Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse 9780773568631

Table of contents :
Half-title
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Introduction
1 Before Juliet: Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad
2 After Dorrit: Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Others
3 Stealing what Matters: Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij
4 Romanticism and Rebellion: Bagrickij and Galczynski
5 Children’s Poetry: Beethoven Discovers America
6 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse
7 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse
8 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron
Coda: “He Reminds Me of John Donne”: Gavrila Derzavin
Appendix: Meter and Rhythm in Brodsky’s Leningrad Poetry
References
Index

Citation preview

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Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

Research concerning Joseph Brodsky has emphasized two aspects of his work – his poetry and his philosophy as an exile from the Soviet Union. The resulting scholarship has presented him as a fundamentally dissident author with little or no positive connection to the social and literary environments in which he spent more than half his life. In Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse David MacFadyen seeks to counter some of the melodrama surrounding the poet’s reputation, repositioning him in the context of Leningrad during the fifties and sixties. MacFadyen focuses on Brodsky’s poetic beginnings. Revising the typical, simplistic representation of the young Brodsky and his peers in Western criticism, he demonstrates that Brodsky and his acquaintances absorbed an amazingly wide range of texts, both old and new, and that they read contemporary American, French, German, and Polish literature. Through numerous interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries and vast archival research, MacFadyen offers a vital new slant on Brodsky’s early verse, providing the first published translations of these poems, examining his work in relation to a broad international spectrum of influences and revealing the art and craft of his poetry. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse will appeal not only to those interested in Brodsky and the cultural influences that shaped his work and literature of the time but to those intrigued with Russian history and culture. D A V I D MacF A D Y E N is associate professor in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, and the author of Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque. He is currently at work on a series of books on Russian popular songs.

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Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse d a v i d m ac f a d y e n

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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For N.I. © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000 isbn 0-7735-2085-6 isbn 0-7735-1606-9 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2000 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Quotations from the unpublished work of Joseph Brodsky are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. Not to be reprinted without written permission. © 1999 The Estate of Joseph Brodsky. All translations are by the author. The author is grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding during this project.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data MacFadyen, David, 1964– Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet muse Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2085-6 1. Brodsky, Joseph, 1940– – Criticism and interpretation. i. Title. c00-900091-7 pg3479.4.r64z782 2000 891.71′44

Typeset in New Baskerville 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

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Contents

Introduction 3 1 Before Juliet: Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad 10 2 After Dorrit: Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Others 30 3 Stealing what Matters: Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij 55 4 Romanticism and Rebellion: Bagrickij and Ga l czyn´ski 76 5 Children’s Poetry: Beethoven Discovers America 97 6 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse 120 7 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse 142 8 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron 161 Coda:  “He Reminds Me of John Donne”: Gavrila Derzavin 175 Appendix: Meter and Rhythm in Brodsky’s Leningrad Poetry 189 References 201 Index 207

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Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

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Introduction Even seasoned figures and internal emigrés with no illusions about the regime resorted to the communist lingo in an effort to explain their ways, as did Brodsky during his 1963 trial, when the prosecutor pressed him to demonstrate how his lifestyle meshed with the Soviet people’s efforts to build a communist society: “Building communism is not just operating the machine and plowing the earth. It is also the work of the intelligentsia, which…” – that is as far as the judge permitted the future Nobel Laureate to take his argument Russian Culture at the Crossroads, D.N. Shalin, 82

Very large and strangely shaped wooden crates began to appear in Leningrad after World War Two. The Hermitage was shipping priceless works of art back into the city, now that hostilities had come to an end. When everything was once again in its place, these crates were dumped in the disused Smolny Cathedral. The building then remained silent for over a decade, except for rare days when thick layers of bird droppings were scraped away by Hermitage employees. One young man used that onerous task to find his way into the empty place of worship and he began to climb the winding stairs, to rise slowly above the jumble, above the birds. Finally he stopped and sat down in the central cupola. Here, he decided, far above the city was the best place to rest and write poetry. This book tells the story of his ascent. The young man, according to this legendary yarn by Vladimir Ufljand, was the Russian poet and future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) on 24 May 1940. He remained a resident of the Soviet Union until the summer of 1972, when he was exiled by the communist authorities. Such an extreme expression of disapproval ended an increasingly antagonistic relationship between the poet and his city. Tried and convicted in 1964 on the farcical charge of “parasitism,” Brodsky had spent a year and a half in internal exile. Once back in Leningrad, the growing (and officially embarrassing) discrepancy between the poet’s literary and social status led to extradition proceedings. His subsequent success in America as a bilingual poet, professor, and recipient of the Nobel prize for literature in 1987, led to increased attention on Brodsky’s post-Soviet life and work, extending from 1972

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4 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

to his death in 1996. The transformation of a Russian poet into an international one has continued to be the most attractive aspect of his literary evolution. As a result, relatively little has been written about Brodsky’s origins, about his foundations or institution as a poet. Why did he start writing? What did he read and how, if at all, did that reading fashion his literary or philosophical inclinations? How and why did the Leningrad teenager become a poet of sufficient – and sufficiently irksome – repute that perhaps the most powerful nation in the world wished to expel him forever? The answers to such questions are found in a simultaneous examination of Brodsky’s poetic texts and their broader contexts. This book focuses upon published materials, but does so through several external prisms: interviews with the poet’s contemporaries, little-known poems published in Soviet periodicals (children’s verse in particular), and literature devoured by the young Brodsky – both prose and poetry, Russian and Western. In addition to these various backdrops against which a burgeoning literary talent began to unfold, one may consider the evolution of the poems from their earliest drafts to their mature form. I was given the opportunity to do this as part of an ongoing project monitored by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky, the National Library in St Petersburg, and the Puskin Fund to preserve the manuscripts in the National Library’s Brodsky collection, which dates from the late 1950s until 1972. Full publication of this material awaits an eventual scholarly edition, but the Estate has allowed me to quote selectively from some of this work-in-progress where it is relevant to the present study. These materials were largely gathered by Vladimir Maramzin, as part of the monumental samizdat edition he began to assemble in 1972 upon hearing of Brodsky’s immanent exile. Maramzin’s purpose was to preserve as much as possible of Brodsky’s work from dispersal upon his emigration and its expected suppression by the authorities. Maramzin was eventually imprisoned and expelled from the Soviet Union for his efforts, but the nearly comprehensive five-volume samizdat edition he was able to assemble before his imprisonment and the surrounding documentation preserved at the National Library, will remain the basis of future textual study of Brodsky’s early work. (The first two volumes of the Puskin Fund’s collected works are based on Maramzin’s text.)* * The texts I am discussing are very early, from the beginning of Brodsky’s career. Many are poems he soon came to regard as juvenilia and did not himself collect. The only poems I discuss that he did collect in his maturity (i.e.,  for Ostanovka v pustyne and C ast’ reci in this case) are Kazdyj pred Bogom, Ot okrainy k centru, Xolmy, Novye stansy k Avguste, and Na smert’ Z ukova. The  poem Zof’ja appeared later, in the Puskin Fund collection.

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5 Introduction

The archives and finished poems work together as follows. In his Nobel speech, Brodsky asserted that speech distinguishes man from animals, that poetry is speech raised to its highest power and, therefore, “to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.” Verse is a process, only part of which is the time it takes to read a finished text. The vitally existential attitude of Brodsky to his craft defines the other aspect of that process: the choices made with old words in order that they become new, the competition between old and new significances, the push of the past and the pull of the future. I stress the existential approach to the creation of a poem not only because of Brodsky’s own express attraction to such ideas in his youth but also because creative and certain physical maturations run parallel. Both the poet and his words must be constantly novel if they are to avoid the downside of his evolutionary, metaphorical description of poetry’s goal in the book of essays, Less than One. There he explains how the imperial rhetoric and architecture of Soviet “degenerates” turned the progressive striving of Leningrad’s sentence-like, ornate embankments into an obsolete, if not extinct “mollusk” (32). That mollusk represents “an unprecedented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide” (271). The triumph of Brodsky’s archival and published verse from Leningrad is not that its finished form displays a highly developed aesthetic sensibility, but that, like the city’s avenues and prospects, it embodies maturation and forward movement, distance covered and forms altered. Brodsky’s frequent recourse to evolutionary metaphors does not allow us to view his work as flashes of wantonly extreme novelty, of radical deviance from his surroundings. Poetic and pennate forms do not alter irrationally or suddenly in the Soviet context of Brodsky’s youth. Just as the Weltanschauung espoused by the young poet views the world as steps or stages, each utterly dependent upon the philosophical solidity of prior moves, so Brodsky builds upon various traditions and prevalent contemporary modes of discourse. He talks in his  Nobel speech of being the “sum total” of Mandel’stam, Cvetaeva, Frost, Axmatova, and Auden. The discussion of such poets and their absorption by Brodsky would raise few eyebrows today; what I propose instead is an investigation of other, more pervasive but lesser-known linguistic contexts that form the basis of Brodsky’s subsequent evolution, contexts of which he was also (very swiftly) the sum total. The “totalizing” intent of the young poet, always a rapacious reader, acquires its true significance if we recall another Nobel axiom: “It is not art, particularly, [that] is a byproduct of our species’ development, but just the reverse.” Literature is the instigator of change, not the passive observer; since, however, it does not produce a slew of neologisms with each and every new poet, the old meanings of old words must be heard, accepted, challenged, or rejected. The intent of this

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book is to suggest why some very odd and old words were absorbed by Brodsky in order that they be reworked as a process of his own, subjective evolution. This process is found in variant readings, for they record the semantic, philosophical and versificational transformation of the poet’s context into a text, of speech into a poem and the consequent(ial) evolutionary magic. Why Joseph Brodsky was an important poet is revealed by looking at what was around him before he began to write and then at what he did with that surrounding material to make it, over time, into something else. The research involved in discovering Brodsky’s significance as a moulder or remaker of Soviet poetry began at the source. I conducted a lengthy series of interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries, primarily in the summer of 1996 in St Petersburg and Moscow. Data and opinions  were gathered from Aleksandr Kusner, Evgenij Rejn, Anatolij Najman, Èra Korobova, Jakov Gordin, Andrej Ar’ev, Mixail Eremin, Vladimir Gerasimov, Vladimir Ufljand, Konstantin Azadovskij, and Tat’jana Nikol’skaja. A subsequent interview with Lev Loseff in November 1997 provided a vital conclusion to the oral histories obtained in Russia. These writers, journalists and academics allowed me to leave not only with a psychological and sociological sketch of Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s. A wonderful list of reading preferences also emerged. Prose and poetry, Western and Russian – the literature that formed the raw material for a young man’s aesthetic and ethical metamorphosis was named, text by text. Even though I spoke to such influential writers, I must add that with its textual exegeses this book does not pretend to depict an entire literary decade, an entire city, or even a very young poet’s entire reading. I can discuss only the texts which were recalled for me during lengthy conversations with these people when I asked what they and the young Brodsky had read with the greatest enthusiasm. Those books are simply the brightest lights from a wealth of reading materials which I use to plot a trajectory of sorts. I am not painting an exhaustive picture with my list, simply joining some dots. From the books that constitute this modest list, especially from the Western, English-language prose, there appears nonetheless a worldview which casts Brodsky’s own literary efforts in a fascinating new light. In virtually all the Western works cherished by the young boy and his school friends, there is a sad but enduring discrepancy between speech and the world, between language’s ability to redefine the world and the world’s stubborn unwillingness to be changed. This problem is apparent in works by Hemingway, Dos Passos, Joyce, Salinger, and others: the loud and confident, explicitly patriarchal rhetoric of many characters mourns its inability to woo, define or entice an

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7 Introduction

elusive, ineffable feminine presence, very similar to that in Altra Ego, the title of the essay in Brodsky’s final collection, On Grief and Reason. Masculine pathos yearns for the transformative spirit of an inexpressible feminine. The huge consequences of such universal concerns of Western, existentially driven masculinity are manifest only when transposed to a Soviet context. Much to Western readers’ surprise, Brodsky was charmed by the bravado of certain Soviet poets, such as Boris Sluckij or the romantic Èduard Bagrickij. He read much of these poets’ work and on several occasions makes direct use of their material in order to change or nudge it in the direction of these “Western” concerns. The brash materialism of Soviet physicality is forced to house some metaphysical issues. A key figure in that process of “rehousing” is a Pole, Konstanty Ga lczyn´ski. Brodsky found a geographical and philosophical bridge between Soviet poetry and Western prose in Poland, a nation which meant much to him and often served as a conduit for translations or ideas from Western literature. Since Ga lczyn´ski is a prime example of a broad, pan-Slavic romantic impulse, he is discussed together with Bagrickij on the following pages. Brodsky’s relationship to Sluckij and Bagrickij leads to another facet of his incipient rhetoric – the weaving of a qualitatively different pathos to match, remodel, and better the passion of his Soviet predecessors. Brodsky wrote several children’s poems, in which we see a young aesthete matched seamlessly with a young readership. Tales of travel and jollity give an air of happy adventure to the existential rigours of developing a new, masculine discourse. The very fact that such “pathetic” discourse is loud and self-assured suggests a deep-seated need to impress an equally self-assured interlocutor. From a Soviet standpoint, that assurance was directed against the ubiquitous threat of political subversion; Brodsky’s verse, by embracing the ethical vigour of Soviet rhetoric, subverts instead the poet himself – all in the following manner. As will be explained, the poet uses the pathos of Soviet poetry as a basis for an ethically-driven existential worldview; Soviet literature becomes eventually the groundwork for Christian existentialism. In terms of the patriarchal aesthetic suggested here, Brodsky takes from the assured voice of his father that which he needs to assert a qualitatively different type of “male” language. He begins by subverting Soviet rhetoric, a way of speaking that excludes a gentle, feminine and ineffable Muse. In other words, he sows a seed of doubt in the confidence of stately discourse by combining it with elements of Western literature: angst and the rather wordy search for an altra ego, a fulfilling feminine presence. That other, ironically, undermines the new rhetoric of Brodsky, too. His wilful

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participation in the frustrating, spoken search for that which cannot be spoken allows for the transition from Soviet socialist realism to Christian existentialism. The arrogant materialist, who shapes the world, becomes the Christian existentialist who chooses to shape the world in imitation of a divine precursor. The existentialist climbs in order to reach that before which he must fall. Since Brodsky’s early verse is constantly pulling out the carpet from under itself, I also pay some attention to some other “Soviet” models according to which (or akin to which) the poet furthers his subjectivity, moving away from the social, objective tendencies of Sluckij, Bagrickij and Ga lczyn´ski. Pasternak’s Spektorskij and Cvetaeva’s Poèma gory are informative markers. Spektorskij and its rambling or conversational narrative show a poet manoeuvring across something of a horizontal plane. In distinction from the static or imperial tower of Soviet discourse, Pasternak’s poem meanders through the markedly quieter domain of byt – that is, mundane life – naming and making anew consequences in daily living. The work is driven by the five senses, by the world touched and heard. Pasternak, however, acts here once again as an initial, lowly influence from which an ascent is then made towards the ineffable. That ascent, and all the worry that accompanies it, is expressed iconically by Brodsky’s reworking or evolution of Cvetaeva’s Poèma gory (The Poem of the Hill) into his own narrative poem Xolmy (Hills), which struggles up a vertical axis. The hills or mountains embody a troublingly unmanageable marriage between ascent and descent, success and failure, life and death. What Brodsky does with Soviet verse is practised in the dual arenas of Pasternak’s and Cvetaeva’s raw material. There is also a significant moment when he confronts and responds to a Western composite of horizontal and vertical axes, of materialist and metaphysical intent. That composite comes in the form of Byron’s Stanzas to Augusta, to which the Russian poet responds with his Novye stansy k Avguste. The unified persona of Byron, as a marriage, perhaps, of the concerns expressed in Spektorskij and Xolmy is now confronted by the unified persona of a Russian poet. What Brodsky does with Byron is perhaps the clearest benchmark of his aesthetic evolution. The emphases drawn from the Englishman are expressed several years later in a tête-à-tête with a Russian poet of similar stature. Just after his exile to America in 1972, Brodsky penned an extremely  strange celebration of the Soviet World War Two hero, Marshal Zukov. The champion of Soviet pathos and its triumph over international “dissent” become fuel for an ode to existential self-definition. Once again Brodsky evolves from the plateau of Soviet materialism, from

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9 Introduction

the flat expanses of military expansionism, and heads directly upwards. From a wholly physical ground or basis there emerge metaphysical significances. The poet is able to record and laud the military success  of Zukov and turn it into a success of subjectivity. Within the framework of an existentially defined telos, success is not a stopping-place; each poem realizes its significance relative only to those that come before and after it. A chain of evolving texts is established in the vigorous conflict of materialism and metaphysics, of speech and a supra-linguistic something. The reason for Brodsky even raising a pen and chasing that something, the reason for him bending and bashing a masculine pathos, is to discover the potential synonymy between his goal and a feminine Muse. He rushes forth for the chance to stop dead before a beloved greater significance. Why? Because “herein lies the ultimate distinction between the beloved and the Muse: the latter doesn’t die” (On Grief and Reason, 95).

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1 Before Juliet: Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad Romeo: O thou wilt speak again of banishment. Friar: I’ll give thee armour to keep off that word, Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy, To comfort thee though thou art banished. Romeo: Yet banished? Hang up philosophy! Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom, It helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more. Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, scene 3 Gender as maleness: officially, Soviet ideology tended to minimize gender differences. A.M. Etkind, “Psychological Culture,” 117

introduction: the political context under khrushchev The early poetry of Joseph Brodsky is linked closely to its sociological, literary and psychological contexts. A series of interviews, conducted in St Petersburg and Moscow in the summer of 1996 allowed me to bridge the gap between the poet and those contexts. The writers and academics who most graciously consented to the interviews were all asked the same questions, in order that I might establish whether or not there exist already common perceptions amongst these people regarding both their youth and Brodsky’s relevance to those years. The period in question – the late 1950s to 1972 – is marked by vacillating attitudes by the state towards its literary citizens. At the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, President Nikita Khrushchev lambasted the criminal excesses of Stalin’s term in office. A revisionist view expressed with such volume from such a podium implicitly validated the consequent efforts of Soviet writers to expose gross discrepancies between lofty, objective state rhetoric and day-to-day existence, between public and private verities. Already by 1958 the state had little remaining tolerance for the increasing expressions of dissent from the world of belles lettres and thus began to refashion (or reinstate) the “truth” that literature itself

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had dared to make moot. Both periodicals and their functionaries were leaned upon or replaced entirely in order that liberalism not have such an irritatingly active mouthpiece. After several years of officially tolerated tension or give-and-take between reactionary and liberal viewpoints, the latter camp once again sallied forth. The bold presence of new ideas in literature and other cultural fields grew to the point where 1963 marked attempts by Khrushchev to silence many voices of disapproval. Within three years, with the increasingly rude intrusion of state security organs into literary matters and business, the Thaw as a period of post-Stalinist liberties evanesced. In this period of uneasy coexistence with freer speech, the Soviets displayed an almost squeamish attitude towards the release or reduction of any control over language as a means of defining the world. That trepidation existed not only on the level of competing social organisms, each of which consisted of myriad members, but even in the mindset of the man at the controls, Khrushchev himself. Psychological traits of the president, which define a nascent but unsure existential drive, appear a microcosm of social self-definition. In their most insightful overview of the 1960s in the Soviet Union, Petr Vajl’ and Aleksandr Genis see a similar competition of public and private drives, public and private responsibilities – the give-and-take of control and release. Khrushchev’s “basic dogma was that of flexibility and multiplicity – but within the framework of an established worldview … his impulsive dogmatism was in the style of the sixties. Slogans changed, not methods” (223). The president appears as a man driven by an instinctive wish for change or action, but that strength has no sense of purpose or destination. In juxtaposing the finesse of international diplomacy with his desire to get things done quickly, Khrushchev often appeared both crude and rude. Instead of lengthy and gentlemanly debate he preferred to go “right to the heart of the matter, imitating a creative act.” A force for change (or at least for action) constantly checks itself, fearing perhaps its social consequences. A man remains within his established framework, as he does not know how to cope with a primal instinct to claim the world anew, to refashion it in the wake of a lapsed father. Stalin’s death leaves a silence that must be spoken into; Khrushchev did not know how. Inspired by what Vajl’ and Genis call a “poetic wilfulness,” Khrushchev was at a loss how to make that will genuinely poetic. “His famous thumping with a shoe upon the podium at the United Nations was an additional means of expression … a hot-headed individual, unable to manage the rush of his words, assists himself with mimicry and gesture” (227).

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In my interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries, Khrushchev was portrayed in a very similar light, as a man who through his own private struggle with monolithic Stalinism and its rhetoric made possible similarly private expressions of subjectivity by the citizens of the Soviet Union. Brodsky and his lifelong friends took their cue from Khrushchev and then did something different. Evgenij Rejn thinks that “to some degree, we’re all born of Khrushchev, because we should all be grateful to him – he liberated us from the formal influence of Stalinism; his report at the Twentieth Congress was the line which Stalinism never crossed. Khrushchev, especially at the start of his period in office, before he began to do battle with the intelligentsia, enabled the passage of some fresh air in our direction … The situation in the early 1960s and at the end of the fifties – that was a fruitful period, when we no longer felt the violence of a dictator. It enabled us to grow on our own (samostojatel’no), according to our own worldview.” Andrej Ar’ev also talks of Khrushchev as starting a process that would be developed elsewhere and in other ways by different people: “He played a marvellous role when he made his famous speech, unmasking the cult of personality … It was all positive, part of a liberation of feeling.” Ar’ev’s co-editor at Zvezda, Jakov Gordin, echoes his thoughts, noting that Khrushchev’s role can be assessed “with gratitude alone … he liberated people … He played no true role in cultural life himself, but he simply granted culture the possibility of  making a great leap (rezkij skac ok).” Anatolij Najman remarks that prior to Stalin’s demise (or his official denunciation), Khrushchev’s wilfulness and energy had yet to find a sufficiently formulated outlet that would allow them to become the poetic wilfulness referred to above. “I sympathize with Khrushchev and have always done so … That report at the Twentieth Congress for us, the young people, was a truly formative moment … Before  that report, Khrushchev was a funny old codger (smesnaja djadka) and nothing more.”

the parallel between political and poetic form By implication, since Khrushchev was an important figure, that inspiration or wilfulness needed not only an applicable medium in which to express itself, but a form, if the rather chaotic expressions of a shoewielding president were not to become the only manner in which novelty is heard after a period of awful repression. The dignity of form is something that Najman has also spoken of with regard to Axmatova’s poetry, terming it a “stone” that held firm

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in the wake of a sewage-like, amorphous flow of ubiquitous Soviet propaganda. At a time when a different formlessness was evident, when the post-Soviet rush of the early 1990s to novelty eventually replaced prior waves of state-sponsored verbiage, Axmatova’s formal dignity would once again find its champions. Brodsky’s writing, even after coming to America, shows a conservative approach to versificational matters (one he accredits to Axmatova), in order that a more inventive or potentially formless content be restrained. In other words, the metrical schemes or rhyme pattern provide a sense of rigidity that both demarcates regular units of line-length and the place where that line ends; the poet’s simultaneous manipulation of, say, rhythm and enjambment struggle within that rigidity, but are always reliant upon it if they are not to spill across the page. The need for borders or limits of some description would suggest a distinction in the poetry of these young men between form and content. Such a distinction is made many times in Brodsky’s own interviews, using exactly these two words. Succinct and gratifyingly precise as they are, they remain far from universally accepted by the poet’s contemporaries. To some, the interdependence of form and content is a postulate that is extremely reminiscent of a Soviet school  education. Kusner remarks: “That type of division into form and content is a wholly Soviet approach. It was precisely in school that they instilled in us the idea that there exist ‘form’ and ‘content.’ I don’t think that’s so.” On several occasions in this book I will be examining this issue of form and content in Brodsky’s verse. For the meanwhile, let me simply state my contention that Brodsky borrows from various aspects of Soviet form or theme in a manner that recalls his commencement address given at Williams College in 1984 and then published in Less than One. Here the poet writes of a labour-camp inmate (implicitly himself), who is ordered to participate in a pointless wood-chopping contest for the prize of a day’s meal, itself already a prisoner’s right. The anonymous hero of the anecdote begins to chop against his fitter and better-fed warders. As work continues, the young man adopts a very rhythmic swing, an odd expression of the very regularity which the camp hopes to instill in its residents. The swing becomes so regular and formalized that the hero gives into it; he works hard to accept his warders’ rhythm and then surrender to it, for the following reason. By adopting the warders’ official (and usually imposed) modus operandi and doing so better, that way of life is either belittled or made redundant; the young man drops with fatigue from the chopping, but by the time he has done so, his adversaries have long, long since submitted and stepped away from the competition. Brodsky says

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in his address that henceforth in the camp there were no such competitions organized. This extremely subjective response to constraints or limits imposed from without comes, therefore, from two sources when we turn our attention from the prison analogy to poetry: from Axmatova’s dignifying insistence upon calm, collected metrics and from the conservative versificational schemes of Soviet poetry. To conflate these two sources with one explanation would be to oversimplify the complex reasoning behind Brodsky’s choice. The matter does, however, suggest that Najman’s definition of Axmatova’s metrical schemes or forms defines a defensive stance, her petrine pose against an external flood. The splendid isolation of Axmatova against such a flood has certainly been praised by Brodsky in such terms. To Najman’s assessment, however, he adds the notion that her inherent conservatism also served as a safeguard against a brash (and self-deluding) rush towards unbridled novelty. Conservatism humbles and lessens the chaotic wilfulness epitomized by Khrushchev. The conservative metrics of Soviet poetry read by Brodsky before he met Axmatova serve an entirely different purpose. The “brick-like quatrains,” as Kusner defines Soviet strophes, are designed as receptacles not for Axmatova’s silent, defensive stoicism, but for a loud, aggressive progression outwards into the world – simple, maximally comprehensible instigations to action. What does Brodsky do with the earliest “Soviet” romanticism of his verse in order to bring his initial, vociferous, and masculine stance closer to the more decorous air of Axmatova’s femininity? He plays upon both content and form. Content, in terms of theme, is best left until later chapters, but some general observations regarding form can be profitably dealt with here. Vladimir Ufljand hints at the temptation to adopt Soviet forms in order that they be shaken up a little. “Form was at that time a very important theme, a lot more than it is now. That’s because the most offensive term [in literary criticism] was ‘formalist.’ If the Soviets wanted to offend Brodsky they’d say ‘You’re a formalist,’ which for some reason meant that you were writing poems in no way similar to the verse of, say, Tvardovskij, Isakovskij, Esenin or Majakovskij … Evidently they understood that form has a much greater connection to content than is apparent, that if one writes verses in an unusual form, the content might turn out the same way, too; not at all what they were accustomed to.” The formal or rhythmic evolution of Brodsky’s earliest verse need by no means be reduced to the two mileposts of, say, Sluckij and Axmatova. Even if one ignores them, a similar development is traced elsewhere by those such as Jakov Gordin, who perceives in Brodsky’s

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evolution an initial, rather disorderly wilfulness, followed by a conscientiously “poetic” state. That second phase proves to be constraining, and therefore excessively conservative metrics are shaken up by the patterns of spoken language. Brodsky’s evolution is just as much spoken as written. The dovetailing of speech, writing, and the paradoxical need of both to adopt some kind of restraint arose in my conversation with Gordin: Nowadays there is a tendency towards the disruption of poetic form, as if there’s an attempt to break out from under the fascination of the preceding period … [In the late fifties] however, there couldn’t be anything of the sort, because there was the sense that poetry was beginning anew, or that literature was starting anew. As far as the relationship between form and content is concerned, that was really very curious and important, especially for Brodsky is his “first” period. After a few – and not always successful – experiments or exercises in poetic forms (in particular he was trying to write in blank verse) – there was a time from the start of the sixties when he used exclusively the  exactness of Puskinian form. Peterburgskij roman, a whole list of other stuff, it’s    simply reminiscences of Puskin and the Puskinian iamb, of Puskinian form. But – fortunately – he soon went beyond that. … I think that the main thing that joined form to what he wanted to say, more than with any other poet, was poetic intonation – the voice. It wasn’t for nothing that the reading of poetry played such a great role for him. It was extremely important for him to utter poetry aloud … When we had just started to write poetry, he would telephone, waiting to read it through, there and then … When Najman was lining up one day for tickets at a railway station kiosk, Brodsky turned up and began to read him his poems, which horrified the nearby queue! Why wasn’t it vanity with him? Because it was exceptionally important for him to declaim his verse … When he read, it was practically the second birth of a poetic line; it wasn’t at all easy for him to do. He read in a tortuous way, experiencing each line as if he were creating all over again. Once on paper and then again with the voice. It stayed that way until the very end [of his life] but it did take on another form … he began to read a little differently, quieter. That wasn’t because the voice grew weaker. It’s just that it wasn’t needed any more. There  had been that oratorical, resonant intonation, which was harnessed (zalozeno) in the poems – the poetic intonation, so to say, and then that was repeated  by the vocal intonation. He followed his voice (sel za golosom), even when he wrote; he knew to a large degree how it should sound aloud – just like a composer hearing notes, he heard that music … [Even] in the latter period, when there might have been something entirely different, if we look at all

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16 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse those enjambments, at the complicated constructions, it’s still a reproduction of speech. Those who spoke with him know that … his thought was complicated, moving along an ornate path, and that was reflected in the poems. Speech and verse were very closely connected.

It is both interesting and important to note that Peterburgskij roman was written in 1961. In the following year, after such rhythmic metrical constraints were willingly accepted, Najman hears a nascent subjectivity from within traditional forms: “I had the impression from the time he was eighteen to twenty-two or twenty-three, he read those [long, wordy] poems whilst suffering from the fact that he had to pronounce the wrong words … He was suffering from pronouncing the wrong words, but by 1962 the right ones started to appear … That’s an early maturation, one at an unusually early age.” Moving from Najman’s and Gordin’s words, we might hypothesize on these initial pages why Brodsky’s early evolution took place within a conservative metrical context. Traditional vehicles, both metrical and thematic, are used to develop variations upon traditional Soviet values: a heroism strong enough to shape the world becomes a heroism strong enough to accept the world; a bold charge into the natural, tangible world becomes a gradual submission to various external constraints. The self-assured rigidity of Soviet romanticism is shaken by the intrusion of doubt into the poet’s voice. He does not entirely break that rigidity, since it comes to serve another purpose in time; it houses an Axmatovian dignity in the face of both Sovietese and the metaphysical horrors ushered in by existential angst. The poet holds his own against these two antagonistic presences: the former is shunned but the latter is willed on, and so the solidity of the regular, rigid stanza continues to be jostled. Konstantin Azadosvkij stresses neatly the need for an ongoing formal conservatism, even whilst fostering the most progressive aesthetic: [At that time] there was a respect for form per se, since form is a law of poetic genres. If you start to destroy that, there’s always a very complicated collision between innovation and the destruction of form … The reason in my eyes why Brodsky is such a grand poet is that he understood the form that lies within the Russian tradition. He existed within that form, but at the same time he’s a member of a new generation, of new times, because within that form he heard, found, and perceived that which his predecessors had not seen and were unable to realize. He saw that which they might have wanted to do, but could not… When the destruction of form starts, then there begins the destruction of poetry’s genesis.

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the formal significance of jazz and related rhythms If, as I will argue, the Western prose devoured by Brodsky instigated that genesis in terms of theme, then whence came the impetus for formal evolution or change? I have wondered for some time the degree to which jazz acted as a rhythmic instigator for the young Brodsky and his contemporaries, given the frequency and the enthusiasm of the references to that musical form in the poet’s work. When I posed the question, I was surprised at the unanimity of the response. Evgenij Rejn and Anatolij Najman were the two interviewees who spoke most to me about jazz. Rejn in fact deferred to Najman when knowledge of the music was required, but he nevertheless spoke at length of his and his friends’ love for American music. “I was a big jazz fan, basically of classical jazz – although I no longer am. That’s Ellington, Miller, Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, plus perhaps the newer version – Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie. There weren’t many records, but they did exist. I had one or two, Brodsky had a few dozen … which he gave to me when he left. It’s called the ‘Diamond Encyclopedia of Jazz.’ In Leningrad at that time there were a few people who were considered big jazz specialists … They knew the entire history of jazz really well: the twenties, the thirties, forties and fifties. They already had good tape-players … they recorded jazz, both from the radio and records, which then made its way – albeit in small quantities – into Leningrad. We listened to those recordings, as did Brodsky. I remember that he really liked Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan … In general, jazz truly did have a great significance at that time … We never missed a single broadcast.” Rejn’s enthusiasm certainly explains why Brodsky’s love for jazz was more of a generational phenomenon than one man’s yearning for Western popular music. When it came time to speak to Najman, the true formal significance of jazz was clarified, especially as a formative influence. “As far as jazz is concerned … what you take in at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty – that’s yours. If you take in rock and roll, then for your whole life something of that will stay in your soul … for us it was jazz. An enormous number of us would listen to Jazz Hour on the Voice of America. It was hosted by Willis Conover … Until then there was only so-called classical music, then suddenly jazz came long. Despite the fact that it’s both amazingly pleasant and sugary to listen to – you just like it – it does at the same time teach you a thing or two. It teaches you improvisation within a system; it teaches you the clarity of sound, the purity of melody, multi-voicedness … Of course, [we

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loved] Charlie Parker, Armstrong … Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Mingus … And then there were the main songs which for us were a magical formula – Melancholy Baby, for example. Even for us it had a certain magical banality, but imagine it in a foreign language, then the banality disappears, then there’s a magic to the magic … It all taught us a kind of rhythm.” Why all the fuss about rhythm? A recent article by the Russian academic M.M. Grisman makes some wonderfully adventurous suggestions. He positions rhythm as an aesthetically unifying force between undesirable and disjointed pairs or polar opposites: “unity–multiplicity, order–disorder, predictability–unpredictability, repetitiveness– uniqueness, obligation–freedom. These are all internal opposites of a literary work’s deep rhythmic structure. Rhythmic movement occurs only between these poles, since they cannot be brought together and at the same time cannot be internally divided or juxtaposed” (107). Rhythm, in its unpredictable progression across a given utterance, comes to create a living, synthesizing flux between the two poles of stasis and chaos. It vivifies inanimacy and gives recognizable form to amorphousness, all in order to create a sense of vibrant harmony between them. Rhythm “is an expression of a unity that does exist prior [to the creative act]. That unity contains in each moment both the return of what was, together with the surprising emergence of a uniquely novel, nascent, non-reflexive and special utterance.” The creation of meaning as movement within limits, as rhythmic novelty within a staid, conservative framework, leads Anatolij Najman to make a beautiful analogy between the genesis of a poem and sport. Nobody cares that much about the result of a game; the game itself is what matters, the transformation of the rules into something unpredictably kinetic. Given that Brodsky was something of a soccer fan in his youth, Najman’s Brazilian parallels are all the more pleasing. “If I give you the ball and say ‘Kick it,’ then you know you can kick it hard, to the left, to the right, upwards and so forth … but then, when you see what Pele can do with it, you suddenly comprehend what an amazing movement your legs are capable of – he can do what a normal person cannot. A poet can move, too, in an entirely unexpected direction, but all the same it’s legs that are moving forward.” Najman then extends his analogy to basketball. “Michael Jordan does absolutely everything; he ought to fall, but he flies up even higher. If we’re shown in slow motion what he does, each and every element is form.” By his basketball parallel Najman again stresses the primacy of process over result, the primacy of writing over what is eventually left on the page. After a Chicago Bulls’ game, says Najman, “you can’t just say ‘He played inspirationally.’ How did he play inspirationally? He

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played by hitting the floor with his left foot, having taken the ball in his right hand and turned around in the air – these are all elements of form.” The rhythmic changes within the preset scheme or rules are what constitutes the game.  Grisman suggests that such changes are the genesis of new, vivacious linguistic significances. I myself am suggesting that Brodsky’s earliest verse, after an initial rush of disorderly free verse, takes on the constraints of a romantically Soviet, masculine poetic form and content. This Soviet stance is then, through thematic and rhythmic shifts, shaken in such a way that the bold, self-determining hero in the material world comes to doubt both his self-determination and the reliability of tangible material. Does that mean, then, that one might draw a parallel between Brodsky’s tendency to accept or reject certain fixed or “shapely” stanzaic forms at a time when his work is concentrating upon explicitly physical matters? In other words, does the young, self-assured poet adopt similarly fixed or “firm” forms whilst in a more materialistically determined context, and then adopt looser, more prosaic forms, such as the accentual meter of dol’niki, as he ages? “Yes, absolutely,” says Evgenij Rejn, “I know all about that myself, too. I understand that perfectly.” Rejn associates rhythmic jazziness within classical forms as an essentially bold and youthful formula; dol’niki he associates with age. “The thing is that an intense, metrical and especially rhythmic poetic line – either classical or avant-garde – demands a great deal more intensity, and a special psychic state, I’d say. It’s much more connected with what is banally called inspiration. One has to be in a special state (v osoboj forme) in one’s life, so that in a non-mechanical manner, in an existential, exacting one, you can give into the rhythmic ascent. As for the dol’nik, it’s more prosaic and colder … If a person isn’t in that certain physical state which is inherent to youth … [then] the dol’nik is much more suitable; it allows a person in a middling condition to write poetry more rationally. I can understand Brodsky in this regard.” So, apparently, can Gordin. “He certainly thought about that,” says Gordin about an equation of Brodsky’s versification and physical form. On the subject of simultaneous poetic and physical evolutions, he then remarks of his friend that “Yes, his perception of life certainly changed – but he couldn’t bear any kind of breach (razryv).” By this, Gordin means that Brodsky’s poetry evolved over the years smoothly from one form into another. “He couldn’t stay within a prior form of his work … at the time of a novel worldview. It all had to be harmonized, one thing with another.” That harmonious evolution is what occurs after the incipient rhythmic twitches within the early meters, after a weakening of

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their rigidity. Nevertheless, says Gordin, “weakening [per se] is not the issue here … it was another spiritual state. A calmer and more analytical one, perhaps. His first – speaking very relatively – ‘romantic’ period, that’s a battle with the world (bor’ba s mirom) … What comes after, that’s … a kind of attempt to live through (perenesti) the world, not ‘the way that I’d like it,’ but ‘the way that it is.’” Vladimir Ufljand synthesizes the above themes of rhythmical evolution, jazz, and the avoidance of stasis at a time of youthful verse. I offer his succinct observation as a summation before turning away from textual to contextual issues once again, from how Brodsky’s verse changed to who might have prompted that change from within the literary world. On Brodsky’s versification, in particular on the sound of his verse, Ufljand proffers the following theory. “A person loves the music and speech he hears in his youth … Joseph loved jazz very much, as I do … There was no jazz at the time of Axmatova’s youth, so it’s a completely different kind of poetry, a different language, that was native to her … When, say, Brodsky or I appeared, it was already an alien language.” The notion of alienation, however, can emerge within a given poet’s established œuvre, too, and inspire a formal or thematic shift. Of Brodsky’s middle career, Ufljand says “Joseph was already bored with all those dactyls, anapests, and amphibrachs … He knew that if you have to read in one meter, in the same iambs, then in the end it’ll lull you to sleep. You know that something rhythmic is being heard, but you’re no longer able to comprehend exactly what it is.” Ufljand’s final note of uncertainty here is a nice attempt to express the interaction of conscious and unconscious processes at work in Brodsky’s poetry. He hears Axmatova, and consciously embarks upon a different, spoken project, but the need at times to deviate from one’s own unchanging style for the sake of novelty is sensed unconsciously. The periods of versificational inceptions or geneses are, it seems, unconsciously prompted but consciously fostered.

the affinities between generations, present and past In order to understand the simple reasons why anyone in Brodsky’s generation would start writing, consciously or otherwise, I asked the writers themselves. Of all those approached, Aleksandr Kusner placed his work in the “thickest” context of prior politics. He began with a description of 1956: Suddenly there was an incentive, a new incentive and an acceleration of Russian culture … Exactly at that time, in ’56, what rained down upon us was

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21 Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad the poetry that had been previously hidden or tucked away. We read Man  del’stam, Cvetaeva, Xodasevic, Kuzmin, Axmatova, and Pasternak. Some people had known about them earlier, but not everyone. When there arose the opportunity to read all of these through, it became a remarkable event in our lives. Everybody read poetry together. … In ’56 I was twenty or so and Brodsky would have been sixteen or seventeen and to some degree it was a happy time … Everybody was reading Thomas Mann, Proust, and Faulkner. Poetry was read in halls, evenings of poetry were organized. I remember that at those evenings – in Leningrad, let’s say – Rejn,  Najman, Bobysev and I would all read. In Moscow there was Voznesenskij, Axmadulina, Okudzhava … It was all one process – a large one. On top of that, people read at home, too, in a domestic surrounding. They gathered over tea or vodka, and sat down in the evenings. There were people of the older generation, such as Lidija Ginzburg … We read to them, they told us about their youth … Speaking briefly, this connection between two ages that had been broken was forged again … I managed, for example, to be a guest  at Èixenbaum’s place; Brodsky would visit the Tomasevskijs … In that way there arose links, not only via books,  but via a private acquaintance with those people of the 10s and 20s … with Zirmunskij, whom Brodsky definitely knew. It was all [happening] as if behind the back of Soviet culture’s major players. We were connected with people who had gone for ages into the shadows … who had been covered by the shadows, but at the end of the 50s and 60s had come out once again. … Almost everybody was writing poetry. There’s none of that now. Now nobody reads poetry at a friend’s place … but then it was very much the done thing. It was a kind of renaissance, if you like! Of course, a lot of it was either funny or silly, but nevertheless I relate to it all with both gratitude and seriousness, because it was a rather vital, nourishing milieu. In one’s youth that’s absolutely essential; later a person can live on his own and not need anyone, but in his youth that kind of competition or support is important, as if to see how others around you are writing.

These “others” constitute the major part of my study. Since the reader (real or perceived) of any work determines to a very large degree a writer’s intention, and since an audience determines the significance of an utterance from the podium, we need to be very specific about who Brodsky’s addressees were. I began during my interviews with a geographical distinction in his perceived readership, by asking whether or not Kusner felt the difference between Leningrad and Moscow poetry. He replied that “Axmatova told me this when

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I was with her in 1963, I think. She said that in Moscow verse is read for the stadium, like football and that it all reminds one of the Coliseum, which is fatal for poetry. She was not approving of  Evtusenko, Voznesenskij – and rightly so. Reading in an auditorium for many thousands – that lowers the level of poetry, because if you want to please that auditorium, you have to write on the level of its consciousness.”  Kusner continued that in Leningrad “there were fewer temptations then, and more time or possibilities to sit behind a table, alone with paper and think, to write for oneself. That’s because poetry in general is not an address to a reader, not to an auditorium – it’s an address  to God, let’s put it that way.” Paraphrasing Brodsky, I asked if Kusner agreed that given the world-building potential of language, poetry was therefore even an address to language itself. He agreed. “As Man del’stam put it, it’s for a ‘distant interlocutor.’ He compared poetry with a letter in a bottle, a sealed bottle, thrown into the water during a … shipwreck. It’s for an unknown reader. And that’s how we wrote poetry here … mainly for that unknown reader, for an inconceivable reader, perhaps in the future. That, to some degree, distinguishes Leningrad poetry from that of Moscow.” The isolation of the table-bound Leningrad poet was expressed by  Kusner on another visit in another way, as he viewed the problem in generic terms, too: “The thing is that for some while now, let’s say since the 20s, there have been no great styles. All ended with Constructivism. That’s the end of it. In poetry, the last great movements in Russia were Futurism, let’s say, or Acmeism. After that each artist, each poet has been operating – as we say – at his own risk. Each one is his own school.” Before I take a closer look at the way in which some of the writers discussed in this book were perceived, not just by Brodsky but by an entire generation, another word or two from Jakov Gordin would  be useful. Gordin, who by his own admission was not part of Kusner’s circle, nevertheless underwent his own, very similar reforming of literary links with other generations. Gordin’s thoughts will give a better picture of multiple circles, cliques, and friends across Leningrad, all redefining the nature of novelty through an actively sought debt before the cultural achievements of living predecessors. Playing devil’s advocate, I wondered aloud if Gordin’s generation had appeared as if from nowhere. No, of course it all came from somewhere … The poetic and literary traditions (despite all the state pressures) were not broken. In the 50s, there were still alive some people from the pre-revolutionary tradition, those who were raised

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23 Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad  prior to the Revolution, those who knew … Mandel’stam, Belyj, the entire circle, Blok, too – the entire foundation of the twentieth century’s poetic tradition. We ourselves were a large group of youngsters in the city who socialized quite a bit with those people. There arose a kind of ‘meeting of generations.’ Many of the older generation had just returned from the camps – they were ‘rehabilitated’ after the period ’54–’56: poets, translators, men of letters. Others did not live here in the city and had a fairly free literary existence, so meetings occurred once again. A form of literary community  arose, through which a tradition was handed over. I read Mandel’stam, for example, at the homes of my ‘older’ friends. His poems were nowhere to be found in any of the libraries – all his books had been taken out. In the homes  of the intelligentsia books such as Mandel’stam’s had been preserved, plus his later works in manuscript form – typed versions, too. They were giving us this tradition … A great deal of translation was undertaken during this period, [such as] the translation of Western poets … That world opened up and created an atmosphere of awakening … So that’s how it all came together. One the one hand, there’s the Russian poetic tradition – in essence that of the Silver Age – and on the other hand Western poetry, which appeared as something exotic and new – and very stimulating.

affinities for prior russian poets In all discussions of such stimulation, of the impetus Gordin terms “psychological” rather than literary, Anna Axmatova must surely be referred to most often. The primary reason, of course, is that Brodsky knew and visited her. In assessing the connection to (or gradual movement away from) Axmatova, Gordin makes a neat analogy:  “Bobysev, Brodsky, Najman, Rejn … were what Axmatova called ‘Avvakumites,’ i.e., those who couldn’t be reconciled with the literary actuality they’d ended up in. And Avvakum – he’s rather confrontational, he stands in opposition. He opposes, but he’s not independent.” Axmatova’s own significance for those young men is expressed even more clearly by the art historian Èra Korobova. As opposed to Moscow, “here in Petersburg, there was Axmatova, and that’s no longer Soviet poetry, but Russian poetry, traditional. Thank God that they had Axmatova and all the rest fell away. A level had been determined – that was the level.” Though Axmatova was indeed a benchmark of huge significance for the young Brodsky, Cvetaeva has just as much claim to the title of primary instigator of his aesthetic. Much more has been said and written about Axmatova’s influence, but Brodsky on the first page of recently published interviews with Solomon Volkov claims that Cvetaeva’s sway over him was always greater.

