Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period

Roberto Echavarren guides readers through a captivating exploration of a pivotal era in Russian history, skillfully unveiling the contributions of key figures through his eloquent prose. This journey reverberates profoundly in the contemporary context of dwindling intellectual and personal liberties in the nation.

Dr. Alejandro Varderi

Manhattan College, City University of New York

In “Silver Age and After,” Roberto Echavarren explores the life and work of crucial Russian poets (as well as other artists and thinkers) who, after a short period of democratic freedom, were faced with the brutal repression of Lenin and Stalin regimes. Echavarren gives us the opportunity to engage with the art of those who, like Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, or Nikolai Klyuev, had the courage of their creative convictions. Together with “One Against All: Lenin and His Legacy” (2022) and “Russian Nights” (2023), this is the final submission of Echavarren’s epic and breathtaking Soviet trilogy. Page after page, this timely book reminds us of the responsibility we ourselves hold in shaping our own destinies and inspires us to believe, singleheartedly, in Marina Tsvetaeva’s creed that ‘Parallel to our unworthy life—there is another life: solemn, indestructible, absolute...’

Dr. Pablo Baler

Professor of Latin American Literature

California State University

I read "The Silver Age" slowly, savoring its intense bursts of poetic and critical insight. It is a lovely recreation of the era, in all its shimmering, mercurial complexity. Echavarren clearly understands and, more importantly, feels the tragic power of the lives he chronicles and of the art these lives brought us. I also admire the book’s innovative form; it is at once a work of scholarship and criticism, a travelogue, and a philosophical drama.

Boris Dralyuk

Executive Editor, Los Angeles Review of Books / https://bdralyuk.wordpress.com

"1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution" (Pushkin Press, Dec. 2016)

"The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry" (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, Penguin Classics, 2015

"Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories" (Pushkin Press, 2015 and Oct. 2016)]

Robert Echavarren's latest work "Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period"

is a brilliant and necessary collection of essays on some of the most significant and exquisite poets of the twentieth century who were persecuted mercilessly by a Stalinist state. In our current era, in which liberal dialogue is at risk globally, in which terrorism is implicitly condoned by censorship and monolithic diversity (I believe Borges would have approved of this oxymoron), Echavarren's book should be required reading for all."

Dr. Suzanne Jill Levine

Professor Emerita

University of California, Santa Barbara

recently honored by the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation

Not many Latin American writers—and maybe none—have experienced Russian literature as passionately as Roberto Echavarren. “Silver Age and After” is the culmination of that passion; an intelligently written, well-documented, and thorough testament of love for a cultural world that no longer exists but has an enduring power as those voices—Akhmatova's, and Blok's, and Tsvetaeva's, to name only a few—are more pertinent now than ever.

Francisco Alvez Francese

Université Paris VIII; Université de Versailles, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France