POETRY SAMPLER

2020

www.academicstudiespress.com CONTENTS

Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer

New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City Edited by Ostap Kin

Words for War: New Poems from Edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Series Anthology Compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk

www.academicstudiespress.com Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature An Anthology

Edited, with Introductory Essays by Maxim D. Shrayer Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiv Note on Transliteration, Spelling of Names, and Dates xvi Note on How to Use This Anthology xviii General Introduction: The Legacy of Jewish-Russian Literature Maxim D. Shrayer xxi Early Voices: 1800s–1850s 1

Editor’s Introduction 1 Leyba Nevakhovich (1776–1831) 3 From Lament of the Daughter of Judah (1803) 5 Leon Mandelstam (1819–1889) 11 “The People” (1840) 13 Ruvim Kulisher (1828–1896) 16 From An Answer to the Slav (1849; pub. 1911) 18 Osip Rabinovich (1817–1869) 24 From The Penal Recruit (1859) 26 Seething Times: 1860s–1880s 37 Editor’s Introduction 37 Lev Levanda (1835–1888) 39 From Seething Times (1860s; pub. 1871–73) 42 Grigory Bogrov (1825–1885) 57 “Childhood Sufferings” from Notes of a Jew (1863; pub. 1871–73) 59 vi Table of Contents

Rashel Khin (1861–1928) 70 From The Misfit (1881) 72 Semyon Nadson (1862–1887) 77 From “The Woman” (1883) 79 “I grew up shunning you, O most degraded nation . . .” (1885) 80 On the Eve: 1890s–1910s 81 Editor’s Introduction 81 Ben-Ami (1854–1932) 84 Preface to Collected Stories and Sketches (1898) 86 David Aizman (1869–1922) 90 “The Countrymen” (1902) 92 Semyon Yushkevich (1868–1927) 113 From The (1903) 115 Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) 124 “In Memory of Herzl” (1904) 126 Sasha Cherny (1880–1932) 130 “The Jewish Question” (1909) 132 “Judeophobes” (1909) 133 S. An-sky (1863–1920) 134 “The Book” (1910) 136 Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) 141 “Palestine” (1916) 143 Sofia Parnok (1885–1933) 149 “My anguish does the Lord not heed . . .” (1913–22) 151 “Hagar” (1913–22) 151 “Not for safekeeping for awhile . . .” (1913–22) 152 Leonid Kannegiser (1896–1918) 154 “A Jewish Wedding” (1916) 156 “Regimental Inspection” (1917) 156 Revolution and Emigration: 1920s–1930s 158 Editor’s Introduction 158 Table of Contents vii

Lev Lunts (1901–1924) 166 “Native Land” (1922) 168 Veniamin Kaverin (1902–1989) 182 “Shields (and Candles)” (1922) 184 Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) 193 “Not my mother but a Tula peasant woman . . .” (1917; 1922) 195 “In I was born. I never . . .” (1923) 197 Andrey Sobol (1888–1926) 198 “The Count” (1922–23) 200 (1891–1967) 205 From The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (1922) 209 (1893–1984) 215 From Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (1923) 218 Matvey Royzman (1896–1973) 226 “Kol Nidrei” (1923) 228 (1886–1957) 234 “The Assassination of Uritsky” (1923) 236 Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) 253 “Judaic Chaos” from Noise of Time (1925) 257 “One Alexander Herzovich . . .” (1931) 262 “Say, desert geometer, shaper . . .” (1933) 263 Dovid Knut (1900–1955) 264 “I, Dovid-Ari ben Meir…” (1925) 269 “A Kishinev Burial” (1929) 271 “The Land of ” (1938) 274 Evgeny Shklyar (1894–1942) 276 “Shield of David, crescent or ikon . . .” (1923) 278 “Where’s Home?” (1925) 278 (1894–1940) 280 “The Rabbi’s Son” (1924) 285 “Awakening” (1931) 287 viii Table of Contents

Vera Inber (1890–1972) 294 “The Nightingale and the Rose” (1925) 296 Elizaveta Polonskaya (1890–1969) 303 “Encounter” (1927) 305 Viktor Fink (1888–1973) 307 From Jews on the Land (1929) 311 “The Preachers” 311 “The New Culture” 314 Semyon Kirsanov (1906–1972) 318 “R” (1929) 320 (1895–1934) 323 “Origin”(1930) 325 From February (1934) 327 Mark Egart (1901–1956) 335 From The Scorched Land (1932) 337 (1897–1937) and Evgeny Petrov (1903–1942) 349 “The Prodigal Son Returns Home” (1930) by Ilf 352 From The Little Golden Calf (1931) by Ilf and Petrov 356 Raisa Blokh (1899–1943) 363 “A snatch of speech came floating on the air . . .” (1932) 365 “Remember, father would stand . . .” (1933) 365 War and Shoah: 1940s 367 Editor’s Introduction 367 Boris Yampolsky (1921–1972) 371 “Mr. Dykhes and Others” from Country Fair (ca. 1940) 373 Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) 390 “To the Jews” (1941) 392 “Six Poems” (The January 1945 Novy mir cycle) 394 Ilya Selvinsky (1899–1968) 397 “I Saw It” (1942) 400 “Kerch” (1942) 404 Table of Contents ix

Sofia Dubnova-Erlich (1885–1986) 409 “” (1943) 411 “Scorched Hearth” (1944) 415 (1905–1964) 419 “The Hell of Treblinka” (1944) 425 Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) 462 “Babi Yar” (1944–45; pub. 1946) 464 Pavel Antokolsky (1896–1978) 470 “Death Camp” (1945) 473 Yury German (1910–1967) 475 From Lieutenant Colonel of the Medical Corps (1949) 477 (1890–1960) 484 “In the Lowlands” (1944) 488 “” (1944) 489 From Doctor Zhivago (1946–[55]; pub. 1957) 492 The Thaw: 1950s–1960s 501 Editor’s Introduction 501 (1919–1986) 504 “These Abrám, Isák and Yákov . . .” (1953; pub. 1989) 508 “Of the Jews” (1952–56; pub. 1961) 509 “Oh, but Jews had all the luck …” (before 1955) 509 “Horses in the Ocean” (1956) 510 “Prodigal Son” (1956) 511 “Puny Jewish children . . .” (1957–58; pub. 1989) 512 Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) 513 From Life and Fate (1960; pub. 1980) 514 (1940–1996) 527 “Jewish graveyard near Leningrad . . .” (1958; pub. 1965) 532 “I’m not asking death for immortality . . .” (ca. 1961; pub. 1992) 533 Vladimir Britanishsky (1933–2015) 535 “A German Girl” (1957–58; pub. 1993) 538 x Table of Contents

Yuly Daniel (1925–1988) 540 From This Is Moscow Speaking (1961) 542 Emmanuil Kazakevich (1913–1962) 549 “Enemies” (1962) 551 Yan Satunovsky (1913–1982) 564 “In the country that has nearly forgotten . . .” (1939; pub. 1990s) 566 “Who are you, repatriated widows? . . .” (ca. 1943; pub. 1990s) 566 “Girls with golden eyes . . .” (1960; pub. 1990s) 567 “You’re mistaken . . .” (1961; pub. 1990s) 567 “It’s the end of our nation . . .” (1962; pub. 1990s) 568 “My Slavic language is Russian . . .” (1963; pub. 1990s) 569 “I’m Moyshe from Berdichev . . .” (1963; pub. 1990s) 569 “Eve, a civilized Jewess . . .” (1964; pub. 1990s) 570 “Expressionism- . . .” (1965) 570 “Blessed be the ill fate . . .” (1967) 570 “Gate slamming, shelter closing . . .” (1967) 571 “There are antisemites, and antisemites . . .” (1974) 571 “Some say: in Solzhenitsyn’s time . . .” (1974) 572 Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s–1990s 573 Editor’s Introduction 573 Vassily Aksyonov (1932–2009) 579 “Victory: A Story with Exaggerations” (1965) 582 Aleksandr Kushner (b. 1936) 589 “When that teacher in , so as not . . .” (1966) 591 “Letters” (1966) 592 Genrikh Sapgir (1928–1999) 594 “In Memory of My Father” (1962; pub. 1999) 596 “Psalm 3” (1965–66; pub. 1979) 597 “Psalm 116 (117)” (1965–66; pub. 1979) 599 “Psalm 132 (133)” (1965–66; pub. 1988) 600 “Psalm 136 (137)” (1965–66; pub. 1993) 601 Table of Contents xi

“Psalm 150” (1965–66; pub. 1993) 603 “A Pole Rode” (1985; pub. 1992) 604 Aleksandr Aronov (1934–2001) 606 “Ghetto. 1943” (1960s; pub. 1989) 608 “That raving blatherskite . . .” (1960s; pub. 1993) 609 Semyon Lipkin (1911–2003) 611 “Khaim” (1973; pub. 1979) 613 Yury Karabchievsky (1938–1992) 615 From The Life of Alexander Zilber (1974–75) 617 Inna Lisnyanskaya (1928–2014) 626 “My father, a military doctor . . .” (1975; pub. 1980) 628 “An Incident” (1981; pub. 1983) 628 Boris Slutsky (1919–1986) 630 “Let’s cross out the Pale . . .“ (1970s; pub. 1985) 630 “I love the antisemites . . .” (before 1977; pub. 1988) 631 “The rabbis came down to the valley . . .” (before 1977; pub. 1989) 632 Anatoly Rybakov (1911–1998) 633 From Heavy Sand (1975–77; pub. 1978) 637 Yury Trifonov (1925–1981) 646 “A Visit with ” (1980) from The Overturned House 650 Lev Ginzburg (1921–1980) 660 From “Only My Heart Was Broken . . .” (1980) 663 Evgeny Reyn (b. 1935) 674 “For the Last Time” (1987) 676 Sara Pogreb (b. 1921) 678 “I’m going to see my grandparents. The cart . . .” (1986) 680 “I’m bidding farewell to the slush . . .” (1989) 681 Israel Metter (1909–1996) 683 Pedigree (1980s) 685 Aleksandr Mezhirov (1923–2009) 693 From Blizzard (1986–2000) 697 xii Table of Contents

Bella Ulanovskaya (1943–2005) 700 Journey to Kashgar (1973–89) 702 Aleksandr Melikhov (b. 1947) 723 From The Confession of a Jew (1993) 725 Ludmila Ulitskaya (b. 1943) 739 “Genele the Purse Lady” (1993) 742 The Jewish Exodus: 1970s–1990s 753 Editor’s Introduction 753 Lev Mak (b. 1939) 757 “A Farewell to ” (1974; pub. 1976) 759 “August in Odessa” (1974; pub. 1983) 761 Boris Khazanov (b. 1928) 762 From The King’s Hour (1968–69; pub. 1976) 764 Ilia Bokstein (1937–1999) 768 “Afánta-Utóma” (“Fantasia-Judaica”) from Glints of the Wave (late 1960s–1970s; pub. 1978) 770 David Markish (b. 1938) 775 “The Appearance of Prophet Elijah, 1714” from The Jesters (1981–82) 777 Michael Kreps (1940–1994) 787 “Childhood” (1980s) 789 “The Cat with a Yellow Star” (1980s) 790 “Call of the Ancestors” (1980s) 791 Philip Isaac Berman (b. 1936) 793 “Sarah and the Rooster” (1988) 795 Ruth Zernova (1919–2004) 817 “All Vows” (1988) 819 David Shrayer-Petrov (b. 1936) 827 “Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Wife” (1975; pub. 1990) 830 “My Slavic Soul” (1975; pub. 1990) 831 “Villa Borghese” (1987–90) 831 “Hände Hoch!” (1999) 833 Table of Contents xiii

