Explanatory Notes:

Epigraph mementote peccatores: First words of an oratorio by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1634-1704), Dialogus inter Christum et peccatores (Dialogue between Christ and sinners). The text, by the Jesuit Father Commire, takes the form of a dialogue between Christ and repentant sinners. It is sufficiently important to the poem that we quote it in full (the Latin original is followed by an English translation).

Dialogus inter Christum et peccatores

Part I

CHRISTUS: Mementote peccatores, mementote quid fecerim vobis. Nonne vos creavi, nonne servavi, nonne nutrivi, nonne vos fovi sicut aquila provocans ad volandum pullos suos et super eos volitans?

Vos autem, incrassati et impugnati, dereliquistis Deum creatorem servatorem et patrem vostrum.

PECCATORES:

Ah cor durum, ah cor ingratum, cor saxeum haeccine reddis Deo, creatori tuo?

Quis capiti meo dabit aquam et oculis meis fontem lacrymarum ut plorem et dicam: peccavi Domine, sed miserere mei.

Heu! stupiditas cordis mei, heu! mentis meae caecitas infesta!

Sic vivo, sic puto, sic loquor et ago, quasi solum circa coeli sphaeras occupatus ambulares de me autem non cogitares.

Ah cor durum, ah cor ingratum, cor saxeum, haeccine reddis Deo, creatori tuo?

Part II

Peccavi Domine, peccavi multum. Erubescit vultus meus nec audeo respicere in coelum prae multitudeine iniquitatis meae. Agnosco vulnera mea, confiteor tibi Jesu bone, Jesu misericors, horret vultus meus sordes animae meae; ingemiscit cor meum, confectus est moerore spiritus meus, commota sunt viscera mea et contritio mea magna est valde.

Parce Domine, parce Jesu mitissime et ne despicias me in humilitate mea.

Factae sunt lacrymae meae potus meus et cineres refectio mea. Miserere Domine, miserere paenitentis, miserere Domine, miserere!

Convertere Deus mitis, convertere aliquantulum ne irascaris mihi amplius. Non, non, non ultra peccabo in te, non, non, non ultra.

Parce Domine, parce Jesu mitissime et ne despicias me in humilitate mea.

Dialogue between Christ and sinners

Part I

Christ: Remember, sinners. Remember what I have done for you. Did I not create you?  Did I not save you?  Did I not nourish you?  Did I not cherish you as the eagle, encouraging his chicks to fly and flying always above them?

But you, grown fat and without provocation, have deserted God, your creator, your savior, and your father.

Sinners:

O hard heart!  O ungrateful heart!  O heart of stone, is this how you repay God, your creator? 

Who will give water to my head and a fountain of tears to my eyes that I might weep and say, “I have sinned, lord, but pity me.”

Alas for the dullness of my heart!  Alas for the destructive blindness of my mind!

I live, I reckon, I speak, and I act as if you walked caring only about the spheres of heaven but did not take thought for me.

O hard heart!  O ungrateful heart!  O heart of stone, is this how you repay God, your creator?

Part II

I have sinned, Lord; I have sinned much. My countenance blushes, and I do not dare to look up to the heavens because of the greatness of my injustice.

I acknowledge my wounds; I confess to you, good Jesus, merciful Jesus: my countenance shudders at the filth of my soul. My heart groans; my spirit is consumed by sorrow;  my vitals are thrown into confusion and my contrition is great indeed.

Spare me, Lord!  Spare me, Jesus most gentle, and do not despise me in my lowness.

Tears have become my drink and ashes my sustenance.

Pity, Lord! Pity a penitent! Pity, Lord! Pity!

Change, gentle God!  Change a little, lest you be angry with me any more. No. No. I will sin no more against you. No. No. No more.

Spare me, Lord!  Spare me, Jesus most gentle, and do not despise me in my lowness.

(English translation courtesy of Andrew Feldherr, Classics Department, Princeton University)

l. 6 tell the story of your life in the world: Christ as judge is evoked numerous times in the Gospels, including John 5:26-30: “For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.”[viii]

l. 9 temples and thrones: See Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”  Colossians 1:15-20 is known as the “Christ hymn.”

l. 10 christ’s commandments: Christ’s commandments incorporate the commandments of the God of Israel. When asked by a young man, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” Jesus responds, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments,” referring to the commandments handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Pressed by the young man to specify which ones, Jesus says, “Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 19:16-19). When the young man continues to press him, Jesus adds his own commandment: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me” (Matthew 19:21; see also Mark 10:17-22). In the gospel of John, Jesus says, “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). In John 13, Jesus offers what he calls a “new commandment”: “That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”

l. 14 let your hearing pierce your heart: In the Russian the use of the word “slukh” (“hearing”) as the subject of “pierce your heart” is very unconventional. It may allude to the many instances in which Jesus refers to the faculty of hearing, as for example Mark 4:9 and 23, where Jesus says in reference to the parable of the sower: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

l. 17 a tooth for a tooth an eye for an eye: A reference to the “lex talionis,” found in the Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (ruled ca. 1796 BCE – 1750 BCE). In the Hebrew Bible, it appears numerous times, for example: “And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again” (Leviticus 24:19-20; see also Exodus 21:23-24 and Deuteronomy 19:21). The law was intended as a means of putting limits on vengeance, restricting it to punishment that would be no worse than the crime. In the Gospels, Jesus offers a new type of response to injury, based on forgiveness rather than retribution.  In the Sermon on the Mount, he says: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39; see also Luke 6:29-30). In the context of Tsvetkov’s dialogue, the sinner is reproaching Jesus for seemingly abandoning “grace” for the “law.”

l. 19 vale of hiccups: An ironic twist on the expression “vale of tears,” which appears in both the Russian and Roman Catholic (Douay-Rheims) Bibles in Psalm 83:7 (compare the King James Bible, Psalm 84:6). The expression also evokes the reference in Psalm 23 to the valley of the shadow of death. Tsvetkov glosses the phrase as “When you cry for a long time you start hiccuping.” Tsvetkov had used the same phrase in a much earlier poem, “sud’ba byla smetana.”

l. 21 was it you who asked for mercy and not sacrifice: When the Pharisees ask Jesus why he eats with publicans and sinners, he answers, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:12-13).

l. 22 tablets of tin: An ironic reference to the stone tablets on which the Lord gave the law and the commandments to Moses (Exodus 24:12, 34:1, 4).

l. 25 to cast me down with the swine into the abyss: The story of the Gadarene (Gerasene) swine. Jesus met a man possessed by demons; he ordered the demons to enter into the swine, “and the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:1-16). The version of this story found in Luke 8:32-36 serves as the epigraph to Dostoevsky’s 1871-72 novel translated as either The Demons or The Possessed (Besy). The full story is found in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39.

l. 29 peccavi domine: “I have sinned, Lord.”  Repeated by the sinners in Part 2 of Charpentier’s oratorio (see commentary to Epigraph).

l. 46 those lion and book guys: Tradition assigns symbols to each of the four Evangelists, based on the “four beasts” mentioned in Revelation 4:7  (“And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle”). The lion is traditionally the symbol for Mark. Often the Evangelists are portrayed in dual guise, both as the “beast” with which they are associated and as humans in the act of writing or holding a book.

l. 52 if you’re not up to being a doctor at least be an orderly: An ironic reference to the fact that much of Jesus’s activity in the Gospels relates to healing and even to bringing the dead back to life (thus the epithet “Christ the great physician”). See note to 1. 21.

l. 54 judge not that ye be not judged: Matthew 7:1, also from the Sermon on the Mount (see also Luke 6:37).

l. 57 with two others for company: At the Crucifixion, Jesus was executed along with two common criminals (Matthew 27:38, Mark 15:27, Luke 24:32-33, John 19:18).

l. 59 with an inscription in letters plain to see: A reference to the mocking inscription above Jesus’s head during the Crucifixion, “the King of the Jews” (Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:25-26, Luke 23:38, John 19:19).

l. 60 the court is adjourned: In the Russian, the word for court, “sud,” is the same word as “judgment” in the Last Judgment, “Strashnyi sud,” literally “the terrible judgment.” The emphasis in the poem is on Christ’s role as judge (see note to l. 6).

