Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad

Gennady Gor

Dmitry Maksimov

Sergey Rudakov

Vladimir Sterligov

Pavel Zaltsman

Translated by Charles Swank, Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebekah Smith, Jason Wagner, Matvei Yankelevich

Edited by Polina Barskova

Ilya Kukulin, Contributor

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $18 $16.20

November 2016
Read an excerpt

Here a horse laughed on and time bounded,
The river entered the buildings.
Here papa was mama
And mama was mooing.
Suddenly the janitor exits,
He goes left.
He holds logs.
He shoves time on with his foot,
He kicks the years,
He throws the sleeping ones into the window.
The men sit
And eat soap.
They drink Neva water,
Gulping grass after…
A young woman pisses standing
There, where not long ago she strolled.
There, where empty spring roves,
Where spring roams.

[Gennady Gor, trans. Ben Felker-Quinn, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich]

In a world gone mad, the refusal of conventional sense
was a conceptual necessity.

Charles Bernstein

This anthology presents a group of writers and a literary phenomenon that has been unknown even to Russian readers for 70 years, obfuscated by historical amnesia. Gennady Gor, Pavel Zaltsman, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, and Vladimir Sterligov, wrote these works in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). In striking contrast to state-sanctioned, heroic “Blockade” poetry in which the stoic body of the exemplary citizen triumphs over death, the poems gathered here show the Siege individual (blokadnik) as a weak and desperate incarnation of Job. These poets wrote in situ about the famine disease, madness, cannibalism, and prostitution around them—subjects so tabooed in those most-Soviet times that they would never think of publishing. Moreover, the formal ambition and macabre avant-gardism of this uncanny body of work match its horrific content, giving birth to a “poor” language which alone could reflect the depth of suffering and psychological destruction experienced by victims of that historical disaster.

Polina Barskova, a Russian-language poet and scholar of the Siege, edited this volume from archival materials. The book includes an introduction by Barskova and an afterword by renowned literary critic Ilya Kukulin. The poems and supplementary materials were translated by Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebekah Smith, Charles Swank, Jason Wagner, and Matvei Yankelevich.

Written in the Dark was named Best Literary Translation into English for 2017 by AATSEEL (Association of American Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages).

About the Authors

Gennady Gor (1907-1981), born in a tsarist prison, belonged to the avant-garde circles of Leningrad in the 1930s, but was ostracized for his “formalist” novel The Cow. After the Siege and his return from evacuation in Alma-Ata, he became a well-known scholar, collector of the art of Northern ethnicities, and science fiction writer. He was renowned in Leningrad as an art historian and young writers’ mentor.

Dmitry Maksimov (1904-1987), was a renowned philologist and specialist of early twentieth-century Russian poetry. As a young poet, he discussed his works with Nikolay Zabolotsky and Konstantin Vaginov, writers close to the OBERIU circle. At the end of his life, he published in Switzerland his only book of poetry under the pseudonym Ignaty Karamov.

Sergey Rudakov (1909-1944), was a philologist and poet and friend of Osip Mandelstam during his Voronezh exile. After spending the Siege winter in Leningrad, he died in action. He was a friend and relative of Konstantin Vaginov.

Vladimir Sterligov (1904-1973), was an artist in the circle of Kazimir Malevich, one of the leaders of the Leningrad avant-garde. He was a close friend of the leaders of OBERIU, Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, the latter whose son he baptized.

Pavel Zaltsman (1912-1985), an artist, belonged to the circle of Pavel Filonov, one of the leaders of the Leningrad avant-garde. He spent most of his life working for film studios, first in Leningrad, then in Alma-Ata.

Praise

The texts collected here represent a remarkable, stunning discovery. This is not only because the unofficial, deskdrawer poems in this book were hidden and unknown until quite recently. Their survival was extremely improbable, and their transmission here is something of a miracle. These poems push modernist verse in new directions.

