Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 1) 9781618111371

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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. 1 Second edition, revised and supplemented

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 Second edition, revised and supplemented © Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-15-4 Translators: Tatiana Retivov, Chris Jones, James Lipsett, Emilia and Maxim Shrayer, Robert Reid, 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 Photographs in the inset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 List of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 A N A T O L Y N A I M A N . A Coagulation of Linguistic Energy . . . . . . . 13 Y A K O V G O R D I N . A Tragic Perception of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 E V G E N Y R E I N . The Introduction of the Prosaic into Poetry . . . . 65 N A T A L Y A G O R B A N E V S K A Y A . Subordination to the Language. . . 85 B E L L A A K H M A D U L I N A . Perfection of Harmony . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 E L E N A U S H A K O VA . A Poet of Intense Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 A L E K S A N D R K U S H N E R . The World’s Last Romantic Poet . . . . 122 L E V L O S E F F . A New Conception of Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 V L A D I M I R U F L I A N D . One of the Freest Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 D AV I D S H R A Y E R - P E T R O V . He was a Universal Poet . . . . . . . . . 179 M I K H A I L M E I L A K H . Liberation from Emotionality . . . . . . . . . . 198 V I K T O R K R I V U L I N . A Mask that’s Grown to Fit the Face . . . . . 213 Y U R Y K U B L A N O V S K Y . A Yankee in Russian Poetry . . . . . . . . . . 237 E L E N A S H VA R T S . Coldness and Rationality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 O L G A S E D A K O VA . A Rare Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 A L E K S E Y P A R S H C H I K O V . Absolute Tranquillity in the Face of Absolute Tragedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 T O M A S V E N C L O VA . Development of Semantic Poetics . . . . . . . . 309 R O Y F I S H E R . A Noble Quixotic Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 D E R E K WA L C O T T . A Merciless Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 C Z E S L AW M I L O S Z . A Huge Building of Strange Architecture . . 357 P E T E R V I E R E C K . Rhyme and Punishment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Valentina Polukhina Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

PHOTOGR APHS

IN THE INSET

Stephen Spender, John Ashbery and Joseph Brodsky, June 1972, London Poetry International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad 1957, photo by Alexandr Brodsky . . . . . . . . . . . I David Rief, Joseph Brodsky and Natalia Gorbanevskaya in Stockholm, December 1987 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II Tatiana Shcherbina, Joseph Brodsky and Evgeny Rein, Rotterdam Poetry International, 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, Krakow 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Kushner at London Mandelshtam Conference, 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III Aleksey Parshchikov, 1993, photo by Valentina Polukhina . . . . . . . . . . . IV Joseph Brodsky, March 1980. Ann Arbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV Joseph Brodsky, Autumn 1973 in Provincetown, Mass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V Czeslaw Milosz and Valentina Polukhina, 6 October 1990, London . . . . . V Derek Walcott, James Morton, Dean of Cathedral of St John the Divine, Czeslaw Milosz, Daniel Hoffman, poet and critic Lyn Chase, Joseph Brodsky, Rita Dove, Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz and Bill Wardsworth . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI Peter Viereck, Berlin 1969 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI Peter Viereck, title ‘The Tree Poet’, taken by Joseph Brodsky in 1982, which Peter Viereck liked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .VII David Shraer-Petrov, 2002, photo by Maxim Shrayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .VII Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott and Octavio Paz, poetry reading at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, November 1994 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VIII Joseph Brodsky and Valentina Polukhina, Keele University, UK, 1985 . . . VIII

LIST

OF A BBREV I AT IONS

The following abbreviations are used for Brodsky’s works repeatedly cited in Russian and in English: S O K C N U M L SP PS TU

Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (Short and Long Poems, New York, 1965). Ostanovka v pustyne (A Halt in the Wilderness, New York, 1970). Konets prekrasnoy epokhi (The End of a Beautiful Epoch, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977). Chast rechi (A Part of Speech, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977). Novye stansy k Avguste New Stanzas to Augusta, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983). Uraniya (Urania, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1987). Mramor (Marble, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984). Less than One (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1986). Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1973). A Part of Speech (OUP, 1980). To Urania (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1988).

8

Anatoly Naiman

P R E FA C E The intention of this work is to take a fresh and challenging look at the work of the youngest of the Nobel Prize-winning poets. It is the record of my conversations about Joseph Brodsky with poets of various nationalities. It is not, however, just another collection of interviews with the famous. These are important discussions about the style, ideas and personality of one of the most original and complex poets of our time. The choice of poets was, above all, dictated by a desire to arrive at an objective critical evaluation of the importance and significance of Brodsky’s contribution to twentieth-century literature and culture. As well as the poets of the so-called ‘Petersburg School’ (Rein, Naiman, Kushner and Gorbanevskaya; the latter was at one time very closely associated with them), there are also poets of a different poetic tendency (Gordin, Ufliand, Loseff, Shrayer-Petrov, Ushakova), poets of a younger generation (Meilakh, Krivulin, Kublanovsky, Shvarts, Sedakova, Parshchikov) and of a very different cultural background (Roy Fisher, Derek Walcott, Peter Viereck, Czeslaw Milosz and Tomas Venclova). A short biographical sketch is furnished for each poet. These sketches list his/her publications which have been updated for this edition, and include poems either addressed, dedicated to or inspired by Brodsky. Some of the Russian poets have shared Brodsky’s fate. None of them, apart from Kushner and Bella Akhmadulina, could, until the end of the 80’s, publish any of their works in their own country. Gorbanevskaya, Kublanovsky and Meilakh suffered arrest, imprisonment and incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. Shrayer-Petrov, Loseff and Venclova were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed behind became professional translators (Naiman, Sedakova), playwrights (Rein, Ufliand), historians (Gordin), scholars (Meilakh, Sedakova). All of them managed to preserve their independence and never lost the admiration or respect of their readers. The same is also true of the younger generation – Krivulin, Shvarts, Sedakova and Parshchikov – though they have nothing in common, apart from their age and the enormous popularity they enjoy at home and abroad. Of the poets of his own

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generation Brodsky wrote, ‘Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly’ (L, p. 29). All are extremely gifted and thought-provoking poets and it was they who were responsible for the ‘poetic explosion’ that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their work forms a vast cultural stratum waiting to be properly appreciated and evaluated. In this book they are all brought together, for the first time, to give an overall assessment of Brodsky’s and, in a sense, their own creative activity. All the discussions are stamped with the vivid and often profound thoughts of my interlocutors. They are linked by certain core questions which are carefully, sometimes provocatively, formulated, questions which always take the concrete world-text of each interviewed poet into account. A number of interrelated themes and issues are discussed with the following aims: to trace the lines of the poetic tradition to which Brodsky belonged and ascertain the extent to which he diverged from that tradition; to sound out the philosophical premises of Brodsky’s work, explaining his concern with the categories of language and time; to understand just what his belief in the priority of aesthetics over ethics, reason over feeling, poetry over faith was leading to; to evaluate his place in Russian culture and the extent to which he has contributed to that nation’s spiritual renaissance; to substantiate the not-infrequent comparisons that are made with Pushkin; to comment on the poetic and cultural significance of Brodsky’s individual poems, and his work as a whole, in the hope of bringing the discussion of Brodsky’s poetic world into focus. Bearing in mind Brodsky’s declaration that ‘a poet’s biography is in his vowels and sibilants, in his metres, rhymes, and metaphors’ (L, p. 164), the emphasis has been placed upon the problems of Brodsky’s poetics and not upon the peripeteia of his biography. However, these discussions do offer some psychological insights into Brodsky’s personality. Most of the poets were asked to recall when and in what circumstances they met Brodsky: to give their impressions of him then and now; to assess his response to the most crucial events in his life, his arrest, trial, imprisonment, and the ultimate test of exile and fame; to tell what part he played in their lives and what influence he had on their poetry; to comment on the desirability, and possibility, of his return to Russia.

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Because we are dealing with a poet who belonged, at the very least, to three cultures, one who spent a great deal of each year in several different countries, and one who wrote in two languages, it seemed essential that his American and English colleagues be brought into the discussion. With Derek Walcott, Peter Viereck and Roy Fisher, I investigate the fundamental problems of translation and the influence exerted on him by the poetics of the Anglo-American tradition, in particular that of the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, the English Metaphysicals. Czeslaw Milosz and Tomas Venclova, both Brodsky’s friends and the authors of articles on his work, are in a unique position to comment on many topics essential to a more profound understanding of this demanding and paradoxical poet. The Russian poets are also asked whether they see English poetry as having had an influence on Brodsky’s style, on his poetic forms, and are asked to evaluate the possible consequences of that influence for Russian poetry. All the contributors have helped to pinpoint the surprising kinship that exists among poets of very different poetic schools, even of different cultures. In the course of our conversations nearly all Brodsky’s major themes are touched upon. The interviewer hopes that each of the conversations, whether grave reservations are expressed or a more favourable appraisal is given, will help us to reach a better understanding of a poet who was engaged in an intense dialogue with world culture and who was, to quote Kublanovsky, conducting his own personal suit against the Creator. All the inteviews, except with Peter Viereck and David Shrayer-Petrov, were conducted and published during the poet’s lifetime. They combine personal and professional recollections and opinions. It is hoped that a more balanced portrait of this major twentieth-century Russian writer will result, his being, to date, the most significant example of a world figure, functioning in the interstices of the two most important twentieth-century world cultures, the Russian and Anglo-American.

AC K NOW L E D GE M E N T S I wish to express my gratitude to the British Academy for their financial support, to my former postgraduate student Chris Jones for his help in translating all the Russian interviews, to my colleague Robert Reid who translated most of the poems dedicated to Brodsky, to Michael Molnar for letting me use his translation of Elena Shvarts’s poem. I am very grateful to Diana Jones for reading sections of the work in English. My husband Daniel Weissbort who read most of the manuscript deserves special thanks. This edition contains material that supplements the earlier edition published by The Macmillan Press in 1992. It is being published at the same time as a second volume of interviews with friends, publishers, translators and family members.

1 A N AT O LY NA I M A N Anatoly Naiman (born in 1936, in Leningrad), poet, translator, writer, graduate of the Leningrad Technological Institute, belongs to a remarkable Leningrad constellation which made its appearance in the mid1950s, close to the ageing giant of Russian poetry Anna Akhmatova, Naiman being her literary secretary for the last five years of her life. In 1964 she and he collaborated on a translation of Leopardi. He is the author of an outstanding work of literary reminiscence, Rasskazy o Anne Akhmatovoy (Moscow, 1989; English translation: Remembering Anna Akhmatova, London, 1991). He has lived in Moscow since 1968 and that is where his translations of the Provencal verse romance Flamenca (1983) and Songs of the French Troubadours (1987) were published. He has also translated Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Donne, Browning, Eliot and Pound. His mature poetry conforms to the precepts of the Acmeist school, employing classical metres, a refined vocabulary, a fastidious syntax and an architectural sense of proportion. For him, as for the Acmeists, the basic structural element is not the phrase but the word. With his lofty spirituality, his abstract imagery and in particular his elegant meditative tone, highlighted by touches of irony, his poetics are close to those of Brodsky, fed by the same springs. Brodsky said that in Naiman’s work ‘in the course of the last two decades the note of Christian humility has sounded with ever increasing purity and frequency, at times drowning out the sound of his early poetry’s intense lyricism and polyphony’. 1 It was Naiman who wrote the first important article to address Brodsky’s work ‘Zametki dlia pamiati’ which was published as a foreword to the collection A Halt in the Wilderness (New York, 1970, pp. 7 - 15) and was signed N. N. In the last decade A. Naiman has been a fellow at Oxford University and the Kennan Institute of the Woodraw Wilson Center and has lectured on Russian Literature at many universities in Europe and America. His publications include Oblaka v kontse veka (Clouds at the End of the Century, 1993); Ritm ruki (The Rhythm of a Hand, 2000); two novels: Sir (2001) and Kablukov (2005), both shortlisted for Russia’s Booker Prize. His English collection Lions & Acrobats with translations by F. D. Reeve and Margo Shohl Rosen, was published by Zephyr Press (Cambridge, 2005). Naiman has published many short stories in Oktiabr and Novyi mir.

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Anatoly Naiman

A COAGU L AT ION

OF

L INGUIST IC ENERGY

Art Interview with Anatoly Naiman (13 July 1989, Nottingham) – When did you first meet Brodsky and what were your impressions? – I’m almost certain it was in 1958, I might be six months out though. However, if I’m right, I would have been 22 and he 18 and, though this sounds funny, I already had something of a reputation, which for me at the time seemed rather a solid reputation, at least in that Leningrad circle which took an interest in poetry. But anyway, at just 22 I was widely known, even though the actual number of people in the know was, arithmetically speaking, far from large. And along comes this 18-year-old youth, a boy, already known for his extremely high-flown style, who is reciting his poetry here, there and everywhere; in one place they would send him packing, in another they simply wouldn’t know what to do with him. I want to emphasise that he wasn’t the only one like that around at the time. That’s what young poets are like. I speak from my own experience, from what I have observed then and since, my whole life through in fact. A poet has this trait, generally speaking it would be called stubbornness. He absolutely must read the poem he has just written to someone, come what may. As the poet said, ‘the more you drink, the more you want; your thirst remains unquenched’.2 You read your poem, you get a reaction and, of course, when you’re 18 or 20, whatever the response, you only pay heed to what’s favourable, or at least to what’s not unfavourable. So, having just this minute squeezed one person dry you’re immediately on the lookout for someone else, for another fly willing to enter your parlour. At 18 Brodsky was, naturally enough, just like that, though you have to multiply the thing several times over to take into account, well, everything we know about Brodsky from later, his extreme sensibility, his energy; and the product you obtain from those factors is that carrot-haired lad with a face that is forever turning bright red. If someone said he blanched they meant he simply appeared normally ruddy. And that’s not just the outer man alone, that’s the essence of the man and that’s not just my impression.

A Coagulation of Linguistic Energy

15

Even now that’s the reason I still retain a real feeling of tenderness for him. That first time I met him, when he was 18, I saw a man for whom well-nigh all the crassness, horror, vulgarity in the world in which he lived was simply unbearable. Moreover, his own poems tormented him in a very similar way. He would read his poems and, in the course of his reading, find almost everything to be not at all to his liking. Now, all in all, he really loved those poems of his; it was clear that he loved his poetry. But at the same time he would, almost incessantly, be interrupting his own reading, with gestures, with blows; those famous blows to the forehead which would have split anyone else’s wide open long before now; and his mumbling of some of his lines, because clearly he felt that they were worthless; and those shouts of his; and the strange haste with which he would scurry through some lines. In short, he was continually reacting to his reading of his own verse. But for me, at that time, his poems were too expressive. There was a lot of shouting and not much structure. I say that now, but at the time they simply seemed superfluous, to me, and to my life. I didn’t need his poetry. It seems to me that he came to me from Rein. That too counted at the time; who recommended you to whom. And afterwards I said to Rein that, well, he is, of course, talented; but I feel myself that at this time I’ve got more than enough things on my plate. What I want to say is, at the beginning there was never any question of ardent friendship. And so the weeks passed. Well, when one is young one is especially egotistical – everyone knows that. I want it to be understood that there was no feeling of the kind, well, here in Leningrad we have some sort of galaxy, with stars of this and that magnitude, and then all of a sudden there bursts into our heavens this new, phenomenally bright star. In fact, I remember at least three people in Leningrad then very much like the Brodsky of those days. One was even called Joseph Bein, or something similar; and there was someone else again – similarly magniloquent, stentorian Jews who read poetry. They too were always being given the push from somewhere or other. They all had reputations as people who were trying to shake the pillars of the world. So he wasn’t the only one like that around at the time. He lived in an atmosphere of general non-acceptance, an unacceptable man, of whom one could only expect trouble: that,

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Anatoly Naiman

however, was tempered by the love and devotion one or two people felt for him. For example, Olga Brodovich was very devoted to him, and there were a few others as well. Tenderness, warmth for him arose involuntarily despite, for instance, my own initial feeling of antipathy. – And how did he come to join your group? – It wasn’t as if we had some kind of special committee meeting to discuss his joining us. Some time passed and it turned out we were constantly seeing one another and knew everything there was to know about one another. Although we were all getting married at that time and we went off on our various travels, had our various enthusiasms and so on, I still have the impression that we spent a great deal of time together. First of all there were the poetry readings in small groups which, at certain times of the year, took place almost every evening, but apart from all that there was also this craving to read our poetry to each other. We lived, roughly speaking, in the same part of town. Rein lived five minutes walk away from my place and Brodsky live about four or five tramstops away; his was a sort of halfway house between ours and Bobyshev’s. I seem to remember our ringing each other up several times a day; I’m talking of myself and Brodsky. And he had, for example, this rather ‘droll’ practical joke he used to play on me. He would ring – and knowing that the telephone lines were tapped and, sometimes, especially when we had foreign visitors there would be people hanging around the entrance to our block – well, he would ring up and say, ‘Hello, is that Naiman’s apartment? This is the KayGayBay calling.’ And we would read our poetry over the phone as well as when we met. In my book I’ve described how he read the ‘Great Elegy for John Donne’ (S, pp. 130 - 6) to me, just after it was written, still hot from the pen, so to speak, in the booking office of a railway station, to the horror of everyone standing in the queue waiting for tickets. 3 It has to be said, there was no feeling of animosity between our various groups then. It goes without saying, though, that we rated our own little group the best. For example, I remember saying to someone. ‘If I wanted to write poetry like yours then I would write poetry like yours. But I write poetry like I do because that’s the kind I want to write.’ Take one group: Eryomin, Ufliand, Vinogradov and Loseff. We treated them as friends, gave them their due. For a long time

A Coagulation of Linguistic Energy

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I thought, and I wasn’t alone, that at the time the undisputed leader in poetry, and really there could be no argument about it, was Stas Krasovitsky – a Muscovite. They were three very talented poets, Krasovitsky, Khromov and Chertkov. I certainly don’t want to get involved in any arguments with anyone about this. I just simply consider them to be remarkable Russian poets. It’s another thing that Krasovitsky, at the beginning of the 1960s, gave up writing poetry. Khromov went on writing. Chertkov met up with every kind of misfortune known to man; that’s not counting his ending up in a labour camp, and then becoming an émigré. We regarded each other with a certain haughtiness, but everyone knew that was the convention. Really, we sincerely wished each other well. To be honest, we were rather taken aback by the ‘mining’ group. They held these courses on how to get into print. And they all, very quickly, did get into print. – Who was in that group? They were indisputably very talented people – Britanishsky, Kushner, Ageev, Kumpan, Bitov, Korolyova, Gorbovsky. We liked Gorbovsky a lot. As you and I both know, talent in general is a very rare commodity. And talent has its charms. And Gorbovsky was and, I think, still is exceptionally talented. There’s no need to rack one’s brain to like his poetry. We simply loved it, just as we loved the way he behaved. As for the rest of the ‘miners’ – that’s to say the other members of the Literary Association of the Mining Institute – as in a good college, they were kept in seclusion somewhat, so that they couldn’t mix with the ordinary man in the street, though they liked to give the appearance of being just that – street-wise at least. But they could have been infected by us and our utter contempt for everything that could, in the slightest way, have been seen as somehow official. In those days, and up until very recently, it was impossible to publish anything that didn’t contain the poison of officialdom in however attenuated a form. Kushner occupied a rather special position because he had managed to stake out his claim with the publication of his first books; had, from the very first, acquired the right to use his own voice, his own timbre, his individual, very restrained intonation. As for the others, well, conventionality gets the better of what they’ve got to say. When I meet up with one of them I know that he’s more or less one of us. You can say an awful lot by implication without spell-

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Anatoly Naiman

ing it out, but somehow I’ve never been able to read their work, it sticks in my craw. To be honest, I found it extremely boring as well. What were we talking about? When you’re 23-4-5-7, things change focus quite rapidly. And, somehow or other, the four of us became inseparable. We understood … we could express our opinion of one another’s poems either with a sort of mumble or with some unusually resonant but precise phrase, and so, later, it only required some gesture, a boo-boo, a moo-moo or some such thing, for us to understand exactly how we each felt about what the other had written. And so it went on until 1964, when events in our private lives disrupted our cohesion as a group. Whatever it was that had tied us together a few years earlier was no longer there. And apart from that, our destinies gradually, pushed us in separate directions. It was not because destiny ordained that for us, but because it is the most natural thing in the world; when four individuals come together they are, given time, bound to part. The one amazing thing is how close those individuals, for a time, were. – Given that none of you were short of intellect or talent, when did Brodsky begin to stand out noticeably from the rest of you, and in what way? When did you become conscious of what Brodsky was? – Here we come to the crux of this interview. He grew very quickly, as they say; I use ‘grew’ in the metaphysical sense. There was still that four-years age difference, but all the same, after, say, three or four years we were equals in every sense of the word. We did not feel that he was in any way younger than us. From now on I’m only speaking for myself. Next came what they call fame; first, the wellknown court case. He became a figure in the spotlight. During the trial he behaved irreproachably. He demonstrated something that I found very touching, the way he acted was somehow so appealing to me that it made my heart ache. All along he was a defenceless human being but, at the same time, he was up there on the heights that a human being is capable of reaching. And seeing his conduct during the trial – and all through that period – it suddenly dawned on one what it means to be a man. This is what men can be like, not just the usual, ordinary, everyday, dishonourable, ignoble creatures. Suddenly one saw this defenceless man, willing at any moment to lay down his life, stand his ground with dignity. And the radio started to chime in with the same theme. You know, at that time the BBC or the

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Voice of America were like voices from on high, and now the Voice was saying ‘Brodsky … Brodsky … Joseph Brodsky’. So that particular aspect of fame started to get into its stride. The overwhelming majority of people then began to exclaim, ‘Fame has come! She’s here in person!’ 4 It was those people who began to say. ‘You know, he writes such remarkable poems!’ He hadn’t started writing poetry that was any more remarkable than what he had written before the BBC and the Voice of America began to repeat his name. It wasn’t that there was some sort of qualitative change. It was just that after the Voice of America had passed judgement on them suddenly his poems turned out to have been remarkable. That had, as they say nowadays, its flip side. It had its effect upon Brodsky himself. Well, I know what happens from my own experience: somehow you have to live up to the image people have of you. I can confirm that Joseph did not have a high opinion of those around him. And he didn’t hide that. He even made sure that they knew exactly what he thought of them. And what is amazing is that people apparently like it, they seem to need their Stalin, in every walk of life. I just couldn’t take any of that at all. And, what’s more, when you see everyone rooting for the same person, then you come more and more to feel yourself wanting to buck the trend. Of course, I was very conscious of that process and kept that popular ferment separate from the kind of poetry he was writing. But I do remember when I was first distressed by one of his poems which was, right from the word go, just simply unacceptable, as far as I was concerned. The poem I’m referring to is ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ (O, pp. 166 - 8). There was this sort of didacticism thrown in with the poetry. And poetry just cannot serve two masters; naturally the didacticism destroys the poem. But leaving that aside, there’s the ‘we’ that sticks its head in there, ‘From which are we the more remote: / Orthodoxy or Hellenism?’ (O, p. 168). What is this ‘we’? Who’s this ‘we’? I understand Akhmatova when she writes ‘we’ – it’s Mandelstam, Gumilyov, Narbut, Zenkevich. But when ‘we’ means, ‘Come on lads! We think alike’, well, first of all it gives rise to unnecessary speculation as to who this ‘we’ refers to: on the one hand you’re convincing people that you are in the right, sort of taking them by the shoulder and saying, ‘we want the same thing’, and on the other hand, there they all are happily joining the band. And it turns out ‘we’ refers to people who

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have no place in poetry. After all, it’s not an epic, it’s a lyric poem. There was something unavoidably Soviet about that poem. There is no need to deny it, but you have to be aware that it’s there. (I’m not singing any praises now, I’m more concerned with pointing out what I think should be pointed out.) Now it seems to me, you asked when we started to be aware of just who Brodsky is. Well, I repeat I’m speaking only for myself, I really don’t know what you mean by ‘become aware’ or ‘who is Brodsky?’. ‘Who is Brodsky?’ is certainly not the same for me as it is for you. I can tell you that the power of his poetry was already evident in 1962. If I’m not mistaken this poem is from 1962, give or take a year: ‘Let it not be my fate to die far from you / in the dove mountains / echoing the bandy-legged boy.’ – ‘Stanzas for a City’ (S, p. 69). – Yes. There’s that line, ‘echoing the bandy-legged boy’ which I remember in my own way, incidentally. Later, of course, there comes that drone, captured in the ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’, when he really became Brodsky. That’s a poem you can take even now, 27 years later, and say, ‘here’s Brodsky’. And later, there’s the unique, for its period, ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 - 55). Subsequently he took that further, used it again and again and, as is always the case when you do something again and again, it lessened the magnitude of the achievement; nothing has been gained, only lost. ‘Isaac and Abraham’ is language racing through a thousand lines, through five thousand to eight thousand words – and all on such a high note as well. Later there’s nothing to better ‘Königsberg’ (‘Einem alten Architekten in Rom’, O, pp. 144 - 7). I know nothing better in the whole of Brodsky: ‘Cheek, cheek, cheereek. Cheek, cheek. – Look up’ (O, p. 147) and so on. That music of his voice has lived with me all my life; and will, I think, live with me to the end of my days. When I say I know of nothing to surpass it in the whole of Brodsky that does not mean that I know of nothing to equal it. ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’ (L, pp. 49 - 52) is an absolutely remarkable poem about which I may say one or two words on some other occasion. – You can say them now. Every one of the poets I’ve interviewed has picked that poem out – but nobody has said why. – It seems to me that in our youth, for Brodsky and myself at least, Baratynsky’s poem, ‘Autumn’ held a special place of honour. We always felt it to be the very apex of Russian poetic achievement. Its

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sound was a translation of the roar of the universe. Having ‘Autumn’ in mind I tried to achieve something similar myself. I approached the theme once, twice … and one of those attempts was even, I think, successful; on an altogether different plane, it has to be admitted. I hadn’t, as the saying goes, got to grips with Baratynsky’s ‘Autumn’, but I had got a hold of something, even if it was a little different to what I had set out to do. I think that the poem, ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’, is a variation on that theme, a version of Baratynsky’s ‘Autumn’. Now, when they talk in such elevated tones about Brodsky, I don’t want to do so (as you know I have the right to, the grounds for doing so, after all it was I who, 25 years ago, brought together in one sentence the two names of Brodsky and Pushkin), 5 but maybe that poem stands equal to Baratynsky’s ‘Autumn’, and, for that reason, I won’t talk at too great a length about it, simply because I don’t want to add one more voice to the already inordinate chorus of praise. – It’s widely known that Anna Andreevna urged all of you to brevity, and, it is alleged, Brodsky succeeded in convincing her otherwise. Was that really the case? What did she feel about his long poems? – It seems to me that that is just a legend, that she urged us to brevity. You don’t recall who told you that? – It was Bobyshev in his article ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’. 6 – It seems to me to be, as they now say, a late interpolation. She didn’t urge any of us to anything. Or rather, that without doing so – at least in words – she did in fact urge us to brevity, but in her own way. That would be more correct. She accepted us just as we were, that’s why we were capable of such unalloyed love for her. She didn’t impose anything at all; absolutely not. If someone wanted to stretch out, or if someone wanted to follow their own bent, or write badly, she would let them do it; everything was permitted. I know what Bobyshev has in mind, but I can’t back him up on that one. I can say this about Akhmatova and on the topic of length, and all that, she rated ‘Isaac and Abraham’ highly, although, as you can well understand, the poem was completely alien to her own way of writing. But she really wasn’t someone who needed any lessons in spotting poetic talent. She could hear it from miles off. And when I, fresh from Norenskaya, I think, brought her some poems of Brodsky’s on a biblical theme she said to me in irritation, ‘You can’t exploit that theme. On a biblical subject, you can write just once and once only.’ That is,

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I think, a comment that goes right to the heart of the matter, but it’s rather more typical of Akhmatova than Brodsky. – What do you think, did Brodsky follow the rules of the Acmeist canon? Some people do consider Brodsky to have been the last Acmeist. – You know, that’s all nonsense in my opinion – the last Acmeist, the penultimate Acmeist. We all went through an Acmeist phase. And you cannot deny that Acmeism gives you an excellent schooling. You know, somewhere in his book, Vasari comes to the defence of Michelangelo, who was commissioned to make a statue of Hercules and Cacus, and speaks of another sculptor, I can’t recall his name (Baccio Bandirielli), who made a horrible mess of some marble. You have to pay a lot for Carrara marble, and then you have to make sure you don’t spoil it – otherwise you go bankrupt. But with words, it’s assumed, if you mess one of them up then you simply take another. Acmeism, though, teaches us that words are like Carrara marble, you mustn’t spoil them; if you do you won’t get any more. Every man who feels some pride in his work has to learn that lesson. We learnt it. The difference between us and a lot of our contemporaries is that we don’t write in sentences, in idiomatic phrases, we write by the word. After we had learned how to use words, we could, if we wished, begin to write in slang. Anyway, that’s what Joseph very often does, and he’s a virtuoso at it. But to start with, we learnt how to respect our material – words. If Acmeism is not just simply a cult of the beautiful word, something to show ourselves and our friends that we are old hands at this game, but really does have some meaning, then one has to come to the conclusion that Brodsky is in no way an Acmeist. But, all in all, Akhmatova – and I talked about this yesterday at the conference 7 – did not teach us poetry, or the poetic craft, and yet she did, because in the course of things, in passing as it were, anyone who needed to learn, learnt. It wasn’t compulsory. Brodsky, there’s no denying it, did go through Akhmatova’s school: but only in the sense I’m speaking of. She didn’t give us lessons. She simply created an atmosphere, a certain spiritual atmosphere. That’s how I’ll answer your question. – And how, do you think, can one justify Brodsky’s prolixity? Can it be justified? What inner need compels him to cover such huge linguistic space?

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– Those so-called long poems and all that prolixity of his in general, about which so much, bad and good, has been said, is the essence of Brodsky. He forced language to work for his poetry. That can be said of only a few poets, and even then one has to stretch the point. But in his case one doesn’t have to stretch anything, he has found all of Russian grammar’s concealed power-sockets – forgive me this complex metaphor – and he plugs himself into the electrical system and receives that initial impulse which sets him on his way. He just has to make sure the charge doesn’t run down. Of course, that sort of stratagem requires a terrific internal charge, attentiveness, a huge amount of energy. The grammar is working, the structures of language are working. In short he gives the Russian language the same freedom a good rider does a good horse; he keeps it on a loose rein but, at the same time, he makes sure the animal goes the way he wants it to. – Speaking of language, I would like to quote Brodsky himself: ‘the biography of a writer lies in the way in which he shapes language’. 8 What matters most in his linguistic biography? – Well, you see, in Brodsky’s case one can’t talk of his ‘shaping the language’. Of course every poet moulds the language. But I have to go back to what I was just saying. If one can say of Mandelstam, or of Pasternak, that they shaped the language, one can’t say that of Brodsky. I don’t want to dismount from my metaphor. He gives the language, trained by him to perfection, the freedom to gallop – along the road he wants it to take. – That is not yet the whole picture because, for Brodsky, language is not only, and not so much, the poet’s instrument but, as he himself affirms, it is ‘the poet who is the instrument of language’. 9 Moreover, for him, language is a metaphysical category which additionally figures as a poetic persona. He uses grammatical categories, sounds and letters in the way one would ordinary words. I have noticed that happens in your poetry too. Let’s start with you. What is language for you? – You know, I can still beat you at this game. First let me answer you about Brodsky, and then I’ll tell you what it means for me. You’re quite right. Language for Brodsky is precisely what he said, exactly as you quoted just now. But, tell me – I think the simile I’ve just thought of is very apt – who gains ground, the horse or the rider? Just let the horse go and he’ll run to his own or another’s stall, and the

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rider will lose the race. In a sense language for Brodsky is, in part, himself; it is a centaur, rider and horse. Brodsky really is just such a centaur. We were, the day before yesterday, talking about Doctor Zhivago and he made this joke. 10 He is one of those who doesn’t consider the novel to be a masterpiece. He doesn’t like it. (I just happen to be one of the minority who do. But he was making out that I too really ought to dislike it. And I know exactly what I ought not to like about it. None the less, the work has such a delicate feel about it which wins me over. And there again I have a liking for the notquite-successful, for things that don’t quite come off, that have flaws; the flaws just serve to underline the authenticity of the thing. All this is by the by.) I noted that he had in mind not just the novel but the film as well; fortunately I haven’t seen it. Well, Joseph said, ‘But you know, Tsvetaeva said Pasternak is at one and the same time like the Arab and like his horse. And so Zhivago is played by Omar Sharif, the Arab.’ In that sense, in the sense that Pasternak is at one and the same time the Arab and his horse, and giving it a somewhat different twist, I can say the same of Brodsky himself. We have the influence which this wild animal one may call language exerts upon its rider. Incidentally, I think Joseph would quite like the comparison, for in my scheme of things, he’s a poet only as far down as the waist, everything below that line I attribute to that wild beast, language. – And what is language for you? – I would distinguish two attitudes, the first being the most recent in date. Ten or fi fteen years ago I finally understood what sort of pole it was that casts its magnetic influence upon my language and thereby gives it direction: the desire to formulate everything exactly. You obtain such exact formulations, not approximate but exact formulations, when academic language, let’s say the language of science, becomes poetry. You have, for example, the articles of the remarkable sinologist Alekseev who died in 1950 or thereabouts. I was reading his books and several of his pages are, quite simply, poetry of the highest order, although he was never accounted a member of the poetic fraternity, was never a professional poet. There you have that exactness where, strictly speaking, there is not so much a need for an exactness in choice of words, but rather a need to fit them into your construct with exactness. In my case that is felt more strongly in my prose. The book I brought out for Akhmatova’s cente-

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nary I regard – and I can no longer pretend that it is simply a book of reminiscences – as a sort of prospective prose – prose with some sort of future, not concretely for me personally, but for the foreseeable future in general terms, in the same way as Pasternak’s Safe Conduct or Mandelstam’s prose could have been seen in their time. A rather earlier attitude to language, and one which continues to exist, is to be found in that mishmash, that jumble which is the language of the people where, in the course of use by whole hordes of mankind, language is constantly being transformed, and the poet forces his way in like some powerful magnet which attracts the steel particles from out of those hordes, those tribes, and correspondingly redistributes them, reorientates them and momentarily creates, in the amorphous solution, a crystal. Here, to cut things short, I’ll simply quote some lines of Eliot’s which I regard as an epigraph upon my work of these past 25 years. They come from the ‘Four Quartets’, from ‘Little Gidding’; they were written in tertiary form. I’ll quote it in my own, Russian version: Коль наше дело — речь, и нас толкнула Она очистить диалект толпы, А разум наш впредь и вспять провидеть...

[Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight…]

Those words embody my attitude to language. Eliot wrote those lines but, nevertheless, you’ll agree that it is I who say it in Russian. Our business, our profession is speech. We poets speak. And, in our singular state as poets, that speech prompts us and compels us to purify the dialect of the tribe and, for that reason, gives us sight of the future and, well, so as not to overload the line, of the past too. That is, we begin to see into that amorphous mass that forms the crystal, into its lattice structure. – In Brodsky language has another aspect. Sometimes it seems as if he finds much more of a spiritual anchorage in language than he does in faith. Do you feel that? If so, how much of that can we attribute to the fact that he lives in an alien linguistic environment?

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– I think that you’re quite right. This is not speculation on my part, it’s the result of our conversations on this very subject. You know, creatively speaking, he is a man with a very well-developed set of muscles. And that keeps him in good shape when a man in his position should, strictly speaking, be at death’s door – not because he’s an émigré but simply because he has only himself to rely on. And as that self is a coagulation of linguistic energy you are, of course, right. He relies on what he does with language, and on what language does with him. Well that’s the case – he speaks and that’s why he lives. To rephrase Descartes, ‘I speak, therefore I am.’ – Do you know when Brodsky first directed his thoughts towards God? And how would you describe his relationship with his Creator – because it’s not unambivalent, not lacking in opacity, is it? – I’m not about to take that task upon my shoulders – simply because there’s something of everything there. It’s very serious matter and it demands a great deal of responsibility. I can only say that, in Brodsky’s case, I would not necessarily feel that I could really use such words as Creator or, in more general terms, the precise names used by this or that religion to designate the Supreme Being. I would use the word heaven though. He does, in essence, know in what direction heaven lies at any given moment. That is the most one can say with any certitude when one talks about the particular subject. The rest really isn’t my affair and I don’t really understand it all that well. In a recent conversation we touched on this very subject and it merely confirmed what I’d already suspected. You know he read the Bhagavadgita and the Mahabharata before he read the Bible – he told me so himself. He differs from me in this: every book he reads he calls a book. For me the Bible is not just a book. – It’s only in connection with language that I dared touch upon that subject. He once said that language has so many aspects to it, so many facets, is such a complex organism that it could never have been the creation of man. He who gave it to us is greater than us. And in that sense, language for Brodsky has two directions – two ends or two beginnings: a word is simply a word and, also, the Word, the Word which leads to God. 11 – Well, now I could leap in and declare that use of the Word, in that context, inexact. And if you were to insist upon its exactness, that, for me, would be quite unacceptable. In fact, it’s simply a bad trans-

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lation, a linguistic confusion. You have, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. There is a mass of speculation about that. Gumilyov wrote, ‘And in the Gospel according to St John / It is said that the Word is God’ – just as if that were our word. Then, as now, Word is used because we have no better way of understanding that our world was created by God’s Word, for the sake of God’s Word. We simply use that term ‘word’ in the same way as when we say: hell is the frying pan in which sinners burn. Maybe it is a frying pan but it is something different to the frying pan we know and use, many, countless light-years different. In precisely the same way we use the expression, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. But that is the Word of God, it has no connection whatsoever with our earthly words. We are simply told that it was by this Will, or Word, or Logos, or Act that the world came into being. That is what we call the Word. As for Brodsky’s statement that language was not given to us by our progenitors, our forbears, but handed down to us from somewhere on high, that seems, to me, to be a truth that has long since been accepted as a commonplace. Science itself now tells us that we don’t learn language from our parents in childhood. We simply drag it out of some sort of genetic storehouse in our brain. What is more, all languages are to be found there. In Russia we learn Russian, but surrounded by Englishmen we drag the English language out of that store, and so on… – How do you explain Brodsky’s preoccupation with the category of time which is, in his work, a counterweight to the category of language: you have only to look at the impression made by that line of Auden’s, ‘Time … worships language’, to see that? 12 – I have to refer you to my book. I have thought a lot about that, in connection with Akhmatova, and it’s all there, in that book. My thoughts about time, about memory, about immortality as a kind of contraband and about true immortality; you will find those in the chapter in which I quote Pushkin’s lines, ‘And my fame will last just as long as in this sublunar world one poet remains alive.’ I don’t take fame to mean ‘outstanding’. What it means is that as long as there is still one poet at least left alive I will still live on; that is, as long as one poet speaks the word that has been spoken by a host of other poets. 13

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– In that sense your position and Joseph’s aren’t so far apart. He too plays with the opposing values of time, language, memory and culture. In particular, he says of your generation that they are people for whom Christian culture is the most precious thing there is; nobody else can lay claim to such devotion to the concept of culture (L, pp. 28 - 31). Do you agree? – Those words, ‘Christian culture’, have two, quite opposing meanings. It depends whether it’s a Christian speaking or someone who is a mere spectator, on the sidelines. When, earlier, I spoke of our differences I didn’t mention the most essential and, for a whole host of reasons, I’m not prepared to speak of them. I’ve learned a great deal over the last 20, 25 years. And I spent many a long year trying to forget what culture means, Christian culture included, to someone looking in at it from outside. I fought against culture. Now, when it appears that I have a deeper conviction of my own, culture is gradually merging in some sort of harmony with something that can only be described as antagonistic to culture. For a Christian, Christian culture is simply an integral part of Christianity and, therefore, of his life, whilst for the outsider, the non-Christian, culture can become an idol to be served or, at the least, a guiding principle of some sort in life. When I say the words ‘Christian culture’ I put the emphasis on the first of those words, because Christianity can lay claim to things more precious by far than anything culture may claim for itself, whilst, it seems to me, Joseph would place his emphasis on the second word. – Of course, you know his play ‘Marble’ in which there are, essentially, two anachronisms. It portrays not only a pre-Christian empire but also a post-Christian empire, where culture, though allowed a place in society, is spiritually anaemic. Your comments please? – I feel a deep dislike for that play. It is very disagreable just in itself, even if you manage to abstract yourself from all its implications. Really, what you have is this monstrous construction where there was no need for anything more than one brick and, to my mind, that’s all. The play does have a certain dose of wit. The plot can be summed up by saying that a man of culture succeeds in breaking out of his prison by chucking his culture down the garbage chute. There is a certain amount of wit there but, in essence, I’m opposed to it, absolutely. However, I really don’t want to use big words … nobody has done

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away with Christianity. And if Christianity has ceased to play the role it has been playing for the last two millenia, it cannot be said to have ceased to exist; it has, rather, returned to a past stage of its existence, but at a different level. So, if we really are convinced that Christ is the son of God, if we are at all capable of pronouncing the words, ‘I believe in that’, it would be ridiculous if one were to say, ‘I believe in Joseph Brodsky, who considers Christianity finished.’ – Doesn’t it seem to you that the play deals with the ‘after the end theme’? A theme he touches upon time and time again, which runs like a thread through his work – after the end of love, after the end of life in Russia, after the end of Christianity. How do you explain the persistence of the theme and Brodsky’s attempts to take it to its logical conclusion? – Again, I can only look at it from my own particular vantage point. The situation one finds oneself in when the thunderstorm is over is immeasurably more attractive than the one one is in during the storm. In that sense we are drawn towards it, either to remember the storm or to find out how we withstood the storm. That’s one thing. The ‘after’ situation allows us to sort out what comes ‘after’, allows us a maximum of calm to sort out what is there, ‘at the time’; that aspect I find very attractive, it demands responsibility and so on. The other aspect is less responsible – it’s indulging in prophecy and I am no friend to prophets. – In one of his essays on Tsvetaeva Brodsky said, ‘The more often a poet takes this next step, the more isolated a position he finds himself in’ (L, p. 187). Do you feel that Brodsky’s whole evolution has been driven by the need to take that next logical step? – Oh, yes. Here, he is, of course, being absolutely honest. It’s what drew me to him from the very first. All the time he’s trying to take that next logical step, and the poet really is always out there on his own in that respect. In the very nature of things he can’t expect any assistance. – And where does the next logical step take him? How far has Brodsky moved, away from us his readers, away from you the poets of the same generation? – I wouldn’t look at it in that way. You see, he tells us, every time, exactly where he is heading, so we’re always out there with him.

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He doesn’t move off and leave us to watch his progress. We always know where he is. – If you know where he is, give us a brief account of his poetic world. – No. I’m not going to refuse, I’m quite simply going to remind you of what Tsvetaeva said: ‘A poet starts speech from afar. A poet is led far by speech.’ Far. I’m not a critic. I can’t say whither. Maybe there are other questions I can answer in more detail. That I can’t. – Well, answer in part then. What general cultural questions does he have clearly in mind? Which of those questions has he answered or is in the process of answering? – In Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, Gavin Stevens says, ‘Well, I’m off, now it’s up to you to hold the fort.’ In that sense Brodsky is holding the fort against vulgarity, against chaos, against those who are trying to bring the walls of the lofty towers tumbling down. They aren’t, perhaps, the towers upon which Brodsky himself takes his stand, but he knows who is up there and he’s taking some of the pressure off their defenders, his gaze is directed towards those high towers. There, in essence, is his mission. Incidentally, it may well be that it is towards those high towers that he is gradually making his way, with each one of those next, logical steps. – Could you possibly say a few words about the English strain in his poetry? What, with his love of the English language, has he brought that is new to Russian poetry? – I think you’ve formulated the question quite correctly. The sort of direction Brodsky has taken is, it seems to me, new to Russian poetry. In the past it was, let’s take Pasternak as an example, somewhat schematic. As for English poetry, when you first happen upon some, even in translation – not to mention one’s first encounter with a poem in English – you realise what aspects of Russian prosody have to be adjusted, what constructions have to be brought in to achieve that harmony, to find that wide harmonic range in the Russian. – Please name those poems of Brodsky’s you consider to be masterpieces. – I think I’ve already mentioned them here and there, in passing. I don’t want to call them masterpieces. I could add to the list of poems I’ve mentioned … No, in general, it’s a thankless task naming the poems of a good writer, because you want to go on including more

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and more poems. I could add ‘Burning’ (U, pp. 145 - 7) to my list; ‘The North crumbles metal’ (C, p. 78). You see, since his departure I must confess only a few of his poems have moved me. I always look at the poems first of all to see whether they move me; quite remarkable poems often fail to move one and then as far as I’m concerned they no longer have any interest. I have to confess very few poems at all have moved me. When I was young it was another matter. I’ve mentioned ‘Königsburg’ and, in my opinion, that poem should be called ‘Königsburg’, because ‘Einem alten Architekten in Rom’ is a bit high flown. ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’ and ‘Burning’ I would single those out, and ‘Isaac and Abraham’. I don’t want to draw up a whole catalogue of them: of course, I’d be bound to leave something out, and regret the omission later. – It’s interesting that you should name ‘Burning’. According to some people it contains the most shocking lines to be found in Russian poetry. 14 ‘If the Nazarene had possessed such passion / then indeed He would have arisen!’ (U, p. 146). – Yes, I reacted very unfavourably indeed to those lines and I told him so. You see, there was this episode, people really wanted me to quarrel with Brodsky; I had, allegedly, said that he was an atheist. Of course, I had not said that; I don’t think that. It even led to an exchange of letters, to explain how things stood. The fact is that those two lines are quite unacceptable, in every sense; apart from anything else, they are tasteless. But the whole of that poem can’t be summed up in those two lines. It’s a powerful, impassioned poem. Well, I’m not Brodsky’s mentor. I’m not going to say to him, ‘You need to free yourself from such and such.’ He wrote it, and I’m talking about the poem as a whole. I repeat, I find those lines hurtful but I’m not the sort of man to be made blind by my hurt to the merits of the poem as a whole. – Did Brodsky’s departure from the Soviet Union affect you in any way? – No. As I’ve already mentioned earlier, we’d been at odds with one another for years before that. And when you get down to it, it’s no great shakes when two people have fallen out and one of them is living in Moscow, the other in Leningrad, and then one of them goes and moves to New York. And, anyway, whatever they say, omnia mea porto mecum. Brodsky’s going is beside the point. Really,

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around that time, life in general had become rather lacklustre. It had been brighter. In some ways a lacklustre life is a godsend; there are no distractions. But it was an unnatural way of life. And for that reason when Brodsky and a few others left the ‘scene life became lacklustre’. – What I really had in mind was your poetic life. For all the dissimilarities, your two poetics do intersect at certain points, you have drawn your water from the same wells. … Did his presence and, later, those poems that came your way, have any stimulating effect upon your own poetry? – Of course, when there’s someone there close to you, provoking you, tantalising you, or the reverse, entrancing you, captivating you, then, of course, that’s all to the good. But I saw his poems, they reached me. But, you know, there is this reflex. Say a poem reaches you that you don’t like, that leaves you cold, then, not without a certain feeling of satisfaction, you come to some sort of conclusion, such as, ‘Well, if that’s how it is, then’ it doesn’t matter a jot if he’s over there, rather than over here – there’s no difference.’ Of course you say that to make things easy on yourself. But those poems did reach us and, I repeat, they very rarely moved me. His long poems written in stanzas are in general not to my taste. A train should really have a limited number of carriages to pull, because somewhere around the middle of the train, the points somehow get switched and you start to get a pile up; the second half, the last third of the train starts to go off the rails, when you have those stanzas, those carriages one like the other ... I know what it was leading up to, what he has achieved in that way. For a professional poet like Brodsky – and Brodsky is a professional poet and one who’s set new standards – there’s a period when, in order to be a record-breaker, you need to master all the techniques of your chosen sport, you need to spend hour after hour practising your punches, your jumps, your putts and so on. There’s this period of working out in the gym, this steady build-up, practise, practise, practise. And so there were these years of practising which, possibly, coincide with some particular psychological problems, hang-ups, during which he tries to resolve the formal tricks of his trade; and in the end he’s built up hard, firm muscles. There’s this poem of his, ‘The Butterfly’ (C, pp. 32 - 8). It’s one of my favourites. However, in mentioning it, I ought to add my name to the host of those who do

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not like his long poems, even though I don’t see myself as really belonging to that army. But I ought to because, though the troubadours whose poems I translate also wrote stanza after stanza after stanza, they wrote eight or maybe ten stanzas, not eighty or a hundred. – Having been a friend of Brodsky’s for so long, how have you managed to preserve your own stylistic independence, in the face of such powerful influence? – Well, there was a period at the beginning of the 1960s when I did try and write in the style he was telling us we ought to be writing in. At that time he was telling scores of people, ‘Write stories in verse.’ And I wrote them. There’s a poem of mine, called ‘Verses on a private occasion’, which I wrote following a visit to see him in his northern exile. Later I discovered it was Brodsky’s syntax I’d used in that poem. That didn’t last long. But talking of coincidences, last September in New York we were talking and, suddenly, he read some lines to me and said, ‘Yours or mine, A.G.?’ And, of course, those coincidences are there. A mutual friend of ours said to us, ‘Listen, in one of your poems [my poems] there’s this line, ‘Sometime when we will no longer be’, and there’s this line of Joseph’s ‘Sometime when we have ceased to be’.’ Joseph said, I wrote that in such-and-such a year.’ I was taken aback and I said, ‘That means I wrote my poem later.’ You know, that’s how it is ... I asserted, though Joseph denied it (his denials were rather luke-warm), that in his essay ‘Less than One’, when he tells the story of the boy who crawled under the desks to see the colour of his teacher’s panties, the boy was in my class and his name was Oleg Knyazev. It’s one of those banal stories you hear when you hang around with the same crowd and you end up telling the story, not thinking about who first told it and, generally, you come to think of it as your own. It’s as if we’d taken two gherkins from the same pickle jar. I repeat, it only lasted a short time and it wasn’t so much his influence as an attempt to do something in the same spirit. – Could you name those Russian poets – from Simeon Polotsky up until the present day – who have helped Brodsky to realise his potential as a poet? – Again, one would have to have something in front of one, one could analyse, well. ... I know, of course, that there was Baratynsky, but the others? No, this is what I want to say to you. The name of Push-

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kin doesn’t come to mind without reason when you think about Brodsky. The fact is they both possess this epigrammatic ease with which they react to events as they happen. This lightness of touch is loaded with meaning, unlike certain ‘stagey’ poetry. Let’s take this example, from Pushkin’s time at the Lyceum. Myasoedov was given the task of writing a poem on the theme ‘Sunrise’, and he wrote, ‘In the West arose the red-cheeked king of Nature’, and Pushkin added, ‘And the people, struck dumb, did not know what to do, go to bed or get dressed.’ That is very much Brodsky’s way of looking at things. He’s quick on the draw and has bags of talent. That’s a concrete example of what I mean. – Couldn’t you continue that comparative study, using other criteria? How universal is Brodsky’s poetry? – All in all, that is the really important question. I’ve thought about that and, somehow, I haven’t been able to come to any decision. And this, perhaps, is the most vital thing I’m going to say today. If we feel a need for ‘mandelstam’ poetry, I’m using a small ‘m’ there, we go to Mandelstam. And the same goes for Akhmatova, for Tsvetaeva, for Pasternak. Now here’s the situation. We feel a need for, well, I don’t know, let’s say, tra-ta-tama’s poetry, we go to Brodsky. We feel a need for bal-ba-lama’s poetry, we go to Brodsky. He’s got it, all of it. Not to mince matters, I don’t go along with those people who criticise Brodsky’s so-called ‘poetic industry’ – you will recall, we both of us had a glance at an article entitled, ‘The Magic Industry’ 15 – I didn’t read it right through, as I should have done. But that word ‘industry’ is an insult. When, in the course of my interview on the Voice of America, they asked me in connection with Brodsky, ‘What distinguishes the poetry of the present day from poetry as it was back then?’, I said that, at that time, rightly or wrongly, we were able to see Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, etc. as being all on the same level, but who can we put next to Brodsky? There is nobody. On the one hand, that does show you his standing in the poetic hierarchy, but, on the other, it’s an unhealthy situation because a poet can’t be synthetical. On the contrary, the narrower the furrow he ploughs the greater the poet he is. With one exception, that is, if, like Pushkin, he is a universal poet. Well, I leave that question open. – I would like you to say a few words about the originality of his lyricism. He himself has made two statements on the subject. First,

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he affirms that ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ is his last lyrical book and, secondly, he declares that, at the end of the twentieth century it’s just not possible to speak point-blank about love or God. 16 – As a rule, a poet’s declarations about his art are indicative of the state of his art. And if he says that at the end of the twentieth century it’s not possible to speak point-blank about God or love, then that statement is only valid until someone does talk about God or love in that way. I think it is possible if the need arises; the vital thing is that it has to be poetry. In general terms, I think I know of poems of the twentieth century, the middle twentieth century, the late twentieth century, that deal with God and which are, at the same time, good poetry. And his lyricism? Well, ‘Burning’ is after all a comparatively late piece of work. – 1981. – And ‘The Hawk’: isn’t that lyricism? – And the theme of love? – Ah! The theme of love! Akhmatova took two stupendous lines of Knyazev’s, the only two decent lines he ever wrote: ‘Love has passed and mortal features become clear and close.’ That takes in an awful lot of things. We have to go back to what we were discussing before. On the one hand, there’s poetry after love: ‘clear and close’. On the other hand, ‘love has passed’, one is incapable of love and then the mortal features become clear. Maybe Brodsky is passing through just such a period. – In that case we are witnessing something of a paradox. We have his collection, ‘New Stanzas to Augusta’, made up of poems addressed to the same woman over a period of 20 years. It’s unique in the history of Russian poetry. – Yes, and I’m very fond of it. It’s remarkable. But I have to allow that, perhaps, it’s stretching things a bit to say all the poems are addressed to the same woman. – Apart from ‘Nunc Dimittis’ which was, initially, dedicated to Akhmatova, all the poems are addressed to Marina. 17 – One has to have in mind the difference between ‘addressed’ and ‘dedicated’. Dedicated – of that there’s no doubt! But is she the person addressed in every one of those poems? One can discover a second, hidden aspect in some of those poems – and it’s not so easy to see. It will be revealed in that world where all will be revealed. I need to

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read the whole book through thoroughly. I repeat that, all in all, it’s one of those things that draws me irresistibly closer to Brodsky. – You see why I brought our discussion round to the question of lyricism. On the one hand, lyricism includes love and similar such sentiments but, on the other, Brodsky has an unusually restrained tone, all his emotions are pushed out towards the periphery of a poem, sometimes right out of it completely. Don’t you think that that is the result of the English influence upon his poetry? – It’s a question of inclination. It’s also a question of talent. Mandelstam can make a lyric out of two words. He takes your beating heart into the palm of his hand and starts to pound it. Brodsky’s approach is different. I don’t know how exactly that links up with English poetry. – It does seem problematic because in 1962, when it was even harder to suspect any English influence, there appeared the poem ‘I embraced these shoulders and looked at’ (O, p. 77), from which all the lyricism has been squeezed. – Yes, yes. That is brilliant! Besides it’s one of my favourite poems – I forgot to mention it earlier. I refer to it very frequently. Everything that came later is really a reworking of that poem; the passionate heart and the cool head. – In that sense you agree with Loseff when he states that Brodsky, both as a poet and a man, matured very early and later just further developed those ideas that were already there, in the poems he wrote in youth? 18 I haven’t come across that remark of Loseff’s, but, of course, that is the case. The only thing he says that’s new is the word ‘early’ because, in general, each and every poet rewrites the same poem again and again; any poet, any poet you care to mention. When you look closely it turns out to be a variation on the same theme he’s already touched upon at some time or other in the past. That doesn’t mean his poems are simply recapitulations. They can be a lot better the second time around but, in essence, they are rewrites of the first poems, and Brodsky is no exception to the rule. Another thing Loseff has got right is that he did mature early. The poems of 1962, the year he was 22, were marvellous. I think that by about 1965 he had written everything he was going to write. If he had died then,

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disappeared from the scene, whatever, stopped writing, it would be no matter, we would have our Brodsky. – You said that he behaved irreproachably at his trial. You visited him several times when he was in exile in Norenskaya. The poems he wrote in exile give one the sense that there too his behaviour was exemplary, that he somehow knew how to divorce himself from what was happening to him. How did he take exile? – With remarkable dignity and courage. There was only one thing which affected him personally, which gave him no rest. Just one. I am only telling you what I myself observed. Perhaps there was something that was hidden from me, something I didn’t notice, perhaps there really was, and I’m prepared to be contradicted, but the exile itself, the imprisonment, the work, he took it in an exemplary manner; almost because it was so difficult. You know, in my book there is a passage somewhere where I say that the main thing was not his isolation from home, the harshness of the conditions, of everyday life there, but the fact that he simply had to be there. If he had gone there of his own accord or one of his friends had advised him to go there, he would have spent as much time there as he wanted to. But he did not have the right to leave… One time, when I arrived I found him not just an exile but also a prisoner. I’ve written about it in my book. 19 I went to the jail and Brodsky was just coming out, carrying two buckets, one marked ‘bread’, the other marked ‘water’. I would have said he looked quite content, after all they had let him out on the streets and so on… – Please, tell me what your meeting with him in America was like after such a long time, even after some cooling of your friendship, as you mentioned earlier? There were no barriers. I entered his apartment just as I had entered the apartment on the Liteiny a thousand times and, as has already been said many times, it was rather like the old Leningrad apartment. Of course, he wasn’t the same person. His sentimentality had quite vanished – at least at first glance. We had both been sentimentalists. But there was something new I noticed in its place. It was very, very good. There was just one difficulty. The fact is that there’s always someone asking him for some favour or other. That takes up, first, a lot of his time – he had to disconnect the phone just so that we could talk – and secondly, it meant I couldn’t really say what

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I wanted to. For example, I might want to ask him something and from my questions, from our conversations in general, he was very good at fishing out requests which I hadn’t made. He found them. It’s like in the Caucausus when you tell them you like this fork and they insist you take it as a present. – He just wanted to please you. – He did. He showed me everything. I don’t want to go into that. That would spoil it. – I know you have a couple of poems dedicated to Brodsky. Which one do you want to see included in this collection? – I can offer you the one I wrote during one of my visits to see Brodsky in exile. VERSES ON ETERNAL YOUTH J. B. The body’s clock’s always slow by the third of the twenty-four given to dreaming; and so I’m convinced my ghost will walk here in the future, unable to do any ill; for pain is unknown to a spirit which is itself harmless. Then you will probably envy my lot. Meanwhile, being still a third slow, eventually slow by a lifetime, I’ll die where I am when I must but I shan’t die in my own country. I suppose we had the idea of freely inhaling our sadness like a wind which blew from out there, while all one did there was sleep soundly. The sunset, the sunset invites the stranger who trips on the stubble to melt his life in its lava and trickle it over his finger; and he wants no soaring balloon his path through the forest to shorten

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by a third; for here skies abound with only the merest horizon. The crown of thorns I thought I saw was a hedge, a dead thicket unlayered; the nestling leaf, now fledged and flown, is fluttering above the cold aspen. Away it bears your voice like smoke from the bird-box of truthful wisdom, sounding now like a deaf-mute’s howl and now like a biblical triphthong. Norenskaya, 1965 Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

8

9

Joseph Brodsky, an afterword to the Poetry of Anatoly Naiman (Tenafly, N. J., 1989). A line from a poem by N. Aseev. Anatoly Naiman, Rasskazy o Anne Akhmatovoy. lz knigi ‘Konets pervoy poloviny XX veka’ (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1989) pp. 72 - 3; Remembering Anna Akhmatova (London: Peter Malban, 1991) p. 6. A line from a poem by Akhmatova. Anatoly Naiman has in mind his introduction to Brodsky’s second collection, Ostanovka v pustyne. Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (New York: Chekhov Publishing Corporation, 1970), which was signed with the initials N.N. (pp. 7 - 15). Dmitry Bobyshev in his article ‘Ahkmatova’s Orphans’ writes, ‘running ahead, it ought to be said that in the course of the first phase of our acquaintance with her she did urge us every time to brevity, that was until Brodsky had ‘convinced’ her otherwise with his long poema (Russkaya mysl, 8 March 1984, pp. 8 - 9). Naiman’s paper, ‘Analysis and Interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Tvorchestvo’’, presented at the Akhmatova Centenary Conference, University of Nottingham, 11 - 14 July 1989; published in W. Rosslyn (ed.), The Speech of Unknown Eyes: Akhmatova’s Readers on her Poetry (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1990) vol. n, pp. 225 - 9. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 10 April 1980, Ann Arbor, Mich., unpublished. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Russkaya mysl, 3 February 1983, p. 9.

10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17

18

19

Brodsky was in London in July 1989 and he and Naiman met there, just before the Akhmatova Centenary Conference in Nottingham. Brodsky’s seminar, conducted at Keele University, 8 March 1978. More on this subject is to be found in one of Brodsky’s essays on W. H. Auden (see Less than One, pp. 359 - 65). Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. 91 - 106. Yury Kublanovsky, interviewed by the author for this collection, p. 242. Derek Walcott, ‘Magic Industry’, a review of Brodsky’s collection To Urania (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), in New York Review of Books, 24 November 1988, pp. 35 - 9. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 10 April 1980, op. cit. Marianna Pavlovna Basmanova is the addressee of the poems in Brodsky’s fi fth collection, Novye stansy k Avguste (Stikhik M. B…, 1962 - 1982) (Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1983). Lev Loseff, a paper, Poeziya Iosifa Brodskogo’, presented at London University (SSEES), 30 March 1984. Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. 130 - 5.

2 YA KOV G O R D I N Yakov Arkad’evich Gordin (born 23 December 1935 in Leningrad), poet, dramatist, novelist and historian, began to write poetry in 1956. At Leningrad University he was a member of Lito, a society run by E. I. Naumov. The latter, noting that Gordin was taking a ‘dubious path’, warned him: ‘May God preserve you from crossing swords with the State.’ From 1957, Gordin began to give regular readings of his poetry to student audiences, in which, on occasion, Brodsky was a participant. His first and, as yet, only collection, Space, came out in 1972. His verse’s ethical maturity reflects his army service experience and his five-year stint as a geologist in Russia’s far north. ‘The classical, artlessly polished’ poetry of Gordin is noble and restrained. Unlike Brodsky, Gordin has never set himself any specific formal tasks and it was possibly for that reason that in the mid-1970s, he abandoned poetry for quite a lengthy period. He switched over completely to prose, a medium he had begun to cultivate as early as 1964. His first tales of army life were published in the almanac Petropolis (2, 1990). The list of his literary-historical works in prose is impressive: The Chronicle of One Destiny (Leningrad, 1980) recounts the life of the first Russian historian, V. N. Tatishchev; Three Tales: The Death of Pushkin; After the Uprising; The World Will Perish if I Stop (Leningrad, 1983); The Three Wars of Benito Juarez (Moscow, 1983); The 14th of December: Events and People (M., 1985); Code of Honour (L., 1989), a semi-documentary account of Pushkin’s last year; Reformists’ Mutiny (L., 1989); Mystics and Guardians (SPb., 1999); Rollcall in the Darkness (SPb., 2000); Towards the Styx (M. 2005): Running in a Circle (SPb., 2006). The intrinsic theme of his prose is the desire to understand just how nature, history and culture interact. This work combines, as it were, a Pasternakian vision of the world in which nature is cross-sectioned to reveal the historical and cultural strata, with a Mandelstamian vision in which nature is almost completely sidelined by history and culture. Gordin is the Chief-Editor of SPb magazine Zvezda (Star).

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A TR A G I C P E R C E P T I O N

OF THE

WO R L D

An Interview with Yakov Gordin (31 May 1989, Paris) – You are one of the oldest of Joseph’s friends. When and in what circumstances did you get to know him? – We got to know one another in 1957. It was summer, or maybe autumn. But where was it? It seems to me it was at the office of the newspaper Smena, because there was a sort of literary advice centre there, and young, and not-so-young, poets would drop in. But I can’t be sure. – When did it start to dawn on you what Brodsky was? – Well, I think it was pretty apparent to me in 1958 -9, after the appearance of his first poems. They may seem a little naive now, ‘Pilgrims’ (S, pp. 66 -7), ‘A Jewish Cemetery’ (S, pp. 54 -5); but for all that, they are extremely effective, they have great intonational potential. And he himself, somehow, opened our eyes pretty quickly. In this instance I was favoured by fortune, because I, really, pretty quickly realised that here was a man with the hall-marks of genius. – Could you define the significance of the Brodsky phenomenon today for Russian poetry, or to take an even wider view, for Russian culture in general? – That’s some question. There’s material enough there for several doctoral theses. – Well, explore one or another of its aspects. – One aspect, several aspects, it’s a question that needs careful thought and the answer would have to be in writing. Let’s talk about poetry. Russian poetry, after a few decades of our Soviet reality, has lost one cultural imperative, and as far as Russian literature is concerned, a seemingly genetically inherent factor and one without which a man is not fully conscious of his own humanity – a tragic perception of the world. Soviet literature has cul-tivated a non-tragic perception of life. The quasi-success of our political system has imposed itself on everything, starting with an empirical groundwork and ending up with a metaphysics. That, as a matter of course, has deadened first one thing, then another, then another … and has denied us the possibility of

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making a breakthrough, up out of the confines of that pseudo-culture, sometimes, admittedly, of pretty high quality, on to a level where it would bear comparison with world culture. Very few people are capable of that. Joseph isn’t on his own, but his is one of the most powerful, most impetuous instances, where that breakthrough has occurred. Obviously, subconsciously he felt this necessity; right from the very start he struck such a searingly tragic note in his poetry. What’s more, this was not determined by his circumstances, or by his character. Well, anyone can be happy, anyone can be sad and he, of course, was both but, I think, the circumstances of his life, his character, his personality were not the deciding factors; though of course they played a role. His was, it seems to me, an acutely intuitive response to this cultural predicament of ours and it began with ‘Pilgrims’, with ‘Gladiators’ (S, pp.31 -2), with that remarkable poem ‘The Garden’ (S, pp. 64 -5). That was already the 1960s then, but nevertheless, he was still a very young man. It was an impassioned attempt to break through to an organic perception of the world and it was in no way plaintive, it was, rather, imbued with tragedy. It seems to me, it was a very important moment. And there was a very strong desire to try everything out. For the first two or three years his poetry oscillated between the influence of Lorca and that of Nezval, between that of Baratynsky and that of Slutsky, though there is a group of poems which are all his own, which are unlike anyone else’s. Nevertheless it was a time of endless experiment. Above all there was this ability of his to foreswear the canonisation of his own momentary lucky strokes of the pen; after all, he could have successfully worked the poetic vein of ‘Pilgrims’ and that group of poems for quite some time. Instead, there was this headlong transformation, this ability to change constantly and yet, none the less, remain himself. And another point, this feeling for freedom, where did it come from? It’s not freedom in the political or banal, everyday meaning of the word, but freedom in relation to everything in the world around him, which naturally made for very interesting results in his poetry, and obviously, in a certain sense, determined the rapidity of his development; for there was nothing which could have kept him from moving on. – And if I were to ask you what was Brodsky’s greatest poetic breakthrough you would again answer, his tragic perception of the world?

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– Yes, I think so, yes. And it wasn’t Bagritsky’s feeling of doom, nor Esenin’s heightened emotionalism. For there was no suit made against the powers that be, or against the times. It was a suit of a different kind altogether. – It was a monster of a question to be asked – almost unanswerable. This one is closely related to it. I ask people coming from the Soviet Union: What is going on there? Are they reading Brodsky? How do they relate to him? And some will answer, ‘We’ve no time for Brodsky now’. So, in this epoch of reconstruction, does Brodsky matter for Russia, or doesn’t he? – Well, it’s nonsense of course, because there are so many very different things going on. And what we have underway is not just a purely political thing – there’s a cultural renaissance going on. And it’s pretty intense. Besides, Brodsky is not a poet who is just being discovered. I happened to organise a Brodsky evening in the Hall of Culture of a large Moscow factory. There was a huge audience, 1200 people. And from the way the audience reacted I sensed that a great number of them knew Brodsky’s poetry very well indeed. If one of those reading his poetry hesitated, then people from various parts of the auditorium would start to prompt. There were lots of young people present and, despite the fact that Brodsky’s poems are really difficult to find in Russia, they knew his poetry very well indeed, and there are fanatical collectors of his poetry. No, there is great interest in him and, of course, it’s not just because he is a man with such a dramatic fate. Apart from those pure externals there are other imperative, psycho-cultural needs. – And I hope spiritual needs. – Well, yes, of course. – Perhaps you could say something about Brodsky’s future in Russia, his return, not simply his physical return home, but his literary return, and not just in the form of the isolated poems which are now appearing all over the place? – As far as I know, there are three books coming out. One in Moscow, to be published by ‘Khudozhestvennaya literatura’, is being put together by Brodsky’s faithful biographer Edward Beznosov. And there is a book being produced by Vladimir Ufliand. Right now in Leningrad there’s a serious discussion going on about bringing out a book there; that would be the most natural thing of all and I think it will happen, maybe even within the next few months1. So you see, there will be a lot

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of books. What’s more, in Leningrad there is even talk of two books, and not entirely trivial; one of them will be provided with an appendix of documents. – I hear that you’re responsible for one or the other of them. Or aren’t you directly involved with either project? – With the Leningrad publication, I am, obviously. It’s just that no decision has yet been made at the editorial level. But as soon as it’s all sorted out, then, I think, I’m going to get directly involved with both of them, especially as Joseph has granted me that right. – What is your attitude to the real possibility of Brodsky’s returning to Russia in person? – I think that it’s completely out of the question, it’s psychologically and physically impossible. And, in my opinion, he is not making any plans to do so. And I think that’s right. – And how much would they like to see him over there? – It depends on what you have in mind when you say ‘there’. Obviously, in the upper reaches of the hierarchy they certainly wouldn’t be jumping with joy; they could do without him. As for his readers, then the desire to see him is very great. Of course, it would be a sort of symbolic act. And there are constant rumours … there’s already quite a folklore … I’m often being rung up. Not long ago someone rang from Moscow, from the Literary Gazette: ‘Is it true that Brodsky’s arrived in Leningrad?’ And people ring up, feeling insulted, ‘Why are you hiding Brodsky? Why didn’t you say he was here?’ And so Leningrad and Moscow live on these myths of Brodsky’s return. Of course it’s a mythologised yearning to see him. – Could you possibly say a few words about Brodsky’s role in your life as a poet? Did you experience, not so much an influence, but was there some sort of stimulus, a shove even? – First, it’s some time since poetry was my main occupation in life. It’s a pity perhaps, but it’s not my main occupation. That’s how it is. Secondly, at the time we got to know one another, were seeing a lot of each other, when he was already making his mark as a formidable poetic talent, in the early 1960s, I was stuck fast in the grip of another great poet’s influence, that of Pasternak. Anyway, nowadays we look at things from a slightly different angle. At that time, though, Joseph was very young; significantly younger than many of his friends, and that, in the beginning, played a certain role. He wasn’t seen by us as

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a master, and he didn’t lay claim to such a position, the relationship between us was all completely different. Anyway, there’s obviously no need to talk about direct influence. Besides, imitating him – and an influence shows itself first of all through imitation – imitating him is just too difficult. – That’s so evident from the word go. – Of course, because his poetics is, on the one hand, easily recognisable, whilst, on the other, so many components go into its make-up that it’s difficult to pick out the dominant. It’s far easier to imitate the young Pasternak, where there is a clear poetic dominant. With Brodsky it’s far more complex. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting part of a letter Brodsky sent me in July 1965, when he was in exile. I don’t think he’ll object, because what I’m going to quote isn’t really personal, it’s literary theory, and contains, as I later realised, a very important idea. He wrote, recalling our conversations during my visit to see him in his northern exile and when he was in Leningrad ‘on leave’ for a few days: If something is stopping you from achieving what you want to achieve, then it’s because of (1) idiotic rhymes; (2) a heavy-handed orchestration of sound patterns, copied from the poetry of the ‘30s; (3) you are hostage to the opinions of the multitude. Don’t look at yourself in relation to others, take a detached view. Be your own man and do everything the way you want to do it. If you’re angry, don’t hide it, if it’s impolite so be it; if you’re happy – the same goes, even if it’s banal. Remember, it’s your life. No rules – even the very highest – should be sacred. They aren’t your rules. At best they only vaguely resemble your own. Be independent. Independence is the best of qualities, the best of words in any language. Even if it leads to your defeat (a stupid word) it will be your defeat alone. You’ll settle your own account with yourself alone; it’ll cost you if you have to account to any bugger else. And here’s something practical (for the love of Allah don’t be angry with me). The most important thing in poetry is the composition. Not the plot, the composition. There is a difference. In your ‘Mutiny’ 2 too, the main thing is the composition. Try putting the execution at the beginning and what will you get? Something rotten.

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And here (forgive me again) is what you have to do. You need to shape the composition. Let’s say you’re writing a poem about a tree. Start by describing everything you see. Start the description at ground level and take it on up to the top of the tree. There’s the sublime for you. You’ve got to develop the habit of seeing the picture as a whole … There are no parts without a whole. The parts can be left till last. As for the rhymes – leave them till last; metaphor – leave it till last. The metre is there, somehow or other, right from the very first – and thanks be for that. Or here’s a method of composition: the sudden break. Let’s say you’re singing the praises of a girl. You sing, you sing and then – in the same metre – a few lines about something else. And please, no explanation of any kind to anybody … But you’ve got to be subtle: no arias from another opera. There’s the girl, the girl, the girl, thirty lines about the girl and her dress, and then, five or six lines of what one of her little ribbons reminds you of. It’s the composition, and not the plot. For the reader the plot is not the girl, but what’s going on there in the poet’s soul … Don’t link the stanzas using logic, follow the movement of your soul, even if only you can understand it. The poem will mean all the more to you. They’ll spare you the opinions of others. Soon you will have no need of them. Of course, I know that you’re not going to take a blind bit of notice of what I’m saying. Your health! But at least you’ll know it now if you didn’t know it before. If you did know it already, remember it once more. The main thing – it’s the very essence of drama – is the composition. And really, metaphor is composition in miniature. I confess that I feel more of an Ostrovsky than a Byron. (Sometimes I feel myself to be a Shakespeare). Life doesn’t answer the question, ‘what?’ but ‘what follows what?’ and ‘what precedes what?’. That’s the main principle. Then the ‘what’ will make itself plain. There’s no other way of answering the question. That’s drama. The Devil knows why, but nobody understands it: neither the cold fish nor the hothead. I would like you to understand this and remember it. Even if you are not going to use it. I really want you to use it. Of course, I do feel rather awkward about quoting like this from a personal letter, but it seems to me that what he says is of great interest to Brodsky scholars and, as I am not one, I feel a bit guilty about keep-

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ing such an eloquent declaration under wraps. As for me, at the time I was, of course, far from despising his advice (isn’t it true that both in tone and energy it recalls Hamlet’s injunctions to the players? And I don’t think that is any accident). Although I have to say in all honesty that I didn’t pay him the attention he deserved. But the main thing is that here Joseph states the principles of his own unique poetics, and he alone is capable of making use of them … Well, there is another thing, and it’s really a question of my character; at the time I was evidently pretty self-absorbed and not receptive enough. But, as you so rightly said, it was stimulating. Of course, Brodsky’s reading of his own verse, one’s own reading of it as well, simply his presence, all made for this feeling of creative tension. It was electrifying. You couldn’t fail to be influenced. And there was a certain amount of jealousy, not in any pejorative sense though, there was no shame involved for those who felt it. It was just that every time you saw him up there on those summits you wanted to get up there with him. So it was very, very stimulating, even leaving everything else aside. And in that sense his absence from our literature, from our poetry, is simply heartbreaking, heartbreaking. – In Krivulin’s opinion, ‘Brodsky’s path and that of the poetry now being produced in Russia lie in quite separate directions’ and ‘Brodsky’s moment of greatest influence lies in the past.’ 3 Is that really so, or is it hard for you to say? – It is hard for me to say, because I don’t know those particular circles as well as Krivulin does. It’s really such a complex process, and it’s not open to public gaze. Sometimes his influence suddenly surfaces. And what’s more, there are poets who are, in the best sense of the word, under his influence. – I would like you to say something about his parents’ last years. It seems you kept in touch with them, even in Brodsky’s absence. – Yes. I saw them all the time. What’s more, we, about ten of us, used to get together every year on his birthday – 24 May. Like many of Joseph’s friends I quite often would drop in on Mariya Moiseevna and Aleksandr Ivanovich. – What would happen on his birthday? Did Joseph always ring? Joseph as a rule rang; but not always. He didn’t always manage to get through. Once he rang from Rome, on another occasion from somewhere else. Well, what would happen? We’d have something to drink, something to eat. It was always a happy affair. Mariya Moiseevna and

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Aleksandr Ivanovich were always astonishingly easy to get on with. There was no kind of cult of personality amongst his Leningrad friends. And there was no hint of exaltation because, beyond the fact that he is a poet of we all know what stature, he’s also a man, and one we all had known in all the usual banal everyday situations. And that, in a sober state of mind, luckily ensures there’s no putting him on a pedestal. – When did his parents realise their son’s significance? After the trial? After his departure? – I think it was during the events of 1963- 64, simply because I know there’s a letter of Aleksandr Ivanovich’s that he sent to Joseph in exile, and there were some conversations amongst his father’s friends, all of which made it pretty evident that he and Mariya Moiseevna – and she, I think, with her womanly intuition guessed even earlier than he – had already evaluated their son’s significance pretty accurately by then. Well, of course, they were very proud of him and even after his departure he remained the main thing in their lives. – What was their standard of living like? – They weren’t rich, but my impression was that they had no difficulty making ends meet. Their personal needs were pretty modest and, as far as I know, they didn’t live in poverty. – How was it that you were chosen to look after the Brodsky archives? – That was what Aleksandr Ivanovich had decided. – He handed the things over personally, or was it in his will? – It wasn’t in his will, no. He simply, in his last year, spoke to several close friends of Joseph’s asking them what ought to go into the archive. And he asked me to take the furniture, Joseph’s desk, wardrobe, his books and papers. Someone else has Brodsky’s drawings. Amongst the papers there are, in particular, Joseph’s letters, but, naturally, I haven’t looked at them. In the collection of papers given at this conference, three letters from Anna Akhmatova have been published which were lying around, separate from the rest without envelopes. I came across them completely by accident, whilst I was looking at files containing all sorts of papers, rough drafts, transferring them just prior to my trip, and that’s the only reason that these letters have suddenly seen the light of day. I asked Joseph, and he decided that they should be published, because they are more important than just a simple exchange of letters between two private individuals 4.

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– Now I want to touch upon his main ideas. How do you see his principal themes, those he’s constantly dealing with, taking that next logical step, sometimes even into the absurd? – It’s hard to say, because the edifice he is constructing is so complex. But in my view, it is more of an outmanoeuvring of the absurd. I don’t mean the absurd in its everyday or in its cultural sense but as the expression of the abnormality, the disjointedness, the especial injustice of life. And he himself said, somewhere not long ago in an interview: the task of the poet is the harmonisation of the world. Sometimes, along with the harmonisation, there comes a schematisation of the world, especially when a poet isn’t talented enough and is making overlarge claims for himself. With Brodsky, yes, there is just that – a harmonisation of the world, together with a squeezing out, an elimination of the absurd using various means. At the beginning, in the first period, there was this romantic resistance in the face of the world, and a concentration on the tragic view of life as such. This was an exposition, a clearing up of accidental details, an exposition of the tragic course of man’s life, the realisation of which demands much of a man, is an education in spiritual courage. During the period leading up to his departure there was this cleansing of life through irony, self-deprecation, sarcasm. It was a sort of pick-me-up for his romantic hangover. An attempt to rid his poems of their farcical histrionics by looking at them from on high with an ironical vision. Pushkin said of the terrible events in his and Russia’s life: ‘Let’s look at what has happened with the eyes of a Shakespeare.’ In Joseph’s case, given this broadness of vision – not angry, perhaps, but bitter is, alas, too trivial an epithet – the irony verges on a sarcasm which is clothed in a very down-to-earth vocabulary that we do not encounter in Pushkin. I want to make a reservation at this point. I used the words ‘sarcasm’, ‘irony’. That’s often the case when it’s a question of Brodsky’s later work. And people who aren’t too well informed might get the idea that the poet is in some way demonic. That would be quite wrong. In that sense I might venture to compare the Brodsky of the 1970s and 1980s with Chekhov – for the outspokenness of his bitter sarcasm which borders on a disdain which is not directed against man but against the way the world is ordered – and also because of the strength of his covert compassion. Few poets in the world feel more clearly the cold of existence and at the same time so heartily oppose it. He talks of coldness and emptiness in such a way

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that one begins to feel sad but also warm and no longer alone. All that has a direct bearing upon Brodsky’s Christianity, but we won’t dwell upon that question here. However strange this may sound, the theme of the ‘small man’ in the midst of a vast terrifying world – a fundamental theme in Russian literature – is very strong in Joseph’s work. And the constant search for the spiritual impulse which, if it fails to neutralise, at least weakens the imbalance of forces present in that opposition. Joseph’s hero is, in essence, that same puny little man stoically overcoming the inequities of the world. And the fact that he so often brings to the surface man’s horror in the face of the inevitability of the void, that too is a part of that harmonisation. And something else: it seems to me that Brodsky’s purpose from a certain moment on, if you like from the beginning of the 1960s, was to write about himself and the world around him with maximum forthrightness, and yet stay within the bounds of literature: a pretty difficult trick to pull off. That, in principle, is the main aim of twentieth-century literature, but in Joseph’s case it has been realised with a rare intensity and inventiveness which skilfully camouflages the irony I mentioned before (not to be confused with the triumphant irony of the German Romantics). Here his conception of the Russian language plays a major role. It can’t be called love of the language. Rather, it is a complete fusing of self and language, an intuitive grasp of language as the universe – the word as creator of the world. The mature Brodsky is at the same time on principle obstinately unliterary. This equation of poetry and the psychology of everyday life makes its appearance. However, Brodsky has been through several, very different, periods. There was a period of romantic poetical generalisation that had out-and-out literary roots: his poems about riders – ‘Black Horse’ (S, pp. 94 -5) and … – ‘You gallop through the darkness’ (S, pp. 85 -7), that whole cycle of poems. – Yes. Although there is, on the other hand, ‘Hills’ (S, pp. 123 -9). This is a remarkable large-scale verse work where you find the same motifs, but they are closely bound up with everyday life, the aim being to actualise the abstract. In the last ten years we observe this submersion of all his major ideas in everyday reality, both at the level of vocabulary and of composition. It is certainly not a peaceful process. It’s a noholds-barred contrast between the Platonic idea and that idea’s incar-

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nation in the world of things. It is an unusually profound aspect of his work which offers great scope for research students. I hope they don’t pass it by. – Your mention of the ‘Black Horse’ leads us on to one of Brodsky’s main themes, the theme of ‘after the end’: after the end of love, after Russia, and after Christianity. Why does that theme haunt Brodsky? – He had method right from the start – to shift the focus of his perception of the world along a vertical axis, and the higher the better. If at first it was the thrill of flight, then in one of his best and most frightening poems ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’ (U, pp. 49 - 52) it is seen to be the urge to self-destruction. – But that applies to all of us, the whole of humanity, not just to the individual. – Well, naturally. In his ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’ (S, pp. 130 -6) there is an extremely important motif ‘And higher than God’ … – ‘You flew around God …’ – ‘and backwards sped … from there God is only a light in the window / on a foggy night, in the very furthest house’. There you have the boundlessness of the hierarchical conception of life, of the world. It is not theomachy because above God there just has to be another, greater Master. It’s the idea of the world as an endless ascending hierarchy. It’s a stubborn quarrel with the very idea of finality whether it be of feeling, of life, of world … Consciousness cannot come to terms with that. It is – leaving aside everything else – an extremely intense religious feeling which is, however, rather difficult to define in terms of any one particular faith. Generally speaking, the inability to reconcile oneself with inequities – whether it be on the everyday level or on some exalted philosophical plane – is something inherent in Joseph. He has more than once made of it a declaration of faith. Finality, mortality, inconclusiveness are all injustices. One of the motifs of his early poems is that of a sense of resentment at the world’s injustice (not in his own personal case but in general) and his attempt to see in death something juster, something more conciliating than the vulgar life process – think of the poem, important in my view, ‘From the outskirts to the centre’ (O, pp. 28 - 32). – You’ve mentioned Brodsky’s perception of language as the universe. Why does Joseph make the category of language such a dominant category, not just in his poetry, but also in his poetics? In his verses

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linguistic categories are sometimes treated like objects, sometimes like people: ‘here I will end up my day, losing my hair, teeth, vowels, suffixes’ (C, p. 26)? – Yes, it’s a striving to embody the abstract. There was a poem of his written in 1960, ‘Verbs’ (S, pp. 72 -3). It is an amazing animation of linguistic concepts; the word made flesh in the reality of everyday existence. That’s where it all stems from: despite all the transformations, the changes of all kinds, Joseph’s is an unusually integrated, steadfast personality. Almost everything that he has done in the last 10 - 15 years was, in some aspect or other, discernible in the work of his early years. As for the role of language, there’s a letter of Joseph’s which contains a whole string of theoretical propositions about language. – It would be a good idea to quote it here, since no one has access to it. – I’ll certainly do that. Besides, there is obviously a more general aspect to it. On the one hand, the poet’s real task is to eliminate the existential absurd, and, on the other, to strive towards the absolute; in the sober certainty that it is unattainable. Nevertheless, what really counts is not your destination but the road along which you travel. And, since the twentieth century is the Grandmaster of the art of knocking the ground out from under one’s feet – in the cultural field as well as elsewhere – and at removing the solid foundations upon which the man of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built and upon which Joseph to a significant degree relies – then it is, for the first time, in its capacity as absolute that language was chosen and transformed into a sort of paradigm of the world, purified, harmonised, and made subject to rules much more clear-cut than those to which the world itself is subject. And language was chosen – I don’t know to what extent the choice was a fully conscious one – as an ideal model of the world’s existence because if the poet inhabits that sphere and doesn’t just walk about on its surface, his existence is justified in terms of the harmony of his relationship towards it. That, I think, is very important. It is a search for unshakeable, familiar ground, because floundering about in an ill-defined space is, for a man of intellect, apart from anything else, somehow very shameful. He wants something he can rely on. He has this thing. It’s half in jest, half in earnest. It has appeared in print and it’s a sort of aphorism: ‘A song is a form of linguistic disobedience.’

