Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing an amazing renaissance of Russian free verse poetry, or poetry written, as Thomas Elliot defined it, “in the absence of traditional pattern, rhyme or meter” (Elliot). This unexpected phenomenon seems to have gone beyond the traditional Russian poetic narrative and has already provoked a heated debate among scholars, critics, and poets about its nature and the boundaries between free verse and cut prose, blank verse and rhymed verse, etc. (Manin 580-596). The purpose of this essay is to describe some features of contemporary Russian vers libre poetry as part of the ongoing process of development of the Russian poetic language in the era of new challenges.
To be precise, free verse is not a new phenomenon in Russian poetry. It appeared much earlier, in the 19th century, following Western literary trends, and was exemplified by the poets of the Silver Age until it was banned under Bolshevik rule in the 1920s. Underrepresented and marginalized in Soviet times, free verse has broken into the mainstream of the Russian poetic scene since the late 1990s. Once banned, free verse became one of the most popular hallmarks of Russian poetry in the 2000s and is now published by numerous literary magazines and websites. Twenty-five festivals, representing a wide range of poetic voices, were held in different Russian cities between 1990 and 2018, resulting in the publication of an anthology in 2020 (Sovremennyi russkii svobodnyi stikh. Antologia po materialam Festivalei svobodnogo stikha ). All this allows some critics to state that at the beginning of the 21st century it has established itself as “the dominant verse form in Russian poetry” (Orlitskaia 223).
This success is an indication of the great demand for this type of poetry in the Russian literary scene. In fact, its volatility seems to correspond to the new cultural trends in Russian society. The epochal change in Russian culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century reflects the end of the period of post-totalitarian mourning and the transition to a postmodern society. It has many dimensions in Russian culture, society, education, art, and literature. The concept of “new literature” has yet to be evaluated. However, it is clear that it includes changes in the genre structure of Russian poetry and the development of new poetic forms capable of reflecting these trends.
The era of unpredictable changes in Russia is generating new literary styles and new voices. With the growing crisis of personal communication and the apparent collapse of many ideological dogmas in Russian society, many poets are looking for new poetic tools to reflect on this new reality. In the second decade of the 21st century, a large group of talented poets writing in free verse has emerged at the forefront of Russian poetry. Among them are both established poets and poets of the younger generation. Alla Gorbunova, Andrei Sen-Senkov, Sergei Zavyalov, Nikita Sungarev, Nikita Safonov, Kirill Korchagin, Stanislav Lvovsky, Oleg Paschenko, Danila Davydov, Oksana Vasyakina, Igor Vishnevetsky, and many others have used the possibilities of free verse to create brilliant poetic texts outside the traditional content and metrical system of Russian lyric poetry.
Picture by Andre
At a time when linear self-expression is in crisis, a new trend is emerging: the expansion of non-lyric poetry. Free verse occupies an important niche in this process. According to the poet Fyodor Svarovsky, this is due to the fact that “traditional stylistics today is simply not suitable for many forms of poetic expression” (Svarovsky). This tendency follows the general logic of the development of Russian postmodern culture and its collision with obsolete structures. In poetry, it often takes the form of a lexical or syntactic deviation of the language. The contemporary development of the free verse in Russian poetry is consistent with the Western model of free verse, which allows the poet to narrate a poetic reality without a clearly organized structure or a pronounced lyrical attitude. This style is prevalent in Anglophone poetry today, and many contemporary poets are exploring the possibilities of free verse. For example, the American poet -laureate Austin Smith writes in the poem “The Hotel” (2011):
……the room
itself is simple
the sort rented out
night by night
to the poor to make
more poor or to die in
but it is not night
nor is she poor. She
could have afforded
a nicer room and it is
day
This almost documentary statement is full of drama and demonstrates an important aspect of free verse – its ability to express psychological momentum without any lyrical undertone. Its content is dense and aimed at the reader’s imagination. The same pattern of verbal communication or conversation on a “hot topic” can be observed in many works of modern Russian poets. Unresolved problems of the past, as well as current issues of social movements, injustice, and oppression, come to the fore as an example of civic self-expression and are popular with poets writing in free verse. Take, for example, Nikita Sungatov’s poem “What Have We Done to You?” (В чём мы провинились перед вами? (2015); its first verse consists of a direct appeal to the reader. It’s an invitation to dialogue on one of the most dramatic themes in contemporary Russian history and culture:
В чём мы провинились перед вами?
За что вы ненавидите нас?
Зачем вы воюете с нами?
Противопоставляете себя нам,
высмеивая и оскорбляя наши ценности.
What have we done to you?
Why do you hate us?
Why are you at war with us?
You are confronting us,
mocking and insulting our values.
The beginning of Igor Vishnevetskii’s poem “CAPSA” (Vishnevetskii 64) is reminiscent of a casual conversation:
Мы приехали туда поздним вечером –
у меня чудом сохранилось расписание поездов –
в 21.34. Огромное многозвёздное синее небо
накрывало Сахару шатром. В чайных работали телевизоры:
шёл чемпионат Франции и здесь, на дальних выселках
сначала римского, а после и галльского мира
все обсуждали марсельцев, прозевавших дурацкий гол.
We arrived there late in the evening –
I miraculously kept to the train schedule –
at 9:34 p.m. A huge, starry blue sky
loomed over the Sahara like a tent. TVs were on in the tea rooms:
the championship game with France was on and there, in the outskirts of the Roman world at first, and then the Gallic world
everyone was discussing the Marseilles, who had missed a foul goal.
Sometimes free verse is just a polyphony of thoughts and observations, as is seen in the striking short poem by Vasily Borodin “The Banner will Flutter” (Stiag zavyotsia 2011):
стяг завьётся сор взовьется свет ворвётся сердце взорвётся
время порвётся
всё остаётся
the banner will flutter the dust will rise the light will burst
the heart will explode
time will break
everything will remain
Fantasy, dry humor, or satire often testify to the poet’s detachment from difficult experiences, an inability or unwillingness to accept the realities of an ever-changing world. Published in Nikita Sungatov’s book The Debut Book of the Young Poet (Debyutnaya kniga molodoga poeta, 2015), a poem about the creative process of poetry, “There is a Method” (“Est takoi sposob” 2015), simultaneously reveals the experience of a young man in a modern urban environment:
Я хочу рассказать о том, как однажды
я принёс себя в жертву идеологии.
И о том, как, прогуливаясь по центру столицы,
вдруг обнаружил, что моё зрение
подчиняясь определённой логике
выхватывает из окружающей среды
некоторые детали
кажущиеся незначительными со стороны
I want to tell you about the time
I sacrificed myself to ideology.
And how while walking through the center of the capital
I suddenly discovered that my vision
followed a certain logic
it picked up
certain details that seem insignificant from the outside
An important feature of free verse is that the abandonment of the traditional pattern of meter and rhyme and structured form frees the poet in his quest to format the sound of the stanza as a whole. The ability of free verse to create new and unique prosody appeals to the reader’s perception rather than to syllabic meaning. In this case, the unity of non-metrical verse is preserved by the rhythm hidden in the sounding word, by a complex system of changing rhythm and intonation, which the reader perceives as the music of poetry. Free verse allows the author to encode many meanings and images in the short space of the stanza and which can still be perceived as a poetic utterance. The linguistic experiments of contemporary Russian authors often contain semantic deviation and metonymy: they allow a combination of both figurative and sound patterns.
One of the experimental poems by Lada Chizhova “Color. Practice” (Tsvet. Praktika) opens with the image of the “snowed-in city” but then moves the reader into different dimensions full of emotions and bewilderment:
город выбелило
в белила вляпаться всеми конечностями
и лицом
жжется
как смириться с телом готовым перемещаться
и расти
the snowed-in city is whitened
as if all limbs were plunged into white paint
and the face
it burns
and how to reconcile with a body ready to move
and grow up
Whether the nature of this kind of prosody represents a “repetitive metrical” or “irregular accent” topology (Manin 581-582) is up to interpretation. However, one of the important aspects of the modern free verse form is that it gives the poet the freedom to experiment with the word as the basic element of poetic speech and create an unpredictable pattern of changing rhythm. It also allows the poet to use different language registers within a single poetic stanza.
In addition to sound, poets sometimes use visual effects, such as the interruption of lines and the empty space between lines. This expands the space of the poem, as is seen in Sergei Zavyalov’s poem “Autumn. Peterhof” (Osen’. Petergof; 1994):
Кто-то скажет тебе
что это только засохшей листвы под твоими ногами
шуршанье
someone will tell you
that it’s only the rustle of dried leaves under
your feet
After all, the discussion about the nature and future direction of contemporary Russian free verse is still in its early stages. Gennady Aygi, the once unrecognized genius Chuvashian poet, called poetry a universal tool of world consciousness, which cannot be defined only by the traditional strict syllabic-tonic prosody. The Russian poetic scene includes the vers libre as an essential part of the postmodern literary landscape.
A жасмин надвигается:
словно душа – отодвинувшаяся
сразу – легко – от греха! …
Jasmine is emerging:
like a soul –
having pushed aside instantly
easily – the sin! …
Manin, Dmitrii Y. “Chopped-up Prose or Liberated Verse? An Experimental Study of Russian Vers Libre.” Modern Philology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2011, pp. 580–596 <https://doi.org/10.1086/660697>
Orlitskaiia, Anna. “Posleslovie.” Sovremennyi Russkii Svobodnyi Stikh: Antologiia Po Materialam Festivalei Svobodnogo Stikha (Moskva, Sankt-Peterburg, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tverʹ S 1990 Po 2018 G.). Edited by Orlitskaia Anna and Orllitskii, Iu. Moskva: 2019. vol. 2, p. 223. <https://rusfreeverse.com/books>
Svarovsky, Feodor. “O razrushitelnoi sile verlibra.” Novosti literatury, 10.06.2011. <https://novostiliteratury.ru/2011/10/novosti/koloka-avtora-fedor-svarovskij>
Smith, Austin. “The Hotel.” The New Yorker, Sept. 17th, 2012. < newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-hotel>
Vishnevetskii, Igor. “CAPSA.” Sovremennyi Russkii Svobodnyi Stikh: Antologiia Po Materialam Festivalei Svobodnogo Stikha, vol. 1, p. 64.
Zavylov, Sergei. “Osen’ Petergof.” Ody i epody. St. Petersburg: Borey-Art, 1994. <http://www.litru.ru/?book=45665&description=1>
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Translations of excerpts from works by contemporary Russian authors on this website are used under Fair Use solely for literary criticism and educational purposes.
Vladimir Kozlov is a writer, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. He was born in 1972 in Mogilev, Belarus. After graduating from Mogilev University, Kozlov moved to Minsk and then to Moscow. His coming-of-age coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is reflected in his early work. Kozlov is the author of a dozen books of prose and non-fiction, including Gopniki (Hoods), SSSR (USSR), which was shortlisted for the Big Book Prize, and Domoy (TheReturn), which was shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize. He was nominated for GQ Russia’s Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012.
Kozlov’s book USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid has been translated into English. The story of the teenagers in this book takes place in the year of the Chernobyl disaster. What makes it particularly disturbing is that the vibrant life of the city and the preparations for the Victory Day celebration took place at a moment when the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl were already spreading over Europe.
Translated by Andrea Gregovich
Andrea Gregovich is a writer and translator. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including “Tin House”, “AGNI Review”, “Hayden’s Ferry Review”, “Guernica”, and the Best European Fiction series. Gregovich’s translation of Mikhail Tarkovsky’s Ice Flow was featured in Best European Fiction-2015 by Dalkey Archive Press.
We didn’t have practice that Wednesday. The coach met us at the bus stop at the Goods for Men store. We went to the grocery store and bought two cakes and two large cans of orange juice from the cafeteria.
The coach lived on the second floor of a building just like ours, in the same two-room apartment, except you had to walk through one room to get to the other. He had sent his wife and child to the neighbor’s. “That way they won’t bother us,” he said.
I sat on a chair by the window, right under the open transom. Children were chirping like birds in the courtyard, climbing all over the parallel bars and spreading last year’s dead grass all over the place.
“Boxing is a really interesting sport because it’s a spectacle,” the trainer said. “The way it goes in sports is the way it goes in life. If a guy is a weightlifter, this is how he goes about weightlifting…” The coach stood up, hunched his shoulders, let his arms hang down, and took two big two steps. “This is what he does in life, this is how he goes to the store, this is how he goes everywhere. A boxer, on the other hand, is always mobile. I would even say graceful. Do you know this word? Do you know what it means?”
A few of the boys nodded. I took a piece of cake from my plate, took a bite and sipped some juice, it was in a white cup with the wolf and rabbit from I’ll Get You! on it..[i]
“I remember once at a competition,” the coach continued. “It was the student championship of the Republic of Belarus. There were a lot of trained boxers who were studying at the various institutes, but there were also guys who were just students. They’d obviously never had any training. There was one guy from the Teachers’ Institute who was competing. He was a fellow from the countryside, big and strong. His weight category was eighty-five kilograms. So anyway, when he got in the ring he didn’t know the stance or anything. His opponent is circling him, jogging in place, getting ready to throw a punch. Then suddenly this collective farmer takes a wide swing, just like in a country brawl, and hits the guy with one punch. It was a knockout. All the spectators were pissing themselves; they were laughing so hard. Although it isn’t always funny. I know a boxer named Vova Kriptovic who killed a guy in the ring once.”
“Did they send him to jail?” asked Litvinenko.
“No, and why would they? He didn’t violate any rules, did everything by the book. His opponent just turned out to have a weak heart. Generally speaking, boxing – and really, this is true of any sport – is always a benefit in life. I’m not talking about the obvious things like getting in a fight to defend a girl’s honor,” the trainer looked at us. “That stuff goes without saying. I’m talking about something else. For example, it made things much easier for me in the army. I graduated from the history department at the teacher’s institute. They didn’t have military classes there so they took me in the army after I already had my diploma. They sent me straight to Pechi, next to Borisov. Have you heard of Pechi? It’s a pretty crappy place to be stationed. The regimen was there and everything else about it. Our wake-up call was at six o’clock in the morning. I had late classes at the university so I was used to waking up around ten. Anyhow, maybe some of you will have this opportunity.”
“Why weren’t you assigned to the sports unit?” asked Kostin, a short guy from the Mir-2 neighborhood.
