What’s Going On in Russian Poetry?

by Matvei Yankekevich

What is contemporary in, or about, contemporary Russian poetry? When, about a year and a half ago, Tracy Grinnell of Aufgabe and Litmus Press asked me to curate a Russian portfolio for this issue, I was presented not only with the problem of selecting poets in an anthologist’s manner, but also with the more salient question of the contemporary.

The contemporary — as is too clear in the formulation of the typical anthology — is always fleeting. There have been several Russian poetry anthologies of various stripes and colors in recent memory1, but this is not one of them, first of all because I am afraid of anthologies. With every anthology I’ve contributed to, I have experienced at least a tinge of disappointment, if not a minor bout of rage. After all, just look at those thick tomes with their zealous titles! How long and how inclusive must an anthology be to ward off the suspicion of incompleteness? Who is left out, and why? How do you figure the expiration date on an anthology of “contemporary” poetry? Can we trust either a lone-star translator or a translators’ posse and its lurking personalities? The questions whirl, raising the dust — you have to turn away.

And so, in imagining this Russian portfolio for Aufgabe #8, I wondered if a smaller selection of poems and essays by a modest number of presently active poets could produce the sensation of knowing, or at least glimpsing, what’s going on — a sensation so often lacking in anthologies? What follows, then, is an admittedly subjective and (therefore) arbitrary selection of essays and poems from a variety of Russian writers who were chosen by some similarly arbitrary parameters: I decided to limit the scope to poets who (a) live in Russia; (b) write in Russian; (c) are about my age, or a little older, but not as old as my parents; (d) are writing poetry actively and in a public way, and seem to be participating in some way in the literary culture; (e) are accessible through my personal connections; (f) seem relatively translatable (an interesting idea!). Also, I had a page limit — which, as generous as it was, I of course exceeded — and a desire to include essays or artistic statements by as many of the poets as wanted to offer such. For the most part, the selection of the poems to be translated was dictated by the poets themselves, submitted in the spirit of periodical publications. I am grateful to the translators, my willing friends and colleagues, but not only for their selfless labors. In effect, and as it always really is, the translators also acted as curators: They further narrowed the sets of poems that I had received or, in some cases, opted to translate other poems, thus taking some more of the selection process out of my hands. Through this experimental process I have had the luck of finding a group of works that somehow provides an array of answers to the question about the contemporary moment in Russian poetry, at least for myself.

The notion of page count only partially motivated my decision to print only the English translations. For a variety of socioeconomic reasons, the internet has been a primary medium for the dissemination of contemporary poetry in post-Soviet Russia. So much so that a large number of authors published on paper in the last 20 years have also made their books and/or individual poems available for free on the web, and still more poems are only available electronically. It therefore seemed to me redundant to print the Russian originals of these texts side by side with the translations. The online component to this issue (www.litmuspress.org) will post links to the Russian originals, or — in the few cases where such are not already available — will provide the texts themselves.

I should first disclose that the poets I am most familiar with in the younger Russian scene are those whom I met through happenstance in the late 1990s (thanks to the Summer Literary Seminars in Saint Petersburg), and later came to publish in the Eastern European Poets Series for Ugly Duckling Presse. Aleksandr Skidan and Dmitry Golynko (and later Elena Fanailova) were my guides into the Russian poetry of the new century, just as it was beginning. Through them I heard of more poets, met some, read others (many of whom I could not include here). Another key resource was Dmitry Kuzmin’s intrepid website, Vavilon.ru, which permitted me to read almost everyone I’d ever heard of. In addition, CEC Artslink commissioned me on several occasions to translate a sampling of poems by several of the visiting poets in their Open World program, which pointed me in still other directions.

Formal verse (rhymed and metered to a lesser or greater degree) still dominates the landscape of Russian poetry, and free verse is seen by mainstream critics and editors as an anomaly at best. (Dmitry Kuzmin’s publishing projects run against the grain in this respect.) This selection is unrepresentative for its emphasis on (what in the Russian context would be) more experimental trends, although, to the readers of this journal, the experimental label will seem odd-fitting when applied, for example, to Kuzmin’s straightforward confessional lyrics about gay relationships or Tatiana Zima’s unrhymed and unhinged rants. In today’s culturally conservative Russia, free verse is as marginalized as queer politics.

