This season it’s fashionable to come out
With an epic poem in Literary Damascus
About patriotic Urals dwarves who
Forge deep in the earth the swords of victory.

It’s fashionable, yes, but it’s classier
To switch to a different expressive medium
For a jolty ride in a highbrow film
As you sample curdled vodka from the canister.

A solar flare of cigar smoke drifts behind
The leader departing this world of strife.
Petitioners wait in the reception room
Of the Mayor of the Fourth Rome.

The boss of Saint Petersburg’s cabs is dispatched
To raise Saratov from its knees and ruins,
Where in the liquor store they check your passport
Once for every 100 mls of hard booze.

And this is why you aren’t exactly there:
A disembodied ghost, you’ve flown to where
In a surreal unprepossessing scenery
Houses are stacked like logs awaiting fire.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Alexei Alexandrov has been published in numerous magazines, including Air, Volga, Children of Ra, and others. He is the author of three books of poems: Without leaving his cartoons (New York: Ailuros Publishing, 2013), These were torpedoes of good (Saratov: Music and Life; Amirit, 2018), Silent tracks (New York, Ailuros Publishing, 2019). He was inner of the festival “Cultural Heroes of the 21st Century” (1999) and serves as poetry editor of the magazine Volga.

Tomorrow Pasternak dies
in Peredelkino, where on his grave
we spent our youth
reciting “August,”
surrounded by quiet men in dark suits —
they almost liked the lines.

Tomorrow is the day, the 30th. And three months from tomorrow
Tsvetaeva will hang herself
in a Tatar town on the black Kahma river.
Kahma — a tribute to the fuller, solemn
Volga, which rolls her waters south farther from the yoke.
The town with a hook-like name: Elahbuga.

A tributary to the yet unknown,
if only I could give her all my blood
to fill those cobalt rubble veins of a laborer!
If only — all the pine tree air to fill his tormented lungs! —
I, illegitimate offspring,
looking for the two of you

on every bank
of each big frozen river
where boats are stuck in hummocks.

*

Irina Mashinski is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the Journal of Brown University’s Slavic Department, and co-translator (with Maria Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, and Robert Chandler) of Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (NYRB, 2018). Irina Mashinski is the co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the Cardinal Points/StoSvet literary project. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian). Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.

Fleet  left. Towers
are rising from waters
— and sink again:
*Grand Central of the sea —

its bottle glass of empty
***deep terminals, and foamless
*******passages, and shoals of baby fish…
Brave  Herodotus had it described, it’s just
*the illustrations
 ****that seem new.

So, to Palenque! To all the native cities
swallowed by forests, to all the folding books
of hieroglyphs, to the clean design
********************of Mayan steps,
to steppes beneath the alto-cumulus convoys,

where my grandfather at sixteen denounced
the family, joined the Red Guard,
saw terror, saw it all, sent them to hell,
got himself jailed, jailed again, exiled, then old.

We haven’t started it but we’ve got to see
how mermaids swim by rusty snapped-off doors
of an express stuck in abyssal mud —
and sit on cliffs of rhymes and sing.

As for the meter — as for the pure honey
of rhythm,
****for iamb of littoral, for anapest of depths,
lighthouses of metaphors, drill towers above shelf waters –
******we know that tar at night does look mysterious.

From space that glides so low,
*******oil spills look like an unknown
************alphabet.

*

Irina Mashinski is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the Journal of Brown University’s Slavic Department, and co-translator (with Maria Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, and Robert Chandler) of Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (NYRB, 2018). Irina Mashinski is the co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the Cardinal Points/StoSvet literary project. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian). Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.

We have a slight problem, general:
our children can’t locate themselves
in space and time.
Maps are muddy, and calendars
have no dates for days like these.

A sacred massacre.
An army blues.
Sell us some primal wisdom; we’ll pay you
in golden possibilities.

The womb of knowledge has no muscles.
We are the babies of the cause,
and we know the big belly from the inside.
Who can camber our mindlines?

The wind combs the steppes of the Budapest Memorandum
for fugitives. Forever
is running a high fever:
days and buildings swollen, corners rounded.
What’s the price of a surprise?

Peace is a wreck where pirates grow on masts.
The peace-keepers trade their dreams
for freshly minted safety,
so their nightmares can pass for urban legends.

Chuffety-chakhnuti-chuff.
The comings-together of sleepless whispers…

*

Anatoly Kudryavitsky is from Dublin, Ireland. He is the editor of  SurVision, a magazine for Surrealist poetry. His fifth collection of English-language poems titled The Two–Headed Man and a Paper Life is forthcoming from MadHat. His poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, The North, Plume, Stride, Otoliths, The American Journal of Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, and others. He has also published seven collections of his Russian-language poems. His latest novel titled The Flying Dutchman has been published by Glagoslav Publications (London, UK) in 2018. He won the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize in 2003 and the Mihai Eminescu Academy Poetry Award in 2017.

