In the Den of the Voice by Philip Metres The Puterbaugh essay L ook inside,” Dima said, gesturing to me to peer between the slats of a tall gray fence. We were on the outskirts of Moscow, halfway to his mother’s old apartment—what we would come to call “The Den of the Voice,” where we would wrestle with Russian poetry and language and each other. I peered in. Across an overgrown yard, stone plinths and busts of heroic men— some in helmets, some decorated with epaulets—were strewn haphazardly in the dirt, as if tossed away. The factory looked like it had been abandoned, but to my eyes, most buildings in Russia looked either condemned or unfinished. It was the fall of 1992, when everything was either dying or not yet born—not yet post-Soviet, and not really free. “Who are they?” I asked. Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “They used to make statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders here,” he said, in his clipped, semiposh English. “In the time of the USSR, each city had its own Lenin. In one town, a huge Lenin statue stands, pointing into the distance. If you follow the direction of his finger, you find yourself at another smaller Lenin. He’s also pointing. If you follow his smaller finger and look closely in the nearby bushes, a tiny Lenin stands.” I laughed. “There in the bushes, where a drunkard sits and drinks and sings, a little Lenin sits with him.” I laughed again. “I’m not joking,” he said. His eyes gleamed with wicked delight, a smile widening on his face, as I laughed in wonder at this place. When I’d called him and heard his arrestingly British accent, precise as a razor, I could hear his wit and gentleness and wisdom and knew he would be a door to the mysteries of Russia. He’d been close friends with Tatiana Tulchinsky, whom I’d met in Chicago to work on my Russian. One day, she’d handed me a sheaf of seemingly ancient typescript called Ex Roma Tertia “ Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland, a memoir of the author’s year talking with poets in Russia during its most tumultuous years transitioning to capitalism (1992–93), and features Dimitri Psurtsev, a noted poet and translator. 32 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 (From the Third Rome), a play on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). I was instantly pulled in. In his poem “Inhabitant of the Third Rome,” Dima creates a self-portrait in a comic, transcendent mirror: In wintertime, I love to wrap myself till fat and warm, To dress in two pairs of pants, tall boots and mittens, To don a coat of fur – even if its fur’s completely fake – Then strap the earflaps of a wolf-fur hat around my chin. This wind’s so brutal, it’s good I’ve got Polovtsian slits for eyes. Though this cruel frost can’t pierce my Tatar cheekbones, Mymustacheturnswhitewithice,my bloodthickenslikecoldvodka. So here I stand, happy inhabitant of the last, the Third Rome, Reforged barbarian, heir, and – perhaps – future ancestor. I’ve drawn my breath on its quick and eternal air. THE VOICE WAS AT ONCE comic and prophetic; I imagined that the poet who made it loved his mongrel background and his country—all its layers of history, which led him to this cold and eternal moment. I would come to learn, while poring over poems together, that he was as entranced by Russia as I was. For as long as he could remember, he’d been writing poems that found the transcendent in the mundane world around him—waiting for the train in the dead of winter, sitting on long bus rides with babushkas in the country, writing letters to émigré friends, toiling...
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Apr 1, 2023
Susan Arrington Madsen 
Open Access