The poet Alexander Kushner

For over half a century, Alexander Kushner is considered one of the most significant figures in Russian poetry. What keeps the reader's attention to this author for such a long period of time? Let's try to figure this out.

Biography Facts

Alexander Semenovich Kushner was born in 1936 in the northern capital. If we accept for the axiom the assertion that the place of birth and the small Native land have a significant significance in the fate of man, then for the poet this statement is even more obvious. Childhood passed in an intelligent Leningrad family, which in many ways predetermined the future choice of the path.

Philological education at the Pedagogical Institute named after Herzen and further work by the teacher in the specialty preceded the coming to the big literature. It should be borne in mind that Alexander Kushner, as a poet, began long before that. The young man wrote poetry in primary school. This was for him a way of expressing his feelings and thoughts.

"Times do not choose"

From the first steps in literature Alexander Kushner declared himself as a strong professional with his recognizable and uncharacteristic voice. His poetry was initially far from the ordinary and everyday realities of Soviet life. It is impossible to find any "socialist realism" in it. The poet always turned his lines somewhere on top of everyday life, meditating and exploring timeless phenomena, images and meanings. That is why he managed to say his word in Russian literature.

Some of his lines have become classic classics. It is difficult today to find someone who would not have known that "Times do not choose, they live and die." Among other things, many of his poems became bardic songs and sound very good under the guitar. This is despite the fact that Alexander Kushner, whose photo is traditionally decorated with collections of bardic poetry, never composed special texts for vocal performance. As, however, never opposed to the performance of his poems in musical accompaniment. Anyway, the author's song became another unexpected facet of his work.

St. Petersburg in the poet's work

In Russian poetry, even since the golden nineteenth century, two main lines have been distinctly traced. Very conditionally they are designated as "the Petersburg and Moscow schools". One of them is characterized by breadth, recklessness and vivid imagery, and for another - the severity of style and fidelity to the classical principles of harmony and composition. Alexander Kushner is a poet of the St. Petersburg tradition. Moreover, he is one of the brightest representatives of the Soviet and post-Soviet historical period.

Despite the fact that the specific realities of the Northern capital do not so often flash in his poems, Alexander Kushner without Petersburg is unrepresentative. The city is literally dissolved in its images and constantly echoes with the poems of great predecessors - Blok, Annensky, Gumilyov, Akhmatova and Mandelstam. With St. Petersburg, the poetry of Alexander Kushner unites the unified architectonics of Russian classicism. It exists and develops in a spiritual space that is one with this city.

Alexander Kushner and Joseph Brodsky

Two outstanding contemporaries were born and took place as poets on the banks of the Neva River at about the same time. For a long time, they were united by personal friendship and creative competition. However, the relationship of the two poets was by no means always smooth and conflict-free. Of course, everyone felt in another person of comparable size. The friendship of the poets continued after the forced emigration of Brodsky. Dialogue of them was never interrupted, only passed into an epistolary form.

The future Nobel laureate devoted two poems to his friend, and Kouchner - a whole poetic cycle. The sudden death of Joseph Brodsky in January 1996 was a hard shock for Alexander Kushner. Only a year before, Brodsky had been conducting his friend's poetic evening in New York. This meeting with the readers was brilliant and left vivid memories to all those present.

Children's verses by Alexander Kushner

A lot of attention in his work, Alexander Kushner devotes poetry to the youngest. His children's poems are not only widely published and read, but also present in the form of songs in performances and cartoons. The poet does not consider the children's audience to be secondary. Moreover, he is sure that a person can not form a full-fledged personality without constant communication with samples of high literature. Indeed, it is in childhood that a person is particularly susceptible to everything that he sees and hears. All this is of decisive importance for the formation of both personality and destiny. And such a position finds a response from a young audience. People who were born in the third millennium, meet in the poems of the poet from the last century something close to him. Alexander Kushner for them is not a stranger.