It’s possible, I think, that poetry—real poetry, the kind that murmurs as much as it howls—prefers to live in cramped rooms. Spaces where shadows slip under doors, where a kettle boils not for comfort but as a metronome for unease. The best poems, like secrets, sit across from you and stare. The poems in All the World on a Page—thirty-four of them, selected and translated from Russian by Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky—do not so much invite you in as implicate you.
You begin reading and then realize, with the particular sensation of descending a staircase that wasn’t there a moment ago, that you are being watched.
I began reading this anthology just before dusk, and by the time I looked up again, the house was dark. That wasn’t unusual—our windows face east, and the afternoon light fades quickly here—but what surprised me was how still everything had become. The cat hadn’t moved. No one had called. And I, it seemed, had gone entirely still myself, frozen over these pages like a spider over a web. That was the first sign the book had gotten to me.
The editors have not chosen safe poems. They have not chosen calm ones. This is not a coffee-table anthology. This is not a collection that asks politely for your attention. It is a house with thirty-four doors, all of them already open, and something waiting in each room.
Reading this book feels like walking through a house with thirty-four locked doors—and every time you open one, something is waiting on the other side. Not necessarily a person. Sometimes just an atmosphere. A memory. A smell that makes your stomach turn before you realize why.
The earlier poems are full of restraint. Not gentleness—restraint. A controlled kind of pressure, like a fuse burning under glass. Tsvetaeva. Akhmatova. Zabolotsky. Their work is full of coded messages, written under surveillance, under siege, under ceilings that cracked when no one was watching. These poets learned to hide everything important under the floorboards. And the essays know exactly where to point.
I read Akhmatova’s entry and found myself sitting straighter, as though someone might be listening through the wall. Then came Igor Kholin’s jagged catalog of a neighborhood no one wanted to name. Lev Losev’s disorienting self-portrait, written like a bad dream narrated by someone already awake.
By the time I reached Elena Shvarts, with her hymn to decay, and Gennady Gor’s domestic poem about the afterlife—or maybe the aftereffect—I was gripping the book with both hands. That’s when I stopped underlining. This was no longer a book of poems. It had become a case file. Something forensic.
And then came the turn.
You can feel it—around a quarter of the way through. The Cold War is over, the old systems have collapsed, and what’s left behind is not peace but debris. The poets in the final third of this book do not write from exile or prison. They write from the aftermath. They write from the ruins that everyone else pretends are condos.
Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Homage to Chekhov’ doesn’t summon ghosts. It all but arranges their furniture. You don’t read it; you overhear it, like a monologue delivered behind a curtain. And Lev Rubinshtein’s ‘That’s me’ is no poem at all—it’s a dossier. A filing cabinet where the poet has stored his life as if preparing for an investigation. Or an interrogation.
By the time we reach the new century, the poems stop whispering and begin to punch. Elena Fanailova’s entry on war and intimacy leaves bruises. Linor Goralik’s fairytale isn’t for children—it’s for survivors. Galina Rymbu takes the body and hands it back to you covered in political evidence. Her chapter’s title says it all: “The Personal is the Political”. But by then, you already know that. You’ve been feeling it in your own ribs for pages.
And then—Maria Stepanova. The final poem doesn’t close the book so much as erase the floor beneath it. The essay calls it “A Quiet Apocalypse”, and that’s exactly right. The poem doesn’t explode. It sinks. You can feel the ceiling lowering with every paragraph. By the end, I had the distinct feeling that I had been buried with it.
The editors write early on that many of these poets were on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics. That’s a neat way of saying they were watched, hunted, exiled, institutionalized, and disappeared. They weren’t activists. They were artists. And for that, they were punished.
And yet, here they are—speaking still. You don’t get to read a book like this and walk away untouched. These are poems that have outlived their governments. They survived the burning of books, the erasure of names, the collapse of buildings no one admits were there. They remain. Not as artifacts, but as voices. Clear. Defiant. Cold to the touch.
Later that night, I had the sensation of having left a door open somewhere in the house. Not a real one. Not one I could lock. Just a sense that something—some presence or tone or watchful breath—had come in behind me, quiet and permanent.
Some books do that. Some books don’t leave.
All the World on a Page is one of those books.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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