HINSEY: In March 1977, after your testimony in Washington and speaking engagements across the East Coast, you arrived in Chicago—

VENCLOVA: I reached Chicago in the first half of March and stayed in my uncle's house. Uncle Pijus was my father's eldest brother. The fate of my father's family was quite typical for Lithuania. Five brothers and three sisters survived into adulthood; several other siblings died early, as often happened in peasant families—I don't even know how many, nor their names. Pijus, the eldest, was a high school teacher; he emigrated in 1944. Juozas, the second oldest, perished in a Siberian (actually, a Kazakhstani) mine as a Soviet prisoner—we have talked about him before. My father was the third in line. The two youngest brothers, Pranas and Kazys, remained in Lithuania. Pranas, a veterinarian, died of a badly treated appendicitis immediately following the war, and Kazys, an engineer, was still living in Kaunas in 1977. All the sisters, Konstancija, Izabelė, and Agota, had married and remained in their native countryside, and Izabelė escaped deportation by a hairbreadth.

In the United States, both Pijus and his wife spent the second part of their lives working in a packing plant. This exhausting and unrewarding work— which was completely at odds with their education and ambitions—nevertheless enabled them to buy a comfortable house, which would have been out of their reach in Lithuania. This was a typical Lithuanian émigré story. Pijus contributed to the Lithuanian Social-Democrat (i.e., strictly anti-Communist) press in Chicago. He was not in contact with my father, but I was surprised to find Father's works in his personal library: Soviet Lithuanian books were easily available in Chicago, in striking contrast with the reverse situation in the old country.

Chicago unquestionably possessed the largest concentration of Lithuanian diaspora anywhere. It started to develop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Lithuanian émigrés, many of them illiterate or semiilliterate, found employment in the city's notorious stockyards. Upton Sinclair rather vividly described their experiences in The Jungle. The book was translated into Lithuanian more than once, and I was well-acquainted with the work. These émigrés established Lithuanian businesses, newspapers, and publishing houses, many of which survived until the 1950s, to which were added new ventures created by the next wave of émigrés.

HINSEY: Could you begin by discussing your family's situation right before the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania?

VENCLOVA: I mentioned that we had moved from Klaipėda to Kaunas. Petras Cvirka and my aunt Maria were living in my grandfather's house, so we rented a small annex building from another professor's family, almost next door. My father again found employment as a high school teacher, but would lose his job at the beginning of 1940. This was due to a pacifist and mildly pro-Soviet poem he published in the literary press; it attracted the attention of President Smetona himself, who telephoned the minister of education and proposed that measures be taken against a politically suspect author. (It was a common practice in authoritarian Lithuania, though the country was far from fascist, even if it was considered as such by Stalinists.) Later, Father found a new job in a leftist newspaper, but our family was in dire straits.

HINSEY: As the war neared, independent Lithuania found itself in an unenviable position—

VENCLOVA: Lithuania had no diplomatic relations with Poland because of the Vilnius question. Nazi Germany, its neighbor to the west, was a genuine threat. In 1938, the Polish government had demanded the immediate establishment of diplomatic relations, which was viewed in Lithuania as a demand to abandon all claims to the capital. After some hesitation, the Lithuanian government conceded—it had virtually no alternative, since a Polish-Lithuanian war would have ended in Lithuania's defeat. Subsequently, Hitler demanded Klaipėda and Memel Territory. Since he could easily have crushed the country in two or three days, the government understood that it would have been pointless to resist. These two calamities had an immense psychological impact on the population. It must be remembered that President Smetona was a leader who had come to power in a coup d’état, established an authoritarian regime, ruled without a parliament, and was strongly disliked by a considerable portion of the country. Now he looked helpless, at the mercy of the surrounding powers. In the national imagination, Vilnius was seen as the heart of Lithuania, and Klaipėda—the country's only harbor—as its lungs. It was unlikely that the country could survive without either.

