Stamp Album

Sergeev paints a picture of hitherto unknown 'catacomb Russia'. ... Sergeev's memory seems to collect mere trifles: children's ditties, counting rhymes, old slogans, newspaper clippings, snatches of conversations, official documents, urban folklore and much else. He fishes various fragments out of this detritus and files them carefully away in his "stamp album"...

Andrei Sergeyev (1933-1998), a poet and professional numismatist, was better known as a translator of English and American poetry, including that of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden. In the 1950s Sergeyev belonged to the original underground literary group that invented samizdat (hand-production and dissemination of banned books). Written in the 1970s "for the drawer", Stamp Album was published in Russia in 1996. This is Sergeyev's first appearance in English translation.
Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Andrei Sinyavsky's Soviet Civilization (Arcade, 1991), Asar Eppel's The Grassy Street (Glas, 1998) and Lev Rubinstein's Here I Am (Glas, 2002). She lives in Moscow.