By Aleksey Calvin

“He shot straight, so to say, into the epoch’s nerve, and the epoch began to scream about itself with his voice.” - Korney Chukosvky

Sasha Chorny, one of the greatest Russia lyric and satiric poets who managed to combine a sense of comic irreverence with an appreciation of the sublime, was born under the name Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg in 1880 in warm sunny Odessa. The origin of his famous surname Chorny (which means “Black”) goes back to his earliest years. It so happened that out of the five children in the family two were called Alexander or Sasha for short. To minimize the confusion which arose each time one of the boys would get summoned by a parent, the blond Sasha was dubbed “Sasha Bely” (Sasha the White) while our dark-haired hero was called “Sasha Chorny” (Sasha the Black). The father of the two Sashas was a Jewish worker in a chemical laboratory. Soon enough the question of education came up in the family. At that time it was difficult for an unchristened Jewish kid to get a formal education, so little Sasha began his familiarization with worldly enlightenment by getting a comprehensive home-schooling courtesy of his cultured family. When Sasha was ten, his family decided that he ought to get christened to get ahead in life and, after finally accepting Christ into his life, the boy entered a gymnasium.

At the age of fifteen he went off to Saint Petersburg where his brother and aunt already resided, but didn’t do too well at his new school and soon flunked out of it due to his inability to pass algebra. Having disappointed his family who simply stopped responding to his letters, the future poet suddenly found himself utterly broke and homeless. Miserable and discouraged, Sasha wallowed around the cold streets and slept on the benches of scenic parks. This destitute period came to an abrupt end when a young journalist named Alexander Yablonovskiy decided to write an article about this strange homeless kid and his “Dickensian” circumstances of a fall from middle class grace. The article drew the attention of an empathetic wealthy man named Konstantin Roshe. Roshe had recently lost his son and was apparently looking for a substitute. Sasha, a distinctly well-spoken and educated charity case, proved to be a perfect match. Roshe adopted the grateful boy and proved to be a wonderful mentor. Under his tutelage the youthful Sasha Chorny was first exposed to the world of poetry beyond the limited, and mostly somewhat archaic, examples of it taught at the gymnasium. This exposure to poetry very soon turned into a passion which would last a lifetime. This is when Sasha began to write poems as well, though the first time he got published was still a few years away in 1904.

At the turn of the century our hero may have grown somewhat bored or restless in his more-or-less comfortable existence with Roshe. So, he decided to change things around and to tempt fortune by joining the army. From 1900 to 1902 he served as a private in a peacetime garrison, but eventually grew bored of that too and got a job as a customs official in a tiny town of Novosiltsy, which may not have been less boring but certainly much more of a financially stable vocation. And possibly thanks to this financial stability, these were the years when the still-youthful Alexander first exhibited the necessary determination to propel his poems into print. In 1904 some of his earliest poems began to be published in the newspaper Volynsky Vestnik (which translates to “The Messenger of Volyn”) under various pseudonyms such as “All Alone”, “Dreamer”, and others. The following year Sasha moved back to Saint Petersburg where he found work as a customs official for the Saint Petersburg-Warsaw railway line. The railroad office is also where he met his future wife Maria Vasilieva who happened to serve as his manager and direct superior at the time. Chorny’s very first published creations were already filled with that acerbic type of ironic satire which would become his trademark.

At the same time he manage to tap into a potent, often absurdist, vein of comedy which would eventually help make his work wildly popular. While these gifts for comedy and satire set Chorny’s work apart from the generally more serious and melodramatic work of the era’s poets, his technical mastery of poetic forms endowed his creations with a certain artfulness inaccessible to the majority of satirists. Besides, Chorny seldom worked exclusively in a satiric mode. Many of his poems not only manage to combine striking images (ranging from the grotesque to the silly to the sublime) and keen observations with a sense of the ridiculous and even, at times, the carnevalesque, but also often feature emotional and dramatic dimensions. They can be truthful, hilarious, but also touching and truly deep. And yet, if we were to stare through all these different facets of Chorny’s writing, to disregard his uniqueness and technical excellence, we would see that satire and irony are still the heart and the soul of this writer’s work. And like typical satiric writing, most of Chorny’s creations have a social basis with a bit of critical bend. Certainly, our Sasha was not the most contented of Russian citizens. This quality in his writing would often get Chorny in trouble. As early as 1905 the first publication of satirical work Chepuha (which translates to “Nonsense”) in the satirical magazine Onlooker resulted in a sizable scandal and the closing of the magazine. One can’t help but wonder about this novice writing professional’s popularity with publishers in the wake of such an episode… But regardless of whether his standing was affected or not, this ill-fated publication is also remembered for being the first documented use of the pen-name “Sasha Chorny”.