Marina Temkina (b. 1948) 843 “1995: Happy New Year!” (1995) 845 Dina Rubina (b. 1953) 847 From Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) 849 Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002) 858 “The Arrest of an Antisemite” (1998) 860 Anna Gorenko (1972–1999) 870 “wake up all the poets all died overnight . . .” (1995) 872 “The Golem” (1997) 873 “Translating from the European” (1999) 874

Outline of Jewish-Russian History John D. Klier 875 The Jews in Russia and the , 1772–2000: A Selected Bibliography 895 Bibliography of Primary Sources 900 Index of Authors 927 Index of Translators 930 Index of Names, Works, and Subjects 933 About the Editor 974 The Thaw: 1950s–1960s

Editor’s Introduction

In the post-World War II conditions, the issue of Jewish cultural memory became acutely significant. Both the émigré critic Vera Alexandrova (origi- nally in 1968) and the post-Soviet scholar Aleksandr Kobrinsky (in 1994) have emphasized that, for the second and the later Soviet generations of Jewish- Russian writers, the cultural memory of the past and the traditions of Jewish literature would display themselves with subtlety but would never disappear. In contrast to some of their elders, the later generations of Jewish-Russian authors experienced less or no euphoria over the prospects of a harmonious Soviet assimilation and Jewish-Russian fusion. As the materials gathered in the postwar and late Soviet sections will demonstrate, Jewish-Russian authors born in the late 1910s–early 1920s (the generation of Boris Slutsky [1919–1986]) and in the late 1930s–early 1940s (the generation of Joseph Brodsky [1940–1996]) could never shake the burden of otherness even while attempting to escape the Soviet-prescribed boundaries of their own Jewish selves. Among the historical events that shaped the self-awareness of Soviet Jews in the postwar period, Stalin’s mani- acal Judeophobia of the 1940s and early 1950s and the persecution of the Jewish intelligentsia left an indelible print in memory. For the vast majority of Soviet Jews, writing in Russian after World War II ceased to be a choice, fur- ther complicating what Alice Stone Nakhimovsky so aptly described in 1985, on the example of the still bilingual David Aizman (see the section “On the Eve: 1890s–1910s”): “By choosing [emphasis added] to write in Russian and about Jews, a writer is taking on a tradition that runs counter to the kind of ­unconscious self-identification that others working in their national literatures take for granted. Working in Russian, he becomes both Russian and Jew; a revi- sionist, a sympathizer, a self-hater.” Over the years of the Thaw and the late Soviet period, degrees and shades of Jewish self-expression—and of Jewish self-suppression—determined many a writer’s place not only in the official landscape of Russian Soviet literature but consequently in the underground and in emigration. 502 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

The Thaw, named after a trend-setting novel of 1954, which Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) quickly composed after Stalin’s death, was the time of the dismantling of Stalin’s cult of personality. The rehabilitation of the vic- tims of began, including the victims of anti-Jewish cultural genocide. Jewish-Russian writers stood at the forefront of cultural politics during this period of partial and temporary liberalization, which first peaked ideologically with ’s anti-Stalin “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 and had its final de-Stalinizing crescendo at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1962. As a member of the generation of writ- ers who came of age during the Great Terror and World War II, Boris Slutsky (1919–1986) emerged as a principal literary exponent of the Thaw. Jewish- Russian authors of different generations and backgrounds met in the camp of liberalizers, among them the former writer Emmanuil Kazakevich (1913–1962). Some of the older writers found windows of limited opportu- nity for Jewish creativity within the Thaw-era official press. Kazakevich, for instance, used a relatively safe political pretext to sound a Jewish note in his story “Enemies,” about Lenin and two Jewish revolutionaries. Authors such as the poet Naum Korzhavin (b. 1925) wove together the recent histories of Stalinism, Hitlerism, and the Shoah in texts they managed to push past the censors. Some older writers sought greater safety in autobiographical and memoiristic writings, revisiting their prerevolutionary childhood and youth. Guardedly Jewish recollections, such as At the Beginning of Life (1961) by Samuil Marshak (his poems are in the section “On the Eve: 1890s–1910s”), meant the world to the Jewish reader in the USSR. Writing about the impact of officially published works on the Jewish self-awareness of the Soviet reader, Shimon Markish stated, perhaps too emphatically, that “not one book in Russian Soviet literature in the fifteen years after Stalin’s death did as much for the Jewish awakening as did [Ehrenburg’s panoramic memoir] People, Years, Life,” published mostly in 1960–65. For the younger generation of Jewish-Russian authors born in the late 1930s and early 1940s and entering the literary stage during the Thaw (primar- ily featured in the sections “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s–1990s” and “The Jewish Exodus: 1970s–1990s”), elements of Jewish self-expression were enmeshed with notes of protest. Poems such as “Jewish graveyard near Leningrad . . .” (1961) by Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) could not be published in the official press but circulated in the underground and first appeared in the West. Others, such as “A German Girl” (1957–58) by Vladimir Britanishsky (1933–2015), were not published until the years of . The Thaw: 1950s–1960s 503

During the Thaw, the literary underground became a prominent feature of cultural life in the USSR, attracting some of the Jewish-Russian authors who were unable (or unwilling) to break into the official literary mainstream. The limited opportunities available in the official Soviet culture pushed writers into the underground throughout the 1960s–80s. Jewish topics were central to the works of some authors who could not publish officially (in this anthology, the 1960s poems by Yan Satunovsky [1913–1982] and also poems by Genrikh Sapgir [1928–1999], in the section “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s–1990s”). In This Is Moscow Speaking by Yuly Daniel (1925–1988)— an anti-Soviet novel smuggled out of the USSR and published in the West— motifs of are treated with an articulate absence of the Thaw-era illusions that permeated officially published works. Liberating as the Thaw was for both Soviet letters and Soviet society, openly Jewish works were mod- estly represented in the Soviet literature of the post-Stalinist 1950s and 1960s, which explains their limited selection in this anthology. Finally, in connection with the culture and politics of the Thaw, it bears remembering that streaks of “chill” and periods of “frost” accompanied the more liberal seasons of the Thaw from the outset. Very telling was the destiny of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1960)—the most important work about the Shoah completed during the Thaw. Seized by the KGB in 1961, the novel did not appear until 1980 in the West and at home not until the reform years of perestroika. Selective targeting and persecution of Jewish artists and writ- ers, such as the harassment and trial of Joseph Brodsky in 1963–64, marked the latter years of Khrushchev’s rule. Nikita Khrushchev was ousted during the bloodless coup of October 1964 and the installment of Leonid Brezhnev as the new Soviet leader. Introduction copyright © by Maxim D. Shrayer. BORIS SLUTSKY

Boris Slutsky (1919–1986), poet, translator, and essayist, was born in Slavyansk (now Province of Ukraine) and grew up in Kharkov. Slutsky attended the literary studio (lito) at the Kharkov Palace of Young Pioneers. Succumbing to pressure from his father, who had trouble imagining (Russian) poetry as a career (for a Jew), Slutsky entered the Moscow Institute of Law in 1937. The following year, Slutsky was accepted to the Moscow Literary Institute on the recommendation of Pavel Antokolsky. He combined reading law with the study of creative writing. Slutsky joined the seminar of Ilya Selvinsky and became a leading member of a circle of young poets that included Semyon Gudzenko, , Mikhail Kulchitsky, Sergey Narovchatov, and David Samoylov (Kaufman); poets Kogan and Kulchitsky perished in World War II. In 1941, a poem of Slutsky’s appeared in the monthly October; he waited twelve years for his next publication of poetry. Slutsky volunteered right after the Nazi invasion, serving initially as a military jurist and in 1942 switching to the track of a political officer. Slutsky spent 1942–44 at the southern fronts; in 1943, he learned about the murder of his family members in the Kharkov ghetto. Slutsky joined the Communist Party in 1943 and was promoted to deputy head of the Fifty-Seventh Army political department. Slutsky wrote virtually no poetry during the front years. He completed a book of documentary prose about his experiences in 1944–45 in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, , and Austria. In the chapter “The Jews,” Slutsky interspersed authorial observations with survivors’ testimony. Lacking the pathos of Ilya Ehrenburg’s essays about the Shoah published in the 1940s, Slutsky’s book combined harsh truths about marauding Soviet troops with ideological window dressing and remained unpublished until the post-Soviet years. The complete text appeared in Notes about the War (2000), edited by Slutsky’s longtime friend Pyotr Gorelik. Slutsky ended his service in August 1946 as a decorated Guards major. Having been twice seriously injured, Slutsky spent two years in and out of hospitals. He returned to Moscow during the darkest years for Soviet Jewry. Receiving a small disability pension, he did hack literary work. An avant-gardist writing at the time when experimentation was deemed “formalist,” “decadent,” and “bourgeois,” Slutsky had a perilous time. “,” apparently his second published poem for adult readers, appeared in August 1953, after Stalin’s death. Boris Slutsky 505

In July 1956, Ilya Ehrenburg lauded Slutsky in Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta). Slutsky became an icon of the Thaw, an enemy of the entrenched Stalinists, and a hero of the liberal intelligentsia then overcome with the palliative optimism of the Twentieth Party Congress. Slutsky’s first collection, Memory, selected by Vladimir Ognyov from a “suitcase of manu- scripts,” appeared in 1957 to include elegantly rough-hewn, street-smart, colloquial, factographically lyrical poems about the war and the shedding of illusions. Slutsky bridged “the generation of 1940” and the one entering the Soviet literary scene during the Thaw. Poets as different as Joseph Brodsky, Genrikh Sapgir, or Yevgeny Yevtushenko acknowledged Slutsky’s impact. Slutsky’s Thaw poems, such as “Horses in the Ocean” (published 1956; text below) and “Physicists and Lyricists” (published 1959), gained national fame. Speedily accepted to the Writers’ Union, in 1957 Slutsky traveled to Italy with a delegation of Soviet poets that included, as a calculated gesture, Jews (Slutsky and ) and victims of Stalinism (Nikolay Zabolotsky). In the poem “I grew up under Stalin . . .” (pub. 1965), Slutsky articulated a transformation from faith to questioning to outright rejection of Stalin: “With sadness over his [i.e., Stalin’s] having croaked/I didn’t soil my soul./I took off, like a rumpled shirt/Him, who ruled and severely punished.” A Jew, a Communist, and a war veteran, an “official dissident,” and heir-designate to the 1920s Left Art, Slutsky solidified his position as a leading anti-Stalinist poet with the publication, in 1962 in Literary Gazette, of the poems “God” and “The Boss” (or “The Master”). Some critics pidgeon-holed Slutsky as a “frontline poet,” but he and his poetry were always about more than war or Stalinism: a Janus-like visionary, whose actions enforced the official Soviet rhetorics that many of his poems subverted. G. S. Smith, whose book of Slutsky’s translations with commentary, Things that Happened (1999), introduced Slutsky to the Anglo-American reader, called Slutsky “the most imporant Soviet poet of his generation.” Given the magnitude of his talent and influence, a reckoning of Slutsky’s career can be frustrating. The episode that most tarnished Slutsky’s reputa- tion was his speech against Boris Pasternak during a meeting of Moscow writers on 31 October 1958, which “unanimously” passed a resolution to “expell” Pasternak from the Union of Soviet Writers. Smith characterized Slutsky’s opprobrious conduct as “an act that was honest and sincere but that tormented Slutsky for the rest of his life.” Apologism does no justice to the complexity of Slutsky’s nature and ambitions. Referring to the pressure­ 506 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

