TO MEET THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF SULEIMAN

On the holidays of early 2015, the Union of Writers of Dagestan held the first meeting of the initiative group created to prepare the publication of an academic collected works of the great Lezgin and Dagestan poet Suleiman Stalsky.

Russian writers living in the Yaroslavl region - poet Evgeny Chekanov and prose writer Mamed Khalilov, as well as the head of the Yaroslavl regional Lezgin national-cultural autonomy Vasif Hasanov - took an active part in the work of the group. The guests from Central Russia brought with them a gift - several dozen copies of the book “Suleiman Stalsky”, which had just been published in Yaroslavl. New translations."

The Yaroslavtsevs were warmly greeted by the head of the administration of the Suleiman-Stalsky district, the famous Dagestan scientist Nariman Abdulmutalibov, who promised the members of the initiative group all possible assistance in their work. E. Chekanov and M. Khalilov met with their colleagues, Dagestan writers Arben Kardash and Zulfikar Kaflanov, as well as with famous Dagestan scientists, doctors of philological sciences Magomed Magomedov and Feyzudin Nagiyev. The Chairman of the Dagestan Writers' Union, Magomed Akhmedov, organized a study trip for Yaroslavl colleagues to one of the most beautiful places in Dagestan, the high-mountain village of Gunib.

The initiative group decided to form an editorial board and editorial council for the future multi-volume edition of the works of S. Stalsky. It is planned that already in May some of the new interlinear versions of the great Dagestan poet will be ready - verified, cleared of distortions and ideological layers. To celebrate his 150th anniversary, Suleiman should appear before the Russian reader as he really was - a wise, sincere, fearless, truly people's poet.

On the picture:

1. Chairman of the Writers' Union of Dagestan Magomed Akhmedov chairs the meeting

initiative group. Far right - Mamed Khalilov.

1. On the way to Gunib. From left to right: poet and translator Evgeny Chekanov, chairman

Union of Writers of Dagestan Magomed Akhmedov, poet and prose writer Mamed Khalilov, Doctor of Philology, Director of the Institute of Language, Literature and Art named after. G. Tsadasy Magomed Magomedov.

1. In Gunib.

Chekanov E.F.

FRUITS OF A HOT SOUL

The poet, member of the Union of Writers of Russia Evgeniy Chekanov celebrates his fiftieth birthday with the publication of a new, regular - ninth - poetry book with the original and bold title “Hot Paper”. This collection (publishing house “It’s Not Too Late” of the Scientific and Technical Center “Rubezh”) summarizes the poetic work of Evgeny Feliksovich over the previous two years, presenting all the poems he wrote during this time. The leitmotif of the book is a person’s struggle with the sorrows of life, restoration of the spirit, a hymn to vigor and mental health.

The book consists of three sections. “Take Off Before Sunset” is the title of the first. Here are poems-reflections, a philosophical view of today's reality, which in a certain sense can be called “timelessness”. Listen to the titles of the poems alone: ​​“Dream of a Flooded Homeland”, “Russians”, “Bandit”, “Wolf in the Swamp”, “Falled Out of the Clip” and others. The section ends with this poem:

It's not so tragic, dear ones.

Well, the body will cool down, don’t cry,

Well, I’ll leave for new circles...

The spirit does not cool down. The spirit is hot.

It burns, bright and stubborn,

It burns quietly, like a candle.

He is the same in these lines:

Touch the paper - it's hot!

The second section of the book - “In the world of love and freedom” - speaks for itself. Here are just a few words from it - a few sad, sorrowful, but bright:

Even though I was just a glimmer of light

In your impenetrable fate,

For this meeting with the poet

A lot will be forgiven you.

In the preface to the final section of the book - “The Test of Time” - the author writes: “While going through my archives, I came across a whole layer of poems that I wrote ten, fifteen, or even twenty years ago. They were never published because I considered some to be weak and others unfinished. But today, after re-reading them and finalizing some of them, I realized that many of them have stood the test of time.”

Well, there’s probably nothing to add here except the well-known: “My poems, like precious wines, / Will have their turn.”

Generally speaking, Evgeny Chekanov is a poet of the widest creative range. There is probably no such phenomenon or object that would not interest him and cause a poetic response. And yet its main theme is love, the relationship between a man and a woman, an eternal and inexhaustible theme. A reverent prayer, a flash of anger, the delight of a shared feeling, an attack of shame and repentance, an outburst of pity and compassion - everything is captured on the pages of his unusually frank and heartfelt books. Each of them is a diary of purely personal experiences, understandable, however, to any person who loves or has loved.

