The commodity markets therefore they take on a new and more important and the States will replace the Indian companies in the belief to take on so definitely the domain of their economies. Arises then between states competing for world domination and war, we already announced, it will result in the first major disciplinary experience of mankind. The theater sees the emergence of a strong competitor at the box office, the film comes to the uniqueness of the act and scenic, its uniqueness, which makes every single time and therefore renews, replacing a new type of representation, which can be reproduced , as had once been with books printed in millions of copies; mass consumption, which kicks off, can not escape so even art. The architecture celebrates the changing world and the theory of beauty is separated from the theory of art, which becomes free to define itself according to its function, is abandoned the aesthetic, as well as the notion of the pleasure of the eye 'observer, because urbanization changes forced the city. The result is also the industrial architecture.
Modernist atmosphere, which necessarily generates, can not escape even the most western Russian cities, Petersburg, where in early 1900, a man already no longer young try to find confirmation to the first certainties obtained through a long and painful apprenticeship on itself, along which is now spent much of his youth: self-acceptance, of his homosexuality. He has already experienced that sense of frustration that comes from the cruel defeats in an effort to combine their identity through education that have given his parents, who join the movement of Old Believers; his defeat ended with a suicide attempt. On medical advice, he then made a trip away from everything he knows and which can not be reconciled in Egypt and later in Italy, but then, still overwhelmed by a new mystical crisis, from an impossible acceptance of himself, He has embarked on a new hermitage in the communities of Old Believers, looking for improbable answers. Finally he discovered art as a means through which to redeem itself and finally discover new man: art as a safe conduct to their own identity and the world. Then returned to St. Petersburg, finds his mentor in Val'ter Nuvel 'and in it own way to the Miriskusstva and, in the synthesis of the different arts, he is a musician and writer at the same time, he arrived at last reconciled to himself, in a world in which he feels he can belong.
Environments that he started attending are a summary of the vibrant culture, announced by the century that comes. The world is populated so for him to new visions, emotional shock, creative chaos of a modernist pastiche, that everything seems to overwhelm. The floor space-time vanishes slowly in a present, which manages to be the time of life just because living in a suspended dimension of a past, which is why the artistic creation but also of community and conviviality so in intellectual circles Petersburgers , who reject the gray bourgeois conformism and smell of tolerance and freedom that he has been able to achieve in only his second homeland, from which he manages, throughout his life, to separate. Whose name is equivalent to the singing of a mother "sounds as your ear, three times blessed: Alexandria! "So this man, already no longer young, in the nonconformist artists Petersburgers salvation is the horror of a world that seems to reject the category of the beautiful, the massification of life and art, the petty bourgeois mentality, hierarchical and conformist. The theory of beauty, aesthetics, together with the elegance and design research in versification as in musical language become a source of artistic creation and thus an existential dimension finally harmonious. Its life becomes a roar of joy for a long-awaited liberation too, and he's finally pares inter pares, as he had perceived himself alone in Alexandria. It turns loved the intellectual circles of the artists Petersburgers contend for, his work starts even to enter the Russian literary tradition and so can finally be born poet Mikhail Kuzmin, destined to leave a deep and lasting trace in the culture of their country.
The lively and stun intellectual life in Petersburg modernist era is a scenario very prismatic, that escapes into heated argument with the brutality of a country crystallized over time, speeding towards its end. Kuzmin knows Meyerhold, Dr. Dapertutto, with whom he starts a collaboration, then Blok, he writes the music for the famous play Balagančik, which is constitutive moment in the renewal of the Russian theater. His life becomes a gentle vortex, the Tower of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who is the most coveted literary salon of the time, he even has his domicile. Meets the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, who estimate, is admired and loved; Marina Tsvetaeva remember that in him, "There was no affectation: there was a natural elegance [...], a manieratezza innate. "Mikhail Kuzmin become the precious symbol of the refined culture of the artistic circles of Petersburg, that of his own otherness did stun the charm of which his world is no longer able to escape in any way the suggestion.
