The Stray Dog Cabaret ─ A Book of Russian Poems

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, My Sister, Life.
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.

Paul Schmidt wrote many award winning translations. He held a Ph.D in Slavic Literature from Harvard and was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Texas and Wellesley College. His critical essays appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Delos. He was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Catherine Ciepiela is Professor of Russian at Amherst, and author of The Same Solitude, a book about Marinas Tsvetaeva's long-distance romance with Boris Pasterna.

Honor Moore's collections of poems are RedShoes, Darling, and Memoir. She edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and is author of The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent.