Read Russia Book Launch For Alexander Vvedensky

Book Launch Party for An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander VvedenskyRead Russia is pleased to invite you to the inaugural event of our 2013 season, a book launch party for An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, presented in partnership with New York Review Books. Join us for an evening with NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank and the book’s translators Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich as we celebrate the work of one of the most influential poets and thinkers of twentieth-century Russia. An Invitation for Me to Think is the first book of Vvedensky’s poems to appear in English.   An Alexander Vvedensky poem doesn’t make a statement. It is an event. Mostly unpublished during his short life, he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. A founding member of the avant-garde collective OBERIU, Vvedensky wanted to enact “a poetic critique of reason”; a project the Soviet state, increasingly hostile to the avant-garde, deemed counterrevolutionary. Vvedensky was arrested multiple times, eventually dying of pleurisy on a prison train in 1941.Read Russia, founded in 2012, is a New York-based initiative established to celebrate Russian literature and Russian book culture.  Through innovative programs supporting the English-language translation and publication of Russian works, Read Russia provides American audiences with fresh opportunities to engage—in person, on screen, and online—with Russia’s literary leaders and heritage.  More info is available online at: http://www.readrussia2013.com/.     An Invitation for Me to Think is one of the first titles in the new NYRB Poets series, which will continue the eclectic, adventurous spirit of NYRB Classics with a focus on the most vital, various, and universal form of literature: poetry.