Stephan Delbos reviews The Naked World by Irina Mashinski
Stephan Delbos, the Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA., is the author of In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019); and Small Talk (Dos Madres, 2021). His co-translation of The Absolute Gravedigger, by Czech Surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval, was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation grant in 2015 and was published by Twisted Spoon Press. He is also the co-translator of Nezval’s Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021), and the translator of contemporary Czech poet Tereza Riedlbauchová’s Paris Notebook (The Visible Spectrum, 2020). His scholarly study, The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism, was published by Palgrave. He is a Founding Editor of B O D Y (www.bodyliterature.com). Website: www.stephandelbos.com
The Naked World by Irina Mashinski
The Naked World: A Tale with VerseBy Irina MashinskiWith translations by the author and Maria Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, Angela Livingstone, Tony Brinkley, Alexander Sumerkin, and Daniel Weissbort MadHat Press, 2022185 pages
The Naked World by Russian-American poet Irina Mashinski is the book of a life. As the subtitle suggests, these poems interspersed with short prose reflections tell a tale. That tale is seemingly timeless and universal, but also indelibly marked by the upheavals of twentieth-century Russia. Encompassing four generations of Mashinski’s family, The Naked World includes “accounts of Stalin’s Great Terror of the Thirties… and childhood memories from the Thaw of the Sixties and the post-Thaw Seventies” as Ilya Kaminsky notes in the preface. The book culminates with Mashinski’s own flight from Russia to New York with her daughter in 1991.
These are stories of Russia and America, but they are also stories of families and strangers, home and exile, evocative recollections of beneficent stillness and forced movement. The combination of prose and poetry affords Mashinski a variety of lenses through which to explore her memories, experiences and family history. Flashing moments of peculiar poetic insight sit next to more journalistic accounts. These texts both explore and explain what it means to have a homeland and what it means to leave one’s home in the past for an uncertain future.
Many of these pages are driven by questioning examination, as a desire for authenticity and truth encourages Mashinski to glimpse into the heart of things beyond passports and appearances, so she may remake the world anew:
“But who said: ‘culture’? Who said that the skies should be worn-out from prayers? Try this parking lot. Try to live in this new winter light, with no rain and no snow, in this young naked world, reflected in the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds. Doesn’t it need me, along with the dent from my winter books on the table and the warmth of my unfocused sight?”
Questions of culture are questions of self. Leaving one culture or one land for another can have a dislocating effect—generating new possibilities for one’s personality and worldview. Mashinski is eloquent and insightful on the particulars of the emigrant experience, and while her personal story is tied to the history of modern Russia, the insights and lessons of her writing speak to the eternal subjects of travel and culture, routes and roots:
“And then you grow up and emigrate, and, still surrounded by the people that were your kin, your kind, and your blood (or so you were told a long time ago)—you feel stark naked in the middle of a stark-naked world, in the empty field where your last name is suddenly the last and the most arbitrary thing that matters to you; you find yourself in a space where your little myth becomes disconnected, disjointed, unassuming, useless, and—therefore—finally honest.”
The poems in The Naked World glint out between these passages of weighty prose. These verses are sharp and visionary, capturing the metamorphosis of humans and eras with imaginative particulars and carefully wrought language:
“Born late,I live a latecomerfalling behindall I likedas we fell behind the Westin our Soviet Youth
stumbling just as our Speedola short-wavewas trying to fish outDire Straitsfrom the storm of the jammers—”
The Soviet radio brand, the British rock band: these luminous details, which are so clearly remembered rather than invented, bring a rewarding authenticity to these poems.
As all good writing does, The Naked World forces us to question our assumptions, our preconceived ideas—about homeland, culture and identity: “What you are asking about, what you are calling America is neither this, nor that, nor the other, but a trying of the otherness, which is a priori impossible.”
The influence of Boris Pasternak looms large here, in the crystalline language and imagery, both clear-headed and startlingly lyrical, as well as in the combination of poetry and prose, which Pasternak famously utilized in Doctor Zhivago. Yet it’s clear that Mashinski’s heritage encompasses Russia as well as the exile experience and the international community of poets.
“Émigré,” pays homage to four of Mashinski’s influences, both as poets and emigrants: Paul Celan, Henry Parland, Boris Pasternak and Gerard Manley Hopkins:
One—a citizen of FranceRomanian-born GermanicJewsquinting in the sunshine,rewrote Yeseninin what happened to beGerman.
