The Naked World: A Tale with Verse by award-winning Russian émigré poet, editor, and translator Irina Mashinski appears at a heightened time for contemporary Russian poets writing about homeland, exile, immigration and the liminal spaces in between. For all émigrés. For everyone. And for those who haven’t (yet) traveled through uncertain landscapes — or don’t believe they have — this tale, with verse, is a harrowing and cautionary primer in how the legacy of government-sanctioned tragedy is created and persists.
Using lineated poetry, prose poetry and narrative prose, Mashinski introduces us to her family, unwitting actors acted upon by shifting, brutal historical dramas. The book is dedicated to her parents and both sets of grandparents. Across the book’s four sections (“Patterns,” “The Myth,” “In the Right-of-Way” and “Borders”), we meet four generations of her family, including herself and her daughter (and, briefly, a few husbands). The first section, “Patterns,” begins with the author’s own naissance, described in a prose narrative called “The Thaw.” The title refers to the short-lived optimism of the late ‘50s/early ‘60s when Moscow was “flooded with young people who smelled of soap and freedom.” Mashinski was born in the capitol in the spring of 1958, the same year Boris Pasternak was forced by the Communist party to decline his Nobel Prize for Dr. Zhivago. For every prose piece in the book’s first two sections, there is a corresponding poem (these interpolating poems echo and amplify the bracketing prose). For instance, between “The Thaw” and “Single” — the latter of which describes the perceptions of Mashinski, an only child, in her Moscow apartment — comes the brief, enigmatic poem “Before Dawn”:
a bird of glass,
a bird with a scratched throat,
a bird that tries to tell it all at once,
a bird that turns its head when called,
a bird that’s pinned with hopes,
a bird O Woe,
a bird that must be turned up louder,
a tip-toed bird,
a bird that types,
a bird that strikes a match.
Mashinski is that bird, carried by circumstance and necessity from place to place (both geographic and emotional), pinned with hopes, striking the match of poetry to illuminate those physical and internal thresholds. The repetition of the subject, the opaque descriptions of the mysterious bird, and the detail accretions that build toward the striking of the match, create a flat, matter-of-fact tone — except for the “O Woe” exhortation that arises just past mid-point, like a sigh punctuating a tale told by someone numbed by trauma. This tone, which underpins the entire book, suggests foreboding by, paradoxically, the understated reportage, drained of emotion, which throws the horrific descriptions into vivid relief. Additionally, the title “Before Dawn” introduces the elements of light, color and liminal spaces which occur in this section (and the next). In “Single,” the narrator describes “silvery twilight,” “lemon yellow and argent haze,” and “uncertain sunlight.” Many scenes in both poems and prose occur at dawn or dusk, on dark winter mornings before school, in the brown winter twilight of a bedroom, in the transparent darkness of an early summer dawn, as if light itself were preparing the poet for the transition she will make at age 33, when she arrives in America.
The second section, “The Myth,” focuses on Mashinski’s grandparents, Alexander and Alexandra, and their siblings, and begins with her grandfather’s arrest and exile in 1928. The reasons for his arrest — his first — are as circuitous as the escape routes sometimes taken by émigrés: his wife’s brother-in-law, Sergei, was a member of the Left Opposition, a faction of the Communist Party formed during the power struggle after Lenin’s illness and death. Several months later, Sergei’s wife Liza, Alexandra’s older sister, will also be arrested, for the crime of being “the wife of the traitor of the Motherland.” In the prose piece “Alexander and Alexandra. The First Arrest,” Mashinski describes how Alexandra, twenty-two and pregnant with Mashinski’s father at the time of her husband’s arrest, rushes frantically between train stations to bid farewell to Alexander — but not to rescue him, as rescue was impossible:
She ran along the cars of the departing trains hoping that he would notice her.
And then she saw him. He was standing in the moving train car, with several
guards next to him … She was trying to guess, by the direction the train was
going, where they were taking him. North, she decided.
Her split-second decision proved correct. He was sent to a town called Usolye in the Ural Mountains, situated on the Kama River. Because this is Russia, everything is touched by poetry: on the same river, farther downstream, is Yelabuga, where Marina Tsvetaeva will commit suicide 13 years later. History works through the quotidian: during the year of Alexander’s arrest, the first purges of the Great Terror begin; the secret police and the Gulag system had their beginnings five years earlier. (In the book’s epilogue, called “Notes on the Great Terror,” Mashinski tells us that the last wave of purges, targeting Jewish doctors and intellectuals — called “The Doctors’ Plot” — ceased only in the early ‘50s with Stalin’s death). Alexander returns home when Mashinski’s father, Victor, is one-year old. But, as we learn in another prose piece, “Alexander and Alexandra. The Second Arrest,” he is imprisoned again in 1948, and sent off to a six-year exile in the far eastern city of Magadan, in a region called Kolyma, part of which is within the Arctic Circle. In another prose narrative, “Alexander,” Mashinski describes her grandfather’s exile:
… in Magadan, Kolyma’s “capital,” he was offered a job and a room, but he
opted out for a small settlement on the Route, the deadly road through the
wilderness … [t]he wide-open, always wakeful tundra, with its lead and
uranium and gold below its cracked cuirass. In the spring, the earth grew
pink with cranberry vines, permafrost turned fluid and moveable, and
corpses would emerge from under the snow: the locals called them
“snowdrops” — the bodies of those who had tried to flee a year earlier.
Only once during this horrifying scene does Mashinski employ the descriptor “deadly.” The adjective seems almost like an acquiescence to readers, a warning for the hideous image of the corpses which comes later. The description of the tundra, which lies peaceably between adjective and image, is as graceful as something one might read in a travel book. Through Mashinski’s understated reportage, drained of emotion, when the corpses appear, the horror, in relief, is even more poignant and vivid.
