Bios
Alexei Khvostenko
Alexei Khvostenko (1940-2004) deserves a larger, "literary" audience, but his "outsider" status is unlikely to be reversed posthumously and outside the Russian context, requiring an appreciation of him as a multi-artist (poet, singer/bard, collagist/sculptor) and an awareness of his immense popularity as a persona non grata during the exhilarating cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Soviet status quo was still in place but the liberating/decadent influences of the West had flooded in. Suspector (literally: "he who suspects") is the title poem of Khvostenko's first samizdat book (1965) at the height of the Khruschev "thaw” which was to be shortly followed by the suppression and stagnation of the Brezhnev years. These words were revolutionary, eliciting the disproportionate response from the authorities that made the Russian outsider bards Pop Icons. Khvost (his nickname means "Tail”) lived in Paris after his 1977 expulsion from the USSR.
Alex Cigale
Alex Cigale's poems recently appeared in The Cafe Review, Colorado Review, Global City Review, Green Mountains Review, The North American Review, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, McSweeney's, and Zoland Poetry, and are forthcoming in Eleven Eleven, Gargoyle, H_ngm_n, Many Mountains Moving, Redactions, St. Petersburg Review, Tar River Poetry, and 32 Poems. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, and in The Manhattan Review, The St. Ann's Review, and Yellow Medicine Review.
PODOZRITEL' (The Suspector). Copyright (c) Estate of Alexei Khvostenko, 1965. English translation copyright (c) Alex Cigale, 2009.