The beggar was standing in the underpass in front of the Ministry of Education. Noticing a rare passer-by, he unbuttoned his Commissar greatcoat with the suddenness of a magician’s gesture. The art of the future, which he heralded for quite some time, instantly came to light from the pockets full of poets, musicians, and actors. Having pulled out one of those figures, he began to inflate it with puffs of vain air.

No one was paying him any attention; they all were going on about their business. Deeper into the night, a couple of culturally concerned passers-by pitched the idea of inflating all the figures at once.

The clock finally struck midnight. The figures were staring at the concert and theatre playbills and bowing like puppets in the wind.

 

*

Anatoly Kudryavitsky is from Dublin, Ireland. He is the editor of  SurVision, a magazine for Surrealist poetry. His fifth collection of English-language poems titled The Two–Headed Man and a Paper Life is forthcoming from MadHat. His poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, The North, Plume, Stride, Otoliths, The American Journal of Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, and others. He has also published seven collections of his Russian-language poems. His latest novel titled The Flying Dutchman has been published by Glagoslav Publications (London, UK) in 2018. He won the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize in 2003 and the Mihai Eminescu Academy Poetry Award in 2017.

For Allen Ginsberg

Dear Allen,

I’ve seen how the most promising minds of my generation,

thrown onto American shores through the windshield of the crashing USSR in the late ’80s & early ’90s,

broke their skulls against the hard Brooklyn pavement,

drunk to death, struggled to survive through the endless chain of odd and meaningless jobs,

grew anxious about piling medical bills and insane New York rents,

jumped down onto the subway tracks, renounced cruelty of their drug dealers from the rooftops,

shouted poetry to the deaf and exhibited to the blind,

suffered from solitude or deranged lovers in the basements & attics,

took life-affirming walks through quiet Bensonhurst cemeteries along Ocean Parkway in snow storms,

talked philosophy with homeless Socrateses of Brighton Beach and Greenwich Village,

drowned in the bottomless pit of obscure literary zines and doomed art projects,

lost all hope to be heard, to matter,

grew disillusioned with America and briefly traveled to indifferent Mother Russia, where they made babies, complimented local skinheads, got outdrunk by Moscow poets, and taught Russians to love Putin,

then came back to be baptized in Delaware river by the Anarchist of Lordville,* joined Masonic lodges,

moved through Buddhist temples, yoga regiments, and Orthodox churches toward the angry glow of Soviet nostalgia,

and experiencing mysterious cases of chakra closings, succumbed to the mounting pressures of approaching middle age,

feasted on Internet conspiracies, found naked truth in the New Chronology,

enrolled in virtual fan clubs of the faschizoid gurus of Russian nationalism,

indoctrinated themselves with geopolitical nonsense and outlandish paranoia,

until, finally, turned into conceited fools

who dared from a safe distance of four thousand miles to lecture, edify and cajole Ukrainians to go back to the Russian fold,

raging on about false hopes, failed states, lack of civility, and naive Russian Americans,

all along imagining that they talk about anything but themselves,

dimming shards of the old broken world that can not be restored.

2015, 2019

* Тhe Anarchist of Lordville — notorious Russian-American poet and anthologist Konstantin K. Kuzminsky (1940-2015), who arrived in the U.S. in 1975. Kuzminsky was known for his extravagant lifestyle and eccentric views. In the late 90s, he settled in Lordville, a hamlet in the Town of Hancock in Delaware County, New York, and spent the rest of his life there.

*

Born in 1969, Igor Satanovsky is a bilingual Russian-American poet, translator, publisher, curator, and visual artist, who authored one poetry book in English, and several poetry collections in Russian. Igor is a Senior Designer at Sterling Publishing, and a Chief Editor of Novaya Kozha, Russian-language almanac of arts and letters. He organized the New York DADA Poetry Centennial (2016), and contributed notes to A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (by Richard Kostelanetz. Routledge, 2018).

When the forces of good and of light gain their final victory,
There is no doubt in my mind that I will be justly sentenced
In a court of law to execution by firing squad for the harm
And damage that I have inflicted upon our country’s literature.
But first – I myself insist on this and I demand a free lawyer –
I will be debriefed with radical interrogation techniques, so that
Under the duress and the torture, I name all my co-conspirators,
Every bit as guilty as I, hundreds and hundreds of names of men
And women whose criminal designs are directly responsible
For the complete decline and decay of our once great culture.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Vitaly Pukhanov was born in 1966 in Kiev, Ukraine. He has served as prose editor of the magazine October and from 2003 to 2015 was executive secretary of the Youth Literary Award Debut, and from 2019, is director of the award Poetry. He has been published in the magazines Air, Banner, Continent, New World, and October. He is author of the poetry collections Wooden Garden (1995), Fig Fruit (2003); and School of Mercy (2014). He was winner of the Anthologia award (2014) and a special award from Moscow Score (2014).

