Writing
Three Poems by Vladimir Gandelsman
Anna Halberstadt
***
И от любви остаётся горстка
пепла, не больше напёрстка.
Нет, не страшно стало душе
быть нелюбимой уже.
Вот тебе рукави...
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Poem
Four New Translations of Sergei Yesenin – translated by Anton Yakovlev
Anton Yakovlev
Please enjoy these four poems from The Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems of Sergei Yesenin Translated by Anton Yakovlev, now available in print and Kindle format from Amazon. Or ask for it from your local bookstore or...
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Podcasts
S02E01 – Anton Yakovlev
Bernard Meisler
Anton Yakovlev in conversation with Bernard Meisler.
Welcome to season 2 of the Sensitive Skin magazine podcast! We discuss Anton's growing up in Moscow, during the final years of the Soviet Union, his emigration to t...
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Poem
Now light, now shadow
Naum Korzhavin
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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What Not
Yevgeny Yevtushenko Has Left the Planet
Valery Oisteanu
Yevgeny Yevtushenko has Left the Planet
On a quiet Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma
A Russian poet dies, smiling in his dream
All his life he waited for springtime
But spring never arrived, only sounds
The sound of wind w...
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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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Poem
untitled—a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva
Karina McCorkle
А следующий раз — глухонемая
Приду на свет, где всем свой стих дарю, свой слух дарю.
Ведь всё равно — что говорят — не пон...
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Poem
The Final Toast
Anna Akhmatova
Последний тост
Я пью за разорённый дом,
За злую жизнь мою,
За одиночество вдвоём,
И за тебя я пью,—
За ложь меня предавш...
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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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Story
The Nose
Nikolai Gogol
Part I
On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Voznesensky Prospekt (his family name is lost now—it no longer figures on a signbo...
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