Rissian Poetry: A Beginner’s Guide to the Great Russian Poets

Why Russian Poetry Matters

“Rissian poetry” means Russian poetry — the misspelling is common, and this guide is about the real poets and poems. Russian poetry is one of the great literary traditions of the world. It is strongly rhythmic and rhymed, meant to be read aloud and memorised, and in Russia it has always carried a public weight: poets were seen as the conscience of the nation, and for that reason many of them were censored, exiled or killed. Below is a short tour through the two “golden” eras and beyond, with a few lines of original Russian (all translations here are our own, and deliberately plain).

The Golden Age

The first half of the nineteenth century is known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry. The literary language had only recently settled, and a generation of poets showed what it could do.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)

Pushkin is Russia’s national poet, and it is hard to overstate his place in the culture. He wrote lyric poems, narrative poems, fairy tales in verse, plays and prose, and his “novel in verse,” Eugene Onegin, written in a special fourteen-line “Onegin stanza,” is the foundation of the Russian novel. Tchaikovsky turned it into an opera. His poem The Bronze Horseman made the statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg a national symbol, and his fairy tales, such as The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, are known to every Russian child — one even gave the language an idiom.

His most famous love lyric begins:

Я помню чудное мгновенье…
I remember a wondrous moment… — Alexander Pushkin, 1825

Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel in 1837, aged 37. His death shocked Russia and launched the career of another poet.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841)

Lermontov became famous overnight with “Death of the Poet,” an angry elegy for Pushkin that blamed high society for his death; it earned him exile to the Caucasus. The mountains and wars of the Caucasus run through his work, including his prose masterpiece A Hero of Our Time. His lyric “The Sail” opens with one of the best-known lines in Russian:

Белеет парус одинокой…
A lonely sail gleams white… — Mikhail Lermontov, 1832

Like Pushkin, Lermontov died in a duel, at just 26.

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873)

A diplomat who spent many years abroad, Tyutchev wrote compressed philosophical and nature lyrics. His four-line poem of 1866 is quoted endlessly: «Умом Россию не понять» — “Russia cannot be understood with the mind.”

The Silver Age

Between the 1890s and the 1920s came a second flowering, the Silver Age, with rival movements — Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism — and an astonishing number of major poets. Many of their lives were overturned by the 1917 revolution, the civil war and Stalin’s terror.

Alexander Blok (1880–1921)

The leading Symbolist, Blok wrote mystical love poetry and urban nightmares. A short 1912 poem starts with four nouns that every Russian knows: «Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека» — “Night, street, streetlamp, pharmacy.” His long poem The Twelve (1918) portrays the revolution through twelve Red Guards marching through a snowstorm in Petrograd.

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966)

Akhmatova made her name with clear, restrained love lyrics before the First World War, as a member of the Acmeist group. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921, and her son was repeatedly imprisoned under Stalin. Her cycle Requiem, written in the late 1930s, gives voice to the women who queued for months outside Leningrad’s prisons. In its prose preface she recalls a woman in the queue asking whether she could describe all this, and answering that she could. Requiem circulated secretly and was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. Akhmatova’s later Poem Without a Hero is a haunting reckoning with her generation.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941)

Tsvetaeva is known for her intensity: breathless rhythms, dashes, sudden breaks. An early poem, written when she was barely twenty, predicts that her youthful verses, ignored at first, would one day have their time — and it came true. She emigrated in 1922, lived in Prague and Paris in poverty, and returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, where her daughter and husband were soon arrested (her husband was later shot). Isolated and destitute after the evacuation from Moscow, she took her own life in 1941 in Yelabuga. Today she is one of the most loved Russian poets.

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)

An Acmeist of dazzling density, Mandelstam wrote a short satirical poem about Stalin in 1933 and read it to a few friends. He was arrested in 1934 and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. Much of his later work survived only because his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, memorised it.

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)

The loudest voice of Russian Futurism, Mayakovsky wrote in a declamatory, street-poster style and broke his lines into a characteristic “staircase” (лесенка) on the page. Early works such as A Cloud in Trousers (1915) mix love, rage and self-mythologising. After 1917 he threw himself into the revolution, writing propaganda verse and designing posters, before growing disillusioned. He shot himself in 1930.

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)

Pasternak’s early lyrics are full of weather, trees and sudden emotion — one famous poem of 1912 begins with the word “February” and the urge to get ink and weep. His novel Doctor Zhivago was published abroad in 1957, and the poems attributed to its hero, such as “Winter Night,” are among his best known. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958 but, under heavy pressure from the Soviet authorities, declined it.

Other Silver Age names to explore include the peasant-born Sergei Yesenin, many of whose poems became popular songs, the Symbolists Valery Bryusov and Andrei Bely, and the Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov.

After Stalin: The Thaw and Beyond

During Khrushchev’s “Thaw” in the late 1950s and 1960s, poetry became a mass event. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky and Bella Akhmadulina read to packed halls and even sports stadiums. At the same time, songwriter-poets (bardy) such as Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky spread their work on home-made tape recordings.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)

In 1964 the young Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky was tried for “social parasitism” — in effect, for being a poet without an official job — and sentenced to internal exile in the Arkhangelsk region. Akhmatova, who had championed him, remarked on what a biography they were making for him. Forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1972, he settled in the United States, wrote essays in English and poetry in Russian, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as US Poet Laureate in 1991–92.

What Makes Russian Poetry Distinctive

• Meter and rhyme. Most classic Russian poetry uses regular meters (iambic tetrameter above all) and full rhyme, which Russian’s rich word endings make easier than in English.
• Memorisation. Schoolchildren learn many poems by heart, so lines by Pushkin or Lermontov are shared cultural property.
• Public role. Poets were expected to speak about the nation, history and conscience, which is one reason so many were persecuted.
• Hard to translate. Sound and rhyme carry so much meaning that translators often choose between accuracy and music. Bilingual editions help.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the greatest Russian poet?

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is almost universally regarded in Russia as the national poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Many readers would also name Lermontov, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Mandelstam or Brodsky among the greatest.

What is the Silver Age of Russian poetry?

The Silver Age is the name given to the extraordinary period of Russian poetry from roughly the 1890s to the 1920s, which included Symbolists such as Alexander Blok, Acmeists such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, Futurists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, and independent voices such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak.

Which Russian poets won the Nobel Prize?

Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 but was forced by Soviet authorities to decline it. Joseph Brodsky received the prize in 1987. Ivan Bunin, the 1933 laureate, was also a poet, though he is best known for his prose.

Where should I start with Russian poetry in translation?

Good starting points are Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in a modern verse translation, a selection of Akhmatova’s short lyrics and her Requiem, and a bilingual anthology that prints the Russian original beside the English.