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Evgenij Rejn recalls an initial influence of Cvetaeva on Brodsky long before Axmatova was encountered. “I remember really well when I saw Brodsky working on Sestvie. Before that time there was almost no Cvetaeva. There was only one tiny book, which had a few separate poems.  I think it was in the series Xudozestvennaja literatura … We didn’t [initially] know any of her big works. I think I knew Poèma gory and Poèma konca.” This minuscule list was extended when Rejn was given a file with Krysolov, Molodec, and Na krasnom kone. “It all produced a huge impression upon Brodsky … His subsequent  work began in many ways to lean heavily on Cvetaeva, especially Sestvie. She was an enormous influence on him; in the sense of form, he borrowed a lot from her.” During these interviews, a similar means of comparing Cvetaeva’s influence to that of Axmatova emerged. On a purely chronological basis, Lev Loseff remarked that “Cvetaeva began in samizdat with Poèma konca and Poèma gory, plus some others … at roughly the tail-end of the fifties … She was very important, perhaps more so than Axmatova.” Kusner says that “as for Axmatova, that’s more a matter of personal relations than a poetical influence.” Rejn’s contention, therefore, that Axmatova had “some sort of influence on him [Brodsky], although it was more of a human one” seems to meet with wide consensus. Cvetaeva’s strong textual, rather than contextual, significance in Brodsky’s corpus is stressed by Andrej Ar’ev with reference to the narrative poem that will be discussed later in this book. Talking, as Rejn, of the time when Sestvie was being written, Ar’ev says “I think by that time the Cvetaevan influence was already noticeable … The poem Xolmy is almost completely Cvetaevan … The strength of her syntax, the possibility of making the poem a little more intense than the basic melodic construction one might hear … It’s something stronger than just a lyrical poem, ‘stronger’ even in the physical sense. There is the sensible strength of pressure coming from both the poet and the poem.” As if the simultaneity of Axmatova’s and Cvetaeva’s influence were not enough for us to contemplate, Lev Loseff throws the kind of spanner in the works that prompted me to write this book. When Brodsky et al were encountering the work of these two women “it was all a little anachronistic, because at the same time there were Cvetaeva’s poems and Sluckij’s poems.” Here are two names that one might otherwise never hear in the same sentence. Boris Sluckij and his influence upon Brodsky will be examined later. I choose this Soviet poet for two reasons. First, Brodsky says openly in several interviews that he was a great admirer of his verse whilst in Leningrad. Secondly, the interviews I conducted also made reference to him in exclusively positive terms. Jakov Gordin, for example, has

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something to say about this poet’s surprising inclusion in our list. “There were, in fact, some Soviet poets who were very interesting and important – take, for example, Boris Sluckij, who was a very good poet … Despite the fact that he was a member of the Party and a military man, he was still an oppositional figure … he kept himself a little aloof … Some poets, definitely Brodsky, and to some degree myself, were attracted by a kind of brutal poetry … and Sluckij was just that kind of masculine poet.” I asked Gordin if there was a sense of adventure in Sluckij’s work: “Yes, in general, yes. That was important.” Such an adventure was stolen from a wholly Soviet, materialist context and transferred to Brodsky’s early evolution, to his initially material concerns of the first few years – concerns that would soon outgrow their earthbound limitations and become increasingly metaphysical. Lev Loseff stresses the initially mundane attraction of Sluckij for Brodsky: “Sluckij’s a very talented poet, very original. He may not be such a great poet as Pasternak or Axmatova, but without doubt a very original poet. He was very, very popular with our generation. He created a new type of poetic after the war, very prosaic … the polar opposite of Pasternak. He was an extremely new type of poet. As you know, in Brodsky’s work, even from the very beginning, there’s an interest in a realistic line, one depicting a very lowly, real life. Brodsky actually met Sluckij, but Sluckij was such a severe and unsociable person …” The oddity of Brodsky’s attraction to Sluckij is also expressed by Èra Korobova in terms of social incompatibility. “Brodsky was terribly fond of Sluckij … those poems were very important for young people … [but] Sluckij, however, didn’t understand Brodsky. We knew him well at the time that Joseph got into trouble, and I asked Sluckij if he would get involved – and he said to me: ‘No, no! He’s mad! What’s he thinking of?’ That is, he didn’t understand him … Sluckij’s a social poet, Brodsky’s not a social poet.” Despite such evident differences between a social and a non- or antisocial writer, the younger of the two saw in the elder what Najman terms Sluckij’s “new approach to words … He was a completely essential poet. He didn’t repeat things … He spoke unexpectedly, unpredictably. Our group, for example, paid a lot of attention to him, because he wrote. We respected him.” The fact that Sluckij was alive would obviously have added a vibrancy to his presence in the eyes of the young Brodsky. Pasternak, however, is often mentioned as the one living poet of that  time who held enormous sway over the younger generation. Kusner, for example, when I asked which living poet was dearest to Brodsky, said: “Well, Pasternak, of course … In early Brodsky, the influence of Pasternak is

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very  marked, … Both Spektorskij and the Evangelical poems from Doktor Z ivago – they were extremely important for Brodsky.” A tiny story from Vladimir Ufljand will show how that extreme importance expressed itself on a day-to-day basis. “I remember that I read Pasternak early on, because … in 1954 there was published a selection of the poems from Doktor Z ivago, and I went to the Central Library … on the Fontanka and took out a collection of Pasternak from ’36 or ’38 … I read it, learned some things by heart … and then finally gave it back, but wondered why. It would have been better to reserve it for myself – so I went back to the library and asked for the Pasternak volume, but they told me it had been stolen!” Pasternak does indeed rival Sluckij as an active, productive, and influential presence in the minds of Brodsky’s generation. In turning to Sluckij to find the inspiration for a bold sally forth into the material world, Brodsky found a kindred spirit in another champion of Soviet romantic masculinity – Èduard Bagrickij. Loseff stresses Bagrickij’s significance in the following way. “He was a romantic poet, very unique … He loved to say about himself that he was a Russian Kipling … the idea of an imperial romantic! There is a reflection of Bagrickij in Brodskij’s very early poems.” (Loseff hazards the additional suggestion that Rejn was hugely influenced by Bagrickij and then Rejn hugely influenced Brodsky! Rejn had actually said to me in an earlier interview that he used to read with enthusiasm the works of Bagrickij, Tixonov, and Sel’vinskij.)

an affinity for western prose The mélange of Cvetaeva, Axmatova, and Sluckij is itself odd and heady enough to keep us busy for a while, especially when we consider Vladimir Gerasimov’s comment that Brodsky regarded Sluckij highly, “despite the fact that Axmatova couldn’t stand him.” I would not like to simplify the picture of Brodsky’s initial literary context, but to include one more cultural source, that of Western prose. The influence of some Western poets, such as Auden, Eliot, and Frost has been dealt with by English-language critics, but prose remains something of unmapped territory. In the interviews I conducted, prose much more than poetry was quoted as a conduit along which English-language culture travelled to Leningrad. Lev Loseff’s words serve as a nice introduction to reading habits in Khrushchev’s period: “We were the last generation to really read a lot – before the tv generation. It wasn’t that we were so cultured, but just in the way that children today can’t be torn away from the tv, so it was with us and books … By the age of thirteen or fourteen we had

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read all of Dickens’s novels. Dickens had been published in Russia since the nineteenth century and there had been many Collected Works … I think that Brodsky read the lot … or at least all the thick novels: Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son …” The other English-language, non-American prosaist mentioned most often was Joyce. Vladimir Ufljand, whilst reminding us that “Joseph, by the way, liked Dickens very much,” goes on to say: “Another very highly respected writer at that time was Joyce … The first half of his novel [Ulysses] was translated in ’37 or ’38 in the journal Internacional’naja literatura by a well-known translator, who was later shot … It was a most interesting thing – and of course that’s all associated with the matter of form, the interesting form of writing, of that flow …” Lev Loseff agrees: “We read them [the excerpts from Ulysses], but it was actually rather hard to find them – especially for Brodsky, because he couldn’t go to the university libraries … One book of Joyce’s was published, though, the early collection of his stories Dubliners. We all read it.” If we are dealing with a writer who is read by all and remembered in terms of a formal “flow,” then Faulkner deserves to be mentioned next, especially since, in Gordin’s words, “the general orientation was towards the Americans, to American writers and towards prose more than poetry … Hemingway and Faulkner were the idols for young writers.” Those writers, it seems, look back on Faulkner as rather more adult material than Hemingway. Vladimir Ufljand remembers that “I read Hemingway, but I moved away from him fairly quickly … I moved on to Faulkner, who for me is a writer of a loftier category.” Lev Loseff speaks of the American at slightly greater length. “The very first book that I read in English from cover to cover was The Sound and the Fury – not because I chose it, but because I got hold of it by chance. I knew an American student and got a paperback. I had very much wanted to read Faulkner before that … I think that Brodsky read the same paperback, the one I had … Faulkner was one of the best-loved writers of the ’60s and I think that in Brodsky’s work there are especially close connections with him.” Loseff then offers one such connection. “There’s a word that’s rather hard to translate in Russian … ‘endure.’ Brodsky took his epigraph to the collection Ostanovka v pustyne from King Lear – ‘men must endure’ – and ‘endure’ is also one of Faulkner’s favourite words … [Between Brodsky and Faulkner] there’s that same kind of existential ethic.” Konstantin Azadovskij goes a little further and claims that of all the American prosaists, Brodsky loved Faulkner. “He was, of course, closer to him [Faulkner, than Hemingway, who] is a great writer, obviously, but in my view a little superficial … Faulkner is a very condensed, rich

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writer … I remember that Brodsky once or twice gave me Faulkner, in the journal Moskva … where the story The Bear was published.” Azadovskij also maintains that Faulkner “could never be that popular a writer, because he’s destined for a narrow circle, being rather elite, but … Brodsky’s poetics, his desire to saturate the line, the text, to make it maximally compact, so that one can’t struggle through it, like dense shrubbery – all of that might very well be connected to Faulkner, to his stylistics.” Faulkner’s style is perceived by some to be above or beyond that of Hemingway. We cannot, however, ignore the latter writer, especially in the light of observations by those such as Vladimir Ufljand: “Without a doubt the most popular Western writer at that time in Leningrad was Hemingway.” Rejn remembers “a huge amount of enthusiasm” for his novels; Èra Korobova recalls their “enormous influence: that kind of vocabulary, of text.” Once again, Lev Loseff’s memory is, thankfully, both exact and retentive: “Hemingway was a fantastically popular writer. There was a whole cult surrounding him. It began even in the 1930s, when he was widely published … We read all of Hemingway’s tales. I think he was translated almost in his entirety … The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not. Then the later novels, Across the River and into the Trees, A Moveable Feast … plus the tales … We had very good translations and knew large segments almost by heart.” Rejn notes that “everybody read and loved For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Under such a barrage of titles it is not surprising to hear Loseff’s contention that “Hemingway pops up in Brodsky’s verse.” Loseff thinks that even given the universal enthusiasm for Hemingway, Brodsky had read still more of Dos Passos, “who was also translated widely, even in the 1920s and 1930s.” In particular he remembers the “very influential” translations of Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy. Far from the epic sweep of Dos Passos’s novels, there is one more American prosaist who will be discussed in the following chapter: Salinger. As Vladimir Gerasimov puts it: “It was easy to imitate Hemingway … Then a new time came … with Faulkner and Salinger.” Èra Korobova also talks of Salinger as a consequence of Hemingway: “Hemingway was important. Then there were Salinger and Updike.” Loseff adds that “Salinger was very popular and made a great impression on many of our friends … a very big influence … More often than not, we read all of this in Russian … We read Catcher in the Rye … we didn’t really know his other things. I remember Brodsky read Salinger, but I don’t remember him being as enthused as the rest of us. Faulkner, yes, but Salinger … Of all the popular Western writers

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who were translated at that time into Russian, Brodsky liked especially … Exupéry. Brodsky was very fond of pilots and that stayed with him all his life … [He read] Vol de Nuit and Terre des Hommes.” Loseff, whilst making passing reference to the extremely enthusiastic response of Brodsky and friends to Camus’s L’Étranger, speaks also of another mainland European prosaist, Remarque. “Remarque was, I think, translated a little bit later. That would have been in the mid1960s … Remarque was a kind of second-rate Hemingway. There are the same motifs, the same style, just more vulgar. He was terribly popular … but we had a rather elitist attitude and although many of our friends continued to enjoy Hemingway and Remarque, the whole affair was over for us fairly quickly. I must say that now, looking back, I rate Hemingway rather highly. He really is a wonderful writer. But there was a [later] period when we were rather ashamed to read him that enthusiastically – Remarque even more so.” When I asked Jakov Gordin to discuss the most popular Western writers of his generation, he mentioned four names in quick succession before pausing for thought: Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger and Remarque. These writers and the others mentioned in this chapter soon crystallized into fairly fixed paradigms over the course of various interviews with various people. The following chapters are designed to suggest why Brodsky and his contemporaries read such writers and how those writers were refashioned by the young poet himself. We will see in the poet’s reading a competition I have already suggested, between a bold, ethically committed examination of the material world and an ethically troubled – but metaphysically braver – examination of ineffable spiritual domains.

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2 After Dorrit: Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Others Who else could have declared a war against a power with ten times the area and a hundred times the men and a thousand times the resources, except men who could believe that all necessary to conduct a succesful war was not acumen nor shrewdness nor politics nor diplomacy nor money not even integrity and simple arithmetic but just love of land and courage… William Faulkner, The Bear

introduction The last chapter served a dual purpose: to define certain salient aspects of a generation’s experience, and to show which works of literature were married to that experience in the mind of the young Jewish poet, Joseph Brodsky. Most of the Western books read by him were in the form of prose; Western novels played a major role in defining Brodsky’s attitude towards the social processes of Khrushchev’s Leningrad. Once I had conducted interviews with the poet’s contemporaries in that city, and then began to consider the literary texts they mentioned, it became clear that Brodsky’s earliest verse makes closest reference to the Russian-language poets he read in the 1950s and 1960s. He cultivates a noticeable intertextuality with poets more than with prosaists. I have suggested that Brodsky’s initial years manifest a bold entrance into the material world and that such bravura is gradually replaced by increasing metaphysical or spiritual concerns. The writer, in a busy social world of tangible phenomena gradually moves away into isolation; the social writer becomes private and the objective is replaced by the subjective. Where is Western prose positioned in this process of growth? The answer is found in observations made by Brodsky during interviews that, for example, his generation was raised upon Faulkner. The prose is prior to the poetry; it forms a basis upon which poets and poems are subsequently chosen. The social nature of a novelistic text hints in several ways at Brodsky’s subsequent trajectory

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away from society into poetic subjectivity. The works of prose listed in chapter 1 pose multiple questions about the nature of society. The problem, however, is that they offer few, if any, answers. Although the corpus of successful writers can rarely be reduced to a mere consequence of those writers’ reading habits, the prose read by Brodsky does explain with great clarity why his poetry set off in a given  direction. These novels do not in any way define the poet’s tvorc eskij put’ (creative path), but they do define which way he was looking when he got to the crossroads. Once again I repeat that these works are simply those remembered by his friends during my conversations with them; I do not assume for one second to encompass the young poet’s entire library. Since the prose works cherished by Brodsky suggest a clear and simple classification, perhaps we might therefore propose that he saw, for example, American novels as expressing American ideas? This hypothesis structures this chapter in such a way that American prose does indeed play a geographically and philosophically specific role. That role is relative to the other countries represented here: England, France, Germany, and Ireland. Even this list, however, is not complete until subjected to a chronological reordering. The age of these books is of significance for two reasons. First, the older texts – in particular of Dickens – had been available in the Soviet Union for a great deal longer and were therefore encountered earlier. Secondly, the interviews leave a strong impression, not only of Western reading, but also of fashionable reading. Brodsky’s enthusiasm for, say, Salinger came as much from the American’s recent publication and availability as from his striking depiction of New York. Some books, in other words, are championed only as and when they appear. If we continue this argument, then the young disillusioned hero of Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, is read as a response to the older books in Brodsky’s list; Salinger is a potential answer to Dickens, the only nineteenth-century writer here. America is an answer, perhaps, to Europe. This logic of both time and geography, then, suggests we look at Dickens (the staple of many a Soviet classroom) first of all, together with Joyce. The broad sweep of Dos Passos’s novels might perhaps offer an alternative to the equally crowded cityscapes of Dickens’s London. Dos Passos draws frequent and unabashed parallels between revolution in Petrograd and New York that could not possibly have been missed by Brodsky: neither society is displayed in positive terms. Both are racked by war, whether it be literal and military, or metaphorical and capital. Social canvases in English and American literature broader than those of Dickens or Dos Passos are hard to imagine. If society is

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presented as conflict, often as the battles of world wars, then it is with Hemingway that the vaguest hint of self is perceived amidst the anonymous hordes of New York or Belgian trenches. Hemingway, though, offers no clear or particularly useful answer to the existential problems that were mentioned in the interviews. If Hemingway fails – or is just outmoded, as some interviewees said – then Faulkner and Salinger are the next writers chosen. Faulkner’s tortuous and tortured rhetoric of the South, of the Lost Cause, is pertinent here, either from a sociological or a metaphysical viewpoint. The marginalized status of Brodsky as an intellectual (and often jobless) Jewish poet could not but have led him to see parallels with the ubiquitous “niggers” of Faulkner’s novels. On a more interesting and less crude level, the desperate self-justification of the defeated South and the consequent search for another ideal, away from the trampled material world, leads to word-weaving that seeks to express something of extraterrestrial, ineffable beauty. The parallel of Brodsky’s syntax with that of Faulkner mentioned earlier in the interviews is very fitting. The existential frustration that haunts both Faulkner and Hemingway finds, sadly, no happier resolution in Europe. Camus’s L’Étranger offers absolutely no hope for a rule-bound world order or ethically committed telos away from the bloody absurdity or amorality of (excessively social) conflict. In the prose of Remarque and Saint-Exupéry, however, an element of Hemingway’s worldview is seized upon and expressed with such conviction that at least the groundwork for poetry is laid. Self-discipline, rules, ethics, and skills are acquired through frequent repetition: these are elements that will help Brodsky find a poetic order and discipline to overcome or tame unruly, Khrushchevian wilfulness. The existential self-discipline of Remarque and SaintExupéry, though, does not really enjoy or cultivate a subjectivity that defeats the objective, material world. These novels are almost entirely passive before the world and ethically lacking, even in some small way. An overview of these books will show how Brodsky needs an ethically committed, courageous masculine voice with which to beat a material context, such that an ineffable ideal be acquired (or at least perceived) through a poetic text. The novels discussed here are founded themselves upon the same need. Dickens is the place to start, since he was translated, read, and studied first.

dickens: male noise and female silence The Life and Times of Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 1844 and the scene is set in the quiet English county of Wiltshire. If nobody whom

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I had interviewed in Russia could remember any other books read by Brodsky other than Chuzzlewit and Little Dorrit, I do not believe that the purpose or relevance of this chapter would have suffered much. These novels contain many salient themes of the twentieth-century prose read subsequently by the poet. The two books have an added significance in that they are ethically much clearer and confident than other texts Brodsky absorbed. Ethical commitment in Chuzzlewit emerges from a critique of two social phenomena: an English class system founded more on rhetoric than reality, and an American class system which is founded on dollars (or dreams of them). The English scenes concern a Mr Pecksniff, a Salisbury architect who designs nothing himself but takes credit for his apprentices’ work. This unpleasant pecking order is maintained with wordy, self-satisfied pomp. As with the Potemkin villages of Soviet rhet oric, described in a 1994 study of literary language by Mixail Èpstein (i.e., words that have no relationship to tangible reality but nevertheless take its place), so Pecksniff’s words create castles in the air that are never actually built, despite the attempted constructions of his “ornamental sentences” (59). Sounds, not semantics, flood the ears. Mr. Pecksniff was in the frequent habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a good sound, and rounding a sentence well, without much care for its meaning. And this he did so boldly, and in such an imposing manner, that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people with his eloquence, and make them gasp again. His enemies asserted, by the way, that a strong trustfulness in sounds and forms was the master-key to Mr. Pecksniff’s character (15).

On one occasion, when Pecksniff launches into a dinner-time diatribe about the “wonderful works” of the human digestive system, he is so overtaken by his own empty eloquence that all others around the table are struck dumb. No room is left to speak or challenge the definition of the world offered by the “architect,” who himself speaks lots but does little. At the end of his monologue, Dickens writes that “as nothing could be added to this, nothing was said; and Mr. Pecksniff, exulting, it may be presumed, in his moral utility, went to sleep again” (121). The novelist is no doubt allowing Pecksniff to celebrate in his speech the miraculous production of intestinal waste matter for a specific purpose. Much later in the work Pecksniff defines the polar opposites which structure his world, but just as his mouth appears to take the place of a nether orifice, his description of that world is topsyturvy, having no relation to actuality. “My friends! … My duty is to build, not speak; to act, not talk; to deal with marble, stone, and not language” (554).

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To escape the ugly, pseudo-familial stasis of Pecksniff’s real and professional “families,” Chuzzlewit sails to America. Martin hopes to escape the “monumental parody of the ideal of pastoral innocence” (Marcus: 105). He flees one way of talking and looks for another, thus shaping a novel in which “characters seem to create themselves simply by becoming involved in the complexities of language or by committing themselves to an appropriate rhetoric” (100). Unfortunately, America is a young nation, and is built (thus far) on big talk of big projects, none of which are finished. Martin realizes this in a town called Eden. “Dear me! It’s really a most important place!” called Martin, turning round [from a wall-map of the city]. “Oh! it’s very important” observed the agent. “But, I am afraid,” said Martin, glancing again at the [depiction of] the Public Buildings, “that there’s nothing left for me to do.” “Well! it ain’t all built,” replied the agent. “Not quite.” This was a great relief. “The market-place, now,” said Martin. “Is that built?” “That?” said the agent, sticking his toothpick into the weathercock on the top. “Let me see. No: that ain’t built” (355).

America, like England, is not short of hot air and plans, thus inflated. In both nations, material gain is the currency by which the “aristocracy of dollars” or pounds is built and maintained. The novel has “a perfectly plain subject: Self” (Lucas, 114), and that self is spoken into being. But a few consequential individuals talk so long and loud that Chuzzlewit cannot squeeze a word in edgeways and thus remains passive before Pecksniffian and “Edenic” rhetorical reality: he listens more than he speaks. Pecksniff’s eventual downfall is managed more by the conventions of plot, with a number of closing weddings, than any worldly or wordy wit on Martin’s part. His friend Tom Pinch does not marry, however, and lives quietly in the house of his recently wedded sister; here, at least, is a hint of happy rectitude. A mythic, immobile state is reinstated: Eden is found (again), not made by hands and it is in a hushed place. “Thy life is tranquil, calm and happy, Tom. In the soft strain which ever and again comes stealing back upon the ear, the memory of thine old love may find a voice perhaps; but it is a pleasant, softened, whispering memory, like that in which we sometimes hold the dead, and does not pain or grieve thee, God be thanked!” (836). Little Dorrit, published in 1857, is a key text in defining the hush of Brodsky’s early world. Peace and quiet are embodied by the eponymous

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heroine, who was born, christened, and lived within the confines of the Marshalsea prison for debtors. The entire novel revolves around the prison and, like Pecksniff’s dark rhetoric, its ubiquitousness suggests that society simply is that dark. Nevertheless, within objective, given reality, the need for subjectively driven, private choice is greater than ever. The businessman Arthur Clennam, returned from many years in France, encounters Dorrit in London where she works as his mother’s seamstress. He embarks on a novel-long search to discover who Little Dorrit (christened Amy) truly is, to define and then surrender to the boundless good that she represents. Amy’s work supports her father, brother, and sister in prison. Surrounded by so many characters, she says little; in fact both Chuzzlewit and Dorrit are crowded out of their respective stories by noisier individuals. Dorrit is silent, rarely seen, and secretly alone: “I have no lover, of course” (553). Even at the novel’s close, when she marries Albert, their departure is made silently amidst London’s daily hubbub. “They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar” (826). What makes Amy unusual is her silence and absence, since so many depend upon her. “Throughout the novel … characters … try to enclose Amy in … formulas they only half-believe, making her over into creature of fairy-tale, a painting of a Raphael Madonna, an emblem and a holy relic. The proliferation of such conventions suggests that Amy both provokes and eludes an easy formulation, and that Amy as an ideal is very much the creation of human minds” (Larson, 261–2). Only very late in the novel does she offer anything resembling a self-definition, but it is not especially useful, since she does so by analogy with Christ; like her, the Logos in its eternal defiance of material existence does not lend itself to easy formulation. Dorrit, in an extremely rare moment of moral explicitness, declares “we cannot but be right if we … do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain!” (792). Dorrit makes this proclamation from a debtors’ prison, which represents the consequence of failure in the material(istic) world. Money, used to maintain a given façade, is juxtaposed to the unheard, invisible, and inexpressible Amy. The inability of others to define her, to talk about her, makes her somewhat immaterial. If, however, we accept the supposition of the critic J.C. Reid that Little Dorrit is a “contrast

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between appearance (the social veneer) and reality (the moral and human truth)” (33), then all is turned upside down. Money and big talk of elaborate plans are together financing appearance; Amy’s silence is real. Language, such as Pecksniff’s rhetoric, is the epitome of falsehood, even if its proponents do control material reality. The parallel with Pecksniff is valid, since in Little Dorrit the government agency that keeps Amy and her family in prison is called the Circumlocution Office. If Amy says very little, means a lot, and offers a metaphysical realm of great freedom, then the office says an enormous amount, which does not mean much and offers a limited physical realm of potential. The following definition of the office is worth offering in its entirety, since it is perhaps the best definition in Brodsky’s reading of state-sponsored loquacity, of the centralized wordiness that allows nothing and prohibits much. The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong, without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. … … This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving – how not to do it (104).

This novel, like Soviet reality on Litejnyj Prospekt in the late 1950s, is made of two ways of speaking: verbose officialese and equally wordy attempts made at evading material existence in the hope of uttering a supra-linguistic truth. By way of a summary, the two brief quotes below are the last I will offer concerning Dickens: they serve to show how such officialese (as if scared of reality’s truth) aims to evade questions and give no answers, to move the goalposts, as it were, whenever it comes under attack. The second quote shows how any fixed definition from Dorrit’s corner is equally surprising, albeit for a different reason. The name of usually ineffable, silent Dorrit is here spoken out loud and termed by a surprised audience an “answer.” Dorrit is what she is. There is no more to say.

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37 Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Others It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on any account whatever, to give a straightforward answer, Mr. Barnacle [an official] said, “Possibly” (111). His [Arthur’s] door was softly opened, and these spoken words startled him, and came as if they were an answer: “Little Dorrit” (165).

The answer is not heard by all, and it comes only if the right question is asked. Dorrit’s brother, “the foredoomed Tip,” knows no such answer and thus takes “the prison walls with him” wherever he goes, because the prison is a state of mind more than a place. In Joyce’s Dubliners an entire city takes the place of the Marshalsea prison. Joyce’s fifteen stories have in fact many parallels with Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorrit, transported to the more immediate context of twentiethcentury Ireland.

eveline and gretta in DUBLINERS: “there is no word tender enough to be your name” I noted that the idyllic, matrimonial relations of Dickens’s novels mute any sense of existential need for, say, Albert to speak up and ask Amy the right question before he can possibly hope to get the right answer. True, both Martin and Albert face generational conflicts – with a grandfather and mother respectively – but the workings of melodrama resolve matters, rather than any existentially troubled decisions by the two young men. Joyce’s stories turn the situation upside down; they rob all involved of any narrative determinism and leave them shaking in the processes of personal responsibility. The tales can be divided according to their focus upon childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life (see Brunsdale); throughout all four stages the pain of progression or (paternal) responsibility persists. Patriarchal striving is consequentially imbued with an awful, double significance. Woman (whoever or whatever she is) becomes an ideal, yet one obtained through sex, an act that kills the innocence of both involved. Hence the mood evident even at the book’s opening: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.” If we ignore the typographical breaks between stories and ride roughshod over the text as a continuous narrative, the enduring nature of that paralysis is most evident. It is the fear of the sensible world in the face of the unsubstantial and as with Dickens, Joyce shows a loudmouthed bravado that masks the world’s fear before the vagaries of

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spirituality or silence. A bullying boy who plays cowboys too roughly “looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cozy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling: ‘Ya! Yaka, yaka, yaka!’ Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true” (12). Not the most coherent sermon heard that year in Dublin. Boys dream of “unkempt fierce and beautiful girls” in American detective tales, “but real adventures do not happen to people who remain at home” (12, 14). Leaving home involves the pain of interaction, of speaking that which might not be utterable; gain comes only with risk of loss. Woman, once again, is the silent goal. Take, for example these sections from Araby and Eveline. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I would tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like figures running upon the wires (23). “Eveline! Evvy!” He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition (33).

These two states of paralysis, one vocal and the other physical, do not allow for easy acquiescence into a gentler state of male / female cognizance. As James Duffy, the cashier in the story A Painful Case, has it: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse” (100). It is in the final story, The Dead, that the sad disparity between speech and woman, between sex and death, is made clear. Giving a dinnertable speech, Gabriel Conroy toasts his aunts as the “three Graces,” drinking to their mutual health and happiness. The toast is preceded by a rather hyperbolic invocation of native virtues, in particular “Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us” (185). He also asks that the guests “cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead,” such that the “new” generation not forget its “living duties.” The familial, traditional context suits the bold, rather heavy-handed toast of the dinner table, but Gabriel is less than successful in his relationship with his wife. At the gathering he watches her: “There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something” (191). In a later moment of anger, which he hopes to turn to sexual advantage, he ponders: “If only she would turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he

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must see some ardour in her eyes first. He hoped to be master of her strange mood.” Even in a much earlier period of their romance he had believed that “there is no word tender enough to be your name” (95). The silence of his wife Gretta is assailed by crude sexual intent, by the material world. Despite the vaguest “hope of regeneration” (Brunsdale, 47), Dubliners at its conclusion is a sad tale of failed attempts to speak or live a feminine silence. The rupture between speech, silence, male and female has led one critic to assess the tales as embodying “angst, anxiety, angina, anguish, strangulation, suffocation, narrowing, constricting [and] binding” (Benstock, 171). If, though, Eveline had got on the ship and gone to the New World, would her silence survive any better?

dos passos: america as a country spoken and a muse spoiled The novels of Dos Passos which Brodsky read provide the best answer: Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–6) – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. If Joyce’s Eveline is shown paralysed at a Dublin dockside, then Manhattan Transfer shows a broad picture of Europeans struggling to make a living or trying to be heard amongst the chaos of a major, younger port. From deep within the crowds comes a male voice heard both on the banks of the Liffey and in the Marshalsea prison: “Women know everything but they won’t let on” (182). The theme of a quiet, transcendent feminine is strong in a book where three noisy destinations are discussed: where I was, where I am, and where I am going. In the early pages, voices of hopeful movement predominate. Most often they come from those who took the step Eveline could not. “I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean. Europe’s rotting and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth don’t matter, education don’t matter. It’s all getting ahead” (21). Various European voices of discontent are gradually heard, though, such as a cockney steward who is laid off after thirty years at sea, or an elderly teary-eyed Italian woman who wanders aimlessly and whispers: Dove andiamo, Madonna mia, Madonna mia? (77). Guidance is non-existent, either in or above the material world. “Motion is the key to Manhattan Transfer … but this movement never implies the possibility of hope. It is not dialectical, it heads towards no regenerating goal, it has no pattern except that of the rush and impact of separate self-interested forces at play in a giant twentiethcentury metropolis. Made for man’s convenience, the city reinforces the helplessness of the human will” (Colley, 49). The city is so greedy

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in its acquisition of others’ wills that femininity, in the form of the heroine Ellen Thatcher, is spoiled and transformed into an overly social “urban Rusalka,” a “prototypical bitch” (50, 58). Equally sullied is the more earthly goal of getting ahead. The problem, however, is that New York, when seen as an end in itself by Europeans, does not suggest any avenues of further progression to its new residents. “This ain’t Russia; it’s little old New York,” screams a Jewish girl, but she has no idea what to do next. “The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage” (220). This sense of helplessness in the face of a merciless social environment leads to parallels between capitalism and “Russian wampires” ([sic] 255), and, as if re-enacting Joyce’s tale of Eveline in reverse, some “Reds” are sent back to the land of material (not materialistic) vampires, while others watch helplessly: “They are sending the Reds back to Russia … Deportees … Agitators … Undesirables …” The unwanted aliens sing The Internationale from the deck of their departing ship, whilst back on shore “gulls wheeled above the dark dingy-dressed crowd that stood silently looking down at the bay” (289). Talk is heard of “beating it to Paris or Havana,” but nobody, save the aimless hobo of the novel’s final page, actually seems to be going anywhere, and even he is not sure: “How fur ye goin?” “I dunno … Pretty far” (404). The point that Dos Passos makes at times in Manhattan Transfer and very often in U.S.A. is that motion – not so much through space as through society – is accomplished through speech: “There’s nowhere in particular he wants to go. If only I still had faith in words” (366). U.S.A. is a monumental, audible montage of spoken, written, heard, and read words in America before and after its tragic entrance into a world war. The experiences of its multiple heroes, each in their own short but recurring stories, are interspersed with newspaper headlines, political rhetoric, and popular songs of the period. More so than in the other books mentioned thus far, private voices are drowned out by the lowest linguistic common denominator. “One way of approaching U.S.A. is to recognize that the trilogy is in large part about the relation of language in America to the American experience … [It is] a massive representation of the corruption of American values as revealed by a corruption of the language” (Pizer, 36–7), by what elsewhere has been called “an elaborate code of mystification … a failure to connect words and deeds” (Colley, 75, 98). The relevance of words from abroad to deeds at home is initially lessened by mixing them altogether. Take, for example, the tentative presence of the Russian revolution in the middle of the American

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psyche as shown by a sound-collage: “czar yields to people holds dead baby forty hours families evicted by bursting watermain czar grants constitution From the fields there comes the breadth of newmown hay Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming” (57). The great homogenizing jumble of media-driven language is creating an entropic perception of (even internationally significant) events which is supplanting the events themselves. In the place of all the displaced European Evelines, a new type of word is spoken. Language is flattened out by the processes of mass consumption and rises anew as the rhetoric of political demagoguery. That rhetoric takes the place of some “Russian fellow workin’ down to the sawmill, an educated feller from Siberia … who was somebody” (61–2). There emerges instead a vile, “prizewinning boy orator,” a minister’s son. The orator lauds the holy labour of local farmers, suffering with their “crown of thorns” on a “cross of gold.” Although he creates a divine mission for the farmers and becomes a “father” to their children, his rhetoric rings hollow twice over. As time goes on, he succumbs to an entirely material ailment (and therefore fails in the fleshy realm which his divine rhetoric hopes to escape); he succumbs to an ailment brought about by a big appetite. Although he prompts others to give of themselves and to produce, he is naught but a consumer in the sense that his body takes, it does not give. The inspired farmers “carried him round the hall on their shoulders, hugged him, loved him, named their children after him, nominated him for president, boy orator of the Platte, silver tongue of the plain people … He was a big eater. It was hot. A stroke killed him” (171–3). The first novel of Dos Passos’s trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, ends with this rhetoric, creating not just a domestic, agricultural, and “parallel” reality. The discourse of domestic politics also becomes that of international conflict, of World War One. In this atmosphere of wholly masculine conflict, the greedy, avaricious lexis of jingoism is muddled with sexual desire. A feminine Muse is replaced by a prototypical bitch or earthly woman, who herself becomes an object of acquisition at emotionally extreme moments of wartime pathos. The Marseillaise makes men grip women’s arms tightly. The Birth of a Nation leads to a tighter, painful grip upon a female knee in the dark of a cinema. Battlefield pathos, however, creates no genuine sense of union: “The band played The Star-Spangled Banner and everybody tried to sing but it didn’t make much of an effect because nobody knew the words” (409). The problem of inflammatory wordiness acquires awful dimensions in 1919. Dos Passos makes frequent reference to the revolution in Russia; parallels with World War One are invited, especially in the light of remarks such as “all those revolutions are just the wars turned inside

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out” (390). A potted biography of John Reed depicts a “westerner [for whom] words meant what they said” – until he encountered revoltionary bluster (17) – or Paxton Hibben, who experiences the “the throaty roar of the Russian Marseillaise” (180). Whether the date is 1905, 1917, or any time during the war, masculine primacy in the material world continues to look (linguistically) for a purely fleshy feminine counterpart: noisy pathos is war is revolution is sex is death. “Oh that battle of Paree, / It’s making a bum out of me / Toujours la femme et combien / 300,000 russian nobles slain by bolsheviki” (215). Deep in the novel’s weaving of biographical, media, and musical material, a complaint is heard: “Oh, I think women are terrible … except prostitutes … there you know what you’re getting” (372). The desperate desire to know unequivocally what you’re getting and then get it has apocalyptic consequences. The following quote illustrates the awful collocation of military and sexual acquisition, egged on by a maximally simple rhetoric. When applied to moments of private success or failure, it is woefully inadequate. That night he took to the movies to see The Four Horsemen. It was darned exciting, they held hands all through and he kept his leg pressed against her plump little leg. Seeing it with her and the war and everything flickering on the screen and the music like in church and her hair against his cheek and being pressed close to her a little sweaty in the warm dark like to went to his head. When the picture was over he’d felt he go crazy if he couldn’t have her right away. She was kinder kidding him along and he got sore and said God damn it, they’d have to get married right away or else he was through (66–7).

When, however, the failed passion of a honeymoon night has to be confronted “… everybody started kidding him and declared he looked all wore out. Joe didn’t know what to say so he talked big and kidded back and lied like a fish” (70). If we allow ourselves the easily perceived parallel between bellicose oration and the “throaty roar” of the barricades, both of which lie like fish, then we see the equally simple parallel between the American heroes and the Leningrad reader of the books in which such mendacious discourse is represented. All of them ask: what can be said if I have heard so much and it all bears such little resemblance to reality? For Brodsky, so profoundly aware of how semantics are accrued over centuries, depending on a word’s cultured or crude usage, the following lines from The Big Money must have rung true when such questions were under investigation. “America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken

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the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul” (467). Dos Passos himself made a similar comment in an interview: certain abstract – but linguistically designated – notions need desperately to be recontextualized if they are to be saved from their crude manipulation in politics. “Liberty, fraternity and humanity. The words are old and dusty and hung with the dirty bunting of a thousand crooked orations, but underneath they are still sound. What was once meant by these words needs defenders today” (Pizer, 37). The “soundness” of these words is valid, but they have been misused as the foundation of faulty bombast. Their sound or solid validity in material existence needs to be re-established, such that their elevated, more abstract significances are not divorced from reality. A simple, sound and true defender of simple and true words is needed “today.” Enter Hemingway.

hemingway and the muse: “eros and thanatos” Five books that span Hemingway’s career were mentioned in my interviews as having been read by Brodsky. The American’s career on Soviet bookshelves is a long one. First published in 1934, he enjoyed great success, but For the Whom the Bell Tolls was so poorly received that he was soon ignored officially for fifteen years, until The Old Man and the Sea in 1955. It is rumoured that when the former novel was being considered for the Soviet presses, Stalin read a draft and said simply: “Interesting. Don’t publish it” (Orlova, 30). Such laconic statements act as a barometer of how certain alien notions were (or were not) accepted. Primary among these is the “English concept of ‘privacy’ – the separateness of a room and one’s soul, [which] cannot be accurately rendered in Russian” (Orlova, 14). The lone passage of a Hemingway hero through the palpable world was captured in Soviet periodicals with the kind of explicit, public histrionics one would rarely find in Hemingway himself: defeat, pessimism, pain, despair, tragedy, and fear (Parker, 177). The Western notion of Hemingway as an existentially troubled maximalist at odds with social processes (as a man moving away, centrifugally) is reversed by Moscow, as Soviet critiques depicted Hemingway as a loner endeavouring to move centripetally into society as a “humble, devoted, suffering writer” (191). The significance of Hemingway, who acted as a “bridge across the abyss between us [the Soviet readership] and the new philosophy, the new literature” (Orlova, 61), is in what he offered on the other side of that bridge, because to a bellowing world of masculine, sublimated

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sexual aggression, to be honest, he offers little. To challenge the patriarchal dictates of wartime pathos and the acts it embodies, one needs to be a new father. Hemingway’s novels show, however, that for his heroes, once the conquest of a woman is complete and the issue of paternity arises, so does the related problem of transience. Sex leads to a child which leads to the introduction of the next generation; the triumph of acquisition leads to a surrender. Sex is death and the woman is to blame; the Muse is a prototypical bitch and Hemingway constantly “interweaves Eros and Thanatos” (Hovey, 167). The problem with this attitude towards the feminine is that a synonymy between “love and the nada of death” not only negates the challenge of fatherhood, but views a feminine aspect as entirely mortal. Twice over, then, these heroes affront the material world only to lose twice over: to their fathers and to their lovers. Hemingway becomes a man “resisting the paternal: an anti-Papa” (Comley, 145). He leaves the field of conflict with his head lowered: here “the hero is less the man who does things than the man to whom things are done – the man who is passive and thus, unconsciously, feminine” (Hovey, 213). Before I offer some evidence from the five novels, it is worth mentioning the autobiographical significance of these books. Hemingway’s own fears of fatherhood, if they inform the novels to a significant degree, would justify the following suggestion by R.B. Hovey: “Hemingway [had] an extraordinary need for punishment, the sort of need that usually comes from overwhelming feelings of guilt. And the extreme end-product of self-punishment is self-destruction” (204). The hero of A Farewell to Arms (1929) is certainly a candidate for guilty feelings, ending up in a wartime hospital not for a heroic act, but because “I was blown up while eating cheese” (63). Frederic Henry falls in love with a nurse, Catherine Barkley, and their love is told in a novel which was published in a year heralding the “high-water mark of post-war revulsion” (Lynn, 385). Not surprisingly, then, their love has a marked air of escapism, punctuated with phrases to one another such as “You’re my religion.” Catherine acquires a sufficiently ethereal air that one contemporary reviewer referred to her as “one of those impossibly beautiful characters of modern tragedy – the Tesses, the Alyoshas, the Myshkins” (Matthews, 126). In a world, however, where people either “fight or die,” stasis (as in war) guarantees death, and this is, unfortunately, a romance that aims at idyllic permanence. What spoils that permanence and ushers in modern tragedy is sex. When Catherine gets pregnant and writhes in the agony of labour, Frederic ponders: “… this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other” (320).

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The ability of language to overcome this high price is non-existent, since (as in Dos Passos) language has been spoiled irrevocably by war. Words as a means of invoking or inviting the Muse have become a means of invading a neighbouring territory; speech is not directed upwards (metaphysically) but horizontally, never leaving an earthbound, physical axis. Propaganda, however, has managed somehow to suck even the physical significance from a modern lexis. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates (184–5).

This infection of language is widespread, in fact so much so that although I have spoken of Brodsky’s aesthetic as akin to a sportsman’s virtuosity within certain rules, of novelty within tradition, here in A Farewell to Arms the hero has no say whatsoever in the game. Existential challenge becomes fate, pure and simple. “You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you” (327). “They” could be replaced by nouns such as “officers” or “women.” Another contemporary reviewer of Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not saw the same emphasis upon rule-bound activity, imposed from outside, and referred to it as a code. “Courage, honesty and skill are important rules of the code, but it is these human attributes as determined by a specific historical context. To be admirable, from the standpoint of this morality, is to accept defeat, to be a good sportsman, to accept pain without an outcry, to adhere strictly to the rules of the game and play the game with great skill” (Schwartz, 246). The novel is actually very unpleasant, since the loss of faith in language, especially within a cruel system, produces silent but agile animals that dodge the inevitable with whatever cunning and ferocity is required. Morality per se is non-existent, being replaced by a certain law of the jungle. The smuggler Harry Morgan dulls his conscience

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in the violent world of Florida’s illegal immigration trade with alcohol. What remains is “like a Tartar or something … kind of like Genghis Khan in the face” (136). Torn from social processes (“F—k his revolution”), Morgan becomes entirely bestial, “like some kind of animal.” The pervading dumbness of this book and the objectification of its hero both lead to the objectification of Morgan’s own body. “The hell with my [severed] arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm” (97). The novel’s stunted language is a linguistic parallel to its hero, who has been through the wars, as it were. It is only in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) that one finds the link between the lonely animal Harry Morgan (or the lonely, horizonhugging ship of the novel’s close) and the more social significances of morality. The link or bridge between Morgan and Robert Jordan is explicit in the Donne quote which is the book’s epigraph. Brodsky first encountered the English poet here: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe, every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine.” Robert Jordan is an explosives expert hired during the Spanish Civil War to blow up a bridge of debatable strategic significance. A successful operation will require the strictest of codes, one that Jordan’s speech (or linguistically rendered thoughts) does not willingly conform to. When he lays the explosives he says to himself: “Come on. Don’t get excited. Do it” (437). Another code that comes under fire is politics (social doctrine). Jordan’s particular significance is defined relative to his deviance from codified doctrine. He says to himself: “You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. You believe in Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much dialectics” (305).

hemingway and silence: not the feminine, but the reticence of action Language still lies and freedom from it is bought with silence or a silent deed. Jordan’s relationship to women, to the hush of what is non-male, remains equivocal: “Where there had been roughness of fabric all was smooth with a smoothness and firm rounded pressing and a long warm coolness” (70). The “thickening throat” used prudishly by Hemingway to express male arousal is an interesting transfer of sex to the domain of inarticulate speech: sex means shutting up. It does, though, lose its prior synonymy with political language. Here sex – which often requires a woman – is a challenge to state pathos. “When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognized your own personal fallibility of that so mutable substitute

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for the apostle’s creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Mayakovsky” (164). The great defence against disconcerting excess, sexual or otherwise, is stalwart control, Hemingway’s refusal to let down his guard, literal or otherwise. Valour does a lot but says almost nothing. As a 1951 review of Across the River and into the Trees (1950) in the Kenyon Review noted, a soldier’s defence or restraint will increase relative to the enemy’s strength (Rosenfeld, 387). (In a novel which gives its heroine a lot to say, the colonel only whispers his admissions of love, and even then they are “as barely audible as a silent dog whistle heard close to the ear” [98].) Although wanting to surrender to his awe- and dumbstruck admiration of femininity, the colonel cannot throw off associated thoughts of death. Death, thinks the colonel, “comes in bed to most people, I know, like love’s opposite number” (184). The frightening dimensions of the feminine in Hemingway come not from an incomprehensible disparity between fleshy man and ethereal woman. Quite the opposite is true: femininity is very much materialized, but is simply expanded to inhuman dimensions. In The Old Man and the Sea, for example, a single-sex conflict of man and fish is enacted against a boundless blue backdrop that could easily swallow them both. “He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman … The old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors” (29–30). Nevertheless, she is named in a foreign tongue, a foreign, dumb object in the central, masculine matter of loud conflict. The old man’s woes upon la mar are caused because he “went out too far.” He did not actively seek the non-masculine charms of the feminine; they caught him off base, too far from home. Distance from home is an idea touched upon in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway contemplates the alien aesthetic of Russian literature. “In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know …” (133). As you read them, Dostoevsky’s sentences are empirical examinations of the unknown; one knows more of saintliness at the end of the sentence than at the beginning. If Brodsky and his friends moved beyond Hemingway to Faulkner and Salinger, maybe it was to find a more adventurous, Dostoevskian way of examining the world. In the two Faulkner texts to which we can refer with certainty – The Sound and the Fury and The Bear – the notion of chasing a saintly or insane femininity with long, investigative syntax is extremely evident.

