Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9780691207162
Format: Trade binding
Year: 2025
Publisher: Princeton University Press


Description:
The rich and ongoing development of Russian lyric poetry, explored through close readings of thirty-four poems by poets ranging from Alexander Blok to Maria Stepanova




The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country's politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. All the World on a Page gathers thirty-four poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts. The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov's Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova's lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov's Symbolist erotic dreamworld, Joseph Brodsky's pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate, Maria Stepanova's pandemic allegory of political repression, Galina Rymbu's energetic manifesto "My Vagina."




An introduction explores the abiding inspiration of modernism on the Russian lyric tradition. Kahn and Lipovetsky's separate chapter essays, informed by extensive knowledge of the existing scholarship and critical styles of interpretation, consider how the interplay of originality and tradition and form and voice work to engage the reader. The poems themselves, many of them in newly commissioned translations, operate outside