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– He said that first in English, in his preface to a collection of Mandelstam: ‘A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and by implication, his psychological superiority, rather than his politics. A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts doubt on more than a concrete political system: it questions the entire existential order.’ 5 – Yes, generally speaking, all forms of existence can be accommodated within the sphere of linguistics. – That leads straight on to the next question. What sort of service has Brodsky rendered the Russian language? – I’m afraid to say anything definite, because language takes shape in such a complex way, at so leisurely a pace, step by step. There are so many unlooked-for layers, beyond the control of any one man, that it would be hard, really, to speak of services as such. And Brodsky himself would not, I think, approve of the way the question is formulated. But, nevertheless, if we talk about language as we find it in a literature at a given moment, then a great poet is remarkable not because he has thought up something new, but because he makes clear to everyone something which has been there unbeknown to him. He simply brings it into the light, formulates it, shapes it, harmonises it and presents it to the public. Such poets have always been expanding the boundaries of language, introducing new substrata: Derzhavin, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Pasternak. – One has only to compliment Brodsky as a poet in some way and he answers, ‘In no way have I made any special contribution. All that is in the Russian language.’ 6 – That’s already something of a paradox. The Russian language does indeed contain everything, just as our planet contains all the useful minerals, but you still have to dig them up and do something with them – they’re not much use otherwise. Let’s read the letter I mentioned about language. In the autumn of 1962 or 1963, I can’t be certain, Joseph brought me the rough draft of a letter addressed to one of the central Soviet newspapers. It had to do with an impending reform of the language. I really can’t recall our conversation on the subject, but evidently he lost his enthusiasm. I still have the draft of that letter. Here it is:

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Dear Editors, In an October number of your paper I read an article by the head of the Orthographical Commission, Comrade (I can’t make out the name of this comrade, Ya. G.). It threw me into turmoil, and I felt it my duty to write this letter. I would like to see it published. A language’s progress and consequently the progress of its written form should be taken to mean qualitative and quantitative enrichment. Our tongue takes on form in script. All forms in time aspire to independent existence, but within the form there remains, continuing to serve the function which created it, what one might term independent substance (this is often not fully realised). The case we are dealing with is that of language. The form, in gaining apparent independence, seems to create its own rules, its own dialectic, its aesthetics, and so on and so forth. However, for all its putative progression, form is in no position to influence function. The column only finds meaning within the context of the facade. And when function is subordinated to form, then the column blocks the windows. The proposed reform of Russian orthography is of a particularly formal kind: it is a reform in the fullest sense of the word: re-form. For it is naive to suppose that it is possible to change, to adjust, the morphological structure of the language by means of this or that rule. A language evolves, it cannot be revolutionised and thus it reminds us of its true nature. There are three types of reform, three types of formal re-organisation: the decorative, the utilitarian, and the functionally consistent. This reform is neither of the first nor of the third type: it belongs to the second type. It is similar to the first type, in that an over-decorated facade is as unpleasing to the eye as a barracks. Essentially the reform’s origins lie in a misconception of the third type … For function possessing inherent plasticity aspires to be free of unnecessary, superfluous elements, it aspires to be transformed of form into its own expression in the most absolute sense. In simple terms, a script should express, and that is to the umpteenth degree, all a language’s diversity. That is the aim and purpose of our script and it possesses all the necessary ways and means.

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Of course, our modern language is complex. Of course, much could be simplified. But one has to know what change is necessary, and its purpose. Complexity is no vice in language. It, above all, bears witness to the spiritual richness of those who have created it. The aim of reform should be to seek out the means by which all those riches might be more fully, more speedily mastered. It should certainly not aim at a simplification which amounts, in essence, to nothing more or less than linguistic larceny. The advocates of reform brush away objections by saying that we have been hypnotised by habit. But, if you stop to think about it, it is precisely in the inculcation of new habits that the proposed reform’s pledge of vitality lies. It’s an unending process. One could, when it comes down to it, go over to using sign language, and get used to that. I don’t know if that would be progress, but it would definitely be simpler than mulling over the question of how many ‘n’s’ there should be in the word dereviannyi. And it is to simplicity that the reformers aspire. Of course, I have taken an extreme, but it is, unfortunately, impossible to reject the logical consistency of an argument which is headed towards that extreme. Form has no influence on function, but may distort it, in any case give rise to a false conception. Utilitarianism and standardisation are, we repeat, as harmful as over-ornamentation. The Manege stripped of its columns would become a shed. A colonnade is functional: in architecture it plays a role analogous to that of phonetics in language. And phonetics is the linguistic equivalent of the sense of touch. In other words, it is the sensual foundation of language. The two ‘n’s’ in the word dereviannyi are not accidental. The articulation of diphthongs and open vowels are not the peripheral of language, they support the whole structure at its base. In speech the luckless suffixes are the sole means of qualitative expression. Dereviannyi expresses quality and texture plastically, by prolonging the sound in both time and space. Dereviannyi is limited by order of letters and by semantic association; the word contains no other supplementary information or perception. Of course, one could grow accustomed – and that very quickly – to one ‘n’ in the word. We gain in simplicity of spelling but lose in meaning because, following the principle ‘we write as we speak’,

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we will pronounce one letter (one sound) less, and the letter in its retreat carries off with it all its substance, leaving in its place a dry sack from which all the air has leaked away. We risk, in consequence, having a language which is both phonetically and semantically impoverished. And, anyway, what is the point of the whole exercise? That’s beyond my comprehension. Instead of acquiring and mastering this treasure trove, – which may take time, but is such an enriching process! – we are invited to follow the line of least resistance and chop its head off, thus giving ourselves an ersatz grammar. And all this is being promoted with an astounding scientific argument that invokes the example of other Slavic languages and cites the reform of 1918. It is really so hard to grasp that another language, be it as Slavic as you like, is another psychology – you simply cannot draw any analogy whatsoever. And is there really such a catastrophic level of illiteracy in our country, as there was in 1918; when, by the way, people proved quite capable of mastering the very grammar which today they are proposing to simplify for us. A language should be studied, not shorn. The script, the letters of the alphabet, ought to reflect, to the maximum possible degree, all the richness, all the diversity, all the polyphony of speech. A script should be an enumerator and not a denominator of language. Everything that appears irrational in our language should be treated with caution, no, almost with reverence, because that irrationality itself is language; it is, in some sense, older and more organic than our opinions. You can’t use police methods on language. There can be no cutting off and putting into isolation. We have to think of ways to master the language, not of pollarding it like some overgrown tree. We should be looking for a modus operandi, and not for shears. Language is a great highroad whose course today is in no need of narrowing. He signed this epistle ‘Architect Koshkin’, once more demonstrating his love for cats. 7 It is interesting that these ideas, dating from almost 30 years ago now, should be so consonant with his present-day views on the subject. – After Brodsky’s Nobel Prize people were going around saying ‘the award was given to our generation’ and that it was ‘a tribute to the Russian language’.

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– I really can’t agree with that at all. But I would like to bring our discussion on language to a conclusion. Joseph, like those writers I’ve mentioned – I could name others – introduced into his poetry a substratum of language; to be more exact, he united a great many disparate elements. Once again in Russian culture, in Russian language, a poet has brought a whole lot together. He simply implemented that same principle employed by Pushkin and Pasternak, introducing a new linguistic substratum at a new level. Here we could well argue: he will deny he has contributed anything to the language, you will insist he has. The fact is there for all to see; who is responsible? Is there this ongoing development of the language which speaks through its poet, or does the poet himself, by some effort of the will push it a little bit further along its road? That’s a question which has to be discussed; there is something there. That linguistic amalgam of unusually diverse elements which Joseph has been employing, especially these last 15 years, was already there in embryo. And that lexical audacity few are capable of was already present in embryo in his earliest works. That obviously has to be seen as his contribution. Lef s put it like this: he has seen the new face of the language and described it in forms which are natural to him, using his own distinctive method. – Not for the first time Pushkin and Brodsky have been mentioned in the same context. You have of course read papers on the topic. 8 Some consider the comparison of Brodsky with Pushkin sacrilegious, others see a basis for a linguistic, if not a historical parallel between the two poets. A third group would say that the comparison doesn’t really flatter Brodsky and, in the end, leads nowhere. What have you to say on the subject? – In my opinion, in cultural matters generally one is justified in comparing anything and everything; so long as they are all part of the same system. But Pushkin … there we see a special credit, a special responsibility. I don’t see anything sacrilegious in that comparison. I can’t, in general, stand that word, because it’s the simplest thing in the world to use that rather ill-defined word, to take it and lash out with it at whatever you’ve chosen to attack. The comparison is entirely justified. Of course, there are lots of reservations to be made, but I won’t go into that here, that’s just not possible – we would be drowning in reservations. Naturally, Pushkin’s field of activity was somewhat different. It’s a commonplace that he had to create new genres – taking

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that word in its fullest sense. And, in general, he was the first to do a lot of things. But Russian literature was in a somewhat more settled state at the beginning of the 1960s than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So the problems were somewhat different. But none the less, Brodsky marked the next qualitative burst of creative energy. Naturally, he was not alone. Back then, at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, some pretty serious work was being done by a whole string of poets who were, although ideologically and personality-wise very different, basically all decent people. You could, for example, completely at random, take the name of Slutsky. He was doing some pretty good things. – Joseph has mentioned him. 9 – Yes. And if you’re talking about Leningrad then you have the quartet, the classical group, as well as Joseph, Rein, Naiman and Bobyshev; and their work has certainly not been properly appreciated, and deserves careful examination. There was, of course, Kushner, who was working away at this own particular substratum of linguistic culture. As it is, we’re talking about Brodsky. And that is certainly no accident. A lot of things came together in his work, and it was he, possibly more sharply than anyone else, who marked out where the boundary lines were. Generally speaking, it always takes a poet of Brodsky’s stature to mark out the boundary lines, that’s why he’s so easily recognisable. He’s a marker, not just for scholars, but for his contemporaries as well. Those who want to see, will see. Brodsky marked out the boundary lines in much the same way as Pushkin did in his day. It is rather an unrewarding task comparing their stature as poets, trying to establish who has accomplished the most. When it comes down to it, Joseph is still working, and has at his disposal all that is needed for the fashioning of new subspecies of genre, which may become genres in their own right. If Pushkin in fact introduced the poema genre, then Brodsky, already at the beginning of the 1960s, was introducing a new kind of poem – the long verse-work. Let’s leave ‘A Petersburg Romance’, 10 and ‘Procession’ (S, pp. 156 - 222) to one side. The other long verses, like ‘The Great Elegy to John Donne’ (S, pp. 130 -6), ‘Hills’ (S, pp. 123 -9), ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 -55) and ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ (O, pp. 177 - 218) are not poemy. There you have something else again. They are verses which have been rolled out, and out, into space, like some vast carpet. And they are constructed like verses; whether they

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are of the ballad type, like ‘Hills’, or running dialogue with a latent, hidden meaning, like ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ or ‘Isaac and Abraham’ is of no vital importance; they are of a completely new type, of his invention. And his explanation as to why this expansion was necessary is that it is the response to a need for almost infinite poetic space into which to draw the reader, completely immerse his consciousness, something he considers impossible in a more confined space. There is, perhaps, a need for a length which both overwhelms and bewitches the reader. It is a new kind of magic. That too relates to the problem of language, the problem of repetition, the problem of the dimensions of such a purely linguistic space, where the meaning is unclear and everything plays a role of its own, the words, phonetics, rhythms and so on. Just think of Lomonosov’s odic somnambulism. – Those who don’t understand that criticise Brodsky for it, seeing neither sense nor function in his prolixity; it simply overwhelms them. – And sometimes it really has been overwhelming. But the particular cases aren’t important, it’s the principle that counts. You can criticise Melville as much as you like for Moby-Dick’s grand scale, for its inclusion of elements which at first glance appear extraneous to the matter in hand. But, at the same time, if they weren’t there, Moby - Dick wouldn’t be the great novel it is. So you see, there are some contradictions between readability and greatness. And there’s no arguing against it. – Yesterday, in your paper, you spoke of the enormity of the problems of assessing the reciprocal influences of Dante and Mandelstam, of Pushkin and Akhmatova. 11 Whose name would you link with Brodsky’s? – I think that depends, perhaps, on the period one looks at. If we look back into the distant past it has to be Baratynsky, whilst, nearer to our own time, it has to be Akhmatova. I think the question of the relationship between Brodsky and Akhmatova’s works offers great research opportunities. – And the non-Russian poets? I would like to hear what you think of his grafting of Russian and English poetry. – You are quite right to bring that up. Of course, nobody after Pushkin has done as much as Brodsky to introduce elements native to other cultures into Russian poetry. And, what is more, it has been done in an absolutely organic way. Nothing strikes one as incongruous. The weave remains perfect. I don’t think this is a purely literary matter.

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Yes, of course, there’s English language poetry … but there’s Polish poetry as well, and his interest in that was, at the beginning, not so much literary as historical, and personal. You know, I’ve thought about why Joseph feels such an interest in and sympathy for Poland. I think that the particularities of Polish history, of the Polish character, its restless, combative, sacrificial nature, its attenuated instinct for selfpreservation, are things which Joseph, simply for reasons of humanity, felt close to right from the very start. It’s hard to say what is of prime and what is of secondary importance, everything sort of came together; the remarkable sonority of the Polish language is so closely related to Russian and yet, phonetically, so very different. I remember him reading Gałczyński in parallel, first in the original, and then in translation. 12 And with what pleasure he read him in Polish! I say this because you cannot, as is so often done, attribute it all to purely literary reasons. Nevertheless, when a poet of such stature builds his edifice, every bit of its structure has to be taken into account. – There’s another of his passions – his passion for antiquity which is, isn’t it, linked with the theme of Empire? – Of course. That theme, too, appeared very early on. An empire is always systematic, systematised violence, because the imperial structure is the structure of oppression, of repression. It’s aimed at preserving it from disintegrating into its various disparate racial elements. It’s not really about the actual Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, but simply Empire as the most apparent manifestation of an ordered system of violent force, of violent harmonisation, as opposed to that natural harmonisation which lies so close to the heart of the culture. Violent, tyrannical harmonisation is alien to culture and, in the final analysis, leads to spiritual catastrophe. The imperial road is always, in one way or another, the road to catastrophe. Joseph investigates all that in his own inimitable way. I don’t think, in actual fact, that the Roman Empire is of any interest to him at all. – It’s a metaphor for the state in general? – Yes, of course. It’s a gigantic metaphor and not limited, naturally, to the Soviet example. Thus the poem ‘To a Tyrant’ (C, p. 7) is certainly not a portrait of Stalin or Hitler; nor is it an amalgam of the two. It is a very concretised metaphor, yet very far-reaching indeed, and that applies to the case in point. Empire is a metaphor for forced harmonisation in the face of deep internal troubles. It’s one of those

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problems that mankind has had to face throughout history, a fundamental problem. – Do you accept everything Brodsky has to say, or do you have reservations? – You know, somehow or other, I’ve never approached his work in that frame of mind. – We really don’t have to get down on our knees before him, do we? – No. We’ve already said there cannot be, should not be, any canonisation of Brodsky. Of course, my love for his poetry is quite selective. I’m very far from knowing all of it off by heart. Like that of all prolific poets, some of his work is of only passing interest, and he himself has been critical of it. – Name some poems you consider masterpieces. – I’m extremely fond of the ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’. It is, in my opinion, an astounding poem, unlike anything else I know. It is one of those sudden breaks through into world culture and, as we saw at the time, it seems to have been entirely unrehearsed. Before that, on almost the same level, there was ‘Christmas Romance’ (S, pp. 76 - 7). – And of the later poems? – The later poems… – ‘The Butterfly’? – I know ‘The Butterfly’ (C, pp. 32 -8) well, but my attitude to it is rather complicated. It’s an astounding thing. It’s like gossamer, it’s written with such precision, such wit, but there’s something rather cold about it. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s because, for me, it’s just not quite Russian. I feel an overwhelming affection for ‘From the Outskirts to the Centre’. Of the later poetry, again I greatly admire ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’ (C, pp. 97 -110) and ‘Lagoon’ (C, pp. 40 -3). I simply adore ‘Letter to a Roman Friend’ (C, pp. 11 -14). It is an astounding piece of poetry, again because it doesn’t sound like anything else, because of its simplicity, because of its blending of the sublime and the realistic. It is what, from time to time, Joseph manages to pull off in a remarkable way no one else is capable of. There is a sort of drawing together of contraries. I really love his ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’ (U, pp. 49 -52). – And ‘The Fifth Anniversary’ (U, pp. 70-3), for which he was attacked by the ‘patriots’? 13

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– It’s amusing talking about those attacks, because if one is going to pick on isolated words and phrases then the greatest ‘anti-patriot’ would have to be Pushkin. As is well known, he said, ‘My Fatherland I despise, from top to bottom.’ He could talk like that because he had done so much for his Fatherland. – Let’s close our conversation with that parallel. Could you please read your poem dedicated to Brodsky. LETTER TO THE NORTH To Joseph Brodsky It is rather as if you’ve stepped aside Into a kind of double self-absorption; As if you are the one fixed point inside A realm of grave, unhurried locomotion While, out of the dark plucking-house of heaven The tepid snow unhurriedly cascades. Do not neglect your thanks to fate for giving You this white-roofed lodging on a short lease, And in a place where daylight’s in decline, Whence blackbirds flee on westerly migrations And where you watch the slowly moving line Of your frozen friends’ smiling apparitions. 1965 Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

By the Autumn of 1991 there were six Brodsky collections published in the USSR: Nazidanie, compiled by Vladimir Ufliand (Leningrad: SP ‘Smart’, 1990) 255pp.; Osenniy krik yastreba, compiled by Olga Abramovich, introduction by Vladimir Ufliand (Leningrad: IMA-Press, 1990) 128 pp.; Stikhotvoreniya Iosifa Brodskogo, compiled by G. F. Komarov (Leningrad: SP Alga-Fond, 1990) 156 pp.; Chast rechi. Izbrannye stikhi 1962 - 89, compiled by Edward Beznosov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990) 527pp.; Razmerom podlinnika, compiled by G. F. Komarov (Tallin: MShK MADLP, 1990) 255 pp.; and Stikhotvoreniya, compiled by Ya. Gordin (Tallin: Aleksandra, 1991) 255 pp.

2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12

13

Miatezh bezoruzhnykh [Mutiny] is Gordin’s unpublished play about the Decembrists, written in 1964. Viktor Krivulin, ‘Slovo o nobelitete Iosifa Brodskogo’, a speech delivered to a Brodsky evening in Leningrad’s Club-81, 18 November 1987. The text was published in samizdat journal Merkurii, no. 12, 1988, and then reprinted in ‘Russkaya mysl, 11 November 1988, Literaturnoe prilozhenie, no. 7, p. iii. ‘Dialog poetov’ (Tri pis’ma Akhmatovoy k Brodskomu), Akhmatovskiy sbornik, vol. I, ed. Sergey Dedyulin and Gabriel Superfin (Paris: Institut d’Etudes slaves, 1989) pp. 221 - 4. Joseph Brodsky, Introduction to Osip Mandelstam, 50 Poems, trans. Bernard Meares (New York: Persea Books, 1977) p. 15. Joseph Brodsky, a seminar given at Keele University, 8 March 1978. ‘Koshkin’ is a derivation from ‘koshka’, meaning a cat. Anatoly Naiman was the first to draw a parallel between Brodsky and Pushkin; see his introduction to Brodsky’s Ostanovka v pustyne (New York: Chekhov Publishing Corp., 1970), written in 1964 and 1968 under the pseudonym N. N., pp. 7 - 15. A few years later, V. A. Saytanov (under the pseudonym D. S.) published an article ‘Pushkin and Brodsky’ in Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. 123, 1977, pp. 127 - 39; it is reprinted in Poetika Brodskogo, ed. Lev Losev (Tenefly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1986) pp. 207 - 18. In the same collection there is an article by Aleksandr Zholkovsky, ‘‘Ya vas liubil ...’ Brodskogo: interteksty, invarianty, tematika i struktura’, pp. 38 - 62. Viktor Krivulin draws attention to the ‘radical similarity’ between Brodsky and Pushkin in that ‘both Pushkin and Brodsky, having realised the un iqueness of their personalities, felt the need to conceal this uniqueness under a mask’ (‘Slovo o nobeliate’, op. cit.). Joseph Brodsky, ‘Literature and War – a Symposium: The Soviet Union’, The Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 1985, pp. 543 - 4. ‘Peterburgskii roman (poema v trekh chastiakh)’ is included in Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo, 7 vols, ed. by Ya. Gordin (Spb.: Puskinskii Fond, 1997 - 2001). Yakov Gordin, a paper delivered to Akhmatova Centenary Conference, Paris, 29 - 31 May 1989. Some of Brodsky’s translations of Konstanty Gałczyńsky were pub lished in the Soviet Union; see Konstanty Il’defons Galczynsky, Stikhi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1967) pp. 70 - 1, 106 - 13, 242 - 4 Komsomolskaya pravda, 19 March 1988, p. 4.

3 EVGE N Y R E I N Evgeny Borisovich Rein (born 29 December 1935 in Leningrad), poet, script-writer, translator, graduated from Leningrad Technological Institute in 1959, worked firstly as an engineer, and from 1962 as a writer. In the 1950s he became famous among Leningrad’s intellectuals for his exceptional erudition, impeccable poetic taste and great charm – all the qualities of a mentor. As Rein himself put it: ‘I taught a dozen poets – six scoundrels and six martyrs.’ While some of his pupils have published more than two dozen books of poetry, Rein had to wait almost 30 years to publish his first collection, The Name of Bridges (Moscow, 1984). For years he was virtually unknown outside his own city – although he had written hundreds of powerful poems and attracted a huge following. He earned a living by writing popular scientific articles in children’s magazines (Kostyor and Iskra) and written a total of 12 children’s books. In 1970 he moved to Moscow, translated the works of a great many ancient and modern Indian poets, of Kipling, of various non-Russian, Soviet poets, and wrote documentary film scripts. After action was taken against Metropol in 1979 (23 of Rein’s poems were included in that almanac) he was unable to find any work for several years. The publication of his first collection hung fire for five years. It is only with perestroika that further collections have seen the light of day: Coastal Strip (Moscow, 1989) and The Darkness of Mirrors (Moscow, 1990). Rein’s poems are appreciated for his highly developed poetic skill, nobility of tone and positive outlook. He started out in the tradition of Blok and Mandelstam, underwent the influence of the Futurists and of contemporary art before finding his own unique style. His love of outdoor colour, of somewhat altered forms, of certain scenes, betrays his passion for French painting (for example, ‘Rimbaud’ and ‘Apple’). The interest in his work in Russia and in the West has never been stronger. He is invited to international conferences, to festivals of poetry, to Western universities to read both his poetry and to lecture. For English translations see Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). In 2004 he was awarded Pushkin Prize (Germany) and in 2005 he received The State Prize (Russia).

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TH E I N T R O D U C T I O N O F T H E P R O S A I C IN TO POET RY An Interview with Evgeny Rein (24 April 1990, Moscow) – Brodsky considers you to be one of the best poets writing in Russian at present. 1 Do you agree with him? – That is a tricky question. I have a high regard for Brodsk’s opinions but I find it rather difficult to relate to that question myself. What poet thinks he writes bad poetry? I am, in general, against any kind of singling out of any extremely restricted group of poets and their designation as some sort of qualitative avant-garde. I hope I’m not a second or third rate poet. That’ s all I can say. – He also said of you, and I quote, ‘He’s the only man on earth whose opinion I, to a greater or lesser extent, took any notice of, still take notice of. If I did have any mentor, he was that mentor’. 2 What burdens does that impose upon you? – That is another tricky question. He’s said roughly the same thing, in slightly different ways, quite a few times now. I can’t really comment fully because I don’t fully understand what Joseph has in mind when he says that sort of thing. This is, roughly speaking, how it came about. The fact is I am five years older than Joseph, and when we first got to know one another, in 1959, he was 19 and I was 24. It would be difficult, impossible in fact, to go into detail now about the various literary coteries that existed in Leningrad then; their membership, who was, and who was not, among their leading lights. But anyway I would say that, within the bounds of a very narrow circle of poets, I held a certain primacy. This primacy was due, possibly, simply to the fact that I was two or three years older than anyone else, possibly to the fact that I had already written a few poems that were fairly well known in Leningrad literary circles, or possibly it was thanks to my erudition of sorts which at the time was something of an achievement. As far as the pupil-teacher relationship goes, in the literal sense that, it seems to me, never existed. What did happen is quite an interesting, quite an amazing story. The Joseph I met was a remarkably gifted but somewhat eclectic poet who was in the process of seeking

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out and shaping his own individual poetic system. My own poetry was already pretty well defined, and it seemed to me to be rather late in the day. Possibly that was a mistake. I’d say that was almost certainly a mistake, to change anything really fundamental in my own poetry. However, I did see some new possibilities for Russian poetry: possible new influences; possible new themes; the possible enlisting, in some way or other, of psycho-analysis; the possible rapprochement of poetry and prose. And, naturally, I somehow expounded, rehearsed, shared all these ideas with Joseph. I can’t always remember what it was I did say exactly; but, as it turns out Joseph has. In one of his articles I read an account, quite a lengthy one, of a conversation we had then about all the possible types of poetics. 3 Possibly it’s thanks to all of those things that the notion you touched upon in your question has come about. – Brodsky has, more than once, remarked upon the fact that you once gave him one of the most valuable pieces of advice on writing poetry that he has ever received from anyone: keep the number of adjectives to the minimum. 4 Do you remember when it was that you gave him that advice and what the specific poems were that gave rise to its being offered? – You know, I cannot remember. I do vaguely remember such a conversation taking place. What’s more, it’s an opinion I’ve held for quite a long time and I’ve tried to apply it to my own verse. But, as I said, I started to write poetry at a very early age, and as a result of that I relied to a great extent on what the Soviet poets had achieved in the 1920s; and I would include amongst them not just Mandelstam, Pasternak and Zabolotsky, but also such poets as Lugovskoy and Selvinsky. And the general result of that was that I was bound hand and foot. I cannot remember the exact occasion I said the things Joseph talks about, but since those remain my opinions right up until the present day, there can be no doubt that I did really say them to him. – And which poets do you look upon as having been your masters? – I think that my real masters were the ones who, when it comes down to it, gave my poetry the form that it has, moulded it into the shape it assumed upon my becoming a relatively mature poet (remember I’m 54). They were fairly numerous really: I learnt my lessons wherever I could, but I would say that those who had the greatest influence upon me were Blok, Annensky and Mandelstam.

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– There is a poem of yours, ‘Ten years later or a glance through the window at the Manezh and the square’, that reminds one, both rhythmically and syntactically, of Brodsky’s ‘To leave love on a clear sunny day, irrevocably’ (S, pp. 41 - 2) and ‘All the same you cannot hear, all the same you wouldn’t hear a word’ (S, pp. 92 - 3). Who is echoing whom? – That’s very hard to say. There you have an example of what Brodsky calls our bond. There came a time when, somehow or other, we had a whole lot of things in common, our melodic line, our vocabulary, our images and possibly even our way of looking at the world. It was, by the way, very discerning of you to notice that. The poem ‘Ten years later’ is an example of the way in which our two poetries came close to one another – not deliberately – but because they both grew from common fields of interest. – In the second volume of Kuzminsky’s ‘Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry’ one finds your poem ‘In the course of four years many people died’ and Brodsky’s ‘In two years / the acacias will wither’, both of which date from the years 1958 - 9 under the general heading ‘Who is who?’. 5 – You know, I’ve never seen those particular pages from Kuzminsky’s collection; some of the volumes of that anthology I’ve never seen. It seems to me that that poem ‘In the course of four years’ was written shortly before I got to know Brodsky. It’s an incredibly old poem of mine which is dedicated to my friend Mikhail Krasil’nikov. The Brodsky poem which Kuzminsky uses, I just don’t know it at all. It must be a very early poem indeed. It has to be said that at that time he sometimes fell victim to the charms of certain Leningrad poets such as Gorbovsky, for example. It was only a passing phase. He then turned to other themes. – Haven’t you and Brodsky a common poetic source? The poems we’ve mentioned, both yours and his, remind one rhythmically of Pasternak’s ‘Interrupt me. Go on, try. Come on, douse the fit of melancholy / that thunders today like the mercury in the vacuum of Toricelli.’ – You know, that could well be so. But that is quite a dangerous critical criterion to use. The fact is that Russian poetry does not possess a wide range of metres. On the other hand it does have a very wide choice of rhythms at its disposal. The same number of feet and the same number of variously positioned stresses is no indication of affin-

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ity. That is indicated by what we call rhythm or rather the breath of the poem. Thus if we had used the famous Pasternakian rhythms of ‘1905’ that would have meant something. But if we simply repeat the same pattern of iambs and anapaests, that proves nothing. – I came intending to ask you to ‘remember clearly all that passed’, to use your words, and if not ‘without faith, without doubt’, then at least ‘without passion’. Tell me, when did you personally begin to see signs of genius in Brodsky? – This is the way it was. I got to know Joseph, if my memory serves me right, in the October of 1959 in Slavinsky’s apartment (at the time he was living on Leningrad’s Novo-Blagodatny Line). Leonid Elkin (he lives in Paris now) came to me and said, ‘There’s this man here who writes poetry and who’s being a frightful pain to everyone by reading it to all and sundry. Couldn’t you give him a hearing and resolve the question once and for all?’ And he introduced me to Brodsky. A few days later Joseph came to my place and read me his poetry. I didn’t much like it. If memory has not wholly abandoned me, this was during a phase when he was mainly reading various poets in translation in the issues of the magazine Foreign Literature: Nazim Hikmet, Yannis Ritsos, and in Russian that wasn’t particularly rewarding. But there was something that struck me, even then. Then he went off on one of his expeditions for the whole of that summer. In the autumn he came to see me and read completely different poems. It’s difficult for me to remember now exactly which poems they were. I think they were ‘In memory of Fedia Dobrovol’sky’ (S, p. 36) and ‘You’ll return to your homeland’ (S, pp. 58 - 9). And already these were very good poems. The years passed. It was in 1961, I think, that some really remarkable poems made their appearance. First, these were long poems – something which, in those days, we didn’t know how to write, and, apart from Brodsky, nobody could write them. Things like ‘Petersburg Romance’, ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 - 55). They were massive poems. ‘Stanzas’ (S, p. 63) had already been written, and the poem which is dedicated to me, ‘Christmas Romance’ (S, pp. 76 - 7), a poem which for me, and I’m not taking the dedication into account here, is even now a remarkable piece of work. And, finally, there were the first poems to come from his period of northern exile: ‘New Stanzas to Augusta’ (O, pp. 156 - 60) is great poetry, poetry of the first order. And

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so sometime around 1961 - 2 my estimate of his powers was high, as high as it is possible to go. – Please tell me how and when did you introduce Joseph to Akhmatova? – This is how it was. It seems to me I’ve already written something about this. I attended the Akhmatova conference at Boston in the autumn of 1989 and the reminiscences of mine which I presented to that conference are due to come out in Zvezda. That account is already pretty detailed. I had known Akhmatova for a few years. However, I couldn’t really be considered an intimate of hers. But, anyway, if I gave her a call on the phone I would be sure to receive an invitation to go over and read some poetry. And from time to time Anna Andreevna would ask me to perform some purely physical chore for her; I packed up her library for when she moved house, and so on. I really did want to tell her about this marvellous poet Brodsky because, with the passing of time, I had become convinced that Akhmatova was not in the least backward-looking in her ideas, because you know it’s quite possible to be a great poet and lock yourself away in your past and pay no heed whatsoever to any of the new poetry that is coming along. But with Akhmatova that was certainly not the case. She loved and admired ‘left’ poetry. She had a great admiration for Khlebnikov’s later poems. She also greatly admired the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Well, one day I told Joseph everything I knew about Akhmatova and said that, if he wanted, we could go and see her. We arranged a date. It was summer, late summer, and we went to Komarovo, to the so-called ‘kennel’, that is, to Anna Andreevna’s dacha. Now here’s something I find rather amusing. Many years later I was racking my brain trying to recall the date of our visit. And suddenly I remembered this one little detail: on our way there, you remember those huge loudspeakers they used to have everywhere in the Soviet Union that would come on now and again to announce something that was considered of special importance to the people, well, on our way to Anna Andreevna’s the loudspeaker came on and announced to the world at large that cosmonaut Titov had been launched into space. That was on 7 August 1961. And that was the very day that I took Joseph to see Anna Andreevna. – That’s very important because Joseph himself sometimes says it was 1961, sometimes that it was 1962. And in my own book on Brodsky,

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after finally consulting him, I corrected my own date, 1961, to the one he gave me, 1962: that’ll have to be altered again now. 6 – When we got to Anna Andreevna’s it turned out that she had a few foreign visitors there and she asked us to wait. We went for a swim in Shchuchye lake. I have to say at this point that Joseph was/is a very good photographer. And that day he had with him this Leica that he took lots of photos with. So it’s pretty funny really that the only photos there are that are still around are the ones he took at the lake. Someone somewhere must have the ones he took at the dacha. I don’t know. Maybe they’re still around somewhere or other. Azadovsky told me once that he had seen one of the group photographs of Brodsky, Akhmatova and me; Brodsky had handed the camera over to someone or other and asked them to take a snap. That evening Brodsky read his poetry. And for some reason I’ve completely forgotten what Anna Andreevna had to say about it. Perhaps she said nothing about it, because she was very good at that sort of thing, giving virtually monosyllabic responses so that no one was offended and, at the same time, giving herself time to think about her eventual response. While she was in the process of forming an opinion she wouldn’t go into any detail at all. We were all badly brought up, in the proverbial desert as it were, whilst Anna Andreevna had been raised in quite different circumstances. She knew how to behave, how things ought to be done. And, for that very reason, I don’t remember a single one of the opinions she expressed that night. The only thing I do recall is that we got to talking about hermeticism in poetry, obscurity in poetry, and how a poet had a perfect right to be incomprehensible, as long as he knew what he meant. And I remember that that winter, or the following winter, Joseph moved temporarily to Komarovo and saw Anna Andreevna very often indeed. – Don’t you think that was the winter of 1962 - 3 because there’s a cycle of poems called ‘Song of a Happy Winter’ 7 – Yes, I remember that very well because he was staying at Raisa Berg’s dacha and I paid the occassional visit, sometimes stopping over till the morning. – Do you agree with those students of Brodsky’s poetry who maintain that Brodsky’s long acquaintance with Akhmatova is not reflected in his style in any way at all?

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– That’s quite a tricky question, trickier than it may appear at first hearing. I think they’re wrong, of course. I mean it is reflected, but there is no direct stylistic link between Brodsky and Akhmatova. Her influence can be traced in some highly significant details, but it is submerged, not up front in full view. It is present in some form or other: at the cultural level, in a moral attitude, in an appreciation of the value of the word, in his psychological insights. If we are talking about his poetics, then it seems to me that Joseph has been under the powerful sway of Tsvetaeva’s influence for quite a considerable period of time. And that’s obvious when one looks at one or two things and starts making comparisons. There’s no need to get out the magnifying glass or anything like that, and there’s even less need of that if, like me, you were there at the time. I remember when the first manuscript copies of Tsvetaeva’s long pieces started going the rounds, ‘The Rat Catcher’, ‘The Poem of the Mountain’, ‘The Poem of the End’. A poem like Joseph’s ‘Procession’ (S, pp. 156 - 222) – there can be no argument about it – goes right back to these long poems of hers. – Am I right in thinking you visited Joseph in his northern exile? Were there any outward signs, in his attitude, to what he was undergoing in that remote village? Was there the same degree of detachment that one feels in the poems of that period, those 18 months of exile in 1964 - 5? – You know, I went to see Joseph quite some time after he was exiled. It would have been, I guess, during May of 1965. I was there for his 25th birthday. I found him in good spirits; there was no sign of any pessimism, of collapse. There was no whining. Although I ought to say in all honesty that, prior to my visit, I had received quite a few doomladen, despondent letters from him. But that, given the circumstances, was absolutely understandable. However, my personal impression when I arrived (I was, by the way, with Naiman) was that here was the same old bold, energetic character. In no way could he have been considered a broken reed, though at the time no decision whatsoever had been made as to his release, and he could still have been facing the full five-year sentence. As it happened, Naiman had to return home, whilst I stayed on. And Joseph had infringed some petty regulation in some way and had to spend a week in solitary confinement in the local jail. And when Joseph went off to start his spell in the jail, he left me with a pile of his poems, poems he had written there in the north, so that I should be kept occupied in his absence. I waited out that

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week for his return, and it was a memorable week. It was late spring, a very beautiful time of year in the north, and the hut was very quiet and comfortable. Nobody interfered with my reading, my walking, and so on. And when I had finished reading all those poems I was really bowled over, because that was one of the most fruitful periods of Brodsky’s life, when his poetry took that final leap. Later on there were other quite significant changes, but he reached the high plateau there in Norenskaya; the high spiritual, high metaphysical plateau. And so I discovered that there, in that lonely northern village where he had been, utterly unjustly and barbarically, driven into exile, he had found himself, not only spiritually but creatively. He had found the strength to cross his poetic great divide. – Do you think that the personal tragedy he was living through at the time also somehow had its effect upon his state of mind? – Yes, there’s no doubt about it. Possibly that was the only thing that did have any meaning for him. That was what he thought and talked about most of all. And a phone call from Leningrad meant more than anything else in the world to him. I remember him paying a great deal more attention to a few words about Marina and that whole situation than to any of the interminable conversations about what was being done to obtain his release. – How did you endure his absence after his departure in 1972? – With great difficulty. It has to be said at this point that I am very fond of Joseph simply as a fellow human being. I find him interesting to be with. I like the way he talks. I like the way he tells jokes, simply the way he behaves. I find it all very interesting and engaging. I would like to somehow make it clear that I am in no way a victim of the sort of Brodskymania that is now flourishing in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. For me Joseph remains the same person he was when he was 20 or 25. I don’t see him as some sort of international superstar, the new Elvis Presley of world literature. His normality, his goodness, the way he tells jokes, the way he behaves, everything that in general goes to make up a person, I find all of it extraordinarily congenial. And when he went away I lost all that. I lost it all twice over. At that time I myself made a parallel move to Moscow. It was to be said, though, that Joseph is very much a Petrograd, Leningrad, Petersburg, whatever, man. It seems to me that he doesn’t like Moscow very much and he was brought up in Leningrad. It was his, my,

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our friends’ home ground. So all at once I lost that home ground and the most congenial of its characters. And it was an extremely grim experience, having to emigrate and being orphaned, all at the same time. It was as if I had moved to the Sahara, to Australia, with nothing around me to remind me of my previous way of life. – Tell me about your meeting Brodsky again after such a long separation. Apparently it was in the States? – Yes, it was in America. 18 September 1988, I think that was the date. I flew in at the invitation of Yale University. It was a direct flight, quite a long one, about eight hours. And, of course, I spent the time preparing myself for our meeting. America was rather a shock: the queue at passport control was a lot longer than any I had been in in the Soviet Union, and I had to stand in line for at least an hour. Then I went off down the seemingly endless corridor that led towards the exit. I had a look around and I couldn’t see anybody, then suddenly I heard Joseph’s voice, ‘Where are you off to?’ At first I could hardly recognise him, and possibly it was the same for him. He seemed to have changed a lot, physically as well. He came to meet me along with a mutual friend of ours, Asia Pekurovskaya. And we drove for a long time, from the airport to Greenwich Village, at least an hour’s drive. And with every minute of that long drive Joseph grew younger and younger in appearance. It was an amazingly interesting process to watch. He grew more and more like his former self. Well, I could see his teeth were somehow different, and his hair was different, a bit like mine really, but, in general, it was the same old Joseph. And when we got to where we were going and had been sitting at our table for some 20 minutes or so, had had a drink, had had a bit of a chat, in came Baryshnikov and we made our way to the restaurant. And, literally, in the course of those few minutes, while we were sitting at our table there appeared opposite me at the other side of the table the man I had known 20 or so years earlier. I think that of all the people I’ve met again among the émigrés, of all the friends I’ve seen again after many years’ separation, he’s the one man who has remained essentially the same person he was all those years ago; his manners, his habits, even the words he uses, don’t seem to have changed. Perhaps there is something Anglo-Saxon there, something new that owes its presence to the Anglo-Saxon mentality but, in essence, he’s the same man I knew in Leningrad long ago.

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– What changes have you noticed in his poetics, in his metaphysics since his departure from Russia? – That’s a question that’s difficult to answer straight off the top of one’s head. There’s enough material there for a pretty extensive paper. I think that one of the most important things that’s characteristic of his latest poetry is everything that comes under the heading of ‘A Part of Speech’. I don’t mean the book but the cycle of poems, because that’s the point at which he found a new language, and it is possibly the most important thing he’s done, a discovery which has, to a certain extent, implications not just for his own poetry but for Russian poetry in general. He has rejected the use of the swell pedal, the use of what, in the past has been most characteristic of Russian lyric poetry – that excitable, hot-blooded, hysterical note. In those poems the heat has been lowered and the melody too has been tempered somewhat, flattened out one might say. There is something in those poems that reminds me somehow of the way time flows past and away from you; and time knows neither heat nor cold. One is reminded of a sea whose waves break monotonously upon some northern shore. And that discovery of his, this merging of his poetry with the movement of time, with that not very bright, rather whitish, the opposite of emotional, measured, even movement of time, that discovery led, above all, to the realisation that his poetry had precisely that motive force behind it. The poems of ‘A Part of Speech’ gave him incredible scope for a broadening of the range of his poetry. His eclogues and all those poems of reminiscence, and in general everything to be found in the Uraniya collection, all have as their basis the ‘Part of Speech’ cycle. That, it seems to me, is, metaphysically, his greatest achievement in Russian poetry. – It’s easy to agree with that because Brodsky himself sanctions the ideas you’ve just expressed about his poetics when he says that his poetry strives towards neutrality of tone, towards a movement that resembles that of a pendulum. 8 And for that very reason he calls his essay on Cavafy, ‘Pendulum’s Song’ (L, pp. 53 - 68). – I’m happy to have understood something. – Is it possible, do you think, to link together all his themes, his concepts and his poetics, by placing time at the centre of things? – Yes, I think so. It’s funny, isn’t it, that we should be constantly circling around that one theme. I was invited to this Brodsky symposium

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at Middlebury as part of the celebrations of his 50th birthday, and when I was thinking about the theme I wanted to discuss in my paper it was precisely the aesthetics of time in his work, the way in which he plays with time was what came to mind. I’ve not as yet fully formulated my own thoughts on the subject, but that is the direction I’m headed in – the poetics of time in his work. 9 I happen to find that particularly interesting because I remember several of the conversations we had on that very theme, a long, long time ago. Anyway, I have the material. – Could you, however sketchily, define the basis upon which Brodsky is constructing his poetic universe? – Again, I think a whole conference is needed to answer that question, not just me on my own. It’s rather difficult right now to say anything at all about that. I think that, when we get down to it, he is, first and foremost, a metaphysician. The religious aspect of his work can in no way be considered to be akin to the poetry of religious ecstasy, nor does it deal with the minutiae of the religious life. And it has nothing to do with that organic fellowship in redemption (sobornost) that is considered to be particular to our Russian Orthodox faith, though he has written such poems as ‘Nunc Dimittis’ (C, pp. 20 - 2). Nevertheless, if one looks carefully at everything he has written, he has, like all important poets, walked that razor’s edge between theism and atheism. He has never been able to choose one side or the other once and for all. Of course he is no heathen but in his poetry it is absolutely impossible for one to find that radiant grace that one finds, let’s say, in the distinctly religious poetry of Khomyakov, or in that of our more recent poets like Kublanovsky, people who think of themselves as practising Christians. It seems to me that there is nothing of that in Joseph’s work. The religious motifs in his poetry are to be found in the meditations about higher things, about the metaphysical, about the Almighty are to be found in any poetry you care to mention which takes as its concern the existential problems of life, which cannot be dealt with without some reference to a First Cause, to God. – In an interview he once said that he if were to set about constructing a theology, it would be a theology of language. 10 Why does he consider it necessary to single out language and turn it into a sort of model of the world?

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– I think that that is one of his principal ideas. And it’s no accident. Maybe I’m mistaken, but the idea arose specifically during his period of exile from Russia. Now poetry is impossible without its own world, without it own home, without its own material. When Russia was so far away he had to find a substitute, maybe even something better than the real, material Russia in the midst of which I, for one, live. And that substitute for Russia was language, something which was more concentrated, purer and free of any of the constraints of reality; it is Russia’s best face. – What gives rise to the extreme tension in Brodsky’s poetic diction, with his conscious turn towards language’s metonymic pole, that is to say, towards prose? – As Pushkin said, prose demands thought and yet more thought. I have noticed one thing which I find rather strange. When I was reading his essay on Byzantium (L, pp. 393 - 446) I noticed one strange device he makes use of. A lot of his paragraphs, of his propositions, are dealt with in the writings of historians, in encyclopaedias and in other books, and Joseph is quite clearly avoiding all that rather antiquated stuff in order to come to some fresh conclusion. And in the process he’s giving himself a very difficult intellectual task – the resolution of all those problems which loom very large on the historical horizon: the Crusades; the Eastern question; the nature of oriental despotism. And there isn’t a hint that he knows anything about that. He brings to bear the full force of his intellectual powers in order somehow to resolve everything anew, to give new answers to old questions. His prose moves at the pace it does because he carries out the intellectual task he has set himself without once making reference to those who have preceded him along that road. Something of the sort is to be seen at work in his poetry as well. It seems to me that there are to be found in the stratum of his poetry that lies closest to the surface, above all else, two very powerful, extremely highly charged qualities. The first is an intellectual power of an extremely unusual kind. There is nothing banal, nothing borrowed in his poetry. Even those subtle borrowings which are accepted by the very best poets, and which are certainly not to be censured, are absent in his poetry. Joseph tries to resolve every question in his own way; he always forces his brain into overdrive. And secondly, you have his remarkable powers of observation. His sight is of a very special kind, more powerful

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than any other I know, picking up on minute details like some very technologically advanced camera that’s used for taking pictures from a satellite. That’s the way his sight works. Sometimes it takes in whole continents, sometimes a fleeing cat, sometimes a barrel lying broken on the ground. These qualities are all, somehow, prosaic in nature. He has a prosaic kind of talent which, evidently, has allowed him to become the last great innovator to appear in Russian poetry. All that pure playing with words that is flourishing now in Moscow is (perhaps I’m being old-fashioned, I don’t know) very ephemeral, one day here, the next it gone. Whereas Joseph has been busy creating a whole new system, based on the supplanting of conventional poetics. Because no matter how great, how remarkable, Russian poetry has exhausted its poetic means, they being conventional. And he, by introducing such a quantity of prosaic elements, in thought and in vision – and vision means pictures, description, the outward appearance of things, the texture … – And in the choice of his vocabulary. – The choice of vocabulary always comes down to one of two things: either the conventional vocabulary of poetry or the precise, determinate vocabulary of prose. It’s as if he had entered a new city. So far he’s passed through perhaps only a few of its neighbourhoods, but beyond them lie as-yet-unexplored streets, squares and new housing estates, as yet unknown to anybody. Meanwhile we are still stuck in some far-off corner of the continent. And Brodsky has this city of his, which he discovered and into which he has entered; it’s there thanks to his introduction of the prosaic into poetry. – Has Brodsky gone beyond the bounds of the Russian cultural model; has he even gone beyond the bounds of the Russian mentality? – Yes, I think he has. – To what extent does that involve that Anglo-American poetry of which Brodsky was, is, so fond? – I believe it’s got a very great deal to do with it. At this point I ought really to be a bit more precise in my approach, with references to diverse English and American poets, whose work I, again, only know in translation. It’s rather an ancient story, but I can refer here to what he himself has said on the subject. What he said was that there had to be a change of alliances. Russian poetry in the past had always been allied with the French and Latin tradition while we had completely

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ignored the Anglo-American tradition, despite the influence of Byron, which had seemed of such great importance at the beginning of the nineteenth century but which had in reality been only a conventional veneer. Byron as a personality had had an impact, but nothing of any importance had been adopted, either from the language or the poetics, and it was precisely to the Anglo-American experience that we had poetically to address ourselves. And at that time he was already talking about the same things we’ve been talking today, that is, the absence of exaltation, of hysterics; the turn towards prose; the change of scale. Almost always the scale of lyrical poetry is dependent upon the scale of the poet – that that is wrong, that the scale ought to be greater, that it ought to be on the scale of a country, of a continent, of some philosophical idea, to do with religion or sociology. – Or time? – Yes, yes. – Don’t you find it rather paradoxical that Brodsky, the poet of an élite, a poet who is conscious of his greatness, should call upon himself and his readers to be modest and humble? – That doesn’t surprise me; there’s something truly aristocratic about that. Only some nouveau-riche, some fat-cat bourgeois would blow his own trumpet. Besides, I think there’s something deeper at work – it’s an attempt to get away from the notorious Russian Romantic pose which is so completely at odds with the common herd. ‘Off with you. What has a peaceloving poet to do with you?’ Brodsky, however, is like certain other poets, Kushner for instance, and I could name two or three others… In that there is even a foretaste of a new way of thinking, that is, that of an outsider, not as Gumilyov put it ‘to shepherd the people’, not a cry from the lectern or the pulpit, but complete fusion with the crowd. There is a line of Brodsky’s in his poem ‘Lagoon’: ‘an absolute nobody, a man in a raincoat’ (C, p. 40). This attempt to be the ‘man in a raincoat’ – that too is a real treasure of a find. – What does Brodsky’s lyrical hero look like in your eyes? He’s not only the ‘man in a raincoat’, he’s also ‘the man in brown’ (U, p. 38), and most of the time he’s just a man and even more often he is portrayed synecdochially: a body, a brain, a voice. Isn’t what is going on here the complete elimination of the lyrical ‘I’ from his poetry? – Yes, what you’re saying is very interesting. It needs some thinking about. Indisputably some elimination has taken place. In any case, he

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always tried to distance himself from the quasi-divine image in which in the most diverse forms of poetry, over the course of many centuries the poet has presented of himself. Brodsky has tried to appear rather ordinary: all the time he’s referring to his rotting teeth, his decaying flesh, his falling hair, there is a kind of fusion with everything that is destroyed by the ravages of time, with everything that perishes with the flesh. That’s all rather interesting and it needs some thinking about. – In the poems he has written since his departure from Russia, is the Russian theme there? Is it obvious to his Soviet readers, or is it hidden? – That depends, it seems to me, upon the texts. There are poems that are entirely devoted to the Russian theme, such as the remarkable ‘The Fifth Anniversary’ (U, pp. 70 - 3), for example. That theme runs through almost all his poems. But there’s another thing. He already sees Russia as being, to a certain extent, torn away from him, an island as it were, an Atlantis that has completed a certain historical stage and sunk into the ocean of history – and he is describing that submerged island. That the Russian theme appears, manifestly or subterraneously, in all his poems goes without saying. – How do you rate his prose, in particular his plays? To me, his plays do not seem wholly successful. However, they do have everything that is so remarkably characteristic of Brodsky: the marvellous fantasy, the first-class intellect, that masterly contrast – he knows exactly when to heighten, when to lower the tone of his writing. They are, in general, interesting, subtle pieces. I like Marbles better, Democracy, possibly less. Anyway, I find them interesting. – Doesn’t it seem to you that in prose he continues to ponder over those same two or three beloved themes of his – the theme of Time, the theme of Empire, the theme of the post-Christian epoch, when culture is permitted but deprived of its spiritual heart? – Undoubtably. I can add nothing to that, I simply have to say I agree with you. – Tell me about one of those first Brodsky evenings you presided over in Moscow just after he’d received the Nobel Prize. – That was the very first meeting. It was a very modest affair. After that I presided over several dozen Brodsky evenings, in large halls, in front of densely packed audiences, aided by several very well-known

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actors. But that very first evening was a very modest affair, and somehow I find it all the more endearing. It was held in Pushkino, a town not very distant from Moscow, in the local library. I really must also express my gratitude to the librarian and the members of the local literary society. It was just after the Nobel Prize ceremony and at the time our leadership had it in for Brodsky, and they went and got permission to hold the event in that small venue where the people were packed in so tight there literally wasn’t room to swing a cat. An actress read Joseph’s poetry and a few other people talked about him. And later there were a few grand meetings, in the Central Club of Literators, in various Palaces of Culture, some of them free, some of them not; hundreds attended, all sorts of stars. Mikhail Kozakov, for example, took part; films about Joseph were shown; cassettes of his voice were played. – His books are now being published in Russia, and will be freely available. How much of an influence for good will his poetry have upon the consciousness of his Soviet readers? – You know, I find that excruciatingly difficult to answer. His works had very large print-runs in the Soviet Union. I don’t mean the productions of the Gutenberg press, but those typewritten, Xeroxed copies of his work. Their number exceed, in many cases, the output of the officially recognised poets. Now there’s a one-volume Brodsky being brought out by Khudozhestvennaya literatura. 11 I was involved at first, but I’m no textual critic and I wasn’t involved in the book’s later stages. The print-run will be 50, 000. Almost all the writers in some way or another involved in the fate of our literature are already well acquainted with Joseph’s poetry. Most of our young poets, most of the intelligentsia, know it. I’m afraid that that edition of 50, 000 will, in no time at all, become a highly priced rarity only to be found on the bookshelves of rich bibliophiles; that, in fact, it will change nothing. By the way, the 16 May edition of Literaturnaya gazeta will be devoting an entire page to Brodsky’s poetry. – I know; they interviewed me for a ‘round table’ discussion. 12 But as well as the official book, two selections of his poetry are being published in Leningrad, Ufliand being responsible for one of them. 13 And then, it seems that another book will be coming out in Volgograd. Three or four books in total, all coming out almost simultaneously, surely something must get through to the ordinary reader?

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– No doubt. I myself live in hope of a good edition, proof-read by Joseph himself. But if several books come out, who knows …? The fact is our attitude towards poetry is undergoing a sea change. We’re becoming more European in the sense that society in general is becoming indifferent to poetry. – And that perhaps is a healthy development? – Yes, I think it is, myself. Of one thing I am convinced: the days when Evtushenko and Voznesensky had print-runs of 100, 000 and read their poetry to packed stadiums and were thought to have the answers to the vital questions of the day, are well and truly gone for ever. It’s an incredibly complicated question how the ordinary reader will react to Brodsky’s poetry. Let’s hope that the best of them will see that it is literature of the very first rank. But those who are, in some way or other, connected with culture, by their umbilical cord, if I can put it like that, they know those poems already, and they will be buying those books. – What poems would you exclude from a Selected Works? – There are a certain number of his early poems which I don’t like very much, though, by the way, they are extremely popular; I mean poems like ‘Pilgrims’ (S, pp. 66 - 7) and such like. In general I like what Brodsky has written recently. Though about seven years ago, he had this period when he seemed to be just going through the motions. Right now I can’t go through all the poems, but they seem to have been written by computer. However, you can’t judge a poet like that. I say it, and while I’m saying it I feel I’m being unfair. You need to love and value a poet and see his work as one long, flowing river, with its white water and its peaceful stretches – like life itself. And just as you can’t live your life smoothly from A through to Z, so it’s simply impossible to judge which parts are bad, which better. Life and poetry concur. – I know that several of your poems are dedicated to, addressed to Joseph. Which of them have you chosen to be included here? – The one I have chosen is a very old one. It was written in 1974 - 76 years ago now. It was the first of my poems to be addressed to Joseph following his departure from Russia. There are several other poems of mine which are dedicated to him, but let it be the first of them that’s included here.

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TO NEW ENGLAND JB The garden which I see from my first-floor window is something of a dwarf, a hirsute one to boot, with gossamer unkempt and undergrowth undipped The residence nearby’s a kindergarten where at seven on the dot the bleary kids are dropped … You’ll sympathise at least, esteemed correspondent. Our relationship has so long a pedigree it’s less epistolary than psychoanalytic. At seven on the dot the bleary kids are dropped. At twenty-five past nine myself will venture forth, exact as radar: I believe in ritual and that life is order and that order’s linked to time. But if all this be so, then space is only show, and me you may compare to a hyperphotic ray. And I would liken you to the crackling ether, to a phone call at night, to a letter with a warm greeting, an envelope that’s bosom-hid and sealed with tongue and tear in haste. As for the postman, he need not come urgently; nowadays you and I no longer plead a case for innocence or guilt, no longer trade in curses or complaints or love, though love, it must be said, was our repeated theme and once the lowering mistress of our writing desks. Esteemed correspondent, it’s fruitfulness and thirst recall to us the fact that we are still alive. For kinship’s more than blood, and land is more than mud, and speech is something more than the plundering of sound. One day a common flag will serve to cover all of us, and a common friend may chance to recall. Translated by Robert Reid

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4 5

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8 9 10 11

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In Annie Epelboin’s interview with Brodsky (July 1981), Brodsky said of Rein: ‘In my opinion, he is one of the most interesting, the most important poets in Russia today’. Brodkii, Kniga interviu, ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007, p. 138. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga interviu, op. cit., p. 114 - 127. There is no published article by Brodsky on the subject. Most probably, Rein has in mind some of Brodsky’s interviews, in particular, those given to John Glad (ibid.) and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Russkaya mysl, 3 February 1983, pp. 8 - 9, where he discusses the problems of poetics. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, op. cit., p. 114. K. K. Kuzminsky and G. Kovalyov, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980 - 6), vol. 2B, p. 233. V. Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 8. The cycle ‘Songs of a Happy Winter’ was published in full by Lev Loseff with his introduction ‘The First Lyric Cycle of Joseph Brodsky’ in the almanac Chast rechi, 1981/82, no. 2/3 (New York: Silver Age Publishing, 1982) pp. 47 - 68. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, op. cit., p. 124. Rein wasn’t able to attend that symposium. Brosdky, interviewed by Gorbanevskaya, op. cit., p. 8. A selection from the book Chast rechi, Izbrannye stikhi 1962 - 89 (Moscow: Khudozhesvennaya literatura, 1990), ed. E. L. Beznosov, was published in Literaturnaya gazeta, 25 April 1990, p. 6. The participants in the round table discussion, published in Literaturnaya gazeta, 16 May 1990, p. 6, were writer and critic Viktor Erofeev, poets Yury Kublanovsky and Aleksandr Kushner, the editor of Voprosy literatury Dmitry Urnov, and the author of this book. Five of Brodsky’s collections have been published in the Soviet Union: Nazidanie (Leningrad: SP ‘Smart’, 1990) ed. Vladimir Ufliand; Osenniy krik yastreba (Leningrad: IMA-Press, 1990) ed. Olga Abramovich, introduction by Ufliand; Chast rechi, Izbrannye stikhi 1962 - 89, ed. Eduard Beznosov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990); Stikhotvoreniya Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. G. F. Komarov (Leningrad: SP Alga-Fond, 1990); and Stikhotvoreniya, ed. Ya. Gordin (Tallin: Aleksandra, 1991).

4 NATA LYA G OR BA N E V S K AYA Natalya Evgenevna Gorbanevskaya, poet, translator and journalist was born in Moscow, 26 May 1936. She studied philology, and in Moscow she worked as a bookseller, Her work first began to appear in samizdat in 1961. She was the founder and editor of the samizdat The Chronicle of Current Events. Throwing in her lot with the Human Rights movement, she was fully conscious that her choice entailed martyrdom and exile. On 25 August 1968, she was one of the fearless seven to demonstrate on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, an event she described in her book Noon (Frankfurt, 1970). In 1969 she was arrested and imprisoned in the Kazen’ psychiatric prison-hospital. Having chosen at an early age to live the life of the spirit, Gorbanevskaya withstood all the physical and moral trials that were imposed upon her. In December 1975, together with her two sons, she left for the West, making her home, very shortly afterwards, in Paris. Until the end of 1990, she worked as a journalist for Russian Thought and since 1983 she has been the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Kontinent. She has published many collections of poetry both in the West and in Russia: Poems (Frankfurt, 1969); Shore (Ann Arbor, 1973); Three Poetry Notebooks (Bremen, 1975); Crossing the Snowy Border (Paris, 1979); Wooden Angel (Ann Arbor, 1982); Alien Stones (New York, 1983); Variable Cloud Cover (Paris, 1985); Where and When (Paris, 1985); Print (M., 1996); Last Poems of the Last Century (Tver, 2000); Tea-rose (Moscow, 2006). Her poetry has been translated into many European languages, including English: Selected Poems (Oxford: 1972); Russian Poetry: The Modern Period, ed. and trans. J. Glad and D. Weissbort (University of Iowa Press, 1978 pp. 331 - 4). Rejecting formal innovation, not resorting to deductive logic and eschewing womanly wiles, Gorbanevskaya remains the constant and consummate lyric poet. Her tragic lyricism, her moral position bind her to her epoch much more strongly than those civic themes her biography would, seemingly, impose upon her. At the ethical centre of her poetic world lies her feeling of guilt, of responsibility for the actions of others: ‘It was I who did not save Warsaw and later Prague’. She has translated many East European poets into Russian, in particular, Czeslaw Milosz’s Poetic Treattise and recently the bilingual The Selected Translations of Polish Poetry (Warsaw, 2006).

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SUBORDINAT ION

TO THE

L A NGUAGE

An Interview with Natalya Gorbanevskaya (13 July 1989, Nottingham) – When did you begin to write poetry? – That’s very difficult to tell, because, according to family tradition, I composed my first poems at the age of four. They are nothing like those which Korney Chukovsky describes in his Book, From 2 to 5. Their poetics is similar to that of my poetry of later years. I can read them to you: Душа моя парила, /а я варила суп. Спала моя Людмила, /и не хватало круп.

(My soul it was asimmer whilst I was astirring broth. Asleep was my Liudmila and the groats were not enough.)

I think, generally speaking, the same principle governs my writing even now. Later in school, at about the age of twelve, I began to put an awful lot of effort and determination into writing graceless verses in a Young-Pioneer-Komsomol-Soviet vein. Later, when I was at university, I started to write and write and write. The ball had started rolling. But since I have preserved only the poems that I’ve written since 1956, I suppose I’d have to say that I started to write in 1956, that is when I was 20 years old. – When did yours and Brodsky’s paths cross, poetically and physically? Or did you come across his poetry before your first actual real-life meeting with Joseph? – In the spring of 1960, at the time that Alec Ginzburg was putting out the third, Leningrad, issue of Syntaksis, 1 Ilya Averbakh came over from Leningrad and brought along some poems of Brodsky’s. And straight away they were included in Syntaksis. It was clear that this was a really new poet. We had heard about all the other Leningrad poets, knew who they were and were already reading something or other of theirs during those four years, between 1956 and 1960. But here

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was something completely fresh, although now I feel free to say that I don’t like Brodsky’s early verse. I don’t like ‘Pilgrims’ (S, pp. 66 - 7) and I don’t like ‘A Jewish Cemetery’ (S, pp. 54 - 5). However, that was the preliminary stage he had to go through – the stage before he could really take off. It was obvious, even at the time, that it was just a clearing of the launching pad. And of course it made an immense impression. But those people who nowadays insist on repeating ‘Pilgrims’ out of sheer nostalgia for their own lost past I consider as having been left behind by Brodsky – a long way behind. In November of that same year, 1960, Brodsky arrived in Moscow, rang me up and said he was Joseph Brodsky and he wanted to meet me and so on and so forth. Well, you can imagine this yourself – he was 20, I was 24. At the time that was a big gap in age. I was in some ways a recognised master of my craft – in Moscow at least. And we met. We walked the streets for a long, long time, talking about everything under the sun. One thing I noticed right away but I didn’t say anything to him about it: he just couldn’t bring himself to address me in the second person singular, and he didn’t want to use the second person plural. And for that reason he talked with me the way they do in Poland – in the third person: ‘And which poets does Natasha like? And what does Natasha think …?’ and so on. But, my feeling was that, generally speaking, we got on quite well and we agreed that when I went to Leningrad (I was an external student at Leningrad University) I would give him a ring and then he would introduce me to his Leningrad friends and acquaintances. I arrived, I rang. He came straightaway and took me to see Dima Bobyshev. And what’s interesting – I’m afraid that possibly no one else would say this now – is that he and Dima were on very good terms indeed. He had no qualms about taking me to see Dima, but he did have qualms about taking me to see Rein. He said to me, ‘You know what … you ring up Rein (or rather Zhenia Rein and Galia Narinskaya – now the wife of Tolia Naiman) and say that you’re a friend of Sergey Chudakov.’ You know what sort of person Sergey Chudakov is? Yes, he’s the man Brodsky dedicated ‘On the Death of a Friend’ (C, p. 31) to in 1973 and he’s still among the living. Yes, he’s a man who, even then, enjoyed a very dubious reputation. But as it was Joseph who told me – and I know what people from

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Leningrad are like, I know them from long experience, Leningraders always look down their noses at those of us who happen to come from Moscow, I ring and say: ‘Hello! I’m from Moscow. I’m an acquaintance ... of Sergey Chudakov.’ It was very hard for me to say that, it stuck in my throat: ‘I’m an acquaintance of Sergey Chudakov, my name’s Natasha Gorbanevskaya.’ ‘Ah!’ Galia said, ‘Natasha Gorbanevskaya! We know about you. Come on over.’ And everyone was to be there: Tolia and Era (Naiman’s first wife) arrived, and Joseph himself came back to check up on how I was being received, and Dima came. And, generally speaking, everything went fine. Then, as years went by, it became quite a celebrated incident, sure to provoke laughter – how Joseph had insisted that I present myself as being an acquaintance of Sergey Chudakov’s. – And did you know Chudakov? – I knew him, I’d met him at Alec Ginzburg’s place. I really was an acquaintance of his and he was an acquaintance of mine but we didn’t feel any particular sympathy for each other. – Well, we’ve brought him in, we’ve mentioned the fact, that Brodsky dedicated the poem ‘On the Death of a Friend’ to him. Could you say to what extent the portrait that Brodsky paints of him is true to life? – It corresponds to the biographical facts but not really to the inner truth. Sergey Chudakov was what’s called a ‘bad boy’. In 1968, after Ginzburg’s trial (and they were considered to be friends) he turned out to be a coward as well. When he was asked to sign a petition being got up amongst Ginzburg’s friends, he wouldn’t admit to being afraid and he shouted out that we were provocateurs. And later he got involved in some criminal affairs and vanished from sight. But he is alive. There is an interesting story that links him and my first Soviet appearance in print. Some lads from the Moscow Komsomolets sought me out, of their own accord, and said that they would very much like to print some of my poems. I gave them some poems and thought that would be the last of it. And it really was a long time before anything came of it. Then suddenly, at some concert or other, I met up with Sergey Chudakov, and he said to me, ‘Do you know that your poems are appearing in tomorrow’s Moscow Komsomolets?’ You see how everything somehow comes together.

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– Did Brodsky’s poetry in any way give your own poetry a push forward? – I can’t say that that was the case. I can say what I felt about his poetry. I liked it very much indeed. But the first two years, his writing wasn’t at that level… though, let’s admit it, I did like ‘Procession’ (S, pp. 156 - 222) a lot but not as a whole. For me Brodsky really got started in 1962, with ‘Procession’ and ‘Christmas Romance’ (S, pp. 76 - 7), and with the other poems of that year. They helped me to enter Brodsky’s poetic world once and for all. For me the difference between ‘The Procession’ and ‘Petersburg Romance’ 2 is that the latter is all drill, drill, drill. ‘Procession’, on the other hand, if you look at it from today’s vantage point, appears imperfect; but it’s still Brodsky. Already it’s the real Brodsky. He’s taken off, he’s flying. How’s he flying? Perhaps at some point or other he starts to roll or loop the loop and he makes a bit of a hash of it – that’s not important. He’s already making a go of doing those highly skilled flying manoeuvres. It’s no longer just drill. – Bearing in mind that you’re such different poets, it’s evident that, both today and in the past, you haven’t been able to accept everything that Brodsky’s done? – The thing is that I’m always looking not for a poem but for a poet. And here I’ve found a poet. And, in general, I accept almost everything that Brodsky has written. Later I don’t know where and when I found ‘Zofya’. 3 I’m mad about ‘Zofya’. Ah, it was at Misha Meilakh’s, and he said, ‘Brodsky hasn’t given permission for it to be copied.’ But never mind, I sat myself down and I copied it and I gave copies to other people. I was Brodsky’s publicity agent. I pushed him everywhere I went. I remember I was invited to appear at the Institute of Eastern Studies and after I had read my own pieces I read a huge chunk of ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 - 55). I was really crazy about that poem. I’d already understood then that Brodsky’s approach was very different to mine. One evening he and I were sitting together in that apartment of his – in a room and a half – at the time when ‘Isaac and Abraham’ had not yet been finished. He read bits of it to me and summarised the other parts in detail. I couldn’t understand such an approach. It wasn’t for me. In 1961, for the last time I tried to write something in the form of a poema. And I couldn’t do it. My approach

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is just so different. I think the only thing we have in common, and I’m running ahead of myself here, is that we both have the same idea that the poet is the language’s instrument. It’s hearing and heeding. – Subordination? – Subordination, but not submission. You don’t have to be submissive. You have to make the language jump with joy. – The question of language is absolutely central to Brodsky’s poetics, and Brodsky’s poetic ideology. And I’m very glad that his ideas on language are very close to yours. And as it is your fate, like Brodsky’s, to live outside of your own land, tell me what effect does it has have on a poet living in exile? – I have already written on the subject in Russkaya mysl 4. It’s very interesting, the difference I observed between what happens to prose writers and what happens to poets. Considerably more of the poets living in the West know the language of the country they live in than do the prose writers. That’s because for a prose writer it’s dangerous, whilst for a poet it’s a source of new potency. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is. I know that a poet is in conflict with that language, with his knowledge of that language. Moreover, it’s a conflict in which he takes a prizes as one of the vanquished. And not just of the language, but also of that collision of languages. I and Joseph are both hosts to a third language – Polish. And there you have a very interesting collision between two languages which are very close to one another. And after my experience of spending two weeks in Poland, during the August of 1988, I have to say that the collision is extremely severe. On my return I had to translate my own thoughts from Polish into Russian. They intrude upon one another. I remember Alexis Rannit said to me, a long time ago, ‘You know, I’ve never met anyone with such a large vocabulary as you.’ I think in exile my vocabulary has grown even larger. I think that we poets are in general enriched by the experience of emigration, of exile. Well, if we don’t snivel, and it has to be said that neither I nor Joseph nor Lyosha Loseff snivel – that is, if we don’t just start to describe the exotica or start getting nostalgic – in-so-far as we are submissive to the language, we bring to it everything that we can beg, borrow or steal from other languages. And the language, in-so-far as it is grateful to us, has yet more to give us in return. It begins to affect some nerve

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cells or other within us which had possibly stopped functioning. And that’s a very interesting thing, because a poet doesn’t find exile horrifying, whilst it cannot be said that exile is a test for a prose-writer. – And what role does the knowledge of an alien poetic language play, be it Polish or French, as in your case, or American and English, as in Joseph’s case? Does that lead to an enrichment of one’s poetics, not just to an enrichment of one’s vocabulary? – Not just one’s vocabulary, but also one’s syntax. But it’s rare that it has an effect on one’s poetics as such. I think that in order to be affected by an alien poetics one has to have been born into an environment where both poetics are common currency. – But in Joseph’s case, perhaps because he teaches English poetry and knows and loves it so well, one can trace precisely at the level of his poetics the course of the Anglo-American current. – That could well be so but, on the other hand, he finds what he’s looking for in Anglo-American poetry. He doesn’t want to grow fat on the whole of Anglo-American poetry, he’s looking for what interests him most. I can’t say that’s true of myself and French poetry. – But what do you get out of your reading of Polish poetry? You’ve translated and you are translating a lot of Polish poetry and you know it a lot better, really, than you do French poetry. – There is no doubt about it. I know very little French poetry. I read it with difficulty, because I just can’t seem to find a way in which to relate to it, there is no familiar landmark. Step by step I’ve made Polish poetry a part of myself, to such an extent that there are familiar landmarks by which I can find my bearings. But I think the Polish language has more effect upon me than Polish poetry does. – Let’s go back to Brodsky, and to your relationship with his poetry. What attracts and what repels you in his poetry? – I’ll tell you what I find repellent, even extremely repellent. Much as I love Brodsky’s work, and I love it very much indeed, there are things in it which in another poet would leave me indifferent, but which in him I almost hate. There was ‘From a School Anthology’ (O, pp. 119 - 27) and ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ (O, pp. 177 - 218). Then Joseph left Russia. His first new poems began to filter through. Again I was over the moon. I copied his poems and sent them to friends who were in the camps. Then my turn to leave came as well.

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I had one very memorable telephone conversation with him. He was sending a fresh consignment of poems to Kontinent and he asked, ‘What do you think of my doggerel?’ I said, ‘They are very good.’ And somehow or other I was thinking timidly to myself, ‘How can I go shoving my opinion in the face of this busy man.’ But I said to him, ‘You know, Joseph, in the last years, just before you left Russia, for me your poems fell into two camps – there were those I loved and there were those I didn’t like at all. But from the moment you went abroad I found I loved all your poems beyond belief.’ I was saying these words and I was thinking: ‘My God! What an idiot I am! Why on earth I am saying this?’ And suddenly Joseph said in this childish voice ‘Really?’ And I knew that he’d needed to hear someone say what I’d just said. My God! And I was really frightened. And surely, in America or somewhere over there in Antarctica, they all say that to him, don’t they? But it turns out that nobody is saying that. And I have to say that that’s still my opinion now. – Does it also mean that you still don’t like such of his masterpieces as ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’? – Ah, here I’m going to tell you this other story. Last year or the year before, when I was working for Radio Liberty, there was published in Neva a story by the Leningrad writer Mikhail Chulaki, a very decent sort of man. The action of the story took place in the psychiatric hospital which is situated on the River Priazhka. It was an honest story. And I broadcast it in two parts. I told my audience that the story concerned the same ‘Priazhka’ described by Aleksandr Blok, the same ‘Priazhka’ where Brodsky was incarcerated in 1964. In the course of preparing the broadcast I decided to select an extract from ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ and I became engrossed; that is, I realised that the poetics which previously had left me cold now suddenly made complete sense. Earlier, it had seemed to me that his poetics branched in two different directions. And that poetics which previously I had found it impossible to accept, I now saw as being part of a single current that flowed through his whole work. Perhaps, to a lesser extent though, it’s there too in the ‘School Anthology’. He’s the poet for me. Simply my favourite poet. I really do think that he is the best living Russian poet. And the best Russian poet in general, after Akhmatova

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and Mandelstam, that is. In the interim I don’t see anyone who can in the least match him. – Why have you excluded Tsvetaeva whom Brodsky valued so much that he said ‘she is the most grandiose phenomenon that Russian poetry ever knew’? 5 – I think Brodsky loves Tsvetaeva out of sheer contradiction. He is too much in dread of the label ‘Akhmatova’s pupil’ because, despite all that he’s said about her, he still hasn’t given her her due. And though it’s true that Akhmatova didn’t teach us pure poetics, she did impart to us an attitude towards poetics, and an attitude towards poetry. I think that our generation’s debt to Akhmatova is as yet unpaid. Joseph’s trying to get rid of, as it seems to him, the millstone of being called one of ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’. 6 You saw the photographs where they all stand by her coffin, and those photographs are everywhere. You’ve probably heard the next story I’m going to tell you already from someone else, but anyway I want to tell it again. I was there when someone, I don’t remember who it was, asked Anna Andreevna whether her poem ‘No longer will I mourn my life’ is about Brodsky? She said, ‘You’re out of your mind! That hallmark of failure!?’ She was indignant. And everyone thought that ‘the golden hallmark of failure’ was about Brodsky because he is red-haired and he was languishing in exile. I don’t remember her words verbatim, but there was no sort of failure involved – on the contrary. 7 – Do you know what Joseph’s attitude is to your poetry? – On that subject I can tell you a very interesting story. It never really interested me what Joseph felt about my poetry because, all in all, my relationship with other people is not based upon how they view my poetry. There may be people I dislike who may want to kiss the ground upon which I walk, but that wouldn’t make me like them any the more. There may be people whom I like but who either don’t like poetry in general or who don’t like my poems in particular. I couldn’t care less. There may be isolated cases when a relationship with a person gets going because he or she likes my poems, but that alone can’t be a cause for friendship. As to Joseph’s attitude to my poems, I have never asked. By the way, it has to be said that the Lenigrad clique only recognised my work after Akhmatova had given me her seal of approval. With the exception, perhaps, of Dima. It was Dima

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Bobyshev who first took me along to see Akhmatova in 1961, unsuccessfully as it turned out. We arrived in Komarovo while Akhmatova was away in Moscow. I was already pregnant then. And the following winter I didn’t go to Leningrad. Then I met Akhmatova in Moscow, in the May of 1962. – And who introduced you to her in Moscow? – I met her off my own bat really. I was at the office of the Literary Gazette and I was saying, ‘I’m shortly going for a few days to Leningrad, and I’m going to meet Akhmatova.’ And Galia Kornilova said, ‘But Akhmatova’s in Moscow. Give her a ring.’ ‘Just like that?’ ‘Here’s her telephone number, sit down and ring her!’ I rang her up and there you are, I met her without any formal introduction whatsoever, just like that. And when I arrived in Leningrad later, for my university examinations, everyone saw me in a quite different light. What’s more, when I arrived at the university and went into the department they said to me, ‘Akhmatova’s singing your praises.’ And then they all acknowledged me, but of course as they were Leningraders they still had some reservations about my worth. I think it was Tolia Naiman who took the longest to acknowledge me. My friendship with Tolia was rather a tardy affair; it began in 1969 just before my arrest. I’ve got my own hypotheses as to why it took so long, but I don’t really see that it is necessary for me to go into that here and now. – Well, how was it that you found out what Joseph’s attitude is to your poetry? – There was a celebrated episode of which I knew nothing until later. It was Dima who told me about it, and we were both out of the country by then. This is the story that Dima told, and which Tolia has now published in his book. 8 Anna Andreevna said to them, ‘You’re four poets; in order to be a school, you need a poetess. Take Gorbanevskaya.’ And one day, it was when Joseph had come to Paris, and he and I walked and talked a great deal (it has to be said, it wasn’t for my sake: he didn’t as a rule have all that much time for strolling about. But that was when Kublanovsky came to the West. And we three talked and walked.) And it was somehow astonishing that he talked such a lot about Dima and so warmly, insisting on calling him Mitia. For me that was totally unexpected, but maybe that’s what Marina used to call him, 9 there was, somehow, so much, how can I put, fellow feeling,

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sympathy almost. And I told to him what Dima had said to me, that Anna Andreevna had told them to ‘take me’. And he said, ‘We did the right thing in not taking you.’ Well, what’s said is said. Either way, I didn’t mind much; if they didn’t take me, they didn’t take me. And subsequently I gave Brodsky my poems so that he could pass them on to Sasha Sumerkin, whom I had known for a very long time but who had become a fan of my poetry only after his emigration from the Soviet Union. 10 And Joseph suddenly rang me up and said: ‘Natalya, we didn’t do the right thing when we didn’t take you. I have been sitting here reading your poems. Véronique here will bear witness to that.’ 11 Veronique told me later that he read them out loud to her and that he read each poem twice. He was particularly taken by the poem, ‘Classical Ballad’. 12 Do you remember that poem? – ‘And one silence said to the other’. But I don’t remember what year it was written? – It is a poem of 1983, and the conversation that I’m talking about took place at the beginning of 1984. The important thing was that he felt the need to ring up. And in the first place, it wasn’t to comfort me, and in the second place, he’d just given me his opinion of my poetry and he suddenly goes and changes it, radically, which as a rule, it seems to me, is something he just doesn’t do. It really was very, very touching. – Looking at Brodsky’s work in its entirety, do you see any sort of evolutionary changes taking place: sudden breaks, high spots, about turns? – I think that for me to answer that question I need to have a look at his books. I think the very first period, that is up until 1960, was simply his apprenticeship; then, from 1960 to 1962, there was the time when, how can I put it, he ripened, he broke out of his shell. And then he grew, grew, grew. Naturally enough, his progress wasn’t linear. There was, I think, a lot of twisting and turning, a lot was borrowed from the poetry of previous generations, and a lot of things were thrown overboard, so that eventually there emerged this productive strain capable of engendering something absolutely new. – Because of the repetition in his work of certain ideas, of certain concepts, some people claim that Brodsky has lost the ability to surprise

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them, that he’s predictable because they know beforehand that he’s going to say the same old things. – How can that be? I don’t understand it. What do they mean, the same things? After all, if you take, for example, – Brodsky himself would approve of what I’m going to say, – any mediaeval Chinese artist, he would be capable every day of drawing the same branch, over and over again. – And for Brodsky that branch is the concept of time? – There is no doubt about that. Only he writes about time using the concept of space. Take his poem ‘Letters from the Ming Dynasty’ (U, p. 88): ‘The thousand li road starts with one / step …’ It’s being divided by the ocean and so on and so forth. If we were to explore it at the metaphysical rather than the poetical level, then it is the category of Time-Space as a unity that is, possibly, the sole entity that brings our poetics in close alignment with one another. I wrote a little poem, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of Joseph at the time, Двойняшки, расстояние и время, Меня признали названной сестрой (The twins of space and time have taken me as their adopted

sister). Time – a hyphen – Space, I think that’s important. Time on its own and space on its own are capable of nothing. Though our poetics approach all that from completely different directions. – How, in spite of your love for Joseph and his poetry, have you succeeded in remaining independent? Weren’t there temptations? Or did you realise that it was not possible to imitate him? Or was there no need? – The last thing you said hits the nail on the head – there was no need at all. My God, it’s just so wonderful that such a poet exists. And he’s here now. I can hear his verses singing in my head, but when I come to write my own poetry there’s something completely different singing in me. And at the same time I hear what Brodsky is saying possibly better than anyone else. Take this example; not long ago I was writing an article about the events in China, in particular about the opposition which is now being formed in exile, and I brought in the poem ‘The thousand mile road begins with one li’ and I noticed his play with phonetics: тысяча означает, что ты сейчас вдали (a thousand means that you’re now afar). Not everyone hears that, by any means.

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– Isn’t that because the alliteration in your own poetry, which is at times extremely insistent, is continuously breaking off abruptly? – Yes, of course. I hear him more clearly than anyone else you care to mention. And possibly I hear him more clearly than I understand him intellectually. And for that reason you can’t really expect me to give you a philosophical interpretation of his poetry. – Talking about Brodsky’s evolution. I would like to hear what you have to say on the subject of which Russian poets you think helped Brodsky to attain self-realisation, to become Brodsky? I think that he could answer that question better than I can, though possibly his answers wouldn’t be accurate. Suddenly he would start to make it up. And now he wants to see himself as having been Rein’s pupil. And it’s clear that Zhenia Rein did have an influence, but not as a poet; he was more someone who was at hand when he needed advice. – And from the nineteenth century, putting to one side Baratynsky, whom Brodsky himself cites, 13 who else is there you can name? Do you see him as a descendant of Pushkin? – The thing is that everyone sees their favourite poets in Brodsky. I don’t see Baratynsky. I see Pushkin. There is a poem of mine, not one of my best, that goes like this: А будь он нынешний, сейчасный, писал бы он в припадке чувств: «Я вам звоню, хоть и бешусь, хоть это стыд и труд напрасный... в собранья наших сочинений не переписка принята, но телефонные счета и неоплаченные пени.

(And were he here now this minute he would write in a flood of feeling: ‘I call you up though I’m furious, though it’s a shame and useless labour…’. In our collected works there’ll be no correspondence but telephone bills and unpaid fines).

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Whether that was after I telephoned Brodsky from the office of Kontinent, or whether it’s just about my telephone conversations with him in general, no matter, that poem for me is linked, in an indirect way, with Brodsky. My lineage comes through Pushkin - Mandelstam and Akhmatova; I see Brodsky as being in the same line. I know that he used to imitate both Kantemir and Derzhavin. – It’s more a case of his making deep bows to them. – That s all very well and all these little devices happen to work beautifully. For me there’s a line that runs through Russian poetry and that line stops at three names before it reaches Brodsky. Three names, that’s all. And for me Brodsky is taking that line straight on. Well, not straight on, though in the sense of ‘and Ivan begat Peter’. – How justified, in your opinion, is the making of any comparison between Brodsky and Pushkin? – As a poet, I will tell you that any comparison is justified given the right context. Of course, there are certain parameters which cannot be used for comparison, since Pushkin wasn’t just a poet. – Let’s take one of the parameters, the strictly linguistic one. Can we compare what they have done for the Russian language? – I don’t think so, no. Pushkin moved mountains and it’s clearly just impossible for anyone else at any time in the future to do as much as he did. We had other things to do. All of us, not just Brodsky. Incidentally, I’m not in complete agreement with him when he said. ‘We’re the last generation who hold culture more dear than anything else … etc’. First, there is no need to misuse the word culture, and, secondly, we’re not the last generation, but the first. There are other generations coming after us. We are the first generation after that break which separates us from Akhmatova and Mandelstam, the generation who really succeeded in their attempt to grasp Akhmatova’s hand, to touch her finger at least. We didn’t do it by reading books, we really did it, like in Michelangelo’s painting, we pulling that tiny thread, enriching that seam, taking unto ourselves those values. In real life, not in books, in real life. And that’s why what he says about culture and what he says about our always preferring literature to life – is simply an untruth. He’s becoming more generous. I hope it will pass. He suddenly got this bee in his bonnet about his generation. It’s an interesting idea but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Our generation, the generation of

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1956, were poets and political prisoners in the making, and cynics and apparatchiks – and there were cynics the equal of which no other generation has seen or is likely to see. People who lived through Hungary and decided that that was it – the only thing left to do was to climb the Party ladder. – Let’s go back to the idea of the line Pushkin-Brodsky. You didn’t really go into your ideas on language in any detail. – Well, here I go then. As well as Mandelstam and Akhmatova, there were Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Zabolotsky. And, to use a biological analogy, they were all of them particles in one bacteriological stew. And it is from a stew like that that a culture grows. At the very least it meant that there was a chance of fighting Soviet-speak – when it came to the crunch we at least had something to fight with. That language which existed, that magnificent subtle instrument hadn’t died, hadn’t choked. They had quite simply buried it alive, but it was a premature burial which failed to kill the intended victim. Later it was dug out, still breathing. – So you’re saying that your linguistic aims differ completely from those that Pushkin had? – Both different aims and different means. – The language’s health was in a different condition? – Yes. – Can comparing Brodsky and Pushkin be justified by citing their universality? – I think that there the comparison is justified. In the course of the last ten years Brodsky has gained quite a few enemies, a lot of people have come up who have stopped paying him his dues. The same thing happened to Pushkin – because one has to move at the same speed as he does in order to understand him. But naturally enough, the universality of their personalities is quite different. Pushkin had to do it all – to write prose, to be a historian, a dramatist and a poet. Of course, it’s easier for Joseph. It’s easier for all of us. But looking at it from a different angle, because Pushkin had done his thing it is harder, because we had to do something different. – What happened to Brodsky’s lyricism? Has anything happened? He once said to me, ‘A Halt in the Wilderness is possibly my final book of lyrical poetry.’ 15 In Loseff’s opinion, Brodsky has squeezed the lyricism out of his poetry. 16

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– In as much as Joseph doesn’t want there to be any lyricism in his verse then, to that extent, one can say that all isn’t well, but it’s there. And already, right from the very start, he was striving to be an epic poet. But at the same time, you need only to look at his latest poems in Kontinent. 17 There, once more, you can see that he’s writing lyrical poetry. The lyricism is there. He can’t change his poetic make up. There’s no coldness there, no, there’s reticence, but that very reticence gives birth to a new kind of lyricism. – And do the reticence and nostalgia manage to coexist? – Nostalgia is a convenient device with something completely different in view. The theme of nostalgia does not figure in Brodsky’s poetry, it’s a device. – And in your case, is there, (was there) an element of nostalgia, either in real life or in poetry? – In real life – never. In my poetry I most definitely use nostalgia, as a device. I, of course, use it again and again. But in my everyday life – I don’t feel it, not for a second. – We will end our discussion of Brodsky’s poetry by your poems dedicated to him. THREE POEMS FOR JOSEPH BRODSKY 1 Nothing that was ours is lost – so the droughted hayfires billow. Nothing of ours is lost – the grinder’s sound is low. Nothing, neither footfall, nor sigh, nor blood, nor blood from the pores, nor the bloody debt which ties us, nothing’s lost that was ours. And the fire will speed through the grass and the fire will cling to the tree and for him who sleeps in the branch the hour of reckoning’s near. The bugle at twilight will blast, the knife on the window will scratch:

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nothing of ours is lost, nothing of ours is lost. 2 Let indifferent Telemon, one-from-faraway, be alienation’s talisman in these sombre days. Telephones and telegraphs – put them to one side; your tutelary deities in the grass blades hide. Me (the petalled runes foresee) folly will chastise in an avalanche of wreaths and of strangled cries. Fire and water are my choice: music has a flaw: lacks authority to pass through sealed carriage doors. 3 My son is small. He can’t pronounce ‘piano’ – he says ‘pain’. And I would call that fair. The element of sound’s no gain. My world, despite its grandeur, has misery not music for king. Like lamplight in limelight, like fire Between rights and right: such is parting. My world has no grandeur, only distance; it’s a resonator for long notes: helicopters droning and the persistent machine-gun’s roar. Translated by Robert Reid

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The samizdat journal Syntaksis was edited by Aleksandr Ginzburg 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. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Peterbugskii roman (poema v trekh chastiakh)’, in Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo in 7 volumes, ed. by Ya. Gordin (Spb.: Pushkinskii Fond, 1997 - 2001), vol. I, pp. 48 - 67. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Zofya’, published by V. Maramzin in Ekho, no. 3 (1978) pp. 26 - 40. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, ‘Yazykovye problemy poeta v izgnanii’, Russkaya mysl V, 9 June 1983, p. 8. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Nastignut’ utrachennoe vremia’, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, ed. V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 116. The expression of ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’ belongs to Dmitry Bobyshev. It is a line from his poem ‘Vse chetvero’ (in Ziyaniya (Paris: YMCA Press, 1977) p. 59): И, на к ла дбищенском кресте гвоздима д у ша прозрела: в черед у у трат за ходят Ося, Толя, Женя, Дима а хматовскими сиротами в ряд.