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faulkner: the battle for an absent muse through deliberate capitulation Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury combines the monologues of three brothers; the young simpleton Benjy, the Harvard student Quentin, and the intolerant Jason, stuck forever in a buildingsupply store, where he is left to bitch about all that is awry in the American South. Through all three runs an awkwardly sexual fixation with their sister Caddy, who is not afforded a monologue and therefore remains a sought, absent ideal. Three mouths try to speak Caddy: one retarded, one educated, and one bigoted. Benjy speaks first, though extreme proximity to his sister robs him of all communicative faculties. “It’s still raining, Caddy said. I hate rain. I hate everything. And then her head came into my lap and she was crying, holding me and I began to cry. Then I looked at the fire again and the bright, smooth shapes went again. I could hear the clock and the roof and Caddy” (57). Quentin is next. His incestuous designs are conjured by a desire, more extreme than Benjy’s, to protect his sister from the world. Given his father’s opinion of women, we can see that Quentin is clearly trying to stop the girl Caddy from becoming an adult. “Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced … Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up” (128). Once again, amorphous liquid is a challenge to the rigid forms of masculinity. Jason spends too much time complaining about niggers to concern himself with metaphysics; you have to “put the fear of God” into Blacks (207). History casts Jason’s remark in a rather ironic light, because as some students of Southern slavery have demonstrated, the very religion introduced by the owners to keep their slaves subjected offered those same slaves – through the same rhetoric of the pulpit – an escape into increased subjectivity. “However much Christianity taught submission to slavery, it also carried a message of foreboding to the masterclass and of resistance to the enslaved. Christianity … preached the dignity and worth of the individual and therefore threatened to stimulate defiance to authority, even as it preached submission” (Genovese, 165). The Negro service which closes The Sound and the Fury shows exactly this flight above all three brothers, above their failed, rambling hunts for Caddy. The more Benjy, Quentin, and Jason cannot say who or what Caddy is, the more they say. The loss of Caddy inspires more talk

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of her, which has led to parallels between the lost glory of Faulkner’s South in the Civil War. The “Lost Cause” was “retrospective in tone, mourning the dead, extolling Confederate valour, and tending to sentimentalize the days ‘befo’ de wah’” (Cunliffe, 350–1). The attempts to chase an elusive glory became an “articulation of confusion” (O’Connor, 298). The historian W.C. Davis outlines the relation of loss to a loose tongue with wonderful simplicity: “Winners have little to explain to themselves. They won. For the loser, however, coping with defeat, dealing with it personally and explaining it to others, places enormous strain on the ego, self-respect and a sense of selfworth of the defeated” (175). Surely one could say the same of an ailing, defensive Soviet political rhetoric? If so, then just as the Negro preacher steals from that Christian rhetoric of the White South to show how he “seed de power en de glory,” so Brodsky – as I will demonstrate anon – steals from Soviet literary pathos in order to step beyond it, to “hold out, be strong and win” – Resistir y fortificar es vencer (Hemingway 1968, 308). It is the notion of winning which this book examines. Brodsky uses the bravado of Soviet literary language to build up the volume and speed required to surrender to a feminine Muse; he wins by losing, he climbs by falling. Faulkner’s tale The Bear is a step down this paradoxical road. Hunters chase a bear for so long that the end of the prey is the end of the predator: both die, as the bear is the hunter’s raison d’être. The human hunter strives to match a brute, unthinking masculinity in order to learn from it, use it, and raise himself above it, to gain “courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and liberty” (284). As Faulkner suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, where except in the South could losing be seen as a glorious, mythmaking opportunity? Faulkner draws a parallel between the self-sacrificing hunter and his dog, which is aware that an act of bravery might be delayed for as long as possible, but if any canine wants to “keep on calling himself a dog,” a leap of faith is required. The leap is bound to fail; the dog knew “beforehand what was going to happen when he done it” (190–1) and the hound is indeed smashed by the bear. In this story, though, a true surrender or lapse before femininity is absent. The supraphysical significance of the bear does not tear itself away from ursine masculinity; it is simply muddied: “The old male bear itself, so long unwifed and childless as to have become its own ungendered progenitor.” In the rites of paternal passage that this hunt represents, the bear is a young man’s alma mater; it teaches values slightly above masculinity and the material world with its masculine material existence.

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This incredible difficulty – the unwillingness to let a feminine value enjoy a separate existence – is central to almost all the books in Brodsky’s list. Things look no rosier when one casts a glance at the remaining texts. Even though Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a recent book (1951) and Camus, Remarque, and Saint-Exupéry are from the continent that spawned the critique of the New World in our listed texts, existential success in either a substantial or unsubstantial realm is rare. The ease with which parallels may be drawn between Catcher in the Rye and L’Étranger (1946) underlines the dilemma’s universality.

“girls. you never know want they’re going to think”: camus and salinger Camus’s Meursault and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield are both adrift from any notion of social, codified existence. Meursualt’s lawyer tries his murder case (with the worst possible consequences for the hero) by being “a sort of umpire” (108); his lawyer also “agreed that the Code was all that could be desired” (77). Holden, when told by a paternal figure that all of life is a game, thinks: “Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right – I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game” (8). The absence of a parental structure in both books also robs the protagonists of a leading role which is theirs to usurp, as if on a bearhunt where there is no bear. Meursault cannot remember when his mother died (a few days ago) and maintains that all “normal” people desire the death of their parents from “time to time.” Holden associates any parental, narrative significance with “that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Both young men, in their search for another, worthy code, stumble into dealings with prostitutes, as if a maternal or amorous relationship with the opposite sex would be a valid substitute for a more ethereal feminine principle. Both recall the associations of hunting and looming paternal challenges that Faulkner notes in The Bear. Faulkner writes of the liminal time when “a youth recognizes the existence of youth and passion and experience which is heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence or perhaps merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men” (195). Faulkner offers another feminine parallel; the obsession with sister Caddy in The Sound and the Fury becomes Holden’s obsession with his sister Phoebe, whom he wants desperately to protect. Robert Jordan

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in For Whom the Bell Tolls calls adult life and its deterministic tendency a “wheel,” warning himself “stay off that wheel … Don’t step on that wheel” (225). Seeing Phoebe on a potentially dull or numbing carousel, Holden thinks, “I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddamn horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring [above the horse] you have to let them do it, and not say anything” (211). Touching though it is, Holden’s paternalism is not only entirely physical but also misdirected towards a sister. The struggle in challenging a father – so that a new one might emerge – is absent in Meursault and Holden. The former cannot be bothered with theatrical social relations, in which “there is an equivalence between sentiment and act” (Champigny, 75); the latter is told (by a father figure!) that dying for a cause is immature (188). Both characters associate the confidence or swagger of heroic loss and sacrifice with second-rate American movies – with cowboys and gangsters. They do not particularly want to lose, but even if they did, they would not know why: as Holden says, “Girls. You never know want they’re going to think” (136). He even brands the loving hero of A Farewell to Arms a “phony” (141).

remarque and saint-exupéry: establishing a rigorous, stoical ethic The last two authors on our list, Remarque and Saint-Exupéry, represent a desperate attempt to find some validity for codes, so that rules, objectively significant ethics worthy of falling for, can be found. Remarque examines ethics in the crowded trenches of World War One, Saint-Exupéry in the empty skies of a nascent South American mail service. The awful truth in the work of both men is that the structure or codes of ethical existence are in place, but the nineteenthcentury myths of the Southern hunt or Dorrit’s Christian charity are gone. Rules are adopted as a defence against storming troops or stormy skies; man is assailed by solid protagonists and is wholly absorbed by the business of self-defence, of holding back death. Remarque’s tale of German trench warfare does succumb to the occasional moment of bad Faulkerian self-defence or self-justification in the face of death: “We are not beaten [by the Allies], for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by overwhelmingly superior forces” (310). The problem at the core of such talk is: what on Earth are we fighting for in the first place? The concept of “Fatherland” involves an abhorrent and inhuman

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“renunciation of personality” (30). If the soldiers do not have a reason to go forward, they will at least get tough, in order to defend themselves against what would drive them back. Masculinity in the guise of discipline is defence against defeat. After staggeringly rigorous training, the troops “become hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough – and that was good; for these attitudes were just what we lacked … Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us. We did not break down, but adapted ourselves” (35). To adapt, however, is not the same as to win. Distressed by his father’s “stupid” impressions of subsequent battle, the hero continues to long for his mother’s body, for her lap – “Why did I always have to be strong and self-controlled?” (183, 203). This question is central to Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit and Terre des Hommes. The first of these novels examines rules or codes, the second the reasons why they exist. The mail pilots of Vol de Nuit fly according to strictly observed timetables which are not an end in themselves. “Never could his planes’ arrival bring him that victory which terminates a war and opens an era of joyous peace. Each forward step he took would be followed by a thousand others like it, remaining to be taken” (114). Through this rhythm men are shaped “like a lump of wax” (122). Above the individual victory or loss of a given flight, men are molded by repeated, codified acts – “for what mattered was the onward movement, the momentum” (174). Within the moulded, pummelled crucible of these pilots, something spiritual is glimpsed, something hinted at, especially in Terre des Hommes. The airmen of the novel are operating in recognizable geographical loci, but Saint-Exupéry also isolates them against boundless physical backdrops (as Hemingway does Santiago). The sea, for example, robs airborne hydroplane pilots of assured “possession of anything in the world” (24); a man lost in snow is “voided bit by bit of blood” (43). Matter in such places is so universal that it loses its specific hardness and becomes a carte blanche, begging an act or two upon its foreground. After a plane crash in the Sahara, for example, “the silence that reigned over it [the desert] was not the silence of emptiness but of plotting, of imminent enterprise” (116). It is in Saint-Exupéry’s enterprise that we have a tiny foretaste of the force with which Brodsky will invest Soviet verse and which will then supersede it with a private Muse. In the meanwhile, Exupéry writes of actual women: “A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter into it? What can one know of a girl who passes, walking with slow steps homeward, eyes lowered, smiling to herself, filled with adorable inventions and with fables? … More surely than if she were on another planet I feel her to be locked up in her language, in her secret, in her habits, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of

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the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine, of the sea, she walks here already half divine” (87). Late in the novel, the theme of a guiding, semi-divine, ineffable presence reappears as the silent, invisible beacon that guides emigrating wild ducks and geese. When caught by chance in a cage, in manmade confinement at the time of year when birds head south, “the duck totters to the right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is a mystery” (264–5). The physical yearns for the immaterial, the male pilot – isolated by the elements – yearns for the semi-divine. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden wonders where the ducks in a Central Park pond go. Isolated by the elemental social forces of New York, and stuck in a “world devoid of good fathers (authorities), … what Holden really wants to know is whether there is a benevolent authority that takes care of ducks. If there is one for ducks, then it follows that there may be one for people as well. Holden’s quest for a wise and benevolent authority, then, is essentially a search for a God-principle” (Baumbach, 57, 60).

conclusion Holden Caulfield, together with the other heroes and narrators of these Western novels, has doubted his masculine potential in a hostile, durable world whilst doubting equally a stronger, other principle – something to which such limited capacity could be sacrificed for a higher goal. Only in Dickens and Saint-Exupéry do we get anything resembling a positive, self-assured, and ethically committed response. Dickens’s ethics, tied closely in Little Dorrit to Christian doctrine, turn that novel into a “confident sermonic attack on Vanity Fair, [which revolves] around questions of the artist’s authority” (Larson, 212). It is in the more modern and perhaps more relevant prose of SaintExupéry that both vanity (of independent achievement) and the artist’s authority (to forge ahead like his airborne characters) are drawn silently onwards into eventual humility before a “sudden love” for one “who walks already half-divine.” Holden Caulfield has no father and inquires instead during his own aspiration towards paternity about another, quieter, stronger principle that draws the birds away from Central Park. In the strangest possible way, as the remaining chapters of this book show, Brodsky takes up the masculinity of Soviet verse and its eulogies to worldy triumph in order to surrender them to a better, stronger principle. As a pilot or a flock of birds senses a sudden love whose object is mystery only at the limit of physical potential, so Brodsky will

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talk and write of materialism in order to discover creatively its (breachable) limits: “Essentially the earth’s obstacles and dangers constitute the necessary challenge to human energy, courage and inventiveness. Without such a challenge … there can be no creative human response” (Benyon John, 38).

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3 Stealing what Matters: Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij Q: What was the impetus that led you to write verse? A: …The first of them came when someone showed me a Literaturnaja gazeta which had some poems by Sluckij in it. I was probably about sixteen then. I was busy in those days educating myself, going around the libraries… Razgovory s Iosifom Brodskim, S. Volkov, 26 My first acquaintance with Robert Frost was when I was twentytwo… I was absolutely astonished at that sensibility, that kind of restraint, that hidden, controlled terror… With Frost it all started Brodsky, quoted in S. Birkerts “The Art of Poetry,” 89

introduction The preceding chapter showed how Western prose posed for Brodsky something of a philosophical riddle, based upon a frustrating collocation of existential drives and certain given limits that oppose those drives. The fundamental questions posed by these works of prose are: am I free to operate within somatic existence and if so, what significance is there to be discovered other than an inherent (and unfathomable) “thingness”? How and why is actuality limited or fettered? The answer to these prosaic problems is gradually worked out over several poems by Brodsky. The following chapters will take a few texts, one by one, in order to discover how the poet’s attitude to temporal existence develops. In each case I have chosen poems which appear directly influenced by other versified materials, most often Russian. The first of these parallels is with Boris Sluckij. There is an unavoidable fissure between the second and third chapters of this book in that the discussion moves suddenly from Western prose to Russian poetry. Any bridge constructed between them will probably be analogical. However, rather than suggest no connection whatsoever, a word or two is warranted as the briefest of parallels between Sluckij and the one poet in our Western list who is an unlikely kindred spirit, Robert Frost.

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frost: in strange praise of substantiality Brodsky has spoken on more than one occasion of owning an illustrated, annotated edition of Frost, which must surely be the Louis Untermeyer 1943 publication, enlarged in 1962. Here, in the editor’s notes between the poems, connections are often drawn between the poet’s texts and his biography. Much is made of the progression from boy to man, from son to father: “Taken back by his mother to the New England of his ancestors, the fatherless boy grew into the independent young man” (1962, 4). Any kind of maturation is going to require a solid base; the fatherless boy finds support in the density of the inanimate world, which populates his space with objects, with forms: “To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form,” commented the poet (31). Clean forms are not open to doubt or argument, hence the poet’s axiomatic remark that a “fact [created through poetry] is the sweetest dream that labor knows” (91) – a very Hemingwayesque observation. “Instead of gunning about for the circumplectious[!] polysyllable,” as Ezra Pound has it, Frost hopes to reflect and create a truth born of natural simplicity. I say “natural,” as Frost’s inanimate world is not that of concrete, but of vegetative processes, of movement within apparently immobile form. Frost will “gaze with a seasoned eye firmly fixed on the natural object, respecting its boundaries and limitations, sensing its affinities with some eternal vision or struggle, [while] himself prophesying nothing” (Coale, 91). The movement of growth that occurs within a tree, for example, needs arboreal form if it is to be a tree and not a pool of vegetable matter. On the nbc program Meet the Press in 1956 Robert Frost remarked on the nature of form: “… people talk of freedom in poetry as if that were a thing very much to be desired; but isn’t it true that great poetry becomes great in part because of its limitations, and may it not be true that freedom, even politically and socially, emerges in the same way?” (Gerber, 120). In the same interview the poet went on to explain that the dialectic between kinetic content and calm form resolves itself in various metamorphoses. Forms die in order to become new forms; figures break down in order to build themselves up again – they strive upwards in order to fall down. “That’s no paradox that we gain in freedom on a higher plane by sacrificing agents on the next plane below it,” says Frost. “All the way up. That’s our freedom.” The most wonderful example of this “losing to win” in the Untermeyer collection is Frost’s poem The Gift Outright. Frost borrows from

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publicly-spirited diction to tell a tale of brave isolation from England before America existed; he tells a tale of private, lyrical progression in a poem couched in the first person plural. He steals from paternal eloquence in order to tell a tale of filial growth; the son must lose himself in order to foster the father within. England must be lost in order to find America. The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia; But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

Although this poem is ultimately a proud recollection of a oncetroubling decision or leap into the unknown, there is another text in this collection which concerns a more ominous crime of the son against the father. Frost writes of stealing (literally) what a paternal figure has, in order to use it “better,” in order to bring an elder to his knees. The false use of material gain by the father becomes “correct” once the son has claimed his own. The best way to hate is the worst. ’Tis to find what the hated need, Never mind of what actual worth, And wipe that out of the earth. Let them die of unsatisfied greed, Of unsatisfied love of display, Of unsatisfied love of the high, Unvulgar, unsoiled and ideal. Let their trappings be taken away. Let them suffer starvation and die Of being brought down to the real.

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The trick that Frost suggests – to steal what “matters” to a father in the name of a filial desire to better and then qualitatively (or spiritually) alter that matter – is in essence the trick that Boris Sluckij plays and that Brodsky also restages.

boris sluckij: martial rhetoric in the service of lyricism Sluckij was born in 1919 in Ukraine, into a generation that saw active service during World War Two. Before the end of the war, in which he was severely wounded, he had joined the Communist Party. Despite this seemingly exemplary behaviour, within two years of Stalin’s death he had penned a couple of bitter poems directed against the late leader that enjoyed great (and potentially dangerous) repute. The risk involved in taking such a stance seems from the late 1990s as something of an aberration, since Sluckij was wary in his acceptance of postStalinist liberties and is now remembered sadly as a vociferous oppo nent of Boris Pasternak and the foreign success of Doktor Z ivago. As if taking a prolonged and ultimately anachronistic stance against the liberal  surrender of a socialist crusade to the silent Muse that haunts Zivago, Sluckij’s own poems talk less and less of frontline soldiering and increasingly of tired soldiers. The death of the poet’s wife in 1977 was a huge blow, and in a modern collection of his verse we see a distressing decline into silence, fatigue, and surrender in the last few poems. Sluckij died himself in 1986. What interests us here is Sluckij’s adaptation of a loud, dominant expressiveness of “paternal” import. The clearest explanation of why a poet might adopt such an attitude is couched in terms of speaking in a public register for an ethically qualified or “good” purpose. This register is used to raise anonymous faces out of a crowd; public words for a private purpose. The high style and Sluckij’s lines thus work in a novel direction. They look down to the forgotten frontline soldiers of ongoing conflict in a tangible realm in such a way that the soldiers might overcome their anonymous status. They do so thanks to an unworldy word, one that remains as silence in all mouths except Sluckij’s.* Я сeбя нe цeню за многоe, А за что цeню и чту: Нe жалeл высокого слога я, Чтоб озвучить ту нeмоту,

* All translations in this book are by the author. Literal versions of the Russian originals are required for textual exegeses.

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59 Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij Чтобы рявкнули лики бeзмолвныe, Чтоб вeликий нeмой заорал, Чтоб за каждой душeвной молниeй Раздавался громов хорал (134) [I do not value myself as much, but here is what I do value and revere: I did not spare a lofty style, so that muteness filled with sound, so that silent faces bellowed, so that a dumb man howled, so that a chorale of thunder resonated after each bolt of the soul’s lightning.]

What exactly this high style is lauding, over and above positivism, is not made clear; by 1969, for example, the physical effort required in the appreciable world is already telling both upon the frame and words of a poet, who while having “an entirely different music,” one of the soul, is nonetheless weighed down in the land of materialist philosophy. The high style descends, since it has failed to engender either mature higher ideals or children with those ideals. Вот и всё: и пафосу – крышка, вeсь он выдохся и устал, стал он снова Отрeпьвeым Гришкой, Лжeдимитриeм быть пeрeстал. Пафос пeнсию получаeт. Пафос хвори свои врачуeт. И во внуках души нe чаeт. И зeмли под собой нe чуeт. (197) [That’s all. There’s a limit to pathos, too; it’s tired and exhausted. It has again become Grishka Otrep’ev and stopped being the False Dmitrii. Pathos gets a pension, tends to its ailments, and dotes upon its grandsons. It does not feel the earth beneath itself.]

A future sadness is hinted at even in Sluckij’s earliest lyrics, where, for example, the divinely creative power of the word is lowered to a corporeal, military, and silently destructive context: it becomes the labour of a diligent military clerk. Дeло, что было Вначалe, – сдeлано рядовым,

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60 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Но Слово, что было Вначалe, – eго писаря писали. Лeгким листком опeрсводки скользнувши по пeрeдовым, Оно спускалось в архивы, вставало там на причалe. Архивы Красной Армии, хранимыe как святыня, Пласты и пласты докумeнтов подобныe угля пластам! (25) [In the beginning was a Deed, done by the rank and file; the Word in the beginning was written by clerks. It slipped through the lead articles as the light sheet of a communiqué, sank into archives, and remained moored there. The archives of the Red Army, preserved like holy relics; strata and strata of documents like strata of coal!]

The kinship of Sluckij’s verse to the waves of material motion, to assaults of one army upon another, is not necessarily a politically conservative one, as his anti-Stalinist texts quoted below show. Just as Brodsky’s axe-swinging escapades in the Williams College speech were likened to the rhythmically possessing movement of poetry, so Sluckij writes of poetry’s appearance in labour camps as a way to use material rhythms for another and better purpose: “The iamb was born from shovels’ regular blows, / As coal, it was rooted in the mines, / Just as a soldier from his stride / It was born and then settled in strophes” (82). In a place of zero freedom, poetry offers at least a little. Another text of the same 1959 collection also ends with a claim that without any divine intervention “we’ll [still] get freedom / With our very own hand” (87). Freedom, imprisonment, and the struggle between them are all defined as material projects, the type of endeavours which soon become tiring. From the very first text of Sluckij’s 1989 collection, that exhausting and noisy assault upon matter leads to an utter displacement of the feminine, or at least its reduction to the level of meat. In a dirty military hospital … Остаeтся одна Марианна. О, пришла бы сюда эта тихая дeвушка в бeлом, Они рвали б на части продолговатоe тeло. Затeрзали бы насмeрть, но любили б нe мeньшe, Потому что нeльзя жe, нeльзя жe, нeльзя жe бeз жeнщин (15)

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61 Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij [Only Marianna remains. If that quiet girl in white came here they’d tear her oblong body to pieces. They’d torture her to death but love no less because you cannot, cannot, cannot be without women.]

The tremendous distance of Marianna from the soldiers’ existence in tangible, assertable reality leaves the frontline champions of materialism in a face-off with durable, insensate phenomena. Life becomes a predictable slowing down and exhaustion of flesh in the face of tougher materials. A fatalistic world view can result. “A soldier lies – he lies in blood, in crap, / But does not want to complain of anything” (22). Brave stoicism can easily become submissive indifference, where one simply “doesn’t care” about sickness (41). One step further down the same sad road reveals not just negative self-assessment, but one’s worthlessness as assessed by the vigorous vindictiveness of others. A later poem – of 1961 – begins as such: “When we returned from the war, / I understood that we were not needed” (148). Sluckij writes in a late cycle (1969) of how Hemingway’s experiences as a hospital orderly coloured his worldview, of how men who beg to be shot leave their cry upon one’s memory once and for all. Twisted physical objects are tougher than any thought: “Blood, bandages and carbolic acid and pus / Got stuck in [his] memory.” Over Hemingway’s entrance into literature, those men who were “cut down in the attack, / or abandoned in the retreat / hung, like Fate” (230). As late as 1975, Sluckij talks of Fate in terms of “endless corridors, as in the Winter Palace” (364). The metaphor of constrained, unidirectional movement implies little room for freedom; it suggests rules that leave little room for innovation. The poet on at least two occasions talks of life as the observing or disruption of sporting regulations (337–8, 359). As Brodsky himself has written, there is no more fitting expression of this sporting interplay than the (slightly) flexible constraints of traditional versification. Sluckij notes: Так нe взяли мeня на работу. И я взял ee на сeбя. Всю нeволю свою, всю охоту На хорeи и ямбы рубя. На анапeсты, амфибрахии, На свободный и бeлый стих. А в учитeли гeографии Набирают совсeм других (180)

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62 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse [They refused me work; I took work upon myself, hewing my captivity and desire into trochees and iambs, anapests, amphibrachs, free and blank verse. And utterly different people are hired as geography teachers.]

The theme of bonds – to the earth, to worldy processes, to their fitting literary constraints – rarely allows Sluckij to part from matter’s “paternalism” or primacy. A poem recording the burial of his father stresses his primary memory, that of family letters and advice; such familial links and guidance have now vanished. The poet thus embodies the “Prodigal Son” defined in a 1957 cycle. The son returns, “fatigued by labour” to his father’s home, eats, quenches his thirst, sleeps, gets up, “finds his staff, and bidding farewell to nobody, leaves” (60). Once left, fathers are not returned to, or if they are, they provide no comforting return to the womb. Since Sluckij is fettered so tightly by “the body that never parted for a moment from the soul” (275), any feminine principle is ill-defined, to say the least. Although writing with a marked lack of seriousness, the poet in one text discusses the unavoidable male tendency to see women as massed, coloured matter such that they have no (and offer no) subjective significance: Жeнщины, с которыми – ты, Тe жe, что у гeния. Но eму – чистота их красоты, Чудныe мгновeния. Тeбe достанутся рост и масть И ничeго особeнного. А гeний имeeт власть – класть Пeчать. Своeго, особeнного (309) [You are with the same women as a genius. But he gets the purity of their beauty and miraculous moments. You’ll get their height, hair colour and nothing in particular. A genius has the power to make his mark. Something of his own, something particular.]

The “personal, special” significance of the feminine remains elusive for Sluckij, especially in the very sad poems that mark his wife’s passing. As she in her death “overcomes the strange link / of hospital bed and poor body,” he himself lives longer in the material world; heavy things outlive spirit because “I was alive / but she was dying.”

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brodsky’s connection with sluckij A handwritten note to himself in the Brodsky archives reminds the poet to read an article about Sluckij in the Literaturnaja gazeta. With some difficulty I found the piece of 28 July 1956, which also must be the article mentioned in Volkov’s interview, and Brodsky’s earliest critical insight into his mentor (especially since publishing the latter’s poems at this time was hard work, to say the very least). The article’s author is Il’ja Èrenburg, who writes this piece essentially to pose the question of the final column: “Why don’t they publish a book of Sluckij’s verse?” (Once the reader sees the anti-Stalinist texts I discuss in the following pages, it is patently clear why not.) Èrenburg defines characteristics of Sluckij’s verse that fall into line with standard, masculine Soviet aesthetics and then points out how these characteristics are used to further original, more subjective goals. “What attracts me in Sluckij’s verses?” he asks rhetorically. “Their organic structure, their liveliness, their link to the people’s thoughts and emotions. He knows both the lexicon and intonation of his contemporaries. He knows how to realize things of which others have only the vaguest presentiment. He is not unnerved by prosaicisms, coarseness, the alternation of pathos [pafos] and irony, sudden rhythmic interruptions – and at times his language does indeed stumble.” Sluckij, continues the columnist, is a people’s poet [narodnyj] since he is “inspired by the people’s life and heroic deeds [podvigi], its woe, burdensome labour and hope, its fatal weariness and invincible strength of life.” Where on earth in the middle of this pseudo-patriotic bluster is there any room for lyricism? Èrenburg asserts that Sluckij’s civic verse has a special characteristic “in that it is lyrical … [because] he writes about his countrymen as if he experienced personally what they went through.” Sluckij’s lyricism is heard through his poems of war, of battle in mud and metal. To Èrenburg it does not make for easy reading: “To show battle as if a parade, that is shameless and pointless, too – nobody will believe it. Sluckij knows the price of victory, the victims and the misfortune of the people. Nevertheless he looks forward in a manly fashion.” This manly development of lyricism within pafos was hugely important to the young Brodsky. In a 1990 interview with Tomas Venclova, he names Sluckij as a poet who even now remains for him “a significant figure of the post-war period” (122). This enthusiasm of a forty-eight-year-old man had been expressed five years earlier in a Times Literary Supplement piece about the relationship of literature and war. Here Brodsky discusses Sluckij as a man who took a pounding on the material plane, but whose pain was linked to a tragic search for a higher, perhaps posthumous ideal.

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64 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse It is Slutzky [sic] who has almost single-handedly changed the diction of postwar Russian poetry. His verse is a conglomeration of bureaucratese, military lingo, colloquialisms and sloganeering, and it employs with equal ease assonance, dactylic and visual rhymes, sprung rhythms and vernacular cadences. The sense of tragedy that his poems convey frequently extends, almost against his free will, from the concrete and the historical to the existential: where every tragedy, in the end, belongs. This poet indeed speaks the language of the Twentieth Century; and it is regrettable that he is less available in English than his often witless successors who rather shamelessly exploit his formal discoveries. His tone is tough, tragic and nonchalant – the way a survivor normally talks, if he cares to, about what, or into what, he survived (544).

Such enduring respect and praise for Sluckij is all the more impressive if we remember the quote that opened this chapter: “In general I think that I began to write poems because I read the verse of a quite remarkable Soviet poet, Boris Sluckij. Actually it was from him that my interest in poetry began, more or less, along with the idea of writing it” (Èpelbuan, 41). Joseph Brodsky starts where Boris Sluckij stops.

sluckij’s poem

BOG

The clearest point of contact between Sluckij and Brodsky is found in  two poems: Sluckij’s Bog of 1954-5 and Brodsky’s Kazdyj pred Bogom … of 1958. The former poem is a radically anti-Stalinist piece, a tirade against the gross discrepancy between self-deification and Machiavellian intrigue, between a dictator’s aspirations towards universal fatherhood and the sickening means used to cultivate loyalty or pseudo-filial attachments. Brodsky’s poem is designed to lessen that discrepancy, to reduce the aura of unquestionable authority surrounding the (or a) god. Although, like Sluckij’s poem, couched in terms of possibly irreconcilable opposites, of Fathers and Sons, Brodsky’s text is designed to urge the son in his future to struggle for either selfdetermination or fatherhood. If the ideas of “father” and “God” seem thus far a little contrived, the reader might welcome a more concrete reference by Sluckij to Stalin, in the more mundane terms of patriarch and underling. Xozjain, written in 1954 in the past tense, is a complaint against a lifetime of being ignored by a master or boss. The “servant” or poet is suspected of endless subversion, of misusing state-sponsored ceremony: “When I bowed my head before him / It seemed to him I hid a smirk.” The poet has sacrificed a physical life to this father: work and sleep are organized in an ingratiating fashion; Christ-like, he was even

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“wounded” for him at war. As a failed Abraham, the poet risks all but gains nothing: “Nothing helped me.” This downhearted litany of various approaches to pleasing the father is made still sadder by a shift in the last three lines to the present, expressing the ever-present and “obvious fact that from time immemorial / Masters have not loved those such as me.” The phase “such as me” suggests not so much a community of suffering amongst various masters’ victims, but more a group of isolated individuals, all failed in their existential endeavours. This failure is not a consequence of dark Soviet politics, but “from time immemorial” a generational conflict; it hurts all the more because the offence is felt as a slur from one’s own father, as the personal and possessive pronouns stress in the text’s opening line. А мой хозяин нe любил мeня – Нe знал мeня, нe слышал и нe видeл, А всe-таки боялся, как огня, И сумрачно, угрюмо нeнавидeл. Когда мeня он плакать заставлял, Ему казалось: я притворно плачу. Когда прeд ним я голову склонял, Ему казалось: я усмeшку прячу. А я всю жизнь работал на нeго, Ложился поздно, поднимался рано. Любил eго. И за нeго был ранeн. Но мнe нe помогало ничeго. А я возил с собой eго портрeт. В зeмлянкe вeшал и в палаткe вeшал – Смотрeл, смотрeл, нe уставал смотрeть. И с каждым годом мнe всe рeжe, рeжe Обидною казалась нeлюбовь. И нынe настроeнья мнe нe губит Тот явный факт, что испокон вeков Таких, как я, хозяeва нe любят. [My master didn’t love me, didn’t know, hear or see me; all the same he feared me as fire, he hated me in a sullen, sad way. When he made me cry, he thought I pretended to cry. When I bowed my head before him, it seemed to him I hid a smirk. But all my life I worked for him, went to sleep late, got up early. Loved him. Was wounded for him. But nothing helped me. And I carried around his portrait. Hung it in the dug-out, hung it in the ward, stared and stared at it, never got tired of it. With each

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66 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse year his lack of love was less offensive. Now I’m not put out by the obvious fact that from time immemorial masters have not loved those such as me.]

The conflation of a social conflict is also central to Bog. The poem begins in the first person plural, indicating the massed social presence that guarantees the isolated, single presence of Stalin. Nevertheless, most of the text is written in the third person; in other words, “we” are not that large a part of the objective legend that simply is. I say “objective” as Sluckij depicts Stalin as a terrible combination of selfdeification or self-perpetuating legend and objective reality; even though myths are by their very nature socially-woven narratives, Stalin’s myth is divorced from all negotiation. That divorce or distance is depicted along both vertical and horizontal axes. The poem’s first two couplets stress first the public’s isolation from Stalin and then the tantalizing moments of proximity to him which allowed the myth to have some relation to reality.  “My vse xodili pod bogom. / U boga pod samym bokom. / On zil ne v nebesnoj dali, / Ego inogda vidali.” Stalin is far above us yet with us, – although the expression “pod samym bokom” suggests less kinship than it does Stalin’s myriad, lesser kin, all of lesser stature. The double deflation in these couplets – from far to near, from god to  man – is taken a step further by enjambment: “ … Ego inogda vidali / Z ivogo.” The juxtaposition is now (thanks to the surprise adjective hidden slyly on the next line), between “living” and some other state. Implicitly it is between life and myth, but Stalin’s proximity to death remains an obvious subtext, especially when we are told he was “on the mausoleum.” Not in it, but on it. Enjambment plays exactly the same trick in the next sentence. We are told Stalin was “more intelligent and evil” – presumably more than we had expected, and thus the comparison of leader and led continues. Alas, the comparison is with “him – the other, different one, / Called Jehovah.” Two things happen with that enjambment: the father of all is suddenly seen in relation to one of his contenders, a wouldbe father; Stalin also becomes not the New Testament father of the poem’s opening, but the more arbitrary deity of the Old. Brodsky has spoken of a dictator’s need to be arbitrarily evil if he is to be successful, because unpredictable wrath leaves the confused impression among victims that a higher order is at work (Janows, 1990 documentary). Since the wonder of Stalin’s myth is that it exists simultaneously in two realms (up and down, far and near), it is not surprising that parental wrath is exercised by dragging a wayward child with awful speed through those unknown realms: Stalin punished

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Jehovah(!) “whom he cast down, / Tormented, roasted upon coals, / But then removed from the abyss / And granted a table and a corner.” (Here, though, the axis of up / down inverts; the non-descript, lofty locus of Stalin [“My xodili pod bogom”] is now obviously not high up, but deep in some hellish recess.) The arbitrariness of Stalin’s anger is emphasized by the frighteningly ridiculous, final phrase, “granted a table and a corner.” The distance and time from writing desk to hell and back is shorter than most poets would dare to ponder. The dictator’s rude intrusion into his immediate family is of greater significance still in the poem’s second half. We have seen Stalin vis-àvis the “we” of Soviet society, vis-à-vis his political contenders, and Sluckij now steps forward with a private recollection. Walking one day down Moscow’s Arbat, he sees “god” in a five-car cavalcade of such imposing scale that even security guards are hunched with fear. The time of this encounter was both “late and early”; early in the morning, but too late to reverse the processes of a snowballing, increasingly obsessive sovereignty. The irreversible nature of this drive – which appears to result in little but “greyness” – dictates that Stalin become not only the one benefactor, but the very source of life, a modern Sun King: “The morning dawned. He looked cruelly and sagely / With his all-seeing eye, / His all-penetrating gaze.” The concluding, inconceivable dimensions of this poem are acquired by a double shift from its opening lines: the initial, calmly sociological observations about “us” and Stalin are jolted, first into the parallel with Jehovah and then, seemingly, Louis xiv. The rhyme scheme supports this with disruptions of its initial aabbcc arrangement. The adjacent rhymes become alternating in the lines depicting Jehovah’s trials and then again when Sluckij himself sees god on the Arbat. Their final appearance is over the poem’s last quatrain, when the Sun King reference is followed by the refrain, “We all walked beneath god.” The sense of unity inherent in the first-person plural pronoun has now been utterly spoiled. As if to suggest as much, the reference to walking at god’s side becomes “almost beside god.” The word “beside” (rjadom) appears once again, in the phrase “beside him [god] the guards shivered.” Not terribly significant, perhaps, but the three-stress dol’nik of this poem opens with an unstressed syllable on every line except three; two of them have the rjadom reference and begin with a zero anacrusis. Sluckij spoils his initially hopeful thought of unity (my) by drawing an analogy between those who protect Stalin consciously (his guard) and those who do so unconciously (the people). One cannot but hear a note of either fatalism or blame: the populace supports the power. Brodsky’s poem will address exactly this problem of social or spiritual responsibility, even in the face of inexorable odds.

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68 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

Before turning to Brodsky himself, something should be said about that dol’nik. It has a predominantly iambic lilt, but almost every line is interrupted with an extra, unstressed syllable that creates something of a ternary hiccup, a moment of unexpected retardation. If we look at the words that cause those retardations, an interesting tendency emerges. Key words vanish into these little gaps, “key” because they usurp the stately rhetoric. Every one of the five times the preposition “beneath” (pod) is used, it falls into a ternary gap, yet it is used to stress the unquestioning subservience to a virtually non-existent authority. (Without that preposition the sentence would be wildly different.) Another monosyllabic preposition that is silently uttered is “on the mausoleum” (na mavzolee). “Did he say ‘in’?” the listener might ask. It makes sense, however, that the deathliness that pervades as the poem continues would be expressed in longer words (three or more syllables) to break the rhythm’s back. Sure enough, Stalin is initially described as living “not at a heavenly distance” – ne v nebesnoj dali – with the adjective spoiling the binary lilt. He is “sometimes seen” – inogda vidali – and here the adverb does the same. The mocking use of references to untouchable royalty, distant in space and time, swell at the poem’s conclusion to the excessively long participles “all-seeing”   and “all-penetrating” (vsevidjasc ij; vsepronicaiusc ij). The binary tendency of the dol’nik cannot support words of this length; the rhetoric has grown too big, and sounds deathly at the very moment it should sound glorious. Мы всe ходили под богом. У бога под самым боком. Он жил нe в нeбeсной дали, Его иногда видали Живого. На мавзолee. Он был умнee и злee Того – иного, другого, По имeни Иeгова, Которого он низринул, Извeл, пeрeжeг на уголь, А послe из бeздны вынул И дал eму стол и угол. Мы всe ходили под богом. У бога под самым боком. Однажды я шeл Арбатом, Бог eхал в пяти машинах. От страха почти горбата

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69 Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij В своих пальтишках мышиных Рядом дрожала охрана. Было поздно и рано. Сeрeло. Брeзжило утро. Он глянул жeстоко, мудро Своим всeвидящим оком, Всeпроницающим взглядом. Мы всe ходили под богом. С богом почти что рядом. [We all walked beneath god. At his very side. He lived not at a heavenly distance, he was sometimes seen alive. On the mausoleum. He was more intelligent and evil than him – the other, different one called Jehovah, whom he cast down, tormented, roasted upon coals but then removed from the abyss and granted a table and corner. We all walked beneath god. At his very side. One day I walked down the Arbat and god drove by in five cars. Beside him the guards shivered in their mousy coats and were almost hunched from fear. It was both late and early. All was turning grey. The day dawned. He looked cruelly and sagely with his all-seeing eye, his all-penetrating gaze. We all walked beneath god. Almost beside god.]

brodsky’s



KAZ DYJ PRED BOGOM…

Brodsky’s poem was written four years after Sluckij’s. It draws upon the dissent of Bog for philosophical, not political purposes. The single god of the Stalinist text is generalized – to gods in general, before which we are not the massed, politically culpable entity described by Sluckij, but individuals who shape themselves by choice. Consequently the overwhelming use of the past tense forms in the older poem is replaced by an interplay of present and future. The relation of god to man, of father to son, is neither defined by nor determined in the past, but by ongoing choices made today. The link between the present and the future is made in the poem by a brief, though significant, interjection of imperatives, by Brodsky’s insistence that the filial challenge to paternal authority be made if we are not to “walk beneath god” for ever. This challenge begins before Brodsky puts pen to paper. The text is entitled Verses beneath an Epigraph (Stixi pod èpigrafom); Brodsky starts with the well-known and axiomatic saying, “That which is permitted

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Jupiter / Is not permitted the bull.” In other words, the pre-existing social and spiritual hierarchy defines the legal and ethical future: it’s right because that’s the way it is. As a result, Brodsky states these lines at the top of the page but does not then underwrite them with the content of his poem; he instead writes under them in order to refashion them. The same three points of social reference in Sluckij’s text are used – “I,” “we” and “god” – but their relationship is altered. The poet begins by stating that “All [of us] are naked before God. / Pitiful, naked and shabby.” The pronoun “we” is only used twice in this poem without being qualified in some way to emphasize the individuals of whom any  crowd is composed. The individualizing adjective “each” or “all” (kazdyj) is then repeated twice: “In all music there is Bach / In all of us is God.” Inherent within each modest human dimension is a potential for its magnificent opposite. This pairing of opposites is enhanced by the rhymes: nag / Bax (naked / Bach); ubog / Bog (shabby / God). Simplicity versus ornamentation; dilapidation versus glory. Of greater significance here, however, is the value judgment implied in the adjectives “pitiful” and “shabby,” which are surely expressions of failure, logically in the face of a potential divinity. The typographical decision in the text’s most recent publication to spell Bog with a capital letter strengthens the sense that for man to raise himself to an inconceivable altitude, he must opt simultaneously for a potentially sacrilegious ascent. The danger of sacrilege is immediately lessened, though, in two ways. First, the word “God,” when pluralized in this text, is not capitalized. What is of absolute significance to the individual is only part of a grander plan: one man’s existential choices against the larger backdrop of his whole generation. Given that Brodsky shifts his view from private, solitary choices to those of many people, to social choices, I cannot help but see more of an ethical drive than a directly spiritual one. Lots of people being told simultaneously what is right constitutes an ethical process; a religious predicament involves instead one person struggling in isolation and informing nobody. The second reduction of pseudo-spiritual posturing therefore takes place through this shift in attention from “God” to “gods” (Bog / bogi). The ethical import of the text is driven home by the odd start to the fifth line: “Because eternity is for gods. / Finiteness is the lot of bulls.” Why “because” (ibo)? This conjunction makes no sense unless married to the adjectives “pitiful” and “shabby.” These undesirable states can be overcome if one chooses not to be pitiful and work instead towards the tiny, subjective foretaste of divinity that is potentially afforded each and every one of us. Bulls are fated to live for a finite period, hence

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the need to “clothe” one’s simple meekness in a supra-physical, fuguelike and complex brilliance. Additional evidence for Brodsky’s shifting back and forth between ethical and spiritual conditions comes in the following lines: “Godliness will become for us / the twilight of gods. / The sky must be risked. / And, perhaps, in vain.” The status up for grabs is described by a single lifespan; new significances need to be created by each “new” believer or initiate. The natural (here the solar) movement of rise and fall, growth and decay demands that such cycles be invested with novel semantics. The fateful wheel of fortune that Robert Jordan and Holden Caulfield curse is not turned into the arrogance of Stalin’s Sun King imitation of fortune itself, his imitation of the sun’s fated circuits. Brodsky takes the loud oration that fuels such imitations in order to transfer a markedly different message: not one of unnatural permanence (an unsetting sun) but of ongoing existential demands (the sun might be gained, but then again it might not – a risk is involved). This risk is outlined by a shift in tense. Unlike Sluckij’s poem, Brodsky expresses the physical rigours that will be undergone during that process of gambling. If one is willing to see a Christian intent in the following quote, then one must also admit that it refers to the future (for current issues are entirely earthbound): “And they will crucify us more than once / and then say: ‘Breakdown.’ / And we will howl from pain. / Then we will hunger for gifts …” This scenario is enacted in the material world – noisy physical suffering in the name of “gifts.” Substantiality is not so much invaded or possessed as used in the name of these gifts. The two most obscure aspects of this poem are the nature of these prizes and the identity of the third person of the crucifiers. They cry out “Breakdown” (raspad) to those who are upon the cross; the integrity of substance (or of political fibre) has been grossly maltreated or subverted. The poet will hopefully use that matter in order to gain, therefore, non-material gifts. The nature of that to which Brodsky is now at least willing to sacrifice himself will be defined as this book continues, moving from the corporeal loss of one’s “grave” to the longterm triumph of one’s “temple,” as the text has it. The whip felt by a bull can be qualitatively altered to become a cross. The final couplet recalls the closing chapter of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The awful attempts of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason to gain airy and ineffable gifts pale in the face of the Negro sermon and congregation. The slaves use the faith and spiritual texts of their masters to express and engender their freedom from those masters. The slaves see a reason for their suffering and a salvation to be gained because of it. They share this understanding with the same, spoken texts used

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by their lords on the same Sunday mornings. Brodsky’s poem also uses “imperial” rhetoric and turns it to a private purpose. He relates the individual to a social whole, even at the poem’s end: “Stand alone as a finger” (as one amongst five, and only significant or useful as such). By giving the text an ancient, rather than an explicitly Soviet context, Brodsky’s social intent is directed more at the catacombs than the Coliseum. He sounds a little like Zamjatin’s eternal revolutionary or Scythian heretic, aware that change, novelty or revolutions are endless, that one must battle the status quo just as pre-institutional Christianity did beneath the cobbled streets of imperial Rome. The three adjectives that suggested distance from imperial or divine grandeur – “pitiful, naked, and shabby” – are now answered from the underground pulpit. First: “Play the holy fool!” – that is, reside in the material realm, but show your complete disregard for it through attention to (and humility before) another, higher realm that is inexpressibly beautiful. Use speech to reach the point where it undergoes a raspad. Secondly: “Steal!” Acquire another’s matter and make it your own. Lastly: “Pray!” Speak such that an unspeakable significance is invoked. Pitifulness will therefore be divine, nakedness will be clothed in another’s matter or “material” significance, and prayers will not lead one away from a divinity (u-bog), but towards it. The poem is set in the future tense only in its central section. The opening and closing lines are in the given state of the present tense. Any text that juxtaposes two given states, pitifulness and death, with a risky flux in between is concentrating upon process, upon choices that define that flux. Hence the imperatives. The archives show how Brodsky began his own choices or decision-making in the creation of this existentially open-ended poem. The published version is as follows: Стихи под эпиграфом

Что дозволeно Юпитeру, то нe дозволeно быку. Каждый прeд Богом наг. Жалок, наг и убог. В каждой музыкe Бах, в каждом из нас Бог. Ибо вeчность – богам.

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73 Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij Брeнность – удeл быков … Богово станeт нам сумeрками богов. И надо нeбом рискнуть, и, можeт быть, нeвпопад. Ещe нас нe раз распнут и скажут потом: распад. И мы завоeм от ран. Потом взалкаeм даров … У каждого свой храм. И каждому свой гроб. Юродствуй, воруй, молись! Будь одинок, как пeрст! … ... Словно быкам – хлыст, вeчeн богам крeст. [That which is permitted Jupiter is not permitted the bull. All are naked before God. Pitiful, naked and shabby. In all music there is Bach. In all of us there is God. Because eternity is for gods. Finiteness is the lot of bulls. Godliness will become for us the twilight of gods. The sky must be risked. And, perhaps, in vain. And they will crucify us more than once and then say: “Breakdown.” And we will howl from pain. Then we will hunger for gifts … All of us have our temple. And all of us have our grave. Play the holy fool! Steal! Pray! Stand alone, as a finger! As if the whip is for bulls, the cross for gods is eternal.]

The archives of the Russian National Library contain this poem in four handwritten variants. Three are from a notebook that can be dated with some confidence as being from 1958-9; the other variant

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is scribbled on one page after a dated text of December 16, 1959. All versions are incomplete and call the published date of 1958 into question. One draft (77/125b) states explicitly some themes otherwise revealed more implicitly: the shared divinity of gods (which is given) and mortals (which is there for the taking); the need to find a divine potentiality through a paradoxical reduction of one’s own arrogant independence in the face of an ethical, hymnic discourse. As with Sluckij, the civic aesthetic will prove an unexpected vehicle for selfexpression. Rhythm and pathos are defined as the primary ingredients of that hymn, which when sung properly is akin to the erect pose of a proud human figure. The sounds raise or elevate matter; if raised higher still, to a divine altitude, the singer is then treated to ambrosia by the gods themselves! Богу кончeно богово смeртным опять жe [что] Дабы [словно быть] богoугодными мы расстанeмся с брeднями [В гимнах божeствe] [должна быть] [ритмика] [Бу] [станeм] Будeм симрными, тихими Постигнeм поэтику, этику В гимнах должна быть ритмика И опять жe патeтика мы ударим [В сумeрк взяв] кимвал(ь)чики? [В мeры] Поэзи(и) споeм, встав в позу Боги оближут пальчики и угостят ам(б?)розиeй(?) [Godliness is of course for God, and again for mortals (which) so that (as if to be) pleasing to God we part with ravings (In hymns deity) (there must be) (rhythm) (We wi) (We will become) We will be calm, quiet We’ll perceive poetics, ethics In hymns there must be rhythm and once again pathos (In the twil too) we will beat cymbals? (In measures) Poetry we will sing,

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75 Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij having adopted a pose the Gods will lick their fingers and will offer ambrosia?]

The extremely brave transformation of the sensible world advocated here is not just a consequence of Sluckij’s prompting, however. We can find an equally dizzying ascent in the work of two other poets, both encountered by Brodsky in his youth. They too need to be factored into this pafos. Brodsky admired one and translated the other, and so we turn our attention to the Russian poet Èduard Bagrickij and the Pole, Konstanty Ga lczyn´ski.

