The author of several volumes of poetry in Russian and English, Ilya Kutik is also a consummate essayist in the Russian tradition: aphoristic, allusive, deploying unlikely juxtapositions and poetic measures to arrive at surprising and gratifying insights. In this first English-language collection of Kutik's essays, readers encounter one of the best and most original contemporary Russian stylists.

As compact as prose poems, Kutik's essays contribute to ongoing efforts to build contemporary theories of image, metaphor, meter, rhythm, and other key concepts of avant-garde and postmodern poetry that define contemporary poetics and critical theory. The essays provide formulas for decoding these complex aspects of contemporary literature; they reveal the poetry of scholarly prose, the metaphoric potential of the concepts and terms so commonly applied to poetry in a nonpoetic way.

The essays also introduce American readers to Scandinavian and Russian poets, such as Stagnelius and Aigi. His choice of poets highlights what he believes to be the major trends in poetic evolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The intersections of Russian and Swedish poetic traditions, as well as Kutik's own accomplishments as a translator of Scandinavian poetry, draw together the "national" elements of this book.

The final section, "Twelve Stories about Swedenborg", is both a continuation and a culmination of Kutik's project, in which the poetic elements discussed earlier in conceptual and historical terms reveal their mystical dimension. Here the life of Swedenborg, the great Swedish mystic, becomes a poetic narrative that exemplifies the laws of epic poetry articulated by Kutik in the book'sprevious essays.

ILYA KUTIK is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University and a poet, critic, and translator of Swedish literature into Russian.

ANDREW WACHTEL is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. He is the author of Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia.