Text collection

Date: Saturday, February 13, 1988

Page: 10

Section: LIVING

South Hadley -- Joseph Brodsky has given me precise directions to his house in South Hadley, just down the highway from Mount Holyoke. I know what landmarks to look for, even the slant of the road where I am to look for the stone gateposts. And yet there is still something startling about the notion of actually finding him here, the exiled Russian poet, sitting at a table next to his kitchen window in an old New England farmhouse, preparing to teach Thomas Hardy in the early afternoon and Alexander Pushkin late in the day.

"Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace," he has written in an essay titled "The Condition We Call Exile." Perhaps there is a certain poetic justice, if not irony, in this spot where he has chosen to settle every spring. The house, too, is an emigre, moved here from its foundation decades ago to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir.

As Brodsky steps outside his back door to greet me, he seems kinder and gentler than the fierce, brooding hawk of a man who gazes out from the book jacket of "Less Than One," his prize-winning book of essays published two years ago. He looks a bit rumpled and distracted, as one might expect from a man who lives, as his friend, the poet Seamus Heaney describes it, "frugally, industriously and in a certain amount of solitude."

He offers coffee and invites me to look around, apologizing for the series of interruptions that signify a man in considerable demand -- the phone calls in English and Russian, the arrival of express mail packages. It has been only three months, after all, since he journeyed to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize.

Although his friends in Russia, he says, have felt more relaxed recently about contacting him, the news of the prize has not been publicized in Russia. In Novy Mir, a Soviet literary almanac that has published some of his poems, the news was mentioned in a footnote. "It was like some kind of Chernobyl," he said of the secrecy surrounding his honor.

Brodsky, I am to discover, possesses a droll, sardonic wit whose sharpest edges he saves for the bureaucratic tyrants of his native country, from which he was exiled 16 years ago after serving 18 months in a Siberian labor camp.

Finally, we settle down at the kitchen table cluttered with papers, a small typewriter, and a pack of the cigarettes his doctors have forbidden since he underwent open heart surgery, his second bypass operation, last year.

Brodsky has rented this house, he says, since 1981, when he first began alternating his teaching appointments between Columbia University and the Five-College program in Pioneer Valley. He still spends much of the year in his West Village apartment in New York, the city he calls "the mother of interference." Last year, he accepted a permanent appointment as Andrew Mellon professor of literature at Mount Holyoke, where he teaches a course in Russian literature and a course in English literature that he calls "The Subject Matter of Modern Lyric Poetry." He stole the title, he says, from the poet Elizabeth Bishop: "I thought it sounded dry, and I didn't want to be swamped with students."

As we gaze out the window into the snowy woods, it seems natural to talk about a sense of place and about Robert Frost, one of his favorite poets. "There is the sort of landscape and a certain diction and tonality here that harks back to Frost," he says. "Sometimes you are tempted to play the Frost game on paper. You can fall under his spell," he said. "But not too much. Maybe it's a matter of temperament. I'm far less steady than he was."

New England scenes have begun to appear in Brodsky's poetry, etched with as much authority as those of Leningrad, where he grew up, and Norenskaya, where he served time. In an elegy for Robert Lowell, he writes of "church-hooded New England," of planes at Logan that "thunder off from the brown mass of industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss."

It would be a mistake, however, to look here for important clues to either the man or the poetry. He is no longer, as he once described himself, in the plight of Lot's wife, the exile looking back. And yet one feels that even as he alights here, the momentum of his exile is still pushing him onward. In a recent essay, he compared the exiled writer to a man "hurled into outer space in a capsule . . . and your capsule is language."

Being grounded, he explains, might be necessary for prose but not for poetry. The fiction writer, he says, "ought to have a community settled in its ways in order to comment on it. But poetry is not a comment on the life of society. Poetry, is essentially the moment in the history of language. Unlike a prose writer, the poet is like a bird who starts to chirp no matter what branch he lights on."

Returning to Frost, he observes of Frost's reputation for angling to win prizes, "If I were Frost, I would indeed seek all forms of recognition, not so much to tickle my ego, but create a situation where my work would find a greater readership."