“I have no idea how you get assigned to that one,” the trainer picked up his glass and sipped his juice. “But ultimately my situation wasn’t any worse. They recognized what a good boxer I was when I was still at college. Right away the commander told me: let’s have you focused on training. Well, I trained, won first place in the unit, then first place in the division. At regionals I got second just as easily. Then that was it – from then until I was discharged I never once held a gun in my hand or marched in formation. Just training and competitions. They let me go home a lot too. The only orders the commander ever gave me were, buy me this in Mogilev, buy me that. But I didn’t waste my time looking all over for it – I just bought whatever shit I could find in GUM.”
“Did you hear about that girl who went to America?” asked Kostin. “Like, she wrote a letter to Reagan or something. A kid from America came here and then this one went over there.”
“I don’t care if her name was Lycheva or Gorbacheva, I would totally go to America,” he said.
“America probably wouldn’t turn anybody away,” said the trainer. “America is America.” *
There was half an hour left before training. The gym was still closed, the cloakroom too.
“Let’s go inside the institute,” suggested Kuzmenok.
We walked up to the second floor, went in the first door and stood on the balcony overlooking the gym. It was more than twice the size of the one where we had training. There was a real football goal with a net in it under the basketball hoop.
There were students running in the gym for their P. E. class. “I figure they must separate babes and guys for P. E. here,” said Kuzmenok.
“Yeah, I know. Natashka told me. Her class is separated too,” I said.
P.E. was taught by a tall bald guy. The students were all wearing shorts and t-shirts in different colors and fashions. Their breasts were bouncing around under their t-shirts as they ran.
“That one’s hot, do you see her?” Kuzmenok pointed at one with a big chest and butt. “Would you screw her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Would you?”
“Me too. Who else?”
“That one,” I pointed. “And that one. And probably that one.”
The PE teacher told the girls to stop. The students turned their backs to us and began stretching. I could see the outline of their panties under their shorts.
“Now we will work on sparring,” said the trainer. “You, Kuzmenok, you’ll spar with Frolov.”
“Get ready to see a knockout,” Kuzmenok whispered to me. “I’m gonna smack him around like a little puppy.”
Frolov was short and compact, almost fat. I didn’t know what neighborhood he came from. He was almost always quiet. He came to practice alone and left alone. alone, almost always, since the first time we went to practice. He wasn’t there on Volkov’s birthday.
Kuzmenok and Frolov punched each other with their gloves, went to their corners, then touched gloves again. Kuzmenok threw a right uppercut. Frolov dodged it, threw a hook to Kuzmenok’s jaw, a cross to his stomach, and gave him a series of jabs. Kuzmenok ran back to his corner, danced in place, ran at Frolov again, faked right, jabbed left, then left again. Frolov deflected the blow and crossed to his gut. Kuzmenok gasped and stopped. Frolov punched him full force in the jaw. Kuzmenok crashed down to the oil cloth floor of the ring.
“Knockout!” yelled the guys.
Frolov crawled out of the ring. Somebody patted him on the back. Frolov didn’t smile. He wiped sweat from his brow with his glove, which tore open a pimple and spread a little drop of blood. Kuzmenok got up and crawled out of the ring on the other side.
“I guess he totally overpowered him,” the trainer looked at Frolov, then at Kuzmenok. “I didn’t intend for this to happen. I thought this bout would be an example of equally matched strength. Alright, let’s have the next pair get up there…”
Kuzmenok and I went to the bus stop. He was still all red. One of his cheeks was swollen. “He got off easy,” Kuzmenok said. “That moron trainer had no right to say our match was over. I would have ended him.”
“He beat you,” I said.
“What? He did not kick my ass; did you get that? He just got off easy. And what, do you think you kicked Skvortsov’s ass?”
“I never said I did. It was a tie.”
“Ours was a draw, too.”
“Oh right, a draw,” I said.
“Okay, so what if he kicked my ass,” he said. “But don’t blab about this at school, alright?”
Mama and Papa were sitting in the kitchen eating sausage patties. Natasha wasn’t home.
“Has training been over long?” asked Mama.
“Forty minutes ago. I’ve been on my way home since then.”
“It’s best that you come straight home. Rather than what you do, goofing around out there all evening. The result of that business is evident in your grade book. All 3’s and a zero for conduct for the week. I can’t fathom why he signed up for boxing,” she said to Papa.
“Boxing is a good idea,” said Papa. “A fellow must learn to stand up for himself. I support him on this one.”
“It’s fine so long as it doesn’t interrupt his studies. Only a few months left until the end of the year, and you have so many 3’s to fix.”
“I’ll fix them,” I said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“We’re not worried about anything. You’re the one who should be worried, that you’ll end up with 3’s this year.”
“I could care less.”
“Seriously? What would make you say that?” Mama said. “You could care less about your progress report?”
“Progress reports don’t mean anything. Natasha only got three 4’s and the rest 5’s, didn’t she? And then at the institute she got all 3’s.”
“This conversation isn’t about her, it’s about you.”
“Quiet, listen to what they’re saying!” Papa got up and turned up the radio.
“…an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station,” said the announcer. “There were two deaths as a result of the explosion at the second reactor, as well as a few isolated occurrences of background radiation.”
*
The school’s parade formation walked down Peace Avenue, past the school supply store, the Sausages store and the Enlightenment bookstore, crossed at the end of First of May Street and came out on Lenin Square. The portraits hung from the sixth floor of the House of Soviets: Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Engels’ head was very small and Lenin’s was very big. On the side with the portraits, starting on the second-to-last floor, there was red material draped from the windows. Below it, on the Lenin Square side, there were even more portraits. The first one on the right was Gorbachev, the rest I didn’t know.
Once Papa took me with him to a parade when I was little, but we didn’t stand with the formation from his factory, just walked. One time we saw the GUM women’s brass band walking on First of May Street, all of them in yellow hats with black stripes, white shirts, blue skirts and yellow high-heeled boots. Their hairstyles were the only things different about them: some had ponytails, some were just long, and a few had theirs cut short.
Dolgobrodov said to Timur: “I called my sister in Dniepropetrovsk – she said there’s already a panic there because of the emergency at the power station. Supposedly it wasn’t just two men who died but several dozen and there’s serious nuclear contamination…”[iii]
“I was listening to Voice of America – on there they said the radioactive cloud is moving across Europe, meaning we might already be covered in it…”
“What does that mean?”
“That means that we really shouldn’t have gone outside today for the parade, especially with the school children. But everything’s always like this. We have serious conversations only about perestroika and democracy…”
“Alright, alright, you don’t need to yell about it. Especially around the pupils.”
“You think they don’t understand anything? They’re grown up enough to get it already.”
I woke up…It was cloudy out the window. It had probably rained during the night. The rails on the balcony were wet. Drops were hanging from the antenna wires. Far away, behind the houses, a train was going past. The radio was playing in the kitchen:
Today is Victory Day
The scent of gunpowder
Permeates this holiday
With gray hair in our whiskers
We will find joy
With tears in our eyes
Victory Day!
Victory Day!
Victory Day!
[i]I’ll Get You! was a classic Soviet cartoon in which a villainous wolf was forever trying to capture the protagonist rabbit.
[ii] Katya Lycheva was a Soviet schoolgirl who was invited to visit the USA in 1986 in response to an earlier visit to the Soviet Union by American schoolgirl Samantha Smith in 1983. Lycheva’s visit was highly-publicized in the Soviet media and she was for a short time a celebrity.
[iii] Dniepropetrovsk is a major city in eastern Ukraine downstream from Chernobyl on the Dnieper River.
Feodor Svarovsky was born in Moscow in 1971. At the age of 19, he emigrated to Denmark. In 1997, he returned to Moscow and worked as a journalist and editor at Vedomosti, then at the Paulsen Publishing House and Esquire. In 2007, he published his first book of poetry Все хотят быть роботами (Everybody Wants to Be a Robot). He is also the author of Путешественники во времени (Time Travelers, 2009); Слава героям (Glory to the Heroes, 2015). In 2011, Svarovsky participated in PEN’s New Voices reading series at the National Arts Club in NYC. He currently lives in Montenegro with his wife and amazing cats.
“When the Antarctic ice melts”
Fyodor Svarovsky hardly needs any introduction. One of the best contemporary Russian poets, he is well known in Russia, and readers admire his poetry, both romantic and metaphysical. He is a universal poet. The appeal to the world of nature and feelings, their projection into the future – these are the main components that create the versatility of Svarovsky’s poetry and cause the readers’ love.
As soon as Svarovsky’s first book, Everybody Wants to Be a Robot (Все хотят быть роботами), was published in 2007, it was an instant hit with literary critics and readers. Even among the diverse and vibrant voices of contemporary Russian poetry, his poems immediately stand out for their fantastic adventurous spirit and unusual poetic style. His book was nominated for the Andrei Bely Prize and won the prestigious Moscow Schyot Prize for the best debut poetry collection. Since then, Svarovsky has played a significant role in the revival of the ballad genre, or narrative poetry written in an “epic” mode. In the process of renewing the genre over the past decade, it has often been defined as a “New Epic”. It represents an original artistic approach to understanding complex reality as a scene of interaction between various forces and actors. Its main characteristics are a narrative text without an author’s linear voice or lyrical statement, the predominance of metaphysical meanings and unusual themes, and a fascinating plot. They were defined in the famous Manifesto (2008). This type of poetry, postmodern in nature, often refers to metaphysical forces beyond the control of the individual.
This trend in Russian poetry continues and flourishes in recent days. Many contemporary poets explore the long ballad genre at the new level of metaphysical comprehension of the world. Among them are such prominent poets as Maria Stepanova, Leonid Schwab, Arseny Rovinsky, Stanislav Lvovsky, Linor Goralik, Pavel Goldin, Andrei Rodionov, Sergei Kruglov, and others.
Drawing on the potential of the “new epic” form, Svarovsky’s first works were bizarre and sometimes grotesque – they introduced themes and heroes unusual for Russian poetry: robots fighting in civil wars, aliens stranded in the Moscow suburbs, or post-Soviet warriors acting in extraordinary circumstances and sometimes in timeless space. In the poetic space of Svarovsky’s first book, Everybody Wants to Be a Robot (Все хотят быть роботами), humans and robots, heroes and villains interact in bizarre circumstances, moving freely through time and space. Besides the unusual plot, some critics immediately noted the features of Anglophone postmodern literature: fragmented narrative, paradox, dry humor, and irony. One of the hallmarks of his first book was the attribution of infinite human emotions to robots, which expanded the poetic space to universal proportions. In one of the most poignant stanzas, the tragic situation in which the robot finds itself is described with almost human sentiment:
знаешь
у роботов ангелов нет
никто не беспокоится
не летит
не закрывает
невидимыми крыльями
нас в пути
поэтому в тяжёлый момент
мы обращаемся напрямую
и вот я прошу
кислоты и воды
но
главное
я тоскую
* * *
you know
robots don’t have own angels
no one worries
no one’s watching us
or covers us with
their invisible wings
on our path
so in times of need
we deal with it directly
and here I’m begging
for acid and water.
but
above all
I’m aching.
Written as contemporary ballads without the visible presence of the author, Svarovsky’s poems meet the aesthetic demands of postmodern literature. They address the realities of modern society, both technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated. The unusual settings and characters – space pirates, robots engaged in galactic wars, and humans communicating with robots – perfectly met the public’s desire for literary forms and characters beyond the usual lyrical standard.
This debut brought Svarovsky deserved fame, many of his poems became famous among readers, and the author became one of the most popular and admired poets in Russia. The reason for this phenomenon is not only the author’s poetic talent, but also his style, which appeals to the reader’s imagination. Svarovsky explained: “The author describes events whose reality or apparent fiction does not matter for achieving the aesthetic effect, since the main goal of the ‘new epic’ is mostly artistic – to provoke an aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual reflection”(Manifesto, 2008).
Like the heroes of ancient tragedies, his characters often face difficult choices and sacrifice themselves. The poet’s detached voice evokes emotions beyond our comprehension. Behind the captivating plot hides the timeless epic story of a man overcoming despair and tragic circumstances. Entertainment is replaced by compassion, and readers find themselves captivated by a dramatic story, as in the poem “Mongolia,” about the incredible bond between an old robot warrior and a little Japanese girl, Aiko, in a desolate land devastated by endless wars (Everybody Wants to Be a Robot). As a result, we react to the fantastic events in Svarovsky’s poems as if they really happened, and indeed we all coexist in a complex universe where time, space and nature are interconnected.
In Svarovsky’s recently published book, Glory to the Heroes (2015), new themes and metaphorical systems emerged. In the book’s preface, Oleg Pashenko emphasizes that Svarovsky has become more open about his Christian eschatological ideas, including the “image of water, sea or seashore as the Kingdom of God.” His poetic style has become more sophisticated and reflected new ontological dimension of reality, “when a person sitting in front of the screen, writing or reading, and at the same time swimming or diving in the notional sea in such a way that the reality is not alien but exists as an additional dimension, as another layer of ontological freedom” (Pashenko, Preface).
In an interview with Sergei Sdobnov about his book (Colta, Oct.25 2015), Svarovsky emphasized that ”for the postmodern and other consequent paradigms, time does not exist; like any other categories, it is an easily controllable part of artistic creation. Since the author isn’t identified with the text, his or her personal sense of time isn’t important.” In this respect, his poetry is in tune with the work of such Russian postmodern prose writers as Mikhail Shishkin, Valery Votrin, and others. The objects in them are only approximations to an ideal world.
Timelessness and the idea of a universal world in which man lives in absolute harmony with all living beings are embodied in his poetic texts. It echoes Plato’s idealistic conception of the unity of all things, but it is also an integral part of the poet’s Christian worldview:
life is love
people are immortal
and glory
glory to the heroes
Far from being a “banal slogan,” as the recent History of Russian Literature (Oxford: 2018) suggests, or an “irony,” this is one of the most powerful humanist messages in contemporary Russian poetry. As such, it can’t be trivially dismissed; it is the only way out of the crisis of human civilization in recent years. All this makes Svarovsky’s poetry relevant to our times, when we all suddenly realize that the survival of humanity depends on harmony with nature, on a return to humanity in politics and society, on refusing to mistreat animals and other living beings, on the love and heroism of the many nameless heroes who fight for all of us. This may seem idealistic in today’s cruel world, but ultimately only poetry can explain life in its entirety.
We are pleased to present some of Feodor Svarovsky’s poems in translation to English-speaking readers. Authentic poetry always loses some of its beauty and magic in translation, but we have tried to preserve as much as possible the originality of the poetic texts and the author’s voice.
