Description
A bilingual edition of Leonid Schwab's poetry with an introduction by Maria Stepanova.
EVERBURNING PILOT is a bi-lingual edition of Leonid Schwab’s poetry with an introduction by Maria Stepanova. Leonid Schwab is an integral figure for the understanding of Russian contemporary poetry; he’s also one of its least conforming members. While remaining singularly unique, Schwab has had a liberating effect on a number of Russophone poets during the past two decades. In his strange poems, elimination of the lyric subject and heightened narrativity unite with masterfully measured lines to create worlds that remain perpetually beguiling.
“The verses trace the contours of something along the lines of happiness, they delineate its momentary trajectories, indicate the direction—until a new shift exposes the next, still uninhabited tract of invisible territory. This strange, dazzling, twilit universe—inhabited by bison, electricians, and short circuits—is something like a promise that you cannot not believe: Schwab knows what he’s talking about.”—Maria Stepanova
“Borges tells of imperial cartographers attempting to construct a map of the empire that was the size of the empire. Discolored tatters of the abandoned project still exist in the desert; beggars and animals live in them. He might have been talking about the poetry of Leonid Schwab. Schwab’s astonishing semilegible living pictures, poetic tatters of imperial dreams, studies in slowed-down, polyphonic time, remnants of an unwritable, strangely male epic are among the most hauntingly beautiful poems written in Russian today. “I love them but I could never set them to music,” a composer friend says, ‘they are music’”—Eugene Ostashevsky
“Leonid Schwab is a poet who creates worlds that oscillate between past and present, stillness and passage, mystery and nightmare. His poems travel far and wide, taking the reader on unexpected visits to Chkalov, Hebron, Chicago, Poland, Manchuria, and even the Moon. Schwab’s poetry transcends rigid cultural frames and national allegiances by engaging in dynamic experiments with border-crossing, diasporic aesthetics, and homelessness.”—Alex Moshkin
Poetry.
Author Bio
Leonid Schwab was born in 1961 in Bobruisk and moved to Orenburg at the age of six. He graduated from Moscow State Technological University in 1983, then lived and worked in Vladimir from 1985-1990. After emigrating to Israel in 1990 he settled in Jerusalem, where he works as an IT professional. In 2004, Schwab was included in the shortlist for the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia's most prestigious prize for poetry. He published his first book of poems, Poverit' v botaniku (To Believe in Botany), in 2005. In 2008, along with Fyodor Svarovsky and Arseniy Rovinsky, he appeared in the book-length compilation Vse Srazu (All at Once). His next book of poetry Vash Nikolai (Yours Nikolai), published in 2015, was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize the following year.
Author City: Jerusalem ISR