This is the first book-length study of the outstanding generation of Leningrad poets whose careers began during the Khrushchev Thaw. The text brings together memoirs, interviews, and archival research to construct an account of the world of poetry in Leningrad, in which many now-famous figures began writing. The author describes the institutions, official events, unofficial groups, and informal activities that were attended by many young poets, including the pre-eminent poet of this generation, Iosif Brodsky. Alongside a detailed study of Brodsky's work from the early 1970s are close readings of two other major poets from this generation whose work has often been overlooked, Viktor Sosnora and Dmitry Bobyshev.

The study provides a close analysis of literary works by women in late-18th- and early-19th-century Russia, with a focus on Anna Naumova, Mariia Pospelova, and Mariia Bolotnikova. Political, social and feminist theories are applied to examine restrictions imposed on women. Women authors in particular were fettered by a culture of feminisation strongly influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Sentimentalism and its aesthetics began to give way to Romantic ideals, some provincial Russian women writers saw an opportunity to claim social equality, and to challenge traditional concepts of authorship and a view of women as mute and passive.

This collection of essays is a seminal contribution to the establishment of translation theory within the field of Russian literature and culture. It brings together the work of established academics and younger scholars from the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Sweden and France in an area of academic study that has been largely neglected in the Anglophone world. The essays in the volume are linked by the conviction that the introduction of any new text into a host culture should always be considered in conjunction with adjustments to prevailing conventions within that culture. The case studies in the collection, which cover literary translation in Russia from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, demonstrate how Russian culture has interpreted and accommodated translated texts, and how translators and publishers have used translation as a means of responding to the literary, social and political conditions of their times. In integrating research in the area of translated works more closely into the study of Russian literature and culture generally, this publication represents an important development in current research.

Tatiana Voltskaia is one of Russia's leading poets, as well as a distinguished journalist and essayist. She belongs to the generation who began to write poetry seriously during the last decade of the USSR, reacting to the profound and disturbing changes of that time to emerge as the poets of the new Russia. Her subjects are the perennial Russian ones of love and death, and her work continues Brodsky's preoccupation with space and time as the vectors of our lives, echoing his vision of Russia as a crumbling empire. At the centre of her lyrical poetry there is a woman trying to escape from her condition of isolation, seeking communication through dialogue, conversations, reflections, shadows, echoes, letters and sex. Many of her poems are set in her native city of St Petersburg - often described as the Venice of the North - where water meets stone, reflections meet their images, and what is real is confronted at every turn by illusion. It is an 'artificial' city, built without native or vernacular architecture or culture: everything was borrowed and imitated to create a window on to the West, and this eclectic cultural mix where East meets West finds its reflection in Voltskaia's work. Her concern with the Western tradition of literature in Russian poetry places her firmly in the St Petersburg tradition of Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky and Kushner, characterised by strict verse form, intellectual themes including those from classical literature and myth, coupled with an intimate address to the reader. The same themes appear in all her work, but while in the prose Voltskaia sets these in the context of our lives and times, examining the implications they have for our society, in her poetry she explores their personal significance for the individual. Russian-English dual language edition.