Zvyagintsev, Nikolai Nikolaevich

Nikolai Nikolaevich Zvyagintsev (born January 4, 1967 , Moscow Region ) is a Russian poet. Laureate of the Grand Award “ Moscow Account ” ( 2013 ).

Nikolai Zvyagintsev

He graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute . Engaged in graphic design in the field of advertising. Poems were published in the anthologies " Samizdat Century " and " Nine Dimensions ", the magazines "New World", "Banner", "Air", " Volga ", the almanac " Babylon ", " Author " and others. Author of seven poetry books. Since the early 1990s, he has been a member of the Crimean-Moscow poetry group “The Peninsula” (together with Andrei Polyakov , Igor Sid , Mikhail Laptev and Maria Maksimova ). Lives in Moscow.

Poems are translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Estonian and Ukrainian. Short list of the Andrei Bely Prize (2008, 2017); scholarship of the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund (2009), award “ Moscow Account ” (2013). Member of numerous poetry festivals, Russian and international.

Like all authors of the Peninsula, Zvyagintsev directly continues the acmeistic line of the Russian verse, but does it in a very original way: the hermeticism and multi-level associations inherent in the late Mandelstam are turned over to him in the childish transparent worldview of Mandelstam early. The nesting of seemingly completely arbitrary images and comparisons in the frame of a defiantly light and graceful syllabo-tonic clarifies the pathos of Zvyagintsev's poetry: the integrity of the world is postulated in it, and the task of the poet (and most likely of anyone living) is to look for the relationship of everything with everything:

Handsome tanks entered Harbin,

And uncle went to the balcony,

From the end of a dumb egg broke

And drank warm milk.

- Zvyagintsev does not explain in any way the nature of the connection between the two events, but insists on its obligatoriness and necessity. Here you can see that the universe according to Zvyagintsev is not hierarchical: the military operation and the everyday gesture of a random person turn out to be links of the same chain, equal and equal (moreover, the tanks are given one line, and breakfast on the balcony is three times as much). Zvyagintsev’s imagery implies the possibility of decoding and unraveling (for example, in the quoted quatrain, due to the allusion to the war of blunt and pointed people from Swift’s pamphlet, the idea of ​​the meaninglessness of any conflict and any victory shines through), but the most important thing here is precisely the idea of ​​universal coherence, in its own way close to the postmodern concept rhizomes .