Alternative Biography

Olga Krashenko

A L T E R N A T I V E B I O G R A P H Y

The heavier the cargo of accumulated experience, the denser the overgrowth of destiny, the easier flighted childhood seems. That was a time when the supporting wings of helpful teachers brought out that which seems now a miracle, at least in comparison to the usual adult state of mind: a feeling of an indisputable need for creativity, the evident existence of an interested public (whether in a concert in music school or while reading your own poems in literature classes), the readiness of performers in your city to learn your new composition just because this music has appeared and has the necessity to sound... All of this happened as if there were a magic movement of a conductor's baton; however, the concert named "Childhood" nevertheless finishes, and, when the curtain falls, there is already not only applause, but also the creaks of the chairs of those people which were sitting silently and not applauding.

Transferring your childhood creativity to an adult's state of mind happens gradually and is accompanied by surprise and perplexity about why such things appear: a feeling of your own insufficiency, the necessity to prove something in an atmosphere filled with other people's doubts, a feeling of loss, your painful appearance in the place called "put under question". The symbol of the conductor's magic baton changes to an ordinary one that is found on the street, an appropriate piece of wood that protects your own creativity and helps you to fight ideological battles. This war which involves going underground is against the idea of creativity as a certain kind of fixed knowledge, a knowledge which is presented as "professional", the only one which is correct. Also, this professional knowledge involves total imitation (for everybody without exception) of a compositional model coming from a certain "school"... A mixture of victories and defeats draws for your imagination some heroic images, but everything becomes even more radical as soon as you leave the battle field itself.

The emerging mental state of yourself as "free artist" returns to you a representation of creativity as a flower where the grain is full of capacities that must grow and open up all its sides and petals independently of forced standards and methods of adaptation. Other feelings, though, get mixed in with this so called "free state": necessity to get rid of something or to lose the habit of useless knowledge, embarrassment with life's problems which appear practically at each step of creativity, absence of the feeling that creativity is what people need and that the existence of a reading/listening public that would receive the act of creation goes without saying,the impossibility to be rid of the embarrassing dimension of creativity as needing to be measurable as to its value in some monetary equivalent...this is so strange... which equivalent are we really talking about ???

Besides, people consider that there is nothing unusual in writing their own biography despite the fact that everybody who writes one is going to restrict themselves to the very narrow surface named "I'm so good" while praising themselves by listing important names, events and honors. Also, strangely enough, no one seems to be against presenting his own life as a kind of linear chronometric graph.

This text is called a "biography" which has, of course, a large grain of irony. Let's not put at the end of this "biography" the last period yet...