Also, Evgeniy Chekanov’s poetic style is characterized by assertiveness, audacity, and sometimes a certain rigidity. Here is what the famous poet, his teacher, rightfully considered a classic of Russian literature, Yuri Kuznetsov, said about him: “His verse is objective, sharp-sighted, clearly focused... He does not wander in metaphorical fogs, does not get bogged down in the routine of abstractions, but seeks the exact word. He is a fighter by nature and wants to win.”

I need to live my destiny

And know that my soul is pure,

When I put it in front of me

Paper sheet.

This is again from the book “Hot Paper”...

I wrote these lines exactly ten years ago. Quite a long time. And in literary life it is huge. What changed? Much, if not all. The poet Evgeny Chekanov remained unchanged. The same reverent attitude towards creativity and its bearers. I mean true, honest, sincere artists of words. But he is also uncompromisingly strict towards literary swindlers, towards their verbal balancing act, towards pseudo-poetry. His creative fire, enthusiasm and colossal capacity for work have not diminished one gram. For the first time in my life I meet a person who is able to do several things at the same time - write poetry, stories, reviews, reviews, translate from other languages, collect and edit manuscripts of fellow writers for the Yaroslavl writers’ magazine “Prichal”, which he created, meet with authors and convince them in the expediency of editorial editing, photograph poets and prose writers yourself, travel to other cities and towns to see interesting writers who are “not allowed to travel abroad” due to age or illness, layout the publication, distribute it in Rospechat kiosks within the Yaroslavl region, monitor positive reviews and criticism, to save the writers' organization...

I would like to stop here, since the salvation of the Yaroslavl regional branch of the Russian Writers' Union is too serious an issue to talk about casually, “in context.” The role of Evgeny Feliksovich in this matter is so great that it requires a separate discussion. And he, the conversation, is ahead. I can say one thing: as long as Chekanov is alive and well, no illusionists of the pen and servile scribblers will drive the writing community into the grave.

In the near future, another book by Evgeny Chekanov will be published, this time - translations of Suleiman Stalsky, an outstanding Dagestan poet. And this, I take the courage and responsibility to say, will be a long-awaited event in the literary, cultural, and spiritual life of our two countries.

And one last thing. In Yaroslavl there was not and there is no other writer so widely published in the most prestigious Russian and foreign literary magazines, almanacs, anthologies, and collective collections. The author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, Evgeny Chekanov, is a laureate of the 4th Moscow International Poetry Competition "Golden Pen" (Moscow, 2007), laureate of the International Literary Competition "Crossroads - 2009" (Dusseldorf, 2009), laureate of the 1st All-Russian Poetry Competition. . Pavel Vasilyeva (Moscow, 2010), winner of the International Literary Competition “Call of Nymphaeum” in the category “Song of Philosophical Content” (Kerch, 2010), winner of the 1st All-Russian Literary Competition “I Erected a Monument to Myself” (Tula, 2010).

I wish you creative success and victories, inspiration and optimism, talented Russian poet!

EVGENY CHEKANOV AS TRANSLATOR

Fragments
LULLABY

Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, no one will come -
Neither animals nor people.
Rock it, rock it all night long
At my mother's breast.

Sail on the waves of my lullaby
Into the vastness of the universe,
Knowing no fear, not knowing sorrows,
Not remembering the suffering.

The native vale growls and groans
Behind my mother's breast.
Foamy salt rises to the sky
With bloody mud.

Foggy times lie ahead
Invisible shallows
And sharp stones... Wait, wait,
Stay in the cradle!

Still seeping through the foamy surface
Both people and animals
You will also have time to recognize your fears,
And grief and loss.

You will have time to swim at all times
A meager vale...
Don't know it - and float on the waves
My lullaby.

