The Poetry of the Silver Age

By analogy with Pushkin's Golden Age, the era at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was called the Silver Age and was marked by an unprecedented number of bright names in Russian poetry: Balmont and Bryusov, Gippius and Merezhkovsky, Sologub and Anensky, Blok and Akhmatova, Gumilev and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, Yesenin and Mayakovsky, and dozens of others. But this era not only gave rise to a great number of poetic talents. The Silver Age was characterized by a special romantic worldview, an amazing atmosphere that reflected the spiritual uplift and new trends that affected both Russian literature and Russian painting, philosophy, music, and theater,— it was a true 'cultural renaissance,' as Nikolai Berdyaev wrote. This collection presents the brightest poets of the Silver Age with sufficient completeness, whose works have stood the test of time and have become the heritage not only of the past era but also a part of Russian literature as a whole.