Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin: biography, personal life, creativity, photo

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Evgeny Golovin is a Russian poet, writer, metaphysician, literary critic, author of numerous essays on the topics of European poetry, Dionysianism and literature of restless presence. A brilliant connoisseur of alchemical texts, hermeticism and medieval mysticism. A key figure in the Moscow intellectual underground of the 1960s and 1980s. Master of poetic and literary translation. One of the best translators of poems by Arthur Rimbaud. A regular participant in esoteric meetings at the apartment of Vitaly Mamleev in Yuzhinsky Lane.

Approach

The biography and personal life of Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin is partially known. Only the date of birth is precisely known - August 26, 1938. His life up to thirty years is shrouded in great mystery. There is very little information about his parents and education. OYevgeny Vsevolodovich's mother knows only from his own words that she was a "cold, normal and not child-loving" woman. Apparently, she was the first "snow queen" in Golovin's life, still on a simple, not mystical level. In the future, the Snow Queen, a woman of night and cold, will become one of the fundamental principles of Golovin's worldview.

Perplexity

Some of his close friends genuinely wondered where he actually came from? Where did this erudite, encyclopedist and mystic get all his knowledge? Indeed, in the years of his youth, in the Soviet Union of the fifties, it was impossible to learn this knowledge. It was also very difficult to find literature about secret doctrines, mysticism, alchemy, paganism and Hermeticism, about everything that formed the basis of Yevgeny Vsevolodovich's knowledge and interests.

Photo of Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin in his youth is presented below.

But he, contrary to fate, found the source and clung to it. This source turned out to be a special repository of the Lenin Library, where, by some miracle, Golovin had access. There he, one of the first in the country, got acquainted with the works of Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, Miguel Serrano, Fulcanelli and others. This is how domestic traditionalism was born.

Rejection

For such an exceptional person as Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin, personal life and biography, in essence, do not matter. He was a person who did not pay attention to everyday life, that is, the external circumstances of life did not affect his internalattitudes and intentions. Yevgeny Vsevolodovich often said that a house is not important for a man, but only ease of climbing and readiness to set off on a long journey at any moment.

Evgeny Vsevolodovich was out of the country, out of the era and out of society. Wars, repressions, plagues, shifts in social formations and any other cataclysms could break out around him, which happened during his life. But he still remained the way he is, regardless of the social system, intellectual fashion and trends in public opinion. Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin is eternal, like Dionysus and Hermes Trismegistus, beloved by him, like the doctrines of the seekers of the spiritual path and adherents of ancient sacred cults, are eternal. How eternal is the ocean.

Golovin hated society and everything connected with it. Once lost, the passport did not even try to recover and lived like this for many years, and then in the USSR it was, to put it mildly, unsafe and inconvenient. But he was not afraid of losing his social support, he despised it, as he despised everyday life and gray everyday life. He had a phobia for the world around him, he saw it as unreal, unreal, someone's evil joke and was very afraid of being poisoned by it. Golovin considered this world a prison and saw the way out of here only in spiritual quests, poetry and antiquity.

Intoxication

Evgeny Vsevolodovich was so different that he did not even have a chance to adapt to this life. Although he still found beauty in this world. He considered alcohol not evil, but, on the contrary, a means of metaphysical disclosure. He loved alcohol for its alchemical sublimation, for the fact that it helped to gropea clearing in everyday life, made it possible to escape from the boredom of petty-bourgeois life, provided a narrow passage to freedom of thought. After drinking, Golovin disbanded, and communication began - his supernatural conversations about life and death, about the poetry of Dante, Shakespeare, Lautreamont and Rimbaud, about Pan's antics and the violent passion of the Bacchantes. From the outside, for the townsfolk, it looked like ordinary drinking and, of course, was condemned.

Women

The wife of Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin, and he was officially married only once, was Alla Ponomareva. In this marriage, his daughter Elena was born. The couple broke up, and Golovin did not marry again, but sailed through life like a mysterious and attractive ship, sometimes entering women's houses as a quiet bay or harbor. But it was impossible to keep him, he moved in his own rhythm and in his own direction, somewhere in the space of meanings, away from the dull routine and gray everyday life. Somewhere to the north. Yevgeny Vsevolodovich considered women to be creatures entangled in matter, tied to everyday life and comfort, but he could not live without them. Women at least a little kept him near the ground, gave support to the anchor of his ship. Without them, perhaps he would have sailed beyond all horizons, away from Earth, drawn by violent winds known only to him.

Poetry

The poet Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin was real, true. A true poet always takes risks. Because he creates his creations from nothing. It revives the flashes of the non-existent, gives it a form. If the poet does not touchNothing, then this is not a poet, this is a rogue who calls himself a poet. Only those who come into contact with Nothing understand what death is. The rest do not understand this, they only repeat what has been written by poets, philosophers and mystics. They are in a dream and do not think about death. Those who do not think about death are already dead.

The poet creates something out of Nothing. That is what is scary. No one knows, not even the poet himself, how Something will behave when it comes to be. Therein lies the risk. And Golovin took risks. Risked all my life and enjoyed the risk.

But the poet is alive, he looks death in the face, and he is worried. Death with its grandeur drives the poet crazy and makes him mad. The poet loses his support and is left alone with death, and fights until the very end, until his very victory. Such poets were so beloved by Golovin: Rimbaud, Trakl, Baudelaire, Pau, Nouveau, de Nerval, Nietzsche, Cros, Verlaine. Golovin himself was such a poet.

In Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin's poems, very different (from hooligan to philosophical, from rude to lyrically tender), the perception of the world is sharpened. The space is moving apart, new dimensions, new meanings and new possibilities appear. But it will not work to follow the poet. The path of each is strictly individual. The poet only slightly opens the abyss and shows the existence of other paths, different from the usual paths of life.

Books

Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin has only seven published books. These are books of poems and songs, collections of amazingly deep essays on poetic and mythological topics, recordings of his conversations. Like any prophet, Golovin did not create any complete philosophical doctrine. He, like Zen masters who left behind only parables and koans, preferred lectures and conversations. It was in conversations that his gift of eloquence manifested itself, and a characteristic intonation began to act, transforming reality and introducing the listener into an intellectual trance and other unexpected existential states. His voice, wandering somewhere in transcendental heights, awakened the ancient deep elements in the listeners, cut through reality and destroyed the settings.

In his conversations, Golovin is deliberately mysterious, his statements are the opposite of any banality, his actions are unexpected, unschematic and radical. This is how the prophets speak and behave, despite the established norms, prohibitions and traditions, thereby revealing completely new postulates and ideas. They are not afraid to switch to absurdity and shocking, they are not afraid to be funny and ridiculous, they are not afraid of anything at all.

Environment

The whole life of Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin complemented his work and was a vivid illustration of his views. In 1962, he appeared at the esoteric Yuzhinsky evenings and instantly joined a very motley company of underground connoisseurs of metaphysics, and soon became one of the leaders of this association. The Yuzhinsky circle at that time was just taking shape and was a weekly meeting of extraordinary personalities at the apartment of the writer Yuri Mamleev in Yuzhinsky Lane. In this circle passed their formation: HeydarDzhemal, Sergey Zhigalkin, Valentin Provotorov. The main "nerve" of these meetings was the search for the Beyond and longing for the Truth. Golovin, with his Dionysian existence and eternal search for meanings, fully corresponded to these attitudes.

Mamleev himself was already a well-known writer in narrow circles of samizdat and had considerable weight among the nonconformist public. He accepted Golovin immediately and unconditionally, their friendship continued throughout the rest of his life.

Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin died on October 29, 2010. On his grave, friends installed a menhir.