HINSEY: Let's now address some questions about the emergence of the Lithuanian and Russian dissident movements. To take a few steps back, you have written that, after the war, due to deportations, imprisonment, and emigration, civil society in Lithuania was particularly broken—

VENCLOVA: Even before the Soviet occupation, Lithuania had neither the time nor the opportunity to develop a mature civil society. There had been the autocratic tsarist rule, which had lasted more than a century, from 1795 to 1915. Independent public opinion and Western-style political life started to appear only at the end of that period, mainly in the final decade, but remained very rudimentary. (Poland was in somewhat better shape because part of it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire where the political environment was incomparably more liberal than in tsarist Russia. Finland and, to a lesser extent, Latvia and Estonia, while occupied by Russia, still possessed a degree of autonomy that was denied Lithuania as a result of its antitsarist uprisings). After World War I, Lithuania's independence was established, but the country enjoyed democracy for only eight years, from 1918 to 1926. Antanas Smetona was the first president, but his party was not in power, and in 1926, the left won a parliamentary majority. Following this, his supporters (who were influential in the army), staged a coup d’état and dissolved Parliament. We have already spoken about this period of authoritarian rule, which lasted until 1940; Smetona took over the presidency and the Tautininkai (Nationalists) became the sole legal party. Smetona was not a Fascist, nor were the Nationalists Nazis; indeed, there was intense conflict with Hitler over Klaipėda. Hitler's racial policies were generally condemned. Yet, there was clear sympathy for Mussolini, whose style was considered more or less suitable for Lithuania. Later, certain young rightists looked to Franco, and especially to Salazar, the Portuguese Catholic dictator (just as some young leftists were fascinated by Lenin and Stalin). Arbitrary arrests and censorship became the norm, and a heavy-handed cult developed around the “nation's leader” (who was disliked even by many in his own party).

HINSEY: We’ve just spoken about the political climate directly after the war. Let's now explore what was happening in the intellectual and cultural milieus—

VENCLOVA: In August 1946, when we were still living in Kaunas, a cultural crackdown started in Russia. One of Stalin's henchmen, Andrei Zhdanov, gave a speech in which he castigated two famous Leningrad writers, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, for their work, which was, according to him, antipathetic to the heroic Soviet people. Even by Soviet standards, it was an exceptionally virulent attack. The abuse that Zhdanov poured on both writers’ heads was obviously dictated by the Great Leader himself. This marked the end of the relative cultural freedom I previously mentioned, and the onset of the Cold War.

Joseph Brodsky, who later became one of Akhmatova's disciples and heir apparent, says in his memoirs that he was unaware of Zhdanov's speech until his early youth, although he lived in Leningrad, where the event occurred. Yet he was three years younger than I was and had not grown up in a literary family. I knew what was happening, though I could not of course understand its full implications. At nine years old, I was able to read not only in Lithuanian but also in Russian, and I remember the journals and newspapers reviling the “decadent” Akhmatova and “cynical” Zoshchenko. Both names were well-known to my parents. Akhmatova's poetry and Zoshchenko's short stories (incredibly funny, by the way) were almost as popular in prewar Lithuania as in Russia itself. Petras Cvirka had even made friends with Zoshchenko in the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty) where he had stayed for a period during the war. Therefore, excerpts from their works were in Father's library, and I managed to get hold of them. They looked, well, quite interesting.

HINSEY: What were the repercussions of the Akhmatova-Zoshchenko affair in Lithuania?

VENCLOVA: As a general rule, every Soviet ideological campaign had to be imitated in each Soviet republic, and not only there, but also in the so-called people's democracies, such as Poland or Czechoslovakia—an old Russian custom, as Brodsky liked to call it. Thus, Lithuanian counterparts to Akhmatova and Zoshchenko had to be identified and discredited.

