Artikel
Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin - traces remain
27 februari 2007
But is this traditional mini-bio enough to give a sense of who Lazutkin is? Biographical references, as it turns out, speak in generalities. Biographical references depict us as less interesting than we really are. Biographical references sometimes say nothing about us.
So, let’s do this. Let’s imagine Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin. Lazutkin – sports commentator on national television channel UT-1, where he’s worked for the past few years; Lazutkin – columnist for men’s magazine XXL (clearly he isn’t restricted to sports commentary – he can write an article about anything, even prostitution); Lazutkin – participant of the Lviv poetry festival, who pulls off writer Svitlana Povaliayeva’s t-shirt on stage; Lazutkin – the nihilist who objects to everything in the world, just so that the world doesn’t object to him. Lazutkin - apolitical and a-nationalistic. Lazutkin — bilingual – at times he’s Russian speaking (he even writes poems in Russian or does his own translating into Russian), even though he’s a Ukrainian poet; Lazutkin who doesn’t say anything that wouldn’t be a provocation; Lazutkin – whose principle is not to have principles, even though this is also a principle; Lazutkin - who recites poetry, at times lapsing into shouting. And Lazutkin, who sometimes – I suppose – writes in complete peace and quiet . . . Are these details important to us? Yes, as the context to his writing.
Biographies, actually, if they don’t lie, then at the least they suppress something and this ‘something’ is too essential to be ignored. Maybe, it can be caught in literature? Or, to put it differently, in Lazutkin’s intimate relationship with literature, because after all, other kinds of relationships with literature simply don’t exist. And since we’re touching upon the sphere of the intimate, let’s prepare ourselves for a serious conversation.
You absolutely cannot describe the poetry of Dmytro Lazutkin as a layer of texts derived from a particular poetic tradition — whether it be Ukrainian, or absorbed from other literatures – and as having some kind of continuity. Perhaps, somewhere far away you can hear echoes of certain intonations of Serhiy Zhadan and at times of Andriy Bondar (hardly anything ties him with older writers and traditions). This conjectural and distant connection notwithstanding, these texts stand alone as naked writing, an exercise in poetics, rhythmicized (with regard to vers libre) or private thoughts in rhymes without any ‘cultural’ or culturological layers (although, by the way, rhyming norms are not always adhered to in Lazutkin’s poetry: the rhymes ‘hobble’ from time to time either because they lack syllables, orbecause there are just too many of them).
The writing is simply the naked, live experience of love, sorrow, loneliness and the internal reflections of a person living in a city in the early 21st century – thus a representative of the society of consumption. This is the only social marker that we can find here and it shows that the subject of the poetry perceives the world in a utilitarian manner and transforms things around himself into an endless collection of signs and functions which replace one another. He imparts the world of the subjects with no more value than the world of objects; he wants to call things by their name, but instead creates metaphors, and even his shout Who fucking stole the chalk? isn’t an authentic shout: he draws a veil, he appeals to something that isn’t evident to the reader . . . Is this a talent? I won’t object to it being called that. But is it good every time? You can’t always stick to this route . . . Sometimes at least (often?) one has to give in to selection.
One of the central themes that Lazutkin addresses from text to text is love. Of course this doesn’t entirely mean that he speaks of it in detail and creates a full-value discourse on love suitable for us on all levels of intimate interaction. Absolutely not. In most cases the reader becomes a witness of hysterical or simply horrible scenes of saying goodbye, situations of forgetting, pain and loneliness, torn from their contexts. They are situations in which private relationships don’t create a space of trust and don’t include the perception of the Other and the understanding of oneself through them. Here love isn’t co-being, but rather an experience of rejection. It is an emotional and almost unconscious experience of the foreignness of the Other. This is a state of war, it doesn’t matter with whom, it may be even (first and foremost?) with oneself.
