I Lived On The Battlefield Of Poltava

"Aleksei Parshchikov (1954-2009) resembled the images we have of his favorite writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, not only physically in life but also in telling a story brilliantly in meter and rhyme. (This book keeps close to the meter and rhyme of the Russian original.) Here the story concerns Poltava, small city in south-east Ukraine, where in 1709 Peter the Great defeated the army of Charles XII of Sweden. Pushkin himself has a long poem with the same topic and characters, but Parshchikov updates to the mid-1980s when as a very young writer he won with it the Andrei Bely prize. The long, treacherous relations of Russia and Ukraine (U-Kraina, at-the-border, the name contains all the issues) is lifted and ironized in the relations between the two Russian poems. Here Peter and Charles and Cossack leader-and-turncoat Ivan Mazeppa (who sided with Sweden) richly deserve scorn-while the thousands of nameless soldiers who followed the dynasts, and died, are put back in history as heroic. Here the modern writer loves the land soaked with their blood. Parshchikov's logic leaps; his rhymes are often jokes; minutely he notices local places, plants, animals. The poem is fully assured in its speaking "I" and in its technical accomplishment. In the last days of the Soviet era, in the contested space between Russia and Ukraine, it is almost impossible to believe a work of such capaciousness was created"--

This prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023. Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.

Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "reference obligee" of contemporary urban poetry" VERONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne IV)

From the end of the Mongol Empire to today, Russian history is a tale of cultural, political, economic and military interaction with Western powers. The depth of this relationship has created a geopolitical dilemma: Russia has persistently been both attracted to and at odds with Western ideas and technological development, which have tended to threaten Russia's sense of identity and create destabilizing divisions within society. Simultaneously, deepening involvement in Western international affairs brought meddling in Russian domestic politics and military invasion. This book examines how the centuries-old Western threat has shaped Russia's political and strategic structures, creating a culture of security rooted in vigilance against Western influence and interference.

Over thirty years in the making, the most comprehensive work in English on Ukraine is now complete: its history, people, geography, economy, and cultural heritage, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora.