Missiles fly during an Odessa poetry reading
Monday, October 14th, 2024
A letter from Alexander Deriev, husband of the late poet Regina Derieva. The Russian couple have a helluva back story. I wrote about her in “Writ on Water,” an 2014 essay for the Times Literary Supplement here. And I’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here and here.
She and her husband have a helluva back story. from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city,” according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.
The couple met at the Karaganda black market, while buying books. She was a pianist and the daughter of a KGB higher-up, he is an artist The two shared a love of Andrei Platonov and Truman Capote. They were Russian Jews, then fled to Latvia to convert (bypassing the corrupt Russia Orthodox Church, which has notorious state ties). Then they settled in Israel, before finally relocating to Stockholm, where she is buried after her death in 2013.
Now she has a new book out, Selected Clouds with Bondarenko M. O. , notwithstanding her death a decade ago. Deriev writes:
“Dear Cynthia, on Friday, September 20, Russian troops attacked Odessa again with ballistic missiles. Despite the bombing, the launch of Regina’s Selected Clouds in Odessa’s Literary Museum went well. About 40 or 50 people attended). However, several more presentations of this book will be arranged in other localities soon.” Photographers Stepan Alekyan and Vladimir Bogatyrov documented the event, which included translator Oleksandr Hint, and Kateryna Chernenko, the librarian of Odessa Regional Scientific Library.
The reading continued smoothly as the missiles fired. Grace under pressure.
Postscript: The poet Regina Derieva was also a great collector of seashells – many of them now housed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Alexander recently found one gastropod that bears the name Cynthia. See the attached photos of this shell. Canefriula cynthia (H. C. Fulton, 1902) – 36 mm, Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. He notes: “It is unlikely that the British malacologist, Hugh Coomber Fulton (1861-1942), when naming the newly discovered mollusk, had in mind the verses of Propertius addressed to Cynthia. Most likely, he used the epithet of the Greek goddess Artemis.” I’m flattered.
