Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 2) 9781618111388

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Brodsky through the Eyes of his Contemporaries

Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Series Editor: Lazar Fleishman

Brodsky through the Eyes of his Contemporaries Valentina Polukhina

Vol. 2 (1996 - 2008)

Boston 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Polukhina, Valentina. Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries / Valentina Polukhina. – New ed., revised and supplemented. 2 v. cm. – (Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures and history) Volume 1 is a new edition, revised and supplemented. Firstly published by St. Martin’s Press, in 1992. Vol. 2 is a new publication. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-15-4 – ISBN 978-1-934843-16-1 1. Brodsky, Joseph, 1940 - 1996 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Brodsky, Joseph, 1940 - 1996 – Contemporaries. I. Title.

PG3479.4.R64Z83 2008 891.71’44 – dc22 2008044425

On the cover: Natalia Moroz. Joseph Brodsky. Linoсut print, 2004 © Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-16-1 Translators: Tatiana Retivov, Chris Jones, Daniel Weissbort Book design by Batsheva Levinson Published by Academic Studies Press in 2008 28 Montfern Ave Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

CONTENTS Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 List of Photographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 I. J O H N L E C A R R É . A Great Talent that was a bit of an Orphan . . 33 M I K H A I L H E I F E T S . The Empire he was Loyal to was the Russian Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 L E V L O S E F F . He Lived at Extraordinary Pace . . . . . . . . . 85 I G O R E F I M O V . Navigators in the Ocean of Spirit . . . . . . . . 105 G E N R I K H S T E I N B E R G . Joseph Wanted to Know Everything . . 119 E D WA R D B L O O M S T E I N . Penetrating to the Depth of Things . 141 M I K H A I L A R D O V . Leaving this Place is Impossible but Living here is also – Inconceivable . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 O L E G T S E L K O V . With his Own Point of View on Everything . 165 T O M A S V E N C L O VA . He Tended to Ascribe his own Traits to Other Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 V I K T O R G O L Y S H E V . He was too Democratic to be an ‘Aesthete’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 A L E K S A N D R S U M E R K I N . Continuation of Poetry by Other Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 P E T R VA I L . Brodsky’s Poetic Globe is Equal to the Geographical one . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 B E N G T J A N G F E L D T . The Terrible Fate of a Russian Poet . . . 231 II. L U D M I L A S H T E R N . He Needed to have this kind of Dulcinea 243 N A T A L Y A G O R B A N E V S K A Y A . He was Lonely Everywhere . . 255 Z O F I A K A P U ś C I ń S K A . In Search of New Meaning . . . . . . 267 A N N I E E P E L B O I N . Generations of Suffering People Speaking through him Over the Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 E L E N A C H E R N Y S H E VA . Russia was his Heartache . . . . . . 299 N A T A S H A S P E N D E R . Ranging over Poetry of all Ages . . . . . 309 S U S A N S O N T A G . He Landed among us like a Missile . . . . . 323 A N N E L I S A A L L E VA . There was a Lot of him, a Whole Mosaic . 333

T A T I A N A R E T I V O V . His Voice Remains Unique . . . . . . . T A T I A N A S H C H E R B I N A . A Demiurge, a Prophet, a Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D A S H A B A S M A N O VA . A Unique Sense of Internal Freedom and Self-esteem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P A S H A B A S M A N O VA . His World is Language . . . . . . . . . A N A S T A S I Y A K U Z N E T S O VA . One can be Worthy of him Only in a Loving Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. 353 . 373 . 397 . 401 . 405

III. S E A M U S H E A N E Y . The Young Poet in him Never Aged . . . . 419 M A R K S T R A N D . Joseph was a Great Choice for Poet Laureate 431 D E R E K WA L C O T T . Almost Medieval Devotion to his Craft . . 441 J O N A T H A N A A R O N . He Pushed English to its Limits . . . . . 455 W I L L I A M WA D S W O R T H . A Turbulent Affair with the English Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 L E S M U R R A Y . English for him was Associated with Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 M A T T H E W S P E N D E R . A Necessary Smile . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 S A M B R U S S E L L . He Restored to Poetry its Metaphysical Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507 I V. A L A N M Y E R S . The Handmaid of Genius . . . . . . . . D A N I E L W E I S S B O R T . Nothing is Impossible . . . . . . P E T E R F R A N C E . A Dictionary-haunted Poetry . . . . . M I C H A E L S C A M M E L L . He Responded to Christianity Aesthetically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P A U L K E E G A N . He Wanted to Infect English with the Virus of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R O G E R S T R A U S . A Great Poet was Living among us . . Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 515 . . . . 541 . . . . 553 . . . . 565 . . . . 577 . . . . 585 . . . . 593

I N T RODUCT ION BRODSKY IN FORTY MIRRORS Brodsky placed a fifty-year ban, from the date of his death, on the publication of any official biography, urging that his own writing should constitute his only biography. Never prone to discussing the details of his trial or exile, Brodsky clearly wanted to avoid being a prisoner of biography. However, already erroneous judgments are being made based on unreliable recollections. How are we to avoid losing what we remember of this great man? As I agreed to my Russian publisher’s, Yakov Gordin’s, invitation to assemble a second collection of interviews, Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, I decided this time not to limit myself to poets. I interviewed a variety of his friends from Russia, America, and England, and of different professions: literary, ballet, art, and psychology, to name a few. There is a historian Mikhail Heifets, the first literary critic of his work, writers John le Carré and Susan Sontag, Archpriest Mikhail Ardov, Lady Spender and her son, Matthew Spender, fellow émigrés Elena Chernysheva, Ludimlla Shtern, Igor Efimov, an artist Oleg Tselkov, former geologists Genrikh Steinberg and Edward Bloomstein. Other close friends include Annie Epelboin, Zofia Kapuścińska, translators Alan Myers, Daniel Weissbort, Peter France, Aleksandr Sumerkin, Bengt Jangfeldt, and Viktor Golyshev, publishers and editors Roger Straus and Paul Keegan, former students Bill Wadsworth and Tatiana Retivov. Of these, the majority are still poets: Derek Walcott, Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Jonathan Aaron, Daniel Weissbort, Annelisa Alleva, Lev Loseff, Tomas Venclova, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Tatiana Shcherbina and Tatiana Retivov. Some of Brodsky‘s friends declined to be interviewed, and foreigners were often more forthcoming, furnishing me with unpublished poems, rare photographs, sketches by Brodsky, even a letter and portrait by the poet. By nature a wanderer, Brodsky traveled a great deal almost as if he were driven to do so. It fell upon me to follow in his footsteps in order to conduct some forty interviews; this was made more possible by a grant from The British Academy. As I prepared for the interviews

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I had to formulate more than five hundred questions. Some questions were used more than once, though I individualized them as much as possible hoping to extract something of general use in each case. As I formulated the questions, I had to bear in mind that what I knew about Brodsky was not necessarily known by the interviewee and vice versa. The process required much tact on my part, occasionally I had to correct obvious mistakes or suppress matters, which were too personal. I must confess that the results were not always up to expectation, and some interviews were never finished and had to be excluded. Though overall it was possible to avoid taking literally certain pronouncements, as well as steer clear of the tendency that many of us have towards generalizations. Most of the questions were addressed under the following headings: the poet’s personality, his life, exile, expulsion or emigration; friendships and estrangements; whether Brodsky the man was equal to his fate; Brodsky, the teacher; self-translation and translators; Brodsky as Poet Laureate of the USA; what the Brodsky phenomenon signifies in terms of American poetry; reasons for the animosity of certain English poets towards Brodsky; what the sources of his ideas about language were; whether he was Christian, Jewish, pagan, or a supranational poet; Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn; Brodsky’s failure to return to Russia. Finally, what new discoveries have been made; what has been learnt about Brodsky’s poetry and about the man as a result of these conversations.

B r o d s k y ’s Pe r s o n a l it y Insofar as Brodsky’s worldview derives from his personality, I tried to find out what were the most attractive features of his multi-faceted personality. According to Ludmila Shtern, Joseph was very handsome, with a magnetism that made women swoon and men warm to him. Others find Brodsky’s charisma godly. Poet Tatiana Shcherbina first met him in 1989, in Rotterdam, and she recalls: ‘It is hard for me to describe this meeting. Well, had I met with Christ, perhaps it would have been like that’. It is undeniable that his charm was not of this world: irresistible, he could persuade one to commit a crime with his ‘meow-meow!’ Men might resist; women, never.’Someone compared him to a snake charmer, hidden in the souls of his contemporaries,

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said Mikhail Heifets. With the pipes of poetry, he summoned forth hidden passions from their mysterious darkness, making spirit dance before him’. He was shaken by talent from within (Sumerkin). Brodsky evinced other energies and transformed them by his sheer presence. He was cultivated by many exceptional personalities. Isaiah Berlin, himself a mythic figure for Russian readers, said that in Brodsky’s presence one was often made aware of being in the presence of genius. Tomas Venclova remembers how when Aleksandr Gabrichevsky met Brodsky he said: ‘He is a genius, the only real one I have met in my life’. – ‘Can that really be so? After all, you have met Stravinsky, Kandinsky and even Leo Tolstoy’. – ‘This man is the real thing!’ he repeated, unperturbed. According to the observation of Brodsky’s friend, the ballet-dancer Elena Chernysheva, he possessed the keenest intuition. He always saw what the king’s new clothes were hiding. Zofia Kapuścińska, the addressee of his poem, ‘Zofia’, says the same thing. He had only to see the start of something to know how it would end. His character was both complex and full of contradiction, his intellect lively and original. Brodsky read a lot, never leaving home without a book in his pocket, having come up with the aphorism: ‘Liberty is the right to go to the library’. Derek Walcott confesses: ‘From Brodsky I learnt one important thing: if you are not thinking while writing poetry, you are not really working’. He believed that he was condemned to solitude, but was constantly drawn to people. He complained that he wasn’t left in peace, but depended on these endless disturbances. It irritated and inspired him (Tatiana Retivov). Everywhere he went he was the focus of attention, making some appropriate comment. He loved light-heartedness. On the death of Brezhnev, in 1982, he wrote, in English: He was in charge of something large; Some called it hell, some paradise. Now that he’s dead, let’s drop the grudge, We’re still alive, surprise, surprise!

We are already familiar with Brodsky’s independent nature. No teachers, no great authorities were ever acknowledged. Nor did he acknowledge how terrible villains could be. ‘He recognized only one torturer, M. B., and submitted only to one master, Christ’. (Tatiana

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Shcherbina). He had his own opinion about everything (Oleg Tselkov). Possessing great powers of persuasion, he was a volatile talker. Igor Efimov tells of a visit to Brodsky, in exile, in Norenskaya. He remembers the following episode: ‘He had a toothache and there was no doctor at hand. He dealt with the pain by going outside. We spoke for nights on end and would go outside for ten minutes or so and then return and resume the conversation at precisely the point at which he had left off’. In Norenskaya, in response to his requests, friends would bring him drink and lots of medications. They were worried about his need for so much medication, but in the village it became clear why: peasants came to Brodsky and he would treat them, committing yet another crime, practicing medicine without a license. He liked to boast of his difficult character, calling himself ‘spawn of hell’. But if you yourself said it, Susan Sontag remarks ironically, you had to prove it. He could be abrupt, foul-mouthed, breaking women’s hearts, making dates and not keeping them. He might ask to be introduced to someone and then be very rude (Annie Epelboin). In youth he was often very outspoken and direct (Lev Loseff). And yet he was also a humble man, breaking out in a sweat, blushing easily, embarrassed (Annie Epelboin). ‘He was arrogant and at the same time vulnerable’. (Tomas Venclova). In the space of a few moments he could pass from profound self-doubting to supreme confidence (Tatiana Retivov). He was sensitive and never burdened anyone with his problems, said Mikhail Ardov. He valued sympathy, but never demanded it of his friends. As Annelisa Alleva said, ‘He was many folks rolled into one, a veritable mosaic of personalities’. He could not lie and hated mendacity in others (Igor Efimov). He could not abide empty, social chitchat either. If he liked to argue, it was because he always saw things differently. He was plentifully endowed with arrogance and pride. If he himself could not appreciate something, he insisted that it was not worth bothering about. Hence his view of French culture (Annie Epelboin). But in his own way, he was humble, often saying: ‘It is more modest and closer to the truth to see oneself as a simple foot soldier, than as a fallen angel’. Lev Loseff, who knew him better than anyone else, says that Brodsky ‘lived faster than most and this may have caused embarrassment and

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consternation, insofar as people living at the normal rate took it for inconstancy’. What was most surprising about the mature Brodsky? His valor, insists Loseff. ‘He was mortally ill, but did not attempt to console himself with illusions, and continued working literally to the very end’. Courageous as he was, he was still scared of policemen. Genrikh Steinberg : ‘If one is to typify Joseph’s character, it can be put in a nutshell: he was quite simply a man of great dignity. He always behaved in a dignified manner, in any situation. He did not conform to what society demanded, very much his own man. One can only envy him’. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, and had assimilated the whole of Russian poetry (Natalya Gorbanevskaya). He was very knowledgeable about the Futurists, Constructivists and Oberiu, as well as about English and Polish poetry. Everything interested him; architecture and geography, jazz and politics (Aleksandr Sumerkin). His knowledge from football to Philby, from Catullus to inexpensive, factory-made Clark shoes, astonished everyone. But sometimes he needed to check his facts, e.g. ‘What time of the year was it’, he asked Alan Myers on the phone, ‘when Belisarius started his campaign of annihilation against the Vandals?’ There was no poet in the West, ancient or modern, says Myers, that Brodsky did not know of. It was enough to mention a name, and he at once gave you the titles of books, or quoted actual poems. Mark Strand recalls that when he first met Brodsky in 1972, Joseph recited from memory one or Mark’s poems. ‘I at once fell for him’, joked Strand. He knew a huge number of poems by heart. ‘He lived poetry’, says Derek Walcott. Lady Natasha Spender recounts how in the early days of his stay in her home, in June 1972, Brodsky and Auden read together, in a duet, by memory, a poem by Betjeman ‘Up the Butterfield aisle / Rich with Gothic enlacement…’ The mixture of Auden’s American accent with that of Brodsky’s Russian was hilarious. Joseph was always afraid of sounding banal, says Efimov. Therefore many of his utterances resulted from a desire to say something nonbanal. Example: Brodsky wrote an article about the events in Poland in the early eighties, when the Communists suppressed “Solidarity”. Brodsky was tickled by a report that western financiers had not come

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to Solidarity’s help, and he invented the saying that the Polish movement was suppressed not by tanks but by banks. It was the rhyme that attracted him. Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott speak of Brodsky’s affinity for rhyme. He injected it into his conversation: ‘Now that I am in Paris / I wish I were where my car is’. In a poem by Seamus Heaney on the occasion of Brodsky’s speech in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988, is the stanza: The poet Brodsky’s held in awe For laying down the poetry law In these late times. He steals the fire and air of words He leaves the cliché for the birds. He worships rhymes.

E x i le o r e m i g r a t io n? Not all of my interviewees agreed with the generally accepted fact that Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. Edward Bloomstein says that Brodsky himself had long wanted to leave the USSR. Brodsky had asked Genrikh Steinberg if it would be possible to hire a fishing boat and perhaps jump overboard and swim ashore in the narrow straits. He saw no sense in remaining in the USSR. ‘To leave here is impossible but to live here is unthinkable!’ he remarked to Mikhail Ardov. Soviet life, as a whole, was driving him out. Whether he left of his own accord or was expelled, Brodsky’s arrival in the West was like a coronation, as Susan Sontag put it: with the little volume of John Donne, along with a bottle of vodka and a typewriter he landed in Vienna, where he was met by an American professor and offered a job in an American university; together they sought out Wystan Auden, who took Joseph with him to London, to an Poetry International festival, where English translations of his poetry were read by Robert Lowell himself; Joseph was hosted by Sir Steven Spender, where he met Akhmatova’s hero, Sir Isaiah Berlin and other members of the English intellectual aristocracy; he was also taken to an evening session of the English parliament, as well as to lunch with a bishop. Finally, on Auden’s request, the American Academy sent him 1000 dollars and he landed in New York.

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T h e C o n q u e s t o f A m e r ic a From his very first days in the USA, he embarked on the conquest of America – hundreds of public performances in colleges and universities, in libraries and in clubs. Everybody admired Brodsky’s poetry readings – a spellbinding natural phenomenon, a kind of mass-hypnosis. People went into a trance (Ludmila Shtern). He was an absolute master of his audiences, and usually the auditoriums were packed. Seamus Heaney, not knowing the Russian language, says: ‘Just the sound of his voice excited me, the sound of Russian words’. For Roger Straus, Brodsky’s voice recalled that of a synagogue cantor. Annelisa Alleva: ‘He read his poems by heart, in a resonant voice, with great conviction, but at the same time somewhat nervously’. Annie Epelboin regarded his way of reading even more unusually: ‘When he read poems, his gaze changed, as if it was not he reading the poems, but a whole generation, speaking to us through the ages’. Its emotional power stunned people. Wherever he went, he was applauded. Americans, as distinct from the English, says Susan Sontag, are able to applaud a man who deserves it. Joseph was admired from the very start. All who got to know him more closely loved him. His extraordinary mind won the hearts of people, his energy, his valor. His presence in America was very soon noticed, both as a poet and as a teacher (Jonathan Aaron). Exile allowed Brodsky to become a world poet, to extend his influence over other poets who admired him and were, he felt, his inferiors. For many American poets, the trial, exile, expulsion of Brodsky became a cause for envy: ‘No poet could ever wish for more’, they said. Brodsky defied institutionalized evil and suffered the consequences. This gave him moral authority. No single American poet could dream of anything like it, says Bill Wadsworth. Brodsky was seen as a hero or as a romantic figure. Precisely on the plane of moral authority, Susan Sontag feels that he had a chance to exert influence in virgin territory among people, audience and poets he both admired, enjoyed being with and felt superior to. And Brodsky knew his worth (Lev Loseff). When Alan Myers read out a review of his collection: ‘They call you a genius’. Joseph responded with a single word: ‘Again?’ Genrikh Steinberg recollects how after Brodsky had read his long poem

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‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ by memory, in 1968, he also remarked: ‘That’s something they’ll give me the Nobel Prize for one day’.

F r ie n d s h ip a n d a l ie n a t io n Brodsky undoubtedly had a great talent for friendship. According to Aleksandr Sumerkin, he would phone half the country to arrange a reading for Rein, or get up from his sickbed to introduce Kushner at a reading. ‘Ironical about himself in poems, Brodsky was exaggeratedly enthusiastic about the poets who figured in his life’ (Tatiana Shchebina). He wrote a vast number of prefaces to books by contemporaries, older and younger. But he could also be unfair and hostile, as Oleg Tselkov thought he was in regard to Yevtushenko. According to Mikhail Heifets, Brodsky ‘was one of those people who never forgave either those close or distant for trying to help him’. Evtushenko did try to help him. Brodsky himself helped everyone, he would secretly send money to refugees, give away his favorite books, buy his friends clothes and airplane tickets, and pay hotel bills. But he could not accept the same from others (Bengt Jangfeldt). He often ascribed to people qualities that only he possessed (Igor Efimov). Sir Steven Spender and his wife were substitutes for Brodsky’s parents during his life in the West. His close circle of friends included such luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney and Les Murray. Brodsky was convinced each of them would receive the Nobel Prize. This has not happened yet only to Les Murray and Mark Strand, although they might still be recipients. Susan Sontag, who was also in this circle, believed that Joseph was the leader of the group, since he always had to be the leader. Why, interestingly enough was there not a single American among these stars, asks Bill Wadsworth. And he himself provides the answer: because in America, poetry occupies only a marginal place; because the quality of poetry depends on the quality of its readers. On the other hand, Brodsky could not abide those who spoke of themselves as ‘the people’. He was merciless in this regard. According to Tatiana Retivov, he did a lot to alter the mindset of the leftist New York intellectuals, correcting and reconstructing them. Jonathan Aaron acknowledges that he himself had been sternly corrected under Brodsky’s influence.

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B r o d s k y, t h e t e a c h e r Students went to the University of Michigan simply because Brodsky was there (Tatiana Retivov). And yet, before Brodsky, both Auden and Frost had taught there. He called his students ‘boys and girls’, was an extremely exacting instructor and he smoked in class. He was politically incorrect and tactless. He was permanently surrounded by female students in love with him. Apart from the fact that he made his students learn poems by heart, which he then analyzed in class, he demanded the same commitment to work that he himself had. Sometimes he overwhelmed them with his knowledge. He was impatient and not always careful about what he said. Many students were scared of him. But he admired those who had the audacity to challenge him, who would give as good as they got. The poet and future President of the American Academy of Poets, Bill Wadsworth, was one of these, arguing, wisecracking and talking about poetry. Bill tells how one day at Columbia Brodsky entered the classroom, cup of coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, puffing like a locomotive and said, ‘You won’t believe what happened to me last night… I met a god. And he described his meeting with the Dalai Lama, ending: ‘And would you believe it, in the end he came over to me – my humble self! – and embraced me’. A female student, who adored Joseph, exclaimed: ‘Joseph, it must be your aura!’ Without missing a beat, Joseph responded, ‘No, I think it was my tie. You see, it was the same color as His Holiness’s robe’.

Brodsky in England Brodsky was undoubtedly an anglophile. He loved English history, even the history of the British Empire. As Daniel Weissbort recalls: ‘We were walking about in central London and passed the Foreign Office. Joseph said to me: ‘A pity England got rid of its Empire’. My big chance and I answered: ‘I don’t think it was entirely voluntary’. He visited places of well-known English people, went to Wellington, whence John Donne brought cucumbers to London; Leighton Bromswold where George Herbert was a priest; sat under the apple tree where Newton had the Law of Gravity revealed to him. He visited places connected with Auden, even the most tedious ones, and as-

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sured Alan Myers that this was gratifying. Alan tells how he did not at first realize to what extent Brodsky had adopted Auden’s persona. He even assimilated Auden’s Anglo-American accent as well as some of Auden’s verbal mannerisms such as ‘that would be awfully nice’. In an almost Audenesque manner, whatever he touched turned into a cigarette (MacNiece said this of Auden). He tried to give an Audenesque finish to his long poems by means of a pointed and profound aphorism (Alan Myers), but his centrifugal thinking proliferated, like the universe itself. Hence his prolixity. Auden like Brodsky was a wunderkind, and like Brodsky he could not stand free verse. Brodsky was amazed at Auden’s technical mastery, his ability to link high and low (Mark Strand). Like Auden, Brodsky was very controlled, adopting Auden’s intonation and rhythm (Daniel Weissbort). Brodsky also identified with Auden’s philosophical orientation; both of them revering Kierkegaard. Both could speak fascinatingly on any topic. Auden was a civilized writer and man, says Jonathan Aaron, with distinct aesthetic principles both in life and in poetry. Brodsky called Auden his twin, as he did Tsvetaeva and Tomas Venclova: Brodsky was so unique that it was hard to endure, and one was always looking for someone else like him (Tomas Venclova).

A u t o - t r a n s l a t io n s a n d t r a n s l a t o r s Russians are convinced that Brodsky’s poems cannot be translated. Igor Efimov: ‘It’s a joke to think you can translate: ‘V kontse bolshoi voiny ne na zhivot, / kogda chto bylo zharili bez sala’ (At the end of the great war, which was for life or death, whatever we had we fried without fat); ‘na zhivot’ is not the belly but for life, and not only did they fry, but they slaughtered. He was able to assemble a metaphorical bouquet in a single line. Robert Hass, poet and translator of Milosz, compared reading Brodsky in translation to wandering through the ruins of a building, which was said once to have been beautiful. Mark Strand believes that his translators did not serve Brodsky well. At the same time, many find that even in translation Brodsky’s intellectual energy was noticeable. It should come as no surprise that among his translators there were some first-rate poets: Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott. Walcott said to me that he, Brodsky and Barry Rubin once spent three hours translating one line in the poem

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‘Letter to the Ming Dynasty’. Doubts about Brodsky’s genius began when he started writing and especially translating his poems into English. He began to attract a lot of negative criticism. It was difficult to detach his poetry from his personality. Critics, journalists, and ill wishers placed him in a special category of ‘exile poets’ and pursued him with this label until the end of his days. Maliciously they picked on any unusually employed idiomatic expression, in the poetry as much as in the prose (Tatiana Retivov). According to Susan Sontag, no one in America went as far as the English poet Craig Raine. In America there was more concern not to hurt, whereas in England critics would get a kick out of insulting him. On the other hand, Sontag acknowledges that it was awkward when Brodsky apparently thought his English good enough to attempt to write poetry in it. She insists that all his essays written in English were closely supervised by his editors or friends. She herself frequently corrected his self-translations, but her corrections were ignored by Brodsky. Mark Strand jokes: ‘I always took Joseph’s advice; he never took mine. Just think what a poet he might have been!’ On the other hand, Brodsky’s translations of two poems by Tsvetaeva, Tatiana Retivov considers, as simply genial. Because of these two translations into English, she feels, he can be forgiven all the idiosyncratic usages in his manipulation of his second language. And Retivov herself is a bilingual poet and translator of Brodsky’s essay on Tsvetaeva. The change of language involves the entire poetic system (Tomas Venclova), Brodsky insisted on keeping the metre and rhyme of the original. This placed considerable demands on the translator bordering on intellectual athleticism if not acrobatics. ‘He tried to widen the scope of feminine rhyming in English poetry, but as a result his poems began to sound like W. S. Gilbert or Ogden Nash. However, he gradually improved; and did indeed begin to extend the scope of English prosody, an unusual achievement in itself. He might have succeeded where Nabokov, for instance, failed’ (Daniel Weissbort). Alan Myers, one of Brodsky’s English translators, like Daniel Weissbort, rarely received any encouragement or praise from Brodsky himself, apart from an ironical ‘I’ve been mangling your masterpieces!’ to Alan. Brodsky regarded the translations made by others as rough drafts to be worked on. On the other hand, Alan Myers and Peter

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France acknowledge that sometimes Brodsky did manage to improve the translation, turning them into masterpieces of their own, as for instance in the 6th line of the first verse of ‘Mexican Divertimento’ ‘Vechernii vozduch zvonche khrustalia’ Brodsky translated as: ‘The crystal, be it noted, smashed to sand’. ‘Quite brilliant. I’d never have thought of that’, says Alan Myers. Similarly brilliant lines occur in his poems in English. Still, he never really mastered the language, even though he very much wanted to. According to Peter France, Brodsky’s auto-translations will remain as curiosities, brave attempts to bring two linguistic cultures closer together. Most American poets, says Bill Wadsworth, consider Brodsky’s English poems as at best mediocre. In his view, the poem ‘Blues’ is ‘embarrassingly bad’. But there are one or two exceptions, for instance the poems to his daughter, also written in English. Seamus Heaney singles out his poem ‘Reveille’, which in its rhyming, imagery, and diction “contains a mass of excellent material.” And now a few words about Brodsky’s translations into Russian. Aleksandr Sumerkin who was very knowledgeable about Brodsky’s poetry and has translated several of his English essays notes: ‘He did not revise, but simply rewrote […] Of my initial text, only the prepositions and conjunctions remained. Hence, by the way, the catastrophic difference between my and other translations, which were done after Joseph’s death, and the translations which he was able to correct’. Brodsky’s prose, Alan Myers remembers, was like a ballet-dance, closer to the language of poetry. It was easier for translators of Brodsky into languages he did not know. Bengt Jangfeldt, Brodsky’s Swedish translator, says: ‘I translated his poetry and his rhyming. It is not true that one can rhyme only in Russian. Because in the West there had been little rhyming for half a century, a mass of free words are available that have never been rhymed. Brodsky, as is known, liked mixing old and new words and this works well in Swedish. It is very time-consuming but also very rewarding, because you are working all the time on the border of your own language. And it permits fewer semantic mistakes, because you are obliged to keep in mind the sense of what has been said’. Bengt Jangfeldt tried to preserve the metre of the source text, sometimes at the expense of meaning, which Brodsky had approved of. He allowed him to use the English translations as well.

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What does the Brodsky phenomenon mean for American poetry? After Nabokov, Brodsky was the first Russian to take an active part in the literary life of the West: he wrote in English and fully participated in discussions and conferences. He became Poet Laureate of the USA, a position, according to Bill Wadsworth, scarcely noticed before he occupied it. He expressed a high regard for Americans in his ‘Immodest Proposal’, stressing that the American contribution to world culture was not confined to movies and jazz, but also included poetry. He suggested that poems should be distributed in huge editions and made available, for free, in hotels, subways, trains, and airplanes. This soon became the talk of the town: ‘Did it have to be a Russian to show us that poetry was important and essential, that Americans in the 20th century had written some remarkable poetry?’ According to Bill Wadsworth, Brodsky changed the perception of the role of poetry in American culture. And for a while poetry collections were in fact available in hotel rooms together with the Bible. ‘But soon the poetry collections were stolen, while the Bibles remained’, jokes Mark Strand. Can Brodsky be called an American poet? Mark Strand: ‘It is more that he combined American and English locutions; his English poetry never sounds natural; all his rhymes are approximate and sound like rhymes only if one pronounces them with a Russian accent’. His tropes are hyperbolic; his metaphors and conceits are of British derivation. On the other hand, Bill Wadsworth comments, not Pound or Eliot, but it is Auden, Frost and Hardy who are poets of the English tradition of liberalism, emphasizing not the system of myths, theologies, ideologies, but individualism; the latter are Brodsky’s poetic masters. In this sense, Brodsky was more an English poet than American, says Bill. And the most important thing, from the American point of view, is that Brodsky belongs to Russian literature and not English. Living in America, he loved New England, Massachusetts, and New York, but not Middle America or the South. He always preferred Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman. Poet Jonathan Aaron feels that 60- 70 of his own poems translated by Brodsky are absolutely firstclass. Though according to Aaron, the remaining translations should also be of interest to students and for poets, as one can learn from

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them something about one’s own language, namely because Brodsky subjects English to the kind of treatment that no American poet would ever dream of. But not all who judged him were so well disposed. Brodsky’s fame irritated poets. For them Brodsky was too self-confident, almost reactionary. Sneering at the left, not respectful of American modernism, dogmatically rejecting free verse. Neither Chinese nor Japanese influences on American poetry interested him. Nor French. These people did not approve the appointment of a Russian as Poet-Laureate of the USA. Mark Strand defended him, Brodsky having succeeded him in this position: “I do not think one has to be born here to be American. One has to feel oneself American to be American, and I think that Joseph felt himself American.” Roger Straus sarcastically remarks that once in a while American intellectuals make the right decision, one being to choose Brodsky as Poet-Laureate of the United States. It is different with Brodsky’s prose, which contains the greater part of Brodsky’s thinking and exemplifies the enormous breadth of his knowledge and originality of his thought. Jonathan Aaron believes that Brodsky is one of the great American writers of the 20th century because of his prose. He particularly values Watermark, where Brodsky brought together prose and poetry. Nothing of the kind has ever been written about Venice. Not all cultures are disposed to accept Brodsky. French culture, for instance, is completely indifferent to him. The French and Brodsky were foreign to one another. But at least those French people who read Brodsky, says Annie Epelboin, had some sense of his measure. Tatiana Shcherbina, who lived for several years in France, says that many poets were amazed that so much fuss was made over Brodsky, and that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize.

W h a t i s t h e o r i g i n o f h i s id e a a b o u t l a n g u a g e a s a n e n d i n it s e l f ? It is arguable that Brodsky was affected by the linguistic epidemic of the twentieth-century. Brodsky reaches his own conclusions about language. The very nature of a writer predisposes him to love language. All real writers are focused on language (Susan Sontag). Why

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did Brodsky make language the centre of his worldview? Bill Wadsworth: because he did not want to make himself and his life the centre of his poetic world; ‘Look at my life, look at what I’ve done and experienced, that’s why I am a great poet’. Instead of this, he gives language priority. Tatiana Shcherbina: ‘Because it is the main thing. What Brodsky writes is a mediation between man and God. Not insignificant is the fact that Brodsky had a special gift not only to make language absolute, but also to express his thoughts about language with vehemence and passion, categorically, unafraid of superlatives, so that it becomes hard to ignore, even if one does not agree. Hence his authoritativeness, his maximalism, like the voice of language itself’. His teleology was language, thinks Bill Wadsworth. One can call Brodsky a logotheist. ‘For many, this seemed characteristic of Jewish thought, says Tatiana Shcherbina, his being an interpreter of the higher understanding and therefore an authority. Many, however, were irritated by it, thinking him arrogant and authoritarian. For me Brodsky’s tone was natural, and if he taught it was because he had something worth conveying’. Brodsky had things, which he formulated and they seemed prophetic. Shcherbina envies him his unbending gaze, such as will dream up formulae. The Gospels are written in formulae, which cannot be altered by translation into Russian. Mikhail Heifets observes that Joseph reveres language, which, as it were, led him, whereas, in fact, he taught Soviet readers to live in a different way. Derek Walcott: ‘For Brodsky, an almost medieval devotion to his craft was natural, hence his devotion to language, hence his writing poetry, which was conceived of like the interior of a medieval cathedral, along with arches and columns’. In this he sees the similarity between Brodsky and Dante. One should remember that Brodsky created the Russian equivalent of idiomatic, 20th century Anglo-American poetry, in the first place, of course, Auden’s. In general, this is a highly artificial, lyrical-ironical fusion of ordinary speech and intellectual discourse, magically made to seem natural. And the sources of the notion of language as an end in itself can be found in the Bible. As can the sources of his maximalism and authoritativeness. We may reiterate Solzhenitsyn’s rhetorical question: ‘What is the role of religion in Brodsky’s world view religion?’

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Chr istian, Jewish, pagan or s u p r a n a t io n a l , u n ive r s a l p o e t? Bengt Jangfeldt: ‘He belonged to Christian culture; for him Christianity is not a religion but a civilization’. He presented Aleksandr Sumerkin with a collection of ‘Christmas Poems’ with the inscription: ‘To Aleksandr from a correspondence-student of Christianity’. This inscription, to some extent, describes his position. Of course, he was not an atheist, and it is enough to read his ‘Roman elegies’ to convince oneself of that: ‘Lean over, and I shall whisper something in Your ear: ‘I am grateful for everything.’ But as an extremely independent person and freethinker, stubbornly freethinking in fact, he found any kind of organized worship inimical. Tatiana Shcherbina: ‘Our entire civilization is based on what Christ brought to it, and this is what distinguishes it from the rest of the world. It does not matter whether a man believes or does not believe, he is still a Christian. From my point of view, Brodsky was just such, an apostle of Christianity’. Aleksandr Sumerkin: ‘insofar as he was a Jew by national origin, which he never denied in public, he could not call himself a Christian’. In an interview, Brodsky said: ‘My work, for the most part, is in praise of God’. Tatiana Shcherbina: ‘Even Brodsky’s fear of God was not so much as fear as service’. And Natalya Gorbanevskaya considers that Brodsky’s spirit worshiped the Lord, even in the most unlikely poems. He was a heathen, says Mark Strand. Brodsky retorted to both of this: ‘Neither Paganism nor Christianity are sufficient in themselves, taken individually: neither can completely satisfy the spiritual needs of man’. Igor Efimov sees a similarity between Brodsky’s religious searches with that of one of the religious sects of Cromwell’s England, ‘the Seekers’, who were not to find satisfaction in either church. And Brodsky was, as it were, one of them. Zofia Kapuścińska: ‘He was always searching […] for that beyond which man could not see’. When Igor Efimov tried to pin him down to a specific circle, he said: ‘My dear Igor, my relations with God are more complicated than that’. Tomas Venclova once quoted Chesterton to Brodsky, saying that he would accept Calvinism, with its dogma of predestination, when he saw a Calvinist who considered himself predestined not for salvation, but for death. ‘You are just such a Calvinist’, said Tomas to Brodsky.

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Brodsky did not argue. Venclova considers Brodsky’s Nativity poems proof enough of his being a Christian poet. Brodsky was buried according to Christian rites. Several of my interlocutors were present at the memorial service held for Brodsky in New York, at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, which holds 3000 people. The very number of those who came to commemorate the fortieth day from the death of Brodsky speaks for the love and veneration in which he was held. ‘His voice of high quality’, says Mark Strand, ‘in an ocean of mediocrity and familiarity’. I have tried to touch also on the important parallel between Brodsky and Dante. According to Elena Chernysheva, Brodsky was always reading Dante. He regretted that he had not written his Divine Comedy, to which Tatiana Shcherbina responds: ‘He did write it, but in the form of frescoes’. But why frescoes, I asked. Because time was on the move. Not so long ago a century was the measure, whereas now a decade suffices to change the world entirely. Today’s world is not monolithic: discrete events, fragmented thinking and perceptions, ideas of good and evil are so confused that the only proper response is apocalypse. What worried men before? Emptiness, the nuclear winter, which would destroy everything, but Brodsky always said that emptiness was not the worst of it; worse still was the degradation which is now universal: ‘After us, not the deluge / where there are enough oars, / but the people flooding in, the plurality of them’. Will it be possible to find a system in these frescoes of Brodsky? His system is yet another renewal of the Gospels, to which the contemporary world has been added. Tatiana Shcherbina considers Brodsky an envoy of Christ. His poetry and essays constitute a recommendation to today’s Christian (the inhabitant of our civilization). If she is right, then Brodsky is utterly unrecognized as a preacher, not understood, and not accepted. It is up to us to identify and describe these frescoes.

W h e r e w a s h e m ov i n g? He was moving towards a philosophical understanding of life, contradicting his lyrical gift. Hence his complex form and complex formulae. He was codifying existence. According to Tatiana Shcherbina, if Pushkin discovered a new Russia in anticipation of the integration

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of Russia and Europe, Brodsky went a good deal further; summing up the twentieth century, Christian history, the Roman empire, being a precursor of the 21st century, both in language, combining the Empire style and barbarism, barbarism and neoclassicism, and Empire style as neo-barbarism. He drew a line between the hot points of history: Roman Empire and Soviet barbarism, beginning to construct a Christian civilization and the people, in their multitude, which cheapens our unique achievements. He foresaw ‘a new ice-age, slavery’s ice-age’. Brodsky wrote the personal into the social, and the social into a general project of the universe. That is, Brodsky sent the Russian language (insofar as he wrote in it) into the cosmos, into space, where it constituted another dimension. He situated the author (not just himself but anyone who writes) in the position of an all-seeing eye; he cultivated the optics, placing himself, like a telescope, in orbit; he built a time-machine – more correctly, this was not an enrichment of Russian culture by means of another regional culture: he already lived in the period of globalization, a period in which our long history has been put into single storage.

S o l z h e n it s y n a n d B r o d s k y One can speak of the incompatibility of their artistic worlds. Both were navigators in the ocean of the spirit, which was crisscrossed by various routes over various individual seas. And each brings back tales of his own travels. However, we must remember that they are sailing different seas (Igor Efimov). Nevertheless, Aleksandr Isaevich can compete with Brodsky’s judge Saveleva, as far as the injustice of his accusations against him are concerned. According to Mikhail Ardov, Solzhenitsyn’s article is ‘impotent really […] damaging only to Solzhenitsyn himself, showing him up for a rather mediocre man’. Brodsky, for his part, gave Solzhenitsyn his due, as a writer and prophet, valued this Shakespearian figure in him, the Soviet state acquired its Homer.

On his non-retur n to Russia Tatiana Shcherbina: ‘What would he have done here? Given advice on how to reconstruct Russia? Greeted enthusiastic crowds of admirers? Given speeches in the Writers’ Union of which he had never been

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a member? Probably, he would not have been able to find a suitable way of returning’. He would have liked to arrive without pomp and circumstance; he wanted no official receptions. Aleksandr Sumerkin: ‘He dreamt of arriving in Petersburg with Maria and his daughter and simply wandering around and showing them the town. Bur he knew that, alas, he was no longer a private citizen’. He was pleased and even quietly proud when the possibility of being published in Russia had arisen. He knew perfectly well that he was a Russian poet and that his reputation was confirmed both by the Russian language and a Russian readership. But he did not favor either Russophiles or Russophobes. He never surrendered to the authorities his concept of the fatherland, even if they took and profaned it (Igor Efimov). At the end of August 1991, he said to Efimov: ‘It is true, my dear Igor, for the first time, we are not ashamed of the fatherland’. He was worried for the fatherland. He did not feel he was a traitor. A man, who lives in the empire of language, can never betray it (Igor Efimov). ‘For Brodsky, the fatherland was the people whose sufferings he shared in the madhouse, in the convict transport, in the kolkhoz fields, in the pliancy of the Russian tongue, Russian literature, and Petersburg architecture. From this homeland it was impossible to separate him, his poetry, his flesh and blood’ (Lev Loseff). If Russians blame Brodsky for never visiting Russia, Jews for never going to Israel, saying you are a Jew and must go to, he refused, because he was afraid that it all might be used there (Bengt Jangfeldt). He was afraid to be confined to too narrow a category, was amused when he was included in a book of ‘Famous Jews’, although he accepted his Jewishness as a fact that would never change. (Edward Bloomstein).

B r o d s k y ’s l a s t d ay s Seamus Heaney saw him on January 7, in New York. Joseph had driven from Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan in a dreadful snowstorm, his paleness showing how sick he was. He refused to join them in a meal, but twice left the restaurant to go out into the street to smoke. On the eve of his death, in the evening of January 27, he telephoned Elena Chernysheva. “I never heard him so happy. A certain lightness and sense of liberation in his voice. A young, young man’s voice. ‘What’s

happened Osenka? You sound like a little boy’. He answered: ‘You know, Lena, I’ve just worked on my archive and found a couple of not half bad verses. Now I can die’. To return to the question of a biography, we should ask ourselves whether the oral tradition is capable of preserving the circumstances of Brodsky’s life, which by its very nature is the stuff of legends. Of course, Brodsky, more than once, declared against biographies. Summing up the facts of the private life of a poet contributes nothing to an understanding of his poems, Loseff reminds us. But as soon as he himself tried to sum up Tsvetaeva’s poetry, or Cavafy’s, or Frost’s and that of others, he made use of biographical material. What we often take for Brodsky’s biography are myths, which he himself nurtured, and a collection of myths, which according to Akhmatova were made for him (‘What a biography they are making for our red-headed boy!’) Before his exile from the USSR, Brodsky told Andrey Sergeev that he would make exile his personal myth. Brodsky, in this sense, succeeded (Tomas Venclova). The myth created itself, so to speak. Akhmatova was right. One can envy his life. Bengt Jangfeldt, who witnessed the whole Nobel ceremony, says, ‘You know, at that moment, I felt the whole fate of this man very powerfully. The entire terrible fate of a Russian poet’. Brodsky repeated: ‘Fate can be different, but a man is answerable for his own’. This was his relationship to his fate from the start. Let us hope that the prohibition on a biography will be lifted. ‘To hide from us a poet’s journey in the spiritual world, says Efimov, is the same as hiding Columbus’s journey, Magellan’s, Marco Polo’s, Amundsen’s. And if a few people are going to be upset or even hurt by the new facts, so be it. The literary world is replete with slander, deliberate, purposeful, and we would like to remain unsullied. But this is purism! It is not practicable, and simply leaves the field open to dishonorable interpreters and biographers’. I shall end with Tomas Venclova’s words: ‘As regards Pushkin’s, Blok’s or Akhmatova’s personal life, some mystery remains. That is how it should be, and I hope will ultimately be for Brodsky’.

LIST

OF

PHOTOGR APHS

John le Carré . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Mikhail Heifets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 JB & Lev Loseff, in Stokholm, December 1987 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 JB & Igor Efimov. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Edward Bloomstein, 2007, London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Mikhail Ardov in his church in Moscow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Oleg Tselkov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Tomas Venclova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Viktor Golyshev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Aleksandr Sumerkin, 1997 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Joseph Brodsky and Petr Vail in Lucca, Italy, September 1995 . . . . . 219 JB & Bengt Jangfeldt, at the reading in Stokholm. . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Ludmila Shtern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 JB’s Inscription for Ludmila Shtern, 1977 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Zofia Ratajczak-Kapuścińska, 1960 s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Susan Sontag, Annie Apeboin & JB, Venice, December 1977 . . . . . . 287 Annelisa Alleva, Rialto, Venice, January 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Tatiana Retivov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Tatiana Shcherbina, 15 September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Dasha Basmanova, July 2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399 Pasha Basmanova, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 Anastasiya Kuznetsova, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 JB & Seamus Heaney, by John Miniham, 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 JB and Mark Strand in Provincetown, Autumn 1973 . . . . . . . . . . . 433 Les Murray, Derek Walcott, JB & Seamus Heaney, 1988 . . . . . . . . . 443 Jonathan Aaron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 JB, Jonathan Aaron and Mark Strand in Provincetown, Autumn 1973 . . 461 William Wadsworth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Les Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483 Sam Brussell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509 Alan Myers, Joseph Brodsky & Diana Myers in Cotswolds, England, 1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517 JB & his translator Daniel Weissbort, reading at London Poetry Society, June 1979 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543 Peter France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555 Michael Scammell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567 Roger Straus, 1996 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587

PHOTOGR APHS

IN THE INSET

Les Murray & Valentina Polukhina at Keele University, 1987 . . . . . . Viktor Golyshev & Valentina Polukhina at Golyshev’s apartment in Moscow, September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genrikh Steinberg & Valentina Polukhina at RGGU, Moscow, 2 September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roger Straus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky, A. Sumerkin and Brodssky’s cat Mississippi . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky and Octavio Paz in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 . Joseph Brodsky in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky & Ludmila Shtern in Holyoke, February 1995 . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky & L. Shtern, in Shtern’s kitchen, 27 January 1993 . . . Joseph Brodsky, Viktor & L. Shterns, by M. Baryshnikov, January 1993 . Ludmila Shtern in Dom knigi, St Petersburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky at Katowice, 22 June 1993 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajevsky and Derek Walcott, 1981 . Joseph Brodsky is giving an acceptance speech at the Honoury Degree ceremony at the Silesian University, Katowice, 22 June 1993 . . . Joseph Brodsky in Albuquerque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky in Albuquerque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky & Petr Vail, Lucca, September 1995 . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Brodsky and Petr Vail in café, Lucca, Italy, September 1995 . . Valentina Polukhina & Daniel Weissbort, Dublin, 1997 . . . . . . . . . Mikhail Heifets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tatiana Shcherbina at Brodsky’s grave, San Michele, Venice, 2002 . . . Seamus Heaney & Valentina Polukhina, Dublin, 1997 . . . . . . . . . . Dasha Basmanova in Sherlok Holmes museum, London, July 2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dasha Basmanova, Rimma Shchipina (mother), Polya Basmanova and Pasha Basmanova, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dasha Basmanova & Daniel Weissbort at Lady Rosa Lipworth’s house . Joseph Brodsky at Loseff’s place, Ann Arbor, 1977 . . . . . . . . . . . A poster of V. Polukhina’s lecture on Joseph Brodsky at Cambridge, March 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . I . . I . . II . . II . III . III . IV . IV . .V . .V . VI . VI . VII . VII . VIII . VIII . IX . .X . .X . XI . XI . XII . XII . XIII . XIII . XIV . XIV . XV . XV . XVI

AC K NOW L E D GE M E N T S I would like to express my gratitude to the British Academy for their fi nancial support. I am grateful to Chris Jones for his help in translating three interviews. All the other interviews were translated by Tatiana Retivov, without whose help it would have been impossible to assemble this collection. Special thanks should go to my husband Daniel Weissbort who reviewed all the texts and helped me to fi nalize them as well as translating two interviews.

I

1 JOHN

LE

CARRÉ

John le Carré (the pseudonym of David Cornwell) was born in 1931 in Dorset. He studied at Berne University (Switzerland) and at Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1956 - 1958 he taught French and German at Eton; in 1959 he joined the Foreign Office and was stationed in Bonn, West Germany when the wall was erected. In 1959 he wrote his first novel Call for the Dead followed by The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963), which enjoyed a huge success. He has published 20 novels, many of them have been adapted for the screen. All his novels are superbly written and complex. His recent novel is The Most Wanted Man (2008).

34

John le Carré

A G R E A T T A L E N T T H A T WA S OF AN ORPHAN

A BIT

An Interview with John le Carré

(28 May 1996, London) – Is it true that you and Joseph were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant, here in Hampstead, in October 1987 when the news about Brodsky’s Nobel Prize for literature was announced? How exactly did this news reach you two in the restaurant? What was Joseph’s reaction to the news? – Yes, I was with him at that moment. I took him to the Chinese restaurant, which is gone now; I’ll show you where it was. It was a lousy little restaurant anyway, but it was quite good food and I used to go there. When I invited Joseph there for lunch, he said ‘yes’, I think, for two reasons: first, Rene Brendel1 would not let him drink, not much, not as he liked to drink, and also of course he was killing time while he waited to hear the news. I had no idea of this. I actually didn’t know that the Nobel Prize winner was at that moment being selected. I don’t like the so-called literary community. I am not that kind of English writer. My wife Jane joined us, and we three sat, just talking about this and that (silly Joseph talk, girls, life, anything), and then Rene Brendel appeared in the doorway. She is big, German, tall, lots of authority, still speaks with a slight German accent, and she said, ‘Joseph, you must come home’. And he said, ‘Why?’ He had had two or three large whiskies by then. And she said, ‘You have won the Prize’. He said, ‘What prize?’ And she said, ‘You have won the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I said, ‘Waiter, a bottle of champagne’. So, she sat down and accepted a glass of champagne, and I said to her then, ‘How do you know?’ She said, ‘The whole of Swedish television is waiting for Joseph outside the house’. I said, ‘Well, you know, there are three or four candidates; they may be outside every door. We need more than this before we can drink the champagne in comfort’. Joseph’s publisher, Roger Straus, was in London, so Rene telephoned him at his hotel, and he confirmed that he had received official word from Stockholm that Joseph has got the prize. So, we drank the cham-

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pagne. Joseph didn’t like champagne, but accepted it as a symbol. He wanted more whisky, but Rene said he must come home. – Did he display any joy? – Wait, wait. He looked miserable. So, I said, ‘Joseph, if not now, when? We’ve got to be able to celebrate our life at some point’. – ‘Ya, ya’, he murmured. Then we went outside and he gave me a big Russian hug and produced a great line: ‘Now for a year of being glib’, he said, which was beautiful. Then he marched off to do his stuff, but of course, the other side of Joseph was that he was a great professional. He knew how to massage people. – But did you know that he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize as early as 1980? – No. – I was in the USA at the time working on my first book on Joseph’s poetry, when one day he mentioned it almost in passing; ‘There is a smell of Nobelevka in the air’. But, as you know, Czeslaw Milosz got it that year, and Brodsky again, as you said, was extremely professional, and very happy for Milosz. – So, actually he wanted it. – O, yes, he wanted it and he was very sure even in 1963 that he would get it one day. – I must have asked him whether he wanted it, because he looked so miserable. But of course, there is a Jewish prayer, which says, ‘May your prayer never be answered’. – I presume this wasn’t the first time you met Brodsky? When and where did you meet him the first time? – I met him at Rene Brendel’s house, but he wasn’t staying at the Brendels, he had either rented or been given somebody‘s house down at the bottom of the hill, in South End Green, and after dinner at Rene’s (we had a lot to drink, and were very happy) we walked down to his place, and we drank alone there. He had an impressive selection of whisky. This was before I went to Russia. After that I met him perhaps a dozen times. We talked of nothing important, nothing very intellectual. He enjoyed my company, I could tell, and I enjoyed his. We laughed a lot. – Do you remember any bits of amusing conversation that you had with Joseph?

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– Yes, I once told him about an interview I never had with Svetlana Stalin. It was when she was in secret exile in America. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and I were supposed to be flown to a secret place to ask her questions. It was a very controlled affair, controlled by the CIA, and a big propaganda coup. She been living in India and nobody knew she was in America. It was going to be presented here in The Observer, in advance, in Paris Match, and in Spiegel. The organizers asked me to submit two sample questions. Well, I thought, I knew nothing about Russia at the time (none of us knew anything about Russia, and certainly not then), but I would ask the two questions I would have asked any exile; number one: ‘What circumstances in the country of your adoption would have obliged you to leave it?’ and ‘What circumstances in the country you have left would oblige you to return?’ Joseph got quite hot under the collar. – Did he answer the second question? – Not really, no. You know, how inarticulate he could be when he was hiding. – Yes, because he was quite an emotional man despite his reputation of being cool and rational. He could also become inarticulate even in Russian because he always preferred to avoid cliché whatever the subject of conversation. One could almost see how he was thinking of an original way of putting his thoughts. Had he read any of your novels? – I have no idea. I shouldn’t think so. – He must have done, because in the essay, ‘Collector’s item’, there is a direct allusion to one of your novels in his phrase: ‘it certainly was much colder. At least for the spy who came in from the warmth’. Had you read his poems or essays prior to the first meeting? – I read most of his essays from Less Than One. I especially like the ones on Akhmatova and Leningrad. – Do you think any of his essays could have been written by an English writer? Or is there something in them that gives his Russianness away? – Yes, in a sense that Conrad wrote in English. I never was able to make the bridge between the Brodsky I knew, whom I regarded as inarticulate in English, and the Brodsky writing apparently in English on the page. I was very suspicious of what I suspect was an intricate

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John le Carré (David Cornwell; no date, received from le Carré)

process of translation that must have gone on. He writes with fineness, but with a slight foreign accent. His prose is syntactically and grammatically beautiful, just as Joseph Conrad’s was. If you have German, which I think was for Conrad the most influential language, you really can read him with a German accent and it is still beautiful. And Conrad comes closer that anybody to the great, big, multiple-storeyparagraphs of Thomas Mann. I am no judge of Joseph poetry. I read a lot of his poetry, but in translation, it’s terribly hard to judge. How many of the judges could read Russian? – Do you believe that only second-rate poets can be improved in translation? – I suspect that a good translation can make a bad poet look good and vise-versa. I was suspicious at my response to his poetry. I respected it, but the wind didn’t whistle in my ears when I read it. But with the prose it was remarkable and I always wanted to ask him (but we never talked about anything seriously) what the process was. And I think he was quite secretive about it. Do you know what the process was? He didn’t command English that way. – His written English is much, much better than his spoken English. When I interviewed Derek Walcott, who translated one of Joseph’s poems, ‘Letters from the Ming Dynasty’, he admitted that ‘Joseph is too

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generous attributing the translation to me; it is his own translation; I don’t know the language. We simply got together and Joseph would explain every line to me in English, doing an interlinear and when I suggested a poetic translation he would reject it every time, as not needed; sometimes Joseph would groan with anger and exasperation and in the end he would produce himself what he demanded from me’.2 – How interesting! – Let us talk about two particular essays of his: ‘Cambridge Education’ and ‘Collector’s Item’. – I have read both of them and I thought they were the only area where I felt Joseph’s limitations. He is not very good on the West. The whole point about Blunt and his group was that they had been educated to power and had been fascinated by the attraction of power itself, and the use of it. If you cannot exercise power yourself, you start looking for other people’s. – He seems to be blaming the Cambridge education system for producing three or four of the most famous Soviet spies, in saying that ‘in the absence of ecclesiastical teaching’ history is ‘our only available source for an ethical education’. Do you accept this criticism? – The men he was writing about lived in a condition of secrecy. They saw themselves as people apart, people in a conspiracy – a political and sexual conspiracy. They’d had all the ecclesiastical teaching they needed, but they were naturally alienated from the orthodox structure of society. They saw a distant paradise that would include them. That wasn’t Cambridge’s fault. – Why, do you think, so many Western intellectuals, people prominent in European and American cultural life, became Soviet agents or willingly gave their help when it was needed? In most cases it was nothing to do with homosexuality. – The very first book that was published about Philby in this country, which broke every official secret act we have, was written by a group of journalists from the Sunday Times. I wrote an introduction to that, which I reread the other day. It is a bit flawed, but it still makes a point, I think. Firstly, it was one of the best-kept secrets of the Soviet Union of just how primitive, how inefficient, how repressive that system was. It is always a mystery to my generation that the show trials did not

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open the eyes of people like Philby. Then, as one gets older, one realizes that they loved the restructuring of society, the ethnic cleansing; they saw it as great sweep of history, producing demotic changes that were essential to a perfect society. So the more they read about the persecutions, repressions, the more they believed that something was really happening in a world that seemed to them inert and boring. Joseph makes the point very well that spying could be fun; it doesn’t take a lot of time; it gives you a sense of your own significance; it’s a way of putting oneself at the centre of human affairs, or seeming to. And the spying institutions themselves are very conventional and orthodox, looking up to all the right things. In a curious way, sometimes, to become a spy is to adopt another orthodoxy in defiance of the one that wishes to embrace you. – What do you think motivated Brodsky to write a piece on Philby and other spies? ‘To quell the sensation of utter disgust’ at the sight of Kim Philby’s face on the stamp, as he put it? Or to use it as a case study of one more manifestation of the ‘vulgarity of the human mind’? Or something else altogether? – I don’t know, but I met Andrey Sakharov, whom I enjoyed hugely, in what was then still Leningrad. He asked me the same questions about spies. With Sakharov it was very clear to me, that here was a man, like Joseph, of huge personal courage, who had taken on an oppressive society single-handedly, and stood up in a world where it was very dangerous to stand up. Whereas Philby and Claus Fuchs, the British atom spy, who was a particular object of Sakharov’s interest, had taken the deceitful course in an open society. Our so-called open society is of course limited. It has all the faults I know about, and you know about. Nevertheless, if you’ve got a grudge, you can stand up and shout about it, you can write it and nobody is going to put you in prison. But the Philbys of this world didn’t do that. I think that fascinated Sakharov, particularly, because in his life it would have been a very soft option if he had simply become a spy as well as a professor. He could have had all his privileges, could have made a sensible marriage, sent his children to Party schools, and been the greatest physicist of all time. Maybe Joseph was thinking in the same way, because exile gives you too much time to think about loyalties. I always thought of him as an exile. I was very interested in the problem he

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must have faced of returning to Russia. In that way alone, perhaps his death was providential. It would have been a very difficult last act. – He once stepped on his own tail, when in 1983 he was asked, ‘Will you ever return to Russia?’ he said, ‘I will return to Russia on one condition: when they publish all my work’.3 When they published all his work, he had to invent a hundred excuses, playful, plain and serious ones for not going back. – I think it must have been difficult for him. As we all know, Solzhenitsyn wrote so badly about the West. I don’t really know what Joseph thought about the West, but he wrote so wonderfully about Russia. – But he was in love with England, with English language. What is your explanation for Brodsky’s life-long love affair with everything English? – He loved self-irony. He was always very pleased to put himself down. He liked coded relationships and the English are good at coded relationships. I think he liked a lack of emotional display, because it left his imagination clear to imagine people’s feelings. And at our best, we are very nice people. At our worst, we are frightful. I can fall in love with Russia for the same reasons, for comparable reasons. But, at the same time, I often wondered how strange we were for Joseph, how much of it was ‘abroad’ still for him. I was very conscious of a great talent that was a bit of an orphan, a little bit wandering in search of parents. One thinks of him as a women’s man, but actually he was extremely spontaneous in male friendship. In this sense he perhaps missed the male group, missed his youth. – Yes, the quality of Russian friendship could never be found in the West, it is so close and demanding. – Yes, I know, it is intense. – But Joseph was always surrounded by people and friends, especially in America where he liked the democratic way of meeting people. – Provided he was boss. – Joseph was also in love with the language itself. Once he said that if he had to give up either Russian or English; it would drive him crazy. The very process of writing an essay in English was such an important exercise for him, it gave him such a pleasure that he could not do without it. He also attempted writing poems in English and at the end became his own translator.

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– My enthusiasm for him and my admiration for him were of course in the first instance not so much poetical but political. I loved the guts, the courage that he displayed in 1964. – It was indeed something he had plenty of, guts I mean. – Also, when you meet somebody like Joseph you feel something; you see something behind the eyes and in the energy of the man. – Have you ever listened how he read his poetry? – No, I haven’t. – Can you recognize a KGB man inside or outside Russia? – It was easy to recognize them in Russia in 1987, because those who were put alongside me had the veneer of Western manners and spoke unnaturally good English, and made fatal mistakes, like trying to talk like sophisticated Europeans. It’s very funny when somebody pretends that he knows whiskies or something like that. I don’t know whiskies, but I know this man doesn’t. – We seem never to be able to produce a realistic portrait of each other. Another fatal mistake that Western writers make in trying to depict a Soviet person. – And vice versa. I just wonder how Joseph saw the rest of his writing life, where it was going to take place. What was the grit in the oyster. Where would he get his aggravation from? – But he knew that he was dying; in fact he was courting death well before he was forty, since his first heart attack, if not before. I remember our conversation after his first open-heart surgery, I said: ‘Provided, you stop smoking, Joseph, you are guaranteed ten more years’. And he replied: ‘Valentina, life is wonderful precisely because there is no guarantee, none whatsoever’. If you didn’t know Joseph at all, what would you have made of him after reading the essay ‘A Collector’s Item’? Is it written by a poet, a university professor, a philosopher or an amateur-psychologist? Are his analyses of the phenomenon correct, profound or superficial? – I was fascinated that Joseph got into the spying business, because it raises all the literary questions: who am I? To what am I responsible? Where do my loyalties lie? What is the true me? You are deliberately contrasting behavior with emotion. You may detest being in my company but I would never know, because the courtesy of our existence tells otherwise. You may be reporting me to the new KGB, I will never know. In a sense, the Russians knew more about psychology before

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Freud than ever since. – Because it was a matter of survival. – Yes, it was a matter of survival and their literature was so perceptive. They have by instinct a greater understanding of human nature than can ever be given to a scientist. I think, Joseph probably knew more about me than any analyst would after 20 years. – If this is true, then it is also because he is a poet. You have just formulated what Joseph said in one of his interviews, ‘I always believed, and I still do, that a man, a human being, should define himself in the first place not in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, philosophical convictions, the citizenship or geographic, whatever it is, situation. But first of all one should ask oneself: ‘Am I a generous man? Or am I a liar?’4 I understand, when you went to Russia for the second time, in 1993, you were looked after by Pussia. Who gave you Pussia? – He works a bit for Bitov, but he was supplied by PEN Club, by Vladimir Stabnikov. – Oh, yes, Vladimir is married to Olga Sedakova’s sister Irina. – That’s right, and Olga is wonderful. – Yes, she is very beautiful, both spiritually and physically. – Have you stayed in her dacha? – No, I’ve never been to her dacha. Your ‘Russia House’ and ‘Our Game’ are almost exclusively about Russia. What do you find so fascinating about Russia? – Everything. Alas, I am ashamed I have no Russian. Isaiah Berlin said to me that I could learn it very quickly; it could easily be done. What fascinates me about Russia? The cultural superpower. The amazing, unbelievable suffering shared. An unequalled capacity to shoot themselves in the foot. An incredible inefficiency, alongside a genius for improvisation and huge energy. And equally huge laziness. You never know what you are getting. Unpredictability. No such thing as collective decision taking. And impulsive actions that can only be explained retrospectively, if at all. Is that not right? – Unfortunately, you are right. If Rainer Maria Rilke is right, that Russia is sharing a boundary with God, then Russian are paying the price for this privilege. – I met in Russia so many wonderful people. Every encounter in all four visits has been so electrical, so unpredictable. You just never know whether you are going to walk into a palace or a thief’s tent.

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I was shocked when I went in 1987 for the first time and took my own interpreter, which disconcerted everybody; then we went again in 1993 and I couldn’t believe that Estee Lauder had replaced GUM in Red Square. The capitalization of Russia is as disconcerting to me as it is for Russians. Money is utterly mysterious. It seems to be in all the wrong hands. – You also perhaps notice that the KGB and the Party knew where the money was and is. – Nobody else does. – Their sons and grandsons are now in business. – Yes, the Branch secretaries are the Bank managers and the District secretaries are the Bank presidents. Everything has restructured itself in the new capitalism. The level of criminality, I suspect, is no greater than it was with the party. All that has happened is that the cover has been removed. There were criminals within the law; for example, cotton growing in Kazakhstan was the work of one particular mafia inside the Ministry of Agriculture, they wanted to sell cotton to Indian crooks across the border. – Who did you meet amongst Russian writers? – I met Bitov, Iskander, Chingiz Aitmatov, and the painter Kabakov, who also wrote. – What do you think of the state of Russian literature today, I mean prose? – I am afraid I don’t read very much of it. – And of course the translation would be four-five years behind. – Yes, I am aware of the problem that you had generations of writers who had to write in coded form in order to be published. So it all became a game. Symbolism became a passionate preoccupation, reading between the lines: ‘ha-ha, I got that one through’. Now they are faced with what we are faced with – translating experience from life to the page. During the Communist era, people in the West imagined that, all through the time of the oppression, great manuscripts were gathering dust. It doesn’t seem to have been the case. – It is not only the content; the style is also no good. I wanted to ask you about your own writing, what is your prime concern as a writer: style, plot, or characters? – For myself I begin with people. Then I want a context for a certain kind of conflict: a cat sat on the mat is not all that extraordinary; a cat

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sat on the dog’s mat is getting extraordinary. – I am asking this question because some of your lines could be the beginning of a poem. You can write with a Nabokovian stylistic relish, using exquisite metaphors and almost poetic attention to details, and at the same time you stay within the popular genre of the spy-thriller. Would you ever sacrifice psychological or realistic truth for a beautiful phrase? – Of course I love the beauty of the language, like Joseph. I love my language, but I would never wish the reader to stop in the narrative – cor, that was good! – I want the music to fit the dancing; I don’t want the music to overpower the dancing and vice versa. – How do you write? Do you use computer, or do you dictate your novels to your secretary? – O, no, no. I do it all by hand. In the end, it’s all about story. There may be beautiful phrases, but finally, it’s a question of why did he do it, what is the consequence, what did he do, whom did he love, whom did he hate? The reason why the great XIX century writers remain so international is that even when they were butchered in translation, they delivered wonderful characters and hold a wonderful story. – I have promised to let you know why you are so popular among the Russian intellectuals. ‘Who done it?’ is a favorite English genre, but for the Russians ‘Who is guilty?’ and ‘What to do?’ are the two unanswerable questions. And you are moving into Russian territory in all your novels. – I am so proud. But I would like to add: it is not so much ‘Who is guilty’, we are all guilty, but who is the guiltiest? Who must be sacrificed? And then, what is the result? – Russians wouldn’t go that far because they cannot solve the first problem. Did you go to Chechnya? – No, I tried, but they wouldn’t let me. I made a mistake trying to get there through Moscow. Kostoev, the policeman who interrogated and brought to his death Chikatilo, the murderer, is an Ingush. He was going to take me with a bodyguard, but he said it had simply become too dangerous. – What did you expect to learn that you didn’t know already? – The war had not officially begun. I would have tried to do what I did in 1981/82 in South Lebanon: share the Palestinian life a little – or in this case, the Chechen life – and see the smoke.

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– Like Vladimir Makanin, the author of ‘The Captive of the Caucasus’, you almost predicted the Chechen war. – It was so easy to predict. Listening to Pussia about Abkhasiya, then hearing Kostoev about Ingushetiya and then – when I came back to England, making a few phone calls to journalists – it seemed inevitable. But what really fascinated me was just that how little it meant for the Western conscience. We like to think, my generation at least, we prefer the victim to the bully. The Ingush and the Chechen were once more about to be bullied. – This was exactly Joseph’s reaction when the first war in Chechnya broke out, he said, ‘what happened to the simple human ethics: the big do not attack the small’. – We always protect the big against the small. We protect the rich against the poor; we protect the bully against the victim. It is quite extraordinary. – What do you think is the main reason for the war? – Religion; historically it is religious. In Tsarist times, the Tsars preferred Christian tribes. So people like the Ossetians converted to Christianity in order to escape the persecution of the Terek Cossacks, and to curry the sympathy of Moscow. The Muslim tribes were perceived as heretics and invaders, and the Chechen and Ingush group have remained second-class citizens and worse in the eyes of Moscovites. Nobody knows, thank God, how racist Russians are. – Are you pleased with what you see on the screen based on your novels? – Almost never. – If Pasternak could have seen what they did with ‘Doctor Zhivago’, he would have died for the second time. Omar Sharif played this most sophisticated Russian intellectual. It is so vulgar. And at the same time it is nothing to do with his poetry, but the film made Pasternak famous all over the world. – Yes, I know. If you were to look at the book-sales that followed the release of the film, you would just say: ‘Thank God.’ – But nobody from Pasternak’s family benefited from it, neither here nor in Russia. David Lean admitted that ‘Doctor Zhivago’ brought him more money than all the rest of his films put together. – And they never had a penny. I heard that the same thing had happened to Rybakov with the publication of his The Children of Arbat.

– You have been lucky with ‘Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy’ and ‘Smiley’s People’, Alec Guinness alone was fantastic. – It was beautiful. Enchanting. – Would you agree with those people in the Foreign Office and in the Higher Education authority that Russia is no longer important, therefore that British universities don’t need so many Russian Departments? My own Department is about to be cut by half.5 – When has the Foreign Office ever been right? Notes 1

2

3

4 5

Rene Brendel was a wife of a famous musician Alfred Brendel. Brodsky has dedicated a poem ‘The Fly’ to both of them. Valentina Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes of his Contemporaries, vol. I, p. 30 (Brighton MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008). Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Dmitry Savitsky, Brodsky, Kniga intervyu, ed. by V. Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov), 2007, p. 230. Brodsky, interviewed by David Bethea, ibid, p. 566. It was closed down after my retirement in 2001 as so many other Russian and Slavic Departments in the UK.

2 MIKHAIL HEIFETS Mikhail Heifets (1934) was born in Leningrad but now lives in Israel. He spent 6 years in the camps (1974 - 1980) for writing an introduction ‘Brodsky and our generation’ to the five volumes samizdat collection of Brodsky’s poetry. During his exile he wrote three books about the Soviet camp system. After completing his term, he was exiled from the USSR. He now works at Jerusalem University and writes for the newspaper Vesti (The News). He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them about Hanna Arendt (2006) and Arabs and Jews (2007).

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T H E E M P I R E H E WA S L O Y A L T O WA S T H E R U S S I A N L A N G U A G E An Interview with Mikhail Heifets (July 2004, Moscow) – When do you remember first hearing Joseph Brodsky’s name mentioned? – In my young days I had a friend, the closest person to me at one time, Vladlen Travinsky. Especially gifted, Vladlen was a retired policeman, a journalist, and the author of, then, quite popular books about Black Africa. He possessed an absolutely astonishing natural talent as an organizer. Orbiting around him there was always this group of unusually interesting people, so attractive was the man’s disposition – commanding, as he did, such a feeling for talent and promise – that people would remain in his circle a long time. I was constantly dropping in on him at the apartment he leased on Pioneer Street and found myself in that company… Through Travinsky I became acquainted with Boris Strugatsky (at that time merely the co-author of The Land of Red Clouds) – with Mikhail Shemiakin (for the latter artist, Vladlen organised, through the magazine Zvezda, the first ever public showing) and with other people who later made names for themselves. One day Vladlen brought to work, in the Zvezda editorial offices, a dozen or so poems by an unknown author, handwritten on little bits of paper; holographs really. How he got hold of them, I didn’t ask: I think through Sandy Konrad (Aleksandr Kondratov, that is). This was, roughly at the end of 1959 or the beginning of 1960. Glancing through them, it took me only a moment to realize that here was the work of a poet such as any generation dreams of having in its midst. These were the juvenilia Brodsky later contrived any which way to hide from the light of publication. His poetic mentor Evgeny Rein once said of them: ‘The customary doggerel of geology’. But, really, Rein himself immediately, at a first reading, sensed the originality of the author’s personality, his singularity; how unlike any of the other poets then writing in Leningrad he was. That was why he gave him his time, why he picked him out immediately – he’d say as much

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himself: ‘Farewell, forget me and do not judge. And burn those letters like a bridge’. – What did you see as unusual in Brodsky’s early poems? – Well, nobody would have used that trope ‘like a bridge’ in a love poem. It sounds like something bursting in from a completely different world. War poetry, perhaps… That genre, and others, we were used to; but this mixing up smacked of the ‘Simple Simon’ effect… The poem concluded: ‘I am happy for those who are, perhaps, going your way’. That unexpected doubt ‘perhaps’ agitated us back then. As Yakov Gordin put it later, ‘we managed to scramble (jump) onto that train’. – What sort of impression did Brodsky make at the start? – I’m afraid, today nobody would understand it. We lived in a supposedly completely normal world, a Socialist Space; that’s to say a world deemed to be harmonious and consequently, in theory, conflict-free. It was normal for people to pride themselves on their ‘life-long service’. In other words, throughout their lives they worked in the same place and lived, more often than not, in the same ‘domicile’! Trips abroad, to other countries, even other regions of their own country were seen as the high life – accessible only to a lucky few. As a rule any sort of novelty was a one-off, unexpected gift. All the concerns of their (of our) lives were the general, run-of-the-mill, human concerns, the getting by from payday to payday, the constant vying to live up to the ideal of the New Woman (New Man), the making of a career and, just maybe – that would be good wouldn’t it? – Some glory for oneself… Brodsky’s poetry wrenched us away from that flat, conflict-free living space, away from the vulgarity (conventionality) of that normal, day-to-day existence. We remembered that Time, Spirit, God exist. We were cautioned, so to speak, that there is a boundary to ordinary desires, to the normal avidity of humanity and that its name is Death. Other variants of life exist besides our own discombobulating Soviet vanity of vanities… Joseph sang the praise of Language, which, apparently, had governed him. Though I would never have dared say this to him in his lifetime, he taught his Soviet readers (and not only his Soviet readership it turns out) to live their lives differently … He himself never – even in the face of death – dared, or even wanted to believe that! But that is clear to me – that’s how it was. – Later on Brodsky was very proud of the fact that he had reintro-

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duced the word ‘soul’ into Russian poetry. Did he, himself, touch the souls of his coevals? – Someone once compared him to a ‘snake charmer’ hidden away in the souls of his contemporaries – of both sexes. With the flute of poetry he would call the hidden passions out of the darkest of inner recesses – forcing souls to dance before him. I remember that in that first selection I read was ‘Pilgrims’. For us those verses which today seem ordinary (that too is difficult to understand) sounded an astonishing new note with their glorification not of the active toilers of this world which decades of inculcation by the Futurists, Constructivists, Socialist-Realists, by Mayakovsky, Lugovskoy, Tikhonov, Selvinsky had accustomed us to… Brodsky gave us fleeting glimpses into a marginal world where the salt of the earth was hidden away in the eccentrics, the holy fools, in one who walks by himself like Kipling’s cats! I also remember in that ‘A poem about Miguel Servete’ whose protagonist, a heretic not burned by the Inquisition but by the very people the Inquisition was in the process of liquidating, charmed me from my college desk… A memorial to the fate of kindred stubborn souls! Travinsky also brought in a later collection, I recall ‘Each man before God is naked, / pitiful, naked and wretched’. There was a constant stream of manuscripts passing through my hands! – And when did you get to know Brodsky personally? – Personally I met him quite by chance – I think at the Zvezda offices. He kind of dropped in. We really just bumped into one another… Later on we used to see each other at the Public Library, on the wide landing at the upper entrance that leads to the Reading Room and to one side in the Manuscript Department where the ‘chatterboxes’ usually gathered – a band of friends exchanging opinions and information. I remember the three of us would stand together – the late historian Boris Kogan (one of the authors of the Dictionary of Mythology) and Dmitry Balashov – more recently known as a writer of history – then a fellow student at the same college… Joseph would approach, silent, gloomy and would sleepily listen to our stories. He didn’t get involved in the talk of the learned historians… and we would spin stories, preen, each trying to win the good opinion of the others. Boris Kogan says ‘And there is another such hypothesis; the pyramids in Central America were built by the lost tribe of Israel…’. I hear

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a strange noise somewhere to the side: Joseph has roused himself. He lets out an abrupt, ‘Oh!’ and once more falls silent. But in that split second I saw another, more lively face! – Almost everybody who knew Brodsky has some amusing tale to tell. Is there anything of that kind that you can recall? – There was an amusing episode about a year later (maybe later still?) I had just collaborated with Travinsky on a script – our first – for the film, ‘Nikolay Kiballchich’ directed by V. Melnikov. The film got a good press, first class with knobs on. And I was summoned to LenScience-films by the editor, V. Kirnarsky: ‘Mish, our distinguished director wants to talk to you’. (His name was Gaivoronsky, it seems – though it’s all so long ago I may have got that wrong somehow, the details don’t matter all that much! Anyway he wanted to get acquainted, he wanted…). The VIP had a request ‘It’s boring working with old writers. It would be great to have a script from some young talent. Can you make any suggestions who in Leningrad, from amongst our talented youth, is worth inviting to the studio?’ Oh! I was always prepared for that question! And I started singing hymns of praise about friends in need of work, a crust of bread and such. Every character sketch would naturally climax with their present coordinates – their

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address and telephone number. Towards the end I said to him: ‘The most talented man in our city is Joseph Brodsky. If you could help him, that would be a really good deed. He’s a very young man. He didn’t graduate from High School. He’s been making some money as a labourer on geological surveys; in his family they think of him as a lost cause… If you could give him something to do… Believe me there’s no better, no more talented man to be found anywhere in Peter! And, at the same time, you’ll help his situation at home!’ It was like the song of a nightingale and I felt that I had my man! I honestly did not realize – because of my own particular gift – that there existed people like Joseph who cannot write to order… What I did in broaching this was strictly practical. I simply had to help a gifted person ‘break into’ Soviet Cinema! It is funny talking about these things, but history cannot be rewritten. The director listened and then said, ‘No need for the address and telephone number. Brodsky is my nephew. Our family really does think of him as a lost boy; however, if a man like yourself values him…’. Later this amusing conversation went right out of my head and I remembered it only when, by chance, years later in 1973, Maramzin sent me the three–volume collected works so that I could write the preface. I saw in one of the volumes the script for, if I’m not mistaken, ‘The Pavlov Gardens’ and an editorial note (quite clearly from Maramzin) that apparently the script had been filmed and had been highly appreciated by the Ministry, but that there had been one quibble: the Ministry of Cinematography requested LenScience-Film to replace the voice-over script! And they had young people working in the Ministry, people with a feel for the arts! You know Brodsky’s name wasn’t on a black list. And nobody knew his name as yet – except for a handful of people in Peter who appreciated his poetry in manuscript. But the bureaucrats in Moscow, enthusiastic about the film, felt somehow there was something not quite to their taste in this young author’s rhythms. And so they asked for it to be dumped! Which, of course, in its own way only goes to prove that they were talented people, in their own field. I met up with Kirnarsky and, laughing, he said how difficult it was to work with a new writer. For example, showing up at a preview, Brodsky had bawled, ‘So you’re the director? You ought to be nailed to the screen!’ – How would you describe your relations with Brodsky then? Were you

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a friend or just a close acquaintance? – We were not at all what you could call ‘hand and glove’. That’s why; today, just disjointed scenes rise to the surface of my memory. There is this graduation evening at the Toksovskaya postal school. I shouted at my pupils, apprentice railway workers; ‘Remember you are living in the age of Joseph Brodsky! Remember that name today!’ They laughed. Well, teacher has had a drink on the last day – who doesn’t? I also remember how Joseph gave the first reading of ‘Procession’ in Travinsky’s apartment. It was reckoned something of an event by the literati gathered there; Joseph’s first epic poem. (Am I mistaken in that? Was ‘Isaak and Abraham’ written earlier or later than that? I do definitely remember that ‘Procession’ was the first reading of a poem in a grand genre. It was in a way his ‘Ruslan and Liudmila’.) The place was packed with people – from wall to wall (I, being at home there, was simply sitting on the floor…), Joseph recited in a singsong voice like a shaman and I hardly understood any of it. I do, however, definitely remember I felt disenchanted; I decidedly disliked the poem…and this is why I remember the event… In the interval Brodsky suddenly said, ‘Lads, I am now going to read a terrifically anti-Soviet piece’. So I was listening to his singsong all-ears because I loved anti-Soviet stuff, however, I didn’t make out anything interesting in it… – But in the tapestry of ‘Procession’ are interwoven Tsvetaeva, Dante, Pushkin and Shakespeare. And the questions of the soul, of good and evil come from Dostoevsky. And, if you want, there’s also quite a bit of anti-Soviet feeling in it too. – I think that that reading played a fateful role in his destiny. It was simply not possible in those times that at such a large ‘illegal gathering’ the KGB didn’t have somebody on hand, a bit shop-soiled maybe, but still an informer! An informer, of course, wouldn’t be able to make much of the text, given the delivery, but he would have heard ‘terrifically anti-Soviet piece’. After the denunciation there commenced the working up of a scheme to rid the city of freethinking spirits – they were being labelled parasites. The KGB are not idiots and when they appeared at his home with an order for his arrest and a search of the premises, of course, the people who were acting at one remove, behind the backs of the ‘agents in the field’, those who had planned the whole operation to deal with ‘parasitism’, were already certain that such

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a popular author was bound to have some anti-Soviet lines somewhere in the house. The whole ‘game’ went according to the script dictated by ‘Socialist Humanitarianism’ – he may well land a five years stretch for anti-Soviet propaganda – but it will be ‘cut back’ to internal exile… Humanitarians! ‘These aren’t the days of Stalin!’ Something of that sort was said at a board meeting of the Writer’s Union to Efim Etkind when he spoke on Brodsky’s behalf. Yes, and maybe it would be best if you passed a vote of thanks to the KGB for their humanitarian approach. However, that didn’t pass muster – Etkind rightly objected to that. ‘Humanitarianism wasn’t a part of their routine’. Good God, we knew them and if they had found something political in Brodsky’s possession they certainly wouldn’t have kept silent about it, even if they didn’t cite the incriminating lines in their judgment… No, they had been fundamentally mistaken in their estimate of the operation’s target. They had been led into error thanks to the usual professional deficiency; too much faith in their operational sources of information. In reality, even a man as inexperienced in conspiracy as I am can win against them – thanks to the crude disinformation supplied by their ‘operational sources’. Usually they are so untrusting but there is this one weak point where they become as naïve as children. And that is where they are caught out… – Were you in court at Brodsky’s trial in February and March of 1964? – Of course I wanted to attend. But, to be frank, I was afraid. I was not long married, loved my young wife and, of course, knew my own nature – if I had been there I wouldn’t have been able to restrain myself. I’d have done something silly and ended up following Joseph to prison. That, in point of fact, is what did happen – a decade later! Somewhere or other my one-time timidity was maturing into a festering boil and it burst the moment I made the proposal to Maramzin to write the article/preface about Brodsky. – And what sort of a relationship did you have with Brodsky after his return? – We never met up again in Leningrad after his sentence ended. There was no desire to on my side. Brodsky had already made it into the ranks of celebrity and, consequently, I started to avoid meeting him. I think he too had cooled towards me; strange as it may seem he hadn’t forgotten about the Pavlovck script affair. In my view, Joseph

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belongs to that part of humanity that never forgives either those close or distant for trying to help them, especially helping them to ‘make’ something of themselves – and the greater the effort made the less forgivable it is. There’s a lot, in my opinion, that crystallizes in that feeling; possibly fear of being tempted, of taking a bite of the apple of Soviet success (he was human after all)… and, again, the cold shouldering of a talent that senses itself primordially superior to what surrounds it, the feeling of shame at the patronage of those he feels to be small fry. The well-wishing ‘lucky ones’ who, of course, make it in their career – the price of it all, their conformity to the everydaysoviet model of behaviour. An analogous type of genius one comes across from time to time in history – Richard Wagner, for example. Remember how the genius behaves to all his ‘benefactors’ – the conductor Von Bulow, the King of Bavaria, Meyerbeer, together with the Jews in general in the world of music, who discovered him, enthused over him and raised him to heavenly heights ‘the talent known to noone’. Unforgivable behaviour. That was the conclusion I came too much later on – in 1988, in the States, in Amherst whither the indefatigable Yuz Aleshkovsky had taken me as Joseph’s guest. In the U.S., Joseph no longer seemed the rather savage estranged young man he had been in Leningrad but a bluff and benevolent host. Almost the first thing he said at meeting, after many years separation was, ‘Misha, have you brought anything of yours over here to America? If you want, I can put in a good word with my publisher’. I, personally, wouldn’t have thought of bringing that up – I wasn’t used to that sort of thing, but here he was making the running… I did happen to have with me in America the manuscript of ‘The Journey from Dubrovcamp to Ermak’, and a day later ‘his’ publisher was on the phone to me. Nothing came of the project – which is par for the course (that book isn’t one that would appeal to America), but I recall the eagerness and pleasure with which Joseph extended his patronage to me. He was in his element there! But when it was the other way round, he couldn’t stand it… – Tell me how did you circulate Brodsky’s poetry in samizdat form? – In the interval between his exile and his expulsion from the Soviet Union we didn’t come into contact – only at readings. But it was in those very years that I became what was called a ‘samizdat activist’. Joseph’s most recent poetry was supplied by my friend and colleague

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Maramzin, the main source of my uncensored reading. And, in that way, I found myself on one ‘long unending course’ of study… – How did the idea of publishing all of Brodsky’s Russian poems arise? – When they shoved him out of Russia I was afraid that he was finished as a creative force. How would he be able to write on a comparable level, when he had lost the linguistic element in which he swam, the ‘wild field’ of the Russian lexicon, lost the readers capable of feeling all the layers of cultural association, deprived, quite simply, of all those charged passions of which we were the generator – whether he himself was aware of that source or not. ‘Over there’ he would be an alien: ‘over there’ who put any value on Spirit! (As you can see I make no attempt at concealing the scale of our ruminations at that time – on the situation in the world in general and in poetry in particular. When it came down to it we were normal Soviet folk, force-fed with rumours about émigré writers starving in alien lands – especially young poets.) In short Joseph’s destiny was seen as that of a poet cut off at the height of his creative powers. There was not a great deal of difference between our reckoning and that of our coevals in the KGB; only our starting points were opposite – they wanted to stifle the voice of a poet through banishment, while we were attempting to preserve that voice for the future, for history (historically, we already believed in Brodsky’s immortality). – Tell me about Maramzin’s part in the collecting of Brodsky’s work. – In 1972 I moved into a new cooperative apartment block on Novorossiyskaya ulitsa belonging to the Writer’s Union. There were comparatively few writers living there. They were basically apartments designated for sale to the children of writers. My family became friendly with a young group in the block that gravitated around the Vakhtins Boris Vakhtin was the leading light of the Leningrad ‘Young Prose’ writers, founder of the literary association ‘Gorozhane’ (‘Towns people’) and also Masha Etkind, daughter of Professor Efim Etkind. About a year after my move, in the spring of 1973, I met up with Vladimir Maramzin, another member of ‘Gorazhane’; in the empty dining room of the House of Writers (formerly the Sheremetev Palace) I should really say something here to define my ‘unofficial’ connection with Vladimir. In the USSR, there an anarchic network of samizdat distribution had developed. Maramzin was one of its Lenin-

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grad ‘agents’ (I think that’s right, even now, but I don’t really know). Anyway, I would receive from him, on a regular basis, a dozen or so transcribed items: short stories, novels, documents, and articles. I can’t even imagine who Maramzin’s sources were, but, having read everything, I had to return all the material. What Maramzin did not know, however, was that I would take all I got through him to a reliable typist (Liudmila Eisenhardt) who made five more copies. Four of these, I would give to acquaintances, each paying 20% of the cost (the copies would be switched around in such a way that overall quality was the same. I, myself, as the ‘organizer’, would always take the first typed copies as my honorarium. The network was uncatcheable. I repeat, Maramzin knew nothing of my clients. To him I was simply a reader. And I, in my turn, couldn’t swear that anyone in my ‘co-operative’ wasn’t doing much the same in their turn for their circle… And so I met Volodia in the Writer’s Union (evidently, it was the usual thing but whether I was taking back or receiving I don’t recall) and he shared his news with me. ‘A letter has come from the States. Joseph Brodsky has become a big man…’. And he showed me the letter, which told of Brodsky’s success in America. The signature on the letter Maramzin took care to conceal with his hand (Maramzin liked to play the conspirator. Much later KGB Major Riabchuk, truly radiant with delight, would inform me ‘It was from Kiselyov!’) Then Volodia said, ‘I’m collecting all Brodsky’s writings. When he went, he did not take a single page with him. We have decided that before they were lost we’d collect them all – from his women, his relatives, close friends, acquaintances…. There’ll be a collected works. It’s been agreed there would be commentaries, dates, dedicatees, etc. He had turned out to be an awfully productive writer! We’d collected enough for three volumes. We were now setting up another two, occasional verse, children’s verse, translations, various other writings… It’s all trifles, but for a complete edition they have to be included. The problem is that nobody would take it upon himself or herself to write a preface. Not because they were afraid of anybody but because they were afraid of the responsibility’. Even now I do not know who, actually, Maramzin meant when he said ‘we’. One of those in the know was an art historian, Mikhail Milchik. Later on, right after the searches, at my and Maramzin’s apartments, Milchik came to our place and told me about his participation in the

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project – of course not in the flat itself, but on the landing by the elevator. It was from him that I learnt that all the Brodsky volumes of the collected edition were ‘already there!’ And not long ago I happened to read that all publications of Brodsky’s Russian poetry were based on the so-called Maramzin collection. – And how did your writing career run its course? – Around that time my writing career got into a strange situation. This lasted several years. From roughly 1971, I could no longer get my writing published anywhere at all! Trying to extricate myself from that, in its way, mystical net (it did not enter my head that the K.G.B. was already interested in me), I tried new and different genres – for example instead of prose and current affairs I wrote scripts or inhouse reviews. Maramzin knew about these ‘experiments’ and in his sally about nobody being willing to write a preface, he was sending out an indirect challenge to me. I realized this and put myself forward to do the necessary thing and write the introductory article. In the summer of 1973 Maramzin sent me the raw materials necessary for my work – the basic corpus of Brodsky’s lyrical poetry. As it turned out samizdat had done its work well – long familiar literary objects were put into a context. – Did you know in 1973 that Gleb Struve, Pierre Emmanuelle, Olga Carlisle, Wolfgang Kazak, George Kline and Auden himself had written about Brodsky? – Today, of course, it’s well known that, at about that time major writers in the West were writing about Brodsky, including W. H. Auden himself. But in the Soviet Union we had no idea of that. Young people in Leningrad considered Brodsky to be a samizdat writer, that is to say a poet outside the normal parameters of literature. And now you can see the significance of my task. Here was something, which had frightened off all the other ‘candidates’, and, apparently, I was to be the very first researcher into the work of a great poet! (I recall with a tremor, not in the figurative but in the literal sense of the word, how I came to give Brodsky that epithet in my article. I felt myself terribly, unavoidably bold in according such a title to a contemporary. Possibly I really was the first Brodsky researcher in Russia? The article, the author’s copy of which is preserved in the archives of the Leningrad K.G.B. will, I hope, give professional researchers in the field of poetics a clue as to how Brodsky’s early poetry was received.

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Of course a novice critic was not up to the task of making a professional analysis of Brodsky’s poetry. I soon came to understand that. But how could I refuse the task, let Maramzin down; disrupt the appearance of the five-volume edition? What was needed was a grasp of the way in which the writer M. Heifets could make himself interesting to the reader as the author of the introduction to the first collected edition of a great poet’s works, tell the reader how Brodsky’s poetry arose in Leningrad as an historical phenomenon … Why, in the bright constellation of the Leningrad School of poetry (S. Kulle, G. Gorbovsky, A. Gorodnitsky, E. Rein, A. Kushner, L. Loseff, V. Ufliand, V. Britanishsky, S. Stratanovsky, V. Leikin, T. Galushko – I am recalling here the names of the poets of that time that come immediately to mind) Joseph was without dispute the first. – Could you give us a short summary of your article’s contents as scarcely anyone has access to it? – Its essence could be summed up in this way. Joseph Brodsky is not a political, anti-Soviet writer; transitory historical phenomena, like Soviet power, did not interest him at all. But any poet lives in the midst of his contemporaries. Although he considers himself to be a tool of language, language is the creation of a people and Lenin was correct in saying, ‘one cannot live in a society and be free of that society – that is an impossibility’. No ivory tower protects the artist from the bustle and vulgarity of the world, or can cut him off from contact with people, with, for example, that language. Admittedly, for instance, the poet Brodsky of the years 1969 - 1970 was really carried away by the specific literary-artistic task of following the examples of Martial and Catullus in a Roman cycle bereft of any political allusions whatever. – But how is it that that particular creative notion arose in Brodsky’s mind at that particular point? – My belief was that, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, there was a rupture in the society in which he found himself, or more accurately, communism lost its ideological pivot (in its various forms – including any communist opposition to the Soviet regime). Communism had its own inner logic and ethic, its own system of ideas – however, the occupation of a small communist country by a communist Imperial Power was a phenomenon which had no place in a communist ethical system. Action of that kind could not be carried out without

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severe damage to the system – whatever the conditions! After 1968, in the Soviet Union what remained was a naked imperialism bent on the conquest and subjugation of other peoples – and it manifested itself in a supremely untroubled form. Naturally Brodsky’s concern was neither with communism nor with imperialism, but the poet could not but feel the deep shift in a society in which the KGB of this world had its being. In the Roman Cycle he unwittingly reflects the coming ruin of an indolent, vulgar Imperial idea, which is decomposing through lack of spirituality – and inertia. Of course, that thesis is demonstrated by the use of quotations and comparative analysis of the poetry – ‘before’ and ‘after’. – Well, weren’t you simply asking to be put behind bars? – The bit on Czechoslovakia later did incriminate me – according to the investigator, V. P. Karabanov (I, personally, failed to see the consequences of my articles’ analysis. But he was right, there’s no denying it, the article was, no doubt, anti-Soviet). That is why the person who had commissioned it when he had it in his hands Volodia (Maramzin) was, quite naturally, scared: ‘Misha, you’ll put us all in prison and our Brodsky cultural enterprise will be ruined’. I could, of course, put myself personally at risk but not the enterprise and all its participants. So I agreed to rewrite the article – ‘depoliticise’ it, as the investigator, subsequently, delicately put it. But the effort ended in failure – either it was beyond my power to write a literary article or it was simply uninteresting redoing it… and I did something very careless. I started showing the manuscript to acquaintances, both critics and writers, who were perhaps capable of giving advice about a rewrite. Nobody gave me any useful idea at all, but there did turn out to be an informer amongst them… – In what way did E. G. Etkind contribute to your article? – I gave the manuscript to Masha Etkind to read. I won’t lie to you; behind that action lay the hope that she would perhaps, if she liked it, show it to his renowned father. Etkind was then considered the most knowledgeable person about poetry in Peter in general and Brodsky’s poetry in particular. My calculation paid off: one day Masha rushed over to our apartment: ‘Papa has come, he wants to talk with you’. So, I met up with Efim Etkind for the first time. The Professor liked my article so much that he did not limit himself to words of praise, but added to my text a piece of paper written in his own hand – his

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own survey. However, he did have one essential objection and we discussed it together there and then. Etkind had written that he knew that Brodsky had actually said that the Imperial essence of communist power had been something that he had become aware of not in 1968 but in 1956, after the Hungarian uprising. Despite my respect for Etkind’s authority I rejected his correction. Even if I were to accept the fact that Brodsky had said something akin to what Etkind alleged (and it was true!) I was analysing the texts and not the reported opinions of the poet. I clearly felt the shift in the poet’s outlook after 1968, no earlier. – Did you surmise that all this would become known to the KGB? – As it turned out I made two fatal mistakes. Puffed up by the high opinion of a professional critic, I pinned his critique to the top copy of my manuscript. I then rang Maramzin: clearly I was unconsciously seeking revenge for his rejection of my manuscript (we are all human, after all!) Over the phone I boasted: ‘Masha’s father has read it and he likes it’. But Maramzin’s phone was already being tapped, as I came to realise later, which meant that I involuntarily gave the Leningrad KGB additional and important information. Another blunder was my showing the manuscript to a neighbour, a friend, the writer V.V., who wasn’t a bad person but, alas, was weak and very much corrupted by his closeness to those in power and the state’s bribery of writers through granting privileges. At the very moment that he returned my manuscript, I immediately suspected he was an unofficial aide of the KGB. However stupid it might sound I did not attribute any particular significance to my suspicions. A snout is no idiot – that was my way of thinking. Why should he snitch on a neighbour, a friend, a person whose children go for walks with his children? Surely he would find someone to snitch on further away and therefore, less dangerous. My reasoning does sound quite sensible, but hiding away in there is a fatal miscalculation in my approach to life. People are frequently incapable of calculating the best line to take in life, even in their own interest. It is this lack of reason (sometimes even insanity) in a partner or an opponent that leads to miscalculation and even extreme reactions in the game of life. – But isn’t it true that Maramzin had already, sort of, found a new writer? – Yes, some time later, I learned from a reader of my manuscript

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(a friend of Masha Etkind, Dr. V. Zagreba), that Maramzin, tired of waiting for a new version, (and possibly no longer believing me capable of writing one) had ordered and received a new preface (I recall Zagreba mentioned the name of a poet I knew – Igor Burikhin). That was a relief: now I no longer had to beat my brains out correcting my text, which, right from the start, I had prepared exactly as intended. Somebody else was fulfilling the necessary social task – thank God! I hid the text away. All the copies had been typed up on an Optima electric typewriter; these were put in the archive drawer of my writing desk… I forgot about them. I would like to remark, in parenthesis, that Maramzin, apparently, was being tormented by several complexes brought on by his rejection of my article and later on actually promised to collect my text and give it to the editorial board of the samizdat journal Jews in the USSR. Thus it was that I first learnt of that particular journal. It interested me that for that, or for some other reason, the Leningrad KGB thought it necessary to include the editor of Jews in the USSR, – Professor Aleksandr Voronel – in our prosecution. Voronel got off comparatively lightly – he was thrown out of the USSR. – Please tell me about your arrest. – On the morning of the 1st of April, 1974 my wife woke me: ‘Misha they have come for you’. A muscular male was towering over my pillow: ‘We’ve come for you from the KGB, Mikhail Ruvinovich’, and he shoved his ID under my nose: ‘Senior Lieutenant KGB Egerev’. With him were Lieutenant Nikandrov and their reliable witnesses. Today it seems strange but I wasn’t in the least surprised. Everything looked the same as it did in the cinema. – ‘Raika, I called, give me my pants’, – that was how my gulag career began. At that time I had, practically speaking, forgotten about my old article about Brodsky. There was something lying in the archive drawer… Firstly, the person who had wanted it hadn’t collected it; consequently the document was part of my personal collection of writings. By the criteria of that time, therefore, not something that ought to land one in court. And, generally, I would simply forgot about something I had written six months ago. I did a lot of work I had written more dangerous manuscripts than that. So dangerous, that this was the only one I hidden in that drawer. That was the only one I was afraid it might be

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found! But chekist Nikandrov was holding it in his hands (in disguise) and… put it to one side. Thus began my astounding ‘good fortune’ in playing conspiratorial games with the KGB (the climax came with the appearance in print in Paris of two books written in the zone and in internal exile). When the chekists extracted Brodsky from my writing desk I was disturbed, truth to tell, not about myself but about Etkind. You see, I had got a complete stranger mixed up in the affair! The chekists were delighted with their find but, somehow, puzzled. They did not arrest me following their search, though strictly speaking something of the sort should have happened… from which I concluded that I would not be arrested at all. As it turned out this was incorrect: I was led away to the inevitable solitary confinement three weeks later. On Lenin’s birthday. During that three-week interval I met with Etkind for the second time. He came to my flat and took me for a stroll in the park opposite that belongs to the Forestry Institute. We discussed some legal niceties… I set forth the tactic I had chosen at my interviews (they had already questioned me several times – as a witness): I had said that I had asked various specialists how I should go about depoliticising the article (a term which I would later hear from Senior Lieutenant V. P. Karabanov). From a legal point of view, no breaking of any laws took place since I had not distributed copies of my work. On the contrary, I had wanted to render it harmless… Etkind, therefore, had nothing to feel guilty about. When he was given the article he did not know its contents and read the text as a consultant in poetics and, when he did read it, he pointed out my mistakes. But the position of our intermediary, Masha Etkind, seemed to be legally vulnerable: she had given her father the article to read and thus committed a clearly illegal act – ‘dissemination with the aim of undermining and weakening…’ And I agreed with Etkind that we would never, in any way, mention Masha’s part in the affair. I would lie and say I had given him the article myself… I failed to grasp the seriousness of my situation and, even more so, Etkind’s. So, he had read my article – what of it? – But Etkind understood? – You see, he explained in the park (and he did seem experienced in these matters), they aren’t in a position to understand that we acted

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freely as individuals – everyone on their own. They have a publishing house called ‘Soviet Writer’ and we must have one called ‘anti-Soviet Writer’! They have their authors. You are ours and that means that Maramzin is our commissioning editor. They have their chief editor, Lesyuchevsky, whilst I am our editor-in-chief… – And how, nowadays, would you evaluate everything that happened to you? – Now, looking back, I would venture to say that my arrest was the result of mistakes, of a miscalculation by the Leningrad KGB – just as with Brodsky himself. They had heard about the preparations for a five volume collected works and through V. about the rough copy of the preface (‘we have the Xerox’, as Lieutenant L. Barkov put it at my interrogation – that was the first time I had heard that term, up until that moment I knew nothing whatever about Xeroxes, only about photocopying). They had, evidently, corroborated evidence that the 5-volume edition was ready – it was clear that they were in possession of sufficient ‘necessary’ facts for me to be hauled up in front of a judge. They had uncovered not domestic freethinkers, tolerated by the liberal authorities in those days, but people who were in contact with ‘centres’ abroad - something which was stringently forbidden. All the copies of the Brodsky article taken from my archive seemed, for some reason, to be a big disappointment for the Leningrad KGB investigation department. It was, really, for that reason that I was, for three weeks, left at liberty… But the information they had was crosschecked and when it was confirmed that it was ‘there’, ‘beyond the cordon’, they decided to take us in! The fatal miscalculation that the authorities made was the circumstance, unknown to them as I later realized, that the preface over ‘there’ was Burikhin’s and not mine. – But your article was, indeed, anti-Soviet? – Of course it was, undoubtedly, anti-Soviet. I’m in agreement with the KGB on that point. I wouldn’t dispute their opinion even today. When it comes down to it, I was an adult and knew what I was doing (‘They’ll put you inside Misha’, my wife said when she was reading the Brodsky article. ‘Let them’, I answered. I knew exactly what I’d done and had consciously accepted my possible fate). Nonetheless, according to the authorities own conception of the rules of the game, as far as the law was concerned, ‘domestic freethinkers’ who did not propagate their ideas beyond their own circle of acquaintances were

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not liable to any legal retribution – Brezhnev himself had declared as much in his ‘To gorod i mir’ speech (‘Gorodu i miru’). And again, according to the Soviet legal code itself, if a person refrained from any criminal intention and the authorities learned of what he had intended that person was not liable to any legal prosecution or punishment. So, in this legal game for which they themselves had set all the rules, I began to play my own – not without success as it turned out – I have to say. Firstly, I managed to conceal my own part in the distribution of Samizdat material (I made out I was a passive purchaser of the manuscripts they had discovered on the ‘open market’). I kept quiet about the samizdat co-operative (they were completely ignorant of it) Secondly, I made the preface out to be a rough draft (which it had every appearance of being) which, thanks to Etkind’s and Maramzin’s advice I, personally, had rejected as of no worth. That was why it hadn’t been printed anywhere. – And how did the KGB behave? – An important mistake in the case was, I think, senior-lieutenant Karabanov’s declaration – he was a subtle and intelligent legalist – when he said, in the course of attempting to persuade me to come clean about how the manuscript had got into Etkind’s hands, ‘The other witnesses don’t interest us much, but, as far as Etkind and Maramzin are concerned everything has to be crystal clear’. At that point I understood who were supposed to be my ‘accomplices’ and, consequently, I was able to sketch out mentally my line of defence. Another investigator Major Riabchuk made the second error: ‘Etkind is your intellectual co-author’, he declared in one interview. So, this was the basis of their case, the role Etkind would be fitted up with to get him into court? Knowing this I could plan my own technically legal counter-attack. The KGB’s third mistake was to keep me in isolation almost all the time the investigation was underway (except for a short period when they put a ‘plant’ in my cell). But I knew my cellmate’s task as soon as I saw him. In isolation I found both time and opportunity to go over in my head all the various shades of meaning in the questions they kept asking me, to figure out their system of interrogation and thus make a stab at guessing their next moves and mull over my own apparently frank answers. I must say the KGB had talented and intelligent jurists working for

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them, but the tyro variant move I elected in the judicial game doomed them to defeat. I did explain that ‘Yes, you could say I had written an anti-Soviet article but, influenced, firstly by Maramzin and then Etkind, I had on my own volition turned back from any idea of committing a crime’. Etkind had shown me where I was factually in error? Yes he had! Of course the professor had not criticized me in the same way, as would a regional party congress – but he had been critical! Correcting the article to incorporate his criticism I had been unable to do and therefore I had decided that the article was unfit for publication. So I had decided against committing what would have been a crime in the eyes of the KGB. In which case Etkind comes out looking good – and me too, for that matter. Here I realised that even professionals in their system worked according to a method that might have been devised by Ostap Bender. So, when they think the game might be won they play the middle game brilliantly and according to the rules (‘I respect the legal code!’) But when it comes to losing (no one always wins – no single mortal) when it comes to the endgame, they steal your rook or break the board over their dumb opponent’s head. I must honestly confess I was surprised by their shameless ‘lack of boundaries’ (bespredel); the latter is an expression I would come to learn later – in the zone. My venomous indignation at the players on the other side was expressed in the ‘dedication’ to them of my first gulag book Places and Times. – Did any news reach you from outside? – In isolation during questioning, I didn’t know what was going on: I have to confess I read about those six years after the event in Etkind’s book. I was delighted with the context in which my name, in absentia, got placed. Here are two random quotations – Yury V. Kozhukhov, Professor of Soviet History, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, the acting Rector of the LGPI: ‘I would not have questioned Etkind. There was no ambiguity – that’s the enemy’s tactic. He took up position long ago and stuck to it, beginning in 1949 and ending in the 70’s when events brought him together with riff raff like Solzhenitsyn, Heifets, Brodsky et al’. I. S. Eventov, Professor of Russian Literary History: ‘I scarcely came into contact with Etkind… he became the spiritual father of the villains, the young anti-Soviets, the propagators of samizdat. Those energetic young subterraneans Heifets, Maramzin, looked up to Etkind. He was well known to a certain

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section of youth, those whom Comrade Brezhnev called weeds.1 The situation’s piquancy is increased by the fact that I scarcely knew Etkind and I ignored the advice he did give me. Kozhukhov and Eventov I knew quite well. I had been in the former’s home more than once and the latter was the graduate student of my own director of studies – so that, strictly speaking, he would have been known in Leningrad as my ‘spiritual mentor’. – How did the investigation proceed? – Their methods were, as at first I refused to speak, to use careful questioning to lead me towards one or the other witness. ‘Mikhail Ruvimovich’, the investigator would say, ‘surely you see that we know all we need to about so-and-so. So in the case of that witness it doesn’t really matter whether you name him or not. But I will, none the less, be obliged to call him. If I don’t have your evidence he will, naturally, refuse. You know, he’ll say, ‘I know nothing’. There’s no difference. We have Etkind’s review papers; there are Maramzin’s notes on the manuscript and that is enough for the Procurator to bring in a case against you; two witnesses, that is the legal norm. But for the witnesses themselves there is an important difference. I could inform their places of work that they are not reliable witnesses. They are creative people and they live on what they get from the literary work. Do you think that after such a signal they will be offered more work? But why should I feel sorry for those people? They have their work – I have mine. I’m not asking them to bear false witness. On the contrary I’ m only interested in one thing: that they confirm what actually happened! Their lies, however, prevent me from completing my task. Why, therefore shouldn’t I have the right to interfere with their work?’ – So, they were relying on your honesty? – Of course. That is the logic of ‘their parasitic reliance on our honesty’, an expression I later heard in the zone from the Ukrainian poet V. Stus. It had an effect on me. After my release I heard all the talk about ‘torture’ and so on… I think that given the moral standpoint of the KGB, torture could certainly exist (‘Why should the person under investigation prevent us working?’) but, in my particular case, the KGB found it to be absolutely superfluous. I understood straightaway that whether they put me on trail or not did not depend or anybody’s testimony – not even my own… The chekists were only interested in testimony in a purely technical way – the witnesses ought to provide

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a double ‘voice-over’ (as they say now) of the ‘operative information’ (they aren’t allowed to present that to the court) If somebody said something extra in the course of the investigation, they’ll use it, why not? But, really, only the operative information is counted as being trustworthy, like a pagan prejudice! Later on I made use of this chekists delusion and won several hands at their expense. After I learnt that it was only intended to cite two people as my accomplices (Etkind and Maramzin) and that the others were not being considered for legal punishment I considered it vital to help people I had endangered to escape any extra-judicial retribution. That’s why the option suggested by the investigators seemed, for many reasons, preferable. Firstly, such a move allowed friends who had read the manuscript to escape the attentions of the KGB as they, for one reason or another, had escaped ‘operational observation’ (my neighbours, the Vakhtins, the Korobovs, Doctor Lansky, my co-author Yury Gurvich, his wife and a host of others). Secondly (and the chief tactical reason) acknowledging the ‘participation’ of the people the investigators would ‘put on the spot’ using my testimony, I would force the KGB to show the text of my testimony to my acquaintances. If the investigator did not demand the witnesses be ‘put away’, the content of the testimony was really a matter of indifference to him, it would be just ‘cash in hand’ so those summoned could ‘conceal the operative data’. For that reason I unswervingly set forth to them that such a witness or other argued with me, ‘called on me to renounce my project’ – and so on. That was also good for the investigator, as it gave him the chance to demonstrate in court the extent to which our writers were good, public-spirited Soviet citizens and what a renegade I was for not taking heed of the warnings of such good people… – Did you make any mistakes during questioning? – Of course. You can’t always win. There was a time when I ‘pinned myself down’ naming someone, some witness or other who, as turned out, the investigator didn’t know (for example the writer Maria Rolnikaite). But even professionals get ‘pinned down’ somewhere or other… As a whole, it seems, I won the investigation. I managed to convince them that, given the evidence they had against them, dragging Etkind and Maramzin into court simply wouldn’t be profitable. The sanctions that would follow all the excitement of a case against such an internationally known figure as Etkind (he was not only a master in

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the field of poetics but the Soviet Union’s leading expert on French Culture and, as a result, a popular figure in France itself) meant that the case was only given the green light if the case in Leningrad was treated as a purely legal one. To try to imprison such a figure without evidence would be undesirable, even for Andropov. And that was why I was convinced that a terrible, scandalous campaign unleashed against him in the Writer’s Union and in academic circles would culminate, not in exile in Paris (‘release the pike into the river’ was the term they used for that) but a forced change of employment a move to a closed city in Mordoviya or in Perm oblast. But, given the amount of investigative material in their hands, thinking about a trial was simply not on the cards – they had to sound the retreat! Substitute Yavas for Paris. – The Lubianka investigators were candid with you. Didn’t they spin you some yarns? – Occasionally. For example: someone reported to them that Etkind had given my manuscript to the actor Sergey Yursky who, allegedly was working up a programme based on Brodsky’s poems. Major Riabchuk convinced me of that – I was well and truly taken in! Yursky himself… What a disappointment it was when he came on tour to Israel and I went backstage to ask him if the Major had been telling me the truth back in 1974. He said very firmly ‘No – no such thing was projected’. He hadn’t read anything of mine. They had called him in for questioning, ‘I answered in the same frank way’. Possibly Etkind mooted some such idea and said something that was caught on some hidden microphone and then forgot about it… who knows what may pop into one’s head. But that particular idea became fixed in the ‘operative observer’s’ head as if it were an accomplished fact! They couldn’t put Yursky ‘on the spot’ with my testimony but Yursky remained a ‘hostile witness’ – so a first-class Leningrad actor wasn’t allowed to go on stage for five years… There is a curious psychological phenomenon: Yursky, in Jerusalem, refused to believe me when I explained the mechanics of it to him. It’s understandable. A man can reconcile himself even to a severe punishment when he really is guilty of something. But he can’t possibly get it into his head that, though he has, as they say, done nothing at all ‘in sleep or in spirit’ yet, as Solzhenitsyn says, ‘Such in our country is the power of secret denunciation’ he gets himself-expelled

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from the theatre for doing nothing at all and for many years… and the chief director of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, Tovstonogov, hinted to him that he should go down to the KGB Headquarters and ask them what they’ve got on him. But Yursky just couldn’t believe such an absurdity… – Tell me, how did you manage to save Maria Etkind from being arrested? – Amongst the operative evidence they had collected in Etkind’s apartment there was evidence that pointed to who exactly had handed my manuscript over to the professor – Masha! The investigator, who wanted to ‘clean up’ the affair, insisted that the evidence be ‘concealed’ by using witness depositions. And I, of course, dug in my heels. As I had agreed with Etkind I would keep on saying my piece – it all came straight from me, straight into the professor’s hands… During one of the final sessions Karabanov pinned me down: ‘Mikhail Ruvimovich, I sincerely fail to comprehend your position. As you see I’ve invented nothing. I’m not presuming anything. I know for a fact that Etkind received your manuscript from his daughter. In the other instances in which you are aware that my information is exact you have agreed to be cooperative. Why in Masha Etkind’s case in particular is it any different? This is what worries me. What is so special in this instance that you can be hiding from us?’ – ‘OK, Valery Pavlovich, I’ll try to explain. Let’s say, purely hypothetically, that you are right. What does that lead to? Etkind and myself will be in the same position as before but Masha will, no doubt, be charged with ‘spreading anti-soviet propaganda?’ Why should I hand you evidence of that sort?’ – ‘Ah, I see… It’s logical in itself. But you have to follow my logic. We aren’t interested in arresting Maria Efimovna. That would be going too far – having a young woman sitting in the dock with a baby at her breast… Nobody in the KGB needs that. But it’s not possible to close the case while there is clear congruence between the operative data and the witness depositions. There is another circumstance as well, something you as yet know nothing about. A decision has already been taken to allow Professor Etkind’ s family to leave for Paris. But until your case is closed, they will be staying… they’ll be sitting on their suitcases in Leningrad. As soon the trial is ended the Etkinds, will go to France. Take that as read. You are not against giving them that little bit of help?’ – ‘I want to help them. But I can’t,

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Valeriy Pavlovich. If I take your hypothesis as a given she would have a seven-year sentence hanging over her. No!’ – ‘And if it were to be supposed that she had not read your article? Why, in fact, should she have read it? And, unaware of the content, only aware that it was, as the headings indicated, an article about poetry, about Brodsky, she gave it to her father as a purely literary production. In that case she would not be liable to any accusation…’. – ‘Thank, you, I’ll have to think that version of events over’. A short time after that they confronted me with Masha. She turned out to be very intelligent – she at once understood the essence of the situation, though she didn’t understand why I had changed the plan of action we had earlier agreed on with her father. – ‘Read the article? What for? It was poetry and I’m a nursing mother…’. She lied with all the naturalness of a woman – so easily and nimbly that it seemed to me that even the investigator began to believe her. But he had dreamed up the whole scenario for us… And so the testimony was agreed upon. The investigator allowed us to talk a bit about everyday affairs while he sat at a typewriter and drew up the official statement about the confrontation of witnesses, concentrating hard on his wording… Of course he was all ears – the intelligent little simpletons were going to talk about something important, thinking they weren’t going to be overheard… – How are things at home? I asked. – All the same as before. – How is (and I name somebody)?’ – OK. – How is V? – He’s gone to Paris. – Did he receive his fee? – Yes. Nothing of interest? And the investigator did not hear anything of interest… HEAR he could not, because at the phrase ‘receive his fee’ I gave a sharp dig with my hand in my breast. And Masha understood straightaway! At that time this was the most important information I could get out to other people: who it was, who was the ‘snout’ in our block of flats. Maybe they wouldn’t believe me (as it later turned out, even my wife didn’t believe me), but I knew the psychological makeup of the writers. None of them would talk openly in front of V. in

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future. God helps those who help themselves… – Why, even now, do you refuse to name V? – I feel sorry for him. In my estimation he’s the one who suffered most in this affair anyway, he has been named – and more than once – first of all by Solovyov in his novel Three Jews. And V. himself has written about his co-operation with the KGB in ‘Leningrad Writer’. But he’s a weak man and they have tried and tested methods for recruiting weak people (a dozen times perhaps, they tried to recruit me and so I pretty well know how they do it). They trapped him into it – let God be his judge, not me. – How did your motherland reward you for your contribution to Brodsky studies? – I got six years: four in the zone and two in exile. In fact, according to their accounting, I should have got less (even after my arrival in the zone the investigator V. Karabanov phoned my mother and my wife and proposed (in a personal capacity!) that I write a letter begging for leniency, promising that, in that case, in a year’s time I would be home helping to raise my children. My wife gave a lively account of this in a letter I received in the zone. ‘He asked me, ‘And you, yourself, what do you want for your husband?’ – ‘I want him to remain the same as he is – an honest man’. – ‘What are you like!’ He yelled down the phone sweating with malicious anger. Alas, like Brodsky earlier, I refused to acknowledge my guilt and was, therefore, given the highest sentence actually allowed in law by the Leningrad City Court. However, it was shortened by one year thanks to a plea from the Procurator to the KGB – instead of seven they gave me six… – How did the Leningrad intelligentsia react to the Heifets Affair? – The Heifets Affair had an unexpected social effect. Up until then the young Leningrad literary school reasoned that though it was difficult living and working under Soviet power, Russia was the only place in the world where a Russian writer could work creatively. No matter what happened there was always the chance of working creatively – earning a living in some way or other – translation, dubbing foreign films, hack work for the small studios, inner reviews. The very idea of leaving the USSR seemed spiritually depraved – if you put to one side, of course, the rise of Jewish national sentiment in certain literary hearts. In that case leaving was permissible. But such people were few in number indeed.

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As it happens I received, in 1973, an invitation from Israel. Learning of that Boris Strugatsky said to me, ‘That is desertion, Mishka! We’re holding the line. There isn’t a solid line. We’re each of us in our own dug-out. But I always knew that somewhere, just over the horizon, Mishka, you were sitting in your own dug-out and that made it easier to hold the defensive line. Now you’re deserting. Go! It’s your choice. But without you it will be harder for me’. When I told Yu. O. Dombrovsky about the invitation he exclaimed, ‘That means I’ll be on my own?’ – ‘But nobody needs me’. – ‘The only people who don’t need you are the people nobody needs over there. But Russia needs you’. I hesitated and I stayed. All my young writer contemporaries thought the same way. Brodsky too was no different to the rest of us. Read his letter to Brezhnev on the eve of his departure.2 Maramzin, even as he was leaving court, wasn’t ready to emigrate: ‘What would a Russian writer do in the West?’ But when, six years later, I returned to Leningrad I was confronted by a literary desert. Almost all the writers I had known had left the city – not just the social misfits but even people acknowledged by the authorities. The city seemed to have emptied! I, by no means, link my own case with the creation of that vacuum. I occupied too humble a place in the city’s literary life. I only became aware of a link later, in Israel, when I read the stories written by Sergey Dovlatov. I scarcely knew Sergey (I’d, from time to time, nod at him at the Writer’s Union and that’s all). Nonetheless, I’m mentioned four times in his collected works. Let me quote from his Zapovednik (The Reserve): – I’m not going. Let them go (the hero of the story ‘Dalmatov’ speaks here to his wife). – Who do you mean by ‘they’? – asked Tania. – The people who’ve been poisoning my whole existence. Let them go. – They’ll put you inside. – Let them. If literature is an occupation you can be arrested for, our place is in gaol… but, generally speaking, they don’t put you inside for literature anymore. – Heifets didn’t even publish his work and they took him and put him away’ – The reason they took him was that he didn’t publish. He should have got it into Grani or Kontinent. Now there is nobody to defend you.

