The “Northern Flowers” allianace enjoys a distinguished status among the literary anthologies and collections of the Pushkinian era. It was founded by poet Baron Anton Delwig in 1825, and its publishing continued for seven years running, a fact unprecedented for this kind of publication. The last issue of the almanac was edited, after the death of Delwig, by his closest friend, the greatest Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
The poetry section of the almanac focused on works of Pushkin and eminent Russian poets of that epoch: Vassily Zhukovsky, Nicolas Yazykov, Evgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Nicolas Gnedich, Fyodor Tyutchev, and others.
From the start, the almanac was praised by contemporaries. The great Russian novelist Nicolas Gogol called the “Northern Flowers” ‘fragrant’. Anna Kern recounts in her memoirs an episode related to Pushkin dedicating to her the famous poem I Remember That Marvelous Moment. The elegy was published in the first issue of the Flowers, and became twice as popular due to Mikhail Glinka's music
The entire almanac seems to be threaded with music. This impression may be explained by the traditional link between music and lyric, and the influence of any piece of music on the plot or emotion of literature, and even by the generic subtitles of many poems: “song”, “dithyramb”, “melody”, “romance” etc.
In any event, the almanac contains knowledge of the musical life of Russia that is really valuable to musicians and historians of music. An example is a review by Prince Vladimir Odoevsky titled “Beethoven’s Last Quartet“ and published in the “Northern Flowers” of 1831.
A peculiar echo of the Pushkinian “Golden Age” of Russian poetry was a new “Northern Flowers” published by Scorpio in Moscow in
We would like to see our “Northern Flowers” project as belonging to the same line of cultural heritage, and we do hope that it will continue the best artistic traditions of this Northern capital.