The works collected in this first issue of ROAR speak for themselves so distinctly that I wouldn’t want to distract readers, viewers, and listeners from them even for several extra minutes. This is why I’ll concentrate on acknowledgements and my gratitude to those who made this issue possible.
Great many thanks to the authors and contributors of this issue for their texts and works of art and sound. Your trust means more to me than I could express with words. Thank you, the incredible team of volunteers, including editors, copy-editors and translators who had been working on this issue. Due to safety reasons, I don’t mention all the names of those who still remain in Russia but I’d like to use this opportunity to thank personally Maria Voul, Ada Kordon, Mariam Tavrizyan, Natalia Zanegina, A. S., Michael Antman, Olga Gardner Galvin, Michael Kooi, Ainsley Morse, Gérard Physdipillo Jr., Stephanie Sandler, and Sana Tchernov. Thank you to those who made the ROAR website, Veta Sbitnikova and her team. Thank you to my beautiful colleagues who assisted in gathering material; among those I’d like to mention Dmitry Kuzmin, Boris Filanovsky, Victor Melamed, Pavel Polshchikov, and Dasha Rodina. And special thanks to my dear friends Alexander Gavrilov, Maria Voul, and Margarita Skomorovskaya for their invaluable personal support extended to me while we’d been working on this issue.
The theme for the second ROAR issue, due June 24, will be The Resistance to Violence. Primarily, we’ll continue publishing materials in connection with the war being now waged by Russia against Ukraine. Moreover, in our portfolio we also have poems, prose works, plays, and works of art regarding the crackdown on dissenters in Russia and other experiences of personal and collective resistance to violence and cruelty. We’ll be welcoming texts, sound, and art works meeting the ROAR next issue’s theme, in any format you like; please forward them to [email protected].
And the last thing. Even now, we’re looking forward to the moment when ROAR is closed forever, that is, the moment when there is no more need to label a certain segment of the Russian-language culture as opposing the criminal Russian regime, solely by reason of the fact that this regime ceases to be. However, before it happens, we’ll be doing what we can to ensure that ROAR, at present made only through volunteer effort, continues to come out.
Yours faithfully, Linor Goralik, ROAR Publisher and Editor-in-Chief April 24, 2022
Translated by Max Nemtsov