CamRuSS talk “What’s happened to that liberal Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky”, 14 May

or “Poet and Postgrad in the 60s Moscow”. A talk (in Russian) by Michael Pushkin, with poetry readings. Followed by juice, wine and nibbles.

• WNEN: Monday, 14th May, 7pm for 7:30pm
• WHERE: Walter Graves Lecture Theatre, Fitzwilliam College, Storey’s Way, Cambridge CB3 0DG
• PRICE: CamRuSS members free, others 2 pounds (1 pound concessions)

Andrei Voznesensky, born in 1933, was one of the archetypal “men of the 60s”. A protege of Pasternak, he was independent-minded rather than an outright dissident, but had regular skirmishes with the authorities, including Khrushchev’s notorious attack on him in the Kremlin in 1963. His poetry, often accused of verbal pyrotechnics, is densely metaphorical, contrasting ancient and modern, spiritual and material, natural and technological.

About the speaker:

• Michael Pushkin has taught Russian language, literature and history at the University of Birmingham since 1968, and was the Head of the Russian Department for many years. He has published articles on the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia and on the modern poet Andrei Voznesensky, whom he has known personally since the early 60s, and interviewed a number of times, in Moscow and in London.