A few months ago I got a copy of this book from Keith Gessen, a contributor and editor at N+1 who covers the Russia beat. Keith is a friend of Marxmailer Thomas Campbell who is a member of Chto Delat (What is to be Done), a collective of artists and intellectuals in Russia who share Medvedev's leftwing politics. Whether they share Medvedev's love of Charles Bukowski, whose poems he has translated into Russian, I don't know...
I was surprised that the NYT would review Medvedev's book and even more surprised that it would be so flattering. I am including the review below as well as a link to a passage from "My Fascism", a wonderful rant about the cultural and political rot in Putin's Russia-that wonderful BRIC power that has the blood of 80,000 Syrians on its hands. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/kirill-medvedevs-its-no-good/ NYT March 21, 2003 A Litany of Betrayals, Petty Yet Terrifying By DWIGHT GARNER IT’S NO GOOD poems/essays/actions By Kirill Medvedev Translated by Keith Gessen with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich 278 pages. n+1/Ugly Duckling Press. $16. The feminist Russian punk band Pussy Riot, some of its members recently imprisoned, stands for many things, notably opposition to the policies of Vladimir Putin. One of its best-known songs contains the line “Virgin birth-giver of God, drive away Putin!” Another is titled, depending on the translation, “Putin Is Wetting Himself.” The band rejects the criminal capitalism so prevalent in Russia. When Madonna and Björk offered to perform alongside the group, a Pussy Riot member replied: “The only performances we’ll participate in are illegal ones. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets.” This stance echoes one taken years earlier by the young Russian poet Kirill Medvedev, whose writing is introduced to American readers in “It’s No Good,” a spirited compendium translated by the novelist and n+1 magazine editor Keith Gessen, along with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich. It’s not often you open a book, flip to its title page, and read a declaration like the one printed here: “Copyright denied by Kirill Medvedev, 2012.” He’s opted out of the literary world. He’s decided that his books will appear in pirate editions or not at all. Mr. Medvedev notes, in an observation that hangs over this book, “It’s strange now to think that business was once portrayed as the enemy of authority.” In his introduction to “It’s No Good” Mr. Gessen calls Mr. Medvedev “Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer.” It’s no surprise to learn that Mr. Medvedev and members of his folk-protest band, Arkady Kots, were detained by the police for performing in support of Pussy Riot. “It’s No Good” collects Mr. Medvedev’s poems and polemics as well as his deadpan accounts of his political actions, like picketing a theater production by a director who has cozied up to Mr. Putin. Mr. Medvedev is a big personality, on the page and off. He comes across as a shambling holy fool, an unkempt mix of Roberto Benigni and Gary Shteyngart. He throws complicated moral thunder. At times his nuances can be utterly lost in translation. He merely seems grandiloquent and aggrieved — a blowhard. Yet you keep turning the pages. Mr. Medvedev’s unrhymed, come-as-you-are poems (he is a translator of Charles Bukowski) reject romanticism of any sort. We find him “in the Smolensky supermarket/at the corner of the Garden Ring,” rejoicing over a can of sprat paté, which he terms “paté for the poor.” He writes about girls and bars and odd jobs and sex and why so many of his friends adore the movie “Amelie.” One poem commences with a haiku about buying a condom from a kiosk. In another he wonders why he should feel the luckiest of his peers, luckier than those who married rich men or a friend who left for the united states and is working there for the washington post sometimes coming in on business trips and staying at the National of everyone who turned out to be a computer genius of everyone who became an assistant to editors-in-chief or a designer for major fashion magazines. This litany continues, movingly: of everyone who got married, traded in their parents’ apartment, and were separated by the fourth day of all the half-drunk and stunted intellectuals who (unlike me) matured too early, then burned out of everyone who found work in the morgue of everyone who did time in jail then died of an overdose of everyone who worked at the politician kirienko’s campaign headquarters and then joined his permanent team. He is a shrewd and irritable observer of the petty (and not-so-petty) corruptions of the Russian literary world. Where once upon a time a hack poet might have schemed against his enemies (“ratted them out, turned them in to the KGB”), these days that same hack “simply would not accept a review of a book” by one of those enemies. Either way, silence is assured. Mr. Medvedev’s most stinging assessments are reserved for Russia’s liberal intelligentsia. His book often put me in mind of an observation by the Soviet-era poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” His political arguments are not easy to condense, but he suggests that in the Putin era intellectuals have “split psychologically and socially in two.” Half are busy grimly raking in money. The other half are ground down, the walking dead, living as if “it would be wrong to grumble, to express discontent, to make demands.” Mr. Medvedev took to the Internet, and to Facebook, to distribute his writing. His later poetry, more strident and shorn of detail, is lesser stuff. He begins to type more often in all caps. You fear for his mental state. You fear for this brave man’s physical well-being as well. “The presence of principles creates serious problems for the person who has them,” he writes. When he pickets a theater production, he’s punched in the jaw by a security guard for his effort. There are other scary moments. Part of the nightmare world that “It’s No Good” evokes is one that both Orwell and the members of Pussy Riot would understand. It’s a nightmare of euphemism and cant. “This is what happens,” Mr. Medvedev writes, “when the authorities don’t want to speak clearly and don’t want to be spoken of clearly, either.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
