Biography

Born in Moscow on March 5, 1986. He has been writing poetry since he was 5 years old. She published her first book at the age of 15. Finalist of the poetic SLEM 2006. She shared the LiveJournal Poet of the Year award with Oleg Borichev. She has written for the Knizhnoye Obozreniye newspaper, Cosmopolitan magazines (led the Difficult Story column) and Afisha. In 2003-2004 she was an employee of FBI-Press, wrote for the magazines Iskra-Spark and Shik-Magazine. Until April 2008 she worked at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art ART4.RU.

The first public performance took place in May 2007 in Moscow, in the cultural center "Bulgakov's House". The first "non-childish" book of poems by Vera Polozkova "Nonpoemanie" was published in 2008 by the writer Alexander Zhitinsky, who met Polozkova through her blog. The presentation of the book took place in February 2008 at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art ART4.RU.

In February 2009, Polozkova was awarded the Neformat Prize in the Poetry category.

Since 2008 he has been playing in the interactive performance “Society of Anonymous Artists” by Georg Genaud (Theater named after Joseph Beuys together with Teatr.doc). At first, Mikhail Kaluzhsky was a partner in the play, then Vera Polozkova and Arman Bekenov (co-author of the project) began to play the play for two. In 2008, the publishing house Livebook publishes a collection of poetry by Vera "Photosynthesis", published together with the photographer Olga Pavolga. The collection is composed of texts by Polozkova and photographs of Pavolga. Subsequently, "Photosynthesis" was reprinted three times in connection with the commercial success of the book. The total circulation of the publication was about 30 thousand copies.

In June 2008, Artemy Troitsky invites Polozkova to co-host the first ceremony of the Steppenwolf independent music award, which was held as part of the Moscow Open Book Festival. In November 2008, Polozkova goes to India for the first time. Thanks to the trip, an extensive corpus of texts appears under the general title "The Indian Cycle". After each trip to India, this cycle is replenished with new verses. Studies of changes in one's relationship with God and the evolution of spiritual experience have occupied a large place in Polozkova's work ever since. And India is becoming a kind of "place of power." In 2009, Polozkova met Eduard Boyakov (founder, producer and director of the Praktika theaters, and later Polytheater). From the same year, Vera served in the Praktika Theater and played in the poetic play Poems of Love based on her own texts (directed by Eduard Boyakov). The premiere of the performance took place in October 2009. In December 2009, the premiere of the play "Poems of Love" took place on the stage of the Perm Theater of New Time "Scene-Hammer". In the spring of 2011, Praktika hosted the premiere of Poems About Moscow. This is a poetic performance based on the texts of four contemporary poets: Vera Polozkova, Andrei Rodionov, Fyodor Svarovsky and Elena Fanailova.

In June 2009, Polozkova's first audiobook "Photosynthesis" was published. The audiobook was released as a compilation of the author's readings of texts from the collection of the same name with a soundtrack. In addition, the audiobook contains various phrases and small notes on the texts, said during the recording by Vera. The producer of the project is Lena Gracheva. The author of the music is Sergey Geokchaev. By 2013, this disc has already been reissued six times. At the end of 2009, another corpus of lyrics was recorded at the studio, which will later compose the track list of Polozkova's first music album, Sign of Inequality. In January 2010, Livebook publishes a reprint of the collection "Nepoemanie". The book is supplemented with twenty two new verses and three poems. Reprints of the book - 2011, 2012.

In June 2010, Vera, together with Valery Maryanov, were invited to be the hosts of the "Jazz Estate" festival. Since 2010 Polozkova is a permanent participant and member of the Council of the Texture festival in Perm. International festival of theater and cinema about the present "Tekstura" brings together Russian and foreign films and performances about the present day on one platform.

In July 2011, the famous producer and promoter Alexander Cheparukhin invites Vera to become his co-host at the large international music festival Movement, held near the village of Khokhlovka near Perm.

