This book is designed to acquaint readers with samples of Russian classical poetry of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It is a selection of verse by seven major Russian poets and includes some of the finest poems of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The poems have been rendered into English by the well-known Soviet translator Irina Zheleznova.