Subtropics has published my translation of Mark Girshin’s “Seaweed Mattress,” a series of vignettes about a childhood spent in Odessa in the 1910s and 1920s, part of his longer memoir, Mosaic. The title refers to the custom there, on the Black Sea, of stuffing mattresses with seaweed rather than straw. In Anastasia Kozak’s interview with Girshin for the magazine, Girshin says he is currently working on a novel, Genghis Khan with a Telephone, “which was how Nikolai Bukharin referred to Stalin.”
Girshin emigrated to the United States decades ago and has a fine body of work that finds its first US audience with this publication. May he have many more.
The graphics used on this site were inspired by the work of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a Russian artist and designer influenced by Constructivism and Futurism, as seen in her biography, by D.V. Sarabianov and N.L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990.