The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

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. Although prose briefly gained the high ground, poetry again became dominant with the 'Silver Age', which held to a magical view of the world when reason and progress appeared to be collapsing throughout early twentieth-century Europe. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors and write verse. This fabulous anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, presenting the very best poems in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others.