Formal Commentary:

To accommodate the dialogue genre, which has its roots in Western culture of the medieval period (mediated in the case of this poem by the baroque), Tsvetkov chooses a form with a distinctly archaic sound: syllabic verse. Based on western models, syllabic versification became the standard system of Russian literary poetry in the period c. 1660-1735, but it fell into oblivion (and even disrepute) as a result of the reforms associated with Vasilii Trediakovskii and Mikhailo Lomonosov. No poet before Tsvetkov has ever sought to resurrect the form in a serious way. As a point of comparison, one might look at the very loose stylization of syllabics in Joseph Brodsky’s 1967 poem “K stikham” (with an epigraph from Kantemir). See Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, Sankt-Peterburg, 1998, vol. 2, p. 191. It is conceivable that Tsvetkov’s interest in syllabic verse also reflects his readings of the Polish poet BolesƂaw Leƛmian (1878?–1937), whom he greatly admires (see interview below). Polish poetry, of course, continues to use syllabic verse to the present day.

Russian syllabic verse was almost invariably written in rhymed feminine couplets, and the 13-syllable line was one of the favorite measures. Tsvetkov follows this example, yet his lines diverge from historical precedent in important ways. Eighteenth-century poets relied on a caesura (after the seventh syllable in a thirteen-syllable line), thus breaking each line into two distinct parts and introducing (especially in the second) a trochaic tendency. In Tsvetkov’s lines there is no caesura and no trochaic tendency. The ratio of stressed to unstressed syllables in his poem is 1:2.59, which is close to the ratio that occurs in non-metrical Russian.

With the exception of the two final lines (which are clearly set off to emphasize closure), Tsvetkov follows tradition by using only feminine rhymes. However, rhyme in traditional Russian syllabic verse was nothing more than a way to highlight the end of a line. Euphony (rather than originality) was the goal. In contrast, Tsvetkov’s anti-grammatical, phonetically inexact rhymes reflect centuries of poetic evolution (as well as his own proclivity to search for the unexpected and unprecedented, e.g. о́ко/баро́кко, ико́ты/кто́ ты).

In terms of the broader structure of the work, each of the speakers is given two fifteen-line stanzas. However, it is striking that the soul both gets the last word and even “interrupts” each of Christ’s speeches by giving the second line of a couplet that Christ begins (in each case, this is a rare instance of grammatical rhyme: греши́ла/реши́ла, кры́шкой/кни́жкой). In contrast, the soul’s speeches end in complete couplets.

Interpretation:

During his Princeton interview, Aleksei Tsvetkov identified love, death, and God as key themes in his poetry and clarified his relation to these themes as follows:

Well, it’s probably in the biographical details simply. I was for years a Roman Catholic
. If I have to specify, I’m definitely a Christian atheist, in a more narrow sense a Catholic atheist. There’s no point in being an Orthodox atheist, I never was an Orthodox, and besides, it doesn’t have any theory, any doctrine worth disproving.

Oxymoronic as the terms “Christian atheist” and “Catholic atheist” might seem, they nonetheless encapsulate the issues that form the intellectual structure of Tsvetkov’s poem “dialogue between christ and a sinful soul”: a struggle between belief and non-belief; an examination of the nature and process of redemption; and an implicit weighing of the Western Christian or Roman Catholic tradition against the Eastern Christian or Russian Orthodox tradition.

Tsvetkov’s poem emerges from a distinctly Western Christian source, the motet “Dialogus inter Christum et peccatores” (“Dialogue between Christ and sinners”) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1634-1704). The Latin text for the motet was written by the well-known Jesuit Jean Commire, and Charpentier himself served as the maĂźtre de musique at the principal Jesuit church in Paris, L’Église St. Louis, thus linking the motet to the most scholarly, analytical branch of the Catholic Church.[ix]  In our interview, Tsvetkov maintains that he became Catholic rather than Orthodox because of the Jesuit intellectual tradition, asserting, “I use my head in anything I do,” and then adding by way of contrast with Russian Orthodoxy, “If there’s a theory in Orthodoxy, it’s that you shouldn’t [use your head].”  Developing a similar line of comparison in a scholarly vein, denoting practitioners of the Eastern Christian tradition as “Greeks” and those of the Western Christian tradition as “Latins,” Timothy Ware writes in his study The Orthodox Church:

From the start Greeks and Latins had each approached the Christian Mystery in their own way. The Latin approach was more practical, the Greek more speculative; Latin thought was influenced by juridical ideas, by the concepts of Roman law, while the Greeks understood theology in the context of worship
. When reflecting on the Crucifixion, Latins thought primarily of Christ the victim, Greeks of Christ the Victor; Latins talked more of redemption, Greeks of deification [of the whole world], and so on. 
These two distinctive approaches were not themselves contradictory; each served to supplement the other, and each had its place in the fullness of [the Christian] tradition.[x]  

It is clear that Tsvetkov does not embrace Orthodoxy. At the same time, a number of the issues that trouble the “soul” in the “dialogue between christ and a sinful soul” relate to peculiarities of the Western Christian tradition: its “juridical ideas,” its emphasis on quid pro quo in the redemptive process, on Christ as a victim, and on individual redemption as opposed to universal deification. These problems would perhaps not be resolved, but would be ameliorated by adherence to the less scholarly, less rationalistic, and more holistic approach of the Eastern tradition, although the most tormenting issue of belief versus non-belief would remain. 

