searching for irina

Searching For Irina by Misha Feigin Manuscript and Collage Illustration Copyright © 2003, Misha Feigin Searching for Irina Illustration Copyright © 1990, Vadim Sidur. Publication Copyright © 2003, Fleur Art Productions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Fleur Publishing Copyright Department, 32 North Goodwin Avenue, Elmsford, N.Y. 10523. Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feigin, Misha, 1951— Searching for Irina / Misha Feigin p. cm. ISBN 0-9741277-0-1 I. Searching for Irina II. Feigin, Misha LCCN 2003106744. Printed in the United States of America. Cover Image Design by Steven Skaggs. Cover Layout Design by Inna Golovina. German Marketing by Franziska Miiller Pfiffner. Released by Fleur Publishing, an Imprint of Fleur Art Productions www.fleur.ws

Searching For Irina by Misha Feigin – Manuscript and Collage Illustration Copyright © 2003, Misha Feigin Searching for Irina Illustration Copyright © 1990, Vadim Sidur. Publication Copyright © 2003, Fleur Art Productions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Fleur Publishing Copyright Department, 32 North Goodwin Avenue, Elmsford, N.Y. 10523. Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feigin, Misha, 1951— Searching for Irina / Misha Feigin p. cm. ISBN 0-9741277-0-1 I. Searching for Irina II. Feigin, Misha LCCN 2003106744. Printed in the United States of America. Cover Image Design by Steven Skaggs. Cover Layout Design by Inna Golovina. German Marketing by Franziska Miiller Pfiffner. Released by Fleur Publishing, an Imprint of Fleur Art Productions www.fleur.ws


Searching for Irina

“Feigin’s book has that sweet impact that only time and distance can provide-this ex-muscovite-turned-Kentucky “blue blood” writes through the eyes of one voluntary displaced within a time warp of pathos and humor, and painfully “good” times in his domestic land in the seventies. I’ve enjoyed every moment of this glorious freak show.” – Steve Dalachinsky


Moscow in the seventies. Dreadful, fascinating, intense… The realm of young Muscovites united by their insatiable appetite to live lives freely and fully, using creativity and poignant humor to fend off the omnipresent authorities’ attempts to break their spirits. In his new novel, Misha Feigin delivers a powerful impression of the era when the political trials showed signs of Stalin’s horrors, while sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll penetrating the Iron Curtain clashed with the seemingly impervious system.

Born and raised in Russia’s capital, Feigin had already achieved the status of one of the country’s premiere guitarists when he immigrated to the US in 1990, leaving behind an established position in the official arts scene, as well as memories of encounters with the KGB who were very interested in some of the underground bands Misha was associated with.

Since moving to Louisville, KY, Feigin has been featured on the National Public Radio and has toured throughout the US and around the world, releasing seven albums on American and British labels, and performing on many prestigious stages, such as Washington’s Kennedy Center and New York’s Knitting Factory. Despite being best known as a musician, Misha Feigin has started to gain footing among the literary critics since winning the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry in 2000.

In this novel, Feigin presents a captivating collection of characters refined during the numerous concerts when the songs were intertwined with stories. The author’s experience brings to life his heroes and their adventures, as they struggle to maintain their dignity and freedom in a totalitarian state. As cultural and political clashes are becoming the way of life in everyone’s home, Searching for Irina gives the reader hope to carry on in our turbulent century.

In the mid-1960s

in one of the more darkly cynical episodes of the Cold War, the United States shopped two dissident Soviet writers to the KGB.

It all began about 1959, when Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (using the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak) began smuggling works – many of them critical and satirical comments on the Soviet regime – to the West, publishing them clandestinely.

By 1966, the KGB had arrested the two writers and charged them with spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. It would be some 20 years before the circumstances that led to their arrest became public. In 1987, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko reported that shortly after the two men had been tried, he visited then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s apartment.

Kennedy, Yevtushenko wrote, “invited me into his bathroom, turned on the shower,” and revealed that U.S. agents had betrayed Daniel and Sinyavsky to the KGB in order to create an incident that would embarrass the Soviet Union and divert world attention away from the burgeoning problems the United States was facing in Vietnam.

