Russian Silver Age Poetry Texts And Contexts (cultural Syllabus) [Hardcover]

Russian Silver Age writers were full participants in European literary debates and movements. Today some of these poets, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, are known around the world. This volume introduces Silver Age poetry with its cultural ferment, the manifestos and the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic debates, the occult references and sexual experimentation, and the emergence of women, Jews, gay and lesbian poets, and peasants as part of a brilliant and varied poetic environment. After a thorough introduction, the volume offers brief biographies of the poets and selections of their work in translationmany of them translated especially for this volumeas well as critical and fictional texts (some by the poets themselves) that help establish the context and outline the lively discourse of the era and its indelible moral and artistic aftermath.It being dauntingly impossible to do justice in translation to that great world treasure that is the Poetry of the Russian Silver Age, editors and translators Forrester and Kelly have given us something more  selections of best existing translations are here amended by new ones and framed within their wider cultural context  the contribution that poets have always made to their culture and age  as critics, essayist, and yes, historians. A valuable personal discovery for myself was Mayakovskys touching tribute on the death of Velimir Khlebnikov (1922). This much needed book promises to become indispensable to students and experts alike. This is an unprecedented tool for educators to present the Russian Silver Age to students in all its astonishing richness and complexity. In addition to the generous, inventive, and subtle selection of poetry, the reader is introduced to the institutions and critical conversations that nourished that overwhelming creative flow that up to this day continues to nourish and challenge Russian literary thought. Reading this page-turner, one feels likl“p