CCC's Street Art Contest. Poetry and music

The small garden on Vasilievsky Island does not have a long and glorious history. If you try to find local history information, you're unlikely to find anything more fascinating than "the green space between house number 50 and house number 58" in the documents. The square seems to have sprung up as if by itself; it wasn't planned. There used to be wooden houses on the site of the garden. Not surprisingly, back then the whole street was lined with wooden houses. Stone buildings were built in the central part of the city for the rich public, and here, in the outskirts, the construction was wooden.

Gradually, however, the town grew, and the former outskirts began to look like an attractive place to live. In the 19th century, the wooden houses began to disappear, and successful merchants and businessmen built new brick apartment buildings in their place. Soon the old wooden houses in the street were demolished as well. To the north and south of the present public garden new buildings were erected, but the area in the place of 52, 54 and 56 houses remained undeveloped. If the beginning of the 20th century had been calmer, this would hardly have happened. But in our history, this wasteland was turned into a public garden and became a convenient place for walks and recreation for the residents of nearby houses.

So graffiti is the only thing that makes this garden stand out and makes its history extraordinary. Housing workers are struggling with unauthorised murals, but some of the work has managed to be coordinated and preserved. This time I went in to look at the graffiti I already knew and noticed a small drawing I hadn't seen before. It may not have been there. A wall separates the garden from the neighbouring residential building, and an empty rectangular opening has been left in that wall for a passage into the garden. The mosquito looks like something I'd rather not encounter in reality!

The main graffiti in this garden is a long composition on the theme of poetry and music at the same time It commemorates a music festival that took place in this garden a few years ago. A grand piano was set up in the square and for several hours professional and amateur musicians played various pieces of music. The festival was dedicated to the memory of the genius composer and pianist Oleg Karavaichuk. Oleg Karavaichuk lived in one of the neighbouring houses.

At the centre of the composition are the poems of the genius Russian poet Alexander Vvedensky. These poems fit perfectly with Oleg Karavaichuk's music, and both cannot be explained, only felt. I won't even try to translate this line, this is the case when every single word can be translated, but the meaning disappears in the translation, because it's more about memories, associations and movements of the soul than about meaning and logic.

This is my entry for the CCC’s Street Art Contest #132 by @digi-me.