All the World on a Page

A Critical Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry

Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691259642, 9780691207162
• eBook ISBN: 9780691269399
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The rich and ongoing development of Russian lyric poetry, explored through close readings of thirty-four poems by poets ranging from Alexander Blok to Maria Stepanova

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 thirty-four 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, Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate, Maria Stepanova’s pandemic allegory of political repression, Galina Rymbu’s energetic manifesto “My Vagina.”

An introduction explores the abiding inspiration of modernism on the Russian lyric tradition. Kahn and Lipovetsky's separate chapter essays, informed by extensive knowledge of the existing scholarship and critical styles of interpretation, consider how the interplay of originality and tradition and form and voice work to engage the reader. The poems themselves, many of them in newly commissioned translations, operate outside state-mandated poetic styles to address the reader directly, “tête-à-tête,” as Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel lecture. With each chapter devoted to a different poem, All the World on a Page allows readers to experience the richness of Russian poetry through poems and poets rather than through movements.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Enduring Modernism
• 1. Alexander Blok, “Free Thoughts. On Death” (1908): In Baudelaire’s Shadow
• 2. Elena Guro, “Gone to sleep, gone quiet now, so kind” (1912): Performing Sincerity
• 3. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Listen!” (1914): Love and the Egotistical Sublime
• 4. Nikolai Gumilev, “The Sixth Sense” (1920): Poetic Darwinism
• 5. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Ballad” (1922): The Return of Orpheus
• 6. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Suppose I make a timepiece of humanity” (1922): The King of Time
• 7. Boris Pasternak, “Poetry” (1922): Experiencing Lyric
• 8. Osip Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder (A Pindaric Fragment)” (1923): Time Future, Time Past
• 9. Mikhail Kuzmin, “Not a governor’s lady with an officer” (1924): Exit God
• 10. Vladimir Nabokov, “Lilith” (1928): Decadent Reverie
• 11. Daniil Kharms, “Myr” / “The Werld” (1930): I Think Therefore …
• 12. Alexander Vvedensky, “Guest on a Horse” (1931–34): Time–Space Conundrum
• 13. Nikolai Oleinikov, “Cockroach” (1934): A Farcical Tragedy
• 14. Marina Tsvetaeva, “I Embrace You Like the Horizon” (1936): Transcendent Love
• 15. Anna Akhmatova, “Secrets of Craft” (1936–60): The Forms of Inspiration
• 16. Ian Satunovsky, “Yesterday, late on my way to work” (1939): Poetics of the Ethical
• 17. Gennady Gor, “I lie together with my wife, the two of us in the apartment” (1942–44): Is There Life after Death?
• 18. Igor Kholin, “Fences. Trash-heaps. Flyers. Ads” (mid-1950s): The Slums of Communism
• 19. Nikolai Zabolotsky, “Somewhere not far from Magadan” (1956): A Gulag Elegy
• 20. Bella Akhmadulina, “Along My Street” (1959): An Elegy on Betrayal
• 21. Alexander Galich, “The Night Watch” (1963): History as the Uncanny
• 22. Vladimir Vysotsky, “My Gypsy Song” (1967–68): Choreography of Despair
• 23. Dmitri Prigov, Three Poems about Dishwashing (1980s): The Banality of the Romantic
• 24. Elena Shvarts, “A Rubbish Heap” (1983): An Ode to Rot
• 25. Ry Nikonova, “furious furious rabious” (1985): Threading the Avant-Garde
• 26. Olga Sedakova, “The Grasshopper and the Cricket” (1979–85): The Music of the Earth
• 27. Lev Losev, “One Day in the Life of Lev Vladimirovich” (1985): Self-Portrait in a Cloudy Mirror
• 28. Joseph Brodsky, “Homage to Chekhov” (1993): Pastiching the Prosaic
• 29. Lev Rubinshtein, “That’s me” (1995): The Self as Card Index
• 30. Elena Fanailova, “… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan” (2003): Scars of Imperial Eros
• 31. Linor Goralik, “Little Star” (2010): The Tale of the Hare and the Wolf
• 32. Galina Rymbu, “My Vagina” (2018): The Personal Is the Political
• 33. Polina Barskova, “Children’s Literature” (2019): The Garden of Earthly Delights
• 34. Maria Stepanova, “A little like this: instead of coming out of the closet” (2021): A Quiet Apocalypse
• Acknowledgments
• Notes and References
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index