Voznesensky and Goya

[Robert Chandler]

Dear all,

Aged about 16, during my first years of studying Russian, I used to be transfixed by a recording of Voznesensky reading his famous early poem about Goya.  Perhaps for this reason, I was struck by the following story, which he told to Olga Carlisle (it is in Poets on Street Corners, Random House, 1968. p. 316) when she was visiting Moscow in 1967: ‘I remember the last war fairly vividly, although I was quite small when it started.  My mother and I were refugees in a small village in the Ural mountains.  My father was in Leningrad.  We thought that he had died.  We were hungry; near the village wolves howled at night.  One day the door opened and my father came in.  He was unshaven and wore an old black overcoat.  He brought us a tin of canned meat and a book about Goya; he was on leave and had come to visit us briefly.  Since that day – I was nine – Goya has become a symbol for me, the symbol of war.’

But …...  How many people got "leave" from Leningrad in 1942???  Can this story be true, or was Voznesensky just romancing?

Any thoughts, anyone?

All the best,

Robert


Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD





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