Joseph Brodsky
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Joseph Brodsky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940—January 28, 1996), born Iosif
Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский) was a
Russian poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and
was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992). He had an
honorary degree from Yale and University of Silesia and was an honorary
member of the International Academy of Science.
In the Soviet Union
Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad, the son of a
professional photographer in the Soviet Navy. In early childhood he survived
the Siege of Leningrad. When he was fifteen, Brodsky left school and tried
to enter the School of Submariners (школа подводников) without success. He
went on to work as a milling machine operator (фрезеровщик) at a plant.
Later, having decided to become a physician, he worked at a morgue at the
Kresty prison. He subsequently held a variety of jobs at a hospital, in a
ship's boiler room, and on geological expeditions. At the same time, Brodsky
engaged in a program of self-education. He learned English and Polish
(mainly to translate poems by Czesław Miłosz, who was Brodsky's favourite
poet and a friend), and acquired a deep interest in classical philosophy,
religion, mythology, and English and American poetry. Later in life, he
admitted that he picked up books from anywhere he could find them, including
even garbage dumps. Brodsky began writing his own poetry and producing
literary translations around 1957. His writings were apolitical. The young
Brodsky was encouraged and influenced by the poet Anna Akhmatova who called
some of his verses "enchanting." He had no degree in the liberal arts.
1964, foto KGB
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In 1963, he was arrested and in 1964
charged with parasitism ("тунеядство") by the Soviet authorities. A famous
excerpt from the transcript of his trial made by journalist Frida Vigdorova
was smuggled to the West:
Judge: And what is your profession,
in general?
Brodsky: I am a poet and a literary translator.
Judge: Who recognizes you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of humankind?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: How to become a poet. You did not even try to finish high school
where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.
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For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years of
internal exile with obligatory engagement in physical work and served 18
months in Archangelsk region. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after
prominent Soviet and foreign literary figures, such as Evgeny
Evtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich and Jean Paul Sartre,
protested.
In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev came to power. As
the Khrushchev Thaw period ended, only four of Brodsky's poems were
published in the Soviet Union. He refused to publish his writings censored
and most of his work has appeared only in the West or in samizdat.
In the United States
On June 4, 1972, Brodsky was expelled from the USSR. He became a U.S.
citizen in 1977. His first teaching position in the United States was at the
University of Michigan (U-M). He was Poet-in-Residence and Visiting
Professor at Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and the
Cambridge University in England. He was a Five-College Professor of
Literature at Mount Holyoke College. He achieved major successes in his
career as an English language poet and essayist. In 1978, Brodsky was
awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on
May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky received the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award. He is also a recipient
of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. In 1986, his
collection of essays Less Than One won the National Book Critic's Award for
Criticism. In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, being the fifth
Russian-born writer to do so. At an interview in Stockholm airport, to a
question: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for
Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?", he
responded: "I am Jewish - a Russian poet and an English essayist".
In 1991, Brodsky became Poet Laureate of
the United States. His inauguration address was printed in Poetry Review. He
married Maria Sozzani in 1990. They had one daughter.
Grave of Brodsky in San Michele.
Brodsky
died of a heart attack in his New York City apartment on January 28, 1996,
and was buried in the Episcopalian section at Isola di San Michele cemetery
in Venice, Italy. Venice is the setting for his book Watermark.
Poets who influenced Brodsky included Osip
Mandelstam, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost.
A close friend to the Nobel laureate Derek
Walcott, Brodsky has been remembered and memorialised in the latest
collection of poetry entitled The Prodigal.
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Poems
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Folk Tune
It's not that the Muse feels like
clamming up,
it's more like high time for the lad's last nap.
And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best
drives a steamroller across his chest.
And the words won't rise either like
that rod
or like logs to rejoin their old grove's sweet rot,
and, like eggs in the frying pan, the face
spills its eyes all over the pillowcase.
Are you warm tonight under those six
veils
in that basin of yours whose strung bottom wails;
where like fish that gasp at the foreign blue
my raw lip was catching what then was you?
I would have hare's ears sewn to my
bald head,
in thick woods for your sake I'd gulp drops of lead,
and from black gnarled snags in the oil-smooth pond
I'd bob up to your face as some Tirpitz won't.
