How to use poetrytex with cyrillic letters

Question

I am trying to use poetrytex with cyrillic letters like this:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{poetrytex}
\usepackage[paperwidth=140mm,paperheight=210mm]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\renewcommand{\poetryheadings}{\pagestyle{myheadings} \markboth{}{}}
\begin{poem}{Title}{Author\\2014}
Мороз и солнце, день чудесный\\
The sea is calm to-night.\\
\end{poem}
\end{document}

But pdflatex generates this:

How to tell poetrytex package what I want?

Answer 1

You can load the T2A font encoding in addition to T1 and babel with options russian, english, plus a font that contains cyrillic glyphs. One of these, on CTAN, is Heuristica – an addition to Adobe Utopia, that also contains oldstyle and superior figures:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[TS1,T2A, T1]{fontenc}%
\usepackage{heuristica}%
\usepackage[russian, english]{babel}
\usepackage{poetrytex}
\usepackage[paperwidth=140mm,paperheight=210mm]{geometry}
\newcommand*\English{\selectlanguage{english}}

\begin{document}

\thispagestyle{empty}%
\renewcommand{\poetryheadings}{\pagestyle{myheadings} \markboth{}{}}
\begin{poem}{Title}{Author\\2014}
{\Russian Мороз и солнце, день чудесный} \\
{\itshape
The sea is calm to-night.}\\
\end{poem}

\end{document} 

While with pdflatex you rely on LaTeX support for a given font, the choice of a font is much easier with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX and the fontspec package, since you can use any Opentype font known to the operating system (at least for ordinary text). Also, you don't have to choose a font encoding, nor an input encoding. Here is an example compiled with XeLaTeX that uses Minion Pro (available with Adobe Reader):

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}%
\usepackage[english, russian]{babel}
\usepackage{poetrytex}
\usepackage[paperwidth=140mm,paperheight=210mm]{geometry}
\newcommand*\English{\selectlanguage{english}}

\begin{document}

\thispagestyle{empty}
\renewcommand{\poetryheadings}{\pagestyle{myheadings} \markboth{}{}}
\begin{poem}{Title}{Author\\2014}
\textup{\Russian Мороз и солнце, день чудесный}\\
\textit{The sea is calm to-night.}
\end{poem}

\end{document} 

Another beautiful font, available on CTAN is ebgaramond. Unfortunately it doesn't have (yet) a bold version, and it works well with LuaLaTeX but, for some reason, has problems with XeLaTeX (if you ask a part of the text in italic, the whole text is in italic).

Last News: The very last version of ebgaramond.sty (2014/07/02, not yet updated in MiKTeX) now works fine with XeLaTeX.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[ItalicFont = EBGaramond12-Italic]{EBGaramond12}%
\usepackage[english, russian]{babel}
\usepackage{poetrytex}
\usepackage[paperwidth=140mm,paperheight=210mm]{geometry}
\newcommand*\English{\selectlanguage{english}}

\begin{document}

\thispagestyle{empty}
\renewcommand{\poetryheadings}{\pagestyle{myheadings} \markboth{}{}}
\begin{poem}{Title}{Author\\2014}
\textup{\Russian Мороз и солнце, день чудесный}\\
\textit{The sea is calm to-night.}
\end{poem}

\end{document}