"Look, man," this Rasputin look alike in a thick brown robe lectured, as he held up the little rubber spider that he had ordered, and which had just come in the mail along with belly button brushes and whoopee cushions, "these will destroy the police state more surely than missiles."
He mimicked a Soviet customs guard. "And what is this?" "A joke. It's funny." He mimicked the facial expression, the contempt. The dismissal. "Move along. Move along." Returning to himself, he pressed his point. "KGB has no sense of humor. They cannot imagine and this gets past them. But - a child understands."
Konstantin Konstantinovich Kuzminsky was born in November 1941, just before the siege if Leningrad. He was a poet's poet.
He passed away May 2, 2015. He was a warrior of the human spirit and the truest freedom for the mind and heart and soul. He survived the worst that the police state and the Twentieth century can inflict. He taught all those around him to be free in their minds. He inspired many.
He was noted for memorizing poems and stories by many of his generation's best "unauthorized" poets and writers. He became a repository for the underground poets and artists who were still in the Soviet Union after he emigrated in the mid seventies. Packages would arrive at his little house next to a beer garden on the east edge of the University of Texas pretty frequently. He had a definitive collection amassed, which became organized as an academic collection under the title , "the Blue Lagoon Anthology of Russian Underground Art and Literature."
He came to the West through the intervention of Robert & Susan Massie, who were in Leningrad researching their book and movie, "Nicholas and Alexandra." Kuzminsky served as a tour guide and consultant, as he knew the city intimately and spoke perfect English.
They published his biography and work in a volume featuring five important young Russian poets. This was his ticket out. Kostia was recruited for a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught comparative Russiand and American literature.
His wife Emma, had been an architect. Her English was not so good and she had to work at UT as a janitor.
I spent a lot of time during 1977 and in the next several years, visiting and interviewing Kostia. I also produced some poetry video featuring his performance. His most powerful work, I thought, was a blenderized mixture of many languages, musical sounds and alliterations.
One video was a talk show format featuring Kuzminsky and Allen Ginsberg. Kostia had glommed onto the work of Kerouac and Ginsberg as a student, and was inspired to be a Russian beat poet. Their work, Kostia explained to me, gave them a model, a way to be free of all the constraints that Soviet writers were constantly pressured to conform to. A whole generation of young writers were searching for intellectual freedom and Ginsberg had been a big inspiration. the interview did not go well, however, as Kuzminsky who had been harassed and nearly killed by the KGB secret police and who had friends who had been killed, insisted on lecturing Ginsberg on anti-communism. The two tried to find a cordial thread but mostly this revealed how different experience can be.
During those years he suffered from severe culture shock. He was deeply, bitterly disappointed with the lack of passion in most Americans, their failure to test the limits of freedom, of trying to get away from what he termed "mediocrative" living or thinking.
"You have Soviet Union in your heads." He would say.
He consumed huge quantities of anything alcoholic and even remotely drinkable. When he was sober he was brilliant. When drunk he would be in a deep melancholy or powerfully, bitingly critical. He was interested in helping anyone understand and could be very good at teaching.
One time when I came over. He was waiting for me. He laid out a copy of PRAVDA, a newspaper famous for being state propaganda, and a copy of the local daily, the Austin-American Statesman. He gave me a detailed tutorial on each story and feature, comparing both newspapers. It was brilliant and chilling. I was stunned to realuze just how similar the media environment in both countries was for the average citizen. The true nature of the dissident is to be mentally strong and it may require enormous courage.
One of Kostia's proteges at the time was a tall, shy and soft spoken young man named Ilya. He had a terrible acid burn scar on the back of one leg which came from visiting an outdoor exhibition of abstract painting. The KGB ran people off and destroyed paintings. They threw acid on people as they ran. One of the painters was a rising star in international art circles. Yevgeny Rhukin and Ilya and a couple of young women went out one evening and returned a couple of sheets to the wind. They fell asleep in Rhukin's studio and apartment. Ilya related how he woke up to a disorienting sense of being held up in the air. The KGB had boarded up the apartment windows and set the place on fire. Rhukin had realized that only one person could be saved. He was a big man. He lifted Ilya up bodily and threw him with enough force to eject him out through a window and out into the street. No one else survived. The KGB launched an investigation into the fire which was an excuse to interrogate all the acquaintances in the local arts community.
One of the members of that community was a woman writer and poet, Julia or Yulya Vosnesenskaya. She maintained a diary. Kuzminsky and Emma always had visitors in their tiny apartment in Austin. Allen Ginsberg turned up there. So did Fred Friendly, of CBS. Someone had mailed a copy of her diary after Yulya had been imprisoned. Kostia gave this to Friendly. Not long after this, a docudrama movie was produced, which came out on PBS, simply titled, "Yulya's Diary." It depicts the scene in Leningrad.
The city was renamed St. Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I don't know that Kostia and Emma ever got to go back to visit. I helped them pack up a U-Haul moving van as they departed for New York. There, they found a community of Russian artists in Queens and in upstate New York, where they lived for a time. In his later years he looked a lot more healthy and happy in the pictures I saw.
I remember one morning in his east campus duplex when he woke up and we shared some tea. He had just had a dream. He was sitting on a blanket having a picnic with his mother. Just matter of factly, they were sharing this picnic with the grey corpse of Stalin, sitting there with them without expression. He was never without this haunting.
Kostia reminisced that one day his mother took him to visit his father's grave. They took several street cars. It was a mass grave that he remembered being a mile long. His father had been an artist. The Germans had laid siege to the city. Stalin would not let the citizens have guns. The men decided that desperate circumstances called for desperate measures. They each carved fake wooden guns from house planks and rushed the German positions en masse, hoping to scare them away. It didn't work.
Young Konstantin grew up as a street urchin who learned to use his wits to entertain unless be needed to use a knife, which he had had to become good at as well. But fate intervened. Stalin needed to replace an entire diplomatic corps after the war, having hauled large numbers to the gulags. As the son of a war hero, Kostia was sent to a school that specialized in English and also Western literature.
I was deeply moved by how passionate someone could be about art and life and the intellectual honesty to see through what otherwise is just given for us to see. I am a much freer American for having known this salty fish of Russia.
His favorite metaphor, which is one of hope, was that of the single blade of grass found growing up through a crack in concrete paving.
He really was, himself, a blade of grass.
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