Alice and Tiger
In my early childhood
it was absolutely necessary
to keep a super small dog
the size of my pinky
and honestly
a similarly sized little girl
so, they fit in my pocket
the dog was called Tiger
and the girl’s name was Alice
I loved them
I wanted to own a swimming pool too
but a weird-shaped one
long
with curves
with the houses
under the water
where we would be at home
and there
we would swim between the walls
in the crystal water
devoted to each other until death
and absolutely immortal
Day at the zoo
1.
we went to the zoo
but we didn’t see a crocodile
because he was lying at the bottom of a concrete pit
and didn’t float up
and we didn’t see the hippo either
my parents said: look, there are his ears and nostrils
but I saw
neither ears
nor nostrils,
polar bears
and brown bears alike sat in their cages
the giraffe was cold
and didn’t come out
monkeys and lemurs were hiding
eagles were sleeping
capybaras were peeking out of their homes
with their backs to the audience
the elephant was standing in the distance
and it was hard to see him
just some pointless
deer
and bulls
which could be seen everywhere
were posturing in plain sight
all of a sudden, I’ve got an upset stomach.
and they didn’t buy cotton candy for me
it was Saturday on my birthday seventy-two-and-a-half years ago
2.
it was a special day
everything went awry from the start
giraffe had a stomach ache
crocodile had a toothache
monkeys and lemurs were bored and cold
eagles were sad and cold
capybaras were sleepy and cold
hippo was cold
brown bears were cold
and even polar bears were cold
and the elephant was appalled
deer and bulls
wandered in some despair
nobody remembers now who it was
but one of the animals
or not of them
but definitely someone
said: Animals, so be it, it is okay, one day it will end it will be over and we’ll go home
When the Antarctic Ice Melts
when the Antarctic ice melts
we will be happy
after many rainfalls
dry bones will become wet
gardens will bloom
on Queen Maud’s land
on the Queen Victoria Peninsula –
white tents flitter in the wind
and meadows stretch from one lake to another –
the bird snatches fish and bread from our hands
everything will be be fine
all the dead will come back to life
all the good
except the bad
oh, glass cities
oh, the land rising from the ice
His Majesty the Emperor
is swinging
ankle-deep in warm water
walking
towards the green coast
just a penguin
imperial
Glory to the Heroes
four Canadians
saved the world from a genetic catastrophe
one Armenian invented a new type of rocket fuel
and a treatment for cancer
one Russian sacrificed himself
he shut down the reactor and saved the international space station
one Englishman gave his liver to a wounded journalist
who came back from the California coup
one Tatar during the ethnic conflict in Southeast Asia
saved 240 Malaysian babies
one Frenchwoman died for the freedom of Phobos in the dungeons
of Deimos
one Cardian
was supposed to attack Earth on a neutrino-driven ship
but
after seeing the blue planet
he turned the ship toward the sun
life is love
people are immortal
and glory
glory to the heroes
Слава героям
четыре канадца спасли мир от генетической катастрофы
один армянин изобрёл новый вид ракетного топлива
и лекарство от рака
один русский пожертвовал собой
отключил реактор и спас международную космическую станцию
один англичанин отдал свою печень раненной журналистке
вернувшейся после переворота в Калифорнии
один татарин во время этнического конфликта
в Юго-Восточной Азии спас 240 малайских младенцев
одна француженка умерла за свободу Фобоса в застенках
Деймоса
один картадианин
должен был атаковать Землю на корабле с нейтринным приводом
но
увидев синюю планету
он развернул корабль в сторону солнца
жизнь есть любовь
люди бессмертны
и слава
слава героям
Brothers
the elephant would never
start fighting the whale
not that the whale is stronger than the elephant
it’s that a war between them is impossible
these animals are brothers
together they swim under the water
the whale is young
and lively
the elephant is jovial and young
the whale’s fin cuts through currents in the depths
the elephant’s trunk flaps overhead
mermaids glide after them
they are the people and gorillas’ brothers
An Excerpt from Anna Grom and Her Ghost by Maria Rybakova translated by Elena Dimov
About the Author
Maria Rybakova was born in Moscow. She studied Greek and Latin in Russia, then in Germany, and subsequently in the USA. She currently resides in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her first novel, Anna Grom and Her Ghost, was published in 1999 and translated into French and German. Rybakova is a recipient of numerous literary awards in Russia, including Students’ Booker Prize, Eureka Prize, the Russian Prize and others.
About the translator
Elena Dimov was born in Vladivostok and grew up in the Russian Far East. She graduated from the Far Eastern Federal University with a master’s degree in Oriental Studies and Chinese Language. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian History and Culture from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. After living in Europe, she now resides in Charlottesville, where she teaches Russian language and culture. Her primary scholarly interest is in contemporary Russian poetry.
28th Day.
Dear Wilamowitz!
The bright light that some hope to see after death should not be sought in death. We, phantoms, wander in the twilight. The bright light should be sought where the land exposes its chest under the sea’s blows – in Greece. Myths like beacons are scattered in our souls like islands of this light. I came to this land of light, and it turned out that white columns did stand against the blue sky in reality. And because I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful, I kept trying to touch them and I couldn’t believe that this beauty and my existence suddenly intersected in this moment. This scene, which I had imagined so often as a child, now seemed to have crept out of my most cherished dream, and it happened not because this dream arose by itself, but because it was derived from books. But in the course of time, especially when I had forgotten what I had read, the boundary between the written word and the imagination had worn away, and I had almost forgotten that this world and these columns did exist only in my mind. When I saw them in reality, I thought the world and I had swapped places and now the tourists were roaming the hills and gardens of my imagination.
The crowds of tourists bothered me. It was frustrating to see all these plebs in colored shorts with their cameras now walking in the places that were meant for the elite, for the elders, or for the priests, or just for the free-born citizens of Athens. Their unpleasant faces and flabby legs, their whole degenerative complexion, seemed to contradict the spirit of this place and violate the ancient ruins. After I met you, an idea of my exclusivity was born in me, and the statues of the gods and the ruins of the temples seemed to confirm this idea. I thought that it would be impossible to destroy the human hierarchy, just like it’s impossible to destroy these ruins that exist until our time, and even though they have turned to dust in reality, they still live on in our imagination. What was wealth? What was the meaning of success? After meeting you, I realized what the ancients meant by the word kalokagathiya. You were so much more perfect than the people around you that you seemed to be a representative of a different biological species that, by its very existence, disproved the idea that there couldn’t be a natural superiority of some human beings over others. You radiated superiority and exclusivity, and approaching you seemed like attaining immortality.
In dirty and muggy Athens I had to stay overnight in a strange hotel; it seemed that these are called rooms by the hour. It was on a central street leading to the Acropolis, but it was artfully hidden between relatively more respectable hotels. Previously it was apparently a brothel. Marble staircase and dusty velvet curtains adorning the foyer seemed remains of the past luxury. The ceilings were high, but the dirt seemed to accumulate even under the ceiling. The hotel was cheap and empty, if you didn’t count the old, drunk, and low-necked concierge and a woman I met who walked holding on to the walls. She filled the space under the high ceilings with the smell of alcohol. I wasn’t alone. I was accompanied by a relatively young German man who, having visited Greece before, had a strange peculiarity: he couldn’t stand the sight of the Acropolis. This peculiarity caused even more difficulties because the Acropolis could be seen from almost anywhere in Athens. So he had to walk with his eyes downcast, observing the piles of garbage in the streets and the stray cats.
The room we were given was large, but almost all the space was taken up by a bed covered with an unclean blanket full of holes. Lying on the bed, you could see yourself in the large broken mirror hanging on the opposite wall and wonder what circumstances had led to the mirror being broken. The furnishings were complemented by a sink with running cold water. I decided to take a shower, left the room, and went down a long dark corridor in anticipation of coming across some person standing unsteadily on his feet, but this time it was lifeless. The bathroom was located at the end of the corridor. The narrowness of the space and the height of the ceiling began to annoy me. There was no light in the bathroom, and when I locked the door I had to wash in the unreliable light coming in through the cracks in the door. It wasn’t a shower typical for hotels, but a spacious marble bath as dirty as an entire hotel itself. The water turned out to be cold, and it didn’t go through the hole but began to fill the bath with a murky fluid. I thought that it might be salty to taste, and at the thought of trying this slush I felt sick, gave up on the idea of taking a shower and returned to the room.
A bare bulb illuminated the dismal setting. I went out to the balcony – there was even something like a balcony where I could hardly even squeeze into – to smoke. This fortified my spirit. They make excellent cigarettes in Greece! The city noise gradually subsided, but this didn’t bring calm, as the Athenian streets begin rustle early at day break, and after a quiet Berlin to be awakened by this noise meant immediately to realize that you are being awakened in a foreign city. Yet, even Berlin was a strange city for me, and all other cities differ only in the degree of my being accustomed to them, otherwise all were alien. But the cigarette smoke wasn’t to be taken away; it was mine, because I sucked it into the very inside of my lungs and exhaled it into stuffy Athens, thereby providing a part of myself to it. Smoking is probably the only way to communicate with a foreign land. Puff – exhale, and your lungs expand to the size of the foreign country. And the tobacco smoke obscures its clear air.
The next day I went to the agora where once upon a time Demosthenes and Isocrates walked, but who could possibly believe it nowadays? Shopkeepers from the shops huddled near the Acropolis offered to let me come in the evening to smoke weed. And the elderly young man was following me like a shadow. Sometime in the early summer this young man had become the object of my short-living passion; it was then that this trip was planned, but after I met you the circumstances changed and there was no way to explain it to him. And I ran away from him.
At first I ran away just to eat alone. I went to a large open-air restaurant, exactly at the foot of the Acropolis. There was music playing. At the beginning, everything was peaceful. I ordered the swordfish and began to eat. A girl selling flowers scurried between the tables. Someone got up from a table and danced the Sirtaki. All in all, there was everything that the tourist’s soul desired. All of a sudden I felt someone’s glance. It was a grim bearded man sitting a few tables away from me. I looked away but after a few minutes decided to check again and looked up. Beardie continued to stare as if I were his acquaintance. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that no, we couldn’t possibly know each other. I looked up again, wondering whether to stick out my tongue at him, but his gaze embarrassed me and I decided it would be better just to stare at the plate. So I did, even if it spoiled my enjoyment. What was the point of sitting in the center of Athens, when all you could see was swordfish? After a while I felt someone approaching my table. I decided that the bearded guy had gone on the attack and shrank in horror in my chair. But it turned out to be the flower girl. She plopped a bouquet of nasty-smelling roses down on my table. I faltered, in broken Greek, saying that I don’t need roses. She said the roses are paid for, and pointed to the bearded man. The bearded guy nodded his head and perhaps winked to me behind his glasses, but I couldn’t see for sure. The salesgirl retreated, leaving me with a bunch of damned roses.
What could I do? Pay the bill and leave? But I didn’t know where to go and I certainly didn’t want to go back to the brothel. So I decided to outstay the bearded man. I ordered an ice cream and began to eat it in very small bits. I have always been proud of my ability to eat ice cream slowly, especially since I involuntarily eat everything else very quickly. I decided that I would think about something pleasant or important. But the bearded guy kept returning to my head. Because I didn’t have any information about him, my thoughts turned out to be almost meaningless, although intense. I thought: “bearded guy.” Sometimes I thought: “damn bearded guy.” And sometimes: “bearded guy, for hell’s sake.” But my thoughts didn’t extend beyond that.
And when for the twentieth time I thought “my god, bearded guy,” I looked up and noticed that he had disappeared. I outlasted him! This is what you can achieve with persistence. But I didn’t know then that restaurants, like the sea, conceal many sharp underwater rocks. At the table in front of me there was a pair of middle-aged people – the imposing gentleman and the small lady with plucked eyebrows. The lady was talking all the time, but the man was barely listening and looking around him. With foreboding apprehension, I noticed that his eyes met mine more and more often. But since he was with a lady, I decided that I wasn’t in danger.
But when I once again plunged a spoon into the ice cream to pick up a small, very small piece of ice cream, and then keep it on my tongue for a longer time, I saw the lady getting up and approaching me. She looked like she was going to hit me. But I reassured myself that she probably wanted to ask me for some matches. Of course she was going for the matches and I was about to get them out. But she didn’t need matches; she was interested in my nationality. She came up to me and asked in English: “Miss, what is your nationality?” Not being prepared for this sudden interrogation, I was confused and decided I should immediately admit it. “Jewish,” – I muttered. “Jewish? From Israel?” – She said in surprise. I was relieved. “No, I am from Russia… I am Russian, so to say…a Russian Jew…” I got confused in the subtleties of my national origin but she seemed to lose interest in this topic. “I am from France”, – she introduced herself, – and my friend is from Athens. If you want to spend the night with him, you can take him.”
And there it was. I remembered what my grandmother advised me to say in a sticky situation, and with dignity I said – “No, thank you. I have other plans for the evening.”
But she didn’t go away. “I don’t care about your plans”, – she said rather impolitely. “My plan was to spend this evening in the restaurant with my friend. This is our last evening. Tomorrow morning I am flying out. But he stares at you all the time, so if you want him for the night, take him.” Without waiting for my answer, the lady turned around and headed to the bathroom. Then her companion turned to me.“She is crazy, isn’t she, Miss?”- He said with a smile. – “And by the way, where are you from?”
I advised them to sort out their relationship without attracting strangers, paid off the bill and left. Then I took a cab to the railway station. Never before had my appeal reached such heights as this evening. In the taxi I anxiously looked askance at the driver, but my charms evidently had no effect on him. Upon arrival at the station, I studied the schedule, determined to catch the first train going to a more or less interesting direction. A train traveling to Corinth caught my eye. “I’m going to Corinth,” – I decided. The train’s wheels started to rattle and Athens went out of sight.
29th Day
Dear Wilamowitz!
Modern Corinth lies on the seashore and I had to take a bus to get to the ancient city, which is in the foothills. I stayed in a cheap roadside hotel. It was already night so I went straight to the first floor. When we recall our journeys, we usually remember the monuments or landscapes and forget the successions of rooms in which we stayed. That makes sense because rooms as a rule are all similar to each other. However, the small events that have happened to us in these rooms influence how we perceive the monuments for the sake of which we came. When I touched the column in Athens and thought that maybe Demosthenes had touched it too, the impossibility of it arose between my fingers and the column’s marble, because these twenty something years I brought with me to the agora, as well as the morning coffee I drank at the coffee shop, surrounded me like a thick wall. I remember that there, in a small room in Corinth, while I was taking a shower, my sandals got soaked and became completely ruined, so I had to throw them out when I left.
