Before retiring from the literary world and relinquishing all copyright to his work in 2003, Kirill Medvedev had published two collections of poetry with a traditional publishing house. His poems are autobiographical free verse, unusual in Russia, and were dismissed by some critics as not really poetry. Medvedev’s poetry – casual, often explicitly political, irreverent – fiercely diagnose the banality and disease of Putin-era Russia. Edited and introduced by n+1 co-founder Keith Gessen, It’s No Good includes selected poems from Kirill Medvedev’s books of poetry and subsequent online publications, as well as his most significant essays: ‘My Fascism’ (on the failure of post-Soviet Russian liberalism, politically and culturally); ‘Literature Will Be Tested’ (on the attractions and dangers of the ‘new sincerity’ in Russian letters); ‘Dmitry Kuzmin: An Essay-Memoir’ (a detailed memoir and analysis of the work of the 1990s Moscow poet, publisher, and impresario Kuzmin, and what his activity represents). As always, they are published without the author’s permission.
About the author
Keith Gessen was born in Moscow in 1975 and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1981. He is a founder of the literary magazine n+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men . From Russian he has translated Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Svetlana Alexievich, and has written about Russian politics and culture for the New Yorker , the London Review of Books , and n+1 .
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