Joseph Brodsky said in his Nobel acceptance speech that it would be nice to judge potential politicians by their literary tastes. This idea was ridiculed as utterly impractical, since a well-read ruler can easily be a bloodthirsty monster. But the poet had a point: Public awareness of culture, and literature in particular, tends to soften one's social mores. This is especially so in Russia, where a popular saying claims that "a poet is more than a poet."

In the 1960s, when that saying was born, poets were in vogue. They recited to overcrowded stadiums and enjoyed the same kind of popularity that pop stars enjoy today. It has never been like that since, and probably never will be again. Still, certain forms of poetry were extremely successful in the '80s and '90s: Some of the so-called "bards" (that is, poets singing their verse) and rock musicians wrote very solid poetry. And a number of pop-music hits featured the lyrics of Russian classics, an especially incongruous example being Alla Pugachyova songs with lyrics by Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva.

Post-Soviet times have brought new attempts to broaden the appeal of poetry. Such initiatives are already familiar in the West. When I first came to Leiden, a small Dutch university town, I couldn't believe my eyes: There was a looming poem by Tsvetayeva, in Russian, written on a huge fire wall. After a walk around, I found poetic texts on other houses -- in Greek, in German, in English. This was Leiden's way of celebrating 20th-century poetry.

Several years ago, a similar (if somewhat less ambitious) project was launched in the Moscow metro with the participation of the British Council. The walls of metro cars were adorned with parallel English and Russian poetic texts. If not for the rather pitiful translations, it could have been a very interesting experiment. Another project, also based in the metro, seems to assume that passengers won't bother to read anything; instead, it bombards them with recordings of recited poetry (mostly Russian classics, usually something about nature or the weather) while they are going up and down the escalators.

New technologies are now joining forces with the muses. At the recent Moscow book fair, a year-long project of "mobile poetry" was announced. By sending a regular text message to a certain number, one can subscribe to 365 days of free poems by 12 modern authors, including such respectable names as Igor Irtenyev and Vera Pavlova. Irtenyev even wrote an ironic epigraph to the project, describing a goon who, by reading a poem a day, becomes much more civilized. Jokingly or not, he expressed the same idea brandished by Brodsky: redemption through poetry.