Azazello and the Meaning of Poetry

‘Вот знаешь, я стихи писал, я почти мало кого знал, я не читал стихов’ Azazello.[1]

‘И короче говоря, он такой был человек, как бы внешне открытый, да, да, да, но его беда – он себя очень сдерживал. Во всем.’ Kestner on Azazello.[2]

 

A significant part of Azazello’s archive is poetry. There are poems about hippies and the hippie world and there are many on other subjects. While broadly the work divides into two sections, pre- and post-incarceration in a punitive psychiatric hospital, they all date from the last two decades of the USSR and earliest years after its collapse. Some idea about the significance of poetry during those years in the USSR, therefore, is a good place to begin a reading of Azazello’s work. What did it mean to write poetry at that time? How unusual is Azazello’s archive? Who else wrote poetry in his circles, and does he seem to have been part of a group or movement with shared aesthetics? Before looking at the poems specifically, I will start with some ideas about Russian poetry in the late Soviet period, and in particular associations it probably had for the young people, and specifically hippies of Azazello’s generation.

 

Many literary scholars would argue that, in spite of the fame of the great Russian novel abroad, at home in Russia the preeminent literary genre has always been poetry.[3] I begin with this, because it is important to remember the high cultural associations that poetry had in the USSR, inculcated into generation after generation through a thorough education in the classics of Russian literature, albeit through a Sovietized canon. You might argue that a sign of the respect accorded poetry in the USSR was the reverence for strict poetic form that persisted – in officially published and samizdat poetry alike – right to the end of the Soviet period. While in the West free verse has long sat alongside formal poetry and brought with it a democratising impulse that challenges tradition and canon, in Russia free verse has never taken root. The craft of versification persisted as a central feature of poetry in the underground as much as it did in official publications, underscoring that reverence for and continuation of tradition was no state imposition.

 

The reverence for Poetry in the USSR sat alongside the complicated position that it occupied within the Soviet literary establishment. Poetry was not only revered, it had also been debased by clumsy attempts to force it serve political ends, most extremely in the Stalin era. During the post-Stalin Thaw, lyric poetry quickly became preeminent in literature. This is no surprise: the expression of an individual voice and often private concerns was antithetical to the collectivism of the previous barren years of Stalinist literature. People greeted lyric poetry written in and about their time thirstily, in the of the ultra-famous figures Evgenii Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesenskii, and Bella Akhmadulina, but also the guitar poets such Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimiar Vysotskii, and countless others who read publicly and published their work. Khrushchev saw the opportunity to harness this enthusiasm insofar as it furthered his cause of de-Stalinisation. For about a decade, young people flocked to poetry groups and aimed to make a career for themselves, with a renewed belief that they could become genuine and sincere Soviet poets. To some extent, this was true. [4]

 

Such an alignment of government, youth, and writers could hardly last, of course. From the mid-1960s, although poetry retained those associations of sincerity and youth, in its official form it also became tarnished by association with an increasingly conservative Writers’ Union and censorship. It became incredibly difficult to publish, and as a result the career path quickly disappeared. Young people continued to enthuse about poetry but, disenchanted with the more official channels, turned increasingly to the growing underground.[5] For some, the distinction grew between official, compromised poetry (and literature more widely) and samizdat poetry that was not subject to any censorship. Unofficial groups within the underground were far more likely to consume underground poetry, and to turn against the lucky generation of the Thaw: those poets’ work was often seen as compromised because it had to pass the censorship to appear in print, and the poets themselves as compromised by their participation in the system. Doubtless, there was also a great deal of frustration and resentment at the change in fortunes the younger generation experienced.

 

By the late 1970s, the Underground was well established. It had a strong association with literature and also visual arts – there were many ‘apartment art exhibitions’ and the more famous unofficial ‘bulldozer exhibition’ of 1974. But alongside and intersecting with this artistic underground were other communities: political dissidents, religious groups, rock musicians, refuseniks, homosexuals, hippies, feminists, drug addicts, and black marketeers. These were usually not sharply defined groups, but more fluid communities with their own identity but links and crossovers with each other. Poetry continued to play an important role in the more cultured and literary of these groups and it was very common to write your own poetry; indeed, this period might be termed the era of the graphomaniac, such was the fashion for writing. The individualism of lyric expression was perhaps part of the reason why poetry remained such a vital part of underground culture and more generally Soviet kitchen culture; the fact that it was easy to memorise and copy down was another. But we should also remember, as I began with, that it continued to be a signifier of high culture for people, connecting them with the Russian poetic tradition of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev and Fet. It was popular, uncensored, and expressive of anti- or un-Soviet sentiments, while also having associations of more lasting value and philosophical content.

 

Hippies and Poetry

Many hippies wrote poetry and reading poems at gatherings, passing samizdat copies of poems, similar to the broader youth culture of the time. Just as young people in higher education institutes were gathering in LITOs and publishing poems in wall newspapers or samizdat, hippies also seem to have held poetry – along with rock music and visual art – at the centre of their creative and social worlds. Sergei Moskalev posted a poem by his friend ‘the hippie and joker’ Misha Krasnoshtan on his live journal, with the following commentary:

 

Мишины стихотворения мы часто читали друг другу вместе со стихами поэтов Серебряного века. Удивительно, как в нём сохранялось возвышенное пространство, при крайне брутальном образе жизни. [6]

 

Moskalev’s reminiscence here describes poetry reading as a frequent occupation of his circle, and one which took in both published canonised poets of the Silver Age (belonging to the popular canon in the broader sense, even if they were not approved by the Soviet literary authorities of the time), and also the works of friends.

 

Even if Silver Age poetry and hippies’ own works were read side by side, there is still an interesting question about whether or not we can identify something that we might specifically refer to as ‘hippie poetry’ in the USSR. At the time hippies published only in samizdat, but with the collapse of the USSR came the possibility of publishing your work, and from this point on poetry by hippies began to appear. Later, of course, internet publishing offered even wider scope for bringing work to a readership, however belatedly. Now, across internet and book publications, it is possible to see a canon of sorts for this sub-genre emerging. While there is a wide range linguistically and thematically among the hippie poets, certain features are striking as similar to Azazello, which merit some consideration. Shamil’ Valiev (d. 2006), a Moscow hippie who wrote a lot of poetry shares with Azazello imagery from nature, writing about natural cycles and seasons, and also associated mysticism. In Shamil’s work specifically religious themes are more prominent. The tone of both men’s poems is often similar, however: serious, a little downbeat, often reflective.[7]

 

Another side to Azazello’s work is poems orientated less towards mystical themes or beauty in nature, and more towards the drudgery of everyday life. Such poems recall the work of poet, screenplay and songwriter Arkadii Slavorosov (1957–2005), known as ‘Guru’ in the Moscow hippie circles he moved in. His work has been compared to the Lianosovo poets,[8] grounded as it is work in the byt of Moscow underground, with a tendency towards social commentary:

 

Начало зимы

Ване Отроку

Праздник машет красным флагом, Свет вечерний бьёт в стекло… Обернётся ли во благо Мне приснившееся зло?

Мимо ГУМа едут танки, Глухо кашляет салют. А в театре на Таганке Снова Горького дают.

Ветер бродит по панели Между пьяненьких блядей. Всюду серые шинели Одеваются в людей.

Снег валит повсюду в мире, Снег валит из всех прорех. А сосед в седьмой квартире Снова заперся от всех.

Крик ветвисто в небо вырос — Не помог и веронал… По соседству в храме клирос Пел «Интернационал».

Не понятно пил иль не пил — Хмеля ни в одном глазу, Только сыплет белый пепел На блевотину в тазу:

В этом доме нету крыши, Крышу ветром унесло. Хлеб насущный съели мыши. Время вырвало весло.

Тараканий люд забавя — Аж топорщатся усы — Я сижу лицо уставя В помертвевшие часы.