The room was square and there was an exit to the corresponding square roof of the ground floor. When I went to bed (I was very sleepy), I remembered that there are earthquakes in Corinth. It seems that someone told me that there was an earthquake in Corinth a few years ago. I almost got scared because given my adventures so far, it would be surprising if I were not overtaken by earthquake. But I was so tired that I fell asleep very quickly, and before the final plunge into insensibility I had time to think that contrary to my custom, I was falling asleep quickly.
Then something happened which I still don’t know whether it was a dream or reality. I woke up due to the fact that the room was rocking. I opened my eyes and saw that I had forgotten to turn off the lights, and the light bulb over my head, which was casting an uneven light, swung like a pendulum to the direction opposite from where it was suddenly thrown. In the moment following my awakening, the whole room had returned to its original position and I caught them on their way back: the bed, the wall, the light bulb cord – all had shifted and they no longer represented a series of parallel and perpendicular lines. In the same instant as the loss of balance there was a feeling of horror that engulfed me. But I didn’t have time to think about running and escaping from the room, because it ceased rocking, and then sleep overpowered my horror.
Upon waking up in the morning, I went through the balcony door to the flat roof of the ground floor. The sun was shining with a vengeance even though it was already the beginning of October. The air was transparent to the extent that you could see all around for many miles, way down to the sea. I saw gardens, which I wouldn’t pass through, houses, which I wouldn’t be able to visit, and I wanted to go everywhere right now so badly that it was almost painful; to see them and at the same time to know that it couldn’t happen. Even if I could go down there now and enter some of the gardens, it certainly would be different from what I’d have seen on the flat roof, and what I saw would be farther removed once I entered. But the air, which was translucent to the extent that it seemed that even the sunlight had a physical solidity, was so calm and motionless that I decided to consider everything that had happened that night a dream.
Then I went out to eat, get some rest, and to somehow pass the time until five, when I found out that there was also Acrocorinth, an ancient fortress on the mountaintop. I was told that from there you can see the two seas at the same time – the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. And I, having put on my sneakers, decided to climb up there. I went out to the road, where a sign was marked “To Acrocorinth” and began walking along it having decided it would lead me to the fortress. But it didn’t happen; the road didn’t rise steeply and smoothly but meandered around the hill, so when I looked up at what I thought had to be the fortress, it gradually turned out to be the opposite side. All of a sudden, I realized that the place from which I had come was by now far below. Since I wasn’t aware of the distance I had been walking for a long time, my ascent appeared to be almost sudden. For a time I trudged with my back forward, so that my glance wouldn’t be fixed on the upcoming goal but my eyes might freely scan down the mountain, taking in the whole panorama below me. Everything beneath me was mine. I understood that even after I descended from the hill, I would know, walking through those streets, that I had seen them from the top; and now, standing at the top, I imagined myself as a little figurine walking down one of those narrow ribbons which my eyes could still detect; and I realized that my gaze, by subordinating everything for many miles around, had power not only over what I saw but also over my own body. I had not been able to formulate the idea precisely, but while I was looking around the hills and imagined that I was walking down the road, I understood that there was something within me that was stronger and bigger than my surroundings, though at the same time it was stronger and bigger than myself.
I climbed this mountain as if there would never be another chance to climb somewhere else. Before, I often had dreams of a mountain in front of me, to which access was blocked; these dreams didn’t return after I ascended the serpentine road to Acrocorinth. On the contrary, after death I remembered everything, down to the smallest detail. But while I was climbing this mountain all my memories remained behind and were obliterated. Nothing else was left: there was no abandoned native country with its maze of five-story buildings, the washed out roads, the cruel childhood friends. There was no other country, where a foreigner is reduced to such obscurity that he strives to turn into a grasshopper. There were no pubs, no post offices; there were no more dirty windowpanes. There was no more of my awkward body, or the face that returned to me in the mirror every morning, after I lost it in the flexible spaces of sleep. There were no bad grades, no domestic quarrels, no rain, no contempt, or anything that darkens life and makes it look like death.
With every step onward, the sun shone brighter. I found myself without a past and realized that the past was death, and oblivion is life itself; and only you, without a past, without a future, you were the real one who supported me in my ascent and, it seemed to me that you were the only one who was waiting for me at the top. Fate, the blind guide to death, turned out to be weaker than you; its tenacious embrace unclenched, and I hurried to you so that you would accept me and never let me go.
When I finally reached the top, it began to get dark. I write “it began to get dark” out of our northern habit. Here in the south, there is almost no twilight. It’s weird, because the half-light semi-darkness of the north is similar to ourselves; and the southern darkness coming unexpectedly frightens us because it’s like sudden death. The serpentine path ended, and I had to climb over the rocks and watch my step; sometimes a rock slipped under my feet and began rolling down the slope. In those places which to me seemed impassable, a herd of sheep suddenly trotted through, their bells jingling in the darkness.
I found the point where you could indeed see the two seas at once; but I was guessing at the dark water only by the absence of lights: there was a glowing strip of land between two dark semi-circles, where by now the Greeks must be sitting in the coffee shops and discussing the news. “I see, I see the two seas at the same time!” – I said to myself (in fact, I only saw the blackness in their place). Dark warm air embraced my shoulders. In the darkness the sky merged with the sea, and the sea with the mainland, and small lights shone at the top and the bottom. I stretched out my hands to them and swore that I would love you forever. Then I began to descend.
The descent from the mountain caused me great difficulty because of the ever-changing darkness. I was surprised at myself that I didn’t think of how dangerous a descent could be in the darkness. But soon I got out on the serpentine path, almost at the same time that the moon peeked through the clouds. While I was looking at it, I thought about all of those faces or rabbit’s likenesses that some found in the moon. At that moment it seemed to me that the moon indeed had a face, and now it was cheerfully looking at me. I hastened my pace, because I decided to call you in Berlin from Corinth before it got too late.
But it was already too late.
I don’t know what happened during those days, but something definitely did. You spoke absently; you didn’t ask me anything, and I had to hang up without saying much, but I wanted to tell you so many things. I decided to postpone our conversation until my return to Berlin. I thought that by this time your strange mood would pass (and at the same time something told me no, it wouldn’t pass, something changed and it changed forever). But I decided to follow my chosen path, without turning away; and if by now it turned out that my way didn’t make sense, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t aware of it then. I could guess, and I was happy and sad at the same time because I knew that I was doomed.
Ilya Semenenko-Basin was born in Moscow in 1966. He graduated from Moscow State University and holds a Ph.D. in history and religious studies. He is currently a professor at the Center for Religious Studies at the University of Humanities and a prominent scholar in the field of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. He began writing poetry very early in his youth, but his first book of poetry, By the Streams of Silver, was published only in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Russian Gulliver’s Poetry Prize in 2014.
In attempting to define the modern poetic process in Russia, it is evident that traditional forms and methods of versification have increasingly given way to more innovative forms that operate in a wide range of linguistic registers, following the Western pattern of free verse. Using the ability of free verse, new generations of Russian poets have created brilliant poetic works in which reality and fantasy come together, and meanings and symbols evolve into more complex forms outside of formal patterns. Literary critics continue to debate the nature of this genre and the boundary between free verse and short prose – free verse, with its lack of formal structure and shifting rhythmic effects, remains a controversial subject. Recent developments, however, show that this genre is flourishing and gradually becoming one of the leading trends in contemporary Russian poetry. It seems to correspond to the inner logic of the development of poetic language, as well as to the ability to reproduce what the American poet-imagist Amy Lowell called “the power of variation” in the 1920s.
We will continue to introduce readers to the poetry of contemporary Russian poets. Among them are remarkable poems by Ilya Semenenko-Basin, a poet writing in the genre of verse libre.
* * *
“Torcido, desigual, blando y sonoro …” -Quevedo
Impossible. It’s not the poetry that is impossible – but the creek a disorderly silence
of a marshy and nameless region near Moscow struggling after the bulldozer’s assault, crushed by the highway, such overwhelming air – from above and eroded by moisture – from the side ………………..and below, in velvet silence still confidently blooming, overturning the four-sided rotten root in front of the watching eyes of nettles from the depths of the pit in the tranquil
forest
* * *
Assumption
Why do I want your love so much? So you can sit in the train and read, Horace for example, translated into English, simple. And I’d bring you food. Or we would ponder that love means nothing to us. What a topic for us lovers, slowly walking around Sivtsev Vrazhek street. Let’s try being still, just get lost in each other’s eyes while our hands feel the warmth on our cheeks. Your love to discover my ability to forget. And there are so many other reasons. We could pick them out and put them back together before they lose shape, bumps, grooves – from the wind. -2007
* * *
Summer variation
Once by noon I had already come Returning at sunset – to the virgin-river to listen to the talking, the splash of speech, the babbling of the brook. But you don’t hear me. Not murmuring, but talking to yourself – about yourself, and within yourself: that being a maiden is like trying to rest in a fast-moving stream. To love someone is incomprehensible, and cannot be learnt. There is silence at noon, In the darkness there is indistinct chatter, dancing barely audible sounds in a shadowy valley.
Copyrights to the original works are owned by Ilya Semenenko-Basin. Translated by Elena Dimov
Russian vers libre remains one of the most contradictory and unacknowledged genres of contemporary Russian poetry. Even though Russian free verse has existed since the 19th century, and some critics consider Slovo o Polku Igoreve* as the first known prototype of Russian vers libre (see V. Kupriaianov, stikhi.ru), there are countless arguments among critics about the exact definition of this poetic genre.
T.S. Eliot described it in his famous essay “Reflections on Vers-libre:” “Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so-called vers libre, which is good is anything but ‘free’, it can better be defended under some other label. Particular types of vers libre may be supported on the choice of content, or on the method of handling the content…If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.”
Paradoxically, he concluded that the charm of free verse “is not defined by absence of pattern or absence of rhyme, for other verse is without these; that it is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the worst verse can be scanned; and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”
The fact that many literary magazines in Russia today, such as “Deti Ra”, AKT,” Slovoslov”, “Novy Mir”, and others, publish vers libre shows that there is a great demand for this kind of poetry in modern Russian society. And indeed, behind the apparent simplicity of verses free from the limitations of the rules of traditional versification, there is sometimes a refined psychology and the ability to express profound meaning through an original system of images and metaphors. Even non-traditional verses add to the magic of the poet’s free conversation with the reader. Although the traditional metrical structure cannot be found there, vers libre is a poetic genre that allows the expression of the natural music of poetry. What is more, it expresses modern reality with the greatest accuracy and truthfulness because it follows the logic of the ever-changing registers of language.
The origins of vers libre, or free verse, in Russian literature can be traced back to the 19th century, following European poetic trends. Afanassii Fet, Ivan Turgenev, and M. Mikhailov were among the first Russian writers to experiment with verse outside the traditional poetic forms. The poets of the Silver Age also paid tribute to this trend. Among them, the masterpiece of Marina Tvetaeva stands out:
…Я бы хотела жить с Вами
В маленьком городе,
Где вечные сумерки
И вечные колокола.
И в маленькой деревенской гостинице —
Тонкий звон
Старинных часов — как капельки времени.
И иногда, по вечерам, из какой-нибудь мансарды —
Флейта,
И сам флейтист в окне.
И большие тюльпаны на окнах.
И может быть, Вы бы даже меня любили…
* * *
Посреди комнаты — огромная изразцовая печка,
На каждом изразце — картинка:
Роза — сердце — корабль. —
А в единственном окне —
Снег, снег, снег.
Вы бы лежали — каким я Вас люблю: ленивый,
Равнодушный, беспечный.
Изредка резкий треск
Спички.
Папироса горит и гаснет,
И долго-долго дрожит на ее краю
Серым коротким столбиком — пепел.
Вам даже лень его стряхивать —
И вся папироса летит в огонь.
December 10, 1916
-1916
I would like to live with You
In a small town,
Where there are eternal dawns
And eternal bells.
And in a small village inn-
The faint chime
Of old clocks, like drops of time.
And sometimes, in the evening, from some garret
A flute,
And the flautist himself in the window.
And big tulips in the windowsills.
And maybe, you would not even love me…
In the middle of the room – a huge tiled stove,
On each tile a little picture:
A rose-a heart-a ship.
And in the one window-
Snow, snow, snow.
You would lie-that’s how I love You: idle,
Indifferent, careless.
Now and then the sharp strike
Of a match.
The cigarette glows and burns down,
And trembles on its edge for a long, long time
In a short, gray column of ash.
You’re too lazy to even flick it –
And the whole cigarette flies into the fire.
You would lie—thus I love You: idle,
Indifferent, carefree.
Now and then the sharp strike
Of a match.
The cigarette glows and burns down,
And trembles for a long, long time on its edge
In a gray brief pillar — of ash.
You’re too lazy even to flick it —
And the whole cigarette flies into the fire.
— Marina Tsvetaeva December 10, 1916
(Translated by unknown author; see also: blacketernal.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/id-like-to-live-with-you/)
In Soviet Russia, free verse was excluded from the official literary scene and not published. Only the great talent and perseverance of poets such as Ksenia Nekrasova (1912-58), Gennady Aygi, Sergei Biriukov, Vladimir Burich, and others allowed this tradition to survive underground and then flourish in the 21st century. This is the amazingly expanding sphere of Russian poetry today.
We are glad to introduce to readers the poetry of Ilya Semenenko-Basin, who writes in the genre of vers libre. Semenenko-Basin follows in the tradition of earlier poets, especially Gennady Aygi, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Akhmetiev, and Arkady Dragomoschenko, yet stands out for his own original voice and poetic manner. Ilya was born in Moscow in 1966. He graduated from Moscow State University and holds a Ph.D. in history and religious studies. He is currently a professor at the Center for Religious Studies at the University of Humanities and a prominent scholar in the field of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. He began writing poetry very early in his adolescence, but his first book of poetry, By the Streams of Silver, was published only in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Russian Gulliver’s Poetry Prize in 2014. His book of microprose, Nachalo Veka, was published in Moscow in 2015. It describes the particular circumstances of the beginning of the 21st century in Russia and other countries, but with an eye to the past.
Semenenko-Basin’s poetry is often laconic, but full of philosophical insight. His verses are characterized by short, sometimes one-phrase lines, almost like maxims. It is always a thought clothed in the verse form, sometimes a sketch of the world around him – momentary and concise, a miniature in itself. The poet’s immersion into his inner world projects dramatic events from the Russian past on the contemporary world around him.
