Georgy Ivanov, On the Border of Snow and Melt (Perceval Press, 2011)

[Shvabrin, Stanislav]

"On the Border of Snow and Melt: Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov." Introduction by Stanislav Shvabrin. Translated, Edited and Annotated by Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin. Santa Monica: Perceval Press, 2011. 532 pp.

As Georgy Ivanov, that quintessential antihero of Russian poetry, is getting ready to introduce himself to his English-language readers, serious doubts may—and should—be raised as to whether he is worthy of a handshake in the first place. There is no question that, when presented quite impartially, a number of facts about his biography will attest to his propensity toward behaving in the manner of an outright scoundrel. It is his poetry, however—or a peculiar brand of lyricism characteristic of his poetry, to be precise—that against all odds (and certainly in stark contrast to Ivanov’s seemingly irrepressible urge to disgust his readers and dismay his scholars) carries him through, making the sparse poetic output of this deeply divisive figure a phenomenon, a territory that deserves not only to be discovered, but also revisited.

Perceval Press is glad to bring to the attention of SEELANGS subscribers this representative bilingual annotated edition of Georgy Ivanov's poetry. "On the Border of Snow and Melt" encompasses the body of mature Ivanov verse and includes *Stikhi*/*Poems* (1931), *Otplytie na ostrov Tsiteru*/*Embarkation for the Island of Cythera* (1937), *Portret bez skhodstva*/*A Portrait Without Likeness* (1950), *Stikhi*/*Poems* (1943-1958) and *Posmertnyi dnevnik*/*Posthumous Diary* (1958). It is our hope that this first substantial collection of Ivanov's poetry in English will be the beginning of a new chapter that rectifies his fate as "probably the most neglected great Russian poet of our time" (Vladimir Markov).

http://percevalpress.com/ivanov.html

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