russian poetry

Poetry. This anthology presents a group of writers and a literary phenomenon that has been unknown even to Russian readers for 70 years, obfuscated by historical amnesia. Gennady Gor, Pavel Zaltsman, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, and Vladimir Sterligov wrote these works in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). In striking contrast to state-sanctioned, heroic "Blockade" poetry in which the stoic body of the exemplary citizen triumphs over death, the poems gathered here show the Siege individual (blokadnik) as a weak and desperate incarnation of Job. These poets wrote in situ about the famine, disease, madness, cannibalism, and prostitution around themsubjects so tabooed in those most-Soviet times that they would never think of publishing. Moreover, the formal ambition and macabre avant-gardism of this uncanny body of work match its horrific content, giving birth to a "poor" language which alone could reflect the depth of suffering and psychological destruction experienced by victims of that historical disaster.

A collection of fifty-two poems about love, translated into English from the original Russian.

Profiles Russian poets, discussing literary forms, achievements, biography, general analysis, and related information.

A collection of Russian poems, featuring selections by Evgeniy Baratinski, Nikolay Karamzin, Vasiliy Zhukovski, Aleksandr Pushkin, and many others; presented in their original language, with English translations by Vladimir Nabokov on facing pages.

Our anxieties, poems 1953-1959 -- Conversation with an American writer, poems 1960-1962 -- People were laughing, poems 1963-1965 -- The City of "yes" and the city of "no".