And, nailed to the graveyard cross, her soul descried: Osia, Tolia, Zhenia, Dima, enrolled into the line of losses, as orphans of Akhmatova. Trans. by Robert Reid 7

In Professor E. Etkind’s opinion, Akhmatova’s poem О своем я уже не заплач у, Но не видеть бы мне на земле Золотое к леймо неудачи На еще безмятежном челе.

What was mine I have ceased bewailing, But on earth let me not, if you will, see the gold-colored brand of failing On a fore head untroubled still. trans. Walter Arndt, in Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1976) p. 90.

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is dedicated to ‘the fate of the young poets of the beginning of 60s’. See his Protsess Iosifa Brodskogo (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1988) p. 37. Aleksandr Kushner has also interpreted this poem as being addressed to Brodsky: ‘In this poem Akhmatova with frightening intuition has predicted Brodsky’s glorious and tragic fate.’ See Kushner’s ‘Afterword’ to Brodsky’s poems published in Neva, no. 3 (1988) p. 109. A. Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (London: Peter Halban, 1991) p. 67. Marianna Pavlovna Basmanova is known to Brodsky’s readers under the initials M. B.; she is the addressee of all Brodsky’s poems included in his collection New Stanzas to Augusta. Aleksandr Sumerkin was one of the editors of a Russian publishing house in New York, Russica. Véronique Schiltz is Brodsky’s friend and an addressee of the poem ‘Adieu, Mademoiselle Véronique’ {Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1973) pp. 134 - 9). ‘Flight from Byzantium’ is also dedicated to her (L, pp. 393 - 446.). N. Gorbanevskaya, Peremennaya oblachnost (Paris: Kontakt, 1983) pp. 11 - 12. J. Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 20 April 1989, Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the French film Joseph Brodsky: Poéte russe – citoyen américain Brodsky said: ‘This is the last generation for whom culture meant and still means the main value amongst those that man has at his disposal. For these characters Christian civilisation meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. They have done their best to preserve these values, disregarding the values of the world that was springing up before their eyes.’ The films’ producers are Victor Laupan and Christopher de Ponfilly. A similar description of his generation can be found in Less than One, pp. 28 - 9. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by the author, op. cit. Lev Loseff, ‘Pervyi liricheskii tsikl Brodskogo’, in the almanac Chast rechi, 2/3 (1982 - 2) p. 63. Kontinent, no. 61 (1989) pp. 7 - 24. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Stikhi (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1969) pp. 38 - 9.

5 BELL A A KHMADULINA

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Bella Akhmadulina is a poet, translator, and essayist. She came to prominence as one of the ‘New Wave’ poets of the, so-called, Thaw period, after Stalin death. Her first collection appeared in 1962. Since then she has published many poetry collections, among which are Sound of Silence (1995), Once in December (1996); Selected poems, in three volumes (1997); Beautiful traits of my friends (1999); The Old - fashioned Syllable attracts me (2000); By the Christmas Tree (2002); With love and sadness (2003), and many others. She is one of very few poets who was able to preserve her independence in the Soviet period. As Brodsky put it: ‘…the lyricism of her poetry is largely the lyricism of the Russian language itself ’. 2 Bella Akhmadulina has received many prestigious awards, including the International Prize ‘Nosside’ (Italy 1992), the Independent Triumph Prize (Moscow, 1993); the Pushkin prize (Germany, 1994), the Russian State Prize (2005). She is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Art and Letters. Akhmadulina’s poetry has been translated into most European languages.

P ERFECTION

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H A RMON Y

An Interview with Bella Akhmadulina (31 October 1987, London) – Bella Akhatovna, it seems to me that you are one of the few Russian poets who does not suffer from a ‘Brodsky complex’. How do you explain this? Do you feel other poets suffer from it, or is it just my own fantasy? – Valya, my dear, I don’t quite understand what you mean. Do you think that some poets feel themselves somewhat shrunken in stature before Brodsky, or are you talking of his influence?

– I’m not talking about his influence in any positive way, nor how his stature and greatness is comprehended, but about how these poets, without exception, somehow want to diminish his stature, to wound Brodsky personally. – Goodness! I don’t know of any such poet. – I myself have personally met such poets, both here in the West and among those who have arrived from the Soviet Union. – I don’t mix with such poets. Besides, Joseph is perfection. – How does his presence make itself felt? – I talked of this only yesterday of the BBC Russian Service, but I can repeat it. The presence of any great poet in the world creates a marked effect on human existence. Even among those who haven’t read Brodsky… There are a few who haven’t read him. But suddenly, I myself can notice this very effect on the young poets I know. They bring their poems to me and I ask them ‘so you’ve read a lot of Brodsky then?’ and they answer ‘But where can we get hold of him?’ and I say? But you have clearly read him’. His influence is so noticeable, so widespread. I think that his presence has in some way influenced the development of minds and especially the methodology of versification among poets who are living in Russia. – Could you be more specific here, how exactly do you feel Brodsky influences these poets? – Well, among those poets I know, it is evident in their lines, rhythm, and intonation. They have read less Brodsky than myself, yet they so love Brodsky. It’s as if he were something guessed of in advance. His influence reveals itself in a certain structure, it could be said in the structure of the line. Well, you know, it’s as if Brodsky had a method, I don’t really think of it as a method as such, more as a correlation of word with word, and a transition from one line to another. It simply didn’t exist before in Russian versification. – But surely it did. This is detectable in Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva … – But what I am talking about I’ve only seen in Brodsky alone. A far stranger alignment of word with word, line with line … But in the end, the most important thing is Brodsky’s perfection, a perfection of harmony. I’m talking now only about poetry, you understand. It is an absolute perfection, his words seem to be held in some sort of formula. If something is taken out or shifted then the whole thing collapses: the line, the formula, this whole universe falls apart. Nowadays

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American and English people tell me that Brodsky’s English is itself his very own personal invention, his own unique and entirely personal form of English. And while we suffer in Russia, Brodsky is elsewhere. I think that this has been useful to him. In other words he has none of the negative qualities of narrow-mindedness, pettiness, parochialism. He is a world-wide phenomenon. Indeed, his sense of world culture, of language in general, it seems to me, reveals itself in his poetics. – As regards this, do you then think that he has derived something positive from his exile that is of use to Russian literature? – I have no doubt of it. – Even at the price of fi fteen years of emotional torment, at the cost of his health? – I have no doubt about it, even at the cost of his health. Let’s touch wood! As to his life in Russia… It was for him… at the price of such suffering, of such terror. But even so, it is the noblest, purest path. But, of course, without a doubt, exile is far better than putting in an appearance at the Luzhniki stadium. – What do you think about the fact that Brodsky has to some extent been mythologizing language, creating a solid ground for himself in exile? I know that it distresses him deeply that he has been torn from the living Russian language, and is therefore not able to follow its idiom. – Yes, indeed, his colloquialisms are very strange. – But then, Bella, aren’t yours as well? Would you not say your everyday language is a little ‘pre-Turgenev’? – My locutions and Joseph’s are quite different. His are far simpler than mine, and therefore much closer to everyday Russian speech, even in its vulgarisms. – So, do you then consider his fears to be ungrounded? – He has nothing to fear. If we’re dealing with someone of such exceptional talent as Joseph and I don’t compare him with anyone else; each person is entirely different, unique. But in exceptional cases, as with Bunin, with Nabokov, we are talking about people who have taken with them something that became… as if they created the Russian language inside themselves. He doesn’t need to hear Russian spoken around him; he himself becomes a force that is ripe. He himself is now both garden and gardener. And he has taken something with him, so that he is no longer a victim of his own absence, of his separa-

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tion from living speech. He becomes a rich soil for the Russian language to take root in. I said this at some time to Nabokov. He asked me, ‘Do you like my language?’ and I answered, ‘Your Russian, it’s the best’, and he said ‘But it seems to me that it is like a frozen strawberries’. 3 And whatever fate does… Well, with such people what is fate? Here, they seem to coincide with one another. For that matter, he himself creates the language. – Your opinion of Brodsky is so high. How would you defend him against those writers and critics who accuse Brodsky of coldness, that he has only written a few love poems, and that he looks down on the reader? – I have neither listened to, nor have I met such fools. – Do you think that he is a cold poet? – Goodness! No! How could that be said. He’s written a great many poems about love. I’ve read every one that he’s written. – So then, you think such criticism should be ignored and brushed aside? – Of course it should! How could such criticism have been made about him? Certainly, as must be the case, he provokes all sorts of attitudes from people, but why should we talk about total fools? – Fair enough, but let me ask you, if I may, to defend Brodsky from one particular poet, whom you know, Krivulin. He wrote two articles about Brodsky, and stated that when Brodsky appeared, Anna Akhmatova repeatedly said that a new blossoming had occurred in Russian poetry. – She was right. – But he goes on to state that now, Brodsky has matured, his presence in Russian poetry is evidence that Russian poetry is at an impasse, an ‘extended crisis’, end of blossoming. 4 – I didn’t know that he had set himself up as a judge of poetry. Brodsky is, without doubt, the only proof of this blossoming in Russian poetry. – How would you explain in fact that, despite the long friendship that existed between Brodsky and Akhmatova, almost nothing of her style is reflected in his idiom? How is it that despite her great spiritual and cultural influence on him, he is in fact closer stylistically to Khlebnikov and Tsvetaeva, than to her?

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– What is important here is this. We have in Brodsky one whose greatest feature in his innate ability to take on board the culture of the whole world. Taking into account the kind of education he had, it is a personal triumph. It is Fate that has so prescribed … He relates to the whole universe, its cultural treasures, classical, Biblical, and contemporary. It is indeed a very personal victory. He is the only person, I know who has absorbed everything that is best. The poverty of life is not evident in his work. As to the influence of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, there are two happy proofs: her perfection and the perfection of Brodsky. She immediately understood the nature of the miracle we now talk about. I believe, that stylistically, too, she has influenced him. But it would be a fruitless search to locate it and what would it prove anyway? This man takes from everywhere for himself. But the most important thing is his ability to comprehend the essence of life, our debt to it. – But, also, for a researcher of Brodsky’s work, seeking to establish his Russian roots, we must try to arrive at something more concrete. As well as Krivulin, I would like to quote from Karabchievsky. In his book ‘The Resurrection of Mayakovsky’, he established a link between Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva, which is not difficult to see. But he also maintained that there is a link between Mayakovsky and Brodsky, insisting that Mayakovsky has been resurrected and is alive in Brodsky. 5 Perhaps we can say Karabchievsky has not read all Brodsky? – I have read Karabchievsky’s book, but I don’t remember this bit. Besides, I think that even taking into account Mayakovsky’s talant and his tragic fate, Mayakovsky and Brodsky are absolute opposites, the anti-thesis of one another. Mayakovsky was a tragically unfulfilled man, but Brodsky is tragically fulfilled. If they can be compared in any way it is only in their utter opposition to one another. – Bella, I would like to ask you about your personal connection with Brodsky, with his poetry. Having recently re-read your poems very carefully I noticed that two particular themes appear to dominate in your work: time and language. The themes that are themselves most dominant in Brodsky’s work. He sometimes speaks with time itself, addressing it in its ‘pure form’. Is this thematic similarity between you entirely coincidental? – My particular relationship to Brodsky can be described quite simply: uncritical, one of adoration. I myself have stated somewhere in

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connection with Akhmatova: ‘Of all calamities, adoration is the worse’. An admirer can never expect his adoration to be returned. And I am sure, that Joseph… I never think about myself when I think about him. And even when they said to me ‘you know, what Brodsky thinks of you!’ (Thumb downward). As he pleases. But it is my business to talk about him with thumbs up. – This is not true at all. I have spoken to him about you. – I have nothing but affectionate feelings. And it’s just as I stated only yesterday, when I heard about the Nobel Prize … By the way I always knew that Brodsky would receive it. I only thought that I wouldn’t live to see it. If we can call it the highest recognition as such, then I interpret it as a sort of personal triumph of my own. It coincided with my feeling of affection towards Brodsky, with my friendship with him, how I understand him. Such a pleasure! As if it were my own achievement. I am happy to have lived to see it. Whatever happens after that, only one thing is important, his good health. Later all the specialists and scholars will study his work to understand his contribution to Russian literature. I am sure that there will be a lot of research and much written about him. For me, he is the confirmation that Russian poetry is alive and has not dried up. – All the same, I don’t want to allow you to move off the question. So I put it to you more concretely. You have written a poem entitled ‘The Butterfly’, which has something in common with Brodsky’s poem ‘The Butterfly’ not only in name, but also thematically. – Mine is far simpler. It was indeed the 16th October and there really was a butterfly trapped between the window panes. Even now I remember this butterfly, ‘October, the sixteenth, Tuesday – And the day of resurrection of my butterfly’. 6 – What is most noticeable is that your butterfly and Brodsky’s provoked similar thoughts about life, death, existence and non-existence. – Brodsky is closer to me than any contemporary writer or poet. As for his thoughts concerning life and death, they are quite remarkable, His perception of eternity is so real that it is sad to read, as though he touched non-existence. – Bella, I want to put one more question to you. It concerns the future, I’ll ask you now: Pushkin and Brodsky. For some it is a blasphemy, for others entirely realistic.

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– But why should it be? In the first case, we all follow somehow in Pushkin’s footsteps. Pushkin is what we are all about, and we all kneel before Pushkin… Perhaps Brodsky is the second coming of Pushkin. Perfection and perfection. In the second place, Brodsky less than anyone else is guilty before Pushkin, before his harmony. – But this is still more complicated, because behind all of you stand ‘The magnificent seven’: Blok, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. They are still so close to you, that, whether you like it or not, you can feel their breath on your neck. And here we compare one of you over their heads with Pushkin. Surely, a contemporary of Brodsky cannot accept such a comparison. – Why not? I can, because there is no poet in the world at this time who is better than Brodsky. – Even including those who don’t write in Russian? – Well, perhaps there are. I don’t read much. – Does it ever occur to you that the role of Pushkin falls on Brodsky not only by virtue of his talent and fate, but also by the very demand of the Russian language? – Could you make yourself a little clearer? – In the last seventy years of the Soviet state, such changes have occurred in the Russian language that a poet was needed who would record all these changes in the most perfect poetic form and also endow his verse with the eternal problems of existence. – But clearly Pasternak and Akhmatova lived in this period. And they too preserved the Russian language. – But they didn’t permit such democracy in their poetic language which we can observe in Brodsky, It’s all there in his poetry: colloquialisms, camp-slang, Soviet bureaucratic jargon, foul language, archaisms, etc. – It is a miracle. An absolute miracle. And indeed in this sense we can compare Brodsky with Pushkin. It is accepted that our poetic language begins with Pushkin. It’s absolutely characteristic of Brodsky. His language is unprecedented, unheard of before. Entirely his own discovery. In this sense he is a poet for a new age. Such a grandiloquent and at the same time colloquial style! It’s simply remarkable! There is absolutely nothing like it. And everything is included in it. But I’m not a scholar… It seems to me, though, as if he were a completion of something and…

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– What you perhaps mean is that if for us he represents the pinnacle of Russian poetry, its highest point, for the future generation he will be a new point of departure. A beginning of something. – I have no doubt that he will. – You have already spoken a little a propos his link with world and European culture. Do you consider him to be one of our most European poets? – Yes, certainly, I do. – Even more European than Mandelstam? – But we must bear in mind when Mandelstam was born and when Brodsky was. Communion with world culture is something that was true of Mandelstam too. We have already talked about this. It only goes to show, of course, that it seems to be just one feature of genius. – Do you think that Brodsky’s poetry would have been different if he had remained in Russia? – You know, of course, that hypothetical speculations of that kind are utterly fruitless. We can never know the answer. Would he have been able to survive there? – I asked him the same question. Brodsky said that what would have happened to him personally, had he remained in Russia is not an important question. 7 – Fate also will not admit hypothetical speculations. But it seems to me that the tragedy of Brodsky’s separation from Russia is not so much a personal tragedy for him as a tragedy for the people who live there. All the same, his poetry will remain. It will always exist. I think that Brodsky even in the geographical outcome that his fate has imposed on him can consider himself lucky. Everything has turned out for the best. – ‘All will be as it should’, said Woland to Margarita; ‘that’s how the world is made’. What is the essence of Brodsky’s conflict with the Soviet state? Why is he so unacceptable to them? – It’s quite simple really; they perceive him differently. In what way is Brodsky at odds with the state? It is simply there is no… On the contrary… Well, generally a poet and the state never get on. They have no particular reproaches. We must hope, though, that he will be published there. 8

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– But the conflict still remains. What do you think is the real source of this conflict? Clearly none of Brodsky’s other ‘ famous contemporaries’ experienced this. – It is and always will be the same conflict. As it was with Pushkin, so with Brodsky. As far as my knowledge of the official opinion of the Soviet Union now goes, they have nothing against Brodsky. But all this is so petty in comparison to Brodsky’s talent. So why talk about it. It is not a question of the official view, but an appreciation of his talent. This kind of conflict always has existed and always will in Russia. How could it be otherwise? A poet is a poet, a state is a state. And no-one gets any satisfaction or comfort from this. – Fine, let’s return to poetry. The fact is that Brodsky is separated from the Russian reader, and more important, Russian readers are separated from Brodsky… – No, there is only one relevant point here and it is that Brodsky is distressed because of this separation. At any rate, Brodsky’s poems are the best we now have in Russian poetry. – Yes, but his poetry is not accessible to the majority of Russian readers. – True, it is not accessible. But we cannot have everything at once. If we already have a great Russian poet in the world we can’t be capricious and demand that all must be as it should. Yes, we cannot read him now, but eventually we will be able to. – I really wonder, though, if Soviet readers are ready for Brodsky’s poetry. – They are ready, quite ready. – But do you really think that if all his work were to be published tomorrow he would be popular? – You wouldn’t be able to get your hands on a copy for a start! – Is this perhaps because he was banned. – That’s not the point. – But clearly he is a difficult poet to understand. – Difficult, yes, but there are a large number of people in Russia who can think. You wouldn’t be able to get your hands on it. Despite the complexity of his poetry, he has plenty of admirers. I see this in a historical perspective: we can’t read him today, but we will be able to read him tomorrow. What’s the difference?

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– But you and I, we have already read him. – And if Brodsky is going to or hopes to return, and… – Do you think he will return? – I don’t know, you should ask him. – Since he already answered this question in one of his interviews I can quote him. He said he would return to Russia on one condition only, that everything he has written be published there. 9 – Well then, in reality that means never. Fate cannot accept a chance twice. But if he wanted to visit… It makes me weak all over to think of it, his appearance in Leningrad. – How would he be received there? – With devotion, adoration. With utter adoration. – There is one more theme which I would like to discuss. One in fact of importance to Brodsky. He seems to think that we are standing at the threshold of a post-Christian era, if indeed we have not already crossed it. This is something which he expressed fully in his poem ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ which was written in 1966, and more recently in his play ‘Marbles’. Could you comment on this? Are his fears justified? Does this idea of an end disturb you? – Yes, indeed, Brodsky has expressed this idea very strongly. I think, that if everything has died for a while, it will be reborn again, so it will exist. There are no other possibilities. Unless of course everything turns to dust. Because it is harmony, and harmony can never be destroyed by artificiality. It can be disturbed, frustrated, but destroyed forever? That is impossible. Incidentally, Brodsky’s poems are … I don’t know what to call it, reflections on God? A poet always address only God, the rest … – In this sense then, do you agree that a poet can never in reality be an unbeliever? – I do. Returning to Pushkin, we can say he was an atheist. And he suffered for it. But who behaved in a Christian way and followed its ethics more than Pushkin? His goodness, his pity for others. – Do you think then that the term ‘Christian’ poet is redundant? – Yes. The gift is by God’s grace. – Bella, could you say a little about yourself? What is it that you cannot help but write about in your poetry?

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– Well, what is there to say? You’ve read my books, you know me well enough. I can only say that in all these years I have been able to help those who live in Russia. They needed me. Look, Brodsky is elsewhere, but I am there, on the spot. I managed in some way to comfort them. Brodsky is superior to me, but he is a long way away. – Bella, this is just your innate modesty. But let me now tell you this from my conversation with Brodsky, so as to prove to you that the gesture which someone showed to you does not tally with what he said about you. He said that Bella is one of the few Russian poets living in Russia who by some miracle has succeeded in preserving her purity, conscience and independence. That is, that you have not accepted compromise, like some others; you have resisted the temptation of topicality to which so many others have succumbed. How did you manage this? – Well, that means something is lacking in those people. I always, when talking about Brodsky, repeat that fortunately for him there were no petty and vulgar temptations offered to him, such huge audiences and stadiums. And I had all this. How did I manage? Well, I think a person has some sort of guiding light. Without doubt, something or someone looks after us from on high. But you yourself must also take care. Sometimes I hear a voice saying ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do this!’ And I listen. And somehow I have been granted a pardon. And I can then write. But this is not enough. We must still look out for ourselves, examine our conscience. But let us not forget, not everything is foreordained. That’s it I think. Translated by James Lipsett FUNERAL GONDOLA Music is higher than literature, But let me pass the unknown place, golden lion of Venice. St. Mark, forgive me, light in the window, all my sins, my feverish brow, my handshaking palm. Brow in palm, I still see a funeral gondola. Enduring March, equal to April’s greeting. I am sitting motionless, on guard, ready.

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Night swims towards my brow, its gondolier a darkening presence. A wintry April turns into bright autumn. What is there, beyond last spring? Maybe it’s more peaceful, easier there, Joseph. The Island of the Dead, the eternal waters nearby. The island, subject of my thoughts, is not far, a familiar place, open to the embrace of neighbouring places. How not to jokes and to forget the real state of affairs? And suddenly it dawned on me, in my head, all around: The secret of dawn wanted to start higher than I can see. The rowers tire of rowing. This sacred island knows neither war nor villainy, and I have wasted my night. Joseph, forgive me. 11 Translated by Daniel Weissbort

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Bella Akhmadulina was in London for two weeks with the Mayakovsky Theatre. She gave two poetry readings at the Littelton Theatre on the 29 and 30 October 1987. The interview was conducted on 31 October. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Why Russian Poets?’ Vogue 167, no. 7 (July 1977), p. 112. Akhmadulina visited Vladimir Nabokov in Switzerland in March 1977. She had written to him from Paris where she was staying at the time with Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi as their guest. Nabokov had replied and allowed her to come and see him. He was already very weak, almost transparent, as Akhmadulina put it. The audience lasted about fi fty minutes. She told me about this meeting in great details during her previous visit to England in April 1977. Krivulin’s articles were published in the West under the pseuedonim Aleksandr Kalomirov: ‘Iosif Brodsii (Mesto)’, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya (Paris, 1977), pp. 140 - 50. Reprinted in Poetika Brodskogo, L. Loseff (ed) (Tenafly: Hermitage, 1986), pp. 219 - 29; ‘Dvadtsat let noveishei russkoi poezii’, Russkaya mysl, Dec. 1985. Literaturnoe prilozhenie, no. 2, pp. VI - VII. Yury Karabchievsky, Voskresenie Mayakovskogo (Munchen: Strana i mir, 1985), pp. 272 - 79.

6 7

8

9

10 11

B. Akhmadulina, Taina (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1983), pp. 88 - 9. Joseph Brodsky interviewed by the present author, April 1980, Ann Arbor; included in V. Polukhina’s collection of articles on Brodsky (Tomsk, 2009). Soon after this interview some of Brodsky’s poems have been published in Novy mir, no. 12, 1987, pp. 160 - 68; in Neva, no. 3, 1988, pp. 106 - 109; in Ogonyok, no. 31, 1988, pp. 28 - 29; in Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 8, 1988, pp. 55 - 64. Brodsky interviewed by D. Savitsky, January 1983, Kniga intervyu, compiled by V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 230. From a private conversation with Brodsky, April 1980, Ann Arbor. This poem was written after Joseph Brodsky’s death. On 21 June 1997 Brodsky’s body was brought from New York and buried in St. Michele in Venice.

6 E L E N A U S H A K O VA Poet, critic and literary scholar Elena Ushakova writes poetry under a pseudonym. She was born in Leningrad, graduated from that city’s university and plays an active role in a literary life that encompasses both Leningrad and Russia as a whole. Her first published poems appeared in the journal Raduga (Rainbow), no. 10, 1989, and subsequently in the journal Neva, no. 8, 1990, Syntaksis, no. 27, 1990, the almanac Petropol, no. 2, 1990, and Zvezda, no. 8, 1991. Today when, on the one hand, we sense a certain staleness and lack of vigour in formally orthodox poetry and, on the other, that the prevailing trend towards free verse is alien to Russian poetry, Ushakova is discovering new possibilities for Russian poetry, to be more precise, developing the long-neglected field of accentual verse pioneered by Mikhail Kuzmin. This allows her to extend the thematic scope of poetry, to bring in a very diverse range of prosaic elements from real life. In her poetry, an attention to fine detail, to the patina of everyday life, is allied to a fine sense of psychology, a striving towards an infinitely detailed elaboration of contemporary man’s spiritual and psychological experience. And it maybe that attention to man, to the hidden ways of his soul, make Ushakova’s poetry, despite the absence of the usual poetic music overlaid by the sound of everyday speech, profoundly lyrical, giving her work a special charm and originality all its own. Lidiya Ginzburg, an astute connoisseur of poetry, writes, ‘It seems to me that our poetry has to a very large extent got itself bogged down in the rut of stereotype. What is needed to escape that rut is experience and experiment. Elena Ushakova is trying to do just that. Her long lines of accented verse are exuberant and dense with meaning; they draw all facets of reality into the poetic realm. In her poetry intellectuality is coupled in an original way with a concrete vision of life’s smallest details.’ 1 In 1991, her first collection Night Sun (Nochnoe solntse) appeared in print in St Petersburg, followed by Snow Storm (Metel, 2001) and In a Secret Regester (V potaennom registre, 2006).

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A POET

OF

I N T E N S E TH O U G H T

An Interview with Elena Ushakova (11 January 1991, Leningrad) – When was it that you first read Brodsky’s poetry? And how has your attitude to his poetry changed in the meanwhile? – I first read Brodsky’s poetry when I was about twenty. My attitude changed as his poetry grew more complex and as I matured. – Which of the culturo-historical experiences embodied in Brodsky’s poetry do you see as being most fully realised? – Our Soviet experience and possibly that of the ancient, Roman world; in a sense it is analogous to our own Soviet experience. – How original are Brodsky’s philosophical meditations? – Their depth and originality is in relation to the extent to which they are the bitter fruits of life’s vicissitudes. Brodsky doesn’t transpose someone else’s philosophy into poetry. – Which is the dominant spirit of his poetry? Is it the Russian or the European spirit? – The European spirit of Russian poetry. – Has Brodsky succeeded in turning the Russian cultural paradigm away from its traditional direction? – One should not think of Russian poetry as being confined to one route, one trend. There are several traditions in Russian poetry and they are all very varied, and so to speak of shifting direction has no meaning. In Mayakovsky’s time it seemed as if he had done just that, but later it became apparent that that wasn’t the case. It seems to me that Brodsky’s work is a blend of Baratynsky, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. Of course, he has brought something new, his own; that is, in part, a product of the times. Possibly English language poetry helped him there; I’m no judge of that since I can only read it in translation. – Do you share Brodsky’s attitude to language? – Yes, language is God. In it is ‘our all’. All we have to do is make our choice, that choice which is prompted by language. – To what extent is poetry in general and Brodsky’s in particular the self-consciousness of language?

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– Poetry gives form to our speech; from childhood on we drink in language together with poetry. There’s nothing astonishing about that. The nature of poetry is such that it comes under the heading of idiolect (I have in mind Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole). Poetry’s destiny is to immortalise the fleeting, momentary, purely locutionary acts of speech, in the first instance its intonation. Poetry’s dependence on language is incomparably greater than that of prose. – How do you envisage the difficulties and the advantages of living as a poet in an alien linguistic environment? – I envisage the difficulties all too well. Our mother tongue is the breast at which poetry feeds. All the changes the language undergoes are very important: each speech situation is capable of engendering new poetry. It’s well known that in the case of a man who becomes deaf after a while his speech begins to falter, he can no longer speak correctly. So the poet who loses contact with his mother tongue may stop writing in it. Thank God that hasn’t happened in Brodsky’s case, such is his gift and his intellect, his understanding of the dangers that threaten him and his readiness to overcome them. – Anatoly Naiman quotes Akhmatova in his book: ‘What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend! It’s as if he’d hired them to do it on purpose.’ 2 Do you see in connection with the Brodsky phenomenon a fusion of gift and fate? – Unfortunately in Russia biography is often a substitute for poetry. I don’t agree with Akhmatova’s definition of biography (or fate). To me it seems old-fashioned. From my point of view it’s of no importance. One could say, in Baratynsky’s or Tyutchev’s case, they didn’t have one. They forced one upon Mandelstam. It’s possible that Brodsky’s biography played a certain role in his world-wide renown but it seems to me that of late he’s grown discontented with his biography and that he prefers talking about his poetry. – Viktor Krivulin explains ‘the note of self-loathing’ in Brodsky’s sketch of a self-portrait as the result of a feeling of defeat. 3 Is Brodsky acquainted with that feeling in your view? – That feeling of defeat is beside the point as far as I can see. He’s probably as well acquainted with it as everyone else. But if you’re talking about his poetic self-portrait then that ‘note of self-loathing’ is unavoidable: it brings the romantic image of the poet up to date, giving it a new, contemporary meaning.

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– By Brodsky’s own admission he’s tried to compete with every Russian poet from Kantemir to Pasternak. The only exception he’s made is for Tsvetaeva. He decided that he wouldn’t compete with her. 4 Why? – It’s only Brodsky’s impression that he hasn’t done that. It seems he was motivated by his love for her work. In fact it is precisely Tsvetaeva that he has ‘beaten’. I couldn’t bring myself to say that he had beaten Pushkin or Mandelstam. – Has Brodsky’s ‘thingness’ an Acmeist origin or is it a metaphor for something else? For what? – Of course Brodsky has learnt the lessons of Acmeism but perhaps the ‘thingness’, as you call it, the concretivity of his poetry comes from Derzhavin rather than from Akhmatova and Mandelstam. – What is it that makes Brodsky’s poetry so semantically densely saturated? – Brodsky is a poet of intense thought, its acceleration is conditional upon emotional pressure and extreme intonational excitement. – In an essay on Dostoevsky Brodsky says, ‘Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul’ (L, p. 161). Do you feel that there is just such a rift between pen and soul in Brodsky’s own case? – That sort of rift is basically characteristic of the Romantic. In as far as Brodsky can be called Romantic then his lyrical hero is characterised by certain ‘perfections’ which, possibly, the author does not ‘deserve’. And on the other hand, I think that his lyrical hero is too true to himself in being submissive to Urania, is rather impoverished and limited in comparison with the author. The poet’s soul is richer, more human. TO JOSEPH BRODSKY The son of Jacob sold into Egypt grieved not So fiercely or persistently or with such dogged despair, As you have, Joseph, as thou hast, Poet. I can’t conceive A better way to put it. Economists ever The English conflate their second person pronouns Into one crooning wordlet whose intimate form’s articulate In a tender hug of friendship (read ‘haven’t we done well’?),

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While its true formal counterparts is the cool handshake. But I cannot well convey to one far off the long golden shade he casts On former haunts and old opponents when on my winter walks ‘Night’s burning mead’, the city light pours out Across the Field of Mars and on Fontanka; see, it’s here out of Eyeshot: youthful grief keeping lively pace, All joyous and radiant; and those Leningrad verses, The early ones, sobbing out warmly, a guileless river Under the ornate ice of recent glaciation. Getting a foreign tongue must cost the soul dear In bridling and breaking and accommodating, in entering And seizing and settling the language, invading the nervous tissue Like a foreign body, by irradiation or osmosis. But what of paradigms and endings, of home’s inflexions dom, doma, domu, dotnoi? Or the tropological power of instrumentals to evoke hearth and native home? These are things clasped in your ocean wake (or in its cool handshake?) Like a dark trailing wing, a part of speech, like tentacles resisting. Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1 2

3

4

From a private letter by L. Ya. Ginzburg. Anatoly Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (London: Peter Halban, 1991) p. 5. A. Kalomirov (pseudonym of Viktor Krivulin), ‘Iosif Brodsky (Mesto)’, Poetika Brodskogo, ed. L. V. Loseff (Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1986) p. 224. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Sven Birkerts, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 95.

7 A LEK SA NDR KUSHNER Aleksandr Semyonovich Kushner (born 14 September 1936 in Leningrad), poet and essayist, graduated from that city’s Pedagogical Institute and from 1959 to 1970 was a teacher of Russian literature. His poetic debut came in 1962 with a collection First Impressions (Leningrad). After a second book, Night Watch (Leningrad, 1966), he was made a member of the Writers’ Union. His 12 subsequent books of poetry earned him a well-deserved reputation – ‘the greatest Russian lyricist’ (Brodsky): Markers (Leningrad, 1969); Hidden Yearning (Leningrad, 1973); Letter (Leningrad, 1974); Direct Speech (Leningrad, 1975); A City as a Present (Leningrad, 1976); Voice (Leningrad, 1978); Canvas: From Six Books (Leningrad, 1981); The Tauride Garden (Leningrad, 1984); Day Dreams (Leningrad, 1986); Poems (1986); Hedgerow (Leningrad, 1988); Apollo in the Snow (Leningrad, 1991); Selected Poems (M., 2005); In the New Country (M., 2006); One doesn’t choose Times (Spb., 2007); Clouds choose Anapest (M., 2008). Indifferent to the prevailing literary market, at one remove from the burning issues of the day, Kushner has managed to preserve his independence and the respect of his readership no matter what corner of the world they happen to find themselves in. Behind that uneventful biography, that peaceful existence, there lies concealed a spiritual life, whose intensity Brodsky has compared with that of an internal combustion-engine: ‘What is characteristic of Kushner’s poetry is its restrained tone, the absence of hysteria, of sweeping declarations, of nervous gesturing.’ 1 A delicate musical pattern imbues with new harmony a modern content cast in a traditional form, the figurative system of an ascetic and the psychology of a stoic, classical rhythm inspired by contemporary introspection. ‘A virtuoso intonational dynamism’ is what the critics single out as just one of his innovatory virtues. Kushner’s lyric hero is a profoundly private man who wants to preserve his dignity ‘in the face of all of evil’s cunning’. He has translated an English poet whose style is very close to his own, Philip Larkin. For English translations of his poetry see The Living Mirrors (ed. S. Massie, trans. P. Roche, London, 1972) pp. 167 - 211; Russian Poetry: The Modern Period (ed. and trans.

D. Weissbort, Iowa City, 1983); Selected Poems (New York, 1990). He is a recipient of many literary awards, including The State Prize (Russia, 1996), Pushkin Prize (Germany, 1999) and The Golden Key (Serbia, 2007).

T H E WO R L D ’ S L A S T R O M A N T I C P O E T An Interview with Aleksandr Kushner (2 May 1990, Leningrad) – Brodsky traces your ancestry from Tyutchev, Annensky and Blok.2 Has he construed your poetic genealogy aright? – Brodsky is two-thirds right. Tyutchev, yes. Annensky, yes. But the third poet isn’t Blok, but Mandelstam. To that I’ll add that I can’t imagine my being the poet I am without Pushkin, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Fet, Kuzmin … shall I run through all the Russian classics? – He’s also said of you that, starting off ‘with a severely conservative poetic form’, you have, to a very large extent, ‘remained true to yourself’. 3 Is that right? – My conservatism of form was deliberate and provocative at a time when lack of discipline and boorishness were the rule. Generally speaking, novelty can be something eye-catching to be paraded through the streets to fanfares; that’s the poetics of Mayakovsky, of Tsvetaeva, of the young Pasternak, of Brodsky. But there is another kind of novelty that’s to be found behind the street-front of poetry, the gossamer-like modulations of meaning that one finds in the poetry of Pushkin, Annensky and Mandelstam. I feel closer to that kind of novelty. – Brodsky is well aware of that; and that’s why he sees in your poetry a kind of poetic oxymoron. To be precise, there is this contradiction between the form which is traditional and the content, which is avantgarde.4 – Well, my avant-gardism isn’t avant-gardism and my traditional form isn’t traditional. Little by little the form and the content are being restructured, by a new intonation, by new experience. In the 1920s

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they called Mandelstam a neoclassicist: a patent misconception; his neoclassicism is a figment of the imagination. They’ll find the right word for me in time, if I merit it. – At one time your poetry and Brodsky’s were linked by your frank lack of interest in social issues. But recently, as Irina Vino-kurova put it, you have introduced the word ‘newspaper’ into your vocabulary.5 Your dialogue with Panchenko isn’t only about spiritual matters. It reveals a concern with the ‘restoration and development of natural socio-economic relations’.6 Does that mean that you have started to respond to the burning issues of the day? – I don’t like poetic journalism. As for the burning issues of the day, they can give birth to a poem. As Goethe said, all poetry is occasional. But in poetry ‘occasion’ is elevated to another existential plane. In that sense the word ‘newspaper’, which Vinokurova discovered in one of my recent poems, is no better – and no worse – than the word ‘poplar’ or ‘tablecloth’. – Do you share Brodsky’s view of literature, endorsed in his Nobel Lecture, that it is an autonomous entity? 7 – Right now I don’t remember what Brodsky had in mind when he talked about literature’s autonomy. If he meant that there’s no direct relationship between literary achievement and the amount of freedom to be found in a society, then I would have to say that I agree. – Let’s continue to draw this parallel between you and Brodsky. With your permission I would like to quote Sergei Dovlatov, who in his ‘Solo on an IBM’ said: ‘The difference between Kushner and Brodsky is the difference between grief and anguish, between fear and horror. Grief and fear are reactions to time. Anguish and horror are reactions to eternity. Grief and fear look downward. Anguish and horror look upwards, to the heavens.’ 8 What do you think of that? Is it just a routine example of Dovlatov’s play with words, or has he really got hold of something? – I should like to answer Dovlatov by shouting, ‘What the hell, I’ve got my share of anguish! And horror to spare!’ But, as I don’t want to be facetious, I’ll answer him another way. I can’t imagine a poet who’s only concerned with the temporal or one who’s only concerned with the eternal. All in all, these debates about time and eternity are fearfully (horribly) old-fashioned. Such speculations have nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.

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Let’s talk about something else. In one of my poems there are a couple of lines: ‘And the formula for life is won in sleep and it / is terrible, terrible, terrible, beautiful, terrible…’ 9 Poetry, and art in general, depend to a large extent upon one’s not closing one’s eyes to life’s horrors whilst at the same time remembering what life can be like when we are happy. Where there is nothing of value, nothing to cherish, there can be no tragedy either. Poetry, in my view, is only concerned with the fact that ‘That beautiful, maybe, fifth part / possibly fiftieth, motleys and expands’.10 Of course there are poets with an acute sense of life’s afflictions and catastrophes: Baratynsky, Brodsky. And there are poets who, despite all the horrors of life, know how to preserve, deep down in their hearts, a feeling of gratitude and veneration for life: Pushkin, Mandelstam (the latter, as is well known, in the most intractable circumstances, such that we have not dreamed of!). Maybe these poets were really more spellbound by time than eternity. Remember Mandelstam’s: And the haughtiness of Batyushkov repels me. ‘What is the time?’ he was asked. And to the curious he replied, ‘Eternity’.11

However, I’ll say it again, every real poet goes through it all, the horror, the grief, eternity, time. And it’s absolutely impossible to picture Brodsky in one’s mind’s eye taking the form of that wolf howling after eternity, as for the moon; or, I hope, myself in the form of a pig that sees only what’s under its nose, under its feet. – Which of the metaphysical categories have you yourself chosen as your refuge? – I haven’t picked upon any metaphysical category, either as solace or refuge: ‘I have fallen into an abyss with no hopes, with no tears or hidden consolations’, as it said in the poem ‘Stog’ (The Rick). 12 Nevertheless, I hope that the soul can go on living for some time after a poet’s death, in his verse. That, it seems to me, is a more or less dependable investment, a safe deposit to entrust one’s soul to. In that regard I’ve had some excellent tutors: Pushkin, and Proust who on the day of Bergotte’s death shows us the writer’s books on display in a shop window. But it seems to me, even without that slight comfort, I would not have fallen prey to despair, convinced as I am that life is in itself

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a precious gift. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. A man lives to 30, to 40, to 50 or more. There’s time for a mature man finally to recognise that ‘the meaning of life lies in life itself’. 13 Otherwise why the hell would he want to go on living, go on being miserable? As for death I’ve thought about it so many times, mentally measuring myself up for one or another of its various get-ups, that I could say that ‘mine is already well worn’ 14 by now, like some old grey raincoat. It’s terrible, dying. I have this overwhelming pity for the dying. But the whole problem of death seems a bit of an anachronism in this twentieth century of ours, so many people have gone to their deaths before their time in wars and in the camps. Those people would be really delighted to change places with us, if they could. Faced by those dead millions it’s really a crime to find oneself pontificating about life’s senselessness. And don’t my favorite authors have something to say on the subject: Seneca, Montaigne, Pascal? As far as eternity and immortality are concerned, I have this to say: ‘nothingness beyond the grave’ doesn’t frighten me. Nothingness? Very good! Hamlet wasn’t afraid of that. He was only afraid of ‘what dreams may come’. I don’t believe in them. I can’t imagine eternal life, immortality. From our position here on earth it has all the appearance of an impregnable stronghold, that or just one long awful infinity without end. If, however, instead of absolute lack of sensation, after death there opens up before us something new, unimaginable, beyond the strain of our thought in this life, so much the better. We’ll sort it out when we get there. As you see, I haven’t once used the word: God. Not because He doesn’t exist for me, but because talking about Him in public is only possible in poetry; it’s the same with love. – Why is Brodsky so obsessed with the idea of death? – All poetry is one long meditation on death. On life and death. Poetry has been circling around them now for millenia. All in all, there aren’t that many themes that feed poetry. You can count them on your fingers. Which is what L. Ya. Ginzburg does in her article ‘The Private and Public in Lyric Poetry’: ‘the theme of life and death, the meaning of life, of love, of eternity and fleeting time, of town and country, of labour and creation, of the fate and the place of the poet, of culture and history, of our relationship with the Divinity and our lack of faith …’ 15 it goes on, but I’ll leave it at that. It goes without saying that

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the theme of death is one that arouses the greatest passions and it is, to put it crudely, a very profitable one. The poems I most like of Brodsky’s are those where the idea of death appears spontaneously and unexpectedly; as it does, for example, in the poem ‘The Thames at Chelsea’: ‘Do you remember the past?’ – ‘Yes, it was wintertime. I went sleighing and caught a chill.’ ‘Do you fear death?’ – ‘No, it’s the familiar darkness; but, growing accustomed to it, you can’t see the chair.’ (C, p. 47)

I don’t have such a high regard for the poems written especially for this or that acquaintance’s death. I even get the impression that Brodsky perks up when he hears the news of someone’s death, like a cavalry horse upon hearing ‘roots and saddles’ – there’s a fresh excuse for a variation on an old theme. But the poem ‘On the Death of a Friend’ (C, p. 31) I consider to be remarkable. – How do you see Brodsky’s philosophical quest? – I wouldn’t take it upon myself to talk about Brodsky’s philosophical quest: he is a poet and not a philosopher. A poet isn’t concerned with philosophical quests; in each of his poems he recreates the world anew. In two poems written one after the other there can be contradictory, mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. The heart is not always in tune with the logic of reason; that is in the nature of poetry: in every poem at any given moment it is contradictory but sincere. The desire to confine a poet’s pronouncements with the limits of a philosophical system is not so very different in nature to those naive formulations of the nauseating idiots who ask questions like, ‘Was Pushkin an atheist?’ On the one hand, you have ‘My mind digs in its heels, despises hope … Nothingness beyond the grave awaits me’, and on the other, ‘But, oh Lord, grant me the sight of my transgressions’. It’s the same with Brodsky. It often happens within the bounds of a single poem: ‘To you your gift /I return – I have neither buried it nor drunk it away’ (K, p. 61), and a few lines below: ‘But even the thought of – what’s it called! – immortality / is a thought about solitude, my friend’ (K, p. 65). – Does Brodsky’s clock indicate any specific point in historical time?

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– There’s no doubt that it does. Not just the contents of his poetry, but his whole vocabulary is contemporary. I don’t know anyone else who so completely reflects our times. You only have to call to mind ‘A Speech on Spilt Milk’ (K, pp. 6 - 17), or ‘Lines on the Winter Campaign’ (U, pp. 97 - 9). And, of course, it isn’t possible to separate, to sunder that specific historical time from universal, ontological time in his poetry; that latter time is there like that wash which an artist applies to his canvas before he starts to paint in oils. – What grounds do you have for calling Brodsky ‘a Byronic’ kind of poet? 16 Doesn’t he push emotion to the periphery of a poem? Doesn’t he make his intonation resemble the monotonous beating of a pendulum? – When I linked Brodsky with the ‘Byronic’ type of poet I didn’t have in mind the intonation of emotion, but rather the romantic image of the poet – the wanderer, the hero who is ready to fight the whole world in the service of his ideal, romantic irony, romantic renunciation, romantic disillusion, and the other things one attributes to Romanticism. Brodsky, it seems to me, is the world’s last Romantic poet. However, most likely I’m mistaken: don’t Tsvetaeva and Gałczyński also belong in the same category? Really, could one have foreseen that it would reappear again, so fully, so convincingly, in the twentieth century? – ‘To a certain degree we all one way or another perhaps in order to free ourselves of Pushkin’s tonality continue to write Eugene Onegin.’ 17 Which poems of Brodsky’s in your opinion are based on Pushkin’s tonality, echo Pushkin? – In my view, it is when Brodsky turns to narrative poetry, to the short story in verse, that there arises this echo Brodsky-Pushkin; it’s a link not with the lyric Pushkin, but with the Pushkin who wrote the poemy. The same thing happened to Pasternak when he wrote ‘Spektorsky’, and several other poems in his Themes and Variations and Second Birth collections. – Brodsky said that Tsvetaeva altered his view not just of poetry but of the world. 18 Why Tsvetaeva and not Akhmatova or Mandelstam? – Yes, it’s Tsvetaeva. As to why that happened, you would have to ask him. But why not? Tsvetaeva is a powerful poet, a very alluring poet. The refusal to compromise, the ‘return of the Creator’s ticket’, the making of solitude into a virtue, the cult of strong though rather

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monotonous emotions, are all very important to Brodsky. But possibly even more importance attaches to her influence on his form; Tsvetaeva’s run-on lines, omnipresent in her poetry, her iron-fisted attitude to language, which often amounts to violence, her complex, sometimes confusing sentence structure: sometimes in order to grasp her meaning you have to read the line, the sentence, and not so much reread as perform them, play the characters, imitate the gestures. – How would you explain Brodsky’s dislike of Blok, a poet considered by Akhmatova to be not only the greatest European poet, but also a monument to his epoch? – Brodsky’s lack of affection for Blok I can understand. Blok’s poems are too songlike, they overflow with the melody of the romance, they are wishy-washy, they haven’t got that ‘flesh of the grape’ which the twentieth century has been so prodigal with. But the most depressing thing is (putting to one side his lack of taste, a trait he shares with the other Symbolists) his lyrical hero, a ‘knight and poet, scion of the Nordic skalds’ is a wet blanket, who reminds one of an actor got up as Hamlet, or of an opera singer. But, none the less, it’s impossible to imagine Russian poetry without that great poet. It’s impossible to imagine one’s own youth without him. It can’t be excluded that our dislike of Blok stems from a dislike of certain of our own personality traits such as, for example, vanity. – Has 18 years of exile left any mark on Brodsky’s poetic language? – His 18-year-long exile has had its effect on Brodsky’s Russian in that in some of his poems it’s noticeable, possibly, that he makes too great an effort to show he’s keeping abreast of linguistic change, knows the latest slang. By the way, in intellectual circles at least, slang has long since disappeared from use; an eventuality that could have been foreseen, even in the late 1960s when Brodsky was still living in Russia. In my opinion he should rely more upon the language of poetry and less upon the language of the streets, of the underworld, because he uses too many words of dubious value. You find this sediment in his poetry – and this is the one really serious greivance I have against someone I consider to be a fine poet. – ‘Only that survives that brings about improvement in language, not in society’, said Brodsky. 19 In your view what improvements has Brodsky brought about in the Russian language?

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– I would have agreed with that if we were talking about the poetic language. Brodsky has contributed a great deal to the poetic language, given it a great sophistication, expressivity, energy; and his complex syntactical constructions are virtuoso though, it has to be said, they are also maddening. As for the language as a whole, by the twentieth century it has grown so complex that it would be arrogant to think that one could actually have any influence upon its development. No one could possibly do that now, for good or for bad; though there have been some who have tried: Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchyonykh and others. – Why does Brodsky make language the dominant of his poetic world? – It’s really because language is a poet’s tool, or rather his element; a poet swims in language like a fish in a river. And there’s another reason: Brodsky when he left for the West took along with him (to use his words) ‘a part of speech’. And again, language is our only hope for the future, it’s a hint of immortality, our collective word to be honoured, so to speak. Brodsky considers language to have been handed down to us from on high, not something that has grown up from below. I’m very struck by the way his intuitions about language and my own, long-cherished views coincide. What could be more enigmatic, more marvellous than that word so beloved of Tyutchev – iznemozhenie – lassitude. The Russian language is a miracle. It seems to have been created especially for the writing of poetry. It gives one hope for the future, even in the most turbulent, most senseless of times. However, we have already been through all that at school: ‘In days of doubts, in days of troubled reflections …’ 20 The grey-bearded classicist with a leonine mane, clad in the check trousers and tight jacket of his liberal convictions. – What strata of the culture do you see yourself mining? – No, no! I don’t mine anything and I have no particular theory about language: language thinks with me and for me. I hope I have succeeded in throwing some new light upon the human psyche: aspects that have been hitherto unexplored, new possibilities. And in bringing greater clarity to the analysis of certain emotions (love, first and foremost, but not only love). Who said that human nature doesn’t change? It changes from century to century, and the changes come about in part because poetry, prose, art in general, suggests them, fixes them,

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even dictates them. That I see, amongst other things, as the chief task of poetry, and I agree with Brodsky when he comes out with statements that emphasise the special power and responsibility of poetry. Where we differ is that whilst Brodsky prefers to wield a strong, almost tyrannical, or more accurately, authoritarian influence I am somewhat sweeter-natured and my influence is more elective; people don’t have to follow my lead. – Apart from Russian, English poetry has held a deep interest for Brodsky, right up until the present. Do you see any traces of that profound interest in his poetry? Brodsky has indeed crossed two varieties of apple tree: the Russian and the English. The individuality of his poetry is closely bound up with that fertile, fruitbearing hybrid. Unfortunately, it’s at this point that I begin to feel my limitations, my lack of knowledge. – You declared recently that classical man, classical culture for you meant just as much as the Christian.21 So I assume that you appreciate and share Brodsky’s nostalgia for antiquity. In what way do your views of the classical world differ? – Indeed our love of antiquity, which has as much significance for me, or almost as much, as Christianity, does bring us together and possibly points to some essential community of spirit between us. The thing is that we have seen the birth of a new consciousness: mankind has discovered the means of its own destruction, how to commit universal suicide. On the edge of the abyss there’s a desire to remember everything that has happened in the course of the few millenia of civilised life on the planet. It’s like Ensign Praskukhin in the Sebastopol Tales, who recalls the events of his past life in the moment before he dies. And there’s another desire; not so much to save ourselves as to save those who have preceded us in this life, Homer, Catullus, Ovid (like little children), to move them further away from the edge of the precipice: they’re not in the least bit guilty. – Was the city on the Neva responsible for Brodsky becoming a poet? – Without a doubt. A boy growing up in that city inherits the whole of European culture, his psyche is moulded by its great architecture. Besides, a creative youth spent in our former capital exempts one (and here I’ll cite another remarkable poet, Evgeny Rein) from the struggle ‘for a bit of the metropolitan pie’. In the shade of a Leningrad garden,

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as Akhmatova says, ‘the scarcely audible voice of the Muse’ sounds clearer. – Is there a cultural and spiritual need for Brodsky’s poetry in Russia today? – Real poetry is always needed. Not by everybody, that goes without saying. Brodsky’s poetry has been going around from hand to hand all these years. Those who love poetry know his. And anyone claiming to be a lover of poetry ought really to be interested in it, and showing an interest amounts to getting hold of it, which isn’t very difficult. But is there a really big demand for his work? That’s another matter. There are temptations and dangers. In Russia they just don’t know when to stop. They can suffocate you with their love. Just two years ago everywhere you went you heard the name Vysotsky. They made a great poet of the man, his grave became a shrine, they lit candles to his memory and so on and so forth. Now they’ve become tired of that. They needed a fresh victim. The celebrations of Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s centenaries turned out to be monstrous carnivals of vulgarity. The two of them were promoted to the rank of literary generals. Now they’re after Brodsky. I’m afraid their loving embraces wouldn’t be exactly beneficial. But, it seems, he is aware of the danger and he’s keeping them at arm’s length. – To what extent is Brodsky seen by you as a spokesperson for certain spiritual values? – Let the culturologists answer that one. They know what that means. The satisfaction that poetry brings possibly does include such things as that. However, I will force myself and say that it’s the free thought which is the melody, the central theme that runs through his verse, that always excites me. – Tell me about your most memorable meetings, conversations with Brodsky. – Accounts of our meetings and our conversations I leave to another time; when I get around to writing my memoirs. The participants are, thank God, still alive. – Could you possibly say something in Brodsky’s defence on any of the following counts: coldness, bookishness, aestheticism, rationalism and bad taste? – Aren’t they a remarkable collection of accusations, especially when you consider what a fine poet all those faults have contributed to the

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making of! Any single one of them would have been the ruination of any other poet. We only need a couple more vices and maybe he could write something else along the lines of his ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’ (C, pp. 11 - 14). In my opinion that is one of the most priceless poems to have been written this century. – It seems to me that quite a few of your own poems echo Brodsky’s. Such as for example ‘In the Cafe’, or ‘He Gets Up in a Leningrad Apartment’. Is that a conscious echo? My poem ‘In the Cafe’ is indeed an echo of Brodsky’s ‘A Winter Evening in Yalta’ (O, p. 135). It’s a conscious echo. At the end of the poem in the doorway of the cafe there appears ‘a red-headed friend’. The poem ‘He gets up in a Leningrad Apartment’ has no connection with Brodsky: that has to do with Pushkin’s seraphim and my distrust of poetic prophecies. I’ve dedicated not just one, but several poems, to Brodsky. One of them, written in 1981, I’ve selected for inclusion here: My bright scrying glass may haply say That far away, Beyond the crocheted strand, Beyond the pinewoods’ basketry, Hills, roads and factories And the wavy sea; Beyond the turn of time zones And varied dialectual Babel One poet bears upon his shoulders The vault of heaven or the greater share thereof. My part’s to uphold the outer edge Which bows and sags, lest it collapse. But now the swooping gust Moves over Neva, melts the poet’s face And it is gone. The wind’s the culprit, Aggravated by our Northern gloom. Only the gilt spire’s prismed in the water And the auburn forelock of a wave. Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

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3 4 5

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J. Brodsky, ‘Poeziya sut sushchestvovaniya dushi’, Russkaya mysl, 22 August 1990, p. 5. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin (July 1981), Brodskii, Kniga intervyu (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 138. Ibid. Ibid. I. Vinokurova, a review of A. Kushner’s collection Zhivaya izgorod (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1988), Navy mir, no. 3 (1989) pp. 369 - 70. Aleksandr Kushner in conversation with Aleksandr Panchenko, ‘Dialog s poslesloviem’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 21 March 1990, p. 3. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Nobel Lecture 1987’, in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. L. Loseff and V. Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990) pp. 1 - 11. Sergey Dovlatov, ‘Solo na IBM. Iz zapisnykh knizhek’, Kontinent, no. 61 (1989) p. 190. A. Kushner, Golos (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1978) p. 37. Ibid. Osip Mandelstam, ‘Net, ne luna, a svetlyi tsiferblat’, Stikhotvoreniya (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1974) p. 71. A. Kushner, Primety (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969) p. 54. A. Kushner, Dnevnye sny (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986) p. 28. A. Kushner, ‘I posle otkhodnoy, ne v silakh golovy’, Golos, p. 72. Lidiya Ginzburg, O starom i novom (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1982) p. 17. A. Kushner, Afterword to Brodsky’s six poems published in Neva, no. 3 (1988) p. 110. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, op. cit, p. 157. Brodsky’s comments on his poetry for the BBC Russian Service, August 1986. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 118. I. S. Turgenev, ‘Stikhotvoreniya v proze’, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow: Detskaya literature, 1967) p. 552. A. Kushner in conversation with A. Panchenko, op. cit.

8 LEV LOSEFF Lev Vladimirivich Lifshits (born 15 June 1937 in Leningrad) writes under the pseudonym of Loseff. He graduated from Leningrad University in 1959 and travelled the length and breadth of the Soviet Union whilst working as a journalist. He has written poetry for children and plays which were staged by two dozen puppet theatres throughout the country. For 20 years, nobody suspected that Lifshits was the highly original poet Loseff. Brodsky only learnt that in America, where Loseff arrived in 1976. He has been widely published in the émigré press: Ekho, Kontinent, Chast rechi, Russica 81, Tret’ya volna, Strelets. In 1979, he gained his PhD at University of Michigan and since 1980 has been Professor of Russian Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many scholarly books, among them, On the Beneficence of Censorship (Munich, 1984) and Brodsky’s Literary Biography (Moscow, 2006) He is the editor of Poetika Brodskogo (Tenefly, N. J., 1986) and co-edited, with V. Polukhina, Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (London, 1990), Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (New York, 1999), and with Petr Vail, Iosif Brodskii: Trudy i dni (1998). He is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose in Russian, including The Miraculous Raid (Tenefly, N. J., 1985); Privy Councillor (Tenefly, N. J., 1987), Sisyphus redux (SPb.: 2000). This ‘unexpected sideshoot’ of Russian poetry, ‘its razor-sharp branch’ (Kushner), poet-philologist, poet-professor, is philosophical, ironical, anti-lyrical: his poetry possessing neither lyrical hero nor lyrical addressee. He cultivates a poetics of belittlement – belittlement of theme, imagery and vocabulary. His rhymes and strict metres discipline the extreme prosaicism of his poetry which is dominated by speculative wit and paradox. ‘He has done for Russian poetry what Chekhov did for Russian prose, turned it from a collection of ingenious absurdities into a well-organised text’ (B. Paramonov). The intertextual field of his poetry is so comprehensive and compact that in the space of hundred pages one finds the whole of Russian literature from The Lay of Igor’s Campaign to our latest Russian Nobel Laureate’s work. In 2000 Loseff was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to support completion of his annotated edition of works by Joseph Brodsky.

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A NEW CONCEP T ION

OF

POET RY

An Interview with Lev Loseff (20 September 1989, London, and concluded 23 July 1990, Harrogate)

– Compared with the other poets I have been interviewing you are in rather a special position. You are a personal friend of Brodsky’s and you are one of the first people to have subjected his poetry to serious, academic study. Tell me, does your friendship of many years’ standing help or hinder you when you try to look at his poetry objectively? – I don’t think it hinders me. I don’t think the reason I write about Brodsky has anything to do with that. It goes back to a much earlier stage, my impulse to write about him is really motivated by my wanting to explain something to myself; why, as a man, do I find him in turn astonishing, exciting and puzzling? – Couldn’t you be more concrete? What, precisely, attracts you to his poetry? – I don’t think there is a concrete explanation for that because it has to do with something that lies at the very heart of our existence as social beings. To put it as simply as possible, for me life entails finding explanations for its various manifestations; one of the most important of which, in my case, happens to be Russian poetry. From my point of view explaining the whys and wherefores of its leading exponent is both the most interesting and the most important of tasks. – How did you get to know Brodsky? – This may seem strange, but no matter how many times I try I cannot recall the exact circumstances of our first meeting. I know it was a long time ago now. Take for example this episode that is often recounted, both by Rein and by others. There was this gathering of poets at the Culture Palace of Co-operative in Leningrad where a very young 15 - year-old Joseph made a very sharp attack on Rein, accusing him of decadence, or was it formalism? Anyway, he said Rein’s poems were incomprehensible to the ordinary man in the street … Really funny! And I was there but, however strange this may seem, whilst I do remember just such a meeting taking place that particular incident I don’t recall. I don’t recall Joseph being there at all. Really, we must have bumped

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into one another quite often, because we both moved in the same, relatively narrow circle. What I do remember well is the way my friends had of treating him. They were what you call well-meaning but at the same time patronising and ironical. Of course it was all a matter of age. Just two or three years made all the difference then. We found him, with that unusual temperament of his, a bit of an embarrassment. He was just a lad whilst we, at 19 or 20, had already tasted of life’s pleasures. I say we, though in my own case I find it rather difficult to pick him out from the mob of youngsters who were penning verses back then. I do remember my friends Vinogradov, Eryomin and Ufliand paying him more attention than they did to the rest of them. But for all that they used, ironically, to call him G. R.; the initials standing for ‘Great Russian Poet’. Because right from the very beginning he was making naive claims to greatness. For some reason or other I didn’t read his poetry then. After all, there was a constant stream of adolescent poetry. Around about 1961 a mutual acquaintance of ours, Natasha Sharymova, handed me a pile of poems all typed on very poor-quality paper (I even remember the exact spot, on the Neva embankment, close to the Troitsky Bridge) and said to me, ‘You’ll just have to read this. He’s a very talented poet.’ And I saw that the lines were extremely long. They ran almost the full width of the page and just the mere sight of them was enough to make one feel boredom creeping up on one. Well, I put on the face of someone who had every intention of reading them. One of the poems there in that pile later appeared in his first book Short and Long Poems. Possibly it was the poem that begins ‘Do you hear, do you hear, in the grove the sound of children singing’ (S, p. 78). And I didn’t read any of them. Then a year later, and I’ve mentioned this elsewhere,1 a whole crowd of young poets gathered at my flat (at the time we, my wife and myself that is, were living in a communal flat). There were a lot more of them than there usually were and they were a pretty mixed bunch. There were a few from Moscow, Krasovitsky, Khromov, and my closest friends, Ufliand, Eryomin and Vinogradov. There wasn’t enough room for everyone in my own quarters so we took over the anteroom. My neighbours were rather tactful and didn’t interfere. When they had to use the toilet they would tiptoe through the crowd of us sitting there in the cluttered, semi-darkness of the anteroom, each of us reading our poems in turn.

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So it was that I heard Joseph read his poetry for the first time. And though I myself was by that time a tried and tested reader of poetry I was absolutely knocked out by his reading. That notorious shamanistic way of reading he has didn’t shock me in the least, though as you know, I’m made very differently and am very suspicious of extremes of any sort, and that includes people who make a show of reciting their poetry. The poem I remember best from that reading is ‘Hills’ (S, pp. 123 - 9). It wasn’t really just the fascination of the way he read which is, as I now know, the very quintessence of the musical qualities to be found in his verse – if you like you could call it a prosodic feast; there was also the sheer novelty of his poetry, because it seemed to me then that I was hearing the poetry that comes to one in one’s dreams, the poetry that I had always dreamt about, and here it was as if someone had managed to catch it and write it down. That is the first of our meetings that I am really conscious of and I am sure that at the time I was immediately conscious of Joseph’s exceptional importance. Though that was not in any way reflected in our relationship, which remained the same as before, as it had to be at the time, given that I was older, more experienced, 23 years of age, married, with a university degree and a job, whilst he was still a mere boy who had yet to find his niche in life and I could well have had his parents ringing me up asking me to exert my influence, to persuade him to find a job or something of that sort. But somehow or other I became more and more conscious that something really exceptional had made its appearance. Right now there are a lot of hastily written memoirs being brought out by his old Leningrad friends, all of them trying to put that singular feeling into words. There were a lot of promising things happening back then on the cultural scene. Our youth coincided with a thaw and there were all sorts of exhibitions. There was Picasso. There were Hemingway’s books, and a lot of other Western books as well. Platonov resurfaced, as did Babel and Akhmatova, and so on and so on. But this was a completely different kind of experience, something which had a far greater weight in the balance of our lives, as we each came, suddenly, to feel the impact of Brodsky. Looking back, it’s hard to explain. It was as if some sort of wind was suddenly blowing into our lives, the wind of reality. There were many amongst us capable, more or less successfully, of imitating Zabolotsky, Akhmatova or Pasternak. There were some who were even

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rather talented at doing just that. But here was something entirely unexpected, which overthrew any concepts we had had as to the nature of poetry and, at the same time, corresponded to our subconscious expectations of what poetry ought to be. That was Joseph. And that was how Brodsky impinged upon my consciousness. And, a few months later, in the spring of 1962 I landed a job with Kostyor (The Bonfire). And, of course, quite naturally all my friends started coming to see me in search of hack-work of some sort or other. And one beautiful day – all of them seemed beautiful then – Tolia Naiman brought Joseph along to see me and said, ‘You’ve got to think of something for Joseph to do.’ Well, I started to think about it and to my way of thinking Joseph simply did not fit with the kind of literary hack-work we were all involved in; though it could be fun and it did demand a talent of sorts. I knew already that he was interested in the Metaphysical poets and that quite possibly he knew all the tricks and turns of the Baroque poets inside out and so I said to him, ‘What if you write some poetry for children. Write it in the shape of a cross, of a star. You know the sort of thing. You could do that very well, you’re very inventive when it comes to writing poetry.’ Joseph hummed and hawed but after a while he got some paper and wrote something down, off the cuff. It wasn’t too exciting when you read it aloud: parallel lines of printed letters one above the other, ‘Beneath the bridge the Neva flows, so swift.’ However when you turned the paper round you found this written in the form of a cross: ‘Over the Neva stands the Cheka, so dread.’ And you saw the bars. 2 Evidently I haven’t matured enough yet to be able to go into a psychological explanation as to why we became friends. That is, I find it easier to explain why Joseph wanted to befriend me than why I needed Joseph. Because I’m not one of those people who make special efforts to be the friend and familiar of poets. For example, there were literally thousands of occasions when I could have got myself introduced to Akhmatova or at least got to close quarters with her. But something or other held me back. There was just this short period in my youth when I would go along with my friends to see Pasternak, and when I got to know Leonid Martynov and Slutsky. But it seems to me that, in general, one shouldn’t thrust oneself upon poets. So the fact, unusual for me, that I liked everything, without exception, that he wrote at that time, has no bearing, at least that’s the way it looks to me, upon the

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fact that we became very close friends. And we really did see a lot of each other, except, that is, for the times when he was away, or when I was away. And of course, we hung around at very close quarters. Kostyor’s editorial offices were right next to the Tavricheskii Gardens and on the other side of the gardens lived Vinogradov, Ufliand and Joseph. And so we were constantly in each other’s company, either at the office or at someone’s flat. – What part did Joseph occupy in your life as a poet? How did you manage with your love of Joseph, your enthusiasm for his poetry to remain poetically absolutely free of his influence? – He played a decisive role in my starting to write poetry; in a negative way. It was like this. As a young man I wrote poetry and I treated the matter very seriously. Not long ago I decided to sort out my personal archive. That consists of a sort of box filled with old poems of mine sent on to me from the Soviet Union. I went through them page by page. And I didn’t find it unpalatable, offputting. Not at all; it was quite amusing seeing into oneself, into the person who wrote those poems so many years ago now. Incidentally, the poems weren’t that bad, that is as long as you took a step aside and looked at them through other eyes. I saw that I had had the potential to be an average 1960s poet. There was really only one thing missing, the main thing, the desire to be that kind of a poet. The energy, the vital force was lacking – and that’s just what a poet needs. There was an awareness of new linguistic trends, an ability to handle words. All that was there, as much as anyone could wish for – all of it of absolutely no interest whatsoever to me now. I think it laughable, naive, what you will. I felt that Ufliand or Eryomin hadn’t at that time had my own feeling for style; but they had had more vital energy. Certain others, whose names I don’t want to mention, were not as good as I had been, at one thing or another. Some of them had heaps of energy but absolutely no conception of what a word is. Joseph had the lot, and then multiplied by the power of ten. It took a lot of time for me to come to understand this. I realise that the need for poetry, the need for the experience of poetry, for the experience of breathing life into words doesn’t necessarily entail the writing of poetry. To put it simply, I began to feel that I really didn’t need any other poetry apart from Joseph’s. Of course I still needed the poetry of the past. But contemporary poetry, my own included, was something I no longer felt any need for. Frankly, Brodsky was saying

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it all for me. Everything I wanted to see expressed he was expressing, and all so much more quickly, powerfully, strikingly, interestingly than I was capable of. In 1972 Brodsky left. By that time I had been a close friend of the man and a scrupulous student of his poetry for several years. At the beginning of the 1970s I corrected Maramzin’s edition of Brodsky’s poetry. 3 That gave me an opportunity to revise everything I knew about Joseph up until then. I won’t, at this point, go into the details of his departure from Russia. Roughly two months after his departure I took a walk along one of the routes we had often walked together. From my Tavricheskaya Street office there’s a roundabout route you can take to the Liteinyi Prospect through the backyards that give on to the Neva Embankment – that takes you from the water tower opposite the Tavricheskii Palace right along to the Voskresensky. And just as I reached the end of that block I stopped in astonishment because I realised I had composed a poem; something I had not done for a long time, my mind had been so preoccupied with Brodsky and his departure. And instantaneously I understood what had happened: some sort of compensation mechanism had come into play. I was used to hearing new poems of his at regular intervals, I hadn’t heard any now for about two months and my own subconscious had come to the rescue to save me from frustration. The poem in itself was unimportant – though I think I’d be right if I said it wasn’t bad. I felt good. I thought the poem was much more interesting than any I had previously written. (Still, when I did start to publish my poetry I didn’t publish this ‘first’ poem.) And immediately the question arose, isn’t it rather like Brodsky’s poetry? There were, and are, a lot of people imitating Brodsky, aping Brodsky. That was the first thing I had said to myself I would never do. It was a good thing that I had developed a sort of mental blue pencil with which I would strike out anything inadvertently couched in someone else’s style. And it didn’t seem to me that this poem was like one of Brodsky’s. I read it through time and time again, looked at it from every possible angle. No, it wasn’t like one of Brodsky’s poems. Though, at a deeper level, I knew that Brodsky’s absence was its sole raison d’être. Ten, twenty further poems followed. In, I think, the winter of 1974, I and Nina, and Volodia Gerasimov 4 went off to the Pushkin Hills and, for the first time, I dared to read those poems to them. They were the sternest critics I could find. And suddenly I saw some-

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thing it was impossible to counterfeit in our circle, where poems were being endlessly read out and submitted to critical judgement, and keen interest. To a certain extent this was explained by the fact that they hadn’t expected me to suddenly take up writing poetry. – It seems you were the first person to publish a poem of Brodsky’s in the Soviet Union. How did that came about? – Yes, that was the poem ‘The Tug’, which I managed, with some difficulty, to get into Kostyor. 5 He brought me this long, long poem. It was sentimental, but I found it awfully touching myself, as I did everything he wrote back then: ‘I’m a tug. / I work in this port. / I work here. / It comes naturally to me. / Beneath me there’s water. / Above me the heavens. / And between the two of them / a stream of tugboat smoke.’ A typical Leningrad water colour, very much in the spirit of a painter like Marquet or Lapshin. And it clicked with me that here was the chance to break through all the barriers, and I worked out a simple plan of action. First of all I showed the poem to my friend Felix Naftulyev. He was ten years older than Brodsky and his tastes weren’t quite the same as ours but I knew there was a chance this poem would be to his liking; he was such an overt romantic. And so it proved. There was another talented man working on the paper at that time – Sasha Krestinsky – and together we started to work on the others. We submitted it to an editorial meeting. Our editor was a party functionary called Galina Cherniakova. And someone, either Cherniakova or her deputy said, ‘Well, what sort of a poem is that?’ They had heard of Brodsky and the name already brought with it connotations of danger. And they said to me, ‘Read it out!’ I started to read it. I tried with all my might to read it in a style that would be to their liking. God forgive me. I read, and read, and read. And I saw how their eyes glazed over as they drifted towards sleep. Their picking their noses was the only sign of life they gave. Finally I finished my reading. My friends, as we had agreed, began to sing its praises, ‘Marvellous! Such talent! It reminds me of Bagritsky.’ And so on. And then the bosses, already somewhat placated, made their decision, ‘O. K., we’ll print it. Only it’s far too long. We can’t let it take up half the magazine, can we?’ I had already agreed with Joseph that we would abridge it somehow or other. And they published it. And, if I’m not mistaken, there was even a coloured insert with illustrations by Vetrogonsky. That was Brodsky’s first publication.

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– With your love of Brodsky, your understanding of his greatness, of his value for Russian literature do you accept everything he has written or do you have reservations about some of his work? – I accept it all. If I consider someone to be a poet then they don’t write good or bad poetry, just poetry. I accept absolutely everything that any poet writes, with no exceptions. – You share Joseph’s fate. You’re a poet in exile too. ‘Life in an alien linguistic environment and all the consequences that flow from that, are an ordeal’, says Brodsky. 6 Do you share that opinion of his, and where do you find the strength to face that sort of ordeal? – I share it in the sense that every turn one’s life takes, every change of circumstances is an ordeal for a man, at the psychological, personal, professional level. But I don’t really agree with the way the question was put. If I’ve read it aright, what you’re saying is that if I were to live back home, in my own country, I would find writing poetry a lot easier, or it would be a much more comfortable, a much pleasanter occupation. In my case at least, that absolutely isn’t so. I think, for me, being an émigré is more of an encouragement to write than a burden or a hindrance. There are a lot of difficulties bound up with being an émigré, just at the level of living one’s life from day to day. It is hard to live in a land that will never be home, where every step you take is a challenge, a struggle, a victory and, most often of all, a defeat. But as far as the writing of poetry is concerned, the conditions are just marvellous, because to write poetry you need freedom, and being an émigré certainly helps you to find inner freedom. The title of Adamovich’s book, Solitude and Freedom is sheer genius. 7 It’s a wonderful formula. – The form the question took was dictated by what Brodsky said. And it also raises the next question: doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky draws more spiritual sustenance from language than he does from faith? – Valentina, you know better than anyone that he always, categorically, refuses to discuss the question of faith. Our knowledge of popular psychology forces us to conclude that that is indicative of the importance faith has in his life. But I think there’s a delicate boundary over which we, his contemporaries, ought not to step. The attacks on Joseph’s Christianity, Joseph’s Judaism or Joseph’s atheism make me laugh. I have my own ideas on the subject. I think no Russian poet of the present day, no poet since Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam has

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expressed such strength of religious feeling as he has in his poetry. Just how much that is reflected in his poetics is detailed in my article on ‘Nature Morte’, and elsewhere. 8 But I definitely refuse to discuss his personal beliefs. – My question wasn’t so much to do with faith. It was more to do with language. You’ll agree that language is one of the central personae of his poetry and of his prose? Brodsky says that the way he relates to reality is dictated, to a remarkable extent, by language, not the other way about. 9 What’s your view? – There are two ways of answering your question. First, one could turn to Lacan and Wittgenstein; something I wouldn’t do, simply because I’m not equipped to do so. The second way of answering that question practically amounts to the same thing and is very simple. The man has lived by language since the age of 16. It’s his life-line. When he was 13 or 14 his mother said to him, ‘Read Saadi’s ‘Gulistan’, it’s a beautiful poem.’ And he goes to the library and gets a copy and he likes it. I don’t mean to say that it’s thanks to Saadi that Brodsky started to write verse, but that was one of the stimuli, one of the impulses behind it. But let’s just imagine that that didn’t happen and he didn’t discover that particular form of self-expression. What then? He has such colossal vital energy, and there’s also that biblical talent he’s been given which he’s preferred not to hide away in the bowels of the earth. Hypothetically he could have expressed himself in some other way, in a political or in a religious way. What I want to say is that language, which Joseph habitually talks about in what are usually considered religious terms is, for all that, one way or another just a semiotic form. For a man of Brodsky’s dimensions that is the form his commission takes, the form of his existential fate, the form of his pact with providence. Brodsky exemplifies – I don’t know anyone else who does – that magnificent line of Tsvetaeva from her poem ‘God’ where she writes of His lack of attachment to ‘your signs and burdens’. It’s amazing just how much of the future language reveals to a poet. In Tsvetaeva’s days the word ‘sign’ had none of the practical connotations it has for us in our semiotic age. What Tsvetaeva is doing is formulating her God in profoundly semiotical terms. For me, there lies the key to understanding Brodsky’s personality.

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– In your poetry, as in Brodsky’s, one observes an habitual assimilation of linguistic concepts and categories into the poetic weave of the verse. What motivates that? What’s behind it? – Truth to tell, I simply haven’t thought about that. It’s an interesting way of looking at it. Although I am, to a certain extent, a philologist, Joseph is not. That’s Joseph’s strong point, hence the strength of his statements on language and literature. But I am a philologist and my principle has been, if there is such a thing in such an unprincipled occupation as the writing of poetry, that everything is grist to the mill and at least in this occupation there’s no need to pretend to be someone you are not. I’m a literary critic, I’m interested in linguistics, it’s part of my life; I think no less a part of my life than the fact that I wash, go to the toilet and sleep in bed of a night. Linguistics is very poetic anyway just taken by itself, as it is. All language is metaphor, the invention of metaphors. – In his essay on Dostoevsky Brodsky writes of the ‘omnivorousness of language which eventually comes to a point where it cannot be satisfied with God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity, salvation, air, earth, water, fire, money; and then it takes on itself (L, p. 163). Is Brodsky’s language threatened in that way? – No. I’m afraid this is one of the things about which I disagree with Brodsky. I could never fully accept that idolisation of language, so characteristic of Brodsky. I sympathise with his paganism in general, see it for what it is – a peculiar sort of Protestantism – with one very essential exception. I think Brodsky’s creative work disproves his own argument. Brodsky is rather overwhelmed by linguistics. Maybe if is something to do with a gap in his education. Please understand me correctly. Brodsky is phenomenally well-educated, much better educated than I am. But we always gain something, lose something. And an absence of formal education in linguistics in particular has, maybe, led to his making a fetish of language. As a matter of fact, I think if s all much simpler than that. Language and especially the idiolect of a great poet is like a living organism: cells are regenerated, organs grow and it doesn’t devour anything at all, it just grows like a tree, gets stronger, more splendid, more luxuriant, more interesting, branches out in every direction. – ‘Every poet’, writes Brodsky, ‘possesses his own personal, inner, idiosyncratic landscape and it’s against that backdrop in his conscious-

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ness, or if you like, in his subconsciousness that his voice resounds.’ 10 Have you such a landscape? Can you describe it to me? – I don’t know because I can’t say that that concept of oneself as a voice, so characteristic of Brodsky, holds true in my case. I really haven’t thought about that at all, about myself as a voice, about any sort of personal landscape. You will, of course, have noticed that I once blasphemously parodied a verse from Genesis: ‘‘And the earth / was without form and void.’ / In the aforementioned landscape /I recognised my homeland.’ 11 If it is possible to identify any sort of idiosyncratic landscape in my poetry, it’s that null and void landscape. That’s the way it seems to me. – Couldn’t you lighten the task of present and future researchers wanting to know about your poetic genealogy by saying a few words about the nature of your absurdism? Where should one seek its origins: in the Oberiuty or in the absurdity of life itself? – I ought here to state officially my own doubts as to whether anyone, apart from the very worthy G. S. Smith, will ever be interested in studying my poetry; and he has done his bit. 12 As for the Oberiuty, I’ve grown disenchanted with the absurd in general. Perhaps that’s just my growing old. They meant far too much to me when I was young. I was, really, one of the first of my generation to discover them. I don’t deserve any plaudits for that, I know of them from early childhood. My parents knew Kharms, Zabolotsky, Vvedensky, Oleynikov. Obviously I was very young when I saw them and I don’t remember anything about it at all. In my family’s conversation quotes from their poetry would be constantly popping up and I took them to be something as natural as the air we breathe. I think that I introduced a lot of their poetics into the work of poets of my generation (purely at the technical level). I would sit in the public library, reading the old books and magazines and copying the poems out by hand. I propagandised them, made their work more widely known and, finally, I grew out of them. For that very reason I find it rather distasteful, talking about my own work in terms of the absurd. If anyone were to want to put some sort of label on my poetics I would prefer it to be labelled a poetics of meaning. – And is there a meeting point, I see and feel one, between the poetics of Loseff and Khlebnikov?

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– Yes, and Loseff and Dante, Loseff and Shakespeare … For me, Khlebnikov is like a poetic yard stick. There isn’t a line of his that hasn’t at some time or other made me catch my breath with admiration or dumbfounded me. I’ve been reading Khlebnikov my whole life. – On the stylistic level; are there certain things you regard as ethically taboo? – Yes, I think there are. Well, first and foremost there’s exhibitionism, which I detest. What else? There are certain words, or to use Vygotsky’s expression ‘word-images’, which for some reason are, to my mind, taboo (why exactly I can’t in all honesty say), for example the epithet ‘grey’. Really, it’s an epithet threadbare with use. – But Brodsky, it seems to me, has put new life into that very epithet, ascribing it to time and to death ‘a grey colour – the colour of time and timber’ (U, p. 72); grey, unremarkable, faded colour – a metaphor of death: The days untwine the rag, sewn by Thee. And it wrinkles up before your very eyes, beneath your hand. The green thread follows the blue, becomes grey, brown, non - descript. (U, p. 69)

– I really can’t stand the word ‘grey’, I never had that kind of luck with it. – In your opinion the Russian psychological novel grew out of Pushkin’s line, ‘I read my own life with loathing.’ Your own lyrical hero suffers quite a bit from the same self-loathing. Does that too come from Pushkin or does it stem from a desire to get away from the traditional romantic image of the poet? – By the way, that’s not my opinion – it’s Joseph’s. Maybe I quoted it without giving my source. – Or maybe it’s because I think of you and Joseph as one.13 – Very flattering. It’s absolutely true. Now for the details. First, it has to do with the stylistic proscriptions we were talking about earlier because all of them really do have an ethical basis as well. For instance, as far the lyrical subject is concerned there is a romantic tradition of presenting oneself larger than life, dressed up for the part, and so on – that isn’t really ethical. It’s going against one of the basic command-

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ments, that way you think of yourself as being better than everyone else; and you, in full consciousness of the fact, put yourself in a position where you, at the very least, cause others to suffer psychological damage. Of course, that isn’t pretty and though we are all guilty of it we ought, in our conscious actions – and writing poetry is a quite conscious activity – to try to avoid it. The same thing applies to the taboo on the use of certain words and expressions; though it is more a matter of individual discretion, it too would be a transgression of a basic commandment, ‘thou shalt not steal’, as they aren’t yours to use. You are under an obligation to your public to give only what is yours, and yours alone. Secondly, and I think that this applies not just to me but all of us – to use a cliché postmodernists it is, overall, an anti-Romantic project. In Joseph’s case you have a poet whose poetics do not fit any of the categories; it isn’t Romantic, it isn’t classical, it isn’t avant-garde – it’s this, it’s that and it’s something else again, like Pushkin’s; that’s very clear in his case. He says constantly, both in poetry and in prose, that the poet, the lyrical persona is nothing in himself. Only his poetic work is important. And the question of the interrelationship between the creator of poetic texts and the texts themselves is, as you yourself have said, 14 the most dramatic theme of Brodsky’s work. And I think that Brodsky as always, only significantly more powerfully than anyone else, expresses the generally held view of our generation. And again, speaking in general terms, you find the same thing in the most unexpected places. For example, Rein who for his ordinary day-today dealings with the world has created this self-image which is an amalgam of Byronic hero and Ostap Bender is, in his poetry, consistent to the extreme in his self-derogation (‘the restless denizen of two capitals’), and always depicts himself as a man on the way out, with a cut-price morality, worthy only of censure, lacking in looks, youth and sobriety – other negative qualities are there too, in abundance. Or take another very different poet, in my view one of the most remarkable poets of our generation, Eryomin. He quite simply obliterates the lyrical persona. – In your article, ‘Dedicated to Logic’ you remarked that Brodsky’s perception of the world is a ‘rather super-human, super-worldly view of the world from on high’.15 Through what sort of a prism do you view the world?