Both Charpentier’s and Tsvetkov’s dialogues reflect the practice of religious meditation propounded in such works as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Spiritual Combat by Lorenzo Scupoli. The process of religious meditation follows a threefold progression from memory (hence, “mementote peccatores” – “remember, sinners”), to understanding, to will, this last stage often embodied in a colloquy or dialogue, very likely with Christ, or in a straightforward statement of belief or religious ecstasy. [xi]  Many European cultures developed forms of poetry based on religious meditation: John Donne, Edward Young and the “Graveyard Poets” in English; Opitz, Gryphius, and Angelus Silesius and other practitioners of the Gedankenlyrik in German; and in the Russian or Russian-Ukrainian context, Gregorii Skovoroda and Dmitrii Rostovskii, who prefigured Tsvetkov in their use of poetic “dialogues” or “conversations” to examine issues of belief, their use of syllabic verse, and their tendency to ignore established strictures of style and lexicon. The Russian tradition then passes to Mikhailo Lomonosov and, in more diffuse form, to Derzhavin, Tiutchev, Boratynsky, Zabolotsky, and Brodsky, all mentioned by Tsvetkov in Princeton as being of special importance to him, especially the last three.[xii]

Tsvetkov uses the first words of Charpentier’s motet, Christ’s admonition “mementote peccatores,” as the epigraph of his poem and follows Charpentier’s dialogic form while altering it slightly to suit his own purposes. Tsvetkov’s dialogue comprises four 15-line utterances alternating between Christ and “the soul,” while Charpentier’s motet has a prose text and features Christ only in the opening, followed by two segments in which “the sinners” respond. Charpentier’s sinners express profound contrition, attributing their sins to the “destructive blindness” of their minds, while – and this is a major difference – Tsvetkov’s soul, engaging in testy point by point arguments with Christ in the manner of a Jesuitical debate, neither confesses her sins nor expresses contrition of any kind. (Although the role of the soul within the dialogue does not suggest any particular assumptions about gender, it seems appropriate to represent the grammatically feminine dusha [soul] with feminine pronouns and modifiers in English, as is the case in the original Russian.)

Turning now to the poem itself, in the first stanza we see Christ taking a stance that is judgmental, somewhat pedantic, and at times self-contradictory. He states that the soul’s life is all accounted for (vse uchteno v smete) but nonetheless poses the question, “were you really one of those for whom we seek salvation/tochno li ty iz tekh komu spasen’ia ishchem,” and then proceeds with an inquisitorial list of particulars with the ring of a catechism: “did you pray
 did you give
 did you respect
 did you keep
” 

жарко ли молилась подавала ли нищим

почитала ли родных храмы и престолы

достойно ли блюла заповеди христовы

did you pray ardent prayers give alms to the poor

did you respect the temples and thrones of your kinsmen

did you keep christ’s commandments in a worthy way

When Christ states, “my father is merciful to the fallen and the meek in spirit/milostiv otets moi k padshim kto smiren dukhom,” he is clearly trying to elicit a confession from the soul as a step toward redemption, but his manner verges on bullying rather than mercy. The subsequent line, “turn your gaze inward and let your hearing pierce your heart/obratis’ vnutr’ ochami pronzi serdtse slukhom,” suggests the use of the senses in religious meditation to make spiritual experience more immediate. This technique should, in theory, move the soul voluntarily toward repentance. This Christ lacks the patience to wait for results, however, and in the final line of the stanza he reverts to his accusatory role as he demands, “answer to your lord why did you sin/otvet’ gospodu tvoemu zachem greshila.”

In the next stanza in the soul’s first response — one could even say rebuttal — to Christ’s assertions, the soul argues in the manner of a syllogistic proof: “if your law is tooth for tooth and eye for eye / then renaissance and baroque labored in vain/esli tvoi zakon zub za zub oko za oko / znachit zria staralis’ renessans i barokko,” which is to say, then neither the brutality nor the legalistic particularity of the Old Testament has been overcome. As the argument continues, the soul rejects the notion of quid pro quo inherent in Christ’s demands, as she distinguishes between mercy, which is freely given, and sacrifice, in which a price is paid for something; and between a gift, which is freely given, and a reward, which is provided in response to a specific act. She asks rhetorically, “was it you who asked for mercy and not sacrifice/ty li eto prosil milosti a ne zhertvy,” making reference to Christ’s words in Matthew 9:13, and concludes, “so judge me not by the tablets of tin/tak ne sudi menia po skrizhaliam iz zhesti,” which is to say if you yourself asked for freely given mercy rather than sacrifice, then you have no right to judge me on the basis of laws or commandments. The flimsy nature of tin tablets, as opposed to the gravitas of the stone tablets given to Moses by God, represents a further attack on religious legalism. Likewise, the soul is willing to accept heaven as a gift, but not as a reward for good behavior (etot rai mogu priniat’ v dar no ne v nagradu).

The movement away from a catechistic, syllogistic approach to faith and redemption is reinforced by gentle echoes of Dostoevsky. The most obvious echo relates to the story of the Gadarene swine, which serves as an epigraph for Dostoevsky’s Besy (translated as The Demons or The Possessed). The soul suggests that being cast into the abyss like the demonic swine would be preferable to gaining entrance to heaven as a reward for toeing the line. Perhaps more significant, however, is the echo of Ivan Karamazov’s “poem,” “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov, which involves Jesuits, issues of faith, free will, and salvation, and the murkiness of reality. In Ivan’s so-called poem (which is written in prose) the aged, and possibly mad, Inquisitor represents an extreme and distorted version of Jesuit practice, while Christ represents mercy – demonstrated by the silent kiss he gives the Inquisitor – and free will. This is the kind of Christ whom Tsvetkov’s soul seeks, but does not find.  But more than this, in both “The Grand Inquisitor” and Tsvetkov’s “dialogue,” Christ’s very identity and existence are questioned. For all that Tsvetkov’s soul debates Christ using specific passages in the Bible to substantiate his charges, he nonetheless addresses Christ with the words “o lord or whoever you are/gospodi ili kto ty” and asserts, “i do not believe in the reality of our meeting/ne veriu v real’nost’ nashei vstrechi.”  The age and possible madness of the Grand Inquisitor and the instability of Ivan Karamazov’s personality create a similar hallucinatory effect in “The Grand Inquisitor”; a later section of The Brothers Karamazov provides a mirror image of these issues as Ivan questions the existence of both the devil and God in his nightmare conversation with the devil.

The story of the Grand Inquisitor will become relevant again at the end of the poem, but for now we return to Tsvetkov’s Christ who, following the soul’s confused tirade in the second stanza, provides his own rebuttal marked by irritation, self-contradiction, and a clear note of victimhood. He begins by rebuking the soul for her complaints and asserting that God the father is “the author of everything good/avtor vsego dobra.”  But then, referring to the soul’s earlier remark that the law of “tooth for tooth” negated the progress of the renaissance, he argues that mortals actually have an enviable lot and laments that in his role as the Son of God, he has been consigned “to torment on the cross / for all the faults of others that will be and were/a otets syna poslal na krestnuiu muku / za vse chuzhie viny chto budut i byli.”  He whines further that “the entire created world bears the scabs of this blood/vse mirozdan’e s tekh por v strup’iakh etoi krovi.”  So much for “the author of everything good.”  Worse yet, it is possible that this sacrifice has been in vain, because the soul, unlike her predecessors in Charpentier’s piece, has yet to make a move toward confession. As the third stanza closes, Christ again issues an imperative: “repent soul before your body’s a corpse under a lid/kaisia dusha poka telo ne trup pod kryshkoi.”

