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Mary Custis Vezey is a little-known poet of the Russian post-1917 diaspora. She is unusual among emigre writers for two reasons: first, that she spent most of her life in China or the United States, and so did not consider herself an emigre; and second, that she wrote in both Russian and English (indeed her first book contains poems in both languages). She comes from the Chinese branch of the Russian diaspora; its work is much less well-known than those of the European and North American emigre communities.

Dr Bakich has performed a valuable service in assembling this collection from a host of rare and almost inaccessible literary journals. It will introduce readers to a new voice in Russian poetry, quiet, perhaps, but once one has caught its tone, individual and memorable. Mary Vezey may be a minor poet, but she is a real poet, none the less.

Boris Thomson

Professor Emeritus

University of Toronto

Ольга Бакич. Введение(на англ. языке)

This book will bring belated recognition and appreciation to a bilingual poet, Mary Custis Vezey (1904–1994), who has left us a fine heritage of published and unpublished works.

Born in New York of a Russian mother and an American father, she lived in Russia, China, and the USA. Her three collections of predominantly Russian poetry came out in the cities of Russian emigration — Harbin (1929), Shanghai (1936), and San Francisco (1973) — and some of her poems appeared in Russian emigre periodicals. Her Russian poetry belongs to the splendid literature created by the first-wave emigres, forced to leave Russia after the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War. In the Russian diaspora in China, her contemporaries included lustina Kruzenshtern-Peterets (19031983), Marianna Kolosova (1903–1964), Nikolai Peterets (1907–1944), Olga Skopichenko (1908–1997), Natalia Reznikova (1908–1998?), Nikolai Svetlov (1908–1970?) and Sergei Sergin (1908–1934). In Europe and the USA, she belongs to the generation of Nina Berberova (1901–1993), Vladimir Smolenskii (1901–1961), Boris Poplavskii (1903–1935), Sofia Pregel' (1904–1973), Gertruda Vakar (1904–1973), Jurii Ivask (1907–1986), Jurii Mandel'shtam (1907–1943), Lazar' Kel'berin (1907–1989), Anatolii Shteiger (1907–1944), Lidila Alekseeva (1908–1989), and Igor' Chinnov (1909–1996).

At the same time, Mary Vezey was an American poet: both the Russian and the English language were native to her. All her life she felt that she had “two homes».I In 1990, she wrote: "In Russia my poems are now published as emigre poetry, but I am not an Emigre at all. Although I write in Russian, I am an eleventh-generation American! Recently, a wonderful (though terrifying) series 'The Civil War' was shown on television, and I felt it very keenly. I saw several of my relatives (southerners) there. When my schoolmates in a Russian school had asked me who I was, a Russian or an American, I had proudly answered that I was hundred per cent Russian and hundred per cent American». She also deeply loved China, the home of her youth; the images of these three countries intertwine in a dreamy surrealist image in a late, unfinished poem (poem 486). "Even if I'll never sail / in my tiny boat, / neither in dreams, nor awake, / on the Amazon, / yet I will always, / as long as I live,/keep the memory of the Neva River/on a Chinese junk-boat."