Reading series Exilibris. / Art-SALON

"And where are the people?" - they will ask. Where are the heroes who do something for our sake, or we for theirs... After all, it is not ourselves we care for, not for ourselves that we strive. As a well-known Russian film has it: "People, people, where are you!" The brave and the virtuous. One always runs the risk of losing one's way in labyrinths. Searching. "I am looking for man," cried a philosopher. "I am looking for a man," a singer confided. We are searching too. The rubric and ethics oblige.

It is about the blues of keyholes - or better: the melancholy of losses. The emigrant living in a foreign land, bereft of his familiar sounds and surroundings, clutches in his need at any straw. And so, at times, a vacuum fills itself in paradoxical ways. For instance, by feeling one's way toward the foundations of the German language. Whoever peers through the keyhole will spy little inkwells; whoever presses an ear to the door will hear the scratching of pen-holders. "General tendencies of a united 'Russian' Germanness," says the experienced reader. "Not so fast, my dear - you exaggerate and generalise," the community smiles. Generalisations and comparisons have something tendentious about them, and the tendentious is the dot on the "i" of subjectivism. In Thuringia's capital there is, by the way, everything, just as in Greece: ...a cathedral, pedestrian zones, trams, parks, mineral springs, a theatre, a university, a mass of very different cafés, bookshops, museums... And on top of that, within arm's reach - Weimar, European Capital of Culture 1999, tidied up and dressed for show, to the edification of the locals and the army of tourists. Allow me to quote from my personal letter to Aleksej Parshchikov, written at the time of those events: "Weimar is asymmetrical and motley..." It went on about the cloned vegetable-garden plot of Herr von und zu... Goethe's garden house in the Ilm park, besieged by girls with easels - splendid for painting and selling in the immediate vicinity. On a rather different, thoroughly autumnal day, the author of this text and one of the future instigators of EXiLIBRIS, in his search for some diverting amusement and for the out-of-the-ordinary, alternative, longed-for creative life, stumbled upon the European Culture Centre of Thuringia - "EKT" - which its international projects and the publication of the series VIA REGIA had made well known and almost charismatic. At first he only stepped in to wait out a shower of rain - and ran straight into the figurehead of Russian conceptualism, D.A. Prigov. "I can pass on greetings from Parshchikov," said D.D., "I have just received an e-mail from him." "E-mail poimel (Russian: got one)," commented Herr D.A., rhyming, correcting, and hurrying past. Much as restless authors once met in Weimar or in the far-off Ukrainian artists' colony Kamenka, so the future comrades-in-arms of EXiLIBRIS found each other then and pulled together. No, D.A. Prigov had nothing to do with it. But Erfurt did - where Goethe and Napoleon once met, where Paganini shone, Humboldt got engaged and the first German socialists conjured up their programmes. The birth of EXiLIBRIS was welcomed by the Germanist Elena Reichardt and the Slavist Christina Parnell. (Not least thanks to their efforts, many guests could be introduced to the texts of a Vladimir Sorokin or a Valerija Narbikowa.) The poet, performer, literary scholar and president of the "Academy of Transrational Poetry" Sergej Birjukow also took a liking to EXiLIBRIS. What comes next, what lies ahead? The future lies silent and black in the dark. But if Alexander Genis is to be believed, silence and darkness are precisely what literature is made of.

Sincerely Yours DD