How helpless we come into the world! But, to our surprise, we are greeted here by a generous mother’s breast and a cozy cradle, and every day past fears and suffering go somewhere, are forgotten... This is how we would live the days given by the Lord - in the warm embrace of our family, far from shallows and rapids dangerous river of existence.
However, we are destined to grow up and leave the precariousness. On still unsteady legs, falling, hurting and crying, we take our first steps into a new reality. And the mother continuously looks at us, and sadness shines in her eyes. She knows where we are going, and she knows that we cannot be stopped - after all, she herself once walked this path.
You are growing up, humanity. How many of us are already living away from our planet for years! True, they do not yet feel like residents of the great Cosmos, they are children of the Earth, and without their mother’s vigilant supervision today they are doomed to death outside their native cradle. But with each new century their steps will sound more and more firmly in the starry vale. We can't be held back...
Do we recognize sadness in a mother's eyes? Do we remember that she has already left behind the path into which we are now striving with such enthusiasm?

ETERNAL ROAD

Everything that happened to us before -
in the womb of a sinless mother,
in a terrible battle of family traits,
in the close darkness, -
was an omen
long torment of existence,
our painful road
on the ground.
Life will pass, we are at the threshold...
But the road is not over!
And, leaving forever
this light
we will tremble, realizing:
life was prenatal...
We will come out of the darkness into the light,
or not?

A person's prenatal experience lays the foundation for his postpartum experience. Taking this logic into account, we can try to say something about our posthumous existence. It can be assumed that the earthly life of each of us, its personal algorithm, survival strategy and goal setting lay the foundations of our posthumous existence. And then every significant act we have done in this world becomes a kind of reference point for the future path of our indestructible “I”.
This, or something like this, was what people thought back in ancient times. And similar thoughts overwhelmed me when this poem was born in the early 80s of the last century.
Today I would add that the logic of such an idea leads to patriotism, national-ethnic and state. After all, if you realize that your earthly life, from birth to death, is “intrauterine,” then you will inevitably think about your “childhood place,” that is, about your homeland.
And humanity as a whole should think about its mother Earth and about the great Father, who gave us the opportunity to first appear in her womb, and then suck on her generous breast for some time.

THINKING OF THE ROSE

You kiss the rose when you get up
From the crumpled bed of love, -
And the rose trembles as if alive,
Catching your kisses.

Earthly moments tremble...
And you'll never understand
That this is not a shiver of pleasure, -
Sacred mortal trembling.

Do I want to say that all the so-called trembling of earthly life is just death convulsions? You can understand these lines this way...
Indeed, our birth can be interpreted as God plucking “one of the roses” from the invisible bush of possible births. Each one born is cut and smells fragrant in the glass of earthly life, in God’s bedroom, on the bedside table. The Lord of the world likes to watch how we flame, how we wait for His caresses, how inexorably, day after day and hour after hour, we wilt, losing our petals...
The most cunning among us know how to dry out our beauty. But God is God because he is not satisfied with poems, pictures and descriptions of past exploits. Give Him everything alive - flesh, sweat, blood, tears... And cut roses, trembling, catch His kisses.
Anyone who lives with the thought that he will one day die perceives the moments of earthly life in a special way - as a sacred trembling before death. True, it is a rare rose that thinks about this and understands this. She burns, she enjoys life, she drinks the life-giving moisture with the entire open wound of her soul. And then it dries up...

THE RESCUE

Look, what kind of baths there are here!
Nikolay Rubtsov

And the cattle mooed. He smelled a stranger
And he looked at me with a bloodshot eye.
But the river was waiting for us all
And we all entered into the depths at once.

Gentle water sharpened the shore,
And I shouted: “What kind of baths there are here!”
And the cattle trumpeted... We were all saved then
On that land that was still giving birth to grass.

Yes, I was saved in my “little time”, at the turn of two centuries - I was born, lived the years allotted to me by the Lord, left offspring, wrote something, published something, imprinted the imprint of my heel in the clay of centuries... but in this poem we are talking about more serious things - about “saving us all.”
One of the possible meanings is the one that, perhaps, the future astronaut, slowly flying now, in his forty-eighth century after Christ, in the orbit of Saturn, will see in these lines. He flies and thinks: behold, humanity has left the Earth, which has long since given birth to neither grass nor trees, we have all moved to other celestial bodies; but once upon a time this planet was the home of our ancestors - a green paradise with gentle water and yellow baths. And, look, our ancestors were not licked by a solar prominence in those days, they were not destroyed by an asteroid, and they themselves did not destroy each other in deadly wars... they were saved, however! They escaped and gave life to their descendants, and they gave life to us. And now we are alive and flying...
This poem can also be read in a purely theological sense - as news of the accomplished apocatastasis, of the salvation of the sheep of the human flock in the river of God's grace. But not even volumes, but entire libraries have been written about this on Earth long ago.