But it's not on the cards or the
waiter's tray,
and it pains to say where one's hair turns gray.
There are more blue veins than the blood to swell
their dried web, let alone some remote brain cell.
We are parting for good, my friend,
that's that.
Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad.
This will be me: no insides in thrall.
Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl.
Translated by the author.
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Elegy
About a year has passed. I've
returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state
bad blood.
Now the place is abuzz with trading
in your ankles's remanants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many
who since have risen.
All's overgrown with people. A
ruin's a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the hearts's distinction
from a pitch-black cavern
isn't that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.
At sunrise, when nobody stares at
one's face, I often,
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"
or "in going under."
1985, translated by the author.
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May 24, 1980
I have braved, for want of wild
beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my
nitty-gritty.
Quit the country the bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors
transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me
vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
1980, translated by the author.
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Tsushima Screen
The perilous yellow sun follows with
its slant eyes
masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize
in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer
days than the other months; therefore, it's more cruel
than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound
to wrap up our sailing round
the globe with habitual naval grace,
moving your cot to the fireplace
where our dreadnought is going under
in great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter!
Golder unharnessed stallions in the chimney
dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,
and the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring
of a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.
1978, translated by the author.
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Letter to an Archaeologist
Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker,
utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler that what we've been told or have said
ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.
1983, translated by the author.
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Stone Villages
The stone-built villages of England.
A cathedral bottled in a pub window.
Cows dispersed across fields.
Monuments to kings.
A man in a moth-eaten suit
sees a train off, heading, like everything here, for the sea,
smiles at his daughter, leaving for the East.
A whistle blows.
And the endless sky over the tiles
grows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.
And the clearer the song is heard,
the smaller the bird.
1975-6, translated by the author.
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Seven Strophes
I was but what you'd brush
with your palm, what your leaning
brow would hunch to in evening's
raven-black hush.
I was but what your gaze
in that dark could distinguish:
a dim shape to begin with,
later - features, a face.
It was you, on my right,
on my left, with your heated
sighs, who molded my helix
whispering at my side.
It was you by that black
window's trembling tulle pattern
who laid in my raw cavern
a voice calling you back.
I was practically blind.
You, appearing, then hiding,
gave me my sight and heightened
it. Thus some leave behind
a trace. Thus they make worlds.
Thus, having done so, at random
wastefully they abandon
their work to its whirls.
Thus, prey to speeds
of light, heat, cold, or darkness,
a sphere in space without markers
spins and spins.
1981, translated by Paul Graves.
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Darling, you think it's love, it's
just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.
1983, translated by the author.
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As though the mercury's under its
tongue, it won't
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That's what coming full circle means -
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free
to cloud your folds, to bare the navel.
Future at last! That is, bleached debris
of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never."
Hence the routine of a goddess, nee
alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on
the heart of color and the temperature of the knee.
That's what it looks like inside a virgin.
1983, translated by the author.
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Belfast Tune
Here's a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someine gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a
parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah, there's more sky in these parts
than, say,
ground. Hence her voice's pitch,
and her stare stains your retina like a gray
bulb when you switch
hemispheres, and her knee-length
quilt
skirt's cut to catch the squal,
I dream of her either loved or killed
because the town's too small.
translated by the author
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To Urania
To I.K.
Everything has its limit, including
sorrow.
A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.
Loneless cubes a man at random.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
body's absence at every given
point? That's why Urania's older sister Clio!
in daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,
you see the globe's pate free of any bio,
you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.
There they are, blueberry-laden forests,
rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon
or the towns in whose soggy phone books
you are starring no longer; father eastward surge on
brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing
in tall sedge; the cheeckbones get yellower
as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam
dreadnoughts
or cruisers,
and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.
translated by the author
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A list of some observation...
A list of some observation. In a corner, it's warm.
A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.
Water is glass's most public form.
Man is more frightening than its skeleton.
A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black
porch resists an osier's stiff assaults.
Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks
like a glacier's debris, a moraine of sorts.
A millennium hence, they'll no doubt expose
a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze
cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe,
mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge.
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A Song
I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
the handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.
