It is already fifteen years since the first issue of the samizdat journal Vavilon appeared, in February 1989, as a platform for young Russian writers. The Vavilon project never intended to draw a line of division between male and female writing. Indeed, from the very start, the project was supposed to unite, not to divide. The very name “Vavilon” comes from a song by famous Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov, who was hugely influential in the youth world of the 1980s:
Vavilon is a city like any other,
one shouldn’t complain about this.
If you go, we’ll go one way—
there simply is no other.
The guiding notion was universal coexistence and fruitful interaction between various artistic discourses and views on life and literature. In those years, so critical for Russian society and especially for Russian literature, beginning authors seemed uniquely placed. Every day new data about Russian and world history, culture, and domestic and foreign literature of the present and the recent past flooded in. In the first place, readers now had access to the forbidden works of the Silver Age as well as to the products of over three decades of the samizdat literature of the second half of the twentieth century. The world in general and culture in particular seemed to these young authors unstable, continually changing, each new publication demanding a reappraisal of set ideas. Therefore, it cannot be said of the majority of significant young writers who entered literature from the late 80s to the early 90s that they inherited any particular tradition, based on earlier Russian poetry. From the very onset of their literary careers, they found themselves at an intersection of many paths, with the option of freely combining different ones, that is, of combining incompatibles.
There were five originators of the project, all of them male (aged between sixteen and twenty in 1989), among them such contemporary young stars as Stanislav Lvovsky and Vadim Kalinin. Our samizdat journal was produced on an ordinary typewriter and was not intended for wide circulation: we simply wanted to record the emergence of a young literary generation, because other publishers, who had published Nabokov and Brodsky for the first time, were not interested in young writers. It was quite understandable, therefore, that our energies went into discovering new writers. And very soon the two first women appeared in Vavilon: the Petersburg prose-writer Marina Sazonova and the Moscow poet Olga Zondberg. These key figures of the early Vavilon represented two very different concepts of women’s writing. The prose of Sazonova was experimental, multivoiced, disruptive of gender stereotypes (her story “Triptikh” [Triptych] of the early 90s remains to this day the most distinctive example of Russian lesbian prose). Zondberg’s poetry, on the contrary, startled with its systematic rejection of any kind of artificiality or affectation, a clearly focused intimacy, a tendency to preserve all the elements of traditional Russian verse, investing it, however, with a uniquely individual emotionality. With time this archetype of woman as conserver of traditions became too restrictive for Zondberg. She migrated from poetry to prose, bidding the former farewell with the graceful cycle “Seven Hours One Minute,” which exhibited a brilliant mastery of modernist literary devices and a modernist view of the world. Zondberg’s poetry of the early 90s became for the young literary generation one of the most significant experiments in the interpretation of their relationship to the poetic tradition.
Gradually acquiring new creative energy, the Vavilon circle, about 1991, felt confident enough to launch an All-Union competition for young poets. An extensive advertising campaign and a jury consisting of such prominent writers as Yury Levitansky, Aleksandr Kushner, Viktor Krivulin, and Ivan Zhdanov encouraged a whole range of young poets to compete. At the poetry festival which concluded the competition, the focus of attention was the youngest participant, the fifteen-year-old Petersburg poet Polina Barskova, whose sensual, somber verse recalled the French “poètes maudits.” The late Soviet period knew many female infant prodigies who did not fulfill their early promise. Strength of character, professional training in philology, and intensive creative and personal links with other prominent young writers protected Barskova from such a fate. The Barskova of today is an acknowledged poet, her juvenile misanthropy having settled into a mature stoicism, the occasional decorativeness having transformed itself into a mercilessly precise description of reality on both sides of the ocean—in St. Petersburg and in California, the two localities where Barskova leads her life. Barskova’s two most recent books appeared in one of the most prestigious Russian poetry series, published by the Pushkin Fund publishing house—but it was Vavilon that initiated all this, in 1993, with a booklet by Barskova (together with a collection by another celebrated Vavilon author, Nikolay Zviagintsev).
Not finding anyone in Russia ready to help the young poetry with money, I turned to the well-known scholar Valentina Polukhina, whom I had met a few years previously at the first Petersburg Conference on Brodsky. The $30 that she sent was at that time sufficient to enable us to bring out the first two books of our publishing house (ARGO-RISK). Ten years later, we have published over 150 collections, mainly of poetry (along with the young writers, under the ARGO-RISK imprint have appeared acknowledged masters of Russian verse, including Dmitry A. Prigov, Genrikh Sapgir, Viktor Krivulin, Nina Iskrenko, and Svetlana Kekova).
