Book. The Delphic Notebooks. M. , 2025

The Delphic Notebooks. The Roads of Silkworm Threads.
Moscow, 2025


A Word to the Reader


       How can I describe my feelings when confronting the Void…?  With its rich depth of meanings and the sound of its silence…
Every time I hit the road, I think of meeting someone who is invisible and something that is subtle yet very meaningful to me.  Every time I believe in the miracle of unlocking the mysteries of cities or deserted areas and getting to know their guardians. Here and now, I am sitting in a white room in the very center of Athens, next to the majestic Acropolis — it has been the center of my attraction for the last few years — and seemingly even thousands of years. The evening air is filled with a fresh salty sea breeze. I see the City and I feel the long life it has lived since the heyday of the Hellenistic world. I have visions of intact ancient temples, the simple life of people, and ritual processions along the roads paved with gray Eleusinian marble. This is what I write about — or rather take notes of — in my poems: they are like notes in the margins of a traveler’s diary. I know that the special land with its geography and geology exudes the mystery of its depths and shapes a culture like a crystal lattice of its vibration. Beneath it is the preserved knowledge. Above it is the starry arch of ideas and insights.  And it feels like we are between the two sacred streams of the heavens and earth — in the abyss of meanings, signs, and developments in the space of ether.
     I have tried to tell about these reminiscences of a dialogue from the unfathomable times in my new collection of wanderings, The Delphic Notebooks.
I dedicate it to all those I have not met at the crossroads of silkworm threads. ...  It is in front of you, my Reader.

V.Э

11 February 2025 / Athens





Abstract


The Delphic Notebooks is the third book in a series of collections of poetry written during the author’s travels. It is like a dialogue that the author has with cities, lands, and forces from ancient mythology. This is a journey along the Silk Road, from northern countries to the south. A substantial number of the works are devoted to, and written in, magnificent Venice — the pearl of Europe. A large number of the poems were created in Greece with its cities of the ancient world that invite seekers to reflect on the power of the areas on Earth that generate a special aesthetics of thought, word, gesture, line, and form. The book includes translations of some poems into English and is intended for a wide range of readers, travelers, researchers, and wanderers.