Permanent Winter: New Poetry from Siberia
Poems translated by Oleg Burkov, Larissa Fomenko, Andrei Konstantinov, Nika Skandiaka, Lika Sokolovskaya and Vitaliy Eyber were published in this collection by Smokestack Books in 2007.
The poems
Siberia has been always linked in the British imagination with violent and wintry extremes - exile, snow, howling wolves, salt-mines, Gulags and sub-zero temperatures. Rasputin was born in Siberia. Lenin was exiled there. Mandelstam died there. Maxim Gorky once called it "a land of chains and ice". But Siberia is also a place of winter magic, a land of extreme natural beauty crossing seven time zones, of ice-princesses and talking bears, frozen mammoths and the shamans who walk among the dead.
For some, Siberia still represents the 'authentic Russia'. For others it is a place of wild escape, or the place where European Russia meets Asia head-on. For 40 million Russians - including the poets in this book - Siberia represents home.
This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, a selection of contemporary poetry from Novosibirsk, Siberia's largest city and the exact geographical centre of Russia. Writing about their extraordinary country, they have adapted Russian literary traditions to its exceptional conditions. There are the love lyrics of Maxim Ukolov, the imagist verse of Sergey Samoylenko, the experimental poetry of Igor Loshilov and Viktor Ivaniv, and the strange, magical free verse of Igor Davletshin. Five poets and five aesthetic and linguistic experiences, united only by the weather.