ANDREY VOZNESENSKY
ROV

Side 1 - 23.30
Side 2 - 23.58

Sound engineer L. Dolzhnikov
Editor T. Tarnovskaya
Artist N. Ozerov

Now you will hear an unusual reading by the poet of his poems, although by its nature it is always unusual. Because the poet reads “above” the rules of euphony - he has different impulses. Many, hearing for the first time how poets read, are surprised - where is the logic! Where are the “pictures” that convey the content! Where are the little “one-man theater” performances that dramatic artists stage from reading poetry! Where is the combination of these qualities, which is demonstrated with academic restraint by professional readers! Nevertheless, true lovers of poetry, for whom it is a condition of life, are attracted and fascinated by the author’s reading. Why! Yes, because in the “monotonous” reading of a poet there is always an approach to the mystery of the birth of poetry. In his reading are the initial chords of emerging music. Because the poet instinctively makes sure that the “swing” is heard through the words, that is, the rhythmic basis on which his poetic magic rests. In these seemingly formal things, the content is dominant for him. The poet, like a composer, hears the music of life. But every poet has his own ear for it. Only his inherent musicality conveys to the listener what his heart is beating about, and often stronger than the skill of the interpreting artist. However, it would be more accurate to say that here we are dealing with different arts. An artist reading a poet’s poetry is, as it were, our representative in his poetic world. Each time illuminates this world in its own way, interprets it in its own way, that is, penetrates into the world of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Blok, Mayakovsky... Each time adds itself to the poet.

Artistic and linguistic innovation of Andrei Voznesensky

(based on the poem “Ditch”)

“Poems are not written - they happen, like feelings or a sunset. The soul is a blind accomplice. I didn’t write it - it happened like this,” said Andrei Voznesensky. In the same way, individual authorial new formations, unique to him, appear in the poet’s language. However, they do not arise spontaneously, out of nothing.
Just as a poet is shaped by an era, a poet feels its subtlest breaths, crystallizes, and passes through himself the slightest touches of time, its sounds, symbols, words.

Here is the afterword to the poem “Ditch”, the genre of which is defined by the poet as a spiritual process:

“On April 7, 1986, my friends and I were driving from Simferopol along the Feodosiya Highway. The clock on the taxi driver's dashboard showed 10 am. The taxi driver Vasily Fedorovich Lesnykh himself, about sixty years old, weather-beaten, ruddy, overweight, with blue eyes faded from what he had seen, repeated his painful story again and again. Here, near the city, on the 10th kilometer, 12 thousand civilians were shot during the war. “Well, we guys, I was ten years old then, ran to watch them shoot. They were brought in covered cars. They stripped me down to my underwear. There was an anti-tank ditch leading from the highway. So, we dug them in and beat them with a machine gun. They all screamed terribly - there was a groan over the steppe. It was December. Everyone took off their galoshes. There were several thousand galoshes lying around. Carts were driving past on the highway. The soldiers were not shy. The soldiers were all drunk. Having noticed us, they gave us a line. Yes, I also remembered - there was a table where passports were taken away. The entire steppe was dotted with passports. Many were buried half-dead. The earth was breathing. Then we found a shoe polish box in the steppe. Heavy. There was a gold chain and two coins in it. This means all the family's savings. People carried their most valuable things with them. Then I heard who opened this burial and dug up some gold. They were tried last year. Well, you already know about this”... I not only knew, but also wrote a poem called “Greed” about it. Another name was hidden: “Ditch”. I questioned witnesses. Some acquaintances showed me archival documents. The poem ended, but still did not go out of my mind. Again and again I was drawn to the place of death. But what will you see there? Just overgrown kilometers of steppe. “...I have a neighbor, Valya Perekhodnik. He may have been the only one to escape. His mother pushed him out of the car on the way.” We get out. Vasily Fedorovich is noticeably worried. A poor, once plastered pillar with an inscription about the victims of the occupiers, a donkey, covered in cracks, speaks more of oblivion than memory. “Shall we imprint?” The friend unclasped his camera. A stream of MAZs and Zhigulis rushed past along the highway. Emerald wheat shoots were heading towards the horizon. To the left, on a hillside, a tiny rural cemetery huddled idyllically. The ditch had long been leveled and turned green, but its outlines could be discerned, running across the highway for a kilometer and a half. The shy branches of the blooming thorns were white. Rare acacia trees turned black. We, warm from the sun, slowly walked away from the highway. And suddenly - what is this?! On the way, among a green field, a square of a freshly dug well turns black; still a land of cheese. Behind him is another. There are piles of buried bones and rotted clothes around. Black, as if smoky, skulls. “They’re digging again, you bastards!” - Vasily Fedorovich has completely gone astray. It was not in newsreels, not in the stories of witnesses, not in a nightmare - but here, nearby. It's just been dug up. A skull, followed by another. Two tiny ones, children's ones. And here is an adult, split into shards. “They are the ones who rip out the gold crowns with pliers.” Wrinkled woman's boot. My God, the hair, the scalp, baby red hair with a braid! How tightly they were braided, probably hoping for something else, in the morning before the execution!.. What bastards! This is not a literary device, not fictional characters, not pages of a criminal chronicle, this is us, next to a rushing highway, standing in front of a pile of human skulls. This was not done by the villains of antiquity, but by modern people. Some kind of nightmare. The bastards were digging this night. A broken cigarette with a filter lies nearby. Not even damp. Near it is a greenish copper cartridge case. “German,” says Vasily Fedorovich. Someone picks it up, but immediately throws it away, thinking about the danger of infection. The skulls lay in a pile, these mysteries of the universe - brown-dark from long underground years - like huge smoke mushrooms. The depth of the professionally dug mines is about two human heights; one has a drift at the bottom. At the bottom of the second one lies a hidden, dusted shovel - that means they’re coming to dig up today?! We look at each other in horror, still not believing, like in a bad dream. How far a person must go, how depraved the mind must be, to delve into skeletons, next to a living road, to crumble a skull and tear out crowns with pliers in the light of headlights. And even almost without hiding, leaving all traces in plain sight, somehow defiantly, with a challenge. And the people, calmly rushing along the highway, probably joked: “Is someone digging for gold there again?” Has everyone gone crazy, or what?! Next to us there is a tin poster stuck on a peg: “Digging is prohibited - cable.” Cable is not allowed, but people are allowed? This means that even the trial did not stop the consciousness of this bastard, and, as I was later told, at the trial they only talked about the criminals, not about the fate of the buried themselves. Where is the epidemiological station looking? Any infection can emerge from these wells; an epidemic can destroy the region. Children are running across the steppe. What about the spiritual epidemic? They don’t rob graves, it’s not about pitiful golden grams of despicable metal, but they rob souls, the souls of the buried, theirs, yours! The police are rushing along the highway after drivers and rubles, but they won’t even look here. At least they put up a post. One in 12 thousand. The memory of people is sacred. Why not think not only about the legal, but also about the spiritual protection of the burial? Click the cry, and the best sculptors will erect a stele or a marble wall. To give people a sense of sacred awe. 12 thousand is worth it. The four of us are standing at the tenth kilometer. We are ashamed, we say inappropriately - what, what should we do? Maybe we should lay out a lawn in place, cover it with a slab and put up a border? And it wouldn’t hurt to remember the names. We don’t know what - but something needs to be done, and immediately. So I again encountered the revived last year’s case No. 1586. Where are you leading, ditch? (I, pp. 14-29).

