Free poetry in your pocket. The story of how one person enhances the culture of a huge metropolis

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Detectives, romance novels and frivolous stories with a lack of prosaic talent for a writer are our longtime companions on the road. Ivan Mitin did not put up with such literature and set about raising the culture of reading among Muscovites. He took it so hard that a year later cities of Russia and abroad joined his project "Poetry in the Pocket".

We already wrote about bookcrossing, a social movement transforming the world into a huge library. This story received an unexpected development in Russia in the form of a project that a simple Muscovite Ivan Mitin took on alone. He laminated sheets of poetry by Pushkin, Kharms, Khodasevich and other Russian classics. Then he delivered free poems to the capital's parks: he left them on benches, put them on monuments, and sometimes attached them to the most unexpected places.

Often, passers-by mistook these sheets of paper for rubbish or advertising, but curiosity won out, as a result of which Muscovites were distracted from the bustle of the city and remembered the lines of the Great Ones.

Soon Ivan had his first assistants. Gathering at their headquarters, like-minded people drink tea and conduct various conversations, along the way making new cards with poems. In order to attract new people to his action, Ivan from time to time comes to a cafe, informing in advance about this in a live magazine, where he invites all people who are not indifferent to literature: pick up cards to distribute to friends, or just sit and chat.

"Every person has their own windmills." - Ivan Mitin writes in his blog. - "Someone has been trying all his life to wipe off the word" feces "in the elevator, realizing that he will never win this war; someone all his life switches the traffic light exclusively to the green light, catching the mocking glances of less conscious passers-by; someone asks wife do not put carrots in the broth. We all do something like that, each at his own level. I recently had my own way of dealing with windmills. I bought a laminator and now I go around like a fool, put in public places small laminated sheets of paper with poetry or short stories of different geniuses."

Other cities joined the Moscow shares: Irkutsk, St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Ufa, Omsk. Then the project had followers abroad: in Minsk, Odessa, Kiev, Prague, New York, Israel. In the community "Poems in your pocket" in the live journal you can read reports about the distribution of cards with prose and poetry in different cities, about writers and poets, excerpts of works of which appear in these cards.

Thanks to this venture, all of Russia learned about Ivan Mitin. Reports were made about him for the central TV channels, they wrote in the newspapers. At the same time, Ivan does not lose his modesty. He is not trying to get rich on his project, refusing offers from political organizations and advertising campaigns. The money for the maintenance of the shares is collected by small donations from like-minded people of this young man.