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! …
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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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
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.
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.
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:
In an interview with “Vrij Nederlands” in 1982, in which he described Russian poetry, Joseph Brodsky mentioned that in his opinion there were only two outstanding poets left (Eugenii Rein and Yurii Kublanovsky – E.D.): “But whatever happens to Russia in the future, it will always have new literature, simply because of the Russian language. Russian is such a language that it’s impossible to stop the existence of literature in this language. Literature continues no matter what people do” (1).
Some thirty years later, in the situation of a prolonged crisis of individual lyric expression, we are indeed witnessing a remarkable new tendency in contemporary Russian literature: a growing interest in non-lyric poetry (non-linear expression), which critics have called a “revival of narrative poetry” or epic narrative. It occurred as an unexpected event beyond the limits of traditional poetic narrative and is related to the epochal shift within Russian society at the beginning of the 21st century. It is often described as a “new epic,” which has become a new literary phenomenon in 21st-century Russian literature (2).
What is a “new epic” and how is it different from an “old epic”?
One of the founders and creators of the term “new epic,” Feodor Svarovsky, assesses the current state of Russian poetry as an ongoing crisis of first-person lyric expression (or linear poetic reflection). In his view, the long line of Russian lyric poets that began in the Silver Age focused primarily on the inner world of their heroes. Svarovsky argues that this was simply not enough for modern literature and describes it as a crisis of traditional direct lyrical expression, which was also evident in European literature in general. This coincides with Ilya Kukulin’s opinion that “the poetic ego appears infantile and vulnerable and has lost all traces of the heroic” (3). Svarovsky points to a way out of this crisis: a new paradigm of poetic expression – narrative poetry without the author’s presence or emotional reflection. According to Svarovsky, “the author of the new epic does not narrate his own experiences, words, actions, and circumstances, but those of others” (4).
In his remarkable 2007 manifesto “New Epic,” Feodor Svarovsky declares: “I have long felt the impossibility of writing in the modernist paradigm of the 20th century, which was established by the writers of the Silver Age and then continued by the writers of the early-mid 20th century as direct lyrical expression… I don’t believe in a crisis of meaning…. It is simply that after secularization, after the crisis of humanism and the establishment of the postmodern approach to culture that took place in the 20th century, personal linear expression (by which I mean the author’s expression of the individual’s feelings, thoughts, and experiences) is no longer effective for achieving any significant aesthetic effect. .. What must be done to restore words to their former importance? I think we need to change the way the author expresses himself” (5). With this, Svarovsky suggests a shift in focus from the lyric hero to “whatever organizes existence outside of the author’s personal experience, feelings, etc. But what is that? The answer depends on the religious and philosophical views of the author and the reader. It could be fate, destiny, unknown forces, or even well- known forces that govern life.”
In his opinion, the difference between the “new epic” and the “old epic” is that the traditional epic narrative describes the heroic events of the extraordinary heroes that happened in the past and influenced life, which could be real events. But the “new epic” suggests that what lies behind all these events is always an unknown force, and it could happen anywhere (in space, in the past, in the future, in the imagination). The author’s goal is to provoke an emotional, aesthetic, intellectual contemplation “on these transcendental forces” by describing these events without interpretation.
Svetlana Gudkova describes several distinctive features of “new epic” works: the synthesis of prose and poetry for the sake of creating an exciting plot with many acting heroes whose fate depends on some transcendent power; the absence of the author’s presence or his narrative voice; the appearance of supernatural powers; the marginal and trivial heroes; the incorporation into the poetic text of many cultural symbols and clichés from traditional ballads, folklore, classical literature, and even the borrowing of plots from famous serials (6).
All this sounds like complete phantasmagoria, and indeed the new epic works are often rhymed long stories (poems or ballads) with a fascinating and constantly developing plot or series of bizarre events. The authors’ assumption that the poetic story, like life itself, is beyond the reader’s comprehension shifts the focus to more complicated, metaphysical processes. Readers can only guess at the nature of these processes, or at the forces behind the heroic actions of marginal heroes.
The “new epic” is flourishing and developing into one of the leading tendencies in Russian poetry.
According to Svarovsky and Rovinsky, a large group of contemporary Russian poets can be considered contributors to the “new epic” literary movement. Among them are Linor Goralik, Sergei Kruglov, Maria Stepanova, Andrei Rodionov, Arsenii Rovinsky, Boris Khersonsky, Pavel Goldin, and others (7). This group of undoubtedly talented writers is diverse and uses various poetic tools, from quasi-folklore to historical chronicles, to create exciting stories in verse.
