Gnedov Basilisk - a famous domestic poet, representing the course of avant-garde. He was among the brightest representatives of ego-futurism. One of his most famous works is The End Poem.
The biography of the poet
Gnedov Basilisk was born in 1890. He was born on the territory of the region of the Don Army in the area of modern Novocherkassk. His real name is Vasily Ivanovich Gnedov.
His parents were a peasant and a tradesman. First, the hero of our article studied at the Zemstvo school, and then entered the elementary school located in Kamensky. Gnedov later entered the secondary technical school in Rostov-on-Don, but could not graduate, he was expelled from the very last class.
In 1912, the 22-year-old Gnedov came to St. Petersburg, where he was fond of the movement of self-futurism. The very next year, he published two books of his poems in a publishing house called St. Petersburg Herald. They are called very provocatively - "Death to Art: Fifteen (15) Poems" and "The Hotel of Sentiment." In 1914, together with Pavel Shirokov Gnedov, the Basilisk published the Book of the Great.
Revolution and camp
In 1914, the hero of our article became close to cubo-futurists. With some of them he participates in disputes and public appearances. The Gnedov Basilisk is especially active in communicating with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, but he does not finally agree with them and does not join their movement.
In 1915 he went to the front, to the First World War. In 1917, he was actively involved in both Russian revolutions. In 1925 he joined the Bolshevik party. Moreover, in 1921, Gnedov actually throws literature, working as an engineer. Interestingly, at the same time, he does not stop writing poetry, but does it for himself.
At the very beginning of the Stalinist repressions, he was arrested under a political article. About 20 years spent in the camp Vasilisk Gnedov. In the biography of the hero of the article, this played a tragic role, his health was finally undermined. However, freed, he managed to return to life. He lived until 1978. He died at the age of 88 in Kherson in the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.
Creativity Gnedova
The hero of this article entered the history of literature, first of all, thanks to his abstruse verses. Vasilisk Gnedov was closest to cubofuturism in the style of his works. At the same time, shocking was an important and integral part of his work. Special mention deserves the famous "Poem of the End", which will be described in the article below.
In many of his later poems, which Gnedov ceased to publish, he departs from various abstruse techniques, moving on to more classical and traditional poems. A large layer of his work, created after his release from the camp in the 50s, saw the light only in the 90s.
So he created his most famous works before the revolution, the rest are not known to a wide circle of readers. In particular, it was Gnedov who wrote self-futuristic poems in Ukrainian. In fact, these were the first futuristic experiments in Ukrainian poetry.
Critics noted that the work of Gnedov was characterized by deliberate illogisms and elaborate word-making, he often introduced certain graphic elements into the texts. Gnedov experimented a lot and successfully in word-making, his literary experiments were one of the most striking works of Russian futurism.
The Poem of the End
The most famous work of Vasilisk Gnedov - "The Poem of the End". With this work, Gnedov completed his book under the provocative title "Death to Art". In the poem itself there was not a single symbol, so on paper it was a white page, at the top of which there was only a name.
At the same time, Gnedov often spoke with her reading. He went out in front of the audience, made only one gesture with his hand, without uttering a single word. Contemporaries recalled that there were no words in the poem, and the gesture that Gnedov demonstrated while reading it was that he raised his hand in front of his hair and then sharply lowered it down, after to the right and sideways. All this resembled some kind of hook and was the whole poem.
The meaning of the poem was a deliberate rejection of the rational meaning, the poet denied art and language itself.
The other works of the book Death to Art were similar, only they had at least some symbols. Some texts consisted of the word "Buba", repeated several times, the penultimate text consisted of one letter "Yu".