the wind
is blowing away from here
a visitor
came to see him yesterday
from the federal
security service
and clued him in
“fly like the wind
from here in 24 hrs
we will facilitate it
otherwise we will start
with your lesser twisters
and it’ll get worse from there”
his hands shaking
he packed into suitcases
all the leaves
sails
open windows
and buzzing wires
the air tickets and visa
were issued without a snag
and the customs officers
even wished him a fair wind
and smiled
which had never
happened before
so as he is on his way there now
awaiting him by the sea
are the wind driven
power generators
of three universities
of the netherlands
while here
a windless calm has set in
and reigns
just as you have so long
hoped it would

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Gennady Kanevsky is a Moscow poet and essayist. He has been published in Homo Legens, Vozdukh, Volga, Banner, Novy Bereg, New World, October , and Ural. He is the author of six poetry books, a book of selected poems, Séance, and is published in anthologies of Russian and U.S. poetry. He has been a participant in poetry festivals in Russia and Ukraine, the poetic program of the Art Biennale in Thessaloniki, and has had poems translated into English, Italian. Hungarian, Ukrainian and Udmurt. With Anna Russ, he was the winner of the 2007 Moscow Poetry Slam, the Moscow Observer Award (2013), the Megalit Independent Award (2013), October Award (2015), and a Special Award of from Moscow Schyut (Moscow Score) for Seance (2016).

nettles frame the structure
that the snail trail marks
under black roof rafters
riddled with white sparks

a sea of wet dust
covers former people
too brief was their lust
but now they lie deep all

where a storm called out
from the clouds in vain
and lightning struck the ground
cinders remain

in a couple of years
torment will subside
they’ll provide the meds
dinner will be served

quiet is the hospice
and the prayer hoarse
for the lost place
where my country was

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

One of Russia’s outstanding living poets, Alexei Tsvetkov is the founder, with Sergey Gandlevsky, Bakhyt Kenjeev, and Alexander Soprovsky, of the Moscow Time poets’ group. In 1975 he was arrested and deported from Moscow and in the same year emigrated to the United States. He edited the emigre newspaper Russkaya Zhizn (San Francisco, 1976–77) and earned a Ph.D. degree from the  University of Michigan. Tsvetkov taught Russian language and literature at Dickinson College, then worked as an international broadcaster at the Voice of America radio station and later at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague. Currently, he is a freelance writer based in New York City and Israel.

courage instantly surges
from the glass in the hand
can’t we be like the others
help me understand

amid chaos and decadence
in the head and the street
bitter love’s evanescence
makes hostility sweet

first cadet corps and church
then siberian exile
every lash of the birch
serves to make us more servile

but when wartime returns
our soft gaze will turn stern
drunken ivan will curse
sober ahmed will burn

that’s because education
and ancestral genetics
make us hate with a passion
those who are not like us

just to intimidate you
we have scanned your identity
try to leave and we’ll treat you
to polonium 210 tea

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

One of Russia’s outstanding living poets, Alexei Tsvetkov is the founder, with Sergey Gandlevsky, Bakhyt Kenjeev, and Alexander Soprovsky, of the Moscow Time poets’ group. In 1975 he was arrested and deported from Moscow and in the same year emigrated to the United States. He edited the emigre newspaper Russkaya Zhizn (San Francisco, 1976–77) and earned a Ph.D. degree from the  University of Michigan. Tsvetkov taught Russian language and literature at Dickinson College, then worked as an international broadcaster at the Voice of America radio station and later at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague. Currently, he is a freelance writer based in New York City and Israel.

Burst into a derisive laughter,
laugh at me, too, at me as well,
as at a foreign Gastarbeiter –
say, hey, go home, pal, or to hell.

Don’t recognize my sacred talent,
at any cost, no matter what,
just do not kill me – that’s sufficient,
bury me not, bury me not.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Dennis Novikov, now recognized as a major poet in Russia, was born and lived chiefly in Moscow, but also spent several years in England and Israel. The intonations of his lyric verse have influenced numerous Russian poets. Novikov attended the Literary Institute of the Writer’s Union (Russia’s top creative writing program) and was the youngest member of the prominent Almanac group in the 1990s, which also included the poets Sergey Gandlevsky, Alexander Soprovsky, D. A. Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Viktor Koval, and Timur Kibirov. Four volumes of his poetry appeared in his lifetime, the second with an enthusiastic afterword by Joseph Brodsky. His collected poems are Viza (“The Visa”, edited by Felix Chechik (Voymega, Moscow, 2007)). An annotated volume of Novikov’s complete works, Reka – Oblaka (“River, Clouds”), was published by Voymega in 2019. His poems are translated into English by Philip Nikolayev with the exclusive permission of the estate of Dennis Novikov.

The hand of fate, the hand of Moscow
clenches my wrist too tight all night
until it’s white, until it’s blue
and feels completely dead inside,

powerless over the weightless matches
and unlit cigarette, as well
as over this whole saving stretch of
reality, and life itself.

