Entries from December 2007
“[The Marches of the Dissenters] give people courage. Everything will be okay here when people start acting courageously. When people stop making excuses—‘I can’t march with this guy, I can’t march with that guy’—like capricious children. We should all go out and fight for our freedom—Russians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, whoever. Let’s go out and at least finally organize a decent political system.”
—Eduard Limonov, quoted in Sergey Chernov, “A Rebel with a Cause,” St. Petersburg Times, 23 November 2007 (edited by Our Swimmer)
Categories: Russian literature · Russian poetry · Russian politics · Saint Petersburg · The Gathering Darkness · fascist regime · protest movements
Tagged: elections, Limonov, Marches of the Dissenters
The whiplashed, pulped and bloodied back of the soldier of culture—of the “little man,” the government clerk, the raznochinets, the baptized Jew, the intelligent whom the crowd drags to the Fontanka River to be drowned—is the price of initiation into history, into letherature.
—Alexander Skidan, “On the Use and Abuse of Letherburg for Life,” Words Without Borders (translated by Our Swimmer)
Categories: Russian literature · Saint Petersburg
Poetry must still invent means for dwelling in the heart of this absolute rupture, for delivering and enduring it as an openness to the future. And, perhaps, as an openness to future (absolutely real) collective actions.
—Alexander Skidan, “Poetry in the Age of Total Communication,” Nypoesi (translated by Our Swimmer)
Categories: Russian poetry · The Gathering Darkness · capitalism · poetry
