93907_90.fm Page i Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:11 PM Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse Research concerning Joseph Brodsky has emphasized two aspects of his work – his poetry and his philosophy as an exile from the Soviet Union. The resulting scholarship has presented him as a fundamentally dissident author with little or no positive connection to the social and literary environments in which he spent more than half his life. In Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse David MacFadyen seeks to counter some of the melodrama surrounding the poet’s reputation, repositioning him in the context of Leningrad during the fifties and sixties. MacFadyen focuses on Brodsky’s poetic beginnings. Revising the typical, simplistic representation of the young Brodsky and his peers in Western criticism, he demonstrates that Brodsky and his acquain- tances absorbed an amazingly wide range of texts, both old and new, and that they read contemporary American, French, German, and Polish literature. Through numerous interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries and vast archival research, MacFadyen offers a vital new slant on Brodsky’s early verse, providing the first published translations of these poems, examining his work in relation to a broad international spectrum of influences and revealing the art and craft of his poetry. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse will appeal not only to those interested in Brodsky and the cultural influences that shaped his work and literature of the time but to those intrigued with Russian history and culture. DAVID MacFADYEN is associate professor in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, and the author of Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque. He is currently at work on a series of books on Russian popular songs. 93907_90.fm Page iii Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:11 PM Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse dav i d m fa dy e n ac McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca 93907_90.fm Page iv Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:11 PM For N.I. © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000 isbn 0-7735-2085-6 isbn 0-7735-1606-9 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2000 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Quotations from the unpublished work of Joseph Brodsky are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. Not to be reprinted without written permission. © 1999 The Estate of Joseph Brodsky. All translations are by the author. The author is grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding during this project. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data MacFadyen, David, 1964– Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet muse Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2085-6 1. Brodsky, Joseph, 1940– – Criticism and interpretation. i. Title. pg3479.4.r64z782 2000 891.71′44 c00-900091-7 Typeset in New Baskerville 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City 93907_91.fm Page v Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:15 PM Contents Introduction 3 1 Before Juliet: Jazz and Related Rhythms in Leningrad 10 2 After Dorrit: Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Others 30 3 Stealing what Matters: Robert Frost and Boris Sluckij 55 4 Romanticism and Rebellion: Bagrickij and Galczyn´ski 76 5 Children’s Poetry: Beethoven Discovers America 97 6 Boris Pasternak and a Polish Muse 120 7 Marina Cvetaeva and a Czech Muse 142 8 New Stanzas to Augusta and Byron 161 Cod(cid:2)a: “He Reminds Me of John Donne”: Gavrila Derzavin 175 Appendix: Meter and Rhythm in Brodsky’s Leningrad Poetry 189 References 201 Index 207 93907_00.fm Page 1 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse 93907_00.fm Page 3 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM Introduction Even seasoned figures and internal emigrés with no illusions about the regime resorted to the communist lingo in an effort to explain their ways, as did Brodsky during his 1963 trial, when the prosecutor pressed him to demonstrate how his lifestyle meshed with the Soviet people’s efforts to build a communist society: “Building communism is not just operating the machine and plowing the earth. It is also the work of the intelligentsia, which…” – that is as far as the judge permitted the future Nobel Laureate to take his argument Russian Culture at the Crossroads, D.N. Shalin, 82 Very large and strangely shaped wooden crates began to appear in Leningrad after World War Two. The Hermitage was shipping priceless works of art back into the city, now that hostilities had come to an end. When everything was once again in its place, these crates were dumped in the disused Smolny Cathedral. The building then remained silent for over a decade, except for rare days when thick layers of bird drop- pings were scraped away by Hermitage employees. One young man used that onerous task to find his way into the empty place of worship and he began to climb the winding stairs, to rise slowly above the jumble, above the birds. Finally he stopped and sat down in the central cupola. Here, he decided, far above the city was the best place to rest and write poetry. This book tells the story of his ascent. The young man, according to this legendary yarn by Vladimir Ufljand, was the Russian poet and future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) on 24 May 1940. He remained a resident of the Soviet Union until the summer of 1972, when he was exiled by the communist authorities. Such an extreme expression of disapproval ended an increasingly antagonistic relationship between the poet and his city. Tried and convicted in 1964 on the farcical charge of “parasitism,” Brodsky had spent a year and a half in internal exile. Once back in Leningrad, the growing (and officially embarrass- ing) discrepancy between the poet’s literary and social status led to extradition proceedings. His subsequent success in America as a bilingual poet, professor, and recipient of the Nobel prize for literature