The Gorky Literary Institute, which briefly appeared in my life in 1990, was remembered for the faces and artistic statements of some of my classmates, a lecture by Archpriest Alexander Me on the eve of his mysterious death, but most of all for the student dormitory. Firstly, because, as a nonresident, I settled there during my first and, as it turned out, my only semester. And secondly, because of the official anti-suicide device I saw there for the first time in my life.
Such devices, of course, probably exist in the world somewhere else. Undoubtedly, in Japan, whose culture has been permeated by the cult of ritual and/or situational suicide for centuries, the modernization of the country required the development of various methods to overcome this cult, but I know almost nothing about it. Kamikazes seem to have suspended their valiant practice, but hara-kiri/seppuku do happen, and other poor devils regularly sneak into the carefully guarded Suicide Forest.
All I know is that the trampoline–like metal nets strung every two floors in the stairwell of the seven-story dormitory tower appeared there in the late Soviet period as an attempt to stop the flow of suicides by students, mainly, allegedly, the poetry department.
The above has a certain connotation of statistical and at the same time psychological knowledge. Poets are the most vulnerable people. I was impressed by the presence of these grids, because I entered the poetry department myself, and I should have thought about it, but soon I stopped noticing them. There were no suicide attempts in my presence, and life was in full swing around me.
Of course, I remember the teachers. Literary critic Stanislav Jimbinov, the son of a Kalmykian national poet, spoke dozens of European languages and read poetry by foreign authors to us twice, first in the original. Vitaly Siromakha taught Russian, and he freed me from his subject after some cognitive feat of mine (I don’t remember the details anymore) on the first test, setting the whole group as an example. The historian Zoya Kochetkova is remembered for her incredible concentration and wit. I caught a glimpse of Henrikh Sapgir, with whom I later became friends, and Konstantin Kedrov, but they did not teach part-time students during my semester.
The warmest image was left by Nelly Murnova. Occupying an important administrative post at my correspondence department, she built quite horizontal human relations with students, and for years she stubbornly refused to expel me from the institute to return to long-term naval expeditions and persuaded me to return to my studies during my visits to Moscow. But by that time I had already realized that I had entered my second university out of almost a sporting interest: it is sometimes important for a provincial (and maybe not only) to make sure of his ability to jump over the barrier set before him.
There are also bright figures close to the administration, but from my generation – Irina Fedorets, the dormitory commandant and, it seems, a novelist, who struck me with almost senile (in her early thirties) wisdom of judging people, and the poet Victor Kull, a former permanent member of either the artistic council or the Komsomol committee. He was widowed at an early age, then fell under a trolleybus, and in recent years has been experiencing periodic health problems: “… when, clutching the engine in his hand, / we are chasing a pack of horses, / you try to crawl to the door / to open it for the ambulance. Vitya’s poems initially tended towards the Baroque, but sometimes he let in a fresh dose of simplicity and truth of life. The literary dormitory lived an authentic life in his lines.:
…And these free dances
Muslims
In the flaky state – owned
corridors,
And malicious bliss
creditors,
Infiltrating the beggarly
pocket…
I do not remember the head of my poetry seminar (here I will legitimately refer to the consequences of the recent covid), but I still know quite a lot of fragments from Kulle’s poems: “Like birds, we voraciously built our own house, / And like people, we were charred along with a burning nest.”
Nikolai Romanovsky, a translator from Minsk, was a polyglot and an encyclopedist. It was said that he submitted his translation from Prakrit to Esperanto to the applicants’ competition, and there was no one in Moscow who knew both languages. It was from him that I first heard the Latin name of the medieval fairground bear training school in Smorgon: Academia Smorgonica. He translated the bucolic quote from the Iliad, “hippoi boukoleonto,” not as “horses grazing,” but as “hippies hanging out.”
The most outlandish of the fellow students was Ruslan Marsovich (Nadreev). He published his suggestive experimental prose, among other things, in the Riga Rodnik. Outwardly, he looked incredibly similar to the young Pushkin, as it was customary to portray him in the 20th century. At My lecture, Ruslan and I asked Father Alexander the most tricky questions, he answered them with no less insidious openness and impeccable logic, and generally looked surprisingly tragic and positivistic at the same time. The next day, he will be killed near his temple. It won’t be until a few years later that I watch an old 70s movie interview with Father Alexander, where he is terribly young and clearly still unfamiliar with the cumulative evil of the world, a pure angel.
Ruslan himself will die in two years – as they say, having joined some business project for bread and becoming a victim of bandits. I learned about his death from Slava Kuritsyn’s landmark literary newspaper article “On Our Differences over Postmodernism.” I tried to interest a famous French Slavist and translator in Ruslan’s prose, but she preferred the traditionalists.
I remember the librarians Emilian Galayku-Pan from Moldova and Eduard Mizhit from Tuva. Emilian, refined and classically educated, wrote in Moldovan, calling it a dialect of Romanian, and comically told how in Chisinau some crook defended his dissertation on Moldovan belonging not to the Romance, but to the Slavic language group. Edik wrote in Russian. About 15 years later, I found out Edik’s home phone number in Kyzyl and called him. He became, it turns out, the first translator of the Bible into Tuvan. Last year, I started looking for his contacts again, and it turned out that the coronavirus had killed him a year earlier.
Even before the pandemic, Oleg Pavlov died of a heart attack – very young, at the age of 48, like Dovlatov. He shares a rare element of biography with the latter.: working as a prison (escort in Oleg’s case) guard is a reflection of this period in prose.
All of them, unlike Ruslan and me, graduated from the Literary Institute. None of the classmates seem to have committed suicide.
But in 2002, in Moscow, my fellow Crimean poet Nika Turbina fell from the windowsill of the fifth floor and did not survive. Whether it was suicide is not so important. There is an obvious integral scenario, common to the poor poets of the Literary Institute. We know that Nika was led through life to poetic fame by her family, then by her senior colleagues in writing, and that her poems, perhaps partially or completely, were written by her artist mother.
Coincidentally, I soon read Romain Gary’s Promise at Dawn for the first time. And suddenly I realized that the situation of programming a child for great achievements described by the French classic is a universal, irresistible mechanism that determines the fate of many of us. Imprinting in a writer is a powerful topic for both a writer and an anthropologist researcher. The faith of mom or dad (or, more broadly, those closest to us) in our genius, transmitted to us at a tender age, will allow us to achieve immeasurably more in life than the absence of such faith. But on one condition: that the loved ones were not mistaken, winding each other up with a reassessment of the child. If the idea of one’s great mission inspired by the environment is not supported by another, genuine gift– it’s a bad thing. Disappointment in their ability to fulfill the mission is fraught with disaster.
The phenomenon of “promesse del obe” (from “La promesse de l’aube”, the title of Gary’s novel in the original, the term was proposed in 2024 in the popular science magazine Znanie – Sila) is a machete with a double-sided blade. It is impossible to predict whether it will cut through the owner’s path to success and fame in the jungle of life or split his forehead.