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But in the West they could kick up a ruckus. – You’re sure of that? – In what? – The Western world is interested in Misha Heifets? – Why wouldn’t they be? They wrote about Bukovsky. They wrote about Kuznetsov… I’ll say it again. I’m not going. – Explain why not. – There’s nothing to explain. My language, my people, my crazy country… Birch trees are absolutely not my things. – So what is? – The language. In a foreign language we’d lose eighty per cent of our personality. We’d lose out ability to make jokes, to be ironic. That alone terrifies me’. Like any true writer Dovlatov senses the deep psychological motivation at work in our fellows: ‘I simply can’t decide. Such a grave and irrevocable step puts me in a panic. Really it’s like being born all over again. Of one’s own will of course. Most people can’t even marry as they should’. And in the final scene of the story the hero goes off to the States! After my ‘case’, a lot of young writers in Leningrad who had the chance of getting a visa for Israel left Leningrad. In the University of Michigan, Brodsky was teaching; at Dartmouth College was Lev Loseff. Efim Etkind was at the Sorbonne. Maramzin was working in the editorial offices of Kontinent. Igor Efimov had set up the Hermitage publishing house and Sergey Dovlatov was in charge of The New American. And at the University of Jerusalem, at a later date than all those, Mikhail Heifets began a new career as a scientific assistant. – Nowadays Brodsky’s figure confronts the reader as either a bronze statue or an object of ideological speculation and a treasure house of poetry. What for you is the real Brodsky? – I still love my ‘own’, that is to say the earlier, Russian, Brodsky. Of his later work I prefer some of the prose pieces. Yes, I understand all the artistry, the depth of thought of his ‘foreign’ period but it doesn’t touch my heart – the early Brodsky is closer to me. The main lesson drawn from my own relationship with the Brodsky phenomenon is a faith in the truthfulness of the thing, which I am primarily concerned with. Brodsky is taken to be ‘monumental’, a ‘classic’? It means there is a sense of remaining true to oneself, spurning

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temptation, money, recognition (by those in power or by society – both are the same), personal success. It’s something you get by getting. It isn’t handed down from on high. Simply by staying true to oneself its possible to achieve something solid in life. Joseph was a man who realised himself. That for me is the main lesson of his life. What more does a man need? – I would like to discuss with you yet another important theme – Brodsky and Jewishness. Do you think his parents gave Joseph his name in honour of his biblical namesake or of the mighty tyrant? – No doubt in honour of the great leader, Joseph Vissarinovich Stalin. It’s quite skilfully thought out – on the one hand, the completely Jewish name, normal for the family, for the Jewish family and environment and, on the other, it’s collateral against fate. Even more than that, his father did work in press, didn’t he? – Brodsky wasn’t ashamed of or proud of his origins. Explaining the reasons for his arrest he would say, ‘I just happened to combine the most inviting characteristics in that I was writing poetry and I was a Jew’.3 Who was he in the first place – Jew or poet? – A weird question. But, doubtless, that question is one that can be asked. It’s a bit like asking if Sir Walter Scott was primarily a Scottish writer, Jonathan Swift an Irish writer or were they primarily British? Let me get a little theoretical here so my position may become clearer to any potential reader. I share the theory of the Parisian academic D. Guzevitch. In Russia there have co-existed for a long time now two Russian cultures: Greater Russian culture (that of the Empire) and national Russian culture. Any imperial culture is fed by the cultures that go to make up the Empire – it takes from those cultures any values that suit it and rejects others that do not correspond, for whatever reasons, with the interests of the Empire as a whole. That also has to do with the culture of the Empire-building nationality i.e. the Russian nation. The example chosen by Guzevich is particularly clear. The Imperial Academy of Science was, for more than a century, made up of ethnic Germans but it was, without doubt, a magnificent Greater Russian cultural phenomenon (in brief, not Russian). From the same point of view Pushkin is a great Russian poet of Empire whilst his contemporary, Shevchenko, is a great Ukrainian poet. Blok is a Greater Russian poet while Esenin is a Russian poet. They

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are two distinct phenomena, though closely related, and as a subject for study it deserve to be closely scrutinised by literary researchers. From this position, Brodsky is, of course, a great Russian poet of Empire, but not a Russian poet. – Let me intervene! The way in which Brodsky would read his own poetry was taken by many people to be an imitation of prayer. The voice, the intonation of a poem was always, for him, the essence of a poem. ‘Her life experience could do nothing but follow the voice, permanently lagging behind it’, he wrote of Tsvetaeva.4 If the same thing happened in Brodsky’s own case how can we distinguish between the Jewish and the Russian poet? – I would definitely say that something Jewish (possibly the intonation, the voice – you are right) was always present in his poetry. Just as, say, the Scottish motifs were in Scott’s work, just as the ‘Byronic’ and the ‘Shakespearean’ were present in the Imperial courtier Pushkin. But why make ‘the distinction’? It is a natural element of imperial culture which Greater Russian culture is in its essence, that there should be a melding into it of the intonations of other, non-Russian, nationalities – the more so when it is a matter of such a powerful force as the influence of Russian Jewry on the Empire in the Twentieth Century. – In 1963 Brodsky wrote his epic biblical poem ‘Isaac and Abraham’. Which had the greatest influence on that poem – the Bible or Kiekegaard? – I think that the Bible only plays the role of giving the poem a plot to build upon. That’s to say a minimal role. I don’t know whether there was any Leningrad poet in 1963 who would have known anything at all about commentaries on the Bible, that is about the Jewish concept of that story’s theme. As far as Kierkegaard is concerned, I don’t think so. I don’t know. It’s completely possible that the poem reflects Brodsky’s own attitude to life and that he had no need of any outside influences. But, I simply don’t know… – Your point of view is shared by Shimon Markish. ‘Isaac and Abraham’, he writes, is no more a Jewish work than Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ or Byron’s ‘Cain’, or Akhmatova’s poems on biblical themes.5 However, scholars of Brodsky’s poetry see, in that particular poem, the Jewish symbols of the bush, the image of the grass blown with the sand. Mikhail Kreps’ views that image as the ‘primary objectified

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incarnation of the Jewish people’.6 How convincing for you is such an interpretation of the Jewish people? – Not in the least convincing. I accept that at the time Brodsky’s imagination was in thrall to the symbolism of a national, a group road to humanity – in part that too is Jewish. Why not? But, in fact, those were images that arose in the subconscious of many of his Russian contemporaries, not amongst Jews alone (less so in their case, perhaps). Very soon there appeared the Russian ‘village writers’ – the Ukrainian national-Democrats – Stus, Svetlichny, Dziuba, Kalinsty. The fate of the groups within mankind through which the whole of humanity can be put in the spotlight suddenly came to the surface in the imaginations of a whole generation of Soviets and a great poet, born in that generation actually expressed that subconscious… And that he did using a Jewish exemplar, the Bible is because it was an Imperial book – for the whole of Russia. – Zeev Bar-Sella, in one of his articles, writes that ‘after “Isaac and Abraham” Brodsky had a choice of two paths before him: he could either stop living or he could stop being a poet. What he did was find a third path – stop being a Jewish poet.’ 7 How seriously can we take that rebuke? – Once again I have to sidetrack into theoretical matters. Someone who is, in principle, a national literary figure how does he go about defining his adherence to national literature? The blood in his veins? Then strictly speaking Gogol is not a Russian writer. The same goes for Blok, Fet, Vasil Bykov, for example. The language he wrote in? Then Zhabotinsky is a Russian writer (though, really, there can be no doubt that he is a Jewish writer). To my mind whether a writer belongs to this or that particular national culture is defined by the audience he is consciously addressing. Pushkin is not African writer; he is Greater Russian because he is speaking to all the readers of the Russian Empire. Dostoevsky is not Polish but a great Russian writer because his audience is a Russian audience. From that point of view Brodsky was never a Jewish writer – and never intended to be one – because he was consciously addressing a Russian (Soviet Imperial) audience. Even the poems written on ‘Jewish themes’ like ‘Jewish Cemetery’ called forth by some aspects of Jewish life – their being treated as renegades in society, were in general echoes of general imperial themes, general imperial questions. Like any other poet

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he himself might have been unaware of that (naturally he was writing for himself, not for some outsider) but ‘living in a society and being free from that society is an impossibility’. I agree with Lenin there. From the very first he was and remained a Russian poet and could not be, nor did he intend becoming, a Jewish poet ‘whatever the weather’. Even if he had come to Israel it would have made no difference. He would not have become a Jewish poet. – Almost at the same time as ‘Isaac and Abraham’ Brodsky wrote the ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’. Did he, at that time, face a choice between a Judaic and a Christian view of the world? – Not in any way. Firstly, he couldn’t have known anything about Judaism – after all, I was in roughly the same group of writers at that time and I am certain he couldn’t really have known anything about Judaism. There was nobody around to tell us about it! I must honestly say that I have no belief whatsoever in his Christianity: it was quite simply a magnetic force that drew him towards God, quite widespread at the time in a godless – and, therefore, amoral – society, which was instinctively seeking salvation from itself. Of course he had a general cultural awareness of Christianity – through music, painting, Russian propaganda, but real actual religious faith he was very far indeed from that, as yet. But as far as Judaism is concerned, even a minimum of knowledge was lacking. – So you sense no conflict between the Jewish and the Christian paradigm in Brodsky’s destiny? – None whatsoever. Of course there were some Jewish particularities in his destiny (according to the critic V. Solovyov, a poetry editor of Aurora magazine, rejected Brodsky’s poems even when someone influential recommended they print something. And she apparently rejected his work because ‘What right does Brodsky have to write about the Russian people?’ I’d like to recall what Lenin wrote, ‘Rights are not given, they are taken’, but they had no bearing whatsoever on that destiny. Either you are a poet or you aren’t. All the rest is beside the point. – I’ll put the question another way. Of the three components of Brodsky’s worldviews – Judaism, pagan antiquity and Christianity – which is the dominant? – I think as far as civilization goes (that’s really what you’re asking me isn’t it?) Russian culture and its place in the world as it came to be

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in the second half of the last century. – What role did Judaism play in the formation of the ‘interior landscape’ of the poet? – Well, how can I answer that? He always knew that he was Jewish. He even spoke with that particular Jewish accent, didn’t he? Everyone around him knew it. And so? In reality anti-Semitism makes its appearance in everyday life when you somehow or other personally manage to annoy your neighbour. The neighbour wants something he can hang on you and your nationality is just a handy hook to grab on to. But Brodsky’s poverty, his day-to-day lack of well being, was so obvious to every one. His inability to get into print (perhaps the price he had to pay would be to deny his own self) was so apparent that there was nobody who could in any way envy him or distance from him (ottorzhenie). But that the state had discriminated against Jews, that they were at the top of its hate list is true. For that very reason the state had formulated a scrupulous policy on the Jewish Question. Jews who served the Party, especially members of the KGB, were certainly not badly off in the USSR. So, when it came down to it, the primary question was a class question – nothing really to do with national characteristics. ‘Are you with us or against us?’ And, in as much as Brodsky was always, not so much ‘against’ as ‘outside’ Soviet power, he took what was happening to him as outside of his own ‘Jewish Landscape’. Well, he was a Jew. He knew that. That was a given, to certain extent. Evidently it had its influence – we all make our appearance in the world thanks to our forebears’ will to continue their human existence and, in that sense, we are not simply our own creations but also the creatures of whatever human group whose existence we are prolonging. However, you might just as well ask Condoleezza Rice to what extent the colour of her skin defines the ‘landscape’ of her conduct as Secretary of State. – What I mean by ‘interior landscape’ is the idiosyncratic landscape upon which is projected the lyrical persona of the poet. I will quote Brodsky himself: ‘I guess there was always some “me” inside that small and later, somewhat bigger shell around which “everything” was happening. Inside that shell the entity which one call “I” never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outside’.8 With that extreme mobility, perspective became one of the principles in the construction of the ‘interior landscape’. But perhaps such qualities

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as the by-stander, the anonymous man, ‘absolute nobody’ for whom ‘any country is just a continuation of space’ is this not a hint at his Jewishness? – No. Excuse my abruptness but your concept of Jewishness is oldfashioned. Of course there was a time when Jews did, indeed, live like that – together, but not side-by-side, with the ‘native’ population. They had their own separate existence, which the official frontier lines only reflected very conditionally. For greater clarity Jewish existence recalled – let’s say – the existence of the nobility. They too placed greatest value on their ancestry, on the family, its honour, personal honour but not loyalty to the state in which they lived – a relatively accidental position, often one open to choice. (A Russian noble could leave one suzerain lord and adopt another and that change did not alter his way of life at all). As you said ‘any country is just a continuation of space’. Exactly so. But from the second half of the nineteenthcentury onwards Jews became patriotic towards the countries where they earned their living – to my taste sometimes far too ardently patriotic; too active. And Brodsky, as I see it, is no exception to the Jewish mass. He was and he remained a patriot, but the Empire he was loyal to was the Russian language, Russian culture – all of the associations, the shades of meaning, the expeditions and games – everything was linked to language. Why do I think I’m right? Read the letter he addressed to Brezhnev – written just before he left the country. Yes, and the situation when the KGB were forced to ‘chuck him out’ of the country – threatening to put him back in prison – speak about the very same thing. Later, in America, he grew ashamed of that position, I know but, essentially, he remained – even over there – a ‘citizen of the Russian language’. – Brodsky identifies with many well known-figures, both historical and mythological, amongst them his contemporaries and fellow Jews, for example, Sir Isaiah Berlin. What can he have seen as having in common with that man who was a liberal and a Zionist – apart from his Jewishness? – You yourself said, ‘with many figures’ – not just with Jews. As far as Sir Isaiah Berlin himself is concerned it was possibly the similarity of their destinies. They were both Jews from the Russian Empire, both Jews who had mastered the English language to such an extent that

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they were admired and envied by people who were native speakers of the language. They both taught British (and American) elites about their own culture and understood better than anyone their local… As for Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Zionism, it was a Zionism aroused by great fellow feeling for the Jewish people but which had a profound lack of respect for the actual leaders. I dare say that such an approach was impressive to Brodsky. I don’t really know but I’d venture that was what it was. In any case he didn’t go to Israel. I personally handed him an invitation from Teddy Kollek, the Mayor of Jerusalem. So, you see, there’s a lot that could personally link Brodsky with Sir Isaiah apart from the liberal outlook of the latter which really was not to the poet’s taste. If there is any outlook that is poles apart from the poetic outlook it is liberalism! – Doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky saw both Judaism and Christianity as cultural entities? – I have to say, quite honestly, I don’t think he thought about it. It seems to me that official religion was something completely beside the point, like Soviet ideology really. It touched him tangentially, like everything that exists in the world. However, I don’t think it held any poetic interest for him. – When asked if he was a believer Brodsky answered, ‘I don’t know, sometimes ‘yes’, sometimes ‘no’.9 What’s your impression? – For me that’s a proof that he’d got as close to God as it’s possible for a human being to get. And shaken by God’s vastness, he sometimes protested – against his own inevitable human limitations – Brodsky supported the idea of a multitude of gods thinking that ‘a conflict between polytheism and monotheism perhaps is one of the most tragic events in the history of culture’.10 For that very reason, he apparently could not have been drawn towards Judaism. However, his poem ‘Isaac and Abraham’ forces us to consider the role of Judaism in Brodsky’s worldview. – I’m a man of roughly the same generation and circle (a little bit older). I lived in the same city yet I learned of the term ‘Oral Torah’ (a major tenet of Judaism) from my daughter here in Israel when she came home from school one day. I was forty years of age! In the final analysis, the subject of ‘Isaac and Abraham’ comes from the Bible, which is, of course, a sacred Jewish text but, actually, both Christian-

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ity and Islam also revere and read it. So there’s no concrete connection there with Judaism as far as I can see. – In Lev Loseff’s opinion beginning with ‘Christmas Romance’ the calendar of Brodsky’s poetry is solely Christian, defined not by the dates of the solstice but by the dates of Christmas, Easter, Candlemass.11 Does that mean he’s a Christian poet? – I don’t believe that either. Of course, a recognition of Christian festivals does show a break with the amorality of Soviet life; a reliance on God, on some sacred tradition. However, to go from there and call him a ‘Christian poet’ is a long long way… After all, is the poet who wrote the ‘Gavriliada’, a Christian poet? Well, he was certainly a worshipper and he did observe all the festivals … – Yes, but for Brodsky Christianity was linked with the idea of the structure of Time and, on the other hand, he did accept Christ as the God-Man: ‘Finally, what is Christmas? The birthday of the GodMan. And it is no less natural for a man to celebrate it than his own… Since I have been writing poetry seriously, I have tried to write a poem for each Christmas as a way of keeping the birthday’.12 To what extent does Brodsky’s declared Christianity put off his Jewish readership? – It doesn’t at all; whoever loves poetry loves Brodsky and whoever is vain enough to see themselves as the ‘elect’, that is neither here nor there, nothing to do with Brodsky. They may be annoyed that he didn’t go to Israel and didn’t serve the ‘great Zionist project’ that I will allow, (I even know a little bit about that) but what has that got to do with his readers? Those people probably haven’t read him they’re asking him to be something other than a poet. – By the way, why in your opinion, did he fail to visit Israel? – He’d give me a very everyday one, ‘In winter I work as you can see for yourself (we had met up in Amherst where he was teaching) I’m very busy. And in the summer it’s too hot for my heart’. I was very stupid and not knowing his material circumstances I tried to entice him with a guest room in my own apartment. I promised to show him around Jerusalem, around Israel… But, in actual fact, I didn’t really believe him that much. I got the feeling that something was keeping him away. He even said something, I recall, about some idiots or other in Vienna (that’s my expression – he wasn’t as rude) who had a demonstrated when they learned he was on his way to the States.

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They were carrying placards saying, ‘Shame on you Joseph Brodsky’. Whatever you say Jews are a people like any other and we’ve got plenty of absolute fools. But, possibly, he felt a bit awkward, a bit unnatural about himself as a perfectly respectable American poet having to encounter the eternal city, that bush you mentioned and that God-Man who walked barefoot on those very cobbles…That’s my conjecture. That’s the way it seemed to me. – Can what Brodsky said of Tsvetaeva be said of Brodsky himself: ‘Tsvetaeva the poet was identical to Tsvetaeva the person; between word and deed, between art and existence, there was neither a comma nor even a dash: Tsvetaeva used an equals sign’.13 – I don’t understand that; perhaps I just don’t feel that. I feel that a poet puts the best of himself into his poetry discarding, at times involuntarily, everything vulgar – and all of us have plenty of that – Brodsky too. Brodsky the man was, of course, capable of vulgarity. I know I am and you are – everyone is. But I don’t sense any of that in his poetry. For me a poet is an ideal and Brodsky could form that ideal from his own self, from his true character. – And, finally, the last and, possibly, the most important question. What role did Brodsky’s Jewishness play in his becoming the greatest Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century? Did it give the energy to a Jewish kid born in an anti-Semitic country? – Who knows? Your question reminds me of a long ago conversation with a KGB investigator – a subtle and intelligent man, V. P. Karabanov. He too tried to ascertain from me whether I didn’t derive my position, laid out in the preface to the five-volume Brodsky, ‘from the energy of a Jewish kid born in an anti-Semitic country’ – if I can use your expression. As I recall I told him that Jews ought to be grateful to Soviet power for the restrictions it put on them. (By the way, though this is not directly relevant to our topic, I personally think that antiSemitism only played a role at about a third removes. The main thing was that a few groups of people were kept in a constant state of tension so that their energy and strength could always be harnessed to the present needs of the authorities – with no special effort or expense on the part of the latter. For example the creation of the atom bomb, rocketry and various things in the field of electronics… Then they would raise the lid on discrimination just that little bit and someone

or other got his bit of ‘freedom’ – as long as they pushed themselves beyond the usual limits!) Thanks to their cramped circumstances the Jews didn’t have to be fed tasty morsels from the state ‘gravy train’, didn’t have to be educated as much as the average Soviet citizen not because of any political convictions on their part – everybody is different there – but thanks to their mentality, their attitude towards their destiny. In Jewish circles there really is a very strong conviction that in order to attain in life what is ‘available’ to the Russian (or any other nationality) the Jew has to expend a lot more energy (and that has to be directed in the right way – but that’s another question). So you could be right. But nobody is going to know for sure because ‘it happens, the way it happens’. Translated by Chris Johns Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

See Efim Etkind, Notes of a non-conspirator (London: OPI 1971), pp 64 - 65. Joseph Brodsky, Washington Post, August 7, 1972. In Russian, see Yakov Gordin’s article ‘Delo Brodskogo’, Neva, no. 2, 1989. James Atlas, ‘A Poetic Triumph’, New York Times Magazine, October 21, 1980, p. 34. Joseph Brodsky, ‘A Poet and Prose’, Less Than One (NY: Viking, 1986), p. 183. Shimon Markish, ‘Jew or Hellene’? ‘Neither Jew, nor Hellene’? Iosif Brodkii, Trudy i dni, eds. Lev Loseff & Petr Vail (M: NG, pp. 207 - 214. Mikhail Kreps, O poezii Iosifa Brodskogo (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), p. 162. Zeev Bas-Sella, ‘Strakh i trepet’, Almanach 22, no. 41, 1985, p. 213. Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, Ibid., pp. 16 - 17). Iosif Brodskii, Rozhdestvenskie stikhi, ed. by P. Vail (M: NG, 1996), p. 68. Ibid., p. 67. Lev Losev, ‘Niotkuda s liubovyu’, Kontinent, no. 14, 1977, p. 321. Iosif Brodskii, Rozhdestvenskie stikhi, Ibid., p. 58. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Footnote to a Poem’, Less Than One, Ibid., pp. 219 - 220.

3 LEV LOSEFF Lev Loseff was born in Leningrad in 1937 and graduated from Leningrad University. He is a poet and a scholar whose works include poetry collections Chudesnyi desant (A Miraculous Raid, 1985), Tainyi sovetnik (A Privy Councillor, 1988), Novye svedeniya o Karle i Klare (New Information on Karl and Klara, 1996), Posleslovie (Afterward, 1998), Sisyphus redux (2000), and Kak ya skazal (As I Said, 2005). Since 1976 he has lived in the USA and since 1979 has taught at Dartmouth College. Loseff has written many plays and critical studies, including a first literary biography of Joseph Brodsky (M. 2006).

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HE LIVED

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E X T R A O R D I N A R Y PA C E

An Interview with Lev Loseff (August 2004) – We have talked in the past of your getting to know Brodsky and your friendship with him in Leningrad. How often did you meet up with him in America? – From time to time. During the first three years, when we both lived in Ann Arbor, very often – almost every day. In 1976, when we had only just arrived and hadn’t yet found any accommodation I, my wife and our children lived with Joseph for a month. I was sorry for him. It was always a torture for him getting up early. Remember, ‘Don’t want to get up now, and never did’? But I didn’t, as yet, have my own car and the children had to be got to school and he was the one who had to do it. After we moved to New Hampshire and he very soon left Ann Arbor and moved to New York and to South Hadley. South Hadley was just a two-hour drive from us. At one time, in the mid–eighties, he would quite frequently come over to visit. Someone close to him was living at that time on our campus. Then I would often travel up to New York, almost always staying with him or the friends he had in the same building. In his last years, the Nineties, we met up rarely – once or twice a year. But we would have long telephone conversations. Usually he was the one who would call up and read some poetry he’d just written or he’d be eager to tell me some new story or extract some information from me and then a long conversation would start up. The last time I talked to him was about a month before his death and we saw each other face to face for the last time in May of 1995. Nina and I travelled up to South Hadley to see him. – Did you visit him at Mount Holyoke? Tell me about his life in that small town which, to me, seemed even more boring than Ann Arbor. – Mount Holyoke is the name of the college. The small town there is called South Hadley. It really is like a toy–town. The campus isn’t very large. Its rather venerable women’s college is in the town centre and there are a few blocks around it of white buildings with green shutters, typically New England, where the faculty live. And just as Mount Holyoke itself is now part of a consortium of colleges, taking in

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Amherst, Smith, Massachusetts University, and Hampshire College, so the small towns run into one another. There’s South Hadley, Amherst and Northampton. So that it all adds up to quite a large place where Joseph had a lot of friends and acquaintances. He loved his New York lair in the Village and his half a house in South Hadley (By the way right now, as we speak, last desperate efforts are being made to save the house and turn it into a museum – it’s under threat of being pulled down). It was very convenient. He could flee from New York to South Hadley. He could flee from South Hadley to New York. The two places were just two hours drive apart and if you put your foot down a bit, ninety minutes. Though the telephone would ring and visitors would appear in South Hadley, it was not like in New York. South Hadley was a kind of refuge for him where he could work quietly. A bit like Komarovo or Peredelkino, but minus the writers. There’s an American documentary film made shortly after the Nobel Prize, in which you see Joseph atop a hill looking down on South Hadley, into the valley of the Connecticut River (locally, Pioneer Valley), and he says that here is a place it wouldn’t be bad to be buried in. That was something that was considered after his death – that he be buried in the shade of a tree on the campus itself, but it turned out to be legally impossible. Then the college hung a plaque on the wall of the house he had lived in, a bronze tablet, with a very beautiful phrase spoken by one of the professors at his memorial service ‘In this place, the words found him, and he sent them back into the eternity in his own voice’. Now the lot has been sold and the house is on the point of being torn down – the fate of the plaque I don’t know. Boring? It seemed to me that Joseph was never bored in his own company. – Apart from Yuz Aleshkovsky and Tomas Venclova, were they any friends you had in common in the States? – I wouldn’t say that I’m that close to Tomas. He’s an immensely talented man and it’s always pleasant and interesting to meet up with him, but that happens very rarely. Joseph introduced us to one another over here. Other than Yuz, we did have one very close friend in common in the States, Garrik Ginzburg-Voskov. He arrived in Ann Arbor in 1977 and he still lives there now. To Joseph he was more than a friend; he was an elder brother. Joseph got to know him in

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his early youth – while he was still almost a boy. Now he’s the only person in the world with an intimate, almost familial, understanding of Brodsky’s character. – Ludmila Shtern divided everyone around Brodsky into four categories. Those he loved, those he got on well with, those he put up with and those he couldn’t stand. Would you place ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’ 1 in different categories? – I’d say that all the people we know could be placed in those four categories. Of the ‘orphans’ (foolish name!) Joseph dearly loved Rein. As for the others, for well-known reasons, he despised one and found the other highly irritating. – It’s well known that there was a certain type of person that Brodsky couldn’t stand having around him. How would you define that type? – I don’t know about typology but he had a definition for those he took a strong dislike to: ‘sheep-eyes’. That was aimed at people without a thought in their heads and for those importunate enthusiasts for whatever. It was often aimed at his compatriots. And ‘clotheshorses’ aimed at empty, pretentious men. Americans were mostly the target of that. – Sometimes Brodsky got on badly not just with other people but also with himself. I had the impression that he wasn’t very fond of himself. In a letter to Andrey Sergeev he talks about his own ‘vile character’.2 Did he have a difficult character? – About his relations with his inner self, his constant awareness of his own existential guilt, a lot has been said, in his verse and in interviews. I have nothing to add. As for his character ‘he was not lilly-white in his temperament’ (Mandelstam about himself), in his younger days he would often be insultingly forthright in what he said; he would be impertinent. As he grew older he became more polite, more tactful. Anyway he lived at an extraordinary pace and that can cause people around you discomfort and grief because people living at a normal human tempo see it as instability. But I’m looking at it from the sidelines. Towards Nina3 and myself he was always very agreeable. Things were relaxed between us. – Whatever the situation he always remained himself and to achieve that one really has to know oneself. How, in your view, did he manage to get on with himself? With love? With respect? With pride? With dutiful humility?

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JB & Lev Loseff, in Stokholm, December 1987.

– To each of those you have to give the same answer. He knew his worth. – ‘People who write poetry are the most perfect examples of human race in biological terms’, he says in one interview.4 Do you share that politically incorrect point of view? – That’s not really a rationally thought through conclusion but a metaphor and it’s only fully comprehensible in the context of the other metaphors Brodsky used when talking about poets and poetry. To take it out of its context is ‘literally’ impossible. – Brodsky quite often wrote about treachery in poetry and prose: ‘No matter […] how much you’ve been betrayed’. What did he have in mind in concrete terms? The treachery of women, of friends, of acquaintances? Or is there something deeper and more general there? – I think it’s ‘treachery of women, friends and acquaintances’. – He himself was continuously accused of treachery. He refused to return to his native city to receive an honorary citizenship. He didn’t go back to Russia. There were even hysterics about that, ‘he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t love his motherland’. Is it worth defending him from the untruths of the vulgar? Or is it better for us to remember the poet’s own words, ‘And to defend you from / harsh tongues is like defending oak trees / from leaves, wrapped in their meaningless but

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clearly / insistent clamour of majority’?5 – The accusations of ‘treachery’ are absolute nonsense. They speak ill of his accusers. What sort of people crucify themselves for love of the motherland, feel hurt on behalf of the country and so on? People who need to fill an empty space in their hearts with borrowed symbols, birch trees, two-headed eagles, or swastikas… For Brodsky his native land was its people, whose sufferings he shared – in the psychiatric hospital – in the Stolypin carriages6 – on the collective farm. It was the ‘pliancy of the Russian language’, Russian literature, Petersburg architecture. Breaking away from that homeland was an impossibility: it was his poetry, his blood, his flesh. – What do know of his ‘career’ as a pilot? He was learning to fly in Michigan. Doesn’t it seem to you that without that experience he wouldn’t have written that missive of his to humanity ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’? – In his youth he was very enthusiastic about the books of Saint-Exupery, Night Flight, Terre des Hommes. He took a few lessons in Ann Arbor. He gave up. In the main because in order to become a pilot you have to master the professional jargon of pilots and air–controllers and, at that time, his use even of everyday English, left a lot to be desired. It could well be that the view from on high does derive from his flying experience. But, it has a lot to do, as well, with the Icarus myth, with Horace’s Ode to Maecenas, Zhukovsky’s ‘Swan in Tsarskoe selo’ and, of course, Gumilyev’s ‘Eagle’ – even, perhaps, with Gorky’s ‘Song of the Falcon’. By the way, I read the poem once to a professional ornithologist and I learnt that from a scientific point of view it’s all a bit suspect, pure imagination. It is a marvellous poem. – How do you feel about today’s academic research into Brodsky’s work? Doesn’t it seem to you that some of the things published in Russia in the last few years instead of analysing the complex and beautiful world of the poet either simplify or substitute his views and ideas? – ‘Brodsky studies’, something which you and I initiated some twenty years ago, is now galloping along at an industrial pace. There is some good research being done – Ranchin’s book, for instance.7 There are two very acute and interesting books – as far as I, with my rather modest grasp of philosophy, can judge about Brodsky and the world of philosophy – Irina Plekhanova8 and Evgeny Kelebay.9 In both books,

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it has to be said, there is something not quite right about the title. In Plekhanova’s case, it seems insufferably long-winded. In Kelebay’s – incomprehensible: Poet in a Child’s House. What sort of an establishment does he have in mind? An orphanage? I don’t know. Besides, Kelebay was a very difficult to read I found, because of his style – nearly every other word is given in quotation marks. For example, ‘Kelebay is ‘very difficult’ to ‘read’ because of his ‘style’…’. It’s a bit like talking to someone whose face is constantly being distorted by a nervous tic. However, I’m in no position to follow everything that appears. It grieves me that we have a huge amount of analysis and interpretation but only rarely do we see anyone delving into the archives or taking a close look at the variant texts. And really the literary and socio-political biography of Brodsky could do with detailed explication. Of course Brodsky, on more than one occasion, spoke out against ‘biograffiti’ saying that the facts of a poet’s personal life were no explanation for his poetry. But as soon as he begun to talk about Tsvetaeva’s poetry as well as Cavafy’s, Frost’s and others’ he used biographical material. In the meantime, we often accept as his actual biography the myth he himself fabricated and the other myth, that, as Akhmatova said, others made for him: ‘What a biography they are making for our redhaired boy!’ – Did you ever see Brodsky hurt by something or in a rage about anything? How did he deal with those emotions? – Of course he was hurt, angry, grieved. It makes me very sad that our last lengthy telephone conversation was, for a lot of the time, concerned with just that. Two things, that had wounded him. There was John Coetzee’s review in The New York Review of Books of his On Grief and Reason.10 The rather cold tone of the article hurt him the more because he himself had a high opinion of Coetzee’s work and had made favourable mention of him in that very book (in the essay dedicated to the memory of Stephen Spender). In that same conversation he talked with hurt and anger about a one-time friend who had published a slanderous piece of rhyming tittle-tattle about him in Moscow. – ‘I have been reproached for everything save the weather’.11 I’m afraid Joseph was mistaken: Solzhenitsyn accused him of a ‘polar climate’ of the soul12 and Korzhavin also – both of them with a disobliging

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choice of vocabulary. Even in the case of such a masterpiece as ‘I have braved, for want of wild beast cages’ Korzhavin was incapable of giving it an impartial reading.13 – I dealt with that in my article ‘Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky as Neighbours’. It seems to me that it was quite simply the generation gap that caused it. Brodsky’s aesthetics and poetics were simply ‘unreadable’ both for Solzhenitsyn and for Korzhavin. More than once, over the years, Korzhavin and I’ve known each other, I’ve had to listen to his temperamental philippics directed at Brodsky. Arguing in those circumstances would have been useless. It’s the same with me; I can’t listen to contemporary music for example. It is, for me, simply an unpleasant din. – Brodsky said that he could never treat any literary attacks on him seriously. Would Solzhenitsyn’s and Korzhavin’s assaults, which were particularly savage and crushing, have grieved him? Why did both of them decide to write in that way about Brodsky only after his death, when he couldn’t answer back? – I think he would have treated it with indifference – though who knows? As for ‘only after his death’, as I’ve said already I heard the same things from Korzhavin long before he died. And Solzhenitsyn really thought that way a long time ago despite his having written to Brodsky, in 1977, that he read everything of his that was published in the Russian journals with interest. Of course it does have an amusing side to it, if Solzhenitsyn and Korszhavin were indeed frightened to come out with their opinions during Brodsky’s lifetime. As it turns out, they only propagated their opinions widely after 1996 and I don’t see anything unethical in that. If you and I have the right after his death to make it known how much we loved him, then others have the same right to express a contrary opinion. The problem is not ethical but aesthetic – two writers of an older generation are aesthetically deaf to Brodsky’s poetics. – What surprised you the most about Brodsky in his maturity? His wisdom? His humility? His generosity? – His courage. He was mortally sick and he didn’t comfort himself with any illusions. He just carried on doing what he did, literally to the very end. – As we know Brodsky had a dislike of his early poetry. Already in 1972 in an interview with Michael Scammell he passed judgment on

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them ‘they also weren’t very good, which is something I realise now’.14 What was that? The normal attitude of a mature person to his own youthful first steps? Do you agree with his evaluation? – I do. As Brodsky himself said to the interviewer ‘I am not a Rimbaud’. Rimbaud or not Rimbaud, in Russia no one writes great poetry in their youth. Even the early poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov is interesting only in hindsight, in the light of their mature lyric poetry. The youngest bloom of our poetry is Mandelstam. In Brodsky’s case the real poetry began to appear from 1962 on. The earlier work is interesting from the point of view of the coming into being of that unusual personality. Even some juvenile material makes its way in to Brodsky’s first real book Ostanovka v pustyne (A Halt in the Desert, 1970): ‘Verbs’, ‘A Poem under Epigraph’, ‘To A. A. Akhmatova’. I repeat, they are interesting – in so far as they play a significant role in the poet’s destiny. – Why didn’t the collection prepared by the Writer’s Union get published? Viktor Toporov maintains the publishers refused to include his epic poems in the collection, but Brodsky said somewhere that the censor got involved. What do you know? – Judging from the documents, which have been recently published, liberals on the editorial board made every effort to get the book out. It’s interesting that in the minutes of the board meetings the word ‘little’ pops up again and again when the book is mentioned: it’s as if they were exorcising the spirits of Soviet power: well now, this small tiny ‘booklet’ – surely you’ll allow that?! But the editorial bosses dragged their heels for a tauntingly long time without saying a word and then in effect demanded of Brodsky that he write half a book’s worth of ideologically sound poetry and then, well into the second half of the book, they would allow his poems about the beauties of the North. Of course they knew that he would write nothing of the sort and they were simply dragging things out. Roughly the same thing happened, in the same publishing house (the Leningrad division of ‘Soviet Writer’), very soon afterwards with a collection of short stories by Vladimir Maramzin. Only the fiery-tempered Maramzin threw an inkwell in the director’s mush for which he was taken to court and given a year’s suspended sentence. The scornful Joseph, in contrast, gave a Bronx cheer and published A Halt in the Desert in America. Almost certainly the director was acting on the orders of the Lenin-

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grad regional Party Committee and the Leningrad KGB. I remember that shortly afterwards Joseph gave a final valedictory Bronx cheer to ‘Soviet Writer’. He asked me out for a talk and told me that two members of the KGB had met with him and in their particular enthusiastic way had asked if he would inform on any foreigners who happened to come to see him. ‘Of course they are, for the most, honest decent people but sometimes you come across…’ If he were to agree ‘It is in our power to ensure that your book gets published…’ Joseph said that he wanted ‘justice to triumph’ (that was his usual ironical way to refer to publishing of his own verse) but there was no-way in which he could be of use to them. This is the sort of thing, by the way, that needs to be looked into in the archives by researchers. – According to Andrey Sergeev Brodsky would rework his poems fundamentally and passionately.15 Is that right? Have you seen his rough drafts? – Oh, yes! In his rough notebooks he would write down lines and stanzas, trying out fresh variations, re-writing whole poems and then cross out and make new alterations. Then he would rewrite the text on a typewriter. And then he would start deleting and re-writing the typed text. Sometimes he would add gummed strips of typewritten material over the top of that. The page would have other bits of paper glued to the bottom margin. At times you would end up with quite an interesting artefact, the sort of thing you’d display in a museum. You could sense that the work was something he really got carried away with and gave him a lot of satisfaction. And then there was the publication, seeing his poems in print. That was something that, in the second half of his life, he lost interest in. He very much loved reading his poetry aloud, from the stage or one to one; but he was indifferent to the printed page. – Brodsky, an aristocrat of the spirit, a poet of the élite, found the working class in the same state as Marx had described. He spent a year and a half amongst the peasants. Did those experiences in his life make him more of an egalitarian? – Brodsky, the mature Brodsky was, for the unschooled reader, a rather difficult poet but it would be a mistake to think of him as a scion of the Petersburg élite, an aesthete from birth. He was by no means a young hothouse plant. He was from birth unusually intelligent and

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gifted but he was not a child of the intelligentsia, suddenly thrown into the midst of the masses. His family were intelligent in the everyday sense; however, they were not intelligentsia – nor did they belong to the city’s artistic elite. And from the point of view of that family, Joseph took a tumble down the social ladder when he did badly at school, was held back for a year in seventh grade and left education early to go to work in a factory and so on. If he wasn’t exactly enrolled in the ranks of the city’s proletariat it was not because of any cultural factors but, rather, owing to his psychological strengths. He had so very little in common with the sons of professors or writers (I know, I am one of them). In the northern countryside there was this transformation of this insanely talented but culturally disorientated Brodsky into a genius who was quite aware of what he was doing, of what he had to do. But the transformation took place thanks to his profound immersion in books and not thanks to the plough, the birch trees and the peasantry. Farm labour, northern weather and village folk were not earth-shattering or eye-opening for Joseph. He felt at ease and self-confident with the people; on a level-pegging, really, with no folkish aspirations. – In ‘Watermark’ Brodsky writes ‘I am not a wise man nor aesthete or philosopher’,16 but that is precisely how the majority of his readers do see him. Why? – I earlier used the expression ‘primed reader’. Not only Brodsky but any serious writer demands a ‘ready reader’ and by that I mean someone who doesn’t attempt to clarify ‘what the author wants to say through his artistic endeavours’ but knows how to savour the poetic text for its own sake. I’ve already said Brodsky is in no way an aesthete. As for the title of philosopher, try building any semblance of a philosophical system from Brodsky’s maxims in his poetry and prose! You won’t get anywhere. Everything is contradictory, everything is ungrounded – jokes and paradoxes masquerade as syllogisms. He is interested in philosophy but has completely different concerns. The sole great philosopher that Joseph reminds me of is Nietzsche. However most philosophers of the present day consider Nietzsche not as a philosopher but a poet. – To what extent can Brodsky’s view of the world be called Christian? How seriously was he involved in his Christian subject matter? – He himself wrote so much, talked so much about it, that I have

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nothing further to add. Look, for example, at his ‘Flight from Byzantium’. – Brodsky was not very merciful in his attitude towards his translators. Was he more positive about his own translations of his work? Which of his own translations caught your attention? – I’m not competent to answer that question. – How far did Brodsky succeed in grafting together two cultures, two poetics, and two languages? The Anglo-Saxon and the Russian is what I have in mind. What has Russian literature gained by that? – Russian language and Russian culture has/have always been adding foreign borrowings. It is the most beneficial form of imperialisms: the losing side in the war suffers no losses but we all gain something. The compass needle of Russian culture began pointing in an AngloAmerican direction as early, I think, as the thirties. I have in mind the exceptional enthusiasm for Joyce, Hemingway, Huxley and others in what were, I must say, excellent translations. And for Joseph it all started with Gutner’s anthology, actually, Mirsky’s, of modern English poetry as well, and the American anthology of Zenkevich and Kashkin: both books appeared prior to the Second World War. I recall the enthusiasm caused by the coming to the USSR of Robert Frost in 1962 (Brodsky, incidentally, was absent from Leningrad at the time. I think he was in Kazakhstan just then. So, Viktor Kulle is in error in his commentary to the collected edition when he says Brodsky saw Frost).17 Well, naturally, it’s understandable that we western-orientated young poets should know something about Frost. But, really, even Soviet writers of the older generation were very excited. At the time I translated a few poems by Frost – something that, by the way, made possible the blossoming of my friendship with Brodsky – and I took them over to the editorial offices of Neva. The poetry section there was run by Sergey Orlov, a former tank–commander, with a burnscarred face. What sort of a man he was I don’t know but as a poet he was very run-of-the-mill, very Soviet. He had one particularly wellknown poem ‘We buried him in this earthly sphere, / But he was just a soldier…’; and there were rumours that he had swiped that image, ‘buried in the earthly sphere’, from someone else. But Orlov himself snatched my translations straight out of my hand and published them in the very next issue. It was apparent how much they interested him.

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For all that, if the influence of American prose of the 20th century is easy to trace, the same cannot be said of poetry. Sixty years on from those anthologies the number of even half decent translations is very small. There are possibly those of Andrey Sergeev, but not even all of his are successful. It’s somehow very difficult for a Russian poet to make the breakthrough to a different poetic idiom, even for a very good poet like Kushner. I have read a few of Larkin’s poems in Kushner’s translations; they are somehow anti-Larkin. Joseph is, possibly, the only one who has organically mastered the genre of 20th century Anglo-Saxon poetry. In Russian poetry the lyric has continued to dominate right up to the end of the century and just take, say, the so-alien-to-the-lyrical-persona ‘tales in verse’ – full of internal drama – of such poets as E. A Robinson, Frost, Auden, MacNiece. Until ‘Shkol’naya antologiya’ (From ‘The School Anthology’) and ‘Posviashchaetsia Yalte’ (Homage to Yalta) there was nothing of that sort in Russian poetry. At a very much deeper level, Joseph created a Russian idiom adequate to 20th century Anglo-American poetry – in the first place, of course, the poetry of Auden – it was, generally speaking, a very artificial idiom and only in some miraculous way did it produce an impression of naturalness with its amalgam of vulgar street talk and intellectual discourse. – Brodsky wrote to Andrey Sergeev, ‘What our Muse lacks is self-estrangement, plus a diagnosis of what is going on, but without personal pressure’.18 Did he fill that lacuna? – He tried. – Compiling the chronology of Brodsky’s life I’m astonished yet again at the speed and intensity at which he lived: ‘gigantic acceleration of consciousness’ in his poetry and hundreds of readings, all the countries he visited, the hotels, the apartments, the friends and acquaintances in his life. What drove him to live at such a pace? – As Zoshchenko said, ‘allow me, an old man, a grubby materialist…’ I think it was genetic. He was pre-programmed that way by nature. In his youth he himself could not understand what was happening to him – that it was élan vital (the life force) that was pushing him forward. But after Norenskaya he somehow quietened down and slackened his pace of living. – He was a poet, a wise and clever man and, above all, possessed ir-

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resistible charm. Did he use those qualities to his own advantage? – Well, firstly, not everybody loved him and, therefore, did not see those qualities as irresistible. He never ever courted anyone. How to be cutting and unpleasant – that he knew from a very young age. ‘Charming’ – no. – Samuel Lurye thinks that for Brodsky a passion for freedom was the main theme of his life. To belong to no one, to have nothing, to love nobody. How, in a few words, would you define the main theme of Brodsky’s life? – However strange this may seem, Lurye, a penetrating critic, makes an error that is characteristic of an inexperienced reader, identifying the lyrical persona constructed by an author with the author himself. Of course, it isn’t that Joseph, in his poetry was playing a role and donning cloven-hooved buskins for it. No, but in lyric poetry it is the Freudian super-ego that expresses itself. That is especially true if you are quoting Lurye accurately about loving no one. In one poem that, for personal reasons, I am particularly fond of, Joseph writes, ‘I loved few, but very deeply’. Reading that poem, I mentally run over, on the basis of those I know Joseph knew, exactly who would be included in that category. I could easily make a list of a score of names (not a ‘Don Juan’s’ catalogue but of people he loved – including in that category platonic love and friendship). And later he wrote: ‘Many, strictly speaking, all individuals in this world, deserve to be loved’. That in no way contradicts a love of freedom. – You didn’t simply attend but took an active part in all three services: the funeral service in Grace Church in Brooklyn on the 31st of January; at the cathedral of St. John the Divine on the 8th of March and in the church of San Michele in Venice on the 21st of June. Which of those services in particular touched your heart and why? – I experienced no positive emotion at all from any of them. – Do you know what Brodsky himself would have wanted – to have been buried in New York, in South Hadley, in Venice or in Russia? – As far as I understand, he didn’t particularly consider the matter. A few times he said – it comes up in that documentary film ‘A Maddening Space’ for instance – that he really did want to be laid to rest in New England, at South Hadley. Even after the burial in Venice, I came across a line in this jokey poem of his addressed to Andrey

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Sergeev where he says he wants to be buried in San Michele. But none of it is very serious. In the poem ‘Lakhta’, for example, he asked to be buried in the sands of the shore in that Leningrad suburb. – Is it true that a certain Kolerov proposed to Maria Brodsky that his company pay for all transport costs involved in taking Joseph’s body to St. Petersburg and organising his burial there? – I don’t know. At the New York wake party, there was some ‘new Russian’ or other circling around. Possibly it was the man you named. I remember he brought Zhenia Rein with him at his own expense, but that he wanted to fly back with the coffin, I wasn’t told that. All of that reminds me a bit about the story of the Georgian who ‘saw Lenin’. ‘Did you go to a mausoleum?’ ‘What for? I gave them two hundred roubles and they brought him out’. – Ilya Kutik wrote in one Russian paper that the coffin containing Brodsky came open during the flight and that when they started to load the coffin onto the catafalque in Venice, it broke in two and Brodsky’s body had to be put in another one. They dug his grave at the feet of Ezra Pound, found bones in the hole, dug another, very shallow grave and buried him ‘virtually at ground level scarcely covering him with earth’.19 What is the truth of the matter? Is it all stuff and nonsense? – Everything that Ilya Kutik wrote about the matter is utter drivel. Kutik wasn’t in Venice. He heard some rumour and he made the whole thing up for the sake of being gruesome. I have no love for the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the newspaper but in this case I wrote an indignant letter and they published it. I think (I hope) that when Kutik sobered up and realised he was talking such nonsense about Brodsky’s funeral, he felt properly ashamed of himself. – What do you know about Brodsky meeting Gorbachev in the Library of Congress? – Only the same as he told Adam Mikhnik in his interview in your own book.20 Other than that he said that the meeting was momentary. They were introduced to one another. Gorbachev said, ‘Joseph, why do you hate me?’ Joseph replied, ‘For pity’s sake, Mikhail Sergeevich, how did you get that idea?’ ‘So, I’ve been misinformed’. And that was that. Then Joseph added that Gorbachev himself didn’t understand, but the impression he had was that history had walked into the room

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and was there with them. Something like that: it got Joseph excited. – Did you discuss politics with Joseph? How did he react to the changes in Russia? – We always talked politics and quite a lot – about Soviet, American, all sorts. We would amicably break off a phone conversation when News hour would start on the TV with McNeil and Lehrer. Then he would call or I would call and we’d continue our interrupted talk. His play ‘Democracy!’ turned out to be a pretty accurate forecast of what’s happening in Russia now but, generally speaking, ‘Letter to Horace’ mirrors more accurately the events at the beginning of the Nineties. It all got him excited and he had to hope. He was awfully happy when Leningrad changed its name back to Petersburg. He was happy to see the dissolution of the Duma in 1993. He sent me on the occasion his Postcard from Pisa with the couplet: ‘My dozhili – my nabliudaem shashni / bronevika i telebashni’ (‘We have lived to see the pranks / of TV towers and armoured tanks’. Tr. by Tatiana Retivov). Towards the end we both felt adverse to what Moscow was doing in Chechnya. In one interview he even repeated something I had said to him ‘What happened to the simple human ethic: the big do not attack the small’. – The Russian Empire fell but the imperial mentality will live on for a long time yet judging by what I’ve seen of the British. Just how universally applicable is his metaphor of Empire? – However strange this may seem, Joseph had a lot of Nietzschean ideas. His Empire powerfully resembles Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ a dreadful infinity of history. – Speaking of Empire, what do you know about Brodsky’s refusal to go to Japan following the personal invitation of the Emperor? – I never heard about that either from Joseph or the Japanese Emperor. – According to Andrey Sergeev, there was a streak of didacticism in Joseph’s character. What did he teach you? – Yes, he was not averse to giving lessons. Naiman with his knack of recalling his friends’ shortcomings, once amusingly told us about Joseph lecturing to a group of doctors about ailments of the stomach. One of the last things he did for me was to explain to me what to say to the auto–mechanic (I was explaining to him that my engine was going mad). Right away, as soon as I had described the symptoms to him he

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said very convincingly, ‘It’s your carburettor’. Then he went into yet more detail. I had already driven off when I heard him breathlessly shout, ‘Tell them, it’s the cardan-shaft!’ – Brodsky felt at home everywhere and yet, at the same time, a stranger – whether it was in Russia, America or Europe. Where should we look to find an explanation of that bizarre phenomenon; in his character, his Jewish genes or in his talent? – In my opinion it’s the resurrection of the Russian intelligentsia’s outlook; the cosmopolitanism of Dostoevsky’s Versilov. We all of us, when we first find ourselves in Rome or Paris, experience a feeling of joyous recognition, as if we were returning after a long absence. – Another trait of Brodsky’s character which was neither Russian nor Jewish was his desire not to complain, his stoical acceptance – whatever the situation. – Yes, he taught himself that; he disciplined himself to it. But I don’t think it was a question of ethnicity. I know Jews, Russians, all sorts of other people who share that same trait. – Does Brodsky still seem to you to be a person utterly devoted to literature or just a great poet? – When it comes to gauging the extent of his heroic achievement, I don’t know. The epithet ‘great’ is too well-worn to have much meaning. What I do not have any doubts about is that Joseph was, in his individual way, a very out-of-the-ordinary man. As I’ve already said he was born that way, with a heightened intensity of feeling, speed of thought. – What even now do you find most puzzling about Brodsky? – This is what puzzles me: it’s why literary scholars like myself should never claim to be able to completely explain a phenomenon like Brodsky, or any other natural genius. We simply do not have and cannot have the personal experience, when compared with such a person, to fully comprehend the ways in which their thoughts and feelings move. Even Lotman or Gasparov when they have to deal with Pushkin or Mandelstam, it is a matter of the lesser attempting to fathom the greater depths. – In about 1978 when Brodsky had already written ‘A Part of Speech’ cycle and such a masterwork as ‘Cape Cod Lullaby’ he said that he thought ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ was the most important work he had ever written. How would you explain that order of things?

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– I don’t know (see at my last answer). ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ really does astonish with its inexhaustible intellectual range and, at times, virtuoso verse-writing and there’s the architecture of the whole thing. I would venture that Joseph placed that poem in such a high position firstly because of the latter characteristic. In no other thing of his does he have to deal with such a complexity of form, and yet the symmetry of its construction is irreproachable. And he was a real lover of neo-classical architecture. And, of course ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ came out of one of the most dreadful of events in his life. – Brodsky regretted that he failed to write his own ‘Divine Comedy’, his own ‘Metamorphoses’. But he really did write the story of his life as an epic tapestry, even though it was made up of fragments and not only on the plane of his early poems but also on that of expanding time and space. How do you see that tapestry? – I don’t know in what sense you’re employing the word tapestry but I would want to grab a hold of that tapestry and rename it as ‘woven fabric’. We all know that the word text has the same derivation as the word textile, both coming from the Latin verb texere, to weave. We all, in a certain sense, weave the text of our lives. But Brodsky in his long and short poems, in his prose, in his letters, in his jokes, his deeds, always seemed to have his eye on the thread and he interwove everything – never losing sight of the overall design of his gigantic mesh. He left us his weaving in an unfinished state. ‘I, nakolovshis’ na shit’e s nevynutoi igolkoi…’ (‘And, having pricked oneself on sewing with an unextracted needle…’). – Brodsky managed to steer Russian poetry in a new direction. How would you define that direction? – I do not share the widespread opinion that a great poet ‘introduces’ something into the poetry of the language and that he ‘turns’ it in on new course. Everything that’s brought into or any turning only happens at the individual level. Repeating it is the work of epigones. Mayakovsky was a genius and then some talentless M. Lukonin or R. Rozhdestvensky comes along and writes and they don’t have to stretch very far at all. The same goes for the innumerable imitators of the Oberiuty. Mandelstam Esenin, Brodsky – you have to do your own thing. – You supplied the commentary to the two volumes edition of Brodsky that the New Poet’s Library brought out. Aside from the satisfaction of

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dealing with Brodsky on an everyday basis what difficulties did you encounter? – None at all. Only satisfaction. That is why I’ve been dragging it out now for eleven years. – And your poem dedicated to Brodsky! – Take any one you wish. Translated by Chris Jones Where the air itself is ‘pink-tinged from the pantiles’, and lions have wings; while birds don’t care to fly, instead displaying on the cobbled piazzas like the Japanese and German tourist tide; where cats can swim and walls can shed a teardrop; where the sun takes time to limn itself in gold in the morning, sends a ray to dip an elbow and check the temperature of the lagoon – that’s where you fetched up, stayed, assimilated, took a deep drag in armchair café lounge, relaxed, grew still, then turned into a double, wafted away like a wisp of smoke, and now just try to guess, when you are omnipresent: sometimes you make the teaset of a church ring out, or else you zephyr through a garden – the non-returner, man in mackintosh, the GULag escapee who found an exit through to behind the mirror; then, effaced, you left us at the crosspoint of the mapmarks, leaving upon the water not a trace – you might go by as fragile little tugboat, nacre of cloud above a dull canal, coffee aroma on a Sunday morning, to rise again next day, for good and all. 9 May 1996 Eugene Translated by Gerald Smith

Notes 1

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‘Akhmatova’s orphants’ is an expression from Dmitry Bobyshev’s poem and includes the poets who surrounded Akhmatova during the 60s: Bobyshev himself, Evgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman and Joseph Brodsky. Andrey Sergeev, Omnibus (M.: NLO, 1997), p. 450. Nina is Loseff’s wife. Iosif Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, compiled and edited by V. Polukhina, A Book of Interviews, (M.: Zakharov, 2006), p. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Bust of Tiberius’, tr. by Alan Myers and the author, To Urania (NY: FS&G, 1988), p. 72. During the Soviet time Stolypin carriages were used to transport political prisoners to the camps. Andrey Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny (M: NLO, 2001). I.I. Plekhanova, Preobrazhenie tragicheskogo (Irkutsk University, 2001) and Metafizicheskaya misteriya Iosifa Brodskogo… (Irkutsk University, 2001). Evgeny Kelebay, Poet v dome rebyonka (M., 2000). Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason. Essays (NY: FS&G, 1995). Joseph Brodsky, ‘Taps’, Collected Poems (NY, FS&G, 2000), p. 457. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Iosif Brodskii – izbrannye stikhi’, Novy mir, 1999, no. 19. Naum Korzhavin, ‘Geneziz “stilia operezhayushchei genial’nosti”, ili Mif o velikom Brodskom’, Kontinent, 2002, no. 113. Michael Scammell, Interview with Joseph Brodsky, Index on Censorship, 1972, vol. 1, no. 3/4, p. 153; a Russian version in Kniga intervyu, p. 11. Andrey Sergeev, Omnibus (M.: NLO, 1997), p. 435. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (NY: FS&G, 1992), p. V. Kulle, ‘Kommentarii’, in Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo, vol. VI (SPb.: Pushkinskii Fond, 2000), p. 432 Andrey Sergeev, Ibid., p. 454. Ilya Kutik, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 28 January, 1999 Iosif Bridskii, Kniga intervyu, Ibid, p. 688 - 716.

4 IG OR EF I MOV Igor Markovich Efimov is a writer, philosopher, and publisher. He emigrated to the US in 1978, and lives with his family in Pennsylvania. He is the author of eleven novels, among which are: Zrelishcha (Spectacle), Arkhivy Strashnogo suda (The Judgment Day Archives), Sedmaya zhena (The Seventh Wife), Ne mir, no mech (Not Peace, But a Sword), Sud da delo (Telling It To The Judge), Novgorodskii tolmach (An Interpreter from Novgorod), Nevernaya (The Unfaithful One) as well as works of philosophy, Prakticheskaya metafizika (Practical Metaphysics), Metapolitika (Metapolitics), and The Shocking Secret of Inequality; books about Russian writers: Bremia dobra (The Burden of Goodness) and Dvoinye portrety (Double Portraits). In 1981 he established ‘The Hermitage’ publishing house which has produced more than 250 books during the 25 years of its existence. Efimov has given many lectures on Russian literature and Russian history at different American universities. More information can be found on www.igor-efimov.com.

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N AV I G A T O R S

IN THE

OCEAN

OF

SPIRIT

An Interview with Igor Efimov (10 November 2003, New Jersey) – You knew Brodsky in Russia as well as in emigration. You both lived in the same small city of Ann Arbor, as well as in the big city of New York. When did you first meet Brodsky and how? – We first met in Leningrad at Evgeny Rein’s home, we were neighbours. I think it was in ‘62. Though most likely my acquaintance began first through poetry. Our mutual friend, a lover of poetry, Aleksandr Steinberg (he is mentioned in a lot of memoirs) first brought some poems, and then Yakov Vinkovetsky let me read ‘The Procession’. ‘The Procession’ astounded me; it was the kind of writing that transforms one’s life. I made many typed copies of it, up to four at a time, distributing them around. I still remember large portions of it by heart. So, by the time we met at Rein’s, he was already, in my eyes, a significant and dearly loved poet. Although he was younger than I was by four years, myself aware of what he meant for me. – In connection with ‘The Procession’, Joseph said that he read Dante and the Bible in 1962, but his ‘Procession’, which he wrote in 1961, is full of quotes from and allusions to Dante. Do you, by any chance, know when Joseph read Dante? – No, I don’t know. I did not make this connection when reading ‘The Procession’, but I am sure that specialists could find something. I have already written about the fact that ‘The Procession’ was composed by someone who had not read the Bible.1 It should be noted that Brodsky tended to reject his early poems and be fonder of the tender shoots still growing in him. Sometimes he would skip ahead to images from future poems. When someone would ask him to read excerpts from his ‘Procession’, he would often bat him away with a certain disdain. I remember how, in the prologue to ‘The Procession’, there is a note of apology: ‘The idea of the poem – is the idea of the personification of the concept of the world; in that respect, it is a hymn to banality’. Of course he is flirting here; there is nothing

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at all banal in the poem; it is the personification of human passion, human moods. The poem is both poetically independent and philosophically daring. I have always found his disdain for this poem misleading, but we often don’t appreciate our youth correctly. – Were you at the trial? – Yes, I was there from the beginning to the end, and they even used me when they were sending the transcript by Vigdorova to the West. The transcript needed to be attested by other witnesses. I was called by Boris Vakhtin to read it and to sign it before sending it. I think this took place in the apartment of the the specialist in German Studies, Admoni, one of the witnesses for the defence. I remember that when we were writing letters in his defence, I had written to the newspaper, taking advantage of the fact that I was not a parasite of society, but had a job as an engineer. The poet, Elena Kumpan, and I were both plain engineers, and so no one could say that Brodsky was being defended only by parasites. When the newspaper, Vechernii Leningrad, published a rebuke directed at us, it mentioned that Efimov and Kumpan didn’t interpret the ideological failure of young writers correctly and so forth. – Therefore you can attest to the fact that everything written by Frida Vigdorova corresponds to reality? Her notes sound like scenes from a Shakespeare play. – Yes, absolutely, and even the tense atmosphere is reflected in the transcript. – Can you say a few words about Brodsky’s emotional conduct during the trial? – I was amazed by his tenacity. He sounded a false note only once, when he allowed himself to wax poetic, grandiloquent. – ‘I think, … maybe it’s from God’? – No, then he was already in full control of himself. It’s difficult for me to recall; it was something along the lines of: ‘everything that I have done, I have done for the sake of my native language and even my country’.2 He never surrendered to the authorities the sense of homeland or motherland; it doesn’t matter that they had seized power and profaned it. It’s what one cannot give up. I can show in his poems how many times he returned to this theme even before his poems ‘On the death of Zhukov’.

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– Those words that he spoke during the trial are almost literally reproduced in his poem, ‘1972’: What I’ve done, I’ve done not for fame or memories in this era of radio waves and cinemas, but for the sake of my native tongue and letters. 3

In October 1964, you and Yakov Gordin visited Brodsky during his exile in Norenskaya. In what condition did you find Joseph? – First of all, he knew about our visit and he was able to come to the train station. He already knew some drivers, so we were able to get to his place from the station by truck. Unfortunately he had a terrible toothache at that time, and it was impossible to get to the dentist, so he struggled with his pain, sometimes by running out into the street. We talked all night, and he would go outside for about ten minutes, then return and continue exactly from where he had left off. He expected more than we brought him; he was hoping for certain letters, which he did not get, from some people important to him. We did not bring him news of any progress toward his release. Only some food, drink, and lots of medicine that he had requested. We were even concerned about the quantity of medicine, but then the reason for it became clear to us: local peasants would stop by and he would treat them, i.e. he practiced medicine without a license! That was another crime. During the day we helped him sort through peas; there was about a meter high hill of peas in the barn which would get heated up on the inside, so it constantly needed to be turned over. It should be said that he was not too eager to get down to work. – But he did not complain, did he? – No, we got so caught up right away in our conversations about poetry, literature, and mutual friends… I remember that he was upset over the long poem that Rein had sent. It was of a personal nature, and Joseph was upset by it. Later he forgave Rein. – Do you agree with Brodsky’s explanation that it was specifically the ‘ménage a troi’ that helped him get over the trial and his exile? – Probably we should believe him. It had probably caused so much and such severe pain, that apparently the pain of exile and forced solitude had shifted into the background. – You had seen him in despair, wincing in pain. But you have written

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JB & Igor Efimov.

that when he remained ‘ face to face with the adversary, he was the epitome of self-control, resolution, and calm, while when he remained alone or with his close ones, he lowered his defenses’.4 Don’t you think that perhaps his ability to keep cool under pressure is what may have caused those who did not know Brodsky well or didn’t like him to accuse him of coldness? – I think so. I think we were all cast in the same political–prisoner mould, even those who had never served time, were always on guard. When at age 14 you feel that everything that you love is forbidden to love, and everything that you hate, needs to be lauded, the pressure from the regime quickly turns you into an outcast; many of those who were unable to develop a prisoner-armor just perished. Refined and talented people just lost their minds, such as Reed Grachev and Genrikh Shef, our contemporaries. It was a very necessary type of saving armor. I think you are right. – And how did this later get transferred to poetics, if we can make the link? Knowing Brodsky, his rationality can be interpreted as a device, and those who don’t know him take it literally: for them he is a cold, calculating, and intellectual poet. – I think that Brodsky, like anyone with a wide, emotional range,

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exhibited very contradictory conditions. Our love of generalization should be held on a short leash. Such multifaceted people should not be generalized about. Yes, he could be cold; he was able to write the following lines: My blood is cold. its cold is more withering than iced-to-the-bottom streams. People are not my thing. 5

And this too is true. But then again he was also capable of writing the following: ‘You clutch at your lofty feelings every day. Clutch even harder, dear ones, at your strong feelings, the bitter muddle…’ (I:109)

This is not being cold. It’s fire and ice, fire and ice. – Who among his friends was Brodsky afraid of? Whom did he especially respect? – I observed some of his friendships with surprise: I was curious to see what he spoke about with so and so. And he would reply: ‘He is great fun to rake all of you over the coals with!’ He greatly enjoyed engaging in backbiting, loved it and loved those with whom he could compete in this. All of our great poets were epigrammatists – Pushkin, Lermontov, and Brodsky. Brodsky has stressed how great his friendship with Rein was. I think that, both in Akhmatova and in Rein, he sensed a poetic source that was independent of poetry. And he was able to pick up on this. I did not know Akhmatova, but I have spent much time with Rein; we lived for a long time in the same dacha; there is a certain poetic quality in him, which may not even trickle down to becoming poetry. At the same time, I have also witnessed how much Brodsky enjoyed spending endless hours with Naiman. Naiman was always burning in the flames of his talent, passion, possessing incredible artistry, as well as cruelty. Their trip to the Black Sea, which was written about by Naiman, as well as others. Of course there are very few people with whom Joseph would have been ready to engage in such long travel. They were never

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bored with one another. So it is no accident that Naiman has written the introduction, signing it NN, to Brodsky’s second collection, ‘A Stop in the Wilderness’, which was published in the West. We should not forget this, as it was done in the years when Sinyavsky and Daniel were serving time for things like that. – Don’t you find that Joseph greatly exaggerated Rein’s role in his poetic development? By calling Rein his mentor, Brodsky gave him reason to aspire to the Nobel Prize, the Oxford honor, and other awards that Brodsky received. – Allow me to refrain from answering this question directly. Rein has many passions, which I don’t understand, nor have experienced internally; therefore I am incapable of judging them. I too am vain, but in a totally different way. – You have observed Brodsky in Ann Arbor close up. Do you know how Brodsky prepared for his lectures and seminars? – I don’t know much about that. I have heard some anecdotal odds and ends from students. He himself said – and this was confirmed by his students – that he would make them learn poems by heart, which American students were quite unaccustomed to. I was never much interested in that side of his activity, as over the years I have become convinced that engaging in poetry is an untranslatable pleasure. For example, here we have Russian poetry, and all the attempts to translate it into different languages… In the best cases, there will be some good poems written in English, German, and French on a given theme. When some of Brodsky’s lines surface, it’s ridiculous to think even about translating something like: ‘At the end of the great war, which was for life or death, whatever we had we fried without fat…’. ‘…ne na zhivot’ is not the belly but for life, and not only did they fry, but they slaughtered. He could create a metaphorical bouquet in a single line! How possibly translate that? It’s our Russian pleasure, while they have their English one. – Did you ever drop in on his lectures or seminars? – No, I only attended his readings before a Russian audience. – Who was Brodsky close to in Ann Arbor, other than you and the Proffers? – An old friend of his lived there, Garrik Voskov, and we would meet at Garrik’s place. I know that Etkind’s daughter, Masha, visited him.

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But more often than not we would meet at the Proffers. – Did Joseph change in America – become more tactful, or learn how to be more formal in his dealings? – I doubt that I am the best witness when it comes to this: most of our meetings took place in an intimate circle of friends, where he would relax and feel at home. Once I saw him being contentious, when people were gathered at the wake for Proffer; after the ceremony and speeches, the writer, Sasha Sokolov, came up to him with some complaints. I heard how he snubbed him, quite badly; I would hate having someone snub me that way. So he still had that prisoner quality in him; therefore, it was not for nothing that some feared him. – Why did Brodsky idealize language so much? Did language, specifically the Russian language, replace Russia for him? Or did it merely help him maintain his own essence in the environment of another language? Or else, was his emphasis on the significance of language merely a way of paying tribute to the general linguistic craze of the 20th century? – I don’t know about his dealings with scholarly linguistic circles, but I think that we all love that sphere where we feel ourselves to be the master. And the pleasure that one gets from working with one’s material fills the artist’s soul. Probably, if musicians were eloquent, they would explain to us how the greatest source of joy is music, and one can run a country with the help of his piano. I remember Lev Polyakov, a photographer I once knew; when too many clouds would gather over my head, and my friends were even anticipating my arrest after I had been questioned by the KGB, everyone tried to console me, to give me some support, and Polyakov came over and brought me a photograph that he had taken once, and gave it to me as an object which should serve to console me in everything, provide assistance and get dispose of this misfortune. He had taken a picture of a crowd of people having fun on some occasion, over the head of the party boss, a very ugly baldhead. A scary photograph; I don’t know how it was supposed to console anyone. – Joseph believed that ‘literature is not about life, and even life is not about life, but about two categories: space and time’.6 In your point of view, does this narrow or widen the framework of literature? – We have already spoken of the beginning of the poem, ‘Proces-

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sion’. The fear of being banal was a fear Joseph always felt. Therefore, it seems to me, many of his utterances were due to his determination to say something that would definitely not be banal. I was always careful in reacting to his maximalist formulas; sometimes I would even get mad at him. I remember once he wrote an article about the events in Poland (in the early 80’s: the communists were crushing the workers, the movement ‘Solidarnost’). He liked the interpretation that the western financiers did not come to their assistance, and so he invented the saying, that ‘Solidarnost’ was crushed not by tanks but by banks. It rhymed! – I am afraid that you would find the following pronouncement of his to be in the category of original hyperbole: ‘…neither paganism nor Christianity is sufficient by itself and, taken separately, neither can exercise man’s spiritual capacity to the fullest’, – he wrote this in his essay on Cavafy.7 Some call Brodsky a Christian, others – a pagan, and yet others – a Jew. Who is he for you? – When the English Revolution took place in the 17th century, there was a whole explosion of Christian sects, and among them (I learned a lot about this when I wrote a historical novel about Cromwell’s revolution) was a sect that called itself The Seekers. These were Christians who felt themselves to be Christ’s followers; they insisted that none of the existing churches satisfied them, and so they continued to seek. I think Brodsky was a Seeker. I too belong to this sect. I sent him my article, ‘The Rat-Catcher from Petersburg’ in its manuscript form, and attached a card with multiple-choice questions and next to them a square: I read with rapture, with pleasure, with interest, with bewilderment, with displeasure, and (scariest), did not read at all. He noted the squares: with interest, and with pleasure. There was still room left on the card and he wrote there: ‘Igoryok, my relations with God are still more complicated than…’ There was not enough room, and the text remained unfinished. When he says that they can’t ‘satisfy man’s soul’, it is a vague generalization that equates all people. The great majority of people is quite satisfied with the existing religions and live at peace with God, with the universe. I think that Joseph frequently projected his spiritual condition onto all other people, though at the same time he could answer questions raised in a hall even when he was very young, as follows: ‘What is permitted to

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Jupiter is not permitted to the ox’. So he really was arrogant enough. But often in his arguments, he would forget about this difference and would attribute to other people qualities that were peculiar to himself as an exception. – As his contemporaries, are we capable of understanding the multidimensionality and greatness of Brodsky’s world? Even Solzhenitsyn did not understand Brodsky.8 You answered him calmly and with dignity.9 But still, what is going on? Could it be that Solzhenitsyn was and remains a Soviet person, whereas Brodsky was and remained a Western person? Or else should we look for a different meaning for this deep misunderstanding and even unwillingness to understand the poet? – I will try to divide my answer in two. First of all, people who love Brodsky’s poetry are deeply under his influence, and do not imagine they will ever grasp all of Brodsky. A normal person can understand that it’s like a huge park; you enter it and understand that it’s a wonderful huge park, but that does not mean that you must walk all around it and see it in its entirety. One finds what one has come to touch and love enough. These people stand out from those who do not get from Brodsky that magical, spirit-uplifting world and feelings, in other words, they are in a hostile position. I think this is perfectly normal. We should be ready for the fact that people who have created their literary world with such intensity and force, the way Brodsky or Solzhenitsyn have, are incompatible. I began my response to Solzhenitsyn, if you recall, with a reminiscence of the famous story about how Tolstoy would repudiate Shakespeare, while Vladimir Solovyov repudiated Lermontov. Recently I gave a lecture in Spain where I tried to explain the incompatibility of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s worlds. Then this turned into an article. When Tolstoy repudiates Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky avoids Tolstoy, this does not really mean anything, it does not belittle either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. They are navigators in the ocean of spirit, who have traveled different routes and different oceans. And they bring back stories of their voyages, the images of these voyages. But we should not forget that they are traveling different oceans. – Do you think that Joseph would have been upset by Solzhenitsyn’s article? He himself was much more magnanimous about Solzhenitsyn,

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calling him the Soviet Homer, though he did not approve his style.10 – I think not. He of course knew about all of this, about how every powerful creative spirit needs to repudiate all that exists, so that he can build a real building, and he was totally ready for this. And his relations were never built on ‘recognition for recognition’. You remember, of course, how in one of his interviews there emerged the following story about Akhmatova, in which she said: ‘Really, Joseph, I don’t understand what’s going on. You couldn’t possibly like my poems’.11 He became flustered. But Akhmatova’s poetic world was so relevant for him aside from the poetry, (it’s what Tsvetaeva wrote about: ‘A poet is first of all a condition of the soul’), he could hear her directly, and she heard him. – But still, in Solzhenitsyn’s article there are very offensive accusations made against Brodsky: that he doesn’t love Russia, his Russian is bad, he was not interested enough in the Jewish theme, he lacked compassion and so forth. It is not so much that he repudiates his world, as you so delicately and generously interpret Aleksandr Isaevich’s article about Brodsky. – I came up with a short, ‘efimism’, as I call them, about Aleksandr Isaevich. He could write his memoirs under the title of ‘The Gulag which is always with you’ with the epigraph, ‘The wolf of Vermont is your friend’. Aleksandr Isaevich could stand next to the judge, Saveleva, when it comes to unfairness of judgment. Aleksandr Isaevich’s Russian is a nightmare. His handling of historical themes is outrageous; and he would have done better not to touch the Jewish theme. But what is one to do? Tolstoy once wrote to Chertkov’s wife: ‘I have here forgotten everything and begun to read the forgotten-by-everyone Dostoevsky. I was told that Brothers Karamazov is very good. I started but couldn’t get over the sense of disgust at this putting on of airs, this hysteria of language’. What can we do about this? – Did Brodsky describe our totalitarian experience in a convincing enough way? – I think not. He reacted to it greatly and clearly, he came the closest to it in ‘Speech About Spilled Milk’: ‘The Moscow Calendar is contaminated with the Koran’ (II:27), and he formulated the boundary well: ‘I am not busy, in general, with someone else’s bliss. / This seems like a beau geste. / I am busy with my own internal perfection:

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/ midnight – half a bottle – the lyre’. (II:32). – Should one attribute any significance to the fact that the Russian government did not issue an apology to Brodsky for the trial and exile, and all the suffering that was caused by the Soviet power? – I think not. Based on my political conceptions, the new government did not need to apologize for what was done by the previous regime. – Well look, the Pope continues to apologize for all the bad deeds of Catholics. – Yes, but there was no rupture, no collapse or overthrow of the Catholic Church. The Pope is responsible for the entire history of the Catholic Church. It’s absolutely logical and justified. – But Gorbachev, Eltsyn, and Putin – they were all ex-communists who, in their time, had approved the politics of the Party. – Well, Khrushchev imprisoned, while Brezhnev released Brodsky and let him leave; he did not send him to the camps. – Do you find that Brodsky, by not returning to Russia, confirmed the irrevocability of his suffering? – No, it did not have anything to do with it. He and I discussed it. I remember one very typical phone conversation that we had at the end of August 1991. He was very excited and literally said: ‘Don’t you think, Igoryok, that for the first time we don’t feel ashamed for the homeland’. He suffered for the homeland and did not consider himself a traitor. A person who lives in the empire of language is incapable of ever betraying it. Anyone else can betray it, but he remains forever devoted to language and through it to the country. I think that the most human and simple explanation was expressed by him in a letter to Sobchak, who constantly invited him to visit. And so Joseph wrote him: ‘I am afraid to arrive in the city where I might run into a classmate who will ask me for alms’.12 And you can’t give to everyone. This is a painful condition. – How do you feel about his interview? As material for a biography or as a text which needs to be interpreted, as everything else written and said by Brodsky? – I would say this: Brodsky did not like lies; he himself did not like to lie. He found thinking so interesting, experiencing and sharing one’s thoughts. He did not have time, or was not interested in lying. I have read many of his interviews and I see and hear his voice everywhere.

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Even through Volkov’s interpretations and distortions and especially the terrible collation – I hear the dear, familiar voice. Here is an interesting detail through which one can determine whether or not the interview has been cleaned up. Brodsky was one of the wittiest people of his time and our circle. When you read the book prepared by Solomon Volkov, in which there is not even a shadow of irony, not a flash of it, you realize that this was a conversation with a person who is closed to irony. That Solomon Volkov is. But that’s to be expected. It’s an emotional incompatibility. I imagine that Brodsky would joke, and Volkov would just let it go. In other interviews, his humor shines. Same goes for Solzhenitsyn. When you read the Book of Interviews of Brodsky, you see how many times he returns to Solzhenitsyn, paying tribute to him. Brodsky knew how to appreciate someone’s Shakespearean greatness, and not the morally correct, a kind of rating category. Of course Solzhenitsyn has this power of the fighter, the chronicler, and the prophet. How can one not appreciate this? Whereas in the large book of conversations with Volkov, there is only one mention made of Solzhenitsyn, and in the most disparaging context: ‘Well, I have no wish to speak of this gentleman’.13 Here I see that Volkov clearly distorted things in accordance with his tastes. – And the last question, how do you feel about the ban being placed on any authorized biography being published in the next half a century? – I am probably not the right person answer this question. I have already made waves in this connection in my correspondence with Dovlatov, apparently in violation of some kind of law. I do hope that this ban will be lifted. As I said before, people who are very gifted go on a journey in the world of spirit, and to hide their journey from us would be as if we hid the results of the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, Marco Polo, Amundsen. All the criteria that are being put forward here… It turns out that we respect the personal lives of separate individuals more than the exciting and important voyages to such depths, which are exceedingly necessary for the soul and where we would never have enough spirit to venture ourselves. I am all for everyone knowing about these voyages. And so what if a few people are hurt or distressed by the details that get revealed… The

world of literature is so full of slander, intentional and purposeful, that such purism – we will remain here absolutely clean – is not realizable; it is illusory and just leaves the field open for dishonest and mendacious interpreters and biographers. Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

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Igor Efimov, ‘Rat-Catcher from Petersburg’, Iosif Brodskii razmerom podlin nika (Joseph Brodsky Through Original Size, Tallinn, 1990), pp. 176 - 192. Perhaps they were the following words: ‘I am sure that what I write will serve people not only living today but future generations’. Translated by G. Kline, Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (OUP, 1980), p. 65. Igor Efimov, ‘One Step to the Right, One Step to the Left’, Zvezda, 2003, no. 9, pp. 158 - 166; under the title ‘One Step out of Line. Joseph Brodsky in Leningrad, 1965’ was published in World Literature Today, no. 3 - 4, 2005, pp. 41 - 47. Translated by G. Kline, Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (OUP, 1980), p. 43 - 44. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu (A Book of Interviews), compiled and edited by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 116 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (NY: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 67. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Joseph Brodsky, Selected Works’, Novy mir, no. 12, 1999. Igor Efimov, ‘Solzhenitsyn Reads Brodsky’, Novy mir, no. 5, 2000, pp. 231 - 235. Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, op. cit., p. 51. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (NY: The Free Press, 1998), p. 209. The text of the letter was published in the book, Brodsky: A Personal Memoir by Ludmila Shtern (Texas: Baskerville Publishers, 2004, p. 352 - 353. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, op. cit., p. 272.

5 GENR IK H STEINBERG Genrikh Steinberg was born in Leningrad in 1935. In 1959 he graduated from the Geophysical and Geological Surveying Department of the Leningrad Institute and the same year began to work for the Kamchatka Geological and Geographical Observatory of the Siberian Section of the Academy of Sciences. In 1965 he defended his master’s degree, his dissertation topic was ‘Deep Structure of the Avachin Group of Volcanoes’. In 1969 - 1970, he led expeditions and served as head of the geological section of the program on testing lunar research vehicles (lunokhod) conducted on the Shivelucha and Tolbachik volcanoes (Kamchatka). He studied lunar volcanism and the morphological comparison of the moon’s surface with that of volcanical regions on earth. He was subjected to unfounded prosecution, expelled from the party (1972), and laid off from the Institute of Volcanology (1973). Steinberg was a friend of Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Nekrasov, and Mstislav Rostropovich, this serving as additional reason for continued persecution. He worked as a boiler-room electrician (1974 -1978). From 1978 he continued to engage in scientific research at the laboratory of volcanology of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics DVO RAN (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk). In 1988, Steinberg defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic of ‘Volcanic eruptions and geysers: physical mechanisms of the processes and their interrelationship’. He was among the first to discover the mineral rhenium, sulphide rhenium, on the first Kudryavy volcano. He participated in monthly prognoses of volcanic activity on the Kuril islands of Iturup and Kunashir (1991). Steinberg was editor of the international journal, Modern Geology (New-York-London-Paris-Tokio), member of RAEN (1991), academic member of RAEN (1993). Vice-President of the International Society of Lunar Geology. Member of various international and Russian scientific congresses and working groups. He is the author of over 200 articles and inventions and the recipient of Russian and international honours and prizes.

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An Interview with Genrikh Steinberg (2 September 2004, Moscow) – You were an old friend of Iosif Aleksandrovich, and your recollections are very important for readers of his poetry. When did you first meet Brodsky? – Most likely I first met Joseph in 1958 or perhaps in 1959, at some poetry event, probably at the House of Culture of Industrial Cooperation. He read the poem, ‘Jewish Cemetery’. I remembered it, although I did not pay much attention to Joseph as a poet at that time. – You weren’t even surprised by his manner of reading? – Well, it did surprise me somewhat, but not too much. I was mostly following the text, the sound, and not so much the author’s presentation. – When did you find yourself being impressed by his texts? – I took note of his poetry either in ‘61 or ‘62. Prior to that Joseph for me was an acquaintance of my friend Evgeny Rein. At that time in Leningrad there were quite a few very interesting poets: Rein, Gorbovsky, and, at the Leningrad Mining Institute, Gleb Semyonov had a wonderful literary society – Volodia Britanishsky, Aleksandr Gorodnitsky, Leonid Ageev, Oleg Tarutin, Lena Kumpan – geophysicists, geologists, and colleagues from my department as well as great friends – Viktor Sosnora, who had returned from the army, and Sasha Kushner, from the Hertzen Institute. They were all in their 20’s, whereas Brodsky wasn’t even 18 yet. They could already be called poets, whereas Brodsky was just beginning, and there were many such beginners. – In ‘61, when you began to appreciate him, how did you get access to his poetry? – I left for Kamchatka in ‘60, but would come back to Leningrad a few times a year and visit my friends. Zhenia Rein was one of my best friends, after the war, as well as Andrey Bitov. From ‘54 or ‘55 I also knew Zhenia’s friends, Tolia Naiman and Dima Bobyshev who had studied together with Zhenia, at the Technical Institute, I also knew Volodia Ufliand and the guys from the university: Lev Lifshits (Los-

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eff), Lyonia Vinogradov, Misha Eryomin, Ilya Fonyakov, Lev Kuklin. – And you yourself did not write poetry? – No, I did not write poetry, unless one considers my cooperation with Rein in the Vechernii Leningrad, in the section ‘On the Edge of the Pen’, where we, ‘gentlemen in search of ten’ would write feuilletons, sometimes in rhyme. But this was not poetry. – You mentioned that poets and writers would often gather at your home. Could you say a few words about these gatherings? – These gatherings would often be held at my place, because by the standards of that time, my three-room apartment was considered to be luxurious and large. It was in the center of the city, on Pushkin Street, No. 9, the fifth house from Nevsky Prospekt, right next to the Pushkin monument. Before the war, my father had been an architect; during the war he built airdromes, or rather, temporary landing sites, and after the war he built airports; he was well read. Poetry began for me after I returned from being evacuated and, having already read what I was supposed to have read by age 10 – Pushkin, Lermontov, Ershov, Nekrasov – I then found a book by Bagritsky in my father’s library. – Was there anything by Zabolotsky there? – No, Zabolotsky came later; his ‘Columns’ was probably too much for a ten-year-old. For me, just as for Rein, poetry began with Bagritsky, the same book. We would often get together at my place. It began in the mid-‘50’s. My father loved being around young people; he himself was very handsome and youthful, barely past 40. My brother Sasha, who was also a student at the Politechnical Institute, was also interested in literature. – So was Joseph ever at your place? – Yes, he was, but not often. Sometimes he would come over with Zhenia Rein. More often than not we would meet at his place. It was more convenient for small meetings for two, at the corner of Liteiny and Pestel. And since I visited Leningrad only a couple of weeks at a time, I did not have time to wait for the crowds to disperse. I would call Joseph and we would arrange to meet usually a day or two later at his place. Usually it was just the two of us, over coffee or a bottle of wine, and we would talk very openly about everything. – Was he already then living in his half a room? – Yes, he already had the box, the cabin then.

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– And his parents never bothered you? – No they didn’t, it was as if they were both there and were not there: his small room had two entrances, one from the living room and one from the corridor of the communal apartment, the latter is how we usually entered. Sometimes I would spend a whole evening there without ever seeing anyone but Joseph. I met his father, Aleksandr Ivanovich, in the early 60’s, and Maria Moiseevna much later, about 3 - 4 years before Joseph’s departure. – Could you talk about how Joseph was invited to take part in geological expeditions or did he himself asked to be? – Joseph began to take part in geological expeditions by the end of the 50’s,1 and in the winter of ‘61, he came to see me. I was already quite well-known then, and enjoyed a certain popularity in the Soviet media; Bitov later poked some fun at me in his Voyages to a Childhood Friend… All of this was due to a certain episode that became a sensation: the descent into the crater of an active volcano. There was much written about it in the press, documentaries were made, and I was on television… Joseph shows up and asks me to take him on an expedition to the volcanoes. In 1961 I refused to take him, I said to him: ‘Joseph, last year you pulled out of the Far East expedition in the middle of the season, I need reliable workers’. So I didn’t take him. – And in 1961 did he show up on his own or did someone recommend him to you? – He showed up on his own. He knew that in ‘57, when the newspaper, Kultura, at the Technological Institute was wiped out, Zhenia Rein had been kicked out of the institute and was subject to being drafted right away, and I had arranged to get him signed up for an expedition to the 11th region on Kamchatka, where I was undergoing my practicum from ‘56 - ‘57. Most likely if Rein had asked on his behalf, I would have taken him, but at that time Joseph was just a mere acquaintance, not exceptional to me in any way. – So was there an occasion when you finally signed him on? – No, there is a long story about my many attempts in ‘66, ‘67, and ‘68. First I attempted to get him on board my expedition for the field season legally. The way, for example, the poet Gleb Gorbovsky had worked for two seasons. These were ideal conditions for a poet; he

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would sit alone at a quiet seismic station, under a volcano, and all summer he could write poetry, once a day he changing the seismogram and making contact, letting us know that everything was all right at the station. There was nature, hot springs, volcanoes… But in ‘66 and ‘67 we could not get Joseph a pass to go to Kamchatka; at the time it was a border zone. In ‘68 we tried to do it differently. The documents and invitation were processed in the name of Misha Meilakh, as at that time plane tickets could be purchased without a passport and one could fly without showing any documents, just the plane ticket. We decided that Joseph would fly as Misha Meilakh, and then in Petropavlovsk, where documents got checked, I would meet him and make my own arrangements with the militia and border guards, as being the head of the expedition I was well known. In either June or July of 1968, I received a telegram with Joseph’s flightarrival information to Kamchatka, and I flew in on the expedition’s An-2, from which I observed the conditions of the volcanoes, arriving in Elizovo at the military airodrome, where liners land. I made contact with the liner and told them that there is a Mikhail Meilakh on board who needs to transfer to our An-2 asap, and that he should be allowed to pass the control first, so as not to delay our flight. The liner makes its descent, the boarding bridge is rolled out, and together with my detachment of the militia I go to meet Joseph. The door opens and out steps Misha Meilakh. It turns out that at the last minute, Joseph had decided that he was being followed, and fearing that he would get caught and accused of violating the border-guard regime, he did not travel. So his trip to Kamchatka never took place. – So Misha Meilakh worked there instead of Brodsky? – For two weeks Misha Meilakh flew with me on a helicopter, took part in the preparatory work conducted for the selection of sites most similar to the surface of the moon, in terms of relief as well as physico-mechanical rock behavior. In the next couple of years, ‘69 and ‘70, the expedition that I led conducted mobile testing of the lunokhod (moon research vehicle) at these sites. – In a letter to you Joseph once wrote: ‘I don’t know yet if I will be able to depart on the ‘Sirius’.2 What was he referring to? – ‘Sirius’ was a sailing vessel for training at sea, and it was possible to serve on it as a sailor. The vessel sailed without entering port or

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landing on shore, so visas were not required in order to make passage. Joseph wanted to be a sailor on this vessel. – What do you know about Joseph’s dream of becoming a pilot? – He was serious about aviation, however I never heard him mention wanting to become a pilot. He wanted to fly over volcanoes, especially once I mentioned that we had our own plane and could fly over Kamchatka wherever we wanted, and that he could practice operating the controls. That is how I had learned to fly an An-2; afterwards I completed my training and received a certificate. Joseph loved aviation, in his poems airplane and volcano-related themes are frequent. It’s a great loss for Russian poetry that he never got a chance to visit Kamchatka. – And didn’t celebrate it in verse. – Exactly, and by the way, Pushkin’s last notes, a couple of days before the duel, were the synopsis of the wonderful book by Stepan Krasheninnikov, ‘A Description of the Land of Kamchatka’,3 in which Pushkin’s fragments describing Kamchatka are especially great. It’s superb poetry, even though it is in prose, and it is not even his own, but a synopsis. – You also mentioned that Brodsky loved soccer. He was indeed very interested in soccer, and whenever he was in England, if there was soccer game, he would ask to watch it on television. What do you know about this passion of his? – Well here one should digress a bit. In the years after WWII, in Leningrad as well as the rest of the Soviet Union, soccer was indeed the number-one sport. Soccer matches were like a holiday. I remember this well because I played soccer from childhood and even made something of a career out of it. – Professionally? – Yes, I had a great trainer, Nikolay Mikhailovich Budnev, and I played in his team ‘Trud’ from the age of 13. By the second year of training he had already outlined an entire soccer career for me: ‘At age 13 - 14 you will play in the children’s team, at age 15, in the youth’s team, at age 17 as goalkeeper of the youth team of Leningrad, at age 18 in the men’s team for the city championship, and at age 19, as a professional’. All of this happened. In 1952, the youth team of Leningrd, and in 1953, the first men’s team ‘Trud’; in 1954 I was

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taken on as a professional, and in 1955 I served in the reserves of the ‘Zenith’ team, as one of the two reserve goalkeepers. ‘Zenith’s’ goalkeeper at the time was Leonid Ivanov, a great goalkeeper, he served as goalkeeper for the USSR’s team in Helsinki in 1952, during the first Olympic games; it was after Ivanov, in ‘55 or ‘56 that Yashin emerged as the goalkeeper of the national USSR team. In 1956 Ivanov left soccer and I had to decide then between soccer and the institute. So I left the major leagues and continued playing for the Institute, in the ‘Trud’ team. My love of soccer continued; I also played for ‘Vodnik’ in Kamchatka, for the oblast’ team, and sometimes even nowadays I play. Joseph loved soccer. In 1959 he went to the games with me and sat behind the gates. He was very serious about soccer. Remember: That city would not lack a yacht club, would not lack a soccer club… I’d twine my voice into the common animal hoot– ing on that field where what the head begins is finished by the foot. Of the myriad laws laid down by Hammurabi the most important deal with kicks, and penalty kicks to boot. 4

– So when did you finally read and come to appreciate Brodsky’s poetry? – Probably around the end of 1961, and definitely by 1962 I knew that he was a great poet, on the same level as Rein, Gorbovsky, Britanishsky, Kushner, Sosnora. But it wasn’t until 1965 that I realized how much greater he was than the rest, after ‘Two hours in an Empty Tank’. For me, even now, I find this to be an exceptional poem, and back then I memorized it only after two readings. – Did he read you his poems when you visited him in his ‘Room and a Half’? – He did, of course. He always read something… – Would he read it in its entirety? From memory? – Sometimes, when it came to long poems, (‘Isaak and Abraham’, ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’), he would check with the text, but for the most part he knew them by heart. Sometimes it was even exhausting. When he finished reading ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’, he said: ‘For this I will get a Nobel Prize some day’. Once, after he had probably just finished writing a poem before my arrival, he said: ‘Listen,

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a great little poem, if you like it, I will dedicate it to you’. And he read ‘Debyut’. Realizing that the theme and topic of the poem are somehow connected with the dedicatee, I said: ‘Joseph, it’s great fun, but don’t dedicate this one to me. You can dedicate some other…’. – ‘Debyut’ – that’s 1970. And so he never offered to dedicate anything else to you? – No, he did not. I regretted it later, I should have just chosen something and told him, and he would have dedicated it. But one always thinks there will be another opportunity. And so there only remain two short dedications in verse that he wrote on the title pages of two books. Inside the book, New Stanzas for Augusta, he wrote: While you engaged alone in lava, I got entangled with a tart. I give to you, Kamchatka’s brother, The entanglement’s a printed part. From Joseph Brodsky 18 June 1989, New York. In his play Marbles: Read this play, dear sir: It’s the reflux of the USSR. 18 June 1989, New York.

– Do you ever observe or witness any of Joseph’s clashes with the authorities? – No, I never witnessed this. Moreover, already during his late American period, when I would visit him there, he would not willingly recollect anything that had to do with his trial and his experience with the authorities during his exile. – So when was your first visit to the States? – In June of 1989. That was my very first visit abroad, because I had been very much a non-traveller, due to my acquaintances, my work, and my relations with the KGB. In the 60’s, while the moon race was on, I began to get ‘moon’ jobs. At first it was a kind of hobby for me. I assumed that someone else was professionally involved with lunar geology and volcanoes on the moon, and that we did not know who

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because all of this information was top secret. But then there appeared an article in the journal, Academy of Sciences News, about the geology of the moon, and once I read it I realized that it was total rubbish, even from my non-professional point of view. Being young then and easily worked up, I wrote a long article in which I compared my aerial photos of volcanoes with photos of the moon from observatories and space stations. I also wrote a short article for the ‘Academy of Sciences Reports’, where they publish all of the most important scientific results. But in order to publish there, one needed to be introduced by an academic. Which one? Who among the academics deals with the moon? From my brother I knew that in the press, the unnamed so-called General Constructor was in actuality the academician Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov. His business address was listed in the academy’s directory – the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospekt. That is where I sent it. The article, introduced by Korolyov, was published in October 1965. Later it turned out that it was the only article that he had ever introduced throughout his entire academic career. This is when the KGB guys contacted me: they began to give me materials about the geology of the moon, published as well as received through their own channels. After that there arose a conflict between us. – Did they try to make an informer out of you? – No, not quite. They had from the start promised not to ask me any questions that did not deal with the moon, and only once did they ask me about some detail, either some drinking party or somebody’s adultery; I pretended not to notice the question, and they did not repeat it. But after the ‘Lunokhod case’ and my being fired from the institute there was a very serious conflict that was connected with my ties with ‘colleagues from the West’ and friends in emigration. In 1975, I received an official warning, which I had to sign. But to return to Joseph, I think that he really did not feel like remembering his trial, exile, or relish getting even with anyone or naming names. He was not interested in all that. – Because he did not want to be considered a victim of the regimes, and did not want others to see him as a victim or draw his readers’ attention to his having been persecuted by the Soviet authorities. – Yes. But most important was the fact that the trial and everything that had happened in connection with it had long been of no interest

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to him. At the same time, he was incredibly inquisitive, and would ask about volcanoes and geology. In 1992, when the catastrophic eruption of the Sierra-Negro volcano occurred in Nicaragua, I led the Emergency Management team and flew in there. My flight connected in Miami, and I called Joseph early, around 8 : 00 a. m. At first the answering machine came on, so I began to leave a message, but then he picked up the phone and said: ‘By God, don’t risk it, don’t take any risks, and as soon as it’s over, call me right away’. He remembered my heavy traumas from ‘62 at the eruption of the Karym volcano: I had been unconscious and in a coma for seven days, on one of which I had been left without any medical help; it’s a long story. This was during the Carribean crisis and the military could not get to us. Thank God that on the second day after the state of emergency, the crisis was over, and a military plane evacuated us. Well, it doesn’t matter. Joseph repeated: ‘When it’s all over, be sure to call me and tell me all about it’. I called him again after the successful completion of my work at the site of the eruption. The Ambassador had arranged a small reception for Yury Taran, Yury Dubik, and me, and he allowed me to make an international call. When he heard that I was talking to Brodsky, he was full of respect (it turns out that he too wrote poetry). The ambassador’s respect for Brodsky significantly helped me: later, when the President of Panama invited us to supply our conclusions about the new craters that had formed in the area of the Baru volcano, the ambassador gave the order to have this processed swiftly, and he confidentially told me before my departure: ‘Diplomatic relations with Panama have only now been established, so there are no embassies, consulates, or a diplomatic corps there. I am holding both offices, and there are only two people from Russia, one on the Canal, and the other is a journalist from ITAR-TASS, but I don’t know him, maybe he is from another agency’. – In 1970 Brodsky had been questioned by the KGB concerning the ‘airplane case’. Do you know anything about this case? – It was in the late autumn of 1970. I had returned to Leningrad for a visit, and when we met, first there were the usual poems and general conversation, then I asked him: ‘What are you doing right now?’ And he replied: ‘Well I am writing this letter’. – ‘Is it personal?’ – ‘Not really. Well here, take a look’. The letter was addressed to Brezhnev about the sentence and extreme penalty in the Leningrad

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‘airplane case’. I read the letter, and of course, as a realist, I asked: ‘Why do you need this? Nothing is going to change; your letter won’t reverse the sentence, and you are under watch yourself, in the public eye; is it worth the price you will have to pay?’ He replied: ‘It’s a death sentence… I have to write about it’. This somewhat surprised me back then. That he was questioned by the KGB about the ‘Leningrad airplane case’, I didn’t know. He never told me about it. There was the ‘Central Asian airplane case’, but that was in the 50’s. But here one must add, if one were to attribute to Joseph a general characteristic, it could be put in one phrase, he had dignity. And he always behaved with dignity, in any situation. Whereas in my case, I see myself always in a dozen different roles: in one, I am the director, in another, a subordinate; here I am socializing on my own level, at a meeting in school for parents – as a father, while driving, with the traffic police inspector – an infringer, and so forth. Everywhere in a different role: the play is shit, the playwright is an asshole, the actors are morons, and everyone is pulling the blanket toward himself. And you are a match for them, because you are on board and playing your different parts. But Joseph was always himself and did not change to suit the situation. He had great integrity. Multifaceted, but with a complete and unified image. It was enviable, no less than was his talent, though talent is given by God, but this was from himself. With age, one becomes more conservative and tends to comply less with one’s interlocutor; with the years, by trial and error, one finds one’s true level, or as they say these days, ‘rating’. Joseph, at age 20, already knew what his rating was. And once he hit 25, others began to know about it as well. – That is very interesting, about the letter from Brodsky to Brezhnev. So, his letter to Brezhnev upon his departure from the Soviet Union was not the first one. – No, it was not the first. I don’t know whether or not he ever sent it, but I can attest to the fact that he wrote it, since I read it. – Well then, was it emigration or expulsion? Did Brodsky want or try to leave the Soviet Union before 1972? – Yes, he did. In 1968, I believe it had to do with his love of some English girl. Considering his very complicated personal life, I never asked him about Marina or any other women, though it all happened before my very eyes, plus what I had gathered from Rein, but I never

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asked Joseph himself. I only knew that there were marriage plans, but since the appropriate services knew of this as well, the girl was not allowed entry into the Soviet Union. That was when he got the notion to end up abroad in order to… And that same year, ‘68, he had asked me whether it would be possible, if he were working on a fishing boat, if it would not be too difficult to pass through the narrow straits (Kattegat, Skagerak), jump off the boat and swim ashore. I told him it was totally hopeless. – Especially considering that Joseph couldn’t swim! – I never asked him whether or not he could swim; it was a bad idea to begin with. In the first place, one could get shot or caught in the vessel. And even if he tried it at night, without anyone seeing, two kilometers in cold water, was suicide. That’s what we discussed. – When he left in June 1972, were you in Leningrad? – No, I last saw him in March of 1972. – Tell me a bit about how you were trained to be an astronaut. – I had been involved in studying the moon for a long time. First it was a hobby, and then on contract, and in ‘66, after a few ‘lunar’ publications in leading national and international publications, I was invited to join the Institute of Space Research in Moscow. I agreed and went to meet with them to discuss the terms. When everything had been agreed to, I asked: ‘Where will the institute be?’ I had assumed it would be somewhere near Moscow. When I heard it was at the metro station Kaluzhkaya, I was not enthusiastic, as Moscow, and cities in general (other than St Petersburg, of course) don’t exactly thrill me. I asked the advice of my Lunar instructor, A.V. Khabakov, and he said: ‘I was the one who recommended you to the Institute of Space Research, but there won’t be any work there in the next couple of years; the institute has not been built yet; there is merely the government decision about its creation, and so for the next two years they are going to be cutting the pie and fighting for positions and so forth. Is it possible for you to keep working in this area on the Kamchatka?’ I answered that it was possible. ‘Well’, he replied, ‘go ahead and work there, and the rest will follow’. And so I began to work on a contractual basis with the Institute of Space Research on ‘lunar themes’ as well as with other institutes and to design bureaus of the military-industrial complex.

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Then in 1968, Professor Cherkasov, who was a specialist in physicomechanical qualities of lunar rock and who worked with his equipment on volcanic sites selected by me, told me: ‘Genrikh, they are now selecting members of the scientific team for the “Salut” station. You qualify by your scientific and physical characteristics, so send them an application with your documents’. So I asked him: ‘To whom do I apply and with what documents?’ He responds: ‘To Keldysh. Though Vinogradov (Vice-president of the Academy of Sciences) knows you, so send it to him, the letter, application, and references. I prepared the documents and sent them, but didn’t think that anything would come of this. However, in three months I received a card with a summons. I went, passed the outpatient commission, a couple of days later was placed in a hospital, spent a month there and passed the inpatient tests as well. Perhaps I passed because I did not take this very seriously. For many who went through these medical tests along with me, mostly specialists from the design bureaus who were applying for positions as engineers on board, passing these tests and ending up in the category of ‘special contingent’, was a big career step. Whereas my attitude towards it was somewhat playful, and I was too old already for the special contingent, even according to the medical standards of the time: I was 33, and for space one needed someone who could serve for 10 - 15 years. On the other hand, the research astronaut needed to have a Master of Sciences degree, and back then, in the field of geology, few could defend the degree before 40. So they decide to keep me for another month for centrifuge. I told them that I couldn’t, I needed to get back as my mission was over, and I had my Lunokhod and so forth. They replied: ‘What do you mean, you can’t? We will send a telegram, and you will stay for as long as we need you’. I barely got away. It turned out that only one out of 52 passed the medical, and only two out of five could tolerate the centrifuge, in other words, one out of 125, whereas the clinic couldn’t test more than 200 a year. So everyone who passed the test was extremely valuable. After the medical commission, they sent me to be reviewed by Keldysh. He looked through my documents and asked: ‘Why haven’t you filed?’ I did not understand, and replied: ‘I have a pass and my documents are all in order’. He clarified: ‘Why aren’t you a member of the Party?’ I responded: ‘The Party is a big responsibility, and so forth,

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plus research scientists aren’t accepted into the Party’. He says: ‘That’s rubbish! Make sure you arrive for the centrifuge in the fall with your documents’. After the meeting, I didn’t know what to do. I asked two separate friends for advice, both totally different from one another in terms of social and professional status; Andrey Bitov, member of the Writers Union, and who was the hope of Russian literature, and on the other, Joseph, who was not in the Union, unpublished, and who had served time. Both answered essentially in the same way. Andrey said: ‘The system is more subtle and refined than we think. We think it’s all about being in the Party, one’s nationality, family status, moral values and so forth. But no, here is a Russian, Party member, with family, reliable moral values, yet he is not allowed to travel abroad, whereas here is a Jew, not a Party member, divorced, womanizer, and he gets to travel everywhere. Because the other guy is not one of our own, whereas this one is. The system makes no mistakes in identifying its own kind. That’s all. You are not a writer, nor director, nor artist. You are a volcanologist, and science is objective, so they aren’t going to pressure you according to Party lines. Every game has its own rules, so go for it’. That is approximately what Joseph said. He was not a typical dissident, but he did not fit in with those in power. He was different, but they did not understand this: a binary system: ‘black/ white, even/odd’, ‘who is not with us, he is…’ and so forth. Joseph, by the way, had nothing but good words for Slutsky and Okudzhava (both communists), and was quite humorous about my problem, mentioned Paris and my namesake, and added: ‘You will be the first Jew who gets kissed by Podgorny’. Since back then astronauts were given the red carpet treatment on the Red Square and in the Kremlin and were greeted by the leaders of the country with kisses. Joseph asked me in great detail about the medical testing, the centrifuge, about everything that they did to me for the whole month, as the rotation and centrifuge took place only once a week; about my dreams during the testing, about the lunar program that I was writing. Joseph wanted to know everything. – How do you think he handled being Jewish? – Well, my impression is not at all. It’s like this, you hear a constant noise, and then you cease hearing it, it becomes a part of your subconscious, and emerges in your consciousness once it’s over, when ‘silence is the best thing I have ever heard…’ The same goes for the

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Jewish complex, a derivative of national anti-Semitism, it existed in the subconscious, as a given, and would get discussed only in situations that were out of control, i.e. outlets beyond ‘appropriate boundaries’. But in one’s own circles the topic came up only anecdotally. It’s another thing when you are dealing with government agencies, the Party, the KGB, and the Ministry of Interior. That is when you remember who is who, and if not, then you will quickly be reminded. But on Kamchatka, where I had worked for almost 25 years, I was freed from these kinds of complexes. For my epigraph, if not my life, then for my choice of where to live, I would choose the following lines by Joseph: If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore. One who lives remote from snowstorms, and from Caesar, has no need to hurry, flatter, play the coward. 5

There was no anti-Semitism on Kamchatka because there were practically no Semites. And the few that were there did not hold positions that anyone would have coveted. – There was no anti-Semitism in Siberia either, where I was born. My first experience of it was when I moved to Moscow. But you both lived in Leningrad, where anti-Semitism was thriving in the schools, universities, every step of the way. It’s not an idle question in connection with Brodsky, as he regularly wrote Nativity poems. How does one reconcile his Christianity with his Jewishness? – Yes, it would seem to be difficult to reconcile. But is it really all that necessary? In the second half of the XXth century in the USSR and in Russia, Christianity and being Jewish were different categories: Christianity was a religious category, whereas Jewishness was an ethnic one (social or even political), not depending on religion. The question of proportion of the Jewish and the Christian in Joseph’s writing and personality is too serious for an interview. It would be a good topic for a critical article or even a dissertation. It should be noted that the Christian theme in most of his poems focuses on the Nativity: Christmas, Candlemas. In essence, the theme is Judaeo-Christian: the child is born, circumcised, unbaptized, everyone around him, including the priests, are Jews; the religion is that of the Old Testament, God is Jehovah, even the ‘temple’ is the synagogue… And when one

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speaks of the way the Father, the God-Father, looked at the baby Jesus, whose God is it? Judaic, Christian? I don’t know. The idea of the trinity (as well as Christianity) does not exist yet. In his ‘Conversation with a Celestial Being’, it’s clear from his lines: ‘I shall not cry out: Why hast Thou forsaken me?!’ and ‘you encounter things in the Second Circle, / having descended from the cross’. It’s clear to whom these words are addressed. In his ‘Nature Morte’, God is addressed by name. ‘How to reconcile his Christianity with his Jewishness?’ Probably in the same way that they are reconciled in the Bible: the New Testament does not refute the Old one, but serves as its continuation. Einstein’s theory of relativity does not deny Newton’s classical mechanics. We did once have a conversation about God, life, and volcanoes. Though most likely it was my monologue about the difference between volcanoes and other geological formations. In geology, one reconstructs the process through the results, all of which took millions even billions of years to form; vulcanology is probably the only field in geology where one observes the process in real time. The volcano is a live formation, it is born, grows, achieves its maturity, after which it begins to go out, followed by old age and death. The age of a volcano is comparable to that of humans – a dozen or hundreds of millenniums – from pithecanthropus to Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens. Though there are some volcanoes that erupt only once. But most of them have been active throughout the entire existence of man. Mankind can destroy itself, but volcanoes will remain. That is why when one finds oneself on a volcano which is actively smoking, emitting overheated gases, glowing with red-hot areas, jetting hot gas, rivulets of melted sulfur, all of this behind the formation of new craters and minerals, one realizes that it will still be living when one no longer is, nor even the rest of mankind. The volcano is life, and life is God. That is why the concepts of the origin of life from Antiquity or Shinto are dear to me, where every natual event, including volcanoes, has its own god. Joseph used to say that he too felt an affinity with this concept. In fact, the theme of such ‘gods’ can be found in a few of his poems: ‘too bad, that in Christianity there is no such god – even a little one – / of memories…’ or else ‘…winged, breasted lions, / god of infinite power’ and the like. In terms of upbringing and culture, Brodsky and I are

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Christians, though, more accurately, Judaeo-Christians. If one were to speak of God, who by definition cannot be known, then for me, Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Krishna, or other names are the names of different versions (literary, historical, theological) of the idea of an indivisible God. The Judaeo-Christian God is more appealing to me, not because it is better than the Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto and so forth, with which I am superficially familiar, but because that is the tradition in which I was raised. – Mythology? – Yes, mythology. One can add here, that of Antiquity, because once again, in terms of upbringing, it is the most familiar one. Whereas Christianity, as a religion, is almost utopian, as it forces one to give up the double standard, which we criticize in words, but still live by. I think that the double standard is typical of human relations, we treat those close to us with love, as per the Gospel, in the Christian way, and those not close to us, justly, i.e. in the Old Testament, Jewish way. I believe that is how it should be. I have not met anyone who loves somebody else’s children like his own, nor those who love their enemies. I can be indifferent toward my enemies, but I could never love them, nor would I try. Perhaps saints are capable of such love but I am an ordinary person living among people… – Even in Christianity we have two testaments, the Old, Jewish one, and the New, Christian one. – Yes, two. But in life as well as in legal documents of all times and peoples, the Old Testament principle: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, is universally practiced. There may be quantitative differences: not ‘an eye for an eye’, but ‘one eye for two’ or the other way around. But it is the Old Testament principle of justice, ‘the inevitability of punishment’, and not the Christian ‘forgiveness’ that lies at the foundation of all codices of law, regardless of faith, culture, or tradition. – What was the most difficult thing for Joseph in his life in the Soviet Union? – Probably the indifference to his poetry among his peers, those he respected. Once we gathered together at the home of Yury Pavlovich Timofeev, who was a specialist in children’s literature; he was quite an influential person and helped young and talented people whenever he could. I can’t remember why we were there, but Joseph had come to

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read his poetry, though the mood was light and everyone was feeling festive, the table was set, and no one was in the mood for poetry! He got offended and left. Practically the same thing happened at an event held at the Composers’ Union. Also on Poetry Day, when the wonderful poet and leader of the literary society of the Miners’ Institute, Gleb Semyonov, stopped Brodsky’s poetry reading after the first poem, since the hall was full of literary Party bosses who were looking for a reason to shut down ‘Poetry Day’, which was practically the only opportunity that young poets had to give readings before large audiences. – And finally, tell me about your meetings with Brodsky in the West. – In June of 1989 I arrived in the States, and settled in Brighton Beach, and on the second day I called Joseph, he wasn’t home, so I left Margot my phone number and said that I wanted to see him. He called me in the morning and explained in great detail how to find his apartment. I found Morton Street without a problem, went up the front steps, rang the bell; there was no answer and I waited for a minute before trying again, and suddenly I hear a voice from below saying: ‘Come in!’ I didn’t quite understand how. I went downstairs, through a narrow passage, Joseph was standing there smoking, wearing a cap and saluting. It is easy to recognize him. Of course he had changed, but I had already seen photos of him from his ‘American life’. I remember how in March or April 1988, in the House of Culture for medical workers, near the Nikitskie gates, the first legal event in honor of Joseph was held, led by Zhenia Rein. I had arrived from Sakhalin a couple of days before that, and Zhenia had listed me as one of the presenters. It was pleasant to be among such worthy people as M. Kozakov, Z. Gerdt, and E. Kamburova. The line for tickets began on Tverskaya (then Gorky street). Behind the curtain there was a table for the presenters, and Misha Kozakov wrote on the poster for me: ‘Genrikh, have we really come to this?’ In other words, I had arrived in New York already prepared: Zhenia Rein, Sasha Kushner, and Andrey Bitov had already visited Joseph. And in June ‘89 we spent all day walking in New York and then the whole evening alone on Morton Street. And Mary, can’t remember her name… – Masha Vorobyova? – No, someone English. – Margot Picken?

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– Yes, Margot. She stopped by and we all went upstairs to Masha Vorobyova’s for dinner. On the following day, he left, and I stayed there another day. Margot was there as well. It was a strange feeling, 17 years had passed, and it seemed only a week or a month ago that we had spoken. Though the last time we did speak was in 1983. Usually on his birthday his friends would get together. That year, in May, I was in Leningrad, and we were celebrating Joseph’s birthday at Volodia Ufliand’s. And since Joseph knew where we were meeting, he called. And either Yasha Gordin or Volodia said to him: ‘Your friend from Kamchatka is here’. We spoke for a few minutes. I noted that he did not once call me by name, and there was no information shared during the call in case somebody was listening. – In other words, you both understood that the conversation was being taped? – Of course. These were the Andropov times. Why call someone by name, let them decode it on their own. Although everything was noted: who came in, who said what. There was another contact with Joseph, I had sent him a letter from the Kurils, thinking that unlike on Kamchatka, I was not under surveillance. More accurately I had sent the letter to my volcanologist friend in Hawaii and asked him to send it to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I did not have the address, but the letter arrived. – What did you speak about with him in 1989? Did he ask you about Russia? – He asked me about Russia and specific people. He was fully informed about the main events in Russia, and concerning the situation in Russia he said: ‘In my view they (Gorbachev, the leadership) don’t really know what to do, the only solution is for the Soviet Union to join the European Union, if they will accept them. This would strengthen the Soviet Union (with a smile) and weaken the European market, which, as an American, thrills me’. He spoke with amusement and humor, but without a trace of disrespect, about his fan mail, often arriving with photos: ‘Girls offer their services: to work as secretaries, conduct correspondence, housework, and so forth. In other words, ‘wash your feet and drink water’. I will definitely answer one of them, she is 18, very pretty, and doesn’t even want anything, other than a reply. Some write that they first heard my poetry in school, how the teachers read it to them and explained it. Not bad, huh?’ Or else

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about another epistolary story (calmly, unoffensively), with the following text: ‘We will get to you, you Jewish mug’. And a few weeks later, from the same address: ‘Sorry, we mixed something up in our previous letter, please accept our apologies’. About how the most incredible predictions come to pass. I noted how in Moscow, Platonov’s Foundation Pit, was published, Brodsky had said about it back in ‘70 this book would not be published under Soviet rule. He smiled: ‘Well it’s no longer Soviet rule…’ It was 1989, the last and final CPSU congress was to take place, in the regional and city committees there were still various interim commissions and the KGB was in full force… About the recent publication of Tolia Naiman’s book about Akhmatova, he said: ‘Not a bad book, but there are lots of lies there, beginning with the first page’, of course, all of this was said with a smile. And more: ‘His A.A. sure babbled a lot, though in truth, she was a very quiet person. Plus I think he really wanted to publish all the postcards that he had received from her, but I know people who had received long letters from A. A., and they would never dream of publishing them’. When we got to the second floor, he showed me my room, and I asked him, if it was true that he steered clear of many émigrés? He smiled and replied that he didn’t avoid anyone, but he only met with those he found interesting. He did not mention any names. However, when I met with Aksyonov in Washington, and we were sitting in his house drinking ‘a shot of tea’, Vasily noted sadly: ‘You are probably the only person in the US, who yesterday visited Brodsky and today is visiting me’. From which I gathered that there were certain divisions and antagonisms. Though Rein and Naiman also met in New York and in Washington, but none of us is American. – Everyone wanted to meet with him? – Yes. While we were walking that afternoon in New York, and while his Mercedes was being serviced at a ‘Russian service station’, he asked me where I was going. I told him to Arizona. He looked at my jacket and pants, and said: ‘It’s 100 degrees there, look at what you are wearing!’ After which he took me to a store and bought me a light summer-suit. This was serious help as in those times Russians were as poor as church mice: it was impossible to buy hard currency, and with a passport for traveling abroad along with a visa it was possible

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to exchange rubles no more than $30 worth of rubles officially, with the exact amount stamped in the passport. – Did he drive you in his Mercedes? What did you think of his driving? – Yes, he did drive me, though I did not really pay much attention to it. He had a decent Mercedes, though it wasn’t new. I must say that it is not difficult to drive in the States. Except for New York, Manhattan. – Was this your last meeting with Brodsky? – There was one more meeting, in New York in 1994, on Victory Day, 9 - 10 May. He was already living in Brooklyn Heights. We were walking in New York, as we had done 5 years before, and he bought me a light jacket, some summer shoes, and for my wife, Marina, some summer clothes; after that we went and had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Buying gifts for friends and going to Chinese restaurants was for him a source of infinite delight. He had a generous nature. After that we hurried home in time to see his daughter, Nyushenka – Anna Maria Alexandra, before she went to bed. She was a lovely thing, probably not yet a year-old. There I met his wife, Maria, who was young, beautiful, and quiet. We had dinner and went up to the second floor, to his study. He read some of his recent poems and excellent translations of Euripides that he had just completed: ‘Prologue and Choir from the Tragedy Medea’, on Lyubimov’s request. He often spoke about the theatre, about its cyclical and progressive development from Antiquity to the present. He was cheerful and amusing. I always found it easy to be around him, in the 60’s as well as in the 90’s. He smoked all the time, practically chain-smoked until he ran out, then he sent me to the first floor and explained where he kept his stash, he did not want to go himself, saying: ‘Maria will figure it out, but won’t suspect you’. I have a 40-minute tape left from that meeting, it was taped with some faults, which is why I haven’t done anything with it. We parted very warmly. It was the first time over the past 35 years of meeting and parting that he hugged and kissed me. Though he was not sentimental. Perhaps he had a feeling, I don’t know. He mentioned that his health was failing, that he needed more surgery; he even asked me to find out about a certain doctor from the Leningrad Military Medical Academy. Then he asked: ‘When do you plan to go back to Moscow from Washington?’ – ‘24 May’. ‘Maybe you could postpone your re-

turn and come on the 25th for my birthday’. – ‘Of course I will’. And then we parted. On the 22nd or 23rd of May I tried to change my ticket at Aeroflot, but it was the weekend, and one had to go about 30 miles to the airport to do this. Plus Marina had to be back by the 25th in Moscow. So I called Joseph, explained to him and wished him a happy birthday. He said: ‘Fine, not the last time that we will see each other!’ But it did turn out to be the last time. Though on 30 January, Zhenia Rein, Sasha Kushner, and I arrived for the funeral and spent three days seeing him at the funeral home in Manhattan, near Morton Street and the ‘Russian Samovar’, where people would come to mourn him. On 1 February, the burial services were conducted, in the Catholic Cathedral in the morning, and in the Orthodox Church in the evening. And then he was buried, temporarily in a crypt. In the summer, he was buried for good in Venice.6 Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

Brodsky first went on a geological expedition to the White Sea in 1957. See his poem: ‘Farewell, forget me …’ (1957), Iosif Brodsky’s Collected Works, compiled by G. F. Komarov, ed. Yakov Gordin (SPb.: Pushkin Fund, 1997), Vol 1, p. 19. In a letter to Genrikh (February 1968) Brodsky wrote: ‘Everything is taking its own unpleasant course, and everyone is leading their own shitty lives. The most unpleasant thing, dear friend, is that in these conditions a person is incapable of performing such deeds that are in direct proportion to the situation he finds himself in. That only happens in the movies, with a limited plot. One ends up with a surplus of energy, some end up in the nuthouse, others become beasts, and the rest don’t end up anywhere’. Stepan Krasheninnikov. A Description of Kamchatka, p. 128 (M.: OGIZ. Geographgiz, 1948, 294 pp.). The book was published later as well, in the 60’s and 70’s. It is a classical text, the fi rst comprehensive scientific description of Kamchatka based on the results of the Bering expedition of 1740 - 1741, in which the author took part as a member of the Academy of Sciences. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Plato Elaborated’, tr. by George L. Kline, A Part of Speech (OUP, 1981), pp. 129 - 131. Ibid, ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’, tr. by George L. Kline, pp. 52 - 54. Brodsky was reburied in Venice on 21 June 1997.

