title: Introduction
abstract: In March of 2009 the popular singer and songwriter Larisa Novoseltseva performed Maximilian Voloshin's poem "Fatigue" (Усталость, 1915) at a concert commemorating the Russian invasion of Georgia the preceding August.1 A modernist poet, Voloshin (1877–1932) wrote this poem during World War I, depicting the war as a fratricidal madness of the warring nations. The poem calls for the second advent of Christ, who comes to earth unknown and unseen and stops the war by his mere presence: "But all that 
journal: Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks