Irina Mashinskaya is the author of fourteen books of poetry, translations, essays and prose in Russian, English and German, as well as numerous journal publications in different languages. Co-founder (with Oleg Wolfe) of the literary project "StoSvet"; co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk) of the anthology The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). Winner of several literary awards, including (together with Boris Dralyuk) the Stephen Spender Prize. / Joseph Brodsky. Born in Moscow, she has been living in the USA since 1991. The book Horizon and the Cave includes selected essays and prose (1995-2024), but the composition of this selection is not accidental. Outwardly diverse texts: the opening volume of the short prose book "And I thought of Scott"; the novel-essay "Blue Cups of Empire" (the Moscow family saga and the American urban landscape); the novel-essay "Isaac" – about the first friend; "The Book of Ethan", a documentary diary of the first months of a person's life – are replaced by a series texts about poets and poetic craft and the unusual, phenomenological essay "The Desire for a Text". The book concludes and unites the essay that gave it its name on geographical and geological time, on the forms and forces of the Earth and life – visible and invisible, their movement and constancy. This forms a single progressively unfolding narrative about the courage of man, landscape, and poem.