BIG RUBBER COCK

I saw it every day on the way to school.
I know that’s not the best way
to start a poem,
but there’s nothing I can do about my memories,
I can’t take the rubber cock out of my mind and
replace it
with, say, a New Year’s Tree.

Welcome to the poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Russia’s ‘first authentic post-Soviet writer,’ in the words of his translator, Keith Gessen. We’re a long way from the lyricism of Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov. Medvedev’s poetry leaves nothing to the imagination. When he writes that he remembers big rubber cocks, he means exactly that.

It’s No Good is a collection of poetry, essays and ‘actions’ that reflects on prosaic events, memories and people, yet it is fiercely political as well as personal. Medvedev’s writing packs a powerful punch, painting a portrait of a Russia that is spiritually barren, culturally denuded and politically authoritarian. Something is rotten in the state of Russia, and its brutality is such that it doesn’t need a tortured prince Hamlet to soliloquise it. Indeed, Medvedev is no Hamlet (nor has a wish to be), but rather a modern version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: misanthropic and ready to pour scorn on the said, the about-to-be-said and the never-to-be-said-but-only-thought. Unlike Dostoevsky’s unhappy ‘little man,’ however, Medvedev is an underdog with a willingness to put his neck on the line, attending demonstrations to protest against Putin and his regime.

In Gessen’s view, Medvedev is morally superior to the liberal intelligentsia of the Glasnost and Post-Soviet years, because he has fully recognised that generation’s tragic failure. This was the failure to mount an effective political opposition, if not in direct democratic terms, then at least by giving people a means to think and feel differently. How different Russia could have been without the capitalistic free-for-all of the Yeltsin years and the early days of Putin’s authoritarian supremacy, if only the country’s intellectuals and writers had done something to intervene. According to Gessen and Medvedev, there was value in the humanism and literariness of the earlier generation, which could quote long stretches of classical poetry, had read Hemingway and Robert Frost and admired Fellini and Bergman. Its politically laissez-faire attitude was easy to forgive from one perspective, since speaking out often resulted in exile, imprisonment or death in the Soviet Union, but it also meant that the ruling elite’s narrative about Russia remained dominant.

Medvedev resists striking a poetical pose. His lines rarely recall other poets or aim for poetic beauty. Instead, he writes about dildos, drunkenness, hating yet lusting after pretty girls, despising classmates who have gone on to have successful careers, ridiculous minor poets and literary critics, pornography, dirty apartments, aimless foreign wanderings and the ‘unstructured waste’ of real life. Prosaic honesty, often vulgar and extreme, is positioned as the ultimate good. The profound disaffection in It’s No Good takes two basic forms. On the first level, the book is tired and disgusted with Putin and all he represents. Medvedev recognises that today’s authoritarianism is not the worst that Russia has experienced in its history, writing in ‘Comrade Kots’:

It must be said , it’s a neat system the Bolsheviks/
created.
…
And now it’s run by their distant heirs,
Not iron-willed masters, but pathetic losers.
Shady characters, with shady faces.
Though, in their way, not idiots.

These ‘pathetic losers’ can be dangerous and vindictive. Medvedev himself has suffered physical harassment during demonstrations and personal protests outside governmental buildings, sometimes ending up with a literal punch in the face. Mostly, however, he is ground down by an unrelenting misery, as seen in this fragment from Facebook:

and to hell with it, but here as with everything
you feel you have to confront the endless resistance of
shit
the endless resistance of shit.

This political malaise also finds expression in the book’s essays, which aren’t far removed, either aesthetically or morally, from the poetry. The endeavour for perfection, in whatever linguistic form, is contrary to Medvedev’s entire outlook. It is better to be understood, even if briefly, by the thug before he punches you, than to be lyrical and otherworldly. It is worth noting that this line of thinking extends far back into Russian history, at least as far as the nihilists of the 19th century, who, in Dostoevsky’s formulation, thought ‘a pair of boots [to be] worth more than Shakespeare.’

On a second, more personal, level, Medvedev’s disaffection is that of an underdog with a chip on his shoulder, though he does this kind of posturing well. Loss and disappointment scratch at the heart, kick around the brain and empty the lungs. Things are never quite right, or they are thwarted or delayed, and God only knows when they will turn out straight. This discontent is apparent everywhere: when Medvedev works as a literary translator (‘in my opinion translators are/on the whole/with some rare exceptions/ghouls/feeding on/other people’s blood’), visits Berlin (‘I found myself/in an absolutely empty square/and all around was forest/and the square was empty’), or thinks of his literary career (‘I’m going to continue sitting here/deep in shit/with my principles’), to name but a few examples.

In the end, the demon of taste whispers, ‘Yes, but is it any good?’ Medvedev’s opinions about Russia in It’s No Good aren’t particularly original or shocking. Any half-reflective mind can sense the country’s horrors. Medvedev calls a spade a spade, deliberately eschewing all ambiguity: Russia is sick to the core, struck by inequality and run by out-and-out crooks. To insist on high aesthetic standards might seem obtuse, given the urgency of this context. On the other hand, there can be something disappointing about poetry that doesn’t care to speak to the heart, that refuses to be a thing of beauty as well as of power. Medvedev’s intellectual insistence on the mundane and the vulgar, even if underpinned by political motivation, imbues parts of the prose with a tin-eared flatness. There are, however, ample instances of Medvedev letting go and producing hypnotic, sombre lines. In these moments he resembles Pushkin, who wrote in the 1830s, ‘Soon we’ll die./On earth there’s no bliss…/long back…I thought of taking flight.’

It’s No Good cries out for a better world. It desires an existence of common causes, a world in which the individual is not brought low by boredom and misanthropy, but in which friendship and truth point to the ultimate good. Medvedev, who tries hard to escape romantic vision and expression, yet approximates that arch-poet Yeats, who writes, ‘All life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.’ Throughout his work, it is clear that Medvedev sees his own life bound up with that of Russia as a whole. Yet, like Yeats, he is fatalistic: he believes that a healthy and prosperous life is nothing but a dream. We can only hope he is wrong.

Andre van Loon is a freelance literary critic, specialising in new British and American novels and studies of Russian 19th- century literature.

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