Russian Silver Age Poetry ─ Texts and Contexts

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.

Martha Kelly is Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. She is the author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press (Fall 2015). She also works on the genre of publitsistika—which overlaps with literary journalism—in the immediately pre- and post-Soviet periods. In connection with this project, she is translating the essays of contemporary poet and scholar Ol’ga Sedakova. She has published articles on Russian modernist poetry, on Chekhov, and on Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.