Kirill Medvedev It’s No Good edited and introduced by Keith Gessen translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen with Mark Krotov, Cory Merril, and Bela Shayevich, with additional translation editing by Isabel Lane n+1 / ugly duckling prese, 2012 eastern european poets series #30 Introduction 11 [poems] from 3% (2005-2006) 215 [poems] from It’s No Good (2000) 23 [action] Why I Started a Livejournal Blog (2006) 235 [poems] from Incursion (2002) 57 [poems] How’s Tis for a Poem? (2006) 237 [poem] Europe (2002) 85 [action] Brecht Is Not Your Aunt (2007) 241 TABLE OF CONTENTS [action] Communiqué (2003) 103 [action] Ostankino Protest (2007) 245 [poems] Pornocracy (2003) 107 [essay] Literature Will Be Tested (2007) 249 [essay] My Fascism (2003-2004) 117 [obituary] Dmitri Prigov (2007) 271 [action] Manifesto on Copyright (2004) 149 [poem] In Praise of Evolution (2007) 275 [poems] Love, Freedom, Honesty, Solidarity, Democracy, 151 [action] Totalitarianism (2005) An Invitation (2007) 277 [action] [obituary] On the Publication of the Book Kirill Medvedev: Texts 165 Stanislav Markelov (2009) 279 Published Without the Permission of the Author (2005) [poems] [poem] Attack on City Hall (2011-2012) 281 End of the Ceasefre (End of the Objectivist School?) 171 (2005) Glossary of Names 295 [essay] Dmitry Kuzmin: An Essay-Memoir (2006) 183 I frst learned of Kirill Medvedev in Fall 2006, when someone handed me a copy of the literary magazine Kriticheskaya Massa (“Critical Mass”; now defunct), featuring a symposium about the CTION release of Medvedev’s book by the Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie DU (NLO) publishing house. Te book’s release required a symposium O R because Medvedev had renounced all copyright to his works, and NLO had nonetheless gone ahead and published the book without NT I asking his permission. Tey called it Texts Published without the N Permission of the Author. One essay defended the publication; another, “Te Surrender and Death of a Post-Soviet intellectual”— V: A V: by the poet, editor, and impresario Dmitry Kuzmin—attacked the E D author. Tere was also an essay by Medvedev himself, reprinted E (again without permission) from his website. Te day after reading DV all this I found the book in question at the annual Moscow book E fair. I read it on the subway ride home. It was a mixture of poems M and essays and descriptions of Medvedev’s (often one-man) political actions. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. After failing to fnd ILL R another copy of the book at several stores, I fnally located three at I K Falanster, of Tverskaya, and bought them all. How to describe the political and cultural and just plain human stagnation of the years of mature Putinism, between about 2003 and 2008? “Fear” is not the right word. Moscow has always been a dangerous place, but it was no scarier in 2006 than it was in 1996—it was a lot less scary, in fact. Putin himself, ruler of Russia, was certainly a bad man. But he was not the boogeyman. Te atmosphere was of boredom, sufocation, and surrender. Nothing happened. No one wanted anything to happen. “Stability” was the word of the day and in service of this stability people were willing to give up a great deal. Te liberal opposition that still made appearances in the New York Times not only had no real presence in Russia—no party organization, no television stations, no support—they were also thoroughly discredited. Tey had taken power in the post-Soviet period on a wave of popular anger and hope and had disappointed those hopes; they had proved by Keith Gessen vain, callow, visibly indiferent to the suferings of millions. (Tese 11 people unfortunately included many urban intellectuals, formerly Te author of Texts Published Without… was just 31 years known as the intelligentsia. Tey hated the Soviet Union so much, old. He had published, through traditional channels, one book of were so happy to see it gone, that they refused to see how bad poetry—Vsyo Plokho (“Everything’s Bad,” or “It’s No Good”)— things were getting until it was too late.) By late 2003, after the and another book, Vtorzhenie (“incursion”), that was a mixture of arrest of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky signaled the fnal end poetry and essays. Both had been well-received by critics, although of the hopes of the 1990s, political opposition to Putin came to also denounced in some circles as self-indulgent, “not poetry,” consist on the one hand of a weird party of teenage outcasts, part and so on. Te poems were free verse, which put them slightly Stalinist, part anarchist, led by a former poet turned revolutionary outside the Russian poetic tradition; they were more reminiscent