This short essay introduces the works of two popular poets: Sergei Kruglov (Narodnie pesni) and Maria Stepanova (Proza Ivana Sidorova). Both poets are widely read in Russia and are attracting the great interest. They are very different from each other in terms of their poetic personalities and styles, but their poetry shows most of the characteristics of a “new epic” movement.
Sergei Kruglov is a rare combination: poet-priest. After graduating from Krasnoyarsk University, he worked as a reporter for the local newspaper in Siberia. In 1999, Kruglov was ordained a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. His first Live Journal publications caught the public’s interest with their combination of great poetic talent and strong Orthodox spirituality. In 2008 he won the Andrei Bely Prize for The Mirror (Зеркальце, 2007) and The Typist (Переписчик, 2008). The echo of Orthodox Christian philosophical thought is evident in his work:
The smoke of prayers
Rising here and there over Russia!
Crawling, blending into a dark storm cloud,
They sprout lightning, they thunder, they howl fearsomely
Clash powerfully —
What a battle of prayers raging
Above the country! How it swirls,
No worse than the sparkling juicy battles of Uccello!
No, the Lord sighs bitterly, the analogy with a painting is inappropriate —
These are real people after all,
Here they squabble in such a non-picturesque fashion,
Pushing each other aside, trying to climb closer to Me,
Heads and hands seething
In the cauldron of this perpetually boiling country!
Excerpt from Nathan and the Elections of the Ruler. Translated by Vitally Chernetsky (8).
What makes his narrative poems unusual is the ability to bring both the “tragic” and “beautiful co-existence of God and our neighbors” (ближние) into his poetic expression. Kruglov is well aware of his mission. In his hypostasisof a priest, Fr. Sergei is concerned with the “low, rejected, smoky, sore sky of/our life” flowing into “oblivion”. He believes that “transformation in lives is always the manifestation of the mercy of the Lord, incomprehensible to humans “(9). The poet Sergei Kruglov successfully brings his sacred knowledge to readers through vibrant polyphonic narrative.
Mirror
I am Your image, Lord, I am
Your little mirror.
Look at me:
These shadows under my eyes,
These wrinkles,
This bitterness, this hope.
Bring me to your lips, oh Lord,
Breathe on me:
Make them sure that You are alive.
Kruglov’s Folk Songs (Народные песни, 2010) are variations on traditional Russian folk stories and songs and introduce well known (for Russians) personages. Re-telling the folk stories in his own words, Kruglov masterfully incorporates motifs of Russian folklore in verses. One of them is Russian Fairy Tale (Русская Сkазка) – a quasi-folklore poem with classical Russian fairy-tale characters: Sirin-Bird (Птица Сирин), Nav-Morevna (Навь Моревна ( 10) etc.
Russian Fairy Tale
Птицу Сирин в небесах молнией сразило,
Пала – и течёт
Мёдом лета позднего.
Костяные лики лет щелку отворили,
Смотрят: не пора ли? –
Цепи ржавы, гроб хрустальный
Грянется, расколется,
Кровью вытечет на дно
Голубое наше злато, дымное, берёзовое! –
Милая, не плачь, не бойся –
Костяная навь морочит,
В чёрных гранях душной ночи
Среди туч – забыта книга,
Колокольный звон берёз
Осень-Волхв пояла, скрыла
В кладях памяти, в пещерах, в тридесятых тронных залах, –
Слышишь хохот?
Навь-Моревна торжествует, яблоки роняет сад!..
Спи, не бойся, доченька!
Помнишь, как там в сказке дальше:
«Жила-была мертвая царевна…» –
Дождь стихает, гроб висит,
Август-Зеркальце разбилось: нет
На свете краше, выше, глубже, постоянней,
Нет страшней и безысходней, слёзней, обречённей
Этой ночи в августе,
Этих мест и этой речи,
Страшно мёртвой вживе, сказочной, последней, –
Спи. Выходят семеро,
На руках несут царевну; плывет месяц-кладенец;
Серебро течёт и тает; небо любит нас;
Спи, моя хорошая. 1994 (11)
Sirin-bird was struck by lightning in the skies
She fell down and flowed
Like late summer honey.
The bony faces of years opened a crack
looked: was it their time?
Rusty chains, a crystal coffin
would clap and crack,
they would flow to the bottom like blood.
Our gold is blue, it’s smoky birch!
Dear, do not cry, and do not worry.
In the black edges of sweltering nights
evil spirits would fool us.
