Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her penname from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married...

We were music in the ice…’ – this is how Pasternak described the fate of the generation that in the twenties had to ‘move from lyric poetry to epic poetry’. It was then that he created great works, thoroughly imbued with the revolutionary element: the poems ‘High Disease’, ‘The Year Nine Hundred and Fifth’, ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’. The time demanded an epic genre, and Pasternak accepted this...

Sergei Prilutsky is a punk writer, virtuoso stylist and hooligan pupil of the ‘swamp glamour society’. A piercing lyricist and a desperate translator from the unbearable to the human. Author of the books ‘Hero of the Age of Stability’, ‘Patriotism for Dummies’, ‘Nineties Forever’, ‘Nothing Scary’, etc. Born in Brest. Since the end of the zero years he has lived in Ukraine. He survived the...

Masha Kaleka (1907–1975) emigrated three times. The first time as a child: her family fled pogroms from Poland to Germany. The second time in 1938, from Berlin. The Nazis recognized her first poetry collections as ‘harmful and undesirable,’ and she emigrated to the United States. And later to Israel. She escaped the worst. But homesickness weighed on her until her death. She never found a new...

Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humor along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe’s ‘Elf King’ and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde....

The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called ‘a strange and beautiful marriage of Joseph Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective.’ Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poète...

Osip Mandelstam is one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work. Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full...

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with...