The Silver Age of Russian Poetry. Poems and Destinies: A Detailed Illustrated Commentary on Selected Works

The Silver Age is a bright and contradictory epoch in the history of Russian literature, characterized by the flourishing of poetry, the ideas of the synthesis of arts, life-creation, religious and philosophical searches, and luxurious salon culture. It is opened... by symbolism (which, in its early stages, is close to decadence), followed delicately by acmeism, and then futurism bursts loudly onto the deck of the steamship of contemporaneity.
In this collection, we intentionally expand the chronological framework of this era, including later phenomena (imagism, OBERIU), since they are a direct branch of futurism.
The turn of the century is a time when many significant events and discoveries occur at the breaking point. This is not only a surge of scientific and technical knowledge, the emergence of cinema, the spread of Nietzsche's philosophy, but also a crisis state before the onset of World War I and the revolution. Such periods are characterized by paradigm shifts and a sense of hope for renewal, including culture and language. Understanding this colorful era is particularly aided by the format of 'book within a book,' where poems are accompanied by comments and various illustrations from artists of that time, many of whom participated in the design of magazines and poetry collections.