Photo of Sergei Chudakov by Roman Prygunov (1988) / Image
courtesy of galchi
This month, Znamia published
a recently rediscovered cycle of poems by Sergei Chudakov (1937-1997), the
Moscow underground poet who was famously—if prematurely—elegized by Joseph
Brodsky in “To a Friend: In Memoriam” («На смерть друга», 1973). In his own poem, Brodsky called Chudakov
“a word-plyer, a liar … a white-fanged little snake in the tarpaulin-boot
colonnade of gendarmes,” and something of that blend of poetic
inventiveness and misfit presence comes through loud and clear in these newly
published poems. They function like a time capsule into a place where you can finally hear the voices you weren’t supposed to hear.
Chudakov wrote his cycle of 30 poems in the summer of 1965,
and editor Vladimir Orlov tells us that they were inspired by Lev Eidlin’s
translations of classical Chinese poet Bai Juyi. Appropriately enough, Chudakov’s
poems appear in Znamia under the
title “Stuck in Moscow for the Summer, I Imitate a Chinese Author.” (Funny, I
can think of a few American writers who were doing the same thing at the same
time… Snyder, anyone? I guess cultural cooptation was all the rage on both sides of
the curtain back then.)
Bai Juyi, who lived during the Tang Dynasty, wrote his poems
in four-line regulated verse, which translator Eidlin then modified by
breaking each line into two, with a caesura after the second beat, thus
creating a new and exotic form: the Russified eight-line pseudo-Chinese poemlet.
And Chudakov, it seems, loved it. (You can read an example of Eidlin’s work, in
Russian, on Wikilivres.)
The key thing to notice about Chudakov’s poems, especially
in this cycle—really, the thing you can’t help but notice—is the casual, gritty
style. Unlikely as it may seem to anyone who knows midcentury Russian poetry, Chudakov
writes in the colloquial, banal, autobiographical vein familiar to those who have read the poets of the New
York School. These are Lunch Poems for
Moscow. Not much happens in them, but the voice is irresistible. My favorite of
the bunch is the third one, “On How I Nearly Became Amphibian-Man,” which
seems to me to present the very image of the “unofficial” poet of the period:
apart from the crowd, amid the detritus of Soviet life, powerless:
The water is 18ºC. I swim.
I
watch the riverbank.
I keep a close eye on my pants.
I
don’t have another pair.
If someone makes off with them,
I’ll
have to swim forever
in the middle of the river
among
cigarette butts and oil slicks.
[All translations mine]
