Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

212 Pages·2000·1.56 MB·English

by  David MacFadyen

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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 acquain-
tances 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.
DAVID MacFADYEN 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
dav i d m fa dy e n
ac
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.
pg3479.4.r64z782 2000 891.71′44 c00-900091-7
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 Galczyn´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
Cod(cid:2)a: “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 drop-
pings 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 embarrass-
ing) 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 exami-
nation 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 o(cid:2)f Joseph Brodsky, the National
Library in St Petersburg, and the Puskin Fund to preserve the manu-
scripts 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 pre-
serve 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 (cid:2)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 him-
self collect. The only poems (cid:2)I discu(cid:2)ss that he did collect (cid:2)in his maturity (i.e.,
for Ostanovka v pustyne and Cast’ reci in this case) are Kazdyj pred(cid:2) Bogom, Ot
okrainy k centru, Xolmy, Novye stansy(cid:2) k Avguste, and Na smert’ Zukova. 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, there-
fore, “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 unprece-
dented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide” (271). The tri-
umph 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 philo-
sophical solidity of prior moves, so Brodsky builds upon various tradi-
tions and prevalent contemporary modes of disco(cid:2)urse. 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 absorp-
tion 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, con-
texts 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 neolo-
gisms 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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6 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse
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 Petersb(cid:2)urg 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 world-
view 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, Salin-
ger, 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 inexpress-
ible 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 Galczyn´ski. Brodsky found a geographical and philo-
sophical 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 Galczyn´ski is a
prime example of a broad, pan-Slavic romantic impulse, he is dis-
cussed 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 prede-
cessors. 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 inter-
locutor. 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 ground-
work 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” lan-
guage. 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 combin-
ing 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