HINSEY: Let's return to the 1960s and your relationship with Joseph Brodsky. In late August 1966, following his return from internal exile in Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region, Joseph Brodsky was in rather low spirits—

VENCLOVA: Brodsky was released from his internal exile in Norenskaya in the second half of 1965. In the end he served less than two years of his five-year sentence. We considered it an almost incredible success. For almost the first time since 1917, the state machine went into reverse due to international protests and, what was more important, to the pressure of mounting public opinion in the USSR. Brodsky returned to his parents’ flat in Leningrad, met Akhmatova, who was instrumental in his release, and started to look for translation contracts (he made a very modest living as a translator before the trial). An old literary scholar Viktor Zhirmunsky (a friend of Akhmatova's and a member of the so-called Formalist school in the twenties) proposed involving him in a very promising project. A large book of English metaphysical poetry was to be published in the academic series Literaturnye pamiatniki (Literary Monuments), and Brodsky began to render John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others into Russian, continuing his own poetic work at the same time. In Norenskaya, he had undergone a veritable transformation: he produced a hundred or so poems during his exile, which were much more original and powerful than most of his previous work. To tell the truth, they were on a par with Pasternak, Akhmatova, or anyone. He also managed to learn English in that northern village—friends had provided him with books by Auden and many others.

Therefore, Brodsky's situation in those years did not look too bad. By Soviet standards, it could even have been seen as enviable. Yet of course he was under strict surveillance by the KGB, and remained on the margins of “normal” society, shunned by all official bodies. The fact that he became the very epitome of Leningrad's and Russia's literary underground, adored by hundreds of young people, lionized by opposition cultural figures, and frequented by Western students who managed to get into the USSR, only served to aggravate his predicament.