Brodsky Beat

Michael Scammell, biographer of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler, in TNR for June 7 on the recent biography of Joseph Brodsky by Brodsky's friend Lev Loseff:

[Older writer Frida] Vigdorova's transcript [of Brodsky's 1964 trial in Leningrad "for", per Scammell, "the crime of writing poetry", for, per the Russian authorities, being a "parasite"] was a work of art in itself—a two-act drama full of tension and conflict, which revealed the reviled young poet, with his back to the wall, as a genuine (if involuntary) hero. The first act consisted of a preliminary hearing, after which the trial was halted for Brodsky to be sent to a prison psychiatric hospital for mental evaluation. (This was in the days before the Soviet authorities started regularly committing dissidents to psychiatric hospitals instead of putting them on trial—a rehearsal, perhaps.) Brodsky was there for only a few weeks, and the “barbaric treatment” he suffered there did not break him. Quite the contrary, as the transcript showed:

Judge: What is your profession?

Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.

Judge: Who said you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?

Brodsky: No one. (Nonconfrontational.) Who assigned me to the human race?

Such exchanges were numerous and continued throughout his interrogation, which went on for several hours. “What struck me,” wrote a sympathetic observer, “was that this young man, whom I finally had a chance to see and observe at close range, in circumstances both cruel and unusual for him, radiated a sort of peaceful detachment—Judge Savelyeva couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t goad him into blowing up; he wasn’t frightened by her shrieking at his every other word.” Brodsky’s behavior in the Soviet Union in 1964 was astonishing, a sign both of the changing times and of his extraordinary courage. He did not cave or confess or plead for forgiveness, nor did he make a stirring political speech. He had not publicly opposed the Soviet system or its censorship (even though he had suffered from it), and he had no political message to communicate. He appeared to float above and beyond the realm of politics and ideology. He stated calmly (and prophetically, as it turned out): “I’m no parasite. I’m a poet, who will bring honor and glory to his country.”

His declaration was met with derision by the court officials, and few at the time, even among his friends, grasped the revolutionary nature of Brodsky’s stance. He seemed just like other young dissidents who were getting into trouble. But inwardly Brodsky resented and rejected his identification as a dissident, and fought it for the rest of his life—not because he disliked or disapproved of dissidents, but because he felt he had other aims than they did. His goal was to make his mark in literature, and everything else was secondary. He wanted to be judged exclusively for his poetry and for his success or failure as a writer, not for his resistance to the Soviet system.

...For Brodsky, as for many of his Russian contemporaries, Poland and the Polish language became important conduits to European and American culture—a subject that is covered by the Polish-born scholar Irena Grudzinska Gross in her fine study Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets. I haven’t the space to discuss her book in detail here, but I cannot resist an anekdot that she cites to describe the nature of the Polish connection to Russians who were cut off behind the Iron Curtain. “Question: What’s the difference between Swedes, Poles, and Russians with regard to group sex? Answer: Group sex in Sweden is when a Swede has sex with several people at once. In Poland it’s when a Pole tells his friends how he saw a group of people having sex in Sweden. In Russia it’s when a Russian describes listening to a Pole talking about the group sex he saw in Sweden.”

Stephen Spender, John Ashbery, W.H. Auden and Joseph Brodsky at Poetry International London, 1972.

... Despite language difficulties, Auden took an immediate liking to Brodsky and whisked him off to London to appear in the annual international poetry festival held on the south bank of the Thames. Brodsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union had proved to be as sensational as his trial, and since many of his poems had appeared in English translation by then, his sudden materialization at the festival caused a major stir. I remember seeing him for the very first time with Auden on the stage, a rumpled, barrel-chested figure of medium height, who managed to seem both modestly grateful and yet remarkably self-possessed for someone who had just been arrested and kicked out of his country. The moment Brodsky was asked to recite his poems in Russian, he was transformed. He went into a trance-like state that I later came to recognize as his trademark when performing (there is no other word for it) his compositions. He would throw his head back, eyes half closed, his prominent nose stabbing the sky, and chant in a nasal voice reminiscent of a Jewish cantor (though Brodsky’s Jewishness was very thin and entirely secular).