On June 8, 2011, the debut demo album "Sign of Inequality" was released, and during the first week of sales on the Internet it took first place in terms of the number of downloads on the website muz.ru. This disc did not appear on physical media, since from the very beginning it was declared as a "test of the pen". The producer of the project and the author of the musical concept is Lena Gracheva. The author of the music is Sergey Geokchaev. Subsequently, a musical group was assembled by Gracheva, and the authorship of the music became common. Members of the group (at different times): Sergey Geokchaev - keyboards, Nikolai Saginashvili - acoustic guitar, Alexander Bgantsev - bass guitar, Anatoly Levitin - drums, Vladimir Litsov - electric guitar.

From autumn 2011 to summer 2012 Vera and her musicians gave about 60 concerts in Russia and Ukraine. The group took part in the anniversary festival "Invasion" in 2011, one of the headliners of the More Amore festival in 2012, opened the Festival of Festivals on Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow with a performance in honor of the City Day (2012), was nominated for independent music award "Steppenwolf". In October 2011, the 16 tons club awarded Polozkova and her group the Golden Gargoyle award for the Sign of Inequality album. During this time, the music for the album was changed and added. In the summer of 2012, the double album "Sign of Inequality" was recorded at Viktor Bulatov's Music Street Studio.

The presentation of the album took place on November 6, 2012 at the Moscow Academic Theater named after Vladimir Mayakovsky and was overwhelmed. On November 18, the second part of the presentation took place in the Moscow club "16 tons", and on December 28, the St. Petersburg presentation in the club "Waiting room".

In the summer of 2012, Vera takes part in the Book Expo book fair in New York. Within the framework of the fair, Polozkova's solo reading took place. In the second half of 2012, Vera took part in the reality show "Polyglot" by Dmitry Petrov on the TV channel "Culture" for the study of the French language.

In January 2013, the premiere of Vera Polozkova's first video for the song from the album "Sign of Inequality" "Evening" took place. The video operator and director is Sergey Sarakhanov.

In February 2013, the premiere of the joint video of Vera Polozkova and Svetlana Surganova "Gertrude" took place (the author of the lyrics is Vera Polozkova, the original name of the text set by Surganova to the music "Little Rock and Roll"). In early March 2013, at the invitation of the SLOVO festival, Vera goes to London for the first time, where during the festival three performances by Polozkova take place - two of them are solo. Vera also reads translations of her texts into English (translated by Yuri Machkasov). On March 13, a poetry performance from the Praktika Theater took place at the Waterstones Bookstore in Piccadilly. The participants in the performance are Vera Polozkova, Pavel Artemiev, Alisa Grebenshchikova and Irina Mikhailovskaya.

On March 16, in the Big Auditorium of the Lecture Hall of the Polytechnic Museum, the Polytheater was opened. And already in April, the premiere of a new performance based on Polozkova's poems "The Chosen" (director - Eduard Boyakov) took place. Polozkova's texts are divided between four characters, played by Mikhail Kozyrev, Pavel Artemiev, Alisa Grebenshchikova and Vera herself. "The Chosen" is a conversation about the poetic craft and evolution of the poet and man, one of the important results of Polozkova as a poet and performer.

On April 18, 2013, Polozkova's third collection of poetry “Ostocherchenie” was published. The texts are divided into 13 parts. For the first time, such cycles of poetry as "Short Meter" and "Indian Cycle" are completely collected under one cover. The book also includes new texts by Vera, written from 2011 to 2013 inclusive. The compiler of the collection is Alexander Gavrilov. At the presentation of the book in the Moscow cinema "Pioner", together with Vera, the book was presented by her friends - Alexander Manotskov, Alisa Grebenshchikova, Alexander Gavrilov and Alexander Mamut. During the first week of sales, the book ranks first among the bestsellers of the Moscow bookstore.

On May 18, 2013, the premiere of the play "Happy 60s" based on poems by Bella Akhmadulina and Andrei Voznesensky took place at the Polyteater. The actors of the play are Pavel Artemiev, Ilya Barabanov, Ekaterina Volkova, Yulia Volkova, Alisa Grebenshchikova, Vera Polozkova, Yegor Salnikov. Director - Eduard Boyakov. This is a performance about the 60s of the XX century and how that era rhymes with what is happening in Russia at the moment.

Vera Polozkova is one of the heroines of the book by journalist and poet Yulia Idlis “Runet. Created idols ”, released in 2010. The heroes of the book are eight of the most famous, brilliant and successful Russian bloggers.

