Poetry. Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891. Professor Donald Rayfield, in his notes to Chapter 42 and the Goldfinch by Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, wrote that Mandelstam's "poetry of the thirties, almost all unpublished in his own lifetime, marks him as arguably the greatest Russian poet this century." He died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938. Elaine Feinstein, in her foreword to A NECKLACE OF BEES, writes that "Maria Enzensberger has chosen not only early poems where Mandelstam is grateful for the quiet joy of being alive, but later poems which have the 'flavour of smoke and grief;' the abrupt, intimate, miraculous poems of Mandelstam's years in exile. And here these translations speak with heartbreaking clarity." Maria Enzensberger was born in Moscow in 1943. She died in London in 1991.

"what a poet and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embraced a cloud But when I soared it rained." -Frank O'Hara, "Mayakovsky" (1954) Mayakovsky's is one of the most compelling voices in twentieth-century Russian poetry. Born in 1893, he joined the Futurist movement in 1912 and soon established himself as one of Russia's major poets. In 1917, he rallied to the Russian Revolution and remained the indisputable leader of its artistic avant-garde until his suicide in 1930. Many of the poems in this book are translated for the first time into English. Accompanying the poems are rare drawings and lithographs by Mayakovsky and his circle, found in private collections of futurist books.

Leon Trotsky and Victor Serge represent the great and tragic oppositional figures to Stalin's dictatorial grip on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s. Written during this period, the letters exchanged between these two friends are published here together with material from both the Trotsky Archive at Harvard and the Serge Archive in Mexico.