that the Party’s central committee exerted upon him, Slutsky claimed that he spoke with “the least indecency.” In agreeing to attack the author of Doctor Zhivago, Slutsky apparently regarded Pasternak as a sacrifical lamb—“the price”—of the Thaw. The translator of Italian writers into Russian Lev Vershinin related in his 2002 memoir how after his speech Slutsky “rushed to Peredelkino to see Pasternak [. . .] and not figuratively but literally fell on his knees and begged forgiveness [. . .].” In the post-Soviet mythology, Slutsky has emerged as both a calculating idealist and a romantic realist. The lives and oeuvres of such Western left-wing avant-gardists as Pablo Picasso, Louis Aragon, and Bertold Brecht loomed before Slutsky’s eyes, but he was living in a Soviet totalitarian state. Slutsky attempted to intercede on behalf of undergound writers and visual artists, argu- ing that revolutionary art demanded radical experimentation. He promoted gifted Russian poets, among them Igor Shklyarevsky (b. 1938), and openly helped Jewish-Russian poets and encouraged them to fight antisemitism using official Soviet means. Yet the fact that one of his closest Russian protégés, poet and essayist Stanislav Kunyaev (b. 1932), in the late 1970s became a leader of the then emergent Russian ultranationalist literary movement suggests that Slutsky had deluded himself into believing he could rear poet-disciples in his own, as he may have hoped, internationalist image. Few poets of the postwar Soviet era were Slutsky’s equals in making lofty poetry out of the polluted idiom of Soviet daily living. During two decades of peak form, 1957–77, Slutsky published a new or selected volume nearly every other year. Titles of his collections augment a penchant for both philosoph- ical lyricism and inflation of prosaisms: Time (1959), Today and Yesterday (1961), Work (1964), Contemporary Stories [or Histories] (1969), The Year [Clock] Hand (1971), Day’s Kindness (1973), Unfinished Debates (1978), Hand and Soul (1981), Terms (1984), and others. Slutsky published many translations from languages of the Soviet republics and the Eastern Bloc. He produced exemplary renditions of Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963), the Turkish poet living in exile. Slutsky translated Yiddish poets, including Shmuel Halkin, Aron Kushnirov, Leyb Kvitko, and Aron Vergelis. In 1963, when the USSR still had diplomatic relations with Israel, the anthology Poets of Israel appeared in Moscow and comprised Russian translations, some expurgated, of the works by Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic poets living in Israel, a number of whom were identified in the biographical notes as “Communists” or “progressives.” Slutsky was listed as the volume’s editor but not the author of the tendentious ­introduction, signed “From the Publisher.” Boris Slutsky 507

In February 1977, Slutsky’s wife, Tatyana Dashkovskaya (1930–1977), died of cancer. They were childless, and Slutsky loved his wife beyond any words—and any poems. Slutsky wrote for three months after his wife’s death, creating piercing love poems and several texts with Jewish themes, but then severe depression set in. After spending some time in mental institutions, Slutsky moved to Tula, a city south of Moscow, where he lived in his brother’s family. He wrote no poetry for the rest of his life and died there in 1986. Pyotr Gorelik reported that in 1975 Slutsky had told him he had about five hundred unpublished poems—and this turned out to be a conservative assessment. Party functionaries and the KGB kept a watchful eye on Slutsky, especially in respect to his treatment of the Shoah and antisemitism, and his poems printed in the 1950s–70s reveal censorial corruptions. Largely through the devotion of Slutsky’s executor, the critic Yury Boldyrev (1934–1993), numerous magazine publications and a number of books appeared during the reform and the post-Soviet years, including Slutsky’s three-volume Collected Works (1991). In 2013, Marat Grinberg published a study of Slutsky’s poetics.

* * * Some of Slutsky’s earliest Jewish poems (1938–40) have been lost. In 1938, he wrote “The Story of an Old Jew (Story from Abroad),” his first known response to ; it appeared fifty-five years later in Israel. After witnessing the imme- diate aftermath of the Shoah in 1944–45 and writing nonfiction about it, Slutsky returned to poetry as the anticosmopolitan campaign gained speed. Memories of the destruction of European Jewry became enmeshed in Slutsky’s acutely political imagination with the antisemitic crimes of late Stalinism, giving rise to a conflation of Jewish questions that Slutsky put in verse in the 1950s and 1960s and later revisited in the 1970s. The most outspoken of Slutsky’s poems about the Shoah and antisem- itism did not appear in the USSR until the reform years, although several circulated in samizdat and appeared in the West, some anonymously. (Pyotr Gorelik included a selection in Slutsky’s volume Now Auschwitz Often Appears in My Dreams . . . [St. Petersburg, 1999].) Some of Slutsky’s poems pub- lished in the USSR treated Jewish themes by employing Aesopian language and allegory. In his memoir “A Jerusalem Cossack” (1991), David Shrayer- Petrov called Slutsky’s “Horses in the Ocean” (see below) a “requiem for the murdered Jews.” In the 1950s–70s, Slutsky steered into print more poems where the Shoah was memorialized, the Jewish question was explic- itly debated, and the word “Jew” was used unabashedly than any of his 508 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

Soviet contemporaries. Slutsky the legalist proceeded as though the official rhetoric on the Jewish question and antisemitism protected Soviet Jews. A tetrade of Slutsky’s Jewish poems appeared in Soviet magazines as the second Thaw peaked and entered its downward spiral. Three of them, “Birch Tree in Auschwitz” (published 1962), “How They Killed My Grandma” (published 1963), and “Burdened by familial feelings . . .” (published 1964), following in the footsteps of Ehrenburg’s wartime writings and Vasily Grossman’s story “The Old Teacher,” transgressed the unspoken taboo on singling out the Shoah. In this selection of Slutsky’s Jewish poems from the 1950s, only two, “Horses in the Ocean” and “Prodigal Son,” appeared in the USSR in Slutsky’s lifetime (see bibliography of primary sources). Of the other four, two (“Oh, but we Jews had all the luck . . .” and “Of the Jews”) circulated as a pair in the Soviet underground and appeared abroad in the 1960s–70s. The other two, “These Abrám, Isák, and Yákov . . .” and “Puny Jewish children . . .” (cf. the opening of Isaac Babel’s “Awakening” in this anthology), languished in Slutsky’s desk drawer until 1989 (see additional poems in the section “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s–1990s”).

* * * These Abrám, Isák and Yákov Have inherited little or none From Messrs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob— Gentlefolk of worldly renown.

In esteem travels the father of nations, Wise Abraham; at the same time, Goes Abram like a poor relation. Praise to Abraham—a plague on Abram.

They sing hallelujas for Isaac From the generous altars on high. But they scrutinize Isak through the eyehole And don’t let him inside their homes. Since the time Jacob wrestled with God Since that time, Boris Slutsky 509 when God had prevailed, Jacob’s known as Yakov. This wretched Yakov Always stands in everyone’s way. 1953

* * * Oh, but we Jews had all the luck. With no false banner to mask its presence, Plain evil threw itself on us, Seeing no need in noble pretense.

The loud disputes had not begun Across the deaf, triumphant country. But we, pressed to the corner with a gun, Discovered solid ground. before 1955

of the jews

The Jews don’t push on a plow, The Jews, as a rule, are loud, The Jews rip you off at the market, The Jews take a good thing and muck it.

The Jews are dangerous people, Don’t ask a Jew to do battle; Ivan lies down for his country, Abram stands behind the counter.

I’ve heard this since childhood, Now my hair is graying. “Jews! Jews!” the incessant holler Will hound me into the grave. 510 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

I never stood behind a counter, I’ve never stolen anyone’s purse, But I carry this race like a curse: And I’m quartered according to quota.

The Nazi bullet had spared me, So neighbors could truthfully intone: “None of the Jews perished! All of them returned home!” 1952–56

horses in the ocean for I. Ehrenburg

Horses weren’t made for water. They can swim but not too far.

“Gloria” means the same as “glory”— You will easily remember this part.

Braving the sea, a transatlantic vessel Raised its flag above the stormy waves.

In its hold stood a thousand horses, Four thousand feet stamping night and day.

A thousand horses! Four thousand horseshoes! Not a single one could bring good luck.

In the middle of the stormy ocean A torpedo tore the plates apart.

People piled into rafts and lifeboats, Horses had to swim as best they could.

Boats and dinghies weren’t made for horses— What else could the poor creatures do? Boris Slutsky 511

A floating herd of reds and bays, a real Island in the blue-green sea.

And at first they thought it was a river, And it wasn’t difficult to swim.

But the river before them was unending. As they reached the limit of their strength

The horses raised a neigh, protesting Against those who pulled them into the depths.

Horses neighed and drowned and drowned, All went down, to the very last.

That’s all. But I often think about it: Drowning red horses, far away from land. 1956

prodigal son

In the ragged robes of need, In the exhaustion of toil, The prodigal son finds his childhood home. He taps at the windowpane softly: “May I?” “Son! My only one! Certainly! Please, come in! Do whatever your heart desires. Wet your father’s old cheek, chew the calf’s fragrant meat. It’s a blessing to have you around! Oh, son, won’t you settle down and stay here a while?” With a thick wooly beard he’s wiping his mouth As he puts away the stew, As he drinks the cold clear water, Beads of sweat glittering on his brow From such unfamiliar labors. Now he’s eaten as much as he could, 512 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

And he goes To the room where the clean bed awaits him. How long has it been since he rested! Then wakes up and puts on his clothes, Finds his staff, And without a word, goes. 1956

* * * Puny Jewish children, Bespectacled and bookish, Who triumph on the chessboard But can’t do a single push-up,

Consider this suggestion: Kayaking, boxing, sailing; Take on the barren glacier, Run barefoot in the grasslands.

The more you come to punches, The fewer books, the better. Keep turning where the wind blows, Keep marching with the ages, Try not to break formation, Leave the boundaries in place.