HOMUNCULIS

You will be given a location
According to rank and gender.
You can live an interesting life -
Work and drink Coca-Cola.

In a multicameral parliament
You will start jumping like children...
And only one thing will be forbidden to you -
Know who you are on this planet.

More and more often you meet them - who read nothing except Cosmopolitan magazine, don’t think about anything for a long time, love football matches and television shows, sip either beer or a cigarette... Having long ago gotten used to openly despising this urban rabble, one day you You will doubt that you are right: what if this dull look and chewing jaws are just a mask behind which hides a thin, vulnerable, suffering soul?
And you will become close to one of them. And you will recoil in horror: in front of you is a homunculus! A creature made by someone - either the street, or the TV, or Cosmopolitan. Spiritual trash without any glimmer of intellectual independence.
There are more and more of them on earth. And the more responsible your task is to preserve, while living side by side with them, your living soul. Don't be like them in any way. Always remember who you are and who your Creator is.

SALT TORCHES

Man is made of salt water
A wave is passed through it -
And a man burns... This is the flame of trouble,
But who should blame him?

Didn't we want to look inside ourselves?
Until the end, until the last bottom?
Haven't we reached the end of this path?
Isn't it our fault?

Is there no limit to knowledge? Here it is, the limit:
Waves fly over the planet,
And the salty torches of bodies burn,
Feeling that knowledge is hell.

And the last question from the smoking ruins
Flies into the last gap:
Is there only one human way?
Is eternal knowledge the goal?

If so, then burn us, all-good Lord,
At the foot of the coming sorrows!
Let the sinful flesh burn and writhe,
Not having comprehended her secrets.

Drown us forever in burning blood,
Make it coal, burn it to ashes!
And for new answers, call to yourself
All the salty waters of the Earth.

If salt water is irradiated with a radio wave of a certain frequency, then the water, as shown by the experiments of John Kanzius and Rustum Roy, burns. This means that people who are 70 percent salt water will also catch fire. So, all of humanity can easily be burned. But then why does it still exist?
From century to century, inquisitive human thought invents more and more new algorithms for the extermination of people. Every now and then we find ourselves on the brink of self-destruction: crises like the Caribbean crisis are multiplying and multiplying in my time. And all this makes us think about the mortal danger, about the destructiveness of the very vector of human existence.
Who are we in the universe and what should we strive for? Man has long been seen by most earthly thinkers as God's creature, always learning something new. Do we really need this thirst for knowledge - especially considering what dark abysses yawn on both sides of the narrow path that leads people to comprehend the unknown? Maybe it's time for us to stop and just enjoy our existence on a beautiful green planet?
What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? Do we need, in the time allotted to us in space, to cognize everything that can be cognized by us - and stop there? Or is our goal knowledge in itself, this very path along the path?
I thought about this after reading in 2007 about the experiments of the American engineer John Kanzius.

***

Kingdom of God, how can I see you?
I will begin to be fruitful, multiplying the diminishing race:
To throw at affectionate women, having fun and loving,
A bright seed - and wait with trepidation for the harvest.

Children will rise and step beyond the earthly eye,
Carrying the seed of love through years and nations.
Minutes of a century - and I will wake up in my descendant,
In the kingdom of God, in the world of love and freedom...