Another—half-German and half-Britfrom Vyborg—taken across Finland on a child’s sled—[…]
Another yearned for music,slitting the veinsof criss-crossed window frames,neither Jew, nor convertand became a poet.[…]
Another, an Anglican—turned Jesuit,abandoned by his family,and himself,reached out to lines—
Here Mashinski proclaims her allegiance to the timeless, universal family of poets, the company of language that traffics in yearning.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mashinski is brilliant on the subject of borders. She does not need to resort to abstractions; she simply draws from her store of memory: “Out of breath, still incredulous, I stopped, and lowered Sasha on the floor. And right there and then, still a few meters away from that impossible border, ashamed, I promised myself to never—never—be afraid of anything again.”
The quiet, fierce strength exhibited in these lines combines with breathtaking longing and nostalgia throughout the book, creating a complex and emotionally multivalent collection of poems and prose. Mashinski quotes Susan Sontag: “My library is a library of longings.”
Each of the book’s four sections is prefaced with an epigraph and an allusion to a piece of music: Part I. Patterns is paired with Scriabin’s Vers la Flamme; Part 2. The Myth is paired with Chopin’s Nocturn op 27 #2 D flat major; Part 3. In the Right-of-Way is paired with John Cage’s In a Landscape; Part 4. Borders is paired with Rachmaninoff’s The Second Piano Concerto.
The book is accordingly musical, with leitmotifs of images, locations, concepts and phrases. But The Naked World is also strikingly cinematic: Mashinski has a gift for creating coherent scenes, with characters and their actions as sharply defined as the landscape, even as the two interact, as in the book’s touching and perfectly framed final prose passage, “Trains”:
“Grandma Alexandra and I are standing on a loam path by a potato field in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, and a freight train is slowly chugging along from the bottom left to the top right corner[…] The sun is almost gone, and nothing is uncertain or blurry anymore: the blackened rim of the field is emphasized by the bending rays, and all outlines are painfully defined. To go there, to the right and upper right corner of the frame—the train calls higher and higher and then lower and lower, as I stand between high and low, forgetting to count.”
This scene, a moment of quotidian communion between the poet and her grandmother, provides a beautiful close to the book and also echoes an earlier scene with Mashinski and her daughter:
“We stopped and as I turned both of us to face this fierce theatrical sunset, I said to Sasha, surprising myself and in my heart of hearts not even believing that such directions can be followed: ‘Remember this—this is Russia.’ Even then I knew that such sunsets—as well as such trees, and such roads, are not only Russian, that they existed in other places on the planet. But I was bidding it all farewell, we were bidding it farewell, I was overwhelmed with this parting, which, I thought, would be forever, and the burning surrealistic image was like a thumbtack, with which (I intuitively felt at that moment) I could fasten in her mind the memory of these places and her early childhood spent here.”
This longing to capture the world in language and in memory; this desire to hold the moment and make it indestructible—these animate The Naked World, a profound and powerful book.
The Naked World by Russian-American poet Irina Mashinski is the book of a life. As the subtitle suggests, these poems interspersed with short prose reflections tell a tale. That tale is seemingly timeless and universal, but also indelibly marked by the upheavals of twentieth-century Russia. Encompassing four generations of Mashinski’s family, The Naked World includes “accounts of Stalin’s Great Terror of the Thirties… and childhood memories from the Thaw of the Sixties and the post-Thaw Seventies” as Ilya Kaminsky notes in the preface. The book culminates with Mashinski’s own flight from Russia to New York with her daughter in 1991.
These are stories of Russia and America, but they are also stories of families and strangers, home and exile, evocative recollections of beneficent stillness and forced movement. The combination of prose and poetry affords Mashinski a variety of lenses through which to explore her memories, experiences and family history. Flashing moments of peculiar poetic insight sit next to more journalistic accounts. These texts both explore and explain what it means to have a homeland and what it means to leave one’s home in the past for an uncertain future.
Many of these pages are driven by questioning examination, as a desire for authenticity and truth encourages Mashinski to glimpse into the heart of things beyond passports and appearances, so she may remake the world anew:
“But who said: ‘culture’? Who said that the skies should be worn-out from prayers? Try this parking lot. Try to live in this new winter light, with no rain and no snow, in this young naked world, reflected in the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds. Doesn’t it need me, along with the dent from my winter books on the table and the warmth of my unfocused sight?”
Questions of culture are questions of self. Leaving one culture or one land for another can have a dislocating effect—generating new possibilities for one’s personality and worldview. Mashinski is eloquent and insightful on the particulars of the emigrant experience, and while her personal story is tied to the history of modern Russia, the insights and lessons of her writing speak to the eternal subjects of travel and culture, routes and roots:
“And then you grow up and emigrate, and, still surrounded by the people that were your kin, your kind, and your blood (or so you were told a long time ago)—you feel stark naked in the middle of a stark-naked world, in the empty field where your last name is suddenly the last and the most arbitrary thing that matters to you; you find yourself in a space where your little myth becomes disconnected, disjointed, unassuming, useless, and—therefore—finally honest.”