On Saturday, August 31, 1940, President Getulio Vargas visited the Juliano Moreira Psychiatric Colony to inaugurate two new pavilions designed with more than 840 beds for the mentally ill. During his tour of the institution, Vargas conversed with patients and listened to them attentively. The inauguration ceremony was deliberately scripted to celebrate the state, and in particular, Vargas's patronage of the institution. It formally began with a speech by Minister Gustavo Capanema exalting the social assistance program of the Vargas administration, followed by psychiatrist Adauto Junqueria Botelho's generous appraisal of the colony's various therapeutic services that would not have been possible without the Vargas administration. Botelho, a psychiatrist who was a student of Juliano Moreira’s, was the newly appointed director (1941–54) of the National Service for Mental Illnesses. The third and final part of the ceremony consisted of a patient presenting the president with an ornate, hand-carved wooden box on the behalf of all the mentally ill patients. The iconic photograph, used by the major newspapers of the day, captures the passing of the present over a table filled with food and a large flower arrangement. It is arresting not only for what it reveals but also for what it renders enigmatic. Behind the mentally ill man is a woman whose identity is unknown. Behind Vargas, standing conspicuously in front of two Brazilian flags, is a cohort of state officials. The colony's psychiatrists are absent. While the divide between sane-insane, citizen-state, black-white had ostensibly been breached by the mentally ill man and Vargas for a moment, the facilitators of these breakthroughs were ontologically silent. In many ways, this photograph marks the extent to which Brazil had entered a new era. Although still a productive good for the use of both nation and state, at this new juncture psychiatry was to play a supporting role rather than a lead role, giving way to the state to facilitate and manage mental health care more directly.

This book traces the emergence of psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro by focusing on the ways in which psychiatrists created initiatives and programs to address mental illness and to serve the mentally ill.

HINSEY: In Marina Tsvetaeva's essay “The Poet and Time,” she writes: “contemporality is not the whole of my time.” Let's step back in this final chapter from chronological events and speak about your creative life as a poet. In our chapter on Sign of Speech, we discussed the impact of writing in Soviet Lithuania. But in exile the restraints of those conditions were lifted—

VENCLOVA: I’m far from a prolific poet. During my life—which is already long—I have composed around 220 poems I consider worthy of publication. In order to write a poem I usually need at least a week of undisturbed calm. Just prior to emigrating—in 1975–76—I wrote quite a lot. The poems from that period would have constituted a samizdat book—or booklet, to be precise— which I call, in retrospect, The Shield of Achilles. My first year in the West was simply too overwhelming to write poetry. I was often traveling and I was involved in extensive dissident and journalist activities, to say nothing of my teaching, job-hunting, and concerns related to citizenship status. My first émigré poem, “Museum in Hobart,” appeared in early 1978. The following year, in Paris, I jotted down three or four poems in a very short period of time. This was a sort of a breakthrough: from that time on, I generally produced several—sometimes up to ten—poems a year on a more or less regular basis. Frequently, however, just contemplating Florence, Rome, or Greece was enough for me: these impressions found their way into diaries, though not necessarily into stanzas.

In America, there was also the problem of audience. For me, poetry is an intimate affair, which means I do not need many readers. Nevertheless, I’m still concerned with publication and consequently with critical response. Luckily, there were some serious periodicals edited by the Lithuanian diaspora, and some good critics—one of them, Rimvydas Šilbajoris, a professor of Slavic literatures in Ohio, was on par with any American critic of that time. Now, all that is gone. Since independence, however, I have both readers and critics in Lithuania itself (I had attempted to reach my audience there earlier, of course, but with varying degrees of success).

HINSEY: In January 1961, you moved to Moscow. Let's speak about your decision to move there—did this have to do with the consequences of the independent study group in Vilnius?

VENCLOVA: Yes, I thought that in a big city it would be somewhat easier to escape KGB surveillance. That proved to be the case: my troubles with the authorities were an intra-Lithuanian affair, and it seems that the Moscow KGB, which already had its hands full, was not much interested in my humble person. In any case, I was never again invited to their premises for interrogation or any questioning. But of course there were other causes for my decision to move, which had to do with entering adulthood.

