Baku motifs by Alexander Grich

Recently, in Los Angeles a book was published, about Baku and Azerbaijani literature, by a wonderful Baku poet and translator Alexander Grich, “The Autumn Station.” This new book by the author collected works, which can be conditionally called “Baku motifs.” In them, Alexander Grich turns to the interesting people whom he was lucky to know in person, to personalities and events which have already become legendary (Rasul Rza, Mirza Inragimov, Yusif Samedoglu, Fikret Godzha); he tells about prominent masters of literature (Mansour Vekilov, Vladimir Portnov, Intigam Gasymzadeh). Organically included in the book is the story “Three Horsemen are Riding in the Aul”, devoted to the Krimans family. This story is very much in the Baku spirit, and its protagonists are of a Baku character. This review of the book “The Autumn Station” is written by a permanent author of “Vestnik Kavkaza,” a student of Alexander Grich – Petr Liukomson.
 
 
The author of these lines had many chances to be convinced that a true poet is always also somewhat of a prophet, if not for the city and the world, then definitely for himself.
I doubted this only once – when I heard that the wonderful poet Alexander Grich, many of whose poems I still inwardly recite, is leaving Baku for the U.S… When I heard about this, immediately the lines from his piercing poem “First, Second, Third…” appeared in my memory – certainly, this is one of the best poems ever written about the city of my childhood. Among others, it had such lines, devoted to Baku:
 
I did not choose. This happened. The lot fell upon me,
I’m living here. And wherever I die,
I won’t escape far from here.
 
“But nonetheless he escaped!” – I then thought. Of course, he escaped because of many circumstances, but this does not change the essence. These lines sounded like a self-prophecy, but one that was not realized! Evidently, this is the time we have – a time of unfulfilled plans and unrealized prophesies.
Turning over the pages of the book “The Autumn Station”, recently issued in Los Angeles, I just became convinced once again that, alas, poets can escape nowhere from self-prophesies. Every page proves that, in fact, the author did not run anywhere from Baku - both in the physical sense and, as it is fashionable to say now, in the existential sense. Escape did not happen, and the poet, it seems to me, did not want it to happen.
To continue with commonplaces, "The Autumn Station" is definitely a declaration of love - to Azerbaijan, to Baku, to its people. To Azerbaijani literature, both in the Azerbaijani and Russian languages, where Alexander Grich himself belongs.
I have to say that in recent years in the United States, in Russia and in Israel many books have appeared devoted to Baku, to its unique colour, to this unique atmosphere of a sort of universal kinship, which seems to be permeate the very air of this city. The most notable of these books was, of course, "Bakinstvo" by the well-known journalist F. Agamaliev. Now it is impossible to find in any bookstore - it is being passed from hand to hand, just like in the good old times.
But in "The Autumn Station" the reader will find a remarkable documentary story "Three Horsemen are Riding in the Aul. Saga about the Krimans," in which Grich gives his understanding of "bakinstvo." In the main hero of the story, Eldar Kriman, one can easily recognize one of the characters of the above-mentioned poem, "First, Second, Third…”, but now, together with him, on just 70 small-format pages, appears the whole story of, so to say, a Baku intelligentsia family with mixed Azeri, Jewish, and many other roots; a family which always kept the doors open for friends and which was in many ways typical. The story covers no less than five decades; five generations replace one another on the book’s pages, and life throws its characters not only across countries but also across continents. But after reading "Three Horsemen," you realize that for the author the capacious term "bakinstvo," coined by Agamaliev, means not a local flavour, not ethnographic details of everyday life, dialects, etc, but those ideas of honour, honesty, reciprocity, and genuine men’s friendship, which served the basis of everyday living in Baku. It is no coincidence that the story ends with a chapter "Children and Grandchildren." Although this is not directly stated, the author managed to insert between the lines and thus bring to the reader his conviction, that if people from Baku managed to convey to their children the very special "Baku-set" of ​​life values, then their children will always remain Baku citizens wherever they reside.
And yet, for me personally, much more important is the first part of this book, with its brilliantly-written literary portraits of the already vanished classics of Azerbaijan literature - Mirza Ibragimov, Rasul Rza, Yusif Samedoglu; of Mansour Vekilov and Vladimir Portnov, who have not been among the living for a few years already; of those now living - the wonderful poet and writer Fikret Godzha and literary critic Intigam Kasumzadeh.
I purposely do not want to pull out quotes from these pages: each portrait is written so tastefully, so integrally, that it reads like a poem - in one breath. To take out one piece is only to spoil the general impression.
Therefore I take the liberty to express just a few thoughts, why these pages will be read with pleasure by any reader, not just current and former Baku residents.
Yes, of course, each of the characters in these essays is a Baku person "to the bone", and therefore when we read, how, for example, the author as a teenager first encountered Vladimir Portnov in a bookshop; how Intigam Kasumzadeh "took", that is, bought a car, while Mansour Vekilov, to the dismay of its owner, climbed up on its bonnet; or how Fikret Godzha was meeting with schoolchildren, we are again immersed in the unique whirlpool of Baku past. The author takes you to a Baku street, seemingly casually tells you about his favourite places of Baku, about the already non-existent beerhouses and pubs, and all this unwittingly awakens a sweet memory and causes a burning sensation in your chest ...
But at the same time Grich leads the reader along literary lobbies, tells about the fate of writers and Azerbaijani literature in general, gives unusually apt deep characteristics to the works of Fikret Godzha, Rasul, Rza and Yusif Samedoglu, tells about a little-known episode of Mirza Ibragimov’s life. All this is all the more interesting because Azerbaijani literature occupied a special place in the the former Soviet Union – given that every republic had a lot of interesting writers. The influence of this literature both on the literature of other Turkic-language republics and on the Russian literature of the twentieth century is not yet properly evaluated, and reading Grich makes this very clear.
Not to mention the fact that Baku gave birth to its own school of Russian poetry, in its strength of artistic peculiarity and expression compatible to the Odessa school, but also, alas, underappreciated. The book presents portraits of only two representatives of this school - Vladimir Portnov and M. Vekilov, but there were also others ...
And finally, all the literary portraits presented in "The Autumn Station" recreate a very special type of people who lived and breathed literature and made service to literature the meaning of their lives. Grich named his essay on Vladimir Portnov "The Knight of Poetry," but, in essence, all the book’s characters are such knights, including the author himself. And trust me, it is not that important whether these people will remain in the reader's memory or the history of literature or not – the point is that the very literary process is impossible without these types of people. Today such people are called "a vanishing nature", given the current devaluation of the writer's craft and literature’s loss of the important meaning it used to have. But I do not think so. Even if the paper book will indeed remain in the past, literature will continue to exist and, hence, mankind will still be in need of the "knights of poetry."
Thus the book "The Autumn Station" is about many things: about Baku, the fate of a whole generation, about literature ...
In conclusion, the book has certain shortcomings. First and foremost, it is a small size. And this is not veiled flattery, as one might think. The author clearly has something more to say, he obviously does not tell everything, and this sometimes produces a feeling of an "unassembled the puzzle," a kind of incompleteness, and it cannot help but annoy.
I think that the book should have a continuation, or in the new edition (and I hope that, even in our difficult time, it will be possible to reprint "The Autumn Station”) it will be significantly expanded. But all this is, of course, at the discretion of the author ...



More information about the book can be found at http://www.agrichbook.com