Выступление в Нью-Йорке
в салоне "Неформалисты" в марте 2002 года
Рафаэль Левчин
Let me thank you, all of you, for inviting me here and for giving me the floor.
I believe I should introduce myself. I'm Rafael Levchin, I was born in small town Dzhankoi (Crimea-Peninsula, now a part of Ukraine) in 1946, and I was graduated from Literary Institute in Moscow in 1983. From 1991 I'm living in US. From 1994 I'm the publisher, editor-in-chief and art-director of the multilingual zine Reflect...
After 91 I was published in different literary magazines as "Chernovik", "Zvezda Vostoka", "Mnogotochie", "Stetoscope", "Oikumena", "Ad Futurum" and so on. My first book ВОДАогонь was published in 1996.
And I was a one of founding members of group of young underground poets...
Actually, I was a member of many different informal groups; for example, the underground theatre "Chen-Dziu" (1983-1986), studio "Theater Club", later - Neomythological Theatre (1985 - till now), group of poets and artists "39.9o C" (1987-1988), group of permanent performance "Glossolalia" (1989-1991), the Independent Union of Literators (1988-1991) etc, etc. But let's return to first one.
This group is now known as metarealists, and it existed approximately from 1976 till 1981 under different names: 1976-77 - apocalyptics (from Apocalypse), 1977-78 - NTR-panteists (tipical Soviet abbreviation, in English would be STR), 1978-80 - postfuturists, 1980-81 - metametaforists, then - metarealists, presentalists and even newbarocco. Now my friend Yury Proskuriakov (he also was a founding member of group, and I'll return to him later) offered to name our former group as tragic existentialists.
Anyway, I must say there is big difference between underground in USSR and underground in US. If you are underground poet here, so, let's say, "New-Yorker" will not publish you, but you can find some another magazine. But in Soviet Union - if you were a part of underground, you automatically were a part of political underground, did you want it or not. If you were an artits, and you were not social realist, you'd better not exist. Because for government you were a dangerous terrorist!
We didn't have official magazines for publishing our poems, we didn't have galleries for exibition our work, we didn't have stages for our performances, we didn't have open mikes in cafe and so on. And it was this way till 90-s (from 30-s). So, we read our poems at home, on the kitchens, to small groups of audience. Then, at the end of 80-s, something started to change. They gave some place to us, where we can have exibitions, poetry reading, discussions and so on. And, of course, there were a lot of people from KGB in this places. The soviet establishment was trying to control us.
But they couldn't. So they decided to divide us.
And they did it.
Some of us: Parshchikov, Eremenko, Zhdanov, Kutik - were widely published and become a sort of official writers. Their names were in newspapers, on TV and so on. And many of us are still in underground... but that's the long story.
I know only one article (1987), where were all our names together (well, not all, but most of us). Unfortunately, it is in Finnish, so I cannot say for sure, what is it all about.
So, what is metarealism? This is about another realities. There are a lot of them, and every reality has some sort of canal to another reality (it's like you are traveling from one dream - from one myth - to another), so every image become a chain of metamorphosises, and instead of usual metaphor is метафора привнесения (?).
(Ср. со словами Мандельштама о слове, которое является пучком, и смысл торчит из него в разные стороны, а не устремляется в одну точку, о гераклитовой метафоре, подчеркивающей текучесть явления...)
Of course, we have continued traditions of our predcessors: symbolists, surrealists etc.
But if the generation of Brodsky believed they can revitalize the old culture, which was destroyed in SU, the next generation understood that's not possible, we can only try to reconnect some parts of it. We were searching the archetypes, and we're trying to create some new myths (actually, they were just the same old ones), using the new metaphores.
Metarealism can be decoded as metaphorical realism or as metaphisical realism.
Actually we believed we are avangardists - but we were postavangardists at the same time.
By the way, there is the difference between a group and a school...
Now my friend Proskuriakov established a very new group - Cassandrion.
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