16 June 2018. A Friend Inspired Me

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Thank you for getting the creative juices flowing. You know who you are… take my hand, the times aren’t good, but friendship is still powerful…

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15 April 2018. N S Gumilyov on Peace and the World

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N S Gumilyov isn’t well-known in English… poetry is notoriously hard to translate. Nikolai Stepanovich loved wordplay, and that’s almost impossible to render in another language. In the above quote, he played on the fact that мир means both “peace” and “world” in Russian… you can only trick out the meaning from the context. There’s much of that sort of thing in Gumilyov’s works… it’s why so many Russian-speakers love his poetry and writing.

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18 April 2017. A Piece of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem”

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7 March 2017. D V Davydov on Great Russia

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Click here for a bio of D V Davydov, a soldier-poet of the Patriotic War of 1812 period. Until his death, Denis Vasilyevich retained an amazingly young heart and character. His cheerfulness was contagious and he was an exciting person to be around; in intimate conversation, he embodied cordial friendship.

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