Overview

Russian Silver Age writers were full participants in European literary debates and movements. Today some of these poets, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, are known around the world. This volume introduces Silver Age poetry with its cultural ferment, the manifestos and the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic debates, the occult references and sexual experimentation, and the emergence of women, Jews, gay and lesbian poets, and peasants as part of a brilliant and varied poetic environment. After a thorough introduction, the volume offers brief biographies of the poets and selections of their work in translation-many of them translated especially for this volume-as well as critical and fictional texts (some by the poets themselves) that help establish the context and outline the lively discourse of the era and its indelible moral and artistic aftermath.

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9781618113702

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Reviews

The early twentieth century was a time of apocalyptic fears, revolutionary stirrings, and excellent poetry. The window this volume opens to the Silver Age captures all that and much more. Billed as a coursebook, RSAP will have undoubted value in classrooms exploring pre-Soviet cultural movements and fin-de-siecle poetry. Yet through its diverse poems, essays, and the editors' explanatory notes, it proves its broader appeal as a gateway to great poetry and a panorama of the turbulent years leading to the Bolshevik Revolution. -- Russian Life (March/April 2016)

Author Information

Sibelan Forrester teaches Russian language and literature as well as a regular Translation Workshop at Swarthmore College. She has published numerous articles on Russian poetry (especially Marina Tsvetaeva), and Russian folklore. Her translation of Vladimir Propp's book The Russian Folktale was published by Wayne State University Press in 2012. She also translates contemporary Russian poetry, most recently that of Maria Stepanova, and her translations of Elena Ignatova's poetry, /The Diving Bell, were published in 2006 by Zephyr Press. She is co-editor of a book of articles on Russian literature, Engendering Slavic Literatures (Indiana UP, 1996, with Pamela Chester) and of a book of articles on East European literature and culture, Over the Wall/After the Fall (Indiana UP, 2004, with Magdalena Zaborowska and Elena Gapova).

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