Intrigued that Alexander was offered a job after being sent away, I asked Mashinski about the conditions of exile. She emailed me:
“After release from prison, inmates sometimes had an opportunity to choose from a list of regions. In general, the entire system of exiles (ssylka) and ‘exile-out’ (vysylka) was very complex, and evolved with the changes of the state, starting right after the October Revolution which promptly reinstated what the February Revolution had ended (the czarist system of exiles). There was, for example, a system of ‘minuses’ — various levels of exclusions: ‘minus 1’ meant that one could live anywhere except one specific place; ‘minus 6’ indicated 6 big cities where they were not allowed to settle, etc. One would often spend (like Alexander did) about a year in horrible transit jails before one would reach (if one survived) one’s destination. There, one would be placed under official surveillance (and various levels and types existed there, too), and would have to report to authorities (‘check’) every 3 or so days. One would be exposed to possible repressions there, too, including being rearrested and executed.”
The “system of ‘minuses'” and the “various levels of exclusions” reminded me, perversely, of the first poem in the collection, “Before Dawn,” with its descriptive, litany-like accretions. The taking-away + the adding-on felt like a subtle entwined trope that Mashinski ran through the entire collection, expressing both ideas as lists, sometimes as descriptions. Where they meet in the book — the legacy of government-sanctioned torture — is Mashinski showing us, if we have eyes to see, the beginnings of historical trauma.
In “Alexandra. Her Book,” a prose piece, and “Alexandra’s Book. “Newark, NJ,” the poem that follows, Mashinski draws parallel portraits of her grandmother in two genres and using the colors and liminality that characterize the book in general. Both pieces take place at a threshold moment: her grandmother dozes off peacefully, while a Jersey sunset blazes behind her. Also blazing, against the fierce burnt-orange sky, are Alexandra’s cobalt blue teacups, “familiar to so many ex-Soviets.” Before she falls asleep, she fiddles with the foil wrappers of Russian chocolates; she folds and smooths them until they become “thin strips like little bookmarks in an invisible book, marking this or that fragment of the oral family saga — my favorite stories that I heard dozens of times and that still sounded new.”
In Mashinski’s family, every object accrues to, and is, story. The psyches of the family, as well as Mashinski’s, the teller of the family saga, and also of those living under these regimes, have been wounded by layers of instability resulting from the violence she matter-of-factly describes (mimicking its delivery). She pointed me to a passage illustrating how this “would resonate with most Soviet families”:
… the heavy striped curtains that have survived several Soviet eras. Material things in stagnant empires lack fluidity. They don’t even get older. No matter how sturdy the stuff from which Soviet citizens are made, their furniture is sturdier still. Solid objects are dormant and seem eternal …
The curtains, like the family and its storyteller, have survived several these layers of eras, but in the end they are broken, divested of fluidity, the ability to adapt. Their furniture is stronger.
The colors, objects, and liminality merge with another lovely feature of this haunting and haunted book: each of the four sections — this “tale” is told quadripartite, like a symphony — is assigned a musical theme and a performer. “Vers la Flamme, Poème” by Alexander Scriabin as performed by Vladimir Horowitz describes “Patterns,” the first section; representing the second, “The Myth,” is Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 27 #2 in D flat major by Arthur Rubinstein; assigned to “In the Right-of Way” is, appropriately, “In a Landscape” by John Cage; for “Borders,” Mashinski chose the Second Piano Concerto by Rachmaninoff, by Sviatoslav Richter. The selections are described as “epigraphs” by Ilya Kaminsky in the book’s Preface, but I had a feeling they were meant to be more than that. I asked Mashinski how she wanted readers to “hear” the music. She said she intended the music to “act as invisible web-like bridges, or echoes that precede the sound . . . I deliberately moved them away from the parts they obviously corresponded with: say, ‘Vers la Flamme,’ which begins the First part foreshadows what will be happening in the Second part, and Cage’s naked landscape (stripped even of the performer, just the pure notes) in part Three, precedes and foreshadows the development of the Fourth part, etc. Like a landscape, or a papyrus or parchment scroll, the book unfolds, ‘unrolls,’ opens up, and flows into what follows (notwithstanding, and contrary to, simple chronology).”
The third section, “In the Right-of-Way,” contains lineated poems, except for the first prose piece, “Behind the Wall,” which shifts focus to Mashinski’s post-Russia life in America. The fourth section, “Borders,” begins with the title prose poem, “The Naked World” and contains this beatification of the American quotidian:
… in an empty pizzeria, smelling of chlorine and flooded with fluorescent
light, a happy toddler drinks cocoa after midnight, swinging his legs back
and forth while his teenage mother loudly chats with her friends across the
counter. You can sit in such places for a long, long time, safe and invisible.
These days, feeling safe and invisible in public spaces may be more aspirational than when Mashinski wrote that piece. In America, we have our own variety of Terror: government-sanctioned violence and guns, as unpredictable and threatening as the government which sanctions — encourages — their proliferation. As unpredictable and threatening as the government itself. But experiencing for ourselves uncertainty and lack of safety might be one way to understand the birth and life of oppressive regimes, so unflinchingly described in this book. During the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, white supremacist Richard Spencer led chants of “Russia is our friend.” A 2018 article on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s site stated, “The bonds between Trump-adoring American extremists and Russia are cultural, political and, apparently, strong.” The horror is not that there is no horror; the horror is that we may not take to heart the cautionary tale that this book (and so many others) provides. In “Notes on the Great Terror,” a kind of afterword to The Naked World, Mashinski makes this observation:
“A 2017 poll showed that 38% of Russians consider Stalin the greatest man in history. Putin and Pushkin come in a close second at 34% each.”
[Published by MadHat Press on April 15, 2022, 185 pages, $21.95 paperback]