Vera Polozkova - laureate of the Rimma Kazakova of the Moscow Writers' Union 2011. In 2012, Polozkova was nominated for the "Snob" magazine's "Made in Russia" award in the "Literature" nomination for the synthesis of literature with other arts (the "Polytheatra" play "The Chosen" and the "Sign of Inequality" album).

Do you know why I dislike poetry?
Poetry is an extremely personal, deeply intimate creativity, the expression of one's emotions, impressions and memories, as a rule, completely devoid of any plot component whatsoever. And most people - we admit to ourselves honestly - have very little to do with each other, so reading the revelations of a maturing poetess is, of course, pleasant from an aesthetic point of view (for Polozkova's language is very rich), but not that very exciting.

The main problem of these poems is a very broken rhythm, literally ground to dust. Vera Polozkova is such a shell-shocked Mayakovsky who has completely lost the idea of \u200b\u200bthe rhythm and symmetry of poetic lines, and, remembering only that words must sometimes rhyme, she sculpts this rhyme somehow, when necessary.

What poetical exercises the poetess does not offer us! Here we have pantorhyme, and hyperdactylic rhyme, and echo rhyme with a torn line, and flirting with a gaping, turning into elysia, and still don't understand what kinhaned - all this is chopped into small pieces and mixed to a state of indistinguishability.
Poems do not "sing", they cannot be read by the soul, freely sliding over them with perception and vibrating in resonance with their rhythm.
Each poem has to be dissected with a scalpel of icy logic to discover what rhymes with what.
Although nominally there is a rhyme - just while you discover it, you risk losing all the poetic mood.

It was in vain that I expected that such a free attitude to rhythm in "Polozkova-early" would pass in "late": it does not. Literally in every poem, in 2003 and in 2007, you have to stumble several times.

But let's not talk about sad things. Let's talk about the good.

Vera Polozkova is undoubtedly very relevant. Her poetry, like a perfectly tuned musical instrument, sounds in unison with the thoughts of her generation - relatively speaking, people from fifteen to thirty, living in stuffy silicate boxes, communicating with each other using a dozen pre-prepared "emoticons" and dreaming of the coming of some abstract Tomorrow in which everything will be different; and we ourselves will be better - kinder, stronger and more honest.
Like, for example, Zemfira or Diana Arbenina, Polozkova could become the "voice and thoughts" of a whole generation of teenage girls who love to quote lines of songs in statuses and tweets.
It's a shame that teenage girls can't read: they would somehow dilute all their snotty vulgarity in statuses.

* * *
In general, Vera is good at two things. The first is such short, biting verses on the verge of aphorisms:
"All ladies are like a lady, and you are like a horse in a plaid"
Or
"Either you will accustom your conscience to stains,
Or you will walk barefoot.
I'd like to be clear
And while not being pop. "
Capaciously, succinctly and deeply, and most importantly, it almost fits into the format of the notorious "one hundred and forty characters".
Poems-candy, little monpensiers with the taste of an explosion.

The second is "long lines":
“At some point, the soul becomes just bitterness in the sub-tongue, there, in the interfluve, in a second pause between the stanzas. And her eyes are all wounded, all birdlike, not human, she rides down the water like wreaths and candles, and from there there are no lighthouses, no fires. "
And so, not poetry at all, but seemingly random phrases, like guests uninvited from the street - and the fact that something rhymes here is somehow not immediately apparent.

And it is precisely such “long lines” (I beg your pardon if I call them incorrectly and they have some specific name - I am infinitely far from poetry) that Vera Polozkova makes, it seems to me, best of all. They read like prose, feel very easy and fluid, and the rhymes that come across in them now and then are perceived as pleasant surprises. In a word, I would read Polozkova only for the sake of such "semi-poetic" prose.
By the way, it is from such verses that a very colorful rap would turn out - fast and verbose.
How fortunate that rappers can't read either!

* * *
In general, it is difficult to say whether I liked Polozkova's work or not.
Some poems hit with an explosive bullet "in the top ten" right through: clear, melodic and very, very about me. They want to be learned by heart and quoted.
But the bulk of the poems is a thick soup of emotions, thoughts and experiences. The broth is undoubtedly very poetic, but damn indigestible due to the rhyme that is somehow cursed.

