The enterprise of Mr. Roman Grynberg, the editor and publisher of this beautiful and valuable series, is a sort of one-man Luftbrücke, stubbornly supplying us with the spiritual provender needed to sustain our long faith in the greatness of Russian letters. Akhmatova, Mandel’shtam, Khodasevich, Pasternak, and now Brodsky – how futile is the impulse to repress, exile, imprison, and kill such people! They are liberated anew by the old magic resurrectionary power of art each time we encounter their words, even the most familiar. But the sense of their living presence is never so vivid as when we come upon works by them which we did not even know existed. For the most part, everything in this volume is new, though newness alone, luckily, is not the only criterion of selection; standards of literary taste and scholarly excellence also apply. It is remarkable, in so large a collection, that nothing is boring. 

In seeking a way to suggest some of the variety in these crowded pages, one notes that the editor has provided for some interesting juxtapositions. In an autobiographical fragment Vladislav Khodasevich, with his usual trenchant humor, tells certain episodes from his earliest childhood in Moscow (including his first couplet, with an unusual rhyme which the mature poet finds professionally intriguing). The little boy grew up to become the subject of another essay, Philippe Radley’s insightful study, in which Khodasevich’s major work is skillfully reinterpreted: a poetry of the grotesque.

Again, one cannot help comparing two documents relating to Russian justice, then and now. The letters from Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov to his wife, written from a relatively cozy tsarist cell in 1908, precede the absorbing stenograph of the poet Iosif Brodsky’s trial and conviction (for “parasitism”) in 1964. Both have far more than documentary interest. The letters are additionally valuable for their revelation of the warm, stimulating, and nobly courteous atmosphere into which the great novelist and scholar Vladimir Nabokov was born (the nine-year-old “Lody” sent his father a consoling butterfly). The stenograph contains, in Judge Savel’eva’s own hopelessly self-incriminatory words, such a portrait of blockheaded malice and gothic poshlost’ as to rival the imaginings of Gogol or Shchedrin. The accused, whose name will one day be to that of his torturess what Pushkin is to d’Anthes, is represented in this collection by eighteen pages of his poetry, the best now being written in Russian.

There are five poems by Osip Mandel’shtam; for variant readings and datings the reader is cautioned to consult the first volume of Mandel’shtam’s new Sobranie sochinenii (Washington, D.C., 1964 [appeared 1965]). Anna Akhmatova’s memoir of her long-time friend Mandel’shtam is – for all the unsatisfactoriness of the state in which it had to be published – the most valuable and trustworthy single reminiscence of him. Two brief but very precious notes by the late Elena Tager also relate to Mandel’shtam. I shall reserve for another place the extended comment which all of this deserves.

Writers of the emigration add to the richness of this book (the Luftbrücke operates in both directions). The best of all is the poetry – by Ivan Elagin, Igor Chinnov, and Mikhail Rusalkin. As for the essays, one is confined by space to the remark that they lend weight and charm to this excellent collection. No undertaking of such large scope could be without its faults, but they are small indeed when compared with our indebtedness to Roman Grynberg for editing and publishing such books as these.

Clarence Brown
Princeton University