For them, as Gandlevsky writes in Trepanation of the Skull, “There was no one whose eyes had to be opened or who had to be made to understand. Gandlevsky himself had no love for what he saw as the “versified ideas of the middle intelligentsia” of Yevtushenko, and saw poetry as a means of privacy, a bulwark against a politics that had contaminated all aspects of Russian life.īy contrast to the attention-seeking political harangues of the Sixties poets, Gandlevsky and Moscow Time saw poetry as a personal matter. With the ongoing reassertion of the Communist Party in the Brezhnev era, the elder generation of poets looked morally compromised to the rising generation. In an unfree society, to be a poet, Gandlevsky believed, required refusing to participate in a system he believed was morally bankrupt. The trial of poet Joseph Brodsky in 1964, the show trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky in 1966, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the Khrushchev Thaw. Unlike the Sixties Generation of Russian poets-most notably, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Vosnesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina-who embraced the role of the poet as public figure of political conscience and performed readings for thousands of people, the Seventies Generation saw the limits of poetry as public dissent. At the same time, after all, we were scoffers, so the priestly pose in its pure, symbolic form was not welcomed. We did not treat poetry as a mere human activity: one stitches boots and the other writes in rhyme. We did not believe that there is no purpose in life and that the Universe is a confluence of some molecular circumstances. There were, of course, reasons of the most general, ideological order. Since we are talking about three or four extremely funny young people who are always drunk, this very idea would have caused a surge of drunkenness and laughter. (Gandlevsky would later elegize all of these poet friends in verse.)Ĭritic Lena Trofimova recalls how Moscow Time’s “poetic fraternity opposed the official literary studio of the university, who had all the necessities of a comfortable but a conformist existence-good lodging, financial support, organized regulations of study.” When asked about Moscow Time’s aesthetic position, Gandlevsky laughed and said: In 1972, at Moscow State University, Gandlevsky co-founded Moscow Time, a poetry group which included fellow comrade-poets Alexander Soprovsky, Aleksey Tsvetkov, and Bakhyt Kenjeev, until Tsvetkov’s emigration in 1974. An integral figure in the Russian underground poetry scene in the 1970s and 1980s, Gandlevsky began writing poetry only for himself and his friends. Sergey Gandlevsky was born in Moscow in 1952, one year before Stalin’s death. Gandlevsky replied, “when I heard Reagan say that, I thought he was right.” At a bilingual reading with Gandlevsky, someone asked why I decided to study Russian language and poetry, I said that I heard Reagan call the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” and I thought Reagan was wrong-that a whole country could not be evil. But in an unfree society, to be a poet, Gandlevsky believed, required refusing to participate in a system he believed was morally bankrupt. He has always been, first and foremost, a poet. “Everything that’s happened to us will happen again,” as Gandlevsky once wrote in a poem, not knowing how it would come true.ĭespite his detention, Gandlevsky has never been, strictly speaking, a political dissident. The Soviet Union has been dead for over thirty years, and Stalin’s crimes disavowed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, but it is as if history is repeating itself in Russia. “I tore it off the wall,” Gandlevsky said, when asked by a journalist, “because is a criminal.”Īfter being threatened with imprisonment for vandalism and petty hooliganism, Gandlevsky was released without charge. It is now home to Russian security services. Lubyanka is the notorious neighborhood that housed the Soviet secret police. In 2016, Sergey Gandlevsky was arrested and detained by Moscow police after tearing down a poster of Stalin on the wall in the Lubyanka metro station.
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