HINSEY: What was Moscow like as a city at that time—what were your impressions of it when you arrived in the winter of 1961?

VENCLOVA: I already knew Moscow, including its museums and theaters that were, and are, among the best in the world. But I had never fallen in love with it, as I had with St. Petersburg/Leningrad. The city was simply too big and chaotic. In one of my poems, I compared it to the Cretan labyrinth, which, in turn, was an allusion to Hades. The premodern architecture was either Byzantine (though most of the churches were in a shabby state, if not totally destroyed), or tasteless nineteenth-century, or, at best, Jugendstil, of which I am not particularly fond. One could find pleasant provincial lanes and nooks here and there—for instance, Kadashevskaya Quay not far from the Kremlin, where I lived for a couple of years—but these were usually overshadowed by Stalinist or grimly Constructivist buildings. There was a great deal of noise and dust, and dirty snow in winter. Most of the apartments I saw were extremely cramped, the stairs were foul-smelling and creaked, and people were generally poor and provincial-looking. One definitely felt the hand of the totalitarian system everywhere: there were lots of police, as well as quiet and frequently apprehensive faces. Many were fearful; on the other hand, boorish behavior and drunken quarrels were rather common and many parts of the city were dangerous at night.

HINSEY: I would like to discuss your poetic work during this time: in the spring of 1972 you were allowed to publish a single volume—your only offi- cially sanctioned book of poetry in Soviet Lithuania—Sign of Speech—

VENCLOVA: During this period, the censorship situation had somewhat improved. After 1968, the prevailing atmosphere was one of a “freeze,” but there were some unexpected fluctuations in the party line, which were duly reflected in the editorial policy of the Lithuanian State Publishing House. For a time, experimental verse was permitted (or benevolently overlooked), especially if it possessed a “life-affirming,” that is optimistic, quality or had a folkloric aspect. Several such books by Sigitas Geda and others appeared at this time. Usually, a “locomotive” was required: the very first poem in a book by a first-time author had to mention Lenin, or Fidel Castro (or, preferably, both) with due enthusiasm. Everyone consented to this demand, which was unspoken, or only discussed in private between an editor and an author. For me, it was out of the question. After my experience with my science book, I scorned the system and had enough respect for poetry to reject these “rules of the game.” Brodsky faced a similar dilemma. After his exile, a book of his poems was being prepared in the USSR, but Yevtushenko told him it needed a “locomotive”—a piece about Lenin or, at, least, about the great Russian people. Brodsky had a poem on people and their language, and quite a good one (Akhmatova admired it), which could perhaps have been construed as “patriotic” and therefore adhering to the official line. Romas Katilius persuaded him this would have been a gesture of capitulation. Brodsky refused to include it in the book; it was subsequently rejected by the publisher. To my astonishment, Sign of Speech appeared without any mandatory “locomotive” or “lightning rod”—perhaps the first such case in Soviet Lithuania, or possibly in the entire Soviet Union.

HINSEY: You had previously published under a pseudonym in small samizdat editions, including Pontos Axenos (1958) and Moscow Poems (1962)—

VENCLOVA: Pontos Axenos was a slim booklet of ten or twelve poems, a typical samizdat enterprise printed by Eglutė, the kitchen-table publishing house I mentioned earlier, whose spiritus movens was Natasha Trauberg.

HINSEY: During the 1970s, many people in the Soviet Union began to see emigration as one of the only possibilities for living a normal life, in which one might contribute and work productively—

VENCLOVA: In the 1950s and 1960s, emigration was not an option. The USSR's borders were hermetically sealed with watchtowers, barbed wire, and wide patches of raked earth to detect the footprints of Western spies. In reality, the authorities were much more interested in the footprints of would-be Soviet escapees who rarely, if ever, made it to Poland or Hungary (where they were tracked down as well). The armed border guards were under the same orders as prison camp guards. Privately among ourselves, we used to call our country “the big zone” (“zone” meaning “concentration camp” or Gulag in Soviet parlance). While the Berlin Wall is perhaps the best-known symbol of Communist force, one should keep in mind that the entire perimeter of the USSR—many thousands of miles—was essentially the same, even if, as a rule, there were no concrete slabs. Incidentally, the border guards, together with their heroic dogs, used to be praised in popular songs and movies as those on whom the peace and safety of the country depended.

