Phaedra: with New Year's Letter and Other Long Poems

Marina Tsvetaeva's verse drama Phaedra, completed in 1927, is the most extraordinary of all literary treatments of the Phaedra legend. Angela Livingstone has translated this little-known great work for the first time into English. Three long poems written at the same time as Phaedra connect, in their depth of thought and feeling, with Tsvetaeva's intense epistolary relationships with Pasternak and Rilke, and fascinatingly fill out the themes and preoccupations of the drama. "Livingstone has created a valuable resource for readers and scholars of poetry. . . An invitation to climb higher in approaching and appreciating Tsvetaeva's work."—Canadian Slavonic Papers