Michael Casper at Poetry Magazine:
When Joseph Brodsky left the Soviet Union for good in June 1972, he flew to Austria, where his first order of business was meeting W.H. Auden at his summer house in the small town of Kirchstetten. Brodsky arrived bearing a bottle of trauktinė, a strong, sweet Lithuanian liquor presented to him for the occasion by Tomas Venclova, a Lithuanian poet and translator of both Auden and Brodsky. The gift was more than a way to win over the hard-drinking Auden, who, Brodsky reported, downed his first martini at 7:30 in the morning. It was a symbol of international and interlingual fraternity, and a reminder of the high level of poetic life that persisted behind the Iron Curtain. A few years later, Venclova himself would go into exile after being blacklisted for his dissident activities.
A cerebral poet with a meditative sensibility and meticulous attention to form, Venclova belongs more naturally on the shelf next to his acquaintances Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, and Anna Akhmatova than among other Lithuanian poets. Rejecting both official Soviet aesthetics and the pastoral folkways typical of Lithuanian verse, he draws much of his inspiration from the classical tradition.
more here.
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