Anatoly Naiman had virtually no opportunity to publish his own work until the fall of the Soviet Union. In recent years, however, his poetry, prose and criticism have appeared in several Russian literary journals, and he has received awards from Novy Mir and October.
When Joseph Brodsky died in January 1996, there was in Russia a strong tendency to oversimplify his life, to reduce it to an outline, and at the same time to mythologise it as Pushkin’s life has been mythologised. It wasn’t so much that a second Pushkin had died, but that people wanted Brodsky to conform to their idea of a poet, and their idea of a poet is Pushkin.
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