Notebook: Real Time (Part One)

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Sandbags protecting a monument to Dante from shelling in the historical center of Kyiv, March 26, 2022 (Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

I’m so sorry, readers, for my recent silence. I have been a bit struck dumb. Since the death of my friend and boss Joseph Brodsky in 1996 I’ve been involved, to a weirdly extreme degree for a non-native, in the twisting path of post-Soviet culture; in a way my very presence there was an embodiment of the international, place-among-nations vision of Russian civilization that was very nearly pulped on February 24. As with so many of the shocks of the current decade, it was hard to believe that this way of life was so ephemeral. Since then my friends and I have been trying to help those threatened by the cataclysm with our small suitcase of resources. The stories I have heard, from poets and artists mostly fleeing either a deadly threat or the tightening hand of the state, disclose a yawning hole in what had been my settled ideas of the possibilities of modern life.