David Herman
Works of Lev Ozerov

David Herman | Works of Lev Ozerov | 06.02.22

- [Judi] So welcome back, David, and hello to everybody who’s joining us from around the world. And whenever you’re ready, I’ll hand over to you.

• Thank you so much, Judi. Hello, and welcome to the second of three talks I’m giving this summer about three of the great Soviet Jewish writers who were born in Ukraine, Isaac Babel, Lev Ozerov, and Vasily Grossman. Babel and Grossman are both famous, perhaps now more famous than they ever were, acclaimed as two of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Ozerov, one of the great poets of the 20th century, is less well known, but today I will try and argue why he should be regarded as one of the great chronicles of Stalinism, of the Gulag, and of Soviet anti-Semitism under Stalin. His writing is deceptively simple but incredibly moving and powerful. I first came across Lev Ozerov in 2015 when I reviewed Penguin’s new edition of the Russian book of, “The Penguin Book, sorry, of Russian Poetry”. It’s a fascinating anthology, almost 600 pages, edited and translated by Robert Chandler, the translator who did so much to make Vasily Grossman so famous, Boris Dralyuk, the main contemporary translator of Isaac Babel, and Irina Mashinski. What is a poetry anthology for? Is it to reflect the established canon with just a little tweak here or there? Or is its job to shift our sense of the whole Russian literary landscape? This is what Chandler and his fellow editors boldly did.

At first glance, their selection seems familiar enough. Nearly all the poets from earlier great Russian poetry anthologies are there. If you look at Nabokov’s “Verses and Versions”, for example, or Peter Washington’s “Everyman” anthology, at first glance, they seem very similar. There are, however, a number of striking features in the Penguin anthology. First, the sheer number of poets, with 70 poets represented. More important, in the new Penguin anthology, there is the massive presence of 20th century Russian poetry, over 350 pages, and in particular, postwar Russian poetry. Only one of Nabokov’s poets, for example, lived beyond 1945, and none of Dimitri Obolensky’s “Penguin Book of Russian Verse” were born after 1917. These earlier anthologies fade away after Stalin. In this new anthology, almost 30 poets lived into the 1970s and beyond, including Ozerov. As you read on, the landscape becomes stranger and more unfamiliar, especially as you come to the late 20th century, almost 150 pages of postwar poetry, almost 30 poets, most of them unfamiliar to many English-speaking readers, new names, a new poetic world. At the heart of the postwar section is Shalamov, who spent almost 20 years in Stalin’s labour camps. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after first reading Shalamov’s poems in 1956, he trembled, as if from meeting a brother. He invited Shalamov to collaborate with him on “The Gulag Archipelago”. And Robert Chandler’s translations of Shalamov’s poems introduced us to a great poet. And then there was Lev Ozerov, six poems, all translated by Robert Chandler.

It was the second which made me realise I was in the presence of an astonishing poet. This is the poem from 1962. “The dead are speaking without full stops or commas and almost without words, from camps, from isolation cells, from buildings as they blaze. The dead are speaking, a letter, a will, diaries, exercise books from school on rough pages of uneven bricks, the cursive of a hurrying hand, with slivers of tin on a bed board, with shards of glass on a wall, or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor. Life signed off as best it could.” Then come three great poems, much longer, the first on Boris Pasternak, the author of “Dr. Zhivago”, the second on one of the great Yiddish poets, Shmuel Halkin, and the third on Shalamov himself. Ozerov describes in his poem on Pasternak how someone loud-voiced and young came up to Pasternak and said, “‘You’re Pasternak, aren’t you?”’ ‘No, no, no, I’m not Pasternak,’ he answered, horrified, and took off in a hurry, yes, almost at a run, like Pushkin’s Eugene from ‘The Bronze Horseman’. ‘You, Pasternak,’ someone was shouting after him. Without looking around, he replied, ‘No, no, you’re wrong.’“ The poems on Halkin and Shalamov are among Ozerov’s greatest works. Halkin was one of the great Yiddish poets, murdered by Stalin in 1952. And he describes, Ozerov, how Halkin was so desperate to work out, to find a way, while he was in the Gulag, how to memorise his poems because, of course, there was no paper. There was no pen. There were no typewriters.

"He was in ??? when they came for him. They led the sick man to the car. He managed to hand his stick to Prishvin, who was standing in the snow with his dog, looking bewildered. ‘Where are you going, Samuil Zalmanovich?’ ‘Goodbye,’ said Halkin. He thought this was the end for him, but it wasn’t. He was sent to the camps, labouring at the bottom of a mine. He once said to the poet Sergei Slavsky, ‘Would you like me to stay alive? Then read me every day one stanza, even just one line. I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be yours. Other people’s will do.’ There was no paper, but Halkin went on writing. New poems piled up, a terrible burden, more dangerous perhaps than gunpowder. He wrote them down on the paper of memory, and day by day, his memory grew heavier. Poems with sharp elbows were elbowing one another out of the way. But when he’d filled his last scrap of memory, he met a prisoner who knew Yiddish, a great rarity, a real find. This prisoner was a sheath of paper, paper for new lines. And then, worn out by the camps, Halkin returned home. He wrote down what he could and his memory emptied and new poems came flooding in. He had come home handsome but heavyhearted, his eyes filled with a sorrow that lay beyond the bounds of sanity, yet still remembered youth and a thirst for life.