The arrests of Sinyavsky and Daniel resulted in a show trial that attracted worldwide attention and resulted in long prison sentences for the two writers. It also became the flashpoint for a fiery period of intellectual and literary dissidence that would culminate in increased visibility for the work of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and would eventually lead to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) policies.

“Searching for Irina,” a new novel by Russian emigre Misha Feigin, unfolds in the wake of the Sinyavsky/Daniel trial, during the turbulent, transitional ’70s. In a series of loosely connected vignettes that form a highly episodic memoir-novel, Feigin depicts a youthful Moscow counterculture that bears a strong resemblance to Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s. Against the stark backdrop of bureaucratic gloom, coldly impersonal modern architecture and long queues for groceries and liquor, Feigin’s alienated Moscow hippies flouted Soviet constraints by experimenting with the hippie holy trinity: drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s a counterculture populated by a rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life wastrels and ne’er-do-wells. There is Sailor, who was once arrested for climbing to the top of the Bolshoi Theater and straddling one of the famous stone horses perched atop the building.

There is Kolya, a dealer in black market sound recordings, who distributes tapes of Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. When Kolya visits the Moscow farmer’s market, he bypasses the tomatoes and sauerkraut and tracks down the Uzbekistan purveyors of poppies, from whom he buys the dried heads of opium poppies and grinds up a powdery substance that “was like swallowing crushed stale straw, a nauseating process,” but which would definitely produce a high. When hauled into the police station for questioning, Kolya makes off with a trove of police files, cuts them up and burns them in the toilet bowl (though in retribution, the cops set him up for a drug deal, and he spends a couple of years in detention).

There is God, whose twin passions are group sex and a seditious personal library of black market books.

And there is Irina. Born in Istanbul, she is the daughter of a Russian diplomat who was executed as an “enemy of the people.” Irina has experienced exile to Siberia, she has lived in cosmopolitan Odessa, she is a true poet and, until she is committed to a series of psychiatric gulags, she is the narrator’s lover and mentor. Her gradual disappearance into the asylums is the book’s central focus.

“Searching for Irina” lacks the grand narrative arch of a fully formed novel, but it compensates with deadpan wit, a cool, understated irony and intimate details about daily life on the streets of Moscow. And as the series of stories unfolds and reach its culmination in the final tale of Irina, a reader can take pleasure in observing Feigin’s control over language and form, which strengthen almost page by page. By the opening paragraph of the final story, he has developed a powerful, confident voice: “From the window of the reading room at the Lenin Library I could see snowflakes twirling around the yellow streetlights. The lights were on for only a few minutes, but the soft gray twilight already had sunk in the fresh deep winter darkness. A cozy green lamp shone on my table. The closed book lay under the lamp in front of me. I stroked the dark-blue old-fashioned binding with my fingers. It felt solid and cool.”


Feigin is already well known to Louisville music fans as a singer of eclectic folk and gypsy music and as an internationally recognized avant-garde guitarist. Based on this first work, he is also poised to become a writer to be reckoned with as well. Marty Rosen, Louisville Eccentric Observer 01/14/2004


An emigre’s surreal poetry

Misha Feigin brings his poetry to us in a slender volume, The Last Word in Astronomy (Fleur Publishing, 75 pp., $11.95). Having left Moscow in 1990, the artist continues to write and make music, giving us a glimpse of his mysterious, enigmatic homeland while explaining his feeling for America where he chooses to live and work.

As Feigin explores past experiences superimposed in our New World, the reader feels a blurring of the lines. Feigin shows that in our deepest selves, people are more the same than different.

It is in the love poems, such as “An Accident”, where we most often recognize similar glories and miseries:

When I moved my lamp on a desk-glass
just to cover your face in the photograph,
it seems I heard a quiet but persisting
gnawing sound-you were biting your way
through the glass, back to the surface
of my desire.


