Singer of modern antiquity. Almost forgotten poets

Translator of Nabokov and Brodsky died after a long illness

On the morning of December 17, the poet, translator and one of the best literary critics in Russia, Grigory Dashevsky, died in therapy after a serious liver disease. In the fall of 2013, he was admitted to the hospital; blood was needed for the operation, as the poet’s friends and colleagues wrote on Facebook. But at the end of November, doctors admitted that the operation was impossible. The poet did not live to see his anniversary for only two months.

Grigory Dashevsky

Grigory Mikhailovich Dashevsky would have turned 50 on February 25. He was born in Moscow and graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1988. Patient by nature, Dashevsky taught Latin at school for two years, and later taught a course on the history of Roman literature at his native philological department. Grigory Dashevsky lived in France for some time, and in the mid-90s he trained in Berlin.

The first book of his poems, “Papier-mâché,” appeared in 1989, then “Change of Poses,” “Henry and Semyon,” and “The Duma of Ivan-Tea” were published. Dashevsky translated from English, French and German, taught Latin and ancient Roman literature. In his translations, the world saw books by Nabokov, Brodsky, Huxley and Warren. For his translation of The Scapegoat by the French philosopher Rene Girard, Grigory Dashevsky received the Maurice Waxmacher Prize in 2010, and in 2011 he was awarded the independent Andrei Bely Prize. Grigory Mikhailovich also managed to be a publicist - he worked as a columnist for the Kommersant newspaper and was the editor of the Necessary Reserve magazine. Dashevsky was rightfully considered one of the best Russian critics in literature. “Dashevsky, in his criticism, seems to be trying to answer the question of how poetry is possible if the word poet itself “sounds too sublime, absurd, archaic,” and by calling himself a poet, a person either tells us that “he has no place in the world.” , or that he lives in a vanished world,” writes Alexander Zhitenev about his manner.

Dashevsky translated everything - prose, journalism and poetry. One of his most striking works is a translation of Robert Frost's most popular poem in Great Britain, “Stopping by a Wood on a Snowy Evening.” The first quatrain in translation sounds like this:

Whose forest do I think I know:

Its owner lives in the village.

He won't see how snowy

I stand and look at the forest.

Grigory Dashevsky created this masterpiece literally a month before his death - in October 2013.

On December 17, Grigory Dashevsky, a poet, translator and literary critic, died in a Moscow hospital after a long and serious illness. Having achieved recognition in all these areas of literature, he remained a man of such extraordinary modesty that the deserved veneration sometimes seemed inappropriate. He was only 49 years old.

Grigory Mikhailovich Dashevsky, as happens with the best in culture, came from classical philology: he studied and taught a little at Moscow State University, and a lot at the Russian State University for the Humanities, whose graduates became spreaders of the fame of their brilliant teacher. Dashevsky remained an antique in his original poetic work, which is convenient to say in other people’s words: “Most of Dashevsky’s poems are “translations” of Latin poems, accurate in meaning, but altered so that their language is certainly Russian, and not translated, in which there is always an admixture of foreignness.”

In poetry, Grigory Dashevsky was not associated with any literary movement - perhaps because he wrote very little. Nevertheless, Dashevsky’s poetic voice was very recognizable: all his devoted readers and grateful critics unanimously speak about this. The thesis about recognition may seem paradoxical when applied to a poet, whose manner is based on the ability to master someone else's style and subtly parody it. However, this is not a unique case in Russian poetry: one of Dashevsky’s teachers can be called Timur Kibirov (the latter dedicated a poem to the younger poet, antithetically rhyming “Dashevsky Grisha” with “I hear from a simulacrum”). Only Kibirov’s soulful intonation, which wraps any borrowed line in a signature warmth, has turned into Dashevsky’s intimacy of a completely different kind - the intimacy of the ultimate state in which a person is alone with himself. Mastering these extreme mental manifestations, familiar to everyone, but special for everyone, Dashevsky made the lyrical characters of his poems a Cheryomushkin maniac, a teenager watching a nurse, or a lover, at the peak of an intimate frenzy, looking at himself with frightening detachment.

