Excerpt from the book "Z/K, or Vivisection. Book of Protocols", published in the magazine "New World" 1999, No. 9.

This book was born from telephone conversations with the poet Nikolai Kononov: the goal is creating a commentary on his poems. It is strange, when a poet is alive, to comment on his poems without the participation of the poet himself, as if he himself had already died; It’s better to encourage the poet to auto-comment by persuading him to participate in the “live cutting” of his poetic composition. The commentary covers both extra-textual reality and images that create the “poetic fabric”; The commentary also clarifies the nature of poetry as a type of discourse and the phenomenon of the “poetic.” Each conversation lasted an hour and a half (both interlocutors were very tired and after two academic hours they lost the ability to talk about poetry) and, being recorded, the type is more reminiscent of an interrogation protocol.