Download or read book I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava written by Alekseĭ Parshchikov and published by Cherry Orchard Books. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Aleksei Parshchikov (1954-2009) resembled the images we have of his favorite writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, not only physically in life but also in telling a story brilliantly in meter and rhyme. (This book keeps close to the meter and rhyme of the Russian original.) Here the story concerns Poltava, small city in south-east Ukraine, where in 1709 Peter the Great defeated the army of Charles XII of Sweden. Pushkin himself has a long poem with the same topic and characters, but Parshchikov updates to the mid-1980s when as a very young writer he won with it the Andrei Bely prize. The long, treacherous relations of Russia and Ukraine (U-Kraina, at-the-border, the name contains all the issues) is lifted and ironized in the relations between the two Russian poems. Here Peter and Charles and Cossack leader-and-turncoat Ivan Mazeppa (who sided with Sweden) richly deserve scorn-while the thousands of nameless soldiers who followed the dynasts, and died, are put back in history as heroic. Here the modern writer loves the land soaked with their blood. Parshchikov's logic leaps; his rhymes are often jokes; minutely he notices local places, plants, animals. The poem is fully assured in its speaking "I" and in its technical accomplishment. In the last days of the Soviet era, in the contested space between Russia and Ukraine, it is almost impossible to believe a work of such capaciousness was created"--