The terrible twentieth century Still has a few more years. 1957–58 Translated from the Russian by Sergey Levchin and Maxim D. Shrayer Boris Slutsky, “U Abrama, Isaka i Iakova . . . ,” “A nam, evreiam, povezlo . . . ,” “Pro evreev,” “Loshadi v okeane,” “Bludnyi syn,” and “Evreiskim khilym detiam . . . .” Copyright © by the Estate of Boris Slutsky. English translation copyright © by Sergey Levchin and Maxim D. Shrayer. Introduction copyright © by Maxim D. Shrayer. JOSEPH BRODSKY

Joseph (Iosif) Brodsky (1940–1996), poet, essayist, translator, and play- wright, was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His Biblical first name also belonged to the Soviet dictator . After Brodsky’s death in New York, contemporaries felt “in his fate,” to quote Genrikh Sapgir, “the lot of Biblical Joseph, who was sold into bondage by his brothers and later rose up and was revered in a strange land, which he made his own.” Brodsky’s father was a photojournalist; his mother was trained as a transla- tor and worked as an accountant. Brodsky left school at fifteen, never to return to formal education, and changed jobs many times between 1956 and 1962. His earliest poems, written in 1957–59, exhibited overtly modernist influ- ences, but in the 1960s he transitioned back in time, engaging in a fusion of baroque and neoclassical poetry with the poetry of the Silver Age and early Soviet . In 1959–60 Brodsky appeared on the Leningrad literary scene and quickly gained acclaim and notoriety, his works still unpublished. The Leningrad poetic peers he was close to at the time included Evgeny Reyn, Anatoly Nayman, Dmitry Bobyshev, David Shrayer-Petrov, and Vladimir Uflyand. In the early 1960s, he fell under the profound personal influence of the great Russian poet (1889–1966). Brodsky taught him- self English and Polish. When Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam’s widow first heard Brodsky read, they responded, “it [sounds] so much like Osip [Mandelstam].” In 1962, Brodsky fell in love with the artist and book designer Marina Basmanova, who was not Jewish. They were never married; their son, Andrey Basmanov, was born in 1967. Brodsky subsequently collected his poems for Basmanova in New Stanzas to Augusta: Poems to M. B., 1962–1982 (1983). A denunciatory article titled “A Paraliterary Drone” appeared in Evening Leningrad (Vechernii Leningrad) on 29 February 1963, signed “A. Ionin, Ya. Lerner, M. Medvedev.” Brodsky’s main detractor, the Jewish opportun- ist Yakov Lerner, commanded a Komsomol Youth Brigade; he was subse- quently convicted for corruption. Brodsky was arrested in February 1964 and was charged with “social parasitism” because he did not have a full-time job (he had been doing literary work on a free-lance basis). He set a new standard for literary martyrdom during his trial on 18 February 1964 and was sentenced to five years of administrative exile, which he served in a remote village in 528 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

Archangelsk Province. Some of Brodsky’s greatest lyrics, including the cycle “A Part of Speech” (1975–76), emerged out of a poetic distillation of his north- ern exile. Brodsky’s sentence was commuted after eighteen months. Brodsky returned to Leningrad in the fall of 1965, and a Russian-language volume, Longer and Shorter Poems, appeared that same year in Washington, DC. His poems also appeared in translation, including volumes in German (1966), English (1967), and Hebrew (Akedat Yisak [Sacrifice of Isaac], trans. Ezra Zusman, 1969). His second Russian collection, A Halt in the Wilderness, appeared in New York in 1970. Brodsky had developed a unique voice by the late 1960s. Brodsky managed to publish a handful of poems and some translations in the Soviet Union, his poems already widely circulating in Soviet samizdat. Yet he refused to compromise with the Soviet authorities. In May 1972, the authorities insisted that Brodsky fill out an application to immigrate to Israel although Brodsky expressly did not wish to be a statistic of Jewish emigra- tion. He arrived in Vienna on 4 June 1972 and met his hero, W. H. Auden (1907–1973), who wrote a foreword to Brodsky’s Selected Poems (1973), trans- lated by George L. Kline. In 1981, after nine years at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Brodsky moved to a professorial position at Mount Holyoke College, dividing his time between New York City and Massachusetts. Between 1972 and 1996, a number of collections and volumes of Brodsky’s Russian verse appeared in the West, among them A Part of Speech: Poems 1972–1976 (1977), The End of a Beautiful Epoch: Poems 1964–71 (1977), Urania (1987), and Landscape with a Flood (1996). Several books of Brodsky’s poetry came out in English during his lifetime; Brodsky’s poems were collected in the posthumous Collected Poems in English (2000). In the 1970s, Brodsky began to write essays in English. They were collected in Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) and Of Grief and Reason: Essays (1995). Brodsky composed a book-­ essay about Venice, published in English as Watermark (1992). Simultaneously a memoir and a treatise on time, exilic memory, and beauty, Watermark shows that fascism and antisemitism are aesthetically incompatible with true art. W. H. Auden is Brodsky’s idealized protagonist, and Ezra Pound, the antihero. An American citizen since 1977, Brodsky was the fourth writer in Russian— and the second Russian Jew—to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987). In 1991–92, Brodsky was a Poet Laureate. By the mid-1980s, Brodsky was a cult figure in the USSR, but an official return of his poetry to the USSR, in 1987, was poisoned by some ­xenophobic Joseph Brodsky 529 statements in the Soviet press. Brodsky’s books were first published in the USSR in 1990. Many more followed, including a 1998 eight-volume edition. Brodsky never visited Russia. In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, a half-Italian, half-Russian Catholic. Their daughter, Anna, was born in 1993. Brodsky died in New York of heart failure on 28 January 1996 and was buried in Venice. “By most accounts,” wrote David M. Bethea, “[Brodsky] is the greatest poet to have been born in Soviet times [. . .].” Brodsky drew inspiration from Russian eighteenth-century poets and from English and Polish metaphysical poets. Among the Russian poets who played formative roles in Brodsky’s devel- opment were (listed alphabetically) Eduard Bagritsky, Nikolay Klyuev, Osip Mandelstam, , Boris Slutsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. “[Tsevetaeva] was the only poet [. . .] with whom I decided not to compete,” Brodsky told Sven Birkerts in 1979. When people try to bring [Brodsky’s ‘immense verbal brilliance’] into English, what you often get is almost pyrotechnics, and almost brilliance, so partly you read his poetry in English as an act of faith [. . .],” stated Robert Haas in 1996. Given the circumstances under which Brodsky mastered the English language, as a writer in English he lacked perfect pitch. He treated English prosody as though it were Russian in translation. Brodsky’s Anglo-American critics often fail to acknowledge how much he had done for the preservation of poetry as an art form.

* * * Jewish references are not numerous in Brodsky’s poems. Three poems of the Soviet period deserve consideration. Shimon Markish singled out “Jewish graveyard near Leningrad . . .” (1958) as an example of a direct influence of Boris Slutsky (see Slutsky’s “Of the Jews” in this section). “I’m not asking death for immortality . . .” (ca. 1961, also included below) has received less atten- tion. Brodsky’s third overtly Jewish poem is “Liejyklos,” part 2 of “Lithuanian Divertissement” (1971). “Liejyklos” (name of a street where Jews used to live in Vilna) sketches two scenarios of Jewish-Russian history, one of which is emigration. (In America, the motif of Brodsky’s Litvak ancestor pushing a cart across Vilna resurfaced in his “Lithuanian Nocturne” [1974].) Given Brodsky’s manifest metaphysical interests, can one agree with Lev Loseff’s conclusion that “[. . .] Jewishness [. . .] was for [Brodsky] primarily an anthropological quality”? Much more than an expression of ethnic markers of identity, “crow, the Jewish bird” in Brodsky’s poem “Afterword to the Fable” 530 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

(1993) harkens back to Schwartz the “Jewbird” in Bernard Malamud’s 1963 tale of Jewish-American self-loathing and assimilation. At the same time, the versification of the poem suggests an homage to Osip Mandelstam’s “Say, desert geometer, shaper . . . ” (1933; in this anthology). Brodsky followed in Osip Mandelstam’s footsteps by coopting into his Judeo-Christian heritage the world of (pagan) classical antiquity. Many of Brodsky’s poems, especially the “Nativity” cycle, project a Christian outlook comparable with that of Boris Pasternak, although devoid of self-hating com- plexes. Shadows of Pasternak’s (apostatic) devotionalism hover over Brodsky’s poems, giving them dramatic power but also a greater distance from the Gospel narratives as compared to many poets who were reared Christian (e.g., part 10 of Brodsky’s 1971 “Nature Morte”). Some of Brodsky’s readers scorn his less than reverent attitude toward Russian Orthodoxy (e.g., Brodsky’s 1986 “Performance”). Loseff conceded that Brodsky’s “[. . .] treatment of Christian subjects was tinged with agnosticism, being irreverent, even blasphemous.” Brodsky regarded with mocking irony the converts to Russian Orthodoxy among Soviet Jews of his generation. The title of Shimon Markish’s essay about Brodsky—“‘Jew and Hellene’? ‘Neither Jew nor Hellene’?: Of Brodsky’s Religiosity”—captured the Jewish ­critic’s hesitancy. Brodsky’s discursive attitudes toward his Jewishness are ambiv- alent and self-contradictory, in places betraying his irritation with attempts to assign him a predictable identity. “I have not exactly been mishandled, but I’ve had my cup to drink with the Jews since I came to the West, and I resent this,” Helen Benedict reported Brodsky saying in a 1985 profile. “Westerners can’t really swallow properly that in Russia, Christianity and Judaism are not divorced that much. Whatever happened to Jesus is somehow prefigured by the prophets. In a sense, we are more scholars of both testaments than wor- shipers—or, at least, I am.” “On the whole, I’d rather not resort to any formal religious rite or service,” Brodsky told Sven Birkerts. “I’m a little bit opposed to that kind of grocery store psychology which underlies Christianity. [. . .] I would go for the Old Testament God who punishes—[Birkerts interrupts:] Irrationally—No, arbitrarily [. . .]. In that respect I think I’m more of a Jew than any Jew in Israel.” “And how did you, author of [. . .] ‘Jewish graveyard near Leningrad . . . ,’ come to Christianity?” the Parisian Russian émigré journalist Vitaly Amursky asked Brodsky in 1990. “Everything depends on how narrowly or broadly one understands Christianity [. . .],” Brodsky responded. Brodsky’s knowledge of Judaism hardly extended beyond reading the Hebrew Bible in Joseph Brodsky 531

Russian and English translations. After having lived and taught in the post– Vatican II West for many years, Brodsky seemed undeterred in his statements by centuries of Christian supercessionism. The question of Brodsky’s penchant for Christianity comes up in Solomon Volkov’s Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (English publication 1998). “In conversation with [Anna Akhmatova], or simply drinking tea or vodka with her, you became a Christian, a human being in the Christian sense of that word, faster than by reading the appropriate texts or attending church.” What did Brodsky mean when he said “you became a Christian”? In 1989, Anatoly Nayman told Valentina Polukhina, “In the words ‘Christian culture’ I stress ‘Christian,’ because in Christianity there are matters more important than cul- ture. And I say ‘Christian culture.’ At the same time, it seems to me, Joseph says: ‘Christian culture.’” Consider a fascinating published conversation between Isaiah and Diana Abaeva-Myers: Berlin asked, “Did [Brodsky] believe in God or not?” Myers answered, “I think not, in the conventional sense. [. . .] In Christ, in that which stands behind it, he believed absolutely.” Berlin asked, “But he did not take baptism, did he?” Myers answered, “No. But he inscribed a book for me ‘from a Christian by correspondence.’ [. . .] But taking baptism for him would have been violence over nature [. . .].” “And why, do you think, did he avoid Israel?” Myers asked Berlin. “He simply did not want to belong to any com- munity,” Berlin replied. “[. . .] he didn’t want to be a Jewish Jew. To be sur- rounded by Jews, tormented by Jewish thoughts, to be thinking about Jewish problems—that was not for him.”

