Footnotes All the Way Down: How Russian Poetry Mines the Past to Reveal the Present

Nina Iskrenko was a mother of two. She was educated as a physicist, though she wanted to study music. One of the prominent Moscow poets wanting to tear free from the traditional formal, rhymed stanzas of Russian poetry in the 1980s, Iskrenko describes her days in a subtle political poem:

Monday                Tuesday

Monday                TuesdayWednesdayThursdayFriday

Monday

The insistent repetition of Monday, the absence of weekend days, the way the rest of the work week blurs into a single entity like one extended day containing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; these are some of the possibilities for interpreting such lines, one section of a long poem titled Special Troikas: A Corps.

Nina Iskrenko (photo by FG)

Everyone will tell you the Russians are literary people. That taxi drivers quote Pushkin. So it’s no surprise that contemporary Russian poems are rife with subtle allusions to other literature. Co-translating with Sara Dickinson a poem by Alexander Yeremenko, I came across the line “I never eat when I’m drinking.” I remembered an evening at Yeremenko’s apartment in Moscow.

The half-dozen other American poets, our translators, and I had opened the front door and entered a hallway which was partly blocked by a hill of bricks and, further on, by an exposed tub. Yeremenko was planning to build a wall around the tub, but for us he had constructed an altar to poetry from the brick pile, placing lighted candles and newspaper clippings and books in various niches on the bricks and against the peeling wallpaper.

In spite of the translators, language was a problem for me. The translators couldn’t monitor every conversation and often they were drawn into their own. Spanish served me that evening with an art critic and a painter, and one of the Russian poets—a huge, bulky man who looked to me like a football lineman—spoke French, which I can understand well enough to construct a garble with vague intimations of sense. It was this poet, speaking French, who took me by the arm and conducted me from the party, from the drone of buoyant voices, toasts, and clicking glasses in Yeremenko’s apartment, out into the chilly Moscow night.

Through shadowy alleys, rain puddles, streets deserted and dark, I was tugged along. After a while, he gave up trying to communicate to me where we were going. But he had taken a shine to me, I gathered, after hearing the Americans read—and our poems translated—in the Mayakovsky museum earlier that evening, and he was absolutely intent on showing me something. Something in this neighborhood. Or was it in a neighborhood nearby? We passed no one. It was after midnight and the rain had paused; we had been walking at a sharp clip through backways and the darkened penetralia of apartment complexes for twenty minutes, sometimes doubling back and redirecting our course.

At last we came to a sunken lake. It was surrounded on all sides by apartment buildings. He gestured to the lake and earnestly began to explain something to me again in sequences of French and Russian. Gradually, scrutinizing his face under a glowering moon, I gleaned an inkling of what he was saying. This is the very lake where the devil first appears, with his feline companion, to the character of the editor in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel The Master and Marguerite. It is from this lake that the editor desperately runs into that subway tunnel over there—he pointed—where he slips on some spilled oil and is decapitated under the screeching steel wheels of the train’s engine as he lies paralyzed with his head propped against the second rail, helplessly watching the train come on. And this is also the very lake where the poet Marina Tsvetaeva skated as a little girl. That apartment, over there—most of the lights were dark in the building—is where Tolstoy lived for a while.

*

When we arrived back at the party, everyone was extremely quiet. Their attentions were commanded by the slender Yeremenko, the poet/host who many called “The King of Russian Poetry.”He was collecting coins from the guests. Kopecks, quarters, subway money. He held each coin one at a time over his full wine cup and let it fall in so that the wine level was raised by whatever volume the coin displaced. Already the wine seemed to bulge beyond the brim.

Yeremenko’s gestures were strange, slow, and mesmerizing, and they invested this spontaneous ceremony with formality. All the time I watched, he was absolutely quiet and his silence was riveting. How long had the ritual been going on while I was out by the lake? I could tell that people wanted to draw away, that they were ready to resume conversations, that some weren’t invested in giving up the rest of the night to what seemed like a silly drunken game. But no one could. And with coin after coin, the wine level rose—impossibly—above the glass. Blood-red Georgian wine, and the surface tension didn’t break. Not for some time longer.

When, at long last, it did, Nina Iskrenko immediately sang out a poem from memory and everyone laughed. Yeremenko’s spell on us was broken.

A poem by Alexander Yeremenko begins:

Ninth year of war in Afghanistan
And I thought: I’m fed up with my silence!
No one will curse me now
For writing about it.

More likely they’ll publish me here
And over there. All sing my praises.
Except, of course, those in chain gangs
Who took the rap for speaking out first.

Now in Ukraine as then in Afghanistan, Russian protesters against the “special military operation” have taken the rap for speaking out; some bide their time in jail. As the war in Ukraine has gone on, protests have largely disappeared from the public eye. In the Arbat, Moscow’s bohemian district, poets and rappers stand before curious crowds and declaim poems about everything else but the war.

It wasn’t until I was rereading Bulgakov’s The Master and Marguerite (in Michael Glenny’s translation, which I prefer to the others) that I came across the very line I had translated in Yeremenko’s poem: “I never eat when I’m drinking.” Like many Russian poems, Yeremenko’s seem to call for pages of footnotes to explain the references. Yet I find them powerful even without knowing all the allusions.

The poet Nina Iskrenko died of cancer at the age of 44. In a memorial essay, the writer Olga Livshin—born in Ukraine, raised in Moscow, and now living in Philadelphia—wrote that Iskrenko was “one of the underground Soviet poets who opened, or rather exploded, several doors for the post-Soviet generation. Her work—both with her own poetry and with the events of Moscow’s Poetry Club, which included over a hundred poets in the late 1980s—helped create a new set of expectations for poetry in Russia.”

Nina and I were close, and we met over the years in Moscow, California, and in Providence—where she stayed with us while trying to find a miracle cure in the United States for her tumor. I remember her pointing out, from the peak of the “Sun of Moscow”—the tallest ferris wheel in Europe— the apartment where she’d lived as a child. I think of her often.

The man who spoke out against war, the so-called “king of poets,” Alexander Yeremenko, is also dead, the cause of death, “unknown.”

The future blows toward us without handholds. It is a gaping. An already. A maw.

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Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander is available from New Directions.