Russian Poets

Book excerpt: Russian poets have always been admired for the lyric and emotional intensity with which they forge private and public experience into verse, and this volume gathers together some of the best-loved, and most powerful and immediate poems from the greatest Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is the work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among many others. Arranged by theme—love, mortality, art, and the enduring mystery of Mother Russia herself—and presented in the best available translations, these poems will serve as both an introduction to the mastery of Russian poetry and a wide-ranging selection to be returned to again and again.