Sasha Chorny: Satire, Exile & the Tenderness Behind the Laughter

Sasha Chorny could make readers laugh at the absurdities of everyday life while leaving just enough melancholy beneath the joke to make the laughter complicated. His poems skewered bureaucrats, respectable citizens, literary fashions, political pretensions, domestic irritation, and the endless small compromises of urban existence. Yet the writer behind that sharp satirical voice was also capable of extraordinary tenderness, particularly in the poems and stories he wrote for children during the later years of his life.

Born Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg in Odessa on October 13, 1880, Chorny became one of the most popular satirical poets of Russia’s Silver Age. His literary career carried him from the upheaval surrounding the Revolution of 1905 through the vibrant magazine culture of St. Petersburg, military service during World War I, revolution and displacement, and finally the Russian émigré communities of Berlin and France. Along the way, his work changed considerably. The young writer whose satire repeatedly attracted the attention of censors gradually became a poet of exile, memory, childhood, animals, homesickness, and the fragile comedy of being human.

Even the name by which he became famous contains a story. “Sasha Chorny” means roughly “Sasha the Black” or “Black Sasha.” According to accounts of his childhood, there were two boys named Alexander in the Glikberg family, and the darker-haired one was distinguished from the fair-haired “White Sasha” by being called “Black Sasha.” A family nickname eventually became one of the most recognizable literary pseudonyms of early twentieth-century Russian poetry.

🌊 Growing Up in Odessa

Alexander Glikberg was born in Odessa when the Black Sea port was part of the Russian Empire. He grew up in a Jewish family whose circumstances were respectable enough to provide a degree of security but could not shield the children from the legal discrimination faced by Jewish families in imperial Russia.

Educational restrictions were particularly significant. Quotas limited the number of Jewish students who could enter certain schools, and the Glikberg children were baptized in an effort to improve their educational opportunities. The episode belonged to a much larger system of restrictions that forced Jewish families throughout the empire to make difficult compromises simply to gain access to institutions available more readily to others.

Chorny’s childhood was not particularly happy, and his education became unsettled. He spent time away from his immediate family, struggled in school, and eventually found himself in extremely precarious circumstances. A newspaper account of his difficulties attracted the attention of Konstantin Roche, a benefactor in Zhytomyr who took an interest in the young man and helped provide him with greater stability.

These early experiences of instability, exclusion, humiliation, and dependence would later give Chorny’s satire an unusual emotional texture. He could mock society mercilessly, but he understood what it meant to occupy an insecure position within it.

✍️ Becoming a Writer

Chorny began publishing in the early years of the twentieth century. One of his first known appearances came in 1904 in a newspaper in Zhytomyr, but it was the political and cultural turmoil surrounding the Revolution of 1905 that helped create the environment in which his satirical voice suddenly became important.

Russia’s satirical press flourished during this period. Magazines appeared that used cartoons, poems, comic sketches, and parodies to criticize government officials, censorship, social hypocrisy, and political reaction. The atmosphere created new opportunities for writers willing to be irreverent, although those opportunities came with substantial risks.

Chorny proved especially well suited to the moment. He possessed the ability to compress irritation, observation, anger, and absurdity into compact verse that readers could remember and repeat. His poems often sounded conversational rather than elevated, allowing him to bring satire directly into the rhythms of ordinary urban life.

🖋️ Becoming Sasha Chorny

In November 1905, Alexander Glikberg published the satirical poem “Nonsense” under the name Sasha Chorny. The poem took aim at prominent figures in government and immediately demonstrated the danger of political humor in imperial Russia. The issue containing it was confiscated, and the magazine in which it appeared was soon closed.

Instead of ending Chorny’s career, censorship helped define it. He had found both his literary name and one of his central subjects: the absurd distance between the official language of authority and the ridiculous human behavior concealed beneath it.

The pseudonym also suited his tone. “Chorny” suggests darkness, and much of his humor contains a dark edge. The joke may be funny, but the society producing it is often depressing. Bureaucracy becomes comic precisely because it is oppressive. Respectability becomes funny because everyone can see the hypocrisy beneath it.

Chorny learned to make pessimism laugh.

🚫 Censorship and Different Motifs

His first collection, Different Motifs, appeared in 1906 but quickly attracted the attention of censors. The volume was confiscated, reinforcing the precarious position of a writer whose satire had become inseparable from political criticism.

