Philip Nikolayev

About me:

View my latest poetry collection, Letters from Aldenderry.

View my journal, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

View my previous collection, Monkey Time (Verse Prize winner).

I was born in Moscow in 1966 and grew up in Russia and Moldova. I have been equally fluent in English and Russian since childhood, largely thanks to my linguist father. I exhibited poetic inclinations early on. My first sixteen years witnessed the rule of Brezhnev -- the glorious Soviet "period of stagnation" whose like won't be seen again. For all their oppressive gloom, unfreedom and brainwashing, those were fascinating times. My youth was thoroughly bohemian and viscerally anti-Soviet because I had discovered in my early teens that the poets and writers whose work mattered to me most were non grata under the Soviet regime, while those whose work was officially promoted tended to be talentless careerist hacks.

I met my future wife, the poet Katia Kapovich, in Kishinev, Moldova, when I was 16 and she 21. As a schoolboy poet, I was interviewed by a local radio program and, having read Katia's poems in typescript, I mentioned her among the poets whose work I liked. It turned out that a KGB associate was present in the studio at the recording of my interview (not an uncommon thing); he waved his hands from behind the glass partition, the tape was stopped and rewound, and we had to re-record that passage. Katia was already known as a dissident and her name was taboo in the media. Somehow she got word of all this and wrote a poem dedicated to me. We met by sheer chance shortly thereafter at a literary gathering where she recited that poem without knowing that I was in the audience. We quickly became friends. She gave me samizdat Brodsky, Nabokov and Mandelshtam, and recited Tsvetkov's "Delirium Tremens" (which to this day remains one of the uncollected masterpieces of Russian lyric verse). She taught me to drink. One night I came home especially late and told my alarmed mother that a YCL (Young Communist League) meeting had gone overtime. She seemed reasonably satisfied. I went straight to bed and within minutes threw up all over the wall.

At 17 I moved back to Moscow, studied this and that here and there, dodged the obligatory military service by half-feigning a mental condition, changed colleges, went on prolonged leaves of absence, habitually skipped school by the semester, showing up only for the exams, which didn't seem challenging. I was a poet, everything else seemed secondary. All my friends were poets. My scribbles started appearing in this and that journal or anthology, and when I needed money I would hire myself out as an interpreter and translator -- a skill that kept me afloat rather well at the time and afforded me a relatively free life. I did a great deal of interpreting for the USSR Writers Union and met such colorful characters as Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Northrop Fry, Robert Bly, Paul Winter (of whale and wolf jazz), Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Ali Sardar Jafri, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Ravi Shankar, Swami Lokeshwarananda and others. This job also took me to remote places within the USSR and occasionally abroad. In the late 1980s I was deeply affected by my first two explorations into India. I wanted to see the world.

With Gorbachev's perestroika well in progress, I realized that there was no stopping me any more from continuing my protracted studies in the West. As a well-placed translator I happened to have the phone numbers of the US embassy (which were not publicly listed), and I called the consular division and asked them in my then-Bristish accent how I might go about getting into an American university. They explained the process to me and told me where I could take the required tests: TOEFL, SAT, Achievement. I registered and showed up for those, having no idea what to expect, but the tests weren't hard and I did all right.

I was admitted to Harvard and relocated to Cambridge, Mass., at age 24 in September 1990. Right before my departure from Sheremetyevo 2, Soviet customs took off me most of what little "hard currency" I had, so I flew to the US with $50 in my pocket. On arriving at JFK airport in NYC on Septmber 5, I fell asleep on the bus to Manhattan, missed my stop, got lost and eventually found myself trying to catch a cab outside Grand Central Station. A gigantic man approached me where I stood waiting hopelessly in a spot avoided by cabs. "Take a look man," he delivered with dignity, proffering a piece of red brick in his pink palm. He claimed it came from the dismantled Berlin Wall, offering it to me for 15 bucks. "Come on, man, it's a piece a hist'ry I got in ma' hands." When I pointed out that the Berlin wall wasn't made of red brick,” he said, "Yow limey, whatcha say I get you a cab." And he did, but he charged me 20 green for it.

I spent the following eleven years at Harvard, first as an undergraduate and then as a grad student, studying literature and history and teaching undergraduates. I also pursued coursework in such unrelated fields as logic, philosophy, math, Hindi, Urdu, whatnot, largely at the expense of my primary academic obligations. My advisor in history was Edward Keenan, a very great Russian medievalist historian to whom I owe my current understanding of many things. God bless him especially for his tremendous tolerance and patience with me. I was ABD ("all but dissertation") in the history Ph.D. program when I dropped out: my daughter Sophia had been born, we needed money, so I left Harvard and took a job in the real world.

I worked at a high tech firm for five years, first as a software developer and then as a business writer. "Caesar's double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form" (Auden). Toward the end of my benighted tenure there the company acquired a grotesque drill-sergeant of a COO (immortalized in a poem of mine) and quickly devolved into a fascistic sweatshop. I quickly quit, slamming the proverbial door and emailing my colleagues a manifesto of protest.

I have been a fulltime poet and poetry editor since, happily if for not much of a living. Since moving to the US I have been writing almost exclusively in English, and have published a few volumes of verse, including Monkey Time and most recently Letters from Aldenderry. Katia and I together edit and publish Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. Faithful to the "perpetual student" archetype out of nineteenth-century Russian novels, I am now working on a new Ph.D., this time on Samuel Beckett's poetry, under Christopher Ricks's advisorship at Boston University's Editorial Institute, and I expect finally to graduate before too long.

I recently lost my main hard drive with everything on it. Back up your work.

May 27, 2007

I have defended my dissertation. No mo' school!

February 2009

View my latest poetry collection, Letters from Aldenderry.

View my journal, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

View my previous collection, Monkey Time (Verse Prize winner).

OTHER RELEVANT LINKS

Philip Nikolayev interviewed by The Argotist
Letters from Aldenderry reviewed in Jacket
Monkey Time reviewed in Jacket
Monkey Time reviewed in Shearsman
Letters from Aldenderry on Editor's Shelf in Ploughshares
Fulcrum #1 reviewed in Shearsman
Fulcrum #2 reviewed in Jacket
Fulcrum #3 reviewed in Jacket
Fulcrum #4 reviewed in Verse
Fulcrum #4 reviewed in Jacket