Report on haiku in Russia

Русские поэты Серебряного века и распространение хокку и эпиграммных хокку с Запада и Востока.

Основная русская литература и включение хайку.

Распространение хайку в Московии в связи с её войнами и революциями.

Опыты и теории ранних русских поэтов в области танка и хайку.

Пост-сталинская Россия: новые переводчики и новые хайкуисты в провинции.

Усилия культуртрегеров по популяризации хайку в Новой [усеченной] России.
Обзор интернет-сайтов и книг хайку, изданных в Москве и Санкт-Петербурге.
Русские критики о минималистической поэзии. Интеграция Хайку в русский гипертекст.
Две отличительные черты российского движения хайку: постоянные соревнования (все присланные хайку доступны для публичного просмотра) и хайку из глубинки (хайку в дорогу).
Юмор в восточнославянских хайку и сэнрю.
Некоторые русские хокку/хайку, написанные за последние сто лет, вот-вот станут преданиями:
ветки перепутались/корни переплелись/лес любви

грибов уже нет / но их сильный запах / в овраге

Два свиста: / шелковые платья / метель

дети собирают одуванчики / ни богатых, ни бедных / на зеленом лугу

пасмурный горизонт / пока только лёгкие облака / над моей головой

успокаиваю ребенка: /чтобы не обидеть меня, он улыбается/сквозь слёзы

приходит зима/вода/впадает в ступор

{зима пришла -- вода остолбенела}

падают листья / открываю глаза / падают листья

раннее утро / я брожу по квартире / повсюду твои поцелуи

в сточной канаве /избитый… пьяный… / но луной любуюсь!

летняя ночь/река становится/запахом реки

дождь, изо дня в день / так, в ожидании зимы / зима истекает

разбила твое сердце / и теперь ступаю по его осколкам / босая

Заболею... Умру... / а пока — / солнце, ветер, вино, обнимашки.

Хайкуизация России.

Russian Silver Age poets and the diffusion of hokku and epigram-like hokku from the West and the East.

Mainstream Russian literature and the inclusion of haiku.

Dissemination of haiku in Muscovy in correlation with its wars and revolutions.

Early Russian poets' experiments and theories in tanka and haiku.

Post-Stalinist Russia: new translators and new haikuists in provinces.

Kulturtragers' efforts to popularize haiku in the New [truncated] Russia.
Reviewing the Internet sites and haiku books published in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Russian critics on minimalist poetry. Haiku integration in the Russian hypertext.
Two distinct features of the Russian haiku movement: committed contests (all sent-in haiku are available for public viewing) and hinterland haiku (taking haiku on the road).
Humor in Eastern Slavic haiku and senryu.
Some Russian hokku/haiku penned in the last hundred years are on their way to become haiku lore:
branches entangled / roots intertwined / forest of love
mushrooms are gone / yet a strong scent of them / in the ravine
two whistles in my ears: / silk dresses / the blizzard
children picking dandelions / neither rich nor poor / in the green meadow
the overcast horizon / for now only light clouds / above my head
calming down a child: / not to hurt me he smiles / through his tears
comes winter / the water / falls into stupor
leaves are falling / i open my eyes / leaves are falling
early morning / I roam my flat / everywhere your kisses
in a gutter / beaten up… drunk… / yet I admire the moon!
summer night / the river becomes / the scent of the river
rain, day after day / this way, while waiting for winter / the winter expires
I broke your heart / and now I tread on its shards / barefoot
I'll get sick... I'll die... / but for now— / sun, wind, wine, hanky-panky.

Haikuization of Russia.

