[‘At the Clinic’: This poem was published in Russian and translated after the poet’s death; it was evidently written too late for inclusion in his last collection.]
‘An Excursion’: On the Boundary Canal in Leningrad / St. Petersburg – see ‘The Tram’.
‘School № 1’: The poem refers to the atrocity at the school in Beslan (Chechnya) in September 2004.
‘Joseph in 1965’: ‘and mended those tatty roofs’ is a reference to one of the poems Joseph Brodsky wrote about carrying out physical labour during his administrative exile in Arkhangelsk province in 1964-5.
‘Grounded Again’: The poem refers to the author’s earlier poem ‘Grounded’.
‘The Funeral Parlour’s Abuzz...’: The poem refers to the funeral of Joseph Brodsky in Greenwich Village in January, 1996.
‘S. D.’: The initials are those of the writer Sergei Dovlatov (1941-90), who grew up in Leningrad and emigrated to the USA in 1978. Aleksei Stakhanov was a coal miner who in 1935 exceeded his daily output quota fourteen-fold (102 tons of coal instead of 7). He, or rather his Party handlers, started the ‘Stakhanovite’ movement in the USSR. Stakhanov was celebrated as a Hero of Socialist Labour. It was rumoured that he took to drinking heavily, and died from alcohol-related illness.
‘Out of Bunin’: This poem was inspired by Ivan Bunin’s novella Light Breathing (Legkoe dykhanie, 1916).
‘June 1972’: The month of June 1972 was exceptionally hot in Russia, with continuous forest and peat-bog fires. On 2 June 1972 Joseph Brodsky left the country, never to return. The phrase ‘Period of Stagnation’ is commonly used in Russian to refer to the Brezhnev years, between Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
‘Dostoevsky’s Handwriting’: ‘No way to confine it’ alludes to the words of Dmitrii Karamazov, ‘No, man is broad, even too broad – I would narrow him down’ (The Brothers Karamazov, Book 3, Chapter 3).
‘Afterword’ – Author’s Note: “In the preface to my first book, The Miraculous Raid (1985), I said that the stimulus for my creative writing was Joseph Brodsky’s departure from Russia in 1972. It was as if some compensatory mechanisms had kicked in: no longer the direct witness of Joseph’s creative activity, without noticing anything I started writing my own poetry. I wrote as the Lord commanded, with no thought not only of publishing the results, but even of showing anything to the people closest to me. At an almost unconscious level there was from the very beginning, though, one limitation, which was that if anything in a poem in progress smacked of Brodsky – his tone of voice, vocabulary, wit – it was thrown out. It wasn’t a matter of that notorious ‘anxiety of influence’, but of the obvious indelicacy, even comic absurdity, that would have resulted from combining elements of Brodsky’s refined and tragic manner with what I was writing.
A few weeks after Joseph’s death on 28 January 1996 a cycle of poems started coming to me that were directly or indirectly connected with his memory (what he called ‘poetry’s memorial fragments’ [used in a famous elegy by Vladimir Mayakovsky]), and in this cycle, contrary to my rule, there was a lot that was his – words, tones of voice, sometimes direct quotations. This now seemed somehow appropriate, perhaps because at the same time I often dreamed about him, and between dream and poem there is a stronger connection than people think. The poems of this period make up the first section of ‘Afterword’.
Later, the tide of borrowings started to ebb, at the same time as the grief of loss started to ebb, and emptiness has gone on growing in the place where Brodsky ought to have been.
18 November 1997, Hanover, New Hampshire”
‘Cold (1921-1996)’: Vladimir Veidle was a highly regarded émigré critic and literary scholar. He wrote a long essay on what he called ‘Petersburg poetics’, discussing what there was in common between the younger generation of Russian Symbolists, whose undisputed leader was Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), and their successors, who called themselves Acmeists. The poetry of the former in many ways may be compared to that of Yeats, while the latter, in whose ranks were such poets as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam and whose main spokesman was Nikolai Gumilev, professed ideas very similar to those of the Anglo-American Imagists. Forty-year-old Blok and Gumilev, who was thirty-five, died almost simultaneously: one from illness exacerbated by the privations of the Civil War period, the other executed by the Bolsheviks for alleged conspiracy against their regime. From Veidle’s point of view the normal development of Russian poetry was interrupted for the next four decades until the young Brodsky in the early 1960s began writing in the same vein as the poets of Blok and Gumilev’s epoch.
‘Lorry engines’: During executions in the courtyard of the Cheka building or in the killing fields outside the city, the operatives would gun the engines of their lorries to muffle the shots and the cries of the victims.
“The chevelure of Petersburg columns…”: Kamaz is an acronym of Kamskii avtomobil´nyi zavod (Kama Automobile Factory), where big trucks were produced. ‘Smerdyakóv’: Smerdyakóv, the name of the character from The Brothers Karamazov, is evocative of the verb smerdet´, “to stink”.
“Where the air itself is ‘pink-tinged from the pantiles’…”: The last two lines of the original contain a play on words: the Russian for Sunday, voskresen´e, is homonymous with the word for ‘Resurrection’.
‘In Memory of Mikhail Krasilnikov’: Krasilnikov (1933-98) was a ‘neo-Futurist’ poet, and the charismatic leader of a group of young poets in Leningrad in the 1950s. From 1956-60 he was in prison for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. He lived the remainder of his life in Riga, Latvia. [Loseff has also published ‘Mikhail Krasilnikov: A Memoir’, Ulbandus Review, 9 (2005-6), 69-86.]
‘Me and the Old Lady’: the poem is set at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, where for many years a Russian summer school was held.
