In the late 1980s, young Vasily Kondratyev was in a sense, the crowning member of the Leningrad underground. His poems differed formal radicalism, a catchy disregard adopted in the city’s neo-classical note. And at the same time they were easy to hear a bitter ending, the dying breath of the entire Leningrad poetic speech.When Leningrad disappeared from the map and reappeared Petersburg, has transformed itself Kondratiev. He abandoned poetry and turned to prose and became one of the most significant innovators in the Russian literature of the 90s. To be held at that time, it was necessary to be either a trickster or a hero. Kondratyev was neither the one nor the other. He was a dandy. He was not interested in neither the sincerity nor the cheerful deception or manipulation of the discourse of literature, no attempts naive pure speech, nor PR, nor terror. Like any dandy, he was able to keep pace with the era, but fascinate her, moving in a distinctive, hypnotic rhythm, to create their own theatre — the system of gestures, not always intelligible to others, but in its own way irresistible.In 1993, a small edition was released his only lifetime book “Walking”. In 1998, he received the award of Andrei Bely. A year later, Kondrat’ev was killed — fell while walking on Petersburg roofs. He was a little less than thirty-two. This death is terrible and as if programmed. Step in anywhere, the fast break was one of the masterfully worked them gestures. As it happens with the poets, these graceful crash of the letters look the preparation of his own death.In the decades following texts Kondratieff almost not published, but forgotten he was not. On the contrary, the inaccessibility of his stuff helped to strengthen the myth of the writer, almost unread and which impact on the development of the new Russian prose, a secret treasure for the few. Books waited a very long time. In 2016 released a collection of poems, and now — 20 years after the death of the author — semiconstrained volume of prose and essays.”The testimony of the poets” — at first glance, a strangely organized book. Stories and novels, essays, forewords to others ‘ publications and annotations to his own translation, the texts of the exhibition brochures, magazine reviews — all of this is not divided by headings and arranged in chronological order.This eccentric stroke there are two explanations. First: this mix is one of the main principles of the letter of Kondratiev. A relatively conventional narrative prose, modernistic stream of consciousness, disintegrating automatic writing, almost academic digression into the history of literature, the appeal to friends, filled with obscure third-party reader with the details, critical judgments about contemporary art, intimate confession, a minor literary joke, a serious Manifesto, a report ��b occult practices — all of which can exist within a single text. One genre does not absorb the other, they do not collide in a collage and not become a hodgepodge. Kondratyev hovers over them, and with it glides the reader. The author does it, and makes you lost.However, this neighborhood genres and tonalities, their own creativity and criticism (and also not included in the book numerous translations) — by software. It is determined by the Kondratieff-conceived project to change the history of literature.Russian literature for Kondratieff ended somewhere in the 1930s: the texts of the last representatives of the Leningrad Baroque — late Kuzmin, Vaginov, the Yurkun, Egunova. Their name for it — something like the shining stars, the subject of constant reconciliation. Everything that happened after that, as if did not exist. It’s not only about the printing of the Soviet literature, but of clandestine literature (with the exception of two or three authors). The story I had to write and live again. It meant an accelerated course to enter Russian literature in the context of international modernism, to restore the missing links. Kondratyev seemed to be trying to do it alone: to be a Russian, Breton, Borges, Blanchot, Keno — series can continue for a very long time. In structure it is, in essence, Pushkin task. She demanded a great effort of will.Favourite style Kondratieff was surrealism. And he demanded the opposite: conscious of the collapse of consciousness, drift, failure in the mind of the invisible holes. Kondratiev’s work was conducted in this paradoxical dual installation: maximum concentration and forgetfulness, self-creation and self-destruction, commitment and sleepwalking. For such a letter required a virtuoso balancing, talent of a drunken tightrope Walker. Therefore, almost every phrase best Kondratieff texts causes dizziness.Publisher Nacitat next