On the long flight from Chicago to Tokyo, I was mesmerized by the seemingly undeveloped shores of Pacific Russia. But in 1904, the  Russian haiku book by B. Aston, “The History of the Japanese Literature,” complete with  Basho's hokku translated by V. Mendrin was published precisely there, in Vladivostok [Rule the East] on the Sea of Japan. The book was not born as a result of the embrace of the Russian Bear and the Japanese Crane. This book was born after much hugging of the Russian Bear and the Anglo-Germanic Eagle, which was prying open all kinds of riches on the quasi-planet—Japan. The thoroughly Germanized Eurasian Empire of Russia wanted its own share of the “Yapan” Islands and sent Muscovites marching to the Pacific Ocean.
Almost immediately after publishing the haiku book, Russians went to war with the Empire of the Rising Sun and were defeated.
{I am singing the Russo-Japanese song which was still widely sung 80 years later.}
The defeat triggered the 1905 pogroms and the first city revolution.
Anything Japanese was not welcome for a while, but the Silver Age poets in Saint Petersburg and Moscow reintroduced hokku a couple of years later. (Basho's hokku rolled along the Trans-Siberian railway up to the Baltic Sea and tinkled, encountering the Silver Age.)
On the 12th of October, 1913 the Ars Poetica guru Valery Bryusov paid tribute to Japanism and swiftly composed "Japanese tanka and hai-kai." Among the seven rhymed verses, seven are tanka, which contain (according to the law of the genre), rhymokku (hokku-haiku):

In the blue pond
The reflection of the white stork...
No trace of it after its torque.

There are only two free standing hokku in  Bryusov's batch, a frog one and this one:
Who called it Love?
Another name could be given to it— Death.
The above three liner is a kind of  epigrammatic senryu. Apparently, Bryusov picked up the fashion trends, brought from the West.
All in all, Russian literature was a fertile ground for planting the Japanese plum tree of hokku.

The Russian language contains kake-kotoba (pivot words) aplenty. A good example is Tolstoy's “War and Peace.” In actuality, it is “War and Society” or “War and the World.” We may find a lot of kigo words, makura-kotoba (pillow words), alliteration, onomatopoeia and assonance in the Russian hypertext. [See The Nor'Easter (Haiku Northeast) Volume 16, Number 2, The Haiku Society of America.]
Russian folk poetry—chastushki—is a good example of poetic miniatures. {Singing one of them.}
Russian literature is averse to much writing and against graphomaniacs.{A Joke by Anton Chekhov follows, time permitting.}
A hundred years ago the seven year old Ariadna Efron wrote:

roots intertwined
branches entangled
forest of love.

The eminent poet Konstantin Balmont deemed it as a striking example of Japanese-like poetry.

girl with the eyes of gazelle
Marries an American ...
Why did Columbus discover America?

The darling of the reading classes, Nikolai Gumilev titled this miniature poem "Hokku.”

After the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the Americans took over Vladivostok and the Japanese occupied the Russian railroad in Manchuria, hokku were not welcome.
However, many heavyweights—Mayakovsky, Block and, especially, Yesenin—presented a plethora of haiku-like images in their exquisitely rhymed verses:

lilac weather
sprinkling lilacs
into the lull.

Russian Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin wrote

mushrooms are gone
yet a strong scent of mushrooms
in the ravine.

Echoing old school translators from the Japanese (Anna Gluskina) on February 27, 1931 in Kuchino (Moscow’s suburb), the mover and shaker Andrey Belyi analyzed his own rhymed tanka "Butterfly." It is a five liner in which the first half gives us an image, and the last two lines reveal the thought put into the image:

Above the grass a moth –
Flower-aircraft ...
So I have: into the wind-death
Above my stalk I shall fly,
an airborne moth

The 5-7-5-7-7 structure is not observed, but the rhythm and the elegance of the verse more than compensate for this "defect."
{Sounds another Soviet song about fighting the samurai on the Halhin-Gol River in Buryat-Mongolia in the mid-thirties V ETOT DEN RESHILI SAMURAI PEREITI GRANITSU U REKI.}
Haiku books became non grata in Stalinist Russia which attacked the Quantun Army in 1945 while taking the Sakhalin (Karafuto) and the Kurile Islands—a new setback for any haiku propaganda in Russia. A haiku void lingered for two decades; meanwhile, new translators (Vera Markova) emerged and hokku trickled into the Moscow “chattering classes.”
Academia books on Zen and Japanese literature (N. I. Konrad) ran off the state printing presses in hundreds of thousands copies.
When the New Russia appeared twenty years later, minimalist poets received new degrees of freedom.
Mikhail Fainerman (free style) and Vladimir Gertzik (strictly 5-7-5) composed their hokku:
the overcast horizon
for now, just above my head
light clouds are sailing.
I discovered the first printed book containing Russian hokku among the Kuban River Cossacks in the North Caucasus. Mr. Baginsky of Krasnodar (Yekaterinodar) included his much earlier hokku experiments in the 1993 book:

calming down a child:
not to hurt me he smiles
through his tears

The Tsvetayeva Museum and the foremost poetry magazine Arion called a haiku (not hokku!) meeting in 1998. Why “haiku” instead of “hokku”? Ah, according to the 19th century critic Vissarion Belinsky, “All Russian literature is a transplant” from the Anglo-Germanic West. In spite of its lower metatextuality and phonetic harmony, the new term “haiku” largely replaced the “hokku” term.

