Russian For Lovers

Russian For Lovers

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Vladimir Davidzon

When reviewing a new collection of poems by a promising young Russian-American poet, one encounters a slew of taxonomic issues. To condense an entire critical discipline’s debates into a telegramattic brief, the literary output grouped together until the sobriquet of “Russian-American poetry” is plagued by a slew of issues: intertextual interpretation, cross-cultural communication, theoretical translation, mimetic mirroring, and, not least, bilingual language competency. In short, one faces all of the conflicts that come with steeping tea in two pots at the same time. In his essay “The Russians Are Coming!,” Matvei Yankelevich provides a shrewd analysis of many of these issues. When he writes in “The Russians Are Coming!” (online here), he points out that “what appears to be a small coterie is really a prism reflecting most theoretical debates between poetic schools that exist in both the American and Russian contexts.”

Marina Blitshteyn, a Jewish woman born in Moldova, is the bright young Russian-American poet under review here (and none of these descriptors are incidental; all appear thematically in her intently autobiographical but not immodest poems). Reading her lightly cadenced first book, Russian for Lovers, one would do well to recall some of the previously mentioned debates; though set at a wry angle from theoretical forefathers, Russian for Lovers is lyric-romantic in a certain tremulously innocent Russian vein, and plain-spoken modernist in another. Though the book contains a variety of poems—dialogues, a poem with a large oval circle the length of the page with the Russian word for lake in the center, and a Summer Travel-Graduate Degree-Wedding-Tenure timetable—the common denominator is Blitshteyn’s attention to internal rhymes and sinuous flow.

The book is organized as a phonetic and romantic primer for a lover, teaching him not only the outlines of runes but also the ideas and forms with which they are associated. Each poem is based on a letter from the Russian alphabet and follows the shape, rhyme, “feeling,” or sound of a letter. “My little mother,” says the morosely pneumatic M. The letter C, or CCCP (pronounced like a s in Russian, with the poem questioning both sounds and meanings), stands for “sister/system,” or when we learn our letters through the lens of Communism. Though that old union of soviets may not be what she made herself out to be—communism is not a utopia / fellow travellers say / communism is a sure sell / communism is a sister city—she knows what she wants and we should “make sure / make sure / communism gets her way / somebody pull her hair”

Then there’s the voiced postalveolar fricative, which is “already tightening under the tongue / that pressure to drum or run / already cracking the mark into parts,” and which begins the chanting of the anti-Semitic refrain (though, unless I’m missing another meaning the poet intended, the correct spelling of “Zhid” in Russian is). Despite the fact that the poem is about being called a racial slur, it is not self-pitying, preachy, or pedantic. The incantation is repeated “until it numbs its meaning,” but it is recuperated and refracted at the end of the poem, despite the fact that it is “still hard buying the translation / believing in it enough to say / I’m already a new constant / I know my American name.”

Blitshteyn’s debut book of poems is a lovely primer on the elemental letters and lessons of love. I, for one, am looking forward to my next lesson.

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