Alexander Kushner: Two “Visits”

The article considers and compares two poems by A. S. Kushner with a common name – “Visit” (1977 and 1985). They are united by the situation of the lyrical hero returning to the places where he spent his childhood and youth. However, the author’s position is deprived of the nostalgic regret about the past years that is expected in such cases – in particular, due to the mismatch of memories with the real world of the past. Kushner continues the Russian tradition of lyrical “returns” (Pushkin, Baratynsky, Nekrasov, etc.), but correlates it with the new historical context and experience of the Soviet era, which undergoes critical re-interpretation in his poems. The second poem does not copy the first: the lyrical retrospective in it is more profound due to the motifs of infant and adolescent reading of the late Stalin era, childrens’ and “adult” (popular in the post-war years) volleyball games, and school studies. The article also analyzes the poetic technique used by Kushner, revealing its significance for the lyrical content of poems. A relatively short meter (iambic trimeter, anapestic dimeter), seemingly unexpected in the poems by Kushner, who gravitated towards the “long” line in the 70s and 80s, betrays a hidden polemic in relation to the epic poetry, a poetic theme seeming to lead up to it, but the epic poetry being consciously foreign to the poet himself. The article also touches upon another (the third) poem by Kushner called “Visit” (1973), which is only indirectly related to the other two, but which also contains the motifs of the Soviet history. As a result, all three poems fit into a series of poems by Kushner that recreate the socio-political atmosphere of the Soviet era.