Facing the possibility of further trouble, Chorny left Russia and spent time in Germany, where he studied at Heidelberg University. The period abroad exposed him to another intellectual environment, but it did not permanently detach him from Russian literary life.

He returned to St. Petersburg in 1908, arriving at precisely the moment when a new satirical magazine would provide the platform that transformed him into a major literary figure.

That magazine was Satyricon.

📰 The World of Satyricon

Satyricon became one of the most important humor and satire magazines in pre-revolutionary Russia. Its audience included educated urban readers who appreciated political jokes, literary parody, comic sketches, caricature, and witty verse.

Chorny quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular contributors.

The partnership was ideal because his poetry could be immediately topical without becoming disposable. He wrote about the annoyances of contemporary life, but beneath particular jokes lay recognizable human weaknesses: vanity, cowardice, pretension, conformity, selfishness, envy, and the tendency to complain endlessly without changing anything.

Readers recognized themselves and their neighbors in his poems.

That recognition gave the satire its force.

😒 Satirizing the Respectable Citizen

One of Chorny’s most frequent targets was the complacent urban citizen who considered himself educated and sophisticated while remaining trapped in trivial concerns.

This figure worries about appearances, follows fashionable opinions, complains about politics without doing anything, discusses art without understanding it, quarrels over insignificant matters, and maintains an impressive opinion of his own intelligence.

Chorny could be ruthless with this type of character because he understood that hypocrisy does not belong exclusively to powerful officials. Ordinary people participate in absurd systems too.

His satire therefore differs from writing that simply divides society into villains and victims.

The bureaucrat is ridiculous, but so is the citizen dealing with him. The literary critic can be pompous, but so can the poet. The revolutionary can develop fashionable poses just as easily as the conservative.

Nobody receives automatic exemption from mockery.

📘 Satires

Chorny’s collection Satires, published in 1910, consolidated his reputation. The poems gathered material written during the years in which he had become one of the defining voices of Satyricon.

His satirical method often involves allowing a character to reveal himself through his own complaints, prejudices, or contradictions. Instead of delivering a formal moral judgment from above, Chorny lets ridiculousness emerge through speech.

The technique resembles dramatic monologue, comic journalism, and caricature at once.

The speaker may believe he is perfectly reasonable.

The reader knows otherwise.

That distance produces the joke.

Yet the poems often contain something darker than simple comedy. The endless repetition of petty habits suggests that human beings may understand their absurdity and continue behaving exactly the same way anyway.

🌙 Satire and Lyricism

Chorny was never only a satirist. His 1911 collection Satires and Lyrics made that increasingly obvious.

Alongside sarcasm and social comedy appeared poems of landscape, introspection, loneliness, tenderness, and psychological observation. The combination reveals two sides of the same sensibility.

The satirist notices what is wrong because he pays attention closely.

The lyric poet uses that same attention differently.

A person capable of noticing hypocrisy may also notice evening light, a lonely room, an animal’s expression, the emotional atmosphere of a street, or the private sadness concealed behind another person’s ordinary behavior.

Chorny’s later writing would increasingly allow this gentler voice to move toward the center.

🎭 Humor With a Sadness Beneath It

One reason Chorny’s satire has remained readable is that the poems rarely depend entirely upon cruelty.

He mocks human weakness while understanding it.

The distinction matters.

Pure ridicule allows the writer to remain comfortably superior to the people being mocked. Chorny’s strongest work does not always provide that comfort. His satirical speakers frequently represent impulses recognizable in almost everyone.

People become irritable.

They envy their neighbors.

They pretend to understand things.

They complain about society while protecting their own comfort.

They become ridiculous when they are frightened.

The poet may laugh, but he knows he belongs to the same species.

That awareness gradually deepened the humanity of his work.

📚 Literary Satire

Russian literary culture itself offered Chorny abundant material.

The Silver Age was extraordinarily creative, but it was also crowded with manifestos, rival movements, aesthetic theories, literary quarrels, flamboyant personalities, and declarations that some new group had finally discovered the future of art.

For a satirist, the situation was irresistible.

Chorny mocked literary fashion, pretentious criticism, fashionable pessimism, exaggerated artistic posturing, and the tendency of cultural movements to take themselves with enormous seriousness.

He could appreciate poetry while laughing at poets.

Indeed, the ability to distinguish between genuine art and artistic vanity depended upon taking literature seriously enough to recognize the difference.