In “Agnostic Reflections,” the poet has a little fun. He compares Tolstoy’s writing of the snowy immensity of Russia, “Spit in the eyes of those who claim/ they can embrace the boundlessness” to his own spitting at his reflection in the bathroom mirror to wipe away dripping toothpaste. The writer’s humor takes aim not only at himself, but to his entire motherland as in “The Flux.” He quotes, “Everything is an ever changing/ flux, says Heraclites./ ” Let’s drink it” , the Russians respond. Then in “The Russians Drink”, he laughs, “The Russians drink/ to keep soul from freezing,/ life from getting too long.”– by Mary Popham, Special to The Courier-Journal Saturday, January 6, 2007, Book Review

Buy Searching For Irina – Misha Feigin here… 

 

 

 

 

 

the dew drop blues

Misha Feigin

The Dew Drop Blues – Music and Poetry

DPR Records

Recorded in May of 2008 by Nick Stevens and Mark Noderer at Downtown Recording, Louisville, Kentucky ©2010 BMI 2010

Tracklist: 1. Schubert and Schoenberg 0:12 2. The Dew Drop Blues, a poem 0:47 3. The Dew Drop Blues, music 8:47 4. The Code, a poem 1:30 5. The Code, music 5:30 6. M-94, a poem 0:56 7. M-94, music 5:37 8. Booms, Dooms, Kabooms, a poem 0:57 9. Booms, Dooms, Kabooms, music 4:17 10. Ascend, a poem 0:35 11. Ascend, music 5:57 12. Trapped, a poem 7:43 13. Trapped, music 6:50 14. Plant Eater, a poem 0:40 15. Plant Eater, music 9:05

Tracks: 3,5,13,15 – classical guitar 7 – steel string guitar 11 -dobro 9 – balalaika Music, poetry and photos by Misha Feigin DPR Records, 221 N. Clifton Ave. #31 Louisville, Kentucky 40206


With “Dew Drop Blues” Misha Feigin has created a beautiful set of anomalies, poetics that turn on an angle that only a bent mathematician such as he could invent and filled with a sardonic wit that is simultaneously dark and euphoric. And when words fail or need to transcend, Misha’s virtuosic guitar continues to propose impossibilities and hallucinations that tie everything together. — Elliot Sharp


Always enjoy Misha’s poetry and music-he is definitely a free spirit with a strong sense of inner direction. — David Liebman


Ascend

When you have
nothing left
but a song
the sound rises
undisturbed
sailing on lunar winds
through the lightlessness
expanding your heart
to the mouth of darkness
where the open space
begins

Buy The Dew Drop Blues – Music and Poetry (CD or MP3) here…

 

soul foods

Soul Foods

by Misha Feigin

Part 1 – The Yellow Cheese Road


Hofheim, Germany -“So, how often your father had Limburger cheese? Once a week?”

“Once a year!” chuckles my old Louisville friend with the good German name Maier.

“That was all my mother allowed him. She was English.” My friend shakes his head: “I still remember the stench. It was horrendous.”

Passion for smelly cheeses is certainly a clear sign of native heritage that was transplanted to the Land of the Free with German immigrants. And it somehow managed to survive through the years of relentless assimilation and constant trouble prompted by the frequent and (often) quite malignant misbehavior of the old country. The first wave of German immigrants reached the River City in the middle of the 19th century. Besides the ability to make strong-odored cheeses, the newcomers brought other skills. They were carpenters and butchers, tailors and cobblers, masons and, of course, beer brewers. They all wanted to settle down and build their own homes, so the city of Louisville generously provided them with a marshy piece of land on the edge of town.

The settlement acquired a trade name – Schnitzelburg (from the German Schnitzel – shred, scrap) – and later became the heart and soul of the area we know today as Germantown.

The sound of hammers and saws filled the humid Kentucky air, and in time the blocks of clean, whitewashed shotgun houses came to existence alongside solid, intrinsically build churches. Beer pubs opened their doors for the thirsty on seemingly every corner, offering their own hand-brewed beer. At the time you could observe young kids with pails hurrying down the neighborhood streets to the nearest beer dispenser to fetch fresh beer for a family dinner. (These days, can you think of sending your teenage son to get a couple six packs from the corner gas station? You better not.) Alas, the young beer messengers stopped their activities in Schnitzelburg in the first part of the 20th century, when commercial beer production squeezed the small breweries out of existence. But if you pay a visit to Schnitzelburg today, you can stop for a drink at any of the dozen neighborhood pubs that function in a four-by-five-block area. And in the place called Flabby’s, you can have some distinctly German dishes, including a Limburger cheese sandwich. Just do not let yourself to be intimidated by the smell; wash it all down with a pint of fresh Warsteiner on tap.