To leave “the big zone,” one had to be issued an exit visa. Permanent exit visas were virtually unheard of, and temporary visas were a privilege accorded the happy few, whose loyalty was beyond suspicion—people such as Ehrenburg or Yevtushenko (or my father, for that matter). Small, closely monitored groups of tourists traveled under surveillance, and had to conform to quite strict rules. Needless to say, defections were infrequent. While many people yearned for the West, most just hoped for a better standard of living (meaning, above all, cars, clothes, and appliances). That said, there were also those who cherished the idea of freedom, however vague that concept might be. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a joke made the rounds: “What would you do if they opened the borders?” “I would climb a tree.” “Why?” “I wouldn't want to be trampled.”

In the prelude to his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, the Nobel Prize Laureate Czesław Miłosz underscored the fact that the twentieth century—” perhaps more protean and multifaceted than any other”—changed not only according to one's viewpoint, but also according to the volatile coordinates of latitude and longitude, a “point in the geographic sense as well.” Miłosz continues: “My corner of Europe, owing to the extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there, comparable only to violent earthquakes, affords a peculiar perspective. As a result, all of us who come from those parts appraise poetry slightly differently from the majority of my audience, for we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind's major transformations.”

Tomas Venclova, who came of age under the same sky as Miłosz and attended the same university, albeit in the rebaptized Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, could easily have written these lines. The “peculiar perspective” that Miłosz somewhat obliquely refers to is, of course, a nearly eight-hundred-yearold intellectual tradition, with its distinct, rich, and complex identity and history. And while, as John Donne reminds us, the globe—like a tear—is a perfect sphere, it remains a human curiosity that certain loci on the earth are perceived as being further from “the center,” even if, paradoxically, their magnetic ore has endured some of history's most violent earthquakes. Such a state of affairs—compounded by the systematic silences of totalitarianism—has resulted in the necessity of writers from the “borderlands” of Eastern Europe to elucidate its topography and attempt to shed light on the contours of this critical cultural and geopolitical point in space. In this, poetry has indeed been an essential witness and participant.

Such a task was given to Venclova precisely because his life has passed through some of the twentieth century's darkest seismic movements. Born in 1937 in Klaipėda, Lithuania, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Venclova's early childhood was first spent in Kaunas at the beginning of World War II, and later in Freda, a nearby suburb, in the home of his maternal grandfather Merkelis Račkauskas.

Antônio Dias Barros replaced Dias Carneiro as the National Insane Asylum director on July 12, 1902, following a litany of complaints and criticisms from the press and state officials about the institution's functioning. Instead of expressing pleasure at the prestige of this appointment, Dias Barros lamented that “any person to assume this position would already be doomed to failure, and publicly dismissed for incompetence, but [he would] be charged in error, when it should be the asylum itself, in this situation [as it is] due to internal excesses of every kind, [perpetrated] after the declaration of the Republic under the authority of those who more worthily should have defended and solidified, in the spirit of [the] public, their claims and spirits.” In many ways, his assessment was accurate, and his tenure lasted only a year. When Dr. Juliano Moreira succeeded Barros in 1903, he brought an unprecedented series of political and medical techniques to the asylum, which ushered in an era of institutional optimism despite the asylum's reputation as a failure under republican rule. No longer a site devoted to the passive stewardship of the mad, the asylum began to carry out the dual, and perhaps somewhat contradictory, goals of containment and treatment. Treatment techniques included hydrotherapy, light therapy, and suggestive therapies. Although evidence does not suggest that these methods were particularly effective in curing mental illness, they reflected a paradigm shift within Brazilian psychiatry. Historians have discussed the evolution of scientific medicine over the course of the nineteenth century and analyzed the institutional, social, and cultural changes that followed the well-known epistemological shift in medicine most commonly associated with post-revolutionary Paris. Beginning in the second half of the century, the asylum, in addition to the general hospital, underwent a fundamental transformation from a place of respite for the poor or the sick to a site defined by science. Historians have also demonstrated that in the world of early twentieth-century medicine, research, education, and the making of careers all became bound to the hospital. Laboratory training and bedside instruction at a university-affiliated hospital largely displaced the medical apprenticeship, and the identity of Brazilian physicians rested increasingly not on traditional therapeutics but on shared educational experiences and a claim to specialized scientific knowledge.

