The Stray Dog cabaret A book of Russian poems

Book - 2007

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891.713/Stray
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2nd Floor 891.713/Stray Due Apr 17, 2024
Subjects
Published
New York : New York Review Books c2007.
Language
English
Corporate Author
Brod︠i︡acha︠i︡a sobaka (Cabaret : Saint Petersburg, Russia)
Corporate Author
Brod︠i︡acha︠i︡a sobaka (Cabaret : Saint Petersburg, Russia) (-)
Other Authors
Paul Schmidt, 1934- (-), Catherine Ciepiela, Honor Moore, 1945-
Item Description
Includes poems by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Esenin.
Physical Description
xxiii, 140 p. ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781590171912
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

On New Year's Day, 1912, a cabaret with the cock a snook name Stray Dog opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, and became the place where the avant-garde met, debated, performed, and otherwise presented itself to itself. Habitues included the greatest concentration of major poets in Russian history, all born between 1880 and 1895: Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. The late Paul Schmidt was a man of the theater, and his translations of the Stray Dog group are crafted for declamation. He gives the two long poems, Blok's The Twelve and Tsvetaeva's Poem of the End, so much impetus and color (they are among their authors' masterpieces) that one hears them without reading aloud and sometimes can't help speaking them to appreciate them better. The selection extends long after the Stray Dog's closing, to Esenin's and Mayakovsky's suicide poems and Mandelstam's ferocious Poem about Stalin. Only Akhmatova and Pasternak lived beyond 1941, writing far more somberly than in their youth. This book conjures their group's initial passion, humor, and revolutionary zeal. --Ray Olson Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A professor of Russian whose translations included the plays of Anton Chekhov and the avant-garde writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, Schmidt (1934-1999) also worked with the director and composer Elizabeth Swados on what would have been groundbreaking musical settings for famous lyric poems and sequences from the great era of Russian modernism, set in the cafe-the Stray Dog-where modernists gathered. The theatrical work never appeared, but those drafts became this book, a memorial to the time-beginning around 1906, and concluding after Stalin's rise to power-when Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova created pellucid elegiac stanzas, Osip Mandelstam meditated on existential dilemmas, Vladimir Mayakosky exploded into radical free verse, and Khlebnikov obliterated the line between prophecy and nonsense. Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafes, of "sun and song," flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova-grown older, immersed in sorrow-proposes a toast "to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied." Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue not seen by PW. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.