Кто-то ссорится за дверью, Дети плачут и галдят… Только с неба пух да перья Мёртвых ангелов летят. [9]

 

As Natal’ia Chernykh explains, his poems could not be published in the Soviet period, and even after. Although he was known in hippie circles as a guru, a strong personality, his poetry was well known and loved by many, again a reference to the currency of texts within hippie and more generally underground circles.[10] Slavorosov’s references to Pink Floyd and Judas Priest underscore the hippie sub-culture that they share with not only Azazello’s poetry, but also his notebooks, and the world that they reflect.

 

‘Guru’ was a good friend of ‘Gudvin’, or Nikolai Daneliia (1959-1985), another hippie who would have intersected with circles that Azazello moved in. but who had, like Slavorosov, more of a foot in the Soviet world by dint of his working as a screen-writer for film, among other odd, literary and intellectual jobs. Both Daneliia and Slavorosov share a sharp and ironic sense of humour, found also in some of Azazello’s poems, that also seems to be particular if not to hippies only, then certainly to the subcultures of the 1970s. Daneliia’s short, sometimes epigrammatic poems combine humour and social commentary, and were often addressed to friends. These were written in the last year of his life, but his writing life began much earlier, with work on films and television.[11]

 

We do not know to what extent Azazello shared his poetry with friends. On the one hand, Ofelia’s close friend Ioko was surprised to hear of his archive of poetry, unaware that he wrote poetry in spite of moving in the same circles of him for many years.[12] On the other hand, a couple of poems appeared in Diversant’s (Iurii Popov) samizdat journal Svoboda in 1980, alongside poems by Ofelia.[13] Diversant knew, then, that Azazello wrote, but this would not have seemed at all unusual in the context. He may not have known the extent of the archive, however. In fact, Azazello seems unusual in the fact that he did not share his poetry widely with others, so far as we know. In a culture where it was quite normal to share with friends manuscripts or typescripts of your own poetry, to read your own poems at gatherings of friends, Azazello seems to have an unusually private conception of poetry. This may have been related to his confidence – as a markedly working-class hippie, moving in circles dominated by children of the elite, he may not have felt empowered to share his work as friends did with apparent ease. Whatever the reason, it was not unusual to write poetry at all, but Azazello’s somewhat secret archive of poems may be less of a common phenomenon.

 

The materials in Azazello’s archive fall predominantly into two categories, notebooks and poems; and although the notebooks are more visual, with many drawings and doodles, their written content is also a major part of their significance. Interestingly, there is relatively little crossover between the two in most cases. There are poems jotted down in notebooks before they appear in the later typescripts, but many others are not found in them.[14] The typed collections of poems also date from the 1990s. The exception to this comes in notebooks 10a and 10b, dating from 1993 to 1994, when the notebooks function as a diary, and when writing about himself is found in both poems and notebook (see below). The linear narrative of time that those particular notebooks contain is quite different from others in which there are hardly any references to calendar time. In most notebooks, time is more cyclical, when it appears at all, and there is no obvious organising principle to the content of the books.

 

Notebooks belong very much in the arsenal of the hippie’s accessories, part of a set of identifiers in hippie culture.[15]Furst’s accounts of hippies and Soviet hippies in particular have pointed to the ‘emotional style’ of their culture, in which deliberately emotional and expressive behaviour and appearance indicated adherence to a set of values at odds with the conformist, collective, and often utilitarian Soviet culture.[16] Along with clothing, lifestyle, and behaviour, an expression of this emotion style could be found in their notebooks, which were very often kept for doodling and writing in. These were a kind of repository of thoughts and drawings, often produced when high, alongside more mundane references such as phone numbers, titles of books, lyrics to music, contacts for people and places to obtain drugs. In Azazello’s notebooks, for example, there are notes made about Eastern philosophy and religion,[17] and notes about etymologies and possible connections and meanings to be found therein, alongside the lyrics of Western rock songs and his own poems: they constitute records of his preoccupations, reading matter, and, more widely, indicators of hippies’ enthusiasms and interests of the time.

 

There is not necessarily a strong association between hippies and poetry. The ‘emotional style’ of hippies is, of course, closely associated with art, which very commonly took the form of visual art (doodling and drawing in notebooks), rock music, and of course the tailoring of individual clothes, replete with decorations and details quite unlike Soviet mass-produced clothing. Poetry, by virtue of belonging to the creative arts, is hardly unusual, yet is not a particular identifier of hippies. Azazello’s poetry, therefore, is not something he produced because of his belonging to the sub-culture of hippies in the USSR. However, some of the poems, especially early ones, are undoubtedly expressive of his hippie identity. In the 1980s he even wrote quite a number using a third-person plural persona ‘we’ to underscore the expression of the collective identity and experience of hippies.[18] This article will seek to read the poems not only as thematically exploring the identity of hippies, however, but try to understand what poetry, and the act of writing poetry, signified for Azazello at different times in his life .

 

What we know of Azazello’s poetry writing is gleaned from comments by his friends who did or did not know that he wrote poetry, and also statements he made himself, in interviews and in prose passages found among the typescripts of poems, which reflect on his poetry. Interviews with his friends and associates suggest that only a few close friends knew he wrote poetry and perhaps read his poems. He and Kestner both wrote stories and seem to have shared their works with each other. However, some hippies who knew him revealed in conversation that they were very surprised to hear Azazello wrote poetry, that they had never known this in spite of being friends and moving in the same circles for some years[19] The fact that apparently many friends did not know that Azazello wrote poetry recalls a comment by Kestner about his friend: ‘I koroche govoria, on takoi byl chelovek, kak by vneshne otkrytyi, da, da, da, no ego beda – on sebia ochen’ sderzhival. Vo vsem’ (‘And, basically, he was the kind of person who seemed very open, from the outside, oh yes, but the real shame about him was that he was always holding something back. In everything that he did’).[20] It would seem that for Azazello writing poetry – certainly by the time of his later poems - was not about expressing his identity as a hippie to his friends and peers. The diaries that are found in the notebooks of the early 1990s seem much closer to his poetry, pointing to writing as a form of confession and reflection.

 

Even if his peers were not his intended readers, the typescripts extant in Azazello’s archive are testament to a concerted effort to organize his poems and preserve them for posterity. They were produced mostly in the 1990s, and include at least two pages of contents of collections, which show that he had organized them into collections. Azazello spoke in interviews about his intention that the typed poems would be preserved for his daughter Tania,[21] and wrote as much in notebook 10a:

Я понимаю для кого предназначены эти записные, которые я пытаюсь вести как-либо регулярно, нет, это не для того, чтобы на старости вспоминать былое, простоя хочу,

чтобы меня хотя бы немного узнал и понял один человек, а именно одна еще маленькая девочка Татьяна. Надежда, что тебя могут услышать, даже понимав тщету, тем не менее отдаешь ей дань.[22]

 

Azazello was happy to go through the poems and order them as best he could before handing them over as part of the archive, and he wanted them preserved in it. He also made a real effort to annotate his typescripts with times and dates where they were not indicated. These are mostly added in handwriting to the typescripts, and can indicate any timeframe from the month that a poem was written in, to a specific hour of the day or night on a certain date; presumably this information was recorded somewhere – perhaps in the notebooks where his poems were first written.[23] The year in which a poem was written is rarely indicated, possibly because the main body of poems extant can be grouped into two or three relatively short periods, when he produced poems intensively. On the other hand, this omission may have been deliberate: a rejection of linear and calendar time, focusing instead on the sense of being in the moment and also within nature’s cycles. It may be, in essence, that Azazello did not indicate the year because he did not believe that it mattered. What we do know in spite of this, is that a lot of poems were written at the beginning of the 1990s, while the earlier ones can be found in notebooks dating from 1976 mainly to 1981.[24]

 

The organization and dating of the archived poems, together with interviews in which he discusses their composition, give some clues as to Azazello’s writing practice. In conversation with Juliane Furst he asserted that he wrote poems only when high; she describes this relationship between poetry and drug-taking thus: ‘His life consisted of repeated attempts to fly – into a higher consciousness and creativity, out of the Soviet Union, into the universe of his self, which seemed to be his key to poetry.’[25] If the poems were written when high, the implication seems to be that they were written at one sitting; given that we are largely dependent on typescripts, it is difficult to ascertain whether he reworked drafts. A few poems were typed up several times, sometimes in different forms, which might point to their importance, but also suggests that in some cases he edited his poems. If Azazello did not envisage a readership among his friends or peers, however, his writing was presumably prompted by his experiences taking drugs, and was a vehicle for expression that was instinctive or natural to him.

