Twentieth Centure Russian Poetry

The story of how this anthology came to be is nearly as vivid as the poetry itself. With the last comparable collection published in the U.S.S.R. in 1925, poet Yevtushenko ( Wild Berries ) began to ``gather into a whole all the pieces of the Russian national spirit'' in poetry during the 1960s, then had to sneak the manuscript out of Russia in two parts in order to publish it, one carried by none other than Warren Beatty. It's an important book. Bringing together the work of some of this century's most momentous writers--Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova--it also assembles many poets who will be new to American readers, and who speak both to the strength of the Russian art and to a ferocity of engagement with an era, a generation, a politics, a soul, that seems exemplary and yet inimitable. ``The primary principle of selection in this anthology is the degree of pain,'' writes Yevtushenko, and the principle is instructive. The translators include Vladimir Nabokov, Daniel Weissbort, Stanley Kunitz, Max Hayward, Olga Carlisle, Rose Styron, Albert Todd, George L. Kline, Michael Frayn and Elaine Feinstein. (Oct.)