Accursed Poets: Dissident Poetry
from Soviet Russia 1960-80 is an anthology of dissident and samizdat poetry in Russian and English translation, featuring work by Gennady Aigi, Yuri Aikhenvald, Yuli Daniel, Vladimir Earle, Yuri Galanskov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Igor Kholin, Victor Krivulin, Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Rea Nikonova, Victor Nekipelov, Grigory Podyapolsky, Genrikh Sapgir, Ian Satunovsky, Mikhail Sokovnin and Kari Unksova. Accursed Poets captures the frustration, suppressed ambitions and hidden energy of the ‘accursed’ generation of poets living a life outside or against society. Because so many of these authors not allowed to publish their work openly, they had to write ‘into the table.’ The work collected here documents Russian poetry in the 1970s and 1980s responding to the challenges of the time by forging a radical new poetic, reconsidering writing techniques and the purpose of language itself.