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.

"Compelling."---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews
"You don’t get to read a book like this and walk away untouched. These are poems that have outlived their governments. They survived the burning of books, the erasure of names, the collapse of buildings no one admits were there. They remain. Not as artifacts, but as voices. Clear. Defiant. Cold to the touch."---Cassandra Fong, The Indiependent
"Highly researched. . . . Particularly beneficial for aspiring linguists and students."---Belinda Cooke, The High Window
"[A] marvelous book. . . . In All the World on a Page, Kahn and Lipovetsky open for us a large, complex and variegated terrain in which to wander, explore, to ponder the work and lives of men and women who, without exception, wrote poetry in periods of oppressive degradation and danger. And here we may find the inspiration, the courage and the idealism to seek the songs hidden in what may well be a bleak and unpromising future. Poems, as ever, are not simply instances of elite insular self-expression, but, as is clear in the work presented in this anthology, the redemption of our inner journeys and the cultures where they take place. These poems thus expand and deepen our common language and thus enable us to find an ever broader and more profound common ground."---Douglas Penick, On the Seawall
"A brilliant and idiosyncratic meditation on Russian poetry by two revered scholars."---Sarah Pratt, The Russian Review
"Compelling and original."---James Rann, Slavonic and East European Review

Andrew Kahn is professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. His books include Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence and Mandelstam’s World. Mark Lipovetsky is professor of Slavic languages at Columbia University. A winner of the Andrei Bely Prize for his contribution to literary studies, he has published books on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, and post-Soviet literature. Kahn and Lipovetsky are coauthors (with Irina Reyfman and Stephanie Sandler) of A History of Russian Literature.