Andrei Sen-Senkov
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
Northern Features of the Text
the snow breaks a white hammer against the window which was appointed to be the square head of a nail you know not a single carpenter will write about it that way - of the two, only the one that was more transparent went unscathed
Pink Immortality
my older friend five-year-old Pavlik taught me to stomp on worms in the rain for not having faces though sometimes it seemed that they had them - baby faces these were rare and they were released they were real lucky i think they're still living those pink almost-people
Vivaldi at the Dead Racecourse
at the beginning the times of year seem no different and then comes winter to warm up you get into the ripped-open belly of a dead horse between the loops of the intestines a sticky non-lollipop summer sets in
Biological Suburban Moscow Striptease
the young snake gets ready to shed its skin for the first time shameful degrading difficult to understand for what they say sometimes its necessary its so nice all watch mouth full of saliva of poison now she's about to jerk the snap open no can't make herself do it her clothes will be ripped off by force she'll shrink even skinnier and crawl away into her little burrow she won't die there give birth to something disgusting the kind that in these cases are born to those like us
A Match from the Girl Factory
(a poor imitation of a film by kaurismäki)she wants to burn up for good so that her hair would stop being gross white not at all finnish so that as the russian write in their books "the eyelashes fell and were subtly warmed by moist spoons in tasty boiled eyes" so that artificial breathing would be performed on her in vain by a good-looking doctor everything will end differently in the body of the match the poisoned fibers will be dislocated by the damp wooden rain
Rodchenko. Smell of Sulphur.
a man jumps off the horizontal bars his hands are bent already turning away from the photograph you realize no, they're not bent they're cut off at the elbow by the human scissors of the inwardly-perspiring komsomol* ... the fire ladder lifts to the sky into autumn into the gray belly where one can feel the fruit with your hands it doesn't want to come here a second time ... road work They say "Eat dirt! Eat dirt!" to the excavator, the fat non-living little girl. Fat ones aren't liked, they are laughed at cruelly. She buries herself even deeper to slim down, into the underground aerobics of sullied lard. ... Lilya Brik screaming something venereal magnificence acquires the right to ceaseless movement in spurts ... the dilated pupils of a pioneer girl she dreams of growing up and becoming a zoo technician she doesn't know that there she'll see an amphibian beginning its transformation back into a fish into a red scaly sweet necktie that was tied for her in the night by the handsome group leader Seryozha Rybakov* ... the kremlin. first-of-may parade. the red tibetan ceremony of exorcising evil spirits from the disposable mausoleum the annual moscow seizure of monotheism losing consciousness
* Komsomol -Young Communist League
*Seryozha - short for Sergey
*Rybakov - This surname is derived from ryba, meaning "fish".