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4 Romanticism and Rebellion: Bagrickij and Gal czyn´ski I was terribly fond of Bagrickij in my youth. (Venclova 1990, 121) I was a great admirer of Polish poetry… I started translating it. I began with Ga l czyn´ski (Husarka,9)

introduction Brodsky recalled his love for Èduard Bagrickij (1897–1934) in the above interview of 1990. At the age of fifty, therefore, he is still talking of the poet in positive terms – but not just with the fondness of retrospection. When asked in the same year by the periodical Nedelja which poets are still closest to him, Brodsky produced a short list of eight and then said: “I’d also add, strange as it may seem, Bagrickij” (Kovalenko, 1990). The briefest of biographies might help here to explain the apparent strangeness of Brodsky’s addition to the list. Èduard Bagrickij was born and schooled in Odessa; by the end of his teenage years he was taking an active part in all things revolutionary, at times of a marked military bent. The literary texts he produced then were of a heady, heartfelt, and romantic tendency, so much so that the energy of those martial themes remained a constant in his work. True to the biographical demands of that chosen aesthetic, he died tragically young of a respiratory ailment. If we take a typical Soviet edition of the poet’s work in Brodsky’s youth – say 1956 – the introduction tells us that indeed the processes of battle, both physiological and ideological, made Bagrickij’s verse: “Only after October 1917, in the years of the Civil War, did Èduard Bagrickij recognize real poetry, poetry of an inspired struggle for freedom and the people’s happiness, poetry of intense, stubborn battles with the enemies of the Revolution” (Grinberg, 7). The concept of “intensity” or density of action is transferred to the man who

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writes the poetry. Battle is done with the world and its rigidity is claimed internally; by ordering the world, the poet orders himself. “The internal intensity of the poetic word and the artist’s excitement touched the reader because they were transformed in every epithet and metaphor, in every ‘cell’ of his verse. Bagrickij absorbed this himself and did so in a well-considered manner. In one of his articles he wrote, ‘The poem is a prototype of the human body. Each part is in its place, each organ is suited [to its purpose] and has a defined function.’” Such were the “characteristics of a new man … freed from material dependence” (15, 20). From materialistic processes, perhaps, but not from matter, as the following few quotes illustrate.  The poem Origins (Proisxozdenie) shows a young man, perhaps the youthful poet himself, storming out from his Jewish, paternalistic background. … всe кликушeство Моих отцов, И всe свeтила, Строящиe вeчeр, И всe дeрeвья, Рвущиe лицо, – Всe это встало попeрeк дороги, Больными бронхами свистя в груди: – Отвeржeнный! Возьми свой скарб убогий, Проклятьe и прeзрeньe! Уходи! – Я покидаю старую кровать: – Уйти? Уйду! Тeм лучшe! Наплeвать! [… all the hysterics of my fathers, all the stars that make the evening, and all the trees that cut my face – it all hindered me like ailing lungs, whistling in my chest. “Outcast! Take your wretched baggage! I loath and curse you! Get out!” I leave my old bed: “Get out? I’ll get out! So much the better! I don’t give a damn!”]

Breaking away from one father in this text of 1930, Bagrickij wrote in the adjacent years of 1929 and 1931 of his own role as father, standing before the son who will one day leave him. On a bird hunt, the father realizes the son’s perception of what now eludes slowing,

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paternal senses: “the hiss of a wing beating upon the wind.” “Lead me, son,” he asks, “I’ll go behind you.” The expression of generations as drawing level or overtaking now troubles the aging Bagrickij, as his paternal verses prefer to talk much more of staying level with a son, so the two of them may “do deeds” in the material world together. “Each of us, forgetting about ourselves, / Perhaps awkwardly and clumsily, / Biting our lips, wheezing in battle, / Does a deed a little better in the world” (1956: 320). This bond of father and son is not permanent. The son must continue his deed, just as the father must admit his own passing as the end of a paternal task. A loss is required for the filial progression to begin in earnest. I have mentioned earlier the need to lose in order to win, when discussing Faulkner’s tale The Bear – the bond of old man and older bear as allowing the human to learn from the beast, challenge it and perhaps even fall to it, all in order to be raised to a principle higher than the crude, bestial simplicity of any chase or stalking. Faulkner’s bear is “old, solitary, indomitable alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality” (186) – which is to say it holds perhaps the key to a timeless vitality above the physical limits of gender or sex. For Bagrickij, the bear represents the old world which is hunted by the higher ideal of “poets, fishermen and bird catchers.” И мы стоим рассыпанною цeпью – Поэты, рыбаки и птицeловы. И, вздыблeнный, идeт на нас, качаясь, Мир матeрой. И вот один из нас – Широкоплeчий, русый и упорный – Вытаскиваeт нож из сапога И, широко расставив ноги, ждeт Хрипящeго и бeшeного звeря. … … мы, поэты, чтò во врeмя боя Стояли молча, – мы сбeжимся дружно, И над огромным и косматым трупом Мы славу побeдитeлю споeм! (1956: 256–7) [And we stand like a scattered chain – poets, fishermen, and bird catchers. Reared up and swaying, the inveterate world comes towards us. And one of us – broad-shouldered and stubborn, with light-brown hair – pulls a knife out of his boot and with legs wide apart waits for the wheezing, crazed beast … We, the poets who stood silent in wartime, will run together

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79 Bagrickij and Gal czyn´ski in friendship and sing praises to the victor above a huge, shaggy corpse!]

The key word here is materoj (inveterate, full-grown, or adult). In Common Slavic the adjective is derived from the word for mother (mat’ ) and analogically connected to the Latin word for lumber or matter. The feminine and physical matter are, at least unconsciously, invoked simultaneously and merged in the bear. In seeking an impalpable significance, one beyond a single generation’s physical existence, Bagrickij drags down the feminine to an ursine lair. (Faulkner’s bear, although “its own ungendered progenitor,” was nevertheless its hunter’s alma mater. It taught what was feminine, without actually being it.) By mixing animal and spirit, the poet can hunt a special significance, and does so with fishermen and bird catchers.

bagrickij’s narrative poems: bird catchers in the suburbs The embodiment of a free spirit is key to Bagrickij’s worldview and an important part of what Brodsky takes from him. The consequent, liminal existence of Bagrickij’s spirituality in a physical world is clear  in two narrative poems, C elovek predmest’ja (1932) and Fevral’ (1933– 4). These two works appear in turn to be mentioned in two works by Brodsky, the unpublished Russkaja gotika (Ja – syn predmest’ja …) and  Ot okrainy k centru (1962: Sobranie soc inenij Brodskogo, 217–20). Bagrickij’s Fevral’ is the logical place to start, since Brodsky’s archives contain the first eight stanzas of this poem written out in hand. This transcription has a few mistakes and corrections, as if the poet knew the poem almost by heart and was trying to remember it. The text is in an exercise book which includes work upon poems published in 1958. Fevral’ was published in the autumn of 1936, though the author’s death interrupted his work upon subsequent additions to it. It concerns the poet’s relation to a girl encountered while on military leave. Coming from a battlefield “scorched by the shell, / Stuck through by the bayonet, [and] wound tight / By barbed wire,” he sees a girl who seems less than material. She “floats, as if in a dance, / into the whirling of leaves, into the swaying / of flowers and butterflies above the lawn.” When he tries to follow her, he senses that she embodies “everything I had read about at nights, / Sick, hungry, half-dressed – / About birds with non-Russian names, / About peoples of an unknown planet …” She is on the edge of both material, intangible existence and the edge of language that defines that existence. Both her meaning and her

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body slip away from the poet. He lowers himself to the point of a “beggar and madman” in order to raise himself up to her: Я козыряю eй, как начальству, Что eй сказать? Мой язык бормочeт Какую-то дрeбeдeнь: – Позвольтe … Нe убeгайтe … Скажитe, можно Вас проводить? Я сидeл в окопах! … Она молчит. Она дажe глазом Нe повeдeт. Она убыстряeт Шаги. А я рядом бeгу, как нищий, Почтитeльно нагибаясь. Гдe уж Мнe быть eй равным! … Я как бeзумный Бормочу какиe-то фразы сдуру … (1964: 211) [Parading before her, like before the boss, what’ll I say? My tongue produces some kind of mumbled gibberish. “Please allow me … Don’t hurry off … Look, could I possibly accompany you? I was in the trenches!” She’s silent. Doesn’t even look at me. She starts to walk faster. I run beside her, like a beggar and bowing respectfully. How can I possibly be her equal! … Like a madman I foolishly mumble a phrase or two …]

The lines of Bagrickij that Brodsky wrote out from memory are entirely from the section of Fevral’ discussed thus far: the chasing of the bird-girl. The later sections, though, are very different and build towards a series of subsequent night raids conducted in search of “unknown bandits” lurking “in quiet families.” One opened door reveals a young man in bed, who quickly produces a Browning but then surrenders. Beside him lies the bird-girl, now sullied for ever. The narrator throws money at her, despite her insistence that she wants his pity, not cash. He then concludes his tale with some horrible lines of poetry that sound a very ugly victory over the girl who has descended to evil and is now therefore fair game. The hunt becomes mere savagery.

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81 Bagrickij and Gal czyn´ski Я бeру тeбя за то, что робок Был мой вeк, за то, что я застeнчив, За позор моих бeздомных прeдков, За случайной птицы щeбeтаньe! Я бeру тeбя, как мщeньe миру, Из которого нe мог я выйти! Принимай мeня в пустыe нeдра, Гдe трава нe можeт завязаться, – Можeт быть, моe ночноe сeмя Оплодотворит твою пустыню (1964: 222) [I’m taking you because my age was timid, because I am shy, because of my homeless forefathers’ shame, because of an incidental bird’s twittering! I am taking you as revenge upon a world which I could not leave. Take me in your empty womb, where grass cannot grow. Perhaps my nocturnal seed will impregnate your wilderness.]

 The brutality of this acqusition is no less so in the second poem, C elovek predmest’ja (1956: 174–81). The work basically consists of two strands: a critique of the “man of the suburbs” and a description of how Bagrickij intends to storm his domestic castle of material acquisitiveness. The man of the suburbs owns a lot of stuff; Bagrickij is irked and intends to take it all. The ethical intent of the poem is not likely to warm a reader’s heart. The suburban man’s dacha and life are described as a process of eternal acquisition, of taking all and giving nothing. He lives in an anachronistic world of self-subsistence which has become selfishness; his triumph over a little part of the world soon becomes anal retentiveness, looking at the world from the doors of his locked barn. The Soviet assault upon the sensible world, though, is bigger, louder, and ready to gobble the truly petty bourgeois. У тeбя на столe самовар, как глобус, Под краном стакан, над конфоркой дым; Размякнув от пара, ты можeшь в оба Тeпeрь слeдить за хозяйством своим. О, благодушиe! Ты растроган Пляской тeлят, воркованьeм щeй,

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82 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Журчаньeм в жeлудкe … А за порогом – Страна враждeбных тeбe вeщeй. На фабрику движутся, раздирая Грунт, дюжиe лошади (топот, гром). Нe лучшe ль стоять им в твоeм сараe В порядкe. Как слeдуeт. Под замком. (1956: 177–8) [On your table a samovar, like a globe. Beneath its tap, a glass. Above its crown, smoke. Softened by steam, you can now keep both eyes on your household. Oh, complacency! You are moved by a dance of calves, by the murmuring of cabbage soup, a bubbling in the tummy … And beyond the doorway lies a world of objects hostile to you. Stalwart horses will move towards the factory, tearing up gravel (stamping, thunder). Wouldn’t it be better for them to stand in your barn. In order. As they should. Under lock and key.]

In this world of unending competition over objects, at least the suburban man’s wife is likened to the dawn. When Bagrickij summons his own literary heroes to fill his neighbour’s otherwise lifeless residence, the wife is “stunned by her vision” of violence and crawls on the floor, crumpling a blanket. The daughter too is altered; she is soon “short-cropped” and in a Pioneer’s handkerchief. The natural, matriarchal, even processes of the old-world suburbs have been transformed into a pillaged domain where one encounters only organized and recently regimented feminine significances.

brodsky and bagrickij’s “suburban” texts In his poem Bogomateri predmest’ja (archive no. 60/66; 64/21) and two works of 1962 entitled Russkaja gotika and Ot otkrainy k centru, Brodsky takes this explicitly liminal or “suburban” state to task. In Russkaja gotika (archive no. 59 /103 and 105) the poet discusses his filial status and peripheral habitat, an object-stuffed, urban picture framed by the factories that Bagrickij showed gulping the old world. The first of the unpublished draft’s nine stanzas clarifies the debt to C elovek predmest’ja. This lone stanza shows Brodsky’s challenge to the poet of a previous generation and Ot okrainy as a related work. The two texts form part of a well-defined poetic stance in 1962.

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83 Bagrickij and Gal czyn´ski Я – сын прeдмeстья, сын прeдмeстья, сын прeдмeстья, в проволочной колыбeли отсырeвших коридоров двeрь, адрeс, трамвайный звон, грохот, стук, звон, камeнныe панeли, подошвы, нeвeсты вдоль окрашeнных заборов, трава вдоль каналов, нeфтяноe пятно, свeт фабрик. [I’m a son of the suburbs, son of the suburbs, son of the suburbs, in a wire cradle of damp corridors – a door, an address, sound of a tram, roaring, a knock, stone pavement, soles of shoes, fiancées along painted fences, grass along canals, a petrol stain, the light of factories.]

This cityscape is a sad combination of flat surfaces – doors, pavement, the soles of shoes, fences, candles, oil stains. Deep in this list is the strange intrusion of “fianceés along painted fences.” Vertical and immobile like the fence posts, the women have been claimed, like suburban daughters, by avaricious Soviet substance. Russkaja gotika draws heavily upon the marriage of these two themes: of youth, and the inanimate, stolid nature of adult Soviet life. If Brodsky is a son of the suburbs, he is akin to the Pioneer daughter with her short hair, an individual whose entire young life has perhaps been spent on those urban edges. There remains, however, a tiny, almost forgotten and elusive memory of a different time and a different, more central place. Ot okrainy investigates that memory, Bogomateri predmest’ja states it explicitly. Bogomateri predmest’ja is the most direct expression in Brodsky’s early work of how the outskirts of Leningrad bridge various opposites: drudgery and divinity, quotidian and literary speech – opposites which are themselves encapsulated in the Logos.  The poem’s first stanza states that “metaphors of the street” (ulic nye metafory) transform themselves into “Virgin Mothers of the suburbs, Holy Fathers of the Suburbs, Holy Children of the suburbs.” It draws extended parallels between daily routine and two radically different consequences of that routine. The first is the unthinking repetition of days which exhaust themselves in larger, slower cycles of reproduction and death. Brodsky writes that each day “everybody gets up. Children, children scream an eternal song. / Everybody gets up, as if at the Final Judgment’s summons, at Gabriel’s trumpet.” The crux of the matter is the adverb slovno (“as if”). The second (lost) consequence is the possibility of seeing the bogorodica in the material or feminine. Isolation, loneliness, and selfishness all lead not only to a woman being seen in purely physical terms, but also to the

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metaphorical damming of an amorphous river, to the cessation of movement. The potential divinity of urban existence is lost and formless rivers become well-formed streets; the proud unwillingness to sacrifice or lose anything means that one will not win what the poem’s final line calls the “rose of the centre” (roza centra). One will pay the consequences, as the poem has it; one will make a poor material trade. Only at the moment of death is there a hint of what has been lost: the harmony of a river’s music, of what its banks contain, of unmoving form’s content. Only with death is there an outpouring or reminiscence of a life’s entire language, of many, many words that together might catch an illuminating glimpse of a rose of the centre which counteracts the dark, material presence of the (non-central) suburbs. Ot otkrainy is written in the first person; it is a more lyrical and selfdeprecating work than Bogomateri predmest’ja. The poem does not have the confidence to tell us whither the poet hopes to go; it shows various forms of maturation: sexual, familial, social, and metaphysical. Here is part of the lengthy latter text. Каждый живeт для сeбя. В отвeдeнный час он ложится в постeль, чтоб зачать в одиночку – рeбeнка, он ложится в постeль, он снимаeт с жeнщины утром надeтоe платьe, бьют часы, он лeжит, он глядит в потолок, в низкий бeрeг колотятся брeвна, каждый сам за сeбя, каждый сам для сeбя умираeт, каждый платит. Но и плачeт он сам по сeбe в одиночку, в потeмках, бeзмолвно, рядом жeнщина спит, с новой жизнью, дышит глухо и ровно, вот он плачeт, о бeрeг колотятся брeвна, он плачeт о завтра, у рeки осыпаeтся гравий, он умрeт послe смeрти тeбe остаeтся нeстeрпимый смeх фотографий. … Развe это мало. Он лeжит на спинe, там в прeдмeстьe, в общeжитии простынку снимаeт, умираeт, в этом тeмном лицe, от рeки долeтают голубиныe крики концeрта, рядом в тeмном лицe проплывают слова, всe слова, всe слова, что он знаeт, и в открытых глазах чуть блeстит, чуть блeстит роза цeнтра.

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85 Bagrickij and Gal czyn´ski [Each lives for himself. At the allotted time he lies down on the bed in order to conceive a child alone. He lies on the bed and takes from a woman the dress she put on that morning. The clock chimes, he lies there and looks at the ceiling, logs strike the shallow bank, each man for himself, each man dies for himself, each man pays. But he also cries on his own in the dark, silently; beside him sleeps a woman with new life, she breathes in a toneless, even manner. And so he cries, logs strike the shallow bank, he cries over tomorrow, gravel is sprinkled by the river. He will die and after death you will have no more than the unbearable laughter of photographs … Is that really so little. He lies on his back there in the suburbs, takes off the blanket in the dormitory, dies, in that warm face, the dove-like cries of a concert fly from the river, close at hand words float by in the dark face, purely words, purely words that he knows – and in open eyes the rose of the center barely, barely shines.] OT OTKRAINY K CENTRU

Bagrickij struggles with the maturing of a woman who becomes sexually attractive to another; he keeps her in his memory as a schoolgirl, hence his poem Fevral’ begins Vot ja snova na ètoj zemle. He goes back to what is not supposed to change or grow. Brodskij’s poem begins Vot ja vnov’ posetil / ètu mestnost’ liubvi, where he too will struggle with a  distant, “feminine” memory. Both texts play upon Puskin’s Vnov’ ia posetil, but here, relying upon the archival record of Fevral’, I draw attention to the stranger side of this triangular relationship, to the  connection between those poets who borrowed from Puskin. The Leningrad text concerns one person and one place. The poet returns to the city suburbs, which he associates with his youth. Bagrickij’s suburb is challenged by gravel-churning construction, by gravelpounding horses and by factories; Brodsky was born eight years after Bagrickij’s prediction and mocks its awful permanence as “paradise, arcadia and heaven.” Not celestial like heaven, not mountainous or rustic like arcadia, this suburb will nevertheless take on a few traits of a modern Eden. Brodsky, in that case, comes into the garden, having left it for some sinful reason. He crosses over the Little Okhta canal (replacing Tigris or Euphrates of Genesis); as an apparently frequent transgressor, he says that he comes back to the garden again and again. This garden is an absolutely man-made project. The fruits of human knowledge are not sin, but heavy industry. Science makes Eden bigger and better. The nasty inversion of a biblical locus is made clear when the poet refers to little domestic gods that await him; the garden becomes a Cæsarean building project, part of a Roman Empire. If

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Brodsky has come back to that empire’s lares, then he has by implication been away from home and is returning to his father’s garden (Eden) or house. The son, it appears, walks out fairly often. Вот я вновь посeтил эту мeстность любви, полуостров заводов, парадиз мастeрских и аркадию фабрик, рай рeчных пароходов, я опять прошeптал: вот я снова в младeнчeских ларах. Вот я вновь пробeжал Малой Охтой сквозь тысячу арок. [So I visited again this place of love, penisulas of factories, paradise of workshops and arcadia of mills, heaven of river steamers. Once again I whispered: so I am again amongst infantile lares. So I ran again through a thousand arches on the Malaia Okhta canal.]

In this place where the movement or amorphousness of a river is stuck beneath the dead weight of coal smoke, a bridge which is as yet “unharmed” carries a thundering train. The link between the garden and the outside world has yet to be severed; movement in and out of the house is still possible – that is, movement in and out of the patriarchal residence. The thunder heard upon that link makes the “sadness of brick enclosures” suddenly lighten. A non-material presence makes her entrance, summoned by sound: “Good afternoon – so here we meet, [my] poor youth” (Dobryj den’, vot my vstretilis’, bednaja junost’). She, the feminine noun junost’ (youth), is conjured by the sound of a link between the father’s solid house and what lies outside; not by a word, but by the noise of moving in and out of the structures of orchestrated, architectural endeavours. The interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries established that jazz was the quintessential, nonlinguistic expression of an interplay between rules and recklessness. Here in this poem it is played by the pipes or chimneys of factories, a “golden Dixieland” – the thumping two-beat rhythm and added improvization of Dixieland make an apt metaphor. Джаз прeдмeстий привeтствуeт нас, слышишь трубы прeдмeстий, золотой диксилeнд … [The jazz of suburbs welcomes us, you hear the chimneys of the suburbs, a golden Dixieland…]

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The jazz picks up on the femininity of junost’ and gives her a more concrete identity: “Neither soul nor flesh – / somebody’s shadow above the house’s record player, / as if your dress is suddenly thrown up by the saxophone.” As if with the Orthodox approach of apophatic reasoning, the identity of the feminine is hinted at by stating what it is not. Language goes as far as it can by negating itself, by negating concepts it can define: not a soul, not flesh… The unutterable space left at the end of such a process will be supremely positive. The train runs between the garden and outside. Brodsky does the same and the feminine lies between flesh and shadow, grammar and melody. When seen in Eden, she occupies an equally liminal position, in gateways and doorways – neither in nor out. She is also spotted “on a bridge beside irrevocable years.” Time may not be reversible or revocable, but the feminine obviously is, given the right record collection. In an apparent attempt to cool herself, she stands coquettishly with a lemonade glass pressed against her face, framed by the backdrop or orchestra of the industrial, noisy bombast that in part conjured her up. The factory-chimney rumble plays part of the Dixieland; it plays the bass. В ярко-красном кашнe и в плащe в подворотнях, в парадных ты стоишь на виду на мосту возлe лeт бeзвозвратных, прижимая к лицу нeдопитый стакан лимонада, и рeвeт позади дорогая труба комбината. [In a bright-red scarf and a raincoat at gates and doorways, you stand clearly on the bridge by irrevocable years, pressing a glass of sipped lemonade to your face while behind roars the factory chimney you love most.]

The poet greets his junost’ once again and remarks how airy or fleshless she is (besplotna), how poor and beautiful. Beauty and matter exist here in an inverse ratio: the more matter, the less attractiveness. Since flesh is part of material processes, of growth and decay, it is inherently transient. Beauty, on the other hand, is permanent. Hence the poet tells this gorgeous presence of his sadness at having seen so many years pass in vain (naprasno). Beauty was always at hand, but rarely glimpsed or sought. Searching is the central concern of the next few stanzas. Across tangible space, both up and down, the hunt is on for a tenuous significance.

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High upon hills of a frozen altitude and down in swamps below the water-table something is sought, but with no apparent success. Borzois do not bark in excitement over a slowing, visible prey; cars vanish into the wastelands. The only sound, as before, comes from the horns of trains. Trees, despite their height, do not manage an escape from this all-consuming flatness. Even they concentrate upon the horizon, in Russian podnebes’e, or that which is beneath (pod) the heavens (nebesa). По замeрзшим холмам молчаливо нeсутся борзыe, срeди красных болот возникают гудки поeздныe, на пустоe шоссe, пропадая в дыму рeдколeсья, вылeтаeт такси, и осины глядят в поднeбeсьe. [Borzois rush silently over frozen hills, train horns arise among red bogs, a taxi flies out onto an empty highway, falling into the smoke of scrubland, while aspens look at the horizon.]

Train horns are a key symbol here, as they “spring up” (voznikajut). Only sound heads skywards. The poet, when talking in subsequent lines about his own noises, says: “I raise my voice, in order that it not collide with the buildings” (Vozvysaju svoj  krik, / ctob s domami emu ne stolknut’sja). The verb “to raise” (vozvysat’) also means “to enoble.” Brodsky will shout in order that some stand be made against flat, massed material, which itself is kicking up a row on the construction site. The word of a young poet once again needs to adopt a lofty register, if the trammels of Soviet rhetoric and its own aspirations to an odic, high style are to be shed. What exactly is up there, though, “on high”? Brodsky suggests that an answer to that question will be discovered posthumously. During our life, “we’ll not find it [our winter] again.” Life is one trip around a seasonal cycle. It displays its great cohesion or overarching significance in death, since “only death will  gather us.” Life ends in the “massive meeting” (gromadnaja vstrec a) of human quietus. Death is depicted as the dark, silent, and calm embrace of one’s shoulders; it is the increase of physical fetters to the point of pressure and stillness. The inexorable processes of a decline towards that meeting can easily breed submissiveness, especially if one starts to see little difference between human and seasonal cycles. At that moment when we will “lose everything,” as the poet has it, “we will become light and shade,” “we become death and heaven.” Shady death or radiant

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heaven are posthumous states; that casts an ominous air over the heaven, paradise, and Eden of the opening stanza. Suddenly Brodsky is on a Dantesque tour of the upper circles, with an very odd Adam and Eve running up ahead. Eve is ashamed of her body and Adam is “bright red” (from either shame or an excess of apples). Adam is glimpsed in an arch, as an animated statue perhaps, and the Dixieland of a feminine spirit becomes the dirge of a masculine body: Brodsky is walking in a post-serpentine Eden. Вот я вновь прохожу в том жe свeтлом раю –с остановки налeво, прeдо мною бeжит, закрываясь ладонями, новая Ева, ярко-красный Адам вдалeкe появляeтся в арках, нeвский вeтeр звeнит заунывно в развeшанных арфах. [So I walk again in that bright heaven, from the bus stop on my left a new Eve runs before me, covering herself with her palms. A bright-red Adam appears far off in the arches and the wind from the Neva sounds dolefully in suspended harps.]

The roiled waters of this arcadia are darker still in the next stanza: “How impetuous life is / in the black and white heaven of new buildings.” Impetuous or striving in what direction? Heaven is not supposed to develop or honour time’s passage. In a place where shady death and radiant life are muddled as “black and whiteness,” a “serpent coils itself / and the sky of heroics is silent.” Physical triumph in Eden (sex) silences a rhetoric of physical triumph (battle) designed ultimately to elevate one above physicality. Posing in the place of a divine rhetoric is a presence Brodsky calls the “unnamed [one],  beautiful and omnipotent,” which “burns above the Fatherland [otc izna]” as a Sun King, radiating a dark blue light. The permanence of this solar presence is manifest in the eyes of the borzois, where “lanterns rustle.” As if to an open flame or will-o’-thewisp, the dogs are drawn to a false guiding light and “there will eternally be somebody walking in isolation by the new buildings.” Brodsky’s situation, as one such walker, is archetypal: the father and the prodigal son. Any solution to that archetype, as Bagrickij’s own prodigal showed, will have to be subjective, potentially subversive, and novel in some other fashion. One possible solution is prefaced or underpinned by the following axiom: “There remains one thing: / to walk the earth untroubled. /

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One must not fall behind. To overtake – only that is possible.” Life is motion, and one’s rivals are running in the same race. To think of this metaphor in wholly linear, athletic terms, however, is to miss its significance. Once Brodsky has “overtaken” his guide or leader, the direction changes radically. The rhetorical or material race, as it stands, is frighteningly unsure; so, too, is the goal of Brodsky’s filial rhetoric, but it is at least superior. He terms it a “bridge,” an “incessant word.” The link of matter and spirit, of inside and outside the Soviet Eden, is built by words, like the carriages of the thundering, incessant train that summoned the jazzy, feminine spirit. То, куда мы спeшим, этот ад или райскоe мeсто, или попросту мрак, тeмнота, это всe нeизвeстно, дорогая страна, постоянный прeдмeт воспeванья, нe любовь ли она? Нeт, она нe имeeт названья. Это – вeчная жизнь: поразитeльный мост, нeумолчноe слово, проплываньe баржи, оживлeньe любви, убиваньe былого, пароходов огни и сияньe витрин, звон трамваeв далeких … [Where are we rushing? Hell or a heavenly place, gloom or simply the dark? It’s all unknown, dear country. The constant object of sung praise – is that love? No, it has no name. It is eternal life, a stunning bridge, an unceasing word, the drift of a barge, the revival of love, the killing of the past, the lights of steamboats and the glare of shop windows, the ring of distant trams…]

The effect of these programmatic stanzas upon their speaker is great; by writing a thought, the poet has advanced through a cognitive process to a revelation. The reference in a prior stanza to “somebody wandering eternally by the new houses” suggested a certain split in the poet’s perception; suddenly he sees himself both subjectively (internally) and objectively (externally). That new self-awareness, relative to other processes – the belittling of a sense of self vis-à-vis “eternal life” or a “dear nation” – leads to a grammatical shift. “I congratulate you on your discovery,” he says to himself, as if a lyrical monologue splits to form a dialogue. Even the word for discovery

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(naxodka) also means “godsend”; the poet chooses to view himself anew and finds himself in a new situation. The naxodka has come at some expense in the concrete, paternal Eden. The poet sarcastically mocks his own tardy processes of selfawareness, his “list of losses at a silent horde of shops.” In the tradeoffs involved in Soviet life, the competition between solid forms for supremacy, the poet had for some time not realized the psychic significances that can be founded upon a materialist worldview. An entirely different identity can be fostered; ignorance, forgetfulness, and deceit are the primary obstacles to such a metamorphosis. This realization, instigated by the prodigal son’s return to Eden, cancels that return; the return trip turns into part of an ongoing progression. Eden is no longer his home, thus the poet is divorced both from any notion of a material residence – and perhaps also the processes of growth and decay to which its residents are subject. This epiphany leaves the poet free of paternal dead-weight, but floating in limbo. He is an “alien,” speaking the “incessant word” that chases ineffable, “eternal life” and fuels the ability to “overtake” paternal figures – to not abandon them, but build upon them, and  then nurture an existence away from Eden, the “Fatherland” (otc izna). Нe жилeц этих мeст; нe мeртвeц, а какой-то посрeдник, совeршeнно один ты кричишь о сeбe напослeдок: никого нe узнал, обознался, забыл, обманулся, слава Богу, зима. Значит, я никуда нe вeрнулся. Слава Богу, чужой. Никого я здeсь нe обвиняю. Ничeго нe узнать. Я иду, тороплюсь, обгоняю. Как лeгко мнe тeпeрь оттого, что ни с кeм нe расстался. Слава Богу, что я на зeмлe бeз отчизны остался. [Not a resident of these places, not a corpse, but something in between. Utterly alone, you call after yourself: you recognized nobody, neither mistook nor forgot them, fooled yourself, thank heavens it is winter. This means I did not return anywhere. Thank heavens I am an outsider, I blame nobody here. There’s nothing to discover; I walk, rush, and overtake. How easy things

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92 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse are for me now that I never left anybody. Thank God that I remained on this Earth without a homeland.]

The final, closing reference to freedom from the Fatherland is followed only by a brief list of maximal  notions, of how long the poet will now live and need nothing – nic ego mne ne nado. Nado, however, rhymes with an expression of how much the poet would also give for a glass of lemonade (stakan limonada). The offhand reference to refreshment harks back awkwardly to the feminine figure of youth, cooling herself in a doorway. The poet uses this self-denigrating rhyme as an admission that retrospection is both sweet and hard to shun. A similar remark is made about the “sadness of a factory chimney and dog’s bark,” they are the sounds of the lost paternal home, recollected at unavoidably maudlin moments. Nevertheless, in the text’s penultimate line the poet equates returning to Eden with the closing of a house; the prodigal son, as in Bagrickij’s poem, is inspired by a journey home to close the door of that same residence and leave it yet again, on each occasion with even greater conviction.

k o n s t a n t y g a l c z y n´ s k i a n d the polish spirit of rebellion The conviction of Ot okrainy k centru comes from having resisted and then remoulded the significance of a paternal, substantial universe. The battle with substance is a large part of Brodsky’s verse for children, as well. The one unruly child of the Soviet family that always meant most to Brodsky was Poland. “There was a practical side to my interest in Polish. In those days the bulk of Western literature, and of news about cultural events in the West, was not available in the Soviet Union, whereas Poland was even at that point the most cheerful barrack in the camp. People there were much better informed and they were publishing all sorts of magazines; everything was translated into Polish. The publishing house Czytelnik was publishing God knows what. I remember I was reading some Malcolm Lowry, some of Proust, some of Faulkner, and also Joyce I read first in Polish. So that was the practical consideration. We needed a window onto Europe, and the Polish langauge provided it” (Husarka, 9). In 1993, given the irreversible damage that Solidarity did to the integrity of the Soviet Empire, Brodsky was willing to credit that nation with nothing less than “destroying the communist system” (Masterov, 4). The psychological traits that made such filial subversion possible were “stubborness, the art of opposition and the talent of mutiny” (Masterov and Boreckij, 43). How does one oppose an imposing

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father, especially in a country fought over by two authorities? Brodsky has remarked before that “Poland was caught [in World War Two] between the Germans and the Russians. In metaphysical terms, they witnessed the fight between Good and Evil” (Lamont, 569). A response to that fight comes from Polish literature. Of the twentieth-century poet Zbigniew Herbert, in fact of all poets, Brodsky writes: “Whether you are a Pole or not, what history wants is to destroy you. The only way to survive, to endure its almost geological pressure, is to acquire the features of a pebble” (1993, 113). Of Czes law Mi losz he says that this stony, material response to matter “is an awfully sober version of stoicism which does not ignore reality, however absurd and horrendous, but accepts it as a new norm that a human being has to absorb without giving up any of his fairly compromised values” (1978, 364). In other words: become like a stone in order to later start a landslide. This instinctive mutiny, contained by the rigid and diminutive constraints of a pebble, appealed to the young poet. A recent collection of Brodsky’s translations by Viktor Kulle notes with regard to Konstanty Ga lczyn´ski (1905–1953) that he was “exceedingly important to his early, ‘romantic’ period. According to eyewitness accounts, Brodsky often read at poetry evenings the translations of ‘Enchanted Droshkies’ and ‘Song of a Banner,’ subjugating the hall to the expressiveness of his delivery” (Kulle, ed., Bog soxranjaet vse., 289: The collection also includes four other poems translated from the Polish). The last of these texts contains exactly the type of resistance praised by Brodsky. Будь жe отважным. Будь жe сильным: нe плачься. Нигдe на свeтe нe прячься. Ни злость Иудина взгляда, ни бомбы, ни грохот снаряда, ни самоe адскоe пламя нe выкрасят польскоe знамя. Останeтся чeстным и чистым. Промчится по склонам гористым. Промчится по всeм пeрeправам рассвeтом бeло-кровавым, бeзумной зарeй над равниной. Останeтся чистым и правым, бeлым, как снeг лавинный, кровавым, как сумрак винный, бeло-кровавым (221–2)

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94 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse [Be brave. Be strong, don’t complain. Don’t hide anywhere on earth. Neither the malice of Judas’s glance, nor bombs nor the thunder of artillery, nor the most hellish flame will dye the Polish banner. It will remain honest and pure. It will fly across mountainous slopes. It will fly across all forges as a white and bloody dawn, as a mad sunrise above the plateau. It will remain pure and true, white as avalanche snow, bloody as a twilight of wine, both white and bloody]

A Soviet edition of Ga lczyn´ski’s work tells us that the poet’s work is “profoundly optimistic. The poet sings of life; of a nature he truly understands, loves and senses; of the labor which has created all that is good upon the Earth; of art born of that labor and art which serves that labor” (3–4). In this palpable aesthetic, Ga lczyn´ski nevertheless manages to see “something unusual, and occasionally fantastic, in the most ordinary objects or phenomena” (9). Czes law Mi losz himself, in evaluating Ga lczyn´ski’s career, sees none of that socialist optimism, but instead a man under material pressure rather than an optimistic materialist. “He assigned to himself the role of the medieval jongleur de Notre Dame, of a weak man, a drunkard, a vagabond, thrown into a world alien to the true desires of his heart, but trying to survive and to bring people something of beauty” (411). Why the contradiction? Ga lczyn´ski’s biography provides an answer of sorts. He was born and educated in Warsaw; during his formative years as a poet he moved among whichever political groups could offer his verse the widest audience. That led to work among right-wing journals, French and Belgian emigrés, and finally socialist Poland after World War Two. Although, as Mi losz himself believes, Ga lczyn´ski’s attachment to socialism was genuine, both his (ugly) desire to be a literary star and his (laudable) desire to find a supra-physical “something of beauty” are married to an apolitical aesthetic, founded on a progression away from physical labour. Ga lczyn´ski uses the rhetoric of socialism for strange purposes.  Those purposes are clearest and strangest of all in the text Vstrec a s mater’ju (1967, 171–8). In the middle of darkness, the poet looks for an elusive feminine presence, one hidden in tangible objects. (I am using only Russian translations of Ga lczyn´ski for two reasons. First, Brodsky was one of his translators; and secondly, a few of my St Petersburg interviewees admitted in hushed tones that the general knowledge of Polish was not that good, and translations were usually read. The following lines are by D. Samojlov)

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95 Bagrickij and Gal czyn ´ ski Ночь. Гдe-то ноeт комар упрямо. Фитилeк чадит, дорогая. Можeт, эти вот звзeды в нeбe Это ты, это ты, родная? Иль на озeрe – бeлый парус? Иль волна на пологом пляжe? Можeт, ты этой звeздной пылью Мнe осыпала лист бумажный? Можeт ты - гудящиe пчeлки В золотом августовском залe? [Night. Somewhere a mosquito whines persistently. The wick smokes, my dear. Perhaps these stars here in the sky are you, my dear? Or a white sail upon a lake? Or a wave upon a sloping beach? Perhaps you sprinkled a sheet of paper with this stardust? Perhaps you are droning bees in August’s golden hall?]

The feminine presence – which vacillates between an actual mother and Mother Nature – is an absent progenitor; perhaps one lost, perhaps not yet acquired, but not audible in human speech. Bees, birds, and wasps are the noises that mark her presence. In entering the maternal realm of “unbounded white snow,” where an elk thumps, a wolf howls, and a forest groans “like the bass of Homer and Shakespeare,” Ga lczyn´ski senses an unspoken, universal harmony. In the harmony of the maternal garden, he senses the presence of his literary forefather, the sixteenth-century poet Jan Kochanowksi. Here the central elements or roots of his song – music, the feminine and filial relationships (zapevka korennaja) – fall into one: И всё – всe музы, и прибой Бeмолeй, ритмов, рифм, и гром, И мeсяц, блeдный родич мой … [Everything – all the muses, the surf of flat keys, rhythms, rhymes and thunder and the moon, my pale relative …]

The fantasy that Ga lczyn´ski senses behind fact is elsewhere expressed in terms both innocent and politically more comprehensible. To reach the “ideal,” labour must overcome an “obstacle”: adolescent self-realization lies along a linear road of physical toil, one

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marked out with little footsteps. In Ju. Vronskij’s Russian version of the poem Idut deti we hear: Труд наш пeсню зажигаeт, Пeсня путь нам освeщаeт – Мы над всeй Зeмлeй развeсим Огоньки вeсeлых пeсeн! Трудных дeл для дружных нeту! Обойдeм мы всю планeту. Если мы прeграду встрeтим, То помогут дeти дeтям. [Our labour ignites a song, the song lights our way – We’ll hang the lights of jolly songs above the Earth! Friends know no hardships! We’ll embrace the entire planet. If we meet an obstacle, then children will help children.]

Brodsky’s own poems for children chart similar, linear adventures in a world of recognizable geography and schoolroom history. Just like Ga lczyn´ski’s text, those of the Russian poet also hint at a subjective process of adult self-realization that is occurring simultaneously in more serious poems. The adventures in tangible space, delineated by the children’s literature, suggest an ongoing metaphysical inquiry, one that peers beyond the “obstacle” of thingness.

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5 Children’s Poetry: Beethoven Discovers America The only truth is goodness … Nobody wins with evil or anger Jakov Gordin

introduction In 1989 Jakov Gordin published four of Joseph Brodsky’s children’s poems in the journal Iskorka; a brief introduction was added in which Gordin offers to some very young readers the biography and work of the Nobel laureate. He begins by noting the impressive list of other twentieth-century Russianpoets who turned their hand to children’s verse: Pasternak, Mandel’stam, Zabolockij, and Xarms. To such company one can add a man “from our home town, from Leningrad. He was born in 1940, just before the Great Patriotic War and spent his childhood in a starving, half-ruined city. Even after the war his youthful years were not always happy, but Brodsky both loved and loves his city; he has written and continues to write poetry about it.” Gordin goes on to emphasize the authority and affection enjoyed by the poet in his American role as a professor, as a “great personality” (krupnaja lic nost’ ). One constant that links the wartime waif and worldfamous writer is an ethical one, important enough for Gordin to end his introduction with it, and for me to steal it as an epigraph. The purpose of this chapter is to look at seven children’s poems published in Soviet periodicals and the relationship of those poems to “goodness.” The poems, none of which were included in subsequent, “adult” collections, were published in the magazines Iskorka and Koster.* * The Koster texts are Ballada o malen’kom buksire (published in 1962 and 1991);  13 ockov (1996) and Ssora (1969). The poems published in Iskorka are those   offered by Gordin in 1989: Kak nebesnyj snarjad; V sest’ casov …; Slon i Marus’ka and Samson. Brodsky’s verse for children has not appeared in authorized versions and is currently being collected for publication in Moscow.

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These texts show Brodsky’s desire to construct a “good,” ethical constancy in a worldview that is “elementary” from two points of view: the poet is establishing the ground rules for a new, novel philosophy not only for himself, but also for his young readers. The relationship of a neophyte to the world is being mapped out in a way that seeks a significance over and above material existence; that significance, hopefully, will be inherently good. Empirical inquiry into tactile existence hopes to discover a positive, a priori and intangible truth (pravota) in or above the world. This inquiry begins in the very first poem Joseph Brodsky ever published: “The Ballad of the Little Tug Boat.” BALLADA O MALEN’KOM BUKSIRE.

the difference between home and away The ballad concerns a tug working in the mouth of the Neva, where the river spills out into the Gulf of Finland – the threshold between city and sea, terra firma and a watery nothingness. The tug, as its very name suggests, is bound firmly to its own ground, to the dead weight of larger ships. The narrative of the poem tells of the tug’s demanding work, directing these ships around the harbour, whilst being unable itself to leave the confines of the river mouth. Both psychological reasons and professional obligations, so to speak, are offered for the tug’s inability to venture farther. The text’s final line tells us how the boat will stay, without complaining, “where I’m needed by others” (nuzen drugim). What exactly are these ties to others? What holds the tug either to bigger ships that weigh more or to weightier responsibilities?  Although the boat may not complain or plan a Polish mjatez, he does nevertheless leave us in no doubt as to his emotional attitude towards hierarchies of harbor life. Those hierarchies are accepted subconsciously or instinctively by the buksir, who in his subservience to bigger ships is isolated against a physical backdrop so big as to be of metaphysical consequence (once again recalling la mar). The “work” or labour in the physical context of the port suggests an incorporeal significance. Я – буксир. Мнe работа моя по нутру. Раньшe всeх кораблeй Я встаю по утру. Подо мною вода.

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99 Children’s Poetry Надо мной нeбeса. Мeжду ними буксирных дымков полоса. Я буксир. Я работаю в этом порту. [I’m a tug. My work suits me. I get up earlier than the other ships. There’s water beneath me. There’s sky above me. Between them a line of tug-boat smoke. I’m a tug. I work in this port.]

The tugboat is not described by Brodsky as an autonomous entity. He is guided and tended to by others. His crew guide, stoke, and service him; a captain steers the tug, a stoker fuels or feeds him coal and two machinists tend to his health. Aware of his daily activities, the tug does not, however, determine them. These bonds to what is heavy and local are expressed as “moorings,” a making-fast or anchor. Every tug leaves the mainland to meet bigger ships, which are then brought to the mainland and themselves tied fast. … отхожу от причала и спeшу в тeмноту, потому что корабль появился в порту. Он пришeл к нам сюда из-за дальних морeй, тeх, гдe мнe никогда нe бросать якорeй. Пeрeсeк окeан – и тeпeрь он у нас. Добрый дeнь, иностранeц, мы привeтствуeм вас! Вы продeлали путь из далeкой страны. Вам пора отдохнуть у причальной стeны … [… I leave my moorings and hurry into the dark, because a ship has appeared in the port. He has come here to us from distant seas, from where I’ll never drop anchor. He crossed the ocean and is now with us. Good day, foreigner! Welcome! You’ve made your journey from a distant land. Time for you to rest at the quayside …]

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Going home at the end of the day, once again “along the moorings”  (vdol’ pric alov), the tug hears perhaps the valediction from the elder or larger ships that can leave their moorings at the dockside. Asking not to be pitied, he tells those ships to “sail from home,” to “greet the native ocean,” to “vanish far away” – all because he is tied or obliged (objazan) to remain close to the land or earth (vozle ètoj zemli). Although this final, published version is the text to be taken as canonical, another version deserves our attention. Brodsky wanted this poem to be accompanied by footage from a well-known film studio (Nauchpop); it was accepted for production and then given a lengthy series of directions, indicating the visual representations for each line. The film, sadly, was never produced, but there exist in the National Library six versions of this text, three of which include professional descriptions of how to visualize the poetry. It seems unlikely that Brodsky wrote these directions around his text, but they act as a priceless record of a contemporary reader’s reaction to Brodsky’s melancholy tale. I will concentrate on a few small quotes from one of the fuller of these “cinematic” variants. It is typed, with handwritten corrections. Before the poetic text even begins, the directions suggest that the “camera move in and out on the moorings. On the moorings stand a line of ships being loaded and unloaded.” Amidst the noise of such activity emerge two boats, one large and domineering, the other a small, auxiliary presence. “Camera beneath the water. The great bulk of a ship, and from the side a little tug.” A little later that tug is described as “rather old and unpainted.” The role of Brodsky’s tug as bound both to the shore and its subsidiary, filial role in the port is made clear by the director’s instructions. Of additional significance is the moment when the tug is obliged to bid farewell to departing craft, because then the inclusion is suggested of “some kind of sad, jazz melody, audible from one of the ships.” The significance of jazz, once again as an audible expression of constraints competing with freedom, is particularly relevant here. That relevance becomes greater still when we see the jazzy melody prefacing some different – and markedly foreign – lines. Собираясь в кружок, Говорят корабли – « Добрый вeчeр, дружок!» Или просто из тьмы, Обработавший груз «Бон суар, мон ами», Тихо шeпчeт француз.

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101 Children’s Poetry Рядом нeмeц твeрдит: «Гутeн абeнд, комрад». «О гуд бай" – долeтит От английских рeбят. [Forming a circle the ships say “Good evening, friend!” Or a Frenchman, having dealt with his cargo, will gently whisper from the darkness: “Bonsoir, mon ami.” Close by a German says: “Guten Abend, Kamerad.” A “Goodbye” flies across from some English children.]

What in the final, published text appears as the positing of a tugboat in the middle of boundlessness appears here as more geographically specific. This is underlined again in both some variant closing lines and their screen directions. The annotated version ends: И хоть [я и] горюю часто Что вот я нe моряк, [И] хоть [я и] тоскую Хоть / нe рeдко О далeких морях, И хоть трудно прощаться С кораблeм дорогим Но я должeн остаться там, гдe нужeн другим. [And although (I also) am sad (often) that I’m not a sailor, (and) although (I also) yearn (Although/ often) for distant seas, and although it’s hard to leave a dear ship, I must stay where I’m needed by others.]

