Poet and artist Nastya Denisova (b. 1984, Leningrad) lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). Her writing has been published in many print and online journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image, and samples of her work can be viewed here: vimeo.com/nastyadenisova.
Scholar, editor, translator, and poet Dmitry Kuzmin (b. 1968) has translated poems from English, Ukrainian, and French into Russian, and his own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages. His scholarship includes the textbook Poetry (Poeziya) (co-author, 2016) and a book-length study of one-line poems (2016). His two poetry collections are It’s Fine to Be Alive (Khorosho byt zhivym, 2008) and Blankets Not Stipulated (Kovdri ne peredbacheny, Ukraine, 2018). Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989, and has been the head of poetry imprint ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993. He is also editor-in-chief of the Vavilon internet project (www.vavilon.ru) and of the poetry quarterly Vozdukh (Air). Kuzmin has compiled several anthologies, most recently an anthology of present-day Russian LGBT writing in Spanish translation (2014). He has been awarded the Andrey Bely prize (2002), and It’s Fine to be Alive won the Moscow Reckoning award for best debut poetry collection. In 2014, Kuzmin emigrated from Russia to Latvia for political reasons and started Literature Without Borders, which fosters translation projects and provides residencies for poets and translators: www.literaturewithoutborders.lv/about. Kuzmin holds a PhD from Samara State Pedagogical University.
Russia/United Kingdom | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Stanislav Lvovsky (b. 1972) was born in Moscow and has worked in advertising, cultural events management, and journalism. Lvovsky is the former editor-in-chief of the “Literature” section of OPENSPACE.RU/COLTA.RU and the winner of several Russian literary awards. He is the author of six published collections of poetry, one short story collection, and one novel (written in co-authorship with Linor Goralik). One of his poems was the basis of the project “Quiet War Songs” (2015) by six contemporary Russian composers. Lvovsky regularly publishes articles on political and social issues as well as on cultural history and contemporary Russian poetry in various periodicals and academic journals. His poetry has been translated into and published in English, French, Chinese, Italian, and other languages. Currently he is finishing his DPhil thesis on Soviet cultural history at the University of Oxford.
Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina) is a native Muscovite. She has published a prose collection, Freakipedia, or the Adventures of a Shard (Frikipedia, ili Pokhozhdenia oskolka, 2010), and three poetry collections: W (Zh, 2000), Voilà: A Genre Anthology (Voilà: Antologia zhanra, 2004), and A Cow Ate [the First Word] ([Pervoe slovo] syela korova, 2008). Zelenina is a historian and the author of From Judas’s Scepter to Fool’s Staff: Jews in the Medieval Spanish Court (Ot skipetra Iudy k zhezly shuta: prodvornye yevrei v srednevekovoy Ispanii, 2007), Judaism Two: Faces of the Renaissance (Iudaika dva: renessans v litsakh, 2015), and The Fiery Foe of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Surveillance of the Inquisition (Ognennyy vrag marranov: zhizn i smert pod nadzorom inkvizitsii, 2018). She was editor and translator at the Gesharim/Cultural Bridges (Mosty kultury/Gesharim) publishing house and editor-in-chief of the website Booknik. She has also taught at Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (RSUH). Currently, Zelenina is Associate Professor in RSUH’s Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies and a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation.
Ireland/United States | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Bilingual essayist and fiction writer Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her English-language articles and short stories have been featured in The Cardiff Review’s queer issue, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Words Without Borders, while her fiction in English translation has appeared in the Norton Flash Fiction International (2015), The Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toad Suck Review, and Eleven Eleven. Meklina has written six books in Russian (two of them in collaboration with Lida Yusupova and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko) and two in English, the YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote and a collection of short stories entitled A Sauce Stealer. Meklina’s awards include the Andrey Bely Prize (2003), the Yeltsin Center’s Russian Prize (2008), the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize (2018), and The Norton Girault Literary Prize’s Honorable Mention (2019).
