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Hanna Hodgetts examines the emergence of the enduring legacy of one of Russia’s greatest poets

“Like almost everyone – man, woman, young, old – I had fallen in love with Anna. I loved her aristocratic bearing. I loved her image, her myth and the power with which she could open doors in both head and heart with only a couple of words…”

As volunteers for an orphanage, on May 2 Oksana Makarevich and Andrey Rannev were allowed to take to their dacha near Moscow two young girls with Down syndrome, Anya and Yana. During lockdown, in order to lower the risk of infection, the authorities permitted established volunteers to take home orphanage residents. In this photo-essay by Polina Surnina, we get an insight into the blossoming friendship between the four.

Peter Lowe looks at Brodsky’s own experience of isolation, through his description of his family home in a Soviet communal apartment.

As we may have tackled our ‘lockdown reading’ piles of books, I’ve been discovering Brodsky’s essays, and in ‘In a Room and a Half’ (written in 1985 as the conclusion to the 1986 volume Less Than One) I found another ‘room’ in Brodsky’s thought. It is one that may speak more to us four months into ‘lockdown’, where feelings of distance and isolation have become more acute…

Polina Bykonya grew up in an orphanage before she joined Vverh (Step Up), an orphan opportunity centre, providing top-up education and life lessons to young people who grew up in state institutions. Polina has prepared this photo essay especially for Pushkin House, sharing the world of her beloved charity which is a life-line for 300 young people.

Tom Philips details the personal admiration between the two great writers, and the secret rituals they used to survive Stalin

Between 1938 and 1941, the novelist Lydia Chukovskaya would get a phone call every few days from Anna Akhmatova, either summoning her to the poet’s Leningrad apartment, or announcing an imminent visit to her own. Such a call introduces almost every entry of the first volume of Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals, which chronicle the meetings triggered by each call. The diaries, published decades later, provide a snapshot of a friendship built both on literary kinship and shared trauma.

Вот и все. Карантин отменен.

Мы сидим в шахматном порядке на открытой веранде, в кафе на Тверской. Посетителей много, но за столиком – по два человека, компаний нет.

По доброй российской традиции, гласящей, что «строгость российских законов компенсируется необязательностью их исполнения», все присутствующие имеют маски, и у всех – вне лица. У одного она надета на лоб, у второго – на подбородок, третий нацепил ее на голову вместо панамы.

It’s a predicament that’s all too familiar to translators of poetry: an enigmatic word or phrase in the original text sparks your attention, but, try as you might, you just cannot work out why it’s there or what the poet had in mind when they used it. Cue hours of racking your brains, mining obscure corners of the internet, consulting native-speaker friends and trawling through countless articles for context. Sometimes meanings and intentions crystallise, other times they don’t and a combination of educated guesswork and virtuosic improvisation has to suffice.

Roger Clarke presents two songs from Pushkin’s ‘Little Tragedy’ A Feast During the Plague

Pushkin’s A Feast during the Plague is his translation of an extract from a play The City of the Plague (1816) by the Scottish writer John Wilson (1785–1854), set in the plague-ridden London of 1665. Pushkin wrote the work at Bóldino while isolated there by a cholera epidemic that was raging across Russia at the time. The songs, unlike the play itself, are very largely Pushkin’s original composition.

Anna Moss explores late-Soviet counterculture through an artists’ squat

St Petersburg is a city celebrated for its kaleidoscopic architecture. Its neoclassical and baroque pistachio green and powder pink domes recall the imperial vision of Peter the Great for city to be a ‘window to Europe’. To manifest this vision of Russia’s new capital, the Tsar enlisted the expertise of Swiss, Italian and Dutch architects. But a darker reality hid behind St Petersburg’s palatial façades…

В девятой части нашей серии, Мария Варденга пишет о переменах в бытовой жизни каждого из нас.

Как мы живем? А вот так. В части Подмосковья разрешили гулять в лесу, при условии соблюдения масочно-перчаточного режима. Ближний к дому лес в этой связи наполнился бегунами. Побежали все, от мала до велика. Выглядит это смешно: люди бегут трусцой в масках на лбу (бежать в маске решительно невозможно) на расстоянии полтора метра друг от друга, и при приближении бегуна из встречного потока молча отворачиваются.

В восьмой части нашей серии, Мария Варденга пишет о новой тенденцией ЗУМ-курсов, и о притяжением дачи

Иногда я думаю, что нынешнюю трансформацию российской реальности лучше всего можно описать через изменение отношения к даче. «Где ты будешь летом?» — «А где теперь можно быть? — Только на даче». Снять дачу близко от Москвы сегодня практически нереально: дачи разобрали уже в марте. Моя знакомая, креативный продюсер независимого телеканала Дождь после долгих поисков нашла для семьи дом около Тулы, в 300 км от Москвы. Туда она и ездит два раза в неделю на своей машине