Poet, critic, scholar of Russian classic poetry, Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) emigrated in the early 1920s to Berlin. Upon his death, Vladimir Nabokov called him “the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced.” Alex Cigale’s own English-language poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, New England Review, and the Literary Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, and World Literature Today. He is a 2015 NEA Fellow, for his work on the poet of the St. Petersburg “philological school” Mikhail Eremin. His Russian Absurd: the Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
Winter 2016
The Ape
The heat was unbearable. The forests were burning. Time passed languorously. At the neighboring dacha A cock was crowing. I went outside the gate.