The Stone Guest’s muscled arm protrudes
from high up, where the shoulder-boards
loom perilously in the clouds
through the balcony’s open door.

Argus, the old imperial guard
Whose heavy steps I hear approaching,
Arrives to discipline me hard
For pacifism and army dodging.

Unable to cross myself, I die.
A shoulder star, five points from hell,
Unblinking, stares me in the eye…
O Donna Anna, my love, farewell!

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

 

*

Dennis Novikov, now recognized as a major poet in Russia, was born and lived chiefly in Moscow, but also spent several years in England and Israel. The intonations of his lyric verse have influenced numerous Russian poets. Novikov attended the Literary Institute of the Writer’s Union (Russia’s top creative writing program) and was the youngest member of the prominent Almanac group in the 1990s, which also included the poets Sergey Gandlevsky, Alexander Soprovsky, D. A. Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Viktor Koval, and Timur Kibirov. Four volumes of his poetry appeared in his lifetime, the second with an enthusiastic afterword by Joseph Brodsky. His collected poems are Viza (“The Visa”, edited by Felix Chechik (Voymega, Moscow, 2007)). An annotated volume of Novikov’s complete works, Reka – Oblaka (“River, Clouds”), was published by Voymega in 2019. His poems are translated into English by Philip Nikolayev with the exclusive permission of the estate of Dennis Novikov.

The mid-century was passing, dragging
Along with it – among outdated
And decomposed calendar pages – a secret
Over which some future generations
Of overachievers will keep racking their brains
For a while. The mid-century was passing,
And somewhere there, in a postwar year,
I was sitting in a multicolored satin dress
On a sun-heated boulder by the fence
Of an old industrial plant, my grubby palms,
Joined like a boat, cradling a shiny green
Rose chafer beetle. Everything that is secret
Tickles. O emerald-winged sacred bug,
Enigma of childhood.
The mid-century.
The tiny lane with a mysterious name,
Written as Great Deer Street in the address.
Where have you moved from Great Deer Street
And where is your green secret now?
The mid-century.
Expectations, waiting.
Pelmeni.
Sweet excitement.
Our kids will live under Communism…
If only America would give us peace…
My grandpa’s clinky WWII medals
In a round fruit-drops tin the odor
Of the New Year fir tree, of snow
And tangerines, the adults’ late return
From the theater, the neighbors’ cat
Cleopatra, allegedly imported from Egypt,
And the whole world folded like the palms
Of a child, wherein are hidden our
Early wishes, childish secrets, and the mid-century.

 

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

An outstanding Russian poet, the late Olga Chugai’s work is lyric and innovative. A master of poetic forms, she was an early adopter of free verse among poets of the Soviet period, using traditional verse and various hybrid rhythmic patterns and achieving a distinct voice. Despite completing an advanced course of study in history at Moscow State University, she was denied graduation because she rejected editorial changes to her final thesis (she was asked to include irrelevant quotes from the works of Lenin and Marx). In the 1990s she received a degree in Advanced Literary Studies from the Literary Institute of the USSR Writers’ Union. Her collections included Sudba gliny (The Life of Clay, 1982) and her selected poems, Svetlye storony t’my (The Bright Sides of Darkness, 1995). She edited an important two-volume anthology of Russian poets of her generation, Grazhdane nochi (Citizens of Night, 1990-2), and also translated poetry from several languages. Chugai founded and was the leader of the First Book Laboratory at the Writer’s Union in 1977-90, an organization that facilitated the publication of first books by many subsequently acclaimed new poets, including Ivan Zhdanov, Nina Gabrielyan, Arkady Shtypel, Faina Grimberg, and Arvo Mets. For these reasons Chugai was nicknamed “supplier of genius.” Philip Nikolayev has the exclusive right to translate her poems into English; his translations are published with the approval of the Olga Chugai estate.

I’ll read it thoroughly,
Leafing through unknown faces:
Hello there, you alien and crazy
Capital city!
All are now dead
With whom I would have cared
To form a bond,
With whom I would have been glad
To share
The last piece of bread
Or just sit down and rest
In the midst of this mess.

The city,
Having read me too,
Is bored with me:
I am unable to cling
Admiringly to the glossy,
Advertised spring,
Nor gawk at the enamel blue
Of a Sunday sky,
With its sun but no sign
Of resurrection:

All that is left is the word,
All else is forgotten,
Otherwise Sundays would surely
Be permanently banned
And gone.
But what is to be done
If someone’s bent on
Reinventing
This idle day of spring?

I’ll go into town
In my cornflower blue dress,
Possessed
By the desire to stare
At the Kremlin wall.
I, without any knowhow
On how to kowtow,
Suddenly feel
Like pressing my face
Against the cool red bricks.

………………..