And if you prefer to know what you’re eating, here’s what the revered German Heinerman book of miracle healing foods tells us about Limburger cheese:

“Made of goat milk, strong smelling, but piquant, spice testing soft cheese with somewhat smutty yellowish surface.”

Bon appetit!

Germans in Kentucky!

I am sitting in an open air cafe on the main street (die Haupstrasse) of the small and pretty 650-year-old town of Hofheim, 15 miles northwest of Frankfurt. A waiter has just brought me a tall glass of fresh Wersteiner pilsner. The weather today is glorious, the temperature in the 70s. Cherry trees are in full bloom. Flowers are everywhere – in the house gardens, in the window flower-boxes, daffodils, tulips. Surprisingly, for the first time since before Easter, the German sky is serene blue with a few fluffy clouds.

It is lunch time, and I enjoy watching the busy crowd. Many people in the street dress with a style. The women often wear elegant scarves and master the art of walking on high heels on cobblestones. The men look quite relaxed in their long trench coats and Italian shoes. Sitting in a street cafe on the Haupstrasse feels just like sitting at a sidewalk table in one of the Heine Bros. coffee shops in Louisville. Every five minutes somebody you know stops to say hello or to exchange the news.

My street neighbor Andreas joins me at the table for a beer and a conversation. I show him the Flabby’s menu I have brought with me from Louisville.

“Germans in Kentucky!” Andreas looks surprised. “Do they eat Kentucky fried chicken?” He notices the German sausage and Limburger cheese sandwich on the menu. “I am impressed!” he utters with respect.

“We played jokes with Limburger cheese in my school years. If you put a little piece of it behind a heating radiator, in two or three days nobody will be able to breathe in the room.” Andreas goes on: “Maybe that is what Americans should look for in Iraq, the Limburger cheese WMD. A few well-trained cheese inspectors following the familiar smell – and no war.”

Another neighbor, Monika, joins us at the table with a cup of coffee. Now we speak about politics.

“Most of us in Germany view the Untied States negatively since the beginning of the war in Iraq,” she says. “We think of it as an illegitimate and harmful enterprise.” I ask what happened to the gratitude to Americans for liberating Germany from Hitler and the Nazis.

“I think it is over now,” Monika answers with the celebrated German directness. “We are not unfriendly to Americans. We understand the difference between people and the government.”

Andreas answers my other question. “We wear American blue jeans and sneakers – it’s all made in Indonesia anyway. It is just a fashion. We might all wear everything Russian style starting next week.” I order one more beer. We continue to enjoy ourselves, the weather, and peace in the neighborhood.


Misha Feigin is a Russian emigre, a musician and writer who lives in Louisville. He is currently touring Europe, where he is performing.  — Louisville Eccentric Observer March 21 2004

assemblies & workshops

Who is Misha Feigin ?

One of the best guitarists of Russia, singer-songwriter and storyteller Misha Feigin was born and raised in Moscow. He has toured extensively in most of the United States, Canada, and Europe. Misha left behind an established career hallmarked by four albums released on Russian “Melodia” label, appearances on popular radio and television shows, national and international tours, and publications in various magazines. The Russian independent radio station “Echo of Moscow” ended three days of emergency broadcasting after the failed coup in August 1991 with Misha’s song “Gulp of Freedom”.

In the United States, Misha has performed concerts for over 300,000 students in 47 States and produced seven albums. He was featured on the NPR (National Public Radio) program “Mountain Stage”, and shared the stage with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. Misha recently toured again in Russia. Misha examines the cultural differences among Russia, modern Germany, and the United States, including customs, schools, sports, and wildlife. The students will learn how unique and amusing American customs are, and will have fun asking questions, participating in discussions, and exploring Russian and German ways of life. Misha sings in English and Russian, and plays guitar, balalaika, piano, and harmonicas. His knowledge of English allows him to communicate with his audiences clearly and directly. Misha is an artist with Kentucky Educational Showcases, Very Special Arts (VSA Kentucky), Columbus Arts Council, and Young Audiences. Misha offers programs and workshops that can be tailored to elementary, middle, or high school audiences.