‘For O’s Scrapbook’: ‘One star conversing with another’ is a paraphrase of a line from Mikhail Lermontov’s famous lyric ‘Alone I walked out on the road’; this is not the only allusion to this poem here. Bulat Okudzhava (1924-97) was a poet and balladeer; this poem was written in response to a request by his wife Olga to write something in her scrapbook, when the Okudzhavas and the author were spending the summer in Northfield, Vermont.
‘The Parisian Note’: A motley group of young Russian émigré poets who lived in Paris between the two world wars was known by this term; they followed the precepts of the critic Georgii Adamovich, who called for the renunciation of grand themes. Many of them perished during World War II; some committed suicide. The phrase ‘…vraiment ça finit mal’ paraphrases a line by Paul Verlaine.
‘There but for…’ (15 June 1925): The author was born on 15 June, but in 1937.
‘Toilette’: The poem is an accurate description of my mother’s mahogany Empire dressing-table as I remember it in 1944-5. It looked very out of place in our small crowded room in a communal apartment. There was, incongruously, a cheap Soviet radio (the ‘black platter made of paper’) on the wall above it that played ‘The International’ at midnight and 6 a.m., until 1944 when the new anthem was introduced. The two lines of dots in the poem separate the topsy-turvy world beyond the looking glass from real life back in the room.
‘Ledger Entry’: The inmates of Soviet prisons and prison camps were not allowed to use the normal mode of address, ‘Comrade’, when speaking to their guards, but had to say ‘Citizen’ instead, e.g. ‘Citizen Commander! Permission to go to the toilet?’ For situations when by a slip of the tongue a prisoner would address them as ‘Comrade’, court officials and prison guards had a set reply: ‘I am no comrade to you. Your comrade is the Tambov wolf!’
‘December Dreams Come in a Crazy Rush’: ‘Piter’ is a colloquial nickname for the city of St Petersburg. At the time this poem was written, M. M. Meilakh, a Russian literary scholar, was serving a 5-year sentence for anti-Soviet activity in the Perm prison camp, known for the especially harsh treatment of political prisoners.
‘The Tram’: From 1947-63 I lived with my parents on Mozháiskaia St in Leningrad, one block from the Bypass (Obvódnyi) Canal, a stinking industrially-polluted waterway. One could see lots of used condoms and the occasional dead animal floating in it. Tram tickets had six-digit numbers on them. If the sum of the first three numbers equalled the sum of the last three, it was thought to be lucky.
‘I’m Living in the States From Boredom’: Nikolai Glazkov was a poet, and my drinking buddy in the summer of 1958. Oleg Tselkov, an artist and old friend, has lived in France since 1975. In Evgenii Onegin, Chapter 8, stanza LI, Pushkin quotes from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’adi: ‘Some are far distant, some are dead’ (tr. Charles Johnston).
‘Sonnet’: The ‘monument built of brick’ is 9 Griboedov Canal, a building in Leningrad where the author once lived. Numerous writers and scholars have lived in apartments there, including Zoshchenko, Eikhenbaum, and Tomashevsky. The diabetic writer sitting in the square is the author’s father. Just across the canal from the building is a park with a monument to Pushkin, in front of the Russian Museum. The statue of Lenin atop an armoured car stands in front of the Finland Station. [It was damaged by a bomb on 1 April 2009.]
‘The Extended Day’: ‘The Extended Day’ was the programme for schoolchildren whose parents wanted them to remain in school after classes. ‘… allied with Nelson, instead of face a hole…’: Street photographers used to have life-sized pictures of dashing horsemen painted on plywood with a hole cut out in place of the face. One could stand behind, stick one’s face into the hole, and be photographed as the brave warrior on horseback with sabre in hand. Here, a young boy’s dream of becoming a great admiral is compared to sticking his chubby bespectacled face in similar holes but in the portraits of famous sea captains. ‘A play by Shvarts’: In fantasy plays such as The Dragon by Evgenii Shvarts (1896-1958) there were many double-entendre jokes in which the sophisticated audience could recognize jabs at the Soviet regime. ‘…for a troika…’, i.e. a No. 3 tram, by St Michael’s Castle. The author lived on ‘Prospekt Gaza’ as a nine-year-old, in 1946-7; its old name, Staropetergofskii Prospekt, has now been restored. In Soviet times the street was named after Ivan Gaza, an Estonian Bolshevik and revolutionary hero. ‘…as taught by Lotman…’: Yurii Mikhailovich Lotman (1922-93), the most important figure in the history of Russian structuralism and semiotics. His most widely read book was The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970). Lotman was genuinely amused by this poem, and communicated his impression to the author in 1990 at the International Conference of Slavists, in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Pavel (Pavlik) Morózov was a Soviet propaganda icon: a young Pioneer, he informed on his own father, and was martyred by “the reactionary peasants”. ‘... wise Gershenzon...’: M.O. Gershenzon (1869-1925), a Russian philosopher and cultural historian.
‘Grounded’: Výtegra is a small provincial river and town. Belomór (from ‘Belomorkanal’, ‘The White Sea Canal’), the brand of Soviet papirosa introduced to commemorate Stalin’s monstrous engineering project of 1934, and retaining their trademark blue packet to the present day.
‘“And this one here is basil”, he declared’: ‘The china rattled…’: a hidden quotation from a collective poem written by Pushkin and others on the occasion of the première of Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (Ivan Susanin, 1836). A line in the poem puns on Glinka’s name, which means ‘clay’: ‘He isn’t glinka anymore, but porcelain!’. ‘A fishnorfowl’: the original has kitovras, the Old Russian word for ‘centaur’; Pushkin is compared to a sacred monster, wise and powerful. Silva (Die Csardasfürstin) is an operetta by Imre Kalman. It was very popular in the USSR during the Second World War and the lean post-war years. Starving and shabbily dressed audiences went to theatres to indulge in reveries about champagne-drinking men clad in tails and women glittering with diamonds.