* * * Two prominent Jewish references in Brodsky’s early poems are concerned with death. The first occurs in “Jewish graveyard near Leningrad . . .” (1958, pub. abroad in 1965), where Brodsky described the Jewish Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery, built in the early 1900s outside St. Petersburg. A number of Jewish men and women who had glorified were buried there, includ- ing the Vilna-born sculptor Mark (Mordechai) Antokolsky (1843–1902). The second Jewish reference, in the poem “I’m not asking death for immortal- ity . . .” (ca. 1961, pub. 1992), brings to mind the ending of ’s “As I wander down noisy streets . . .” (1829), with its intimation of mortal- ity: “And where will fate send me death?/In battle, in my wanderings, among waves?/Or will the neighboring valley/Receive my cold dust? // And although 532 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

it is all the same to the unfeeling body/ Wherever it may rot,/Yet nearer to my dear haunts/I would like to rest. // And at the entrance to the grave/ I want young life to be at play,/And let indifferent nature/Shine with everlast- ing beauty.” Reading young Brodsky’s unfulfilled prophesy about his “Jewish grave” brings unwanted tears to the eyes of his many Jewish readers.

* * * Jewish graveyard near Leningrad. Crooked fence of rotten plywood. Behind the fence lie side by side lawyers, merchants, musicians, and revolutionaries.

For themselves they were singing. For themselves building savings. For others they were dying. But first they paid taxes, respected policemen and, in this hopelessly material world, interpreted Talmud, remaining idealists.

Maybe they saw more. Or perhaps their faith was blind. But they taught their children to be tolerant and to be persistent And they did not sow grain. They never sowed grain. They simply laid themselves in the cold soil like grain. And went to sleep forever. They were covered with soil, candles were lit for them, and on the Day of Remembrance hungry old men wheezing from the cold were shouting in high voices about eternal calm. And they achieved it in the form of decaying matter. Joseph Brodsky 533

Remembering nothing. Forgetting nothing. Behind the crooked fence of rotten plywood two and a half miles from the end of the tram line. 1958

* * * I’m not asking death for immortality, Frightened, beloved, beggarly, but with every day I live, I breathe with greater pluck, warmth, and purity.

How broad the embankments seem to me. How cold, windy, and eternal. And the clouds gleaming in the window are broken, airy, and ephemeral.

And I won’t die in summer or fall— the winter sheet won’t stir. a mere thread burns between me and life. look, my love, there in the sunlit corner.

And something like a spider who has been stepped on runs curiously in and out of me, but my exhalations and my gestures hang in the space between time and me.

Yes. I shout about my fate to time louder and louder in sad defiance. Yes. I make myself aware of time but time answers me with silence.

Fly in through the window and quiver in flame! fly down to the wick of the greedy candle. Whistle for me, river! Bell, toll for me, my Petersburg, my firebell. 534 Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

Let time be silent about me. Let the sharp wind weep easily. and over my Jewish grave, let young life shout persistently. ca. 1961 Translated from the Russian by Joanna Trzeciak Joseph Brodsky, “Evreiskoe kladbishche okolo Leningrada . . .” and “Bessmertiia u smerti ne proshu . . . .” Copyright © by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. Translated and reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. English translation copyright © by Joanna Trzeciak. Introduction copyright © by Maxim D. Shrayer. NEW YORK ELEGIES

Ukrainian Poems on the City E d i t e d a n d w i t h an i n t r o d u c t i o n by O S T A P K I N

Boston 2019 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi Note on Transliteration xv Introduction: Mapping the Ukrainian Poetry of New York xvii

PART I: 1920s–1930s Mykhail Semenko Каблепоема No 2 4 Cablepoem, No. 2 (trans. Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) 5 Каблепоема No. 6 6 Cablepoem, No. 6 (trans. Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) 7 Система 8 System (trans. Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) 9 Решта 10 The Rest (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 11 Oleksa Slisarenko Уот Уітмен 12 Walt Whitman (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 13 Mykola Tarnovsky Subway 14 Subway (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 15 На П’ятій Авеню 16 On Fifth Avenue (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 17 У місті, де жив Уот Уітмен 18 In the City Where Walt Whitman Lived (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 19 Kasandryn Times Square 22 Times Square (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 23 Table of Contents ix

M. Pilny Вже досить 24 Enough Already (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 25 V. Rudeychuk Ню Йорк 26 New York (trans. Abbey Fenbert) 27 Ivan Kulyk Чорна епопея (уривок) 30 From the Black Epos (trans. Alexander Motyl) 31

PART II: 1940s–1980s Yevhen Malanyuk «Ані вершин, ані низин…» 36 “There are no mountains, there are no fields…” (trans. Alexander Motyl) 37 Одного дня 38 One Day (trans. Alexander Motyl) 39 Дні 40 Days (trans. Alexander Motyl) 41 Ньюйоркські стенограми 42 New York Shorthand (trans. Alexander Motyl) 43 «Ні, не пустеля і намет…» 46 “No, neither desert, nor tent…” (trans. Alexander Motyl) 47 Думи 48 Thoughts (trans. Alexander Motyl) 49 Vadym Lesych Нью-Йоркські строфи 50 New York Verses (trans. Olga Gerasymiv, Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko, and Jazlyn Kraft) 51 Гарлем Harlem (trans. Olga Gerasymiv and Jazlyn Kraft) Ніч (І) 54 Night (І) 55 Iнтермецо (ІІ) 56 Intermezzo (ІІ) 57 День (ІІІ) 60 Day (ІІІ) 61 x Table of Contents

Люди осілі 62 Settlers (trans. Olga Gerasymiv and Jazlyn Kraft) 63 Ніч на Іст-Бронксі 64 A Night in East Bronx (trans. Olga Gerasymiv and Jazlyn Kraft) 65 Yuri Kosach Мангаттен, 103-тя вулиця 66 Manhattan, 103rd Street (trans. Ali Kinsella) 67 Нью-Йоркська елегія 68 New York Elegy (trans. Ali Kinsella) 69 Бродвей 70 Broadway (trans. Ali Kinsella) 71 Авеню діамантів 74 Diamond District (trans. Ali Kinsella) 75 З пісень Гарлему 78 From the Song of Harlem (trans. Ali Kinsella) 79 Балада про Золотий Бродвей 82 Ballad of Golden Broadway (trans. Ali Kinsella) 83 Andriy Malyshko Маяковський в Америці 86 Mayakovsky in America (trans. Alexander Motyl) 87 Leonid Lyman Осінь у Бронкспарку 88 Autumn in a Bronx Park (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 89 Yuriy Tarnawsky Ода до кафе 90 Ode to a Café (trans. the author) 91 Неділі 94 Sundays (trans. the author) 95 Любовний вірш 98 Love Poem (trans. the author) 99 Приїзд ІV 100 Arrival IV (trans. the author) 101 Кінець світу 102 End of the World (trans. the author) 103 Сссмерть 104 Dddeath (trans. the author) 105 Table of Contents xi

Bohdan Rubchak Бездомний 108 Homeless (trans. Olga Gerasymiv and Jazlyn Kraft) 109 Bohdan Boychuk Вірші про місто 110 City Verses (trans. Anand Dibble) 111 Листи 114 Letters (trans. Mark Rudman) 115 Негр сидить посередині дороги і б’є у барабан 118 A Negro Sits in the Middle of the Road and Beats a Drum (trans. Anand Dibble) 119 Любов у трьох часах (уривки) 120 From Three Dimensional Love (trans. Mark Rudman and the author) 121 Одинадцять 124 Eleven 125 Ланчонетний триптих 126 Luncheonette Triptych (trans. Anand Dibble) 127 Нью-Йоркська елегія 130 New York Elegy (trans. Anand Dibble) 131 Dima Вечірній Бродвей 132 Broadway in the Evening (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 133 Нью-йоркська ніч 134 New York Night (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 135 Lida Palij Спекотливий день в Ню-Йорку 136 A Hot Day in New York (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 137 Повітря Нью-Йорка 138 New York’s Air (trans. Alexander Motyl) 139 Двоє ввечері пішки 140 Two Walk in the Evening (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 141 xii Table of Contents

Нью-Йорк в стилі кубізму 142 New York in the Cubist Style (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 143 Вічний блюз 146 Eternal Blues (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 147 Дмитрові Павличку (уривок) 148 From a poem “For Dmytro Pavlychko” (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 149 Borys Oliynyk Від білої хати до Білого дому . . . (уривки) From the cycle From White Home to the White House (trans. Ali Kinsella) 1. Знайомство 152 1. Getting Acquainted 153 2. Горить Нью-Йорк 156 2. New York Burns 157 4. Прометей приручений 160 4. Prometheus Doomed 161 5. Та від Білої хати . . . 164 5. From the White Home 165

PART III: 1990s–2016 Abram Katsnelson Уолл-Стріт 170 Wall Street (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 171 На Бродвеї 172 On Broadway (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 173 Serhiy Zhadan Нью-Йорк — факін сіті 174 New York Fuckin’ City (trans. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps) 175 «І найменша дівчинка в Чайна-тауні…» 176 “And the smallest girl in Chinatown…” (trans. Ostap Kin) 177 New York, NY 178 New York, NY (trans. Ostap Kin, Ali Kinsella, and Jazlyn Kraft) 179 Table of Contents xiii

Yuri Andrukhovych Bombing New York City 180 Bombing New York City (trans. Sarah Luczaj) 181 Vasyl Makhno Нью-йоркська листівка Богданові Задурі 182 New York Postcard to Bohdan Zadura (trans. Luba Gawur) 183 На каві у «Starbucks» 188 Coffee in Starbucks (trans. Michael Naydan) 189 Federico Garcia Lorca 192 Federico Garcia Lorca (trans. Orest Popovych) 193 Прощання з Бруклiном 196 A Farewell to Brooklyn (trans. Orest Popovych) 197 Бруклінська елегія 200 Brooklyn Elegy (trans. Orest Popovych) 201 Staten Island 202 Staten Island (trans. Orest Popovych) 203 Maryana Savka Одинадцята-стріт 206 Eleventh Street (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 207 Oksana Lutsyshyna «Мій друг Стефан у вельветовому піджаку фотографується…» 208 “My friend Stefan in the corduroy jacket is taking selfies…” (trans. the author and Ali Kinsella) 209 Kateryna Babkina Знеболювальні і снодійні 210 Painkillers and Sleeping Pills (trans. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps) 211 Iryna Shuvalova велика риба та інші мости big fish and other bridges (trans. Olena Jennings) 1. учора містом ходила велика риба 212 1. yesterday a big fish walked through the city 213 2. ти розгойдуєшся — й переступаєш поріг 214 2. gathering momentum—you cross the threshold 215 xiv Table of Contents

