England in Russian Émigré Poetry: Iosif Brodskii’s ‘V Anglii’

Abstract

As we all know, the literary capital of the First Wave of Russian émigrés, at least after 1925 when economic circumstances made Berlin lose its advantages, was Paris; there were outlying centres in the Slavonic capitals of Prague, Sofia, and Warsaw; there was an even more peripheral outpost in Harbin. After World War II, the centre of gravity shifted to the USA. The Third Wave of emigration has had a triple centre: Paris, the home since 1974 of its most important journal, Kontinent; New York, the place of publication and residence of a large number of its writers; and, in contrast to the earlier situation, Israel. During the entire seventy-year history of the Russian literary emigration, the British Isles has been marginal territory, for various reasons which — while not too controversial — are too complicated to go into in the present essay.¹

V Londone tozhe ne polezhish’

Lev Loseff