Сергей Гражданкин
Geydar Jemal "Grazhdankin and the “taste of new human relations”
[статья из сб. "Soviet Rock", Прогресс 1990]
From a warm bath to the Last Judgement. Grazhdankin
The "schizoid world" and its atmosphere are inconceivable without this man. In the final count, stars and planets are moving in space. Sergei Grazhdankin epitomized the space of a fantastic cosmos that emerged in the heart of Khrushchev's Moscow. His artistic mission lay in creating a special link between the citizens of the "schizoid" world. Therefore, the main thing to him was the aftermath of a new, emancipated relationship.
Grazhdankin pioneered the "schizoid ballad". His lyrics were accepted unhesitatingly, for such was the magnetic force of something that facilitated a transition from the geometry of normal life to the schizoid dimension.
Typical of Grazhdankin is a poem projecting the existence of another person. In such a case he would say bluntly: "I am not the author, he is the one that stands behind it."
I will never again tread the grass with my bare feet
Never again will I catch butterflies
I will never again punch a fat bourgeois
With my big proletarian fist
I don’t want to do guessing
About when I die here
Tomorrow I’ll set off a bullet in my head
And in the morning
A bear will ramble onto my place
He will sit down at my piano
And a plane will fly by
Into silly, silly wilderness.
Of course, this is "Mamleyev", only refracted through Grazhdankin's sentimentality with his acute sensation of special childish loneliness. His intuition of the infantile leads the poet to an understanding of fear and spiritual disintegration. True, Grazhdankin's plunge into existential depths is always assuaged by a special mental warmth that bears a tinge of hallucination:
In winter, when the trees are asleep,
I lay dead on the snow
Yellow windows are flickering around me
And snow flakes are falling, and I...
I am so strange, all icy
They cany me, they carry me on and out
From a warm bath - to my repose.
Grazhdankin consciously exploits a kind of egocentrism that exists in the mind in the form of ready-made images. What drank, pitying himself, lying on the snow and holding up his face to the falling snowflakes, hasn't pictured himself as dead? Grazhdankin employs sentimentality with muffled irony. This is especially evident when he resorts to jubilant, lucid sentimentalism:
On a hot summer we'll fly off to the lake
To take a swim in it at dawn
You - as a mermaid with your rosy flesh
I- as your azure stallion
Oh leave me alone, sorceress,
I will set out into the golden wilderness
I, so tired on these stairs
I, apiece of crystalware that your broke.
The sustained sentimental elation grated upon the schizoid's inner ear with the vulgarity which was only soothed by a delicate hint at the absurd.
The demi-haut monde coquetry of the infinitely mellow and fragile poet also masked intolerance toward the conventional mind.
An adherent of the schizoid culture, Sergei Grazhdankin attempted to explain it by a "new taste of human relations" which only revealed itself when one "turned to face the absolute spiritual freedom".
Was that the key that opened the door to Soviet rock?