3. із чого складається місто? 216 3. what is the city made from? 217 4. якщо вийти за двері 218 4. if we were to walk out the door 219 Iryna Vikyrchak Р.А. 220 To R.A. (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 221 Сезонна 222 Seasonal (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 223 Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko в Maikley 224 At Maikley’s Café (trans. Olga Gerasymiv) 225 Vasyl Lozynsky Нью-Йорк 228 New York (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 229 Yulia Musakovska «Тунелями білого кахлю курсують жовті рибини…» 230 “Yellow fish course through white-tiled tunnels…” (trans. Olga Gerasymiv and Jazlyn Kraft) 231 Olha Fraze-Frazenko Грудень 232 December (trans. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) 233 Notes 234 Acknowledgement of Publications in Ukrainian 245 Prior Publications in English Translation 250 Artists 251 Poets 253 Translators 260 Illustrations 263 Index of First Lines and Titles in Ukrainian 271 Index of First Lines and Titles in English 274 Index 277 Абрам Кацнельсон

Уолл-стріт Так наче створювали гето нам — від нас ізолювали світ. І от іду тепер Манхеттеном, переді мною Уолл-стріт. Про Уолл-стріт, немов чудовисько, чимало чули реплік злих: мовляв, ото осердя утиску і всяких планетарних лих. І згадуючи про химери ці, було нам соромно, коли реальність бачачи в Америці, цією вулицею йшли. Ще нас лякали хмарочосами. А я повз них не раз ходив — радів творінням рук і розуму, красі струнких висотних див. Та все ж і тут, за океаном ми — серед рекламних веремій — в душі лишаємось киянами, залюблені в Хрещатик свій . . . 1995

170 Abram Katsnelson

Wall Street It’s like they made a ghetto for us— they isolated the world from us. So now I’m walking around Manhattan, And Wall Street lies before me. About Wall Street, like about a beast, we’ve heard a lot of nasty comments: like, it’s the center of oppression and various worldly calamities. And recalling these illusions, we felt ashamed when we saw the American reality as we walked down this street. They tried to scare us with skyscrapers. But I’ve gone past them many times. I enjoyed these creations of hands and minds, the beauty of these tall, slender miracles. But even here, across the ocean, among the noise of ads, in our souls we remain Kyivans, in love with our Khreshchatyk. 1995 Translated by Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella

171 172 Абрам Кацнельсон

На Бродвеї

На рекламно залитому сяйвом Бродвеї, наче Богом врятовані, ходять євреї. Де звелись хмарочоси стрункими огромами, йдуть оті, що вночі сни їх будять погромами. Йде старий інвалід з перекошеним ротом, що розідраний був у концтаборі дротом. В того спалено діда живцем в крематорії. А онук батьком став, порівнився із Торою. Капелюх, довгі пейси. І з ним, поруч матері, по ранжиру йдуть чада. І їх уже п’ятеро. На рекламно залитому сяйвом Бродвеї, наче Богом врятовані, ходять євреї . . . 1998 Abram Katsnelson 173

On Broadway

On Broadway, illuminated by ads aglow, as if saved by God, the Jews, they all stroll. They who are awakened by at night move past the skyscrapers clustered so tight. An old cripple walks with them, mouth split and splayed, it was slashed at a concentration camp with a blade. That one’s granddaddy burned alive in an oven. Grandson’s now a father and lets the Torah govern. A hat and long sidelocks. With him and their mother, their brood walks along—all five, one after another. On Broadway, illuminated by ads aglow, as if saved by God, the Jews, they all stroll… 1998 Translated by Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella Сергій Жадан

Нью-Йорк — факін сіті ніби не вода ніби не витікала не збивала з ніг не холонула на камінні лише закинутий на хідники під аритмічну музику і веселі піднебесся я знаю — годі щось винести із такого досвіду коли придорожня оса перелітає за вікном у південному напрямку і незалежні радіостанції першими сповіщають про наближення міста вже тоді як псується погода ні везіння тобі не буде ні заспокоєння хоча ніби так мало статись із-за рогу вибрідає юний трансвестит в довгому дощовику і теплій спідниці стоїть перед своїм під’їздом шукає ключі дощ тече обличчям фарба збивається під очима наче бруд під нігтями великі сині краплі скочуються на тонкі вилиці на в’язаний одяг і чорні ботинки ніби і справді не лишилось слідів і пам’ять ніби не вода і не холоне глибоко в тілі любов до великих населених пунктів ніби любов до дерев що ростуть незалежно від тебе говориш собі засинаєш непомітно і очі закочуються під повіки наче згублені іграшки <2001>

174 Serhiy Zhadan

New York Fuckin’ City as if water wasn’t pouring down growing cold on the cement knocking people off their feet just tossing me down on the sidewalk to arrhythmic music and blissful heavens I know—it’s hard to learn anything from experiences like these a roadside wasp flies by the window heading south as an independent radio station announces that you’re approaching the city when the weather turns bad there’s no luck or peace although both were promised a young transvestite emerges from around the corner in a long rain coat and a warm skirt stops at the front door looking for keys rain pouring down her face the makeup cakes under her eyes like dirt under nails great blue drops run down her narrow cheeks onto woolen clothes and black boots as if indeed no trace remained and memory wasn’t water and wasn’t growing cold deep inside the body love of large cities is like the love of trees that grow without you you say to yourself as you imperceptibly fall asleep and your eyes roll up behind the lids like lost toys <2001> Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

175 176 Сергій Жадан

* * *

І найменша дівчинка в Чайна-тауні, і старі баптисти в холодних церквах Мангетена навіть не уявляють, які зірки падають в наші комини, і яке смарагдове часникове листя росте на наших футбольних полях. Це ось океан, без початку і кінця, заливає берег, на якому стоять китайські їдальні, і тисяча кашалотів ховається в ньому за піском і мулом, навіки відділяючи мене від країни, яку я любив. Це ось чорні дерева в холодних снігах, ніби африканки на білих простирадлах, і на кожному дереві сидять птахи, крикливі птахи еміграції, співучі птахи вигнання. А це ось я кожної ночі вві сні вантажу свій пароплав зорями і пшеницею, заповнюю трюми ромом і цикутою, прогріваю старі машини, так як топлять кахляні печі. Вже зовсім скоро Господь покличе нас усіх, поверне океанські потоки, пожене нас у темряву. Ридай тоді за мною, солодка морська капусто Америки, так як умієш лише ти одна, так як умієш лише ти одна. 2008 Serhiy Zhadan 177

* * *

And the smallest little girl in Chinatown, and the old Baptists in the cold churches of Manhattan don’t even imagine how the stars fell into our chimneys, and how emerald leaves of garlic grow on our soccer pitches. This is ocean, without beginning or end, flooding the shore where Chinese buffets stand and a thousand sperm whales hide beneath sand and silt separating me forever from the country I loved. Here are black trees in cold snow, like African women on white blankets, and birds sit in every tree, the vehement birds of emigration, the melodious birds of exile. And here I am every night in my dream I load my steamship with stars and wheat, I fill holds with rum and hemlock, I warm up old engines the way you stoke tile stoves. Yet soon the Lord will summon us all, will divert the oceans’ tides, will urge us into darkness. Then weep for me, sweet seaweed of America, the way only you can do it, the way only you can do it. 2008 Translated by Ostap Kin Оксана Забужко

New York, NY . . . Так довго знати країну, що пам’ятати часи, Коли проїзд на метро був удвічі дешевшим . . . В небі горять перехняблені Терези, І Стрілець з цього боку Землі виглядає, як вершник. Місяць з’являється нагло, мов терорист, — Не з того боку, і не за тим закрутом . . . В цій країні я вільна — як вільним буває лист, У шухляду вкинутий і до пори забутий. Можна звернути з шляху і в парку на Ріверсайд Хоч до ранку сидіти і просто дивитись на Бруклін . . . (В цій країні й без мене повнісінько всяких зайд, На краях їх зору я лиш ще одна «біла кукла».) Анонімність і є свобода — не краденого «ай-ді», А лишень непотрібного, навіть в нічнім мотелі, — Відчуття під ногами не тверді і не води, — А колишньої стелі. От задля цього й долається океан (Й виставляються Вежі, як кеглі, — на те, щоб збити . . .). Я люблю цю країну — за те, що вона нічия, Що вона не моя — і не мушу її любити. 2002

178 Oksana Zabuzhko

New York, NY …you’ve known the country so long you can remember when the subway cost half as much… Tilted Libra burns in the sky, and from this hemisphere Sagittarius looks like a cowboy. the Moon appears abruptly like a terrorist, not from her usual side, but around a foreign corner… In this country I’m free, just like a letter tossed into a drawer and forgotten until its time. You can veer from your route and sit in the park on Riverside until morning, just gazing at Brooklyn… (Even before me, this country held enough unwelcomes— in whose eyes I am just another white chick.) Anonymity is freedom—even before an ID is stolen, it’s extraneous, even at a motel— what you tread is neither firmament, nor waters, it’s what used to be the ceiling. This is why the ocean is crossed (and the Towers are set up, like pins to be knocked over). I love this country because it’s nobody’s, because it is not mine and I don’t have to love it. 2002 Translated by Ostap Kin, Ali Kinsella and Jazlyn Kraft

179 Юрій Андрухович

Bombing New York City Осіб жіночої статі запрошуємо на вихід — Зникнути в темряві. Цей номер — суто наш, чоловічий. Зрештою, так захотіла природа, Саме цю непотрібну стать, наділивши здатністю Без води гасити жевріючі багаття. Небо над нами в зірках. Це серпень, серпень. Місто під нами прекрасне, ніби Галактика. Це серпень, серпень. Це багаття, при якому щойно сиділи. «Це Нью-Йорк, — кажу я. — Приготуватись до бомбардування». Починаємо неводночас, але всі четверо. Струмені перехрещуються, Місто під нами сичить І гасне цілими кварталами. «Більше уваги Мангеттену, — кажу я. — Чорний Гарлем і Бронкс не чіпаємо». «З Брукліном і Квінсом покінчено», — Доповідає Джон, дещо п’яніший і зосередженіший. Поваливши Крайслер, Сіґрам та Емпайр Стейт, Ми в цілому задоволені операцією. Затягуємо замки на ширіньках, Відходимо на базу, в темряву, Почуваючись небесними асами. Мине місяць — І такі жарти видадуться поганими. <2004>

180 Yuri Andrukhovych

Bombing New York City Those of the female gender are requested to leave— to disappear into the darkness. This is a guy thing. It’s how nature herself planned it, bestowing on this useless gender the ability to put out smouldering bonfires without water. The sky above us is starry. It’s August, August. The city below us as gorgeous as the Galaxy. It’s August, August. This is the bonfire, which we were sitting around just now. “It’s New York”—I say.— “Prepare for bombing.” We start, not at the same time, but all four of us. The streams cross, the city beneath us hisses and whole neighbourhoods go out. “More attention to Manhattan”—I say.— “Black Harlem and the Bronx are not to be touched.” “Brooklyn and Queens are down”— adds John, a bit drunker and more concentrated. Having demolished Chrysler, Seаgram and the Empire State, we are generally satisfied with the operation. We pull up our zips, we go back to base, in darkness, feeling like the aces of creation. One month later— such jokes are in bad taste. <2004> Translated by Sarah Luczaj

181 New Poems from Ukraine Edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky

Boston - 2017

Words of War.indd 5 12/7/2017 3:34:12 PM Contents

Preface xiii Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky Introduction: “Barometers” xix Ilya Kaminsky