HINSEY: In 1958, Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy. How did it come to pass that you and a few fellow students wrote Boris Pasternak a letter of congratulations regarding his nomination for the Nobel Prize? How did you first hear this news?

VENCLOVA: Everyone in our small group loved Pasternak's poetry. His nomination for the prize was a joyous occasion (I believe we learned about it on the radio, which in 1958 was less jammed than before). During one of our meetings, quite spontaneously, we composed a short letter that Juozas Tumelis, Pranas Morkus, Romas Katilius, and I signed. In it, we expressed our faith that Pasternak would receive the well-deserved prize, and wished him good health and productive work.

HINSEY: How was this letter of congratulations transmitted to Pasternak?

VENCLOVA: While attending Moscow University, Pranas Morkus had established contact with some people close to Pasternak. As far as I know, the letter was transmitted via Irina Emelyanova, the daughter of Pasternak's last love, Olga Ivinskaya, who was the prototype for Lara. After the poet's death, Irina and her mother spent time in prison camps. I became acquainted with Irina after she was released.

HINSEY: On October 23, 1958, the Nobel Committee awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize. After first accepting the award, he came under intense pressure from the Soviet leadership and was forced to renounce it. How did you learn about these events?

VENCLOVA: Again, by Western radio. Then, the Soviet media informed us of “the reactionary uproar raised in the imperialist press” because of the prize. In my diary, I noted that I had eagerly joined the reactionary uproar. As it turned out, it was the Soviet response that soon developed into a sort of pandemonium. Several years earlier, Pasternak had attempted to publish the novel in the USSR. A group of highly placed writers wrote him a letter explaining that the novel was unfit for print because of its counterrevolutionary tendencies. Now the letter was made public. The phrase “an apology for treason” was among its milder invectives. Dozens of letters soon appeared in the press, condemning Pasternak in the harshest imaginable terms.

HINSEY: Let's return to your personal experiences. Could you describe the beginning of your high school education in Vilnius?

VENCLOVA: I previously mentioned that I attended only the second grade of primary school in Freda, and then enjoyed two blessed years of idleness. As often happens under such circumstances, I learned quite a bit, including Russian as well as the rudiments of English and French. My mother tried to teach me piano, but I had no aptitude for it. Neither could I paint or draw. In time, I learned to understand and appreciate painting, but I only started to enjoy serious music later in life. The area that really interested me was literature, especially poetry.

When we moved to Vilnius, it was time for me to undertake a regular high school education. The Soviets prided themselves on mandatory secondary schooling, in contrast to bourgeois Lithuania. Actually, only a seven-year school, the so-called semiletka, was mandatory; after this, some continued their education for three more years (this was the ten-year school, or desiatiletka), while others went to vocational schools or simply joined the workforce. Since Vilnius was half-empty, secondary schools were not numerous. In the beginning, only two of them were Lithuanian and the rest Russian (later, a small number of Polish schools were also allowed). Moreover, they were not coed. Stalin eliminated coeducational schooling throughout the Soviet Union after the war, having gotten it into his head to restore the old tsarist custom of his youth. Later, this was reversed, but I graduated from a boys’ school. I believe this may have resulted in some psychological damage: for a rather long time, I had very little information about girls and was shy with them (which, in turn, led to stupid escapades when I became more self-confident).

