LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Last fall 2019, Kate, Konstantin, and Ryan—students at the Jack Kerouac School in Boulder, CO—met over borscht and Yevtushenko translations to discuss the possibility of starting a magazine dedicated to underrepresented post-Soviet writing and diaspora: LGBTQIA+, Womxn, Diasporic, Central Asian, Transcaucasian writers, poets, and artists of the post-Soviet space. Over the course of the year, with the help of Isabel, Caro, and Anastasia, our team grew internationally to include Boulder, Brooklyn, Luxembourg and Basel, Switzerland. The scope of our contributors also grew, spanning three continents. Our longing for diasporic connection—beyond a brief encounter with a Russian or Ukranian speaker in an uber or cafe—took form.

As an international magazine, translation is a central feature of this issue. All of our labors hinged on our ability or inability to cross a boundary whether time zone, language, or cultural sensibility. Yes, contact with writers and poets of Central Asia and Transcaucasia proved challenging; but thanks to our advisory board, we now bring translations of Paata Shamugia, Gunel Movlud, and Hamid Ismailov from the original Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek, respectively. We are also excited to share Alex Karsavin’s translations of Elena Georgievskya and Stanislava Mogileva, appearing in the New Russian Feminist Poetry anthology edited by Galina Rymbu and Eugene Ostashevsky. Ismailov’s prose in “Cat and Dog” is a vibrant portrait of family dysfunction and the possibility of care. Gunel offers a charged lyricism that blurs the contours of the personal “I” while Yukhimenko leaves us with an unforgettable “dildo poem.” 

When reading submissions for our debut dislocation/hyphenation issue, we understood Eurasian and post-Soviet broadly, making for an eclectic mix of writing from emerging and established authors. Nearly half of the contributors are based in North America or Europe, tracing experiences of immigration, assimilation, resistance, and/or the search for hybridized identity. Alina Stefanescu’s “Pickled Plums” reads “Like my mother, I planted / a Romanian plum sapling / in the northeast corner of the yard / to keep evil away.”  Molotkov’s “Poison in the DNA” is radically different: “I carry the expression on my grandmother’s face when I last saw her. I’m from the rotten roots I reject.” Marina, our contributing editor, also put together an exciting section of diasporic writing, featuring Hajar Hussaini, Genya Turovskaya, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Tanya Paperny, Sahar Muradi, and Olga Livshin. As a whole, these two features (the Eurasian/post-Soviet and the diasporic) form an encounter shaped by the heightened pressures of space, time, forgetting and remembering. What remains is the striking similarity and difference that comprised these interconnected yet different worldviews. 

The pandemic wielded a serious blow to the handicraft element of our magazine, but with our online issue, we were propelled into a multimedia direction, accommodating a rich multilingual experience: the virtual tearoom recordings as well as an uniquely ekphrastic editorial approach. The virtual tearoom recordings—where contributors were invited to read their work over a cup of tea—led to zany interpretations and re-interpretations of a lit reading. Whether we see Mogileva drink Velikiy tigr black tea in Russia, her eyes obscured, or Dralyuk reads translations of a Russian-American in Los Angeles, Pocket Samovar is a place where these oral experiences are enterable to anyone with wifi access.

As Madina Tlostanova writes in What Does it Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the post-Soviet empire: “the post-Soviet condition must not be seen as a lamentation of the lost paradise, but rather as a way to re-existence.” It has the potential to give birth to new “forms of communication, praxis and production of meanings.” To serve as an archive for these re-existences is a lofty endeavor and we are bound to be human, to fall short. In this issue, we acknowledge our commitment to to center Black, Romani, Eastern Bloc, and differently-abled writers of the post-Soviet space in forthcoming issues.

In a time when international travel and media is in the hands of an elite, literary translation beckons as a space where diasporic community may strike root. The liberation struggles of Belarus, Poland, and Russia and entire globe call for the understanding that liberation is a global movement. Thinking of the immensity of the scope, it is nearly impossible to introduce such a diverse body of experiences and forms to an ever changing and complex world. Some of the works confront the authoritarianism, instability, and violence of the post-Soviet experience by finding freedom in the past or by freedom beyond the past. Some do both. However, much more than an assortment of past-looking texts, we think what the works here are really asking is whether freedom is something we find beyond each other or whether freedom is something we find in each other.

Perhaps, Ostashevsky’s feeling sonnet “16” offers us a start: “What do we want from poetry. / We want it to tell us who we are and what we think. / We want it to serve for a station of certainty, / even if it’s like a piece of ice in black water. / We want it to create a you. An ear. / Shouldn’t an ear be also a mouth. / Yes, we want words to create a mouth.”