Written during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed, these poems are suffused with Tsvetaeva's irony and humor, which undoubtedly accounted for her success in not only reaching the end of the plague year alive, but making it the most productive of her career. We meet a drummer boy idolizing Napoleon, an irrepressibly mischievous grandmother who refuses to apologize to God on Judgment Day, and an androgynous (and luminous) Joan of Arc. "Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve - or rather, a straight line - rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher ... She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art." --Joseph Brodsky While your eyes follow me into the grave, write up the whole caboodle on my cross! 'Her days began with songs, ended in tears, but when she died, she split her sides with laugher!' --from Moscow in the Plague Year: Poems

Reproduction of the original: An account of the plague which raged at Moscow, in 1771 by Charles de Mertens

Histories of the Plague, exhibiting the modifications it undergoes in different climates, must at all times and in all places be acceptable, if not to the public at large, at least to that class of persons who make the art of medicine their study and employ: But, to a country situated like our own, histories of this terrible disorder occurring in the northern parts of Europe are more particularly interesting, by holding up to our view a picture of what it probably would be, whenever it should visit us again. Such a picture is presented to us in the history of the plague which depopulated Moscow and other parts of the Russian empire, in the year 1771, and which forms the subject of the following pages. What, at the present time, must give a greater degree of interest to such a subject, is the danger to which we are exposed of importing the pestilential contagion from America[1], on the one hand, and from Turkey and the Levant on the other: For, although the cold has, happily, suppressed for the present the pestilence which has been committing such dreadful ravages at Philadelphia and New York; yet is it to be feared that it may be retained in many houses, and lie dormant in various goods, ready to break out again, whenever it shall be favoured by the weather[2]: And no one who is acquainted with the nature of that contagion can deny the possibility of its importation from America into this country, either now or hereafter, by infected persons or infected merchandise. On the other hand, are we not threatened with a similar danger from the East? In executing the hostile operations which are going forwards in the Mediterranean, it seems scarcely possible for our fleets and armies to keep clear of contagion. No nation was ever long engaged in a war with the Turks, without taking the plague. In this respect they are as much to be dreaded by their friends as their foes. If, in the present contest, Italy, and France, and England shall escape this scourge, it will form an exception to past events, which all Europe must devoutly pray for.

WHEN THE WORLD ENDED... The Cull swept the world in the early years of the twenty-first century, killing billions and ending civilisation. Only a fortunate few, blessed with the right blood type, were spared. In the chaos of the Afterblight, scientists, priests—even armed robbers—may become leaders, or heroes. Three incredible writers, including the bestselling author of the Shadows of the Apt series Adrian Tchaikovsky, lead us into the apocalypse. In Malcolm Cross’s Orbital Decay, the team in the International Space Station watch helplessly as the world is all but wiped out. Exiled from Earth by his blood-type, astronaut Alvin Burrows must solve the mystery of the “Pandora” experiment, even as someone on the station takes to murdering the crew one by one... In C. B. Harvey’s Dead Kelly, fugitive and convict “Dead” Kelly McGuire returns from hiding out in the Bush to the lawless city of Melbourne. McGuire has three jobs to do: to be revenged on his old gangmates, to confront some uncomfortable truths about his past, and—ultimately—to discover his own terrible destiny... In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Bloody Deluge, Katy Lewkowitz and her friend and old tutor Dr. Emil Weber, fleeing the depredations of the so-called New Teutonic Order, take refuge among the strangely anachronistic survivors at the monastery of Jasna Góra in Western Poland. A battle of faith ensues, that could decide the future of humankind...