The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Paul Schmidt (Translator), Catherine Ciepiela (Introduction), Honor Moore (Afterword)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: December 5, 2006

A New York Review Books Original

A master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English

In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence “Twelve”; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life.

It was a transforming moment—not just for Russian but for world poetry—and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A professor of Russian whose translations included the plays of Anton Chekhov and the avant-garde writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, Schmidt (1934-1999) also worked with the director and composer Elizabeth Swados on what would have been groundbreaking musical settings for famous lyric poems and sequences from the great era of Russian modernism, set in the café-the Stray Dog-where modernists gathered. The theatrical work never appeared, but those drafts became this book, a memorial to the time-beginning around 1906, and concluding after Stalin's rise to power-when Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova created pellucid elegiac stanzas, Osip Mandelstam meditated on existential dilemmas, Vladimir Mayakosky exploded into radical free verse, and Khlebnikov obliterated the line between prophecy and nonsense. Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of "sun and song," flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova-grown older, immersed in sorrow-proposes a toast "to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied." Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue not seen by PW.
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From Booklist

On New Year's Day, 1912, a cabaret with the cock a snook name Stray Dog opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, and became the place where the avant-garde met, debated, performed, and otherwise presented itself to itself. Habitues included the greatest concentration of major poets in Russian history, all born between 1880 and 1895: Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. The late Paul Schmidt was a man of the theater, and his translations of the Stray Dog group are crafted for declamation. He gives the two long poems, Blok's "The Twelve" and Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End," so much impetus and color (they are among their authors' masterpieces) that one hears them without reading aloud and sometimes can't help speaking them to appreciate them better. The selection extends long after the Stray Dog's closing, to Esenin's and Mayakovsky's suicide poems and Mandelstam's ferocious "Poem about Stalin." Only Akhmatova and Pasternak lived beyond 1941, writing far more somberly than in their youth. This book conjures their group's initial passion, humor, and revolutionary zeal. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (December 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590171918
• ISBN-13: 978-1590171912
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #662,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Forgotten Flowering, August 4, 2007

By 

Asher Waxwing - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

The poets here are the more prominent Futurists (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak) and Acmeists (Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva) as well as the "hooligan" poet Sergei Esenin and the great late-Symbolist Alexander Blok. Though Pasternak is well known (if mostly for "Zhivago") and though a good many readers who are familiar with the crimes of Lenin and Stalin might know something *about* Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam, my strong suspicion is that most of these people aren't very widely read in the English-speaking world.

This is a shame. These poets were part of the last wave of a Russian renaissance that stretched well back into the Nineteenth Century. In the generations before the Symbolists and Acmeists, we find another splendid set of writers--Fet, Tyutchev, Gippius, Annensky--as well as some very fine painters and composers. Partly because of the difficulties of rendering Russian verse into English, and partly because communists and fellow travelers would later present pre-Bolshevik Russia as a uniformly vulgar and repressive hell-hole, this cultural flowering has largely been forgotten. Paul Schmidt (who died in 1999) and the editors of this collection should be commended for doing what they can to refresh our memories.

Can one find nits to pick? Well, sure.

Schmidt's strength as a translator is capturing the flavor of this group of poets, and there are times when this leads him to sacrifice a lot more of the sense than I would like. Schmidt introduces, with little success, American street slang into Blok's "Twelve." In Khlebnikov's "When the winking wax-wings whistle," Schmidt's inclusion of "mockingbird" is ludicrous on both linguistic and ornithological grounds. In Mayakovsky's "Me," Schmidt actually *invents* the insipid refrain, "And it makes / me / cry," a decision that made / me / cringe.

Speaking of "Twelve," I suppose it had to be included here because of its fame, but I have never been able to understand the reason for the poem's high standing, especially when so much of Blok is so much more pellucid and powerful. I have similar feelings about Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End," and it is unfortunate that these longish poems take up so much space in "The Stray Dog Cabaret."

But enough nitpicking. There is an awful lot to admire in such a slender volume. The collection starts well, with a stark imagistic piece by Blok. There are several strong Mandelstam poems in here: "This life of constant thrills will drive us crazy," "Somebody gave me this body," "Insomnia," "Leningrad," "The Poem about Stalin," and "All I want to do is escape the madness here." The Akhmatova selection is good, is mostly free of histrionics, and includes fine renderings of "There were three things in life he loved" and "I drink to the wreck of our life together." Esenin evokes the Russian countryside in a pleasingly mournful way in both "I am leaving my home in the country" and "The Backstreets of Moscow." Though I'm no Mayakovsky fan, his "Suicide Poem" is quite moving in Schmidt's translation. Pasternak's "Thunderstorm for a Moment Forever" is a little lightning-strike of a masterpiece, an example of metaphor helping us re-see the world.