When he read, he would begin quietly as if to the beat of his heart. He would catch fire quickly. He would flare up wildly. He would stand up on tiptoe and then stand on the table and then on the windowsill. His strength failing, he would call out, ‘Maria,’ and his wife would come running. With the help of their son and their daughter, they would take him down from the windowsill and put him to bed half dead. He was still living. He was still writing. And then he died. On the day of his funeral, a bearded man in a wadded jacket came up to me in the cemetery and asked, ‘Are you a relative? Or do you know any relatives of the deceased or maybe any close friends?’ ‘I’m not a relative. I’m a friend and translator. What can I do for you?’ ‘I’ve brought with me a number of poems dictated to me by Halkin. I learned them by heart. I’m his manuscript.’ This man’s jacket was the uniform of a Zek.” A Zek was a prisoner from the Gulag. “I introduced this man to Halkin’s wife and children. We sat at the table for a long time and talked about Halkin, and he dictated many lines, the cycle , his posthumous collection of poems. This Zek read us an unwritten book, and Halkin came to life in his own poems, line by line and stanza by stanza, in poems honed by grief to a diamond’s sharp glitter.”

The poem about Shalamov, who he also knew, is a long poem so I’ll only read the second half, if you’ll forgive me. He’s having lunch with Shalamov. Shalamov has just also come from the Gulag. “Someone brings coffee, sausages, bread. Steam rises from our cups, steam rises from our plates, the renowned fragrance of a Moscow people’s cafe. Shalamov tries not to eat too quickly, not to show that he’s very hungry. I don’t ask about Kolyma,” the most famous and the most terrible of the camps in the Gulag, “and he doesn’t mention it, as if it hadn’t happened. As he eats the bread, he holds one hand just below his chin. Crumbs fall into his palm. Shalamov eats them greedily with particular relish. His long experience of malnutrition is apparent. This mouth, accustomed to hunger, opens slowly, mistrustfully, almost unwillingly, as if in shame. Shalamov eats in silence with tried and tested deliberateness, with meaning, with pauses. And to me, he seems not to be thinking about food. What is Shalamov thinking about? How am I to know? He returns his notebook to his knapsack. Out we both go into the winter outside. ‘It’s a cold day,’ I say. ‘What do you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s warm.’” Those two details, the crumbs, the care with which he eats the crumbs, which conveys his hunger still from the time in the Gulag.

And course, what to anyone else might seem a cold day in Moscow, is almost barmy to someone who has spent years in a camp in Siberia. Lev Ozerov was born Lev Adolfovich Goldberg in Kyiv in August, 1914. He was the son of a pharmacist. He began to publish poems in the early 1930s and adopted a Russian-sounding pseudonym, Ozerov. In 1934, he moved to Moscow and studied at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History, graduating in 1939. He was a close friend of many Yiddish poets whose work he translated into Russian. He then worked as a frontline journalist, like Babel and like Grossman, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. After the liberation of Kyiv in 1943, the great Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg commissioned him to write an article for “The Black Book” on Babi Yar. “The Black Book” was a book which Ehrenberg and Vasily Grossman were planning to publish on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union that followed the invasion by the Nazis, especially in Belarus and Ukraine, which was approved at one point by Stalin and then later banned. Ozerov also wrote a famous poem about Babi Yar, the terrible massacre outside Kyiv in a canyon where tens of thousands of Jews were massacred by the Nazis and their accomplices. The poem, his poem was published in early 1946 and was described by one critic as the most historically reliable and extensive treatment of Babi Yar in all of Soviet poetry.

From 1943, Ozerov taught in the translation faculty at the Gorky Literary Institute, translating poetry from Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian. He served as poetry editor of October Magazine from 1946 to ‘48, one of the more important literary publications of the time. He was dismissed both from the university and from October Magazine as part of the anti-Semitic purges of the postwar period and only returned to teaching seven years later during the post-Stalin fall. He also wrote many books of literary criticism and did much to publish writers who had suffered or perished under Stalin. For nearly half a century, he stood out as a quiet yet persistent voice of conscience. For example, he was the first editor to publish Zabolotsky on his return from the Gulag after eight years in 1946. His article on the poems of Anna Akhmatova published on June 23rd, 1959 was the first review of her poetry after years of silence under Stalin. The edition he published of Pasternak’s poems in 1965 marked the beginning of Pasternak’s slow posthumous rehabilitation after the Zhivago affair of the late 1950s. And for 27 years, Ozerov ran the Oral Poetry Library, a regular series of readings at Moscow’s House of Actors where poets who found it difficult to publish could present their work. He died in Moscow in March, 1996.

Ozerov’s masterpiece, which includes the poems on Pasternak, Halkin, and Shalamov, is called “Portraits Without Frames”. It was published in Russian in 1999 after Perestroika, after the fall of Soviet communism, and in English 20 years later in 2019, edited by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, and translated by Chandler Dralyuk, Maria Bloshteyn, and Irina Mashinski. Boris Dralyuk calls the book an intimate, penetrating mini encyclopaedia of Soviet culture, and that is what it is. “It draws, the poems draw on a lifetime of encounters with his fellow poets and prose writers, visual artists, composers, musicians, and performers, restoring,” writes Dralyuk, “humanity to its subjects and to their vanished world.” Portraits is divided into sections of artists, the poets, the prose writers, the Yiddish poets, Soviet Ukraine, the visual artists, and music, theatre, and dance. As one American reviewer wrote, “It seems like he met everyone that was anyone, from Isaac Babel to Shostakovich, from Boris Pasternak to the great ballerina Galina Ulanova, from the poet Anna Akhmatova, to the novelist Platonov. What is striking immediately is the economy of style. A single stanza suffices to render an entire life.

Here is his description of Andre Malraux, the great French writer, and Isaac Babel in 1936, leaving Ozerov’s university in a car. "Malraux elegantly waves his fingers, the fingers of a trained conductor. Babel nods methodically and patiently. He’s clearly tired. In his eyes are laughter, slyness, a sparkle. His large head attracts attention. It does not yet foresee troubles or grief, but in a few years’ time, they will be heaped upon it.” As those of you who were here with me on Tuesday afternoon will remember, Babel was arrested three years after this, in 1939, and murdered with a shot in the head in January, 1940. “Portraits Without Frames” is a slim paperback, barely 250 pages, and each poem preceded by a perfect concise introduction by the editors. The subjects are all individual people, poets like Akhmatova, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, prose writers and novelists like Shalamov, Platonov, and Babel, the Yiddish poets, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish, and Shmuel Halkin, three of whom were murdered by Stalin in 1952. There’s another chapter on writers from the Soviet Ukraine, on visual artists, and the chapter on music, theatre and dance includes Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Malraux. But what is really striking about these poems is the tone, intimate, affectionate, poems about memory and friendship.

Let me read you one poem about a writer I’ve never heard of, Kulikovsky. Again, I will just read part of the poem, written in 1994. “He had not lived life to the full, not had his full of life. And in June, 1956, he felt he must go to Yalta. ‘Why Yalta again?’ ‘I have to.’ ‘Stay here, Uncle Volodya.’ ‘I need spring. I need blue very badly.’ We part. He turns quickly to the car. We part. He pulls the door open then slams it abruptly, a frown, decisiveness. The wrinkles on his face flicker, a smile, a majestic wave of the hand, like a king, like a sovereign. But the look in his eyes is so unexpected, it sends a shiver down my spine. Anyone who can read looks, who has seen looks of that kind does not need words to understand that this was a last look. I understood all too clearly but did not dare to admit it, recalling this look only later when a zinc coffin was brought to Moscow by plane from the deep blue of the Altai. I remembered it later when after many speeches, Maya poured cognac onto his fresh grave.”

What is so moving about these poems about friendship is that so often, Ozerov and the subject of the poem are the only two people in the poem, unless perhaps there is a reference to a wife or a child. They’re not, the poems are not crowded with people. There is this focus, intense focus on Ozerov and his friend, and the details, the wave of a hand, the kind of coffin it was, the cognac poured on the grave. Above all, of course, these are poems about hard times, what he calls those troubled days. We remember that Akhmatova’s first husband, Gumilyov, was shot, that her third husband, Punin, died in the Gulag, that her only son, Lev Gumilyov, spent more than 10 years in the camps. Those who have read Isiah Berlin’s wonderful encounter of visiting Akhmatova in Leningrad will remember how she served potatoes because that was all she could offer him. Kvitko, Hofshteyn, and Markish were among the Yiddish poets murdered by Stalin. Yevgenia Taratuta spent six years in the Gulag after the war.

In two lines in his poem, Ozerov writes, “They deprived her of sleep. They broke the bones of her hands.” Let me read from the poem on Akhmatova. Again, just an extract. He describes her appearance, “A loose fitting robe or a house coat, or rather, a coverall disguises her corpulence, a gift of the prison cues. Those used to her slimness cannot believe she’ ha grown stout. ‘It’s Akhmatova,’ they say, ‘but not Akhmatova.’ ‘Who’d have guessed,’ she says, ‘I might end up waiting day after day in those long cues outside prisons, feet swelling, heart giving up,’ said Anna Andreyevna as she passed me a photo of herself straw thin, lying on her stomach and touching the nap of her neck, the fringe of her little white cap with her toes. Painters never tired of depicting her poise, her proud angularity.”