Although the scientific literature on the study of new formations and linguistic phenomena in general in the work of Andrei Voznesensky is quite extensive, it mainly examines the works of this poet from the 50s to the 70s. As a rule, an analysis of individual, not thematically united, works of the poet is given. I have made an attempt to consider the process of creating new words using the example of a complete work. For this purpose, I analyzed the individual author’s new formations in A. Voznesensky’s poem “The Ditch,” considering their stylistic role.

“Ditch” is one of the poet’s major works, written in 1985-1986. In it, with the core of his poetic pen, Voznesensky strikes at such a social phenomenon as people for profit, going for the sake of it to dig a ditch with the corpses of victims of fascism, to torment decayed remains in order to obtain gold crowns, rings, coins.
The poet tries to introduce this phenomenon into a wide range of social life, understand it and give his assessment. Purely poetic frameworks are not enough for him. In the “spiritual process” - a new genre of fiction - prose is intertwined with poetry, information messages - with philosophical theses, prose-newspaper sketches - with the intense pathos of high poetics.

In this new genre, caused by a newly emerged social action, new words appear not as a result of the process of comprehension, but as the process itself. Despite the fact that legally the case was completed and the grave diggers received what they deserved, their guilt cannot be redeemed by any prison sentences, because “what they committed is not just a crime, but something that has long been called by the people with the deep word “sin.” A sin before the memory of those innocently killed, a sin before the meaning of a short human life, before conscience, before love, hugs and the miracle of the birth of life.”

The poet is the spiritual healer of the era. It is no coincidence that “Ditch” was written by Voznesensky in an unusual genre - “spiritual process”. Initially, the poem had a different name - “Alch”:
How to prevent a soulless process,
What did I conventionally call “greed”? . (I, p. 84)

The poet, with a capacious definition of “greed,” combined “the passion of individuals...competing with love,” and “the ditch where the people died for the people.” It is not by chance that speech was chosen as the antipode of “alchi”. “Burn you, greed!” - the poet calls:
What is richer than greed?
Weak computer and sword.
And how can you burn me?
- Only Speech, which is richer than you, only Speech,
only poor prophetic Speech. (I, p. 91)

This is how on one pole, hostile to the spirit, greed, bile, gloom, and silence arise - on the other - the original Speech and brightness, intended by the poet for his descendants.

Following Count Rezanov from ancient times, asking: “What am I looking for? Something fresh...", the poet says: "What do I want? A new look, so my eyelids hurt.”

It is precisely the novelty of the poetic view that owes its appearance to the occasionalisms “greed”, “gloom”, “bright” and “keep silent”. The first two words are formations from adjectives, consisting of a suffix-free stem with softening or alternation of the final consonant: greedy - greedy; gloomy - gloomy.

These new nouns simultaneously have the meanings of property, quality and collectivity. “In essence, this type of word formation extends only in poetic speech in the language of artistic prose,” noted V.V. Vinogradov. He also noted the unproductivity of homogeneous formations from verbal derivatives.

In a particular case, the result of the action is precisely the verbal new formation - the noun “keep quiet”:

How hungry I am,
everything will be shrouded in darkness,
will be silent in literature... (I, p. 92)

However, one cannot help but notice that the above-mentioned occasionalisms superficially resemble the common linguistic “speech” and “bile”, and the last word, in fact, is a model for their emergence.
In the same row stands the new formation “incorruption” from the “Vienna Tale”, at first glance, arbitrarily included in the “Ditch”, but again telling about “greed”, when love is bought and sold:

I hesitated, turning on the ignition.
Where to go? The night was great.
The hood shook like a nervous greyhound.
All the impatience of Balzac's age
bubbles burned through my skin -
champagne air with a touch of balm!
I lowered the left window.
And two young Delons came up -
in a mink coat, the necks are bare.
“Free, miss? Would you like to relax?
Five hundred a night, a thousand a night.”
I flushed. Me like a prostitute
accepted! And my heart was beating terribly:
they want you, you shine, you are young!
I was indignant. I said yes".
Another added, swaying his hips,
lowering his blue chastity:
“What if you have a friend, like you, who is rich?
I charge the same - a thousand a night.”
Oh, bastards! corrupt fiends!
Having doused them with gas, I rushed away.
And my heart was beating with melancholy and happiness!
“Five hundred a night, a thousand a night.” (I, p. 84)

Voznesensky introduces a negative semantic connotation into words with truncated stems, so “greed” is undoubtedly more significant than the word “greed,” with which the poet characterizes racketeering.

“Greed” is a whole social phenomenon. What happens to spiritually degraded renegades who have united in an impulse to fill their wallets tighter is really difficult to describe with a familiar word. What causes horror and indignation is that greed has ramifications, it has metastasized and embraced different strata of society.

Trying to more accurately define the psychology of the “new thief,” Voznesensky, by analogy with mass “pop art” and decadent “art nouveau,” divides today’s greed into “pop greed” and “greed nouveau”:

Your son is dying from pop art.
My wife is saving art nouveau.
Your driver is guilty of pop greed,
The greed-nouveau is sharpening you, - (I, p. 95)

The poet denounces the “miserly knight of NTR.”

“But what test can be used to measure the monstrosity of such a new genre as the theft of souls?” - the author's question sounds rhetorical.

The occasional words “old-dig” and “new-dig” are also built on the comparison of old and new evil, which formed nouns by adding the adverbs “old” and “new” with the stem of the verb “dig”:
Old snout and new snout, dig for two!

Let's exceed the plan to bury the living! (I, p. 123)

The semantics of these new formations leads to the origins of the Simferopol ditch, being a connecting thread of times.

“Staroryly” are the fascists who shot twelve thousand civilians during the war on the tenth kilometer of the Feodosiya highway.

“Novoryly” are today’s “grave worms” profiting from a long-standing tragedy.

The second associative plan gives a homonymic convergence of the occasional words “old snout” and “new snout” with the noun “snout”.

“Why do they breed, these new snouts?” - asks the poet.

In the poem “Ditch” everything is new: a new look, “greed-nouveau”, “new creatures”, and new words.

This is the apt word “display boy”, which characterizes the ultra-modern young man who betrayed “blood ties in the name of machine relationships.”

The occasionalism "displayboy" is formed by superimposing the morphemes of the words "display" and "playboy", in turn, the word "playboy" was formed from the fusion of two English words into one. It is significant that when the morphemes of the words “display” and “playboy” were superimposed, the final morphemes of the first and the initial morphemes of the second word coincided. Despite the fact that the superposition of entire morphemes is a rather rare phenomenon in modern poetry, here, in one row - and in one poem! – we meet the occasional “sexsportsman”:

Who was I, a sex athlete,
a person without problems,
Hochma of the spirit in any group,
combining sex with the chill of a computer?
I would call myself a display boy, - (I, p. 107)

The contamination method helps to find the exact characteristics of the robotic tray that has become a grave digger. Here again there is a clear connection between the neoplasms and the phenomena that torment the poet:

