Original title Под северным небом Publication date 1894 | Language Russian Originally published 1894 Genre Russian symbolism | |
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Similar Let Us Be Like the Sun, The Knight in the Panther's, Lieutenant Kijé, The Pathfinder - or The Inl, Polnoe Sobranie Stihotvorenij | ||
Under the Northern Sky (Russian: Под се′верным не′бом, romanized as Pod severnym nebom) is a collection of poetry by Konstantin Balmont featuring 51 poems, first published in the early 1894 in Saint Petersburg. Formally Balmont's second book, it is considered to be his debut, since all the copies of the Yaroslavl-released Collection of Poems (Сборник стихотворений, 1890) have been purchased and destroyed by the author.
Contents
History
In December 1893 Balmont informed his friend, Nikolai Minsky in a letter: "Wrote the whole lot of the new poems and in January am going to start the process of publishing a book. Expect some chastising from my liberal friends, for there is no liberalism in them, with the 'degrading' motives aplenty."
The collection's general mood was captured in an epigraph, from the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau: "All the divine things enter my life invariably accompanied by sorrow." The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary later described the book as full of "greyness, hopelessness and gloom." Yet, Balmont's misgivings proved groundless: the reaction to the publication was positive. Critics liked the musical quality of his poetry, exquisiteness of form and the sense of tension which enlivened the general atmosphere of gloom.