Poems

A poem about a nocturnal walk in which the author wanders aimlessly along the water’s edge and through abandoned parks. It is characterized by a soft, murmuring musicality that mirrors its semantic field: night, sea, singing trees, mist, and visions. Near rhymes and echoing sounds create a floating, fluid soundscape, while each return of the refrain resets the movement, reinforcing the poem’s wandering, aimless mood.

In this poem, the author contemplated the beauty of the world from two sides - the outer one, inspired by the charms of nature; and the inner one with love as its major incentive.

The poem's speaker yearns for the family hearth. She attempts to quiet her melancholy and tries to abandon her feelings for her beloved, seeking solace in nature and the routines of everyday life.

This poem expresses in short two stanzas a sense of the mingling of eternity with ennui. Eternity is not exalted but weary, transforming immortality into a form of quiet despair rather than transcendence.

This poem is commonly regarded as an address to Lermontov’s cousin Ekaterina Bykhovets, with whom he maintained a tender friendship in the last year of his life. The poem also alludes to the poet’s first love Varvara Lopukhina whose marriage to a different man left him heartbroken.

This page features Brodsky's poem Six Years Later along with a literal and a professional poetic translation into English. Listen to the rendition of the poem in Russian here. Click this [link]( https://youtu.be/HEE45m74tb4) to hear American poet Richard Wilbur talking about translating Brodsky’s Six Years Later.

Among other Pushkin’s poems reflecting upon the special role of a Poet in life, the following one is probably the most well-known. At the core of the poem lies an aristocratic and stoic conception of art: the poet is a sovereign (“You are a king”) who answers only to himself. Pushkin frames poetic creation as both a noble calling and a lonely one, defined by discipline, self-scrutiny, and indifference to public validation.

The popular Russian playwright, stage director and actor Eugene Grishkovets performs his blank verse to music. Grishkovets is popular for his solo dramas (monologs) that he writes, stages and acts himself. He is also an author of several books and has two recorded albums with the band Bigoudi, in which he recites his rhythmically arranged sketches to a light electronic beat.