Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems

Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich. Illustrated with Ripley Whiteside's drawings of Kholin and his friends. KHOLIN 66 is a trampoline into underground Soviet poet Igor Kholin's life and work through the window of a single autumn. In a string of acerbically related non-adventures excerpted from his 1966 diary, Kholin moves to the country, sleeps a lot, drinks and debauches among Moscow's literary underground, and eventually moves back to the city. Broke and bitter, he details his bemusement in terse, absurdist prose. The selection of Kholin's poems feature self-deprecating self-portraits, bleak visions of the Moscow outskirts, and strange visions of life on other planets.