Poetry – Contemporary Russian Literature

Russian Verse Libre in an Era of New Challenges

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.

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! …

– Aygi, 1969

Elena Dimov

Works Cited

Aygi, Gennady. “Poiavlenie Zhasmina.” Pamiati Muziki. Shubaskar, Russika – Lik Chivashii, 1969, p.6.

Borodin, Vasily. “Stiag zaviyotsia.” P.S. Moskva, Gorod-Zhiraf. Stikhi, 2005-2011. N.Y.: Evdokiia, 2011, p. 29. <https://brownianmotionfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/gorod-ghiraf_final1.pdf>

Chizhova, Lada. “Zaneslo gorod vybelil,” Tsvet: Praktika. Tsykl stihotvorenii, 2013. < www.litkarta.ru/studio/participants/chizhova-l>

Eliot, Thomas S.”Reflections on Vers Libre.” The text of “Reflections on Vers Libre” by T.S.Eliot. <https://www.theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/essays/reflections_on_vers_libre.html>

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. 17^th, 2012. < newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-hotel>

Sungatov, Nikita. “V chem ny provinilis pered vami?” Debi︠u︡tnai︠a︡ kniga molodogo poėta. M.: Translit, 2015.

______________. “Est’ takoi sposob.” Debutnaya kniga molodogo poeta.

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>

Disclaimer

Translations of excerpts from works by contemporary Russian authors on this website are used under Fair Use solely for literary criticism and educational purposes.

The Art of Poetry Translation

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.

Elena Dimov, Ph.D.

Featured pictures by Alexander Borisenko

Poet Laureate Viktor Sosnora on Poetry and Poetics

About Victor Sosnora, by Michael Marsh-Soloway

Viktor Sosnora was born in Alupka on the Crimean Peninsula in 1936. During WWII, Sosnora and his family endured the blockade of Leningrad for over a year, before being evacuated to the Kuban region in the Russian South. Soon thereafter, however, the Kuban region was occupied by Nazi forces. He once pretended to be dead after a bullet grazed his head to avoid detection by advancing Nazi soldiers. Sosnora was captured three times by the Gestapo and interrogated because of his family’s connections to detachments of Soviet partisan groups. He was released each time on account of his young age.

In 1945, Sosnora moved to Warsaw to reunite with his father, who served as a regional commander in Rokossovsky’s army. After touring Europe, the Sosnoras ultimately settled in the city of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. In 1958, Sosnora enrolled in the Department of Philosophy at Leningrad State University, supporting himself by working as a factory electrician.

Shortly after his twenty-third birthday, Sosnora became the youngest author in the Leningrad Writers’ Union. His poems first appeared in print in 1960, and in 1962, he released his first book, January Downpour, which included a foreword by Nikolai Aseev. In 1965, he traveled to Paris to read his poetry, and in 1970 he became a professor at the New Paris University.

Throughout his lifetime, Sosnora attained popularity among diverse artistic circles and peoples. In Paris, he worked alongside the likes of Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon. Despite losing his hearing as a result of complications from an operation on his pancreas, Sosnora continued to correspond with authors and readers around the world. In 1987, he toured the United States, and participated in poetry readings with Allen Ginsberg and FD Reeve. Sosnora considers himself an epic poet, especially in his early collection Horsemen (1969), but he also creates extraordinary lyric poetry.

In May 2011, Sosnora delivered the following essay, “Poetry and Poetics,” as part of his acceptance speech when he was awarded the title of Poet Laureate of the Russian Federation, the highest national honor bestowed on Russian writers in the field of poetry. His books are printed in many countries, including the United States of America, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, France, and others.

The publishing group Lenizdat released a collection of his poetry titled My Life (“Zhizn’ moya”) in 2013. Currently, Viktor Sosnora resides in St. Petersburg, where he continues to write, make public appearances, and participate in ongoing artistic discourses. He granted the translator and the University of Virginia special permission to print this translation.

References:

Emily Lygo. “Chapter 4: Viktor Sosnora.” Leningrad Poetry 1953-1975: The Thaw Generation. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, 2010, 173-175.

Darra Goldstein. “An Interview with Viktor Sosnora.” The New York Review of Books. October 13, 1988.

