Elena Fanailova has been one of the most boundary-pushing poets in the contemporary Russian poetry scene for over twenty years. Known for her keen observations of both Russian authorities and her own peers in the intelligentsia and art world, Fanailova shows off the height of her incisive yet colloquial, even witty, narration style in “masha and lars von trier,” a poem in which everyone is complicit in the crimes of their culture.
—Madeline Jones, Blog Editor
masha and lars von trier
Diary, summer 2006
1.
The Russian after-party is fucking up the championship
Russian Masha is losing Wimbledon
To a wooden machine by the name of Amélie
Behind whom stands a thousand-year-old blitzkrieg
And all of France, the Church’s eldest daughter
Russian Masha is getting nervous, you can tell,
No matter how loud you yell.
Her powerful serves splinter against the mechanics
Of the still more powerful machine and its instruments
Here nothing will come of it
Except her volleys,
Lesser versions, knockoffs,
Pitiful byzantinism
Putin kisses the belly of an innocent, just like king herod
Crafty Kadyrov installs an independent Chechnya
Ksenia Sobchak is photographed nude
Stands to reason, they made a deal,
They were cast in the devil’s mold
I’ll take them and I’ll pull the plug
Backstage, dead Basayev
Seems like a total idiot now
Though there had been some hope for him,
Just like there had been some hope for the GRU workers,
Or so the Russian internet informs us
Everything takes on a marginal character.
How provincial we are! —like the turks
Who hang not the enemies of islam
But local stars from tv shows
On billboards at intersections
Who are they, even? these fatfaced smiley people?
Russian Masha can bang her head against a wall
Get hanged in a Tatar village
Give chthonic howls until she’s hoarse
It doesn’t change anything
We’re appallingly provincial
All that’s left for us
Is to watch tv shows, die pretty,
But even that won’t hook anyone,
Go to parties, dance
At parties, dance,
Watch the pretty girls in black dresses—
Katia Metelitsa, Sveta Reiter, Yulia Bederova—
Moving exceptionally well to American music,
Like real she-wolves,
Incarnated in something unrealizable, some kind of modest flame—
But the guys circle around to them on their asses
(Possibly the best part of the male organism)
And gulp their alcohol
Russians don’t want to fuck anymore
To produce posterity
Putin is like a military robot
But robots don’t fuck
Robots don’t fuck
2.
Lars von Trier turns into a woman
No one notices
Everyone’s yelling that he’s a provocateur and doesn’t love America,
She can go to hell
Lars von T. follows his Anima,
His feminine soul, as the founding fathers say,
He suffers cruel torments
Stigmata manifest on his body,
Just like on the catholic saints and halfwits,
No one notices.
They write voluptuously about unhappy actresses.
Even my friend, not a stupid woman,
And not without feminist ambitions,
She confirms that he’s basking
In maiden mutilations.
Fuck, he’s even sobbing like a kindergarten girl.
An artist’s laughter is never far from tears.
Lars von T. in his woman’s body has to fucking deal with the wombs of the afflicted
Substitutes his ass
Like a harlot being stoned
No one notices
Where’d they get those bells in the sky?
No one can bear it, physiologically,
Except for perverted aesthetes
He’s going blind, he’s dancing like Shiva,
He’s perishing
In the vicegrips of human justice
He’s a human rights advocate, goddamnit,
And he gets holy fools acquitted:
Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev, Maria Sharapova,
All Russian projections of the unconscious,
But no one notices
Like Herman Hesse, he plays hopscotch
Drawn by a schoolgirl,
A candy jar filled with sand for weight
Not all boys can do this
But it somehow goes unnoticed
Or it’s considered boorish
The Anima of Lars von Trier is as tireless
And relentless as original mercy
Like claims on the throne
—Coronated, carried past—
She’s unbearable, true,
All this melodrama
And pantomime
People don’t want Lars von Trier’s #hell ice,
They don’t want Babi Yar anymore.
They don’t see the joker, they don’t remember the trump card,
Just flattery and gold, malice and flattery.
No time for the sublime, kittens, no time for the sublime
In this most Christian of worlds.
Russians, you used to have a girl named Marusia, remember, a Polish Russian,
How come you’re still building her a fence out of dicks?
A row of stakes with impaled heads?
Like in the scary stories von Trier tells?
She would have been buried beyond the wall, not with you.
She’s in heaven with the others,
She, terrible, like Fáfnir, guarding the treasure.
Listen to the wind, Russians, listen to the wind.
You’re real stubborn monsters.
Your sovietism and your orthodoxy aren’t gonna help you.
You’re not gonna make it to safety like Harry Houdini.
3.
(Maria Kravchenko, 24,
doc. film Collecting Shadows)
Lars von Trier smokes nervously in the corner,
Like an eighth-grade girl caught in the act.
The Russian girl Masha is going to Chechnya
To Grozny, to see her house and garden.
She’s filming
Her grandpa and grandma on the seashore
With a Betacam-SP
Her grandpa, still young, says:
When we were leaving,
Ahmed said: let’s drink.
Got cognac and a watermelon.
I said: it hurts me to leave, Ahmed,
My house and garden are here,
But I don’t want to keep you
From doing your Chechnya.
Masha says: when we were leaving,
Cherries were hitting the hood of our car,
Cherries were falling, and the branches were creaking
I’m never going to forget that
Artur the musician says:
I saw a multi-story house
Crumble after an explosion
First the top floor ceiling
Then gradually, like a house of cards
The lower ones
We brought western journalists
It was pretty
(Artur Atsalamov speaking,
Vocalist for the band The Dead Dolphins)
Lars von Trier smokes nervously in the corner.
There’s no one here to be provoked
With Brecht’s methodology
(Except for the thieves
Who as a result of mutation
Became leeches,
Or the other way around: leeches became thieves)
The survivors in the Catastrophe
Children of the Soviet International
Walk down the streets of our capital
In hijabs invisible to the world
In palpable camouflage
Ammunition-belted by a Ribbon of St. George
Translated from the Russian by Caroline Lemak Brickman
Trained as a doctor and as a psychoanalyst, Elena Fanailova has been a central player in the contemporary Russian poetry scene for over twenty years. She lives in Moscow, where she works as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe and writes cutting, formally virtuosic poetry about love, war, and trash.
Caroline Lemak Brickman lives in Oakland, where she reads, writes about, teaches, and translates Russian poetry, and sometimes prose. Her translations have been published by Dalkey Archive Press and various magazines. She is currently working on a PhD in UC Berkeley’s Slavic Department.
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