Yuri Kublanovsky / Image courtesy of Российская газета
I was struck last month by the opening paragraphs of a book review
by Victor Leonidov in Ex Libris, the
literary supplement to one of Russia’s leading newspapers, Nezavisimaya gazeta. The book under review was the
latest collection by Yuri Kublanovsky, called Reading in Bad Weather (Чтение в непогоду), and Leonidov’s
piece began with these two quotations:
“This is a poet who is able to
speak of the history of the State with lyricism and of his own personal turmoil
with the tone of a citizen. His technical
equipment is amazing. Kublanovsky has perhaps the richest lexicon since
Pasternak.”
“Kublanovsky’s poetry is
characterized by an elasticity of line, a boldness of metaphor, a vivid sense
of the Russian language, an intimate kinship with history, and an ever-present
sense of God above us.”
Only then did we learn who had spoken:
The first quotation belongs to Joseph Brodsky, the second to Solzhenitsyn.
Today Yuri Kublanovsky is probably the only contemporary poet who has received
such enthusiastic praise from two Nobel laureates, two geniuses of Russian
literature in the twentieth century.
Wow. So who is Kublanovsky? If these two Nobelists thought
so highly of him, then why don’t his books accompany theirs on the shelves of American
bookstores? (I mean, the three percent problem aside.) My first question is
rhetorical, but my second isn’t: I really can’t comprehend why someone like Kublanovsky
is not better known among English readers. Perhaps our market can’t bear much
more poetry—I don’t know—but surely we can try to make room among the hordes of
mediocre MFAs for some of the best international poets. And Kublanovsky certainly
fills the bill.
