Victor Sosnora (1936-), who IS still alive after all, is a strange mix of futurism and avantgardism, and reads a bit like a cross between Marina Tsvetaeva and Velimir Khlebnikov, except he's much more dark, hopeless and bitingly pugnacious than the other two. Combining intricate archaisms in most of his poetry, he couples it with a postmodern subject matter, producing a kind of vertiginous effect in the reader.
We have a huge two-volume set at home (each volume approximating 900+ pages), one containing his prose works, the other his poetry. I haven't had enough time to delve into the former, unfortunately, but opening the book at random, I came across the following sentence. The speaker stands upon the shores of a stormy sea on a particularly gray and gloomy day, and he says: "The sea breaks, like a cobweb." I don't know why I thought this line was so very beautiful, but I did.
Initially I didn't think his stuff was something that would have appealed to me: my mother finally convinced me when she said that he rewrote some of the Old Russian texts (like
The Song of Igor's Campaign) in his collection
The Horsemen, along different lines. Here's where his historical negativity comes in. Imagine somebody rewriting
Beowulf, and every bit as brilliantly as the original anonymous poet or poets, except portraying him as a serial rapist. Sosnora doesn't exactly glory in Russian history, he exposes it as a bloody farce.
There's a
French and
Russian Wiki page on him, if you read any of those two languages. Amazon has one book by him in English on offer, namely
A Million Premonitions, collecting some of his poetry in one volume. I've no idea if it's any good (but can check the quality of the translations at my local library, which has the book), as I've only read Sosnora in the original, which, by the way, is not for the faint-hearted. I asked my mother, who's a better Russian-speaker than I am, if he was meant to be this difficult, or if it was just me, and she said, No, that's the way he writes. Insanely complicated syntax, coupled with new word-coinage.
One of his short stories that I've read in full talks about a mentally unstable man staying in the countryside for the summer, whose holiday is ruined when he comes across a crucified frog nailed to his door! It may not sound like much, but it is a very powerful short story, all the more powerful because it ends where it does--we never find out who did it, or why, or what happens to the narrator afterwards. A single moment of cruelty, illuminating the speaker's day like a sudden epiphany, and then, the end. I think that pretty much sums up Sosnora's negative view of life.
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