His humor therefore belongs inside the Silver Age even when it is making fun of the Silver Age.

🪖 World War I

When World War I began, Chorny’s life changed sharply. He served during the conflict, including work connected with a field hospital, and encountered the suffering and disruption produced by modern warfare.

The experience intensified the darker elements already present in his writing.

War made the absurdities of civilian society look different. Bureaucracy was no longer merely inconvenient when bureaucratic decisions affected soldiers, medical care, supplies, and survival.

Chorny wrote about wartime experience without turning himself into a heroic military figure.

His perspective remained focused on ordinary people caught inside systems larger than themselves.

The war also helped destroy the social and political world in which his prewar literary career had developed.

Imperial Russia was approaching its end.

🌪️ Revolution and Upheaval

The revolutions of 1917 transformed Russian life and eventually made Chorny’s continued place within the country increasingly uncertain.

Like many writers of his generation, he experienced the period not simply as a political change but as the collapse of a familiar cultural world. Institutions disappeared, publishing networks changed, cities experienced violence and shortages, and intellectuals faced difficult choices about whether to remain or leave.

Chorny ultimately left.

His departure began a new phase of life that would define much of his later writing.

He had built his reputation as a Russian satirist writing for readers inside Russia.

Now he would have to write Russian literature outside Russia.

🧳 Exile

Chorny’s path into exile eventually carried him through Central and Western Europe. By the early 1920s, he was part of the large Russian émigré community in Berlin, one of the major centers of Russian-language publishing after the revolution.

Berlin temporarily became an extraordinary literary city for Russian writers. Publishers, newspapers, journals, cafés, bookstores, and audiences emerged to serve the thousands of émigrés who had left the former Russian Empire.

The situation offered freedom from Soviet censorship but introduced a different kind of uncertainty.

Writers had readers, but those readers were scattered.

Publishers existed, but finances were precarious.

A literary culture had survived, but it no longer possessed a secure geographical home.

Chorny responded by continuing to write.

📖 Russian Literature in Berlin

In Berlin, Chorny participated actively in émigré publishing and literary life.

He wrote for newspapers and magazines, worked with publishers, and released new books. His 1923 collection Thirst reflected the increasingly complex emotional world of exile.

The title itself feels appropriate for émigré literature.

Exile creates many forms of thirst: for home, language, familiarity, lost places, old relationships, cultural belonging, and a version of the past that cannot be recovered exactly as remembered.

Chorny’s humor survived exile, but nostalgia increasingly joined it.

The satirist had always understood disappointment.

Exile gave disappointment a geographical dimension.

✒️ Chorny and Vladimir Nabokov

One intriguing connection from Chorny’s Berlin years involves the young Vladimir Nabokov, who was then beginning his own literary career within the Russian émigré community.

Nabokov had left Russia with his family and was publishing Russian poetry and prose long before becoming internationally famous for his English-language novels.

Chorny participated in the same publishing world and assisted with literary work connected with the young writer.

The connection illustrates how tightly interconnected émigré literary circles could be.

Established writers, beginning writers, editors, journalists, and publishers were all attempting to rebuild Russian cultural life outside the country that had produced it.

Exile scattered Russian literature geographically while creating unexpected new communities abroad.

🧒 Turning Toward Children

One of the most important changes in Chorny’s later career was his increasing devotion to children’s literature.

He had written for children before leaving Russia, but exile made this part of his work especially significant.

Russian émigré children were growing up in Germany, France, and other countries. Many attended foreign schools, spoke other languages in daily life, and had limited direct experience of the country their parents still called home.

For émigré writers, children’s books therefore carried an additional responsibility.

They could preserve language.

They could transmit stories.

They could provide cultural memory without turning childhood into a political lecture.

Chorny proved exceptionally good at the task.

🏝️ Children’s Island

His collection Children’s Island, published in Berlin in 1921, became one of his best-known works for young readers.

The title offers an appealing image of childhood as a territory partly separate from the adult world.

Chorny understood that children do not simply inhabit miniature versions of adult reality. They possess their own logic, humor, fears, misunderstandings, fantasies, relationships with animals, and ways of transforming ordinary objects into imaginative worlds.

His children’s poems respect that perspective.

They do not constantly instruct from above.

Instead, the writer enters the child’s scale of attention.

A cat can become important.

A toy can acquire personality.

