Poets to gather at Chestnut House

The Kashtanovyi dim (Chestnut House) Poetry Festival will be held in Kyiv on Sept. 28-28 (sponsored by the ISD Corporation).

The program of the upcoming Kashtanovyi dim Poetry Festival includes the awards ceremony for the winners of the Tarkovsky Memorial Prize for poetry and cinematography. The awards will be presented by members of the jury headed Marina Tarkovska. Among the special guests will be Tarkovsky’s friend and noted producer Aleksandr Gordon, the winner of Russia’s most prestigious Poet Prize, Oleg Chukhontsev, and the legendary Russian poet Bella Akhmadullina. Other renowned contemporary poets will visit from Moscow, among them Igor Tsariov, Igor Luksht, Leonid Malkin, and Sergei Brel.

Poets will also come from Belarus (Ales Shapovalov), Estonia (Mikhail Gofaizen), Lithuania (Illana Esse), Kazakhstan (Erbol Zhumagulov), Kyrgyzstan (Tatiana Ignatova), Canada (Sergei Plishevsky), and Germany (Sergei Wickman). This year the festival organizers invited the celebrated Finnish poet Marin Angel, who writes in both Finnish and English and translates his poetry into Russian.

Yevgenii Demidovich is expected to come from Kustanai (Kazakhstan). He is the organizer of a regional young poets’ competition named in honor of Anatolii Koshtenko, a Ukrainian poet who lived and worked in Kustanai. The 11th competition took place this year, ending with the sensational victory of two female poets from Kyiv: Marianna Solomko won an award and Oksana Borovets won the Grand Prix.

The Tarkovsky Memorial Prize was founded in 2007 on the initiative of, and with support from, the Industrial Union of the Donbas (ISD) Corporation, the international Kashtanovyi dim Poetry Festival, the International Association for Free Creativity, the Tarkovsky Foundation, and the journal Raiduha (The Rainbow). This prize is awarded for collections of verse and films in recognition of their creators’ outstanding achievements in the development of culture in Russia and Ukraine.

The prize was instituted in memory of Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky, the noted poet and celebrated film director, respectively, whose creative legacies are precious contributions to world poetry and cinematography. Their achievements belong in equal measure to Ukrainian culture (owing to the Tarkovsky family roots) and that of Russia, where their creative potential was fully realized. The prize is aimed at supporting and developing the finest examples of contemporary poetry and reviving the best feature and documentary filmmaking traditions in Russia and Ukraine.

The Kashtanovyi dim Poetry Festival is not just a forum for poets and filmmakers. Every year prior to the festival, the almanac Kashtanovyi dim and the CD “The Best Bards and Poets of Kyiv” are issued. Besides poets and bards, this year’s festival will feature Oleh Laponohov, the legendary leader of the Ukrainian pop-rock band Tabula rasa.

In the 1970s, Andrei Makarevich, the founder of the Russian rock band Mashina vremeni (Time Machine) set his melodies to poems written by contemporary and classical poets. His concerts featured songs that are still popular today, as well as wonderful poems, particularly those written by Arsenii Tarkovsky. It is no coincidence that the motto of the Tarkovsky Prize is comprised of the following lines from Kyiv’s poet Kateryna Kvytnytska:

That Andrei and Arsenii
Are soaring above us all
Gives me hope for salvation.