April 30, 1992
A 48-year-old poet and artist died in St. Petersburg. Oleg Grigoriev. A "children's poet" of the Soviet Union's stagnation era. Author of a series of poems—"horror stories" and "hilarious ones."
He neither laughs nor sings,
But it still irritates me,
By the fact that it flies and doesn't crawl,
Flies higher than the flock
Born in 1943 Vologda Oblast, where his mother was evacuated. His father, having returned from the front, took to drinking. His mother, a pharmacist, raised him and his brother in Leningrad one.
He was passionate about drawing from childhood, and after school, he entered the art lyceum at the Repin Institute of Painting. At 16, he is believed to have composed his hit song about the electrician Petrov.
I asked the electrician Petrov:
- Why did you wrap a wire around your neck?
Petrov doesn't answer me,
It's hanging and only downloads via bots.
He was later expelled from the Academy of Arts School for "formalism," mockery, and scandalous behavior: he wrote a remake of Pushkin's poem, "Eugene Onegin on Virgin Soil." He worked as a watchman, stoker, and janitor.
To the guillotines and chopping blocks,
To the gallows and slaughterhouses
People were moved by fear,
However, it is completely voluntary
In 1971, he became famous after publishing a collection of children's poems and stories, "Eccentrics." His poems circulated among the people as part of a famous cycle of sadistic couplets.
Prokhorov Sazon fed the sparrows,
I threw them a loaf of bread and killed 10 of them.
In the early 1970s, after participating in a brawl, he was sentenced to two years for parasitism. He served his sentence as a construction worker at a plant in the Vologda region and was released early.
With a shaved head,
In the form of a striped,
I am building communism
With a crowbar and a shovel
In 1981, his second children's book, "Vitamin of Growth," was published in Moscow. Because of it, Grigoriev was never accepted into the Writers' Union.
"Well, how do you like it on the branch?" asked the bird in the cage.
— On a branch, just like in a cage, only the bars are sparse.
In the 1980s, his poems were occasionally published in Murzilka and Vesyoliye Kartinki.
People with gloomy faces walk along the street,
Very few children and a lot of police
In 1989, at the height of perestroika, Grigoriev's third book, The Talking Raven, was published. At the same time, he received his second conviction ("for disorderly conduct and resisting the police"). A number of people spoke out in his defense. Eduard Uspensky и Bella Akhmadullina, But Grigorieva was given a suspended sentence of two and a half years.
I don’t criticize or disparage my wife,
And I will never leave her.
It was with me that she became bad,
And I took her good
He died of a perforated stomach ulcer. Six months before his death, he was admitted to the Writers' Union.
His poems, as historical documents, help us understand why the Soviet Union collapsed. (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