Just as the dichotomy of traditional form vs. free verse is still a central one in Russian poetry, so is the long-standing division between Moscow poets and Petersburg poets, even when comparing similarly progressive (free-verse) poetics within one generation. (This divide is sometimes felt so strongly that some recent anthologies have for the most part excluded one in favor of the other.) Of course, there is a long history of mapping the mind-body problem onto the geographical space of Russia, where Petersburg is the cold, controlling intellect, and Moscow the warm-blooded and chaotic heart of the land. Reductively speaking, the difference could be said to be one of modernist difficulty (Petersburg) vs. avant-garde accessibility (Moscow). The three Petersburg poets presented in this issue (Golynko, Skidan, Sergey Zavyalov) often use found language or existing discourse — conceived in widely varying ways — as source, or at least as integral to their practice, and are typically more Western-leaning in their philosophical underpinnings. Whereas, Moscow’s most coherent new stylistic movement has, at its base, the more homegrown straightforward utterance — seemingly born out of the esthetics of Moscow’s 1990s spoken-word scene — which Dmitry Vodennikov has dubbed the New Sincerity (a term also used in the late 90s, to different ends, by the Moscow Conceptualist Dmitri Prigov). (Poets associated to some degree with this esthetic might include such vastly different poets as Linor Goralik, Zhenya Lavut, Ilya Kukulin, Dmitry Kuzmin, Stanislav Lvovsky, Kirill Medvedev, Slava Mogutin, Andrei Rodionov, and many younger writers). The perceived schism being performed along these lines is a rift that recalls the American poetry wars of the 1980s.

The American reader of this Brooklyn-based journal will be intrigued to find just how much the Russians are influenced by American poetry (an indication of which might be Zavyalov’s use of a poem by Ezra Pound as the final word to support his essay’s claims). Moreover, many of the poets presented here translate American poetry: Medvedev has translated most of Charles Bukowski; Skidan has brought Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and various Language poets into Russian; Kuzmin translates mostly New York School poets. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that American poetry has become the most prevalent foreign model for the contemporary Russian poet, replacing the European models of the past (German and British Romanticism for the Golden Age of Pushkin’s time, and French Symbolism for Russia’s early 20th-century Silver Age). I would argue that this has something to do with an anxiety over the place of poetry in contemporary Russia.

The poet in Russia has only recently suffered the blow dealt to poetry by the introduction of a free market and the loss of traditional cultural values. For the Russian poet, a crisis of identity has ensued which Soviet publishing practices and that culture’s valorization of poetry (whether by the official structures or the dissenting intelligentsia) successfully warded off until the 1990s. Thus, it should be no surprise that the place of poetry — of the poet and the reader — in the post-Soviet (and arguably post-Putin) society is central to several of the essays and, indeed, at least peripheral to many of the poems included here. The poet in Russia now has to deal with the fact that the poet is no longer a hero, a reality that American poets are long used to.

Anxiety over the audience for poetry seems to form a cornerstone of American modernism: “If anything of moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.” So begins William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, pairing the lack of audience and the contemporary in poetry in a kind of mathematically reciprocal relationship. And it’s not that no one will see it, but that no one will “want to.” The critiques inveighed by Williams’ hypothetical readers of the early 1920s — “Is this what you call poetry?” and the like — are the same ones that contemporary Russian poets feel they must defend poetry against.

As it happened, in organizing the material alphabetically, Elena Fanailova’s poem, “Lena, or The Poet and the People," sets the stage. (The title seems to echo Alexander Pushkin’s The Poet and the Crowd, anchoring the poem to a history of Romantic defenses of poetry on Russian soil.) Echoing the voices that confront Williams, the cashier Lena, at the store where Fanailova (the other Lena) likes to go, expresses bemusement about the book of poems that the poet — somewhat apologetically — gifts to her. Fanailova’s anxiety over whether Lena will like the poems and, later, why she doesn’t like them, becomes the shaky ground on which she builds her “defense.” The defense of poetry is the task at hand for many of the poets in this selection; it seems poetry is threatened in a way it never was in the Russian context2. As the title of one of Skidan’s essay collections suggests — The Resistance to/of Poetry — poetry resists the mainstream as much as it is resisted by its intended audience. Moreover, the official culture virulently resists most poetry that is “of moment,” mounting its own defense against what it perceives as a threat to Russia’s poetic tradition. Kirill Medvedev’s provocatory claim that his poetry is mainstream poetry — perhaps a Whitmanesque, or maybe Beat, but definitely American move — is a reversal that only serves to prove the same point.

I think that from the conscious appraisal of this crisis stems much of what is contemporary in Russian poetry; only the poetry of the past and the future can avoid it. This crisis of confidence is the invisible impetus for the assertion of new lyric and epic modes, by Maria Stepanova and Sergey Kruglov, respectively. It is the implicit subtext of Skidan’s analysis of poetry’s place in a media-saturated world, and the explicit topic of Zavyalov’s thoughts on the place of Russian poetry in a globalized culture. (“How will the poet survive in the coming century? What will he live on and for? What kind of relationship will there be between poet and reader?”) The globalized referentiality of an Igor Zhukov or an Andrey Sen-Senkov confirms this anxiety, which also serves to jump-start the vehement reaffirmation of the “I” in Vodennikov’s New Sincerity, or its problematization in the transgressions between pronouns in the poems of Anton Ochirov, and the redemptive approach to the poet’s voice in Golynko’s post-Language defamiliarization of everyday Russian speech. The same crisis may also effect a kind of return to a (neo-)folk poetry in the intonations of Stepanova and Linor Goralik, as well as Kruglov’s resurrection of religious poetry in its peculiar Russian Orthodox form.

Furthermore, the institutional mediation of the relationship between poet and audience has itself become an object for serious scrutiny, which prompts Medvedev, for instance, to step out of the game completely by forbidding publication of his work and simultaneously refusing his own intellectual property rights. On the other hand, seeking to reinstate the poet-hero, Vodennikov seems to have embraced institutional support and publishes his poems (and commentary on contemporary poetry) in “glossy” magazines, and his five-star website (vodennikov.ru) may be what it takes to return celebrity status to the poet in the 21st-century.

The poet writes toward the future rather than the present, as Sasha Skidan once convinced me in a more elegant formulation. So, it remains to be seen what stance will be taken by poets coming of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. Of particular interest are those poets who will have no cultural memory of what was the traditional role of the poet in Russia for several centuries. One assumes that poetry will still be written, and perhaps it will even flourish after the anxiety over poetry’s lost cultural relevance is, as the Russians like to say, perezhyto — lived through, survived. Will they demand a return to order (as Eliot and Pound had in their different ways)? Will they become content with isolation, retreating into their local status, their poetry becoming a kind of an untranslatable heirloom product? Will they value global trade over national identity, the epic over the lyric? Or — what is most difficult for a country so vast and yet so centralized to apprehend, much less accept — perhaps they will become absolutely various, at which time the editors, translators and publishers of anthologies will focus only on smaller groups, towns, virtual communities, neighborhoods, or even... just the unique specimens: individual poets. Poets who do not write with the anthology in mind.

The directions poetry will take, it seems to me, are largely being determined by the fierce and friendly debates taking place in the present, on the margins of the entrenched and inert Russian culture, and in the poems that follow. What’s going on over there will hopefully have some resonance with what has been going on over here.

Notes

1. For those curious, here’s a list of recent anthologies of (more or less) contemporary Russian poetry in English translation, going back ten years:

New Russian Poetry, edited by Peter Golub (Jacket, #36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/)

Contemporary Russian Poetry, edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and J. Kates (Dalkey Archive, 2008)

A Night in the Nabokov Hotel: 20 Contemporary Poets from Russia, edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky (Dedalus Press, 2006)

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets, edited by Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort (University of Iowa Press, 2005)

Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, edited by John High, et al. (Talisman House, 2000)

In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era, edited by J. Kates (Zephyr Press, 1999)

2. During Russian Modernism, what’s called the Silver Age, poets — whether Symbolist, Acmeist, or Futurist — were at the forefront of public debate on modern art. They rarely seemed anxious about a lack of interest in poetry, and therefore never needed to defend it. In the Soviet era, stadiums filled to capacity for Mayakovsky, and later for Pasternak and Evtushenko. (Had Brodsky ever returned, I’m sure the same fate would have awaited him, much to his chagrin.) Soviet culture, perhaps by virtue of the hero-worship implicit in totalitarian propaganda, swallowed whole the trope of poet as national hero. At the same time, the intellectual opposition believed in the poet’s potential to be conscience and voice of the people. Thus, poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam were feared by the regime — one must assume, because of their potential heroism — and therefore persecuted.

© Matvei Yankelevich. All rights reserved.