February 7, 2006

Dunja Popovic, "Pravo na TRUP: Power, Discourse, and the Body in the Poetry of Nina Iskrenko," The Russian Review 64.4 (2005): 628-41.

I only know Nina Iskrenko's work that was in the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr, 1999). The rape sequence poem "Sex -- a Five Minute Briefing" is especially powerful:

And having hunched over her out of vileness out of tenderness
& abuse
He pulled out her soul having taken her the best he
could
Across the Urals Then closed the gate (ll.38-42)

Popovic argues that Iskrenko's poetry is subversive on several levels: anti-Soviet, feminist, and anti-traditionalist. Popovic notes three uses of the body in Iskrenko's work that corresponds to each of these catagories. First, Iskrenko juxtaposes the realness of the body ("the touchstone of the real" 632) to demonstrate the emptiness of the collectivity promised by Soviet political rheotoric. Second, Popovic examines the poem "Dear Undress to the Waist" in which the female body is manipulated by men (by a doctor, an artist, and by Tolstoy) giving rise to the Russian cliche turned pun "We are waiting/ for the tram" (which apparently means we are not whores who hang around trainstations looking to pick up men) "to suggest the possibility of female agency in the face of repressive misogynist ideology" (637) . Lastly, during Iskrenko's last phase before succombing to cancer, the body is used subversively to elevate personal experience as a "rejection of grand narratives in favor of 'little ones'" (638).

This article makes me want to pick up her selected translation The Right to Err: Selected Works (Three Continents, 1995).