On a wooden terrace in a garden washed
by rain under the clouds
a book was left forgotten.
Birches were ringing as bells.
Fall-Magus sang, and hid
in its memory’s treasures as in a cave.
Do you hear the laughter? –
It’s in a far away kingdom’s chambers
Nav-Morevna triumphs.
The garden drops its apples!
Sleep, fear not, my little daughter!
Remember how the story continues:
“There once was a dead princess…” –
The rain subsides, the coffin hangs
August-Mirror shatters – there is
no other night in the world more beautiful, higher, deeper, permanent
terrible, hopeless, tearful, or doomed
than this August night,
than this place and these words.
The frightening and marvelous dead is now alive
Go to sleep. Seven come out,
in their arms they carry the princess.
Silver flows and melts; heaven loves us.
Sleep, my darling.
Tr. by Elena Dimov
Phantasmagoria in a Russian Provincial City
Maria Stepanova is a prominent writer and editor of the website Colta.ru. Her acclaimed The Prose of Ivan Sidorov contains the activity of forces that bear resemblance to Bulgakov’s devilry. In 2007, Stepanova published TheProse of Ivan Sidorov (Проза Ивана Сидорова) on her blog in “Live Journal” under the name Ivan Sidorov – hence the title (12). It immediately caused a stir among Russian critics and readers. Her poem became a hit and was performed in a theater in November 2007. It was published a year later and has since become a representative example of “new epic” poetry. Its title “Prose” indicates that it is a story in verses, or a synthesis of prose and poetic text. Mark Lipovetsky calls it a “verse narrative” (13) and describes it as a “roundelay” (хоровод) of a modern phantasmagoria. Ghoul-criminals, the Black Hen from Pogorelsky’s story “The Tale of the Black Hen” and Bulgakov’s motifs, as well as a mystic-cop series merge into “a muddy lump”(14) in a story whose undertone is the agonizing guilt of the main character, Aleosha.
So what is it about this story that grabs the reader’s attention? At first, the story is too incredible to be taken seriously. In a small provincial town somewhere in Russia, the phantasmagoria begins one winter night when a half-drunk man enters the train station. The quiet, dreamy life of a provincial town is suddenly transformed when the main hero, the marginal Aleosha, arrives. The reader doesn’t know anything about his previous life, but it’s clear that some traumatic experience has brought him here:
In the provincial town, so to speak,
but in a low-minded way
with white steep cliffs,
with on-shore over the giant strides,
with the tubes of heavy industry,
with women, similar to the touch
like bottles with tight tops, arrives a drunken man.
The city, say, under the Snowy Shroud. The lights are off.
Carefully-painted, fences are dark, and even in the square there are no cops.
The adventures start when the drunken Aleosha finds a sleeping girl and the black hen in a waiting room, and brings them to a small hut:
In a waiting room a screaming hen runs across.
In the glass doors emerges a night patrol.
A sleeping girl – below the steering medium-sized adult bike –
and where is her mother? and who is she, trash?
A Hero, a Black Hen and a Sleeping Girl
As the poem progresses, Aleosha becomes the center of bizarre events involving a gang of supernatural criminals and the police. The following events describe the violent clashes between the supernatural criminal powers, led by the Black Hen, and the Moscow police forces (МУР). The modern setting is suddenly interrupted by forces beyond the comprehension of the heroes or the readers. The characters become mere elements in unpredictable processes, real or imaginary, and the narrative moves into a metaphysical space. Aleosha is by no means a true hero: when police forces arrive at the small house to arrest a gang of supernatural criminals under the leadership of the Black Hen, all the inhabitants are hiding under the bed. By the will of an unnamed power, Aleosha turns into a rooster, but he bravely protects the Black Hen in prison. All the heroes are saved in the end, but during the party of the supernatural gang with their leader, the Black Hen, there is the appearance of the beautiful Major Kantariya from the Moscow police force, who is looking for her lost daughter:
Rocking on black, smartly styled heels,
a beauty comes out of the shadows, with a gun in her hands,
and holding two targets in one sight,
she says: “Whoa, gangsters!
I am Major Kantariya from the Moscow MUR,
it’s done, and I reached my goal.
Hands behind your back, stay facing the wall.
I have a special price for your lives,
but I will end them
if those who are here
will not return my daughter to me here and now!”
At the end, Aleosha was saved from evil spirits and had a final chance to talk to his dead wife, who was incarnated as the Black Hen. Their conversation gives a final closure for Aleosha’s guilt and grief. The Black Hen then ascends to heaven, leaving Aleosha on this earth to proceed with his life.
