2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
For more than half a century, Alexander Kushner has rightfully been considered one of the most significant figures in Russian poetry. What keeps the reader's attention to this author for such a long period of time? Let's try to figure it out.
Biography Facts
Alexander Semyonovich Kushner was born in 1936 in the northern capital. If we accept as an axiom the assertion that the place of birth and the small Motherland are essential in the fate of a person, then for the poet this statement is even more obvious. Childhood passed in an intelligent Leningrad family, which largely predetermined the further choice of the path.
Philological education at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute and further work as a teacher in the speci alty directly preceded the arrival in great literature. It should be borne in mind that Alexander Kushner, as a poet, began long before that. The young man wrote poetry in elementary school. It was a way for him to express his feelings and thoughts.
Times don't choose
From the very first steps in literature, Alexander Kushner saidhimself as a strong professional with his recognizable and unlike anyone else's voice. His poetry was initially far from the routine and everyday realities of Soviet life. No "socialist realism" can be found in it. The poet always turned his lines somewhere over the everyday, reflecting and exploring timeless phenomena, images and meanings. That is why he managed to say his word in Russian literature.
Some of his lines have become textbook classics. It is difficult today to find someone who would not know that "Times are not chosen, they live and die in them." Among other things, many of his poems have become bard songs and sound very good with the guitar. This is despite the fact that Alexander Kushner, whose photo is traditionally decorated with collections of bard poetry, never composed special texts for vocal performance. As, however, he never objected to the performance of his poems with musical accompaniment. One way or another, the author's song became another unexpected facet of his work.
St. Petersburg in the poet's work
In Russian poetry since the golden nineteenth century, two main directions are clearly traced. They are conventionally referred to as "Petersburg and Moscow schools". One of them is characterized by breadth, recklessness and vivid imagery, while the other is characterized by strictness of style and fidelity to the classical principles of harmony and composition. Alexander Kushner is a poet of the Petersburg tradition. Moreover, he is one of the brightest representatives of it. Soviet and post-Soviet historical period.
Despite the fact that the specific realities of the Northern capital are not so often flashed in his poems, Alexander Kushner is unimaginable without St. Petersburg. The city is literally dissolved in his images and constantly echoes the poems of the great predecessors - Blok, Annensky, Gumilyov, Akhmatova and Mandelstam. With St. Petersburg, the poetry of Alexander Kushner is united by a single architectonics of Russian classicism. It exists and develops in a single spiritual space with this city.
Alexander Kushner and Joseph Brodsky
Two outstanding contemporaries were born and took place as poets on the banks of the Neva at about the same time. For a long time they were united by personal friendship and creative competition. At the same time, the relationship between the two poets was by no means always smooth and conflict-free. Of course, each felt in the other a comparable personality. The friendship of the poets continued even after Brodsky's forced emigration. Their dialogue was never interrupted, it only turned into an epistolary form.
The future Nobel laureate dedicated two poems to his friend, and Kushner dedicated a whole cycle of poetry. The sudden death of Joseph Brodsky in January 1996 was a severe shock for Alexander Kushner. Just a year before, Brodsky hosted a friend's poetry evening in New York. This meeting with readers was brilliant and left vivid memories for all those present.
Children's poems by Alexander Kushner
Alexander Kushner pays considerable attention in his work to poems for the little ones. His children's poems are not only widely published and read, but also present in the form of songs in performances and cartoons. The poet by no means considers the children's audience to be secondary. Moreover, he is sure that a person cannot form into a full-fledged personality without constant communication with samples of high literature. After all, it is in childhood that a person is especially susceptible to everything that he sees and hears. All this is of decisive importance for the formation of both personality and destiny. And this position resonates with a young audience. People who were born already in the third millennium meet something close to themselves in the poems of the poet from the last century. Alexander Kushner is not a stranger to them.
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