Then there’s the Georgian poet, Tabidze, who was tortured to death in his early 40s. Again, this is just a short extract. “Why, indeed, waste words when it was all too clear how faced by slander, did not know where to turn, how quickly he kept losing the hope and calm we tried to offer him. He melted like a candle, more swiftly than a candle. The era of suspicion had set in. Those now cast as enemies of the people had to pass through each circle of hell hurt, indignant protest, resignation, incomprehension, anger, and despair.” Zabolotsky, who Ozerov did so much to try and rehabilitate when he emerged from the Gulag then to Siberia. “Trakovsky’s parents and brothers were deported as kulaks to Siberia.” There’s also a poem about one of the great Soviet literary critics, Shklovsky, who was one of the first to write about Babel and establish his reputation. “And we had other conversations other years. One day in winter, I bumped into him in the courtyard of our building, cloaked in dust and a long coat fringed with frost, arm in arm with his grandson. We stopped and Shklovsky he told me quietly but clearly, ‘Remember, we are on our way out. On our way out.’ And I recalled the 7.5%, the wall of books all written by a man who lived in times that were hard to bear.”

And of course, the Yiddish poets who he wrote about, including Dovid Hofshteyn. His poem ends, “That house has been destroyed along with the pump organ, and the clocks, and the volumes of girder, and the ancient Pentateuch. ‘Oh time, oh space, oh terrible year, he said, holding a handful of dust on his palm. And then he himself became a handful of dust on our century’s palm. His own dust is mixed with the dust of others who perished in August of 1952. The location of his grave is unknown. When they name those who perished, they call out the name of the poet Dovid Naumovich Hofshteyn and readers of Yiddish stand up, heads bowed.” Then there are the composers. And he writes a poem about Gnessin and the time when Zhdanov, the master of Soviet culture under Stalin, summons the composers, the great composers of the Soviet Union, to the Kremlin because he wants to play for them. Play with them or play for them I suppose is the question. And before he goes, his wife begs him, begs Gnessin not to play, not to remember, not to upset himself, but it’s impossible not to remember, not to remember hurts, to remember hurts still more. But then who really knows who can say.

Gnessin looks pale and sad. Not long before this, he had suffered a stroke soon after an official meeting with Zhdanov. Zhdanov had played the piano to the assembled composers. Cruelty often likes to adopt the dress of sentimentality, a hatchet beside a curtain of light blue tulle. Zhdanov had pounded away at the keys as if pounding his 1946 decree into the composers’ skulls, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Shostakovich, Khachaturian and others had listened. Not one of them said a thing. What could they say? Only Gnessin got to his feet and gently as ever said, ‘And you dare to teach us about music?’ No answer. The silence did not bode well.“ Everywhere in the poems, there is suspicion. "There are ears everywhere,” writes Ozerov, “ears and more ears. And like it or not, you must remember to keep silent in your cell, to keep silent in the column, to keep silent in the quarry. There is suspicion and there is fear, as in the story about Pasternak when someone loud-voiced and young,” that’s all we learn about this person, loud-voiced and young. That’s all we need to know. “When he comes up to Pasternak and says, ‘You’re Pasternak, aren’t you?’ Pasternak took off in a hurry.”

But there are also poems about courage, extraordinary courage. The introduction to Ozerov poem about Tabidze tells us that he is said to have stood up to interrogation and to have named only the 18th century poet Bziki as his accomplice. Courage, but also betrayal and compromise. In 1931, the father and brothers of the poet Fadovsky were deported as kulaks because, of course, they weren’t kulaks. But to be even accused of being a kulak was enough to send you to Siberia. And when one of his brothers escaped, Fadovsky had him sent back to Siberia. He had his brother sent back to Siberia. “He was a Stalin laureate,” write Ozerov. Ozerov says to him, “You are close to the powers that be,” and he says nothing. Let me read you an extract from the poem on Fadovsky. “Fadovsky became a deputy to the supreme Soviet. He was a Stalin laureate. He was dragged everywhere. He was honoured everywhere. But each summer, he would go to Siberia to see his deported parents and come back sad and overwrought, hopelessly sodden. And only vodka could save him, and only poems could save him from shipwreck, from going under for good. He never swore by the name of his Auntie Daria, but his Aunt Daria’s life was the standard by which he judged himself and judged others. And it was with his aunt’s eyes that he looked at this earth bathed in blood.” And this is how the poem ends.

