A reading and book talk by translators, AINSLEY MORSE and BELA SHAYEVICH, who will speak about their collaboration on two poets of the Moscow Lianozovo Group (1950-1970s), its nonconformist avant-garde aesthetics, and the challenges of rendering their writings in English. They will read from I Live I See: Selected Poems by Vsevolod Nekrasov (2013) and Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems (2017), both published by Ugly Duckling Presse.VSEVOLOD NEKRASOV (1934-2009), a lifelong resident of Moscow, became active in the literary and artistic underground in the late 1950s. Through the fall of the Soviet Union, his work only appeared in samizdat and European publications. His poetry, which is often characterized as minimalist, uses repetition and paronomasia to deconstruct and recontextualize his linguistic environment – he targets everything from stock Soviet political mottos to clichés people mutter to one another in everyday situations. I Live I See presents a comprehensive survey of his work. Exploring urban, rural, and linguistic environs with an economy of lyrical means and a dark sense of humor, Nekrasov’s groundbreaking early poems rupture the stultified language of Soviet cliché while his later work tackles the excesses of the new Russian order. It is the first collection of Nekrasov's work in English translation, with a preface by Mikhail Sukhotin and an afterword by Gerald Janecek. IGOR KHOLIN (1920-1999) was born in Moscow, ran away from an orphanage in Ryazan, and eventually enrolled in a military academy in Novorossiysk. In 1946, Kholin landed in a labor camp in Lianozovo, a suburb of Moscow, where one of his friends was the guard and would occasionally let him out to visit the Lianozovo library. When he asked to check out a book by forbidden poet Alexander Blok, he aroused the interest of the librarian, Olga Potapova, an artist married to the poet and painter Evgeny Kropivnitsky. The two of them hosted a Sunday salon out of their nearby barracks apartment, encouraging the work of young artists and a few poets, including Genrikh Sapgir and Vsevolod Nekrasov. Along with Kholin, they called themselves Kropivnitsky’s students and formed a loose poetry collective known as the Lianozovo Group. Kholin’s early work took the rough edges of Soviet life as his primary subject matter, while lampooning formulaic Socialist Realist poetics. Later years saw cycles of outer-space poems and a series of poetic self-portraits; but all of it equally unpublishable until the fall of the Soviet Union. Kholin 66 is the first book of Kholin’s work in English translation. In a string of acerbically related non-adventures excerpted from his 1966 diary, Kholin moves to the country, sleeps a lot, drinks and debauches among Moscow’s literary underground, and eventually moves back to the city. Broke and bitter, he details his bemusement in terse, absurdist prose. ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS AINSLEY MORSE has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. She holds a PhD in Slavic literatures from Harvard University. Her previous publications include Andrei Sen-Senkov's Anatomical Theater (with Peter Golub; Zephyr Press, 2013); she has also worked on the farcical Soviet pastoral Beyond Tula by Andrey Egunov, and the forthcoming collection of theoretical essays by Yuri Tynianov. BELA SHAYEVICH is a writer, translator, and illustrator. Her translations have appeared in It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev (UDP/n+1, 2016) and various periodicals including Little Star and The New Yorker.
Poetry of the Moscow Lianozovo Group: Vsevolod Nekrasov & Igor’ Kholin