I was easily accepted into fifth grade (the first level of gymnasium, in prewar terms); the only requirement was an informal dictation test. However, this was not all that easy. Lithuanian orthography is rather complicated: most of the vowels have three variants that differ only slightly in pronunciation.

HINSEY: The Lithuanian Helsinki Group's press conference in Moscow had transpired without incident, but upon your return to Vilnius, you were informed that you had been invited to the Ministry of Internal Affairs—

VENCLOVA: The first thing my mother told me when I entered her flat was that I had been summoned by the ministry to appear the very next day. As I have said before, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, differed from the KGB in that it meant “regular” rather than secret police. That said, both offices were sometimes merged, and at other times separated during the Soviet era. In any case, the reputation of the ministry was grim enough.

HINSEY: Can you describe your internal state before your meeting at the ministry?

VENCLOVA: It was not exactly radiant. I had to reckon with the possibility that they would arrest me in the MVD building, although at the same time that seemed somewhat abstract. Rather, I expected another intimidating talk that led nowhere. In any event, I felt very clearly that, for me, there was no way back. Later, I used to say that I took a “prison bag” with me, that is, a change of underwear, a toothbrush, and so on, but that was a joke. In fact, I didn't take any precautions.

HINSEY: What time was your appointment? Would you describe the room? Who was present at this meeting?

VENCLOVA: It was in the morning, perhaps around eleven o’clock. The building was well-known to me, and to everyone in Vilnius—it was a veritable palace on Cathedral Square, with security guards inside who checked your identity papers. The room where the meeting took place was quite large, much bigger than the interrogation room in the KGB building, which I remembered well. Perhaps the idea was to create the impression of one's insignificance in relation to the authorities. There were three or four people on the other side of the desk. I knew one of them, as I had met him before: a highly placed official, perhaps the minister of the interior himself, although I’m not entirely certain. It was he who had once advised me that I had no grounds to apply for emigration. On my right was a nondescript young man. Instinctively, I sensed he was from the KGB.

HINSEY: Let's return to the 1960s and your relationship with Joseph Brodsky. In late August 1966, following his return from internal exile in Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region, Joseph Brodsky was in rather low spirits—

VENCLOVA: Brodsky was released from his internal exile in Norenskaya in the second half of 1965. In the end he served less than two years of his five-year sentence. We considered it an almost incredible success. For almost the first time since 1917, the state machine went into reverse due to international protests and, what was more important, to the pressure of mounting public opinion in the USSR. Brodsky returned to his parents’ flat in Leningrad, met Akhmatova, who was instrumental in his release, and started to look for translation contracts (he made a very modest living as a translator before the trial). An old literary scholar Viktor Zhirmunsky (a friend of Akhmatova's and a member of the so-called Formalist school in the twenties) proposed involving him in a very promising project. A large book of English metaphysical poetry was to be published in the academic series Literaturnye pamiatniki (Literary Monuments), and Brodsky began to render John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others into Russian, continuing his own poetic work at the same time. In Norenskaya, he had undergone a veritable transformation: he produced a hundred or so poems during his exile, which were much more original and powerful than most of his previous work. To tell the truth, they were on a par with Pasternak, Akhmatova, or anyone. He also managed to learn English in that northern village—friends had provided him with books by Auden and many others.

Therefore, Brodsky's situation in those years did not look too bad. By Soviet standards, it could even have been seen as enviable. Yet of course he was under strict surveillance by the KGB, and remained on the margins of “normal” society, shunned by all official bodies. The fact that he became the very epitome of Leningrad's and Russia's literary underground, adored by hundreds of young people, lionized by opposition cultural figures, and frequented by Western students who managed to get into the USSR, only served to aggravate his predicament.