The poet, who was born in a small town near Moscow, has now published seven volumes of poetry. This is the second one that has been translated into German. And it was published in the long deserving library OSTSÜDOST of the Leipzig literary publisher, with which it makes authors accessible to German readers who have little chance of being noticed in the programs of the major publishers. The time when well-known German publishers deliberately published dissident literature from Eastern Europe is over.People like to pretend that this is no longer necessary after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as if this attention was done with when the communist parties there lifted their sails and flags. However, the fact that in many cases the old authoritarianism has established itself in new structures and uses very similar censorship and prohibition models to those that were common during the Cold War seems no longer to be noticed even in the major German media.
As if they simply lacked the propaganda color red to recognize the style of government that is practiced in Russia and why no communist party is needed. To get the press and literature of a country down.
And even if the publisher sees it a little differently (“Polonskaja’s poetry breaks with Russian lines of tradition …”), this mournful volume of poetry by Angelina Polonskaya also belongs in the tradition of the great Russian poets, in a row with Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, Bely and Mandelstam. One of Artjom Wesjoly’s novel titles is constantly running through his head: “Russia washed in blood”.
And if you read a book at the same time that describes Napoleon’s campaign against Russia, you can’t help but see the ultimately unbroken line of tradition that sets the tone – not only for the great Russian literature of the past 200 years, but for this country itself and its difficult course through time with the bloody wars, the failing revolutions and the games of power and the mighty. And the impotence of people who do not have the power to change anything about it.
It is exactly this perspective that Polonskaya takes when she describes life in a country that has been at an undeclared war for years, as if it had never stopped, as if the wars were like bushfires that are always somewhere flare up and devour the men, the sons and fathers who never return. A country in which the mothers and women repeatedly stand anxiously at the train station, watch the trains going east, or wait in vain for the men to return.
It is the other Russia, the one that tolerates and suffers, that never finds itself in the speeches of those in power. “Close to the fire, the colder it is / the bigger the drops are in the eyes”, Erich Ahrndt translates the last lines of the poem “You told me the house is no longer there…” Polonskaja’s poems are full of such goodbyes and losses.
“But the children have been sheared into recruits / the badges and field caps are rotten”, it says in “Source of the Feminine”. Without it being tangible: Is this an echo of the Afghanistan war or one of those recent campaigns that officially shouldn’t be? How do you experience a country in which protest is also suppressed: “I stand with my face to the wall, as the guard ordered / with unusual elegance, my coat is whiter / than a June night on the Neva …”
Of course, her poems are full of breaks. How could it be otherwise after such a century that apparently does not want to end? A century of smoke and ashes. A century in which the break became the stylistic device of the poets in order to be able to express the incomprehensible, the unbearable in words. These poems only appear harmless on the outside, only superficially if you don’t follow the pictures. “Like beasts, the headlights will catch us / and lead us from separation to separation. / The music has not stopped inside, / it no longer obeys hearing. “(Unfinished Music (2))
With each poem one delves deeper into this knowledge of how the poet loses herself. Whole poems tell of “not”, which not only tells of an empty life, but also of the cessation of dreams. “I’m not standing by the sea for a long time, can’t get enough of me on the ship / And you don’t pull up the bridge that you / you admired in the morning …”, it says in a poem that begins with “The rain rushes”.
The elements and seasons are always present. Because when possible life is emptied, the omnipresence of nature becomes the determining image. In it: the vastness and solitude. And being lost. Because if you are not allowed to live your life, what is left?
Even when power makes its mark. Alone and yet only unobserved. “… there is nobody at the end of the street. Not even in the beginning. / The phone does not answer my ring. / We are on the brink of civil war / but it is not yet known whether pogroms are imminent. (“Chronicle of a day”)
Perhaps there will be no civil war either. Maybe it goes on and on. And the women stand waiting at the fence, at the train station. Or lean against the fountain. “A bullet in a coat. / But who the ball is for – I don’t remember. / There are no duplicate keys. “(” Vom February “)
Is someone here trying to silence the poet? Is it too clear what she says about herself, the sadness of the country and the emptiness that arises when sadness is no longer allowed to be shown? When the feeling is omnipresent: “The world ends here. / Don’t talk about it, not a word … “
Because in “unfinished music” there is both: the unfinished music of life (as in “Sad waltz by Sibelius”) and the unfinished music of the vast country that is not allowed to find itself.
“For the last time I ask: Forgive me. / I’m a bad daughter and cornered. / Drops of cement on the verse made of cement / About the one who no one loves, ”she describes the loneliness that inevitably arises when one can no longer get rid of the feeling of being wrong, unwanted and inappropriate. Who does not rejoice with the power – what is left besides loneliness? “I forgot the summer / rain. Central Russian suffering / none of my business / and whoever turns someone’s neck … “
They are not lamentations. The monitored could live with that. They are sober inventories, descriptions of the situation, notes from a life that only registers, ticks off and lives on, the limitations and losses. And it is precisely in this quiet relentlessness that the poems are like accusations. This is exactly how they can be read. Here comes the word that is not representative of many others. And shows non-being as a state.
It’s so easy for people to forget when they live in happier countries, what it feels like not to be allowed to be. But maybe only the poets really notice that. And hold it firmly in poems that will still show in 100 years how bitter this not-being-allowed-to-be was. And is, and always will be. It is the other side of power, the rebellion of those who still know that life could be: “How quiet / does the soul knock / on closed doors …”
And again and again we hear the notes that remind us of the awake poets, especially from the early 20th century, their bitterness, which was always combined with a satirical tone that did not need any pretense. As in the last lines of “Unfinished Music”: “We lived, lived badly and rightly / and died as we could.”
Angelina Polonskaja Unfinished music, Leipziger Literaturverlag, Leipzig 2020, 16.95 euros.
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