Bazensky/Kolomiets: Russian Text on the Bouzingo

Gleb Kolomiets has translated the only text he could find in Russian dealing with the Bouzingo. This piece by Andrey Bazensky plays pretty free and easy with the name 'Bouzingo', and deals with the whole 19th Century avant-garde, but does suggest the way in which the group's influence can bee seen throughout the century. It's approaching it as analogous to punk rock, reminding me a bit of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces. Thanks, Gleb!

By Andrey Bazensky
translated by Gleb Kolomiets

Bouzingos - the name of 19th century Parisian punks. They didn’t play music then, but wrote poems and novels. Some of them made it rather shrill and beautiful. Anyway they always played out of tune.
The leather boots and tight pants, a black velvet tunic and white Baroque-style shirt with ruffles, pink gloves, hair painted in bright green - that is Charles Baudelaire’s ordinary “suit” at the meeting of the Club des Hashischins. Once during a high-society dinner Baudelaire complained with boredom that the cheese has the smell of a child's brain…
Another sad punk and emo, Gerard de Nerval, was close to Dada and a Monty Python sketch: he was the one who walked his lobster on a blue ribbon over the streets of Paris.
Alphonse Esquiros recorded his somber hit – “The Wizard”, featuring, among others, a harem of dead courtesans, the bronze robot, as well as a hermaphrodite in love with the moon.
The album by gloomy aristocratic post-rocker Villiers de l'Isle-Adam dedicated [The Future Eve] to the inventor-Rosicrucian (he resembles Thomas Edison to me), who created an artificial woman. Mallarmé once said about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: “this man never existed, except for his dreams”.
Huysmans tried to commit to a kind of androgenic focus in a Ziggy’s and/or in a Münchhausen’s manner: he tried to twist himself inside out in his creative experiments.
Some of these voyants suffered from synaesthesia. And most of Bouzingos sought the disorder of all the senses. They fled their own nature anywhere: into Africa, into drug addiction, to the barricades. They were stubbornly stroking themselves against the grain and heard, like Kafka, too many fraudulent votes to make up one whole personality. Bouzingos were the centaurs, openhearted freaks, walking stills trying to accommodate too many ingredients all the time.
Being aware of their monstrous nature, they believed a God, the demiurge, who isn’t a great specialist in a molding of humans. Blake once marked Him by the punk pun “Nobodaddy”. A friend Theo [this is Gautier--O.L.] called de Nerval “footless swallow”.
In short, everything has already happened. Today we can - in a cozy atmosphere - open the book and enjoy the results of theirs sublimation, an unparalleled soup from swallow-foot, transparent and delicate liquor silicum, which dissolves and disappears under the action of ordinary air…