Semenenko-Basin defines his new book, Lira for the Wild Animals (Lira dlya dikih zverey. Moscow: 2016), with the words of Andrei Bely: “he wrote what the air uttered to consciousness.” And indeed, with the clear vision of a scholar, he sees the spiritual dissociation of society as one of the central problems of the postmodern world. His poetic talent, however, suggests his own vision of the way out of human alienation, where the poetic voice is like an “orpheum lire” that influences the depths of human consciousness. As a hundred years earlier, poetry could help the individual overcome desolation and connect with the world. To paraphrase Joseph Brodsky’s famous words, if it could not change the world into a better, happier, sunnier place, it could still “save the individual.
Several translated poems from The Lire for the Wild Animals open a window into the poet’s vision of the world around him and also appeal to the reader’s imagination. These verses bring with them the sharp austerity of 21st century minimalist poetry and its refined psychological messages.
March 20th
A bright ray of sunshine illuminated
girls’ faces, girls who were bent over their papers
at a long table
in a room on the ninth floor of the ugly ancient house.
And there was nothing, nothing
that I could call my own,
the center of my little universe
where my interests and rights reign.
But only the sun
the sun reminded me of myself by unsettling me
with its too early spring warmth.
* * *
there’s a point on the horizon,
that I’m interested in
or rather, it’s interested in me
and perhaps I’m not the center of the universe
and maybe the center is not here, where I’m standing
but at this point on the horizon
in that hardly visible dot
is the center that attracts me
* * *
where were we going?
* * *
Morning coffee
in the one thousand nine hundred thirty ninth year
my grandfather wrote to his relatives
“With great satisfaction I now drink my morning coffee
every day since I received that one small tin of condensed coffee in the mail.”
the letter was sent from the nine hundred fourth kilometer
of the Northern railroad
the first sector
fourth division
of the Onega gulag **
* * *
“Our grandfathers heard: the war has begun,
They quit their jobs, got ready for battle… “
Old wartime song
In the steppe, armored vehicles are moving
uniformly alternated.
they move
like thoughts, gripping the three-dimensional air.
In the ole’ ancestors’ song the brave man
raised his right hand like a hero:
the undefeated
no-winner
* * *
In the twilight we were walking on the bridge
in the village where the old ladies swear like sailors
all the babushkas there swear
but not your grandmother
not your granny, Zhenya,
the decrepit bridge did not collapse behind us
you glanced behind you
to see it was still there
* * *
I listen and watch
Linguists proclaim:
God is sound and the word of God is hiding Dikt rampages like a round street light
it burns behind the apple grove
on its heels it crouches in the snow
* * *
the sun
curled up on your ring like a snake
the moon watched
giving away days and months and ages
how well you were saying the sound er
* * *
Translated by Elena Dimov
Notes:
* The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, (Russian Slovo o polku Igoreve), masterpiece of Old Russian literature, written about the unsuccessful campaign of Prince Igor’ of Novgorod-Seversky against the polovtsy . Slovo was written anonymously in 1185–87 and preserved in a single manuscript, which was discovered in 1795 by A.I. Musin-Pushkin, published in 1800, and lost again during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.
** The gulag is the acronym of government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during the period
Ilya Kukulin at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. Picture by Prof. Irina Shevelenko
About Ilya Kukulin
Kukulin is often called one of Russia’s best literary critics, but he is also a poet and scholar. He graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in psychology and received his Ph.D. in literary theory from the Russian State University for the Humanities, writing his thesis on the work of Daniil Kharms. He is the editor of the online literary journal TextOnly and the book series New Poetry. In 2015, he was awarded the Andrey Bely Prize in a nomination “Scholarship in the Humanities” for his book The Machines of Noisy Time: How Soviet Montage Became the Method of Unofficial Culture (Moscow: 2015). Until early April 2016, he was a visiting professor of Russian language and literature at Washington and Lee University and graciously agreed to be interviewed for Contemporary Russian Literature at UVA. Our conversation took place in the charming Lexington Coffee House on the Washington and Lee campus. I spoke with Kukulin about the place of Russian literature in world culture and the moral responsibility of contemporary Russian writers and critics to transcend the legacy of Soviet literature and return to the humanism of the classics.
About Elena Dimov
Elena Dimov is a regular contributor to this site and the translator of Maria Rybakova’s novel-in-verse Gnedich. Elena was born in Vladivostok and grew up in the Russian Far East. She holds a master’s degree in Oriental Studies and Chinese Language from the Far Eastern Federal University and a Ph.D. in Russian History from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. She has lived in Hamburg, Germany and Sofia, Bulgaria. For many years she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary Social Theories in Sofia. She currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has taught a course in Russian language and culture at UVA.
“If literature has a social function, it is, perhaps, to show man his optimal parameters, his spiritual maximum. On that score, the metaphysical man of Dostoyevsky’s novels is of greater value than (Mr. Kundera’s) wounded rationalist, however modern and however common.”
– Joseph Brodsky The New York Times, Feb.17th, 1985
Elena Dimov: Ilya, let’s start with a traditional question: please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Ilya Kukulin: I was born in 1969, and at the moment I am an Associate Professor at Moscow Research University of Economics, in its School of Cultural Studies. This University’s design is reminiscent of a Western style, more precisely, of an American college of liberal arts, but with fewer opportunities for choosing a specialization. During this year, I’ve also worked as a Visiting Professor at Washington and Lee University. Besides that, I work in Moscow as a senior researcher at the School of Humanitarian Studies of the Academy of National Economics and Public Administration. Using an English idiom, I wear many hats: I am simultaneously a literary critic, cultural historian, and social historian, and here I have been teaching Russian language and literature. In Moscow, I also teach modern Russian literature and cultural studies.
ED: What is your opinion on the mission of literature?
IK: I do not think that literature has some incredible special mission. But like any art, its function is to make the world richer and promote the transformation of human consciousness so that we can have more opportunities to experience the world, to perceive and understand each other, and become a little bit different, maybe a little bit better than we are. At the same time, we should not forget that literature is both entertainment and a way of understanding the world, all in one. Besides this, the mission of literature as an art is to bring joy to the world and, similar to catharsis, transform the sadness of which there is so much in the world.
In the modern period, the concept of catharsis becomes suspended because we see increasingly more suffering and discomfort all around us, which we definitely know cannot be solved in the near future. In this situation, the task becomes to help people cope with this disastrous experience, to not let people succumb to the temptation of considering this world unfair and terrible. This is also because there are some people, a lot of people, who promised to move us toward a better future and social order but turned out to lead people to different nightmares. That is too familiar to the citizens of the former Soviet Union, which I am as well. Literature helps us to live through the painful experience at the present time and to make this experience meaningful and endurable — rather than postpone it for the future, about which we know nothing.
ED: Could you explain in more detail what the task of the literary critic is, as someone who undertakes the study of literature and the explanation of literature, the understanding of literature? After all, the critique has certain functions, doesn’t it?
IK: Regarding the task of literary criticism, it seems to me that there the most important thing is the definition of the word itself, according to Kantian’s interpretation of «critique». Criticism is usually associated in our minds with “criticizing” something. But in fact, the Kantian understanding of critique as a method for explanation of the world defines the function of literary criticism as a whole. The word “critique” does not mean disapproval or negative judgment, but analysis and making the matter comprehensible and clear. Being comprehended in this sense, literary criticism has its social and ethical aims. Of course, you remember Alexander Pushkin’s words that poet has to be judged by the law, which he (or she) established for him- or herself.
ED: Ilya, I understand that this is a very broad topic, but can you briefly describe the main trends of modern Russian literature in your understanding? What is happening now in Russian literature?
IK: First of all, let’s define the way in which we can speak about contemporary Russian literature. It is important for me that this literature, since its inception, has been and remains European literature. Similar to this, American literature is European in its spirit, though it sounds paradoxical. It means that these literatures belong to the same circle of cultures that are called Western culture. In this sense, Russian literature is part of the same context as French, German or British contemporary literatures. Only in this context we can consider it – it is not exotic but has the same trends that are important now for modern Western culture in general.
ED: This is obvious for classic literature, but does it relate to modern Russian literature which, figuratively speaking, seethes? It is all agitated and unsettled.
IK: The contemporary look always discerns the seething, and then what remains – or, to be more precise, what we ourselves cause to remain — becomes a classic. Innovative Russian literature seems to me to be a field of intense struggle, and though this struggle is invisible and often goes without controversy, there are multiple diverse flows, which can be schematically reduced to two or three.
In the first one, the writers reproduce mutatis mutandis some trends that existed in Soviet literature. The Soviet literature was exotic: it was arranged unlike European literature because it was a large-scale system of social and psychological programming. British researcher Evgeny Dobrenko has written some important books about this feature.
The second aspect of the Soviet literature was the creation of the system, if you will like, of alternative social programs. This is what we can call non-official literature, i.e. the literature that emerged in the Soviet era, was published and went through censorship with some difficulties. This kind of literature offered less support to the officially approved social programs of human transformation and their mobilization but more to the questions of humanism and individualization, the possibility of ethical action and compassion to the private person.
Soviet literature was not uniform, but the idea about literature as an intermediary for ideological and social programs was very important for Soviet literature and was shared both by those who were at the helm of governance in Soviet literature and those who tried to resist. Besides, Soviet literature was based on the idea of progress; this idea was probably gone from modern Russian literature, including the heirs of Soviet literature who left this idea a long time ago.
The second trend was connected to the so-called uncensored literature. They were not the authors who wrote something forbidden, but mostly they did not aim their work at passing through Soviet censorship. This meant that they turned on the self-censorship – not automatically, but in case of uncensored literature it was much more probable. It was a literature more diverse and more European in style that allowed itself to be more problematic. Its authors questioned the unity of self, or meaningfulness of language – especially of the Soviet ideological language… It included many elements that could be found in Western counterculture of the 60s, including American literature and poetry. It happened not because these Russian authors specifically imitated somebody, but most likely because after they left the Soviet paradigm of social programming, they had to reconsider critically the main elements of Russian and especially Soviet cultural canon.
It’s exactly from this kind of uncensored literature that authors appeared who worked out their own vision of the literature’s place in the modern world, not as an ideology’s intermediary, but as a standalone system, which generated a new language of human interaction with the world, a new language of human emotions and so on.
ED: Don’t you think that the importance of the mass (popular) literature is considerable, that the mass literature helps people in their daily existence?
IK: No. I mean that the uncensored literature rather questioned the basic concepts of human existence and not only the Soviet, but also the new European in general, had done the same as the 20th century European avant-garde by presenting such questions: What is society? What is culture? What is language? In Soviet literature, the language had minimal reflection but in uncensored literature it was high.
Mass literature is another important trend that exists in modern Russian literature. In Soviet literature, popular culture was not separated into a special segment but pretended to be something unified with the rest of literary field. For example, the considerable part of detective genre in the USSR was presented as some kind of production novels. Now there is a lot of detective literature, women’s prose. Sometimes these works are quite curious, but the most part of this literature stratum is focused on pure entertainment.
Nevertheless, the most recent large-scale experiment in popular literature was at the beginning of the 2000s. There were the works by Boris Akunin (Chkhartishvili), who continued the tradition of the intellectual detective, say, in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton and, at the same time, of Umberto Eco. His novels were aesthetically postmodernist, but they were riveting – especially his early novels — and easy comprehensible.
There are also noticeable the ideas of imperialism in Russian fiction especially science fiction…
ED: Don’t you think that the emergence of the idea of imperialism was logical because the traditional triad (God, Tsar and Nationality) holding the Russian empire (the doctrine: pravoslaviye – samoderzhaviye – narodnost’- E.D.) disappeared? Only one element is left of this triad – nationality.
IK: You know, I think that all of this is much more complicated. I agree with you on the major point that the idea of imperialism emerged logically, although it first appeared much earlier. According to our wonderful cultural historian Andrei Zorin, a professor at Oxford University, who particularly analyzed the origin of the so-called Triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” the concept of narodnost (“Nationality”) was defined by both the Orthodoxy and autocracy. It meant that the Russian man back in 1833 was defined as one who believed in God and was loyal to the Tsar. And those who believed neither in God nor in the tsar were presumably not considered to be Russians. The process of nation-building, which was going on at the time in various European countries, was captured in Russia by officials, in particular the imperial statesman and “political technologist” Count Sergei Uvarov (1785-1855) and worked to build the empire. Since then, all attempts of independent, society-rooted nation-building in Russia were overturned and blocked. This led to the situation that at every next phase, the imperialist elements acting under the nationalist slogans, became more powerful, and to hateful xenophobia. And now we see the next stage of this process, when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, social reflection on the roots of this process was forcibly blocked though after the collapse of the British and French empires, their processes of reflection went on quite turbulently.
In Russia, only a few were thinking about this, and these reflections were considered extremely uncomfortable. It was more affordable in the 1990s, because in spite of a difficult situation in the country, the people had much more faith in the future. The condition of triumphant cynicism in Russia these days is more reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 70s than the 90s, when some people tried to transform their lives, to become more religious or westernized, etc.
ED: I wonder if the rise of postmodernism in Russian literature was a reflection of this nihilism?
IK: Not in the least.
ED: Would you please describe what Russian postmodernism is, very briefly?
IK: There is a fairly widespread illusion among critics and journalists that postmodernism emerged in Russia in the 90s. This is not true. Postmodernist literature appeared in Russia in the 1960s but it remained underground. This concerns literature, but also fine art and other kinds of art. In the 90s all of this was published and therefore gave the impression that postmodernism in Russia emerged at that point in time.
ED: The popular assertion among UVA professors of Russian literature exists that Russian postmodernism is associated mostly with authors such as Pelevin, Ulitskaia etc. How are things in reality?
IK: No, the first Russian postmodernist literary works were Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki and Pushkinskii Dom by Andrei Bitov at the end of the 60s; the roots of Russian postmodernism could be traced back to the works of Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), or to the poems of his friend Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941), or to radical experimental prose written by Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986) in the 50s, 60s and 70s. His works could be compared, say, with the novels of William S. Burroughs.
Pelevin is a postmodernist, but he is more the heir of the New Age, the spiritual and cultural movement which existed in America during the 1960s. Pelevin mostly draws on the postmodernist methods for his own benefit. Postmodernism assumes that a person is not able to reach the ultimate truth. On the contrary, Pelevin is constantly preaching his interpretation of Buddhism is the final truth. Pelevin is a good writer, but it would be strange to regard him as the foremost representative of Russian postmodernism.
I also think that when speaking about postmodernism, we underestimate poetry, starting with such poets as Viktor Krivulin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitry Prigov, Mikhail Ayzenberg, Yevgeny Saburov, and ending with contemporary young poets.
