'What is to be done in a country whose genius has gone?' Lev Loseff asks in his poem 'June 1972'; Loseff's close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that the poet's departure symbolised a graver loss, to do with the country's identity.

LRB 19 October 2006 | PDF Download