Gossip & Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems & Prose

There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm.

This anthology's structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling--creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity--to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.

Thanks to the Antonia and Vladimer Kulaev Cultural Heritage Fund for support of this book, in honor of artist Elena Karina Canavier.

Featured writers: Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Bely, Joseph Brodsky, Daniil Kharms, Velimir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva

With versions and translations by: Katya Apekina, Walter Arndt, Clarence Brown, Christopher Colbath, Herbert Eagle, Katie Farris, Jane Gray Harris, Max Hayward, G. M. Hyde, Ilya Kaminsky, Jane Kenyon, Roger and Angela Keys, George L. Kline, Stanley Kunitz, Anna Lawton, Constance Link, Angela Livingstone, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Valzhyna Mort, Eugene Ostashevsky, George Reavey, Judson Rosengrant, Barry Rubin, Paul Schmidt, Janet Tucker, Jean Valentine, Daniel Weissbort, Margaret Wettlin, Christian Wiman, Matvei Yankelevich