Dashevsky did not need post-Kibirov centon poetry in order to build a common emotion on the foundation of cultural closeness with his contemporary. As the poet himself said, analyzing the poems of Maria Stepanova, an author from a close poetic generation, “quotes do not serve as a password for some circle, but<...>therefore they require only the most fleeting and weak reaction - “oh, something familiar.” According to Dashevsky, in modern literature, “clinging to recognizable quotes, meters, images in popular poems comes largely from the fear of reality, from the fear of being among strangers, from the fear of admitting that one is already among strangers. There are no more quotations: no one has read what you have; and even if you read it, it doesn’t bring you closer.” The meaning of stylistic borrowings (in particular, ancient ones) from Dashevsky is to highlight with them that very ultimate experience. The focus of his attention is not on the general read - cozy and safe, but on the extremely personal felt - secret, forbidden, and therefore unsafe. The most intimate fragments of experience, conveyed in quotative language, became outwardly impersonal (the poet himself said that romantic - egocentric - poetry ended after Brodsky), and therefore general, like a collective unconscious. Reading Dashevsky’s poems, you feel with horror and trepidation of self-knowledge: the Cheryomushkin maniac is a little bit of you too.

It is paradoxical how, with such lyrical tension, which not everyone will be ready to share, and at the same time hermetic sophistication, designed for subtle connoisseurs, Dashevsky’s poetry was widely loved. Having overcome the quotation, she herself entered the quotation background, and any real reader of modern poetry knew Frau has twins inside who argue: What if China is behind the walls of the peritoneum? / What if we are girls? But they can't go to China. Or these sapphic stanzas:

The one braver than Sylvester Stallone or
his photos above the pillow,
who looks into the gray eyes of nurses
without asking or fear,

and we are looking for a diagnosis in these pupils
and we don’t believe that under the starched robe
almost nothing, what is there at most
bra and panties.

Quiet hour, oh boys, has exhausted you,
in a quiet hour you chew on the duvet cover,
during quiet times we check more thoroughly
There are bars in the windows.

Unlike poetry, Dashevsky was prolific in translations and journalism, which became not only separate areas of application of his talent, but also the poet’s bread (for which we cannot but thank the Kommersant Publishing House). As an author of periodicals, Dashevsky was extremely responsible: you will not find notes or reviews from him without an independent and clear thought - thanks to which Dashevsky easily became the best modern Russian literary critic. The same applied to translations, which he seemed to choose not at all on a poetic whim, but based on the criterion of intellectual equality. Dashevsky translated Brodsky's essays, Nabokov's literary lectures, Aldous Huxley's biographical work (together with Viktor Petrovich Golyshev), and Truman Capote's stories. Not only in his journalism, but also in Dashevsky’s translations, a high degree of social responsibility was manifested, which is not characteristic of every writer. Dashevsky translated Hannah Arendt, a prominent post-war thinker famous for her analysis of the origins and nature of totalitarianism and fascism. And Arendt Dashevsky criticized other people’s bad translations precisely for intellectual negligence, which alone was capable of changing the meaning of a sharp text to the opposite.

The favorite author of the translator Grigory Dashevsky was the French philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard (still alive, he is 89 years old). At the same time an academician and a rebel, Girard managed to become a bone in the throat even of his rebellious generation: he developed the ideas of structuralism to criticize the structuralists, and turned leftist ideology in a conservative direction so suddenly that he shocked the French left. Dashevsky translated two of Girard's main books: Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat; both develop the philosopher's main idea that the tradition of sacrifice - collective violence against an individual - lies at the basis of all human culture. Girard shows that the same mechanisms that triggered the persecution of Jews in our era also underlay archaic myths: when something is unsettled in a group, you need to find an extreme person to take out your fears on him - and then (in the case of a myth) and deify him, thanking him for his salvation from troubles, purchased at the cost of his life.

Just recently one could say about Grigory Dashevsky - “a living classic”. A teacher of Latin and the history of Roman literature, a creator of poetic palimpsests, a brilliant translator and essayist, a literary observer and an unusually handsome man, died two months before his half-century anniversary. After him, four collections of poetry remained (one of which was completely included in the other, and another was destroyed due to the presence of parallel texts in German), many brilliant translations from German, English, French, and unique lectures posted on the Internet. But, perhaps, Dashevsky’s most important legacy is the uninterrupted relationship between education, philosophy and poetry.

Traditions of classical philology

The biography of Grigory Dashevsky is laconic, like the inscriptions on ancient monuments, and could belong to the century before last. A native Muscovite (born February 25, 1963, died December 17, 2013), a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. He first taught Latin, then the history of Roman literature to philology students of his alma mater, interned in Paris and Berlin, and until his death worked at the Department of Classical Philology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Constant literary reviews in the far from philological Kommersant made it possible to rank Dashevsky among the most brilliant Russian critics. His discussions about the rights of people with disabilities caused heated debates in society, and video recordings of lectures and draft translations

Dov were transmitted among students. Dashevsky belonged to a rare type of poet in Russia, gravitating not to bohemian, but to university traditions, although he himself called himself a student of Timur Kibirov.