A small injustice can feel enormous.

An ordinary afternoon can become an adventure.

The satirist who had spent years exposing adult absurdity discovered that childhood offered another way of seeing.

🐕 Animals in Chorny’s Writing

Animals became especially important in Chorny’s children’s work.

Cats, dogs, birds, and other creatures appear not merely as decorative figures but as personalities with their own imagined desires, frustrations, habits, and opinions.

This interest eventually produced one of his most charming works, The Diary of Fox Mickey.

The book is narrated by a fox terrier named Mickey, allowing Chorny to look at human behavior from the perspective of a dog.

The choice is perfectly suited to a satirist.

Dogs observe people constantly without understanding all the elaborate social conventions humans use to explain themselves.

From Mickey’s perspective, adult behavior can look wonderfully strange.

🐶 The Diary of Fox Mickey

Written during the mid-1920s and published in Paris in 1927, The Diary of Fox Mickey combines children’s storytelling, animal observation, comedy, and gentle satire.

Mickey describes his experiences, feelings, dreams, annoyances, and observations about the humans around him.

The voice allows Chorny to return to one of his oldest literary techniques: making familiar society look unfamiliar by changing the speaker.

Earlier satirical poems had allowed pompous citizens to reveal their own absurdity.

Now a dog reveals human absurdity simply by observing it honestly.

The result is warmer than the political satire of Chorny’s youth, but the underlying technique is related.

Change the angle of vision and ordinary behavior becomes strange.

🧸 Respecting the Child Reader

Chorny’s success as a children’s writer came partly from his refusal to underestimate children.

He did not assume that writing for younger readers meant removing complexity or humor.

Children understand absurdity extremely well.

They recognize adults behaving irrationally long before they possess the vocabulary to analyze it.

They also respond strongly to rhythm, exaggeration, wordplay, animals, surprises, and reversals.

Chorny’s natural comic instincts therefore transferred beautifully into children’s literature.

At the same time, his own difficult childhood may have contributed to the sympathy with which he approached young readers.

He knew that childhood was not automatically carefree.

Children experience fear, loneliness, embarrassment, injustice, and confusion too.

The best children’s literature acknowledges those feelings without allowing them to consume the entire world.

Chorny could do exactly that.

🇫🇷 Paris and the Russian Émigré Community

Chorny eventually moved to France, where Paris had become another major center of Russian émigré culture.

Russian-language newspapers and journals served communities attempting to preserve a literary life outside their former homeland. Writers gave readings, published essays and poems, debated politics, reviewed one another’s books, and attempted to support themselves within often difficult economic circumstances.

Chorny contributed to this world as both writer and editor.

His satire continued, but the subjects naturally changed.

The absurdities of émigré life replaced some of the bureaucrats and urban types of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.

Exile itself could become comic.

People who had once possessed titles, positions, property, or social importance in Russia might suddenly find themselves struggling with rent, language barriers, paperwork, unfamiliar jobs, and the indignities of beginning again.

Chorny understood that exile could be painful without being immune from laughter.

😂 The Comedy of Emigration

Chorny’s later satire often explores the peculiar psychology of displaced communities.

Émigrés can idealize the country they left while complaining endlessly about the country in which they now live. Political arguments continue even when the political world being argued about has disappeared. Social hierarchies may survive in people’s minds long after material circumstances have erased them.

The situation contains both sadness and absurdity.

Chorny did not treat émigrés merely as victims.

He could sympathize with displacement while laughing at the habits people carried with them.

This balance prevents his exile writing from becoming purely nostalgic.

The lost homeland is important, but memory is not always reliable.

People reinvent the past just as they reinvent themselves.

The satirist notices both processes.

📚 Unserious Stories

Chorny’s prose collection Unserious Stories, published in 1928, demonstrated that his comic gifts extended well beyond verse.

The title is characteristically deceptive.

Calling the stories “unserious” creates permission to explore subjects that may become serious almost accidentally.

Humor lowers the reader’s defenses.

Then a story can reveal loneliness, social frustration, homesickness, vanity, or disappointment without becoming solemn.

This movement between comedy and melancholy is one of Chorny’s most distinctive qualities.

He rarely remains entirely on one side.

The joke contains sadness.

The sad moment contains something ridiculous.

Human life refuses to maintain a single tone.

☀️ Wonderful Summer

Chorny’s Wonderful Summer, published toward the end of the 1920s, belongs to the increasingly rich body of prose he produced during exile.

