Три стихотворения

Galina Rymbu is at the forefront of an increasingly prominent poetic movement within the New Russian Left. The long poem printed here, “[There were so many factories . . .],” was written in 2013 in response to a Facebook polemic over one of the central institutions in this movement—the independent journal, Translit, which combines radical leftist politics and a profound engagement with literary theory and political philosophy. At the time, a group of leftist poets from Belorussia accused the Translit group of practicing bourgeois aesthetics and failing to develop a poetics that could specifically speak to workers. Rymbu’s poem—in a sense more of an anti-poem—experiments with fulfilling this demand, drawing on personal experience to suggest the impossibility of avoiding the “eternal aggression” of “taking the part” of workers while also assuming a position of power. How can one speak to the oppressed while also speaking on their behalf?

Rymbu has recently developed her ideas concerning the accursed problem of political poetry’s accessibility in an interview published by Music & Literature. At the same time, she now agrees that Translit may have initially been overeager and politically naïve in its fascination with western theory.

The two shorter poems were written in 2015 in response to the darkening political atmosphere in Russia following the aggressive response to the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. “[“This isn’t war”. . .],” about the Donbass proxy war that followed Maidan, was written on the eve of what has become Russia’s biggest holiday, May 9, commemorating victory in the Second World War.