 

While we cannot be sure whether or not Azazello ever wished to see his poems in print, we can suggest that at some point the idea was attractive. At the same time as he set about typing up the poems in the early 1990s, there was a sudden opportunity to publish work that had never existed in the USSR. Many small publishing houses were set up, and would publish a poet’s work if the costs were covered, in a very small print run, and many poets of the underground took advantage of this. The story that the hippie Amanda almost published a collection of Azazello’s work would support the theory that the typescripts that we now have were produced with the aim of using them for a publication.[26] It also seems likely that this moment when Azazello considered publishing was rather short-lived. In his account, certainly the reason for ordering and preserving the manuscripts was to preserve them for his daughter Tania.

 

Another facet of the poems which has a bearing on our understanding of Azazello’s conception of poetry is the absence of almost any intertextuality. Russian poetry is so often characterized by such references; these establish thematic connections, but also place the poet in dialogue with predecessors and peers and, in so doing, establish a relationship to Russian Literature more broadly. This intertextuality, apart from anything else, speaks of a poet’s desire to be seen as part of the broader literary process in Russia. Such a desire would appear to be absent in Azazello’s writing. His work shows almost no concern to engage with poetry; other influences such as rock music lyrics are discernible. But overall, the poems are concerned with the poet’s sensual and emotional experience of the world around him. Even if influenced by drug-induced highs, they nonetheless are rooted in the immediate time and place of the poet. He writes primarily about his mood and disposition through observations of his immediate environment, emotions at night-time, in the morning, when high, and the influences of seasons of the year and other elements of the natural world.

 

Before moving to these poems, it is worth pausing to consider one of the very few exceptions to Azazello’s indifference to other poet’s is a poem found in notebook 5, which plays on Lermontov’s canonical poem ‘Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu’. It demonstrates that he was certainly able to write in dialogue with the canon if he so wished:

Выхожу во тьме я на дорогу,

Ночь густа как смоль,

Ни зги не видно мне!

Я совсем один

Но кажется порой

Будто близится во след мне

Кто-то в этой тьме.

Я не стар еще,

Но встреч не жду нежданных,

Я не жду слов радости, привета,

обращенных именно ко мне.

Слишком долго я желал увидеть свет

И пройти под ним пути остаток свой.

Но видно суждено брести

Наощупь, спотыкаясь в ночи

Никто вослед мне не пойдет,

Не услыхать мне радости слов,

Мне только бы пройти свой путь.

(где-то 15-20 июня, и конец декабря 1996)[27]

 

This poem does not appear among the typescripts, since it was written after they were produced, but it is in Azazello’s notebook of 1996. With its overt reference to Lermontov’s poem and its origin in a notebook, it stands out from his other poems. Here he uses the reference to invoke a tone of contemplation, to describe a point of reflection on the poet’s existential position, his feeling of loneliness yet also the intuition that he is not entirely without a companion or understanding in the world. Like Lermontov’s poem, here Azazello considers what his path through life in the future might hold, hoping modestly for the strength, forbearance, or opportunity to follow it to its end. It is perhaps significant that the poem comes so late – written after all the poems that he typed in 1991, its uniqueness may be related to the date of composition.

 

This poem is significant for us not so much because of the specific reference to Lermontov, but because it demonstrates that Azazello knew and was able to make reference to Russian poetry. His familiarity with classical Russian poetry is not surprising since he passed through the Soviet educational system, in which learning classical poems by heart would have formed a major part of literary studies. He was also well-read, pursuing interests through his reading as a way of developing his individual view of life that was often in contrast to Soviet norms and values. The fact that his poems exist for the most part without a dialogue with Russian Poetry is a strong indication of his view of his own writing: he is not involved with writing literature, but using poetry as a creative vehicle of expression. This approach to poetry is one commonly encountered, of course, in the use of poetry as therapy, or other situations in which the spectre of Literature does not loom in the background. It underscores that, since Azazello is not writing poetry for publication, or because he wishes to join the pantheon of Russian Poets, then any reading of his poetry needs to engage with his purpose in writing and his conception of poetry.[28] It is worth noting that in his journal Svoboda, which featured Azazello’s poems and the work of others, a similar attitude is found. By way of introduction to the selection of poems in volume 4, Diversant writes: ‘– как всегда, это не литература, просто несколько знакомых имен, фамилий’.[29] This article will trace the development of his poetry as his own life moved on from the earlier collective hippie culture of the 1980s to a more restricted social circle of drug-takers continuing into the post-Soviet years with some essential elements of the hippie lifestyle, with the hardships and the mixture of principles and compromises that entailed. It will read the poems in the context of this life, as expressions of an individual perception of the late Soviet world, but also of the mind-set and values to which he subscribed.

 

Azazello’s poems – form and themes

Given the liminal position of hippies in society and their clearly expressed rejection of Soviet society’s norms and values, it is not surprising that Azazello engages so little with Soviet or pre-revolutionary Russian literature. Both, ultimately, were identified with the school curriculum and Soviet institutions. It is true that for the Thaw generation, poetry was closely identified with the values of sincerity and openness, which they championed as part of the de-Stalinizing, liberalizing movements in culture under Khrushchev.[30] But by the time hippies such as Azazello had come of age, figures of the Thaw had too often been assimilated by the Writers’ Union, and no longer represented young poets, nor entailed a challenge to the status quo. There were undoubtedly friendships between some groups of underground writers of the 1970s and 1980s and circles of hippies: in Moscow, Ofelia was friends with Piatnitskaia, who was married to Mamleev for a time and this friendship would have brought her into contact with literary and artistic circles.[31] Another association for Ofelia was through her husband Igor’ Dudinsky, later a journalist, who also moved in Mamleev’s circles. The religious-philosophical seminar organized by Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, was another group where hippies were likely to have crossed paths with poets: underground circles were often fluid, attracting people with broadly esoteric and intellectual interests. While it is probably true that many hippies wrote poetry at some point or another, on the other hand, the number of hippies publishing poems in the samizdat journals was small.[32]

 

More than poetry, the hippies were engaged with music and lyrics, and above all Western music. The focus of hippies was decidedly on the West: on Western hippie style, books of gurus such as Castaneda, and most importantly the lyrics of their favourite groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Doors and Pink Floyd. Azazello’s notebooks contain many lyrics of rock music written out (e.g. Az 19b-1982 has many lyrics from Pink Floyd; Az09-1977 features single lines from the Rolling Stones). There are many lyrics written in English which appear to be Azazello’s own work – the English is not correct, and songs cannot be identified as any that he has attempted to transcribe. In Az16-1977, for example, there are a lot of these lyrics in English. They are quite different from anything he writes in Russian, suggesting that while his idiom for poetry in Russian is drawn, broadly, from poetry in Russian, his idiom for writing in English is probably solely rock lyrics. The lyrics in English are often structured around repetition, typical of songs, and contain many of the clichés of rock-and-roll.

