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Poems You Have Never Met
Category:
Poetry
Publisher: Maria Kuroshchepova
Pages: 32
Copyright: 2007
As I make my way through various on-line and brick-and-mortar book stores, I am increasingly convinced that Russian literature is woefully under-represented. One can always find War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but to think that is all there is to it?! In all fairness, it would take a separate store chain or a huge server bank to accommodate all the works that would provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of Russian literature. However, I can’t help feeling disheartened when seeing, how much precious shelf space is dedicated to the mediocre romance novels and how little – to the works by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Tyutchev, to say nothing of Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Yesenin, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Igor Severyanin, Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy (yes, there was more than one famous Tolstoy in Russian literature) and many others. There is an entire population of poems and stories you have in all likelihood never met.
THE LAST LOVE
by Fyodor Tutchev
How can the twilight passion be described?
It’s ever so reverend and tender.
Shine brightly, my farewell sun-setting light –
The light of evening love, of dying splendor.
Night shadows have encompassed half the sky,
But embers in the west are still aglow.
Please wait, my daylight, do not say good-bye,
Please stay, enchantment, do not rush to go.
While blood is growing thinner in my veins,
The love will not diminish in my heart.
You are my evening love, my twilight chains –
My hopelessness and bliss in equal parts.
Excerpt
Works of art in general and poems in particular are very much like living beings, except their lifecycle vastly surpasses that of their creators. Otherwise, they go through many of the same life experiences as humans do: birth, growth, maturity, periods of popularity and broad recognition and periods of obscurity. So, when you encounter poems, you don’t just glance through them or peruse them – you meet them. Getting to know a single poem can vastly expand your literary circle, because it introduces you to its siblings (other poems by the same author), its parent, the friends of its parent and their poetic “children”.
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