“Dear Leonid Ilyich: A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language. As for the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.… Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in the flesh or on paper.”
