‘FROM THE FLAME AND LIGHT
THE BORN WORD
WOULD NOT FIND AN ANSWER' TAMAMSHEV, Aleksandr Artem’evich.
Iz plamia i sveta [From the Flame and Light].
First edition. The title is taken from a poem by Lermontov (Est’ rechi—znachen’e / Temno il’ nichtozhno … ‘There are speeches – whose meaning / Is obscure or insignificant / But it is impossible to hear them without being moved … From the flame and light / The born word / Would not find an answer / In the worldly noise …’). It would appear that the fifty poems included here have suffered much the same fate amid the ‘noise’ of the last ninety years or so; we can discover nothing about Tamamshev (this may well be his earliest collection) and his work is now rare.
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