Probably, of all the lines of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, I repeat these most often to myself: "Who is talking about what, and I, of course, about You-that, they say, everything is wonderfully arranged in this small world, etc." And I repeat them, of course, at moments when in the wonderfully arranged small world you can I could have doubted it, " and I hear her voice, tinkling slightly like the crystal of a chandelier when a tram passes under the window, but at the same time calm, telling us the good news.

Of all the meetings with her, predictably, the first one turned out to be the most memorable - it was the cold spring of 1995, when she called and offered to go to the Hermitage. I was very worried, Gorbanevskaya was listed as a "real poet" in my youth lists, and also a hero: I hoped that the Hermitage situation would somehow fill the bubbles of my excitement-silence.

But what happened, our meeting and our contact, turned out to be quite different from the usual parallel Hermitage wanderings, when people swim between the paintings without crossing each other. On the contrary, Gorbanevskaya demanded

full attention to the artists and works that at that moment seemed to her the most acute, the most important in her life now. We stayed at the Cranachs ' - for her, they were inextricably linked to Brodsky. At the time of his passion for Basmanova, Brodsky took Gorbanevskaya to "Venus and Cupid" and "Madonna and Child under the apple tree" and asked-said: "really, it looks like". For Gorbanevskaya, the thick-set, steep-browed heads of these deadly beauties, their dangerous charms rhyming with the apples around them, were a greeting from her youth - something akin to a photograph, but not so much of a specific face or situation, but of emotions-desires and anxieties.

In the aesthetic palette of Gorbanevskaya herself, anxiety did not play a decisive role, so she strongly pulled me to a different palette. In general, in all walks with her, I remembered her as the leader-she walked quickly, sometimes noticeably ahead of the interlocutor, noticing the absence of which she turned around in some confusion.

Then she took me to Fra Filippo Lippi ("don't confuse it with Filippino," she said sternly). That's what it was for her. A calm, triumphant glow, but not solemn, but pathetic, too human.

"Look at these colors," Gorbanevskaya ordered me sternly. - How clean, warm: everything is clear here." What is clear to us in the Vision of St. Augustine? Doubt, joy - and warmth coming from everywhere, from all the objects of being; being as a warm and pathetic thing.

Since then, whenever I read or click her poems in my head, I think of Filippo Lippi - everything is clear here. Here are her poems on the death of the poet - since this death radically changed the geography and arithmetic of my fate (in the sense of settling accounts with this very fate), I read them very carefully when I appeared:

 
 
 Leaving out the brackets, 
 how to brace boxes, 
 music boxes, 
 poems are not timid,
but not in a hurry, 
 they are not in a hurry,
rolling back like the ebb tide,
splashing against the distant shore. 
 
 

Gorbanevskaya interprets the death of a person associated with literature as a grammatical phenomenon-going out of brackets. You are no longer free in the text, including in your own, only the forms and rhythms of your grammatical and rhythmic periods remain from you. "Not timid, but not in a hurry," like a wave, last as long as the breath lasts, however strange this term may sound in the context of literary reasoning, are natural. I believe that the common place, the starting point, is the discussion about the stability of Gorbanevskaya's poetic form-the eight-line and the short-line. From the moment of her youthful, programmatic, wonderfully grateful appeal to Bartok, she has occupied her niche-musicality and lightness. From that moment on, this niche has remained behind her, and those who now continue to improvise in tune with her, to develop this tone (say, Mashinskaya, Bulatovsky, Suntsova), are marked by this aesthetic task: to guide their caravans through the eye of a needle.

Gorbanevskaya was always preoccupied only with the most important, global issues, but she intoned them as light, by no means, God forbid, simple, but light: hovering over us, leading us. Paradoxically, but

It is about her, I think, that Nekrasov's "blessed is the good-natured poet" is said. Moreover, what was said ironically in her case took on a different meaning and a direct meaning. It would seem that if any of the poets of the second half of the Russian twentieth century had something to be angry about, it was her. Marathon on mental hospitals in reasoning about the fate of your baby-the plot is a test. However, the poet Gorbanevskaya coped with her own choice of such a fate incomparably. Her poems were gradually and steadily filled with light, movement, rushing upward: poems-clouds.

 
 
 Stained with jam, 
 You speak poetry. 
 This is my village, 
 If you get there, you'll die. 
 Red mountain ash 
 She spread her wings. 
 This is my foreign land, 
 My sorrow is light. 
 
 

She filled her foreign land with the taming of foreign languages: the language of journalism for a Russian poet is as foreign as, say, in her case - Polish. It must be loved, seduced, and mastered. She entered new languages, new tasks with curiosity, ease, and audacity. Easy breathing, easy walking, easy tongue. And in this light language of his, always the same question, the same addressee:

 
 
 Before you go to the bottom, 
 How to quirk this shadow and not shout, 
 Don't sing it: "God, let go!" 
 
 

Her time gave birth to several female poets of striking power (next to Akhmadulina, Mnatsakanova, younger - Schwartz and Sedakova), each of whom built sui generis an intense, direct literary conversation with the Deity. For Gorbanevskaya, this is a conversation about joy. In general, as far as in Russian thought (we will not drive a seedy pun) this feeling is exceptional-it goes without saying like. Her pleiad grieved, lamented, was horrified (there was something, there was something), Gorbanevskaya humbled herself and called for joy.

What was it for? That there was music above them, that her poems were born and read, that not far from her Parisian home there was a favorite bar where you could go to play table football, that when you leave the Hermitage, the sky above the Palace Square is roundest of all. As I go over her verses now, replaying her facial expressions, her voice, and her silences, I use this intonation mechanism that she invented - to be happy that everything is clear here.

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