Curated playlist
20th-century Russian poets
- Alexander BlokAlexander Alexandrovich Blok heard something in the summer of 1917 that most people could not. Writing in his diary, he recorded: "I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me." That sentence…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Anna AkhmatovaAnna Akhmatova chose a Tatar surname for herself because her father refused to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name. The surname she took was her grandmother's: Akhmatova, carrying the lineage of Khan Akhmat, a descendant of…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His…
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several decades reshaping itself by force. His father, Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov, was…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match the model of his pistol. Neighbors reported hearing two shots, not one. Ten days…
- Sergei YeseninSergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old. The day before, he had cut his wrist and used his own blood to write a farewell poem. That poem,…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…
- Ivan BuninIvan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living as an exile in France. On the 10th of November that year, Paris newspapers ran…
- Konstantin BalmontKonstantin Balmont once sent Leo Tolstoy a copy of his most celebrated book with a letter that read: "This book is a prolonged scream of a soul caught in the process of being torn apart." That sentence captures something essential about a…