in 1987, led to increased attention on Brodsky’s post-Soviet life and work, extending from 1972 93907_00.fm Page 4 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM 4 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse to his death in 1996. The transformation of a Russian poet into an international one has continued to be the most attractive aspect of his literary evolution. As a result, relatively little has been written about Brodsky’s origins, about his foundations or institution as a poet. Why did he start writing? What did he read and how, if at all, did that reading fashion his literary or philosophical inclinations? How and why did the Leningrad teenager become a poet of sufficient – and sufficiently irksome – repute that perhaps the most powerful nation in the world wished to expel him forever? The answers to such questions are found in a simultaneous exami- nation of Brodsky’s poetic texts and their broader contexts. This book focuses upon published materials, but does so through several external prisms: interviews with the poet’s contemporaries, little-known poems published in Soviet periodicals (children’s verse in particular), and literature devoured by the young Brodsky – both prose and poetry, Russian and Western. In addition to these various backdrops against which a burgeoning literary talent began to unfold, one may consider the evolution of the poems from their earliest drafts to their mature form. I was given the opportunity to do this as part of an ongoing project monitored by the Estate o(cid:2)f Joseph Brodsky, the National Library in St Petersburg, and the Puskin Fund to preserve the manu- scripts in the National Library’s Brodsky collection, which dates from the late 1950s until 1972. Full publication of this material awaits an eventual scholarly edition, but the Estate has allowed me to quote selectively from some of this work-in-progress where it is relevant to the present study. These materials were largely gathered by Vladimir Maramzin, as part of the monumental samizdat edition he began to assemble in 1972 upon hearing of Brodsky’s immanent exile. Maramzin’s purpose was to pre- serve as much as possible of Brodsky’s work from dispersal upon his emigration and its expected suppression by the authorities. Maramzin was eventually imprisoned and expelled from the Soviet Union for his efforts, but the nearly comprehensive five-volume samizdat edition he was able to assemble before his imprisonment and the surrounding documentation preserved at the National Library, will remain the basis of future (cid:2)textual study of Brodsky’s early work. (The first two volumes of the Puskin Fund’s collected works are based on Maramzin’s text.)* * The texts I am discussing are very early, from the beginning of Brodsky’s career. Many are poems he soon came to regard as juvenilia and did not him- self collect. The only poems (cid:2)I discu(cid:2)ss that he did collect (cid:2)in his maturity (i.e., for Ostanovka v pustyne and Cast’ reci in this case) are Kazdyj pred(cid:2) Bogom, Ot okrainy k centru, Xolmy, Novye stansy(cid:2) k Avguste, and Na smert’ Zukova. The poem Zof’ja appeared later, in the Puskin Fund collection. 93907_00.fm Page 5 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM 5 Introduction The archives and finished poems work together as follows. In his Nobel speech, Brodsky asserted that speech distinguishes man from animals, that poetry is speech raised to its highest power and, there- fore, “to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.” Verse is a process, only part of which is the time it takes to read a finished text. The vitally existential attitude of Brodsky to his craft defines the other aspect of that process: the choices made with old words in order that they become new, the competition between old and new significances, the push of the past and the pull of the future. I stress the existential approach to the creation of a poem not only because of Brodsky’s own express attraction to such ideas in his youth but also because creative and certain physical maturations run parallel. Both the poet and his words must be constantly novel if they are to avoid the downside of his evolutionary, metaphorical description of poetry’s goal in the book of essays, Less than One. There he explains how the imperial rhetoric and architecture of Soviet “degenerates” turned the progressive striving of Leningrad’s sentence-like, ornate embankments into an obsolete, if not extinct “mollusk” (32). That mollusk represents “an unprece- dented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide” (271). The tri- umph of Brodsky’s archival and published verse from Leningrad is not that its finished form displays a highly developed aesthetic sensibility, but that, like the city’s avenues and prospects, it embodies maturation and forward movement, distance covered and forms altered. Brodsky’s frequent recourse to evolutionary metaphors does not allow us to view his work as flashes of wantonly extreme novelty, of radical deviance from his surroundings. Poetic and pennate forms do not alter irrationally or suddenly in the Soviet context of Brodsky’s youth. Just as the Weltanschauung espoused by the young poet views the world as steps or stages, each utterly dependent upon the philo- sophical solidity of prior moves, so Brodsky builds upon various tradi- tions and prevalent contemporary modes of disco(cid:2)urse. He talks in his Nobel speech of being the “sum total” of Mandel’stam, Cvetaeva, Frost, Axmatova, and Auden. The discussion of such poets and their absorp- tion by Brodsky would raise few eyebrows today; what I propose instead is an investigation of other, more pervasive but lesser-known linguistic contexts that form the basis of Brodsky’s subsequent evolution, con- texts of which he was also (very swiftly) the sum total. The “totalizing” intent of the young poet, always a rapacious reader, acquires its true significance if we recall another Nobel axiom: “It is not art, particularly, [that] is a byproduct of our species’ development, but just the reverse.” Literature is the instigator of change, not the passive