Russian Poets [Hardcover]

Russian poets have always been admired for the lyric and emotional intensity with which they forge private and public experience into verse, and this volume gathers together some of the best-loved, and most powerful and immediate poems from the greatest Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is the work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among many others.

Arranged by theme—love, mortality, art, and the enduring mystery of Mother Russia herself—and presented in the best available translations, these poems will serve as both an introduction to the mastery of Russian poetry and a wide-ranging selection to be returned to again and again.Foreword

THE MUSE

BORIS PASTERNAK A Definition of Poetry
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN Echo
AFANASY FET To the Muse
BORIS PASTERNAK Poetry
VLADISLAV KHODASEVICH Stanzas
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN The Poet
BORIS PASTERNAK ‘Thus they begin’
MARINA TSVETAYEVA ‘Poems grow’
SERGEI ESENIN ‘I am the last village-poet’
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN Exegi Monumentum
ANNA AKHMATOVA The Muse €
BORIS PASTERNAK For Anna Akhmatova
ALEXANDER BLOK To Anna Akhmatova
ANNA AKHMATOVA For Alexander Blok
OSIP MANDELSTAM On Akhmatova
VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV
‘The Dostoyology of racing clouds!’
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV
In Memory of A. I. O[doevsk]y
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN To a Poet
NIKOLAI NEKRASOV From Princess Volkhonskaya
JOSEPH BRODSKY To Urania
FYODOR TYUTCHEV Silentium!
OSIP MANDELSTAM Silentium
NIKOLAI GUMILEV I and You
NIKOLAlI