Ozerov describes how Fadovsky, “Releases my hand, not exactly calmly, but he walks off calmly without saying goodbye.” Ozerov is fantastic at what words can say and what silence can say. Of course, there are other kinds of silence. Ozerov writes about Zabolotsky, “Later, when we met, he never said one word about the camps. It’s the same with Shalamov, also back from Siberia. I don’t ask about Kolyma, and he doesn’t mention it. His wrinkled face is a hieroglyph of all he has lived through and does not speak about.” And of course, there are other kinds of silence which have nothing to do with the Gulag, or indeed, the Stalinist regime. In his poem about Selvinsky, he talks about a gunshot of silence. “Selvinsky has cancer. He’s asking the doctor for good news. ‘Do I have six more months, doctor,’ Selvinsky asks hopefully, looking intently into the face of the expert cardiologist. Dr. Maznikov stays silent. The whole ward goes quiet too. ‘Three more months,’ whispers Selvinsky. His voice sounds disembodied. You’d think the ward was empty. A gunshot of silence, an explosion of muteness angina, high blood pressure, a heart corroded by tyranny, by long years of critic-itis, by a band of scoundrels.

Selvinsky wants to survive. He wants to hope, but there is no hope. There’s nowhere for his heart to turn, nothing to do but to watch it fade, the cruellest of occupations.” There is also the silence of other kinds of fears. As I say, the poem about Gnessin, the composer and the encounter with Zhdanov when he writes, “Not one of them said a thing. What could they say?” And of course, there are descriptions of the Gulag and the cattle trucks, as in the poem about Zabolotsky. “It had been crowded in the cattle truck. It had been dark in the cattle truck, terribly cold and nothing to eat, only black soot-covered icicles, prisoners popsicles, cattle truck toffee. Worse still is having to meet the stare of a criminal wanting to hit you with a log. ‘They’ve given me 10 years, and now I’m going to smash you, smash you hard.’ And there he was, right in front of Zabolotsky, about to do away with this bespectacled intellectual. His mate got in the way, ‘Calm down, brother, not now.’” Running through the poems is also the question of memory. Who will be remembered? Will a poet’s words be remembered or simply disappear? Ozerov writes of meeting Zabolotsky and reciting his work to the astonished poet, “That evening, he said to his daughter over a cup of tea, ‘I thought I’d been quite forgotten, but it seems people still remember me.’”

Or again, in the poem about Akhmatova, “Who will remember him, this fool of an editor, that every line of yours, whether early or late, will be worth its weight in gold? No, that’s not right. It will be beyond price.” In another poem, Ozerov describes this exchange with Shengley. “I looked for a long time at Shengley. He noticed, so I asked hesitantly, ‘You’re Shengley, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, you’re not mistaken.’ ‘I know some of your poetry by heart. Yes, I know your lines about the Romans.’ ‘Really,’ he answered, and his face lit up.” And I’ve already read the poem about Shmuel Halkin, sent to the Gulag where there was no paper and another prisoner, a Czech who spoke Yiddish, arrived and learned his poems by heart. And then there’s the question of posterity. “The contrast between those who are forgotten, shamed by their complicity with the regime and those who will be remembered as voices of conscience, Akhmatova, but also Pasternak.” And then there are acts of witness. “Alone, I think of Kvitko and I write about him so that those who did not know will know.” There are also poems about bodies, about hunger, about cold, the great poem about Shalamov and the crumbs and not feeling the cold in Moscow compared to Siberia, and wonderful poems about wives.

The poems are really about their husbands, but some of the most powerful moments are about their wives, Kulikovsky’s wife who pours cognac on his fresh grave, or Peretz Markish, the Yiddish poet, and his wife, and his teeth. “His widow is making inquiries about her husband, about his notebooks and manuscripts confiscated when he was arrested. His widow walks down the long corridors of the seventh floor, corridors her soul had walked long before. She had endured much, a waiting room, a small window where relatives could hand in parcels of food and clothes for a prisoner. But now, she’s here by invitation. Courteous and charming, the general addresses her, ‘You can probably guess why I’ve called you here.’ ‘No, tell me.’ ‘I am now able to inform you that your husband has been rehabilitated.’ ‘Where is he?’ The general’s reply is ready and waiting, planed and polished, ‘He was executed by enemies of the people.’ And he offers Markish’s widow a glass of water, also ready and waiting. ‘I want to read his case file.’ ‘But you’re not a lawyer.’ ‘Where is my husband’s grave?’ ‘He has none.’ More time passed, another telephone call. ‘This is the KGB finance department. It seems we owe you a little money.’ ‘What do you mean? You’ve already returned me the money I tried to send to my husband but which he never received.’