In the same year I called a haiku meeting at the Anglia Bookstore in Moscow. Among the attendees there was Dmitry Kuz'min who subsequently launched the first digest—the almanac of Russian haiku Triton (2000-2003).
The Ros(s)inki book (Hyperion, Moscow, 2011) mentions the first Russian haiku contest (1999) and the Internet sites “2shu,” “RenguRu,” “IMH(O),” “Aromat Vostoka,” “HaijinRF,” etc. [See the Wild Violets essay on haiku in Russia, Yuki Teikei Haiku Society anthology, 2011.]

Former Russian Minister Yevgeniy Sidorov, in his book "Necessity of Poetry" (Helios, Moscow, 2005) muses on the J. Brodsky's 14 stanza poem "Butterfly," pointing to its excessiveness and noting that while each rung is a rather small addition, it allows for a new rise of virtuosity from stanza to stanza.
Reading young Brodsky's long poem “Winter Night at the Hay Barn,” Sidorov excerpted a haiku-like quotation about a butterfly:
saved from death
it climbed to the hayloft—
hibernation
One can cull many haiku-like lines not only from mainstream poetry of the Soviet period, but from the earlier times of Byzantine Tartary-Russia turning to the Germanic North Europe, Pushkin and Lermontov are still looming large:
night is quiet
desert listens to god
star talks to star.
As a review of an obscure book by Ashley Smith “Haiku Cottage” [Almanac Haikumena #3, Moscow, 2007] shows, haiku is a perfect example of a fractal (quotation) which is capable of giving a quick and concise impression of longer texts.
Using a fractal approach in her outlook (“The Architecture of Semiotics”) philologist Oksana Makhneva expounds at length on “lecton,” which is neither a negation, nor an assertion, neither a truth nor a falsehood.
Let's look at some strophes of the Russian Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak:

write poems,
while the black of spring
burns in the thumping slush

or the preeminent poet Marina Tsvetayeva:

in my ears two whistles:
silk dresses
the blizzard

or the paramount poet Osip Mandelshtam:

oh, the butterfly!
oh, the Muslim female
in your slit shroud.

This three-liner represents the much longer poem by Mandelshtam and does it well. (The translated text is available.)
The similar ideas were advanced in my Arion Magazine article (2000), my HNA memorandum (Boston, 2001) and my report at the Turin conference (2009). I should confirm again here the clear trend in Russian literature regarding haikuish lines in prose and poetry and their upward correlation with the degree of fame of Russian authors.


[occurence of haikuisms]                *               
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The percentage of humorous Russian haiku and senryu is on a par with American haiku. (See my essay on haiku humor on Amazon or in the book Virgule [Suseki Publishing, Boston, 2010]).
Indo-Germanic America (pun intended) is a much more individualistic society than the Russia of Eastern Slavs. I suppose, Russian poets are less isolated since they—like the Chinese or the Japanese—are more attuned towards “the common good.” Haiku poetry is much better integrated in mainstream Russian literature than in the West.
The young darling of Moscow's oligarchs, Vera Pavlova—she was invited to read at Harvard—penned this senryu:

I broke your heart
and now I tread on its shards
barefoot

Russian haiku contests are run by the Haikumena almanac team in cooperation with the Japanese Cultural Center in Moscow. Thousands of the submitted haiku are available for public viewing after judges have made decisions in the different categories.

Russian and Ukrainian poets are taking haiku on the road crisscrossing Eastern Europe. There are plans to drive haiku caravans through Eurasia to the Sea of Japan, but they are on hold due to the presence of roadside bandits across the Amur River.
I intend to finish with the Russian school of poetry recital of the programmatic poem by Osip Mandelshtam who died at a prison camp on the Sea of Japan.