Grigory Dashevsky was an excellent teacher of Latin and the history of Roman literature, a literary critic, a talented creator of essays and poetic palimpsests, and also a brilliant translator.
Biography of Dashevsky
The poet’s biography is so concise that it most likely refers to the century before last than to our time. Gregory was born in 1964, on February 25, in the capital of Russia. Until the last days, he remained faithful to his Moscow. He studied Dashevsky at Moscow State University at the classical department of the Faculty of Philology.
After graduation, a young graduate began teaching Latin at school, and later at Moscow State University, philology students - the history of Roman literature. Then he worked for more than twenty years at the Department of Classical Philology of the RSUH. During his work, he trained several times abroad, visited Paris and Berlin.
Creative activity of Dashevsky
In parallel to his teaching career, he led his column in the completely non-philological publishing house Kommersant. Thanks to literary reviews, he earned the title of best domestic critic. The topics of his discussions had a wide response in society. What was his statement about the rights of persons with disabilities worthy of which resonated in society and were discussed for a long time. It has also been actively published in the magazines Citizen K, Kommersant Weekend and Safe Reserve. Several times he was invited as a guest on television to the program "School of Slander." He was a living legend at the university, among the students draft copies of his translations and video lectures were plying.
Grigory Dashevsky belonged to such a rare type of poets today, more prone to university traditions than bohemian delights. And this is despite the fact that he always considered Timur Kibirov to be his ideological inspirer.
The traditions of classical literature
Literary critics and literary critics believed that, as a poet, Grigory Dashevsky is more a rare genre of palimpsest. Literally translated, this word means "parchment from which old inscriptions were erased and new ones were written on top." There are not so many poets who worked in this style, especially among domestic authors. In poetic palimpsests, established traditions harmoniously interact with modernity. You must be a master of the highest class to write such poems. In fact, these are not accurate translations of verses and not individual statements of the classic, this is a kind of development of the work, its continuation, the so-called "poetic roll call". The creations of Grigory Dashevsky are unique. In them you can find an intellectual banter and elements of pop music, and poetic images simply erase the space - time. His characters seem to be from a neighboring courtyard and at the same time from an absolutely different dimension, while street slang is harmoniously replaced by the chased minimalism of Latin.
Grigory Dashevsky was actively engaged in translations of writers, philosophers of the twentieth century, but most of all he loved works devoted to the totalitarian system and the personality interacting with it. This topic was unexpectedly and paradoxically reflected in the poem “Henry and Semyon”, published in 2000.
Author Achievements
Despite the uniqueness of the works, in his entire creative career he received not so many awards. Only two times his works were included in the shortlist, he received a diploma from the Soros Institute and one of the most prestigious awards - named after Andrei Bely and Maurice Maxvacher. The awards could not find his hero during his lifetime, as often happens, the main thing is that after him there remains a great literary heritage, as well as a contribution to literary criticism and poetry, the role of which can hardly be overestimated. His merit was that he tried to maintain such a precarious relationship between education, poetry and philosophy.
Love and death
Dashevsky was not the idol of the majority, many people didn’t have his name, but despite the difficulty of perception, his work can bewitch anyone, whether he is absolutely not interested in poetry or brought up on completely different literature. His works do not obey the general requirements and laws of poetry. They do not hear a musical tune, there is no clear change of images, they do not preach generally accepted common truths.
The size of verses is inherent in the more forgotten classical prototype than the canons of Russian poetry. The visiting card of Dashevsky is considered the poem “Quarantine”. His work is reminiscent of the poetry of Catullus, who described the unfortunate love of Sappho. In the work of Catullus, the state of the heroine Sappho is described, in which the line between love and death has been erased. And the hero of Dashevsky, a young man who looks at the nurse with bated breath, at the same time wanting her and being afraid to hear a terrible sentence.
According to reporters, while in the intensive care unit, Grigory Dashevsky made his last translation of the Elliottian Ash Wednesday, which called for teaching "indifference and pity." It is noteworthy that the last two lines have remained untranslated (Prayforusnowandatthehourofourdeath). They speak of a request to pray for us now and at the hour of death.
Heritage
Dashevsky published his first poetry book back in 1989 under the title Papier-mâché. Later, he wrote 3 more books: “Change of Poses,” created in 1997, “Henry and Semyon” (2000), and also in 2001, “The Duma of Ivan Tea.” As the author Grigory Dashevsky left behind a few works, he was more involved in translations from German, French and English. He loved to work not only with poetry, but also with works of art, philosophical and scientific works.
The translations performed by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, Robert Penn Warren and Hannah Arendt were in great demand .
The author really enjoyed working with the works of the philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard. The most famous of these were Violence and the Sacred and Scapegoat. By the way, it was for the last work that Dashevsky received the French Maurice Waxmacher Prize in 2010.
Serious disease
In the fall of 2013, Grigory Dashevsky was hospitalized. Family and colleagues have long hidden the true reason for hospitalization. It was only known that he was in very serious condition and he needed a serious operation. But doctors considered that Dashevsky Gregory, whose illness was simply a shock for the majority, is too bad and may not be able to tolerate surgical intervention.
In September, a message appeared on Facebook on the page of a colleague Tatyana Neshumova, a researcher at the Marina Tsvetaeva Moscow Museum, saying that Grigory Dashevsky needed an urgent blood transfusion. What was sick and what blood type is needed was not reported. All that was said was that anyone could help him. Since the blood is needed not specifically for transfusion, but to replenish the blood bank.
last years of life
Suffering from a debilitating disease, continuing to fight it for a long time, he never sought compassion and support. The only thing Dashevsky complained about was a strong decline in working capacity.
After a long struggle with a serious illness in a Moscow hospital in December 2013, Grigory Dashevsky died. The cause of the death of the poet remained a mystery to the majority.