 

The poems written in Russian, by contrast, are not very close in form to lyrics.[33] They are not without formal organization, but neither can they be said to be entirely metrical. Azazello clearly had a natural ear and sense of rhythm, and was able to write fluently with frequent rhyme and often metrical lines. Among the poems from the 1980s, for example, is a playful poem ‘Afro-skazka’ (IMG 0328) which imagines an African man almost being eaten by a crocodile. The poem openly acknowledges Kornei Chukovsky’s famous verse for children ‘Doktor Ai-Bolit’, in which the Doctor is carried to Africa to heal sick animals that are calling for him. Throughout Chukovsky’s poem the refrain ‘Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo!’ is repeated, naming the exotic destination that the doctor must struggle to reach. Kilimanjaro, Kalahari, Zanzibar are also mentioned, but repeated. The sound of ‘Limpopo’, and rhyming with Hippo are important in the creation of the playful tone. There is exoticism in some – but not all – of the diseases the animals are suffering from too, and also in the species of African animals the doctor attends to.

 

As he consciously echoes Chukovsky’s poem, Azazello foregrounds the association with children, and the naïve, exotic, and playful AiBolit. His first lines demonstrate that although his line length is varied, the rhythm and rhyme are accomplished:

В бородатой реке Лимпопо

сидит крокодил, ожидая его,

хи из янг Африкэн мэн,

идёт, ударяя в свой тамбурин,

идёт из Конго, идёт в Калахари,

бушмены и банту его по тамбурину узнали.

Ничего не замечая, вступает в воду

и сейчас крэкадайл пробует отнять его свободу.[34]

 

Azazello clearly is not concerned to produce syllabo-tonic verse, but he is competent in creating rhythm, with varying line length. The poem does not draw attention to its form, but form is integral to its effect. Here, there is adjacent rhyme, connecting closely related ideas such as the Limpopo and ‘him’ – the African man, the man and his tambourine, and entering the water and being eaten (ironically and euphemistically described as ‘losing his freedom’ here). Within the poetic line, too, there is structure such as the repetition of ‘idet’ in lines four and five. Azazello’s use of English in ‘Hi iz iang Afriken men’ marries the exotic image of the African man and the Limpopo with English language and its Western associations, creating an unexpected, interesting rhyme with ‘tambourine’.

 

While this short poem from the early 1990s is quite different from the Limpopo poem – it is a descriptive poem, without humour – it demonstrates again Azazello’s ability to manipulate form in poetry:

Луна кучерявится

среди туч.

ветер остр –

он могуч,

когда ловит

лунный луч

из-под тонных туч. (IMG_450)

 

The short line and short adjectives, together with enjambment throughout, create a laconic style which is the dominant feature of the poem. Its description of the moon seems a vehicle for the creation of the form, and not the other way round. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Azazello’s work is generally characterised by such a foregrounding of form. Most of the poems use form to organize the work, but not in a remarkable way; more important are the themes developed, and his reflective tone, which is sustained often across quite a number of poems written at a particular time, or even across a period of years.

 

Periodization

When it comes to examining the themes and preoccupations of Azazello’s work, it is helpful to understand the periodization of the extant poems, in order to consider the circumstances of a poem’s composition and to see it in the context of those contemporary to it. There are apparently two main sections to his body of work: the first contains the poems written before the glasnost era. Some are dated 1981, while others that apparently belong with them have no date, but are listed on one extant contents page, apparently of a collection. A distinct section, grouped in other manuscripts, seems to contain two collections ‘Смутное время’ and ‘Бойтесь Горилл’, as well as other poems.[35] There are significant differences between the two bodies of work, which are perhaps best introduced with a comment that Azazello made in relation to his poems in one interview:

A: Я считаю, у меня хорошие стихи пошли в начале 90-х.

И: Там таких нету…

A: Вернее, после больницы.

И: Когда вы из нее вышли?

A: В 89-м. Суть в чем заключается, почему я считаю, что они хорошие? Потому что я начал писать «я», а до этого было «мы, мы, мы». Редко там - «я пройду по горизонту, объятый пламенем заката». [36]

 

The earlier poems are indeed typically written from the collective ‘my’, but this is not indicative of Soviet collectivism. They are chiefly concerned with the definition and description of hippies, and hippie-related theme such as Western music and drug taking. It appears that Azazello at some point organized them into a collection, for which a typed page of contents is extant. The collection has three parts: ‘KTO MY’, ‘Skazki’, ‘Sagi’ and ‘Legendy’ (IMG 0352). The other poems, which make up the larger part of his poetic archive, are those written after he came out of incarceration in a psychiatric hospital (this happened over the years 1986–9); they seem to date predominantly from the early 1990s. As Azazello notes, these are written with an individual lyric persona, and they are characterized by a very different tone from earlier ones.

 

The earlier poems demonstrate clear preoccupation with aspects of hippie activities and culture, while the later poems and their dominant themes are more wide-ranging in their themes and preoccupations, probably prompted by the upheaval of the collapse of the USSR as well as events in Azazello’s own life. They are written in an often muted tone, are far more sophisticated in their imagery and language. They are no longer explicitly ‘hippie’ poems, although the poems continue to describe the sense of being apart from the mainstream of society and the lyric voice can be aloof.

 

Earlier ‘Hippie’ poems

Among Azazello’s papers is a hippie manifesto that he wrote with friends.[37] The manifesto begins with a series of five definitions which, although not written in verse, stand out formally from the remaining text:

37 There were some hippies who were active in producing manifestos and more political material. Iura Popov (Diversant) is perhaps the best-known; his papers can be found in the Wende Museum of Cold War History. Los Angeles. See Juliane Furst, ‘Flower Power and Developed Socialism: A Short Course in the History of the Soviet Hippie Movement and its Sistema. Part II: Maturity’ (unpublished typescript), p. 20.

мы с мозгом, свитым из пламени Солнца и кристаллов льда;

мы с глазами, охватывающими все горизонты;

мы с сердцем, извергающим Любовь и Мир;

мы с губами, искрящимися смехом;

мы с длинными волосами, опутавшими весь мир. (IMG 0344)

 

These images recall drawings in the notebooks, which often feature the sun, hippie faces, and especially hair. Interestingly, Azazello’s drawn hippies are almost never smiling, but otherwise, figures and faces such as this (Az13-1977-27) illustrate the feel of the poem in its expansiveness and the assertion of hippies active roles:

Among Azazello’s early poems we find a similar concern to define hippies, using key images for them such as light, summer, hair, flowers, colour, and sincerity. One of the most direct attempts at definition is found in the poem ‘My – eto svet’:

Мы – это свет,

свет струится из наших глаз в мир.

Мы вырастили сад волшебный в серых сумерках

и стали цветами радужными в этом саду.

Мы радуемся, видя своё отражение в тенях от луны,

солнечных зайчиках, на облаках.

Мы входим в наши глаза,

разливаемся жаркими волнами в крови,

рвёмся их сердец взрывами Лава,

удивляемся, видя себя и любим,

Я люблю тебя и мы любим всех нас.

Мы – океана волны, мы – наш сказочный мир,

мы – нежные цветы

и мы – свет, струящийся из наших ярких глаз в мир,

в наш мир и ничто не изменит этот мир,

мой и твой, 20

 

наш мир. (IMG 0343)

 

Again, the images here are often found in his pictures in the notebooks: hippies, eyes, the moon, flowers, and blood. This poem defines hippies in their own terms and in contrast with the rest of society –represented as the ‘grey dusk’ in which the hippies grow their magical garden. The images are reminiscent of the manifesto, and do not diverge from typical symbols of hippiedom which are repeated over and over in notebook doodles, hippie clothing, and are found in the aesthetic emphasised in photographs they took of each other. This overall picture of hippies is redolent of joy, innocence, freedom, and nature. In a similar vein, a poem entitled ‘Frend’ (a Russian rendering of the English word typical of hippie slang) defines hippies using a repetitive structure once again. The poetic voice defines a friend as one who has forgotten the appearance of coldness, who wants to look upwards to the clouds, who has climbed a mountain and seen the dawn, and so on.