After Marina Tsvetaeva emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922, she suffered from a sense of homelessness that left her desiring fulfilling relationships. As a romantic, Tsvetaeva felt the rift between reality and fantasy, body and spirit, thought and feeling. She felt an aversion to the physicality of the world, as this physicality was a barrier that prevented a direct connection to the essence of nature and those around her. Her feelings on love reflected this focus on spirit rather than body, as well as the desire for all-consuming love from one person to another rather than mutual love.
Living as a poet in exile, disconnected from her spiritual motherland and audience, Tsvetaeva often despaired in the 1930s that she had lost her creative abilities and was doomed to lose her lofty position as a poet. She relied on correspondences to establish a separate space for her to express intimacy and to escape the spiritual isolation she felt in her self-imposed exile from home. Her greatest inspiration throughout her life came from the intense, one-sided adoration she exhibits in her letters.
In 1936, Baron Anatoly von Steiger, a young Russian émigré, sent her a book of his poems from a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Switzerland. They had met briefly at one of her poetry readings but Tsvetaeva could not fully recall their meeting. However, as a young poet of noble descent, ill and lonely, Tsvetaeva immediately developed a maternal love for Steiger as she fabricated an ideal romantic image of him. In her first letter to him, excerpted below, Tsvetaeva assumes the maternal role and makes clear her desire for this “enclosing and embracing” love, this filial relationship with her young, ill poet. It is over the course of the following two months, after receiving Steiger’s initial correspondence, that she writes the cycle, Poems to an Orphan. Tsvetaeva recreates her former creative power by immersing herself in this constructed romance. She fills the space around the heroine with images of an imaginary lover, while dissolving herself into nature, embedding her own emotions into the natural world around her.
After this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote only a few more poems before her return to the Soviet Union and subsequent death. Given the significant role that correspondences, particularly with Boris Pasternak, played in inspiring Tsvetaeva’s poetry throughout her life in exile, this last relationship with Steiger was her final attempt to connect with what she felt was her former self.
- Tara M. Wheelwright
These translations are born out of a fascination with Nikolaj Reber's poetry that began about ten years ago when I discovered his verses online at some Russian literary sites. Since then we've been in touch on and off. He is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting postmodern Russian poets. His voice is immediately recognizable, and my goal was to be as faithful to the original as possible in order to preserve his unique style and imagery. The two poems featured here, originally published in Going to downtown (2006), represent the aesthetics of Nikolaj Reber's poetry only to a certain degree, but I believe they give readers in English a good introduction.
- Boris Kokotov
In 1938 and 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva was living in Paris with her son; her husband, Sergei Efron, who had fought with the White Army during the Civil War, had returned to the Soviet Union as an NKVD agent. Tsvetaeva and her son would follow Efron back to the Soviet Union in 1939, where it seems Tsvetaeva knew she was unlikely to survive, and where she would die in 1941. Tsvetaeva’s years in Paris were marked by almost complete isolation, these last years even more so, and it seems that at this time she knew she would not publish again.
It was within this context that Tsvetaeva wrote “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” a sustained sequence responding to the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The cycle is an impassioned outcry, condemning fascism and affirming the resilience and promise of human life and collective human struggle. It is also grounded in personal experience, political events, and an awareness of Czech history, landscape, and culture: Tsvetaeva had lived in Czechoslovakia during the first years of her exile (her son was born there in 1925), and her poems convey a sense of identification with this country so often marked by country-less-ness. The poems draw on images of the Czech national revival movement and the Czech national anthem, and often address specific political events, sometimes including quotes from newspaper articles or references to news photographs, such as the photograph taken of Hitler in a window of Prague Castle. “Poems to Czechoslovakia” is one of Tsvetaeva’s greatest works, varied yet integrated in tone and formal approach, speaking both to a particular historical moment and to larger questions of freedom, belonging, and survival.
Curiously, most significant translations of Tsvetaeva’s work, such as those by Elaine Feinstein or the recent edition by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, include just a few poems from the cycle. These translations also remove Tsvetaeva’s references to specific events; for instance, both Feinstein and Kaminsky/Valentine remove the quote from a newspaper article (“The Czechs came up to the Germans and spat”), with which Tsvetaeva prefaces “Took,” the sixth poem in the second half of the sequence. These elisions take the poems out of their context, but they also obscure the fact that Tsvetaeva was not just writing passionate poems of protest; she was also and deliberately grounding her poems in real events as they occurred.