From the other side, Yury Davydov (1924—2001), the author of the outstanding historical and surrealist novelBestseller (2000), was also a postmodernist author, and it would be inaccurate to conceptualize Russian postmodernism only by Pelevin’s works or, for example, by Ulitskaia, who is also a good writer. Speaking about the younger artists, we should remember also Denis Osokin who lives in Kazan, and Valery Votrin, who lives in the UK, and many other authors. Denis Osokin’s novel Ovsianki (The Yellow-Hammers) became a basis for Osokin’s script to Alexey Fedorchenko’s film Silent Souls, highly acclaimed by the USA critics. Also the novels by Valery Votrin, Poslednii magog (The Last Magog) and Logoped (Speech Therapist). This literature might provoke discussion, but, to my opinion, these works are socially and aesthetically important.
As a matter of fact, postmodernism is an extremely important movement by modern standards. At its origins are such works as the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges (1947) and the novel Gravity’s Rainbow by American writer Thomas Pynchon (1973). Postmodernism as a cultural movement emerged in the 40s-50s of the 20th century in literature and then blossomed. It raised two very important questions. The first: how can the individual distinguish between the real and the virtual? It is a timely question now; it becomes more urgent at this time when we more and more live in the world of virtual reality. The second: to what extent is an individual able to distinguish between their own and alien perceptions within his or her inner self?
Modernism was a program of the adaptation of all alien elements and turning them into its own. According to modernism, any person could understand exotic or archaic cultures and make them their own, or to surpass themselves so that they could accept it as their own culture. But postmodernism suggests that a person can discover within his or her soul many alien images and ideologies that were not his/her own creation and cannot distinguish between one’s own and the alien. With every day, while we are reading social media and absorbing alien texts, we so often cannot differentiate between our own and other people’s perceptions, so the analytical work of the postmodern art becomes more and more important. It helps us to realize the fact that it’s impossible to make a complete distinction between the self and alien perceptions within our souls, but also that this analytical work should never stop, like everyday ethical reflection.
ED: Did the rise of Russian classical novels happen in the modern time?
IK: What do you have in mind?
ED: For example, Zakhar Prilepin’s works.
IK: I do not consider Zakhar Prilepin as the successor of the traditions of classical literature.
ED: How do you relate to the assertion that “Zakhar Prilepin is our modern day Leo Tolstoy?”
IK: Negatively.
ED: Why is he considered one of the most important contemporary authors?
IK: By whom?
ED: I have read this idea in some critical press.
IK: Prilepin, in my understanding, is one of the brightest representatives of the revival of Soviet literature’s stereotypes at the current stage. Take his latest novel, the most sensational novel The Abode (Obitel’). This work starts with the assertion in the preface that “Truth is what is remembered.” For him, moral nihilism is more characteristic than for postmodernists, which are usually considered nihilists. This novel is built on the thesis that the main positive characters declared that Russia is more important than any individual subject, and the individual’s achievements matter only if they are important for Russia. In my opinion, this allows for the manipulation of individuals. According to this novel, human life has aesthetic meaning, but not ethical. In my opinion, it is breaking with the traditions of Russian literature of the 19th century, if we will interpret them, say, due to the essays of the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In Prilepin’s novels, moral reflections are devaluated. Prilepin’s methods of reestablishing ideology in literature was analyzed in Mark Lipovetsky’s recent article “Political Motility of Zakhar Prilepin”. Now, I see not the rebirth of the Russian classical novel, but rather the imitation of this renaissance.
ED: So in your opinion, there is no present comeback of the Russian classical novel?
IK: This question is constructed incorrectly. For example, could we say that there is the return of the traditional American novel?
ED: I agree, literature is a vibrant phenomenon evolving in accordance with its own laws, but do the elements of classical psychological literature exist in the works of contemporary Russian writers?
IK: They certainly do, but there is one delicate point. We are accustomed to the fact that the classical psychology is present in thick novels. I believe that today, the most intense psychology has moved to other formats. Current poetry and short prosaic works are more psychologically sophisticated than huge novels, comparable by their volume to Dostoevsky or Tolstoy’s works. And among such lengthy novels, which are published nowadays, the most successful works mostly enter into dialogue with modern Western authors but not with the literature of the 19th century.
ED: Could you point out some notable novels of the 2000s?
IK: In my opinion, the turning point during the last decade is the appearance of remarkable novels such as Bestsellerby Yury Davydov (Бестселлер, 2001); Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (Venerin Volos) and A Letter Book (Pismovnik), and novels by Vladimir Sorokin. His Ice Trilogy (Tr. by Jamey Gambrell, N.Y.: 2011) is not close to me, but I like his novel Telluriyya (Telluryia, M.: 2013) very much and I especially like his short stories. There has appeared a very bright trilogy by Oleg Yuriev who lives in Germany, which consists of the novels: Poluostrov Zhidyatin (The Zhidyatin Peninsula), followed by Novy Golem ili Voina starikov i detei (New Golem, or, The War of the Old Folk with the Children) and the final part Vineta, published in 2008.
There is a novel by Leonid Kostyukov Velikaia strana, (М.: ОГИ, 2009), the funniest work ever written about America by a Russian author; unfortunately it’s almost untranslatable, because its language plays with the differences between English and Russian languages. I would also add the prose by Maria Boteva, who pictures the Russian little town in a tragic and mastery fashion and with poetically innovative style.
Among non-fiction, the most prominent include works by Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, who writes in Russian and who has received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. But there are also Russian women authors who are her successors: Elena Kostyuchenko and Elena Racheva. Elena Kostyuchenko’s book of journalist prose, Uslovno nenuzhnye, was published two years ago and became an important literary event. This is non-fiction of outstanding style, picturing the life of paupers, of unemployed people, of criminal teenagers, of young drug addicts… Racheva has published a book of interviews of old survivors of GULAG camps, they told about their experience of unfair court and everyday struggle for their dignity.
Speaking about the works written by Russian-language authors during the 2000s, we should remember that Russian-language literature exists outside of Russia’s boundaries. We should keep in mind the Russian literature of Israel. Israeli-Russian writer Alexander Goldstein, who died recently, was one such exceptional author. His latest novel, which came out not long before his death,Spokoinye polia(The Quiet Fields) was an outstanding work, but it was left unnoticed in Russia.
ED: Don’t you think that the literary critics are responsible to some extent for these outstanding authors who were undeservedly forgotten in Russia, and the literary critic’s task is to pull them out of oblivion and to convey their works to the public?
IK: Certainly. But let’s return to where we started our conversation: modern Russian society is now a state of collective affect. It is the society, which was muddled by TV propaganda, but also people fooled themselves because they wanted it and were frightened by changing post-Soviet circumstances. They cannot accept discomforting information; therefore, these novels, which tell something more complicated than it seems, and also the critical articles which describe these novels, are not perceived by the Russian audience. Literary critics are responsible, but Russian society is responsible too, because many colleagues and I have written convincing words about novels which are coming out, but these articles have sometimes not been read. Though we cannot say that all these literary works have sunk into the void because there are still people who are reading them.
ED: Regarding Russian literary prizes, what is the function of the Russian Booker Prize?
IK: Do you know by any chance who the latest Russian Booker winner was?
ED: I don’t remember for 2015, but I’ll check (Alexander Snegirev with Vera – ED). The Booker of the Decade was Lozhitsia mgla na starye stupeni (A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps) by Alexander Chudakov (2011), a very good book. What criteria are used to choose the book for the prize?
IK: Chudakov’s novel undoubtedly is the great book. But there are some problems with literary prizes in Russia at the present moment. I am very glad that recently there have appeared new literary prizes such as the “Razlichie” (Distinction) Prize, which is given by young critics to the aesthetically radical poets. There aren’t many of them, and the awarded amount of money is usually rather symbolic, but the mere fact of awarding these prizes demonstrates a renewal of the understanding of literature.Regarding the Russian Booker, it is a sad story; in 2009, I published an article in Russian on the evolution of the Russian literary prizes, here you could read it in detail. When the Booker was founded in 1992, the committee tried to award it to people who had been deprived of attention during the Soviet era. It was, figuratively speaking, the State Prize for loyal, but nonconformist intellectuals. The first Booker winner, Mark Kharitonov, wrote truly an exceptional novel, Dva Ivana, depicting the fate of an elephant and its young attendant Ivan in Russia in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible. However, Kharitonov received the Booker not for this work, but for his second book, Lines of Fate. The Booker Prize, however, did not stimulate reading of this book. Then the prize was awarded to Vladimir Makanin for Blaize-Covered Table with Decanter in 1993. Makanin and the consequent winners of Booker prize were all very worthy authors, but it often felt like payback for them being disadvantaged during the Soviet time. Not always, but often. Some Russian Booker winners were not sufficiently understood by critics and underestimated by readers – I mean Andrei Sergeev with his novel Postal Stamp Album, analyzing the child’s experience of the late Stalininst and early “Thaw” years, the late 1940s and the 50s, and Alexander Morozov with his novel The Others’ Letters written in 1968 and published only in 1997. After giving prizes to Ulitskaia and Shishkin (in 2000 and 2001 correspondingly), they began to acknowledge young writers, sometimes very good authors like Alexander Ilichevsky.
However, it would become obvious that the prize was given because it was safe variant but not the representative of some acute problematic literary movement. In general, it became like a kind of Soviet approach, similar to presumptiveness of the Soviet times: “the West has Beatniks but we have our own poet Andrei Voznesensky who is like the Beatniks but ideologically safe.” The issue was not with Voznesensky, but with the fact that the excellent writer Alexander Ilichevsky was put by the Russian Booker award into Voznesensky’s position of the permitted Beatnik. We can describe this process further, but it has been a sad situation. In my view, the Russian Booker Prize has currently lost its significance, and there is no need to discuss it in detail. Far more important was the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 2015 to Svetlana Alexievich. I consider this a jubilant, very important, and fundamental event.
ED: Without a doubt it was the most important literary event of 2015. But there were some negative responses in the Russian press because of a lot of negativity in her books.
IK: For a significant part of post-Soviet educated community, not for all, but for a significant part, it’s hard to look at itself in the mirror. Alexievich’s books are a frightening but well-reflecting mirror for the post-Soviet men and women.
ED: Was it right for Alexievich, as an outsider, to exalt the negative Russian experience in her books?
IK: Alexievich was not an “outsider” but lived within the Soviet Union. She explains that by origin, she’s connected with the three East Slavic countries – Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
ED: One of the most important questions is whether what Alexievich did was innovative for Russian-language literature?
IK: Yes, I think so. Svetlana Alexievich paved the way for a new Russian literature.
ED:Would you please explain in what sense are her works not documentaries?
IK: During the 20th century, Soviet society accumulated enormous, catastrophic psychological experience, which, as she emphasized many times, including in her Nobel lecture, could not be processed and represented by traditional literary methods. This kind of experience is best transferred by poetry or by montage prose similar to Alexievich’s.
ED: I agree. I received many personal letters describing the terrible experience of the daily struggle in Russia at the end of the 20th century.
IK: Alexievich did not merely collect these monologues, she edited them, but most importantly, she created a new literary art form for them, reproduced them into a new literary form. She started as a Soviet journalist but then invented a new literary form for her books and this took her out of the limits of the Soviet journalism to the new literature of the 21st century. She lent these monologues a poetic form.
ED: Regarding contemporary Russian poetry, do you agree with the Manifesto of Feodor Svarovsky about the crisis of the individual “I” and the lyric genre in general?
IK: I love Svarovsky, but I don’t agree with Svarovky’s Manifesto. I have argued with his Manifesto in an article. In my view, the crisis of the lyric genre has existed for a long time and it is a productive phenomenon because it allows us to identify the “I’ of the modern man. Before the beginning of the 20th century, a man confidently said “I am myself”, “I understand myself.” Then came Freud, Jung, and other psychologists, and Michel Foucalt, and everything changed.
ED: Who is in your opinion the brightest representative of the “lyrical movement” in contemporary Russian poetry – could it be Dmitry Vodennikov?
IK: In my opinion, Dmitry Vodennikov is a very talented poet. He is someone who maximally boosts his self-expression. But he understands and shows this self-expression as a tragicomic performance, as an enacting of the replica of a romantic “I,” which is sometimes traceable to other poets. In this sense, of course his poetry is very interesting, but it does not return to the traditional romantic “I” but only imitates such a return in the postmodern situation.
ED: Is it possible to point out “the most important writer” of modern Russian literature? This is a question from students.
IK: When we are speaking about American literature, for example, in America there has never been such a thing as “the most important writer.” You can study many different classical writers in different high schools across America, and, in my opinion, it is a very good situation, despite the fact that it forces university teachers to solve the difficult problem of how to integrate these different types of reader experience. But, nevertheless, this situation is potentially fruitful. The existing Russian tradition of choosing “the main writer” is rather dangerous. It was invented by the critic Belinsky in the 19th century for political purposes, for focusing attention on the socially subversive writers. On one hand, he did the right thing, because he participated in the process of transformation of Russian literature into the instrument of defense of human dignity and social reflection, but on the other hand, through his idea of “the main writer,” he created false benchmarks for Russian literature for many decades ahead. The idea of “the main writer” was covertly connected with an idea of an “ideological correctness.” It seems to me that now, fortunately, there is no main novelist, nor main poet, nor playwright.
I can mention the poets I like, but it does not mean that they are “the main poets.” If we talk about the older generation, it is Mikhail Eremin. Mikhail Ayzenberg – his poems were beautifully translated into English by the wonderful poet James Kates; George Dashevsky who sadly to say recently died; Stanislav Lvovsky; Elena Fanailova; Maria Stepanova; and Linor Goralik, author of poetry and short prose and brilliant comics in Russian. I really like poetry by Polina Barskova, poet and writer; Eugenia Lavut; as well as Olga Zondberg, the author of ultra short prose in one or two sentences. Finally, I would like to mention two very important poets of St. Petersburg origin: Sergey Zavyalov and Alexander Skidan.
A lot of very talented young poets, among them the recently debuted Lada Chizhova, Eugenia Suslova, Nikita Sungatov, and Nikita Safonov — they all are very young people who are now in their 20s.
Regarding prose, I already listed many authors.
ED: What are in your opinion the most interesting novels of the past few years?
IK: In Russian literature, as well as in French, for example, every time we ask about the most interesting works, it would be more fruitful to talk about those novels whose authors experiment with language, question the author’s figure or the habitual types of narration.
