The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

This is an enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler. Although prose briefly gained the high ground, poetry again became dominant with the 'Silver Age', which held to a magical view of the world when reason and progress appeared to be collapsing throughout early twentieth-century Europe. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature.

This fabulous anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, presenting the very best poems in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors and write verse. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet.

Robert Chandler is a poet and translator.His translations from Russian include Aleksandr Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter, Nikolay Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and The Road. With his wife Elizabeth and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov; Soul won the 2004 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for best translation from a Slavonic language, as did his translation of The Railway by the contemporary Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. His Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics.