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 Bjrk offered to perform alongside the group, a Pussy Riot member replied: The only performances well 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 Its 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.
Its 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. Hes opted out of the literary world. Hes decided that his books will appear in pirate editions or not at all. Mr Medvedev notes, in an observation that hangs over this book, Its strange now to think that business was once portrayed as the enemy of authority.
In his introduction to Its No Good Mr Gessen calls Mr Medvedev Russias first genuinely post-Soviet writer. Its 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.
Its No Good collects Mr Medvedevs poems and polemics as well as his deadpan accounts of his political actions, like picketing a theatre 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 Medvedevs 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 pat, which he terms pat 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 kirienkos campaign
headquarters
and then joined his permanent team.
Mr Medvedevs most stinging assessments are reserved for Russias liberal intelligentsia. 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 mans physical well-being as well. The presence of principles creates serious problems for the person who has them, he writes. When he pickets a theatre production, hes punched in the jaw by a security guard for his effort.
Part of the nightmare world that Its No Good evokes is one that both Orwell and the members of Pussy Riot would understand. Its a nightmare of euphemism and cant. This is what happens, Mr Medvedev writes, when the authorities dont want to speak clearly and dont want to be spoken of clearly, either.
2013 The New York Times News Service
ITS NO GOOD
Poems/essays/actions
Kirill Medvedev
Translated by Keith Gessen with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich
n+1/Ugly Duckling Presse
278 pages; $16
