Andrei Voznesensky first published Ode to Gossips in his second collection of verse, Parabola, published in Moscow (1960); he then slightly altered the poem when he republished it in Antimiry (Antiworlds, 1964). Stanley Moss’s excellent translation preserves the work’s eclectic diction and saucy tongue-in-cheek tone.

The poem’s speaker blusters at first, opening the eight-stanza poem by announcing, “I praise the keyhole, / Long live slanderers, may all / Reputations fall / Into a creaking bed” (Antiworlds 81). The ears of gossips are “like toilet bowls,” and their stories “gurgle and echo / Down the sewerage of years. . . .”

In the central part of the poem, the speaker relates that while he “was living in Siberia, messages / . . . / Came in like machine-gun bullets, flashes / Of gossip mowed me down.” The gossipers relished relaying—via letters and long-distance telephone calls—a barrage of lascivious details about the infidelity of the speaker’s woman.

In the final five stanzas, the speaker returns to Moscow to find his “Darling Natasha” smelling not of sin but of “snow and spring.” He deduces that the slander “came to prove” her “longing” and her “love” for him. In an ironic twist of logic, he sees that malice powers gossip, not truth. Still, the speaker’s question (“But why this deathly silence?”) reveals his foreboding when, back in Moscow, he notes at the end of the poem that his “phone has stopped ringing.”

If this poem, like so many others by Voznesensky, is a parable of sorts, it is not simply about spiteful gossips, but also about the constant state of dread and paranoia that a person feels, no matter what, when he or she is kept under constant KGB-type surveillance (whether by nosy, chitchatting characters or the silent, lethal types).

Ode to Gossips was reissued in 1964, after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s informants and sycophants “called for an end to the [dissident writers’] editions of 100,000 copies, the favorable reviews, and the trips abroad for writers who, they claimed, flout party opinion and play the game of Western bourgeois ideologists,” and after Khrushchev himself hurled his menacing personal tirade in 1963 against Voznesensky and his fellow poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and their “‘rotten, overpraised, unrealistic, smelly writings’” (Blake and Hayward xiii).

Ode to Gossips was the poet’s sardonically defiant gesture against his enemies. Voznesensky was cleverly likening himself not only to the poem’s first victim of gossip (its tortured speaker), but also to the other innocent and slandered injured party (Natasha), the beloved who came out smelling clean as “snow” and sweet as “spring” in the end.

Bibliography

Blake, Patricia, and Max Hayward, eds. Introduction to Andrei Voznesensky’s Antiworlds. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

Voznesensky, Andrey. “Ode to Gossips.” Translated by Stanley Moss. In Antiworlds. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

Categories: Literature, Russian Literature, World Literature

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