Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Eugene Ostashevsky. Alexander Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy. In RED SHIFTING, Skidan blurs and shifts the boundaries between the two as literary genres and as modes of discourse. His work is both lyrical and disjointed, addressing unflinchingly the literary and historical condition of post-Soviet Russia, engaging in continuous discourse with what Walter Benjamin would call "the origins of the present crisis". He lives in St. Petersburg where he is also a literary and cultural critic, journalist, and translator, as well as one of the founding members of the collaborative art and politics publication What Is to Be Done. In 2006 he won the Andrey Bely prize for Nonfiction.
Author Bio
Aleksandr Skidan, born in Leningrad in 1965, has published five poetry collections in Russian, one of which was awarded the 2006 Andrei Bely Prize. An award-winning essayist, Skidan has published four books of essays (Critical Mass, The Resistance to/of Poetry, Summation of a Poetics, and Theses Toward the Politicization of Art and Other Texts), as well as a novel. He translates American and European literary theory and American poetry. He is a member of the art and activist collective Chto Delat'? and a co-editor of the New Literary Observer. His first book in English translation, RED SHIFTING, was published in 2008 by Ugly Duckling Presse. In 2018, he was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship in poetry and spent the fall in Rome and Venice. GOLEM SOVETICUS: PRIGOV AS BRECHT AND WARHOL IN ONE PERSONA (Ugly Duckling, 2020) is his latest book. He lives in St. Petersburg.
Author City: St. Petersburg RUS