Selected Poems [antikvár]

Foreword "The height of my dreams is that one day a reader lighting upon my book of poems will come to under-stand not only me but alsó the times in which I lived." This remark by the poet could form a fitting epigraph to his verse. His poetry throbs with the times. Both the poet and the people we meet in his poems are actively and passionately involved in historical events. Mikhail Arkadievich Svetlov was born in the Ukraine, in Dniepropetrovsk (then Yekaterinoslav) on June 17, 1903. In 1919 he joined the Komsomol or Young Communist League, and soon began writing and having his poems published. This was the time of the Civil War, which broke out in the country föllowing the Socialist Revolution of 1917. In his autobiographical notes the poet recalls: "Armed bands were on the rampage near the city and to beat them off the First Yekaterinoslav Infantry Regiment was förmed " He joined that regiment. His im-pressions as a Red Army man were to figure prom-inently in his poetry. Later he worked in the press department of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Komsomol in Kharkov, and in 1923 he moved to Mos-cow and entered the Literary Institute, headed at that time by the brilliant poet Valeri Bryusov. Even back in Kharkov, when he was not yet twenty, Mikhail Svetlov had produced a book of poems entitled Rails, of which he was later to say with a smile: "It now looks very ridiculous and rather pathetic because none of us, young poets, had at that time any clear notion of