The new poetry anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work published in isolarii, as series of “island books,” released every two months by subscription. Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (with forewords by Eileen Myles and Amia Srinivasan), the groundbreaking collection features the work of twelve feminist Russian women and members of F pis’mo. As well as co-editing this anthology, Galina Rymbu is a famed Russian poet, whose own work was published by Asymptote in 2016 and whose poems are included in F Letter. Rymbu formed the F pis’mo poetry collective with other feminist and LGBTQ poets in 2017 in order to use language as a form of political protest. F pis’mo‘s work has since inspired a new generation of Russian poets to challenge patriarchal society by giving voice to their own personal experience through poetry. In this essay, Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for Central America, José García Escobar, speaks with Galina Rymbu as well as other F Letter poets, translators, and editors to discuss the collective’s work.
Saint Petersburg. January 2, 2017. Poetess Galina Rymbu was in her house, waiting for a knock on her door. Hopefully several. Galina had sent out an invitation to everyone interested in talking about feminism in literature.
“We thought that only a few people would come,” she writes, from her house in Lviv, Ukraine, where she has lived since 2018.
In the end, more than forty people crammed inside Galina’s tiny kitchen.
“Some were standing, some were sitting on the floor.”
Not only poets and writers went. Activists, artists, and theatergoers were there as well. Galina says that there were no feminist literary communities in Russia at the time. It is a country where the work of heterosexual, cisgender male authors sits, untouched, at the forefront, and where women and LGBTQ authors are often ignored. Galina describes Russia’s literary community as conservative and patriarchal.
“During that first meeting, we said that we didn’t want to be locked in our small circle of ‘feminist literature,’” she says. “We wanted to change literature to make it more gender-sensitive.”
In Russia, according to Galina, only artists working for the state receive financial support. They work under a set of rules, naturally. Don’t write about the LGBTQ community, don’t write about the occupation of Crimea and Donbas, cooperate with Putin’s regime, for example. Poets, writers, musicians, and film and theatre directors who abide by these rules have access to public platforms, large publishing houses, and galleries. These spaces must also follow the rules. Galina says that censorship is everywhere—in the media, television, literary, and film festivals—and compares it to Kafka’s Der Process. Those outside the cultural circuit of Russia’s state, like Galina, resort to independent publishing, where there’s no censorship, but also no visibility—much like Russian writers did before 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The existence of these artists is a political act. Their work is often, and by definition, dissident.
“It was impossible for us to remain feminist poets and express our views only in the space of political activism,” Galina says. “We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.”
And thus, F pis’mo was born.
What started out as a modest gathering quickly turned into a groundbreaking literary movement. Seminars on feminist literary theory, lectures, reading groups, discussions, poetry readings in small galleries, bookstores, bars, and libraries. Authors in Yekaterinburg, a city more than a thousand miles from Saint Petersburg, formed their own F pis’mo. And, in 2018, they founded an online magazine where they publish poetry, prose, and theoretical works by Russian authors, as well as translations of feminist and queer poetry from the likes of C.A. Conrad, Eileen Miles, and Zheng Xiaoqiong. But the arresting energy of F pis’mo’s authors is not limited to the page. They soon moved to social media and, naturally, did street demonstrations. Activism, struggle, and the politics of resistance influence poetry, according to Galina. One clear example of this is Galina’s most famous poem Моя вагина-My Vagina, written in 2018, in response to the arrest of the artist and activist Yulia Tsvetkova. Here’s its first stanza:
On May 17, 2013, to music by Semantic Hallucinations,
a son came out of my vagina,
and then the placenta, which the midwife held like a butcher,
weighing it in her hands. The doctor placed my son at my breast
(at that point I still didn’t know his name)
and said, ‘Your son.’ And immediately my son peed all over my breasts and stomach,
and the world became my vagina, my son, his burning stream,
his wet, warm head, my empty
belly.
My Vagina has been translated into twelve languages, and much like Yulia Tsvetkova, Galina faces charges of disseminating “pornography” and “gay propaganda.” Galina now lives in exile in Ukraine, where she still edits F pis’mo.
F Letter
In October 2020, indie publishing house isolarii published F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry. This tiny, beautiful red book includes the work of many of F pis’mo’s authors, including Galina Rymbu. Editors India Ennenga and Sebastian Clark first became aware of Galina in 2016, after reading an interview published in Music & Literature.
“We were struck by the extent to which Galina’s worldview was, and remains, startlingly total; and how effectively her work opens this to others,” India writes. “We were aware that, in the face of revanchism, there was a growing number of writers in Russia that were melding poetry with political dissent. And Galina was someone, both humble and committed, that people, the world over, could rally around.”
In 2017, as India and Sebastian reached out to writers for isolarii, India felt it was essential that Galina and other F pis’mo writers be involved.