As a translator my intention has been to correct these redactions, by considering the sequence as a whole and staying as true to the original as possible, including notes where historical and cultural references might present confusion. This translation is part of a larger project to bring Tsvetaeva’s politically oriented poems into English at a moment when the sharpness of her perceptions, and the fierceness of her reply, are acutely relevant.
- Margaree Little
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2017In a recent interview, Russian writer Igor Sakhnovsky relayed what could be taken as the author’s literary credo: “Life’s cornucopia of nonfictional material renders fantasy unnecessary.” His short story “The Jealous God of Chance” puts this precept into practice. Sakhnovsky’s peculiar breed of realism evolves out of his own life. In each of the six parts of the story, the narrator (the author’s alter ego) reflects on an autobiographical episode and imagines what could have happened along with what actually did. Rather than lamenting what might have been, Sakhnovsky relates these events in wry, staccato prose, full of irony and self-reproach. Each vignette explores a decisive moment of action, inaction, or, as the title suggests, chance. They include a near-death experience in the narrator’s childhood, a hasty marriage proposal in his early adulthood, and a fateful encounter with a Russian mobster in middle age. The last episode finds the narrator in the present, sitting at his desk, contemplating an offer from a stranger he’s been chatting with on the Internet which concerns whether or not the two should spend the rest of their lives together. An ambiguous final paragraph seems to suggest that the God of Chance is, as the narrator suggests, a jealous one.
- Michael Gluck
Novel (excerpt) | Russia | Russian
July, 2015Let the question asked and answered by one German critic stand as introduction to Vasilii Golovanov's "documentary novel" The Island (Original Russian title: остров or Ostrov):
"A travelogue, a novel, an ethnographic report, a historical narrative, a cautionary tale, an autobiography, or a collection of stories and myths? It is all of this and more. It is the kind of book that only appears a handful of times in a century."
Now it's my turn. I say The Island is a transcendently beautiful book, both formally innovative and emotionally charged, possibly the first deep engagement with the extremes of the Russian Far North that is truly post-Soviet. And by "post-Soviet" I mean it is less concerned with bearing witness to great suffering and great crimes, and more concerned with the allure of the north (although Golovanov acknowledges crimes visited upon living beings and living land).
By "post-Soviet" I also mean a work that is not explicitly political (and much of the fiction we call "post-Soviet" continues to identify itself in terms of its stance toward the power of the state). In The Island, the state is marginal, marginalized. The focus is on the individual, his environment, and whatever informs him--past traumas, personal history, education and engagement with the world around him--and as such is liberating, for any reader, not just the Russian reader.
The Island details a number of journeys Golovanov made during the nineties to the island of Kolguev, a "tiny planet" in the Barents Sea. Golovanov claims these sojourns were a therapeutic response to a personal and professional crisis brought on by his work as a war correspondent. Over time, his involvement with Kolguev broadened into a meditation on the Russian Far North, its inhabitants, its natural beauty, and its tragedy; along the way, the work he produced to document this engagement deepened into an exploration as to the meaning of travel itself.
Formally, it may be the first Russian nonfiction novel (it is billed as such). It is certainly the first Russian work I know that mixes a wide variety of genres, and puts them all at the service of a rhapsody. It is a cut-and-paste picaresque, filled with lengthy discursive asides on flora, fauna, indigenous inhabitants, earlier encounters with the landscape (by Scottish explorers, by Soviet scientists, by other late-20th-century dreamers and refugees), myths, legends, personal stories, and the vast Russian literary tradition to which Golovanov lays claim, from Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Aksakov, Platonov (to whom he consciously acknowledges a deep debt), and even the Babel of Red Cavalry. The theme of the book, or its impetus, is that of flight--and for the first time in Russian literary history this flight takes place within the vastness of Russia, because of Russia and not in spite of it, constituting challenge, possibility, and opportunity--for redemption, for self-discovery, for a deeper understanding of what it means to go to extremes.
- Adam Siegel
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We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
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