Neither animacy nor “somewhere else” are granted the tug; he remains something stuck at home. This melancholy reduction of metaphysics to the physical world is amplified by the director; the tug’s captain receives a parrot in a cage from a now southbound ship. “The captain looks at the parrot affectionately and sadly.” The most crucial of all the differences between the staged and published versions of this text  lie in three,  tiny introductory lines: Èto – ja./ Moe imja Antej./ Vprocem ja ne antic nyj geroj (“It’s me./ My name is Antaeus./ By the way, I’m not the ancient hero”). The tug, by telling us who he is not, only draws more attention to the classical nonanalogy. He refers (or tries not to refer) to King Antaeus, who was son of Poseidon (the sea) and Mother Earth. (We already sense an inversion or muddling of terrestrial, tangible masculinity and an

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intangible feminine.) Antaeus’s fame was founded upon his skills as a wrestler; he needed only to touch the earth to be replenished by his mother and therefore defeat any opponent. He slept upon the ground in a cave, to remain in constant contact with his life-source. Antaeus’s precautions kept him unbeaten until challenged by Heracles, who realized during unarmed combat with the king that the monarch had to be divorced from the earth if he was ever to be defeated. “Heracles … lifted him high into the air, then cracked his ribs, and, despite the hollow groans of Mother Earth, held him aloft until he died” (Graves, 509). King Antaeus, Joseph Brodsky, and the little tugboat hardly constitute a logical trio. They do, however, all have inextricable ties to the Earth, to place, space, and thingness, which in the case of the speaking tugboat even rob it of animacy: “I’m not an ancient hero, I’m not a sailor.” Neither the king, nor the poet, not even the tug, can leave the parental “home.” The business of the tug’s day, for example, consists of shuttling within the framework of moorings. The work becomes allpossessing and obliterates time. The following quote is from the annotated text. Так тружусь я всeгда, Так тружусь и живу. Забываю во снe, Чeм я был наяву. Постоянно бeгу, Постоянно спeшу, Привожу – увожу, Привожу – увожу. [That’s how I’ve always worked, that’s how I work and live. I forget in my sleep who I am when awake. Always on the run, always in a rush: ship it in – ship it out, ship it in – ship it out.]

The tug, just like its author and captain, is not able to heroically assail the material world and relate such sallies in high pafos. He is in, not on top of, matter. In a moment of extreme self-denigration, Brodsky looks, in another of his children’s poems, to the muddled attempts of beginners at handling a supra-spatial category, time (or, more specifically, human history). He on many occasions has written of the supremacy of time over space, and if here in 1966 he is looking for some ethically informed realm over and above matter, the fact that he does turn so early to temporal matters is significant.

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13 OC KOV: sensible space and nonsensical time The event that needs to be fixed in history is when America was discovered, when a certain individual “moored on its shores.” When and who that was seems unclear, to say the least. The poem in which such issues are debated is “Thirteen Points, Or Verses on the Matter of Who Discovered America.” The main body of the text is given over to arguments between some intellectually challenged school children. Increasingly silly suggestions are made as to who made the discovery. The pretenders to this title are (in order of appearance): Shakespeare (hardly an impressive start), Julius Caesar, Copernicus, Torricelli, Newton, Darwin, Byron, Schiller, Beethoven, Leeuwenhoek, Napoleon, Michelangelo, and Charles V. Three poets, three military leaders, scientists, an artist and a composer. Although we do not begin with the most astute of suggestions, at least a little justification is offered. Shakespeare, living at the time of Caesar, moored his ship to the shore and was promptly chopped to pieces by the natives. The location of America appears to cause no problem: it is time that confuses, not space. Dragged from the messy, myriad dates of history by the school children, a historical figure, as soon as he is introduced, is objectified, grounded, or domesticated, to the point of being granted a patronymic: G.J. Caesar. After the realworld explanation of a temporal hodgepodge, we spin off into outer space, beginning with Copernicus. Dislodging space from its position of prior significance, as his career documents, Copernicus here ushers in an incorrectly identified nation and the superfluous mention of an Italian tragedy by a Frenchman. Events are now all over the place, so to speak, and this jumble invites the crude interjection that a madness of some description has taken hold. – Шeкспир открыл Амeрику. Давно. При Г.Ю. Цeзарe. Он сам причалил к бeрeгу. Потом eго зарeзали. – Вы что? Шeкспир – Амeрику? Он умeр до отплытия! Принадлeжит Копeрнику чeсть этого открытия. – Да нeт, пeру Копeрника, французского поэта, принадлeжит трагeдия

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104 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse «Ромeо и Джульeтта». – Ах нeт, вы просто спятили! [“Shakespeare discovered America. Ages ago, under G.J. Caesar. He moored on shore himself. Then they sliced him up.” “What? Shakespeare – America? He died before they set sail! The honour of that discovery belongs to Copernicus.” “No way, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet comes from the pen of Copernicus, the French poet.” “Not at all! You’ve gone crazy!”]

Doubt over the centrality of earthly matters lets loose references to Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, and Newton, the recorder of Earth’s downward drag. Pressure and gravity are highlighted, at a time when the primacy and centrality of tangible reality is joked about. By the time Newton’s name is proffered, the very need for concrete names is questioned: perhaps some anonymous Roman discovered America. The need to populate time with human markers or mileposts persists, however. The trouble is that by now, even Darwin’s monkeys and Roman emperors are barely distinguishable from one another. – Постойтe, нe Ньютоном, а … – Нужно ли настаивать на имeни? Еe вeдь обнаружили до нашeй эры римлянe! – Я чувствую бeз имeни сeбя совсeм подавлeнным. Вы что, какиe римлянe? Она открыта Дарвином! [“Hold on … Not Newton, but …” “Do we have to insist on a name? After all, America was discovered long before us by Romans!” “It gets me down if I don’t have a name. What do you mean, Romans? Darwin discovered America!”]

As if a collocation of hirsute primates and epoch-making scientists or empires were not enough, the association of sound and geography leads to an equally witless train of shared thought: the Englishman Darwin who studied hairy animals is confused with an English poet blessed with flowing locks. That poet is then confused with an unnamed writer who is both “bald and depressed.” Byron triggers an incorrect association with Schiller and then, by Teutonic analogy, with

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Beethoven. Talk of earthbound and cosmic matters is married unconvincingly in Romanticism. As a result we have the ridiculous union of history and geography, time and space, art and science in a tiny eulogy to Beethoven’s “exemplary service to science.” – Нe Дарвином, а Байроном! – Плeшивым и пришиблeнным? – Да нeт, извeстным барином. – Нe Байроном, а Шиллeром! – Увeрьтeсь, бросив глупости, в суждeньe обоснованном: Амeрика на глобусe нанeсeна Бeтховeном! – Бeтховeна примeрноe служeниe наукам извeстно. [“Not Darwin, but Byron!” “That bald and depressed one?” “No, the famous aristocrat.” “Not Byron, but Schiller!” “When you’ve stopped this nonsense, you can be sure of one opinion that’s well-founded: Beethoven put America on the globe! His exemplary service to science is well known.”]

For the final section of the quarrel, the speed of contradiction accelerates together with the shifts in emphasis: Leeuwenhoek discovered America (it shrinks to microscopic dimensions); Napoleon (it swells again to a nation). Art, in the form of Michelangelo, appears only at a phonic suggestion: the Russian spelling of Napoleon is Buonapart, of Michelangelo it is Buonarroti. Art squeezes itself into the proceedings only by rhyme, not reason, in a world of spatial concerns and conquests. As lunacy takes hold, reference is made to Charles v , King of Spain. Charles  is perhaps most famous for his appearance in Gogol’s Zapiski sumasedsc ego, in which the utterly deranged hero maintains in his lowest, institutionalized moments that he is the King of Spain. Fittingly, then, with Brodsky’s mention of Charles, even temporal logic leaves the premises and the schoolboys are not sure if America was discovered after electricity or before the start of the Ice Age. There remains one step in this painfully aimless dialogue: to come full circle and forget what was said even at the outset. William Shakespeare, the well-known Italian historian and geologist, is once again dragged into the proceedings.

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Here end the puerile ramblings and begins the poet’s participation. He remarks that the door has quite literally been closed on the discussion; while the boys are locked away, help is requested from the reader. The relationship of physical labour (a sailor’s discovery) to a metaphysical dimension (time) needs desparately to be clarified. Brodsky insists that this relationship requires the aforementioned truth or pravota; here he demands veracity or istina, which, by implication, is also a good thing (dobrota). The connection between physical matter and an ethereal domain is ethical. Good students are those who can define the fame of our thirteen heroes. Мы сами – очeнь заняты, а истина – нужна. Даeм очко за правильность. Надeeмся, что справитeсь, пусть это – нeлeгко. Тринадцать лиц, которыe прославились в Истории! ЗА КАЖДОГО – ОЧКО. [We’re very busy ourselves, and we need the truth. We give points for correctness. We hope you’ll work it out, though it’s not easy. Thirteen people, renowned in history! For each of them – one point!]

As if to guide this assessment of physical activity or achievement, there are in the poet’s archives several stanzas that outline correct responses to the question posed by the published text – why each of the thirteen heroes is famous. There are suggested answers for Darwin, Charles v , Copernicus, and Julius Caesar, in no apparent order. The answers are a vitally significant part of interpreting 13 oc kov for two reasons. First, they are the missing answers to Brodsky’s questions. Secondly, they permit us to draw connections between what otherwise is a random list of historical figures. The loudest of all these voices is that of Darwin. Although he is only represented in one of the four answers, everything that is said about Charles, Copernicus, and Caesar is in terms of the survival of the fittest during an endless struggle over matter, over space – which is a finite resource and is therefore hardly likely to satisfy any yearning for the infinite. Darwin is shown as that matter made eternal – as stone, an honorary bust celebrating the systemization of all animate animal matters. Life is objectified as it is schematized; in the process, Darwin’s overarching, planetary plans include the man himself and thus he becomes an object within them.

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The grandest version of this biological battle is war itself. Brodsky jokes at the expense of Gallic history when he writes that “Charles was a most important king/ for good-natured France.” France’s awful military record against Charles is woeful testament to the bestial tendencies of materialists when placed one beside the other. Charles gets more territory and become a bigger fish in an increasingly inadequate pond; only by virtue of his colossal material gains is he worthy of history’s attention. Copernicus, by dislodging little planets in favour of bigger stars, also robs the conflict between big and massive, individual and massed entities of all apparent fairness. Animals fight to the death, he says, and “tragedies” are no different, since they too are of no emotional import. What matter can or cannot do before it falls to a defter foil or a heavier broadsword is here called a “game” (igra). In a real tragedy, Caesar lost such a game to “low-crooked court’sies and base spaniel-fawning.” Prior to his murder, still cursed with regal arrogance, Caesar licks his lips in Brodsky’s description – as a foretaste, perhaps, of further acquisition. He refuses to allow the acquisition of his own bodily space by another, by Brutus et al. Brodsky shows Caesar gaining, and then losing. Дарвин: Музeй живой Природы пуст. В окнe – дeрeвья, крыши. И вдруг смотрю: бeлeeт бюст. Бюстуeт Дарвин в нишe. Карл Пятый: … Был очeнь важным королeм для дружeствeнной Франции. Он войны вeл и приобрeл большиe тeрритории. И так как был большой орeл, оставил слeд в истории. Копeрник: Ну что трагeдии?! Игра. Гeрой пронзил сопeрника; а вот что шло из-под пeра взаправду у Копeрника … Цeзарь: Гай Цeзарь губы облизал и, говорят, что дажe тому, кто звался Брут, сказал: «И ты, мой Брут, туда жe».

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108 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Он притeснял простой народ, и вот пришла расплата притом совсeм наоборот со стороны Сeната. [Darwin: The museum of living nature is empty. Through the window: trees and roofs. Suddenly I see: a whitening bust. Darwin as a bust in a niche. Charles v : … Was a most important king for good-natured France. He waged war and garnered large territories. Thus he was a really big bird and left his mark in history. Copernicus: So what are tragedies?! A game. The hero skewered his rival. And that indeed is what came from the pen of Copernicus, too. Caesar: They say that Caesar licked his lips, and to the one called Brutus intoned “Et tu, Brute.” He oppressed the simple people, then came the reckoning – albeit back to front, since it came from the Senate.]

There is undoubtedly much humour in such lines, but when we bear in mind the kind of overall impression gained from the children’s poetry, such as Gordin offers us, then a serious ethical intent cannot be forgotten or ignored. Take, for example, the final line of the next poem which begs our attention, “Samson, the House-Cat” (Samson, domasnij kot): “Does Samson have any conscience?”

samson the cat: the uselessness of beauty Samson the cat calls into question the need to participate in the dogeat-dog world of Darwinian matter. Brodsky puts this feline, whose very name speaks of a strength potentially lost, quite literally in the middle of things. He is officially registered as a resident of central Leningrad. He lives on the “lane near the church” – a description that recalls Brodsky’s own childhood address (at the junction of Litejnyj Prospekt and Ulica Pestelja, a stone’s throw from Ascension Cathedral). Samson lives where matter overlaps (the crossroads) and near to where it is shunned or overcome (the church). Towards which pole does this big male cat tend, and why is it a matter of “conscience” or “rightness”? Brodsky tells us that Samson is “beautiful and unemployed.” While school children are busy, he “hangs about the rooftops,/ like a star upon the heavens.” Two little paradigms are established here: beauty, uselessness, and ascension, versus (by implication) ugliness, practicality, and the meeting of material conduits. For those of us who can read these poems with the luxury of hindsight and are familiar with

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the poet’s later aesthetic theories, it is easy to see the conscious divorcing of beauty from usefulness, of an ineffable ideal from thingness, of noumena from phenomena, perhaps. Being “by nature carefree,” Samson is not inclined to be phenomenally successful, and is therefore more susceptible to the presence of beauty. He loses in the material world and starts to gain elsewhere. But that loss is good; it allows a chubby feline to be compared with a star in the sky, with ineffable light (born of a material source), radiating from the middle of nowhere. In that case, the star upon high is domesticated, like Samson himself, in the simile of a cat on a windowsill a few floors up. Кот Самсон прописан в цeнтрe, в пeрeулкe возлe цeркви. Он красив и бeзработeн. По натурe – бeззаботeн. И, пока мы в классe пишeм, он слоняeтся по крышам, как звeзда по нeбосводу. А в нeнастную погоду, отказавшись от прогулки, на событья в пeрeулкe смотрит с миной бeзучастной из окна квартиры частной. Вот он влeз на подоконник … [Samson the cat is registered downtown, on the lane near the church. He’s beautiful and unemployed. By nature he’s carefree. And, while we’re writing in class, he hangs about the rooftops like a star upon the heavens. In bad weather, instead of a stroll, he watches events on the lane with an apathetic expression, all from a private apartment’s window. Look – he’s crawled onto the windowsill...]

From his aerial viewpoint Samson observes the busy city below. Of particular importance are his thoughts upon fellow cats who inhabit that city. Since he cannot see his acquaintances, he falls to “disorderly dreams” of them; these dreams are tinged with guilt or a troubled conscience, as Samson himself is at least “guaranteed a night’s rest.” Each cat has a task to attend to, necessary requirements in the tactile world: a drink, dinner, sleep, escape from a dog or, for those who have momentarily succumbed to their urban surroundings, sickness from a chill. The lines that describe Samson’s attitude to these tasks and troubles are the essence of the poem’s moral or conscience-pricking

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conundrum. He has trouble mustering both the energy for selfjustification and verbalizing that justification in a coherent, convincing manner. Многим, муррр, конeчно, хужe … Нe могу им всeм помочь … Потому что скоро – ночь … Это мнe – нe по плeчу … Потому что … спать хочу … [Of course many, miaow, have it worse … I cannot help them all … Because it’ll soon be night … and this is all a little too much for me … Because … I’m sleepy ...]

So, does Samson have a conscience? The question, to be honest, is not especially clear. One might argue that the desire to catch forty winks does not entitle a sizable cat to shirk his social responsibilities. That, in turn, might be countered by the question: What responsibilities? A cat is by nature (po nature) a solitary beast and the grandiose scale  of ideas such as “charity for all cats” is an unmanageable (ne po plec u), state-sponsored, and unnatural notion. What is actually good or right must therefore reside in a smaller framework, on a more personal, subjective scale. How, though, can we be sure? Ethics hardly benefit from obliqueness. An alternate version of Samson offers a less ambiguous view of the cat’s rightness. Related work upon this poem can be found in three places in the National Library (6/16; 182/1; 63/204-5 [#35]). An initial handwritten draft, a typewritten version (very close to the published version) and a larger text that changes the cat’s name to Vas’ka. Even in that earliest, extended jotting of notes, there is an episode mapped out which is missing in the version from Iskorka. A little girl (first termed  a neighbour [sosedka] and then edited to read “chatterbox” [boltuska]) lives with Samson / Vas’ka and attends a nearby school. The cat watches her to make sure that she behaves properly, that she is good and truthful, both at school and at home with her father. Размышляя о глаголe, дeти носятся по школe. И когда болтушкe – Ирe (той, что с ним живeт в квартирe), вдруг приходится в тоскe отвeчать, идти к доскe, –

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111 Children’s Poetry нe спускаeт Васька глаз с Иры. Та глядит на класс, что-то робко отвeчаeт … На всe-то, что получаeт, Васька точно замeчаeт; так что видитe, друзья, Ирe дома врать нeльзя. [Musing on a verb, children rush about the school. When chatterbox Ira (the one who lives with him in the apartment) suddenly has to wearily answer a question or go to the blackboard, Vas’ka doesn’t let her out of his sight. She looks at the class and replies timidly … Vas’ka makes precise note of all she’s awarded because you see, dear friends, Ira must not lie at home.]

Although this variant (63/204–5) is considerably longer and has much to offer as supporting interpretative material for Samson, the little excerpt here is the most direct response to the published text’s closing question. Yes, Samson has a conscience. It is not loudly social, nor is it applicable to large numbers. It seems to embrace an ethic in a world often lacking in such guidelines; it cultivates a potentially public virtue in a maximally private context. Apparently Samson will need first to overcome some instinctively bestial drives; a dropped couplet describes how the instinctual predator Samson  the cars  views below from the dizzy heights of a windowsill: Slovno mys i, mc at masiny. /   Vmesto lap – c etyre siny (“The cars rush by like mice / Instead of feet – four tires”). SLON I MARUS’KA. cumbersome males and nimble females

Brodsky’s tomcat may sit and ponder the ethical significance of doing little whilst caring a great deal; Marus’ka, the poet’s female cat of another poem, acts in a way that displays a different instinct. This second cat lives with the narrator of the poem Slon i Marus’ka (“The Elephant and Marus’ka”). The text was published in Iskorka and tells of an elephant frightened witless by a mouse on circus property. The elephant calls Marus’ka for help and she comes, only to discover that the mouse is both famous and erudite. Eternally grateful to find such a genial – and not ill-willed – rodent on the premises, the elephant gives Marus’ka a ride home, together with the promise that all subsequent visits to the circus for her (and the narrator) will be free.

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The bull elephant is so scared by the presence of the mouse that he wheezes, lies on the floor, suffers palpitations, and feels suffocated. The answer to his physical breakdown comes from a cat, who like Samson is too beautiful not to be at odds with quotidian existence. This female cat, in fact, is so gorgeous that she “not  counting her ears / is not a cat at all, but round-faced beauty” (ne koska: krasa krugolicaja). Called to the circus, Marus’ka saves the male elephant from a troubling female presence. It transpires that the white female mouse “works with the Durovs” – a renowned family of circus performers in Russia since the late nineteenth century. Feared earlier just for her presence, the mouse is now praised for her intellectual or creative capacity. Even Marus’ka had once thought of devouring the mouse, but was won over by her talents. – Хватай eго киска … чeго ты глядишь … – От страха стал Слон цвeта бурого. – Да это жe, гражданe, бeлая мышь! Она жe сотрудница Дурова. Учeная мышь! Палата ума! Я мeсяц назад или около была на ee прeдставлeньe сама и хлопала eй, а нe слопала. [“Grab its tail, don’t stand there gawping” – the elephant turned brown from fear. “But citizens, that’s a white mouse! She works with the Durovs. A scholarly mouse! A towering intellect! About a month ago I was at her performance; I didn’t gobble her up – I applauded her.”]

The internal rhyme here, between “applauding” and “gobbling” (xlopat’ / slopat’) shows the fine line between living and losing to the trials of wordly existence. To become a lauded, lionized “big bird” (as Brodsky writes of Charles v), is to invoke envy or challenge. Given the ruthlessness of any bestial society, being loud and successful can lead to problems with those who aspire to the same status. If a rhetoric that has scaled the heights of the material world – praising prestige and acquisition – does now realize the limitations of that world and the finite nature of matter, then a battle will ensue between different possessors of certain entities. Armies battle each other for land, Charles hounds the good-natured French. Pathos (pafos) without a subsequent, metaphorical intent becomes bluster and an expression of avarice.

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113 Children’s Poetry SSORA. a nasty conclusion to big talk

That may sound a rather heavy-handed conclusion to draw from a discussion of children’s poetry, but a little text from the magazine Koster entitled The Argument (Ssora) shows the close connection between personal aspiration or gain and talking big in a rigidly stratified or schematized social context. The poem is in two parts: a Carrot, lying in its packaging, boasts that she has been invited to visit a Knife. In response, a Cabbage states that she has been invited to visit two Spoons. The end for both vegetables is bleak. They boast to each other about the prestige of an invitation into high society, when in fact they are both destined (at best) for haute cuisine. The little drawings by N. Zvereva that accompany the text show a self-satisfied Carrot (prior to leaving for the Knife), but a terrified Cabbage after arrival at the Spoons’ residence. The Spoons look on with glee at the Cabbage, now jammed into the narrow confines of a soup-pot. The rhetorical one-upmanship of the poem’s dialogue did much to spur the vegetables on to their sticky demise.

a investigation into the nature and durability of matter The third and fourth of the Iskorka poems (which the archives allow us to date as 1962) are linked closely to the poet’s maturing aesthetic. They form a bridge with their “rightness” or “goodness” to the bigger metaphysical issues addressed in adult poems. The two works that allow us to take Brodsky’s bold adventures in the tangible world to the point where space starts to mean  are: At Six O’Clock on New Year’s  little Eve and As a Heavenly Shell (V sest’ c asov pod novyj god ... ⁄ Kak nebesnyj snarjad ...). Before going further, I should note that a variant reading has the title somewhat differently: “As a Heavenly Detachment” (or “Vanguard” – otrjad) which seems to make more sense. The first poem sends the narrator on a whirlwind tour of the globe’s surface, only to return home with incomprehensible speed to Leningrad. The second describes that city in a snowstorm where the architectural outlines become indistinct. Geography merges with metaphysics, all with an eye to what is good and right. As the title suggests, At Six O’Clock on New Year’s Eve takes place a few hours before the start of a new year. In that period, the narrator hopes to fly across the surface of the globe, thanks to the assistance of various machines and mammals, and return home to Leningrad at

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11:55 p.m. Why exactly this trip is planned is not at all clear. It is, however, all related in the future tense and tells of a round trip. It is not a matter of escaping Leningrad, but (without actually going anywhere) a means of exhausting space mentally, or realizing the finite and ultimately unsatisfying nature of loci. Something else resides at home, something worth coming back for; whatever is at home supersedes the notion of space. Hence the significance of the title; geography (the material world) is entered and exhausted in favour of a temporal marker: the narrator demarcates his way with a calendar, not mileposts. The brave tale of adventure, a childlike, accelerated travelogue à la Saint-Exupéry, is told in order that it be rejected as unsatisfying. The acceleration takes place with the help of rapid transportation or animals associated with boundless territories: in the former category are steamships, trains, airplanes, and sleds. In the latter are an albatross, an elephant, whale, tiger, eagle, bear, and wolf. The shifts between these various vehicles are made faster by the means of acquiring them: the verb “to buy” (kupit’) appears in the poem five times, as Brodsky on a whim purchases the ship, train, elephant, whale, and eagle. The narrator gets what he wants when he wants it. For him, space is less a domain over which battles are fought than a commodity which he possesses or trades with great ease and effect. The ability to deal with and “in” space has a rhetorical counterpart. No real-world purchasing is actually taking place; the adventure occurs only in speech. The narrator gets space by commanding it, by assailing it linguistically. Я скажу: – Самолeт, надоeл мнe снeг и лeд. Я в тeпло тeпeрь хочу. Словом, в Африку лeчу. Там куплю сeбe Слона и скажу: – Поeдeм на остров тот, что я искал у доски, – Мадагаскар. … Там куплю сeбe Орла и скажу: – Орeл, дeла таковы – в кратчайший срок мчимся во Владивосток. ...

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115 Children’s Poetry Я в бeрлогу палкой ткну, разбужу Мeдвeдя. – Ну, – скажу, – кончай рeвeть, на Урал вeзи, Мeдвeдь. Там я в горы побeгу, Волка в сани запрягу и скажу: – Давай-ка, брат, полным ходом в Лeнинград. [I’ll say: Airplane, I’m tired of snow and ice. Now I want somewhere warm. In brief, I’ll fly to Africa. There I’ll buy myself an elephant and say: Let’s go to that island I sought on the blackboard – Madagascar … There I’ll buy myself an eagle and I’ll say: Eagle, here’s the deal – and we’ll rush off as fast as possible to Vladivostok … I’ll poke a stick into the lair, and wake the bear: Well, I’ll say, stop that roaring and take me to the Urals, bear. I’ll run into those hills, harness a wolf to the sled and say: ok, bro’, full speed to Leningrad.]

Arriving back at 11:55 p.m., when time is about to manifest itself with great significance and space has been whittled away to naught, thenarrator does “not [even] feel his feet beneath” himself (pod soboj ne c uja nog). He is travelling but making no contact with the earth’s surface. A line has been cast along both a horizontal axis (over the globe) and a vertical one (Brodsky’s journey concentrates on hilly areas), but the only end to this linear passage through the atlas is a final, true connection with a fellow Leningrader. И в Двeнадцать Бeз Пяти, под собой нe чуя ног, позвоню я в ваш звонок. [And at 11:55, not feeling my legs beneath myself, I’ll ring your door bell.]

The final poem from Iskorka – Kak nebesnyj snarjad / otrjad – explains more than any of the other children’s texts the supra-spatial dimension that lies beyond a probing or exhaustion of tangible existence or documented presence on a map. A “heavenly shell” or, as I think it should read, a “heavenly detachment” of snowflakes is descending upon Leningrad. The text describing this snowfall is prefaced by an introductory section which describes the interaction of the snow with the ground below.

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The detachment of flakes descends “on its task (or mission)” to the banks of the Neva and covers the buildings from cornice to sidewalk (or lower still, tumbling beneath a dog’s paws). People and plants receive a similarly “divine” dusting. In fact, St Isaac’s Cathedral, mentioned here, gathers all three domains in itself: architectural mass, human form, and the place of a desired  “ascension,” to remind the reader of the church in Samson, domasnij kot. St Isaac’s is covered “to its knees, its columns …” It is surrounded by snow rising from the ground up, whereas the Hermitage almost collapses from the white weight bearing down upon it. The poet attributes this acquisition of frozen water to its adhesiveness (klejkost’), to its “rustle” against the sides of moving trolley buses. None of this sounds terribly “celestial” (nebesnyj). The snow is viscous enough to inhibit the trolley buses’ movement; it somehow adds to the existing mass of St Isaac’s (already an impossibly broad architectural complex), and threatens the less rigid structure of the Hermitage. The suspicion that this heavy “detachment” is less than heavenly, that it is entering into the material fray, comes not only from the poem’s initial military metaphor, but the reference to snow “beneath a dog’s paw.” The snow is either as low as can be (on the sidewalk, beneath the tread of a lowly beast) or a potentially divine manifestation which once upon the ground is trapped by an inquisitive or acquisitive predator. The snow has entered into the Darwinian world of competing forms of animate(d) objects. Как нeбeсный снаряд (отряд) на своe заданьe, снeг лeтит в Лeнинград – на дома, на зданья, на карниз, на панeль, под собачьи лапы, на пальто, на шинeль, на кусты, на шляпы. На вокзальный пeррон, на лоточeк всякий. До колeн, до колонн занeсeн Исакий. Занeсeн Эрмитаж, ломится от груза и – по пeрвый этаж – помeщeньe ТЮЗа. Снeг лeтит, мeльтeшит,

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117 Children’s Poetry проявляeт клeйкость, о троллeйбус шуршит, о нeго – троллeйбус! [As a heavenly detachment on a mission, the snow falls on Leningrad, on the houses and buildings, on a cornice and sidewalk, beneath a dog’s paws, on a topcoat, on an overcoat, on bushes and hats. Onto a railway platform, on hawkers’ stands. St Isaac’s Cathedral is covered to its knees, to its columns. The Hermitage is covered – it’ll break from the load – and the Young Viewers’ Theatre is covered up to the first floor. The snow is glimpsed as it flies by, proves sticky as it rustles against a bus – and the bus right against it!]

Suddenly the poem shifts from the moving snow to a moving person, trembling beneath a clock. Then comes a question, presumably asked by the man himself: “Who is spinning around?” and the answer comes back: Snow. The question, however, is not set off by inverted commas; neither is the answer. They are robbed of specific significance – that is, they are not attached to one specific person. The question “who” is answered with “what.” The snow straddles (in)animate states and there is an additional, broad meaning hidden in the freezing man “on the run” in that his single presence dissolves into multiple snowflakes. Many flakes compose one person; if we reverse the equation, then the myriad drops of water that fall as a “heavenly detachment” attach themselves to one another and embody the composite figure of a man. What is said about snow is in fact about flesh. Brodsky confirms this in his quickly modified response to the proffered answer “snow”; he says that we ourselves are what is spinning. Snow is us and we are hardly celestial; our task or zadan’e is to gravitate towards and amplify existing material forms. Our rushing around in space only strengthens our bonds to tangible, three-dimensional existence. We may be flung into amorphous snowdrifts or take on the inanimate shape of a snowman. We spin in a process so universal that Brodsky equates it with the movement of the Earth. The movement is not a jolly one. At the time when any stability of wintry forms is lost, once again a canine paw or claw is referred to as our fate in the face of a bigger, fitter presence. A snowflake’s ultimate demise occurs, as ever, in a liminal location, in a warm doorway. It vanishes altogether in a courtyard or apartment’s entrance; the vaguely ethereal, airborne status of snow dies not on the way out of an enclosure, but on the way into a domestic and domesticating box.

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118 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse На бeгу чeловeк вздрогнeт под часами: кто здeсь кружится? Снeг. Вот и нeт, – мы сами. Мы лeтим к фонарям, на ступeньки лeстниц, по садам, по полям, прямо в нeизвeстность. Разгоняeмся – хлоп под собачью лапу. То ли свалят в сугроб, то ли слeпят бабу. Мы лeтим, мeльтeшим, в снeгопад влeтаeм, будто вниз мы спeшим, в подворотнях таeм. Обрываeтся слeд за двeрной пружинкой. И вращаeтся свeт вмeстe со снeжинкой. [A man on the run will quiver beneath a clock: Who’s spinning around here? Snow. Yet it’s not – it’s us ourselves. We fly to street lamps, up the steps of stairwells, across gardens and fields, straight into obscurity. We gather speed and end up beneath a dog’s paw. Dumped in a snowdrift or forming a snowman. We’re glimpsed as we fly into the snowfall as if we’re rushing downwards and melt in a doorway. The trail cuts off after the door-spring. And the light revolves, together with a snowflake.]

conclusion This poem opens Jakov Gordin’s selection for the Iskorka readers. What here is “good” or “true,” then? The key lies in the final adverb of the text, the final indication of the direction in which space and matter are exhausted: “downwards” (vniz). In these children’s poems of adventure, of the limitations of the tangible world, an ethical weight is attached to the futility or “wrongness” of conflict within a hierarchical, tangible world. If success is determined by the survival of the fittest, then both success and inevitable decline or failure are enacted in, limited, and defined by the very material world they hope to

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conquer. The adverb vniz in Brodsky’s poem encapsulates the woefully inadequate parameters of such affairs. How can that bad or untrue descent be transformed into an ascent (vverx)? A crucial step from the daring assault upon space to a higher goal comes in the poem of 1962, Zof’ja. Here we see an initially faltering investigation of snow-wrapped Leningrad transform itself into a paradoxically vigorous advocation of losing in the material world in favour of a higher, feminine Muse. That goal is of explicitly Polish origin, which will allow us to draw some instructive parallels with prior chapters.

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6 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse  Both Spektorskij and the Evangelical poems from Doktor Z ivago – they were extremely important for Brodsky.  A. Kusner Well, he [Pasternak] was one of the greatest poets, but it’s awfully hard to talk about it. “Questions,” 6

introduction In an interview of 1981, Brodsky was asked to make a few observations about the literary intent of his youthful Leningrad verse. He replied that “what the youngest poets in the late fifties and early sixties were busy with was extremely reminiscent, as an example, of early Pasternak … That is Pasternak, Xlebnikov and others, so to say, bequeathed [us] their shoots, like a plant, like a seed placed in the ground. And suddenly they all sprouted” (Èpel’buan, 36). Brodsky often said that he valued Pasternak’s poetry very highly. “Pasternak is an excellent poet, a much more interesting poet than an author of prose, although theoretically he was awarded [the Nobel prize] for a novel …” (Lyubarsky, 62). The Nobel committee’s decision-making processes have been cruelly criticized by Brodsky in the past (specifically with regard to Soloxov), and he even suggests in a  1989 interview that the official Swedish lauding of Doktor Z ivago should be enough to sway a curious reader towards Pasternak’s poetry  (Mirc ev, 24). The largest uninterrupted investigation by Brodsky of  his predecessor’s “powerful verses” (sil’nye stiski) comes in a paper he delivered to a Cvetaeva conference of 1992, in which he assesses Pasternak’s debt to the poetess. Some aspects of the speech will serve to explain the logic and intent of this chapter and the next, which concern Pasternak and Cvetaeva. Brodsky notes that a genuine poet cultivates a debt to his or her predecessors in a way that runs counter to notions of the anxiety of

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influence. He discusses such a debt as it relates to Pasternak’s and Cvetaeva’s depictions of Mary Magdalene’s sufferings. The two biblical texts in question are close enough that they constitute a “dialogue, or – more accurately – a duet. The [Pasternak] poem of 1949 appears as a continuation of the 1923 [Cvetaeva] poem … Pasternak’s text follows after Cvetaeva’s as a continuation of diction or – to take things further – as a continuation of the subject” (1994, 276–7). The desired relationship of such a literary resurrection to its progenitor, to the act of the Logos, is a difficult and frustrating one. Pasternak, notes Brodsky, “ was a man, and in his experience love was always addressed to a woman. The death of Christ upon the cross could not therefore be perceived by him as a personal loss” (281–2). Pasternak was obliged by his predetermined relationship to his Muse, his female precursor or ideal reader (and even to the Logos, the work of the Father) to start his poetic craft from a quieter, lowlier coordinate. “Pasternak begins his poem as a novelist: from quotidian exist ence  [byt], from a conscious lowering of his point of reference [toc ka otc eta]. This is done according to strategic considerations, in order to raise oneself more or less higher, since he is proposing that such a height be attained. That [slow ascent] is opposed to Cvetaeva, who almost always starts from the upper doh” (278). Pasternak, by virtue of his unavoidably earthbound status in terms of gender, of poetic and spiritual heritage, will begin a lexically-fuelled pursuit of his Muse, be it female or the Father’s Logos. The heritage that Brodsky lauds in this chapter’s second epigraph is Pasternak’s poetry. Pasternak, having spoken himself to the heights of a woman’s poetry, is now followed by Brodsky. True to the mundane interpretation of male poetry offered by Brodsky, he sees in himself the influence of Pasternak’s verse upon a generation, as a seed sprouting deep in the fertile soil of young bibliophiles. Pasternak offers a “lowered point of reference” to the young men in Leningrad – a grounded experience of ineffable presence. SPEKTORSKIJ: to PROPAST’

from

PREDMEST’E

 From the conference paper and Aleksandr Kusner’s quote in the first epigraph to this chapter, it is clear that Spektorskij (1: 336–73) is perhaps the single poem of Brodsky’s poetic grounding. What, however, is the relation of that text to Cvetaeva and to Brodsky’s experience of her through Pasternak? Spektorskij, in the form that we now know it, was written between 1925 and 1931. The text tells of its eponymous hero and his relationships

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with two women: Ol’ga Buxteeva and Mar’ja Il’ina. The latter is thought to be based upon Marina Cvetaeva. The former is associated with bold, political (masculine) attributes of the Revolution, whereas the latter is much more culturally grounded and therefore more socially passive, with her tendency towards retrospection. In other words, Spektorskij shows a wilful passivity before Il’ina, who herself displays a certain passivity before the ethical and spiritual wealth of her academic upbringing (her father, like Cvetaeva’s, was a professor). Pasternak’s heroine, Mar’ja Il’ina … is a de facto victim of historical circumstances, a captive of a way of life already crumbling around her … When Spektorskij meets her, she is alone in an alien world, in mourning for her father, a representative of a bygone age, on the verge of becoming homeless … [Through such liminality] Mar’ja Il’ina’s image takes on a greater significance than her actual persona. She is thus transformed into an ‘image’ or ‘vision’ … Mar’ja Il’ina becomes an image of the pure soul, the poetic spirit, of the poet destined to live in an alien social political and cultural environment. Her love affair is a Pasternakian idyll … True love becomes synonymous with the pure soul or poetic spirit … (Harris, 403–4)

That spirit is so evidently within Mar’ja Il’ina that one critic has called her “the real reason” for writing Spektorskij and claimed that the hero  is “faceless and without any marked qualities” (Flejsman, 163). Mar’ja, through her connection with Marina Cvetaeva, is also faceless, but in a qualitatively different way. She is a poetess whose work has fallen out of official favour, necessitating her removal from the otherwise conspicuous realm of Soviet literary renown. Even at the time of initial literary successes, she had been seen as a writer at a certain remove from the main body or stream of national verse. Она была в чeсти и на виду, Но указанья шли из страшной дали И отсылали к старому труду, Которого ужe нe обсуждали. ... Всe, как один, всяк за дeсятeрых, Хвалили стиль и новизну мeтафор, И с островами спорил матeрик, Английский ли она иль русский автор. [She was respected and in public view, but mention was made from far away of an old work, one not discussed for ages …

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123 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse Everybody to a man, one for all, praised her style and novelty of metaphors. The islands argued with the mainland as to whether she was an English or Russian author.]

The woman based upon Marina thus belongs mysteriously to no landed mass, to neither mainland (materik), nor islands, to neither Russia nor England. Avoiding both materik and matter, Mar’ja is also connected to the equally mystical pursuits of Masonry. Abandoned by her generation and the political status quo, Mar’ja lives in a building that once housed a Masonic lodge, was then taken over by the state, and is now under seige from state-funded builders who do little but reduce the old temple (and Mar’ja’s home) to ruins. To this empty, silent architectural form, Mar’ja adds a loud and elemental noise. She is heard more than felt. “Dates were made: in the noise of birds, / In rain-clusters, in bird cherry and thunderclaps – / Everywhere where there is life and people do not part.” Sound, untouched by material ruin, is where these “two [people] will not separate.” When they must at last part, however, both head off “into the empyrean,” following a final roll of thunder – “now between them there yawned abysses” (propasti). When Spektorskij first sees Mar’ja she is sitting close to a window, “above an abyss [propast’] and saying nothing.” The character who seeks such a “pure soul or poetic spirit” that is far from language, yet close to elemental noise, is not – as Pasternak himself admits in no uncertain terms – a hero  (Ja b za geroja ne dal nicego / I rassuzdat’ o nem ne skoro b nacal). The lack of heroism is attributable not only to  the male lead but also to the narrator and author. As Lazar’ Flejsman notes in his book on Pasternak’s work of the 1920s, since both the hero and narrator are writers, a certain conflation is unavoidable. Spektorskij knows Mar’ja  personally, the narrator knows her from her books (Flejsman, 163). Both the narrator (whose own lyric “I” seems at times to merge with that of Pasternak) and Spektorskij yearn for a woman, based by Pasternak upon Cvetaeva. Brodsky writes of Pasternak’s poems on Magdalene as a prosaic project that aims to attain the heights of Cvetaeva’s sympathies with the sufferings of a paternal Logos; we can see this striving in Spektorskij, too. The hero, narrator, and author advance towards the poetic presence of Cvetaeva, christened with a then-popular literary name for  Lenin – Il’in. As Flejsman writes, “this blasphemous identification of Cvetaeva with the leader of the Revolution was born of the process of identifying … the Revolution with a ‘feminine’ source. Moreover, it is testament to Pasternak’s fundamental conviction that opposites converge in the conditions of revolutionary elements” (169). The Muse and Father are as one or, more accurately, the Muse is so strong as to

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usurp the father, hence the passivity or “facelessness” of Spektorskij in the face of a feminine presence that is much stronger than himself, though it says much less. The primary context in which Spektorskij, isolated from the active, busy processes of social existence, makes the transition to Mar’ja’s ineffable femininity is that of winter. Many times in Pasternak’s poem snow creates a boundless expanse, a divorce from concrete forms and concepts. That divorce leads to introspection and matters of metaphysical or existential import. Take, as a closing example, the opening to chapter one in which space secedes to isolated figures posited in a dizzying, bottomless chasm (propast’ ) on the edge or suburb (predmest’e) of formal certainty. И вот идeт подвыпивший разиня. Кабак как в половодьe унeсло. По лбу eго, как по галош рeзинe, Проволоклось раздолий помeло. Пространство спит, влюблeнноe в пространство. И город грeзит, по уши в водe, И морe просьб, забывшихся и страстных, Спросонья плeщeт нeизвeстно гдe. Стоит и за сeрдцe хватаeт бормот Дворов, прeдмeстий, мокрой мостовой, Калиток, капeль … Чудный гул бeз формы, Как обморок и разговор с собой. … В раскатах, затихающих к вокзалам, Бушуeт мысль о собствeнной судьбe, О сильной боли, о довольствe малым, О синeй волe, о самом сeбe. [Here comes a tipsy scatterbrain. The tavern seemed adrift at high water. Across his brow, as across rubber galoshes, a mop of expanses tarried. Space sleeps, in love with space. The city dreams, ear-deep in water and a sea of passionate, forgotten questions barely wakens and splashes heavens knows where. A mumble continues and grabs the heart – from courtyards, suburbs, wet pavement, gates, raindrops … A miraculous roar without form, like swooning and a conversation with oneself. In peals, lessening towards the station, there rages a thought about one’s fate, great pain and resignation to paucity, about a darkblue freedom, about oneself.]

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Brodsky employs the same backdrop in Zof’ja in order to address Pasternak’s “sea of thoughts about oneself.”

two women, two muses: brodsky’s ZOF’JA and pasternak’s MAR’JA IL’INA Thus far I have examined one major narrative poem Brodsky wrote in 1962 – Ot okrainy k centru. Two others of the same year underline the Pasternakian and Cvetaevan influences. Those influences surface only months before Brodsky’s daring investigation of existential limits:  Bol’saja èlegija Dzonu Donnu and Isaak i Avraam. In this and the following chapter I will examine the tentative, Pasternakian Zof’ja and the Cvetaevan Xolmy. Together they use the verse of Pasternak and Cvetaeva to lay an ethical groundwork for the spiralling ascent of the verses that attempt subsequently to outdo the wit of seventeenthcentury metaphysical narratives. The role of Pasternak’s Mar’ja is taken by Brodsky’s Zof’ja. Just as Pasternak’s prosaic grounding in biography marks the start of an ascent to spiritual matters, so Brodsky’s heroine is also in part a real-life figure. An interview of 1987 with the poet deepens the context: “I knew a girl who was from Poland, Zos´ka was her name; she was studying in Leningrad then. She was married to a physicist, an athletic fellow, so it was a dangerous acquaintance. She knew I was writing poetry so she gave me, or rather I heard in her apartment, a record of Ga lczyn´ski reading some of his poems and I liked them very much … I sort of understood them, because after all the languages are quite similar” (Husarka, 9). The interviewer notes that, in the view of another Polish visitor at the same time, Brodsky was “emotionally ecstatic” about Poland. That emotion is transferred in Brodsky’s poem. The boundless expanses of snow in Ga lczyn´ski’s Vstrec a s mater’ju or Pasternak’s Spektorskij become again the backdrop for the “maternal” or feminine spirit. The celebration of that spirit comes in the longer, rambling form of a poèma: it takes more words to get closer to what words maybe cannot say. The sense of movement in a poèma that allows one to chase what a lyric cannot is referred to in a letter by Pasternak, written about Spektorskij in 1928. “For the first time in my life I seem to have written a large piece of narrative lyric verse with a beginning and an ending, where everything is transformed by the medium of the tale, as in prose … For the first time the compositional medium [stixija] has entered my experience as an integral element, that is, I have experienced it as something instinctively simple, just like metaphor, melody, meter, or a line or verse” (Barnes, 408). That prosaic, sometimes self-doubting narrative drive is couched in iambic pentameter, iambs being explicitly associated by Pasternak with

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 Puskin. The age-old, time-worn connotations of such a form were for the author a vehicle for “strength, and … growth, accompanied by the growth of a general moral [nravstvennyj] force, [which] is the sole plot for a lyric poet” (Barnes, 350). A lyric poet uses a type of verse associated with Puskin to invoke an old, prosaic set of morally superior values and thus pursue a feminine spiritual ideal, itself founded upon an actual acquaintance. My interview with Jakov Gordin revealed Brodsky’s own association  of iambs – the feet of Zof’ja – with Puskin in the year of that poem’s composition. “There was that period from  the start of the 1960s when he used exclusively the exactness of Puskinian form: Peterburgskij roman [like Zof’ja, written in 1961-62], a whole list of other stuff   – it’s simply reminiscences of Puskin, of the Puskinian iamb, of Puskinian form. But fortunately he soon went beyond that.” Brodsky called upon  Puskin in 1962, the year before Bol’saja èlegija and Isaak i Avraam, in order to try and go through or beyond something. He did so by courting the female presence that introduced him to Ga lczyn´ski’s spiritually driven romanticism. The need to go beyond what is “generally moral” must surely involve an element of doubt about the activity at hand. Pasternak, in a letter just after the completion of his poem, wrote: “I know it’s a failure, but what I do not know is whether its publication is at all feasible” (Flejsman, 137). In an attempt to convince himself of his project’s worth, in the middle of Spektorskij Pasternak addresses the text itself (or, rather, its Muse). Poetry is asked not to focus its attention upon the details of the quantifiable material world: it should concentrate upon the road, not the steps required to travel it; it should emphasize the poem, rather than the quantity of words required to complete it. The goal, if attained, will justify the vehicle required to get there. With the crudity of an armed assault, poetry should shake the individual from the security of his existence or significance in the tangible world. Poetry, in no uncertain terms, should bring its reader to a state of metaphysical uncertainty. Поэзия, нe поступайся ширью. Храни живую точность: точность тайн. Нe занимайся точками в пунктирe И зeрeн в мeрe хлeба нe считай. Нeдоумeньeм мeди орудийной Стeсни дыханьe и спроси чтeца: Нeужто, жив в охватe той картины, Он вeрит в быль отдeльного лица?

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127 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse [Poetry, don’t forgo your breadth. Preserve the exactness of life, the exactness of secrets. Don’t fuss over a dotted line’s dots or grains in a slice of bread. With the bewilderment of gun-copper, inhibit breathing and ask the reader: Does he really, living in the confines of such a picture, believe in the truth of an individual person?]

 The idea of being specific [toc nyj] in order to lose that exactness, of doing in order to undo, the connection between rising and falling – all of this is integral to Brodsky’s Zof’ja. The poem, towards its conclusion, invokes Orpheus and Christ together as a central, doubled metaphor of rising and falling (or vice versa). Brodsky tells a Polish tale of his own wavering individuality by surrendering, losing to or descending before a quiet, feminine presence. Zof’ja takes the place of Mar’ja Il’ina; she also takes the place of Marina Cvetaeva, since Brodsky’s true address to Cvetaeva comes in the poem Xolmy. By moving through the text of Zof’ja to the closing Orphic references, we will see how Brodsky’s relationship to Zof’ja is that of Pasternak to both Mar’ja and Marina. The connection between these men and their yearning is both mythologized and typologically organized, just as it was for Cvetaeva herself, in her use of the same myth. “Myth [for her] served not as a source of specific allegorization, but rather as an incentive for typological thinking. It provided the creative framework, the pattern and the formulae by means of which various facets of existence are interrelated into a comprehensible whole” (Hasty, 6). The comprehensible wholeness of gender, generic and typological coincidences all lead us to select Spektorskij as a text from Pasternak’s corpus through which to view Zof’ja, not only because Brodsky emphasizes the poet and the period in various interviews, but  because Kusner tells us that the poet was influenced by that text.

the text of

ZOF’JA:

chapter one

Zof’ja is composed of two chapters, the first of which is broken up into forty-one six-line stanzas, followed by fourteen separate couplets in the same meter. The chapter has four key emphases: the narrator sitting by the window of an apartment on a snowy evening; the intrusion of some seemingly real trees into that apartment; the activities of the family members during this time; and a threatening, anonymous presence that interrupts the confusion. (I say “narrator” because although there is no reason to doubt the first-person, lyrical voice as Brodsky’s, there are constant references to a brother in the family and the poet was an only child.)