6 E D WA R D B L O O M S T E I N Edward Bloomstein (born in Leningrad in 1937) is a geologist and specialist in gold deposits. After graduating from the Leningrad State University in 1962 and until 1975, when he led the geological party of the central expedition of VSEGEI (Karpinsky Russian Geological Research Institute), he engaged in the exploration of the Russian Far East. He had known Joseph Brodsky since 1959. From 1963, through 1968, he was married to Rada Rabinovich, who has compiled a collection of Brodsky’s early poetry. In 1975 Bloomstein emigrated to the US and has since worked for major geological companies in many countries, including the USA, Uruguay, Fiji, and Kazakhstan. He has authored many scientific research articles and has discovered some deposits. He has been married to Elena Shklovskaya since 1972, and over the past ten years has lived with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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P ENETR AT ING

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TH I N G S

An Interview with Edward Bloomstein (26, 30 June, 12 July 2004, London) – When and where did you first see and hear Brodsky? – I think it was either at the end of 1959 or in 1960. Brodsky was then 20 years old, and I was 23. We lived near each other: Joseph – on the corner of Pestel and Liteiny, while I lived at the intersection of Nekrasov and Grechesky, about a 5 - 10 minute walk down side streets. Joseph and I were friends, and we remained friends for a long time. We often met; I would stop by his place. I knew his parents well, and I remember that we spoke of world or Soviet politics usually in an anti-Soviet and sarcastic tone; we would share what we had found to read from the abundant flow of samizdat literature, discussing those ideas that had amazed us or about how best to fly the coop. Occasionally there would be something to drink, but that wasn’t the main purpose of our meeting, nor could we afford it much. I remember that he was always ahead of me in most things, had his own approach, but apparently found something interesting in me as well; for example, I knew the geography of the world, both physical and political, and I read a lot. Joseph and I would visit other people from either his or my circle of friends, and that is how I met Leonid Entin, Vladimir Shveigoltz, Efim Slavinsky, Aleksandr Pinsker, Leonid Aronson, and other since then famous and not so famous poets, writers, and journalists. Life in Leningrad in the 1960’s was very stimulating intellectually. Among geologists there were many poetically gifted and literary people; many of these Brodsky had met on his own. I introduced him to numerous geologist friends of mine as well, many who loved and understood poetry, as well as possibly played the guitar. But the geological circles were not known for pretty girls, only smart ones. Such was the cross-section of the generation, the background that permeated the era of the so-called ‘thaw’, or, to put it more succinctly, of the beginning of the 1960’s. Its significance became apparent later, but it was an interesting

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time to be alive. Though I cannot say that I was a close friend of Brodsky’s, I think he had many friends like me. – How soon did it occur to you that he was an unusual young man? – As soon as we had met. Especially after I had heard him read his poetry; his reading was incredible. It greatly touched me. His early poems were, of course, very good and brought him much fame. – Though he himself later rejected them. – I know, but I do not share his negative attitude toward his early poetry. Those poems by Joseph were the expression of the mood and soul of our entire generation, that same Leningrad circle, and this very proximity to that generation is what he came to dislike, beginning to see his objective as something totally different. Joseph later began to be sarcastic about those who liked his early poetry. He yearned to have done with not just the simpletons who still favored the stanzas of the Vasilievsky island, ‘Pilgrims’, or ‘The Jewish Cemetery’. – Joseph had already quit school, what about you, where did you study? – I was enrolled in the geological department of Leningrad State University. Joseph needed a typewriter in order to type his poems, and I would lend him mine. When I was away on expeditions, my mother would lend him hers. The typewriters had to be changed from time to time, otherwise the KGB could easily determine who had typed the samizdat. Many years later, when I was already living in the US, in Salt Lake City, Brodsky came to the University of Utah to give a poetry reading; a huge audience greeted him, overflowing the large university hall, so another hall was opened up where they had installed a television screen. After the reading I went up to him with my mother, and we reminisced about how Joseph would arrive by bicycle, put the typewriter into a backpack, and go out of town to Komarovo, where a typist would retype his poems. In Salt Lake City Joseph visited us at home, talked a lot about New York, and for some reason I remember that he spent a lot of time with our cat.

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– Do you remember what year it was that he gave a poetry reading at Salt Lake City? – It was in 1980. – Did you see much of each other in the States? – We did see each other, but not that much, as we lived in different parts of a large country. We emigrated in 1975, arriving in California in December. Brodsky called me within 3 - 4 days. We then lived in San Jose. After a few days Brodsky came to give a poetry reading at the University of California in Berkeley, on the other side of San Francisco Bay; he came by to get me and took me there to talk, and hear his poems and look at people. After the reading, we went to some café, where he was accompanied by a pretty girl, I don’t remember anything else about her, since I had only recently arrived, I was more worried about simple things, such as how to say in English (I pointed at my bag with books) – ‘this thing’. Joseph said: ‘Stuff, Edik, stuff’. I already mentioned his reading at the University of Utah and his visiting us at our home in Salt Lake City. The next time we saw each other, some time in 1986, when we were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was already working as the chief geologist of a large mining company and traveling all over the world. I was not in town when Brodsky arrived in Albuquerque with Maria and a friend.1 They wanted to go to museums and art galleries and see the Spanish colonial architecture of Santa Fe, an hour’s ride from Albuquerque. My wife Lena who knows all about this took them around and showed them Santa Fe. There were wonderful photographs taken by Lena from that visit, plus some advice left to me by Joseph, namely not to work so hard for a living. This from a Nobel Laureate! I think you will enjoy the photographs as well. – I did like the photographs very much, thank you. You mentioned that there were two poetry readings given by Brodsky at which you were present as well. Did his manner change? What impression did he make on the American audience? – He read very well, in the same manner and with the same cadences as he had read in Leningrad. He was more confident, was dressed very well, and looked very handsome. There were a lot

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Edward Bloomstein, 2007, London

of people in the hall, and the audience listened to him with rapt attention. I was pleasantly amazed by the audiences in America; people who hardly knew Russian, if at all, would come and listen to a foreign poet read, and after listening to a brief translation would react as if they understood everything. Of course there were enough Slavic students there, too, however I do think that most of the people in the audience were not students but from the city. – Was it difficult to see him after such a long interval? – No, we had a lot in common, even in small details, for example we shared a love of shirts. I regretted that we lived so far from Brodsky and from New York. I still have a letter that Brodsky had written to me while I was on an expedition in Yakutiya, to the small town of Chulman.2 From that letter it was clear that Brodsky did not think much of my ability to understand poetry. I can now say that he was right about life tied forever to a geologist’s hammer, my continued love of jazz, art, and much else; however when it comes to cigarettes, we differed, cigarettes and I parted ways.

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During our first meeting in America we would reminisce about work, the expeditions, and the joy of working out in the field. – Do you think that Brodsky’s desire to leave the Soviet Union arose early in him? – Yes, I think quite early. But for Joseph it was much more complicated, due to a complex attitude toward the Russian language, the language in which he wrote poetry. As I did not fully grasp how gifted he was, I did not understand the complexity of the issues. I, too, very much wanted to leave, and so I would try to inveigle him into it, though, in actuality, the final departure did not occur for another ten years or so. Now, reading over his earlier poetry, for example: ‘You’ll return to your homeland. So what. / Look around you, who needs you anymore…’, and as a geologist who is constantly on the road, I wonder how it was possible that the 19 - year-old Joseph Brodsky could so deeply grasp the contradictory feeling involved in returning home. Perhaps in this lies his unique talent of penetrating to the depth of things. – How did Brodsky work in geological expeditions and how did he feel in abandoned places? – Joseph always wanted to join an expedition, to see a totally new place, to get away from St. Petersburg for a while; plus it was important for him to be able to earn as much money as possible, so that he could spend winter solely on his literary writing. There was also a romantic but unrealized idea, when he was working in Central Asia, which was to escape the Soviet Union. Joseph was our kind of guy in field conditions; in other words, he understood what was required of him as a collector or a geologist’s assistant. He respected our profession very much. He would carry a heavy rucksack, without being perturbed about the endless walking, though occasionally it could get risky and difficult. One had to wade through large rivers in the taiga or else get across by boat. But the fishing and hunting was wonderful, one did not have to go hungry. Though there were occasions when, for weeks, all there was to eat was canned meat. It would often be very cold. Brodsky would conscientiously perform his duties, but he was a nervous kind of guy. One summer, having gotten all the way to Yakutiya,

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Joseph became melancholic on account of the death of a friend of his, Fedia Dobrovolsky, who had drowned the year before. Brodsky was tormented by fears, and decided to quit and return to Leningrad, which caused problems as the geological party could not find a replacement locally. 3 But that only happened once. In general, he would quickly get his bearings in field conditions, and he got along well with the local inhabitants. Though perhaps later, in exile in Norenskaya and in prison, he would arrive at a deeper understanding of people, and so forth. But going out into the wild and, to a certain extent, to the people, began with this field work on geological expeditions. Well maybe he wasn’t totally up to par when it came to dealing with the common folk; he rolled his r’s, was redheaded; but it wasn’t really necessary to be up to par; he knew how to get along with people and how to socialize. When you work out in the field, you come across a totally different crosssection of the population and you hear a different language than you do in Petersburg. – Genrikh Steinberg also tried to entice Brodsky to go to Kamchatka, but at the last minute Brodsky changed his mind.4 – I respect Genrikh very much; he is a great volcanologist. I was by far not the only person who would help Brodsky get hired to take part in a geological expedition. Yes, Genrikh did try to persuade Brodsky to work in the Kuril Islands; it would clearly have been interesting, but for some reason nothing came of it. – Galia Dozmarova, who now lives in Florence, also tried to get him hired to go somewhere. – Yes, that’s great that you know Galia Dozmarova. She is a very talented person, a geologist as well, and she also plays guitar very well, she is exactly from that circle of geologists that I mentioned earlier. Another person who could tell you more about Joseph’s ‘expedition motives’ is the poet Sergey Shultz, who is now a famous geologist and author of history books. I was a student of his father’s, a professor of geomorphology also named Sergey Sergeevich Shultz. I think that it was Sergey who first got Brodsky hired to take part in an expedition. Sergey at that time was already a widely educated man and his relations with Brodsky remained

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interesting for a long time. The same typist that typed Brodsky’s poems also typed Shultz’s poems. Since Shultz worked at the Geological Institute, he had some standing there, (I too later worked at that same Institute), and he would help Brodsky find good field work. – Who typically became friends with him? – Well that undoubtedly depended on how drawn he was to somebody, their particular behavior, background, or membership of a certain group. These were people who would make one feel comfortable spiritually. When a person was not interesting to talk to or spend time with, then no friendship was possible. For the most part he found other poets interesting. – Did your relations change? – A new phase in our relations began when I married Rada, a woman with a good figure, a great knowledge of Russian poetry, and an outstanding ability to memorize poetry by heart. After about a year and a half of floating from one rented apartment to another in Leningrad, we were able to purchase a cooperative apartment on the Decembrists’ island, on the 8th floor, with a view of the Finnish bay. Brodsky would visit us often; he was a friend of the family. By then we already knew that we were dealing with a great poet. He dedicated to us the wonderful ‘Housewarming Ode for Edward and Rada Bloomstein upon moving to their own apartment, composed 11 July 1966, with love, by Joseph Brodsky’. This poem, as well as those listed above, has never been published. – Unfortunately I do not have the right to include any of Brodsky’s unpublished poetry in this collection of interviews, even occasional verse. How much I would like to include this poem. – Please feel free to do so. 5 With Brodsky’s consent, Rada took upon herself the task of compiling his handwritten poems, which she performed very diligently. She began zealously to collect all of Brodsky’s new verse as well as his early verse, to the extent that this was possible. Joseph himself quickly got used to this and knowing how ethical and disciplined she was, he would himself bring her texts that he would sign and correct. Rada collected all of this into tomes of typewritten sheets, which she then sewed

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together and catalogued. I think that the circle of people studying Brodsky’s poetry, such as Lev Loseff, Petr Vail, Aleksandr Genis, Yakov Gordin, plus a handful of some older ones, all acknowledge her significant contribution; however I have never seen this formally acknowledged. – Where can it all be found? – I think, in Rada’s apartment in Paris. I know that she showed her archives to Lesha Loseff, who is compiling a volume of Brodsky’s collected poetry for ‘Biblioteka poeta’. 6 – Did you know Joseph’s parents? – Alexander Ivanovich and Maria Moiseevna were quite fond of me. I visited them a lot and they treated me as someone who could be trusted. When Joseph was in exile they had to place their calls to the Arkhangelsk region from a trunk-call station, I would often go with them when they went to the trunk-call station, as the conditions there were unpleasant. There were other things as well, and they always knew that they could count on me to get it done. They were like family for me and so it was easy for me to deal with them. – Do you remember his departure? – I do remember his departure. It happened in a hurry, incredibly quickly. Although he and I both had the presentiment that this would happen. But it was clear that he would be hounded out of Russia; thus I did not fully share his sense of nostalgia for the homeland. But what remained unclear was that neither Aleksandr Ivanovich nor Maria Moiseevna would ever be allowed to travel abroad. This ended up being a piece of dirty work on the part of the authority, unprecedented, since Brodsky was neither a political activist nor a dissident. They couldn’t stand the fact that he was a great poet and they did not have enough power to reverse this. It was mostly the local Leningrad petty scoundrels rather than the Muscovite bigwigs who were so incensed. – Max Voloshin used to say that the most important work of the poet is the poet himself. Were you witness to how Brodsky created his own personality? – Yes, I was witness to that and tried to explain here about his

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very significant self-education, following his own path in life, a tendency toward philosophical analysis, traveling in expeditions, observing nature, understanding people, women – all of this served to create Brodsky’s personality. – What has Brodsky got that no other Russian poet has? – I was always drawn to his unusual philosophical and analytical approach to life, I also enjoyed the unexpected comparisons between incomparable, that permeated his poetry. Technically speaking I enjoyed how a quatrain might get carried over into the next one in the middle of a sentence, thus lengthening the rhythm and making interesting. Concerning what ‘no other Russian poet has’, I am not a philologist and am not familiar with the terminology or methods of comparative analysis. But for me the resemblance with Mandelstam’s poetry is apparent. Perhaps you shouldn’t have asked me this. I am trying to answer conscientiously, but Joseph Aleksandrovich himself warned that when it comes to poetry, ‘I am biting a very young hedgehog’.7 – According to Rein, Brodsky walked the knife-edge between theism and atheism. In terms of religion, what is Brodsky for you, a Christian, Jew, Calvinist, or atheist? – On the one hand, of course, we all emerged from Soviet atheistic society, but towards that Brodsky had a negative attitude. I found it very important, for example, that he treated his being Jewish as a given, as something that would remain with him forever. Being Jewish for him was a normal thing; he was much more calm about it than many others, though it is difficult to ignore the deep-rooted anti-Semitic tradition of Russia, which makes being a Jew in Russia far from desirable. One has to live outside Russia to understand this, and even then some never come to feel that way. I am not one easily to understand Brodsky’s religiousness. Of course he searched the Christian path intensively; that is clear from his Nativity and other poems, but there was a threshold that he would not cross. He did not respect the State of Israel and refused to go there, most likely out of fear of being branded. He chuckled when he was included in the book, ‘Famous Jews’. On the other hand, there have always been plenty of Jews who were christened and

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then became Christian writers and noted Christian activists, and though I truly believe that this is their own business, I have always felt somewhat uncomfortable about it. I think that his discretion would not have allowed Brodsky to pursue this path. But that is my personal point of view; it is not founded on anything. – He refused to discuss this. – And rightly so. When a person belongs to a certain church or synagogue, then after the service people usually spend an hour or so socializing with other worshippers, to help or seek help from others; it is a definite kind of social institution. But faith is something else, and it is deeply personal and perhaps has not yet been fully formulated. Clearly he did not wish to discuss it. It is all in his writing. For me, Joseph was the kind of Jew, who is definitely engaged in a religious search, primarily Christian, and he covered much territory, but at the same time he considered it to be tactless to depart from what he had been born as, as well as from those among whom he grew up. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

Notes 1

2

3

Brodsky could not have traveled to Albuquerque with Maria in 1986 as he had only met his future wife in 1990. This letter is written in verse. The Brodsky Estate would not allow me to include any unpublished poems, even occasional poems dedicated and addressed to my interlocutors. Here is how Sergey Shultz describes this incident: ‘There were 4 geologists and 4 collectors in the party; they were to conduct geological surveys and other related prospecting work in the eastern part of the Aldan shield. They arrived first in Irkutsk, from there they went to Yakutsk, and from Yakutsk to Ust’-Maya. From Ust’-Maya they took a special flight to the settlement of Nilkan where they waited for deer. Brodsky was gripped by a terrible sense of nostalgia. Two years before that time, during a geological party’s fieldwork, a young collector, an 18-year-old boy, Fedia Dobrovolsky, had died. Joseph took this death very hard and dedicated a couple of poems to his memory. And so during their idle stay in this tiny settlement, he began to feel constricted by mortal anguish and presentiments of death. Joseph told me

4 5 6

7

later what he had felt: a few more days, and he would die from the same kind of attack as Fedia Dobrovolsky had suffered. Knowing Joseph’s expansive nature and remembering the condition he was in when he had returned to Leningrad, I was convinced that this really might have happened. And he notified the leader of the party that he was sick, that he urgently needed to go home, and then he left on the next available flight back to Ust’-Maya and then Yakutsk, leaving one of the geologists of the party without a collector, something that the leader of the party, G.Iu. Lagzdina never forgave him for, and which was recalled in the trial of March 1964’. Sergey Shultz, ‘Joseph Brodsky from 1961 - 1964’, Zvezda, no. 5, 2000, p. 76. See my interview with Genrikh Steinberg in this collection. See note 2. Lev Loseff is working on commentaries to Brodsky’s Selected poetry for the ‘Biblioteka poeta’ series. From an unpublished letter in verse form.

7 M I K H A I L A R D OV Mikhail Viktorovich Ardov (1937) graduated from Moscow University as a journalist, worked on Moscow radio, and now is a senior priest at a Moscow church. He has published several books, including Legendarnaya Ordynka (Legendary Ordynka, 1995), Monographiya o grafomane (Monograph about a graphomaniac, 2004) and Anna Akhmatova: Ozorstvo moe… (My mischief, 2006).

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L E AV I N G T H I S P L A C E IMPOSSIBLE BUT L I V ING HERE I S A L S O – I N C O N C E I VA B L E An Interview with Mikhail Ardov (4 September 2004, Moscow)

– Brodsky strayed at your apartment on more than one occasion, what sort of guest was he? – Wonderful, intelligent, tactful; the sort who makes an effort to reduce the number of inconveniences to a minimum. Besides that, he would even try not to eat dinner every day so as not to be a burden on the family. – What sort of people did he find it easy to talk to? Were they very diverse? – As I see it, they were very diverse. Obviously they had to have some traits he felt at ease with. For one thing they would have some interest in poetry, for another they would be easy-going and tactful, and thirdly he had some sort of scientific interest. I think in finding a single common denominator, impossible as far as that went. – Did you get the impression that Brodsky was a bit afraid of being like everybody else in everyday life? – No, never. He wasn’t afraid of being like everybody else and he wasn’t afraid of being simply the man he was. We and every other normal human being had to accept him as he was – with all human weaknesses – at times, a little irritable, angry even, but never inclined to pounce on you. He was very sensitive and never burdened anyone with his own problems. He valued sympathy but never demanded it of his friends and he would never lay his troubles on you. – It was your father, Viktor, Efimovich Ardov, who advised Brodsky to sign himself into the Kaschenko psychiatric hospital in December 1963 and it was with his help also that he managed to get himself out of there very quickly. Could you give us a few details about the circumstances? – Evgeny Rein’s memory failed him when he wrote about this, it is nonsense that Ardov liberated Brodsky by getting hold of some tickets for Leonid Utesov’s concert and giving them to the head psychiatrist.1

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Mikhail Ardov in his church in Moscow (no date)

I don’t know where to find a worthy comparison for that – kissing the matron somewhat higher than the elbow possibly and getting Brodsky out as a reward. In fact, besides my father, there was another person drawn into the affair, our mutual friend, still flourishing, Mikhail Yurevich Yarmush. He is a psychiatrist and also a poet and translator, with books to his name. Akhmatova thought highly of him. And, as a psychiatrist, he had a part to play in this. As I recall getting into the hospital was easy. Extricating someone once they were there was another matter all together. None the less they pulled it off. I’ve put into print how Yuliya Markovna Zhivova and I arrived at that awful madhouse-hospital and spotted Brodsky strolling amongst the throng of unfortunates in the grounds. He ran up to the fence and shouted ‘I can’t stand it here; get Ardov to get me out of here – quickly!’ By the way if he had been more patient – we knew a whole string of reasons why he had to be back in Peter – he could, of course, have gained time or have avoided all that scandal.2 – Roughly how many days was he in there? – About five days, I think. Not long at all. – It’s a widely held belief that Brodsky’s position was not defended by any of the older generation of writers because he had insulted many of them with his very sharp criticism. Is there any truth in that?

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– I don’t think so. No. Up to a certain point, incidentally, my father very actively helped him and then, I never understood the reasons, he stepped aside and threw in the towel. It’s all in Lidiya Chukovskaya’s diaries about how Ardov phoned up Tolstikov.3 In Leningrad it simply wasn’t possible to get him on to phone, but my father understood him to be a constant visitor at the Hotel Moscow in the capital and somehow managed to find the number of his room and phone him there. Besides that, Marshak and Chukovsky sent telegrams to the court. And Lidiya Chukovskaya herself, not to mention Anna Akhmatova, did their bit, so it’s simply not true. I think it was rather the younger and the not so old generation who were quite simply jealous of his talent and his popularity – like that bastard Voevodin who testified in court – those were the ones who had it in for him. – How did you form your own conceptions of Brodsky’s poetry? Did Akhmatova and your parents influence you, or did you come to them independently? – Absolutely independently. I did get to know him in 1962 when he was twenty-two and I was already twenty-five. At that time, educated by Akhmatova, I had a fully formed taste in poetry. I didn’t need anybody’s recommendations. I appreciated the extent of the man’s talent pretty quickly. – Did he read you his poetry as you strolled about or at your home? – Everywhere. I remember the way he read when I went to see him at his place on Liteiny Prospect. He was always keen to read his poetry. – Poetry he’d just written or early poetry as well? – Both. And he would give me his poetry. – We know that Joseph didn’t exactly reject his early work but he did stop loving it. What do you think of it? – I know that Lermontov would be horrified to learn that his early efforts were in print. Akhmotva couldn’t stand her early poems, which they blamed her for all her life: things like of ‘A grey-eyed king’ or ‘Gloves for the left hand…’ Brodsky was such a bright light that there can be no reservations – his early poems are excellent. And, besides, very few of his poems are bad. Something not true of Russian poets in general; possibly Mandelstam is another case – but that’s another story. It’s understandable; every poet sees his own

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poetry subjectively and it’s not possible for us to enter his mind – nevertheless, there’s no gainsaying the worth of the early poems. – What was the greatest trial for Brodsky in the way he had to live in the Soviet Union? – Simply the humiliation of existence, the lack of money. The fact that he, an adult, a grown-up person with such talent, had to live off his parents, behind that fragile wall, in a portioned-off bit of a room. The humiliation of Soviet life in general and his own particular situation, where he was unable to earn enough money, the impossibility of seeing his poetry in print – and so on. – In your book ‘Monograph about a Graphomaniac’ you describe one of the last days Brodsky spent in the Soviet Union which you spent together going round the courts. What is your impression? Did they drive him from the country or did he want to leave – as some of the people I’ve talked with have said? – I think it was an ambivalent situation. A bit of one and a bit of the other. I’ll cite what he said near his house, near the Preobrazhensky Cathedral; ‘Leaving this place is impossible but living here is also – inconceivable!’ There’s no disputing, that he had notions of getting out. I remember… By the way, I’ve never said this in print you can be the first to publish this – if you like. We had this friend, Mike Toomey, an Irishman who worked for the British, helping to set up exhibitions. Brodsky and myself would visit him and he would feed us and we’d drink whiskey. We particularly appreciated one of the canned goods – marinated tongue, which we called ‘the English language’.4 Usually the exhibition would be in Moscow in Sokolniki Park. And then, for some reason, Mark turned up in Leningrad (I wasn’t there) and he invited Brodsky to dine aboard a British ship in the port. Brodsky told me about it and I’ll remember to my dying day this one sentence of his: ‘You just can’t imagine, Mikhail, what I felt when I found myself aboard a British vessel flying the British flag!’ I wouldn’t say that the Soviets threw him out specially, but all his life, all that existence, which pressed down on him – and he was a sensitive person, extremely gifted – he felt all that pressure rather more than your average person and, of course, the whole Soviet way of doing things was squeezing him, forcing him out. In the end there was no way it could not have turned out as it did. Praise is to God that it happened the way

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it did, because anything could have happened to him if he’d stayed here. – Most of those who wished him ill, in the West and in Russia, reckoned that his persecution by the authorities created a ‘classic biography’ for him, just as Akhmatova had foretold. To what extent did that ‘biography’ help create his international fame? – Those circumstances, no doubt, made his fame possible or, as they would say nowadays, were not bad PR, and all that. But you have to realise that there were, roughly speaking, about a dozen other writers who left in similar circumstances but, somehow, not one of them was awarded the Nobel Laureate – not Sinyavsky, not Maksimov. Yes, there is that element to his biography, but after all, a biography is just a biography. – Incidentally, how do feel about his heirs vetoing his biography for the next forty-two years? – I think it is foolish. No heir owns a writer, any poet, in that way – certainly not a great one. They can only make matter worse with an embargo of that sort, because in such cases you will get not very scrupulous people wanting to work on it rather than people who are capable of doing a good and useful job and with high standards. – Doesn’t it seem to you that because the political element in his biography was so emphasised by others, Brodsky himself refused to talk about his persecution by the KGB, refused to stress the role of the courts (as recorded by Frida Vigdorova), and Vigdorova’s help which hurt many of her friends, and refused to condemn the Soviet Union; thus trying to sideline those political elements in his biography so he could be judged, above all, on the strength of his poetry? – Somehow that isn’t something I’d considered, because I don’t read much of that kind of literature – for a variety of reasons – and the three volume, Brodsky is enough for me to think about, but I would suggest that there is a portion of truth in that, because his business in life was poetry and literature. It did sicken him, of course, when he was dragged over into the political portion of the spectrum. I never talked to him about it and there was never occasion to do so after he left the country I only ever saw him the once – specifically the 5th of March 1995. And anyway he was always somewhat squeamish when it came to politics – just as I myself am. – Yet another big difference between Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn.

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– By the way, here’s your chance to be the first to publish this criticism of Solzhenitsyn that Brodsky made. As we both know there is rather a stupid piece of writing by Solzhenitsyn in which he dissects Brodsky’s poetry rather crassly, in my opinion.5 It does not do Solzhenitsyn himself much credit and shows him up as a rather mean-minded kind of man. When Solzhenitsyn was given the Nobel Prize, Brodsky was still over here and he said, ‘Solzhenitsyn should have been given the Nobel prize not for Literature but for Medicine, for curing himself of cancer’. – Do you know anything about Brodsky’s attitude towards Pasternak? Boris Leonidovich’s English relations are convinced that Brodsky did not like Pasternak. Did you and Brodsky ever talk about him? – Never, I can’t recall a single conversation about him. – Your father used to talk about the extreme brutality of Marshal Zhukov. What was his reaction to Brodsky’s poem ‘On the Death of Zhukov’? – I don’t know. At the time he was already very ill – he may not even have read the poem. – And you, personally, how do you see it? – It’s a very good poem though, of course, it is one-sided because Zhukov was an incredible bastard and, now, Viktor Suvorov has published one book and will be bringing out another volume in which everything will be brought into the clear light of day. The Soviets were full of outright lies – you just couldn’t imagine; for instance Pavlik Morozov was not a Pioneer and I have a mass of other examples… And Zhukov, their very leading architect of Victory was a looter, a sadist and a brown-noser of the first water. Incidentally Suvorov called his book Shades of Victory. But Brodsky didn’t know any of that. A poet as we know from Pushkin’s verse, is free to choose the subject of poetry where he will and make of it a masterpiece. – Brodsky greeted almost every Christmas with a new poem. Does it follow from that that the motif of Christmas is the most important theme in his spiritual development? – No, I don’t find that is very convincing, particularly the way he described Candlemass Day in the poem ‘Nunc Dimittis’. I think those poems are just a reflection of the holiday itself. The spirit of the festival got into his blood. It’s the Christmas trees and all that – January and the pine needles. It’s got nothing to do with God made flesh.

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– Isn’t there an element of rivalry in that with Pasternak? – No, no. I say that with conviction since I’m no fan of Pasternak’s religious verse. There are only two of those poems of his, which are any good. The rest are all very ersatz, imitations of the religious spirit. – So you don’t consider Brodsky a religious poet? – No. In general it’s my opinion that there can be no such creature as a religious poet. My own profound conviction is that all art is worldly and poetry especially so – its more demonic than godly in spirit. The Muse is more inclined to arouse demons than angels. The Demonic is at times, very apparent; at others it’s hidden away. It’s apparent in Pushkin’s ‘The clouds scurry, the clouds whirl…’, or in Blok’s ‘The Twelve’. Both Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova – I never talked to Brodsky about this – were well aware of the nature of this arcane gift. And, so, I consider a religious poet to be a contradiction in terms. Moreover I consider that real religious poetry is the work of a very few people – Pushkin, for example in ‘Reverend Fathers – Hermits’ because, intrinsically, all those meters, the iambs and chorees have, for centuries on end, served opposing principles – demonic principles specifically – and saying something, in that language, about religious subjects is difficult in the extreme and only in a handful of cases does it succeed. The nature of poetry in itself is such that it lies outside the religious sphere. – Yes, Brodsky also said that, ‘the craft always weaves a plot against the soul’, but, at the same time he believed that his work was, to a large extent, work for the glory of God.6 – It’s completely possible to say that. – In what kind of God did Brodsky believe? – What kind of God? You could have put that question to him, perhaps, but I’m not convinced that he would have answered anybody on that point. In any case, as I recall, there was one vital conversation when I got christened at the beginning of the 1960’s, in 1964, I think. We were walking along Klementovsky Lane between Piatnitskaya and Ordynkaya and I asked Brodsky. ‘And you wouldn’t consider being christened?’ To which he replied in English, ‘I am a Jew’. I wrote about that. I think that theme vanished off into the wings over the years. In any case, in the summer of 1995, less than six months before his death, I got a letter from him in which he asked me: ‘what do you think, Mishenka, does adhering to one, or another, religious

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doctrine enlarge the metaphysical potential of the individual or does it tend to narrow it?’ I replied that, without doubt, it was enlarging; however, unfortunately he didn’t have very long to live. That’s to say it may be that he made a few steps in that direction but how far he went and what came of it, in his remarkably fine mind, we shall never know. – You are sure that Brodsky was never christened? His mother told Natalya Grudinina that when they were evacuated to Cherepovets the woman who was nursing him in his mother’s absence had Joseph baptised without his mother’s consent. I’ve asked a few people to find out about that from the church in Cherepovets, but it appears to be impossible. – Absolutely impossible. If that had been in Tsarist Russia there would have been an entry in the Church Register. But in 1943 you can imagine how that sort of thing was done – and doubly so if it was done without the mother’s consent. In this case it has no specific meaning for the following reason. We know that nowadays 80% of the Russian people have been christened however they have no connection at all with the church. Brodsky even if he wasn’t christened had one big advantage he did have some understanding of religion and some sort of outlook, which could be termed religious. – The theme of death is the litmus paper of poetic ethics. Do Brodsky’s exercises in the in memoriam genre pass the test? – I think so, yes. Without a doubt. He was a steadfast man. I remember the verses Petr Vail read on Radio Liberty in the days following his death, very remarkable lines, which made the deepest impression on me. Incidentally, even now I’ve never seen them in print. However I can recall them without the least hesitation: ‘I know what I am saying, building a cohort out of letters… / Marble narrows my aorta’.7 – ‘The main thing is a grand design’, said Brodsky to Akhmatova . Which of his own designs would you call grand? – First of all that question is incorrectly put, again design and so forth. I don’t think you can make a judgment along those lines. Brodsky set himself an imposing task in his poetry, and eighty times out of a hundred, maybe even more, he attained striking results. – Let’s put the question another way. How do you see the map of the world that Brodsky drew? –That question I can’t answer.

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– Brodsky regretted that, as he said, ‘I didn’t write my ‘Divine Comedy’’. Tatiana Shcherbina affirms that he did, but as a series of frescoes. – But you see this is the way it is. His Divine Comedy is a one time thing – for all eternity. It stands between the Middle Ages and Modern Times. It’s absolutely unique. Even Shakespeare, who is, really, Dante’s peer, did not write The Divine Comedy. No one is going to write it again, ever, because as Pushkin said just the plan of The Divine Comedy – the way the Cosmos is constructed with Hell, Purgatory, Paradise is pure genius. And that Brodsky’s regret speaks for those grand designs of his! It’s just not possible to compare anybody with Dante but, in the ranks of poets who have come after Dante, he is far from the last. – And does he hold comparison with Pushkin? – Well, you know Pushkin for Russia is also… – Our everything? – That is, of course, an idiotic phrase of the same like as Dostoevsky’s ‘Beauty will save the world’ but there is an element of Pushkin in him, in his grand, self-evident multifarious. He could be serious, he could be playful, he could write hooligan poetry, limericks, etc. And if you compared Brodsky and Blok you would find Blok very monotonous in comparison. – What was the greatest truth that he said about the times we’re living in? – He formulated a remarkable ethical principle, which is very pertinent to our contemporary world – ‘the thief is dearer to me than the bloodsucker’ (‘I, for one, prefer a vulture to a vampire’, George Kline’s translation).8 – Your own book, ‘A Monograph about Graphomaniac’ you decided to conclude with the death of Brodsky. How did you learn of his death and how did it leave you feeling? – At that very time I was flying into New York, New Jersey and was intending to get in touch with him and arrange a meeting. I phoned Aleshkovsky and asked how Joseph was. He told me that he was in a bad way, a very bad way and was about to have another heart surgery. I said, ‘Then I won’t call him, you talk to him and tell him I’m over here and give him my phone number. He can give me a call when he’s feeling better’. That was on the 27th of January and, on the morn-

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ing of the 28th someone I knew who was then living in America called me and told me Joseph had died. After that Russian radio called me to say something on air. Really, for me that was a big thing. After all I’d flown in to be with him. We’d agreed that that was what I’d do the spring of the year previous. I sort of knew he had heart problems but, apparently, he wasn’t in line to die. However the Almighty made His decision. – And Brodsky’s funeral and the fortieth day prayers and the re-intermerment in Venice all of it according to Christian ritual… – That wasn’t right in my opinion. It’s true there was Maria who’s Catholic. I, in any case, didn’t attend the requiem service. I’m not sure that he would have approved and because I wasn’t sure then I… I really do pray and beseech God’s mercy for him and, if God be willing, his entry into the Heavenly Kingdom, but saying those words the words that you say and chant didn’t seem quite right. – This question is my personal question. I always, whenever I enter a church, in any part of the world, light a candle for him. Do you think that’s the right thing to do? – Absolutely. It’s completely right to do that. – You wrote that you supported Brodsky in his wish not to return home when he received the invitation from Anatoly Sobchak. What was your reasoning? There are a lot of people who really can’t forgive him for not wanting to visit Russia. – It wasn’t so much that I supported his reluctance to make the trip. It was more a case of not seeing him consorting with Sobchak and becoming a professor in some sort of quack university Sobchak was setting up in Petersburg9 – it wouldn’t have been fitting for Brodsky to be involved in that. Not that I have a particular dislike for Sobchak but when he invited Brodsky to his Petersburg I remembered Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon trying to get Akhmatova to be their personal guest – this was in 1965 – and Akhmatova didn’t go and said ‘It would never enter my head to invite the Pope to be my guest’. Sobchak’s invitation to Brodsky was the same as inviting the Pope. There was one amusing moment to do with that. Sobchak promised Brodsky there would be an evening celebration at the October Hall. I told Brodsky, ‘You’ve got something you can read, for example, “we have razed a Greek church, to make space / for a new concert hall, built in today’s / grim and unhappy style”, it’s the very spot’.10 Just imagine.

Brodsky goes to Leningrad and makes his appearance at the October Hall! Do you know what Brodsky inscribe his book for Sobchak? – ‘Gorodskomu golove ot gorodskogo sumasshedshego’ (‘To the city chief from the city madman’ )? – Really splendidly, don’t you think? Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9 10

E. Rein, Zametka marafontsa (A Note of a Maraphon Man), (Ekaterinburgh, 2003), pp. 129 - 130. Ardov had in mind the first Brodsky trial of 18 February 1964. Tolstikov, V. S. was the first Secretary of the Communist Party of Leningrad region. In Russian both ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ means ‘yazyk’. A. Solzhenitsyn, ‘Iosif Brodsky – izbrannye stikhi’, Novyi mir, 1999, no. 12. Iosif Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, sostavitel V. Polukhina (M: Zakharov, 2006), p. 553. From Brodsky poem of 1995 ‘To Cornelius Dolabelle’; see his Russian collection Peizazh s navodneniem (Ardis, 1995), p. 197. Joseph Brodsky, ‘A Letter to a Roman Friend’, A Part of Speech (OUP, 1980), p. 53. It was European University in St Petersburg which still exists. In 1966 Brodsky wrote a poem ‘A Halt in the Desert’ about the Greek Orthodox church, which was torn down during the mid-1960s and replaced with the October Concert Hall. see his Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 131 - 133, translated from the Russian by George Kline.

8 O L EG TSE L KOV Oleg Tselkov was born in Moscow in 1934. He studied at the Moscow School of Art, the Minsk Institute of the Fine Arts, and the Ilya Repin Academy of Art. He graduated from the N. P. Akimov Department of the Leningrad Theatrical Institute. Since 1977 Tselkov has been living in Paris, France. He was a participant in many ‘non-conformist’ art exhibits. Tselkov’s paintings can be found in several museums and private collections in Europe, US, and Japan. In Russia, his paintings are in the National Tretyakov Museum, the A. S. Pushkin Museum of the Fine Arts, the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

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WI T H

HIS OWN POINT OF ON EV ERY T H ING

VI E W

An Interview with Oleg Tselkov (June 2004) – You had many friends among poets, including Brodsky. – Although I was friends with many Russian poets, I do not consider myself tied to the literary world. I don’t even know literature all that well, neither contemporary nor the classics. And I don’t think that anything I might tell you now about Brodsky would be of interest for professional poets. Most likely what I have to say will sound like something out of the memoirs genre, and so I beg forgiveness in advance if what I say is not be of great interest. I wanted to remember and write down even the most insignificant episodes connected with Joseph Brodsky. – Well in that case, let’s begin with some kind of interesting story. – Interesting? Here is an interesting story that may help one picture the young Brodsky. Once in St. Petersburg he and I were walking towards my place; I had sprained my foot slightly and it was hurting. I was limping somewhat. And then suddenly, at the entrance of my house, where I lived on the sixth floor without an elevator, Joseph, without a word, like some strong buddy or the even the father of a small son, picks me up and carries me up the stairs piggyback. After a few floors I come to myself amazed and in deep gratitude, after which I proceeded to ascend the stairs on my own, but Joseph continued to help me, holding me by the arm. The blood flowing in him was young; the weak heart would come later. But even later, when we met, he would not clutch his heart, but instead would easily down half a dozen shots of vodka and chain-smoke after having torn the filters off the cigarettes. – Could you tell about how you first met Brodsky, where, when, and how? – I must admit that I don’t remember exactly. It happened in Leningrad; maybe it was 1958 or 1959, or maybe later. I used to be close friends with a group of young poets who got together and drunk

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Oleg Tselkov, from his book Tselkov (Milano: Fabbri Editori, 1988)

vodka. We were all on the average about 20 then, Mikhail Eryomin, Leonid Vinogradov, Vladimir Kondratov, and Vladimir Ufliand. I was also friends with two St. Petersburg poets, Anatoly Naiman and Evenly Rein. It was through one of those two, most likely Anatoly Naiman, that I met Brodsky. – If it was through Anatoly Naiman, then it could not have been earlier than 1959, as Naiman himself only met Brodsky in the fall of 1959. – I don’t remember either the year or the circumstances. In general I don’t have a very good memory for past events. It’s probably because I am rather egocentric and am not much interested in the world around me; more in my own personal existence. But I do remember that he made quite an impression on me, right away, from our very first meeting! I sensed in him a kindred spirit, since I too then was being dubbed a so-called genius; in other words, I didn’t give a hoot about anything: teachers, authority figures. And it seemed to me that Brodsky too was made of the same material; he was self-confi-

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dent, not self-ingratiating, nobody’s follower, but with his own point of view on everything. I also liked him because he was so unusual looking. A redhead, he rolled his r’s hopelessly, and all of this made the somewhat insolent expression of his face somehow attractive. – Where and how did you first hear Brodsky read his poems? – I don’t remember where I first heard his poems; perhaps it was at Kirill Kostsinsky’s home. Brodsky’s style of reading was unusual, I had never before heard this type of reading. He looked like a desperately praying Jew, swinging back and forth with his eyes closed, singing at the top of his voice in this, I would call it, a nasal falsetto, a type of singsong where all the words come one after another. Certain word – combinations would jump out of this singing, making an unfamiliar, powerful impression. I can compare this impression with what I experienced when I was 14 years old and in the library first got my hands on a book by Mayakovsky with his poem, ‘A Cloud in Pants’. When I first started to understand ‘The Cloud’, I was stunned, shocked. I started out by looking for the rhymes hidden in the famous ‘ladder’, then pulling the words into lines, then looking for the subject, predicate, and finally the meaning in this unclear but mesmerizing text that drew me like a magnet. After which the impression from the poem, strong enough initially, increased a thousand fold. That is approximately how, a decade or so later, I reacted to Brodsky’s poetry. And usually everyone else present was equally impressed. The second thing that amazed me in his poems, and here I would again compare this with the effect of Mayakovsky’s ‘The Cloud’; that it was an absolutely new poetics. This did not resemble the traditional Russian verse that we were used to at all. Not at all. If classical Russian poetry sounded fully intelligible and its material was usually well known and understandable, when it came to Brodsky, it was all about unusual things. What amazed one was the form, whereby a complex sentence with a few subordinate clauses would intertwine in an endless spiral. I would also compare it to the impression I got from reading Dostoevsky. I opened one of his novels and started reading it, but got stuck on the very first page. It seems to me so curious, in terms of style, that I began to read it again and again. The third time I read that page, marking all the subordinate

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clauses, I looked at the big fat book, closed it, and decided that I might not be able to get through it. What I mean to say is that Brodsky’s poetry reminded me (please forgive me, but as an artist I have the right to such foolishness) of a page out of a Dostoevsky novel but in rhymed verse. Brodsky wove the cloth of prose into poetry and poetry into prose, while the prose, in turn, would wrap itself, with the help of rhyme and some amazing interlocking of words, into incredibly unprecedented poetry. By that time I had already been old friends with the then famous poet Evgeny Evtushenko, whom I once asked what he thought of Brodsky’s poetry. At that time, almost half a century ago, he replied that it did not resemble Russian versification. Indeed, Brodsky’s poetry was perceived as something unprecedented. And this is precisely where I detect a great similarity with Mayakovsky, his being so out of the ordinary. – Other scholars have noted the similarity of their poetics. – I don’t mean to say that Brodsky’s poetry resembles that of Mayakovsky. They are very different poets, but they both entered Russian poetry as if they ‘fell out of the sky’. – Yes, and Viktor Krivulin wrote something similar about his impression of Brodsky’s public performance: ‘We, as teenagers, were overwhelmed by the sense of a new, unheard music’.1 How did Brodsky surprise you most of all as a person? – What further amazed me about Brodsky and what made us become kind of friends, though I did not read his poems all that much, nor did he look at my artwork. The thing is, it wasn’t important for me whether or not my paintings were exhibited, just as it wasn’t important for him whether or not his poetry was published. The most important thing was to create. And by far not everyone shared this point of view. – What did the Soviet system see in his poetry as being dangerous and seditious? – It so happened that the so-called socialism at that time had routinely cracked. As is well known, legally we have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Thus I could paint my paintings and show them at home to my friends, and that was not forbidden. Brodsky too could write his poetry and give poetry readings at someone’s home,

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and this too was not forbidden. It was difficult to fabricate some kind of political charge if there were no clear anti-Soviet slogan in either the poetry or the paintings. But at the same time, people like us serve significantly to destroy the monolith of Soviet power, as in a totalitarian regime, conformity is the rule. So they would try to find out what made these individuals click, so as to either placate or isolate them. Brodsky was tried and sent into exile not for his poetry as such, but for being Joseph Brodsky, for being an individual. But the most important thing is that though he lived in the Soviet system, he was a person who had nothing in common with anything ‘Soviet’. The authorities miscalculated; they had no clue that the Brodsky trial would become so notorious. The Petersburg authorities had decided to scare the Petersburg intelligentsia, and Brodsky seemed to be the most appropriate figure. But this backfired and the opposite happened, it caused his name to become famous. – As an artist were you at all affected by the Brodsky trial? Since the State also considered your artwork as heretical. – I must admit that I was often afraid that someone might push me under a car. But one should be ready for anything. As we can see, Joseph was ready; he did not lift his hands in surrender nor beg for mercy. – Did you see him often? – At first we would run into each other quite often in Petersburg. We both liked dropping by the café, ‘Uyut’, where we would order a bottle of wine, some inexpensive snack and chat about whatever. These were not serious discussions about art; it was just a pleasant way of passing the time, talking. I visited him in his unusual room that one had to enter through a closet serving as a doorway; one would open the door of the closet and enter his room through the other end. He liked everything that did not resemble the typical; he enjoyed the whimsical playfulness. When I first entered his room, I saw a few encyclopedias, including a geological one. This amazed me. Now it occurs to me that he probably got his education from dipping into different encyclopedias. He also managed to accomplish a remarkable feat at that

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time, in the 7th grade he left school and never returned. This was an incredible feat, even unbelievable. – Permit me to correct you: Brodsky left school not in the 7th but in the 8th grade. – I might be wrong, but in any case, when he left school he went to work as a milling-machine operator. He was not an office boy; he was not afraid of the rough life. And moreover he never hid his ‘redheadedness’ nor his ‘r-rolling’. – Did Brodsky understand art? – I don’t think he understood it much; probably in the same way as I understood poetry. Though maybe more than I did poetry. But in any case I was very flattered when I showed him my work and he reacted with enthusiasm. Many years later, when I visited him in his apartment in America, I was astounded to see a poster on his wall that had a reproduction of one of my paintings. I was very flattered. – Did you and Brodsky maintain your relations in the West? – Yes, we would see each other quite often in New York, then in Paris, and even in Venice and Turin. Once when I was taking a walk in Venice, there was Joseph calling to me. It was a totally chance meeting. He suggested that we get photographed together. We were standing in the famous St. Mark’s Square, surrounded by pigeons. The photographer apparently had fed them on purpose. Brodsky had the photographs developed and gave me one. It should be in Vladimir Maramzin’s archives, I gave it to him for safekeeping, since I don’t save any files or archives. – I most definitely have seen this photograph somewhere. It was published. – And something else I remember. When we were walking in Venice, he suddenly asked me whether or not I knew the following poem by heart: When for the mortal the loud day falls silent And on the mute squares of the city Sinks down the half-transparent shade of night And sleep, reward of daily toils, – At that time for me in the silence drag

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Hours of tormenting wakefulness: In the nocturnal idleness more briskly (burn) gnaw in me The hear-serpent’s bites; Fancies seethe up; in the mind weighed down by grief There crowds an excess of oppressive thoughts; Remembrance wordlessly before me Unrolls her lengthy scroll; And with revulsion reading [there] my life, I quail and curse And bitterly complain, and bitterly shed tears, But cannot wipe away the grievous lines. 2

I did not remember it by heart. What was unexpected was that it was this very poem, and by heart. – Don’t you think that Brodsky could apply the last quatrain of this poem by Pushkin to his own life? Since he called himself ‘the devil incarnate’.3 You mentioned that you had seen him in Turin. What were you doing there, and what was Joseph doing there? – My wife Tonya and I went to Turin to visit the publishing house that was publishing an album of my artwork. And we found out that Joseph was going to be reading his Nobel Prize lecture at a theater.4 We called him at his hotel, went over to visit him. ‘I just arrived from Spain where I wrote this lecture’, – said Joseph. He looked a bit dusty, a reddish-brown jacket and shoes, but Tonya noticed was some kind of cloth hanging from the tail of his jacket. – ‘Joseph, what is this?’ – Tonya asked. Grinning, he waved away with his hand: ‘The lining of the pocket is torn’. To our great astonishment, that evening, in the theater hall full of richly dressed people, our new Nobel laureate, with a bunch of sheets of paper in his hands, ascended the platform wearing the same outfit as earlier that day, with the lining hanging from the tail of his jacket. After the lecture a party begins in the foyer. ‘We’re going to leave’, – I tell him, – ‘so as not to bother you’. ‘Where are you going?’ – ‘To have dinner with the publisher of my art book’. And suddenly: ‘Can you take me with you?’ – ‘You are an important person now, a ‘Nobel’, you can be taken anywhere’, I laugh. And we suddenly and quietly take our leave.

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– Tell me about your meetings in Paris. – Once in Paris, Joseph, together with Lev Loseff and Veronique Schilz, if my memory serves me right, came over for some vodka and pelmeni [meat dumplings] prepared by my mother-in-law. Jokingly I asked him whether or not he was able to extemporize. Within a few seconds he had written on my mother-in-law’s tablecloth: Here ate dumplings the ready to betray his motherland, Joseph Brodsky. 5

This verse is especially dear to me now that he is no longer with us. I also attended his poetry readings when he came to Paris. But he no longer sang his poems as he used to. And once he even read his poems as prose, not breaking them up into rhymed lines, not stressing the rhyme but losing it. – Did you ever talk to him about other poets? – I don’t think it would have been very interesting for him to discuss other poets with me. But one thing I remember absolutely. When Vysotsky died, I asked Brodsky what he thought of Vysotsky, whether or not he would remain in Russian literature. Brodsky replied as follows: ‘In literature, it’s doubtful, but maybe in folklore’. Those are his literal words. – What do you know about the friendship-competition between Evtushenko and Brodsky? Based on what Rein has told me, Evtushenko tried to help Brodsky after he was released from exile in 1965. – Based on what Evtushenko told me, he took a direct part in Brodsky’s release. In the fall of 1965, right after Brodsky had been released from exile, Brodsky, Naiman, and Evtushenko spent a quiet evening having dinner at my apartment in Tushino. I have been friends with Evtushenko all my life. As far as I can understand, Brodsky was in conflict with Evtushenko. But I was absolutely sure that Evtushenko did not experience any kind of hostility toward Brodsky. I know Evtushenko very well; he is quite benevolent. But on Brodsky’s part, I think, there was some aggressiveness. What was it caused by? I think they were total opposites as poets,

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antipodes. And Brodsky, as the younger one, made a stand for his new way. It was, the way I see it, a point of view and not hate. It was a kind of moral enmity. Clearly Brodsky was sickened by the fact that Evtushenko was a successful poet in the USSR, published in huge editions, wealthy, and able to travel for months all over the world, all of which a normal Soviet person could not even dream of. Evtushenko irritated Brodsky. He was often unfairly judgmental of him to the highest degree. For example, Evtushenko once solicited the powers-that-be with the request-suggestion that Brodsky be allowed to leave the country: ‘Don’t detain him, let him go, he wants to leave’. Whereas Brodsky, once he got to the States, turned all of this around, saying: ‘Evtushenko suggested they kick me out’. And something else. For Brodsky, poetry was something elitist. Giving poetry readings at stadiums, the way Evtushenko did, was, in Brodsky’s point of view, blasphemous, a mockery of poetry which should be written only for a narrow circle of experts, and not for a crowd of thousands who barely understand anything. – Why do you think that Brodsky demonstratively dropped out of the American Academy once they accepted Evtushenko? – I have already partially answered this question. Leaving the Academy was a continuation of the struggle in defense of his point of view, and the famous Evtushenko was a visible target. In general, Brodsky was not such an angel; he could easily play a nasty trick on someone. – Did he change after he received the Nobel Prize? – Personally I found him to be the same. Let me tell you something. Once, in New York, Tonya and I called Joseph, he had just received the Nobel Prize. His happy voice resounds over the phone: ‘Come over right away. Though I have some business to attend to, I do have a half an hour or so’. We go to see him at that infamous apartment on the ground floor with a garden. ‘Come on, show me the medal’, I ask him. Joseph pulls out the drawer of his desk, takes out a box, and removes the medal. I look at the medal, and then ask him straight in the face: ‘So what kind of feeling does it give you?’ – ‘Nothing’, he replies. – ‘Absolutely nothing?’ I ask him again. He looks at me straight in the eyes and says in distinctly, very seriously: ‘Abso-lutely no-thing’. ‘Terrific!’ – I say to myself. Then we continue talking

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more freely: ‘Hey’, says Joseph, ‘do you like Indian food? There is a great little restaurant right next door, let’s go. I’ll do the ordering. Do you like spicy food? Let’s go!’ – Do you have a favorite poem by Brodsky? Which one and for what reason? – I must admit that reading literature for me has always been rather hard, so I have not read all of Brodsky, nor other poets or writers in their entirety. But there are a few things by Brodsky that I know almost by heart. Once, maybe in Venice or in Paris, we were out walking, and I recited out loud to Brodsky his ‘Letter to General Z.’ And just recently I saw an article by Alexander Kushner about Brodsky where I read his poem, ‘Letter to an Oasis’. As some forty years ago it made me catch my breath. What a powerful bellicose intonation! What words! What poetry! It is one of Joseph’s last poems that I found myself most impressed by. – Since we started our discussion with an interesting story, it would be nice to complete it with one as well. Is there anything else that you remember? – Well here’s a small episode. ‘Do you know how I started writing poetry?’ Joseph once asked me in a totally unexpected and beside the point way. ‘Does the name Britanishsky mean anything to you?’ – ‘Yes’, I reply, ‘Vladimir Britanishsky, I knew him, he was a Petersburg poet, well-known in our circle’. ‘Well then’, Joseph continues, ‘I used to hear everyone around me talking about Britanishsky, Britanishsky! So I took a piece of paper and started writing poetry myself, and I saw that it was not difficult for me at all. And ever since then I have been writing poetry’.6 Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

2

Viktor Krivulin, ‘Slovo o nobiliate Iosifa Brodskogo’, Russkaya mysl, 11 November 1988, Literary Supplement, no. II - III. Poem by A. Pushkin, ‘Reminiscence’, tr. by Walter Arndt, Pushkin Threefold. Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse (New York: A. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), p. 220 - 222.

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6

Brodsky, Kniga intervyu (A Book of Interviews), compiled and edited by V. Polukhina (M: Zakharov, 2005, 2007), interview with Tomas Venclova, p. 337. 18 May 1988 Brodsky has took part in Turin Book Fair and gave a lecture ‘How to read a Book’, published in The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1988. In the original: ‘Zdes el pelmeni / gotovyi k izmene / rodiny. / Iosif Brodskii’. See Brodsky’s own version as to how he began writing poetry in the interview with Annie Appelboin, A Book of Interviews, compiled by Valentina Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov, 2007), p. 141.

9 T O M A S V E N C L O VA Tomas Venclova (1937) is a Lithuanian poet, author, and translator. He graduated from Vilnius University (1960), received his PhD from Yale University (1985) and now is a Professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University. He is author of several collections of poetry, books about Vilnius, and scholarly books, among them Neustoichivoe ravnovesie (Unstable Equilibrium, 1986), Alexandr Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast (1996), Sobesedniki na piru (1997), Stat’i o Brodskom (Essay on Brodsky, 2005). He has translated into Lithuanian Shakespeare, Alfred Jarry, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Baudelaire, Milosz, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak, among others. Venclova writes essays in Lithuanian, Russian, Polish and English. His poetry collections have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

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HE H I S OW N

TE N D E D TR A I T S

TO TO

A SCRIBE OTHER POETS

An Interview with Tomas Venclova (April 2004) – Tell me about your first encounter with Brodsky. – The first time we met was in the summer of 1966, in Vilnius. It might have been August. It might have been September. In any case it was nearing to the fall. Joseph had come to Lithuania on the advice of a friend we had in common, Andrey Sergeev. Amongst Sergeev’s Lithuanian friends were the brothers Ramūnas and Audronis Katilius, the former a physicist, the latter and younger, an architect. I knew and still know them well. Ramūnas (known more simply as Romas) was in the same class as I was and Audronis (Adas) had made a trip in a canoe, in my company, along the length of the Nemunas (Neman), from its source to the sea. After his internal exile, Joseph was not in the best of health, his personal life was taking a bad turn and Sergeev told the Katilius brothers that he needed a change of scenery to get ‘into more normal surroundings’. They invited Joseph to stay at their (for the time) quite reasonably sized apartment on Liejyklos Street (now there’s a memorial plaque beneath the windows of the flat). I seem to remember being in Palanga (or perhaps Tartu) at the time, but after a day or two I returned to Vilnius and went straight to the brothers’ place. Joseph and I went for a walk through the city. Our first conversation was about the Polish poet, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński who had lived in Vilnius and had written about the city in the Thirties. I knew Brodsky’s translations of the poet and was somewhat take aback when, with no beating about the bush, he declared, ‘Gałczyński is a bad poet’. In the evening we were all guests of the well-known translator Natalya Trauberg, then also a Vilnius resident. There was some sort of a quarrel; Joseph made a scornful reference to Chesterton whom Trauberg had spent her life translating and rated extremely highly. The squabble upset even Joseph. From the very first day of our acquaintance I realised he had a difficult character – both arrogant and vulnerable. Brodsky had brought with him a poem he had only just written, ‘An imitation of a satire written by Kantemir’.

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He spent a few days with the Katilius brothers and read poems to a group of five or six of our friends in the flat. We visited the distant suburb of Sudervė famous for its domed church and I think, we also went to Trakai. Those days he spent in Vilnius and his other visits to Lithuania were, it seems to me, in general enjoyable for him. – You have written that Lithuania for Brodsky was as important as Georgia had been for Pasternak or Armenia for Mandelstam. Do you think it was because Brodsky’s grandfather had been born in Vilnius, or was there something else? – I heard from Brodsky that his mother was born in Lithuania, he mentioned the place, Baisogala, near where, according to him, she lived as a child at her grandfather’s. But he always said that that had no influence whatsoever on his attitude to Lithuania. His Vilnius friends, the architecture and traditions of the city, were of more importance. I remember something he said, ‘For a Russian, Lithuania is always a step in the right direction’ – meaning towards the West. It’s curious that he didn’t show more interest in Estonia and Latvia, which felt themselves to be and, indeed, were more ‘Western’ and became for many of his contemporaries what one might almost call the focus of a cult. The fact was that Lithuania was similar to Poland and Italy (not to Germany and Scandinavia) – that is, countries of Europe with which Brodsky felt an inner kinship. It could also be that Lithuanian history is a bit more impressive than the history of Estonia and Latvia. It had a very unusual Middle Ages and there is the Catholic Baroque, the uprisings and the desperate, stubborn resistance of the ‘the forest brothers’ – In ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ which is dedicated to you, Brodsky calls you his double. To what extent is that a metaphor for you? – Brodsky was such a unique person that he found it a difficult burden to bear and was constantly searching for someone similar to himself. Our destinies were, in part, parallel. Neither of us was being published; both led lives, as some sort of challenge to the powers that be and, finally, we both loved roughly the same poets. However, in those days there were not a few such people. The difference of language played its part; it made less evident our differences in other ways. I personally don’t consider myself his double and I hope it is not destined to become a biographical metaphor for me. And without going into the obvious difference in scale, everybody has his or her own

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particular fate; you cannot borrow someone else’s. And that is how it turned out in the end. – How often did you and Brodsky meet up in America? – We lived in different cities. Joseph was in New York and I was in New Haven. But, in general terms, that means we lived close by. For about ten years, I would make the trip to New York and, naturally, I would call on Joseph, maybe twice a month, sometimes more often than that. Then, when we both started families of our own, the meetings became less frequent. Possibly Joseph spent more time as a guest of Tanya and myself than we did of him and Maria. – You visited Joseph in Mount Holyoke. What was his life like there? – I went to Mount Holyoke only twice (I’m one of the few Americans who manages without a car and it was difficult getting there by other means). I visited Mount Holyoke in the summer of 1984, at the time when Joseph’s father died in Petersburg, and went with him, in his car, to New York. In my diary it says that he rented from the college, for $250, half of a huge wooden house, which was practically empty and untidy, in the way bachelor establishments are. There was only the one room that was habitable – relatively speaking. There were mountains of paper on the table and on the floor and the bed linen did not distinguish itself by its pristine cleanliness. It was then that Brodsky read me ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ which he had finished just a little before. The second time I was there was in February 1988 together with my graduate student and translator Diana Senechal. We went in her car to interview Joseph for the Lithuanian journal Akiračiai. The interview duly appeared and got to be very widely known. The house looked pretty much the same but it was an almost Russian winter, and in the lamplight in the evening, it looked more comfy. Finally there’s one more memory connected with that house. I would ring Mount Holyoke, that’s to say Joseph, right up to shortly before his death and I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t feeling too well. My wife Tanya was eager to help him – made him some soup and so forth – but Joseph talked her out of it. There were people nearby who would do everything he needed. Apparently that’s what did happen, but it would have been better if we have gone there. – Did you ever argue with Brodsky? Who was it who had the last word?

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– It did happen. As a rule, I ceded to Brodsky, though I didn’t always agree with him. – Your enjoyed many years friendship with Milosz and Brodsky. It was an astonishing literary companionship. You translated one another’s’ works into Polish, Lithuanian and Russian. You lived in the city of Milosz’s youth, and in the city where Brodsky was born and grew up. What was it that united the three of you most of all – the experience of not being free, your literary interests or, quite simply, personal congeniality? – Milosz said once that our ‘triumvirate’ (that was his expression) possibly foreshadowed the future relations between our three peoples, the Poles, Russians and Lithuanians who had all, historically speaking, got on rather badly together. May God let that come to pass. I think that in what drew us to each other, what gave us something that we may call mutual understanding, all three of those factors you named, played a part. Only one thing to add: lack of freedom unites those who have risen above it. And one other thing: we had in common our love for Lithuania and Vilnius. For two of us, there was also love for Pe-

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tersburg (Milosz’ attitude to that city was very like that of Mickiewicz – he was wary of it). – Did that friendship influence your poetry? – Of course. My work has many links with that of Brodsky (the same is true of Milosz) – though I hope it’s a dialogue rather than imitation. Strictly speaking, imitation is only possible when both parties use the same language; the difference in language brings with it a restructuring of the whole poetic system even when you are borrowing or simply translating (a good example of that is Zhukovsky). Perhaps even more important was the influence of the ‘living text’ of Brodsky and Milosz. I learned a lot from them in terms of their outlook on life and, yes, in the way they led their lives. – A poet finds himself in a world in which another language rules. Is that, as some think, an ideal situation or is it, on the contrary, a torment? – Being in another linguistic environment is a difficult situation but not I would say, a tormenting one. However, it would be even harder to be solely confined to one’s own linguistic sphere when there is nothing to measure it against, no way of looking at it from the outside (admittedly, an absolutely mono-lingual sphere of one’s own is scarcely possible). Experience shows that a poet is often stimulated by emigration – notwithstanding his own sense of self in foreign lands. You don’t have to go far in search of examples, especially in Eastern Europe: Mickiewicz, Norwid, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich. However, there are opposite examples as well. There is no general formula. – The idea of linguistic self-evaluation and self-development was something Brodsky formulated in 1963. Where in your opinion, do the sources of that idea lie? – In the Sixties that idea was in the air. Though Brodsky had an ironical attitude to the structural-semiotic enthusiasms of the then intelligentsia, his ideas on language, about the ‘dictates of language’ are often congruent with the position of the Tartu-Moscow circle and with that of the French structuralist school. Incidentally, Brodsky’s irony was moderated when it came to the nub of the matter rather than the personalities (and ambitions) of certain semioticians. He respected Viacheslav V. Ivanov and had feelings of piety towards Roman Jakobson – admittedly he undervalued Yury Lotman, but that passed when he got to know him personally. Brodsky could have arrived at

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his conclusions about language on his own, however, his ‘lingua-centrism’ – right down to its polemical extremes – is, as a whole, very characteristic of the atmosphere of that epoch. – Who is whose prisoner? Is the poet the captive of language, or language the captive of the poet? – To talk about captivity is inadequate here. Language guides the poet; the poet purifies and enriches language, multiplies it by the square root (or even higher). – How did Brodsky see the links between science, religion and art? – I would venture that Brodsky saw art as being, in a certain sense, wider-reaching than science and religion; logically preceding them and including them within itself. – Brodsky never rejected the idea of the divine, the idea of God. Why do so many refuse to consider him a Christian poet? – Brodsky’s attitudes towards God were complex. Once I quoted Chesterton – I have already mentioned him – Chesterton said that he would accept the Calvinist faith and its dogma of Predestination when he met with a Calvinist who felt himself to be preordained not to eternal salvation but condemned to burn in Hell. ‘And you are that Calvinist’, I said to Brodsky. He didn’t start trying to deny it. Brodsky vacillated all his life between belief and disbelief (like so many in our age). It is not possible to call him a Christian, in the strict sense of the word. Apparently he was never even baptised, though I never discussed this with him. But there are people who never visit a church, never participate in any of the religious rites and who even call themselves atheists who, however, seem closer to the Christian spirit than many practicing Christians. An example of precisely that was Andrey Sakharov (a man Brodsky greatly respected). Some of Brodsky’s poems, especially, ‘Nunc Dimittis’ and ‘Nature Morte’ express the Christian view of the world with a rare profundity and perspicacity. There are others, but those poems fully suffice if you wish to justify calling him a Christian poet: more of a Christian than, say, Rilke. I think that the people who deny him that name are, for the most part, those who are nowadays called ‘hard-line Russian Orthodox’; people who have come late to the church and are inclined to be intolerant, formalistic and take the name of the Lord in vain (the type can be encountered in other branches of the Church, but not so often, in my opinion). Brodsky had a severe allergic reaction to the ‘hard

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line Russian Orthodox’ and their ilk. And I am in full agreement with him there. – Are we in a position, at the present stage, to evaluate his religious views? We really don’t have the language, the mechanism has not been found, a method has not been worked out for analysing his energetics. – Evaluating the religious views of a poet is a difficult affair, for it leads us beyond the bounds of literature and often into a confusion of ideas. In any case, what is needed here is restraint and humility. – Brodsky was of the opinion that Tsvetaeva was the greatest manifestation of Russian poetry. Do you share that very high evaluation of her worth? – No, though I love Tsvetaeva and I do not doubt her greatness. I feel closer to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Khodasevich. – Brodsky, even more radically, than Tsvetaeva, changed the function of the line in poetry: verse lines lose their automatism and become steps that climb towards the next ridge of conception. Will that have any consequences for Russian poetry? – It may well, though predicting the future course of Russian versification is not the most fruitful of pursuits. Brodsky, as some poets before him, pushed poetry closer towards prose (especially scientific prose, something almost never done before) and worked in the dol’nik, producing its variations roughly speaking in the same way as rhythmic variations are produced in the syllabotonic verse. All of that has already had its influence. – In explaining to his students why he loved Cavafy, Brodsky said ‘Perhaps the main reason is the uninterrupted note of devastation which is a significant human feeling about life and which neither before nor after Cavafy revealed itself so insistently in poetry’. Do you hear that same note in Brodsky’s own poetry? – Yes, I hear it in Brodsky, but in Cavafy not so very often – perhaps mainly in his love poems. Generally Brodsky tended to ascribe his own traits to other poets. – What helps a poet ‘to foresee back and forward’ (‘vpered I vspiat providet’)? Did you have a feeling that Brodsky had been ‘sent’? – In a certain sense he was. But that is very delicate problem and according to Wittgenstein, it is better to be silent about it.

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–Did you discuss the idea of versifying the Psalms and indeed the whole of the Bible with Joseph? – No. – Sir Isaiah Berlin said that in Brodsky’s presence one very quickly had the feeling that the man was a genius. Did you have a similar feeling? – They say that an art historian Aleksandr Gabrichevsky, when he met Brodsky, said right away: ‘He’s a genius, the only real one I have ever met in my life’. ‘Heavens above’, the people around him said, ‘you have met Stravinsky, Kandinsky and even Lev Tolstoy’. ‘He is a genius, the only real one I have met in my life’, Gabrichevsky repeated calmly. When I met Brodsky in 1966, I knew that he was a genius, but that spontaneous feeling did not come straight away. It was obvious that he was a difficult man, extremely complex, very vivacious, intellectual and original. But genius? You couldn’t tell straightaway. Brodsky’s reputation melded in with his personality after about eighteen months or so. – He thought the first and second wave exiles couldn’t stand him. Did you find that yourself? – I couldn’t be absolutely sure of that: sometimes people from those other waves of emigration attacked Brodsky in the articles, but not very often. With people from the first wave he was sometimes close – he got on quite well with Nina Berberova for instance. But, as a rule, he saw them and their views as anachronistic. He was on his guard with the second wave; he supposed, and not without reason, that many of them were (and some still are) Nazi sympathisers. The negative attitude was reciprocal. – What is your impression of Solzhenitsyn’s pogrom article and Korzhavin’s recent anti-Brodsky tirade? – Solzhenitsyn’s article was 100% foreseeable and, therefore, of no interest. Korzhavin’s article I haven’t read and, to be honest, I’m not going to read it. Naum Korzhavin laid out his grievances out his grievances against Brodsky to me in the course of one long nocturnal conversation. He didn’t convince me at the time. I don’t think his arguments had become any more convincing with the passage of time. – Brodsky was an ordinary mortal. Did he like drinking? Rein assures me that in the right mood Joseph could down a whole bottle of brandy or whiskey.

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– Brodsky could most certainly drink. I don’t know, however, about the bottle of brandy or whiskey. I never saw that personally. But, I would think, he was capable of it. Alcohol, however, was never a problem for him in the way it was for many others. Brodsky’s problem was nicotine. To my admonitions to him to quit smoking (and in the end that was what put him in his grave) he would always reply, roughly, thus; ‘An ape took a rock in its hand and became a man. Man took a cigarette in his hand and became a poet’. I would declare, ‘That is bullshit, Dante did not smoke: in those days tobacco was unknown in Europe’. Brodsky would say. ‘A very strong argument; all the same, I’m not quitting smoking’. – Brodsky was interested in a lot of things, besides literature: music, architecture, football, food, women. However, it seems philosophy came bottom of his list. Apart from Shestov and Skovoroda, he had little regard for philosophers, though he himself was constantly philosophising in his poetry, his essays and in life. Have you an explanation for that? – They say there are three types of philosopher: the sages (Socrates, Confucius, Skovoroda) the thinkers (Montaigne, Rozanov, Shestov) and the actual philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Husserl). Philosophy of the third type is very like higher mathematics. It has a very limited number of readers and Brodsky, like the majority of us, did not particularly concern himself with it. But it does possibly make an appearance, from time to time, in his poetry. I think he was interested in Kant and he did, in general, understand Kantian system (I tried to show that in an article on Brodsky’s Koenigsberg cycle of poems.) – What do know about Brodsky’s relationship with Evtushenko? According to Rein, Brodsky was very indebted to Evtushenko because after his internal exile when Joseph didn’t go back to Leningrad but to Moscow, Evtushenko held a banquet in his honour, took him out to a restaurant, gave him books and even a suit. They did appear on stage together at Moscow State University. – I don’t know much about that all. It’s well known that Brodsky, at any rate once he was in the States, sharply criticised him as a poet and as a social activist – though he preferred Evtushenko to Voznesensky. Maybe I’m mistaken but it seems to me, that in private conversations, Brodsky did show a tinge of sympathy for Evtushenko – relatively speaking. By the way, I heard that after Brodsky’s

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internal exile, Evtushenko tried to get a collection of his poetry published but told Brodsky that the book needed what he, Evtushenko, termed a ‘locomotive’, that is a poem about Lenin. Brodsky, naturally, refused. They say that it even came to fisticuffs between the two of them. But that’s all rumour and you have to treat all those stories as just that. Brodsky’s biography is already too reliant on rumour as it is. – Brodsky used to say that the actress Zarah Leander was, for him, the ideal of feminine beauty and that all his succeeding predilections and preferences represented a falling-off from this ideal. Don’t you find that all of Brodsky’s women were, in some way, similar? – Brodsky loved the type of woman you find in Italian Renaissance painting: in those of Leonardo or (better still) Ghirlandaio. I couldn’t say whether that type bore any likeness to Zarah Leander, because I’ve absolutely forgotten what she looked like. – Brodsky put a veto on his biography. Is that because he left a lot of women with their lives in ruins or is there another reason? – I’m not in favour of discussing Brodsky’s personal affairs (or any one else’s for that matter) in print. Whether he ruined women’s lives or not that’s a matter between him and those women. Incidentally, I will say that I know nothing personally about any ruined lives though I was more or less informed about Brodsky’s personal life. For Brodsky it would be an extremely unpleasant fact that people close and not so close to him were now chewing over his personal life. There are those who will say that without doing so you won’t understand the poetry. There is, within limits, a certain logic in that. But in any case it would be better to leave such research for the distant future. It is possible, perhaps, even necessary, to ‘fix’ certain facts in the manuscripts but there is no need to hurry to publication. Alas, here I am a voice crying in the wilderness. If the personal lives of Pushkin, Blok and Akhmatova still have a hint of mystery to them, so be it. That, I hope, is how it will be in the end with Brodsky. – Before he left the Soviet Union Brodsky said to Andrey Sergeev that he would make his expulsion into his own personal myth. How far did he succeed in that? – He succeeded in the highest degree. – What is your opinion on the literature written about Brodsky? There are dozens of monographs and collections of articles, hundreds of es-

says, reminiscences and sundry other publications. One already has the impression that Brodsky lived a hundred years ago. – In the literature about any writer there is a lot of dross. That is true about Brodsky as well. But, nevertheless, I’m glad so many are busy working on him. I am happy that in Russian literature in the second half of the 20th century there is an author people find it both interesting and useful to study – just as they do the writers of the Silver Age. – I know you have written poems addressed to Brodsky may I include one of them in this book? – Take ‘Winter’. Translated by Chris Jones WINTER Fifths and sevenths in mid winter. Who inscribes the lordly hum you heard a second ago? Distant beyond Imagining. The link breaks; membranes don’t tremble; the letter returns to its sender. In the confined hearth, a clairvoyant flame trembles, casting a pitiful eternity of bridges. But loneliness already shapes the soul – full to the limit of non-existence, as if shaping a shell or stone. That’s how you will be at the Last Judgment, waking from the flow of time Into a country larger than our countries, blindness and fear will accompany you, as much wisdom and glory and the fading pulse, all the same, subservient to Aonides Each spring, death and violence push up though piles of gravel, casting off reason, foaming on screens and in newspaper columns, and the hardened heart merges with its surroundings: this is called art. One steps twice into Lethe. The chair darkens, and fingers rest, turning the world into signs: (night ocean moth farewell star), let just a thread remain, something to hold onto. Translated from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort

10 VI K T OR G O LY S H E V Viktor Petrovich Golyshev was born in Moscow in 1937. In 1961 he graduated from the Moscow Physico-technical Institute specializing in automation and remote control. He worked as an engineer for the Institute of Automation and Remote Control, as editor at the physics section of the ‘Mir’ publishing house, and he taught electronics at the Institute of Steel and Alloys. He has been a professional translator since 1966 and a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union since 1970. He taught literary translation at the Gorky Literary Institute since 1992. Golyshev’s bibliography of translations includes over 50 English and American writers, among which the most famous are Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell. He has also translated Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky.

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HE

WA S T O O D E M O C R A T I C T O B E A N ‘A E S T H E T E ’

An Interview with Viktor Golyshev (September 2004, Moscow) – How long ago did you meet Brodsky and where? – If I am not mistaken, we met in January 1964 in Tarusa. At that time he was already under pressure in Leningrad and his friends in Moscow sent him over to stay with us in our house to wait it out. He lived in Tarusa for a couple of weeks, but then he had to get back to Leningrad, where he was arrested. – Then most likely his stay in Tarusa fell at the end of January to early February, since he was arrested on 13 February 1965, right after he returned from Moscow. Did he often stay with you when he was in Moscow? What kind of guest was he? – He was a wonderful guest. Our family was always happy when he visited us. It was never boring or awkward when he was there; one did not have to look after or entertain him. We never argued. People argue when they end up stuck on a certain level of discourse. He always had in mind a higher or more general level that rose above a given topic, and then after that, one more and so forth. Thus any point of minor significance would become irrelevant. He was not interested in what Khodasevich called, ‘the empty quarrel of small truths’. And when he wanted to eat something special, he took a five-minute walk to Krasina Street and bought himself a pack of dumplings. – Why did Brodsky call you Mika? – Because that is what I was called as a kid by my parents; then by other relatives and friends. – You admitted to not having fully appreciated his ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’, when he read it in 1964.1 What do you think about this elegy now? – I am afraid that I have reread it since then only once and that was a long time ago. I still find it to be a masterly piece, but to my mind it is a bit long and intellectual. I still do not fully understand it. Although technically, as regards composition and the rest, it is

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remarkable. And it was written with a great deal of passion. However I must admit that I am not such a great reader of poetry. – Andrey Sergeev wrote about some of Brodsky’s readings in Moscow, one at somebody’s apartment in Lefortovo, at the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences, at the translators’ section of the Writers’ Union, where he was critically received by the SMOG poets, namely Gubanov.2 Did you go to any of these or other readings of Brodsky’s? – I was at only one reading, the one at the Writers’ Union. I remember only that one of the SMOG poets started to say it sounded like Akhmatova. Andrey Sergeev, whom I had not seen before, cut him off quite competently. I remember being touched by such loyalty; at the same time I thought he was severe. He liked Brodsky a lot and was a faithful fan. He was especially amazed by the fact that Brodsky was the only one who could write a long lyrical poem. – When you heard Brodsky read his poetry, were you able to follow him? Or like many others did you have the feeling that you were running after him over pits and bumps in the road? – He read as if in a perpetual state of crescendo. The whole process was entrancing, but I only got about half of the meaning. There is no

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verbal sense in music as such, still it is effective. Not really pits and bumps, but a very powerful and captivating flow. Then, after reading it, one would get another fourth of it, and after reading it again, the rest (all that one was able to get). In America he began to read in a more reserved way, as it is more acceptable to be less emotional. But he still read in a distinctive fashion. I find the way he read to be ideal. Somebody once told me: ‘When he reads his own poetry out loud, it is as if it’s the end of the world, but when you read the texts yourself, they are poems like any poems’. I agree with the first part but not with the second. – You were present at Brodsky’s reading at Boston University. What were your impressions? – The hall was packed: a lot of Russian émigrés live in Boston. He read only in English, and our people don’t know English that well. Even the locals who were sitting near him on the stage got only about half of it, as his accent was quite strong. The émigrés were at a total loss; he hadn’t read anything in Russian. He believed that if one lives here, one needs to be able to listen in this language. – Where do you think he got his manner of reading? – I don’t know, I have practically never heard how poets read. I never went to the Polytechnical Museum. Once I heard Martynov read and Slutsky also. As far as the origins of his reading style, I don’t know. Though it seems to me that he read the way it should be read. He could not stand the way actors read, as they would introduce some kind of extra accents, and the musicality would fall apart, it was as if they would take out the meaning, though in truth, it’s not really clear where most of the meaning lies; in the melody, the enjambments or what is being said. – Brodsky was in awe of your translations of Faulkner, stressing that you had refreshed the Russian language.3 Are you in agreement with such a high estimate of your work? – I would hate to argue with a great man. Though personally I never gave it much thought. If we are to speak of refreshing the language, then credit should be given to Faulkner himself, and primarily to his consciousness, which naturally is an integral part of language and, possibly, in a small way, models the language after itself. – How does your practice of translation correspond to your theory?

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– I have no theory. There is only the consideration that whatever is occurring in the book – movements, sounds, scents, dialogues, topography, experiences – should also be occurring for you and needs to be arranged in approximately the same phrases, hopefully of the same length, and the rhythm should be similar as well. This is possible because what is occurring in the book is actually occurring in one’s consciousness. And given some additional resonance, why shouldn’t it occur in someone else’s? But this pertains to prose, as for poetry – I don’t know. – You have said that translation is a ‘dubious profession’. What compels you to engage in such difficult, painstaking, and poorly paid work? – I don’t know; maybe it’s because I don’t want to do any other kind of work. I am an engineer, a physicist, by profession and training, but in truth I prefer translating. This is a serious question. You deal with the best writers, or did until the 90’s. If you yourself do not write, you at least read. – Brodsky dedicated to you one of his best poems, ‘The Year 1972’. It was written in December, Brodsky had already left Russia. How and when did you find out about its dedication? – Occasionally he would send me his poems, including this one. I don’t think I have anything to do with the poem, though it’s a good poem. I read it without considering myself, and thought that it had been written a bit prematurely: he was only 32, so why was he concerned about aging? – But remember how soon Pushkin began to sing of old age: ‘Already Old’ (1815), ‘To Hear the Threats of Old Age’ (1816). There are many parallels between Brodsky and Pushkin. He even predicted as far back as 1968 that he would get the Nobel Prize.4 – Once the three of us were sitting at Sergeev’s, bad-mouthing everything, laughing, and Brodsky said: ‘Oh to be a poet-in-residence!’ We laughed for a long time, he longer than the rest of us, understanding how impossible this was. Now of course his biography can be seen as an ascent to Olympus. I had seen him in bad shape both before and after his exile, and other than that he knew that he had to write the right kind of poetry – there was no idea of a Nobel Prize. – The right kind of poetry in terms of poetic language?

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– Right, in terms of how he thought. Of course, he could have compromised, but he knew what he owed poetry, that is why he never published anything in the Soviet Union, other than maybe a couple of poems. – I think more, three in the journal ‘Kostyor’ (‘The Ballad of the Small Tugboat’, the poem, ‘Who Discovered America’, 1962, no. 11 and ‘January’, 1966, no. 1) two in ‘Molodoy Leningrad 1966’ (‘Wagon Train’ and ‘I Embraced these Shoulders’) and two in the ‘Den Poezii 1967’ (‘On the Death of T. S. Eliot’ and ‘In the village God…’). – I know of one publication in Estonia and in Den Poezii. – Yes, in Tartu: ‘Candlestick’ in the university newspaper, 26 December 1969, and another one – ‘The Tractors Awaken as Roosters…’ in the Konoshenskiy district paper Prizyv, 14 August 1965. A total of nine. – Also there was a well-known poet who was arranging to have Brodsky published either in Yunost or Novy Mir, I don’t want to mention him by name. – Everyone knows who it was. – Brodsky sent him to hell when the guy asked him to drop a stanza. Our friend Sergeev used to say that when writing prose one can hold back, but not when writing poetry, as one has to give oneself completely when writing poetry. That is how Brodsky was. There were many talented people, but Brodsky stood out because his inner voice would not let him do certain things. This inner voice is not as developed among others, and practically no one had such a developed one as Brodsky. – Do you think that Brodsky knew his own worth? – Yes, but not always. I remember saying about his ‘Song of Innocence, and Also Experience’, a great poem, to which he replied: ‘Yeh, right, like a hole in the head’. Though sometimes he would say: ‘Not bad’ or ‘Rather excellent’. – How do you feel about the ban on publishing his earlier poems in his collected works? – I think he knew best. Though in the beginning he was quite romantic and somewhat in the dark. He was not raised in an environment where children know everything from the age of five. Perhaps there was a kind of naiveté that got in the way, rather than the verse

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being technically inadequate. – Did you observe how he educated himself? Did he read any books from your library when he stayed with you? Or did he grasp a lot out of the air? – Maybe he did read, but we never bothered about it. His life was so intense in Moscow that he had no time to read. But about ‘grasping from the air’, I think you hit the nail on the head. That’s a quality that belongs to many gifted people; what others take painfully long to figure out, they grasp things from the air. He had a great talent when it came to this, could sense something very important even in someone else’s slip of the tongue. And of course his understanding of what is essential and what is not. No wonder he became so educated despite his lack of systematic education. When I was in America, Brodsky showed me the list of books that were required reading for his students. There were some 300 titles, beginning with Gilgamesh and ending with Joyce. I was shocked: ‘It’s impossible to read this!’ He merely shrugged: ‘It doesn’t matter, let them try’. – You compiled one of the first collections of Brodsky’s prose in Russian, ‘Naberezhnaya neistselimykh’ (‘Watermark’, 1992). What principles did you follow? How did you come by the originals? Why were there no references to the original publications? Why was the title of the collection based on his essay about Venice, but his photographs were taken in New York? – There were no principles. We just wanted to publish all the essays, written originally in Russian or translated, that were available, as no one was too eager to translate him. Only the younger translators would dare to translate him, such as Dashevsky, Chekalov. The older translators I had approached were wary, as it is difficult to translate when you have someone looking over your shoulder, who knows the language. They were right to be cautious, because Brodsky was not pleased with most of the translations until Kasatkina began to translate him. Back when this book was being planned, in 1987, there was no regular communication. So much so, that we were going to translate his Flight from Byzantium, until we found out in time that it had been originally written in Russian. One publishing house kept delaying the book’s publication until it fell apart. Brodsky did not welcome this plan as he said that this had not been written for us.

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I objected, saying it is interesting that it had not been written for us. It seemed to me that for a writer he had a very productive mind, which was quite unusual. Usually a person has two-three thoughts of his/her own, and the rest he/she has read or heard somewhere else. Anyway, no one came by any originals. Cornelia Bessie brought Less Than One to Moscow, someone else was given Watermark. It was important to begin with something. Watermark was just a title; we could not call the collection Less Than One, as the contents didn’t correspond with the book in English. Why the photographs – the chief artistic editor of the publishing house ‘Slovo’, V. V. Medvedev, would know best, but he is dead. But the cover is of Venice and not Morton Street. – Was Brodsky pleased with the translation of his essays into Russian? – Hardly. On my translation, which he read unsigned, he wrote something to the effect that: ‘It’s okay, but I am still going to cringe, as the intonation is wrong’. Though practically nothing had been edited. I felt that he was more detached in his writing, but it is up to each translator to determine the extent of his mimicry, based on what he is capable of or willing to do. About one translation everyone thrilled at he said: ‘What a nightmare!’ about a third translation – ‘it’s okay, but he doesn’t get the humor’. But the first translator he was totally satisfied with was Elena Kasatkina, he even specially called a couple of literary magazine editors about this. He said that she understood his boorishness, meaning his rough humour. From then on, most of his essays were published in her or Aleksandr Sumerkin’s translation, as approved by the author, while he was still alive. Later, when the collected works began to be published, three volumes of his essays came out (I don’t know if the fourth will ever come out), it was quite a complicated effort. Here, mainly Kasatkina and sometimes Chekalov translated, whereas there, Sumerkin translated but already without Brodsky. I would edit all of them, and then send everything over there to Ann Kjellberg, after which Sumerkin would read it all again and make amendments. Then the editor of the publishing house would look it over as well, but that was a mere formality. The anthology was a real pain in the neck because there were too many levels in the chain of command.

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– Brodsky wrote about himself, ‘I am neither righteous…nor wise; neither aesthete nor philosopher’.5 What do you make of this selfnegation? – That he was not righteous is clear. But that he was not wise? Wisdom, in terms of what one learns upon reaching the correct final conclusions, is somewhat a static notion. Some of his predictions did not take place, for example that this nation’s inborn élitism combined with political freedom would yield a new quality of life, such as cannot be found in the West. So far, all we can see is the dumb arrogance of those who found themselves in the upper levels of society, combined with the traditional Russian inability to heed the misfortunes of the unfortunate. It was enough that he was a person with an unusually productive mind. He was too democratic to be an ‘aesthete’ and was not one to avoid lowly topics. Not a philosopher. A philosopher is first of all a professional, so it’s clear that he was not a philosopher in that sense. Secondly, a philosophical text is less dense than prose, and especially poetry, which he believed accelerated thought. In his essays he would philosophize frequently enough, but it was not systematic philosophy, albeit certain leitmotifs in his discourses are clearly discernible. Thirdly, philosophy requires proof. Brodsky could not be bothered with that, preferring to go straight for the formula or aphorism; this was the method of a poet. Though unlike most essayists, he could develop a theme sequentially and at great length. – How do you interpret Brodsky’s strategy of displacing his lyrical self from the poem? – I am not so sure that this was strategy so much as an expression of integrity. When I read today’s poets I find myself tripping over their ‘I’s’: I ate this and that, my tooth aches. That he is interesting to himself is one thing, but at least out of decency one should not force oneself on others. Of course, Brodsky did write about himself, but attempted to do so, as though from the outside. Without mentioning the minor details of his personal life, but only that which connected him with other people. Even when it came to love problems, it was rendered abstractly or transferred from the personal level. In these days, especially among women poets, there is a tendency to overdo the personal details of one’s emotions, and I just can’t be bothered

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with that. Either he understood this intuitively or else it really was a kind of spiritual modesty. He was capable of being removed from himself. That is the way he wrote his essays as well, as if in the name of some other abstract person. – Yes, this kind of objectification of his personality is especially noticeable in his identification with man in general: ‘to any corner of the world / man brings with him a dead end’ (‘York’). In his ‘Letter to Horatio’, Brodsky has Horatio serve as his guide, rather than Virgil, as Dante did. Though other parallels can still be drawn. Is it obvious to you or is it forced? – It seems to me that he felt that there was a resemblance in character. For some reason he saw himself as melancholic. I see him more as choleric, the stronger type, whereas his view of existence was melancholic. Though I doubt that he really needed a guide as a literary device, as he was totally at home in Latin antiquity. – Brodsky regretted that he did not write a ‘Divine Comedy’ or ‘Metamorphosis’.6 Do you think, he perhaps wrote his own ‘Divine Comedy’, but in frescoes? – I don’t know what he is regretting; it’s not as though one can write them again, since their time has passed. It is too late to retell the myths and mentally put one’s acquaintances into cells. Too many others have engaged in this practically throughout the 20th century, with the help of a developed communications technology and repression. Brodsky differs from the majority of Soviet and Russian lyric poets in that when he writes about his affairs, he can view himself from the side, plus there is the constant motif in his poetry that his affairs are actually the affairs of humanity and not just something exceptionally and peculiarly his own. I do not think that this indicates epic aspiration; rather it is the product of a perfected consciousness. His complaints against the world were in the order of things. But, at the same time, there was a sense of gratitude, as stated in his poem: ‘I entered the cage instead of a wild beast…’ – ‘I never imagined myself as his double’, he said of Ovid. But we know that to serve, as a double was second nature to him: ‘And a new Dante bends over his quill’. What do these parallels mean? Do they reflect Brodsky’s ambition? His standards? Or a search for parallel worlds?

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– I can’t really speak about the double. To me it is somewhat forced, without much bearing on Brodsky himself.7 – For many, Brodsky was incredibly multi-faceted. Which personality trait of his do you find the most characteristic? – Naturally he was different in different situations. But I don’t really know about his being ‘multi-faceted’. He was an integral and spiritually unified person. It’s difficult for me to identify a separate trait in a person, as I tend to see people in their entirety. But as far as Brodsky is concerned, perhaps it is best to list the traits in the order that they come to mind: his being gifted (not just in verse), his temperament, openness, generous nobility, tolerance of people and aesthetic intolerance, sense of humor and unlimited wit. Though the list seems somewhat dumb. One can add that for the longest time, there remained something boyish about him. Perhaps it ties in with his romanticism? – Would you call Brodsky a humble person? – No. He was a true democrat and treated those he respected as equals, irrespective of their profession, but he knew the extent of his own gift. He had a competitive spirit, which to my mind is not conducive to being meek. I remember how, by the end of the 80’s or early 90’s, he told me over the phone something to the effect that: ‘Perhaps my place will be no less than that of Batyushkov’. Out of modesty he avoided mentioning Baratynsky. – ‘No matter…how much you’ve been betrayed’.8 What do you know about the betrayals that Brodsky was unable to forget? – I think he lived according to the simple rule that he once shared with his students in one of his lectures, which is that as long as you remember an offence or being done wrong, it remains with you. I never heard from him any talk of being betrayed or offended. Being quite impressionable, he could talk of problems, but these were in relation to life in general and not to traitors. – It is well known that with different people he spoke on different topics. Andrey Sergeev wrote: ‘… he was very honest with me. He was never afraid to discuss in detail being upset with someone, or to complain about someone, about his successes and failures, his grievances, or wounded pride’. As well as: ‘Joseph practically did not expect anything from his friends, not even their understanding as readers.

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He did demand that they do not betray or play mean tricks on him. He demanded loyalty, as he himself was a very loyal friend’.9 Why is it so difficult to imagine Brodsky as a Muscovite? – I don’t know, I myself am a Muscovite, and I have been to Leningrad only twice. I don’t think he really felt that kind of Petersburg snobbism toward Moscow. – Brodsky once said of the Soviet experiment: ‘We were undressed, had our shoes removed, and then were placed in the existential cold’. Who else among our contemporaries had such an understanding of the essence of the Soviet system? – ‘Existential’ is still a fashionable word from a philosophy that was, for the most part, created by failed poets. Applying it to the ‘cold’ makes it twice as poetic, though rationally I find it difficult to grasp, nor would I call it ‘understanding’, to be able to say who among our contemporaries had such a sense of the Soviet system? People have been placed, without being undressed, into the existential heat of, say, the Ibo in Nigeria, or what about the people of Cambodia, Rwanda, Afghanistan and other places. – Brodsky considered his philosophy to be one of resistance.10 What was the main force he resisted? – Evidently his ‘resistance’ was to the regime, which did not allow him to take his deserved place in society and which finally forced him out for good. He was steadfast not only in his resistance, but in his overall tolerance, as he was forced to be tolerant of various personal troubles, ranging from physical ones to forced separation from his parents, his country, and his friends. – ‘I am probably a Christian, but not in the sense of being Catholic or Orthodox. I am Christian because I am not a barbarian’.11 How is Christianity presented in his poetry and prose? – Christian perhaps in the sense of personal responsibility for what has been done. In this sense his faith was closer to Calvinism. Secondly, all the European estheticism worth talking about has inevitably been permeated with Christian or Biblical values over the past fifteen or twenty centuries. Therefore it is natural that he should be too. – ‘One can renounce anything’. What did Brodsky renounce that would have been beyond the endurance of a normal person? – It doesn’t make much sense to me. He was always in awe of Tsve-

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taeva’s formula: ‘To your crazy world / I respond with refusal’. Though in truth he did not really deny himself too much. He did not renounce his poetry, did not refuse food, drink, or cigarettes. I think the main idea is that one is ready to renounce much, but it does not necessarily mean that one does. I think that is the important thing. Of course in the Soviet Union he turned down a lot of things that came naturally to a more malleable young citizen. – How was and is Brodsky viewed in Russia? – About 20 years ago I found out that he was being read much by young people. This was during the Soviet times, in 1984, and his work was still being circulated in typed copies. Young people at that time knew him much better than older people, and the latter did not take to him as much. The younger generation understood not only that he wrote good poetry, but also that he set an example of how to behave. His desire to be somewhat detached or to abstract himself was fully acceptable. Poets of the previous generation were too topical, whereas Brodsky transposed the political into a wider historical context. How he is viewed today I don’t really know. I think that many idolize him, whereas some, on the contrary, are not fond of him or do not understand him. Or envy him. I think that he is very important for everybody. – Can I include in this collection the poem that Brodsky dedicated to you a month and a half before his death? You have already published it in the ‘Novaya Gazeta’.12 – Of course. He himself even requested that Sumerkin be given his letters for publication. This last one we didn’t get a chance to include in the book, Portfel (Briefcase), which was almost ready. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

Notes 1

2 3

Viktor Golyshev, Interview, Izvestiya, 14 February 2004. There was a mistake in the date given in the cited inteview, which has been corrected in the current interview, namely that he first met Brodsky in January 1964 and not in January 1963. Andrey Sergeev, Omnibus (M.: NLO, 1997), pp. 440 - 441. Andrey Sergeev, Ibid, p. 433.

4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12

See my interview with Genrikh Steinberg in this collection. Joseph Brodsky, Naberezhnaya neistselimykh, compiled by V. Golyshev (Moskva: Slovo, 1992), p. 212. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Letter to Horace’, On Grief and Reason (NY: FS&G, 1995), p. 433. See my paper on this topic, ‘More Than One: Doubles in Brodsky’s World of Poetry’, Neo-Formalist papers, eds. Joe Andrew & Robert Reid (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 222 - 243. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (NY: FS&G, 1992), p. 29. Andrey Sergeev, Ibid, pp. 438, 441. Joseph Brodsky, Kniga intervyu (The Book of Interviews), compiled by V. Polukhina. (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 22. Ibid, p. 30. ‘8 December 1995. To V. P. Golyshev’, Novaya gazeta, 22- 28 May, 2000, p. 23. For copyright reasons we decided not to include the poem here.

11 A LEKSANDR SUMERKIN Aleksandr Evgenievich Sumerkin (born in 1943, in Russia) completed the Romance-Germanic Language Section of the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University. He left the USSR in 1977 and has lived in New York until his death in December 2006. From 1978 -1999 he worked for ‘Russica’, an independent bookstore and publishing house. He was editor of the first representative collection of Marina Tsvetaeva (two volumes of prose and five volumes of poetry). He participated in the publication of books by Yuz Aleshkovsky, Nina Berberova, Sergey Dovlatov, Edward Limonov, and others. Since 1990, he has been engaged in translation and literary activity, compiling a collection of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry Peizazh s navodneniem (View with a Flood), (1996).

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CON T I N UAT ION

OF

POET RY

BY

OTHER MEANS

An Interview with Aleksandr Sumerkin (November 2003, New York) – You have described in great detail your participation in the creation of the last Russian collection of Brodsky’s verse, ‘View with a Flood’. You have also translated some of Brodsky’s essays and poetry from English into Russian. Was he as demanding of the translation of his poetry into Russian as he was into English? Did he make many changes in your translations? – The thing is, I translated his poetry when he was no longer with us, and I did not render the translations poetically (I never even called them translations), but literally, word for word. This idea was born in Leningrad during a conference held in 1997. Since the journal that organized the conference, Zvezda, did not have much funds, the organizers asked their friends to host some of the guests. I was hosted by one such friend of the journal, this being Vladislav Aleksandrovich Stankevich, a true member of the Leningrad intelligentsia who remembers the whole Brodsky story; he speaks excellent French and German, however he does not know English, as is often the case among people of his generation in Russia. We became very close especially due to our common fondness for drinking tea at night and love of the ‘Queen of Spades’, and at some point he asked me: ‘Is it true that Joseph wrote good poetry in English?’ I replied that I didn’t know whether or not the poems were good, but there were some that I truly liked. He said: ‘Could you possibly give me some kind of idea about this poetry?’ And I tried to translate the poem, ‘Epitaph for a Centaur’, straight from the page. Of course, nothing came of it, and when I returned to New York, I decided that I should do a word-for-word translation of this poem for Stankevich. After that I did a few more such translations, and I am very pleased that they were included in the St. Petersburg collection of Brodsky’s poetry as an appendix to his poetry in English. – What about his essays? These you translated while Joseph was still alive. Did he review your translations?

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– He not only reviewed, but also just plainly rewrote, and he also corrected a lot. Moreover he would edit twice: I would prepare a first draft, a rough one, and then I would try to pull it together myself, after which I would show my translation to the author, who initially did not want to look at it. Then he would review it and return my typed text thickly marked; I would very diligently make all the corrections and retype the text. Luckily, the computer age had already begun, and this made things easier. After I brought him the corrected version he would edit it again. In other words, all that remained of the original text were prepositions and conjunctions. That is why there is such a catastrophic difference between translations, my own and that of others, done after his death, with those that he was able to correct. Even though Joseph was never fully pleased with these translations. It all began with ‘Radio Liberty’ wanting to read his ‘Collection Item’. And some nice lady there translated this essay, though not too well, not because she is a bad translator, but because it was a very complicated text. Then Joseph asked me: ‘Maybe you could retranslate it?’ In essence, we did this together. I still have all of the versions; I gave Ann Kjellberg the originals for the archives. Joseph would edit using a green pen, which made it obvious. Afterwards, when he had reviewed it a second time and given his go-ahead, I got a call from Sergey Yurenen at ‘Radio Liberty’ who asked: maybe Joseph would agree to read just some excerpt himself? I passed the request to Joseph, but he replied: ‘No, this is not exactly my kind of diction’, even though every second word was written by him. – But, in fact, it’s true that when Joseph reads his works, it influences the meaning. And when the same piece is read even by a fine reader, it just sounds terrible, and the meaning is distorted. In your review of ‘So Forth’, you do not evaluate Joseph’s English verse or self-translations. I am of a like mind. One of the researchers of Brodsky’s selftranslations explains the lack of correspondence between the original and the English translation by the fact that Brodsky set for himself the challenge not to match but to ‘enrich and transform himself’.1 Do you agree with this opinion that two languages can show two different sides of an author, who in turn is trying to bring the languages closer to one another? – I think that, as a rule, he aimed to bring the translation as close to the original as possible; on the other hand, he really did have a unique

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sense of language, which was enviable; this is why he would often change or add something, to make the poem sound right in English, and not a translation from another language. Something would have to be changed, and of course, being the author, he was in a privileged position: it’s possible that he would not have forgiven another translator such ‘willfulness’. He would have thought that something was being randomly changed for the sake of how it sounded. And since he was in charge here, he would partially rewrite the poem, since this was important for him. With prose it was a bit different, I remember, I once asked him, when he was cross about some translation of prose: ‘Joseph, why don’t you sit down and translate it yourself?’ He replied: ‘What? And chew twice what I already ate once?’ – In principle, I think he was against the translation of his English works into Russian. You are most likely familiar with the reviews of his self-translations. Perhaps I know more about this than others, as I collected all of the reviews of Brodsky’s books in English, in England his self-translations were met with harsh criticism.2 In his Russian verse, the meaning, style, and sound are united organically, which does not get carried over into the self-translations. Can we, Russians, appreciate his self-translations? – Honestly speaking, I cannot, I am too influenced by the original, including Joseph’s own translations. It’s as if I can hear the Russian text. It is impossible to get away from the Russian ‘word-by-word translation’. Thus that which may sound unjustified or forced to the native language speaker, does not sound that way to us, we know where it comes from and why it was done. When it comes to appreciating, justifying some affectation or turn of phrase, this can be done only by someone who is a native speaker, and not by someone who has learned the language, even if very well. – Other than Brodsky’s being accused that his English is not idiomatic enough, there is another aspect which few are aware of: one needs to know what is going on in contemporary English or American poetry. How effectively does he fit into the contemporary stream of poetry or is he going against the current, and if so, why is he doing this? – I think that he answered this question himself in his essay on Hardy. Clearly Hardy is not well received by contemporary poets. But Joseph had a tendency to be contrary, everyone who knew him can confirm this, and he tried to prove that the ‘archaic’ Hardy was not by

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Aleksandr Sumerkin, 1997

any means out of date. It is well know that Joseph was a great fan of traditional Russian prosody. But why Russian? Today it’s Russian, but two hundred years ago it was universal. – Because Russian poetry is at least two hundred years younger than European poetry. – Of course, of course! That is why he insisted on promoting Hardy, whom 90% of the native speakers have already forgotten about as a poet. It was as if he were insisting on the fact that this form is capable of life even now, if the poet has something to say and is technically capable of it. And Joseph’s Russian practice shows that this system is viable, because Russian poetry, even though it’s young, can also occasionally sway from strict, traditional versification. Already Kuzmin and later Mayakovsky would shake the classical foundation. And over the past half century Russian versification has gone through much experimentation. Within the framework of traditional prosody especially today, it is apparently very difficult to find an original form of expression something without it being a reiteration. I think that some of the English and American critics are under

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the impression that those of Joseph’s self-translations that attempted to retain this prosody sound as though they simply repeat what has already been done, or else are an unsuccessful attempts to do something new, fresh, in this framework. For Russian poetry it was new, because Joseph found alternatives that made it possible to renew and widen the system without destroying it entire. – What do you know about Yury Lyubimov’s request to have Brodsky translate the choral texts of Euripides’ ‘Medea’? Lyubimov claims that the translations were lost.3 Did Joseph translate more than was published? – No, no! As far as I know, everything that he translated was published. I remember that I once went to see Joseph about something; he was sitting surrounded by different versions of ‘Medea’, including the translation done by Annensky as well as some old English version. Joseph said that Lyubimov had asked him to make the chorus easier to pronounce for some new production. And Joseph got very caught up in it. By the way, Joseph said that Lyubimov never even mentioned payment for the translation, and it was a huge task. But we should be grateful to Lyubimov, as in my mind, these chorus texts from ‘Medea’ are some of the best later writing of Joseph’s. It so happens that I was one of the first publishers of the translation: at the time I was working for Novy Zhurnal, and the first excerpt that Joseph translated, he let me have, because I was so amazed. When young and studying at the university, I had to read Aeschylus and Euripides, and my impression was that it was very heavy. And here there was this very wonderful verse, totally alive. I wailed: ‘Let me publish it’. And he said: ‘Go ahead, take it, please’. This was about half of it. Later, when View with a Flood was being compiled, I insisted that we include these chorus texts, though Ellendea Proffer, a more academic person, had her own view as publisher, and she was against it: ‘This is a collection of original poetry. Why include translations of Euripides and Auden?’ I argued: ‘These are not translations, it’s Russian poetry’. Joseph was still correcting some details and then gave me the whole thing; as far as I know, there was nothing else. – Let’s begin from the beginning. According to many, Brodsky arose as an example of an ideal poet long before he actually was one. What, in your view, was conducive to this mythologization?

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– I think it was his character. Joseph would get very angry when there mention was made of his biography. In fact, if one is to remember his biography, even long before he decided to become a poet and consciously move in that direction, he was an unusual and independent person. Even if he had not become a poet, he would have become famous in some other area: an adventurer, criminal, inventor, whatever; but in any case a person who lives outside the system. He left school, as we know, and lived an astonishing life, working in a morgue, taking part in geological expeditions. From the start there were signs of an exceptional man in him. – His talent shook him from within. – Yes, yes! He had this inner force that looked for an outlet and could not settle for the standard social blinders. Soviet society; in this case, did not have much to do with it; it could just as well have been a nonSoviet society: it is just that his individual energy and inability to accept certain conventions determined his behavior. I think that one of his main psychological traits was his need to verify everything, doubt everything, to question everything. And only after he had thought through it on his own, would he either accept or refuse the given thesis, rule, or law. In the beginning it had to do with life, later it had to do with the word. – Then it became instinct. Even during a conversation, if someone would make an interesting point, he would immediately approach it from the opposite end. – This was, of course, his spirit of contradiction, but, at the same time, his internal need to check all the possible alternatives. In other words, to check the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’. If someone said ‘yes’, then he said ‘no’, and there would begin a testing of alternatives. I think this also explains, relatively speaking, his romantic position, as a result of which his biography and creativity developed according to an unusual course for the Russian intelligentsia of the 60’s. – Brodsky had certain things he considered sacred and for which he was ready to sacrifice much. Serving belles-lettres and the independence of the private person, for example. Can you add to this list? – He was a very loyal friend. I met him quite late, already in the West. In the beginning it was difficult for me to judge his relations with his friends, because they remained in Leningrad, while he was in New York. But I remember with what warmth he spoke of them and

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how insistently he would try to promote the poetry of Rein, Naiman, and Ufliand. I remember that Joseph received a collection of poems by Rein – this was still before Gorbachev, and he did not know what was the best way for him to act: on the one hand, he wanted to somehow promote Rein; on the other hand, he was afraid that publication in the West would bring the author harm. I remember when I worked for ‘Russica’ (it was either in ‘79 or ‘80), we were trying to convince Joseph to publish a volume or two of his selected poetry, but he resisted, saying: ‘But Sasha, understand that I just published four collections, while no one in Leningrad has. Rein still doesn’t have a single book published’. This was so amazing to me, because frankly speaking, I did not even know about the existence of Rein, Naiman, Kushner, rather, Kushner I had known about from poetry that had been published by either Syntax, or Phoenix. It was a real sense of fellowship. Then when perestroika began finally, he helped and arranged things for everyone. Though later, as we can remember, something maybe came between some of them, but toward the end of his life, when he was really seriously ill, he could still drop everything in order to introduce Kushner at some reading. He could call half the country for Rein’s sake, in order to arrange a reading for him, so that Rein could earn a hundred bucks. This was great, on the one hand, but on the other, I already knew what it cost him, and would get angry at all the guests that would swoop down on him and always ask him for something; he would always try and help, and up to his very last day he would spend an inordinate amount of time and energy fulfilling all of their requests. I think that this feeling of fellowship in him was very deep and strong. – Do you think that many of his friends who came to visit from Russia took advantage of his friendship? We know of some cases where they would end up being displeased with all of his help, expecting even more. We also know that they took literally everything that he said, especially flattering public evaluations, and believed that, say, if someone was ‘Brodsky’s teacher’, then he too deserved a Nobel Prize or Oxford cloak.4 – Yes, yes. I remember when Bella Akhmadulina, whom I just love, came to visit even before perestroika. Joseph introduced her to the Americans, he wrote a short essay about her in English and it was published by Vogue. At her reading, he of course, spoke in English,

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and said of her that she was a ‘poet of genius’, which would have been best translated as a poet with a streak of greatness. The Russian listeners decided that he had called her a genius: ‘What kind of genius is she?’ angrily asked Viktoria Schweitzer. As in Russian, a genius poet could only be someone like Pushkin or Pasternak. – In Bella’s defense I can say that when I interviewed her in October of 1987, in London, she said: ‘I relate toward Brodsky in one way only and that is adoration. It is a total miracle’. – You are right. She indeed never took advantage of his kind words. You are also correct about how what he said was taken literally or even distorted, with more being attributed than was really meant. But without a doubt, there is a great temptation to do so, it’s just human. – We know that Brodsky was a music lover. What else interested him other than poetry and music? – He was interested in everything in the world. This is what is so amazing. He was interested in architecture, soccer, jazz, politics, geography, and to a certain extent, travel. Because of his life style he did not go to the theater or concerts all that often. But he was incredibly curious, and this always amazed me. – Joseph could speak for hours, maintaining an exceptional quality, never repeating himself. Were you every present during such monologues? – Whenever the discussion would deal with things that were truly important for him, he was able to accelerate it, accomplish a kind of ascent, like a plane that is taking off. And sometimes it was difficult for me, with my modest abilities, to follow him during such ascents. But I have witnessed this quite a few times. I recall once in the late fall of ‘95, he would talk at length about the problem of power, the structure of power, about how society is in need of a president, a king, i.e. a symbolic head of state to bring people together. He spoke about this with great interest and enthusiasm. Clearly at the time he was thinking of Russia, how to organize everything so as to achieve the unity of the nation with optimal latitude in the political spectrum. I very much regret now that I did not try to record it all. It seemed so natural. – Sasha, don’t you think that had you recorded it, it might have had an effect on the quality of your friendship? – That’s very likely.

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– He could speak freely in your presence knowing that you were not recording anything. – Unfortunately, that is the case. – When I was recording everything for half a year, despite his having allowed it, he would sometimes ask: ‘Valentina, please remove the microscope’. Now another question. What do you know about Brodsky’s attitude to Pasternak? The critics have noted that Joseph did not write a single lecture about him, though he was once invited to the Pasternak conference, nor did he write a single essay. He never mentioned him in any interview nor in his Nobel Prize lecture. Does this mean that of the great seven, he felt least close to Pasternak? I know that he did teach him, would always refer to him affectionally, as Boris Leonidovich. What do you know about it? – First of all, I think that if he did not like Boris Leonidovich, he would not have written the comparative essay, ‘Footnote to a Commentary’ about Tsvetaeva’s ‘Magdalina’ and Pasternak’s. I have the feeling that he first of all felt obligated to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, to bring them to the maximum number of people, in newspaper articles, to students, in his Noble Prize speech, and so forth. One must agree that Boris Leonidovich sure had his share of worldwide fame, albeit posthumous. I think that this simple moment played an important role. Other than that, I think he actually depended on Pasternak, say in his Nativity poems. Perhaps he was both conscious and resistant to the dependency. – In this sense, to praise Pasternak is to praise oneself. – Of course! And it’s clear why he did not mention him in his Nobel speech: he was a predecessor, and everyone remembered this. If we look at the addressees of his important works, many of these – Frost, Hardy, and even Auden, in a certain sense – are not mainstream for contemporary literary criticism, i. e. Joseph had an additional goal, to draw attention to these poets who were not popular enough. Whereas Pasternak did not suffer from lack of attention from literary researchers and critics. – Brodsky’s essay about non-Russian poets – was this the result of his teaching or search for kindred worlds? Or a case of cultural expansion? – Of course, it was the search for kindred worlds, because, especially in his later years, Joseph had enough freedom to choose whom to write

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about, he could write an essay about T. S. Eliot or Rilke or whomever. I think that this really reflected his internal movements and search for bearings especially in the West. Whereas he saw himself, to a certain extent, as an extension of those he wrote about. – Brodsky, the essayist, and Brodsky the poet. We distinguish the two to make our study of Brodsky’s writing easier. How do you see the internal relationship between Brodsky the essayist and Brodsky the poet? Or is it, to quote Tsvetaeva, a continuation of poetry but with other means? – I think that it is the continuation of poetry, but with different means, as when one compares the stylistics of his prose, it is very close in essence to that of his poetry. In other words, the mixture of all of the Lomonosovian styles literally occurs on the same page; this striving for paradoxical expressions, aphorisms, even if they are no so apparent as in his poetry; engaging in lengthy digressions, as in a poem, when suddenly there begins an insistent development of a ‘secondary’ motif. I think that one could find even more in common between his prose and poetry. – I did a comparison between ‘Watermark’ and his poems and could add to your list: he pulls complete excerpts from his own poems and inserts them into ‘Watermark’; he fills prose with phrases that could be mono-poems: ‘One’s eye precedes one’s pen’, ‘love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound’; alliteration and assonance, anaphora and epiphora, even internal rhymes: ‘I was neither a star nor even an extra’, ‘they don’t so much help you as kelp you’, repetitions, parallelisms poeticize his prose.5 – Very interesting. – Brodsky saw all world poetry as being ‘one living organism’ or a single cultural ocean. What helped Brodsky stay afloat in this ocean? – I hesitate to provide any response to this question. I think that within him there constantly sounded his own music, which provided enough support, it was his reliable life buoy in this ocean, i.e. he was not afraid to drown. Hence his remarkable variations on other sounds, for example, ‘Spanish Dancer’, a kind of Russian ‘echo’ of the Rilke poem, which became a fact of Russian poetry. He used to say that all poetry is continuation, influence, development. – In poetry everything is an echo of everything.

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– Of course! He heard all of this and was not afraid, because he knew he had his own internal music, his own fundamental tonality, which was capable of expressing anything, but which in turn was not changed by this. – According to Olga Sedakova, the fact that Brodsky never received any Russian awards or titles is the highest honor. By the way, he did receive the title of honorary citizen of Saint-Petersburg. Did he accept this title? – Honestly speaking, I don’t know. I know that he was invited to Petersburg, and first he wanted to go, and then decided not to. Joseph had said more than once that if he had been able to go to Leningrad with Maria and Nyusha and just wander and show them the city, he would have done this with great pleasure, but he knew that he was no longer a private person. I don’t know about Russian awards and titles. I think that he would have been pleased, as anyone would have been. We know that Brahms, for example, when he was already the most renowned and loved composer in the world, never found peace before the end of his life, because he never received some kind of title in his native Hamburg. Thus recognition in the fatherland, whatever it may be (Joseph, by the way, would frequently remind us in different forms that one’s fatherland remains one’s fatherland) is always nice to receive. – I agree with you, I remember the day when they announced that he had won the Nobel Prize, I called him, he was in London, and I said: ‘Finally the blind can see and the deaf can hear’. He responded: ‘Not quite, Valentina, not a word from back home’. By the way, how did Brodsky feel about the changes in Russia throughout the 80’s and 90’s? – I think that he felt both hope and disillusionment, by turns, but of course they worried and troubled him a lot, and he was very glad and quietly proud when it became possible to publish in Russia. Of course, he knew very well that being a Russian poet, his reputation could only be validated by the Russian language and Russian readers. – ‘The most important thing is the greatness of one’s design’, Brodsky would say. Which of his intents do you consider great? – That is a very difficult question, and it’s hard for me to come up with an objective answer. For me, his concept of the ‘School Anthol-

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ogy’ is especially dear, and it’s too bad that it was not possible to see it through completion. He wanted to write this book, 30 chapters. It would have been a totally unique thing. – Was it obvious to you how Brodsky changed, his worldview, his character? Were these changes dictated by changes in circumstances or spiritual growth? – I suspect that, as usual, it’s a bit of both, since one’s spirit also depends on circumstances. His forced emigration played an important part, and later, his marriage, and especially the birth of his daughter. He somehow softened, literally before our very eyes. In other words, he became aware of something that clearly he never had experienced before. And such a banal thing: men usually are not good fathers if one’s fatherhood begins at an early age. His marriage was like a kind of shock that he brought upon himself, and for a while he was in a state of disbelief and couldn’t come to himself. But by the time Nyusha was born, something changed in him, a kind of door, louver slat, opened up in him, one that he never knew existed. – A real poet can’t be an atheist, since it’s impossible for him not to feel the participation of a supreme being. What did Brodsky believe in? – In his Moscow book of Nativity Poems, the only one, by the way, among all his Russian books that he was truly and without reservation pleased with, he wrote the following dedication: ‘To Alexander… from a Christian-external student’. I like this because it seems to me that it clearly describes his position. Of course he was not an atheist; it is enough to read his ‘Roman Elegies’: ‘Bend forward, I will whisper to You that I / am grateful for everything’, where ‘You’ is written with a capital letter. But as a person who was so independent and freethinking, to the point of being stubborn, he was repulsed by any form of organized faith and confession. Moreover, since he was Jewish by nationality, about which he noted in public more than once, it was not possible for him to admit to belonging to a church, because if he had announced that he was a Christian, that would have been unfortunate. As the saying has it: ‘A baptized Jew is like a forgiven thief’. The coarse Russian saying has an element of truth in it. He wanted to be neither. But all that being said, he really would not have felt comfortable anywhere. – You have probably also heard complaints on behalf of Brodsky’s Jewish friends about his Catholic wake?

– The wake was organized by Maria, and she arranged it the way that was natural for her and her daughter. All of this was in the context of the family situation. The modest funeral service took place, by the way, in an ecumenical church, in Brooklyn, not far from their home. I am sure that Joseph loved Maria and Nyusha enough to not have given it another thought. Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1 2

3 4

5

Natalya Rulyova, a manuscript of her article on Brodsky auto-translation. See my article ‘The English Brodsky’, Iosif Brodskii: tvorchestvo, lichnost’, sudba, itogi trekh konferentsii (Joseph Brodsky: Creative Writing, Personality, Fate. Papers of three conferences, SPb.: Zvezda, 1998), pp. 49 - 59. Yury Lyubimov, see interview, European newspaper, November 2003. See my article ‘Brodsky about his Contemporaries’, Iosif Brodskii i mir (Joseph Brodsky and World, SPb.: Zvezda, 2003), pp. 249 - 268. See my article ‘Joseph Brodsky’s Prose: The Continuation of Poetry by Other Means’, The Poetics of Joseph Brodsky (Tver, 2003), pp. 9 - 27.

12 P E T R VA I L Petr Vail was born 29 September 1949 in Riga. He graduated from the editorial department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (1976). He served in the army, was employed as a dockworker, cemeteryworker, fireman, metalworker, and as a contributor to the Latvian Russian language newspaper, Soviet Youth. He emigrated to the US in 1977. In New York he worked for various Russian periodicals, such as Novoe Russkoe Slovo, Novy Amerikanets, Sem Dney. Since 1988 he has been at Radio Liberty. He headed the New York bureau of the Russian Service, which is now headquartered in Prague, where he is currently serving as Chief Editor of the Russian Service. He was first published in 1973. Since 1989, he has been regularly published in Russian periodicals; he is the author of nearly 300 publications. Vail has compiled and written afterwords to Brodsky’s Nativity Poems (1992) and Peresechennaya mestnost’ (Crossed Roads, 1995). The book, Iosif Brodskii: Trudy i dni was co-edited, and co-compiled with Lev Loseff (1998). He is also the author of Karta rodiny, (A Map of the Homeland, 2003), Genius Loci, (1999), Stikhi pro menia (Poems about me, 2006), and has co-authored with A. Genis the following books: Amerikana (1991), Rodnaya rech (Native Speech, 1990), 60-ye. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (The 60’s. The World of Soviet Man, 1988), Russkaya kukhnia v izgnanii (Russian Cuisine in Exile, 1987), Poterianny ray. Emigratsiya: popytka avtoportreta (Lost Paradise. Emigration: An Attempt at a Self-Portrait, 1983), Sovremennaya russkaya proza (Contemporary Russian Prose, 1982). Petr Vail is a member of the Russian Academy of Contemporary Russian Letters and of the editorial board of the journal Inostrannaya literatura. He has served on the board of trustees of the fund Znamia. He has received prizes from the journal, Znamia (1994, 1996), and the Russo-German Karelsky Prize (1996), as well as the ‘zoIL’ prize of the journal, Inostrannaya literatura (1998). He has been living in Prague since 1995.

