Russian Silver Age Poetry

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.