None of this proves compelling for the soul, who turns the tables, arguing in the final stanza that Christ could forgive “just like that/zadarom” by means of mercy, but has instead focused on legalistic aspects, capitalizing on his role as victim in order to justify acting as a judge. He signs warrants “with stigmata hands/stigmatnymi rukami” and lives without sin not for the sake of virtue, but for the right to cast stones at others. Much as Christ set out to remind the soul of the necessity of contrition – “mementote peccatores” – the soul now reminds Christ, “you’re the one who said judge not that ye be not judged/ ty skazal tam ne sudite da ne sudimy.”   In closing, the soul once again turns the tables, this time in an act that combines self-sacrifice, irony, and hubris: she proposes that she herself take on the role of Christ and give herself up for crucifixion. There is, however, a catch. While the New Testament conveys the message that Christ died to atone for the sins of humanity, the soul turns this message inside out, casting it back into the Old Testament as she proclaims her readiness to die “to atone for God’s vengeance/vo iskuplen’e bozh’ei mesti.”

There is yet another reversal to come, this one hammered home by the sudden switch from the well-established pattern of feminine rhymes to masculine rhymes in the closing couplet, as the soul requests an inscription on her cross in letters well visible:


с надписью чтобы буквы видны

суд отменяется ни на ком нет вины


with an inscription in letters well visible

the court is adjourned and nobody is guilty

Instead of an inscription of identity, “The King of the Jews” as in the crucifixion of Christ, the inscription requested by the soul does not deny the existence of sin, but eliminates the legalistic concept of guilt leading to punishment: “court is adjourned and nobody is guilty,” or more literally, “the court is adjourned and there is no guilt on anyone at all.”  As some readers see it, this is an affirmation of atheism: Christ is defeated and “the soul wins.”  This understanding was confirmed by Tsvetkov himself, who said during our discussion, “Of course the soul wins, because it’s the winning argument.”  As noted by other readers, however, such an understanding recapitulates the irony of the story of the gospels themselves. The world puts Jesus on trial (the chief priests, the Romans, and the people who wag their heads at Jesus on the cross and say “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross”), and yet the life of the church and world history represented in the resurrection show that the world’s judgment of Jesus was really the foolishness of the wise.[xiii]   

Another way of understanding the conclusion — albeit in contrast to Tsvetkov’s own view as expressed in our discussion — is to see the poem not as a total denial of the possibility of belief, but a denial of Jesuitical thinking and a corresponding movement toward the precepts of Russian Orthodoxy. [xiv]  The inscription on the soul’s cross can be seen as leading the poem towards the Orthodox emphasis on deification of the universe: sin and sinners exist, but there is no guilt on anyone at all because all are redeemed. [xv]  This, of course, is opposed to the Jesuitical emphasis on a practical, piece by piece, sin by sin and sinner by sinner approach to exculpation and redemption. 

As readers, we do not know whether or not the soul actually will be crucified, or whether such a crucifixion would accomplish atonement for God’s vengeance, the sins of humanity, or even the soul’s own sins. But the reversal in the line of argument, the undercutting of the poem’s initial apparent meaning, brings the poem again into the orbit of “The Grand Inquisitor.”  When the would-be atheist Ivan Karamazov finishes telling the story, his saintly brother Alyosha likewise reverses the direction of the narrative:

“But all that is absurd!” suddenly exclaimed Alyosha, who had hitherto listened perplexed and agitated but in profound silence. “Your poem is a glorification of Christ, not an accusation, as you, perhaps, meant it to be. And who will believe you when you speak of ‘freedom’? Is it thus that we Christians must understand it? It is Rome (not all Rome, for that would be unjust), but the worst of the Roman Catholics, the Inquisitors and Jesuits, that you have been exposing!”[xvi]

This is the shifting ground of belief and non-belief, reality and chimera, and interweaving Christian traditions, that provides the context for Tsvetkov’s “dialogue between christ and a sinful soul.”  What readers make of it is up to them – and no one is guilty.

Interview with Aleksei Tsvetkov from 19 June 2008 (Princeton University)

Q: Tell us about your compositional technique. Do you think for a long time, then sit down and write? Do you write poems quickly or slowly?  Is it a process of days and days?

A: It is certainly not days. It varies, of course, but the most typical situation is this. . . I have to have a certain space of time in front of me, otherwise I simply cannot do anything. But if I do, I just sit down and write. I do not necessarily have an idea. Sometimes it’s a meter, sometimes it’s a very general plot. And I have to have it finished before I get up, because I never do it in two sittings. It has to be a kind of instant gratification. Of course, the gratification part is doubtful because afterwards you seldom understand what you wrote. . . I never write very long poems because I smoke, and I’ll die much faster than I’ve planned, but an average sized poem takes an hour and a half, two hours. If the poem is a bit longer, it lasts almost three hours, but I’m usually exhausted by that time.

Q: What about revisions?  Do you come back to them later?

A: No, no, no. Just a word or two; it has to be completely finished. I remember that when I reissued my very early poems, I corrected some, but never as much as an entire line, for instance. In two hours I have an entire poem. Now I usually post it.

Q: When we were asking you about the image of the foliage in the Shakespeare poem, you mentioned that you don’t see the images. Would it be accurate to describe your writing as words on paper and hearing?

A: Yes, it’s about hearing, of course, the sound in my mind, but it’s just words. I just put words together, and maybe I run ahead in the poem and consider what would look nice in this or that stanza. But I do not visualize anything; it’s only words — and sound, of course.

Q: You said that when you came back to writing poetry you tried a few things and you were feeling your way around, but that you’ve finally discovered the themes and things you wanted to write about and that you’re now exploring them.

A: Well — they kind of discovered themselves. I do not usually have control over the general topics that I deal with. People have remarked — and I can see it myself — that mostly what I write about is love and death . . . and God. I have an English poem where I expressed it more succinctly:

“but really all he gave us from above

was love and death and much more death than love” 

So that’s how it turned out in the end
 I do not have a real border between humorous poetry and serious poetry, because I use the same devices in both. Some of those [humorous poems] I include in my books, so they might not necessarily be about these subjects, but basically, I return to them. As far as the word “death” is concerned, I believe that I am the Russian poet who uses it the most.

Q: What are the merits of blogging for poetry?

A: I would have never written without it. Living under the Soviet regime taught us a certain conspiratorial life. When I emigrated I still had my soapbox, I still had my friends in the Soviet Union, so we would write letters and put our new poems in without breaking them into lines, so that whoever read the letter in between didn’t pay any attention to it. Then we’d wait for a month or so for somebody to say whether your poem was good or not. I do not believe I could do this today. Besides, blogging is the only way to deal with the geographical separation. When I lived in Prague I visited Russia quite often, but now I don’t, and this is the way to keep up with the living language, which is very much of interest to me. I consider language the ultimate toy. The way it changes is interesting — even people living in Russia do not quite know what to do with many of those new words. There are people I know who simply do not notice the changes that happened during the last 20 or 30 years. Writers in Russia are now divided. There’s a particular vocabulary that some people use, who are called neo-akmeisty [neo-Acmeists] — which is not really a meaningful term, because I believe akmeisty [Acmeists] never existed. These people more or less follow the classical tradition. Then there are the “revolutionaries,” and they use different vocabularies. I own both, and I do not see that there should be any division, so usually in my poetry you can find archaic words or curse words. I mix it up. To follow the actual usage you have to be present in Russia. You can see it even in Brodsky’s poems, that his vocabulary kind of dries up towards the end. He didn’t know what to do with all those words that he had already put in as many combinations as possible. I thought it was only my impression, but many people who like him and his poetry very much, but who live in Russia, say that this is obvious.

