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regularity during my youth.
Do the components of that monstrous mass fall into any
discernible periods or stages of development?
What can be called rather grandly my European period of
verse-making seems to show several distinctive stages: an
initial one of passionate and commonplace love verse (not
represented in Poems and Problems)-, a period reflecting
utter distrust of the so-called October Revolution; a period
(reaching well into the nineteen-twenties) of a kind of private
curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and
developing Byzantine imagery (this has been mistaken by some
readers for an interest in "religion" which, beyond literary
stylization, never meant anything to me); a period lasting
another decade or so during which I set myself to illustrate
the principle of making a short poem contain a plot and tell a
story (this in a way expressed my impatience with the dreary
drone of the anйmie "Paris School" of emigre poetry); and
finally, in the late thirties, and especially in the following
decades, a sudden liberation from self-imposed shackles,
resulting both in a sparser output and in a belatedly
discovered robust style. Selecting poems for this volume proved
less difficult than translating them.
Why are you including the chess problems with the
poems?
Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from
the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile
art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity,
and splendid insincerity.
Most of your work in Russian {1920-1940} appeared under
the name of "Sirin. " Why did you choose that pseudonym?
In modern times sirin is one of the popular Russian