Letter from the
Editor
…And so concludes our
inaugural-year gimmick. To
recap, each of our first four
issues was “sponsored” by an
individual Russian letter,
featured throughout and
emblazoned on the spine; shelved
in sequence, our Vol. I spells
out a four-letter word. Since we
admittedly came up with this
idea two letters in–П and Я were
chosen purely for their visual
flair–that word, absurdly
enough, will now have to be пять,
or five. Which leaves us Ь, the
Soft Sign.
Talk about ending with a
whimper. The Soft Sign is less
than a whimper–it is, in fact,
totally unpronounceable by
itself. Synesthetically
speaking, it’s a kind of
translucent, odorless polish for
rough consonants: its function
in Russian is similar to the one
the letter “g” carries before
“l” and “n” in Italian. Nabokov
wrote that it makes “t” sound a
bit like “ts”; it also, for that
matter, makes the “v” in
Vladimir sound a bit like the
“v” in Vera. It turns мат
(obscenity) into мать (mother).
It palatizes, and makes
palatable. It soothes.
No words begin with the Soft
Sign, so instead we’re adopting
it as a kind of general
principle for this issue. A year
ago, our magazine debuted with a
scathing review of Gary
Shteyngart’s Absurdistan: an
act akin to starting a cycling
periodical with a takedown of
Lance Armstrong.
This time,
writer Emily Gould goes softer
on Mr. Shteyngart in her
overview of the suddenly crowded
Russian-American lit scene.
Our other subject, Dmitry
Medvedev–Russia’s new
presidential
semi-appointee–began his victory
lap by sounding some
encouragingly liberal notes on,
among other things, freedom of
self-expression. Might this be a
sort of soft sign in itself? Or
just a soft-power one?
Elsewhere, William F. Buckley
softens his stand on a
Khrushchev, and Julia Ioffe
softens up to hard porn’s Elena
Berkova.
With that, exeunt Letters From
the Editor (pursued, naturally,
by a bear). Thanks to each and
every one of you for finding,
and staying with, this
mind-boggling experiment of a
magazine in its first year.
Signing off softly,
Michael Idov
