byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

via Brodsky’s Room and a Half

San Michele is a rectangular island, separated from Venice by a stretch of water and surrounded by a high wall. From an airplane, its cemetery could seem like an enormous hardback book: one of those stout, heavy dictionaries in which words – decomposing skeletons – rest for ever. There is something ironic about the fact that Joseph Brodsky is buried there, facing that city in which he was always to be found but always wanted to be just passing through. Perhaps the poet would have preferred a grave far from Venice. When you come down to it, the city was, for him, a ‘plan B’ or, to use a more literary metaphor, an Ithaca whose attraction consisted of being unattainable, an ephemeral, imagined place. What’s more, Brodsky once stated in an interview that he would like to be buried in the Massachusetts woods; or perhaps it might have been more correct for the body to be returned to his native St Petersburg. But I suppose there is no sense in speculating about a person’s posthumous wishes. If volition and life are two things impossible to separate, so are death and chance.

An abridged version of Valeria Luiselli’s beautiful essay abuot searching for Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice can be found on Granta Magazine.

Happy Chekhov’s Birthday *

(the only cat you’ll ever see on this tumblr)

(Source: itsawisechild-zooeyglass)

Chtenia / Чтения - Journal of Russian readings
Issue 15: Summer - Table of Contents

7: Summer Delight tamara eidelman :: Translation by Paul E. Richardson
14: What a summer, what a summer this is! fyodor tyutchev :: Translation by Lydia Razran Stone
17: White Nights fyodor dostoyevsky :: Translation by Constance Garnett and Paul E. Richardson
65: The Cathedral Clergy nikolai leskov :: Translation by Margaret Winchell
74: Rainy Summer afanasy fet :: Translation by Lydia Razran Stone
77: Memoir of a Gulag Actress tamara petkevich :: Translation by Ross Ufberg and Yasha Klots
102: I embraced by midday maximilian voloshin :: Translation by Lydia Razran Stone
105: Return to Ithaca irina bogatyryova :: Translation by Liv Bliss
127: August, Asters marina tsvetaeva :: Translation by Nina Shevchuk-Murray

—

This evening’s entertainment arrived in the post today. It’s about to be consumed with perfect Damson plums and Pearl Jam bootlegs, as the St Pancras sunset fills our living room with an orange glow.

In 1892 the editor of a literary journal which was to publish some of Chekhov’s short stories asked him to send in a short autobiography to accompany his photograph. Chekhov was always reluctant to write about himself in public, so he sent this note:

Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V.A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov’s] name day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.

Quoted by Janet Malcolm, in “Travels With Chekhov,” The New Yorker, February 21, 2000, p. 242