The recent writings of Russian poet and one-man social activist Kirill Medvedev, published this year in English translation for the first time, have an unusual extraliterary feature—their copyright has been “denied” by the author: “I have no copyright to my texts and cannot have any such right.” This extreme gesture of renunciation, a show of proud humility that is reflective of the book itself, is followed by an equally misleading title—“It’s No Good.”

But Medvedev, in his fashion, is completely serious even as he performs the seeding of such softly humorous ironies. He excels at telling the truth about the overwhelming “It” that is contemporary literature, Russia’s bleak political reality in the Putin era, and the depravity of his people—“Dostoevsky didn’t need to / make up his plots and his characters.” His bracing and often abrasive poems, which alternate with essays and political manifestos taken from Medvedev’s website, movingly consummate and resurrect a continual desire to find the bottom of things: “the most important thing is for a person to know their worth / …that’s what interests me the most.”

To achieve this holistic “truth” not only in his analysis of others but also in his own person, Medvedev erases the boundary between the poet’s personal and artistic life. It is his own personality speaking as the poems’ first-person narrator, as if each poem were a segment in a prolonged monologue. His continual use of an autobiographical “I” across the poetry and essays is an echo of Walt Whitman, from whose poem “Song of Myself” he quotes before beginning a poem of his own. As with Whitman’s poems, the ones in “It’s No Good” manage to make a powerful impression through the narrative force of his repetitions, striking juxtapositions and paradoxes, exclamations, and progression towards climatic outbursts of feeling.

Individually, the poems are like vignettes offering incisive character sketches of the hungry, lonely people he has encountered. He has no consolation for them, but what he does promise is a faithful description of both their situation and his own. When a male child prostitute approaches him and is turned away, he thinks of something that might have been said:

I want to whisper something in your ear;

no, closer, a little closer; all right:

poor little boy;

I don’t feel sorry for you at all.

I’d feel sorry for you

If you were a girl,

I’d feel sorry for you

If you were some kind of toad,

a little piglet, or a ragged chicken –

but I don’t feel sorry for you because you are a rock

a rock-person

with moss growing on you, lying for a million years

under a pale northern sun, and, in the winter,

under a cold northern wind.

Pitilessly diagnostic in his ability to gauge exactly how little he wants to help this suffering child, Medvedev’s calm voice fades out to a deserted polar landscape which seals the boy in an eternal irredeemability. These words have been unspoken on the street and are now being spoken belatedly, but still yield no pity. In place of a false empathy, Medvedev presents a new heroism in the tough love of reality.

The dark tone of his poetry, often garnished with a humor of the absurd, reflects Medvedev’s political goal of uncompromising truthfulness in creating without corroborating: “Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible,” he writes in an essay. In a post-Soviet world, censored and inflated with corruption, art must become political in order to sustain its own independence from politics, or risk becoming propaganda in service of the government that maintains it.

But poetry that consistently maintains a moral responsibility for the world outside must of necessity lose out on perfection in its own internal experience. It is true that Medvedev’s work inspires with its uncompromising candor, but it is also true that by definition one can only be uncompromising to one aim. And, as the aims of pure art and politics are by his own admission fundamentally irreconcilable, in straddling both of these realms his poetry risks not performing fully up to the expectations of either.

This loss is apparent in the limited scope of his work. He has chosen to use poetry as performance and public “Actions,” rather than as an invitation to voyage into the voluptuousness of words and their implications. Though Medvedev accomplishes the essential poetic task of conveying an experience in some irreducible way, at times his transparency can become offensively exhibitionist. For example, the use of capital LETTERS in poems throughout the middle of the collection is BOMBASTIC AND OVERDONE:

I also have love,

I love the two girls

who walked by,

I love the boy

who said “cunt.”

BUT WHAT SORT OF LOVE IS THIS?

THAT’S AN INTERESTING QUESTION,

BECAUSE I AM UNABLE TO EXPERIENCE

NORMAL HUMAN LOVE –

THE LOVE OF A MAN AND A WOMAN, FOR EXAMPLE,

I CAN ONLY UNDERSTAND SEXUAL ATTRACTION

AND LOVE FOR ALL MANKIND –

an innocent, self-negating love,

and so I ask someone far away, and also self-negating,

but he doesn’t answer – as if he’s mute or not there…

The repetitions of “love...LOVE...LOVE...love” are heavily monotonous; by the time we have left Capsland, the word “love” is numbed out of its original intensity and the poem seems thinner, as if Medvedev had performed a liposuction on it. One result is that while each poem is very powerful, most cannot be considered standalone masterpieces because the violence of the author has colored them with this political take-it-or-leave-it quality.

Medvedev has brilliantly anticipated, but not truly managed to avoid the traps of literature and politics that he so perceptively outlines in his essays. His present celebrity as the leading poet of his country is yet a fragile one, by very fact of its inimitable novelty. Having escaped the rules of the Russian publishing world to become their lonely exception, Medvedev yet risks turning out to be only a confirmation of their proof.

—Staff writer Victoria Zhuang can be reached at vzhuang@college.harvard.edu.