| Abstrakt: |
In one poem by V. Krivulin-a now well-known poet from the old literary "underground"-spirituality "with love for lofty words" is called empty, nameless, chilly air, akin to silence, "where there is no one, no sound," akin to "moonlit torment" on "a square, white, completely." In Krivulin's recent book of verse, Appeal [Obrashchenie] (Leningrad, 1990), we sense the specter of emptiness, a world where everything gradually "issues like steam from a mouth"-and dissolves into nonbeing, nonexistence, the "taste" of which the poet has grown rather used to. Krivulin's poetry is like a transparent glass vessel of elegant shape that looks empty, although it is full, according to the poet, with the invisible "pure water" of being. Sometimes Krivulin seems to get carried away by realia and reminiscences of culture; he seems culturological, but the sensation of the "temple of culture" he values and seems to cherish is inescapably constructed in the midst of emptiness. The shakiness and erodedness of the contours of life brought out by the poet, its unfilled quality, create the impression of an "escape into culture"-not into the immaterial spiritual that resembles transparent space but into the "stuff of existence." The realia of culture and civilization become like a gaudy curtain concealing the emptiness of the cosmos, a screen that shields man, who knows that should he ever come out of the temple of culture and open the door to civilization's comfortable house, he would find himself in the embrace of the void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