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IS

B RO D S K Y ’S P O E T I C G L O B E EQUA L T O T H E GEO GR A PH IC A L

ONE

An interview with Petr Vail (March 2005) – How often did you see Brodsky in the last years of his life? – From the early 90’s, quite frequently. Usually our meetings started out in cafés. Joseph loved all kinds of Asian food, Chinese, Vietnamese, sometimes Japanese, but the cafés had to be Italian. Near his place on Morton Street, in Greenwich Village, there were plenty of cafés. His favorite, the ‘Mauritsio’ on Hudson St., is no longer there. Also there were the ‘Vivaldi’ and ‘Mona Lisa’. It was at the ‘Mona Lisa’ that I had the honor and pleasure of introducing Brodsky to Sergey Gandlevsky and Timur Kibirov, who were staying at my place in April 1995. We visited Little Italy in Manhattan, the wonderful ‘Bocca di lupa’ café with an internal courtyard; here Brodsky once spent the whole evening reminiscing about beautiful old movie stars. As a memorial of these meetings, at home, I have his first collection of poetry, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, autographed as follows: ‘To Petya and Ella, these old poems were inspired by Zarah Leander, Beata Tyshkevich, Lucia Bose, Silvana Pampanini, and Betsy Blair, all of whom, in turn, have grown old’. When the Brodskys moved to Brooklyn Heights, we often visited the couple at home. A few times Joseph, with or without Maria, would visit us in Washington Heights. I remember the Pantagruelian gluttony of November 1994. Yuz and Ira Aleshkovsky were visiting from Connecticut, and at 5:00 AM, Yuz and I went to the fish market on Fulton, not far from Wall Street, where we bought a great deal of seafood: lobster, scallops, oysters, and different varieties of fish. In the evening, Joseph and the Loseffs, Nina and Lyosha, came to visit. It was impossible to finish eating everything in one evening, and so we continued in the following day. When Brodsky had visitors from Russia, he would often invite us. Once Galina Starovoytova came to visit; there was an American

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Joseph Brodsky and Petr Vail in Lucca, Italy, September 1995.

student at the same table, which meant we had to speak English all evening. Brodsky was very ironic about this, as well as about how Starovoytova from the start put a tape recorder on the table, saying: ‘When will I ever get another chance’. A few times, with our families, we went to the theater, in a purposeful way. Twice we went to see ‘Medea’, as Brodsky was translating the chorus from Euripedes for Yury Lyubimov’s production at that time. Once it was a very dramatic production, which irritated us, especially Brodsky, with its wild shouting: it seems to me that he could only appreciate expressions of anguish when made by Tsvetaeva. The other ‘Medea’ was written by Charpentier and performed by the magnificent ensemble, Les Arts Florissants. Brodsky enjoyed old, pre-Romantic music: some of his favorites were Purcell, Bach, and Haydn. – Which meetings do you consider the most memorable? – Probably Christmas Eve at the Brodskys, which we spent inti-

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mately with them, two or three times: Maria and Joseph, Sasha Sumerkin, my wife and I, and maybe three or four more people. On Morton Street, and later at Pierrepont Street, there would be a large Christmas tree, which, after their daughter was born, became larger and more festive. Maria would set the table, and Joseph himself would turn the holiday into a constant gift-giving festival. Gifts had to be given by everyone to everyone. The ceremony of getting them out from under the tree and then distributing them took up to three hours. Here Brodsky would really go the whole hog. He was a very generous man, and during this holiday, he very much lived up to his own poem: ‘On Christmas, everyone is a bit of a magus’. I will probably be outlived by the luxurious leather briefcase he gave me one Christmas. He also equally enjoyed receiving gifts, I remember how he would strut back and forth wearing a new scarf around his neck, new gloves, barely able to hold onto an armful of wrapped parcels, saying: ‘This we enjoy!’ He really did enjoy it, the receiving, the giving, the feast, and the partaking. – For some, Brodsky is an attentive and loving person, for others, he is haughty, cold, calculating, as well as other things that are stand-offish. How did you see Brodsky in real life? – I had, of course, heard about Brodsky being unapproachable and arrogant, even harsh and rude. I can’t argue; maybe this was in his earlier years, I don’t know, I never saw it. I knew him as a very kind, attentive, and warm person, all of which formed his worldview based on trust in life. On that essentially religious consciousness for which there is nothing fortuitous, everything is unique, everything is valuable. I think and am even sure that in essence Brodsky was always like that. Where else would he have gotten that humble gaze and timid, albeit solemn, intonation as in his nativity poem from, way back in 1965: ‘But suddenly, lifting your eyes / to heaven’s light, you realize: / your life is a sheer gift’.1 I have no grounds not to believe those who knew the young Brodsky. At the same time, it is apparent that the greater the person, the more lies are told about him. I can only speak of that person whom I knew well. This was the Brodsky of the 90’s, the last five years of his life. Of course, he would change, or as he himself

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would say: ‘I am cultivating myself ’. He would say this often. ‘This is how I taught myself ’, ‘I trained myself this way’, these were his phrases. Once he called me and told me: ‘There are two guys here from some Moscow journal, I need to meet with them, but I don’t feel like doing this alone’. I went with him, and they turned out to be real pompous types, full of it. They were talking rubbish, asked the stupidest questions, which turned out to be quite insulting as well. Something like: ‘So what are you working on? What are we to expect from your further relations with the Muse?’ Trite newspaper style. After they left, I asked him: ‘Joseph, what is going on? If they were speaking to me that way, I would have ended it all within fifteen minutes, it’s impossible to listen to. How can you stand it?’ He replied: ‘Ten years ago I would have done the same’. He did have this quality of magnanimity and unwillingness to cause offense. With age, he had changed. For example, he became much softer after he married, and especially after his daughter was born. Lev Loseff once told me about a situation that required a moral choice: ‘In such cases I always try to imagine how Joseph would have handled it’. Brodsky had this distinct sense of the moral imperative. When socializing with him one wanted to match this. It is what also imbues his poetry as well. Because genius is talent plus personality. I think that we can find enough people whose talent is no less, but whose caliber is somehow petty. Brodsky was a person of major caliber; this was connected with his magnetism, which everyone could feel. Tatiana Liberman, that same Tatiana Yakovleva, who was Mayakovsky’s love in Paris, said that in her life she had known only two real geniuses: ‘Picasso and…’ – everyone started nodding, thinking she meant Mayakovsky, but she completed with: ‘…and Brodsky’. – Practically no one mentions one of Brodsky’s main traits – his humility. – Yes, he wasn’t hung up on himself. He was almost reluctant to use the personal pronoun, ‘I’, which resulted in his using these ironic and mannered expressions, such as ‘my humble self ’.

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To imagine him saying something like, ‘my creative writing’ or ‘my poetry’ is impossible. Usually it was, ‘my versicules’. He didn’t even pretend that his readers’ or interlocutors’ reactions were of no interest to him; on the contrary, he was very much interested. He iked to read a freshly written poem out loud, either upon meeting or over the phone. It was amazing; tons of articles and books had already been written about Brodsky, but he still needed a live reaction. My wife would be surprised when he would earnestly ask her: ‘Do you really like it? Really?’ His earnestness would emerge in different ways, sometimes almost in a childlike manner. Once we bet on a bottle of fine wine about what was Charlie Parker’s main instrument, Brodsky, for some reason, insisted that it was a tenor sax, whereas I was sure that it was an alto, and so I felt uncomfortable betting, when I knew I would win, but he insisted. When the bet was resolved, he remained quiet and didn’t even turn over his booty, because, of course, out of vanity, he hated to admit he was wrong. He was a bad loser. – You also wrote about Brodsky while he was still alive. Did he read your essays about him and if so, how did he react to them? – He would nod approvingly, but not say much of anything; he would bellow something inarticulate. I think he tried to differentiate, on the one hand, between a quick live reaction, and on the other, something more substantial, about him as a classic. Or, maybe, he just didn’t want to upset me. Once and only one time in my life I decided to translate a large fragment of his article, ‘An Immodest Proposal’, from English, but not for publication, I would never have done that, just for the radio. I brought Brodsky the translation; he read it, made literally three to four corrections, then said that it was okay. I then asked him with great enthusiasm: ‘So it’s okay, it turned out okay?’ He replied: ‘Well, if one were to take it on seriously, then one would have to totally rewrite it, but it’s okay’. I was slightly offended, and then I asked: ‘Were there any translations of your writing that you have ever liked?’ Brodsky explained that there were not. I was surprised: ‘What about Golyshev?’ He replied: ‘Well you see, with Mika it’s a totally different thing, I tell him, say, you need to

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change this, and Mika replies, go to hell’. – You put together a compilation of Brodsky’s ‘Nativity poems’. Were you satisfied with his explanation as to why he would return to this theme over and over again? What can you say about Joseph’s relations with God? – I think that as someone raised not only in a Soviet and atheist system but a meaningless one, he had a deep sense of the need to establish his own world-view reference points. I remember how glad he was when he heard about my idea to collect all of his Nativity poems in one book, saying that mankind as a whole and every separate person needs to have a reference point, and the most natural and traditional one is the birth of Christ. Of course, he was not a church-going person. But I remember when we were visiting the Brodskys in Italy, in 1995, at Maria’s parents’ summer home near Lucca, they showed the small church at the top of a distant hill, where Nyusha had been christened. Joseph spoke about his daughter’s christening with great enthusiasm, about how great it was when one could see from one’s house the church in which one was christened. Concerning his relations with God, I can only reiterate what he himself told me in a conversation about Pasternak’s Nativity poems: ‘It is completely improper to speculate about his religious feelings’. – ‘Not to have faith – is to be blind, and even more often, a swine’. Can one take seriously Brodsky’s frequent admissions that he considered himself a Calvinist? – This I can respond to, since the question is not about religion per se, but about a view of the world and how we cultivate ourselves. Of course, Brodsky knew the essence of Calvinism, and broader yet, Protestantism, he knew of the primordial significance of grace and predestination, but it was no accident that he focused on that which was especially important for him. Firstly, communication with the higher force without any intermediary; secondly, a lofty sense of personal responsibility. Simply put, he did not want to shift the burden onto anyone else, including… – The worship of language, the overemphasis of language, and its

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identification with the Muse. What is the source of this logotheism? – In my view, the atheistic upbringing which we received. Nature abhors a vacuum, thus every person is filled with religious feeling, thereby making it a sacred place. For Brodsky, this place was taken by language, which was not only the Muse, but its moved mover. – Brodsky’s lyrical hero is always in the company of great shadows. Why did he need them so much? – Well, in essence, one faces again the issue of reference points. For Brodsky, primarily, they are the authors of Antiquity: Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius. Hierarchy in culture is not only crucial, but more than natural: just the opposition alone of ‘like – don’t like’, ‘love – don’t love’, puts everything in its place. Therefore, political-correctness, which can be good for society, in culture is absurd. Brodsky had his own hierarchy, at the top of which were the Greeks and the Romans, the Romans, even, in the first place. He measured himself by them. In one of Loseff ’s poems, the main hero, a certain Russian poet, woefully pronounces: ‘And a river of lovely, pure Latin flowed past us’. This was about Brodsky, of course: he always took to heart the separateness of Russian literature, which, even at its greatest remains an exotic part of European culture, Western, nonetheless, a part of it, but an exotic part. – Most English and American poets consider Brodsky’s poetry written in English as mediocre. Brodsky could not have ignored the risk he was taking. What prompted him to write poetry in English? – I cannot judge the quality of his English poetry; I can only note that he didn’t write that many poems in English, Brodsky mostly wrote prose in English. What prompted him? It was exactly the desire to bring Russian culture closer to world culture. He had a strong sense of the culture-triggering impulse, for example his idea to create a Russian Academy in Rome, so that Russian poets, writers, and artists could go there, as had been possible a long time ago. In 1997, I took part in a conference on Brodsky in Petersburg. All the speakers who were from Petersburg spoke of the ‘sad anniversary’ – 25 years – since Brodsky’s departure from Russia.

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An incredibly provincial type of sadness. Brodsky’s poetical globe is equal to the geographical one, something that is unprecedented in our literature. New York, the Midwest, Sweden, England and New England, not to mention Venice and Rome, not mere places where he lived or visited, but literary events, equal to the phenomenon of Petersburg-Leningrad in his writing. He wrote the following, though not about himself: ‘The nests we were born in, we would also die in’. About himself: ‘A weary slave – from that breed, which is seen most often – having taken a gulp of freedom at curtain call’. His departure on 4 June 1972 was a crossing into world culture. – Do you have any insight into why Brodsky accepted neither French poetry nor French culture in general, despite some very close French friends? – Mainly what is known from his own words. He considered French culture to be primarily decorative, focusing mainly on the question ‘how’, rather than ‘why’. However, he did single out Pascal, Proust, Baudelaire, Du Bellay, and then, after mentioning a few more names, he laughed and said, such exceptions do form the rule. As far as Proust goes, he considered him to be the leading prose-writer of the XXth century. Once I suggested to Brodsky an idea for a book, which he was very enthusiastic about: to select five prose writers of the past century and discuss them. This idea broached half a year before he died, and so it never materialized. But the five-some for Brodsky would have been: Marcel Proust, Andrey Platonov, Robert Musil, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. I think that his dislike of France was caused by something quite simple: he did not like to be in a place where he didn’t know how to communicate, and he didn’t know French at all. Of course, after marrying Maria, a lover of French culture, his feelings about it changed somewhat. Also, Brodsky had within his consciousness a kind of juxtaposition, somewhat relevant historically, of two Roman countries, France and Italy, with his choice strongly in Italy’s favor. – What do you think explains Brodsky’s great love for Italy?

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– I once asked him and received the following answer: ‘First of all, it’s where everything came from… Everything happened in Italy, and then crawled over the Alps. Everything to the north of the Alps can be seen as a kind of Renaissance. That which was in Italy proper, was also Renaissance, variations on the Greek theme, but that is already civilization. Whereas, in the north, they were variations on the Italian theme, and not always successful ones’. Historical-cultural motives were always important for Brodsky (other than the typical, exemplary tourist, the typical Acmeist yearning for world culture). But one cannot explain his powerful emotions by such means; the main emotion was rapture, which resounds with such force only in his poetry about Italy. ‘I am in Rome, where the sun is shining!’ ‘I am happy in this cradle of the Muses, the Law, and the Graces…’ (the quantity of exclamation marks and caps beat all of Brodsky’s records in his ‘Piazza Mattei’). And then his words about himself, in the third person: ‘He drinks Chocolate Con Panna in the center of the universe and clock dial!’ Not any old drink, but hot chocolate with cream, Brodsky, who never mentions something by chance, is here referring not to the usual manly type of drink that he liked, such as grappa, but a kind of girlish delight, because everything is lifted up to the higher rank of ‘center of the universe and the clock’. The key word being ‘center’. Brodsky knew the palindrome, ‘Rim – mir’ [in Russian: Rome – world], with his whole being. Personally. Italy was the emotional balance, between which the ‘middle nail’, holding in balance two enormous rings – Russia and America, from the region of Arkhangelsk to the state of Michigan, from the Palladian Petersburg, to the Palladian New York. One can develop the metaphor of scissors even further, with the Fates and thread. But let’s stop here and leave only the section of worlds which exists in Brodsky’s poetic consciousness. Italy was darning something, sewing it together. Not only through history and culture, but through its incomparable harmony – that of climate, nature, personalities. One would imagine that marriage to a half-Italian beauty also played a role. In September 1995, at the Brodsky’s near Lucca,

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we were sitting in the courtyard watching how at the bottom of a hill the forester, named, of course, Virgil (Virgilio), was burning leaves. The smoke rose toward the distant hills, the ones of which Mandelstam wrote, ‘of all mankind – brightening in Tuscany’, and which here are not only green, but can be blue, lilac, or violet. Maria took her daughter over to the bonfires. They were returning, walking up hill. Brodsky paused during our conversation, and taking the picture in, half asking, said: ‘Lucky guy?’ – Did you take part in the discussion of where to bury Brodsky? – No, absolutely not, though Maria was interested in my opinion. But my feeling was and remains that this issue needed to be decided only by the family, in this case, Brodsky’s widow. But it’s correct, that his tomb is in Venice. Primarily because it was Brodsky’s favorite city, about which he has written the most, and that the island of San Michele has the most beautiful cemetery in the world, with red brick walls that disappear in the lagoon waters under towering cypresses. It is the best imaginable transit point between this world and the next. And it’s correct conceptually: Brodsky belonged to two literatures, and his tombstones lie between them. Remember how in 1997, after Brodsky was reburied in Venice, in the evening we all got together in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Large canal, in Byron’s home. Everything in life rhymes, especially in the lives of poets: it is not by chance that Brodsky’s book of love poems dedicated to M.B. was called ‘New Stanzas for Augusta’. – Brodsky mentioned that there were a few reasons why he would not return to his native city. Which reason do you find the most convincing? – Brodsky and I often spoke about it. He was very interested in everything that was going on in Russia. When in 1995 I went to Chechnya, the war zone, he took it very much to heart; he didn’t try to talk me out of it, the way many of my friends did, but he did caution and pay attention to the details. He questioned me in great detail afterwards, and read the draft of what I had written upon my return, gave me some advice, which I used. I don’t recall

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having any conversation with him in the 90’s without mention of Russian affairs, Eltsyn, and Chechnya as well. The reason I bring it up is that undoubtedly he considered the possibility of such a trip. Why it did not take place? I think there are two reasons. One, mentioned by him, the other, my own personal thought on the subject. Once he said: ‘If one were to go, then one must stay and participate in all of this. However circumstances make this impossible, but to go as a tourist is not possible either’. Secondly, it’s what I gathered from our conversations. I think that Joseph subconsciously felt that his heart might not be able to take the enormous emotional strain. How he managed to survive his last years is amazing: he knew that his heart was weak, but he did not want to know. When we were traveling with Joseph and Maria in Tuscany, he was lively, cheerful, and showed us everything, as a guide, but when we got to the top of the mountain in the town of Tereglio and started walking up hill through the winding streets, he had to stop every five or ten meters. However, he refused to turn around and go home. –Brodsky dedicated to you the poem ‘From Albert Einstein’ (1994). Could you please tell about the circumstances of the dedication and your reaction to it? – Having a keen sense of language, Brodsky was always interested in linguistic novelties. There is plenty of jargon in his poetry, probably more so than in any other Russian poets. He would especially use it in speech: ‘chuvak’, ‘kanat’, ‘khilyat’, all jargon terms from his youth. He was curious about new slang as well. I remember discussing with him the word, ‘tusovka’ [hang out]: Brodsky agreed with its convenient multiple meanings. Once I shared with him an expression that did not remain long in the language, but over which Brodsky was especially enthusiastic: ‘lomitsia na pozore’, i.e., to ride public transportation. (‘Couldn’t catch a cab, so I had to be crammed in shame’). Around that time he was completing his poem, ‘From Albert Einstein’, and he put this expression in at the end, and in the beginning, his dedication to me. About my reaction, I don’t think anything needs to be said, it is clear enough as it is. But as I thanked Brodsky, I asked

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him: ‘Would it be too difficult to do a whole poem in that kind of jargon?’ He said: ‘Bring it – we will pack it’. But probably the most important thing in this 1994 poem was that it reflected our frequent conversations of that time, about what was going on back home (or to use his own unchanged terminology – ‘in the fatherland’. About which he wrote as follows: ‘There the soldiers in the trenches over the parapet / look toward where they no longer are’. – Before our very eyes Brodsky’s contemporaries are burning out, whereas his star continues to burn as brightly as when he was alive. Where does this energy come from? – Brodsky rhymed our time and our place within it. Brodsky’s saving formulas are always close at hand: ‘As you reach for a shirt in the dresser, a whole day is lost’, ‘Freedom is when you forget the tyrant’s patronymic’, ‘As if life swerving left, swerved right’, ‘A petty thief is dearer to my heart than a bloodsucker’, ‘How slowly the soul worries over new changes’, ‘What can I say about life? That it turned out to be long’, ‘Out of all the laws published by Hammurabi, the most important ones are the penalties and the corner play’, ‘How is Liviya, my Postum, or wherever it is? Are we actually still fighting?’ ‘Small towns, where they don’t tell you the truth’, ‘A shot of this vileness? – So pour’. Russian poetry was always good at formulaic expressions that helped clarify us to ourselves, helping us live (Pushkin, Griboedov, Tyutchev, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Vysotsky). Sometimes it came out rather curiously: for example, Onegin’s uncle became an epic figure without any basis, but we still refer to his honest rules, as we do to Pushkin’s as well (‘Who will pay the bill? Pushkin?’). Pushkin’s prompts are universal. Brodsky’s theses as well. But there is a difference. In the middle of the 70’s, Brodsky began, as he put it himself, ‘to let his verse somewhat disintegrate’, as he switched to mixed syllabotonic verse (dol’nik), which in the end prevailed. The fact that he had mastered smooth writing is clear; I don’t think that there is anything in the art of poetry he was not a master of. His decision to ‘disintegrate’ was conscious and created a qualita-

tive shift: not so much in the poems themselves as in how they were perceived. Brodsky’s rhythm resonated with contemporary life, life at the juncture of centuries, even millennia. Resonance magnifies amplitude. Brodsky’s amplitudes make one lose one’s breath; all one can hear is his pulse, which appears to be one’s own. In this sense, the difference in harmony, between Pushkin and Brodsky – for they have framed the two centuries of our literature – can be reduced to the following: Pushkin was all about how we wanted to be; Brodsky was all about how we really are. Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1973), tr. by George Kline, p. 86.

13 BENGT JA NGF EL D T Bengt Jangfeldt born 1948 in Stockholm, completed studies at the University of Stockholm. Ph. D. in Russian literature 1976 (‘Majakovskij and Futurism 1917 - 1921’, Stockholm 1976). Published several works on Majakovsky and his circle: V. V. Mayakovsky i L. Ju. Brik: Perepiska 1915 - 1930, Stockholm 1982 (sov. edition 1991: Liubov eto serdtse vsego; translated into many languages); Dorogoi diadia Volodia… Perepiska Mayakovskogo i El’zy Triole (Stockholm 1990); Jakobson-budetlianin. Sbornik materialov (Stockholm 1992). Translated the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Awarded the translation prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his translation of Brodsky’s essays 1989. Author of the books: Svenska vägar till S-t Petersburg (Stockholm 1998), awarded the August [Strindberg] Prize (Russian ed. 2003: Shvedskie puti v Sankt-Peterburg); En osalig ande: Berättelsen om Axel Munthe (Stockholm 2003). Med livet som insats: Berättelsen om Vladimir Majakovskij och hans krets (Stockholm, 2007), awarded the August [Strindberg] Prize (Russian ed. 2008). From 1989 to 2000 editor of the literary journal Artes, published by the Swedish Academy, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Musical Academy.

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T H E T E R R I B L E FA T E

OF A

RUS SI A N POET

An Interview with Bengt Jangfeldt (October 2003, Stockholm) – You translated Brodsky, published him, wrote about him, and presented him to the Swedish public right after the Nobel Prize. You were friends with him for many years. In which of the above roles would you prefer to be remembered in the history of Russian literature? – It is difficult to say. I was publishing him already in 1972, when I was guest-editor of the journal, Lyrikvännen (‘The Poetry Friend’). The translation was done by the excellent Swedish poet, Werner Aspenström, with the help of his daughter, who was a student of mine. This was the ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’. I translated his essays, and the collection, Less Than One, was published on the day Brodsky received the Nobel Prize. This was a difficult job, but I got a lot out of it, as the subject matters are so different. Later I also translated his poetry, keeping the rhyme. It is incorrect to assume that one can rhyme only in Russian. The opposite is true. Since in the West poets have not written in rhyme for half a century, there are many contemporary words, which have never been rhymed before. As is well known, Brodsky enjoyed combining a new lexicon with an old, and this works well in Swedish, too. It takes time, but one gets a lot out of it because it forces one to work on the edge of the possibilities of one’s own language. One ends up making fewer mistakes because one has constantly to think about the exact meaning of the text. Whereas if one translates into free verse, one risks making mistakes, because it seems easy. Joseph and I used to talk about this a lot. It turns out that independently from each other, when he was preparing his collection, So Forth, which was published posthumously; he had selected more or less the same poems as I had for Swedish translation. There were certain Russian poems that he himself could not translate because of the density of the language, in which case he would do much rewriting, as with ‘Clouds’, for example. Since the lines are so short it is difficult for a translator to work with the poem, Brodsky ends up being the author, both in Russian and in English and can make the changes he wishes. – Since Brodsky did not know the Swedish language, he could not interfere with your translations. At the same time, it was impossible for

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JB & Bengt Jangfeldt, at the reading in Stokholm.

him not to interfere. How did he manage this difficult situation? – He very much appreciated the fact that I always tried to maintain the meter and the rhyme, and he could hear this. Sometimes I would ask him about something specific, and he would respond and comment. Once, while I was translating ‘An Admonition’, I had to change the meaning slightly in order to get a good rhyme in Swedish. To my surprise, he accepted my change, adding that this is exactly what he had wanted to say in Russian, but he couldn’t find the right rhyme. But in Swedish it worked. Isn’t that wonderful? – Does that mean that you read him your translations? – Sometimes. Sometimes we would discuss why I chose one direction over another. You know that sometimes in his English translations he would change the metaphor. I would ask him whether or not I could use the translated version, if it seemed more appropriate for the Swedish language, or else could I combine the Russian original with the English translation, in other words, take one stanza or one metaphor from the Russian original and the other from the English version. He approved of this. – As we know, true poetic speech always remains deeper and wider than the way it is analyzed and described. What was Brodsky’s reaction to what you had written about him?

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– You know, while he was alive I did not write much about him; just a few things in Swedish along with some interviews. He sensed that I understood him well. What I mean is, a specific attitude toward life and poetry. For example, in his essay about Nadezhda Mandelstam he wrote that in Russia ‘in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers’ widows with such efficiency that in the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union’.1 I told him: ‘Joseph, I wrote exactly the same thing 15 years ago in Swedish. But no one will ever believe me; everyone will think I stole it from you. Whereas in truth, you borrowed it from me’. In fact, no one borrowed it from anyone; it was just a coincidence. – Having translated so much of Brodsky, have you learned something from him as a writer? – Before Brodsky I never had any ambitions about becoming a writer. I was always able to quench my passion for language through translation. I always felt that the translated poems were my own. That is why I did not like it when others read my translations; as I felt as though it was my flesh and blood. When I translated Joseph, I would end up dealing with the ultimate possibilities of language and thought. This made me move forward. I think that if it weren’t for Brodsky, I never would have got around to writing the larger things that I have written in the past few years, and perhaps I would not have allowed myself such freedom of form. In other words, I became aware of the fact that I knew my own language well enough and could afford a certain extravagance of expression. – You were witness to Brodsky’s receiving the Nobel Prize. The following day you introduced him when he gave his poetry reading. What was the most exciting moment, during the presentation, as well as right afterwards? – You know, at that moment I really came to feel acutely what his entire fate was. The whole terrible fate of a Russian poet. For me, he was the first major Russian poet as well as my contemporary. When he died I understood that an exceptional voice of Russian language had died. That is what they wrote when Blok died, and the same can be said here. I remember how awkward he felt, and I sympathized with him as he sat there on the stage in his tails. At that time he was somewhat without teeth, another sign of the Soviet past. And this was very touching. And he himself was very moved by it all. When he was going to the King’s dinner, he complained: ‘Tails again!’ But

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afterwards he told me that he had enjoyed it very much, especially the Queen of Sweden, who charmed him no end. – Did it show how much he was practicing being humble? After all, he was such a proud man. –Yes, of course. He was very humble and modest, except for one time, and that was during the first press conference. He had arrived in Stockholm very early in the morning, though I had warned him… I had been to New York a week before, I interviewed him, received his Nobel Prize speech for translation, and had photographed him next to his cat, Mississippi. I said to him: ‘Joseph, you just don’t realize what a difficult week it will be: receptions and banquets from morning to night, lots of people. You really should arrive earlier to make sure you get enough rest’. But he arrived that same morning with only an hour or two of sleep behind him. I did not attend the press conference, but it did not go too well, especially when he was asked questions about Gorbachev, such as: ‘How do you feel about Gorbachev?’ He replied: ‘I feel nothing, and I hope it is mutual’. – Tell me about Joseph as a friend. – There is a lot one can say about this, because he was not just a friend, but the presence of an element, of language, mainly. He could be very different. Sometimes he felt very much at home, and that is how he was with our family, not just with me; he loved my wife and adored my older daughter, Sara, for whom he would write poems. At that time he would be relaxed, quiet, he would laugh a lot and there would be none of the aggressiveness that he would sometimes show in other situations. When I called him and the timing was not right, I could always tell by his voice. However in principle he was always ready to help. I remember when Tomas Tranströmer had a stroke, I called him, and he asked whether or not any money was needed. That was an American reaction, as we have free medicine here. – In September 1990 you helped organize Joseph and Maria’s wedding in Sweden. Why did he decide to get married in Sweden and not in the States or in Italy? – Because they wanted to do this secretly. Moreover, they were in Sweden at the time, and it was just convenient for them. It was a civil wedding. – Do you think that perhaps Joseph was afraid of being like everyone in his daily life? – Well yes, a kind of existential awkwardness. But during the wed-

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ding he was happy, he was very much in love. – Joseph claimed that life in a foreign environment helps one to a better understanding of oneself. How well did Brodsky know himself? – I would say that he probably knew himself quite well. I understand what you mean; in a foreign country one is naked, everyone is removed, all connections and ties. – What would depress him? What would put him in a bad mood? – His health, for the most part. And certain people. I would tell him that there are people with whom one never wants to be, who are just unpleasant. ‘Oh’, he would say, ‘just being in the same room with these people is unbearable. I just leave’. He would not show up if he knew that someone he found unpleasant would be there. But he could also be unfair in his dislikes, just as he could also overdo it in the other direction, in his adoration of people. – Why is it that Joseph never quite managed to become a western person? He could be rude to his friends, more so to acquaintances, or else he was unreliable and haughty. An Englishman, for example, would never behave himself that way in any situation. – Yes, that’s a fact. – But how can this fact be understood? In everything else, in his views about the world, poetry, in the direction of his thinking, he behaved as a Russian European, but in his personal behavior he remained purely Russian, if not Soviet. – Yes, this is very interesting. He is the first Russian who took an active part in the literary world of the West, the first after Nabokov. I mean the very fact that he was born in Russia and became a part of Western literature because he began to write in English. He engaged in debates, took part in congresses. I think that, to a certain extent, he did not favor the western way of behaving, its lack of sincerity, the superficial relations between people: too much ‘culture’. At the same time, he adored this culture. Born in the Soviet Union, i.e. on the periphery, he was always somewhat unsure of himself, in his behavior, living in the West. Sometimes he would ask me how to dress, for example. – Based on your observations, was Brodsky a Christian or a Jew? – He belongs to Christian civilization. Here he very much resembles Mandelstam. I wrote about this in an article about Brodsky, that for him Christianity was not a religion but civilization. I think that to be a Jew is to always be a Jew, to a certain extent. He was Jewish, but when he was told that he must go to Israel because he was a Jew, he refused

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to do so, as you know; he never went to Israel because he was afraid that that aspect of his identity would be taken advantage of there. – Nevertheless, in his interviews he has said that he prefers the Old Testament to the New Testament, and that ‘Judaism is more attractive to him than the Christianity of the New Testament’. How would you explain the contradiction between this confession and the fact that to the end of his days he would compose a poem in honor of the Nativity of Christ every year? – I think that in some kind of philosophical sense the Old Testament was closer to him. However, as far as civilization goes, of course, Christianity is synonymous with Western Civilization. – In one of your interviews with Brodsky (1987)2 you asked him about Pasternak and Christianity. Were you satisfied with his answer? – Joseph did not like Orthodoxy because it is a national religion, a kind of servility. He definitely preferred Protestantism, which, he said, makes a person ‘undergo judgment day with himself every day’. He wrote about this in his essay about Dostoevsky. – And here is another example of the split personality of our Gemini poet. Joseph was neither a saint nor a victim. And yet these are the precise properties assigned to him by his critics. What is going on here? – Because in his biography there is a certain heroism, and we are in need of that. He did not like to speak about the trial. He also said that one should not be hostage to one’s own biography. I frequently think about this. Whatever one’s fate, one is always responsible for it. That was his initial attitude toward his own fate. There is a wonderful quote from Auden on this topic: ‘We shall be judged not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection’. – You have spent a lot of time studying Mayakovsky and know his poetry very well. Do you see any similarity between the poetics of the young Brodsky with that of Mayakovsky? – I don’t know about influence, but in any case they are quit similar in the energy of the verse, the clarity of expression, didacticism, and so forth. Once we discussed Mayakovsky, I remember it well: it was while traveling by train from Stockholm to Gothenborg for the book fair in 1988. Perhaps it was the one and only time when we spoke of him at length. He knew that I had studied Mayakovsky, and that I had published the correspondence between Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, whereas I knew that he always spoke badly of Mayakovsky and

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Lili – because of Akhmatova. This time we spoke calmly about how, in the end, Mayakovsky was a good poet who had written plenty of bad political poetry. – It is interesting that Brodsky was, for many years, friends with Tatiana Yakovleva in New York, where he was very much respected and loved. How did they treat Brodsky in Lili Brik’s home? – I don’t remember whether or not Brodsky was spoken of in her home, but Lili Brik valued all signs of talent; she had impeccable taste. – Brodsky was very actively opposed to people digging up his biographical details, insisting that everything that a poet has written is his true biography. No official biography has yet been authorized for publication. Yet our interest in the life of the genius poet remains unfulfilled. What is the best way to fulfill this interest without offending his memory? – I don’t really understand what an ‘official biography’ is. I guess that means that an ‘unofficial biographer’ would not have access to the archives. In any case, one must be tactful. It all depends on who writes it. In the end, something will be written despite the bans. – Meanwhile, people who knew Joseph are getting old and dying. Future biographers will then what? Engage in mythmaking? – I think everyone should be asked to write down their memoirs and this should be collected in an archive. I remember even thinking about it while Joseph was alive, when I would meet with his friends, I would say to them: ‘Write, write’. – I see this second volume of interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries as a kind of collection of material for a future biography. I do understand that one needs to be extremely tactful, but at the same time, I am a scholar of Brodsky’s writing and I need to ask essential questions, even if they are not always flattering. For me, for example, it is very important to have serious lack of understanding of Brodsky’s writing by Solzhenitsyn and Korzhavin explained by others.3 Korzhavin recently published a totally inadequate article about Brodsky in ‘Kontinent’. Both articles are mediocre, but the authors are well-known and respected. How should one react to them? – Roman Jakobson once prompted me as to how to deal with such situations, he said that one should not enter into polemics with such people; one should prove that one is right by one’s work. – In 1988 Brodsky wrote: ‘I will return to Russia only on one condition: on the condition that they publish everything I have written’.4

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We know that even when everything was published, he did not return. Did he ever discuss with you his possible return? – Yes, we once even tried to arrange a trip for him to Leningrad, because it was possible to go there for a day without a visa. It is true that each time he would come up with a new excuse, either it was his health, or else he did not want to go as a tourist. The last one was: ‘The best of me is already there: my poetry’. I think he is right not to have gone back; he would have been torn to pieces there, by friends and foes alike. – Should one take note of the fact that neither the Russian government under Gorbachev nor under Eltsyn ever apologized to Brodsky for the trial and exile as well as all the suffering he was forced to endure under the Soviets? – When Solzhenitsyn turned 80, he was invited by the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. As you remember, there were some problems with his Nobel Prize, and the Swedes wanted somehow to apologize. They invited Gorbachev as well. He had the perfect opportunity to apologize to Solzhenitsyn on behalf of his previous colleagues, but he did not do so. – I know that you have a poem dedicated to Brodsky. Would you like to publish it here? – I wrote it the day after he died. It was published in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on 30 January 1996 and in Polish in the journal, Naglos 1996.5 Interview and footnotes were translated by Tatiana Retivov PHOENIX I don’t know how it came that you, Apollo, who could make each thing echo with its metaphor, fell so in love with Euterpe in the role of Tosca or Lucia di Lammermoor. Maybe it was thanks to Gena, who wrote the book about Misha but passed away before he finished his biography of the great soprano; or through Vertumnus*, perhaps, your Italian friend who so badly wished to acquaint you with the Adriatic and the tramontana and then one day fell down on the bathroom floor. These thoughts arrive as I listen to the voice of the divine** whom you used to play in your leased Volvo, before

you went on to the next country; you left the tape behind, to pick up again the next time you set foot on the granite of the Baltic – just as you did with Roget’s International Thesaurus, fourth edition, which you would mutilate in order to avoid a faulty enjambment or in search of a fresh rhyme for -ition. Your knowledge of the music of words is much greater than mine. The reason I bother you so soon afterwards is quite other: Something happened the day after you moved your hand to your heart for the last time; something I think you should know before you move any farther. I remember you complaining that you never had occasion to listen to Mozart or Donizetti when you visited the Lagoon. There was always Wagner, Tchaikovsky or some bloody Frenchman on the billboard, although you went there as often as you could. It’s not too late, you know: the day after you became your admirers, La Fenice went through the same rapid change. You now dwell in the same neighborhood, a result of the fires I think you would have liked; but it wouldn’t seem strange if you already knew it. English translation by the author

Notes 1

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (NY: Viking, 1986), p. 145. Joseph Brodsky, A Book of Interviews, compiled and edited by V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2000), p. 298. 3 A. Solzhenitsyn, ‘Joseph Brodsky – Selected Poems’, Novy Mir, no. 12, 1999; Naum Korzhavin, Kontinent, 2003, no. 113. 4 Joseph Brodsky, A Book of Interviews, ibid., p. 223. 5 In the fi fth line, Gena refers to Brodsky’s friend, Gennady Shmakov, who had published a book about Baryshnikov in 1981, and who was working on a book about Callas until his death. * ‘Vertumnus’, the god of transformation, refers to Brodsky’s Italian translator, Gianni Buttafava, who died from a stroke. Brodsky’s poem in memoriam of Buttafava is called ‘Vertumnus’. ** The ‘divine voice’ refers to Callas in her role as Lucia di Lammermoor. 2

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14 LUDMIL A SHTERN Ludmila Shtern was born in Leningrad. She graduated from the Leningrad Mining Institute and received her PhD in geo-mineralogical sciences from Leningrad University. Ludmila immigrated to the US in 1976 and is currently a Resident Scholar at the Women Studies Program at Brandeis University, Boston. In the West, Shtern has published five books in Russian as well as numerous articles and stories in Russian and American periodicals. In Russian, her materials have appeared in Novoe Russkoe Slovo, Novy Amerikanets, Russkaya Mysl, Panorama, Kontinent, Bostonskii Marafon, Bostonskii Kosmopolit, Kolokol, zhurnal Slovo, and others. Her story, ‘The Russian Blues’ was published in Hungarian, and she has had short stories published in Dutch; the Italian translation of ‘Twelve Colleagiums’ was published in Palermo, Sicily. In English, Shtern has published in the following magazines: Stories, Piquod, Boston Globe Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Connecticut Review, and others. In 2001, her book, Leaving Leningrad, was published in English. Since 1989, Shtern has been widely published in Russia. Her stories have been published in such Russian magazines as: Prestizh, Soglasie, Zvezda, Four Seasons, the almanacs The City and the World, Aprel, Novye Amazonki, NLO, Four Seasons. She has given interviews to the following radio stations: VOA, Svoboda, BBC, Echo of Moscow, St. Petersburg, as well as to many television channels, including NTV, New England Cable News, the History Channel, and Round Table. In December 2001, her memoirs, Brodsky: Osia, Iosif, Joseph, were published by the Nezavisimaya gazeta publishing house, and in March 2003, her travel stories, Inclined to a Change of Place, were published. Her book Dovlatov, My Good Buddy was published by Azbuka publishing house in 2005, and Brodsky: a Personal Memoir was published in English by ‘Baskerville Publishers’ in September 2004. Joseph Brodsky about Ludmila Shtern: ‘Ludmila Shtern is a talented humorist and a subtle stylist who works in the short story genre… Her writing represents a fusion of ironic restraint and insight. Shtern has a sharp eye, which allows her to notice the details of contemporary life, and an accurate ear, which allows her to distinguish the rich nuances of urban spoken language. All of these qualities make reading her prose a pleasure’.

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An Interview with Ludmila Shtern (15 November 2003, Boston) – You had many famous friends in Russia and America. Do you feel that your friendship with Brodsky was a significant event in your life? – Of course I do. When your friendship with any person lasts almost forty years, then it is undoubtedly a significant event in your life. As for fame, Brodsky became famous many years after we first met. By the end of the fifties there was no hint of Joseph’s fame; he was an eighteen-year-old kid whom we took care of, sometimes feeding him soup, consoling him when he was upset, and listening to his early poems with much delight. – By the way, have you ever heard of him being nicknamed at that age, ‘the Jewish Pushkin’? – No I have not heard this nickname. But at his trial, his lawyer, Zoya Toporova, said that Brodsky was an exceptional individual and that many cultural specialists was convinced that he was as great poet as Pushkin. – What impressed you most in Brodsky: his genius or his spiritual power or his charm? – When we were young, we were not so interested in our spiritual power or charm. We were sure that we all had wonderful spiritual qualities and that we were the best, the most promising, loyal, and honest. There was much that charmed me in Brodsky. First of all, he was quite handsome, and that was important to me. He really won me over with his absolute (now it’s easier to talk about it, because his life attests to this) detachment from the circumstances in which he found himself. He was like the proverbial cat, who comes and goes as he pleases and does whatever he wants. He had this very rare, for our generation, sense of inner freedom. It is a mystery how he managed to remain so free in the circumstances, and still survive. Plus he was much more talented than his friends who were older than him and took the lead, such as Rein, Bobyshev, and Naiman.

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Ludmila Shtern, photo by Joseph Brodsky in SPb.

– I know this for myself and have observed it in other women in the 80’s in the US and then in Europe that his appeal, his sex appeal was totally irresistible. Did you personally experience this in your youth? In other words, were you ever a little bit in love with him, ever somewhat? – Frankly, not. I remember once at some party, in our house, he was sitting for some reason in the hall, and I was running past with a plate. He grabbed me and set me on his lap, in response to which I said: ‘I am sorry, but I don’t feel anything of the sort’. I don’t think he felt anything of the sort either. As is well known, he favoured quiet, mysterious blondes, and not mouthy brunettes in glasses. – Yes, but there were exceptions. – But I was not one of them. Do you remember the poem he dedicated to Larisa Kaplan: ‘In general, I prefer blondes / but in spirit, I think I am a brunet / or else a polished boot / without a single light spot’. That is actually true. But I was never in love with him. Of course now it would have been nice to pretend there was something romantic, but I never felt anything of the sort and there was never anything like that between us. I think my Jewish-mother complex often infuriated him. – Did you ever go to any of Brodsky’s public readings? You don’t write much about that in your book. – In Leningrad I used to go to them all. In the States also, when

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he read in Boston or New York. In the book, I only mention one of his readings in Leningrad. At this reading, Kuklin, a mediocre poet, said that Brodsky was good for nothing, and left slamming the door. I wrote about this episode, because it had to do with the story of our practical joke. His readings were always entrancing and would have a hypnotic effect on listeners. I have many tapes of his readings. I also have a video of his last reading in Boston, which I organized. He often read at my house, but, unfortunately, when we were young we did not have these video toys. – It’s curious that none of the other poets ever tried to read in his manner. – About other poets I don’t really know, but he did have many imitators. For example my late friend, Gena Shmakov. The owner of the ‘Russian Samovar’, Roman Kaplan, also can imitate his manner. You should hear his ‘Speech about Spilled Milk’. – Did everyone take to this manner of reading? Or were there poets or others literary figures, who made fun of it? – I don’t know about poets, but just among listeners there were plenty. If a person didn’t fall for his magic, then Brodsky’s manner of reading could be perceived as a mournful Jewish prayer. Can a prayer sound funny? But for many, including myself, there was an incredible, almost physical sense of hypnotic power. People would go into a trance. Though there were those who would laugh and say: ‘Howling, as usual’. – Don’t you find it strange that he never changed his style of reading? – No, I don’t. Moreover, he would get irritated when others would try to read him with Kachalov expressiveness. He would tease Misha Kozakov. – I know that every time I organized a reading for him at British universities, he would say: ‘Valentina, please, no actors or actresses. Let some English poet or lecturer read the translations’. – Yes, he couldn’t stand it when his poetry was performed by actors. And he would also get very irritated by bards who sang his poetry to a guitar accompaniment. – Was Joseph a romantic? Is there any period of his creative life that could be designated as romantic? – No I can’t think of a specific period. I think that his entire oeu-

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JB’s Inscription for Ludmila Shtern, 1977

vre is permeated with romanticism. Most of his poems are dedicated to Marina Basmanova. And this was broken with the poem, ‘Dearest, I left home today very late in the evening…’ – I know, you are critical of the lines: ‘you amused yourself with me, and then took up with a chemical engineer / and based on your letters, became incredibly stupid’. But do these lines testify to his cure from the chronic pain, as you write, rather than the pain becoming more acute? We slap the offender in the face when the pain is at its worst. – Yes, but when one is a man and a world famous poet, and the other is an aging woman. It is not nice to hit her. – You wanted Joseph to be a gentleman. But for all my and yours love for Joseph Aleksandrovich, we know that he was not a gentleman. – What he wasn’t, he wasn’t. Too bad. I still find it shameful on his behalf.

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– By the way, tell me how he handled your reproaches, did he get mad? – Apparently he got very mad. I hesitated to call him, and so I wrote him and quoted Pushkin: ‘I loved you without words, and hopelessly…’ I reproached him for not being able to hit a higher note. He did not answer my letter, never mentioned it. But he did receive it and read it to a mutual friend… – Many of Joseph’s old friends remember how their closeness from youth was replaced by a cooling down, and in America even a distancing. Who of his previous friends did Joseph keep, whom did he lose or weed out and on what principle? – I would rather not provide a list of friends that Brodsky cooled to. But the reasons for his cooling off were fully understandable. Some people just began to get to him. He was constantly besieged with requests by people who were maybe old acquaintances, and sometimes, even chance ones, and who believed that he was obliged to solve their problems and take care of them. And the more famous he became, the more people tried to use his connections in order to solve their problems. The most outstanding example is Anatoly Naiman who indeed had been a close friend in youth. But toward the end of his life Joseph literally hated him. Though perhaps hate is too strong a word. He just did not want to have anything to do with him. Naiman was tactless and impudent and he used Joseph to the maximum. He was what is called a typical user. Other people ceased being of interest to Brodsky. At the same time, Joseph was incredibly busy; it is difficult to imagine how truly busy; he was and how he would have to fight off thousands of minor things so he could focus on his main pursuit, writing poetry. First of all, he had to earn money and write articles, essays, introductions, which he would not have written if he had not needed to. Secondly, he was preoccupied with his university position. It wasn’t just lectures, but endless reviewing of students’ assignments. He was constantly invited to read. He was extremely busy. Plus, he had bad health. Many thought that if Joseph was their pal, how hard could it be to lend a hand. But he had quit being just a pal a long time before. Then after many years in America and Europe, he began to get the impression, and unfortunately not unfounded, that the old friends of his youth who had come here behave very provincially, ‘embarrassing’, he would say to me.

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– Yes, I know, he also told me about it and how he had become disappointed even in his dear friend Zhenia Rein. Already during their first meeting in 1988, Zhenia kept complaining about life in the Soviet Union, so much so that Joseph tired of it. Don’t you think that by calling Rein his teacher, out of gratitude, he did him more harm, as Rein took it seriously? – No, I don’t think so. Rein is my close friend, and I don’t want to say anything that would cause him pain. If Joseph was not attentive enough to Rein in New York, it is because he did not have enough energy or time. He loved Rein and when he was young he would indeed read him everything he wrote and listen to his opinion. One could in fact say that Rein was one of his teachers. I think you are right, he said this out of gratitude. I am not sure if he really felt that way. He was ironic, moody. Sometimes he felt one way, other times another way. He would often get irritated. Rein, like everyone, has qualities that can irritate. Though of the many friends from his youth, whom he really loved sincerely I would pick out Zhenia Rein, Mika Golyshev, and Andrey Sergeev. With Sergeev, mind you, there was also a certain cooling off, in New York. – What about Yasha Gordin? Yasha was one of his most loyal and honorable friends. – Yes, I would say the most loyal. When Joseph left, Yasha took care of his parents and his archives. He could rely on Yasha in a practical sense. I think also that Yasha was the custodian of his romantic secrets. Yasha never asked Joseph for anything for himself. Brodsky loved both Yasha and his wife Tata deeply. – Why do you think that in Ann Arbor Joseph lived as if in a vacuum? Did you visit him there? – I did not visit him there, but he told me about it many times. At first he was totally alone, yes The Proffers were there, but there was no one spiritually close. – Yes, but this is not something one can find either in America or in England. I lived in Ann Arbor almost half a year in 1980, and in the beginning I socialized with Joseph almost too much, until Ellendea Proffer warned me that if I didn’t want to make enemies, I shouldn’t spend every evening in Joseph’s company, as everyone should take their turn, there is a timetable indicating when and with whom he is having dinner.

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– When did you say? 1980? I am talking about 1972, when he didn’t know anyone yet, and he was all alone. – What is the source of the rumour about how Brodsky applied to teach either at Boston or Brown University, but they never even called him for an interview? In fact, Brodsky got invited to teach at Mount Holyoke back in 1981, which was why he left the University of Michigan. – I don’t know about Brown. – I did find out about Brown from the Harvard Professor, Stephanie Sandler, who taught at Amherst in the 80’s. She told me that Brown very much wanted to hire Brodsky, and all the five colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and University of Massachusetts), where Joseph taught, were worried that this new offer might be of interest to him, because Brown is located near the ocean, and Brodsky was fond of water. But Joseph did not accept the offer. – This was probably when Joseph was already teaching at Amherst. I am speaking of the time before he taught there, when he was lecturing at Columbia University and he was looking for a permanent position. About his not being called in for an interview by Boston University, he told me himself. There is a story about Nabokov, how in his time did not get invited to teach at Harvard and that Roman Jakobson had a part in this, I heard this from Nabokov’s sister, Elena Vladimirovna. – But Brodsky did have a permanent job in Michigan, though he suffered there because it was in the deep provinces. From Michigan he went to the five colleges, with a one-year break in 1981, which he spent in Rome as a grantee of the American Academy. – He was probably already looking for another position while in Michigan. – Joseph actively resisted having his poetry interpreted in the context of his biography. At the same time, he himself did this when he spoke of Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and many Western poets. What does the reader stand to lose if he knows little about Brodsky’s life? – I think a lot. Moreover, I think that he used a lot of biographical elements in his poetry; veiled though they were, they were still recognizable. Maybe because I knew him well and for a long time, I could tell when it was about him and when it wasn’t. Take, for example, his ‘Cape Cod Lullaby’. That was all about him.

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– What do you think is the main reason that will continue the ban on an authorized biography for 50 years after his death? – There could be many reasons. – We all got letters requesting us not to help anyone who wanted to write Brodsky’s biography. – I know. I even called Maria and said: ‘Maria, this is very stupid. If you do not want his friends who loved him and who knew the truth to write about him, then anyone else who thinks of it will write about him whatever they want: who once went to a restaurant with him, who chased women with him… You can’t make people not write about Brodsky. They will write whatever they want; you have no control over them. Instead of supporting those who could write the truth about him with love and good intentions… How can you not understand that casual acquaintances will make their careers out of him?’ – Did you have any problems with your book? Did you also need to request permission to quote from his poems and letters? – Yes, they allowed me to include one letter and not in its complete form, only excerpts, while I have lots of letters from him. But I didn’t have any problems with his poems. – We are urged to follow the poet’s own lead, not to make a biographical hero out of him. But our memories of him, our testimonies are a guarantee against future mythologizing. Maybe all of his friends should write their memoirs about him, leave some kind of document behind? – Perhaps. It seems to me very naïve and nearsighted that he gave the right to handle his literary estate to two ladies, one, his wife Maria, who had met Joseph only in 1990, that is she had known him for just five years, and the second is Ann, who doesn’t know Russia nor does she speak or understand a word of Russian. – Perhaps because it would have been too difficult to find anyone among the Russians to perform this thankless task? – There are people both in Russia and America who could have handled Brodsky’s legacy effectively. In Russia, Yasha Gordin, if he would have agreed, and here – Loseff, Sumerkin, Vika Schweitzer… I think Joseph did not think about it seriously, which is why it is so stupidly managed. – Do you know anything about Joseph’s older daughter from the ballerina, Masha Kuznetsova? Why did he hide her existence from Maria?

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Both she and her son, Joseph’s grandson, have been deprived of their share of the inheritance. – I do know about her, and moreover, I was once asked by a mutual friend to bring her some money. I did this when I was in Petersburg. But I have not met her. – The last poem written for MB was dated 1992. Do you think that the wound that she caused Joseph never healed? – I think it healed a long time ago. He needed to have this kind of Dulcinea, with whom he was hopelessly in love, because she was the source of his inspiration. Have you noticed that he never dedicated anything to Maria? – Not dedicated, but addressed, for example, ‘The Byzantine’, ‘Ischia’. – Those are good poems. – ‘One can refuse anything, Brodsky said. There is nothing one cannot refuse’. What did he refuse that would have been too difficult for any ordinary person? – We can read about this in his poem, ‘I entered the cage instead of a wild beast’. I can’t say it any better than he does in his poetry. He refused to reconcile himself with the fact that the Universe will continue living without him. – Does that mean that he suffered from such a sin as pride? – I think it’s more of an understanding of one’s mission. Though maybe it’s pride too. – But he resisted this sin almost physically. One could see his muscles getting taut, when he was practicing humility. He wanted to be modest and he would belittle his poetic worth, calling his poetry little poems and so forth. I have both thought and written about this a lot. – We constantly forget that he was a person with a great sense of humour and self-irony. When among close friends he loved to laugh at himself and did it well. He was easy about himself, didn’t take on airs, which is why it is difficult for me to say when he resisted his pride. I know that certain people brought out in him this excess pride, which he would try to keep in check. – Why did Brodsky not become as popular in Russia as Vysotsky? Does it have to do with the quality of the verse or the fact that for 30 years Russian readers did not have access to his texts? – Well then why have such great poets as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva

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not become popular? Because they are very complex poets. Someone such as Khachaturian is one thing, whereas Schnitke is something totally different. Some like Esenin, others like Brodsky. A different ear and a different way of hearing. I think that Brodsky is an élite poet. It is possible to find a couple of dozen easier poems of his, such as ‘Pilgrims’, and redo them into songs, but with the more complicated poems, such as ‘The Face of Tragedy’, it would be too difficult. – Perhaps this is the reason why Solzhenitsyn does not understand or accept Brodsky? – Exactly so. Aleksandr Isaevich turned out to have a deaf ear for this kind of poetry. – In your essay, ‘A Giant Against a Titan’, you note that Aleksandr Isaevich was of the same mind as the Soviet system of justice, regretting that Brodsky was released ahead of time from his exile in Archangelsk, which was a ‘resuscitating earthly force’. Brodsky himself stated in an interview that his exile to the village was the best time of his life. Which one of them is being less than straightforward? – Neither. Brodsky, most likely, had very personal reasons for feeling this way. And in truth, he is the only one who has the right to express an opinion as to whether or not his exile was good for him or not. But a writer who has gone through the GULAG should not publish words to the effect that any exile or deprivation of freedom is beneficial for the poet. That is out of order and it did not serve Solzhenitsyn well. – Can one compare Solzhenitsyn’s congealed language (‘craven submersion in the abyss of language’) with Brodsky’s Pushkinian, contemporary language? – To me, Solzhenitsyn’s ‘abysses’ and ‘submersions’, and other linguistic arabesques and pirouettes seem parodies. – Was Brodsky proud of the fact that the Soviet system had rejected him as something alien, and that his parents did not raise him to be an obedient slave? – No, he wasn’t proud of it. And his parents, as far as I know, did not raise him in any particular way. – As you know, Eltsyn sent a huge wreath to Brodsky’s grave in Venice, which, rumour has it, Naiman moved to Ezra Pound’s tomb at night. – I doubt that Naiman would have spent the night at the cemetery on the island of San Michele. But if that were true, then we can consider it to be one of the few truly worthy deeds of his life.

– Did Brodsky feel nostalgic? – I think he missed Petersburg. He wanted to return without pomp and circumstance; he did not want any kind of showy receptions. – In August 1995, he was in Helsinki, and he felt very well. He had a successful reading, an audience of three thousand in an open-air area, but he did not think of going to Petersburg. – He was concerned about his heart. In April of 1995, when he was reading in Boston, we had a tour planned for his readings in the States, beginning with November, but he cancelled everything. – Your uncle Grisha, back in 1961, understood that Joseph was marked by God and needed to believe in God. Based on his poems, can one say whether or not he believed in God? – I never asked him directly whether or not he believed in God, but I am sure that he did. It’s apparent in his poetry as well. – You have witnessed Joseph practically throughout all of his poetic life. How would you interpret the vector of his evolution? Where was he headed? – He was moving toward philosophy. It seems to me that his attempt to make sense of life, philosophy through poetry, clashed with his great lyrical talent, because the very complicated thing that he wanted to say required a very complicated form. This alienated some of his readers. – One should add that Brodsky brought into the great flow of Russian poetry a new current of English metaphysical poetry from Donne to Auden, hence the tendency toward reason, coolness, and distance, as well as his other virtues or shortcomings. – This is something the Russian reader is not ready for, because it is totally out of the mainstream of the Russian poetic tradition. Joseph in this is a pioneer. In England, such a tradition has existed for four centuries; I think that a lot of time needs to pass before his poetry is fully absorbed by the Russian reader. We still have Pushkin wandering through our blood. – I thank you for our discussion. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

15 NATA LYA G OR BA N E V S K AYA Natalya Gorbanevskaya was born in Moscow in 1936. She studied philology in Moscow State University; she graduated from the Philological Department of Leningrad University in 1964. Gorbanevskaya has worked as a bookseller, bibliographer, and a technical and scientific translator. In April 1968, she was the founder and editor of, as well as typist for the samizdat news-sheet, A Chronicle of Current Events, and on 25 August, 1968, she took part in the demonstration on Red Square against the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, which she described in her book, Polden (Midday, published by Posev, 1970). In December 1969, she was arrested and, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was subjected to compulsory treatment in Kazan psychiatric prison-hospital in 1972. In December 1975, with her two sons, she emigrated, and since February 1976, has been living in Paris, where for years she worked as assistant editor of the Paris-based journal Kontinent. Since 1988, she has been a regular contributor to the Radio Svoboda and until 2003 she worked for the newspaper Russkaya mysl (Russian Thought). Since 1999, she has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Novaya Polsha (New Poland), which appeared in Warsaw, in Russian. Gorbanevskaya’s poems have appeared in samizdat from the early 60’s. The first almost complete selection Poberezhye (Seaboard) was published in USA in 1973. ‘Since then she has published many collections of poetry; the most recent ones are: Last Poems of the Last Century (2000), Russo-Russian Conversation (2003), Tea-rose (2006). A selection of her early work, translated by Daniel Weissbort, was published by Carcanet in 1972. Gorbanevskaya has translated a good deal from Polish, Czech and Slovak.

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An Interview with Natalya Gorbanevskaya (April-June 2004, Paris) - You’ve already told how you met Brodsky, in 1960 in Moscow, when Alec Ginsburg printed his poems in the third issue of the underground journal ‘Syntaksis’.1 What did the young Brodsky look like, and what was his mood at the time? Was he pleased his poetry was being published? – I first got to know Brodsky’s poems in connection with Syntaksis. This was in early spring, and Joseph came to Moscow in the autumn, in November, and I don’t remember if we talked about whether he was pleased or not. Alec Ginzburg was already in prison, and Joseph was more concerned about his fate, but this is only a guess, because in fact I do not remember what we discussed (except that they wanted to know ‘what poems Natasha liked’). On the other hand, later on, when we’d already left the country; he always greeted Alec very warmly, calling him ‘my first publisher’. I cannot recall what Joseph’s appearance was like, since that memory is overlaid by our whole subsequent friendship. The impression that remains is that he was more like the later self than the seventeen-year old, as in the photograph his father gave me, before I emigrated. Not the even later self, but when he resembled his father. At the beginning of the Nineties something remarkably like his mother showed through. When I told him about this in Paris, he was deeply moved; ‘Really!’ He had such a special way of saying ‘Really!’ As if utterly astonished. – You participated as a typist in the publication of Brodsky’s first poems. For his part, after thirteen years, he acted as proofreader of your collection ‘Poberezhye’ (Seaboard)2 published by Ardis. Do you see in this the finger of fate moving, or simply a deep mutual respect? – I took part as a typist (first for Syntaksis, later simply for his poems, ‘Isaac and Abraham’. Then I asked Meilakh for ‘Zofia’, which Joseph wouldn’t authorise – I typed it anyway) and even copied it by hand. But that was already later. Joseph had emigrated, and his poems appeared in Vestnik RSKhD (Le messager), which I came across

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in Moscow. I copied the whole collection and sent it to Garik Superfin in the camps, since you couldn’t send anything typed to the camps. – But why didn’t Joseph want ‘Zofia’ reproduced? – Mishka Meilakh told me Joseph had planned it very deliberately in four parts, strictly formal – and it hadn’t worked out (I don’t recall the details; perhaps Meilakh does), but Joseph simply forbade it. The reason for Joseph being the proof-reader of my collection is simple. He had just come to America. Professors Carl and Ellendea Proffer took him on at Ardis, as a proof-reader. So, it’s not a question of the finger of fate, but simply of my good luck. Imagine! My little book comes out, and at the end there is a note to the effect that Joseph Brodsky was the proof-reader! Whether it had anything to do with deep mutual respect, I rather doubt. Joseph had a good opinion of me, from time to time also of my poems. Bur only from time to time. – You and Joseph have other things in common, both superficial and profound: you’re both Gemini, both were at odds with the system, both experienced prison, involuntary psychiatric treatment, exile and emigration. Do you feel a special kinship with Brodsky? – ‘In solitary, a shoulder as one walks …’ I felt a close affinity with this poem a long time before I experienced – well before I even imagined I might experience incarceration. These lines simply bowled me over. Under Gemini – yes. Also it was May. Joseph said: ‘We were born in May – you and I will both suffer’ (in Russian ‘mayatsia’, relates to May but means ‘to suffer’). Banal but true. Kinship would be putting it too strongly. A somewhat similar fate – yes. – Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn and some who were never in prison that prison and exile were useful to Brodsky and that it’s a pity he didn’t have to serve his full term? – You know, I never found anything like that in Solzhenitsyn – let’s check. Here’s what he says: ‘Every growing thing, horses, labouring peasants participate in, are part of a life force. Once, I too, a city student, lived among horses, harnessed like a horse to a cart, experiencing something like that and already I took my harness as a kind of joy. I think, if Brodsky had been longer in exile, the development that took place might have gone a little further’. Anyway, it is no ‘pity’ that he didn’t served his full term! I don’t know what those others are saying. I think that exile (not the arrest, not prison, not the trial, although it also produced some wonderful poems), were somehow

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‘useful to him’. But, thank God, it didn’t drag on. And, of course, ‘In a village, God does not live in corners …’ goes beyond the life force of the earth, and so forth. – You have written that for you Brodsky became a pre-eminent poet after ‘Isaac and Abraham’. What do you particularly like about this poem? The subject, its treatment by Brodsky? Its poetic embodiment? – Well, if one is to use such terms, then it must be the poetic embodiment. In general, although I was already impressed by Joseph’s poems in the 1960’s, for me, he emerged as a great poet some time in 1962, and he grew and continued to grow. – You say, ‘Grew and continued to grow’. But I have just read a dissertation sent to me from Saratov, about time and space in Brodsky’s poetics ‘ from a Christian-religious point of view’, in which the author comes to the conclusion that ‘in general, the second period of Brodsky’s creative life is not marked by spiritual growth’.3 Do you think such a conclusion is acceptable? – Of course not. Spirit, as the saying goes, bloweth where it listeth, but with a poet, in the first place, this concerns his poetry. With Brodsky, growth continues in his poetics, but I insist that it is particularly noticeable in the Eighties and Nineties, in the ethics of his poetry. Of course, it is not an openly stated ethics. In my understanding, that of an entirely orthodox believer, what becomes increasingly visible is an ascetic attitude to life, poetry and so forth (although, to be perfectly serious, one already caught a glimmer of this in the Sixties). – What do you think of Brodsky’s Christmas poems? Not all of them are about Christmas; some of them, overtly about Christmas, are written ‘in a monotonously cold metre, the amphibrach’, which provides some of those who have researched Brodsky’s work with a basis for the claim that none express the Christian joy in eternal life and that in them, Brodsky totally fails to understand the essence of Christianity? Is Brodsky, in your view, a Christian poet? – I find it hard to call anyone ‘a Christian poet’. This label, role belongs to Kublanovsky or Sedakova. As for not bringing Christian joy in eternal life, what foolishness! I have many Christmas poems by Brodsky associated with the beginning of Polish Christmas carols: ‘God is born, might is crushed …’ Another thing, he does not have the limited Western view of Christmas as simply a holiday, Christmas-tide, when one forgets everything to do with what lies

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ahead. And although he didn’t write a single poem about Easter, but lots about Christmas, his tonality is closer to the Orthodox tradition, where the most important celebration is not Christmas but Easter with the Passion and Crucifixion. At Christmas he always remembered the Crucifixion. – You are very attentive to the intonations of your own poems and those of others. How would you describe the dominant intonation of Brodsky’s poetry? As of a detached observer or as one intimately involved in what is happening? – As a listener or even a ‘hearer’ – of one who is within the poems and one who is outside. Outside himself and inside. That is, as a participant and observer – not terms I would use, however. But this is probably a characteristic of my perception, not objective, but directed (in relation to the poetry) at hearing. – Does it not seem to you that many of Brodsky’s utterances in poetry and even in prose are sermon like? Perhaps Brodsky is ‘teaching us how to live’ as Akhmatova did? – Brodsky’s ‘teaching’, in my view, is not a property of these poems, but of his poetics. In general, he proposes formulations, as if they were scientific formulae, especially in the Seventies and Eighties. His ‘sermons’ are part of it. Of course, in human behaviour there were many things in Joseph that impressed me, that seemed familiar, but for me he was not ‘a teacher of life’. Can one teach ‘how to live’ solely through poetry? Well, why not! But this is not specific to his poetry. – You had a deep admiration for Akhmatova and had the pleasure of knowing her personally. Did you speak to Akhmatova about Brodsky? – Well, we must have talked, but I remember nothing specific. All I remember is how she loved him, was extremely concerned about him, when he was arrested and right up to his release. I remember them together – before his arrest, but it was always with lots of other people present. She treated him with great tenderness. – You differ significantly with Joseph in one matter. You both loved and stop loving Tsvetaeva, but he regarded Marina Ivanovna as ‘the most grandiose phenomenon in Russian poetry’. Why, do you think, he valued her so highly? – Well, you know, I never understood this. Grandness of design perhaps? It seems to me that Akhmatova repeated these words with slight irony. ‘Grandiose phenomenon’. Agreed. But there’s your ‘teacher of

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life’ the wrong way around. Also a ‘teacher of poetry’, but in my view, quite the reverse. It seems to me Joseph deferred to her, but that, thank God, he learned nothing from her. – On the other hand, Brodsky said that all he does and writes ‘in the final count is the story of Akhmatova’. How do you view the conjunction of these enormous streams in the sea called Joseph Brodsky? – Well, I think that my earlier answer in part answers this question too. But let me go further. It seems to me that these ‘streams’ simply do not converge in the sea called Joseph Brodsky. Not only do I not hear Tsvetaeva in Brodsky’s poetics, but to be honest, not even Akhmatova, although no doubt she taught him a lot about life. In general, I do not know where he comes from. Perhaps, from English poetry? I can’t say much about that, but I suspect that if you dig deeper, you’ll come up with a similar answer – from nowhere. That is, everything has been assimilated (from Mandelstam and Khlebnikov and whomever), but nothing manifested itself directly. Finally, when Brodsky named his slightly older contemporaries as his teachers, he was right, except that in his generosity he named too many of them; but one name, Stanislav Krasovitsky, to whom he owed a lot in his youth, I managed to wring out of him only once. – Brodsky helped you in the translation of Milosz’s ‘Treatise on Poetry’. How, specifically, did he help you? – We read the translation closely with the source text beside it and he pointed out many places, which I corrected at once either while he looked on or afterwards. Sometimes he suggested corrections; for instance concerning the pronunciation of the word ‘International’. I do not remember any other corrections although there were a few more. He reassured me that alexandrines and iambic pentameters could be alternated, that this was all right. The reading of the whole translation took several hours. – In 1987, you were present at the Nobel ceremony when Brodsky received the prize. Tell us, please, how he behaved, how he felt, what your impression was of the ceremony. How did he come to invite you to it? – Joseph did not invite me to Stockholm. I was there as a correspondent for Russkaya myself (Russian Thought). He was on his best behaviour, like a child, an urchin, but whenever necessary (at the lecture, the presentation of the award, the speech), he was no lon-

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ger a boy but a man. He was radiant – in a childlike way, no conceit at all, no self-satisfaction, and he radiated such joy that we all glowed as well. – It was particularly clear from his Nobel speech that Brodsky has been preoccupied with the fate of the world. Did events in Russia, in the Nineties, disturb or exit him? – I saw Joseph for the last time in Paris, at the beginning of the Nineties, so I can’t say anything about that. – How would you define the basic direction of Brodsky’s thought? – O, I myself am no thinker; what a hard business, to define a basic direction! Maybe to understand the world? And to understand that, all the same, you’ll never really understand it? – I hoped by this question to bring you back to Brodsky’s Christianity. In an interview, he said: ‘My work, to a large extent, is to praise God’ and he agreed with Anthony Hecht that the poet’s task is an elemental wish to interpret the Bible. Does it not seem to you that Brodsky scholars have not yet found a language suitable for discussing Brodsky’s world-view? – Exactly! ‘Work in praise of God’! But it is not a question of worldview – it is a description of your life’s work, your ‘task as a poet’. You know, in one of my own poems, I write: ‘Let it be your will, Lord, that each breath be in praise of You’ – and later I explain that I had myself in mind too! Brodsky’s every poetic breath praises the Lord – even, it seem, in the least appropriate poems (and in the ‘appropriate’ ones, for instance the Christmas ones – no less). Unlike the socalled ‘Christian poets’. That is, his world-view, of course, is religious, monotheistic and Christian more than Jewish; his Bible is both Testaments. But not declaimed, not for effect, not programmatic (whereupon it stops being a world-view, just as religion stops being religion when it becomes ideology). – You say that we have not yet fully understood Akhmatova’s poetry. Have we understood even a quarter of Brodsky’s? – It’s different. Perhaps we haven’t understood, but we have looked, are looking, will continue to look. Just consider all the volumes dedicated to Brodsky’s poetics, an activity in which you have taken part. I simply don’t know how to approach Akhmatova. ‘I am the quietest, I am simple one …’. A puzzle, a mystery – I don’t know exactly how to

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describe it. Still waters run deep and it’s hard to find devils in them, there is something else. You’ll never see right through to the bottom, however much you are temped to try. – It is well known that Brodsky could not stand the company of a certain type of individual. How would you characterise this type. – You know, to answer that question, one would have to have been closer to Joseph than I was. He and I were always on friendly terms, but we did not meet regularly. And to comment on how he chose his friends is something I cannot do. – Natasha, you surprise me. People who maybe had one or two drinks with him consider themselves close friends, but you knew him from his poetic infancy. – Yes, I knew him from when he was twenty, and I was twenty-four. – How, in you opinion, did he treat himself? With love, with pride, with respect, with humility? – In relation to himself, his own poems, his fame, he seemed a child to me. I remember him in Stockholm: he was completely childlike. He shared his pleasure with everyone, and was happy that he was spreading joy around. – It used to be hard for Brodsky to tolerate other people and also himself. Perhaps, he did not like himself? In a letter to Sergeev he talks about his ‘vile character’. Did he have a difficult character? – You know, not long ago I said to one of my Orthodox women friends ‘It’s very hard to love one’s neighbour, as one does oneself, because often we don’t love ourselves at all’. She said: ‘These are excuses’. I think that our dislike of ourselves is an excuse. We must try, in the first place, to love our neighbour, and then, perhaps, we’ll be able to love ourselves in the same way. Joseph in general loved his neighbour. As far as I can judge from his kindness towards people, his readiness to help … Take those accursed introductions to other poets’ collections, about which you yourself have written. His kindness was always totally practical. I think, it is not so much that he did not like himself as that he was very exacting. I think that I am less exacting; I cannot bear living with myself. Joseph demanded a lot of himself; of those close to him, he demanded less. And sometimes he was broken by someone he could not be soft toward, whom he really could not abide.. For me this is very simple. If I cannot abide someone, everybody knows it, including the individual concerned. Joseph, in his

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tenderness, could not always say that he couldn’t take any more of this individual. But this is all guesswork. He and I were friends, but never close friends. Sometimes he told me things, which, it seemed to me at the time, he had never told anyone else. I have already written, in my article on his death, how he complained that Marina had rejected him. But I didn’t write it all in this article and what I didn’t then write I’m not going to tell you now. There are some thing, it seems to me, Joseph told me alone. Not because I was a close friend, but because I happened to be there at the time. – He also knew you would not betray him. As regards betrayal, he wrote about this on several occasions in his poetry and his prose: ‘It doesn’t matter how often you are betrayed’. What exactly did he have in mind? Betrayal of women, friends, acquaintances? Or something deeper, more general? – I think the most significant thing was when Marina left him for Dima Bobyshev, who was his friend. Dima of course was very fond of Joseph. I remember how Joseph introduced me to Dima Bobyshev and how he was scared to introduce me to others, considering himself too young, but he had no qualms about Dima. At that time they were very fond of each other. And what Dima did was terrible. Later he forgave Marina, but he never forgave Dima. When he was on the editorial board of Kontinent4 there was a conference in Milan, Joseph refused to come because Navrozov was there. I phoned and he said: ‘I don’t want to see Dima’. I think that the betrayal of friends is the very worst thing. In general, though, it is unclear who betrayed whom – Marina’s character is complex. And perhaps Dima was already envious of Brodsky’s creativity (one sees it in Dima’s writings) – hard for me to talk about this, because Dima is my godchild. This envy of Brodsky made Dima take his revenge in another way. But of course, he was madly in love with Marina. He asked Marina, already pregnant with Brodsky’s child to leave him and come to him, to Dima. There are women, like Marina, who loved both Brodsky and Bobyshev. And Joseph went on loving her for so many years, through all his love affairs. None of his affairs cured him of this love. And how he insulted her in that poem!5 But this suggests that her betrayal of him at the time was not so important. – I know, many blame him for this poem?

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– I phoned him and he said: ‘You don’t understand. It had to be done’. For him this was a moment of healing. He was simultaneously cured of love and of the memory of her betrayal. He deleted it all. But we are left with the poems, so we cannot do the same. And perhaps, it is good that he wrote this poem; we see that Brodsky was cured. He could not cure himself in any other way. It had to be. I really don’t understand, but I believe him that it had to be, and that he could do nothing else under the circumstances. – Brodsky himself is continually accused of treachery. He refused to visit his native city when he was made an honorary citizen of St. Petersburg, did not return to Russia and continued hysterically to be accused: ‘No, he did not love, did not love, did not love his country’. Should we be defending him against these lies? Or is it better to remember the words of his own poem: ‘And to defend you / from calumnies – is like defending trees / from the leaves, wrapped in their meaningless but clearly / insistent murmur of majority’.6 – First, we know where these calls came from. Better not to pay any attention. Second, everyone has the right to visit or not visit his homeland. – But surely no one is accusing you, a Russian, of hatred towards your country, because you do not return to Russia. Don’t you think antiSemitism is playing a part here? – If they try to say that I am Russian, I say, excuse me, but my father was a Jew, although it is true that I feel myself Russian, even though I am fifty per cent Jewish. My great-grandmother was Greek, and my Jewish blood is mixed with Ukrainian. – Both in Russia and America and in Europe, Brodsky felt a stranger and at the same time at home. Where is the solution to this odd phenomenon to be found: in his character, his Jewish genes, and his talent? – It is simply that he was lonely everywhere. I do not think that he felt displaced anywhere. I never saw any limitation of that kind. Joseph, from his early years, went on expeditions. From early days, he was a kind of wanderer. But there were times when he felt at home: in the room and a half, and in the basement apartment in New York. In Paris, which in general he did not much care for, I visited him at his place, near Odeon. He seemed to find this apartment pleasant. He and I met at a corner cafe, and he liked it there too. Perhaps,

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as a wanderer who sits down and immediately feels at home. But one should not exaggerate. – By the way, why didn’t Joseph like France? – What’s there to like! But he didn’t like Paris either, whereas I do. – He didn’t hide it. It’s surprising the French awarded him the Legion d’honneur. – But they do that for their own sake. The French state is honouring itself, when it honours a great foreigner. – One more thing, regarding Brodsky and France. Brodsky was released from exile earlier not because Akhmatova and Shostakovich appealed on his behalf, but because Sartre wrote Mikoyan a letter. Brodsky himself preferred not to mention this. – Of course. This, however, does not change my opinion of Sartre. Sartre at that time refused the Nobel Prize and declared that it would be better to give it to Sholokhov. And it was awarded to Sholokhov the next year, as you know. Of course, the Soviet state would do such a useful, unpaid agent a favour and release the ‘red-headed boy’. Or perhaps there was another reason. They realised that Brodsky had to be released anyway, and sent Sartre their own agent who nagged him. ‘Look what is happening to this young poet in the Soviet Union and so forth. Jean-Paul, let’s do something about it’. And Jean-Paul did. – Brodsky is also blamed for not being grateful to Frida Vigdorova and Etkind for not talking about the trial. He was terribly upset by Etkind’s second book about him. – Etkind’s book is awful.7 But Vigdorova’s notes on the trial are a masterpiece.8 Joseph wanted to be judged not on account of the trial, but of his poetry. – You have dedicated some poems to Brodsky. What provoked these? – Well, all the poems are based on actual events: ‘Three poems to Joseph Brodsky’ were after the sentence. The poem, ‘There, where is Pushkin’s autumn …’ was after the Nobel Prize, about which I learnt in Rome (from there I went to Florence – ‘Before the angelic Madonna…’). Italy, for me, is more Joseph’s country than America. All the other poems were on his death or written after his death. By the way, the very year he was sentenced, I wrote ‘Three poems to Joseph Brodsky’; in ‘Three poems written on the road’ I wrote, ‘… on Brod-

sky Street I take the metro’. This too is about him and perhaps about our similar fates (see above). It suggests a certain foresight … – Which of the poems dedicated by you to Brodsky do you like best? Can we include it? – How about this one from ‘New Eight-liners’? 9 The Russian language has lost its instrument, hands wipe themselves on overalls, it cannot get used to the fact that Joseph has died, moving its lips, does not dry the eyes. Translated by Daniel Weissbort

Notes 1

2 3

4

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6 7

8

9

Samizdat journal Syntaksis was edited by Aleksandr Ginsburg from 1959. Soon after the third issue (1960) he was arrested, tried and sentenced to five years imprisonment. He was released in 1971 and emigrated in 1973. Poberezhye was published by Ardis (Ann Arbor, 1973). Ruslan Izmailov, Time and Space in Brodsky’s Poetics, PhD, Saratov University, 2004, p. 82. Kontinent is a monthly magazine established by Vladimir Maksimov in 1974. There are two unflattering poems dedicated to M. B.: ‘Dear, I came out of the house late this evening…’ (1989) and ‘The girl-friend, loosing her looks, settled in a country…’ (1992). Joseph Brodsky, from a poem ‘The Bust of Tiberius’, 1981. Efim Etkind, Protsess Iosifa Brodskogo (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1988). Frida Vigdorova’s ‘Notes on the trial’ were published in New Leader, vol. 47 (August 31, 1964) and in Encounter, vol. 20, no. 9 (9 September 1964). N. Gorbanevskaya, Chainaya roza (M.: NLO, 2006), p. 96.

16 ZOF I A K A PUśCI ńSK A Zofia Kapuścińska was born in 1937 in Łódź (Poland). She completed her studies at the Department of Psychology of the (former) Leningrad State University. Upon returning to Poland she began working in applied psychology at a scientific research institute (CIOP) in Warsaw. At the same time she was writing her Ph. D. dissertation, which she defended in 1972 at the University of Warsaw. Since 1970 she has been affiliated to the University of Silesia in Katowice. In 1975 - 76, upon receiving a Fulbright scholarship, she visited the US. (University of Pittsburgh). She is the author of a number of monographs on various applied psychology issues, as well as a few collections of articles and reviews. She is currently Professor of Psychology and was Director of the Institute of Psychology of the Silesian University till 2007. From 1996 - 2001, she served as the pro-rector of the university. She has participated in the work of various international psychological organizations (IAAP, ENOP, as a member of the Executive Committees).

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An Interview with Zofia Ratajczak-Kapuścińska (23 April 2004, Krakow) – Brodsky dedicated a few poems to you: ‘Fly away from here, white moth…’ (1960), ‘The bush is filled with water from the border…’ (1962), ‘Farther away from your country…’ (1964), ‘Polonaise: A Variation’ (1981). He also named a long poem after you: ‘Zofia’ (1962). Did you know about these poems being dedicated to you back then? How did you react to them? – Yes, I knew about them at the time when they were written. All of these poems were sent to me in letters. Though the long poem, ‘Zofia’, was hand delivered to me by Drawicz. Drawicz brought this poem to me from Moscow when they first met. But even earlier in letters, he noted that he was writing this poem: ‘And so I wrote these poems for which previously I would have gone to prison’. Of course I found myself very interested in these poems. I do not see anything all that dangerous in the long poem, ‘Zofia’. It all seemed strangely fantastic. It always surprised me that this poem was named after me, because it includes complicated aspects of his personal life. I think that it marks some kind of turning point in his internal and creative life. It always seemed to me that this was written by some other Brodsky and not by the author of all the poems that I had read or heard, which all seemed quite different. There are also some other poems by Joseph that were dedicated by him that are very important to me, namely: ‘To your soul wandering in the woods…’ (From the letter dated 1 November 1964, hand-written by Tolia Naiman), ‘It’s dark in my eyes…’, and of course, ‘Polonaise: A Variation’. The latter, I believe, was written in response to events in Poland. – The poem, ‘Zofia’, is indeed a bit enigmatic, but, as noted by Yadwiga Szymak-Reyferowa, many typical Brodsky motifs and themes are to be found here: the motifs of the home, family, danger, flight, pursuit, Christmas. She also found traces of what Brodsky was reading at the time: the Bible, Mahabharata, Bagavad Ghita, Lev Shestov, Soren Kierkegaard, and much else. Professor Reyferova reminds us

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that Zofia is the Polish variant of the Russian and Greek Sophia, which carry different meanings: Sophia – Anima Mundi, the mystical soul of the World, the Gnostic Soul, as represented by proto-man who sacrifices himself 1. – But Brodsky very much wanted to stress that this is Zofia and not Sofia. And I think this was something personal, without any symbolic meaning. There is much passion in it. I got the distinct impression that in this poem he moved away from the causal, logical principle, as it is full of the fantastic. Here is what he wrote in a letter dated 21 February 1962: ‘The thing is, Zoshka, the end of January I had some major problems with the KGB…The only unpleasant thing about the endless story is that when my apartment was searched, they took all of my poetry, including the poem I was working on, and so I am somewhat in the dark right now’. I think that he was working on the poem, ‘Zofia’. That is just a guess. There was a drawing with the following verses inserted into the letter: In my eyes and all around me it is dark. The soul’s fire in its blind flight would not have been seen here long ago, were it not for our almost transparent form.2

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– To me it seems that in the poem, ‘Zofia’, Brodsky is applying montage tools: camera, lenses, mirrors. Do you happen to know when Brodsky read Dante? In the poem, there are quite a few allusions to the ‘Divine Comedy’: images of darkness and light, hell and paradise, are hidden in the rhyme: ‘klAD / khlAD’, the image of the soul (‘Nothing shall shatter your soul’ and ‘the soul shall save you from Judgment Day’, and more as well.) – I don’t know the exact date when he first read Dante, but a few months after sending me this poem he wrote that he was reading the Divine Comedy. It is quite possible that he had also been reading it before and after writing ‘Zofia’. Dante frequently becomes one’s reference book when one begins to read him. – Natasha Gorbanevskaya asserts that Joseph would not allow ‘Zofia’ to be copied in samizdat, but she liked this poem so much that she wrote it out by hand and distributed it widely. Do you have any idea why Brodsky did not wish to have this poem distributed? – I think that there were a couple of reasons. First of all, he wanted to give it to me first, and only let it be copied later. And secondly, the poem was unfinished. See how the second part seems to repeat what is in the first part, and so I think this was a variant. The dialogues and voices in this poem appear to be coming from different sides. – This poem is still awaiting the attention of scholars. It needs to be read in a wider context. – I also wanted to say that in one of his letters Brodsky sent a drawing, you know that he drew rather well and could even make portraits. The way I understood it, he saw himself as an ancient poet, a Roman poet, or even Dante himself. It’s possible that he identified with Dante. – Yes, if you remember his lines: ‘And a new Dante leans over the page / entering a word in the blank space’ (III : 35). You said that you did not see anything dangerous in the poem. But even the word ‘spirit/soul’ was then forbidden. Whereas in this poem Brodsky speaks of the soul as follows: ‘infinite solitude of the Soul’, ‘my soul is unprecedently pure’, and ‘your soul shall exalt you’, thereby stressing his own individuality and foreseeing his future. Another poem was also dedicated to you and is not any less interesting, from 1981: ‘Polonaise: A Variation’.

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– This poem is very meaningful for me. It was written in Russian and Brodsky himself translated it into English. – Could you tell about how you met him and when? – I heard about him and his poetry much earlier than seeing him. He was friends with Tolia Naiman, Zhenia Rein, and Galia Patrabolova, my friend from the university. She too was a psychologist. She is the one who introduced us, having invited him over. It was around the end of 1960 or maybe already 1961. That was when I first heard his poetry. It made a very considerable impression on me. Perhaps back then I did not understand poetry, but to me it seemed that I understood everything, and it was extremely interesting and important.

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It was his spirit that especially excited me: it was clear that this was an incredibly talented boy. That is how he was called: ‘A boy, a redheaded boy. So young! Who will he be in ten years?’ – Do you remember, by any chance, what poems he read when you first met him? – I do remember! It was: ‘Why are we switching places again…’, ‘Now I am leaving Moscow…’, ‘The time for regrets has arrived…’, ‘March has arrived, again I serve…’, ‘I feel weary so often these days…’. Later, when I visited again, I noticed that he had already become quite a famous, acknowledged poet in literary circles. The poems that he read were much more mature and they made an unusual impression. Back then he especially valued ‘Christmas Romance’, ‘Hills’, ‘You will gallop in the dark…’, and, of course, ‘The Great Elegy for John Donne’. There were grander forms. He had with him the manuscript of the long poem, ‘Guest’, which he showed to me as we were walking down the Bolshoi Prospect. It was some kind of new era. We met very infrequently. Later I went back to Poland and our friendship, acquaintance, ties, all that is important between people, was carried on via letters. – You mentioned in an interview that your correspondence was very important for both him and you.3 What kind of issues did you discuss? – It is difficult to say what issues we discussed. Primarily he expressed his opinions and doubts, his presentiments, views on life and issues having to do with his writing. For example he wrote me that: ‘…worldly truth is only an echo of another grandiose truth, which I do not have the strength for currently. It is all devilishly frightening and full of torment, but I suspect there is some kind of justice here; that is why I allow myself to write these letters to you’. You see, I was primarily an addressee, though sometimes he would ask me my opinion, as, for example, about the long poem, ‘Isaac and Abraham’. I answered that the essence of this poem is not in the plot. He said: ‘That’s brilliant’. He experienced a period of spiritual crisis, searching, and reassessment of everything. He was full of contradictions. On the one hand, he was full of purpose, on the other hand, he would quickly change his mind about others, harshly reassess them, drastically switch his interests to other topics. He would be harsh and

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often hurtful to others. In short, this was a period of self-searching. But just as unexpectedly he could be very tender, gentle, attentive, and very ready to reciprocate. I remember him nervous and even somewhat hysterical in his reactions, but at the same time he was very calm on the inside. He considered himself doomed to be alone, but everyone knows that he often yearned to be with people, a community, and to socialize. His poems, in fact, are a cry from the heart addressed to others. – Everything that you speak about was reflected in his poems: ‘I search. I am creating a person out of myself’. You mentioned your friend, Galina Patrabolova. Was the sonnet of 1961, ‘Again we are living by the bay…’, with the initials ‘G. P.’ dedicated to her? – No, not to her, but to whom, I do not know.

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– Did he know Polish when you first met? – I don’t think so, but he was interested in Polish poets. He wanted to translate them in order to earn some money. He was especially interested in Galczinski, perhaps because I had given him a record of his reading. In my view he did a great job translating his: ‘In the Forest Park of Prana’. And his ‘Spellbound Carriages’ are just marvelous, congenial. But he became interested in Norwid for other reasons, not because Norwid needed to be translated. Brodsky found in him somewhat close to himself. Later he came to realize that Polish poets were good, but that that wasn’t it. He began to search for metaphysical poetry. And he found it of course in 17th century England. – When did he finally learn Polish? Did you correspond in Russian? – Only in Russian. But he would insert amusing passages in Polish into his letters to me, sometimes translations, sometimes verses composed in Polish, funny ones, to cheer me up. – You mentioned that your correspondence with him ended. For what reason? – He left Russia. – You saw him again in 1976 in America? – I spent a year in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, in Pittsburgh, and I went for a few days to Ann Arbor. There was a very famous Institute of Social Psychology there. I found out that Joseph was working in Ann Arbor, as I had met someone from the philology department in the library, who knew Joseph’s phone number in New York. I asked him for the number and called Joseph. It was a totally unexpected for him. He did not yet have his own apartment in New York; he was living at some American friend’s place. He invited me to come over to his ‘berth’ and he read me his poems. One that was especially complicated, ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’. – Well that’s one of his masterpieces. Continue, please, with how you met in America. – And so when I called him, he was very happy. ‘It’s almost mystical’, he kept repeating. I was in New York for three days and then went to New Haven, and he called me every day. When I returned to New York, we met. It was both funny and scary. I was afraid of this meeting. You know how people change. But everything was as it had

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been the last time we had seen each other. He invited me to a Chinese restaurant; afterwards we went to Greenwich Village. There he read Polish poetry in the original, a poem ‘Spellbound Carriages’. And I was amazed because his Polish was perfect, without accent. He was translating Gałczyński then, excellent translations; he managed to capture Gałczyński’s sense of humor. The waitress asked us what language we were speaking. – Do you have favorite poems of Brodsky’s, other than those that are dedicated to you? – His poems about Venice. Of course, I find his long poem, ‘Isaac and Abraham’ also very significant. It is something totally new and unusual. It was brought by Drawicz from Russia. I think this poem is a reflection of his spiritual crisis. – Did you ever discuss religious themes when you met or wrote

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to each other? – At first he wrote that there is something that one calls the Absolute, and then about his doubts. To my mind, all of his personal problems, hardship, and complications in life served as stimulus for his creative writing and heroic life. But on the other hand, he surely believed that it was unfair that all this hardship had befallen him. And here is what he wrote: ‘It occurs to me that if one would ever need a motive or documents in order to join a monastery, then one could surely use these letters’. – Yes, self-disparagement and pride easily coexisted in him. Perhaps this was why neither Christians nor Jews saw him as their own? – Perhaps this is what he wanted. But he wanted more than anything else to maintain his independence. – But at the same time one should always remember that every Christmas he would write a poem. – Yes, as if arguing in favor of his being a Christian poet. I think that Christmas was a holiday that even physically stimulated him to reflection and creative writing. A very refined kind of writing, without impudence or irony. – Does it not seem to you that he constantly felt that death was near, standing behind him? Since from childhood he had a weak heart. – It is difficult for me to agree with this. It is mere speculation. He loved life very much but did not spare himself. My friends in Oxford told me about how when he would visit Oxford, he would read for hours, drink, smoke; and he loved to eat. Once he had a heart attack, the doctor came and gave him a shot and recommended that he check into a hospital, but Joseph refused. – I know this. When I visited him in Ann Arbor in 1980, he asked me right away to make some Siberian pelmeni (dumplings). I made lots of them, and in the evening Iosif and his friends ate all the pelmeni with vodka. The following day he was extremely late for our meeting and did not show up until the evening. I asked him what happened. He said, ‘I ate too many of your pelmeni yesterday and began to feel bad in the middle of the night, so I went to the hospital, thinking that it might be a heart attack’. Have you ever been to Venice? – Yes, I was at Brodsky’s funeral. – Were you invited by Maria Brodsky?

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– No, I received an invitation from a friend of Brodsky’s, the one to whom he dedicated Watermark. – The American artist, Robert Morgan. When I visited him, he had a Polish girlfriend. Recently he gave me a copy of his portrait of Brodsky and said that I could use it as a cover for the collection

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of interviews.4 He is a wonderful man. – Yes, yes, we stayed at his girlfriend’s, Eva. – Did you help the circulation of Brodsky’s poetry in Poland? – To a certain extent yes, a friend of mine, Eugenia Siemaszkiewicz, was the first to translate Brodsky into Polish. Her translations were published in Poland, both hers and Drawicz’s, at the same time. I was surprised by how one and the same poem could be translated so differently: ‘The fire, do you hear, has died down…’ and ‘The blind musicians’. – Brodsky and Poland. Why was he so drawn to the Polish language, Polish poetry, and Polish women? – As concerns women, I can’t judge. I think that it was the time, a historical time, when young people in Russia, especially intellectuals, were especially interested in Polish literature; they liked reading Polish journals, such as Pzrekroj, for example. At that time there was more freedom in Poland than there was in Russia. That is what drew them. There was a circle of people interested in Polish literature. Brodsky had seen some of the films directed by Wajda, such as Diamonds and Ashes, which he found absolutely brilliant, both the idea of the film and the way it was made. – And of course many Western writers were translated into Polish, such as Joyce and Faulkner, whereas in Russia they remained inaccessible. – Oh, yes, I would send such books to him in English also, as every year we would have international book fairs where it was possible to buy anything. The books that were brought for fairs remained in Poland. I would buy many books and mail them to Joseph. Perhaps he did not receive everything. But he too would send me some important books, such as the collections of Derzhavin, Tyutchev, Baratynsky, Tsvetaeva, Zabolotsky, and many typewritten samizdat texts. He loved to ‘lecture’, which I enjoyed very much. An example of absolutely required reading was Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, which he made me read. – When and how did you learn to speak Russian so well? – I studied for five years at the Leningrad State University, and completed my studies at the Psychology Department of the School of Philosophy. A substantial part of my youth was spent in Russia.

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– After Joseph left Russia did he visit Poland frequently? – Only twice. The first time was when, in 1991, he was invited by Andrzej Drawicz, who was director of a television center at the time. Joseph was in Krakow for three days, and we did see each other. Then he came to Poland for a week in 1993, for three days in Katowice (21- 23 June) and three days in Warsaw. – Whose idea was it to honor him with the title of doctor Honoris Causa at your University? – That was the idea of the director of theatre in Katowice, Bogdan Toszy. The Philology department of my University decided to participate in this jointly, since he is, after all, primarily a poet. I was of course ‘for’ it and voted accordingly at the Senate meeting. The theatre was producing his play, ‘Marbles’, and the theatre company members very much wanted to meet its author. I brought you the book by Elzbieta Tosza, the wife of the director of the theatre, where all of this is described and there are plenty of photographs.5 Of course, the Slavic department also took part in this ceremony. Many people came to this event: literary critics, translators of Brodsky, as well as Stanislaw Barańczak, Katarzyna Krzyżewska, and others. Milosz himself introduced Brodsky and spent three days in Katowice. They gave a poetry reading together. All of this is described in the book. Brodsky‘s speech, ‘Poland’, is very interesting; it too was published in the book by Elzbieta Tosza. Laudatio was read by T. Slawek, the leading specialist in English at the University. – What made the greatest impression on you in his speech at the gala ceremony? – He spoke about how he had learned the art of resistance from the Poles, and that we no longer have a ‘convenient’ external enemy. Now we must stand face to face with the evil, which is in our selves: ‘The resistance to self-interest, the constant concern for other people requires developing a totally other instinct than that which was in opposition to a police state’. Neither the West nor the East proposes a convincing model. He recommended developing good taste and self-doubt. He said that culture, especially literature, is the only defense against vulgarity. – You mentioned Barańczak. Milosz, in his conversation with me,6 praised his translations. But there are a few different translations of

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Brodsky into Polish. Which translations do you find the best? – Barańczak‘s translations are probably the best, but I wanted to stress here the great contribution made by Katarzyna Krzyżewska. She wrote her diploma on the topic of Brodsky‘s poetry, and she translated practically everything that he has written. Some of Brodsky’s poems were also set to music. Don‘t you find his poetry to be very musical? And how he would read his poetry! – You mentioned that you met in the early 1960’s and that he read his poems to you upon your first meeting. Was it the same manner of reading? – Yes, the same manner. I think it created a great impression. – Even if people did not understand the language, they were hypnotized by the voice. Where exactly in Katowice did Milosz and Brodsky read? – In the Silesian theatre. There were hundreds and hundreds of listeners. There was great interest and it was an even greater success. An evening on the main stage of the theatre was considered to be a cultural event for the whole country. That same evening a meeting was organized with actors and friends of the theatre on the small stage. They read Joseph’s poetry, and then asked him to read. And suddenly he went into shock and began to weep; Bogdan Tosza got him to calm down. The following day, during a press conference, he explained the reason for the experience: it had evoked memories of Leningrad for him, the friends and climate of that time, where his youth was spent. This is what he said in an interview on the following day: ‘…what especially impressed me was yesterday’s evening at the theatre. When I arrived, and the actors were reading my poetry; there was this incredible feeling as if I had entered my own life. When you write poetry, you do not really think about its contents much, you know what its contents are, but the main task before you is the formal aspect, how to make them better; in other words, to a certain extent you forget about the contents; instead you pay special attention to form, it forces you to think about yourself as a person who gradually – how to explain this? – Loses his human appearance, becoming more and more if not like a machine then in any case something false, fake, and you cease being able to hear your own writing. You wrote it, but you have forgotten it. And then comes this

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feeling when you see the people, i.e. the poems become these people, i.e. when they become human voices. One should add here that most of these actors were young. And this makes an absolutely stunning impression on you, i.e. it is impossible to endure, as if you were fully alive and your entire past flashed by you, i.e. returned through the identification in the form of your faces, i.e. as if it was all true. I really don’t know how to react to this. I asked Bogdan Tosza: ‘Co robic teraz?’ (What should I do now?) Tosza replied: ‘Byc’. (To be) That was perhaps the most powerful experience of my whole life. There were two other such moments: one was when I found out that the poet whom I very much admired, the English poet Auden, was writing an introduction to my book. This was either in 1970 or 1971. And later, when I received the Nobel prize, in 1987, that was the day that I had gone to London, to the BBC, to say a few words to my readers in Russia. Someone speaking Polish had called the BBC, and I was called to the phone. It turned out to be Witek Woroszylski, he was visiting Leszek Kolakowski. He said: ‘I congratulate you; moreover, I am very grateful for the poem that you wrote for me and Drawicz’. I said: ‘What poem?’ And he says: ‘Kolęda stanu wojennego‘ (A Martial Law Carol). ‘Oh that’, I say, ‘that was nothing, and he says: ‘You say it was nothing, but you just don’t understand how timely it was’. This poem, which I had written in English, had been cut out of a newspaper and pushed under the door of their prison cell. I am not exaggerating: this made the most incredible impression on me, much greater than the Nobel Prize and everything in connection with it. And if I were to look back at everything that has happened in my life and that has turned me inside out, then the third such event took place last evening, in the Wyspianski theatre’.7 – Perhaps he was sad that he was being honoured in Poland rather than in Russia? – No. Read the text of his acceptance speech at the ceremony, ‘Poland’. He expresses his respect for Poland for never having been under anyone’s thumb. And this is what he liked most in the Poles, their recalcitrance. But he did not like the new times, the wild capitalism and so forth. This was 1993, the beginning of it all, but he already saw what it would lead to. He had very sharp vision. I would watch him and how he would see everything. It was enough for him

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to notice the signs of something, he would already know the results, how it would all turn out. – He could see what for most of us is closed. You of course read his essays, that quality is also prevalent there. – Yes, of course. I have very many books from him, some of his favourites, Tsvetaeva, Zabolotsky, which have a very powerful metaphysical streak. I have many such gifts from him. – You must also have a lot of letters from him. Did you return them to Brodsky’s estate? They have asked all of us to return his letters and manuscripts to them. – I gave them all the letters, actually copies. I kept the originals for myself. – I also gave them all the tapes of his lectures and seminars. It is better for all of this to be kept in Brodsky’s archives at Yale University. One more question. Having translated so many Polish poets, and having had so many Polish friends, what did he get, borrow, or appropriate from Polish culture? – I find that he has a lot of Norwid in him, especially in the form of the poem. He found that Norwid had this wonderful combination of the absolute with the specific. With one hand he would take, with the other, he would cast away. – Do they read Brodsky these days in Poland? – Yes they do, very much so. He was popular there from the start, especially among the young. It should be noted that Brodsky’s poetry was published in Polish journals before being published in the Soviet Union. In 1963, the literary journal of the city of Łódź, Odgłosy, published a sonnet of his in E. Siemaszkiewicz’s translation; and the ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’ came out in A. Drawicz’s translation in issue no. 21 of the journal, Wspołczesność. Then, beginning in 1985, both his poetry and prose would appear illegally, for example: J. Brodski, Wybor poezji (Krakow, 1985), 1987, translated by Barańczak, Drawicz, Mandalian, Wirpsza, and Woroszylski. Zeszyty Literackie, no 19, 1987 also published him illegally. From 1989 - 1998, the following books of Brodsky’s poetry in translation were published: 82 wiersze i poematy, translated by S. Barańczak, with forward by Milosz (Krakow, 1989); Wiersze i poematy, translated by Katarzyna Krzyżewska (Krakow, 1992); Lustro Weneckie,

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translated by K. Krzyżewska (Krakow, 1993); 20 sonetow do M. Stuart, translated by Nets (Katowice, 1993); Poezje, translated by P. Fast (Katowice, 1993); Znak Wodny, translated by S. Barańczak (Krakow, 1993); Marmur, translated by Gondowicz (Katowice, 1993); Zamieć w Massachusetts, translated by K. Krzyżewska (Krakow, 1994); Fin de siecle, translated by K. Krzyżewska (Krakow, 1996); Poezje wybrane, translated by S. Barańczak, K. Krzyżewska, W. Woroszylski (Krakow, 1996); Pochwata nudy, translated by S. Barańczak, A. Kolyszko, M. Kłobukowski (Krakow, 1996); Wiersze ostatnie, translated by K. Krzyżewska, S. Barańczak (Krakow, 1998). Issue, no. 7, 1988, of the journal, Literatura na swiecie, was totally dedicated to Brodsky’s writing. This is probably not the entire bibliography, but I think that it gives a good idea as to how much Brodsky is known and read in Poland. All of his books that were published after 1993 were bestsellers. Moreover there are also many books and articles written about Brodsky’s writing. – If I were to ask you to specify what you thought was the most characteristic trait of Brodsky’s, would you say that he was a mass of contradictions? – No, I would say that it was passion. – But what about all of the accusations of coldness, rationalism, a lack of the warmth of the Russian spirit? – I think that these critics find him lacking in sentimentality, a trait that was foreign to Brodsky. He was constantly in search of new meaning, constantly searching for that which was above and higher than the usually visible. And there was this sense that it was attainable for him, that he would find it, that language, which he believed to be the universal means of a spiritual life, would lead him to this higher meaning. – That is why he idealized language. How did you find out about his death? – I learned of it from a friend of mine, also was living in Petersburg at the time. She called me in Warsaw that very same day, later in the evening. Someone sent his last photograph. It was terrible, I hardly recognized him. It was a photograph from the New York Times, lots of cigarettes lying all over the floor. And he had this hopeless look

on his face. He knew it was the end. Later I heard that many dedicated poems to him. – For a while I collected them, I have a file of over 100 poems addressed and dedicated to Brodsky. Perhaps enough for a whole anthology. I am sure that I have not collected all there is. Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

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Iosif Bridskii: Kak rabotaet stikhotvorenie, eds. by L. Loseff and V. Polukhina (M.: NLO, 2002), p. 30. Lines from the poem: ‘Steklo’ (Step after step, onward and down…) Alternative version to that included in Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo (SPb: Pushkinskii Fond, 1997), vol. I, p. 281. Jerzy Illg, Reszty nie trzeba. Rozmowy z Josifem Brodskim (Katowice, 1993). See the Russian version of my collection, V. Polukhina, Brodskii glazami sovremennikov, vol. II (SPb.: Zvezda, 2006). Elzbieta Tosza, Stan serca. Trzy dni z Josifem Brodskim (Katawice: Ksiaznica, 1993). V. Polukhina, Brodskii glazami sovremennikov, vol. I (SPb.: Zvezda, 1997, 2006), p. 318, 370. Iosif Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, compiled by V. Polukhina, Interview with Brodsky by Ludmila Bolotova and Yadwiga Szymak-Reiferowa (M.: Zakharov, 2007), pp. 670 - 673.

17 A NNIE EPELBOIN Annie Epelboin was born in Paris in 1948. She studied French and Russian literature first at the Sorbonne, and then at the Paris University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). She spent 1970 - 1971 as an exchange student at Moscow State University. She worked as a translator and wrote introductions to many different books, including the works by A. Platonov and M. Mamardashvili, and also prepared radio programs for France-Culture. Annie Epelboin currently teaches 20 th century literature at the Paris VIII University at VincennesSaint Denis.

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GENER AT IONS OF SUF F ER ING P EOPLE SPEA K ING T HROUGH HIM OV ER T HE AGES An Interview with Annie Epelboin (June 2004, Paris) – In July 1981 Brodsky granted you an extensive interview.1 Would you please talk about the conditions and occasion for such a detailed interview with the poet, not only about himself, but also about Russian poetry? – I was working then for the radio station, France-Culture, and I proposed a series of reports on Russian poetry. I decided to discuss the special significance of poetry for the Russian public, in other words, to explain, among other things, the oral character of this poetry, the meaning of Pushkin, the role of poetry as a moral standard, and so forth. And right away I thought of Brodsky. But I knew that his health was poor, that he has always felt that life is short, moreover he had let me know that he wasn’t feeling well. In short, it seemed best not to put it off; I also wanted to conduct an open, all-encompassing interview with him, for ‘a rainy day’. At this time he was in London, and I requested that half a day of studio time be reserved for me at the BBC. I decided to ask him in great detail about himself, about Pushkin and Russian poetry, in other words, to be comprehensive and not confine myself to what I needed for my story. The conditions were ideal not only in terms of the equipment, but the people were very pleasant. Joseph was in a good mood and we spoke openly. – Clearly you were able to get him to talk. We know from other interviews that the extent of his generosity did not depend on the amount of time or how he was feeling, but it depended completely on whether or not he liked the person sitting in front of him. Without a doubt he liked you very much. Did you sense that? – It was a good time for him, he enjoyed living, talking. It was not an intense time, as it had been a long time before the Nobel Prize. He had not yet become interested in politics and he would calmly discuss what was most important, literature. He knew that I had

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Susan Sontag, Annie Epelboin & JB, Venice, December 1977, photo by Nicole Zand

come to London to see him, and that we would be able to socialize for a few days, as we occasionally did. The weather was wonderful; a July sun over London, and we took very pleasant walks through the city… – In your talks with Brodsky, you noted that ‘the French don’t know who Joseph Brodsky is’. When did the French find out about him? – That’s a difficult question. In my view the French still don’t know who Brodsky is. He remains a total stranger for many, though there is a narrow circle of poets and intellectuals who think very highly of him. On the one hand, the French themselves are to blame. In order for them to accept a poet there needs to be something that Brodsky just didn’t have. For example nowhere, either in his poetry or prose, did he ever mention France or French poets. Whereas a writer such as Makin, whom I would never place on the same level as Brodsky, is successful if only because his heroes love France and French culture. Brodsky loved American culture instead of French. Moreover, Brodsky is a complicated poet. Although Mandelstam is also not an easy poet, and yet is quite popular: people who have nothing to do with Russian studies read him, know him, and quote him, but not

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Brodsky. – However attempts to introduce Brodsky to the French public were undertaken a long time ago. The French journal, ‘La Breche’, which was established by Andre Breton, published an extensive protest against the legal persecution of Brodsky as early as 1965. Why was it that specifically the surrealists took a stand in Brodsky’s defense? Considering that so many of them were leftists and would later sign a declaration in defense of Fidel Castro? – There is no contradiction here. One could be a leftist poet and struggle for liberty! There were different surrealists. Andre Breton stood apart from some of the other French poets by being politically independent. As opposed to Aragon, he was clearly an anti-Stalinist writer who would voice opposition to any kind of censorship, and he had a sober view of Soviet reality. If Brodsky is known at all in France, it is because from the start, to this day, he is known as a free poet who was able to resist the Soviet regime. Later he was forced to emigrate, and he chose the States. This is both good and bad, as it is always bad when poetry takes second place to one’s biography or to politics. – To what extent did the transcript of the Brodsky trial show to the leftist intelligentsia of the West the true nature of the Soviet regime? – In France it is possible to be leftist and not pro-Soviet. Most of the French intelligentsia after the war was leftist. There are some significant nuances here. In the 60’s, not all leftists supported the Stalin myth, however there was a great interest in what was going on in the Soviet Union. The first upheaval that took place in the minds of the pro-Soviet intelligentsia took place in 1956, and later during the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1966. By then just about everyone understood that it was possible to accuse a writer just of being a writer. Few knew about the Brodsky trial in 1964, but two years later, all the newspapers were writing about the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, many protests were published at that time. – How well known is it in France that Brodsky was released from exile ahead of schedule in 1965 not due to efforts made by Akhmatova and Shostakovich, but because of a letter written by Jean-Paul Sartre to Mikoyan, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,

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in August, 1965? In September 1965 Brodsky was released. – I did not know anything about that letter. I am not even sure that such a letter, if it exists,2 would have helped. It would be interesting to find out who suggested this to Sartre. He was the most pro-Soviet writer, and for twenty years was a fellow-traveler of the French Communist Party. He was invited to the Soviet Union and his plays were produced there. He was not opposed to any of this. – Natasha Gorbanevskaya believes that the Soviets understood that Brodsky had to be released, and they secretly sent ‘agents of influence’ to visit Sartre who prompted him to write a letter to Mikoyan. – I have no doubt of the fact that Sartre would have received Soviet agents and their advice. But that he would himself decide to speak up in support of Brodsky with a letter is not possible. – When did you first hear of his name and read his poetry? – Professor C. Frioux, a specialist in Mayakovsky, under whose guidance I wrote my thesis about Platonov, had given me some addresses, including the address of Lili Brik, when I first went to Moscow as an exchange student in the beginning of 1970. He told me that if I went to Leningrad I should try to meet with some of the young, gifted poets, one being Brodsky, about whom he had only heard. Another French exchange student, Muriel Cerf, who knew Brodsky well, took me to visit him. And we found a common language right away, initially on the topic of Platonov. The fact that I was studying Platonov astounded him; he clearly enjoyed talking to me about literature. And I still have the notebooks in which he made a list of books that I absolutely had to read. He had this tendency to give out friendly pedagogical recommendations. However he did not exert pressure on me this way; it was more like he appropriated me, in other words accepted me as one of his kind, and I began to respect him right away, because he was almost always right. This is exactly what I was looking for in people then. Every phrase of his had great meaning for me, as it stood out against the usual lies and mythmaking. I was amazed by the clarity and confidence of his thought. He asked me to come back. Then he began reading me his poems, and I got to know his poetry orally, I recorded his poems on a tape recorder. That was in June 1970. I began to read his poetry

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only much later, in Paris. – Was there no distance between you? – From the first moment we began communicating as if we were old friends and were speaking the same language. Everything that he said to me was at the same time transparent and extremely valuable. He seemed to glow with dignity. It is precisely this, which drew us together. There was the impression that we were saving ourselves from the general filth, finding ourselves where it is peaceful and possible to breathe freely and talk. – Brodsky wrote the afterward to your translation of Platonov’s ‘The Sea of Youth’.3 Did he offer to do so himself or did you ask him? I am not aware of a Russian version of this essay. – I returned to Paris in January or February of 1971. I brought with me the manuscripts of The Foundation Pit and The Sea of Youth. The latter was available in samizdat, while The Foundation Pit I copied at the Lenin Library from an old issue of the journal Oktyabr. These were the last two large unpublished works by Platonov. Chevengur had just been published in Paris in Russian and translated into French. In France I made an arrangement with Albin Michel to write an introduction, and then I suggested that Brodsky might write the postface. Brodsky agreed to do this with pleasure, as did Peter Israel, the head of the department of foreign literature. He was an American who had heard about Brodsky and had then met him in Paris, where he took us to a restaurant, and they signed a separate contract. This is how the first publication by Brodsky about Platonov was issued. Later Brodsky would joke that I was the only woman with whom he was sleeping under the same book cover. – In what language did Brodsky write this Postface? I have the text, but only in English, and I don’t remember where I got it. – He wrote it in Russian, then sent the text to the publishing house, I translated it into French and returned both texts to the publisher. I believe this was in the spring of 1975; the book was published in 1976. – You had the opportunity to observe him quite closely. Is it true that in any given situation he behaved as a poet? How did you perceive Brodsky? As an interesting man or as a poet?

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– I think that he was an incredible poet and a normal person. He liked to eat, laugh, go to museums; he loved cats. From time to time he would sit at his desk and compose something. Or else he did not go anywhere. He saw things as a poet in that he looked at and noticed the unusual in the usual. We had some serious jokes about the details of daily life: he was cheerful, but was quick to note what was most important in small detail. Back then I spoke Russian freely, and we played word games. Once at the end of 1970 we met in Moscow and he said: ‘Do you know what I saw on the way here? There is this truck standing on the sidewalk, and barrels are being unloaded. And suddenly I see a fish fly out of a barrel and jump under the truck’. This was such a beautiful image, one of those that has both a simple and deep meaning, and the kind we would exchange all the time. In other words, he saw the world as a poet; he knew how to catch the kind of details that opened up the deeper sense of life. – Brodsky was extremely unpredictable. Did you ever have the chance of experiencing this quality as it related to you? – Of course. I remember, for example, how once when he found out that I was in Ireland, he made a date to meet me in some city and he never showed up. I drove around, waited for him, and he never arrived. He could arrive a few days late and be surprised to find that you were no longer waiting for him. Or else he asked me to introduce him to a certain person and then was extremely mean to him. I don’t want to remember those things. – This is important, as Brodsky the person is no less interesting than Brodsky the poet. – As you have already noted, he was unpredictable. We could be going in one direction, and then he would suddenly turn and disappear; he is no longer there; then suddenly he is near by; then suddenly plans change again… There was no consistency in his relations with people, that is to say with women. And at the same time there was a certain consistency: we remained friends, as if we were related. It was I who adjusted to his manner, his character. But I cannot say that it was easy. I think that he had a need occasionally to offend.

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– What personality traits of his did you find delightful and which – irritating? – I was delighted by his constant interest in ideas, in elevated human values. His interest in the daily events of life and his ability to turn them into what had universal significance. What irritated me was his unpredictability and unreliability. And even rudeness. – Can this rudeness be explained by his Soviet upbringing? – You know, he was an exceptional person, who was not influenced by upbringing. There are among Russians raised in the Soviet Union some very refined people. No, it doesn’t really depend on upbringing. Or else not only on family upbringing. Most likely he was a spoiled child. But it is not enough to talk about that. As an adult, he chose a certain style of life, could not have done otherwise. – Maybe because he was a very nervous person. Since he had a weak heart from his birth. – Yes, he certainly felt how brief life was. For all that, he was quite a shy person. He was incredibly confident in himself as a poet: I met him when he was 29 years old, still a somewhat young poet, and yet fully formed as a poet undoubtedly he considered himself a significant poet; he already dreamed of receiving the Nobel Prize; he wrote me about that in a letter. But as a person he was not very confident, often blushing, shy. And he had some kind of inferiority complex. He did not like himself physically. Perhaps that explains his behavior, the combination of incredible tenderness and rudeness. He very much needed to be provoked. – Which poetry readings in Paris did you attend? How was he received by the French? One of the readings, on 12 June 1984, was organized by the literary magazine,’Kontinent’, and the newspaper, ‘Russkaya Mysl’. It was taped by an Italian television station. Were you present at that reading? Was it shown on French television? – I was probably present at all of his readings. Of course, there are a few great fans of Brodsky’s poetry in France, including French poets, but not that many. At his poetry reading, most of the audience consisted of Russian émigrés of various generations, students, and Slavists. It should be noted that French poetry is usually not recited in public, but is read privately, in an intimate setting. There is no

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tradition of poetry evenings. – Did the fact that Brodsky did not know French and could not influence the way his poetry was translated into French help or hinder the quality of the translation? – The quality of translation does not in principal depend on this. But it of course hindered. Brodsky had a negative attitude toward France, the French language, and French culture. Such bias did not encourage good translation. He believed that there were no poets in France. Through such evident dislike of French culture he was as if ensuring adverse reception in France, whereas his enthusiasm for Anglo-American culture was conducive to his success in the USA. There were other reasons as well. Initially the translation of his poetry into French was managed by Etkind, but later they quarreled. Brodsky was very much displeased with how the book Joseph Brodsky’s Trial4 turned out, and he did not approve of Etkind’s theory of translation. He later told me: ‘I forbade him to deal with my French publications. Would you like to be the one to deal with them?’ I must admit that I refused the offer; I did not want to take upon myself such a responsibility, to enter into difficult relations with Etkind, with the Russian community, and with Brodsky himself. He never said so himself, but I sensed that he of course did not like this. – He offered you this privilege, and you refused. – Yes, I refused and I even refused to translate him at all. And he asked me to translate some poems. I regret now that I refused, but I was afraid the translation would not do justice to the scope of this poetry, as happened, for example, with Pushkin’s poetry, which provides a very pitiful representation of the poet. However I did later prepare a series of reports for the radio, right after he received the Nobel Prize. That was the week of Brodsky. I was able to do this because I already had the BBC tape from which I excerpted bits of my interview with him, as well as his poetry readings. I also used some additional interviews with Brodsky’s friends. – How do you explain this aversion of Brodsky’s to French poetry as well as to France itself? He had quite a few very close friends in Paris, yourself included. One cannot forget that without French po-

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etry there would be no Pushkin. – He did not know French, and when he did not know something, he reacted not by being silent but by negating. This again was symptomatic of his inferiority complex. If he did not understand something, then he was convinced that there was nothing interesting to be found there. Secondly, he told me that French culture and French literature were finished because there were only communists left in France now. That was an exaggeration and comical. That was his weak side. Or else it’s part of him, he had some childish traits; negating the positive qualities of whatever he did not know. He did not admit that one cannot know everything. He could speak about Japanese poetry because few knew much about it. But he always wanted to be authoritative. Not having mastered either the language or the culture, France became for him an uninteresting subject. I recommended other names, poets to him and read some Baudelaire, but he reacted without interest. – Did he have any friends among the French, other than women? – I don’t really know exactly. In Paris he primarily met with Americans living here. But with time he came to love the city, the Luxembourg gardens, and the embankment along the Seine. – Did Brodsky ever visit you at your home in Paris? – Yes, once he came over for dinner, and I introduced him to my daughter who was small then, and he began to speak with her in the language of cats. She replied as if she understood. He enjoyed this very much. Before that, I had never seen Joseph with children. He used to say how difficult it was for him to remain tied to one woman, with a household, family life, and a year later he suddenly got married. – Brodsky met his future wife, Maria Soccani, a Berteneva on her mother’s side, during his readings at the Sorbonne in January 1990. Were you at this reading? – It’s strange, but Russians are always sure that conferences in Paris take place only at the Sorbonne. That is a Russian myth. The Sorbonne, as Paris’s only university, ceased to exist in 1968. At the beginning of the 20th century Mandelstam attended Bergson’s lectures there. But after the student demonstrations, other university

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centers were established, while of the Sorbonne itself practically nothing remained. In 1990, Brodsky spoke at the College de Philosophie. – In your conversations with Brodsky you asked him much about Pushkin, about his own poems with Pushkin themes. Did you yourself see parallels between Brodsky and Pushkin, not so much biographical ones, as in terms of how much each of them contributed to Russian poetry? – The parallels are not just in the area of poetry. One can say that they exist in their behavior as well: the same standard of freedom, not only in the subject matter of the poetry, but in the way of conducting oneself in society, the free approach to those in power and any ideology, the tendency to react to having one’s liberty limited, the self-assuredness… – One can see other parallels: Pushkin managed to transplant all of French poetry onto Russian soil; Brodsky did the same with English metaphysical poetry. Brodsky made a parallel cultural effort. – Yes, it is possible to say that his persistent work on English translation allowed him to open for himself as well as for the Russian public a huge poetical and metaphysical world. This also allowed him to create a certain distance, which made him free. Even though he was born on Russian soil, he was born on the soil of translation. Without these translations and knowledge of English poetry, the Brodsky that we know today would not have come to be. He does not belong to just one culture, but is a transcultural poet, a kind of ferryman or guide to the culture of the entire world. He is too cramped on the territory of just one culture, even though he is undoubtedly a Russian poet. Unfortunately there was not enough material in French. All the major poets had already been discovered and translated into Russian at the beginning of the last century. – Pushkin completes his journey with ‘Monument’ (1836), whereas Brodsky begins his journey with: ‘I have raised myself a monument of a different kind’ (1962). How significant do you find the theme of fame in Brodsky’s poetry? Was he not indifferent to fame? – It is as if he threw down the gauntlet to Pushkin. He felt himself

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to be a poet from his very first poem. And he was not indifferent to fame. I can testify that in 1970 he was already dreaming of getting the Nobel Prize. That just totally amazed me then. At the age of 30 he was already dreaming of the Nobel Prize! He had some very high ambitions and he never doubted that he was one of the greatest poets. Without a doubt he yearned to be famous. I would say that as a good professional, he did everything needed to achieve it. But it did not take over his life. The most important thing remained poetry, and the vitality of language. – Toward what direction was Brodsky’s gaze turned? Ethics, society, faith, beauty, death? – I do not consider him to be religious. He never spoke about being Jewish, he did not express much interest in this religion. For a while, when he was young, he was interested somewhat in Hinduism, but this was temporary. Christianity always interested him insofar as it was the foundation of European culture and not from the point of view of faith. In this he was similar to Mandelstam. And for him it was very important to master the foundation of culture, which for centuries followed Christianity in terms of images and subjects. This is especially important in order to appreciate and understand the significance of the Renaissance in his poetry. He always saw death everywhere, in art, in daily life; it merged with his life and didn’t even get in the way of his leading a cheerful and interesting one. He was always concerned with the moral role of poetry in society; it was the compass of his life. – How do you explain the number of Christmas poems? – Yes, that was a topic that interested him. He even drew pictures on this topic, do you remember? The one of the angel blowing a horn to announce to the world that the Messiah was born. For a while he also drew angels in his letters. I used to see this as a humorous poetical signature, as a joke he played on himself: he was announcing the important role of poetry to the world. And the free movement of the angels in the air ironically reminded one of his own wandering… – Brodsky said that poetry taught one to be modest.5 In your view, did he possess this quality to a visible extent?