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– Through books, I would say, through culture. And that is a prism I’ve opted for in full consciousness of the choice. – Of his life outside Russia Brodsky has said, ‘I regard my situation as being a loss of an absolutely classical kind, at the least of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century kind, if not of antiquity.’ 16 Do you see your life outside Russia in these terms? – No, I don’t see my life as a repetition of some sort of classical model. What, evidently, Brodsky has in mind is the example of Ovid’s life and exile, nostalgia for the Empire’s umbilicus and so on and so forth. In my case it’s more a question of my seeing my own fate as being akin to that of a particle in the Brownian motion of our contemporary world. I’m not even sure that my emigration was an act of free will, as it seemed to be at certain moment in my life. I think I was simply blown away by some sort of wind. And such an unpredictable whim of fate does have its advantages. It reveals to you certain interesting unexpected aspects of life. You can imagine the consequences of one’s seeing one’s life as the unfolding of some predetermined plan. You can’t really expect anything unpredictable to occur. You already know that at a certain moment your plea for mercy will be rejected, that your lover won’t betray you, that you will never return to a certain place and so on. I don’t have feelings like that, though my life isn’t rich in external events – and, please God, it stays that way! At the same time I’m completely in the dark as to what is waiting for me just around the next corner. – Apparently you were the first person to see philosophical parallels between Brodsky and the Euroasianists, in particular in those oppositions: Russian and the West, Islam and Christianity.17 Czeslaw Milosz sees a close link between Brodsky, Shestov and Kierkegaard.18 To what extent are Brodsky’s philosophical postulates second-hand and superficial? Or are they profound and original? In what respect are they original, different? – As far as his Euroasianism is concerned, you have to go back to the original sources – Vladimir Solovyov and, maybe, to that Russian philosophical tradition which can be traced back further than that, to Leontyev and, thinking of what we’ve heard at the conference today from Ospovat, 19 right back to the beginning of Russian political awareness, to the national consciousness of being an Eastern rather than a Western nation. I’ve never said that Brodsky shares the point of view of the

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Euroasianists. In my view – and this is interesting in itself as a cultural phenomenon – Brodsky, belonging as he does to a rather more cosmopolitan school of historical thought, lacks a framework for his discussions, apart, that is, from the traditional one worked out by the Russian geopo-liticists. He uses the language, and that includes the political language, of Vladimir Solovyov and of course Blok, though he’s no great admirer of the latter, as you well know, when he has to voice an opinion on these matters. However, he is engaging in a polemic with them, he turns their ideas inside out, rejects them, parodies them and makes use of every possible stylistic tool in pursuit of his polemical ends, but he always speaks with them in their own language. Georges Nivat was quite correct when he wrote that Brodsky too is a son of Russian symbolism – a rebellious son, but a son none the less.20 As for Shestov and Kierkegaard, that is more the concern of existential philosophy, of anthropological philosophy, of theology, and such dichotomies as man and the world, man and God, and I have little to add there. I think that while he was just beginning to develop his view of the world Brodsky fell under the extremely powerful sway of Kierkegaard and Shestov and he hasn’t got away from that. – What lies behind all those questionings, re-evaluations, re-examinations, behind Brodsky’s extreme logicality? Doesn’t that reveal his realisation that the world, and man, are in the final analysis unknowable, and all that there remains for the poet-philosopher to do is to ‘encounter things in the Second Circle’ (K, p. 63), to look at everything from a fresh angle, to pose certain questions, in no expectation of an answer? What is the essence of his philosophising? – I think that Brodsky’s philosophy by definition poses rather than answers questions. And really, in that sense, Brodsky isn’t all that original. I’m not very well up on the history of philosophy but, at least in the Platonic tradition, the philosopher is the one who poses the questions, not the one who supplies the answers. That’s what distinguishes true philosophy from those quasi-philosophical Utopian doctrines of which Marxism is an example. – If we were to construct a model of his poetic thinking, would the structure be predominantly Russian or European? – It would be constructed along Pushkinian lines, that’s to say on Russian lines, on the lines of a dialogue between Russian and European man.

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– Has the vector of his world-view changed since his departure from Russia? – No, it hasn’t. – Then why at the poetic level, which in his case is not only semanticised but also conceptualised, has his earlier passion for the AngloAmerican poetic tradition so noticeably grown in strength here in the West? Just take, for example, such features of his poetics as the rather cold tone of his meditations, his intona-tional monotony, his ‘striving to neutralise every lyrical element and bring it close to the sound of a pendulum’.21 Doesn’t all that demonstrate a turning away from the Russian mind-set? – I don’t see it like that. Of course Brodsky’s poetics has changed. Of course if you take any one poem written in 1990 and compare it with a poem written in 1960 the contrast will be striking from the point of view of poetics. But, in my view, what is even more striking is that the hidden structures of his poetic thinking (the mentality of the poet), which we can unearth in poems 30 years apart are, to our surprise, the same. Brodsky, in this respect, is just too much of an original personality for the contingencies of the external world to have had any fundamental influence upon his idiostyle. He consciously worked towards the fashioning of a style that is especially his own and what that amounted to was a mastering of the lessons of English language poetry. I’ve written about this and I still say that it is an astoundingly Russian trait. It’s what Pushkin and the Pushkin Pleiade did with French poetics; it’s what the Russian lyric poets of the mid-nineteenth century, my own favourite period in lyric poetry by the way, did with Heine and German poetics. Brodsky has done exactly the same thing, transplanting the great leafy tree of English poetics to the Russian wilds. But, in my view, there’s something else that is of interest in connection with that. Brodsky has been living in an Anglo-American cultural environment for 20 years now and, being a very attentive, an incomparably more attentive, more educated reader of English language poetry than I am, he turns out not to have been particularly receptive to all the cardinal changes that have been taking place in Anglo-American poetry over the past 30 to 35 years. This is an example of what I mean. I’m not going to talk about popular poets like Allen Ginsberg or about poets who have nothing in common with Brodsky. Let’s take those poets Brodsky himself singles out as the best poets

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currently writing in English. He does have certain traits in common with Richard Wilbur; but take Mark Strand: Brodsky sometimes calls him the best American poet. I find it very difficult to see any affinity whatsoever between his poetics and those of Brodsky. Incidentally, I personally find Strand’s poetics exciting. It would be like fulfilling a dream to create a Russian equivalent to that, for us, absolutely innovatory poetics; cleansed of rhetoric, as we understand that term. It’s a poetics of prose, where the imagery is communicated to the reader using purely prosaic descriptive means, where the poetic effect is produced by a compositional manipulation of those descriptions. That is not characteristic of Brodsky’s poetics. He has never rejected rhetoric. He has mastered it, achieved unbelievable virtuosity, but he is a profoundly rhetorical poet. – What is it exactly in Brodsky’s world view that seeks expression through the poetics of the English Metaphysicals? – We’ve already touched upon the fact that Brodsky’s world-view is determined by the philosophical existentialism of Kierkegaard and Shestov and, of course, of Dostoevsky. We’re also dealing here with the existentialism of the 1940s and 1950s which was in the cultural air he breathed as he grew to maturity. But the means by which that particular form of philosophical speculation could be bodied forth in Russian poetry were lacking. Such means did, however, exist in European poetry because the problematics of existentialism and the metaphysical problematics of the Baroque Age had a great deal in common: the isolation of man, alone in the universe; the counterpoising of man and God; the questioning of the very existence of God. The poetry of the European Baroque naturally arrived at a form suited to that kind of philosophical speculation: the conceit, a logical mode of argument in verse, extended metaphor. But we must bear in mind that what we are dealing with here is not simply an exercise in rhetoric (sometimes in poetry a rhetorical figure may appear purely for its own sake, as art for art’s sake. And that may even be a fine thing). Here we are dealing with a rhetoric which carries out an unusually important and essential task. This line is being constantly quoted: ‘A poet starts his speech from afar. / A poet is led far by speech.’ In Brodsky’s case that is a practical description of his work, as, apparently, it was also for the work of Andrew Marvell or John Donne. Unlike the poets of later epochs, when the poet-metaphysician puts pen to paper he really doesn’t

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know what he wants to say. In the nineteenth century the poet knew only too well what he wanted to say and what he sought was an adequate medium for his message – Tyutchev for example. Whereas the metaphysician seeks only the initiatory metaphor, expands it and then the metaphor all by itself leads him to results which in all probability stun the poet himself. As you yourself know, Brodsky in his metadescriptions is quite often astonished by the places language leads him to. Tsvetaeva followed the same route. But until Brodsky came along such far-fetched, far-reaching Baroque metaphors did not exist in Russian poetry. And I’ll say straight away that I’m not in the least bit certain that they will continue to exist once Brodsky has passed from the scene. And if from time to time I run across some young poet in some magazine or other making use of some far too widely extended metaphor then I find myself thinking it too extrinsic, too superficial. I have not as yet found anything that is on a par with Brodsky’s work. As yet none of it has advanced beyond the stage of aping the surface features of his style. – You have mentioned the names of both Pushkin and of Dostoevsky several times now in the course of our conversation. It is Brodsky’s view that Dostoevsky can be traced back to Pushkin.22 Doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky can himself, broadly speaking, be traced back to Dostoevsky? There’s that same striving to make the plus and the minus equal, to make the argument contra more convincing than the argument pro and so on and so forth. Have you thought about that? – Brodsky is really just as dialectical a writer in verse as Dostoevsky is in prose. Brodsky as poetical persona, as authorial voice is astonishingly like some of Dostoevsky’s protagonists. In particular, I find that there is an especially close resemblance with Dmitry Karamazov whose speech is also macaronic through and through. Though Dmitry’s monologues lack such rhetorical structures as extended metaphor, they are always roughcast. Unlike his brother Ivan who talks in an artistical-cum-philosophical style, Dmitry doesn’t know where his speech is leading him and he uses this instrument, speech, to get somewhere. Stylistically speaking Dmitry’s speech is eclectic in the extreme, it is saturated with quotations. He quotes endlessly, accurately, inaccurately, with serious or with parodic intent. And the quotes take an extremely macaronic form. He may quote from the lofty poesy of Schiller, of Pushkin, from hackneyed romances, from

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folklore, from philosophical texts, from scientific texts, chemistry, psychology etc., etc. If one could couch all the foregoing in more-orless abstract terms then we would have what would amount to a description of Brodsky’s style. – Continuing our discussion of Brodsky’s literary, and philosophical family tree, I’d like to hear your views on Brodsky’s connections with the world of classical Greece and Rome. You have called Brodsky a descendant of the seven great Romans: Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Martial, Horace, Virgil and Ovid.23 George Steiner has called him ‘the most Latin, the most latinate of lyric poets’.24 How do you account for that profound attachment Brodsky has for those poets and for his, as Georges Nivat puts it, ‘nostalgia for antiquity’ in general? 25 – It’s the Pushkinian personality type. Pushkin too was at heart a classicist, that is to say, a poet who sees his mission as being, above all else, to seek out harmony in the midst of chaos, to bring harmony to the real. And the cradle of all that sort of artistic endeavour is classical Greece and Rome. And Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Martial, Horace, and Ovid were the first lyric poets, as we understand that concept. Brodsky is simply returning to the well-spring of his art. – Could one call Brodsky a dispassionate observer? – That, in my opinion, is an uncommonly dull-witted judgement about Brodsky. At our school we had a head of drama, an actor, who explained to us in simple terms the fundamentals of Stanislavsky’s system. So that we didn’t indulge in unnecessary gesticulation he would say, ‘Chatsky is standing still, but his soul is in turmoil.’ Why should Brodsky be a dispassionate poet? Because we come across the words, ‘it’s all the same’, ‘who gives a damn’, ‘it doesn’t mean a thing’, ‘it doesn’t matter who’ and so on and so on? On the contrary, that is a sign of an impetuous inner life, full of the storm of emotion. The poets who are essentially dispassionate are those who are willing to be emotionally explicit, leaving nothing to the imagination. Poems describing, say, love of country or of a woman are with very few exceptions self-obsessed and leave no space for the emotions of the reader to respond internally to the emotion of the poem and can in that case be called dispassionate. – Brodsky is in complete disagreement with you when you say that ‘a writer can only write in his mother tongue’.26 He considers that a parochial, one-horse-town view of things and that the examples of

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Pushkin, Turgenev, Conrad and Beckett disprove it.27 What are your counter- objections? – He hasn’t as yet succeeded in writing in English anything anywhere near as good as anything he’s written in Russian. – Brodsky has more than once cautioned his fellow-writers that they should avoid being dragged into writing about the burning topics of the day. Does he follow his own precepts? In your article, ‘Poetics and Politics’ you, it seems, prove that that isn’t the case.28 – No, I think that in the sense that he warns the writers of the dangers of tackling topical issues he does follow his own code. Journalistic poetry simply isn’t characteristic of him. He thinks, and in my view quite correctly, that to mix poetry with journalism is to blend God’s gift with an omelette. I think that what he had particularly in mind was the sort of journalistic poetry that Voznesensky produces. – But isn’t his own poem ‘Lines on the Winter Campaign’ (U, pp. 97 - 9), for example, about one of the burning topics of the day? – It’s a philosophical response to the Afghanistan war. Brodsky immediately transfers the current event to a religio-philosophical plane. The fundamental imagery of that poem is almost geological. It distances itself from human history. Incidentally, in that poem Brodsky invites comparison with those masters of prose so unlike himself, such as Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, who strive towards the same ends as he sets himself; although no doubt politics can be presented on a much wider scale in prose than it can in poetry. But one can compare the beginning of the Gulag Archipelago to a poem like The End of a Beautiful Era (K, pp. 58 - 60). And Shalamov has that marvellous short story ‘On Lend-Lease’ which is permeated with geological images that stem from a time before the advent of man. – As one of Brodsky’s closest friends, as one who was there when he received the Nobel Prize and able to observe his reactions at close quarters, how did he fare when put to the test by fame? – It has been my lot to observe other men upon whom fame has fallen in this life. And some of them coped with it, and yet to a certain extent, it does corrupt everybody, even if only temporarily. I ‘examined’ Brodsky’s conduct very, very closely from that point of view and, in my opinion, there was absolutely nothing to fault him for. He didn’t show off. Naturally enough he expressed satisfaction that his work should be thus given recognition. He took note of the people around him just

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as he would have done on any quite ordinary occasion. Amidst all the fuss, all the stir, all the rituals connected with the Nobel ceremony it seemed as if Brodsky had mobilised all the attentiveness at his command so as to observe those around him. He is, truth to say, in general a very attentive man as far as other people are concerned, for all the self-criticism we meet up with in his poetry, even in the midst of such a ritual like, for instance, an autograph session with all those people waiting in line from the first to the fourth floors of a very large bookshop, clutching their copies of his book. And always, at the very least, he had one or two words to say in greeting to the autograph hunter, and it wasn’t the televisual attention of the political figure always ready with the welcoming smile and handshake. His look, the intonation of his voice showed me that he saw them not as one of a crowd but as individuals in their own right. – What do you know of his extra-literary interests and passions? – What in particular do you mean? – Music, art, hobbies? – Brodsky is a music lover. I think his favourite composer is Haydn. A composer to him is a man who teaches composition. He thinks it was Haydn who taught him how to develop a theme. But I’m no judge of that. I’m more qualified to say something on the subject of Brodsky the gourmet. He does love to eat. He has his favourite restaurants and he really prefers Far-Eastern food, Chinese and Japanese above all, though he doesn’t shun the others. I think that Brodsky the gourmet has very democratic tastes. – And finally, please read me the poem you dedicated to Brodsky on the occasion of his Nobel triumph. – The poem is called ‘Joseph Brodsky or the Ode on 1957’: JOSEPH BRODSKY, OR THE ODE TO 1957 I First hot soup and then collective action, some placard-waving on the street, some drink, a signature of protest, then slam the door and leave for good. That’s the sort of thing. No such luck though.

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II It may not quite be prison but there’s still nowhere to go. The flicks are closed. The sauna’s out. Well, there’s always the street corner with fumes to sniff and gossip, cars and crowds (and oneself) to outstrip. III The lamp, vacillating on its post, replicates familiar forms: Look – there’s the cant-clad poetaster, there’s Twenty-words-where-one-will-do, and there’s some wretch with fist upraised like something out of The Bronze Horseman. IV Our streets are a rowdy cross over which the local churches tower. Two commemorate deeds of martial might and mariners and bombardiers, iron cannonry and anchors, blood, sword and chain ... so runs the litany. V A third, and greater, has fared worst, its gilded head cut off, its body dressed in granite clothes. Its sleepless windows watch the night away. No angels call on those now crucified within. VI ‘Barer than bare’s the dark of night.’ And night, that rises in the east tolls the bell that brings the crowd to church. The midnight mystery has candles to inflame the human heart.

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VII The soup is supped, the gruel not quite, as mother ties the muffler on her teenage son. The street cop shrills. The tongue is wagging in the bell. But chief of all the word-hoard speaks at the crossroad: VIII Man and spirit, head and cross, thing, aeon, space and nothingness, garden, air, time, sea and fish, ink and ceiling, dust and floor, paper, moth and mouse and thought, snow, marble, tree and thankfulness. 11 December 1987 Stockholm Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1 2

Lev Loseff, ‘Iosif Brodskiy. Predislovie’, Echo, no. 1 (1980) pp. 25 - 6. The impromptu had a following form:

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Joseph Brodsky, Sobranie sochinenii. Stikhi i poemy v 4-kh tomakh, ed. V. Maramzin (Leningrad: Samizdat 1973 - 7). Nina Loseff is a linguist, a lecturer in the Russian Department at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire: Lev Loseff’s wife. Vladimir Gerasimov is a Leningrad writer and a student of local history; see Loseff’s article ‘Tulupy – my’, in K. K. Kuzminsky and G. L. Kovalyov, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, vol. 1 (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980) p. 145. Kostyor, no. 11 (1962). The poem is included in Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 4, pp. 21 - 6. Bella Ezerskaya, ‘Intervyu s Iosifom Brodskim’, in Mastera (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1982) p. 105. G. V. Adamovich, Odinichestvo i svoboda. Literaturnye ocherki (New York: Chekhov Press, 1955). Lev Loseff, ‘Poetics of Faith’, in Aspects of Modern Russian and Czech Literature (Selected Papers from the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies), ed. Arnold McMillin (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Pub lishers, 1989) pp. 188 - 201. See also Loseff’s article ‘Chekhovskii lirism u Brodskogo’, in Poetika Brodskogo, ed. L. Loseff (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermit age, 1986) pp. 185 - 97. J. Brodsky, interviewed by D. Savitsky, January 1983, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, ed. by V. Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov, 2007), pp. 232. J. Brodsky, ‘Poeziya kak forma soprotivleniya realnosti’, Russkaya mysl. Spetsialnoe prilozhenie, 25 May 1990, p. 158. Lev Loseff, Taynyi sovetnik. Stikhotvoreniya (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1987) p. 5. Gerald S. Smith, ‘Flight of the Angels: the Poetry of Lev Loseff, Slavic Review, vol. 47, no. 1 (Spring 1988) pp. 76 - 88. J. Brodsky, ‘Foreword’ to An Age Ago: A Selection of Nineteen-Century Russian Poetry, selected and trans. Alan Myers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988) p. xvii. V. Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 244 - 8. L. Loseff, ‘Posviashchaetsia logike’, Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. 127 (1978) p. 130. J. Brodsky, interviewed by D. Savitsky, op. cit., p. 232. L. Loseff, ‘Rodina i chuzhbina’, paper presented to the international conference Under Eastern Eyes: The Depiction of Western Life in the Works of Russian Writers of the Third Wave of Emigration, 19 - 21 September 1989, SSEES, London.

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Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, a review of Brodsky’s A Part of Speech, New York Review, 14 February 1980, pp. 23 - 4. A. Ospovat, ‘Pushkin’s Political Biography’, paper presented to the IV World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, 23 July 1990, Harrogate. G. Nivat, ‘The Ironic Journey into Antiquity’, in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. L. Loseff and V. Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 96. J. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, op. cit., p. 124. That striving towards neutrality, towards monotony is also expressed in the way Brodsky reads his own poems. It seems to him that it’s ‘in bad taste to underline the nuances’. He strives to ‘make everything equally audible’, ‘to show that everything is equal’, so that ‘no part of the poem, no one word is shown preference’; J. Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1981, ‘Evropeyskiy vozdukh nad Rossiey’, Kniga intervyu, op. cit., p. 142 - 143. Ibid., pp. 154 - 155. A. Loseff, ‘Niotkuda s liubov’yu … Zametki o stikhakh Iosifa Brodskogo’, Kontinent no. 14 (1977) p. 323. George Steiner, ‘Poetry from the Shadow-zone’, review of Brodsky’s To Urania: Selected Poems 1965 - 1985 (London: Viking, 1988), in The Sunday Times, 11 September 1988, p. G10. George Nivat, ‘Kvadrat, v kotoryi vpisan krug vechnosti’, Russkaya mysl, 11 November 1988; Literatumoe prilozhenie, no. 7, p. I. L. Loseff, ‘Angliiskii Brodskiy’, in Chast Rechi. Almanakh literatury i iskusstva (New York: Silver Age, 1980) p. 53. J. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, op. cit. p. 122. L. Loseff, ‘Politics/Poetcs’, in Loseff and Polukhina (eds), Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, pp. 34 - 55.

9 VL A DI M I R UF L I A N D Vladimir Iosifovich Ufliand (1937 - 2007), poet, artist, playwright, studied history for two years at Leningrad University (1955 - 7), served two years in the Soviet Army (1957 - 9), spent four months in prison, worked as a stoker and as bursar for a geographical society, presented an exhibition of his graphic work at the Hermitage Museum and has written works for children and the stage. A man who ‘can do everything’ (Loseff), he once made a Gobelin tapestry. In his youth he belonged to a group of poets (Eryomin, Vinogradov, Kulle, Kondratov and Loseff) which was called the ‘philological school’. For a long time he was the author of just one collection of poems which was put together by Loseff and published in America in 1978, Texts 1955 - 1977 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1978). The majority of the poems are reprinted in the first volume of the Blue Lagoon Anthology (Newtonville, Mass., 1980) and in Petropolis, no. 1, 1990, in both cases with the addition of some new poems. His play The People has been published in Kontinent, no. 60, 1989. It is a witty parody of the history of the Soviet state and its leaders. Ufliand weaves a unique poetic tapestry, combining the speech of the ordinary Russian with the monstrous jargon of the party bureaucrats, the slang of the camps with poetic tropes. He is a past-master at turning threadbare stylistic conventions inside out; commonplaces receive the same treatment. ‘He just slightly modulates the resonances of everyday speech – sometimes using contrasting combinations of words, sometimes metric pauses, sometimes using mild rhyme in place of over-insistent rhyme (incidentally, if Brodsky has learned something from Ufliand, as he loves to say he has, then above all else it has to be that freedom with which he treats colloquial speech)’ (Loseff). Ufliand’s favourite genre is the ballad with elements of the fantastic and romantic added. He is the gayest and the saddest of Russian poets. His major collections of poetry are: Poetic Texts. 1955 - 1980 (SPb., 1993); Selected Texts. 1956 - 1993 (Paris-Moscow-New York, 1995); Detailed Anticipation (Paris, 1990); Rhymed Regular Texts (Spb., 1997); and books of prose: Should God Send me Readers (Spb., 1997); Iz zhizni ukhorylykh (Spb., 2002).

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ONE

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FREEST MEN

An Interview with Vladimir Ufliand (8 July 1989, London)

– When did Brodsky write his ‘Ufliandiya’, which was published in Russkaya mysl? 1 – This year, in reply I suspect to my own reminiscences in ‘From Poet to Myth’.2 – What occasioned their writing? – They were written in anticipation of Joseph’s fiftieth birthday, in celebration of which a collection of his poetry is due to come out in Leningrad.3 – Loseff and I are marking the event in two ways. First, a collection of essays edited by us, Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, is to be brought out by the Macmillan Press. All the articles have been written especially for it. We have also included Brodsky’s Nobel Lecture and my interview with Bella Akhmadulina about him. 4 The second thing is that for the IV Congress of Soviet and East European Studies at Harrogate in July 1990 I have got together a Brodsky panel. 5 What else is going to happen in Russia? – Selections of Brodsky’s poetry are to be published in Moscow by Khudozhestvennaia literatura 6 and by several other publishing houses. In Leningrad we hope to organise an international conference devoted to Brodsky. – Let us turn to you. Your mother was a Sumarokov and that itself hints at your poetic pedigree. Are you in any way related to Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov? – To the poet? I don’t know. But when I consulted Brockhaus and Efron I found that there was only one line of descent from the poet. It seems we must be distantly related somehow or other. – When did you start writing poetry? Some of those in the American collection, Teksty, are dated 1955. 7 – Well, by 1955 my work was already fully formed. I was trying to write poetry in an imitative way at the age of 13 - 14.

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– And why is it the results are so meagre? Loseff says that ‘the present collection contains almost all the lyrical works of Vladimir Ufliand’.8 Is that right? – Yes. I really have written very little, for various reasons. I was busy somehow with other things, and they were no inducement to writing poetry; then I’d go back to it. – And what have you had published in the Soviet Union? – In the Soviet Union my situation is the same as Joseph’s before his exile, just four of my poems have been published. A few more will be appearing in Avrora at the end of the year together with Brodsky’s ‘Ufliandia’. 9 – Are you planning to publish a book in Russia? – Yes, everything that was circulated in samizdat and was known to a narrow circle of readers, and everything that I want to see in print, will be included in the book. There’s been a proposal to publish, but I’d have to pay for that as well. – How is it that the state decided it would foot the bill for your food and lodging? What I mean is, what was their pretext for arresting you and putting you in jail? – They accused me, my brother and a friend of ours of beating up 12 policemen, no more and no less. We were arrested on New Year’s Day 1959 and taken down to the police station. And since we didn’t want to go quietly to our cells and we put up a bit of opposition, they beat us up and left us to rot in jail for four months. And because it proved impossible to find any witnesses to swear to the fact that we had beaten up 12 policemen, each of whom was getting on for twice my size, they just had to let us go. That was pretty unusual. At the time there was nobody who thought they would let us go. There were a lot of people who stood up for us; the late Kiril Vladimirovich Kostsinsky spoke up for us in literary circles. Olga Yakovlevna Lebzak, the actress, did some rabble-rousing on our behalf in the theatrical world. – You were in the same prison, The Crosses, in which Brodsky was later held in 1963; not by any chance in cell 999? – No, it wasn’t in cell 999, but over the four months I was shifted around quite a lot. – When did you get to know Brodsky?

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– In 1959 I came back from doing my military service, and Zhenia Rein, whom I had known for a long time, told me right off that a great poet had emerged in Leningrad. Up until then I hadn’t seen a single line of Brodsky’s poetry. – And was such an epithet really used? – Well, practically. We weren’t frightened then of looking one another in the eye and speaking the truth: ‘You’re a genius’, ‘You’re a great poet.’ Well, then Zhenia Rein took me along to this poetry reading. I can’t remember now where it was, but I was shaken to my very core. At first I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t make out the half of what Brodsky was reading. Anyway, he didn’t as yet have a particularly clear way of reciting. But he really did impress me, fantastically impressed me, with his intonation. It was clear from the very first minute that Zhenia Rein had not taken me there for nothing. – You don’t remember what he read? – No, I can’t remember because I was rather thrown off balance. Just recently I’ve been putting together a selection of his poetry and I was trying to include some of the early poems. And every time I look one of those early poems up it seemed to me that it was something like one of the poems he read then. – Did you take the early poems from, his first American collection ‘Stikhotvoreniya i poemy’ or from the four-volume samizdat collection that Maramzin put together? 10 – I used the Maramzin. – Joseph is somehow particularly sensitive about his early poetry. Did he agree to each and every one of the poems you chose? – Yes. Here I am now in London for just that, to get his final agreement, because he really is pretty stringent about what can and cannot be used. – In the course of your many years’ friendship have there been any times when you’ve had disagreements, times when the relationship has cooled? – No, there really hasn’t been any cooling off in our relationship at any time. But there have been times when, for various reasons, we simply haven’t seen anything of each other; for example when Joseph was in jail, when he went into exile, or when he went off on some geological expedition or other.

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– Tell me, do you like to be considered one of his mentors? – Ha! Ha! – But seriously, what did you teach him? – Seriously, of course, it just simply isn’t possible to talk about my teaching him anything. I think that the notion that I’m one of his mentors is a form of flattery of the same sort as when someone comes up to you and says: ‘You’re a great poet’ or ‘You’re a genius.’ I think that 99 per cent of the time they’re putting you on. The only reason anyone has to think that I am his mentor is quite simply that I started to write before he did, started to get noticed before he did. Of course, when I read Joseph I see that there is something that, possibly, is the result of my influence. At the same time if you take a careful look at my poems you’ll see Joseph’s influence. I think the first person to declare that I was Brodsky’s mentor was our mutual acquaintance Kostia Kuzminsky, and anything he said … – … should be discounted by at least half. – A half wouldn’t be enough, a hundred is more like it. He just likes to say things other people wouldn’t even consider thinking. 11 – Couldn’t you be a little more specific about the ways in which you and Brodsky have influenced each other? – Joseph once said he really liked my rhymes. Possibly we both feel the same passion for rhymes. But the number of rhymes in Russian, however large it may be, grows less and less each day, as more and more poems are written in the language. So rhyme is not the best criterion for excellence in poetry. There are poems of Joseph’s, take ‘Lesnaya idilliya’ 12 for instance, which should, by his own admission, have been written by me. There you can clearly see stylisation in concert with the primitive, a device I myself often employ. Joseph too has a soft spot for the same device; witness ‘Novyi Zhul Vern’ (U, pp. 40 - 6), ‘Predstavlenie’, 13 but he rarely constructs a poem just using stylisation, primitivism or the absurd; he uses them incidentally. As for Brodsky’s influence on me, I feel it as a sort of impulse. Sometimes I’ll go a long while without writing anything under my own steam; I’ll only write when I’m commissioned to, then suddenly I’ll read something or other and, as a result of the specific or not so specific impressions, ideas, that that arouses, the need arises within me to express myself on the particular topic, whatever it may be.

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As I read Brodsky more frequently than I read anyone else, it follows that nearly all such impulses are the direct result of something of his that I’ve read. – What did Brodsky learn from Akhmatova? In my view his poetry feels as if it had been more influenced by her spirit rather than by her style? – I think you’re right there. I’d even go as far as to say that they are quite different. It’s not just that they are of different generations; they set out for different destinations, even their literary gifts differ in nature. But there is something, possibly, that they do have in common: their way of looking at the world. And the places at which their two gazes intersect is at a spiritual rather than a poetical point. Of course one can, if one so wishes, find influences, echoes of a sort, concealed quotations, paraphrases, but that’s all beside the point. – And what about his poetics? Which Russian poet of our century is he closest to? – Now I find that a bit difficult to say because there was a time … – If I, in 1955 - 6, let’s say, was familiar with the poetry of Akhmatova and Pasternak and at least acquainted with the poetry of Khlebnikov, at that time I had no idea at all about Tsvetaeva’s work, since it didn’t start being circulated in manuscript until four or five years later. Mandelstam too made his appearance then. And clearly, each time you’re confronted with a ‘new’ poet then, in some way or other, you’re going to be influenced. And so you discover that there’s a Tsvetaeva, a Mandelstam, and you get to closer grips with Khlebnikov, and in the course of time it becomes much harder to work out which of them has had the more influence upon your work because each new discovery, of course, does have its effect, on me and, I think, upon Brodsky too. – And if you were to cast your eyes over the wideflowing river of Russian poetry from Antioch Kantemir, from Simeon Polotsky even, right up to the present day, in which channel do you think Brodsky steers his course? – That’s difficult to answer unequivocally. I know that Brodsky himself cited Baratynsky, but that’s possibly simply because he likes his poetry. Personally, I wouldn’t want to tie Brodsky together with Baratynsky, because it’s clear that if Pushkin hasn’t had a direct influence

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upon him he has had an influence, a topsyturvy influence, even on Tyutchev, possibly. – Because repudiation is also an influence? – Of course. Sometimes it’s the stronger influence. – And you, what’s your ancestry? To my mind it’s harder furnishing you with a poetic genealogy. What have the critics to say about that? Do they actually write about you, over in the Soviet Union? – They do. When, for instance, my book was published abroad and then, about two years later, became accessible in the Soviet Union, there were reviews in the samizdat press. I’ve got a collection of the articles. They are notable both for their brevity and their intensity. The people who write in our samizdat press are very knowledgeable. I read what they had to say, and it astonished me. Now I belonged to one poetic tree, now to another. Some assigned me to the line of Khlebnikov and the oberiuty, some said that, of course, Futurism and the avant-garde had had their influence, especially Pasternak’s. A third group said, no, one must look further afield: they saw me as an offshoot of Barkov. – And with which of them do you yourself feel inclined to agree? – The fact is that when I was 15 or 16 I wrote a dozen poems or so in imitation of Akhmatova. Later, or it may even have been earlier, I don’t know, I tried imitating Mayakovsky, the early Mayakovsky. Nowadays you won’t find the least trace of their influence in my poetry, I’ve realised that I have this model of reality of my own which exists independently of anyone else. Maybe in places it abuts upon, cuts across, the boundaries of someone else’s, let’s say Brodsky’s or Barkov’s, Pushkin’s or Pasternak’s, Khlebnikov’s or Kharms, Zabolotsky’s or Zoshchenko’s, Lev Loseff’s or Edward Lear’s. I think that for a man of letters who knows the ropes, with his own concept of the way in which the world is ordered, there is no need for him to go troubling his head who his great predecessors were, who his great contemporaries are; or who’s going to be coming along when he’s gone. Of course I have my literary affairs of the heart but, with the passing of the years, I’m more inclined to pick up something I’m already familiar with when I want something to read: Aristophanes, let’s say, or Brodsky, rather than something new. I’m faithful to my old flames, new ones are fairly rare.

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– Have you ever suffered from a Brodsky complex? I ask because I’ve met more than my share of poets who do. – No, probably not. But you’re right there are a lot who really do set out, literally, to follow in Brodsky’s footsteps: some of them have that intention at the outset; some of them have dedicated their whole lives to that. I never had that, possibly because my formative years as a poet were just that little bit earlier. And then, no matter how drawn I may have been, no matter how much I may have admired his poetry, I was already discerning enough in literary matters to know that that wasn’t in my line. – In what ways have your insights into Joseph’s character, your appreciation of him as a poet changed? – If I were to tell you about the early days then I’d have to say that, of course, Joseph stood out, but I really couldn’t say that I preferred his poetry above that of all the others, because there were a lot of good poets, both in Leningrad and in Moscow. Clearly he did stand out, both as a poet and as a literary personality, and he became the centre of attention, the centre of all literary activity in Leningrad, non-official literature, of course. That was after his return from exile. In exile he wrote a lot of fine poetry and after that he blossomed out and began to write a great deal. And every time, no matter what it was he had written, it really was an event. – Which of the poems written in exile do you consider the best? – I would find it difficult to single out any one poem. Joseph, and it is very characteristic of the man, really does have varying attitudes to his early poetry; but he has published all the poems he wrote in his northern exile. Each of them has beauties of its own and they are all important. – What effect did his departure have upon you, not just personally; what were its literary consequences for you? How much of a gap did he leave? – Of course, the simple fact that he had gone was heart-breaking in itself. And what hurt the most was that one knew that the chances of our meeting again were virtually nil. You know we’d been through all those various thaws and clamp-downs, and though neither Joseph nor I were pessimists, when we cast a sober eye over what was going on we both realised that nothing was going to change for the better

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in our lifetime. All we could do was trust that God would find a way. Well, of course, it was all very depressing. There was this feeling that this was it: we were saying goodbye for ever. But once I had got over the actual moment of his going away then I got to thinking, and I still think, that it’s a very good thing that Joseph did go off and land up in America. Even if he hadn’t written another word after he arrived there, just stayed healthy, it was still a good thing that he’d gone. I don’t know how he would have gone on if he had stayed in Russia. Things could have turned out for the worst. But as it is he is alive and healthy and his writing gets better and better. It just wasn’t on for him to stay in Russia. Of all the things that could have happened, that was the best. Maybe it was the only possibility. – Did you keep in touch with him? – Yes, of course we kept in touch through people we knew, by mail. – Did his letters get through? – Not on a regular basis, especially at first. We wrote to each other very frequently, and only after Joseph had told me everything he could about life over there did he start writing less often. At times it seemed that none of his letters were getting through at all, then he would send me notes, would send me his regards through friends. Then there was this coincidence of sorts: my son and Joseph’s son were both born in the same year. 14 Joseph tried to keep up with what was happening with his family through me. – Does his son Andrey take after his father in any way? – He looks very like Joseph when he was younger. – Did you often visit Joseph’s parents after he had gone? – Yes. We had this tradition, every year we would get together on Joseph’s birthday. – When was your first meeting with Joseph in the West? – Right now, here in England, is the first time. This year is the first time I’ve ever been abroad; I went to Paris, and now I’m here in London specially to see Joseph. – How has he changed? What surprised you the most about him? – That’s hard to say because, recently, with the lines of communication between us and the West becoming so much more open, we’ve been corresponding with each other intensively, been chatting over the phone and, back home, I’ve got a few video-cassettes of TV pro-

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grammes in which Joseph puts in an appearance. So as far as looks go I haven’t had any surprises. I had already seen photographs and videos of him. And I recognised him straight away when we met at the station. As for the inner man, I find that a difficult one to answer as well, because we’ve only had one week together and we’ve been occupied with business affairs. It’s still too early for me to specify any changes. – What would you say stands out in his character? – That I can answer with no nagging doubts whatsoever precisely because he occupies such a special place in contemporary Russian poetry: because he is one of the freest men I know. And that obviously is what stands out. And that intrinsic freedom can be felt in his poetry. All the other things, the purely literary things, the purely technical things, are secondary, just as it’s a secondary question to ask which tendency he belongs to. What is important is, that at a time when freedom was a rare thing indeed, when there was practically no one around who managed to preserve their intrinsic freedom, he did. – And that includes freedom from a preoccupation with the buming issues of the day? – No, he was always responding to the burning issues of the day. But he took up a position where he was free of it all, could somehow see it all at a distance; but he couldn’t remain a dispassionate observer; he played his part. And it was his participation, the influence he wielded by the position he took, the influence he wielded with his personality that, in my opinion, was the most important thing. – You agree that his personal freedom has directly influenced his poetics, in that he takes everything he wanted from whomsoever he chooses and yet still remains his own man. – Yes, yes. He really does have a very wide range. He has a very good grounding in contemporary poetry and he really isn’t afraid of being influenced by anybody because he has his own position which cannot be shaken by any influence whatsoever. – And how does that freedom harmonise with the tragic content of the overwhelming majority of his poems? – I think that that tendency to intensify the tragic (life is never as tragic as all that, in life tragedy and comedy are interfused) is characteristic of his particular personality, of his temperament, of his psy-

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chological make-up. If Lev Loseff, let’s say, or myself try to do the same thing we don’t go for tragedy, we use irony or farce. Different poets use different means. – Writing about Tsvetaeva, Brodsky says, ‘she demonstrated language’s own self-interest in tragic subject matter’ (L, p. 192). Do you share that point of view? – I have to say I disagree with Joseph. That assertion contradicts what Joseph said about his being an instrument of language. If he means by language the Word that is from God then God cannot be interested in the tragic content. By my lights God is objective. And it happens to be precisely that interest that language takes in the promise of salvation wherein lies the main countervailing potentiality in the face of real evil, suffering and death. I feel that Joseph’s formulation takes too large an account of the literary language. The literary language has struggled long to free itself from the spoken, developing fairly specific self-contained worlds: the tragic, the dramatic, the comic. And at same time the spoken language has been taking a route of its own. New types of slang arise. When Joseph gets bored with using the literary language and he introduces conversational turns of phrase, words normally only used in the spoken language, slang, it always ruins the tragic, the dramatic effect. You get something jaunty like this: У северных широт набравшись краски трезвой, (иначе – серости) и хлестких резюме, ни резвого свинца, ни обнаженных лезвий, как собственной родни, глаз больше не бздюме. (U:183)

After taking in lots of the sober colours from the Northern latitudes (in other words, grey) and concise resumes, the eye is incapable of seeing either the frisky lead or the bared blades just as one no longer notices close relatives.

– In essay after essay Brodsky insistently underlines the mutuality of the relationship between poet and language, the extent to which he is dependent upon language. In what specific ways does Brodsky’s dependency upon the Russian language manifest itself?

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– The specific dependency of Joseph upon the Russian language is manifest in the fact that his poetry could only possibly have been written in Russian. Translated into another language it wouldn’t mean the same thing. The poems would be different. It’s exactly what he’s said about his English language essays; strictly speaking, translated into Russian they would be quite different pieces. – Are you yourself aware of your own dependency upon language? – I feel my own dependency very strongly indeed, because I’ve only got Russian to express myself in. I feel that dependency all the time. Really, language doesn’t just influence my literary ideas, it has its influence upon me as a person. My language circumscribes me in all I do, it moulds my life. But when I hear Joseph saying that, it surprises me a lot because he’s got the English language as well as the Russian. Now, when I look at him I see that he was raised on Russian poetry, he sees his whole life in terms of Russian language. But there’s something new there, something interesting, a trace in some way or other of an English element. He is different now, but the difference defies precise definition. I’m talking about him both as a man and as a person. That a poet is a determinant of language is pretty self-evident. But that language defines man is a question that hasn’t been much looked into. Joseph has started to think and write about that particular issue. – What has the Russian language learned through Brodsky from the English language? – It’s learned a lot. But it has to be said that it has not learned through Brodsky alone, because now we’ve got a lot of poets who’ve come up, they’re a bit younger than us and amongst them there are some who, one feels, have been very much influenced by the poetry of the English-speaking world. The condition of literature at the present moment is such that these influences are really indispensible. – None the less, all this has come after Brodsky’s ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’, his ‘Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot’, after his Beckettian poem ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’, ‘The Butterfly’ and other metaphysical poems of his. – Yes, you’re right. Joseph was the first to do so. – And here we’re really talking about the dependency of presentday Russian poets upon Brodsky, for it’s through him that the Eng-

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lish metaphysical tradition has entered the bloodstream of Russian poetry. – Yes, I agree with you. The influence of English-language poetry upon the new Russian poetry outweighs any other. And that influence is there, to a large extent, especially in the case of our younger poets, thanks to Brodsky. My knowledge of other contemporary poets writing in German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew etc., etc. is poor. Possibly, right now they have not reached the highly developed stage that English language poetry has reached and, for that reason, have had less of an influence. Brodsky is better acquainted with them than I am, but he didn’t get his metaphysics from those sources. – In your opinion what will future researchers see as Brodsky’s contribution to the Russian poetic language? – It’s already clear that the process of mutual influence that is now going on between the various different literatures is both timely and irreversible. And the fact that Joseph gave the whole process a powerful thrust forward, setting in motion a convergence of the two poetic traditions, the English and the Russian, is very important and can now already be seen as his particular contribution to Russian poetry. – And how would you evaluate his indiscriminate blending of the various different registers of the language, the way in which he brings into his poems archaisms, vulgarisms, technical terms, foreign words etc., etc? – I think it’s really a sine qua non, especially now. The language has to enrich itself from hitherto unexploited sources, let’s say, for instance, from jargon, dialect, other languages, scientific terminology. It’s in the natural order of things, and it’s especially important now, because we must get away from the pernicious influence of newspeak which has so vitiated the Russian language as to have affected our way of thinking. And Joseph has made a huge contribution to a renaissance of the language; all our writers are now at last making an effort to write in real Russian. And after us, after my and Brodsky’s generation, there’s a new generation who are, it’s already clear, going to write in a different language to the one used by the poets and prose writers of our generation. That language of the up-and-coming generation has, in turn, its influence upon us; but not to such an extent that we are going to change the way we write. That is to say, we don’t as

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yet know the nature of the language the next generation will use but it’s undergoing these elemental changes which are beyond the reach of our influence. And neither I nor Joseph, no matter how important he may have been, can have any decisive influence upon that process. It’s beyond his power. That is, he will have some influence I think, but it wouldn’t be decisive. – According to Brodsky, ‘poetry is not ‘the best words in the best order’; for language it is the highest form of existence’ (L, p. 186). Do you share this view? – Of course, the crowning achievements of a language are the works of its great poets and writers. And Brodsky’s language, being the language of the greatest Russian poet of the present day is the epitome of that ‘great and mighty Russian language’, 15 its loftiest manifestation. – How would you define Brodsky’s major themes? – As a man with rather a wide-ranging mind he’s written about a great many things, but one has to admit that his main theme is the tragedy of individual existence. He is extremely self-aware and also very aware of the world around him and he sees the solution to life’s problems in some elevated sphere. In our epoch everything takes on a more and more gloomy aspect. And the more gifted a man is, the more he feels that tragedy. And Joseph, to whom more has been given that to anyone else I know, feels it more powerfully than anyone else. – Brodsky has himself outlined some of his major themes. Thus, in his essay on Tsvetaeva he says that ‘in the final analysis, every writer strives for the same thing: to regain or hold back time past or current’ (L, p. 180). – To varying degrees all poets, all writers, are preoccupied with that, they all try to hold back the march of time: ‘Verweile doch! du bist so schon! Joseph is acutely aware of the problem and he has the ability to give expression to it. I would say that he has been more successful than anyone else I know. – What do you see as being different about his use of antiquity? – I’ve thought about it quite a bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that every poet, or least every real poet, conscious poet, that one finds interesting, that one really wants to read again and again, creates his own world which has, of course, some sort of connection with the real world but, at the same time, is in some way not quite the real world.

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The poet creates a world which if it’s not exactly an easier or more comfortable world to live in, is at least more pliable. And in that world (he calls mine ‘Ufliandiya’, I would call his ‘Brodland’) antiquity is an integral part of what – I even dreamed up a term for it – I would call it ‘would-be reality’. For someone else, let’s say myself, antiquity would be exotic, but for him it is an organic part of his world. – The title of his third collection, ‘The End of a Beautiful Epoch’, suggests to us another of the important themes that run through his work, the theme of ‘after the end’. His ‘New Stanzas to Augusta’ deal with what comes after love, A ‘Part of Speech’ with what comes after Russia, his play ‘Marbles’ with a time after the end of Christianity. Are you yourself aware of this theme in Brodsky’s work? – Yes, it really is there. I feel that it is in some way linked with the absurd. You have this need to express your concept of the way things are and you take them to their logical conclusion, their absurd conclusion. That is there I think in Joseph’s work. In part it is a literary device, and in part it’s psychological. In order to experience something, to live through an idea, you have to take it and think it through to its logical conclusion, take it to the limits of the absurd. – Yes, Tullius says much the same thing in ‘Marbles’: ‘To take everything to its logical end – and further’ (M, p. 26). – That’s it. In certain situations which are especially difficult to resolve one always has to resort to the absurd; a more or less meaningful absurd. – Whatever theme of Brodsky’s we care to chose, whether it be Time, Empire or Faith (you remember the definition he gave of faith: ‘All faith is nothing more than a one-way correspondence’ (K, p. 62)) he’s already taken all of them to their logical end. What more is there he can surprise us with? – That, of course, is up to him. If he’s not content to rest on his laurels and is intending to go on further, if that’s really within the power of man, it has to be something quite unexpected, quite unpredictable. – In Loseff’s opinion, Brodsky, both as a man and as a poet, was fully formed at a very early age, and in essence everything that’s he’s writing about now he’s already said before somewhere or other, in embryonic form in his earlier poems.16 Do you share that feeling?

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– Yes, I feel something very similar to that. He really did mature very quickly. There is a period a poet goes through when he knows what he wants to write but lacks the technique he needs in order to express himself freely. He passed through that phase in which a poet starts to make certain themes his own very, very quickly. In the course of a few years he had attempted to give some sort of form to all those themes with which he would later be associated and then … – … began to take them through to their logical end. How would you assess Brodsky’s anti-lyricism? – In my opinion it isn’t anti-lyricism. It’s simply contemporary lyricism. There’s certainly nothing traditional about it. If in earlier times a poet quite openly tried to make his readers reach for their handkerchiefs, nowadays we’d consider that just a cheap trick. Where today’s poetry has the edge is that it leaves it up to the reader, disillusioned as he is with rhetoric and prophecy, with formulas of any kind, and who has lost faith in any form of authority, to take the poet’s argument and make his own conclusions, decide what is good and what is evil. The most important thing is that the poet should possess, as Brodsky does, the power to draw his reader into the spiralling, misty darkness. It’s up to the reader to find his own way out: or not, as the case may be. That’s the reader’s problem. – Can you recall any amusing, any funny incident that you associate with Brodsky? – There was one rather amusing thing that happened when we went off to get ourselves taken on as foresters. It was late in 1963 and Joseph felt that things were about to take a turn very much for the worse, so we decided to find ourselves a hide-out. And we came up with the idea of becoming forestry workers. – And where did you go? – First of all we went to the head office of the forestry commission. We went there and told them we wanted to work as foresters. They asked us what we did for a living and we told them we were poets. Their reaction then was, naturally, to be a bit taken aback. But when they began to take down our particulars and they saw that one of us was called Vladimir Iosifovich Ufliand and the other Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, clearly we were of a nationality that didn’t strike them, first off, as being fitted for toil on the forest front. They were

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even more dumbfounded. Anyway, they gave us letters of recommendation addressed to the head of the Sosnovsk branch of that industry. It took me and Joseph quite some time to get there. It’s about 80 kilometres north of Leningrad, over towards Priozersk. And when we arrived they got a bit of a shock there too. But they did promise us that, if we came back again in a while, they would fix us up with some work. But after that things began to move pretty rapidly and Joseph never did get himself fixed up with a forestry job, because they were then starting … – … to get him in their sights? – Precisely. – Have you got a poem dedicated to Joseph? – Yes, I have. It was written on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature: TO JOSEPH BRODSKY: PARNASSUS Drop me a line, poet of All the Russias, With fragrant recollections of your birchings; How you’ve been pining for your unstamped passport, For racist questionnaires, no references, And all those cherished wastes and desert places Where churches once and monasteries stood; Indeed, for all those blessings great and small With which we’re so richly endowed; meanwhile, The Jew, the Russian, other races too, Shed their nostalgic tears on Hudson’s banks. Then picture for me, if you will, the day The noble Swede delivered you his prize, And, tell me, did he ask for written proof Of your poetic capabilities? From laurel crown and lyre inseparable You’ll surely choose Parnassus for your lodging. I’ll write there, Iosif, stamped with hammer and sickle Forlorn without their golden wreath: it’s yours now. November 1987 Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

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Joseph Brodsky, ‘Zametki dlia entsiklopedii’, Russkaya mysl, 16 June 1989, p. 8. Vladimir Ufliand, ‘Ot poeta k mifu’, Russkaya mysl, 16 June 1989, p. 8. Four Brodsky collections were published in 1990: Nazidanie, ed. V. Ufliand (Leningrad: SP ‘Smart’); Osenniy krik yastreba, ed. O. Abramovich, introd. V. Ufliand (Leningrad: IMA Press); Chast rechi: Izbrannye stikhi 1962 - 89, ed. Ed. Beznosov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura); and Stikhotvoreniya Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. G. Komarov (Leningrad: SP AlgaFond). Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990). Neither Professor G. Nivat nor Professor I. Smirnov were able to take part in the panel ‘Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics’, chaired by Professor Lev Loseff. Papers were given by Anatoly Naiman (Printsip ravnovesiya slov v ego razvitii’) and by Valentina Polukhina (‘Poeticheskii avtoportret Brodskogo’); Professor Gerry Smith acted as a discussant. Brodsky, Chast rechi: Izbrannye stikhi 1962 - 89, op. cit. Vladimir Ufliand, Teksty 1955 - 1977 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1978). Lev Loseff, notes on the cover of Teksty, ibid. Avrora, no. 11 (1989) pp. 76 - 82. Joseph Brodsky, Sobranie sochineniy. Stikhi i poenty v 4-kh tomakh (Leningrad: samizdat, 1973 - 7), collected and ed. Vladimir Maramzin. Konstantin Kuzminsky and Georgy Kovalyov have collected and published 9 volumes of unofficial Russian poetry under the title The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (Newtonville, Mass.: Orien tal Research Partners, 1980 - 6). Joseph Brodsky, ‘Lesnaya idilliya’, in the literary almanac Russica (New York: Russica Publishers, 1982) pp. 25 - 9. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Predstavlenie’, Kontinent no. 62 (1990) pp. 7 - 13. The poem is included by V. Ufliand in Brodsky’s Soviet collection Nazidanie. Brodsky’s son Andrey was born in 1967. The epithet ‘great and mighty Russian language’ belongs to Turgenev; see his ‘Stikhorvoreniya v proze’, in Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow: Detskaya literature, 1967) p. 552. Lev Loseff, ‘Poeziya Iosifa Brodskogo’, a seminar at London University (SSEES), 30 March 1984.

10 D AV I D S H R A Y E R - P E T R O V Born in 1936, Leningrad, USSR; immigrated to USA in 1987. Books in Russian: Friends and Shadows (Druz’ia i teni), memoir-novel, 1989, New York, NY; Song about a Blue Elephant (Pesnia o golubom slone), poetry, 1990, Holyoke, MA, USA; Villa Borghese (Villa Borgeze), poetry, 1992, Holyoke, MA, USA; Herbert and Nelly (Gerbert i Nelli), novel, 1992, Moscow; 2nd ed. 2006, St. Petersburg, Russia; Petersburg Doge (Piterskii dozh), poetry, 1999, St. Petersburg, Russia; French Cottage (Frantsuzskii kottedzh), novel, 1999, Providence, RI, USA; Form of Love (Forma liubvi), poetry, 2003, Moscow, Russia; Vodka and Pastries: A Novel with Writers (Vodka s pirozhnymi: Roman s pisateliami), memoir novel, 2007, St. Petersburg, Russia. Books in English: Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America. Syracuse, NY, 2003; Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories, Syracuse, NY, 2006. The prose and poetry of David Shrayer-Petrov have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and been translated into Belarusian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish and other languages.

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HE

WA S A

UN I V E R SA L POE T

An Interview with David Shrayer-Petrov (28 September, 2003, London) – What do you feel at the mention of Brodsky’s name? – Each time I, or somebody else, mentions Brodsky, I feel like I am remembering a brother. – In your memoirs ‘Friends and Shadows’ (New York, 1989) you write, that in 1961 Brodsky came to your house just ‘to chat’, though you had never met before. Tell me about that meeting, please. – Yes, that is true. I had just been discharged from the army and was back in Leningrad early in April. I was a young officer then, – I thought I looked very handsome, strolling along Nevsky Prospect in my military coat, when I suddenly ran into Ilya Averbakh. He asks me: ‘Have you heard about Brodsky? (I had, I’ll tell you about it later: why and how I heard about him.) He is a genius. You have to meet him’. I said I would be happy to. Literally a day or two later, at about five or six in the afternoon, the doorbell rang in my communal apartment. I lived far from downtown, on the Vyborgsky side of Leningrad, alone, in two empty rooms; my mother having died six months before. I went out to answer the bell and saw a young guy, his face stubblecovered, who says: ‘Are you David Petrov?’ – ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Petrov was my pen name in those years for what had already been published or was circulating in hand-written sheets signed either by Petrov or Petrov-Shrayer. ‘I am Joseph Brodsky’. – ‘Oh yes’, – I say, – ‘I heard about you, come on in’. He had come by bicycle. A blizzardwas just starting and it was getting dark. I was somewhat in shock to see him, though I knew I would be having visitors, as we all were good and close friends at that time. All of us: Rein, Naiman, Bobyshev, Averbakh. We entered my room. I had a bottle of Madeira. I lit the stove because he was wearing only a sports jacket, maybe a sweater, no overcoat, and I feared he might catch cold. He was about five years my junior, and so I felt like an older brother. He came in and immediately struck me as someone who was possessed. That was the first thing I felt; he was possessed. He was moving as if drawn by

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a magnet. I being the centre of poetry, my poetry, and he being drawn to me. One other thing struck me! A yellow maple leave was stuck – still there from last autumn – stuck to the window pane. He noticed it and said: ‘That’s like Star of David’. We sat down, I lit the stove, and we began reading poetry to each other. At that time I knew all my poems by heart. He said: ‘You know, David, almost no one writes love poetry nowadays; that’s why I came to see you. I know many of your poems are about love’. We felt very close to one another; there was a lot of trust. And so it remained, until his departure. Whenever we met, we felt as if we had never parted. We could talk openly about anything – literature and politics. Later we simply lost contact, but there was never anything that would hamper this openness with one another. We talked about many things that night. Soon after that, Joseph began inviting me to his poetry readings. He wanted me to read with him. This flattered me, as I understood right away what a great poet he was. I didn’t need anyone to tell me, I knew right away that he had greater intellectual power, and an amazing intellect, i.e. I had never encountered such an intellect among the writers of my generation, or any of the Leningrad poets. The only poet, who I thought could challenge Brodsky, despite their big differences in style, was Genrikh Sapgir. The latter also had a big heart, great emotional force, and a large interest in the poetry of others. On top of that he had a vigorous intellect. We took part in different poetry events. I remember one reading at the Leningrad University, which was absolutely terrific. Gorbovsky, Dmitry Bobyshev, I, and maybe Kuzminsky were reciting verses. – Did you hear that Brodsky at that time had a nickname: ‘Jewish Pushkin’? – Never. And what he said about the maple leaf might also have occurred to Blok or let’s say Sergey Vikulov; the image was not a difficult one. I have to say here that at that time we didn’t talk so much about Jewish problems. – This topic is certainly important and always intrigues many researchers. However, none of them has enough knowledge, or tact to discuss it. You mentioned that he not only compared the maple leaf with the Star of David, but you also noted that Brodsky brought to po-

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etry the disarrayed Jewish soul. Did this disarrayed soul quiet down in him with time, or did it take a different form? – You know, Valentina, my first impression was that here was a Jewish guy who had burst into Russian literature bringing with him quite a reserve of disarray, as to get into Russian literature without the incandescence he had was impossible. I think the first push for him was some Jewish motifs, for example ‘Jewish Cemetery’, or other poems, but nothing else. I remember once, I quoted something about the Jewish religion or God – I‘m not sure now, and he said that for him there is no Jewish God, but only god of the Universe. And I think that with time, this disarray of his soul was straightened out, as he suddenly realized that he had entered Russian literature, achieved a certain level and even risen above it and so there was nothing for him to worry about. He got rid of this complex that we all suffered from… I remember you came into an editorial office in those days, and even if your name was Petrov – typically Slavic – it was still obvious you were Jewish in every line of what you write. Brodsky made a decision from the very start not to visit editorial offices or dream of getting published. He understood that his poems – even if published – wouldn’t bring him any success there, in his motherland. He achieved such heights in literature that he didn’t worry. And on that level, it doesn’t matter who you are: Jew, Georgian, Russian or Tartar. It’s important that he was a poet of the Universe who wrote in Russian. I would say that very soon he felt himself to be a poet beyond nationality, a poet of the Universe, who wrote masterfully in Russian. I think if he had been born somewhere in Georgia, or England, or Uganda, he would still have written the same poetry – though with a different local color – as he wrote in Russian. In my opinion being Jewish or Catholic didn’t matter much to him. And with time he settled down. If you want to compare his poems and his method of composition, regarding vowels and consonant as well as the rhymed assonances, you will see that very soon he began to write calm, well structured, definitively poems of genius. – And yet we can’t help finding both Jewish theme and Jewishness in Brodsky’s verses. He was born and grew up in an anti-Semitic country. In Russia even now Brodsky is reproached for losing his Russianness. Jews in Israel don’t consider Brodsky their poet and blame him for refusing to go to Israel. By the way, why did he refuse to go there?

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– I don’t think he refused to. Maybe he was postponing it? First of all, there’s no reason to blame. In general I think nobody can blame anyone for anything. Such was his choice and his decision. From 1961 and till his death Brodsky had occasional Jewish motifs in his poetry. Just think of his ‘Lithuanian Divertissement’ of 1971, or ‘Postface to a Fable’ with its Jewish crow, of 1993. Also it would be premature to blame him for writing too few genuinely folkloric (Slavic) verses. We shall return to this topic later and talk about Brodsky and the Russian village poets. – Are you joking? – No, it’s not a joke. This harmony is built into his poetry and it’s so subtle that the reader doesn’t notice it. – Let’s go back to the Jewish theme. – There are poets who talk about it openly. When thoroughly analyzing others, like Pasternak, you suddenly see: this is Jewish prosody, very subtle. There are poets who never ever talk about their Jewish descent, though it runs through all their work. I remember I was thirty when I first met Lev Anninsky and showed him my verses, which didn’t have a single word about Jewishness. He told me: ‘Your verses are saturated with Jewishness’. – ‘How did you see it?’ – ‘Well, I can see it in the lines, their very nature’. Same goes for Brodsky. Of course, Osya took it in with his mother’s milk that he was not the same as everybody else. He wrote about it. And yet, it wasn’t the topic of his conversations with other people. It wasn’t his major interest. His major interest was poetry per se, regardless of its national origins, I think. – Language for Brodsky is one of his central themes. It was back in 1963 that Brodsky formulated this idea of self-value and self-development of a language. Where, in your opinion, are the origins of this idea? Don’t you think they are from the Bible? – Valentina, I must agree with you. In fact, he read the Bible very seriously. Like all of us he read it in Russian. My grandmother‘s Bible had one side of the page in Yiddish and the other side in Russian. One of Brodsky’s early poems is ‘Isaac and Abraham’. The problem of Isaac, Abraham and Ishmael has not been resolved to this day. And of course Brodsky was thinking about it. In those years everybody was concerned with what was going on there, in Palestine.

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You asked me if he was considering going there. No, he wasn’t. We talked about it – I think it was in 1970 - 1971 – when I came to Leningrad specially to see him. And he said to me that he didn’t want to go to Israel, that he was planning to go to the West, – not Israel. By the way, I don’t agree with the conception adopted by many that Brodsky was forced to leave. – You mean his departure from the Soviet Union? – Yes. – Do you have any ground to believe he wanted to emigrate before he was offered to? – Yes, I heard it from him, and afterwards he was sorry he told me. – Does it mean that Joseph, like almost every great poet, at some stage of his life, began to rewrite his biography, to create his myth? – I don’t think he was creating a myth. I think the people who were interested in his myth created it, as they needed to balance Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky. I don’t know how it really was with Solzhenitsyn, but I was a refuznik for nine years, and I know how it was in our community. I know that some refuzniks who had been struggling to get permission to leave for ten years, when, suddenly, they were issued a visa, would say: ‘I am being forced to leave the country’. An example is Yury Karabchievsky, I knew him well, – we both were refuzniks. He came to see me and said: ‘I’ve been given a visa, but I don’t want to leave’. And he refused, but he refused at a time when it was permitted to do so. As for Joseph, I remember telling him: ‘You were in exile once, and the times are not getting better: they may be getting better or worse for some, but the situation in general is getting tense and supercharged’. He told me he was thinking about it and was taking some steps. He even told me about some ladies visiting him with a view to discussing a fictitious marriage. And he said: ‘You have to understand me, I can’t possibly do it. When I think about having to kiss hereven fictitiously – I am disgusted. But I want to leave and have to. It’s finished here; I have no reason to stay. They publish my verses there, my book has just been out.’ He told me about it himself. Maybe because I was no longer in his circle, as I lived in Moscow, and so he knew he could be quite open with me. Or maybe because he remembered how I had spoken in his defense at the Writers’ Union during a most difficult time in his life. I was a young candidate for membership of the

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Writers’ Union, recommended by Vera Panova. I came out and said: ‘What are you doing? He is the most talented poet in Leningrad now’. Maybe that’s why he was so open with me. You know the Leningrad circle was very tight; you couldn’t be open with anyone; the day after, it was reported to the Big House. Anyways, I knew about it and never told anyone. You are the first to hear it from me, and this is absolutely true. His photo is in front of us, he is looking at me now and won’t object to it. –The fact that he did want to emigrate is known; he must have shared his plans with others as well. However, in the Soviet Union when one was offered the opportunity to leave, one did not refuse. – Of course, it is shocking anyway. My family was waiting for nine years. I was arrested, my wife Mila was beaten up at demonstrations, but when we got a call from OVIR and were told that we had permission to leave, it was a shock. It is still your country. Suddenly you see your whole life passing before your own eyes, and you feel as if heaven is leaving you, and now you are in quite a different space. I understand he experienced something like this. But the fact that he wanted to leave is also true. – Once again I would like to turn you back to the Jewish theme. Would you attribute the fact that his poems are saturated with original ideas to his Jewish descent? – I wouldn’t say so. There is no way I want, or can, or even have the right to think so, because it is enough to remember Pushkin, Blok, and Tsvetaeva. – Well, I don’t think Blok is really such a big thinker. – True, Brodsky is a poet of intellect compared to Blok, though Blok has an enormous reserve of emotional thinking. We can recall Tolstoy here who used to say: ‘intellect of the heart’. You can’t deny Blok that. – By the way, how do you explain Brodsky’s enmity to Blok? – I think he was jealous. Brodsky couldn’t tolerate rivalry. There is this troika: Bobyshev, Naiman, Rein. You would want to continue: Three, Seven, Ace, (the winning three-card secret) and the Queen of Spades, Anna Akhmatova. Only because Joseph knew he was above and beyond them each of them could he remain a friend with each up to a certain time. As soon as Rein was reaching his level, Brodsky destroyed him totally in his introduction to Rein’s Selected Verses.

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– Destroyed by compliments? – Yes, just by compliments, he certainly knew what he was doing. Once he was very angry with me. I think it was in 1962. Boris Vakhtin, Vera Panova’s son, a wonderful person, brilliant translator and prose writer, and a very good friend of mine, arranged a poetry contest at the Institute of Asian Nations. We all poured in, like a flock of sheep, but then later I realized that it was a very tricky move. We read our verses, the four of us (Evgeny Rein was not there as he was in Moscow at the time taking courses in screen writing). The audience was supposed to compare contestants, choosing a winner at the end. It was a huge audience. Imagine competing with Brodsky! His fame was at its height. Naiman was very popular too. Bobyshev, in my opinion, is a better poet than Naiman, much better and more profound. I am talking now about Bobyshev as a poet. He was not popular at that time; in general he is not a popular poet. Despite his many remarkable verses: Akhmatova’s eight-liners, and so on, he is not popular. Naiman was so amiable, handsome, witty, and could recite his poems beautifully. He was loved by everyone. I loved him too at that time. And what did the evening end with? Naiman fell off the stage; the audience did not favor Bobyshev. So it left the two of us: Brodsky and myself. I would read a poem, and then he would, – each was supposed to read one poem. Right at that moment, Marina Basmanova walked out. Joseph was sitting next to me and I saw him grow pale. Finally neither of us won. I thought then that I should have let him win. He was younger; I had had my life already … I was sorry I didn’t let him … – Let him win? – Yes. And it seems to me it was one of those first invisible moves which resulted in our drifting apart later. Though we saw each other after I moved to Moscow. We would meet during my occasional visits to Leningrad, and it seemed as if nothing had changed. But I felt that since that reading we met less frequently, rarely shared poems with each other. It was as if we realized that we could do without each other. And that’s perhaps how it was. – And how did your relationships develop in America? – Just before his departure for America, in 1972 we met for a last time. I ran into him on Tverskoy Boulevard near the editorial office of the journal Znamia. I believe he said he was negotiating the publication of his translations in the journal. I may be wrong about that, but he

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had some business there with the poetry section of the journal; Natasha Ivanova was in charge of the poetry section then. Brodsky was well dressed, in a sheepskin coat, looking quite confident … I had a feeling he was OK. This was our last meeting in Russia. I remember him having a high regard for Slutsky, saying this: ‘I love Barukh!’. Though nobody ever called Slutsky by that name, everybody calling him Boris Abramovich. Incidentally, Slutsky was never popular as a Jewish poet – this became obvious only later; but at that time he was known as the commissar of leftist progressive poetry. He and Martynov were the two commissars of good intellectual progressive poetry, not underground, but semi-official poetry. They came to our gatherings, but were rarely published. Despite my membership of the Writers’ Union, I could publish translations from Lithuanian and other languages, but not my own poetry. That meeting with Brodsky was our goodby. I didn’t know that he was leaving Russia; he didn’t say anything about it to me then, just gave me some worldly advice. You ask about America. I passed along some of my verses for Brodsky to Vasily Aksyonov when the latter was leaving. I believe it was in 1980. And one day I received a post card from Vasily mailed from San Francisco. He wrote that he had read my verses to Brodsky over the telephone, and that they would be trying their best to get me out of ‘there’. I didn’t correspond with Brodsky. I only corresponded with Dmitry Bobyshev. We came to America in August 1987. I sent the manuscript of my book Friends and Shadows to Liberty Publisher in New York, and also some of my stories to the journal Time and We. Suddenly all three stories were accepted for publication. The ‘Liberty’ publisher called me and suggested I come to New York to discuss a contract for my book. But we kept procrastinating, – we didn’t have money for the trip. Finally we all: Mila, Maxim and I, with our friends, decided to go to New York at Christmas. I couldn’t think of being in New York and not visiting Joseph. Though rumors were reaching me already that Joseph was very angry at my becoming a member of the Writers’ Union. But I had long been kicked out. I was not sure how we would meet. Just a week before, Joseph received Nobel Prize. I got his address and even his telephone number from Rein. I decided to stop by without calling. I didn’t want to call fearing something might go wrong and I wouldn’t get to see him. I always had affectionate feelings for him. And so we went there, though everybody was trying

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to talk me out of it: don’t go, you shouldn’t, he never wrote a word to you knowing you were a refuznik. Oh God, he had gone through such a lot, why should I settle accounts with him. We never quarreled. And so there I was ringing the bell! No answer. Suddenly the door opens and Joseph comes out. I say: ‘Osya, is it you?’ – ‘David, it’s so good to have you here’! I say, I am not alone; Mila, Maxim and our friends are out there. ‘Bring them in, everyone’. As if we had just parted yesterday: he is so sweet, easy-going, and casual. He brought us into his living room – a table with a typewriter, in it a sheet of paper with the poem that he was typing out. ‘What will you have? Brandy? I’ll make some coffee too’. He suddenly begins fussing, as if close relatives were visiting. It was touching. We were having a good time and then he says: ‘Well, so what are we planning to do?’ Gorbanevskaya in all fairness commented on this ‘WE’ saying that he borrowed it from the Polish language. I answered him that I am planning to write and research, which is what I had been doing all my life. ‘And where?’ – ‘I hope at Brown, I’m not sure. I’ve just signed a contract for a book, and there’s a chapter about you, Osya. I want you to read it’. – ‘I don’t need to read it, – he says, – I don’t care; you can write whatever you like’. – ‘No, Osya, I want you to read it, and I’ll send it to you. If I don’t hear from you, it will mean it’s OK. But if you don’t like it, you won’t give me your OK to publish it and that will be it. I am going to send chapters from my book to everybody living here: you, Bobyshev, Aksyonov’. And I did send them to everybody. We spent with him an hour or an hour and a half pleasurably. Joseph gave me a present of three of his books signing them for me very affectionately. We stayed a little longer in New York. I was in a good mood after signing a contract for my book and receiving some money as an advance – it was only three months after I came to America. The next day I call him to say goodby: ‘Osya, if I happen to be in New York again, may I stay at your place?’ Our last meeting was so warm, like family. And he says: ‘No, no’. I was shocked. – But there was no room, physically, in his place for another person to sleep over – only one small bedroom. – If he were to call me, I would have given him my bed and would go to the neighbors for the night. I felt he had changed, something had happened. I said: ‘Don’t worry, Joseph, I was just kidding’. And so I got back home and sent him that chapter. He didn’t respond.

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My book came out and I sent him a copy. Again, no response. I called and said: ‘Osya, did you receive my book’? – ‘I did’. – ‘I haven’t heard from you. Does that mean you approve of that chapter, or at least have no objections’? – ‘No, I don’t have any objections. But if I had been writing about you, I would have written differently’. Soon after that he was in Providence, giving a lecture at Brown. He wanted to get a professor’s appointment at the department of English literature. I knew about his lecture and called him: ‘Joseph, when you come here, you’re welcome to stay in my home’. – ‘We’ll meet, and please come to my reading’. Of course I went; we all did. He read very well, smoking all the time; he was a great success and was asked many questions, about Rein, and Naiman too. And he answered them. He saw me sitting right in front of him, but didn’t say a word about me, as if I were not there. Naturally I didn’t come up to him after the reading. I went home in a state of shock. It was the last time I saw him alive. The night of January 27 we celebrated my 60th birthday in my home. The next morning, January 28 I had a call from Gregory Poliak, publisher of ‘Silver Age’ and he says what a nightmare, what a tragedy, Brodsky has died. I called Bobyshev. He burst out crying. I called Brodsky’s home and his wife told me where the funeral would be. The morning of January 30, I went to New York. I came about 15 minutes before they opened access to the deceased. It was in an Italian funeral home with ads about burial services at different catholic churches. The ad about Joseph said that his burial service would be held in a cathedral near Columbia University. At the door there was a crowd of Russian correspondents and those who came first to say goodbye. Soon we were allowed to file into the hall. In front of me was a line of ten or twelve people. I put on my yarmolke, stood in front of the coffin and stared at the features of the deceased. His face was solemn, handsome, a high forehead, prominent nose. He looked like a sleeping patrician. In his hands was a cypress cross on black lace. I read Kaddish, a prayer for the repose of the soul, in Hebrew, as best I could remember it. It was very hard for me to get over Brodsky’s death – from the moment, on January 28, when I heard of it, till that moment when I was standing before his coffin. And suddenly, I no longer felt this heavy weight or anguish. The only thing left was a deep respect for the writer. Why? I loved his poetry passionately, felt much compassion for him and did whatever I could to help him out when he was being persecuted. I met

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with him a few times before his departure, – at his place or just by chance. And each time, it seemed to me, there was mutual sympathy and love for each other’s work. So what happened? Why wasn’t I any longer mourning him as my own brother? No way it could be related to our meeting at his reading at Brown University. – What was your own explanation of his conduct? Was it self-defense before another Russian, since Russians were pressing him from all sides? Or maybe he remembered grudges for long? – No, it was his reaction to my chapter about him. I have been suffering from this all my life afterwards, and I still am. Aksyonov started a horrible campaign against me, but I only learned about it later, when my novel about refuzniks came out (it was nominated for the Booker Prize in Moscow). But before it was published, I had sent the manuscript to Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers. The editor replied saying: ‘Your poetry is so good that it would be untimely to publish your prose now. Your poetry should be published first’. Later I learned that the editor was a close friend of Joseph. I don’t remember her name now. There’s no way she could have known about my poetry. Joseph must have told her. I mean he permanently kept an eye on me, what I was publishing. Why did he not like that chapter? Because I didn’t write about him in a laudatory manner. I wrote about a poet who had developed and then broke free from our group, though he also remained one of us. Brodsky’s magic had been created by a group of poets who made up our milieu. It was a very talented group. Look at the names: Gorbovsky, Kushner, Sosnora. So, the Brodsky phenomenon is no accident. – You promised to tell, how you first heard about Brodsky. – I was serving in the Army when one day I receive a letter (it was around 1960) from my friend, Boris Smorodin, who never wrote poetry but always came with me to poetry readings, as my aide-de-camp. He knew everybody and was friendly with a lot of people. So, he wrote that he was at Sosnora’s wedding, and some poet called Brodsky had a fight with Sosnora. That was the first mention of Brodsky. As my friend wrote, he is a brilliant poet, but, alas, had a fight with Sosnora. Coming back to my relationship with Brodsky, I think the reason for the cooling off was the chapter about him in my book. It must have been something I wrote about him, not exactly to his liking. He was

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very carefully guarding his reputation, and he certainly felt himself to be already an Olympian. – You think he didn’t want the Western reader to know much about his adolescent and his young years? – Not certain details. I made a point of not revealing all the details of his departure either because I had experienced the same thing. He told me about it himself very openly. – You may not know that Brodsky liked nothing written about him, – he didn’t like the wonderful monograph of David Bethea; nor did he like other monographs, or what I wrote about him. Trying to console David Bethea, I remember telling him: ‘Joseph must be expecting someone to write about him in the same way as he would write about Tsvetaeva, or Auden; I’m afraid it won’t happen in his life time’. – I agree. You know, my son Maxim, at that time, also wrote an article about Brodsky and Bobyshev. It was published in 1993 and Brodsky certainly knew about it. Maxim wrote that the winner was Brodsky, though the poem ‘Funeral Octaves’ was written by Bobyshev and the phrase ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’ also belonged to him. But Brodsky was superior. Nevertheless, Joseph never wrote a word to Maxim. I think he shouldn’t have appointed himself an Olympian; it should have been somebody else who did it. I also think it cost him a lot. Maybe even his heart disease was related to the tremendous pressure he was under. It’s very hard to act out all the time. – Do you think Brodsky’s arrogance was a sin? – I don’t think it’s a sin. – In Christianity it is a big sin. – But he wasn’t Christian. I am not sure he was Jewish. I once discussed it with Bobyshev, after Joseph’s death. Just at that time Bobyshev wrote a wonderful poem, ‘Guest’, very moving. His sufferings were greater, I know, but he deserved it, since betrayal should be punished. – Yet Joseph didn’t forgive him? – No, and he cannot be forgiven. I didn’t forgive him either for what he did to Joseph, and I couldn’t forgive Naiman for what he did to Rein. For me, betrayal is the worst thing. Nevertheless I once talked to Bobyshev about Joseph and we decided that he was neither Jewish nor Christian. He was pagan. It seems clear to me now that the religion closest to him was the pantheism of antiquity. He wanted to find

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a niche for himself somewhere between Apollo and Zeus. Rein wrote about it very well in his poem ‘At the Pavlovsky Park’: ‘Apollo’s constant stare is trained on the back of your head, / your golden pledge already drawn and in your hand’.1 I think it cost Brodsky a lot. There are people who feel happy and at ease with fame; he wasn’t one. – But fame followed him right from the very beginning of his trial … – Oh, no! Much earlier! Two days after he first came to see me in Leningrad, there was a poets’ reading. Gorbovsky was enormously celebrated in Leningrad at that time; he was a good poet. But when Brodsky came on to read, everybody went crazy. I had never seen anything like it. I have often listened to Voznesensky and he was a great reader too, the crowd roaring. But it was nothing compared to Brodsky’s reading. Besides, the Soviet authorities pampered Voznesensky. Also he was a beloved son of the people who cared for poetry, as well as a beloved son of the ideological commission of the Central Committee of Communist Party. He was a child of Soviet society. But Brodsky was a bastard son who completely won the audience over. And he never, never lost this appeal. – You write that you felt something both diabolical and frightening in Brodsky. – Yes, literally so! The devil (who comes not only from Christianity, but earlier, from the Old Testament) is attributed in pagan times, to before Abraham. Speaking about religion, Joseph was a pagan. Coming back to the chapter I wrote about him, he might not like my comparison between him and Dostoevsky, in particular with the protagonist of his novel ‘Adolescent’. And on top of that there is Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, a coincidence of names and characters, very heavy stuff. – His sphere of hypnotic magnetism only enlarged with the growth of his fame. But at the same time, Brodsky started alienating people; the number of his ill-wishers was growing, especially in Russia and England. How was it in America? Let’s not talk about Aksyonov now. – The only thing I know is that when I came to America I lost them both, Brodsky and Aksyonov. The only one left was Bobyshev. He was grateful to me for writing about him. When I called Aksyonov, the first thing he said was: ‘How much harm he (Brodsky) has done to me, totally destroyed everything for me’! But I couldn’t imagine then that I would turn out to be in the same position.

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– However, you didn’t libel on him, as Aksyonov did. Nor did you provide a negative image of him, or become his enemy. – No, I wasn’t even close to that. It’s one thing to break up, but another to become enemies. A wise aunt of mine used to say: ‘Before you decide to marry a woman, you have to be sure you will be able to divorce your future wife without a scandal’. Same is here. He certainly was a man of honor and you could break up with him decently. We might have had some grudges, but neither of us ever did any harm to the other. – Do you know any ill-wishers of Brodsky among Russian poets in America? – First of all, even if there were such, they wouldn’t admit it in my presence. They know that I have a very high opinion of him. – What would you say in Brodsky’s defense to those who blamed him for losing his ‘Russianness’ with his departure from Russia, and insisting there is no nostalgic sense of loss in his verses? – Oh, that is all so silly. You just have to read his poetry. ‘The End of a Beautiful Era’ with it’s ending of ‘Speech over Spilled Milk’, or his poem ‘Song’. Or his book ‘Part of Speech’ and its poems ‘We don’t drink wine at the end of the village…’ or ‘You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows…’ Naturally, folklore was not his major theme. So what? Neither Slutsky, nor Martynov made folklore their major theme, except for, maybe, ‘Sunflower’ by Martynov. The only folkloristic poem by Selvinsky is his ‘Red Coat’, which is, rather, in thieves’ slang, than written in a folkloristic manner. Brodsky wasn’t a folkloristic poet, and yet he was a Russian poet. I remember once visiting him and bringing a bottle of wine; we sat down to have a drink in his half-room-half-closet. I showed him my folklore of poems saying that Anatoly Mariengoff liked them and had written to me that Esenin would have been very happy to read these poems. I asked him: ‘Osya, do you like Esenin’? He answered: ‘I like Esenin very much, and I also like Klyuev a lot’. – Yes, I can confirm this. During one of his visits to Keele, he stayed with me and was reading Klyuev’s two-volume collection all the time. – There you are! After that we talked about the new ‘country’ poets: about Bokov, and Rubtsov. Now compare Brodsky’s:

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You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows ever stand in orchards; the crops aren’t worth it, and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface 2 .

And Nikolay Klyuev’s, writing in a different rhythm system: A chink in the fence reveals a hunk of sun – The spindle of verses, the source of being lovestruck, And in the air the smoke of clover and dying leaves… An orange September weaves itself a wreath… 3

Here he reveals himself. – You describe young Brodsky almost like a madman: ‘Face, stubblecovered, red bristle, red-haired, tousled head … guttering, burring, ominous, howling voice, crazy eyes …’ And this is about a man who was cold and rational? – He was never cold. He could be arrogantly scornful or sarcastic to people who hurt him intellectually or emotionally. But never cold. He was very emotional and – at the same time – super-rational. – Brodsky was open to world poetry ever since he living in Russia. What qualities should a poet possess to be able to absorb the experience of world poetry and then transform it? – His knowledge of literature was immense. At the beginning, he was very familiar with the Russian Futurists, Constructionists and Oberiuty. Later he discovered the classics and contemporary English poets. Afterwards he leaned Polish poetry. But, Valentina, both you and I can name a dozen highly erudite writers who didn’t rise above the standards of professionalism. You need something else to rise above. Joseph reached the top-in our generation. And this gave him an incredible range. He managed to see all the beauty of World poetry, all the rocks that collapsed in antique times and obstructed our routes. And, like Antheus, he lifted those rocks, disposed of them, cleaned up the routes, and transformed Russian and World poetry. You can’t compose now without turning back to what he did. – You call his verses ‘the voice of hurting conscience’ which many Russians won’t agree with. Can your definition apply to his English verses?

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– I can’t say anything about Joseph’s verses written originally in English. I am not that strong enough in English to judge. As for poetry translated by him into English, I have checked them and find them quite adequate. – Would you say that Brodsky’s poems are less biographical than those of other poets? – All his lyric love poetry is biographical. Let’s take his poem ‘Love’ (‘Twice I woke up tonight and wandered to …’ 1971) or ‘Dear, I ventured out of the house late this evening, merely …’ (1989). Also a whole section of his cycle ‘A Part of Speech’ is totally autobiographical with these wonderful lines that I keep repeating to myself, a prayer: ‘You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows …’ And many others, absolutely autobiographical poems. Even when he puts on the masks of Zhukov, Maria Stuart, or a Rome patrician. – Are Brodsky’s verses related to his life events? – Valentina, this question is intimately linked to the previous one. Yes, Brodsky’s poetry, – if read by a friendly and scrupulous eye – can be a good source for his biographers, readers, researchers. – Where do you think the grain of his poetical philosophy lies? – I think he is a futurologist of death. All of his poetry – from beginning to end – is a nostalgia for death. – Do you have a poem dedicated or addressed to Joseph? May I use it in this collection of interviews? – I can give you two poems. Authorized translation from the Russian by Emilia Shrayer.4 BIRCH FOGS (from Flying Saucers) for Joseph Brodsky The night when they launched me was so rife with luminous fog That drops of life’s brood had condensed on the faceted sides Of my drunken soul rewarded for its sorrows just like Some hens are rewarded with a high perch in the vale of brides. My dear friend, the sails of your vessel are tired and drenched. To dry them you need to find shelter in a harbor upriver, To leave the four bridges behind. Have you made out their shapes Through fog where the Neva meanders so slender from afar?

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I roam in this fog and collapse, like a horse in a bog. I reach for you, brother mine. But you have taken your sails To an alien harbor of concrete and to exile’s song – A caustic lament for the discord of factories and fields. And what am I to you? You’re now in different, star-spangled worlds. The memory of a friendship is muggy like some old anecdote. Cigarette ashes disperse like sooty remains of our home, And our beloved Leningrad is missing, is no more, all gone. They launched me so far into centuries’ deepest domains, That my genes, after wandering through mountains and plains Are ready to abandon this land and rush into clouds of fog If only those clouds of birches would let go and forgive. 1976 Translated by Maxim D. Shrayer PETERSBURG DOGE In memoriam Joseph Brodsky This weather doesn’t push my pen, This weather’s for old men, Old man-like, I come out on the porch; Heavy thoughts lurch. Outside the windows rain, like rage, Where are you, Petersburg doge? New York genius, where are you? Where? Your coffin’s in alien water. But now your coffin swims out of the hole – Forehead pressed to the North pole. Just rip yourself from the alien deathbed, Redheaded Orpheus, full speed ahead. You will have sailed from Adrian shores To the Aegean Sea, you Petersburg doge, Past Istanbul, now due North, Rust hasn’t damaged your verse.

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The route from Greece – now reverted – To the tsardom of Varangian waters. Into the Venice of the North you’ve sailed, Here your spirit is hailed. Near that old bridge you’ll moor your vessel, Actually, you know these places so well, Here your heels stomped and rattled, There your fists swelled, There where her heels fluttered by, Like wispy clouds on high, Moor your boat under Petersburg’s dome, And say, hello city my home. 1997 Translated by Maxim D. Shrayer

Note 1

2 3 4

Evgeny Rein, Selected Poems, Ed. by Valentina Polukhina (Bloodaxe Books, 2001), tr. by Daniel Weissbort, p. 143. Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 107. Tr. from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort. Emilia Shrayer was born in 1940, Moscow, USSR; immigrated to USA in 1987. A professional bi-lingual translator of English and Russian. Her translations into Russian include works by Erskine Coldwell, Maxim D. Shrayer and Australian poets. She has translated into English stories for David Shrayer-Petrov’s books Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America, Syracuse, NY, 2003; and Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories, Syracuse, NY, 2006.

11 MIKHAIL MEILAKH Mikhail Borisovich Meilakh, poet, translator, philologist was born in Leningrad in 1945. He graduated from Leningrad University in 1967, completed his doctoral dissertation and, until 1972, worked in the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Science. A man of encyclopaedic knowledge, he is fluent in several languages. His first published research, The Language of the Troubadours (Moscow, 1975) won him the respect of French academic circles. His research interests extend from Mediaeval French poetry to twentieth-century Russian poetry, from Eastern philosophy to Christian theology. He has edited the complete works of Aleksandr Vvedensky, published with his foreword by Ardis (vol. I, 1980; vol. II, 1984) and Daniil Kharms (Bremen, 1979). At a time when cooperation with colleagues abroad was not encouraged by the State, Meilakh published dozens of articles in learned journals in France, Germany, Israel and the US. Retribution was not slow to follow. In 1972 the KGB carried out a prolonged search of his flat, and in the course of that same year he was fired from his job at the Institute and then ten years later his academic work was again interrupted by the State: on 29 June 1983 Meilakh was arrested and sentenced to five years’ corrective labour. During a police search, Western editions of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Nabokov and theological works were confiscated from his library. The poems he wrote in prison and in labour camp were collected by him in 1988 in a samizdat book Game in Hell: Poems 1983 - 1987. It bears witness to the fact that Meilakh survived ‘on the edge of the world’, thanks to culture, poetry and faith. In his poems, the daily round is raised to the poetic level and brought within the bounds of ethical and existential themes. In recent years Meilakh taught at Strasburg University, and has been an active participant in both Russian and Western cultural life, attending international conferences, reading his poetry and working as a freelance journalist. He edited The Selected poems of Daniil Kharms (Spb., 1999) and co-edited with D. B. Sarabyanova Poeziya i zhivopis (Poetry and Art, Moskva, 2000). In 2003 Meilakh was the recipient of the Andrey Bely Prize.

