Contemplation C

Vladimir Kucheryavkin was born in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) in 1948. He graduated from the philological faculty of Leningrad University, worked as a fire safety instructor, a gas boiler operator, and taught at the Institute of Foreign Languages. In recent years, he has been living in the village of Ust-Volma in the Novgorod region. He is the author of the books "Dance of the Dead Leg" (1994), "Far from the Cordon" (1994), "Tripod" (2001), and "Selected Works" (2002). He was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2001. There is a surrealist poetics of shock and an Oberiut poetics of flickering - Vladimir Kucheryavkin inherits both. The jagged, grating, 'tram-like' rhythm, grammatical shifts and irregularities unsettle the regular verse, imparting to it a hidden, 'trembling' harmony that is better than the 'obvious', for beyond the allegory and dissonances, beyond the 'hell of wild noises and squeals', it allows one to hear the main motif of this poetry: the brotherhood, the comradeship of beings in a 'conspiracy against emptiness and non-existence'.