Dmitry Vodennikov A boy on the street About how we were all lost once 03.12.2022, 08:07

I am still walking from the subway on a bright day – I look: a child is walking in the crowd. Small. I don’t know how to determine the age of children, but he is clearly a preschooler. Maybe four or five.
He walks alone, passed by other passers-by. Then it stops completely.

I look ahead among the people in a hurry: already fifty meters away is a mother, a young aunt, herself on the phone (either typing or watching something), behind her – also a detached tugboat, but at least a meter away – another baby.

My old teacher’s heart (if the teacher’s heart is old) is bathed in black anger. I catch up to my mom – and badly reining in this black anger: “Your child is falling behind,” I say.

Continuing to move, he turns his face towards me, and it seems to me that he does not immediately understand me.

Then I almost hisse (like a cat) with an utterly hateful face: “Don’t you see? Your child is behind.”

And I point back.

Watching how my aunt ran there (the second one who didn’t lag behind her) I say, “I’m totally stunned,” and the old uncle who follows her sympathetically says: “Well, how can you forget? About your son? And then there’s all kinds of horrors.”

A child left behind stands like a little offended soldier.

We are all soldiers of our war.

…December 3, Day of the Unknown Soldiers in Russia.

Mandelstam has a complex, dark poetry, all built on air pockets of meaning and silence. It’s called “Poems about the unknown soldier”. The most transparent stanza out there is this:

And for Mikhail Lermontov
I will give you a tight report
How the grave teaches the hunchbacks
And it draws air pockets.

The most famous is:

aortic bleeding
And whispers between the rows:
– I was born at ninety-four,
I was born at ninety-two…
And in a frayed fist
Year of birth – with the crowd and the flock
With a bloodless mouth I whisper:
– I was born in the night from the second to the third
ninety one january
Unreliable years – and centuries
Surround me with fire.

Time in Mandelstam’s poetry, like thought, makes strange cycles. Sometimes you don’t understand what you mean at all. Too many colors, too many mixed shapes; including figures of speech.

It is important that Pavel Filonov once also mentioned the strange flow of time. What is “reverse time” (almost like “reverse perspective” in pictures). And that this reverse time moves from the future to the present.

What it looks like?

swinging grapes
These worlds threaten us
And hang stolen cities,
Gold plugs, sneaking,
Poison cold berries –
pull constellations tents,
Golden constellation oils…

Well, yes, probably something like that. (My friend once said that he had the idea that you’re moving towards yourself from old age. There’s even a chance to meet yourself in the crowd in the middle of life. Maybe I’ve already slipped through the middle of life long ago? And did I meet this angry boy the way I used to be?)

“Draw each atom persistently and accurately. Persistently and accurately introduce the studied color to each atom, so that it eats it like heat in the body or organically binds to the form, like the colored fiber of a flower in nature.

It turned out that Filonov paints his large canvases with a thin brush – from one edge of the picture to the other. Basically embroidered.

He said that as all living things in nature grow, the organism in the picture should also grow.

It seems that this is exactly how Osip Mandelstam “writes” his “Unknown Soldier.” There is a lot of darkness, obscurity for us, but the sound is alive and therefore fascinating.

Here they are, our two soldiers (one of them means “soldiers”, they are very fragile and it is as if they are not for a feat, but they achieved their success, not us: solid, fat), they are fighting their battle.

Khlebnikov told us about the first military Filonov with these words: “I also wage war, not only for space, but for time. I’m sitting in a trench and taking a bit of time from the past. My mission is as heavy as that of the space troops.

Mother-life leaves them a senseless fool looking at their smartphone, television, newspaper (if you rewind time, when there is no television or smartphone), and the offended child in the hat and fur coat remains. He consciously stood like a pillar among the crowd – out of anger, outrage. With the rage of oblivion. The offended boy Mandelstam, the hungry child of treason Filonov.

The artist will die of exhaustion in besieged Leningrad on December 3, 1941. Her sister Evdokia Glebova will leave her memories: “I was lying in a jacket, a warm hat, I had a white woolen glove in my left hand, no gloves in my right hand, it was clenched into a fist. A great master who had not known peace all his life has now calmed down.”

They met there, probably later, in the realm of shadows, angels, and clouds. Mandelstam and Filonov. Khlebnikov will be there too. And Mandelstam will argue with him again. (I found where to argue, but Mandelstam is often belligerent, and Khlebnikov once wrote anti-Jewish rhymes.)

But Filonov will say: “I will beat you both. [то есть Мандельштама и Хлебникова]And in general, everything you say is unimportant.
Someone present will ask: “But what is not trivial?”
Filonov will say: “Here, all my life, I wanted to paint a picture that would hang on the wall without nails.”
Khlebnikov will stop arguing with Mandelstam and will ask with interest: “And how?”
“Fallen”.
“What were you doing?”
“I,” will answer Filonov, who already understood his past future, “I haven’t eaten in a week.”
“So what?”
“It collapsed,” Filonov will answer.
And there will be a new tension bed.

But then other shadows and angels will try to separate them.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.



Source: Gazeta

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