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“Going Home to Russia”? Irish Writers and Russian Literature

The poet Josef Brodski once wrote: ‘I’m talking to you but it isn’t my fault if you can’t hear me.’ However, Brodski and other Russian writers, thinkers and artists, continue to be heard across gulfs of language, space and time. Indeed, the above line from Brodski forms the epigraph of ‘Travel Poem’, originally written in Polish by Anna Czeckanowicz. And just as Czeckanowicz picks up on Brodski’s ‘high talk’ (as Yeats might call it), so too do Irish writers (past and present) listen in, and dialogue with, Russian counterparts and exemplars. Some Irish writers go further and actually claim to identify with Russian writers, and/or to identify conditions of life in Ireland with their perception of life in Russia. Paul Durcan, for example, entitled a whole collection of poems Going Home to Russia. Russia feels like ‘home’ to Durcan partly because he is one example of the many Irish writers who have listened in very closely to Russian writing, and who have identified with aspects of what they find in Russian culture. Another example is the poet Medbh McGuckian who has looked to earlier Russian literature for examples of women artists who ‘dedicated their lives to their craft’, who ‘never disgraced the art’, who created timeless works in the face of conflict and suffering: she refers particularly to Anna Akhmatova and, especially, Marina Tsvetaeva. Contemplating and dialoguing with her international sisters in art, McGuckian finds a means of communicating matters and feelings that are ‘closer to home’, culturally and politically (including the politics of gender). Ireland’s most famous poet Seamus Heaney has repeatedly engaged with Russian writings: especially those of Anton Chekhov and Osip Mandelstam. The former is recalled in the poem ‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, a work taut with tension between an artist’s ‘right to the luxury of practising his art’, and the residual ‘guilt’ which an artist may feel and only possibly discharge by giving ‘witness’, at least, to the chains and flogging of the downtrodden. On the other hand, Mandelstam, for Heaney, is a model of artistic integrity, freedom and courage, a bearer of the sacred, singing word, compared by the Irish poet to an on-the-run priest in Penal days. In this conference paper, I will outline some of the impact and influence that Russian writers have had on Irish writers (who write either in English or in Irish). I will point to some of the lessons and tactics that Irish writers have learnt and adopted from their Russian counterparts: including Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s debt to Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s to Maxim Gorki, Máirtín Ó Direáin’s to Aleksandr Blok, and Padraic Ó Conaire’s to Lev Tolstoi, etc.