So, all that’s left is to fall
Asleep and sleep all
Through Sunday.
Sorry to miss the glorious weather,
but it’s just one day.
No, sleep all eternity or, better,
Sleep for three hundred years and then come pay a visit
To this location, examine it
With the studious gaze of a tourist.

 

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

An outstanding Russian poet, the late Olga Chugai’s work is lyric and innovative. A master of poetic forms, she was an early adopter of free verse among poets of the Soviet period, using traditional verse and various hybrid rhythmic patterns and achieving a distinct voice. Despite completing an advanced course of study in history at Moscow State University, she was denied graduation because she rejected editorial changes to her final thesis (she was asked to include irrelevant quotes from the works of Lenin and Marx). In the 1990s she received a degree in Advanced Literary Studies from the Literary Institute of the USSR Writers’ Union. Her collections included Sudba gliny (The Life of Clay, 1982) and her selected poems, Svetlye storony t’my (The Bright Sides of Darkness, 1995). She edited an important two-volume anthology of Russian poets of her generation, Grazhdane nochi (Citizens of Night, 1990-2), and also translated poetry from several languages. Chugai founded and was the leader of the First Book Laboratory at the Writer’s Union in 1977-90, an organization that facilitated the publication of first books by many subsequently acclaimed new poets, including Ivan Zhdanov, Nina Gabrielyan, Arkady Shtypel, Faina Grimberg, and Arvo Mets. For these reasons Chugai was nicknamed “supplier of genius.” Philip Nikolayev has the exclusive right to translate her poems into English; his translations are published with the approval of the Olga Chugai estate.

From Pushkin to Pussy Riot—Russian Political Poetry and Prose, a special issue of Matter guest-edited by Larissa Shmailo and Philip Nikolayev

Preface
Russia, the American mirror — serfs and slaves, manifest destiny, nationalism, strongmen at the helm, revolution and New Deals denied. LGBT outlawed, oligarchs in charge, racisms, religiosities, and misogynies enthroned.

From Pushkin to Pussy Riot, how do we engage Russia and her dead Kareninas, her poetry, her dissent? How does Russia affect us? What is her history and politics, the literature of her culture wars?

Here we address these questions and collude with you with our poetry and prose in translation. As with all oppressed and repressed writers, we write in myth, parable, and slant. And sometimes, we scream, run at tanks, get arrested and do hard time, just for reciting a poem. (This way to the polonium cocktails, ladies and gentlemen!)

Learn from us, American cousins; better yet, join us as we sing from our materialist-consumer-authoritarian lives as we have always sung, to fight and win. We are on the same side, are your brethren with strangely accented polysyllabic names, cry, drink, die the same.

Here are over 30 poets, essayists, and prose writers for your delectation, expanding the word politics to the size of our polis. Let this be a beginning of a new dialogue, a new dialectic and true collusion.

Larissa Shmailo

A special thanks to the collaborative translators and poets of YOUR LANGUAGE MY EAR http://web.sas.upenn.edu/yourlanguagemyear/and the estates of Olga Chugai and Dennis Novikov for their contributions to this issue.

*

Larissa Shmailo‘s new novel is Sly Bang (2018); her first novel is Patient Women (2015, semifinalist, Subito Press/University of Boulder Prose Competition). Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country (2016), #specialcharacters (2014), In Paran (2009), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (2006), and the e-book Fib Sequence (2011). Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award; tracks are available from iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and other digital distributors. Shmailo’s work has appeared in over 25 anthologies, including Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Penguin), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey). Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Garage Museum of Moscow, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society.

Philip Nikolayev is a Russo-American bilingual poet living in Boston. He is a polyglot and translates poetry from several languages. His poetic works are published in literary periodicals internationally, including Poetry, The Paris Review, and Grand Street. Nikolayev’s collections include Monkey Time (Verse/Wave Books) and Letters from Aldenderry (Salt). He co-edits Fulcrum, a serial anthology of poetry and critical writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

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Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

From the trunks of trees             and bare stones
Sprung the dead and abducted girls
And the terrifying bodies of men and older boys
From the air sprung the monsters
From the air sprung the horror
Of knives in the dark
From the ground came the voices of the people who had lived in the valley
Before settlers came
Their missing voices and bodies sprung from the grass
From the animals sprung the warmth
Of internal worlds from my skin sprung the silent
And bitter mystery of my solitude
The shame stretching throat to groin
Sprang from a place or a moment or a thing
I did not know and could not see or remember
The shame came alive singing back to  the invisible things everywhere
These things that were real            the most real
When I was young

 

 

 

 

 

 

***

I am native of rural Oregon though I lived for some years after college in northern Italy.  I hold an MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Washington University.  My poems, translations, and articles of literary criticism have appeared in journals in the US, the UK, and Italy.  My first book of poems, The Paled Guest, was published by Aldrich Press in January 2018.  Currently, I teach medieval literature and creative writing at a small liberal arts college in central Minnesota where I live with my husband and our two sons.