 

These poems of definition do little more than name-check the stereotypes of the hippie aesthetic and lifestyle. They utilise only cliché phrases and ideas, do not present any particular interest in terms of poetic form, and as such represent probably the least interesting poems of Azazello’s work. They are a good point from which to start looking at other poems, however, not least because it seems possible that Azazello’s poetry writing began with these efforts. Their simplicity and lack of sophistication suggest they are early attempts.

 

The similarity between the manifesto and these ‘definition’ poems make it relatively easy to see the connections between them; it is possible to see other connections too between Azazello’s earlier poems and the activities and culture of the hippies to which he belonged. The project of writing the manifesto and the poems defining hippies chime with the creation of a hippie banner, made by Ophelia and her group ‘Volosy’ for the exhibition of non-conformist art in 1975.38 The banner, whose slogans read ‘World without borders’ and ‘Make hair everywhere’, was provocative against the background of Soviet norms and society, defining in terms of hippie identity, and creative. The idea of a banner even appears in Azazello’s poem ‘Dazhe padaia, my derzhim nashe znamia’; here, the hippies’ banner is not Ophelia’s sewn work of art, but the flower that the hippie holds as he walks through life:

Я смотрю на распустившийся цветок

/и это не только мак/,

да, клёвое очень наше знамя (IMG 0345)

Although the title seems to express defiance, with the image of the hippies holding aloft their flower banner even as they fall, the poem is not so much concerned with struggling, battling, or falling, but with the road the hippie takes through life, carrying his symbolic flower. We are told several times that the flower is not necessarily a poppy, underlining this poem is not about the specifics of drug-taking, but about defining the hippies and their way of life. The road the hippie walks is oxymoronically twisted yet straight, and is one of thousands spreading out before him:

Я смотрю вокруг на тысячу разбегающихся дорог,

по которым рвётся, мчится наше пламя.

И я иду по одной из этих дорог-стрел,

они прямые и извиваются (IMG 0345)

 

The hippie’s life, and road through life, is characterised by flowers, colours, light and flames, his road can be walked for centuries. The images chosen are again somewhat predictable; perhaps the most significant message here is the peculiar and privileged position of the hippie. While the rest of the world does not figure here, the descriptions all imply a comparison with the normal, everyday, Soviet life that does not share the variety, colour and above all potential that the hippie’s world contains. The Hippie transcends not only Soviet normality, but also rationality: his path is simultaneously straight and winding, he is not limited to one or the other.

 

Azazello’s most striking expressions of the brilliance and colour of the hippie world come in his psychedelic images; these are another parallel with the broader hippie culture in the USSR and in the West. The psychedelia aesthetic was strongly associated with Western hippie culture, as an 22

 

expression of the influence of psychedelic drugs on the mind. Azazello’s notebooks are full of psychedelic drawings, parallel to the images in the poems, probably influenced by artwork on album covers, other sources of information about Western hippies, but also by his own drug-taking experiences. The poems are often full of colour, with images that are in flux, transforming from one thing into another. Unlike the poems concerned to define hippies, here the imagery can be less saccharine and stereotypical. In ‘Dazhe padaia, my derzhim nashe znamia’, we find images of rainbow colours flooding his eyes , and a purple light on the horizon; in the poem typed below it, ‘Sirenevoe plamia tol’ko dlia nas’ (IMG 0345/330), a similar light is seen shining only for a collective, privileged ‘us’ – presumably hippies. And another short poem uses not colours, but images in a fluid way to create the impression of hallucination:

Белый сок падает с солнца большими каплями,

под кайфовым дождём я иду,

капли темнеют, когда летят вниз,

становятся коричневыми,

под жарким солнцем я торчу. (IMG 0342)

The image of juice dripping from the sun, becoming rain, and then darkening to brown is akin to a psychedelic or hallucinogenic vision. Azazello captures the fluid nature of the images, which morph into something else and disappear as quickly as they form. This quick succession of images and rate of transformation is found in later poems too, even when the tone and subject matter has changed significantly.

 

A similar quick succession of ideas and images is found in more narrative poems as well. Typically, ideas move quickly from one subject to another, progressing in a similar way to the psychedelic poem above:

Я оставил Землю,

чтобы полететь, когда взойдёт луна.

Два шага и одно усилие –

поплыла моя страна,

вверх стремится звёздная трава.

Воющий пёс

остался сзади и справа;

луна звала, луна была права –

ненавидимая земля

потеряла небо и меня.

я – звезда.

Увядает земная трава. (IMG 0327)

 

Visually this poem is akin to the kinds of psychedelic drawings found in the notebooks. With the rise of the moon, the hippie follows a starlit path away from Earth, rising above a howling dog below which remains behind, hated and abandoned below. The dominance of the moon, calling him as he leaps from Earth towards it rising, and the image of the hippie becoming as star in the firmament as the Earth fades, can be imagined in the style of Azazello’s pen drawings of thin hippies in bell bottoms detailed in the foreground and tiny details of a landscape in the background.[39] Such fluid images are found in drawings as well. In picture of figures and fantastic landscapes found in the notebooks, one element morphs into another, such as the plume on a knight’s helmet becoming an opium poppy, or faces whose features are made up of poppies, castles, winding roads and other shapes. The frequency with which the poppy and syringes appear in such drawings underline the close association with drug-induced states.

 

The hippies’ use of drugs, and the importance that altered states of mind assumed for them, is found in the poetry in Azazello’s psychedelic imagery, in images of the poppy as a symbol but also the source of opium, and also in direct references to taking drugs. A poem entitled ‘Oda’ describes injecting opium without recourse to descriptive or psychedelic imagery; it is unusual for concrete detail, rare in the other poems:

Ода

Я сижу на табуретке и беру контроль,

держу зубами крепче перетяжку,

игла упирается в веняк –

я чувствую маленькую боль,

в машину сгусток крови вытекает,

резиновый жгут соскальзывает с руки,

медленно на поршень нажимаю

и опия бежит, журчит в крови, -

горячий жар, глаза закрыты,

истыкан иглами с головы до ног,

да, опиум – это бог,

да, и я тоже бог.

Here we have a step-by-step description of injecting opium, in a poem where the metre is not regular but the rhyme scheme gives pattern and shape to the poem. In contrast to the poems defining hippies, with symbolic rainbow colours and flowers, sincerity and smiling, here we have the reality of the pursuit of ‘kaif’, central to Azazello’s hippie identity.[40] In Azazello’s drawings, as here in this poem, the syringe, the opium poppy, and taking drugs is paramount; this poem reflects the reality of the drug-taking, and also acknowledges the feeling of ‘kaif’ that the opium hit gives. Rather than emphasis on the brotherhood of hippies, heightened understanding, or the achievement of a higher reality – it is the feeling that he is God. This poem speaks not for all hippies, as those above do, but is written from his lyric ‘I’, which, with its less stereotyped view of the world and individual voice, will come to the fore in the later poems.

 

Defining the self

Azazello drew the same face and figure of a hippie in his notebooks over and over again, which is similar enough to his own to regard them as self-portraits. The drawings mirror the same impulse found in the poems, to define the individual poet hippie. Unlike the clichéd attempts at defining hippies in general, there are poems in which the hippie, or a similar figure, features in various guises. The poems entitled ‘Saga’, and ascribed to the 9th century, feature the figure of the knight, who is a version of Azazello commonly found in the notebooks. The drawings show him in armour, on horseback, armed and especially in various helmets. In these poems he observes a battle in which knights are dying, the raven Munin, from Norse mythology, comes to feed on the corpses; and the scent and sight of blood and carnage is everywhere. There is an apocalyptic sense of everything crashing down in the last lines:

Падёт пропащий Вавилон, обрушатся крутые стены, 25

зайдет звезда за горизонт и будут звери немы,

сгорит закат до черноты, не выдавив ни капли влаги,

лишь тусклый луч блестнёт вдали,

и только для того, чтоб увидали.

