Magazine "The Avant Guard Almanac" №4

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Book\_5

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**Magazine "The Avant Guard Almanac" №4** (Russian: *Журнал «Альманах Авангарда» №4*) is a document in *ATOM RPG*.

## Transcript

"The Avant Guard Almanach"

14.04.1984

Topic:

"The revolutionary verse of Relsoff"

Verse libre or free verse as they call it is a rare bird indeed, at least in Soviet literature. As soon as this genre was born back in the last decades of the XIX century, it was labeled harshly by Marxist critics as being degenerate. Even in modern times, and even in the most intellectual company of people, the word verse libre draws associations with decadent, weak-minded, pale faced degenerates that called themselves poets of the so-called Silver Age Of Russian Literature. The manner with which a typical verse libre breaks the traditional syllabotonic structure of rhyme and tempo, is associated with how those filthy decadents broke social and human norms by taking drugs and attending unspeakable bourgeois orgies, that sometimes featured bestiality as well as acts most homosexual!

Other kinds of verse have their share of stereotypes, but those are mostly positive. For example strict verses with hammer-driven rhymes are associated with good, valuable and truly Soviet poetry, because thus wrote Pushkin, Mayakovsky, and other classics most beloved.

But if that stereotype was all true, wouldn’t the whiny, sickening poetry of a man-child such as Bunin was, be also considered great poetry? It has some really strong rhymes, after all!

Of course not. So, the stereotype about strict poetry being good is false. As false, as the stereotype that all verse libre poetry is decadent. Truth be told - real working class values can take any shape. Even the shape of free verse.

An everlasting example of this is the body of work by Andrian Sergeyevitch Avdotyev, also known under his alternative name, A. Relsoff who would be 100 years old in the day this issue of our Almanach hits the library shelves and news stands.

Comrade Relsoff was born April 14, 1884 in Tsarist Russia, in a family of medics – Sergey and Galina Avdotyev. Their family home, which also served as a private clinic, became the young boy’s first school. There, even before attending classes in the St. Petersburg Second Gymnasium, little Andrian helped his father during medical procedures, and managed to lend a hand to his mother as she worked on cadavers in the basement-turned-morgue.

While only 16, Andrian finished his Gymnasium studies prematurely, and attended the Surgery Academy of St. Petersburg as one of its youngest students. There, he took classes with such future legends of Soviet medicine as I.F. Tsion, F. V. Ovsyannikov and even I.P. Pavlov before the former left for Odessa.

A sharp twist in the life of the young aspiring medic shown itself during the Revolution of 1905. Being a lover of working people, and having a backbone of steel, young Andrian decided to give medical attention to those revolutionaries, that were injured in the city-wide fights with Tsarist gendarmes. He was only 20 years old, when the secret police captured him, and sent him to the Ust-Kutsk labor camp.

Although, this did not stop the young prodigy from practicing medicine. The head of the Ust-Kutsk salt mine quickly learned that a talented medic was among the new batch of prisoners, and asked Andrian, or comrade A. Relsoff, as he preferred to be called, to staff the prison clinic as part of his sentence.

Three years later, comrade Relsoff died in a prison-wide influenza epidemic. All that was left after he passed, was his notebook of verse libre, that he tended to as he worked in the prison clinic and especially the mortuary.

These verses, miraculously discovered years later by A.B. Mariengoff and published in his ”Sirena” magazine in 1919 held amazing, profound thoughts of the captive Communist poet. We will read those amazing verses today, and reminisce on the life and labors of Comrade Relsoff, the young red martyr for truth and beauty.