The Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry brings together forty original chapters by scholars, critics, and poets from across North America, Russia, and Europe, offering a wide-ranging account of the Russian poetic tradition from the early modern period to the present. Responding to evolving critical priorities and the expanded sense of Russian poetic practice in recent decades, the Handbook aims not to settle the canon but rather to model a range of approaches to poetic history. Chapters are attentive to rupture, reinvention, and literature's changing social and institutional conditions. In particular, the volume engages with an increasingly complex understanding of Russian twentieth-century literature-one that treats, separately and together, censored, uncensored, and émigré writing, and that engages with multilingualism and rapidly shifting cultural boundaries. Collectively, the contributions consider texts both well-known and newly recovered, metropolitan and diasporic, official and underground. They reflect diverse methodologies, from close reading and historical poetics to network theory and performance studies. The volume is organized around seven conceptual rubrics-Timelines, Maps, Networks, Forms, Intersections, Performances, and Rereadings-which take up thematic and historiographical questions at varied scales. While designed to serve both as a reference and a pedagogical resource, the Handbook also considers urgent contemporary questions raised by war, censorship, and relocation, recognizing that the historical frameworks through which Russian poetry has been studied are themselves in flux. It is intended for a broad anglophone readership-from students and general readers to scholars of Russian literature and comparative poetics, and all quotations from Russian poetry are in the original and in English translation.
