Igor Pomerantsev. Monologues

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Poet who understands words erotic and also is a dissident, famous European radio journalist, essayist and wine lover Igor Pomerantsev is thinking about personality’s geography, language sensuality of South, emigration, dialogue of cultures in time and territory and what is more — about the poetry and independence that can be born in (by) it

Diana KLOCHKO Photos Milena Findeis

Igor Pomerantsev:

Not without a pinch of irony I often say about myself — «the only Austria-Hungarian poet, who writes in Russian». Certainly, it’s a nod to Chernivtsi where I spent my childhood. Whether we like it or not, geography largely is the base of our personality. If you are German who grew up in Khazakhstan and you speak Russian — you are different from German from Schwaben. In thirties Victor Shkolovskiy called writers and poets who grew up in Odessa «South-West School». This school is connected with such names as Babel, Kataiev, Bagrytskiy, Olieshy... «Secret agent» of this school was also Pasternak as his parents were born in Odessa. It seems to me that it’s possible to refer Gogol to this school also. It’s him who had done inoculation of «South» — I am talking about the attitude when people wrote and float their boat. My personal experience of emigration proves that the first emigrant’s reaction — it’s allergy on other’s taste, colour and smell. In St. Petersburg Gogol felt something similar. He was suffering being in the North. He felt himself in St. Petersburg like modern East European emigrant in America of XXI century; he experienced sensual and emotional misunderstanding. Immigrant created from such dough sees in aboriginal zombies, except nation of

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new motherland to which he got on his own wish as evil spirits. It happens in childhood: you are invited to the living room, you are put on the chair and everything what you are eating seems to you lusciously strange. Though Gogol, when he arrived after immigrants St Petersburg shock to Italy happened to be nearly at home in Sorochyntsi. It’s true that Sorochyntsi is closer to Rome than to St. Petersburg. That’s why he so energetically wrote and lived in Rome as if he returned back to Poltavshchyna. The closer it is to the South the renderer the world acceptance, more delicate the cloth with which artist works; different zone of colour, light and emotions. That’s why childhood on the South remains with you forever. Childhood, his geography, measures writers who wouldn’t make it up with each other. So if to read their work from the tenderness point of view it happens that they are united and very strong team. The place where historical time and territory collides — we get crossroad. Something similar happened with Chernivtsi — Olga Kobylianska Ukrainian and Rose Ausländer Austrian — were linguistic crossroads. Kobylianska wrote in German and Ukrainian. Ausländer — German and English. And Paul Celan left after himself not only German poems but Romanian as well.


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