Gennady Aigi (Lisin; 1934-2007)

Gennady Aigi occupied an ambivalent position in Soviet Russia. For one, his poetry was demonstrably against Socialist Realism canon and for that he was expelled from the creative writing program.  His poetry was very much like Celan's: condensed, aphoristic and opaque. However, there could not be more difference between the two men: Celan was a paramount urbanite, while Aigi was most at home in the  village (see the photo), or so he loved to pretend. For two, the most sublime of the post-War Russian poets was a Chuvash, a member of ethnic minority and as such a target of promotion in accordance to the Soviet “nationality” policies. Similarly ambivalent was his position with respect to the Nobel Prize Committee, which preferred outspoken dissident Brodsky to the quiet and withdrawn Aigi who ostensibly was nominated several times. But there was also an intrinsic shortcoming: similarly to Velimir Khlebnikov, almost every single mature poem, which Aigi wrote was perfect. But perfection (as someone French, probably Debussy or A. France said) is only a first step to viability.

Gennady Aigi is adequately translated into English, in particular, by the Russian-Polish-Irish translator Kudryavitsky who, regrettably, prohibits any reproduction of his work. 

Iosif (Joseph) Brodsky (1940-1996)

Iosif (Joseph) Brodsky (1940-1996)

       Joseph Brodsky was larger-than-life illustration to the saying of Russian comedienne Ranevskaya, the friend of his literary mentor Anna Akhmatova that “the talent is like a boil that can spring on any ass.” The ultimate subject of his thoughts was always Joseph Brodsky. Equally narcissistic doyen of the émigré Russian letters Vladimir Nabokov was at least daily reminded that he may be a Pope of the Russian literature but that it has a goddess and her name is Vera.
          By the end of his life, his pretense of morphing into a Gilded Age old money type: buying a New England estate, marrying eurotrash Russian-Italian Princess, negotiating a purchase of Venetian Palazzo and acquiring a set of political views matching this persona, started to be bordering on comic. His steady diet of stogies, cognac and pitch-black coffee finally worn his health down and this scion of Jewish tailors found his rest on the Venetian cemetery, in its Protestant section.
        Yet, his poetic genius is undeniable and in a particular genre of an elegy, Brodsky could not find his rival elsewhere but in his adored Romans, Virgil in particular. It is even hard to say whether his (bi-) sexual and gastronomic preferences were the conscious imitation of a life of the Roman patrician or natural habits. Awkwardly for Brodsky who detested any thing Russian, he wrote the best in the language of barbarians. 
       This awkwardness connected him to Paul Celan, who had to write in the language of the butchers of his family, though I doubt Brodsky ever gave his affinity with such “lo-oser” as Celan much of a thought. Because as Nabokov, he was bilingual and wrote in English in his later life, Brodsky is quite adequately translated, sometimes with the help of excellent poets in their own right.