“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.”

The traveler struggles through a wood. He is lost.
The traveler is at home. He never left.
He seeks his way on the conflicting trails,

Now you are a bag of ash
Scattered on a coastal ridge,
Where you watched the distant crash,

For one who watches with too little rest
A body rousing fitfully to its pain
—The nerves like dull burns where the sheet has pressed—

I look round the cluttered
icons of your room:
quilt, photo, stuffed bird.

He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step

One by one they appear in 
the darkness: a few friends, and 
a few with historical 

The ice plant is not in flower:
it extends, a springy floor

over the rocks and the sand

My body trots semblably
on Market Street. I control
the singular spy from my

New face, strange face, for my unrest.
I hunt your look, and lust marks time
Dark in his doubtful uniform,

Here is a room with heavy-footed chairs,
A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears,

A polished table, holding down the look

Lictor or heavy slave would wear it best,
The robe of uncapricious Emperor,
Waging a profitable war, at least

Martin sat young upon his bed
A budding cenobite,
Said ‘Though I hold the principles

Look, in the attic, the unentered room,
A naked boy leans on the outspread knees
Of his tall brother lolling in costume,

The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:

One night I reached a cave: I slept, my head
Full of the air. There came about daybreak
A red-coat soldier to the mouth who said

     You are not random picked. I tell you you
     Are much like the one I knew before, that died.
     Shall we sit down, and drink and munch a while

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.