Poem
Wasps
Jenny Wade
In an interview from 1976, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was asked if she had any favorite poems. She mentioned two, both written in the winter of 1937: “Verses about an unknown ...
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Podcasts
S02E03 – Sensitive Skin Live At San Francisco LitCrawl
Jenny Wade
Sensitive Skin live at LitCrawl, recorded at the Valencia Room, San Francisco.
Instead of the usual conversation, why not give a listen to last week's Sensitive Skin reading at LitCrawl, live from San Francisco? Reade...
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Poem
Now light, now shadow
Jenny Wade
Naum Korzhavin was born in the Ukraine in 1925 and as a child witnessed the horrors of collectivization: “I remember the Kiev of 1933. People died right in the streets. . . We survived not only hunger. We got used to think...
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Poem
A conversation between landing craft in the Odessa Port
Jenny Wade
An excerpt from Mayakovsky Maximum Access, selected poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated and with commentary by Jenny Wade.
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A conversation between landing craft in the Odessa Port
Feather-clo...
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Classics
The Twilight of Freedom, a poem by Osip Mandelstam
Jenny Wade
Let us praise, brothers, freedom’s twilight,
The great diminishing year!
A heavy forest of nets is lowered
Into the turbulent waters of night.
You are ascending in desolate years,
Oh sun, judge, people.
Let us prai...
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Essay
Unfinished – A New Translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Poem Fragment
Jenny Wade
Unfinished, a poem fragment by Vladimir Mayakovsky, discovered in M’s papers after his suicide in 1930.
Любит? не любит? Я руки ломаю
и пальцы разбрасываю разломавши
т...
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Essay
Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris
Jenny Wade
During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...
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Essay
Memory – New Translation of Pushkin’s Poem
Jenny Wade
Воспоминание
Когда для смертного умолкнет шумный день
И на немые стогны града
Полупрозрачная наляжет н...
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Poem
Mayakovsky – New Translations
Jenny Wade
Маяковский в 1913 году
Я тебя в твоей не знала славе,
Помню только бурный твой рассвет,
Но, быть может, я сегодня впра...
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Essay
Maria Yudina
Jenny Wade
The Russian concert pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina, little known in the West, died this day, November 19, in 1970. She had a fervent cult following in the Soviet Union, partly because of her resistance to the establishme...
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Music
In Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich
Jenny Wade
Today is the anniversary of the death of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (Sept 29, 1906 - April 9, 1975).
Shostakovich struggled under a hostile and perilous political environment for his entire working life. Af...
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Essay
Alexander Blok – The Stranger
Jenny Wade
Alexander Blok, the supreme poet of the Russian Symbolist movement, died this day in the year 1921 in St. Petersburg, at the age of 40.
Blok broke from the tradition of Russian realism with its emphasis on social respo...
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