café Yuryuzan, 150 kilometres of highway left to get to Ufa I feed a hundred into the machine to pay up my phone, so I can send texts to Siberia to my beloved Masha Masha, you can’t imagine