Year of publication: 1997Publisher: Eurasia Publishing Group Series: Ultima Thule "The poet, whose collection of poems you have now opened, became famous not only for his poems - nostalgically beautiful and shockingly frank - but also for statements about poetry that are equally deep and often equally provocative in nature. The most original of them is, undoubtedly, the following: “None of even the greatest poets of our century left more than six or, at most, eight truly perfect poems, the rest may be of interest in biographical terms or as signs of creative evolution, however, only a few remain self-sufficient, self-luminous, possessing lasting charm - so for the sake of these six poems, from thirty to fifty years of asceticism, suffering and struggle pass. , and will repel (what will repel? It will outrage, cause deep disgust) early. I can imagine another reader to whom Benn’s early poems from the “Morg” section will seem bright and daring, while the later lyrics, on the contrary, will seem somewhat monotonous, secondary, at best reminiscent of rehashes by Blok, Khodasevich, Georgy Ivanov. It is much more difficult to imagine a reader who was able to discern, understand and appreciate the internal integrity of Benn’s poetic work: the transformation of disgust into suffering, and suffering into beauty. But it is precisely such a reader who seems ideal - to him the proposed book will reveal its depths and abysses. And heights. And, of course, heights. The easiest thing would probably be to attribute the excesses of early Benn to the literary movement that he joined in his youth, to expressionism." (V. Toporov, from the "Preface") This book represents the first little a slightly complete edition of Gottfried Benn’s poems in Russian translation. The collection includes two thirds of the “Collected Poems”, prepared in the last years of his life by the poet himself and published as the first volume of an eight-volume collected works by Dieter Wellershof (Stuttgart, 1977), preserved (with implied omissions) the author's sequence and rubrication of the poems - four large sections with a poetic epigraph prefaced by the entire book. Poems that, for one reason or another, were not included in the author's collection (and made up the second volume of the collected works) are presented in a small selection at the end of the book. first; a quarter published in various anthologies since 1977.