Viktor Sosnora “Zhizn’ moya.” Izbrannye stikhotvoreniya. Laureat Rossijskoj natsional’noj premii “Poet”. Izdatel’skaya gruppa “Lenizdat”. Sankt-Peterburg, 2013.

Poetry and Poetics by Viktor Sosnora

Translated by Michael Marsh-Soloway

Yes, forgive me, I will not be speaking about poetry, but about poetics. Poetry is a term used too broadly, and poetry is everything: nature, and impressions, and love, and dreams, and reality, and velocity, and the sun, and darkness. It is possible to enumerate without end, and vocality, and muteness, etc., and all the like. In general, take a walk, soul, if only to provide something poignant for the soul.

Poetics is a term that is much narrower. It entails verse, not what, or about what, but how something came to be written. And here, we are stalking with paradox: just as somebody’s verses captivate the soul, so to say, tickle the nerves, summon laughter and tears, you then close the book as if you hadn’t really read anything at all.

A minor digression.

Soviet society in Stalin’s memory was not able to give “I”, but “we”, which reduced into, how should we frame it, poetic mooing. There could never be speech about the poetics of Soviet poets, and poetry predominated slavish labor.

In Leningrad, for thirty years, I guided different literary unions, of which it seems, there were no less than ten.

Why did these young poets show up? Somebody inculcated in them the notion that at the literary unions they could learn to compose verse. Did they learn? No. So, they went to the philology departments. Did they learn? No. The dream of the Soviet and post-Soviet intellectual that it is possible to teach somebody the arts was never realized. It couldn’t be.

I would be very careful in using the word “poetry”. In my dictionary, in general, there is no such term. But, while reading contemporary “poetry”, I discern, that in these rhymed or unrhymed texts, there is something indiscernibly “poetry”. It is, for the most part, rhymed or free-verse discourses on moral, common, or quasi-political themes. And in general, this term “poetry” is inapplicable today, yes, and may it always be.

The term “poetry” is a self-actualization, and so on, and so on.

If a poet is rhythmically interesting, it means that the rhythm of his own organism has been captured for them. Rhythm, and not “meaning”– we will leave meaning for the philosophers. And veritable prose should be rhythmic. Gogol justly called his “Dead Souls” a poema. If there is no rhythm in one’s scribbles, then it isn’t prose, but rather, belles-lettres.

But if this is the case, just what is this notorious “poetry”?

I think it is rather more likely a genetic manifestation, if not a literary one. More seemingly, it is a paranormal manifestation, rather than one that bears explanation. I am speaking about great poets, and not about good and different poets, of which there are exceedingly many, but appreciably, they are unified. I would try to account for this appreciation, let us state the result of Pushkin, who had in his ancestry the Moor Gannibal. Yes, this manifestation is true for Pushkin himself, his brother Lev, and his teacher Batyushkov.

Batyushkov had two brothers and an uncle, and they departed from “normal” life into “paranormal” life—all four ultimately did, only three did not write verses, but Batyushkov wrote them.

It seems to me that it is time for Russian literature to depart from amorphous definitions of so-called creativity toward practical definitions that have long been made by Western literature. That is to say, from sanctimony to reality- this sharply individual arrangement “I”. I am eurhythmics.

We are still not able to be ourselves, that is, to give an account to ourselves- what and from where? It is an honest account. And what we should do, while it agitates the particulars, is a way of life. It is an abundantly everyday gaze at the surrounding life and at the self. It couldn’t be simpler to cast back the particulars toward Batyushkov. You shouldn’t be surprised by this paranormal manifestation, as it’s known among the common people, “madness”, or as we will say directly, geniuses. In the arts, this affair is trivial. We will say, beloved Hemmingway during Soviet time was of this Pleiades of paranormal types, and before him, Flaubert, his teacher Maupassant, the Japanese author Akutagawa, Virginia Woolf, etc.; and of our authors, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Mandel’shtam, namely an entire Pleiades of “paranormal” geniuses.

А reasonable question: what is there for normal poets to do?

Well, nothing. Live in your own comfortable normal society and partake of the fruits of this society.

Period.

And beyond this period: live, as it’s advertised in the TV commercial:

-Doshirak- with love! [1]

April, 2011

[1]: Doshirak, a popular brand of instant noodles sold in Russia.