Paradise: Selected Poems

Each new generation has to reinterpret St. Petersburg, the place, the culture, and its significance for Russia. Shvarts' haunted and demonic city is nearer Dostoyevsky's than Akhmatova's or Brodsky's. Her poetry draws backwoods, Russian folklore with its cruelty, its religiosity and its quaint humor, into cosmopolitan Petropolis. She shows both the truth and the irony of Peter the Great's 'Paradise', celebrating and reviling her native city as a crossroads of dimensions, a reality riddled with mythical monuments and religious symbols. A dual text Russian-English edition, this is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.