It is no longer possible to deny it: it was a war.
Not a youth festival, but a war.
Not the thick literary journals, but a war.
Not sex, rock-n-roll or a steak cooked rare, but a war.
When the enemy won’t succumb, they dance a tango with him,
They recite emotional verses to him,
They feed him chicken drumsticks with a crunchy crust,
They walk him along the sea beach, hold his hand gently.
“Look, enemy, how beautiful the world is!” they whisper softly.
And the enemy, his shame awakened, realizes
That there is no war, that it’s been nothing but his own sad
Paranoia, while the world is fragile and tender –
And he stretches his unarmed arms toward it.
The war is over. The thing we nearly missed was the war.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Vitaly Pukhanov was born in 1966 in Kiev, Ukraine. He has served as prose editor of the magazine October and from 2003 to 2015 was executive secretary of the Youth Literary Award Debut, and from 2019, is director of the award Poetry. He has been published in the magazines Air, Banner, Continent, New World, and October. He is author of the poetry collections Wooden Garden (1995), Fig Fruit (2003); and School of Mercy (2014). He was winner of the Anthologia award (2014) and a special award from Moscow Score (2014).

1

a century plus ago’s no yesteryear’s
snow watch out for speedsters wheeling by like mad
long evenings kerosene and candlelit
are blinking their eyes as they well with tears

greeting the electrical age with hurrays
old steam machinery is trembling in its belts
shadowy monsters prowl the nights with stealth
glass beads and tinsel mark the winter days

the domino path is edging gently further
the purrer falls asleep the backyard blackens
and in the pub the gypsy song grows louder

the necklace all four rows of gold coins jangles
one still lit window’s visible from some angles
a library is nurturing a bomber

2

they’ll enter your name in a well-known catalogue
and deftly amputate your soul
as with a dental surgeon’s hard cool tool
a flushed redolent lump or a pink fog

or drive a steel-heeled army boot into
your ribs and groin to make
you cute pettable and obedient
or sweet and spongy like a cake

or like a treacly pinch of divine dust
or disused flesh drained of its life and lust
or a white sea sail sagging over hills

or the proverbial skull with punctured eyebrows
that slips scalded by heaven’s rain and towers
over graveyards of fish and sunken ships

3

as to the tyrant that we’re living under
he isn’t one of the bloodthirstiest
but is rapacious vicious merciless
and overcome with delusions of grandeur

there’s no escape to cairo or zurbagan
and though my tastes are broad i beg your pardon
for feeling confident that baden baden
is more enticing than say magadan

while with the internet it now appears
it matters little if these walls have ears
true we may yet live to see times of change

but our reality remains much stranger
than g marconi could have predicted surely

it would be sad to peg out prematurely

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Arkady Shtypel was born in 1944 in the city of Kattakurgan in Samarkand and writes in Russian and Ukrainian. In 1965, he was expelled from university for his literary activity on charges of formalism, deception, Zionism and Ukrainian nationalism. His first publication was in 1989 in the anthology of the poetic underground, Citizens of the Night. The author of four books of poems and numerous literary-critical publications, Shtypel was winner of the Moscow Slam 2011 Superfinal. He is translated into German, English, Ukrainian

Even on the eve of the end of the world women will go on
Preening in fitting rooms and buying new dresses,
But most importantly high heel pumps, the softest
And most comfortable kind, so they don’t pinch the foot,
Should occasion arise of descending a red carpet
over white marble stairs in leopard patterns of shade
And light down to a sea beach, or over the colored tiles
Of a dance floor to strains of music, a glass of white wine
Cool and misty in the hand, next to a shapely owner
Of bronzed muscles, so yes, nothing is more important
To a sweet and carefree life than pumps and a new dress.
Ah, sighs she, stealthily trying them on at home,
I am such an idiot, these pumps pinch, I’ve again
Bought them one size too small. But that’s OK,
It’s literally for just one night, since tomorrow
Is the end of the world anyway,
And who’s going to need high heel pumps afterwards?

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Maria Galina, poet, writer, critic, and translator, was born in Tver. She writes both literary and science fiction (with ten SF books to her credit); her literary fiction contains a strong element of magical realism. She is the author of the novels  Volchja Zviezda (2004, The Wolf Star ); “Iramification” (2004; Russian version Givi and Shenderovich – award for the best science-fiction/fantasy novel of International Assembly Portal, Kiev, Ukraine, 2005 and Academia Rossica award for the best translation from Russian,  Great Britain, 2009); Malaya Glusha (2009/0; short-list of the Big Book (Bolshaya Kniga) award (2009) and long-list of  Russian Booker Award; Ground Crayfish, 2011, short-list and reader’s choice for the Big Book award-2012, and Autochthons” (2015),  short-list and reader’s choice for the Big Book award, short list for the National Bestseller award). She also has more than ten genre awards in the field of Science Fiction and Fantasy. As a poet she has been awarded with numerous prestigious Russian poetry awards. Galina currently works for Russia’s oldest literary magazine Novy Mir (Moscow) as the deputy governor of the department of literature critique and social problems, and as a columnist.