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An Interview with Mikhail Meilakh (30 May 1989, Paris) – What did you know about Brodsky when you first got to meet him? – That was in 1962 and he was, so to speak, already into his ‘historical period’ when he had written quite a few outstanding poems. They were circulating in manuscript and I knew them well. As far as I remember we first met at a Philharmonic concert; Rein introduced me to him. I had just started university at the time. Soon afterwards we met again at the Komarovo dacha where I used to spend most of my time, and where I live now. He spent several days there, staying with some mutual acquaintances. After that I was constantly meeting him in that same circle of people. We belonged to the same circle. He had earlier thrown in his lot with Rein, Naiman and Bobyshev. They were all friends of my elder sister, and I had known all of them since childhood. Brodsky was younger than the others and he regarded Rein as his mentor. From his very first appearance on the literary scene Brodsky attracted a great deal or attention. It seems to me that Brodsky became ‘Brodsky’ after 1960, when he wrote the poem ‘The Garden’ (S, pp. 64 - 5). Following that he wrote one of the most popular poems of the time (dedicated, by the way, to Rein), ‘Christmas Romance’ (S, pp. 76 - 7), and then there was a series of poems which included ‘The Black Horse’ (S, pp. 94 - 5) (that’s what it’s usually called), and then in 1961 came ‘Hills’ (S, pp. 123 - 9) and the monumental ‘Procession’ (S, pp. 156 - 222). Those poems’ titles were upon everybody’s lips. And before that there was his great ‘prehistoric period’ and, regrettably, in the consciousness of a section of the reading public, mainly the industrial intelligentsia, that is where Brodsky still remains: one of the most popular poems of that time was ‘Pilgrims’ (S, pp. 66 - 7), someone put it to music and it was long successful as a song. Then apparently, as Brodsky himself says, he fell under the influence of Slutsky 1 and of ‘Soviet poetry’ in general, with which he hadn’t the slightest bit in common. To me those poems don’t seem to be of any interest whatsoever, not even for a student of literature. I don’t think those juvenilia

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are worth saving and I’m convinced that Brodsky himself would say the same. – And were you writing then? – Yes, I had started and Brodsky gave me a few lessons, for which I am very grateful. – Was Brodsky for you what Rein was for Brodsky? – Rein, I have to say, is really just made for the role of mentor. There was something about him that suited him for the role; he had a remarkable ear for poetry, impeccable taste, allied with charm and good-nature. But, as for me, I was closer, both as a friend and as a poet, to Naiman. – And can you remember exactly what lessons Brodsky did give you? – Once Brodsky went over my poems very meticulously, and I had written quite a few by then. He advised me, for instance, to avoid adjectives in general and conventional epithets in particular. – One of Rein’s lessons. 2 – Yes, undoubtably, it’s the same school, a poetry of substantives, so to say. Basically it was a fight against the commonplace and, no doubt, I had at the time penned quite a few of them. Exact rhymes as well, several times he suggested some exact rhyme to replace one of my own approximate rhymes. – But now, when I read your poetry I see practically no influence, though I do see conscious echoes of Brodsky, quasi-quotations. – Brodsky, no doubt, had a colossal influence on me with his personality and with his poetry. Indeed, back in those days as a young man I did go through a phase when I quite simply imitated him. I either destroyed those poems later or they’re lying around somewhere gathering dust. I haven’t looked at them for years and I’ll never publish them. But I did go through that short phase of straightforward imitation, and I think it was very useful in some ways. – But you do have something in common, for instance, in the way you sprinkle your texts with foreign words. What is their function in your poetry? Or is it just the result of your knowing so many foreign languages? – Of course not, no. The foreign words probably have some sort of function, possibly one of estrangement. It’s possible that they play the role of the ‘alien word’ which throws some light or other on words in one’s own language.

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– Now we all recognise Brodsky’s greatness but did you know back then just who you were mixing with? – I think so, yes. His personality is such that he somehow draws a lot of people into his orbit. He once said – this was back in the old days sometime – ‘I’m spinning a great big spider’s web.’ Very few people could remain indifferent to him; they either loved him or, just as passionately, they hated him. All that was heightened, several times over, when a year after my first meeting him all his troubles started, then there was his arrest, then his exile. All that was very painful for me. – There are people in the Soviet Union, even now, who explain his success by pointing to the facts of his biography, his fate.3 – Well, one’s fate is something that can’t be changed, it’s inseparable and all of a piece. Brodsky’s weight as a poet is sufficiently evident by now for the poetry to be judged without any direct reference to all that brouhaha. Although of course just that one single circumstance, that Brodsky even in what could, more or less, be termed good years was still subject to persecution, had to do with his being an outsider at a time when certain organisations had a fairly long reach, none of the existing structures could accommodate him, had to do with his personality as a poet. I think that Rein, Brodsky and Naiman, all of us belonged to the Petersburg school of poetry, and that we were all very strongly influenced by the personality and poetry of Akhmatova. – Doesn’t it seem to you that the Akhmatova-Brodsky parallel is a bit more complex? Whilst expressing his gratitude to Akhmatova, Brodsky also made the proviso, ‘but all the same, all the same, it’s not that poetry which interests me’. 4 From his two essays on Tsvetaeva we see whose poetry it was that did interest him. – Of course. If you hadn’t said it then I would have had to. Akhmatova, in my opinion, had more of a personal than a poetic influence upon him. But for all that, Brodsky did take a lot from the Peterburg school: suggestiveness, for instance, its orientation towards the concrete, and so on. – Is there anything in his poetics, his ideas, themes that you yourself find alien? – He had his line which could, conventionally, be called ‘ideological’. There are those poems, ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ (O, pp. 166 - 8), ‘Two Hours in an Empty Tank’ (O, pp. 161 - 5), though it’s true that in

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the latter everything is, somehow, neutralised by an unusual sharpness, frankness. But I find that line alien. – But what sort of ideology is there in ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’? Surely, it is rather a concern for the present-day condition of Russia? Where have we got to? And which is further from us: Orthodoxy or Hellenism? What are we close to? What’s up there ahead? (O, pp. 168)

There’s a certain rationality in those lines that I find alien. It seems to me that that concern, or whatever it is, isn’t expressed in a strictly poetic way; it’s all too explicit, and, for me, that is alien to poetry. – It’s alien to him too. – It’s a kind of deviation in his poetry, and it’s not the only one. – And how do you regard his reactions to concrete political events, such as the war in Afghanistan? I mean, how do you view his poem ‘Lines on the Winter Campaign, 1980’ (U, pp. 97 - 9)? Brodsky himself has said, more than once, that a writer shouldn’t wallow in the mud of topical controversy. – I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what he writes about, because it’s quite possible to respond to the most controversial of topics; the crux of the matter is, does he express himself poetically, has he found the right balance? – In Brodsky’s poetry there are more serious and deliberate imbalances. He is moving, it seems, towards the metonymic pole of language, that is, if you accept Jakobson’s dichotomy, towards the language of prose – squeezing the emotional note out of his lyrics. Do you find that alien? – Not in the least. On the contrary. I’m not a lover of emotionality as such. I’m not in the least drawn to it. I prize that coldness of his. – He’s bringing his poetry closer towards the realm of prose by other means as well; breaking up the poetic line, the stanza, using compound rhymes, preferring the dol’nik to the classical metres. What’s behind all that? – I think that that is one of the tendencies in high art in the twentieth century – a liberation from emotionality.

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– Doesn’t it seem to you that at this point we ought to talk about that English strain which he has introduced to Russian poetry? – That’s a very important question. The fact is that, generally speaking, he has in some measure created a new kind of poetic language for Russian, along the lines of English poetry. He made the latter his own at a very early stage; he had a magnificent feel for it, even when he didn’t as yet know the language really very well at all. Even before he was exiled he took special note of an anthology of English poetry that was published in the mid-1930s, the so-called Gutner anthology, so-called because, despite the name, it was compiled by Svyatopolk-Mirsky: but, since the latter has been arrested, to save the book Gutner took upon himself the dubious honour of responsibility for its publication. I had the satisfaction of giving him that anthology, which he had pointed out to me, as a present on the occasion of his birthday in 1963. After that Brodsky always had some English or American anthology on the go and, of course, he would also get hold of books by those same authors whenever he could. In his poetry there are, as you know, many echoes of English and American poetry. Several times in those years, whilst Brodsky had not as yet acquired a sufficient mastery of the language, I made interlinears of the poems he was working on. When I visited him in exile at Archangel for some reason or other, he was reading Hart Crane, rather a difficult poet. So as he progressed with his reading he was gradually reduced to opening the book with the recurrent question – ‘And what is it that Hart Crane says?’ Another topic is that of Brodsky and the Metaphysical school. Brodsky had a particularly high regard for John Donne. He was supposed to prepare a whole book of translations of the Metaphysicals for Literaturnye pamiatniki (Literary Memorial) and I helped him to compile that book and wrote a short foreword to each of the selections from the various poets. It seems to me that Brodsky has acquired certain English characteristics – first there’s a special kind of suggestiveness, a weight attached to each and every one of his words. – Is that one of the deficiencies of Russian poetry and had nobody achieved that until Brodsky came along? – Yes, there’s no doubt of that. – Brodsky evaluates all writers, from Dostoevsky to Kublanovsky, by their attitude to the Russian language.5 Here are some of the things

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he’s said about language: he maintains that Tsvetaeva’s isolation was imposed from without, by the logic of language (L, p. 194); ‘the dictates of language – are what are called, in the vernacular, the dictates of the Muse’; the creative process is a ‘product of the language and your own aesthetic categories, a product of what the language has taught you’. 6 Why, in your view, does he give language such a central role? – Twentieth-century linguistics is also, to a large extent, based on that same sort of approach. And not just linguistics; philosophy and phenomenology give language just as large a role as Brodsky does. That question was always hovering around in the vicinity. All of us, all of our lives have been talking about emigrating, that was one of our constant topics of conversation. But back in the old days our conversation would turn around the impossibility of our emigrating and around our unlikely plans to that end. Brodsky always said that that wasn’t for him, because it wasn’t any good for a poet to tear himself away from the language he hears on the street or on the tram. When, however, that did happen, then to all appearances he concentrated all his energies on that problem, with all the more obstinacy, all the more attention. That exclusive significance that he ascribes to language not only in his poetic practice but also in his pronouncements on the subject has, possibly, just that overtone. Since Brodsky isn’t a confessional poet, language for him occupies the place theology would for a believer. – If one can trace such dependence upon language, such service to language, it’s logical to ask: what have his contributions been to the Russian language? – I’ve said already that he has created a new form for the poetic language in Russia. He has developed, to a quite incredible extent, certain linguistic structures, which before he came along existed only in embryonic form and were quite simply not used. As is always the case with a great poet, his cachet can be seen in anyone of his lines, and that tells you more about it than I or anyone else can. – I’ll allow myself another quotation from Brodsky: ‘Language creates a poet in order that he take care of it, in order that he restore some balance to the linguistic seesaw.’ 7 To what extent was the appearance of a Brodsky dictated by the demands of the language itself, with all its garbage, its Soviet bureaucratese, political jargon, camp slang and so on? Or is that question simply a figment of my imagination?

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– Not at all. In our contemporary Sovdepiya the language really has moved a long way away from what every cultured person conceives the literary language ought to be; it really is in an extremely eroded state. You can feel that phonetically, syntactically – it’s literally as if certain cases had vanished. The language is turning into a kind of linguistic soup, so that the structure of the language is an extremely pressing question. And, naturally, poetry is the salvation of the language. – Does that mean that you agree with Brodsky when he disputes Coleridge’s axiom and says that ‘poetry is not ‘the best words in the best order’; for language it is the highest form of existence’ (L, p. 186); that a poet improves the language? – That is how it has been and not just in our time. That is what happened to the Italian language in Dante’s time, when from the vast number of dialects spoken in Italy, still spoken there to this day, there was created a brilliant literary language, not on the basis of any one of those many dialects – that would have been the simplest way – but on the basis of a form that was superior to any one of the dialects, embracing them all. Earlier the troubadours had carried out a similar task, and Dante profited from their experience. That has happened at various times in the past and it is happening now. – That is what Goethe in Germany, Pushkin in Russia were striving for. You don’t find it embarrassing putting Brodsky up there in that league? – No. That’s his measure. – Parallels have been drawn between Pushkin and Brodsky more than once. 8 Is there a sufficient basis to justify that? – There are, to a certain degree, analogies that can be drawn between that time and this, because in Pushkin’s time the literary language was comparatively flourishing and comparatively well developed. Pushkin gave it the final nudge which brought it to perfection. I don’t really like the Pushkin comparison all that much perhaps because, like it or not, Pushkin is a sort of a figurehead and for that reason the comparison doesn’t sound right. – How do you see Brodsky’s evolution as a poet? In one interview he said that it is only possible to speak of a poet as evolving in one plane, the prosodic – the question to ask is what metres does he use? 9 Do you think that that is the sole parameter one can use to gauge a poet’s evolution or are there others?

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– I think that to reduce everything to prosody is a simplification. Of course he has evolved, that can’t be denied. As I’ve already said, and he himself has talked about this, his first poem was ‘The Garden’: Oh, how void and mute you are! In the autumnal half-light how illusory the translucency of the garden holds away where leaves edge closer to the earth down drawn by dissolutions’ mighty tractive force. (S, p. 64)

And really the whole of Brodsky is there already. Then comes a new important stage – ‘The Songs of a Happy Winter’ of 1963;10 whilst he was in exile up north everything he wrote was on the same tack. And as his exile ended, there started to appear the truly metaphysical poems, poems like ‘A Song without Music’ (K, pp. 75 - 82) in 1970; that too was, in my opinion, a sort of break. And already, before his emigration, poems like ‘Nature Morte’ (K, pp. 108 - 112) and ‘The Butterfly’ (C, pp. 32 - 8) were steps in the same direction. The next break with the past came after his emigration, with the appearance of new forms, those long lines of his. And all that is still all on the same tack, the ‘Brodskian’ tack. And then -the unprecedented, even for Brodsky, chef d’oeuvre – ‘The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn’ (U, pp. 49 - 52). – On the one hand we observe an evolutionary process, in the poetry itself and in his poetics, and on the other hand we say that it’s all on the same tack, it’s on the Brodskian tack. Hence there has to be some unchanging nucleus. What does that nucleus consist of? – His personality, nothing more. – That’s natural. But evidently there are certain central themes, central ideas. What can’t he write about, in your opinion? – The moment you try to define it, it all fades away to nothing because those themes of his are the eternal themes: man and his place in the world. But if one says that, one might as well say nothing at all – it amounts to the same thing. – Brodsky himself says that he writes about one thing to the exclusion of everything else: what time does to man, how it transforms him.11 – In my opinion that is narrowing it down too much, because that’s just one aspect of his poetry.

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– Well, let’s take those other perennial themes, love and God. Brodsky doesn’t consider it possible, at the close of the twentieth century, to speak directly, explicitly about love or God. 12 – He has always, from very early on, avoided any kind of solemnity, all pretentiousness in general when it comes to those questions. I don’t remember who exactly it was he had in mind when he said, ‘He writes about an angel while having nothing in his soul.’ – What do you know about Brodsky’s philosophical predilections? – Dispite his rejection of the Eastern world, in his youth he was attracted to the East, he had had a very strong dose of Eastern spiritualism. There was this friend of his, Garik Ginzburg-Voskov, the dedicatee of one of the early poems. Voskov was very much into Indian philosophy, and Yoga too, to a certain extent. – I met him at Ann Arbor in 1980. He’s an artist. – That’s right. Incidentally, the first two books Joseph recommended I read were both recently published academic studies of oriental philosophy – one was a translation from the English, the other was The Arcanes by Shmakov, a colossal tome. Shmakov was a communications engineer, no relation to Gennady Shmakov. 13 I’m not sure that Brodsky read them himself, but he recommended them to me. And I began to study them. To a certain extent I think they both, somehow, struck in him a very elevated note of high-toned spiritual culture. That’s how I would describe that trend. – Do you know when he became interested in Shestov? – I think it was during his exile up north. – How do you explain the persistent presence of another theme in Brodsky’s poetry – the ‘after the end’ theme, after the end of love, after ‘The End of a Beautiful Epoch’, after the end of Christianity – that’s especially clear in his play ‘Marbles’? – On the one hand, it’s his note, a trait of his personality. On the other hand, it is, in the highest degree, an answer to life in Russia: all of us over there live ‘after the end’. It’s a Petersburg theme – it is the city ‘after the end’. – What do you think of his blending of the modem and the antique? – Brodsky in one of his poems said, ‘I’ve been infected with the usual classicism’ (O, p. 142). That too is part of the ‘Petersburg poetics’. – Georges Nivat considers ‘Marbles’ to be an ironic, deflated variation on Brodsky’s poetic world. 14 Do you agree?

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– In my view the play is narrower in scope than his poetic world. I don’t like the play all that much. There’s a certain whimsicality that’s not very much to my taste, and its absurdities are rather trying. – Is there a ‘Jewish Question’ as far as Brodsky is concerned? – It’s quite right, in my opinion, that you should ask about Brodsky’s Jewishness, but I can’t give any very profound answers to that question. I think that Brodsky felt this problem sharply in his youth and even later; in his poetry you can find clear, and not so clear, indications of that, although there are indirect indications that Brodsky is still disturbed by that even now. It’s really in his Jewishness that one sees the roots of his sympathy for the Old Testament which has found expression in his metaphysical poem ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 - 55) in particular. The vulgar conception of Brodsky as a Jewish poet was characteristic in the years of trial and exile of those members of the official ‘intelligentsia’ who referred to him as the ‘Jewish Pushkin’. – In your opinion, is it possible, desirable, for Brodsky to make the journey home? – I think it’s absolutely impossible and unnecessary. There are some things in life you can’t go back to. The only thing he’ll get out of it is heartache and unpleasantness. I think he knows that all too well. – Is there a poem of yours that is dedicated to Brodsky? – Yes, it has an English title, ‘April is the Cruellest Month’, which is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH ‘… from under the grey rubble a hyacinth …’ Once, when Brodsky … but first things first perhaps. It was a damp December with a thaw. A stratospheric agon was in train between the Arctic and Atlantic which had driven winter back towards the pole. Beneath the pearly chill of heaven the wind raised stooks of sluggish water where it met the Neva’s flow (though we were spared a flood) and sodden trees and houses contemplated an efflorescence of brown lush upon ancient diabases and cobbleways

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(which last have followed the plank road to Lethe) a theme not uncongenial to the Bard. At ten o’clock in the aftermath of dawn, an hour of Petrine spleen and dull indifference, a bile-steeped, bitter wasteland of a morning, I sought out Brodsky who had lately been restored to us from exile. I’d agreed to take him somewhere on an errand which, though vital then, seems commonplace today. I found him still in bed (perhaps I’ll skip the minutiae of his slow levee in that quaintly appointed logement of drawers and mirrored wardrobes crenellated with suitcases to guard his privacy; such details as the percolation of his coffee en garçon, the leisured rites of shearing stubble and investiture, the accompanying voluntary by Bach being a concerto for two claviers, a Polish rendition which brought to mind Franck’s F sharp minor violin sonata in its Proustian context). So at length, when he was ready, we went on our way, which took us down Liteyny past the place of his long month’s hibernation, from which he’d miraculously sprung forth; I too would know that spot in seventeen years’ time. We strolled along the sleepy Neva bank and talked of many things beneath the chill, the pearly chill of heaven, while the wind turned swathes of sluggish water and repulsed the Neva’s flow – as ever. Till at last our ambling brought us where the lime trees stand (I here wax operatic) prisoners behind their iron bars, though in July they spray luxuriant foliage over all in rich profusion. Now their spectacle appalled the observant eye which saw in them

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the corpses, bones and ghosts of erstwhile trees shivering in the winter damp. So what sudden thought struck him then; what distant shore did he conjure up; what vision of Spring induced him, being where and when he was, to break the silence with a line like this: ‘From under the grey rubble, a hyacinth …’? A sonnet on this theme would work, he said. If I would write it, he’d read the result – a plan we instantly forgot. Since then centuries have passed (a quarter in fact) and the reign of Brodsky as poet-king, jure divino, is already long (his friends in jest say Brodsky must have hired an agent to arrange his ‘destiny’ – sud’ba poeta is the Russian phrase); while I, a humble Soviet prisoner, am told that Brodsky speaks of me with scorn which first amazed me, though with space and span of time, forgetfulness set in, or nearly. Then, once upon a tense and tardy Spring that wrestled with the step-maternal rod of Winter raining blows, to gain from her a grudging few square feet by hauling back the trimly folded sheet of snow (a thing I noticed when at sea was how even in the most restricted space there is room for some small solitude), I ventured on a walk; and so as not to bruise the eye on such surroundings, downward turned my gaze, though here the sight was no more picturesque: chippings and shavings, last year’s detritus, formed a slimy gruel made treacherous by glass, splintered, not ground, which anointed a mound of rubble… now the reader has guessed what sprang from under this grisaille: I stooped and saw a purple hyacinth there, fragrant though impoverished, blooming in a barren

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land ignorant of Lady Hyacinth’s ilk. And my penates hold this land forever alien to them; for their names are Brodsky, Petersburg, efflorescence of brown slush, Me-past-and-present, gardens behind bars, hibernal lime trees and prevailing winds; December’s month, time lost and not returned, friendship, and with it a corollary aptness for betrayal, clavier concertos, Petrarch, a sonnet never written, or a wreath of sonnets, or a misspent youth, Eliot, Russia, Lethe and Neva, the confiscated ash of morning under the pearly chill of heaven, the timeless moment bursting out of time’s chrysallis, the eternity which summons forth to bloom from under the grey rubble a hyacinth. 1986, May Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

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In the interview Brodsky gave to Annie Epelboin he said: ‘I think I started to write verse because I had read that of a quite remarkable Soviet poet – Boris Slutsky’, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 157. For Brodsky’s estimate of Slutsky’s poetry, see his article ‘Literature and War – a Symposium: the Soviet Union’, The Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 1985, pp. 543 - 4. Brodsky in an interview given to Natalya Gorbanevskaya, reminisces, ‘I learned a lot from him [Rein]. There was one lesson he gave me simply in the course of conversation. He said, ‘Joseph … in a poem there should be more nouns than adjectives, than verbs even. A poem should be written in such a way that if you were to wave a magic wand and make all the adjectives and verbs vanish the paper would still be black, the nouns would be there: table, chair, dog, wallpaper, Liberation from Emotionality couch …’. That, possibly, is the only or the main lesson in poetry making that I have ever received’ (Russkaya mysl, 3 February 1983, p. 9). For example, the chief editor of the journal Voprosy literatury, Dmitry Urnov, began his contribution on the occasion of Brodsky’s fi ftieth birthday with the words, ‘In one’s attitude towards Brodsky’s poetry his personality and

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his fate, the fact that he was persecuted, put on trial and finally expelled, carries a great deal of weight.’ And he ends by saying, ‘When our (perfectly understandable) passions have quietened down then we will see the real weight of his poetry’ (Literatumaya gazeta, 16 May 1990, p. 6). Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 20 April 1980 (Ann Arbor, Mich.). Brodsky, in his ‘Afterword’ to Kublanovsky’s collection, S poslednim solntsem (Paris: La Press Libre, 1983), writes, ‘A poet has only one duty to society: to write well. And that duty is not so much to society as to language. A poet who fulfills that duty, will never be deserted by language. As for society, matters are a little more complicated’(p. 364). Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 117. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Ostat’sia samim soboy v situatsii neestestvennoy’, from Brodsky’s lecture at the Institut d’Etudes slaves in Paris, Russkaya mysl, 4 November 1988, p. 11. Anatoly Naiman first drew that parallel in his foreword to the second of Brodsky’s collections, ‘Zametki dlia pamiati’, written in 1964 and 1968 and signed with the initials N. N. A more detailed comparison of Brodsky with Pushkin can be found in the article signed D. S., Poetika Brodskogo, ed. Lev Loseff (Tenefly, N. J. : Hermitage, 1986) pp. 207 - 18. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, op. cit. p. 124. The cycle ‘Pesni schastlivoy zimy’ was first published in full by Lev Loseff, with his foreword, in the almanac A Part of Speech (New York: Silver Age Publishing, 1982), no. 2/3, pp. 47 - 68. Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, op. cit. p. 115. Brodsky in an earlier interview said roughly the same thing, ‘What interests me most are books. And what happens to man with time. What time does to him. How it alters his value-judgements. How, in the final analysis, it assimilates him to itself (Bella Ezerskaya, Mastera (Tenefly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1982) p. 109). Brodsky, interviewed by the author, op. cit. Gennady Shmakov, literary historian, art critic, translator and friend of Brodsky’s. ‘The Venetian Stanzas’ (L, pp. 105 - 7) and ‘In Memory of Gennady Shamakov’, Kontinent, no. 61 (1989) pp. 22 - 4, were dedicated to him. He died 21 August 1988 in New York, aged 49. Georges Nivat, ‘Kvadrat, v kotoryi vpisan krug vechnosti’, Literaturnoe prilozhenie, no. 7, Russkaya mysl, 11 November 1988, p. I.

12 VI K T OR K R I V U L I N Victor Borisovich Krivulin (1944 - 2001), poet, critic, essayist, graduated from Leningrad University (1967), and has worked as a teacher, proof-reader and editor. He began to write poetry at the age of nine, his first ‘official’ poetry reading taking place in 1962 under the auspices of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union. Founder of the ‘School of Concrete Poetry’ (1967 - 70), he became famous at the beginning of the 1970 s with his poem ‘I drink the wine of archaisms’. For many years he occupied a central place in the world of uncensored poetry, editing such unofficial journals as 37 and Obvodnoy kanal, giving poetry readings and talks on modern poetry; he is also the author of articles on Annensky, Bely, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Kushner, Sedakova and so on. Krivulin is well-read in philosophy, theology, linguistics and psychoanalysis. His most important works have been published in Paris: Poems (1981) and a two-volume collection (Leningrad and Paris, 1988). He has had a lot of his work published in Vestnik RKhD, Beseda, Kontinent, Ekho and in the last few years in Ogonek, Raduga, Zvezda. In 1990, he was made a member of the Writers’ Union and that same year his first Soviet collection Address (Obrashchenie, Leningrad) was published. His view of the world is one that uses imagery rather than logic though his poetry is full of cultural reflections and dry prosaicisms. He has found an original way of fusing the epic with the lyric, the myth and the everyday. Khlebnikov’s ‘divergence of thought’s string away from the life axis of the artist and flight from the self’ is characteristic of Krivulin. His poetry is the manifestation of an attempt ‘to unite the Acmeist concentration on the object, a sharpened perception of the world as mediated by things, with a purely Futuristic awareness of the absurdity of the very principle of creativity’. He tries not to tell, not to express but to demonstrate, without stating ethical and aesthetic evaluations of what is portrayed. He has ignored a great many poetic conventions, played freely with his forms, experimenting with graphics. His main Russian collections are Texts 1993 - 94 (Spb., 1994); Kupanie v Iordani (Basing in the Jordan, (SPb., 1998); Stikhi yubileinogo goda (Poems of Celebratory Year, Moskva, 2001). In English his poetry can be found in the anthologies Child of Europe (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1990) pp. 219 - 23, and The Poetry of Perestroika, trans. M. Molnar (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991) p. 67.

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An Interview with Viktor Krivulin (17 January 1990, London) – Did you watch the American film on Brodsky yesterday? 1 What sort of impression did you get of him? How did he compare with the man you knew in Leningrad? – What struck me first of all (I knew it already but yet again I had my conviction further reinforced) is that as a man he’s at one and the same time independent and yet still part and parcel of the establishment. He’s tied somehow to this concept of an extremely hide-bound artistic and social hierarchy – and to knowing his own place in it. It’s amazing that whilst remaining a free man, having quit our militarised country where the military hierarchy has permeated every sphere of consciousness, for all his freedom Brodsky retains that hierarchical structure of value, of relations, of ties with the world. He’s constantly, and that’s especially apparent in that film, differentiating: higherlower, nearer-further; whatever it is he comes across. – Even in his American surroundings? – Yes, and that’s particularly strange. Well, take an example. It isn’t done in an obtrusive way; his house, let’s say. This house is of course substantial, solid; moreover one can’t escape the feeling, despite the fact that one sees him getting in the wood, chopping it up and lighting his fire, that here’s the wealthy owner of a large mansion, occupying a well-defined and, what’s more, a fairly high social position. – But that isn’t his house, he rents it. Yes, I know, but he acts like the lord and master. And there was another thing. In his dealings with Americans – and in the film this again was very apparent – Brodsky sort of draws a dividing line between himself and Russian culture. There was one particular episode in the film where he lights the fire with a Russian newspaper. – Yes, with copies of ‘Izvestiya’. But, you’ll agree Izvestiya has never been representative or even symbolic of Russian culture? – No, but when he says ‘Russians’ he has such a smile on his face, it’s ironic, aloof, detached and so, in a certain sense, he finds himself in Nabokov’s position. There’s this sort of scornful air that he seems

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to cultivate as if to detach himself from Russian culture and integrate himself into the American world. Whilst at the same time at the back of him, behind the poet, there exists the kind of world it’s better not to allow Americans into. – Doesn’t it seem to you that it’s more of a self-defence mechanism than a carefully considered stance? Doesn’t his behaviour demonstrate that there’s a pain there that won’t go away, rather than any attempt on his part to distance himself from Russia? – Yes, it was the same thing with Nabokov; but with Nabokov the pain was expressed openly. Apparently Brodsky is trying not to show it. And for me, there’s something both acceptable and unacceptable about that. And another thing in the film. The telephone rings and Brodsky speaks in Russian, again with that sort of half-smile as if he’s at one and the same time excusing himself and yet almost showing his scorn – ‘Russians’. I felt that that was very unpleasant. Of course, it’s a game he’s playing. It’s a mask that’s grown to fit his face, as he says himself in that film; and it’s a gesture, more of a cultural gesture, and Brodsky in general is for me above all a poet of gesture. Language and the metaphors for him, in my view, are fleshed out in gesture. In a certain sense, a word is a gesture. And there you have that sort of linguistic gesture of alienation and of some sort of wary unease, of shame that he’s Russian. It’s a sort of pose, a strange, ambivalent pose. That too, in my opinion, is part of his poetics, his poetic image. In terms of living, that kind of a position seems to me to be one of hopelessness and, at times, it even makes me begin to feel sorry for him. – But maybe it’s precisely that stance of his that has enabled him to survive in the West? – That’s probably right. But there’s a price one has to pay for survival. Just how far has that survival assisted his survival as a Russian poet? I know that the scale of his claims, both artistic and human, are on a higher plane and not limited to Russian culture. That’s good and fine. But there’s another side to that. It’s not possible to be a worldclass poet and at the same time be breaking free from your roots and finding yourself in the sort of ambiguous situation that he finds himself in. Take Joyce, for instance. He remained an Irishman, emphasised his Irishness, even though at times his relationship with the Nationalists was extremely strained.

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– Brodsky too underlines his Russianness and, more than that, he hopes that in his case it’s a widening of his Russianness that’s taking place, not a narrowing of it.2 – Maybe. But then why that play-acting in the American film? It has to be said that there wasn’t any of that in Laupan’s French film.3 There he spoke in Russian and he even said he was not an American poet; though those same characters were there, and that Derek Walcott. But Brodsky behaved quite differently. That ability he has to change his behaviour to suit his audience seems to me, in a certain sense, to attest to the ambivalence of his position now in the West. For all his prosperity, however well integrated with the establishment he may be, he none the less feels himself in some way to be an outsider. – You’re not the only Russian poet who’s written about Brodsky. The others, Loseff, Venclova, Kreps, write about him out of love, or because they teach in American colleges. 4 What drove you to take up your pen and turn to prose? The need to understand Brodsky, to explain him to others, or was it in order to free yourself of his influence? – I see Brodsky as a very essential manifestation of our contemporary poetic culture. Obviously I draw a line between my work as a poet and critic. Their tasks are different. As a poet I tend to avoid Brodsky’s influence. It has to be said, in general, that the force of Brodsky’s influence upon Leningrad poetry has been so tangible that anyone starting out to write has had in a way to seek out some kind of counter-version, an opposing figure, as it were. Probably that’s characteristic of Russian poetry in general. Pushkin, for example, so monopolised the poetic word that, even in his lifetime, the need for a counterweight was felt. And that came along, willy-nilly. In Belinsky’s eyes, for example, Gogol was the alternative. A critic is always on the lookout for some sort of situation where one literary figure balances out another. In Brodsky’s generation, though, no such figure existed and as a poet I developed in a way that was counter to Brodsky though, naturally, I read everything he wrote. Brodsky remained my yardstick. For that reason, when I began to engage in literary criticism it was Brodsky’s figure that interested me in particular; his place, his poetic function in the contemporary literary scene. Brodsky remains the key figure for understanding it. That’s the first thing. And secondly, Brodsky is a cultural bridge that today

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links Russia with certain trends in the West. Thus Brodsky, for me, is not just a poet of the 1960s, he’s also the first Russian post-modernist. He’s interesting as a stylistic development, as a turning point in the literary process. – You’ve written already about your first meeting with Brodsky at the poetic Tournee in 1959. 5 Have you had further personal contact with him since then? – Yes, I can’t say that the relationship has been warm or even friendly, but it was good because we did meet quite often in the early 1970s. Brodsky was pretty sceptical about what I was up to and that was, in general, his attitude towards all the young up-and-coming poets. But behind that scepticism there lay a genuine interest. It must be said he did read practically everything that came out. That did astonish me. The point at which we parted company had nothing to do with poetry as such, it had more to do with poetic behaviour as metaphor. And I had some conversations with Brodsky that were very important to me. He was interesting to talk to, though really he behaved more like a teacher, he didn’t take any objections, he didn’t listen to anything that went against the grain of his own opinion. But he liked some of my poems and disliked others. Now I see, looking at them again 20 years later, that he was probably right in his judgements to a certain extent. But at the same time, our relationship wasn’t at a personal level, though, possibly unbeknownst to him, I did help him in some ways. For example, I did get some money together for him when he left the country. There were other occasions when I had some part to play. Anyway, our meetings were still connected with Akhmatova because I was at her place comparatively often in the early 1960s. And Brodsky and Naiman and Rein would be there. – And what did Akhmatova think of your poetry? – You know, that’s hard to say because Akhmatova used to praise all the poetry she heard. She generally liked young people to come to see her and to write. And in as far as my own poetry was, in some way, in the Acmeist tradition then, in theory, she liked it. How genuine that liking was is difficult for me to judge. – The very fact that you were at her house so often goes to show that her judgement was a positive one, doesn’t it? – Yes, she was rather sympathetic in her attitude to me though, ofcourse, it was Brodsky she singled out from all the other poets who

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visited her – including Naiman, Bobyshev and Rein. Well, I was younger than the others; I was 16 when I first went to see her. – Who was it who gave you the first impulse to write poetry? – That impulse was more a matter of my own feeling of muteness. I didn’t have a teacher. I felt a sort of need to express my inner anguish, an indefinable metaphysical feeling which I didn’t even dare hope that it was possible to express. At first that came in fits and starts, half in verse, half in prose. And then the poetry came. My first steps as a poet happened in several stages. One of them was very curious: for quite a while I wrote syllabic verse, it was as if I had discovered syllabo-tonic verse for myself – I counted up, I subtracted. And now, in retrospect, looking back I see that I had gone through … – … the same evolutionary stages that Russian poetry went through. – Yes. And at about the age of 16, when I was in tenth grade and I was still wearing school uniform (you remember it was very military in appearance – shirts with very high collars?); so, in my school uniform, along with my friend Zhenia Pazukhin, who also wrote poetry (now he is a priest) and Yaroslav Vasilkov (now known for his translation of the Mahabharata – a marvelous translation), all of us arrived at Akhmatova. That was in 1959, maybe early 1960. – So you got to know her earlier than Brodsky did? – Yes. And we started to go there quite often. We’d travel over to Komarovo and buy some medicine. She was, in a way, our spiritual guardian. She really put herself forward as our poetic mentor, but I can’t, as Brodsky does, call her my mentor because at the time I was following another, different tradition – that of the Futurists. For the poets of my circle things like Benedict Livshits’s The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, Mayakovsky’s first volume, the five-volume edition of Khlebnikov and everything else to do with the Futurists was of rather more importance. It was a strange mixture like that. In Leningrad the Futurists’ influence was very powerful. That was apparent from the middle 1950s onward and it emanated from that university circle to which Lev Loseff, Krasil’nikov and all that gang belonged. But on the other hand, the way Akhmatova bore herself, that had a massive influence on all of us. Brodsky, and I saw this, quite simply learned how great poets behave. And in that sense of course, in my view, Akhmatova passed on to him the tradition

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of the metaphor of gesture. For me that wasn’t as important as it was for Brodsky. The explanation I give myself for that now is this: for me, as a poet the most important thing, possibly, was communication which Lotman describes as I above I, vertical communication. 6 Brodsky always needed the horizontal in order to sense that vertical. And the horizontal in linguistic terms is speech, articulation. I saw how attentive Brodsky was to the way she pronounced her words, to the way she would translate any given situation in life on to the plane of speech, on to the plane of poetry, by means of articulatory metaphor, by means of gesture turned into word. Well, for instance, what an amazing sense of humour Akhmatova had! It has to be said that Brodsky, in every television interview I’ve seen, reminds me of that sense of humour she had. It’s there in the way he deals with his own personality, the way he deals with the person he’s talking to, the interviewer, the situation. But compared with Akhmatova he’s crude. I don’t know whether it’s done consciously or not, but he is coarser, harsher; sometimes it verges on a bad joke – one that’s gone stale. – It’s obviously done consciously, because you see the same thing in his poetics. Every time he’s been carried away to some elevated plane he feels he has deliberately to lower the tone. – Akhmatova always knew how to keep things on a lofty plane, she made it clear to whoever it was she was talking to just how much distance there was between them and only hinted at the possibility of there being some lower level. In that sense she was a virtuoso. – From who else, among your contemporaries, have you been forced to defend your independence? – I think that Brodsky, of course, has been the most influential figure. Though at the beginning of the 1960s his influence was momentarily broken by poets like Stanislav Krasovitsky. For me, he remains a great poet to this day. Now I want to do something with those texts of his, get them published, write about him. – Brodsky thinks highly of him too. – Yes, I know. My first conversations with Brodsky (I don’t remember whether it was 1961 or ‘62) went something like this: I was saying what his poetry meant to me and how much I liked it. Once he said that there were at least ten poets on a par with him, and he named Volodia Ufliand, Rein, Bobyshev, Naiman, Krasovitsky and, I think,

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Khromov. I don’t recall all of the names now – Gorbovsky was another, I think. – Kushner and Eryomin must have been in there as well. Doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky, despite the fact that he’s obviously aware of his own uniqueness, is generous in giving equal weight now to one, now to some other contemporary of his? – You know, it seems to me that that again is another instance of Akhmatova’s schooling. Brodsky is a very willing, very sympathetic advocate on behalf of those poets who don’t, in his view, threaten him. – You think his judgements aren’t simply dictated by personal taste, that they are thought through? – The desciption Eikhenbaum gave of Tolstoy fits Brodsky to a tee: he’s a literary politician, a literary regimental commander. It’s no accident that that military Zhukov theme is so important to him. He really does, in a sense, map out a strategy, one all of his own, and in that strategy, for example, Irina Ratushinskaya’s semi-literary poetry gets a high billing. Brodsky knows all too well just how far Ratushinskaya’s gift goes, the limitations of her poetics. I’ll leave the other examples I could give to one side. – If Brodsky has got a strategy, Ratushinskaya scarcely enters into it. Brodsky wrote the foreword to her book at a time when she was in a camp and, in my view, it was quite simply a matter of Brodsky’s name being needed to help get her out of there.7 – Yes, that’s all very understandable but nevertheless literature is literature. In that sense it’s also interesting how Brodsky sees current poetry in general. I find his choice of poets striking – they’re all his closest friends! Well, so what? you may say. Volodia Ufliand is a remarkable poet, well-defined, rather parochial. I’m not going to talk about Rein. I value what he did in the 1960s but, in essence, he hasn’t changed a bit. However, when Brodsky picks out those names and calls them our leading poets, what in fact he’s doing is setting up some sort of a hierarchy, some sort of Pushkinian Pleiade with sole pretensions to the poetic throne. And I can see why that annoys the poets who belong to other schools – Gennady Aygi, for example. That old division between Cubo-Futurism and Ego-Futurism is still with us. Brodsky’s more of an Ego-Futurist, Aygi represents the Cubo-Fu-

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turist tradition. It’s the same old choice between two alternatives, the same old civil war. – Brodsky and Aygi perhaps don’t have much love for one another but they do respect each other and Aygi, having refused to give me an interview for this book, did talk to me until four in the morning, and, amongst other things, he talked a lot about Brodsky. He considers Brodsky to be not only a great poet but also one of the most intelligent people he has ever had the chance to meet up with. Naturally, finding themselves at opposite poles of the Russian poetic continent, there’s a lot of each other’s work they don’t find acceptable. However, Aygi does recognise it as a fact that Brodsky has, to a considerable extent, transformed the Russian poetic landscape. 8 Has Brodsky changed your perception of Russian poetry? – No, on the contrary, he’s confirmed it. Remember, I’m not that much younger than Brodsky. By the time Brodsky became wellknown as a poet certain strategic lines of advance already existed for me. Brodsky simply showed us what was possible: a lofty elevated form of poetry is possible in this day and age. Inwardly I felt that but that, to me, obvious fact lacked a voice and was, as it were, surrounded by a zone of silence. And that, of course, is remarkable. I don’t understand how a literary strategy and an authentic poetic movement came together in Brodsky. For me that is one of the puzzles: at one and the same time the situation is open – and it is closed. You have extreme clarity and yet, at the same time, there’s also a tendency towards metaphysical darkness. The fact is that all of us, seemingly, set off from some sort of fundamental concept of the void which is, for us, as it were, the centre. Then that centre began to fill in some way. For some people it was a religious quest, for others it was a social quest, but Brodsky remained a poet, remained down that metaphysical well where man is alone face-to-face with the Universe. Moreover, I repeat, for him his own position in the hierarchy was always very important. – Why, in your opinion, was it that from the ‘magnificent seven’ or ten, if you will, of Russian twentieth-century poets Brodsky specifically singled out Tsvetaeva? Why is she so important to Brodsky? – You know, I think with Brodsky one has to differentiate various degrees of literary sincerity. Let’s say it’s like this: for him Tsvetaeva ought to be a great poet; ought to be but isn’t. That is, for him there

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is a category of necessity, a purely imperial category. Brodsky is, in principle, a poet of Empire and that appears first and foremost in his attitude towards literature which for him is, in a way, just another hierarchy. Tsvetaeva is a master. Tsvetaeva, as the Ancient Greeks would put it, is a techne. Brodsky doesn’t have the Greek mentality, he is more of a Roman. And in Roman culture that techne is the ability to build, to fit the blocks together, to display a masterly attitude towards one material – that was a particularly appreciated trait. In Russian poetry Tsvetaeva is possibly the most technical of authors. That’s the first thing. Secondly, in Tsvetaeva’s case what is exceptionally important is the personal principle, the individual, individualistic principle. Well, somehow it’s not the done thing to like Mayakovsky, though his work was in precisely the same vein; that would be bad taste. But Tsvetaeva, with her fate, her tragedy, justifies her individualism. But if we talk about the metaphysical nucleus of her poetry and of her poetics then it’s completely different from Brodsky’s. And to me he seems to be the more profound poet of the two: simply in another class altogether, on another plane. And for both Brodsky and Tsvetaeva there was, at the very outset, a frenzied Romanticism there, that is to say an extreme Utopianism of vision, as far as poetry was concerned. If you take her ‘To my verses as to precious wine, their time will come’ 9 and something of the early Brodsky like, ‘He believed in his skull, believed’ ‘(S, p. 19), where the artist achieves all he sets out to achieve, it’s the same motif, the motif of personal affirmation through the medium of the poetic word, through techne. But later on came that break in his poetic which, especially after Norenskaya, after his exile up north, seems to me to have led him away from Tsvetaeva. And another instance where he and Tsvetaeva differ; Brodsky always felt his Jewishness as a religious thing, despite the fact that, when all’s said and done, he’s a Christian poet, and that Jewishness of his is his inferiority complex, which was particularly apparent at the outset and which required, as it were, that his voice strike that inherently weak string. And that is precisely what Tsvetaeva lacked. His poetry is quite simply on a different scale in my view. – What is there, do you think, in Brodsky’s poetry that is especially dangerous for an apprentice poet?

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Brodsky is very infectious. I know an awful lot of young poets who, having read Brodsky, try and write just like him. There are two things, in my view, that attract them to him. There’s, first, the way that he makes the concept of personal fate into an absolute. And so you have a first wave of young poets, aged between 15 and 17, who refuse to go on to university, who think of themselves as great poets, who go off and get themselves jobs stoking boilers and who, very often, come to a bad end. And really, out of that whole wave of poets, I can’t think of one real poet, but I know of several dozen young people for whom Brodsky was, as it were, the Way. There is this great poet and therefore one needs to do as he has done in order to prove oneself. But they didn’t have the necessary energy, the necessary personal qualities – and, anyway, the times have changed. So the uniqueness of Brodsky’s fate has been seen ‘ as some sort of natural law which, from the literary point of view, is very dangerous. Secondly, you have that same metaphysical void I’ve already mentioned that, in poetic terms, is expressed in the way that Brodsky has a few key devices which he employs and which are not, in principle, too difficult to master but which have their origins in precisely that sense of life’s discreteness. – Could you possibly name them? – First of all, and most important of them, is enjambment. The feeling that the text just goes on and on, without a break. And in as much as being is discrete, has breaks, lacks meaning, a text for Brodsky is order, an order which vanquishes life’s chaos, its Brownian motion, and so, in Brodsky’s case, that device has a metaphysical basis. – That device also reveals new possibilities in the realm of rhymes. – Yes, but the main thing is that it has caused a rhetorical shift. That is the most powerful instrument he has with which to wield influence. In my time there was still a voice. Somewhere towards the end of the 1960s the voice disappeared. In the second phase of his work the poetry became more graphic. It was no accident that at the end of the 1960s Brodsky had recourse to a complex graphic. Even as early as ‘Procession’ (S, pp. 156 - 222) he was trying out a kind of graphical experiment; later it was as if the graphics stepped in and took over the place of the voice.

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– ‘Poets work with a voice, with a voice’, Mandelstam used to say. What you’re implying is that the poems are written without being voiced? – Yes, now the poems are written and not being heard in advance. Hence the accusation one hears most often from people who read Brodsky and accept his poetry in the Soviet Union: coldness. They were expecting Brodsky to be a prophet precisely on the strength of his voice. When he was first starting out, because of his own particular physiological peculiarities, his inability to pronounce a whole string of sounds, his own voice became for him a value in itself. For Brodsky the voice’s ability to produce smooth sounds, strident sounds has a suggestive power analogous to what, let’s say, existed at the beginning of the Rock movement. There is one more danger for those poets who take Brodsky’s poetics as paradigmatic. The fact is that in the last few years the degree of irony in his poetry has grown larger. And a fear of openness, possibly a desire not to be open (a Western feature already there in Brodsky) has grown deeper so that every poetic statement already exists inherently as an object for analysis and the following statement springs from that analysis. So that irony towards the words, towards the self, that too can be devastating. I could name a few poets – well take, let’s say, Aleksandr Barash who is developing that line of Brodskian poetry. His poetry of course is qualitatively, accoustically, in a different dimension from Brodsky’s but it is the irony that robs it of any independence, whilst in Brodsky it is that very irony which preserves the unity of the world. Irony is the weapon he uses to try and stem the intrusions of alien poetics, alien ideologemes and situations. There is irony that can be a self-directed but which amplifies rather than belittles the poetic I. For example, in the ‘New Jules Verne’ (U, pp. 40 - 6) the octopus is called Osia. That is clearly self-directed irony. Osia isn’t just some incomprehensible creature, Osia is a monstrous creature, something that devours, it is an I mutated into a fantastic new shape. That is a self-irony which gives rise to self-aggrandisement. – But on the other hand, the majority of Brodsky’s tropes which replace the lyrical I are deliberately self-belittling: ‘I’m one of the deaf, bald, gloomy ambassadors / of a second-rate power’ (K, p. 58), ‘an absolute nobody, a man in a raincoat’ (C, p. 40), ‘though you’re the lowest scum, dust under the fence’ (U, p. 92), and so on.

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– I could counter that string of examples with another string of my own. For instance, the tooth that is compared with the Coliseum. – I know of no such simile in Brodsky’s poetry, though I’m compiling a dictionary of his tropes and similes. Maybe what you’re thinking of is this: ‘In the mouth’s cavity the caries do not yield the palm / to Ancient Greece, at the very least’ (C, p. 24), ‘I, who hide in my mouth / ruins comparable with those of the Parthenon’ (C, p. 28)? – OK, but take one of those tropes you’re just quoted: ‘a man in a raincoat’. Actually it’s a film quote and is indicative of an anti-hero. It’s a quote from a 1930s film, maybe even one of Marcel Carné’s. I recognise that image from a film, one of those we saw back then, Quai de Brumes or Le Notti Bianche. The man in the raincoat, played by Jean Marais, was a lone wolf, a renegade-hero or super-hero who stood up against the whole opposing world. ‘Dust under the fence’ that too is a quote: ‘If you only knew from what sort of trash / poetry grows not knowing shame / like the yellow dandelion by the fence, / like the burdock, or the goosefoot.’ 10 With Brodsky, ‘dust’ is just a case of his taking Akhmatova’s metaphor and stretching it to the limit. And that’s something else too that’s, possibly, important. With Brodsky a quotation is always the prologue to his saying something about himself through the medium of someone else’s words. For me, however, what is important is the dissolution of my I in someone else’s words. Other people’s words become, at a certain moment, more important than my own and I repeat them. In this sense, for me, my spiritual mentors are the poets of the Middle Ages, the Mystic poets who deal with mystical-erotic side of things, the Provencal troubadours. – Since we’re talking about the lyrical I allow me to quote Brodsky. In his afterword to Kublanovsky’s collection Brodsky writes that ‘Kublanovsky’s lyrical hero lacks that self-disgust which he needs in order to be really convincing.’ 11 – He’s absolutely right. – Does that mean that the originality of Brodsky’s self-portrait is determined by his desire to be convincing? – Not by that alone, but by a deeper metaphysical sense. Brodsky nevertheless thinks of himself as the poet of a Christian culture. And in Christian culture self-abasement is a kind of self-aggrandisement.

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– In what spheres do you see your own route to an understanding of the world? – For me the religious quest is, of course, important. I wouldn’t say experience, it’s difficult to talk about experience in connection with poetry. There one crosses a dangerous boundary. Existence on the boundary line between being and non-being that is there in Brodsky but, in my view, what is not there is any striving for anonymity, striving for dissolution of the I in the ‘other’. But it is precisely that anonymity which interests me. So my poetics have taken form in a turning away from Brodsky, as an alternative to his system. Aronzon tried to do the same thing. 12 Speaking in conventional terms, that is the poetics of maximum concentration of meaning, a poetics of minimalism but not in a negative sense, not in alienation from the personality as is the case with Aygi. I see clearly that our contemporary poetic universe has two extremes. On one side there is the homogenous unbroken cosmic order of Brodsky and, on the other, the absolute anonymous discrete ‘white on white’ world of Gennady Aygi. Neither suited me as a poet. To me it seems that the main thing in poetry is, when all is said and done, concentration of meaning. That is the sine qua non of poetry’s survival. And it is precisely the survivability of the poetic word which now depends upon just how incapable it is of being absorbed with the cultural Establishment, that is, how subject it is to erosion by the mass media, the mass means of communication and, on the other hand, just how hard it can lean on poetic tradition as a whole. For me it is obvious that Brodsky’s Nobel Prize dealt a powerful blow to his poetics. I would not like to find myself in a situation like that. I now deliberately spurn publication because any word which in these days, these years, gots into mass-circulation is in mortal danger of losing all meaning; some kind of semantic replacement takes place and it becomes a sign, an emblem. I would like to exist in the context of the kind of poetics which would, as it were, ‘flicker’ on the edge of absolute incomprehensibility and, at the same time, be poignantly invariable, full of meaning which would be incapable of being distorted by translation into the language of mass communication. In other words, I would like to create the poetics of the impossible, untranslatable into what are today categorised as artistic values. It’s rather a complex problem because it does look as if, in

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practical terms, mass culture is omnivorous, all-devouring. The TV camera erodes all meaning, even the most private, the most complex, and turns it into nonsense, cooks it until it’s bone dry. To counter that culturological digestive process the contemporary poetic word ought to somehow ‘encapsulate’ itself, vanish to all outward appearances, and only reveal itself to the most attentive and painstaking reading. I see the posthumous fate of Mandelstam’s poetry as being very important here. Despite his apparent predisposition to be a sweet-smelling corpse in the consciousness of our contemporary masses, poet, victim of Stalinism, Acmeist, his poetry is aristocratic (and aristocratism is nowadays Soviet bon ton, it’s the mainstream of new Soviet ideology and it’s no accident that Nabokov is one of the most influential of authors and that Brodsky, being one of the Establishment, is seen as being aristocratic); Mandelstam remains outside the bounds of mass culture, indefinable and undefined. It’s a shame that there are elements in Brodsky’s work that can be so easily integrated into mass culture. When, for example, in last night’s film his poems are illustrated by showing a train passing over a bridge, they are, as it were, translated into another language, that of the cinema and that puts me on my guard because they are too easily translatable into another language. – Isn’t that metaphor borrowed from ‘Gorbunov and Gochakov’ (O, pp. 177 - 218)? You remember, ‘A Song in the Third Person’? ‘He said.’ ‘He said.’ ‘He said.’ ‘He said.’ ‘He said.’ ‘A train!’ ‘And on a line without an end.’ ‘And starting at the station of He-said.’ ‘And who would want to make the track his bed?’ (TU, p. 143)

I would like to put one question to you as a philologist. What is it that engenders energy in a poem? Is it just the tropes, the rhythm, the syntax? Or is some sort of a spiritual or semantic quality? – That is a complex question. I will try to answer it. For me what is important is the unseen, outwardly unapparent moment of suggestion. A poem is born out of a sum of yearnings and denials. The yearning can be of various shades, it can be joyful, it can be sad but

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it is always yearning and denial, denial of the situation I find myself right now in a definite, physical, here-and-now sense. – Denial or overcoming of yearning? – Possibly the latter but, if I’m going to be precise, it is rather a rejection. There arises a certain melodic structure as yet void of words, the words are as yet unthought of. It’s not even a rhythmic pattern, just a mumbling, a melody which I find quite difficult to transform into a metrical pattern. I do find it hard. And the basic element of that metrical pattern, for me, is the expirational element. A stanza is, for me, a sort of expirational figure. As a rule, I write in stanzas, though it is somewhat different now. I spurn punctuation for greater freedom of reading. So, conventionally speaking, this special kind of expiration is engendered. I begin to write the moment I know that this particular expiration is new to me, that this particular expirational figure is somehow different. Later instrumentary fragments of words rise to the surface. That is, there are groups of consonants, vowels, but they as yet lack meaning. A word develops spontaneously, as it were, possibly vegetatively. What’s more, I notice that the freer my instrumental progress, the more sure the development of meaning is. The meaning is only revealed at the very end of my work on a poem. So the very process of progression towards meaning is a result of musicoexpirationary movement. And, to my own astonishment, I discover that I have written something intelligible. That’s always very interesting because, theoretically, if that unexpected conjunction of all those meaningless mumbling elements does not take place, if they don’t come together into one, indivisible meaning, into an inviolable crystal of meaning, into a sort of geometrical-semantic whole, then the poem is a failure and I have to leave it, throw it away. – Does that mean that it isn’t language that’s leading you on but some other kind of non-linguistic harmony? – Language is there too, but language in what sense? The main device I employ is not metaphor but polysemy. That, generally speaking, is rather a rare genus of poetry; really one could call it a-metaphorical poetry. Metaphor is born of the internal clashing together of various different layers of words, of various different senses of one word with another. Polysemy is a taking account of the whole spectrum of a word’s semantic field. If the word is ‘I’ then the metaphor will be based upon the relationship of ‘I’ and ‘you’ but with polysemy

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it is a question of the ‘I’ and its various meanings. It seems to me that nobody was interested in that sort of communication. – And what about Khlebnikov? – Yes, there’s Khlebnikov. But with him it’s different. He’s more concerned with homonyms, false etymology, with playing games with pseudohomophones where the revelation of the poetic meaning is based on an analytical dissection of the word, the phrase and so on. But that sort of language, for all its apparent continuity, is fragmentary, exploded into its component parts. It’s the language of a pagan cult where the degree of symbolic freedom is higher than, let’s say, in Christianity, but where no real freedom of the word exists. This freedom does, however, exist when the word, cognizant of its sinful nature, is placed in the difficult situation of the vertically orientated polysemic field of play. Those are, strictly speaking, laboratory conditions, ‘difficult’ ones for the word because the syntax is incomprehensible, the lexicon is archaic, things are pushed to the limits of the absurd. But the meaning of a word opens up in precisely those harsh, unusual conditions – not in everyday situations. And, taking it further, the word breaks down, just as it does in Khlebnikov. The consonants break up, rejoin, change places – that is the instrumentation I mentioned earlier. It is built upon the movement of those elements and that movement is spontaneous, it doesn’t depend upon anything I may do. – That’s to say, you place the word in some sort of extreme existential situation in much the same way as Brodsky does a man? – Yes, that’s it, absolutely; in an extreme existential situation. And the word experiences tragedy, it dies. That is the reason why I can somehow allow – and Brodsky cannot – bad lines, bad poems. That’s not important, as far as I’m concerned because, in the context of the resurrected word they are absorbed, swallowed up. On the contrary, sometimes I aim precisely for that. I make some statement that borders on the banal, that borders on the vulgar, precisely because, right now, that is the sharpest, most powerful poetic device. – Brodsky does do the same thing, though I do see certain dissimilarities as well as similarities. Whilst you lay stress on the word Brodsky is solicitous of the language as a whole, and I quote from him, ‘language is more important than God, than nature, than any-

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thing else, for us as a biological species’. 13 To what extent would you share that view? – Yes, his concept of language is quite close to mine in some ways. There’s another reason for my studying his poetry. But for me language is above all a description of silence. That for me is the crux of the matter, it is what I am silent about, what I don’t want to talk about. – That sounds remarkably akin to Olia Sedakova’s view. – However strange it may seem, there is a definite similarity – a semantic one. And I like Sedakova’s poetry, despite its rather too coquettish articulation and its strict musico-rational base. She has a wide knowledge of music and she makes use of devices that have already been tried out in a musical context. What sets my generation of poets apart from the preceding one – and Brodsky lies somewhere between the two – is that we write about what you can’t write about. What’s more, the impossibility of writing about it isn’t political or ethical. You can’t write about it because it isn’t possible to write about it. It is really, I would say, an attempt to give iconic form to the unattainable. There’s an expression that’s used in the Orthodox faith: ‘a literal paradise’. What does it mean? It’s the actual heavenly existence of man after death. And what characterises all that ‘underground’ culture that began to develop in the 1970s (this applies to painting too – they were trying to depict the undepictable) is that it is striving to create, will create new values, values which cannot be eradicated in the colourless flow of the mass media. None the less, language is an eradicable value. Language is an evolutionary, historical creation. But despite language’s transient nature, the search for those ‘eternal’ values, through the word, through a revelation of language’s resources and possibilities, the attempts to discover the limits of meaning which we are striving to reach, for me that is the most important thing. – To what extent do your poetics, your aesthetics lead you on the philosophical level? And to what philosophical tendency do you consider yourself to belong? – At a certain moment I was literally thrown head over heels by Berdyaev; not at a human level, poetically. In 1970 I read his The Meaning of History and it became clear to me how I should write -even though, to all appearances, there’s nothing in that book about

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it. I don’t know how I would feel about Berdyaev now. I haven’t read him for a long time. I continue to feel drawn to existential philosophy and to its right wing – that of Heidegger. What Heidegger says about poetry simply fills me with ecstasy. And it’s precisely for that reason that I want to write about poetry myself. I feel less enthusiastic about the psychoanalytical trend. I do though, for example, respect Lacan’s approach to the word. The existential-phenomenological approach to poetry is crucial to me. – Whose philosophical ideas, in your opinion, feed Brodsky’s poetry? – For Brodsky, Shestov and Kierkegaard are important. Thinking of Brodsky I recall Kierkegaard’s book on Abraham. – Fear and Trembling? Yes, that’s the basis of his advance, of his course. It’s curious that for Brodsky, and for Russian poetry in general, psychoanalytical thought just does not seem to exist. But at the same time, it seems to me that there is in some way a possibility for hope, socio-metaphysical, existential hope, precisely there in the field of self-knowledge that opens up to us, because in Russia psychoanalysis has taken on a religious colouring and it reveals an absolutely new dimension to the personality. And language takes on absolutely new overtones. I recently reread the poetry Brodsky wrote after 1972, from that particular point of view, and what struck me was the appearance of new motifs which attest to the fact that Brodsky was immediately aware of that psychoanalytical sharpening of European man’s daily round. He was trying, let’s say, in ‘Odysseus to Telemachus’ (C, p. 23) to read traditional myth in a Freudian light. It has to be said it wasn’t a success and he moved on from that. – That’s to say the psychoanalytical principle was overwhelmed by the mythological principle? – Yes, and there possibly you have a weakness in his poetics. But therein lies the secret of his success because he had acquired his image. Those mythological, classical contours he’s given his poetry made for instant success, especially in America. It placed him all at once in a ‘resonant’ situation, a well-defined situation. Possibly Brodsky senses the dangers of psychoanalysis since he’s mostly avoided contemporary European culture’s sore spot. – If that is the case then the explanation perhaps lies in the fact that Brodsky having left Russia settled almost immediately in America

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where psychoanalysis has been so vulgarised, become so much a part of mass culture, as to be compromised? – Yes, that’s the case, but he could have, of course, looked for something beyond the shrink’s couch and crass symbolism. What I’m talking about is French rather than American psychoanalysis, which goes much deeper. As a philologist I am, for example, at the moment confronted by the problem of how Russian literature can be read not on a Freudian, or even Jungian, basis but on the basis of the post-Jungian psychoanalytical writings of Lacan, Derrida – because they lead in completely new directions, offer new keys, new possibilities. It’s interesting that for Brodsky it’s as if all that just didn’t exist. – It seems to me that he feels a slight distaste for French culture even though he visits France every year. He ignores, for instance, contemporary French poetry. – Yes, yes, for him the Anglo-American strain is much more important. But it must be said that the possibilities of psychoanalytical description are not really of service to a poet. They are a danger to him. – That is strange because a poet, to my way of thinking, has four if not five eyes. The very ability to create tropes shows that the poet sees connections in the world around him, all around him, 360 degrees simultaneously, sees similarities no matter how distant they may be. Why shouldn’t he have another eye at his disposal for looking within? – That eye evidently has a brake on it. Clearly, it is rather dangerous, that power, for a poet. A reflex can be social, can be metaphysical, but as soon as it touches upon the inner sphere it becomes dangerous. In fact, that’s the key to Christian poetry. In Russia we never did have those erotico-metaphysical texts like for example, those of St Teresa. We never knew love that was so strong that it was able to examine its own inner workings. That would now, it seems to me, be our salvation. – But really, contemporary poetry, including your own and Brodsky’s is to a considerable extent a poetry of self-analysis, both at the aesthetic and at the poetic level. It seems that only rarely do poets go any deeper than that. – Yes. And that is the sort of task that’s facing me now. And it turns out to be very difficult. Our poetic language in its present form is not capable of describing that. Maybe I’ve tried to resolve the problem

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by using obscurity, by using the polysemic structure itself when some sort of erotic, subconscious meaning comes to the surface. – Is the Russian language not prepared for erotic description? – It’s not prepared for an extreme uncovering of the self at an individual level. You know exactly the same thing is happening with perestroika: up to a certain point self-reflection is okay but then it comes to a stop. It perhaps has something to do with the nature of Russian political culture, with our social structure. And at a human level our puritanism doesn’t allow us to go further than a certain point. For the poet the poetic system he creates possesses a colossal inertial power. And there you have the enormous strength and weakness of the poetic word. It contains within it such enormous inertial power. It’s very difficult to make it change direction but, seemingly, it is possible. – Recently you said that the ‘new poetry’ could only claim to be the expression of higher values when official literature was in control. But who now in Russia, besides the poets, gives expression to the higher values? – I think that, when all’s said and done, poetry evidently retains that strength. But now with the onset of a crisis in our literary culture as a whole, a crisis that evidently has been underway in the West since the end of the Second World War, poetry does appear to be in a difficult position. The way poetry is discussed is just a profanation. What was once sacred is now losing its individual dimension and is being transformed into a social banality. To me what matters is the existence of a text which cannot be turned into a banal social fact. In that sense Brodsky’s pessimism is, in part, caused by the ease with which any statement, taken out of context, can be harmful. According to what I see, our present generation is a void. The most talented of them are busy with cinema, video, painting, the graphic arts. That pays, gives them their independence, satisfies their ambitions. More and more it’s a case of poetry, as in the West, becoming a form of art that’s seen as prestigious and one which the government ought to subsidise in order to ensure its continued existence, because it ought to exist. – But isn’t that a healthier position for it to be in when you compare it with the days when they made heroes and martyrs of poets, when they were subject to the personal attention of a tyrant? It would

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never have occurred to Churchill to ring up T. S. Eliot and ask him if W. H. Auden was really a great poet because, let’s say, he was getting ready to leave England for America? – Because for Churchill that wasn’t a matter of vital importance. – But isn’t that how things are, normally? Isn’t that how it should be everywhere? – Generally speaking, yes. That’s how it ought to be. On the other hand, it seems to me that there is enshrined in Russian culture this concept of sacrifice. Of course that is terrifying but it’s not really just a question of a poet’s prestige. The danger of saying anything makes us more responsible to the word. You can’t write just whatever you want to write. – We’ll finish our conversation about you, about Brodsky and Russian poetry with some lines of yours dedicated to Brodsky. Apparently they were written shortly after he left Russia? – Yes, the poem dates from 1973 and the epigraph is taken from Brodsky himself. MEETING Now more and more often I feel … J. B. More and more on the street I see people (or I think I see people) who’ve gone so far away that you speak of them hushly and carefully just as we speak of the dead: with a sadness unfeigned but for all that an awkwardness too. More and more in the distance they loom as they seem to withdraw. Look closer: the analogy strikes with the force of a blow; as sickened with fear we behold the earth opened and gaping – O when wilt Thou give up Thy dead from the kingdom below? Now oceans and continents yield up their booty afresh; death’s colourful palate bespatters the orbis terrarum; and middle-earth’s tropics now make its inhabitants live the old myth of Orpheus’ quest for a shade in the pit.

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To what manner of place are you leading me, phantom that flits through the teeming numbers that fill the Apraksin Gallery where, keener than fears that are conjured by partings and meetings, the beak of the buzzard hangs poised for a stoop at my face? I appear in the crowd, paralysed. The allegory of power chastises those under its wing as it howls. More frequently now the impression of being at one with people takes hold, unreal people, happily unborn. And into the shaft on the mountain I haplessly tumble and follow the one who has gone – a centripetal force seems to urge me to know what the lot of a mortal may be near the hub of the earth, beyond the frontier – or the grave. Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1

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The Soviet-American co-production for television was called ‘Joseph Brodsky: a Maddening Space’ (director/writer: Lawrence Pitkethly; producer: Sasha Alpert) was shown on British TV’s Channel 4 as part of the ‘Soviet Spring’ season on 16 January 1990. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Brodskii, Kniga interv’iu (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 121 - 122. The French television film about Brodsky was first shown on 15 February 1989 at the Institut d’Études slaves in Paris. The film had its TV premiere on TF3, 6 March 1989. The film was made by Victor Laupan and Christopher de Ponfilly. Viktor Krivulin wrote an interesting reviewed of the film for Russkaya mysl, 3 March 1989, p. 13. Lev Loseff and Tomas Venclova are close friends of Brodsky and the authors of many articles on the poet. See the Bibliography in my book, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For their latest work see articles collected in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990). Mikhail Kreps is the author of the first monograph to be devoted to Brodsky in Russian, O Poezii losifa Brodskogo (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984). Viktor Krivulin, ‘Slovo o nobelitete losifa Brodskogo’, Russkaya mysl, 11 November 1988, Literaturnoe prilozhenie, no. 7, pp. II.

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Yu. M. Lotman, Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta (Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1971) pp. 298 - 300. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Introduction’, in Irina Ratushinskaya, Poems (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Hermitage, 1984) pp. 51 - 2. My long talk with Gennady Aygi about Russian poetry took place on 18 November 1989 in Glasgow, during the festival Soviet Art in Glasgow 1989. Marina Tsvetaeva, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow and Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel, Biblioteka poeta, 1965) p. 57. Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel, Biblioteka poeta, 1976) p. 202. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Afterword’ to Yury Kublanovsky, S poslednim solntsem (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1983) pp. 361 - 5. For more about Aronzon, see K. K. Kuzminsky and G. Kovalyov, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, vol. 4 A (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983) pp. 73 - 131. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 149 The Soviet-American co-production for television was called ‘Joseph Brodsky: a Maddening Space’ (director/writer: Lawrence Pitkethly; producer: Sasha Alpert) was shown on British TV’s Channel 4 as part of the ‘Soviet Spring’ season on 16 January 1990.

10 D AV I D S H R A Y E R - P E T R O V Born in 1936, Leningrad, USSR; immigrated to USA in 1987. Books in Russian: Friends and Shadows (Druz’ia i teni), memoir-novel, 1989, New York, NY; Song about a Blue Elephant (Pesnia o golubom slone), poetry, 1990, Holyoke, MA, USA; Villa Borghese (Villa Borgeze), poetry, 1992, Holyoke, MA, USA; Herbert and Nelly (Gerbert i Nelli), novel, 1992, Moscow; 2nd ed. 2006, St. Petersburg, Russia; Petersburg Doge (Piterskii dozh), poetry, 1999, St. Petersburg, Russia; French Cottage (Frantsuzskii kottedzh), novel, 1999, Providence, RI, USA; Form of Love (Forma liubvi), poetry, 2003, Moscow, Russia; Vodka and Pastries: A Novel with Writers (Vodka s pirozhnymi: Roman s pisateliami), memoir novel, 2007, St. Petersburg, Russia. Books in English: Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America. Syracuse, NY, 2003; Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories, Syracuse, NY, 2006. The prose and poetry of David Shrayer-Petrov have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and been translated into Belarusian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish and other languages.

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HE

WA S A

UN I V E R SA L POE T

An Interview with David Shrayer-Petrov (28 September, 2003, London) – What do you feel at the mention of Brodsky’s name? – Each time I, or somebody else, mentions Brodsky, I feel like I am remembering a brother. – In your memoirs ‘Friends and Shadows’ (New York, 1989) you write, that in 1961 Brodsky came to your house just ‘to chat’, though you had never met before. Tell me about that meeting, please. – Yes, that is true. I had just been discharged from the army and was back in Leningrad early in April. I was a young officer then, – I thought I looked very handsome, strolling along Nevsky Prospect in my military coat, when I suddenly ran into Ilya Averbakh. He asks me: ‘Have you heard about Brodsky? (I had, I’ll tell you about it later: why and how I heard about him.) He is a genius. You have to meet him’. I said I would be happy to. Literally a day or two later, at about five or six in the afternoon, the doorbell rang in my communal apartment. I lived far from downtown, on the Vyborgsky side of Leningrad, alone, in two empty rooms; my mother having died six months before. I went out to answer the bell and saw a young guy, his face stubblecovered, who says: ‘Are you David Petrov?’ – ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Petrov was my pen name in those years for what had already been published or was circulating in hand-written sheets signed either by Petrov or Petrov-Shrayer. ‘I am Joseph Brodsky’. – ‘Oh yes’, – I say, – ‘I heard about you, come on in’. He had come by bicycle. A blizzardwas just starting and it was getting dark. I was somewhat in shock to see him, though I knew I would be having visitors, as we all were good and close friends at that time. All of us: Rein, Naiman, Bobyshev, Averbakh. We entered my room. I had a bottle of Madeira. I lit the stove because he was wearing only a sports jacket, maybe a sweater, no overcoat, and I feared he might catch cold. He was about five years my junior, and so I felt like an older brother. He came in and immediately struck me as someone who was possessed. That was the first thing I felt; he was possessed. He was moving as if drawn by

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a magnet. I being the centre of poetry, my poetry, and he being drawn to me. One other thing struck me! A yellow maple leave was stuck – still there from last autumn – stuck to the window pane. He noticed it and said: ‘That’s like Star of David’. We sat down, I lit the stove, and we began reading poetry to each other. At that time I knew all my poems by heart. He said: ‘You know, David, almost no one writes love poetry nowadays; that’s why I came to see you. I know many of your poems are about love’. We felt very close to one another; there was a lot of trust. And so it remained, until his departure. Whenever we met, we felt as if we had never parted. We could talk openly about anything – literature and politics. Later we simply lost contact, but there was never anything that would hamper this openness with one another. We talked about many things that night. Soon after that, Joseph began inviting me to his poetry readings. He wanted me to read with him. This flattered me, as I understood right away what a great poet he was. I didn’t need anyone to tell me, I knew right away that he had greater intellectual power, and an amazing intellect, i.e. I had never encountered such an intellect among the writers of my generation, or any of the Leningrad poets. The only poet, who I thought could challenge Brodsky, despite their big differences in style, was Genrikh Sapgir. The latter also had a big heart, great emotional force, and a large interest in the poetry of others. On top of that he had a vigorous intellect. We took part in different poetry events. I remember one reading at the Leningrad University, which was absolutely terrific. Gorbovsky, Dmitry Bobyshev, I, and maybe Kuzminsky were reciting verses. – Did you hear that Brodsky at that time had a nickname: ‘Jewish Pushkin’? – Never. And what he said about the maple leaf might also have occurred to Blok or let’s say Sergey Vikulov; the image was not a difficult one. I have to say here that at that time we didn’t talk so much about Jewish problems. – This topic is certainly important and always intrigues many researchers. However, none of them has enough knowledge, or tact to discuss it. You mentioned that he not only compared the maple leaf with the Star of David, but you also noted that Brodsky brought to po-

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etry the disarrayed Jewish soul. Did this disarrayed soul quiet down in him with time, or did it take a different form? – You know, Valentina, my first impression was that here was a Jewish guy who had burst into Russian literature bringing with him quite a reserve of disarray, as to get into Russian literature without the incandescence he had was impossible. I think the first push for him was some Jewish motifs, for example ‘Jewish Cemetery’, or other poems, but nothing else. I remember once, I quoted something about the Jewish religion or God – I‘m not sure now, and he said that for him there is no Jewish God, but only god of the Universe. And I think that with time, this disarray of his soul was straightened out, as he suddenly realized that he had entered Russian literature, achieved a certain level and even risen above it and so there was nothing for him to worry about. He got rid of this complex that we all suffered from… I remember you came into an editorial office in those days, and even if your name was Petrov – typically Slavic – it was still obvious you were Jewish in every line of what you write. Brodsky made a decision from the very start not to visit editorial offices or dream of getting published. He understood that his poems – even if published – wouldn’t bring him any success there, in his motherland. He achieved such heights in literature that he didn’t worry. And on that level, it doesn’t matter who you are: Jew, Georgian, Russian or Tartar. It’s important that he was a poet of the Universe who wrote in Russian. I would say that very soon he felt himself to be a poet beyond nationality, a poet of the Universe, who wrote masterfully in Russian. I think if he had been born somewhere in Georgia, or England, or Uganda, he would still have written the same poetry – though with a different local color – as he wrote in Russian. In my opinion being Jewish or Catholic didn’t matter much to him. And with time he settled down. If you want to compare his poems and his method of composition, regarding vowels and consonant as well as the rhymed assonances, you will see that very soon he began to write calm, well structured, definitively poems of genius. – And yet we can’t help finding both Jewish theme and Jewishness in Brodsky’s verses. He was born and grew up in an anti-Semitic country. In Russia even now Brodsky is reproached for losing his Russianness. Jews in Israel don’t consider Brodsky their poet and blame him for refusing to go to Israel. By the way, why did he refuse to go there?

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– I don’t think he refused to. Maybe he was postponing it? First of all, there’s no reason to blame. In general I think nobody can blame anyone for anything. Such was his choice and his decision. From 1961 and till his death Brodsky had occasional Jewish motifs in his poetry. Just think of his ‘Lithuanian Divertissement’ of 1971, or ‘Postface to a Fable’ with its Jewish crow, of 1993. Also it would be premature to blame him for writing too few genuinely folkloric (Slavic) verses. We shall return to this topic later and talk about Brodsky and the Russian village poets. – Are you joking? – No, it’s not a joke. This harmony is built into his poetry and it’s so subtle that the reader doesn’t notice it. – Let’s go back to the Jewish theme. – There are poets who talk about it openly. When thoroughly analyzing others, like Pasternak, you suddenly see: this is Jewish prosody, very subtle. There are poets who never ever talk about their Jewish descent, though it runs through all their work. I remember I was thirty when I first met Lev Anninsky and showed him my verses, which didn’t have a single word about Jewishness. He told me: ‘Your verses are saturated with Jewishness’. – ‘How did you see it?’ – ‘Well, I can see it in the lines, their very nature’. Same goes for Brodsky. Of course, Osya took it in with his mother’s milk that he was not the same as everybody else. He wrote about it. And yet, it wasn’t the topic of his conversations with other people. It wasn’t his major interest. His major interest was poetry per se, regardless of its national origins, I think. – Language for Brodsky is one of his central themes. It was back in 1963 that Brodsky formulated this idea of self-value and self-development of a language. Where, in your opinion, are the origins of this idea? Don’t you think they are from the Bible? – Valentina, I must agree with you. In fact, he read the Bible very seriously. Like all of us he read it in Russian. My grandmother‘s Bible had one side of the page in Yiddish and the other side in Russian. One of Brodsky’s early poems is ‘Isaac and Abraham’. The problem of Isaac, Abraham and Ishmael has not been resolved to this day. And of course Brodsky was thinking about it. In those years everybody was concerned with what was going on there, in Palestine.

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You asked me if he was considering going there. No, he wasn’t. We talked about it – I think it was in 1970 - 1971 – when I came to Leningrad specially to see him. And he said to me that he didn’t want to go to Israel, that he was planning to go to the West, – not Israel. By the way, I don’t agree with the conception adopted by many that Brodsky was forced to leave. – You mean his departure from the Soviet Union? – Yes. – Do you have any ground to believe he wanted to emigrate before he was offered to? – Yes, I heard it from him, and afterwards he was sorry he told me. – Does it mean that Joseph, like almost every great poet, at some stage of his life, began to rewrite his biography, to create his myth? – I don’t think he was creating a myth. I think the people who were interested in his myth created it, as they needed to balance Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky. I don’t know how it really was with Solzhenitsyn, but I was a refuznik for nine years, and I know how it was in our community. I know that some refuzniks who had been struggling to get permission to leave for ten years, when, suddenly, they were issued a visa, would say: ‘I am being forced to leave the country’. An example is Yury Karabchievsky, I knew him well, – we both were refuzniks. He came to see me and said: ‘I’ve been given a visa, but I don’t want to leave’. And he refused, but he refused at a time when it was permitted to do so. As for Joseph, I remember telling him: ‘You were in exile once, and the times are not getting better: they may be getting better or worse for some, but the situation in general is getting tense and supercharged’. He told me he was thinking about it and was taking some steps. He even told me about some ladies visiting him with a view to discussing a fictitious marriage. And he said: ‘You have to understand me, I can’t possibly do it. When I think about having to kiss hereven fictitiously – I am disgusted. But I want to leave and have to. It’s finished here; I have no reason to stay. They publish my verses there, my book has just been out.’ He told me about it himself. Maybe because I was no longer in his circle, as I lived in Moscow, and so he knew he could be quite open with me. Or maybe because he remembered how I had spoken in his defense at the Writers’ Union during a most difficult time in his life. I was a young candidate for membership of the

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Writers’ Union, recommended by Vera Panova. I came out and said: ‘What are you doing? He is the most talented poet in Leningrad now’. Maybe that’s why he was so open with me. You know the Leningrad circle was very tight; you couldn’t be open with anyone; the day after, it was reported to the Big House. Anyways, I knew about it and never told anyone. You are the first to hear it from me, and this is absolutely true. His photo is in front of us, he is looking at me now and won’t object to it. –The fact that he did want to emigrate is known; he must have shared his plans with others as well. However, in the Soviet Union when one was offered the opportunity to leave, one did not refuse. – Of course, it is shocking anyway. My family was waiting for nine years. I was arrested, my wife Mila was beaten up at demonstrations, but when we got a call from OVIR and were told that we had permission to leave, it was a shock. It is still your country. Suddenly you see your whole life passing before your own eyes, and you feel as if heaven is leaving you, and now you are in quite a different space. I understand he experienced something like this. But the fact that he wanted to leave is also true. – Once again I would like to turn you back to the Jewish theme. Would you attribute the fact that his poems are saturated with original ideas to his Jewish descent? – I wouldn’t say so. There is no way I want, or can, or even have the right to think so, because it is enough to remember Pushkin, Blok, and Tsvetaeva. – Well, I don’t think Blok is really such a big thinker. – True, Brodsky is a poet of intellect compared to Blok, though Blok has an enormous reserve of emotional thinking. We can recall Tolstoy here who used to say: ‘intellect of the heart’. You can’t deny Blok that. – By the way, how do you explain Brodsky’s enmity to Blok? – I think he was jealous. Brodsky couldn’t tolerate rivalry. There is this troika: Bobyshev, Naiman, Rein. You would want to continue: Three, Seven, Ace, (the winning three-card secret) and the Queen of Spades, Anna Akhmatova. Only because Joseph knew he was above and beyond them each of them could he remain a friend with each up to a certain time. As soon as Rein was reaching his level, Brodsky destroyed him totally in his introduction to Rein’s Selected Verses.

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– Destroyed by compliments? – Yes, just by compliments, he certainly knew what he was doing. Once he was very angry with me. I think it was in 1962. Boris Vakhtin, Vera Panova’s son, a wonderful person, brilliant translator and prose writer, and a very good friend of mine, arranged a poetry contest at the Institute of Asian Nations. We all poured in, like a flock of sheep, but then later I realized that it was a very tricky move. We read our verses, the four of us (Evgeny Rein was not there as he was in Moscow at the time taking courses in screen writing). The audience was supposed to compare contestants, choosing a winner at the end. It was a huge audience. Imagine competing with Brodsky! His fame was at its height. Naiman was very popular too. Bobyshev, in my opinion, is a better poet than Naiman, much better and more profound. I am talking now about Bobyshev as a poet. He was not popular at that time; in general he is not a popular poet. Despite his many remarkable verses: Akhmatova’s eight-liners, and so on, he is not popular. Naiman was so amiable, handsome, witty, and could recite his poems beautifully. He was loved by everyone. I loved him too at that time. And what did the evening end with? Naiman fell off the stage; the audience did not favor Bobyshev. So it left the two of us: Brodsky and myself. I would read a poem, and then he would, – each was supposed to read one poem. Right at that moment, Marina Basmanova walked out. Joseph was sitting next to me and I saw him grow pale. Finally neither of us won. I thought then that I should have let him win. He was younger; I had had my life already … I was sorry I didn’t let him … – Let him win? – Yes. And it seems to me it was one of those first invisible moves which resulted in our drifting apart later. Though we saw each other after I moved to Moscow. We would meet during my occasional visits to Leningrad, and it seemed as if nothing had changed. But I felt that since that reading we met less frequently, rarely shared poems with each other. It was as if we realized that we could do without each other. And that’s perhaps how it was. – And how did your relationships develop in America? – Just before his departure for America, in 1972 we met for a last time. I ran into him on Tverskoy Boulevard near the editorial office of the journal Znamia. I believe he said he was negotiating the publication of his translations in the journal. I may be wrong about that, but he

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had some business there with the poetry section of the journal; Natasha Ivanova was in charge of the poetry section then. Brodsky was well dressed, in a sheepskin coat, looking quite confident … I had a feeling he was OK. This was our last meeting in Russia. I remember him having a high regard for Slutsky, saying this: ‘I love Barukh!’. Though nobody ever called Slutsky by that name, everybody calling him Boris Abramovich. Incidentally, Slutsky was never popular as a Jewish poet – this became obvious only later; but at that time he was known as the commissar of leftist progressive poetry. He and Martynov were the two commissars of good intellectual progressive poetry, not underground, but semi-official poetry. They came to our gatherings, but were rarely published. Despite my membership of the Writers’ Union, I could publish translations from Lithuanian and other languages, but not my own poetry. That meeting with Brodsky was our goodby. I didn’t know that he was leaving Russia; he didn’t say anything about it to me then, just gave me some worldly advice. You ask about America. I passed along some of my verses for Brodsky to Vasily Aksyonov when the latter was leaving. I believe it was in 1980. And one day I received a post card from Vasily mailed from San Francisco. He wrote that he had read my verses to Brodsky over the telephone, and that they would be trying their best to get me out of ‘there’. I didn’t correspond with Brodsky. I only corresponded with Dmitry Bobyshev. We came to America in August 1987. I sent the manuscript of my book Friends and Shadows to Liberty Publisher in New York, and also some of my stories to the journal Time and We. Suddenly all three stories were accepted for publication. The ‘Liberty’ publisher called me and suggested I come to New York to discuss a contract for my book. But we kept procrastinating, – we didn’t have money for the trip. Finally we all: Mila, Maxim and I, with our friends, decided to go to New York at Christmas. I couldn’t think of being in New York and not visiting Joseph. Though rumors were reaching me already that Joseph was very angry at my becoming a member of the Writers’ Union. But I had long been kicked out. I was not sure how we would meet. Just a week before, Joseph received Nobel Prize. I got his address and even his telephone number from Rein. I decided to stop by without calling. I didn’t want to call fearing something might go wrong and I wouldn’t get to see him. I always had affectionate feelings for him. And so we went there, though everybody was trying

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to talk me out of it: don’t go, you shouldn’t, he never wrote a word to you knowing you were a refuznik. Oh God, he had gone through such a lot, why should I settle accounts with him. We never quarreled. And so there I was ringing the bell! No answer. Suddenly the door opens and Joseph comes out. I say: ‘Osya, is it you?’ – ‘David, it’s so good to have you here’! I say, I am not alone; Mila, Maxim and our friends are out there. ‘Bring them in, everyone’. As if we had just parted yesterday: he is so sweet, easy-going, and casual. He brought us into his living room – a table with a typewriter, in it a sheet of paper with the poem that he was typing out. ‘What will you have? Brandy? I’ll make some coffee too’. He suddenly begins fussing, as if close relatives were visiting. It was touching. We were having a good time and then he says: ‘Well, so what are we planning to do?’ Gorbanevskaya in all fairness commented on this ‘WE’ saying that he borrowed it from the Polish language. I answered him that I am planning to write and research, which is what I had been doing all my life. ‘And where?’ – ‘I hope at Brown, I’m not sure. I’ve just signed a contract for a book, and there’s a chapter about you, Osya. I want you to read it’. – ‘I don’t need to read it, – he says, – I don’t care; you can write whatever you like’. – ‘No, Osya, I want you to read it, and I’ll send it to you. If I don’t hear from you, it will mean it’s OK. But if you don’t like it, you won’t give me your OK to publish it and that will be it. I am going to send chapters from my book to everybody living here: you, Bobyshev, Aksyonov’. And I did send them to everybody. We spent with him an hour or an hour and a half pleasurably. Joseph gave me a present of three of his books signing them for me very affectionately. We stayed a little longer in New York. I was in a good mood after signing a contract for my book and receiving some money as an advance – it was only three months after I came to America. The next day I call him to say goodby: ‘Osya, if I happen to be in New York again, may I stay at your place?’ Our last meeting was so warm, like family. And he says: ‘No, no’. I was shocked. – But there was no room, physically, in his place for another person to sleep over – only one small bedroom. – If he were to call me, I would have given him my bed and would go to the neighbors for the night. I felt he had changed, something had happened. I said: ‘Don’t worry, Joseph, I was just kidding’. And so I got back home and sent him that chapter. He didn’t respond.