– School assembly performances (45 to 60 minutes) –

Custom-planned full-day residencies that include one performance and four “hands-on” workshops in a classroom, where Misha shares more detailed information about Russia and Germany and answers questions. The students will pick up a few Russian and German words and will be introduced to the Cyrillic alphabet. They will be able to explore some Russian and German artifacts such as money, art books, photographs, and folk-art items.

One-week or two-week residencies with multimedia creativity enhancement workshops. Misha uses games and creative exercises connecting music, creative writing, and visual arts of different styles, cultures, and eras to create stories, poems, songs and artwork. Students will experience the joy of collective musical improvisation, no matter what musical skill they have or what musical instruments they choose. Workshops are fun every minute! Programs and workshops are tailored to every particular age group: K-3, 4-6, 6-8, 9-12.

– Special programs and workshops for children with special needs. –

Study guides and curriculum connection webs are included. Curriculum areas reinforced: Art, Music, Social Studies, especially Geography and History, Language Arts, Social Skills. Fees are based on time and travel. Special discounts for block-booking.

m94

Some scientists suggest that African “Adam and Eve”-or at least a small group of genetically similar group of hunter-gatherers -lie at the base or a manybranched human family tree? The trial of mutation coalesces in a single Y-chromosome whose owner lived between 40.000 to 140.000 years ago in Africa? Because every man on the planet now carries that mutation named M94, scientists like to call this man “Genetic Adam.” There were other human beings living at the same time. Their lineages simply did not make it to the present. — AP News

Genetic Adam (his name sounds
“Uh-Uh in local language) finds himself
illuminated watching the lightning
splitting the bulging baobab tree
in two, greedy flames
tongue the tree guts,
Uh-Uh’s neurons fire,
his brain spins – he grabs
a cindering branch
and dashes back to his cave.
“Let it be light!” Uh-Uh growls
raising his torch victoriously.

Full of awe, his tribe folk
retreated to the dark corners,
but stepping carefully over the border
marked by undulating shadows,
Eve (they called her Yoee-Yoee),
walks into the circle of light,
curiosity and desire spark in her eyes
mixing with flames’ reflections,
the wise one, Yoee-Yoee knows –
mutation A94 requires
a good fuck.

agnostic reflections

Almost two centuries ago
Duke Tolstoy had written this,
smiling cunningly in the snowy
immensity of Russia:
Spit in the eyes of these who claim
they can embrace the boundlessness.
This morning
I spit into the mirror
and try to clean
the toothpaste dripping
from the hibernating
vertical puddle of mercury,
a graveyard of many eyes –
it never reflects anything,
only steals.
I trust no Alice
wearing every face –
the wonderland
is on my side.

The master of my own illumination,
I flip the light switch off
and walk away
leaving the darkness contained
behind the closed door
in the bathroom.

adjustment

Transformation as a form
of trance does not guarantee
that delirious centipede trapped
in a Franz Kafka dream
will tear through the fabric
of mute nightmares and recursive
mutations to become a little girl
in white dress lost in the cloud
of dandelions just a few steps
from the garden fence
and her mother smiling obliviously
to the blank serene sky.

Transition as a form of
transmission feeds on itself
from vibration to vibration
broadcasting every want
liberated by every heartbeat
pushing the universe to expand
a little more, so a little boy
with bruised knees will run again
towards his father turning the corner
of a country lane immersed
in the soft light of one July
evening that never ends.

the singing

when I become this rain
and these dark still trees
touching the restless air
with their swollen buds,
I will be this soft humid night,
and this golden shining lamp
by the window in a quiet room.
I will become you, and you
will be a bird, perched
on a naked tree branch,
a ruffled sparrow crazy with
spring, full of longing, delight,
and pain that will become
this song, but
who will be the singer?

this poem is the winner of Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry 2000