F Letter includes the work of twelve poetesses from different generations and whose experiences are so wildly different from each other that they seem to have grown in different countries. In a way, they did. For example, veteran poet Lida Yusupova, born in 1963, was twenty-eight years old during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a time, she says, of unprecedented freedom.
“I was lucky that the USSR fell apart when I was writing my college thesis,” she writes from her home in Toronto. “The restricted collections of the Public Library opened right when I got there. For me, the collapse of the USSR was a joy. The ’90s were really the years of the greatest freedom in Russia.”
Once, Lida was at a café when an old friend waved at her. She sat by his side and he, downcast and crestfallen, gave her a business card from a newspaper published by the Leningrad KGB.
“I had known that he was a snitch,” she writes, “yet there he was, tearing off his mask.” Lida remembers mass productions of books and literary journals. “Everything that had been forbidden or inaccessible before was being published.”
In 1995 Lida published her own first book of poetry, Irasaliml.
“No one believed that unfreedom would return,” Lida writes. “But alas. With Putin’s ascent, the unfreedom came back. It was as if the USSR had never gone anywhere.”
Galina calls Lida a “guiding light” for many writers and “the first contemporary Russian author to write a poem that speaks openly about sexual violence against women and about her own experience.” Here’s a fraction of said poem, titled Mateyuk:
if the teen had been home Mateyuk would not have raped me
bad luck
and when he came back he lay down on top of me without saying anything and sex happened with us I didn’t resist I just said this isn’t right I repeated this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this isn’t right this right this isn’t right this isn’t right this (. . .)
Lida first read this poem, in front of an audience, on October 9, 2016—four years after Vladimir Putin began his second term as president of Russia. In the audience was Lida’s ex-husband, not the rapist in Mateyuk, but someone who had threatened to kill her after the divorce.
“I had never read anything written in Russian before then where a woman talks about having been raped, I didn’t know how to talk about it in Russian,” Lida writes. “I just took a flying leap into my experience and memories. I just had to fly beyond the horizon, along an unknown path, straight toward the rapist, to once again draw close to him and say: ‘this isn’t right’ and to repeat ‘this isn’t right,’ ‘this isn’t right’ forever and ever.” By the time Lida finished reading Mateyuk, everyone at the Word Order bookstore in Saint Petersburg was silent. “It was the first time I spoke out loud about having been raped,” Lida writes.
Three months later Galina hosted the first meeting of F pis’mo.
“For me, this group is one of the most important spaces of my existence as a woman who writes,” says Lida. “If I compare it to other, male-dominated literary projects, I can say that I am not constricted, anxiously anticipating the danger of being dismissed as a writer simply because I am a woman.”
“Lida writes the body, she writes sex, sexual violence, and queerness, and her work is politically critical and formally innovative,” writes Ainsley Morse, one of F Letter’s translators and editors. “I’d venture to say that Lida, as someone who spent time as an adult in the USSR, takes a more skeptical view of clear-cut political declarations and affiliations. I also think that Lida, again by virtue of her generation, stands in for a lot of other older women poets in Russia, who for various reasons do not self-identify as feminists, even as their writing has explicitly tackled all kinds of aspects of feminine experience.”
F pis’mo became a place of refuge for countless other authors. Twenty-eight-year-old Egana Djabbarova—another poet featured in F Letter and one of F pis’mo’s youngest poetesses—calls it a chosen family.
“Feminism for me is a safe place where you are accepted and not judged, whatever you are,” Egana writes. “Poetry also is a safe space, it is a refuge, and F pis’mo, particularly, as well.”
Much like Galina—born just two years prior—Egana also grew up during what Lida calls the “new unfreedom.” But unlike them, she says he has never faced any type of censorship, even if she has also written about sexual violence. Such is the case of ямы сестры Хачатурян–we are all the Khachaturian sisters. The poem was inspired by the ongoing case of Krestina, Angelina, and Maria Khachaturian, who are accused of murdering their sexually and violently abusive father, and who could face up to 20 years in jail if found guilty.
“For me poetry is a way of hugging, saving people,” Egana writes. “It is a form of emphathy and apology for people, in particular, those who are vulnerable, weaker, and disenfranchised.”
Here’s part of we are all the Khachaturian sisters:
Mekhti earns 50 manats an hour,
gasps from asthma in a stifling car
20 days awaiting trial for prostitution
4 beds between 17
beatings without end and violent movements
your father—your sin, Mekhti, you are your father’s sin
the rotting fruit of the Garden of Eden,
don’t, stop it, no, please don’t hurt me
“The bravery of these women, who are making art and activism in increasingly adverse circumstances, is unquestionably inspiring,” says Ainsley Morse.
