Ksenia Nekrasova.

Frequent correspondent Patrick Wang wrote to ask if I knew Ksenia Nekrasova’s poetry, including a link to his recent post on her. I responded that I’d never heard of her, and it turns out she’s not mentioned in Kahn et al.’s History of Russian Literature (see this post), which is generally very inclusive, but she should certainly be better known, so I’m helping to spread the word. Patrick’s post starts with a quote from Anna Akhmatova (“I have met only two female poets in my life… Marina Tsvetaeva and Ksenia Nekrasova”) and continues: Two of these names are among the best known Russian poets in the west: Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. The third name—Ksenia Nekrasova—is obscure to the English reader. She does not appear in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse. Of the half dozen other English anthologies of Russian poetry in my library, I only see her making one appearance: in 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, an encyclopedic volume over a thousand pages long. It…