Pause. An in breath. An out breath. ‘We owe you for the teeth.’ ‘What teeth?’ ‘The gold crowns.’ In a voice not her ow, the widow let out a wild scream. Neighbours ran out into the hallway and caught her as she collapsed in a faint. She was pale now and silent while the telephone receiver on its twisted chord groped the wall, swinging like a pendulum, counting off our godforsaken time.” Above all, “Portraits Without Frames” is about the power of art. Ozerov quotes Tabidze, one of the Georgian poets, “What’s a poem? An avalanche. It exhales, blows you away and buries you alive. That’s what I call a poem.” Before these lines, Ozerov writes, “And these next lines, of course, I knew too. The power and simplicity of the words, of course.” Ozerov, the narrator, doesn’t just remember their poems, doesn’t just remember their lives. He doesn’t just remember their fate of the terrible things that happened to these writers and composers. He’s everywhere in the book of poems, in the canteen with Shalamov, watching him greedily eat those crumbs, with Markish’s widow when the KGB rang, with the composers when Zhdanov pounds at the piano, humiliating them. It is as if he was everywhere during the Stalinist terror, observing, remembering, bearing testimony. And perhaps this is the best way to remember him, in the words of Boris Dralyuk, restoring humanity to his subjects and to their vanished world.

And I hope I’ve done a little something to introduce you to someone I consider one of the great poets of the 20th century. And I’d be happy now to answer your questions since I’ve gone on far too long.

Q&A and Comments

Q: David Sefton asks, “What is the Zhivago affair in the late ‘50s?” A: Well, yes, David, you’re absolutely right. I did refer to that, and I should have explained. Pasternak wrote the novel “Dr. Zhivago”, on which David Lean’s wonderful film was based, and it was smuggled out to the West. This was at a time after Stalin’s death, under Khrushchev, but it was still impossible to write, to publish a book like “Dr. Zhivago”, a novel like “Dr. Zhivago” in the Soviet Union. And of course, once it was smuggled out to the West and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, which is one of those gestures by the Nobel committee which was prompted by the best of intentions but with absolutely no thought for the consequences for Pasternak himself, locked in the Soviet Union. And that was what the Zhivago affair was, because after the publication of Zhivago in the West, but obviously, not in the Soviet Union, and after the Nobel Prize he was awarded for “Dr. Zhivago”, he was, became a non-person in the Soviet Union and could not be published. and hence, the importance of Ozerov’s courage in championing Pasternak some years later.

Q: And Arlene Goldberg writes, was there a way for any of these greats to leave the USSR? And why did they stay in an oppressive country? A: Well, that’s a very, very good question, Arlene, and I think the problem is, as I tried to address in my talk about Babel two days ago, Isaac Babel, you may remember, had the opportunity to get out of the Soviet Union. He knew Gorky, who was living in Italy at the time. Many of the great Soviet writers did get out. Satayava was in Berlin, and Gorky was in Italy. Nabokov was in Berlin, and then in Britain, and then in America. But it was a question of timing. If you left during the civil war or immediately after the revolution, you could get out. And Babel had the opportunity. His wife had moved to, his first wife had gone to Paris with their daughter. His mother and sister moved to Brussels. So it was possible in the early years, in the decade between 1917 and the mid-1920s. But of course, by the 1930s, it was then too late and nobody could get out. If you were under suspicion, you would have your passport and your papers confiscated and there was no way of getting out. And the other thing was that for some of these people, they thought they were in favour. Babel was invited to parties in the Kremlin. People thought, people like Grossman were asked to write about and edit a book documenting the scale of the Showa in the Soviet Union. But then comes the wave of anti-Semitism after the war, and of course, it’s unthinkable to be able to publish such a book, and indeed, it is not published. And Grossman was lucky that he was not, I say lucky. He was lucky that he was not sent to the Gulag for having even thought about writing about the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus. So the answer, the simple answer to your question is there was a way for these greats to leave the USSR if they’d left in the decade after the revolution. If they didn’t leave after the decade after the revolution, it was too late. And people like Babel did go to and fro to Paris and Brussels to visit his wife, his ex-wife and his daughter, and his mother and his sister. But then, at a certain point in the '30s, it was simply impossible. And I think it is unimaginable for us in the West today to realise what it was like in the Soviet Union under Stalin, under Yezhov, under barrier. It was just, you had no freedom of movement at all. The lure of fame brought figures like Gorky back from Italy, back to the Soviet Union because he thought Stalin loved his writing, and that he was a great Soviet writer, and that he was a friend of the regime, and the regime would look after him and so on. And they sort of did. The problem was that when he died in the mid-1930s of natural causes, people he had shielded and protected, like Babel, with his reputation was suddenly left vulnerable to the regime. And within a few years, Babel was arrested and shot. So the answer to your second question, why did they stay in an oppressive country, is simply they had no choice. Sheila Tiat. Thank you very much for your kind words, Sheila.