Of his own relationship to such recognition, however, he feels differently. "I'm not a native son," he says. "In the spotlight, I feel a bit uncomfortable. The accent would be the first reason. I know I may sound unconvincing. But it is pure and simple animal insecurity. And if I can speak about myself with sobriety, I have sought a slightly different posture, a posture of somebody isolated, operating in his own idiosyncratic way, somebody on the outside instead of in the thick of things." He pauses, then delivers the punchline. "Finding myself one day outside Russia," he says, "in some grotesque way, was a very congenial thing."

Brodsky says that there was never a single dramatic moment when he realized in a blaze of clarity that he would become a poet. "It simply happened," he says. "In some ways, I'm distressed to have turned into a professional writer. I used to regard it as a byproduct of life, a gentleman's occupation. A picture I had was to be in the merchant marine, a deckhand, to disembark at a cheap hotel and write a couple of elegies." And yet, during his trial in Leningrad on charges of "parasitism," the Soviet judge questioned where the writing of poetry could be learned, if not in school. "I think that it comes from God," he had said.

For Brodsky, the value of literature lies in its power to evoke uniqueness and individuality. "This may be a very crass view of the medium," he says, "but it provides the reader with the sense of his own uniqueness. Poetry offers a higher plane of regard. It is a terrific accelerator of one's mental operations. To use the modern lingo, it expands your consciousness. And in that sense, it saves."

In that spirit, he teaches the work of his favorite poets, requiring his students to memorize up to 2,000 lines of poetry a semester. He tells them, he says, "Let's commit this stuff to our brains, to our bloodstream."

Poetry, he believes, offers an antidote to the illusions created by politics as well as popular culture. "Every society," he says, "has in its articulation a positive slant, a positive tenor all the time. The way the politicians talk, the way commercial people talk. The language gets tilted, and literature tries to restore the balance, to convey the idea that life is a double-edged sword.

"When you've been fed all this positive stuff, and then you encounter trouble that exceeds your expectations, you are prone to get hysterical or to say that someone deceived you. You look around for a culprit. What a poet tries to do is tell you that the wolf is never too far. It may be inside already. It may be that you are the wolf yourself."

It was literature, he says, that turned his own life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he says. 'I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down, 'Notes from the Underground.' I realized what I am. That I am bad."

That notion of human nature as fundamentally flawed, he says, has been omitted from the modern world. And paradoxically, he says, it is the belief in humanity's fundamental goodness that has led to the tyranny of the state. "We are victims of the enlightenment," he says. "We are all Rousseau-ists, who believe that man is good, and that the institutions have spoiled him. Hence we have to improve the institutions, which results in the ideal state -- the police state."

Technology, too, he says, enforces a certain uniformity. "In one way or another," he says, "the species is becoming a victim of technology. The nation falls under the spell of the TV screen. Eventually, the diversity of opinion is going to shrink to the number of networks." As for the aesthetics of technology, he observes, "Everything is done in an opaque block of color and texture," he says. "The dashboard of the car looks like the VCR, and the VCR looks like the Uzi machine gun. Perhaps a Japanese firm like Sony could combine into one unit a machine gun, a camera, a VCR, and a car. A fusion."

Although he is reluctant to talk about Gorbachev -- "My imagination fails to get absorbed by political figures," he says -- he feels that Americans reacted naively to the Soviet leader's recent visit here. "You put anybody on the TV screen, and you will get a following," he says. "You wouldn't want to live under that man. But to watch him on TV is all right. You feel that you are in control, that you can switch him on and off."

Brodsky says that what he feared most in coming to the United States was a certain American naivete about human nature. "What I feared most of all in my first years here was that it would turn me into a simpleton. It's a good thing I arrived here not at the age of 18 but at 32. I'm not saying one should concentrate on one's dark nature. But with good intentions, you can do a lot of harm. For instance, by loving someone you can wreck someone's life as substantially as by hating. You love that person, and you are convinced of your noble motives, and you impose yourself on that person. You reduce that person's options and confine that person to yourself. It should cross your mind that maybe there is somebody better than myself for that person. That is why the epithet `love is blind.' Love should not be blind, it should be very keen."

