The Work of Russian Poetry Today

We deal only fragmentarily with any culture of which we do not know the poetry. The essence of a culture is its language; the essence of a language is its poetry. Poetry keeps the language. A country without poets cannot say anything new. Russia’s newness now, as forty years ago, or 140 years ago, comes from her poets, who have made it possible to say new things and have provided the standard for saying them.

I suspect that one of the reasons why American intellectuals over-emphasize the moral and political aspects of Russian literature is plain ignorance of the poetry of the language. Dostoevsky’s Nastasya Filipovna comes clear enough in translation; if you do not read Russian, you cannot get to Pushkin’s Tatyana. She eludes you. She escapes into her language. Until somebody gets her into our language, into our poetry, she must strike us, in even the best translations we have so far, as a saccharine figure in a banal plot of an artificial and long-gone time. In her own language, of course, she remains always fresh and new, vibrant and typical, an image of exquisite sadness and faith.