No evaluation. Difficult to digest. Relevant and poetic. Remarkable. Brodsko.

She released her first collection of poems at the age of 15, and by the time she was twenty she had won the status of one of the brightest contemporary poets. On November 24, at the Moscow Palace of Youth, Vera will present a new program "High Resolution", which will include texts from the future collection. The five most poignant ones are in the ELLE collection.

* * *

anita is best at lying:
freeze on click, smile and not blink,
praise only the dear, the important to avoid,
kiss past the cheeks of fragrant bitches

the hardest thing for Anita is to be alone,
ballerina in a casket, a clockwork doll,
because anita knees, dimples, day off,
laughter, facebook

anita is uncomfortable where you can't pretend:
where the old woman buys onions, where the dog sits,
where a child puts a cheerful mouth under the snow,
as if someone was whispering in your ear,
taking away the perfect curl:

in those who are smart, anita, and in those who are stupid
in visiting and not visiting the fitness club
in the owners of narrow lips and pouting lips
god lies wrapped in a tight cocoon

he will open his eyes, anita, will enter the right
will tear the flounces and laces on you,
take out your hairpins, wash you of makeup,
and you will be alive, my anita, alive
and loved

* * *

and then we lived easily: silver and honey
the summer sunset did not go out all night
and the river stood up to the cross of the windows
we went down where the stars were, and our feet bathed in them
and below us the shore seemed to be woven from woolen
and flax fibers

it was a town without a century, with a simple face,
and visitors to tea with oregano and thyme
they added bright jam, jammed;
bought dishes in shops, braid and calico
and cars and boats rotted, crushing to the seams
sharp rusty lace

you loved looking at the barges from under your arm,
handed out five nickels to neighboring boys:
and they hugged you, who did not live well.
and you were different, inconceivably young,
and you had eyes - twilight over the water,
blue agate.

it was June, strawberries, smoked bream,
you wore, like a prince, any thing
and three houses were deprived of their will, as soon as they arrived
- Tonya says, are you married? - terrible slander!
and around lay an enchanted Levitan,
endless chekhov

stairs, floors in my room, hallway, porch, pier -
everywhere your step sounded so cheerful and good,
as if we would not untie our fingers, would not perish in smoke,
as if I'm still reading you about ancient Rome
like we’ll talk again somewhere else,
won't die young

it seems that we are still looking like a cold haze
gain trails, depressions and corners,
the shade permeates forests and houses like moisture.
black on the background of water, we are sitting together
and above us honey, silver and pearls on the eye,
crumpled paper.

leave in August, my light, new school year
let everything that happens happen -
and neither dress, nor utensils, nor chest of drawers will survive,
our embankment will end and the mountain, -
you will be the embodiment of silver,
silver and honey.

* * *

deborah Peters has always been a strong-willed woman.
did not live happily ever after - but lived overcoming.
incredible strength of mind, zero fatigue.

deborah Peters wanted a ginger daughter since her youth.
deborah raised her gin alone.
before going to bed she kissed a button, her bird, in a tender lobe.

deborah is unhappy: the girl is weak at heart.
this passion - at fifteen - for abstruse books,
broken boys, short haircuts:
deborah thinks it's too much.

ginny peters sunset on the sea, red ocher.
ginny pretends to be crazy and deaf:
because the mother is screaming continuously to make her die.

when hell in this house becomes tangible
ginny runs away, as they say, to the partisans,
overcomes drugs, outgrows madness,

and a thirty-year-old, a sweater to match light trousers,
deborah in a wheelchair is driven to the car with an uneven thud:
that's all, mom, good fellow, let's go to the grandchildren.

deborah squints: God teaches subtly,
it cost almost to die to deserve a child again -
bald valkyrie cancer,
one-breasted Amazon

it was almost worth dying, and here we are again girlfriends,
how can I arrive like this, but sweet, and toys,
two grandchildren, boys, do they have freckles?

i'll scare them, baby, I'm scary as the desert.
you are a beauty, mom, make sure you don't catch a cold.
it cost me almost to die for my bird to forgive me.