Unfortunately, the young poet’s troubles with tsarist authorities did not end there. One of his earliest collections “Different Motives” was banned by the humorless eagle-brained censors in 1906. Somewhat deterred by this violent official reaction to his witty opuses the newly dubbed “Sasha Black” took a couple of years off to study at the Gendelberg University. His inevitable return to popular literature took place in the pages of the Satyricon magazine where wily wits were quite appreciated. The magazine was a must-have for any educated and culturally hip big-city Russian at the turn-of-the-century and, thus, assured not only a relatively wide readership for Chorny but one composed of precisely his target audience: the people who could appreciate a well-woven lyric as much as a good joke, who could handle the. The following three years were to become some of the most fruitful of the poet’s life. He became the most popular and sought out of the magazine’s writers. His poems were memorized and recited a dinners and drinking parties all across the country. He may have approached the kind of instant success only dreamt-of by writers of any time and place. Poet and translator Korney Chukovsky recalls: “...after receiving the fresh issue of the magazine, the reader before anything would search through its pages for the poems of Sasha Chorny. There wasn’t a single college girl, a single university student, single doctor, lawyer, engineer, who didn’t know them by heart. He shot straight, so to say, into the epoch’s nerve, and the epoch began to scream about itself with his voice.” And yet, for less-than-clear reasons he decided to leave Satyricon and, as they say, go solo.

Around that time the poet was published in many other magazines as well including Argus, The Sun of Russia, The Contemporary, and The News of Odessa, but none of these partnerships were nearly as significant as his legendary stint at the Satyricon. 1911 sees the release of Chorny’s books Satires and Satires and Lyrics. In-between 1912 and 1915 he penned and published several books aimed at children and, at once, became one of the country’s favorite children’s authors. One of them was a poeticized and illustrated version of an alphabet book which actually became quite popular was used to teach the basics of literariness to innumerable kids. But, lo and behold, amidst all this came the explosion of the inhuman massacre which became known as The Great War and it would change Chorny forever...

His vast literary fame, unique ironic wit, and poetic talent did no matter here, for the rules of civilian life immediately ceased applying. He was drafted into the Russian Imperial army and, for better or worse, sent to work in the 13th field hospital in the vicinity of Warsaw (Poland constituted Russia’s westernmost border at the time, serving as a scene for many bloody affairs during the war). Tending to the wounded, some lacking in both body parts and facets of their sanity, was a taxing experience for Chorny. He developed an intensely melancholic disposition which eventually grew into a genuine depression. Thankfully, his wife was around to nurse it to an extent. Besides, as every poet born before 1950 has known, sorrow is often the mother of great art. His poetry of the time feels simultaneously more naturalistic and detailed than his former peaks and also more conscious of life’s simple beauties embodied in such sights as setting suns and vistas of Russia’s vast fields. Notice the meditative questioning of a soldier in “To the Front” or the almost casual sense of horror pervading “In the Operating Room”, both included below. Within the gnawing swirl of wartime experiences the poet seems to have found a more timeless voice which remains relevant and powerful across any number of years and cultures. In contrast, his earlier poems may still charm us with their humor and perceptiveness, but some of their mass-winning appeal in the Satyricon days may very well be connected to the readers’ first-hand sense of familiarity with the absurdities of tsarist Russia. However, though Chorny’s new work was undoubtedly his best his new-found sense of insecurity somewhat crippled his past prolific nature shown during the Satyricon days, at least when it came to poetry. And then, like everything in this world, Chorny’s s days on the front n came to a more-than-timely conclusion.

