Alexei Purin

Alexei Purin Poems

Alexei Purin Biography

Alexei Purin (full name Alexei Arnol'dovich Purin, Russian: Алексе́й Арно́льдович Пу́рин) (born 1955) is a Russian poet and critic. Born in Leningrad, Purin graduated from the Leningrad Technological Institute as a chemical engineer but soon turned to literature. In the 1970s he became part of the group around the poet Alexander Kushner, who opposed the government's socialist realism but also rejected the "underground poetry" often found in samizdat publication. For Purin and his circle the core concepts of literary art were the ‘everyday word’ of Innokentii Annenski (1856-1909), who inspired the Acmeists, a group of early-20th-century poets reacting against the vagueness and affectations of Symbolism, and Mandelshtam’s ‘nostalgia for a world culture’. Purin’s first book of poems contains the much-discussed cycle ‘Eurasia’ (1985), which deals with his years of military service in Karelia on the Finnish border. ‘Never before has the Red Army been written about in this manner,’ said the reviewer of Novii Mir... The combination of earthliness and literary condensation in Eurasia became Purin’s trademark. Yevgeny Rein said of him: "A poet of wide, organically digested culture, a poet of the rarest technical equipment, he sends his muse along two paths: complex classical stylizations based on rarely visited poetic regions (Alexandria, the ancient East, Greece of the times of Pericles and Alcibiades, the early Middle Ages), and the other, simpler path, that of lyric exercises, impressions from touristic Europe, normal love lyrics, sometimes with an exotic tendency." He has been in charge of the poetry section of the St. Petersburg literary review Zvezda (The Star) since 1989 and editor of Urbi, a literary almanac, since 1995.)

The Best Poem Of Alexei Purin

Butterfly

‘Where is the Grace of God?' It lives amongst
Nymphalis Antiopa, wings closed like a book.
It's in your palm, you rub the coloured dust
of everyday anxieties. Just look:
it's unalive like lace (don't say it's ‘dead'),
it's just the muted fright of a distant space,
where fragile words are woven thread by thread,
into the interlacement of the Word. Embrace

and tune into the animated sadness of these wings,
papyrus that's reciting it forever:
‘A caterpillar-chrysalis-the final dream,
the image that was lingering', and ever
I see a temple of the future life
as if it was written out by a Grace:
it's not a lingam, or a spire like a knife -
a butterfly with wings of coloured lace.

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