In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence "Twelve;" that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life.

It was a transforming moment — not just for Russian but for world poetry — and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

"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 café-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 cafés, 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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[T]he most versatile American translator of his generation....[I]ntense and subversive." Richard Howard

A New York Review Books Original <BR>"A master anthology of Russia's most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English" <BR>In the years immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog Cabaret was a famed haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet people, drink together, give public readings, and put on performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary and artistic ferment of that time. It was then that Aleksander Blok, a master to rival Rilke, composed his apocalyptic sequence "The Twelve"; that the radical experimentation in poetry and in the theater of the futurists Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky took place; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova's poignant early love poems saw the light; and that the electrifying Marina Tsvetayeva dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, "My Sister, Life." <BR>It was an extraordinary moment-one of the great occasions not only in the history of Russian but of world poetry-but it was a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, Revolution and terror were to disperse, prematurely silence, and destroy many of the poets of the Stray Dog Cabaret. <BR>No book better captures the intensity and inspiration of that time than this remarkable anthology, compiled by the late Paul Schmidt, a professional Slavicist who was also a man of the theater. Here Schmidt offers spellbinding new translations of "The Twelve" and Tsvetayeva's "Poem of the End," surrounding these works with the many beautiful poems that the poets of the Stray Dog Cabaret wrote to and for each other. The resultis a new kind of anthology, from which the personal and poetic energies of that long-ago moment shine forth with undimmed brilliance.

Paul Schmidt (1934-1999), translator, poet, actor, librettist, playwright, and essayist, was born in Brooklyn.