JHADA BATASHARA PAKSHEE is a collection of poems of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva translated from Russian to Oriya Language, an important branch of the Indo-European group of Languages. These four authors struggled hard to maintain the glorious literary tradition of Russia established by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Gorky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Block etc. in the Soviet regime of Stalin. No body knows when Mandelstam perished in the Siberian prison camps. Pasternak had to decline Nobel Prize for Literature in order to continue to Stay in his Motherland. Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide due to intolerable poverty. Anna Akhmatova had to endure execution of her first husband and thinker Gumilyov, and imprisonment of his second husband and son. Inspite of reeling under extreme poverty and torture, these poets preferred to perish than to compromise with literature for a safe and dignified living, like many of their compatriots.
Some of the famous poems included in the collection are For Anna Akhmatova, The Ice will Melt One day, A Kiss on Your Forehead , I know the Truth, Only One Sun, You had loved me, (Marina Tsvetaeva), Hagia Sofia , Tristia, Casino, Sisters, Words are Unnecessary, 20 years Old American girl, ( Mandelstam ), February, Venice, Winter Night, Nobel prize, Autumn, In the Memory of Marina Tsvetaeva ( Boris Pasternak ), We are all Drunkards, For Alexander Block,, Cleopatra,, The death of Sophocles, Alexander in Thebes, In the Evening, Four of Us (Anna Akhmatova).
Literature had always occupied a very important position in Russian Cultural Life. Women played a very important role in organising poetry sessions in their houses. It was the women of Russia who had been patronising Literature, Art and Culture in the social lives of Russians. The conversation and interaction of Russian Women were so enlightening and pleasant that Karamzin wrote in his Epistles to Women(1796) that such behaviour of the Russian Women should form the ideological background of Russian language and Culture.
A special room of evry aristocratic household was exclusively reserved for literary and cultural meets, which was known as Gostinia . Princess Volkonskaya was famous for organising Literary and Cultural meets which was attended by Authors no less than Pushkin.
Things went tupsy turvy after the first World war followed with the October Revolution. The new Soviet Regime in its effort to regulate the literature and Culture of the country caused immense damage to its own tradition and culture. Writers and Poets, who did not seem to produce Progressive Literature to the new regime headed by Stalin, were persecuted and tortured like anything. The interferance of the Bolsheviks in Art, literature and Culture was never appreciated by the intellectuals of Russia. When Lunacharsky, the people's Commisaar of Enlightenment invited more than 120 Artists and Authors in 1917 for a meeting, only five of them turned up. The situation was so precarious that Akhmatova wrote- "Poetry will be moving from door to door like a hungry beggar, but no body will be opening the doors...". Among the millions of people who had been cruelly tortured and humiliated during the Bolshevik regime included Svetaeva, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Many more like Mandelstam who had been sent to Siberian prison Camps to perish there unheard and unsung. It is they who protected the soul of the great Russian tradition with their blood.