I collected all the abomination on pages, like a doctor,
to burn you, greed.
Don't manuscripts burn?
They're still blazing!
Authors are eternal, they say.
They're still dying.
Lie down, creature, in the fire of Falcon Mountain.
Hungry, burn!
All four heroes look at me -
Ditch, Greed, Speech, Look.
- You aspired to be Goya for the Russian dawn.
Ghouls writhe in the ashes.
Your friend grabbed his side. There are blisters in the soul.
Or are you burning from within?
It's your jealousy that invites you to lunch,
that she was of an underground nature.
This is greed, this is greed, this is worse than greed
your life has been twisted to the ground.
- You ruined my comrade.
Be ambitious, writhe, yach!..
Like a look or pure substance
Greed stands out above the fire.
I saw, the only one of the people,
like your pathetic smile.
Combined in the smile of that Alkonost,
and Gioconda and the platypus.
And behind her, like an overweight snake, swam
your endless body.
And I realized that greed -
this is a ditch, this is a ditch,
where the people died for the people.
Help - they shouted from the black vapors.
And a smile opened your mouth.
And I saw your flexible sting,
that my face was already touching.
I remember I grabbed the sting
and set it on fire like a fuse -
greed flared up to Kamchatka
“Give me amnesty, executioner...
Assign three wishes...”
"Three wishes? Fine!
So that you die, greed.
Not to be resurrected, greed
And further -
to forget you
in a world of new passions.
In a century as pure as a viola,
the boy will ask in the reading room,
confusing display:
“What does the word “Greed” mean?” (I, p. 129)

The type of abbreviation truncation of stems, the peculiarity of which is its independence from morphemic division, is most common in the poetic language of Voznesensky.

This is the formation of “ambulance” (from truncation of the bases of the phrase “ambulance”), when only the root morpheme remains from the word:

Among business Scorpios,
benefits living nearby,
with short hair, ambulance,
saving the unfortunate, he lives.
Where do you go at midnight?
I wish I could save you!
Your path is blocked, first aid,
and a ditch across the path. (I, p. 26)

The semantics of the phrase contributes to the truncation of the first and the merging of two words into a single whole. Similar new formations were encountered in the poet’s work earlier. In the poem “Ditch” we also find “gosmuzh” (statesman), but in this example part of the root morpheme is cut off.

Andrei Voznesensky tends to rearrange familiar language combinations in order to rethink their meanings. He gives new meanings to general linguistic combinations with the help of the prefixes not-, without-; at the same time, new formations become antonyms to words that are established in speech: “I value muskrats among the bright snows more than the world’s non-standard of non-standard minds.” A noun with the prefix non- “non-standard” - names the opposite of what is called by the motivating word “standard”.
This type of word formation is highly productive. In the same row we meet “... that you created - get - car keys and diamonds in fake ears.” Here the rethinking is deeper. The semantic formation “false ears” is based on the semantic relation “fake diamond”; the latter, out of context, can be understood as a free combination.

Potentialism “unspiritual” (process), which names a feature opposite to that which is named by the motivated word “spiritual,” is formed in the same prefixal way. The adjective “unspiritual” combines two meanings – “opposite to spiritual” and “devoid of spirituality,” that is, of soul.

Voznesensky calls this soulless process greed and builds his work “Ditch,” written in the genre of “spiritual process,” on an analysis of the origins of its occurrence and the forces that can resist it.
Thus, the artistic and linguistic innovation of Andrei Voznesensky lies in a new look, a new feeling, a new way of thinking, in the desire to understand new social phenomena, determine the reasons that gave rise to them, and possible consequences. New words are born, familiar combinations are being rethought. The poet’s new developments are fresh in nature; they are organically woven into the figurative fabric of the work. We observe in the poem “Ditch” the unity of new content, a new genre and new linguistic means.

Bibliography

I. Voznesensky Andrey. Rov // Poems, prose. Simferopol - Moscow. December 1985 - May 1986. // M., 1987.
II. Vinogradov V.V. // Russian language: Grammatical teaching about the word. M., 1972

©. Nemirovskaya D.L. Artistic and linguistic innovation of Andrei Voznesensky (Based on the material of the poem “Ditch”). Types of linguistic units and features of their functioning. Interuniversity collection of scientific papers. Saratov University Publishing House, 1993, p. 99-104.

The poet Andrei Voznesensky died on June 1, 2010. I do not undertake to add anything to what has been written about him. Let me just remind you that it was thanks to Voznesensky (or rather, his Crimean friends at first, and then his poem “Ditch”) that a modest but expressive obelisk in the form of a black wing appeared on the 10th kilometer of the Feodosia highway. A terrible fate united Jews, Crimean people, Crimean gypsies and Red Army soldiers of all Soviet nationalities. They were shot. According to the German habit of saving - in an anti-tank ditch.

And many years later, from the Brezhnev doctrine “The economy must be economical,” various offspring of the great fraternal family of Soviet peoples pulled out gold crowns from their skulls with pliers in an open ditch.

Voznesensky is a classic only because black archeology and “diggers” have not disappeared from Crimea. The spirit of Nazism, xenophobia and “justice” does not disappear from Crimea, Ukraine, Russia and the various “free” states around us.

I do not undertake to judge the artistic merits of poetry. Only within the framework of my specialty I recommend that all guides on routes from Simferopol to the east, to Belogorsk, Stary Krym, Feodosia and Kerch show the obelisk with a black wing and quote the poem “Ditch”.

ANDREY VOZNESENSKY

SPIRITUAL PROCESS

AFTERWORD

On April 7, 1986, my friends and I were driving from Simferopol along the Feodosiya Highway. The clock on the taxi driver's dashboard showed 10 am. The taxi driver Vasily Fedorovich Lesnykh himself, about sixty years old, weather-beaten, ruddy, heavyset, with blue eyes faded from what he had seen, repeated his painful story again and again. Here, near the city, on the 10th kilometer, 12 thousand civilians were shot during the war. “Well, we guys, I was ten years old then, ran to watch them shoot. They were brought in covered cars. They stripped me down to my underwear. An anti-tank ditch ran from the highway. So, we dug them in and beat them with a machine gun. They all screamed terribly - there was a groan over the steppe. It was December. Everyone took off their galoshes. There were several thousand galoshes lying around. Carts were driving past on the highway. The soldiers were not shy. The soldiers were all drunk. Having noticed us, they gave us a line. Yes, I also remembered - there was a table where passports were taken away. The entire steppe was dotted with passports. Many were buried half-dead. The earth was breathing. Then we found a shoe polish box in the steppe. Heavy. There was a gold chain and two coins in it. This means all the family's savings. People carried their most valuable things with them. Then I heard who opened this burial and dug up some gold. They were tried last year. Well, you already know about this”... I not only knew, but also wrote a poem called “Greed” about it. Another name was hidden: “Ditch”. I questioned witnesses. Some acquaintances showed me archival documents. The poem ended, but still did not go out of my mind.

Again and again I was drawn to the place of death. But what will you see there? Just overgrown kilometers of steppe. “...I have a neighbor, Valya Perekhodnik. He may have been the only one to escape. His mother pushed him out of the car on the way.” We get out. Vasily Fedorovich is noticeably worried. A poor, once plastered pillar with an inscription about the victims of the occupiers, a donkey, covered in cracks, speaks more of oblivion than memory. “Shall we imprint?” The friend unclasped his camera. A stream of MAZs and Zhigulis rushed past along the highway. Emerald wheat shoots were heading towards the horizon. To the left, on a hillside, a tiny rural cemetery huddled idyllically.

