Few have the courage to make Shadow the protagonist of their works. The first who come to mind are Shakespeare with the shadow of Hamlet’s father (but this character is secondary) and Schwartz with the play “Shadow”, written after Andersen’s fairy tale and became famous after the film adaptation, thanks to Oleg Dal in the title role. But the Shadow of Shwartz is devoid of a mystical philosophical basis. On the contrary, with Alexander Korotko, mysticism and philosophy, whimsically intertwining, inform Shadow multidimensionality, the semantic scope, it not only is vividly present in the four poems published on the blog, but has long and persistently appeared in the poetry of Alexander Korotko: “the pain fell on the shadow of reason “, And the shadow said:” I’m in years, and I’m embarrassed and insulted “,” a heavenly living shadow, why are you making me crazy, “and somewhere Joseph, shadows fall …”. You can endlessly call it … The shadow appears as a reflection or optical illusion, then as a portrait (“the artist in the graph is the axis of coordinates: in the vertical direction – Kafka’s shadow …”), then as the embodiment of the lyric hero or the author himself (“and somewhere in the distance , In the wasteland of love, my shadow plays with the same as I, the owners of the inheritance … “). The Shadow by Korotko sound and visual, incorporeal and animate, mystical and real. Whatever properties Shadow would be endowed with, it lives in this poetry as a full-fledged actor.   New publication “Shadow. Four Poems ” – Alexander Korotko’s blog.