The poems in The Naked World glint out between these passages of weighty prose. These verses are sharp and visionary, capturing the metamorphosis of humans and eras with imaginative particulars and carefully wrought language:
“Born late,I live a latecomerfalling behindall I likedas we fell behind the Westin our Soviet Youth
stumbling just as our Speedola short-wavewas trying to fish outDire Straitsfrom the storm of the jammers—”
The Soviet radio brand, the British rock band: these luminous details, which are so clearly remembered rather than invented, bring a rewarding authenticity to these poems.
As all good writing does, The Naked World forces us to question our assumptions, our preconceived ideas—about homeland, culture and identity: “What you are asking about, what you are calling America is neither this, nor that, nor the other, but a trying of the otherness, which is a priori impossible.”
The influence of Boris Pasternak looms large here, in the crystalline language and imagery, both clear-headed and startlingly lyrical, as well as in the combination of poetry and prose, which Pasternak famously utilized in Doctor Zhivago. Yet it’s clear that Mashinski’s heritage encompasses Russia as well as the exile experience and the international community of poets.
“Émigré,” pays homage to four of Mashinski’s influences, both as poets and emigrants: Paul Celan, Henry Parland, Boris Pasternak and Gerard Manley Hopkins:
One—a citizen of FranceRomanian-born GermanicJewsquinting in the sunshine,rewrote Yeseninin what happened to beGerman.
Another—half-German and half-Britfrom Vyborg—taken across Finland on a child’s sled—[…]
Another yearned for music,slitting the veinsof criss-crossed window frames,neither Jew, nor convertand became a poet.[…]
Another, an Anglican—turned Jesuit,abandoned by his family,and himself,reached out to lines—
Here Mashinski proclaims her allegiance to the timeless, universal family of poets, the company of language that traffics in yearning.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mashinski is brilliant on the subject of borders. She does not need to resort to abstractions; she simply draws from her store of memory: “Out of breath, still incredulous, I stopped, and lowered Sasha on the floor. And right there and then, still a few meters away from that impossible border, ashamed, I promised myself to never—never—be afraid of anything again.”
The quiet, fierce strength exhibited in these lines combines with breathtaking longing and nostalgia throughout the book, creating a complex and emotionally multivalent collection of poems and prose. Mashinski quotes Susan Sontag: “My library is a library of longings.”
Each of the book’s four sections is prefaced with an epigraph and an allusion to a piece of music: Part I. Patterns is paired with Scriabin’s Vers la Flamme; Part 2. The Myth is paired with Chopin’s Nocturn op 27 #2 D flat major; Part 3. In the Right-of-Way is paired with John Cage’s In a Landscape; Part 4. Borders is paired with Rachmaninoff’s The Second Piano Concerto.
The book is accordingly musical, with leitmotifs of images, locations, concepts and phrases. But The Naked World is also strikingly cinematic: Mashinski has a gift for creating coherent scenes, with characters and their actions as sharply defined as the landscape, even as the two interact, as in the book’s touching and perfectly framed final prose passage, “Trains”:
“Grandma Alexandra and I are standing on a loam path by a potato field in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, and a freight train is slowly chugging along from the bottom left to the top right corner[…] The sun is almost gone, and nothing is uncertain or blurry anymore: the blackened rim of the field is emphasized by the bending rays, and all outlines are painfully defined. To go there, to the right and upper right corner of the frame—the train calls higher and higher and then lower and lower, as I stand between high and low, forgetting to count.”
This scene, a moment of quotidian communion between the poet and her grandmother, provides a beautiful close to the book and also echoes an earlier scene with Mashinski and her daughter:
“We stopped and as I turned both of us to face this fierce theatrical sunset, I said to Sasha, surprising myself and in my heart of hearts not even believing that such directions can be followed: ‘Remember this—this is Russia.’ Even then I knew that such sunsets—as well as such trees, and such roads, are not only Russian, that they existed in other places on the planet. But I was bidding it all farewell, we were bidding it farewell, I was overwhelmed with this parting, which, I thought, would be forever, and the burning surrealistic image was like a thumbtack, with which (I intuitively felt at that moment) I could fasten in her mind the memory of these places and her early childhood spent here.”
This longing to capture the world in language and in memory; this desire to hold the moment and make it indestructible—these animate The Naked World, a profound and powerful book.
