The late Joseph Brodsky, a Soviet dissident who had immigrated and become an American citizen, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. When a Stockholm interviewer asked him, "Who are you, an American or a Russian?" he answered, "I am Jewish." But in his laconic way, he was a Jew who mourned the wreckage of Russian Christendom. No need to tell him anything about Russian anti-Semitism. He knew better than you did. And yet he could write a poem—indeed only he could write such a poem—about a dog disconsolate that the Communists had torn down the basilica it so loved to piss on.

It was Brodsky's practice, starting in 1982, to write an annual Christmas poem, and the best of these poems combine his inimitable blend of the elegiac and the wry. Nativity Poems, a collection of these, was published in 2001. It ends with an interview in which Peter Vail asks the poet, "Are you a religious person, a believer?"

JB: I don't know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

PV: Not a churchgoer, that's for certain.

JB: That's most definitely for certain.

PV: Not Russian Orthodox and not a Catholic either, Perhaps some sort of Protestant?

JB: Calvinist. But in fact only someone who's strongly convinced of these things can talk about them. I'm not convinced of anything.

PV: Either firmly convinced or shameless.

JB: I think I'd put myself in the last category rather than in any of the previous ones. There's much in Protestantism that I dislike intensely as well. Why I say Calvinist—not particularly seriously—is because according to Calvinist doctrine man answers to himself for everything. That is, he is his own Judgment Day, to some extent. I don't have the strength to forgive myself. And, on the other hand, I don't feel any particular attraction or respect for anyone who could forgive me. When I was younger, I tried to figure this all out for myself. But at some point I realized that I am the sum of all my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions.