Simferopol, the regional center of the peninsula, is home to another important poet: Andrej G. Polyakov, born in 1968. He is one of the best-known Russian-language writers of poetry and prose and also, like Azarova, a literary scholar. Since the early 1990s he has been a member of the Crimean-Moscow poetic group “Poluostrov,” to which Igor Sid also belongs. His poems have been translated into German and English, among other languages. Inspired by the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstamm, Poljakov’s poems focus on a lyrical self that experiences the postmodern alienation from culture. In the meantime, he has received all of Russia’s important literary prizes, so that the small apartment he lives in with his parents is overflowing with certificates and prize trophies, as well as books. Polyakov has a travel phobia; he almost never leaves his hometown, despite many invitations. For the Bosphorus Forum, he makes an exception and travels all the way to Kerch. In this respect, it is a stroke of luck that he became friends with T. during their trip to Crimea in 2015.
Polyakov, like Azarova, stands for intellectual Crimea. Ideas about philosophy, cultural history, psychology and sociology bubble out of him lecture-like. He does not like to plan beforehand what he is going to tell, but he likes to talk extemporaneously about what he has read. It doesn’t matter if it’s already two in the morning, he cares about how important the Frankfurt School is at “our” universities today, whether we read Erich Fromm and what we think of Fritz Perls. In his room, the stacks of books rise from the floor like stalagmites, Woznessenskij on Lotman, Mandelstam on Gestalt theory.