His later writing often finds refuge in small-scale experience.

Gardens, children, animals, friendships, domestic incidents, weather, village life, and personal observation provide a counterweight to the enormous political upheavals that had reshaped his generation.

This shift should not be mistaken for retreat into triviality.

After war, revolution, censorship, and exile, attention to small pleasures can itself become meaningful.

A writer cannot control history.

He can still notice a dog.

He can still make a child laugh.

He can still describe summer.

Chorny’s later work repeatedly protects these modest forms of happiness from the machinery of historical catastrophe.

🏡 Life in Southern France

In 1929, Chorny settled in La Favière on the Mediterranean coast of southern France.

The setting offered a quieter life than Paris and allowed him to become part of a smaller local community while remaining connected with Russian writers and artists.

Visitors came to his home, and he continued to participate in literary events among Russian émigrés.

The landscape of Provence also suited the increasingly lyrical side of his personality.

The writer who had made his name in the dense urban world of St. Petersburg satire was now living beside the Mediterranean, surrounded by a very different atmosphere.

Exile had taken him far from Odessa and Russia, yet the Russian language remained his literary home.

That paradox defined many émigré writers of his generation.

The country could be lost.

The language traveled with them.

🗣️ Preserving Russian for a New Generation

Chorny became especially concerned that children growing up in émigré families might lose their connection with Russian language and culture.

His children’s books therefore had a purpose extending beyond entertainment.

They allowed Russian to remain associated with pleasure rather than merely parental obligation.

This was crucial.

A child forced to study a heritage language only through formal instruction might experience it as something imposed from the past.

A funny story about a dog could accomplish something entirely different.

The language became alive.

It became playful.

It belonged to the child’s imagination rather than exclusively to the parents’ memories.

Chorny’s humor made cultural preservation feel less like preservation.

That may be one of his most important achievements in exile.

🎼 From Satire to Shostakovich

Chorny’s poetry continued to attract attention long after his death. One particularly notable example came from composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who set several of Chorny’s satirical poems to music in his cycle Satires, composed in 1960.

The collaboration across generations feels remarkably appropriate.

Shostakovich understood musical irony as deeply as Chorny understood literary irony. Both artists knew how a cheerful surface could conceal discomfort, criticism, anxiety, or mockery.

Chorny’s poems gave Shostakovich language already filled with tonal instability.

The music amplified it.

A joke could sound funny and disturbing at the same time.

That duality helps explain why Chorny’s satire survived the immediate political situations that inspired it.

The particular officials disappeared.

Human absurdity did not.

🪞 Satire as Self-Recognition

The most durable satire does more than allow readers to laugh at someone else.

It eventually turns the mirror around.

Chorny understood this.

A reader can begin a poem amused by a pompous bureaucrat, pretentious intellectual, irritable citizen, or fashionable writer and gradually recognize some portion of the same behavior in himself.

This self-recognition prevents satire from becoming merely vindictive.

The laugh becomes uncomfortable because the target is not completely foreign.

Everyone has moments of vanity.

Everyone rationalizes selfishness.

Everyone complains.

Everyone occasionally values appearance over reality.

Chorny’s satire remains sharp because these weaknesses did not belong exclusively to imperial Russia.

They belong to people.

💛 Tenderness Behind the Satire

The contrast between Chorny’s adult satire and children’s writing is sometimes presented as though he became a completely different writer later in life.

The continuity is actually stronger than it first appears.

Both forms depend upon close observation.

The satirist notices the small detail exposing hypocrisy.

The children’s writer notices the small detail revealing personality.

Both depend upon rhythm, voice, surprise, and an ability to see the familiar from an unexpected angle.

What changed most noticeably was the emotional balance.

In the early satire, irritation often leads.

In the later work, affection increasingly does.

Yet tenderness had always existed behind the laughter.

Exile simply gave it more room.

🕯️ Sasha Chorny’s Final Day

Sasha Chorny died on August 5, 1932, in southern France at the age of fifty-one.

Accounts of his death add a final dramatic episode to an already unusual life. A fire broke out at a nearby farm, and Chorny reportedly helped fight the blaze. After returning home, he suffered a heart attack and died.

He was buried near Le Lavandou, but the precise location of his grave was eventually lost. A memorial marker was later placed in the cemetery to commemorate him.

