He knew them all: Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, as well as Wislawa Szymborska, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the Soviet dissidents. As a child, Tomas Venclova experienced the occupation of his homeland - first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis. His hunger for the world was insatiable: he went to Leningrad, learned languages, engaged with modern poetry, and early on caught the attention of the KGB as a translator and poet. In 1976, he was one of the co-founders of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group for Human Rights. During a stay in the USA, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. He taught at Yale University until 2012 and has lived on two continents since 1990 - an émigré who had too many grievances with independent Lithuania to return to his homeland, and who viewed his exile as a stroke of luck. In conversations with his poetry.