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Mom didn’t think that your Pobeda watch had any significance except that it didn’t stop when your heart ceased its ticking. Asked what was left, she handed me your cardiogram. She flattened you. You were reduced to a straight line.
Is it proof of the finality of the spirit?
She threw out your glasses and burned your Magadan pictures, except one where you had a full head of red hair.
“Near the Arctic, your father walked hatless. To impress former Gulag convicts? Or reindeer? That’s why he went bald.”
Did it feel ugly to be called “shitface” by her because by immigrating, you, a former mining engineer, became only a lowly janitor? Now she slid into afterlife practicality.
“I put his sneakers into a coffin beside his usual shoes, so he is comfortable where he is!”
Papa, did you know that I was expecting?
Mom didn’t let me tell you, guarding the gates of access to you, promising that she’d tell you herself.
It’s been five months. The memory of you hadn’t left me for a second. I protected what was inside me from cruelty, severing contact with her. But I invited her now.
Did you know that your life wasn’t in vain?
Your first grandson was just placed, clean and dry, into a cot. It is the spitting image of you as a baby.
Mom gasped looking at his red hair.
As though you briefly inhabited him when saying “hi.”
Of course, Papa, you knew.
Margarita Meklina is a bilingual fiction writer and essayist born in St. Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States in the early 1990s and spent twenty years in San Francisco; now she divides her time between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She received the 2003 Andrei Bely Prize (Russia’s first independent literary prize, which enjoys a special reputation for honoring dissident and nonconformist writing) for her short story collection Battle at St. Petersburg and the 2009 Russian Prize, awarded by the Yeltsin Center Foundation, for her manuscript My Criminal Connection to Art. In 2013, she was a finalist for the Nonconformism prize for her novella Cervix, and in 2014 she was short-listed for NOS, a prize given by the fund of Mikhail Prokhorov for “new social trends” in literature. Author of 6 books in her native Russian, she also completed a YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote in English (Black Wolf Edition & Publishing LTD, 2016) and a collection of short stories A Sauce Stealer (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). Translated into French and Swedish, two of her novellas are available as chapbooks: Poussière d’étoiles (Etoiles, 2016) and Linea Nigra (Ars Interpres, 2017). In 2018, she was awarded the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize for her novella Ulay in Lithuania. The prize is given by New York’s Novy Zhurnal to Russian writers living outside of Russia.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