The ditch had long been leveled and turned green, but its outlines could be discerned, running across the highway for a kilometer and a half. The shy branches of the blooming thorns were white. Rare acacia trees turned black. We, warm from the sun, slowly walked away from the highway. And suddenly - what is this?! On the way, among a green field, a square of a freshly dug well turns black; land of cheese yet. Behind him is another. There are piles of buried bones and rotted clothes around. Black, as if smoky, skulls. “They’re digging again, you bastards!” - Vasily Fedorovich has completely sank. It was not in newsreels, not in the stories of witnesses, not in a nightmare - but here, nearby. It's just been dug up. A skull, followed by another. Two tiny ones, children's ones. And here is an adult, split into shards. “They are the ones who rip out the gold crowns with pliers.” Wrinkled woman's boot. My God, the hair, the scalp, baby red hair with a braid! How tightly they were braided, probably hoping for something else, in the morning before the execution!.. What bastards! This is not a literary device, not fictional characters, not the pages of a criminal chronicle, this is us, next to a rushing highway, standing in front of a pile of human skulls. This was not done by the villains of antiquity, but by modern people. Some kind of nightmare.

The bastards were digging this night. A broken cigarette with a filter lies nearby. Not even damp. Near it is a copper, greenish shell. “German,” says Vasily Fedorovich. Someone picks it up, but immediately throws it away, thinking about the danger of infection. The skulls lay in a pile, these mysteries of the universe - brown-dark from long underground years - like huge smoke mushrooms. The depth of the professionally dug mines is about two human heights; one has a drift at the bottom. At the bottom of the second one lies a hidden, dusted shovel - that means they’re coming to dig up today?! We look at each other in horror, still not believing, like in a bad dream. How far a person must go, how depraved the mind must be, to delve into skeletons, next to a living road, to crumble a skull and tear out crowns with pliers in the light of headlights.

And even almost without hiding, leaving all traces in plain sight, somehow defiantly, with a challenge. And the people, calmly rushing along the highway, probably joked: “Is someone digging for gold there again?” Has everyone gone crazy, or what?! Next to us there is a tin poster stuck on a peg: “Digging is prohibited - cable.” Cable is not allowed, but people are allowed? This means that even the trial did not stop the consciousness of this bastard, and, as I was later told, at the trial they only talked about the criminals, not about the fate of the buried themselves. Where is the epidemiological station looking? Any infection can emerge from these wells; an epidemic can destroy the region. Children are running across the steppe. What about the spiritual epidemic?

They do not rob graves, it is not about pitiful golden grams of despicable metal, but they rob souls, the souls of the buried, theirs, yours! The police are rushing along the highway after drivers and rubles, but they won’t even look here. At least they put up a post. One in 12 thousand. The memory of people is sacred. Why not think not only about the legal, but also about the spiritual protection of the burial? Click the cry, and the best sculptors will erect a stele or a marble wall. To give people a sense of sacred awe. 12 thousand is worth it. The four of us are standing at the tenth kilometer. We are ashamed, we say inappropriately - what, what should we do? Maybe. Should I lay out the lawn in place, cover it with a slab and put up a border? And it wouldn’t hurt to remember the names. We don’t know what - but something needs to be done, and immediately. So I again encountered the revived last year’s case No. 1586. Where are you leading, ditch?

INTRODUCTION

I appeal to the reader's skulls:

Has our mind really exhausted itself?

We are standing above the steppe.

Crimea is gathering dust along the highway.

The skull trembled under my scalp.

Nearby is black,

like a smoke mushroom, smoked.

He pulled a smile into his fist.

I felt

some secret connection -

as if I was involved in the conversation -

that stretched from us

to devices without eyes,

like a cordless phone.

- ...Marya Lvovna, hello!

Mom, we got carried away...

Storms again, cosmic interference

Feel better, Alexander? - It’s bad, Fedor Kuzmich...

Straight up Hitchcockian kitsch...

Skulls. Tamerlane. Don't open the tombs.

War will break out from there.

Don't cut with a shovel

spiritual myceliums!

It will come out worse than the plague.

Simferopolsky did not stop the process.

Has the connection fallen apart?

Psychiatrist - in the hall!

How to prevent a soulless process,

What did I conventionally call “greed”?!

What the hell kind of poet are you, “the voice of the people”?

Why did he open his loaf?

In front of twelve thousand pairs of eyes

do something instead of talking!

The foreman will not save you.

Look, country, -

The mother shouts to her son from the trenches.

The environment is scary

The ecology of the spirit is worse.

Wherever I go,

no matter what I read, -

I’m still going to the Simferopol ditch.

And, turning black, skulls and skulls float,

like an eclipse of white minds.

And when I go to Luzhniki,

now every time

I will see the demanding pupils

twelve thousand pairs of eyes.

Don't drag me down, rock

into the Simferopol ditch.

Steppe. Twelve thousandth look.

Chu, the shovels are knocking

grateful grandchildren.

Genocide laid this treasure.

Hold the shovel!

We were people.

Here, take it! I carried the diamond.

You, dad, don't

shake the bones.

Hand over your stash and lie down again.

Okay people first

joy to open.

God forbid you be the first to see

this fresh pit

where the skull is open.

Valya! It was your mother.

It's true, it's true

this is true, this is true,

gold and bone dust.

The bat took the bracelet off the skeleton,

and the other one, driving, was in a hurry.

….
“The German fascist invaders at the 10th km shot civilians of predominantly Jewish nationality, Crimeans, and Russians,” we read in archival materials. Then the partisans were executed in the same ditch. These are sacred-historical depths. What about profiting from the past when sacred shadows are blasphemously shaken? Boyan, Skovoroda, Shevchenko taught selflessness. It was not hunger or need that led to crime. Why, in the eternal, terrible and holy days of the Leningrad Siege, was it hunger and suffering that highlighted heightened morality and selfless stoicism? Why does the current morgue employee, giving the body of his grandmother and mother to the shocked family, calmly suggest: “Count the number of valuable metal teeth of the deceased,” without being embarrassed by the horror of what was said? “Psychology is changing,” the thinking lawyer tells me, squinting like Chekhov, “previously they killed simply in the “affect of the ax.” Recently there was a case: a son and mother conspired to kill their tyrant father. The handy son connected the current from the socket to his father’s bed. When the father, drunk as usual, lay gropingly looking for an outlet, it hit him. True, the technique turned out to be weak, we had to finish it off.” Only two of our heroes had previous convictions, and then only for self-harm. So they were like everyone else? In restaurants they paid in gold, so everyone around them knew? Whose fault is this? Where did these golden chervonets, blown rings, seductive ducats roll out from, flashing like ribs of samples - from the darkness of centuries, from our life, from the sweet Mediterranean, from the depths of instinct? Who do they belong to, these tokens of temptation - a master from Mycenae, the depths of the steppe, or a future lareshnitsa?

Who is the victim? Who owns the underground jewels, whose are they? We are standing at the 10th kilometer. Nobody's grass is fresh around. Somewhere far to the north, no one’s meadows stretch, no one’s groves are being ruined, no one’s rivers and lakes are being abused by unworthy people? Whose are they? Whose are we?

I woke up at night. Someone told me:

"The Dead Sea is sacred Baikal."

I felt the gaze on me,

As if I were a sea killer and a thief.

I hear that the Irkutsk resident is not sleeping in the darkness.

Smokes. And the ancestor woke up in the earth.

When you are sick, we are all sick.

Baikal, you are the crystal liver of the country!

“Baikal is the reserved conscience of the country.”

I was sailing on a boat along the edge of Lake Baikal.

The evening was full of light.

Well, did science lie?

over the upturned gaze of Lake Baikal?

And will we really be in history -

“These are the ones who ruined Baikal”?

full text of Andrei Voznesensky's poem "Ditch" http://er3ed.qrz.ru/voznesensky-row.htm

Krymchaks- a small part of the Crimean population, formed into a small nationality in the medieval period of Crimean history. During the Crimean Khanate, Crimean communities lived in Karasubazar and Cafe.