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– Why did he have such success with women? Not because he was a major, confident poet, but because despite all of this, he was a modest, kind person. He was very pleasant, sweet; he looked at people with such tenderness, such gentleness. But his modesty had its limits: within half an hour he could turn away from you and say or do something hurtful, especially to a woman, forgetting all modesty and politeness. – In Brodsky’s poetry there is much irony and wit, why is he considered a tragic poet? – Being tragic does not at all exclude an ironic stance toward life, in fact the opposite. We know this from the ancient writers. This mix is what determined his poetics, as well as his own attitude toward life. – If in France he remained foreign for the reasons you mentioned earlier, in Russia he is foreign for many just because he is Jewish. Who is he for you primarily, a Jew, Russian or American? – He was an American-Russian Jew! I asked him about this. He did not consider himself to be Jewish, as he said that he had never gone to a synagogue. But if one were to remember how he read his poetry, surprisingly, his manner was very similar to that of a kadish in a synagogue. As if he speaks across generations. When he recited his poetry, the expression in his eyes and face changed: he closed his eyes as if it were not himself reading these poems but generations of suffering, remembering people speaking through him over the ages. But he would not admit this. When I saw him in New York, he said to me with great enthusiasm: ‘I want you to understand what an American Jew is’. Clearly he was interested in that environment. It was his environment, despite the fact that they were intellectuals, whereas he was not, and they were leftists, and he was not. But it was apparent that he was sharing something with them that was very important: a light, tragic sense of humor, and the sense of not belonging to any single culture. – That’s true. Roger Strauss, his publisher, Susan Sontag, his good friend, the poet Jonathan Aaron, and one can name a few other famous American Jews among his friends. But what made him a poet was the Russian language and Russian culture.

– He was undoubtedly a Russian poet, and that is the only thing that he would ever acknowledge. Translated by Tatiana Retivov Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Annie Epelboin, ‘European Air over Russia’, Joseph Brodsky. A Book of Interviews, compiled by Valentina Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov, 2007), pp. 136 - 160. The letter from Jean-Paul Sartre to the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Mikoyan, was published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, 5 May 1995 and reprinted in the book by Yakov Gordin, Pereklichka vo mrake (SPb, 2000), p. 198 - 199). Andei Platonov, La Mer de Jouvence, Traduit du russe et preface par Annie Epelboin; Suivi de Andrei Platonov par Iossif Brodski (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), p. 173 - 178. E. Etkind, Protsess Iosifa Brodskogo (Joseph Brodsky’s Trial), London, 1988. Joseph Brodsky, In Memory of Stephen Spender, On Grief and Reason (New York: FS&G, 1995), p. 475.

18 E L E N A C H E R N Y S H E VA Chernysheva (born Kittel), Elena Filippovna, is a choreographer and ballet-master. She graduated from the Vaganova School of Choreography in Leningrad. Chernysheva danced with the Kirov theater for seven years. In 1969 she quit dancing and, together with her husband, choreographer Igor Chernyshev, she worked as the head coach at the Odessa Theater of opera and ballet. In 1971 she began her studies at The Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in Moscow where she enrolled in the department of ballet-mastery. In 1976 she emigrated to the US, where from 1977 to 1990 she worked as a ballet coach at the American Ballet Theater, and took an active part in revising the ballets, ‘Bayaderka’ (directed by Natalya Makarova) and ‘Don Quixote’ (directed by Mikhail Baryshnikov). In 1990 - 92 she served as the artistic ballet director of the National Opera of Vienna, where she directed the revised ballets, ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Giselle’. In 1993 she returned to the US, she continues serving as ballet-master and coach for various American and European theaters.

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RUS SI A

WA S H I S

HE A RTACHE

An Interview with Elena Chernysheva (18 November 2003, New York) – Have you ever been to any of Joseph’s readings in American? – No, never. – What about in Leningrad? – I went to his personal readings, at somebody’s apartment, but never at any official readings, probably because when we met, I was doing a television show for young people, though I was already living in Moscow and studying at GITIS, and so I met him when I was visiting Leningrad, but we became close only here. – I remember when he introduced you to me at his birthday party in 1980, he said: ‘Here is Lena Chernysheva, whom even Baryshnikov is afraid of’. Though I don’t remember exactly, either it was ‘afraid of’ or ‘listens to’. Were you working with Baryshnikov at that time? – Yes, I was working with Baryshnikov, but we never had the kind of relations that I had with Joseph or Gena Shmakov, because Misha is a very constrained type of person. But it’s impossible to only talk about ballet all your life. – What are you doing now? – I am preparing an exhibition; we plan on inviting photographers and artists. We want to create a kind of contemporary art center, where I plan on inviting the best in their field, in terms of movement; it can be ballet or shamanistic dances. – Will this center be in Russia or America? – They want it to be in Russia as well as in New York, but I don’t think it would be of interest here. It is the next step in our movement toward the esoteric. Joseph used to laugh at me, at first, about my speaking with spirits, but he was still curious. But then he became seriously interested when Gena Shmakov died, and I was communicating with Gena. – You apparently saw Joseph not long before he died. Tell me, please, how was he feeling? What did you talk about? – The day before he died, we were sitting here, in a café, and I was on my way to the New York City Ballet, while he was planning to go

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to Massachusetts the following morning. He said: ‘I already called Yuz [Aleshkovsky], and I will stay with them. He will fix me all kinds of good food. No, I am not going to check in and get operated on. I am going to call the doctor and cancel it’. He had a doctor’s appointment, but I had a feeling that it wasn’t all that simple. I kept talking him into having the operation. Brodsky said: ‘No, Elena’. Some stupid doctor had told Joseph (I knew this doctor, he is dead now) that he had so many stitches after his two operations, that it would be very difficult, he could die under the scalpel. I said: ‘Joseph, the technology these days is so state-of-the-art, that one should not be afraid. Plus it is better to die under the scalpel than while driving’. I remember how this really made me panic. He said: ‘Don’t worry. I will be okay there, my students are there’. He was loved and worshipped there. He wanted to get to his college by hook or by crook. The next day was Misha Baryshnikov’s birthday. He kept reminding me to call Misha. I called, but Misha was in Florida. I left a message and called Joseph. It was around 10 : 00 pm. I said: ‘Joseph, I did everything you asked, I called Misha and left a long message wishing him a happy birthday’. He says: ‘That’s great, I am very glad’. I responded: ‘What’s with your voice, you sound like a five-year-old boy?’ I had never heard him sound so happy. There was a kind of lightness and freedom. And it was a very young voice. ‘What happened, Joseph? You sound like a mischievous boy’. He replied: ‘You know, Lena, I have been sorting through my archives and I found a few poems that are not that bad. Now I can die’. After that conversation I came to realize that he knew that he was dying. I am afraid that he didn’t take his medicine, because he knew. Why was he sorting through his archives? Why did he suddenly say: ‘Now I can die?’ And he found a few poems that are not that bad, first of all, and secondly, when we were sitting in the café, instead of my saying that I only had an hour or so or his saying that he had to go, we sat there for four hours. He brought me a new book with his revisions. – ‘View with a Flood’? – Yes. We talked about everything, and then he suddenly said: ‘Elena, I am very worried, the work situation in America is so bad’. After all my jobs, if you fall out of touch here, you lose your reputation. I have status and everyone knows me, but it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that I am without work. On the other hand, I can’t go knocking on doors looking for a job, that is not how I was brought up. Joseph was

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very worried, he said: ‘Elena, if you were all set, I would not be so worried’. – ‘My God, I will find something, don’t worry’. – ‘No, I mean really set for life’. I looked at him, and he continued: ‘I have always had this feeling that you know more than you say. You are so intuitive’. And then he looked at me. Of course I tried to drive away any thoughts of death. From how he autographed the book for me it was clear that he was saying goodbye. I am afraid that he did not take his medicine, that all of this was done consciously. – Lena, one could already tell by his eyes how ill he was. His eyes had changed a lot. – He suffered, he suffered greatly. I begged him to take his medicine. Finally before leaving the café he took a pill. He was not supposed to smoke or drink coffee, but he did the very opposite. I remember how another time we had met also in a café, we sat for a while, and then he got hungry. Instead of going home for dinner he bought some hot dogs and something else as bad. Nobody cooked dinner for him at home. – Why do you think he did not want to go back to Russia? – I think the main reason was because of his health. Here he had his own doctor. He knew that the level of heart operations here was state-of-the-art. And secondly – Maria. His daughter. Maria would not have been able to get used to it there. Without them he could not have returned. He did not speak about this, of course. Russia was his heartache. And even though he was used to living here and everyone loved him, he missed Russia. – Would you have preferred that he be buried in Russia? – Yes, in Russia, in St. Petersburg, because that is where his readers are. – Some believe that Joseph was a victim of the regime; others almost see him as a saint. How do you see him? – I would say as a victim of the regime. Otherwise he would never have left. He would have suffered with the rest of the population, but he would not have left. You know that when Joseph got the Nobel Prize, he immediately gave away half of the money. He helped some talented and poor students, all of his friends from Russia. He helped me, and I didn’t even ask for anything. Before I left for Vienna I had a year without work, but it wasn’t as though I did not have money for food. I was building a swimming pool at my dacha. And he suddenly called me at the dacha and said: ‘Elena, what’s the problem?

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How come you didn’t tell me that you needed money?’ I told him that I didn’t need money. He replied: ‘Please don’t lie to me. Come to New York right away, today, immediately’. – ‘I can’t today, I will come tomorrow’. – ‘Tomorrow you need to be here as the day after I leave for Italy, plus I need to get my haircut’. I went and gave him a haircut. He had $50,000 left from his Nobel Prize. And he said: ‘25 thousand for you and 25 thousand for me’. – ‘But I don’t need 25 thousand’. – He says: ‘I am sure you will find a way to spend it’. Of course, three months later I went to Vienna and then returned the money to him in three installments. And we never spoke of this again. That is the kind of person he was. For a Russian person to think about money, he needs to change his mentality. Some of my colleagues in the ballet world changed their mentality once they got rich. But not Joseph. Nor I, unfortunately. – Lena, did I hear you correctly that you sometimes gave him a haircut? – Almost always. – What a beautiful barber Brodsky had! – He even wrote somewhere that I cut his hair like a sheep. Sometimes he would give me such practical advice causing me to think: ‘How can such a genius, someone with such brains, talk such nonsense!’ He would think of something and say: ‘Elena, let’s go into business’. – ‘What kind?’ – ‘I have invented matches that can be attached to a pack of cigarettes. Can you imagine how convenient that will be? We could sell the patent and make a lot of money’. – What was the most attractive thing about him, his poetry or his personality? – I would say that without his personality there wouldn’t be any poetry. – For those who knew him, the magnetism of his personality eclipsed everything else Reading his poetry confirmed that you are dealing with a genius. – Absolutely, of course. And even without reading his poetry you have this sense. There is a great deal of warmth. – He had many friends in the ballet world both in Russia and in the West. Other than Baryshnikov and you. In Leningrad there was also Masha Kuznetsova with whom he had a daughter. How often did he go to the ballet?

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– I was the one who introduced him to Masha. He decided that he needed to get involved with a ballerina. Back then it was in vogue to have a ballerina as a lover. When it comes to ballet itself, he actually could not stand it and never really went to it. Once I dragged him to a show, but I had chosen a very intellectual program, after which he began to condescendingly get interested in ballet. Once he even suggested: ‘Let’s re-do “Swan Lake”’. This was when I received an offer from Berlin to choreograph ‘Swan Lake’. So I asked him how. ‘Well imagine that four small swans emerge wearing Napoleonic shakoes. These four little Napoleons’. He would get carried away like a child. But he did enjoy the show, as well as Misha’s [Baryshnikov’s] dancing. Especially the way he moved, with such coordination, as if in a dream. This he understood right away, the incredible natural coordination. It is the same as in writing poetry, unless you have a sense of coordination or harmony, it won’t work. And here he suddenly saw it with his own eyes; he came to feel the plasticity. But as far as the plots of ballets go, they did not impress him because of how naïve they were. No, he did not come to love the ballet. – Opera as well, other than ‘Aeneas and Dido’, he even wrote a poem on this topic. He once said that this poem is neither about love nor the burning of Carthage, but about betrayal in love. In other words, he gave away the secret. – Yes, indeed. And what about ‘Marbles’? I read the manuscript when it was titled differently. What do you think the play is about? He said: ‘These are like my dialogues with Gena Shmakov’. When he began writing the play, Gena was still alive. Brodsky had said: ‘I am writing Gennady’s and my dialogues and arguments’. Gena was like a walking encyclopedia. Joseph would often turn to him for reference, for information. We both had known Gena in Russia as well, but he did not like him much then. Whereas here, there were so few of us when we first arrived, and Gena himself was drawn to Joseph, and Joseph was condescending with him back then. Only later, once I became a close member of their circle, as I had been friends with Gena in Russia, I would say to Joseph: ‘Relax, Joseph, and take a closer look at Gena; he is kind, open, and erudite. He is not at all what you think’. Later on he did become very close with him, and he would say: ‘Lena, I am very grateful to you for discovering Gena and Sasha Sumerkin for me’. He was very worried about Sasha who was gravely

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ill. ‘Only not Sumerkin’, Brodsky would say. When Gena died we were all so concerned that he would not be able to stand losing that which had replaced Russia for him. – And he could talk with them about anything, something which was not always possible with his American friends. – Exactly, but these were select Russians. It was not that easy to get close to Brodsky, to enter his home. – Elena, you mentioned here about his warmth and generosity, but those who did not know him personally, such as Korzhavin and Solzhenitsyn, accuse him of being cold. – Cold? This quality had nothing to do with Joseph’s soul or intellect. He was just very selective. If he for some reason did not like somebody, then he would right away become unfriendly; especially back in Russia he was like that. He would just be rude to people right in their face. Here he would be rude as well, though less so. – Here is another contradiction: he was a man of culture, he loved everything that was refined and intelligent, how could he be so uncultured in real life? He could wear the same shirt for weeks, eat with his hands, shoo someone away, and so forth. – It’s an extremely unusual quality that very few people actually possess – being natural. When he had to wear a dinner jacket it was incredibly tormenting. Though he looked smashing in it. You know, put a dinner jacket on any guy and it makes him look like a king. And Joseph, with his Dante profile, he was especially irresistible in a dinner jacket. But he never liked new things; he would buy everything at a second-hand store. Not because he was stingy: Joseph and stinginess are incompatible. It was comfortable, and he was as he was. – I know. The first time he visited Keele University in 1978, I met him at the station wearing my sable furs. He hugged me, felt the quality of the fur, and said: ‘And I am wearing a $100 dollar coat that I bought at the market’. To which I replied: ‘Joseph, you can afford it’. – But he liked it when women dressed well. Women exist to be admired. He had an endless amount of admirers among his students and women in general. – Yes, his don-juanesque list is most likely longer than that of Aleksandr Sergeevich [Pushkin]. You mentioned Dante. Did he ever discuss Dante with you? – No we did not discuss Dante. Actually with my ballet upbringing,

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I always felt that I wasn’t really up to par. When he would read me his new poems and ask: ‘So what do you think, Elena?’ I pretty much felt that I did not have the right to even say that it was good. But only once I allowed myself to comment: ‘Joseph, rock and roll happened in the 60’s, but you are writing poetry today’, and then I thought, what am I talking about. I can discuss ballet at any level and with anyone, but to talk with a poet about his poetry is just obscene. About Dante. Once he visited me at my dacha, a friend of mine from Moscow had made a lot of pelmeni [dumplings], which he just loved. So he stayed the night and our morning was quite philosophical, he said: ‘Elena, I think it is time for you to reread Dante’. – I replied: ‘I do happen to have a copy of Dante here’. He then said: ‘So starting today and make it regular’. He was so glad that I had Dante there. He kept rereading Dante himself. – Was Joseph a religious person? – Yes, he believed in God. When I began to get tuned into the world beyond, he became very interested. – You must know that many of his friends were not pleased with the Christian burial and wake. – Yes, I heard some unsatisfied remarks, but this really has no bearing on Brodsky. He believed in God, but he clearly understood that people who live in groups need these rituals in order to live the right way, otherwise they might begin eating with their feet. He was not self-conscious about being Jewish, and he considered himself a Russian poet, but he did not believe in any rituals, neither Russian nor Jewish. As concerns the service at the church of St John the Divine, it was a wonderful event in a beautiful place, like a theater with a crowd of 3,000. – Did he believe in fate? – He would constantly ask me about this. His intuition was incredibly sharp. Though he would often be mistaken in people. But more often he was not mistaken. He applied his perception to all political events. He had a deep sense of what was fair, and wanted everyone to be happy. I often said to him that everything is held together by pluses and minuses, and if one were to give everyone money, everyone would be poor and there would be no progress. I too want everyone to be happy and I try to help everyone whether or not I can. Those were the kinds of topics we would sometimes discuss.

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– How did Joseph see perestroika and the subsequent changes in Russia? – He welcomed it, but he also said that years must go by before they will understand what true democracy is. – Aksakov once said about the poet, Baratynsky, that his feelings think and discuss. Don’t you think that the same can be said of Joseph? – Yes, yes. Whenever he would begin to talk or argue about something, it was his brain that plugged in first. He would parse everything so logically, and then emotion would take over and redistribute everything. These processes, energy, philosophical, psychological, and emotional, would take turns being in charge throughout a single evening. And not because he wanted to argue with you, but because he would see things differently. At any given time he could see differently and absolutely believe in it. He never lied to anyone, never flattered anyone. Though he once did flatter me. I have a letter from him, I will show it to you, where he proposed marriage to me and said: ‘There are many like me, but there are few like you’. – Many like him? – Yes, can you imagine coming up with that? I said that I could not accept such a compliment. He could compliment someone to make them feel good but not in order to get something out of it. – His ill wishers say that Joseph knew how to use people, what levers to pull, who to socialize with. – That is not in his character at all. He would occasionally pull certain levers to help someone. – Joseph used to say that as he got older he placed more and more prohibitions upon himself. Have you ever noticed any such limitations or prohibitions? – He undoubtedly became softer, kinder. He even began answering letters from people that he did not know. He wrote an incredible preface to my book, which will probably never be published. He read a few chapters and then offered to write the preface. Afterwards his heirs demanded that I return it to them. – Has the book been completed? – Yes, it has, and I am editing it. – Does anyone have a copy of the preface? I thought that I had collected all of his prose, but I am not familiar with this essay. – No, no one else has it. I will find it and send it to you. I remember

he called me over and over one day asking for details, I was in Connecticut, and then he wrote it in a couple of days. And also I taught him how to swim; he didn’t know how to swim. – Yes, and during one of his geological expeditions he almost drowned twice. – Once after he had had heart surgery he came to visit the Libermans in Connecticut, where they had a swimming pool with warm salt water, and I said: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, that you don’t know how to swim! It is the best exercise for your heart’. He said that he was afraid of water. Tatiana then said: ‘I am sure, Joseph, that she will talk you into it’. – ‘Of course’, he replied, ‘I will follow even if she tries to drown me’. Afterwards he yelled: ‘I am going to have a heart attack!’ – Interesting details, thank you. – Nobody knows about this, maybe in some hundred years someone will find this interesting. – It is already interesting because it is prohibited to write his biography. – Who issued this prohibition? – Supposedly Joseph himself did. – I don’t believe it. – Maybe Maria did not understand him correctly. It seems as though we already know everything about his life. What kind of secrets could there be? – It is difficult to write an objective biography; as soon as one begins to write one is already lying. People always add a bit of something. To write the whole truth about Brodsky one needs to write about his running around, and Maria would not want that. But if one were to focus on only one aspect, then it would not be a complete person. On the last day of his life, Joseph said: ‘Elena, you know that I have been in love with you for 19 years’. I replied: ‘I guess that means we will have an anniversary next year?’ He said: ‘I am afraid that it will have to be without me’. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

19 NATA SH A SPENDER Lady Natasha Spender (nee Litvin) was born in 1919, graduated from the Royal College of Music, in 1941 married Stephen Spender. They have two children, a son Matthew (1945) and a daughter Elizabeth (1950). Natasha’s musical career was disrupted by war and took off two year later, when she started playing for the BBC. In 1943 she took part in concert performances for the Army, traveling with a troop of musicians; together with her husband and Peggy Ashcroft she helped found the Apollo Society, giving concerts of poetry reading and music. This was one of the most successful cultural initiatives to come out of the war effort. Natasha remained actively involved with the Apollo, as an organizer and a performer, until 1960 s. On 18 April 1944, she made her debut at the Wigmore Hall. In 1951 she met Igor Stravinsky; they remained good friends. In 1954 she was in Australia on a six-week concert tour with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and in 1956 – concert tour in America. In her forties, a successful concert pianist, she was forced to give up the piano because of breast cancer, which affected her arm muscles. She quickly re-established herself as a scholar in the psychology of music and contributor to the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 70s Natasha taught psychology at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1983 Stephen Spender was awarded a knighthood. With Lady Spender’s retirement from the Royal College of Art in 1984, the Spenders spent more time in France at Mas de St Jerome. After Stephen Spender’s death in 1995 Natasha became her husband’s literary executor. In 1997 she set up the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which aims to widen knowledge of 20 th century English literature, with particular focus on Stephen Spender’s circle of writers. The Trust also promotes literary translation and helps contemporary writers reach an English-language readership.

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R ANGING

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An Interview with Lady Natasha Spender (June/September 2004, London) – Shortly after your husband’s death Joseph wrote an essay in his memory. Were you pleased with it?1 – Yes, I was. It was the most truly evocative portrait of Stephen. – Joseph’s encounter with Stephen Spender took place well before their actual meeting. In June 1965 Stephen gave Akhmatova a gramophone record with Purcell’s opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ to pass on to Joseph. Can you recall that episode? – Yes, Stephen and I had heard about the 25-year-old poet in an Arctic labor camp from Anna Akhmatova in 1965, when she was in Britain to receive an honorary degree from Oxford. We sent him through Akhmatova a volume of John Donne, a recording of Richard Burton reading a selection from the English poets and some ‘warm woolies’. It was the prelude to one of Stephen’s most rewarding latelife friendship. – Did you attend the ceremony at Oxford when Akhmatova was awarded an honorary degree? – I didn’t; Stephen saw her in Oxford, and he went to the ceremony. Then we saw her in London, that’s all in my article.2 – Do you remember what she looked like, what she talked about? – She was wonderful, she really was. She was immensely dignified, but very ironic. – Who was her interpreter? – I don’t remember the interpreter, I think Akhmatova spoke English. – You were the very first person to meet Brodsky when Auden brought him to London in June 1972. You met them at Heathrow airport and drove them to your house. What do you remember of this occasion? – Wystan Auden brought him to stay with us in London, just a week or so after his departure from Leningrad. My most vivid memories are of his first week in England in 1972, and then of our last visit to New York in 1994, during Stephen’s final months. Although they are 22 years apart, the two pictures are all of a piece. As with other

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great artists I’ve known as friends, Henry Moore or Stravinsky for instance, his inner spirit remained unchanged throughout, however much the pattern of artistic and moral life around him swirled and recomposed itself. – Did you know in advance that Auden would be bringing Brodsky with him? – Yes, Auden rang from Austria. – What was your first impression of Joseph? – My first impression of Joseph – as of Stravinsky, his fellow exile – was of bristling creative energy bursting out of a too-confining body. Naturally, on that first evening we were wondering how he could be feeling in this brutal uprooting from family, friends, accustomed daily life and even native language. What he calls the ‘retrospective machinery’ in the exile’s stream of consciousness must have been going full-tilt. Yet he impressed us with his poet’s determination to be open to all experience. From the first we admired his strength and were unconscious of the difference in age – which he was 30 years younger than Stephen and only five years older than our son Matthew, to whom he always felt particularly close. – Brodsky was stunned by the beauty of the voices in your home: ‘I felt as if all the nobility, civility, grace and detachment of the English language had suddenly filled the room’, he wrote.3 How did Brodsky’s English sound against such a background? – He had in mind mostly Stephen’s English, Wystan’s English was already Americanized. Joseph was unduly modest about his spoken English. He was a fluent speaker with occasional spurts, like walking on stepping-stones, his thoughts pushing against his diction and by their sheer force winning out. His extraordinary command, from the breadth of his reading, made momentary hold-ups barely noticeable. It is the poet’s métier to reject the imprecise word. I used to think his saying ‘Wall’ before any remark was his advance apology for a possible vagueness, judged by the exacting standards of a poet. – How did Brodsky’s love for English poetry reveal itself? – I was amazed at what he knew, sharing his passion for English poetry at supper with Wystan and Stephen. Joseph was wonderfully ardent, ranging over poetry of all ages, not only his beloved John

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Donne. I was amazed at his memory in English. Wystan’s verbal memory was very good, but Joseph’s was better. – Please recount the episode when Auden and Brodsky recited John Betjeman’s poem in a duo, as it were: ‘Up the Butterfield aisle / Rich with Gothic enlacement’. – Since we were to join John Betjeman some days later at a local bishop’s dinner-party, they all three started quoting Betjeman. Joseph, surprisingly, reeled off whole poems and then joined Wystan to intone an exuberant duet: Up the Butterfield aisle Rich with Gothic enlacement (Licensed now for embracement) You and I, Pam, as the organ Thunders over us all.

The mixture of Wystan’s Americanized tones with Joseph’s rich Russianised ones added to the fun. In this enthusiastic meeting of minds, we felt that poetry was also a reassuring terra firma for him in the confusion of exile. – Did he talk about his life in the Soviet Union? – No, he never spoke of his previous life and its hardship except in terms of the odd cheerfully sardonic jokes. Like Akhmatova, he had a caustic sturdiness, not simply a contempt for the tyranny they’d been obliged to endure, but a refusal to admit their powerlessness. In 1965 she’d teased Stephen for his Anglicized attempt to say the word ‘Brezhnev’. ‘Who?’ ‘Brezhnev’. ‘Who?’ Then she said with confident irony: ‘You can’t pronounce his name – and neither can I’. In similar spirit, Joseph enjoyed remembering American tourists in Moscow accosting him to ask where they could get the best view of the Kremlin, and his gleeful reply: ‘From the cockpit of an American bomber’. – Brodsky said that Auden and Spender were his ‘ family’. In what sense? – I hadn’t realized the degree to which we simply stood in for his family. Given the cruel deprivation of close contact with his own family, particularly in his father’s last days, his family feeling for us seemed to afford some small degree of solace. He confided to me

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that he tried to ring his father and he couldn’t get through to him and it took years before he got permission to do this. I know that he felt like family. He also felt like an older brother. Later, when he joined Matthew and Stephen on their bi-annual holiday starting from Venice, his enjoyment of a sort of family threesome with them was total. He didn’t at that time talk about his sadness with regard to his own parents. I can’t imagine greater generosity of spirit than that. Perhaps a clue to his grieving for them was in his last words of farewell over Stephen in the church just before the funeral service. He came to the funeral and held on to Stephen’s foot in the coffin and said: ‘Thank you for everything! Say hello to Wystan and my parents. Farewell’. – Do you think, he believed in another life? – I think, yes, in a way. What was interesting is also his relationship with my daughter, Lizzie, which I haven’t really thought about. When he was staying here he took Lizzie out to lunch. He gave her a tremendous talking to; she burst into tears because he said she wasn’t serious, that she was talented but not serious. I think she was learning Russian at the time. We were having a dinner party here that evening and he felt that having been so awful to Lizzie he could not possibly appear at dinner. We had to persuade him that it was really quite all right. – What do you know about his first meeting with Sir Isaiah Berlin? – We introduced him to Isaiah. Isaiah certainly knew of his existence. But when Joseph was staying here, he had been here two or three days; we rang Isaiah to tell him Brodsky was here. Stephen delivered him to the Athenaeum to have tea with Isaiah. Not only the luxury of speaking Russian for two hours, but also their instant rapport, made him look very contented when he came down the steps afterwards. I picked him up from there. As he was to read at the Poetry International that evening, I suggested we go directly to the Festival Hall, where he could rest. Instantly, he looked very alarmed, and clutching at his breast pocket said, ‘But my papers! I haven’t got a passport, or any papers!’ When I said they weren’t necessary here for concert-halls and theatres, he looked incredulous, laughing uncertainly. ‘No, really? You’re sure? – Oh, woll!’ Despite his bravura and his exasperation with Soviet regulations, in those very

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early days he sometimes seemed amused at our casual, unorganized society, as being a little crazy, though enjoyably so. – Did Brodsky meet any other English writers while he was staying with you in 1972? – That first week, when the bishop’s guest of honor turned out to be not the poet Betjeman but the unpoetic CP Snow, we foresaw a tiresome test of patience ahead for Joseph! As soon as the ladies had left the dining room, Lord Snow made a rather pompous overture by praising Mikhail Sholokhov as a truthful and very great novelist and a force for good. Stephen said that Joseph’s withering put-down of Snow, and his contempt for Sholokhov’s belief that literary dissidents should be shot was masterful. I shall always regret not having heard it, though I saw the respectful impression he had made upon these establishment figures. Small wonder that as we drove at midnight over Westminster Bridge, Stephen was still enjoying the memory of Joseph’s self-possessed moral authority among these establishment strangers. We explained that the light under Big Ben meant that the House was sitting, and asked whether Joseph would like to drop in. He was amazed that we could stroll into the Mother of Parliaments (as if to the British-style Kremlin). Shown to our gallery seats by a policeman, we heard a debate, as I remember, on housing finance. Suddenly I felt the whole row of otherwise empty seats shaking quite hard, and turned to see the cause: it was Joseph in delighted, helpless laughter. He whispered happily: ‘It’s so boring’. – How did Sir Stephen Spender react to Joseph’s fierce condemnation of communism and the Soviet Union? – I remember once Joseph and Isaiah, Stephen and I had dinner at Christmas when the bombing of Vietnam had been resumed.4 I said, ‘I am ashamed of our government. The prime minister of Holland and the prime minister of France, they all protested, and where is Ted Heath?’ And Joseph objected: ‘Never forget, everything which is bad for the Soviet Union is absolutely right’. We were a bit taken a back. But we understood him. After Joseph had left, Isaiah said, ‘Do we think the worse of him?’ We said, ‘Of course, we don’t, we understand why’. Then Isaiah said, ‘But I think, he thinks the worse of us’.

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– But of course, he didn’t. Natasha, do you remember when Brodsky wrote an indignant letter after Ian Hamilton’s attack of Stephen Spender.5 What was it all about? – That was after the publications of Stephen’s Selected Poems and Journals. The reviews were quite favorable with one exception, Ian Hamilton’s. Stephen confided his irritation to Reynolds Price to whom Selected Poems was dedicated: ‘I find the kind of sneering criticism which the English specialize in today very hard to take. One feels oneself being made a kind of scarecrow to one’s friends’. There was a really disgusting article in the TLS by a professional hatchet man called Ian Hamilton, which you may or may not have seen, saying among other things that Ian Hamilton did not understand why I was such an admiring friend of Auden since Auden never did anything in return for my friendship. Fortunately Brodsky saw this letter, and although he was about to have open-heart surgery, wrote a letter, which is really a masterpiece of indignation.6 Along with Brodsky, other friends responded to the published volume with warmth. – In 1980 Brodsky flew in from America when Stephen Spender broken both of his legs. What happened? How did he break both legs? Did Joseph stay with you or just visit you? – On the evening of the 14 th of January we had some guests. Stephen went out to get some smoked salmon for supper. It was dark and raining. When he came out of Waitrose he slid off the curb, fell heavily and broke the quadrileps tendons of both legs. They took him into Finchley Road station, phoned for an ambulance and took him off to the Royal Free Hospital. But the Hospital didn’t realized that he had broken both legs. They fixed up one leg and the week later they asked him to stand on one leg. He said, I couldn’t. They had to perform the second operation, that’s why he stayed in the Hospital for three months where Joseph visited him. – Did you also meet Joseph in America? – Many times. I remember, we all had dinner in New York, I think at Dick Sennett’s house, and Susan Sontag was there. I played the Schubert F Minor duet with a guest, and she became elevated by the music. Anyway, there was some conversation about the scherzos. Joseph said he couldn’t see the point of the scherzo, first and second movements are wonderful, why introduce this comparative frivolity

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of a scherzo? Then, Stephen argued, how about the scherzo of the 9th Symphony or of the Hammerclavier? Then Susan waded in saying (she always backed Joseph and she always enjoyed his approval) scherzos made her want to throw up. Joseph just dismissed that. – Did he like arguments? – O, yes, he enjoyed them. He was more like Wystan. I think, he and Wystan were very alike in that. He had his private thoughts about poetry, about writing, about this and that, and they were stored up. But then he unloaded them in conversation. Stephen once said about Wystan that when he came to stay for a week he would deliver a whole dissertation on what he happened to have in his mind. Stephen said, it’s like most house-guests bring you a bottle of whisky or a bunch of flowers, Wystan used to bring what he happened to have in his mind. And Joseph was like that too. And they would have conversations about teaching poetry. They both made their students learn poems by heart. – Did Auden know his own poetry by heart? – O, yes. That’s what made his reading wonderful. I once made a mistake in that I was too moved by his reading at the Poetry International, when he read in the sort of wise and compassionate manner that he had when he was reading a poem with spiritual content. I said, ‘Wystan, it was absolutely wonderful’. He could see that I was too moved, and he said, ‘My dear, I am just an old ham’. – When did Auden come to your house for the first time? – The first time Wystan came to this house after the war and stood on the doorstep, I was with a baby, Matthew, on my arm when I opened the door, Wystan turned around and said: ‘Where is my gas mask?’ with such an American accent! I thought, ‘You’re English, you cannot become an American so soon’. – Was Auden treated badly by his Oxford colleagues, as Brodsky implied? – The fellows of his college (Christ Chuch) where he dined at high table every night, were impatient with his repetitive conversation. But other friends were both affectionate and unable to interfere in that situation. – Do you see any affinity between Brodsky’s prose and poetry and that of Auden?

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– Like Wystan, he often used to express stern moral values rather playfully. They shared a passion for the truth and refusal to engage in worldly tactics and polemics. – On 28 September 1985 in Milan Stephen Spender and Brodsky awarded a Guggenheim ‘Montale’ prize to Anthony Hecht. You also were there. What do you remember of that occasion? – I remember they were both concerned for the aged Italian poet (name?) as he struggled to the platform. Joseph and Stephen rose to their feet and led the applause for him. I remember our son Matthew came up from Tuscany to see us in Milan. We were in Venice together too. Somewhere I have a photograph of all of us, including Joseph, in Venice. I was always concerned that Stephen saw Matthew so seldom. And Maro7 remarked ‘Matthew thinks that you always go on holiday with David Hockney and never with him’. So, the concept of the biannual honeymoon was invented in which Matthew and Stephen used to go together to Venice for ten days. And once or twice Joseph joined them in Venice. – In 1987 Brodsky was in London when the news about his Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. Do you remember his reaction to the news? – I didn’t know, it was Lizzie who rang up to say that Joseph had won the Nobel Prize. He had lunch with Lizzie the day after he got the Nobel Prize. She said that he laughed off the worldly accolade without vanity. He was pleased but it was much more, he felt it as a serious responsibility: to be used for the good of other writers, particularly his former compatriots, for Russian poetry. He made quite a speech to her. – On 6 October 1990 Brodsky debated with Stephen Spender at the I. C. A. They discussed the reunification of Germany, the European Union and the future of Russia. They also talked about the link between Auden and the poets of that generation. What do you remember about that debate? – I am afraid, I wasn’t there. – Did you attend Brodsky’s lecture at the British Academy on 12 October 1990? Many people complained to me that Brodsky spoke so fast that it was very difficult to grasp what he was talking about. Did you understand him?

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– I had no difficulty understanding him. – As you know the critical response to Brodsky’s essays are peppered with adjectives such as ‘brilliant, wise, penetrating, thought provoking’ etc. In comparison his English poems have been called a ‘great American disaster’ (Christopher Reid). Do you sense a big difference between Joseph’s poetry and his prose in English? – I don’t agree with Christopher Reid, but on occasion in his poetry I found the rhythm is more Russian than English. – You have authorized Stephen Spender’s biography and helped Professor John Sutherland a great deal in writing it. What is your attitude towards those widows of famous poets who forbid biographies of their husbands, Carol Hughes, Valerie Eliot, Maria Brodsky? – I don’t know about Maria, but I must defend Valerie. She made Tom a promise on his deathbed that she would not allow one, and she is utterly loyal to his wishes. And she is still devotedly in love with him. But you cannot prevent criticism. In fact, Stephen and I were talking about a biography before he died with John Bodley, the Faber editor. And Stephen vetoed various people but he left it to me to choose the biographer. He was already ill; it was his last few months. He turned down a really quite distinguished Professor, because he said it would be too conventional. John Sutherland is an awfully nice man. He and his wife stayed with me in France and I have spoken absolutely freely with him and very occasionally I said: ‘That’s not for publication’.8 I didn’t utter a word of complaint about any quotation taken from a private journal. My help was as research assistant, never as writer. Recently I said to somebody that I was writing my memoir and that was reported in the press as: ‘She is going to hit back’. I have neither reason nor desire to hit back; I am just going to write about a different aspect. – Did you attend the Oxford ceremony at which Brodsky received an honorary degree? Do you know why Jackie Kennedy-Onassis was there? Surely, Joseph and she were not friends? – No, I didn’t go, but Jackie was an old friend of ours. That’s what irritates me about biographers: people say that Stephen was running after Jackie Onassis. The truth is that we knew Jackie before she was in the White House because she was a great friend of Joe Alsop, the journalist, who was also a great art lover. And Stephen and Joe

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spent a lot of time together. I remember staying with Joe when Jackie came in and said that she’d just delivered an electioneering speech in Italian. And she ended up with a wonderful parody of herself being charming in Italian to the electorate. So, we knew her long before 1960. I also knew her family, partly because of Gore Vidal and also because I knew her sister very well. If she came to Oxford it is because she admired Joseph and also was very ambitious as a publisher. – Why do you think Joseph was so fascinated by the ‘Thirties group’? – The English poets of the Thirties had been a lifeline to him in prison. He had adopted Wystan and Stephen as paternal figures in poetry long before he met them. In his last letter to me he wrote that he had ‘always regarded Stephen as a creature of some superior order’, and he missed Stephen, Wystan and me ‘as a dog misses its master’s voice’. – You knew a few Russians who never lived in the Soviet Union. How did Brodsky strike you in this respect, as a Russian or as a Soviet man? – The Russian I really knew well was Stravinsky and Joseph had a lot in common with Stravinsky. Stravinsky, long settled in the West, used to jump from idea to idea like a grasshopper; Joseph rose above his vulnerable moment of exile, and forcefully grasped his long-imagined Free World of ideas; there was nothing passive about his perceptions. You yourself must know the most important thing about Russians is homesickness. – I personally didn’t have a single day of homesickness; neither did Joseph as far as I know. He missed his friends, we all did. I am not so sure about Stravinsky since he didn’t live in the Soviet Union. – Stravinsky felt homesick for the pre 1917 Russia till the end of his life. He had been particularly sympathetic to Prokofiev’s homesickness when they were in Paris. It was he who persuaded Prokofiev to go back to the Soviet Union. – In your article in ‘The Independent’ you said you remembered Joseph with affection. What was it about his character and his life that made you feel this way? – I remember Joseph with affection, and with astonishment that so

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much was crammed into one life – voracious reading and traveling, intense and devoted friendships, mastery of his own language and others, his constant welding of it all into his poems, translations, essays, his morality, his funniness; his refusal to waste time on the trappings of formal life and worldly goods. It was, one might say, a life bursting at the seams, a life cut into two halves by expulsion from Russia in 1972. My late memory of Joseph’s friendship is our last New York visit in 1994, when Stephen was obliged to spend a month in the Lenox Hill Hospital. Just as in 1972 Joseph had felt ‘mothered’, as he put it, by the Wystan-Stephen family, now we felt welcomed into an extended, rather bewildering Russian family of Joseph and some of his fellow immigrants. They would turn up at the hospital unexpectedly, bearing delicious pirozhki in great steaming parcels. Too shy or considerate to enter Stephen’s room, these great-hearted Russian strangers would give me a huge bear-hug of sympathy in the corridor, ask for a precise bulletin and speedily depart, as if they had infiltrated through enemy lines to feed a wounded prisoner and must immediately report back to base. Indeed, within the hour there would be a call from Joseph with a precise list of questions I must ask the doctor, or insistent advice to consult the king of New York specialists, followed by a beguiling, relaxed talk with Stephen which left him laughing – about Joseph’s version of the love life of W. B. Yeats, or whatever. Between them they ignored Stephen’s infirmity. They both shared with Wystan a lofty disregard for the mechanics of their health or illness; it was no more important to their thought and conversation than the car having its 5000-mile service. And Joseph displayed the utmost tenderness for Stephen, and affectionate, helpful bossiness with Matthew and me. One day, when all three Brodskys were visiting, Stephen suffered a severe cardiac crisis. He was rushed away to emergency and intensive care, and the Brodsky’s waited some hours with Matthew and me. Maria and I managed to affect a little calm by playing with Anna; Joseph clearly responded to Matthew’s feeling for his father and the need to master anxiety. In a fit of inspiration he started up one of his serious games – ‘Who are the six greatest nineteenthcentury Russian novelists?’ – and Matthew and Joseph plunged into

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it. Maria contributed some delicate dissensions and I some rather less informed queries. I only remember that Joseph gave first prize to Dostoevsky, while Tolstoy came sixth; there was some good-humored haggling about the positions of Leskov and Goncharov in the pantheon. The order was shuffled around with zestful energy, and he managed by sheer determination to keep us somehow engrossed. When we were finally summoned for a minute or two with Stephen, in intensive care, we all seemed to share in the tremendous affirmation of life, which had always characterized their long friendship. Joseph threw out some of his cheerful jokes and hugs and left the Spenders feeling ablaze with confidence. – In 1994 Joseph himself was very close to death. What was his attitude to death? – Though passionate for others, particularly his old friends and his beloved young family, I believe that for Joseph himself, death was no big deal; it might as well descend one day as another. Just as every minute of his life was crammed, so was his telephone call to me in his last week. Even at that moment of physical frailty, doctors’ views were dismissed as if they were plumbers, and his avid talk was of Tuscany, of Mount Holyoke, of Bach fugues, of how to write about music, ideas spinning off him like a Catherine wheel. It is this image of his creative vitality, his devotion and generosity, which will go on and on living in our memory. – Was he a religious person? Did you discuss any religious subjects with him? – We didn’t talk about religious subjects. He had a sense of the sacred. Most of my best friends fit into that class; Iris Murdoch is a case in point, or Stephen if it comes to it. Joseph, at Stephen’s funeral, in the little church on Paddington Green, just had a quiet acceptance of eternity, which gave one a sense of spiritual survival. Notes 1

Joseph Brodsky, ‘In Memory of Stephen Spender’, On Grief and Reason (NY, FS&G, 1995), pp. 459 - 484, dated 10 August. Russian version, Iosif Brodskii, ‘Pamiati Stivena Spendera’, tr. Aleksandr Sumerkin. Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo (SPb., Pushkinskii Fond, 2000), vol. VI, pp. 386 - 407.

2

3 4

5

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7 8

Natasha Spender, ‘A family of poets’, Independent on Sunday, 23 February 1997, pp. 24 - 25. Joseph Brodsky, ‘In Memory of Stephen Spender’, Ibid, p. 461. According to Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was the bombing of Cambodia, not Vietnam that provoked Brodsky’s remark. See my interview with Isaiah Berlin in Znamia, no. 11, 1996, p. 130. Ian Hamilton’s review of Spender’s Journals, The Times Literary Supplement, November 22, 1985, pp. 1307 - 1308. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4317, December 27, 1985, p. 1481. Maro Gorky is a daughter of Arshile Gorky and a wife of Matthew Spender. John Sutherland, Stephen Spender. The Authorized Biography, (London: Viking, 2004).

20 SUSA N S ON TAG Susan Sontag was born in New York City (1933); studied at the University of California, Berkley (1948 - 49); University of Chicago (1949 - 51), BA; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954 - 57), MA; St Anne’s College, Oxford (1957). Taught English and philosophy at Harvard University, City University of New York and Columbia University. She is one of the most important American essayists, respected for her sharp intelligence. She has written about film, dance, photography, painting, opera and theatre as well as on poets and writers: Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva and Elizabeth Hardwick. She is also the author of four novels, several plays and a collection of stories. Her books Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as a Metaphor (1978), Where the Stress Falls (2001) have become classic. Susan Sontag has also directed several plays and films. She is a recipient of many awards: American Academy Ingram Merrill Foundation Award (1976); the National Book Critics Circle Award (1978, for ‘On Photography’); Order of Art and Letters (France, 1984). In 2000, she received the National Book Award for the historical novel In America; in 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her works, and in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Soon after our meeting, she had a bone marrow transplant and died on 28 January 2004 of acute myelogenous leukaemia.

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HE L ANDED

AMONG US LIKE A

MISSILE

An Interview with Susan Sontag (11 November 2003, New York) - You are perhaps in a unique position to give Russian readers an empirical account of New York literary life at the time of Brodsky’s arrival on the American poetic scene. Was it difficult for him to fit in? – I think people were very open to Joseph. First of all, he made a stunning impression; he was so authoritative personally. That would register here as supreme confidence; and people are – I want to say in America, because I think it’s more so than in New York – Americans are rather disposed to admire, if they are given grounds to do so, unlike the English, whom I find quite spiteful and malicious. If they see that somebody who is presented to them is very important, their first impulse is to try to cut that person down, undermine that person quite maliciously. These are the things I least like about England. It’s absolutely the opposite here. If people are given grounds to admire, they like to do so. I think Joseph was admired from the start. There was also, of course, a small body of readers and alert people, for whom his reputation preceded him. The transcript of his trial with those wonderfully quotable sentences was printed in a New York magazine. I remember reading it myself and cutting it out. It was, actually, I guess, the first time I ever heard of Joseph. He made a great impression here from the beginning. People were very open to his self-confident, peremptory manner. – When was your first encounter with him, do you remember? – I remember it very well. I wanted to meet him because by that time I knew his poetry in translation. It was in January 1976. He was published by my publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He was still teaching in Michigan, and I heard through our publisher that Joseph was in town. I said I would like to meet him and I was invited to lunch. It was in a restaurant. And we hit it off immediately and saw each other the next day. The first thing I said to him was: ‘You have to leave Michigan and come to New York’. And he said: ‘It’s very nice in Michigan’. You know how contrary he was. I said:

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‘Come to New York, come to New York, it’s a bigger pond here’. You shouldn’t live in an entirely academic atmosphere. If you go out into the country, this big continental country that is the United States, and if you are not on either of the two coasts, then your milieu has to be exclusively university, because the universities are our cultural centres, maisons de la culture, to use the French analogy. The places where literature is discussed, where readers exist, are the university towns, places like Ann Arbor, Madison Wisconsin and Austin Texas and others. If you come to New York or even Boston or Washington, places that I like much less, or the West coast, Los Angeles or San Francisco, then you could be connected with a university but also most of the people you know will not be university people. I think it is much healthier for a writer. I am all for big cities. That’s what I wanted to tell him. – How did your friendship with Joseph develop? Were there any ups and downs, or was it all loving and understanding? – No, it was tumultuous, because I became very attached to Joseph emotionally, as many women did. That was one aspect of it. Naturally at the end it was quite frustrating, as it always was. And there was something in his character that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how mean he was sometime to people. He could be very cruel, especially to young people. I remember one time we really had a fight. I was at his house, here in Morton Street, before Maria’s time, and there were other people. One was a young woman of 25. It was spring or summer and we were sitting in the garden, and he turned to this young woman and said: ‘So what do you do?’ And she said: ‘Well, I am a writer’. And he said: ‘Who told you that you have any talent?’ It was a very cruel thing to say; he didn’t know anything about her. And she started to cry. If somebody had said something like that to him he would have replied: ‘God!’ This young woman couldn’t say anything, she just felt beaten up by this man. After they left, we had a fight. I said to him, ‘How could you be so mean to this woman? You are going to win the Nobel Prize and you get pleasure out of torturing some kid’. What I wanted to say was: you are so big, so big, you should be kinder. But of course in that quarrel I was playing the classic female role, telling the big, brutal man to be kind. So, he was that big, brutal guy. That was a side of Joseph. No one, least of all

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Joseph himself, could claim that he had a good character. He liked to say sometimes that he had a rather bad character. Surely, I am not the first person to tell you this. And if you have a bad character, I suppose, you have to display it from time to time, exemplify and illustrate it. – Did he talk about his hardship in the village of Norenskaya, a collective farm in the Far North? – He was elegant enough always to claim that he had not really suffered during that year and a half of internal exile. As you know, he wrote quite a few wonderful poems there. – You went to Venice together once? – More than once. – Joseph has written about how you met Olga Rudge.1 Could you tell your side of the story? – My side of the story, which Joseph of course would not tell. We were together in Venice and staying in the Londra Hotel. It was winter, before Christmas, and I went for a walk by myself to the Piazza San Marco, cutting diagonally across the misty, almost empty Piazza. Venice in winter is wonderful; almost black and white. And there was this little woman, very frail and small, crossing also. We were practically the only people in the square. She came up to me and she said: ‘You are Susan Sontag?’ And I said, yes. After a pause she said: ‘I am Olga Rudge’. I said: ‘Oh! Oh!’ I guess she knew the effect this would have on me. Then everything drops away and instead of thinking: ‘This is that horrible woman’, I said: ‘How fantastic, how wonderful! What a pleasure to meet you’. She said: ‘Would you come and visit me? I’ll show you things’. I said: ‘Absolutely’. Than I ran home to Joseph and I said: ‘Guess what?’ And we went together. She was amazing, she said thing like: ‘Ezra wasn’t an anti-Semite. How could he be an anti-Semite? He had a Hebrew name’. And another thing she said was: ‘And that young Mr Ginsburg came to visit him in St Elizabeth Hospital. And he received him. He couldn’t be an anti-Semite, could he?’ – Did Brodsky ever feel displaced in the USA? – He has written so magnificently about ‘The Condition we call exile’.2 Those reflections are his most serious and considered thoughts on the matter. What I observed was that he revelled in those situ-

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ations. Joseph was supremely ambitious and saw this as a fantastic opportunity to occupy more space. I felt that it was precisely being displaced that was the great advantage; he could say what Thomas Mann said in exile in South California in 1940s: ‘Where I am, German literature is’; so Joseph could say: ‘Where I am, Russian poetry is’. He could feel that he had in no way lost the place he thought was his as the great Russian poet. But he had a chance to exert influence in virgin territory among people, audiences and poets he both admired, enjoyed being with and felt superior to. He felt so superior that it was his privilege and pleasure to flatter Americans, and to flatter the United States, saying how wonderful the United States was. I don’t think he thought that. I was always impressed by how he enjoyed impressing people, enjoyed knowing more than they did, enjoyed having higher standards that they had. I think the bond between us, whatever emotional bond there was, as he told me early on, was that I was the one American he knew who had standards like his. So I wasn’t typical at all. I am a self-Europeanized American. – You can be called both a ‘besotted aesthete’ and an ‘obsessed moralists’. Are we talking now about aesthetic or moral standards? – Moral standards. My moral standards, in a larger sense, are higher than Joseph’s, but that wasn’t the issue. I am thinking of moral standards in literature, a moral conception of the vocation of writing. In fact, sometimes he teased me or insulted me or flattered me – I guess it’s all three – by saying: ‘Susan, your standards are too high for me; I am a whore and you are not. I am a prostitute. I flatter people I don’t respect; you don’t’. He did say things like that. I am sure I had my moments of compromise too. He told me or led me to believe that I was the one person he knew in the early years in America. We talked a lot because I am a self-Europeanized American. I am sure he saw exile as a tremendous opportunity to be a world poet, not just a Russian poet. But of course, his primary identity was as a Russian poet. But to change empires, as he put it, could only be to his advantage. I do remember his saying laughingly, some time in 1976 - 77, ‘Sometimes I find it so odd to realize that I can write anything I want and it will be published’. Almost as if something was

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missing! I think he enjoyed America, felt superior to America. – Who else played a part in Brodsky’s career in the USA? I know, a lot of people did, but who in particular? – His publisher, but mostly it was Brodsky himself. He was immensely industrious and self-confident. As I already said somewhere, he landed among us like a missile from another empire, whose payload was not only his genius, but his native literature’s exalted, exacting sense of the poet’s authority. – These are the qualities that help him becoming a member of the ‘big league’ poets, such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Les Murray and a few others. Or there were other factors? – It was his dream. It was Seamus, Derek and Les, and Joseph was the leader. Joseph always had to be the leader. According to Joseph, they were all going to get the Nobel Prize. And they did, as if it has been planned that way. Unfortunately, Les Murray has been delayed. How did he do it? I think, it was a number of things: the patronage of Auden was tremendously important. The one thing I haven’t mentioned: to come with the imprimatur, the benediction rather, of Auden, who by that time was regarded as the greatest living poet in English, and now has been described as the greatest poet in English in the 20 th century, which is a big change from what his reputation was 30 year ago. I think to have Auden’s benediction had already set him on an incredibly exalted plane. – And Robert Lowell’s, too. Remember, Robert Lowell read his translations during the Poetry International in London in June 1972. – That’s right, he emerged from the cloud in a chariot. As Akhmatova said, ‘What a biography they making for our red-hair boy!’ So he leaves Russia with a typewriter, a bottle of vodka and John Donne, gets out of the plane, and Carl Proffer is waiting for him in Vienna. Then they go straight to Auden; then he gets to London, etc. It’s a coronation! He arrives in an atmosphere of coronation. And then, what can I say, he fulfils all expectations, he breaks the rules. I don’t believe the English proverb that the exception proves the rule, because I think it’s a complete misunderstanding. The exception tests the rule. People were perfectly prepared to adore him, because of his attitude, his self-confidence, his desire to be an American in a certain way. Like Balanchine, actually. The only person you can really

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compare to Joseph is Balanchine. Balanchine thought that the entire history of Russian ballet is with him, in his head and he can transform the ballet here. People were prepared to adore Joseph in the way they adored Balanchine. And the fact that his poetry was known in translation… His poetry is so powerful intellectually that even in translation doubts didn’t arise. The doubts arose when Joseph himself started to write in English. Then of course there were people who were waiting for the chance to attack him, like Craig Raine.3 – Why do you think Brodsky was attacked more severely in the English Press by English poets that in America? – Once again, in literary matters, Americans are much more civil, also more inhibited than the English. Most American poets expressed serious doubts about Joseph’s poetry in English. But the truth is that nobody would write an attack like Craig Raine’s. They didn’t because they liked him so much; they didn’t want to hurt his feelings. This sort of concern would never be a factor in England. – But do they doubt that Brodsky is an excellent poet in Russian? – No. They were surprised and embarrassed by his constantly claiming that he had mastered English as a poet. – What about his essays? They are written in English. – His essays were extensively edited. – Did he ever ask you to look them over? – Yes, he did. Not the poetry in English, because he knew that I didn’t like it; not the essays in English either. He had a couple of people who did that on a regular basis. And editors of the magazines, like Bob Silver of The New York Review of Books certainly re-wrote a lot of his stuff. He often asked me to have a look, in the period when we were close, at his translations of his own poetry. And he very rarely accepted my suggestions. He didn’t have a good ear for the sound of English, for the way it works. He had slang in his head that was very dated and kind of silly, like the word ‘ain’t’, for instance. People don’t say ‘ain’t’ anymore; maybe a hundred years ago, but not now. He liked to use slang and he like to use contractions when they didn’t sound right. We do use a lot of contractions, but in speech and it is a very delicate matter to use them in translation, particularly of poetry. There was a real confusion in his knowledge of English and at the same time he adored English of course. His exposition of the dramatic content of poetry

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was always very powerful. I actually heard him expound poets like Auden and Frost and he was wonderful. – Did you ever attend any of his lectures and seminars? – I did, once or twice. There was an awful lot of joking and he clearly wasn’t prepared. Of course you can say that even Joseph’s silly remarks were more interesting than other people considered remarks. But it was a kind of silliness that was not worthy of him. Teaching brought out something silly in him: there was a lot of teasing and showing off and evident lack of preparation. Once I was staying with him in Mount Holyoke, in his house, and attended his class the next day. I could see he wasn’t prepared. To cover up he would say: ‘Let’s read the poem’. And also another thing I was doing a lot with him, that was fun, again in those years when we were close – I would read with him in public in New York; he would read the Russian and I would read the translations. I was a good reader, but he had of course his magical very Russian way of reading. – How do you rate Brodsky as a friend? Was he loyal and generous or unforgiving, vindictive, competitive? – I don’t want to generalise. I think he had a different attitude to the Russians and to the Americans, he had a different attitude to men and to women. – How selective was he in his choice of friends? – He wasn’t very selective. I think, it was quite arbitrary, but I cannot evaluate it, because I think he broke a lot of people’s hearts. But he could be very faithful as well. I think he was more loyal to his Russian friends than to his American friends. He was generous, he was arbitrary and generous. I know he helped people out financially. – A few words about Brodsky’s attitude to women: was he gallant or a misogynistic exploiter of women? – As I said, he broke lots of people’s heart, especially women’s heart. –Brodsky always identified his citizenship through language instead of place of birth. Language for him was a synonym for voice, Muse, poetry. Was his obsession with language connected to the 20 th century obsession with linguistics? – No, it just being a poet, being a writer. I am obsessed with language, too. That’s what a writer is, a real writer. Of course, Joseph

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always loved to talk about how poetry was superior to prose. – Did Brodsky achieve any kind of harmony between his Jewish origin and his Christian outlook? – I can’t pronounce on that. I never felt that Joseph was a Jewish author. We never talk about religious matters. I am completely secular, and I also felt that he was completely secular. I never sensed any allusion to his Jewishness. He was interested in Christianity because of its domination of European culture. I feel the same way. When I saw him laid out in the Catholic funeral home in downtown Manhattan and buried in a Protestant Cemetery in Venice – I was at both funerals – I was surprised. People, when they die, are at mercy of their relatives. – So you wouldn’t consider him to be a religious poet? – I don’t feel him as a religious poet and I don’t feel him as someone who particularly identified with Judaism or been Jewish, just as I don’t. He was a poet of world culture, in the European sense. I never brought it into our relationship. I just felt what seems to me his secular point of view that took in more than two thousand years of European and new-European culture. This was his material: there was Horace, there was Ovid and there was Auden, there was Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. Why does Judaism have to come to it, why does Christianity come into it? – Because at the end of his life Joseph said: ‘I am convinced, in parenthesis, that what I’ve been doing [i.e. writing poetry] is to His (if He does exist) liking, because otherwise there would be no reason for Him to keep me around’.4 – Joseph said a lot of things because he was terrifying of dying. He was obsessed with death. He knew he was dying. I was told I was dying, so I know what it is to think, you are going to die. And he liked to be contradictory; he liked to say things he didn’t think he was going to say. Of course, he often just said things over and over again, but he liked to be a provocateur. I remember a time when he and Misha5 and I went to a dinner, rather a social affair with rich people. It was Misha’s world, rich people, patrons of the ballet. And he invited Joseph and Joseph made an incredibly rude remark at the dinner table. I cannot remember what it was, but it was something like ‘you are an idiot’, the most grotesque and stupid thing I ever

heard. Misha and I looked at each other and we literally stood up and walked out in the middle of the dinner, a formal dinner at the 5 th Avenue apartment, because Joseph has decided to insult the host or the hostess. It was so bad we had to leave him. And we went to the Russian Samovar to get drunk. So you cannot take seriously everything he said about the Man upstairs. Notes 1 2

3

4 5

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, London, (Hamish Hamilton, 1992), pp. 68 - 74. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Condition We Call Exile’, The New York Review of Book, vol. 34, no. 21 (January 21, 1988), pp. 16 - 20; reprinted in Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. 34, 1991, pp. 1- 8; Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in Exile, Ed. By Marc Robinson, London & Boston: (Faber & Faber, 1994). Craig Raine, ‘A Reputation subject to inflation’, Financial Times, 16/17 November 1996, p. xix. I. Brodskii, Kniga intervyu (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 552. Misha is Mikhail Baryshnikov.

21 A N N E L I S A A L L E VA Annelisa Alleva is a poet, translator, and essayist, born in Rome in 1956. She completed her studies at the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the University of Rome. She studied as an exchange student in Prague (1978), Leningrad (1980 - 81), Warsaw (1983), and in Macedonia (1984, 1986). In 2001, she was a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center in the US, and in 2004 she taught the Master course in Literary Translation course, at the University of Rome. She currently lives in Rome with her husband, artist Ruggero Savinio, and her two children. She is the author of seven books of poetry: Months, 1996, Who Enters This Door, 1998, Letters in the Form of a Sonnet, 1998, Stars and Stones, 1999, The Spirit of Ceremony, 2000, Inherited Gold, 2001, Instinct and Specters, 2003. Annelisa Alleva is the author of critical essays about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tommaso Landolfi, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pushkin, Angelo Maria Ripellino, Boris Ryzhy, and Wyslawa Szymborska. A Slavist, she has translated from Russian into Italian novels and short stories by Aleksandr Pushkin (1990) as well as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1997). She has also translated the poetry of many contemporary Russian poets, thereby introducing them to the Italian reader: Bella Akhmadulina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Svetlana Kekova, Timur Kibirov, Aleksandr Kushner, Boris Ryzhy, Olga Sedakova, Sergey Stratanovsky, Vladimir Strochkov, Elena Shvartz, and Elena Tinovskaya. From 1997 through 2001 she organized many poetry readings for the Teatro della Concordia in Perugia. Recently she published an anthology of contemporary Russian short stories (Metamorphoses, 2004).

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TH E R E A

WA S A L O T O F H I M , WH O L E M O S A I C

An Interview with Annelisa Alleva (May 2004, Venice) – When and how did you first meet Brodsky? – I first met Brodsky in April 1981. There was a lecture series being held for Russian Language and Literature diploma recipients and Ph.D. graduates at the ancient Villa Mirafiori in Rome. At that time, Brodsky was in Rome as an American Academy fellow, and he lived in a small house right next to the American Academy. He gave a lecture to a small group of students on Russian poetry, namely about Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Novogodnee’, based on his recently published article.1 – What did you find most engaging about him? – How he entered the classroom with a wide, determined step, and in heavy men’s shoes. I was charmed by his jeans jacket, his Russian language, and especially how he rolled his r’s. And he also charmed me with the way he disparaged our professor, who could not even open his mouth without hearing a sharp response from Brodsky. I was 24-years-old then, and he was almost 41. – How did your relations develop? Did you see each other often? – I liked him; when I looked at him it seemed to me that he was also looking at me, when he looked up during the lectures or questions. That is how it ended up being. Toward the end of the lecture I went up to him along with the other participants to get an autograph, I had with me a two-volume book by Tsvetaeva. I had not yet read Brodsky’s poetry at that time. I noticed that he was autographing the books of those who were standing behind me, and he gestured to me to wait. Then he autographed my book and added his phone number below. Right away I lost my appetite and couldn’t sleep. Later he left for England, and I too had to go to London to study English. In the summer, he returned to the States, and I too had to go to the States with my Italian friends. This was an innocent mistake on my part. While there, I came to realize that he did not let anyone into his

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Annelisa Alleva, Rialto, Venice, January 1983, photo by Joseph Brodsky (from Annelisa Alleva’s archive)

lair. After America, I decided that I would not see him again. I got a scholarship for a trip to Russia. In the US, Brodsky had given me the address of his parents. While I was in Russia I did not write him a single time. And even when I returned to Italy I did not call or write him. He called me himself in Christmas, 1982 from Venice and invited me. Brodsky hated to lose people. Our relations began to resemble a game of chess. He let me know that it was he who decided, when, where, and under what circumstances we were to meet. We met more or less regularly once or twice a year, and we talked on the phone about once a week and corresponded. We rarely lived together, though sometimes we managed to, in Ischia, on the Main, in New York, in Amsterdam, in Brighton, in London, and in Florence. We traveled in Italy and often met in Venice. That is how it continued until the end of January 1989. – You wrote about how in the fall of 1981 you went to Leningrad as an exchange student and throughout the entire year, every Thursday you would visit Brodsky’s parents.2 Did you get a sense of whether or not they understood how gifted their son was? Already by 1980, he had been first nominated for the Nobel Prize.

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– Yes, I met Joseph’s parents every Thursday at 5: 00 pm. Of course they were conscious of the fact that they were the parents of Brodsky and were very proud of it, especially his mother. But for them, especially for Maria Moiseevna, it was very trying and painful to discuss him. It seemed to me, though she never really said this, that it was unbearable for her to think that theoretically I could see her son any time, whereas she, his mother, could not. For this reason we did not speak about him very often. But his presence was felt in the air of the apartment. Everything there was saturated with nostalgia. I respected his parents very much for their endurance, for the dignity with which they endured each day of their lives without him, and for their decency. – Did they tell you any interesting stories about Brodsky’s childhood or youth? – Yes, they did, of course, and somewhere I wrote about this in great detail. Maria Moiseevna always defended her son; she considered him to be kind. In this she was right. Joseph was her only son. He was raised during the war; his mother worked, and she had to leave her son at home alone. She told with great pride about how once when she returned from work she saw that her three-year-old son was holding in his hands the book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as if he were reading it. She took the book from his hands and returned it upside down, and Joseph immediately turned it back into the right position. It was as if he were reading at the age of three. Brodsky and I often ate in restaurants, whereas at his parents’ we had dinner on Thursdays, and in his mother’s gestures at the table I could recognize Joseph’s, the way they broke a piece of bread. He learned that from her, he learned everything from her. After the war, Joseph often helped her carry wood into the apartment. It made for an unusually tender picture. Joseph was indeed kind, he always helped his friends, gave away his new clothes, protected cats. But at the same time, he could invite his friends to his place for his birthday, and then leave during the evening. He wrote his poetry while listening to Bach. Once he bought a necktie in Cambridge and sent it to his father. Aleksandr Ivanovich wore this tie stylishly. – Memory often serves us wrong. For example Maria Moiseevna has

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told you how she often saw Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva walking together on Liteiny after Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union. We know that they met twice in Moscow on 7 and 8 June 1941. Or else his father showed you Joseph’s photographs said: ‘And here he is after defending his diploma’. But Joseph never defended any diploma in his life, albeit he has received a few honorary doctorate degrees in different countries, including Oxford, in 1991. What do you make of these stories? – I remember exactly Maria Moiseevna telling me that Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva would walk down the Liteiny prospect wearing long skirts and resembling schoolteachers. Akhmatova lived near by and it is possible that the other woman was not Tsvetaeva, but actually some schoolteacher. Or perhaps they were both schoolteachers, and one of them looked like Akhmatova. It’s too bad, as I believed her then and still believe it. I just like the idea of two great Russian poetesses resembling schoolteachers, since that is the way it often is. Concerning Joseph’s diploma, I distinctly remember a black and white photograph from the 1970’s taken somewhere in England, on which Joseph is thin, sad, and with long thinning hair; was wearing a hat with a tassel and a dark raincoat, the typical attire of a student who had just defended his diploma. I believed them and I never had the sense that they were not telling the truth. Though Aleksandr Ivanovich did have a tendency to exaggerate somewhat. While Maria Moiseevna was washing the dishes after dinner, I would sit with him in Joseph’s half-room, on Joseph’s hard bed where now slept Aleksandr Ivanovich, and he would tell me stories about his youth. Once he took a couple of pictures of me against a background of photographs taken of Joseph before he left Russia. I treasured one of these, in memory of those times. – To what extent was this friendship important for you and for them? – For me it was very important. Not only then and there, but forever. In the Leningrad dormitory no. 2, on Shevchenko Steet for foreign students from capitalist countries, I secretly kept a black and white photograph of Joseph, perhaps because his name then was still banned. It was very dangerous to mention that you knew him or that

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you were meeting with his parents in a communal apartment. For the type of young lady that I was back then, all of this was rather alluring. To this day I have a scar on my left hand, and I am left-handed, from the heavy door of a telephone booth on Pestel Street. Joseph’s parents kept me company and fed me. I entertained them a bit, gave them little useful gifts: wine, chocolate. Joseph gave me some money so that I would buy them things in the ‘Beryozka’ store, where goods were of a higher quality. For Christmas, I went to Italy where I bought a sweater and shoes for Maria Moiseevna and a suit for Aleksandr Ivanovich, as well as a calendar with reproductions of Botticelli and something else. Later, on the other side of town in Leningrad, I bought his mother a hat. But that is not what is most important. I still remember her kitchen advice, his maxims, for example, before meeting with one’s higher-ups, one should have a good meal. I would add, before going to the dentist as well, i.e. on the eve of any kind of suffering. – You mentioned that Joseph looked like his father. Was this resemblance external only or was it deeper? – Without a doubt, Joseph looked like his father, but also like his mother. She softened the features inherited from his father with her beauty. His father’s prominent eyes are a mere hint of the prominence of Joseph’s own eyes. The same can be said about his hooked nose; Joseph’s nose was more like his mother’s. The same goes for his balding. But Joseph was young; he died at a younger age than his father. After his mother’s death in 1983, Joseph asked me to write his father a letter, ‘as tender as the previous one, which he liked so much’. Father and son had another similarity, quick hands, small and white. Yes, Aleksandr Ivanovich had a very long fingernail on his right little finger. There was something else. After their wedding, he did not go to live with his wife, but instead remained in his previous apartment.3 He would only visit his wife and son from time to time. She was very critical of him and would sometimes say: ‘There is something secretive about him’, adding: ‘He is an egoist, while my son is not an egoist’. She would reproach him for never having taken her to a restaurant after they got married. What father and son had in common was the way they treated women. They both believed that

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social life was for men, while women should remain home. They also both insisted on having the last word. Both were incredibly quick to react, being quick-witted and deft. They were distinguished by their love of luxury and passion for women. Maria Moiseevna would look at him askance across the table and say: ‘He liked to steal his way into other people’s bedrooms’. Also, Aleksandr Ivanovich loved pomp and ceremony. I would say that Joseph did so as well, to a certain extent. – That is strange, I was under a totally opposite impression that Joseph did not like official events and avoided gala ceremonies. For which reason he declined an invitation to visit Japan that was formally issued by the Emperor himself; he also declined to visit Saint Petersburg for the ceremony in honor of his honorary citizenship of the city. Did Joseph ask you about the details of the lives of his parents, when you would meet with him after returning to Italy? – Joseph, like his parents, suffered from memories. I remember we were once sitting in the kitchen of my Venetian friend having tea, and he asked: ‘She treated you, right? Wasn’t she an excellent cook?’ He missed them a lot. I remember I once showed him my velvet album of photos from Leningrad. Joseph turned its pages slowly, as if he was afraid of what he would see behind the corner of each page. He told me and wrote me that when he was young he wanted to leave home and live separately. But later he came to understand that in fact the only real life was at home. His parents constantly argued, not seriously, but all the time. Joseph also loved to argue, it probably reminded him of his family. – Your friendship with Joseph lasted a few years. Were there any ‘pits and bumps’ in it? – It’s interesting that you call our relations – friendship. It wasn’t friendship between Joseph and me; it was more like war. I would ask myself in my journal and him in my letters: ‘Who are you? Friend or foe?’ There would be long pauses of silence between us when we were together. He was larger than I was, in terms of height, age, language, culture. I was like a small female David. I would listen to him attentively and heed his advice or reproaches concerning my reading. At the same time, I would study his behavior, I tried to un-

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derstand him, to open him and to resist him, somehow to defend myself from him, to save myself and be liberated from him. Joseph knew about this and called this intention of mine ‘giving him up for lost’. But it took me a long time to succeed in this. I read and read, because Joseph said that literature, especially poetry, helps develop a person. I needed to grow quickly. I was with him face to face, and no one could explain to me what Brodsky was all about. Were there any pits or gullies in our relations? ‘Pits’ for me, a foreigner, are places for the deceased, where people rest. Whereas I was burning, and to burn one needs oxygen. Burning is the light of a lofty flame in the sunlight. My heart burned with passion; however I needed to remain sober of mind. I tried to gain some insight into him psychologically, but ever elusive, he would not allow me to formulate any concept about him, as he constantly sent me contradictory signs, creating different images of himself. I think that behind all of this mystification there was some kind of concealed insecurity. He would draw one to himself and then leave. He stole other people’s love in order to hide his insecurity. He would leave for the sake of self-sufficiency. What an effort, isn’t it? He would talk to me sometimes about his doubts, but it was difficult to believe him because he provided such self-contradictory information. He would demand constancy and patronage, as any homeless person, but in return he gave too little; at best, he would take his leave, making you weaker and thereby not letting you go. As if this were his only means. There was something childish about it. In short, I could not afford to let myself fall into a pit. On the contrary, I was very vigilant and wary. – What did Joseph’s presence in your life mean? – Joseph’s presence in my life was actually a constant absence. That’s how he play it showing up and then disappearing, but not for good, keeping me on a long leash. That leash was the phone. It ended up with my finally going to the telephone company by bicycle and asking them to change my telephone number. Later I left Rome for a time and moved to the countryside to live with the artist, Ruggero Savinio, whom I later married. My despair was not born of his absence: when he was absent I could

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dream. It was his presence that would cause my despair: because my solitude would be multiplied, when he, the long awaited for, was near. He was always hurrying somewhere, interviews, dinners, and receptions. I describe this condition in my poems.4 – Cats were Brodsky’s totem animals. In Leningrad you met the ‘kitty in white booties’. Did you ever meet Joseph’s last cat, Mississippi? – It’s true; cats were Brodsky’s totem animals. He loved them a lot. I did meet the ‘kitty in white booties’ in Leningrad. I did not know his last cat, Mississippi, though I did know his previous one, the orange one, but I forgot his name, with an ‘R’, I think, Big Red. After the death of his cat, Joseph had its photograph framed and put it on his desk in his Morton Street apartment. In my letters, I called Joseph – Giuseppe Gatti, and signed as Anna Gatti. In his letters to me as well as in the books he gave me there were lots of drawings of cats. We have a cat named Argentina at home which we got recently at my daughter Gemma’s request. I am charmed by how graceful it is, I remember Joseph often talked about how graceful cats are, in any position. He loved to watch them. – Evgeny Rein, in his essay-story, ‘My Copy of Urania’, writes that Brodsky wrote in your name above some of the poems that were about you: ‘Aria’ (1986), ‘Night possessed by whiteness…’ (1983), and ‘Elegy’ (1986). Why are your initials omitted from the published versions? – Evgeny wrote a great summary of our meeting in Moscow.5 God only knows why Joseph did not include my initials upon the publication of the poems dedicated to me. One of his very last poems published already after his death, ‘Memory’, 6 is indeed the memory of our walks and our small utopia. After our closeness ended, he wrote a few poems on this topic in 1989 and 1990. I also recognized myself in Watermark, in the girl with the eyes the ‘color of mustard and honey’.7 Also, in the ‘Letter to Horatio’.8 I had the impression that Joseph would sometimes confuse the reader in his dedications, keeping everyone in the dark. He used dates, names, dedications, changed the poems themselves in order to please or annoy someone, or to merely play hide-and-seek with the reader. These were his subtexts. He also maintained that one should not show a woman too

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much how one feels. – In ‘Watermark’ there is, I believe, a phrase having to do with your relations: ‘That is, neither for a honeymoon (the closest I ever came to that was many years ago, on the island of Ischia, or else in Siena’).9 If what Rein says is true, under the dedication of ‘Night possessed by whiteness…’ after your name Joseph wrote ‘whom I should have married, but maybe this will still happen’. Why didn’t it happen? – Once on Piazza Navona, he asked me: ‘Look at me, do I look like a family man?’ – You are a poet, and based on your self-translations into Russian and English, you are an excellent poet. Was Brodsky familiar with your poems or translations and if so, what did he think of them? – Thank you, Valentina. Joseph read some of my published poetry and approved of them. Once he told me over the phone that he had read my poems in Italian with the help of Masha Vorobyova, and that this was one of his greatest joys after receiving the Nobel Prize. In general he liked to assign everyone a place. He would compliment me for my letters, saying that when I wrote, something would happen to me, he would say that my letters are his capital. He kept one of my letters in his wallet. He would write me that he liked the directness of my thoughts, and that I needed to continue writing. But that if I wanted to write, I needed to start from basics. I shall always remember this advice of his. Brodsky was the first who took note of my poems. His approval was incredibly important for me. Once he even told me that I probably write better than anyone else in my milieu, in my city. And that being conscious of this is the most important thing in order to begin, and that I could write like Akhmatova. It is difficult for me to forget these words. He appreciated my imagination and my similes. He liked my translations of his poems,10 enjoyed the game of alliteration and the precision of the translation. I would sometimes consult with Joseph over the phone when translating Pushkin’s prose, and he would make suggestions, helping me resolve certain problems. Once we were working together in Brighton. He made a suggestion that was very important for translation in general. I still remember his advice. – I was especially moved by his poem ‘Who Enters This Door’.11

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It is as if it was written on behalf of all the women who were ever in love with Joseph and whom he left. Did you ever hear Joseph say ‘I love you’? – Rarely. He would not say, ‘I love you’, but rather ‘We love you’. There was a lot of him, a whole mosaic. – Did you ever get a chance to attend any of his lectures or readings? What do you remember from Brodsky’s public appearances? – I did occasionally attend, but not often. I remember that very first lecture at the University, which I mentioned earlier. I also remember how he read his poems at a poetry festival at the Villa Borghese in the summer of 1983. He read his poems by heart, with the confidence of a great personality, boldly, loudly, but at the same time always slightly worried. I loved him for worrying. – You have probably read many interviews given by Brodsky, including those published in Italian and American journals. Do you agree that it was typical of him to teach everyone? Did he live by those rules or criteria that he would so often formulate in his essays and interviews? – Yes, of course I read many of his interviews. I even think that after so many interviews, the interview style somehow entered Brodsky’s blood, or else Brodsky’s literary style was naturally close to oral speech, i.e. to that of the interview. I was once present when he was being interviewed by a journalist for the newspaper, La Republica, and all the while I kept thinking that tomorrow my mother would open the newspaper that she reads every day and find out that Joseph was in Rome. I was hiding him from her at that time. For her, his name was like a thorn in the side. Of course in real life he did not follow the rules he talked about. At that time many of his utterances complicated and confused my understanding of him. Today all that remains of this is a rare richness and strength. Then and now the most interesting and important thing for me is what Joseph the poet, the Russian poet, thought of life, about the simplest things; his experience was the most important thing. For this I was ready to tolerate anything. Hegel wrote in his Aesthetics, that every person needs to imitate Christ, to experience all of the stages of his path. Well then, Brodsky was my Golgotha. Pushkin wrote that suffering was a good

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grade school, while happiness was the best university. In that case, Brodsky was my grade school. As regards a tendency to teach everyone, that is true of him. As a joke I would say to him that he was trying to engage me in sedition. As he was always protesting in his homeland, it seems to me that later he just wanted to agree with something. I liked his approach to his students, as that of an aged teacher, an old father; all of his abstract reasoning derived from his life experience. Joseph was popular among students; at the end of the year they would give him a t-shirt with his own photograph or something of that sort. As he was generous toward his students and his friends in general, he would give them have the very instrument they needed to resist him. Toward the end of his life, in those round glasses, he looked very much the professor. And once again this reinforces the story that Maria Moiseevna told about the two poetesses who looked like schoolteachers. Poets and professors look alike. – You observed Brodsky socializing with Italian as well as with Russian friends. To what extent was his unwillingness not to belong to some kind of group, organization, country, or even one woman determined by his fear of getting caught? – Yes, I observed Brodsky for a long time. He was allergic to groups, societies, organizations. He hated to sign letters in somebody’s defense. He told me that he only signed those letters that he himself has written. He could not enter a group of unknown people; instead of that he would form his own group, Brodsky’s group. His own mondo. Of course the leader of such a group would undoubtedly be himself. His friends sincerely and faithfully loved him. He told me that he picked his friends well. – Do you remember, that he said: ‘I am a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad American, a bad Christian, but a good poet’. Do you agree with this self-evaluation? – I agree with the fact that he was a very good poet. I grew up on Joseph’s poems: when I would get a new book from him, I would open it with the feeling that it was my own unwritten book. I did not even read, I swallowed his words. What I love in his poems are the school, Leningrad, street, snowy, Christmas, melancholy, forest,

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chamber, and sentimental atmosphere. I prefer hearing his poems in an undertone, rather than the more intense, provoking applause, straight-A poems. I love his comparisons, his rich imagination, and his rhymes. Joseph would say that a poet needs inertia, needs to live in his own city and repeat the same action every day; he would advise me not to change where I lived. And in language he preferred the most inert and slowed-down part of speech – the conjunction. ‘Today there are so few Greeks in Leningrad…’ is such an interesting beginning in terms of inertia. I remember a few years ago I had the chance of meeting a talented Russian artist, Varvara Shavrova, on an Irish beach. She said that she had read Brodsky while still in Russia, in samizdat, as a young girl on a bus, and she immediately felt that this was something totally new, in terms of language. – Does your knowledge of Brodsky as a person help you to understand his poetry better? – Without a doubt. In general, anyone who knows the author is in a privileged position as a reader and especially as a translator, especially if he himself is a writer or poet. After Brodsky, I met with many Russian poets and I have become convinced that familiarity with a poet’s biography is very helpful, as is visiting his home. Sometimes just a phone-call is worth a lot; it is so important to hear the voice of a poet, since his voice is his main instrument. – Do you consider Brodsky a religious poet? – I would say not. One senses a kind of distance, a removal or absence from the hussle and bustle of life, as is often the case with people who are not well. And he was very ill. Or in people, who have suffered through a lot, lost a lot. About himself he would say: ‘I am an old hand’, or ‘I am far from a saint’. – You have translated all of Pushkin into Italian, and are well versed in his mentality and his significance for Russian culture. Can one call Brodsky a contemporary Pushkin? – Yes, I have translated a lot, other than Pushkin; I translated Anna Karenina as well as many contemporary poets. I do not see Brodsky as a contemporary Pushkin. Joseph had no sense of gallantry, nor the French culture of the 18th century, nor the notorious ‘little feet’. They did indeed share a lot in common; both were Gemini,

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born May, 26 and 24; both died in January, 29 and 28. It is as if they shared the same horoscope. They were both elusive and duplicitous, sharing Don Juanism, sharp wit, gloominess, extrovertedness and, at the same time, a kind of unsociableness. Compare Pushkin’s ‘Onegin’: ‘Who lived and contemplated, he cannot help but / hold people in contempt at heart’ with Brodsky’s ‘Nature Morte’: ‘I do not like people’.12 Of course here one must pay tribute to the literary cliché. Here is how I imagine one of the genealogies of Russian literature: Tolstoy from Pushkin, Akhmatova from Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, Brodsky from Akhmatova, and many contemporary poets from Brodsky, such as Boris Ryzhy, Oleg Dozmorov, Elena Tinovskaya, and others. Brodsky’s descendants are already living, writing, suffering, and dying. – How do you see Brodsky’s triumph in the West? – I am grateful to Brodsky for everything that he has given us. But it would be good to assign a place to his contemporaries or younger poets. Every triumph is always, to a certain extent, a form of tyranny. I remember how Brodsky called me from London the day that he was notified that he had won the Nobel Prize, and he asked in a kind of lamentful voice: ‘Please say that you are happy’. I replied: ‘Of course I am happy. Well done!’ But it seemed to me very odd that he doubted whether or not I was happy, because his tone was full of unhappiness. – Was Brodsky in Rome in November 1995 in connection with the Russian Academy? Do you take any part in the activities of the Brodsky Foundation? – I read in the papers that Brodsky was in Rome at that time and that he was planning to establish a Russian Academy. I am not a member of the Brodsky Foundation, but I have worked with the poets who have received grants from this Foundation. I introduced Timur Kibirov the first time at the University of Rome and I translated him. I also translated some of the other grantees of the Foundation: Strochkov, Stratanovsky, Elena Shvartz, Aizenberg. My translations were published in various Italian literary journals. I think Brodsky would have been pleased to know about this. He himself, as my instigator, always taught me that poetry needs to be disseminated, and

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I am very pleased that all of these poets speak Italian in my voice. I have translated other poets and invited them to international festivals; I am now planning to compile an anthology of Russian poetry in Italian. Poets, on their part, are grateful to me and help me when I ask them. This winter I compiled an anthology of contemporary Russian short stories, and poets helped me with advice as to who should be included and where to find interesting material. – When or if you read or look through much of the research written about Brodsky’s writing in Russia and in the West, what is your impression? Do you think that his legacy is being actively assimilated? Has the canonization of Brodsky occurred? Is Brodsky research an ‘actively growing field of the philological industry’?13 – We have a very good friend in New York, Lee Marshall, who comes to visit in Italy. She brings me the newest books no longer by Brodsky but about him. It is very interesting to follow what is being written. But I am far from familiar with everything that is being written about him in America and in Russia. I think that the Brodsky’s canonization has partly occurred, and there is a risk in all this philological industry. For the full canonization of Brodsky it would be good to occupy oneself with other poets, who lived before and after Brodsky. There are many who wrote and continue to write poetry about Brodsky and dedicate poems to him. Brodsky is becoming a cliché in the poetry of his contemporaries. The most impressive poem that I have read was in the new book by Aleksandr Kushner. But I don’t read others in the search of some kind of connection with Brodsky. They are interesting of and in themselves. In the end, Brodsky himself insisted on the theory of the next step. Translated by Tatiana Retivov WHO PASSES THIS DOOR It is not me this lonely girl with a grief too great. It is not me the widow, present left to the imperfect. They are not my lenses, dark shoes,

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nor wrists, ears without gems. It is not me who tucked in this earth, shook out the last pillow. It is not me hedged round by this high wall of cypresses. It is not me. It is she who guides the cortege, she who is heir to grief. It is she, devout, she who kneels, she who cries. Console her. Follow the others, the smile a moon which lulls itself through unlaced curtains of hair. Like a malicious enamel pendant they take you in their eyes. They had you without having you, you were there and you were not. They were towns, where one passes a day. You didn’t tear away their life, nor throw on a thick blanket. If anything, you took away from them a little of death. Without hatred, or passion, now I see you, without hope, expectation, without fear. I see you as you were, I don’t veil you. I see you even if you are not anymore. I see a broken enchantment and turned over earth, which recloses more red. If you were a cloud, steam, how can I now cry for you? You were appearing and disappearing, you were giving dark and giving light; you were curtain to the sun. In running you were miming your end. When your shadow was slipping away I was crying. But after the noble age of self-damage was spent, how is it possible

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to regret a cloud? Arid the earth, dry the eyelash. You were a cloud which never rained. They bury a love made of words. Unaware, like every bride, white and light, you were walking, and the train cancelled your footsteps. Every step of the churchyard was a woman’s body, ours. All of us helped you, but in secret. We were your smooth ascent, your guide. To not turn, you were holding your future behind your head. In your hair he thrusted in his hairpin. Today, widow, you wear the dress of our ancient mourning. You, the last, the new, renew it. The girl who suffers is my double. She has light hair, and a skin which tans. The clay of her features models itself on a nostalgia. Not falling to each other’s lot, we grazed. So the bee grazes a flower and doesn’t settle. So her pain grazes me today. You recognize me, but I’m not the same. You queen of chess, you Maria. He son and father, he who is grand, he on her lap, he who lies. You genuflected, like at the Annunciation, you recognize me, because you are the same. Many times, when I loved you, I was tempted to push you down a narrow stair, to throw you into a lonely channel. Every night I invoked justice: ‘Give life only to he who merits it, Oh Lord’.

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Later nightmares transmuted into bland dreams. From erythema, burn, you became an unguent. Today I chant to save you from the oblivion of time. Before the umpteenth departure, the last airport, profaned bed, glass, I discover the secret you didn’t unveil to me. You go, I stay, and this I would not renounce. In mourning you resist the cold, at the end of the day, and anyway you resist; this is the truth you knew. That embers become ash, and you can touch them. How much firewood, how many bellows, smoke, for not understanding what you now unveil to me. Life was not knowing, I was life. Thoughts crossed your mind like moths bore into curtains and vanish in a golden flutter. You tried to give them a shape, to embroider holes all around, to patch emptiness with a cry. From the living and the dead you took leave in your last days. She, a friend, garnishes the grave with a rose, an unknown woman steals a handful of earth; everybody, one after the other, moves towards the church, and settles themselves in rows behind the benches, like floor planks, when a home falls into silence. Who passes this door is cut from the earth like the flowers which he brings. Here rests a man without a land. The island has the color of iron when it’s getting old, of freckles, little springs, and the taste of blood in the mouth.

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Here tides will calm his thirst. Tepid wind will dry his sweat. Branches will rustle when the sun is extinguished. Round pine-cones fallen from cypresses Will beat on his stone slab like kisses. Birds will pause on the cross. And we will not be the same. Only by writing I give vent to a grief which is of stone. I provoke him, I go around him, I face it with rage. But he claws, he is cross. Fluid flows the ink, or the pencil. While it speaks, pressed against the callus, the lead blunts. Cetona, June-July 1997 Translated from the Italian by Annelisa Alleva 14

Notes 1

2

3

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Joseph Brodsky, ‘Footnote to a Poem’, in Marina Tsvetaeva, Collected Poetry, Volume 1 (New York: Russica, 1980), p. 39 - 80. Annelisa Alleva, ‘Ulica Pestelia, 27, kvartira 28’, Europa orientalis, XVI (1997), no. 2, pp. 193 - 206. The Russian version was translated by Denis Dateshidze: Annelisa Alleva, ‘Ulica Pestelia, 27, kvartira 28’, Neva, 1999, no. 12, pp. 162 - 168; Staroye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 2001, no. 1, pp. 51 - 56. Brodsky was born on the Petrograd side and grew up on Ryleev Street, where his mother lived. His father lived on the corner of Gasa Prospekt and the Obvodnoy canal. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (NY: The Free Press, 1998), p. 20. See selected poems by Annelisa Alleva translated by Denis Dateshidze in the journal, Zvezda, p. 8, 2004.

5

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7 8

9 10

11 12

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Evgeny Rein, I am Bored Without Dovlatov (SPb: Limbus Press, 1997), pp. 195 - 196. Joseph Brodsky, Peizazh s navodneniem (Landscape with Flood, Dana Point: Ardis, 1995), p. 194. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (NY: FS&G, 1992), p. 66. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Letter to Horatio’, Collected Works, vol. 6 (SPb.: Pushkin Fund), pp. 363 - 364. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (NY: FS&G, 1992), p. 101. Iosif Brodskij, ‘Tre elegie romane’, traduzione di Annelisa Alleva, Nuovi Argomenti, No 9, 1984, p. 16 - 18. Translation of three of the ‘Roman Elegies’; Iosif Brodskij, ‘Strofe veneziane’, Nuovi Argomenti, traduzione di Annelisa Alleva, No 16, 1985, p. 10 - 14. Translation of the poem, ‘Venetian Strophes’. Annelisa Alleva, Chi varca questa porta (Roma, li Bulino, 1998). In a published version this line reads ‘People are not my thing’. See Brodsky’s collection A Part of Speech, tr. by George Kline (Oxford: OUP, 1980), p. 44. Lev Losev and Valentina Polukhina, Kak rabotaet stikhotvorenie Brodskogo (M.: NLO, 2002), p. 7. This poem was included in Annelisa Alleva’s Italian collection of poems Chi varca questa porta e alter poesie (Il Bulino, Roma, 1998).

22 TAT I A NA R E T I VOV Tatiana Retivov was born in New York, in 1954, into a Russian émigré family. In 1978 she received her B. A. in English Literature at the University of Montana. In 1981, she received her M. A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Michigan. For seven years she worked as a conference interpreter for the US State Department. She has been working and living in Ukraine since 1994, where she was involved with the disarmament program.

H I S VO I C E R E M A I N S U N I Q U E An interview with Tatiana Retivov (July-November 2004) – When and how did you first meet Brodsky? – It was in 1979, at the University of Michigan, half a year after my first trip to Russia. While I was an exchange student in Leningrad, I met many Leningrad poets, the so-called poets of the ‘Blue Lagoon’, as per the title of the anthology issued by Kostia Kuzminsky. I socialized with Krivulin, Elena Shvartz, Okhapkin, Mironov, Cheigin, Kupriyanov, all poets whose unpublished manuscripts I had gotten a chance to read in the original before traveling to Leningrad. At that time everyone was actively discussing Brodsky, his trial and his departure. Probably not an evening would go by without mention of him. Many years later, in Russian literary circles, there would be much active discussion about him again, namely about his winning the Nobel Prize and refusing to return to Russia. Anyway, one can say that I chose to do my graduate studies at the University of Michigan under the influence of my first trip to Russia, and to confirm, forsooth, that which I already knew. – You attended Brodsky’s seminars at the University of Michigan in 1980. What was he like as a teacher?

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– I attended all of the seminars that he taught while I was there. In terms of the standards of Slavists, he was an unusual teacher, especially at the University of Michigan, where everyone, especially then, was in the throes of formalism, structuralism, and semiotics. Though for me, his teaching method was, as they say, just what the doctor ordered, balsam for the soul. I had gotten so weary of the dry approach to teaching literature, as true philology had long gone by the wayside at our department. Philo- had separated from -logy, and philology had split into two disciplines of study, literature on the one hand and linguistics on the other. And, what was symptomatic at Slavic Departments then, typically those who knew Russian well, didn’t read literature much, whereas those who didn’t know the language that well, did read (mostly in translation), except for those students who knew Russian to begin with. However Brodsky taught not as a literary critic but as a poet, and this was familiar to me, since that was precisely the approach I was used to, having been a creative writing student at the University of Montana, both in poetry and prose, which was where I received my B.A. in English Literature. My main teacher there, at the poetry workshops, was the poet Richard Hugo, who, in turn, had been the student of poet Theodore Roethke. Roethke also graduated from the University of Michigan. Both were striking representatives of the American postwar school of poetry. Hugo had even flown as a bomber pilot during WWII. Anyway, with his help I not only mastered free verse (vers libre), but also got interested in various forms of versification, and this interest continued after I met Brodsky. – How did his students and colleagues at the University of Michigan relate to him? Did he bother anyone with his encyclopedic knowledge or political incorrectness? – I think that for the rank and file students of Slavics his approach to literature was very useful, because he interpreted poetry in a way that they would rarely have encountered elsewhere, as Brodsky most likely interpreted texts through elucidation. For experienced Slavic structuralists, formalists, and semioticians, this was highly unusual, but they still found it interesting, nevertheless, to argue with Brodsky, since he refused to recognize their theories. He violated all of the basic tenets and principles of the so-called New School of American Formalism, namely that the literary significance of a text depends on

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the text alone, and everything else is superfluous. Thus even from the point of view of a beginner formalist, Brodsky could easily have been accused of sophism or the intentional fallacy, since his way of interpreting a text was more conceptual than textual. Though, as they say, there is no prophet in his homeland, and quite frankly, Brodsky was better understood, appreciated, and loved by students of other departments who attended his seminars of American poetry or Russian poetry in translation. With these students he found a common language, as English and Comparative Literature students tend to be more philologically inclined than the future literary critics from foreign language departments. In any case, this pertained to those American students who were interested in Brodsky at that time, before he received the Nobel Prize. I am sure that the Department of English also had its share of devout formalists, but I doubt that they would have attended his seminars just for the sake of a good argument. Regarding Brodsky’s colleagues at that time and how they related to him, that’s a rather complicated question. Perhaps some considered him to be audacious, same goes for his publisher, Carl Proffer. Brodsky and Proffer were stars, and their major activities went beyond

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the framework of the typical American academic establishment. The ordinary professors were not especially charmed by the duo’s success and stardom, especially when this success became academic as well. However, the University of Michigan administration did not disapprove of their success and activities outside of the university, as stars attract students, and students bring money. Every department depends a lot on the success and popularity of its professors. – Who was he friends with while in Ann Arbor? Did he have any serious involvements? – While I was studying in Ann Arbor, he was frequently traveling, this was after his first bypass operation, he took this surgery very hard and was rather sensitive. In Ann Arbor he lived gratis in the attic of some large house whose owners considered it an honor to have him as a lodger. As for his affairs of the heart, other than his landlord’s cat that would come and spend the night with him, I am sure there was the usual entourage of enamored fans. But for the most part he hung out with his friends, the Loseffs, the Efimovs, and the Proffers, as well as one of his oldest friends, Garrik Voskov, from Leningrad. – Did he have any serious non-well wishers in Ann Arbor? – I don’t know, but even if there were, I am sure that now it is long forgotten, as it goes in that old émigré song, ‘All that was, all that was / has long come to pass’. – Why did you decide to study at the University of Michigan and not at some university in Washington, where your parents lived? – In the US there are lots of good universities scattered all over the country, and no one hardly decides on where to study based on where one resides. The state universities, such as the University of Michigan, also attract a lot of out-of-state students, the main difference being that in-state students pay much less for tuition. But I decided to study at the University of Michigan mainly because Brodsky was teaching there. And by the way, the University of Michigan is often called the Harvard of the Midwest, while Harvard is the Michigan of the East. Both W. H. Auden and Robert Frost taught at the University of Michigan in their time. And Roethke together with Frost received honorary doctorates from the U of MI. Auden, by the way, was friends with Roethke and even attended his wedding. Roethke and his wife

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honeymooned at Auden’s villa in Ischia. Brodsky also went to Ischia, perhaps in Auden’s footsteps. – Based on his essays about Auden, Akhmatova, and others, Brodsky was a very grateful person. Was he that way in real life? – Grateful to whom and for what, to other poets or for his fate? I don’t know, I believe that he was primarily grateful to his own gift and voice. And secondarily to everyone and everything else. Undoubtedly he always remembered and gave his due to Auden, Frost, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam, as well as all the other poets he had absorbed. In the final analysis, his fate was easier than that of the poets of the Silver Age, and he was fully aware of that. Brodsky often spoke of the so-called survivor’s guilt, and clearly he felt this guilt as well. Though himself quite lucky and favored, in his own way, he was the socializing favorite of many remarkable individuals; he had the great quality, not only of energizing others, but transforming them as well, with his presence, with his poetry, i.e. he was a true charismatic, in the Max Weber sense, in terms of a charisma of divine origin. But in answer to your question, I would say that Brodsky was most likely not only grateful but obligated to many. Obligated in the sense that it was difficult for him to exist in a vacuum or without socializing, he was not one to write his poetry for himself; he very much wanted to become a classic and he strongly yearned for recognition. He was not self-sufficient, since he very much needed company and acknowledgement. Of course he could complain that he was constantly being disturbed, but he thrived on this constant disturbance; it energized and inspired him. The Nobel Prize hung over him like the sword of Damocles in reverse, he would not rest until this sword dropped near him; somewhere he wrote about ‘waiting for the axe to drop and the green laurel’. – We all know that Auden played a large part in Brodsky’s fate. But hardly anything has been written about Auden’s influence on Brodsky’s poetics. Do you feel this influence? – Yes, I do feel it, but not so much in style, not in specific word combinations, but in his dramatic pose as author of prophetic lines, in the way he addressed the reader with a certain authority, a kind of gravitas. Brodsky supposedly said that he began writing in English in order to please a shadow, meaning Auden. Though in truth, as is well known, everything that he admired in others he valued in him-

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self as well. While interpreting Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of Yeats’, Brodsky would draw attention on the transitions from low to high style, how Auden would go from a civic to an ironic to an intimate lexicon. Brodsky also easily shifted from one style to another, even flitted, and these shifts were his element. ‘I entered the cage instead of a wild beast’, is akin to Auden’s words: ‘I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street’. – Why did Brodsky need other poets so much? What did they do for him? – He needed them as a reflection. Allow me to refrain from psychoanalytical explanations. Poets write for each other in the same way that women dress for each other. Pardon my banality, but believe me, that is the case. On the one hand, one needs a muse, and it doesn’t matter whether or not she understands the lines addressed to her; on the other hand, one needs the smartest reader in the world, and it is best if that reader were another poet. – You translated into English his essay about Tsvetaeva. How actively did Brodsky meddle in your work? – Well he didn’t meddle actively at all. Actually I would not even call it meddling but inculcation, and it happened automatically. I can’t say that I translated his essay. He mainly asked me to provide a rough translation of Tsvetaeva’s ‘Novogodnee’ (‘New Year’s Greetings’), and it all happened rather spontaneously. The attempt ended with a creative interpretation of the text, we parsed both the poem itself and my translation of it. It is difficult for me to revive this memory, since I have already written about all of this in a separate essay and in my poetry. If I may, I would rather provide my poetic interpretation below. – You were born in America and you write poetry in English more than in Russian. Thus unlike other Russian literary scholars, including myself, you are able to evaluate his poetry written in English as well as his auto-translations. What is your opinion? – I used to write more in English than in Russian, but now I write more in Russian. My opinion is twofold, in his translations one hears a different rhythm of the language, and this rhythm sometimes interferes with an adequate grasp of the text, which probably is what irritated some critics of his translations. For example he loved using apostrophes, and didn’t always apply them where appropriate.

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He also loved using contractions, such as ‘ain’t’, which I am sure disturbed some. But frankly, his fame, most likely, got in the way, and it especially irritated some of his readers in English as well as translators, more than the English texts themselves. His auto-translations and English texts could not be perceived separately from his persona, thus those who were well disposed toward him to begin with, would tolerate his unusual syntactical tricks, whereas those critics who were ill disposed toward him, would attack and find fault with any unusual idiomatic expression. But in general one can say that his poetry in English pales against his Russian poetry; he tends to show off too much in the former, showing off for the sake of showing off, to the delight of his critics. But there is a big exception, once I read in The New Yorker his translation of two poems by Tsvetaeva, some of her earlier work, I don’t exactly remember which, but the translations were superb. I still have them somewhere in my archives. For the sake of these two translations into English one can (and should) forgive him any idiosyncrasies in his borrowed tongue. – In his auto-translations, ‘ foreignization’ was closer to Brodsky than ‘domestication’. To what extent were his translations into English russified? – His auto-translations were a kind of battlefield of dialectics or polemics between the intertextuality of Russian literary-centeredness and English self-restraint and self-sufficience, a clash between two worlds. Though consider Shakespeare, he too was intertextual, albeit at the same time he was an incomparable and unique genius. His intertextuality served not so much censorial principle as aesthetic, which is why it is still relevant. If you mean ‘foreignization’ in terms of ‘making strange’, as per Shklovsky, then I would agree, I think that in this field of battle there was this non-stop process of making strange alternating for each language, as in a crooked mirror. Though if one were to look at it from the point of view of Chomskyan linguistics, then one should note that Brodsky’s poetics goes beyond language, since his poetic language is an unusual, live example of generative grammar. – Bodsky’s English friends and translators, particularly Bernard Meares note Brodsky’s incredible arrogance. Can you think of any examples?

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– Not really, it was mostly a pose from his end. He could go from being incredibly arrogant to being equally unsure of himself in a flash, i.e. his negation of somebody’s thoughts, words, including his own, were part of the dialectical process of his thinking, ‘aufgehoben’, as per Hegel, sort of an attempt in overcoming contradiction in motion, during the process of uttering one’s thought, which is already a lie (once uttered). Perhaps he became more arrogant when he was dealing with people who doubted the ability of thought to metamorphose into its opposite. What comes to my mind is rather different, Brodsky abashed and unsure of himself. I saw him in San Francisco in 1984, and I remember this meeting well as I later wrote about it ironically, full of citations from Eugene Onegin, anyway, we spent the evening there together with Vladimir Bukovsky, and there was this moment when the two of them were observing something in a store window, trying to figure out what they were looking at. I don’t remember what it was exactly, probably some kind clothing, and Joseph said, ‘Tatiana, you must excuse us, we are just barbarians’. This phrase I will always remember and have even called him that in one of my poems that describe these walks in San Francisco (‘Just white noise’). Of course, we are all barbarians, from the point of view of ancient Greece and Rome; it is just that not all barbarians recognize who they are. When Brodsky realized that he did not know something, then he could easily become embarrassed or abashed, and I remember a few such moments. Brodsky was not aware of the fact that Thomas Hardy valued poetry more than prose, and only in old age did he quit writing prose and return to poetry. This was discussed during debates on a favorite topic, namely can poets write good prose and prose writers write good poetry. Well as an example of a good poet and prose writer in one person it seemed appropriate to mention Thomas Hardy, which I did, causing Brodsky to fall into deep thought. And another anecdotic moment from the lives of poets. It is known that Yeats, apparently out of an overabundance of love, underwent an organ transplant of a monkey’s balls, Brodsky was a bit abashed by this information! He even blushed! We once argued loudly about the color of the hair of the famous muse and femme inspiratrix, Lou Andreas-Salomé. He claimed that she was blonde, whereas I – that she was a brunette. In such situations,

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in any case, in my experience, Brodsky would be a bit capricious, but never aggressive, though perhaps because he tried to spare my feelings, since he sensed that I was sincerely shy. If I had instead manifested signs of self-assurance and aggressiveness, then it would have incited in him a similar reaction in response. Therefore I have no doubt that he would have behaved arrogantly with translators, I just don’t see that as an issue. Translating poetry is a very painful process, especially when the author knows both languages. I for one hate translating poetry, neither good nor bad. And the fact that he had clashes with the representatives of the English-speaking intelligentsia is not surprising, as he actively participated in highly politicized circles. Once I gave Brodsky a book by Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Brodsky was totally amazed by the fact that he had never heard of either the book or the author, which quite naturally made him quickly fall into deep melancholy. Brodsky was rather generous and often gave books away, not only those written by him, but those that he especially loved. For example he once gave me his old earmarked edition of Kozma Prutkov, this for me was the most valuable gift, since that book undoubtedly spent a lot of time by his side and absorbed much from his life. – Did he suffer from either russophobia or russophilia? What can you say about the concept of ‘Russian spirit’ in Brodsky’s poetry? – Brodsky liked neither Russophobes nor Russophiles, and in the presence of a Russophobe he could quickly become a Russophile and vice versa. It was quite typical of him to change his position in reaction to an irritating interlocutor. But here one must give Brodsky credit where it’s due, he did a lot to change the course or current of the leftist intelligentsia of New York. Just by his very appearance on the shores of the Hudson River, Joseph managed to straighten them out and set them straight. Before his arrival, all they did was whine about American intervention in Latin America, but they were totally silent about the USSR, and only thanks to the dialogue and relationship between Brodsky and Susan Sontag did this initially pro-Soviet and leftist intelligentsia swerve significantly to the right. A kind of paradigmatic shift occurred in their consciences, as among other infamous fellow-travelers, such as the New French Philosophers. Brodsky and New York is a whole theme

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for a dissertation, as he managed to get a fierce grip on the city, capturing it and intercepting it from all the other (Russian) writers, except maybe Dolvatov. I was born in New York, and I must admit that ever since I met Brodsky, New York ceased existing for me separately from Brodsky. The city and the poet have become forever intertwined for me. – Did you ever observe Brodsky in the process of writing poetry? – To write poetry in front of others is a bit blasphemous, there is something theatrical about it, how can one pine for the muse if either she or someone else is nearby? However, Brodsky did like to show his freshly baked oeuvres, even unfinished ones, especially if he liked the way something turned out, he would read it out loud and perhaps in the process of reading it over would change something. Somewhere I still have the galleys of one of his books published in English. I remember that when he gave a poetry reading in San Francisco in 1984, he read some poetry in Russian and some in English, during his reading he was not at his best and he worried a lot especially about how he had read in English. And perhaps in order to gain back some of his confidence, after his reading he shared some of his new poems, which later were published in his book, To Urania, and in turn, I shared with him some of my new sonnets. – Did Brodsky ever visit your parents’ house in Washington? – No, he never visited there, but my parents did meet him a long time ago at somebody’s house, when he first came to the US. As you probably know, Brodsky claimed that he could tell where any Russian comes from by his speech. However my father, who was born in Prague but had studied in a Russian gymnasium, speaks a perfect Russian, the provenance of which Brodsky was unable to decode, and to this day my father is rather proud of this fact. And by the way, when people in Russia tell me that since my father was born in Prague, that means he must be a Czech, I always reply by asking, does that mean that Mur, the son of Marina Tsvetaeva, is also a Czech? To which everyone always answers, of course not. So where is the logic? Mur was the same age as my father, and while Mur was being born, my grandmother along with her sisters and some other Russian émigré women delivered the baby. My grandmother was the daughter of the writer Evgeny Nikolaevich Chirikov, and Tsvetaeva

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would often visit them at their home. Tsvetaeva was especially close to my grandmother’s sister, Ludmila Evgenievna Chirikova, and their correspondence has even been published. – Why did Brodsky dislike your first husband, writer Sasha Sokolov, so much? – Well it wasn’t really so much that he disliked him. It is just that Sasha Sokolov was totally foreign to him. As Sasha Sokolov is a modernist, whereas Brodsky didn’t really take too well to contemporary Russian modernists, live ones. And plus he just didn’t really like good-looking guys, especially writers. – Brodsky did not like to talk about the trial, exile, and other unpleasant events of his previous empire. Did he speak about any of these things in personal discussion? – He probably did not like to speak of these things when asked. He and I mostly talked about poetry. If he mentioned the trial or his exile, it was usually in the context of their influence on literature. By the way, my teacher in Montana, the poet Richard Hugo, many times tried to tell us that every poet must put himself in prison, prison, as per Brodsky, being this metaphysical condition where there is too much time and not enough space. Time and space, one of Brodsky’s favorite themes! Probably all poets are interested in etymology, I remember how once I shared with Brodsky the interpretation of the word, ‘opportunity’, which he became ecstatic over. In Chaucer’s times, this word was still a live metaphor, and it combined the sense of being propitious simultaneously in time and in space, i.e. the opportune circumstances of a ship approaching the port, with the wind behind one as one slides along the sea (ob portum veniens). The word is a kiss of time and space. – There is a point of view that Brodsky’s poetry is rational, reflexive, and overly cultured. Is that a shallow or deep view? – Well I don’t know; perhaps there is an element of psychological compensation. People who write well rarely express their thoughts well out loud. The British writer le Carré, was very surprised by how much better Brodsky articulated his thoughts in writing as against out loud.1 When I interviewed Brodsky for the ‘Voice of America’ in San Francisco in 1984, it was practically impossible to listen to it, there were lots of ah-ah-ah’s and eh-eh-eh’s, and so forth, somewhere I still even have the uncut tape with these ah’s and eh’s.

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To put it mildly, there was much less rationality in what Brodsky said out loud than in what was fi xed in a text. This is something I can relate to quite well, as I too am rather inarticulate and I write poetry primarily in order to finally fi x a thought or an image, otherwise it will run away from me and begin living its own live, eternally transforming itself into their mirror opposites, these aufgehoben werewolves. Regarding whether or not it is a shallow or deep view that Brodsky’s poetry is rational, reflexive, and overly cultured, it seems to me that these are all attempts to rationalize those qualities which emerged as a result of a total lack of pretentiousness and hypocrisy. As a poet, Brodsky’s conscience was clear, and he was always quite capable of standing up for his own personal classicism, despite the fierce reality and run-down grayness of Soviet life. Despite a whole galaxy of poets that I call ‘five minutes to Brodsky’, who have multiplied like weeds in the height of Brodsky’s glory, his voice remains a unique golden stalk that has grown ‘out of a seed between two millstones’, crippled by the rotting slabs of St. Petersburg cobblestone pavements. The latter being said with an Orphic look back and a certain challenge in the direction of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his ‘notorious enjambment’.2 However I must say that I render such memorial homage with certain reservations as, other than the so-called five minutes to Brodsky, there is still a whole echelon of many very different poets who may be even more rational, reflexive, and perhaps overly cultured, for which one would never dream of criticizing them. And thank God! – Why is the addressee of Brodsky’s love poems mute? – A good question! The addressee of love poems is always mute, hence his/her being the addressee. And thank God, all we need now are the addressee’s retorts. But seriously, the muse conquers the poet by being inaccessible and mute. The poet is like Tatiana Larina, the muse – Eugene Onegin, and all the other characters – the readers. For a male poet, the ideal muse is that portrayed by the poet Blok in his unknown lady whose vague image flickers in the poet’s subconscious, provoking his imagination with its amorphism. For a female poet, the ideal example of a muse is the Flying Dutch-

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man, as noted by Jung in his discussions on the topic of anima and animus. – Brodsky set a standard that was inaccessible for young poets. What did you learn from Brodsky as a poet? – I would say that he is more inaccessible for young poets now, but back then, when I knew him, he was quite accessible. I think it doesn’t really have to do with age so much as with the level of consciousness, both for the individual and society. The standards that he set corresponded to that era, and he was a man of his time. Now the times have changed, it’s a different century, a different epoch. Nowadays even the Russian word for ‘dissident’ can be considered an anachronism. I would even say that Brodsky was then more accessible for American students than he is now for students in Russia. I have been living and working in the Russian-speaking world (Ukraine and Russia) for over ten years, the average age of my co-workers has been 27 years old. Many of them have graduated from foreign language departments. Out of about 100 of them, perhaps only 2 or 3 have read Brodsky, and those would be in the older category, closer to 40. And not one of them is familiar with the expression ‘faithful Ruslan’, from a book by Vladimov. How all of this managed to evade them is beyond me. It’s just that Russia’s famous literariness is a big myth! I spent a year in Sakhalin, and there is a theatre there named after Chekhov, a museum dedicated to Chekhov, a mountain named after Chekhov, a village named after Chekhov, I lived at the end of Chekhov street, but one could not find a single book by Chekhov in any of the book stores there, it is impossible to find his book, Sakhalin Island, anywhere there. I beg your forgiveness, but only weirdoes and literary specialists continue to read here, though for me, ‘it makes no difference where to be / completely alone’. I have already come to terms with my being weird. There are no longer any readers in this post-Soviet Russia; well in any case, not any more than in the rest of the Western world. Is it really that important that short order cooks and chicken factory workers read Pushkin or Shakespeare? I for one don’t care if they do, let literature be elitist, let it be read only by those who can or want to read. Not much good ever came anyway from pseudo-education and egalitarianism.

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But to return to Brodsky, for me the most valuable thing I learned from him was when I took part in his seminars and observed his mental processes as he analyzed and parsed the poetic texts. Undoubtedly he made all of us really exert ourselves. He was an elite poet, the keeper of the flame bestowed upon him personally by the last representative of the Silver Age. – What kind of favorable conditions does emigration provide for a poet? We know enough about the unfavorable conditions. – I don’t know, it’s difficult for me to imagine what kind of favorable conditions can exist for a poet, it’s a kind of oxymoron. Do such conditions really exist? Emigration is an outdated concept these days, with people going abroad, to the West, to make money, these are the new ostrbeiters. – How did you find out about Brodsky’s death and what was your reaction? – Great grief and solitude. How did I find out and not find out about his death? I have been living in Ukraine since 1994, and up until 1997 I lived and worked, for the most part, on the territory of a former Soviet military base located somewhere in the middle of Ukraine. After work, the electricity would often go out in the whole city, and one ended up having to spend one’s evenings by candlelight. So as not to go crazy nor allow thoughts of Elabuga to seep through my consciousness, I eagerly reread Dumas. About Elabuga, I must admit that for me Tsvetaeva’s fate is a kind of measuring stick, thus in the most trying and difficult moments of my life I always fall back on remembering about Tsvetaeva, the finality of her despair and being beyond hope, and how she dealt with this. The end of January 1996 I went to Moscow for a visit, where I planned to go with my parents to celebrate St. Tatiana’s day (25 January) at the new chapel that was built at the Moscow State University, named after the saint and martyr Tatiana. The weather was just awful, there was wet and dirty snow on the road, and we barely made it to the church. There we donated some money for the chapel, and even received a certificate for this. The rest of the time was spent well, and on Sunday, before leaving for Kiev, I met with an old childhood girlfriend of mine at an Italian restaurant on the Arbat. As is often the case, during the meal, my friend and I ended up having a big argument about something, and after a lengthy pause I overheard some-

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thing being mentioned about Brodsky on the radio. Something about the announcer’s tone made me wary, but I didn’t really have time to give it another thought, when my friend asked me about the last time I had seen Brodsky. I tried to remember. Our last meeting was at the yearly international PEN club meeting in Washington, DC, in 1987. Russia was represented by such writers and poets as Aleksandr Kushner, Yunna Morits, and others. As I became distracted by my memories, I managed to miss hearing about the unfortunate news and returned to Ukraine totally ignorant of what had happened. It was only a few months later, when I belatedly read his obituary in The New Yorker, which I received late enough as it is, that I found out about his death. No one had even bothered to let me know about it, and I still cannot understand who was farther away from the world at that time, my friends and family or I? As the environment in which I was living was that of the post-Soviet world, where we would sit in the evenings, without light and water, where the death rate is higher than the birth rate, where the population is falling into a drunken stupor for lack of anything else to do. While my friends and family resided in a world blasted by a surplus of information with every step, it’s Babylon and Avalon, the fallen twin towers, which, thank God, Brodsky did not live to see the fall of. – ‘One can tell a lot about a person by the epithets that he chooses’, Brodsky wrote in an essay about Stephen Spender.3 Which Brodsky epithets allow one to understand Brodsky better? – Well in one of my sonnets to Brodsky, I call him ‘roaming’, a play on the word for the same in Russian, ‘brodyachii’, although I know that the etymology of his name has to do with the word ‘Brot’, which is German for bread or piece of bread. But I find the fake etymology somehow closer. In my poem, ‘Vers blud’, I speak of Brodsky as being both a wanderer and one’s daily bread. – Brodsky, I believe, considered a poet to be exceptional. Is the romantic view of his gift peculiar of Brodsky? – I think that Brodsky of course believed in divine providence, not so much in the romantic sense but in the metaphysical one. – Do you remember his lines: ‘Cup some of this stuff in the hollow of your hand, dear friend, / to better understand, how many versts to God…’ (‘A Blizzard in Massachusetts’, 1990). Was he closer to God than we are?

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– No, I don’t think so. The poet who wrote that faith is one-ended correspondence cannot be closer to God than other mortals. His addressing of God in his poetry is, to my mind, a way of primarily addressing some higher form of reason beyond the muse. Of course, it’s another thing that his Christmas poems are incredibly religious, but not in a theological so much as aesthetic sense. One should not fall victim to the intentional fallacy here. One should also note the role of unrequited love in his poetry, since Brodsky addressed God specifically in this unrequited context, thanks to which his religious poetry is especially resonant. Perhaps it is inappropriate to speak of Brodsky’s relationship to God in the context of Darwinism, evolution, and the Olympics, but nevertheless, Brodsky was to begin with a true maximalist, and he was more interested in the human potential and development of man than in what could be determined as the godly in man. I remember his reaction once when I was waxing a bit ironic about the Olympics, he quickly put me in my place and launched into a whole lecture on the significance of the Olympic games. – What would he rather have been like in comparison to how he was? – He probably would have liked to have been a handsome, tall, and mustached man, because he hated those types. – That’s very witty but not exactly correct: he loved Mark Strand, who is tall and handsome, and he also loved the mustached Giovanni Butafava. He dedicated poems to each of them. What did Brodsky dislike about his status as a star? – Well, as all stars, he did not react well to the pathos of insincere relations. Success is poison for a poet. – I know that you have a poem dedicated to Brodsky. Can I publish it with your interview? On what occasion was it written? – I have many poems dedicated to Brodsky, my favorite one is ‘Ode To an Untuned Lyre’. Unfortunately, the ode is in English, and no one has either the strength or the desire to translate it, though I would welcome holding a competition and giving the winner an award, if a winner could be found. With the end of the great Brodsky era and our great common loss, I have lost my muse, and my lyre has become untuned. You may confirm this for yourselves.

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Translated by Tatiana Retivov ODE TO AN UNTUNED LYRE For Joseph Brodsky, ex anima I’ve kept it high and dry, beyond repair, a broken driftwood carving on the shelf untuned and overwrought as is my self, covered with lacerations, wear and tear. My muse is gone, and with him goes my voice buried beneath the sinking city’s arcs, it climbs the mildewed walls along St. Mark’s, shrieking ‘hic sepultus …’ It has no choice but let its chords entwine with weeping vine and like the seven strings of a guitar emit, de profundis, a plaintive bar until it is less vocal than divine. The river Styx is where I’d like to be, swimming upstream against this you-ward pull toward some Orphic idyll in which you’ll metamorphose to be–Euridyce, while I, swift-footed Hermes by your side, would guide you firmly through the asphodels, bending your ear with winged words and spells, keep you from hearkening, the breathless bride. Ensconced in Orphic garments she would not repeat the warning trembling on her lips. Recite instead the catalogue of ships. See how Charon emerges from the grot … Or else, like some Alcestis on her throne, I would aspire to give up my lyre, untuned though it may be and now unstrung give up my heart, my restive name undone, no longer marking time to my own rhyme. Survivor’s guilt perhaps, I’d give you life. Return you to the manger where your wife and child remain bewildered and inclined

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to weave and then unweave what for a song has become history, legend and myth. Let the more loving one be me, Iosif. Here’s one more for the road, and then anon. 4

I (also) propose to include my poem, ‘Vers Blud’, in your collection of interviews, moreover it is relevant in the context of the interview, as it deals with the translation of Tsvetaeva’s poem, ‘Novogodnee’. VERS BLUD* Observing vers libre Is my passion. Two Hump backed trowels Are moving mountains. The consonance of plates Pas dans son assiette Is the pterodactyl Made strange, i.e. illuminated. It is also the forefather Of the bustrophedon plowing Strophes in the times of yore. From versts to versiFication lie milestones alone, Measured by land surveyors In trenches, one rhyme per hour. I too once sang the praises With goose quill Of a certain daily wandering Bread and guslar. Twisting Shakespeare’s tongue Into garlands of sonnets By which I meant to betroth So-and-so’s bald spot. Him being the King of Diamonds As well, having refused to

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Tend to my pastures, Keeping a certain distAnce. Nevertheless I milked The bustrophedon in the furrows, Storming the field with Dactyls, pterodactyls, Enjambment, caesura, Villanelles, sestinas, Odes, sonnets, Tempo rubato, etc…. Broadside I went, worshipping, Braiding tidbits of doggerel Into my chestnut hair, Ode to my ruin. My town, your town, We have swapped shores, You and I, my Hudson Hums in your elegies. Your Neva flows past, Swells inside of me With renal effluent. Salt absorbed by stilts. I avoided the enigma, Under Venetian skies, Of the wake, as well as its Greek Choir of trochaic widows. And not out of a surplus of Restiveness, no not. But out of the general shipwrecked Finality of the word,.)]?!, say epoch. St. Cassian’s day, 1980, Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am translating ‘Novogodnee’ Under your guidance.