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My book came out and I sent him a copy. Again, no response. I called and said: ‘Osya, did you receive my book’? – ‘I did’. – ‘I haven’t heard from you. Does that mean you approve of that chapter, or at least have no objections’? – ‘No, I don’t have any objections. But if I had been writing about you, I would have written differently’. Soon after that he was in Providence, giving a lecture at Brown. He wanted to get a professor’s appointment at the department of English literature. I knew about his lecture and called him: ‘Joseph, when you come here, you’re welcome to stay in my home’. – ‘We’ll meet, and please come to my reading’. Of course I went; we all did. He read very well, smoking all the time; he was a great success and was asked many questions, about Rein, and Naiman too. And he answered them. He saw me sitting right in front of him, but didn’t say a word about me, as if I were not there. Naturally I didn’t come up to him after the reading. I went home in a state of shock. It was the last time I saw him alive. The night of January 27 we celebrated my 60th birthday in my home. The next morning, January 28 I had a call from Gregory Poliak, publisher of ‘Silver Age’ and he says what a nightmare, what a tragedy, Brodsky has died. I called Bobyshev. He burst out crying. I called Brodsky’s home and his wife told me where the funeral would be. The morning of January 30, I went to New York. I came about 15 minutes before they opened access to the deceased. It was in an Italian funeral home with ads about burial services at different catholic churches. The ad about Joseph said that his burial service would be held in a cathedral near Columbia University. At the door there was a crowd of Russian correspondents and those who came first to say goodbye. Soon we were allowed to file into the hall. In front of me was a line of ten or twelve people. I put on my yarmolke, stood in front of the coffin and stared at the features of the deceased. His face was solemn, handsome, a high forehead, prominent nose. He looked like a sleeping patrician. In his hands was a cypress cross on black lace. I read Kaddish, a prayer for the repose of the soul, in Hebrew, as best I could remember it. It was very hard for me to get over Brodsky’s death – from the moment, on January 28, when I heard of it, till that moment when I was standing before his coffin. And suddenly, I no longer felt this heavy weight or anguish. The only thing left was a deep respect for the writer. Why? I loved his poetry passionately, felt much compassion for him and did whatever I could to help him out when he was being persecuted. I met

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with him a few times before his departure, – at his place or just by chance. And each time, it seemed to me, there was mutual sympathy and love for each other’s work. So what happened? Why wasn’t I any longer mourning him as my own brother? No way it could be related to our meeting at his reading at Brown University. – What was your own explanation of his conduct? Was it self-defense before another Russian, since Russians were pressing him from all sides? Or maybe he remembered grudges for long? – No, it was his reaction to my chapter about him. I have been suffering from this all my life afterwards, and I still am. Aksyonov started a horrible campaign against me, but I only learned about it later, when my novel about refuzniks came out (it was nominated for the Booker Prize in Moscow). But before it was published, I had sent the manuscript to Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers. The editor replied saying: ‘Your poetry is so good that it would be untimely to publish your prose now. Your poetry should be published first’. Later I learned that the editor was a close friend of Joseph. I don’t remember her name now. There’s no way she could have known about my poetry. Joseph must have told her. I mean he permanently kept an eye on me, what I was publishing. Why did he not like that chapter? Because I didn’t write about him in a laudatory manner. I wrote about a poet who had developed and then broke free from our group, though he also remained one of us. Brodsky’s magic had been created by a group of poets who made up our milieu. It was a very talented group. Look at the names: Gorbovsky, Kushner, Sosnora. So, the Brodsky phenomenon is no accident. – You promised to tell, how you first heard about Brodsky. – I was serving in the Army when one day I receive a letter (it was around 1960) from my friend, Boris Smorodin, who never wrote poetry but always came with me to poetry readings, as my aide-de-camp. He knew everybody and was friendly with a lot of people. So, he wrote that he was at Sosnora’s wedding, and some poet called Brodsky had a fight with Sosnora. That was the first mention of Brodsky. As my friend wrote, he is a brilliant poet, but, alas, had a fight with Sosnora. Coming back to my relationship with Brodsky, I think the reason for the cooling off was the chapter about him in my book. It must have been something I wrote about him, not exactly to his liking. He was

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very carefully guarding his reputation, and he certainly felt himself to be already an Olympian. – You think he didn’t want the Western reader to know much about his adolescent and his young years? – Not certain details. I made a point of not revealing all the details of his departure either because I had experienced the same thing. He told me about it himself very openly. – You may not know that Brodsky liked nothing written about him, – he didn’t like the wonderful monograph of David Bethea; nor did he like other monographs, or what I wrote about him. Trying to console David Bethea, I remember telling him: ‘Joseph must be expecting someone to write about him in the same way as he would write about Tsvetaeva, or Auden; I’m afraid it won’t happen in his life time’. – I agree. You know, my son Maxim, at that time, also wrote an article about Brodsky and Bobyshev. It was published in 1993 and Brodsky certainly knew about it. Maxim wrote that the winner was Brodsky, though the poem ‘Funeral Octaves’ was written by Bobyshev and the phrase ‘Akhmatova’s orphans’ also belonged to him. But Brodsky was superior. Nevertheless, Joseph never wrote a word to Maxim. I think he shouldn’t have appointed himself an Olympian; it should have been somebody else who did it. I also think it cost him a lot. Maybe even his heart disease was related to the tremendous pressure he was under. It’s very hard to act out all the time. – Do you think Brodsky’s arrogance was a sin? – I don’t think it’s a sin. – In Christianity it is a big sin. – But he wasn’t Christian. I am not sure he was Jewish. I once discussed it with Bobyshev, after Joseph’s death. Just at that time Bobyshev wrote a wonderful poem, ‘Guest’, very moving. His sufferings were greater, I know, but he deserved it, since betrayal should be punished. – Yet Joseph didn’t forgive him? – No, and he cannot be forgiven. I didn’t forgive him either for what he did to Joseph, and I couldn’t forgive Naiman for what he did to Rein. For me, betrayal is the worst thing. Nevertheless I once talked to Bobyshev about Joseph and we decided that he was neither Jewish nor Christian. He was pagan. It seems clear to me now that the religion closest to him was the pantheism of antiquity. He wanted to find

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a niche for himself somewhere between Apollo and Zeus. Rein wrote about it very well in his poem ‘At the Pavlovsky Park’: ‘Apollo’s constant stare is trained on the back of your head, / your golden pledge already drawn and in your hand’.1 I think it cost Brodsky a lot. There are people who feel happy and at ease with fame; he wasn’t one. – But fame followed him right from the very beginning of his trial … – Oh, no! Much earlier! Two days after he first came to see me in Leningrad, there was a poets’ reading. Gorbovsky was enormously celebrated in Leningrad at that time; he was a good poet. But when Brodsky came on to read, everybody went crazy. I had never seen anything like it. I have often listened to Voznesensky and he was a great reader too, the crowd roaring. But it was nothing compared to Brodsky’s reading. Besides, the Soviet authorities pampered Voznesensky. Also he was a beloved son of the people who cared for poetry, as well as a beloved son of the ideological commission of the Central Committee of Communist Party. He was a child of Soviet society. But Brodsky was a bastard son who completely won the audience over. And he never, never lost this appeal. – You write that you felt something both diabolical and frightening in Brodsky. – Yes, literally so! The devil (who comes not only from Christianity, but earlier, from the Old Testament) is attributed in pagan times, to before Abraham. Speaking about religion, Joseph was a pagan. Coming back to the chapter I wrote about him, he might not like my comparison between him and Dostoevsky, in particular with the protagonist of his novel ‘Adolescent’. And on top of that there is Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, a coincidence of names and characters, very heavy stuff. – His sphere of hypnotic magnetism only enlarged with the growth of his fame. But at the same time, Brodsky started alienating people; the number of his ill-wishers was growing, especially in Russia and England. How was it in America? Let’s not talk about Aksyonov now. – The only thing I know is that when I came to America I lost them both, Brodsky and Aksyonov. The only one left was Bobyshev. He was grateful to me for writing about him. When I called Aksyonov, the first thing he said was: ‘How much harm he (Brodsky) has done to me, totally destroyed everything for me’! But I couldn’t imagine then that I would turn out to be in the same position.

14 E L E N A S H VA R T S Elena Andreevna Shvarts (1948), poet, translator, essayist, graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema (1973). She began writing poetry at the age of 13, her first two poems appearing in the newspaper of Tartu University. Her poems have circulated widely in samizdat. Shvarts declared her unique vision of the world at an early stage and has significantly altered her readers’ sensibilities. Her poetry readings are extremely popular and her first Soviet collection, Corners of the Earth (Leningrad, 1989), was sold out on its day of publication. In 1990 a second collection Poems appeared and that same year Shvarts gained membership of the Writers’ Union. In the West three collections have been published: Dancing David (New York, 1985), Poems (Paris and Munich, 1987) and The Works and Days of Lavinia, a Nun of the Order of the Circumcision of the Heart (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1987). Her second Soviet collection, Poems, appeared in 1990. Since then several of her poetry books have been published in SPb. and Moscow, including two volumes of Collected works (2002), Visibal Side of Life (2003), Vine of the Seventh Year (2007). Shvarts is an adherent of the Baroque wing of the Christian tradition, using a complex symbolism which is all her own. The pace of her mystical poems is absorbing and breaks with all our usual habits of thought and ways of looking at things (see for example ‘Unbodied Passion’ or ‘Elegy on an X-Ray Photo of my Skull’). Her explorations of extreme existential situations (her favourite oxymoron is ‘death-life’) are acccompanied by regular metrico-syntactical conflicts and shifts in intonation. In describing earthly and non-earthly horrors Shvarts, it would seem, is praying for the right to ‘be mistaken and seek’ which Lessing asked of God. In English her poetry can be found in the anthologies Child of Europe (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1990) pp. 197 - 203, The Poetry of Perestroika, trans. M. Molnar (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991) pp. 99 - 101 as well as in her bilingual collections Paradase. Selected Poems and Birdsong on the Seabed (both by Bloodaxe, 1993 and 2008). Shvarts has been awaded many literary prizes in Russia and in Italy.

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COLDNESS

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An Interview with Elena Shvarts (3 May 1990, Leningrad) – In the West you are one of the best known of present-day Leningrad poets. Your first three collections were published abroad, whilst in the Soviet Union only one small collection of poems has appeared. 1 Isn’t it because they don’t know your poetry that Soviet critics admonish you for your intellectual pretensions, your coded meanings, your complex associations? – The person who said that in the Literary Gazette had clearly never read anything of mine at all. 2 There are other things they criticise me for: my lack of poetic structure; my inaccuracy; my alleged, this is from their point of view, mysticism. A review of my first Soviet collection has just appeared in Oktiabr. It isn’t very good but it’s interesting because it’s written by somebody from Sverdlovsk, a provincial critic, I’ve never heard of him – but at least he shows some understanding. 3 – How seriously do you take criticism of your poetry? – I don’t. There’s nothing I find more wearisome than having to read it. – And you usually ignore it? – Occasionally you find something interesting. Usually it’s just one sentence, some astute observation, but lengthy reviews of my poetry just don’t interest me. – ‘Storony Sveta’ (Corners of the Earth) is a very slim volume. What else do you plan to publish in the Soviet Union? – In about a year’s time a book entitled Poet is due to come out. It is to be published by the Soviet Writers’ publishing house and it will include ‘Laviniya’ and some short poema, not all of them, it has to be said. Another publisher, not a state one this time, is also bringing out an edition of my poems. 4 – And there’s no difficulty in doing that? You didn’t need to do a lot of pushing? – Not at all. They invited me. I’ve never been one to submit poems without first being invited to do so. A selection of my poetry is shortly to appear in Zvezda, issue number six. 5 They printed two poems of

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mine in a Den poezii almanac. 6 They chose the poems themselves. As a rule they reject the best poems. – And you let them? – What else can you do? Now I try to give them the sort of poems where it doesn’t matter too much what they choose, something will survive. I’ve noticed that after years of appearing in samizdat strange changes have taken place in poems, alterations that are almost impossible to rectify. A friend of mine has a remarkable memory for poetry and in that slim volume of mine she spotted 15 errors. 7 She showed them to me and I’m sure she’s right, but I’ve forgotten the originals. – When it comes down to it, isn’t that the price you have to pay for such long delays in publication? – Of course. – And how many errors in the American books? – A colossal number. Lines have been omitted, quite separate poems have been artificially joined to make one, and so on. – How many variants of a poem do you reject before deciding on a definitive version? – There aren’t any variants. I write a poem en bloc. I’m no drudge. I don’t work in the way poets are supposed to work. Usually I do all the creative work in the bath. When I type them out I make some corrections, some additions – And you don’t go back to the original drafts several months, years later? – Very rarely. I might possibly alter a word or something – And are any indirect quotations from other poets to be found in your poetry? – Oh, from Pushkin mostly, but those quotations are ironic. I don’t quote with any intention other than irony. It’s always irony. There are some pure coincidences, but it’s not my job to find them. My job is simply to avoid consciously repeating what someone else has already said. – With whom, amongst your great predecessors, do you most often converse? – I tend to look to the poets active at the beginning of the century, simply because, after all, our acquaintanceship with Brodsky, with Bobyshev wasn’t very protracted. I was raised on the idea there was some sort of cultural chasm, abyss lying between us and the start of

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the century. I came to know Brodsky’s work only after I myself had fully matured as a poet. – So there was no conscious turning away from him as there was in the case of Krivulin? – Krivulin is a little older than I am and a more sociable person. He knew a lot more of his contemporaries than I did mine. – What aesthetic tasks have you set yourself? – I’ve no aesthetic task to fulfill as such, my task is rather different. I don’t want to call it spiritual, but I see my task as somehow to grasp another reality, through things, through people, through myself, to grasp something other. It’s an attempt to further my knowledge but the means are a matter of indifference to me. – In Brodsky’s opinion the success of Leningrad poetry, of Petersburg poetry in general, is to a large extent explicable in terms of ‘a respect for form, a respect for the demands of form’. 8 You, it seems, though raised in the ‘cradle of Russian poetry’, choose to deviate from the traditional forms? – That idea, though widespread, is, it seems to me, erroneous. Petersburg is not just the city of the Acmeists it’s also that of Khlebnikov. Khlebnikov though, of course, first and foremost a Russian poet, is also a Petersburg poet. Then there is Kuzmin, a poet who, formally speaking, is very strict. But if you look into his poems the discipline is not so severe. I feel closest possibly to those two – apart that is from Tsvetaeva. Therefore for me the Petersburg school is a fictive concept, one that has been dreamed up. – Why Kuzmin? When did you discover Kuzmin? – It just so happened that I was given some of his poetry to read. Kushner sang his praises to me. Bobyshev likewise. But I discovered him for myself. The Trout Breaks the Ice in the main. – What, in formal terms, is it that holds your poetry together? – A kind of energy, not verbal energy, another kind – musical energy. At first glance it’s chaotic but actually it has a complex musical structure radically different in kind to that which you find in poets of the Classical tendency. – Does that mean that your general musical task is to create a new, original sonority, a new kind of harmony? – Exactly. It has to correspond fully to what I want to say. It’s rather like the music of the first half of this century. I have never understood

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why poetry had to play the same old tune, why if you bring in a metre you have to follow it to the end. I’m simply different. I can’t ever bear to keep to one metre. I love to keep breaking step. But at the same time, my poetry possesses a hidden, complex musical harmony. – Is it only through musical harmony that your poetry achieves harmony? What about the mythological system you use, your culturo-etymological associations and, yes, your prosody too; what, in the end, is their function? – Of course, I do make use of all of those things and many others as well, but of course, music is primary. And there is another, very complex, system of correspondences in my poetry. I don’t know how to explain it, I’m not in the least a theoretician. I try to understand as little as possible, I consciously want not to understand. That too is possibly another difference between me and Joseph, though of course, after all is said and done, I do understand something of what I do. I just see how all that comes together spontaneously: first and foremost this strict, almost mathematical order which emerges at the semantic level. You know Aronzon’s work? – I know of him and I know the poems that are included in Kuzminsky’s anthology. 9 – Why did I ask? He too is a very classical poet and though Brodsky apparently considers him of little importance, to me it seems that, deep down, he is important to Brodsky. He really did write very little. It’s just that a contemporary is always important, especially when he’s such a talented poet, as Aronzon was. – Does that mean that Brodsky, your own contemporary, ought to have been important to you? – In a certain sense, yes. I used to feel that very strongly. – What is it about Brodsky you find particularly unacceptable? – His coldness and rationality. At the same time, of course, I see what a great poet he is. It’s just impossible not to see that. – His coldness and rationality – that’s just his way of dealing with tragedy. – I see that, but none the less it amounts to the same thing. – To what extent is any poetic device a kind of fixative for the spirit? – To a large extent almost entirely that. They must correspond to the realities of the spirit as clothes do to the body, even though there is no body.

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– Our body is just a temporary dwelling place for the soul? – Yes, of course. Some poems of mine do in fact say that God is, in a certain sense, more corporeal than we are. – Do you agree with those who say that the sole subject matter of art is religion? – No, I don’t agree with that in the least. But really I’ve been somehow drawn to God since I was a child – even, very often, against my own will. – You seem, I feel, drawn not just to the light but also to the darkness. Just how far into the dark will you allow yourself to go? – As far as it’s possible to go. As far as I can go. – Where does such a need come from? – It’s because the realm of darkness is, in all probability, merely a shadow cast by the light; is the same light in a certain sense. And then man is born for knowledge, though the apostle Job says that man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. I myself feel as if I were sent here by someone to tell of what I could understand, of what is here. And as darkness also exists here how can you avoid it? That would be tantamount to spiritual cowardice. – Then you think that someone who’s moving towards the light may, in consequence, be less knowledgeable? – No, of course not. He may learn even more. But only a saint can attain to such spiritual and physical enlightenment as to see everything clearly. And I am weak and far from being a saint; in every respect. I simply see what is there in front of me and what I find there in front of me is more darkness than light. – We’ve already touched upon the difference between you and Brodsky as far as versification is concerned. Couldn’t you say a few words about those places where on the philosophical plane your views do intersect? – In order to answer that question I would have to reread everything he’s written. To be honest with you I’ve little time for Brodsky recently. I don’t want to be untruthful. He has slipped somewhere towards the back of my mind. He is not very important to me. But maybe it’s just that modern poetry in general isn’t very important to me. – Do you think it’s impossible for anyone, and for a poet in particular, to absorb more than a certain part of another’s universe?

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– Yes, at least when you’re not very fond of it but when you love it then there’s no limit to your capacity for absorption. – I find it strange that you can’t accept Brodsky as you are preoccupied by the same problems. – As I see it, we come together only as antipodes. It seems to me that with him it’s words, words, words and more words, that’s not what I want to achieve. Yes it’s fine, virtuoso, intelligent but it’s not at all what I’m after, what I want. He is, after all, a great sceptic. And I’m not, I’m the very opposite. His relationship with God is the same as with the people he was once so close to. He’s distanced himself. – Doesn’t this misunderstanding arise because Brodsky thinks that in our day and age you can’t write about God openly and frankly? 10 – I think that is possible if you’ve really got something to say on the subject. Of course if it’s over-contrived or just banal, then it’s of course a sin – I agree. But if you’ve got some real insight into the higher truths, that’s quite a different matter. It’s a sin, would be a sin, to hide them away. – Isn’t there something of Brodsky’s you find interesting? – Of the poems I know, I like ‘Conversation with a Celestial Being’ (K, pp. 61 - 8). I find Brodsky interesting from an historical point of view: what he’s written about Leningrad, about his childhood, his youth. And everything he’s written about America. – So you’ve read his essays, a few of them at least? – Some of them. – And what do you think of his prose? – I’ve only read them in English. I really like the one about his parents (L, pp. 447 - 501). As an essayist he is, of course, brilliant. But he’s a brilliant sophist, in his way. – And you’ve read his essays on Tsvetaeva? – I don’t read things about Tsvetaeva, apart from the biographical stuff. – Why? – I don’t want to, I love her too deeply. – Brodsky also loves her deeply. – I know. I find that very strange. – I think you’d like what he’s written about her. I remember when I met Brodsky in 1978, I was captivated myself by Tsvetaeva and I said to him guardedly, ‘Wouldn’t you agree that Marina Ivanovna is

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almost a genius?’ He corrected me, ‘Not almost, she is a genius.’ Then later when his essay on Tsvetaeva appeared in the guise of a foreword to the selected edition of her prose 11 I made a copy of it and sent it to Salomeya Nikolaevna Andronikova-Galpern. She, as you know, was a friend of Tsvetaeva’s for 13 years – Tsvetaeva wrote her over 40 letters. She was completely over the moon about the first two pages and was unable to continue reading to the end without looking to see who had written such a penetrating, such a brilliant essay on Tsvetaeva. She told me later, ‘At last, it’s just what Marina Ivanovna has been waiting for.’ In one of his interviews Brodsky said that Tsvetaeva was the only poet he refused to compete with.12 – Because it’s impossible. – How do you explain the fact that Brodsky who, as a poet, grew up around Akhmatova, is so drawn to Tsvetaeva? – It’s only natural, given her greatness, that he’s drawn into the gravitational pull of such a large planet. – Do you think, technically speaking, she’s more accomplished than Akhmatova? – There’s no doubt in my mind that that is the case. In that sense she is the most accomplished of Russian poets, the most virtuoso. – How do you see Brodsky in the long term? As a poet who has ushered in a new era for Russian poetry or as someone who has brought a certain evolutionary stage to its logical conclusion? – Of course, as someone who has ushered in a new era and, in particular, as someone who has brought about a fusion of Russian poetry with English and Western poetry. It is as if he had created a new poetic graft. And that is, of course, a big achievement. His main achievement. – Do you think that Russian poetry needed that kind of a graft? – I’m not convinced that it was needed but he has done it in such a natural way that, really, as soon as it became a possibility it became a necessity. Well, in general, Russian poetry, if you think of it as a field and see the poets as trees or as people standing in that field, then there was very little room left, especially within the tradition, and what he did was to take a new step, or jump. He brought a completely new musicality and even a new form of thought, something completely different to what one had grown used to expecting of a Russian poet. But did Russian poetry need it? It seems to me that Russian poetry is

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nearing its end and that that is one of the signs of its approaching end, its death. But maybe it’s difficult for me to make such an evaluation, being a poet myself. Brodsky is a readers’ poet, unlike Khlebnikov for instance. Though you can’t imitate Khlebnikov either and apart from the Oberiuty nothing has come of him. – That’s strange, I see traces of him in your poetic world. – Well, yes, some. – And in Brodsky the traces are obvious, in particular the way his tropes are structured, his preferences for noun over attributive and verbal metaphor, the way he transforms the real world into apoetic world. 13 So you and Brodsky have at least two poetic ancestors in common and yet your two poetics are so different. – That just goes to show their primordial richness. It seems to me that Brodsky is closer spiritually and intellectually to Khodasevich, though he’s more intelligent than Khodasevich. My attitude to Khodasevich is roughly the same as my attitude to Brodsky; maybe, in truth, I feel a mite more enthusiasm, but there’s also a certain hostility. – We can only speculate on the psychic, the spiritual kinship that exists between poets. If we compare their formal structures Brodsky appears closest to Tsvetaeva and Khlebnikov. – Yes, you’re absolutely right there. – And how do you explain that kinship of form Brodsky and Khlebnikov have? Perhaps the explanation lies in the very evolution of the poetic language? Remember Mandelstam wrote of Khlebnikov, ‘Khlebnikov wrote neither lyric poetry nor epic, but rather one enormous all-Russian book of prayers and ikons from which, for centuries and centuries to come, everyone who may will find something to draw on. 14 – It seems to me that, in actual fact, a poet can’t secure anything on behalf of another poet, with the exception of something pretty insignificant. On the contrary, the place the other poet has opened up and developed has to be given as wide a berth as possible; if not, then plagiarism is inevitable. – And do you too give Khlebnikov a wide berth or do you read him regularly? – Generally speaking I reread poetry, any poetry at all, extremely rarely.

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– Brodsky, like Khlebnikov, has to a larger extent mythologised language, made almost a cult of language. What makes him accentuate, in both theory and practice, the value of language as such? – First and foremost, the very soul of language itself is in need of Brodsky’s concept of language. I’m not convinced that it is the Russian language. It’s some other sort of language. With every poet there’s some sort of elemental force that’s at the back of him, that moves him; defining which is very important. I, for example, guess and could even prove that behind Kuzmin lies water, in its various manifestations. Behind someone else maybe there’s wind, fire. And behind Brodsky there lies some sort of linguistic essence, but I don’t know which. – There’s also the element of air; I could prove that too. What role, do you think, does Brodsky’s having lived for a quarter century now in an alien linguistic environment play? – It’s had no effect on his poetic language; perhaps it has on his everyday language, but that is another matter all together. Its relation to the poetic language is only tangential. Brodsky’s living in another linguistic environment has possibly even enriched his poetic language. – And what does language mean to you? – For me language is above all a handmaiden. I’m very much in love with language, with its richness, its possibilities. I feel the creation of poetry to be a sacramental, sacred act in which certain powers coalesce – not my powers alone, mine is the least important part, that comes from somewhere else again. And in as far as, in as much as some other absolutely different powers are at work it is they that arouse the hidden strata of language and everything else you may wish for or need. – You don’t see yourself as a mouthpiece of language, an instrument of language, as Brodsky does? 15 – An instrument yes, but not of language. – Of Spirit? – Yes. – In so far as Brodsky considers language to be something which man is incapable of having created and as the gift to us of someone greater 16 then we, then in his ‘theology of language’ 17 language and Spirit are drawn together. – Yes, because inspiration comes not in the pure form of some sort of ill-defined waves or other, but specifically, in the form of a verbal

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wave. For me the important thing is to see something, to hear something but, when it will do, language makes its appearance. – You said of Brodsky’s new way of thinking that it was alien to the Russian mindset. What exactly did you have in mind? – I’ve already said it: his coldness and rationality. They are not major characteristics of Russian poetry. It is characterised by deep inner emotional turmoil. – How do you see Brodsky’s advent in Russian poetry? As a sudden poetic explosive blossoming on the dreary Soviet stylistic plateau or as in the natural order of things? – Of course it’s an explosion. That, to my mind, is obvious. – And what do you think of Brodsky’s long poems? – It isn’t the fact that they are long but that rhythmically speaking they are absolutely monotonous. That is what put my teeth on edge when I read his ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (S, pp. 137 - 55). It seemed to the that everything that could, that had to be said, could have been said in the space of a few lines. I don’t understand why there was this need for such senseless going round and round in circles. And though I myself have a tendency to write long poems they, first, aren’t as long and, secondly, I break up my rhythms. The genre I love, my main genre, is the small poema; take ‘Black Easter’ 18 or ‘Horror of the Erotic’. 19 In a certain sense, it’s the Kuzmin tradition. That’s the way he saw the poema. It’s not possible, now, to see the poema in any other way. – And you yourself think your poemy are written in Kuzmin’s style? – My poemy are structured differently. Our starting points coincide. I conceive narrative poetry in musical terms rather than in terms of the unfolding of the plot; that is the plot finds its expression in a number of complex musical collisions. The narrative is, to a large extent, hidden away, it has a plot but it’s internal to the poema, not immediately forthcoming. For me what’s important is the linking of different motifs and their contraction into a single harmony. All in complete concord with a certain semantic, thematic line. My favourite genre is that of the visionary adventure. That’s one in which one doesn’t know how things will end. – Do you go as far as the Symbolists and ascribe a mystical significance to music? – In a certain sense I do, but I’m not following their example. My music is quite different. What I consider to be music seems to others

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a cacophony of sounds, like Shostakovich at first hearing. Music either brings some sort of reality to the world or it doesn’t. – If we are to credit Brodsky, his evolution is the expression of ‘a striving to neutralise every lyrical element and to bring it as close as possible to the sound of the pendulum, so that it is the beat of time rather than music’. 20 – That I find rather horrifying. I don’t believe that that really is the case. I don’t believe it because it’s evident, in the very nature of his poetry, which is somewhat capricious and, rhythmically, extremely varied. It’s true that the latest poetry of his that I’ve read attains, possibly, just that aim, because you feel there’s something about it that transcends the limits of our mortality. Although his latest poems, those I’ve heard on Radio Liberty, were, generally speaking, written in a chastushka form. – You mean ‘Woodland Idyll’? It’s an Ufliand pastiche. – No, it’s something completely new. – Then it must be ‘Performance’, which was published in Kontinent. 21 – Not long ago Olga Sedakova was in Leningrad and she told me about her meetings with Brodsky in Venice. Did she tell you about them? – A few days ago in Moscow very summarily. But somehow her impressions of him weren’t negative, though he was trying to shock her, introducing himself with the words, ‘Isn’t it true that we’re all, in a way, a little like monsters? 22 – What’s shocking in that? It’s the absolute truth. – You think that’s true of Olga Sedakova too? – Of her to an even greater degree perhaps than of Brodsky himself. No, her impressions weren’t negative. But she also, incidentally, said that it seemed to her that his attitude was one of indifference as far as modern poetry was concerned – it doesn’t interest him. – Parshchikov told me that at the Russian Festival in Rotterdam in the summer of 1989 Brodsky mentioned both him and Eryomenko. – Well, mentioned, he mentions everybody, me included. It doesn’t cost him anything as far as I can see to mention somebody. I find it, by the way, all very distasteful that there’s this man going round handing out awards, assigning ranks of importance. – It’s an awful shame it should be seen like that. Brodsky doesn’t go throwing compliments around. If s true that when he’s generous he’s

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generous beyond measure, and very often he ascribes his own qualities to the other poets he’s writing about. – It’s not like that at all. People of Parshchikov’s ilk have been brought up in the Soviet ethos. They need a leader. And there you have him – their leader. – What role do you see the poet’s personality as having? – To a certain extent all poets are mythological figures. There’s nothing real about Pushkin or Baratynsky. The real person dies and the myth is all that’s left. What we know of them has no relation whatsoever to reality. And even what we know of Brodsky possibly has very little to do with the real man. The myth is not created by the poet himself but by the powers that surround him. And the greater the poet the more inescapable the myth. The personality of a poet, of course, casts its reflection on everything, on the music above all. Every poet has his own music. That is the sign of a poet. – For Brodsky music is also very important. In one of his interviews he said, ‘As far as the structuring of a poem goes my main teachers have been de Regnier and Bach and, to a certain extent, Mozart.’ 23 – What Brodsky has introduced me to, made me conscious of, is an attitude towards poetry, towards its structure and composition, its kinship with architecture, for his poems remind me of a complex building. And that when I first read his poetry that, perhaps, played a central role for me. I very quickly realised that poetry is not constructed in such a simple way as, let’s say, speaking one’s thoughts out loud in the way that Kushner does for example, expressing some already familiar idea or describing a certain feeling; and that’s all. I think that poetry ought to be completely different. It can be some sort of complex building with columns, roofs, girders and all that. And if the architecture is so complex, then it is also musically complex. – Isn’t the architectural quality of your poetry to do with the fact that you were born and live in Leningrad? – Yes, I was born in Leningrad and it is my city. I can’t be born anywhere else, nor can I live anywhere else now. But my poems aren’t, strictly speaking, architectural; you couldn’t build anything out of them. It is construction as an approach. Because, really, my poetry is also to a certain extent rational, but I don’t let that rule the roost,

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I don’t see that as being the most important, or the best, thing I’ve got. – What do you see as being the smallest semantic unit in your poetry: the word, the musical phrase, syntagma? – The poem itself. It breaks up into various elemental parts, but for me a poem is like a living organism, a whole – you can distinguish its arms, its legs. – Why do you agree with Brodsky that all poets are monsters? – I would say that the monster phase is the first phase and then we’re absolutely void, except for what we have to say. Brodsky isn’t a monster now. – One can see in him, in recent years, a striving for humility. – That’s very good. Every poet suffers from great fatigue as far as his I is concerned, with everything that has to do with his self. That I comes down from somewhere on high and is foisted upon you, it eats one’s inside out, plagues one to death, nauseates one, torments one. But there’s no escape from it anywhere. – To what extent are scholars justified in placing an equals sign between the real I of the poet and his lyrical subject? – I don’t know the answer to that. Evidently the urge to hide oneself behind some character, behind some sort of a mask, is no accidental trait. – Are you familiar with Brodsky’s travel poems, – Czeslaw Milosz calls them ‘a philosophical diary in verse’? 24 – No, I haven’t come across them. I’ve never seen any of Brodsky’s books, all I’ve read are extracts. – Are you willing to concede that if you were to read in full even one of his books then that would alter your attitude towards him? – It has changed, taken overall; before, I was even more ill-disposed towards him. Perhaps that was inevitable in what was my initial period of coming to maturity. It wasn’t really enmity, it’s just that if you are a cat you know what dogs are like. – And you were, incidentally, acquainted with Brodsky? – Well, in a way. I saw him once at some party or other when I was 15 - 16: when Rein moved to Moscow they had this send-off for him and Brodsky was there. The only thing I remember is that for some reason or other I put on Brodsky’s hat. And then there was another

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time: I was staying with the poet Gleb Semyonov and Brodsky was there too. He read some of his poetry whilst he was there. – Do you like the way Brodsky reads his poetry? – I think that it’s perfectly adequate. Before, he used to do it better than anything I’ve heard since from him on the radio. Krivulin always says that Brodsky is like a tank – and there really is likeness. – Do you suspect that a poet who speaks ill of another poet is simply covering his own tracks? – If Freudian theory holds any water then that is the first sign. Then one can say that I love Brodsky. And possibly there is some truth in that. When I was very young I was very enthusiastic about Brodsky. But now when I read his poetry I just can’t understand what my enthusiasm was all about. – All poets go through certain evolutionary stages, they are less noticeable in your case, judging by what has been published. How does a child prodigy develop? In my mind a poet reaches a certain level early on and can’t fall below it, until death intervenes. That height once attained, however, is the maximum. Really, there’s no evolution but an expansion of the self, a broadening out. That happened to me at the age of 23. – Do you have any obsessions? – Of course I have. For example I believe that there is some kind of Spirit, some sort of, literally speaking, Supreme Being. – Sex figures in your poetry. What’s its function? – If you take an early poem like ‘Horror of the Erotic’, there you have a complete rejection of sex as a dark, murky, evil principle that denies the possibility of genuine love in this world. To be more exact, it’s the impossibility of finding the forms in which to express it. Because a person who’s in love is condemned to only those forms there aren’t any others. That I cannot accept. – If not love, what then can defend us from the fear of death, from the darkness, from the destructive action of time? – Well, firstly, Chrysostom had this to say, ‘Death where is thy sting? Where is thy victory?’ Christ is our defence. – Don’t you attribute to poetry the ability to defend us from something negative? Don’t you claim …

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– I do. Poetry too saves and defends. Generally speaking, I can’t imagine how others live, I don’t see any reason for being anything other than a fountain. – Do you have any cultural concerns? – Yes, about poetry in particular. I’m in the same position as Olga Sedakova; she too started to talk about the end of the world drawing near. Later I realised that that really is the case. I don’t know if it is the end of the world, but as far as Russian poetry is concerned then there’s no doubt about it, it is the end because poetry always develops like that, in sudden flashes like a marsh fire; now in England, now in France, now in Russia. Why should it remain eternally in the same place? – Russia has been especially lucky in the twentieth century. 25 – Yes, it has already given so many great poets. – And do you think that today the energy and the spirit of the language is exhausted? – Yes, it’s like a field, it ought to lie fallow for a while. – What’s your attitude towards translations of your poems? – I regard it as a necessary evil, though, in my opinion, Michael Molnar’s were perfectly presentable because he does understand something about poetry. – You’d agree that only a second-rate poet can be improved by translation but that, as a rule, a real poet becomes an average poet in translation? – Indubitably. – I’ll say it again, you have a very high reputation in the West. You can’t be entirely indifferent to that fact? – To be honest, I’m absolutely indifferent. What I heard in the West was, in my opinion, simply awful and had nothing whatsoever to do with poetry. And the most awful thing is that people over there have begun to lose any idea of what poetry is. It’ll soon be the same here. The last poet I liked was possibly T. S. Eliot. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m missing out on something. The only thing that worries me about Brodsky is that he doesn’t want to come back here. I understand only too well that that would be very painful; painful almost in the physical sense. Though it’s precisely here that there may be people who, through their love and understanding, could support him. I myself, of course, can’t relate to those people, but there are a lot of them. Still,

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real poetry is more appreciated here than in the West. It’s true that in the West there are exceptions, but over here they are the rule. – What price does a poet pay for his popularity? – I don’t know. Thank God, I’m not that popular. Though I do like to boast a little. I’m almost the only poet in Leningrad people will come to listen to. I occasionally read one poem ‘Laviniya’ 26 in a small theatre like ‘the Comedians Shelter’ on Gogol Street. I use puppets as part of my performance, incidentally. But I try to do that as seldom as possible: personal appearances, radio shows, interviews. It’s really all become rather vulgar. And when I hear myself on the radio I don’t feel anything, apart from revulsion. The years of stagnation were in a certain sense a blessing because they gave one so much inner space, nothing got in your way, except for poverty. Now our lives are invaded by the various mass media. – What danger is there for Brodsky with several books of his coming out all at once in the Soviet Union? – I think that he will become more of an official poet. He had already become that in a lot of people’s eyes with the Nobel Prize; in a place like Saratov he’s been regarded a classic for a long time now. – Who is there writing in Russian today who you think was no less deserving of the prize than Brodsky? – I just don’t understand that Nobel prize, simply as an institution, but I think Brodsky deserved it. – As none of your poems are dedicated to Brodsky could you decide upon a poem for the book? – Whatever you like. Only if it’s an extract, please indicate that it is otherwise it’ll seem as of something got lost. I’d better choose one myself. ELEGY ON AN X-RAY PHOTO OF MY SKULL The flautist boasts but God’s enraged – He stripped the living skin from Marsyas – Such is the destiny of earthly flautists: Grown jealous, he will say to each in turn – You’ve licked the honey of music but you’re just muck, You’re still a lump of that same dirt And lodged inside you is the stone of death. Apollo was the god of light

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But he grew dark When round his hands, you Marsyas, Twisted in pain. And now he is a god of glimmer, But eternal also are your groans. And my God, growing dark Slipped me this photograph In which my glowing skull Etched from the invisible Swam, blocking out the dusk And the stripped naked park – It was a mass of fog Embraced in liquid dark. In it shadow and cloud were blended And my hand began to tremble. This skull was my own But it didn’t know me, Its intricate pattern Like a damascene dagger Is skilfully crafted, How pure and how strong. But the mouth is bared, Still alive its grin … Bone, you yellowed a long time, Grew as heavy as sin, Like a walnut you aged and you ripened, A present for death. Grown brazen inside me, this yellow bone Has lapped itself in a sleigh-rug of skin And taking my reins sped off headlong But come to a halt at my brow. In anguish here before my God I stand Holding my skull in a trembling hand – Lord, what shall I do with it? Spit in its eyesockets? Fill it up with wine? Or put it on my neck and wear it once again?

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So I hurl it aside – this light-looking shell And it flies off thundering among the stars like a pail. But it returned and landing on my neck, reminded me in consolation: Way back at someone’s house, its fellow stood as a table decoration And led the deathlife of a dehydrated plant As if it were a temple or a chalice. There was a lot to drink but not enough – And someone took this skull and began to pass it round To collect the money for a vodka bottle. Small change was scattered clinking on the dark occiput But straightaway I confiscated it, Put it back where it belonged – calm down – And like a kitten it rubbed against my palm. For this I shall be granted as reward That nobody will desecrate my skull – No worm will crawl inside it, no new Hamlet take it in his hands. When my end comes – I shall walk up the aisle in flames. But something else strikes me as weird, That I can’t sense my skeleton inside – Neither skull nor flesh nor bones – More like a crater after the explosion Or a memory of missing news, Mistiness or mist Or a spirit drunk on its new life. But you will be my lodgings when They start to pipe the Resurrection. You, my spirit’s navel, fly Sooner to the East. And I All around you as a dusty cloud Erupting, swirling as the Word. But what a shame you won’t be filled again With all that soft old curd. 1972 Translated by Michael Molnar

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Elena Shvarts, Tantsuyushchiy David, Stikhi raznykh let (New York: Russiaca Publishers, 1980); Trudy i dni Lavinii, monakhini iz ordena obrezaniya serdtsa (Ot Rozhdestva do Pashki) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1987); Storony sveta (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1989. P. Ulyashev, ‘Glasnost’ bez glasa?’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 8 December 1989, p. 4. V. Kuritsyn, ‘Prekrasnoe yazycheskoe bormotanie’, a review of Shvarts’s poems published in Avrora, no. 12 (1988) and of her collection Storony sveta, Oktiabr, no. 2 (1990) pp. 205 - 7. Elena Shvarts, Stikhi (Leningrad: Assotsiatsiya ‘Novaya literature’, 1990). Elena Shvarts, ‘Bestelesnoe sladostrastie’, Zvezda, no. 6 (1990) pp. 117 - 18. Den poezii (Leningrad, 1989) pp. 39 - 10. Shvarts, Storony sveta. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1981, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 138 - 139. Leonid Aronzon died in 1971. For more about him see Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, ed. K. K. Kuzminsky and G. Kovalyov (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983) vol. 4A, pp. 73 - 131. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 20 April 1980, Ann Arbor, Michigan, unpublished. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Poet i proza’, an introduction to Marina Tsvetaeva, lzbrannaya proza v dvukh tomakh (New York: Russica Publishers, 1979) vol. I, pp. 7 - 17. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Sven Birkerts, Brodski, Kniga intervyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 95. For more on the grammar and semantics of Brodsky’s metaphors and a comparison of his metaphors with those of ten other Russian poets, see my article ‘Grammatika metafory i khudozhestvennyi smysl in the collection of articles Poetika Brodskogo, ed. L. V. Loseff (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1986) pp. 63 - 96. Osip Mandelstam, ‘Storm and Stress’, in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. J. G. Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979) p. 178. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by V. Rybakov, Russkaya mysl, 26 Janu ary 1978, p. 8. Joseph Brodsky, a seminar given at University of Keele, 7 March 1978; see also Brodsky, interviewed by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Russkaya mysl, 3 February 1983, p. 8. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by N. Gorbanevskaya, op. cit. Shvarts, Storony sveta, pp. 40 - 7.

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Shvarts, Tantsuyushchiy David, ‘Grubymi sredstvami ne dostich blazhensrva (Khorror erotikus)’, pp. 47 - 53. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by John Glad, Vremia i my, no. 97 (1987) p. 176. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Predstavlenie’, Kontinent, no. 62 (1990) pp. 7 - 13. Olga Sedakova met Brodsky in Venice on 22 December 1989 when he introduced her to the audience in the Palazzo Querin Stampala. Solomon Volkov, ‘Venetsiya glazami stikhotvortsa’, a dialogue with Joseph Brodsky, in the almanac Chast rechi (New York: Silver Age Publishing, 1982) no. 2/3, 1981 - 2, p. 117. Brodsky said more on the subject in his interview to Vitaly Amursky, ‘Nikakoy melodramy’, Brodskii, Kniga interv’iu, cit. op., p. 508. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, a review of Brodsky’s A Part of Speech, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1980, p. 23. In the interview given to V. Amursky (op. cit.), Brodsky said on this topic, ‘however strange it may seem, a nation, a people, a culture cannot, for some reason, permit itself to have more than one great poet in any one particular period. I think that that comes about because man is eternally attempting to simplify his spiritual task. He finds it much pleasanter to have the one poet, see him as the great one, because then he is relieved of the obligation he owes to art. ‘A rather fantastic thing happened in Russia in the course of the twentieth century: Russian literature gave the people ten figures, or thereabouts, of equal weight and it was absolutely impossible to chose the One … At such heights a hierarchy does not exist’ (pp. 394 - 5). Shvarts, Trudy i dni Lavinii, monakhini iz ordena obrezaniya serdtsa.

15 O L G A S E D A K O VA Olga Aleksandrovna Sedakova (borrn 1949 in Moscow), a poet of refined taste, extremely erudite, a polyglot, graduated from Moscow University in 1972, and defended her PhD in the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies. She has published schol-ary articles and translations of Gałczyński, Lewis Carroll, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Hardy, Ronsard, Claudel, Rilke, Heidegger, Petrarch, Horace, Dante and so on. She began writing poetry while still at school. Several of her mature poems appeared in the student newspapers of Tartu and Tbilisi universities and in the unofficial journals Vybor, Paragraf and Rossiyskie vedomosti. She has published eleven collections of poetry, including: Gates. Windows. Arches. (Paris, 1986) and A Chinese Journey (M., 1991, 2002), Poems (M., 1994), Poems. Prose, two vols. (2001), The Journey of Magi (M., 2002, 2005), Music. Poems and Prose (M., 2006). Her poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, French and English, see her bilingual editions: The Silk of Time (1994); The Wild Rose (L, 1997), Poems and Elegies (2004). Her poetry is influenced by modern philosophy and music. In her extremely original, irregular rhythms a sensitive ear detects the presence of strict underlying ground rules (for instance, everything may be divisible by three), whilst the attentive reader of her poetry will note the role rhythm plays in the general semantic conception of her verse. Thus, in her ‘Autumn Water’s Elegy’ the now long, now singleword lines portray the freedom of the waters cascading over the hills and refer back to the fountainhead of poetic inspiration, ‘the true, the blushful Hippocrene’ produced at a stroke by Pegasus’s hoof. Her rhythmical sensitivity is allied to a frugal ascetic use of metaphor. Her verse is reticent and yet full of allusions to the mythical, philosophical and theological origins of our culture. One senses an ethical and aesthetic self-restraint which can only be welcomed in our age Sedakova has taught in many universities in Russia, Italy and USA. She has been awarded the Paris Prize (1991), Pushkin Prize (Humburg, 1994), the Vatican Literary Prize (1998), the Solzhenitsyn Prize (2003) and others. Olga Sedakova has taken part in many Academic cinferences and International Poetry festivals.

A R ARE INDEPENDENCE An Interview with Olga Sedakova (25 November 1989, Glasgow) – From what section of society does your readership come? Is your audience still restricted to the artistic intelligentsia, or has it widened with the coming of glasnost’? – It’s grown wider on its own with no assistance from glasnost’. The number of publications that I’ve had out during the years of glasnost’ is negligible, just a selection in Druzhba narodov. 1 In the unofficial journal Paragraph 2 S. Semenyuk (who, by the way, is the author of a short essay on Brodsky which is quite outstanding and published in the same journal) called that publication insulting. I don’t think so. Viacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov’s marvellous foreword alone makes it worthwhile. But the selection of poems is not representative. My readers, as far as I can judge, live in the university towns, in Kiev, in Tartu, in Saratov, in Sverdlovsk. And they read my poems, as they did before, in manuscript or in unofficial journals – Vybor, Rossiyskie vedomosti etc. – And who chose the poems which appeared in ‘Druzhba narodov’? Why weren’t you involved in the process? – Basically because I don’t want to publish anything. My relations with all the journals, with all the publishers had become rather complicated. Even now, when they have changed, I can’t seem to make any progress. It was Tatiana Tolstaya who took the initiative which led to publication. People on the journal staff made the selection with the best of intentions. I didn’t interfere. – Did you feel the selection was, somehow, tendentious then? – No, it wasn’t that it was tendentious. The poems were taken from the book that came out in Paris. 3 But that book itself wasn’t put together by me. On what principle the particular poems were chosen is hard to tell. Of course, they are my poems for all that. I don’t reject them. It’s just that, taken as a whole, they seem to be the work of another poet. – By the way, are you happy with the afterword to the Paris book, which is signed by a certain D. S.? Is it the same D. S. who, some time ago, wrote the article ‘Pushkin and Brodsky’ for the Vestnik? 4

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– Yes, it’s the same person. I can now tell you who D. S. is. He’s the Pushkin scholar Vladimir Arkad’evich Saytanov. He’s very close to a certain circle of ‘alternative’ poets, most of whom come from Leningrad. What can I say about the article? I am very, very grateful to him; it’s quite a flattering portrait, but you can hardly call it a convincing analysis. Besides, the article was written about another book, about The Wild Dogrose, 5 and this just completely confuses the reader. – How, in a few words, would you describe your poetics? I know that’s hard, but it’s not impossible. – Well, I feel quite at home with the work of analysis, but it’s easier if somebody else is talking about you, like, Aleksey Shevchenko who wrote a very good article for the Kiev journal Philosophical and Sociological Thought. 6 He’s the author of two books, one about Bakhtin and the another about Western anthropology. Possibly the philosophical approach suits me better than a strictly analytical treatment of my poems. I have no faith in our literary critics. They have no idea where to start. It seems to me that a philosopher would find it a lot easier. I read a lot of philosophy, in a completely unprofessional capacity, in the same way that other people read poetry, or listen to music. And anyone who, like me, reads modern philosophy will recognise many of my motifs and themes. Of course, I’m not talking about a transposition of ready-made concepts. – Can I take it from that, that you look at the world through the prism of philosophy rather than through the prism of history, or culture or religion? – I’m regarded now as being synonymous with religious poetry. I avoid that term myself because it presupposes that I’m a specialist in that field, in those sorts of themes, and I just wouldn’t want that. Religion in art (if in general we can talk of such a thing) is a wider concept, one that cannot be simply determined by content. I know quite a few ‘Christian’ poets whose pious intentions do not save them from sinning, and that in the most horrific way, against literature. What it adds up to is nothing more nor less than the breaking of one of the ten Commandments: ‘Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’ I am Orthodox by conviction, but I would never want, nor would I dare, to make that a literary profession of faith. If I were to call myself a religious or an Orthodox poet, that would mean I would, in some way, have to vouch for my conformity to canon law, for my

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own work’s accordance with doctrine. There is no way in which I can do that. And in my opinion that would be simply dishonest. For me poetry is unthinkable without ‘openness’ of meaning, whilst religion in art, according to the common view, involves a prescriptive, engaged approach, of one’s knowing how the thing’s going to end. But I often simply don’t know how the thing’s going to end. Often, perhaps, it ends differently to how I intended it to. So mine is certainly not that exemplary art which people have in mind when they call it religious. First and foremost it is the word that is in the right. And thanks be to God if that lightness in some way approximates to righteousness, but that does not depend upon one’s ‘creation’ but rather upon what they call one’s ‘private life.’ – What more can you add about your poetics? What is your poetic dominant? – First and foremost it is the word, the word per se, the word as name. For me it’s more important than word combination, syntax, versification, certainly far more important than tropes. All in all, a poem in my opinion serves the word. In what way, that’s another matter, the way in which all that comes about rhythmically, the way in which many words come together so that each individual word realises the full range of its potential, its etymological potential, its phonetic potential, its potential for ambivalence of meaning. Generally speaking, in order to explore the full range of a word’s potential you have to extend its register upwards. And what I find I like least of all about contemporary poetry is the quality of the words used. – If you have chosen as the unit of your poetry the word, then you face the task of liberating the word from the influence of its neighbour. How do you go about doing that? – Yes, there’s no doubt about that. That task is not a deformation (that’s Tynyanov’s term for it). On the contrary, it’s a kind of setting to rights, and liberation, of the word. In what way? Well, really that’s a secret. Rhythm would seem to be more important than most other factors. What I can say is that I don’t pay any attention (or rather, I have to make an effort in order to pay any attention – and I simply don’t want to make that effort) to usage. Usage is the fundament of conceptualism and of social art. That’s just what they do, they play with the everyday, common, stable language of contemporary man, with usage. For me it’s just a hindrance. The fact that they debase one

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more word, a run of the mill word such as ‘mercy’, for example, is, as far as I am concerned, a matter of complete indifference; I know what it can mean. For me usage cannot corrupt it and, what’s more, does not destroy the thing itself, the word. The thing retains its quiddity however badly it’s treated. In all probability, there isn’t a single person working in the literary field who would agree with these opinions of mine, and they reproach me for not being up-to-date (above all for my out-of-date vocabulary). – It seems to me, in many of your texts a word is separated from the others by a space, quite a large space. – Yes, of course. That does not necessarily have to be realised plastically, but for me the word is sort of surrounded by a huge zone of whiteness, of silence – the silence within words. The silence within words is, as you know, the fundamental principle of hesychasm; for me it is where poetry begins. – Let’s now talk about Brodsky. When did you first read Brodsky? – During my first year at university, in 1967. His poems were going the rounds, from hand to hand. But I have to say that at the time he didn’t really impress me. I was reading Mandelstam at the time. And to love, really love, those two poetics simultaneously is impossible. So I read Brodsky, really read, a bit later than that. – How has your attitude to his poetry changed? – From the indifference which I just mentioned I progressed to a quite acute dislike of his poetry (of the content – because of the general tone of scepticism; of the form – because I love the crystalline composition one finds in the late Mandelstam), and then I began to pay him serious attention to get his measure. The first thing that won me over was the rhythm. A poet who introduces a new rhythm to poetry is a great poet. But my final conversion, however strange this may seem, came about as a result of my reading his prose, his essays on other poets, which are so full of intelligence and generosity: possibly the latter quality is the greatest gift anyone who is called to be a poet can possess. – Can one trace back any common sources, any stylistic affinity between you and Brodsky? – I don’t think so because I was never as enthusiastic about him as I was about Khlebnikov, Rilke or Mandelstam.

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– But Khlebnikov, Rilke and Mandelstam are Brodsky’s favourite poets. There are recurrent images such as dust, mirrors, butterflies and moths which are common to them all. – I really do love butterflies. That’s just a fact of my life; it dates back to childhood, before Nabokov or Brodsky; before anything else I may have read, for that matter. Anyway, it’s a perennial poetic motif. It always gladdens my heart to come across such perennial motifs in the work of other poets, especially in the English Metaphysical poets and in T. S. Eliot. So there’s nothing very strange about the coincidence of certain motifs and images in our poetry. The law of gravity could have been discovered by two, three or ten men because, after all, it does really exist. In the same way these perennial images actually do exist, are part and parcel of man’s psyche. You don’t discover them in the way you do a technical innovation; you come across them, at least those who are moving in a certain direction do. They are essentially anonymous, so you can’t seriously talk about patenting their ‘invention’. There’s no invention, only recognition (Mandelstam’s ‘joy of recognition’). – The English Metaphysicals and T. S. Eliot – there’s another source you and Brodsky have in common. Yet nevertheless you consider it impossible for one to draw a straight line between you and Brodsky? – It really would have to be a crooked line. Or you could start from someone who is our complete opposite (from Evtushenko, let’s say). – Do you consider Brodsky to be a Christian poet? – There you have to take into account the complexity of that characterisation. He is not indifferent to religion and he is not indifferent to Christianity. But if you’re talking about Christianity as a creed and are going to take as exemplar either Dante or the later John Donne, then that’s something else. For all the complexities and subtleties of the argument I can’t conceive of a Christianity that could exist without Christ. – Don’t some of Brodsky’s poems give you the impression that he has found in language a far firmer spiritual mainstay than he has in faith? – Of course. He himself has written both frankly and at length on that very subject. Although, in his essay on Montale, he does describe language as the best available tool for articulating the inner life.

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– How, do you think, did that come about? Why does he look at the world through the prism of language? – But that’s very much in line with an influential trend in twentiethcentury thought. I don’t know what his attitude is to Heidegger, for example, towards his concept of language as ‘the house of being’, or towards other philosophers of language, but it’s in the intellectual air we breathe, and what suggests itself to one man will suggest itself to others. It’s the theme of our times – language. – To what extent does Brodsky’s life apart, cut off from his linguistic roots, have a bearing upon the fact that he has chosen language as an absolute? – It’s likely that his being in an alien linguistic environment set the idea in motion, but it can occur spontaneously, under any conditions. Take Heidegger, for instance. – In Brodsky’s prose one encounters a multitude of pronouncements on the subject of language, specifically there’s his opinion that the sole form that patriotism can take for a poet lies in his relationship to the language. Do you share that opinion? – A particular language, the Russian language, or any other language, of course, epitomises the meaning of the word Motherland. But the making of language into an absolute, to which Brodsky is prone, is for me unacceptable (perhaps because by training I’m a linguist). The words, the ‘names’ about which I was talking earlier, can be made flesh not just in language but also in the plastic arts and in music (for example, I find the paradigm of extremely striking examples of the ‘naming’ of the nameless, in the works of M. M. Shwarzman 7). It’s not a metaphor, or at least not quite; there are many languages capable of expressing or revealing ‘the image of the world’ (‘the image of the world, in the word made flesh’); human speech is the most telling, the most easily understood, the most useful way of extending the discourse. – Brodsky writes on Tsvetaeva: ‘she demonstrated language’s own selfinterest in tragic subject matter’ (L, p. 192). Your comments, please. – In Brodsky, language is an active force, a prime mover, subordinate to nothing else; destiny in a way. Language is the operator, the organiser of history. In Tsvetaeva he shows his own interest in the tragic; in Platonov (and in the revolution in general) – the taste for Utopia; in Dostoevsky – the unwillingness to accept Grace. So that conceived

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in this way Tsvetaeva is just one example of language’s voyage of selfdisclosure, aided and abetted by writers (I have my doubts, by the way, as to whether one can explain away a phenomenom like Pushkin by alluding to the vigour of our grammar. Although …) – Do you think that Brodsky, whilst talking about Tsvetaeva, Platonov and other Russian writers and poets, is to a certain extent talking about himself, ascribing to them his own conception of language? – No, he ascribes nothing to them. He translates the content of their work into the language of his own ‘grammatical’ concept. Besides, he has a perfect understanding of both. This is a rare gift in the history of our literature. But the idea that the writer is a medium, passively submitting to dictates to language seems to me to be an exaggeration. As a rule I dislike fatalism, linguistic fatalism included. I’m more interested in the theme of free-will and consequently in personality (of course, I don’t mean the personality of the literary biographies but, roughly speaking, what a man does, and please forgive me for using this word, what a man does with his soul). And Brodsky himself, whose poetry and fate are in themselves literary and cultural events, is the least passive, the least mediumistic of authors. In any case, that’s how it appears from the sidelines. – How does Brodsky’s great poetic monument, which he’s in the process of building, look to you? What’s its foundation? – I’ve thought about that: I wanted to know what the basis of his independence is; not just as a poet, but also as a man. I have my own peculiar mania. Brodsky sees language everywhere and what I see, in any particular detail, stylistic, phonetic, what have you, is the man. Speech tells me more about the speaker than about the object of his speech. Incidentally, Tolstoy thought the same way. So it’s Brodsky’s independence that I’ve always found the most exciting thing about him. It’s a rare independence; there’s nothing contentious about it, it’s really calm and unconstrained. That state is almost impossible in our situation, but all the evidence goes to show it isn’t easy to attain in the West either: many of our nonconformists have turned into conformists in the West. And I’ve thought: what’s the basis of that freedom, that ‘self-reliance’, to use Pushkin’s expression? I really, in all truth, can’t find that religious faith in him which ‘put the world to rout’. And, it seems to me that the basic liberating element in Brodsky is his

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consciousness of death. There was some sort of early and extremely powerful intimacy with death, mortality, temporality. It’s the key motif of many of his poems: Смерть — это тот кустарник, в котором стоим мы все. (S, р.127)

Death – it is the thicket in which we all of us stand.

And there a lot of other fine examples in his poems. But poems apart, I was startled by his letter to Brezhnev, written from that same point of view – sub specie mortalitatis, yes mortalitatis, and not aeternitatis (‘we all will die’). 8 I certainly haven’t come across another political document like that in my life! And there you have it, in an extremely striking manner, the fact that a man does not close his eyes to his own mortality liberates him from a host of things, political amongst others. As the result of this single lesson of Brodsky’s one can see the disgusting vulgarity of all projects for ‘do-it-yourself eternal life (after the fashion of N. Fedorov). 9 It would be hard to find a better point of view from which to observe our world, such wide vistas! it’s ‘the view of the planet from the moon’ (N, p. 114), and for observing one’s own self: it is also a liberation from the self (Brodsky’s belittling portraits of himself in his poetry also seem like views ‘from the moon’). It frees one from petty demands, insults and ties. It’s what connects Brodsky with the poetry of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, but above all else with the poet of Ecclesiastes (in New Testament times the after-death, ‘after the triumph over death’ theme, one of the favourite themes of Antique Art, was always bright with the glow of the Resurrection). – Is that reflected in Brodsky’s poetics? – First and foremost in the composition. The composition of his long pieces is a plastic representation of transience, of perishability, of the making level of the important with the unimportant. ‘Everything passes’, that is what that seemingly spell-breaking form says to me, the circling dust, the dust particles in a ray of light. In my opinion, his broken rhythm’, his ‘washed out words (that’s how he himself describes them) are ordained to sing that theme.

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– Do you consider Brodsky’s works, as some do, to be brimful of pessimism? Is there in his poetry an attempt to overcome that pessimism, and if so, does he succeed? – I don’t think that an awareness of one’s mortality is pessimism. It is a necessary precondition of maturity (Paul Tillich’s ‘courage to be’). Without it ‘optimism’ is mere illusion and turns into neurosis. People who find Brodsky’s view of the world ‘horrific’ are simply afraid to look things squarely in the face. But it’s far worse not to see things as they really are, and to think that everything is more or less fine. As for overcoming his pessimism, Brodsky’s ethical position (particularly in his prose) is one of stoicism, which is not just ‘courage to be’ in a world which one cannot change (that idea was expressed very early in ‘Pilgrims’) but also a solicitude for, a gratitude vis-a-vis this perishable world of ours. Whether the Russian language wants such stoicism (to use Brodsky’s mode of thought) I don’t know. Perhaps that’s what Petersburg demanded of him (I’m from Moscow and for that reason Brodsky’s Petersburg origin is very evident to me), Petersburg the martyr-city of the Empire. I do see him moving beyond pessimism with his fidelity to Culture in the face of counter-cultural forces, both ours and the West’s. They fight culture as if it were a repressive external foe, whilst Brodsky sees it as something to be loved, as a remedy against humanity’s dehumanisation. It’s that more than anything else which makes me feel close to him. – And how does his victory over pessimism express itself in his poetics? – I would call it the ‘ethos of form’. The most obvious example is to be found in the complexity of his stanzaic forms. From what I was saying before about his rhythm, about his composition, one can assume that I regard Brodsky’s form as being close to the edge of destruction. But that is a rather one-sided impression. Beyond the mimicking of destruction, beyond the cataloguing, one feels the presence of a strong will, of an ethos. Where there is an absence of this ethos we feel that, really, the whole thing, be it a poem, be it a book, lacks form. I’ll give an example, there’s the talented Parshchikov, an amoral poet: he has, to use Cavafy’s words, no Thermopylae. But Brodsky is a different case. – So does he conquer his pessimism?

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– Sometimes, in my opinion. Some pieces remain for me mere monuments to the melancholy of existence or taedium vitae. – And what have you to say about the theme of Time in Brodsky’s work? – Time, like language and like death, is one of his basic themes. In his hands, Time has the all appearance of being a destructive principle: the motifs of ageing, for example, or the image of death (‘Time is created by death’, K, p. 59), that’s completely in tune with the existential view of the world. And yet, on the other hand, the time he has in view is extraordinarily broad in scope, far exceeding the time of any one, individual existence – it’s the time of language, of history, of culture. And this, in my opinion, is no longer existentialism. – What qualitative leap forward in Russian poetry has his arrival on the scene marked? – First, he’s broken with ‘Soviet poetry’ and has, generally speaking, placed a full-stop at the end of that literary epoch. (What I mean by ‘Soviet poetry’ would take a long time to explain.) He has revived the link with Russian poetry proper, with its last ‘positive’ tendency – Acmeism – and reprised the theme of Acmeism, ‘the nostalgia for World Culture’. Like every great poet he has made possible the accession of new strata, new intonation of speech. I won’t go into everything he’s done. – In what way is the poetic tradition of the English-speaking world reflected in his verse? – You’ve got more than the English tradition there: in the early pieces, it seems to me, the Polish strain is noticeable. The most notable thing, the most obvious novelty, which Brodsky really has brought to our poetry is his provoking of a fresh encounter with the European tradition. Everyone recognises that. It’s on that basis that Saytanov in his article ‘Pushkin and Brodsky’ places Brodsky cheek by jowl with Pushkin. Brodsky broke out of the cocoon which Russian poetry had at the time wound around itself. New genres, new themes, new forms made their appearance in Russian poetry together with those poems of his. One shouldn’t forget that Russian poetry – poetry that is attributable to a particular individual – is of very recent origin. Russian poetry has not lived through its mediaeval, its Baroque (like John Donne) or its Metaphysical period. The only testimony to the times when the spirit has flowered in Russia that we have are her icons and her archi-

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tecture. For that reason the encounter with English poetry meant an encounter with the great themes (such as death) and the great forms of literature which flourished before the advent of realism. It was the fountain of youth springing forth from an archaic source. Possibly it’s to European poetry that we owe the new image of the poet. It’s unknown in Russian poetry. – What exactly is new about the image of the poet in relation tn Brodsky? – Our poetry had a lyrical hero as persona. You found that character in Lermontov, Blok, Tsvetaeva and, on a reduced scale, in Esenin. They are biographical poets, the heroes of their own dramas. There was the impersonal poet, that was what Mandelstam strove for; the personality vanished in the heat of creative rapture: «Лететь во след лучу, / Где нет меня совсем» (To fly in the light’s pursuit, / Where I am not at all). In Brodsky’s case the poet is impersonal, but not in the same way as are Tyutchev and Mandelstam: he is everyone whilst, at the same time, he has a very concrete individual image. – If we were to reduce Brodsky’s lyrical hero to a single personality, how then would you see him? – Well, above all he’s a literary man. The rest recedes into the background. All the peripeteia of his life are his bricks and mortar. – From what do you deduce that? – He has said so himself, he has acknowledged it pretty frankly. There’s the whole structure of his poems, the rather indifferent way in which quite important events in his personal life are transferred to his poetic account. In my opinion it doesn’t need any real analysis or reconstruction. You simply feel it: I write, and that for me is my existence. For him the most important thing is to write. For the Acmeists, poetry is sound. They wrote to the dictates of their inner voice and repeated it aloud – or in a whisper. Hence you have the Acmeist theme of the lips, the tongue; the organics, the mechanics of speech. But with Brodsky it’s the brain, and ink. Literary work and not pythic raptures. – What do you find unacceptable in Brodsky? – Unacceptable – that’s a strong word. I find him alien, but really that’s because of my own prejudices. It’s just that language, which lies at the centre of his view of the world, his language is in concrete terms (for me, of course) alien. And there Brodsky, who has in many

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other ways pushed Russian poetry forward, takes a step back, away from that stylistic subtlety which all Russian poets from Pushkin to Akhmatova possessed. Playing with different styles – that I find fully permissible, but consciously taking the game beyond all the limits and not making some sort of eclectic fusion of it, that leads one to suspect that either the fate of the word is a matter of indifference or not that important as far as the poet is concerned. It’s as if he doesn’t feel it when he writes two words which simply aren’t in harmony with each other. And if that is a reflection on Soviet language, Russian newspeak, as it is in the case of the conceptualists, then that too would be, in a peculiar way, pure style. Dmitry Prigov writes in that poor, utterly distorted, monstrous language, but it is in keeping with the characters portrayed, the subjects depicted. Brodsky has another object in view. However, I am quite willing to allow that it is intentional, that it is a conscious linguistic policy. – Doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky is striving to include all the registers of the contemporary language and that therein lies the proof of his monumentality? Whether he succeeds is another matter, isn’t it? – All the registers? Possibly. But one kind of word is clearly absent, the sort that Bakhtin called the clearly intentional word. But on the whole, yes; what really distinguishes him from other present-day poets, from those of his and of a younger generation, is his inherent tendency towards the universal, towards the monumental, towards grasping the whole of life, from its zenith to its nadir, from one end of the horizon to the other – ‘the view of the planet from the moon’. – Or ‘ from the point of view of Time’ (N, p. 140). Is there a Pushkinian universality inherent in Brodsky? – I don’t know if Pushkin is really all that universal. Universality is a changeable concept. Each epoch has it’s own notion of what unversality is; it depends on how the universe is viewed. And if you take it as established that Dante is the most universal of poets, then Pushkin can no longer be called universal, because it’s clear what elements are lacking in him in order that one could make the epithet applicable. And Brodsky’s universalism in his description of the contemporary, actual condition of the world is such as one would expect, perhaps, given this particular world of ours. Many things are absent in that world and, essentially, he describes everything as if this were

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a world of absences. That is completely different to the universality of Pushkin. – Can we find in Brodsky’s work poems that satisfy every aesthetic taste, every emotional condition? – In Brodsky I can only find Brodsky, certainly no ‘sum’ of poets, no synthesis of manner. – How would you place Brodsky in the context of the contemporary Russian poetic scene? – In my opinion he, for those people who have taken an interest, has survived for all these years as the central figure. And, naturally, attitudes to a central figure can be either centripetal or centrifugal. The reaction of the younger Leningrad poets is markedly centrifugal, which is only natural, given poetry’s evolution. For that reason he acts as a negative quantity upon such poets as Krivulin, Elena Shvarts and Stratanovsky. But in Moscow and the provinces I know of many poets who find themselves under his direct influence; they are his imitators. That is a direction which I find the least interesting of all. – It also can be detected right away. – Of course, it’s immediately evident. People never have any luck with their epigones, and he is no exception. His greatest significance for me lies in the fact that he is a poet in the old, classical meaning of the word, a poet who is free and responsible. He has a personality that imposes. I’ve returned to that theme because he’s the only one in whom that quality is to be found. There may be all sorts of charming traits in other poets; in Akhmadulina there’s her wonderful feeling for language; in the early Voznesensky, his fresh subtle approach to phonetics; in Ivan Zhdanov, his unexpected images; but what they all lack is the integrity, the definiteness of Brodsky’s position. And without that quality a poet remains a marginal, peripheral figure. It seems to me that the chief factor that places him centre stage is the quality both of his will and of his work. His work, his cultural, his personal work can truly be compared to Pushkin’s. Such great forward strides, from his early poems to those of his maturity, are probably unequalled by anyone. – Does that mean that there’s no one writing in Russian today whom you would place alongside Brodsky, in the same way as we link the names of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak?

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– I’m afraid I’m not such a Brodsky enthusiast as you are, and that means I’d rather not place anyone up there alongside Mandelstam and Akhmatova. Each of them is encircled by a vast empty space. It’s just that there was a time, in a way it was a time of cosmic explosion, when in that generation both in Russia and in the West, all at once, there appeared a whole galaxy of great poets. But in Brodsky’s generation there was no such explosion, and that’s why he appears so distinct from the others of his own age. The younger generation does have a poet of the first class – Elena Shvarts. – How do you account for his enthusiasm for antiquity? – If you go back to his life then it’s Petersburg, a city full of reminiscences of antiquity. You have this constant feeling in that city of being surrounded by it. If you go back to literature, then it’s simply tradition. The great poetry of Europe, of Russia, is unthinkable without its two fountainheads, Athens and Jerusalem – Antiquity and the Bible. Those are the two eternal sources from which everything flows. It’s simply that in the Soviet school of writing they are both unheard of – not just antiquity but the biblical tradition too. The antique theme (and in my opinion it’s exclusively Roman antiquity; of Greece there is scarcely a hint), the antique themes of Brodsky signal his adherence to that culture which he is renewing or upholding amidst the wreckage. It would be strange if they weren’t there in his poetry. – What cultural tasks do you, yourself, see facing you? – I was overjoyed when I heard that part of the Nobel prize speech where Brodsky spoke clearly about his own task (he called it the task of his generation) which he feels to be a positive one amidst the wreckage, the devastated cultural wasteland. But the succeeding generation evidently does not feel itself called to any such task. In literature now you can hardly detect any desire whatsoever to uphold or renew anything. A destructive movement has got the upper hand. You can already see it at work in Brodsky’s peers (Ufliand), but that was all rather comical, a joke really. Now they’re no longer jesting. Prigov and the prose writers whom we’ve heard from today – are the leading wave. 10 There’s hardly anyone else. And in order to counteract that suicidal urge ‘serious’ culture (responsible, confident, I don’t know how to put it succintly) ought to be more serious than it has traditionally been, closer to the work of the spirit in the real, rather than in

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the aesthetic sense (Pushkin’s ‘spiritual labour’). What that means in concrete terms I’m not going to spell out in detail. – Brodsky often uses not just the term ‘culture’ but ‘Christian culture’. On which word, in your opinion, does he put the emphasis? On which one would you put the emphasis? – I think that he would put it on the second. Like Mandelstam in his early poems, Brodsky is conscious of the European tradition, the chief inspiration of which – Christianity itself still – lies dormant somewhere in the depths or waiting in the wings. It is, as it were, the principle which gave it birth. But a poet is more concerned with its actual consequences, with the cultural powers which arise from that foundation. I’m more excited by the first word in the duo. I know that Christianity is not only a cultural, a structuralising, a generative principle. It may be embodied in a sublime simplicity which lies possibly outside the bounds of culture as such (and I mean culture in the widest sense of the word), as it has been in the twentieth century in the elder of Mount Athos, Selouan. And, in general terms, to what extent Christian culture continues to be Christian (in any event after the Renaissance) remains a question. It is not for nothing that those with an evangelical frame of mind so often turn against culture. Take Lev Tolstoy, for example. Christianity is not just an enlightened conservatism, as Mandelstam portrays it; it is also a radicalism, a rejection of the world and of all of its culture. – Judging by those poems which have appeared in Soviet journals, is it possible to say whether or not Brodsky is concerned with the theme of Russia? – Of course. Brodsky is a state poet, a poet of Empire, a national poet, like Derzhavin or Pushkin. In my opinion, Russia means no less to Brodsky than Florence did to Dante. – Accusations are constantly being mouthed by so-called patriots that Brodsky does not love Russia. They point, for example, to the poem ‘The Fifth Anniversary’. 11 – The same breed of patriots would have been saying in Dante’s day that he didn’t love Florence; and, in their way, they would have been right. What is important is, what they do mean by love, and even more importantly, what do they mean by Russia? Their Russia has no place in his poetry. His view is the historical view: he has inherited the point of view of eighteenth-century Russian literature, the idea

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of Russia as a state, an Empire. And an Empire cannot be the object of simple familial love, as one’s homeland can. It’s an almost exclusively post-Petrine city-bound culture. Brodsky does not concern himself with the Russia of the peasant villages, with the Russia of the church (and, by the way, their corresponding linguistic registers). His country is not Rus’ but Russia (you know that there’s a bookish name ross, Rossiya). And I think his very departure is a manifestation of the responsibility he feels towards Russia. – Would his return to Russia change anything? Do you think it’s a real possibility? – For whom? – For Brodsky himself and for Russian poetry? – Whether it’s desirable for him, only he can answer that question. For poetry? I don’t know. I don’t myself see him returning; I just don’t see it. Although there are a lot of things happening now that no one could have foreseen. His part in our literature is so far-reaching and perhaps from a distance it has more potency, especially now when it’s easier to get hold of his poems. But I really wouldn’t like to judge … – His very presence in poetry, is it obstructive or stimulating? Can one simply ignore him? – It’s impossible to ignore him. It’s absolutely essential for one to know his every new poem. – On your part is there no desire, temptation to compete with him, to emulate him? – No, my relationship towards him is very simple – I feel deep respect and gratitude. – Have you met Brodsky? – Never. 12 – In conclusion, please read the poem which you said was written with Brodsky not entirely absent from your thoughts. – It’s a poem dedicated to the memory of two poets of my own generation – Leonid Gubanov and Sergey Morozov. Sergey killed himself, Leonid died of alcoholism. In what way is that linked to Brodsky? Because it’s a poem about poetry in general, and natural enough, the first among poets makes an appearance. He is in the rhythm, in the rhythm of this poem – it’s a sort of homage to Brodsky – and perhaps in some of its imagery. It’s called ‘The Autumn Water’s Elegy’.

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AUTUMN WATER’S ELEGY 1 Intimacies turn to formal YOUS and YOUs to THEY. For how long must we stand and watch them end self-annihilation while autumn’s eerie hiss shears off the days? 2 Old age and winter stare me in the face and it’s with inhuman boldness in their eyes they stare at me, old age and winter, measuring what treasures may remain, pyxing and assaying with the lupine teeth of decimating grief. 3 Arise, my soul, arise (to paraphrase the saint). But whether it’s too late or not, we cannot say, though others might. Warm is the air which age and winter print white words on, sightless wicks that burn 4 in darkness visible. Coming tracks impressed in snow that’s not yet fallen. Sergei, Leonid, the slant earth gasped (remember?) to see those waters lit below on winter’s edge, a flambeau. 5 With staff in hand I walk familiar waves of ever unreaped corn and through typhoons of earthen seas, those watery strings, which cause the hills of mud to ripple, 6 echoing on high the source’s sound like … yes, like tiny hammers on a gamelan, like comb and paper in the flowing waters’ mouth winding their courses towards us out of silence.

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7 Water gazes down from the soundless core of the pallid watchfire’s rustling humstrum. Bending she comes down and turns to me and asks: ‘What is humbler than water?’ 8 What is humbler than water? Than patience more patient; like the name Anna, grace abounding, giving from poverty, turning out pockets at the merest prompting of the inconstant ground. 9 All things open like a door, each has a secret doorway to a deep transcendent passage. Try the latch; in bolts the grateful heart, to home and silence. Right now 10 I think that nothing leads straighter there through wildered gardens, flowers of the field and flowers of the forest – all long desiccated – via somnolence, than water on her sleepless rounds, 11 before ice closes in and sleep begins, and she becomes as eyelids or the faithful skin of one tight-clasped whose dreaming self’s a distant two-in-one. Things in paradise, are you like love or it like you? 12 A person with the skill to die when living means approaching death: such is the poet. Let the rest fool who they can

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and etch their letter’s back with sender’s address. 13 It costs us no great toil, my Muse, to master sensual inquisitiveness, outstaring, empty-eyed, the monstrous horse that hews the flaming waters from 14 the treeless, beastless, birdless rock. Where dwell only you, thin shadows. And you who like a fair child pluck the bents of grasses, blessed, parched and bleakish. 15 Such is the sound when winter looks and old age watches and the skies survey. Such is the scream of pinions over nightmare governments cowardly as death, bearing you aloft with fiery trail, our only goddess, Muse of Victory. Translated by Robert Reid

Notes 1 2

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Druzhba mrodov, no. 10 (1988) pp. 120 - 5. Paragraf is a free Moscow journal, published since August 1988 by A. Morozov. The article by Sergey Semenyuk appeared in December 1988, and the article on Brodsky was published in January 1989; it was reprinted under the title ‘Tak deviatnadtsatyi vek obrushivaetsia v vek dvadtsatyi’ in Russkaya mysl, 7 April 1989, p. 10. Olga Sedakova, Vrata. Okna. Arki. Izbrannye stikhotvoreniya (Paris: YMCA Press, 1986).

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Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. 123 (1977) pp. 127 - 39; reprinted in Poetika Brodskogo. Sbornik statey, ed. Lev Losev (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1986). Olga Sedakova, The Wild Dogrose (Dikiy shipovnik). This is Sedakova’s favourite collection, completed in 1978. A few poems from that collection were published in Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. 145 (1985) pp. 172 - 6. This book was written as one long, whole poem, like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Aleksey Shevchenko, ‘Pis’mo o smerti, liubvi i kotionke’, Filosofskaya i sotsiologicheskaya mysl, no. 9 (1989) pp. 110 - 14. M. M. Shwarzman (1933 -1997) is a very original artist who works in the tradition of the temple sacred art – ieratika – as he called it. He shies off publicity and hasn’t organised a single exhibition of his works. Brodsky’s letter to Brezhnev was written 4 July 1972, the day he left Russia. It was published by Yakov Gordin in Neva, no. 2 (1989) pp. 165 - 6. The actual words are: ‘I, who write these lines, will die, you, who read them, will die, too. Only our deeds will remain, but even they will suffer destruction.’ N. Fedorov, Filosofiya obshchego dela, 2 vols (Verny, 1912). The writers who took part in the meeting ‘Soviet Art in Glasgow’ during the weekend of 24 - 6 November 1989 were Evgeny Popov, Vladimir Sorokin and Yury Polyakov. See, for example, P. Gorelov’s article ‘Mne nechego skazat’ …’, in Komsomolskaya pravda, 19 March 1988, p. 4. Soon after our interview, Olga Sedakova met Brodsky in Venice where he introduced her to the audience at Palazzo Querini Stampalia on 22 December 1989 before her poetry reading.

16 A L E K S E Y PA R S H C H I K O V Aleksey Parshchikov (born 1954 in Olga Bay, near Vladivostok), poet, essayest, translator, graduated from Kiev Agricultural Academy (1972) and in the following year moved to Moscow, where in 1975 he began his studies at the Gorky Literary Institute. Having graduated, he worked as a janitor, electrical repairman, and photographer. In 1990 he became a postgraduate student at Stanford University and received his MA in 1993. His poems first began to appear in the Soviet press at the end of the 1970’s, and very quickly met with an adverse critical reception, his aesthetic orientation, his oxymoronic, deeply ironic view of the world being unacceptable to critics. He is close to those poets Epshtein has called ‘the generation that has found itself: A. Eryomenko, I. Zhdanov, O. Khlebnikov, M. Kudimova and so on. The first extensive selection of his poetry to see the light of day appeared in a joint venture with three other young poets under the general title Dneprovskii Avgust (Moscow, 1986). In 1989, his collection Figures of Intuition (Moscow), the very title of which alludes to his way of looking at the world through intuition and imagination, was published. In his poetic world everything is in a state of continual flux. It is a world governed by a power benevolently inclined towards the gifted and the clear-sighted. ‘That power’ ‘resonates with the change of metaphors’ and becomes ‘other’. His rather estranged description of the world points to the interdependence of nature, the living world and culture. In his poems, with their open-endedness, their irregular metres, lack of punctuation marks, inexact rhymes, highly inventive tropes and lines which invade the margins of his pages, the form is clearly disjointed. In the attempt to synthesise the various arts all accents are shifted. His other collctions are: Cyrillic Light (M., 1995), Selected Poems (M., 1996), Metarealists: Eryomin, Zhdanov, Parshchikov (M., 2002) and Contiguity of Pauses (M., 2004). His poetry has been translated into Finnish, Danish and English; see the anthology Child of Europe (Harmondsworth, 1990) pp. 213 - 18. Since 1995 he lives in Cologne.

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A B S O L U T E TR A N Q U I L L I T Y FA C E O F A B S O L U T E T R A G E D Y

IN THE

An Interview with Aleksey Parshchikov (25 November 1989, Glasgow) – You belong, it seems, to a group of poets that calls itself the metametaphorical? – The name was Konstantin Kedrov’s idea. But why specially metametaphorical? It applies possibly to tropes in general and the concept isn’t so much linguistic; it’s more a way of looking at the world. And a metaphor is a metaphor. – Tell me about your poetic connections, affiliations. – I have links with the American poets of the so-called ‘Language School’. Most of them live in Berkeley, that’s to say Lyn Hejinian and Michael Palmer. It all began with Arkady Dragomoshchenko, who lives in Leningrad. Lyn Hejinian has translated a lot of his poetry for the American ‘Sun and Moon Press’. The ‘Language School’ thinks that the source of tropal transformation is to be found in language itself. They belong to the linguistic philosophy tendency: Wittgenstein and the whole French Structuralist school. Michael Molnar, ‘who translates Dragomoshchenko and who is into Andrey Bely, also knows that school well. 1 There’s also a journal published in Paris called Action poétique which brings out translations of their poetry, and there is my Danish translator, rather an international line-up. And then we had this idea of publishing an almanac, to be called Five on Five, five Americans of the ‘Language School’ and five Soviet poets. – Who’s translating the Americans? – Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nadia Kondakova, Dragomoshchenko and myself. – What is the essence of the relationship between you and the ‘Language School’? – There’s no clear-cut relationship, really, because they work exclusively with language. The Russian language has an ideological colouring to it; it always has its ideological lexis. Though the Americans think that their language has a certain parodic layer, that has nothing to do with mass culture; but that’s difficult for me as an outsider to ap-

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preciate. For us it has ideological associations, for them it’s associated with what they call ‘yuppies’. They try to be independent, anti-commercial. What is different is that they use language in different ways to us. The important thing for us to do is to deform the language to the maximum. We want to feel its bones start to break. We want to see the naked skeleton. In there, there are certain things that determine the order of words. And you need to violate that order to get at the information that’s there. If they think that language determines the way we think, I on the other hand, would say that the source of poetic transformation is to be found not in language alone; it might well have nothing to do with language at all – language may well just be tinged with the colouring of those sources. There’s something somehow lacking if you take language by itself, because there is a whole huge field of silence, of intermission, of quiet, of extra-linguistic things. Syntax (and here I’m not talking about grammar) determines those sorts of intermissions that lie between structures – that is the case in economics, in geography: the intermissions rhythmise the structure’s manifestations. Those syntactical intermissions are now especially in evidence – take perestroika, for example. That really is one huge intermission, though it isn’t all of a piece and it has its own particular rhythm, like the French Revolution for instance. – You’re using ‘intermission’ here as a metaphor? – Yes. – Let’s go back to linguistics: intermissions, rhythm, silence only exist because speech exists. If speech, if language were to vanish there would be just one long continuous silence. Brodsky writes about that: Silence is the words’ future and it’s already gobbled up all the thingyness. (O, p. 206)

You remember ‘The Conversation on the Porch’ in ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’? – Of course. – Consequently for you, language is important at the deep level and if you try to find out what happens when it’s pushed to breaking point, where Khlebnikov, in Mandelstam’s words, ‘busied himself with words like a mole digging down into the earth to make a path into the future

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for the entire century’. 2 You, like Khlebnikov, busy yourself with the deep structure of language. – Of course, but I make a distinction between language and speech. Speech consists of oppositions and language is a semiotic system of interconnections between text and context and so on. When speech comes into play, language becomes speech – I don’t know if that’s an up or a down turn. There’s this rather amusing experiment I did with Michael Molnar. When practically nothing I had written had ever appeared in print, it was very difficult for me to imagine how my poems would look on the printed page and what would be lying in wait for me to discover there; you know a text changes when it’s printed. I didn’t like editing my own work and when Michael translated my poem, clearly intending to see it published, he did a bit of editing and the poem I got as a result of that was better than it had been originally, or that’s the way it seemed to me. I translated it back into Russian again and returned to Michael. He translated it afresh into English. And again it seemed to me that there were certain new angles there and I translated it back into Russian. We did that five times in all and a poem that’s been translated back and forth that many times – five or six – is a pretty serious matter, because you have to, at the very least, try to exhaust all the possibilities of the text in order to understand what it’s about. But imagine a poem that’s been translated like that eight or nine times! Of course it’s a game. – It’s a very interesting game. Priceless material for the students of poetry. But isn’t the very writing of poetry a selection of variants and milking them for everything you can get out of them? I remember Brodsky in his seminars at Ann Arbor would often ask his students, who were analysing the poetry of Rilke or Tsvetaeva, ‘What do you think, how many different variants did the poet reject before he decided upon the one we’re looking at?’ 3 – Yes, the processes really are similar. – It seems you are very conscious of what you’re doing and it won’t be hard for you to answer the next question. Do you use the reification of the animate world to the same extent as the more traditional transformation of the real world into the poetic world, that is the personification of the inanimate world and of the world of ideas?

