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Who is at fault?.. What’s to be done?.. Where to turn?
Pick up your luggage in Stambul, Harbin, another town?
A dozen people care about you back in Russia,
outside of it, not one.
Unfamiliar letters don’t gel into words.
Belt out a song of protest, refugee-songbird!
Let’s hear something bitter and vicious…
Back home this was risky—here, just absurd.
Fill your mouth, free of native soil, with water
from the Bosphorus, Red Sea, or the Hudson.
Step out on the shore and keep your eyes glued
to the horizon.
***
Кто виноват?.. Что делать?.. Куда идти?..
Где получать багаж – в Стамбуле или в Харбине?
Ты и в России-то нужен максимум десяти,
А на чужбине…
Непривычные буквы не складываются в слова.
Ну-ка, забацай, беглец-щегол, песню протеста.
Ну-ка, позлее чего-нибудь нам слабай…
Но там твоё пенье опасно, а здесь – неуместно.
В рот, не набитый родной землёй, набери воды
Босфора, Красного моря, или Гудзона.
Выйди на берег и взгляда не отводи
От горизонта.
Born on May 25, 1961, in Omsk. Studied acting, worked in theaters in Khabarovsk and Chelyabinsk. In 2005, Sergey moved to Moscow. He is well known as a scriptwriter and playwright. His plays are produced in Moscow’s leading theaters. He has been writing poetry since the age of 15.
Maria Bloshteyn is a literary scholar, editor, translator, and essayist. She was born in Leningrad and she grew up and lives in Toronto. Maria studied Dostoevsky’s impact on American culture and is the author of The Creation of a Counter-culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (2007). She is the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal (2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (2015), as well as the editor and the main translator of Russia is Burning, a collection of Russоphone poems of World War II (Smokestack Books, 2020). Her poetry translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
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.