Literary scholars call Dashevsky's poems palimpsests. This ancient term literally meant parchment from which the old text had been erased and a new one written over it. Poetic palimpsests are a way of interaction between tradition and modernity, the highest manifestation of authorship. Palimpsests are not translations or direct quotations of the classics, they are its development and continuation, a kind of poetic roll call. In Dashevsky's poetry one can find elements of pop and intellectual banter, his poetic

These images erase the boundaries of eras and spaces - they are simultaneously from another dimension and from a neighboring courtyard, taking on the harsh significance of an ancient amphitheater, and the minted minimalism of Latin is organically transformed into street slang, raising it to the heights of the spirit.

Dashevsky's translations of philosophers and writers of the twentieth century speak, first of all, about the theme of interaction between the individual and the totalitarian system, which unexpectedly and paradoxically appeared in his poem "Henry and Semyon."

Dashevsky's last years were spent fighting a debilitating disease, but he complained only of decreased performance. Awards received during his lifetime included two shortlistings and one Andrei Bely Prize, the Maurice Maxwahe Prize

ra and Diploma from the Soros Institute. Dashevsky’s main legacy is his invaluable contribution to poetry and literary criticism and the uninterrupted tradition of the relationship between philosophy, poetry and education.

Love and death

Grigory Dashevsky cannot be classified as an idol whose names are well known. His poetry is not at all easy to understand, but it fascinates even readers brought up on literature of a completely different kind. In these poems there are no hypnotizing rhythms and musical harmonies, a flow of visual images and an appeal to common and generally understood truths. In addition, the meter of versification is unusual for Russian poetry, although it is quite trivial for its forgotten classical prototypes. At the heart of the title for Dashevsky's creativity

o the poem "Quarantine" ("Quiet Hour") is the poetry of Catullus, who, in turn, adapted the love lyrics of Sappho. Sappho’s work describes the heroine’s state, blurring the line between love and death; in Catullus, through irony, you can hear the fading heartbeat, and Dashevsky’s hero is a teenager looking at the nurse with a mixture of lust and fear of reading a gloomy verdict in her eyes. The twin embryos included in the quote, who may be born girls, and they will be “not allowed to go to China,” the atmosphere of fantasy and the incorrectness of speech in “Martians in the General Staff,” the “Cheryomushkin neighbor” who stopped seeing what she saw, make one clearly feel the fine line between being and non-being, life and death, reality and illusion

y. Dashevsky's latest publication is an essay on Robert Frost and a translation of his iconic poem "Winter Forest", which reproduces with filigree precision both poetic form and deep content, especially "the most famous repetition of English poetry" in the finale, which brings together the interconnection of the desire for peace, sense of duty and the cold reality of existence.

It is noteworthy that the last creation of Grigory Dashevsky, made, according to rumors, in the intensive care ward, was a translation of Elliott’s “Ash Wednesday” with a request to teach “pity and indifference,” in which the last two lines remained unfinished with a request to pray for us now and at the hour of death : "Pray for us now and at the hour of our death."

Gregory Dashevsky was an excellent teacher of Latin and the history of Roman literature, a literary critic, a talented creator of essays and poetic palimpsests, and a brilliant translator.

Biography of Dashevsky

The poet's biography is so laconic that it more likely refers to the century before last than to our time. Gregory was born in 1964, on February 25, in the capital of Russia. Until his last days, he remained faithful to his Moscow. Dashevsky studied at Moscow State University in the classical department of the Faculty of Philology.

After graduation, the young graduate began teaching Latin at school, and later at Moscow State University, to philology students, the history of Roman literature. Then he worked for more than twenty years at the Department of Classical Philology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. During his work, he interned abroad several times and visited Paris and Berlin.

Creative activity of Dashevsky

In parallel with his teaching career, he wrote his column in the completely non-philological publishing house Kommersant. Thanks to his literary reviews, he earned the title of best Russian critic. The topics of his discussions had a wide response in society. Just look at his statements about the rights of people with disabilities, which caused a resonance in society and were heatedly discussed for a long time. He also actively published in the magazines Citizen K, Kommersant Weekend and Emergency Reserve. Several times he was invited as a guest on television in the program “School of Scandal.” He was a living legend at the university; drafts of his translations and video recordings of his lectures circulated among students.