 

The knight recurs in Azazello’s drawings, but figures only rarely in the poems, and we may speculate as to his significance. The saga poems where the knight is found are pastiches of medieval accounts of battles, and there is no obvious connection between the poetic knights and hippies; in the drawings, however, poppies often feature, as well as bell bottoms or other hippie clothing. Below the poem ‘Saga’, there are a couple of parenthetical comments which at once draw attention to the playful status of the texts. The first continues the pastiche, adding that the last lines are a later addition of the translator; following this, is the comment that the century could be changed. This second comment acknowledges the fictitious nature of the text, and also opens up the possibility for reading the knight and medieval battle as metaphorical.

 

Like the drawings of hippie-like knights, here the division between the sagas and the world of their hippie creator is intentionally blurred. Certainly, it would be possible to read into the images the values of sacrifice and suffering for a cause, and to see a self-portrait that underscores principles and refusal to compromise values. It may simply be, however, that knights and medieval battles fascinated Azazello and featured in hallucinogenic experiences, which he expressed in his drawings and poems. Azazello is not alone in his interest in medieval imagery; the young Leningrad poet Viktor Sosnora published his collection Vsadniki in 1969, in which all the poems are dedicated to the medieval theme, and he in turn was probably influenced by the work of Dmitrii Likhachev, whose studies of medieval Russian literature published from the 1950s brought the subject into view, and opened up a quite apolitical area of literary study.[41] It may have been that this revival of interest in medieval literature, and its association with apolitical and intellectual culture, made an impression on Azazello.

 

The genres of the fairytale, legend and saga, which he indicates in his table of contents even if we do not have all the poems listed there, share in common that they are originally oral, traditional tales, and that they were often told to children. The hippies’ identification with children and also with an organic, original and folk culture, may be significant here for understanding Azazello’s interest in specifically these genres. Other poems are written in a deliberately childlike tone, and images of nature, spring, and the sun are common. The cycles of the seasons replace the calendar year, and the poems celebrate the coming of spring, which symbolised for hippies the beginning of travelling within the Sistema and the flowering of the poppy.[42] The poem below, for example, not only celebrates spring, but describes a very personal relationship to this change in season. It also features a psychedelic chain of images, in which the sun is likened to a flower growing, and morphs into many colours across the sky:

Весна подходит ко мне и целует меня в глаза,

берёт за руку, молчит, на небо смотря искоса,

запёкшийся цвет огня – цветок вырастает вверху,

откинута голова назад,

я на огонь смотрю:

красный, оранжевый, белый, бордовый –

по небу идут круги,

открыты широко глаза,

над головой собрались разные радуги.

И небо, собрав столько цвета,

раздулось в мыльный пузырь – пульсирует и дрожит,

мы стоим и смотрим на это,

Весна ничего не говорит, её рука на моей лежит.

 

Here the syntax is simple, the iteration of colours childlike, and the relationship to nature personal: these elements contribute to a naïve tone to this account of probably drug-influenced vision of the sun. As such, the poem marries many key associations and preoccupations of the hippies; it is an example of how even in the less programmatic poems from this period, Azazello is writing poems that we can describe as specifically hippie works. Their themes and images, their psychedelic chains of images, their symbolism and tone all contribute to a childlike, yet also drug-influenced psychedelic effect. Hippies, their way of life, drug-taking, and their particular view of the world form the subject of his writing.

 

The Later Poems

The earlier poems are in many cases found in draft form in the notebooks dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and thus coincide with the period when Azazello came to know and later was living with Ophelia. During this period he was active in hippie circles, frequented hippie places, and was educated in the ways and history of hippies by Ophelia. That relationship broke down probably in 1982, and it may be that he ceased writing at that time, or earlier; certainly, there do not seem to be any poems from the period after 1982 but before Azazello’s incarceration in the psychiatric hospital in 1986, where he would spend 3 years. The next indications of dating in the poems comes in the form of references to the psikhushka, or psychiatric prison, and references to his relationship with Irina, which began at some point after his release in 1989 (their daughter Tania was born in 1992). The years after the psikhushka are characterised by a marked shift in the tone, themes, and voice in the poems, and therefore mark the beginning of the period of ‘later poems’, which make up the greater part of his poetic archive. These poems are greater in number and more sophisticated and accomplished as poems; we also have some of Azazello’s own comments about them, written at the time, which are helpful in starting to read them in the context of his life and purpose in writing.

 

By this time, in the last years of the USSR and the early 1990s, the Hippie movement in the USSR had undergone many changes: for many, the movement had soured when the group around Solntse had descended into drunkenness and violence,[43] relationships and the birth of children added complications and sometimes tragedy,[44] and for many, as they grew older, the inevitable sadness and disillusionment associated with the fates of drug addicts set in. The death of Ofelia, which was probably an open secret, due to a drug overdose in the early 1990s is one example of the kind of tragedy associated with the often dysfunctional lives of the drug-addicted Hippies.[45] Their dependence on procuring illegal drugs endangered them through the substances themselves and the ways that they had to try to procure them, but also excluded them, in the case of overdose, from the health services. It seems likely that Ofelia’s companions on the night of her death did not seek medical assistance for her when she overdosed because of the fear of state punishment, and disposed of her body in a canal for the same reason.[46]

 

Another feature of life was incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, along with dissidents and others.[47] One poem in particular makes specific reference to the psikhushka, and it seems possible that it was composed, at least in draft, while Azazello was held there:

1

когда-нибудь отсюда выйду я не обернувшись

забуду про лечение больных

забуду слово врач похожее на враг

забуду что я был не человек

забуду здесь

2

передо мною будет путь

уйти в леса дремучие

средь гор высоких скрыться

в густых туманах поселиться

обрести покой в покое пребывать

с зимой под снег за сном здоровым лезть

и после сна адамом по земле гулять

от всех скрываясь

и природой наслаждаясь

3

или скорее в мегаполис

где буду я невидим среди стен

найти средь переулков тупики 29

 

и между башен башенок укрыться

в тумане городских огней

с работы на работу каждый день

зависнуть в келье между небом и землёй

этаж 15-20ый

зимой тесней страстней

рефлектор обнимать

и ждать и ждать чего-то

ждать

чего не будет или что прошло

и навсегда и никогда (IMG 0525)

 

Here Azazello’s lyric voice is more personal and confessional. He is writing about himself, and not primarily as a hippie. In the first section he describes the psikhushka, which is symbolised by the treatment he receives and the doctor’s attitude, which makes him feel sub-human. The second section imagines an escape to nature which has strong associations with hippie ideals, but more fundamentally here is associated with Adam and the experience of the world anew. He imagines a place for him in nature. The third section describes what in reality is likely to happen: return to the city, to life there in an apartment in winter, to an unfulfilled state. The elegiac reflection in the final lines – on waiting for what has passed or will never come to be – is typical of the way that these later poems question the meaning of life at a more profound level than in the earlier works. In particular, they engage with the question of how we live our modern lives, and what our emotional responses to the world might reveal. They are intensely personal: the idea of a collective identity no longer seems to be a theme.

