Monday 5 October 2015 7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.
Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TA
Pushkin Press has commissioned Boris Dralyuk to edit an anthology (working title: 1917 and All That) marking the centenary of the February and October Revolutions. He will discuss his plans for the anthology, as well as a number of translations, including poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Zinaida Gippius and Alexander Blok. This is a Pushkin Club event and all are welcome.
Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews. He has translated and co-translated several volumes of poetry and prose from Russian and Polish, and is the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).
From “14 December 1917”
Will our pure heroes grant us pardon?
We didn’t keep their covenant –
all that is holy has been squandered:
our shame, the honour of our land.
We stood beside them, stood together,
when storm clouds gathered in our skies.
The Bride appeared. And then the soldiers
drove bayonets through both her eyes.
(Zinaida Gippius, tr. Boris Dralyuk)