In the 19th century The main occupations of the Krymchaks were crafts related to leather production. Among them are the production of leather and morocco, various footwear, saddle and saddlery, and the manufacture of hats.

Until the middle of the last century, the spoken language of the Krymchaks was the Krymchak language - Chagatai. During the Great Patriotic War, the Nazis exterminated more than 80% of the Crimeans. Currently, 204 Crimeans live in Crimea.

The eternal dream of Alexander Tkachenko

Alexander Lyusy

Sasha Tkachenko and I were fellow countrymen; we lived in Simferopol for decades, and recently became cultural experts. Usually celebrating the release of each of his more than a dozen books of poetry and prose with crowded presentations, he did not particularly advertise that last year he defended his dissertation at the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies “The culture of human rights protection in the legal culture of post-Soviet Russia (based on the case of military journalist Grigory Pasko).” .

Perhaps, if the general director of the Russian PEN Center expands his activities into the scientific field, it would be more logical for it to be political science. However, the poet (Andrei Voznesensky liked to publicly call him a “mustang” and it was with him that he organized joint poetry evenings in Crimea for ten years) and prose writer, who for his human rights activities can also be called a politician, nevertheless went into cultural studies. I think he could well devote his next doctoral dissertation to the strategy of creative behavior (both in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia).

A few days ago, the Russian Abroad library-foundation hosted a presentation of Alexander Tkachenko’s latest book, “Autumn of the Krymchak,” dedicated to the disappearing people. Some of the speakers didn’t even know this word before—Krymchaks. But almost everyone tried to play on the theme of poetry and football. Tkachenko was a former football player who played not only for Tavriya Simferopol, but also for Zenit and Lokomotiv. And only now I understood the origin of Tkachenko’s special strategy of glasnost.

Almost at the end of the evening, Andrei Voznesensky, who wrote the poem “The Ditch” in 1986, appeared in the hall. Then it was he who scored the exact poetic “goal” - with an accurate feed from Tkachenko. The publication of this poem became a great social event. A barrier was put in place for grave diggers who were extracting gold and other precious things from the burial of 12 thousand civilians shot during the war by the Nazis near Simferopol, and a monument to the victims appeared. Not only Jews and Crimeans ended up in the ditch, but it was for the latter, given their small numbers at that time, that it became almost complete destruction. In those conditions it was better to raise such a topic from the center, so Tkachenko sent a “transmission” there.

But in the case of “Krymchak’s Dream”, he walked the entire field himself, “made the game” and scored an independent beautiful goal. This is not a scientific study, there are stories, parables, short stories here. The result was an artistic “encyclopedia” of life and death, dying and resurrection of an ancient people with a tragic fate, decorated with ancient photographs. So Tkachenko (on his father, the commander of a partisan detachment in Crimea, was Ukrainian, on his mother, Crimean) became a great national hero of a small people.

The Internet is replete with messages about the sudden death of Alexander Tkachenko. Inaccuracies also arise. On Polit.ru his first prose book is called “Football”. In fact - “Football” (with a soft sign at the end - and a reproduction of his own painting on the cover, with a football player-crucifixion).

source http://www.russ.ru/pole/Vechnyj-son-Aleksandra-Tkachenko

Andrey Voznesensky Virabov Igor Nikolaevich

Where are you leading, ditch?

Where are you leading, ditch?

In January 1985, Literaturnaya Gazeta published Voznesensky’s “Ecology of Culture”. This is a kind of review, a broad commentary on readers’ letters with which the editors were inundated in response to the publication of Voznesensky’s essay “Foremen of the Spirit.” "Strange affair! - Voznesensky himself will be surprised. “Months have passed, a book with the same title has already been published, but the mail continues to arrive.”

Who are the authors of those letters? From what planet? To which galaxy will they all fly away - in a very short time? Engineers, designers, teachers, young scientists, museum workers, workers, from everywhere - from Omsk, Saratov, Voronezh, from Kyiv and Vitebsk, Vladivostok and Arkhangelsk. Letters like those to which the poet diligently answers will soon not remain in nature. Not just anyone, but precisely the authors of such letters (each is an ode to selflessness and, without any pathos, care for the homeland) by the end of the 20th century, time will leave them broke. Not just anyone, but they will be blown away, completely blown away by the “winds of change.” Voznesensky answers them admiringly - not yet suspecting that they are all “fools of selflessness”, “trinkets of idealism”, “the shortcomings of romance”, “remnants of faith”, “fiends of the system”, and so on and so forth. “If you are so smart, why are you so poor” will become the most common aphorism of the new era, in which there will be no place left for the authors of these letters. Quite a bit of time will pass. In the meantime...

For now, we read what Voznesensky wrote.

“Anxiety for the passing culture is the main note of the letters that arrived after the publication of “Foremen of the Spirit”... It is joyful that the idea of ​​ascetics of the spirit, concern for culture, excited so many hearts. They write to the editors, to the Writers’ Union, to home, they name the names of their unmercenaries, “foremen of the spirit” and “foremen of the sense of smell,” pointing out emergency points and ways of correction - it means that it coincided with their own thoughts, with the active principle in them, which means they share the idea that culture is reserved, that culture is in danger..."

“The ecological decline of the internal spiritual environment is much more dangerous than the external one. If the first one collapses, the second one will die.”

“We measure the degree of radiation with a Geiger counter, determine environmental pollution and shallowing of lakes, but how can we measure spiritual shallowing when people learn about Caligula or Mozart only from videotapes and almost everyone has not read the entirety of War and Peace?!”

“There is an ecological balance of culture. Tolstoy is interconnected with Turgenev. Rimbaud is the rib from which new European poetry was born. The American novel of the 20th century is connected with Russian prose of the 19th century. A typhoon of futurism was sweeping across borders.

Shouldn't we create a Society for the Ecology of Culture, inviting Academician D.S. Likhachev to head it? This would be public control of Culture. The society would include not only the capital's luminaries, but also the foreman of the spirit of Saratov and Penza and, of course, young enthusiasts. The cultural processes of the century must be studied while the century is still alive, so that our descendants do not puzzle over the blank spots of spiritual history.”

“On New Year's Eve, a letter arrived from overseas from Gary Snyder, the greatest American poet, a cultural hermit. “Brother Andrey,” he begins in an old-fashioned way, asks how I liked the “ecological jazz” of Paul Winter, leading a duet with a wolf on the saxophone, and writes about his concern for our civilization. “The planet does not belong to anyone. We need to save her." His hope is children. He proposes “pigeon mail” - let children write letters to governments and this snowfall of millions of letters will carry the monsters of rockets..."

Naive people - they were naive on any side of the ocean. What are they for? To hope... For this, the poet is grateful to them, who seemed like kindred spirits:

“Farewell, Saratov! Farewell, restless swallows of culture!.. Thank you for the hope. Sorry to those I didn't answer. I will answer in poetry.

Here’s another envelope: “Write something from your latest book on the card. Zhuravlev, mountains. Kuibyshev."

Germany is famous for Luther.

The twenties - Tatlin.

The states are strong in computers.

Russia is a reader.

He awakens reason and conscience.

The cassettes have been adjusted.

Will there be no books in the future?

But there will be readers."

("Subscription")

And a year later the monstrous, marauding “Ditch” was exposed. “Where are you leading, ditch? Shadows follow us. The words come to life."

