[virtual]

BARATYNSKY DAY (Russian Poetry Celebration)
March 6, 2021, 4:00 pm
at St. Rocco's Readings for the Dispossessed and Ugly Duckling Presse

Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (Евге́ний Абра́мович Бараты́нский) was born either on March 2nd or February 19th [depending on your geopolitical inclinations] in the year 1800. He was lauded by Alexander Pushkin as the finest Russian elegiac poet. After a long period of neglect, Baratynsky was taken up by Russian Modernist poets who considered him a supreme poet of thought. This “most daring and dark of the nineteenth-century poets,” as Michael Wachtel has called him, inspired Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, and later, according to the Nobel laureate himself, forced a young Joseph Brodsky “to get more seriously into writing.”

St. Rocco’s Readings for the Dispossessed has gathered for the past three years in Albany around Baratynsky’s birthday to drink tea, eat sushki, and share favorite Russian poems, old and new, read aloud. Due to the pandemic, the curators of St. Rocco’s Readings for the Dispossessed has teamed up with UDP to launch an online celebration of Russian Poetry.

BARATYNSKY DAY will feature opening remarks by Rawley Grau, translator/editor of A Science Not for the Earth (UDP, 2015) and readings from UDP authors and translators Ainsley Morse, Simon Schuchat, Matvei Yankelevich, Aleksandr Skidan, Marina Temkina, Anna Moschovakis, and many more.

Register for the event here.