Russians Archives - Sensitive Skin Magazine

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Yearning for homeland!

Marina Tsvetaeva

Yearning for homeland! Yearning for homeland! Long Exposed torment! It's completely all the same to me – Where completely alone To be, over which stones to trudge With a market tote, on the way home, Into a hous...

Poem

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�...

You – New Translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Poem

Jenny Wade

Ты Пришла— деловито, за рыком, за ростом, взглянув, разглядела просто мальчика. Взяла, отобрала сердце и просто пошла ...

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...

Memory – New Translation of Pushkin’s Poem

Jenny Wade

Воспоминание Когда для смертного умолкнет шумный день И на немые стогны града Полупрозрачная наляжет н�...