In this connection, I would like to draw your attention to new works by Alexander Ilyanen, the St. Petersburg writer. Ilyanen is a Finnish surname; he is Finnish by birth. His latest novel The Pension has been much discussed. It’s diary prose in the tradition of Mikhail Kuzmin, of the Kuzmin era, absolutely ephemeral, weightless and very delicately made. It is prose as though about nothing, about the everyday life of a man who lives his rather quiet, withdrawn life. But it recreates the fabric of human existence.
Dmitry Danilov, a popular writer, implements the same task, but in milder, non-sophisticated form; he received various prizes and his works were translated in English.
There are also authors who write more simplified prose, but at the same time experiment with language. When we are talking about the 2010s, this is very important to me in the example of author Vladimir Sharov. I do not completely agree with his previous novel Be Like Children, but his latest novel, The Return to Egypt, which received the Russian Booker Prize in 2014, is extremely interesting, a wonderful thing, and deserves a lot of attention.
I would like to point out the St. Petersburg author Boris Dyshlenko, who sadly to say, died at the end of last year. He was completely unnoticed during his lifetime, but his latest novel Lyudmila, published in 2015 (Lyudmila. A Detective Long Poem. St. Petersburg: 2015), is excellent, in my opinion. An excerpt was published online by the literary journal Zvezda.
There are several other works, which should be mentioned — there is a novel by Igor Vishnevetsky called Leningrad, about the Leningrad Siege of 1941—1944. It is a significant work that requires thinking, analysis and discussion. Fortunately, Polina Barskova, who studied the history of the Leningrad blockade, wrote an excellent review of this novel. And she herself wrote very important fiction book about the Siege, The Living Pictures.
Modern Russian literature is very rich. There are authors whose “greatness” is overblown by critics, such as Prilepin, but there are also some writers who are paving new paths for the development of Russian literature. In general, I would like to conclude our meeting by saying that Russian literature is in much better condition than Russian society.
My original intention was to write about my work on the English translation of the poetry by contemporary Russian authors. In my mind poetry translation is walking a road alongside the author and his thoughts, imagery and poetic imagination, where a translator’s role in reproducing the author’s intention is of the same merit but usually not recognized.
Maria Rybakova expressed this process in a splendid metaphor:
Translator, the winds from the North and the West blow upon you, your thoughts have just flown to Thrace, but now waves carry you like a goddess on a shell to the shore of a
paper sea, and no one recognizes you.
But the process of working on the novel–in-verse Gnedich by Maria Rybakova and other poetic works by contemporary Russian poets has become part of a broader reflection on the art of poetic translation as a unique element of the creative process. This is especially important now if we want to draw the attention of the Anglophone world to the many brilliant but unknown in the West Russian poets. Almost unknown are the translated books of poems by contemporary Russian women poets.
Recreating the poetry’s imagery and meaning into another language connotes translator’s ability to reproduce both the poetry’s music and its essence. When beginning work on a translation, a translator typically has before his or her eyes an original text which incarnates the poet’s soul: the poet’s own thoughts, sense of reality, and metaphors born by a poetic perception of the world. In addition, this perception is always a unique snapshot of the universe.
The translator usually has the necessary knowledge and linguistic means for recreating the text in another language. However, reproducing the original poetry’s metaphors and epithets in the other language, or what Brodsky called the “fringe” of a language that actually creates the poetry, suggests a departure from simple reproduction of the poetic work by linguistic tools to a new design thinking.
This often requires the translator’s creative ability to think metaphorically. Translators often have two solutions to this situation. The first approach is based on technically competent translation without touching the poetry’s subtext as the soul of the language.
Another approach is when translators create their own poetic work using tropes and images from the original work. Brodsky called them “espousing certain poetics of their own” and was unhappy with this kind of poetry translation. Both approaches could not lead to success in the art of poetic translation. Unlike other forms of literary translation, a successful translation of the poetic form requires absolute harmony between the original and the translated version.
In my opinion, the key part in a successful translation of the original poetic imagery is the metaphorical thinking of the translator. This suggests the same level of metaphorical representation of reality as in the original.
The ability to recreate a poetic image in another language implies the translator’s creation of the adequate symbol in consonance with a poet’s own inner world. It depends primarily on the translator’s creative and linguistic potential and metaphorical vision of the world. In this case we observe the successful union of the two creative potencies, when the translator is able to re-create a unique work in another language, as was the case with Homer’s Illiad translated by Gnedich. And this brings us back to the beginning of this essay: the translator’s own work is sometimes as good as the original, but remains out of the readers’ sight, “and no one recognizes it.” But these questions are open to discussion.
The proceedings of the UVa conference, “Centrifugal Forces: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives, ” March 26-28, will be broadcasted as a free online streaming event. Please find instructions to access the stream here. A PDF version of the instructions with screen caps of each step is available for download at the bottom of the page.
Updates regarding the conference will be posted on the official Twitter account for the event, @RussiasRegions. We welcome and encourage the participation of diverse online audiences. While watching the live stream, you can direct questions to the panelists via Twitter (@RussiasRegions), or email at <russiasregionsconference@gmail.com>. Throughout the event, a team of graduate students will be monitoring the Twitter and email accounts to communicate your questions to the associated speakers.
For more information on the conference, please visit
Translated from the original Russian by Yuri Urbanovich and Michael Marsh-Soloway
Valentin Pikul (1928-1990) is almost forgotten author today. However, he was the most read author in the Soviet Union in 1970-90s. Although Pikul is not well known by Western audiences, his works sold over a million copies in Russian markets between 1967 and 1979. In addition to producing more than two-dozen novels, Pikul published hundreds of historical miniatures. This story, Drown Me, or Be Damned, describing the trials of John Paul Jones in the American Revolution and the Russian Imperial Navy, appeared in the 1988 anthology, Blood, Tears, and Laurels. Pikul was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, but he grew up primarily in the small town of Molotovsk, now Severodvinsk, on the shores of the White Sea. At the outbreak of WWII, Pikul and his mother were visiting relatives in Leningrad. In the ensuing violence, they became trapped by the blockade of the city that lasted over 900 days. While residents of the city endured bombings, starvation, and brutal winters, Pikul and his mother managed to escape the siege by traversing the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga, popularly called ‘the road of life’. Upon his return to the Russian North, Pikul enrolled in the Midshipman school in the Solovetsky Islands, and throughout the duration of the war, he served as a cadet on the minelayer vessel Grozny. During this time, he developed a strong connection to the sea, and an enduring fascination with naval history. After the war, Pikul became an author, and his writing flourished in a literary circle led by Vera Katlinsky. Shortly after his 32nd birthday, Pikul moved to Riga, where he produced most of his best works. Pikul’s rich historical imagination resonated broadly with adolescent and adult readers alike, who enjoyed the author’s vicarious experience of pivotal scenes, events, and interactions from lesser-known annals of the past. In addition to providing audiences with the thrill of historical adventurism, Pikul’s texts promoted international collaboration through the presentation of common bonds uniting dissimilar nations and peoples. In this regard, the figure of John Paul Jones serves not only as a heroic naval personage, but also as a personal bridge connecting the legacies of America and Russia. While John Paul Jones is most notably remembered as one of the founders of the American Navy, who fought vehemently against the British in the American Revolution, he also served with distinction as an Admiral of the Russian Imperial Navy in the Russo-Turkish War, and his efforts allowed Catherine II to proceed triumphantly through the annexed territory of Crimea with her ally Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Despite looming hostilities of the Cold War, Pikul encouraged readers to reconsider bonds with people of different national and ethnic backgrounds. The popular reception of Pikul’s work demonstrates the resonance of themes promoting international collaboration, peaceful cultural exchange, and the ever-present possibility for rapprochement to settle the conflicts of divided peoples and institutions.
By Michael Marsh-Soloway
The American ambassador to France, Mr. Porter, studied the time-trampled cemeteries during his six years in Paris. In 1905, his research was finally crowned with success. In the Grange aux Belles cemetery, he discovered the grave of a man about whom several books had already been written, one by Fenimore Cooper, another by Alexandre Dumas. “Are you sure you found Paul Jones?” – the ambassador asked. “I’ll open the coffin and look at his face.” “Do you think the Admiral has been well preserved?” “Of course! The casket was filled to the top with embalming alcohol.”
It was unsealed, and after the strong grape spirit spurted out of the coffin, everyone was struck by the striking resemblance of the deceased’s face to the plaster mask of Paul Jones in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Two renowned anthropologists, Pagelion and Captain, examined the admiral’s remains very carefully and came to the conclusion:
“Yes, we have before us the notorious ‘master of the sea,’ Paul Jones, and there are even traces in his lungs of the pneumonia from which he suffered late in life.”
The body was placed into a metal coffin, on the cover of which was installed a small round porthole like that of a ship. A squadron of U.S. battleships set off for the shores of France across the Atlantic. In Annapolis, the Yankees were erecting a ceremonial crypt, so that Admiral Paul Jones would find his final resting place in America. Paris had not seen such an impressive procession for such a long time! The coffin with the body of the sailor was escorted by French regiments and a cortège of American midshipmen. At the head of the funeral procession marched the Prime Minister of France, carrying a top hat in his hand. Orchestras played triumphant marches. Behind the gun carriage walked ambassadors and ministers from different countries in ceremonial style.
The Russian naval attaché mentioned with a smile to the Ambassador A. I. Nelidov: “The Americans firmly remembered that Paul Jones was the founder of the U.S. navy, but they have forgotten that the Admiral earned his rank not from America, but from Russia… After all, from us!” The son of Scottish gardener, Paul Jones began his life like many other poor boys in England, as a sea cadet. He got to know the taste of the sea on a slave ship traveling from Africa to the American colonies. He learned how to predict danger in the darkness and the fog, but his soul was outraged by the cruelty of his countrymen. The young sailor left the slave traders’ ship, swearing to himself never again to serve the British crown.
“British ships deserve only to be sunk like rabid dogs!” shouted Jones in a seaport tavern…
The new world hosted the fugitive. In 1775, the American War for Independence had begun, and Lieutenant Paul Jones offered his service to a country that was not yet even printed on the world map.
Washington declared, “I recognize the spirit of this man…Let him fight!”
Jones gathered a crew of ruthless daredevils, who knew neither their fathers, nor their mothers, and who grew up without roofs overhead. With these men, he crushed the English on the sea in such a manner that sparks were flying from the haughty bravery of this ‘Master of the Sea’. They boarded ships in brutal battles, decided by the strike of a saber or a spear. Jones captured British ships, and tugged the dishonored vessels to American harbors, where now ashore he was gloriously honored by clamoring crowds of people…
Paul Jones turned to Washington and stammered, “And now I want to burn the skin of the English king in his English sheepfold. I swear to the devil, it will be so!”
In the spring of 1778, a seemingly peaceful commercial vessel appeared on English shores. In reality, however, the ship had 18 canons hidden beneath its hull. It was the corvette, “Ranger”, masked as a merchant ship.
“What’s new in the world, friend?” the sailors asked the harbor pilot when he boarded the deck of the corvette. “They say,” he turned to the captain, “that close to our shores roams the traitor Paul Jones, and he is such son of a bitch, such a swine, that sooner or later he will be hanged!”
“How can it be so? You Englishmen have such a good opinion of me. Allow me to introduce myself: it is I, Paul Jones! But I am not going to hang you…”
In a thunder of grapeshot and hand grenades, while encouraging sailors with whistle and song, Paul Jones drowned British ships at their own shores. The London Exchange was experiencing a fever. The prices for all goods grew steadily, and bank officers declared bankruptcy as cargo ships sat idly in the harbors.
The pilot of the corvette pointed into the distance, where the city lights were flickering, responding, “There is Whitehaven, as you wished, sir. What are you planning to do here?”
“This is my homeland,” answered Paul Jones, “and one’s homeland sometimes needs to be visited even by a prodigal son, such as I!”
Showered by a warm nighttime mist, the sailors, led by their captain, descended into the city, seizing the fort, destroying all of its cannons, and after having burned down the British ships anchored in the harbor, again disappeared into the endless expanse of the sea…
The King, who was dispirited, lamented, “I am ashamed. Is the glory of my fleet merely myth?” “What is to be done?” replied the admirals to the King. “Jones is uncatchable, like an old hull rat. There is no rope in your majesty’s navy, which wouldn’t generate bloody tears from the desire to strangle this impudent pirate on a mast!”
By then, Paul Jones had already descended into County Selkirk. In the castle, he encountered only a duchess, to whom he expressed his deepest apologies for the disturbance. Meanwhile the men from The Ranger were dragging all of the duchess’ silverware to the boat. In taking his leave from the fair gentlewoman, Jones personally obliged himself, until the end of his days, to repay the Selkirks out of his own pocket.
“But I am not such a robber as the English think me to be,” stammered Paul Jones. “If my glorious men have such a desire to have supper only on silver, then let them eat like nobility! They have so few joys in their lives!”
Soon after having rested with his crew in France, he again appeared in English waters aboard The Bonhomme Richard. This time he was accompanied by French ships under the banner of someone named Landais, who had been discharged from the fleet for insanity. Jones recruited him into his own service.
“I myself, when I fight,” Jones affirmed, “lose all sense of self. So this crazy man fits in perfectly with the matters that we are going to undertake…”
On the traverse of the Flamborough Peninsula, Jones saw through the fog, the high riggings of the fifty-canon ship of the line, The Serapis, which by its right was considered the best ship of the Royal Fleet, and behind it, the wind propelled the astonishing frigate, The Duchess of Scorborough.
At first, the Englishmen called to them on a bullhorn, “Identify your vessel or we will drown you!” Paul Jones in a clean white shirt, rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, and answered with unusual rage: “Drown me, or be damned!”
In this risky moment, ‘crazy’ Landais dashed behind the commercial vessels. Thanks to Landais’ obvious foolishness, the small Bonhomme Richard, squared off one-on-one with the thunderous royal opponent. The first artillery shot of the British rang out, and the American ship started leaking and burning. Throughout the volley, several cannons blew up during the first moments of the fight. The ships pounded with such fury for one hour, then another, then three, and the battle came to a close under the moonlight. While tacking sharply, and as showering sparks streamed down from burning sails, the enemies came so close to each other that the mizzen-mast of The Serapis suddenly crashed down before Jones’ feet, and he seized it with his own embrace.
“I swear,” shouted Paul Jones enraged, “I will not let go of the mast until one of us sinks to the bottom of the sea!”
The deck became slippery with blood. The Bonhomme Richard continued to fight in the crackling fires, losing cannons, masts, and spars. In the flames, one could hear whistling, obscenity, and song. The wounded Paul Jones continued to inspire his crew.
