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Take Me to Stavanger - Poems
Anzhelina Polonskaya, Andrew Wachtel
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R467
R383
Discovery Miles 3 830
Save R84 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Amid the din of Russia’s patriotic sentiments and Instagram
instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite
the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina
Polonskaya’s spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger
declare a wholehearted “Yes.” This bilingual Russian-English
volume makes a refuge for the poet and her readers, plumbing the
depths of contemporary melancholy and ennui. Beautifully crafted
idiosyncratic dissections of a strong individual who refuses to go
along with the currents of popular culture or political jingoism
invite readers to slow down and pay attention.
In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large
as a somewhat frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at
definition focus on geography (the actual mountain range that gives
the area its name and the lands surrounding it) or, more recently,
on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside
observers. There has been far less concern with attempting to
define this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point not
geography as such but rather the cultural, historical, and social
threads that could allow us to see what might be merely contiguous
places as a coherent, though complex, whole. The goal of this
volume is to do precisely that. The Balkans should probably be
defined as that borderland geographical space in which four of the
world's greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and
meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes
combustible, multi-layered local civilization. It is the space in
which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of
Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and
sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans can be seen as a
history of creative borrowing by local people of the various
civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Each
civilization has thus been hybridized, modified, and amplified by
other voices and traditions.
Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to
be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian
writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to
his homeland; "The Life of Arseniev" is the major work of his
emigre period.
In ways similar to Nabokov's "Speak, Memory, " Bunin's novel
powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before
the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural
traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full
English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as
its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an
introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.
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