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  Page-Turner A Note on Brodsky and Ukraine By  August 21, 2011 Save this story A few months ago, I published an  essay  in the magazine about the poet Joseph Brodsky; the essay was partly a review of a new biography of Brodsky by his great friend and fellow émigré Lev Loseff. In Loseff’s book, I learned about a poem Brodsky had written in the early nineteen-nineties lamenting the splitting-off of Ukraine from Russia. Part of the reason I’d never heard of the poem is that it had never been published; Brodsky read it aloud once, at Queens College in New York in 1994, but never again circulated the poem. Loseff describes it as “the lone act in his life of self-censorship.” I’ve since received a note from Brodsky’s literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, mildly rebuking me for not pointing out the complex circumstances of the poem, both political and bibliographic. “A poem known only from private manuscripts and other unauthorized sources should perhaps not be taken as repres...