That year, we were going to France in June—small, out-of-the-way places in Guyenne and the Dordogne—and so I decided to brush up my college French (se remettre le Français que jai apprit à I’université), even though I realize it’s a losing game. As everyone knows, the French are delighted to encounter one’s college French — they either ignore it and ask in plain English, “What language are you trying to speak.

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

Archibald MacLeish died just two-and-a-half weeks before May 7, 1982, when he would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday. He had accomplished what Robert Frost once said it was his hope to accomplish: he had written a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

He wrote other letters that day to Wes Joyce, proprietor of the Lion’s Head where he drank, and to Joe Flaherty the writer who lived in the same house as himself. The letters were all postmarked at three in the afternoon. That evening he went to the Lion’s Head, drank quietly, said little, and studied the faces of Joyce and Flaherty who were also at the bar and would receive his letters in the morning. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

I used to be interested in mountains.


They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up.


It was like that all my life.

For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume.

My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when I went over to play. There were three trees in the yard, but if you know where to stand, you can get lost in a forest of three trees. She could do it. She had to. Her mother died when we were nine.

You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.