“A futile gift, a gift so random, / Life, you’re granted me — but why?…”

Or — “Where am I? Who am I? Why am I?…”

Or — “I am tired of living — to death, / I accept nothing of it…”

Yes, these are poets, very different and even from different centuries, speaking about the agonizing rejection of life in its loathsome, burdensome manifestation, about the affliction, about life that compresses like tights, about the disagreement with fate, role, place…

“Sorrowful, lonely, / I will walk the earth not recognized by anyone” — the only surviving poem by Sergey Muravyov-Apostol…

Yes, the poet is lonely and sad, yes, he strives to define his place not in the working ranks, but in the world anthology… Whether he is the best or the worst, or mid at most — that's how the pendulum swings — there were times when the first became the last, and Konstantin Konstantinovich Kuzminsky believed that there are always six firsts.

Everyday life is a burden to the poet, it does not fit him, he is an outsider, a dime a dozen, a misfit, he is a loner, but he wants to be heard, he wants to find a point of reference — 

“I am a king — a slave — a worm — a god!…” or Naught?

As in Derzhavin's ode “God”,

“Naught! — But life in me is calling / Flying insatiably nowhere…”

This is the key to Vsevolod Nekrasov's text — he is a poet of the 20th century; from the mixed gloom of existence and disillusionment in its meaning, he convinces himself or the one who understands his words of the meaningfulness of Creation, that death is not subject to mortals, that the individual's free will is limited by another, higher will.

And Nekrasov's text is as simple as psalms, as complex as a prayer.

TAMARA BUKOVSKAYA