“I’ve never seen anyone or anything like it,” declared Nadezhda Mandelstam after hearing him read for the first time. “[His] nostrils stretch, flare, go through all sorts of flourishes that bend every vowel and consonant. This is not a man, it’s a whole wind orchestra.” Nadezhda seemed to be mimicking (perhaps unconsciously) her late husband, who had once growled at Mayakovsky, “Don’t roar, Volodya. You’re not a gypsy orchestra.” Whether she had Mandelstam in mind or not, she was right about Brodsky; and since he also admired Mayakovsky’s early poetry, he may have been consciously imitating him. At the London festival he read part of his “Elegy to John Donne,” which lends itself naturally to chanting, and gave an extremely impressive performance, even for those who understood no Russian.

... Loseff is also interesting on Brodsky’s relations with intellectuals in New York. Once settled in a small apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, Brodsky became a regular writer for The New York Review of Books and became friends with several of its contributors. He was also an honorary fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, then led by Richard Sennett, which together with the New York Review dominated left-wing political discourse at the time. I was able to observe him there, and everything was fine so long as the talk was about literature and art. Once it turned to politics, especially international politics, Brodsky found himself at odds with the prevailing line, and he was not shy about challenging it. Loseff credits him, rightly, with helping to open the eyes of certain intellectuals in New York to the realities of life under communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and Loseff cites Susan Sontag as one of Brodsky’s more momentous converts.

Brodsky’s views on politics and religion and the malign nature of communism were not much different from those of his illustrious compatriot and fellow exile Solzhenitsyn, though his tone was vastly different and he did not always put these subjects at the front and center of his discourse. Loseff points out that when Brodsky was living in Boston and Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, the two of them were almost neighbors, and while they did correspond for a while, it was probably no accident that they never met. Nor did Brodsky meet that other distinguished Russian exile and former resident of America, Vladimir Nabokov, though Nabokov had paid for a pair of jeans for Brodsky while the latter was still in the Soviet Union, and Brodsky had exchanged letters with Vera Nabokov, the gatekeeper of her husband’s privacy.

...[His] inability to break through fully in English tormented Brodsky until the end of his days. It is the main reason that he is still under-appreciated in America. As Isaiah Berlin observed, “How could anyone who had not read him in Russian understand him by his English poems? It’s utterly incomprehensible. Because there is no sense that they were written by a great poet. But in Russian ... From the very beginning, as soon as it starts, you are in the presence of genius. And that is a unique sort of feeling—being in the presence of genius.”

Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian in 2011, on Brodsky's 1986 collection Less Than One: Selected Essays:

I have never had to suffer a Commencement Address, so don't know in what state of mind they're heard; torpor is my default setting for similar occasions, but presumably bushy-tailed expectation is the ideal. Either way, the students at Williams College in 1984 may have been a little discomfited by Joseph Brodsky's opening words: "No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil." Well, I would have sat up sharply at that point; and would certainly have still been awake by the end, when he is arguing for a very careful reading indeed of the biblical exhortation to turn the other cheek: "In post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face."

Well, as I have said more than once in this column and elsewhere, if you want good prose, ask a poet to write it, and that Brodsky wasn't even writing (or speaking) in his native language makes this even better somehow. He certainly has a gift for the striking phrase – and if you want some explanation of why poets write good prose, read "A Poet and Prose", in this collection.

...if there's an essential essay collection (actually, I think there are plenty), it's this one. Brodsky's prose zips along, even when you are reading about Mandelstam or Tsvetaeva or those other names which in this country are, I suspect, vague abstractions rather than representatives of well-known bodies of work...

His evocations of life in Soviet Russia should be compulsory reading. He evokes not so much horrors as the quotidian, grinding strictures: the shared bathroom arrangements among families (you could tell who was in the toilet from the volume of their farts; and what they'd had for dinner), and what it's like when it gets to -25 degrees in St Petersburg, and the glass is still dropping.

