Technically, we transcend our "short twentieth century" convention because the most active period of these poets fell on the first post-Soviet decade. Korkiya's epic "Hosts (forty by forty)" is the poem, which concluded the Soviet period in Russian literature both due to its content and circumstances of its emergence on the literary scene. Korkiya's "The Hosts", Kibirov, Kekova and Sedakova were the brightest poetic constellation of post-Revolutionary Russia.
In contrast to the West, the extreme social conservatism was always since Archpriest Avvakum (Habbakuk), a fellow traveler of literary modernism in Russia. Even for T. S. Eliot, his turn to ultra-conservative political stance coincided with the evolution of his literary taste to a more traditionalist viewpoint (hence, "The Criterion"). In Russia, literary innovation and traditionalist, sometimes even obscurantist social views (
Dostoevsky,
Gumilev, G. Ivanov,
I. Brodsky) frequently went hand-in-hand. Because of that, American campus-based literary culture was frequently overlooking the Christian wing of the Russian poetry, especially when it did not express social protest, which is still the hallmark of "Russian-ness" among the Western Slavists.
Т. Кибиров. 2011
Currently, Timur Kibirov (pseudonym of Zapoev, i.e. Mr. Hangover), an Ossetian, i.e. nominally Moslem named after Timur the Lame, undeniably the greatest poet of the late Soviet, early post-Soviet literature almost ceased secular poetry writing. Korkiya mostly moved to (sometimes poetic) drama. Yet, some of Kibirov's literary output, e.g. his short poem "Travel from A? to Z?" burst into being as something as monumental as the Divine Comedy, or Beowulf, something I cannot and do not yet dare to translate. In that short epic poem, Kibirov runs the course of Russian history through the mythological combat to the death between two unrecognized brothers or father/son. Each contest is staged in the language and imagery of the historic epoch starting with traditional saga-ballad ("былина") and ending with tape-recorded drivel of Russian declasse yokels in the late Soviet Union.
Svetlana Kekova's poetic work had the same watershed quality as characterized
Khlebnikov and
Mayakovsky according to
Anna Akhmatova. She suggested that all that Khlebnikov was writing before the Revolution was hackwork and genial thereafter, while for Mayakovsky it was just the opposite. Her pre-revolutionary, pre-Christian conversion poetry was a talented imitation of Brodsky (myriad of contemporary Russian poets imitated Brodsky with different degree of proficiency). Only when she turned to unrestrained Christian declamation, her poetic talents had fully developed. Unlike the majority of Russian poets (with notable exceptions of Vyacheslav Ivanov and I.
Annensky), who were indifferently educated, Kekova has a PhD in Russian literature and an author of literary studies in her own right.
Korkia, from "The Hosts" (excerpts)
To the
thousandth anniversary of Russia’s
Conversion to Orthodoxy
We are naïve, we are sublime,
We fly through currents of the Ethers,
In our
weightlessness, extreme,
And
frolicsome, as band of cripples.
We’re
passing by an old Third Rome,
And all the downtown Crosses,
There are
no pastures o’er us,
Which would
not turn in our pastiche.
The ashes of
ten centuries
Fall, fall
on poor of the soul
And
secretly, the forty hosts
Are wailing,
as the Earthen Mothers.
The fact
that they do not exist,
As does the
Nature, our Mother,
Sheds
glimpses of some Secret Light
On
perestroika’s gho/astly
years.
Fly high,
the crutch, Ostankino,
For Ethers
is a plainly vacuum,
Where only
cosmic dust is not
Entangled
in “War and Peace” discussions.
Our times
rewind as VHS
And the idea
pops straight out
And crawls--
from primordial marsh;
Amphibian—to
solid ground.
Life winds
throughout back and forth
as rivers
turned by Soviet bosses.
While our way
of sorrows,
Sails to Byzantium from Normans.
We are
amazed by silence, which
conjures us
by the people’s voices.
Some have
as mother Motherland,
But I
keep Freedom as my mistress...
....................................................................................
I love the sum of total good,
And to the manly strength that roams,
I love vaginas of subway
Which till 1 AM
remain wide open.
This love False Dmitri barely knew,
He marched to field of Kulikovo,
To get renamed Donskoi anew,
But fell on ice of the Sadovoy.
His handsome corpse would pay last dues,
Of his grim fate took no nonsense.
St. Jury’s Day
proscribed the Jews,
Which was for Ivan’s heart bit warming.
He murdered son and heir, the B.,
Appointed Cossacks to the “service”,
By founding the KGB
And took greenbacks
in lieu of corvée.
But Habakkuk, the
Archpriest,
Confused the folk,
and Razin, Sten’ka,
Ignited fire from
his dark thoughts
And threatened
Tsar with this Inferno.
Then Peter suddenly
decides
To hand Alaska to his neighbors.
He killed his son,
and being hideous,
He hurried to Afghanistan
To scare his
enemies, the Swedes.
....................................................................................
Khan
Karl-Adolf-Napoleon
Surprised the
Kalmyck and the Cossack
But the wild bunch
of Amazons
Defeated the
barbarian rank.
Tsaritsa Katya
raged, forlorn,
But forced her
march to Angles Terra,
She killed her
“rebel on the throne”
And got remarried, to Voltaire.
Their first offspring was kind of
wit,
The second—kept in Maltas forum,
And third—he died before his sleep
But keeping in with all decorum.
He sent Pouchkíne, the Fatalist,
To Holy Hills, for absolution,
Where he, already in his grave,
Described Sodom of Revolution.
...............................................
And in the streets is Spring, you
hood,
and warmth, Blue Sky, Red Flying Banners.
Rage, rage, you, the Star Wormwood
In the concrete slabs of Chernobyl.
“Salute, the Third Rome, I salute,
Continue chat a little bit later,
Minherz, remember Germantown,
Did
you forget your cuckoo’s crown?”
Why do these voices always
come?
Who comes inviting them by dawn?
.................................................................
But there is no Savior Christ,
And truths became at once uncertain
When Holy Star of Bethlehem
Illuminated Iron Curtain.
