I just discovered that the Russian-American poet Irina Mashinskaya (she emigrated in ’91, lives near New York City, and teaches mathematics) has a web page that links to the complete texts of each of her books (under КНИГИ, in the right-hand sidebar). I have her 1996 collection После эпиграфа [Posle epigrafa, ‘After the epigraph’], but it’s rather cheaply printed; the poems actually look nicer in the online edition. I wonder why more poets don’t do this? They can’t be making money off the few printed books sold; the poetry is more likely to be read if it’s freely available online, and I imagine if people liked what they saw they’d be likely to buy a book or two.
Many users of Russian Live Journal write, some poetrty, some prose, some both, and collect their works under separate directory on their blogs. Sometimes they form communities within LJ that serve as a writers’ workshops; sometimes they have additional personal sites like I.Mashinskaya. Majority have also published books, both before starting LJournals/sites/blogs &c and after.
One of my personal favorites: Mikhail Rabinovich, writes poetry and proze, on- and off-line (I only have one book of his; can’t wait to see his next published).
I know at least one example of a LJ-user who is also a publisher of online literature, Aleksandr Zhitinsky, (LJ-name maccolit)here’s the site of his publishing house. Part of his business – non-commercial publishing of online authors, like Dm.Gorchev and others. Numerous magazines in and outside of Russia are also printing online literarure (like Seagull,for instance).
Most of them are too sensitive for comments, I guess. Still, LiveJournal is full of verse (mosty bad, obviously).
LiveJournal is full of verse (mosty bad, obviously)
Yeah, there’s a lot of self-published verse on the internet in general; my surprise was at finding a “real” (published, respected) poet putting all her stuff online.
Actually, you can find a lot of Elena Shvarts freely accessible on Vavilon’s site or in Zhurnal’nyj Zal (which aggregates tolstye zhurnaly); also, nearly all of Sergei Stratanovsky’s poetry seems to be available at Vavilon, too. Shvarts is quite well known in Russia and beloved of Western Slavists; Stratanovsky is less known but still a poet of repute. By the way, Vavilon also hosts a volume of Olga Sedakova’s verse.
Great, I’ll look for them — thanks a lot!
For the “real” poetry to publish on the internet the place should be immaculate. Irina Mashinski’s personal web page that links to the complete texts of each of her books and contains some of her essays is actually a part of a bigger internet project named “СОЮЗ И” (“UNION AND”) located at http://www.union-i.com. Among its members are prominent russian poets, writers, musicians, and artists from USA, Europe and Russia, such as Vladimir Gandelsman, Maria Stepanova, Kirill Kobrin, Igor Pomerantsev, etc. They publish their own magazine “СТОРОНЫ СВЕТА” at http://www.stosvet.com with a great taste for earnest readers. Unfortunately, one can not find too many places like this on the internet. No surprize.