Anna Akhmatova may be the reason you opened this book. Her name springs first to the minds of Americans who know much about Russian poetry, if I may draw on an entirely unscientific sample of my own chance conversations over the years. Russia must have the only world literature whose poetry has been represented by a woman, an oddity that grows when one realizes that Russia in fact had two great women poets early in the twentieth century: Marina Tsvetaeva may be less known abroad, but only because her linguistic wizardry nearly defies translation. In Russia they command equal respect, and generations of writers have looked to both as exemplary lyric poets.
Some Russian poets look back to Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva as proof that women more than hold their own with men as poets. Thus in “Evening at Tsarskoe Selo,” a poem you will find in this volume, Polina Barskova describes Akhmatova walking through a park where Akhmatova had imagined Aleksandr Pushkin walking a century earlier. In Barskova’s poem, Akhmatova is preoccupied by an unfinished poem, and she pays little attention to her male companion. Barskova wittily rewrites the myth of Akhmatova as a love poet and makes her first and foremost a poet, someone whose mind and heart are taken up with poetry more than with any lover. In another poem you will find here, Olga Sedakova also turns to Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva as poets, although by means of the briefest mention. She adds a footnote to “In Memory of a Poet” telling readers that she has drawn on the poetic traditions of both Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova; their mediation has given form and intonational nobility to a poem memorializing her great contemporary Joseph Brodsky.
These two examples show Akhmatova as muse to later women poets, but she and Tsvetaeva can also, paradoxically, cast a long shadow. Some poets may wonder which is the greater danger, seeking the lofty, stern harmonies of Akhmatova or risking comparison with the wilder linguistic experimentation of Tsvetaeva. Not for nothing did the poet Yunna Morits once see them as Scylla and Charybdis. For her, the Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova traditions had to be circumnavigated. Happily, the women poets included here have avoided one risk, repeating the biographical fates of these two poets, which included exile and later suicide for Tsvetaeva and the doom of seeing loved ones imprisoned for both Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova. Later poets were blessed by the kinder turn of Russian history. No one has had an exile as difficult as Tsvetaeva’s years abroad, and younger poets live more easily in Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, or New York, even if their financial circumstances can be uncertain. Life outside Russia is no longer a form of exile: poets are finally free to visit Russia (this was not true before the late 1980s, which shapes the creative biography of those who left earlier, like Irina Ratushinskaya and Natalya Gorbanevskaya). Today Russian poets living abroad can have intensive, ongoing contact with poetic traditions in Russia itself. They see fellow poets and can travel to Russia if they wish, and the Internet and e-mail have made it easy to remain informed even at a great distance. We in the West have luckily heard some of them read, both those who emigrated and those visiting from Russia; poetry festivals or book fairs in New York, London, Frankfurt, and many smaller cities as well as tours by individual poets have brought their voices very much to life for American and European audiences.
Some of the poets included in this generous collection will be familiar to American audiences, who may have heard Bella Akhmadulina read and seen a volume of translated poems by Elena Shvarts or Olga Sedakova. The prose and drama of Liudmila Petrushevskaya may be known by many. It is all to the good that the barriers should be lowered, that Russia’s poets should seem less exotic and strange, more a part of the larger international poetry scene in which national literatures interpenetrate and are transformed by contact. Another paradox emerges here, then, as these poets surprise us when they seem suddenly familiar, even as they pursue new forms of difference. Many of these poets, including some whose names will be entirely new to almost everyone, pay attention to familiar cultural currents in the humanities and in popular culture; and so we recognize the worlds they describe: Mariya Galina’s “Ghazal” mentions Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze; Mariya Kildibekova has Osip Mandelstam, Marilyn Monroe, and Oskar Schindler in the same poem; Elena Fanailova writes of Frida Kahlo; and Aleksandra Petrova uses a Quentin Tarantino film as a point of departure. Daily life is here, too, the tumult of communal apartments and the recollection of exotic landscapes—Katia Kapovich, who lives in the United States, writes with irony of “an untidy Russian life.” We also see objects of daily life that are not marked as Russian in any way: for example, the computer to whom Inna Lisnianskaya writes an ode; the laundry and household clutter in Nina Iskrenko’s “Another Woman.” Women are treated for cancer and give birth in the poems of Vera Pavlova; cars and teeth are fixed in a poem by Olesia Nikolaeva. All is not entirely prosaic, of course. Familiar in a different way to readers of modern poetry will be the metaphysical concerns of poets like Olga Sedakova and Svetlana Kekova or, in the poems of Nikolaeva, the sense that religious experience and fear of one’s own demise can descend on the dullest catalogue of daily life.
The 1980s and 1990s were good years for poets, despite the chaos induced by massive social change in Russia and the apparently falling status of poetry in an age of electronic communication and mass media. Many poets have found new routes to publication because of these technological and social innovations, and their experiments are often truly inspired. Among the more adventurous in their treatment of poetic form are Rea Nikonova and Larisa Berezovchuk, but the stunning leaps in diction, stylistic register, and theme by many others should not be underestimated. Some of these elements are difficult to convey in translation, but not all. The metaphors remain vivid, and lineation and arrangement on the page are formal traits that show through. Readers will see at a quick glance that these poets have many different ideas about the layout of poetic words on a page.
Would these poets be pleased to find their work in a volume entirely dedicated to women? They have agreed to it, which says something; but many would be ambivalent. At least one, Yunna Morits, flatly refused to have her work in such a book. Herein rests yet another paradox of contemporary Russian women poets. Most do not see themselves as “women poets,” and the derogatory sting of the term poetessa remains. Their bonds to male poets of their generation or to the male poets who inspired them are often quite strong. Thus Elena Shvarts has enduring ties to Aleksandr Mironov and keen admiration for poets like Lev Rubinshtein and the late Viktor Krivulin; and if you ask about Silver Age poets she admires, she is more likely to mention Mikhail Kuzmin than Anna Akhmatova. But Shvarts maintains friendships with several poets in this volume; if I may inject a personal note, it was she who first told me to read Gali-Dana Zinger, also included here. One could tell similar stories about the ties among other women poets, but still we would want to conclude that the reason to group these poets is not because their primary allegiance is to one another, since it is not; and not because any of them should be read entirely outside the context of their male contemporaries and precursors. They should not. Rather, these women poets require separate attention because some collections of contemporary poetry still do not fully attend to their work. This is a surprising lack, because even surveys that relegate women poets to belated acknowledgment admit that they are doing significant work. What persists is a strange awkwardness about how to think about a woman who is a poet. In December 2003 I was present at an evening of Russian poetry where more than half a dozen men read and performed their work. Polina Barskova was the lone female voice. The men decided to make the evening more interesting, as they put it, by creating a competition among the poets. One of the men self-consciously selected Barskova to receive their Golden Lyre award. One could argue that she was, in fact, the most interesting poet in the room, but the supposed competition seemed more an expression of anxiety mixed with benighted male gallantry.
Books such as this one afford a further opportunity, then: this anthology lets us ask what it means to these poets that they write, and are read, as women. The answer to that question cannot be unitary: the variety among these poets in temperament, tone, and poetic inclination is vast. Some explore a feminine identity with passion or with ironic wit, whereas others find the very idea of gender oppressive and uninteresting. Yet the question must be posed, for without it we will have a diminished appreciation of the achievements of women writing poetry in Russian today. And their achievements are considerable, living up to the legacy of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, as you will discover in the pages that follow.