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Imagine a Russian reader asking: How can you write poems in Russian, when you don’t hear any Russian speech around you? Or a variant on this: How can you survive as a Russian poet in England, in an alien linguistic setting? To answer without giving way to self-pity, one might cite as an example the celebrated nineteenth-century Russian poet Tyutchev. He lived in Germany for more than twenty years (like myself in England), fell in love with German girls, married them. I also fell in love with English girls and married them . . .

Well, let me answer the question! When I came to Great Britain, as distinct from the aforementioned Tyutchev my knowledge of the local language was none too good. Finding myself at Leeds University, on a grant from Visual Arts, I had to get by somehow. There was no opportunity to speak to anybody seriously in English, let alone in Russian. At times I suffered almost physically, like a one-legged man among super-athletes. Furthermore, since I was in Leeds as an artist, I was supposed to produce paintings, which is something generally accomplished in solitude. I abandoned poetry, mainly because I had too many impressions to process all at once; there was none of that detachment and peace of mind without which writing cannot be done. Incidentally, it is highly problematical being simultaneously involved with two mediums, poetry and art. True I found a way of dealing with this, but let’s press on.

This does not mean that some obtrusive metaphors didn’t at times bother me and that the absence of a Russian environment didn’t affect my sense of language. Language is not simply a means of communication with other people; it is also one of reacting to your surroundings, and most important of communicating with your own self. I’m not suggesting that when on my own, or walking around, I was always muttering, like some crazy old man. It is just that, on the mental level, language is constantly active within one. It is not simply a matter of noting what is happening outside (or within). Something more important than that is going on, a process which one might call the embellishment (embodiment?) through words of those revelatory moments of perception. All these phenomena, actions, deeds are, as it were, brought to life and given shape by words, by imagery, by courtesy of what has been ours from birth, our mother tongue. Significantly enough, even now, when I want to express some unexpected feeling or some urgent viewpoint, even when I’m among non-Russian speakers, I still snatch at the first Russian word or expression, as it bursts from me like a bird. It is here that the natural rootedness of words lies, which apparently seizes hold of the image in the semi-darkness of the subconscious, and in fact merges with it there. I once jokingly remarked that art is my daytime occupation and poetry my nighttime one. But actually, what we are talking about is dusk and morning. It’s no accident that some of the most significant things I have written came to me at night, in Russian, while still in bed, the light off and the body in a state of relaxation . . . At such moments you struggle with your fading consciousness and you think: I must write this down; I’m bound to forget it by morning . . . But you don’t feel like getting up. It’s as if the body doesn’t really belong to you and to move, to switch on the light, or find a pen in the dark, is simply unthinkable! At such moments, in a no-man’s land, so to speak, I truly do not know what country I’m in, although it seems to me that whatever it is, it’s more like Russia than England. Even if it’s imaginary, unreal, it is mine – Russian words come to me from all over. Particularly since precious moments like this occurred even during my earlier life in Moscow. In my daily life, of course, it is English that rules.

But I do not wish to limit myself to the above mundane world! I should like to say something about two most sublime manifestations. First, kids’ talk. I never cease to be amazed at how children in England, from the age of five, can speak in a way that I can only dream of. After only two or three years of preparation, they speak faultlessly and so poetically. I suppose, this is how the fabled bird acquired the gift of speech and became a princess.

The second phenomenon is Shakespearian theatre. The tragic quality in Shakespeare’s poetic speech, its density, its weight, the rhythmic and melodic energy, affect me even if I do not understand everything, the same way great music does. It seems that all that’s left for me to do, however inadequate, is to react, to speak, using my inner, secret and incomprehensible language, the language of poetry, to mutter something in the language of half-sleep, half-wakefulness, as when you cut yourself off from the tumult of the day, from empty although sometimes deceptively pleasant vanities, and turn inward, your primordial “I”.

 Here is a poem which may amplify what I have just said:

in the british gulf of possibilities
russian poetry came upon me

in the region where the adolescent casually
masticates his shakespearian porridge
softening up the words
in their viscous volatile weight
there is a foretaste of the motherland
the youth of a grassy clearing
glimmers in the embrace of ancient woods

on the edge of the atlantic
i burst into russian verse
and flung it like a rough piece of flint
repeating the movement of the slavs