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 ›
Scholars consider this complex autobiographical triptych an exceptional achievement. In it, Anna Akhmatova revisits pre–World War I St. Petersburg with the hindsight of several decades and from the perspective of Tashkent and Moscow. The cycle, “the work that would crown… Read More ›
Written shortly after Mayakovsky’s first meeting with Lily Brik in 1915, this poem takes its tone from Catullus’s “I love, and I hate” and its mood from the gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom the poem alludes… Read More ›
This poem begins with the observation that no marker preserves the memory of the Jews and others whom the Germans killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, on September 29, 1941. Yevtushenko’s words (and the… Read More ›