The Naked World begins with Mashinski’s birth:“Stalin had been dead for 5 years 1 month and 4 days.” The concluding notes tell us that currently “38% of Russians consider Stalin the greatest man in history.” The eerily exact figures underline the survivor’s dilemma: do I live in the past and allow my identity to be determined by atrocities, or do I cling to the present and sanitize my own experience?
Mashinki’s response is a brilliant poet’s: “each time when you raise your eyes to the stars, you see the past, and each time when you raise your eyes to the moon, you see the reflected present.” The past never really ends: “... three months from tomorrow / Tsvetaeva will hang herself / in a Tatar town on the black Kahma river.” But if history is beyond endurance, Mashinski humanizes it in moments of extraordinary intensity: scouring a Jewish cemetery for a single pebble; returning to a cathedral to re-position a votive candle “so you wouldn’t be so alone.” In a forest where thousands of civilians were once butchered, a father teaches a child how to set a campfire: “the tiny timid flames perished one by one with a wet hissing sound. Suddenly they caught fire and burned, and the silver circle of melting gleaming snow grew quickly around it.”
Irina Mashinski knows that a witness is the opposite of an onlooker. The Naked World is a gift and a necessity in our culture of screens and disembodied violence.
—D. Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult (2017), member of board of directors of Amnesty International USA
The Naked World defies neat categorization as a powerful memoir that combines both prose and poetry in its witness to the news that stays news of a Russian émigrée whose four generations of Jewish relatives survived “The Great Terror” of Stalin’s genocide and then
the so-called “Thaw and Post-Thaw Soviet Union.” In a hybrid of interwoven reminiscences and lyrical poems, Mashinski witnesses to her sense of herself as a “double pariah,” that is, as a Jew who “like a Russian émigrée in the 1920s” exists also “as a stateless person with a so-called Nansen passport, stripped naked of national and cultural identity in the new world of her hosts.” In this new world, which is America, Mashinski takes on and meets the challenge of acquiring her “right to freely create her own destiny.” The Naked World represents Mashinski’s decades-long effort to “create her own destiny” through writing both her past and her present as memorable testimony to just how an entire world can fit into the memory of a single person. By finding enduring, literary expression that recounts the details of her remarkable journey, along with the vital legacy of an otherwise lost people, Mashinski redefines American citizenship from a fresh perspective in which she tells an essential human story first before documenting her hard-won, exemplary “destiny.”
—Chard deNiord, author of My Unknowing and Interstate, Poet Laureate of Vermont 2015–2019
All of us who translate poetry know that our failures greatly outnumber our successes. A whole collection of beautifully translated poems is a rare event—and few Russian poems have been translated as well as these. More than that, The Naked World is composed of several different elements—translated poems, freely adapted poems, and poems and prose originally written in English— and these seemingly disparate elements are perfectly integrated. Irina Mashinski’s English voice is entirely convincing. Never simplistic, never pointlessly obscure, each poem takes us with gentle confidence to an unexpected place. In her own words,“The train is both hurrying and lingering, it’s endlessly leaving—but where to?”
—Robert Chandler, translator of Andrey Platonov’s Soul and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