Q: You then say, “I’m familiar with Vasily Grossman and Babel and their works. This is another world I look forward to reading. Did he have any contact with Yevtushenko?” A: No. I don’t know why not. Both wrote about Babi Yar. Both wrote famous poems about Babi Yar. Yevtushenko became, interestingly, much more famous in the West in the '50s and '60s. Ozerov, to my knowledge, I literally had not heard of him till five years ago, till I came across him in the Penguin anthology of Russian literature, and then the translation of this first book of poems.

Q: “Could Yevtushenko have been familiar,” you asked, Sheila, “with his poem about what I had when he wrote his poem?” A: I’m not quite sure what that means, what I had. Perhaps you mean about their different poems about Babi Yar, maybe. I don’t know how Ozerov wrote his poem in '46, and I think it was widely disseminated at the time until the sort of full anti-Semitic purges started under Stalin, which only ended with his death in '53. And of course, Ozerov lost his job writing for October Magazine. He lost his job teaching at the university for seven years. I don’t know what he lived on during those seven years. What could he possibly have lived on when he was unable to work for that period of time? So my apologies. I haven’t really got a very good answer to that, Sheila. But I’m sure that if he had had contact with Yevtushenko, he would have written about him.

Neville Schulman asks, says, “The Ozerov poems are full of pain, poignancy, piercing comments, and it’s great you give them life again.” Thank you.

Q: “Do you think they will survive the 21st century or just vanish into obscurity forever as fresher violence and younger voices out-loud them?” A: Or outlive them. Out-loud them, perhaps, yes, as you say. Well, Neville, let me be optimistic for once and say that I believe these poems will last. Now that he has been translated into English and that he is in the main new anthology of Russian poetry, that I think more and more people will come to discover him. It is rather like a sort of snowball effect that I think once somebody gets discovered and gets translated by the greatest translators around today, people like Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, and become available in anthologies, and become set texts in Russian literature courses and departments, especially in America, which is really the centre of the discovery of both Russian and Yiddish writers and Ukrainian writers, I’m optimistic. And I think more Ozerov poems will be published. This book, “Portraits Without Frames”, was published by Granta in paperback in this country, and by New York Review Classics in America. And so I think we’re living in a very exciting moment. If I can just generalise for a moment, I think what has happened is in the last 20 years or so, writers from the former Soviet Union and from the former East Europe under the Communists have emerged as if from the deep freeze of history, to quote a friend of mine, the poet Michael Hofmann, who was talking about Joseph Roth. But this is true of many Polish writers, Ukrainian writers, Russian writers who are now, Latvian and Baltic writers who are now being discovered, and thanks to a wonderful new generation of translators.

And let’s pay full homage to the work of these translators. Thanks to a wonderful new generation of translators, of editors, and of small brave publishers like Pushkin Press, like New York Review Classics, like Granta Books, like Scribe Press, we are, at last, discovering writers who, I’m ashamed to say, I had never heard of, Antal Szerb, the Hungarian, Ozerov himself, the Yiddish poets who I first came across in a small, obscure British magazine founded in 1953 called “The Jewish Quarterly”, which still exists nearly 70 years on. And it so happens the editor from Bukovina, somebody called Jacob Sontag, a refugee, not only read and wrote in Yiddish, but could translate in Yiddish. And I think he was one of the first people to translate a lot of the Soviet Yiddish poets and the East European Yiddish poets into English. And the moment was not right, I think we have to accept, in the early 1950s and 1960s. But now, I think the moment is right. And remember what Philip Roth did when he became editor of a series published by Penguin called “The Other Europe” when he commissioned translations of people like the great Polish writer, Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, which was his masterpiece about his experience in Auschwitz, and writers who had simply not been translated, not been heard of. And this Penguin series in the 1980s and '90s, perhaps it started even in the late '70s, published and translated something like 20 Eastern European writers, Aharon Appelfeld, who although he came to Palestine and then settled in Israel for the rest of his life, originally came from Czernowitz, which is now in Ukraine. And that, I suppose, was the beginning, and now this is really taking off. And I suppose, well, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about these three writers born in Ukraine but famous as Soviet writers, Babel, Grossman, and Ozerov, is that they’re beginning to be rediscovered.

Yes, of course, Babel was first translated in America and published in proper paperback editions and written about by critics like Lionel Trilling, and Steven Marcus, and Irving Howe. That was back in 1955. But just in the last few years, Pushkin Press have published translations of this three cycles of short stories by Babel. And Grossman, of course, continues to be translated. We had “Life and Fate”, which really made his name, but there’s also a fantastic book of essays and articles and short stories called “The Road”, and there’s also his great novel, “Stalingrad”, which has only fairly recently been translated, again by Robert Chandler. So this is a fantastic moment for translation, for independent publishers who are brave and put their reputation on the line. Pushkin Press, who’ve just won an award as best independent publisher of the year, of 2022, this was a week ago or two weeks ago or a week ago, they commissioned a translation of a novel by a German-Jewish writer in his 20s called “The Passenger”, which was written in the late 1930s, which became a huge bestseller. It won awards. It did terrifically well for Pushkin Press. And so sometimes, this courage is rewarded, and we must hope, I’m sorry, this is a very long answer to your question, Neville, but I do hope that all these writers will be rediscovered.

