A City of Women
I must confess that the very notion of assembling and translating into
English an anthology of Russian “women’s” poetry surprised me.
It has always seemed to me that divisions according to gender
should apply only to changing-rooms and public toilets – because of
natural bashfulness. In poetry, there is nothing to be ashamed of.
At least, in Russian poetry, particularly of the twentieth century,
women have always had a place – and often in the front rank: Zinaida Gippius, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Bella Akhmadulina; the list can be extended, of course. And from the point of view of readers’ predilections there is no boundary – one can’t, for instance, say that female readers are more drawn to female poets or male to male. As regards the work of our young contemporary Vera Pavlova, clearly men value her work more highly than do women. So what!
On the other hand, it is precisely in the last century that women’s
voices in poetry changed from isolated instances into a powerful lyrical chorus, so that it has become possible to talk of a phenomenon. Still the same has happened in almost every other sphere of life. It probably wouldn’t occur to anyone to assemble a collection of the work of women mathematicians, for example.
Russian poetry today really is, in the full sense, the product of a
heterogeneous marriage. Women poets are not just represented, but are, to a great extent, defining its character, temperament, development. It is no accident that in the poetry journal I edit, Arion (the only professional, large-scale, all-Russian poetry journal, a quarterly which has been appearing since 1994), there are as many female as male names: not because we aim at political correctness, but simply because we print the best available to us.
Russian poetry of the end of the twentieth and beginning of the
twenty-first centuries is unimaginable without the poetry of Inna
Lisnianskaya, Olesia Nikolaeva, Tatyana Bek, Elena Ushakova, Elena Shvarts, Svetlana Kekova, Irina Ermakova. In the last decade, Vera Pavlova, Elena Fanailova, Olga Khvostova, the very young Mariya Kildibekova have added their powerful and quite distinct voices to this chorus. Nevertheless, to isolate them from the general text and context and to assemble a separate “women’s” issue of Arion, or an anthology, is something I simply wouldn’t be prepared to do.
Firstly, because poetry is a whole. Imagine an opera being staged
without the male parts. Secondly . . .
A little over ten years ago, when I was living in China, I got to know
two American women. The younger one was taken up with feminism
and was writing a book about the position of women in the PRC. The older one was a serious journalist, who had worked, as far as I can recall, for the BBC in Panama and had even been imprisoned there by the regime. Now she was collecting material for a book on China’s reforms. In a cafĂ©, one day, over a cup of coffee, our young friend told us enthusiastically about the opening somewhere of a museum of “women’s fine arts”. At which the other one rather coolly remarked: “I don’t think I need a museum like that. I do not consider myself less talented than men . . . ”
Need I say that I sympathised with her?
I am very happy for the contributors to this collection, that finally
English readers will get to know their work a little. They deserve it. As for myself, I would be bored without women – on a desert island, in paradise, and even in books . . .
Moscow, 10.03.02
Translated by Daniel Weissbort
Page(s) 16-17
magazine list
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- Second Aeon
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