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Boris RyzhyPoet
Country:
 Russia |
Content:
- A Biography of Boris Ryzhy
- The Man Obsessed with Death
- The Outsider
- The Power of Boris Ryzhy as a Poet
- The Desire to Be Understood
- A Brief Biography
A Biography of Boris Ryzhy
Boris Ryzhy, a poet, predicted his own death at the age of twenty-one. Although he spoke of another person, it sounded too personal. Unfortunately, he did not have the opportunity to meet Boris Pasternak, who could have advised him, as in 1960, not to predict his tragic death in his poems, as the power of words is such that it irreversibly pushes poets towards a bullet or a noose. For Boris Ryzhy, it looked like this: "...still in front of my eyes, in memory, in hearing: / running through the plant, a cry that stopped us, / a dead body swinging from the ceiling in the night workshop. And a shadow, like a pendulum, between the eyes." However, unlike a factory worker, Boris Ryzhy chose to hang himself on the balcony of his own apartment. It is unbearable to look at the young photograph of Boris Ryzhy, included in his selected works published in 2003 by the St. Petersburg publishing house "Pushkin Foundation" under the simple title "Poems". He is sitting on the floor, on a makeshift bed, with an open book in his hands, from which he has just torn his eyes away, and his face is as if he was looking for an answer in the book but did not find it, how to live on.
The Man Obsessed with Death
Why did his poems have an almost manic urge towards death, an almost lifelong preoccupation with it? "A checkered shirt, striped trousers - / hand in hand with death, a classmate / I walk down the street, / kissing on the go." Larisa Miller, with whom he corresponded with rare frankness, called him the best poet of his generation, but also noticed with concern that he was "enchanted with death." Even when he saw an English mannequin in a shop window, he whispered, "Remember his suit - / I want to die in it..." He did not go to the Afghan or Chechen wars, but he asked himself, "My God, wasn't I killed in your war, dear people?" And sometimes, the main meaning of life for him seemed to be only in leaving it: "...I came into this world to say goodbye forever"; "Death tiptoes after me, / twirling a blood-soaked bow."
The Outsider
Publishing corridors caused him nauseating boredom compared to the much more appealing world of back streets: "...editorial snails / dragging their desks behind them." He felt dead here too: "...in this, the present, you were killed / and wiped your hands on yourself." If we speak the truth, there were not only "editorial snails" in the world of literature, but also people who genuinely loved his "difficult" poems and tried to promote them, even at the risk of their low-paying, yet still jobs. And he seemed to reject support, empathy, and did not want anyone to help him. He lived self-destructively, like Esenin: "...And my fate - / To keep rolling down, downwards." Perhaps he felt disgust towards those in his generation who, infected by the current cult of success at any cost, chose a different fate: rolling onwards and upwards.
The Power of Boris Ryzhy as a Poet
Boris Ryzhy's strength as a poet lay in his fearless recklessness. Look at how close his lines are to Esenin's self-destructive mood: "Nothing is really needed, / no matter what you call it: / neither someone else's apple orchard, / nor someone else's love, / that supports you gently, / afraid to let go. / Better to be scared, better to be hopeless, / better to nose-dive into the mud." These poems do not beg for life's indulgence. On the contrary, they demand mercilessness towards oneself. But no one could accuse Boris Ryzhy of misanthropy. It is remembered that he was not afraid to confront tank school cadets, but was also ready to pull a drunken old woman out of a snowdrift and escort her to her building. He took care of a childhood friend, driving to his area in Vtorchemet (locally known as Vtorchik), doing everything possible to help him get into the "Drug-Free Fund."
The Desire to Be Understood
He had a thirst "to be with those who weep for us, / who understand, remember, know, / and worry about us." Think about it, young people, do you have the right to voluntarily abandon those who wait for you and worry about you? By freeing ourselves from loneliness through suicide, we condemn so many people who love us, who trust us, and unfortunately, we give them a dangerous example to follow. "You are forever responsible for everyone you have tamed," - the simple yet profound words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And if you are poets, you leave not only loved ones but also Words in loneliness, as there are so few people whom God has given the gift of taming them? After all, Boris Ryzhy had such lines: "You, my native speech, farewell - / like any life, you are precious."
A Brief Biography
There is nothing in Boris Ryzhy's biography that explains his self-destruction. He was born in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40, in a family of a geophysicist. In 1980, the family moved to Sverdlovsk. Boris started writing poetry at the age of 14 and also took up boxing - he even became the city champion. Following the family tradition, he entered the Ural Mining and Geological Academy in 1991 and got married. In 1992, his poems were published in the "Russian Newspaper", and in 1993, in the magazine "Ural Tracker". Since 1997, his works have been published by "Zvezda", and since 1999, by "Znamya". He received the marginal literary prize "Antibooker" (January 2000) and had the opportunity to attend the World Poetry Festival in the Netherlands (June 2000) - also a marginal event.
But, without knowing other details of his biography, I felt that something had happened to him at some point. I found a possible explanation for Boris Ryzhy's tragedy in an article by Yuri Kazarin: Vtorchemet, where he grew up, "is not a solid proletarian district like Uralmash, built by the Germans, but a poor outskirts of a ceramics plant, where the entrances are littered with syringes, and in 1974 (the year Boris Ryzhy was born! - E.E.) there was an outbreak of a bacteriological weapon called 'Siberian plague', resulting in seventy lethal cases. Helplessness and meekness are almost like those of Nesterov's saints on people's faces there, but they are dark, gloomy, and cry out for help."
Who knows how this outbreak could have affected the psyche of infants born in 1974, unprotected from unforeseen consequences! Perhaps that is why Boris Ryzhy appointed himself a martyr, wrote relentlessly about death, and, enchanted by himself, headed towards it, like Sergei Yesenin.
Boris Ryzhy had a very Russian gift for confession. When you reread his poems, your heart clenches, and you want to urge all young people: please, for God's sake, do not treat your life in this way, as it is already too short.
