| Poets on Street Corners does not pretend in any way tobe a definitive anthology of contemporary Soviet poetry.It is no more than a personal effort, dictated by my ownpreferences in an immensely rich field. Naturally thesepreferences reflect to some degree those of my family. Itis from them, and especially from my father, the Russianpoet Vadim Andreyev, that I have acquired my love andmy knowledge of Russian poetry. (It is well known thatpoets may be prejudiced in their literary tastes and thatRussian families are given to passionate likes and dis-likes. ) Deliberately, I have chosen to stress one particular as-pect of contemporary Russian poetry--the poets in-volvement with the flow of everyday life as it is symbol-ized by the street, whether it is Mayakovsky s Square, where Yevtushenko read his "Babi Yar" publicly for the first time, or Yesenin s murderous "bent streets of Mos- cow," the scene of his private wanderings. (Thus, for example, there are no patriotic poems in this book, al- though many very good ones were written in the period it encompasses.) |
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