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I stall, knowing full well That I too now face this Finding out, mourning, and There is no better way to say it… ‘Happy New Place! Happy New Year – World/Light – Edge/Realm – Haven! … Happy New Sound, Echo! Happy New Echo, Sound!’** * The title of the poem is a nonsensical play on words, referring to, on the one hand, ‘vers libre’, on the other, ‘verblud’, which in Russian means ‘camel’. Thus I have chosen to render it as ‘Vers Blud’ in English. ‘Blud’ in Russian means to stray and/or to be immoral. ** From Tsvetaeva’s poem ‘Novogodnee’ (‘New Year’s Greetings’), dedicated to Rilke, as translated by Brodsky.

Notes 1

2

3

4

John le Carre in an interview given to Valentina Polukhina, see this collection; Russian version in Iosif Brodsky, Trudy i dni, Eds. Lev Losev and Petr Vail (Moscow, NG, 1998), pp. 111 - 120. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Iosif Brodsky, Izbrannye stikhi’, Novy mir, 12, 1999. Joseph Brodsky, ‘In Memory of Stephen Spender’, Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason (NY: FS&G, 1995), pp. 459 - 484. ‘Ode to an Untuned Lyre’, by Tatiana Retivov, appeared in the Troubadour: Best of Rhyme – 2001, (Towers and Rushing LTD, 2001).

23 TAT I A N A S HC H E R BI N A Tatiana Georgievna Shcherbina is a poet, essayist, journalist, and philologist. Among some of her books of poetry are: Nol’ Nol’ (M., 1991), Parmi les alphabets, tr. Ch. Zeytounian-Belous (France, 1992), bilingual, L’ ame deroutee (France, 1995), poems written in French, Zhizn bez (M., 1997), Dialogi s angelom (M., 1999), Prozrachnyi mir (M., 2002), The Score of the Game (Brookline, MA, 2003), Lazurnaya skrizhal (M., 2003), Life Without, tr. Sasha Dugdale (UK, 2004), Zapas prochnosti, a novel (M., 2006), Ispoved shpiona, a story, essays (M., 2007). Participant in many international literary festivals and projects.

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A DEMIURGE,

A

P RO P H E T,

A

P HILOSOPHER

An Interview with Tatiana Shcherbina (10 March 2004, London) – How old were you when you first heard Brodsky’s name? – Sixteen. But first I read the poems and tried to find out who the author was. It was practically impossible to find anything out, as life in Petersburg was so distant and so abstract, in any case, for a person in my circumstances. – And when did you first read his poems? – It was 1971, I was finishing school. Someone gave me a dozen or so typewritten pages with the poems from 1961: it took ten years for the poems, ‘Pilgrims’, ‘A Christmas Romance’, and ‘Neither country nor graveyard’ to reach me. I was smitten. I knew poetry very well as I had been reading since early childhood and I knew a lot by heart. When taking entrance exams for admission to a special French school, everyone was asked to recite a poem. I started reciting ‘The Tale of the Tsar-Sultan’, after a while I was interrupted and told that this was enough, but I continued, objecting that a text needs to be read in its entirety. I approached poetry with trepidation, moreover, according to family legend, it took a while for me to begin speaking, and when I first spoke it was in verse. In high school I held poetry soirées and performances of poetry by Blok, Esenin. I spent a lot of time digging through the archives of the Literary Museums. I was not allowed to do a presentation of Pasternak in the assembly hall, but I was given two hours in class instead of sitting through a lesson in literature. I even read a transcript of the report, which circulated in samizdat about Pasternak being expelled from the Writers Union. My teacher of literature (ours was a unique and liberal school) made the following comment to me: ‘You are criticizing Khrushchev’s times; everyone criticizes the past, but what about the present…’. The present was Brodsky, and someone mentioned his trial. – Were you already writing poetry yourself at that time? – I was, but I was throwing it away. With teenage boldness I would repeat Chekhov’s phrase: ‘I write everything, except for poetry and denunciations’. At that time practically everyone wrote poetry; the oc-

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Tatiana Shcherbina, 15 September 2004, photo by A. Tiagny-Riadno

cupation seemed blasphemous to me and it seemed as though the era of written poetry was over. I knew the poetry of Evtushenko, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Rozhdestvensky, and others, but it all seemed to belong to a different genre, rather like variety performance songs. I chose to listen only to bards. The last poet of the written word for me was Pasternak. And then suddenly there was Brodsky; he was of the same substratum of poetry that existed from Pushkin to Pasternak and which one was hard put to find among contemporary poets. – By the way, you had read poems that were written even before 1961, ‘Pilgrims’ was written in 1958. You admitted in one of your essays that you had been ‘living with the paper Brodsky’ for 18 years.1 How did you manage to find his poems during those 18 years? – With cunning and guile. By 1980, Brodsky’s poems got circulated quickly and many began reading them and making typewritten copies. In 1979, when I had already graduated from MGU and was writing articles, it was as though a fountain burst within me, I suddenly began writing poetry without being prompted by anything, I wrote all the time, kilometers of verse, it became my natural language. I took to this flow of poetry: was possessed by it, I couldn’t understand what was going on and I couldn’t stop. I hid everything, but did not de-

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stroy it this time. I probably did show it to someone. After that, it all happened on its own, I was asked to read my poetry, (these were home readings, often in artists’ studios), and copies were made of it. I can’t say that I wanted to become a poet at that time. Nothing has really changed since then; what I want to accomplish today remains the same. It is just that poetry is a form of expression that seemed natural to me, but this doesn’t have so much to do with the poems themselves; it is the particularity of the text. Theoretically, poems are a pure form of message, without the tiresome plot or scholastic structures, or a kind of divine word in harmony with one’s own organism. Practically speaking, by far not all poetry is always the result of a creative act. For me what is most important is to tune into that dimension that one cannot enter physically, but which remains somewhat open. We don’t know anything, and writing makes it possible to find something out. That for me is what is most important. And so in 1980 I was asked to take part in a public reading. And at this very first public reading of mine I met the poet Evgeny Rein, since when we have remained in touch. At that time he was quite a modest person. He showed me Brodsky’s new poems as well as his letters. He kept teasing me about being so hooked on Brodsky, but still continued to keep me supplied. Later on I became friends with some Americans, Slavists, and they brought me books by Brodsky that had been published by Ardis. I made Xerox copies of his poems and gave them away. I would speak about Brodsky constantly, publicly and in general conversation. I would ‘defend’ him, as in literary circles he was often spoken of with deprecation, branded with terms such as ‘overly literary’ and ‘secondary’. I remember once arguing to the point of hoarseness with the neurosurgeon, Kantor, (‘he was a surgeon, and even a neuro’, Vysotsky had written a song about him), who insisted that Voznesensky was a great poet, whereas Brodsky was just a wagger of the tongue, not even a ‘professional’ poet. I would always react, in such situations, as if I were being personally offended and belittled. I quit speaking about Brodsky once he received the Nobel Prize. It’s interesting that the same people who used to say that ‘Brodsky could have become a poet if he had remained in Russia’, after finding out about his receiving the Prize, started claiming that he was a great poet.

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– Did Brodsky inspire any of your poetry? – Yes. I wanted to emulate Brodsky, not so much in terms of his distinctive intonation, nor in his manner of writing, as I am a totally different person, of a different age, a woman, and with different experience, but in terms of relationship to language, to rhyme, to the discipline of pitch. This I tried to emulate. The inspiration primarily came from Brodsky’s attitude to life. I consider him to be a demiurge, a prophet, a philosopher, and representative of Christ, totally fearless and, at the same time, responsible beyond reproach. Even Brodsky’s fear of God was not so much fear as service. And as far as demiurges go, there were just a few of them in the history of our era. – Do you mean to say that for you Brodsky was not a Jew but a Christian? – You know that every Christmas he would compose a poem and would urge everyone to celebrate Christ’s birthday as their own. What was this gift of Christ? Every person, including Christ, is at the same time human and divine. In principle, this is what should have permeated everyone, becoming the human norm. It is precisely how humans differ from everything else, from plants to animals, and not by virtue of thought, as the other also think and can even build homes for themselves. But they do not create, they do not change the world daily, they merely preserve what is. Whereas humans are meant to create, to follow in the Creator’s footsteps. But it is rare for someone to accept this gift and even more rare for him or her to exercise and develop it. Just as the Creator created in His own image, we too are able to create. But few use this ability. In Judaism there exists a code of laws, which has to be followed by every person, irregardless of whether or not they agree with or understand it. In comparison to the Creator, one is no one. In Christianity there are the same laws, but what is important, each person has to understand on his own, based on experience of life, truth, and how one should or should not act. This is why individualism emerged in Christianity, precisely in the civilization that we belong to. If every person is permeated with the Word: ‘That which is written must now be accomplished. / Amen. So let it come to pass’ (from Pasternak, translated by Christopher Barnes), then he or she becomes a part of creation with a sense of a personal mission, and the knowledge that one has language in order to converse with God.

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What Brodsky wrote is an act of mediation between man and God. It can be a subconscious process (admitting to being an atheist is most often due to an aversion for the church), but I think that Brodsky consciously chose this way. It was not ‘an idle gift, a chance gift’; he dedicated his whole life to and worked hard at it. Perhaps this is what led to his being branded a ‘rational’ poet. – Is this not the source then of his authority, not only in tone, but moral persuasiveness? – Well this brings us back to Judaism again. Some considered it to be the trait of a Jewish wise man, an interpreter of higher learning, an authority. Many found this characteristic irritating and considered it to be arrogant and authoritarian. In the democratic stage of our civilization equality is preferred. Everyone has his or her own point of view and an equal right to express it. But this is merely at the level of political correctness. Society does accept social inequality, as well as the right of a politician, bureaucrat, or billionaire to behave in an authoritarian way, whereas a poet ‘having a too high opinion of himself’ is considered irritating. I remember how in 1990, while I was in America in the company of Slavists, mention was made of Brodsky’s audacious (i.e., arrogant) behavior. ‘How dare he! If he were an oil magnate, then that would be one thing, but he is just a poet, albeit a Nobel Laureate’. I always found Brodsky’s tone quite natural; if it sounded as if he were lecturing, then perhaps one should have taken heed of him. – I know that you visited Brodsky’s parents. Could you please tell about these visits, what you remember of them. Who introduced you to them? – Rein. I would go Petersburg practically every year, and I asked him for their telephone number, or else he suggested I visit them, I don’t remember it exactly, but I visited them whenever I went to Petersburg. They immediately made me feel welcome, showed me his room and some of the things he had left behind, and we would sit and have lunch… He looked a lot like his father. Looking at his parents I felt as though I as seeing him, as I had never seen him in real life, only in photographs. It was Rein who also gave me a photograph of Brodsky in exile; it still hangs on the wall of my home. Naturally, I asked them about Joseph. They wrote to him and spoke with him over the

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phone. I continued visiting them until they died, first his mother; then I visited one more time, when his father was alone. – Tell about how you once met Brodsky’s double in Moscow. – I was on my way home one day on the trolleybus. Some man keeps bugging me, I move away without looking at him. I get off at my usual stop, he follows me and says: ‘Miss, can I get to know you?’ Then I took a look at him and realized that it was Brodsky. In any case that is exactly how I imagined he would look, based on his photographs. I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him home. He was taken aback by such a turn of events. My then husband, the poet Berdnikov, who had met Brodsky, was home. I wanted to show him this man, so that he could appreciate the similarity (maybe a secret brother or twin?). I rang my door. The guy asked: ‘Whose door are you ringing?’ – ‘My husband’s’. He grew very alarmed and wanted to run away. But I restrained him. My husband opens the door and nearly faints: ‘Brodsky’ (this was in 1980). We enter the apartment, and I ask him about himself, who and what he was. It turns out he has no connection to Brodsky whatsoever and has never even heard of him; he is in the construction supplies business. Confused, he looks at our walls and ceiling and comment: ‘They are in need of repairs’. ‘I can’t deal with it’, I respond, ‘it will have to do as is’. He leaves. The next day the ceiling caves in, and I ended up obliged to deal with the repairs. – Did you ever expect to meet him? – Yes. I once had this dream, a rare kind of dream which seemed real on wakening and was hard to forget. I dreamt that I arrived somewhere unfamiliar, a rural place, and there were small houses with red tiles, windmills, green grass. And then I met Brodsky there. There was kind of happiness that can only be experienced in dreams. I immediately call Rein and tell him about this dream in detail, about how I met Brodsky. And he says: ‘You are nuts. Don’t you realize that you will never ever be able to meet him, because he will not be allowed to enter the Soviet Union, and you will not be allowed to leave here. And the landscape that you described is Holland. There are windmills only in Holland’. Of course, now I know that it is not only in Holland. It is precisely there in Holland that I first met Brodsky. – It was at the International Poetry festival in Rotterdam in 1989. Could you please tell about this first and last meeting you had with

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Joseph. – It was my first trip to the West. I was invited by the organizers of the festival, the Dutch side. But it wasn’t easy; the Dutch Embassy had to get involved, as I was not being allowed out. Akhmadulina, Kushner, Rein, Parshchikov, Aygi, and I were invited. This was during perestroika, and I was popular, I gave readings practically every day and gave interviews to Western correspondents. Well, finally they let me go. I knew that Brodsky would be there, and this excited me most. When we arrived, Rein told me that he would not introduce me to Brodsky, unless I fulfilled certain conditions, and that without him I would not stand a chance of meeting Brodsky. It’s worth saying that by then we had been friends for 9 years. I was upset and we argued. I ended up meeting Brodsky on my own. I just bumped into him as we were walking toward one another. Of course, I recognized him, and I think he probably recognized me. We sat down on a sofa and began to talk; the Dutch TV station, RTL, filmed our meeting. They gave me the videocassette with their report, and then someone stole it from my home. – What did you speak about? Did he know about your meeting his parents? – Yes, he did. And he knew my poetry. Yury Kublanovsky once told me that when he visited Brodsky in New York he saw some of my samizdat books on Brodsky’s desk. I don’t remember very well what we talked about; I was in a state of shock during the meeting. We sat on the sofa and talked all morning, then he said: ‘Let’s go have lunch’. We went and had lunch together, and practically spent the entire time that he was in Rotterdam together. – He was there for a day and night. – Yes, and we spent that entire time together. It is difficult for me to describe this meeting. Had I met Christ, it might have left a similar impression on me, as it wasn’t as if I had merely met someone whom I respected and thought highly of; it was practically unreal (though I finally got used to the idea that only a time machine could have brought us together in the same space). I remember the scene when they had served us some kind of stewed meat with boiled carrots, a taste of local cuisine for lunch. I tried to express my raptures, but he categorically rejected any further discussion of this topic. He spoke

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about Auden, Frost, about how he had translated them. I felt no arrogance on his part, though, being my idol, he could have flaunted everything he had. – Was there anything that disappointed you in Brodsky? – By morning, at the end of our meeting, he asked me that same very question. I said: ‘No’. No. Though he was a bit impolite with the rest of the Russian poets. That evening when we went to the hotel, I sat at the Russian table, whereas he sat at the American one. Later he got up and invited me to join him at the American table, but only me. The other poets might have taken offence, though, as I am sure you realize, I did not hesitate for one minute. I got up and followed him. With some of those present, good relations ended in Rotterdam. – And some were offended. Aygi refused to talk to me about Brodsky in the fall of that year when I was collecting interviews for the first volume, ’Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries’. – Afterwards we walked together with Brodsky and Derek Walcott. Derek’s girlfriend, Zigrit, took a lot of photographs of us. – That was when Derek Walcott translated your poem, ‘About Limits’. All the versions of his translation we published two years ago.2 Was this done through Joseph’s initiative or help, or with your help, as Derek knows French? – I remember that there were booklets published for every participant of the festival, with their poems in Russian, English, and Dutch. Jim Kates translated my poems into English, including ‘About Limits’. The initiative to get this poem translated was Derek’s, but he does not know Russian. I think Brodsky said that it had been badly translated into English, and so Derek translated it as suggested by Brodsky. It didn’t really matter. I was glad and grateful for the time I had spent with him. Afterwards, however, I did not follow up on our meeting when I went to the States. – Why not? Had once been enough or were you afraid of being disappointed? – It might have been out of place. I did not want to leave the realm of the ideal, otherwise he would have had to help me, the way he helped all the other poets that came from Russia. I did not want this at all. Maybe out of pride, I didn’t want to be the ‘younger one’. And of course I had a very strong prisoner complex, having spent all my

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life incarcerated in the USSR, those who managed to escape it, the émigrés, behaved as mentors toward the visitors to the West at that time, whereas the local population would treat them as novelty toys called the ‘Gorby generation’. – Perhaps you were afraid that something more personal would occur? – Well, no, as by the end of our meeting in Rotterdam, it had come to that, and it scared me. First of all, I knew that he had a weak heart, he did not sleep all night, chain-smoking and drinking BloodyMary’s. I was afraid that his heart would not able to take it. Secondly, I was not ready for any relations with the person, Brodsky, as I was used to relating with his texts. It’s like relating with a language; not everything is possible. – Did he seem to be a cold person or on the contrary, passionate and warm? – He seemed to me to be emotional, lively, independent, strong, though I had met him when he was already very sick. – In 1989 he was still feeling quite well, he had had his second heart operation in December 1985. I know how emotional he was about any situation. How do you explain the contrast between his character and the coldness of his poetry? – His poetry is not cold, that is the result of one’s perception of the ontological knowledge with which it is permeated. This is not something expected to be found in poetry, as ‘poetry should be somewhat silly’. In any case, as far as the Russian Pushkin tradition is concerned. Brodsky wrote in formulas, lines from his poems and essays could be quoted as proverbs. Nowadays, the younger generation is immune to his messages. – I have a totally different impression; we are currently preparing an anthology of Russian women’s poetry, which includes poets aged from 20 to 80 years of age. And I see how among the younger poets, images, rhymes, expressions, and direct quotes from Brodsky are scattered as if his lexicon were already in their blood. – Yes, but they think they were born with it, as with their native tongue. – How did you manage not to get influenced by Brodsky, considering how long ago you first read him and how much you love his poetry?

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– I hope that I have managed to get influenced by him; in any case that is precisely what I aspire to develop in this now totally different world. – Do you mean to say that he influenced your worldview rather than your poetics or intonation? – Well, look, I am a totally different person, and this is a different world. How can it be similar? But in essence, what moved Brodsky is what moves me as well, that is why he means so much for me. An example of that is a comment Brodsky made that totally changed my relationship to the future. In 1989 it seems as though the USSR was headed toward a military coup, with a Soviet restoration. I asked Brodsky, in that case what should we do? He said to me: ‘If that happens and when it happens, that is when you should think about what to do; so far nothing has happened. And everything will be different from what you imagine ahead of time’. Worry about the future is something that everyone experiences (‘what will happen if’), strategic formulations based on something that doesn’t yet exist. Ever since Brodsky answered that question of mine, I no longer have had any phantom worries or anxiety. He said it in such a way as to make me realize, on my very own, how funny it was: the putsch of 1991 was a three-day event; I was in Germany at the time; the restoration began to occur much later and without any tanks; in the US, despite all the different reports being prepared about all kinds of threats, 9/11 caught everyone off guard. This is important metaphysically as well. If you anticipate your enemy from the right, he will arrive from the left! In general, do not project, but concerned yourself with the present. – The spirit of competition, which Brodsky himself admitted, never seemed to leave him throughout his entire life. Do you feel he wanted to write better than Mandelstam, better than Pushkin, better than Tsvetaeva? Or did he need to compete with anyone? – Better? Every great poet has poems that no one else could write any better. Pushkin’s ‘Demons’, Khodasevich’s ‘Mirror’, Mandelstam’s ‘Power is repulsive as are the barber’s fingers…’, and the poems from Doctor Zhivago… Brodsky had more of these kinds of poems than most other classics. When it comes to Russian poetry (speaking of competition), I would assign him the first place. Not Pushkin, but

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Brodsky, because Pushkin was the first to begin speaking in Russian as if it were his native tongue; before that the language was merely being formulated by the likes of Trediakovsky, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky. Pushkin was a revelation for Russia, a brilliant interpreter: the French language (spirit, thought, all that is expressed through language) was the native tongue of the Russian nobility, and Pushkin managed to find the appropriate Russian language niche for the French spirit, adapting it. Some of his poems are almost translations of lesser-known French poets. And indeed he brought into this dense, bogged down, patriarchal Russia some light, high society French charm and Cartesianism. Pushkin discovered a new Russia, in which not only does the German Catherine correspond with Voltaire, but which has its own Childe Harold – Onegin, its own folk tales, epics, its own common man, a Russia where Heine and Goethe were understood… For Russia Pushkin was everything, for other cultures he is not that interesting. Though Russia has completely absorbed Pushkin, when we continue repeating that ‘Pushkin is our all’, we continue admitting that we are on the threshold of the 19th century, in anticipation of an integrated Russia and Europe. Brodsky has gone much farther; he summed up the 20th century, the history of Christianity, the Roman Empire; he foretold the 21st century, through language that combined the Empire style and Barbarism, Barbarism as Neoclassicism and the Empire style as Neobarbarism. He drew a line connecting the hot spots of history: the Roman Empire with the Soviet; the Barbarians that began to build Christian civilization and ‘the delusion of multitudes’, which reduces the value of our unique accomplishments. He foretold ‘a new ice age, the ice age of slavery’. Brodsky inserted the personal into the social, and the social into the general draft of creation. In other words, Brodsky sent the Russian language (since he wrote in it) into the cosmos, space, where there was an additional dimension; he tried to place the author (not only himself, but whoever writes) into the position of an all-seeing orb; he developed an optics, launching himself like a telescope into orbit, he constructed a time-machine; in short, it was not just a matter of enriching Russian culture through some other regional culture; he already lived in the time of globalization, in the period of history being compressed in a secluded corner. – But all of this was just as important for the English metaphysical po-

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ets of the 17th century, and one could ‘accuse’ Brodsky of transposing their poetics into the Russian language. Other than Donne, he also introduced much from Auden and Frost into Russian poetry, their detachment and rationalism. – I can’t really comment, as I know these poets only in translation. But I think that Brodsky merged them: social models with metaphysics, creation with his own feelings. Yes, this English current that you mention does exist in Brodsky, but that’s just part of it. There are other things which he has formulated and which continue being prophetic. – For example? – There are many examples, here are some random ones: ‘A tyrant’s no longer a bugaboo / but a plain mediocrity’, ‘New times! Lamentable, sorry times! / Goods in shop windows, sporting nicknames…’ and mankind entering the stage of ‘… inanimate sort of slave; / on the whole, for safe / anonymity’ (‘Fin de siecle’), ‘the world fading into darkness, where, when doing evil, we still knew to whom’, ‘Although the victory of caviar over the fish is not yet a sin, / angels aren’t mosquitoes; there won’t be enough of them for all’. – Brodsky considered Tsvetaeva to be the greatest thing that happened to Russian poetry. Do you share such a high assessment? – Not much higher than his assessment of Akhmatova: ‘to you thanks for finding the gift of speech in this deaf-mute universe’. About himself, Brodsky is often ironic and off-handed in his poems, whereas when he writes about those poets that played an important part in his fate, he is exaggeratedly enthusiastic. Tsvetaeva had such enormous power of folly, the folly of a scapegrace who loves the world so fiercely, that the world runs in horror from such pressure, ‘goes out for cigarettes and leaves forever’. Brodsky had written: ‘I don’t like people’. But he is the opposite of Tsvetaeva; he too is a scapegrace who has paid tribute to an all-consuming passion, but while Tsvetaeva is a classical element, and her writing is the sound of this element, so she is totally without limit, Brodsky was not so free with himself: Mendeleev can dream of the periodic table, but it cannot be chaotic; its essence lies in the discovery of regularity. Folly does have a certain beauty, the tension is so powerful that everything melts, but to find system in the periodic table and to discover America is incomparably more interesting.

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– When you say without limit, do you mean linguistic ones as well? – Yes, linguistic ones as well. Folly is freeing. Perhaps Brodsky was even somewhat envious of this freedom, but I don’t have any need for this kind of freedom; in fact I am probably more envious of Brodsky for his uninterrupted and hard gaze, the type of gaze that dreams up formulas. The Gospel is written in formulas, moreover there are formulas that are impossible to change when they are translated into contemporary Russian. Thus it is clear that they are messages of the Divine. In the texts of the New Testament, there is that which is ascribed by people out of their own consideration, their own understanding, so that it would be more comprehensible. In Brodsky (as well as in certain other poets) it can be easily discerned, whether it is of himself or a Part of Speech. – You speak French and know contemporary French poetry well. You have even written poetry in French. How do Brodsky’s poems sound in French translation? – Most of the translations in the book were done by Veronique Schilz, and these are, in my view, a failure, whereas the translations done by Aucouturier are very good, quite adequate, but he did not translate much of Brodsky. In fact, Brodsky was not very well perceived in France, I spoke with many different people, including many poets, and they would shrug: ‘What did he get the Nobel Prize for?’ This has to do with French perception. First, these days rhymed poetry is not taken seriously; everyone writes in free verse, and the poets believe this to be the only possible form. Though not exactly a form, but a rejection of any kind of limitation. A poem, a short story, a novel, a journal article or even a constitution are all a bunch of limitations. In life, a person who does not structure himself, who doesn’t choose, focus, or set limits or bans for himself, is a nonentity. Perhaps that is why contemporary French and not just French poetry has lost its readers, it has declared itself to be a reduced phenomenon, refusing to make an effort. – Joseph repaid them in kind; being a Francophobe, yet he liked neither France nor French poetry. – Whereas I am a Francophile. What a mismatch! – The idea of self-esteem and self-development of language was already expressed by Brodsky back in 1963. He practically reiterated

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it in every essay. Why did Brodsky place language at the very center of his creation? Is it not because he lacked a philological education? Or is this the tendency of any poet? Or did he literally believe that ‘In the beginning was the Word?’ – In the beginning was the Word. And since we have no other instrument with which to formulate something, as well as communicate with one another, we first name the reality, and only then discern the item with one’s eye. First we formulate the idea of flying, and then build the airplane. – Even when we fall in love, until we have admitted it to oneself or to the other, we can still be in doubt, right? – Yes, but even then it may not mean anything, since ‘I love you’ are not our words, they are a public declartion. But if one were to find one’s own words… the finding of one’s own words is like living one’s own life. If one only uses clichés, then one isn’t living one’s own life, but merely dissolving oneself in the crowd. – Still, why did Joseph place language at the center of his creation? – Because that is the most important thing. – Then shouldn’t that be the most important thing for any poet? – Of course, for any poet, writer, or philosopher. – But we don’t find such a center in just any poet. – Yes, of course. There are poets who speak of themselves in Pushkin’s language or even Brodsky’s, but they are borrowing language in order to share their feelings. And these feelings, as a rule, are also evoked, by novels, films, stories told by friends. As Tsvetaeva once formulated, ‘The parity of soul and talent equals a poet’. If I understand her correctly, the soul should be one’s own and not superimposed. And language, it is a gift or talent. But talent is not a non-recurring gift (there have been many talented young men and women!), it acquires value only once it is accepted. In other words, Tsvetaeva singled out two equally great centers, and not just one. – Let’s continue the quote: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. And here I would like to return to a theme already mentioned by you, whether or not Brodsky was a Christian. He himself has stated that he is a bad Russian, a bad Jew, a bad American, a bad Christian, but a good poet. The way I understand it, if he was not a Christian’, then he would

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not have said,’‘I am a bad Christian’. In my case, I cannot say that I am a bad Muslim, as I am not at all Muslim. On the other hand, practicing Christians don’t consider him a Christian, and practicing Jews don’t consider him a practicing Jew. Joseph is quoted as saying about himself: ‘I am probably Christian, but not in the sense of being either Catholic or Orthodox. I am a Christian because I am not a barbarian’. Based on his poetry and essays, do you consider Brodsky to be a Christian? – Yes. He commemorated every Christmas with a poem. Do you remember how he said in one of his interviews: ‘In the end, what is Christmas? It is the birthday of God in Man. And it is just as natural for man to celebrate it as his own birthday’.3 Since this is the basis of our civilization. I personally do not go to church, do not revere the Apostles, Peter and Paul, do not choose among churches. I interpret this as being the human need for a leader, to have a house to go to, but the essence is not in there. – Were you baptized? – Yes, as a child, by my nanny, and, of course, against my parents’ will. I was told about it, whereas I have baptized myself in the river Jordan, where Christ was baptized or, to be more exact, underwent his initiation. And on Golgotha I had a cross-consecrated. I know the Gospel very well; I even once transcribed it by hand, the first time that I read it. It lives in me. Whenever I am scared or lonely (which is one and the same thing), I always turn to it. Right away I don’t feel lonely, but this, of course, is an anomaly, as in one’s normal condition one is always wrapped in warmth, connectedness, and participation. Christ helps, but He too is in need of help. That is how I feel it to be. – So in other words, from your point of view, you recognize in Brodsky’s poetry, prose, and interviews that which you believe in yourself? – Yes, it is our civilization. All of European civilization is based on what Christ brought, and that is how it differs from the rest of the world. It doesn’t really matter whether or not a person believes; he is still a Christian. From my point of view, Brodsky is a kind of apostle of Christianity. There was another poet, Fernando Pessoa, a Christian Portuguese poet. – Brodsky said that he is ‘with his sense of the divine closer to God than any of the orthodox’. Did you hear from his parents about the

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fact that when his mother, Maria Moiseevna, was evacuated with the young Joseph to Cherepovets, the woman who looked after him at one time baptized him without Maria Moiseevna’s consent? – No. – Maria Moiseevna told this to Natalya Grudinina. I am looking for confirmation of the story from others, but have not yet succeeded. How do you interpret Brodsky’s refusal to return to Russia or even visit his homeland at the end of his life? – For those of us living in Russia, it seemed as though something had changed in Russia then, but from outside, Brodsky would have seen something else. What would he have done? Given advice as to how to restore Russia? Greeted his enthusiastic admirers? Appeared before the Writers Union, of which he had never been a member? Perhaps he could not find the appropriate genre of a return. – Do you remember how Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, in a specially leased train, accompanied by BBC cameramen filming his every meeting with the people from Vladivostok to Moscow? As one journalist noted sarcastically: ‘Only the sun and Solzhenitsyn arrive in Russia from the East’. – Russia is the main theme of Solzhenitsyn’s life, so how could he not return? Whereas Russia was merely one of Brodsky’s themes. – By the way, some, including Solzhenitsyn, have accused Brodsky of losing his ‘Russianness’. When I asked him in August of 1995 at a press conference in Helsinki, whether or not he had lost his Russianness, he answered that any Russianness that one could lose is not worth a pin.4 – Is the national issue so important? Language is national, of course; it cannot be translated without loss. Russianness is merely the Russian language, plus a certain relationship toward freedom. ‘Still, freedom, whose daughter is literature, has not been left behind’. Frenchness is highly diversified, in design, aroma, cheese, and wine. So is Englishness. However in the corporeal world, Russianness has a limited representation. – Solzhenitsyn asserts that in Brodsky’s poetry ‘there is no pain’, no warmth. That’s the way the great writer sees the great poet. – Well, first of all, Solzhenitsyn is mainly a historian. Plus a prophet, a social philosopher. But his ‘pain’ is anybody’s pain, who sees the

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ramshackle rooftops, the alcoholic boondocks, power for the sake of power, the endless feudalism. He wrote a gigantic work about the gulags, and his point of view about Brodsky and other things, well it’s just that, a point of view. – How will history judge the fact that the Russian government did not apologize to Brodsky for the unjust trial and exile, for all the persecution? Gorbachev could have done that; they met in the White House, when Brodsky was the U. S. Poet Laureate. – I think that for Brodsky it was not so important, because for him Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Eltsyn, Putin – if he had lived long enough – and Andropov are difficult to tell apart (he only noticed Havel, because he is a writer with whom he could talk and to whom he wrote an open letter saying everything he wanted to say about the politics of the previous century). But what concerns Russia proper, that is a different story: it’s not really because they didn’t apologize to Brodsky; but they didn’t apologize to the physically and morally destroyed people, as currently Stalin is considered an outstanding leader, and the Soviet period, a legitimate period of Russian history. No Nuremberg trial took place, and the corpse in Red Square is still there. He was and remains the symbol of Russia. If some kind of cleansing had occurred, then there would have been a special apology issued to Brodsky. But since it did not occur, we have what we have today. – Brodsky himself thought that he had been punished with reason: he did not recognize the regime and he was arrested, sent into exile, etc. He refused to consider himself a victim or a martyr. Yet those are precisely the images being imposed upon him by his critics. What is going on here? – Personally I think that he was very lucky. It seems as though Brezhnev (or was it Khrushchev) was a good man, as Brodsky could have rotted in prison, been mutilated, but, instead, was released alive, healthy, and with his wits about him. – Well, calling him healthy is a bit of an exaggeration: his first heart attack took place in prison on the second day of his arrest, 14 February 1964, and on 18 February he was transferred to the psychiatric clinic on embankment Pryazhka and placed in the violent ward, where he spent three weeks. There he was given shots and maimed, though he

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did not lose his mind; instead he wrote ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’. – I meant, primarily, his mental health, he continued to write and paid no attention to the villains, i.e. he did not accept them as being great and terrible, nor as having authority over him, and did not allow himself to be diminished. His trial and exile drew the attention of the whole Western world, ‘It sealed our redhead’s fate’, as Akhmatova said. Brodsky recognized only one single tormentor – M. B. (Marina Basmanova), and subjected himself to his superior – Christ. – What a fate: a Jewish boy, barely educated, 8th grade dropout, and in possession of such a gift, such a feeling of freedom and a heightened perception of everything above and beyond. It’s enough to remember his ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’, here his thought and gaze move in a circle and then in a vertical direction: ‘And you did soar past God, and then drop back’. Where does he get this longing for the unlimited? I see here a connection with Dante. Remember, you once shared with me your interesting approach to the theme of Brodsky and Dante. Brodsky himself regretted that he had not written his own ‘Divine Comedy’, whereas you commented that he had, but in the form of frescoes. Which of his frescoes stand out the most for you? – For me it is his ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’, ‘Sitting in the Shade’, ‘Lines on the Winter Campaign of 1980’, ‘I entered the cage instead of a wild beast’. No, I don’t know where to stop. Well concerning the contemporary Dante, the same kind of metamorphosis took place with time. Time, and this is a scientific fact, accelerates; what previously took a million years later took ten thousand years. Until recently, the unit of measure was a century, and now each decade is a different world. Moreover, it used to be that creation was perceived primarily as history, a continuous topic, with a beginning and an end. Today’s world is not monolithic (few will finish reading War and Peace or The Forsythe Saga), events are discrete, our thinking and perception is fragmented, we do not have Olympic gods behind every move of the head. Rather, the gods are there, but they are different and are not always noticed (only Allah is cast in a heroic mode; our concepts of good and evil have gotten so mixed up that the only subject that draws a response is that of Apocalypse. Can one say that Brodsky described the creation of the world? Yes, but as frescoes. For him the concept of empire as a social organism is important; the project

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of humankind as such; the future: ‘After us, not the deluge, where a paddle can help / but the delusion of multitudes’. Where was the horror before? In the emptiness, in the nuclear winter that will annihilate everything. Whereas he always maintained that emptiness is not the most frightening thing; worse is the degradation which we are witnessing today, about which he had written a long time ago. – That which you are depicting can be called something else; these are universal themes that concern many great poets. Dante arranged them into some kind of system. Can one find such a system in Brodsky? – His system is another update of the Gospel with the addition of the modern world. You’ve heard about how Newton, for example, spent his whole life deciphering the Torah, whereas physics for him was incidental? The results of his deciphering have been published, and according to Newton, the end of the world will occur in 2020. The deciphering of the Torah was his concept of creation. Returning to Brodsky and Dante, I consider Brodsky a messenger from Christ. His poetry and essays are recommendations to those living in our civilization. These recommendations were missing, at least concerning how to reach reality through the multiple layers of lies that now cover humanity, and they should be heeded. I am not a scholar to speak about them in great detail. – It is interesting that Brodsky himself said something similar on 23 August 1995 in Helsinki at Natasha Bashmakova’s, an evening that Viktor Krivulin and I invited Brodsky to. Addressing the Russians, he said: ‘Listen to an old wise Jew’. – It seems to me that he remains totally unrecognized as a prophet, neither understood nor apprehended. – As you know, Brodsky valued aesthetics more than ethics and appreciated women’s beauty. In order for him to appreciate a woman, she had to be either beautiful or an aristocrat. Do you consider this to have been a weakness on his part or a sign of strength? – I don’t know about the beauties; it is not significantly expressed in his poetry. – What do you mean, not expressed? In his essays about Venice, ‘Watermark’, there are entire treatises about beauty: ‘That explains the eye’s appetite for beauty, as well as beauty’s own existence. For beauty

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is solace, since beauty is safe. It doesn’t threaten you with murder or make you sick. A statue of Apollo doesn’t bite, nor will Carpaccio’s poodle. When the eye fails to find beauty – alias solace – it commands the body to create it…’. Including the last chapter, which is also about beauty:’ ‘Let me reiterate: Water equals time and provides beauty with its double… The tear is proof of that. Because we go and beauty stays… Or else it is the result of subtracting the greater from the lesser: beauty from man. The same goes for love, because one’s love, too, is greater than oneself’.5 Admit it, if you weren’t so goodlooking, would he have led you off by the hand? – I don’t know. But ethics and aesthetics are inter-connected. – I agree with you there, and if Brodsky sometimes stressed aesthetics, it was to draw our attention to the significance of both. It is as though we must correspond with the subject that we are speaking about. Can one achieve this in Brodsky’s case? Since after his death even some of his closest friends dared to sound disparaging in their reminiscences of Brodsky. – I can’t speak for others; perhaps they did not want to correspond. Maybe for them he is someone from their crowd; he rose, whereas they remained behind. Luckily I am not burdened with such memories, it’s as if we had eaten a pound of salt together, which is why I would rather correspond with the subject. – What was your reaction when you heard of Brodsky’s death? – I head about it the very same day, I can’t remember from whom. It was not unexpected for me. His last poems spoke about it; they upset me very much and I did not like them. There was this sense that life was leaving, leaving, leaving… But when I remember hearing about his death, I feel as though I was there. I see it not in the words that someone said, but as a picture, a scene. – I will tell you how it really was, as in Russia they write that he died in his sleep. On 27 January, around midnight, after his guests left, Brodsky went upstairs to work in his study. As often happened, he would fall asleep in his study. As he finished work, he got up from the table, took a step toward the door and lost consciousness. At that moment, his cat, Mississippi, on Morton Street started meowing and rushing about the apartment. The next morning, around 9 : 00 am, Maria could not open the door when she went to get him for the

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phone. He was lying on the floor in his glasses, smiling. Have you heard this version? – Yes. – You wrote two essays about him, one while he was still alive, ‘Brodsky. Liquid crystals’ (1989), and the other one shortly after he died, ‘From nowhere with love’, (May 1996).6 Were they written on demand or because you missed him? – I wanted to speak about him, but in general I prefer speaking on paper than with people. And when it comes to Brodsky, probably no one has said anything about him more interesting than his own texts. – And how did you come about writing this limerick? Once, out of stupid habit, Joseph Brodsky began composing poetry, oh did he. And so he wrote again, how brilliantly, hot damn! That’s how he always wrote, did Joseph Brodsky!

– I read the English limericks translated by Grisha Kruzhkov, and for some reason they made such an impression on me, that I immediately began writing limericks, not about places but about poets: about Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Esenin, Sapgir, and Brodsky. This was in 1980. – You used the word ‘damn’ because it was part of Brodsky’s lexicon?7 – It’s part of my lexicon as well. – Would you say that you still have an internal need to read Brodsky’s poetry? – Of course, I read him and a lot surfaces in my memory. Even had I never met him, nothing would have changed because of it. – What would you say is the most important quality of his poetry? – The ability to zoom in. He saw the picture as a whole, which for a poet is a rare quality, but he saw every single detail, a million details, as he described a world of complex subordination and composition. The world had never dealt with so many details. Brodsky experienced all time in the present, the time of Tiberius, of the Ming dynasty. He found the 21st century, it seems, abominable; clearly he

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did not want to live in it. That’s what happened. ‘The century will soon be over, but sooner it will be me’. – Shortly after your meeting with Brodsky in Rotterdam you wrote a poem dedicated to him. I would like to end our discussion by quoting it. J. B. You can threaten direct the Betacam, I won’t give birth nor give in without love. Having brewed some Earl Grey I attack a ham from Ardenne, like a vulture, not being a bird of prey. I wait and delay. Delaying for eighteen years, finally and suddenly, though no octopus, I extend all my eighteen hands, one organ per year, which grew from waiting, my equipment,

like that of Sony and Toyota – doesn’t lag behind the Japanese in the mediocrity of embraces. But now, the equipment is behind doors, and the greatest of all seven wonders allows us to kiss. How terribly apropos: it is possible to go further than the heart can hold, two hundreds beats per minute in one bed can incinerate a red pepper into two hundred grams. Go away, go away – I say to myself, as I said to others, coming out dry from an attack, I exit into another world. It’s called – clutter, theft, blackmail, no bounds on blood, and it’s a lie that life is more prescient than love. 1989 Translated by Tatiana Retivov

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

Tatiana Shcherbina, ‘Brodskii. Zhidkie kristaly’, Lazurnaya skrizhal (M.: 2003), p. 323. Russian Women Poets, Modern Poetry in Translation, no 20, edited by Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort (London, 2002), p. 200 - 208. Iosif Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, compiled by V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 598. Ibid, p. 732. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (NY: FS&G, 1992), pp. 107, 135. Tatiana Shcherbina, ‘Brodskii. Zhidkie kristaly’, Lazurnaya skrizhal (M.: 2003). Translator’s note: the word ‘damn’ was chosen over then literal translation of the Russian word for ‘whore’, as being the more suitable and frequently used expletive in English.

24 D A S H A B A S M A N O VA Dasha Basmanova was born in 1987. She is studying Theory and History at the Academy of the Arts in St. Petersburg.

A UN IQU E SE NSE OF I N T E R NA L F R E E D OM A ND SELF-ESTEEM An Interview with Dasha Basmanova (January 2008) – Let’s begin this dialogue with you. What are your earliest memories about the world as well as specific people? – Golden leaves and acorns on the asphalt, ducks in the canal, my mother, sister, and I are returning from kindergarten. One of the earliest memories of people: MB’s garret, dark-red easels; MB is giving me an art lesson and is getting irritated because all I want to paint with is crimson paint, my favorite back then. I am rinsing the paintbrush, because paintbrushes must be kept clean, and I again choose crimson to paint with. There was a long corridor and a very small window, much higher than usual (maybe it had to do with my own height). Out of the window all one can see are stupid rooftops. – Have people often said about you: ‘What a beautiful girl?’ – Lately yes. – Have you been told how you look like both your paternal grandparents? – Periodically, but at great intervals. – Describe your favorite day. – My first day in London. I dreamt about London, and I never thought that it would be possible to actually come here; in any case not soon. In my dreams, London was Shakespeare, The Globe Theatre, and Tower Bridge. – What do you like to do most?

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– Socialize, travel. These days, though, I am not getting enough sleep, so happiness is a good night’s sleep. – Name a couple of conditions that could make your life better somehow. – Well it would be something out of my fantasies. Dreams from childhood: to be a ballerina, but I was too fat; later, to work for Vogue magazine. Recently I was in Germany, and I liked it there so much that I would be ready to move there right away. Runs in my blood? I know it sounds crazy, but I feel as though I was happy there. – Have you ever felt self-pity? – No. Hardly ever. – If you could change or forget something you once did and that you are embarrassed about, what would it be? – In the sixth grade I didn’t let someone copy from my exam book in maths. – What quality would you like to possess? – Cheerfulness. – As an up-and-coming artist or architect, how do you feel about the old buildings of St. Petersburg being torn down? – I have a very negative attitude towards that, as though some part of the soul is being lost. It is difficult to comprehend how irreversible it is. New buildings look temporary. – Where would you like to live? – In Hamburg. – What is your favorite book? Do you have a bedside book? – It really depends on my mood. Probably, Twelfth Night. Kafka’s short stories. – What disgusts you? – Hypocrisy. – Recently you were in London and you met with some of Joseph Brodsky’s friends. In what way did these meetings add to your image of your grandfather? – I could imagine how his circle of friends would have been different, but I never imagined how different he himself could have been. – Have you ever had to deal with the cult of Brodsky among your friends or acquaintances? – Often one hears of ‘Brodsky’ where you least expect it. I was talking to a student in German class, and she says that one of her teach-

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Dasha Basmanova at V. Polukhina’s study, London, July 2007.

ers is named Andrey Iosifovich Brodsky, could it be his relative? I say: ‘No’. – ‘Maybe it’s his son?’ – ‘Believe me, it isn’t’. It’s not really a cult; just his being famous. I haven’t really thought about it being a cult. – How often do you read Brodsky’s poetry? – Very often. – Brodsky frequently drew his self-portrait in a self-disparaging way. Are you familiar with such an approach? – I think that it’s a case of confusing humility with self-disparagement. In my view, self-disparagement was not something he practiced, as he was a person with a unique sense of internal freedom and self-esteem. He spoke of humility in the old sense of the word, how the poet guides the Word, serving as medium. He is transparent and does not get in the way of the Word.

– Brodsky was always very interested in art and he himself drew well. Do you think that his long friendship with Marina Basmanova and her family had an influence in shaping his tastes in art? – Without a doubt. As theirs is a rare and deep-rooted culture with a range of vision, that goes back to Tanagra, Ucello, the Venetians, before Dufy and Morandi. – What color would you assign to reality as depicted in Brodsky’s poetry? – Navy-blue. – Do you yourself find there to be any overt or covert associations in his poetry with Rembrandt or other Dutch masters? – Possibly with Vermeer. And with Rembrandt. – Is his connection with classical Italian art apparent to you? – Actually, it’s the other way around: I would love to be able to see Italians the way he did. – Do you ever think about drawing a map of all the places that Brodsky has ever been to and then visiting them as well as meeting with the people who knew him and who are still alive? – Of course, and I don’t think I am the only one. – Do you find yourself being captivated by Brodsky’s personality? – Well, first of all, ‘captivated’ is not exactly what I would call it; I would prefer to shift the accent from the personal to his poetry, though not separating them. The way he spoke about Italian paintings! – Has the breadth of your vision been increased through your reading of Brodsky’s poetry? – Yes, in my perception, this can be measured by the poles of ‘Portrait of a Tragedy’ and his ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

25 P A S H A B A S M A N O VA Pasha Basmanova was born in 1989 in Leningrad. She is a student of St. Petersburg University.

H I S WO R L D

IS

L A NGUAGE

An Interview with Pasha Basmanova (January 2008) – How would you describe, in a few words, your childhood to the American reader? – My childhood, without any doubt, was happy. Of course, if one stresses the fact that the reader is American, then I imagine that someone might be interested in the financial aspect of it. As far as that goes, it was not so smooth. But allow me to note that children are least of all interested in money as such; children find pleasure in much more wonderful things, such as swimming in a river or drawing. Therefore my childhood was happy, I was surrounded by wonderful, kind, attentive, and cheerful people. – What do you remember from your infancy or early childhood? – I remember the winter sky, woods, the dacha in Barnaul, where my grandfather, Vladimir Simonovich Potapov, practically built everything with his own hands, where there is a huge garden, and in the summer nightingales sing. – When and on what occasion have you felt truly happy? – In order to feel happy I don’t need a specific occasion but the right kind of mood. – At what point did you find out that your grandfather was the famous poet, Joseph Brodsky? – I found out about it when I was five years old or maybe even younger, but I did not become aware of how famous he was until I started noticing that when people found out that we were related, they would

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act differently. This I do not like, but there is nothing one can do about it. – Who introduced you and when to his poetry? – Once when I was sorting the books in the bookcase, I came across a collection of poems by Brodsky, and decided to see for myself what kind of poet this is that causes strangers to become so excited in my presence. I did not understand half of what I read, but I was impressed. The second part I liked, on a kind of intuitive level. I was around seven then, and since books that are in the bookcase periodically need to be sorted, with time I gradually absorbed his ideas. – Do you like his poems? Which ones? – I like many of his poems, but they are all so different that I cannot single out my most or least favorite ones from all of the rest. Again it all depends on one’s mood. – What specifically do you find fascinating in his poems? – Their veracity and valour, and how informative they are. – Which of Brodsky’s poems made you realize that you are reading a great poet? – ‘A point is always more visible at the end of the line’. – Have you ever wanted to find out more about Brodsky? – I like him in the image, which exists in his poetry and other writing, but when it comes to anyone else’s private life, other than those people with whom I am close, I am not curious. It would have been interesting to personally socialize with him, for he was a very smart person, but that didn’t happen. – Brodsky used to say in his lectures that every poet opens for us his own private universe. How do you see Brodsky’s universe? – His world is language. – It is necessary for us to be on his level when we are speaking of him. Do you think this is possible in Brodsky’s case? – Is it possible to be an honest, smart, courageous, and free person? It is very difficult. But when it comes to Brodsky in particular, it’s possible. – In the summer of 1995, Brodsky wrote a letter to A. Sobchak expressing his regrets at not being able to go to St. Petersburg, despite the fact that he had already accepted the invitation. Why do you think, Brodsky refused to visit Russia? – He had his own reasons, which will always remain a mystery. But if

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he would have returned here, he would not have found either familiar faces or things. – There was a legend created around Brodsky, and he himself created his own version of this legend. And these two versions not only do not match, but are diametrically opposed to each other: the victim of the system and the poet full of nostalgia in exile; a free person and stoic, from whose mouth one hears only gratitude. Which of these two versions do you find the more convincing one? – Pride does not let a free person feel as though he were a victim of circumstances, even if that is the case. People who are proud and courageous are not lacking in feeling, but they will not flaunt their suffering. In fact, the system did ruin Iosif Aleksandrovich’s nerves, but his self-discipline did not allow him to bemoan his fate. When one finds the strength to endure hard times, one rises above one’s previous self. Life is not possible without evil; on the other hand, there is no justification for those who cause evil. But a wise person will be grateful to the higher power for any experience. – Khrushchev condemned Brodsky, Brezhnev deported him, Gorbachev had him published, returned him to the Russian reader, and later met with him in the US Library of Congress; Chernomyrdin changed

his itinerary and came to the funeral home to pay his final dues to the great poet. Are there enough grounds for the creation of a contemporary myth on the topic of ‘Poet and Tsar’? – A myth is called a myth precisely because upon creating it, one does not worry about whether or not there are enough facts and how reliable they are. As a rule, the desire to create a myth serves as the grounds. The question still remains who will be the winner after the successful promotion. – What is Brodsky for you, a Jew, a pagan, or a Christian? Or is he a ‘stoic under the care of Christianity’, as he described Cavafy? – There is not enough room for such a poet as Iosif Aleksandrovich within the framework of just one religion. When one is dealing with a good person, what does it matter what his God is called? But based on what I have had occasion to read already of his writing, I would say that he was a Christian. – What do you know about Brodsky’s interests in Eastern philosophy and yoga? – Only that M. B. had books on the topic stored in her alcove. – Do you find that you have any similar personality traits with Iosif Aleksandrovich? – I never encouraged any attempts to compare us and have no intention of taking part in this myself. – What are you afraid of the most? – Ceasing to hear my conscience. – What disgusts you? – Duplicity and cynicism. – What traits do you not tolerate in others as well as in yourself? – Self-humiliation is greater than pride; therefore allow me to refrain from confessing. – Whom do you find the most impressive person living today? – Most definitely it is my Kung Fu teacher, Maxim Nikolaevich Katkovsky. Translated by Tatiana Retivov

26 A N A S T A S I Y A K U Z N E T S O VA Anastasiya Kuznetsova was born in Leningrad, 31 March 1972. Her mother, Marianna Kuznetsova, was a ballet dancer with the Marriinsky Theatre (at the time called the Kiirov). She was a close friend of Baryshnikov and Makarova. Anastasiya Kuznetsova graduated from the English school and the philological faculty in of the Hertzen Institute. She works as a translator and has a son.

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ONE

C A N B E WO R T H Y O F H I M I N A L O V I N G WA Y

O N LY

An Interview with Anastasiya Kuznetsova (June 2008, London) – You are now in England and everyday I admire your fine English pronunciation when you are talking to my husband. A few days ago, you played guitar for us and no less impressively sang your own song-compositions. Is this talent of yours inherited or acquired? – Thank you for the compliment on my English. However I speak better than I understand. As for the rest, it is difficult to say. Genes of course played a big part, but they are not just my father’s, my mother’s as well. On my mother’s side I am a forth generation philologist. My mother was good at foreign languages. When she was in England and America or France with her company, everybody asked for her help, as if she were a walking dictionary. Although she herself was too shy to speak. So I think it’s both. And also it’s due to my education in English and Music, since age 5. – Tell me more about you mother. – My mother was an outstanding individual. Very clever, very kind, and not afraid of anyone. Every member of my family, on mother’s side, grandmother and aunt and uncle, taught not so much with their words as by example. And by books, which were given me in timely fashion. Most of my childhood, when my mother was still dancing, I spent behind the scenes, at the Mariinsky Theatre. I tried all the costumes and examined everything from A to Z. This was a part of my education, in that milieu, it merges with art, beauty, and bohemianism in the best sense. It seems that at that time I began to see artistic people not as cloud-dwellers. As they say in Soviet books, all this was imprinted on my personality and fate. – Who, amongst the famous dancer and friends of you mother, do you remember best? – Unfortunately the most famous of her friends left the Soviet Union before I was born. And when I became self-aware they were not around. Natasha Makarova later visited Russia and came to see

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us. She was very generous and pleasant, although she was more interested in my younger brother than in me, because she herself has a son, two year older than him. I found her very open. At that time I discovered that those who had left for the West, very quickly lost their patronymic names. When, as a well brought up girl, I attempted to address her as Natalya Romanovna, she was surprised and told me that Natasha would do! Unfortunately I saw Baryshnikov only on photographs. My mother was a close friend of his, but because both of them are quite difficult character, they did not have many other friends. Later on Baryshnikov helped my mother a lot. – What is the most striking memory in your colourful childhood? – A difficult question! I remember everything quite clearly from the age of one and a half. So, it’s difficult to single anything out.

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I cannot say I had a boring childhood! My childhood was so full of happenings that my memory is over-saturated. At the same time, my childhood was problem-free and full of absolute assurances in my surroundings, about myself and the goodness of the universe. There was nothing to trouble my childish mind. – What made you mother send you to an English school from age 5? – I went to the school, like all Soviet children, at age 7, and English classes began in the 2nd year. But from age 5, my stepfather taught me English, using old English school texts by Eckersley, which they brought from England. Since I didn’t go to kindergarten, they decide to ‘socialise’ me and sent me to the English school at age 6, in the Teacher’s House (Dom Uchitelya) situated in the Yusupov Palace. And twice a week, obediently, I went to the Yusupov Palace and traversed its lovely rooms, admiring the beauty of the carved oak staircases and the magnificent amphilads (the Soviet school of restoration was still functioning) and I went to this palace like going to a job. And all this seemed perfectly normal to me. We lived in the centre of Leningrad, just behind the Mariinsky Theatre, on the corner of Rimsky Korsakov and the Kryukov Canal, in a house with Atlases, and later on Rossi Street, One’s visual surroundings form one’s personality no less than do social conditions. – Did you ever imagine that one day you would need your English; that you would go either to England or America? – No, to be honest, such thoughts never entered my head when I was young. Later, I dreamt about it, but I didn’t believe I would ever go. I dreamt about being in England as early as 6 - 7 years old, when I began to learn English seriously. The fairy stories by Bissett, and there was also Lewis Carroll and the whole pleiad of English children’s writers. I fell in love with them. I also fell in love with the country, language, and that’s why I learnt the language so well, unlike many of my classmates who after 10 years torture got their grade and forgot the strange verbs as if it had been a horrid dream. – So, this is your first visit to England. Has anything disappointed you? – Again, it’s difficult to tell. Most likely not! Thank God, I am now an adult and I didn’t expect to meet gentlemen from the Victorian

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epoch. Or knights in shining armour! The only thing that has disappointed me is that I have seen so little. Just London and Cambridge. Although I got a petty thorough view of Cambridge, having worn out my shoes walking everywhere. I saw a bit of Kent and a bit of East Anglia, but I would really like to walk over the whole of England. – Did your impressions of England coincide with the descriptions we find in Brodsky poetic cycle ‘In England’? The stone-built villages of England. A cathedral bottle in a pub window. Cows dispersed across the field. Monuments to kings.1

Or from ‘The Thames at Chelsea’: London town’s fine, the clocks run on time. The heart can only lose a length to Big Ben. 2

– Joseph’s pictures are a bird’s-eye view and almost always there is a kind of enstrangement, typical of him. I felt that I was coming home. I feel very much at my ease here, despite the fact that London, like all old cities, is not just tortuous city but also quite hilly. Still, unlike in Moscow, I can orientate myself here very well. I don’t feel the slightest tension and like everything. And because what I saw coincides with what I first imagined, and also because I have been lucky with the weather, I feel as if I’m in some confined burrow, as if I had lived here some time in the past. That is, I don’t have the feeling of space, so characteristic of Brodsky’s poems, but feel everything to be close by, near to me. – Brodsky also loved England, the language, the people. Do you understand why now? – I do! – At what age did you hear or read Brodsky’s poems? – I don’t really remember. His name was always familiar. My mother had a recording of his poems, so, very early on, when I learnt how to use a tape-recorder, I heard how he read his poems; this was at some point, during my primary education. Mother had ten tapes and I listened to them all many times. I know mother had some friends:

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Garrik, Joseph, Misha and Natasha. I remember that Garrik (Voskov) left the USSR in 1976 but before that he often visited us. When I was a little girl, he looked after me. He would come to our dacha and take me and mother for walks in the woods. I remember very well how we sat on a tree stump; I was 3 years old and Garrik fed me oxalis. For me, Joseph Brodsky’s name was never either cast in bronze or gold; he was just one of mother’s friends who had also left Russia. They were all alive at the time and I didn’t know that they had left for good. I saw Garrik only once. He came to Russia at the end of the 80’s, but we regularly correspond and phone each other. – What exactly charmed you in Brodsky’s poems? – Their naturalness. Living diction. Not crammed into a corset or some poetic metre. But the metre was subservient to speech; total absence of pomposity and poeticisms. I became aware of all this but formulated my views only much later. At the time, because I read and heard his poems so early, I perceived these qualities as the norm. Now I’m very captious. – Which of Brodsky’s poems convinced you that you were reading the work of a great poet? – For me here are no great poets, only favourites. The poet’s great services to a language are defined by other criteria and in different conditions. – When and in what circumstances did you discover that Joseph Brodsky was your father? – Even now, I do not know what made mother tell me. I was already 23 and mostly did not live at home. On that particular day, I stayed at home a bit longer. We were sitting in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea, and almost casually mother remarked: ‘Do you know who your real father is? Now I can tell you: Joseph Brodsky’. ‘Ah’, I said, and I can tell you that it was neither a shock nor revelation for me; firstly because his was a familiar name, which I had been used to from childhood. Secondly, by that time I had already suspected something of the sort and half consciously understood what had happened. It seemed to me like a natural development of the plot. – Are you saying that this fact did not affect your self-awareness or behaviour?

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– Perhaps it influenced my self-awareness. Some events came into perspective. But it hardly influenced my behaviour. Besides, what could it change? – Brodsky dedicated to your mother, Marianna Kuznetsova, a poem ‘You recognize me from my hand-writing…’ (1987). Do you know the circumstances of his dedication? When did you mother learn about the existence of this poem? – Unfortunately I know nothing about it. Mother told me practically nothing. I repeat, she was a very reserve person to the point of being secretive. And I learnt about some nuances literally a year and half before Joseph’s death. I didn’t have much time to ask her the details. But I found postcards he sent her from Yalta and other places with amusing and semi-rude poems. When I sort out her archive I show you these poems. – Did you see any letters or post-card sent by Joseph from America? – No. But, as I said, I must sort out her archive; maybe something will surface. As far as I know, they didn’t correspond directly after he left Russia. – I remember, in November 1996, when I attended a conference dedicated to Brodsky at the University of Michigan, Garrik Voskov told me about you for the first time. He also told me that at some point of your youth you were seriously ill and your mother told Joseph via Garrik. Joseph said: ‘Send her to America as an exchange student and I’ll pay for everything, I’ll take her to the best doctors’, or something to that effect. – Yes, at the age of 16 I got infectious meningitis from swimming in a river; the result of this illness I feel till the present day. But I know nothing about this conversation between my mother and Joseph; she didn’t tell me. The only possible echo of this direct communication between them reached me when I was already 18 years old and had just entered the University. Suddenly, my parents said to me, ‘Would you like to go to America, for a year, to study at Michigan?’ I was a home-child, hadn’t even gone to a kinder-garden, I had to be at home by 4pm every day, and I couldn’t imagine living separately. So I asked, ‘Why?’ They told me that there was a chance to go to Ann Arbor. The only thing was, I had to come first in every subject

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and I would be sent to the University of Michigan. Everything was presented to me in such a way that I would be bound to refuse. Naturally, I did refuse. Why me, a little girl, should be sent to another continent? I knew that Garrik lives in Ann Arbor, but I was not sent to see Garrik. Besides, coming first in every subject was not part of my plans. – And if you had known at that time who your real father was, would you have gone? – I doubt it very much. At any case, not right away. – How did you imagine your possible meeting with Joseph? – I thought a lot about it, I even dreamt of meeting him and walking along some embankment. But it wasn’t to be… – You got to know Brodsky’s son, Andrey Basmanov well before you learned that you were his half-sister. Please tell me more. – It was a very amusing but not particular remarkable event, because we moved in similar circles of hippy young people. At some point my boyfriend at the time brought Andrey to our house. Andrey came in, snapped his heels and kissed my mother’s hand. My mother giggled a bit (I had no idea why), we had some tea, chatted and boys left. An acquaintance like many others, nothing special. Later we met each other in different groups and said ‘Hi’ to each other; two young hippies always have a lot to talk about: the weather, nature and Andrey Basmanov. Later, when I learnt who I was, my other boyfriend took me to Andrey’s birthday party. When we arrived, I took Andrey to another room and said to him, ‘Andryusha, I have a present for you’. I think, it was a much bigger shock to him than it was for me. Nevertheless, we both survived it and see each other from time to time, but not very often. – Garrik also told me when Joseph was leaving Russia, he asked Garrik: ‘Take care of Masha and the baby’. From Joseph’s other friends I know that he helped your mother indirectly. Do you know how this help revealed itself? – I know nothing about this. My mother never told me. I know that Misha Baryshnikov and Natasha Makarova helped her many times, for example, to buy a flat. But I know nothing about Joseph’s personal help.

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– On my request, you translated my interview with Lady Natasha Spender and some of Brodsky’s interviews for my collection. Did these talks help you to understand Joseph and his work better? – They did. In the first place, Lady Natasha Spender’s story which she told so fervently about a side of his life in the West, which very few know about. The family he found here was very precious to him. Later, in America, the many changes in his life are not that important. But the fact that he found, in the West, in the first days of his arrival, a place where he felt at home is very important. Everything I have read in Natasha’s interview and in his own interviews has not so much revealed something new as confirmed my own feelings and suppositions. – You yourself write poems and songs, which you perform, on the guitar. Have you ever been tempted to set Brodsky’s poems to music? – Never! For several reasons. First, became my mother told me when I was still a child, that Joseph couldn’t bear his poems being set to music. I remembered this and decided never to do anything like that. Although I like what Mirzayan and others have done. But I do not allow myself the same freedom. I’m not saying that his poems lack rhythm or melody; on the contrary. It’s not for nothing that he said: ‘My song lacked of tunefulness / but it cannot be sung by a choir’. – You have a son, Aleksandr, who began writing poems at age 3. I published one in the magazine ‘Family & School’ in 2005. When did he learn about his famous grandfather? Do you read him Brodsky’s poems? Does he want to know more about Brodsky? – He has known almost from birth that he has two grandfathers, grandfather Rost and grandfather Osya. He imbibed this information with his mother’s milk, especially since both of them are dead. He also knows that grandfather Rostik was in the military and grandfather Osya was a poet, a famous one. He has known that from the cradle; it’s a part of his life, a general fact, just as a tree is the offspring of sun and air. He knows what Joseph looked like, because he has seen photographs. His mother has a t-shirt with Osya’s image on it. All this is simply factual for him. And I don’t want him to have any complexes about it. There is no need for that. In the final

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analysis, when he is 15 or 16, he will understand the significance of all this and draw, I hope, the right conclusions. – Conducting these interviews about Brodsky, I must keep reminding myself that we must be worthy of the subject. It must be even more difficult for you to be worthy of him in life. Can this be achieved in he case of Brodsky? – You know, in my view, in such a situation, one can be worthy of him only in a loving way. It doesn‘t matter whether you are a blood relative or just an admirer of his poems, which you came across either at 15 or 50. For me, Mayakovsky’s phrase “I purify myself with Lenin” is farcical, a rude sign made on the sly. Besides, Brodsky preferred doing hackwork in life but not when it came to poetry. And I try to succeed in many spheres. To write at Brodsky’s level, as you well know, is impossible. To imitate him is foolish. To be on his level is possible only in an inner sense. And besides, even a cat may look at a king! – I totally agree. We know that, in summer 1995, Brodsky wrote a letter to Sobchak, then Mayor of St. Petersburg, apologizing for not being able to come to St. Petersburg, even though he had already accepted his invitation. Why do you think he refused to visit his beloved city? – I don‘t remember who told me this – either Garrik or my mother – that Brodsky said: ‘I don’t need another heart operation’. I doubt if he was afraid something would go wrong here, or perhaps that he would be received in an unacceptable way. On the other hand, the city has changed since he left it. I think he was afraid he might be shocked by the changes. He really feared for his health. You cannot blame him for not coming, although he did like visiting Sweden and Finland, so as to breathe the same air. But to return to Russia… One cannot enter the same river twice! And most important, one can imagine the shock he would have suffered. And we must also remember that the same people who kicked him out would now be licking his hand. – There is a legend around Brodsky. Two versions are particularly active. They are not the same and in fact contradict one another: victim of the system and poet in exile, full of nostalgia; free man and

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stoic, whose lips can express only gratitude. Which of these versions for you corresponds with reality? – I think both are extreme and the truth lies somewhere in-between, but closer to the second. The first is just the official view. Judging from what those who knew Joseph in Russia and America have said, the first version had not much basis in fact. And if such a concept has formed itself, he did not allow himself to encourage it, from very first early days in the West; it was simply forbidden. The image of an absolutely free poet whose lips can utter only gratitude is too romantic, one of Brodsky’s lyrical heroes – and not in all his poems. It is not for me to tell you this. Joseph liked reiterating: ‘I am a private individual’. And privacy, with all its salient features, including nonattachment to any particular place. So, there could be no question of lamenting about what has been lost. Not to waste the few years remaining. He was a bit like the cat that walks by itself. – Khrushchev put Joseph on trial; Brezhnev exiled him; Gorbachev published him and gave him back to Russian readers and then visited him in The Library of Congress. Chernomyrdin altered his schedule so as to be able to go to the funeral parlour and pay his respects to the great poet. Eltsyn sent a huge wreath to Brodsky’s grave. Is this enough to create a modern myth on the theme of ‘Poet & Tsar’? – Absolutely not! Joseph wouldn’t have given a damn about all these pretensions. And I don’t think Khrushchev or Brezhnev gave a damn about the likes of Brodsky. OK, they imprisoned, exiled him… But I don’t think they even remembered his name. As for Gorbachev, this was simply noblesse oblige, showing his attitude to poetry, not so much to Brodsky himself, but to the image of him in the perception of certain groups of society. No more than that! I doubt whether any of them loved Brodsky’s poems or wept into their pillow at night when he died. – Every poet reveals his own universe to us, said Brodsky once in a lecture. How do you see Brodsky’s universe, speaking quite schematically? – Valentina, that is a topic for a dissertation! – All my poet-interlocutors have a poem either dedicated to Brodsky or influence by his work. Do you have anything of that sort?

– I must admit, at the age of 15, I wrote an imitation of Brodsky. I have tried hard to remember it but can‘t. Perhaps just as well! But I do have another poem, a tiny one and quite recent, not so much influenced by Brodsky as that there is something in it which reminds me of him. The sun is older than the planet. Bronze is older than coins. A river is older than its bridge. The fish is older than Christ.

Translated by Daniel Weissbort Notes 1

2

Translated by Alan Myers, Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (Oxford, Melbourne: OUP, 1980), p. 128. Translated by David Rigsbee, Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (Oxford, Melbourne: OUP, 1980), p. 90.

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27 SEAMUS HEANEY Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level in 1996 and Beowulf in 1999. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2006 the T. S. Eliot Prize.

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T H E YO U N G P O E T

IN HIM

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An Interview with Seamus Heaney (March/September 2004, London) – You knew Joseph almost from the day he arrived in England (June 1972) to the day he died. Could you tell me about your first and last meeting with him? – What happened first was more a sighting than a meeting. He arrived at Poetry International in London, where I was due to give a reading and we were all conscious of him as the man of the moment, ever since he’d landed in Austria as the guest of Auden. Now here he was, en route for America. The Festival ran for at least three or four days, different readers every night, and I believe Auden may have been reading also. I can’t remember whether Joseph and I were on the same programme, but I have a distinct image of him, with his reddish hair and his red shirt, looking at me and I at him. I had a feeling at the time that my Belfast address may have been of interest to him, since the bombing and shooting were by then in full swing. But it was six months or so later, round about February 1973, when I really met him. We were at another poetry festival, this time in Massachusetts, in Amherst, and Joseph had come from Michigan. I can’t remember what we talked about, but there was certainly a recognition that we were on the same wavelength, probably because we both had a lot of canonical poetry – English poetry, that is – in our heads and talked more about that than about the contemporary Americans. I would meet him soon again, on a couple of occasions in Ann Arbor, where I knew Bert Hornback and Donald Hall in the English Department – so by the mid-seventies we were on familiar terms. The relationship was also helped by the fact that Joseph had got to know a friend of mine, Tom Macintyre, who was then writer-in-resident in Ann Arbor, and had been to Ireland in Tom’s company. The last meeting was about three weeks before he died, in January 1996. In New York, on a lousy, sleety day when he came from his apartment in Brooklyn across to the Union Square Café where Marie and I were having lunch with Roger Straus and Jonathan Galassi.

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JB & Seamus Heaney, photograph was taken by John Minihan in London at a reading for Mandelstam at the Royal Festival Hall, 1991

We’d come to New York to see Brian Friel’s play, Molly Sweeney, on one of the worst weekends ever – a blizzard so unrelenting the traffic stopped on the avenues. But by that lunchtime it had eased a bit and Joseph made the valiant trek to Manhattan. He was white-faced and didn’t join us for the meal. He arrived instead halfway through, talked, went out for a cigarette, came in again, talked and was clearly not in the best of physical shape, went out for another cigarette – and then off home. Dear, undaunted and endangered Joseph. I had been to Stockholm the previous month and I suppose he felt it was the courteous thing to join us, at whatever inconvenience. But you know, having said all that, perhaps the last meeting really occurred after his death, in his parents’ apartment in St. Petersburg, in the company of his old friends, in that bare room-and-a-half where the only furnishings were photos on the wall – the ones taken on the day of Joseph’s departure by his friend, Misha Milchik, who was also present. It was Sunday morning in June 2003. We stood in a circle, ate sweet cake and drank vodka, and I read a poem ‘Audenesque’ that I’d written in his memory. An utterly solemn, sweet, sorrowful, unforgettable moment.

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– You shared several readings with Joseph in the USA, UK, Ireland, even Finland. Which one do you remember best and why? – I remember a lot of them. In the Gate Theatre in Dublin, for example, where he appeared one Sunday night in the early 1980s. I was reading his translations and urged him to finish before ten o’clock, which in those days was when the pubs closed on Sundays – but of course Joseph paid no attention. He flailed on in his magnificent way until after time for the last drinks. Then there was an occasion when we did a Mandelstam commemoration together in London, with Isaiah Berlin in the audience, and a marvellous feeling that Joseph was standing up there with the shade of Mandelstam at one shoulder and Akhmatova at the other. I think, all the same, the one in Finland, in Turku, was the most vivid and typical, because after each of us had done his bit – I was reading my own poems on that occasion – and the question time arrived, Joseph simply started to lecture the audience on what and whom they should be reading. Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy. Laying down the law, joyfully and unrepentantly. – You wrote an introduction in verse for ‘An Evening with Joseph Brodsky’ at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard in February 1988. Did you ever publish this introduction? Do you recall the occasion? – Clearly. Joseph had been at the Nobel ceremony a couple of months before that and was more the hero than ever. And we’d become faster friends than ever, because the previous summer he’d come to Dublin for a couple of days and we’d spent time on our own. There was a heat wave and in order to keep cool we walked in the sea breeze on the South Wall, the long arm of Dublin Port stretching out to where the shipping comes and goes at the mouth of the River Liffey. It reminded Joseph a lot of the quays of St. Petersburg, and he spoke more intimately than he’d done before about his family and his first life in Russia. I don’t mean he shared secrets, just that his tenderness and loss were more evident, readier to reveal themselves because of the lonely stone jetty and the wash of the ships’ wakes. Anyhow, I felt very sure of our friendship after that and consequently very free, and in a way the verse introduction in Cambridge was a symptom – and celebration – of that insouciance. I remember that the lines Joseph

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liked best of all were ones where I suggested that his verse was essentially a lie detector. There was a submerged reference also to Kafka’s image of a book needing to be an axe that could break up the frozen sea within us. And Joseph, as you know, wasn’t a bit shy in that kind of literary company: Yet Joseph’s tool is not the spade. The axe with ice upon its blade Is more his thing. It splits the frozen sea inside And the, You lie! You lied! You lied! The echoes ring.

I don’t think the introduction has been published. It contains verses about Derek Walcott too, and about Wallace Shawn, who performed a bit of Joseph’s play – the one about two astronauts, I think. And they also read translations of the poems. – You said in one of your interviews that it was Joseph who made you buy a Mercedes. How come? – Well, he didn’t exactly make me buy one. But he was important in removing my inhibition. I’d been driving a car for 43 years and for my sixtieth birthday I was going to treat myself to a good one. At the time, my motor was an old 1989 Nissan, a diesel banger and wheezer, well and truly past its sell-by date. And I had this friend, a businessman, who was used to a higher grade of vehicle and knew a dealer and was forever urging me to make the upwardly mobile move, if only in the second hand range. But there’s a commandment we all learn early on that a poet shouldn’t be susceptible to that kind of sumptuous bourgeois temptation. I felt a Mercedes was sort of taboo, but then I remembered that Joseph arrived in Cambridge one evening from South Hadley, smiling broadly, behind the wheel of his ample, ancient, mighty Merc saloon. And I thought, if Brodsky, why not Heaney? Which is how I became a member of the homo mercus species. – Like Joseph, you have a tremendous sense of humour and selfirony. Did it help cement your friendship? – It certainly didn’t hinder it. There was a lot of laughter. – You have at least two common grounds with Brodsky – English

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metaphysical poetry and Dante. Do you feel a bond between yours and Joseph’s poetics? – I felt, as I’ve said, on the same wavelength. It had to do with a belief that poetry should be guaranteed by some inner rule and that its survival depended first of all upon those people whose poems proved the ongoing virtue and workability of that rule, and after that upon those who recognized work where the rule was being obeyed. I know that sounds both vague and haughty, but Joseph’s haughtiness was infectious. Discussion of poets with him often entailed nothing more than a fast roll-call and an immediate thumbs up or thumbs down. But just as often it entailed listening to Joseph going into critical orbit and running with an insight until it had been turned into a dogma. Exhilarating, extreme, unfair, incomparable. The young poet in him never aged. But at the same time there was a veteran’s awareness of what was required of the art. A disrespect for poets who didn’t know enough, who weren’t sufficiently read in the canonical poetry of the past and present, for a start, but – worse – who didn’t know what being a servant of the muse demanded. As far as Joseph was concerned, you were down on the rowing bench with Horace and Hardy: there was no two-tier system, no handicapping, just the shoulderto-shoulder striving of the whole poetry crew. Although this didn’t mean that he equated himself with the great ones, just that he knew they had set the standards by which he must judge himself. – Speaking of great ones, did you ever discuss Yeats with Brodsky? Do you know what his attitude was to Yeats’s poetry? – There was a bit of blind sport there, I think. He told me once that Yeats’s rhymes left something to be desired and at that stage I felt he was too far-gone in certitude to be educable. If ever there was a poet who should have gained Joseph’s admiration, it was Yeats. His faith in poetry, his capacity to break the lyric barrier, the sheer bodily wham of his meter. I suspect Joseph just never dwelt with Yeats enough. He rated him, certainly, as a real presence, an Olympian, but he wasn’t possessed by him. Both of them, come to think of it, had the kind of implacable excellence that made them like two strong magnets set wrong end to end. – For some Russians Brodsky was not sufficiently Russian. How did you perceive him as a Russian, a Jew or an American?

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– As a Russian. Because of the language. His speech reminded you that English was not his mother tongue. The higher he bounced in the new language the harder he was hitting off the old one. As ever with him, the defiance and the delight were inextricable. Yet when he began to speak about Russian poetry – and even, speak it aloud – you knew he was in his element. It was as if some underground cable had started to carry the full voltage and the whole grid was sizzling. – Was Brodsky trying to russify English in his self-translation? – He couldn’t help it. I remember opening The New Yorker once and coming across one of those poems he calls eclogues, big slabs of stanzaic verse, full of matter and metaphoric moves, opaque to begin with and never in the end entirely unclogged: burly enough to discomfit and then outface the reader. I admired the inner necessity that constituted them in this way, the intellectual and imaginative overdrive in the original action, but I still balked at what I took to be certain metrical oddity, especially in the matter of enjambment. The word suggests that one line steps ahead into the next, so it should be a long stride, not so much a heavy foot as a hurdler’s heft. Anyhow, I marked a few places where I thought the heavy foot was falling and was bold enough to bring up the question with Joseph the next time I saw him. But there was no concession. He began to read the lines with a metrical emphasis that forced the natural stress and cadence of his English words to march to what must have been a Russian tune. So I left it. The best commentary on all this, as you know, has been written by Danny Weissbort, a wonderful stereophonic response because Danny’s ear is like a scale that can weigh to the nth degree the Slavic against the Anglophonic without getting all heated up about what’s going on. – How would you explain the contrast between the perception of Brodsky’s English versions in the UK and the USA? In America Brodsky never received such scathing reviews as in England via Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Donald Davie and Peter Porter. In the USA Brodsky was widely regarded as one of the pre-eminent poets of our time. – Well, for a start, there’s a tendency for reviewing in England to be more trenchant anyway. In many cases the forensic style has been honed in the Oxbridge seminar. And besides, there’s the simple cul-

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tural fact that until fairly recently on this side of the Atlantic, the ear was more tuned to the traditional iambic melodies. From Ireland to Australia there was a certain historical component in the syllabus, the schooling that even an average student received meant that certain registers were normative. Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum was taken as read. When it came to aural matters there was a consensus of sort, based on the conventions. Call it, if you like, what Derek Walcott calls it in his poem ‘The Schooner Flight’, ‘a sound colonial education’, but it still had its effect. There’s a form mistress, if you’ll excuse the pun, in the English ear, one who insists that the poetry class should be able to sing the scale perfectly. But the one in charge of the American ear is more permissive. Something happened to her ear in the 19th century that created a new acoustic for her. The Bible gained on Shakespeare and the result was Whitman. So nowadays she’s readier that her English counterpart to listen to the modes and scales that poets of multi-culturalism. Carlos Williams, for example. ‘OK’, the American muse thinks, ‘Carlos – there’s something Spanish in the background there, so there’ll probably be something different, maybe a Hispanic note in his performance. And Brodsky? Interesting, there’ll be a Russian turn to his tune’. But true to her own form, the English mistress thinks, ‘Brodsky? The boy must be taught that he can’t get away with that. It’s against the genius of our language. He may be great in Russian, but I’m afraid he’ll have to try harder if he’s to get full marks in my singing school’. She’s jealous and exacting because she feels she’s guarding something she’s been entrusted with – that, at least, is a generous way of seeing it. – Did Joseph’s insistence on formal poetry have a good or bad effect in English language poets who came under his influence? – I’d say the influence was ultimately as institutional as it was personal. Maybe more so. I mean, Joseph’s hard drive for formal discipline was felt throughout the creative writing departments of the American universities the way a powered-up propeller is felt by passengers in a small plane on the tarmac. And it was salutary for them to be reminder of the deep culture of poetry, its historical dimension – which constitutes, in a paradoxical way, its eternal present. But tradition, as T. S. Eliot once maintained, can only be acquired through great labour. You can’t tune a poetic ear, graduate

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or undergraduate, inside a couple of late teenage years. Students in workshops might learn the shapes and see how rhyme schemes fit and perceive that a poem is ‘a verbal contraption’, but that deep bodily feel for the inner rule of verse will elude them unless they hear and hear and hear the music of what’s there in the language already. So, dare I say it, insofar as Joseph contributed to the smugness of what they call in America the ‘new formalists’, his influence wasn’t entirely for the good. On the other hand, in every good sense and no bad sense Joseph’s own poems are always winging it, and for those who could learn art of flying in verse, the initiation was wonderful. Gertrude Schnackenburg, for example, achieved real lift off thanks to his example. – Brodsky believed that the XX century had exhausted the possibilities of salvation and had come into conflict with the New Testament. Do you agree? – I hadn’t heard that he had put it like that, but there you have the real Brodsky: upping the ante, offering a proposition so boldly and simply uttered that it could be printed in a school primer; and yet containing enough challenge to keep the scholastic or rabbinical schools in dispute for a lifetime. But I wonder… If the possibilities of salvation are or were exhaustible, should they not have run out before the message of the New Testament took in the first place, in the age of the Roman Empire? St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans tells them they’re not living in nature any more but in the spirit, in other words that they’re not to quail no matter how devastating the historical onslaught proves to be. – What do you make of Brodsky’s statement: ‘I have the conviction that what I’m doing, in the final analysis, is to the glory of God… No matter what drastic statements I can make here and there, even those should be to His liking in one way or another’? – I find the statement entirely convincing. God has to be as magnanimous and principled in his being as the man who wrote ‘May 24, 1980’: ‘Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx, / only gratitude will be gushing from it’. – Once you gave me a present – your poem ‘Lauds and Gauds for a Laureate’ written as an Introduction to a reading by Brodsky at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

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15 February 1988. May I include this poem in my collection of interviews about Brodsky? – Please do. Lauds and Gauds for a Laureate The work you’re going to hear to-night By one who’s earned the right to write Will have two readers And is so valued by so many It hardly needs my praise nor any Special pleaders. Even introducing Joseph To overcrowding rows on rows of Cambridge hotshots In mostly all just the buzz of showbiz For you know who Joseph is Since before glasnost. The poet Brodsky’s held in awe For laying down the poetry law In these late times. He steals the fire and air of words. He leaves the clichés for the birds. He worships rhymes. Uncheckably his poems outrun The range and writ and jurisdiction Of all Big Brothers. He would revive and fortify The individual human cry Their newspeak smothers. When I consider Joseph’s work I recollect, in Stalin’s dark, How one man wrote, Then sealed his manuscript in jars And buried them beneath the stars Like a deep root.

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The scene is stealthy as a crime. The digger working against time, A thing being hidden: The truth that dare not yet be told, The written word like buried gold, Rare and forbidden. Yet Joseph’s tool is not the spade. The axe with ice upon its blade Is more his thing. It splits the frozen sea inside And then, You lied! You lied! You lied! The echoes ring. As if self-launched through hoops of fame – The very opposite of tame – His poems start When whetted sounds get whetted keener And spring into the mind’s arena As uncaged art. Milosz said it: poems stand Lashing tails and pawing sand, Facing the sun, For they are visions out of light Lured down by art from a great height Of imagination. Romantic rhetoric this is not. This is the poet we have got To-night as guest. For him we’d prime and fire cannon. In Ireland we would dam the Shannon. He is the best. In Ireland, on a harbour wall, Among the shipping lanes and all Those gulls and gannets, Joseph, I won’t forget the day We spend last year by Dublin Bay Discussing sonnets,

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Discussing what it takes and what Old X might have young Y has not, Who’s in pro-tem. Praising friends behind their backs And when it came down to brass tacks, Preferring them. Like you know who, who’s here to-night, The author of The Schooner Flight And plays in verse: Derek Walcott, poet of tides, The genius of whose music rides A winged sea-horse. His lines are rigging for a mind Susceptible to each south wind And breaking comber And ere my rhyming fit abates, For him I quote Joyce quoting Yeats: One thinks of Homer. One thinks of Shakespeare too, for he Is guardian of the mystery Of Wally Shawn. All actor-playwrights are his friends, Burning candles at both ends, On cue till dawn. So let your expectations tremble Now these real presences assemble And lights are lowered, As they unearth the jars and click The locks wide open on the Slavic Poet’s word-hoard.

28 MARK STRAND Mark Strand was born in Summerside Prince Edward Island, Canada in 1934, and was raised and educated in the United States, at Antioch College and Yale University. As a Fulbright Fellow he spent a year (1960 - 61) at the University of Florence; he received a BFA from Yale and MA from the University of Iowa. He has taught at many American universities, including Princeton, Harvard, University of Chicago and Columbia University where he now teaches. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Blizzard of One, three books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others). Several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. His honours include the Bollinger Prize, a National Institute of Arts and letters Award, a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1990 - 1991 he served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

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JOSEPH FOR

WA S A POET

GREAT CHOICE L AU R E AT E

An Interview with Mark Strand (February 2004) – In your Brodsky tribute, October 29, 1996, you said that you met Joseph for the first time at a party at Richard Howard’s apartment. And when you introduced yourself Joseph quoted one of your poems. Do you remember which year it was? – I met Joseph at Richard Howard’s apartment after he read at The New School in 1972. I think it was soon after he came to the U. S. I can’t be sure. I have a poor memory when it comes to such things. I went up to him and I said, ‘Mr. Brodsky, I’m Mark Strand, I sent you a New Years card, did you ever get it?’ He said yes. Then he quoted one of my poems to me. I fell in love. No, I was astonished. He had a marvellous memory. I had the impression then that he probably knew more about my poetry, since he could remember it, than I did, who could not. – When you lived in New York in the Village during the 70s your group of friends included many poets and writers such as Derek Walcott, Susan Sontag, etc. When did Joseph become a part of that circle? – When I lived in New York in the 70’s I knew Derek Walcott and other poets, but I was not a friend of Susan Sontag’s. I had met her once or twice briefly, but that was it. Joseph was friendly with her, and was very friendly with Derek whose work he admired greatly. I can’t say that Joseph was part of a circle. I can’t say that there was a circle. I can’t say that anyone was part of a circle. Poets tended to see one another, but not usually in groups. Joseph would see Derek. He would see me, and perhaps others, but it was usually one on one. During our long friendship he and I would talk on the telephone and read each other’s poems to one another and offer advice. I took Joseph’s advice frequently. He, however, did not take mine. If he had, just think of what a great poet he might have been! – In what way was the Brodsky of the 70s different from Brodsky of he 90s?

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JB and Mark Strand in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 (from Mark Strand ’s archive)

– Brodsky of the 70’s was very much like Brodsky of the 90’s. He remained loyal to his friends and true to his ideas. His impatience was perhaps less noticeable or perhaps it had diminished, but it was still there. It had to do with the failure of most American poets to have a clear idea of what they were doing, their incompetence or stupidity in matters relating to poetry. – What do you recall of the time after Robert Lowell’s funeral (16 September 1977) when Roger Straus, Susan Sontag, Derek Walcott, you and Joseph gathered at Elizabeth Bishop’s place? Please tell us what you remember. – I don’t remember being at E. Bishop’s place after Robert Lowell’s funeral. I don’t remember attending Lowell’s funeral.1 – I know that some publishers and editors of prestigious American journals used to send to you poems even by well-known poets, such as Derek Walcott prior to publication. Did they also seek your opinion about Joseph’s poems? – No American journal ever solicited my opinion about any poet’s work. It is usual to receive the uncorrected proofs of a poet’s forthcoming book from his or her publisher, but this is done with hope of

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receiving a blurb. I was never asked to blurb any of Joseph’s books, nor any of Derek’s. Why would a less known, less accomplished poet be asked to blurb books by his betters? – Poets also sometimes or maybe even quite often ask you to be a referee when they apply for a grant or fellowship. Did you ever act as a referee for Joseph? – I never was asked to act as a referee for Joseph. – In January 1980 you, Joseph and Derek Walcott gave several joint readings in the West Indies. What was your impression of Joseph’s way of reading his poems? – Ah, the West Indian trip! That was a splendid time. It was a celebration of Derek’s 50th birthday, and I was flattered to be asked to make the tour with him and Joseph. Derek was already very famous in the West Indies. People worshipped him. Everywhere we went he knew people. And Joseph was magnificent on that trip. His reading style was something new down there. Everyone was blown away by the deep resonance of his voice and the way he half-spoke half-chanted his poems. I had heard Joseph read before so the way he read in Trinidad was nothing new. – There were other occasions when you and Joseph read together. On November 1st 1992 Derek Walcott, you and Joseph gave a reading for the benefit of the Playwrights Theatre in Boston. What do you remember of the occasion? – I don’t remember the Boston reading at all. Are you sure I was there? – In Derek Walcott’s biography we read: ‘In mid-September Walcott asked those he contacted for $5,000 to be patrons and invited them to a buffet dinner followed by an evening of poetry, music, and dance at the Tsai performance centre at Boston University. This became a reading, 1 November, with Clampitt, August Wilson, Strand, Soyinka, and Brodsky for the benefit of the Playwrights Theatre and the expensive dinner afterwards with the performers’.2 In 1990 - 91 you served as Poet Laureate of the United State. In 1991 Joseph succeeded you. Most people found it very strange that a foreign poet should be an America’s Poet Laureate. Did you have anything to do with this particular choice? Have you encountered such criticism? – I thought Joseph was a great choice for Poet Laureate. I may have

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been asked, what I thought of his being appointed, I am not sure. In any case, I would have been for it. Joseph had a deeper grasp of American poetry than almost any American poet I knew. Some American poets objected to his being named Laureate, but I reminded them that Joseph was an American citizen and had as much right to be named as any of them. I do not think one has to be born here to be American. One has to feel oneself American to be American, and I think that Joseph felt himself American. – Joseph was concerned about the limited public access to poetry. Did he manage to enlarge the audience for poetry? – Joseph successfully managed to get a publisher to put an anthology of American poetry in thousands of motel rooms. Thus, for a short while poetry existed cheek by jowl with the Bible. The poetry was stolen, leaving only the Bible. He thought, of course, that poetry should have a wider audience, and I think his readings widened the audience. – Was Joseph a good ‘publicist’ for poetry? – Yes, Joseph was a good ‘publicist’ for poetry, if we can use the word ‘publicist’ for simply speaking intelligently about what one loved to do. Joseph never spoke nonsense about poetry. In this way he was a good ‘publicist’. – Did he change the tasks and the function of the Poet Laureate? – I don’t think Joseph changed the tasks and functions of the Poet Laureate. It was hard to make any changes when we were laureates. The poetry office was ruled by a madwoman who wanted things done her way. – Do American poets read Brodsky as a Russian intelligence engaging with English or do they read him as an American poet? – American poets read Joseph as a Russian poet who is not particularly well served by translations of his work. – Your poetry is so different from Joseph’s, why do you like his poetry? – Yes, my poetry is very different from Joseph’s and that is precisely why I like his poetry. – You use deceptively simple language, an almost traditional style, and yet your poems are disturbing and strike deep:

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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it, As though we had written it. 3

Can you define the source of your persuasive power? – I haven’t a clue as to what the source of my persuasive power is. I am not even sure that such power exists in my poetry. However, I shall take your word for it. – Joseph often repeated that ‘the voice of the Muse is the voice of the language’, and he put language at the apex of his universe. Do you go along with such an attitude to language? – I would rather not talk about the Muse. The Muse has meant different things to me over the years, but usually it has to do with what inspires. Language begets language, so I suppose the Muse is made of words. I am on shaky ground here. – Derek Walcott understands poetry as metaphor; Joseph Brodsky filled his poems with metaphors; you, on the other hand, scarcely use any. Why do you mistrust tropes? – I rarely use metaphor, that is true, unless the whole poem is a metaphor, the realization in words of something else, something that exists but has no shape. – Is the supposed fusion of the lyric and dramatic in your poetry the result of a conscious decision or is it what just critics say of it? – I really have no idea what the critics say of my poetry. I rarely read anything written about me. But I like the idea of fusing the lyric and dramatic. I try quite consciously to combine the humorous with the serious in many of my poems. Often the poem will begin one way and end another, and in a short space (a few lines) the reader will have travelled a great distance (psychologically). Sometimes it is impossible to know whether I am being funny or not. This is true of Kafka who is of all 20th century writers the one whose work I admire most. – Joseph said that music teaches poets composition, what follows what. Some of your poems are very musical. Do you share Brodsky’s belief? – I think Joseph had a better ear for music than I have. I think he had a better ear in general. I have a good feel for the cadences of English as spoken by an American, but that is something I developed slowly over the years by paying attention to the sounds of spoken English. I listen to music, but I can’t say with any certainty that it has helped

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me compose. Joseph was very fond of Haydn, but I cannot for the life of me see the connection between his poetry and the other’s music. – You have translated a number of poets, such as Rafael Alberti, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. You know the choices and problems that a translator faces. Brodsky’s primary focus in translating his own poems was the prosodic quality, which often caused considerable semantic shifts. Did Brodsky’s critics understand his approach to translation? – I don’t think anyone understood Joseph’s approach to translation. He wanted prosodic verisimilitude, but that was rarely possible. He wanted me to translate some of his work, but I always refused. I know no Russian, so I would be working from a trot, which is the same thing as editing someone else’s version of the original. I believe that one’s initial impression of the original is the most important one, and that initial impression would be marred by someone else’s initial impression. Even if Joseph were directing the translation, I would feel at some distance from the original, I would feel, I suppose, like Joseph’s secretary. – You read Brodsky’s poems at the Memorial service at the Cathedral of John the Divine in New York on 8th March 1996. What was your impression of the Service? – The Brodsky Memorial service was awe-inspiring. There were 3,000 people there, an astonishing number by any standard. People loved Joseph. He was an independent voice, one with very high standards, in a sea of cronyism and mediocrity. – Most of his Jewish friends were upset by the fact that this was a Christian service. What do you make of Joseph’s poetry? Is it written by a Christian or by a Jew, by an atheist or a pagan? Or does every poet talk to God in his own way and in his own language? – I was mystified by Joseph’s Christmas poems, which struck me as Christian, although Joseph never claimed he was Christian. He was Jewish, although one wouldn’t guess that from his poetry. I think Joseph’s interest in Christianity came through the poetry and poets he admired – they were invariably Christian. Eliot and Auden come immediately to mind. I don’t think it makes any difference whether the service was Christian or Jewish. Finally, I think, that Joseph was attracted to what he perceived to be the spiritual source of the poems

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he admired. At heart Joseph was a pagan. – He admitted having a love affair with the English language. Was his English good enough to write poems in? – Joseph’s English was certainly good enough to write poems in. – You were astonished by Joseph’s authority. Is it possible for any foreign poet who enters the language as late in life as Joseph did, to become an English poet? – Joseph was a genius, so for him it was possible to write poems in English although he learned it late. I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. – Joseph never perceived himself as a bilingual poet but he was a bilingual writer. Would you say something about Brodsky’s poetry in English? – Joseph’s poetry in English was a direct reflection of Joseph’s English, a cross pollination of American and English. It seemed created in a test tube, that is, it never sounded natural. It was metrically regular (very important to Joseph), but it never sounded quite conversational. It was almost conversational, almost formal, but consistently itself. Joseph’s rhymes were ingenious and most often approximate, that is, words would rhyme, but only if they were pronounced with a Russian accent. – Could you say a few words about Brodsky’s self-translations? – We usually say someone is translated into English, or someone into Russian, and its very unfair, because you don’t translate a poet into a language, you translate him into the idiom of a translator. So Brodsky translated Brodsky into Brodsky. – I know you called him ‘a superb poet in English but a different kind of poet’. How different and how superb? And I also remember your line: ‘the truth lies like nothing else’. What is the truth? – This was not always true, but true enough. Joseph’s great strength was conceptual. The invention of hypotheses, the creation of metaphors, the apt elaboration of conceits, these were what made his poems brilliant and inimitable. The truth lies like nothing else, because in art truth wears a disguise. I have no idea what truth is. – Do you understand the reason for Joseph’s admiration of W. H. Auden? Many English poets I know don’t. – Joseph admired Auden’s technical virtuosity, his way of being elo-

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quent and conversational at the same time, and his ability to be interesting no matter what the subject happened to be. It is true sometimes he sounds like Auden, and I think that sometimes he even sounds a little like Emily Dickinson, though some people will say that’s going too far, but I don’t think so. Maybe he’s a cross between the two, with Thomas Hardy thrown in. – How difficult was Joseph to get to know? – If Joseph liked you, he made himself available. One could always feel that he was present. Getting to know anyone is a tricky business, that is, how do we know we know someone? We make the assumption that we do and then, suddenly, that person does something that cannot be explained. Joseph never did the inexplicable. – What was the best and the worst thing Joseph ever said to you? – I don’t know. I can’t recall a worse thing or a best thing. I never evaluated what Joseph said in that way. – What would you say to Joseph if you were to meet him now in New York? – If I were to meet Joseph in NYC, I would first ask how he got there. – What do you remember about the circumstances of the dedication of Brodsky’s poem ‘Sextet’ to you? – I remember being flattered that Joseph dedicated the poem to me. But I can’t recall the circumstances. – You know how much Joseph admired beauty. What kind of ‘unit of perfection’ did he use to measure beauty by, a woman or a cat? – Joseph never discussed the standards he used to measure beauty in a woman or in a cat. – I believe you have a poem dedicated or address to Joseph? May I use it in this collection? – In my book Blizzard of One there is a memorial poem to Joseph, you may use it. IN MEMORY OF JOSEPH BRODSKY It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through; That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,

And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable, Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep. What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph, Dear Joseph, those sudden reminds of your having been – the places And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear Like ghost in your wake. What remains pf the self unwinds Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile And the future no more than et cetera et cetera… but fast and forever. 1996

Notes 1

2 3

Bruce King, Derek Walcott’s biographer, writes: ‘Roger Straus, Mark Strand, Susan Sontag and Walcott travelled to Boston for the funeral (16 September) after which they went to Elizabeth Bishop’s where Walcott met Joseph Brodsky; they soon became close friends’. Derek Walcott. A Caribbean Life, OUP, 2000, p. 354. Ibid, p. 531. Mark Strand, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), p. 50. 20

29 D E R E K WA L C O T T Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands, in the Lesser Antilles. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies, he was, in 1957, awarded a Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American Theatre. On his return, he formed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, the first touring ensemble in the West Indies. In 1969 his play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, was produced with great success at the Eugene O’Neill memorial Theatre at Waterford, Connecticut. It was followed by a number of collections of poetry and plays: Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), Remembrance and Pantomime: Two Plays (1980), Selected Poetry (1981), Collected Poems 1948 - 1984 (1986), The Arkansas Testament (1987), Omeros (1990), Three Plays (1992), Poems 1965 -1980 (1992), Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993), The Bounty (1997), What the Twilight Says: Essays (1998), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), and Selected Poems (2007). A prolific writer of poems, plays, and essays, in 1992 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has made his native culture and history into a myth for our age.

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An Interview with Derek Walcott (November 2004, New York) – Roger Straus gave us the biography of you by Bruce King. It is a very impressive work. Did you collaborate with him? – Yes, I answered his questions, but he still got a lot of things wrong. I never actually read it. But he was very industrious and relentless; he talked to lots of people. – But at least you didn’t object. Why do you think Joseph objected to biography so strongly? – To any biography? – Yes, to any biography. And now the Brodsky Estate has told us that no biography can be written for 50 years. – 50 years! – Yes, five o. – They cannot really forbid this. – They can’t, but they do. They asked all of us, Brodsky’s friends and scholars, not to cooperate with anybody planning to write a Brodsky biography. – But they can’t stop it either. Who is this «order» coming from, Ann or Maria? – From both, I think. We saw Ann two days ago and she gave me her blessing for this collection of interviews, seeing it as a kind of substitute for a biography. – Why do you need her permission for these interviews? – I don’t really, but if I am going to quote Brodsky’s poems I will need her agreement. For my interviews, especially with non-Russians, I quote Joseph’s poems only occasionally. I would like to talk to you not so much about your poetry as about your friendship with Joseph, if it is OK with you? Judging by the fact that you still mention Joseph’s name in your poems and your lectures, you miss him. What do you miss most? – Joseph was somebody who lived poetry. He proclaimed it every time I met him. That’s why I admired him. He didn’t do the English

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Les Murray, Derek Walcott, JB & Seamus Heaney, 1988, photo by Valerie Murray

or American thing, you know, of being shy and saying, ‘I am not really a poet’ or, ‘I don’t like to be called a poet’. Any of that nonsense. He was very proud of being called that. He was Brodsky. He was the best example I knew of someone who proclaimed that he was a poet; that’s what he did. He was industrious and you can’t separate the industry of Joseph Brodsky from Joseph Brodsky. I think there’s a kind of attitude in biographies, literary biographies, that can say, ‘Well, you know, W. H. Auden was this, he was a homosexual but he was also …’ whatever. So that there are two lives, a literary life and a personal life. Joseph didn’t make a distinction between his calling and his life. He is the best example I know of someone being a poet in the professional sense. – What is the best way to talk about Joseph: through his poetry or through his life? – I think that Joseph would have the same position that Auden had, that a lot of people have about that, about the work and the man. He was indifferent to the man. That the man did not matter, that the biography did not matter compared to the poetry. That the biography was really of no use and should not be made to stand for the poetry. In other words you couldn’t say, ‘Well I’m not going to read Auden

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because he’s homosexual. And besides, because he’s a homosexual he’s not a good poet or valid poet’ – whatever – anything else that you can apply biographically. There’s nothing emblematic about a poet. His attitude of ignoring the text of the biography is kind of my attitude too. It was very emphatically his. – At the same time when Brodsky was talking about Frost, Cavafy or Tsvetaeva (and I attended many of his lectures and seminars) he would give students relevant biographical facts surrounding the particular poem. So what did the readers of Brodsky’s poetry need, if they didn’t know about his life? – If anyone I think, said that you didn’t have to know anything about the poet; he would say the opposite: you should know quite a lot about the biography of the poet you are reading. But to use it as a critical tool is what is wrong. Admitted, it would be great to know what happened to Cavafy, to be aware that Cavafy was also a homosexual, but, if you’re saying that when I read Cavafy I have to bring any particular fact about biography of the poet to bear upon the particular poem that I happen to be reading, that’s what he objected to. Ultimately, biography is no use. Ultimately it is no use for any criticism of the poem. – At the same time we know that the whole collection of poems ‘The New Stanzas to Augusta’ (1962 -1982) is dedicated and addressed to M. B. And even much later when Joseph was already married he was still writing poems about her; the last one is dated 1992. Without knowing the source of the pain that produced such poetic energy we lose a lot, how these poems are linked, where the centre is? – As a subject, yes, it is a very disturbing subject. Nobody knows that much about all those beauties that have been celebrated throughout the history of literature. They are all dead. We can’t see them. We don’t have the evidence of their beauty. They may have been plug ugly, for all we know. We may well ask, ‘Well, why was he crazy about X?’ But it’s just not relevant. So, in terms of love poetry in particular, a lot of other poetry for that matter, I think, it doesn’t matter. That’s the point. You cannot sum up in any poem the physical features of beauty that it embodies. You are celebrating a phantom. I think that’s what he’s saying; the idea of the beauty, the ideal women, the ideal loves. Any woman. – In 1978 you and Joseph were jurors of the ‘Neustadt International

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Prize for Literature’. What do you remember about that event and your time with Joseph? – I remember, at one point, at a roundtable of judges – Joseph used to recall this himself – I said «I nominate Naipaul and, if you don’t like Naipaul, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom». I pretended to shoot them down. And Joseph cracked up. It was so against the mood, the solemn mood. So many people take poetry very seriously indeed. – Who was Joseph’s candidate at the conference? – Well, I recommended Naipaul, but Joseph recommended Czeslaw Milosz. Because I remember Joseph in New York, I remember it was on a city corner somewhere, I think it must have been New York, and Joseph said to me, ‘We really must do something about getting Milosz into the American Academy’. There was this great Polish poet here and he had no status in America. I thought it was hilarious this, ‘I think we should try and get Czeslaw into the American Academy’. And I said, ‘Obviously we must do what we can’. And he recommended Czeslaw. To me that is so typical of the man. Everybody in Europe was rising in acclaim of Milosz. And he’s saying, we must get him into some kind of club. And both of them won Nobel Prizes. – Yes, that was soon after that meeting. I know that, because Czeslaw got the Nobel Prize in 1980; the nomination took place in February 1978. So within a year and a half Milosz not only got into the American Academy but was also awarded the Nobel Prize. Obviously this was a successful initiative. Talking about this big league of poets, you, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, you were all writing in English. But Joseph was a foreigner. His poems had to be translated into English and we are all aware of the controversy surrounding that, the problems with that. But despite that he managed to get into this big league of English language poets. How did he manage it? Because he was, really, only known in translation. – Well, the translations are his work. There are a lot of poets and all we know of them is through translation. I know Dante and Cavafy in translation. Milosz too. Everything I know that’s not English, I know through translation. I can judge by reputation, by other poets and critics knowing how good Joseph was from very early, through Auden. Auden knew that Joseph was gifted only on the basis of the translations. In Russia they recognized, even very early, the talent that he

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had, the genius that he had. – Can one great poet recognize another great poet through an inadequate translation? – Well, I don’t know about that. Some people told me about certain translations of my poems into Italian or Spanish which are abominable in their view. When we were in Rotterdam, I think, I was asked to read Aleksandr Kushner’s poetry in translation and I found them so poor that Joseph and I spent several hours going over them. And as I unpeeled the form I thought, ‘This guy is dynamite’. But not from what I had in front of me at first. In fact there was another Russian poetry occasion when I was given some poetry to read out and… I never put on a prima donna act but I said, ‘I don’t want to play the prima donna but I cannot read this, because it is so bad. The guy is going to sound so banal. I don’t want to be a part of this. I’m not reading it’. – Yes, I suspect the same thing happened with Tatiana Shcherbina. You translated one of her poems at Rotterdam. You probably retranslated somebody’s translation. It all revolved around ‘cicada’ and ‘CK’. She was playing around with Russian sounds. She kept it. You gave it to her and with your permission we would like to reprint it in an anthology of Russian woman poets. It is such valuable material for scholars; the way you translate it. – There are certain poets who, if you attempt to translate them you’re in an awful lot of trouble. The quality just doesn’t come through, particularly if in the original language they are very lyrical. Because I remember talking to Joseph when we were out walking and I asked him to recite some Pushkin to me. And he said, ‘There’s no point, because you just wouldn’t understand how terrific it is in Russian. It’ll just sound so banal’. And I think the same thing would happen if you tried to do certain poets, especially the Romantics, in Russian translation. Particularly when the poems are short. Maybe the quality of Shelley would come across in Russian. I don’t know. But in the case of Pushkin, it’s like trying to translate water. He didn’t say that, but that’s what he meant. But what drove him, what made for Joseph’s genius, was not just the lyric quality. It was the intelligence. Because he was a poet of phenomenal intelligence. That is the principle at work. And it’s not an English or an American quality.

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– Both Auden and Brodsky are reproached for being too cool, too intelligent, too thinking. Even Solzhenitsyn, lately, has reproached Joseph for that. – That’s what drew Brodsky to the English metaphysical poets. Their lyric quality but also their intelligence, because he is a poet of phenomenal intelligence. – Because Joseph was also, in a way, a didactic poet – as well as giving a lot of advice to everybody in real life – I was going to ask you what you learnt from Joseph’s poetry? You’ve now answered that question of mine; in part at least. – That’s one thing I learned from Joseph; that I respected him for. It was OK to drive along and write but if you’re not thinking in the poem, you’re not really working. I really learnt that from him. That was his principle. Well, one day I showed him a poem called ‘Hurricane’ that got published in The New York Review of Books. And, I suppose I have to say, I did like it at first. It was well done. But then he read it and said; ‘There are no dead people in it!’ So I thought about it and I think what he was saying was that the pitch of the poem was rhetorical, purely rhetorical and descriptive. In other words, to romanticize the fury of a hurricane without the reality of the disaster of the hurricane is simply to write a kind of poem of force. There should have been some section of the poem dealing with the human reality of the damage. – Joseph has written so many poems on the death of friends, of all sorts of people, of a general even. Why does this particular poetic genre hold so great an attraction for him? – I think he was a very formal poet and that is a very formal genre of poetry. A poem of design. The elegy gives you instantaneous design. It’s tragic. It’s also a very classical, Latin, thing. A thing that was expected of poets in the tradition, who will write my elegy? Will I write your elegy first? – It recalls Joseph’s poem, which appeared in the New York subway: ‘Sir, you are tough, and I am tough, / But who will write whose epitaph?’ Do you remember this poem? – Really! I don’t remember that, no. But that’s terrific Joseph was always excited by rhyme; especially rhymes for ‘is’: ‘Now, that I am in Paris / I wish I were where my car is’. He was very proud of that and

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I said, ‘Joseph that is very ordinary’. But he thought it was terrific. Many of his rhymes were real discoveries though. – Derek, you too, rhyme which is against the mainstream of American poetry. What drives you to rhyme? – But I am not an American poet. I think it’s the opposite, not to rhyme, the opposite instinct. It doesn’t have to be actual rhyme. You can feel that this might have rhymed, that it’s going in the same direction. A lot of it was like that. I didn’t rhyme, but that was where the thing was heading. There is a whole generation that has no instinct for rhyme. It is something that has vanished. – In Russian a good rhyme still constitutes a metaphor. Take two rhymes out of context and you can see the connection, the similarity or the opposition – some metonymical connection. It would be a really profound rhyme, a semantic rhyme or even conceptual rhyme. The language just lends itself to this wonderful kind of rhyming. Do you think he was influenced by say, Ogden Nash? Did he read him? – Oh, yes. I think he took a great delight in musicals. He loved Cole Porter for instance. He took a lot of delight in English rhyme. I don’t know much about Russian rhyme, but it seems it is easier. – It’s easier because there are many multi-syllabic words and there are all the grammatical agreements. But would you believe it? Joseph knew all Russian rhymes by heart. And if he repeats Mandelstam’s or Pushkin’s or Akhmatova’s rhyme he’s either sending his greetings to them or he’s telling his readers to go to the poems, so they can see what he’s referring to. ‘I don’t have to say anything more. Go to Mandelstam (or whoever)’. Derek, you shared a liking for many of the same English and American poets with Joseph. What about Russian poets? Did you like the same Russian poets as he did? Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Derzhavin, Barytynsky? – Of course I couldn’t make the distinctions that he could in Russian. He adored Tsvetaeva. – Joseph considered her the greatest poet of the whole 20th century. He would put her at the top. And there is no way you can judge her through the translations, because translating Tsvetaeva is the hardest job of all. But you have read two of his essays on Tsvetaeva. And Rilke ‘A Poet and Prose’ and ‘Footnote to a Poem’ which is a line-by-line analysis of her ‘New Year poem’ so that you can have some idea of the

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way in which Tsvetaeva wrote poetry. And, Derek, do you have any idea how Joseph would arrive at a line, how he would go from line to line or even more, how he would progress from the beginning to the end of a poem. Do you have any idea of the way he would technically construct a poem? When you yourself have worked on the translation of his poems you’ve almost re-written them. – Once I was living at Christina Armstrong’s house. She was away and Barry Ruben and I were there and Joseph and I were working one day on a poem. So we worked on it together and at the end of three or four hours the outcome was not successful. At one point he said, ‘fuck me, fuck you, and fuck everybody’. He just stopped because it was so agonizing. But what we tried to do and what he respected (I tried to do it as well) was to keep the shape and the meter, everything, structurally as close as possible to the Russian text. You can’t really do it but you can try hard… And, in fact he didn’t mind (and this really was astonishing). He didn’t mind if you changed a metaphor. – He didn’t mind if you changed a trope? – No, and I thought that was a little astonishing. But I think what one was trying to do was to follow his intent as much as to copy him. In other words if you’re coming across with a certain metaphor and for the sake of the rhyme you have to change it, that was OK with him, if the intent was the same, so long as you found a parallel equivalent, rewriting it almost. And he would do that himself or suggest it. I think he wanted to get an English poem. Joseph had tremendous admiration for English poetry. I think that, poet for poet, he didn’t think it was richer, but as a language to work in he found it very exciting. And the people who criticized the results are not fair in the sense that even the distortion of syntax of a Russian poet writing in English has to be taken into account. – At the end of his life JB said: ‘I am convinced, in parenthesis, that what I’ve been doing ( i. e. writing poetry) is to His (if he does exist) liking, because otherwise there would be no reason for Him to keep me around’. That is exactly the attitude that Dante had to his poetry. Did you ever discuss Dante with him? Did his perception of Dante change with the years? – I don’t remember our discussing Dante in particular. He must have come up in conversation a couple of times, but not really…

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– Robert Lowell was obsessed with Dante and knew Dante. Joseph once visited Lowell and they talked the whole evening about Dante. Joseph was so glad to have someone, at last, to discuss Dante with. But you yourself, what is your attitude to Dante and his poetry? Has he influenced you in any way and has your perception of Dante changed with the years? – No (long pause for thought). No, what I think has happened is that I have become more and more aware of the roughness, of the coarseness of the language, the texture of the language in Dante. It is not based on elegance. It’s based on experience, immediate experience. – The fact that Joseph said, ‘I hope that what I’m doing is pleasing to Him’. This sounds very Christian but most Russian writers and critics would not accept Brodsky as a Christian poet, despite the fact that he wrote a poem almost every year at Christmas. Jewish critics, on the other hand, would not accept Joseph as a Jewish poet. So, where does he stand on the spiritual level? – He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling. I share that view. He never exploited his Jewishness. He never played the victim. He detested people who played the victim and whoever wrote as a victim. I think he thought that was too easy. A clear description of Brodsky is of someone who has an almost medieval devotion to his craft and everything that goes with that, in terms of architecture of the craft, the design of the craft. A lot of the poems are designed like cathedral interiors, the font, the arches, the whole thing the whole concept of the poem as cathedral. That devotion is to poetry as the hermetic craft and it’s what you’d find in Donne too. And what he kept going was the concept of perception as a part of intellect, not merely an emotional reaction. – Have you visited his grave in Venice? – No – Would you like to go to Russia? – It’s a pity Joseph isn’t there. I really don’t think I’d enjoy Russia. I’ve got the memory of Joseph. I’d rather not go, in particular because of Joseph. He was like a brother. There was the funeral, the memorial services. Maybe I’ll get over that. But I don’t think so. Maybe I’m saying the opposite of what I mean. Maybe I’d like to see St Petersburg. – How did Joseph handle the last part of his drama, refusing to visit

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Russia despite the many invitations from the mayor, the governor, of St Petersburg; the honors he was offered? – There’s the sociological thing about honours but it’s not a matter of refusing to forgive. The people who offered him the honours never persecuted him in the first place. It was maybe just too predictable, too easy, to do the 1 - 2 - 3 of saying we hurt you, now all is forgiven, come back home. It would have been kind of encouraging the whole system and what they did. – Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin apologized officially for what happened. – Because they were not responsible, as they saw it. I wish he might have said yes to go back to St Petersburg but, on the other hand, I have seen the depth of the wounding of Joseph when he was going absolutely crazy, trying to reach his father and the mother. They would not let him get there. How do you forgive a country when it prevents you from seeing your dying father – even if it expresses remorse? He may have said that’s the system, any system. The big cliché of going home being greeted by welcoming hands would have been a denial of his entire life. And there was no reason to go back. His parents were both dead, he may have had a son there, but he wasn’t going back to anything. When he did want to get back it was impossible. What could he have done? Gone to the border, disguised himself and done some sort of James Bond bullshit? It was evil. And it was the bureaucracy that did it, the petty tyranny of clerk after clerk after clerk. It was just as Hannah Arendt says, ‘It is the furthest evil can go’. The tyranny of the twentieth century. The banality of evil. The blandness of it. When your enemy is not a single tyrant Genghis Khan or Stalin but the bureaucracy you can’t say, ‘Well. The son of a bitch has it in for me!’ No, nobody in particular is to blame; it’s just the system. And you have to be incredibly strong to face that. He was a phenomenally strong man. – You have dedicated several poems to Joseph and a collection of your essays ‘What the Twilight Says’ (1998). Do you have any recent poems which you have written with Joseph in mind? – You can choose something from my long poem ‘The Prodigal’,1 Joseph was in my mind when I was writing that poem.

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4. II Envy of status; this is how it grew: every day in Milan, en route to class, I passed my rigid, immortal friend, the General, on his morose green horse, still there on weekends. The wars were over but he would not dismount. Had he died, catapulted in some charge in some euphonious battle? The bronze charger was lathered, streaked with sweat, in the summer sun. We had no such memorials on the island. Our only cavalry were the charging waves, pluming with spume, and tossing plunging necks. Who knows what war he fought in and whose shot tumbled his whinnying steed? Envy of fountains. Poor hero on his island in the swirl of traffic, denied the solace of an umbrageous linden or chestnut with bright medals through its leaves. Envy of columns. Calm. Envy of bells. Peace widened the Sunday avenue in Milan. Left-handed light at morning on the square, the Doumo with long shadows where clamouring bells shake exaltation from blue, virginal air, squaring off corners, de Chirico parallels – and where the soundlessly snorting, big-balled horse whose head, lowered and drooping, means the death of its rider, holds a far longer breath, longer than ours in our traffic island. The widening love of Italy growing stronger against my will with sunlight in Milan… For we still expect presences, no matter where – to sit again at a table watching the luminous clatter of the great mall in Milan; there! was that him, Joseph in an olive raincoat, like a leaf on a clear stream with a crowd of leaves from the edge to the centre and sinking into them?

Almost Medieval Devotion to his Craft

6.II White walls set back amidst a mutter of birches the house kept its cold secret – it had been a cultural outpost in the old regime, when the East was a colony of Russia. But there was no partition in the sunshine of the small rusty garden that a crow crossed with no permit; instead, the folded echo of interrogation, of conspiracy, surrounded it, although its open windows were steamed envelopes. This was another empire, though a cold, not a hot one, and its relic still gave me a November shudder. The shadow of a cane-factory wheel shed by the pines grew on the rough lawn. I sat on a plank bench by the wooden table and listened to the sound of papers being shuffled by an inquiry into the parasitism of poetry by the dry-lipped leaves. Then through the thinned trees I saw a wraith of smoke, which I believed came from the house, but every smoker carries his own wreath; then I saw that this morning wreath was yours. Another empire was finished. This time, Russia’s. Between the sighs of leaves shone the bones of birches. I imagine your phantom in the alders, listening, or, as the green phrase went: under den Linden. For History here is the covering-over of corpses, not only in trenches of quicklime, but also the dandruff of pigeon-drops in the stone-wings of statues composing minuets in the open, scoring sparrow-notes on the page of a cloud, the flecks of blossom on enamelled meadows the pages of spring, a fusillade of skylarks in the smoking sky and the screams of lilies harvested into a vase, a sky composed of bandages and cotton and the needles of sick spires, it is the music

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heard in the cold March through the black bars of lindens by a remembering Jew, it is not only the cloud but what is hidden under the cloud, under the page, like the sinuous shadows of a sunken barge in a sparkling canal, to the sound of a shovel scraping over and tapping a small mound of error which white flowers sprinkle to the sound of leaves turning over and over in libraries in a new spring.

Notes 1

Derek Walcott, The Prodigal, NY, FS&G, 2005. On the cover of the book we read: ‘The Prodigal’ is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, from Pescara to Milan, from Germany to Cartagena. But always in ‘the music of memory, water’ abide St. Lucia, the author’s birthplace, and the living sea. In his new book, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountings, train stations and statuary, a place where the New World is an idea, a «wavering map», and where History subsumes the natural history of his «unimportantly beautiful» island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in the betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which he must return for the sustenance of life’.

30 JONAT H A N A A RON Jonathan Aaron teaches literature and writing at Emerson College in Boston. He received his B. A. in literature at the University of Chicago and his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of three books of poems, Second Sight (1982), Corridor (1992), and Journey to the Lost City (2006). Married and the father of a grown - up stepson, he is also the guardian of a strong-willed sheepdog found in a rainstorm.