The authors’ unclenching potency, focused fury, and zest, make F Letter a riveting read, not devoid of moments of kindness, tenderness, empathy, and introspection. An anvil and a rose. Lolita Agamalova’s momentum and vivid imagery is also filled with irony, subtle humor, and charisma. Elena Kostyleva’s poetry is as punishing as it is confident, as earth-shattering as it is softly wicked and mischievous. Stanislava Mogileva’s passionate sarcasm is brimming with acute critique—perhaps they’re one and the same, or one posing as the other. For the poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky, who is also F Letter’s other editor, the authors included in this collection courageously follow the tradition of previous Russian feminist authors, such as Nina Iskrenko, Vera Pavlova, Elena Fanailova, Linor Goralik, Polina Andrukovich, and Dina Gatina, to name a few.
“They’re definitely part of a broader movement,” he says.
island books
isolarii are island books. F Letter is isolarii’s second book, second island, second isolarii.
Isolarii’s first isolarii was Salmon: A Red Herring by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, or Cooking Sections. The duo uses art, performance, video, and installation to show how climate change affects food. Salmon was precisely that: a book that focuses on the effects of salmon farming on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and its surroundings. The color of its pages (from red to pale pink) mimics the color of salmons. A true book-object. And quite the predecessor for F Letter. India Ennenga and Sebastian Clark call isolarii’s books “islands,” based on the extinct genre of the same name—the ‘island books’ that emerged at the start of the Renaissance.
“Together they assemble disparate writers, artists, filmmakers, and architects to help us navigate the world anew,” as is written on their website.
With such descriptions, one can quickly see how the authors of F pis’mo fit with isolarii’s line of work. They are, without question, disparate writers. But as a fairly young press, I asked the editors how F Letter continues to solidify and expand isolarii.
“Islands have unique logics, narratives, and even weather pattens,” India writes. “isolarii are such places, and the ultimate goal of the series—to articulate something that might be called a new humanism—we think can only be achieved by journeying between them, unexpectedly, with irrationality and adventure. This is why isolarii are released periodically, every two months, as a subscription series: to bring together people who are willing to take leaps of faith into worlds unknown to them, because this is what our times require. And so going from Salmon to F Letter felt like an important early transition to us—an erratic jump between two otherwise disconnected spaces. This poetry responds to its Russian context, but its poetics are global.”
I think of Oksana Vasyakina’s Эти люди не знали моего отца/These people didn’t know my father. Here’s a bit of this poem:
5
just about anybody can die of AIDS
(. . .)
the fact that he died of AIDS is being kept strictly secret
I don’t understand what for
though on the rare occasions when people ask me what he died from so young only 47
I look at the person and wonder how to answer
I don’t know why
but sometimes I think I wonder what to choose precisely because an official cause of death exists
in fact when people ask me most of the time I say it was HIV-infection
it doesn’t sound as frightening as AIDS
your father can’t die of AIDS
but HIV-infection could cause the death of your father
Today F pis’mo is still active, with hundreds of members across Russia. It’s not tied to a specific city anymore. Galina calls it a “nomadic network.” Its website, found here, it’s an endless scroll of eye-catching artwork. After three clicks on the Показать еще button, one can find Eileen Myles dressed in jean shorts, with a casually disarming look on her face and the fire emoji next to her name. Inside, are three of her poems: Geek, Gotheborg, and March 3rd. You also find work by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, and the master of speculative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin.
Galina Rymbu believes that such self-organization will not just deepen their writing, but change the social space of literature.
“We think not only about what the politics of gender equality might look like, but also about what the aesthetics and poetics of gender equality are,” Galina writes.
The poetess thinks of F pis’mo as more than a series of literary events. She sees it as an organization that can exist without being limited to one space and language.
“As Galina writes in her introduction, the poems and the anthology exist as ‘islands of freedom, secret burrows, zones of discomfort,’” says India Ennenga from isolarii. “This is palpable and what first struck me, personally, as a reader. As publishers, we see it existing within a long tradition, from Baudelaire to Rushdie, of subversive, explosive verse. One that periodically reinvigorates the literary landscape, and brings literature to bear on political life.”
*
F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry by isolarii is one of three poetry books to come out this year featuring work from F pis’mo’s authors. The other two are Lida Yusopova’s The Scar We Know, published by Cicada Press, and Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
Galina Rymbu was born in 1990 in the city of Omsk (Siberia, Russia) and lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, as well as Gryoza, a website for contemporary poetry. She is the co-founder and co-curator of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize for emerging Russian-language poets. She has published three books of poems in Russia: Moving Space of the Revolution (Argo-Risk), Time of the Earth (kntxt), and Life in Space (NLO). English translations of her work have appeared in The White Review, Arc Poetry, Berlin Quarterly, Music & Literature, n+1, Asymptote, Powder Keg, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as in the chapbook White Bread (After Hours Editions). Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages and stand-alone collections of her work have been published in Latvian, Dutch, Swedish, and Romanian.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He works as a journalist in Agencia Ocote.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: