Our Notes & References

A scarce poetical poster, signed by the future Nobel Prize laureate and “the most popular Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century” (Shubinskii, our translation here and ).

A very early US production of the poet and apparently Brodsky’s first separate work to be printed by “the most important and legendary foreign publisher of Russian literature, the pinnacle of tamizdat history” (Oborin).

Written in early 1966, the poem reflects on the destruction of a Greek church in Leningrad to make way for a concert hall marking the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Just a few months earlier, Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) had returned from exile in a labour camp, where he had been sent for “social parasitism.” In 1972, he was forced out of his homeland and settled in the US, where, thanks to his close friends Carl and Ellendea Proffer, he became Poet in Residence at the University of Michigan.

In 1971, the Proffers founded a small publishing house named “Ardis” in the basement of their Ann Arbor house, publishing banned Russian literature and, in doing so, “completely changed the map of Russian literature” (Oborin). Thanks to Ardis, works excluded from Soviet publishing became accessible to readers in both the West and the USSR.

From 1977 onwards, Ardis published the majority of Brodsky’s Russian poetry. After Carl Proffer’s death in 1984, Brodsky remarked: “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” (quoted by Voronina).

A very early professional collaboration between Brodsky and Ardis, this broadside-poster was apparently published in 1972, as catalogued by Harvard and other libraries. It features a rare translation by Jamie Fuller (b. 1945), previously printed in Ardis’s Russian Literature Triquarterly, (#1, Fall 1971), alongside a handful of her other translations of Brodsky. This translation appears to have been published nowhere else. In his detailed biography of Brodsky, Lev Losev refers to a limited edition of 200 copies of Stop in the Desert in Fuller’s translation, misdating it to 1973 and mistakenly describing it as a poetry collection; but we have found no trace of such a collection elsewhere.

This broadside is indeed limited to 200 copies, most of them hand-numbered and signed by Brodsky — this one being no. 200.

The broadside was likely produced for Brodsky’s public poetry readings — both to promote his work and to help raise funds during his first year in the United States. His first public appearance in America took place on 12 September 1972, at Rackham Hall Auditorium, University of Michigan. Later that autumn, he gave readings in New York, at the Donnell Library and the New School. While copies of the broadside are held in several American university collections, very few have appeared on the market in recent decades: we are aware of only two other copies.

From the publication of Selected Poems (Penguin Books, London, and Harper & Row, New York, 1973) onwards, English translations of Brodsky’s poetry came to be dominated by George Kline, who played an essential role in establishing Brodsky’s reputation in the English-speaking world. Kline’s translation “Halt in the Desert” appeared in Selected Poems (1973), and earlier in The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1972). Another translation—likely also by Kline—titled “A Stopping Place in the Wasteland” was published in Unicorn Journal in 1968.

Provenance

From the estate of Ellendea Proffer (Ellendea Proffer Teasley (b. 1944), co-founder of Ardis publishing house, writer, translator of Russian literature into English, and Brodsky’s lifelong friend; by repute).

Bibliography

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