observer; since, however, it does not produce a slew of neolo- gisms with each and every new poet, the old meanings of old words must be heard, accepted, challenged, or rejected. The intent of this 93907_00.fm Page 6 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM 6 Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse book is to suggest why some very odd and old words were absorbed by Brodsky in order that they be reworked as a process of his own, subjective evolution. This process is found in variant readings, for they record the semantic, philosophical and versificational transformation of the poet’s context into a text, of speech into a poem and the consequent(ial) evolutionary magic. Why Joseph Brodsky was an important poet is revealed by looking at what was around him before he began to write and then at what he did with that surrounding material to make it, over time, into something else. The research involved in discovering Brodsky’s significance as a moulder or remaker of Soviet poetry began at the source. I conducted a lengthy series of interviews with Brodsky’s contemporaries, primarily in the summer of 1996 in St Petersb(cid:2)urg and Moscow. Data and opinions were gathered from Aleksandr Kusner, Evgenij Rejn, Anatolij Najman, Èra Korobova, Jakov Gordin, Andrej Ar’ev, Mixail Eremin, Vladimir Gerasimov, Vladimir Ufljand, Konstantin Azadovskij, and Tat’jana Nikol’skaja. A subsequent interview with Lev Loseff in November 1997 provided a vital conclusion to the oral histories obtained in Russia. These writers, journalists and academics allowed me to leave not only with a psychological and sociological sketch of Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s. A wonderful list of reading preferences also emerged. Prose and poetry, Western and Russian – the literature that formed the raw material for a young man’s aesthetic and ethical metamorphosis was named, text by text. Even though I spoke to such influential writers, I must add that with its textual exegeses this book does not pretend to depict an entire literary decade, an entire city, or even a very young poet’s entire reading. I can discuss only the texts which were recalled for me during lengthy conversations with these people when I asked what they and the young Brodsky had read with the greatest enthusiasm. Those books are simply the brightest lights from a wealth of reading materials which I use to plot a trajectory of sorts. I am not painting an exhaustive picture with my list, simply joining some dots. From the books that constitute this modest list, especially from the Western, English-language prose, there appears nonetheless a world- view which casts Brodsky’s own literary efforts in a fascinating new light. In virtually all the Western works cherished by the young boy and his school friends, there is a sad but enduring discrepancy between speech and the world, between language’s ability to redefine the world and the world’s stubborn unwillingness to be changed. This problem is apparent in works by Hemingway, Dos Passos, Joyce, Salin- ger, and others: the loud and confident, explicitly patriarchal rhetoric of many characters mourns its inability to woo, define or entice an 93907_00.fm Page 7 Wednesday, May 17, 2000 2:18 PM 7 Introduction elusive, ineffable feminine presence, very similar to that in Altra Ego, the title of the essay in Brodsky’s final collection, On Grief and Reason. Masculine pathos yearns for the transformative spirit of an inexpress- ible feminine. The huge consequences of such universal concerns of Western, existentially driven masculinity are manifest only when transposed to a Soviet context. Much to Western readers’ surprise, Brodsky was charmed by the bravado of certain Soviet poets, such as Boris Sluckij or the romantic Èduard Bagrickij. He read much of these poets’ work and on several occasions makes direct use of their material in order to change or nudge it in the direction of these “Western” concerns. The brash materialism of Soviet physicality is forced to house some metaphysical issues. A key figure in that process of “rehousing” is a Pole, Konstanty Galczyn´ski. Brodsky found a geographical and philo- sophical bridge between Soviet poetry and Western prose in Poland, a nation which meant much to him and often served as a conduit for translations or ideas from Western literature. Since Galczyn´ski is a prime example of a broad, pan-Slavic romantic impulse, he is dis- cussed together with Bagrickij on the following pages. Brodsky’s relationship to Sluckij and Bagrickij leads to another facet of his incipient rhetoric – the weaving of a qualitatively different pathos to match, remodel, and better the passion of his Soviet prede- cessors. Brodsky wrote several children’s poems, in which we see a young aesthete matched seamlessly with a young readership. Tales of travel and jollity give an air of happy adventure to the existential rigours of developing a new, masculine discourse. The very fact that such “pathetic” discourse is loud and self-assured suggests a deep-seated need to impress an equally self-assured inter- locutor. From a Soviet standpoint, that assurance was directed against the ubiquitous threat of political subversion; Brodsky’s verse, by embracing the ethical vigour of Soviet rhetoric, subverts instead the poet himself – all in the following manner. As will be explained, the poet uses the pathos of Soviet poetry as a basis for an ethically-driven existential worldview; Soviet literature becomes eventually the ground- work for Christian existentialism. In terms of the patriarchal aesthetic suggested here, Brodsky takes from the assured voice of his father that which he needs to assert a qualitatively different type of “male” lan- guage. He begins by subverting Soviet rhetoric, a way of speaking that excludes a gentle, feminine and ineffable Muse. In other words, he sows a seed of doubt in the confidence of stately discourse by combin- ing it with elements of Western literature: angst and the rather wordy search for an altra ego, a fulfilling feminine presence. That other, ironically, undermines the new rhetoric of Brodsky, too. His wilful