But the turmoil of the era did not yet deign to leave the popular poet alone. Soon came the first of the two major revolutions which shook Russia at the tail-end of the century’s second decade. This was the relatively bloodless uprising which put an end to the regime which Chorny managed to so effectively satirize in his verse. Almost inexplicably, after the first revolution Chorny wound up as the assistant commissioner of the Northern Fleet soldier emissary Soviet – an important administrative role entirely mind-boggling in its peculiarity. For better or worse, he did not last long in this capacity. The second, October revolution, arrived on the heels of the first and brought forth a brand new world, one in which Chorny could no longer recognize his home. It certainly was no place for satirists and, in order to avoid a social and artistic reality in which the eventual fate of Chorny's fellow satirist and genius Mikhail Bulgakov was considered lucky, the poet almost immediately emigrated to Western Europe. So, by 1920 if one were to look up an “Alexander Chorny” (as the poet began signing his works) in Saint Petersburg or in the city's many satirical magazines, one would find out that he's been long gone. In fact, following the war and the Revolution, but before his permanent exit to Europe, Bely spent some time living in a small Ukrainian village where he finally found enough peace and quite to somewhat recuperate his work ethic. Nevertheless, the main thing which helped the poet get into tip-top form was his imminent journeys. A wanderer with a fresh wind at his back, he passed through Berlin, Rome, Paris, across the French coast. And with each new destination which seemed so exotic to his imaginative Russian eyes he seemed to regain some of the strength and spirit which was drained out of him by the bloody war. Bursting with this energy like a bottle of fine champagne, he once more began, at lightning speed, flaunting his art along with his boundless wit at all who could hear and all who could read.

Chorny began regularly performing with readings at the Russian communities of the various places he'd turn up. In 1923 he released a book entitled Jajda (Thirst) which was followed by Detskiy Ostrov (Children's Island). Soon thereafter came Dnevnik Foksa Mikki (The Diary of Mickey the Fox-terrier) which was written in the voice of Chorny's trusted dog Mickey and predated many other works of a similar nature (including my own experimental short story written during a 5th grade Literature class in Russia and given an F by the narrow-minded teacher). Around that time Chorny also penned Soldatskiye Skazki (The Soldiers' Fairy Tales) which approached the subject of war and soldiering from a decidedly brighter perspective than his war-time poems. Among Chorny's other major prose works are Goubiniye Bashmaki (Pigeon Boots), subtitled “Short stories about children and for children.”, as well as the short novella Chert Na Svobode (The Liberated Devil). What all of these prose works have in common is a balance between richly detailed, sublimely beautiful descriptive passages, sometimes bizarre, consistently imaginative plot-lines, and the wealth of the author's typical humor and irony. Like his poems, these works are just as defined by their satirical zeal as by their often-profound lyricism and artful observations. In 1927 he released a rare “love poem” under he title of Moy Roman (My Romance). Naturally, it was very far from any sort of a conventional romantic lyric, but an absurd love ode to a three-and-a-half year old daughter of a concierge. Of course, there's no sense of genuine pedophilia here. The whole thing is an elaborate, beautifully worded put-on which will, hopefully, be remembered as a real 20th century standout for many centuries to come. Sadly, like many other poets and writers of his generation, it was not in Chorny's fate to live past middle age and see out even the first half of his own century. Though, no, unlike them he did not die under the barrel of a gun or in the snowy chains of a Siberian Gulag. He was living in relative comfort and peace in a French village located in the province of Provence. That village, which was named La Favier, was quite the little gourmet food capital, famous for its fish, wines, and olives.

Chorny moved there in 1929 and, in contrast with his equally uneventful days in Ukraine which fired up his creativity, his written output slowed down somewhat during the following few years. But Chorny had other things to occupy his time. Benial genial and fairly charismatic he quickly made a lot of friends and began involving himself in the village life. Who knows? Perhaps he could have become a mayor someday. And yet, it was precisely Chorny's altruistic nature which brought forth his demise. On July 5th, 1932, a farmhouse in the town of Le Lavandou, not too far from he poet's residence, caught on fire one bright and scorching day. Chorny was at the scene in no time and began tirelessly trying to help put out the wild blaze and rescue the people inside. It's easy to imagine that as a man who since childhood loved imaginative stories of last-second rescues and superhuman heroism Chorny simply beamed at the possibility of finally proving himself in this role and not just through his literature, but in real life! When the flame was finally out, a smiling fifty-one year old Chorny traveled home, laid down on his bed in relief and satisfaction and... never again got up. A sudden heart attack put an untimely (or perhaps poetically perfect) period at the end of his existence. According to legend, Mickey the pup – the hero and narrator of the famous story – jumped atop of Chorny's chest once the poet died and immediately joined him in death. Such was the beautiful and an absurd ending for a life full of beautiful and absurd creations. So, the next time the subject of Russian literary geniuses comes up, do say a word for Sasha Chorny!