But . . . is this really about love at all? Perhaps it’s actually about substitutes for love? Is this just an unsuccessfully-chosen expression for calling things what they really are? Does the word beloved always concur with its meaning? Is the little one, who dyes her hair also the beloved? And what relationship does she bear to the one after quick sex / before fast food? And does the reference to Marta truly attest to her presence? Signs, traces of the womanly change all too easily and substitute one another, but the woman as a subject doesn’t appear in these poems. She’s the outsider here. The author, rather, is speaking about himself — for himself and for the reader.
In picking a genre for these texts, I would hazard calling them post-intimate poetry, and more precisely – poetry of quick love (copulation?) and untamable despair. This isn’t a new ‘offer’ in the space of a consumption society, in which products of consumption aren’t just things, but elements of the intimate, sensual space — in other words emotion devalued only to the level and status of abstraction. In Lazutkin this is well conveyed in the strophes: eat a morning serving of love / if you get hungry – demand another.
Today, within this genre you'll find the recognized ‘maestros’ of contemporary French literature, Frederick Beigbeder and Michel Houellebecq. The former is an example of radical nihilism and cynicism, which replace (force out?) intimacy in a society of consumption. Beigbeder forces you to experience the constant shock of this situation and in being a “romantic egoist” doesn’t allow you to search for a way out of it. It is Houellebecq instead, in the neo-utopia of The Possibility of an Island, who searches for and finds it, especially in loneliness, reserved from society. Lazutkin is to be found somewhere between the following mental coordinates: the poetic fixation of his daily conditions, almost unadorned by artistic convention, flaunting his cynicism (this is our land son this is our land little one / little bastard) and, simultaneously, a joyous feeling which is almost miraculous (high water we’re walking on water / traces remain). Such is his mental freedom – without it this poet would be completely different.
Another possible genre which could adequately convey the nature of certain texts by Lazutki, might be poetry of shout. By this I don’t mean expressionism. This is another kind of shouting – the shouting of a young poet for whom conventional poetic maturity doesn’t matter. He, regardless of biological age, remains a troublemaker, shameless and happy. It seems that maturity for Lazutkin is an impossible thing; after youth there is only old age, and since a person ages when sad, this time will come quickly, maybe even now.
Therefore, is the poetry of Lazutkin – if we’re talking about originality and aesthetics – something special? We can hardly say so. What is it then? And what is Lazutkin doing in literature after all?
If, in short, Lazutkin is first and foremost a provacateur of the literary sphere, his goal doesn’t have to be to demonstrate the aesthetic value of his poetry or the originality of its poetics – absolutely not. The provocateur can be a totally functional instrument with other motives, such as provoking the recipient into reacting to the text, or not being troubled by his own emotions of rapture, aggression, rejection, acceptance, tenderness but expressing them fearlessly. He pushes the reader to question whether these texts are good and if so, why? What is their place in literature? What relationship does the written have to the recited? Is literature just written text, or the contexts, the fragments we become witness to? Can reading be a manifestation and what exactly does such a “megaphone of literature” (Lazutkin always reads as a megaphone . . . ) manifest? And what can be said of the reader who needs such texts?
These and other questions convince one that Lazutkin’s work is, in some sense, a litmus test of the literary environment. Lazutkin’s verse is the division and border between good poetry and not-yet-poetry. To write better than Lazutkin would mean being a good poet; to write worse would mean having no chance of becoming one. Writing like Lazutkin is at first a demonstration of all ‘rough’ writing, and later the process of its polishing and perfection. This is talking about oneself and one’s freedom. This is reminding one of oneself. This is being Lazutkin, who calls himself “a poet, a cosmonaut, a miracle worker.”
Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin. Traces remain.
Within Ukrainian literature, Dmytro Lazutkin is a unique poet if only because critics of his works have stated more than once that literature could exist even without him. More radical voices might add that literature should exist without him; even more radical ones contend that without Lazutkin’s unconventionalism, or simply his poetic presence, contemporary literature would be uninteresting. And so, this conversation should begin with the following question: who is Dmytro Lazutkin and what is he doing in literature at all? We’ll take this as a starting point.
The answer to the question Who is Lazutkin? is more or less obvious – at least when it comes to his biographical details.
