Шесть Стихотворений

Vsevolod Nekrasov (1934-2009), a lifelong resident of Moscow, became active in the literary and artistic underground in the late 1950s. Through the fall of the Soviet Union, his work only appeared in samizdat and European publications. Nekrasov was associated with the experimental and innovative Lianozovo group of writers and artists, and through this affiliation went on to become one of the founding members of Moscow Conceptualism. Nekrasov's poetry, which is often characterised as minimalist, uses repetition and paranomasia to deconstruct and recontextualize his linguistic environment—he targets everything from stock Soviet political mottos to clichés people mutter to one another in everyday situations. His ground-breaking work and his long tenure in the Russian poetry community made him an influential figure for both his peers and subsequent generations of Russian poets.

Bela Shayevich is a writer, translator, and illustrator. Her translations have appeared in journals such as Little Star, St. Petersburg Review, and Calque.

Ainsley Morse has been translating twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and (former-)Yugoslav literature since 2006. A longtime student of both literatures, she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic literatures at Harvard University. Recent projects include Andrei Sen-Senkov's Anatomical Theater (Zephyr Press, translated with Peter Golub), short stories by Georgii Ball, and the poetry of the Serbian surrealist Oskar Davičo.