The Emergence of Russian Subjectivity: A Critical Introduction to the New Poems of Alexei Makushinsky

I first found Alexei Makushinsky through the Russian-American New York online magazine Interpoezia.  I read his poem “Train into Frankfurt” and was immediately surprised at how much it didn’t sound like the typical modern Russian poetry that any reader might find in poetry anthologies.  It had a contemporary tone, had a relaxed, easy-to-understand conversational style and word choice —it could almost have appeared in any number of today’s American literary magazines. I had always assumed Russian poetry sounded in certain ways intrinsically different from American poetry, since they come from entirely different cultures.  But this poem seemed to prove me wrong with its questioning of the framing voice; the displacement, or at least the questioning of the assertion of the lyrical “I”; and the transcendental yearning to question both time and place as they attach to, and detach from, the fictive nature of the individual “self” — concerns of many Language poets working in America.

For many readers, early 20th-century poets like Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak still represent the “newest” and Russian poetry, as evidenced by the newly released Paul Schmidt anthology, The Stray Dog Cabaret.   Although recent writers like Prigov and Dragomoshchenko have certainly made space for themselves in contemporary poetry, these earlier poets nonetheless hold sway, even upwards of fifty years after their deaths. In fact, the aspect of a contemporary “real time” that I found in the poem even differentiated Makushinsky from Dragomoshchenko’s exhibition of Avant-Gardism and experimentation.    I began to wonder, how representative is “Train into Frankurt” of today’s Russian poetry, given the political and social changes that are expanding not only the country’s ideologies, but the interests of smaller groups and “schools.” [?]

A booming amalgamation of poetic and critical sources exists in one large online index, known as “Jurnalniy Zal”1 (“Magazine Hall”). It contains prestigious and long-standing literary magazines like Arion, Star, New Coast, and the revised Journal of New Youth, which have been kind (or diligent) enough to post most, if not all, of their publications online.  Of course, you must know Russian to read them (links are provided below for access).  Before Makushinsky sent me his manuscript, The Light behind the Trees, I was able to obtain up to 10 of his poems for my translation project from this site2.  What drew me to the texts was the ways in which Makushinsky differentiates himself from other voices. As a child I was required to memorize and recite Pushkin and other “idols” of the state. Many current writers still follow strict patterns of rhyme and meter.  This is less interesting to me as a translator because I prefer to put meaning first and form second (at least as of now), so as not to sacrifice the “sense” in an attempt to replicate its structure.  However, there were several other poets who also intrigued me, such as the Katherine Keller, born in 1980, who published the poem “The Guest,” which I also translated and included in the poems index.

Perhaps the most crucial theme that is reveals itself in Makushinsky’s and Keller’s poems is the concept of “Home” and “Away.”  This issue is not only relevant to Russians, as seen in the organization of one of the events in the upcoming PEN Festival, “Town Hall Readings: Writing Home,” whose description reads:

Writers explore what binds us to home and what holds us apart from it, and why home, or the idea of it, is or isn’t worth dying and killing for. How do we find home, and, when we lose it, how do we make a new one? Why do we leave home and why do we long to return? We’ll visit the domestic, the exiled, the global, and the imagined in search of a place we can call our own (PEN, online).

The concept of the poet’s perception of “Home” and “Away” is especially interesting in the context of the Russian landscape. When nationalism is the ruling force of the poetic voice —in this case, the pressure to adhere to a particular “Soviet” style —what happens to that voice when the oppressive regime is dismantled?

Makushinsky was born in Moscow in 1960 and emigrated to Germany in 1992, where he currently teaches at Eighshnet-Ingolshtadt university.  Even though he doesn’t reside in Moscow currently, he publishes his work enthusiastically in popular Russian literary magazines, and only publishes his philosophy and some works in German under the last name of his father (A.N. Rubakov), “Alexei Rubakov.” We may therefore consider him to be straddling both worlds, something that a lot of writers do today.  His poetry shows a questioning of landscape that contends with the definition of “border” in a larger sense —what we attach ourselves to, what binds us, and perhaps even makes us accountable for its history.

In this way he creates the figure of a perpetual wanderer. His poem “Nowhere, from Nowhere,” for example, might suggest his perspective on both of his residences. Katherine Keller’s “The Guest”3 also deals with the stranger’s relationship to a definitive “home.”  Similarly, the destabilization of the lyrical self, and the negation of the assertion of power that this traditional figure represents, coincides with the Language poets and  Makushinsky’s predecessor, Dragomoshchenko, who incidentally has had a fruitful poetic relationship with Lyn Hejinian, a major figure among American Language writers.  Makushinsky has published one fiction book, Max.  His first book of poems, from which I chose pieces to translate, was released by Aleteria in April, 2007.  His poems represent one of many voices in contemporary Russian poetry that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, are expanding in scope and range.

The poems in Alexei Makushinsky’s The Light behind the Trees may resemble a Robinson Crusoe speculation at a newly erected, or in the narrator’s case, deconstructed world that is still professing borders within borders and historical allusions within a landscape that can be surveyed and walked.  However, the poem “Cities, which we drove past that summer” displays the conception that just as anything must be perceived as real, the “veil of Maya” must also be considered: “Nothing, in general, exists, only this / rocking, these patches of light” literally reflects the vision back onto the viewer, creating a sophisticated blindness in that he doesn’t mind the glare.

Just as traditionally light has been a source of enlightenment, safety, and power, in this context the light overpowers any real image in its refractory nature, and so the viewer can only guess what he gathers. At this point, the viewer begins to implant various self-perceptions of ideas within a landscape, in effect simultaneously denying his position in the world and attempting to solidify his existence.  The poem ends, “And somewhere, on some outskirt, / Sun, dust, corpse smell, / Endless, low, red / Wall of a slaughter-house.”  The use of “somewhere” and “some” to ‘circle’ the periphery implies the idea of a position rather than a physical location, but to the viewer, perhaps out of a Historicist remnant of a state of mind, it is enough to be certain that the idea of it exists, the slaughter-house, distant enough from harm’s way, but close enough to add a chill.

The speaker’s position is reflected upon himself in a mirroring effect, and it is this that develops as a trope throughout the manuscript, the idea that because the landscape, the periphery, the city’s vision can only be glanced through sand, light, a mirror, further exhibited by the speaker’s own positioning in the poem with the starting lines, “Walking away, he looks at the already foreign objects,” where he states, “He is the hero in his own novel / (film?)” — while at the same time we are discouraged from relying on this figure too much because while first, he is apparently an actor, a fraud, and shifting figure, also implicated is the speaker himself, who is either characterizing his own existential walkabout or focusing on an illusory figure that has no real “nature.”  Thus the mirror breaks into even smaller shards of questioned perception of “self” and perspective.

The element of historicity, the involvement with the issues of the past while experiencing the present, is at an all-together different level in these poems — there is no desperation to know how everything happened —there is no immediate dire need to fix things, make them new or do away with them altogether.  The viewer is a partial observer in that he is aware of the shadows of events and lives that have crossed paths at the very intersections he finds himself, but there is a sophisticated understanding that very little can be changed in the direction of causes and effects. However, the narrator in Makushinsky’s poems can’t stop himself even syntactically from continuously building and expounding on the things he sees: the inherent curiosity is there.

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