Dmytro Lazutkin was born in Kyiv in 1978, where he grew up and graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute with a specialization in metallurgic engineering, which didn’t get in the way of him becoming a contemporary Ukrainian poet. Today, Lazutkin is the author of four poetry books: Roofs (2003), sweets for reptiles (2005), grass stuffed sacred cows (2006) and Sweet Pepper of Dreams (2006, written in Russian and published in Moscow). He has also been a participant in recent international festivals in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Lithuania, and the recipient of several literary prizes including the B.I. Antonych Award and the Smoloskyp Award. His poems have been translated into English, German, Russian and Polish. The answer to the question Who is Lazutkin? is more or less obvious – at least when it comes to his biographical details.
But is this traditional mini-bio enough to give a sense of who Lazutkin is? Biographical references, as it turns out, speak in generalities. Biographical references depict us as less interesting than we really are. Biographical references sometimes say nothing about us.
So, let’s do this. Let’s imagine Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin. Lazutkin – sports commentator on national television channel UT-1, where he’s worked for the past few years; Lazutkin – columnist for men’s magazine XXL (clearly he isn’t restricted to sports commentary – he can write an article about anything, even prostitution); Lazutkin – participant of the Lviv poetry festival, who pulls off writer Svitlana Povaliayeva’s t-shirt on stage; Lazutkin – the nihilist who objects to everything in the world, just so that the world doesn’t object to him. Lazutkin - apolitical and a-nationalistic. Lazutkin — bilingual – at times he’s Russian speaking (he even writes poems in Russian or does his own translating into Russian), even though he’s a Ukrainian poet; Lazutkin who doesn’t say anything that wouldn’t be a provocation; Lazutkin – whose principle is not to have principles, even though this is also a principle; Lazutkin - who recites poetry, at times lapsing into shouting. And Lazutkin, who sometimes – I suppose – writes in complete peace and quiet . . . Are these details important to us? Yes, as the context to his writing.
Biographies, actually, if they don’t lie, then at the least they suppress something and this ‘something’ is too essential to be ignored. Maybe, it can be caught in literature? Or, to put it differently, in Lazutkin’s intimate relationship with literature, because after all, other kinds of relationships with literature simply don’t exist. And since we’re touching upon the sphere of the intimate, let’s prepare ourselves for a serious conversation.
You absolutely cannot describe the poetry of Dmytro Lazutkin as a layer of texts derived from a particular poetic tradition — whether it be Ukrainian, or absorbed from other literatures – and as having some kind of continuity. Perhaps, somewhere far away you can hear echoes of certain intonations of Serhiy Zhadan and at times of Andriy Bondar (hardly anything ties him with older writers and traditions). This conjectural and distant connection notwithstanding, these texts stand alone as naked writing, an exercise in poetics, rhythmicized (with regard to vers libre) or private thoughts in rhymes without any ‘cultural’ or culturological layers (although, by the way, rhyming norms are not always adhered to in Lazutkin’s poetry: the rhymes ‘hobble’ from time to time either because they lack syllables, orbecause there are just too many of them).
The writing is simply the naked, live experience of love, sorrow, loneliness and the internal reflections of a person living in a city in the early 21st century – thus a representative of the society of consumption. This is the only social marker that we can find here and it shows that the subject of the poetry perceives the world in a utilitarian manner and transforms things around himself into an endless collection of signs and functions which replace one another. He imparts the world of the subjects with no more value than the world of objects; he wants to call things by their name, but instead creates metaphors, and even his shout Who fucking stole the chalk? isn’t an authentic shout: he draws a veil, he appeals to something that isn’t evident to the reader . . . Is this a talent? I won’t object to it being called that. But is it good every time? You can’t always stick to this route . . . Sometimes at least (often?) one has to give in to selection.
One of the central themes that Lazutkin addresses from text to text is love. Of course this doesn’t entirely mean that he speaks of it in detail and creates a full-value discourse on love suitable for us on all levels of intimate interaction. Absolutely not. In most cases the reader becomes a witness of hysterical or simply horrible scenes of saying goodbye, situations of forgetting, pain and loneliness, torn from their contexts. They are situations in which private relationships don’t create a space of trust and don’t include the perception of the Other and the understanding of oneself through them. Here love isn’t co-being, but rather an experience of rejection. It is an emotional and almost unconscious experience of the foreignness of the Other. This is a state of war, it doesn’t matter with whom, it may be even (first and foremost?) with oneself.
