Gennady Aygi's longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained this great Russian poet through the hardships of a dark age. Composed from the 1960s into the early 1990s, the pieces in Time of Gratitude intersperse poems with a verse-infused prose of Aygi's own imagination--a quiet, intensely expressive, essayistic style that blends autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. Aygi addresses such literary masters as Pasternak,...