Though I've already mentioned my reservations about "The Poem of the End," some of my favorite poems in here are by Tsvetaeva: "I am an empty page beneath your pen," "It may be that a better way," "Homesickness." But the one I can't get out of my head is "I'd like to live with you / in some small town," with its succession of sharp images from everyday private life.

Less than a year after Tsvetaeva wrote her poem (December, 1916), everyday private life was likely to be seen as counterrevolutionary, and it is impossible to keep the tragedy of the October Revolution out of one's head when reading these poems today. The poems and the history get strangely jumbled together, with beauty and value getting all mixed up with loss and grief and insanity. And one of the most heartbreaking things is that it did *not* require nine decades of reflection to know what was going on. Akhmatova writes, "This is the moment they told us would come some day / when there's nobody alive to hear what we say. / The world is no longer the place it used to be. / Be still, don't break my heart. Be silent, poetry." Here is Tsvetaeva: "I'm still alive. That may be soon / a sin." Here is Mandelstam: "All I want to do is / escape the madness here. / To rise into the light / where I can disappear."

And here is Akhmatova again: "In the west the familiar light still shines / And the spires of cities glow in the sun. / But here a dark figure is marking the houses / And calling the ravens, and the ravens come."

4.0 out of 5 stars Vital but uneven collection of translations, September 15, 2011

By 

S. Smith-Peter (Staten Island, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This book gives a verse portrait of the circle of Russian poets that formed around the Stray Dog Cabaret in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. The translation is tuned for the spoken word and to American ears. The translator also performed them live, and I can hear that vitality in the translations. Some translations are excellent. In particular, Blok's "Twelve" gives more of a sense of the informality and immediacy of the Russian than others I've seen. Some of the Mandelstam poems I preferred earlier translations, as they are more restrained and so suit his work better.

Some of the choices are questionable. In particular, changing the dedication of one of Blok's poems from Marina Nelidova to Anna Akhmatova is problematic. The addition of "And it makes/ me / cry" to a Mayakovsky poem is not one of the better moments in the collection. However, the collection does very much provide a vivid collective portrait of Russia's greatest poets moving from bohemia to Stalinist horrors. If it introduces new audiences to Russian poetry, all the better.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars IF YOU LIKE VODKA THIS IS VERITABLEMENT A MUST ! ! !, April 27, 2008

By 

* MIRTH-ENNUI * "a.k.a. binkel" (in Rio de Janeiro where else...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This precious lil' ten-buck bouquin is the perfect and savoury intro to Russian post-revolutionary poetry ! Rated a just - and generous - 5 on the mirth side of the mirth-ennui scale, the bouquin (yeah, I keep calling it bouquin - French slang for book or old book - comes from Dutch boek) packs into its extremely well designed
140 pages simply THE BEST THERE IS ON THE SUBJECT WITHOUT LEARNING FRENCH OR RUSSIAN !

The editorial concern responsible is affiliated or belongs to the N.Y. review of books magazine (which is fine though slightly hillbilly as some American corporate journalism has become ...) and so this bouquin of theirs is really very impressive due to the thorough n.y. review professionalism of it all: great translations from 8 (!) poets, very very fine translations by Paul Schmidt (this guy was great. look him up. a wonderful icon of American post-war culture and theatre and intelligentsia. gay but married Stockard Channing. and translated Chekhov and lots of Russian literary goodies - this anthology is from his literary estate).

This Stray Dog anthology also does not skimp on good and efficient knowledge tools, like a juicy introduction by Catherine Ciepiela, and a chummy afterword by Honor Moore, who knew Paul Schmidt in college (Harvard where else...).

Somehow, reading these poems, you are magically transported to St. Petersburg, to the Stray Dog Cabaret (which really existed), to the dismalness of revolution and to the glory of poetry (ah... well... and if it's too much for you, there's always vodka...). A MUST ! TOP MARK IN THE MIRTH-ENNUI SCALE.