The first verses of motivation is in fact linked to the journey undertaken by Kuzmin in Egypt in 1895, from Constantinople to Athens, Smyrna and Alexandria to Cairo and Memphis in the company of a mysterious "Prince George".
Refined poet and sometimes accused of excessive affectation and aestheticism, Kuzmin that in 1910 with its theoretical manifesto Della beautiful clarity argued the reasons for a poem once harmony, rigor and symmetry had lived a spiritually troubled youth, traveling and researching always new landings (also in Italy, whose culture was very close) for his sensitivity as a man and as an artist, he was linked to the world of the old believers but had noble origins and a French mother. The uneasy affective attitude of the poet pours into all his work, and in this perspective the Cantos of Alexandria constitute a kind of litmus test of his artistic legacy.
Alexandria is a symbol of harmony lost, memory is the city, but far away from the stereotypes and learned quotations from the Symbolists, revisited as it is in a completely original way in a perspective that has nothing bookish or conventional, because it transfers the magnificent Egyptian and Hellenistic world in the contemporary sensibility.
Among other things, Kuzmin was in Alexandria just as the city was also the great poet Cavafy neoellenico, and in his autobiographical verse combines experience with the cultural one. Hence the plan mitopoietico where figures stand out as Antinous, Adonis, Penelope, the god Ptah, who figures in the complex process of reincarnation narratives are compounded with many characters and self-projections traced in other works of the poet, starting from ' hero of the novel homoerotic Ali.
Kuzmin saw Tyre, Ephesus and Izmir, saw Athens, Byzantium and Corfu also saw the excellent Rome; but Alexandria would have been the first love, the first beauty alive in the memory and mirror-inverted in the poetic word to identify the Last Thule harvest trout breaks the ice, verses leave before a long silence and death in the now empty poetically Leningrad.
Stefano Garzonio