ANASTASIA AFANASIEVA 01 she says we don’t have the right kind of basement in our building 02 You whose inner void 04 from Cold 06 She Speaks 08 On TV the news showed 11 from The Plain Sense of Things 12 Untitled That's my home 14 I came back 14 Can there be poetry after 17

VASYL HOLOBORODKO 19 No Return 20 I Fly Away in the Shape of a Dandelion Seed 21 The Dragon Hillforts 22 I Pick up my Footprints 24

BORYS HUMENYUK 27 Our platoon commander is a strange man 28 These seagulls over the battlefield 30 When HAIL rocket launchers are firing 33 Not a poem in forty days 36 An old mulberry tree near Mariupol 39

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When you clean your weapon 41 A Testament 42

YURI IZDRYK 47 Darkness Invisible 48 Make Love 49

ALEKSANDR KABANOV 51 This is a post on Facebook, and this, a block post in the East 52 How I love — out of harm’s way 53 A Former Dictator 54 He came first wearing a t-shirt inscribed “Je suis Christ” 55 In the garden of Gethsemane on the Dnieper river 56 A Russian tourist is on vacation 57 Fear is a form of the good 58 Once upon a time, a Jew says to his prisoner, his Hellenic foe 59

KATERYNA KALYTKO 61 They won’t compose any songs 62 April 6 63 This loneliness could have a name, an Esther or a Miriam 65 Home is still possible there, where they hang laundry out to dry 66 He Writes 68 Can great things happen to ordinary people? 70

LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA 73 Did you know that if you hide under a blanket and pull it over your head 74 How to describe a human other than he’s alone 75 The whole soldier doesn’t suffer 76 A country in the shape of a puddle, on the map 77 Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in 78 that’s it: you yourself choose how you live 79

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I planted a camellia in the yard 80 One night, a humanitarian convoy arrived in her dream 80 When a country of — overall — nice people 81 Leave me alone, I’m crying. I’m crying, let me be 82 the enemy never ends 83 every seventh child of ten — he’s a shame 84 you really don’t remember Grandpa — but let’s say you do 85

BORIS KHERSONSKY 87 explosions are the new normal, you grow used to them 88 all for the battlefront which doesn’t really exist 89 people carry explosives around the city 90 way too long the artillery and the tanks stayed silent in their hangars 91 when wars are over we just collapse 92 modern warfare is too large for the streets 93 My brother brought war to our crippled home 94 Bessarabia, Galicia, 1913–1939 Pronouncements 94

MARIANNA KIYANOVSKA 99 I believed before 100 in a tent like in a nest 101 we swallowed an air like earth 102 I wake up, sigh, and head off to war 103 The eye, a bulb that maps its own bed 104 Their tissue is coarse, like veins in a petal 105 Things swell closed. It’s delicious to feel how fully 106 Naked agony begets a poison of poisons 107

HALYNA KRUK 109 A Woman Named Hope 110 like a blood clot, something catches him in the rye 111

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someone stands between you and death 112 like a bullet, the Lord saves those who save themselves 113

OKSANA LUTSYSHYNA 115 eastern europe is a pit of death and decaying plums 116 don’t touch live flesh 117 he asks — don’t help me 118 I Dream of Explosions 119

VASYL MAKHNO 121 February Elegy 122 War Generation 123 On War 124 On Apollinaire 125

MARJANA SAVKA 127 We wrote poems 128 Forgive me, darling, I’m not a fighter 129 january pulled him apart 130

OSTAP SLYVYNSKY 133 Lovers on a Bicycle 134 Lieutenant 136 Alina 137 1918 138 Kicking the Ball in the Dark 139 Story (2) 141 Latifa 143 A Scene from 2014 144 Orpheus 145

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LYUBA YAKIMCHUK 147 Died of Old Age 148 How I Killed 149 Caterpillar 150 Decomposition 152 He Says Everything Will Be Fine 154 Eyebrows 155 Funeral Services 156 Crow, Wheels 158 Knife 160

SERHIY ZHADAN 163 from Stones We speak of the cities we lived in 164 Now we remember: janitors and the night-sellers of bread 164 from Why I am not on Social Media Needle 166 Headphones 168 Sect 169 Rhinoceros 171 Third Year into the War 173 Three Years Now We’ve Been Talking about the War A guy I know volunteered 174 Three years now we’ve been talking about the war 176 So that’s what their family is like now 178 Sun, terrace, lots of green 179 The street. A woman zigzags the street 181 Village street – gas line’s broken 182 At least now, my friend says 183 Thirty-Two Days Without Alcohol 185

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Take Only What Is Most Important 187 Traces of Us 189

Afterword: “On Decomposition and Rotten Plums: Language of War in Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry” Polina Barskova 191 Authors 198 Translators 204 Glossary 212 Geographical Locations and Places of Significance 215 Notes to Poems 222 Acknowledgements 232 Acknowledgement of Prior Publications 235 Index 237

Words of War.indd 12 12/7/2017 3:34:12 PM VASYL MAKHNO

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FEBRUARY ELEGY

today the muse is the nurse who is shot through the neck in Maidan’s winter winds in the war now upon us for which we are given wings

the student who now lies murdered wrapped up in heavenly blankets muse, please give us some advice and hold tight onto the forceps for the hour of death is nigh

in hearts that are shot right through in ripped open stomachs and lungs my muse, you, too, are bruised an angel of death holding nails while recording the names of the slain

who drags all the wounded aside who strikes matches until they blaze I see how he keeps up the fight ripping asunder his greatcoat — two-hundred-year-old Shevchenko

Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker

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WAR GENERATION

each generation must fight its own war each in that generation bears his own guilt you may live in New York but you are always a soldier of your unit — your country — its troubles

you’re a soldier of the air — its commando your country’s army is a flying garden shielding the heavens, the source that feeds the earth beneath your feet, its simple seed

your sole defense is your heart — and a flak jacket today you must forget that you are a poet you must come here and stand — there’s room in the ranks merge into the — its protective banks

your standard issue boots squeeze your feet your unit digs trenches — and digs in its heels each one’s a soldier in this earth-seed generation each one is capable of carrying a machine gun

war will come for each generation filled up with light — but still more with scum with the dirty boots of funeral guards with mourning marches and army ballads

Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker

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ON WAR

a soldier — he can catch a bullet with his quivering heart and fall into solitude itself the earth — like a mother — will embrace him because an idiot sniper shot him an angel lights a candle and sounds his trumpet

a battalion that no longer exists — they were shot in the back at close range — they’re still tying their bootlaces still marching through the steppe already hopelessly late

the general — commander of a non-existent front a turncoat swine and no hero — deserves to have his epaulettes stripped should grovel at every door forget his hemorrhoids and heal his soul

this is war: mother and stepmother — cousin, aunt and, sure, a whore, death, lacking any semantic sense when it gathers up its metal bowls is a hole-riddled soldier’s heart, nothing more

I am a poet of the periodic table of ruins of a broken army and a forfeited land shot-through like the heart of a soldier it shakes like an uncatchable feather trembling lightly on a stem

Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker

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ON APOLLINAIRE

while we may call snow a flute — which among all the flutes of language is the finest stem — the deepest well to hide sounds, the fanfares of interwar silence, so beloved of the lieu- tenant: who tells his soldiers to study the military trade

snow in the business of war is no fault of flutes or fanfares a plane flies like an angel through the heavens, scattering the feathers of the hawk’s victim wrapped in white, like a cut-out sheet of darkness nervously sealing the holes in the flute’s ragged corpse

perhaps in that music between silver and bronze — all snow and water — it rises like a sail, like a ship’s pitch-covered bottom — the lieutenant forgets orders and hallucinates: the almonds will flower and the soldiers melt like snow through the village, seeking port wine

lucid in his dreams, he bleeds from his head — Apollinaire has forgotten something — in the end he’ll ask for pickled cabbage juice, but there are no villagers here, the angel of death arrives, opens the door shuts his eyes, wraps him in music, and then cuts loose

his boat on the river, the soldiers bring wine, sit downcast on the hilltop, make a tent from their rifles and pull dried bread from their pockets washing it down with their wine, sadness and surrealism — death is here — all around them lurk ravens and foxes

Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker

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Photo: Natalia Rajinyk

Words of War.indd 126 12/7/2017 3:36:11 PM MARJANA SAVKA

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* * *

We wrote poems about love and war, so long ago we could have gone grey three times over— in the days before we had war, it seemed love would never burn out and pain was in the offing Yes, there were wounds there, not just cracks in a chocolate heart, but they managed to heal and we went on living. It wasn’t mocking, or some deliberate game. We read the signs on palimpsests of old posters, on the walls of blackened buildings, in coffee grounds. What changed, my sister? Our hot-air balloon turned into a lead ball. The metaphor — died.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Sibelan Forrester and Mary Kalyna with Bohdan Pechenyak

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* * *

Forgive me, darling, I’m not a fighter. Every time you gaze into my face, I tell you: I have a knife to cut willow twigs — I can weave you a basket — If you like, I can weave you a bird, And plant violets in its eyes. I’m not a fighter, darling, I have a knife to prune branches On the young trees. You haven’t come out to the garden for so long. The cherries are coming in. Darling, why have you gone so grey?

Translated from the Ukrainian by Sibelan Forrester and Mary Kalyna with Bohdan Pechenyak

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january pulled him apart february knocked him off his feet spitting blood into the snow he waited for his march — but didn’t know what shore he’d be able to cling to god, what a calendar — blow after blow his heart scarred by such weird months: Deathcember, Sorrowtober, or Bittertember where even the trees grow upside down, crowns up into roots so young he barely lived yet dying his death fully then one day the war died with him and he was born again in may amidst the grasses or maybe he didn’t really die but just lay in the grass under a wide open sky under the sky everyone’s alive

Translated from the Ukrainian by Sibelan Forrester and Mary Kalyna with Bohdan Pechenyak

Words of War.indd 130 12/7/2017 3:36:20 PM Words of War.indd 131 12/7/2017 3:36:24 PM THE WHITE CHALK OF DAYS THE CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN LITERATURE SERIES ANTHOLOGY

Compiled and Edited by MARK ANDRYCZYK

Boston 2017 Contents

Acknowledgments ix The Kennan Institute/Harriman Institute Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series xiii

Introduction 01

A Note On Transliteration 21

ANDREY KURKOV 22 From Jimi Hendrix Live in 24

HRYTSKO CHUBAI 30 The Woman 32 and ever so slowly looms . . . 33 The Corridor with Eye-Sized Doors 34 When your lips are but a half a breath away . . . 35 From Maria 36 Light and Confession 37

OLEH LYSHEHA 42 Song 55 44

MARJANA SAVKA 46 Books We’ve Never Read 48 From A Short History of Dance 49 Easter Jazz 50 For Yann Tiersen 51 Boston, April 2007 52 Baghdad Night 53 In This City 55 Who, Marlene, Who? 56 Some woman . . . 57 Organs of Sense 58 vi Contents

My beloved sun . . . 60

VIKTOR NEBORAK 62 From Genesis of the Flying Head 64 Monologue from a Canine Pretext 68 A Drum-Tympanum (a sonnet uttered by the Flying Head) 70 She (rap performance by the Kids of the Queenie) Part 3 71 An Itty Bitty Ditty ‘bout Mr. Bazio (sung by Viktor Morozov) 73 Fish 75 Supper 77 Green sounds echo . . . 79 The Writer 80 The Poet 81

