Author's website Alexander Korotko

When Michael Kozakov died, a brilliant actor, a director, a writer, a reader and a narrator, thin, ironic, intelligent man, Alexander Korotko responded to this sad event by the memory of one of their meetings in Kiev. A small volume essay accompanying by a poem ( lifetime), dedicated to the great artist, so deeply and “with such clarity of Pushkin» reading beautiful poetry. 
Published in the newspaper “MK” in Ukraine “, № 18, 2011.

In the damp chilly weather even the sun is lazy to appear in public. When he arrived, Kiev has a smell of the night. The state of his soul corresponded to the time of the year. Mikhail Kozakov was confused, rather crushed by the circumstances, by the change of geographical locations. His birthplace the USSR, like “Titanic”, lay on the bottom of his youth, of his brilliant career. He was on this ship, he surfaced, but never sailed to any of the coast to the unrequested to the heart life…

The car was full of people. Kozakov in the front seat, half-turned, was reading from memory Brodsky. It was the best poems of the poet, read with such Pushkin’s clarity that it seemed, that’s all – then life has no meaning any more, everything has been said.

April 25, 2011
Kiev


* * *
Michael Kozakov

Memory takes off the scalp from the last year life. 
Such a luck. Light a candle and put it in the temple, 
in which there is no place for you, like in your homeland. 
And when you touch the world with alien lips, 
look back. Emptiness. Dancing of the foreign mind. 
Just trembling of the unfulfilled promises 
of fate. Take this gift without the publicity. 
Listen, the liturgy of the last hope is sounding. 
Farewell before the winter season.

1997