Reflecting on the kingdom of God, where there is no death, no need, no sighing, I once thought that the path to it is commanded by the very nature of man, created by the Lord “in the image and likeness.” After all, it is said: be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth.
Myriads of scribes and Pharisees from different countries and peoples immediately began to gnaw at my simplicity: how dare you even compare the high path of moral self-improvement, leading straight to the kingdom of God, with vulgar childbearing!
Well, that’s what I dare,” I answered them, beaming with a Rozanov-like smile. - Of course, you are improving in good health, but who told you that your efforts are the general path to that very kingdom? I, at least, create with my behavior a certain chain of DNA stretching into the next earthly millennia, throw my genotype into the future - what about you? You call to build this kingdom of yours right now, inside each individual person, in his created image. Is this possible in principle?
Even if it is impossible, the scribes and Pharisees retorted, then we must still strive for it. What are you calling for? Is it stupid to create copies of yourself so that they can create their own, and so on ad infinitum? This is a stupid infinity! Its name is regression!
No, wait, gentlemen, spiritual progressives,” I pressed. - One hundred percent copies still won’t work, that’s out of the question. But by creating, let’s say, more and more new human organisms, I am thereby providing for my descendants a very real opportunity to become better, more moral, purer - I am creating the basis for this! And you say that such a basis is not at all the main thing. Ultimately, it turns out that you are calling for abortions? After all, if you put on the scales, on the one hand, morality, and on the other, living life, you will choose morality, right? And I, although I don’t directly say this in my poem, in essence, am speaking out against abortion here, because I call for people to be fruitful and multiply. Well, what do you say to this, the coffins are all washed up? Isn’t it said about you: you yourself do not enter and you do not allow those who want to enter!
Here the washed-out coffins scratched their heads. No, what are you, what are you, - they whined, - are we against living life? But you too, with this “throwing of seeds” of yours, you go too far, brother, you go too far. It's a bad thing, you know, it's simple. Let's better drink the world...
Well, we drank. First, for the children, and then for moral self-improvement.

THE INVISIBLE PALM

I’ll forget in the pitch-black crowd,
What are you here... But I’ll find out instantly,
When in your sinful fate
Suddenly I feel Your hand,
When through the entire ecumene
I’ll rush towards the alluring fire -
And I hit an invisible wall,
As if touching someone's palm...

How often in my life have I been a moth flying towards a destructive flame! How often I fought, in frustration and indignation, against an invisible wall!..
But gradually outbursts of indignation began to visit me less and less often. More and more often I caught myself with a simple thought: if you are not allowed somewhere, then maybe you don’t need to go to that very “somewhere”... What if they save you from trouble, such a fool?
It often happened, too often, that I managed to cleverly go around an invisible wall, or even break through it with my forehead. I got my way. For some time I rejoiced at the victory. Alas, more often than not, nothing good came of these victories.
But it’s strange and providential: on the way to those places where all sorts of blessings and joys really awaited me, everything always worked out for me in the best possible way. Nothing ever stopped me from moving to these beautiful places: all the doors there were always open cordially.
As I realized this as I got older, I began to view insurmountable obstacles as manifestations of God's will. I realized: in this way the Lord protects me from troubles. And what His hand looks like in each specific case, to whom (or what) He entrusts to put His will into practice and stand against my stupid desires - it’s all the same...

* * *

For some reason I am needed, since I was saved by God,
For some reason, therefore, I am needed.
Perhaps He saw me in the future
A fit husband for a woman.

Or maybe the father of clear-eyed children,
Or maybe a wonderful poet,
Or maybe a thunderstorm for various devils...
But it is not given to me to know about this.

I will never understand the will of the Lord,
I am only saved, nothing more.
And these verses are gratitude to Him,
His unsolved will.

To penetrate into God's plan, to understand what further path He has planned for you? This is impudence on your part, and quite a lot. You probably forgot who you are - and who He is... or has everything that happened to you in your lifetime taught you nothing? Maybe you want to see the darkness gathering menacingly over your head again? Do you want to fly down a steep slope again, frantically clutching flimsy plants? Do you want to go to the bottom, gurgling helplessly, again?
No, you don't want that. It’s light and warm all around, and the soil under your feet is solid—let everything stay that way from now on. If you are honest with yourself, then you must admit that this fate is enough for you. Others don't even have one.
But maybe you think that you owe your current position, first of all, not to God, but to yourself - to your mind, talent, audacity, hard work, patience? Well, you really have all this... but didn’t those who had ten times more of all this than you go to the bottom? did not fall into the dark abyss?
They left and collapsed. Before your eyes. And you are alive and well and even making plans for the future.
By the way, many of those who initially had ten times less of all this than you do feel much better today than you. Doesn't this circumstance give you some thoughts? For example, this: these people have completely entrusted themselves to the higher will, they do not philosophize, but simply do the work that is determined for them by their fate. A merchant trades, an official serves, a soldier fights...
Maybe it’s time for you to finally stop boasting about your talents? And understand that your salvation is, first of all, the result of the Lord’s care for you, His providence for you, incomprehensible to you.
Once you are saved, live. And do your job - the one that heaven has blessed you with.

© Evgeny Chekanov

Chekanov E.F. Burning brushwood. Reading for thinking poets. / Evgeny Chekanov; will enter. article by D.N. Bakuna. - M.: Grifon, 2017. - 568 p.

