<…> memoirs of E. M. Tager-Maslova about Mandelshtam. At first, I was going to include these into his collection of poems (and include her short story “Popadia”) with a pretty long introduction (memoiristic in nature), but our publishing house recently went through a certain (hopefully minor) financial setback, and so this book had to be excluded from this year’s plan, and in Novyi Zhurnal the introduction had to be much shorter). <…>

Brodsky was recently in Moscow and read his poems at the “House of Writers” and visited Chukovsky. This is according to Chukovskii himself, whom one of my students had visited in Peredelkino. And as for Siniavskii and Daniel, things don’t seem to be going well: have you read the spiteful article in Izvestiia and a slightly less spiteful one (“Heirs of Smerdiakov” in Literaturnaia Gazeta)? It is obviously a matter of the court case; however, unless they have been brainwashed, I don’t see how it could be an open trial.