"There was no shortage of great Russian prose written during the twentieth century, much of it inevitably representing a period of revolution, war, penal servitude, and political collapse; but the distinction and prestige of poetry never waned in Russia, a country in which poetry has been regarded as the premier source of creative inventiveness and psychological and emotional truth. Despite the huge challenges posed by the Soviet system, poetry found a route to talk about the interior life and explore individual consciousness, and through linguistic means to present a different, defamiliarized take on the world. And the form has flourished in the post-Soviet era. In this new anthology, editors Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky aim to demonstrate that poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first century is the jewel in the crown of Russian literature. Out of each of the thirty-four works here included a personal view of the world emerges, but this collection as a whole conveys a bigger picture about a Russian poetic tradition that is both national and international, playful and existential, historical and contemporary. Each poem is reproduced in the original Russian and presented in translation. An explanatory essay introduces each poet and offers a close reading of the poem, with specific consideration of form, language, and questions of translation. The introduction provides an overview of the Russian tradition and explores how the history of its poetry is also an image of this complex and fascinating country. Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky aim to demonstrate that Russian poetry has been unstintingly responsive and illuminatingly vital even at the darkest historical times. Whatever the context, whether one of Socialist Realism or Glasnost', and whatever the mode of publication, whether official or clandestine in samizdat, Russian poetry has exhibited a remarkable resourcefulness"--

Andrew Kahn is professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow in St Edmund Hall, Oxford. His books include Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence and Mandelstam’s World. Mark Lipovetsky is professor of Slavic languages at Columbia University. A winner of the Andrei Bely Prize for his contribution to literary studies, he has published books on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, and post-Soviet literature. Kahn and Lipovetsky are coauthors (with Irina Reyfman and Stephanie Sandler) of A History of Russian Literature.