Q: Since you mentioned Brodsky: did you know him personally?

A: Yes, I knew him, but our relationship wasn’t good. He greeted me in the beginning, and actually his word was very instrumental with Ardis [Publishers], with Carl and Ellendea [Proffer]; he said I should be published. But for the rest of his life he never praised me or said a good word about me — not that I expected this from him, but it was odd.

Q: And what about his poetry?  You mentioned the later poetry, but what about the earlier poetry? 

A: There are poems of his, not that many, which I consider among the best in the Russian language. I think he was a great poet.

Q: Your reference to the pylkie devy [passionate maidens] in “kennedy kennedy king” recalls the idea that Ă©migrĂ©s coming to the United States have some sort of fantastical visions of what they’ll find. When you first came to the United States, what most conformed to your expectations and what most deviated?  What came as a surprise?

A: What least conformed — I think this was the experience of everyone from Russia. This drudgery, this everyday work which everybody hated — people thought that in the United States you didn’t have to do it, but it turned out that here you actually did. But for me, the atmosphere that I tried to reflect in the poem “kennedy kennedy king,” — I say “tried,” because I didn’t do anything on purpose, it wrote itself — is the way it’s a new life. You arrive in a new country where nobody knows you, you have — in my case — no useful skills. You are like a high school graduate. I was twenty-eight years old at that stage, so this was kind of the expectation. And then, of course, you move to San Francisco, which at that point still had some remainders of Haight-Ashbury and all that stuff, which was very interesting.

Q: Why San Francisco?  Why is that the place you chose?

A: Because some of my friends lived there, and they invited me, and I wasn’t going anywhere in New York. I think I wanted to enter Hunter College, and I think I was accepted, but I thought better of that, and I decided instead to have a year of rest. They called me, and I moved to San Francisco, and I liked it much better than Yonkers, where I had been living.

Q: And how long were you in San Francisco?

A: A year and a half.

Q: And then you went to Michigan?

A: Yes.

Q: Why did you go to Michigan?

A: Because I was invited. Sasha Sokolov came to San Francisco, and we met, and we liked each other, and he brought my poetry to Ardis, Carl [Proffer] gave it to Brodsky, and they told me to come to Michigan. I didn’t have any university diploma; I had studied many years, but never received a diploma. I had studied chemistry, history, journalism, and Carl told me I could be accepted for graduate studies on this basis; they turned it into credits.

Q: And then, did you think when you did your doctorate that you’d spend the rest of your life as a professor of Russian literature?

A: I didn’t quite understand all that it would entail. But, of course, I was not averse to the idea. And, in fact, when I taught for a few years at Dickinson College [in Carlisle, Pennsylvania], I liked the job itself, even though there were many stupid students, but those that were not really made it worthwhile.

Q: How did you move from being an American university teacher to being a journalist for Radio Liberty?

A: Well, I was clearly given to understand that I wouldn’t get tenure. I had moved to the DC area, and I came to Voice of America, where I had friends. They interviewed me and hired me on the spot. A few years later I moved to “Radio Liberty” in Munich (and later, Prague), and I stayed with them for 17 years.

Q: And that was when you stopped writing poetry.

A: Not quite. I stopped somewhere on the move from Carlisle to DC, because I had thought of a big prose project, which was never finished, but which was partly published.

Q: This is the novel about classical times?

A: Yes. But this was an extremely hard task; it had to be pursued full-time, because for years I read nothing except literature on the subject, studied Latin, classical authors. But nobody was paying me, so I had to abandon it. And at that time I decided . . . I didn’t decide anything, but there was no purpose in writing poetry anymore.

Q: Well, that’s an enormous question, and we’re all dying to ask you why.

A: In the February issue of Poetry magazine, there’s my essay on living in Prague, where I try to synthesize my thoughts [on this subject], but there are many answers. The fact is that I just stopped without regrets and started after 17 years.

Q: Without regrets. You didn’t feel this hole in your life?

A: Why would I regret it?  If I had regretted it, I would have sat down and written something.

Q: You felt you could have written at any time?

A: Why not?  It’s not like I was sitting and nothing came to me. This has never happened to me. If I sit down, I write something.

Q: During that time, did you read what other people were writing?  Were you following what was going on?

A: No. Insofar as I read anything, most of my reading — unless it was non-fiction — was either prose or the poets that I really like. These do not necessarily include living ones.

Q: Does it include any living ones?

A: Among the Russians, yes. Vladimir Gandel’sman.

Q: Can you list any of the non-living ones?

A: I would say that my gods are probably Mandel’shtam and Auden and Bolesław Leśmian, but all in the original. Also, Wallace Stevens, which I kind of see that I’m not imitating in my English poetry, but it’s somehow akin to it.

Q: When did you first write a poem in English?

A: About three years ago.

Q: Nothing before. . .?

A: Nothing. Never attempted it. There was this unfortunate translation that I put at the end of . . .

Q: Of Edem.

A: And that was it. It was odd because actually I lived for many, many years outside of the English language, although most of my reading has always been in English. . . I wrote my first English poem in Prague.

Q: And what was the impulse to write in English?

A: I don’t know. I was bored at work, but at work the situation was such that you couldn’t just sit and concentrate on something, especially since we were forbidden by that time to smoke. So we had a smoking atrium where we’d step out for a few minutes, and by the end of the day, I thought I’d written a decent poem, and it was published.

Q: Is there much of a Russian environment around you today, or is it mostly the blog?

A: The blog, but the blog is a crowd of people. I now know many people personally whom I met through that blog. If I go to Moscow, for instance, those are the people I see there. Because, my generation, generally, unfortunately, died out or is silent. The only really active person I know is Gandel’sman. Also Gandlevsky, but he writes a poem a year, so it’s kind of difficult to say that. So, Gandel’sman is the only person that I could look up to, but otherwise it’s a desert. So most of my friends are ten, twenty, thirty years younger than I am.

Q: Could I ask another question that connects to what was said about the visual element? I think you replied to the very early question about the actual process of writing that you’re now composing on screen, are you?

A: Yes, In the olden times, I used to do it in pencil on cards, like Nabokov. Then you put it on the typewriter, of course, and see what you actually wrote.

Q: This is what I was getting to — you have to see what you’ve written.

A: Yes, but with the computer it’s much easier. You just remove the versions you don’t like; they don’t crowd the paper.

Q: So you’re seeing and not hearing? Or are you hearing as well? What’s the relationship?

A: I do hear, I hear in my mind. . . I think that I’m quite alone in that respect, because sound has completely disappeared from Russian poetry. People don’t pay attention to it and they don’t see it. Except for people like Gandlevsky and Gandel’sman. It’s no difference whether it’s on screen or on paper.

Q: That doesn’t make a substantial difference, but what I was getting at is this: you’ve said before you seem to see something in a stanza, you’ve got a kind of visual image, you’re conceptualizing in terms of stanzas.