There is something strangely fitting about the uncertain grave of an émigré writer whose life had been shaped by displacement.

The physical resting place became difficult to locate.

The literary voice remained recognizable.

📖 A Silver Age Voice That Refused Solemnity

Russian literature of the Silver Age contains extraordinary seriousness. Symbolism, philosophy, mysticism, revolution, spiritual crisis, cultural decline, and artistic transformation all produced some of the most ambitious literature of the modern era.

Chorny contributed something equally necessary.

He laughed at it.

He could see artistic achievement without pretending artists were immune to vanity. He could care about politics without accepting political pomposity. He could recognize suffering without believing every poem about suffering needed to become solemn.

Humor creates perspective.

It reduces inflated claims to human scale.

Chorny’s contribution to the Silver Age lies partly in refusing to allow his era to become too impressed with itself.

🌍 A Poet Between Countries

Chorny’s biography also belongs to the larger story of twentieth-century writers displaced by revolution, war, persecution, and political change.

He was born in Odessa, became famous in St. Petersburg, experienced war, left Russia after revolution, participated in Berlin’s Russian literary world, lived in Paris, and finally settled in southern France.

Yet his primary literary language remained Russian.

This made him part of a culture that increasingly existed without one geographical center.

Russian books could be printed in Berlin.

Russian newspapers appeared in Paris.

Russian children grew up in French or German schools.

Russian writers debated the meaning of a country some would never see again.

Chorny’s work helped hold that scattered world together.

✨ Why Sasha Chorny Still Matters

Sasha Chorny matters because he understood that satire works best when the writer remains suspicious not only of governments and institutions but also of ordinary human pretension. His poetry exposes vanity, conformity, cultural fashion, bureaucracy, domestic irritation, and social hypocrisy without pretending that the poet himself belongs to some flawless class of observers.

He also matters because his career demonstrates how humor can change without disappearing. The early satirist used laughter as a weapon against public absurdity, while the émigré writer increasingly used it as a form of survival. The joke could preserve dignity when circumstances were humiliating, maintain perspective when politics became overwhelming, or help children inherit a language their families feared they might lose.

Chorny’s children’s writing reveals the deeper generosity behind his comic voice. The writer who knew how ridiculous adults could be also knew how seriously children experience their own worlds. He respected their imagination, their relationships with animals, their fears, their games, and their ability to see through adult nonsense.

That combination of sharpness and tenderness gives his writing unusual range.

🌙 Laughter in Exile

Sasha Chorny’s life passed through some of the most disruptive decades in modern Russian history. Imperial restrictions shaped his childhood, censorship followed his early satire, World War I interrupted ordinary life, revolution scattered the literary culture in which he had become famous, and exile forced him to reconstruct a career outside his homeland.

Yet he continued writing.

The subjects changed, and the tone softened, but the fundamental act remained the same. He watched people carefully and turned what he saw into language capable of making readers recognize themselves.

Sometimes recognition came through sarcasm.

Sometimes it came through an animal’s imagined thoughts.

Sometimes through the strange comedy of émigré life.

Sometimes through a child’s view of the world.

Chorny understood that laughter does not necessarily mean that suffering is unimportant. It can mean the opposite. Humor can make difficult experience bearable enough to examine closely.

More than ninety years after his death, Sasha Chorny remains a fascinating figure because the two sides of his literary personality never truly cancel one another. The satirist and the children’s writer belong together. Both reject inflated language, both prefer vivid observation, and both believe the world becomes clearer when viewed from an unexpected angle.

His poems may have begun by laughing at a society that took itself too seriously, but his later work discovered another possibility: laughter could also protect what was tender, vulnerable, and worth remembering.

Two Wishes

To live on an exposed peak,
To write uncomplicated sonnets….
Being sustained by the peasants
With bread, wine, and cutlets.

To burn my ships, those behind and ahead,
To lie down, looking at nothing, in bed.
Drift into dreamless sleep and, for ken’s sake,
Some one hundred years or so hence, awake.

-Sasha Chorny, 1909, translated by Alex Cigale

Два желания

Жить на вершине голой,
Писать простые сонеты…
И брать от людей из дола
Хлеб, вино и котлеты.

Сжечь корабли и впереди, и сзади,
Лечь на кровать, не глядя ни на что,
Уснуть без снов и, любопытства ради,
Проснуться лет чрез сто.

-Саша Чёрный