Through the poetry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian authors, including Pushkin and Akhmatova, Poetry Reader for Russian Learners helps upper-beginner, intermediate, and advanced Russian students refine their language skills. Poems are coded by level of difficulty. The text facilitates students’ interaction with authentic texts, assisted by a complete set of learning tools, including biographical sketches of each poet, stress marks, annotations, exercises, questions for discussion, and a glossary.
The twelve poets included are Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Evgeny Baratynsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Innokenty Annensky, Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Yesenin.
An ancillary Web site will contain audio files for all poems.http://russianpoetry.yale.edu/
The book on amazon: http://a.co/edIf2vX
A companion audio album is here: https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/juliatitus22
This book was nominated for AATSEEL (American Council of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Best Contribution to Language Pedagogy Award .
Praise for Poetry Reader for Russian Learners:
“As a Russian language and literature teacher, I find Poetry Reader for Russian Learners a most useful resource to have in the language classroom, giving the students authentic Russian texts to experience early on in their study of the language. These are some of the best-known poems in Russian, fully annotated with impressive introductions and accompanying exercises testing both grammar and content. Moreover, they are fully digitized with an accompanying soundtrack to facilitate the student’s learning experience outside of class. To my knowledge there are no such readers available on the market today, and this book will certainly be helpful for teachers in introducing their students to Russian poetry. “
—Michael Pesenson, University of Texas, Austin
“Julia Titus’s collection of Russian poetry’s greatest hits in the original, thoughtfully and carefully supplemented with glossaries, useful exercises on Russian grammar, discussion topics and the poets’ short biographies, offers students of Russian at different levels of language competency a wonderful opportunity to better understand and more fully appreciate the subtleties and continuities of Russian poetry, inevitably lost in translation.”
—Nadya L. Peterson, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center
“As a scholar and teacher of Russian poetry, I believe Poetry Reader for Russian Learners has great utility and can be an excellent resource in a number of different courses on Russian and Soviet literature and culture. It will fill the lacuna that emerged when some excellent old anthologies went out of print. This new book will also have a valuable advantage over the classic anthologies from the past given the online version of the text, complete with a soundtrack.”
—Lina Steiner, University of Chicago