The four multi-colored volumes of Olga Sedakova’s collected works included her viscous poems, reminiscent of silk embroidery, as well as translations, articles on poetry, lectures, essays, memoirs. In her poems, Sedakova calls out to a variety of traditions, from the poetry of the troubadours and Dante to Akhmatova and Zabolotsky.
The four multi-colored volumes of Olga Sedakova’s collected works included her viscous poems, reminiscent of silk embroidery, as well as translations, articles on poetry, lectures, essays, memoirs. In her poems, Sedakova calls out to a variety of traditions, from the poetry of the troubadours and Dante to Akhmatova and Zabolotsky. In the same way, she translates texts from completely different eras — the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Silver Age. But in the end, the motley patches are stitched together into a single colored space of European Christian culture. That is why all the characters of Sedakova, hailed, rearranged, disassembled or simply met — Socrates, Horace, Petrarch, Francis of Assisi, John Donne, Rilke, Nabokov, philologist Sergei Averintsev, philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin, Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh, Venechka Erofeev, Solzhenitsyn — turn out to be side by side at the same table. And this is really a “feast for the whole world” or, as Sedakova herself said in connection with the prose of Venichka Erofeev, “a feast of love”, love for God, creation, culture, and therefore for you and me as their authorized representatives.
RUSSIAN FUND FOR PROMOTION OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE, in 4 volumes (432 p., 576 p., 584 p., 864 p.)