what Café Yuryuzan is doing for me the Ural mountains, the first of May everything I saw today revives me with the faith that this country will go on living it will live for all eternity guarding Yuryuzan within itself and thousands of other little spots — enough bitching about collapse as long as the boys keep tying one on, elegantly pulling broads, long-haul truckers keep drinking coffee, and poets reading verses in cafes resembling Yuryuzan — all together we are the catechism and you all in Moscow quit already seeking that national idea fucking pack it in come on over to Cafe Yuryuzan and while away the night. An article from Andrei Gornykh, “Tarkovsky’s social poetics,” presents an analysis of the relationship between the cinematographer Andrei Tarkovsky and his social context. The cinematographic theme of home in Tarkovsky’s work is seen not as a reference to the director’s remote biographical experience, but rather as a model for a social poetics of the Thaw-era intelligentsia and its historical experience of the European home. The social poetics of the Soviet intelligentsia is placed in the perspective of the genesis of early European urban communities (urban communes, taste communities). The meaning of a return to a lost Home is transferred from the plane of Soviet man’s acquisition of a world of privacy into the plane of the very means of return — the reproduction, by a group, of connectedness in the context of the artistic search for truth. In an article from Veronika Berkutova, “In search of lost choice: the Strugatsky brothers’ protagonists between labor-for-a-good-cause and life-against-allodds,” the focus lies on the correlation between the situation of choice typical for literature of the 1960s-70s and the motif of labor. Analyzing the basic themes of the Strugatsky brothers’ story “A billion years before the end of the world,” Berkutova traces the change in the concept of work (significant for the Soviet system) from something equal to creative activity, a marker of the subject’s social engagement, to a form of internal protest and a means of confronting the authorities. Berkutova concludes that in the high-pressure situations in which the Strugatsky protagonists find themselves, the choice is always predetermined and, in its own way, tragic: in circumstances where the previous symbolic order is being destroyed, the protagonists can make any choice and still lose not only the possibility of social stability, but also their own sense of identity. Next, Ukrainian curatorial collective Khudrada’s provides a run-down of its “Labor exhibition,” which focuses on the images of labor driven off somewhere behind the stage curtains of capitalist production. Having migrated to the outskirts of the everyday, labor is losing the contours of the real and becoming fantastic, to such an extent that it permits any forms of control, exploitation and self-exploitation. In “The demarcation of ‘Soviet’ and ‘unofficial’ as problem: the self-definition of the ‘cultural movement’
on the pages of Chasy,” Aleksandr Zhitenev analyzes attempts to define the border between “Soviet” and “unofficial” in 1980s Leningrad samizdat and reveals the foundational values underlying such a demarcation. Using articles published in the journal Chasy, Zhitenev comes to conclusions regarding the paradoxical nature of the literary underground’s self-definition; the presence of elements of self-criticism and self-abnegation which nevertheless coincide with a comprehensive denial of the Soviet system of literary institutions, forms of legitimization for the writer, principles of dialogue with the public, etc. Giorgi Khasaia Killing a Cop By the entrance, On the left side of the supermarket A cop was butchered They knifed his chest And indifferently examined Red flowers just grown on his soul asylum Red flowers On his soul asylum The blood splashed on the children’s faces It’s no blood it must be freckles It is blood It’s no blood it must be freckles By the entrance, On the left side of the supermarket A sleepless cop was killed He had been reading Naked Lunch all night long And then they killed him And the kids Freckle-faced Each bought an ice-cream And threw the changes into the face of A beggar with a boyish haircut By the entrance, On the left side of the supermarket A proud cop was killed His eyelashes smashed the sun into pieces once and for all And once and for all his lips repeated: Kids Heroine Tangier By the entrance, On the left side of the supermarket A cop was butchered He knew nothing about the literary work of a poet Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov He just remembered his name From a literary radio program In November or April On the left side of the supermarket From the darkness and the wall scripts of the entrance A cop appeared like a comics character With a cap on and a stiff collar, he had been cutting through the darkness and air And he somehow reminded a shark Huge and white By the entrance, On the left side of the supermarket A courageous cop was killed Then he got up and walked across The river, which does not divide a city into two parts He walked with pride He’d got the power To taste the sea Without getting wet.
trans-lit.info | #10-11 [ Транслит ] 2012 | 187