This illuminating collection of essays by international scholars and critics, both well-known and emerging, alongside the translations of Olga Sedakova's poetry by Martha Kelly, establishes the connection of Sedakova's work with her great predecessors and contemporaries within the Russian tradition and with European and American poetry through her translations of major European and American poets as well as her essays on many of them. As a collection of approaches, this book gives a perspective of the poet and thinker, showing how Sedakova's poetry moves from the exuberant images, tropes, and rhymes of her early poetry to what I would call the frugality of Sedakova's later poetry, in Emily Dickinson's dictum. In that respect, most notable are Sedakova's later poems, like “Nothing” (I: 400) or “Saint Alessio. Roma” (I: 401–2), stripped of all the embellishments, including rhyme and meter, in comparison, for instance, with such a poem as “If this is not the garden/ let me go back, into silence, where things have been thought through” (I: 27), one of Sedakova's early poems, the opening lines of which are written in rhymed trisyllabics, a combination of anapestic trimeters and dimeters, and quoted by many contributors (Benjamin Paloff, 22, Aleksandr Kutyrkin, 103, Ketevan Megrelashvili, 220, Henrieke Stahl, 247). In contrast, “Nothing” and “Saint Alessio. Roma” emphasize “nothingness,” implying humbleness and humility as a hope of resurrection and means of redeeming history and the horrors of Auschwitz and the Gulag, of which Ksenia Golubovich writes in “The Poet and Darkness,” citing the famous question in Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer's book Dialectic of Enlightenment (41). Alluding to the poetry of Paul Celan, translated by Sedakova into Russian, Golubovich arrives at conclusion that “for Sedakova this ‘last’ language must be made the language of mercy” (54–55). In other words, the horrors of history should be redeemed through the language itself. In his Afterword, David Bethea seems to arrive at a similar conclusion.

In her insightful introduction, Stephanie Sandler, one of the volume's leading editors, gives an impressive overview of Sedakova's poetry and essays, and presumes that the core of her work is based on philology, both by education and her preoccupation with languages and literatures. This is true, especially taking into consideration Sedakova's background and her decades-long affiliation with Moscow State University and Tartu Semiotic School, but then, as Benjamin Paloff observes, following Sergei Averintsev, her mentor, Sedakova has long become what Paloff calls a Christian humanist, as she herself put it her major essay about Averintsev, “Apology of the Rational” (“Apologiia ratsional΄nogo”). Interpreting Sedakova's ideas, Paloff suggests that “one's rational faculties, rather than emotional or ecstatic experience guide us along our path toward faith” (35), and cites the above essay in support: “And so Averintsev had chosen the humanities—but the kind of humanities in which reasoning point of departure not only does give way to the natural scientific, but in some respect surpasses it” (4:524).

In her own essay, “Constricted Freedom: On Dreams and Rhythms in the Poetry of Olga Sedakova,” Stephanie Sandler juxtaposes political and social freedom, artistic freedom, and what I would call “Eschatological freedom, ” as one of Sedakova's essays is entitled. Comparing Sedakova's dreams, which I would characterize as having primary imagination, and those of the fantastic or even phantasmagoric ballads of Fedor Svarovskii, which I would describe as “fancy,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put in his Biographia Literaria (Oxford, 1985), Sandler comes up to the conclusion that the freedom of imagination should be both “constraining and liberating” (134).

The collection struck me as predominantly philosophical and theological, although according to the title, it should deal mostly with poetry and poetics. The first two parts deal with what Andrew Kahn calls “devotional” lyric while Henrieke Stahl applies the term “transcendental,” claiming that the form of Sedakova's poems is rooted in her transcendental experience. It is notable that Martha Kelly, who is credited with the outstanding translation of Sedakova's poems, is preoccupied in her article with philosophical, anthropological, and theological approaches rather than with poetics. In doing so, she speaks about apophasis and icon painting and refers to the French scholar Marie-Jozé Mondzain's book on the Byzantine icon in Image, Icon Economy (169), but does not mention Iconostasis [Iconostas] by Pavel Florenskii (1882–1937), who compares the art of icon painting to the art of translation from the divine language into an earthly human tongue. Icon painters, according to Florenskii, have divine vision while copyists have only technique. Florenskii describes two types of creativity: the first is inspired by God and is a transition from the world of being into a higher world; the second is limited only by the earthly life. He compares these two types of creativity to human dreams: in the early dream, the soul ascends from earth to Heaven, having stronger ties with human existence than with God; in the other, the soul descends from Heaven to earthly life, bringing “divine visions to earth” (“Ikonostas,” Collected Works, 1985).