Joseph Roth, think of the revival of interest in Joseph Roth from Galicia in Southern Poland. This has been a fantastic golden age for rediscovering the great writers of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. So yes, I’m optimistic. Bernard Cottany, I hope I’ve pronounced your surname correctly, Bernard, says, “The movie "Within the Whirlwind” about the life of Yevgenia Ginzburg is an excellent portrayal of Stalin’s purges.“ Thank you, Bernard, for that recommendation. I appreciate that. I will look out for it. And Sharon Fingleson, thank you for your kind words.

Q: Dr. Kleinman, "Did he manage to stay out of the Gulag himself? If so, how?” A: Two very good questions. Yes, he did. And I guess his only punishment under the regime during the anti-Semitic purges was that he lost his job and he couldn’t be published at all for seven years until Stalin died. So I suppose, but bear in mind also that, of course, these poems were not published, not only not under Stalin, it was inconceivable, of course, that they could be published under Stalin, they couldn’t be published under the Soviet regime. So they were only published in the Soviet Union after the fall of the Soviet regime, and after Perestroika, and during the Yeltsin years. So nobody knew about these poems. It would have been unthinkable to publish them. They couldn’t have been published. Well, we’ll come to that in July when I talk about Vasily Grossman of how he kept manuscripts locked away in drawers and given away copies to various friends so that even if one manuscript was found, there would be other manuscripts available. And that is, indeed, what happened with some of his masterpieces, they were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by friends so that one of the manuscripts got out. And that’s all you needed, one manuscript of “Dr. Zhivago”, one manuscript of “Life and Fate”. If they got to the West, the word was out, and they could be published, and the writers could be recognised. Nikki Steiner, thank you very much for your kind words. Susan Weinberg, thank you very much for your kind words. Well, I’m sure I’m not going to be able to pronounce your name from your email address, Obloomin Stein. Well, what makes these writings poems rather than elegant prose? Well, they’re free verse is the answer. And in free verse, you can have, they do read like prose, you’re absolutely right, like elegant prose. But they are poems, they’re just free verse poems, which are not bound that tight by metre or by rhyme.

Q: Judy asked, “Are you going to lecture around Osip Mandelstam? I read some of his poems translated in Romanian as they translate a lot.” A: Interesting you mentioned Romanian, by the way. Another writer who has just recently been discovered is Mihail Sebastian, of course, who has now been discovered as a fascinating and important writer. Are you going to lecture about Osip Mandelstam? No, not as yet. There are no plans to, but it’s an exciting thought. And of course, Nadezhda Mandelstam, so I may well come back to some of these other Soviet writers at another time. Elena Drasnin, “The Iron Curtain fell in 1927, '29, and there was no way to leave USSR. You are correct, but the majority of Westerners cannot imagine a society from which there is no escape. I am from this part of the world.” Elena, thank you. Yes, of course, things got so much worse in the late '20s. And then by the '30s, as you say, there was no way to leave the Soviet Union. And it’s true. We cannot imagine what it is like to live in a society which you cannot escape from. Nanette Spain, thank you for your kind words.

Rossi Schwartzman, “'The Passenger’, is it the same that was done into a great opera? I saw it in Miami four years ago.” I’m afraid I don’t know. The book only came out last year in English, so I don’t know. I think not, but I may be wrong about that. And Judy says, “Also Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Shishkin, et cetera.” Well, et cetera, of course, is the key word here. There are so many writers one could add, writers, composers, artists one could add to the list. Chagall, by the way, there is somebody else, another Jewish, great Jewish creative figure who managed to get out to Paris at the right time. And Barbara Gryce or Grace also asks, “Is ‘The Passenger’” that I mentioned, the same poem set to music in the opera by Weinberg?“ I really think not. But unfortunately, I don’t know the opera, so I can’t help. And we’ve just got a couple more minutes.

• [Judi] I think that’s the end of the questions.

• Right, okay.

• [Judi] We got through it.

• [David] We got through it at last. Well done.

• [Judi] Wonderful.

• Thank you so much for coming, for listening so patiently, and for your very, very interesting questions. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to answer them all properly, but I’ve done my best. And I look forward very much to seeing you all again in the middle of July when I return to talk about Vasily Grossman, the third of this trilogy of talks. So thank you. I wish you a very happy Jubilee weekend for those of you in England. And for those of you not in England, I wish you a very happy weekend.

• [Judi] Thank you so much, David, and see everybody soon. Take care, bye-bye.