Russian

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics)

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry

Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi

Witness to the international and domestic chaos of the first half of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova (1888-1966) chronicled Russia's troubled times in poems of sharp beauty and intensity. Her genius is now universally acknowledged, and recent biographies attest to a remarkable resurgence of interest in her poetry in this country. Here is the essence of Akhmatova - a landmark selection and translation, including excerpts from "Poem with a Hero."

Hope Against Hope: A Memoir

Nadezhda means "hope" in Russian. And Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, is aptly named, for it is hope alone that seems to have buoyed her strength during very trying times. In this, the first of two volumes of her memoirs, she offers a harrowing account of the last four years she spent with her late husband. She re-creates in terse, stripped-to-the-bone sentences the atmosphere of intense paranoia that enveloped Russia's literary intelligentsia. In 1933, Osip had written a lighthearted satire ridiculing Stalin. It proved to be a 16-line death sentence. Nadezhda recalls the night the secret police came for him: "There was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip,' I said." He was arrested, interrogated, exiled, and eventually rearrested. Nadezhda chronicles each turn of event, describing her feelings of heartbreak and joy with self-effacing discipline. Not only does Mandelstam write with the vitality and insight of the classic Russian novelists, she is far too selfless to write an account of her own travails. Instead, she acts as witness to a society's. Similarly, although Osip's mind became unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his spirit remained unbroken; it is this liberating, imaginative force that Nadezhda celebrates in Hope Against Hope. --Lilian Pizzichini, Amazon.co.uk

History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

The Three Sisters

The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics)

Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror.

This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process.

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Initially published in 1990, when the New York Times Book Review named it one of fourteen "Best Books of the Year," Judith Hemschemeyer's translation of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is the definitive edition, and has sold over 13,000 copies, making it one of the most successful poetry titles of recent years.

This reissued and revised printing features a new biographical essay as well as expanded notes to the poems, both by Roberta Reeder, project editor and author of Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (St. Martin's Press, 1994). Encyclopedic in scope, with more than 800 poems, 100 photographs, a historical chronology, index of first lines, and bibliography. The Complete Poems will be the definitive English language collection of Akhmatova for many years to come.

Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

Anna Akhmatova is not only Russia’s finest woman poet but perhaps the greatest in the history of Western culture. This volume brings together all of D. M. Thomas’s acclaimed translations of Akhmatova’s poems, including “Poem Without a Hero” and “Requiem,” her poem of the Stalinist Terror.

A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics)

From his teenage years in provincial Russia to his premature death in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote thousands of letters to a wide range of correspondents. This fascinating new selection tells Chekhov’s story as a man and a writer through affectionate bulletins to his family, insightful discussions of literature with publishers and theater directors, and tender love letters to his actress wife. Vividly evoking landscapes, people, and his daily life, the letters offer revealing glimpses into Chekhov’s preoccupations—the onset of tuberculosis, his dual careers as doctor and writer, and his ambivalence about his growing reputation as Russia’s foremost playwright and author. This volume takes us inside the mind of one of the world’s greatest writers, and the character that emerges from these pages is resilient, generous, charming, and life enhancing.