 

The turn inwards in these later poems, and emergence of an individual lyric voice may well have been prompted by a watershed time for Azazello that came in the years at the end of the USSR. This watershed is not so much political as personal.[48] The end of the USSR coincided with and, no doubt, contributed to the death of many hippies from Azazello’s circle. Not only Ofelia, but many others at this time fell victim to drink or drugs overdoses. It seems very likely that the loss of many contemporaries would have prompted serious reflection in those still living. As we see in a short piece of prose dated the end of the 25th October – it is not clear which year –Azazello is currently very preoccupied with himself:

Я и моё отношение к самому себе занимают значительное место в мыслях и крайне мешает меня. надеюсь, это последняя попытка самоутвердиться в этом мире, я уже достаточно вкусил плодов побед и поражений без/имянного демона, которого пробуют переводить, как радость или счастье. я, как мотылёк, обречённый лететь на огонь; по сути, не так легкомысленно, как звучит. Я получил ту определённость, которую желал, я получил правду. (IMG 0441)

 

Not only does this seem to establish his field of enquiry, it also underscores that in essence he sees himself as unchanged: his decision to become a hippie was turning towards understanding the truth, as opposed to the untruthful Soviet society and way of life he was born into. Now, as then, he sees himself as searching for what he believes to be truth and a truthful way of life. In these later poems and prose excerpts, a significant new theme is Christianity, which presumably formed part of this search. But Azazello’s search is not only for an overarching meaning to life. It is also, it seems to me, about living true to himself, which may have been influenced by not Orthodox Christianity, but the Baptists, of whom there were many in underground circles. Another short prose piece, dated very precisely as written on 12 May 1990, shows a similar preoccupation, and a rejection of media, the news, specifically the television. Significantly here, Azazello dismisses post-Soviet television – broadcasting at a time when the media had been freed from Soviet censorship – as repeating all that he heard 30 years before; he does not see the seismic shifts in politics at this time as any kind of realisation of hippie ideals of freedom, as one might have anticipated. His attention turns inwards at this time, not outwards to the changing society around him; his poems do not engage with elections, revelations about Soviet history, or even the appearance of more Western culture that characterised these years of glasnost’ and perestroika:

МЫСЛИ ПРО СЕБЯ ВСЛУХ И НАОБОРОТ

Я продал телевизор, избавился от этого надоеды-гипнотезёра, достал. радио тоже куда-то заныкал. хватит, я сыт информацией до отвала, в прямом смысле, такое иногда начинаешь гнать: ого-го.

вот я в гостях, один, на флэту телевизор, включаю – буш говорит через тридцать лет будем на марсе/ и на марсе будут яблони цвести/ в бейруте опять стреляют резкое понижение курса доллара за последние 28 месяцев глупый кот снова дерёт мне

штанину ураган в индии что вы испытывали играя на инструменте который держал в руках сам великий моцарт новые последствия чернобыля чехословакия уже федерация всё-таки мы рвали сегодня черёмуху запах-то запах спорт погода на завтра. ну и что? что такого дал мне этот ящик за полчаса? я слышал это и двадцать лет назад, только некоторые имена и названия поменялись, а так та же самая параша, что и была. я способен к осмысленным действиям, несмотря на катящиеся на меня телеги и диагнозы; избавление от тв доказывает это и я рад за себя.(IMG 490)

 

The lack of punctuation here means Azazello’s list of programmes on the television run into each other as they do on the television schedule. His conscious rejection of this mainstream media and all that it is concerned with is consistent with dropping out as a hippie all those years before: he still asserts an independent mind and the ability to take his own path through life which differs from what is normal in the society around him.

 

At this time when he turns away from the media, the television, when he has been released from incarceration in the psychiatric prison, and when Soviet society is undergoing the changes under Gorbachev which he finds apparently sees as relatively superficial, Azazello began to write again. Another prose excerpt typed up among the poems in his archive we find his following comment, rare for its reflection on writing:

за прошлый, но не прошедший год я написал достаточное количество стишков, себе же на удивление, возможно, мои отношения с ириной повлияли, Бог весть, но заметил по стишкам свои настроения, их метаморфозы, – помню начало года /меня достал этот крик…/, тусовки-перепитии/страдание отрабатывает счастье – эта мысль сейчас/, на каком слове остановлюсь / “вначале было слово..”/, а пока кончилось 28 декабря, по комнате летает божья коровка/их в этом году много/, ёлка блестит и вот стих: (IMG 0435)

 

Here there is a strong suggestion of the place of poetry in Azazello’s life: he writes in his poetry self-reflection, a kind of poetic diary. In the poems of the early 1990s, there are some clusters of poems written intensively, over days or within a couple of months which seem to be written in parallel with his notebooks of the time, which also take the form of a diary.[49] His comment that he is surprised at how much he has written suggests that perhaps this comes after a hiatus; it is not clear whether his relationship with Irina, which he feels has influenced his writing, has been a positive or negative experience at this point.[50]

 

The later poems can be read in the context of poetry and art by hippies. It is also productive to see them as poems of the early 1990s. Azazello’s diary-style notebooks 10a and 10b are testament to the disorder and chaos of his life at the time, due not only to his hippie lifestyle, of course, but also to the disruption in Russian society. His experiences of Russia’s chaotic years were coloured by his relationship with Irina and their subsequent broke up, and especially his relationship with his daughter by her, Tanya. The poems, mostly written in one sitting and in a drug-induced high, capture moments of reflection and insight at this tumultuous time: they can express raptures at the beauty of nature, a preoccupation with death as an end point for us all, and in particular emotions associated with night that are distinctly deeper and more resonant than those of the day:

в час ночной

все звуки тают медленней,

чем в свете дня,

и всё гуще дрожь

кожи старого барабана

к утру

/конец окт./ (IMG 460)

 

His night-time perception is privileged and profound, represented here by the longer resonance of sound at night and the deeper vibration of the drum skin in the hours approaching dawn. Many of the poems which have an indication of the date when they were written are specified as having been composed at night. Night is also a time for drug-taking, which may also play a role in this heightened perception. Azazello’s poems return again and again to this tone and mood, often associated with night and with the poet’s own particular, individual view of the world.

 

A poem written in March, most likely in the early 1990s, uses nature as a symbol of a genuine level of life, which Azazello implies is more fundamental than current events or other preoccupations. It begins with a heavy fall of snow, and extends into a meditation on what knowledge and understanding about the world is really significant:

‘НУ ЧТО ТЕБЕ НАДО, ДУРАК, А?’

идёт сильный снег. ветер с запада.

что это – метель, вьюга или пурга?

каменные стены города ограничивают

наше знание окружающего мира.

кроме ворон, воробьёв, голубей и ещё нескольких,

сколько мы знаем птиц?,

не просто имя, а так, чтобы узнать;

то же с цветами, деревьями и прочими чудесами природы.

мой Бог,

я не помню, когда последний раз видел грибной дождь. (IMG 539)

 

It’s certainly possible to see connections between this poem and hippie ideals, but the expression is personal and reflective. Instead of defining himself as different from others because of his choice to join the hippie way of life, there is a broader reflection on how far modern urban life has become removed from knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Indeed, Azazello seems to see that he himself has experienced this distancing from nature. His image of the city as walling up its inhabitants, cutting them off from the nature, appears in other poems, too; the snow coming into the city seems to connect him to nature and remind him of what the city cuts out.

 

In the penultimate line, Azazello addresses God, which is another element common to many of the later poems. At some point he converted to Christianity, which was a path not uncommon for hippies; he probably took this step in the late Soviet period, possibly after his release from the psikhushka. In a page of prose included in this collection of poems, he describes himself as ‘baptist, nosiashchii katolicheskii krest i skloniaiushchiisia k pravoslaviiu’. In notebook 10a, from 1993-1994, we find him describing how a priest Father Arkadii from the Church of the Tsarevich Dmitrii listened to his confession.[51] This church is situated at the city hospital where Azazello had been treated for a broken arm, and demonstrates that Azazello did attend church at times, though he asserts in the notebook that he is going to this one more rarely. It must be said, however, that there are relatively few overtly Christian poems, or poems where Christianity is the main subject. It seems that Azazello’s belief encompassed a vision not narrowly Christian, but including a strong identification with nature. In a poem from February in this collection, for example, he describes an agitated spiritual state and identifies this with the moon and stars keeping him awake:

Нет, мне не понять эту ночь,

завертело, закружило, унесло прочь.

мне не уснуть, пока луна не спит

и звёзды пусто смотрят с высоты.

мне не уснуть, пока душа не спит,

всё ожидая, что придёт покой. (IMG 535-536)

 

This explanation of a spiritual state as being influenced by the moon and stars belongs to a whole worldview, common among hippies and other alternative beliefs, which sees humans as influenced by and part of a larger cosmos; the pathetic fallacy here emphasises the closeness of God and nature. In the following month, March, which would coincide with Lent, we find poems more specifically Christian. In one poem, typed up several times in the archive, the lyric voice describes the addressee nailing himself to the cross. At one level, this suggests a meditation on Christ’s Passion; on another, however, there is a strange interaction described between the addressee and kind onlookers:

удивление от камни,

брошеного в самого себя – больно!

когда одной рукой

прибиваешь другую к перекладине,

стараешься не думать

как прибьёшь вторую.

добрые люди кругом, кто-нибудь поможет,

постоит некоторое время и посмотрит

как ты желал быть просто чистым,

отвернётся, плюнет и уйдёт. (IMG 539)

 

The inflicting of pain on oneself is presented as problematic here. Both images – of throwing stones at yourself and nailing your own hand to the cross – are association with Christ’s suffering, yet here, the conundrum of being unable to nail your second hand yourself is somewhat absurd. It seems to suggest a metaphor for, and criticism of, actions that draw attention and seek to represent a person as worthy or virtuous. The reaction of the onlooker, who will help you, is to observe for a while how you wished to be pure, and then turn away, apparently in disgust. This reads like a criticism of if not the Christian creed of selflessness, at least pretentious actions intended to appear as such.

 

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this and other poems written in this later period, which is in contrast with the earlier poems, is the way that they embrace complexity. The poem above interrogates the Christian association between pain, suffering, and virtue, not necessarily dismissing the whole Christian model, yet able to point to problems with it. In questioning motives for self-sacrifice and entertaining the possibility that such actions are open to criticism, this poem shares with others the concern to understand one’s true self. Azazello’s project of understanding himself and finding the truth can be seen reflected in the explorations of quite a few of his poems from this period. In ‘памятуя ночью’, dated ‘17 November, night’, he describes how the night time enables him to understand and see himself more clearly than in the day. Towards the end of the poem he describes looking at himself:

я в ночь как на себя гляжу,

поймать пытаясь за окном глаза,

когда опять в темноте замечаешь

остервенелый взгляд, а в нем слеза,

и отсвет дальних фонарей на ней

и на снежинках медленных и редких. (IMG 489)

 

Here, looking into the night, he looks at himself. The series of images that he perceives – eyes, a frenzied expression, and a tear, which contains the reflections of far-off streetlamps, and the same reflection in snowflakes falling – suggest his catching a glimpse of himself reflected in a window at night, and symbolically seeing himself with deeper understanding. There is no final resolution; the different elements of the picture, the layering of reflection over the night outside, seem to coalesce into a moment of insight. On the one hand he sees anger and sadness contained within one image, different sides of the same person; on the other, the streetlights are reflected both in his tear and in the snowflakes, creating a connection between himself and the outside world. The last three lines of the poem assert that it is only at night, free from what he terms the ‘husk’ of the day, the outer casing hiding what lies within, that he can see himself as he truly is.

 

The idea of continuity of the self is closely related to reflections on ageing and change. In later poems we often find acknowledgement or awareness of the passing of time – Azazello looks back, often, and tends towards summing up life, weighing up his experiences, drawing significances from them. Not all these poems are negative and they do not reject Azazello’s choices in life or his hippie past. There are poems on the subject of the natural world that are preoccupied above all with atmosphere and beauty of night time, early morning, and especially the cycles of the seasons. In a poem about September, for example, he describes the beauty of the night’s stars, the caress of its cold, and the sense that such endless nights afford time a chance to rest after summer:

так бесконечны ночи в сентябре –

для времени всего лишь повод

отдохнуть после лета немного

в тиши без края ночью в сентябре (IMG 506)

 

For Azazello, the seasons held also strong associations with key events in his life – for example his meeting with Ophelia in spring time – and his poetic descriptions of nature are often imbued with associated emotions. This preoccupation with the passing of time, the cycles of seasons repeating, and preoccupation with memory also underscore his awareness of his own mortality, which in the later poems surfaces quite regularly. In the following poem, for example, he looks backwards in a moment that is both melancholic and philosophical:

День прожит, понят, позабыт,

но в памяти еще звучит

смутным намёком на прошлые дни,

потом окажутся будущими они.

утром солнце резко слепило глаза,

в полдень жаркое золото по звёздам узнал.

я миру благодарен,

что мимо меня не прошёл,

кто счастлив, тот печален,

от Бога никто не ушёл. (IMG 474)

 

The poem’s theme is the bittersweet nature of life, the topsy-turvy unpredictability that characterises our existence. Its acceptance of life with its ups and downs, and the gratitude for existence again chimes with the Christian themes of some poems, and here finds explicit reference in the last line.

 

Azazello’s appreciation of the world, and especially the natural world, is a part of his poetry’s theme of his individual perception. It is akin to the themes of being alone, and of finding truth and insight. What emerges is an uncompromising, strong sense of his individuality and independence. We see this in a poem on his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, ‘Odinochestvo moi udel’, which describes him as defending himself behind a shield of isolation (IMG 527). His independence and isolation also comes through in a poem such as ‘skol’ko smotriu vokrug’, in which he sets up a contrast between the world around him that he never ceases to wonder at, and his fellow humans, who ‘repeat today their yesterday and tomorrow’:

Сколько смотрю вокруг,

устал удивляться не вдруг;

но удивление не прошло

перед миром меня родившим

и давшим на время приют.

устал удивляться на людей,

повторяющих сегодня

свой вчерашний и завтрашний день.

пусть влекут их спячка и уют,

ни себя, ни мира они не поймут. (IMG 466)

 

Here his isolation is not because he is in a prison, but because his view of life is so different from that of others, who do not understand or appreciate the world around them. The implication is that his ability still to wonder at the world sets him apart from the masses who are tempted by ‘sleep and comfort’, apparently the antithesis of seeing the world in its true state.

 

It is not much of a stretch to see in this phrase ‘sleep and comfort’ something like Marx’s description of an opium for the people: Azazello sees many people as in some way pacified and unable or unwilling to see beyond mass media or the trivialities of everyday life. He, it follows, is set apart from others and from the mainstream of society by his greater level of insight than average people and his heightened understanding, both of which hippies believed they gained through taking drugs. In the 1970s and 1980s the hippies rejected Soviet doctrine in just this way, and privileged their own insight and understanding which they believed that drugs could lead them to. It is notable that in the early 1990s, Azazello continues to see most of society as duped and severely limited in their perception of reality, and sets himself apart from it. Above all, we see his determination to achieve his own freedom by staying outside the system to a large extent, so while the later poems are not explicitly about hippies and their way of life, they still express the hippie rejection of mainstream life and characterise Azazello as being just as independent and unconventional as the hippies were. There is a sense of self-justification in his writings: the poems that explore moments of insight, emotions reaching for an understanding of the world on a large scale, represent his view as privileged and also, by implication, hard won. It is only by living a life uncompromisingly independently, by insisting on values that preclude a comfortable and unthinking life, that you can reach a higher level of understanding and appreciate fully life’s beauty and pathos. Certainly we can read in the poems, written for his daughter to read later, a strong message of a life that was not perfect but represented authenticity. Though the hippies’ lives were so often blighted with sadness and even tragedy, Azazello’s lyrics of the hard years in the early 1990s continue to assert the values that led him to grow his hair long and leave the Soviet mainstream over two decades earlier.