LETTER FROM EDITOR

Issue one sprang from the dislocation/hyphenation of post-Soviet diaspora and brought together a variety of international and multilingual experiences, forms, tonalities, images, and constructions of self. For our second issue, our team felt drawn to the theme of hospitality. Daily speech returned to the same nexus of unsafety: illness and hospitals, mass shootings and state violence, trauma and the possibility of healing. A languishing, an immovable weight of grief, accompanied what seemed to be all movements into the hospitable. We recognized a longing for or reckoning with refuge and safety. But we asked: what exactly is hospitality and what does it mean in the post-Soviet context?

Our interpretation of our hospitality theme would again have to be broad. Our magazine also faced the inhospitable. We didn’t meet our goal for printing issue one and quarantine followed by arson fire buried our letterpress cover concept. And then the catastrophic took place. On the brink of releasing issue two, Russia launched an unexpected, full-scale invasion upon a neighboring country. What was a piping hot samovar was cast in the wide shadow of war. In the context of destruction, literary creativity seemed out of place.

When Kate, Ryan and I founded Pocket Samovar, we wanted it to be a space “dedicated to underrepresented post-Soviet writing, art and diaspora.” For Kate (born in Crimea) and myself (born in Russia with Ukrainian ancestry), the underrepresented is where vitality would be found. Though no contributors came from Ukraine in this particular issue, after some deliberation, our team voted to move forward. When the tools of war threaten planetary existence, language and its new uses beckon us. To stall publication would be defeat.

Even though these submissions pre-date the invasion, many of the works invariably begin in the inhospitable: ruptures of identity, relationship, language, place. In many ways, for the past three decades, the post-Soviet situation is inherently a post-crisis situation, gripped by the terrors of national instability, violence, migration, exile, identity issues, mental illness, and addiction. The decision to include the plight of Russians in exile was a difficult one. Yet, we felt these works expose how Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is a threat to both Russians and non-Russians, though in very different ways.

In the context of diaspora, one of the most tragic works, “An Epithet for All That” by David Wolsky, explores inhospitable institutions of social control and drug use as an illusory hospitality. Scridon, Šalamun, and Kalinin, on the other hand, are able to see and sing out of the beauty and complexities of the alien spaces they inhabit. They do so through either spiritual sensibility or imaginative faculty.  And as Ukrainian refugees face xenophobia and assimilationist attitudes, these works push us to confront what is at stake for all people in migration.

For others, the migratory context is one in which spatial stability is not an option and only one, mobile constant remains: the body, speech, language, time itself. Liza Michaeli’s work locates the question of hospitality in the multilingual body and physiology of language. Similarly, for poets like Krasnoper, Ostashevksy, and Mamedov, the primary trauma of experience is linguistic and seeks the fresh tissue of new language. Whether time is container (Krasnoper); German, Russian, and English sing to each other (Ostashevsky); or the lyric self confronts language as alien (Mamedov), these works are artistic intervention. The poet must stretch the limits of language so as to render it hospitable to constructions of self alien in the English, or in Mamedov’s case, the Russian. These works also remind us that wherever there is linguistic violence—as Ostashevksy’s allusion to samovars in the context of amputees—there may be physical violence nearby.

In Fathom, the American poet Andrew Joron reflected on the meanings of poetry during the Iraq war. In the introduction, he asks “what good is poetry at a time like this?” He points to calls to action, consolation, exposing ideology, but ultimately concludes “poetry cannot be anything but inadequate, even to itself. Where language fails, poetry begins. Poetry forces language to fail, to fall out of itself, to become something other than itself.” For him, “the abyssal language of poetry represents (translates) the motion of social change more than it does the facts of social change…” At the core, these works point to the complexity and instability of human experience, uncovering striking similarities veiled in human differences themselves. And if the facts of journalists and the rhetoric of politicians risk narrowing or bifurcating experience, poetry expands, humanizes experience.

Our visual art in issue two is just as eclectic as the first. For example, the photography of David Zung is a unique take on the theme of hospitality, studying static domestic spaces and their relationship to the persona: the wearing of masks. We are also privileged to bring the Almugal Menlibeva’s striking photography, bringing to light underrepresented imaginings of hospitality from Central Asia. Through a series of delicate and understated sketches, Maria Kruglyak explores the domestic space and how it shapes our relationship to ourselves and the world around us. Alongside daily reminders of violence and inhuman destruction, perusing images of hospitality is peculiar, almost transgressive. Perhaps, in some way, these same images could magnetize us to resist hostility with hospitality, no matter how small the gestures?

One of the most important features of issue two is the addition of our book review and film section. Anton Relin reviews Yivgeny Fik’s The Wayland Rudd Collection, an extremely relevant title on Soviet race politics and visual art from Ugly Duckling Presse. Relin highlights how important it is to look at anti-racist movements outside the capitalist context, especially when the refugee crisis in Ukraine exposed a continued blatant racism. It highlights how, in the Soviet and post-Soviet space, white supremacy may not have taken the vicious systemic forms it took in the states, yet its presence is irrefutable.

We are also honored to include two short films. Albert Rudnitsky’s short film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian” explores the contradictions of American individualistic culture, privacy, and advertising through a Russian-American lens. Outsiders written by Julia Masli and Viggo Venn, on the other hand, is a performance piece that re-interprets the Soviet tradition of clowning and re-imagines silence, space, communication. 

In ancient Greece, hospitality was understood to be a right; citizens were expected to welcome strangers into their home so long as both parties obeyed a strict code. Today, at its best, hospitality is a capitalist industry, and at its worst, a xenophobic liability veiled as economic and cultural security. In spite of the rubble, Pocket Samovar came to a rolling boil and with sorrow and gratitude, we bring an undulant configuration of poems, nonfiction, short stories, book review, translation, and visual art, including film, painting, and photography.

A lit mag does not necessarily provide a solution to the immensity of loss and longing. But thanks to these works, we learn hospitality is not always something available; we can, or better, we must shape it from the materials at hand. Sometimes, we must reveal the absurdity of its lack or see deeply enough into reality to call-forth its potential. As Ukrainian poet Vitaliy Yukhimenko announces in “Seesaw” published in our first issue,

 “Run, tiny sperms,
tadpoles of existence,
owners of the PIN code, of the DNA formula.
Run, for the water cycle of nature,
the cycle of life at high speed.
A resilient apple hangs off a high branch,
it is of a fast-ripening sort.
Run even faster, run!
The ripening time is getting shorter,
the blooming period is equally shortening…”
 

Warmly,
Konstantin Kulakov
Co-Founding Editor