Resurrecting a Great Golden Age Poet
It’s the final day of Russian Literature Week. We’ve celebrated all week by sharing events and excerpts from our Russian Library series. Today’s we are sharing an excerpt from a compilation of Konstantin Batyushklov’s work.
The final Russian Literature Week event will be held tonight at Book Culture in New York City and will include The Man Who Couldn’t Die author Olga Slavnikova.
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Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov. Presented and translated by Peter France
Praised by Alexander Pushkin, elegized by Osip Mandelstam, and rumored to be the inspiration for Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian literature. This genre-defying book blends biography and anthology to introduce a nearly forgotten poet, who Pushkin said “did for the Russian language what Petrarch did for Italian.”
Read an excerpt from the beginning of the book.
Want to read more? You can find more excerpts from our Russian Library series on ISSUU.
