Biography

I was born on Sadovaya Street, in the “Iron House” in a communal apartment, where love was expressed with swear words. My mother taught me to read syllable-by-syllable when I was 3 years old, and I read the children's writers, Agnia Barto and Samuel Marshak. I did not pronounce the letter R until age 5, I said Blezhnev, Andlopov, Chelnenko, Golbachev. But that was fixed when the USSR was fucked. It was later that Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Bataille came along. For now my Montmartre is grandpa’s barn I spent the summers in the village of Sloboda-Sholomkovsk, Zhytomyr region in Ukraine. There I read Mayakovsky's pamphlet “How to Make Poetry?” Pork fat instead of a pacifier, I’m the kindergarten Marquis de Sade Then I read the Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka, friend of the proletariat The sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko killed 100 fascists I read Taras Shevchenko’s poetry collection, “Kobzar,” until it was worn out. “When I die, then bury me in the grave in the middle of a wide steppe in the dear Ukraine.”
Everyone knows Romochka Osminkin -
a prominent member of the Writers' Union
He walks around in boxers with an elastic waist band and when he stretches it out and lets it go, he says: “Fuck!"

The 80s passed under the sign of Chernobyl
The 90s came and they were as sharp as 9 grams.
Father shot us notes from prison In the notes, father promised that everything would be fucking awesome
He wrote it in poem form and seemed not to lie
Years have passed since then and I finally understood
That poetry is needed only where and only when
You want to tell the truth
But you can't do it without going through nine circles of hell Because people went to die at the barricades for the truth
To overcome death through physical violence
But Dad already long died But I’m still rapping like the poet Basho read his haikus and my beats keep getting tougher with time If the son of God-the-son didn’t save us, then God-the father won’t either.

Everyone knows Romochka Osminkin -
a prominent member of the Writers' Union
He walks around in boxers with an elastic waist band and when he stretches it out and lets it go, he says: “Fuck!"

Text by Roman Osminkin
Translation by Jason Cieply