Later that afternoon, the exile walks across the Mount Holyoke campus from one class to another, crossing continents and centuries, teaching first the majestic fatalism of Thomas Hardy and then the wild resolve of Pushkin. He translates Pushkin line by line, as his friend, the poet Derek Walcott, described in a poem he dedicated to Brodsky: "Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel, the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves." As Brodsky walks wearily back across the snow, bundled up in his flapped Russian fur hat, I feel startled again by the unlikely scenario of the exile who has landed here, an exotic bird alighting on the tundra, an unexpected gift of grace.

On Monday night, in behalf of the Poets' Theater, Brodsky will join his fellow lyric poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney onstage at the American Repertory Theater for a reading of his poetry. Wallace Shawn will read a portion of Brodsky's play, "Marbles."

TSUSHIMA SCREEN

The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes

masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize

in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer

days than other months. Therefore, it's more cruel

than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound

to wrap up our saling round

the globe with habitual naval grace,

moving your cot to the fireplace

where our dreadnought is going under

in great smoke. Only fire can grasp this winter!

Golden unharnessed stallions in the chimney

dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,

and the dark room fills with plaintive chirring

of a naked grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.

Boston Globe

Citizen Of A Language

Date: Sunday, October 25, 1987

Page: A6

Section: Editorial Page

The Nobel Prize for Literature, in honoring the poet Joseph Brodsky, honored an ancient literary tradition. In the manner of Virgil, Dante and Joyce, Brodsky has bestowed his gifts on the Russian language from afar, in exile. So common is the literal experience of exile among poets that Baudelaire took it as an allegory for the poetic condition.

This year, the often obtuse Nobel jury appears to have showered recognition not merely on a Russian writer who has had but four of his poems published legally in the Soviet Union, and not solely on a survivor of "Gulag University," but on a figure who incarnates the poetic way.

"I feel bitter as I leave Russia," Brodsky wrote of his expulsion from his homeland, in an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev. "I belong to the Russian culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language."

This is a statement devoid of grandiloquence; it is simply a recognition of the truth. Brodsky, like every other genuine poet, lives in his language. No commissar, no fuhrer can banish him from there.

If the Nobel award to Brodsky represents a slap in the face to the bootlickers of the Soviet literary establishment, so be it. Their respectability was bought with a shameful silence. In service to an ephemeral state, they kept quiet about the disappearance of entire libraries. They pretended to forget all the poets and storytellers who were shot in the head or forced to confess to the crime of literature.

Brodsky himself was convicted of being a "social parasite" and sent to Siberia as a young man. The judge who sentenced him asked Brodsky who had authorized him to be a poet. Responding with the impertinence proper to a scion of a poetic line that traces back to Francois Villon, Brodsky told the judge that nobody had authorized him to be a human being.

Boston Globe

Nobel Poet Joseph Brodsky Dies In New York

Monday January 29 1:04 AM EST

Brodsky, New York (Reuter) -- Soviet emigre Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning poet once sentenced to hard labor in the frozen tundra, died of a heart ailment in the United States, where he had lived in exile for over 20 years.

Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel laureate in literature, died at his New York home Sunday with his wife and child by his side, said Roger Straus, his publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was 55.

Brodsky shot to prominence at the age of 23 when he received a five-year sentence for hard labor in the frozen Archangelsk region of the Soviet Union for writing poetry without academic qualifications.

International pressure helped get him home to Leningrad in November 1965 after serving 18 months -- and also helped widen his fame.

"He is a mass cult figure. For many of his generation he is a god," said Duffield White, professor of Russian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. White once recalled being mobbed at a Moscow concert when word got out he knew Brodsky.

British poet Anthony Hecht, who worked on Brodsky's translations, told Reuters the Nobel Prize-winner's work is "at once personal and social, reflecting his detestation of tyranny."

Radicalized in part by his government's armed suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution and determined to go his own way, Brodsky, who left school at 15 to work as a laborer, rejected a state that claimed to have all the answers:

"Isn't that a sign/ of our arrival in a wholly new/ but doleful world? In fact, a proven truth,/ to be precise, is not a truth at all -- it's just a sum of proofs. But now/ what's said is `I agree,' not `I believe,'" he wrote.

