What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page
Author: Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky
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 34 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, and Joseph Brodsky's pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate.
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