Poetry
Urbi et Orbi
Not translated into English
Valery Bryusov · 1903
Opening lines
По улицам узким, и в шуме и ночью, в театрах, в садах я бродил,
И в явственной думе грядущее видя, за жизнью, за сущим следил.
Through narrow streets, in the noise and at night, in theatres, in gardens I wandered,
And, seeing the future in lucid thought, I followed life, followed what is.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
The author's fourth collection gathers poems written from 1900 to 1903 and arranges them by genre, in the manner of a classical book: songs, ballads, meditations, elegies, sonnets and tercets, pictures, odes and epistles, lyric poems. The poet's solitude and his isolation among men sit alongside the life of the big city, the misery and suffering of the people. The book is dedicated to Konstantin Balmont, “friend and brother”.
Context
The collection appeared in Moscow in 1903 from the Skorpion publishing house, in a volume of about two hundred pages. In the author's work it marks a turn towards the city and towards social reality. Alexander Blok devoted two reviews to it: he saw in it a book forming a closed whole and not a chance assemblage, of great formal mastery, and noted more than forty different metres, some of them new in Russian poetry.
Who it is for
Poems in a great variety of forms, to be read in Russian: no French or English translation of the collection.
Prizes and reception
Hailed by Alexander Blok from its publication, it is among the books that changed its author's manner.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.