"I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltova"

“Alexei Parshchikov's ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ (1989), an important postmodern historical poem imbued with parodic touches, sheds a new light on Pushkin’s Poltava and its legacy. It challenges Pushkin's mythologised portrayal of the Great Northern War by presenting everyday life in late twentieth-century Poltava through the prism of palimpsestic imagination influenced by Russian cultural memory.

Donald Wesling's excellent translation of Parshchikov’s ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ animates effectively the playful space created in the poem through the powerful use of metaphor, associative language and surreal overtones. Wesling shows an exceptional sensitivity to Parshchikov’s exuberant language and renders the performance-like quality of the poem exquisitely. Parshchikov’s concerns with the inevitability of change, the importance of place and the power of language to transform realities embedded in this poem make his version of the historical event—reimagined in a decolonising manner—highly appealing to the readers of the 2020s.”

— Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh

“When Alexei Parshchikov, perhaps the greatest poet of the Russian perestroika generation, died prematurely in 2009, he could not know that Ukraine, where he had spent much of his childhood and youth, would one day rise up against its former rulers. It was in the Battle of Poltava (1709), that Russia first seized control from Charles XII, the King of Sweden of the territory in question. Parshchikov’s brilliant Poundian ‘poem including history’—as well as geography and ecology—juxtaposes superbly surreal battle scenes with the quiet meditations of the poet, cultivating, on the site of the former battlefield, his garden, with its apricot trees, its ‘long-nosed field mice’ and ‘fruit-honey grog,’ and celebrating Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian opposition fighter, and his sweetheart Marfa Kochubey. In Donald Wesling’s excellent rhymed-verse translation, which dissolves into free rhythms in the course of the poem, Parschikov’s brilliant and highly original imagination lives again. It could not be more apropos today!”

— Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics

“One of great poetic achievements of the 1980s, Parshchikov’s long poem appears, in Donald Wesling’s ambitious new translation, startlingly of our time—not just because of its dismantling of Russian imperialist myths but also because of its insistence on the multifarious resilience of language in the face of its misuse and of the horrors of wars, past and present.”

— Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media

“From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, Ukraine has been periodically destroyed by those who would own it. Among these blood-soaked backstories, the three-way struggle between Peter the Great, Sweden’s Charles XII, and the treacherous Ukrainian Cossack Mazepa in 1709 has long been pan-European lore. In this ‘historical-geographical-ecological’ evocation by the Russian metarealist Alexei Parshchikov, the poet is tending his garden on the site of the battle. Knives, bits of cannon and bone, snatches of sexual violence and the Tsar’s largesse emerge from the black earth. Sacrificial lambs and mosquitos look on. Donald Wesling’s spectacular rendering into English, reflecting subtexts in Pushkin as well as the late Soviet poetic underground, is formally audacious and so tightly constructed that the reader can’t breathe. Exactly what is required today.”

— Caryl Emerson, Princeton University