“It is worth thinking about the fate of people significant and remarkable, and you do not leave a feeling of embarrassment and whether we are allowed to touch the unique essence of the moments that have gone into non-existence, into other spheres,” writes Alexander Korotko in a new essay about Peter Chaadayev, the Russian nobleman of French and German blood, aristocrat of spirit, philosopher, publicist, deprived of the autocrat of the most precious – freedom, for the reason of freedom-loving.
Traveling with Chaadayev continues a series of laconic in form and extensive in content works about artists of thought, word and artists in the literal sense, whose life and creative path Alexander Korotko considers righteous. The reader will not find in them dates and other biographical facts, an abundance of quotations or art critic’s terms, but will touch the subtle spheres where the souls of those who are “no”. Pushkin, Gogol, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky … All of them insolent freethinkers who encroached on the foundations, dared to talk and write, not as it should, therefore destroyed. “Power reveres great poets unconditionally, with a grand scale – when they are not there, less trouble”
To the day of memory of Alexander Pushkin. With them, and Chaadaev, declared by the king insane, locked almost for ten years under house arrest – “Here is the true triumph, the recognition of the peak.” But let us return to the first quotation in which Alexander Korotko writes about the feeling of embarrassment as about doubt, how ethically to touch someone else’s destiny, to evaluate her earthly path. However, this doubt has nothing to do with insecurity; on the contrary, it shows a force bordering on a delicate and delicate treatment of a word, when the poet writes about a great personality close to him in spirit.