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An Interview with Jonathan Aaron (November 2004, Boston) – Joseph dedicated a poem ‘Ex Voto’ (1983) to you.1 Do you like the poem? Do you know anything about the circumstances of the dedication? – I like the poem very much. It’s not a translation, but a poem he wrote directly in English. In it, he says, ‘The farther one goes, the less / one is interested in the terrain’. That line says something about how Joseph was looking at the world at the time. He loved being in America, and he came to love being an American. But he was always completely a Russian and – it goes without saying – devoted to Russia. Being in exile weighed on him. This was something we’d talk about from time to time. ‘Ex Voto’ is about what it’s like to grow into exile – a wearisome and painful process. – How would you characterize your relationship with Joseph? – I can’t characterize my relationship with him. We met in March 1973 and, as it happened, quickly became close. Joseph spent Christmas 1973 with me and my parents. In the years that followed, we saw each other quite often. When he wasn’t traveling, we’d talk on the phone several times a week. Joseph advised me, lectured me, was immensely helpful and supportive of my attempts to write. But if I hadn’t been a writer – if I’d been a plumber or a car mechanic or an accountant – things wouldn’t have been any different. For me, he became like an older brother. – Do you remember your first meeting? – Very clearly. His Selected Poems had just been published by Penguin,2 and he was on a reading tour. He was due to read at Williams College, in northeast Massachusetts, where I was teaching at the time. I was asked to read the translations of Joseph’s poems at the reading. I read a poem in English, Joseph recited the original in Russian. And so it went. The reading lasted more than 2 hours. The audience consisted of college students and at least 200 Russians and Russian speakers who had come from as far away as New York and Boston to hear him. After the reading, Joseph came back to my house for the

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kind of party that always followed poetry readings in those days, with students and some faculty members. Joseph and I stayed up after everyone had left. We didn’t talk about literature. We talked about the War, about German and Russian aircraft and tanks, about uniforms, and of course about strategy and tactics. And he played with my two cats. We had a mutual interest in such things, and that mutual interest turned out to be a bridgehead to our friendship. If had tried to get him to talk about literary stuff, I rather think we might never have seen each other again. – Were you influenced by him? – In a poetic sense, I can’t say. But in a human sense, absolutely. For one thing, he taught me about the realities of 20 th-century Russia. When I met Joseph, my understanding was that Lenin was a good guy who was betrayed by Stalin, Trotsky was a kind of rebel angel, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. That kind of thinking sickens me now. Joseph never preached or harangued about Soviet totalitarianism. He talked intensely about what he’d seen. He talked about his parents. He talked about his absent friends. He told me to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s

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memoir. What an education that was! – In your essay, ‘Song of the Atom’,3 which you wrote shortly after Joseph’s death, you called him ‘one of the great writers of our time’. – Obviously, Joseph was one of the primary Russian poets of the 20 th century. But he also was one of the most original and forceful writers of literary prose in English in the 20 th century. How he managed to do that will be the subject of innumerable future PhD theses. He’s a writer with an essential identity in two languages and two literary cultures. The only other remotely comparable example – to my mind, anyway – is Conrad. And perhaps Milosz. Surely, his Russian-ness informs the essays he wrote in English – essays that are among the most original written by anyone in my language in the last 50 years. And I’m equally sure his American experience informs the poems he wrote – I’d suppose from the late 1970s on. – In Russia, Brodsky is perceived as the last in a line of great 20 th century Russian poets starting with Blok, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Akhmatova. In the West Brodsky as a poet is mainly known through translations. Yet he attained a position of eminence and influence, particularly in the United States. How might you explain this? – As you know, Joseph’s formal education ended when he was in his early teens. But his learning was prodigious. Idiosyncratic, but vast. He approached whatever he wrote about or talked about from unexpected, often totally original perspectives. In a formal debate or at the dinner table, he was both incredibly learned and entirely down-toearth. Some of the preeminent writers of his time – Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz – were his pals. These guys admired him, and they liked him immensely, too. – You know how mercilessly the English poets attacked him… – Somebody sent me the scurrilous piece by Craig Raine that was published in The Financial Times (of all places!).4 Raine’s timing speaks for itself. As for other poets in England and America who attacked Joseph about one thing and another, I suppose one could look them up to see what they said. But why bother? Who cares? Tentwenty years from now is anyone going to be reading what they had to say? – Did you make notes or recordings of your conversations with Joseph?

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– Never. I’ve never done that with any of my friends. The idea of spending the evening talking with someone and rushing home to write it all down for posterity strikes me as – distasteful. – Did you translate any of Joseph’s poems? – No. In his Collected Poems in English, my name is listed as cotranslator (with Joseph) of several poems. But all I did was help him with little details: this word instead of that one, take out a comma here, put in another there – that sort of thing. He asked me to go over the manuscript of Watermark, his long meditation on Venice. Of course, it’s much more than just a ‘long meditation on Venice’. I think it’s a key, if not the key, to understanding the poems Joseph wrote during the last years of his life. But anyway… We met in London at Diana Myers’ house to discuss it. I had prepared many suggestions, but as we talked I realized – suddenly – that my approach was all wrong. The manuscript needed hardly any editing at all. Joseph had written Watermark in English. His English had its own distinctive sound. It was English, masterful English, with a Russian accent, which is one of the Watermark’s most important characteristics. From then on, whenever Joseph would ask me to look over a poem of his that he himself had translated, I always mindful to make as few suggestions as possible. – Your view is close to Daniel Weissbort’s policy of ‘creative non-intervention.’ – Absolutely. That’s the right phrase for it. – Did American poets learn anything from Brodsky? – Maybe the question should be, ‘Can American poets learn anything from Brodsky?’ I feel quite sure, for example, that his friends – Walcott, Heaney, Milosz, Paz, and the Americans Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and Mark Strand (to name a few) – would say ‘yes’. Though I wouldn’t presume to guess why they’d say ‘yes’, I imagine it would have something to do with the odds that Joseph had had to overcome to become the person he was. His commitment to poetry, and then also to essays, was indomitable – and exemplary. Anyway, my hunch is that sooner or later young poets, who must study their peers and forebears in order to grow as poets, will read Joseph’s poems in English and learn from doing so because he pushed English to (and sometimes beyond) its limits, just has he did Russian in the originals. And for that, among other reasons, his poems will prove to

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be a factor in the literature of our time. Joseph took terrific risks in translating his poems into English. The results were, to say the least, controversial. Susan Sontag remarked – after Joseph died; she’d never have said it to his face – that his poems in English were ‘ruins’ of the originals. As far as I know, she didn’t read Russian, so maybe she was quoting someone else. At any rate, I think she was completely off-base in what she said – though I don’t know Russian, and wouldn’t dream of saying that the poems in English can compare with the poems in Russian. My sense is that often the poems in English aren’t so much translations as they are – to use Robert Lowell’s term for his own versions of poems from other languages – imitations of the originals. Of the 300- plus in the Collected Poems in English, I’d argue that at least 60 are first-rate free-standing poems in English. I also see Joseph’s Collected as the record of a Russia writer’s adventure with the English language. Joseph explored it, tested it, argued with it as he pushed it to do things no one had asked it to do since maybe the late 16 th and early 17 th centuries. No wonder John Donne was one of his household gods. – Did Brodsky achieve any kind of harmony between his Jewish origins and his Christian outlook? – I was never aware of there being any disharmony between Jewishness and Christian-ness on his part. He certainly never made a big deal out of it. The word ‘disharmony’ in Joseph’s case applies, I would think, to his being at odds with the world. But that’s a given, isn’t it. Who isn’t in a more or less constant state of disharmony with things? – Was Brodsky a religious poet? – If ‘religious’ denotes a state of not knowing that one would like to overcome, then all real poetry is religious. Sure, Joseph is a religious poet, but not in any specifically orthodox or doctrinal sense. Wislawa Szymborska in her Nobel Prize speech said that poetic inspiration comes from the continuous sense of ‘I don’t know’. For all genuine poets, that’s the long and the short of it. Anyway, Joseph knew a lot, and everything he knew prompted him to push toward what he felt he didn’t know. In his essay on Robert Frost, ‘On Grief and Reason’, Joseph says of Frost, ‘One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonetheless in the grip of a different gravitational force: outward. The fuel, though, is still the same: grief and reason’. Referring to Frost, Joseph was also speaking of himself and of his fate as a person and as an

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JB, Jonathan Aaron and Mark Strand in Provincetown, Mass. Autumn 1973 (from Mark Strand’s archive)

artist, propelled centrifugally outward into the unknown. – How did you learn about Joseph’s death? – By telephone. I think about that moment almost every day, and with all due respect I’d prefer not to say anything more about it. – I know you wrote a poem dedicated to Joseph. May I use it here? – Sure. Maybe I should say a few things about it. Its template is a poem by Valéry Larbaud. I don’t really know who’s talking in the poem: maybe it’s Joseph; maybe it’s me thinking of Joseph. If the poem is confusing, that’s okay by me. Bushmills is a brand of Irish whiskey Joseph was particularly fond of. OFFERING Some evening, after I’ve been dead a few years, when the cabs are busy sideswiping each other in the rain just as they’re doing right now (a few things won’t have changed that much), maybe I’ll be the sensation of a cool hand

on your forehead as you drive across what’s left of the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and look up, suddenly not yourself, at the tall black monuments stacked this way and that in the sulphurous air. Or maybe I’ll be the radio glow’s low-volume sibilance of words and music you’ve been hearing but not really listening to, or the surmise starting to come to you as you take a right onto 6th Avenue, a moment of silence in the storm carrying headlong more or less everybody toward the latest spectacles of love and corruption. And yet, and yet – later that night, for one reason or another, maybe you’ll think of me and spill a few willy-nilly drops from your shot of Bushmills onto the floor in memory of my first steps into eternity5 .

Notes 1

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This poem was written in English and first published in The Time Literary Supplement, June 26, 1987. Included in Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English (New York, FS&G, 2000), p. 318. Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems, Foreword by W. H. Auden, Translated and Introduced by George L. Kline (Penguin, 1973). Jonathan Aaron, ‘Song of the Atom’. Remembering Joseph Brodsky. Poets and Writers, vol. 24, no. 3, 1996, pp. 16 - 21. See, Christophe Reid, ‘Great American Disaster’, London Review of Books, 8 December, 1988; Craig Raine, ‘A Reputation Subject to Inflation’, Financial Times, 16/17 November, 1996, p. xix. For a different evaluation of Brodsky’s English, see Michael Hoffman, ‘On Absenting oneself’, The Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 1997, pp. 6 - 8. Jonathan Aaron, ‘Offering’, The New York Review of Book, vol. XLIII, no. 10, June 6, 1996; included in Journey To The Lost City (Ausable Press, 2006).

31 W I L L I A M WA D S W O R T H William Wadsworth served as executive director of The Academy of American Poets from 1989 to 2001, where among many other programs he created National Poetry Month and the award-winning website Poets.org. His poems and essays have been published in the Tin House, The Paris Review, The New Yale Review, The New Republic, The Grand Street, and The Best American Poetry 1994, among other publications. Mr. Wadsworth is currently serving as special consultant to the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund and teaches poetry at Columbia University and Purchase College. He is also a contributing editor of Tin House and The Paris Review, and serves on the advisory boards of The Frost Place, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Archipelago Press. Mr. Wadsworth attended Joseph Brodsky’s poetry seminar at Columbia University in 1984, at which time Brodsky wrote, ‘In thirteen years of teaching in this country I’ve never dealt with intelligence as concentrated as is the case with Mr. William Wadsworth’.

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A T U R B U L E N T A F FA I R W I T H ENGL I SH L A NGUAGE

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An Interview with William Wadsworth (19 November 2003, New York) – When did you meet Joseph for the first time? – I met Joseph in the fall of 1984 when I was the graduate student at Columbia University and attended his seminar. –Tell me about your own and the other students’ reaction to his manner of delivering his lectures. – Joseph was certainly unlike any other professor or teacher of poetry I had had, and I think everyone in the class recognized that he was remarkably different from the other teachers, most of whom were poets themselves. Joseph projected a kind of mental energy and a kind of rigorousness that was not common. He challenged the students in ways that they were not used to being challenged, and he treated poetry as a more serious endeavor than most American students ever dreamed it could be. Some students reacted strongly against his attitude, while others, like myself, thought he was the most stimulating embodiment of poetry they had ever encountered. – Brodsky used to speak emphatically and uninhibitedly both in his poetry and with friends. Did this manner attract people to him or the reverse? – Both, depending on the person and the occasion. Joseph was tremendously charismatic, but he also came across in many ways as an absolutist, and was frequently given to outrageous statements, even insults. If you couldn’t roll with the punches, if you disagreed with him and your skin was thin, Joseph’s manner could seem overbearing. When asked by a student about the repression of leftists in Central America and whether this wasn’t comparable to Soviet repression in Eastern Europe (this was in the 1980s when the violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua was at its height), Joseph dismissed the question with one sentence: ‘I don’t give a damn about that part of the world’. On the other hand, one could see Joseph’s tendency to be outrageous as evidence of his uncompromising honesty, as a necessary expression of his iconoclasm, his refusal to bow to any shibboleth.

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He had a terrific sense of humor: irreverent, sardonic, self-mocking. He was expert at seeing through the emperor’s new clothes. One day at Columbia he charged into the classroom, cup of coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, puffing like a locomotive, and said, ‘You won’t believe what happened to me last night… I met a god’. He proceeded to recount the story of having attended a reception the previous evening for the Dalai Lama, and made the observation that the most remarkable thing about the ‘god’s’ appearance was the vaccination mark on his arm. Nevertheless, it turned out that Joseph and the god got along well, and at the end of the event, the god gave Joseph a special farewell. As Joseph put it, ‘And would you believe it, at the end he came over to me – my humble self! – and embraced me’. A particularly worshipful female student exclaimed, ‘Joseph, it must have been your aura!’ Without missing a beat, Joseph responded, ‘No, I think it was my tie. You see, my tie was the same color as his robe’. – What do you know about Brodsky’s work as Poet Laureate of the USA and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress?

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– The consultant position had existed for decades as a temporary appointment and modest sinecure for eminent poets. Then, in the 1980s, Congress added the highfalutin title, ‘Poet Laureate’ which most poets considered pretentious, even though the apparent motive was to bring more public notice to the position, and consequently to the art form. Until Joseph was appointed, the poets who held the title continued to treat it as mostly a figurehead position. Joseph changed all that. His inaugural lecture, ‘An Immodest Proposal’, re-defined the laureateship as a position of public service and a platform for literary advocacy. His proposal was a mass distribution program that would put poetry anthologies, for free, into the hands of millions of Americans by all sorts of means – in hotels, on trains and planes, at post offices, etc. This happened when I was executive director of The Academy of American Poets, and it was a terrific project, one that perfectly suited the Academy’s mission to promote poetry in American culture, and we soon formed a partnership. One of the remarkable statements Joseph made in the course of his speech was that the three greatest contributions that America has made to world culture are its jazz music, its cinema, and its modern poetry. For the Academy, and for poets all over the U.S., this was a heaven-sent validation of the importance of American poetry. Joseph had taken an obscure appointment and turned it suddenly into a highly visible public post: he had made poetry ‘news’. In the U. S., where poetry is generally considered an arcane art form at best, this was an extraordinary turn of events. Suddenly there was a great deal of excitement in the press over this Russian poet laureate. Very ironically, it had taken a Russian to affirm to the American people that their literature mattered, that Americans in the 20th century had produced some of the finest poetry ever written. With that speech, Joseph initiated a transformation of the public perception of poetry’s role in American culture. – What do you think gave Joseph such moral authority to write a poem like ‘I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages’ with the concluding lines: ‘Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx, / only gratitude will be gushing from it’? Am I right to assume that such lines are unthinkable in the context of contemporary American poetry? – Not to take anything away from Joseph’s originality, not to take

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anything away from his innate vision and power as a poet, but I did attend a reading once where Joseph was introduced by the poet Charles Simic, who recounted the story of Joseph’s childhood, persecution, and exile, and concluded, ‘No poet could ever wish for more’. Miroslav Holub once said that when things were really bad in Eastern Europe, ‘it is a very poetic situation’. It is a terrible thing to say, but Joseph was blessed with ‘a very poetic situation’. No American poet has had the opportunity to enjoy such terrible historical circumstances. Consequently, Joseph could speak with a moral authority, the authority of one who defied institutionalized evil and suffered the consequences, an air of authority that would hardly be possible for an American contemporary. – This echoes Akhmatova’s famous reaction to Brodsky’s trial, ‘what a biography they are creating for our ginger-haired boy!’ But Joseph, however, was very much against biography as such: he would insist that a poet’s biography is in his vowels and consonants. Isn’t there some contradiction here? – Contradiction is the essence of poetry. Yeats said that it is out of the ‘quarrel with ourselves’ that we make poetry. Frost said that contradiction is fundamental even to prosody, that if the rhythm doesn’t contradict the meter you don’t have a good poem. If Joseph had been the sort of poet who said: ‘Look at my life, look at what I’ve done and experienced, that’s why I am a great poet’, the actions and experiences and their significance would have been rendered nil by the egoism of the statement. The very fact that he led the life he led, and believed what he believed, demanded that he make language the absolute priority, one that negates the incidentals of biography. Poets deal in paradoxes, and this was Joseph’s paradox, just as his insistence to the Soviet judge that poetry had nothing to do with politics or social responsibility was in itself a political act with social consequences. – Many of Brodsky’s greatest works are homage to predecessors, John Donne, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Cavafy and Hardy, yet we find little trace of any anxiety of influence, why? Is it because they belong to other cultures? – From T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom, critics have made too much of ‘killing the fathers’. My own impression was that for Joseph, language

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subsumed time, and all poets were therefore contemporaries, not fathers and sons. The young poet’s task is not to commit patricide, but to seek his or her most congenial company among the shades. Joseph was an autodidact and, as such, I suspect he didn’t have to suffer the burden of a tradition academically defined; I suspect he felt somewhat isolated at the outset and more than welcomed, one might say, the ‘inspiration of influence’. – Why was Brodsky so taken with WH Auden’s poetry? – Well, of course there’s the story of Brodsky arriving in Austria and saying, ‘Take me to my leader’. Auden played the midwife to Joseph’s passage out of Mother Russia and into the New World. Auden also, like Joseph, was a virtuoso and a wunderkind, an extraordinary prodigy among his generation of English poets. And he, like Joseph, had made a similar, if uncoerced, transition to the New World, and likewise to New York City. But more than anything, I believe it was Auden’s poetic stance, and its philosophical and political implications, that Joseph was most drawn to. First, Auden was a thoroughly modern poet who more or less rejected the modernist dispensation of vers libre, who disproved any presumption that to be modern required disposing with traditional verse forms. But there’s a deeper reason than prosody. The first day of class, the first thing Joseph did was to put a line from Yeats and a line from Auden next to each other on the blackboard. It soon became clear whom he thought to be the superior poet. Joseph had no patience for Yeats’s sentimental nationalism and elaboration of occult systems, just as he detested Pound’s Fascism, and, one suspects, Eliot’s monarchism and anti-Semitism. The modern poets he most admired – Auden, Hardy, Frost – can be seen as coming out of a tradition of classic English liberalism, in which the highest value is placed not on myth, system, theology, or ideology, but on the individual, on the intrinsic value and truth of human subjectivity. For this reason he was drawn to Shestov, just as for Auden the key philosopher was Kierkegaard. I believe this is also one of the things that attracted Joseph to America: the American tradition of ‘rugged individualism’, which Frost for instance so perfectly embodied. – Was Joseph a good publicist for Russian poetry? – This is an interesting question, and one that goes to the heart

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of Joseph’s paradoxical sensibility. On the one hand, for American poets and readers, he embodied Russian poetry in a way that could not have been more forceful, more remarkable, more influential. On the other, he was acutely aware of the problem of Russian poetry in English translation. While he clearly felt it was essential that his American students know Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva, he openly deplored the quality of the extant translations of their work. In his essay on Mandelstam he notes that Auden couldn’t appreciate why Mandelstam, on the evidence of translations, was considered a great poet. He goes on to say that if English-speaking readers want to know what Mandelstam sounds like, they’re better off reciting Auden, Yeats, or Frost than reciting Mandelstam in translation. In his literature courses, Joseph had no qualms about presenting, and praising, English translations of, for instance, Rilke, Propertius, Cavafy, Milosz and Herbert, etc. – but he never, as far as I know, treated the Russian poets. He couldn’t bear the fact that nearly all translations violated the prosodic structures of the originals. Moreover, there was his critical relationship to the Russian poets who had managed to thrive inside the Soviet system, particularly Evtushenko, whom he loathed. Yet for most American readers, prior to Joseph’s arrival on the scene, Voznesensky and Evtushenko were thought to represent contemporary Russian dissident poetry at its most powerful. Once Joseph arrived, one felt forced to choose between Brodsky and these slightly older poets, which made the whole notion of ‘Russian poetry’ suddenly more problematic. – Perhaps you would like to say something about Brodsky’s poetry in English? – Of course the problem of Russian poetry in translation became particularly acute in his own work because he insisted the poems retain their prosodic structures. The result was that many American poets and critics found most of the poems in English mediocre at best. The poet and critic Robert Hass compared reading Brodsky’s poems in translation to touring the ruins of a building one is told was once a beautiful edifice. On the other hand, his essays, which were written in English, have been generally acclaimed as works of genius in their own right, magnificently composed in spite of the fact that they were written in a second-hand language.

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– To what extent did Brodsky’s poems written in English differ from his self-translations? – I am not a Brodsky scholar, nor am I a critic or an expert on translation. That said, I would say that they don’t seem so different, which is telling. Joseph had a turbulent affair with the English language. The very fact that he wrote poems in English at all is surprising, though maybe not so when one considers the active hand he took in the translations. In either case, he wanted to pay homage to his adoptive language, to the poets in that language who meant most to him (for instance the elegy to Lowell, which echoes Auden’s famous elegy for Yeats), he wanted to test himself ‘to the max’ against the language, he wanted to learn it inside out and, insofar as possible, to master it. Yet, at the same time, he was terribly insecure about his English, acutely aware that his Russian accent often made it difficult to understand what he was saying, especially when his mind went into overdrive and he began to speak very rapidly. The poems written in English are usually quite short, and often strive for the simplicity of a sung lyric – with titles like ‘song’, ‘tune’, ‘blues’, etc. Nothing is more difficult to do well in English poetry, especially when the lines are short, say a rhymed dimeter or trimeter. The ear must be pitch-perfect, and Joseph’s ear for English was, naturally enough, not. As a musician, he was more than equal to good English prose, but not to the purest form of lyric. He especially got in trouble when he tried for something idiomatic, for instance the poem ‘Blues’, which is truly embarrassingly bad. The same is too often true of his tendency to use English slang in his translations, to ‘rough them up’, as one translator put it. On the other hand, it was an approach that worked well for light verse, where the stakes are lower (his children’ book, Discovery, is a delight), and his poems in English can be wonderful when the lines are longer and more relaxed. One of his loveliest poems of all is the poem to his daughter, but note the ironic last line: ‘Hence, these somewhat wooden lines in our common language’. This is a perfect instance of Joseph’s flip side: his tendency to self-deprecation. I guess the fact that the poems in English don’t sound much better than the Russian poems in translation (at least to me) says it all. And yet, remark the willingness to take great risks in even trying. Joseph wanted to do all he could make his ear for

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English as fine as it could be. – How was Brodsky received by the poets of your generation? – When Joseph arrived in this country, Auden was considered old fashioned by many of my contemporaries, and was largely ignored. The Vietnam War was still on, the student Left was being hounded by the government, anti-American sentiment was running high, and the verse that was fashionable was mostly free verse. Traditional versification was seen by many as an expression of the academic establishment at a time when students mistrusted all ‘establishments’. On the one hand, Joseph was a heroic figure, the paradigm of the dissident writer, a tremendously romantic figure who had stood up to the Soviet ‘establishment’, paid the consequences, and prevailed nonetheless. On the other hand, he praised the culture that had adopted him, had no sympathy for the Left, and dogmatically rejected free verse as ‘wine without a bottle: a blot on the tablecloth’. To his detractors, he was arrogant, reactionary, and ignorant of the American modernist tradition. But to others, he was a breath – more like a hurricane – of fresh air. He did a great deal to bring attention to Eastern European poets, especially the Polish poets, and he catalyzed in a major way a resurgence of interest in traditional versification among the younger poets of the 1980s (my own generation). His disparagement of the modernism of Pound and W. C. Williams, and more so his high regard for Auden and Frost, made an indelible mark on many younger poets. The moral seriousness he brought to the art form made a good deal of ‘postmodernist’ verse look frivolous. Of course the endless dialectic of the strict and the free, of the ivory tower and the open road, is not new, and has driven American poetry since Dickinson and Whitman. But Joseph enlivened the debate. – Considering that most Western readers know Brodsky’s work mainly through translations, how did he succeed in becoming a member of the so-called ‘a big league’ of poets, such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Les Murray and a few others? – Paz didn’t write in English, Paz was one of them. Milosz didn’t write in English. With all due respect, I think it is a false question. A better question would be why is it that no of American poet is part of this league. – Can you answer this why?

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– Not really, except to say that poets simply don’t play the same central cultural role in America that they play in other countries. No one looks to poets as public intellectuals or moral authorities. It’s not a question of the quality of the poetry, more a question of the quality of the readership, and the nature of the society at large, which has always mistrusted the role of intellectuals and artists, and arguably, for that matter, anything so immaterial as language itself. This may have to do with the Puritan legacy, it may have to do with American materialism, and it may also have to do with the variousness and relative youth of the culture, which is a blend of so many different peoples and histories. Because poets in the U. S. are marginal to the culture, they cannot speak, or write, with the same cultural authority as the ‘big-leaguers’. Our big-leaguers are movie people, rock musicians, athletes, and billionaires. – In Russian Brodsky has revolutionized the tradition of philosophical poetry by introducing a Donnean complex yet serious wit and various forms of poetic stanzas. Is this visible in the English translations? – Yes. The brilliance of the mind, its metaphysical cast, and the degree of prosodic invention, remain, in part due to Joseph’s firm hand on the translations. It’s the music, the accuracy of the ear for English, that too often fails. But Joseph himself said that the virtue of poetry in translation was that of a classical sculpture with its head and limbs missing: the reader’s imagination must engage in the task of re-inventing what’s missing. Nothing compares with the experience of listening to Joseph recite his poems in Russian; the music is all there, minus the sense. Reading the translations, one must try to hear the cadence, the pitch and timbre, of Joseph reciting in Russian, to get some idea of the lyric power of the poems. – What is his place in American poetry? Was he an English or a Russian poet? – Joseph was without a doubt a Russian poet. There is no poet like him, and no poetry like his, in the English language. On the other hand, one might ask, to the extent he wrote in English, was he an American writer or an English writer? To this I would say that, in spite of the fact that he made his home in America, Joseph’s sensibility was in many respects more English than American. It may be most accurate to say that his adoptive culture was New England.

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When Joseph would leave New York and wasn’t headed for Europe, the place he went to was his second home in Massachusetts near the Vermont border, in the very heart of New England. New England is a region of America with its own distinct history, which is reflected in its name: the ties to English Puritanism go deep. I don’t think of Joseph as someone fascinated with, or well acquainted with, the American West or the American South. He had no time for the free verse tradition, the modernism of Pound and Williams, the West Coast legacy of Rexroth and the Beats, the influence of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry that informs so much American poetry in the twentieth century. He apparently didn’t have much use for the strong vein of French influence in American modernism, from the symbolists to the surrealists, so present in poets from Eliot and Stevens to Merwin and Ashbery. Between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman – the mother and father of American poetry – Joseph chose Emily categorically. The poets he was most sympathetic to who wrote in English were either ‘New Englanders’ – Dickinson, Frost, Lowell, Wilbur – or they were English (Hardy, Donne, Crashaw, etc.). Auden, the poet who influenced him most, was an Englishman transplanted to America – quite literally, a ‘new Englander’. To push the point further, Joseph’s chosen city, New York – in spite of its cosmopolitanism – is historically the most anglophiles of American cities, one that still retains its roots in Toryism. So, from an American perspective, I would say that Joseph was a ‘New English’ poet. But first and foremost, he belongs to Russian literature, not English. – Why did Brodsky claim such power for poetry? – Because he himself possessed such a powerful spirit. Poetry was his god-given gift. It so happened that he had this gift, that he was a genius, that his personality was a force of nature. He was irrepressible, and he took things quickly to their logical extreme; he had no fear of the superlative, and fearlessness was one of his most outstanding qualities. He would not have chosen poetry if he didn’t feel it had chosen him, that its claims were absolute, that language is what makes us human, and the stronger and more elevated the language, the stronger and more elevated our humanity. Many poets feel this, but Joseph had a preternatural gift for articulating this claim as forcefully, as convincingly, as categorically, as possible.

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– Brodsky rejected the authority of the state, and asserted the authority of the individual. – I remember him saying in class, ‘the poet is the man who always says no’. I think that his notion of individuality was in many respects defined in terms of contradiction, especially the contradiction of arbitrary authority. After all, he was an autodidact, someone who had to assert his own authority without external validation, someone who had not grown up inside any institution he cared to identify himself with. For Joseph, it was the duty of the individual, as such, to disregard authority. – Even American authority? – O, yes. He had the highest regard for American individualism, but not for American conformism. American society in many respects depressed him. In a conversation about American popular culture, he once observed that human beings were becoming ‘just another species of moss’. – Was he an uncomfortable person to be with? – Joseph could be intimidating, and as I said earlier, arrogant, dismissive, impatient. Some students felt his demands, his assertions about poetry and the way it should be written, were oppressive. Often he terrified them. What those students failed to see was that such assertions were Joseph’s way of asserting the value of individuality: at best his intention was to incite the same assertiveness in his students. His technique was in some respects to ‘bait’ his students, to provoke contradiction in return. He respected those students who could and would disagree with him, match wits with him, stand up to him, show the same qualities that got him into so much trouble when he was young and defiant. He enjoyed the contest, the sport, of literary discourse. The flip side was that Joseph could also be extraordinarily generous, humorous, and down to earth – great fun to be with, charming, full of mischief and jokes. When you visited his apartment, he sometimes made his entrance by sliding into the room in his slippers like a kid on a skateboard. He hated snobbery and pretension, and truly enjoyed the company of his students; in fact, as a rule, he often preferred it to the company of academics and professional intellectuals. He treated his students as equals, which was the reason he could be so hard on them. Above all, he was a tre-

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mendously loyal human being, who never let you down once he took you up. – Do you read his poems as the genuine, heartfelt testimony of an extraordinarily intelligent human being or as cold, intellectualizing statements about everything? – ‘Cast a cold eye’ (Yeats): the sublime can be cold. You know the poem, ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’. This seems to me to recount Joseph’s vision of the sublime: the poet ascending in a flight of words to an altitude where the air is frigid and there’s barely enough oxygen to survive, but where the view – as Joseph would say, ‘the plane of regard’ – is as high and wide, as godlike, as possible. Eliot coined the term ‘dissociation of sensibility’, meaning the tendency in modern culture for intellect and feeling to go their separate ways. Joseph was divinely ‘undissociated’; I’ve never encountered a more passionate intellect. A common intellect grows cold in its pretension to objectivity, whereas JB affirmed, in every line, the primacy of subjectivity, of the individuality of consciousness. Again, we’re in the territory of Shestov and Kierkegaard. – Did Brodsky become at the end of his life ‘a NY- based cultural guru who felt entitled to sound off about anything that took his fancy’? (G. Smith). – Joseph was not a ‘cultural guru’, whatever that is. He was a poet with intense likes and dislikes, full of ideas and opinions, as any poet should be. I suppose once he received the Nobel Prize, and again in the U. S. when he was appointed Poet Laureate, there was a surge of media interest which put him even more in the spotlight, or under the interrogator’s light, however you want to see it. The notion that he was ‘sounding off’ only reflects the level of public interest in what he had to say. This is an uncommon position, to say the least, for poets in the U.S. In fact I would assume he would have been asked to sound off more if he had been residing in a culture that holds its poets in higher regard. Consider Octavio Paz: in Mexico he was expected to sound off regularly precisely because he was the great poet. This sort of criticism sounds all too much like an expression of envy. As a major Russian poet, as a moral hero, as a charismatic genius, as a Nobel laureate, etc. I suppose there was a great deal to be envious of in Joseph. ‘NY-based cultural guru’ is the expres-

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sion of someone who trades in caricature and cliché, someone whose small-mindedness is reflected in their own readiness to lower ‘the plane of regard’. – Like Mandelstam and Pasternak, Brodsky in his poetry had bridged Christian and Jewish culture. Yet, many critics treated Brodsky as a Christian and he was buried in the Christian tradition. Where do you stand in this respect? – In an interview once Joseph called himself a Calvinist, which not incidentally alludes to a New England sensibility. He also added that there was a great deal in Protestantism he disliked, and that he wasn’t sure that he was even a religious person. But what drew him to Calvinism was the emphasis on individual responsibility, which was at the core of Joseph’s moral outlook and at the core of New England values – Emerson’s ‘Self Reliance’ the toughness one finds in Frost. There’s also a good deal of the Old Testament in Calvinism, which must have appealed to Joseph’s Judaism. But Joseph’s attitude, his morality, was certainly Christian, and he clearly considered the Christian West culturally and ethically superior to Byzantium and the East, whether Near or Far. But I would say he was a Christian not in the theological sense, but morally and existentially. Typically, I think his mind was divided on the question of God. If anything, the subject and object of his theology was language. He was a logotheist. – Brodsky’s experience of exile and bilingualism has been compared with Nabokov’s by many of his scholars. Shouldn’t we be contrasting rather than comparing a poet and a writer of prose and seeing the difference rather than similarities? – Absolutely. I don’t claim any expertise on Nabokov, but Nabokov was an aesthete in a way that Joseph wasn’t, and an extraordinary master of English prose in a way that Joseph wasn’t (though the power of JB’s intellect more than made up for this in his essays). He was also a Russian aristocrat, a White Russian émigré. Joseph was cut from rougher cloth, born to an outsider culture, an autodidact who detested any air of entitlement. He was a moralist, and took seriously the existence of evil. Forget exile and bilingualism; the novelist he would be best compared to is Dostoevsky. – But again and again Joseph would make the same statement that

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aesthetic is the mother of ethic, not the other way around. – There’s a rather crucial difference between a mother and a virgin. A pure aesthete doesn’t venture beyond beauty into the more grownup realm where such questions as human evil and individual responsibility are taken seriously. When Joseph said this, he would also compare the aesthetic faculty to the judgment of a child, who can only say ‘I like this, I like that’ without being able to say ‘why’. For Joseph, the aesthetic child may be father – or mother – to the ethical man, but the child must eventually grow up and confront such difficult questions as ‘why’? The point is that for JB the aesthetic and the ethical were indelibly linked. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was not his credo. – Do you agree that there is a Jewish quality in some of Joseph’s statements? – I suppose, I never thought of it that way, but JB’s ferocity of temperament, his tendency to moral and aesthetic absolutism, could be considered Old Testament. Job, the prophets, Jehova Himself: they had a lot of JB in them. Also his mystical regard for language, for the shapes of the alphabet itself, is reminiscent of Jewish mysticism. –Why did critics and journalists make such a big deal of Brodsky’s exile while he himself said many times that ‘ from tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy’? – The romance of exile is powerful and presents an easy, reductive definition. JB was not a man given to easy definition. He did not want to be put in the victim’s box. The fact was that he was an exile, twiceover: first to the Gulag, then from Russia altogether. But in both instances, the condition strangely suited him. Not to be glib, but one can say that for Joseph, though exile was an involuntary act, it was in a way liberating; it offered a kind of condition of existential freedom, at the very least a stoic’s freedom, versus the imprisonment of the spirit in a repressive society. And the vehicle of this freedom, including the translations he did in the labor camp, was the English language. Joseph did not return to Russia when he could have, and he wanted his daughter to be raised in the U.S. with English as her first language. But his attitude towards exile contradicted the cliche. – How are we to reconcile the grandeur and modesty of Brodsky’s stance in American literature? – JB, as I’ve said, was a walking contradiction. This is the true mark

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of a poet. He will not be reconciled. That said, Joseph deeply loved aspects of American culture, and he loved the English language and English poetry intensely. The proper stance of the lover is one of humility before the beloved. The grandeur is in the quality of love itself, not the lover’s stance. – Some critics see JB as a paradigm of polarities: victimized exile or ruthless ambitious careerist; modest man or vaunting egotist; a loyal and generous friend or unforgiving and vindictive rival; a deeply religious man or intellectualizing cynic lacking human warmth, and so on and so on. Is such an approach justified? – Yes. But only once the prejudices of the critic have been set aside, the ego of the critic quelled, and the polarities are seen for what they are: the two sides of one psyche wrestling with itself. Many critics are themselves careerists, egotists, vindictive, and cynical. The point is that Joseph was more honest about himself than most critics, who write from under the mantle of the interrogator rather than the interrogated. Joseph’s virtues were as real, and far rarer, than his flaws. – Do you remember your last contact with Joseph? – Yes. We spoke on the phone three days before he died. I was still at the Academy and we were continuing to work with Joseph on the project of distributing poetry anthologies around the country. Joseph called me at the Academy, and said, ‘Bill, do you know what American poetry is all about?’ – ‘No, Joseph, I don’t. Please tell me’. – He said, ‘American poetry is all about wheels, it’s about the Open Road. It’s all about wheels’. – I said, ‘OK’. – He said, ‘So, you know what you have to do?’ – ‘No, Joseph, what do I have to do?’ – ‘You have to call up the Teamsters. We have to get poetry on the trucks. So when milk is delivered in the morning to the grocery stores, they deliver poetry with the milk’. – Now the Teamsters’ Union is the most notoriously corrupt union in the U.S. I said, ‘Joseph, are you telling me that The Academy of American Poets should collaborate with organized crime?’ There was a pause. Then Joseph said, ‘Bill, one thing about organized crime. It’s organized’ This was the last thing he said to me. – How did he play the last act of his drama – return or not return to Russia? – I didn’t know Joseph well enough to really know. I would guess his

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refusal to return had a good deal to do with that fact that he was not able to go back before both his parents died. This, I’m sure, was the worst thing that ever happened to him. – Do you have a poem dedicated to Joseph? May I use it here? – Yes, you can have ‘Bloom’s Photograph’. BLOOM’S PHOTOGRAPH for J. B. In Reykjavik that year the bomb talks failed, but we survived among the sweet dead leaves that lay along the esplanade before Grant’s Tomb. They spiraled into wind-banked heaps between the benches and the faded grass; the season escalated elsewhere, but here the clever hopes blew lightly down. Safe beside each other, we were reading James Joyce when across the street a white Rolls Royce pulled up outside a church. A bride walked out into the light, exalted – as if the future, gowned in white, had made a sudden promise in spite of Reykjavik. This vision, gilt by autumn light, had interrupted Molly Bloom’s adulteries, had stopped the fading of the leaves, until the newlyweds abruptly went their way. That faded shot of Mrs. Bloom her husband keeps adulterates this bride: one sweep of the wind and the greenest leaf does not survive. The scene must change. Ulysses Grant, in the heat of battle, was known

to sit absorbed, cool as stone, composing letters home to Mrs. Grant, to say all he privately believed was going up in smoke. Puffing on a cigar, he soaked the fields with blood in Tennessee, buried his conscience in each glass of whiskey, and finally told Lee at Appomattox that victory was sad – he did not care to pass humiliation on – he lived without illusions. So grant us all another cold and golden fall, and knowledge as to how to leave the scene. The bride took off her dress that night as gangs of boys played ball against the mausoleum wall. We shut the book on Molly’s Yes.

32 L E S MU R R AY Les Murray is Australia’s leading poet. His first collection The Ilex Tree was published in 1965. His verse novel The Boys who Stole the Funeral (1980) consists of 140 sonnets, modest precursor to his massive verse novel Freddy Neptune (1998), a story that takes its protagonist through the history of the twentieth century in a series of adventures and reflections. His first substantial book The Vernacular republic: Poems 1961-1981 was published outside Australia in 1982. Later books include The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1990), the large Collected Poems (1991), Translations from the Natural World (1993), Learning Human (2000), Collected Poems (2002) and Selected Poems (2007). He is an author of more than 30 books. Les Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Levin Prize (1980 and 1990), and for Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) he was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1996. In 1999 he was awarded the Queen Gold medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes and in 2004 he was awarded the Premio Montello – Citta di Palermo.

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ENGLISH

F O R H I M WA S A S S O C I A T E D W I T H CI V IL I Z AT ION

An Interview with Les Murray (9 November 2004, Stockholm) – Your are regarded as an eccentric Australian voice, a rural poet speaking for an urban culture, a Roman Catholic speaking for a largely secular people.1 Are you comfortable with such perceptions? – I don’t speak for anyone; I speak to the poetry public. They can be Catholic, they can be Jewish, they can be whatever they like. I just speak as I am. I am a Catholic and I don’t believe that other people are necessarily secular. I think that intellectuals are mostly secular or are required to pretend they are. But broader people are very varied; a lot of them are religious, lots of them Catholic. I speak to those who want to read me. – What tradition do you follow in your writing? – My own. It is based on certain Australian predecessors, particularly a poet called Kenneth Slessor, and also Roland Robinson, James McAuley and others, which is a bit different from European poetry. – At what age did you discover them? – At school I was pointed to them by my sports master: he knew I wouldn’t play football, so he introduced me to poetry. – Are they well known outside Australia? – They are getting a bit better known now, partly because I’ve been trying to get them known. The British Empire believed that only in England was poetry produced. We existed to produce soldiers and wool. – You compiled the anthology ‘Fivefathers: Five Australian poets of the pre-academic era’. Was the selection of the works of these five poets personal or did you present the leading Australian poets? – Those were the leading Australian male poets of the era 1930 - 1965: Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb. They were the great generation just before my time. I think it is quite a good book. I have just done another one on earlier Australian poets; one of them was an early 19 th century

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convict. It’s called Hell and After; and it is coming out next February. The convict poet is McNamara. Our popular ballad tradition largely descends from him. And the book contains works by three other poets born in the 19 th century who lived through to the 20 th. – Your poems often tell a story. Is this a deliberate device? – Yes. I come from an oral storytelling tradition. I grew up on stories; stories were everywhere. My father was a really fine storyteller. He was barely literate; he was interested in ballroom dancing, gossip and storytelling. Gossip and storytelling are the same thing, of course. – You have a lot of regularly metrical poems. Do you enjoy rhymes? – Yes. So does everybody, really, except John Ashbery. Because I am not writing just for intellectuals or scholars I feel free to rhyme. I don’t use it all the time. I play jazz with rhyme too. Poetry has got to appeal to the body as well as the soul. Too much poetry these days makes Aristotle’s mistake of seeing only the intellect as the divine in Man. – Joseph said it is too narrow to call you an Australian poet; it is

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like calling Yeats an Irish poet. You are a poet, thanks to whom the language lives.2 Would you agree with this definition? – I agree with the first bit but the second bit, I think, is a wild exaggeration. – You are very modest. Besides it is a quotation from W. H. Auden: Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everybody by whom it lives…

– Joseph also said this about somebody else. – Joseph knew your poetry while still in the USSR. Who introduced you to Brodsky’s poetry and when? – It was in the middle of the 80s in New York. The first poem that impressed me deeply was, I believe in Russian ’Snigir’. – Brodsky doesn’t have a poem with such title. Maybe you mean ‘On the death of Zhukov’ which is modelled on the 18 th century Russian poet Derzhavin’s ‘Snigir’ (Bullfinch). – Yes, it is about general Zhukov. I though it a marvellous poem. I like the translation. I remember, Joseph once said: ‘We are fighting to win’. – Please tell us about this first meeting. Was it during Poetry International in London or in New York? – It was in New York, about 1983, at Mark Strand’s home. And I met Derek Walcott the same day. We all had lunch together. They are all good poets; Strand wasn’t as good a poet as those two. Brodsky and I had a long talk; we talked all afternoon. I had a talk with Walcott as well; he was always a bit blustering with me, calling me Bwana and the like. – In 1988 four poets, you yourself, Derek, Seamus, and Joseph, took part in a Round-Table discussion chaired by Michael Schmidt in Dun Laoghaire.3 What do you remember of the Dublin Conference and that discussion? – I don’t remember much of the discussion. A point I made to Sea-

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mus was that he writes in an English that is more familiar to me than the English of England. The first poem of Seamus I ever saw ended with the words ’I’ll dig with it’ (emphasis on ‘it’) and I read that and said ‘Yeah, and I bet they can’t read that in England; there it would sound like ‘I’ll dig with it’ (emphasis on ‘dig’), and it ruined the line completely. Although we weren’t speaking with an Irish accent, we remembered what it sounded like and ‘I’ll dig with it’ (emphasis on ‘it’) is perfectly good Australian English. Seamus was very pleased by that. English is not just one language. – Do you recall any interesting statements made by Joseph about the English language? He was in love with the English language. – Yes, I recall his regret that the British missed their chance to colonize Russia in 1918, and that his writing in English could be seen as an attempt to repair the mistake. Of course English for him was not so much associated with colonization as with civilization; he was talking about the English of George Herbert, Marvell, Donne, and Shakespeare. – Could the fact that you, Derek, Seamus and Joseph are not British poets be taken as evidence that England is no longer the centre of poetry in English? – That centre hasn’t always been in England; sometimes it’s been in America, sometimes in Ireland or in Scotland, and to some extent, in Australia. Scotland was the centre in the 70 s to 90 s, but all the best Scottish poets, in both languages, Gaelic and English, died in 1990 - 95: Norman MacCaig died and Sorley MacLean also died. A little later, the marvellous Welsh poet R. S. Thomas died too. I think they are better than the Irish ones, but the Irish ones are more famous because the Irish had a war, and war always makes poets more popular. England hasn’t been the centre for ages – but it’s still very powerful in publishing and criticism. Not so much in America, because in America poetry disappeared into the universities. There are very few real American poets – Sharon Olds is one, Ron Rash is another – the rest are nearly all academics who write poetry. – How does Brodsky fit into the English poetic scene? – He doesn’t really, if you mean England. If you mean English language, he’s a respected visitor. A roc among native birds…

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– Are you aware of the gap that exists between the original and even the best English translations whether done by Brodsky himself, or by Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, or by any of the professional translators? – I’d have to know Russian. – Your great grandfather’s first cousin wrote the Oxford English Dictionary. Did this fact influence your attitude to language? – I had the attitude, a habit of mind, before I learned of James Murray. I was a natural born word-freak. I always loved language. I wanted to be a painter but I couldn’t paint, so I chose to paint with language. I am a linguistic primitive. – Brodsky’s complex and idiosyncratic view of language is central to an understanding of his poetic world. Is this clear from his essays or from his poetry? – Both, I think. The breadth of language I think was always natural with me, but unlike Brodsky, I made a philosophy out of poetry rather than language. - In your view, poetry is a universal making and is not confined to language. How would you explain Brodsky’s obsession with language? – Poetry isn’t all language. It comes through language, but it also includes music and painting. – Here Brodsky would agree with you. He once said that he learned composition from music. And there are plenty of paintings in his poetry. He admired the Renaissance artists. – The same with me. I know lots of artists; I go to all the galleries. – Brodsky intensely disliked Western leftwing intellectuals. What does attract them to the leftist ideology? – It offers them all the keys to the world. It says, ‘You are going to be the leaders; you are going to be the top people, the new aristocracy’. – 75 year of existence of the Soviet Union taught them nothing. – It taught them bloody nothing. Australian poetry has been ruined in this generation: about 75% of Australian poets are on the left. People will read Leftist prose but not Leftist poetry. It’s all the same poem. – And they always find the way to promote themselves, to take over

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magazines, to publish each other. – Most Australian magazines and all the newspapers are left wing. – Let’s us return to Brodsky. Finding himself outside his own culture, Brodsky continued to serve it by introducing an entirely different sensibility into that culture. In trying to get rid of its sentimentality and provincialism, however, he encountered all manner of criticism, both in Russian and in the West: coldness, bookishness, rationalism to name but a few accusations levelled at him. Do you understand the reason for such criticism? – I remember once in Amsterdam just after he got the Nobel Prize, he was given a reception. There was a German woman with a beautiful leather bag and he said: ‘Ah, madam, it’s a handsome hand bag; human skin, I imagine?’ – We all have a problem with the Germans; it took me 25 years to be ready to visit Germany. – As for coldness, don’t you have the word ‘dusha’? – We do and we demand of and attribute a lot to our ‘dusha’! By the way, Brodsky was the one who re-introduced the word ‘dusha’ into Russian poetry after a 30-year ban by the Soviet authority. – To answer your question, I think, the main reason for such criticism is pure jealousy. I once asked him in Massachusetts, ‘Would you ever go back to Russia?’ He said, ‘No’. – ‘Don’t you miss the landscape and all the natural parts of Russia?’ He said, ‘No, it’s the same as here’. I, like most Australians, miss Australia horribly if I stay away for long. – It is hard to miss the country that treated you so badly. One tries to forget it. – Yes, of course. – Like Mandelstam and Pasternak, Brodsky in his poetry bridged Christian and Jewish culture. Almost every year Brodsky wrote a Christmas poem. Yet, many Russian Orthodox people don’t accept him as a Christian poet. How do you see him in this respect? – We all do it. From Abraham to Jesus is what I call Jewish evolution, a moral and spiritual evolution. The difference is whether you accept Jesus or not. As for Russia, it is an anti-Semitic culture, I gather. – Maybe you are not aware that in 1963 Brodsky wrote a long

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poem ‘Isaac and Abraham’ from a point of view of a son rather than a father. – Human sacrifice is a constant in this world. You know, I always ask about a work of art, how much human sacrifice does it require? That is what that tradition and that evolution is about: sacrifice, absorbing it and making it bearable for humans. In the end, God takes it on Himself and so removes the legitimacy of all further literal human sacrifice. I quite like the Jewish evolution! – Why? – Salvation comes through the Jews, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman. English evolution, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, and all that, tends to reduce humans to interchangeable units. They sacrifice us all; they turn us into money; whereas Jewish evolution turns us into persons. Persons die and come back; they will not be lost. That is the most important evolution of all. – Brodsky’s erudition was astonishing. Do you too believe that a poet should be omniscient? – I believe it, for myself. I was always interested in the whole world; it was my ambition to know everything. I think a poet should know everything. But many poets have lacked such breadth. I knew as much as Brodsky did, so we got along fine. – Sir Isaiah Berlin once said that in Brodsky’s company you got the feeling that you were in the presence of genius. Did you ever feel the same? – No, but that I was in the presence of a fiercely intelligent man. I’m not sure what a genius is. – You said that poetry prevents ‘things from happening, bad things’.4 What, in your view, is the main task of poetry? – It models how human really think and create. And it discharges energy. It helps to get rid of society’s or culture’s bad visions. Most poetry is rubbish, but at least it has the effect of exposing worse rubbish. It neutralizes political dreams; it discharges rather than promotes them. People think they are promoting these visions but in effect they are exhausting their energy. Real poetry should delight us! Otherwise it does harm. – Do you have a poem, dedicated or addressed to Brodsky? – No, I am afraid I don’t.

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– What a pity, all my interviews with poets end up with a poem for Joseph. Maybe you can write one when you return home? – I’ll try. On 29 th December 2004 I received this poem by post from Australia, sent by Les Murray on 19 December, with a note: ‘I’m far too late with the above for your project, I fear, but I must offer it to you if only because it partly arises from discussion I had with Joseph. He told me he did entertain ideas of becoming a Christian, a Presbyterian in fact! Please pardon the coinage “gentrifical force”. It is derived from “gentrification”. I do suspect that’s very nearly the strongest social force of the lot. And the churches have all too often got caught up in facilitating it. With that, I leave the poem to your judgement.’ CHURCH In memoriam Joseph Brodsky The wish to be right has decamped in large numbers but some come to God in hopes of being wrong. High on the end wall hangs the Gospel, from before he was books. All judging ends in his fix, all, including his own. He rose out of Jewish, not English evolution and he said the lamp he held aloft to all nations was Jewish. Freedom still eats freedom, justice eats justice, love – even love. But the retarded man says church makes me want to be naughty, but naked in a muddy trench with many thousands, someone’s saying the true god gives his flesh and blood. Idols demand yours off you. 5

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Weidenfels & Nicolson, 1998), p. 894. Joseph Brodsky in Les Murray, The End of Symbol. Zavershenie simvola. Bilingual selection (New York - Stockholm: Ars-Interpres, 2004), p. 5. Poets’ Round Table. ‘A Common Language’, A Discussion between Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky and Les Murray with Michael Schmidt, P. N. Review, vol. 15, no. 4, 1989, pp. 39 - 47. Russian translation of this discussion is included in the selection of Brodsky’s interviews, Kniga intervyu, compiled by V. Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov, 2007), pp. 395 - 417. P. N. Review, Ibid, p. 40. This poem appeared in Les Murray’s latest book The Biplane Houses (Carcanet, 2007).

33 M AT T HEW SPENDER Matthew Spender (1945- ) is a sculptor who for the last forty years has lived and worked in Italy, where he exhibits regularly. He has also written two books: Within Tuscany, about his life in the countryside near Siena; and From a High Place, a life of the painter Arshile Gorky, to whose eldest daughter he is married. They have two daughters and three grandchildren. At present he is helping to tidy the archive of his father, Stephen Spender, who was a close friend of Brodsky, while simultaneously preparing for a large exhibition of is work in Milan.

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A NECE S SA RY SM I L E An Interview with Matthew Spender (14 November 2007, London) – Your mother, Natasha Spender, once showed me a photo of your father, Sir Stephen Spender, you and Joseph in Italy. You all are looking so happy. Do you remember the occasion? – Sure. It was in Venice. I was having a ‘honeymoon’ with my father, since we had lost touch for a while. Dad wanted me to come back to England, and I wanted to stay in Italy with my family and my life in Italy. So there was a bit of tension. To get over it, we decided to have a little holiday together alone. We had three of them during the remainder of Dad’s life: the first and the second were in Venice and during the third one we went wandering around the north of Italy. Don’t ask me for the dates, I really don’t remember. One afternoon Dad wanted to have lunch with Brodsky and he said, ‘You will really enjoy it, he a very nice person. But please keep your tiresome communist ideas to yourself’. Well, I’d never thought of myself as particularly communist, or even left-wing, and indeed I’ve always had difficulties with my left-wing friends in Italy. Nevertheless, at that time, the entire cultural scene of Italy, plus all the progressive ideals, were in the hands of the Italian Communist Party, so it was necessary for me in some way to belong. Anyway, we met Brodsky at Piazza S. Marco in Venice, sat down and had a drink in the café Florian. At the next table there was this famous Italian feminist communist writer. I could see how she was looking at Brodsky, wanting to come over and join in, but I could also see how Brodsky was doing everything he could do to avoid looking at her. Then we went out for lunch. I was still annoyed with Dad for having said something disparaging about my supposedly communist ideas. Brodsky was saying how much he loved Venice, how beautiful he thought it was, and how he’d love to live there, and that he thought he could live there forever. I asked him, ‘What are you going to do about the fact that 32% of the electors during the last election voted for the communists’? He said, ‘Well, I will just try to avoid 32%

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of the population who are stark raving mad’. The next time we met Brodsky, he was restlessly looking for somewhere to live. I think this must be something that he enjoyed doing, actually, because it’s quite a good excuse to go and see other people houses and poke around. I have a clear memory of going to see somebody’s flat, and the flat was obviously occupied by a left-wing Italian intellectual, as he had a lot of Lenin and Gramsci and all that, sitting on the desk in front of him, and he was busy writing away. So there we were, in his house, and Brodsky was looking everywhere, except at this man. He wasn’t rude or anything but it was offensive. I mean, we were in the man’s house! But Brodsky looked out of the window, he looked in the bedroom, he looked at the loo, he was particular about the view – and all through these inspections here and there, he didn’t give this man one tiny glance. And when we left, he hardly said good-bye. The man, naturally, was stunned. – When did you hear Joseph’s name for the first time? – I think quite soon after he came to England. When did he come to England? – 18 June, 1972. – My parents met him at the airport, and then my father took him to the Houses of Parliament, which was in session at the time. Brodsky was extremely impressed that you could just walk into the British Parliament, and there weren’t any policemen to stop you, and you could just sit down and listen to these people making our laws. – Were you in London in June 1972 when W. H. Auden brought Joseph to England and both of them were staying in your parents’ house? – No, I wasn’t in London at the time, but I came back every six months or so. Well, I remember Brodsky in Loudoun Road sitting next to my wife. Brodsky came with a large bottle of whisky that he was drinking his way through in a very cheerful way, and he was talking about the Second World War. We were discussing the postwar policy – the possibility that the Allies could have made friends with the Germans after their defeat and turned the whole of Germany around and made war on Russia immediately. I think that must have been in the newspapers at the time, and for the first time we realised how close we had been to getting involved in yet another war, with

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the impossible starting-point of saying, yesterday’s friend is now our enemy. It was completely crazy, and we said so. And Brodsky said: on the contrary, it would have been a very good idea if the American troops had managed to get to Moscow and hand out little bits of chewing gum and cigarettes. – You know, he wasn’t serious, just contrary. In 1974 Brodsky wrote a powerful poem ‘On the death of Zhukov’, one of the Soviet Marshal responsible for Germany’s defeat. – It is extraordinary. The Russian army lost a million men just during the battle of Stalingrad – one battle – when the total troop losses on our side, for the entire war on all fronts – American, English, New Zealanders, Australian, South African, Indian – came to seven hundred and fi fty thousand. – When did you read his poems and which one of them did you like most? – No, as a matter of fact, I did not know his work. It was different kind of relationship. I just recognised him as a part of the family. He was part of the family. His relationship with Dad was very fraternal. In fact, at some point I said, ‘Don’t you miss your family in Russia?’ or something banal like that. And he said, ‘No, I don’t. My family is here. My family is Wystan and Stephen – they are my family now’. In fact, he told me once that after Wystan died, he’d had the feeling that he’d become Wystan. ‘Not physically – God forbid!’ he said, but (I suppose) in the sense that he’d become a receptacle for the English language. Or its custodian. Which is how Auden had come to see himself in his maturity. – How did your father and W. H. Auden manage to appreciate Joseph’s poetry reading it in translation only? Auden wrote an introduction to Brodsky’s first English edition of ‘Selected Poems’, and Stephen Spender wrote a review of that book in 1973. – Yes, that’s a very good question. Indeed, there was one moment when I said to Brodsky, ‘I don’t understand how you can go from writing in Russian to writing poems in English, because the sounds are surely different, and besides, it is a language which you acquired quite late in life’. And he said, ‘O, well, poetry is just rhythm, a series of sounds and bumps, then words come and you put

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down the words. I don’t see why you shouldn’t do it in any language’. I wasn’t very convinced. I don’t think Dad was very convinced by it either, but with someone like Brodsky, you gave him the benefit of the doubt. – This was at later stage when he began to write poems in English. – Yes. But I remember Brodsky showing Dad an early piece that he had written in English. It wasn’t a poem, it was a magazine article, and he was like a schoolboy in front of a schoolmaster. Dad read it and said, ‘I think it works fine’. And Brodsky was so pleased! He was hopping around like a schoolboy who’d just been given an A+. But your question is: how can either Auden or Dad have judged him as a poet in Russian. They couldn’t. They didn’t speak Russian. But I suspect they’d have asked people who did speak Russian. Like Isaiah Berlin, or John Bayley, for instance, who could read Russian and could surely tell a good poem from a bad one. – And in 1965, when Akhmatova came to England to receive her honorary degree at Oxford University, she told your father about a talented young poet by the name of Brodsky who was in exile. – Everything about Brodsky’s background was in his favour. And Brodsky’s personality, too, was in his favour, because he obviously was very sincere and very brave. Everybody was in awe of the trial, when he managed to not be bullied by the prosecution. ‘Who gave you the right to write these poems?’ said the prosecutor. ‘Who gave me the right to breathe?’ replied Brodsky. This made a huge impression on everybody. You could just see people thinking with embarrassment: would I have had the courage to make such a brave answer? And so briefly? So Brodsky himself made them take him seriously as a poet. Still, I would say that Auden would have read the translations and judged by instinct. It’s not real appreciation, but even in translation, you can surely feel when something good is happening. – And being knowledgeable, they could guess what was missing, what was lost in translation. And what was left was enough to give them some idea of the originals. And also since his poetry is intellectual, rather than emotional, more can be preserved in translation. – Right. – You have lived in Italy for some time now. And Joseph, too, had

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a love affair with that country. What are the most attractive features of Italy for you and were for Joseph? – Beauty. – Could you be more specific, do you mean beauty of architecture, nature, beautiful women? – I don’t think Brodsky starved himself of beautiful women! But I meant the beauty of the country. In Italy, beauty is a part of the way people live. In England, if you get it, it’s sprinkled on top of everything else, like sugar on prunes. It’s not an intrinsic part of English life. The English think of beautiful things, as outside themselves, to be added to life, but not really a part of life. In Italy you find even very foolish people who simply take beauty for granted – I mean, to take beauty for granted seems to me a wonderful thing. Italians assume that they have a right to their beautiful cities. They can treat those beautiful cities sometimes quite badly, but they are aware of a beauty that belongs to them. So I think that Brodsky just liked the life of the streets. He liked to be outside, walking. Inside people’s houses, so much of Italy was dominated by left-wing intellectuals - some even by right-wing intellectuals – but in both cases it doesn’t take long to feel that the reactions to most subjects are somehow predictable. Italian society is still very formal. ‘Stare insieme’, ‘being together,’ does not include saying unusual or challenging things. Communication, even intimacy, consists of respecting the conventions, not breaking them. Brodsky didn’t like conventions of any kind. I remember once, we were in Milan, and Brodsky had to get a prize or something; or maybe Dad was getting a prize… – No, they were amongst the judges of the Montale Prize, which they awarded to Anthony Hecht. It was in 1984. – Yes. And we had to sit in a theatre and listen to an aria from an opera, and Brodsky behaved very badly. I said to him, ‘It’s Katia Ricciarelli we are about to hear, you should sit still’. But he didn’t sit still. Then a strange thing happened. Katia Ricciarelli was booed – because she was about to marry a man her fans didn’t like. The woman just stood there for ten minutes during which everybody booed. She stood like a rock, waiting until it was over, and then she sang – beautifully. It was magnificent!

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But by that time, Brodsky was out. He’d left his front row seat and slipped off, unnoticed by anything less than the entire audience. I chased him into the auditorium and I said, ‘I truly don’t understand. Quite apart from anything else, it’s an amazing thing, seeing a colleague being booed, and she stands there, and she sings, and it’s marvellous’. He said, ‘I don’t see what’s so special about it’. It turned out he didn’t like the music. In fact, he didn’t have any idea about music at all – which seems to me extraordinary. How can you talk about rhythm and sound in poetry and be indifferent to these same qualities in music? Once he told us, ‘I can see that the first movement has to be brisk, because you have to get the attention of the people who are listening. I can also see that the second movement has to be a bit sleepy, so that people can get into a different kind of mood. And I suppose that, if you get that far, you have to have something bright to finish up with’. And that was his idea of what constituted a piece of classical music! In our house, my mother is a pianist, I play the clarinet in our village band, Dad loved Wagner and Beethoven and listened to them frequently, so we all just looked at him. None of us could think where to begin. – He was a very bad theatregoer all together. Once we went to see a play by Samuel Beckett. He loved Beckett but couldn’t stand the performance, so we left before the end of the play. He didn’t like to go to ballet, even though one of his girl friends, Masha Kuznetsova, was a ballet dancer, and Misha Baryshnikov was his best friend. – Yes, I know. He had a huge admiration for Baryshnikov, because he knows such a lot about Russian literature. I remember him saying something like, ‘the astonishing Misha’. – How often did you two meet in Italy? – I must emphasise that I never arranged to meet Brodsky. Our paths only crossed by chance. The last meeting was absolutely amazing, because it was only a month or so before he died. I was in Siena sitting on the steps below a church, because I was travelling with lots of women – my life is entirely dominated by women – and they’d gone off shopping and I was bored. There I was, guarding a lot of parcels, lying on stone steps, and Brodsky looked down and said, ‘Matthew? I thought I recognized that heap!’.

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We went to a bar; we could hardly speak, because it was so unexpected. He must have been on a farewell visit to Italy or something. We must both have been thinking: what chance brought us together in this way? Is this fate? He was with a woman, a much older woman. I don’t know who she was, but she was Russian. And they were both ill. In fact they both looked absolutely terrible. – In November 1995 Brodsky was in Rome meeting the mayor Francesco Rutelli to discuss his idea of establishing a Russian Academy in Rome. – I see. There was definitely a feeling of farewell. We just looked at each other, because it was such a coincidence that we should have run into each other. Then both my mother and I, independently, rang him up a day or two before he died, one from London, one from Siena. That was also strange, but I suppose that independently we’d heard that he was facing another operation. He said, ‘your mother just rang’. I wanted to tell him that his bypass operation could be performed three times without undue risk. He said. ‘I know. I’ve had it three times already. This is the fourth’. I could only say, ‘Oh’ He laughed. ‘Exactly! I also feel, ‘Oh’!’ – Your mother told me about how Joseph tried to comfort her and your father when he was in a hospital in October 1994. What do you remember about that time? – Yes, in New York Brodsky was absolutely wonderful. Dad has gone through an exhausting book launch. It’s a long, slightly crazy story. An American novelist called David Leavitt had written a pastiche of Dad’s autobiography, a novel set in the Spanish Civil War, and he’d copied a lot of my father’s descriptions and just stuck them into his own novel. Perhaps it followed the post-modern notion that a writer must feel free to recycle other people’s work. And Dad became extremely upset. There was a big fuss and a court case, as a result of which his autobiography was republished, but unfortunately, he had to go to the United State to promote it. He really wasn’t up to the trip, physically. On the very last day, when my mother was exhausted and had gone to bed, he was taken out to the supper and he fell down in the street. He ended up in a hospital with a broken hip. While in a hospital, he

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had a heart seizure of some kind, so he had to have a pace-maker put in. All this took fi fteen or twenty days maybe, and Brodsky came every single day, and if he wasn’t able to come, he sent other people with little cans of borsch. The borsch was the same, but each visitor was different. I remember a huge man with a beard dressed entirely in black who said in a deep voice, ‘I am from Brodsky’, handed me a can of soup, turned around and left. Brodsky was very supportive, and Dad was really out of it, with the anaesthetics and the fear. He was apprehensive about dying; in fact he died six months later. He was so out of it, I think he was unaware of Brodsky’s kindness, which is a shame. Brodsky wanted to cheer him up by asking things like, ‘who was the greatest Russian novelist of the 19 th century?’ And Dad could hardly remember a single name, let alone join in this game. I was also very upset and tense. Brodsky would take me down to a bar opposite and calm me down. He was very, very sweet. I remember, once he said, ‘Well, your father is going to die. So what?’ I looked at him blankly and he said, ‘I am sorry. I did not necessarily mean that’. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I know exactly what you mean, Brodsky!’ Indeed, it was a relief to have it put on the table next to a cup of coffee, bang, like the ace of spades. – Did you really call him Brodsky, not Joseph? – Valentina, I called him Joseph, of course. But I’m not going to pretend to the readers of this interview more intimacy than I in fact possessed. All I can say is that on, the few times I met him, I felt totally at home. – What else do you remember about Brodsky and your father? – In the presence of Auden and Dad, he once said, ‘What about Betjeman?’ They said, ‘Yes, we read Betjeman’. ‘Don’t you think, he’s a wonderful poet?’ Brodsky seemed to be very enthusiastic about Betjeman. Auden was also, because of his skill and his humour. I don’t think Betjeman’s poems meant so much to Dad, because he wasn’t too interested in horses and neo-gothic train stations. – Brodsky knew some of Betjeman’s poems by heart. But then he knew many Western poets by heart. – Yes, they were surprised and impressed by this. American and English poets don’t learn their own work by heart. It is not part of

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the cultural tradition. Perhaps the fact that Brodsky knew English poems by heart and they didn’t, was a bit humiliating, as if he were more professional than them in some way. In England poems are read, rather than recited, because the experience is supposed to be private and unique. As soon as it becomes public, it becomes ‘rhetoric’. Given that rhetoric can be used to serve any kind of moral or immoral purpose, it is obviously suspect. I know that Auden thought about this a lot, especially after the war. He grew to dislike the supposedly ‘rhetorical’ voice of his early poems, to the point where he’d alter or suppress even the best of them. My father also, in a different way, thought that a poem was an attempt to clarify a private experience, and that a successful poem was one, which stated this experience accurately and truthfully. – What do you know about the incident in Venice when Joseph’s essay ‘Watermark’ was published in Italian? What was the need to insult well-known Venetian citizens? – I’m afraid I don’t know that piece or the reaction it provoked. Was he irritated by someone? It’s not surprising. In Italy, the bourgeoisie often seems only interested in money and the intellectuals are too frequently bound by some recognisable ‘party line’. Even today, culture is still in the hands of the left wing, and Brodsky wouldn’t fit in easily with them, given his pitiless contempt for the Soviet system and defiant admiration for all things American. Did you know that after the Second World War, there was a sort of civil war in Italy, during which the communist partisan groups behaved with incredible ferocity towards all the other partisans? People say there are at least 30,000 dead unaccounted for, and there are some who say that the figure is even larger. Yet even today, left-wingers do not want to talk about it. Even – and especially – my friends. Dammit, they should be saying, ‘it’s absolutely terrible’, not, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. Or even worse, ‘you must not question the integrity of the partisan struggle’ – which is what someone told me at band practice two days ago. It’s easy to see that Brodsky would never have tolerated that kind of thing – but neither could he fit in with bourgeoisie. So I assume that what he did fit in with, was the life in the streets. – He liked a few aristocrats like count Girolamo Marcello, Brodsky dedicated a poem to him and stayed in his palazzo a few times.

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He was on friendly terms with a few Americans, like an artist David Morgan, but not with University professors. Have you visited his grave in Venice? – I am not very keen on graves. – Recently I received quite a disturbing letter about the state of Joseph’s grave: nobody is looking after it, all the flowers are dead, the water is black, etc. People ask me, what can we do to help keep the grave in a fit condition? – Tidy it up. – And we do, but how often? We all live in different countries, and visit his grave once a year. Something has to be done on a regular basis, and we don’t want to upset his widow. – Just do it quietly, then. But taking care of graves is a very family thing, so maybe ask Maria first? The time when it absolutely has to be done is late October, before All Saints’ Day. – Did Joseph talk to your about his life in Russia? – Let me think. He said that the state of being Jewish is what all Russians seem to be obsessed by – to find out if you are Jewish or not. So much so, he said, that if you were a dog, instead of a Jew, you’d occasionally feel other dogs not just sniffing, but with their noses actually up your asshole. With regard to his Jewish feelings, I have a funny story. When Dad was dying in New York – except that he didn’t die there, we managed to bring him back to London – Brodsky was with us, as I was saying, more or less every day. One afternoon, he and I were sitting in a corridor waiting for something to happen, and we were talking about Shostokovitch’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which I’d just seen with my mother the night before. Well, Brodsky talked about the libretto, which he didn’t like, and I talked about the music. Finally I said, ‘why is it that, whatever one feels about his music, whenever one looks at a photo of Shostakovich, one feels such intense compassion?’ At that moment the elevator door opposite us opened and out came a dying Rabbi. He was lying on a stretcher with wheels, clutching a sheet to cover his nakedness and with four tense acolytes at each corner. They wheeled the dying Rabbi rapidly down the corridor towards the operating room behind us and disappeared. The scene was

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dramatic, tragic, and also faintly absurd. And Joseph turned to me and said, ‘Maybe that’s your answer’. – Joseph said that he never allowed himself to be a victim, either in the USSR, or in the West. – That’s true. He would not have fitted in anywhere. It is nice to think that he was a great hero against the Soviet system, but if he had been born in America, he would be just as much anti-American as he was anti-Soviet. – What was the source of his resistance? His stoicism? Is it in his character? – I suppose so. But Stoicism? He wasn’t resigned in any way. Our lives are all run by systems. Closed socialist systems, free-range capitalism, the bureau of driving-licenses, town-hall marriage certificates, pearenthood – though fatherhood is more of a vocation than a system, I suppose. He would have liked to steer clear of every single one of them. As I see it, he was one of those people who just wasn’t going to be tied down. – Did you ever hear Joseph’s complain about his translators? – He gave me an Italian translation of Auden’s poems when Dad was in hospital. I looked at the title: ‘Ditemi la verita’ sull’amore’. I said, ‘It just doesn’t work, does it? It’s nowhere near as good as, ‘Tell me the truth about love’. He gave a grim little nod – I think he was aware of the problem! I have a vague memory that he spoke with respect about one translator, but I can’t remember whom. But, Valentina, I didn’t dare talk about literature with Brodsky! I would have been scared of saying something disparaging or just plain dumb about an author he loved. Can you imagine the risk? But I once talked to him about British spies: Philby, Burgess, Anthony Blunt. I think he found the idea of betrayal both fascinating and awful. I told him something about Englishness which perhaps he didn’t know: that we can tolerate even betrayal, if the reasons for it are strong enough. As in the last war, they were. He said, ‘Why Matthew, I am so glad you also think about such things!’ Which perhaps meant, ‘I’m not going to listen to a word you’re saying!’ – ‘Love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one’s soul’ (On Grief and Reason, p. 87). Did Joseph

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manage to liberate his soul from his obsessive love for Marina Basmanova, the mother of his son? – A selfish remark, with regard to love, perhaps? As if the only person involved is you, and your only responsibility is the welfare of your soul? Mind you, people say ridiculous things about love. The Surrealists thought it was a gift, as in ‘I hereby give you all my love’. Which didn’t stop you from taking it back again when you were finished with that particular beneficiary. – For a person who believed that two subjects are compromised in 20 th century – love and God – he has written many poems on these subjects. – Valentina, he was a naughty boy, he could say naughty things, and he didn’t necessarily believe it all. As to love – I remember when I met Maria for the first time, wheeling their daughter Anna, I was overwhelmed by how beautiful she was. I said, ‘Joseph, you don’t really deserve that, do you?’ He took it as a compliment. He said, ‘And she is exactly what she looks. She looks innocent and she looks beautiful, and she is both’. And then he said something baffling. ‘It’s worth the sacrifice’. I asked him what he meant. ‘Well, if you go in for love and marriage, obviously you have to sacrifice something’. ‘Really? What?’ He said, ‘Obviously, if you are going to limit yourself to one woman for the rest of your life, you have to sacrifice some of your liberty’. I said, ‘Sounds wonderful! Still, it’s hardly appropriate, if you’re also trying to tell me that you’re a happily married man’. – Do you know that Maria has aristocratic connections? Do you have a feeling that Joseph had a weakness for the people with aristocratic background? – Being an aristocrat means something to other aristocrats, perhaps, but it doesn’t mean much to anybody else. Anyway, I don’t mix much with aristocrats. – I am sure you know that Joseph widened the linguistic range of Russian poetry by transplanting to Russian soil many of the qualities of English poetics: its powerful wit and scepticism, its irony and baroque coarseness, the cult of metaphysical conceits and elaborate strophic structures, prosaicisms and paradox, to name but a few. Do you think the British poets are aware of this monumental work?

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– Probably not. They’d have to know Russian to appreciate it. – Do you have an explanation why so many English poets (Craig Raine, Peter Porter, Christopher Reid) disliked Joseph and his poetry so much, and still do? – I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s probably quite complicated. I think the fact that he went to America and worked in American universities may have something to do with it. Or professional bitterness? It’s hard to make money from poetry. Those who do, can easily become targets for the rest. I went to a Faber party the other day with my mother, and you should have heard them all complaining, all these successful authors and poets. – Is it something to do with the fact that Brodsky adored Auden, who is not liked by contemporary British poets? – Yes, this could be part of it. Gosh, do people still dislike Auden? They miss a lot. But, if Craig Raine and the other poets you mentioned dislike Brodsky because they have doubts that you can go from writing poems in Russian to writing poems in English – well, that’s a plausible doubt, even if you don’t agree with it. – As you probably know, Joseph read Dante all his life. At the end of his life he regretted that he hadn’t managed to write his version of the ‘Divine Comedy’. But one of my Russian interlocutors, the poet Tatiana Shcherbina is convinced that Joseph has written something like Dante’s masterpiece, only in the form of frescoes. Do you see any similarity between Dante and Brodsky? – That’s a very technical question. The amazing thing about Dante is that there is no compartmentalization in the way he thinks. One kind of emotion goes into another. There are no frontiers. You can’t tell whether he is describing a real situation, or an ideal one, or a political one. It’s very convincing, but you find descriptions of landscape, which are specific to one spot in Tuscany, mixed up with personal hate, plus a vision of life after death. Dante is so concentrated, emotionally, and his language is also incredibly compressed. You can’t really do it now. I don’t know what Brodsky thought about Dante, but it must surely be a joke on his part to compare himself with him. In Russia, he said he was up there with Pushkin. In Europe, he’s up there with Dante. I mean, how high can a man rate himself before he sounds a little crazy?

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– Do you have an explanation of Brodsky’s obsession with an image of Empire? He perceived both the Soviet Union and the USA as an Empire. He has written poems about the Roman Empire. – I have no idea regarding his obsessions, but those are the three Empires, and they are interchangeable. Russia was a socialist empire, the American Empire doesn’t like calling itself that but all the same here we are, the Roman Empire was kinder to slaves than Russia… Sure, he can simply go from one to another. – As has already been noticed, no other modern Russian poet has written more elegies on the death of friends than Brodsky. Do you know the reason for this? – With his heart condition, for the last ten years of his life he was a very sick man. Defiantly sick. I remember him describing the constriction in his chest as being ‘not unpleasant’, even though he must have simultaneously been thinking, ‘is it going to be now?’ At which he’d pop another pill of nitro-glycerine. I think he even offered one to Dad, absentmindedly, as one might offer a cigarette. And I certainly remember him pulling out a cigarette in front of the cardiologist in the hospital, at which she gave him a very cold stare. The death of friends offers a great opportunity to channel all these thoughts into a poem, don’t you think? Then there’s also the question of whether or not you’ll ever see him/her again. On this subject you can enjoy a double standard. You can have imaginary conversations with the dead, even though you doubt that you’ll ever see them again. I’m pretty sure that Brodsky would have carried on imaginary conversations with Wystan. When my father died, we delayed the funeral for a week so that Joseph could attend. In retrospect it seems a strange thing to have done but it seemed natural at the time, on the grounds that he was an elective relation. And he was a big help. I remember I had great difficulty in reading the passage from Ecclesiastes that I’d chosen. We went out into the cemetery to practice. He listened, and for the first time I got through it without choking. He gave me a pat on the back and murmured, how good that line is, ‘even the sound of the cricket shall become a burden’. – This is an important subject indeed since Joseph has written so many poems for Christmas. If he wasn’t a believer why did he write such poems?

– Well, Christmas is a good subject, too … If there is a life after death, I would be happy to see Brodsky again. – Joseph was perceived by some as the greatest Russian poet in absentia, and by others as a martyr, a lonely Titan, and an eternal nomad. What do we know of Joseph? Who was he, really? – At the time, I didn’t know enough about his writing to treat him with any greater or lesser respect because of his achievement. Nor do I, even now. All I can tell you is that, if he thought of Wystan and my father as family, then I’m a lucky man to have been included in the deal. But I am sure that, if he’s now in a position to read all this stuff about ‘lonely Titan’, ‘suffering exile’, ‘Russian outcast’, then it will be with – if I can use a favourite word of his – a ‘necessary’ smile.

34 SA M BRUS SE L L Born 1956 in Haifa (Israel). Discovers Brodsky’s poetry in the Post War Russian Poetry anthology published by Penguin and edited by Daniel Weissbort – in 1974 – in the basement of 84 Charing Cross Road. Writes to Brodsky, then goes to see him in NYC. After many ramblings through Europe (east and west), Israel and America, founds Anatolia editions in Paris in 1992 (some 250 titles to this day.) Edits sporadically since 1997 the literary magazine Le Lecteur. Author of Généalogie de l’ère nouvelle (Grasset, Paris, 2005) and Musique pour les vivants (Grasset, Paris, 2007.) Lives in Bruges (West Flanders) and Nyon (Canton Vaud, Switzerland.) On Brodsky, he has written and published a prose: ‘Correspondances avec Joseph Brodsky’ (in ‘Musique pour les vivants’); itranslated into Russian by Irina Kuznetsova for a Moscow literary magazine.

HE R ESTOR ED TO POET RY I T S META PH YSICA L DIMENSION An Interview with Sam Brussell (December 2007) – How would you characterize your relationship with Joseph? – I recall our relationship as somewhat stressful at the beginning. I had an insolent attitude, perhaps unintentionally provocative, probably due to my youth – I was barely 20 when I first met him in New York. In the course of time, I had the impression that our relationship improved; from the moment that I began to earn my living in publishing and to be published myself. – Do you remember your first meeting? – I had called him from London when he was in Michigan teaching at Ann Arbour and he gave me a date to meet him the following week at his apartment in the Village, at 44, Morton Street, where I was.

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I recall that in my enthusiasm, I had the habit of crossing the streets without paying any attention to traffic and every time he grabbed me by the collar and told me I was going to get killed. On the first occasion, we went to the Caffé Greco and he ordered a sandwich with a double espresso. I ordered the same and then I launched into an attack on Robert Lowell and Stephen Spender, both of whom he had praised. I had the feeling that he disagreed with me more on principle than out of deep conviction, and that he was rather amused by my juvenile arrogance. – You titled your article on Joseph ‘Correspondence with Joseph Brodsky’ this having lasted almost 20 years. Was it a real or imaginary correspondence? – It was a mental correspondence that lasted through the period I knew him, over some 20 years. I still have the feeling it goes on to this day. – You shared many interests with Brodsky, one of which your love for the English language. What is so special about English that makes you single it out among all the other European languages? – The importance and the quality of the literature it produced is what makes this language so special to me. – You also like Russian to such an extent that you find Cyrillic letters elegant. Are you serious? Or do you prefer the letters to the sounds of the Russian language? – I love everything about the Russian language, though I never went beyond a basic knowledge of it. – How did Joseph’s voice sound to you? You attended a few of his readings. What do you thing of his manner of reading poetry? – He read his poetry as a poet, in a vibrant way. You could feel he was under a spell – so were those who listened to him. You’d have had to be a stone not to be moved. – Do you prefer Brodsky’s prose to his poetry? – I make a distinction between his autobiographical prose and his critical essays. I like enormously the former, which is very close to the essence and inspiration of his poetry, animated by daring – almost borderline – metaphors. His critical prose is very imaginative, coloured by the somewhat haphazard culture of a self-taught man. When he wrote his essays on Tsvetaeva, Auden, Cavafy, Mandelstam, Frost, etc., I wonder to what extent he was not yielding to his desire

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to be recognized as the professor, somewhat on the model of Nabokov. Nonetheless, he did rejuvenate the art of criticism, and through it, supplied enormous raw material for thought, even if his critical writing is simultaneously both constrained and stimulated by his unbridled poetic intellect. – You also describe how you read Joseph’s ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’. Do you know that when he read this poem to Anna Akhmatova in 1963 she called him a genius? She also expressed doubt as to whether Joseph himself realized what he has written. Do you still like this poem? – I still do. Actually, I think his early poems are among his best. – In Russia, Brodsky is perceived as the last of the twentieth century’s great Russian poets in the line of Blok, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Akhmatova. In the West Brodsky as a poet is mainly known through translations. A few American poets said that most of Brodsky’s poems are hardly of the quality of, say, Heaney’s or Walcott’s originals. Yet he attained a position of eminence and influence, particularly in the United States. How do you explain this? – Brodsky always inspired jealousy among his colleagues and not only

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the English speakers. One would have to be completely out of touch with contemporary poetry not to see that he overshadowed completely his fellow writers. He is the only poet of his generation in the West to have restored to poetry its metaphysical dimension, not to mention his extraordinary stylistic innovations. From which follows his influence and his dominant position, as much in the West as in his native Russia. Inevitably, he made himself vulnerable to criticism when he wrote some of his later poems directly in English. For my part, I see in this aspect of his work a kind of exercise and a way of paying respect to this language, that he loved. – Such English poets as Donald Davie, Peter Porter and Craig Raine did not appreciate his poetry. Can you offer an explanation? – These poets probably did not understand it. – In October 1988 you took part in a so call ‘Meeting of Writers from West and East’. Please tell me more about that meeting and Brodsky’s part in it? What was the most memorable moment for you during that meeting? – It took place in Paris. Basically, I remember that ‘the western writers’ – the French – showed a total incomprehension of ‘the eastern writers’ – Brodsky, Zagajewski, Milosz, Kolakowski, Kiš – for whom literature was mingled with a strong sense of history. Literature, for the French, was a purely decorative, bourgeois concept, or so it seemed to me. – Not many people have the energy or the appetite for freedom that Joseph had and professed in his poetry. Could it be one of the reasons of the resentment by some Western poets? Can you suggest other reasons? – Energy and the thirst for freedom are the components most lacking in contemporary Western poetry, even though they are the foundations of poetry. With unprecedented vitality, Brodsky re-defined the poetic imperatives as moral imperatives. – What is his reputation in France? Is his poetry read much in French translation? – He is fairly unknown in France. His poems are read by a few poetry lovers. Cioran described the French as ‘the people most foreign to metaphysics’ – which is to say to poetry. This is perhaps the reason for his small audience in France. – Why didn’t Brodsky like France? – He was basically disgusted by the intellectual and political attitudes

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of the Parisian intelligentsia – a disgust that was shared by a number of his contemporaries such as Burgess, Naipaul or Simon Leys. That did not prevent him at all from greatly admiring the French moralists from Pascal to Chamfort. In fact, he viewed Cioran as one of their most pure heirs. – Joseph always refused to play the victim. Nevertheless, his critics never ceased to claim that he owed his fame to his trial and exile. Is this fair? – The critics forget his genius, without which his trial and exile wouldn’t have been of any help. In any case, his biography and his work, in his case as with all writers, are indissociable in the construction of his legend. – How did you learn about Joseph’s death? – By my radio-alarm clock, at 7 am, GMT, on the 28th of January 1996. – Did Brodsky achieve any kind of harmony between his Jewish origins and his Christian outlook? – His poetry bridged the two cultures without contradiction. As such, he incarnates a revelation. This harmony permeates his entire body of work, from his early poems written in the sixties such as ‘The Jewish cemetery’ or ‘The Greek church in Leningrad’, to the last poems such as ‘The Flight from Egypt’. – Like Mandelstam and Pasternak before him, Brodsky bridged Christian and Jewish culture. Every year Brodsky wrote a Christmas poem. Yet, he is not accepted as a Christian poet. How do you see him in this respect? – He is a Christian by adoption – in the broadest sense, poetic and metaphysical. That’s what he called being a Christian by correspondence. That he wouldn’t be perceived as a Christian by people with a more narrow view of Christianity matters little. – In your view, was Brodsky a religious poet? – He is a metaphysical poet, therefore a religious poet, in the tradition of John Donne, Thomas Traherne or Emily Dickinson. – Like Brodsky, you have a very high opinion of W. H. Auden. Do you see any common features between Auden’s and Brodsky’s poetics? – The moral imperative they assigned to poetry. Also I see them both as Christian heretics. Auden and Brodsky recognized each other despite the differences in their age, country, and language. A few

syllables were enough for them to appreciate each other; this is the privilege of poets. – Do you know, why Brodsky refused to visit Israel? – I know the subject weighed on him. His hands were full enough already with Soviet Russia, Europe and the U. S. without adding to it the Jewish state – a problematic subject one has to admit. I also believe that he cultivated a certain distance with regard to Israël, which for him was a form of discretion. Also, we must remember Brodsky looked West. Finally, I see his position on this subject as an indirect affirmation of his attachment to his homeland – Russia. – Which contemporary British or French poets do satisfy your need for beauty? – No names come to my mind spontaneously. – Why do you think Joseph was more popular among women than among men? – He was a man who loved women, which was present in his poetry, and I am sure it didn’t escape his female readers. – Brodsky was trying hard to disperse the aureole of biographical legend that others had constructed around him. What comes first for you, Brodsky the man, or the poems? – It is rather difficult for me, having known him, to dissociate the man from the work. – In you essay you have a beautiful little chapter about a black cat that you identify with Joseph. Do you know why Joseph was so fond of the cats? – He was fond of kotiks since the times of Peter, if I’m not mistaken. – That’s true, in Leningrad (or Peter, as Brodsky called it) he had a black cat with a white tie and white paws, named after him – Osya. He also called her ‘koshka v belykh sapozhkakh’ (a cat in white boots). He couldn’t help rhyming everything!

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35 A L A N MY ER S Alan Myers was born in South Shields, near Newcastle upon Tyne, and attended London University 1957- 60, and Moscow University 1960-61. He taught Russian and English in Hertfordshire 1963-86 before retiring to work as a freelance literary translator, producing mimetic rhymed versions of 19th century Russian poetry (An Age Ago, Penguin,1989) extracts from which appear in the Oxford Book of Quotations. He also translated poems and essays for Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky as well as his two plays Marbles (Penguin, 1988) and Democracy! (Granta, 1990) – the latter performed at London’s Gate Theatre. In prose, major works include Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1992) and A Gentle Creature and Other Stories (1995) both published by Oxford University Press. This was followed up by Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (1997), also for OUP. In addition Myers has published a wide range of modern Russian novels and stories, including thrillers and science fiction (Edward Topol Red Gas, Fridrikh Neznansky Operation Faust; the Strugatsky Brothers Snail on the Slop and Far Rainbow). The Myers Collection of Russian science fiction is held at the University of Liverpool. Particular mention might be made of Lydia Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary (1995), and Yury Dombrovsky’s epic novel The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1996), both brought out by Harvill. He has also translated literary memoirs, including Kruchenykh My Vykhodim – Our Arrival RA publishers, Moscow, avant-garde art criticism (Efros, Malevich, Kandinsky etc.) and a docu-novel on the Chernobyl disaster. Mimetic rhymed versions of Irina Ratushinskaya have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. His translations appeared in Utopias (Penguin, 1999), a survey of Russian modernism. These include versions of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Kharms, Vaginov and Zamyatin. He has also published research articles in the Slavonic and East European Review and elsewhere on WE and Eugeny Zamyatin’s life and writings in Newcastle 1916-17 (there is now a plaque in the city). He is contributing associate editor of Northern Review in Newcastle; author of Myers’ Literary Guide: The North East (1995, 1997, now online); co-author of W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet (North Pennines Heritage Trust, 1999), as well as the literature chapter in Newcastle: A Modern History (Phillimore, 2001) and in Northumbria (Phillimore, 2007). He is a contributor to the Oxford Companion to English Literature and the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

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An Interview with Alan Myers (November 2003 – September 2004) – You are perhaps in a unique position to give a Russian reader an empirical account of Joseph’s visits to England: you were his friend and translator for more than 20 years. When did you hear about him for the first time? – I first became aware of Joseph Brodsky’s name in the early ‘60s, when BBC Radio 3 broadcast a dramatisation of the transcript of his trial for parasitism. I was struck by Joseph’s brave remarks during the court proceedings, though these were delivered by the actor in a soulful ‘poetic’ voice, as if to emphasise the brutality of the state machine in crushing a defenceless artist. Some of Joseph’s early poems were also broadcast (in Nicholas Bethell’s translation) and they made a considerable impression on me, though Joseph had no great regard for these, and subsequently repudiated the poems themselves. I do remember rather resenting the later section of ‘The Great Elegy for John Donne’. It seemed to be gilding the lily but, much later, Joseph was to comment gloomily on my lack of ‘winged words’ in this regard. It reminded me of a short film I saw once, showing Picasso at work on a minor abstract. I kept wanting to shout ‘stop there, it’s wonderful!’ But he went on and on. It’s just a matter of sensibility. I mean does anyone think Picasso was wrong? – Joseph was a close friend of your wife, Diana. Did she help you to become aware of the magnitude of Joseph’s talent? – Joseph’s reputation was reinforced from time to time by references in the British media but these were uninformative and tendentious. Diana spoke of how Joseph would come to her room and read his latest verse in his unique delivery, thrilling and tragic. I learned from her of the various shifts he adopted to earn a living, and how his reputation grew inexorably, despite the fact that his name was taboo in the Soviet Union. Moreover, he would ask her opinion of his work in progress, and once informed her that she told him things he never heard from anyone else. He even came to Tbilisi to see her when he

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Alan Myers, Joseph Brodsky & Diana Myers in Cotswolds, England, 1975.

had missed her in Leningrad. There was snow on the ground, a very rare event in the city, though Pasternak has a poem on the subject. When Diana came to England in 1967 after our marriage, she was carrying a bunch of flowers from Joseph, with instructions to lay them at the feet of John Donne’s effigy in St Paul’s Cathedral. We accordingly set off at once by tube and executed Joseph’s behest. When he stayed with us in England he would continue the consultation with Diana as he wrote, and would ring up from around the globe and read his work down the line. Memory tells me that I received news from Vienna that Joseph would be attending Poetry International in London in 1972, along with his hero, Auden. As instructed, I phoned Charles Osborne at the Arts Council to inform him. He seemed taken aback by this message out of the blue from someone he’d never heard of. In the Queen Elizabeth hall, Joseph’s delivery came as a surprise to many and occasioned much comment. This, combined with the circumstances of his ‘60 s banishment to the Arctic and his recent dramatic departure from the USSR on a one-way ticket, made Joseph an intriguingly heroic figure and, less fortunately, provided a facile handle then and thereafter for journalists and critics to evaluate his verse largely in terms of ‘the poetry of exile’.

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– So, it was not before June 1972 that you met Joseph in the flesh. What was your impression of him as a man? – When I eventually saw Joseph, he had been visiting Al Alvarez in Hampstead, and we adjourned to a restaurant in Flask Walk, called, I think, the ‘White Bear’. I found, not a soulful aesthete, but a sturdy and self-assured individual (Diana told me that he had occasionally acted as a sparring partner for the formidable Leningrad boxers). He was ginger-haired, broad-browed and rather handsome. He behaved expansively and had a strong sense of humour, often expressed in those early days as Nabokovian punning: ‘And-drop-off!’. He maintained, by the way, that Nabokov had chosen the Swiss town of Vevey as his residence because it corresponded to his initials VV. Joseph rarely laughed out loud, but had the disarming habit of grinning with his lips closed, as if he were pulling a comic face. – Apart from poetry and music, did he have any more mundane interests at the time? – His first words on arriving in England and entering our house would be: ‘Is there any football on?’ The league season was over as a rule by the time he got to England, but the European Championships or the World Cup would be in progress in the summer months and he watched the television broadcasts avidly. He particularly relished Marco Van Basten’s memorable goal against the USSR, and would remind me of it years later. At our house in Welwyn Garden City, we played vigorous and rowdy games on the green outside, until warned off by a neighbour because we were waking his baby up. Joseph wasn’t otherwise a TV watcher, though he enjoyed the film Midnight Run with Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin. He hated Woody Allen, that’s certain. He was also a voracious reader, of course, not just of poetry; ‘Liberty is for going to your library’. He never went anywhere without a book; he borrowed my Dog Beneath the Skin (by Auden and Ishrwood), I remember, and took an Evelyn Waugh with him to New York, leaving a note in four languages: ‘Ich grab votre Bo’. – Was Joseph a solitary or social creature? – When not engaged in solitary writing, Joseph was intensely fond of company. I once remarked that I was fairly sociable, but not gregarious. ‘Why not?’ he inquired, apparently quite serious. It goes

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without saying that Joseph had an almost magnetic presence in any gathering I attended. No one else was able to hold the floor, with Joseph a patient listener. Assemblies without him seemed to be curiously lacking in a gravitational centre. At one such in Hampstead, Joseph duly appeared, wandered distraught from room to room crying: ‘Gde veselye? Gde veselye?’ (Where’s the party? Where’s the party?) before disappearing again for a walk on the Heath. – In his conversation Joseph tended to have a kind of authoritarian manner. Would you agree? – Domination of the social group reminds us of Auden again, though I have read that Auden was surprised that people took what he said so seriously. Joseph was less ludic; he knew his worth of course and had earned it the hard way. When I pointed out that someone in a review had called him a genius, he merely chuckled: ‘Again?’ Peter Porter once told me that Joseph was the most conceited individual he had ever met. Perhaps a good parallel for Joseph’s conversational behaviour was Doctor Samuel Johnson. The great lexicographer took delight in ‘declaiming’ to his morning company, and of an evening, loved arguing on both side of a question. He enjoyed ‘tossing and goring’ his opponents – ‘arguing for victory’ as Boswell put it. Some people took offence, but most were utterly seduced by the love in the man and indulged him without reserve. (Joseph was far less ponderous and bullying than Johnson of course, but there was a resemblance). Indoors, when not working, Joseph had a bluff and hustling manner, and women would enter into the spirit and cheerfully obey his every whim. ‘Kisa, nu kisa!’ would be his affectionate coercion to those he really liked (Joseph was fond of cats, and used to call his parents ‘kot’ and ‘kisa’). Men, I think, were more resistant; I stood my ground occasionally, but it took some doing. Joseph, if rebuffed, would usually say ‘miaow’ and adopt an approach of elaborate coaxing. If he still got nowhere, he would sigh: ‘Nu ladno’ or ‘alright’ with such a piteous inflection that you were left feeling foolishly intransigent. Once in Kensington, he suddenly said: ‘Let’s go to Egypt! Now!’ Such was the force of his personality that I felt a real spoilsport when I replied: ‘I prefer not’. Naturally, he picked up the quotation at once (Herman Melville’s Bartleby).

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– Did he display his vast knowledge in every area? – Despite, or perhaps because of his lack of formal education, Joseph had an immense web of knowledge (to which he was always adding) and was able to snap swiftly from football to Philby to philosophy, often ending, as he loved to do, with some decisive aphorism: ‘In theory, one should be able to lose weight as quickly as one put it on’; ‘Evil is a bad stylist’; ‘Civilisation always spreads from south to north: barbarism from east to west’. I suppose he meant Europe here, but hadn’t said so. I played the straight man and demurred: ‘What about the Chinese?’ He stared at me, smiled slowly and said: ‘Well, who gives a shit about them?’ Far from being tentative or unassuming in the Anglo-Saxon manner, Joseph would fight tenaciously over matters of fact, on the rare occasions when his prodigious store of knowledge on everything from Catullus to Clarks shoes failed him. He took quite a lot of persuading, for example, that Madam Butterfly and Cho-Cho-San were one and the same opera. This procedure was not mere mulishness, but rather his way of actually learning something. Ancient history was not his forte; however, and throughout his life he would ring me or Dr Veronique Schiltz, from Stockholm or Reggio Calabria with questions. I recall him asking me what season of the year it was when Belisarius launched his campaign of annihilation against the Vandals. – As we all know, Joseph travelled a lot. Was he in touch with you regularly? – He would send me cards and letters from far-off lands, signed ‘Tarzan’, ‘vostro monstro’, and, in imitation of Emily Dickinson, ‘spinsterly yours’. These missives sometimes contained advice, a propos of what I don’t remember, like ‘hang on, that’s what the fingernails are for’. I’ve used this phrase myself to others, and it has worked well. The postcards usually included a piece of doggerel: Life lingers like Count Dracula’s fingers and I am in Sweden which is the WC Eden they are as pristine as ‘mein lieber Augustine’.

or:

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I write this junk in Seven Forty Seven heading to England through Atlantic heaven. My buttocks like some heroes of science fiction Are challenging the last degree of friction. I wish to happen something cruel: To be shot down or run off fuel I’ve landed safely in this land of fellows And blokes whose heads are covered with umbrellas Where hard to chew, no easier to digest And paying cash is nothing but beau geste.

I have a note of another one, on the death of Brezhnev in 1982: He was in charge of something large; Some called it hell, some paradise. Now that he’s dead, let’s drop the grudge, We’re still alive, surprise, surprise!

– Was he always happy and cheerful? Or did you see him depressed and miserable? – Joseph wasn’t always buoyant. He might be depressed over some matter of literary infighting, family concern – or of course his health. He rarely confided in me over anything like this. He would occasionally exclaim in exasperation: ‘Oi bliad!’ And latterly rub his chest and groan. ‘Poor Joseph’ I used to say, and he would repeat the phrase, moaning in mock despair. He told me that on the way to the theatre for a heart operation, he had taken comfort from the fact that a fine letter of his had been published in the press that morning - defending Stephen Spender against Ian Hamilton’s attack. He felt it was a good note to go out on, should things turn out that way. On a lighter note, Joseph at one time was very worried about going bald. I assured him that this was the result of an excess of male hormone, and he cheered up no end. Even at the best of times, it wasn’t easy to make small talk, though. As with Wittgenstein, one learned to think twice before making even a trivial remark to him – and he was always chivvying; no semi-automatic responses were allowed. As Seamus Heaney said, his conversation achieved lift-off immediately, and the stakes were always being raised.

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– Joseph became domiciled in America, but made regular annual visits to England, giving readings around the country, taking part in Poetry International, both in London and in Cambridge. Did he always stay with you and Diana? – Yes, at least for some of the time. In fact he quite often came more than once a year. On occasions he also had the loan of someone’s London flat. He would normally choose some secluded spot to work in during the summer as well (for example, Anstruther in Fife), but I have a feeling that solitude was not something Joseph could put up with for long. One year we recommended Berwick-on-Tweed in Northumberland, but this wasn’t a success. Despite the fact that Pevsner calls Berwick one of the most architecturally exciting towns in England, Joseph was bored stiff and phoned Diana every night. There was only frozen fish to eat, it seems, which seems a bit odd in a fishing-port. I think Berwick was still technically at war with Russia at that time (a Crimea treaty anomaly). This has been formally rectified since. – I remember you once mentioned to me a particular long journey with Joseph to the North of England. Tell us more about it. – We had all made a trip to Bibury and Chipping Camden in the Cotswolds, with Veronique, and on another occasion Joseph, with Diana and two other friends went to Salisbury and Stonehenge. In the summer of 1974, Joseph originally intended to hire a Ford Escort, but instead we used our car. I was in charge of the itinerary and the four of us, Diana and I, Joseph and Veronique, set off for the North. The journey began with Blunham. John Donne used to visit Blunham annually 1622 - 1631 when he was Dean of St Paul’s in London. Village tradition has it that he would load his carriage up with cucumbers to take back with him. We stopped at Leighton Bromswold, where George Herbert had been prebendary and Little Gidding of Four Quartets fame. After the majestic Elizabethan ruins of Kirby Hall (lunch among the roses), we visited Isaac Newton’s birthplace in Woolsthorpe, studied the great man’s geometric graffiti and sat beneath a descendant of the famous apple tree – though I was too dense to remember Auden’s ‘apple falling towards England’. – Was Auden on his mind during this journey? – South of the Humber, I found myself apologising for the uneventful landscape of small waterways, sheds and cranes. Joseph assured me,

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with what seemed excessive earnestness: ‘I like it, really, I like it!’ I still hadn’t realised the extent to which he had modelled himself on Auden; to him this was Audenesque industrial scenery. We spent the night in York, and next morning visited the plaque on Auden’s birthplace. We then headed for Coxwold and Laurence Sterne’s ‘Shandy Hall’, before climbing to the vividly purple North York Moors by way of Rievaulx Abbey and the vast, white domes of the Fylingdales early warning system. Gradually, as we approached Whitby, the horizon seemed to tilt up into the sky, with ships stuck in the intense blue. Joseph was entranced: ‘Here I work!’ he exclaimed. I headed north on my own by rail from Whitby, but a phone call from Diana informed me that I had taken the car-keys with me. My sister and I returned them next day, driving down from Tyneside. Joseph, it seemed, had been much alarmed when Diana approached a Whitby policeman for help: ‘Ne nado! Ne nado!’ Eventually most of the Whitby force became involved in opening the car, and would later greet the three travellers around town, asking how things were going. Joseph was impressed. He kept a number of photographs from this journey and they are now in the archive. He also wrote some pertinent lines for my birthday on 20 August that year: It took to lose that key to learn the when and where that you were born. See how a soulless car can cast revealing lights into one’s past. The more we move, the less we know of things above and things below. Say, if I hired that Escort, then where would be now my soul and pen? At least my pen is here. It makes bloody paper, bit by bit, less white, less innocent of course. Thus, ‘Happy Birthday’ also scores. Before I leave for States or crash I wish you more in terms of cash,

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and, as the Poet said, ‘keep cool when you are old and grey and fool’. Since you were born before myself It’s hard to choose between to be or not to be, my lord, thy serf. (This was written in Welwyn arden City.)

In fact Joseph didn’t stay in Whitby to work after all. On the way back south via Lincoln, Diana’s car broke down and the travellers were helped by a passing motorist. He asked their nationalities – Russian, French, and Joseph, who declared himself an American. ‘All we need now is a German’, remarked the motorist. One year, Joseph gave a reading in Durham and I was able to arrange for him to stay in the 11th century castle of the Prince Bishops. He also visited Hadrian’s Wall at this time, but whether he connected Auden with the North Pennine moorlands lying to the south of the Wall seems unlikely. If he had, he would surely have visited what Auden called his ‘Mutterland’, his ‘great good place’. Rookhope, where Auden first became conscious of himself as a poet in 1922, is only a few miles west of Durham, though Bolt’s Law, where he dropped the famous stone down a flooded mine-shaft might have been too testing a climb. It occurs to me that Philip Larkin may well have been in residence at Monica Jones’ cottage in Haydon Bridge, a mile or two south of the Wall at this very time. I did mention Larkin to Joseph once; he just smiled grimly and said: ‘Aubade’. There was no writer, ancient or modern, certainly no poet, who was a stranger to him. Unlike Auden, however, Joseph didn’t let this store of knowledge overwhelm his verse. It never became ‘the product of an exile’s reading’. – What did Joseph find so attractive about England? Its climate, its history, its language, its poetry, or all together? – I don’t remember Joseph ever mentioning the climate. He knew Auden preferred autumnal weather – high wind and driving rain, and this may have prompted a stoical stance. He knew very little of the minutiae of English history either. It goes without saying that he loved English poetry. In fact he was an anglophile altogether. What really appealed to him most were the people he met in England. He particu-

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larly enjoyed the sort of conversations he had with Stephen Spender and Isaiah Berlin. He loved the sound of well-spoken English, something he infinitely preferred to American speech. Joseph had an acute sensibility with regard the ambience of a place, but no eye for architecture. He never mentioned any particular building. Towards the end of his life he spoke to me about residing in Northumberland, even of laying his bones there. This was a surprise, bearing in mind Joseph’s penchant for classical, particularly Roman, civilisation. I merely said: ‘For a public man, it’s rather far from the action’. ‘What action?’ he responded quite fiercely. Of course, he adored Venice and Rome, where his Brodsky Foundation was designed to assuage the ‘yearning for world culture’ on the part of present-day Russian writers, and once, in a Hampstead garden, he came across a classical garden ornament; with a beatific smile, he spread his arms and exclaimed: ‘Rome!’ All the same, as with Auden, there was a certain ambivalence. Auden expresses this in his poem, ‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ and always declared himself to be a man of the North, living outside the limes. He had written in 1947: ‘Years before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did these feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins’. – Joseph, too, preferred the North to the South, remember his poem: ‘The North buckles metal, glass it won’t harm; / teaches the throat to say, ‘Let me in.’ / I was raised by the cold that, to warm my palm, / gathered my fingers around a pen’. – Yes, Joseph used to say that he was a ‘northern man’ (severnyi chelovek). Nevertheless, none of his northern peregrinations in England produced a poem, except for ‘York’, a heart-felt tribute to Auden – though of course, Auden had left York for Birmingham as a small baby. This poem, incidentally, with its line ‘four years soon since you died’ caused Joseph consternation, when the editor of The New Yorker queried, prior to publication, whether it was still four years. ‘Does he want me to re-write it every year’, laughed Joseph. – Joseph regarded Auden as one of the best poets in the English language; he imitated his poetic forms (e.g. ‘On the Death of TS Eliot’), his reserved style, now you are saying, even his manners?

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– Until late in Joseph’s life, I consistently underestimated his worship of Auden, whom he considered to be the greatest thinker of the 20th century – a heterodox view, to say the least. Like his hero, Joseph adopted a sort of mid-Atlantic idiom in English, dotted with modern American colloquialisms, though unlike Auden he didn’t dig up fantastic words from the dictionary. Particularly in the later period, he would incline to the encapsulating aphorism in conversation, as Auden had done. Oddly enough he also employed Audenesque genteelisms like: ‘That would be awfully nice’. He visited Iceland, where Auden supposedly intended, eventually, to live for six months of the year, shut off from the world in a dwelling with small windows. ‘I like it cold’ was the title of the relevant Auden article in 1947. On his famous 1936 Icelandic expedition with Auden, Louis MacNeice noted glumly: ‘Everything he touches turns to cigarettes’. Joseph too smoked like a chimney. He wore casually sloppy clothes, like Auden, and even begged an old duffel coat from me when I was about to discard it. Joseph arrived from Iceland at the Scottish port of Scrabster, wearing a weatherproof jacket, which had belonged to Mikhail Baryshnikov. He gave it to me and I wore it with pride for some years. Joseph clung to his old Olivetti, as part of the same image, though around 1990 he asked me how long it would take to learn to use a word processor. I said perhaps a week or two to get comfortable with it. He never got one. Certainly Joseph followed some of Auden’s poetic forms, and the impersonal style of Eliot and the pre-1948 Auden, but he never tried to imitate the dazzling alliteration that permeates so many Auden poems, far less a virtuoso performance like The Age of Anxiety. – Joseph dedicated his ‘In England’ sequence to you and Diana. Can you tell us more about the circumstances of this dedication? – Not a great deal more. Joseph presented these poems out of the blue to Diana in Paris, where they were staying with Veronique. They reflect his early experience of England, which he associated with us – ‘York’ for example relates to our trip to Whitby. In ‘East Finchley’ he meditates on our house in the uneventful London suburb of that name. Joseph found our sleepy residence very relaxing. Both Diana and I feature in the poem and our budgerigar (of which Joseph was very nervous) appears as a stuffed quail. I remember pointing out that

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the fuchsias in the garden resembled ballerinas in tutus, an image Joseph used in ‘East Finchley’. I liked the poems very much, though it again struck me that Joseph had occasional difficulty in rounding-off his verse without producing an effect either arbitrary or obscure. I always thought that in his longer works he was seeking some final Audenesque aphorism of allencompassing profundity, but the centrifugal movement of his thought constantly ran counter to this, seeming to proliferate, spreading implacably, rather like an analogue of the expanding universe itself. Those images that yet Fresh images beget …

These longer poems might well have gone on forever, like Borges’ Library of Babel. The short poems are more successful in this regard and I have a fondness for my version of ‘The classical ballet…’ in A Part of Speech. – You translated this cycle ‘In England’. To what extent did Joseph exercise control over your translation? – Joseph was very keen for me to translate these verses, despite the fact that I had never done anything like that before. I did my best, and the versions were published in magazines in this country and the USA. I remember that The New Yorker didn’t feel able to use my phrase ‘so it goes’ in ‘York’, because it had become over-familiar in the USA from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-5. Someone replaced the phrase with ‘and so on’. Joseph had suggested ‘etcetera’ on the manuscript, but that would have been worse. There were other minor changes, all sanctioned by Joseph without reference to me, but by and large the original magazine versions were as I had done them. The shortest poem ‘Stone Villages’ has turned up since in anthologies, on radio and so on; it’s usually described as Larkinesque, which is ironic because Joseph had no great opinion of Larkin. I got no praise for my efforts, as I recall, and later one or two of the versions were reworked to some extent by Joseph, again without consulting me, before their appearance in A Part of Speech. Joseph puts it disarmingly in that book: ‘I would like to thank each of my translators for his long hours of work in rendering my poems into English. I have taken the liberty of reworking some of the translations to bring them closer

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to the original, though perhaps at the expense of their smoothness’. Smoothness in my own versions equated to one of the most damning words in Joseph’s vocabulary – ‘cute’. I didn’t take it amiss that Joseph would rewrite parts of my work; I was only too glad to be the handmaid of genius, and to be taken for granted. – Did you ever question Joseph’s authority in English? – Well, yes, as a teacher of English myself, I did that constantly at first, but when I realised with some exasperation that he was disposed to ignore my sage words, I resigned myself to the inevitable. If the final version suited Joseph and his editors, who was I to complain? As W. C. Fields said: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try again; if you still don’t succeed – give up. There’s no point of making a damn fool of yourself’. I saw my status as an amateur in a world in which he had to survive as a professional. I just wanted him to avoid errors like the one in ‘Three Knights’, where he took the plural ‘carp’ to be my misprint for ‘carps’. This solecism has been repeated in every printing of the poem since, despite my objections. There are other such instances. – Brodsky came out of a tradition of mimetic verse translation, which seems to dismiss any translation that doesn’t seek to imitate the original form. Did Joseph ask you to reproduce his rhymes and metre? – I could sense that he was only satisfied up to a point with ‘In England’. He began to encourage me to translate mimetically, preserving the exact form of the original, including the rhyme scheme – a heterodox procedure in this country, and one in which I had little original faith. We never collaborated in the sense of working together on a poem. I would produce, and he would amend, without discussion: ‘I’ve been mangling your masterpieces’, he would heartlessly declare, as I arrived home from school. He would also snigger derisively if he caught me counting syllables. Annoyingly, he wrote that translating was just like solving a crossword puzzle. A translator would say that a crossword has a specific solution, whereas a translation is relatively open-ended. After all, even without the Josephian pyrotechnics, as Robert Conquest remarked: ‘Translating rhymed poetry into English rhymed poetry is the most difficult of all arts’. Incidentally, as a complaisant amateur, I was happy to work for nothing, though Joseph would rage when I said so: ‘None of this fucking Red Cross! When

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have I ever asked you to work for nothing?’ There are, as we know, serious arguments against mimetic translation, especially from the Russian, a language whose words are on average fifty per cent longer than in English. The translator, maddeningly, has to fit the articles ‘a’ and ‘the’ in there somewhere, words Russian does without. Using ellipsis would be suitably Audenesque but looks like showing-off in English nowadays. In any case, English is notoriously resistant to rhyme unless you are ‘daring’ as I think Joseph says euphemistically somewhere. The trouble there is that any ‘daringly’ complex rhyme-scheme is going to look like a tour-de-force in English, so drawing the readers’ attention to the poet’s technique and away from the content. – Did you admire his stubbornness or laugh at it when he insisted that translation should retain the form of the original? – I had to admire his doggedness – partly because I had an uneasy sense that he was right. Whether I was the one to bring the trick off was another matter, but strangely enough, as I gamely toiled at producing mimetic versions (Joseph used the stick always, not the carrot – I don‘t recall any praise) I gradually became entranced by the thrill I got when the challenge evoked inspiration. In fact, I actually came round to Joseph’s way of thinking. It was, I began to think, the only game in town. His insistence on the primacy of the rhyme also began to make sense; if one could get that right, it would provide the driving force of the poem if not its destination. Sometimes, of course, Joseph’s verse just wouldn’t come out and I left it to him to change things around to his own satisfaction – the privilege of the poet, but not the translator! (In ‘A Part of Speech’ he changed the Russian polar explorer Sedov into Captain Scott. The most prominent name in British polar adventure in recent times has been Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Fiennes. If it had been he who perished in Antarctica in 1912, Joseph might have stuck with Sedov!) Sometimes his interventions were inspired. The first part of ‘Mexican Divertimento’ is mostly my original work (apart from the marmot). I can’t recall now what I had for the end of line six but Joseph inserted: ‘The crystal, be it noted, smashed to sand’. Quite brilliant. I’d never have thought of that. Still, there was obviously a limit to the time an amateur could spend on such an exacting task as producing finished and polished

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translations for the master to re-work. Anyone who has ever tried to produce mimetic versions of rhymed poetry knows that as a killer of time it has no equal. Whole days can pass unnoticed. It is the ideal prison occupation. At first I was content to have ‘with the author’ attached to these versions. I see this appears at the end of ‘Christmas 1971’ though the thing is all mine except for the last line. I suppose this is why people think I actually worked with Joseph. But when the poem had been greatly changed, I felt disinclined to share the billing. It wasn’t my non-existent fastidious ego a-squeaking, I just felt uneasy about it. One or the other, I thought. Eventually, I put it to Joseph that some other modus operandi would have to be reached and we agreed that I would furnish some sort of fairly sophisticated armature or polufabrikat which Joseph could mould to his will. As we reached the ’90 s I found this less and less fulfilling and besides, I was undertaking some major prose works by now, including Dostoevsky’s Idiot for O. U. P. – Did you also furnish polufabrikat for his translation of Mandelstam’s ‘Tristia’? – No, he sent me a translation of Tristia to show what he could do unassisted. It’s a beautiful achievement. One line has remained with me: ‘And candles twist the temple colonnade’. I think he spent a long time on it and I’ve wondered why he didn’t do more. I’ve only ever translated one Mandelstam poem. The others just won’t come out for me. – You also translated his poem ‘1972’ using dactylic rhymes that can work only in light verse in English. Was it your idea or his? – I hope you don’t think that was my idea! I’d sooner bite my own arm off. My version was grimly flawed, as I recall, and can barely be glimpsed in the final version, despite supposedly being the work of myself with Joseph. But I don’t think Joseph’s was much more convincing. He was faced with doing the crossword himself now and although he could use my work as some sort of pointer, the rhyme scheme of aaa b ccc b plus dactylic rhymes came over as an awesome display of mental athleticism rather than a realised poem. Nevertheless, all these poetic acrobatics had their effect on my own attitudes. Robert Frost once compared free verse to playing tennis without a net, and whatever the dubious success of my efforts for Joseph, I felt that if I continued to translate poetry, this facsimile ap-

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proach was the way I would have to go. I don’t remember when the question of translating early 19th century Russian poetry came up, but I was working on them in the ‘80s. After my brisk tutelage at the hands of Joseph I found it positively relaxing to follow the exact formal structure of the originals with their relatively restrained vocabulary and unemphatic rhymes. They had their problems too, of course – finding eight different rhymes for God in Vyazemsky’s ‘Russian God’ for instance, but on the whole I felt I performed vastly better in that field. – What was the last poem of Joseph’s that you translated? – To the end Joseph was still asking me to do verse translations and I had just completed my last Brodsky poem ‘To N. N.’ before he died. He never saw it. I trust that the master‘s voice can be detected, if not, alas, his hand. – May I reproduce it here, in this collection of interviews about Brodsky? – By all means. It will give the reader a good idea of how I performed on my own, as it were, when dealing with a complex poem. IN MEMORY OF N. N. I have forgotten you; but I can clearly picture the hallway plaster, swollen thyroid stricture of central-heating pipes, awash with callers, a hail of phone-names sounding like ‘last orders’, or ‘murder’, and psoriasis-asbestos, an epidemic too – a fungus-fester of electric meters, the blockade fashion. You died, but they still linger on, years splashing beneath the waves like Stenka Razin’s princess. A different currency, and different winters, A different foliage, the carrion quite other. What can be done with what’s been lived? Why bother in any case with what the thing is saying, the hypothalamus I mean, the neighing, the distant echoing its very heroes cannot make out by now, so far away from Hellas?

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Advice for me, perhaps? Cheer up and take it? Look up and see the clouds? All those – the faces and the outlines - have jackets with a braiding of Holland lace. But still, there’s no invading the past by parachute, that post-war scenery, the river-artery, the trams careening, your laundry with those double digits spotted. Eleven square metres living-space allotted right opposite a bombed-out ten-year college have brain-shrunk to a single cell of knowledge, including that old flannel sofa-cover beneath the swan, where you indulged a lover, teenaged, cloth-capped and wearing short serge britches. Look up into the clouds? – where all those pictures lie strewn around like squares in an old painting attempting to inure eyes to privation? Not worth it, darling, since besides the weather, its vagaries, what survives? A new era, lapels are different, different dogmas, values. And I’m the only one who still can call you at once to mind entire at century’s closing, outside of time. I mean sans clothing, there on the sheet. But then, no doubt, the body resists in its decay the constant prodding of memory, like victims of the system denying evil the best part of existence and more – the right to future action. All for the greater praise and satisfaction of archangels, who sharpen their slate-pencils: the torso, hips, buttocks, shoulders, profiles – it all turns out to be a reparation for that embrace. A statue’s ruination. I shan’t be able to effect a rescue. That modest Pompeii of yours, bless you, is overwhelmed by the Vesuvian ashes of my forgetfulness; the hurts, mad rashness,

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the spatial dislocations, europes, asias, commitments, continents; those obligations, emotions, shambles-driven by a rabble of days, years, so forth. And you beneath that rubble lie buried. And my present lamentation is nothing but an extra inhumation of you, not the unearthing of an ancient, unique – I long to say it – quintessential! civilisation. So farewell, my lady. I have forgotten you. But who knows, maybe the sackcloth of non-being, like any other material may suit, preserving rather than dissipating, like a lifetime’s savings, the warmth retained in an eruption’s leavings.

