Who better to tell the story of Ukraine than a kobzar, one of the country’s blind wandering minstrels that sang of its history and people? It is this iconic and entertaining figure, who walked the land and conveyed its traditions, that serves as the prism through which Taras Shevchenko composed his pioneering collection of poems, The Kobzar.The origin of the poems themselves is extraordinary. Written over a span of nearly 25 years, they mark many crossroads in Shevchenko’s life. Th...

A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution.Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil ...

Nikolay Nekrasov was a Russian poet, critic and publisher, whose deeply compassionate poems about peasant Russia made him the hero of liberal and radical circles of the intelligentsia. He is credited with introducing into Russian poetry ternary meters and the technique of dramatic monologue; working as the editor of several literary journals, Nekrasov was also singularly successful and influential, launching the career of Leo Tolstoy. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the work...