COCKROACH FOREVER
Cockroach is the sacred beast of Russian poetry. This small, ugly, omnipresent, inconsumable creature. They are millions, and anyone who crunches under your heel is personality. Sometimes Cockroach grows to gigantic proportions and rules the world. He knows something about life and death, we do not know. Oddly enough, a Cockroach is always about power.
The tradition was started by Fyodor Dostoevsky in the novel Devils (Possessed, 1872) with verses by crazy character Captain Lebyadkin:
There lived a Cockroach,
Cockroach since his childhood,
Then he fell into a glass,
Full of feeding-with-flies.
This insane guy could not really explain the meaning of the verse, but it became a touchstone of Russian absurdist poetry of the 20th century.
The Cockroach sits in the glass
The leg redhead sucks
He’s trapped,
And now he awaits execution.
So picked up this topic Nikolay Oleynikov, ruthless and cynical joker, the leader of the group of Leningrad young poets OBERIU in 1934. His Cockroach is a victim of a barbaric experiment on research, supposedly scientific but actually sadistic.
One hundred and four tools
Tearing the patient into pieces
From injuries and wounds
The Сockroach dies.
The experiment is meaningless – like the life itself.
His blue eyes
Will the rain wash,
His dry bones
Will the hen peck.
Oleynikov, the Communist and chief-editor of a children’s propaganda magazine, was the victim of a revolutionary experiment himself – he was shot during the Stalinist repressions in 1937th year.
Cockroach can be no sacrifice, but rather a huge and frightening as he is in the children’s poem by Korney Chukovsky Tarakanische (Cockroachissimo) (1922).
That was the Cockroach a Victor,
And the forests and fields of the Lord.
All the animals obeyed the mustachioed one
Hell to him, damn!
Ultimately the Sparrow pecked him to death, the greatness was nothing.
These nursery rhymes called Leo Trotsky’s anger – he even wrote critical article against Chukovsky. In spite of this generations of Russian intellectuals believed that the Cockroachissimo was written later – about mustached Stalin (by the way, Stalin loved the poem, and he quoted it at party meetings).
In 1933, Osip Mandelstam responded the Cockroachissimo with the famous epigram We live not sensing the country under us, where:
Cockroach mustache laugh,
And his boots shine.
This is certainly about Stalin, and the poet paid with his life.
In 1970-90 Dmitry Prigov, classic of Soviet conceptual poetry, has created a poetic cycle Tarakanomakhia (Fighting against Cockroach). His Сockroach – the phenomenon of chthonic forces, equal to human being. They have deadly fight in which nobody wins.
As a hardened criminal
A Cockroach wanders by night
In the kitchen, for example,
I’m a Militsaner (Policeman).
As, for example, guard,
I told him: wait!
He shoots back and runs away
I’m chasing him all night.
They tell me that cockroaches in large cities disappeared due to mobile phone radiation. I don’t believe. In the home life – possible. In Russian art – Cockroach forever!
