A New York Review Books Original
A master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English
In the years immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog Cabaret was a famed haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet people, drink together, give public
readings, and put on performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary and artistic ferment of that time. It was then that Aleksander Blok, a master to rival
Rilke, composed his apocalyptic sequence “The Twelve”; that the radical experimentation in poetry and in the theater of the futurists Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky took place; that the lapidary
lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova’s poignant early love poems saw the light; and that the electrifying Marina Tsvetayeva dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company,
putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life.
It was an extraordinary moment–one of the great occasions not only in the history of Russian but of world poetry–but it was a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, Revolution and
terror were to disperse, prematurely silence, and destroy many of the poets of the Stray Dog Cabaret.
No book better captures the intensity and inspiration of that time than this remarkable anthology, compiled by the late Paul Schmidt, a professional Slavicist who was also a man of the theater.
Here Schmidt offers spellbinding new translations of “The Twelve” and Tsvetayeva’s “Poem of the End,” surrounding these works with the many beautiful poems that the poets of the Stray Dog
Cabaret wrote to and for each other. The result is a new kind of anthology, from which the personal and poetic energies of that long-ago moment shine forth with undimmed brilliance.
