When my family left the collapsing U.S.S.R., we took with us the Russia we wanted to remember: classic volumes passed from one generation to the next, carbon-copied samizdat, and beloved mass-market storybooks, concealed in luggage and clothing. Every day after school in Israel, where we immigrated, my sister and I would sit in the kitchen, spellbound as my grandmother conjured up the ghosts of Russia’s literary past. As a child, my grandmother had considered reporting her parents to the authorities for their anti-Soviet talk; she had cried into her school uniform when Stalin died. But the de-Stalinization processes of the Thaw and Perestroika, in which archives were opened, and hundreds of thousands unjustly persecuted people freed and rehabilitated, released untold numbers of suppressed literary masterpieces to a public hungry for the truth. In teaching us about our heritage, my grandmother made the world-historical figures of the Soviet regime seem like footnotes in the nobler history of Russian poetry, if not outright objects of ridicule. Under her guidance, we committed to memory and performed innumerable Russian poems. One popular one from the early Soviet period had given Stalin his nickname, “the whiskered beetle,” which my grandmother uttered with special revulsion.

I thought of my grandmother recently, when I read “The Fire Horse,” a new translation of children’s poems, out from New York Review Books. In the volume, the translator Eugene Ostashevsky, a Russian émigré who is a talented experimental poet in his own right, presents the popular children’s verses of three major Russian poets—one each by the Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, the antiquarian modernist Osip Mandelstam, and the absurdist Daniil Kharms. Rendered in a jubilant, spirited English, these narrative poems are accompanied by their original and beloved avant-garde illustrations. Both Mayakovsky and Kharms wrote children’s propaganda poems for the state, earning much-needed cash; Mandelstam, who couldn’t bear to write for hire, supported himself as a critic and translator and relied on his wife, the memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam. But for their work as children’s authors all three poets drew upon the images and techniques used in their overtly experimental, subversive writings. Amid social upheaval, they spoke to young people over the heads of the censors about finding and defending the territory of the imagination.

An illustration accompanying Mayakovsky’s ”The Fire Horse.” Illustration by Lidia Popova

In the 1927 Mayakovsky poem that gives the collection its title, for instance, a boy intent on becoming a cavalryman in the Red Army has to assemble his own hobbyhorse from scraps. He drags his father to plead for materials from the city’s artisans. Drawn by Lidia Popova as blocky paper dolls, the workers contribute piecemeal to the boy’s making of the Fire Horse. Ostashevsky’s translation telegraphs the spirit of revolution in this collaged creation:

What a charger, what a horse! Like a fire, it’s as hot! You can go forward, you can go backward! You can gallop, or you can trot! Its eyes are blue, Its sides are dappled, It is bridled, It is saddled . . .

As a teen-ager in tsarist Russia, Mayakovsky was already attending anarchist meetings and distributing socialist leaflets. A stint in prison converted him into a poet; the Revolution made him a Communist. Proclaiming himself a “Bolshevik in art,” Mayakovsky founded innumerable avant-gardist groups that variously inspired or horrified the Soviet authorities in the nineteen-twenties. When he killed himself, in 1930, ostensibly because of romantic rejection, authorities were able to smooth his image into that of an exemplary Soviet writer. “Bridled” and “saddled” like the hobbyhorse he described, Mayakovsky’s legacy is still contested today. Renegade poets gather at his monument in Moscow to read their oppositional verses, while protests take place in Mayakovsky Metro Station and marches start from Mayakovsky Square.

Mandelstam’s “Two Trams.” Illustration by Boris Ender

If Mayakovsky was the sloganeering poet of the broad Moscow street, Mandelstam was a writer in the St. Petersburg tradition: a moody neoclassicist. In Mandelstam’s “Two Trams,” from 1925, Zam, a streetcar, looks for its companion, Click, which is lost in the city. Ostensibly inspired by the rapidly modernizing cityscape, the work is also a bitter homage to the poet Nikolai Gumilev, Mayakovsky’s friend, who was executed in 1921. Mandelstam’s amiable streetcars are overworked and in terrible shape: “Rattling and clattering over joints on the track / Gave Click a shattering platform-ache.” The illustrations, by Boris Ender, show the streetcars floating in a sea of undifferentiated blue, as if, for all its zeal, the machines’ brave new urban world constantly threatens to melt into thin air. For Mandelstam, less than a decade after he wrote “Two Trams,” it did. In 1934, he recited his notorious epigram on Stalin to dinner guests; he was denounced by one of them, arrested, exiled, arrested again, and sent to his death in the Gulag.