Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on September 17, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book launch of Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky‘s “All the World on a Page: A Critical Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry.” The authors will discuss the book in conversation with Stephanie Sandler and Kevin Platt.
The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. “All the World on a Page” gathers thirty-four poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts. The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov’s Symbolist erotic dreamworld, Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate, Maria Stepanova’s pandemic allegory of political repression, Galina Rymbu’s energetic manifesto “My Vagina.”
An introduction explores the abiding inspiration of modernism on the Russian lyric tradition. Kahn and Lipovetsky’s separate chapter essays, informed by extensive knowledge of the existing scholarship and critical styles of interpretation, consider how the interplay of originality and tradition and form and voice work to engage the reader. The poems themselves, many of them in newly commissioned translations, operate outside state-mandated poetic styles to address the reader directly, “tête-à-tête,” as Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel lecture. With each chapter devoted to a different poem, “All the World on a Page” allows readers to experience the richness of Russian poetry through poems and poets rather than through movements.
Andrew Kahn is professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. His books include “Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence and Mandelstam’s World.”
Mark Lipovetsky is professor of Slavic languages at Columbia University. A winner of the Andrei Bely Prize for his contribution to literary studies, he has published books on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, and post-Soviet literature. Kahn and Lipovetsky are coauthors (with Irina Reyfman and Stephanie Sandler) of “A History of Russian Literature.”