But . . . is this really about love at all? Perhaps it’s actually about substitutes for love? Is this just an unsuccessfully-chosen expression for calling things what they really are? Does the word beloved always concur with its meaning? Is the little one, who dyes her hair also the beloved? And what relationship does she bear to the one after quick sex / before fast food? And does the reference to Marta truly attest to her presence? Signs, traces of the womanly change all too easily and substitute one another, but the woman as a subject doesn’t appear in these poems. She’s the outsider here. The author, rather, is speaking about himself — for himself and for the reader.
In picking a genre for these texts, I would hazard calling them post-intimate poetry, and more precisely – poetry of quick love (copulation?) and untamable despair. This isn’t a new ‘offer’ in the space of a consumption society, in which products of consumption aren’t just things, but elements of the intimate, sensual space — in other words emotion devalued only to the level and status of abstraction. In Lazutkin this is well conveyed in the strophes: eat a morning serving of love / if you get hungry – demand another.
Today, within this genre you'll find the recognized ‘maestros’ of contemporary French literature, Frederick Beigbeder and Michel Houellebecq. The former is an example of radical nihilism and cynicism, which replace (force out?) intimacy in a society of consumption. Beigbeder forces you to experience the constant shock of this situation and in being a “romantic egoist” doesn’t allow you to search for a way out of it. It is Houellebecq instead, in the neo-utopia of The Possibility of an Island, who searches for and finds it, especially in loneliness, reserved from society. Lazutkin is to be found somewhere between the following mental coordinates: the poetic fixation of his daily conditions, almost unadorned by artistic convention, flaunting his cynicism (this is our land son this is our land little one / little bastard) and, simultaneously, a joyous feeling which is almost miraculous (high water we’re walking on water / traces remain). Such is his mental freedom – without it this poet would be completely different.
Another possible genre which could adequately convey the nature of certain texts by Lazutki, might be poetry of shout. By this I don’t mean expressionism. This is another kind of shouting – the shouting of a young poet for whom conventional poetic maturity doesn’t matter. He, regardless of biological age, remains a troublemaker, shameless and happy. It seems that maturity for Lazutkin is an impossible thing; after youth there is only old age, and since a person ages when sad, this time will come quickly, maybe even now.
Therefore, is the poetry of Lazutkin – if we’re talking about originality and aesthetics – something special? We can hardly say so. What is it then? And what is Lazutkin doing in literature after all?
If, in short, Lazutkin is first and foremost a provacateur of the literary sphere, his goal doesn’t have to be to demonstrate the aesthetic value of his poetry or the originality of its poetics – absolutely not. The provocateur can be a totally functional instrument with other motives, such as provoking the recipient into reacting to the text, or not being troubled by his own emotions of rapture, aggression, rejection, acceptance, tenderness but expressing them fearlessly. He pushes the reader to question whether these texts are good and if so, why? What is their place in literature? What relationship does the written have to the recited? Is literature just written text, or the contexts, the fragments we become witness to? Can reading be a manifestation and what exactly does such a “megaphone of literature” (Lazutkin always reads as a megaphone . . . ) manifest? And what can be said of the reader who needs such texts?
These and other questions convince one that Lazutkin’s work is, in some sense, a litmus test of the literary environment. Lazutkin’s verse is the division and border between good poetry and not-yet-poetry. To write better than Lazutkin would mean being a good poet; to write worse would mean having no chance of becoming one. Writing like Lazutkin is at first a demonstration of all ‘rough’ writing, and later the process of its polishing and perfection. This is talking about oneself and one’s freedom. This is reminding one of oneself. This is being Lazutkin, who calls himself “a poet, a cosmonaut, a miracle worker.”
Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin. Traces remain.
© Bohdana Matiash
Vertaler: Chrystyna Kuzmych
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