Author's website Alexander Korotko

The first Beijing literary magazine in 2023 published an extensive article about the poem by Alexander Korotko PARIS. The publication includes an autobiographical article, a preface to the poem and the poem PARIS itself.

Last year, on our website, we already published an article-review of the Chinese Writers’ Union on the poem PARIS called “Reflections on the poem by A. Korotko PARIS”. You can read this review at this link:

korotko-poetry.com/ru/razmyshleniya-nad-poemoj-parizh-a-korotko

At the request of the Chinese Writers’ Union, Alexander Korotko also wrote about what exactly inspired him to write the poem.

Below is the author’s text:

« The poem “Paris”, what is it about, who is it about? Yes, about all of us, and, of course, about the author. Any creative person, and first of all, a poet, in all his works – and the poem “Paris” is no exception – writes only about himself, about the worlds accessible to him, visible and invisible, and one of these shimmering worlds is, of course, Paris.
“Paris” is not the fruit of contemplation and hard work, it is an indisputable, unconscious interlinear of esoteric premonitions that did not exist and cannot exist in reality, but they arose in my soul from the Parisian air, and the streets turned into a stream of consciousness, and this inspired delirium of allusions and illusions lay down on paper like birdlike flocks of lines, which, against my will, lined up in the ranks of the future poem.

The poem does not talk about the poet’s involvement in Paris as an event caused by a meeting with the eternal city. We are talking about the magic of the transformation that happened not by the will of fate, but as a gift, as a reward in punishment for the life lived in a foreign land, behind the walls of Paris. The city did not make me stronger – it emptied me, crushed me, flattened me, disassembled me into molecules, threw me into the Seine a happy drowned man. Only when I had completed my work did I realize that one does not live in Paris, one dies in Paris together with presentiments of tormented hopes.

All my vices – pride, vanity, narcissism, like a cobweb in Indian summer, flew away beyond the horizon of my past life, as soon as I stepped on the doorstep of this city, devoid of pathos and snobbery. For greater reliability, I chose an impressionistic style of presentation, which allowed me to decompose the solitaire of my emotions and feelings, as a galaxy of artists did in their time, who, after their death, rested with their paintings in d’Orsay, the pantheon of painting.

The poem is multi-layered, and at first glance it seems that it is glued together from separate, unrelated fragments. Maybe so. But the main thing that I tried to achieve was not to take a conscientious photograph of the real life of Paris, but to throw out on the easel of my forebodings a vivid perception of the poet’s spiritual world.

We also add the text of one of the chapters of the poem PARIS in the original language:

***

К Парижу с нелюбовью.

Праздничное отчаяние.

В суматохе не твоей

жизни

хочется быть похожим

на других,

жаждущих, страстных,

принявших

географию местности

за абсолют,

за бесконечную точку

счастья,

за экслибрис человеческих

чувств

на пути разочарования,

признавших

поражение оловянных

солдатиков,

бегущих с корабля

будничных дней,

отравленных сознанием

непричастности

к событиям оголтелой

эпохи.

Read other fragments of the poem PARIS on the website at the link:

https://korotko-poetry.com/ru/parizh