I will never understand the will of the Lord
I am only saved, no more,
And these verses are gratitude to Him,
His unsolved will.

“He is a fighter by nature and wants victories,” is how contemporaries speak of the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Feliksovich Chekanov. This type of poet belongs to the generation that managed to form during the Soviet Union, which saw “stagnation,” “perestroika,” and the collapse of a great country. Having survived this tragedy, not all of them passed the test and began to create again; many became lost and betrayed their calling. Evgeny Chekanov managed to survive like the Phoenix bird, without betraying himself or betraying his poetry.

Look into the darkness. Do you see faces
Your gloomy peers?
They would like to be born
But you were born instead of them.

He was born on September 19, 1955 in Kemerovo, but his entire adult life is connected with the Upper Volga region, Yaroslavl region. In 1979 he graduated from the Faculty of History and Law of Yaroslavl University. During his studies, his debut publication was published - the story “I belong here”, and then poems began to appear in print. In 1983, E.F. Chekanov became one of the youngest editors-in-chief of regional newspapers in the country (he was then 28 years old), heading the Yaroslavl newspaper Yunost. Among his achievements is a series of publications “The Legend of the Yaroslavl City of Kitezh” (August 1987): an almost forbidden topic was brought to the attention of the public - the tragic fate of the city of Mologa and its environs, flooded by the Rybinsk Reservoir. And in 1987, the Verkhne-Volzhsky Publishing House published the first book of poems by Evgeniy Chekanov, Night Alarm, and a little later the collection “Illuminate the Face.” In the preface to the second collection of poems, his mentor, the Soviet poet Yuri Kuznetsov, wrote: “The arrival of every young talent always pleases, one more hope, one more promise! True, the joy is alarming: will the promise be fulfilled? Thirty years later, we can say with confidence that Evgeny Chekanov fully lived up to the expectations placed on him, and this collection “Burning Brushwood” is a clear confirmation of this.

I need to live my destiny
And know that my soul is pure,
When I put it in front of me
Paper sheet.

The creative credo of Evgeny Chekanov can be said in the words of the poet Yuri Kuznetsov: “He does not wander in metaphorical mists, does not get bogged down in the routine of abstractions, but seeks the exact word. He has the right guidelines: homeland, goodness, truth. The homeland gives him solid ground under his feet, and goodness and truth are light and path.”

But I'll go! I know in advance
That he is happy, even if it knocks him off his feet,
Who will go through everything when the soul leads,
And there is no higher happiness in life.

In this collection, the poet writes his own commentary for each poem, simultaneously conducting his own dialogue with the reader, encouraging him to be involved in the topic raised. And the themes of the collection “Burning Brushwood” are very broad and varied: philosophical reflections on the meaning of existence, the purpose of man in this world, the search for the path to God, memories of first love and beloved women, criticism of the political situation in the country, the bias of writers, years of service in ranks of the Soviet Army in the far North, the theme of the small Motherland and a return to its origins, comprehension of the tragedy of the Great Patriotic War and a new look at it from another generation.

A German tank drove into a rye field,
Smolensk unharvested field.
Without turning off the exhausted engine,
The tired German got out.

He lit a cigarette and wiped the sweat from his forehead,
And with a blue gaze he looked around the world calmly
And, gropingly plucking the dusty ear,
Rub it into oiled palms.

The sky was shining, the clouds were floating,
Birds were flying around, the forest was turning blue far away,
The river glistened with the blade of a bayonet
And rye rolled in waves from the east.

The tankman was smoking... But, suddenly looking back,
I pressed myself against the armor as if by accident,
And, shaking off Russian bread from German hands,
He dived back into the clanging and roar!

The lyrical hero of Evgeniy Chekanov is a free, lonely “wolf”, a Byronic romantic rebel against everyday life, he is full of longing for a lost paradise and is existential in nature.

The doors are flying off their hinges!
Breathing hatred
I'm going out into the wind
Fierce as the soul.

Hello, invisible brother,
Free and evil flow!
Beloved by heaven alone,
You, like me, are cruel.

You, like me, are in Russia,
Eternal born of longing.
You, like me, are powerless
Change the human race.

Evgeny Chekanov’s dialogues about love with the reader amaze not only with an intimate vision of the secrets of the female soul, almost biblical wisdom, but also with the desire to understand the origins of our mistakes in achieving harmony and happiness.

