The Stray Dog Cabaret

On New Year's Day, 1912, a cabaret with the cock-a-snook name of Stray Dog opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, and became the place where the avant-garde met, debated, performed, and otherwise presented itself. Habitues included the greatest concentration of major poets in Russian history, all born between 1880 and 1895: Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. The late Paul Schmidt was a man of the theater, and his translations of the Stray Dog group are crafted for declamation. He gives the two long poems, Blok's "The Twelve" and Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End," so much impetus and color (they are among their authors' masterpieces) that one hears them without reading aloud and sometimes can't help reciting them to appreciate them better. The selection extends long after the Stray Dog's closing, to Esenin's and Mayakovsky's suicide poems and Mandelstam's ferocious "Poem about Stalin." In English.