ANDRIY BONDAR 82 Genes 84 Slavic Gods 87 The Men of My Country 88 Just Don’t Push Me Away 90 Fantasy 92 Robbie Williams 93 St. Nick No. 628 95 The Roman Alphabet 98 Jogging 100

YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH 104 The Star Absinthe: Notes on a Bitter Anniversary 106

TARAS PROKHASKO 118 Selections from FM Galicia 120 22.11 123 24.11 126 30.11 133 04.12 139 07.12 143 09.12 145 15.12 147 16.12 149 23.12 151 15.01 152 Contents vii

24.01 154 25.01 156 27.01 158 10.02 160

SERHIY ZHADAN 162 Chinese Cooking 164 Hotel Business 165 Children’s Train 167 The Inner Color of Eyes 169 Alcohol 171 Contraband 172 Paprika 174 . . . not to wake her up . . . 176 The Lord Sympathizes with Outsiders 178 The Smallest Girl in Chinatown 180 Owner of the Best Gay Bar 181 The Percentage of Suicides among Clowns 219

IVAN MALKOVYCH 222 Stand up and look . . . 224 bird’s elegy 226 happiness . . . 228 futile people 229 The Village Teacher’s Lesson 230 Nothing is right here, you see: . . . 231 An Evening with Great-Grandma 232 The black parachute of anxiety grows . . . 233 There is much—I know—sadness . . . 234 The Man 235 The Music That Walked Away 236 At Home 237 I gaze at my mountains . . . 238 Tonight . . . 239 Circle 240 an evening (goose) pastoral 241 A Message for T. 242

VASYL GABOR 246 The High Water 248 viii Contents

A Story About One Dollar 253 Five Short Stories for Natalie—The Fifth Story— The Last One—The Lover 255

YURI VYNNYCHUK 260 The Flowerbed in the Kilim 262 Pea Soup 266 From Spring Games in Summer Gardens 268 Prologue 268 The Pilgrim’s Dance, Part One 273 , Part One 279 Pears à la Crêpe 288

OLEKSANDR BOICHENKO 296 Out of Great Love 298 The Lunch of a Man of Letters 302 In a State of Siege 304

SOPHIA ANDRUKHOVYCH 308 An Out-of-tune-Piano, an Accordion 310

LYUBA YAKIMCHUK 320 Apricots of the Donbas 322 The Face of Coal 322 The Slag Piles of Breasts 324 Apricots in Hard Hats 326 My Grandmother’s Fairy Tale 328 The Book of Angels 330 the eye of the slag heap 332 decomposition 333 eyebrows 335 I have a crisis for you 336 false friends and beloved 338 such people are called naked 340 marsala 343

About The Editor 344 Translators 346 Index 348 Praise for The White Chalk of Days 351 VIKTOR NEBORAK VIKTOR NEBORAK is a poet, prose writer, literary critic and translator who lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine. He is a founding member of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group, which gained enormous popularity in Ukraine during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The syllables of the group’s name stand for burlesk (burlesque), balahan (bluster) and bufonada (buffoonery). At that time, Neborak’s performances, and that of his Bu-Ba-Bu colleagues—Oleksandr Irvanets and Yuri Andrukhovych—were often at the center of mass gatherings that celebrated the cult of the new, which were ushered in by the fall of the Soviet Union. Neborak’s poems, particularly those from his ground-breaking collection Litaiucha holova (Flying Head), introduced a myriad of taboo topics into Ukrainian literature, including rock music and its imagery, which fed the suddenly free Ukrainian youth starved for Western symbols of freedom. His poems often feature an aspect of performance and, in fact, many of them served as texts to songs written and performed by the then-budding and now- legendary rock bands Plach Ieremiï (Jeremiah’s Cry) and Mertvyi Piven (Dead Rooster). Neborak is the author of ten collections of poetry. He has also authored the novel Bazylevs, a monograph analyzing Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s Eneïda (2001), and a monograph on Ivan Franko entitled Ivan Franko: Vershyny i nyzyny (Ivan Franko: Highs and Lows, 2016). Neborak has published four books collecting his essays and literary criticism. He currently works at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Literature in Lviv. Viktor Neborak’s events in the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series, entitled The Flying Head and Other Poems, took place in January 2009. 64 The White Chalk of Days

From GENESIS OF THE FLYING HEAD

(a show in verse)

I. METRO FANTASY

Color is still not space you try anyway to hew through this black night facets of light sparkle and a double sits in the pane opposite the painted doll faded a rapid line of movement saws his neck an underground river dried up dinosaurs crammed together in the night tusks bones broken mirrors voices of apparitions— this is all the setting for a painting your neck is bleeding and your head in the pane starts up and your head through the thickness of a stone sea through a Dnipro River fish and block of ice through library stacks burning a path for itself a minute flies solemnly to a carnival explosion its lips move with exertion: I-am-a-fly-ing-head

III. METRO FANTASY

This is a body a murder a specter a hook this clown takes skulls cicero’anderthal shakespeare adolph chaplin joseph skovoroda peopleraven Christ ’umanobeast bug boar-fanged-night an even narrower tunnel draft the black ash of faces shadows painfully wail a piercing moment

monsters mongrels ghosts they howl through you in a flock Viktor Neborak 65 and they try on your body like an old boot you squeak

V. METRO FANTASY. REFLECTIONS

He sees himself before himself he sees himself transparent he sees a transparent colored shadow a moving shadow in the air it utters words and all at once goes silent it utters words he takes a step it comes to meet him face to face eyes overlap pass through a mirror of glass thickens raise my eyelids THERE HE IS my shadow in me bat wings grow fangs and fingers grow shadow grows through the body the stinger sniffs out blood

VIII. THE FLYING HEAD. A PRODUCTION SELF-PORTRAIT

. . . They assemble the flying head in my likeness in a mine. A brigade of vampires in overalls with banging carry a nine-foot nose. In the nostrils—fireworks, and wires, and paper streamers two loud talkers gape downward. My nose is massive, an ordinary one, a monumental nose—not for assorted nobility! Into the three-story carcass a control center is lowered with a crane, 66 The White Chalk of Days

and the brain is transformed into levers, pedals, and a steering wheel. My forehead—stuffed aluminum—welded by metal specialists, will be moved down a bit below— there they fit my eyelids and connect he juice for the TV screen eyes. A few more words about the mouth—some dozens of devils push the jaw-bone, a snail-giant crawled into it, a boastful liar, his ‘cellency’s tongue, the teeth stand guard, no fillings whatsoever, tongue like a sleeping bull, two anacondas pressed together hide it, to keep from getting into trouble. Here they fit the ears, glue on the skin, weld the joints—a roar and unbearable heat. The engineer-lucifer-mime turns on the flame in the nozzles. I’m in a space suit, I’m saying goodbye—let’s get going—I crawl my brain. Half of hell runs up to watch the start.

X.

It rises up like a head, the lopped-off head of a vagrant. It utters words from the beyond once, twice, and for the third time: I AM THE FLYING HEAD! The all-seeing flying Baroque hangs above the city square’s horde. Blood clots drip in the air, the torn cut casts a deep and heavy shadow: I AM THE FLYING HEAD! An invisible ax has entered the city, headless bodies are thrown from the scaffold, gawkers have drunken their fill of cheap blood, Viktor Neborak 67 and will scrape off the rusty smudge from the forehead A GHOST—THE FLYING HEAD! Are you devouring TV soaps? You gaze at dragons behind the glass! The wrecking ball from Fellini’s Orchestra1 has come to life and breaks through your wall— I AM THE FLYING HEAD! Remember, you can’t hide anywhere! The square is coming to the hiding places, the square! The feast rinses the dark cobblestones and moves to the heavens of the Renaissance A MASK—THE FLYING HEAD! I AM THE FLYING HEAD! I AM THE HE AD FLY ING HE AD I INGHEA I AM AYO AY O

Translated by Michael M. Naydan

1 The wrecking ball that breaks through the walls in Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal (1978). (Translator’s note) 68 The White Chalk of Days

MONOLOGUE FROM A CANINE PRETEXT

The body of the deceased was found in a ditch In the middle of a yard hung on a hook and they buried him beyond the garden.

Fido’s2 hung himself—suicide dog! Fido’s soul’ll be hounded from heaven. They’ll tell him: “You didn’t croak the way you should have!” Then they’ll lift him up by the tail and . . .

Fido’s hung himself on his chain at night. The real nightly R movie3—rats viewers sighing, wooing, curling up, and lovemaking!

Fido’s hung himself! Do you hear?—you! Are you reading Leaves of Grass? Márquez? Borges? Hesse? The I Ching? Ah? Fido’s hung himself! That’s the change!

You’re called a poet and he’s—a dog. A poem gnaws at you, a chain—at him. Someday you’ll be a pro poetaster, But Fido chose not meat, but the spirit!

2 “Dzul′bars” in the original—a typical name for a Ukrainian dog. This particular canine poem has a real event as its basis. Viktor Neborak’s dog Dzul′bars strangled himself on his chain. (Translator’s note) 3 “Notsne” is in Polish in the original and refers to the practice in Soviet times of going to a friend’s house in Western Ukraine, someone who had a strong antenna and could receive signals from Polish TV to watch films from the West—usually with a heavy dose of eroticism or horror. (Translator’s note) Viktor Neborak 69

How much can you bark at the moon? How long can you wait for your paycheck? How much can you scrape your backsides? Forever? Till death! What a schizophrenic profession— to tend to chickens and goats and send them off to be butchered?

The Constellation of the Dog pierces through the earth and heavens!

Translated by Michael M. Naydan 70 The White Chalk of Days

A DRUM-TYMPANUM

(a sonnet uttered by the Flying Head)

—Paint a BABE naked BLUE with lips the day looks BA BU in dithyraMBs BU taBOO put your teeth in BUBABU poetry grows from hunchBAck work with money BAttle in the hump and BUBABU will BE reBEllion your head’s feeble from alphaBETs the BArd BUrsts with his labia lips what the world hisses with the theater screams you’ll play a poem that’s worth it all you’ll end up in Paradise (or Paris) BU to death to eternity BU and BU and BA and BUBABU

Translated by Michael M. Naydan Viktor Neborak 71

SHE

(rap performance by the Kids of the Queenie)

PART 3

(crazy lady) alone in the lilies you’re walkin’, walkin’ white tops wearin’ eyes on the trees you’re paintin’, paintin’ you’re the queen of the cretins my crazy lady when you walk into shrines gates crumble behind ‘em with their claws they scratch the cretins at a wedding you’re the queen of the cretins the temp’s 90 degrees don’t lead me lordy to her hot chamber darkness falls from the soul the wine’s hot and thick but the queenie’s cryin’ over the snout of a pig you’re the queen of the cretins you’re-a-wi-ld wi-ld qu eenie we be dancin’ in the wind I CAN SAY-IT-A-GAIN 72 The White Chalk of Days

you’re the queen of the cretins you’re-a-wi-ld wi-ld qu e enie we be dancin’ in the wind I CAN SAY-IT-A-GAIN

you’re the queen of the cre . . .

Translated by Michael M. Naydan