We will head virtually to Massachusetts and truly travel across Russia — to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Samara, Koktebel (Crimea) and Yalta. This seventh volume is dedicated to two major women poets: a nineteenth century American and an early twentieth century Russian.

At first glance, Emily Dickinson and Marina Tsvetaeva don’t seem to have much in common. The first was a recluse, who almost never left her home in Amherst, in the Connecticut River valley, while the latter, born in Moscow, studied in Nervi, Lausanne and Paris. During the October Revolution, she spent several long stretches in Crimea before going into exile in Berlin in 1922, then Czechoslovakia and later, the suburbs of Paris. In 1939, she went back to the USSR, where she committed suicide two years later.

Through the heroic lives of these two women, the book describes two literary adventures that survived indifference, hostility and even censorship. Both women refused to give in to either decorum or gendered expectations for poetry, instead displaying existential inspiration that is at once feminine and universal. Formally, rhythmically and metaphorically, they overturned literary propriety, imposing a new poetic art.

Both Dickinson and Tsvetaeva were confident in posterity’s reception, convinced that their work, dredged up from the depths of their souls, would enter the poetic canon one day.

Two different fates for two important female poets: Emily Dickinson and Marina Tsvetaeva – one’s voluntary reclusion, the other’s trials and tribulations. In addition, the author talks about today’s Russia, exploiting the profound truth of poetic language, its sense of eternity.