Reading about Putin and Poetry

By Darryl Cunningham (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95)

How graphic novels and graphic nonfiction work is something like the way documentaries do, but slower. We look: A face, an action, a series of actions are laid out boldly, dramatically. Pow! Wham! We look again, we read. Does “graphic biography” mean really just a comic book? Sure. But comics can be provocative and indelible.

Darryl Cunningham is a British journalist who reports and editorializes in cartoon-format. His pictures are simple, drawn seemingly on a computer from photographs. He is not interested in the human being that must be hidden under the hide of Putin, and for a cartoonist, he has no knack for satire. Instead of making fun of Putin, he catalogues the decades of authoritarianism and murder, which are the earthquakes setting off Cunningham’s and perhaps our tsunami of anger: “Do nothing and Putin will strengthen his grip on our world. Take action and we will both encourage the stirrings of democracy in Russia, and stop his regime spreading corruption to other countries, including our own.”

Sincere and angry, Cunningham is not a biographer so much as an effective prosecutor. He expresses no wonder or fascination about how this little, unimpressive KGB agent climbed his way to the throne of the largest country in the world: “The Russian government’s anti-gay policies are the flip side of Putin’s absurd macho posturing and need to portray himself as Russia’s patriotic strongman.”

As food for justifiable spite, Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator will suffice. Still, there are better, broader actual biographies, ones Cunningham has read and references, Steven Lee Myers’ excellent The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2016) and Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). The great Gessen shares all of Cunningham’s outrage, but has an expert’s understanding of Russian sociology and its political dynamics.

The most humanly evocative biography I’ve read of Putin is not a biography but a novel by Michael Honig, The Senility of Vladimir P. (2016), wherein it is 2035 or thereabouts, and Putin is out of power and demented, looked after by a humble angel of a man who eventually has to decide whether or not to swipe one of Putin’s countless valuable watches to save the life of a relative. Vladimir P. doesn’t remember his crimes. Though conniving and pathetic and a shell of himself, even in his dementia he can still read con-men, and he manages to foul up the plans of one of his crooked successors. Honig, a British doctor, paints the most poignant portrait of Alzheimer’s I’ve ever read and the most revealing portrait of Putin in that the addled dictator is vulnerable, no longer capable of monstrous deeds and, due to his condition, beyond them. Honig finds almost a happy ending to Putin’s reign. May his novel come true, как можно скорее.

Boris Dralyuk (Paul Dry Books, $16.95)

Boris Dralyuk is the fine and expert translator of many collections of classic and contemporary Russian fiction and poetry. One of my favorite of his poems, “The Garden of Allah,” is a sonnet prefaced by a quote from a 1959 Los Angeles newspaper: “The Garden of Allah Hotel, playground of the movie stars during the 20s and 30s, will be torn down to make way for a new commercial and business center... The hotel originally was the home of Alla Nazimova, late stage and screen star.”

And now I watch another era fade,
Cyrillic letters scraped from shuttered storefronts,
tar-crusted bread, stale fish, stiff marmalade
sit sulking on the shelves, unchosen orphans
in what were once the bustling little shops
of Russian Hollywood. Hardly a soul now stops
to thumb the plums, frown at the penciled prices;
the neighborhood is lurching towards crisis,
all in slow motion. Rents climb out of reach
for emigres . . . There’s nothing new in this.
Think of Nazimova and of her short-lived bliss
beside her pool – her private Black Sea beach . . .
She died a tenant in a bungalow
of a hotel razed sixty years ago.

To appreciate Dralyuk’s work is easy because the phrasing is attractive, quick, natural and witty. On second and subsequent readings you notice that the strict poetical forms are the bases that give his poems wings. He continually evokes the Hollywood that is there if one looks at the present with its history in mind:

My Hollywood, mon vieux, is not ideal:
a grand old dame reduced to dishabille

Everyone will enjoy “Bargain Circus,” an ode to, as the 1997 Los Angeles Times epigraph has it, “perhaps L.A.’s most whimsical discount store. . . . The eclectic selection of goods and guilt-inducing low prices draw a melange of Orthodox Jews, Russians, Armenians and Westside connoisseurs.”

Clown prince of bargain shops—those penny-ante
Xanadus that take up half a block—
was the La Brea Circus. Huge barn chockfull
of overstock, a poor man’s horn of plenty,

where we, though broke as sparrows, like canaries
flitted about, whistled with disbelief
at deals – no, steals! – that would abash a thief:
Bic pens for nickels, dollar dictionaries!
I wore my Webster’s out, clumsily wooing
the tongue in which I sing this dime store’s praise.
But they’re worn too, my memories of those days,
like VHS tapes after years of viewing

and spooling backwards to the sweetest spot.
Oh yes, that was another thing we bought:
a plastic sports-car VHS rewinder—
so obsolete, so perfectly designed for

its vanished purpose, like a streamlined hearse
inexorably heading in reverse.

Anyone who has tried to translate will appreciate the images in “The Catch: On Translation”: “I draw you out, faint voice, from rippled pages: / A famished angler reeling in a fish […]”

Another proof of the Odessa-born Dralyuk’s skill as a language-master is in the pudding of his selected translations of twentieth-century émigré Russian poets who whiled away in their own experiences of Hollywood, among them Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovsky and the most excellent Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), particularly his “Sunset Strip.”

My Hollywood is a first-rate collection of precise, delightfully graceful poems, the poet as Fred Astaire tap-dancing up and down the lines.