[Selected Poems]. Izbrannye Stikhotvoreniia.: Series ‘Licentia Poetica’. Translation by G. Kruzhkov.

One of 3 000 copies published.

First Yeats's book in Russian.

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was first mentioned in Russia in an article about William Blake in Severny Vestnik (#9, 1896). In 1915, the literary critic and translator Zinaida Vengerova translated Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan, but it remained unpublished. She also reviewed his Ideas of Good and Evil in 1903, but this did not lead to any Russian translations of Yeats's works. Interestingly, the prominent Russian poet and founder of Acmeism, Nikolay Gumilyov, met Yeats during his visit to London in June 1917. In a letter to his wife and poet Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov called Yeats 'English Vyacheslav' after Vyacheslav Ivanov, a leading Symbolist poet in Russia. Gumilyov also translated Yeats's verse drama The Countess Cathleen, but it was not published. The first Russian translations of Yeats's works appeared only in 1937 in the Anthology of New English Poetry. The anthology included 14 poems from Yeats's early lyrics but didn't impress the Soviet intelligentsia, including Boris Pasternak. Yeats was virtually ignored and considered an anti-social Western Decadent. Only sporadic translations of Yeats's works appeared in different anthologies from 1977 to 1988.

This first book of Yeats's works in Russian, prepared by Grigorii Kruzhkov (b. 1945), a poet, scholar, and translator, reopened Yeats to Russia and sparked renewed interest in his works.

OCLC locates one copy of this edition only: in the Hesburgh Library.