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This collection of essays, which should appeal both to Slavists and students of comparative literature, deals with twelve major twentieth-century Russian poets who, for varied reasons, became estranged from the Soviet state. Some stayed in Russia to become inner émigrés, others chose to go into exile in the West. One less hope, one more song (Akhmatova's words), stands both for their suffering and often their deaths, but also for their humanity and poetic achievement. The poets in question are Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Nikolay Gumilev, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Poplavsky, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. The whole collection is followed by a cultural perspective of the Russian 19th and 20th centuries.

This interdisciplinary book examines the nature of spirituality and the role it plays in the search for meaning. Spirituality is a loving tendency towards the sacred. In a secular environment, the sacred is taken to be a power greater than self. In a religious environment, the Sacred refers to God, or Higher Power. The book examines the developments of the s/Sacred in great works of art and literature, as well as in medicine, theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Spirituality also functions as an unloving tendency towards disunity, or a force for evil. The first part of the book examines the ways of the spiritual as a force for good and evil. We have just witnessed one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. The experience of two World Wars leaves a legacy of brokenness: \"Where Nossack's reminiscences bore poetic, compassionate, and personal witness to the disaster, Eliot's poetry reads more like a sacred and religious poem taking contemporary Western European civilization to task--much like the biblical prophets of old--for its spiritual bankruptcy.\" Albert Einstein, Edvard Munch's Madonna, and Carl Jung's 'unconscious' touch the curve of the Sacred in more promising places. The second part examines how the search for meaning works. The distinction between being human and being a person plays a central role in the life of the spiritual; \"...the spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central self. The central self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, acts of reason and judgment, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The central self is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships are processed. The essential feature of the central self is that it does not exist outside these processes.\" The same spiritual energies that light up great works of art also light up our destructive side, only the associations' change.

In this context, his choice of sketching a portrait of Mademoiselle, his Swiss governess, come to teach him French, is revealing. To begin with, why did he choose a figure who was not very likable in the first place, one difficult to get along with, far from attractive as a person, and undertake, as he put it, \"a desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.\" He did it because, metaphorically speaking, what attracted him to her were not the details of her uneventful life, but her personification of the tragedy of exile with which [Vladimir Nabokov] could identify: \" 'Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?' [her Russian for \"where\"] she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express supreme misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she would be understood.\" At the very end of his chapter on Mademoiselle, he slipped in the following lines which suggest that she was perhaps after all much greater than the sum of all her parts: \"Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her chins or her ways or even her French...\" The enormous artistic significance of the caterpillar-butterfly phenomenon to Nabokov's creative process reminds one of Walt Whitman's romantic definition of poetic inspiration in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: \"The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.\" For Nabokov the poetic transformation of the real world through metaphor was \"the main theme\" of his writing. His view of the poetic process came very close to Whitman's: \"There is, it would seem [Nabokov wrote], in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.\" IN HIS WONDERFUL AND HUMANE NOVEL Pnin (l957), Nabokov - through Pnin - spoke of pain as the sole reality of human existence: \"The history of man is the history of pain!\" And, consequently, as Pnin again remarked elsewhere: \"Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?\" Nabokov's personal agony in Speak, Memory could only be muted by metaphor. But though the pain was muted, the memoir as a whole, in its metaphorical guise, was able to express the pain transfigured by the author behind the scenes. And, indeed, Nabokov could finally say with relief that \"all of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close.\"