Ivan Barkov - Poetry

Poetry

Barkov was highly regarded as an able interpreter and a poet. Since poetry was his hobby more than his job, he could afford to use simpler language in his work. Most of his poems are outrightly obscene or even pornographic, although very funny. Written copies of his work circulated Russia since their creation.

Several works commonly yet erroneously ascribed to Barkov actually date from the 1840-60s. One such poem is "Luka Mudischev" (Лука Мудищев), a story of a low-life Russian nobleman from an old family which was given nobility due to the size of their penises (his last name Mudischev is derived from a highly obscene word муда́ meaning testicles). He is paid to have sex with a bored widow and kills her with his eight-vershok-long phallus in the process of doing so. In the end, he and the madame kill each other. However mundane the plot is, the poem manages to tell a lot about daily life of that time and place and is partially a satire directed towards odd nobility politics and social practices of that time.