Stray Dog Cabaret

<b>A New York Review Books Original</b> <p/><i>A master anthology of Russia's most important poetry newly collected and never before published in English</i> <p/>In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets artists and musicians a place to meet drink read brawl celebrate and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence Twelve; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company putting together his great youthful hymn to nature <i>My Sister Life</i>. <p/> It was a transforming moment--not just for Russian but for world poetry--and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade revolution and terror were to disperse silence and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.