A late collection by one of the Soviet Union’s most internationally visible poets, these poems and prose-poems take in tyranny, censorship, poverty, anti-Semitism, war memory, love, and modern disillusion without ever quite surrendering their appetite for life.

Yevtushenko’s can sound intimate and theatrical at once, a poet of conscience who also knew exactly what it meant to be famous, compromised, watched, and still trying to speak. It has that late-Cold War, end-of-empire electricity — restless, self-aware, political, sometimes messy in the interesting way rather than the bad way. Less marble monument than live wire.

Yevtushenko’s reputation in the West was shaped by poems like “Babi Yar” and by his broader role as a dissenting Soviet literary celebrity, and this collection lands in that afterglow, when the public voice has aged but not gone quiet.

First edition, first printing. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1987. Hardback with dust jacket in near fine condition. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Foreword by Harrison E. Salisbury.