During Osip Mandelstam’s internal exile in the Soviet city Voronezh, Anna Akhmatova visited her Acmeist colleague, whose 1934 arrest she had witnessed, and wrote this poem in March 1936. The poem first appeared in the journal Leningrad, with the last… Read More ›
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s To Sergei Yesenin You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere. Emptiness… Fly, cutting your way into starry dubiety. No advances, no pubs for you there. Sobriety. No, Yessenin, this is not deridingly,- in my throat not… Read More ›
Pre-Morning (Predutro) is the title poem of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s first book of poetry published after his Collected Poems in 1991. The 11 quatrains that make up the poem are set in a liminal time, when the day is coming into… Read More ›
“On a Red Steed” (Na krasnom kone) first appeared in Tsvetaeva’s Remeslo (Craft) in 1923. In this poem, the female speaker traces the development of a woman poet, explores her source of inspiration, and identifies the sacrifices she has to… Read More ›
This 1940 cycle of five poems is included in Poems and Long Poems (Stikhotvoreniya i poemy), published in 1979. The poem’s first appearance in the journal Leningrad (1946) was suppressed swiftly, and the publication led to the poem’s condemnation when… Read More ›
“I Am Goya” (“Я – Гойя!”), composed in 1957, first appeared in Andrei Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mosaics), which was published in Vladimir, USSR, in 1960, when the poet was 27 years old. It is reputedly “one of the poet’s… Read More ›
Regarded as the definitive novel by Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), Quiet Flows the Don was both a significant contribution to the corpus of work that earned Sholokhov the Nobel Prize in 1965 and a source of extensive and long-standing… Read More ›
The Gift is the final and most important Russian novel (English translation, 1963) by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). The semi-autobiographical story of a young Russian émigré writer living in Berlin in the 1920s, The Gift was first serialized in the Paris… Read More ›
Regarded as the author’s most elaborate novel, with a vision, scope, and breadth befitting its topic, The First Circle addresses the recurrent theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s oeuvre, namely the “internal freedom” which even the most totalitarian of political and cultural… Read More ›
The Moscow-Tartu school (MTS) is a group of Soviet linguists (including Valerii Ivanov, Isaak Revzin, Vladimir Toporov), folklorists (Eleazar Meletinskij, Dmitri Segal), Orientalists (Aleksandr Piatigorskij, Boris Ogibenin), and literary scholars (including Jurij Levin, Jurij Lotman, Boris Uspenskij) who, since about… Read More ›
Treatises devoted to the study of style can be found as early as Demetrius’s On Style (C.E. 100). But most pre-twentieth-century discussions appear as secondary components of rhetorical and grammatical analyses or in general studies of literature and literary language…. Read More ›
Russian Formalism, a movement of literary criticism and interpretation, emerged in Russia during the second decade of the twentieth century and remained active until about 1930. Members of what can be loosely referred to as the Formalist school emphasized first… Read More ›
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