“The Ditch,” written by Voznesensky in 1986, must be re-read to try to understand where everything will come from, why history will turn around so wildly in the new century. “Ditch” explains a lot about humanity digging a hole for itself. And in what will turn out to be an unfinished war.

Where are you leading, ditch? Where are you leading, ditch? Where are you leading, ditch? These refrains run through the poem. Why does Voznesensky, with all the ambition of the poet, suddenly write so mercilessly about its formal imperfection - “Actually, the poem was not an aesthetic masterpiece”? Because I don't care about the little things. Because for a Russian poet the most important concept is purpose. It was impossible not to write. The poem “Ditch” was stitched with tracing quotes from criminal case No. 1586. Cases of grave diggers. About the marauders of memory. “The poem was a means of making the terrible truth known.”

“Is what I write a poem? A series of poems? That's what interests me the least. I am interested in reducing the amount of evil. The smoked skull looks at me. The more evil I collect on pages, the less of it will remain in life. Is prose combined with poetry? What about evil with life?

Voznesensky’s Crimean friend, the poet Alexander Tkachenko, who has been mentioned more than once, obtained the materials of the criminal case from his fellow investigators. I read it and my hair stood on end. How to print this? There was still no talk of publication - threats poured out of the telephone receiver. “I realized that I couldn’t handle this alone... Only Andrei Voznesensky, with whom I was friends, could help me stop the looting. I called him and said: “Andrey, come to Crimea urgently, there is a very serious matter.” And indeed, after two or three days, and this was at the end of March, he arrived.

“With my friends Vladimir Vasilyevich Zubarev, chairman of the bar, and photographer Arkady Levin, we went straight from the airport to the excavations.”

Voznesensky remembered how once at a military training camp in Lvov he visited an artificial lake that was used to flood the site of mass atrocities. Why was it flooded? To hide the horror? So as not to remind about local volunteers, with whose hands the occupiers, who loved Goethe and Wagner, exterminated darkness and darkness and darkness of human material? To avoid looting? And this, and this, and that... The same ditches cut up the Baltic states, and Belarus, and Crimea, which became Ukrainian under Khrushchev. We learned about Babi Yar near Kiev thanks to Viktor Nekrasov and Evgeniy Yevtushenko. Even earlier, the poems of Ilya Selvinsky, written in 1942 in Kerch, “I saw it!” appeared: “The ditch... Can you say about it as a poem? / Seven thousand corpses. Semites... Slavs... / Yes! There are no words about this. / By fire! Only with fire!”...

And a red trickle

from a child's ear

Flows into

maternal

Back then, in 1986, shadows were still creeping into the night. But the hour will strike, they will still call themselves “heroes”... Did the poet foresee this? That’s why I warned: where are you leading, ditch...

“At one time, I wrote the poem “Living Lake”, dedicated to the Transcarpathian ghetto, shot during the war by the Nazis and flooded with water - with this Voznesensky begins his “Ditch”. - Last year I read these poems at an evening in Richmond. After the evening, Uliana Gabarra, a literature professor at the University of Richmond, approached me. There was not a speck of blood on her face. One look. She said that her whole family died in this lake. She herself was a baby then, she was miraculously saved, and then ended up in Poland. Then to the States.

This poem was once illustrated by Chagall. In the foreground of his drawing, the child is frozen on his mother's lap. Now for me it’s Ulyana Gabarra.”

On April 8, 1986, in Togliatti, Secretary General Gorbachev will pronounce the word “perestroika”. The country will tremble joyfully - it does not yet know that it will now have to tremble often.

The day before, on April 7, Voznesensky arrived at the tenth kilometer of the Feodosiya highway. In December 1941, here, near Simferopol, 12 thousand civilians and prisoners were shot. An ordinary humanitarian action of the Third Reich. The taxi driver, Vasily Fedorovich Lesnykh, while driving, told Andrei Andreevich how he ran with the boys - he was about ten years old - to watch them being shot: “They brought them in covered cars. They stripped me down to my underwear. An anti-tank ditch ran from the highway. So, we dug them in and beat them with a machine gun. They all screamed terribly - there was a groan over the steppe. It was December. Everyone took off their galoshes. Several thousand galoshes lay...

Yes, I also remembered - there was a table where passports were taken away. The entire steppe was dotted with passports. Many were buried half-dead. The earth was breathing. Then we found a shoe polish box in the steppe. Heavy. There was a gold chain and two coins in it. This means all the family's savings. People carried their most valuable things with them. Then I heard who opened this burial and dug up some gold. They were tried last year. Well, you already know about this... I have a neighbor, Valya Perekhodnik. He may have been the only one to escape. His mother pushed him out of the car on the way.”

Many were buried in the lowlands, where it is cold. Many bodies were well preserved many years later. The burial was dug up by looters. Voznesensky and his friends arrived a year after the trial. Among the green fields, squares of freshly dug wells were still blackened. The depth was two human heights; there were drifts at the bottom. Broken skulls, two tiny ones, children's. Wrinkled woman's boot. Baby red hair with braided hair. The trial did not stop the looters.

They worked professionally and thoroughly. In one night's “walk” to the dead, gold worth 70–80 thousand rubles could be dug up and ripped out with pliers. Fabulous money - considering that at that time a quite decent salary on which you could live well was 150–300 rubles a month...

I appeal to the reader's skulls:

Has our mind really exhausted itself?

Voznesensky is poring over file No. 1586. Volume two, which he managed to obtain in secret. He gives shocking quotes in the poem:

“...Jewelry was systematically stolen from a burial site at the 10th kilometer. On the night of June 21, 1984, disregarding moral standards, a gold pocket watch case weighing 35.02 grams was stolen from the indicated grave. at the rate of 27 rubles 30 kopecks. per g., gold bracelet 30 g. costing 810 rubles. - only 3325 rubles. 68 kopecks

...On July 13, gold crowns and bridges worth a total of 21,925 rubles, a 900-carat gold ring with a diamond worth 314 rubles were stolen. 14 kopecks, four chains worth 1,360 rubles, a gold ducat of foreign coinage worth 609 rubles. 65 kopecks, 89 coins of royal minting worth 400 rubles. each”...

Who was involved? Doctor at the Moscow Institute of the Academy of Sciences, driver of Mezhkolkhozstroy, worker, auxiliary worker, cinema worker. Russian, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, Armenian. Age 28–50 years. They answered the court with their gold crowns glistening. Two had a mouthful of “red gold.” They received short terms; those who resold suffered more.

It is confirmed that they received at least 68 thousand rubles in income. One was asked: “How did you feel while digging?” Answered: “How would you feel taking out a golden bridge damaged by a bullet? Or by pulling out a child’s shoe with the rest of the bone?” They had a hard time getting the buyer to accept this defective product.

...One worked in the pit - two at the top accepted and crushed skulls, pulled out teeth with pliers - “cleaned them of dirt and remnants of teeth”, took them to the Simferopol purchase of “Coral” and Sevastopol “Yantar”, boringly bargaining with the appraiser Hyda, who, of course, realized , that “the crowns and bridges were in the ground for a long time.” They worked in rubber gloves - they were afraid of infection. The team was friendly. They strengthened the family. “Witness Nyukhalova testified that her husband was periodically absent from home, explaining this by the fact that he worked as a high-rise painter, and regularly brought in wages”...

Skulls. Tamerlane. Don't open the tombs.

War will break out from there.

Don't cut with a shovel

spiritual myceliums!

It will come out worse than the plague.

Simferopolsky did not stop the process.