I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
we'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
To where we've been before.
I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.
I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening, the sun is setting;
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
If it's followed by dying?
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Nobel Lecture
December 8, 1987
I
For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has
preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and
who went in this preference rather far - far from his motherland to say
the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a
martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny - for such a person to find
himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and
trying experience.
This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who
stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by
this honor, who were not given this chance to address 'urbi et orbi', as
they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of
searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.
The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is
the simple realization that - for stylistic reasons, in the first place
- one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet
especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert
Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn't have
helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might
have felt somewhat uncomfortable.
These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as
well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better
moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to
any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on
the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is
precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that
often move me - more often perhaps than the case should be - to regret
the passage of time. If the next life exists - and I can no more deny
them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence
in this one - if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive
me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not
one's conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured
by.
I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot
matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, both
as a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I
wouldn't be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades -
better still, sources of light: lamps? stars? - more, of course, than
just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely
mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious
man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to
which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by
thoughts about contemporaries and fellow writers in both cultures,
poets, and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had
they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long
ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.
I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of remarks here -
disjointed, perhaps stumbling, and perhaps even perplexing in their
randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my
thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield
me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my
occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he
claims to have a system - but even that, in his case, is borrowing from
a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a
tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the
means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be
- than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse
really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose
are no more honorable.
II
If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the
privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as
the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man,
knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality,
of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an
autonomous "I". Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread,
convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A
work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular,
addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct - free of any
go-betweens - relations.
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and
poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the
common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For
there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover,
in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and
polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and
fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the
champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to
operate, art introduces a "period, period, comma, and a minus",
transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty,
face.
The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, characterized her as
possessing an "uncommon visage". It's in acquiring this "uncommon
visage" that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this
uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of
whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in
mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from
without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is
issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be
regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else's appearance,
someone else's experience, on a tautology - regrettable all the more
because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may
be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with
him or give him so much as a thank-you.
Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient
and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The
revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards
the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent - better yet, the
infinite - against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least,
as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of
literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of
the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any
system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that
aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as
well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can
afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the
possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the
state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the
state's features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the
better, are always temporary.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics - not to mention its
aesthetics - are always "yesterday". Language and literature are always
"today", and often - particularly in the case where a political system
is orthodox - they may even constitute "tomorrow". One of literature's
merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his
existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his
predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology - that is,
the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, "victim of history".
What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable,
what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor
repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and,
thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though,
this sort of conduct is called "cliché".
Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by
the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of
the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time
demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing
its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous
with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists
is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is
often found "ahead of progress", ahead of history, whose main instrument
is - should we not, once more, improve upon Marx - precisely the cliché.
Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in
his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language
of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic
appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is
quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case,
literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time
for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature
should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who
should speak the language of literature.
On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's ethical reality
more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of
"good" and "bad" are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least
etymologically preceding the categories of "good" and "evil". If in
ethics not "all is permitted", it is precisely because not "all is
permitted" in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum
is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who,
on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an
aesthetic choice, not a moral one.
Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic
experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes
one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming
at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn
out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against
enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less
susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to
any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue
does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that
evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more
substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his
taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily
the happier - he is.
It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we
should understand Dostoevsky's remark that beauty will save the world,
or Matthew Arnold's belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is
probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always
remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly,
for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually
requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn't like and what
doesn't suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a
human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one.
Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product
of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes
us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature -
and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution - is, to
put it bluntly, the goal of our species.
I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse
composition; nevertheless, the subdivision of society into
intelligentsia and "all the rest" seems to me unacceptable. In moral
terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into
the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely
physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for
intellectual inequality these are inconceivable. Equality in this
respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I
am speaking not of education, but of the education in speech, the
slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice
into one's life. The existence of literature prefigures existence on
literature's plane of regard - and not only in the moral sense, but
lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the
possibility of choosing between the passive role of listener and the
active one of performer, a work of literature - of the art which is, to
use Montale's phrase, hopelessly semantic - dooms him to the role of
performer only.
