boris

When I was about 16 I met Boris Ryzhi.

I was working for the Poetry International festival in my hometown of Rotterdam. Filming people who knew a poem by heart. Was projected after the break when the people flood back into the theatre.

Upstairs was a 'poets foyer', with newspapers from around the world, lockers, message boards and... a free bar.
Now there is something you have to know. In this day and age, contrary to popular believe, poets in general are no suicidal alcoholics anymore. They are kind of 'together'. Kind of boring too, sipping orange juice and most of them bring their wives along from all these parts of the world.

Not Boris Ryzhi. In his eyes was an incredible sadness. He was drunk all day. Didn't speak a word od English. Got mugged in the middle of the night in an alley behind the theatre. Fell from the theatre stairs. Got drunk again.

It was that year I got drunk myself for the first time. With Boris. We could not communicate, but we both KNEW life made no sense.

He came all the way from his hometown of Yekaterinburg in central Russia to blow his performance. He was too drunk.

A year later, 26 years old, he killed himself.

This ‘fairy-tale Sverdlovsk’ is the world of Ryzhi the poet. It is a world of the street, a man’s world of drinkers and smokers, of hitmen and police, of factories and jails. If women are mentioned at all, it is in such phrases as ‘the woman I didn’t live with’, or ‘Elya has died’. Ryzhi sees himself as ‘a poet and a bandit’, and wants to ‘sing like a drunken whore’. He is a child of the 1980s, the years of ‘stagnation’, and ‘a soldier of perestroika’, a child of a lost generation if ever there was one.

Hans Boland, poetry.com