Russia Is Burning online talk with Working Class Movement Library

Online talk 'Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War', online, 8 July 2020, free entry - Visit now

The latest talk in the Working Class Movement Library‘s Invisible Histories series comes to us live from Toronto as editor and translator Maria Bloshteyn introduces us to brand-new tome Russia Is Burning: Poems Of The Great Patriotic War.

Due out on 1 August with Ripon-based Smokestack Books, this stonking 500-page bilingual anthology of Russian poems from and about the Second World War brings together, for the first time, war poems by over 50 poets, from the classic Soviet poets to Russian émigré poets and poets of the Gulag. Included are Konstantin Simonov, Boris Slutsky, Bulat Okudzhava, Arseny Tarkovsky, Ivan Elagin, Yuri Grunin, and others, many in their first English translation.

This stonking 500-page bilingual anthology of Russian poems from and about the Second World War brings together, for the first time, war poems by over 50 poets

It includes poems written by soldiers on the frontline, by prisoners of war and by civilians in the Leningrad blockade, by poets who wrote ‘for the drawer’ and by writers who later tried to understand the ‘Great War’ and its long-term effects on Russian society. Russia Is Burning is described as “a testimony to the power of poetry to resist fascism and to the extraordinary heroism and endurance of the Soviet people in the war against Nazi Germany”.

With translations by a range of linguists, St Petersburg-born Maria Bloshteyn is the editor and she will be giving the talk that will be live-streamed on 8 July; the talk will also be recorded and uploaded to the Library’s YouTube channel in case you can’t make it. Admission is free and there will be light refreshments afterwards, as long as you boil your own kettle…