The reconstruction of the psychological complexity of Mikhail Kuzmin, which can not but be reflected in the versatility of the artistic production of a teacher who is able to add up in himself the qualities of poet and composer, narrator and essayist, theorist of literature and fine translator, operation is large and the outcome by no means certain. Analytical research of all the facets that make up, like a complex weave of plots among them only apparently freely intertwined, human identity and creative Kuzmin, in fact requires sharp intuition and a versatility of knowledge equally wide. In this complex operation he can recognize the talent of a Slav, Paola Ferretti, to which we now have to the corpus of the most comprehensive and thorough studies available on Mikhail Kuzmin.
In his latest book Paola Ferretti offers us a new, sensitive and careful translation of the Songs of Alexandria, complemented by a new essay of this collection kuzminiana, which more than any other is essential to penetrate not only the complex warp that is the theory versification in Kuzmin, but also the genesis of the complex psychological and artistic personality of a teacher, able to express themselves through a wide variety of languages. The work, of great depth of perspective, proves itself invaluable to access the reading of a text, which still maintains all of its mysterious charm and the extraordinary power of impact on the reader, who is dragged into a timeless Alexandria, all ' but bookish and museum, as rightly noted Ferretti, "become home of the dream of freedom and liberation from all burden and breathing among those unusual verse. Banner of any levity in poetry, shadow of a seraphic pleasure [...] (which lives for us NDA) hosting the colorful, tiny crowd of restless teenagers, scribes and courtesans eyed bilayers that populate the verses [...] that seems to spring from instead voices of its inhabitants, in a refined game of refractions between reality and imagination, antiquity and present, dream and revival (which coexists NDA) homo-erotic infatuation with the representation of heterosexual love. »Up to a final performance in which, writes Ferretti, live the historical dimension related to Alexander the Great and that of the Pharaohs, Egypt and the Hellenistic mystery of Mozart's Magic Flute
In the years after the October Revolution, but not before a durable adhesion to Bolshevism delivers it back to his role as master of artistic renewal in Russia, but what attracts him but the envy of many in the culture, which began to innovate and to change. The enthusiasm of the initial adherence to Bolshevism in Kuzmin, like other intellectuals who lived the Revolution, however, is gradually turning into doubt and finally detachment. The construction of the new world to which he had joined, thinking of building a new literary canon, turns out different from what he had imagined. Public Declaration of emotionalism that removes the formalists and the outcome is not as hoped; Trotsky in 1924 defines an immigrant inside of the Revolution. The role of culture and refinement dandy, who once had earned the respect and sympathy of all, now becomes a burden.
His writing is not even including the most, because the construction of the new citizens of a new world its intellectual profile is not organic and is no longer needed. Gradually his literary fortune vanishes and a new onslaught of Zhizn 'iskusstva put an end to his career as a critic. Kuzmin has become one of the many writers of the past whose breathing has stopped and it is progressively marginalized and forgotten by a world that runs wildly into the future and can not afford any kind of waiting: a new world that can have no other goal outside of its construction and its defense.
While the swallows were absent, from the roof down to flight a sparrow, he jumped into the nest, looked around, shook her wings and stuffed it inside; then she puts out her head and uttered a peep. Shortly after one of the swallows returned to the nest. He entered, but since the guest, groaned, flapped his wings and flew away. The sparrow was left where it was and chirping. Suddenly he came flying a group of swallows came one after another to the nest like to take a look at the sparrow, and then resumed their flight. The sparrow, not at all intimidated, turned her head to and fro and chirping. They returned again the swallows to nest, they did something, and again flew away. Not in vain they had come: each carried in its beak a little 'mud, and gradually turavano the opening of the nest.
Again they flew away and came back again, continuing to plug up the nest whose opening was getting closer, ever closer. At first she could see all over the neck of the sparrow, then only her head, then the nozzle and then you saw nothing; Swallows had completely walled in nido1. The poet of the Songs of Alexandria spent the last years of his life in misery, keeping with the profession of translator. His latest book Forel 'razbivaet led, Trout cracking ice is ignored by the critics, it has now marginalized and his audience that he had forgotten. Mikhail Kuzmin dies of pneumonia 1 March 1936.
Luciano Risa
1 Leo Tolstoy, Sparrow and the swallows.