In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often
than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the
population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of
society (i.e., the ever-increasing isolation of the individual), this
role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don't suppose that
I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that,
in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a
friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the
conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that
is very private, excluding all others - if you will, mutually
misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal
to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the
writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of
consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the
form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately
or not, it conditions a person's conduct. It's precisely this that I
have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more
natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual
loneliness - of a writer or a reader.
In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the
book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the
invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not
so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book
constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience,
at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement,
becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate
this denominator's line, previously never reaching higher than the
groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This
flight is the flight in the direction of "uncommon visage", in the
direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the
direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there
are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other
future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past
- the political one, first of all, with all its mass police
entertainments.
In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and
literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority
appears to me unhealthy and dangerous. I am not appealing for the
replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has
visited me frequently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we
been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and
not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth.
It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked,
first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign
policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If
only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity
and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt -
whether familiar or yet to be invented - toward a total mass solution to
the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least,
literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a
philosophical doctrine.
Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no
criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature;
though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the
persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we
are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading
the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the
offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I
live in, I would be the first prepared to believe that there is a set
dependency between a person's material well-being and his literary
ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of that country in
which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect
minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the
tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the
prerogative of the minority: of the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.
I have no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this
evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed
by other millions, since what occurred in Russia in the first half of
the Twentieth Century occurred before the introduction of automatic
weapons - in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose
unsoundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human
sacrifice for its realization. I'll just say that I believe - not
empirically, alas, but only theoretically - that, for someone who has
read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is
more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am
speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky,
Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about
literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to
be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise
or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a
rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was
Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had
in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading
list.
However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it
would make sense to regard the Russian experience as a warning, if for
no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is,
on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This,
by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West of the
Nineteenth-Century Russian psychological novel, and the relative lack of
success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged
in Russia in the Twentieth Century presumably seem no less exotic to the
reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from
identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on
the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find
today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate
observer might remark that in a certain sense the Nineteenth Century is
still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I
say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the
size of the human toll taken in course of that social - or chronological
- change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is
the chorus.
IlI
Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about
political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change
the subject. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they
corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which
they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right.
Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of
a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the
comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps
responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my
contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under
their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a
muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. "How can one write
music after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian
history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the
camp - and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the
number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number
of German prisoncamp victims. "And how can you eat lunch?" the American
poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I
belong has proven capable of writing that music.
That generation - the generation born precisely at the time when the
Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the
zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother
Nature herself - that generation came into the world, it appears, in
order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in
those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's
archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not
in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am
no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And
the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that
generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam,
I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we
were beginning in an empty - indeed, a terrifyingly wasted - place, and
that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the
recreation of the effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction
of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often
totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new,
contemporary content.
There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further
deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of minimalism, of choked
breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it
was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely
animated by the idea of preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms
of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our
consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in
reality the choice wasn't ours, but, in fact, culture's own - and this
choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.
To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an
instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and
custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it's not because toward
the close of the Twentieth Century there is a certain charm in
paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but
because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the
vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate
of the language; that it's not that the language happens to be his
instrument, but that he is language's means toward the continuation of
its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain
animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical
choice.
A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win
the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality
surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of
mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a
trace on the earth. He resorts to this form - the poem - most likely for
unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the
white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the
world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the
reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect
produced by what emerges from beneath that pen on his audience - however
great or small it may be - the immediate consequence of this enterprise
is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language or, more
precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it,
on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished
in it.
This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well.
For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the
colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential -
that is, by all time Iying ahead. And this potential is determined not
so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it
is determined by that, too), as by the quality of the poem written in
it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity;
it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today
in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these
languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish
to repeat, is language's means for existence - or, as my beloved Auden
said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease
to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are
written and in which you read them will remain not merely because
language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of
mutation.
One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame
with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at
least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language
prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet
as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times he
is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out
better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he
reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its
present.
There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical,
intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets,
revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is
that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the
second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language;
and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the
writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been
before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The
one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an
extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending
the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no
longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one
falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into
dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of
dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.
Translated from the Russian by Barry Rubin.
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