Our Notes & References

Two first editions, both volumes inscribed by the future Nobel Prize winner to a Russian woman of letters living in Los Angeles and New York, and an important figure of the Russian community in the USA.

This is Brodsky’s first collaboration with Ardis, “the most important and legendary foreign publisher of Russian literature, the pinnacle of the history of tamizdat” (Oborin, our translation here and elsewhere). By creating Ardis, the American Slavists Carl and Ellendea Proffer “completely changed the map of Russian literature” (Oborin): thanks to them, works that had no place in Soviet publishing houses became available to readers in the West and the USSR.

During one of their trips to the Soviet Union in 1969, the Proffers met Nadezhda Mandelshtam who introduced them to Moscow literary circles and to Joseph Brodsky (1940-96), who was to become the major Russian poet of post-war 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. These two contacts led the Proffers to the Soviet literary underground and enabled them to collect unpublished works by contemporary authors and rare editions of Russian literature from the early 20th century.

Two years later, the couple founded a small publishing house, “Ardis”, naming it after the estate from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada. The office of this private enterprise was located in the basement of the Proffers’ house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “In the best times it had three or four full-time employees, but often it would be the publishers Carl and Ellendea Proffer themselves who were typing, proof-reading (mostly at night), packing and mailing books. This publishing house acquired almost a mythical status as a refuge for uncensored literature among the Russian intelligentsia” (Lev Losev).

Ardis published works and translations of the main Russian authors of the 20th century, including Osip Mandelshtam, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Andrei Platonov, Sasha Sokolov, Vasilii Aksenov, Sergei Dovlatov among many others. Brodsky became close friends with the Proffers and when he was forced to leave his homeland in 1972, they helped him emigrate to America and secured a place for him at the University of Michigan. Since 1977, the vast majority of Brodsky’s Russian poetry had been published by Ardis.

After Karl Proffer died of cancer in 1984, Brodsky stressed in his memorial: “What Proffer did for Russian literature is comparable to Gutenberg’s invention, for he brought back the printing press. By publishing in Russian and English works that were not destined to appear in print, he saved many Russian writers and poets from oblivion, distortion, neurosis, and despair. Moreover, he has changed the very climate of our literature. Now the writer whose work is rejected or banned is personally freer, because he knows that he can, after all, send his work to Ardis.”

When preparing his first post-emigration collection of poetry in the US, Brodsky argued with Karl Proffer about the composition of the book: Brodsky wanted an edition of only new (post-1971) poems, while “Proffer did not want to leave out the other high quality poems that had been written since Brodsky’s earlier collection A Stop in a Desert [Ostanovka v pustyne] (1970)”. One of the editors of the present edition, Lev (Aleksei) Losev (1937-2009), also a Russian poet, literary critic, essayist and the author of one of the main biographies of Brodsky, remembers that as a result of this argument, Ardis decided to publish two collections of poetry simultaneously: in the first, The End of a Beautiful Era — Brodsky’s poems written before leaving Russia; in the second, Part of Speech [Chast rechi] — poems written in the West. Another editor of both works was the writer Vladimir Maramzin (1934-2021). In 1974, he was arrested for compiling a typewritten collection of Brodsky’s works in 5 volumes for samizdat; since 1975 he lived in France.

Brodsky himself chose the colour and font for both editions; at his request, Ardis placed on the front covers images of winged lions: from the Bankovskii Bridge in Leningrad for The End of a Beautiful Era and the Venetian lion of St Mark for the Part of Speech. The first collection includes Brodsky’s famous “Letter to general Z” [“Pismo generalu Z”] (shockingly relevant today) in which he expressed his reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the eponymous poem “The End of a Beautiful Era” and the “Speech over Spilled Milk” [“Rech o prolitom moloke”]. The Part of Speech comprises Brodsky’s poems from 1972-76 with four major cycles (“Letters to a Roman Friend” [“Pisma rimskomu drugu”], “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart” [“Dvadtsat sonetov k Marii Stuart”], “Mexican Divertissement” [“Meksikanskii divertisment”] and “Part of Speech”).

According to Losev, the publication of Part of Speech was particularly important to Brodsky for his “fear of loosing his creative potency outside his mother tongue was not borne out… He was proud of the title of the book… The idea of a person’s creation, his “part of speech”, being greater than man as a biological individual or social unit, was very dear to Brodsky. He gave the same title to his first representative collection of selected poems published in his homeland in 1990.”

In his review of both works, the literary scholar Henry Gifford wrote: “Our moment is ironically characterised by the fact that perhaps the best poetry currently created in America is written by this Russian” (quote from Losev).

Provenance

Iraida Vandelos-Legkaia (1932-2020; manuscript dedication from the author on the upper flyleaves; a Latvian-born Russian poetess and translator of the second wave of emigration, journalist and radio presenter at the “Voice of America” (1963 –1987) in Los Angeles and from the 1970s in New York).

Bibliography

Iosif Brodskii, “Pamiati Karla Proffera”. Per. Olga Voronina // Zvezda, n.4, 2005; Lev Losev, Iosif Brodskii. Opyt literaturnoi biografii. ZhZL, Moskva, Molodaia gvardiia, 2006; Valerii Shubinskii, “Proshchaniie s normoi”, Polka academy, 2020; Lev Oborin, “Ardis byl obshchim delom”, Polka academy, 2021.