The rich and ongoing development of Russian lyric poetry, explored through close readings of thirty-four poems by poets ranging from Alexander Blok to Maria Stepanova

The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. All the World on a Page gathers thirty-four poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts. The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov’s Symbolist erotic dreamworld, Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate, Maria Stepanova’s pandemic allegory of political repression, Galina Rymbu’s energetic manifesto “My Vagina.”

An introduction explores the abiding inspiration of modernism on the Russian lyric tradition. Kahn and Lipovetsky's separate chapter essays, informed by extensive knowledge of the existing scholarship and critical styles of interpretation, consider how the interplay of originality and tradition and form and voice work to engage the reader. The poems themselves, many of them in newly commissioned translations, operate outside state-mandated poetic styles to address the reader directly, “tête-à-tête,” as Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel lecture. With each chapter devoted to a different poem, All the World on a Page allows readers to experience the richness of Russian poetry through poems and poets.

"There was no shortage of great Russian prose written during the twentieth century, much of it inevitably representing a period of revolution, war, penal servitude, and political collapse; but the distinction and prestige of poetry never waned in Russia, a country in which poetry has been regarded as the premier source of creative inventiveness and psychological and emotional truth. Despite the huge challenges posed by the Soviet system, poetry found a route to talk about the interior life and explore individual consciousness, and through linguistic means to present a different, defamiliarized take on the world. And the form has flourished in the post-Soviet era. In this new anthology, editors Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky aim to demonstrate that poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first century is the jewel in the crown of Russian literature. Out of each of the thirty-four works here included a personal view of the world emerges, but this collection as a whole conveys a bigger picture about a Russian poetic tradition that is both national and international, playful and existential, historical and contemporary. Each poem is reproduced in the original Russian and presented in translation. An explanatory essay introduces each poet and offers a close reading of the poem, with specific consideration of form, language, and questions of translation. The introduction provides an overview of the Russian tradition and explores how the history of its poetry is also an image of this complex and fascinating country. Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky aim to demonstrate that Russian poetry has been unstintingly responsive and illuminatingly vital even at the darkest historical times. Whatever the context, whether one of Socialist Realism or Glasnost', and whatever the mode of publication, whether official or clandestine in samizdat, Russian poetry has exhibited a remarkable resourcefulness"--