turned federal prisoner named Eduard Limonov (he served a two- of Charles Bukowski (whom Medvedev had translated) than any year sentence beginning in 2001 for illegal purchase of frearms), Russian predecessor. But what put them really outside the Russian and on the other of Chechen terrorists. Real power was wielded by tradition was their everyday-ness. It was bad enough for a poet a cabal of businessmen and politicians and businessmen-turned- not to rhyme, but to discuss at length how he found some cheap politicians (and vice versa). Occasionally for prying into business paté at an expensive supermarket—and not as a metaphor for transactions—but not for any political speech or position—a jour- anything, really: he was mostly pleased to have found some cheap nalist would get shot. paté—was a little much, or too little. Tere had been a strain of anti-Romantic Russian poetry going back all the way to Pushkin; All this, plus money. Russia is a huge exporter of oil, natural gas, in the late Soviet period, especially, the great conceptualist poets, nickel, and aluminum. Between 1998 and 2008, prices for these Dmitri Prigov chief among them, enjoyed puncturing the preten- and other raw materials rose, in some instances, by an order of sions of highly rhetorical Soviet poetry with their unrhyming tales magnitude. Te country was awash in cash. And so in addition to of going to the store to buy stale bread. (Te Soviet conceptualist total political and cultural stagnation, a culture of “luxury” sprang novel par excellence was Vladimir Sorokin’s Te Queue (1984), the up; people were buying luxury cars and suits and thousand-Euro entirety of which took place in a line outside a store.) So it wasn’t leather jackets. In response, a great many people threw in the towel. as if Russian poetry had never not rhymed, and it wasn’t as if it had It was almost impossible to participate in politics; the remaining never been to the supermarket. Te diference may have been that cultural institutions were either irrelevant, cowed, or (in the case of Medvedev, while doing away with much of the formal apparatus the new glossy consumer magazines, like Russian Esquire) entirely of Russian lyric poetry, had retained its messianic element. He was geared toward the nascent bourgeoisie; you may as well get what not an ironist; he was very much a Poet. In the end, as Medvedev you could while the getting was good. says of his one-time friend turned antagnoist Dmitry Kuzmin, the Tis was the cultural, political, and social situation in the fall of combination of all these things in one person proved really very 2006, when I found Medvedev’s book. Te crusading journalist aggravating. Anna Politkovskaya had just been shot in her elevator, and Putin had Medvedev’s evolution as a poet and thinker leading up to his as much as spit on her grave a few days later. To the great indignation rejection of the literary world was visible in his frst two books. of the international press, he declared that no one in Russia cared Te poems in his frst book, It’s No Good, were memoiristic and about Politkovskaya—and he was right. She was shot and it didn’t introspective, though that book, too, began with a rejection—of matter. Perhaps it was time to pack it in for the next decade or so. translation. Te frst poem of Medvedev’s frst book declared that 13 he would no longer translate other poets, but be himself a poet. the anti-totalitarian poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of the Te rest of the book expanded, confdently and sometimes exu- theater’s guards came out, infuriated, and punched Medvedev, who berantly, on this discovery. In his second book, Incursion, doubt nonetheles continued his picket. Tat was my Medvedev, all right. began to creep in: poems and essays responded to his critics, made further declarations, pleaded for more time. Te book included As I read Medvedev’s critique of the Moscow literary and intel- a long essay on the terrorist attacks of September 11; a discussion lectual world, what struck me above all was how it answered so of Medvedev’s translations of American pornographic novels; and many of the questions my friends and I had been struggling with some refections on the diferent Russian words for cock and cunt. in New York. Here we were, writing about the depredations of It concluded with a long diary about the author’s frustrations with multinational corporations—how they dodged taxes, of-shored money and publishing and writing that was framed as annotations work to places with lax or no labor laws, and destroyed the envi- to the published diary of the dean of the Gorky Literary Institute. ronment—and then publishing our books or articles with places that were owned by .