Amidst the Noisy Ball...

Each of us has known the song "My Little Bells" since childhood, and everyone can at least hum the first verse of the romance "Amidst the Noisy Ball." But if asked about the author of the lyrics of these songs,... almost anyone would attribute the authorship of "Little Bells" to Tyutchev and "Amidst the Noisy Ball" to Pushkin, even though their author is Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy. A talented poet, more than 80 of whose works were set to music by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other great domestic composers and became part of Russian culture almost at a subconscious level. It is the lyrical poems of A.K. Tolstoy that make up the first part of this collection. The second part includes ballads, parables, and stylizations of bylinas, written on both historical and mystical, fairy-tale, and fantastic themes…