Proud to Suffer

G.S. Smith

  • The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia by Lesley Chamberlain
    Atlantic, 414 pp, £25.00, March 2006, ISBN 1 84354 040 1

‘What is to be done in a country whose genius has gone?’ Lev Loseff asks in his poem ‘June 1972’; Loseff’s close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that the poet’s departure symbolised a graver loss, to do with the country’s identity.

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Vol. 28 No. 20 · 19 October 2006 » G.S. Smith » Proud to Suffer (print version)
Pages 30-31 | 2741 words