– What does attract translators to Brodsky’s poetry? – While Joseph was alive, I’d have said: ‘Like Everest, because it’s there’. Nobel Laureate, a controversial figure precisely in this region of translation, a literary heavyweight, a challenge. A translation crown unclaimed if you like. Actually I’ve no idea what the situation is as regards modern translations since 1996. Has anyone addressed himself to mimetic interpretation? Anything less would resurrect the netless courts of vers libre and would certainly not have met with Joseph’s approval. – You also translated some of Brodsky’s prose. How much cooperation was there between you and Joseph? – I think you can guess. None at all. Joseph wrote prose, as someone aptly remarked, the way a ballet-dancer walks; it was a pleasure to work on. It is the kind of idea-literature I am most at home with. He asked me to translate his fine essay ‘Flight from Byzantium’ eventually published in The New Yorker. I also translated the plays Marbles, and Democracy. Marbles seems to me a minor masterpiece and pretty much represents my original version. Joseph had made some changes, but the people at Comparative Criticism in Cambridge, who published it before Penguin, made suggestions, which brought the text back nearer my original again. I’m amazed that it has never been accepted for production as a radio play (I’ve tried). My view

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of the characters in Marbles differed from Joseph’s completely. He agreed with me that the play had affinities with Tom Stoppard, (‘but it ain’t ‘R&G’). He described Publius in a letter of September 1982 first as ‘Levantine in appearance and heavy-set’, then later as ‘older and leaner, a sort of cross between Lee Marvin and me’. Although Tullius is a fastidious nobleman, calls Publius a barbarian and indulges in sparkling discourses on time, space, freedom and so on, Joseph insisted that neither of his characters was sophisticated. Joseph added bits and pieces and a couple of pages in the middle of Democracy for emphasis, unnecessary in my view. More means less here and the ‘Shavian’ dialogue received praise in the largely favourable reviews, which greeted its performance at The Gate Theatre in London. This play was again hugely enjoyable to do. – Brodsky launched a fierce attack on Merwin’s and Raffel’s translations of Mandelstam’s poems into English. – Those translations came out in 1973. I don’t recall Joseph’s review in any detail, but he certainly laid about him with a will in The New York Review of Books. I don’t know Raffel’s work, but Joseph was deeply disappointed with the Merwin/Brown approach. For him, translation was the search for an equivalent rather than a substitute. Some effort at reproducing the metric effect of the original had to be the starting point. The Merwin/Brown version of ‘Insomnia’, for example is a little more than the literal English prose meaning set out in lines. Who could guess that the rhyme scheme is abba, or that the first and last lines have thirteen syllables each, the middle two twelve with a feminine ending? What trace is there of the poet’s formal rhythmic skill which makes the verse so memorable to Russians? The last verse is rendered: The sea – Homer – it’s all moved by love. But to whom shall I listen? No sound now from Homer, and the black sea roars like a speech and thunders up the bed. Compare a version of my own which seeks at least to reproduce all the formal elements of the original:

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Thus Homer, and the sea – love sets all things in motion. To which shall I give ear? Now Homer says no more, The dark declaiming waves, that melancholy roar Bring surging round my bed the thunder of the ocean.

I should point out that Joseph did like Robert Tracy’s translation of Stone. These versions are not strictly mimetic, but they do strive to retain the rhyme scheme. – The more carefully crafted the Russian original the more Brodsky’s English imitations fall short. The case in point is his cycle ‘A Part of Speech’. Is the English language capable of reproducing Brodsky’s poems? – That’s a question which could be applied to any major foreign poet. It’s been said that second-rate poetry translates far more successfully than first-rate. The reputation of Edgar Allen Poe in France for example or Byron’s everywhere have been adduced as examples. If true, this would be a great, if back-handed, tribute to Joseph’s stature as a poet. The simple answer to your question is – yes. The English language can certainly reproduce Brodsky’s poems (or, as he put it, devise an equivalent) just as it can Mandelstam’s. The equally simple fact is that the process is very difficult for the reasons I gave when talking about mimetic translation in general. It is also exhausting, enormously time-consuming, and therefore uncommercial. As regards ‘A Part of Speech’ one might compare a quatrain from Joseph’s final version of one rhymed stanza with my original. Joseph first: As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these.

Then mine: As the pilot of a rocket-ship out there, his face half-hidden in the shadows, said by chance, it seems there’s no life anywhere and none of them is worth a second glance.

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My version may not be perfect and it’s certainly deplorably ‘cute’. My only point is that it gives no support to the view that this kind of verse is somehow untranslatable or that the English language can’t, as a general rule cope with Joseph’s poetry. – Craig Raine condemned Brodsky’s English as erroneous and awkward; Gerry Smith writes that ‘the general level of Brodsky’s autotranslation often verges on the embarrassing’. Do you agree with them? How did he take a similar criticism of his auto-translations from English poets, like Peter Porter or Donald Davie? – In prose, Joseph’s occasional lapses in idiom or word-usage are to me rather endearing, particularly his use of ‘replete’, a word I once used and which he liked. Paradoxically, these minor solecisms enable the reader to feel closer to the writer. Rather than being faced with pages of lapidary prose, they can sense and identify with the strenuous reasoning going on behind its verbal expression. The reader’s attention to the actual idea-content is the more engaged. The occasional linguistic lurches are easily indulged and in any case are somehow emblematic of Joseph’s auctorial stance, often located at a slight angle to the universe. As far as the poetry translations go, I have to agree with Raine and Smith, I suppose, but with a heavy heart. I am gloomily aware that Joseph was driven to these shifts by the inadequacy of his translators, myself included, to convey the power, and above all, in his view, the energy of the original lines. He was irked by the predictable smoothness of his translators and sought to inject energy, jagged and jolting rhythms (‘closer to the original’, as he put it). He was apt to regard resistance as the protestations of bruised egos and, as I have remarked, had a low regard for translation anyway. Joseph wanted to write like a master in English, rather than a novice under tutelage, but the exasperating obstacles of mimetic translation proved insuperable in too many cases. His ‘crossword’ analogy must have come back to haunt him, but it actually does feel on occasions that he is actually wrenching a crossword square, or scrabble-board about just to get a word to fit. One wonders if the pressures of his everyday existence caused him to underestimate the vast amount of time needed for the task he had set himself. This is not to deny the presence of dazzling lines, indeed whole passages in So Forth and elsewhere – episodes which

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give an additional thrill to readers when they encounter these diamonds among the unpolished gems and rough-hewn stone. The very awkwardness of these episodes focuses my mind on what Joseph is saying; they become, in a way, nodes of creative tension. Peter Porter expressed something of this when he wrote of A Part of Speech: ‘For all my negatives, I found Brodsky’s book moving and challenging’. Joseph always said that he never read the critics and so far as I know, that’s true. I believe Auden said the same. I don’t suppose he felt they had anything to tell him. I have never heard of him feeling hurt at the critical reception of his auto-translation. The obduracy that was in his character would have engendered a certain pride and made any admission of failure out of the question. He could, after all, have got some American wordsmith/poet to go over his translations and at least iron out errors in idiom and word-usage. Whatever the reasons for his decision not to do so, the question recurs to me – why didn’t his editors intervene? Has anyone asked them? – For many critics Brodsky (wittingly?) willingly or unwillingly comes out of self-translation as different, foreign and strange. Is it possible for a poet to translate his own poems? – Well, I think it’s generally agreed that English poets are usually indifferent readers of their own verse, so there may be a parallel phenomenon here. A poet may be too embedded in his own cultural and linguistic idiom, have invested too much of himself in the work as it stands to be able to transfer his ideas easily and submit to the text with humility. He will detest compromise and set himself impossible standards. The best interpreter may be someone who is scholarly, self-effacing, highly literate but without the talent to be a poet himself. Step forward the harmless drudge who is the literary translator. – Did Joseph ever express any regrets about settling down in the USA rather than in England or somewhere else in Europe? – Joseph adopted the USA and all its works with child-like glee. Apart from playing with the transatlantic idiom, I believe he had stars and stripes duvet-cover and certainly called his cat Mississippi. He proclaimed the virtues of Chivas Regal. ‘My country’, he would exclaim with mock pride at any suitable juncture. There was one thing that

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irked him slightly about America, though; he preferred solid English surnames, the kind he had come across in his 17th century reading – Fairfax, Cromwell, Marvell, Milton – to cosmopolitan American ones. Once he earnestly discussed with me the nuances of the word ‘grey’; he disliked the transatlantic ‘gray’. As I’ve mentioned, he adored the sound of educated English speech. Diana and I always thought Joseph was more himself, more domestic as it were, during his stays in England. We felt in a way that he actually lived here, and that elsewhere in the world he was a different person He had friends and a life in the USA, Iceland, Holland, Sweden, Italy and so on, but to us this was part of a public persona altogether elsewhere. He had a low opinion of France and French poetry, incidentally, which was upsetting for Veronique. Perhaps he was following Auden’s dismissal of French poetry as displaying lots of sensibility but no notions, but it was more likely because he didn’t know the language. He didn’t know Italian either, but took the trouble to learn it. – Don’t you find it strange that with all his subtlety and sensitivity to language he was very unsure about his spoken English? – Despite an ironclad certainty when it came to his gifts, including his confidence in his own translations, Joseph could nevertheless evince an odd insecurity at times. On one occasion, he was to address the British Academy in London, and confessed that he was in a panic about it. I elicited the fact that he thought the gathering was the Royal Academy, or even the Royal Society - anyway, he’d got himself all mixed up. I was able to reassure him that the British Academy was ‘only’ made up of British intellectuals like Sir Isaiah Berlin, with whom he would feel at home. It didn’t help; Joseph had already reached a pitch of anxiety and couldn’t shake it off. He had certain linguistic habits or tics, like always saying ‘etcetera’ three times, and ’hold a second, hold a second’ which gave him time to muster his English vocabulary. Things like that. – You worked together with Joseph on the XIXth century anthology ‘An Age Ago’. Tell us about it. – The saga attending the publication of An Age Ago lasted for most of the ‘80s. Joseph and I spent a long time sorting out which poets were to be represented, and he gave me a list of poems to translate.

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He then encouraged the publishers to adopt the project, sorting out how many poems were to be included and in what order. Meanwhile I worked away to see which poems ‘came out’. Joseph never understood this process and grew impatient when I didn’t produce more Vyazemsky. In the end, probably the best poem in the book is one of Vyazemsky’s. Again, I remember no direct praise. I heard from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, however, that Joseph thought my versions of Fet were better than the originals. I also have a letter from Joseph himself, describing my Tyutchev pieces as ‘remarkably good’. They were included in a successful reading at Mount Holyoke College by Richard Wilbur and Joseph in 1983: ‘I must say that the response was far beyond anything I could expect. Some translations are indeed smushing (sic). Lots of people told me afterwards that they had no idea of the riches we, Russians, had etc., that the profundity of the stuff is overwhelming, that now they begin to see the origins of our novel’. Nevertheless, it was years before Joseph’s notes were done, the introduction written. For some reason, he had wanted me to include an enormously long poem by A. K. Tolstoy, ‘Popov’s Dream’, which would have completely unbalanced the book, even if I had managed to translate it. He was remarkably insistent about this and when he realised that I was adamant, I understand that there ensued protracted negotiations with the publishers about his precise ‘billing’. He didn’t want it to be thought that he had selected the anthology, apparently (I had also added a few choices of my own). In the introduction, his attitude to my work is surprisingly defensive in view of his known approval of my mimetic approach to the poems, and his earlier praise of individual authors and poems, a number of which appeared in The New York Review of Books. This is a puzzling episode – Brodsky said that ‘the poet’s personal qualities – his character and his aesthetic culture – directly influence the content or the form of his work’ (on Gorbanevskaya). Do you see such an influence on his own poetry? – A statement like that is rather too broad to get a grip on. Isn’t it something of a truism? Anyway the quality most noticeable in Joseph’s poetry in my view is a kind of inbuilt universality, an amplitude of

vision, the constant, exhilarating invocation of space and time. It was said of Wittgenstein that he drove himself, never letting up, always trying to find a flaw in his reasoning. Add a deep undercurrent of human passion and pain and I see a coherent picture of Joseph‘s poetic approach. Most people found Wittgenstein the most arresting person they had ever known, and Joseph was certainly in that category. – You were obviously very fond of Joseph despite some major and minor disagreement. Was he an important person in your life? – In the latter years I saw comparatively little of him, especially after his marriage and the birth of his daughter. I was also busy on major prose translations at that time, but I was always conscious of his presence as a moral pole of my existence, just as I am now of his irreplaceable loss. I often re-read him. If I have made Joseph sound something of a monster, nothing could be further from the truth. His dedication to the muse was uncompromising, but he was never malignant. On the contrary, he was a radiant source of wit, generosity of soul and exaltation. No one who knew him well thought it other than a privilege to share the planet with him.

36 DA N I E L WE I S S B O R T Daniel Weissbort graduated from the University of Cambridge and studied Russian history at the London School of Economics. With Ted Hughes, late Poet Laureate of England, he founded Modern Poetry in Translation. Weissbort is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, and Honorary Professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Coeditor, along with John Glad, of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (Iowa 1992), he also edited the Penguin Post-War Russian Poetry. He has translated more than a dozen books, and has edited several anthologies, as well as publishing several collections of his own poetry. His recent books include a historical reader in translation theory Translation – Theory and Practice (OUP, 2007), Selected Translations of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 2007), and a forthcoming book on Ted Hughes and translation (OUP, 2009). He had also translated a selection of Inna Lisnyanskaya’s poetry (2005), Regina Derieva (2008) and is working on translations of S. Lipkin’s and N. Gorbanevskaya’s poetry.

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NOT HING

IS

IMPOSSIBLE

An Interview with Daniel Weissbort (February 2005, London) – Who introduced you to Brodsky’s poetry and when? – No one actually introduced me. I introduced myself to him at his reading at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, for Poetry International, in 1972, I think. – Tell us about Brodsky’s appearance at the London Poetry International, 19 - 24 of June 1972, when WH Auden brought him from Vienna to London and when you acted as a co-director of that Festival. – The memory is quite vivid. Joseph came with Auden, from Austria, and Auden, as best he could, ‘protected’ him from journalists and others. The actual reading was sensational and I have described it in my book, From Russian with Love.1 As you know, Lowell was the English-language reader, but I had forgotten that, so indelible was the impression made by Brodsky himself. Although we had heard other Russian poets reading – in particular Voznesensky and Evtushenko – we were not prepared for the hypnotic power of Brodsky’s reading. He naturally read without a text – as, incidentally, did Auden and, for instance, Robert Graves – but occasionally he would forget a line or make a mistake, at which point he would stop and beat his brow in frustration. He was obviously under a great strain, as is scarcely surprising given the circumstances. It was an astonishing and, at the same time, almost tragic performance. That is, there were tragic dimensions to it – a young poet, virtually alone on the stage (I suppose Lowell must have been there too!), alone in the world, with nothing, but his poems, nothing but the Russian language, of which he was already a ‘master’, or as he would have preferred to say, ‘a servant’. – How did the English audience react to Brodsky’s liturgical chanting? – As far as I can recall, the audience reacted – that is, we all reacted – appropriately, as you might expect, in view of what I’ve just said. When he ended, the audience was as stunned as the poet on stage was now silent – inaccessible, emptied, a kind of simulacrum of himself.

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JB & his translator Daniel Weissbort, reading at London Poetry Society, June 1979

It was as if the air had been drained of sound. And the appropriate response would have been that, a soundlessness, in which you would hear only your own breathing, be aware only of your own physicality, your isolated self… To say we were impressed is putting it far too mildly. We were moved, emotionally, even physically. – Did you see Brodsky privately during his first visit to England? – I don’t think I did. I’m not sure he stayed very long. He went on from here to America, to Michigan, to take up the position Carl Proffer had arranged for him at the University of Michigan. I saw him, of course, on subsequent visits to London. – You left for America in 1973 to teach at the University of Iowa and to direct the Translation Workshop. How often did you see Brodsky there, talk to him on the phone or communicate by correspondence? – I saw him at least once in Ann Arbor and quite often once he moved to New York, since I passed through New York at least twice a year on my visits to England. I phoned him from time to time, to ask his opinion about this and that. I consulted him, when he was in Amherst, when I was offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa. He was already teaching and had some experience of this mysterious

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profession. I had none and was very concerned about that. He told me not to worry, as anything I had to say, as a European, must be of interest to my students! – Joseph came to the University of Iowa at least three times. What do you remember about these visits? – Again, I remember his astonishing reading, his performance. On each occasion, I think, I read the English, so I was physically close to him at these times. He was a very accomplished and confident performer and his memory of his own work never failed to amaze me. These were after all, often long and extremely complex poems, and – unlike that first time in London – he remembered them faultlessly, although he did occasionally hesitate. He was open but, at the same time, quite intimidating. He would answer questions, almost all questions, but often quite dismissively. But, of course, American student audiences were not put off by this. He seemed to quite enjoy the give-and-take. I recall once, when he was asked what he thought of Solzhenitsyn, he did not groan, as one might have expected him to do, but immediately said: ‘I feel privileged to be writing in the same language as – Aleksandr Isaevich’.2 On another visit to Iowa, in 1987, Joseph flew in at around noon and at once asked me what I was doing that day. I told him that I was scheduled to talk to a comparative literature class about translation. ‘Let’s do it together’, he said. Consequently I entered the classroom, with its small contingent of graduate students, accompanied by that year’s Nobel Laureate. Joseph indicated that he would just listen, but soon he was engaging me in a dialogue, except it was more monologue than dialogue. Finally, he was directly answering questions put to him by the energized students. – Did you find that you have a lot in common with him? For instance, did you share his believe in poetry as a force for good, for the health of the individual mind and soul? – I’m not sure we ever discussed such matters! I do, however, believe in poetry as a kind of therapy, whatever else it might be, for the writer him/herself and for the reader – to a lesser extent. – Which of his poems did you translate first? – I translated poems that were printed in that first collection, Ostanovka v pustyne, Chekhov Publishing House, New York. I don’t re-

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call which poems exactly, but they were all, of course, early poems, which he did not want included in later collections. I also translated, on his urging, the sequence ‘Chast’ rechi’ (A Part of Speech), but that was later. – I know you translated his ‘The Jewish Cemetery’, ‘From School Anthology’ and ‘Lagoon’. When did Joseph start to interfere with your translation? – ‘The Jewish Cemetery’ he never ‘interfered with’. He was, as you know, not keen on that poem, but he did not object to my publishing the translation again, in – for instance – The Penguin Post-War Russian Poetry, the Anthology, which I edited. With ‘Lagoon’ etc. I was already in touch with Joseph and we communicated in some detail. He urged me, of course, to stick closer to the form of the source text. In particular he wanted rhymes to be reproduced or imitated. – When did you begin to translate his poetry systematically? – Never systematically. As I said, I translated some of his early work before actually meeting him. One poem in particular interested me at the time, ‘Kholmy’ (The Hills). I produced a draft version of this, but never took it any further. It was a very early but fascinating poem, I felt, a kind of novella in elaborate verse form. – Did you have many disagreements with Joseph over your approach to translation and his? – We did disagree and almost fell out over it! At the time I believed strongly that the best a poet translator could aim at was a kind of strict and lucid literalism. Any attempt to approximate form, between languages so different as English and Russian, led inevitably, I believed, to betrayal – semantic betrayal of the source text. I agreed with Nabokov about this. 3 – Brodsky is famous for laying down the rules, be it in poetry (its moral values), or in his teaching practice (insisting that students learn poems by heart) or in translation (advocating preservation of meter and rhyme). How flexible or stubborn was he with his translators? – He was not, in my experience, very tolerant of translators. But I do not think he can be blamed for this. He was totally dedicated to poetry and to Russian poetry, in particular. He would not accept the limitations of translation. One can surely sympathize, but it did not make him an easy man to work with.

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– What forced him to become his own translator? – Well, I suppose it was because he found himself in a bilingual situation, as it were – that is, he was a Russian poet but living in America, surrounded by English – American English. Also, since he had an absolutist approach to translation, which was not shared by many if any of his translators, the only honourable thing for him to do, in a way, was to translate his own poetry. In addition, of course, he had done quite a lot of translation into Russian. He was also devoted to English and English poetry, especially the Metaphysical poets, as we know. For the translator of John Donne into Russian, nothing seemed impossible! – Can an English reader tell the difference between Brodsky’s poems written in English and poems translated by the author into English? – Yes, I think so, if only because most of the poems Joseph actually wrote in English were fairly light (rather like Auden in a lighter mood) whereas his own Russian poems are often very complex! On the other hand, there are also certain similarities, since Joseph developed a distinct way of using English. – In his collection ‘Less Than One’ (1986) out of 18 essays only three are written in Russian. Do you know how and why Brodsky began to write in English? – I’m afraid I don’t know, but one can see that for someone as brave – some might say foolhardy! – as Brodsky, the temptation to write in English and, as it were, bypass the need for translation, necessarily involving a degree of distortion, would be irresistible. – You said once that when you read Brodsky in English you heard the Russian too, in Joseph’s rendering. – I even see Joseph himself, his hands straining the pockets of his jacket, his jaw jutting, as though his attention had just been caught by something and he were staring at it, scrutinizing it, while continuing to mouth the poem, almost absent-mindedly, that is, while the poem continues to be mouthed by him. His voice rises symphonically: ‘syn ili Bog’ (‘son or God’), already on the turn towards an abrupt descent; and then the pause and a resonant drop, a full octave: ‘Ya tvoi’ (‘I am thine’). As the poet, with an almost embarrassed or reluctant nod, and a quick, pained smile, departs his poem.

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– Brodsky has been transplanting English Metaphysical poetics into Russian soil since ‘The Great Elegy for John Donne’ (1963) for which Akhmatova declared him a genius. In other poems such as ‘A Song to No Music’ (1970), ‘The Butterfly’ (1973), ‘The Burning’ (1981), etc., he, according to Czeslaw Milosz, ‘revisited, revived and enriched’ the 17 th century poetic tradition. What did, in your view, Brodsky learn from the great Elizabethans? – I don’t know. I think he recognized a similar spirit. All poets, especially great ones, are conscious of their predecessors and, to a lesser extent, their contemporaries. That is about all I can say. One does see some similarities between Brodsky’s intricate work in, say, ‘Butterfly’, and some of Donne’s poetry. – Do you feel a kind of precision in his metaphysical thinking that has been lost in contemporary poetry? – I see a complexity. It is possible that Brodsky is by instinct a kind of Metaphysical, in the Donneian sense. But I’m not sure about this, because he was also capable of almost confessional-type poems and lyrics of great simplicity. – Brodsky was often seen in the company of Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Mark Strand and Les Murray. Three of them became Nobel Prize winners. Do you see them as poets of equal stature or, do you have your own hierarchy? – One can see why he was drawn to Milosz, as a fellow exile and Slav (although, of course, Brodsky was a Judaeo-Slav, if one can put it that way). As for the others, I guess there was a kind of social hierarchy operating in the literary world as well. I cannot comment on their friendships because I do not know enough about it. He liked bon-viveurs and both Walcott and Heaney can be described as such. He also liked intellectual duels and all these writers were expert duellists. – Among these five, only Brodsky and Milosz wrote in foreign languages so they were in a weaker position compared to the rest. How can an English-speaking reader judge them? – The answer is, he can’t fully judge them. To fully grasp Brodsky, obviously he must be able to read in Russian in the first place. However, with him – as with Milosz – because he lived and functioned in an English-speaking environment and concerned himself much with translation of his own work, there is a greater possibility for the non-

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Russian speaker to draw quite close, I think. Brodsky exists in both languages, physically, in actual fact, not just because – like any major poet – he was much translated. So powerful was he, as a literary figure, that he actually made an impact, it seems to me, on English prosody itself. Many of course would disagree with me about this. – When Joseph was alive the British press use to publish his poems regularly. How did he fit into the English poetic scene? – I don’t think he did fit in really. The English scene is not a hospitable one – far less so, for obvious reasons, than the American. Joseph loved England, but would have had a devastatingly hard time if he had settled here rather than the US, in my opinion. Mind you, he was so stubborn and so brilliant, that he might even so have prevailed! –What do you think is the main reason that British magazines, including TLS, stop publishing him? – Who knows? No periodical is much interested in dead poets, unless – possibly – they’ve been dead a very long time. – It is difficult to find any of his books in London bookshops and there hardly any reviews of works about him in British press. Is there any genuine interest in Brodsky’s writing among British poets and critics? – There is interest, but the pressure from ‘below’ is such that temporarily, I think – he has been displaced. He will return! – How do you explain the absolutism in Brodsky’s view of poetry, the prophetic tone, which must sound so strange, even arrogant, to modern day British poets? – Again, this can surely be explained in (Russian) historical terms. In Brodsky’s case, it was compounded by his personal fate, by the fact, too, surely – even though he himself might have underplayed it – that his case was emblematic of a certain phase of 20th century history, connected to the eventual demise of the Soviet Union. – Brodsky acted both in life and in poetry as a challenging medium in American and English literary circles. What kind of reaction did he provoke in you? – Well, as noted, I didn’t see eye to eye with him initially about translation. On the other hand, I did get an inkling – through him – of the importance of writing, of the word. I connect this somewhat with Jewishness – Joseph would probably have disagreed! We, Jews, after all, as my father always repeated, are children of the Book.

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– How would you describe Brodsky’s spiritual outlook? Did he possessed deep religious sensibility or was he incapable of endorsing any faith without irony? – I think he did, although – again – he made little of it. He was ironical, it is true, about the given, ‘official’ faiths and he did, at times, appear rather arrogant – in this regard and other regards – but he was, in the deepest sense, religious and, even, god-fearing, I would say. – Let us talk about the man. Brodsky was a mixture of sweetness and rudeness, modesty and arrogance; I can go on listing other contradictory features of his character. Which of his qualities were the most endearing to you? – Well, what endeared him, of course, were the endearing qualities! He had a devil in him, though; if he saw you getting too fond of him, he would do something to make you almost hate him. Still, my overriding memory is of someone very sweet, tender, vulnerable – and immensely generous, in all senses. – Joseph loved ‘doing the laundry list’, as he called it, that is going over the names of contemporaries. We know the poets he loved. Can you give us a few names that he despised? – One poet he disliked certainly is Evtushenko, although I think he had some regard for his writerly ability – more than he had for his literary-world twin, Voznesensky. I don’t know whom he despised, although there were undoubtedly some, perhaps many. He did not think much of Vinokurov, a Russian poet of the War generation whom I have quite a high regard for. Actually, he did despise the ‘official’ Soviet poets, creatures of a regime for which he had contempt. But as for English poets, I’m not sure. I don’t think he had much understanding of some of our major poets, for instance Ted Hughes. – Why do you think Brodsky and Ted Hughes were somewhat blind to one another poetry? – Ted could only approach Brodsky through translations. Ted did not much care for Auden and Brodsky was much influenced by Auden. As regards Ted’s work, I think Brodsky thought of him as a nature poet – that’s all. He was not interested, as far as I know, although he seemed to regard Ted himself with some affection. They were worlds, as well as languages, apart and never, as far as I know, properly engaged with each other’s work.

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– In the notes to your collection ‘Letters to Ted’, which you dedicated to the memory of Ted Hughes and Joseph Brodsky, you said that both Ted and Joseph encouraged you in your translation of Nikolay Zabolotsky. What form did this encouragement take? – Well, Joseph was very fond of Zabolotsky, regarding him as unquestionably major, almost on a level with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, although I think he had some doubts as to my ability to translate him. He changed his mind about this, to some extent, it seems to me – or he realized that nothing was going to stop me and so very generously offered his help, very near the end of his own life when his medical problems were becoming critical and one might have thought that he would not want to spend any time on anything other than his own work. One of his missions, of course, was to facilitate the translation of Russian poets he admired, Zabolotsky being one. – You gave your recent book on Brodsky a title ‘From Russian with Love’. Tell us about the origin of this title and the relevance to the content of your book. – When I first met Brodsky – as I said, at that festival in the Queen Elizabeth Hall – I had a copy of Ostanovka v pustyne, which I asked him to sign. He signed it ‘From Russian with Love’, obviously remembering the James Bond movie. However, instead of RUSSIA, he wrote RUSSIAN. This was probably deliberate, knowing Joseph, and for me suggested a kind of language journey – from Russian into English – and so I connected it with the whole business of translation, which inevitably became a leitmotif of our friendship. – What is the main ‘theme’, if I can put it that way, of your book? – I think I was trying to convey to a probably sceptic audience – especially a British-English literary audience – that Brodsky’s experiment in translating from Russian into English was, so to speak, authentic, understandable and that it even produced something of value. English, it seems to me, is at present in a particularly permeable state, probably due to its being the world lingua franca. It is capable of absorbing other languages, or dialects – it is, in a way, omnivorous! Brodsky took advantage of this, it seems to me, to mould English, to russify it, colonise it, you might say. He created, as one of his obituarists put it, an ‘idiolect’ of his own;4 this was compounded of Russian and English. He made English speak Russian; in so doing, he encountered less hostility in America than in England itself. American, American

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English, is after all, to some extent, a polyglot tongue, owing something to each of the waves of immigrants who brought their own languages and infiltrated the host language. Brodsky saw the difficulty of translating from Russian – as did Nabokov before him; but unlike Nabokov, he did not simply lament it and declare unequivocally that translation in an absolute sense was impossible. Of course, he could not really expect his English-based translators to follow him and so, in the end, he himself had to take over the business of translating himself. First he attempted to work through translators but gradually, more and more, he undertook the task himself. The result, as I see it now, is fascinating and instructive. – You have a poem for Joseph written after his death. May I include it into my collection? – Of course. You were among us, Joseph… I think, biblically. At least, that is what springs to mind. Like a child, a different being, strangely unprotected, unprotectable, and so with that tough-guy stance. Tender. Well, there is no need to think of it, because you said it yourself. Your tenderly, with tenderness – I wince now, as I did then, The word, resuscitated in our language, yours as much as mine. Nothing to do with flower children, with reimagined gender roles. To do with language simply. You were, found yourself, among us, were there to be found, were found, belonging, more so than the indigenous even… Because you changed wherever it was you were. We did not believe, couldn’t, yet accepted the fait-accompli. Its saving virtue that,

our acceptance of the fait-accompli. An accomplished fact, then, Joseph, and somehow we found ourselves in the middle if a conversation with you, as we were when suddenly you were an absence in our lives.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Daniel Weissbort, From Russian with Love. Joseph Brodsky in English (London: Anvol Press Poetry, 2004). Questions and answers after Brodsky’s reading at the University of Iowa in 1978, under the title ‘V Solzhenitsyne Rossiya obrela svoego Gomera’, see Brodsky, Kniga intervyu, selected and edited by V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), pp. 46 - 53. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Problems of Translating Onegin in English, Partisan Review, 22 (1955), pp. 496 - 512. Lachlan Mackinnon, ‘Joseph Brodsky’, The Independent, 30 January, 1996, p. 12.

37 P ETER FR ANCE Peter France is a scholar and translator of French and Russian literature. He was born in Londonderry (N. Ireland) in 1935 and has lived mainly in England, France and Scotland. He is currently living in Edinburgh and is married to the historian and translator Siân Reynolds. After studying French and Russian at Oxford and in France, he taught in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex and was appointed Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh in 1980. He retired in 2000, having also held visiting posts or fellowships in Vancouver, Princeton, Canberra, Cape Town and Paris (Sorbonne). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His scholarly writing includes books on Racine, Diderot, Rousseau, various aspects of classical French culture, and modern Russian poetry, and he is the editor or co-editor of the New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (1995), the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000) and the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2005 -, 5 vols). As a translator, he has worked mainly on French prose, including Diderot and Rousseau, and on Russian poetry. He collaborated with Jon Stallworthy on translations of Aleksandr Blok and Boris Pasternak, and he has translated several volumes of poetry by the ChuvashRussian poet Gennady Aygi, including Selected Poems 1954 -1994 (Angel Books, 1997), Salute – to Singing (Zephyr, 2002), Childand-Rose (New Directions, 2003), and Field-Russia (New Directions, 2007). He also translated, from the Russian, Aygi’s Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (Forest Books, 1991), and has made a number of visits to the Chuvash Republic. There is a section on Brodsky in his Poets of Modern Russia (1982), and he translated Brodsky’s ‘Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots’ of which two versions exist, one (done in collaboration with the author) in Brodsky’s To Urania (1988), the other in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (1990).

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A D I C T I O N A R Y- H A U N T E D P O E T R Y An Interview with Peter France (6 January 2004, London) – I am not sure whether I ever told you this. When you sent me your translation of ‘20 Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots’ in 1989, and I told Joseph about it, he was delighted. Then a few days later, to my horror, Alan Myers phoned me and said that Joseph was re-translating your translation. I didn’t know how to inform you about this. Then it occurred to me that we can have two versions of the same poem – we will include your translation in our collection ‘Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics’1 with your commentaries and Joseph can do whatever he pleases with his ‘corrected’ version. And being a gentleman, you kindly agreed with my suggestion. Did you or do you accept his ‘corrections’? – The version which was published in your and Loseff ’s collection wasn’t what he had suggested, but neither was it what I had originally proposed, since I revised my translation as a result of what he said. So some of what he said was useful to me for my own purposes, to make my own translation better. In the same way when he retranslated my versions, his practice varied greatly; some of them he hardly touched, some of them he completely reworked. There is not much to say about the ones he rewrote because they were virtually new poems. But we negotiated quite a bit. – How did Joseph react to your translation of the Sonnets? – He wrote to me in English saying that he was absolutely delighted by my translation and so on and so on, but… he went on: ‘you have no ear’ – or something like that. – As politely as that? – Yes, as politely as that, then he talked about meter and rhyme. Certainly I noticed that the changes that he made almost always strengthened the rhymes, but they didn’t always improve the meter. I thought my translations were metrically OK, obviously, he didn’t agree, and we just had to differ about that. On rhyme, well, he was more willing to make sacrifices for the sake of rhyme

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Peter France, photo by R. Gillanders

than I was. And the result was quite interesting, in some cases better than I could come up with because he could do whatever he wanted, and also because he had a certain audacity and being a foreigner he could do certain things that you cannot do as a native speaker. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I wouldn’t say our correspondence was at all unpleasant, I suppose he wrote fairly rude things to me as well as nice things, but I didn’t mind that too much. And I wrote back in my usual gentlemanly polite sort of way (I hope this comes across ironically in Russian), and sometimes he adopted what I had to say, sometime he didn’t. – How often did you write to each other? – Not often, I have two or three letters from Brodsky – If you could estrange yourself from your own translation, which translation of ‘20 Sonnets’ do you prefer, yours or his? – It varies with the sonnets. Some sonnets he does better, and some sonnets I do better. But I cannot really estrange myself

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enough to have a view because I got quite involved with them. It has to be said, a lot of the sonnets are pretty hard to understand and I don’t think they become any easier to understand when he translates them, they remain difficult. – They are a bit easier to understand for a Russian I suppose because they are mainly about his relationship with MB and based on a film. – I’ve seen that film. – And they are also a mask, a cover for writing a love poem using the old form. Elena Fanailova has written a wonderful parody of Brodsky’s sonnets ‘Stikhi k Marii C’.2 How long did it take to translate these sonnets? – Two or three months, I can’t remember exactly. – And why did you decide to translate these particular poems? Was it because of the anniversary of the death of Mary Queen of Scots? – Yes; because of the anniversary, there was a lot about Mary at the Edinburgh festival that year. And they showed the German film ‘Das Herz einer Königin’, with Zarah Leander playing the Queen. All of that made me interested in Brodsky’s sonnet sequence. I suppose it was the challenge, it wasn’t that I particularly loved the poems and wanted to translate them, I just got interested. There are so many other poems in Chast’ rechi I love very much, I did translate bits of them when I did the chapter about Brodsky in my book Poets of Modern Russia.3 Also, all the references to Paris are familiar to me; I go and look at that statue in Paris several times a year. – What kind of translation do you prefer – the one that domesticates the original or the one that foreignises? – When you translate you negotiate between the two, you don’t want it to be so domesticated in the English tradition as to be unrecognisable for what it is, but you don’t want it to be so weird that nobody will want to read it. I think the current fashion tends to favour foreignisation, and I think it may sometimes have gone too far. In that sense I am probably more like a Russian translator, since traditionally Russian translators want nothing to do with

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foreignisation, they domesticate wholeheartedly. Translation is a literary genre. – Would you agree that JB’s own translations tend to resist domestication? – Yes, as far as I can tell, they are odd. They strike all readers with their peculiarity, and some people regard this as just incompetence. I don’t think that’s right, I imagine he knew what he was doing, he knew he would sound strange and was willing enough to do that. As I see it, they have to be read in a rather different way from any other sort of translations. You need to read them as self-translation, in a sort of stereoscopic way, alongside the original rather than as standing in their own right. In their own right they are not always very good, but if you see them in their relation to the original they are good. – JB had a hard time convincing his translators that emphasis on form, rather than on the semantics was what was required. Did he ever specifically discuss this with you? – Only in the letters I mentioned. – Do you think that Brodsky’s English critics understand his notion of translation? – I think they understand it, but it is a deeply unfashionable view in English-language culture now. They may understand it, but that doesn’t make them any more sympathetic to it. Perhaps I am thinking not so much of the English as of the French, e. g. the French poet Yves Bonnefoy who in his 1979 article ‘On the translation of form in poetry’ 4 states the opposite case very well. – Tell me about your first meeting with Joseph. – I didn’t really meet him – I don’t think he noticed me. I just said ‘Hello’ to him and things like that, but we never had a real conversation. When I met him in Edinburgh and Cambridge, it was a long time ago, long before I translated him. I never met him since. I had no personal friendly contact with him at all. – What drove Brodsky to translate his own poems when he had so many distinguished American and English translators? – It’s simple, isn’t it? He wanted to avoid all the arguments, all the conflicts and so on. He must have thought that he could do it bet-

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ter, because he was closer to it. I don’t think as a rule, self-translation by poets is a terribly good idea. It has been done a lot in Scotland and in Ireland from the Celtic languages. My impression is that when one has a choice between a translation by someone else and the translation by the poet, the one by someone else is usually better. It is not an absolute rule though; for instance, not very long ago, Seamus Heaney published a translation of a poem by Sorley MacLean which is to my mind less good that Sorley MacLean’s own translation. So, it can work either way. Of course, Sorley MacLean, unlike Brodsky, was really bilingual. – Did Brodsky’s translations of his own work have an influence on the formation of his English? – I don’t know. – You have read some of his essays written in English. What do you think of his English? – It’s very good, lovely, very interesting to read. – How would you characterise Brodsky’s relationship to the English language? – It is a relation of love, and certainly his essays read beautifully but I don’t know whether he got any help. – At the same time you must agree that whatever help he had, the ideas, the thought process, the dealings with syntax are his own. – Of course. – What do you think was his motive for transmitting so much from English poetry into his own? Was it because it hadn’t been done before him? Even the Russian Romantic poets borrowed from English poetry an image of the Romantic poet rather that the structure of metaphors or variety of stanzas or logical thinking. It hadn’t been done before Brodsky. – Except for Shakespeare, who was important for Russian culture. Pasternak translated Shelley and Keats, but for him Shakespeare was the essential England. Brodsky’s interest moves away from Shakespeare towards all sorts of other things. I don’t know why, or what was the significance of Auden in all this, or when he discovered Auden. – He discovered Auden in Louis Untermeyer’s Anthology of Eng-

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lish and American poetry that one of his friends sent him to Norenskaya in 1964. His poem ‘Na smert T. S. Eliota’ (1965) compositionally and metrically is based on Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. – I always assumed that he was impressed, in reading Auden’s poem on Yeats, by the extraordinary things Auden said about language, which must have struck him as so audacious … Time […] worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives …

– But whether that is reason enough to fall in love with English poetry I don’t know. – Most likely, this happened before he read Auden. Lidiya Chukovskaya sent him in Norenskaya ‘The Complete Poetry of John Donne’ and Brodsky translated some of Donne’s poems. But even before his exile Brodsky read some English and American poetry when he was staying in the houses of Professor Tomashevsky and Academician Alekseev, whose private libraries were very impressive. I myself once spent several nights in Tomashevsky’s study and asked his daughter, Zoya Tomashevskaya, what did Joseph read. She said it would be easier to name what he hadn’t read. Should we conclude that English native speakers cannot sense in the English versions the technical virtuosity of Brodsky’s originals? – I suppose that is true. It has been a long time since I looked carefully at the translations. Some of them are very good translations, Derek Walcott’s or Richard Wilbur’s, but probably none of them tried to reproduce the technical virtuosity. In the same way, until very recently, Tsvetaeva was inadequately translated. Elaine Feinstein’s Tsvetaeva is good poetry but it is not Tsvetaeva. Their richness and complexity is probably not to English taste anyhow. – I am glad you mention English taste. The difference in our poetic taste has always puzzled me. Is it due to the fact that Russian poetry is at least 200 years younger that English? All those formal devices which are still exciting and workable in Russian poetry have been used up by English poets?

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– That’s not entirely true. Dylan Thomas is perhaps the best example of formal complexity and conceptual and figural complexity. And he has been very popular and influential in Great Britain and the United States. Or take someone like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is fantastically rich and complex, though he is not like Brodsky (and to my mind, stronger that Brodsky). The difficulty is to get translation done. – What we need is a congenial translator. But how can we persuade a great poet to waste his time and energy in translating another great poet unless he has no choice as in Stalin’s Russian? – We can’t, but we can hope that an occasional translator will rise to the challenge. And indeed there have been good poets who have worked on Brodsky, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht for instance. But most of us are not quite at that level. – Have you ever felt that Brodsky’s auto- translations are ‘dictionary- haunted’ (Clarence Brown) or ‘wilful to the point of incomprehensibility’ (Peter Porter)? 5 – Well, ‘dictionary-haunted’ maybe. I am sure Brodsky like many poets did feel that it was part of the business of being a poet to fill your head like a barn with as many words as you can. His Russian too is dictionary-haunted, if you like, in the sense that he uses the language as richly as he possibly can. I don’t think that being dictionary-haunted is a bad thing for a poet. As for Peter Porter’s remark, yes, sometimes these auto-translations are incomprehensible, but his original is sometimes difficult to understand as well. I don’t think he is deliberately making it more difficult in translating it; he is just translating what is there, as I understand it. It would perhaps strike Peter Porter that way because he is not that sort of poet, he doesn’t like obscure things. It seems to me that difficulty, even obscurity, has become virtually inseparable from writing poetry now. – Brodsky’s primary focus in the translation of his own poems was the poem’s prosodic qualities. Didn’t this cause considerable semantic shifts? – Yes indeed – not a shift that most translators are keen to make.

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– Given Brodsky’s very particular views about the translation of poetry, is there ever any chance that his auto-translations would be acceptable to English poets? – I think so, if they can take them for what they are. But I don’t think they will ever enter the canon of English poetry. They will remain as a very interesting phenomenon of two cultures coming together. – Why did the English literary establishment receive him in so lukewarm a fashion? I have in mind Faber poets and editors, like Craig Raine and Christopher Reid who not only rejected him but made fun of him.6 – I don’t know the reason behind these particular rejections. But in general they are in favour of sort of translation, which is a remaking into English poetry, as in Don Paterson’s Machado (The Eyes), which is extremely Don Paterson, and beautiful too, I think. I don’t see Brodsky’s self-translations as being like that. They relate strongly to the Russian. – Since Brodsky’s auto-translations into English are so different semantically to the original would you describe them as translations or as poems in English? – Translations – mostly they don’t quite stand up by themselves, I think. – Would you agree that every Russian poem translated into English by Brodsky should be regarded as a poem with two original languages? – Maybe, or a double vision of one poem. – Were you at any of Brodsky’s public presentations, e. g. at the British Academy in 1991? If so, what was your impression? – Only at two readings, where (like everyone else) I was impressed by the power of his delivery, the concentration on form and sound. Very Russian. – How would you rate Brodsky among the major 20 th century Russian poets? – Не за нами слово. He is one of the ten major Russian poets in the public estimation. I don’t know who my top ten poets would be or anything like that, I don’t like to think of poetry in those

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terms, but there is no getting away from Brodsky. And indeed since the death of Pasternak and Akhmatova there has not been any other poet in Russia who has made such an impact. I’m talking about the general view, not necessarily what I think. – But I would prefer to hear what you think. You have translated the poetry of Gennady Aygi who is well known in the West, and in France possibly more popular than Brodsky. He is obviously extremely attractive to you. How do you compare them? – I’ve committed myself to one of them and I know Aygi’s poetry so much better than I know Brodsky’s, so it’s not really possible for me to say. My reading of Brodsky is quite limited; I haven’t read that much of the later poetry. The poetry I read with the greatest pleasure was his early poetry up till about 1975 or 76. But there is an element in his poetry I suppose that is not to my liking: too many words, too rich, too complex and so on. If Brodsky is a ‘rich’ poet, Aygi is a ‘poor’ poet, and I like his poverty. That being said, all my poetic training should have inclined me to like Brodsky. He is the kind of poet that we in the West think poets should be. – Why do you think Brodsky attracted so much attention? His excellence as a poet? The fact of his trial? Auden’s patronage? Or sheer luck? – It is odd. In the English-speaking world most people think (or used to think) that Brodsky was one of a super league with Les Murray, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, but they have no real idea what his poetry is like in the original. Obviously it has something to do with the media and the Nobel Prize. And it would be interesting to know why he got the Nobel Prize. I think this contributed very much to his popularity in Britain and America and in the rest of English speaking world. And the whole political business helped too. It is like with Sinyavsky; indeed I’m surprised that Sinyavsky didn’t get the Nobel Prize. His prose is wonderful, though perhaps too Russian in a way. Brodsky’s poetry is also very Russian but it is clearly world poetry. There is a kind of Mandelstamian feel for world culture in Brodsky, so anyone in the West reading a translation of Brodsky feels some sort of immedi-

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ate closeness or familiarity with a whole set of metaphysical concerns, with a set of cultural references. And the Russian themes can take care of themselves. There is also the forthrightness of his pronouncements that made him a very noticeable figure. And the fact that he was published by FSG earned him a position of great power in the States. It was in the States far more than in Great Britain that he got his reputation. In Great Britain he was certainly highly regarded, but in the States he could almost do no wrong. – You think if Brodsky had settled in England and not gone to the United States he would never have become so famous? – Possibly so, it’s as if there isn’t a space here for a great exiled writer. – Why was Brodsky so hostile to contemporary French poetry? Is it because he didn’t know the language? Or because there are no good poets today in France, apart from Yves Bonnefoy? – There are plenty of good French poets, but they are playing a different game really, a game in which traditional verse is not very important. For Yves Bonnefoy, too, traditional verse is not very important. If Aygi has been very popular in France, it is because he plunged into the French tradition, he learnt French when he was in the Gorky Institute, he reads French very well, he knows the French poetic Pantheon back to front. Both in its metaphysics and in its form, his poetry fits norm of French poetry during the last 30 or 40 years. – How would you remember Brodsky best? – I recall above all the first powerful impression of reading poems such as ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’ or ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’, but equally I recall my correspondence about translating Brodsky, which left quite a mark on me. – In what sense did your correspondence with him change your attitude to translation? – It made me more willing to see virtues in the sort of extravagance or daring which earlier on I had been wary of.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina, Brodsky’s Poetics & Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 1990). Russian Literature. Special Issue ‘Joseph Brodsky’, Guest editor Valentina Polukhina, XXXVII-II/III, p. 185 - 187. Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), pp. 188 - 219. Yves Bonnefoy, ‘On the Translation of Form in Poetry’, World Literature Today, no. 52/3 (Summer 1979), pp. 374 - 79. Peter Porter, ‘Lost Properties’, Observer, 11 December 1985, p. 46. Christopher Reid, ‘A Great American Disaster’, London Review of Books, 8 December 1988; Graig Raine, ‘A Reputation Subject to Inflation’, Financial Times, 16.17 November 1996, p. 13.

38 MICHAEL SCAMMELL Michael Scammell was born in England, graduated at the University of Nottingham, got his PhD at Columbia University where he is teaching now. He edited the periodical Index on Censorship, as well as an anthology Russia’s Other Writers, Samizdat, Soviet Unofficial Art and From under the Rubble. He is the author of an award-winning biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1985). He has also translated extensively from Russian, including works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov and Marchenko.

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HE RESPONDED TO CHRISTI ANIT Y A E S T H E T IC A L LY An Interview with Michael Scammell, (4 May 2004, London) – You were one of the first people to interview Brodsky when he arrived to London with W. H. Auden to take part in Poetry International in June 1972. Could you tell us about your meeting with Brodsky and the circumstances of the interview? How did he look? Was he nervous, calm, excited? – The first time I saw him was actually on the stage at the Royal Festival Hall when he was introduced by W. H. Auden who brought him to London. He looked dishevelled, somewhat nervous, but the moment he had to recite his poetry he lapsed into a trance-like state, began to chant in the way we all know. Of course, it was magical, especially for me, because I was one of the few people in the hall who could understand him in Russian. One of the poems he read was ‘The Great Elegy for John Donne’, which of course is an amazing chant-like poem anyway. – Did he read ‘On the Death to T. S. Eliot’? – I have the feeling, he did, yes. Then I don’t know how it happened, remind me of the year. – 18 of June, 1972 Joseph arrived to London together with Auden. Poetry International took place on 19 -24 of June 1972. – I had only just started Index on Censorship then. I met him back stage. It must be Stephen Spender who introduced us. – He was staying in Stephen Spender’s house. – Yes, yes, that’s right. It was at that point that I asked him whether I could interview him for this new magazine we had literally just started, I think the first issue had just come out. And he came. We were working out of one room in Covent Garden. And he came on his own, as far as I remember. We sat down and I interviewed him. I interviewed him in Russian. – O, we had to translate your interview back from English into Russian for the collection of Brodsky’s interviews in Russian.1

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– We had that discussion. I am not sure it was already then… One of the other things that amazed me was the way he declaimed his poetry. It always made me uncomfortable, I have to say. But if I mentioned it, it would be in that interview. – No, there is nothing in that interview about his declamation of his poetry. – Maybe I didn’t mention it then. You also have to remember that very, very little was know about Brodsky at that time. Just the slightest outline: that he had been arrested and had been sent up north, and had come back. Those were the big facts that everybody knew. But nobody then knew that he left school early, that he had had all these other jobs. So, the interview was based on just the newspapers stories and having read his poems from the moment they began to appear. It was really a getting-to-know-you kind of thing. I have to say, he was very friendly, not nervous at all and extremely forthcoming, no difficulties. – What was the main reason for your interview so soon after Brodsky’s departure from the USSR? Political, or just curiosity, or you need some material for the magazine? It could hardly be his poetry. – Well, yes and no. We published poetry in translation in those days. We had a whole literary section. The magazine has lost that

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since. I had quite a lot of poems and prose in it; I had Solzhenitsyn’s poetry that I got from samizdat. I had poems from Greece, which was under military regime at the time. So, I wanted Brodsky for both cultural and political reasons. But, of course, the fact that he had been censored meant that he was ideal material for Index on Censorship. And he was one of the first to come. – And the fact that Auden brought him… – This was the whole extra dimension added to it. If Auden took him seriously, everybody had to take him seriously. – But you personally, have you been aware at the time the scale of Brodsky importance as a poet? – Absolutely not. I thought that his poems were very unusual poems and pretty powerful, but there was no way then to know just how far he would go, and a lot of his poetry wasn’t translated or even available in Russian. We knew the tip of the iceberg. – Mind you, his first collection ‘Stikhotvoreniya i poemy’ was published in the USA in 1965 and the second one ‘Ostanovka v pustyne’ in 1970. So, by the time he came to London two of his books had been published in America. – Yes, it’s true. I must tell you, I am not such a brilliant judge of poetry. I knew he was a significant poet and certainly he was not a political poet. – When Brodsky said that the two years he spent in the Northern village were one of the best times in his life, did you believe him? – I was suspicious, I have to say, and sceptical. I thought he was playing a role there. I now believe him, but at the time it seemed like bravado: ‘They sent me to the North for hard labour and I say it was the best time in my life. They thought they were imposing hardship on me, I say it was great’. It’s a way of turning the tables. – And this would be very Brodsky like. – Yes, I think it was some of both. I am sure it drove him inward, I am sure it provoked a great deal of introspection and thought which must have been good for his poetry. – Yes, some people think that by 1965 he had written everything he was going to write. ‘If he had died then, disappeared from the scene, whatever, stopped writing, it would not matter; we would have

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our Brodsky’.2 But the point is, till the very end of his life, he always played down the significance of his trial, his arrest and his exile. He decided never to complain, never make a big deal out of these, never allow the dissidents to use him. – Yes, absolutely. From the beginning he made that very clear. That was expectable. It seemed like bravado, but the fact that he didn’t want to be just another dissident was totally believable. – The magazine you edited at the time, ‘Index on Censorship’, helped many writers and poets in the Eastern block to survive, helped secure their release from prison or concentration camp. Brodsky, it seems, didn’t appreciate the involvement of Western intellectuals. Is my impression correct? – I don’t think so. He appreciated their involvement, but didn’t want to be reduced to ‘just a dissident’. – As you know, Brodsky wrote two poems and two essays in memory of W. H. Auden which are, in Gerry Smith’s view, ‘the deepest bow Russian culture has ever made to an Anglo-American’. Why was Auden so appealing to Brodsky? Was it just gratitude for Auden’s introduction to his first English collection and for bringing him to England? Or did he really find something that is congenial in Auden’s poetry? – I am sure he did. Gratitude may have played a part, but I don’t think gratitude is something that Joseph would bother about. Not that he was necessarily ungrateful; he was neither for or against it. I think Auden appealed to him for two reasons. One was that he was a formalist in his meters and rhymes, one of the major formalists of that time writing in English. Secondly, I think it was his religious feelings, his devotion to Christianity. Again, Auden was writing religious poems at the time when very few people were doing it. If you look at Auden’s contemporaries like Spender or Isherwood, they were completely secular – agnostic, one might say. And Auden for a long time had already been writing Christian poetry. Those were the two elements that Joseph responded to in a very profound way. – Very interesting answer, Michael. Why did you put such a stress on the religious poems? Why they should appeal to Brodsky? Many Russians refuse to recognise him as a Christian poet.

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– Is that because he was a Jew? As I understand it, Joseph has written much more about the Christian religion than he has about Jewish things. I am not sure it is an either/or proposition for Joseph, like gratitude. It wasn’t what he was about or interested in. I think Joseph had a profoundly religious … what is the word? He was interested in depth of religious response. My sense is that he responded to Christianity aesthetically. The beauty of the Christian philosophy, or if you like, the Christian myth, if you are not Christian yourself, the beauty of the whole scheme appealed to him. I think Christian ethics appealed to him, probably more than Jewish ethics. I think these are the things that drew him to it. And Auden was a contemporary voice expressing similar ideas in his poetry. In a sense Auden provided – though Joseph was writing in Russian, Auden in English – he provided a poetic language that Joseph could use. – At the moment Brodsky’s Christianity amongst Brodsky scholars is a hot topic. And the Russians try to find any excuse to reject the proposal that Brodsky could be regarded as a Christian poet. But why then each Christmas did he write a poem? Do you think your answer is convincing? That the aesthetic of Christmas attracted him? The birth of the myth? – I think so. I think he responded to the aesthetics but he also responded to the ethics of Christianity. He was a deeply ethical man. – Yes, he said that humanity hasn’t invented anything more important than the Ten Commandments. – What was so interesting about Joseph was that, probably because of having grown up and lived in Soviet Russia, he felt civilisation was under threat, all the time. He felt like someone who has lived on the edge of the abyss, he had looked into the abyss in the form of Soviet society. One of the reasons he was so attached to Classicism, as was Auden, was this sense that civilisation, our civilisation, Greco-Roman-Christian civilisation, had to be defended at all costs – which made him conservative in his taste, conservative in his aesthetics, conservative in his ethics, too, I guess. – Auden also provided Brodsky with a link, a living link, to 17 th Century English Metaphysical poetry.

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– It a very good point. I don’t know how accessible the English Metaphysical poets were in Russia, but of course, the rediscovery of Donne coincided with Auden’s youth. Donne was virtually forgotten till early in the 20th century. – Did you ever see Brodsky in the company of Stephen Spender or WH Auden? – Not really. Just casually, sometimes at receptions. – In what way did Auden help Brodsky to realise his potential as a poet? – I don’t think that Brodsky was in any way dependent on Auden. Perhaps he would have developed in another way. – And not as speedily as he did, arriving in Auden’s company in this country. – Yes, yes. – By the way, if Joseph had stayed in this country instead of going to the USA, do you think his poetic carer would have been as successful as it was in America? Was there room for Brodsky here, in England? – I don’t think so. The situation is much improved since then, but English society, including literary society, is a very small cohesive and controlling one. Auden himself moved to America, which may have set a kind of precedent for Brodsky. There have been many discussions of why Auden moved, or whether he should have moved and so on. By the way I have had this discussion with innumerable Russian émigrés. Another émigré, completely different from Brodsky, was Pavel Litvinov whose grandmother was English; I had a long discussion with him as to why he didn’t settle here. He said, ‘I just felt it is too constricting. To flourish here I needed to become an Englishman’. In America you can stay whatever you are and still flourish. I think for Joseph, the possibilities in America were much greater; there was less pressure to conform, less pressure on him to go in any particular direction. He possibly also knew (which I didn’t know at the time) that there were already more American poets of real stature than there were English, and that American poetry had become much more interesting than English poetry. – And also in America he could make a living. Here not a single university had the post of Poet-in-residence.

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– That’s very basic, and it has driven many people to America. – Nevertheless, he was in love with everything English: English poetry, English language, English history, even with a few English girlfriends. What is your explanation of Brodsky’s life-long love affair with the English language and England? – Once again I think you have to look at this notion of Greco-Roman civilisation, and at his poems on Italy and Rome. He was interested in a high tradition of culture. And like so many Russians that I know, he was at heart an imperialist. He was from St Petersburg, he had this imperial view of the world, and he admired empires. What he admired in England was the past, just as so many Englishmen did and still do. England will never ever recover the kind of greatness it had when the empire was at its zenith when we had so many great poets, great statesmen, when industry, science, everything was at its peak. And literature, of course. He admired that tradition very much. Why he admired the English tradition rather than the French, which is equally grand, is hard for me to say. To quote from another Russian exile, Solzhenitsyn, when he was here in London; the only part of London he really admired was Trafalgar Square. ‘Ah, now I see how this could have bee the hub of a great empire’. – But Brodsky was also interested in the collapse of empire. – Maybe, but when we list the various reasons he moved to America, we could say he moved to the centre of imperial power. – Yes, he said it himself: ‘I have switched the empires’.3 You have mentioned Solzhenitsyn. Of course, you have written an outstanding biography of Solzhenitsyn; we all used it as a textbook in British universities.4 You must feel that you know the man well. Why, in your view, is Solzhenitsyn incapable of understanding Brodsky’s poetry? – Solzhenitsyn’s is an interesting case; he comes from a totally different aesthetic tradition. Solzhenitsyn is post-revolutionary, and Brodsky is post-post-revolutionary, if you know what I mean. Solzhenitsyn is a son of the 20s and 30s; he grew up as a socialist realist. We mustn’t forget that he was a communist for a long time. He is more interesting than Brodsky in this regard, because he grew up at an earlier stage of communism, regarded it with an idealistic

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eye, saw through it and came out the other side. Brodsky was never close to Communism; he was from a much younger generation. Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetics were marked by socialist realism too. I never found out whether this was an apocryphal remark, but I quoted in my book. Apparently, Anna Akhmatova when she read Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha, said, ‘Ah, sots-realism nashel svoi genii’. What does it mean? That Solzhenitsyn was using the traditional method of socialist realism and realistic prose, except that he crashed right through it. There is real poetry in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There is poetry, I think, in V pervom kruge. – And we should add ‘Matryona’s House’ to your list. – Yes, yes, in many of his short stories – and in a whole other way in Arkhipelag Gulag. The way he deals with that sort of vocabulary is interesting. He turned ‘gulag’ into a proper noun, which is now in the English dictionary with a small ‘g’. It’s like inventing the word ‘holocaust’. Solzhenitsyn was a poet or is a poet in his own way. He is a natural poet. He burst through socialist realism. But he never escaped a sort of mental prison. I think the best part of Solzhenitsyn burst through almost in spite of himself, because he was trying to achieve something so much greater than anyone had done before. To my mind, ethically, Solzhenitsyn is not so far from Brodsky, but aesthetically, they are at opposite poles. And I think it is this that prevents Solzhenitsyn from seeing any merit in Brodsky’s poetry. We also have to see where Solzhenitsyn ended up. I think that in terms of his intellectual capacity, in terms of aesthetics and understanding, in terms of his own writing career, Solzhenitsyn blossomed in the sixties and seventies. But after 1973 -74, he was not on the same level as before. And it was the later Solzhenitsyn who pronounced judgement on Brodsky. He failed to see that the ultimate political attitude or statement is to ignore politics altogether. – And this was something that the Soviet authority couldn’t cope with. They could deal with people who were against them, but they didn’t know what to do with people like Brodsky, who ignored them. – Yes. Solzhenitsyn understood their psychology. Brodsky maybe didn’t even understand them all that well; he was on a different plane.

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– Or preferred to ignore them completely. Once he said: ‘Look at the kitten. The cat doesn’t give a damn, whether the ‘Pamiat’ group exist at all, or the ideology department of the Central Committee. He is similarly indifferent, however, to the President of the USA, the latter’s presence or absence. How am I any worse than that cat?’ 5 Solzhenitsyn would never say such thing. He also thinks that there is no ground for talking of Brodsky’s Christian views; he blames Brodsky for not being interested in politics, for not paying enough attention to the Jewish theme; he accuses him of not loving Russia.6 For Brodsky, as you know, politics was the lowest level of spiritual activity; for him the task of a writer was to write well and to show his readers the true scale of things. There is plenty of material for the future scholars to see these two major writers, Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn as representatives of two opposite poles of Russian culture. Still, I’m tempted to ask, why, unlike Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky did not return to Russia? – We can only speculate. As we said earlier, the greatest insult Brodsky could inflict on the Soviet regime was to ignore it and ignore politics – that’s why he was so different from Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, I wonder, whether in the depth of his soul he was so insulted, so offended, so deeply wounded by his experiences that he could never ever forgive them. – It would be a plausible explanation, if he didn’t admire so much Akhmatova’s ability to forgive the system for the execution of her first husband and for the arrest of her son and her third husband. He said that Akhmatova taught him not so much how to write poetry as how to forgive. – I didn’t know that. Did he learn that lesson? – Very good question! If he did, it must have been very hard for him because he was a very proud man. Did you meet Joseph in America? – Yes. I was at several readings he gave. We were also both part of something called the Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In 1981 there was a round table discussion on ‘Literature in Languages Other than English’,7 at which Brodsky was present. It was a group of very high-powered intellectuals, very brilliant people. Susan Sontag was one of the members of this

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group. What impressed me most was how Brodsky always held his own. He didn’t show off, but he always had something to say. Well, maybe he did show off a bit… – By disagreeing with everybody? – Yes, he liked to disagree. This was still the tail end of that sort of liberal period that began in the 60’s, and a lot of people in the Institute were leftwing. Susan was beginning to move away from that, partly under the influence of Brodsky, but was still very liberal, and he would always take the opposite point of view to her. I was at the PEN Congress in Brazil with him in 1979, and we talked a bit there. I heard him read at Columbia and other places, and I read with him myself here in London at the ICA, I read translations of his poems, and he said I was the best reader he had had. I said he should choose me again, but there was a very pretty woman there, he pointed her out and said he probably wouldn’t. – It was a joke because he couldn’t stand it when a woman read his translations. I organized several readings at British universities, and he always made the same condition: no actors and no women. – Ok, it was a joke. Anyway, I always took issue with him on the way he declaimed his poetry. I said, ‘Joseph, you sound so old fashioned’. He wanted to communicate the music of the verse, I understand, it was probably the way he composed it in his head, but I felt when he came to a public reading it would have been better if he had read against the music. What I meant was that the music underlines the sound, whereas I think you should read syntactically, for meaning. But he didn’t read for meaning, he read it for the music. – What was his response? – I think Joseph liked me, but I don’t think he took me all that seriously. He just laughed. Our other big disagreement was over his English poems. He was beginning to write them in the early 80’s, and I remember on a couple of occasions he came and showed them to me. He would put something into my hands and he wouldn’t say whether it was a translation, or one of his original poems in English. And he asked me to guess. I said, ‘Joseph, this is you in English’. He asked, ‘Well, how do you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t think, this is as good as your Russian poems’. And he hated that. It’s interesting

that along with his admiration of English and English literature, he desperately wanted to be able to write in English. – Finally, who was this man: a victimized exile whose life choices were largely determined by external agencies, or an ambitious man who ruthlessly forged a new destiny for himself? – No answer is needed. He was both, but I think the second part of your description is more significant than the first. Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7

Josef Brodsky, Kniga intervyu, compiled and edited by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2000, 2007), pp. 7 - 12. Anatoly Naiman in conversation with V. Polukhina, Brodsky Through Eyes of His Contemporaries, vol.1 (Brighton MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008). Joseph Brodsky, ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’, tr. by Anthony Hecht, A Part of Speech (Oxford: OUP, 1980), p. 108. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn (London: Paladin, 1985). Josef Brodsky, Kniga intervyu, p. 394. A. Solzhenitsyn, Novy mir, no. 12, 1999. Published in New Your Arts Journal, no. 24 (1982), pp. 23 - 30.

39 PA U L K E E G A N Paul Keegan graduated from Merton College Oxford and the Sorbonne. Taught in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, was formerly Editor of the Penguin Classics, and is currently Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber. He edited the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes (2003) and The Penguin Book of English Verse (2004); has recently written the introduction to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life for the New Penguin Freud series.

H E WA N T E D

TO INFECT ENGLISH W I T H T H E VI RU S OF H I S T ORY

An Interview with Paul Keegan (March 2005, London) – Tell me about your first meeting with Joseph. – I remember our second meeting. There must have been several first meetings, all of them much the same, with Brodsky abstracted and distracted. I was working at Penguin, and had just acquired rights to To Urania and Less Than One. Brodsky was quite often in London at this time – Capital Incognito, in his words – staying I think in Alan Myers’s apartment. (Michael Hofmann remembers seeing Brodsky sitting alone in a café in London, working away, and nobody knew he was in town). Then one day he won the Nobel Prize, and Penguin held a press conference. Brodsky smoked his way through the questions – all of them about his status as a world-historical individual (as if he had won the Nobel Prize for dissidence), none of them about his poetry; he joked and parried, with a self-commiserating smile: as if fate in the form of historical irony had dealt him another crap hand. Our second meeting was when we had dinner one evening, around that time, in an empty restaurant in Hampstead. He doodled with a biro on the linen tablecloth; and by the end of the meal – several hours –

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the white was black with ink, and the management complained, so we had to buy the tablecloth. On that occasion a long conversation got going, and he became very focused, interrogatory, as if he kept needing confirmation. From then on I saw a lot of him in London, and whenever I was in New York. He always gave me the feeling that we were in the same room, sometimes small and close, sometimes large and distant. We had close friends in common, like Alexandra Pringle, and other figures like Roberto Calasso and Roger Straus in New York, so there was a kind of triangulation. He liked triangles, and cells. He had what I called his Under Western Eyes side. Every meeting was in fact our first conversation continued – an ongoing doodle of talk that ramified over ten years and covered a larger and larger tablecloth. He was an amazing listener disguised as a talker or (the role he liked least and was asked to practice most) a sage. I think the really private thing for him was listening. You jump into the stream of a conversation that is always in spate from its prior occasion, and it doesn’t matter who talks. I often got the feeling that he paid no attention, while at the same time being nourished by his own inattention. I think he wanted conversation to be a form of luck, and felt that one must not invoke the muse directly. And he also made you feel that when you listened you were also talking. Just as he made you feel that reading was a higher form than writing, that writing was a wealth tax on reading. It was all part of his unexpectedness, his lefthandedness – his historical irony. – Brodsky’s success in the West is due to a combination of talent, luck and opportunities. Which, in your view, is the most important factor? – Brodsky’s very strange yet exemplary life seemed at the time (perhaps to him as well as to others) to be what Keats would have called an allegory. I think he was condemned to live thus, and that it was perhaps the last time an individual life could be regarded symbolically, as universal – courtesy of the Cold War and its Manichean arrangement of the world. So, Brodsky Agonistes. His life was a sort of approved Calvary, and for that very reason, to my mind, tragical, aberrant. In New York, especially, I think his life was lived vicariously by his audience of friends and admirers – on his behalf – and that he seemed marginalised as much by this big family as by his inconsolable linguistic and cultural displacement. – In Russia Brodsky is perceived as the last great poet of the XX th

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century, in the line of Blok, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Akhmatova. Does his reputation in the English-speaking world come anywhere near to matching his status in Russia? – His iconic status to one side, the answer to your question is surely ‘No’. But I would add that none of the other poets you mention – except Mandelstam, by some unique osmosis (and because of contributing factors such as Nadezhda’s memoirs) – matter truly to the English-speaking world. Most of us are still waiting for a translation of Akhmatova that will reveal Akhmatova; likewise a version of Tsvetaeva that will make her seem more than a silver poet (despite Brodsky’s wholly convincing reverence for her); likewise a version of Blok that will make his poetry seem remotely as gripping as almost any book about Blok, e. g. Lucy Vogel’s compelling Aleksandr Blok’s Italian Journey. And Pasternak to the English is and always will be exclusively a prose master (despite Brodsky’s view that he was a far more interesting poet). In other words, it is not clear to me that the English at this point have a niche in which to place a statue called ‘last great Russian poet of the Twentieth Century’. But neither does it seem to me that the English reception of Brodsky is necessarily distorted if it fails to recognise in him such a figure. What is unique to Brodsky after all is the double focus: an identity that was as much minted in the West as it was mutilated by the Soviet imperium. – Are Brodsky’s virtues, as an exquisite mastery of verse technique, unlimited inventiveness, elegance, bold resonant metaphors, visible in English? – Yes (figurative richness, invention) and No (mastery, elegance). On the other hand, is Brodsky’s courageous English attempt to write a messy living vernacular – an ersatz idiolect – present at all in his Russian poetry? – John Bayley remarked in his review of Brodsky’s English collection that in English he sounded like a ‘bear playing a flute’. Is this cruel, correct, or just condescending? – Well, the image of a bear playing a flute has its own delicacy, and accuracy (this is irrelevant, but the oldest musical instrument ever found is a Neanderthal flute carved from the femur of a bear, discovered in a cave in Slovenia). I certainly think Brodsky wanted to do cloven-footed things with the English language, and that he

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was interested in profanation rather than proficiency. If he had to live in it and with English – or, even worse, American – he wanted to do more than merely learn it. And I think Nabokov’s Pushkin translation and its principles were a reality for him – we often spoke of it – not to mention Nabokov’s image of the translator (‘a parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter’), or Nabokov’s astonishing preface to his own English version of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, or Nabokov’s study of Gogol’s creative estrangement from linguistic propriety as a form of self-translation. The question of ‘fluency’ was therefore alive with paradox and energy for Brodsky, because he wanted to encode historical experience – his own historical witness – in the very phonemes of his adoptive language, which he thought of as largely innocent of history. Like making dirty footprints in virgin snow. He wanted to infect language (English) with the virus of history: a very Audenesque image. And you do not achieve this by mere fluency or correctness. – How do you evaluate Brodsky’s translations of his own work? – Self-translation is of course possible (Enzensberger, Beckett). Brodsky translated himself simultaneously into English and American, and the results of the experiment were what mattered for him, rather than measuring up to an abstract standard of excellence. His versions are sometimes unfortunate, but always bold, brassy. And based on a consistently articulated philosophy, which he applied to other poets who were in the same boat, insisting for example that the only meaningful English selection of the poetry of Milosz would be a selection devoted exclusively to Milosz’s own versions of himself – that anything else was just dross. Rather than thinking that self-translation was possible, Brodsky thought that the only form of translation possible was self-translation. – What drove Brodsky to translate his own poems when he had so many distinguished American and English translators? – Firstly, he was fortunate at the very outset – at the instigation of Auden, really (Hecht for example a notable admirer of Auden) – in having a gifted and capable team of translators virtually assigned to him. I think he became afraid of them, afraid of being taking over by them – and could not help but think of them as a proxy censor. Milosz had the same uncanny good fortune as Brodsky with his translators, but Milosz was more urbane about it, and trusted to the

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reciprocities of collaboration far more than Brodsky did – as long as Milosz was in control. In Milosz’s case it was his translators – Hass notably – who thought of their vigilant author as the censor! Secondly, Brodsky turned away from his translators because he wanted to learn English through the act of translating himself. And thirdly, because he wanted to become an English poet by translating himself – even if this meant becoming an antithetical kind of poet to the Russian original of himself. A fabulous idea, if you think about it, in its ability to embrace the circumstances in which he found himself – and also a characterisically opportunistic pondering of the odds. – What do you think of Brodsky’s notion about translating form? – Well, he professed Equivalence (when he discovered that Cavafy wrote formally in Greek, he canvassed for a new translation of Cavafy which would honour and reflect that fact). What he maintained about Mandelstam – when you listen to Mandelstam in Russian you have to think of late Yeats: sturdy quatrains – exemplified a general principle. I think he was wary of free verse, and most especially wary of free verse translation. He felt that – like most things in the West – free verse had not earned its liberties. He agreed with Eliot’s reflections on vers libre, that ‘the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras’. The problem here is that you need a miraculous command of the rules in the first place to be able to break them… I think it is a shame that – unlike Milosz, whose versions of Herbert are so good – Brodsky did not translate other Russian – or Polish – poets into English. He contemplated doing so. – Do you think that Brodsky’s English critics understand his notion of translation? – Probably not. His ideas do seem to have a dialectical and even Gnostic flavour. Again, the contrast with Milosz is apposite and instructive. Milosz took a simple view of getting his poems across into English. After all, a Milosz poem is a poem in Polish, not a poem in English, so the business of its conveyancing into English is just that – a business. In which case translation is a secular, pragmatic activity. An activity of the fallen world, even. Brodsky’s view of language is different. I think that he had intuitions about real presence. That in Auden’s words, time worships language, worships the right words.

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Secondly, Brodsky’s English critics operate with latent, unexamined and often simple-minded notions of decorum. They feel obliged to correct his English, and they have been conducting strangely sterile and infantile arguments on this subject for years. – You read some of his essays written in English. What do you think of his command of English? – For me, at the time, Less Than One was the real discovery. It was his essays that got me excited in his poetry again (i.e. made me go back to the old Penguin selected poems, and to A Part of Speech). I often think Brodsky’s prose in English must have a similar effect to Mandelstam’s prose in Russian. And that Brodsky learned velocity – the velocity of his imagery – from Mandelstam’s prose (the Journey to Armenia). Brodsky’s prose is extraordinarily accomplished. – How would you characterise Brodsky’s relationship to the English language? – He married it. But he thought of it as a child-bride, and of himself as an immigrant worker. – Who amongst contemporary English poets had a lasting influence on Joseph? – None. I think he was impervious to anything post-Auden. He respected some of the Irish poets (Muldoon, Mahon) because he loved Heaney, and I think he learnt things from – or was at least observant of – Walcott. But basically Frost and Auden sufficed him, for one life, or for less than one life. From Frost he learnt what a vernacular was; i.e. Frost’s Wordsworthian ability to employ clumsiness with point and power, something Brodsky recognised when he met it in Frost, because he knew it already from Pushkin. And he learnt everything else from Auden and Auden’s grace – so what you have is a very peculiar tension in Brodsky between a horizontal urbanity and a vertical attempt to dig down to a vernacular bedrock. There are other things going on too, of course, but I think that for the other things Brodsky turned away from English, turned to the Europeans and the Greeks and Romans. – Was Brodsky’s approach to poetry purely intuitive or was it affected by any particular philosophical or religious orientation? – A good question, but I would need to have a longer conversation with you to work out my sense of this. – Brodsky visited Ireland several times, for example, in January 1986

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when he was in Belfast; in 1988 and 1989 he was in Dublin. Did you ever go with him on his Irish pilgrimages? – I was a couple of times with him in Ireland. Once I spent a week with him in Cork, maybe in 1989. He gave a reading in Kinsale. Derek Mahon went round Kinsale ripping down all the hand-written posters advertising the reading (‘Big B comes to Kinsale. 8 pm’) because he thought it would give Joseph the wrong idea. We spent some time idling about in the hills above Kinsale, delinquently looking for dolmens. It was amazing crystalline weather, day after day. I remember one long conversation about the possibility of intellectual rigour in poetry, the presentation of abstract ideas in a poem. And I remember Brodsky being very taken by the physiognomical vigour of the Irish - all those untamed, extinct-looking lopsided country faces; he said that Gombrowicz would have felt at home on the streets of Wexford. He liked the bars, and the sight of solitary men nursing dark pints in congenial silence. Just as he felt a fastidious contempt for English pubs (the ubiquity of background music and food signifying ‘a loss of faith in the power of alcohol’). But he was sceptical too about Irish charm in some of its forms, which he diagnosed as a desire to be liked, a wish for approval. And he had a sort of instinctive scepticism about such things. I often thought he had a Brechtian side to his nature (I’m thinking of Hannah Arendt’s pointilliste portrait of Brecht in Men in Dark Times), much as he’d have hated the thought. – Brodsky wanted Russian to be heard and so he gave innumerable readings. Did you attend any? What was your impression? – I went to several reading, over the years. I think he did too much reading of Russian in these readings. The two languages interfered with each others’ magnetic fields. His English would sound more and more Russian in proximity to Russian. I wanted to focus more intently on the English, and the Russian (instructive though it always was) prevented this. It also prejudiced his listeners into thinking that his English was being propped up by his Russian. – Why did Faber and Faber refuse to publish his Collected Poems in English? – Because the story of Brodsky’s reception here is very different to the story of his reception in the USA: Brodsky as a poet (as opposed to Brodsky as an essayist, or Brodsky as an icon) has yet to find an enduring English reception, and a big American Collected

Poems is not the place to begin. What is needed – and therefore unlikely to happen – is a ruthlessly selective new Selected Poems, which would bring together Brodsky and his translators in a new way. And Penguin should publish such a volume. They were – and are, in my view – Brodsky’s natural home in this country. – How does he fit into the English poetic scene now? – Ambiguously, for the reasons given above. Beyond such ambiguities, he fits about as much, and about as little, as Herbert, as Milosz, as Zagajewski… – Not many people have the energy or the appetite for freedom Joseph had and professed in his poetry. Could it be one of the reasons of resentment by some English poets? – Not really. I think he was loved and admired by younger English poets (Glyn Maxwell, Alan Jenkins, Michael Hofmann, Lachlan MacKinnon). I think his English admirers have a more subtle sense of what he is up to than many of his American friends. – Brodsky said in his ‘In Memory of Stephen Spender’: ‘People are what we remember about them’. What do you remember about Joseph? – All of the above is a memory of him, since he converted everything into personal data, and all personal data into principle. There was this seamlessness about him. I liked especially his gift for bad behaviour. It was a shame that he became quite so celebrated, quite so in demand, because it stiffened some of his carnivalesque qualities; though it was better by far for him to have gone to America – the America of back then – than to have pitched up in the England of back then. He liked big cars. I remember his definition of himself as ‘a nervous guy’.

40 ROGER S T R AUS Roger Straus, co-founder of one of the most respected publishing houses Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died in New York, on May 25, 2004, at the age of 87. He played a prominent part over six decades at the publishing house, which he considered to be a last vestige of the age of great independent publishing. In 1994, Straus sold the firm to a German media company. In his time, the company published the works of Isaak Bashevis Singer, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag.

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A GREAT POET

WA S

LI V ING

AMONG US

An Interview with Roger Straus (November 2003, New York) – Who introduced you to Brodsky’s poetry? – It seems to have been forever. But I can’t remember who first introduced me to Joseph. You know I loved Joseph and we were close friends. We talked on the telephone almost every day. He would call up and say: ‘Hello Boss, what’s new?’ Or I would call him. And it went on forever. It was wonderful. And I have, in my room in the country, a wonderful portrait of Joseph – half smile and so on and so forth. – On the 22nd of October you were in London when the Nobel Prize was announced and John le Carré told me that he had lunch with Joseph in a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead, and Irene Brendel, Alfred Brendel’s wife, burst in and said: ‘Joseph, you must come home!’ And he asked, ‘Why?’ – ‘You’ve been given the prize’. – ‘What prize?’ – ‘The Nobel Prize’. – And then John le Carré asked, ‘How do you know?’ – ‘The journalists are outside our home’. You were in London at the time, at your hotel. How about your side of the story? Did you learn about the Prize before Joseph did? – I got a telephone call from one of the Swedes to let me know that Joseph was about to win the Nobel Prize, or had just won it. I had forgotten I was in London. And then the question was, where could I set up a press conference? None of the hotel facilities made any sense and finally, knowing that the Brendels were great friends of Joseph’s, I asked them. I don’t know whether you know the house? – Yes, it is a big double-fronted house. – So we had a lot of people, fifty or so. And they kept coming and going. It was a wonderful occasion and seven of us had dinner afterwards. – And the photograph in the corridor of your office with Joseph and Brendel and you, was that taken in London? – Yes. – Did you go to Stockholm? – Yes, I did go. – And was the Swedish queen as beautiful as Joseph claimed she was?

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Roger Straus, 1996 (from Roger Straus’s archive)

– She was very good-looking. I always tell the story – not true, of course, – of how I was in Stockholm, first with Isaac Singer, then with Nadine Gordimer, then with Joseph, then with Derek and then with Seamus. When I came to Stockholm again, the king turned to one of his aides, and said, ‘What’s that New York Jew doing back here again?’ – Do you think that Joseph got his Nobel Prize for his essays rather than for his poetry, which is pretty inaccessible and controversial in translation? Would you agree that his first collection of essays ‘Less than One’ played a decisive part? – Yes and no. Well, I don’t know. I was always under the impression that Joseph was given the Prize for the body of his work. I think that’s the truth. After all, it’s his poetry he’s known for. Of course, his prose is wonderful too. ‘A Room and a Half’ is terrific, a first rate piece. Primarily Joseph was a poet, thought of himself as a poet, was interested mainly in poetry and incidentally was very generous about other poets – unlike some poets I know. – As I’m sure you are aware, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize as early as 1980. I was in Ann Arbor, at the time, for half a year following him around, taking in every word he uttered. One morning he

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told me: ‘There is a smell of Nobel’. So, he was probably nominated several times before he got it. – One never knows, you know. I just happen to have a Nobel Laureate’s book on my desk, which I haven’t yet read and wanted to. But I have two authors, both I think deserving of the Nobel Prize, I mean Mario Vargas Llosa and Les Murray, the poet. – Les Murray is a great poet. I hope he gets it. – He was in London last week, with friends of mine. I don’t know where he is now. Anyway, to say that somebody is a runner-up for the Nobel is nonsense, because it doesn’t work that way at all. – How would you respond to the suggestion made by some American poets that Farrar, Straus & Giroux was the real promoter of Joseph? – Joseph was his own promoter. We just happened along. – Some writers, J. M. Coetzee for one, didn’t value Brodsky’s second collection of essays ‘On Grief and Reason’ as much as ‘Less Than One’. Do you see any advance in Joseph’s thought, or a deepening of it in the second collection? – I think it’s a question of taste. Some people like some part of his second collection, some people are jealous. I think Coetzee was a very good choice, by the way, for the Nobel Prize. – Coming back to the poetry, you are probably aware that there is a huge gap between the original and the translation. For you, for many Western critics and poets, Brodsky exists in his own translations. John Bayley remarked in his review of Brodsky’s English collection that Brodsky in English sounded like ‘a bear playing a flute’. Is this a cruel or correct view? – There was always a lot of talk about Joseph’s translations. But the fact of the matter is, I think, a lot of it is just because Joseph’s English was so good that he could read the translations himself. I’m sure that some purist could say that when he said ‘warp’ it should have been ‘whir rip’, but the fact is that the translations are quite good. He was attacked, I remember, once by a little prick that I know in London. – Do you mean Craig Raine? 1 – Who said the translations were no good, just to put Joseph down. Joseph was bigger than life and beyond all that nonsense. – How did he manage to become American Poet Laureate? – Every once in a while the intellectual community in America does something intelligent. I think that was the case here. Suddenly, they

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realized here was a great poet living amongst us, with a certain lifestyle, which was engaging, and that he was the person we should be talking about, reading and listening to. – By the way, did you like his reading? – Yes, he read wonderfully. The first time I heard him do a reading – I can’t think how long ago – I was reminded of the cantor at my temple – much the same sort of thing. He was a wonderful reader of poetry. It was almost always the same but it had a lot of, well, a lot of balls. It was very, very Jewish. – He never changed his manner of reading. – It’s interesting, just this morning I got a long fax from my friend Mitchell Kruger saying that the last conversation that he had with Joseph was in Munich. They talked of doing a buy-in of hundreds of poems of Joseph Brodsky and he wanted to proceed. Was I willing to proceed with it? And I just told him that, yes, I was but I had to talk to the widow first, Maria. I’ve just written a long letter. I couldn’t reach Maria by telephone. You know she lives in Milan and works for my friend Calasso. So I told her to get back in touch with me. I will probably do it. But the other thing that’s fallen off the radar screen – we all talked about it at one time and Joseph talked about it too – that was the retranslating, the collecting of his very early poems. That badly needs to be done. Many of them have never been translated or have been translated badly – at least that’s what I’m told. What do I to know? It’s what I’ve been told, and I believe it. – Joseph was reluctant to acknowledge the influence of any poet, but he made an exception for Auden. Why do you think he singled out Auden? What exactly attracted Brodsky in Auden’s poetry? His selfrestraint, a touch of absurdity, controlled lyricism, self-disgust? – When I think of the voice it’s very similar in many ways. That’s how I would answer that question. They both had wonderful resonance. It’s the same tune. – The intellectual theme, the detachment? – Yes. – Do you think Brodsky would be Brodsky without the persecution, penury, imprisoment and exile, the political upheaval that happened in his early life? He always resented that critics paid so much attention to his suffering in Russia.

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– He resented it but I think I disagree with you. I don’t think there was too much emphasis on it. I think that when he was incarcerated he was writing poetry at the time, as we both know. He dealt with it by writing poetry; even when he didn’t have paper and pencil he wrote in his head and then later he put it down. I published Solzhenitsyn and of course almost all of Solzhenitsyn has to do with his political problems. – When I said too much emphasis, I meant not by Joseph but by his critics. Almost all the monographs and the reviews about Brodsky start with this biographical element. He disliked it. Maybe this was one of the reasons why he was so much against biography? Do you think we need a biography of Brodsky to understand his poetry better? – I think we do. – As you know, Brodsky was very fond of England and everything English. Do you think he saw England as imperial, since the image of empire played such an important part in his writing? – You’ll have to excuse me, but I think Joseph thought that when he went to England; when he came to America, he was liberated politically. In other words, nobody was following him around and saying you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Of course, I’m just speculating. I never discussed this with him. I knew he was very comfortable in England. I knew he was very comfortable in America too, and when he lived on Morton Street with all those people, all of whom I know, he was happy. By the way, I wanted to see one of the women living there, but it turns out she’s in Cambodia now. – Margot Picken?2 – Yes. It was actually a very American thing – a sort of commune. This one worked extremely well. These were people who were very keen about each other, admiring each other’s artistic talent, so there was a lot of give and take. And I think all that was very appealing to Joseph. I know it was, since he mentioned it. – You published a lot of top-flight poets. Almost all of them are foreigners. How did Joseph fit in among the American poets? – He was very generous. He spoke well of all of them. I do know, on reflection, a couple he didn’t like. But I’m not going to name names! On the whole he was very positive about contemporary American poetry. – I know, that Derek Walcott, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur loved Joseph. But there were some prominent poets you don’t want to mention who didn’t.

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– I would say that most poets were very pro Joseph and his work. I think he was beyond that kind of things. – How many American poets can write with such moral authority and such control of the medium, as Brodsky in his 40 th birthday poem – ‘I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages’ – with the closing lines: ‘Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx, / only gratitude will be gushing from it’? – Hard to tell. – Do you agree with Anne and Maria and their wanting to restrict translation of Brodsky? As a teacher, I know that for students one needs many versions of the same poem to appreciate the original. What is your feeling about that? – I can’t get into that sort of discussion. I don’t know Russian and I can’t compare different translations. I publish a lot of foreign writers, as you know, Spanish, Germans, Italians and so forth, but I don’t read any foreign language, except for French, even then… Susan Sontag, a great friend, works in three or four different languages. Her Spanish publisher says, ‘I don’t think that’s very good or I want it done over again.’ I can’t say that, because I wouldn’t know what I’m talking about! I mean, I have to take advice from someone I trust. Personally I can’t say this one is good and that one is bad. – Some Brodsky’s scholars think that an unfortunate result of Brodsky’s fame has been that others Russian poets have been relatively neglected. Has your publishing house done anything to rectify this situation? Are you planning to publish any other important Russian poet? – We published Aleksandr Kushner’s poetry that Joseph recommended. – Are you planning to publish any other Russian poets? – I can’t think of any at the moment. – What were Joseph’s other interests apart from poetry? – We were in London and I remember, he loved Chinese food. There’s a wonderful restaurant in London called ‘Memories of China’. I took him there for lunch and we ordered vodka to begin, and he said ‘Roger, do you call that vodka!’ The drunkest I ever got, by the way, was in Russia. – When did you go to Russia? – I visited Russia in 1940. I was in Russia again right after Isaac Singer won the Nobel Prize, on my way back from Stockholm in 1978.

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– You know that in September next year they are planning a big international Brodsky conference in Moscow. Would you like to go? – I think I’ll stay in New York. – Do you remember any outrageous stories about Joseph? He was generous and tender, but he could also be rude and unreliable. – You know, when we were together, we always had a wonderful time, whether in New York or London or Stockholm. We spent a lot of time together, always in good humor, but I can’t think of a single funny story. – You mentioned Solzhenitsyn and you are probably not aware that a couple of years ago Solzhenitsyn published an article in ‘Novy miir’, soon after Brodsky’s death, attacking Brodsky, saying that he wasn’t Jewish enough, he hadn’t written on Jewish topics. He wasn’t Russian enough either, he didn’t love Russia. Why would he do that? – I’ll tell you why. Solzhenitsyn was accused, with some justification, of being anti-Semitic and this is his way of responding. I turned down Solzhenitsyn’s ‘History of the Jews’. I was offered it, of course, and turned it down. As a matter of fact I published ‘Knot One’ and ‘Knot Two’, but I’m not publishing ‘Knot Three’, I don’t think it’s very good. Having said all of that, I think ‘Cancer Ward’ is a very interesting book. – Joseph was much more generous about Solzhenitsyn. He was a bit critical of his aesthetics, but he said we have in Solzhenitsyn a Soviet Homer because he describes the history of the atrocities committed by the state against the people. On that account alone, he is a great man. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand poetry. – Talking of Jewish themes, one of the things of Brodsky that I read and among those I liked best is his poem about the Jewish cemetery. It’s quite wonderful and quite important in a way. Notes 1

2

Graig Raine, ‘A Reputation subject to Inflation’, Financial Times, 16/17 November, 1996, p. xix. Margot Picken was Brodsky’s close friend, she lived in the same building, 44 Morton Street, and often looked after his cat. Brodsky dedicated to her ‘Eclogue V: Summer’(1981).

NA ME I NDEX Aaron J. 7, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 27, 297, 455, 462 Admoni V. G. 107 Ageev L. 120 Aitmatov Ch. 43 Aizenberg M. N. 333, 346 Akhmadulina B. A. 210, 333, 375, 380 Akhmatova A. A. 26, 36, 76, 91, 93, 104, 110, 115, 138, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 177, 184, 187, 191, 238, 250, 259–261, 265, 288, 310, 312, 328, 331, 337, 342, 346, 357, 385, 391, 394, 422, 448, 458, 467, 469, 495, 509, 515, 547, 550, 562, 573, 574, 579 Aksakov S. T. 307 Aksyonov V. P. 138 Alberti R. 437 Alekseev M. P. 559 Aleshkovsky I. 218 Aleshkovsky Yu. 55, 87, 162, 203, 218, 301 Allen W. 518 Alleva A. 7, 10, 13, 27, 333, 335, 351, 352 Alsop J. 318, 319 Alvarez A. 518 Amundsen R. 26 Andrade C. D. de 437 Andreas-Salomé L. 361 Andropov Yu. V. 69, 137, 390 Aragon L. 163, 288 Ardov M. V. 7, 10, 12, 24, 27, 153, 155, 156, 163 Ardov V. E. 154 Arendt H. 451, 583 Aristotles 483

Armstrong Ch. 449 Arndt W. 175 Aronzon L. 142 Ashbery J. 473, 483 Ashcroft P. 309 Atlas J. 84 Auden W. H. 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 58, 97, 177, 208, 212, 237, 254, 281, 310–312, 313, 315–317, 319, 320, 328, 330, 331, 356–358, 381, 385, 420, 437–439, 443, 445, 447, 462, 467–471, 473, 484, 493–495, 499, 500, 502, 504, 505, 508, 511, 517–519, 522–526, 537, 538, 542, 546, 549, 558, 559, 562, 566, 568– 571, 580–582, 589 Aygi G. 380, 381, 553, 562, 563 Bach I. S. 219, 321, 336 Bagritsky E. G. 121 Balanchine G. 328, 329 Balashov D. 50 Barańczak S. 279, 280, 282, 283 Baratynsky E. A. 199, 278, 307, 448 Barkov L. 64 Barnes Ch. 377 Bar-Sella Z. 77, 84 Barthes R. 323 Baryshnikov M. N. 28, 239, 299–301, 303, 304, 331, 332, 405, 407, 410, 412, 497, 526 Bashmakova N. 392 Basmanov A. 399, 412 Basmanova D. 27, 28, 397, 399 Basmanova M. P. 9, 129, 227, 247, 263, 266, 391, 400, 404, 444, 503 Basmanova Pasha 27, 28, 401, 403

594

Name Index

Basmanova Polya 28 Basten M. van 518 Batyushkov K. N. 199 Baudelaire Ch. 177, 225, 294 Bayley J. 495, 579, 588 Beckett S. 497, 580 Belisarius 11, 520 Berberova N. N. 185, 203 Berdnikov A. 379 Bergson A. 294 Berlin I. 9, 12, 42, 80, 81, 185, 313, 314, 322, 422, 488, 495, 525, 538 Bessie C. 196 Bethea D. 46 Bethell N. 516 Betjeman J. 11, 312, 314, 499 Bishop E. 433, 440 Bishops, prince 524 Bissett D. 408 Bitov A. 42, 43, 120, 122, 132, 136 Blair B. 218 Blok A. A. 26, 75, 77, 160, 162, 187, 364, 374, 458, 509, 553, 579 Bloom H. 467 Bloomstein E. 7, 12, 25, 27, 141, 145 Bloomstein R. 148, 149 Blunt A. 502 Blunt E. 38 Bobyshev D. 104, 120, 244, 263 Bodley J. 318 Bolotova L. 284 Bonnefoy Y. 557, 563, 564 Borges J. L. 323, 527 Bose L. 218 Botticelli S. 338 Brahms I. 214 Brecht B. 583 Brendel A. 46, 586 Brendel I. 586 Brendel R. 34, 35 Breton A. 288

Brezhnev L. I. 9, 64, 66, 73, 80, 116, 128, 129, 312, 390, 403, 415, 521 Brik L. Ju. 231, 237, 238, 289 Britanishsky V. L. 59, 120, 125, 175 Brodskaya M. M., J. Brodsky’s mother 122, 149, 336–339, 344, 388, 389 Brodsky A. I., Brodski’s father 122, 149, 336–339 Brodsky Anna Maria Alexandra, J. Brodsky’s daughter 139, 214–216, 223, 320, 503 Brodsky Joseph, passim Brodsky Maria, J. Brodsky’s wife 25, 99, 139, 144, 151, 163, 180, 214, 216, 218, 220, 223, 225, 227, 228, 235, 251, 252, 276, 294, 302, 308, 318, 320, 321, 393, 442, 501, 503, 589, 591 Brown C. 534, 560 Browning E. B. 333 Brussell S. 27, 507, 509 Budnev N. M. 124 Bukovsky V. K. 74, 360 Bulgakov M. A. 565 Bulow H. von 55 Burgess 502, 511 Burikhin I. N. 62, 64 Burton Richard 310 Burton Robert 361 Buttafava G. 239, 368 Bykov V. V. 77 Byron G. 76, 227, 535 Calabria R. 520 Calasso R. 578, 589 Callas M. 239 Campbell D. 482 Capote T. 36 Carlisle O. 58 Carré J. le 7, 27, 33, 34, 37, 363, 586

Name Index

Carroll L. 408 Castro F. 288 Catherine II 384 Catullus 11, 520, 59 Cavafy K. 26, 91, 113, 184, 404, 444, 445, 467, 469, 508, 581 Cerf M. 289 Chamfort N. 511 Charpentier M.-A. 219 Cheigin P. N. 353 Chekalov D. I. 195, 196 Chekhov A. P. 365, 374, 544 Cherkasov, geologist 131 Chernomyrdin V. S. 403, 415 Chernyshev I. 299 Chernysheva E. F. 7, 9, 23, 25, 26, 299, 300 Chertkov V. G. 115 Chesterton G. K. 22, 178, 183 Chikatilo 44 Chirikov E. N. 363 Chirikova L. E. 363 Chomsky A. 359 Chukovskaya L. K. 156, 559 Chukovsky K. I. 156 Cioran E. 511 Clampitt A. 434 Coetzee J. M. 91, 588 Columbus 26, 117 Condoleezza Rice 79 Confucius 186 Conquest R. 528 Conrad J. 36, 37, 458 Crashaw R. 473 Cromwell O. 113, 538 Daniel Yu. M. 111, 288 Dante 23, 53, 106, 162, 186, 198, 270, 305, 306, 391, 392, 424, 445, 449, 450, 504 Darwin Ch. 488 Dashevsky G. 195

595

Dateshidze D. 351 Davie D. 425, 510, 536 Dawkins R. 488 Dozmarova G. 147 Derzhavin G. R. 278, 384, 448, 484 Dickinson E. 19, 439, 471, 473, 511, 520 Diderot D. 553 Dobrovolsky F. 147, 152 Dombrovsky Yu. O. 73, 515 Donizetti G. 239 Donne J. 12, 15, 254, 310–312, 328, 385, 450, 460, 467, 473, 485, 511, 517, 522, 546, 547, 559, 571 Dostoevsky F. M. 77, 101, 114, 115, 162, 168, 169, 237, 278, 321, 346, 476, 515, 530, 565 Dovlatov 73, 74, 117, 203, 362 Dozmorov O. V. 346 Drawicz A. 268, 275, 278, 279, 281, 282 Du Bellay J. 225 Dubik Yu. 128 Dufy R. 400 Dumas A. 366 Dzyuba I. 77 Eckersley C. E. 408 Efimov I. M. 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 22–27, 74, 105, 107, 109, 118, 356 Efros A. 515 Egerev 62 Einstein A. 134, 228 Eisenhardt L. 57 Eliot T. S. 19, 177, 213, 318, 426, 437, 467, 468, 473, 475, 525, 559, 566, 581 Eliot V. 318 Eltsin B. N. 116, 228, 239, 253, 390, 415, 451 Emerson R. W. 476 Emmanuelle P. 58

596

Name Index

Entin L. 142 Enzensberger H. M. 580 Epelboin A. 7, 10, 13, 20, 27, 176, 285, 287, 298 Ershov P. P. 121 Eryomin M. 121, 167 Esenin S. A. 75, 102, 253, 374, 394 Etkind E. G. 54, 56, 60, 61, 63, 65– 70, 74, 84, 265, 266, 293, 298 Etkind M. E. 56, 60, 61, 63, 70, 111 Euripides 208 Eventov I. S. 66, 67 Evtushenko E. A. 14, 169, 173, 174, 186, 187, 375, 542, 549, 469 Fairfax T. 538 Fanailova E. N. 556 Faulkner W. 192, 189, 225, 278 Feinstein E. 559 Fet A. 77, 539 Fonyakov I. 121 France P. 6, 17, 18, 27, 553 Freud S. 42 Friel B. 421 Frioux C. 289 Frost R. 15, 19, 26, 91, 96, 97, 177, 212, 330, 356, 357, 381, 385, 422, 444, 460, 467, 468, 469, 471, 473, 476, 508, 630, 582 Fuchs C. 39 Gabrichevsky A. 9, 185 Gaivoronsky A. V. 51 Galassi J. 420 Gałczyński K. I. 178, 274, 275 Galushko T. 59 Gandlevsky S. 218 Gasparov M. L. 101 Genghis Khan 451 Genis A. A. 149, 217 Gerdt Z. 136 Ghirlandaio D. 187

Gilbert W. S. 17 Gillanders R. 555 Ginsberg A. 326 Ginzburg A. 256, 266 Ginzburg L. Ya. 515 Ginzburg-Voskov G. 87, 111, 410, 411, 412, 414 Glad J. 118, 541 Goethe J. 384 Gogol N. V. 77, 580 Golyshev V. P. 7, 27, 28, 189, 201, 202, 222, 223, 249 Gombrowicz W. 583 Goncharov I. A. 321 Gondowicz 283 Gorbachev M. S. 99, 116, 137, 235, 239, 382, 390, 403, 451 Gorbanevskaya N. E. 7, 11, 22, 266, 270, 289, 539, 541 Gorbovsky G. 59, 122, 126 Gordimer N. 587 Gordin Ya. A. 7, 48, 84, 108, 140, 149, 249, 251, 298 Gorky A. M. 90 Gorky Arshile 322, 491 Gorky M. 317, 322 Gorodnitsky A. M. 59, 120 Grachev R. 109 Gramsci A. 493 Graves R. 542 Griboedov A. S. 229 Grodin Ch. 518 Grudinina N. 161, 389 Gubanov L. 191 Guinness A. 46 Gumilyov N. S. 90 Gurvich Yu. 68 Gutner M. 96 Guzevitch D. 75

356,

191,

210, 415, 255,

137,

Name Index

Hadrian 524 Hall D. 420 Hamilton I. 315, 521 Hammurabi 125, 229 Hardwick E. 323 Hardy T. 19, 206, 207, 212, 360, 422, 424, 439, 467, 468, 473 Hass R. 16, 469, 581 Havel V. 390 Haydn F. J. 219, 437 Heaney S. 7, 12, 13, 14, 18, 25, 27, 28, 328, 419, 421, 443, 445, 458, 459, 471, 484, 485, 490, 509, 521, 547, 558, 562, 582, 587 Heath T. 314 Hecht A. 16, 261, 317, 459, 486, 496, 560, 576, 580 Hegel G. 186, 343, 360 Heifets M. R. 7, 9, 14,21, 27, 28, 47, 59, 66, 72, 74 Heine H. 384 Hemingway E. 96 Herbert G. 15, 522, 485 Herbert Z. 422, 469, 581, 584 Hockney D. 317 Hoffman M. 462, 577, 584 Holub M. 467 Homer 24, 430, 534, 535 Hopkins G. M. 560 Horace 90, 224, 331, 424 Hornback B. 420 Howard R. 432 Hughes C. 318 Hughes T. 481, 541, 549, 550, 562, 577 Hugo R. 354, 363 Husserl E. 186 Huxley O. 96 Illg J. 284 Ishrwood Ch. 518 Iskander F. 43

597

Israel P. 290 Ivanov L. 125 Ivanov V. V. 182 Izmailov R. 266 Jakobson R. 182, 238, 250 Jangfeldt B. 7, 14, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 231, 233 Jarry A. 177 Jenkins A. 584 Jones C. 29, 103, 188 Jones M. 524 Joyce J. 96, 225, 278, 430, 479 Jung C. G. 365 Kabakov A. 43 Kachalov V. I. 246 Kafka F. 398, 423, 436 Kalinets I. 77 Kamburova E. A. 59, 136, 163 Kandinsky V. 9, 185, 515 Kant I. 186 Kandel E. I. 376 Kaplan L. 245 Kaplan R. 246 Kapuścińska Z. 7, 9, 22, 27, 267 Karabanov V. P. 60, 63, 65, 70, 72, 83 Kasatkina E. 195, 196 Kashkin I. A. 96 Kates J. 381 Katilius A. 178 Katilius R. 178 Katilius, brothers 179 Katkovsky M. N. 404 Kazak W. 58 Keats J. 558, 578 Keegan P. 7, 577 Kekova S. 333 Keldysh M. V. 131 Kelebay E. 90, 91, 104 Kennedy-Onassis J. 318, 319

598

Name Index

Khabakov A.V. 130 Khachaturian A. I. 253 Kharms D. I. 515 Khlebnikov V. V. 260, 458, 509 Khodasevich V. F. 182, 184, 190, 383 Khrushchev N. S. 116, 374, 390, 403, 415 Kibirov T. Yu. 218, 333, 346 Kierkegaard S. 16, 76, 268, 475, 468 King B. 442 Kinsale C. 583 Kipling R. 50 Kirnarsky V. 51, 52 Kiš D. 510 Kiselyov 57 Kjellberg A. 196, 205, 251, 442, 591 Kline G. L. 58, 118, 140, 162, 163, 230, 352, 462 Kłobukowski M. 283 Kogan B. 50 Kolakowski L. 281, 510 Kolerov 99 Kollek T. 81 Kolyszko A. 283 Komarov G. F. 140 Kondratov A. M. 48 Kondratov V. 167 Konrad S. – see Kondratov A. M. Korobov 68 Korolyov S. P. 127 Korzhavin N. M. 91, 92, 104, 185, 238, 239, 305 Kostoev I. 44, 45 Kostsinsky K. 168 Kozakov M. 136, 246 Kozhukhov Yu. V. 66, 67 Krasheninnikov S. 124, 140 Krasovitsky S. 260 Kreps M. 76, 84 Krivulin V. B. 169, 175, 353, 392 Kruchenykh A. E. 515

Kruger M. 589 Kruzhkov G. 394 Krzyżewska K. 279, 280, 282, 283 Kublanovsky Yu. M. 258, 380 Kuklin L. V. 121, 246 Kulle S. 59 Kulle V. A. 96, 104 Kumpan E. 107, 120 Kupriyanov V. G. 353 Kushner A. S. 14, 59, 97, 120, 125, 136, 140, 175, 210, 333, 347, 367, 380, 446, 591 Kutik I. 99, 104 Kuzmin M. A. 207 Kuzminsky K, 353 Kuznetsov A. V. 74 Kuznetsova A. I. 27, 405 Kuznetsova I. 507 Kuznetsova M. P. 251, 303, 304, 405, 411, 497 Landolfi T. 333 Lansky A. 68 Larbaud V. 461 Larkin Ph. 97, 524, 527 Lean D. 45 Leander Z. 187, 218, 556 Leavitt D. 498 Lehrer J. 100 Leikin V. 59 Lenin V. I. 63, 78, 93, 99, 187, 457, 493 Leonardo da Vinci 187 Lermontov M. Yu. 93, 110, 114, 121, 156, 580 Leskov N. S. 321 Lesyuchevsky 64 Leys S. 511 Liberman (Yakovleva) T. 221, 238, 308 Limonov E. 203 Lipkin S. 541

Name Index

Lipworth R. 28 Lisnyanskaya I. 541 Litvinov P. 571 Llosa M. V. 588 Loseff (Losev) L. 7, 10, 11, 13, 25, 27, 28, 59, 74, 82, 84, 85, 89, 120, 149, 152, 173, 217, 218, 221, 224, 251, 284, 352, 372, 553, 554, 564 Loseff N. 85, 88, 104, 218 Loseffs 356 Lotman Yu. M. 101, 182 Lowell R. 12, 328, 433, 450, 460, 470, 473, 508, 542 Lugovskoy V. A. 50 Lukonin M. 102 Lurye S. 98 Lyubimov Yu. P. 139, 208, 216, 219 M. B. – see Basmanova M. P. MacCaig N. 485 Macintyre T. 420 Mackinnon L. 552, 584 MacLean S. 485, 558 MacNiece L. 16, 97, 526 Magellan F. 26, 117 Mahon D. 582, 583 Mailer N. 36 Makanin V. 45 Makarova N. 405, 299, 406, 407, 410, 412 Makin A. 287 Maksimov V. E. 158, 266 Malevich K. S. 515 Mamardashvili M. 285 Mandalian 282 Mandelstam N. Ya. 234, 457, 579 Mandelstam O. E. 88, 93, 101, 102, 150, 156, 177, 179, 184, 212, 227, 231, 236, 250, 252, 260, 287, 294, 296, 357, 383, 394, 422, 448, 469, 476, 487, 508,

599

511, 515, 530, 534, 535, 562, 579, 581, 582 Mann Th. 37, 327 Maramzin V. R. 52, 54–62, 64–68, 73, 74, 93, 171 Marcello G. 500 Marchenko A. T. 565 Markish Sh. 84, 76 Marshak S. Ya. 156 Marshall L. 347 Martial 59 Martynov L. N. 192 Marvell A. 485, 538 Marvin L. 534 Marx K. 94 Maxwell G. 584 Mayakovsky 50, 102, 168, 169, 207, 221, 229, 231, 237, 238, 289, 414 McAuley J. 482 McNamara R. S. 483 McNeil R. 100 Meares B. 360 Medvedev V. V. 196 Meilakh M. B. 123, 256, 257 Melnikov V. 51 Melville H. 519 Mendeleev D. I. 385 Merrill I. 323 Merwin 473, 534 Meyerbeer G. 55 Michel A. 290, 298 Mickiewicz A. 182 Mikhnik A. 99 Mikoyan A. I. 265, 288, 289, 298 Milchik M. I. 57, 421 Milosz Cz. 14, 16, 35, 177, 181, 182, 260, 279, 280, 282, 429, 445, 458, 459, 469, 471, 510, 547, 580, 581, 584 Milton J. 538 Miniham J. 27, 421

600

Name Index

Mironov A. 353 Mirsky D. P. 96 Montaigne M. 186 Montale E. 317 Moore H. 311 Moradi G. 400 Morgan D. 501 Morgan R. 277 Morits Yu. 367 Morozov P. T. 159 Mozart W. A. 239 Muldoon 582 Murdoch I. 321 Murray J. 486 Murray L. 7, 14, 27, 28, 328, 443, 445, 471, 481, 483, 489, 490, 547, 562, 588 Murray V. 443 Musil R. 225 Myers A. 7, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 27, 104, 416, 515, 517, 554, 577 Myers D. 27, 459, 516, 517, 518, 522, 523, 524, 526, 538 Nabokov V. V. 17, 19, 44, 189, 250, 476, 509, 518, 545, 552, 565, 580 Nabokova E. V. 250 Naiman A. G. 100, 104, 110, 120, 138, 167, 173, 210, 248, 253, 268, 271, 576 Naipaul V. 511 Nash O. 17, 448 Navrozov L. A. 263 Nekrasov N. A. 121 Nekrasov V. 119 Newton I. 15, 134, 392, 522 Neznansky F. 515 Nietzsche F. 95, 100 Nikandrov 62 Niro R. de 518 Norwid C. K. 182, 274, 282

236, 551,

111, 244,

O’Connor F. 585 O’Neill E. 441 Okhapkin O. A. 353 Okudzhava B. Sh. 132 Olds Sh. 485 Orlov S. 96 Orwell G. 189 Osborne Ch. 517 Ovid 198, 224, 331 Pampanini S. 218 Parker Ch. 222 Parshchikov A. M. 380 Pascal B. 225, 511 Pasternak B. L. 45, 159, 160, 177, 179, 211, 212, 223, 237, 374, 375, 377, 394, 448, 458, 476, 487, 509, 511, 517, 553, 558, 562, 579 Paterson D. 561 Patrabolova G. 271, 273 Paz O. 14, 15, 28, 458, 459, 471, 475 Pessoa F. 388 Philby K. 11, 38, 39, 502, 520 Picasso P. 221, 516 Picken M. 136, 137, 590, 593 Pinsker A. 142 Plath S. 333 Platonov A. P. 138, 225, 285, 289, 290, 298 Plekhanova I. 90, 91, 104 Podgorny N. V. 132 Poe E. A. 535 Polo M. 26, 117 Polukhina V. 46, 104, 118, 164, 176, 202, 242, 284, 298, 352, 372, 396, 399, 490, 552, 553, 564, 576 Polyakov L. 112 Porter C. 448 Porter P. 425, 504, 510, 519, 536, 537, 560, 564

Name Index

Potapov V. S. 401 Pound E. 19, 99, 253, 326, 468, 471, 473 Proffer C. 328, 257, 355, 543 Proffer E. 208, 249, 257 Proffers 112, 249, 356 Prokofiev S. S. 319 Propertius 224, 469 Proust M. 225 Purcell H. 219, 310 Pushkin A. S. 23, 26, 75, 76, 77, 93, 53, 101, 110, 121, 124, 159, 160, 162, 172, 175, 187, 193, 211, 229, 230, 244, 248, 253, 254, 286, 293, 295, 305, 342, 343, 345, 346, 365, 375, 382, 383, 384, 387, 446, 448, 504, 515, 580, 582 Pussi R. 42, 45 Putin V. V. 116, 390 Rabinovich R. 141 Racine J. 553 Raffel B. 534 Raine C. 17, 329, 332, 425, 462, 504, 510, 536, 561, 588, 564, 593 Ranchin A. M. 90, 104 Rash R. 485 Ratushinskaya I. 515 Reid Ch. 318, 425, 504, 561, 564 Rein E. B. 14, 48, 88, 99, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 120–122, 125, 129, 136, 138, 140, 150, 154, 167, 173, 185, 186, 210, 244, 249, 271, 341, 342, 352, 376, 378, 380 Rembrandt 400 Retivov T. 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 27, 29, 100, 140, 151, 163, 175, 201, 216, 230, 239, 254, 284, 298, 308, 347, 353, 355, 369, 372, 395, 400, 404

601

Reynolds S. 553 Riabchuk V. 57, 65, 69 Ricciarelli K. 496 Rigsbee D. 416 Rilke R. M. 42, 183, 213, 372, 448, 469 Rimbaud A. 93 Ripellino A. M. 333 Robinson E. A. 97 Robinson M. 332 Robinson R. 482 Roethke T. 354, 356 Rolnikaite M. 68 Rostropovich M. 119 Rousseau J. - J. 553 Rozanov V. V. 186 Rozhdestvensky R. 102, 375 Ruben Barry 449 Rubin B. 16 Rudge O. 326 Rulyova N. 216 Rutelli F. 498 Rybakov A. 45 Ryzhy B. 333, 346 Sakharov A. 39, 183 Sandler S. 250 Sapgir G. 394 Sartre J. - P. 265, 288, 289, 298 Saveleva E. 24, 115 Savinio R. 333, 340 Savitsky D. 46 Scammell M. 27, 92, 104, 565, 567, 576 Schiltz V. 173, 386, 520, 522, 526, 538 Schmidt M. 484, 490 Schnackenburg G. 427 Schnitke A. G. 253 Schubert F. 315 Schweitzer V. 211, 251 Scott W. 75

602

Name Index

Sebald W. G. 323 Sedakova O. A. 42, 214, 258, 333 Sedov G. Ya. 529 Selvinsky I. L. 50 Semyonov G. 120, 136 Senechal D. 180 Sennett D. 315 Sergeev A. Ya. 26, 88, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 178, 187, 191, 193, 194, 262, 199, 201, 202, 249 Shakespeare W. 53, 107, 114, 162, 177, 359, 365, 370, 397, 426, 430, 485, 558 Sharif O. 45 Shavrova V. 345 Shcherbina T. G. 7–10, 14, 20–24, 27, 28, 162, 373, 375, 396, 446, 504 Shchipina R. 28 Shef G. 109 Shelley P. B. 446, 558 Shemiakin M. 48 Shestov L. I. 186, 268, 468, 475 Shevchenko T. G. 75 Shklovskaya E. 141 Shklovsky V. B. 359 Shmakov G. 240, 246, 300, 304, 305 Sholokhov M. A. 265, 314 Shostakovich D. D. 265, 288, 501 Shtern L. 7, 8, 13, 27, 28, 88, 118, 243, 245, 247 Shtern V. 28 Shultz S. S. junior 147, 148, 151, 152 Shultz S. S. senior 147 Shvartz E. A. 333, 346, 353 Shveigoltz V. 142 Siemaszkiewicz E. 278, 282 Silver B. 329 Simic Ch. 467 Singer I. B. 585, 587, 591 Sinyavsky A. D. 111, 158, 288, 562 Skovoroda G. 186 Slavinsky E. 142

Slawek T. 279 Slessor K. 482 Slutsky B. A. 132, 192 Smith G. 103, 475, 536, 569 Snow C. P. 314 Sobchak A. A. 116, 163, 402, 414 Socrates 186 Sokolov S. 112, 363 Solovyov V. I. 72, 78, 114 Solzhenitsyn A. I. 8, 21, 24, 40, 66, 69, 91, 92, 104, 114, 115, 117, 118, 158, 159, 163, 185, 238, 239, 253, 257, 305, 364, 372, 389, 447, 544, 565, 568, 572– 574, 576, 590, 592 Sontag S. 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 27, 234, 287, 297, 315, 316, 323, 326, 361, 432, 433, 440, 460, 575, 585, 591 Sosnora V. A. 120, 125 Soyinka W. 434 Spender E. 309, 313, 317 Spender M. 7, 309, 311, 313, 316, 317, 320, 322, 491 Spender N. 7, 11, 309, 322, 413, 492 Spender S. 12, 14, 91, 298, 309–322, 367, 372, 491, 492, 494, 508, 521, 525, 566, 571, 584 Stabnikov V. 42 Stalin I. V. 75, 390, 428, 451, 457, 560 Stalin S. 36 Stallworthy J. 553 Stankevich V. A. 204 Starovoytova G. V. 218, 219 Steinbeck J. 189 Steinberg A. 106, 121 Steinberg G. 7, 11, 12, 13, 28, 119, 147, 152, 202 Sternes L. 523 Stevens W. 473 Stolypin P. A. 90

Name Index

Stoppard T. 534 Strand M. 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 368, 431, 432, 433, 434, 440, 459, 461, 484, 547, 590 Stratanovsky S. 59, 333, 346 Straus R. 7, 13, 20, 27, 28, 34, 297, 420, 433, 440, 442, 578, 585, 587 Stravinsky I. 9, 185, 309, 311, 319 Strochkov V. 333, 346 Strugatsky B. 48, 73 Strugatsky brothers 515 Struve G. 58 Stus V. 67, 77 Sumerkin A. E. 7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 22, 25, 27, 28, 196, 201, 203, 207, 220, 251, 304, 305, 321 Superfin G. 257 Sutherland J. 318, 322 Suvorov V. 159 Svetlichny I. 77 Swift J. 75 Szymak-Reyferowa Ya. 268, 284 Szymborska W. 333, 460 Taran Yu. 128 Tarutin O. A. 120 Tchaikovsky P. I. 239 Thomas D. 560 Thomas R. S. 485 Tiagny-Riadno A. 375 Tikhonov N. S. 50 Timofeev Yu. P. 135 Tinovskaya E. 333, 346 Tolstikov V. S. 156, 163 Tolstoy A. K. 539 Tolstoy L. N. 9, 114, 115, 185, 321, 333, 346, 565 Tomashevskaya Z. B. 559 Tomashevsky B. V. 559 Toomey M. 157 Topol E. 515

603

Toporov V. 93 Toporova Z. 244 Tosza B. 279, 280, 281 Tosza E. 279, 284 Tovstonogov G. A. 70 Tracy R. 535 Traherne Th. 511 Tranströmer T. 235 Trauberg N. 178 Travinsky V. 48, 50, 51, 53 Trediakovsky V. K. 384 Triolet E. 163, 231 Trotsky L. D. 457 Tselkov O. N. 7, 10, 14, 27, 165, 167 Tsvetaeva M. I. 16, 17, 26, 53, 76, 83, 91, 115, 160, 182, 184, 203, 212, 213, 219, 229, 250, 252, 259, 260, 278, 282, 323, 331, 334, 337, 351, 357, 358, 359, 362, 363, 366, 372, 383, 385, 387, 444, 448, 449, 458, 469, 509, 550, 559, 579, 448, 448, 508 Twistleton-Fiennes R. 529 Tyshkevich B. 218 Tyutchev F. I. 229, 278, 539 Ucello P. 400 Ufliand V. I. 59, 120, 137, 167, 210 Utesov L. I. 154 Vaginov K. K. 515 Vail P. 27, 28, 84, 149, 161, 217, 219, 372 Vakhtin B. B. 56, 68, 107 Venclova T. 7, 9, 10, 16, 17, 22, 23, 26, 27, 87, 176, 177, 181 Vermeer J. 400 Vidal G. 319 Vigdorova F. A. 107, 158, 265, 266 Vinkovetsky Ya. 106 Vinogradov A. P. 131 Vinogradov L. 121, 167

604

Name Index

Vinokurov E. A. 549 Virgil 198, 224, 227 Vladimov G. N. 365 Voevodin E. V. 156 Vogel L. 579 Volkov S. 116–118, 351 Voloshin M. A. 149 Voltaire 384 Vonnegut K. 527 Vorobyova M. 136, 137, 342 Voronel A. 62 Voznesensky A. A. 186, 375, 376, 469, 542, 549 Vyazemsky P. A. 531, 539 Vysotsky V. S. 173, 229, 252, 376 Wadsworth W. 7, 13–16, 18, 19, 21, 27, 463, 465 Wagner R. 55, 239 Wajda A. 278 Walcott D. 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 27, 28, 37, 328, 381, 423, 426, 430, 432–434, 436, 440, 441, 443, 458, 459, 471, 484–486, 490, 509, 547, 559, 582, 583, 587, 590 Warren R. P. 189 Waugh E. 518 Webb F. 482 Weber M. 357

Weissbort D. 7, 15, 17, 27, 28, 29, 188, 255, 266, 396, 416, 425, 459, 507, 541, 552 Whitman W. 19, 426, 471, 473 Wilbur R. 16, 459, 473, 486, 539, 559, 560, 590 Williams W. C. 426, 471, 473 Wilson A. 434 Wirpsza 282 Wittgenstein L. 184, 540 Wordsworth A. 582 Woroszylski W. 281–283 Wyspianski S. 281 Yarmush M. Yu. 155 Yashin L. I. 125 Yeats W. B. 320, 424, 430, 467–470, 484, 559, 581 Yurenen S. 205 Yursky S. Yu. 69, 70 Zabolotsky N. A. 121, 278, 282, 550 Zagajewski A. 510, 584 Zagreba V. 61, 62 Zamyatin E. I. 515 Zenkevich M. A. 96 Zhabotinsky V. E. 77 Zhivova Yu. M. 155 Zhukov G. 159, 484 Zhukovsky V. A. 90, 182, 384 Zoshchenko M. M. 97