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Both Brodsky and Pasternak set their poems at Christmas-time and isolate a lyrical narrator, who often merges with the author, in a snowy  nothingness. Pasternak punctuates his scene with bright posters (afisi), Brodsky with advertisements; the former poet describes in this dissolution of solid space a “tipsy scatterbrain” who wanders across a white canvas of snow; Brodsky writes of a drunk (p’janica). Pasternak lets the “mop of expanses” sweep across the brow of this disoriented lush; his head is crowned by the existential carte blanche of the snow. Brodsky’s drunk stops still at the decision-making point of a crossroads and is crowned not by the vagaries of emptiness but by the halo of a street lamp’s reflection. A confrontation looms between the drunk and a policeman, yet the potential divinity hidden in this metaphysical whiteness is not spoiled by the intrusion of earthly law and order, for one of the two men’s “footsteps vanished,/ as if he appeared from the heavens.” The spirituality inherent in this metaphorical description of lonely, dizzying choices is accompanied by fear (strax) which is felt so strongly that it takes on a physical presence: the darkness of the night, the firmness of urban forms, cannot hide the “horde of shadows” that are rushing across the immaterial, frozen whiteness. As space is said to “sleep” in the snow of Pasternak’s poem, so boundless night becomes the domain of opposite, “unknown forces” in Zof’ja. В сочeльник я был зван на пироги. За окнами описывал круги сырой eжeвeчeрний снeгопад, рeкламы загорались нeвпопад, я к форточкe прижался головой: за окнами маячил постовой. … … на пeрeкрeсткe пьяница возник, eщe плотнeй я к форточкe приник. … На пeрeкрeсткe пьяница застыл. Всe тeни за окном учeтвeря, качалось отражeньe фонаря у пьяницы как раз над головой. От будки отдeлился постовой и двинулся вдоль стeнки до угла, а тeнь в другую сторону пошла. …

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129 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse Дул вeтeр и раскачивался куст, был снeгопад мeдлитeлeн и густ. Под снeжною завeсою сплошной стоял он, окружeнный бeлизной. Шeл снeгопад, и слeд eго исчeз, как будто он явился из нeбeс. … Я думаю порой о том, что ночь, нe в силах снeгопада прeвозмочь и дажe ни на чeтвeрть, ни на трeть нe в силах сонм тeнeй прeодолeть, который снeгопад прeвозносил, даeт простор для нeизвeстных сил. [On Christmas Eve I was called in for pastries. The usual raw evening snow described circles outside the window, the advertisements lit up inopportunely and I pressed my head to the window: outside a policeman loomed. A drunkard arose at the crossroads; I pressed closer still to the window. The drunkard froze at the crossroads. All shadows outside quadrupled, the reflection of the street lamp swayed by the drunkard, right above his head. A guard left his box and moved down the wall to the corner, but the shadow moved in the other direction. The wind blew and the bush swung, the snowfall was slow and thick. He stood beneath a complete curtain of snow, surrounded by whiteness. The snow continued and his steps vanished, as if he appeared from the heavens. At times I think that the night cannot overcome the snowfall, that it cannot overcome the horde of shadows that extolled the snowfall even by a quarter or a third. That night gives free rein to unknown forces.]

Brodsky then turns his attention to the mother, father, and brother in the apartment who are, respectively, darning, cleaning a camera, and leafing through magazines. Nobody in this poem speaks out loud; the air of peace and quiet is strongly felt in the family scenes. During this time the narrator stares in the mirror “like Narcissus.” What happens for the rest of the text will tear the narrator from his selfabsorption and leave him in a state, like Pasternak’s Spektorskij, where he doubts the “individuality of his person.” That doubt begins with the vaguest of references to a bush (kust) that stands in the snow during the drunkard’s scene. An odd enough

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object on a Leningrad street, the bush seems a precursor to the odder still intrusion of trees into the apartment, an event that takes place in the following manner. The clanking of a door bolt is suddenly heard in the apartment, which is worrying enough to prompt the capitalized warning that “one must not believe in bolts now.” Someone or something is in the room. It soon manifests itself as a series of branches, leaves, and trunks, which the narrator describes in shock as they “twisted with their roots into our eyes.” It transpires that the noise of the foliage outside made the trees seem physically present indoors (or perhaps, as is suggested, just reflected in the eyes of family members). The bush outside, near the drunk, swells meanwhile to the dimensions of a tree, leaving the narrator just as dumbstruck as that inebriate. The comparison is possible because the narrator’s mirrored reflection is now also lit from behind by the halo of a lamp. The triptych of policeman – drunkard – fear is matched now by narrator – reflection – yearning (toska). Both the alcoholic and the narrator are alone in the face of a dialogue between fear (a desire to retreat from what the snow represents) and yearning (a desire to go somewhere). The explanation of the trees outside being reflected in the eyes of the family inside makes some sense as a parallel to the narrator’s own narcissistic experience of his reflection in the mirror. If so, then we have a paradigmatic organization to another aspect of Zof’ja, a series of oppositions between material and immaterial states: sober policeman versus drunkenness; physical narrator versus intangible reflection; actual family members versus non-existent trees. Those trees are a product of sound, one awe-inspiring enough to shut the narrator up, to make him immobile at his own existential crossroads. Появится ли кто-нибудь мeж нас! Протянeтся ли что-нибудь из глаз, похожee на дeрeво в пыли. Уста мои разжаться нe могли, в обоях на стeнe явился мeл, от ужаса я вeсь окостeнeл. Дeрeвья в нашeй комнатe росли! вeтвями доставая до зeмли и такжe доставая потолка, вытряхивая пыль из уголка, но корни их в глазах у нас вились, вeршины в цeнтрe комнаты сплeлись.

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131 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse Я вглядывался в комнату трeзвeй, всe было лишь шуршаниe вeтвeй, ни хвоя, ни листва их нe видна … … Всe кончилось впотьмах, как началось, всe кончилось, бeсшумно улeглось, и снова воцарилась полумгла, мeлькнула мeжду стульями игла, я замeр в полумракe у окна, и снова воцарилась тишина. [Maybe someone will appear among us! Something will stretch out from our eyes, like a tree in dust. My lips could not open, chalk appeared in the wallpaper and I turned to stone from fear. Trees have grown in our room! They reach the ground with their branches and reach the ceiling, too, shaking dust from the corner. But they have twisted their roots into our eyes, the treetops have wound together in the middle of room. I looked into the room more soberly; there was just the rustle of branches, neither needles nor leaves could be seen. It all ended as it began, in the dark, it ended and settled silently; the penumbra appeared once more; a needle was glimpsed between the chairs. I died away in the half-darkness and silence arose once more.]

The immaterial bush and trees made noise; now at the outset of this final section, the wind blows, emptiness “drones,” the telephone “rings out lightly” and this activity interrupts the “reign of quiet.” The narrator receives an anonymous telephone call. It begins with twenty syntactically parallel observations, all of which inform the narrator of what he will no longer have, of what he will now lose (ne budet …). The degree of loss is huge. The narrator is told he will not only lose what is positive or desirable, but everything that constitutes the past and his reality: “The past will turn its back, / reality will be covered with a shroud.” The narrator will be robbed of holidays, lodging, kisses, seasons, yearning, nostalgia, passion and evil, the compassion of warmth, bread, water, tears, memory, dreams and “previous reason”  (preznij um). He hangs up, but the voice keeps talking in a disjointed fashion, continuing the associative chain of bush–tree–telephone call. Any reference to spiritually significant, garrulous shrubbery in the wilderness recalls Moses and the events in Exodus. Moses is told by a

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bush (“in the backside of the desert”) that represents “Abraham, the God of Isaac” to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. God’s command wipes out the significance of Moses’s past life, such that he asks “who am I,” to do such a deed. Not only the past and personal identity vanish: Moses is also uncertain of his ability to speak the future, to utter words in honour (and worthy) of the spirit that speaks to him: “I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” Moses will even be unable to name the source of his divine inspiration: “i am that i am,” says God, calling “to him [Moses] out of the midst of the bush.” ZOF’JA:

chapter two

Who or what speaks to Brodsky in the form of a silent bush, noisy trees, or disjointed phone calls? The second chapter of Zof’ja will hopefully provide an answer, one in which the woman named in its title might make even the briefest of appearances. Thus far she is utterly absent and her presence is chapter two is hardly clear-cut. The reason for such confusion is the same as in Spektorskij: an overlap between prosaic and poetic intent. Is the narrator entirely separate from the author and is the female character fictitious or real? Is she perhaps the text’s primary addressee – in which case the poem becomes an epistle, from Pasternak to Cvetaeva, from Brodsky to Zos´ka. The actual participants hide behind a literary mask or façade. The notion of masquerading is strong from the beginning of chapter two, which starts in exactly the same manner as chapter one. “On Christmas Eve I was called in for pastries.” Many lines describing the snow in chapter one are shipped wholesale into this second section. The difference beween them, though, is made clear by the last line of the first half: “I tied my tie and went out.” The narrator is now downstairs, where the drunk was. He was looking down on the drunk and “receiving” the visible and audible information sent by the action below. Now he is himself down below and sending information upwards. I say “up” because Zof’ja does appear to make her debut in chapter two, in a few, sizable second-person passages. Her presence invites the narrator’s or poet’s admiration and awe as he directs his praise towards her from his lowly location. Although Brodsky, like Pasternak, lowers his “point of reference”   (toc ka otc eta) to the street, it is to enter the fray of matter and spirit, stone and snow, sobriety and drunkenness in order to overcome it. The differences between the wintry cityscapes of the two chapters

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usher in exactly that type of competition between form and formlessness (content?), depicting it as noise. Качался над сугробами забор, раскачивлася в сумракe собор, внутри eго подрагивал придeл, раскачивался колокол, гудeл, подрагивали стрeлки на часах, раскачивался Бог на нeбeсах. [The fence swung above the snowdrifts, the cathedral rocked in the dusk and the side-chapel trembled within, the bell swung, rang out, the hands trembled on the clock, God swung in the sky.]

 The reflexive verb “to swing or shake loose” (raskac ivat’sja) is applied to a multitude of objects, but suddenly it becomes transitive in the middle of a question: the narrator wonders who might know how to shake loose yearning (toska). He hopes that with a “touch to the temple” the bush, drawn out by light bulbs, might swing “like a pendulum of feelings / (confusion – abasement – revenge) / with the difference that time not be counted … that feelings not be announced [peredat’].” The experience sought is (at least initially) of conscious or mental origin and it involves three stages of confusion, abasement and revenge. The poet / narrator has passed through the initial confusion of chapter one and is now undergoing a Pasternakian abasement (or descent) in order that revenge be taken against the material world which demarcates the space marking movement “down.” That revenge would effect an ascent above the limits of fleshy existence (since time is the monitor of physicality’s lamentable transience). The experience would be ineffable, or spoiled by any transformation into a simplified, ethically crude guidebook for others of similar spiritual intent. “In order to announce such feelings,” the poet writes, “one ought not – on Christmas Eve – / to invade the encroaching dark” with candles that “artificially push aside the gloom.” He launches into a section of self-denigration, beginning with a series of questions. “Who shuddered in anticipation of misfortune, / anticipating boundless woe?” The logical answer is “You, Joseph,” unwilling to take sin upon yourself, to fall in order to transgress the limits of what is currently available. If you, Joseph, can fall before such a metaphysical presence, you will go beyond the church’s experience of what is now unattainable, beyond

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sin, beyond the apparently indestructible, beyond the apparently calming effect of drunkenness. These limits will be breached as a step beyond the narcissism of mirrors. Кто вздрагивал в прeдчувствии нeвзгод, прeдчувствуя бeзмeрную бeду, кто вздрагивал eдиножды в году, кто на душу нe принял бы грeха, чья свeтлая душа была глуха, кто воврeмя умeньшил кругозор, кто вздрагивал, прeдчувствуя позор? Насмeшка, издeватeльство и срам: прeдeл нeдосягаeмости – храм, примeр нeсокрушимости – орeх, примeр нeдосягаeмости – грeх, прeдeл нeвозмутимости – бокал срeди нeсокрушимости зeркал. [Who shuddered in anticipation of misfortunes, with premonition of limitless misfortune, who shuddered once a year, who would not take sin upon their soul, whose radiant soul was deaf, who shrunk his worldview opportunely, who trembled, with premonition of shame? Mockery, scoffing, and disgrace; the limit of inaccessibility is a temple, the limit of indestructibility is a nut, the limit of imperturbability is a goblet amongst the indestructibility of mirrors.]

The fear of making – or not making – a spiritual or psychic decision becomes large enough to evoke fear of being hounded by the Four Horsemen of Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcut. The Horsemen are heralded by “the thunder of fire-breathing steeds / and a scarlet sword in the yawning skies / that swings as a clock’s pendulum.” Sure enough, Dürer’s woodcut of 1498 shows the Horsemen of Revelation, including the second beast. “There went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword” (Revelations 6:4). The rider holds a long broadsword above his head so that it appears as a spiritual needle or indicator that can swing either down to the Horseman or up to the angel depicted above him. This sword or metaphor will be of crucial significance anon, especially if one considers its meaning elsewhere in the Bible. In Ephesians 6:17 the “shield of faith” is supported by the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” In Hebrews 4:12 the

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symbol is clearer still: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Any dividing asunder is going to require or create two halves, two people, or two ideas of good and bad (hellish and heavenly) inclination. Since we have Brodsky wavering between snow and darkness, upstairs and downstairs, spirit and matter, we might reasonably ask at this period: why on earth is the poem called Zof’ja and when is she going to make an appearance? The answer is the same as for Pasternak. The author or narrator’s vacillation between earthbound and metaphysical concerns is cast in terms of an actual dialogue, acquaintance, or conversation with a woman, whom Brodsky here calls “my inconceivable Polish addressee.” Brodsky’s talk to his soul or spirit is mixed with talk to his female friend. “You” refers to his soul and Zof’ja. She is his better half, before which he must fall to overcome the non-Zof’ja, that is, the masculine, solid world that lives downstairs. Like Pasternak’s “lowest point of reference,” Brodsky must go downstairs in order to go up to Zof’ja. His soul, born of a physical reflection or “dividing asunder” of one’s physical oneness, is no more than a sheet of paper, clean and white as the snow, beautiful as a young woman, with a young woman’s optimism, but as yet stunted by what he calls deafness and infantilism. Growth will be audibly cultivated, through a penned dialogue with a woman. Я вижу свою душу в зeркала, душа моя нeслыханно мала, нe болee бумажного листа … … прeкрасная, как дeвочка, душа, ты так жe вeлика, как хороша, – как дeвочкe присущий оптимизм, души моeй глухой инфантилизм всeгда со мной в полуночной тиши. [I see my soul in the mirror, its smallness is unheard of, no larger than a sheet of paper … My soul, as beautiful as a girl, you are as great as you are fine; as optimism is inherent in a girl, so the deaf infantilism of my soul is always with me in the quiet of midnight.]

Now that the spiritual challenge at hand is expressed in terms of gender, a rather negative reference is made with regard to what is

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masculine, or more specifically paternal, and its relationship to darkness. Brodsky lists ways in which a Muse will not be obtained: the passive stance of beseeching, of a prayer, especially one that is not bolstered by individual fervour, but simply the approved, institutionalized context of a given ceremony or festival. Equally unfruitful is the return to one’s Father, as the sad surrender of a prodigal son or his inability to exist independently. In terms of communication, both are as pointless as an empty envelope. What is needed is physical “labour, lechery, blood, and love” to transform the material world into the spiritual, to see the Muse in femininity. Едва ли взбудоражишь пустоту молитвой, приурочeнной к посту, прeкрасным возвращeньeм в отчий дом и маркой на конвeртикe пустом … … Как будто это ложь, а это труд, как будто это жизнь, а это блуд, как будто это грязь, а это кровь, нe грeх – но это странная любовь. [You’ll scarcely agitate the emptiness with a prayer that coincides with a fast, with the beautiful return to a father’s house and with a stamp on an empty envelope … As if it’s falsehood, but it’s labour, as if it’s life, but it’s lechery, as if it’s dirt, but it’s blood, not a sin, but this is a strange love.]

This strange love (strannaja liubov’) is then explained more clearly, in a conflation of soul and Zof’ja. Here Brodsky includes himself in the moments of eulogy for his Polish friend, albeit negatively; he refers to himself as Orpheus, left only with a photograph of the woman, and a memory of her voice that sounds like Dixieland. The reference yet again to jazz as the interplay of limits and freedom works with the introduction of Orpheus. We were told earlier that the poet / narrator was undergoing a process of “confusion, abasement, and revenge.” The ability of Orpheus to animate inanimate objects, to confuse their stability and make them “shake loose” their solidity is followed by the abasement of going downstairs, to where he hopes to make contact with Zof’ja / Eurydice. The revenge is the tricky part, since thingness is no slacker in its ability to resist metamorphosis: fleshiness does not easily become something divine or poetic. The poet claims that Orpheus and Christ both went through selfdefining, self-judging rigours relative to an absent feminine or paternal

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 dictate: Tak sestvoval Xristos i pel Orfej. Both were caught between the “up and down” of Dürer’s dual-edged indicator, the divine word that can point to a superior goal or trajectory, but can equally sever those two extremes, such that one falls back into faithless physicality. Success or failure in Brodsky’s case has yet to be determined (he was only twenty-two when Zof’ja was written); he is more concerned with correct paths, rather than goals attained, more with tomorrow than a distant, supra-temporal status that might be won. The knowledge of and acquaintance with Zof’ja is an initial, rather mundane contact with the feminine. It is, however, good and thus the text ends with a long invocation to the reader that he do the right thing and become a sword-like pendulum, a participant in the choices between snow and night. Ethical concerns prevail; illogical, spiritual ones do not. The lines on Brodsky’s addressee and his role as Orpheus show the opposites between which this sword might swing. Любовь твоя – воспитанница фeй, возлюблeнный твой – нынeшний Орфeй, и образ твой – фотографа момeнт, твой голос – отдалeнный диксилeнд. Прогулки в ботаничeском саду, возлюблeнного пeниe в аду, возлюблeнного пeниe сквозь сон, – два голоса, звучащих в унисон, органный замирающий свинeц, вeнчальныe цвeты, всeму вeнeц, душа твоя прeкрасна и тиха, душа твоя нe вeдаeт грeха, душа твоя по-прeжнeму в пути, по-прeжнeму с любовью во плоти. … Что будeт поразитeльнeй для глаз, чeм чувства, настигающиe нас с намeрeньeм до горла нам достать? СОВЕТУЮ ВАМ МАЯТНИКОМ СТАТЬ. [Your love is the governess of fairies, your beloved is a modern Orpheus, and your image is the moment of a photograph, your voice is a distant Dixieland. Walks in the botanical garden, the song of a beloved in hell, the song of a beloved through a dream. Two voices, sounding in unison, the organ-like demise of lead, wedding flowers, a wedding crown for all, your soul is

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138 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse beautiful and quiet, your soul knows no sin, your soul is – as before – on its way, as before and within flesh con amore … What could be more amazing for the eyes than feelings which overtake us, all with the intention of reaching the throat? i advise you to become a pendulum.]

The National Library of Russia has four versions of this poem in its archive, versions of hand- and typewritten texts. I do not intend to discuss those long and involved variants here, but instead will only introduce two tiny notes, scribbled in the margin of one draft.  The first of these is the phrase: A. Puskin “Arion” written beside thirteen lines describing the “beloved” outside (either Brodsky or the narrator), with his soul hovering separately and behind him. “How strange that you follow behind with your gaze” he then writes, shifting suddenly to the second person. The pronouns and dual roles assigned to poet and narrator, Zof’ja and Muse, are so interwoven at this point that the addressee of these lines is unclear. Zof’ja nonetheless is the prime candidate. It is she who is upstairs and floating over her own body when she sleeps. Brodsky is downstairs, Zof’ja is upstairs. Orpheus is down in the depths, but Eurydice is not there: she is the significance the poet will obtain if he overcomes the hellish,  physical world. The connection between these lines and Puskin’s 1827 poem Arion is in one more phrase: the poet calls his physically blessed addressee “a secret singer” (tainstvennyj pevec). The expression comes from Arion and refers to Puskin himself. He describes a storm in which an entire crew is lost save one – the poet himself, the secret singer who had serenaded the sailors with his “carefree faith.” The text refers to  Puskin’s friends, the participants in the failed Decembrist uprising against the czar in 1825. Somehow the poet had escaped any terrible repercussions from the throne and managed to sing on, after the executions of his acquaintances. … Вдруг лоно волн Измял с налeту вихорь шумный … Погиб и кормщик и пловeц! – Лишь я, таинствeнный пeвeц, На бeрeг выброшeн грозою, Я гимны прeжниe пою И ризу влажную мою Сушу на солнцe под скалою. [Suddenly the cradle of the waves whipped up a noisy tempest without warning … Both helmsman and swimmer perished! Only I, the secret singer, am thrown on shore by the storm.

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139 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse I sing prior hymns and dry my damp garments in the sun beneath the cliff.]

By implication, Zof’ja or her soul becomes the secret singer, whose carefree faith, clothed in priestly garments (riza) sings of lost or doomed champions of revolutionary romanticism. Brodsky therefore becomes a romantic figure, a fitting and flattering role for a spiritual rebel against Soviet materialist philosophy. How appropriate that this metaphor (or metaphorical role) is proffered by the woman who gave Brodsky Ga lczyn´ski’s poetry for the first time. The second note in a draft’s margin is: W. Shakespeare – 121st. sonnet. It is written beside fourteen lines that claim the loss of a “fleece” is more serious than losing a “singer”; losing a “liar” is worse than losing an “idiot”! To be a sinner, he states, is better than being thought a sinner; to drown is easier than swimming on. So the object of (reasonable) desire becomes the lie of a fleece, the sin or transgression that may result in a fall or abasement to the ocean floor. The spiritual leap of faith confronted here is cast in terms of romantic revolt, of Jason’s quest. The absolute ideal would be not to run a rebel’s risk at all, but “rely on the oarsman.” Since neither oneself nor one’s Father (political, regal, or heavenly) can be relied upon for support in moments of existential risk, the issue warrants little discussion: you are your own oarsman. Once again the text switches to the second person, but here Brodsky seems to be addressing himself. “Your” gaze and the “song of a beloved” wander, dictated by the presence and perception of several Eurydices. Just as myth is a single template for the experiences for many individuals, so here Eurydice is pluralized. We have seen Mar’ja, Marina, and Zof’ja and will see more of the same. The existential setup never changes; the way you respond to it does. Уж лучшe бeз глупца, чeм бeз вруна, уж лучшe бeз пeвца, чeм бeз руна, уж лучшe грeшным быть, чeм грeшным слыть, уж лeгчe утонуть, чeм дальшe плыть. Но участи пловца или пeвца уж лучшe – положиться на грeбца. Твой взор блуждаeт сумрачeн и дик, доносится до слуха Эвридик возлюблeнного пeниe сквозь ад … [It’s better with no fool than no liar, it’s better with no singer than no fleece, it’s better to be sinful than presumed such, it’s easier to sink than swim further. But better than the fate of

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140 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse swimmer or singer is to rely on the oarsman. Your gaze roams, both dark and wild, and the song of a beloved reaches the hearing of Eurydices through hell …]

The echo of Shakespeare’s 121st sonnet is heard clearest in Brodsky’s line that “it’s better to be sinful than presumed such.” The bard writes “’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed.” The sonnet is directed against those who wrongly attribute their own failings to others, and thus needlessly darken the world with their sullen philosophies. For such a situation to arise, one might argue, an apparently dark, vile, or ominous act must have been perpetrated before it can be judged by others. It is as if Brodsky were challenging various misperceptions of himself and his work amongst those who bemoan his “sinning.” Such people think, as Shakespeare has it, “all men are bad.” Various sins that could be levelled against Brodsky include sacrilegious verses and dissident behaviour. The disparity between what seems and what is, between objective and subjective, between public and private interpretations of Brodsky’s work is the difference between what is correct and incorrect. What looks like a sacrilegious use of Christological analogies is actually an attempt, as Christ offers all men, to overcome the fetters of the substantial world. What looks like dissident behaviour is actually an Orphic attempt to transform or overcome the solidity of inflexible matter. What looks like the confidence of Soviet poetry (albeit not here!) is an attempt to find a higher significance. Shakespeare’s text is inherently humorous: you think me sinful, so I might as well be so, since it is better to jump than be pushed – and a lot more fun. ’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, When not to be receives reproach of being, And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing. For why should others’ false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Brodsky’s lines are devoid of such wit. They are directed against the posturing of individuals before a spiritual quest of some description. The sin or failed quest referred to in the sonnet is sexual. Falling into bed becomes, however, the Fall in Brodsky’s poem. The Polish woman is not an object of sexual transgression, but an educated, ineffable presence before which one must tumble into an awareness of one’s physical nothingness.

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conclusion The sword or pendulum between Shakespeare’s sin and that of Brodsky’s text is the movement of self-definition, between down and up. The definition of oneself linguistically is effected upon the carte  blanche of Leningrad’s snow or Puskin’s stormy ocean. Pasternak and Brodsky both hope to play out their Orphic roles and descend into that stairwell, snow, or “marina” in order to hear and find the rumoured Eurydice. Pasternak’s Spektorskij was designed with Marina Cvetaeva in mind. Zof’ja is designed just as Pasternak’s text – it is one step removed from the poetess. Brodsky’s direct invocation of and response to Cvetaeva comes in the narrative poem written in the same year as Zof’ja – Xolmy. By growing closer to the feminine he will attain a greater degree of self-determination and leave the “paternal home” he shuns in this text. Shakespeare shuns the patronizing, dominant definitions of others to the point where he steals his Father’s words: “I am that I am, and they that level / At my abuses reckon up their own.” The Englishman recalls the words of God to Moses and implicitly places himself outside of linguistic definition. This tall order is what lies ahead of Brodsky as he steps up to try and do what Pasternak attempted in his cultivated dependence upon a feminine presence. A indication of the daunting task at hand can be heard in Brodsky’s own assessment of Pasternak’s relationship to Cvetaeva: “We are not talking so much about faith as a feminine archetype and its potential, i.e., we are talking about the projection of oneself [samoproekcija] … Rather it is the projection of Christ upon oneself” (1994, 268).

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7 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse I don’t remember who gave it to me, but when I read Poèma gory everything fell into place. Up until then nothing had produced the kind of impression that I got from Marina Brodskij o Cvetaevoj, Volkov, 28

introduction: brodsky, pasternak, and cvetaeva In Brodsky’s youthful poetry, the one feminine archetype with the greatest “perceptible potential” is Marina Cvetaeva. Brodsky’s paper on the relationship between Pasternak and Cvetaeva investigated that potential, referring to it as a projection of the former writer onto the latter. The male poet tries to match an aesthetic goal attained by an earlier female, a goal that requires great physical effort. Such a draining enterprise and its concomitant loss of self-determination will transform themselves into a gain, into an epiphany available through poetry and poetry alone. One’s independence or self-determination that comes from such a revelation is therefore, paradoxically, purchased at the cost of obeisance before a writer or Muse that has, seemingly, already experienced such insights. Pasternak projects himself onto Cvetaeva and, inspired by Pasternak’s successes, so does Brodsky. I have already mentioned Brodsky’s rejection of any “anxiety of influence,” his championing of an initial, cultivated subordination to tradition or the versified triumphs of other poets. The clearest example of humility before such achievements comes from the few inches allowed Brodsky in an article of the Literaturnaja gazeta of 1992. Here ten poets are asked seven questions each about their relationship to the poetry of Marina Cvetaeva, questions that together assess or define the contemporary relevance of her corpus. The seventh question reads: “What would you like to ask Cvetaeva herself?” Brodsky’s response shows both the sense of personal proximity cultivated by

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chasing her aesthetic, as well as the ongoing sense of subservience, of the material pandering to the immaterial: “What might I do for you?” In the twelve sentences permitted Brodsky, he turns primarily to  Pasternak’s Evangelical cycle from Doktor Z ivago as the place in Russian literature where Cvetaeva’s influence sounds loudest. “Here Pasternak transforms himself from a microcosmic poet, a centripetal one, into a centrifugal one … I am inclined to ascribe the broadening of the metaphysical radius, characteristic of this cycle, to Pasternak’s internal dependence upon Cvetaeva” (1992, 6). Literary history is seen as a wholly private, subjective experience between those who create it. The direct invocation of a prior poet’s corpus, “dependence” upon a precursor, becomes a means of a widened metaphysical horizon. What is it in Cvetaeva’s corpus that Brodsky is indebted to in order to widen that horizon? How does Cvetaeva, as a woman, embody both the gradual projection of oneself onto the template of the Logos and the widening of a wholly physical horizon to the point of metaphysics? In the lengthy but only recently published interview of Solomon Volkov with Brodsky, the poet expresses that difference in terms of moral or ethical dictates: “as opposed to men, women are always more relentless – significantly so – in their moral demands” (24). The thing is that women have a keener sense of ethical transgression, of psychological and intellectual immorality. Universal immorality is exactly what the twentieth century has given us in abundance … A thoroughly normal example: A man comes home from work, bringing his boss with him. They have dinner and the boss leaves. The wife says to the husband: “How could you bring that bastard home?” And that home, by the way, is kept up thanks to the money the bastard gives the husband. “Into my home!” The woman takes an ethical stance, because she is able to do so. Men have another goal, therefore they shut their eyes to a great deal. In actual fact, that kind of ethical stance is what must act as the sum total of existence, it must be an ethical evaluation. On that count women come out much better (32).

The amazing feminine ability to uphold an ethical purity in the face of materialistic problems hardly leaves Brodsky in a position to respond fittingly or eloquently. Indeed he admits as much: “I don’t feel anything except absolute dumbfoundedness in the face of her poetic strength” (54).

cvetaeva’s narrative poems Although struck dumb, Brodsky encountered in Poèma gory a text that made “everything fall into place.” In the same interview the poet talks of another, related text as well. In both Poèma gory and Poèma konca

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“the issue is a universal severance (razryv), and not just severance from an actual person” (53). (Brodsky himself refers here to the failed romance with Konstantin Rodzevic in Prague which inspired Cvetaeva to write both texts.) Why take both poems into consideration? A recent article by the Lithuanian scholar and poet Tomas Venclova offers a most convincing argument. Venclova suggests that Poèma gory traces a pattern that is indebted to the Old Testament, while Poèma konca owes much to the New. “At the center of Poèma gory lies the story of Original Sin and banishment from Paradise; at the center of Poèma konca is the story of the sin-offering upon Golgotha” (Venclova 1997, 215). These parallels alone would allow us to draw an instructive connection between Cvetaeva and the projection of oneself upon a feminine or Christological archetype. Venclova, however, offers us more, with a letter to Pasternak from Cvetaeva of 26 May 1926. In that letter the poetess associates the earlier poem with a masculine intent, a “man’s face.” The latter she associates with “feminine woe.” Masculine to feminine; physical to immaterial. Even within each poem, the oppositions of the hill (up/ down, land/sea) are, holds Venclova, aligned continuously with masculine and feminine significances to the point where they are akin to the extremes of death and life (215). There are elements of both texts, of both extremes, in Brodsky’s poem of 1962, Xolmy. The text manipulates critical elements of Cvetaeva’s diptych, as Venclova terms them, in order to both cultivate dependence upon her poems (a morally “relentless” archetype), and in order to gain a severance. That severance is from Cvetaeva’s model, in order that Brodsky add something to her; it is also from the “abundant immorality” of his century, from the amorality of Soviet materialism, by celebrating the great linguistic triumph over imperial mattter – the Logos. Rather than wander into the biographical complexities which surround the production of Cvetaeva’s two narrative poems, we should focus on the texts and look for a struggle between substantiality and spirit, between a hill and the end of something; between space and time in a way that suggests an alignment along gender-specific lines. In other words, how are notions of original sin or paradise discussed in a masculine context, while the narrative of Golgotha is viewed through a feminine prism? POÈMA GORY

The Poèma gory (1: 349–55) begins with the shirking of a mountainous load. A problem referred to as a hill is dropped from Cvetaeva’s

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shoulders, so that she might give voice to the equally lofty matter of her suffering because of that hill. The first of these poems discusses the hill (gora) and the second the sadness it caused (gore). The gora is based upon an actual hill in the outskirts of Prague. Cvetaeva associates that real-world locus with real-world sacrifices: the cannon-fodder of battle, the masculine hunger for virginal lovers, and the equally moribund processes of institutionalized couplings, of marriage. She places herself, just like Brodsky’s own suburban or liminal lodgings, on the outskirts (prigorod) of such materialism. She challenges its supremacy with noise, with a shout of “Hurrah!” that the mountain then counters with thunder and a long, dark shadow cast across the residents of its slopes. Та гора была, как грудь Рeкрута, снарядом свалeнного. Та гора хотeла губ Дeвствeнных, обряда свадeбного Трeбовала та гора. Окeан в ушную раковину Вдруг ворвавшимся ура! Та гора гнала и ратовала. Та гора была, как гром. Зря с титанами заигрываeм! Той горы послeдний дом Помнишь – на исходe пригорода? Та гора была – миры! Бог за мир взымаeт дорого. Горe началось с горы. Та гора была над городом. [That hill was like the chest of a recruit, cut down by a shell. That hill wanted virgin lips, a wedding ceremony. That hill made demands. Then an ocean broke into its ears with a hurrah! That hill fought to drive it back. That hill was like thunder. In vain we flirt with titans! Do you remember the last house of that hill at the suburb’s edge? That hill was worlds! God takes a lot for one of them. Hell began with a hill. That hill stood above the town.]

Cvetaeva mocks the paradise offered by the hill and maligns its intention to grab her and her clothes and force her to stop still, lie down, and stay in one place. Looking around that place, the poetess

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remarks upon its difference from the paradise of early books in school. It is too windy, too empty, with nothing to halt a storm’s passage. The hill burdens Cvetaeva as dead weight; it is not surprising that she views that burden as thorns, inhibited movement, and a violent sexual claim. В ворохах вeрeска бурого, В островах страждущих хвой … (Высота брeда – над уровнeм Жизни) – Нà жe мeня. Твой … [In piles of brown heather, in islands of suffering pines … (The altitude of delerium is above the level of life). – Go on, take me. Yours …]

The hill complains of Cvetaeva’s love. It hates the timeless nature of an unrealized love, of “unknown mornings.” She champions the “unalterable kinship of lips” – either the kiss that shunned sexual gratification or the words between two people that both shun and outstrip any form of physical contact. Not only does Cvetaeva’s challenge ignore the primacy of stasis and size in the hill (it is big and immobile), together with the reification that accompanies immobility, but she champions instead a different kind of residence, which she calls a gypsy encampment (tabor). The hill is beginning to sound like Aleko of Puskin’s Cygany and Cvetaeva his fickle, transient lover, Zemfira. Cvetaeva lives in the material world, yet she will not bind herself to one lover, to one constant object of affection. Neither the hill nor Aleko can stand such betrayal. The poetess must live in the world, but refuses to be loyal to its inanimacy. By living in an emotional “gypsy camp,” she is using physicality or material existence in order to overcome it. She is sinking in order to rise up. Гора горeвала, что только грустью Станeт – чтò нынe и кровь и зной, Гора говорила, что нe отпустит Нас, нe доспустит тeбя с другой. … Гора горeвала о том, что врозь нам Вниз, по такой грязи – В жизнь, про которую знаeм всè мы Сброд – рынок – барак …

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147 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse Ещe говорила, что всe поэмы Гор – пишутся – тàк. [The hill mourned that what is now blood and heat will become just sadness. The hill said that it will not let us go, that it’ll not admit you with another … The hill mourned that we must descend separately, through such dirt – into a life of which we all know: riff-raff – market – barracks … The hill also recounted that all poems of hills are written thus.]

All in all, this overcoming or gross abuse of somatic existence is termed by Cvetaeva a stubborn desire to “not exist” (ne byt’ ). Utter nonexistence, though, is death, and the poetess admits to the absolute and unavoidable primacy of daily routine (byt) in life. The game (igra), as she puts it, is to challenge the forces of byt and the world’s unwillingness to let her wring the full, poetic significance out of existence or byt’. Byt and byt’ do battle as death and life, male and female. Cvetaeva shouts to her “son” that he should exhaust his flesh with gypsies, meaning that flesh should sacrifice itself to a higher, eternal nobility or nomadism. Such a sacrifice will raise a human above human existence. Byt will lose and the poetess will thus prove herself tougher. The hill will seem puny in the shadow of Cvetaeva’s greater, ethically loftier achievement on a different kind of peak. The hill will vanish in favour of her hill. Твeржe камня краeугольного, Клятвой смeртника на одрe: – Да нe будeт вам счастья дольнeго Муравьи, на моeй горe! [Tougher than a cornerstone, like the vow of a lifer on his prison bed – May you have no earthly happiness, ants upon my hill!]

In the penultimate stanza, then, a shift from one hill to another takes place and ushers in the heights of passion, not space: the Poèma gory becomes Poèma konca. POÈMA KONCA

The second half of Cvetaeva’s diptych is in several places of direct relevance to our investigation. The woe that is caused by the hill is now the focus of attention, as the reader is offered the metaphysical significance of the physical hill. The hill as a stable, immobile and

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masculine home lends itself to Brodsky’s understanding of the material world as a paternal domus to which a squeamish prodigal son might eventually gravitate. The very word “home” now has  for Cvetaeva the connotations of a lost, spoiled child (albeit zabluds ii, not bludnyj) who screams for the literal possession of a house. The poetess depicts such a house on the top of the hill. It is as high as byt can be taken by the material world. She shows it ablaze. There is no real security, so Zemfira keeps wandering, never under one roof long enough to be a permanent resident. Заблудшeго баловня Вопль: домой! Дитя годовалоe « Дай» и «мой»! … Дом на горe. – Нe вышe ли? – Дом на вeрху горы. Окно под самой крышeю. – Нe от одной зари Горящee? Так сызнова Жизнь? – Простота поэм! Дом, это значит: и`з дому В ночь. [The howl of a lost, spoilt child: Home! A year-old baby: “Give!” and “Mine!” … A house on the hill. Is it higher? A house at the top of the hill. A window right beneath the roof. Burning not only from the dawn? Is life like that anew? The simplicity of poems! A house and that means: out of the house, into the night.]

Home, stability, and bodiliness are all sacrificed for a risky, higher goal: “Love – that’s all gifts/ into the bonfire and always for nothing.” The gift of one’s own body is hopefully a means, like Christ’s, of buying a higher meaning, a bridge or “in-between.” The meaning of the Logos is so universal that it is not a specifically male experience. Cvetaeva, according to Brodsky, participates in that experience via her poems on Mary Magdalene. Here, too, the intertwined bodies of a poetess and her lover reach the point where gender and other distinctions evanesce. Cvetaeva plays the role of entities both outside and inside an object (albumen around a yolk; an Eskimo surrounded by fur). These moving, merged opposites form Siamese twins. As if moving backwards in time to claim the origin of human growth,

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Cvetaeva then says she is superior to her lover’s mother (who only ever held her son immobile inside her). The poetess may turn her suffering into a model of Christ’s path, but she here lays claim to the role of a new progenitor. She is no longer following the Son of God, but usurping the paternal position, the paternal role of substance’s originator, of the Creator. The saddest aspect of Poèma konca is its inability to let go of substance or stuff. Rather than transcend it, Cvetaeva is torn apart by the horrible pull of what she loves on Earth. Her spiritual zeal is therefore translated at times in terms of the need to gain control over physical existence. She perceives her sacrilege. Та жeнщина – помнишь: мамой Звал? – всё и вся Забыв, в торжeствe нeдвижном Тe-бя нося, Тeбя нe дeржала ближe. … Плю-щом впилась, Клeщом: – вырывайтe с корнeм! Как плющ! Как клeщ! Бeзбожно! Бeсчeловeчно! Бро-сать, как вeщь, Мeня, ни eдиной вeщи Нe чтившeй в сeм Вeщeствeнном мирe дутом! [That woman you remember: you called her Mother. Having forgotten everything and everybody and carrying you in immobile triumph – she did not hold you closer … I dug in like ivy, like a tick: tear me out by the roots! Ivy! A tick! It’s godless! Inhuman! To abandon me like an object when I never respected a single thing in this empty, material world!]

The hollow thingness of the world is transferred later in the text to the poetess herself, to the very role she trumpets as progenitor supreme. The potential epiphany of passion and the ability to engender the world as mother are reduced to a single, dire metaphor for man’s sexual penetration of a feminine or maternal realm. That penetration immediately debases the feminine and creates a wound through which all immaterial or spiritual notions slip.

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150 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Корпусами фабричными, зычными И отзывчивыми на зов … Сокровeнную, подъязычную Тайну жeн от мужeй, и вдов От друзeй – тeбe, подноготную Тайну Евы от дрeва, – вот: Я нe болee чeм животнoe, Кeм-то ранeнноe в живот. Жжeт … Как будто бы душу сдeрнули С кожeй! Паром в дыру ушла Прeсловутая eрeсь вздорная, Имeнуeмая душа. Христианская нeмочь блeдная! Пар! Припарками обложить! Да ee никогда и нe было! Было тeло, хотeло жить, Жить нe хочeт. [Like factory complexes, loud and responsive to a summons … Here for you is the sacred secret that wives held beneath their tongues from husbands, and widows from friends, the entire truth that Eve plucked from the tree: I am nothing more than an animal, wounded by somebody in the stomach. It burns, as if the soul had been ripped off with the skin. That notorious, ridiculous heresy called a soul vanished through a hole like steam. That Christian chlorosis! Steam! Lay on the poultices! It never existed! There was a body that wanted to live but now does not.]

Then, suddenly, she regrets with a shriek that she is so submissive, likening that regret to a last-minute request for pity from a prisoner sentenced to death. When the body is threatened with non-existence, it suddenly beseeches a higher power: “Forgive me! I didn’t want [to say that]!” Speech still has the ability to bridge two domains of existence and even cancel out the lower of the pair (physical) with an invocation of the upper (God). By bemoaning her spiritual failures, Cvetaeva cannot but affirm the existence or preciousness of a longedfor spiritual goal. The loss of that goal will come with the loss of a lover, the loss of an “in-between” (mezdu). The poetess refuses to accept that the verb “to separate” (rasstavat’sja) even exists in Russian. If it cannot be said, it can do no damage. Women simply do not know

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such a word (nor, come to that, do men, adds the poetess as an afterthought). Звук, от коeго уши рвутся, Тянутся за прeдeл тоски … Расставаниe – нe по-русски! Нe по-жeнски! нe по-мужски! [A sound from which ears explode and strain beyond the limit of yearning … Separation – that’s not Russian! Not for women! Not for men!]

Stuck in the metaphysical suburbs like  Brodsky, Cvetaeva has wrung her physical experience dry (net propazi mne). In the final section of her text that experience, terrible and potentially fatal as it is, is validated precisely because it is so awful. The game of living in the suburbs, in and out of what the physical body can stand, is presented in terms of a modern Golgotha. Cvetaeva’s crown of pearls is made from the “shameful” tears of her lover upon his “warrior’s bronze.” His shame is a sin, as is the poetess’s occasional (and admitted) godlessness. The unavoidable vacillation between gross humility and gross self-satisfaction in fervent believers is viewed in terms of gravitation towards Earth and Heaven. Cvetaeva is caught between them and although Poèma konca is an awfully sad text (its final metaphor is a silently sinking ship), the fact that the poetess does suffer great woe in her defiance of the physical hill allows her to wear a crown. She may just be able to bear the hill, but in doing so earns the loftier prize of her own new and metaphysical vista. XOLMY

as a response to cvetaeva

Brodsky’s poem Xolmy (Hills) has just as much trouble gaining either  altitude or insight. It is divided in the recent Sobranie soc inenij into seven sections, all of which emphasize descent more than ascent. Two people sit upon the slopes of a hill, from which they watch events in the town far below. In that town a couple of evening weddings are taking place. As the sun sets, the two people separate slightly and head down the incline. Suddenly they are attacked and killed by four men who appear, armed with knives, from behind some bushes. The wedding parties are alerted to the crime, and ascend from the town to find a hole in the middle of thick pondweed where the bodies have been dumped. The poem muses upon the nature of a death that has claimed the two so utterly, then finally turns its attention to the hills,

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to the vague hope or escape they offer from the moribund atmosphere of the lowlands. We begin, at least, at the top of the hill. (Let us not forget, however, that the title of this poem is in the plural. It refers both to the universality of this hummock and to the constant need of individuals to answer the challenges of either death or a positive existential task with a potentially life-affirming rise.) A long glance is cast down upon a compartmentalized cityscape, upon the enclosures or boxes of churches, gardens – and prisons. Even the freer atmosphere of water is boxed in by a thick layer of pondweed. Across three bridges, the Cvetaevan “in-betweens” or Brodskian links, cars and trucks head into town. Movement is centripetal. Substance runs into town, where human forms are distorted, perhaps from the compression of tangible matter. Unsullied by the noisy claustrophobia of the town, the two people on the hill sit where the air is fresh. In a vaguely fetal position they adopt a stance of innocence against the dirty metropolis. A mosquito, however, hovers above the pair, just as a crow hovers in the foothills, ominously above the spire of a bank. The black angel of materialism’s temple is mirrored by the hovering insect that will die without human contact. The people on the hill are not entirely free of existence in the town. Life atop the hill is not an escape from life in the plains below. Вмeстe они любили сидeть на сколнe холма. Оттуда видны им были цeрковь, сады, тюрьма. Оттуда они видали заросший травой водоeм. Сбросив в пeсок сандалии, сидeли они вдвоeм. Руками обняв колeни, смотрeли они в облака. Внизу у кино калeки ждали грузовика. Мeрцала на склонe банка возлe кусков кирпича. Над розовым шпилeм банка ворона вилась, крича. Машины eхали в цeнтрe к банe по трeм мостам. Колокол звякал в цeркви: элeктрик вeнчался там.

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153 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse А здeсь, на холмe, было тихо, вeтeр их освeжал. Кругом ни свистка, ни крика. Только комар жужжал. [They loved to sit together on the slope of the hill. From there they could see a church, gardens, and a prison. From there they could see the reservoir overgrown with grass. They threw their sandals on the sand and sat together. They hugged their knees and looked at the clouds. Below them cripples waited for a lorry. A tin can glistened on the slope near bits of brick. Above the pink spire of the bank a crow hovered, crying. Cars drove downtown, across three bridges towards the bath house. The bell jangled in the church where an electrician was getting married. Here, though, on the hill it was quiet and the wind freshened them. Neither a whistle nor a shriek was heard. Only a mosquito buzzed.]

The lack of escape is also shown by the fact that the grass on the hill is flattened (trava primjata) from frequent ascents. Despite such common trips up and down the hill, the pair do not sense their “marriage” to the earth (as a parallel to the events in town). “The cows always licked this place with their tongues. Everybody knew so. But they [the pair] didn’t know.” The friends do not see that the cows, eating picnic leftovers, claim the food which was claimed by the pair from farms where the cows lived and which they fertilized. The tight, claustrophobic cycles of earthbound existence have yet to force their way into the quiet life on the hilltop. Charmed by bovine sirens, by the lowing of the cows, the pair descend the slopes as in Cvetaeva’s text and separate (rasxodit’sja). The harmony of union and the erasure of gender which Cvetaeva celebrates are here spoiled. One member of the pair descends to a path, stumbling and wheezing as he goes. He descends to linearity, to a difficult and poorly-uttered passage through the material world. His partner descends towards water and is surrounded by the smoke of a cigarette. These shapeless, ideally immaterial forms mean little, though, when divorced from their necessary dialogue with tangible existence. As the picnickers descend, the fissure between them grows. They head for the bushes. … они спускались к кустам и расходились в молчаньи – как и сидeли там.

