Tomas Venclova was born in the Lithuania of 1937. A book of his poetry,
Winter Dialogue, was recently published by Northwestern University Press. He is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley.
In this collection of essays, acclaimed Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova reveals the tangled relationship between poetry and politics in Eastern Europe. His perspective is that of a political dissident, a human rights campaigner, a writer, and a critic. Included here are essays published in the New York Review of Books and The New Republic, such as ones on subjects from South Africa to Ivan the Terrible, as well as a famous dialogue between the author and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