Trying to balance a philosophical approach with detailed analysis of Sedakova's poem in her article “The Topography of the Other World in Olga Sedakova's Poetics,” Ketevan Megrelashvili claims that “it is precisely the structure of Sedakova's poetics that intensifies the theme of the other world” (214), and goes on to establish the transcendental nature of Sedakova's poetry through a combination of phenomenological and epistemological approaches. In doing so, Megrelashvili grounds her argument on Sedakova's own essay “In Praise of Poetry,” in which, as the scholar puts it, “Sedakova clearly prioritizes the elemental force of space over that of time in the creative process” (215). Likewise, Emily Grosholz writes about the importance of “vibrant stasis” (65) in Sedakova's poetry, emphasizing the importance of childhood places, alluding to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (70). Sarah Pratt establishes the connection between Sedakova's work with that of Nikolai Zabolotsky based, however, not on their similar relation to Nature with the capital “N” and to language itself, but rather on their religious beliefs as a protest of what she calls “disruption,” meaning the atheism of the Soviet state. She thus entitled her article “Disruption of Disruption” (191): that is, restoring faith.

In his explication of Sedakova's Old Songs, Ilya Kukulin claims that like Mikhail Bakhtin, Sedakova addresses “the great time” defining it as “a time of crisis” (272). He further states that Sedakova's “stylized folklore” alludes to Aleksandr Pushkin's Songs of the Western Slavs, thus linking her poetry to the European tradition. Arguably, Kukulin draws affinity between Sedakova's poetry with that of Dmitri Prigov's, based on their common opposition to the Soviet system, although Sedakova herself pointed out the shortcomings of postmodernists in comparison with moderns, stating in particular that it lacks spirituality (“Pri uslovii otsutsviia dushi. Postmodernistskii obraz cheloveka,” in Nashe Polozhenie, 2000, 104–11). The Italian scholar Vera Pozzi draws the distinction exactly between Sedakova's poetry and postmodernists, emphasizing Sedakova's attraction to both European and Russian moderns, as stated by Sedakova herself and cited by Pozzi, in which the poet gained her “new linguistic freedom and depth” (298). Pozzi draws on the spiritual affinity of Sedakova and Boris Pasternak, as well as Sergei Averintsev based on anthropological approach, concluding that a new approach to poetic anthropology gives Sedakova the possibility to discover “‘another self’ within the self” as a means of spiritual and poetic renewal (320).

Maria Khotimsky writes about Sedakova's translations, noting that “Sedakova defines translation as an open hermeneutic act” (332). She shows how her translations affect Sedakova's own poetry on the one hand, and how they differ from the so-called “school of the Soviet translation” on the other, naming many prominent translators like Efim Etkind and Vil΄gel΄m Levik, but paradoxically missing the most prominent translator of that period, Arkadii Shteinberg (1907–1984), an outstanding poet and painter and the translator of John Milton's Paradise Lost (among other landmark translations, such as Stefan George, Gottfried Benn, or Dylan Thomas). Shteinberg, who spent more than ten years in the Gulag, in many respects deviated from the laws domineering the Soviet school. Furthermore, it would have been worth mentioning the impact of Mikhail Gasparov's approach on Sedakova's translations. In his later translations, Gasparov demonstrated a gaunt, nearly interlinear approach, stripped of rhetoric and embellishments; his translations are often shorter than the original poems (Mikhail L. Gasparov, Verlibr i konspektivnaia lirika, 2000, 189–90). This is evident, for instance, in Sedakova's own hermeneutic translation of T. S. Eliot's “Ash Wednesday” or Dante Alikgeri's Paradiso, in which she decided to sacrifice the form (terza rhima) for the sake of rendering the content.

Finally, in her detailed explication of Olga Sedakova's Chinese Journey, Natalia Chernysh reads the cycle through Confucius and uses The Book of Changes as a guide. Chernysh applies the term “hexagram,” which Ezra Pound called ideogram, and concludes that the Chinese Journey is a spiritual quest “in praise of all changes” (376).

In his Afterword, David Bethea emphasizes that the way Sedakova thinks is “healthy and growth-worthy,” and in itself the answer to the question of “how poetry as a written phenomenon survives in a world that seems…more and more postliterate” (381). Bethea agrees with Sedakova that one “can express new experience through the very intensity of language,” as she stated in an interview with Polukhina (Bethea, 383). He affirms that “Sedakova's thinking is heir to Mandelstam's and Pushkin's” (388).