In the mid 90s, Russian literary life gradually became less agitated, and traditional publishers began to pay attention to young writers—often, unfortunately, to those who were more familiar, somewhat resembling their older colleagues. Sometimes, however, they were surprised: poetics, seemingly quite innocent, turned out to be explosive and apt to take unexpected turns. So it was with Mariya Stepanova, who appeared in Vavilon after being published in Yunost and Znamia. Stepanova’s début was distinguished by brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style, behind all of which stood the shade of Akhmatova, to whose early portraits Stepanova bore a resemblance. Progress along this route would virtually have assured Stepanova of success with the reading public and with the critics, but she chose another and far riskier strategy. Each publication produced something unexpected. At times she engaged in a dialogue with the Russian tradition, with the archaic language and poetry of the eighteenth century; at others she introduced casual contemporary diction, close to slang, into a classical stanza reminiscent of Catullus. At one time, in a lyric miniature, she reached the heights of estrangement, observing the sufferings of the spirit and the body from some point of passionless elevation; at another, a sonnet cycle looked like total parody, aimed partially at Brodsky’s famous sequence of twenty sonnets but mainly at his many imitators, also attempting this difficult form. Her text was suddenly invested with genuine, penetrating lyricism. In some texts Stepanova hovers on the edge of misogyny; thus, she is true to her conviction that the artist must be many-sided, Protean.
The end of the 90s was a time in which new literary organizations came into being. Poetry turned from the problematical customary path, “from journal to book,” to the oral presentation of texts in literary clubs and via mass accessibility on the Internet. In both cases the youngest generation could hardly fail to have a head start: the literary club Avtornik was established in late 1996, under the aegis of Vavilon. Since then, young authors not only appear each week but invite literary individuals of all generations. So a picture of contemporary literature from the standpoint of the young generation has emerged. Similarly significant is the Internet anthology of contemporary Russian literature www.vavilon.ru, which was inaugurated in autumn 1997 and today includes a vast array of contemporary writing. At the same time the Internet led to an influx of many talented new authors into Vavilon—and here a particularly characteristic and significant figure is Linor Goralik, who made her début on the Internet initially with her early poems and later with strikingly audacious social and political commentary (including material on sexual problems, unparalleled for its frankness and in-depth treatment). Later on the Vavilon website she contributed texts which were on the border between verse and prose, broaching almost all the painful and taboo cultural topics, especially those relating to female sexuality and interaction between the Russian and Jewish peoples.
The start of the new millennium was marked for Vavilon by the initiation of a fruitful rivalry with the young writers prize “Debiut,” the first such award to have been established in Russia. The first winner, in 2000, was the present manager of the Vavilon project, poet and prose-writer Danila Davydov. Young Russian writers cannot now complain of a lack of interest in their work. This coincides with the appearance on the literary scene of a whole pleiad of talented poets born after 1978, most of them female. The latter have something in common which encourages one to call them “angry young women.” The forerunner of this poetics, the worldview proclaimed by these writers, is the scarcely older Anna Gorenko—a rising star of Russian poetry in Israel, who died of drug abuse at the age of twenty-seven and whose work has only now become accessible to Russian readers. Independently of Gorenko, in Russia, Moscow authors Elena Kostyleva, Irina Shostakovskaya, and Kseniya Marennikova as well as representatives of the new wave of Ural Poetry—Elena Suntsova, Natalya Starodubtseva, and others—also subscribed to this poetics. The leitmotiv of their work is a tendency to convey the fragmented consciousness of the youthful writer of today, swamped by all kinds of information, hardly able to achieve or retain self-awareness. Against the background of such perceptions, love is experienced as extremely painful, traumatic, the high price demanded of the individual wishing to acquire wholeness and purposefulness. This poetry does not make easy reading: the disintegration of syntactic connections, unpredictable associational moves, abundant intertextuality—not so much quotations from classical poetry as fragments of information that make up the background to contemporary life (advertising slogans, pop lyrics, items of news footage). At its best, however, this writing does possess a striking authenticity.
In its fifteen years of existence the Vavilon project has essentially fulfilled its task: today the young literary generation (from very young, twenty-year-old authors) forms an inalienable part of the literary landscape. Critics and publishers have to reckon with it, and so, above all, does the reading public. Each year, women’s voices ring out more clearly in its midst.
Translated by Daniel Weissbort