Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Russian, edited and annotated by Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin.
Mirrors reflect each other,
Mutually distorting their reflections.
I believe not in the invincibility of evil,
But only in the unavoidability of defeat.
Not in the music that burned my life,
But in the ash left from the burning.
Author City: RUS
Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov (1894-1958), Russian poety and prose writer, was born at Kovno (now part of Lithuania) into the Russian gentry. He emigrated to France in the early 1920s, and there he became a major Russian poet—bitter, perceptive, difficult as a person, and chilling in his abilitiy to give voice to the despair, the utter negativity of his vision. At the same time there is implicit in his verse an abiding faith in poetry, particularly in the senseless, insane music of verbal art.