The synopsis of this story reveals a modern ballad (it was even compared to a popular TV series “Место встречи изменить нельзя “). But behind the post-modernist absurdity is a story about lost love and guilt, as well as about all conquering mother’s love for her child. The tragic person of Major Kantariya in a search of lost child became one unforgettable symbol in the poem:
They left in a hurry like this: in front there was
a beauty with her daughter pressed to her chest,
and wrapped in a warm cloth.
Behind them left an angry man,
and the hen looked away from the basket
like a nail, not packed to the cap.
They walked on the white and then through the blue,
and from the hill they looked back, like a single soul:
at inanimate policemen near an abandoned house,
standing in the winter dusk,
without breathing in the snow dust.
The transformation of the Black Hen into Aleosha’s dead wife, her plea to supernatural forces to return the girl to Kantariya, the tragic and magnificent monologue of the “invisible power” at the end of the poem completely change our perception of the poem. We understand that at this moment the girl is brought back from another world by her mother’s love. Stepanova synthesizes timeless emotions and ideas of human destiny with symbols of pop culture and modern folklore. By appealing to the reader’s imagination and using recognizable cultural symbols and the environment of the Russian provincial town, Stepanova succeeds in creating a modern epic story about the eternal search for happiness and forgiveness. As it was a hundred years ago, provincial Russia remains a place where the idea of humanity grows out of chaos and despair.
Svarovsky, Feodor. “Neskol’ko slov o novom epose”. Zhurnal RETS: Novyi epos, 44 (June 2007). www.polutona,ru/rets/rets44.pdf
Kukulin, Ilya. “Aktual’nyi russkii poet kak voskresshie Alyonuoshka i Ivanushka.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2002, N. 53, p. 275.
Svarovsky, Ibid.
Ibid.
Gudkova, Svetlana. “New Tendencies in Contemporary Poetry: Artistic Species of M. Stepanova’s Book The Prose of Ivan Sidorov .” Izvestiia Rossiiskogo Gosudarstvennogo Pedagogicheskogo Universiteta im. Gertsena, 2009, N. 118, pp.12-15. cyberleninka.ru/article/n/o-novyh-tendentsiyah-v-sovremennoy- poezii-k-voprosu-o-hudozhestvennoy-spetsifike-knigi-m- stepanovoy-proza-ivana-sidorova
Viazmitinova, l. ” Ipostasi Sergeia Kruglova”. NLO, 2011, N.110. litkarta.ru/dossier/o-knige-devushki-pojut/dossier_4278/view_print/
Навь Моревна ( or прекрасная Марья Моревна – пленница Кащея ) is one of the most ancient and mythic goddesses in traditional Slavic beliefs. Sometimes she is a pagan-goddess in the image of tall woman with long hair, sometimes a beautiful girl in white. She is not only a nightmare from the palace of Kaschei, but the personification of fate, responsible for changes in human lives.
Dmitrii Bykov is one of the most prominent contemporary Russian writers but he is still not known in the West. In 2006 Bykov won the National Bestseller Prize for his book “Boris Pasternak . He became the winner of the National Bestseller Prize again in 2011 for his novel “Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice” . Only several of his works were translated to English: his novel Living Souls was translated to English and published by Alma Books in 2010. Dmitri Bykov is also a poet.
Excerpts from Amid the Empty Meadows…
By Dmitri Bykov Translated by Michael Marsh-Soloway
“Amid the empty meadows, In the amber brume of the afternoon, My sweetheart lies Curled up beside me.
The bay willow is blooming, Honey thicket and dogrose, I, her lover, Dozed off in the thick grass.
She gazes off somewhere, Above the thick grass, Above my pileous, Dozed-off head–
And thinks, which of The centrifugal forces Will sweep us away, shattering The remnants of our wings.
And all the while, I sleep blissfully, She looks there, Where hellish Hades And black water,
Arms stretching out, Embrace on the stoop, And separations are long And eternal– in the end.
For the time being, The sultry heat of Hades frightens her– A dream, warlike and playful, Through and through, comes to me.
But my dreams are not things In which there is something prophetic. I dream only of objects, And scents, and color.
I dream not of separation, Or a foreign land, But the curve of brushwood, And, perhaps, of her.
And this malachite Rug beneath my head– With the dispersal of the battlefield Into its protective color.
I dream of automatons, Cartridge pouches, boots, Some squares, Some circles”.