The Russian Presence

The following section, centered on recurring themes and patterns in Russian history and culture, contains an exceptionally wide range of writings, many of which appear here in English for the first time. The works—in a variety of genres—are arranged in roughly chronological order, with the date of composition following each piece. Biographical information regarding each author and translator may be found in the “Contributors’ Notes” at the end of this issue.

Representing the work of more than twenty different authors, the selections gathered here span nearly two hundred years, from poetry by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) to an excerpt from a contemporary novel by journalist and fiction writer Oleg Kashin (born in 1980). We have included major Soviet era poets like Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, along with such contemporary poets as Anzhelina Polonskaya and Lev Rubinstein; in the area of prose fiction, there are new stories by Russian Booker Prize winners Mikhail Shishkin and Olga Slavnikova, as well as new translations of works by Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Also in this extensive compilation you will find a rich array of nonfiction writings, with essays that range in topic from the films of Andrey Tarkovsky to Lee Harvey Oswald’s fateful pilgrimage to the USSR to the far-reaching Babel-like political and linguistic fragmentations produced by the collapse of the Soviet empire after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition, we have included a new—and for the first time, annotated—translation of the complete transcript of the historic 1964 trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky, along with a compelling interview with Lithuanian dissident poet Tomas Venclova, who shares his memories of Anna Akhmatova.

Some of the authors whose work is included in these pages may be familiar to readers of English, but others are likely to be encountered here for the first time. Above all, in assembling this special section, our hope has been to suggest some of the ways in which—effectively since the time of Peter the Great—the Russian example, in its multiple paradoxical and conflicting manifestations, often with unanticipated consequences, has continued to assert itself decisively in the cultural imagination and in the world of historical events.

The editors would like to thank the translators of these works for their extraordinary skill and dedication in making these Russian texts accessible to contemporary English readers. In particular, we would like to express our deep gratitude to Michael R. Katz, Ellen Hinsey, and Robert Chandler, without whose invaluable counsel and steadfast assistance this section would not have been possible.