I’ve lived here for over 3,5 years (on August 30th 2008 it will be 4 years since I came to Russia) but I’ve only spent one day in Moscow, not counting all of those innumerous times that I’ve traveled through the capitol by plane or train. On the one day I spent in Moscow I was shown around town by a Siberian businessman [who was later to name his Omsk-based company Esomo, a word that I made up] and he took me to the The State Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum. He explained to me that it was the best museum in town, and even though the museum that I really had wanted to visit on my one day in Moscow was The State Dostoevsky Museum, I agreed and together we spent over three hours in the building where Mayakovsky used to live in the Lubyanka Passage in downtown Moscow. I don’t regret this visit, not the least, quite on the other hand – I stood still on the spot where the poet had shoot himself dead for several minutes in silence without knowing how to handle the situation. It was an enormous moment, a terrible moment, a moment that contained as much fear as astonishment as confusion and a feeling of never being able to comprehend this. I guess not everyone experiences such a metaphysical sensation as I did there, and even without it the Mayakovsky Museum is well worth a visit, no matter if you love his art or not. Even if you hate everything that has to do with Mayakovsky, and can’t stand even one line of his poetry or as much as a glance at his propaganda posters, humble yourself enough to drop in for fifteen minutes and those precious fifteen minutes of your life will not be lost. I suppose most people who grew up in the Soviet Union, for understandable reasons, can only learn to love Mayakovsky after overcoming some difficulties, one of them being seeing his name everywhere – улицы Маяковского here, парки Маяковского there, библиотеки Маяковского everywhere and so on and so forth. And after all his ‘communistic poems’ written in the 20’s that proclaimed a new world based on an ideal that was impossible to believe in after seeing it fail in reality later in the 20th century, there is a great need of a reconsideration of his art now in the 21st. As the ‘revolutionary poet’ Mayakovsky became State Property after his death and remained so during many years, something that forced school children to recite his poetry by heart according to the official program instead of finding him on their own, instead of coming upon his poems printed in a small red edition in the library on some dusty shelf on a slow Saturday and sit there for hours on the window sill, lost among poetry and mesmerized by the rhythm, by the sentences, by the words, by their meaning. (In Russia I have come to know that the official program on literature in Russian schools tend to kill any kind of love for the Russian classics among this country’s kids – I guess anyone who is forced to read Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky all in one year at 15 is bound to grow up to hate «Рудин» and «Анна Каренина» and «Братья Карамазовы». But that’s another discussion for another day!) I believe that every poet has to be a private poet. There can be no State Poets. I believe that to be able to love a poet and his or her poetry, you have to find him or her on your own. Their words must speak solely to you, and be almost your own, or even closer to your skin than your own words can ever be… I know not everyone agrees with this, but this is my firm opinion – poetry is made for those slow Saturday afternoons when the sun seems to have a dusty glow or when it won’t stop raining and you find those tainted and tattered but old and beloved copies of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Yesenin, Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Chyutchev or someone not Russian at all but just as brilliant, like, for example Allen Ginsberg, who will take you into their poetry and only let you go at dusk…

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