Don't fall in love with a slave, free one,
Look into her eyes like a stranger:
In addition to fear and hungry trembling,
There is a desire to become a mistress.

The abyss of melancholy gaze flashes,
Like a cry from cave times.
She doesn't need freedom. She needs
Take your soul to fullness.

Look around! But the trade is eternal
Everywhere feminine beauty shines,
And on every flawless face,
The eyes gape like dungeons.

And from every dungeon - out
The greedy glances of the slaves are torn...
Servant of the Lord, save your soul
And leave the slave market

“It has long been known that a slave does not desire equality with his master, but domination over him. Millennia of patriarchy have made a woman a slave, internally almost always wanting to dominate a man. What is the way out of the situation? “Very simple: not to abolish slavery as a phenomenon of human existence..., but to transfer this paradigm to the relationship between man and God,” says the poet. “Become a slave only in relation to the Lord, become a servant of God - that’s where your salvation is, man!”
The poetry of Evgeny Chekanov is deep, like the deep northern rivers and attractive with its Russian discreet beauty. Such poetry has no age, no pathos, but only love for the Russian people, its reader.

Evgeny Feliksovich Chekanov is a famous Russian poet and translator, a member of the Russian Writers' Union (since 1988), the author of a dozen books published in Yaroslavl, Moscow and Sindelfingen (Germany). E. Chekanov’s poems and translations were published in the magazines “Our Contemporary”, “Moscow”, “Young Guard”, “North”, “Dagestan”, and were included in a number of poetic anthologies: “Strophes of the Century” (Moscow, 1999), “Anthology of the Russian lyricism" (Moscow, 2000), "Word and Spirit" (Minsk, 2003), "TOP 20. The best poets of Russia" (New York, 2010), translated into Ukrainian, Lezgin and Hungarian.

Chekanov’s poetic translations of works by the Avar Magomed Akhmedov, Lezgins Suleiman Stalsky, Zulfikar Kaflanov, Arben Kardash, Feyzudin Nagiyev, the Czech Petr Kukal and other masters of literary expression have been published in various publications.

In the fall of 2017, the Moscow publishing house “Grifon” published a voluminous book by E. Chekanov, “Burning Brushwood,” the text of which, according to the definition of literary critic Irina Kalus, is “a special fusion of poetry and memoir-philosophical commentary.”

Diploma winner of the IV Moscow International Poetry Competition "Golden Pen" (Moscow, 2007), laureate of the International Literary Competition "Crossroads-2009" (Dusseldorf, 2009), laureate of the I All-Russian Poetry Competition named after Pavel Vasiliev (Moscow, 2010).

Born in 1955 in Kemerovo, in 1979 he graduated from the history department of the Faculty of History and Law of Yaroslavl State University. After graduating from university, he worked for many years in the Yaroslavl press. In 1983-1990 he was editor-in-chief of the Yaroslavl regional youth newspaper “Yunost”, in 1995-1998 - editor-in-chief of the daily regional newspaper “Gubernskie Vesti”. He worked as an employee of the press service of the Yaroslavl mayor's office and as a press secretary of the State Duma of the Yaroslavl region. For fourteen years (1995-2009) he edited a newspaper that carried out the official publication of regulatory legal acts of government bodies of the Yaroslavl region. In 2015, he retired from the position of chairman of the board of the publishing house Pechat.

Over the course of a quarter of a century, he taught the basics of newspaper business to a whole galaxy of Yaroslavl journalists taken literally “from the street.” Today, many of E. Chekanov’s students themselves head Yaroslavl newspapers and magazines, work on radio and television, and manage the press services of Yaroslavl enterprises.

E. Chekanov has a lot of merit in the sphere of organizing the literary process. With his help, dozens of poets and prose writers came into Yaroslavl literary life - Evgeniy Feliksovich helped them at the beginning of their creative path, edited their first books, and gave recommendations to the Writers' Union of Russia. As the creator and editor-in-chief of the literary magazines “Russian Way at the Turn of the Century” and “Prichal”, he published works of many Yaroslavl authors on their pages.

In the online literary magazine “Parus”, published since 2010, E. Chekanov runs a prose section. And his Yaroslavl colleagues entrusted him with the posts of chairman of the creative council and chairman of the audit commission of the regional branch of the Writers' Union of Russia.

Lives in Yaroslavl.