Has the connection fallen apart?

Psychiatrist - in the hall!

How to prevent a soulless process,

What did I conventionally call “greed”?!

Writing, the poet admits, was difficult even physically. The abyss that opened behind this ditch was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep, I had nightmares, I didn’t want to write about anything else. Burnt.

“Ditch” will appear in the seventh issue of the magazine “Youth” in the same 1986. Voznesensky will write warmly about the editor-in-chief, poet Andrei Dementiev, “who took over the publication.” Unexpectedly, the Secretary of the Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev, who had previously demonstratively disliked Voznesensky’s poetry, but had now become a leader of perestroika thought, helped. “After the publication of “The Ditch,” the poet recalls, “in the “October” hall they presented me on stage with a drawing depicting a penis tearing the Star of David. The caption read: “Andryukha, suck the f... of a dead rabbi.”

The manager said several dozen people filled the front rows to disrupt the evening. I showed the drawing to the audience: “Well, who drew it?” Get up! I’m not hiding from you, show your faces too.” No one rose from the darkness. “So you are just cowards, cowards!” I shouted to them. The audience supported me, the evening was not disrupted.”

“This is not someday, in the foggy past,” Voznesensky reasoned, looking around at the 10th kilometer near Simferopol. - This is now and here, at the present time. “The clanging of teeth and shovels. / At the 10th verst / the dead are burying us.”

Perestroika is already sweeping across the country, the heavy shackles are about to fall, and even yesterday’s defendants in the looting case and other looters of all stripes and industries will be released from prison and will tell their children how they suffered from the bloody Soviet regime, from party adversaries!

Such bright prospects opened up. And Voznesensky is somehow gloomy. What is he? “A fair poster / is hoisted over the pole: / “The dead are the majority, / and the living are the minority.” / Let’s quickly croak: / “Requiem for the living!”...

I have never known wider toothy smiles.

The Hallelujah Man is now a master of bold speeches.

They are squeezing with a grader shovel, wise men.

They will bury the country - just don’t hold it back!

...The critic, who had dozed off, woke up. He is perplexed: how does the poem end? Why would four inanimate heroes suddenly appear in the poem at once: “All four heroes are looking at me - Ditch, Greed, Speech, Glance”? What is he talking about?

Ditch - a warning or forecast. “What has broken through and what has not yet broken through, / and what warned us in Chernobyl? / What if there is an uncontrollable war? / Goodbye, great lies of hope.”

The look is about the same thing, about the lethargy of those sleeping with their eyes open, about the peculiarities of Gogol’s Viy’s eyes. The poet turns to the “national Volodya” - Vysotsky, peering somewhere there, into the heavens: “What is there, Volodya? What does life look like without blinders? What's behind the scenes? / The so-called soul / to be or not to be? - that’s the mystery.”

But Hunger and Speech entering the fray? Speech is not an empty shaking of air, not just sound waves. Speech is roots, childhood, the smell of an orange, which is Murka’s neighbor, a phone call from Boris Leonidovich, parents, family, fatherland and historical memory. Speech is the last thing that preserves a unique personality in a person. If anything can conquer Greed in humanity, it is only Speech.

In the nineties, when the country falls apart, some of the former fraternal republics will begin to arrogate with all their might - not in the name of the sought-after freedom, not in the glory of the desired prosperity, but only to destroy the common memory, inextricable history, inalienable literature and the Russian language. And suddenly it turns out that the same war that we have been talking about winning for so many years, the same one in which these ditches lay like scars, is not over for the whole world. Maybe the ditches are to blame for everything? Maybe the unsleeping shadows of those executioners? Let's call them simply, like the poet - Greed. Unexpected anger will spill out with her. "You lost the war!" - a neat lady at the UN headquarters will shout in an American voice. Once again the Russian, well, intellectual elites will split - then it will no longer be shameful to adore the oligarchs, but it will be shameful to love the homeland. Greed versus Speech. Ordinary collaborationist Alch - and the Great Patriotic Speech.

A year later, in 1987, Gorbachev paraphrased Voznesensky’s “foremen of the spirit” and put into circulation the “foremen of perestroika.” But Voznesensky doesn’t seem to hear, as if he understands that this ringing is empty.

The 1990s will roll strictly along the line of the “Ditch,” confirming the prophecies. “Perhaps,” the poet will say, “the poem predicted the criminal insides of man, which has now led to a criminal revolution.” We, they will reassure the country, have a forgivable period of initial accumulation of capital. We rob the loot, sir. But with the most noble intentions. We are joining the civilized world space.

“But what test can be used to measure the monstrosity of such a new genre as the theft of souls?”

...Time puffed on. The flywheel whacks, the gears shirk, the piston puffs. Everything was going somewhere.

Foreman of the spirit - or marauders of memory? Where will history go?

Voznesensky, of course, is not a scientist or a historian. But a real poet is always a prophet, and his premonitions are worth believing... In the last year of the 20th century, Voznesensky suddenly exhaled a strange poem: “A young man came to me in my snowstorms / from Sevastopol. / Pierced naively and fatally / to tears with the bitter rhyme “poplar”. / Suddenly, like everyone else, I drank away my conscience?!”...

They gave Crimea as a gift - and they didn’t grunt.

The drowned man rises up like a corkscrew.

At the bottom, like a button with an anchor,

we lost Sevastopol.

...Bitter lines - but the “young man from Sevastopol” left hope...

Andrei Andreevich will write the poem “Return to the Flowers” ​​in 2004, as the fellow Khlebnikov would say, “winging the thinnest veins with gold writing.”

I'm on the hill at the green cutout for you

I'll pin a white temple like this

I love white irises!

How short their life is...

This text is an introductory fragment. author Ershov Vasily Vasilievich

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06 March 2015

SPIRITUAL PROCESS

AFTERWORD

On April 7, 1986, my friends and I were driving from Simferopol along the Feodosiya Highway. The clock on the taxi driver's dashboard showed 10 am. The taxi driver Vasily Fedorovich Lesnykh himself, about sixty years old, weather-beaten, ruddy, heavyset, with blue eyes faded from what he had seen, repeated his painful story again and again. Here, near the city, on the 10th kilometer, 12 thousand civilians were shot during the war.

“Well, we guys, I was ten years old then, ran to watch them shoot. They were brought in covered cars. They stripped me down to my underwear. An anti-tank ditch ran from the highway. So, we dug them in and beat them with a machine gun. They all screamed terribly - there was a groan over the steppe. It was December. Everyone took off their galoshes. There were several thousand galoshes lying around. Carts were driving past on the highway. The soldiers were not shy. The soldiers were all drunk. Having noticed us, they gave us a line. Yes, I also remembered - there was a table where passports were taken away. The entire steppe was dotted with passports. Many were buried half-dead. The earth was breathing. Then we found a shoe polish box in the steppe. Heavy. There was a gold chain and two coins in it. This means all the family's savings. People carried their most valuable things with them. Then I heard who opened this burial and dug up some gold. They were tried last year. Well, you already know about this"... I not only knew, but also wrote a poem called "Greed" about it. Another name was hidden: "Moat". I questioned witnesses. Some acquaintances showed me archival documents. The poem ended, but still did not go out of my mind.