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154 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse … Один достигал тропинки, другой в тот жe миг пруда. … Один, кряхтя, спотыкаясь, другой, сигарeтой дымя – в тот вeчeр они спускались по разным склонам холма. Спускались по разным склонам, пространство росло мeж них. Но страшный, одноврeмeнно, воздух потряс их крик. [They went down towards the bushes and parted in silence, just as they had sat there … One reached the path, the other a pond at the same moment … One, groaning and stumbling, the other puffing on a cigarette – went down different slopes of the hill on that evening. They went down different slopes and space grew between them. But at the same time their terrible cry stunned the air.]

The final couplet shows the pair moving so far apart that they split. The divine union is lost and they become victims of brute matter. The bushes here are central. In Brodsky’s work, such as Zof’ja or Isaac and Abraham, the bush may be a conduit for divine proclamations, but in Cvetaeva’s Poèma gory the tangles of heather or gorse grab and hold tight in an expression of sexual avarice. (In Poèma konca ivy plays the same role.) Brodsky’s bushes open like jaws to reveal armed murderers. Thrown into a pond’s deep waters, the pair “meet once again.” The union of love atop the hill becomes the union of death beneath it. At this point Brodsky shifts his attention to the other unions at the foot of the hill. He describes the wedding receptions. Grooms fumble their way around the tables (still “married” to their masculine, wholly sensory life), when suddenly shepherds report the murder to those gathered on the town square. The centre of centrifugal cohesion is told the awful tale of substance’s destruction. Those who tend to the cohesion of animals in a collective form come to tell of severance, fissure, and splitting. (With a biblical analogy, one might say that the shepherd’s hopefully “good news” becomes “bad news.”) Even the clouds, in a flock like sheep, are caught by the sunset. Semi-tangible

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clouds are dragged centripetally towards the sun, and then down beneath the horizon. With this display of life’s cruel cyclicality, the cows make another appearance, licking up blood. Ещe пробирались на ощупь к мeстам за столом жeнихи, а страшную вeсть на площадь ужe принeсли пастухи. Вeчeрнeй зарeй сияли стада густых облаков. Коровы в кустах стояли и жадно лизали кровь. [Grooms still picked and felt their way to places at the table, but shepherds had already brought the awful news to the square. Flocks of thick clouds glowed with the evening sun. Cows in the bushes stood and greedily licked the blood.]

Women are left in the lurch by this self-destructive triumph of masculine matter. A jilted bride, like Cvetaeva in her crown of pearls, is surrounded by flowers and the attention of another woman. The marriage will not take place as the wedding guests head off to the pond. The union of love is outdone by the union of death. When Cvetaeva shifts from her Old to the New Testament emphases, she pays merciless attention to the physicality of the Logos, to the risk of faith. The physical maximalism or extremism of a “poetic” experience, of the Word of God, is horribly close to death itself. She rhymes “temple” (xram) with “scar” (sram). Brodsky makes a similar statement, as both poets soak the flowers or bouquets of romance in blood. Cvetaeva: Любовь – это плоть и кровь. Цвeт, собствeнной кровью полит. [Love – that’s flesh and blood. A flower, flooded with its very own blood.] Brodsky: Смeрть ужe в каждом словe, в стeблe, обвившeм жeрдь. Смeрть в зализанной крови, в каждой коровe смeрть.

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156 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse [Death is already in each word, in each stalk that entwined a pole. Death is in the blood that was licked up, death is in every cow.]

Brodsky is playing upon Cvetaeva’s experience of Golgotha, but is unable to imagine the resurrection of fallen flesh. The bodies are raised from the pond by others, they are not spiritually reanimated (Kto ix ottuda podnimet?). The supreme subjectivity of a resurrecting experience, of a private epiphany, is not here. The questions of the poem’s third section investigate how private life falls before universal, fleshy processes. Who will find the bodies and remove them? Who will lessen the anguish? Why does milk have to be red on a wedding day?

the sad resolution of

XOLMY

The inability to escape the given nature of natural processes means that the attempted, subjective experience remains earthbound, stuck in the social world. Spiritual experience can only aspire to an ethically instructive equivalent. The final section of Poèma konca, for example, is remarkably confrontational in its advocating of what is right and good about the suffering undergone by the author. Brodsky, too, in his closing sections, switches from interrogatives to a rather axiomatic rhetoric. Cvetaeva manages to wring some Christological significance from her pain; Brodsky, in the same unavoidably masculine way as Pasternak, has been sent summarily back to his material point of origin. Whereas Cvetaeva sees hope in physical suffering, Brodsky does not. He adopts in the final sections of Xolmy a rather strident tone, designed more to instruct than elevate. He concentrates upon death, its presence in the thorny bushes that dot the sides of all hills. We all reside in the town centre, he writes, towards which stuff gravitates. As a result, even Brodsky’s residence in the “suburbs,” on the “edge” is now in jeopardy. The deluding contact with the outside world that windows offer us (on the edges of buildings) simply underlines one’s imprisonment – one looks out but stays in. All efforts expended in that boxed world of the town centre do little but bolster death’s hegemony. Смeрть – это тот кустарник, в котором стоим мы всe. … Смeрть – это всe машины, это тюрьма и сад.

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157 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse Смeрть – это всe мужчины, галстуки их висят. Смeрть – это стeкла в банe, в цeркви, в домах – подряд! Смeрть – это всё, что с нами – ибо они – нe узрят. Смeрть – это наши силы, это наш труд и пот. Смeрть – это наши жилы, наша душа и плоть. Мы большe на холм нe выйдeм. В наших домах огни. [Death is those bushes in which we all stand … Death is all cars, it is a prison and garden. Death is all men with their ties hanging. Death is glass in the bath house, in the church, houses, and everywhere else! Death is all that’s with us, for they will never notice. Death is our strength, our efforts and sweat. Death is our veins, our soul and flesh. We’ll no longer go up the hill. Fires are in our homes.]

The burning house or domestic box of Cvetaeva’s Poèma konca makes a reappearance as a metaphor of the self-destructive inclination inherent in moribund thingness. One’s final box, a coffin, is where we find the poem’s duo in the text’s final section. They are surrounded by so many flowers that one cannot but think of Ophelia: roses, geraniums, hyacinths, peonies, lilac, iris, roses, daffodils, lilies, gilly-flowers, orchids, astrids, and carnations. Like Brodsky’s picnickers, Ophelia undergoes a separation – from Hamlet and her father – and goes mad as a result. The ballads she sings tell of lost virginity, of masculine intrusion upon a woman prior to a wedding ceremony. Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window To be your Valentine. Then up he rose and donned his clothes, And dupped the chamber door; Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more. By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame!

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158 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Young men will do’t if they come to’t. By cock, they are to blame Quoth she, before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed. So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed. Hamlet, Act IV, scene 5

Xolmy has also been assessed in terms of its debt to the balladic genre. The compression of time in a ballad’s swift narrative allows the poet to “realize a multiplicity of positions in space and time. By doing so, he does not destroy any lyrical genre, instead he overcomes its  narrow dimensions (tesnota)” (Zigaeva, 56). Brodsky’s investigation of how Cvetaeva experiences severance (razryv) is a bold challenge to his own tesnota. That challenge is romantic in aim and Romantic in genre. The balladic spatio-temporal shifts are expressions of Brodsky objectifying himself relative to external, universal processes. Both the chosen genre and Cvetaeva set certain philosophical or spiritual goals, degrees of self-objectifcation which are as yet too difficult. Hence the emphasis upon death, not a crown of pearls. The hills of Brodsky’s poem represent the exhausting interaction of finite flesh and infinite faith, hopefully a means of obtaining that crown. The ethical prerequisites of faith are patently obvious; turning them into an active and humbling belief in a lofty entity is, sadly, another matter altogether. Холмы – это наши страданья. Холмы – это наша любовь. Холмы – это крик, рыданьe, уходят, приходят вновь. Свeт и бeзмeрность боли, наша тоска и страх, наши мeчты и горe, всё это – в их кустах. … Присно, вчeра и нынe по склону движeмся мы. Смeрть – это только равнины. Жизнь – холмы, холмы. [Hills are our suffering. Hills are our love. Hills are a cry and sobbing that come and go. The world and pain’s boundlessness, our yearning and fear, our dreams and sadness – it is all

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159 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse in their bushes … Forever, yesterday and now we move on that slope. Death is only plains. Life is hills, hills.]

The distance between ethical (public) and spiritual (private) significance that this poem tries to bridge is shown by a tiny connection visible in his drafts (82:21). Brodsky shifts one brief section from a first-person pronoun to a third-person. What refers to us in particular is passed over to them instead; the uncomfortable lyrical significance of the “hill” is shunted off. The pronoun “we” is emphasized in several separate sections of Xolmy. To see that same part of speech vacillating in its point of reference is testament to the troubled process of the text’s production. In the example offered here, Brodsky even forces a severance or separation between “us” and the oft-mentioned cows. Brief moments of affectionate physical contact with them only foreshadow the union of human and bovine blood after the murder. Смeрть как вода над нами в жeлудках у нас вода [Всeми своими снами она осeнит стада напрасно лижут коровы нашу любовь и соль] Кто их оттуда поднимeт кто вынeт их из пруда смeрть, как вода над ними, в жeлудках у них вода … [Death like water above us, water in our stomachs. (With all its dreams it will overshadow the herds, in vain the cows lick our love and salt.) Who will lift them out of there, who will take them out of the pond? Death as water above them, water in their stomachs …]

conclusion The romanticism of a ballad is not sufficient to overcome what Brodsky calls the “dreams of death” that overshadow the herds. The herds of cows and the wedding ceremony are loud, social, and very earthbound; the hills of both Brodsky’s and Cvetaeva’s poems offer no permanent release from people and places. Cvetaeva’s ability, in Brodsky’s mind, as a woman to find a greater ethical siginificance in her simultaneous sympathy for and severance from Christ does not help him. It appears that his own dependence upon Cvetaeva’s model provides exactly that:

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a model, not an existential bandwagon. The realization of the poet’s “romantic” potential will come with another poet, Byron, but this time through the real possibility of severance from a living woman, from an actual acquaintance. The romantic potential of Zof’ja, the potential of a metaphysical pendulum, is furthered in Novye stansy k Avguste (New Stanzas to Augusta). The “grounding” of the feminine in a real-world context proves to be the success of Brodsky’s interpretation of Byron.

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8 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron Q: What [poetry] were you getting in school? Goethe, Schiller? A: We got the whole thing. The English poets would be Byron and Longfellow, nineteenth-century oriented. Classics, so to speak … they give you two or three foreign figures and that’s about it. Birkerts, “The Art of Poetry: Joseph Brodsky,” 89–90

introduction In my book Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque, I argued that two narrative  poems of 1963, Bol’saja èlegija Dzonu Donnu (Great Elegy to John Donne) and Isaak i Avraam (Isaac and Abraham), mark a serious tension between ethical and spiritual stages in the poet’s corpus. Both tell of spiritual ascents, but Brodsky’s private conclusion in writing of these three men is that his own experience remains rationally ethical, rather than irrationally spiritual. Over the 1960s, after these lengthy texts, the competition between explicable, ethical poetic intent and ineffable spirituality grows more extreme with each year. The year under investigation in this penultimate exegesis is 1964. At that time Brodsky was in internal exile. The reader should therefore expect some overlap between the issues of Brodsky and the Baroque and this chapter, between the ethical issues prompted by reading English Baroque verse and those raised by reworking an English Romantic. At a University of Michigan conference dedicated to Joseph Brodsky in November 1996, Professor David Bethea gave a paper in which he suggested that Puskin and Brodsky mark the beginning and end of Romanticism in Russian poetry. Professor Bethea noted in particular the romanticizing of their biographies through verse, a view which led  him to remark that “with Puskin, the notion of romantic biography was born in Russian poetry and, with Brodsky, that notion died.” I found such an approach an intriguing one, and wondered whether some conciliatory ground might be found between the seemingly

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contrapuntal labels of “Romanticism” and “Baroque.” If one accepts, for example, the definition of literary development proposed by  Lixac ev – that literature is a constant oscillation between extremes of formality and formlessness, between order and disorder – then both Romanticism and the Baroque become artistic expressions which gravitate towards an irrationality or decorativeness, born of the desire to communicate a spiritual state (180).  Lixac ev finds common to both movements a weaker connection with socially-oriented content than we might see, for example, in Classicism. “Therefore,” he writes, “in their exposition there are considerably  more elements of self-development, self-complication [samousloznenie], independence from ideology … [Such a style] is sometimes defined within a learned milieu, as a style for the few, since its ornamentation evokes forms only loosely related to their content” (181). Where, though, in Brodsky’s corpus can one find material to support such a reductionist approach? A Polish female colleague of mine, upon reading Brodsky’s Nobel lecture for the first time, remarked recently that the poet’s theories of aesthetics were akin to those of Schiller. I was struck by this remark, for the following reason. Brodsky on several occasions does express, especially in his public speeches, the view that aesthetics are the mother of ethics, that beauty can save an individual from metaphysical nothingness. In an essay written just after his exile to the United States in 1972, the poet notes the origin of this idea in the work of Fëdor Dostoevskij. Whence did Dostoevskij get such an idea? From Schiller. In the collection Less than One, Brodsky writes of Dostoevskij in terms of drives, in terms of an unrelenting striving upwards or onwards. The novelist’s investigation of the world through the Russian language was a necessarily lonely one. Dostoevskij’s language, Brodsky writes, soared to such a lonely, lofty pitch that it could not be repeated. It could not help but cause the nineteenth century’s inevitable descent to Tolstoj (277) and the age’s subsequent “mimetic avalanche,” its century-long tendency towards moralizing, towards the advocacy of ethical norms. Brodsky says the only exception was Sestov. Such attempts to capture divine beauty in mundane words were, in part, inspired by Schiller. The German Romantic saw beauty as a goal to be reached by the union of two drives or impulses, those of sense and form. Opposing sensual and formal drives (Stofftrieb and Formtrieb) could be harmonized in the games of a so-called play impulse (Spieltrieb), in aesthetics. Dostoevskij was a little troubled by the tendency of such Schillerian ideas to ignore the significance of palpable reality, their tendency to be a little otherworldly. “He was always aware that

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Schillerism was in practice often, perhaps always, divorced to some extent from reality. Thus, like the nihilistic ideas which evolve from it, it was in essence also an abortive quest for form, involving the projection of sublime ideals onto an unyielding reality” (Jones, 341 and 347). Ideas divorced from reality, in Dostoevskij’s mind, could lead to extremism; the content of an idea needs form. The painful Schillerian dialogue in Dostoevskij’s novels between divine ideas and an inadequate earthbound form is perhaps clearest in the  The Brothers Karamazov where, if we accept a suggestion made by Cizevskij, each of the brothers might represent  one third of Schiller’s  triad: Ivan as form, Dmitry as sense, and Alësa as play (346). Alësa seeks the limits of human experience within the rules or limits of what either physical form or divine dictates allow, and the result is termed a “game.”  The difficulties Dostoevskij had in capturing Alësa’s beauty in words lead to the nose-dive described by Brodsky. Language is tied to its earthly origins and is dependent upon mundane, social existence. Schiller, although endorsing a dynamic worldview, a dialogue between thought and feeling, pays scant attention with his idealism to the rigours of the here-and-now. Brodsky praises the use of physical limits by Dostoevskij, not the escape or  avoidance of them. It is important, therefore, that Brodsky praises Sestov in this context as Dostoevskij’s  great champion. Either through Sestov’s work, or at the same time as he was reading them, Brodsky encountered the teachings of Sestov’s greatest mentor, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, like Schiller, structures his thought triadically, such that drives or impulses will drive man towards the peak of this triad. Kierkegaard’s triad, which Brodsky in Less than One calls the “key to the human species” (377), suggests that man drive himself from aesthetic, through ethical emphases, to an ideal religious stage. Schiller, for example, over and above these drives sees all of history as triadic: “First comes harmonious Nature (typified by the Greeks), then the antagonism of forces and disintegration of human personality (ourselves), and finally renewed wholeness (the perfect Man yet to come)” (Roseberry, 23). Brodsky at times organizes his thoughts in the same way. For example, the two halves of a metaphor (tenor and vehicle) link to what he optimistically calls the subsequent “possibility of virtually endless development” (lto , 31). Or, elsewhere, at the end of his Nobel lecture, the poet boldly advocates the development of a worldview based upon analysis, synthesis, and a resulting epiphany. His later verse states even that a more revealing “stereoscopic” Weltanschauung will come from combining views of an object both in profile and en face (see 1977, 8).

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byron and his muse, augusta The suggestion that Brodsky’s œuvre manifests, but tempers, aspects of Romanticism requires some proof. One of the closest contacts of his verse with that of the Romantics is the work Novye stansy k Avguste, the title of which already invokes Byron’s Stanzas to Augusta. We should look at how Brodsky uses the English text, which I am choosing because Brodsky not only read Sestov in the early 1960s, but during his exile he also obtained a ten-volume collected works by Dostoevskij (Polukhina, 13). The poems used by Brodsky were written in 1816 by Lord Byron out of love for his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The intensity of their relationship had led to rumours of incest and the couple found themselves most rudely shunned at a social function on 8 April of that year. “No sooner had they entered the room … than they were aware that they were the object of general attention … The men turned their backs on them and moved away. He [Byron] stood silently to one side, watching the expression of disapproval on the part of people who had so recently courted him” (Gunn, 180). By the 25th, the poet found himself forced by social disdain and “domestic misery” (Moore, 193) to leave England. On two occasions, nine days before his exile and three months afterwards (from Geneva), Byron wrote verses to his beloved Augusta. These poems should be considered together with the versified Epistle to Augusta, also written in Switzerland. The three works, in their totality of 220 lines, praise Augusta in two ways: as an unmoving home, around which Byron’s exiled movement gravitates, and as half of an undying passion that is unharried by the increasing distances of banishment. The first of the three poems was written just before Byron went into exile, at the height of social animosity. In such gloomy surroundings, he is failed by the guiding lights of reason and hope, since spectral guidance is feeble in the face of “hatred’s shafts [that] flew thick and fast.” Battle on the social, horizontal plane is juxtaposed with a saving, feminine presence on a vertical axis. Her guidance counteracts the failing of dim, yet “enlightened” rationality. Augusta becomes not just a guiding light, a ray of hope, but a seraph offering care and attention. The Muse becomes a celestial being, the prophet-prompting, sin-purging presence known to Russian readers  from Puskin’s poem. The Muse on high becomes one of the highest order of celestial beings; the nine Muses become the nine orders of a celestial hierarchy. Augusta is posited far, far above the rigours of material and social existence.

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165 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron When all around grew drear and dark, And reason half withheld her ray – And hope but shed a dying spark Which more misled my lonely way; In that deep midnight of the mind, And that internal strife of heart, When dreading to be deem’d too ’kind, The weak despair – the cold depart; When fortune changed – and love fled far, And hatred’s shafts flew thick and fast, Thou wert the solitary star Which rose and set not to the last. Oh! blest be thine unbroken light! That watch’d me as a seraph’s eye, And stood between me and the night, For ever shining sweetly nigh.

Augusta is away from the geographical spaces or distinctions enabling exile; she is also distant from Byron’s temporal experience, in the sense that she will outlast her lover. She is depicted as a vibrant tree above a grave, a solid emotion which is firmer than the ebb and flow of real-world events or emotions. She is of such psychic constancy that she surpasses the longevity of all things inanimate, which, sooner or later, “shake” and tumble. Thou stood’st, as stands a lovely tree, That still unbroke, though gently bent, Still waves with fond fidelity Its boughs above a monument. … Then let the ties of baffled love Be broken – thine will never break; Thy heart can feel – but will not move; Thy soul, though soft, will never shake.

The second of the poems is dated 24 July 1816 and was written near Geneva. The text documents a much lower point in Byron’s fortunes; the “star of his fate” has dropped below the horizon, at a time when so many found fault with the poet. His troubles are related in terms of real-world conflict, as rocks of hope, now shattered by public

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pressure. Byron’s “soul is delivered to pain [but] it shall not be its slave.” His psychic state is able somehow to elude the pangs felt by the body which houses that soul. By directing his thoughts outwards and upwards to Augusta, Byron runs the gauntlet of public scorn unscathed. Trait by trait, vice by vice, the poet extracts from the notion of Augusta that which she is not. In her interactions with society, Augusta neither causes nor feels pain. She is utterly absent and distant, utterly separate. Like Caddy in The Sound and the Fury, Augusta is spoken of, not with. She is defined by not being that which Byron dislikes; each time the poet is insulted by the real world, Augusta is defined and lauded further for not being that insulter. The greater the number and severity of Byron’s assailants, though, the more Augusta vanishes into nothingness. She may be constant and “not fly” from the poet’s attention, but she is gradually extracted from actuality. Byron in this second poem seems to realize as much in his admission that an earlier exit from the arena of arrows coming thick and fast would have been in his and her interest. Though I feel that my soul is deliver’d To pain – it shall not be its slave. … Though human, thou didst not deceive me, Though woman, thou didst not forsake, Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me, Though slander’d, thou never couldst shake, – Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me, Though parted, it was not to fly, Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me, Nor, mute, that the world might belie. Yet I blame not the world, nor despise it, Nor the war of the many with one – If my soul was not fitted to prize it, ’Twas folly not sooner to shun …

In the third text, Byron wavers in his resolve. His worldview is reduced to a simple opposition: tangible space or matter and Augusta; physical versus spiritual existence – “A world to roam through, and a home with thee.” (I do not take “home” in the literal sense here.) The cruel distance that creates a pair from what was once unified is one that Byron now sees as his own fault. Neither witty observations nor cunning verse will hide the fact that he is here and she is there. The

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poet has lost a battle or “contest” that began the day he entered the material world and took on the fleshy form of being. This contest is so entrenched in physical existence that Byron ponders suicide as a means of regaining residence in Augusta’s “home.” The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen My errors with defensive paradox; I have been cunning in mine overthrow, The careful pilot of my proper woe. Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward. My whole life was a contest, since the day That gave me being, gave me that which marr’d That gift, – a fate, or will, that walk’d astray; And I at times have found the struggle hard, And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay: But now I fain would for a time survive, If but to see what next can well arrive.

To say a “fate or will” is hardly to show great faith or awareness in one’s degree of worldly agency. Indeed, Byron is troubled by what he terms “an ebb in my philosophy.” Once again the assaults of social processes and physical existence are felt deeply enough to prompt the regret that “had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun …” Those processes are so painful that Byron has reached the awful dead-end of reducing Augusta to a silent, absent, aestheticized nothing which he cannot give up. As a result, the final stanza is far from convincing. It is the same, together or apart, From life’s commencement to its slow decline We are entwined – let death come slow or fast, The tie which bound the first endures the last!

brodsky’s response to byron. AVGUSTA and augusta Brodsky’s response to these lines came in 1964, when he was himself in exile in the isolated village of Norenskaja. The poet, like Byron, begins by telling us that he is brave enough in his isolation to not follow escaping birds with an envious gaze, but the subsequent, selfdenigrating stanzas lead us to sense that Brodsky’s tongue is firmly in his cheek. He “does not need the South” – that is, the sunny landscape of Byron, Puskin or Lermontov – though it would be nice! The cold

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limitlessness of the surrounding hills leads him to feel “buried alive,” surrounded by stunted, insensate plants that seem like “hairs on a dead body.” This pervasive morbidity of nature starts to invade the living, foreign presence of the poet within it: he writes that the frost moves “the slit of my mouth” and the world “flows into my eyes through a sieve, / through a sieve of forgetfulness.” Ironically, when the poet seems inanimate, anonymous, and objectified by his milieu, the most Byronic echoes of animate, human affection are heard: Сeнтябрь. Ночь. Всё общeство – свeча. Но тeнь eщe глядит из-за плeча в мои листы и роeтся в корнях оборванных. И призрак твой в сeнях шуршит и булькаeт водою и улыбаeтся звeздою в распахнутых рывком двeрях. Тeмнeeт надо мною свeт. Вода затягиваeт слeд. Да, сeрдцe рвeтся всё сильнeй к тeбe, и оттого оно – всё дальшe. И в голосe моeм всё большe фальши. Но ты ee сочти за долг судьбe, за долг судьбe, нe трeбующeй крови и жалящeй иглой тупой. [September. Night. A candle my only company. But a shadow still looks over my shoulder at my papers and digs around in torn-up roots. Your ghost rustles in the vestibule, gurgles in water and smiles in a star through the doors that were jerked open. The light fades above me. Water covers my footsteps. Yes, my heart rushes all the more towards you, and therefore it is increasingly distant. And there’s more and more falseness in my voice. Consider this a debt to fate, a debt to fate that asks for no blood and stings me with a blunt needle.]

Suddenly, in a text of isolation, a second, seemingly human presence is noted. With the lengthening of the evenings, the poet notes that he only has a candle with him. One might argue that the candle casts Brodsky’s shadow across the wall, that neither his real-life addressee nor the Muse are present. An equally unhappy interpretation would be to read the line Vse obsc estvo – svec a as “all society is a candle,” a light to attract the poet in his (unspoken) search for a readership,

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 hopefully a large one. In his exile from “the crowd,” to borrow Puskin’s definition of romantic isolation, he longs secretly to win approval with the lines he is penning, while suffering in an exile requested by that same society. A moth courting a flame, perhaps. tends me away from such a reading, however, is the word “still”  What (esc e). The shadow was there either before the autumnal evenings or the lighting of the wick. The word “shadow” (ten’ ) grows closer to the meaning of “shade” or ghost. She muddles his sheets or “leaves” of paper (albeit listy and not list’ja), his torn-up roots. The leaves of poetry and the roots are a poor, late and silent harvest. The shade brings noise and light. She replaces the sun as a star and thus the shadow reading the papers might be the two of them together: her light and his obstruction of that source, creating the ten’. By trying to express or invoke that feminine presence, the poet does little but prove her ineffability. The distance from her, expressed in such realworld terms as exile, does paradoxically underscore her preciousness. The more the poet fails to capture her, the more precious she becomes  and the more falsehood (fal’s’ ) in his voice. Then we encounter the strangest of lines: “But consider this [the falsehood] a debt to fate, / a debt to fate that asks for no blood / and stings me with a blunt needle.” What the poet states here is the desire  to choose or “pay for” a certain fate. The price, as stated is fal’s’, is falsehood or deception, trickery, falsity, hypocrisy, insincerity (if we steal our synonyms from the Oxford Russian Dictionary). That observation, together with Brodsky’s remark in the recent Volkov interviews that Byron’s fundamental manifestation in Russian poetry has been in the form of wordiness, make it clear that falsehood is synonymous with loquacity and truth with silence. Silence is a desirable fate: the poet wants to talk to the point where self-determination might vanish and a positive silence take hold of him. Unlike the dramatic sacrifices of stereotypical exile, this self-induced isolationism “demands no blood,” but what it does do is “wound with a dull needle.” In poems such as the elegy to Donne, Zof’ja, or Moi slova, ja dumaju, umrut (My words, it seems to me), needles are a symbol of a studied harmony between Earth and Heaven, of matter sewn to spirit. A dull needle will do the job with only moderate, messy success. That success has led the poet far astray. He asks the Muse of lyric verse, Euterpe, where on earth he might be. Led far from a syntax or events easily controlled, his Muse (as Mar’ja in Spektorskij) is posited above an abyss of aesthetic and spiritual failure. Here the role of that nothingness is played by water (since puddles double the boundless sky, going down as far as the sky goes up) and the fields of exile. The gorse or heather of Cvetaeva’s hill slopes appears here as a metaphor for

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physical inadequacy, for the dead weight that holds one down and makes abyss-dodging attempts at divine poetry a very risky and exhausting business. It is lyric poetry’s elevation of physical existence that makes the fatigue or pain valid, perhaps even desirable. (The thorns of these prickly shrubs might be a counterpart to the pearls of Cvetaeva’s crown.) The  heather is bent like a lyre and horseshoe,   recalling Mandel’stam’s poem “The Horseshoe-Discoverer” (Nasedsij podkovu). Mandel’stam’s text celebrates the seemingly sad remains of a blacksmith’s work as testament to the strength and grace of a stallion, as the curvature of lips posed to pronounce their final sounds. Cvetaeva’s thorny bushes and Mandel’stam’s horseshoe bequeath their curves to Brodsky’s lyre; his willing subjugation of lyricism – to not only their presence but that of his ten’ – seems to grant happiness.

finally, the direct invocation of a muse by name The sudden shift from busy social existence to the timeless unrushed pace of a northern wilderness where Brodsky ponders such questions is what he terms the shift from a “gallop to an amble.” This is the same shift from the bold, Sluckian assault on material existence to the Golgotha-bound, intensely personal experiences of a romantic, Cvetaevan homage. Neither strict lyricism nor prior “epic” turns of phrase suffice, neither the Muse of lyricism nor epic poetry. In a poem inspired by a Romantic poet, a poet from an age of scant respect paid to the generic integrity of lyric or epic verse, Brodsky’s own verse remains inspired by a non-generic Muse. She is a silent, stellar presence that is elusive enough to break the poet’s normal rhythms as he tries to chase her with Byronic prolixity. Эвтeрпа, ты? Куда зашeл я, а? И что здeсь подо мной: вода? трава? отросток лиры вeрeсковой, изогнутый такой подковой, что счастьe чудится, такой, что можeт быть, как пeрeйти на иноходь с галопа так быстро и дыхания нe сбить, нe вeдаeшь ни ты, ни Каллиопа. [Euterpe, is that you? Where’d I end up, eh? And what’s this underneath me: water, grass, offshoot of a heather lyre, bent

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171 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron like such a horseshoe that it seems like happiness? Perhaps neither you nor Calliope know how to shift from a gallop to an amble so fast without breaking the rhythm of your breath.]

A couple of variations in the National Library archives (67:95, 98)prove the larger significance of this wavering between Muses. In one reading, the “blunt needle” becomes the “needle of irony.” Brodsky has spoken on several occasions of the limited use of irony, of its metaphysically self-destructive nature. The noun, it would appear, was dropped in implicit agreement with such a view. Instead, as noted, needles have an entirely different, more serious and potentially positive significance in poetry of this period. The desire to push one’s worldview further, to grant oneself a centrifugal outlook, as Brodsky says of “post-Cvetaevan” Pasternak, is what informs the second (of very many) variants. In the final stanza, the line that happiness appears to be a consequence of the heatherhorseshoe lyre reads instead that “happiness is near.” The final text indicates a more serious, less self-deprecating or ironic attitude towards the relationship of what is and what might be, between the poet and the Muse. 1 … сочти ee за долг моeй судьбe за долг судьбe нe трeбующeй крови [и] но ранящeй мeня иглой тупой [иронии] … 2 … [Притихла надо мной листва] и что здeсь подо мной, вода, трава обломок лиры вeрeсковой изогнутый такой подковой что счастьe близко … [1. Consider it a debt to my fate, a debt to a fate that asks for no blood (and) but wounds me with a blunt needle (of irony) … 2. … (The foliage above me fell silent) and what’s this underneath me, water, grass, a shard of a heather lyre, bent like such a horseshoe that happiness is near …]

In this final stanza of New Stanzas to Augusta, Brodsky at last invokes his potential Muse by name. Her presence is noted, but not verified: Èvterpa, ty? Instead we have an odd and isolated reference in the

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middle of the poem to Pollux: Drug Polidevk. Tut vse slilos’ v pjatno. This is either a reference to the second-century rhetorician or to Pollux, the brother of Castor, one of the twin sons of Zeus. Brodsky feels an extremely close bond with his addressee, one with whom he can chase the ineffable “fleece” of perfect poetry referred to in Zof’ja. Castor and Pollux did indeed take part in the voyage of the Argonauts. Although Brodsky’s feminine Muse remains an immaterial light source, the ethical concerns of his verse are close if one compares these “new” stanzas to Augusta with the old ones. How, though, do the two poems compare? Where, for example, are these two men? Although we know where they are in tangible space, Brodsky’s topography is turned into metaphysical nothingness: “And so I wander around nobody’s earth / and ask for a lease on Nonexistence.” The encroaching of nobody’s earth upon the poet is turning him into a nobody, with no discernible past. For Byron, nature also has an explicit link to the absence of his loved one: it helps him, it benevolently cradles memories of Augusta and therefore preserves his private self, it keeps his biography intact and does not threaten obliteration. “Then when nature around me is smiling, / The last smile which answers to mine, / I do not believe it beguiling, / Because it reminds me of thine.” The natural, solid world is not so kind to Brodsky: “Nature settles accounts with the past, / as is the norm. But her face then, / even if flooded with the light of sunset, / willy-nilly becomes evil.”

conclusion These examples suggest that the extent of the two poets’ exile or isolation is different. For Byron, Augusta is always near. For Brodsky, his addressee is far away, a problem exacerbated by the concomitant erasing of both the poet’s own presence and any sounds produced by that presence: “I hear no words, and exactly 20 watts / worth of the moon shines. So be it.” What is the connection of language to the differences in the poets’ experiences? For Byron, sound is a means of maintaining his “home” – the presence of Augusta: “In the wide waste there still is a tree, / And a bird in the solitude singing, / Which speaks to my spirit of thee.” The twist in Brodsky’s poem, however, is that as a collection of stanzas to someone who cannot be present, the more he writes, the more he senses the lack of response and the ubiquitousness of silence. His real-life addressee is absent, so only the frighteningly silent recipient of his words (that is, Brodsky himself) remains: “Pressing a frozen palm to my hip, / I wander from mound to mound, / without memory,

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with just one kind of sound, / I tread across the stones. / Stooping down to a dark brook, / I cast a frightened gaze.” The result of these pessimistic observations is surely that Brodsky’s response to exile, to the absence of the woman he loves is more extreme, more dejected. In fact, despite all of the above evidence, I would suggest the opposite, that the Russian poet’s response is more moderate and down-to-earth. Consider the following. Byron, just as Schiller, falls victim to the quintessentially Romantic discrepancy between idealism and the intrusion of reality. Epistle to Augusta documents this discrepancy: “My whole life was a contest, since the day / That gave me being, gave that which marr’d / The gift, – a fate, or will, that walk’d astray; / And I at times have found the struggle hard, / And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay.” Despite this admitted subservience to reality, he tells material existence to do its worst: “let death come slow or fast.” Byron’s ideals, borne by words, try and defy matter. Brodsky, on the other hand, does not try to divorce language from physical misfortune, because, as he would later say, physical exile, seen in a metaphysical light, is just one expression of the “terrifying human and inhuman vistas for which we have no yardstick except ourselves” (Brodsky 1995, 33). An alternative but equally terrifying vista is that of man staring in the face of divinity, and divinity for Brodsky is language itself, the world-building potential of words (Birkerts, 111). The empty vistas of exile suggest metaphysical vacuum, so Brodsky must speak up and create or build something. Sadly, though, this divine potential seems woefully dependent upon the material world – in other words, the closeness to his addressee, “mb.” That closeness is not possible, so Brodsky grows more silent. If he grows more silent, then the “dead” natural world is winning. The horror of Brodsky’s gradual realization is that, as he later shows in poems such as Razgovor s nebozitelem (Conversation with a Celestial Being), linguistic creation comes from a dialogue not with a person, but with language itself. The awful loneliness of this situation causes the shock he receives when he looks in the dark brook at his own reflection. Brodsky is more ambitious in his writing than Byron, by eventually planning to move beyond real-world addressees, but his approach to that “step beyond” is much more level-headed than Byron’s self-deluding, Schillerean eulogy to idealistic love, despite the obvious triumph of external circumstances. Brodsky knows that real-world loneliness is a necessary counterpart of man’s metaphysical loneliness, but even that “anti-social” loneliness is damaging enough in and of itself. It should not be toyed with. Byron does not take it seriously and is hurt by his own emotional extremism in the process.

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Dostoevskij had doubts about Schiller’s Romantic division of ideas from reality, of “sense” from “form,” as it were. Brodsky has similar doubts about the Romanticism of Byron, since it, too, pays scant attention to the forms or tangible constraints of his exile in a foreign space. Brodsky in much of his later work creates a synonymy between poetic form and the “space” of the human body. This synonymy allows us to suggest that for the Russian poet exile is almost insignificant; what is, however, important is that exile in the middle of nowhere is an experience by his human body of what man’s nothingness in the face of ineffable divinity will be like. In the same way, poetry for Brodsky is a physically difficult endeavour, an attempt to speak a word and create both in the face of faithless nothingness and the everlouder “noise of time” or literary tradition. Thus Brodsky tempers the extremes of Romanticism’s expansiveness, just as I argue elsewhere that he moderates the extremes of a Baroque aesthetic, thanks to the sobering influence of the English Metaphysicals. This tempering in New Stanzas to Augusta is done by the clay that Byron hoped to shake off. The trouble is, though, that at this early stage in Brodsky’s development, before what I have elsewhere called the more extreme “flights” à la Dostoevskij of, say, Osennij krik jastreba (The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn), reality is a little too vigorous in its hold.  The dizzy heights of Kierkegaard’s religious stage, the irrational, Sestovian ascents of the 1970s, lie ahead, and will be created only as a dialogue between body and soul, form and sense, clay and clouds.

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Coda: “He Reminds Me of John Donne”:  Gavrila Derzavin Q: Which of the Russian poets has influenced your work or which do you particulary admire? A: Two or three. The first one is an eighteenth-century poet,  Derzavin … He’s a great poet. He reminds me very often of John Donne. He’s a bit more lapidarian, something more primitive. His thoughts and psychology are equal to John Donne but because of a young language, young nation and young culture, he expresses it in a rather more primitive way, for example with primitive metaphors. But the drive which is his voice, the expression …! A.-M. Brumm, “The Muse in Exile,” 244–5

introduction The aim of this book has been to fill a speculative lacuna in my previous work, Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque. How did a young man in the Soviet Union use the language which he encountered in order to say something different? Moreover, how did that difference define itself by the early 1960s? I hope the preceding chapters have answered those two questions by investigating the relationship of an active, masculine, and Soviet aesthetic to a subsequent passive stance adopted before a feminine spirit in the form of a Muse, a poetic precursor or a contemporary acquaintance. By 1964 that spirit finally breaks through and the ethical conclusion or synthesis of Brodsky and all his youthful reading joins the scheme I outlined in that prior research. The poet of Novye stansy k Avguste joins the poet who was driven fundamentally by the English Metaphysicals and the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sestov. Even now, though, when Brodsky knows that a pursuit of Augusta, Euterpe, or Calliope is the “right” thing to do, and he is using the wilderness of his bleak place of exile to foster an equal humility before those spirits, the voice of pafos is still heard. I mentioned that the poem

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Xolmy is so titled because the obligation to rise from a material masculinity – from a physical base – to a loftier notion is a constant dictate. Here in 1965, during the same period of exile, a radically “nonAugustan” and resonant voice is heard as the start of yet another ascent up Cvetaeva’s hill. Brodsky sent a couple of poems to a tiny local newspaper while stuck  in the village of Norenskaja. In the town of Konosa the editor of Prizyv had no idea that their author was doing time for social parasitism and so happily published the texts. The first of the poems in question, Traktory na rassvete (Tractors at Dawn), sits in the strangest manner between the materialist rhetoric of Soviet news-sheets and the Cvetaevan, Christological drives expressed with such force in other poems of the same period.

the ongoing need for moments of PAFOS Prizyv is a stultifyingly dull publication, a couple of folded sheets replete with agricultural statistics. The front page of 14 August 1965 announced the urgent need to place the stockpiling of fodder at the forefront of common attention: Zagotovka kormov – udarnyj front! Together with such expressions of material drive are a few poems, not only by Brodsky but also by the local poets, V. Kidrijanov and V. Borodin. The latter of these offers a text entitled The Agronomist (Agronom). A weather-beaten, round-faced woman sits with great faith and little sleep over a microscope. She inspects a yellow-grey kernel that may prove the salvation of East European farmers. Not only is the object of her faith delimited spatially (that is, Western farmers will not reap these fruits) but temporally also. In the course of one year one hundred and fifty poods of wheat [2,457 kilograms] must be garnered from each hectare. This dithyramb to carbohydrates draws on extremely clear connections between labour and its goal, between the pafos of the text and the instigation of that goal-oriented labor. Обвeтрeнна. Широколица. В раздумиях упрямый лоб. Нацeлeн в зeрнышко пшeницы Еe помощник – микроскоп И вeрит юношeской вeрой, Что станeт гордостью полeй Вот этот крупный, жeлто-сeрый Гибрид нeдоспанных ночeй.

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 177 Gavrila Derzavin В полях зeрно заколосится И надо снять в свою страду Сто пятьдeсят пудов пшeницы С гeктара в будущeм году. И eй сквозь линзы микроскопа Нe просто зeрнышко видно, А хлeб, которым пол-Европы Засeять, можeт, суждeно. [Weather-beaten. Round-faced. Her stubborn brow in thought. Her ally the microscope is directed at a grain of wheat. She believes with a youthful faith that this great, yellow-gray hybrid of sleepless nights will become the pride of the fields. In the fields the grain will sprout ears; from intensive harvesting we must get one hundred and fifty poods of wheat per hectare next year. She sees not just the grain through the microscope's lens, but crops, too, with which perhaps half of Europe is fated to be sown.]

Traktory na rassvete begins with a synonymy of animate and inanimate entities, of cockerels and agricultural equipment. These birds are often used in Brodsky’s earliest verse as an embodiment of primordial noise. That cry is akin to the Word of Genesis, but here it is still sound, more than a recognizable linguistic form. That sound originates a transformation of the material world. It does not instigate the growth of a seed; instead we are told that it hews silence like wood. The “front” of Soviet labour-rhetoric, such as shown in the headline of Prizyv, becomes the pseudo-martial front of a confrontation with matter. Brodsky does not nurture thingness, he goes at it with the lathes, axes, and saws of pseudo-pafos. An increase in volume begins a reconstitution or reorganization of things. Such a metamorphosis is not so much destructive as reconstructive. The bold attack on substance, on a wholly tangible world where clouds can be cut up by the saw-teeth of tree-tops, is likened through rhyme to the maternal hovering of a bird above its young in a nest. Both birds and the world are being raised anew from their slumber; the sun rises above them all. Cockerels cannot fly, neither can fledglings, and even their mothers are earth- or nestbound due to their caretaking responsibilities. What is normally airborne now has both feet on the ground and wings folded. Little by little an inversion is effected upon the world. The noise of labour has reached a peak, but now the sun rises, “slicing the huts” with its rays. Tractors now begin to rise “like birds into the sky,

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and with their plows raise the fields to the sun.” Immaterial rays are assaulting the structure of houses and material tractors are elevating leaden, sodden fields towards the sun. The “elevated” tone of statesponsored pafos has raised its attention from the low-lying realms of microscopic slides and soil samples of Agronom. Traktory na rassvete raises an attack on the tangible world to the point where that world suddenly become passive in the face of a greater (and paradoxically) intangible force. Physical experience is pushed to the point where it snaps, but it has been granted a superior significance in that the experience was designed to make noise in an otherwise silent, nocturnal wilderness; a moment of epiphany is won, one that suddenly belittles all prior physical actuality. The final quatrain of the poem explains or defines this epiphany as “a morning of work, a morning of the people.” The day’s start is graced with “an ancient smile” and, as upon a river, “it looks upon the people of Nature” as it rises from its slumber “with the village” (or “countryside” – s derevnej ). The “people” are therefore a natural entity, akin to a river and bearing an ancient smile. The references here to antiquity, humour and rivers cannot but create a little Baroque paradigm, one that juxtaposes the permanence of Rome with the endless flow of the Tiber. Humour and jollity invert and shun the vertical, hierarchical stability of empires, as do all natural processes of blossoming and wilting, rising and falling. The juxtaposition is most succinctly phrased by the Polish Baroque poet Miko l aj Se¸p Szarzyn´ski (1550–81) in his Epitaph for Rome, which I offer beside Brodsky's text: Wszytko sie w nim zmienil o, sam trwa prócz odmiany Tyber, z piaskiem do morza co biez˙y zmieszany, Patrz, co Fortuna broi: to sie popsowal o, Co by l o nieruchome; trwa, co sie ruchal o (Carpenter, 210–11). [Everything in it has changed, the Tiber alone Lasts without change, running to the sea mixed with sand. Look at the tricks Fortune plays: what was motionless Has been destroyed, and what was in motion endures.] Тракторы просыпаются с пeтухами, Пeтухи просыпаются с тракторами, Вмeстe с двигатeлями и лeмeхами, Тишину раскалывая топорами. И в туманe утрeннeм по колeно, Рокоча, выстраиваются вдоль фронта.

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 179 Gavrila Derzavin Тишина разваливаeтся, как полeно, По обe стороны горизонта. Затопляются пeчи. Дым вьeтся прямо. Птицы склоняются над птeнцами. Лeс, как гигантская пилорама, Облака раскраиваeт зубцами. И восходит солнцe. И смотрит слeпо, И лучами сонныe избы косит. И тракторы возносятся, Как птицы в нeбо, И плугами к солнцу поля возносят! Это рабочee утро, утро Народа! Трудовоe утро. С улыбкой дрeвнeй. Как в вeликую рeку, глядит на людeй Природы И встаeт, отражаясь, от сна с дeрeвнeй. [Tractors awake with the cockerels, cockerels awake with the tractors, with the motors and plowshares, cleaving the silence with axes. Up to their knees in the morning mist, they line up along the front. The silence falls apart like logs, along both sides of the horizon. Stoves are stoked. Smoke winds directly upwards. Birds bend over their fledglings. The forest, like a gigantic saw-frame, splits the clouds with its teeth. And the sun comes up. And it looks blindly, slicing the sleepy huts with its rays. And the tractors rise up, like birds into the sky and raise the fields up to the sun with their plows! This is a morning of work, a morning of the People! A morning of labour. With an ancient smile. It looks upon the people of Nature, as if into a great river. It gets up, reflected all the while, from its sleep with the village.]

A year after the appearance of this poem in 1965, Brodsky planned  to publish a collection of his verse entitled Winter Post (Zimnjaja poc ta). The reaction of officialdom to his work remained a private or secret affair until 1988, when the Parisian emigré newspaper Russkaja mysl’ published all related materials. Within the Leningrad division of the Soviet Writers’ Union some very positive opinions were voiced: “a gifted poet,” “a talented man” whose poems are “extremely professional.” Certain tendencies and texts, however, troubled the Soviet reviewers. Isaak i Avraam was deemed “long and boring,” “verbose,” and “rhetorically long-winded.” In fact, any use whatsoever of biblical motifs was not smiled upon, because “what might have worked for Pasternak doesn’t always work for Brodsky.”

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Greatest praise is saved for the one poem that does work, a piece entitled The People (Narod). This peculiar text is an even bolder competition with Soviet rhetoric than Traktory na rassvete. Knowing this to be the case, the poet placed Narod at the start of his submitted collection, as if to show through the process of reading that collection from page 1 how to hit state pafos head-on and then jump into a qualitatively different (but consequent) mode. Narod has not been published in its entirety before, but the poet knowingly and cleverly submitted it to the Writers’ Union. It is safely preserved in the National Library and known to all readers of samizdat, but tiny fragments have already been published amongst the Writers’ Union papers in Russkaja mysl’. A definitive version of the text will be published among Brodsky’s juvenilia, but the Estate has permitted me to quote these fragments for the purposes of my argument. Even these quotes serve to show their essential – and I do not use the word lightly – significance in reshaping or forcing a Soviet aesthetic. The Soviet cliché of the “people” undergoes a powerful recontextualization, one of huge ethical significance. The people are synonymous with “goodness.” That goodness is charted on an explicitly vertical axis, movement along which is made linguistically, in isolation from the crowdedness of society, here presented as a forest. This linguistic process via the people becomes at the end of the text a surrender, a willing loss of agency to the amorphous flow of a spoken “river.” Calliope has been pushed to her limit, if you like, and even Euterpe has surrendered her proud distinctiveness as Brodsky finds triumph in his “loss” to language. He willingly falls before that which was, is, and will be the Russian language. Нe обманeшь народ. Доброта – нe довeрчивость. Рот, говорящий нeправду, ладонью закроeт народ … … Лишь народ можeт дать высоту, путeводную нить, ибо нe с чeм свой рост на отшибe от лeса сравнить. … Припадаю к народу. Припадаю к вeликой рeкe. Пью вeликую рeчь, растворяюсь в ee языкe. Припадаю к рeкe, бeсконeчно тeкущeй вдоль глаз – сквозь вeка, прямо в нас, мимо нас, дальшe нас. [You won’t fool the people. Goodness is not credulity. The people will close with their hand a mouth that does not speak

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 181 Gavrila Derzavin the truth ... Only the people can grant height, a guiding thread, for there’s nothing to compare one’s growth with away from the forest ... I fall before the people. I fall before a great river. I drink the great speech, dissolving in its language. I fall before the river, endlessly flowing past my eyes – through the ages, right into us, past us, farther than us.]

