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.