Seamus Heaney (right), with the late Czeslaw Milosz, whom he admired for ''the way he followed conscience into solitude.'' (''STEPPING STONES'')
Speaking, as did Michael Scammell above with regard to Brodsky, of the ways in which NYRoB-linked poets (and philosophers, e.g., Leszek Kolakowski) exiled from the Eastern bloc managed to read their left-Manhattanite friends the Molotov Cocktail Act, see the reply from 1968 within the journal at issue by the Berkeley-based Czesław Miłosz, at once diplomatic and subtly contemptuous, to "Poet Power", a modishly, gaseously Aquarian poets' manifesto, drafted by Allen Ginsberg at a Stony Brook conference both had attended, upon finding his name among those of the other collective poet-signatories.


Meet Christopher Ricks (1933-), one of the most admired critics of poetry and the Eng. Lit. canon these last fifty years, of the company of William Empson and Frank Kermode, whose services to the word include helping establish an audience for Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill:

WH Auden once described Ricks as "the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding", and fellow critic Frank Kermode describes him as "virtually unique in the profession. He has a wonderful memory, an extraordinary, and perhaps sometimes slightly overdeveloped, sensitivity to language, is amazingly industrious and is a very remarkable reader of verse. In his line he is the best in the business and his achievement in his edition of Tennyson is just about as good as you can get."

... Ricks's "cleverness" can irritate some readers but the critic and academic Martin Dodsworth, a university contemporary, says his weakness for puns is part of what makes him such a vivid and powerful critic. "He thinks through the power of a word and its place in society. He has written very well on 'prejudice' in the Eliot book and has written very interestingly about lying. He is not just interested in literature, but also in the way words do things in the world."

... Ricks went up to Balliol College in 1953 to read English, and still delights in stories about eccentric Oxford figures, such as a mean tutor who sat so close to his meagre fire "that every now and then there would be a smell of burning tweed and he would have to put himself out". He is still impressed by people who are called names that seem to have no relation to their initials. "CS Lewis was Jack. Wonderful."

... Ricks was duly awarded a first and in 1956 embarked on a BLitt in 18th-century heroic couplet poetry. He praises the BLitt system, as opposed to working for a PhD, "because it cuts free of that 'making an original contribution to knowledge' business. I think that is much too much to ask of someone in their mid-20s and it explains the paralysis in doctoral work. The amount of research you have to do to find out that no one has done what you have done is quite different from an apprenticeship in sources, authorities, and methods. Of course, if the apprentice comes up with an original piece of leatherwork or glassware that's good. But it is an apprenticeship."

... one [early Ricks] review did prompt TS Eliot to bring in the lawyers when Ricks said Eliot's clearing Wyndham Lewis of having fascist sympathies was like the pot calling the kettle white. "I was right and wrong to make the joke, which was quite a good joke," says Ricks. "If you follow it remorselessly it suggests Eliot was a fascist which I don't think he was. But he also wasn't in a position to clear other people of the accusation. There is too much that Eliot is associated with that is not without its links to fascism. But Sue, Grabbit and Runne sent their letter and there was some form of apology."

... since his move to Boston University in 1986, he has published a dozen new books. John L Silber was president of the university when Ricks was recruited and describes him as "one of the really dynamic centres of intellectual activity at BU. He sees around the corners of everything and sees the double and triple entendres whether they are there or not. Students respond to him in a way that is very rare. He is both respected and adored by the students."

Meanwhile, back in the USSR by way of The New Criterion, the art critic - and, according to Gore Vidal, hotel in the Catskills - "the" Hilton Kramer (1928-2012) on The strange case of D.S. Mirsky (1890-1939), aristocrat and scholar whose History of Russian Literature, written in exile in London in the 1920s, is a classic still in print, and who of his own volition returned to his Russian homeland under Stalin, there to face certain death.

One of the nicest guys in 19th-century Russia. - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Back in the pre-USSR Russia: The Folio Society reprints, with a new introduction by Hisham Matar, On the Eve by "the gentle barbarian" (as the Goncourt brothers dubbed him), Ivan Turgenev: "Turgenev's story of an upper-class Russian woman who falls for a Bulgarian revolutionary was controversial in its day." 

From Library of the World's Best Literature, edited by Charles Dudley Warner (New York: International Society, 1897), "Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)" by Henry James. "Ivan Turgenev" by Henry James, 1903. Free Turgenev online, including Diary of a Superfluous Man, at Eldritch Press, host of many public-domain works by decidedly non-superfluous 19th and early 20th-century writers.