from Sovetica
Dragon
In every Soviet school
there was a bust of Lenin
made out of cheap plaster
and hollow inside. And
every Soviet schoolchild
knew more or less how to
make a smoke bomb using
saltpeter cigarette paper.
I once heard
of someone using a nail
to make holes in Lenin’s
nostrils and then putting
a smoke bomb inside.
Very soon smoke started
coming out of his nostrils
like a zmei gorynych.
Sweet
In school the idea
was that when it
came everything
would be free.
Someone would
offer me a sweet
and say you can
have it for free
when communism
comes but for
now you can buy
it. When we were
very small we used
to steal things
and say we’d
communismed
them.
By the snowplough
Armchair
One summer I worked on
a building site. We used to
sit around till about 11 doing
nothing because there was no
cement. It was usually 12.30
by the time they brought the
cement and lifted it up to us
on a crane at which time we’d
all go home for lunch. When
we came back the cement had
always dried out and we were
unable to use it so we would
have to wait for the next batch.
Sometimes they would bring it
just before the end of the day,
sometimes it would come straight
away and we would have to start
work. But we never worked in
the mornings as there was never
any cement. We didn’t work in
the rain either.
One morning
because it was boring doing
nothing I got hold of all the
bricks lying around and built
myself an armchair and so
did my other two friends. We
made 3 armchairs, like sun
loungers, out of bricks and
we lay back and sunbathed.
It was a beautiful August.
Sherlock Holmes
It was shot in the
1980s in the Baltic
States. It looked very
foreign. They always
used the Baltics for
films set abroad. Any-
thing from the West
like Prince Florizel
and James Chase.
There were
also good Westerns
made in Yugoslavia.
The Indians were
always good and
the cowboys bad,
drunk and greedy.
Ration card
English
There was a channel
that showed language
programmes. One was
in English about foreign
children living with an
English family. There
was a Finnish boy who
used to like to eat a lot
and he always seemed
a little shy about asking
for more. The father would
try to encourage him saying,
maybe a sausage? And
a voice from behind the
screen would say, Mikko
likes a big breakfast.
Caroline Clark's first collection, Saying Yes In Russian, came out in 2012 with Agenda Editions. She's had poems and essays recently published in PN Review, Agenda, Tears in the Fence and Snow lit rev. Other poems and scanned images of slides from Sovetica are forthcoming in Confingo and in the latest Snow lit rev.
Her translation of an essay by Olga Sedakova, In Praise of Poetry, came out with Open Letter Books in 2014. She has also edited the novel Meridian (Unthank, 2015) by David Rose and is on the (snow)board of Snow lit rev.
She moved back to her hometown of Lewes 6 years ago after living in Moscow for 10 years and Montreal for 6. The texts are based on stories she has recorded of her husband, Andrei Nikiforov, telling in Russian about his childhood and teenage years in the Soviet Union. The slide was made by him as a stereo slide in the late 1980s.
