ABOUT BARATYNSKY DAY
Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (Евге́ний Абра́мович Бараты́нский) was born either on March 2nd or February 19th [depending on your geopolitical inclinations] in the year 1800. He was lauded by Alexander Pushkin as the finest Russian elegiac poet. After a long period of neglect, Baratynsky was taken up by Russian Modernist poets who considered him a supreme poet of thought. This “most daring and dark of the nineteenth-century poets,” as Michael Wachtel has called him, inspired Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, and later, according to the Nobel laureate himself, forced a young Joseph Brodsky “to get more seriously into writing.”