Again and again I was drawn to the place of death. But what will you see there? Just overgrown kilometers of steppe. “...I have a neighbor, Valya Perekhodnik. He may have been the only one to escape. His mother pushed him out of the car on the way.". We get out. Vasily Fedorovich is noticeably worried. A poor, once plastered pillar with an inscription about the victims of the occupiers, a donkey, covered in cracks, speaks more of oblivion than memory. “Shall we imprint?” The friend unclasped his camera. A stream of MAZs and Zhigulis rushed past along the highway. Emerald wheat shoots were heading towards the horizon. To the left, on a hillside, a tiny rural cemetery huddled idyllically. The ditch had long been leveled and turned green, but its outlines could be discerned, running across the highway for a kilometer and a half. The shy branches of the blooming thorns were white. Rare acacia trees turned black. We, warm from the sun, slowly walked away from the highway. And suddenly - what is this?! On the way, among a green field, a square of a freshly dug well turns black; land of cheese yet. Behind him is another. There are piles of buried bones and rotted clothes around. Black, as if smoky, skulls. “They’re digging again, you bastards!”- Vasily Fedorovich has completely sank. It was not in newsreels, not in the stories of witnesses, not in a nightmare - but here, nearby. It's just been dug up. A skull, followed by another. Two tiny ones, children's ones. And here is an adult, split into shards. “They are the ones who rip out the gold crowns with pliers.” Wrinkled woman's boot. My God, the hair, the scalp, baby red hair with a braid! How tightly they were braided, probably hoping for something else, in the morning before the execution!.. What bastards! This is not a literary device, not fictional characters, not the pages of a criminal chronicle, this is us, next to a rushing highway, standing in front of a pile of human skulls. This was not done by the villains of antiquity, but by modern people. Some kind of nightmare.

The bastards were digging this night. A broken cigarette with a filter lies nearby. Not even damp. Near it is a copper, greenish shell. "German", says Vasily Fedorovich. Someone picks it up, but immediately throws it away, thinking about the danger of infection. The skulls lay in a pile, these mysteries of the universe - brown-dark from long underground years - like huge smoke mushrooms. The depth of the professionally dug mines is about two human heights; one has a drift at the bottom. At the bottom of the second one lies a hidden, dusted shovel - that means they’re coming to dig up today?! We look at each other in horror, still not believing, like in a bad dream. How far a person must go, how depraved the mind must be, to delve into skeletons, next to a living road, to crumble a skull and tear out crowns with pliers in the light of headlights. And even almost without hiding, leaving all traces in plain sight, somehow defiantly, with a challenge. And the people calmly rushing along the highway were probably joking: “Is someone digging for gold there again?” Has everyone gone crazy, or what?! Next to us there is a tin poster stuck on a peg: "No digging - cable". Cable is not allowed, but people are allowed? This means that even the trial did not stop the consciousness of this bastard, and, as I was later told, at the trial they only talked about the criminals, not about the fate of the buried themselves. Where is the epidemiological station looking? Any infection can emerge from these wells; an epidemic can destroy the region. Children are running across the steppe. What about the spiritual epidemic? They do not rob graves, it is not about pitiful golden grams of despicable metal, but they rob souls, the souls of the buried, theirs, yours! The police are rushing along the highway after drivers and rubles, but they won’t even look here. At least they put up a post. One in 12 thousand. The memory of people is sacred. Why not think not only about the legal, but also about the spiritual protection of the burial? Click the cry, and the best sculptors will erect a stele or a marble wall. To give people a sense of sacred awe. 12 thousand is worth it. The four of us are standing at the tenth kilometer. We are ashamed, we say inappropriately - what, what should we do? Maybe we should lay out a lawn in place, cover it with a slab and put up a border? And it wouldn’t hurt to remember the names. We don’t know what - but something needs to be done, and immediately. So I again encountered the revived last year’s case No. 1586. Where are you leading, ditch?

INTRODUCTION

I appeal to the reader's skulls:

Has our mind really exhausted itself?

We are standing above the steppe.

Crimea is gathering dust along the highway.

The skull trembled under my scalp.

Nearby is black,

like a smoke mushroom, smoked.

He pulled a smile into his fist.

I felt

some secret connection -

as if I was involved in the conversation -

that stretched from us

to devices without eyes,

like a cordless phone.

- ...Marya Lvovna, hello!

Mom, we got carried away...

Storms again, cosmic interference

Feel better, Alexander? - It’s bad, Fedor Kuzmich...

Straight up Hitchcockian kitsch...

Skulls. Tamerlane. Don't open the tombs.

War will break out from there.

Don't cut with a shovel

spiritual myceliums!

It will come out worse than the plague.

Simferopolsky did not stop the process.

Has the connection fallen apart?

Psychiatrist - in the hall!

How to prevent a soulless process,

What did I conventionally call “greed”?!

What the hell kind of poet are you, “the voice of the people”?

Why did he open his loaf?

In front of twelve thousand pairs of eyes

do something instead of talking!

The foreman will not save you.

Look, country, -

The mother shouts to her son from the trenches.

The environment is scary

The ecology of the spirit is worse.

Wherever I go,

no matter what I read, -

I’m still going to the Simferopol ditch.

And, turning black, skulls and skulls float,

like an eclipse of white minds.

And when I go to Luzhniki,

now every time

I will see the demanding pupils

twelve thousand pairs of eyes.

Don't drag me down, rock

into the Simferopol ditch.

Steppe. Twelve thousandth look.

Chu, the shovels are knocking

grateful grandchildren.

Genocide laid this treasure.

Hold the shovel!

We were people.

Here, take it! I carried the diamond.

You, dad, don't

shake the bones.

Hand over your stash and lie down again.

Okay people first

joy to open.

God forbid you be the first to see

this fresh pit

where the skull is open.

Valya! It was your mother.

It's true, it's true

this is true, this is true,

gold and bone dust.

The bat took the bracelet off the skeleton,

and the other one, driving, was in a hurry.

“The German fascist invaders at the 10th km shot civilians of predominantly Jewish nationality, Crimeans, and Russians”, we read in archival materials. Then the partisans were executed in the same ditch. These are sacred-historical depths. What about profiting from the past when sacred shadows are blasphemously shaken? Boyan, Skovoroda, Shevchenko taught selflessness. It was not hunger or need that led to crime. Why, in the eternal, terrible and holy days of the Leningrad Siege, was it hunger and suffering that highlighted heightened morality and selfless stoicism? Why does the current morgue employee, handing over the body of his grandmother and mother to the shocked family, calmly suggest: “Count the number of valuable metal teeth of the deceased.”, without being embarrassed by the horror of what was said? “The psychology is changing,- the thinking lawyer tells me, squinting like Chekhov, - Previously they killed simply in the “affect of an ax.” Recently there was a case: a son and mother conspired to kill their tyrant father. The handy son connected the current from the socket to his father’s bed. When the father, drunk as usual, lay gropingly looking for an outlet, it hit him. True, the technique turned out to be weak, we had to finish it off". Only two of our heroes had previous convictions, and then only for self-harm. So they were like everyone else? In restaurants they paid in gold, so everyone around them knew? Whose fault is this? Where did these golden chervonets, blown rings, seductive ducats roll out from, flashing like ribs of samples - from the darkness of centuries, from our life, from the sweet Mediterranean, from the depths of instinct? Who do they belong to, these tokens of temptation - a master from Mycenae, the depths of the steppe, or a future lareshnitsa? Who is the victim? Who owns the underground jewels, whose are they? We are standing at the 10th kilometer. Nobody's grass is fresh around. Somewhere far to the north, no one’s meadows stretch, no one’s groves are being ruined, no one’s rivers and lakes are being abused by unworthy people? Whose are they? Whose are we?