The work of more than sixty modern Russian poets is represented in this selection prepared jointly by Progress Publishers and the monthly journal Soviet Literature. This journal, published in Moscow by the Union of Soviet Writers, has separate editions in nine languages-English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovak and Japanese-which give it a worldwide circulation.
The present collection is based on translations of Soviet Russian poetry that have appeared in the English edition of Soviet Literature during the past thirty years.
The poets represented here include world-renowned members of the older generation, such as Nikolai Ase-yev, Vladimir Lugovskoi, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vera Inber, Anna Akhmatova, Ilya Selvinsky, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Prokofiev, Nikolai Tikhonov and Mikhail Svetlov; poets who flourished in the postwar period, such as Alexander Tvardovsky, Mikhail Lukonin, Alexander Yashin, Sergei Narovchatov, Olga Bergholtz, Yevgeni Vinokurov, Sergei Orlov and Yevgeni Dolma-tovsky; and poets who emerged only in the past thirty years, such as Yuri Voronov, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Rimma Kazakova, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Nikolai Rub-tsov, Larissa Vasilyeva, Valentin Sorokin and others.
This is the second in a series of books prepared jointly by Progress Publishers and Soviet Literature. The first was a collection of Russian short stories of the sixties and seventies. Subsequent books will present selected poetry and prose of many nations constituting the USSR, selections of works by young authors, of literary essays and other current writing.