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– I don’t know how to resolve that equation. I think that, in principle, the whole world is animate; it’s just that everything has its specific aims and its own specific way of manifesting itself. Life is a manifestation of the world. It all depends upon how one looks at it. One could see some scratches on a tree and attribute significance to them. We put ourselves into them and thus give them a soul. Besides, there are many things in existence which we do not think of as having life, but they demand our assistance in order to exist. Take, for example, the world of technology – you have computers which possess certain of the characteristics we ascribe to living creatures; they have feedback, self-reflexion, a feeble expression of free will. But in principle, of course, because that world is an unconscious world it is a world of idiots. But how should we regard idiocy? When a man isn’t conscious of what he is doing he may well be a saint. I haven’t got any fixed ideas about the world of man-made things. We’re only just seeing the first steps of their journey if, that is, we accept that they are capable of evolution. And do they have purposes of their own? That isn’t clear because we ourselves act as if we didn’t have any. We just circle around it. But each one of us has a task – to find the situation in which the thing, the word, the object can manifest itself. After all, things are helpless without us. But we can always find something significant in them and raise them, drag them out of the darkness that surrounded them. So the problem of the inanimate-animate resolves itself, with my participation. There is a poem of Brodsky’s called ‘Things’ or ‘About Things’. – I think the poem you have in mind is ‘Nature Morte’ (K, pp. 108 - 12). I see how dense your own poems are with tropes and I would like to know what type of metaphor is dominant. On the one hand, like Khlebnikov, you have removed all the boundary posts that lie between semantic classes, for example, ‘History is a sack containing an abyss of money’, 4 and on the other hand, even in your copulae metaphors, the tenor and vehicle are only compared one with another, they do not merge as one, in contradistinction, again, to the case of Khlebnikov or Brodsky, for example, ‘Time is cold’ (U, p. 119). – Yes, metaphors of identification are very rare in my writing. And the fact is things ought to be allowed to remain at liberty. Brodsky, somewhere says, ‘In essence, a bush resembles everything’ (S, p. 141). You can compare and identify everything, if you need to.

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– When did you first read Brodsky? – The first book – six or seven years ago. It appeared by chance in the Literary Institute. – Do you remember which of his collections it was? – The poems were copies. I do remember that the ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’ was amongst them. – That means they were some of his early poems. – Yes, that’s right. They were. How would a book have got there? It depends what people bring. Now, of course, it’s no longer dangerous, but you still can’t lay your hands on everything. I don’t know which of his poems were written when. But when we got hold of The End of a Beautiful Epoch and A Part of Speech I read them systematically. – Which of the poems did you find interesting? Did any of them bore you to tears? – Compared with what I was back then when I read them, I’m a changed man. I didn’t find it at all easy, atuning myself to his sense of humour or that system of belittlement he has. Now I find that very human but, at the time, it seemed to me that he was rather exaggerating the negative side. The main thing for me when I’m writing a poem is to know when the poem starts demanding things. Well, for example, you write 20 lines and then you have to transform yourself into the reader of your own verse in order to see where it’s leading. That is the most important thing of all for me. And I have never been able to see where the boundary lies in his poems between what he wanted to say and what his poem wanted him to say; where he rose to the challenge and answered the poem back. I see the writer and the reader as being in the text together and the text has these demands of its own. And with other poets I can feel that. But with him the text runs so smoothly that in his case I don’t know where he starts and where he finishes. And that annoyed me, as a writer, just a bit. – Does the length of his poems annoy you? – No it doesn’t. I don’t, generally speaking, see Brodsky as a lyric poet. I think he’s a poet of the lexis, a poet of the epic of the language. – Yes, he said that ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ was his last lyrical book. 5 – Of course, I didn’t know that. We didn’t manage to have a conversation.

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– You’ve met him, then? – This summer at a festival in Rotterdam. He was making an appearance and someone asked me to act as a messenger boy. I said I didn’t know him. Gennady Aygi introduced me and we agreed to meet later. I had various things to do in Amsterdam. I thought I ought to give it a few days while the Master sorted things out with his old friends: Rein, Kushner, Bella Akhmadulina were there. I came back at night from Amsterdam and went to the Poetry Centre next morning and some Dutchmen threw themselves at me clutching these newspapers and offering me their congratulations. There had been this interview with Brodsky and he had had a few, rather warm, words to say about me. I asked them where he was and they told me he’d already flown out. Here I ought to mention Yukka Mallinen: he was Brodsky’s interpreter when he was in Helsinki, about a year ago now, and he asked Brodsky if he knew anything about the new poetry groups in Moscow. Brodsky told him he knew just a bit about conceptualism, but it left him cold. And then Yukka gave him something of mine to read. Brodsky went from Finland to Copenhagen. It was about a month before we were due to put in an appearance there, and in one of the interviews he gave at the Festival of Russian Poetry in Rotterdam he had one or two kind words to say about my group. – Has Brodsky had any influence upon you personally at all? – For me there are two Brodskys. There’s the Brodsky before ‘The Lullaby of Cape Cod’ (C, pp. 99 - 110) and the Brodsky after. It excites me the way he suddenly changed. He was always a rhetorical poet and, if I’m honest, I’d have to say he didn’t excite me all that much. His poetry didn’t project any images on to that private cinema I carry around in my brain. With ‘The Lullaby of Cape Cod’ there suddenly appeared this metaphysical world, of a fresh, hitherto unapprehended kind and its movements could be projected on to something and I found particular pleasure in projecting it on to the cinema screen in my brain: it gave me a feeling of great satisfaction. I began then to quote him to myself, not in the usual banal way – I mean I began to use his images. But for me it’s a puzzle as to why he changed. It must have something to do with language because at the same time he suddenly began to use a different language: it was, I’d say, a lot warmer in feel, a lot more Russian. Earlier he’d written in that language that’s peculiar

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to Leningrad which I find almost metallic. I was talking to Sosnora 6 about it. And the fact is Sosnora too divides Brodsky up into different periods. ‘Before there wasn’t much to talk to him about and now, when there is something to talk about, he’s not here.’ That’s what he said. – It’s interesting that Svyatopolk-Mirsky wrote of Baratynsky that he cultivated his own particular ‘metallicity’, that his poetic language was a kind of counterbalance to the ‘sweet-sounding’ poetry of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov and the young Pushkin. 7 Baratynsky, as you possibly know, is Brodsky’s favourite poet. As your English is pretty good and you are apparently acquainted with Brodsky’s essays, in which he has a lot to say on the subject of language, perhaps you can explain his obsession with it? – Brodsky has ended up living in a place where that subject is on everybody’s lips. It’s the meat and drink of European, of American philosophy. And it’s to do with the fact that we live in an overly semiotic environment. You just have to point out the source of a trope – you don’t have to name it and you’re considered an artist. Such a thing as a diagetic poetry is possible. The sources of transformation change every five to ten years, just as language changes. This is something that happens several times in the life of a man, of a society; it happens more often to a society than it does to a man. Those sources can be used by naming what is what in order to bring about some change in our consciousness, or you can simply point them out in order to show that this is essential, and that that is essential. And that can set a man thinking. And that is enough to start you off as an artist. In my view, what Brodsky has done is to put a lot of faith into a milieu that is self-inscribing: everything that we see around us here in the West, and that in Russia we only get to hear about. There, space is less structured; here, everything is very semiotic and Brodsky lives in this semiotically oversaturated world. – Doesn’t the very fact that Brodsky lives in an alien linguistic environment force him to be particularly careful, particularly attentive to the way in which he sees language? – I’m sure that’s right. Of course, Brodsky’s language is refined now because he’s in a linguistic vacuum and he can pick and choose his words and he can feel free in relation to his vocabulary. He’s able to treat every word’s component part with special care.

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– For Brodsky his Muse is simply the voice of language. What is the Muse for you? – My Muse is vision. I think that our eyes are a part of our brain that has gone out for a walk in the fresh air. And it’s only through them that we gain understanding at all. I think the Muse is a visionary entity. – What do you think of Brodsky’s love lyrics? It seems to me that he hasn’t sought to find a language that’s up to the task of describing love. Such a language doesn’t exist in Russian. I, as others have been, was excited by Henry Miller because he wrote about those things that we don’t have a language for. – Yes, look at Nabokov’s Russian version of his ‘Lolita’ and compare it with the English original and see how much has been lost in translation. – I haven’t read it in English but I can imagine the possibilities, and his foreword to the Russian version is, in that sense, an apology. – And have you found your own language for that particular theme? – The fact is I’m from a medical family; my father is a professor of medicine and so is my mother. When I finished school it was difficult to get into a medical institute and so I went to the Kiev Agricultural Academy to study genetics and selective breeding. I spent three years there and I studied the devil knows what. Our practical assignments ranged from the castration of bulls to anatomical dissection. At the time I did not as yet understand the meaning of the world of the dead – where it entered into life and where it didn’t, but I was wildly curious about what lay in the middle. There was this mare, she was very old and decrepit and at long last they put her to sleep and we cut her up. And during the course of our dissection I saw all the fantastic beauty of her internal organs. They should have had some wonder drug handy that would have enabled her to enjoy one last canter, just to express all that beauty there was inside her. And I realised then that this disjointed, dismembered world has its own inner workings and, for a moment, I was sucked up into contemplation of that world. I think one has to undergo some sort of a shock for that. Later, when I graduated from the Literary Institute, it was impossible to find a job. Completely by chance I got involved with the journal Druzhba narodov and I worked in the poetry section there for

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three years and before that I was a photographer. I began to see the whole semiotic system through the view-finder of my camera and to abstract myself from it. I took pictures of everything: weddings, funerals, anything as long as I was paid – there just wasn’t any money around. I had my rent to pay and life was miserable, and there wasn’t a hope in sight of my ever getting anything published. I did some fashion sessions. And I saw this model standing under the lights and the way she was standing told me it wasn’t worth going to the trouble of turning any more lights on. She had some innate concept of what was right and proper in her work, in her life – although she herself wasn’t conscious of that. And then I started to use a certain plasticity in my poetry which may, possibly, be the language that is suited to describe love. There’s a text of mine, the poem, I lived on Poltava Field’ and I really did live there. After I graduated from the Institute I got a little bit of money together and bought a bit of land with the idea of going back to farming. I was a sort of green hippy – work the land and be independent of Sovdepiya (the State). To cut my story short, the poem describes the up-and-down relationship between the hero (Ivan Mazepa) and the heroine (Marfa Kochubey). It’s just slightly grotesque and as a result of that I was called a pornographer and so on. So through pornography, if you like, through what excites us, no matter what its meaning, I tried to find a language adequate to the task of describing love so that, through photography, through other visual means, people are mentally drawn to the situation I am trying to describe. I pay a lot of attention to such rubbish as, for example, make-up. There is a moment when the body acquires a publicity all of its own and enters into the world of signs. Up to that moment, failing to participate in that semiotic world, it lacks beauty. Only when it enters that world of signs exchanging signs with other signs – only then does it become beautiful. That is what beauty means to me – it’s a participation in everything that’s outside, beyond itself. And again you have this constant on-going process of self-clarification, of discovery. Beauty can appear and beauty can vanish. And it appears when a person comes to life, acknowledges their participation and they inscribe themselves in the empire of signs. That can be a very beautiful moment and, objectively, it can be said to be nothing at all. It just needs to be seen.

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– Let’s go back to Brodsky’s language of love. If I were to agree with you and say that he hasn’t sought, hasn’t found a language adequate to the discription of that emotion, then how do we explain away the fact that there is a book called ‘New Stanzas to Augusta’, a collection of poems written over a period of 20 years, from 1962 - 82, and all addressed to the same woman? A poet as self-exacting as Brodsky is hardly likely to write poems about love if he didn’t have an original way of expressing himself on that subject, would he? – Yes, there are those ‘Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots’ (N, pp. 117 - 28) – that’s a very erotic piece of work. Its eroticism is the result of the emotional experience of violence. It’s a remarkable work. – The ‘Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots’, ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (N, p. 78), ‘Anno Domini’ (N, pp. 90 - 3), and there are others – don’t they all suggest to us that Brodsky uses mythical and historical paradigms as a mask for the delineation of love? – I would say something rather different. When Brodsky is dealing with intimate relationships between people like that, rulers who enjoy absolute power, Archimedes’ law comes into play and love is displaced as well as all those widely held notions about its nature. He’s very erotic in those scenes. – Another of his devices is belittlement; for example, he quotes Pushkin: I loved you. And my love (or maybe it’s only pain) still stabs me through the brain. The whole thing’s shattered into smithereens. I tried to shoot myself – using a gun isn’t so simple. And the temples: which one, the right or left? Reflection, not the shakes, kept me from acting. Jesus, what a mess! I loved you with such strength, such hopelessness may God send you in others – not a chance! He may be capable of many things, but – with Parmenides – won’t reinspire the fire in the blood, the bones’ crunching collapse, melting the lead in fillings with desire to touch – ‘your hips’, I must delete – your lips. 8

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– In Sosnora too there’s something similar: ‘I loved you, perhaps, love still, but it will not be.’ – This clash of high and low is characteristic in general of Brodsky’s poetics. Do you agree with me that, unlike certain of his contemporaries, Brodsky can’t be accused of sentimentality or of melodramatics? – I agree absolutely. Looking at it that way, I too couldn’t find anyone, except maybe Zhdanov and Eeryomenko. People supplement their experience by interpreting it. They describe feelings that they’ve never experienced themselves. In fact, when you look at it, it’s all different somehow and I think it’s all linked with the concept of time. – You’ve hit the nail on the head. In Brodsky’s poetry that major theme is inextricably entwined with the theme of love. See for instance his poem ‘Stanzas’ (N, pp. 108 - 16). Could you possibly develop that link between time and love, because it’s by no means obvious? – No, it isn’t obvious. It’s usually said that poetry, and lyric poetry in particular, describes the emotional experience of a man who finds himself in a desperate situation; he’s either in a labour camp, or there’s something he’s missing out on, or he’s got some sort of complex: there is, generally speaking, something lacking somehow or other. But there’s another completely different way of looking at the world, when you experience its over-generosity rather than its shortcomings. Conventionally speaking, I divide all that sort of poetry into two types; there’s the poetry of Hell and there’s the poetry of Heaven. Dante goes to Hell and asks the lost souls, ‘How did you come to be here?’ ‘I raped my mother’, one replies; ‘I killed someone up there’, replies another. But in Heaven his experience was quite different. There are no markers, no points of comparison to make with what he has gone through in life: his own capabilities, potentialities mean nothing when he is confronted with the world he finds up there in Heaven. He has to expand, go beyond the bounds of his own self, to deepen, to broaden. And what is more, in Paradise the stream of time is never-ending, in contrast with Hell where time stands, eternally, still. In Paradise you find yourself in what could be called one eternal funfair – you get off one ride and immediately you’re on another, you go from one game to the next. You have something to occupy your time, and thus you experience change, which is time. – What is, do you think, Brodsky’s greatest service to Russian poetry?

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– Zhukovsky gave us German Romanticism. Brodsky’s rather like him in that he’s been a conduit for Western, Anglo-American literature. It’s through him that those two worlds communicate. For example, I can’t get out of my head the idea that Brodsky has studied Lowell’s poetry thoroughly. – Well, of course, he knew him personally, stayed at his home, wrote an elegy on his death in English and, to cap it all, analysed his poetry with his American students. – Yes? That’s interesting. There’s a cycle of poems by Lowell called ‘Near the Ocean’, there’s that same ‘speed of writing’ there. I have this notion about one’s ‘speed of writing’. When something is written at speed there are changes that take place, not only in subject matter; a poem is all the time taking off in some new direction or other and it becomes, more or less, unpredictable. It’s the speed of prophecy and unexpected gifts. That’s the game I call ‘speed of writing’. You find that in Brodsky too, and Brodsky’s very like the Lowell of ‘Near the Ocean’. – Could you say a few words about the philosophical, ethical foundations of Brodsky’s poetic world? – The fact is we have to deal with some very strange things. He has a very clear apocalyptic vision. And moreover, it’s interesting to note that his friends, Rein, again, for instance, are not tragic poets. They are elegists. They’ve written some very good elegies. But Brodsky, and his lyrical hero, they both are keyed up for the big finish. That is, he’s constantly seeing the big black hole yawning up there in front of us. And all that makes for an unpredictable sort of world, of a kind we never had before. And the conflict lies in the fact that he achieves absolute tranquillity in the face of absolute tragedy. He talks about things which mean the annihilation of everything on the planet, of himself in particular, but he clutches at language, at the Russian lexis. Remember what Mandelstam wrote: You, Maria, aid of those about to die. One needs to forewarn death, fall asleep. I stand on a firm threshold. Off with you. Away. No, stay. 9

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Here you have that eternal hesitation – stay, go, stay, go. That’s a strategy. He doesn’t feel nervous in his poetry, he creates this feeling of being at complete peace with himself, despite the fact that if you understand what it is he’s writing about it, is of course horrifying. – Horror, that’s the feeling he himself was struck by in the poetry of Robert Frost which he was reading when he was in exile at Norenskaya in 1964 - 5. 10 What do think of his enthusiasm for antiquity? – Well, first of all, it’s a form of eroticism – he sifts through myth, history, power and seeks out the erotic. Secondly, it’s a metaphor for history. It exists out there in the real world and for him the connection is obvious. – Do you feel that Brodsky is concerned about the Russian problem? – No, I don’t. In any case, not immediately. In fact it seems to me that he feels no concern at all for the state, full stop; he uses that as a metaphor, just as he does Empire. – You don’t feel any note of nostalgia in his work? – No. – Who of Brodsky’s generation would you single out? – There are three poets of the 1960s who’ve gone through a lot of changes. There’s Bella [Akhmadulina] who has fulfilled her aim of being completely useless and pure. Nobody understands the nature of the conflicts she describes or why she writes about them. They think she’s doing embroidery. And there’s Sosnora. He’s tense, he plays with words all the time. He’s changed a lot. If you were to judge him simply on the basis of his Soviet books it would be just impossible to understand what it is he’s thinking about. But the book that Ardis has published shows how he’s changed, matured, grown in complexity. One would say that he’s got his degree absolute from the language. He has beaten it about so much that he’s shut the door on grammar and his cases are at sixes and sevens, but despite that you can understand everything. And the third poet is Brodsky, who has changed for no reason at all. Forgive me if I talk like this; he might find it hurtful. I simply don’t know how it happened. I adore his ‘Roman Elegies’ (U, pp. 111 – 117). So, three of them from the 1960s have achieved something. The others I haven’t mentioned have changed but, generally speaking, they’re still fighting the same old battles.

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FORCE To J. B. It brightens up the epithelial darkness, as if a sting magnetized by the madness of movement along simultaneously: a solid body almost turned gas simultaneously: a gas jimmied to a pause. This force which matures within us and without like a bear in an alcoholic brain and – again – in the corner of a twisted room where damnable tidbits are. The bear ripens and suddenly moves out to the table. You – are the prognosis of this force broken out at random, you latch at it with your fiber and your skeleton clippity-clap, you didn’t see it because you lugged it hunchback up and you counted the filaments in the anatomy of your own brawn. In unembraceable mountains with this world flying to naught, drifting from this world, penetrating it in paths, drifting apart, for instance, like radio waves and oil, penetrating each other, scarcely touching and almost… You recognized this force: a sharp flick followed – that full release and silence instantly scattering you, then assembling and bundling and – another flick! – the force was given back to you. a pair of old boots and a thousand holes in the air getting smaller, and along the windowsill crawling down and coming to and the entrance to a corridor struck to the depths with darkness like a falling cypress. by Aleksey Parshchikov, trans. by Darlene Reddaway

Notes 1

Michael Molnar, an English Slavist, a translator of contemporary Russian poetry and the author of Body of Words: A Reading of Bely’s ‘Kotic Letaev’ (Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 17, 1987); see his article ‘The

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Vagaries of Description: the Poetry of Arkady Dragomoshchenko’, in Essays in Poetics, vol. 14, no. 1 (April 1989), pp. 76 - 98. Osip Mandelstam, ‘On the Nature of the Word’, in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. by Jane Harris, trans. J. G. Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), p. 122 Brodsky’s seminar on Russian and Comparative Poetry during the winer semester of 1979 - 1980 at Michigan University. Aleksey Parshchikov, Figury intuitsii (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989), p. 77. Brodsky, interviewed by the author, 20 April 1980, Ann Arbor, Nich. Viktor Sosnora made his poetic debut in 1962 with the book Yanvarskii liven (January Shower) with a foreword written by N. Aseev. His second book Triptych (1965) was highly praised by B. Slutsky; his third collection Vsadniki (The Riders, 1969) carried a foreword by D. Likhachev. Other books followed: Aist (The Stork, 1972), Stikhotvoreniya (Poems, 1977), Crystal (1977), Vozvrashchenie k moriu (The Return to the Sea) (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1989). There is also a fuller American edition Izbrannoe (Selected Works) (Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1987). D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, ‘Baratynsky’, in Articles on Literatura (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literature, 1987) p. 225. Translated by Peter France, see his ‘Notes on the Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots’, in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. L. Loseff and V. Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 117. O. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochineniy v triokh tomakh, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov (New York: Inter-Language Associates, 1967) vol. I, p. 209. Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin (July 1981), ‘Evropeiskii vozdukh nad Rossiey’, Kniga intervyu, ed. V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 148.

17 T O M A S V E N C L O VA Tomas Venclova, poet, translator, essayist, philologist was born on 11 September 1937 into the family of the well-known poet Antonas Venclova, one-time Minister of Culture and President of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. Tomas graduated from Vilnius University in 1960, a year later because he had been sent down for protesting against the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. From 1966 to 1971, he was a student of Tartu University in Semiotics and Russian Literature. Up till his departure from the Soviet Union (1977), he lived in Lithuania, Moscow and Leningrad, earning his living as a lecturer at Vilnius University, as a translator and as a journalist. He was associated with the Human Rights Movement. Upon settling in America, he first taught at Berkeley then at Los Angeles, defending his PhD thesis at Yale (1985), where he is now Professor of Russian Literature. He has published much in the field of Slavic and Lithuanian studies, including Unstable Equilibrium: Eight Russian Poetic Texts (New Haven, Conn., 1986); Alexandr Wat: Life and Art of a Iconoclast (1996); Discussants at the Feast: Articles on Russian Literature (Vilnius, 1997); Articles on Brodsky (Moscow, 2004). Among his several collections of poetry in Lithuanian, the first, A Sign of Language, was published in Lithuania before he left for the US, and Winter Dialogue (1989) was translated into Polish. His own translations of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Frost, Baudelaire, Jarry, Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Akhmatova and Pasternak have been collected and published in one volume in his homeland. There are also three books of essays, including A Form of Hope (1999). He writes his essays in Lithuanian, in Russian, in Polish and in English. Besides these languages, three of which are native to him, Venclova is fluent in French, German and Italian. He also knows Latin and Greek. This ‘archaicist-innovator’, ‘the son of three literatures’, and ‘product of their fusion’ welds his poetry lyricism with intellectual sobriety, classical symbolism with a Northern Baltic landscape. ‘His consciousness and – often – his diction are wedded into a Christian ethic.’ 1

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DEVELOPMENT

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An Interview with Tomas Venclova (18 December 1990, New Haven) – In the short article you wrote to mark Brodsky’s fortieth birthday you acknowledged that his poetry changed your way of life, changed the way you saw your own inner space. 2 Could you be more explicit about how you got to know Brodsky’s poetry? Which of his poems did you find particularly striking? – If I’m not mistaken, I first heard Brodsky’s poetry the day Pasternak died, 30 May 1960. As yet unaware of that event, I and my then close friend, Volodia Muravyov, went to an underground artist’s place in Moscow and it was there that Volodia read Brodsky’s ‘Pilgrims’ (S, pp. 66 - 7) and some other very early poems of his to us. To me those poems appeared to be too straightforward and, to put it bluntly, weak. Brodsky himself calls the things he wrote back then ‘kindergarten’ stuff. But I remember very clearly that even then I had this feeling that didn’t quite crystallise in words: Brodsky is a charismatic poet, beyond the bounds of our current literary scheme of things or, more accurately, above it, and he has about him the aura of one who has been chosen, something that better writers than he do not possess. I later learned about Brodsky and obtained copies of his poems from lots of people; mostly, however, from Andrey Sergeev. He gave me copies of ‘Hills’ (S, pp. 123 - 9), Two Hours in the Tank’ (O, pp. 161 - 5), ‘Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot’ (O, pp. 139 - 41). At the time Brodsky himself was in exile but I heard a lot about him and his doings from Akhmatova; at the time there was a small collection of hers in Lithuanian due to come out and, being involved with that, I was a frequent visitor. By about 1965 it had become clear to me that there was no one of his generation to equal him. I knew dozens of his poems off by heart and I read them often, both to myself and others. Most often it would be ‘The Horizon was Black’ (S, pp. 94 - 5), ‘Christmas Romance’ (S, pp. 76 - 7), ‘Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot’ and extracts from ‘The Great Elegy to John Donne’ (S, pp. 130 - 6). Of course I was not the only person to do that. His term of exile over, in the

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August of 1966, Brodsky visited Vilnius: and that was the start of the Lithuanian connection, but that is another subject. – You wrote in that article of yours, ‘Brodsky’s virtuosity is stunning, even overwhelming.’ 3 Do you as a poet suffer from a Brodsky complex? – Yes, I did, a lot. Just my being aware of his existence often brought me close to the verge of inner paralysis and sometimes over the edge. – What have you learned from him? Is there anything in his poetic practice which is translatable into terms of Lithuanian poetry? – There are often rhythms of his in my poetry, quotes, attempts to continue his themes, to dialogue with him. I think that, on the whole, we have little in common, that is, if some coincidences in taste are discounted; there are certain things in poetry that we are both attracted to or, possibly more accurately, that we both turn away from. What one could say is that from Brodsky one learns sobriety, dignity, a respect for the word as such, and a consciousness that one pays for that in ready money, with all one’s biography, all one’s life. And also there’s the realisation that poetry is a conversation with one’s predecessors, one that presupposes their presence. But that’s what all true poetry teaches us, no matter where it is written, though my generation learned that lesson anew, through Brodsky in the main. Brodsky’s giant linguistic and cultural reach, his syntax, his thoughts that transcend the limits of the stanza lead to one’s reading his poetry as a spiritual exercise: it extends the reach of one’s soul; in roughly the same way as running or rowing increase one’s lung power. As for Lithuanian poetry, at present it’s going through a phase that cannot be called one of its best: it’s governed by a certain cultural isolationism, a search for an ethnic self, an untidy stringing together of genuine and imagined archetypal symbols. In a word, a homegrown version of Russian pochvennichestvo, though with a definite touch of modernism added. It’s the poetry of a peasant civilisation that’s lost its way in our contemporary world. I don’t rule out the possibility that a knowledge of Brodsky’s poetry could help Lithuanian poets to leave that rather unpromising semantic landscape behind. – Brodsky sees in your poems a quality which is very characteristic of his own poetics, and here I quote: ‘What strikes one about Tomas Venclova’s intonation is its conscious, deliberate monotony. It is as

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if he were trying to stifle the too obvious drama of his existence’. 4 Earlier you said that you have thought you had little in common with him. – I think that is in an article that flatters me far too much; Brodsky is mostly talking about himself. – Have you yourself translated any of his poetry into Lithuanian? Have there been any reviews of them? – I translated some early poems of his that I like very much: ‘The Great Elegy to John Donne’, ‘From the Outskirts to the Centre’ (O, pp. 28 - 32); ‘To Lycomedes on Scyros’ (O, pp. 92 - 3); ‘Sonnet’ (O, p. 98); ‘A Halt in the Wilderness’ (O, pp. 166 - 8); ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (N, p. 78); ‘Odysseus to Telemachus’ (C, p. 23). They were published in the Lithuanian émigré journal Metmenys and are to appear in a bilingual edition of Brodsky’s poems to be published in Vilnius. Most of the things in that book have been translated by the young Lithuanian poet Gintaras Patackas. The only critical assessment my own translations have received has been confined to a few personal letters. Gintaras Patackas is enthusiastic about them, but a connoisseur of poetry who knows both my own poetry and Brodsky’s, Romas Katilius, a personal friend of both of us, is sceptical. – What is your feeling about Brodsky’s translations of your work? Which of them have been published? – Only one of them has appeared in print – the poem, Memoir of a Poet. Variation’, in Kontinent. 5 Incidentally the word ‘Variation’ in the title is indicative of that poem’s connection with Brodsky’s epitaph to T. S. Eliot and taking it just that little bit further, Auden’s to Yeats. Brodsky’s translation is very free and undoubtedly better than the original. I believe that particular publication played no small part in my own fate, speeding up my departure from the Soviet Union. There is another, unpublished, translation, a very good, exact translation of my poem ‘The Eleventh Canto’. – Is it possible to establish a stylistic link between Brodsky’s poetry and Lithuanian poetry? – I don’t think so. That Lithuania appears in Brodsky’s poetry is another matter. – You’ve said that most of Brodsky’s poems occupy two distinct textual spaces – English and Russian. 6 Given that that is the case, what gains and losses does that imply for his poetry?

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– I have to say I prefer his Russian poems to his English, and the Russian originals to his own translations of them. Maybe that has to do with my own relationship with the English language; and again maybe it’s because Russian prosody and its taxonomies, or rather Russian forms of thought, differ very markedly from the English. At the same time, Brodsky’s English essays have no equal for clarity of style, imagery and power of observation. In that particular instance, his own translations or his English originals don’t get in the way of the Russian texts and at times surpass them. – To what extent does his intertextual plenitude help us to define his aesthetic preferences? – One always gains a better idea of a person’s aesthetic prepossessions by looking at the ways his mind moves rather than at declarations of the type, ‘I like so and so and so and so and so.’ At times the intertextuality is ironic, parodic, but that is less characteristic of Brodsky than is commonly thought. – In what general direction do you think his poetics are headed? – Brodsky’s poetics are a continuation and development or ‘overdevelopment’ of the semantic poetics of the Acmeists. – Has his poetic world changed since his departure from Russia? – Yes, it has changed a great deal. Those poetic worlds differ, possibly to much the same extent, as the architectural worlds of Petersburg and New York do. Nowadays Brodsky has a neutral ‘matt’ intonation that goes hand in hand with an extremely heavily laden semantics and syntax, with rhythmical complexity, and his material is very diverse. The sense of universal cold has grown stronger; that was always there but not with the extreme clarity that one finds, for instance, in ‘The Autumn Cry of the Hawk’ (U, pp. 49 - 52). It eats away at Brodsky’s verse and at his authorial personality in the same way as acid eats away at metal; but both poetry and personality, in an amazing way, possibly at God’s personal command, escape destruction, remain whole. – Is it possible for you to name the basic, fundamental category which, in your view, constitutes the foundation stone of his world-text? – It’s hardly worth going to the trouble of doing that. What you’ll get is either too general a shape, one applicable to a great many poets, or something irrelevant to the verge of being parodic. Of course it is

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possible to compile a list under various headings, ‘time’, ‘city’, ‘void’; but there is a huge distance between that and the poetry. – The Polish critic Klemens Pozhecky has defined Brodsky’s chief theme as the theme of evil, evidently on the basis that evil is absence, void, minus, zero, null; all of which categories abound in his poetry. 7 In Viktor Krivulin’s opinion, in Brodsky’s poetry ‘darkness is conquered by greater darkness’. 8 You select as Brodsky’s main theme, ‘being and nothingness’. 9 Do all of these themes intersect? – Of course they do. I have also said that the emphasis in that verbal combination, ‘being and nothingness’ may shift, specifically; it may shift on to the ‘and’, that is, on the motif of the boundary, the crossover point and also that of identity. It is worth remembering that nothingness is very complex and varied; to describe it demands a far greater outlay of poetic forces than is required in order to describe objects, phenomena. – There is yet another favourite theme of Brodsky’s: the theme of ‘after the end’. After the end of what? – As far as that theme is concerned, I usually talk about post-catastrophe or post-eschatological poetry, the poetry of ‘after the end of the world’; that was the Gulag and Auschswitz. – But you have yourself noted that in Brodsky’s poetry the poet’s own native city quite often stands ‘in an apocalyptic light, symbolising civilisation approaching the verge of cataclysm, or to be more precise, already toppling over the edge’. 10 Is there a link between the theme of the city and the theme of the end? – The city is the final condition of humankind in precisely the same way as the cave was its first. The myths about a depraved Babylon and the Heavenly City, as well as the reality of our own times, talk of that. – You are one of the admirers of Brodsky’s essay ‘Flight from Byzantium’ (L, pp. 393 - 446). 11 Why is it that so many Christians find that essay of his unacceptable? – It is they who ought really to answer that question. I have said that Brodsky, in the course of that essay, behaves far more scandalously than Chaadaev ever did, disclosing as he does the authoritarian potential of Christianity, of monotheism as such. It does not follow that either monotheism or Christianity is therefore, as a matter of course, fated to fulfill that potential; though, historically speaking,

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it has been realised – and fairly frequently too. Above and beyond that, Brodsky affirms that man’s metaphysical potential is broader in scope than Christianity alone: that is, that Christianity is not the sole truth. In my view ‘Flight from Byzantium’ is an outstanding philosophical essay, although I don’t agree with everything he says in it. Incidentally, I was in Istanbul and the impressions I carried away with me were quite different to Brodsky’s. – In what way has Brodsky benefited from his love affair with Rome? – At this point it’s well worth recalling the palindrome Rim – mir (Rome – world). Rome is one with the world and at the same time its opposite; like the eternal amidst the temporal, death amidst life, stones amidst the grass. It’s precisely that identity, that mirroring, that Brodsky’s Roman poems are about. – More and more often the addressee, and the subject, of his poems is ‘time in its purest from’ (U, p. 122). How do you explain that tendency of his to mythologise time? – I am not convinced that he does mythologise time; we could, with equal success, talk of its de-mythologisation. One way or another, the whole of his poetics, theory and practice, rests to a large extent on time. Time is, in particular, associated with pain, and ‘man is a prover of pain’ (K, p. 63). Hence the significance of his biographical text for the body of his creative work, a characteristic Brodsky shares with the Romantics and Tsvetaeva, but certainly not with the majority of twentieth-century poets. – Brodsky has said of Tsvetaeva: ‘Reality for her is always a point of departure, not a point of support or the aim of a journey, and the more concrete it is, the greater, the further the repulsion’ (I, p. 240). Who’s he talking about in that passage, Tsvetaeva or himself? – Mostly about Tsvetaeva, I’d say. – Finding yourselves at a very distant remove from your native lands you and Brodsky both involuntarily glance at them from the sidelines, something which, in Brodsky’s view, guarantees that element of estrangement so necessary to poetry. 12 Are there any traces, obvious and not so obvious, of similarities in the way you express that feeling of estrangement? – In my own case, it’s not for me to judge and I’ve only written a handful of poems in exile. Brodsky always did look at his own country

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from a distance, a historical and poetic distance: ‘Let the artist, the parasite, depict another scene’ (C, p. 10). In a way, exile for him was the realisation of a metaphor which had been there in his poetry for some time. – How have you borne the many years of being cut off from your Lithuanian readership? – I always was; for me exile, however strange this may sound, brought me closer to my readers and, in essence, it was my letter of introduction to Lithuanian literature. For Brodsky it’s different. – What is the most decisive factor in his poetic self-portraiture? – I would point, in particular, to the myth of the wanderer with its wealth of biblical and classical connotations: that wanderer, ‘a writer who has seen the world, / who has crossed the equator on an ass’ (O, p. 9), observes the world without being surprised by anything in particular. – Doesn’t it seem to you that Brodsky’s lyrical hero suffers from an excess of authorial hostility? You find metaphors of the type, ‘a renegade, a son of a bitch, outside the law’ (U, p. 161), ‘a weary slave of the kind / one meets more and more often’ (U, p. 95); and in his prose you find direct statements of the same sort as Joseph voiced in conversation with you when he said he felt himself to be ‘a monster’, ‘the progeny of hell’. 13 What poetic strategy is concealed behind a selfportrait like that? – Well, on the one hand, he is very often speaking from the point of view of another person, and on the other, it is a straightforward, normal attitude to have towards oneself as a human being, as a sinner; and not everybody is capable of that. It has been noted that that enmity towards his self cohabits with a solicitude for his gift, even with astonishment at himself as at a mouthpiece, 14 ‘the singer knows that he is a mere mouthpiece’ (O, p. 142). – You know perhaps that some émigré critics consider Brodsky to be an ‘imperial poet’. 15 Has such a ‘designation’ to do with the fact that Empire is a metaphor for state that runs right through his poetry, or are there other reasons? – That accusation is either the fruit of misunderstanding or ill-intention. Empire is a spacious metaphor, a suggestive name for a state which carries on its dialogue with its poets mainly with shot and

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shell. What’s more, there is also an Empire of culture which is also, at times, merciless. The absence of ‘warmth’ (Brodsky in conversation used a much blunter expression). He is not noted for all-forgivingness, tearfulness, tender-heartedness, or cheeriness; he does not believe in man’s inherent goodness; nor does he see nature as a universal panacea made in the image of God – all of which are associated, not neccessarily correctly, with the New Testament and are so rife in, for instance, Pasternak’s works. Brodsky looks at the world with a clear gaze and with the understanding that despair is often an adequate response to the world’s challenge: ‘pain is not an infringement of the rules’ (K, p. 63). – Where, in your opinion, should we look for the origin of this tragic world view of his? – A poet is a man with a tragic world view par excellence. History, in as far as it is able, is his helpmate there. – What is the most painful truth that Brodsky has managed to say about our times? – Brodsky may be the first man to find an adequate response to the population explosion, the fact that one man is as good as another, the fruitlessness of our personal efforts, of our knowledge for future generations. – You said once that Brodsky has no one to compete with, no one to talk to on his level, amongst his contemporaries. 16 Did you have in mind just Russian poets or also those writing in Polish, Lithuanian, English and so on? – I had in mind, and I continue to have in mind, Russian poets only. – Do you know what sort of things he reads? – In general yes, but less so of recent years. Brodsky rejects many books, many authors, after reading a few pages, and possibly he doesn’t make any attempt to know everything in full, doesn’t aspire to a literary specialist’s ‘breadth of vision’ but he does read his favourite authors constantly. Sometimes it’s Baratynsky, sometimes it’s Tsvetaeva or Frost or Hardy or Montale. I’ve seen it myself on many occasions. I’ve also noticed a fondness for the Austro-Hungarian writers Musil and Joseph Roth.

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– What do you think of Aksenov’s skit on Brodsky in his novel ‘Skazhi Izium’? How do you explain Aksyonov’s coarseness? – In the novel Brodsky is dealt with at a level that is very uncharacteristic of him, the level of petty authorial intrigue, career, fame and royalties. The thing is, the author of the novel, turn as he will, remains a Soviet writer. That’s not a reproach, but a simple statement of the facts, and Aksyonov himself would, possibly, agree with that. Brodsky isn’t a Soviet writer and, in a certain sense, he can’t be pinned down as belonging to literature as such, to the realm of career, fame and royalties. – ‘What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend! It’s as if he’d hired them to do it on purpose.’ 17 What, in Brodsky’s case, guarantees identity of voice and fate? – Like almost everything Akhmatova said, those words are true. The times paid no heed to the voice as such, only to the absence of or the falsification of the voice (that was also outside the Soviet Union, though within the Soviet Union that took a particularly ferocious character). Nowadays things have improved somewhat almost everywhere. But sometimes an awful situation can be like the tempering of steel; it imparts an unexpected resonance to the voice. – I’m pretty certain there’s a poem of yours called ‘Achilles’ Shield’, which is dedicated to Brodsky. Would you please tell me about it? When was it written? – It was written at the time of Brodsky’s departure, at a time when he was sending me postcards from London. It’s written in the form of a conversation between the two of us (between London and Klaipeda), perhaps it’s a distant echoing call to his ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ (U, pp. 55 - 65). ‘Achilles’ Shield’, the title is taken from Auden, stands for a sheet of paper and for poetry in general. The arch of sound, the chains, the rock, naturally a quote from the Gospels, all relate to the same theme. It’s all about two worlds, and in both of them the poet can expect much the same fate – hence Thermopylae versus Troy etc. Terra firma is an Italian, even a Venetian word, which means firm ground, the continent as opposed to the lagoon. The style is rather archaic but that may be of little importance; it’s in the style of Norwid.

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ACHILLES’ SHIELD To Joseph Brodsky I speak alone that on the nerves’ taut screen I shall see clearly now, as once you used to, The key lying there beside the empty ashtray, These railings by the chapels built of stone. You weren’t wrong: all’s just as it is here. For now. Even the scope of the imagination. The same descent of kilometres to the shore-line Where still the sea Hears both of us. Beneath the green-leafed roof Gleam, almost as before, the heavy lampshades. The different tempi that impel the clock’s hands Are far more dangerous than the bitter wave Between us. Moving far in space’s grip You grow as distant as the Greeks, as strange as The Medeans. In shame we’ve stayed, we others, On board this ship Which is not safe, not even for the rats. And if one looks well, then one realises: This is no ship, but brick walls, bright roofs, troubles, A date that all too frequently comes round – In fact, maturity. This tutelage Sinks into all our brains. Expanses, Each day growing emptier, would have come to blind us, If by the verge Where, vertical, the rain hovers and roves A solemn vault of sound had not arisen, Almost annihilated in this sudden summer, But giving us the blessed manacles That probably coincide with, fit the soul – Exalt and burn, defining outlines, forming, Because our heaven and our terra firma Are in voice, all.

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Peace to you. To you and me, both, peace. Let it be dark. And let the seconds hurtle. Through densest space, that dream of many layers, I read each character your pen’s released. Whole cities disappear. In nature’s stead, A white shield, counterweight to non-existence. In its engraving both our different eras Lie double-etched (Were there but happiness and strength enough!) As though in water. Or, put more precisely, As though in emptiness. Waves beat the beach-head, Disintegrate the mobile sketch. The squares Of windows gleam with blackness. Late in dreams The heated air seeps slowly through the glass panes. Beyond the towers, a motor faintly rasping And into me Roll day and hours. You see, between each chime, The bell’s blind swing inside its belfry. Till the foundations answer its peal dully There flows an endless interval of time. The portals quiver, tautened by the beat, And archway signals out to neighbouring archway, And soul and continents call out to one another In living night. A dirty gloom enshrouds the sails, and sticks. The sodden quay exhales a pungent vapour. You see Thermopylae, having seen Troy earlier – The shield is given to you. You are a rock. The pillars set above this permanence Impact the wind with their scintillant metal, Although the rock, too, stands near sham and swindle And wordlessness. Entrusting to each one of us our fates You cross now to the level of remembrance. But every moment that exists, exists twice.

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We are accompanied by a double light Inside the ring that days, nights tighten more. Low tide. On sand the ebb’s pools glisten. Boat, stone don’t yet look different on the coastline, The empty shore. Translated from the Lithuanian by David McDuff 18

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12

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Joseph Brodsky, ‘Poetry as a Form of Opposition to Reality’, Foreword to a collection of Venclova’s poetry translated into Polish, Rozmowa w zimie (Paris, 1989); published in Russian in Russkaya mysl, 25 May 1990, pp. I, xii. Tomas Venclova, an article without a title, Novy Amerikanets, 23 - 9 May 1980, p. 9. Ibid. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Poeziya kak forma soprotivleniya real’nosti’, an introduction to Tomas Venclova’s collection of poems, trans, from the Lithuanian into Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak, Russkaya mysl, 25 May 1990, Spetsialnoe prilozhenie, p. I. Tomas Venclova, ‘Pamiati poeta. Variant’, trans, from the Lithuanian by Joseph Brodsky, Kontinent, no. 9 (1976) pp. 5 - 6. Tomas Venclova, ‘A Journey from Petersburg to Istanbul’, Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 135. Klemens Pozhecky, ‘Uvenchanie neslomlennoy Rossii’, Literaturnoe prilozhenie, no. 5, k Russkoy mysli, 25 December 1987, p. II; trans, from the Polish by N. Gorbanevskaya. Viktor Krivulin, ‘Iosif Brodsky (mesto)’, Poetika Brodskogo, ed. Lev Loseff (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1986) p. 227. Venclova, in Novy Amerikanets. Venclova, ‘A Journey from Petersburg to Istanbul’, p. 140. Ibid., pp. 13 49. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Preface’ to Modern Russian Poets on Poetry, ed. Carl Proffer, selected and introduced by Joseph Brodsky (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974) p. 8. Tomas Venclova, ‘Chuvstvo perspektivy’, a conversation with Joseph Brodsky, Brodskii, Kniga interv’iu (M., Zakharov, 2007), p. 547.

14

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16 17

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Aleksey Losev, ‘Niotkuda s lyubovyu … Zametki o stikhakh Iosifa Brodskogo’, Kontinent, no. 14 (1977) p. 308. Zeev Bar-Sella, in ‘Tolkovanie na …’ writes: ‘The paths of the two dissidents have diverged – one is an imperialist, the other a separatist … the Lithuanian poet and a representative of a Russian empire (it’s strange to think that before that Jew came along there wasn’t a real imperialist in Russian literature!)’, Dvadtsat’ dva, no. 23 (1982) p. 231. Venclova, in Novy Amerikanets. Anatoly Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (London: Peter Halban, 1991) p. 5. The English translation of Venclova’s poem was published in Encounter, vol. LV, no. 5 (November 1980) pp. 32 - 3.

18 ROY F I SHER Roy Fisher (born 11 June 1930 in Handsworth, Birmingham), poet, jazz piano-player, graduated from Birmingham University (1951), worked as a school and college teacher (1953 - 63), and as a lecturer at Bordesley College, Birmingham (1963 - 71) and at Keele University (1972 - 82). Since 1982, he has been a freelance writer and musician. His first poem (1949) was modelled on Dylan Thomas; those following being pastiches of Auden, Yeats and Eliot. He acquired a reputation as ‘a city poet’ with the publication of his first two pamphlets City (Worcester, 1961) and Then Hallucinations: City ll (Worcester, 1962), where he displayed a new approach to the material by intermingling ideas and images from paintings, newspapers and photographs. In the late 1950’s, in touch with many American poets, he was working outside the English orthodoxy of the time. He became well-known with his next book, The Ship’s Orchestra (London, 1967), a surrealist prose poem which he had begun in 1962, a sensuous response to Picasso’s Three Musicians. During the 1960’s he published a few more collections: Ten Interiors with Various Figures (Nottingham, 1966); The Memorial Fountain (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1967); Titles (Nottingham, 1969); and the most accomplished of all: Collected Poems, 1968 (London, 1969), which brought him international recognition and prestige and put paid to his being called ‘a muffled provincial eccentric’. He continued experiments on the borders of poetry and prose in The Cut Pages and Matrix (both London, 1971), composing some poems in the manner of a musical phrase. Out of a total of two dozen collections, the principal ones are: Poems, 1955 - 1980 (Oxford, 1980), A Furnace (Oxford, 1986), Poems 1955 - 1987 (Oxford, 1988), Birmingham River (Oxford, 1994), The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955 - 2005 (Bloodaxe, 2005). ‘A Furnace’ is a long poem, a double spiral, as Fisher put it, ‘a mixture of verbal experience and physical observation’; it continues the theme of the city and projects ‘an overwhelming subjective sense of being possessed by the place’. Although Fisher described himself as ‘a 1920s Russian modernist, his style is too elegant and exact to a fault, his use of tropes too sparing, and his treatment of the poetic persona too austere to fit into any Russian model.

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A NOBL E Q U I XO T IC S IGH T An Interview with Roy Fisher (5 March 1990, Keele) – Peter Porter has said that your message is about how to look for the mystical in a barbarous time. 1 Would you agree that this is your message? – I wouldn’t disagree with that. He’s picking up some words from the closing section of ‘A Furnace’, 2 in which I am referring to our own times as barbarous. I suppose I refer to them as barbarous times with the thought that they have no vocabulary and no forms for finding what he might call the mystical. I would simply call it the truth. – Do your critics, when they interpret your poems, usually get it right, or do they miss a lot? It varies. Reviewers, who, write in a hurry, have rather different motives for writing. I’ve never been interested in such short pieces. Recently there have been three or four longer essays, which seem to me to be getting a reasonably accurate view of what I’m doing, so that I feel that I am managing to be comprehensible. – You are a poet who in a way, belongs to two cultures: to the American and to the English tradition. Where would you place yourself? – I’ve never thought about this. I don’t seem to have done more than to find out how to get started, simply to maintain a space around me in which I can work. I don’t think I’ve been, knowingly, directly influenced by many poets and I haven’t felt much fellowship, in the deep sense, with the work of many poets. – Which criteria would you choose in order to place yourself? Your technique? Your attitude to the English language? Your main themes? Your concern with the problems of the present time? Which would be the dominating one? – Well, the sheer blankness of my response is extremely interesting. I don’t see myself from that distance. I don’t know whether the question, even as you detail it, is not very meaningful to me because I’ve got an antipathy to all those criteria; or whether it’s because I’m so solipsistic that I’ve no sense of surroundings, or where my work might fit. You see, I’m very used to being placed, by the people who

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try to place me, in a curious position, which is absurd, but it makes sense to them. That is, having been a young experimental writer, then a persistently experimental writer, I am now, apparently, a veteran experimental writer. I’m an ‘approachable outsider’. I’m very used to being put in that sort of position and to being treated as somebody who’s rather obstinate, really, who follows his own way. I’m content to let people who ask me for work publish it. I don’t ask people to do things for me because, to be honest, I don’t believe either the part of the literary world which accepts me or the part of it which ignores me to be particularly substantial. I use the minority of people who invite me to do things, write to me, talk to me, obviously know my work, I use them almost socially as people who are my circle and who keep me going. – Would you be able to define the most characteristic features of your poetics? – I think I can only answer that by watching myself work. I relate myself, as I suppose every writer does, to the state of the language, to the ordinary everyday language I hear around me and which I use. And the stance I take towards that is, first, to withdraw from it into silence. It’s not quite the extreme and philosophical silence of Beckett, but it’s a similar one. I go into a silence in which I don’t exist. And that silence is pleasurable to me. Then I will allow sounds and language, as little as possible, as meanly as possible, to earn their places in the silence, only because they must intrude and can’t help it. It is essential to me for them to be there. And where I will take it from there, from that very mean use of language, very careful use of anguage, I like to move through that narrow path into an opening of lyric, or of description, or of sensuality, or of the recreation of nature in language. But only if the experience is passed through nothingness and silence. I can do at times without very much in the way of figurative language, because I’m much more concerned with the angle of an utterance, with the tone of it, with the degree to which it points up, down, sideways; the degree to which it is alive, nearly alive, just dead. I start from that and go on from there. – Do you feel any affinity with Brodsky? – For me there’s a very delicately balanced ‘yes’ and ‘no’. They are almost equal. I’ve said already that, for me, to experience a sense

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of affinity with a poet is almost meaningless. I don’t have that sort of feeling for another poet. But if I look for an affinity with Brodsky I find it through that curtain of language that’s between us. Sometimes the curtain is English. I find it quite easy, I think, to understand what it’s like to be Brodsky; what his work is for him; what his life is for him. And this is partly because he is very eloquent at saying this. Beyond that, I go on to relate to him, as I would to anybody, by seeing where I diverge from him. Brodsky is ten years younger than I am, and he’s only been around in my consciousness since my forties or fi fties, so he’s not going to have been anything formative for me. So I think I can see him and sense his energy and his gift most clearly at the points at which I diverge from him. And I can sense those quite well. There’s a point in one of the autobiographical essays where he talks about the young writers in Leningrad when he was in his teens. And for them books were freedom, books were the opposite of authority. And the ‘world culture’, the things that they could pick up from the classical literature (which he now uses so much) along with whatever they were fed in the educational system they went through. I can see how they could then go to the books which would be at the centre of Western syllabuses and value them as symbols of freedom. For me, though, those same books that were at the centre of the syllabuses were the property of the people, of the caste, who were the owners and manipulators of our society. The terms of authority in those two societies are so vastly different that they can hardly be compared. But, for me, the feeling of being able to use accepted literature, of being able to be bookish, to think with the aid of certain texts, to communicate with other people through literary allusion, all that would be stifling and academic. And for much of my time I’ve felt impelled to work in a quite anti-literary way. Similarly, Brodsky’s got very clearly, in so far as I can make anything of the poetry through translation, a great affection for discursive poetry, a quite open play of ideas and figurative language. That was never a way I could go, because I’d simply have been joining a quite amiable literary establishment which never had to fight for any freedom it had. Any freedom I have I get by withdrawing from that, by claiming to be a piano player rather than a writer, and writing in

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a way which doesn’t put me in danger of being taken by the culture as a favoured son. – It seems to me, you and Brodsky have something else in common. You are a poet of a city, as Donald Davie has called you. 3 Brodsky has a special gift for characterising cities: take such of his poems as ‘The Thames at Chelsea’ (PS, pp. 89 - 91), ‘December in Florence’ (PS, pp. 119 - 21), or ‘Near Alexandria’ (TU, pp. 58 - 9) about Washington. I would like your comments on any of those poems. – My initial reaction to the London and Florence poems was an extratextual one: that one shouldn’t pander to the pretensions of historic capitals and city-states by honouring them with poetic set-pieces, however brilliant. If the poet who does that is merely a cultural tourist the work will have a stale smell. But it’s plain in all of these poems that Brodsky is a genuine stranger who has a right – indeed, he has no choice but to do so – to bring himself from the city of his birth to these particular ‘sacred’ places and measure them as parts of a deeper journey. So he’s a constant presence. You’re aware of him looking from under lowered lids at what these showplaces are showing him; and you’re also aware that at the same time he’s drawing his own pictures of them by mapping them in similes and metaphors, sometimes outrageous. Characteristically, he goes for the monumental self-images of the places, especially Washington, but isn’t overawed. Also, he sets out in Florence to conjure Dante, and has enough strength of will to bring it off. Not many would have managed it. It’s in the second of the remarkable pair of stanzas – the fourth and fifth – of ‘The Thames at Chelsea’, where he shrugs free of the patterned tedium of London and dives into his own compulsions, that I find most common ground with Brodsky’s writing about cities. I don’t imagine he’ll ever now need to write about a city like mine, a huge, hasty, uncherished growth with no metropolitan qualities and only the shallowest claims on imperial history, but having for all that the power to overwhelm a poet’s consciousness. I’d like to see what he’d do with it. – According to Czeslaw Milosz, Brodsky resembles W. H. Auden ‘in his experiments with poetic genres – ode, lyrical poem, elegy, descriptive poems, the story in verse’. 4 Since genres survive better than anything else in translation, do you see any affinity between Brodsky and Auden in this or any other respect?

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– I can see that very clearly. That’s most unusual, because it means that a good part of what Brodsky is doing in Russian, or in English, or in Russian translated into English, either by himself or by others, is something which is not now commonly done in English poetry. It’s very much a genre, or a set of genres, which I suppose Auden developed, particularly between the middle thirties and the late fifties, when he was moving into his style of (how shall I put it?) cultural discursiveness, of behaving in one or other of the neoclassical ways. I don’t know that that style of writing ever extended very far beyond the enormously strong personality of Auden himself. I’ve been puzzling over how much coincidence there was in Brodsky’s discovery of Auden as his way into English poetry. – As you know, Brodsky has written two essays on Auden. Why do you think he has singled him out from all the other English poets of this century? – Well, he explains this himself, doesn’t he, in terms of the Auden poem about time worshipping language? So that explanation leads me to believe that there was no chance about it, Brodsky’s preoccupations were such that an English poet who swam into his net saying those things would appear very congenial. I probably can’t clear the question up, only obscure it, by pronouncing an almost contrary instance from my own experience, of encountering what an English reader will think is Russian poetry. When I read translations of Pasternak, who was the first to come through into general interest because of Dr Zhivago 30 years ago, it was the sheer explosion of sensuality and emotion which made me think: this is an aesthetic I will incorporate and this is something which I want to write which is not in English poetry. English poetry is often a notably moralising sort of poetry. Auden’s didactism and his willingness to moralise, those were refreshing for Brodsky perhaps, because he certainly enjoys working on that level and for reasons other than Auden’s. He has, for instance, a powerful metaphysic of form and discipline. What does he say about why rhyme is effective? Something like this, ‘it shapes your mental operation, to say the least, in more ways than one; it becomes your mode of cognition’ (L, p. 350). So I can see the appeal of Auden there. I can only say, and I suppose almost every English poet who is around today will say, that it is a most unusual choice for anybody to come up

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with, because Auden was an extremely powerful and influential figure for a period and invaded the ears of a whole generation of people, of readers and young writers, simply with the beguilingly authoritative tone which he developed. And there has been a reaction against that ever since. – It’s interesting that whilst you’ve been struck by an explosion of emotion in Russian poetry, Brodsky has been trying to cultivate the quality that he finds in Auden’s and in English poetry in general, that of an ‘objective and dispassionate discourse’ (L, p. 319). Would you agree that English poetry, generally, sounds more neutral, less emotional, strives towards objectivity, both in tone and vocabulary? – Yes, there are more answers to that than one. The way I myself work is obviously going to depend upon a very flat and objective tone, because that’s the ground on which you have to stand before you can rise. I know that my neutrality of tone goes so far as to preclude anything judgemental – although I think of my work as didactic. But there is in English poetry a tendency to be tiresomely and compulsively judgemental, in that a great deal of the middle ground of English poetry in the last 20 or 30 years has been merely descriptive, merely autobiographical, merely journalistic, and it has had just about the degree of mild judgement in it that good journalism has, whereas poetry of the 1930s, of Auden, was severely judgemental. I would rather have that. I’d rather know what was being done. But there’s a sort of low judgemental level, a sort of gentle moralising; describing things, elaborating them a little, using some well-chosen figures of speech and making them sensible. – Apart from the names we so far have mentioned, who else, to your eyes, is especially visible in Brodsky’s poetry? – Dante, I suppose. Again, I’m closed off from the poetry by language. I may not be able to answer that at all, because my classics are not as good as Brodsky’s. – I’m hinting at English seventeenth-century poetry, at John Donne and the other Metaphysicals. – Oh, yes, I can see in the laying out of his poems there is a particular way, in which Donne would lay out a poem like ‘The Nocturnall upon St Lucie’s Day’, or like ‘The Flea’. It’s a certain length of poem. It operates in long stanzas, contains a proposition which is partly ver-

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bal, partly fanciful, and will carry with it a great undertow of feeling and association. – You’re familiar with Brodsky’s poem ‘The Butterfly’. Do you see John Donne in that particular poem? – Yes, I should think so; I know of no other source but the English seventeenth-century for it, although it’s not a pastiche. Interestingly enough – I’m speaking off the top of my head and without looking at the books – Auden’s habit of elaborated memorial or meditative poems, particularly from the late 1930s on, would link with the direct influence of the seventeenth-century. That seems to be a thing which Auden felt he had the grasp of tone and also the technical reach to be able to pull off, though it’s never occurred to me before to wonder where it was that Auden got that. He was being educated at the time when the Metaphysicals had become a proper subject of study, which was in the late 1920s. They were not much regarded before then. – T. S. Eliot wrote on English Metaphysical poetry. Didn’t he write in that vein himself? – He reacted back in order to bring the echoes of that time forward. Auden lifted forms out to make vehicles for the modern but un-English ability he’d cultivated, of moving tightly through abstractions. – Brodsky discovered English Metaphysical poetry before he discovered Auden and T. S. Eliot. Do you think his interest in both of them is in part due to his interest in Donne and the other Metaphysical poets whom he translated into Russian at the time? – I’m rather deaf to Eliot these days, these decades, so I can’t see any relation between his methods and Brodsky’s. I can certainly see them between Brodsky’s and Auden’s, but I’m so dubious about Eliot’s ways of developing his material that I can’t really pursue that course of thought any further. – Now, Tom Gunn said that one has ‘to be obsessed about something to write well about it’. 5 Would you agree? I would agree. I think that there’s got to be a degree of obsession. It’s got to be of the language of the obsession too, so that the words of it are exciting beyond their ordinary, common level. Then has to be something which has invaded your mental life or which is within it. It lives off you, you live off it. – What are your obsessions?

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– I don’t know all of them. I know perfectly well that from about 30 years ago I began to write out of an obsession with the actual physical fact of my native city. I knew at the time that it was an obsession, but it was a Gothic obsession. It towered. It’s what Brodsky would call a vertical thing. It towered over me. It towered around me. I would go through it as in a dream landscape and I didn’t know what it was made of, or why it was there, or why it affected me in the way that it did. I now know a good deal about it and I always assumed that I’d written the obsession out completely. But I’m still being caught by surprise and the obsession becomes more and more abstract, more and more refined. The other obsession I know that I’ve got, and it comes out in the strains I put on language, is boundaries: light and dark, day and night, life and death. I’m very often taking language to boundaries of this sort and making it not divided when it wants to divide. I’m trying to make it overlap, make it explain that its divisions are not permanent. It doesn’t want to do this, but I’ve got an obsession with wanting to take language at that point. There’s Beckett again obviously. He was taken to that area over and over again. – Beckett’s name brings us back to Brodsky since Brodsky adores Beckett. I hope you’re familiar with the last part of To Urania, his long poem in dialogue, ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’. When Brodsky showed it to his English friend in Leningrad (it was written in 1968), she said, ‘It’s fine, Joseph, but there’s too much Beckett in it.’ And he said, when he told the story to me, ‘I think it’s better than Beckett.’ 6 Do you see any Beckett in ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’? – I remember him saying he fell in love with the picture of Beckett before he’d read any of his words (L, p. 22). Yes, there’s plenty of Beckett there. I can see bits from Godot and I can see bits from the novels: that particular sort of struggle between two figures. I suppose Brodsky will think it better because it’s got an external form. On my side of the wall we believe in an idol, which is the idea of organic form, the idea that the energy in a movement of ideas can, in itself, add an optimum form. Which is why I work so often at great risk to any reputation one can have in England, I work in prose-poetry and I work very close to prose and I destroy metre in my own work, so that metre will not distort, not what I’m saying, but will not distort the poetry I’m saying.

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– A number of Brodsky’s critics have referred to the ‘prosaic’ quality of his poetic language. Bearing in mind that he does preserve metre and rhyme, what in your opinion constitutes his prosaism, apart that is from his vocabulary? – I can’t comment on the sound of Brodsky’s Russian as it compares with other Russian poetry which may be considered less prosaic. And, paradoxically, his perpetual play of metaphor and other figures shows up in the English version as a texture much more ornately worked and eventful than the low-mimetic or conversational quality of most contemporary poetry written in English. So we have to take the alleged prosaic element on trust. Where it is unmistakably present for us is in the persona: the place of its attention, its dryness, its irony. Devices are used, not to inflate but to maintain a constant process of deft conceptual housekeeping. The lyric sense is always there, but its flights are kept short. – As a man with obsessions, are you able to spot any of Brodsky’s obsessions, whether in his poetry or in his prose? – I notice particularly, because it makes him present images of objects, his fascination with the Augustan attempts of cultures to make themselves durable, in monuments, buildings, statues. – Why do you think he is preoccupied with the theme of time to the extent he is? – I’ve puzzled over this, because it’s a thing I accept as a psychological torment that we have. I tend to live with it so constantly that it doesn’t come apart from me. I’m never a yard away from it. So that I can never talk about it by naming it. So it may well be an obsession of mine which is as strong as it is for Brodsky. It is an absurdity of every minute I live. I can understand his interest in it. I have to say that in reading the essays I tend to notice that he’s talking about it as being of primary importance for him, but I don’t get the feeling as to why it is of primary importance for him. That fascinating thing which comes up from time to time when he’s talking about the devices of verse, particularly the caesura, how does he put it? – ‘… within his Alexandrine verse – Mandelstam, along with producing an almost physical sensation of time’s tunnel, creates the effect of play within a play, of a caesura within a caesura, of a pause within a pause. Which is, after all, a form of time, if not its meaning: if time does get stopped by that, it at least gets focused’ (L, p. 127).

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– He talks about it as a means of manipulating time or arresting time. I find that very exciting, or very excited, very heady. He gives himself this freedom to generalise grandly and to make very wide remarks of that sort. I can see that that’s where he wants to manipulate time, in his mental world, and in his own native language. As English reaches me I don’t want to manipulate it. I almost want to manipulate time in an opposite way. I want to arrest the language completely and make it stand still, because our language is running, it’s running slithery, so it’s quite good to arrest the language. And for me the means have to be quite brutal. You have to use means like the machines that dig up the roads. Literally, I may have to dig up the ground in front of a run of English in much the same way as you would cut down trees in front of a fire. I have to make blank space, but that’s the way my language comes to me and it’s not the way his language has come to him. – Language is another of Brodsky’s obsessions. For him, ‘poetry is not ‘the best words in the best order’; for language it is the highest form of existence’ (L, p. 186). Why is Brodsky, as can be seen from all his essays so enormously preoccupied with language? – An important part of it has to do with the familiar notion that an authoritarian state can steal the people’s language and then, since language is extremely vulnerable to taboo, lease it back in a doctored condition, using it as an instrument of social and mental control. Any scraps of deviant language cannot then but acquire magical powers – real powers, too, to strike fear into the authorities, to change events, to get people killed – whereas with us language comes cheap and is thought to be plentiful and hence unremarkable. Brodsky doesn’t appear in his poems as a romantic or dramatised figure, but his poetic impetus comes from an underlying dramatisation of his magic and intimate relationship with the powers, and the fate, of the Russian language. – Brodsky also makes a distinction between English literature and Russian, or rather European, literature. According to him, ‘Europeans look at the world as if from within, as its participants, its victims’, while English writers and poets ‘have a slightly amazed, dumbfounded view of things, from off to the side’. 7 Where does this sense of detachment, which Brodsky values so much in English, come from? Is it an organic part of the language itself?

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– There may be something quite subtle built into the language, in that our language is the language of a declined empire, just as Latin in its time had to become that and our language has many habits inherited from Latin, as we administered the Empire through the leavings of other empires. It may be that the fact that we are a decayed Empire means that our language has somewhere a way of including distance, including, if you like, hierarchy, which appears a new language for somebody who doesn’t have that. Again, one can see why Auden is so congenial for Brodsky, because it’s the idea of a world whose patterns and courses can be seen from somewhere. Auden’s view of it, so far as I know, was informed by the conventional Christian view of history which centres on the alleged Redemption and what followed it. That there’s an order and there’s a concept of order, of a world city and of a heavenly city and a predictable order which works whether one follows the theology or not. Auden’s view of the world culture must be also appealing to Brodsky. – Since you mentioned world culture, why is it, in your view, that Brodsky felt that there is an urgent necessity to come to the defence of culture in our age of reason and progress? – Well, he makes no bones about this. He takes I suppose a neo-classical position – it’s certainly one which is congenial to me – which supposes that full civilisation has never occurred. That certain small, well-wrought packages of civilisation have occurred here and there and they survive only because of the degree to which they were well-made and to which they have left relics, scraps of literature, bits of statuary, bits of jewellery, legal codes, the odd tragedy, by which we can know the standard, the acute-ness of people’s perception. Poets who take up that position will react to it according to their own temperaments. Pound took a highly active and obsessional view as to what was to be done with actual culture. My old friend Basil Bunting withdrew to the North and said very little, and said it quite vehemently. My tendency, coming as I do from the working class, is to be cynical and pained and to preserve my own view of what’s right. Brodsky, who is a liberated man, a man who has got out of jail, seems to me to wish to circulate and to gather and to discourse and to keep culture – dreadful word – to run around in it, to see that the channels are open, that the circulation is working. That’s valuable.

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– Why do you think Russian poetry of this century has attracted so much attention in the West, seeing that it is almost untranslatable? – The Russians keep telling us it’s good though it’s untranslatable. It’s a very important question. The naive answer is …well, there are two naive answers and they are probably the only ones I’ve got. The first one is that it looks as though it’s good. The other explanation, similarly naive and often sentimentalised, is that it speaks bravely to the formlessness of Western, capitalist, liberal-democratic, whatever you like, cultures which suffer a strange vertigo of not knowing what to do with, how to regard their artists in all arts, how to remove them from the flux of social classes, finance, journalism. They don’t know in what world they live. They don’t know what they are for. They want to have them. They wish they could value them. But to that world there is the raw appeal of fundamentalism such as exists in the dramatic situations of writers in Eastern Europe, whose mere playing with language is treated as a crime. That brings the whole thing into focus and draws our attention to it. In this country if you’re a poet you can get into the press only by two means: one is if you are the Poet Laureate; the other is if you are elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Even if we allow for the fact that individual Oxford Professors of Poetry often try hard to make sense of their duties, these are two utterly trivial posts, which ought to be abolished because they do more harm than good, in that they attract trivialising attention: this little outcrop of clowning and tawdry competitiveness over nothing, with the assumption that poetry is a strange little hobby which silly people do and have silly pretensions about. That is, literally, the only real visibility of the whole art to the general public, and not very many of them at that. It would be extremely difficult for poetry to collide with the authority system. If you imagine the full blankness of a situation where the writers, particularly the poets, have no one to talk to but one another, and the talkative ones are usually the very small-time reputation-makers and logrollers, then you can very easily see how an oppressed writer, who may be a very good one like Mandelstam, or a very much less good one like Ratushinskaya, can become a dramatic character on to whom people will project their ideas of what it is like to be a writer. And you might say, ‘Mandelstam came to a dreadful end.’ You can be aware that you have no wish whatsoever to meet the end which Mandelstam

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met. You might also know that what happened to Mandelstam was quite possibly, as far as I understand, irrelevant to his actual poetic gift. It was in no way commensurate to the gift, but the knocks on the door, the sense of being watched, or listened to, meant that poetry was brought sharply into focus. Now Brodsky talks about this. He points out that most of a poet’s life is indescribable flux. It’s just the same as everybody’s life and it’s only the bits which are focused into poetry, or into the role of the poet, which move beyond that person’s life and become the material for other people to use. It’s very obvious that some writers – Yeats did it, so far as I’m aware, Blok probably did it, Rilke certainly did it – extended the poetic centre of their lives into every possible area of it, so that they themselves, the poets, were the artwork. But it’s always interesting for us who are outside that world where the focusing is done by force of circumstance, to be able to imagine that a person’s work can be compressed and made dense and energised even by those terrible means. In Britain we don’t regard our intellectuals, our artists, our writers, as having any other status than that which they can acquire by commercial means. There is no scale of usefulness for intellectuals and writers per se on account of what they do. It is how society operates. It’s extremely inefficient, extremely wasteful, extremely cruel and extremely damaging to the intelligence of the populace, and one day it will bring us to ruin, and it’s working hard to do it. But, again, we have a nostalgia for any country that notices an artist long enough to put him in jail while knowing perfectly well that we’re quite glad never to have been beaten up, never to have been banned, never to have been arrested. But we pay quite a high price for our peace. – You’ve read all the Russian poets in translation: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Blok, etc. None of them have been particularly lucky with their English translators. How would you evaluate Brodsky’s translations, whether they are done by other poets, or by himself, in comparison with the translations of Akhmatova, Mandelstam or Pasternak? – I think he’s probably in the same boat as the others. Very strange, actually, for a person whose prose is so approachable that he may well be in the situation that we’re taught to believe that Pushkin is in: that hardly anything of the poetry comes through. I tend to think that some raw energy or drama of the self does, particularly if the English translator has gone for that, and then you feel you’re in touch with the

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poet. You’ll know very well that English translators of these poets have usually avoided trying to reproduce the metres, because if you reproduce the metres in English with any exactitude, even without going into the fact that the metres of an inflected language function totally differently from the metres of an uninflected language, the metres suffer from being accidentally associated in the mind of all the readers with comic poetry and children’s poetry and light verse. So the metres are not free to do their job, because we hear other poetry in them. This is a great pity, but there’s not much you can do about it. So the translators, in my experience, tend to go for a particular feature of a poet and will try to reproduce that. With Brodsky who, as far as I know, works in a different way… – He doesn’t dramatise himself. – He doesn’t dramatise himself. There’s an urbane persona. There’s the sense of the mind and the language playing over a surface extensively. Translation becomes very, very difficult indeed, I would have thought. Added to which he is present and can intervene in the debate as to whether his metrical forms are so important that they must be carried over. And there I think we have problems. I’ve got a feeling that the English would learn quite a lot from the systematic working through of the translation of Brodsky. For instance, if I take Brodsky’s writing in prose with an almost metaphysical sense of what rhyme does and then see him using a half-rhyme – it’s almost impossible to reason through the argument, because the answer isn’t reasonable – there are certain half-rhymes which the English ear will accept as a valid consonance, and others which strike them as worse than a non-rhyme; and time and time again unless we imagine ourselves as trained by a whole school of poetry that used that degree of non-rhyme or partial rhyme to accept those as consonances or parallelisms rather than ruptures, then our ears will be disturbed when he wants them to be confirmed. We want the experience, I think, to be a confirmatory one and instead it’s a disruptive one, and it makes the surface of the poetry as it comes in English look fanciful and playful, but we can’t tell just what degree of playfulness there is. I think there’s another problem which is that English is, as everybody knows, a rich and subtle and very fluent language; to my mind it’s too fluent for its own good, because standard English has lost a lot of the force of its consonants in the last few hundred years. It’s very weak in

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consonants. It’s poor in rhymes. To write in rhyme in English tends to be quite inhibiting because your choice is very limited compared with, say, German or Russian. But there’s also the fact that English contains already a great body of dead metaphor. Most languages do, I suppose. English particularly contains a lot of dead metaphor, a lot of buried figurative language, so that very often what a writer has to do is to clear away metaphor in order to create space and to make a impid texture. To write, as I call it, meanly, so that there is space between the figures. I know that if I react against Brodsky’s versions I may be reading from my own extreme position of wanting little, of wanting it to have space to hang and radiate. In music there’s a phrase ‘busy’, which means there are lots of little notes and pauses. The texture of Brodsky’s translations, as English poetry, reads to me as busy. Something is active, something is running about in the way of the poetry and it somehow needs combining for me, so that the shapes show better. I can’t believe that the texture of the Russian, or the texture of Brodsky’s mind when he’s writing in English, is as ‘busy’ as the texture of the translations. There’s a great deal going on, and it’s not quite systematised so as to show its inner form, the way in which ideas hang as planets hang in the sky. I can’t see the three-or four-dimensional relationships of the ideas, because I’m seeing a very active single surface. So I’m not happy with them yet. I don’t know what the answer to this is. It’s salutary and quite a noble sight, if a quixotic one, to see Brodsky coming into English and fighting, practically, to reverse its retreat as a matter of principle, and in gratitude for what it’s given him. – Do you have a poem either addressed to Brodsky, or dedicated to him, or thematically close to him? – After writing ‘The Collection of Things’ I became aware that while describing a scene into which I could easily imagine Brodsky walking I had been sailing not far from some of his concerns. Apart from Life, Death and Time, I can detect such themes as the survival of poets as monuments; the preservation and revival of classical ceremonies (the Delphic Festivals which Sikelianos instituted); the mission of poetry and language to lead the consciousness of nations; cultural pilgrimage. There’s even a mention, rare for me, of Judaeo-Christian beliefs. Some things – love, metre and rhyme – I couldn’t manage to include on this occasion.

A Noble Quixotic Sight

THE COLLECTION OF THINGS I encountered Sikelianos unexpectedly, in the early evening. It was in the bare, ungardened patch around what must have been his house, or summer place, or his museum: shuttered, builder’s gear all about; a chained goat; a telegraph post with a streetlamp slung from it; Sikelianos on his plinth in that scruffy, peaceful spot, surveying the Gulf of Corinth in the haze below, marble head and shoulders a little grander than human, flushed by the sunset’s glance across Delphi’s red-tiled roofs. He was one more fact. Not a provocation to any fervour, to any damage. On a side track along the hill there was damage: two bullet-holes, small calibre, crazing the glass front of a shrine, erect kiosk of rusted grey sheet iron, a worn offertory slot under the locked, tended display-case. Which contained, undamaged, a green glass lamp, oil for it in a pop-bottle, a torn-out magazine page with a stained ikon. And another place, below and behind the poet’s head, had a cracked gold high-heeled slipper. It was an almost empty grave under the cypresses, cut shallow and dry in the churchyard rock, most recently used, for a short spell,

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by a woman of the generation of Sikelianos. Nothing left in it but the marker recording her death at ninety, two or three years back, and a plastic posy, some small bones, the shoe. Sikelianos is gathered in, called down from every corner of the air to condense into that shape of marble, rendered to a decent conceivable size and emitting among the hills a clear quiet sunset tone that owes no further obligation at all to detail, description, the collection of things. 8

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Peter Porter, ‘Soliloquies on the City’, The Observer, 27 April 1988. Roy Fisher, A Furnace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Donald Davie, ‘Roy Fisher: an Appreciation’, in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. 152 - 72. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1980, p. 23. Thom Gunn, interviewed by John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981) p. 35. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by the author, April 1980, Ann Arbor, Mich. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1981, ‘Evropeyskiy vozdukh nad Rossiey’, Kniga intervyu, ed. V. Polukhina (M.: Zakharov, 2007), p. 148. Published in Bite Noire, nos 8 - 9 (Winter 1989 / Spring 1990), included in Birmingham River (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994) and in Long and Short of it: Poems 1955 - 2005 (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2005).

19 D E R E K WA L C O T T Derek Walcott (born 23 January 1930 in Castries, St Lucia), poet, playwright, graduated from the University of the West Indies, Kingston (1953), worked as a schoolmaster and as a journalist for Public Opinion and the Trinidad Guardian. At 18, he published his first collection 25 Poems (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1948); a second book, Epitaph for the Young (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1949), followed. Neither is free of English poetic influences. Art and theatre are his other major interests: 1950 saw a joint exhibition of his paintings in Castries; later (1957) he studied the theatre in New York. He has written more than a dozen verse dramas; The Sea at Dauphin and Six in the Rain were produced in London in 1960, as was his latest play, Remembrance (1990). Poetry, however, is his first and lasting love. His next two collections Poems (Kingston, Jamaica, 1953) and In a Green Night (London, 1962), brought him success and recognition. Critics noted a sophisticated mind and an attractive tension between the Caribbean oral and the classical European tradition. All his subsequent collections were published in London and in New York: Selected Poems (1964); The Castaway, and Other Poems (1965); The Gulf, and Other Poems (1969); Another Life (1973); Sea Grapes (1976); Selected Poems (1977); The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980); The Fortunate Traveller (1981); Midsummer (1984); Collected Poems: 1948 - 1984 (1986); Bounty (1997); Tiepolo’s Hound (2000); Selected Poems (2007). Their major themes – history, exploitation, displacement – are treated with exceptional poetic skill and imagination. Brodsky has called him a ‘metaphysical realist’ and ‘the great poet of the English language’ saying that ‘the need to itemise the universe in which he found himself gives Walcott’s descriptive powers a true epic character’. 1 His truly epic poem, Omeros (London and Boston, Mass., 1990), is a mythological reinterpretation of his people’s history; adapting Dante’s terza rima and using Homer’s motifs, he salutes two of the great masters of poetry whilst at the same time successfuly bringing all his mythical characters ‘fully and movingly to life’. This work has been praised for its wit and word play, for its mastery of rhyme and its musical subtlety, qualities that are to be found throughout his work. In 1992 Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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A M E RC I L E S S JU D GE An Interview with Derek Walcott (29 September 1990, London) –I believe you met Brodsky for the first time at Robert Lowell’s funeral. Do you remember the meeting? – When Robert Lowell died we all were very shaken, because he was a very endearing and very gentle person and he was very kind to me when I came up to New York. I first met him in Trinidad, then he and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick were very kind to me and my wife when we came up to New York. That was very, very upsetting. We left from New York with Susan Sontag, Roger Straus and Pat Strong, an editor, and flew up to Boston. But there was no sign of Joseph, they kept asking for him. Something had gone wrong in terms of connecting the flyup with us to Boston. Then I went to the funeral; it was a largely attended funeral. When I was in the pew this man came and stood next to me. I didn’t know who he was, but he had a very interesting face, a nice profile of a face, and keeping his head up and very restrained. But I could see that he was in some pain too. Then I began to guess that it might be Joseph Brodsky. I don’t remember whether we were introduced after the funeral outside or at what point I spoke to him. I was thinking about Cal’s death at the funeral. Then we went to Elizabeth Bishop’s house after that; there were a lot of people. It’s all so hard to focus on exactly when some contact was made but what began to happen was that on coming to New York we developed a very strong friendship by seeing each other a lot. – Brodsky already knew about you from Lowell and read some of your poems. Had you read Brodsky before the meeting? – I knew about the case. 2 I think I’d seen the Penguin edition. 3 At that time I’d read some Russian poetry. – What do you find particularly attractive in Russian poetry? – Russian poetry, especially modern Russian poetry, seems to me to be a large body of work, almost like a thicket, in a sense that I couldn’t get through it in translation. Of course, I knew Pasternak, but most of Pasternak translations are simplified terribly, except for Lowell’s. Lowell’s Pasternak I like a lot. Then, of course, I read Safe Conduct which is fantastic as prose. I didn’t know too much of Ts-

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vetaeva, I read some of Akhmatova again through translation. The difficulty always is in terms of translation. What is very, very vigorous comes across as sentimental and that is very perilous in a writer like Pasternak who is not afraid of sentiment and tenderness and so on. But then when that is translated into English, poignancy becomes mushy which it is not; it is hard. Akhmatova comes across wrongly for that reason. Generally you could not dissociate Russian poetry from Russian biography; in other words, Akhmatova therefore had to be paid attention to because her son had been imprisoned, and Tsvetaeva because she had hung herself. I knew others like Esenin and so on. – Are you saying that those of you who don’t know Russian have to take for granted that they are great poets? – Right. – You’ve watched Brodsky’s life in exile for many years now. You yourself are also living in exile. What effect does exile have on a poet? – Through the political condition that Joseph was in, it is the first time in my life that I’ve really encountered, as a friendship grew, what exile, real exile, means, because in most cases they are writers who are away from their country and who can jump on the plane and go back home, maybe not to leave here but just to revisit, for example, WestIndian writers like Lamming and Naipaul. The latter even has a book called The Pleasures of Exile. It’s not a real exile. Exile is banishment. I didn’t know anyone who had been banished from his country, and in a sense banished from his language: the conditions are the same. Banishment from your country implies that you are forbidden to use that language, if it were possible to do that, and that is the full and complete intention of banishment. Therefore I began to realise through Joseph’s real condition that mine wasn’t exile, nor was that of any other writer who was just living abroad. It was a very facile word to use for that pain. It was unimaginable for me that I would never ever see my parents again (my one parent, my mother) or my country again. And I became aware of the depth of pain that is involved in the word. But Joseph’s example, personally, was an example of great fortitude, there was never any self-pity, there was never any arrogance, there was never any complaining about his being Jewish and all that, but there was a terrible sarcasm in him about the regime. Also, what I really appreciated was the concentration and the visible example he

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was that being a poet under those conditions was not only a necessary industry, it wasn’t therapeutic to write, it became something that was a serious occupation, superior to politics, superior to self-examination. And that is, first of all, the nobility of Joseph’s conduct, I think, which has endeared Joseph to people. People like Joseph not because he is a great poet but because he has fantastic endurance and humour, a disregard for any kind of self pity. I don’t find any sort of predictable Jewishness in Joseph [laughs]. What I mean is, a Jewish writer might well behave as a Black writer might, say ‘Declare your heritage! Declare your condition! Declare your persecution!’ or whatever. And then I began to realise that most of the writers who had been persecuted by the regime were Jewish, which came to me as a sort of late fact. I had thought of it as being directly political, not that there was a sort of anti-Semitism in the persecution that was there. – Marina Tsvetaeva would correct you and say that all poets are Jews, in a way. 4 – If you make that statement it’s like a privilege, to say you’re becoming a Jew if you’re a poet. I know what she means, but you have to be careful. That’s how certain societies treat their poets. – What do you think it is in Joseph that keeps him going, that gives him the strength to succeed? – First of all, there’s no question of success in Joseph’s mind. Joseph can feel triumphal in many ways if he does something that he considers to be good, a poem that he thinks is good, and that’s okay. But I think that Joseph sets himself up not in direct competition but, rather, he sets up models for himself; not even models, sort of peers, contemporaries, people he thinks of as great poets. People like Ovid, Virgil, these are massive names, and he’s impatient with modern poetry. What’s that line of his? ‘Why do we need the twentieth century when we’ve already had the nineteenth?’ This is a line about literature but also in terms of scale and achievement of writers at the end of the century, the scale of Joseph’s work, the prolixity is there because he does it from day to day. To me he is the complete poet, going to the poetry not as to the banality of a job, a thing of a necessary kind that one has to do daily. Because I think most poets say, ‘I’m going to wait for the flash, I’m going to wait for a reason to write a poem’. But I think for Joseph the day alone is the reason to write a poem. Of ourse, the shadow of death, the fact of his heart condition and so on. You often

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see him momentarily holding his heart, but he hates you to fuss over him. Fussing can be infuriating. It infuriates his friends. He doesn’t like to draw attention to himself, you know, and that kind of conduct is very exaggerated. – There are certain themes that appear in both your works and his. For example, exile, Empire, Time. And more importantly, I can see certain common features at the poetic level; for example, a very complex syntax, a frequent use of enjambment and a certain technical virtuosity. Is that incidental, or how do you account for it? – Of course Joseph’s been an influence on me. I think that this is a condition which poets have found themselves in at different points. Without any comparison, when people make references to, ‘Oh, I see there’s an influence of Joseph’, well, companionship is an influence, friendship is an influence. And if something I write is admired by Joseph then to me it’s a terrific compliment because he’s a very exact, merciless kind of judge of every poem. Also the instruction that’s there from example. In the sense that here is someone who knows what the ramifications of political suffering are and also, ultimately, that it is negligible in terms of poetry. I would say that in Joseph’s opinion political suffering, political change, anything worldly, anything that happens in the temporal sense, including what is happening in Russia now, compared to what happened to Russia before, is negligible. It is simply events. It is simply the conduct of men in their temporal situation and in that way he finds his idea of flux, but also that of stasis. It isn’t poetry. It isn’t the idea. What is worth doing is language. For instance, I’ve been under an Empire as a boy. But the whole idea of seeing a historical parallel between, say, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, particularly a condition equal to that of Ovid as if Ovid were alive. I’m not saying that he is Ovid. I’m simply saying that the condition is an easy parallel. But it wasn’t a matter of the political condition of exile, because he had a son in Russia and so forth, and he was not going back to his country, and all the stuff about the Black Sea and the Baltic that’s there. He’s not making an egotistical comparison. But, regardless of that, the reality is there. That is what he was, is. And, quite apart from the Jewish stuff, that’s not important. So that the example is in terms of, what should one say, of the political, if you wish to simplify it to political. But the word ‘Empire’ when it became a part of my vocabulary, either in terms

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of not appropriating Joseph, but of something adapting through my experience of friendship with him, it did affect, or did come into the vocabulary. Because there is a time in poetry, a time historically in poetry when poets wrote letters to each other in the same diction, the epistolary diction or the reflexive diction. It was a common thing. It was a thing to exchange letters of reflection. And in many cases, when I have written or referred to Joseph, like the book Midsummer, it was really an attempt to do that. Joseph was writing elegies on Rome and I thought, ‘Well, there’s no difference between Rome and Port-of-Spain really.’ I don’t mean historically or culturally. The one did have ruins, the one had memories, and the other did not have ruins and, presumably, no memories. So those poems are like large epistles, like letters to Joseph in a sense, and obviously if two friends are talking there is an exchange. – It is very modest and generous of you to interpret my question as Brodsky’s influence on you. I really meant the other way around. I wonder whether Joseph is competing with you? – No, no. I have two very dear friends, Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky. I love them because they are poets naturally, first of all, but also I love them because they are friends. There is no competition there. – I’m asking this question because Brodsky himself has admitted that the spirit of competition never left him: ‘At first you tried to write better than … your friends, and then better still … better than Pasternak, better than Mandelstam, or better than, I don’t know, Akhmatova or Khlebnikov or Zabolotsky’. 5 Tsvetaeva is the only Russian poet with whom he ‘decided not to compete’. 6 – I think the word competition is, even if Joseph uses it in his own terms, wrong. That’s not really what it is. Dante was competing with Virgil, if you wish. I mean, he is competing with Virgil and Virgil is there, he can check him out. All the literati keep an imaginary friend. But all the literati also keep an imaginary guide. Whoever the master is. Therefore it’s like the preceding shadow of Ovid, or whoever. I don’t know about contemporary poetry, with which Joseph is very impatient. On the other hand, there is the example of Aleksandr Kushner which is a good example, a personal example. We were in Rotterdam and I had asked Joseph about different poets and he told me about Kushner. And I got a book which was a set of translations

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of Kushner that was terrible. I didn’t want to read it. It was so banal. It wasn’t a matter of my being so arrogant that I felt, I can’t read this man!’ It simply would have done terrible damage and I saw absolutely no value in reading it. And I knew Joseph had said he was terrific. But I saw nothing in the translations that would do any service to Kushner at all, and I didn’t want to be up there reading something like that. There were other translations sent and Farrar, Straus and Giroux have brought out a new book of Kushner’s. Although I don’t know Russian, something strong is certainly showing through, but I’m not happy either about the translations. But in Rotterdam when Aleksandr was there, and he’s a lovely guy and a good friend of Joseph’s … that’s what I’m saying, the friendship Joseph has made with other poets. Even if he talks about competition it’s just nonsense because he’s too kind to other people. If he is dismissive of any aspect of anyone’s work, anyone’s poem or something, it’s for the sake of poetry not for the sake of any sort of feeling of competition. He has a lot of jealous enemies obviously, like any famous person. But in the case of Aleksandr when we were in Rotterdam there was a poem and I began to work on it. I don’t know Russian but Joseph and I were working on a Kushner poem and what began to be revealed was astounding. It was superb. And it’s not just a matter of translation. But what I’m trying to point out is that Joseph’s generosity, in terms of the opinion of people, relates very strongly to his love of poetry, to the impatience he may have when he thinks a good poet is letting poetry down. He’s very dictatorial. He is very absolute and he is irascible, but at the same time the man is excited, he’s physically excited, the same as a footballer is excited about a football match, for example, or a soldier about war, a tennis player about tennis. That is physical excitement. That is one of the great things that the experience of meeting a Russian poet in exile meant. Just the fact of that, that this man lives inside of poetry. Most English poets who are in a safe condition, physically, they think of poetry as an ancillary aspect of their lives. I mean they have imagination and they do that kind of work, and there’s a book that walks alongside of all of us … But to be inside of it so completely and so necessarily, you know. And he had his predecessors like Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva … and his friends like Milosz, Zagajewski, people like that.

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– Your translation of Brodsky’s poem ‘Letters from the Ming Dynasty’ (PS, pp. 132 - 3) has been praised as ‘flawless work’. 7 To what extent did Joseph collaborate with you? – I’ll try to be very clear about this. For instance, before that Dick Wilbur did ‘Six Years Later’ (PS, pp. 3 - 4). That’s a beautiful poem, right? It’s a lovely English poem, an American poem if you wish, done by Richard Wilbur. The same feeling is there in ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’ (PS, pp. 107 - 18) translated by Anthony Hecht, and some of Howard Moss’s translations. But ideally I don’t know how close the Russian is, but I’ve listened to Joseph recite it. I’ve listened to the rhymes in it. I’ve listened to the metre in it. And I think Dick Wilbur has done a superb job. Now it may be more Wilburrian than it is Brodskian but, at the same time, I don’t think that matters very much. A prosaic translator goes for the sense, goes for the meaning, goes for the logic and the order of the words. A poet-translator knows that he has to adopt the poet’s personality into his own and therefore when Wilbur becomes Brodsky (it’s not a matter of Brodsky becoming Wilbur, it’s Wilbur trying to become Brodsky) it’s very, very sincere. As to the particular poem, ‘Letters from the Ming Dynasty’, I did not translate it. The thing about Joseph is that he pays very large compliments to people he likes. Joseph had done an interlinear. He himself does his interlinears. And he’s quite capable of rhyme. I think when I came in and me and Barry Rubin, his translator, I remember we spent, I think it must have been, six hours on three lines together, the three of us, in the apartment of a friend. And Joseph was groaning with anger and exasperation. He just said, ‘Fuck this, fuck that, fuck you’, in fun. But we all collaborated on trying to get those three lines right. The thing Joseph is particularly concerned about is approximating the Russian metre. But what happens in the Russian metre is that you lose the article. If you lose the English article, since there’s no article in Russian, and it’s done by inflection, or whatever, then you’re seriously affecting the metre of the poem because, for example, you can’t say ‘the ship’; you need that extra syllable. But the problem was he is always careful that the thing did not sound too pentametrical. And, therefore, he would try to violate the pentameter as much as possible, or slur it, or break it down into thought, blocks of thought rather than the colloquiality of it. He showed me this when we did some work in the Caribbean on it. The interlinears were already

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there. I was just given something that I had to wordfully adopt to a metre – with him there – that was metrically very close. I’m not saying that out of the translation there were not felicities that I arrived at in a sense. But that required getting into Joseph’s mind. So people have asked me, ‘Do you know Russian?’ So the word ‘translation’ is very exaggerated. – I wonder to what extent are you aware of the gap that exists between the original and even the best English translations, whether they are done by you, by Wilbur or even by Joseph himself? – Well, nobody is claiming that they are perfect. What you’ve come on to really is the question as to whether Russian is better than English. And, in fact, in Joseph’s opinion he almost thinks that the English language, for writing poetry, is better than the Russian. I don’t mean to say that that is exactly what he says, but Joseph can be very extreme in his views. Barry Rubin once said to me, ‘You have no idea how rich and complex Joseph’s Russian is’. Of course I know that. I think also what gets difficult in the translations of Joseph is that sometimes he can be very stubborn about certain aspects of translation, but he has a right to be stubborn, and when I say something about a particular aspect of a poem that I may find difficult, it’s hard for him to give any ground because he’s talking from two situations. First of all, he writes terrific English prose, and he can write, and he has written, good English poems. So it’s astonishing for him, I mean, without making any boasts for him, the only person I can think of who can write good English poetry is Nabokov, and Joseph is a much better poet than Nabokov. Or take Conrad, for example. But to come back to the idea of the richness and complexity of Joseph’s language, it’s easy to see that, because in Russian you can have triple rhymes at the end of a line. In English you can’t have that. In English triple rhyming becomes ironic like Byron or it becomes comic. It’s very hard to defend such endings in English: they have a comic or ironic edge to them. But, obviously, in the Russian language you can do that and the fact that it rhymes and that you have all the complexities of design that goes with the sound of Brodsky. But I think that to try to attempt it in English, it can lead to all kinds of structural disasters. But to clear up the last point about ‘Letters from the Ming Dynasty’: yes, there were things that I did that I did feel good about and that Joseph liked, and so on. What is true for all of Joseph’s translators is

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that he does an awful lot of the work himself, even metrically, even with rhyme. It isn’t as if he’s floundering, as if he needs any help. Very often he’s on a level with his translators, so that if you’re working along with him and some metaphor comes along he’s quite prepared to change a metaphor for a rhyme in English, which is a little astonishing because he’d rather get the metaphor right in English with the rhyme than keep the Russian. I find that exciting because he’s saying, ‘I’m working in a language, the metaphors that have come out of that language are right and natural to that language, and so on, but I’m bringing a Russian intelligence to those things.’ And I think that Joseph’s poetry has enriched English twentieth-century poetry because most poets in the twentieth century that I can think of don’t see intelligence as being a quality of poetry. The ability to think is not very common. The ability to be not only argumentative but to think thought is not necessarily the attribute of a lot of twentieth-century poetry. I mean, there’s a lot of striving and a lot of mumbling and a lot of stuff like that but thought as grace, as intelligence ... I think one of the things I learned from Joseph is that it made me realise thinking was part of poetry. – As you know, W. H. Auden occupies a very special place in Brodsky’s heart. Why is Auden so appealing to Brodsky? – What’s appealing to Joseph in Auden is what appeals to anyone who gets down to where Auden is. Auden’s authority, casual grace, intelligence is so flattering to the reader. It makes you feel intelligent too. That’s one thing. And he does not make poetry simply a matter of sentiment. Poetry as the industry of thought, however casual, is important. And Auden’s probably, certainly for what he undertook, a much braver poet than anyone around. He’s braver than Eliot, Pound or Frost. And I think it’s his bravery that attracts Joseph. It’s at least one of the aspects. – Who amongst your great predecessors exerts pressure on your writing? – Everybody. But I mean, I once said that I don’t think I’m a poet, I’m an anthology. But I don’t mind that, you see I don’t think I count, the I, the me, I don’t count as a poet. Poetry matters to me much more than me, you know. So that whatever influences I have I don’t feel embarrassed by it. I feel flattered by it, by compliments like that. If I was a painter and somebody said to me, ‘Well, it’s a little bit like

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Leonardo’, I would say, ‘Oh, no. It’s mine.’ And I’d also say, Thanks a lot. Wow!’ And I think we share that whole feeling. I think that if there’s a flash of Ovid or of Auden … and Joseph has unabashedly admitted his debt to Auden … But it’s not the same thing. There are things of his which are Audenesque, whatever that word means, but it’s simply a matter of recognising a master and that’s not a common thing in the twentieth century, to use words like master. It’s a nineteenthcentury thing. It’s a very Russian thing too, I think, not like a guru but some kind of master. It’s part of the tradition. And that reverence that Joseph has for Auden is part of the Russian tradition, whereas in English everybody is so democratic: ‘I’m as good as the next guy. When I get the chance I’ll beat him.’ That’s not his attitude. – I wonder if you are familiar with Brodsky’s interpretation of Robert Frost’s poetry. When he read Frost in 1964 he was stunned by an entirely different sensibility. He thinks Frost is ‘the most terrifying of poets’, whose poems ‘don’t involve tragedy but rather fear’ and ‘ fear’, he said, ‘has a much greater effect upon the imagination than tragedy’. 8 Do you share this viewpoint? – Joseph has a way of making these papal pronouncements. First of all you dismiss them, then later you look at it and you think, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Because tragedy is already resolved, tragedy as such is anaesthetic opinion and anaesthetic agreement that ‘Yes, this is tragedy’, whereas fear is vague and undefined. I mean it’s paranoia in a sense. One is afraid of things, and fear is no different to awe because to be afraid of God used to mean to be in awe of God. But if we already have a sense of the tragic then that becomes a literary form, which is lesser than the fear of God, or fear of death, or fear of what God contains – which is death. I mean the idea of God contains the idea of death because we don’t know whether we are going to God or to death. Nobody knows that. Certainly that remark is not as cranky sounding as it appears. That’s the kind of statement that Joseph makes. You know, you don’t sit around with Joseph and suddenly start some profound Platonic symposium. But in the course of conversation a remark like that would come out, then he will amplify it, and it’s staggering the sort of process of argument that will develop. – Czeslaw Milosz called Brodsky, ‘a true descendant of English metaphysical poetry’. 9 I feel that you too have some affinity with them.

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What is it that attracts both of you to that particular stratum of poetry? – Well, now I think for instance, this again is a very Brodskyish remark, but if you compare Dante and Donne one would say that Dante is a greater poet than John Donne. And he is, I suppose, if you have to do that. In Dante you feel the same fear or awe that Joseph is talking about and there’s a hierarchy in progress in Dante and hence there’s a great poem there. But in Donne what you are aware of is, that he comes from an order, I mean he was Dean of St. Paul’s, the doubt and the almost fear of blasphemy. Donne like any great religious poet is always on the edge of blasphemy, through sex or through whatever. I think mainly through sex, but it’s not as if he’s repressed, because there is a lot of sexual delight, sexual joy in Donne. But it is that process of questioning, of arguing, of great quarrelling, about his own faith or about poetry itself, that is there in Donne and absent in Dante. Because Dante proceeds in an Aquinian way, from a given order in a sense. Whereas in Donne, when you go back to the greatness of Donne, it is the thought that astonishes. And the tortuous but finally illuminating way that the thought is arrived at makes him certainly a more interesting and arresting poet than Milton, for example, or Marvell and so on. And I think those qualities continue in Auden, on a more intellectual, platitudinous basis than in Donne, but certainly that continues in a sense. Auden can be seen as a metaphysical poet and not simply as a political poet. And the same thing has struck Joseph. – In your essay on Brodsky you said that ‘the intellectual vigour of Brodsky’s poetry is too alarming even for his poet-readers’. 10 Do you think that Brodsky has become more of a polemical poet in his recent work? – He’s not polemical. He’s too ironical to be polemical. I wouldn’t put him in any category. What is admitted into Joseph’s poetry, as it was admitted into Auden’s poetry, is the banality of the world around one. The Brodskian figure is a banal figure, in a raincoat, sitting in a hotel room by himself. Now that is not a mask. It’s a real condition. Like sometimes I make jokes with Joseph and say, ‘Look, it’s Christmas but I suppose you want to go to some poor place in Venice that has some soul instead of going some place and having a party.’ You know, we tease each other, we make jokes like, ‘You’re going to have

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to put coconuts in this poem.’ Or to Seamus, ‘Why don’t you go back to your bog?’ – How do you evaluate his tendency towards generalisation and metaphysical speculation? – You can’t separate that from his experience. He is a man who goes all over the world. He’s not attached to any one city in reality. Who is a Russian, but if you wish it doesn’t matter ultimately. Who is Jewish, but doesn’t make a thing of it. Who is very attracted to the idea of Christianity, which is a kind of conflict perhaps. He is certainly drawn to the orthodoxy of poetry. And he now goes from place to lace, not really rooted, and therefore the tone of any person in such a situation is like a man eating alone. If a man is eating alone he doesn’t just have a piece of bread and a cup of tea. As he eats he reflects. And therefore it comes out of that condition. If it appears to be didactic then there’s no other choice, because a person talking to be reflective, to be didactic, it’s not like somebody in a safe condition making a pronouncement behind a lectern. His lectern is a table in a restaurant and therefore he is talking to himself. And that meditative process of self-reflection is fragmentary. And the Brodskyian figure is that of a person who hasn’t killed himself, hasn’t been murdered or tortured – who escaped. And he reflects on the fact that his compatriots have gone through just that. There’s no other choice. – I believe you have a few poems either addressed to Brodsky or dedicated to him. Which one of them may I include in my book? – You can have ‘Forest of Europe’, if you like. FOREST OF EUROPE for Joseph Brodsky The last leaves fell like notes from a piano and left their ovals echoing in the ear; with gawky music stands, the winter forest looks like an empty orchestra, its lines ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow. The inlaid copper laurel of an oak shines through the brown-bricked glass above your head as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite, uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.

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‘The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva.’ Under your exile’s tongue, crisp under heel, the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves, the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light in a brown room, in a barren Oklahoma. There is a Gulag Archipelago under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains as hard and open as a herdsman’s face sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow. Growing in whispers from the Writers’ Congress, the snow circles like Cossacks round the corpse of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard of treaties and white papers as we lose sight of the single human through the cause. So every spring these branches load their shelves, like libraries with newly published leaves, till waste recycles them – paper to snow – but, at zero of suffering, one mind lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves. As the train passed the forest’s tortured icons, the floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires of frozen tears, the station’s screeching steam, he drew them in a single winter’s breath whose freezing consonants turned into stones. He saw the poetry in forlorn stations under clouds vast as Asia, through districts that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape, not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space so desolate it mocked destinations. Who is that dark child on the parapets of Europe, watching the evening river mint its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets, the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes, then, black on gold, the Hudson’s silhouettes?

A Merciless Judge

From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours, under the airport domes, the echoing stations, the tributary of emigrants whom exile has made as classless as the common cold, citizens of a language that is now yours, and every February, every ‘last autumn’, you write far from the threshing harvesters folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair, far from Russia’s canals quivering with sunstroke, a man living with English in one room. The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth? From hand to mouth, across the centuries, the bread that lasts when systems have decayed, when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches, a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase whose music will last longer than the leaves, whose condensation is the marble sweat of angels’ foreheads, which will never dry till Borealis shuts the peacock lights of its slow fan from L. A. to Archangel, and memory needs nothing to repeat. Frightened and starved, with divine fever Osip Mandelstam shook, and every metaphor shuddered him with ague, each vowel heavier than a boundary stone, ‘to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva’. but now that fever is a fire whose glow warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates exchanging gutturals in this winter cave of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside mastodons force their systems through the snow. 11

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J. Brodsky, ‘On Derek Walcott’, New York Review of Books, 10 November 1983, p. 39. Derek Walcott refers to Brodsky’s trial which took place on 14 February 1964 in Leningrad. On 19 February, Brodsky was sent for testing at a Leningrad psychiatric hospital and after three weeks he was declared fit for work. On 13 March 1964 the second trial passed sentence to exile Brodsky to distant places for a period of five years. Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1973). Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘Poema kontsa’, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, vol. iv (New York: Russica Publishers, 1983) p. 185. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1981, Brodskii, Kniga intervyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 147. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Sven Birkerts, Kniga intervyu op. cit., p. 95 Robert Hass, ‘Lost in Translation’, a review of A Part of Speech by J. Brodsky, New Republic, no. 183 (20 December 1980) p. 36. Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, op. cit., p. 148. Czeslaw Milisz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, a review of Joseph Brodsky’s A Part of Speech, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1980, p. 23. Derek Walcott, ‘Magic Industry’, a review of Brodsky’s To Urania, New York Review of Books, 24 November 1988, p. 37. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948 - 1984 (New York: Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) pp. 375 - 8.

20 C Z E S L AW M I L O S Z Czeslaw Milosz (born 30 June 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania, died 14 August 2004 in Cracow), poet, writer, translator, Nobel Laureate (1980), graduated from the law faculty of Wilno University (1934), studied in Paris (1934 - 5), worked for Polish radio (1935 - 9), was an active member of the underground, participated in the Warsaw Uprising (1944), an event he describes in his novel The Usurpers (London, 1955), and served as Polish cultural attaché in Washington and Paris (1946 - 51). In 1951 he broke with the regime and settled in the West. In 1953 he published a series of essays, The Captive Mind (London, 1953) and in 1955 two novels appeared, The Seizure of Power (New York) and The Issa Valley (London). In 1960 he left France for California, where he was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley. He is the author of 20 collections of poetry, which include two books of avant-garde poetry, A Poem on Time Frozen (Vilnius, 1933) and Three Winters (Vilnius, 1936), and two war collections, Poems (Warsaw, 1940) and Rescue (Warsaw, 1945), and from his time in Paris, Daylight (Paris, 1953), Treatise on Poetry (Paris, 1957), Continents (Paris, 1958). In these Paris collections he subjected his aesthetics to close examination and wrote ‘in order to be understood by Slowacki and Norwid’ (Brodsky). Even after his change of residence to America, his Polish-language books continued to be published in Paris, but Poems (1967) was published in London and Selected Poems (1976) and Hymn to the Pearl (1982) were published in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In English there are: Selected Poems (1973); Bells in Winter (1978); The Separate Notebook (1984); and Collected Poems, 1931 - 1987 (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1988). Milosz is also the author of The History of Polish Literature (1969) and the editor and translator of Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology (New York, 1965; Berkeley, Cal., 1983). He has translated Weil, Whitman, Sandburg, Eliot, the Gospel of St Mark and the Book of Job into Polish and the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (1968) and Alexander Wat (1977) into English. In 1989 he returned to Poland and published a few more books of poetry and prose. He is the recipient of many awards and honours. Though what he has written in America has other horizons, other perspectives, the lakes of Lithuania and the rains of Warsaw continue to dominate his poetry and the ‘unbearable awareness that man is not capable of interpreting his own experience is one of the cardinal themes of Milosz’s poetry’ (Brodsky).

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A HUGE BU I L DI NG OF S T R A NGE A RCHI T ECT UR E An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz (6 October 1990, London) – Brodsky recalls how, shortly after his arrival in America, he received a letter from you warning him, very opportunely, he said, that there are not many writers capable of keeping up their creative work once outside of their homeland and adding that ‘should that happen to you, well then, you will know your price’. 1 Why did you think it necessary to send him such a stern warning? – I remember that letter. He hasn’t quoted it in full. I was speaking there of the first, the hardest-to-bear period of one’s exile, a period that has to be gone through so that later on it will be easier for you. It was also my way of saying hello, and of giving him some support. – Later on, in your article about ‘A Part of Speech’, you wrote, Brodsky ‘accomplishes what previous generations of Russian émigré writers were unable to do: to make the land of exile, however reluctantly, their own, to take possession of it through the poetic word’. Where, in your opinion, did Brodsky find the strength for such a vast poetic broadening out? – I don’t know, his success is astounding. Earlier Russian émigré writers lived in a sort of autonomous world of their own. Some of them wrote very good things, Bunin for example; but he too lived in a world of his own. Brodsky really has been a go-getter, conquering America and the West in general; and he is also something of a cultural explorer, take his poems about London, Washington, Mexico, his poems about Italy. The whole of twentieth-century civilisation lives in the imagery of his poetry. I see it as being the result of Leningrad’s architectural influence. – A remedy for the ‘longing for a world culture’? – Yes, perhaps it is. I ought to say that for me my friendship with Brodsky is both very welcome and very important, in the same way as my friendship with Tomas Venclova, the Lithuanian poet, is. We three poets have achieved more than the politicians have, we have established friendly relations between our three peoples.

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– You know Brodsky’s poetry both in the original and in English translation. In the opinion of some English and American poets who know Russian, even the very best of those translations don’t approximate to the original or, what is more important, give us a substitute for it. 3 How much, in your view, does Brodsky lose in translation? – I have to confess that I find it difficult to read Brodsky in Russian, so many of the words he uses are unknown to me. That’s his linguistic triumph, he has domesticated modern terminology. As for the translations, I think it’s difficult, in general, to translate Russian poetry into any of the Western languages; just look at what Pushkin is reduced to. And why is that? Because Russian poetry is very heavily accented. It has a very strong iambic pulse. That is where it differs from Polish poetry, which does quite happily without rhymes, without metre. There is a need in the Russian language for that rhythmic pulse. And when you listen to Brodsky reading his poetry you understand what is lost in translation. – In Brodsky’s opinion, ‘a regular meter and the exact rhymes shaping an uncomfortable thought are far more functional than any form of free verse. Because in the former case the reader gets a sense of chaos being organised, while in the latter a sense of dependence on and being determined by chaos’. 4 You yourself have said something very similar to that: ‘ form is a constant struggle against chaos and nothingness’. 5 Doesn’t that contradict what you just said to me? – But form in poetry does not necessarily entail the use of metre and rhyme. My early poetry was much more rhythmical in the traditionally accepted sense of the word. For example, during the war that was the sort of poetry I was writing and the rhymes are, quite often, simply childish. But they really are intended to combat chaos. Now I’ve found other forms. Of course I don’t believe that there really is such a thing as free verse, poetry always has a rhythmical structure – it’s just more complex. – Do you think that Brodsky has learned anything from the Polish poetic tradition? I’m thinking of his translations of Gał czyński, of Norwid, of Herbert. And he has said of his own particular generation, the generation of the 1960s, that ‘we needed a window on to Europe and the Polish language provided it. 6 His own first contacts with Proust, Faulkner and Joyce were through the medium of their Polish translations.

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– I don’t know, but when I read ‘Post aetatetn nostrum’ (K, pp. 85 – 97) I thought of Norwid, of his poem ‘Quidam’ which has to do with what went on in Rome in Hadrian’s time. It’s an analysis of that situation, the revolt in Palestine; the Jews, the Greeks, the first Christians in Rome. He paints a very complex picture, but, unlike Brodsky’s, it’s not satirical. What interests me, generally speaking, in Brodsky are the classical themes. Of course they’re always there in Russian poetry. Take Mandelstam, for instance. But in Brodsky’s case they predominate; it began with ‘To Lycomedes on Syros’ (O, pp. 92 – 3), ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (N, p. 78), and then there were the ‘Roman Elegies’ (U, pp. 111 – 117), the eclogues, and so on. – How do you account for those frequent incursions of his into the world of Antiquity? – If you were to ask him that he’d probably say: ‘That’s classical Petersburg for you’. – Has he broadened the linguistic scope of Russian poetry? I’m thinking, in particular, of his transplantation of English metaphysical poetics to Russian soil. – Of course he has. Continental Europe was acquainted, in general terms, with English poetry, but for all that English and American cultural influence was weak when you look at the influence of the French. French was the language of the intelligentsia. I know from my own experience that the French influence was still there in my youth. It was at the end of the 1930s that they started to teach English in Warsaw. Nowadays when you go to our part of Europe, to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, you notice that the younger generation know English, not French, and that is symptomatic. Russia was cut off from the English-speaking world by the Revolution and its aftermath. And Brodsky was the first to discover that new world. I often cite this paradox: when T. S. Eliot died, not one Western poet marked the event in verse, the only poet to do that was a Russian. – His ‘Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot’ are, by the form they take, the allusions they make, in essence a triple act of homage: to Eliot, to Auden and to Yeats. – Yes, yes, that’s right. – Brodsky once said, ‘If it came to the choice and I had to live with only one language, either English or Russian, even if I chose Russian, I would find that, to say the least, unsettling; it might even

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drive me insane.’ 7 Have you had similar feelings? After all you are bilingual, to be more exact, multilingual. How much would you miss your English if, for some unexpected reason, you were to lose it? – That’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t know. I began translating English and American poetry quite early on, in 1945, during the reign of Stalin; because those poets were forbidden to us. Then after 1965, when Poland began to liberalise, everyone got on the bandwagon and I thought, well let them get on with it, and I gave up. – Does that mean that when you came to America you were up to the task of translating your own poetry into English? – At that time my mastery of the language was insufficient. For a long time I considered my own poetry to be untranslatable. I started to ranslate other Polish poets and only gradually did I come to work on my own. But I always do it in co-operation with my American friends, Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. They correct my versions. – I was recently comparing the English translations of your poetry with those that Gorbanevskaya and Brodsky have done in Russian, and I notice that there were some astonishing coincidences, lexical and figurative … – Do you know Gorbanevskaya’s renderings of my Treatise on Poetry? 8 – Of course. What’s more, I noted how often Brodsky echoes you in his own poetry, starting with the title of his third book, ‘The End of a Beautiful Epoch’. And he almost quotes your lines on Norwid: In his poems, which are like his testament, He compared his fatherland to Sviatovid. 9

And in his ‘Lithuanian Divertissement’ there are lines: And there’s a statue of the bard Who once compared his fatherland to his girlfriend. (K p. 102)

– That I didn’t know. – Brodsky’s critics, and Brodsky himself, note the emotional neutrality of his poetry, so uncharacteristic and almost, one might say, inadmissible in the Russian poetic tradition. What has compelled him to expel

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all emotion from his poetry? Or, to quote you, ‘of strong feelings poetry falls silent’? 10 – I think there are always a lot of tricks at work in poetry. One wants to shout because so many terrible things have happened, are happening. But, of course, calmness is to be preferred. There’s this line of mine: ‘I haven’t learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.’ 11 Brodsky has probably learnt that lesson. – As you know, Russian poetry has always regarded philosophical, religious and ethical questions as being within its scope. How true is Brodsky to that tradition? – I’ve written elsewhere about that. I feel close to him because we both reverence the same philosopher, Lev Shestov. 12 I love what he says about the Russian tradition of social optimism with regard to Tolstoy, and about the belief that progress goes hand in hand with the amelioration of man. 13 Both Shestov and Brodsky challenge that tradition. – You define one of the problems that troubles you as ‘the world evil, the pain, the torment of living beings as an argument against God’. 14 Shestov wrote a whole book on the same subject, In Job’s Balances. 15 Can one find a strategy common to you three in defence of faith in our faithless times? – Yes, I think so. Shestov was an avowed enemy of stoicism. He said that Western philosophy and Christianity agreed that the world is the way that it is, and there is nothing that can be done about it, save grin and bear it. And he said, ‘But I do not accept that.’ He had this idea of God being completely free. They say that God is love. But who knows that? Maybe God isn’t love at all. He does what He wants to do, He knows no bounds. And there Shestov is echoing the cry of Job. Of course Shestov is an Old Testament writer. Even his book Athens and Jerusalem 16 is an act of resistance against that view. – And what is your strategy? Brodsky has called you a Job crying not about a personal tragedy but about the tragedy of existence itself. 17 – Perhaps my strategy is slightly different because I have been influenced by another modern philosopher, Simone Weil. She believed that God is love, but God is very far distant from our world, and God left this world in the care of the Prince of This World and inert matter. And so there are two strategies and both are based on a very acute awareness of the presence of evil in this world.

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– Klemens Pozhecky thinks that Brodsky’s ‘main theme is that of evil. Since he is such a profoundly religious writer and he sees historical events in metaphysical terms, he, in accord with the Orthodox tradition, sees evil as an absence, an emptiness, a sort of minus or cipher.’ 18 What do you see as being the essence of Brodsky’s work? – Brodsky belongs with those poets who have been astonishingly successful in preserving the Christian, the Classical traditions. Perhaps in order to write poetry in our twentieth century you need to believe in God. Beginning with Mallarmé, Western poetry lost its faith, became an independent art. I think that Brodsky and myself, we preserve a sacred vision of the world. – You have, in the past, bewailed the fact that Pasternak failed to establish a ‘philosophical opposition to official Soviet doctrine’. 19 What alternative would you propose? – That was Pasternak’s strong point; if he had proposed an alternative that would have sealed his fate. I think that in recent years my poetry has grown more and more metaphysical. But, you know, it isn’t a poet’s job to formulate the answers. What is Brodsky’s programme in ‘The Butterfly’ (C, pp. 32 - 8), for instance, or in ‘The Fly’ (U, pp. 163 - 72)? – There isn’t one, but those poems do encompass his thoughts on the problems that trouble him: faith and art, language and time, life and the void. I’ll cite your own words, ‘In ‘The Butterfly’ … the seventeenth century is revisited, revived, and enriched’. 20 You also define one of his major themes as being that of ‘man against space and time’. 21 You will agree that that theme is as old as the world. Has Brodsky brought something new to it? – That’s difficult to say. I think that poetry belongs to the tradition of the language in which it is written. I think that you know better than I the significance of Brodsky to the Russian poetic tradition. – It seems to me that no one has been as absorbed as he has with the theme of Time. – I must tell you that not long ago a selection of Brodsky’s poetry appeared in Polish. I wrote an introduction to the book. The translator is a Professor Baranczak. 22 I envy Brodsky, he is very inventive when it comes to dealing with the rhymes. He’s unsurpassable. I find it very difficult to write rhymed poetry, but Barańczak has preserved Brodsky’s original rhyme schemes in his Polish translation.

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– Despite all the resistance of the Polish language? The rhymes aren’t banal, are they? – No, they aren’t. Not at all, It’s simply astounding. And I find that Polish book of Brodsky’s very strange because it isn’t in the Polish tradition of poetry. Something similar happened with my book Treatise on Poetry. I said as much to Gorbanevskaya; it may have been translated into Russian, but it doesn’t conform to what one expects of Russian poetry. – I want to return to the philosophical aspect of your poetry, of Brodsky’s poetry. You have said of your own poetry that it resembles ‘dancing an intellectual ballet’, 23 whereas Brodsky’s is like a ‘philosophical diary in verse’. 24 How successfully do the poetry and philosophy tie together? – I think that Brodsky makes a better job of it than many Western poets. I’ve tried very hard myself to move in an opposing direction, against the current tide of Western poetic tendencies. And in this sense it’s not possible to call my poetry Western; it stands in opposition to Western poetry. And there Brodsky and I take a common stand, we’re fighting the same fight. – In a way you’re building a bridge between the Slavic and Western tradition? – Yes. Western poetry is moving towards subjectivism, and that is fraught with very serious consequences. In Russian poetry there is, of course, a tradition of autobiographical verse – it’s a very old tradition. And there are a lot of Brodsky’s poems which are autobiographical, but Brodsky is striving for objectivity. Take all of those poems of his where he gives us descriptions of various cities, historical situations; take for example his ‘Lullaby of Cape Cod’: his attempt to be objective about the two empires can be felt very strongly indeed. And that is all very much against the grain of modern Western poetry. – Brodsky calling Cavafy ‘a spiritual extremist’ (L, p. 67), once declared that ‘ for this life Christ is not enough, Freud is not enough, Marx is not enough, nor is existentialism or Buddha’. 25 Don’t you think that Brodsky himself is a spiritual, an intellectual, extremist? – Possibly, possibly. It’s a very Russian trait. – Do you agree with him when he says that ‘poetry provides a far greater sense of infinity than any creed is capable of’? 26

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– No, I can’t agree with that postulate. Unlike him, I don’t ascribe so important a role to poetry. – He once said, ‘If there is any deity to me, it’s language.’ 27 Why does he place language on such a high metaphysical plane? – In our epoch language has been seen to be of paramount importance by academics in the West. Everything else is swept away and language is left standing alone, allegedly speaking for us and for itself. But that is sheer nihilism, ontological nihilism. They look upon any search for the truth as plain metaphysical nonsense. For the deconstructionists, the linguistic pragmatists, language is our master, language is everything and everything is language. With Brodsky there is a difference. – Yes, though Brodsky is constantly saying that the writer is the servant of the language, the tool of language, 28 he also insists upon the divine nature of language, ‘the language we are given is such that we find ourselves in a situation of a child who received a gift. The gift is, as a rule, less than the Giver – and that demonstrates the nature of language.’ 29 – Brodsky isn’t at all like those academics and poets for whom language is an autonomous entity. He doesn’t experiment with language just for the sake of experiment. For him language is a way of confronting the world. – … and time. Isn’t that why he was so struck by Auden’s lines, ‘Time … Worships language’ (L, pp. 362 - 4)? There’s a similar notion in your poem: I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing That is dictated to me and a few others. 30

Can we take that as being analogous to Brodsky’s ‘servant of language’? – I think that’s possible. At any given moment when a poet appears upon the poetic stage set by his native tongue, there are a whole string of possibilities which the poet has to explore, to put to his own use. He isn’t free to wander too far beyond certain boundaries set by those possibilities. I have talked about this with him and I asked him why certain tendencies exist in modern Russian poetry rather than others. It was his view that an unbroken line that was broken during 1920s

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and 1930s has to be continued. In that sense Brodsky knows his place. He can’t and he doesn’t want to move in a different direction, he is trying to preserve the continuity of Russian poetic tradition. – Why in your view has the Polish language chosen you to be its ‘secretary’, its medium when, for the greater part of your life now, you have lived abroad? – I cannot rationalise about what is just fate. – In ‘Wormwood Star’ you write, ‘and this is how my prayer of a grammar-school boy, brought up on the verse of the Polish poets was fulfilled: my prayer for greatness and therefore for exile’. 31 Why do you couple greatness and exile together like that? – In Polish poetry there is a true myth of exile; for example, look at Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Norwid. – You have confessed that you found it difficult to identify with the milieu in which you live. 32 For Brodsky, however, to use his own words, ‘every new country is, in the final analysis, just a continuation of space’. 33 But at a deeper level it seems to me that you and Brodsky echo one another. He thinks that with every new line, with each succeeding thought the poet in exile is carried further and further away from the shores of his homeland. And, finally, he finds himself tete a tete with the language. That is his Otherland. 34 And in your Treatise on Poetry you express a very similar idea: ‘only speech is the fatherland’. 35 – That, in my opinion, is the declaration of a proud man, though it seems to me that I suffer less from that vice than Brodsky does. I’m constantly aware of the limitations of poetry, of language. I constantly feel the incommensurability that exists between world and word. All that a poet can do is to attempt, to try to express something. Brodsky, as I’ve said already, ascribes too great a responsibility to literature. Some people find the idea exciting, others find it annoying. – Don’t you believe, then, in the salvatory role of poetry? In your poem ‘Dedication’ you write: That I wanted good poetry without knowing it That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation. 36

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I don’t know whether that is salvation or not, but poetry really can be a help in times of despair, a shield against the misery of existence. – In the introduction to your Treatise on Poetry one reads: As if the author, for reasons unclear to you, Addressed the worse side of your nature, Pushing aside thought, cheating thought. 37

What is that? Hidden irony or an exercise in self-improvement? – What I am talking about there in the main is the difference between poetry and prose. In this twentieth century of ours poetry has moved further and further away from the relative, rationality of prose and it deals more and more with extremely subjective situations, with man’s subconscious. The poem also expresses the desire to restore to poetry a philosophical content. And there again Brodsky and myself stand together and choose to differ from certain Modernist poets. – In a lecture he gave on your poetry Brodsky said, ‘He has a catastrophic almost apocalyptic cast of mind.’ 38 And actually, in your youth you headed a group of poets who called themselves ‘The Catastrophists’. Are you yourself conscious of this particular way of thinking? – Possibly. He saw me as having a particular, Slavic, way of thinking. That, after all, is the way Solovyov, Dostoevsky etc. saw the world. And of course we have our own particular Polish variation on that theme. Maybe Brodsky is right, but I’m not particularly proud of it. – In some of your poems one senses an overwhelming guilt. Is that because you are one of the survivors or is it because you yourself didn’t experience the post-war traumas that so afflicted Lithuania and Poland? And does it follow from that that your feeling of guilt is your Quasimodo complex, which Tsvetaeva thinks every poet ought to suffer from? – I’m not convinced that every poet necessarily has to suffer from such a complex. I know I do have a guilt complex. I don’t think I have to look at history to explain it. I think that, in my case, its roots lie deeper: in a feeling of being fated, destined. It appeared when I was still very young, practically when I was still at school. My friend Adam Mikhnik said to me not long ago, ‘I like your poetry because it bleeds. It thus demonstrates that a wound can be a source of strength.’ Maybe

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literature in general and poetry in particular develops from a wound. One just has to overcome the pain. – Brodsky took his epigraph to his selected essays ‘Less than One’ from your poem, ‘Elegy to N. N’: ‘And the heart doesn’t die when one think, it should.’ 39 Could you explain that line? – That is a very concrete situation I’m describing there, about a person who is close to me. Her son was sent to his death in a German concentration camp and yet she went on living. Millions of Russians went through the same mill, under Stalinism. I have a Russian acquaintance whose husband was arrested during one of the purges. She had a young child and she just couldn’t let anyone know that something dreadful had happened. – Brodsky once remarked that you ‘get an almost sensual pleasure from saying ‘no’’. 40 Is that right? – I’m afraid so [laughs]. But it’s more complicated than that. I call myself the ‘ecstatic pessimist’. Schopenhauer in my opinion has the best theory of literature, of art; it’s as objective as a Dutch still-life. I try to put that into practice. – Both you and Brodsky use a lot of negations in your poetry. What is their function? – I am full of contradictions. I can’t see myself as a whole. I am continually riven by contradictions. – Isn’t that why your poetry is so difficult? Its essence slips so tantalisingly through the reader’s fingers. Could you suggest some ways in which an adequate reading of your poetry might be pursued? – Yes, my readers are having a hard time. They can’t understand why I so often change my points of view, my opinions. I recently showed a friend a couple of poems. The one completely contradicted the other. I asked whether it was worth my while publishing them when, really, taken together they were self-contradictory. He answered, ‘Of course. It’s typical of you. But try to get them printed side by side and write a short accompanying commentary.’ My poetry is very ironical, and there are many allusions in it to sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish poetry. – You are virtually a younger contemporary of Akhmatova, of Pasternak, of Mandelstam. How early on did you get to know their poetry? – Strange as it may seem, I was no great reader of Russian poetry. A friend of mine gave me, it must have been sometime around 1934,

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a book of Pasternak’s, his Second Birth. I didn’t understand what it was the title alluded to. I really liked his poetry. By the way, the poet Korzhavin said that he ascribed his own conversion to Stalinism to that very book of Pasternak’s because it was so full of beauty and joy. I learnt about Mandelstam very late on. I don’t think that Russian poetry had any very strong influence on me. I was really influenced by French poetry. – And English poetry? – Yes, but to a lesser extent, because the French influence came in my formative years. – You are on record as saying that ‘the poet, before he is ready to confront ultimate questions, must observe a certain code. He should be God-fearing, love his country and his native tongue, rely upon conscience, avoid alliances with evil, and be attached to tradition.’ 41 Does Brodsky fulfil all of your demands? – Yes, of course he does. I’ve already said that, given the state of Western poetry at present, Brodsky and I may well be considered to be lingering in the rearguard, but really we may be the avant-garde. That’s something you just never know, because if we poets work hard at it then we can change the direction in which poetry is headed. – How does it look to you today, that ‘huge building of strange architecture’ that you called Brodsky’s poetry ten years ago? 42 – For me architecture is the key to Brodsky’s poetry. He is always looking back to Petersburg. He underlines that himself, in his essays. When you compare him with Beckett the contrast is particularly striking. For Beckett, architecture is a matter of indifference, with Brodsky it’s all important. Take, for example, his play Marble, which is a very Beckettian play with this essential difference: the setting of the play is in Ancient Rome, it is dominated by classical motifs and there is an architectural imagination at work. Brodsky is heir to a complex cultural legacy. He makes use of themes from the Bible, from Homer, from Virgil, from Dante, from the English Metaphysicals and from Russian literature. The classical themes make for a gigantic poetic structure but they also underline the essential unity of European culture. Brodsky, I think, suffers from neither an inferiority nor a superiority complex with regard to the West. – You once said you don’t correspond to the American idea of a poet. 43 Does Brodsky?

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– I don’t think so, because the American idea of a poet is of someone who is an alcoholic, has had a couple of mental breakdowns, an attempt or two at suicide, and pays regular visits to a psychoanalyst. Let’s end on that humorous note. – As far as I know none of your poems have been dedicated to Brodsky. Could I take your ‘Secretaries’ and use it in my book since it is a poem about poets in general? – Yes, that’s right. I haven’t written a poem especially for him. If you like my ‘Secretaries’ so much, then, by all means, use it. SECRETARIES I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing That is dictated to me and a few others. Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed Is not up to us to inquire, we won’t read it anyway. Berkeley, 1975

Notes 1

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Joseph Brodsky, ‘Ostatsia samim soboy v situatsii neestestvennoy’, from Brodsky’s answers to the questions from the audience after his poetry reading in Paris, 26 October 1988, Brodskii, Kniga intevyu, Ed. by V. Polukhina (Moskva: Zakharov, 2007), p. 379 - 380. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1980, p. 24. F. D. Reeve, ‘Additions and Losses’, comment on Selected Poems by Joseph Brodsky, trans, with Introduction by George L. Kline (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), Poetry, vol. cxxvil, no. 1 (October 1975) p. 43. Joseph Brodsky, ‘On Richard Wilbur’, American Poetry Review, (January/ February 1973) p. 52. Rachel Berghash, ‘An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz’, Partisan Review, no. 2 (1988) p. 257. Anna Husarska, ‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky’, New Leader, 14 December 1987, p. 9. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1981, ‘Evropeiskii vozdukh nad Rossiei’, Kniga intervyu, cit. op., p. 159.

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Czeslaw Milosz, Poeticheskiy traktat (Traktat poetycki, 1957), trans, from Polish by Natalya Gorbanevskaya (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982). Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 24. Milosz, ‘Preparation’, The Collected Poems (1931 - 1987) (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1988) p. 418. Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, p. 24. Lev Shestov, Dobro i zlo v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i F. Nietzsche ( filosofiya i propoved’) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1971). Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Nad perevodom Knigi Iova’, Kontinent, no. 29 (1981) p. 263. Lev Shestov, In Job’s Balance, trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macarthney (London: Dent, 1932). Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966). Joseph Brodsky, a recording of his lectures and seminars on comparative literature, Michigan University, Ann Arbor, 2 April 1980. Klemens Pozhecky, ‘Uvenchanie neslomlennoy Rossii’, Literaturnoe prilozhenie (No. 5) k Russkoy mysli, 25 December 1987, p. II, trans, from the Polish by N. Gorbanevskaya. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘On Pasternak Soberly [1970]’, World Literature Today, vol. 63, no. 2 (Spring 1989) p. 218. Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, p. 24. Ibid., p. 23. Joseph Brodsky, 82 wiersze i poematy, trans. Stanislaw Baranczak, introduction by Czeslaw Milosz (Paris: Zeszyty Literackie, 1988). Milosz, The Collected Poems, p. 172. Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, p. 23. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Beyond Consolation’, a review of N. Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned and three translations of Mandelstam’s poetry, New York Review of Books, 7 February 1974, p. 14. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Virgil: Older than Christianity. A Poet for the New Age’, Vogue, October 1981, p. 178. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Sven Birkerts, Brodskii, Kniga interv’iu, op. cit., p. 100. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by N. Gorbanevskaya, ‘Byt mozhet, samoe sviatoe, chto u nas est’ – eto nash yazyk …’, Russkaya Mysl, 3 February 1983, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems, p. 325. Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Osobaya tetrad: zwezda Polyn, trans, from Polish by N. Gorbanevskaya, Kontinent, no. 27 (1981) p. 9.

32 33

34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Nad perevodom Knigi Iova’, p. 262. Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Bella Ezerskaya, in Mastera (Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage, 1982) p. 108. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Language as Otherland’, a lecture delivered at London University (SSEES), 28 November 1977; a recording is available. Milosz, Poeticheskii traktat, p. 2. Milosz, The Collected Poems, p. 78. Milosz, Poeticheskii traktat, p. 3. Joseph Brodsky, a lecture on Czeslaw Milosz, 2 April 1980, Ann Arbor, Mich. Milosz, The Collected Poems, p. 239. Brodsky, a recording of his lectures and seminars on comparative literature, Michigan University, Ann Arbor. Milosz, ‘A Struggle against Suffocation’, p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. Milosz, interviewed by Rachel Berghash, op. tit., p. 260.

21 P E T E R VI E R E C K Born in New York City in 1916, Peter Viereck, who in 1949 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his first book of poems, Terror and Decorum, has an international reputation as an historian, poet, dramatist, and political. He was professor of European and Russian history at Mount Holyoke College and the only American scholar to have received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry as well as history. He is also among the most creative and original translators of poetry. He is a translator of Goethe and Georg Heym, among other German poets, and has eight poems in the Norton anthology World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998). Among Viereck’s many collections of poetry is Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycle 1967 - 1987, of which Joseph Brodsky wrote: ‘Applewood is the major event in American poetry of today, on a par with Williams’ Paterson or Pound’s Cantos (although Mr Viereck would resent such a comparison). It would be considered a major event in any literature. Had Applewood been written in French or German, it would be no doubt a lot luckier: by now we’d have it translated into English several times, hailed, imitated, parodied’.1 His latest collection of poem, Door, has been published by Hagganum Hill Books in June 2005. He is the author of a number of widely used scholarly books in political science and history, including Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind, 2 Conservatism Revisited 3 and The New Conservatism: What Went Wrong? A collection of Viereck’s selected essays on poetry and on history, written between 1938 through 2004, Strict Wildness (2005) is an ideal introduction to his literary and political thoughts.4 Peter Viereck died in May 13, 2006.

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RHYME

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Interview with Peter Viereck, November 2003, South Hadley, Massachussets. – Brodsky dedicated a poem to you that he had written in English ‘The Berlin Wall Tune’ (1980). Tell me about the circumstances of this dedication. – I’ll give my answer, which will also apply to other questions – I don’t know. It was so long ago. It appeared in the New York Review of Books. It’s not about me, it’s about the Berlin Wall. I have something special about Brodsky in the magazine Agni, it has an interview with him. I think, you should have it.5 – When did you first meet Joseph? – I went to the Soviet Union in 1961, 62 and 63. The first time I went on an exchange of ‘singing birds’. Kennedy made a deal with Khrushchev: each country would send two poets to the other, free of charge. They would be given the red carpet treatment, visit any place they wanted, meet anyone they wanted, which, by the way, the Soviet didn’t stick to. I wanted to meet Solzhenitsyn and that was forbidden for obvious reasons. I met various interesting people, for instance Akhmatova. And then I met Brodsky a second time when I was in Russia. I guess it was ‘63. And it’s mentioned in this interview that we sent each other letters and poems. We never got them. The secret police confiscated everything – from him and to him. So we never got those. He sent me photos, with very witty inscriptions. I made a Xerox of the inscription in one of his books. I don’t have the original here but in vault because I’ve so many valuable books, from whom ever, Brodsky, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann. – Then you became persona non grata to the Soviet authority. What did you do to deserve this? – Indeed I’d been expelled from Russia after one of my visits for having exposed Soviet anti-Semitism; my books were banned. I had written a poem about a tree, ‘A tree speaks’. And I had said, ‘You’re all static. I alone am moving. And at the end, everyone else is planted’. So Joseph wrote me, either in a book or on a photograph,

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‘You are all moving. I alone am static’, meaning he was stuck. When I saw him he never expected to get out of Russia. He thought that was impossible. – For more than 10 years, Brodsky taught the history of English and Russian literatures at Mount Holyoke with you. Was he a popular teacher, a good colleague? – As a colleague, he was brilliant and unreliable. He was very conscientious; he gave lots to the students. He could be ruthless too, particularly if they liked modern free verse. He hated any progressive left wing intellectual who are fond of declaring: ‘We are, the masses …’ He could be quite brutal in that case. He could be unreliable too; once we invited him to dinner and he came two hours late … Joseph was looking forward to again teaching a seminar with me, officially called ‘Poets under Stalin and Hitler’ for which we had our secret name: ‘Rhyme and punishment’; punishment can also be spelled ‘punish-man’. I gave him – when I shouldn’t have done – a pack of cigarettes … Marlborough, I think (laughter). That’s how he began smoking. Well no, but I mean that’s what killed him. Afterwards, when I found out he was a chain-smoker, when he came to America, I never let him smoke when I was in the room, and he obeyed that and then he would say, ‘Excuse me, I want to go look at my car’. And then he would come back smelling of cigarette smoke. He couldn’t quit. He tried. He couldn’t. – Was it your idea to bring Joseph here to teach? – Oh yes. – Tell me a little bit about that. – Joseph was teaching at Michigan, where they published his books, but he wanted something on a human-scale. Michigan was too big, too impersonal. And since we’d always gotten along well, he called on me here when he was giving a reading nearby at Amherst and asked. And I asked how would he like to teach in a small college: they don’t have the money Michigan has, but it’s a relaxed life, no tension; not so much work either. And he said he would prefer that. So the first appointment I got him must have been ‘81 or ‘82. – I think it was in Autumn 1981. – Anyway, the first year he was not at Mount Holyoke alone but at the five colleges: Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and so on. And then in

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the later years I persuaded the Dean, Joseph Ellis, who was a friend of mine, and who became a friend of Brodsky’s and the President, who was also a friend of mine – she had been a student of mine; she’s not President any longer; her name was Liz Kennan – I persuaded them to make Joseph a good offer. He found it too strenuous to have to get around five different colleges. The driving between them was hellish and it took some doing because this was before the Nobel Prize and he wasn’t at all well known. In fact, people there hadn’t heard of him. I remember one of the deans – it wasn’t Mount Holyoke – interviewed me. I was trying to get my way at a meeting and he said to me, ‘Where did he get his PhD?’ The President would want to know. So I replied, with a straight face, ‘University of Gulag’. And he’d never heard of it. It worked. Joseph lived around the corner at 49 Woodbridge Street. It was an old house with wood paneling. It appealed to him. I had a lot of extra furniture. I helped him out. He lived very simply at the beginning when he came here. Once he stayed overnight here, before he had the house. He stayed in my guest room and he just slept in his trousers and his undershirt. He didn’t even have pajamas. It was Russian poverty... I mean, given overcrowded apartments … And then I noticed a subtle change. At a certain point he became a great connoisseur of whisky. We were talking about that and he said he liked Jamieson best and at that point I said, ‘Listen kid, you’ve lost your innocence’. He became a connoisseur of different kinds of cars, Cadillacs and Jamieson whiskey. There was a lost innocence there; which I regret, you know, in a way. – His house is rather far from the centre of the campus. Was he happy there, in so far as he was capable of being happy? – He could never be happy. Wherever he was he’d be dissatisfied, arguing with publishers, things like that. But he was much happier than in Russia. In fact, much happier than I am, and I was born here. For example, he loved Coca Cola and in Europe that’s the symbol of American vulgarity; Europeans talk about the Coca Colonysation. But he loved Coca Cola. He loved driving cars at a dangerous speed and he got some device that could tell him if a traffic cop was nearby. He lived fast and dangerously. He lectured like mad all over the country, smoked maybe thee packs a day. That’s how he was. – Did you ever attend any of his poetry readings? – Yes.

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– Did you read with him? – At Amherst I attended a reading of his. And then I introduced a reading of his at Mount Holyoke . By that time he was already a Nobel so I didn’t want to repeat a lot of clichés about who he was. That would have been insulting. He was world famous, instead I quoted two lines from Pushkin’s Onegin, ‘I vozbuzhdat’ ulybku dam / Ognyom nezhdannykh epigram’. 6 –Have you read Brodsky in both languages, in Russian and in English? – No, my Russian’s not that good, so I read him in English or in English side-by-side. I studied Russian at Harvard in 1941 and never had a chance to speak it. I know certain phrases. – What is your view on Brodsky’s controversial self-translations? – I know they were attacked by Stanley Kunitz. But I have to explain. It’s sometimes incorrect, but if you turn it, as if the English language were a mirror, and you slant it so that you see it from a different viewpoint … You see, its idiosyncratic in a new way. I found this very refreshing. I think some of his rhymes are forced in English. But it made me see my own language, which I love, in a different way … – Joseph felt at home in the Anglo-American tradition but neither Akhmatova nor Tsvetaeva, his poetic parents, were interested in that tradition. Where do you think his love of the Anglo-American tradition came from? – I don’t know. He thought it was the greatest storehouse of poetry, even greater than the Russian. And he read John Donne and Auden. They were among his favorites. – Do you think that Russian poetry itself demanded that this stream of new blood should be transfused into the veins of Russian poetry? – I’ll tell you what I think. English is really two different languages. I think that gives nuances that no other language has. After 1066 the upper-class spoke only French: the Normans. The lower-class spoke Anglo-Saxon. And after a few centuries the two intermingled and the result is that where there’s only one word in Russian or French, or German, there are two words in English. One being the aristocratic, crook-your-little-finger word, and the other the AngloSaxon word. All the four-letter words. For example, in class-wise a ‘courtesan’ ranks higher than a ‘whore’, which is Anglo-Saxon.

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‘Courtesan’ is French. Or, a ‘mortician’ ranks higher than an ‘undertaker’. The greatness of Shakespeare is partly that in the same sentence he will have a short Anglo-Saxon word and a long melodious Latin/French word. For example, in ‘Macbeth’ you have Macbeth washing the blood off in the ocean and what he says is: ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/ Clean from my hand? No this my hand will rather/ The multitudinous seas incarnadine/ Making the green one red’. This is, I think, very exciting, the combination, and it’s this aspect which may have attracted him. No other language has it. I would say that we have the biggest vocabulary of any language in the world - and no grammar. Everything got broken down. We don’t have any endings except ‘who’ and ‘whom’ – which everybody gets wrong. People who are intellectually pretentious, but vulgar, will often say ‘whom’ when they mean ‘who’. Have you noticed that? They get it all wrong. They mix ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt’, for instance… And its almost unbelievable how quickly Joseph learnt to write in English. It took him a while with the rhythm. I remember once he was in my house. He’d come to read me a poem before sending it to a magazine. I think this was the one about Maximilian and Mexico. I’m not sure. He read it and I said to him, ‘This is completely metronomic – tom-ti-tom-ti-tom’. And the beauty of the English language is that everything is on two levels. You do have the tom-ti-ti-tom iambic pentameter but you have, crossing that and contradicting it, the conversational tone. So you can get wonderful effects. Yeats is the master of that. You have a slow moving tom-ti-tom-ti-tom and then a very, very fast moving irregular syllabic. ‘Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?’ – ‘being’ really becomes one syllable. And he took that to heart and rewrote the poem accordingly, breaking up the metronome, the metronome effect. He was a quick learner. – Did he ever ask you to look over his English? – He never asked me to look over his translation, my Russian isn’t that good. He asked George Kline and he taught with George. – Your ‘Archer in the Marrow’ is written in strict rhymes and metrics. You obviously shared Brodsky’s love for regular classical prosody. Did you ever discuss his poetics with him? – We talked a lot about metrics. – You never translated anything of Brodsky’s?

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– No. He worked with Kline and Wilbur; both are very good. – Mark Strand said you had to have heard Brodsky speaking to appreciate his rhymes. – He had trouble with the accent. He did have problems with his English right up to the end. He would say ‘concur’ when he meant was ‘conquer’. – He always tried to avoid displaying the wounds suffered in Russia but critics would always emphasize that. Did he resent it? There were all the books, the articles, the interviews. Journalists would always ask questions about his ‘Siberian exile’. They were always dramatizing the situation. Everybody was always reminding him of his suffering and mistreatment. – No, he didn’t complain. And he had great empathy for others. And once he got his mitts on that Nobel Prize cash he was extremely generous, in an unpublicized way, helping refugees. He would just privately and secretly give them money. When it’s done publicly, it’s showing off, like a guilty millionaire funding a university. But he would do these things privately and that impressed me. Poets are supposed to be so egotistical. – But if he did it privately, how did you know about it? – A good question (laughter). One of his Russian friends told me, but I don’t remember who. There were two different Russians who mentioned it. – Probably Victoria Schweitzer? – Yes, her husband used to say he had been in prison under three tsars: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. – When he was elected Poet Laureate of the U. S. was there resentment among American poets? – Yes, among fellow-travelers. I remember one full-professor at Amherst who had a very good reputation and who said, ‘Oh, this is just part of the Cold War’. Another said to me, ‘Joseph should be grateful he got a free education in a non-capitalist country instead of biting the hand that fed him’. Imagine calling a brain-washing an education. But you can’t imagine how powerful fellow-travelers were in the chic Ivy League colleges. There are so many intellectuals, usually rich, upper-class snobbish individuals who want to ‘epater le bourgeois’ by being pro-communist. But they knew nothing. They were hostile to Joseph and thought that it was all to do with Cold War. And he did

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offend people by his bluntness. For example, there was a gathering … I had brought him with me to some poetry reading, in Tennessee I think, and when we were talking together a lot of ordinary Babbitt citizens came in – so Joseph said: ‘Now the small talk can begin’. This was a joy to me, but very offensive … – Are you aware of his spiritual outlook? Was it Christian or Jewish or neither? Or something in between? – One Jewish friend of mine who was quite religious resented Brodsky because of the Mother Mary poem ‘Nature Morte’: ‘On govorit v otvet: / – Mertvyi ili zhivoi, / raznitsy, zheno, net. / Syn ili Bog, ia tvoi’. 7 He acted as if this was some kind of betrayal. I think Joseph appreciated the spirit in all religions – Jewish, Christian, Greek – not Muslim. I think he appreciated spiritual values wherever they occurred. But he was never Jewish in any dogmatic way – no sign of that. No kosher food. None of that. He admired the spirit. He even carried on vendettas against both Jewish and non-Jewish fellow-travelers in New York. He was very proud though of being Jewish. He told me he was Jewish on both sides, descended from the city of Brody in Poland – hence Brodsky. He equated communism with Nazism, Stalin with Hitler. – He had a great feeling for Poland? – Yes. He was a friend of Milosz and I had known Milosz many years – even before he defected from the Communists. I brought him and Brodsky here for a discussion of the modern world and that was recorded. I can give you the typescript. Milosz talked a great deal. Brodsky didn’t say much because he came late. He was rushing from New York, but his voice is there all right. – Tell us more about your meeting with Akhmatova. – When I took part in this exchange of poets, among the people I asked to meet was Akhmatova . I was brought there by my Russian translator who translated a lot of poetry, non-political of course, into Russian. He was a broken man. He’d been protected by Bukharin. But after Bukharin was eliminated, he was sent to the gulag. But he was out now and he was an old friend of Akhmatova’s from the Acmeist movement. Now a totally broken man, he was my guide and interpreter. So he took me to Akhmatova and suddenly a woman appeared, who said she was from the Union of Writers, but I didn’t know what she was doing there. Akhmatova knew and my translator knew, because afterwards he told me she was a police spy. They

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didn’t want to leave Akhmatova alone with me. And so we discussed very safe things and she mentioned she liked apples with cream and so on. And then we talked a little about the Acmeist movement and she and this poor broken old Russian, whose name I’ve forgotten for the moment, talked about the year 1912 or thereabouts – when the Movement was flourishing and they both were publishing books. And they met together, both of them with laurels around their head, and talked about the future. And they said, ‘What a tremendous future! What a blossoming of poetry lies ahead!’. And then their eyes met and she began sobbing. She was unable to say why. I knew why. You know why. But in front of a police spy she couldn’t explain why she was sobbing after remembering all the high hopes of a new Russia. I was moved to tears. I mean the tragedy condensed into one minute, a whole generation … – You showed me another Brodsky’s poem dedicated to you. Do you remember the occasion? – It was written as a ‘Foreword’ to my new book Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems, 1995, publication with University of Arkansas Press. Here it is, you can have it.8 An introduction to a book of poetry must have a look of poetry. I thought a lyric befits this work by Peter Viereck, perhaps the greatest rhymer of the modern period, a prof of history at Mount Holyoke College, famed for its feminists and foliage. […] May 1993.

– You also have a poem for Joseph written after his death. May I include it into my collection? – Of course. It is from my larger ‘Gate Talk for Brodsky’, which won The New England Poetry Club prize for the best published poem of 1998.

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NOT WORMS For Brodsky The night the poet died his metaphors Gloated in liberation round his corpse. Now rouged clichés, disguised as muse, Ignite a bombing bombast’s purple fuse. Cant sneaks its Trojan Pegasus Into Parnassus. Hoarse refugees race to warn us That exclamation marks are running wild And prowling half-truths carried off a child. Fixed stars his vision etched into the skies Now gouge – as falling stars – his too-wide eyes. Yet he throbs on in form to shatter This formless mutiny of matter. His dust is dead, his pulse a frightening thunder. Bell, book, and test tube can’t exorcise its gong, Pulsing us into shapes of gargoyle wonder. In vain we drive our stakes through such a haunter. Are we but split iambics of his song? Are hearts feet lungs and couplings strummed By two-way thump, Scanning our outraged flesh with metric romp? Yet some sereneness in our rage has guessed That we are being blest and blest and blest When least we know it and when coldest art Seems hostile, unless, or apart. Nor worms, not worms in such a skull But rhythms, rhythms writhe and sting and crawl. They spin the seasons round from bud to snow. And all things are because he tuned them so. (Revised, March 2000)

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Notes: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

From Brodsky’s letter to Mr George Brockway, then the Editor of W. W. Norton, I June 1982. Peter Viereck gave me a copy the letter. The quote was published in the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which includes many translations by Peter Viereck and the poem dedicated to Brodsky. See MPT, no. 18, 2001, p. 236-258. Expanded edition of Metapolitics adds not only Thomas Mann’s long essay on Viereck but Jacque Barzun’s debate with him about romantisism. Vireck’s essays on the case of Albert Speer, Claus von Stauffenberg (the German officer who led the army conspiracy to assassinate Hitler), and poets Stefan George and Georg Heym appear for the first time in book form. Transaction (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2003). See also a new addition of Conservatism Revisited. The Revolt Against Ideology with a major new study of Peter Viereck and conservatism by Claes Ryn. Transaction, (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2004). Peter Viereck, Strict Wildness. Discovery in Poetry and History. Transaction (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2005). Lynette Labinger, A Conversation with Joseph Brodsky (Leningrad, July 13, 1970), Agni, no. 51, 2000, pp. 17-20. ‘…with an epigram-surprise, / of kindling slimes in ladies’ eyes’, tr. Charles Jonson, Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (NY: The Viking Press, 1978), by p. 15. ‘Christ speaks to her in turn: / ‘Whether dead or alive, / woman, it’s all the same – / son or God, I am thine.’ Tr. by George L. Kline, Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (Oxford: OUP, 1980), p. 46. Unfortunately, the Brodsky Estate has refused permission to reproduce this entire published poem, so we giving the first stanza only to demonstrate Brodsky’s wit.

VA L E N T I N A P O L U K H I N A B O O K S : 1989 – Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge University Press, 1989), xx + 324 pp. 1990 – Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (London: The Macmillan Press, 1990), co-editor with Lev Loseff and contributor, x + 204 pp. 1992 – Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press and Basingtoke/London: The Macmillan Press, 1992 1993 – Literary Tradition and Practice in Russian Culture. Papers from an International Conference on the ocassion of the seventieth birthday of Yu. M. Lotman, co-editor with Joe Andrew and Robert Reid and contributor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), xii + 341 pp. 1994 – Russian Culture: Semiotic and Structure, co-editor with Joe Andrew and Robert Reid (Amsterdam: Russian Literature, Special issue – Ju. M. Lotman I, XXXVI - II, November 1994), pp. 243 - 369. 1994 – Russian Culture: Semiotic and Structure, co-editor with Joe Andrew and Robert Reid (Amsterdam: Russian Literature, Special issue – Ju. M. Lotman II, XXXVI - VI, November 1994), pp. 371 - 469. 1994 – Structure and Trudition in Russian Society, co-editor with Robert reid and Joe Andrew (Helsinki: Slavica Helsingiensia, 1994), 186 pp. 1995 – Russian Literature, XXXVII - II/III, 15 February/1April 1995. Special issue: Joseph Brodsky, guest editor Valentina Polukhina, 295 pp. 1995 – Словарь тропов Бродского (На материале сборника «Часть речи»). При участии Ю. Пярли (Тарту, 1995), 342 с. 1997 – Бродский глазами современников (СПб.: Звезда, 1997). 2000 – Иосиф Бродский, Большая книга интервью, составитель В. Полухина (М.: Захаров, 2000, 2005, 2007), 783 с. 2000 – Russian Literature, XLVII-III/IV, 1 April/15 May 2000. Special issue: Brodsky as a Critic, guest editor Valentina Polukhina, p. 243 - 450. 2002 – Как работает стихотворение Бродского. Из исследований славистов на Западе, редакторы-составители Лев Лосев и Валентина Полухина (М.: НЛО, 2002), с. 303. 2003 – Поэтика Иосифа Бродского. Сборник научных трудов. Редколлегия: В. П. Полухина, И. В. Фоменко, А. Г. Степанов (Тверь, 2003), 472 с. 2005 – Иосиф Бродский: Стратегия чтения, ред. В. Полухина, А. Корчинский, Ю. Троицкий (М.: Издательство Ипполитова, 2005) 2006 – Бродский глазами современников (СПб.: Звезда, 2006), том 1, издание второе. 2006 – Бродский глазами современников (СПб.: Звезда, 2006), том 2. 2008 – Иосиф Бродский: Жизнь, труды, эпоха (СПб.: Звезда, 2008)б 528 с.

NA ME I NDEX Abramovich O. I. 63, 84 Adamovich G. V. 143, 159 Ageev L. 17 Akhmadulina B. A. 9, 104, 115, 116, 162, 285, 299, 306 Akhmatova A. A. 13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27, 34, 35, 39, 40, 49, 60, 64, 70 – 72, 92 – 94, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107 – 110, 119 – 121, 128, 129, 132, 138, 139, 166, 167, 185, 186, 191, 192, 198, 201, 217 – 220, 225, 236, 238 – 242, 258, 284 – 286, 309, 310, 318, 322, 336, 343, 346, 347, 368, 374, 377, 380, 381 Aksyonov V. P. 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 318 Alekseev V. M. 24 Alpert A. 235, 236 Amursky V. 271 Annensky I. F. 67, 123 Anninsky L. A. 183 Arndt W. 102 Aronzon L. L. 226, 236, 255, 270 Aseev N. N. 39, 308 Auden W. H. 11, 27, 40, 191, 234, 240, 250, 309, 312, 318, 323, 327 – 330, 334, 350 – 352, 360, 365, 377 Averbakh I. 86, 180 Aygi G. 220, 221, 226, 236, 299 Azadovsky K. M. 71 Babel I. E. 138 Bach I. S. 263 Bagritsky E. G. 44, 142 Bakhtin M. M. 274, 284 Bandirielli B. 22 Barańczak S. 321, 363, 371

Barash A. 224 Baratynsky E. A. 20, 21, 33, 43, 60, 97, 118, 119, 121, 125, 166, 263, 300, 308, 317 Barkov I. 167 Bar-Sella Z. 322 Baryshnikov M. N. 74 Barzun J. 383 Basmanov A. 169, 178 Basmanova M. P. 35, 40, 71, 94, 103, 186 Batyushkov K. N. 123, 237, 300 Baudelaire Ch. 13, 292, 309 Beckett S. 155, 172, 331, 369 Belinsky V. G. 216 Bely A. 198, 213, 294 Berdyaev N. A. 230, 231 Berg R. 71 Berghash R. 370, 372 Bethea D. 191 Beznosov E. L. 44, 63, 84, 178 Birkerts S. 121, 270, 356, 371 Bishop E. 342 Bitov A. G. 17 Blok A. A. 65, 67, 92, 110, 123, 129, 150, 181, 185, 283, 336 Bobyshev D. V. 16, 21, 39, 87, 94, 102, 180, 181, 185 – 189, 191, 192, 199, 218, 219, 253, 254 Bokov V. F. 193 Brezhnev L. I. 280, 292, 379 Britanishsky V. L. 17 Brockway G. 383 Brodovich O. I. 16 Brodskaya M. M., Brodsky’s mother 48, 49 Brodsky A. I., Brodsky’s father 48, 49 Brodsky Joseph passim Browning R. 13

386

Name Index

Bukharin N. I. 380 Bunin I. A. 106, 358 Bunting B. 334 Byron G. 47, 79, 128, 148, 349 Carné M. 225 Carroll L. 272 Catullus 131, 154 Cavafy K. 75, 281, 364 Chaadaev P. Ya. 314 Chekhov A. P. 50, 135, 159 Cherniakova G. 142 Chertkov L. N. 17 Chudakov S. 87, 88 Chukovsky K. I. 86 Chulaki M. M. 92 Churchill W. 234 Claudel P. 272 Coldwell E. 197 Coleridge S. 205 Conrad J. 153, 347 Coventry C. 371 Crane H. 203 Dante 60, 147, 205, 250, 272, 277, 284, 287, 304, 327, 329, 341, 346, 352, 369 Davie D. 327, 340 Dedyulin S. 64 Derrida J. 232 Derzhavin G. R. 54, 98, 120, 241, 287 Descartes R. 26 Donne J. 13, 152, 203, 240, 277, 282, 329, 330, 352, 377 Dostoevsky F. M. 120, 145, 152, 153, 192, 203, 246, 278, 367 Dovlatov S. D. 124, 134 Dragomoshchenko A. T. 294

Eikhenbaum B. M. 220 Eliot T. S. 11, 13, 25, 70, 208, 234, 240, 266, 272, 277, 309, 312, 323, 330, 350, 357, 360 Elkin L. 69 Ellis J. 376 Epelboin A. 84, 134, 160, 211, 236, 270, 308, 340, 356, 370 Epshtein M. N. 293 Erofeev V. V. 84 Eryomenko A. V. 262, 293, 304 Eryomin M. F. 16, 137, 140, 148, 161, 220, 293 Esenin S. A. 44, 193, 283, 343 Etkind E. G. 102 Evtushenko E. A. 82, 277 Ezerskaya B. 159, 212, 372 Faulkner W. 30, 359 Fedorov N. F. 280, 292 Fet A. A. 123 Filippov B. A. 308 Fisher R. 323, 340 France P. 308 Freud S. 231, 232, 265, 364 Frost R. 9, 306, 309, 317, 350, 351, 374 Gałczyński K. I. 61, 64, 272, 359 George S. 383 Gerasimov V. V. 141, 159 Ginsberg A. 151 Ginzburg A. 86, 88, 102 Ginzburg L. Ya. 117, 121, 126, 134 Ginzburg-Voskov G. 207 Glad J. 84, 85, 102, 134, 160, 212, 235, 250, 271 Goethe J. W. 124, 205, 373 Gogol N. V. 216 Gorbanevskaya N. E. 9, 39, 84, 85, 94, 102, 103, 188, 211, 250, 270, 321, 361, 364, 371

Name Index

Gorbovsky G. Ya. 17, 68, 181, 190, 192, 220 Gordin Ya. A. 9, 41, 42, 63, 64, 84, 102, 292 Gorelov P. 292 Gubanov L. G. 288 Gumilyov N. S. 19, 27, 79 Gunn Th. 330, 340 Gutner M. 203 Hadrian 360 Haffenden J. 340 Halban P. 103, 121, 322 Hardwick E. 342 Hardy T. 272, 317, 340 Harris J. G. 270 Hass R. 356, 361 Haydn F. J. 156 Heaney S. 346 Hecht A. 348 Heidegger M. 231, 272, 278 Heine H. 151 Hejinian L. 294 Hemingway E. 138 Herbert Z. 309, 357, 359 Heym G. 373, 383 Hikmet N. 69 Hitler 61, 375, 380, 383 Hölderlin J. 13 Homer 131, 341, 369 Horace 154, 272 Husarska A. 370 Ivanov G. V. 248, 250 Ivanov Viach. Vs. 273 Ivanova N. 187 Ivask Yu. P. 241 Jakobson R. O. 202 Jarry A. 309 Jones Ch. 12 Jones D. 12

387

Jonson Ch. 383 Joyce J. 215, 359 Kantemir A. 98, 120, 166, 241 Karabchievsky Yu. A. 108, 115, 184 Katilius R. 312 Kedrov K. A. 294 Kennan L. 376 Kharms D. 146, 167, 198 Khlebnikov O. 293 Khlebnikov V. V. 68, 103, 106, 108, 128, 144, 145, 164, 165, 213, 218, 229, 254, 259, 260, 276, 277, 295 – 297, 346 Khodasevich V. F. 259 Khomyakov A. S. 76 Khromov V. 17, 137, 220 Khrushchev N. S. 374, 379 Kierkegaard S. 149, 150, 152, 231 Kipling R. 65 Kline G. L. 370, 378, 379, 383 Klyuev N. A. 193, 194, 237 Knyazev O. 33 Knyazev V. G. 35 Komarov G. F. 63, 84, 178 Kondakova N. 294 Kondratov A. M. 161 Kornilova G. 94 Korobova E. 88 Korolyova N. 17 Korzhavin N. M. 247, 369 Kostsinsky K. V. 163 Kovalyov G. L. 84, 159, 178, 236, 270 Kozakov M. M. 81 Krasil’nikov M. 68, 218 Krasovitsky S. 17, 137, 219 Kreps M. 216, 235 Krestinsky A. 142 Krivulin V. B. 9, 48, 64, 107, 108, 115, 119, 121, 213, 214, 235, 254, 265, 285, 314, 321

388

Name Index

Kruchenykh A. E. 130 Kublanovsky Yu. M. 7, 9, 38, 74, 82, 92, 203, 212, 225, 236, 237, 238, 246, 250 Kudimova M. 293 Kulle S. 161 Kumpan E. A. 17 Kunitz S. 377 Kuritsyn V. 270 Kushner A. S. 9, 17, 59, 79, 84, 103, 122, 123, 124, 134, 135, 190, 213, 220, 254, 263, 299, 346, 347 Kuzmin M. A. 117, 123, 252, 260, 261 Kuzminsky K. K. 68, 84, 159, 165, 178, 181, 236, 254, 255, 270 Labinger L. 383 Lacan J. 144, 231, 232 Lamming G. 343 Lapshin N. F. 142 Larkin Ph. 122 Laupan V. 103, 216, 235 Lear E. 167 Lebzak O. Ya. 163 Leonardo 351 Leontyev V. 149 Leopardi G. 13 Lermontov M. Yu. 242, 283 Likhachev D. S. 308 Link C. 270, 308 Livshits B. 218 Lomonosov M. 60 Lorca F. G. 43 Loseff (Losev) L. 9, 16, 36, 40, 64, 84, 90, 99, 103, 115, 121, 134, 135, 136, 146, 147, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 171, 175, 178, 212, 216, 218, 235, 237, 250, 270, 292, 308, 321, 322, 384 Loseff N. 141, 159 Lotman Yu. M. 219, 236

Lowell R. 305, 342 Lugovskoy V. 68 Macarthney C. A. 371 Mallarmé S. 363 Mallinen Yu. 299 Mandelstam N. 242, 371 Mandelstam O. 19, 21, 25, 34, 36, 41, 54, 60, 64, 65, 67, 93, 98, 99, 110, 111, 119, 120, 123 – 125, 128, 134, 143, 166, 198, 213, 224, 227, 239, 259, 270, 276, 277, 283, 285 – 287, 295, 305, 308, 332, 335, 336, 346, 347, 360, 368, 371 Mann Th. 374, 383 Marais J. 225 Maramzin V. 102, 141, 159, 164, 178 Marquet A. 142 Martial (Martialus) M. V. 154 Martin B. 371 Martynov L. 139, 187, 193 Marvell A. 152, 352 Marx K. 150, 364 Massie S. 122 Mayakovsky V. V. 34, 108, 110, 115, 118, 123, 130, 167, 218, 222 McDuff D. 321 McMillin A. 159 Meares B. 64 Meilakh M. B. 9, 89, 198, 199 Melville H. 60 Michelangelo 22, 98 Mickiewicz A. 366 Mikhnik A. 367 Miller H. 301 Milosz Cz. 9, 11, 85, 149, 160, 264, 271, 309, 327, 340, 347, 351, 357, 358, 370 – 372, 380 Milton J. 352 Molnar M. 12, 213, 251, 266, 269, 294, 296

Name Index

Montaigne M. E. de 126 Montale E. 277, 317 Morozov A. 291 Morozov S. 288 Moss H. 348 Mozart W. A. 263 Muravyov V. 310 Musil R. 318 Myasoedov P. N. 34 Myers A. 159 Nabokov V. V. 106, 107, 115, 198, 214, 215, 227, 277, 301, 349 Naftulyev F. 142 Naiman A. 9, 13, 14, 16, 39, 40, 59, 64, 72, 87, 88, 94, 103, 119, 121, 139, 178, 180, 185, 186, 189, 191, 199 – 201, 212, 217 – 219, 244, 322 Naipaul V. 343 Narbut V. 19 Narinskaya G. 87 Naumov E. I. 41 Nekrasov N. A. 54 Nezval V. 43 Nietzsche F. 371 Nivat G. 150, 154, 160, 178, 207, 212 Norton W. W. 373, 383 Norwid C. K. 318, 357, 360, 361, 366 Oleynikov N. 146 Ospovat A. L. 149, 160 Ostrovsky A. N. 47 Ovid 131, 149, 154, 344, 345, 346, 351 Palmer M. 294 Panchenko A. M. 124, 134 Panova V. 185, 186 Paramonov B. M. 135 Parny E. D. de 243

389

Parshchikov A. M. 9, 262, 263, 281, 293, 294, 307, 308 Pascal B. 126 Pasternak B. L. 22, 23, 28, 32, 39, 43, 44, 52, 65 – 67, 97, 108, 116, 118, 120, 128, 132, 138, 139, 166, 167, 183, 238, 239, 285, 309, 317, 336, 342, 343, 346, 363, 369, 371 Patackas G. 312 Pazukhin E. A. 218 Pekurovskaya A. 74 Petrarch 272 Picasso P. 138, 323 Pinsky R. 361 Pitkethly L. 235, 236 Platonov A. P. 138, 278 Poliak G. 189 Polotsky S. 33, 166, 241 Polukhina V. 84, 102, 116, 121, 134, 135, 159, 160, 178, 197, 211, 235, 236, 250, 270, 308, 321, 340, 356, 370 Polyakov Yu. M. 292 Ponfilly Ch. de 103, 235 Popov E. A. 292 Porter P. 324, 340 Pound E. 13, 272, 334, 350, 373 Pozhecky K. 314, 321, 363, 371 Presley E. 73 Prigov D. A. 284, 286 Proffer C. 321 Propertius Sextus 154 Proust M. 125, 359 Pushkin A. S. 10, 21, 27, 34, 41, 50, 54, 58 – 60, 63 – 65, 77, 81, 97 – 99, 109 – 110, 112, 113, 120, 123, 125, 127, 128, 133, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153 – 155, 160, 166, 167, 181, 185, 205, 208, 212, 216, 241 – 243, 253, 263, 272 – 274, 279, 282, 284, 285, 287, 300, 303, 336, 359, 377, 383

390

Name Index

Rannit A. 90 Ratushinskaya I. B. 220, 236, 335 Reddaway D. 307 Reeve F. D. 11, 370 Regnier H. F. de 263 Reid R. 12, 39, 63, 83, 101, 102, 121, 133, 158, 177, 211, 235, 250, 291 Rein E. B. 9, 15, 16, 59, 65, 66, 84, 87, 97, 131, 136, 148, 164, 180, 185 – 187, 189, 191, 192, 197, 199 – 201, 211, 217 – 220, 264, 299, 305 Rilke R. M. 272, 276, 277, 296, 336 Rimbaud A. 65 Ritsos Ya. 69 Ronsard P. de 272 Rosen M. S. 13 Roth J. 317 Rubin B. 348, 349 Rubtsov N. M. 193 Rybakov V. 270 Ryn C. 383 Saadi 144 Sandburg C. 357 Sapgir G. 181 Sarabyanova D. B. 198 Saussure F. 119 Savitsky D. P. 116, 159 Saytanov V. A. 64, 274, 282 Schiller F. 153 Schiltz V. 95, 103 Schopenhauer A. 368 Schweitzer V. 379 Sedakova O. A. 9, 213, 230, 262, 266, 271, 272, 273, 291, 292 Selouan 287 Selvinsky I. L. 67, 193 Semenyuk S. 273, 291 Semyonov G. S. 265 Seneca 126 Sergeev A. Ya. 310

Shakespeare W. 47, 50, 147, 309, 378 Shalamov V. T. 155 Sharif O. 24 Sharymova N. Ya. 137 Shestov L. I. 149, 150, 152, 207, 231, 362, 371 Shevchenko A. 274, 292 Shmakov G. 207, 212 Shostakovich D. D. 262 Shrayer E. 183, 185, 195, 197 Shrayer M. 187, 188, 196, 197 Shrayer-Petrov D. 9, 11, 179, 180 Shvarts E. A. 9, 12, 251, 252, 270, 271, 271, 285, 286 Shwarzman M. M. 278, 292 Slavinsky E. 69 Slowacki J. 357, 366 Slutsky B. A. 43, 59, 139, 187, 193, 199, 211, 308 Smirnov I. P. 178 Smith G. S. 146, 159, 178, 375 Smorodin B. 190 Solovyov V. I. 149, 150, 367 Solzhenitsyn A. I. 155, 184, 237, 242, 272, 374 Sontag S. 342 Sorokin V. G. 292 Sosnora V. A. 300, 304, 306, 308 Speer A. 383 Stalin I. V. 19, 61, 104, 227, 361, 375, 379, 380 Stanislavsky K. 154 Stauffenberg C. von 383 Steiner G. 154, 159, 241, 250 Strand M. 152, 379 Stratanovsky S. G. 285 Straus R. 342 Strong P. 342 Struve G. 308 Sumerkin A. E. 95, 103 Svyatopolk-Mirsky D. 203, 300, 308

Name Index

Tatishchev V. N. 41 Thomas D. 323 Tibullus 154 Tillich P. 281 Tolstaya T. 273 Tolstoy L. 185, 220, 279, 287, 362 Tsvetaeva M. I. 24, 29, 30, 34, 72, 93, 99, 105, 108, 110, 118, 120, 123, 128, 143, 144, 153, 166, 171, 174, 185, 191, 201, 204, 221, 222, 236, 254, 257 – 259, 270, 278, 279, 283, 285, 296, 315, 317, 343, 344, 346, 347, 356, 367, 377 Turgenev I. S. 106, 134, 155, 178 Tvardovsky A. T. 247 Tynyanov Yu. N. 275 Tyutchev F. I. 119, 123, 130, 153, 167, 218, 283 Ufliand V. I. 9, 16, 44, 63, 81, 84, 137, 140, 161 – 163, 176, 178, 219, 220, 262, 286 Ulyashev P. 270 Urnov D. M. 84, 211 Ushakova E. 9, 117, 118 Vakhtin B. B. 186 Vasari 22 Vasilkov Ya. 218 Venclova A. 309 Venclova T. 9, 11, 216, 235, 309 – 311, 321, 322, 358 Vetrogonsky V. A. 142

391

Viereck P. 9, 11, 373, 374, 383 Vikulov S. 181 Vinogradov L. A. 16, 137, 140, 161 Vinokurova I. E. 124, 134 Virgil 154, 344, 346, 369, 371 Vladi M. 115 Volkov S. 271 Voltaire F. M. de 243 Voznesensky A. A. 82, 155, 192, 285 Vvedensky A. I. 146, 198 Vygotsky L. 147 Vysotsky V. S. 115 Walcott D. 9, 11, 40, 216, 341, 356 Wat A. 309, 357 Weil S. 357, 362 Weissbort D. 12, 85, 115, 123, 197 Whitman W. 357 Wilbur R. 152, 348, 349, 370, 379 Wittgenstein L. 144, 294 Yakobson A. 242 Yeats W. 312, 323, 336, 360, 378 Zabolotsky N. A. 67, 99, 138, 146, 346 Zagajewski A. 347 Zenkevich M. A. 19 Zhdanov I. F. 285, 293, 294, 304 Zholkovsky A. 64 Zhukov G. K. 195, 220 Zhukovsky V. A. 300, 305 Zoshchenko M. M. 167