In each of our lives, there are days alike and fairy-tale dreams that startle us at night; routine and adventure; duties and dreams. Dreams end with awakening, yet sometimes they are remembered and seem to carry over into reality. Dreams rarely come true, but how dreary life would be without them. This is what 'The Ballad of the Little Tugboat' is about, first published in 1962 in the Leningrad magazine Kostyor. For Joseph Brodsky, who was twenty-two at the time, this publication was his first, and for nearly a quarter century one of the very few in his homeland.
It seems Brodsky foresaw the trials that lay ahead. The heart of a harbor tugboat, which seemingly forbids itself to dream, belongs to the ocean, and the dream itself comes true beside it — in the port, on the embankments of the Neva, outside the window. And in the end, it swept him along, into the distance. The young poet, and even more so his little hero, do not speak of this directly — for them it is, it seems, merely a guess, whose visible features were given by the artist Kasya Denisevich.