All the World on a Page

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 rather than through movements.

“An immensely useful book in the way it is assembled, but also one filled with pleasure, in both the poems themselves and in the exceptionally fine commentary. All readers will learn from the beautiful close readings that attend to form, diction, rhythm, and intertextual allusions.”—Stephanie Sandler, author of The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry Unbound, 1989–2022

“The contours of the twentieth-century Russian poetic canon have been redrawn many times in recent decades. Kahn and Lipovetsky’s anthology offers a compelling version of the canon while daring to represent it through an idiosyncratic selection of texts which fascinates at every turn. Their twentieth century emphasizes an abiding spirit of modernist experimentation that persisted through a tumultuous and often repressive era. With extensive analytical essays accompanying the poems, All the World on a Page is a fine guide to both celebrated and underappreciated poets, for scholars, students, and poetry enthusiasts alike.”—Lyubov Golburt, author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination

“In highly accessible language, All the World on a Page offers expert guidance to some of the most beautiful, culturally significant, and often challenging Russian poems and poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The selection of texts decisively revises and updates representation of the Russian poetic canon for the present moment. Kahn and Lipovetsky have done a tremendous service to all enthusiasts of Russian poetry—from undergraduate students, to scholars, to the broader public.”—Kevin M. F. Platt, author of Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders