Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

TRAFIKA EUROPE 13 - RUSSIAN BALLET Editors’Welcome Dear Trafika Europe Reader, On behalf of our contributors, I would like to welcome you to our Russian Ballet issue and to offer a brief guided tour of the contents I and Trafika Europe editor-in-chief Andrew Singer have had the distinct pleasure to assemble and curate. We have made an honest attempt to be representative: among the work in the present pages are both conventional and post-modern narratives, short and longer fiction, “literary” and “genre” work, formal poetry and free verse of different sorts. Russia is a bridge between East and West. While historically it has been particularly successful in expressing the universal, human condition, it has also been an integral part of the continental “main”. Nowhere has this been more directly in evidence than in the presence of Russian writers and poets abroad. In addition to Moscow and St. Petersburg – the two historic poles of Russian literature – New York had already some time ago emerged as its de facto third center; more recently, this has been supplemented by Jerusalem and Berlin, so that, from a global perspective, Russian is progressively

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