На берегах Голубой Лагуны. Константин Кузьминский и его Антология. Сборник исследований и материалов

9 years passed. I am 35 now. I had to leave my own country (as many of us, but not all). Well, it happened so, that for the past 15 years I had everything: my friends were the painters, my pupils were the poets, I was a poet myself and women were in my heart. Unhappily, I made several unofficial exhibitions of Ld painters, unhappily I collected something about 100 poets of Ld for the past 20 years and when I stopped drinking (if you are able to remember our “meeting”, you can as well remember that I smelled cogniac. I cannot forgive myself till now, that those 40 minutes you were waiting in the palace for somebody knowing languages – Ksenia Pavlovna it was, I was drinking cogniac between guiding groups!) – I lived as a poet and a poet I was – but when I stopped (and it happened occasionally, without my wish!), I looked around my room. About 50 Ld and M painters, their works were hanging on the walls, and the same it was with the poets and novelists – but the manuscripts were in a chaos, thousands of them. And I began to work.

You must forgive me, Mr. Boll, but if you read the letter up to this place, please, read it up to the end. A lot of people are speaking about their love to Dostoevsky, a lot of professors, specialists and other are eating his defenceless flesh – but none of them is interested in those, who were bred by Dostoevsky, who are flesh from flesh of him, because they are – Russian writers. Should I explain you, who met Solzhenitsyn, thrown out of his own country, to you, who comes to the USSR “to visit your friends-dissidents” and not the “brothers of the pen”, anything about Russian art? You know well how it is.

I came in the world totally unknown to me. Its inhabitants are the same people, why should I ask questions? But they are. I had to leave my own country. I didn’t hesitated. But here am I – one of those hundreds and thousands of unknown Russian artists and I came here not for my own sake, but – for them. If the questions was in my own manuscripts – well, I have friends and connections on the West since 1967.1 made a book “The Living Mirror (Five Young Poets of Leningrad)” a long ago, it was published by Doubleday, mostly made by S. Massie (her husband wrote “N & A”, they are my friends). But the question is wider than my problems, which are privat.

During the past year, before my departure, I made something about 20 books. There were three anthologies (14+14 poets of two generations and 23 novelists – about 1200 pages), there were catalogues of three exhibitions of Ld painters (most of them are my friends), there were the books of my “pupils”, the poets, made with the help of mine, there were photos, type-records of 30 poets, microfilms, etc.

I knew, what for I was collecting them, printing the books. I knew what I was doing, standing with my wife at the Netherlands embassy in Moscow with 12 kg of documents (12 kg of names, work). But when I passed the custom house (nothing except old “Underwood” typewriter had I with me, that was my instrument permitted me to do all my work and still helps me) with my wife and a dog, presented to me by my friend, when I was met by Sochnut in Vienna, was fed, given money and place to live – then I became upsetdown. I spent here in Wien 2 months already (July, 9 it was when I left Russia), my friends came from different countries to meet me, helped me, I am writing my first novel – 100 pages are done already – but what? What? Why am I writing you?