Emily Van Buskirk, Rutgers University

In a world gone mad—over one million perishing in the Nazi siege of Leningrad—the refusal of conventional sense was a conceptual necessity. Written in the Dark is full of wit, gallows humor, and mordant courage, with overlays of Surrealism, Futurism, Acmeism, Symbolism, and the absurd. Grappling with a fate that defies logic, poetry becomes a necessary measure against the dark, like the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse.

Charles Bernstein, U. of Pennsylvania

…Written in the Dark embodies the pain and loss of an era that few historical and literary works achieve. Each act of writing feels deliberate, questioning its function within the larger strife of the time.

Alex Niemi, Exchanges Literary Journal

Those interested in Russian literature, particularly the Russian pre-war avant-garde, will be fascinated with Written in the Dark. Ugly Duckling Presse has done a great service by bringing us these historical poems—which unfortunately remain all too timely.

John Bradley, Rain Taxi

Barskova brings to Western light a startling selection of long-hidden poems… These heirs to the Russian avant-garde brutally rend Pushkin’s fairytale verses, the sing-song march of Soviet children’s literature, and even the Russian language itself…

Publisher's Weekly

Reading about someone else’s trauma, poem after poem, page after page, can dull our senses. But these poets shock us anew with each line, making sure we remain alive to the horror… The new language creates new meaning both for those who wrote these poems and, perhaps even more importantly, for us, who may put that meaning to good use, drawing lessons from what has transpired.

Piotr Florczyk, LA Review of Books

About the Translators

Charles Swank graduated from Hampshire college, where he studied literature, translation, and Russian. He lives and works in western Massachusetts.

Anand Dibble was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He studied Russian and literary translation at Hampshire College under the guidance of Polina Barskova and spent a year in St. Petersburg studying at Smolny Institute where his behavior and writing were checked by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. He currently lives in Kyiv, where he writes a technology blog during the day and poetry at night. He has been previously published in the Ampersand Review.

Ben Felker-Quinn studied Russian and literary translation at Hampshire College when he worked on poetry of Mandelshtam, Vvedensky, and Brodsky. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. She teaches Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College. Previous UDP publications include the co-translation of Vsevolod Nekrasov (with Bela Shayevich, UDP 2013) and Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems (also with Shayevich, 2017). Other recent translations include the farcical Soviet pastoral Beyond Tula, by Andrey Egunov, and a collection of theoretical essays by the brilliant Formalist Yuri Tynianov. Coming up is the macabre modernist prose of Konstantin Vaginov and a number of contemporary Russian women poets.

Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968) grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His latest chapbook is The Feeling Sonnets (Clinic Publishing). His latest full-length book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB), discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, and was the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the Venice Biennale. His previous books include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP) and Iterature (UDP). As translator from Russian, he works primarily with OBERIU, the 1920s-1930s underground circle led by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. He has edited the first English-language collection of their writings, called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern). His collection of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB)with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich, won the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently preparing, with Daniel Mellis, an edition of Tango with Cows, a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, which is forthcoming from UDP in 2021. He also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golynko, As It Turned Out (UDP), and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).

Rebekah Smith is a writer, editor, and translator based in New York City.

Jason Wagner was raised on a hammock in the swamps of North Central Florida. He studied Russian Literature at Hampshire College. In the fall he will begin graduate studies at the University of Michigan.

Matvei Yankelevich is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and has curated UDP’s Eastern European Poets Series since 2002, and was a co-editor of 6×6 (2000-2017). His most recent book of poetry is Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square). His co-translation (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), received a National Translation Award. His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

About the Editors

Polina Barskova is a poet and a scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has three collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House) and Relocations (Zephyr Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

About the Contributors

Ilya Kukulin, a literary scholar and a cultural historian, is the author of Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture, which won the Andrey Bely Prize (2015), and has edited six volumes of critical work, ranging from the history of schooling in the 20th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. His articles on Russian literature have been published in the United States, Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, and Armenia. In Moscow, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University, a Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, and a Senior Researcher for the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. rn

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-937027-57-5
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 160 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: November 01 2016
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #38