Table of Contents

Introduction: Magnetic North, Iron and Grace
Childhood and Family
The Soviets: 1939-1941
War Years: 1941-1944
Return of the Soviets
Postwar and Culture
Gymnasium
Antanas Venclova
Vilnius University
1956 and Khrushchev's Secret Speech
Boris Pasternak
Study Group and the KGB
Moscow: 1961-1964
Anna Akhmatova
Sign of Speech
Joseph Brodsky
Civil Society and Dissidence
The Lithuanian and Moscow Helsinki Groups
Preparation for Exile
Czeslaw Milosz and Berkeley
Travels: Exile as Good Luck
The Junction: Poems
Notes
Works by Tomas Venclova
Index of Names

Reviews

What we have in Magnetic North is the result of an extraordinary life fully lived.
*EUROPEAN LITERATURE NETWORK*

[An] undeniably rich and fascinating journey spanning Venclova's entire life and career, moving through a highly informative and wide swath of Lithuanian cultural and political history, and through a great deal of Soviet history as well. . . . Although much of it describes large-scale historical and cultural process, questions, and events, it is also a deeply personal work.
*CANADIAN SLAVONIC PAPERS*

Today Venclova is the foremost Lithuanian writer of modern times, but he is not just of national significance: he ranks among Europe's greatest living poets. Magnetic North, a book length interview with his translator, Ellen Hinsey, is therefore an important historical document, and it foregrounds a voice that is sober, mordant and deeply principled....Hinsey, perhaps his foremost translator, makes a graceful, seamless, and well-informed interlocutor, and one obviously devoted to a cultural legacy that needs its champions.
*TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*

[This] wonderful book, which is non-fiction but reads like a novel, by the greatest living Lithuanian Poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North. It's his life as a child during world war two in Lithuania, as a student during Soviet oppression and later as a dissident and citizen of the world. I would add that he is a poet of world calibre, so I truly recommend. KRISTINA SABALIAUSKAITE BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight
*.*

Little could be done to ennoble the poet who already enjoys the reputation of a sage. Nonetheless, the published conversations with the American poet and translator Ellen Hinsey in the new book Magnetic North serve as a testament to the first 50 years of Venclova's life, covering the period of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and his emigration.
*NEW EASTERN EUROPE*