Who is he? An art teacher, together with Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Burliuk and Kamensky, who undertook to revolutionize the foundations of Russian literature. Time? Inflated, 1910-1913, the starting point of all future coups. The place is violent – St. Petersburg, the nerve center of the Russian Empire. The intelligentsia turns the tables, mind for mind, mysticism, full of forebodings. There seems to be a deadly shift ahead.
From right to left: A. Kruchenykh, D. Burliuk, V. Mayakovsky, N. Burliuk, B. Livshits. Around 1913 Photo: GettyImages
AND YOU ARE 20+. We need to change the world urgently! Everyone should know you! And you must raise a cry. Twisted ones? “Declaration of Abstruse Language”! “From the meaning, the word contracts, writhes, flames, but the meaning is wild, fiery, explosive.” “Eugene Onegin” in two lines? No problem! “ENI VONI SE AND TSYA.” And one more thing: “HARLAMY HOWL THE SAPULNA”! Hooray!
All this is wonderful, but where is the money? You, even though you are abstruse, need am-am. Then – a direct path to the stage. You won’t get away with little books. Forward – to operas and debates! They have become fashionable and terrible. Malevich – “with a large wooden spoon in his buttonhole”, Kruchenykh – “with a sofa cushion on a cord across his neck”, David Burliuk – “with a necklace on his painted face”, Mayakovsky – “in a yellow jacket” (Matyushin, “Alexey Kruchenykh in the memoirs of contemporaries “).
This is a scandal! Here is Kruchenykh’s opera “Victory over the Sun”. “Nero and Caligula rolled into one” proclaim: “I eat dog and white-legged fried cutlet and dead potatoes.” Or: “I will travel through all centuries, I was in the 35th, there is strength without violence and the rebels are at war with the sun and although there is no happiness there, everyone looks happy and immortal.” Philistine song: “Yu yu yuk yu yuk gr gr gr pm pm dr dr rd rd.” And in the opera the airplane crashes: “Amda, the curlo grabbed it and sucked it!” “Ha ha ha – I’m alive”! – the aviator laughs.
How absurd! “Tickets were sold in great demand, and the people who bought them, at least many of them, went in advance for a scandal and for the sake of a scandal.” The crowd hissed: “The pretty faces of the women hissed; the graceful men in tailcoats and tuxedos hissed.” Scandal, scandal! And yet: “People, sooner or later, will appreciate the true prophets of our nightmarish and yet enormous time, leading to who knows what!” (Matyushin, “Alexey Kruchenykh in Memoirs”).
Cover of Kruchenykh’s collection of poems “Blown Up”, hand-painted with watercolors. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Isn’t this a victory over the sun? The inner, immortal part of the tongue was captured. Anxiety of time – as much as you want. “EVIL IS A FAMILITY! A PETROLEUM IS INCORRECT! THE KNIFE IS PROUD! THE WORLD IS FALLING!” Twisted, his tongue is iron, clumsy, terrible, but suddenly metaphors explode, from which you want to tremble, howl and whine: how good!
“I’m lying there – terrible – like a white galosh without milk.” Yes, sometimes we lie down. Or our current one: “Anticyclone… Sh (f) ara-a… Africa – Moscow. On the muddy asphalt – pussies wither. I can barely crawl… my suit is in tatters!” Who hasn’t experienced this? “Tenderness, like intoxication, accumulates in completely imperceptible sips – you dance, laugh, not seeing the trap covered with flowers, and suddenly it capsizes right away.” It capsizes, for sure! What then? “My soul is overcooked chicken”! Familiar.
More? Imagine: “SPRING – LANGUAGE. Mlen… feterok kufirk… Blossom the stump! Flowery fusée gloire… I’ll go and lie down.” I want to howl like March!
But he is over thirty. 1917, hell, wars, uprisings, Russia in fragments, machine-gun life, and finally, here it is – the Soviet regime, uniting everyone, but clearly not futuristic. You can still shout and tweet, but sooner or later you will be grabbed with an iron fist. Twisted ones? He has a new mind, but what a dear one, ours!
“The monument to Lenin is the whole earth! And the enemy sees, through fear and screaming, the inscription on it is red: Communism!” “With a heavy thunderstorm and a spring downpour, the lands will be cleared! Into the blue shadows, the trill of the International, go and shine! Wider than the smile of the first heat of the workers’ government is our Inter-National May!” “In the sun, the reaumur revolutions are also burning! The earth is spinning… the red Golfstrom – all the engineers of America will not stop. The earth is burning, hotter than the Kremlin.” And so on.
Russian people are the height of adaptability. We will adapt to anything. We will be the same, but not the same. What about Kruchenykh? It didn’t work out. Since 1932, everything has been prohibited for him, he is almost an enemy, he cannot publish, he must go somewhere, hide in a corner, he is not even a member of the Writers’ Union (refused). In the 1920s, he lived on samizdat, small books with pictures, several hundred copies each (nowadays they cost a lot of money). The auction price for such a book today is 30-40 thousand rubles. Not for him anymore. And then – that’s it, it’s impossible.
What’s next? How to live in silence? And how to live? He is not even half a century old yet. A person is a way of adapting to current circumstances. He suddenly became a “junk book dealer”, a “book commission agent”, selling books, drafts, manuscripts – and, of course, autographs, collecting all this even from unknown people, in case they become famous. Writers, past, present and future, willingly gave him all their work trash, which could someday become precious.
Kruchenykh – who is he? Famous bibliophile! Need a library? Rare book? Mayakovsky’s letter? Authentic sheets of Khlebnikov? He will find all this – for a fee, of course. His famous, battered “brown briefcase” – it contained unheard-of literary rarities.
He had one single room in a communal apartment in the center of Moscow. “Books were everywhere. The floor was not visible, burying things and clothes underneath, mountains of books rose. A path was laid from the door to the window, there was a smaller layer of books on it. There was a table at which he once ate, but at different times From time to time, various celebrities came to him, and he turned it all into a museum. I wanted to somehow clean up this table, but Alexey Eliseevich shouted in horror: “It’s impossible, it’s impossible! So and so sat and ate here, and ate from this jar, and drank from this cup” (Yu. Tutova-Senkina. “Alexey Kruchenykh in Memoirs”).
During the war, Ehrenburg was able to drag him into the Writers’ Union. This is a feeding, a writers’ canteen! With her he survived. And he became the last of the last futurists. Back in the 1960s, he was dry, agile, pointed-nosed, with a jumping gait, always searching, always running somewhere. Do you know what immortality is according to Alexey Kruchenykh? This is “Mtseh Khitsi Mukh Ts l Lam Ma Tske”! No less than that!
Why was he once deprived of his words? What kind of manner is it to plunge into silence? Not a harmful, laughing, stormy, ever-changing person! We could have heard so many things with him! They would laugh, jump around – and maybe they would make it up themselves – not for the sake of brilliance, but in the name of the power and charm of the abbreviated Russian word, stripped down to the letters, desperately omnipotent! Mindlessly omnipotent! PRE RU RE! – Russian speech is beautiful!
We must talk. We must not remain silent. We can be diametrically opposed. We don’t like to change our points of view. More often than not, we cannot be convinced. Let there be frames! But we should never and under no circumstances be as dumb as the king of all zaumi, the king of the universal cry, one of the “people of the future” Alexei Kruchenykh. Let no one ever say, as he once said: “I live in silence!” Or he, bowing his head: “The press be silent!”
Source: rg.ru
