Choked on lemon

Choked on lemon

The Fatherland judges the writer again,
And in a closed process.
Writing spoils both your nerves and your blood,
It comes from a dangerous profession.

Cases concocted with white threads
Quite a few in Russian annals:
Chernyshevsky sat, and Gorky sat
(That's why the world recognized them).

Dostoevsky sat, and - woe to my mind! —
Griboyed was under arrest;
While in custody, Turgenev conceived “Muma”,
Which became his manifesto.

Kobylin sat, and Mandelstam sat,
Branded the guardsmen boldly;
He could have met Shalamov there -
There were a lot of writers sitting there.

Russian Parnassus is a stinking basement.
Russia is a country of turmoil.
And Pushkin, you remember, was in exile,
And Brodsky sat there, a parasite...

But Limonov drives the judges into ecstasy:
Limonov killed everyone else!
Writers have been hired in Russia more than once,
But, alas, they took it without riot police.

Limonov must be a cool writer,
It’s not for nothing that he ended up on the tablets.
But Tolstoy is complete crap:
He was never imprisoned.

How he wanted to sit, they say,
How he achieved this!
But still I didn’t get into this valiant row,
Whereas Limonov broke through.

And you are not offended, Russian authorities,
And you, informers-skins:
When will you ever get there?
In the history of literature?