It is difficult to find a Russian person who doesn't know by heart at least one poem by Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925), whose distinctive lyricism and lush rural imagery have indelibly imprinted themselves into the Russian consciousness. Second in popularity among Russian speakers only to Alexander Pushkin, Yesenin has received surprisingly little attention abroad, where he is best known for his brief marriage to Isadora Duncan. This bilingual edition (original Russian side-by-side with translation by Anton Yakovlev) is an attempt to rectify the relative scarcity of Yesenin's English translations and to introduce English speakers to many of his most beloved and iconic poems.

We act like children with our dead, Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: confused, / as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die. In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart... Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.

These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine's most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: nothing predicted the arrival of humankind..../ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank... Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: what will kill you will seduce you first, or they can strike you like Lomachenko's lightening jabs: flirt, Cheka agent, bitch.

Leading readers into the world's darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.

The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova's 2020 stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor--the world had withdrawn from her, time had gone numb. When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of a transformative, epochal experience. Her book-length poem Holy Winter, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen time and its slow thawing.

As a poet and essayist, Stepanova was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow's cosmopolitan literary scene until it was strangled by Putin, along with civil liberties and dissent. Like Joseph Brodsky before her, she has mastered modern poetry's rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the languages and traditions of Russian, European, and transatlantic literature, potently yet subtly creating a voice like no other.

Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She takes in and incorporates the confusing signals from social networks and the media, opening herself up to the voices of kindred poets like Sylvia Plath, Inger Christensen, and Anne Carson.

This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan's poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan's no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.--World Literature Today

A startling collection of verse.--Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement

Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully, reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world-renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where every year there's less and less air. Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people will never let it be / like it was before.

Osip Mandelstam's second collection of poems, Tristia, astonished Russian readers in 1922 with its daring verse forms and meditations on revolution, exile, death and rebirth. Thomas de Waal's new translation gives English-language reader the chance to experience the entire collection for the first time.

Andrew Davis's translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.

This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.

The first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry and its embrace of freedom--formally, thematically, and spiritually

Since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural underground, poets reacted with immediacy to events in the world. In The Freest Speech in Russia, Stephanie Sandler offers the first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry, showing how these poems both express and exemplify freedom.

This period was a time of great poetic flourishing for Russian poets, whether they remained in Russia or lived elsewhere. Sandler examines the work of dozens of poets--including Gennady Aygi, Joseph Brodsky, Grigory Dashevsky, Arkady Dragomoshchenko, Mikhail Eremin, Elena Fanailova, Anna Glazova, Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, Olga Sedakova, Elena Shvarts, and Maria Stepanova--analyzing their engagement with politics, performance, music, photography, and religious thought, and with poetic forms small and large. Each chapter investigates one of these topics, with extensive quotation from the poetry, including translations of all texts into English.

In an afterword, Sandler considers poets' responses to Russia's war on Ukraine and the clampdown on free expression. Many have left Russia, but their work persists, and they remain vocal opponents of domestic political oppression and international violence.

When Columns, a slim volume of poems written by an unknown young Russian poet named Nikolai Zabolotsky, appeared in 1929, it took the literary world of Leningrad [St. Petersburg] by storm. Zabolotsky was not part of the city's artistic elite, having arrived in Leningrad from the provinces only eight years earlier, but the privations and confusion he found in the city following the 1917 Revolution and ensuing civil war stimulated his poetic imagination. Zabolotsky's translator Dmitri Manin describes his poetry as portraying a worldview with no oppositions, no differences between the living and dead, abstract and concrete, naive and sophisticated, artful and artless, meaningful and meaningless, high and low, important and trivial, funny and sad. It's all mixed inseparably...

The early poems of Nikolai Zabolotsky present to us images of such stark and surprising vividness that they continue to stun nearly a century after their publication. Dmitri Manin's translations retain the freshness of Zabolotsky's vision - that of an imaginative outsider thrust into a world torn apart and remade, haphazardly, by a bloody revolution and civil war - as well as the solemn music that effectively counterpoints the poet's cavalcade of novel images. This book will change the way you see the world around you. - Boris Dralyuk

Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation

Reading these words now is enough to make one's breath catch. [Ukraine's western partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.--Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country's struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry's power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan's lyrical monuments, forged entirely in wartime, beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.

Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, and with a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan's poetry is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Penguin Classic

Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, based on the statue of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg and the great flood of 1824, is widely considered to be his most successful narrative poem, the second most famous poem in Russian literature after his Eugene Onegin, and notoriously difficult to translate. One of the most influential works in Russian literature, it will appeal to readers of Dostoyevsky's The Double, Andrei Biely's Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova's poetry, and the works of Nikolai Gogol. This new translation, described by Robert Chandler as truly wonderfull, is accompanied here by Pushkin's greatest shorter verses. They range from lyric poetry to narrative verse based on traditional Russian stories of enchanted tsars and magical fish. Together, they show the dazzling range and achievement of Russia's greatest poet.

Today is a Different War is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her penname from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. Together they became associated with the literary movement know as Acmeism. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter revolutionary activities.

Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia's leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953-with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War-she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union in the wake of the notorious speech by the Communist Party cultural boss Andrey Zhdanov, in which he described her as a 'cross between a nun and a whore'. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges.

After Stalin's death in 1953 the restrictions on Akhmatova's work were gradually relaxed and a selection of her poems, entitled The Course of Time, was published in 1958. She died in Moscow in 1966.