“Get ready to board the ship! Board the ship!” somebody screamed from aboard the Serapis. “You are welcome!” Jones beckoned. “We will teach you a lesson that you will never forget!”
The English soldiers flew overboard, slashing with sabers, however, the power of the royal artillery also did its bidding: The Bonhomme Richard was sinking into the abyss with an audible hiss. The sea was already flooding over its deck, and suddenly they heard from The Serapis:
“Ahoy, it looks like you are finished. If you are surrendering, then stop fighting, and behave like gentlemen!”
Paul Jones suddenly threw a hand grenade at the English, with the quick reply, “Why do you think so? We haven’t even begun to fight!” “It’s time for you to finish this story.” “I will finish this story so fast, that you, I swear by the devil, that you won’t even have time to pray.”
The Bonhomme Richard collided into the side of The Serapis with full force; boarding hooks flying high clenched the wooden sides, and the two warring ships grappled with one another. Hand-to-hand combat commenced, and in this moment from the sea approached the ‘crazy’ Landais with his ships. Without understanding who is friend or foe, he covered the fighting parties with hot grapeshot, which immediately knocked out half of the English, and also half of the Americans.
“Now, he’s really lost his mind!” Paul Jones exclaimed, bleeding from his wounds.
But at this juncture, the captain of The Serapis surrendered his sword to Paul Jones.
“I congratulate you, sire! I have lost this match…”
The Bonhomme Richard was lost in the abyss with grappling ropes ripping as it sank, releasing huge gurgling air bubbles from the hold. A tattered, star-studded American flag was raised over the mast of The Serapis.
“And we are again on deck, men!” declared Jones to his crew. “We will board The Countess of Scarborough, and take it too!”
The victors headed for French shores on the two captured vessels. The burial rites of the fallen were read, the wounds were mended, barrels of wine were opened, canisters of “Yankee hash” were boiled, and the men cavorted and sang: Cast a line in Puerto Rico, The cannibal waits onshore, Hum diddly hum! Pray for our patron, dear Father, And we from our cannons, strike square between the eyes, Ah- ha- ha- ha! The fight is now over, tonight we feast, And then we’ll sleep soundly, Hum diddly hum!
Everyone gets a piece to taste thigh, rump, breast, stomach, We clean the boiler down to the bottom, Ah- ha- ha- ha!
This spirit of rough times in this sailor shanty of antiquity was born in the stuffy taverns of the New World.
Flexible and dark, he looked entirely not like a Scot, but a Native-American Indian Chief. The look of his gloomy eyes pierced right through his interlocutor. His cheeks drilled in by the winds from all latitudes, were almost brown, like dates, and summoned to mind tropical countries. This is the extremely proud young face of friendliness that breathed contemptuous reticence. So this how his contemporaries remembered John Paul Jones.
Poets in Paris composed verses in his honor, but he did not like to be indebted, so he immediately paid for them with compositions of pleasant lyrical elegies. Parisian beauties started fashioning their hair in the image of sails and riggings in honor of the victory of The Bonhomme Richard. France, hostile to England from olden times, showered Jones with unprecedented favors. The King of France appointed him a knight of the crown, and in the Parisian opera, the sailor was publicly crowned with a wreath of laurels. The most distinguished ladies sought momentary interactions with him, and they displayed kindness in kind with a torrent of love letters.
Jones justifiably expected that the Congress of the country, for which he did so much, would appoint him to the rank of Admiral. He was outraged, when across the ocean, only a bronze medal was forged in honor of his exploits. Around the name of Paul Jones, which thundered across all the seas and all the oceans, had already begun the intrigues of politicians. Congress was jealous of his glory, and Paul Jones felt betrayed.
“I agree to shed blood for the freedom of mankind, but I do not wish to sink the burning ship for the gratification of shopkeeper-congressmen. Let Americans forget what I was, what I am, and what I will be!” . . . In distant snow covered St. Petersburg, the public had long followed Jones’ exploits. Catherine II, an experienced and cunning politician, immediately understood that beyond the ocean, a great country with an energetic people was now being born. She declared “armed neutrality” in support of America to win its freedom. Meanwhile, on the steppes of the Black Sea, brewed a new war with Turkey, and Russia always needed brave young captains for its fleet.
“Ivan Andreich,” Catherine II bid to the Vice Chancellor Osterman, “It would behoove us to entice the boisterous John Paul Jones into our service, so I ask you to submit a request through our ambassadors.” Jones granted his consent to enter the Russian service. In April of 1788, Paul Jones enlisted and was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral as indicated on his Russian documents.
“The Empress received me with the most flattering attention that adequately affords a foreigner,” he told his friends in Paris. The Russian capital opened the doors of its estates and palaces. Jones was showered with invitations to dinners and luncheons for intimate receptions in the Winter Palace. The British merchants, as a sign of protest, closed their stores in Petersburg. Hired British sailors, who served under the Russian flag, openly resigned. British intelligence sharpened its teeth and claws, waiting for the chance to ruin the career of Jones in Russia.
As a sailor next to the Russian throne, Jones conducted himself in Republican fashion. He boldly presented the texts of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as gifts to Catherine. The Empress, like a discerning woman answered him:
“I have a premonition that the American Revolution cannot fail to ignite other revolutions. The fire will spread!” “Your Majesty, I venture to think that the principles of American freedom will open your many prisons, the keys of which we will drown in the ocean.”
. . . The Rear Admiral left for the Black Sea, where he raised his flag on the mast of the Vladimir. He raised his own sailing squadron that smashed the Turks under Ochakov in the Dnieper Estuary. The brave buccaneer now performed in a different guise, consisting of dusty Cossack trousers with a curved saber at his hip. Paul Jones smoked Ukrainian shag tobacco from a pipe, and drank Cossack vodka, downing it with chuck jerky, garlic, and cucumbers. At night aboard the Zaporizhian sharp-nosed vessel, The Seagull, after ordering that all oars be wrapped, the Rear Admiral sailed lengthwise past the Turkish fleet. Aboard the flagship of the Sultan’s navy, Paul Jones etched his resolution with a piece of chalk:
Burn.
-Paul Jones
The Russians were delighted with his prowess, but he himself was delighted in the unparalleled courage of Russian soldiers and sailors. At the battle of the Kinburnsky Peninsula, Jones shook hands with Suvorov ‘like century-old friends’, as Suvorov described it, and the Turkish fleet suffered a terrible defeat. Paul Jones might have been an excellent seaman, but he was an incompetent diplomat, and his relationship with Prince Potemkin soon became detrimental to his standing. British intelligence, with an invisible eye watching Jones even in the Dnieper floodplains, waited for the moment to strike! The blow was very painful, for it was during this period that James started petitioning for the development of trade between Russia and America. He made plans for the creation of united Russian-American squadrons, which were to be based in the Mediterranean Sea as a guarantee of universal peace in Europe, but with Prince Potemkin, he quarreled all at once.
The British rained down on him from St. Petersburg a torrent of lies and dirty rumors claiming he was guilty of smuggling, and that he shot his own nephew, and so on. There was no affair without bribery at the capital summit. Much is still not clear to historians, and due to the lack of documents, the corpus of legends based on lies of this time period only muddles the real picture. But historians discerned something in this all the same. Paul Jones was neither in the favor of the Russian navy, nor of the Empress herself. He never tired in ‘educating’ her of the constitutional spirit, touting the Republican way of life everywhere he went.
But after all, his resignation was submitted. Suvorov gave him a fur coat. “In spite of it all, I will return to Russia,” Paul Jones said with conviction when the horses set off carrying the carriage to the gate.
After roaming around Europe like a homeless vagrant, he finished his run on seas and oceans in Paris. Paris was different, having experienced revolution. The Keys of the Bastille were forwarded across the ocean as a gift to Washington, with the words: “The principles of America opened the Bastille!”
Henceforth, from Paris, the sailor set about his own project, the amazingly successful construction of a 54-cannon vessel, which the French hid beneath a broad cloth.
Catherine recognized features of Paul Jones in conversations with those close to her: “Paul Jones possessed a very quarrelsome wit, and was deservedly celebrated by despicable riffraff…”
This phrasing of the Empress is easy to decipher: “despicable riffraff” always surrounded Jones. There were always these people, craving freedom. They were his fellow Jacobins.
Then began a new phase of life. From the window of his own squalid garret, The Мorraine Survey, he saw the tiled roofs of Paris and sweetly dreamed of powerful squadrons setting off into the ocean for the battle against tyranny. . . . Like all progressive people of Paris in his time, Paul Jones joined the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters, which absorbed the best minds of France. In those years, he was surrounded by poets, philosophers, and revolutionaries, and he carried on the tutelage of his sincere friend Mrs. Telisen, the natural daughter of Louis XV. France wished for Paul Jones to head the revolutionary Navy, but the “surveyor of the seas” was already sick. Yes, he was sick and impoverished. He already carried on with a walking stick in his hands, but the white shirt of the sailor looked then, as it did on the eve of a battle, consistently waving, flashing dazzling purity.
Death struck him on July 18, 1792. He died at night, all alone, when he was only 45 years of age. He died standing up, leaning against as cupboard, holding in his hands an open volume of Voltaire’s works. A surprising end! Even in death, the admiral did not fall, and even death could not unclench his fingers firmly gripping the book.
The American Ambassador did not attend his funeral. The French National Assembly dedicated the memory of a man who well served the cause of freedom with a moment of silence. 12 Parisian sans-culottes in the Phrygian red caps brought the foam of the seas to his grave. Then it was decided to move his body to the Pantheon of great men, but in the whirlwind of subsequent events, this all was somehow forgotten.
The place where Paul Jones was buried was also forgotten. In the end, most people forgot of Paul Jones… But Napoleon thought of him on a dismal day in France, when Admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.
“I am sorry,” Napoleon remarked, “that Paul Jones did not survive until our present days. Had he been at the head of my fleet, the shame of Trafalgar would never have befallen the head of the French nation.” In 1905, the historian August Buél found a man in America, who preserved the memoirs of his great-grandfather, John Kilby, a sailor from Jones’ command of the Bonhomme Richard.
This Kilby wrote about Jones:
“Although the British proclaimed him the worst person in the world, I am obliged to comment that this kind of sailor and gentleman was unlike any I had ever seen before. Paul was brave in battle, kind in his interactions among us simple sailors, and he fed us excellently, and in general, he behaved as he should. If he was not always given a salary, then it is not his fault. It is the fault of Congress!”
Paul Jones took his place in the American pantheon. Recently, one of our country’s historians N.N. Bolkhovitinov offered the monograph describing the fate of Jones’s legacy:
Honor your war heroes, as best as you can. Every school pupil knows about Paul Jones, and texts about the valiant captain should be found alongside biographies of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Initially, we were somewhat surprised to see Paul Jones in such brilliant surroundings, but ultimately we decided that Americans know best just whom should be honored most. We, generally speaking, least of all conceive of the details, which somehow diminish the merits of the famous admiral.
Upon reflection, we can say the latter. Of course, somewhere in the depths of Paul Jones’ soul, there has always been the adventurer with the manners of a typical pirate of the eighteenth century. Does it not link his fate to the struggle of American independence, if he had not become an admiral in the Russian Navy? Who knows? Perhaps, he would have slid into the usual business of piracy on the high seas, but if he had remained in this bloody arena, Paul Jones would have probably left our history, appearing instead on the most brilliant pages of sea brigandage. But life writes itself according to the fate of this remarkable man, and Paul Jones will remain in the peoples’ history as an Admiral of the Russian Navy, as a national hero of America!
Biographies of the Editor and Translator
Professor Yuri Urbanovich was born in Tblisi, the capital city of the Republic of Georgia. He received his M.A. in International Relations from the Moscow State University of International Relations in 1972, and his Ph.D. in International Relations from the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1984. In 1992, Dr. Urbanovich was invited by the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) to coordinate dialogues defusing the “velvet divorce” between Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Currently, Dr. Urbanovich is teaching three seminars, Post-Soviet Challenges: National Ethnicities, Rise & Fall of the Soviet Union, and America through Russian Eyes.
Michael Marsh-Soloway is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. Throughout the spring of 2014, Michael embarked a tour of Moscow and St. Petersburg to conduct archival research for his ongoing dissertation project, The Ontological Necessity of All That is Imaginary: Mapping the Mathematical Consciousness of F.M. Dostoevsky. In 2011, he participated in the U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship, and studied at Bashkir State Pedagogical University in Ufa, the capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan in the southwestern Urals. His research interests include the Russian novel, linguistics, and film.
**The editor and translator would like to express special thanks to Sergey Nikolaevich Dmitriev, Editor-In-Chief of Veche Publishers in Moscow for granting us special permission to publish the first rendering of this work in English. It is our sincere hope that the text will inspire interest among Western readers to investigate further the diverse writings and life experiences of Valentin Pikul.
Maria Rybakova was born in Moscow. She studied Greek and Latin in Russia, then in Germany, and subsequently in the USA. She currently resides in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her first novel, Anna Grom and Her Ghost, was published in 1999 and translated into French and German. Rybakova is a recipient of numerous literary awards in Russia, including Students’ Booker Prize, Eureka Prize, the Russian Prize and others.
Elena Dimov was born in Vladivostok and grew up in the Russian Far East. She graduated from the Far Eastern Federal University with a master’s degree in Oriental Studies and Chinese Language. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian History and Culture from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. After living in Europe, she now resides in Charlottesville, where she teaches Russian language and culture. Her primary scholarly interest is in contemporary Russian poetry.
Ilya Semenenko-Basin was born in Moscow in 1966. He graduated from Moscow State University and holds a Ph.D. in history and religious studies. He is currently a professor at the Center for Religious Studies at the University of Humanities and a prominent scholar in the field of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. He began writing poetry very early in his youth, but his first book of poetry, By the Streams of Silver, was published only in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Russian Gulliver’s Poetry Prize in 2014.
Elena Dimov is a regular contributor to this site and the translator of Maria Rybakova’s novel-in-verse Gnedich. Elena was born in Vladivostok and grew up in the Russian Far East. She holds a master’s degree in Oriental Studies and Chinese Language from the Far Eastern Federal University and a Ph.D. in Russian History from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. She has lived in Hamburg, Germany and Sofia, Bulgaria. For many years she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary Social Theories in Sofia. She currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has taught a course in Russian language and culture at UVA.
The proceedings of the UVa conference, “Centrifugal Forces: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives, ” March 26-28, will be broadcasted as a free online streaming event. Please find instructions to access the stream 