A: No, no, no. Not really. I do not think that broadly. Just a few words that stick together that seem natural together. And then they find other words that go after them or before them. It’s like a jigsaw.

Q: You see, I think one of the greatest difficulties and one of the most exciting things that we’ve found in analyzing what you write is why one thing comes after another. But this to you is an unconscious process?

A: No, this is the only thing that I care about. You have to have correct words following each other in the correct order. That’s the whole secret. Otherwise it’s prose. When an idea comes before words, then it’s called prose. And most contemporary American poetry (I could talk about neo-formalism, which I think largely a failure, but this does not predominate) — most contemporary American poetry is weak prose, and it’s done intentionally. I don’t see why. It is not a requirement of the language. We know that great poetry was written in this language. When I write in English, I do not try to import Russian poetics into English, but I try to go against the current of weak prose. I try to stay as metaphorical and — to the extent that it’s possible for me because I am not a native speaker — as tied to the word as I am in Russian.

Q: Can you say a little bit more about your deliberate practice of messing up words?  It seems mainly to happen around syntax or phrasing, but as you said, it’s a signature. I wonder if you could say more about where that comes from and what effect it has.

A: It’s one of the ways to overcome, to defeat the dullness that comes from using the same words. Some poets have a thousand or two thousand words and they put them in different orders. Akhmatova is one of these — she never even thought that you could write differently. As it was given to her, so she lived for decades, and she never came up with anything new. It’s like a children’s toy; you never try to open it and see what’s inside. For me it was natural to overcome the dullness. I do not see why one word is worse than another. If I see a hackneyed word in a particular place, I want to replace it with something else. And if it’s a curse word, if it’s mat — so much the better, if you are skillful enough to do it. Some of the younger poets now overdo this. It becomes ridiculous; they put as many of those words into a poem as possible. They are trying to shock you. You can shock me by your inability, and that’s what they do. But every word has its place, and once you realize that your choice is not two thousand words but twenty [thousand], say, the job is much more fun.

Q: Could you say a little bit about the presence of music in your work and also in how you compose? It’s clearly so central in one of the poems that we worked on (the dialogue) and also in your essays.

A: Well, that basically is one of my interests. I would rather listen to music than read poetry, so naturally it seeps through into my poems. It’s not only music, in smaller degrees it’s sciences, philosophy, or stuff like that. You cannot write about what you are not interested in; you do write most of all about what you are interested in. And the same basic questions that I deal with — God, death and love — are dealt with in many of those disciplines. So basically it’s an extension of the words issue: if you use strange words, then why not use mathematical symbols or musical symbols or philosophical terminology?  Fine with me, if you can do it. The only thing that amazes me is: how come more people don’t do it?

Q: So how strange do you like your music?  What is your level of tolerance?

A: I would say that my favorite composers are from the second Viennese school. But I hate the more extreme music, stuff like Cage. . . I used to be like everybody; in my youth I preferred Baroque. Then I discovered twentieth-century music that I like very much. And now I am quite tolerant of the Romantics.

Q: Could I follow that with a question about the relationship between the Charpentier music and your dialogue poem? Were you conceiving of it musically? Obviously you were following the genre. . .

A: No, I simply know Charpentier very well, so that is always in the back of my mind. And I decided that it would be interesting to make a poem in the form of a dialogue, as they used to do.

Q: Speaking about music: in “kennedy kennedy king” there’s not just one, but two references to American popular music. Is this something that you associate with your first impressions of being here or do you still have an ear for popular music?

A: No, not at all. I am horrified by it. That was my youth, and that’s how the poem is written.

Q: There’s a political dimension to some of your poetry. Are you hesitant to put these poems — or certain other types — on the blog?

A: I put everything I write on the blog. But, the political ones, well, when I’m pushed, it could involve politics as much as anything else. But in my poems on the killing of children in the Caucasus or on the murder of Politkovskaya — that simply touched me. But that’s a rare thing for me, because usually I do not have a topic before the poem, only in very general terms.

Q: Well, it produces very powerful poetry, so I . . .

A: Yes, but some people hate it.

Q: For what reason? They hate the politics of what you’re saying?

A: They hate the politics. They hate the politics, but it’s obvious to them that the poems are bad because they express hatred.

Q: Do these considerations that you’ve just been talking about affect what you submit for publication in Russian journals? Do you send them blocks of poems and let the editors choose? 

A: Not necessarily. I just send them what they should publish. If they remove a poem or two, I do not have any grudge, of course. There are always situations, and they inform me in advance. But the Politkovskaya poem was published in Znamia. Of course, people in the Kremlin are not aware — they don’t read Znamia. And if they did, I don’t know whether they would do anything about it. They pretend they were not the ones who killed her.

Q: I’m very interested to know how editorial boards, and specifically poetry editors, in Russia go about presenting you, an author, a person of your status now, with their decisions about what to publish and what not to.

A: Well, it’s not like they are not responsible. There’s no committee, there’s no official censorship now.

Q: No, I know. That makes it even more interesting. There’s nothing to hide behind.

A: They are aware of the simple truth that if they do something to me, I’ll simply stop sending poems to them, and I believe they would prefer that I did.

Q: Ah, so it’s their loss.

A: I could easily live without those publications anyway, because I have the blog. I don’t earn any money with it, so it doesn’t matter to me.

Q: Has this situation changed radically since you came back to poetry?  This is the new situation for publishing poetry, is it, in Russia?

A: Well, with the advancements of the internet, yes, surely. A whole generation of contemporary poets who are pretty good grew up. There was a total hiatus during perestroika. I do not remember anybody except for, you know, dinosaurs still writing their stuff. But the new generation emerged in the internet. There’s a site called stikhi.ru, which still exists, and it’s a sea of the most idiotic nonsense, but some people emerged from that, and they are now established and well-known poets.

Q: Is there anything in American politics and culture that could inspire “entries”?

A: I wrote a poem about [Hurricane] Katrina and Dubya which was published in Fulcrum.

Q: Could you say something about your decision not to use punctuation and capitalization?  How did that come about? I’m particularly interested in what it feels like to you to have made a decision that all of your poetry then follows. It feels to me like that’s unusual for a poet to do.

A: You know, the decision was taken more than thirty years ago. I cannot imagine how I would write poems now with all the punctuation. I cannot give you all the considerations I had in mind because I’ve forgotten most of them, although I am aware of some of the effects it produces. At that time Bakhyt Kenzheev sent me a few of his poems that were written like that. (He doesn’t do that anymore.)  And I looked at it and tried to do it, and I liked it. I realized that you could do things with the meaning that way. First of all, you equalize all the words — you can insert proper names without them standing out. And then, naturally, if you have proper names written that way, then you remove the graphical devices altogether. And I’ve done this ever since. If you asked me [to comment] in detail, it would be my present thinking, which, of course, grew up together with my writing. What I thought at that time I never wrote down.

Q: Does it trouble you at all that in certain cases it introduces ambiguities that you don’t necessarily approve of?  For example, in intonation. When you read the poem aloud, we can hear whether it’s a question or not, whereas when you write it this way, often it’s not clear.

A: Very rarely, yes, it does. The only thing that gives me trouble, probably, is when it’s a question. But you cannot introduce just one question mark, so people have to work it out.

Q: But surely you have a sense of stanzas, because all these poems have very clearly marked stanzas.

A: Not necessarily. Sometimes I break that. But mostly, yes, most of the poems are in stanzas. What I do is to hypertrophize the classical form and insert totally new content into it. To an extent it’s meta-poetry, in the sense that I try to put together all that was done in Russian poetry. Therefore, I have so many quotations, for instance, or hidden quotations or distorted quotations. And the stanza form goes naturally with it. It would be difficult to do it in free verse. I do write free verse, but very seldom.

Q: The thing that stands out is that you write not just in stanzas, but in big stanzas. I don’t know what percentage of Russian poetry is still written in quatrains, probably in the 70 percentiles, and you hardly ever do.

A: I do, sometimes. A quatrain is too short a thing. It cuts the idea too short when you have to develop it. I don’t know why. It’s the same thing as the classical meters that sometimes irritate me. That’s why I invented, whatever, resurrected the syllabic form. Quatrains irritate me if I don’t see them as natural. I usually use them when I write short lines. Then to underline the laconicity I employ them.

Q: It has traditionally been claimed that Russians have a great understanding of poetry. What do you think of that?

A: No, I wouldn’t say that, because it’s fads, like everywhere. We were speaking about Brodsky. An interesting thing happened to him. First of all, of course, he was Nobel Laureate, and he was even published in the Soviet Union, which was a unique case; even before perestroika he was recognized in the press as an existent poet. After that, there was great enthusiasm, and everybody was trying to write like Brodsky. But then, with growing nativism, there was a reaction. They started perceiving him as somebody imposed on their taste from the West. And so now it’s an accepted thing to speak negatively about Brodsky.

Q: When you say “everybody,” could you give some examples? “Everybody was trying to write like Brodsky.”

A: Basically, what I have in mind is the constant dialogue in livejournal.com and in literary circles. When I tried in the Russian context to speak of Brodsky objectively — and I think he’s a major poet, but there are some things one might dislike — I understood that I was in the wrong chorus. I had to shut up eventually, because people were taking me for somebody else, for an ally in a struggle that I was not conducting.

Q: You haven’t shut up about Akhmatova, though!

A: Well, I consider her worthless, and I have been saying that all my life.

Q: Are there any female poets in the twentieth century, Russian poets, who you have any particular . . .

A: There’s none who is my favorite. Of course, I have a different opinion of Tsvetaeva than of Akhmatova, but she’s not my cup of tea. In my view, she is too hysterical, undisciplined, and she is simply not the kind of poet who appeals to me.

Q: Any recent woman poets?

A: Yes, if you’ve ever heard of Linor Goralik, I like her. I cannot say that I admire her, but she is very interesting. And Evgeniia Lavut. I wouldn’t say that they are first-rank names. It would be hard for me to give a first-rank name that emerged recently except maybe Boris Khersonsky.

Q: In our earlier discussion you mentioned Limonov. You were obviously friendly with him at one point.

A: At one point. I mean, we haven’t seen each other for decades and decades. But we were friendly at one point, and I am still a great admirer of his poetry — the books that were published, quite obviously.

Q: Could you expand on that?  Some things happen like that in life. You know somebody and you move on and they move on. Have you got a sense of your own development as a poet?  You said several times, “I’ve thought this for thirty years,” or, “I’ve said this for forty years.”  Do you think you’ve been consistent throughout your whole creative career?  Or has it changed somehow?

A: Of course I’ve changed many opinions. Not necessarily on the positive side. I used to be a great admirer of Pasternak, but not any more. But in some cases, from the beginning it’s obvious to me and nobody ever proved to me otherwise, and I don’t see how it could be proved. I still hold those opinions. I mean, Nazism is bad.

Q: I meant not so much your opinions about people and other poets but your sense of your own poetics.

A: I think it’s not for me to judge — although I have claimed that I could write a negative review of myself. I do not try to control, I am aware, I am more concentrated now.

Q: Than you were?

A: Than I was in my youth. I basically know, in very general terms, what I have to say. I do not just sing mindlessly. But otherwise it’s not my job to lay down manifestos.

Q: Do you think you did sing mindlessly before?  I don’t.

A: From my present point of view, probably. Well, there was a method in what I did then, of course. But I was much less reflective about it.

Q: When you talked about the themes in your work, you said love, death and God. Could you say a bit about that last theme and where you see that in your work, where you see your contribution in relation to others?  Of those three topics, that’s the one that can often be the most freighted, the most complicated.

A: Well, it’s probably in the biographical details simply. I was for years a Roman Catholic, and those are the worst atheists. So, that is just how it transpired. If I have to specify, I’m definitely a Christian atheist, in a more narrow sense a Catholic atheist. There’s no point in being an Orthodox atheist. I never was Orthodox, and besides, it doesn’t have any theory, any doctrine worth disproving.

Q: When did you become a Roman Catholic?  Does it have to do with Ukraine?

A: No, no, no. When I came to this country, almost in the first year.

Q: What was the motivation for that?

A: I have no idea. It’s probably that when you live in the Soviet Union, you kind of reject their doctrine and atheism together with all that.

Q: And why Catholic rather than Orthodox or . . .

A: I don’t see why anybody would become Orthodox. It’s a different mindset. I use my head in anything I do. If there’s a theory in Orthodoxy, it’s that you shouldn’t [use your head]. I couldn’t just worship, I had to understand why. Orthodoxy discourages that.

Q: In Catholicism, you have the Jesuits; there’s a really strong Catholic intellectual tradition.

A: Exactly, that’s why it appealed to me.

Q: And why not Judaism, which also has a very strong intellectual tradition? 

A: I was so cut off from that, I simply didn’t identify with those people. In Russia, unless you belonged to some underground Jewish intellectual community, there was no way to know anything about Judaism.

Q: But you knew something about Roman Catholicism in Russia?

A: Yes, sure, because they are so prominent and you know all the scholars. And some of them you could even read there. If not in the original, you could read about mystic philosophy.

Q: And were you a Roman Catholic for many years then?

A: Yes. I don’t know how many. I don’t know when I ceased to be one. Not long ago. Maybe seven years.

Q: How does that relate to when you started writing poetry again?

A: It doesn’t relate in any way. The topic emerged, you know, it’s not in the early poems. It emerged somewhere in the middle. In the middle of the first book, I guess.

Q: Is there a possibility that you had Roman Catholicism instead of writing poetry?  And then when that faded, you went back to writing poetry?

A: No, I stopped writing poetry before I stopped being Catholic, I think. I do not see any connection. The poetry was not undertaken again in order to give a tool to my atheism.

Q: Still staying with the theme, but taking it in a slightly different direction: one of the things that we noticed when we looked at poems from Shekspir otdykhaet and other publications is the sheer variety and richness of genres in which the same topics recur. There’s a kind of generic map of death that you can take from five or six poems. They’re all very distinct, but very vividly generic. What do you think of genre?  What does that word mean to you?  Does it mean anything?