The text produced a fine impression on its Soviet audience. One reviewer wrote that  the poem was “deep in meaning,” another said it gave Zimnjaja poc ta the very right to exist! Although this text serves to bolster a critical shift in the ethical commitment of Brodsky’s verse, it is not an isolated event. I have already mentioned that the ethical drive of the poet’s period in internal exile acts as the groundwork for a spiritual leap of faith or at least a moment of fleeting epiphany. That groundwork must be prepared time and time again. It will, I hope, be of interest to the reader to hear of perhaps the one moment of greatest similarity in subsequent years to Narod and Traktory na rassvete.

the ongoing relevance and use of PAFOS, even in america In scanning Brodsky’s career-long aesthetic constancy, an attentive reader will note something of a blip on the screen in 1974. In that year the poet, who owes much to the casual wit of those such as Auden and Frost, suddenly swaps his ball-point pen for a quill and composes a funeral ode on the passing of Marshal Zukov. Why on earth is a young poet of Jewish extraction lauding an inspired military tactician of World War Two, a four-time Hero of the Soviet Union?* Why is a poet, twice exiled by that regime, mourning the demise of its fantastically successful defendant? The basis for such questions is that Brodsky’s reputation in the West, especially since his investiture as American poet laureate in 1991, helps to foster two fundamental paradigms: homesick Jewish dissident or, once in New York, whizz-kid manipulator of the Western literary canon. What helps us solve this problem vis-à-vis such stereotypes is Brodsky’s odd and very clever relationship to his aesthetic and ethical antithesis – the Soviet rhetoric  that both inspired and was inspired by those such as Marshal Zukov.  * Although even dissenting Russians felt gratitude towards Zukov as a man who had saved them from mortal danger, Brodsky admitted in his interview with Solomon Volkov (1997a, 45) that he “took a lot of crap” for writing this poem, hence my question.

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A definition of this relationship will explain why Brodsky wrote his monody.  Brodsky chooses Gavrila Derzavin’s poem The Bullfinch (Snigir’ ) as his model for a new, pathetic word to challenge or refill the vacuous Soviet rhetoric. The poem laments the passing of Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov five months after the end of the eighteenth century. Suvorov was one of greatest field commanders in the history of Russian  warfare and the drama of his death is captured in Derzavin’s poem. Что ты заводишь пeсню воeнну Флeйтe подобно, милый снигирь? С кeм мы пойдeм войной на Гиeну? Кто тeпeрь вождь наш? Кто богатырь? Сильный гдe, храбрый, быстрый Суворов? Сeвeрны громы в гробe лeжат. Кто пeрeд ратью будeт, пылая, Ездить на клячe, eсть сухари: В стужe и в зноe мeч закаляя, Спать на соломe, бдeть до зари; Тысячи воинств, стeн и затворов, С горстью россиян всe побeждать? Быть вeздe пeрвым в мужeствe строгом, Шутками зависть, злобу штыком, Рок низлагать молитвой и Богом, Скиптры давая, зваться рабом, Доблeстeй быв страдалeц eдиных, Жить для царeй, сeбя изнурять? Нeт тeпeрь мужа в свeтe столь славна: Полно пeть пeсню воeнну, снигирь! Бранна музыка днeсь нe забавна, Слышeн отвсюду томный вой лир: Львиного сeрдца, крыльeв орлиных Нeт ужe с нами! – что воeвать? [Why are you playing a fife-like martial song, dear finch? With whom will we go to war against the Hyena? Who is now our leader? Who is our knight? Where is the strong, brave, and swift Suvorov? Do the northern thunders lie in the grave? Who will ride ardently before the host on his nag, nibbling a rusk? Harden his sword in cold and heat, sleep on hay, keep vigil until dawn, so that a handful of Russians can conquer thousands of hosts, walls, and locks? Be everywhere the most severely

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 183 Gavrila Derzavin courageous, ridicule envy, fall upon malice? Dethrone fate with a prayer and God, shun sceptres, call himself a slave, suffer for common virtues, live for czars, exhausting himself? Men so great are gone from the world; stop singing your martial song, finch! Military music is not amusing here, the dull wail of lyres is heard everywhere. We no longer have among us the lionheart, the eagle’s wings! Why battle on?]

The first strophe consists of a chain of substantives, arranged in ascending order of grandeur: leader–folk hero–Suvorov himself. The final step of this ascent moves even beyond tangible reality, up to thunderclouds. The transformation of the generalissimo into an elemental noise is immediately followed by the interruption of that thunder, because the physical being, upon whom the production of that noise is dependent, has fallen down and fallen silent. The strophe therefore scribes an arc of ascending grandeur, which is bound to its origin or source of the human body. The ascent and stalling of this body, as it were, take place simultaneously in two realms: in both war and the “military music” (branna muzyka) inspired by that war. Derzhavin is equating two processes: warring and the struggle to interpret or designate the world. If Suvorov has died and will no longer wage battle, then, as the poem puts it, “why battle on?” Suvorov was a stable  support of the state and pathetic discourse has vanished. Derzavin, in discussing problems very akin to those of Hemingway, is asking the following question: If the reason for pathos has vanished, then what are we to do or make, if we have no idea what to say? The first and last questions of the poem turn out to be identical. Now let us consider the response to that very interrogative, one couched in the same, stately, even ponderous, meter. Вижу колонны замeрших внуков, гроб на лафeтe, лошади круп. Вeтeр сюда нe доносит мнe звуков русских воeнных плачущих труб. Вижу в рeгалии убранный труп в смeрть уeзжаeт пламeнный Жуков. Воин, прeд коим многиe пали стeны, хоть мeч был вражьих тупeй, блeском манeвра о Ганнибалe напоминавший срeдь волжских стeпeй. Кончивший дни свои глухо, в опалe, как Вeлизарий или Помпeй.

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184 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Сколько он пролил крови солдатской в зeмлю чужую! Что ж, горeвал? Вспомнил ли их, умирающий в штатской бeлой кровати? Полный провал. Что он отвeтит, встрeтившись в адской области с ними? «Я воeвал». К правому дeлу Жуков дeсницы большe ужe нe приложит в бою. Спи! У истории русской страницы хватит для тeх, кто в пeхотном строю смeло входили в чужиe столицы, нe возвращались в страхe в свою. Маршал! поглотит алчная Лeта эти слова и твои прахоря. Всe жe, прими их – жалкая лeпта родину спасшeму, вслух говоря. Бeй, барабан, и воeнная флeйта, громко свисти на манeр снeгиря. [I see columns of frozen grandsons, the coffin on its carriage, the croup of a horse. The wind does not bring me here sounds of the mourning, Russian military trumpets. I see the corpse of ardent Zhukov, moving off to death and regaled in decorations. He was a commander before whom walls fell – though the enemy’s sword was sharper – and with the brilliance of his manoeuvres on the Volga steppe reminded one of Hannibal. He ended his days alone, in disfavour like Belisarius or Pompey. How many soldiers’ blood did he spill in foreign lands? Did he mourn? Did he remember them, dying in his civilian’s white linen? His memory failed him. What will he answer, when he meets them in some hellish place? “I was fighting.” Zhukov will no longer bring his right arm to the right matter of battle. Sleep! One page of Russian history is enough for those from the infantry who went bravely into foreign capitals, but returned in fear to their own. Marshal! Greedy Lethe will swallow these words and your boots. Take them all, this pitiful mite spoken aloud to the one who saved his homeland. Drum, beat! And martial fife, whistle loudly like a finch!]



brodsky’s reworking of derz avin  What of Brodsky’s text, and why did he decide to use Derzavin’s Bullfinch? The twentieth-century situation is different in that whereas

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 Suvorov died a faithful servant of both czar and God, Zukov was not so easily subsumed into the epic hierarchies upon which state-sponsored pafos is composed. Due to the great popularity he enjoyed after his  martial triumphs over the Third Reich, Zukov appeared to both Stalin and Khrushchev to have become a dangerously popular hero. Whereas the pathos of Suvorov’s achievements describes a man subservient to  earthly and heavenly thrones, Zukov, by embodying that pathos, by living it out, used it as a tool of self-definition and raised himself up to eye level with the state. In terms of language, his death marks the silent end to that ascent and the end of a noisy competition between two worldviews. No longer will the marshal subvert the stability of the  Soviet monologue. In an age where polysemy was rarely suffered, Zukov is silenced, objectified by the state, and turned into an object. He is dumb and therefore becomes the object, rather than the walking, talking lyric subject of Soviet pathetic discourse. Brodsky,  it appears, wrote this one published stylization out of sympathy for Zukov and is therefore not writing with  true Soviet pafos, but composing in a manner not unlike Zukov, who stole, as it were, from hegemonic rhetoric in order to further his own, subjective intent. The first strophe of The Bullfinch shows the end of that intent. It finishes with a silent, supine corpse. The first stanza of Brodsky’s poem ends in a similar fashion, with the marshal’s surname and another corpse. This objectification of the deceased justifies Brodsky’s references to three ancient warriors: Hannibal, Pompey, and Belisarius. Hannibal struggled all his life against the Roman Empire, a conflict which resulted ultimately in his suicide. Pompey was one of the last of the Roman republic’s great supporters, though he, too, clashed with moribund, imperial immobility in the form of Caesar. Fleeing from Caesar, Pompey fell into the hands of traitors and was killed. As for  Belisarius, a Byzantine general, he suffered, again like Zukov, the suspicion of his native peoples after some dazzling military victories and was accused of both political infidelity and subversion. In unifying these three objects of deafening, state-sponsored monologues, I should note that Brodsky uses the adverb gluxo to define in particular the last few days of Hannibal’s life. This part of speech in Russian has several meanings: deafness (that is, the absence of sound), distance or isolation, and deathliness. All three soldiers, on the edge of either literal or metaphorical empires, sooner or later jar with the intolerance of imperial discourse. All three men are deprived of their clamorous, stormy existence by a ruling, dogmatic power which  prefers silence to dissent. Zukov, as one of these heroes, is turned into a lifeless body, the significance of which is determined and then used by the state.

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The theme of objectified soldiers is inherent in the paronomasia of Brodsky’s fourth stanza: “Zukov’s right arm which once was enlisted/ in a just cause will battle no more.” The pun here on what is “right” or “just” shows what connects these two poems over the span of two centuries. Before God – or the state, if we are speaking about the military figurehead of a godless system that aspires to similar omnipotence and omniscience – a speaking individual belittles himself in order to magnify the importance of that which he serves. The logical limit of this process is the transformation of a previously animate individual into an inanimate one, who is devoid of free will or speech, who accepts everything unquestioningly and refuses nothing.  In Zukov’s objectified state, he contains “some-thing” right or just in himself. The pun upon a right idea and a right hand expresses the potential of any speaker to objectify himself  correctly – before the divine, world-creating potential of a word. Zukov used pafos to shape his world and now,  unfortunately, it has shaped him. The physically “right” deeds of Zukov enter, therefore, into history books. The rise and fall of Hannibal, Pompey, and Belisarius come to us now only in established formats; these soldiers become objects of an abbreviated,  diminished “de-scription” of the world. As such, the deeds of Zukov are reduced to one page. Brodsky, with his own pathetic word, his own “little” tribute, tries to turn everything back to front or upside down. The poet sympathizes with the marshal and surrounds him – re-elevates him – with the very pathos which he once served.  Zukov is dead. The brave officer, the embodiment of Soviet rhetoric, has left. An immediate consequence of the marshal’s demise is silence: “The wind does not bring me here sounds/ Of the mourning, Russian military trumpets.” A new noise is required: “Drum, beat! And martial fife, / Whistle loudly like a finch!” This reference to the finch leads  us back to the start of Derzavin’s poem. Zukov is dead and Brodsky has wound up, so to speak, his clockwork songbird. Derzhavin, hearing the song that interrupts the silence, asks “Why are you playing a fife-like martial song, dear finch?” The poem by Derzhavin begins all over again! Derzhavin says: Be quiet, because pathos has gone quiet. Brodsky answers: Speak up and fill the emptiness caused by a quieted pathos – in fact, create a formally similar, but qualitatively different rhetoric. The vital dialogue between these two funeral laments, 174 years apart, shows clearly the reason why Brodsky resorted to an alien discourse. A sacrilegious use of the Word is altered in favour of a “creative” significance: Brodsky is acquiescing not to Soviet aesthetics, but to the formally similar mode of expression which Soviet pafos usurped. The whole process is neatly formulated in an essay ten years hence, one

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that shows how the fantastic hyperbole of Soviet pathos can be used by “outsiders” to subversive ends, how the tendency of impersonal pafos to think in generalizations and to objectify can be transformed into a subjective triumph. This fantastic reversal, paradoxically, is done through an apparent aesthetic or ethical surrender to the source of negation, which in this case is Soviet bombast: “Evil can be made absurd through excess … through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor” (Less than One, 389).

conclusion It is such mental aggression that has dictated the course of this book across the late 1950s and 1960s. Those years in the culture of the Soviet Union were a time of so-called samorodki in the view of Petr Vajl’ and Aleksandr Genis; the word (which etymologically suggests “self-birth”) denotes a person of natural and spontaneous, rather than institutionally refined, talents. The need to bear or fashion oneself required a loud, rhetorical tone: “In keeping with the rules of rhetoric, concerns over the accuracy or beauty of style were not only unnecessary, but superfluous: one should not bother tracing every leaf in the depiction of a distant forest” (Vajl’ and Genis, 35). The bold rhetoric of self-definition, of “self-birth” even, fostered a “sweeping” (razmasistyj) romanticism. That sweep was so broad and all-embracing that Vajl’ and Genis note the frequent appearance of the word romantika on the front pages of newspapers. Even in the middle of the twentieth century the term was “vaguely connected to   Byron and [Puskin’s’] Baxc isarajskij fontan.” I have followed Brodsky’s romantic change through the poems of his late teens and early twenties in search of a Muse. The Muse is just as permanent a concern in the poet’s mind almost thirty years later, when he writes the essay that I drew upon for my introduction – Altra Ego (On Grief and Reason, 81–96). It wrestles with the problematic, yet popular image of poets, which owes so much to the “public success of Lord Byron’s Don Juan.” The morally vacuous bedroom bravado of such rakes is rejected here by Brodsky in favour of Orpheus, who is “no Don Giovanni.” The poet “overshoots reality” or realism by chasing his Eurydice, his Muse, which is exactly the process I have tried to chart – that is, the use of realist verse for an unreal experience. “This takes its toll. The longer he is at it … the more idiosyncratic his conduct becomes. Revelations and insights obtained by him in the process may lead him either to an upsurge of hubris or – more likely

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– to a deepening humility before the force that he surmises behind these insights and revelations.” The verse that Brodsky published, especially in English, after his move to America is very much poetry of deep humility, of awe before one’s medium. The Orphic descent into the language of his youth in order to find the Eurydice of poetic tradition took place in Russia, in poems such as those chosen for this book. Joseph Brodsky became a poet in Leningrad in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Leningrad he began to listen to the “nagging, idiosyncratic, self-referential, persistent voice of the Muse” because a “poet continually has to get where nobody has ever been before – mentally, psychologically or lexically.” The lyrical isolation incurred by a drive to verbal heights known to few, if any, post-war Russian poets always managed to preserve what Jakov Gordin terms an integrity or wholeness (cel’nost’). That wholeness has two halves: a man and a voice. The voice is called Augusta and for a while she resided on Litejnyj Prospekt. The previous pages have been her story.

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Appendix: Meter and Rhythm in Brodsky’s Leningrad Poetry Works of the Leningrad school have one distinctive feature: a respect for form, for the demands of form A. Èpel’buan, 1991

introduction: brodsky and poetic form This appendix has a simple intention: to show how Brodsky’s poetry between the late 1950s and 1972 adopts and alters certain metrical and rhythmic tendencies. Thus far I have looked at how his verse concerns itself thematically with the relationship of matter to the immaterial. Here I intend to see if these thematic emphases are reinforced – or perhaps contradicted – formally. Do the formal changes in Brodsky’s verse show any similarities with changes in subject matter? In the introduction to this book I offered a quote from the work of M.M. Grisman, who defines rhythm as the struggle of certain opposites such as necessity and freedom. Grisman goes on to draw upon Baxtin’s observation that free will and activity are negated by rhythm, since they are obliged to do battle with constraints or schemes. Upon such broad views let us place the more specific proclamations of Brodsky, who expresses formally the ethical intent I have traced thematically. One must, he says, adopt a strict form and only then jazz up its content: In my opinion a regular meter and exact rhymes shaping an uncomfortable thought are far more functional than any form of free verse. Because in the former case the reader gets a sense of chaos being organized, while in the latter a sense of dependence on or being determined by chaos. From what

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190 Appendix one would call a moral point of view, the former is more important than the latter. Even in the event that it is not organization, but nothing more than a form of resistance to chaos. For in the physical world only resistance is possible. (1973)

Rhythm pokes and prods at formlessness until the physical integrity of a poem is hard pressed to resist the ensuing chaos. Elsewhere Brodsky explains the juxtaposition or interplay of form, rhythm, and formlesness as a linear, philosophically significant passage. Once more, the poet stresses the ethical weight of his relationship to versification: q : Did you ever write in free form? a : I did a lot, especially when I was younger. q : That seems characteristic of younger poets, doesn’t it?.. a : Because it’s easier to express yourself in free verse. But poetry is not a question of self-expression. It’s also some kind of craft, you know. q : Which takes time – a : Which takes time. You know, as Robert Frost said, “to write free verse is the same as to play tennis with the net down.” And with free verse, the first question should be, free from what, free from what? It’s ok if you write free verse because you’re tired and you can’t write any more. It’s all right if you at least experience a strict form and if the free verse is a consequence of it. Because why did free verse appear? – as a consequence of strict form. So each poet has to repeat in miniature the same process. Free verse, freedom – this is a question of liberation. But he who has liberated himself has liberated himself from what – from some kind of, let’s say, slavery. But if he didn’t experience slavery, he can’t experience freedom because freedom does not have an autonomous meaning. (Brumm, 240–1).

brodsky’s chosen meters and their frequency In any analysis of such a process, the best place to start is with an overview of which meters Brodsky works in, which forms of constraint he willingly adopts to impose upon his syntax, and the thoughts for which that syntax acts as vehicle. The data base I used to discover such tendencies is over twenty thousand lines long for classical lines alone.  It consists of the Puskin Fund Collected Works plus the archives in the National Library. Nevertheless I should point out that the work continues to locate Brodsky’s early manuscripts outside of the Library and we do not know how much material will eventually be available from other sources.

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By archives I mean two types of text: first, published poems which were not included in the Collected Works, but which are in Stixotvorenija i poèmy or other collections, and are also in the Library. Secondly, I have taken only what I have considered to be completed versions of unpublished poems, together with untitled pieces of sufficient length and cohesion that can be considered finished. The earliest of these texts can be dated with confidence from 1957; the latest include a piece or two from after the poet’s exile, which would have been sent back to Leningrad from overseas. These latter peculiarities have been overlooked, since I include only texts written in Leningrad. Such texts, therefore, cannot be from later than the summer of 1972. Each poem is included only once. Even sizable and self-contained variant stanzas of longer works are excluded in favour of a single, canonical version (the published version, wherever possible). With well over twenty thousand lines under consideration, the following tendencies manifest themselves. In the texts of 1957, 45 percent of Brodsky’s output is accentual. (By “accentual” I mean lines of six stresses or less, with a moderate two-stress differential, e.g., 2–4 stresses, 4–6, etc.) Almost a third of the poet’s work is in binary meters, whilst only 8 percent is in ternary form. Ternary meters never enjoy great popularity in Brodsky’s œuvre; in 1958 he casts 15.5 percent of his verse in that form. In subsequent years that figure falls to a usual total of 10 percent or less, with the exception of 1962–3 (21.0–18.9 percent) and 1972 (20.0 percent). The one meter that is often and openly discussed as the marked tendency of early texts is free verse. Although none of the earliest freeverse texts can, as yet, be concretely determined as the product of 1957 or 1958, in the next year there is more free verse than any other type (40.3 percent). This form is used at the expense of binary meters (7.0 percent). I have already mentioned Jakov Gordin’s perceptions of Brodsky’s preferences at this time: “After a few – not always successful – experiments or exercises in forms of poetry (in particular he was trying work in free verse), there was that period from the start of the sixties when he used exclusively the exactness of Puskinian form … But – fortunately – he soon went beyond that.” Gordin is absolutely correct in his assumptions. In 1961 the accentual output drops to 5.3 percent and binary meters shoot up to 79.5 percent, a percentage only to be improved upon in 1965 and 1969. In fact, after 1961 binary meters remain the most popular vehicle for every year spent in the Soviet Union except 1967, in which accentual verse accounts for 67.2 percent of the year’s efforts and binary for 26.5 percent. The major change discernible after 1967 in the use of binary meters could be clearly shown in a visual representation: in the

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years prior to his exile, binary structures were fading in favour of both accentual and ternary.

exactly which binary or ternary meters did the poet prefer? Behind the rather broad assertions of such summarized tendencies we need to specify the distribution of each binary or ternary meter. We need to define exactly which binary meters Brodsky employed and, perhaps more importantly, when. Within the iambic meters, no real preference is shown for any linelength until 1961, when the aforementioned rush towards binary meters takes place. In that year Brodsky produces 35 percent of all his iambic trimeter and tetrameter lines. Iambic pentameter lags behind at 14 percent. As the years pass, however, that modest rate of pentameter production remains more constant than trimeter or tetrameter, which fall sharply out of favour until the start of the decade. As for the very long or very short iambic lines, hexameters appear tentatively in 1964 and then again with more assertion in 1971, when the poet writes 50 percent of his six-foot lines. Dimeters appear in three marked bursts of activity: 25 percent in 1964 and then in 1970 and 1972, 35 percent and 24 percent. The reader may notice at this juncture that the totals from the annual percentages do not at times produce 100 percent. The reason for this is that a section of the poet’s archive remains in an undatable form, as individual sheets or other collected papers with no texts among them of a specified year. Rather than involve myself in wild conjecture, I have taken a more cautious approach towards the calculation of percentages, using only texts that are of a discernible year. I have been able to place a very large number of archival texts as the work of a given year (or even month), but I suspect that some will remain forever without a birthday. It happens sometimes that when we talk of rarer meters, such as the trochaic trimeter, more of the texts remain undated than dated. As a consequence, exactly when the poet’s fondness for that line appeared is hard to say. Thankfully, such problems are few and far between; they do not prohibit us from talking, for example, about all other trochaic lines. If 1961 shows itself to be the early peak of binary tendencies, it is due almost as much to trochaic pentameter as iambic trimeter or pentameter. Thirty-five per cent of Brodsky’s trochaic pentameter lines were written in that year. The poet began working in it before any other recorded trochaic meter. Of all trochaic lines, the tetrameter is

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also used with the greatest regularity, in ten of the sixteen years of Soviet poetic activity. (The next most popular line is the pentameter, in seven years.) After 1963, trochaic meters do not enjoy great usage, save a sudden interest in the hexameter in 1972 (and the pentameter, in fact, vanishes after 1969). Turning to when Brodsky used ternary meters, it comes as no surprise to see that he does so less often. No ternary meter is employed in more years than the anapestic dimeter (nine). The anapestic dimeter and trimeter also account for a larger total number of lines than any ternary meters. (By contrast, the most popular of all classical meters in Brodsky’s repertoire is the iambic pentameter, used 29.2 times more than the most popular ternary meter!) Beginning with these anapests, Brodsky has lines in all five possibilities from dimeter (426) to hexameter (14). Only the hexameter lines are confined to one year (1963); all others are used in at least four separate years. Dimeters appear first of all in 1958, where Brodsky wrote 8 percent of his total number of such lines. They peak in 1962 at 42 percent. The early 1960s (from 1962 to 1964) appear the most fruitful period for anapestic experiments: 47 percent of anapestic trimeters are conjured up in 1963 and 39 percent of pentameters. From 1965 onwards general interest in this foot declines, with the exception of the tetrameter, which enjoyed something of a resurgence in 1969 (22 percent) and 1973 (30 percent). Dactyls are rarer than anapests in Brodsky’s verse. Dactyls account for 3 percent of his output, anapests 6 percent. (Amphibrachs own 2 percent of his corpus, compared with the modest 6 percent of trochees and the massive 83 percent of iambs.) All of his hexameters appear in 1957 (eighteen lines) and all his pentameters in 1961 (twenty-four lines). Once again, as with anapests, the period of 1962–3 is when dactyls are tried in earnest; 1962 for tetrameters (49 percent of his total output in that line), 1963 for trimeters (64 percent), and dimeters (79 percent). Dactylic lines fall dramatically from 1964 onwards; none appear after 1970. Rarest, however, of all ternary lines recorded are amphibrachs. Brodsky has work only in lines of two to four feet. Dimeters appear between 1958 and 1964, with 43 percent of them appearing in that initial year. Trimeter lines, save almost a hundred of them in 1971, are evident only between 1961 and 1964.

rhythm The above answers questions concerning which feet or line lengths Brodsky uses prior to 1972, when he uses them, and how often. Such

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is the situation with regard to classical meters and I shall stick with them for the discussion of rhythm. Rather, however, than subject the reader to a discussion of all twenty-three classical line types and their rhythmic tendencies, I will look only at iambic and trochaic lines, for the simple reason that 88.6 percent of Brodsky’s classical lines are in binary form, while 11.4 percent are in ternary. I will focus here just on tetrameter and pentameter binary lines.

rhythm in the trochaic tetrameter The trochaic tetrameter in both Brodsky’s Collected Works and the archives constitute 3.4 percent of all his classical lines: a small percentage, but nonetheless one that stretches over a sufficiently long period (from 1961 to 1971) to warrant our attention. In order to give these binary lines some contextual significance, I will draw upon the stunningly comprehensive overviews of rhythmic tendencies in Russian poetry by M.L. Gasparov. Those statistics show that since the eighteenth century, all the way to the generation of Soviet poets born in 1911 or later, the following rhythmic patterns have been established in the trochaic tetrameter. First, stress on the initial ictus is decreasing, from 63.3 percent in the eighteenth century to 50.9 percent in Soviet poets. Secondly, the middle ictus is hit with increasing frequency (89.5 percent to 94.5 percent), and lastly, by implication, the third ictus is used 47.6 percent of the time, down from 54.8 percent two hundred years ago. If these statistics really do represent a continuing tendency, then Brodsky pushes it further. His first-ictus stressing remains below 50.9 percent until 1965 and only goes above 55 percent in 1971. In the second ictus, the Soviet average offered by Gasparov (94.4 percent) is not wildly different from Brodsky’s, hovering around the low nineties until, once again, a big change takes place around 1971. The same year also witnesses a change in the third and final (variable) ictus. Gasparov offers the Soviet 47.6 percent, Brodsky here shows the greatest experimentation, between a low of 26 percent in 1963 to the radical 100 percent of 1971.

rhythm in the iambic tetrameter In the iambic tetrameter, experimentation shows itself in a different manner. In the trochaic tetrameter, Brodsky uses the second, central ictus as a frequently stressed anchor in the middle of the line to allow less stressing in the first half of the line and variation in the second. Here, in the iambic tetrameter, Brodsky hits the first ictus with great

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frequency, in order that experimentation be possible in the second and third. Gasparov records the average stress rate of first, second, and third ictuses in the Soviet iambic tetrameter as 82.3, 84, and 47.3 percent (91). Brodsky’s first ictus floats in essence between 80 and 90 percent as the most consistently used of all the ictuses. The second or “central” ictus wavers between 100 and 35 percent, but nevertheless does remain consistent with Gasparov’s Soviet poets in that it is stressed almost always more often than a third ictus. (The two exceptions to this are in 1959 and 1964–5 when Brodsky tends not to stress the middle of an iambic tetrameter line so often, relying instead on the first and third ictuses.)

rhythm in the trochaic pentameter If we move from tetrameter to the longer and more varied pentameter binary lines, the solidity of a trochaic line-middle in the tetrameter moves a little further towards line end. In other words, stressing in Brodsky’s trochaic pentameter is less frequent at the start of the line. Gasparov notes Soviet poets stressing the first ictus of trochaic pentameters 58.7 percent of the time. From a wildly under-stressed first ictus of 1957 (18 percent), Brodsky goes above 58.7 percent only twice, 1958 and 1964. The overall range of that ictus is, however, great (18–75 percent) and made possible by the less exciting departures from standard Soviet stressing of second, third, and fourth ictuses as noted by Gasparov (76.4, 86.3, and 37.3 percent). The general tendency of Brodsky’s trochaic pentameter has been a process of increasing moderation, with (as appears to be case with several meters) 1964 acting as a year of sudden adjustment. The excessive stressing of the second ictus in the 1950s lessens; the third and fourth ictuses manifest a narrower range of stressing frequencies, especially if we ignore the single small text of 1957 that accounts for such wayward figures.

rhythm in the iambic pentameter Most demanding of our attention is the hugely significant iambic pentameter. This is the backbone of all Brodsky’s meters. The figures given by Gasparov for Soviet poets are 82.8, 70.9, 84.6, 40, and 100 percent. The penultimate ictus is sacrificed for rhythmic relief after three reasonably consistent stresses. What Brodsky does is stress the first ictus at a higher rate than usual (in seven years at above 90 percent) and then do the same for the third (in ten years above the typical 84.6 percent). The stresses in between (second and fourth) are used less often than expected. The second in twelve years is below

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70.9 percent; the fourth is also in twelve years below Gasparov’s average of 40 percent. Brodsky, then, in his iambic pentameter is creating more of a “swing,” as it were. He increases the stressing on alternate ictuses. It forms something of a back-beat, a solid thump against which other tricks may perhaps be tried. This emphasizing of up versus down beats would certainly play into the hands of any analogy between Brodsky’s verse and jazz, if one pays explicit attention to Dixieland. There are, of course, moments of rearrangement or reassessment in this scheme. In 1957, for example, Brodsky completely flips the organization of dominant and weakly stressed ictuses on its head. In 1963 the stressing of all ictuses is very high, only to be slackened in 1964 so that a more stable and longer-lasting relationship between them can be established.

an example of rhythmic complexity and significance: NOVYE STANSY K AVGUSTE

If indeed the iambic pentameter has played the fundamental role in the poet’s corpus that I am suggesting, then a word or two should be said about one specific text as something of a litmus test. Let us stick with iambs, since such a text will be made of feet that constitute 83 percent of the poet’s Leningrad œuvre. If possible, two types of iambic lines should be played one against the other. As a result, I suggest Novye stansy k Avguste and do so for three reasons. First, the text is thematically very significant, as already explained. Secondly, it is written fundamentally in iambic pentameter, in 1964, a year when a rearrangement towards stability takes place in that meter. The final reason for choosing the poem is that a substantial, secondary metrical strain also runs through the text, that of iambic tetrameter, when the stressing pattern of this meter departs from stability. This poem therefore acts as an interplay between the pentameter and the tetrameter, between stability and instability at a time of thematic shift from a masculine, earthbound tendency to a troublingly elusive feminine one, hence the question at the end of the text’s final stanza: Èvterpa, ty? Kuda zasel ja, a? Novye stansy k Avguste is 134 lines long. It appears a little longer as four lines are broken typographically, but they should be joined to the following phrases in which the necessary rhyme is found. The text has nine lines in iambic dimeter, two in hexameter, and a couple of oddities. In essence, however, the poem is a competition or contrast between seventy lines of iambic pentameter and fifty-one of tetrameter.

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The oddities are two lines in the text which break the iambs (a couple more are open to varying interpretation). In English the lines read “the rain steals the shaft of light” (or “ray of hope” – prosvet); the second reads “I will not hasten my step.” These lines have an identical broken meter (- ´ - ´ - - ´) and to some degree draw additional attention to themselves by highlighting the central competition of the poem’s content, that of light (or hope) versus a dark or somehow viscous presence, movement through which is necessarily slow. It is my contention that this symmetry of themes is managed through a tricky symmetry of meters and rhythms. All the lines in the poem except for a couple of exceptions are composed of iambs. When a person hears those iambic lines, he does not have the reader’s advantage of knowing (by looking at the text) how long a line is in advance. A listener hears an iambic cadence begin, but has no idea how long it will continue – three, four, five feet or more. (In this particular poem, rhymes mark the line-ends.) If I am stressing the rhythmic tendencies of Novye stansy k Avguste, then I should never forget the interpretative status of a listener, hearing the text for the first time. That listener will be hearing iambic tetrameter lines, stressing their ictuses with an overall average of 72.3 percent and pentameter lines at an average of 75.6 percent. I cannot imagine that even the most sensitive or experienced audience would notice that difference. The frequency of stressing is very close, allowing Brodsky a delicate interplay of two types of line that often coincide. The degree of stressing of the four tetrameter ictuses is as follows: 1 2 3 4 84% 27% 78% 100% For the pentameter it is: 1 2 3 4 5 84% 53% 91% 50% 100% If we take a look at Gasparov’s Soviet averages, we notice that every single stressing-percentage here is lower than a generation’s average except the pentameter’s third ictus of 91 percent. That ictus becomes the spine, as it were, of the text, upon which the looser stressing is played. The way to record this play is to line up vertically all the first iambic feet in the text, then all the second, and so forth. (For such computations, I counted the typographically broken lines as two, such as: “I prut’ja verb, / vonzaja rozovatyj mys,” even though the rhyme mys is what shows the real line-end. The line on the page would cause the reader to pause at its break. In any case, the four broken lines in the poem are set up such that the second half is also an iambic line.)

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If we then ignore the distinction between tetrameter and pentameter lines for a moment and look at the rhythm perceived across the “massed” iambs, then a clear tendency reveals itself. Instead of different line-lengths being heard in advance, different rhythms are heard across the whole line (especially since the last thing one hears is that fifth foot of a pentameter – one hears four other rhythmically jumbled feet beforehand!). The first twelve lines of the text show a strong preference for tetrameter lines, and a coincidence of sentential (or phrasal) and linebreaks. The first two pentameter lines cause an awkward enjambment and those two unexpected fifth feet are created by the adverbs “up” and “down.” Here is the first key to what the pentameter rhythms will offer the text thematically. That new theme is not really heard for the first three stanzas. The low second-ictus and light third-ictus stress that characterizes the tetrameter predominates until stanza four. Suddenly, when the conversation turns to “shades” or “ghosts” (ten’), to boundaries of the soul, the pentameter rhythm of second and third ictus working together is heard loud and clear for the first time. (The second ictus is the one that the tetrameter hates to hit!) Stanzas five, six, and seven show a certain degree of balance between rhythms, over the course of lines that describe the muddy, sticky locus of exile. It is in stanza eight that the second ictus, the bane of the iambic tetrameter, reappears with a vengeance when talk turns to not so much immaterial, spectral movement up or down as the complete absence of matter, a place with a poet extracted from it. Stanza nine sees less attention paid to ictuses one and three, as they float together in a middle range. Balance is maintained in the fourth ictus, the only sure thing about a tetrameter line. The second and fifth ictuses – of a pentameter rhythm – rush up above 90 percent as the poet talks again of his physical loss, debilitation, or absence. Balance within a “middle range” is maintained across second, third and fifth ictuses in stanza eleven, the stanza that recalls Byron more than any other with its talk of the pain of physical separation and distance. So what happens in the final stanza? A radical reshuffling takes place; not so much in terms of percentages up or down as in rearrangement of the ictuses relative to one another. One and three change places, two and five come to meet each other, and four – the tetrameter certainty – plummets off the face of the map. How do the final percentages compare to the averages across the whole poem for tetrameter and pentameter? Which are closer to the averages? The first ictus is no guide, since it has been stressed with such regularity by both meters, and they share a text-long average of

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84 percent. The second-ictus competition is won by the pentameter: 55.6 percent is closer to 53 percent, not 27 percent. The backbone of the pentameter, the 91 percent stressing of ictus three loses out to the tetrameter, since 71 percent is so close to 78 percent. In other words, both meters sacrifice their salient rhythms to a compromise, both are forced to shift from a “gallop to a stroll,” as the poem has it, which is hard to do without “breaking the rhythm of one’s breathing” (sbit’ dyxanie). It seems possible to align the thematic emphases of different iambic lines (in the large forms of stanzas) such that the freer, more flexible iambic pentameter rhythms (not lines) tend to carry discussions of difficult flight into emptiness or absence. The tetrameter rhythms, on the other hand, carry perhaps the discussion of presence, of being somewhere, a place where one would rather not be. Whether one adopts the rather impressionistic conclusions that come from the arranged marriage of rhythm and semantics, it remains clear that in 1964, a year when Brodsky writes a poem about the struggle of two forms, of matter in search of an immaterial Augusta, two closely related lines play their rhythms one against the other in such a way that extremes are cancelled and harmony or balance is attained.

conclusion: rhythm and jazz I draw the reader’s attention to these rhythmic patterns for two reasons. First, because they have not yet been studied; and secondly, because Brodsky speaks on several late occasions of how he perceives time as a hum or buzz, one which can be manipulated by the stopstart processes imposed upon it by meters. Versification structures time, but unless we are talking about accentual verse (and we are not), then since Brodsky invents no new meters, novelty or innovation expresses itself rhythmically. Jazz was a primary instigator of that sense of rhythm. The poet himself wrote of its effect upon not only poetic, but physical form; having heard Ellington, Fitzgerald et al., “something began to happen, I remember, even to our walk. The joints of our highly inhibited Russian frames harkened to ‘swing’” (On Grief and Reason, 6). That swing is expressed not just in the lilt of an iamb, but in the arc of Zof’ja’s metaphysical pendulum, up and down, between flesh and spirit, matter and the immaterial. The swing that we see in Brodsky’s earliest verse, eventually between the ethical opposites of “good” and “bad,” prepares the groundwork for his subsequently spiritual expressions of the later poems. I quoted the poet on his definitions of writing poetry as swings between “hubris” and “humility.” In this book I have hopefully shown how the former category, stolen

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in part from the materialism of Soviet verse, fuelled a rush towards an awe-inspiring, humbling relationship with the power of his very medium, with the words of his pen and his predecessors. The rush from hubris to humility is made in an attempt to sound, eventually, a little less august and a little more like Augusta.

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205 References Moore, T. 1835. Commentary to “Stanzas to Augusta” in Byron X: 193. O’Connor, W.V. 1958. “Rhetoric in Southern Writing: Faulkner. Georgia Review 12:1 (Spring): 83–6. Reprinted in Utley et al., Bear, Man and God. Orlova, R. 1985. Xeminguèj v Rossii. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Parker, S.J. 1965. “Hemingway’s Revival in the Soviet Union,” 177–95 in Asselineau, R., Straumann (eds.), The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe. Paris: Minard/Lettres Modernes.   Pasternak, B. 1989. Sobranie socinenij v pjati tomax. Moscow: Xudozestvennaja literatura. Pizer, D. 1988. Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.” – A Critical Study. Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia. Polk, N., ed. 1993. New Essays on “The Sound and the Fury.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polukhina, V. 1989. Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pound, E. 1913. “A Boy’s Will.” Poetry (May): 17–18. Reprinted in Gerber. Critical Essays on Robert Frost. “Questions and Answers after Brodsky’s Reading, 21 February 1978.” Iowa Review (Summer 1978): 4–9. Reid, J.C. 1967. Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit. London: E. Arnold. Remarque, E.M. 1930. All Quiet on the Western Front. London: Putnam’s. Roseberry, R.L. 1974. “Schillerean Elements in the Works of Dostoevsky.” Germano-Slavica 3: 17–35. Rosenfeld, I. 1951. Review of Across the River and into the Trees. Kenyon Review 13 (Winter): 147–55. Republished in Meyers, Hemingway.  Russkaja mysl’. 1988. “‘Zimnjaja pocta’: K 20 – letiju neizdanija knigi Iosifa  Brodskogo.” 3750 “Literaturnoe prilozenie #7,” 11 November: iv–vi. Saint-Exupéry, A. de 1961.Wind, Sand and Stars. London: Heinemann. – 1976. Southern Mail and Night Flight. London: Penguin. Salinger, J.D. 1991. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Shalin, D.N., ed. 1996. Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of PostCommunist Consciousness. Boulder: Westview. – “Intellectual Culture,” 41–99 in ibid. Schwartz, D. 1938. Review of To Have and Have Not. Southern Review 3 (Spring): 769–82. Republished in Meyers, Hemingway. Simons, J.D.1967. “The Nature of Suffering in Schiller and Dostovesky.” Comparative Literature 19: 160–73.  Sluckij, B. 1989. Stixotvorenija. Moscow: Xudozestvennaja literatura. Snell, R., ed. 1965. Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of a Man in a Series of Letters. New York. Stites, R. 1992. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Utley, F.L. 1971. Bear, Man and God: Eight Approaches to William Faulkner’s “The Bear.” New York: Random House.

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206 References  Vajl’, P. and A. Genis. 1996. 60-e: Mir sovetskogo celoveka. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.  Venclova, T. 1990. “Cuvstvo perspektivy: Razgovor Tomasa Venclovy s Iosifom Brodskim.” Vil’njus 7: 111–26. – 1997. “Poèma gory i Pòma konca Mariny Cvetaevoj kak Vetxij Zavet i Novyj Zavet,” 212–26 in Sobesedniki na piru. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos. Volkov, S. 1997a. “O Cvetaevoj: Dialog s Iosifom Brodskim,” 23–56 in Brodskij o Cvetaevoj. Moscow: Nezavisimaja gazeta. – 1997b. Razgovory s Iosifom Brodskim. New York: Slovo.   Zigaceva, M.V. 1992. “Ballada v rannem tvorcestve Iosifa Brodskogo.” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 9/4 (July/August): 51–6.

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Index

Ar’ev, A. 6, 12, 24 Auden, W.H. 5 Axmadulina, B. 21 Axmatova, A. 5, 12–14, 16, 20–6 Azadovskij, K. 6, 16, 27–8 Bagrickij, È. 7, 26, 75–82, 89, 92 Belyj, A. 23 Bethea, D. 161 Blok, A. 23  Bobysev, D. 21, 23 Brodsky, J.: and affinities between generations, 20–3, 120–1; and affinities for prior Russian poets, 5, 23–6; and affinity for Western prose, 26–9; and declamatory verse, 15–16; and ethics, 97–8, 106, 109–11, 118, 125–6, 139, 143, 156, 161, 173, 175, 186, 199–200; and form versus content, 13–14, 16, 162, 173–4; and jazz, 17–20, 86–7, 90, 100, 136–7, 196, 199–200; and male / female discourse, 7–8, 32, 47, 52–3, 86– 7, 101–2, 111–12, 120–3, 126–7,

135–8, 142–4, 148, 175, 187–8; and matter / materialism, 8, 19, 43, 53–4, 60, 83, 91–3, 96, 102, 108–9, 113–14, 117–18, 121–3, 133, 140, 144, 151–3, 160, 162– 3, 173–4, 177–8; and metrical evolution, 15–16, 19–20, 126, 189–193; and pathos, 7, 49, 63, 71–5, 88, 112–13, 170, 175–88; and the relationship of prose to poetry, 30–1, 120, 125; and “suburban” texts, 82–92, 145, 151, 156; and risk, 7–8, 19, 71, 119, 124, 126–30, 137, 140, 161, 163, 180; and rhythm, 17–20, 170–1, 189–90, 193–9; and speech versus the ineffable, 6–7, 32, 36, 38–41, 47, 87, 90–1, 124, 132, 141, 169– 70, 173–4, 199–200  Brodsky, J., works cited: 13 ockov, 97, 103–8; Ballada o malen’kom buksire, 97–102; Bogomateri pred  mest’ja, 82–5; Bol’saja èlegija Dzonu Donnu, 125–6, 161, 169; Isaak i Avraam, 125–6, 154, 161, 179; Kak

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208 Index nebesnyj snarjad / otrjad, 97, 113,  115–18; Kazdyj pred Bogom, 64, 69–75; Moi slova, ia dumaiu, umrut, 169; Narod, 180–1; Novye stansy k Avguste, 164, 167–75, 196–200; Osennij krik jastreba, 174; Ostanovka v pustyne, 27; Ot otkrainy k centru, 79, 82–92, 125; Peterburgskij roman, 15–16; Razgovor s  nebozitelem, 173; Russkaja gotika,  79, 82–3; Samson, domasnij kot, 97,  108–111; Sestvie, 24; Slon i Marus’ka, 97, 111–12; Ssora, 97, 113; Traktory na rassvete, 176–9;   V sest’ casov, 97, 113–15; Xolmy, 24, 127, 151–60, 176; Zof’ja, 119, 125–41, 154, 169, 199 Byron, Lord., 8, 161–7, 170, 172–4, 187 Camus, A., 29, 32, 50–1 Cvetaeva, M. 5, 8, 21, 23–6, 120–3, 127, 132, 141–60, 169–70, 176  Derzavin, G. 182–8 Dickens, C. 27, 31–7, 50–1, 53 Dos Passos, J. 6, 28, 31, 39–43, 45 Dostoevskij, F. 44, 47, 162–4, 173–4 Eliot, T.S. 26 Eremin, M. 6 Èrenburg, I. 63  Evtusenko, E. 22 Faulkner, W. 21, 27–30, 32, 47–50, 71, 79, 92, 166 Frost, R. 5, 26, 55–8 Ga l czyn´ski, K. 7, 75–6, 92–6, 139 Gerasimov, V. 6, 26, 28 Ginzburg, L. 21 Gogol’, N. 105

Gordin, J. 6, 12, 14–16, 19–20, 22– 5, 29, 97, 126, 188 Hemingway, E. 6, 27–9, 32, 43–7, 50–2, 61, 71, 98 Herbert, Z. 93 Joyce, J. 6, 27, 37–40 Khrushchev, N. 10–12, 14, 26, 32, 185 Kierkegaard, S. 163, 175 Kochanowski, J. 95 Korobova, È. 6, 23, 25, 28  Kusner, A. 6, 13–14, 20–3, 25–6, 120, 127 Kuzmin, M. 21 Lermontov, M. 167  Lixacev, D. 162 Loseff, L. 6, 24–9  Mandel’stam, O. 5, 22–3, 97, 170 Mann, T. 21 Maramzin, V. 4 Mi l osz, C. 93–4 Najman, A. 6, 12, 14–19, 21, 23 Nikol’skaja, T. 6 Okudzhava, B. 21 Pasternak, B. 8, 25–6, 58, 97, 120– 9, 132–3, 135, 139, 141–3, 169, 179 Pound, E. 56 Proust, M. 21, 92  Puskin, A. 15, 85, 126, 138–9, 146, 148, 161, 164, 167, 169, 187 Rejn, E. 6, 12, 17, 19, 21, 23–4, 26, 28 Remarque, E.M. 29, 50–2

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209 Index Saint-Exupéry, A. de., 29, 32, 50–4, Salinger, J.D. 6, 28, 31, 47, 50–3, 71 Schiller, F. 103–5, 162–3, 173 Se¸p-Szarzyn´ski, M. 178 Shakespeare, W. 27, 95, 103–5,  139–41, 157–8 Sestov, L. 162–4, 175 Sluckij, B. 7, 14, 24–6, 55, 58–69, 74, 170 Stalin, J. 10–12, 43, 64–9, 71  Tomasevskij, T. 21

Ufljand, V. 3, 14, 20, 26–7 Venclova, T. 63, 76, 144 Volkov, S. 23, 63, 142–3 Voznesenkij, A. 21–2 Xarms, D. 97 Xlebnikov, V. 120  Xodasevic, V. 21 Zabolockij, N. 97  Zirmunskij, V. 21 Zukov, G. 8–9, 181, 185–7