Grigory Dashevsky belonged to such a rare type of poets today, more predisposed to university traditions than to bohemian delights. And this despite the fact that he always considered Timur Kibirov his ideological inspirer.

Traditions of classical literature

Literary critics and literary scholars believed that, as a poet, Grigory Dashevsky belongs more to the rare genre of palimpsest. Literally translated, this word means “parchment from which ancient inscriptions have been erased and new ones written on top.” There are not so many poets who worked in this style, especially among domestic authors. In poetic palimpsests, established traditions harmoniously interact with modernity. You need to be a master of the highest class to write such poetry. In fact, these are not exact translations of poems and not individual statements of the classic, but a kind of development of the work, its continuation, the so-called “poetic roll call.” The creations of Grigory Dashevsky are unique. In them you can find intellectual banter and pop elements, and poetic images simply erase space and time. His characters seem to be from next door and at the same time from a completely different dimension, and street slang is harmoniously replaced by the minted minimalism of Latin.

Grigory Dashevsky was actively involved in translating writers and philosophers of the 20th century, but most of all he loved works devoted to the totalitarian system and the individual interacting with it. This theme was unexpectedly and paradoxically reflected in the poem “Henry and Semyon,” published in 2000.

Author's achievements

Despite the uniqueness of his works, he did not receive many awards throughout his creative career. Only two times his works were included in the shortlist, he received a diploma from the Soros Institute and one of the most prestigious awards - named after Andrei Bely and Maurice Maxvacher. The awards might not have found their hero during his lifetime, as often happens, the main thing is that he left behind a great literary legacy, as well as a contribution to literary criticism and poetry, the role of which is difficult to overestimate. His merit was that he tried to support such a precarious relationship between education, poetry and philosophy.

Love and death

Dashevsky was not the idol of the majority, his name was not heard by many, but despite the complexity of perception, his work is capable of bewitching anyone, be it a person who is absolutely not interested in poetry or who was brought up on a completely different literature. His works do not obey the general requirements and laws of poetry. There is no musical melody in them, there is no clear change of images, they do not preach generally accepted truisms.

The size of the verses is more inherent in the forgotten classical prototype than in the canons of Russian poetry. The poem “Quarantine” is considered Dashevsky’s calling card. His work is reminiscent of the poetry of Catullus, who described the unhappy love of Sappho. The work of Catullus describes the state of the heroine Sappho, for whom the line between love and death has blurred. And Dashevsky’s hero, a young man who looks at the nurse with bated breath, simultaneously wanting her and being afraid to hear a terrible sentence.

According to journalists, while in the intensive care unit, Grigory Dashevsky made his last translation of Elliott’s “Ash Wednesday,” which called for teaching “indifference and pity.” It is noteworthy that the last two lines remained untranslated (Prayforusnowandatthehourofourdeath). They talk about asking us to pray for us now and at the hour of death.

Heritage

Dashevsky published his first poetry book back in 1989 under the title “Papier-mâché.” Later, he wrote 3 more books: “Change of Postures”, created in 1997, “Henry and Semyon” (2000), and also in 2001 - “The Duma of Ivan Chai”. As an author, Grigory Dashevsky left behind few works; he was more involved in translations from German, French and English. He loved to work not only with poetry, but also with works of art, philosophical and scientific works.

His translations of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, Robert Penn Warren and

The author really enjoyed working with the works of the philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard. The most famous of these were Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat. By the way, it was for this last work that Dashevsky received the French Maurice Waxmacher Prize in 2010.

Serious disease

In the fall of 2013, Grigory Dashevsky was admitted to the hospital. For a long time, family and colleagues hid the true reason for hospitalization. It was only known that he was in very serious condition and needed serious surgery. But the doctors considered that Grigory Dashevsky, whose illness was simply a shock for most, was too ill and might not survive surgery.

In September, on the Facebook page of her colleague Tatyana Neshumova, a researcher at the Moscow Museum named after Marina Tsvetaeva, a message appeared stating that Grigory Dashevsky needed an urgent blood transfusion. What the illness was and what blood type was needed were not reported. All they said was that anyone could help him. Since he does not need blood specifically for transfusion, but to replenish the blood bank.

last years of life

Suffering from a debilitating disease and continuing to struggle with it for a long time, he never sought compassion or support. The only thing Dashevsky complained about was a strong decrease in performance.

Grigory Dashevsky died in a Moscow hospital in December 2013 after a long struggle with a serious illness. The cause of the poet's death remained a mystery to most.