A: Well, it does mean a lot to me, and I believe that that’s one of my bones to pick with [recent] literary theory, that it tries to destroy genre and get rid of it. But it doesn’t have to be so strict, you can play with it. It doesn’t have to be the same forms that were given to us by classical antiquity or the middle ages.

Q: Is it still a genre if you play with it?

A: It is because it contains references. Just as in the case of the sonnet we were discussing — you can distort it as long as it is still recognizable as a sonnet. You cannot define [my] genres, unless I really name them, though they do not all correspond to “ode” or something like that. But I don’t believe it could be classified more. What is elegy, basically?  Elegy is a very wide category; you could write all your poetry in that genre.

Q: It seems to me that besides love, death, and God, there is another huge theme, which is childhood and specifically your own, which you’ve been celebrating for forty years, inexhaustibly.

A: But that’s biography.

Q: Yes, it is. Do you still think of that as an inexhaustible topic?  How you grew up in Soviet Russia?

A: I do not really think of it. I told you, when I write, I do not really think. But this somehow comes naturally. And I believe that poetry devoid of biography, of meat, is worthless. This is something that I might have learned from Pasternak, whom I don’t like very much, but, of course, you can learn even from those.

Q: We’ve spoken a bit about twentieth-century poets, but we haven’t really said much about nineteenth-century poets. I know for some poets growing up in the Soviet Union, having to go through that shkol’naia programma [syllabus] produced a sense that Pushkin was somehow associated with the Soviet Union. I’m wondering if you feel a particular closeness to certain nineteenth-century poets.

A: Mostly, probably Boratynsky. Although I love Pushkin very much. Of course, I had this rejection of Pushkin. I passed through it like everybody, but soon after school I started reading him seriously. But then I started reading Boratynsky. If I had to classify myself, I see myself as coming from that largely metaphysical tradition that goes from Boratynsky (and from Derzhavin, of course, earlier) to Zabolotsky, Vvedensky and then Brodsky too.

Q: Do you read Pushkin now?

A: Very few things, a poem now and then, and, of course, I know now that it’s about fifteen poems that I like; the rest I don’t even look at. I reread Evgenii Onegin [Eugene Onegin] recently, but that’s about it. There are things, like Tsygany [The Gyspies], that I would never even look at.

Q: Boratynsky is so hard to read because of his syntax. It reminds me of some of our struggles with yours.

A: Many things happened to syntax after him, with Zabolotsky and Vvedensky. But actually, they mostly attacked the word, and I think syntax is more my area. That’s why some people are very hostile to me. Kushner seems to believe I’m illiterate, because I can’t build a sentence properly.

Q: In your essay on Gandel’sman, you talk very interestingly about Khlebnikov and his significance for you. Could you elaborate on that?

A: I think I elaborated well enough in the article, that Khlebnikov showed — which I don’t see ever having happened to such an extent in English literature — Khlebnikov showed that you have to go further than the word. And there were people who understood that, and the best poets grew out of that tradition. And the tradition that didn’t accept that gave us Akhmatova, Kushner. But without Khlebnikov we would never have had Mandel’shtam, we’d never have had Zabolotsky, we’d never have had Tsvetaeva. Although I cannot read him. He doesn’t impress me. But I know what he did.

Q: What about Mayakovsky? Do you consider him a major poet? 

A: No
 He is a major poet, but he wrote so much nonsense that [one overlooks] all of the good things. I still remember many of his lines, but they drone. He was a person without a compass.

Q: Can I ask a little bit about translation, partly because you’ve been engaged in it so intensely lately?  If you could say a little bit about what you’ve learned from this project of translating Hamlet: what got you started, what you discovered that you didn’t expect to discover, and if you would ever consider translating something else into Russian.

A: Well, I have certain borders which I will not overstep. For instance, if poetry is consistently rhymed, it entails such losses in translation that I wouldn’t undertake it. But Shakespeare is one thing that, whatever your principle, you have to translate. First of all, it’s enough to give to the native audience an inkling of what’s important in such a great writer. And in the case of my Hamlet translation, it’s to amend the sins of my predecessors, mostly Pasternak, of course. To show that it’s actually a much better, consistent play than people think. I am thinking of maybe translating Lear at some point. Macbeth has now been translated anyway by Gandel’sman, and I think both plays will be published under the same cover. But Macbeth is such an uneven play, I suspect that Gandel’sman improved it. It has just horrible passages. Obviously they were not written by Shakespeare. And this is a practice unacceptable in Russia. I remember that I did a translation for Inostrannaia literatura [the journal Foreign Literature], and they rejected it because the style of the original was sloppy. I translated it that way, because otherwise you put your foot into the mouth of the author. Chkhartishvili [aka B. Akunin] was the supervisor, and he is a very well-educated person who knows English pretty well. He understood what I meant, but he said, “Our readers won’t accept that.”

Q: When was that?

A: About ten years ago.

Q: I’m curious about what you find most odious about the Pasternak translation of Hamlet and the point earlier when you said you liked Pasternak as a poet.

A: I still like some poems very much.

Q: Did you always dislike the Hamlet translation?

A: Well, how could I, you know, if I still remember pieces of it?  Of course I read it before in the much more faithful translation by Lozinsky, but then there was this movie by Kozintsev, which I tried to watch recently — it’s impossible. So the Pasternak translation was canonical at that time. It was when I started reading Hamlet in English that I understood what nonsense Pasternak’s version was. What I find the most odious is that he doesn’t understand the difference between himself, who he is, and who Shakespeare is. He thinks he’s a great poet. Stalin himself called him, and I don’t know whether Elizabeth ever called Shakespeare. And this is disgusting.

Q: But whether or not Pasternak was a great poet wouldn’t make a difference as a translator. He should be translating Shakespeare’s voice and not Pasternak’s. I mean, that is the point, is it not?  Even if you loved Pasternak, the objection could still stand.

A: Yes, sure, that’s totally independent of my personal like or dislike of Pasternak.

Q: What do you think of Lozinsky’s translation of Hamlet?

A: Lozinsky’s translation is much more faithful. Still, for me, it’s not scholarly enough. He didn’t have any idea of Shakespeare scholarship. But he was trying to be, to do it equilinearly and faithfully, but sometimes he does violence.

Q: Is your translation meant for the stage, for performance?

A: I think so.

Q: And you don’t think your Hamlet reads like Tsvetkov?

A: No. If I know anything about my poetry — it is very recognizable. I have a trademark. Nobody would ever plagiarize my poems because they would be discovered immediately.

Q: Would you translate Auden or Stevens?

A: Stevens I have translated, and it will be even published in a collection in the United States. And Auden, a poem or two, but no, he’s too difficult. He is not too difficult for Gandel’sman, but I have yet to sit down and compare


Q: What do you think is the best poem you’ve ever written?

A: I have no idea.

Q: Which do you like best?

A: I tend to forget those poems that I’ve written in the past. And they were all written in the past.

Q: And you never go back to them?

A: No.

Q: Is there some particular kind of poem or form that you’ve never tried but that you have in your head: this is something I still want to do?

A: If I knew, I would have done it. I always sit down with the intention to write something different. Unfortunately, it comes more often like what I’ve written before. But there’s still time to try.