Rome, from I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni the collection of poems "The best verses melt in the air" by Bel'skij

Rome, from I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni the collection of poems "The best verses melt in the air" by Bel'skij.

The editorial tradition of the continues The Bard's Notebooks Editions di Stefano Donno with international poetry releases: it arrives translated and edited by Paolo Galvagni The best verses melt into the air di Stanislav Belsky.

The terrible war, unfolded by Russia in Ukraine, has a little-noticed victim. Right now the Russian-speaking poetry of Ukraine ceases to exist. The authors, who over the last decade transformed it into a unique, particular phenomenon – the space of dialogue between two rich and heterogeneous national traditions – one after another switch to the Ukrainian language, admitting that the dialogue was unsuccessful. But if this dialogue is destined to empty, Stanislav Bel'skij will probably be the one who leaves it last and closes the door behind him. In part this is due to the fact that Bel'sky himself was the most active in Ukraine in translating contemporary Ukrainian poets into Russian, and even today on his page Facebook The latest military verses of the leaders of Ukrainian poetry appear in Russian a few hours after the publication of the originals.

But it's not just about that. One of Bel'sky's most interesting poetic projects is an endless poetic cycle, of which he publishes new texts from time to time: it is called “Friendly conversations with robots”. The title is not entirely accurate: in the verses of this cycle neither the author nor the lyrical hero converse with the robots. No, robots and neurological networks talk to each other, write letters to each other, they don't hide emotions. Dialogue is possible. Dialogue in itself is a value, even if there is no one to conduct it, nor anyone to conduct it with.

Bel'sky's poetry 10 years – the one before the war and the one during the war “little war” after 2014 – is all built on similar paradoxes. It is surrealism and the absurd, but domestic, comfortable. The world has gone mad, but in this madness you can live almost carefree, love your wife and observe a nice girl on the train. The quiet hedonism of these verses is permeated with stoicism: with the willingness, as events unfold, to accept the world as a given, to see its coherence. Wide-ranging war releases this stoicism: the absurd bursts into daily existence like a zipper, exasperating you, just when you need to escape to the shelter.

Paraphrasing the famous aphorism about atheists, one could say that there are no avant-gardists in the trenches, but this is incorrect: the previous creative experience of the poet Bel'skij, who sought the human in the inhuman, has now served to maintain that same uniform tone and the serene observation in the face of inhuman things happening in the world: hatred and human adversity. And it is not surprising that we can read Bel'sky's previous lines through the prism of the catastrophe, which fell on his paese: “on such a day disappears / an old railway branch / the bell tower on the river / or some of your old acquaintances”. There was a time when disappearances could be peaceful, and now… Or maybe peaceful disappearance was an illusion even before, and catastrophe always slept in it? We don't know: unlike some authors, aesthetically similar (Russian Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, or, say, Ukrainian Michajlo Žaržajlo), Bel'sky never alludes to anything. But when he speaks directly, as in 2022, there is nothing to object to him.

Dmitry Kuz'min is a famous Russian literary critic and publisher. Born in 1968 a Moscow, where he worked as a publisher, has resided in for years now Latvia.

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