Brodsky's works challenged the bleakness of Soviet life with linguistic brilliance and were circulated widely underground, finally prompting Soviet authorities to expel him in 1972.

Fifteen years later, and by then a U.S. citizen, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

His editor at the The New Yorker magazine, Alice Quinn, said Brodsky was "a majestic writer, with an absolutely fantastic reputation... He was a very compelling and warm person, complex and extremely endearing."

PBS Newshour Interview with Joseph Brodsky

November 10, 1988

Transcript

ROBERT MACNEIL: Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940. At the age of 15, he dropped out of school and took a variety of odd jobs while he began writing poetry. In 1964, the Soviet Government labeled him a militant parasite and sent him to an arctic labor camp for 18 months. Seven years later he was deported from the Soviet Union and came to the United States, where he now lives in New York City. Last year, he won the Nobel Prize for literature for poetry and essays. His most recent collection of poetry titled "To Urania" was published earlier this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mr. Brodsky, you are an American citizen now. What do you think of the democratic or the exercise in democracy that we have just been through?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: You want the truth?

ROBERT MACNEIL: The truth.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well, a travesty.

ROBERT MACNEIL: How?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well, it was simply because neither man in my view was adequate simply as individual... well, that is... how should I put it? I guess I should think about what I'm saying. I lost my heart... that is not lost my heart... I lost interest in the Governor of Massachusetts when he dropped Jackson. That wasn't a Democrat for me. And I never developed a sentiment for Mr. Bush because I haven't heard from him any sort of coherent or anything interesting, anything... or any sort of attractive, even grammatical sentence.

ROBERT MACNEIL: How would you rate the new President of your old country, Mikhail Gorbachev, in these terms.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Terribly talkative, terribly talkative, terribly eloquent. Well, he has another weakness of course. He doesn't know where to stop. Well, in fact, there is ... there is a term now existing in the Soviet Union about the man, himself, that he prattles the Perestroika down.

ROBERT MACNEIL: "Prattles the Perestroika down?"

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Yeah. To prattle it down, that is... well, there are too many words... that is he's a bad rhetorician, he's a bad orator.

ROBERT MACNEIL: You've appeared far more indifferent, even disdainful of the so-called reforms in the Soviet Union have there and here. How do you explain that?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well I don't think the reforms... well, I'm not exactly disdainful. I'm pleased that changes do occur, so that I don't harbor that much of a hope for these changes, that is, they are improvements in comparison to what I'm used to. Well, I can speak only about my feelings with any degree of expertise, the things that I know, so I never thought we'll see the dark print, though they do see the light of day now and this is obviously an improvement. But the point is. the point is that the... all these attempts are in my view attempts to regalvanize a doomed concept.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Not redeemable?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: In my view, it isn't.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Are you as an exile from your former country, are you in any way imprisoned by the need to dislike what you were, what you escaped from, what you were exiled from? Are you locked into a need to disparage what happens there because of it?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Good question. I am not.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: No I think I'm not. I'm simply disdainful though that... how should I put it... how should I put it best... I suppose the whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth not on my own behalf, because I don't really care for myself so much... and I'm saying that without any country... it's simply because, well, one I will always get even and I'll always find some mental comfort or indeed a physical comfort as it were. But there are lots and lots of people whose lives, entire existences, have been subjected to that inescapable idiom. They can't alter their lives. The system... the system has compromised itself enormously, though it's subjected lots and lots... well, lots... millions, generations of people to the course of events, to the course... to the types of existences, to the types of lives, which they couldn't have altered, they couldn't have changed the plight. And I simply, well, I'm not even talking about the crimes, I'm not talking about the terror, I'm not talking about the victims, I'm not talking about the camps. I am simply talking about the subverted lives; well, subverted lives and generations of Russians. And I simply can't... well, I'm answering your question not exactly in a direct way, I realize that... but that informs my... that informs my disdain for the entire system.

ROBERT MACNEIL: You don't agree then with Andrei Sakharov who said the other day it is very important for these reforms to succeed, that the West should help Gorbachev make them more concerned?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well, I'm speaking from the outside. Sakharov speaks from the inside. If you're inside you want reform, of course, but I am not a reformer. I want a drastic change, 180 degrees, whatever it is. Even that is not, may not work, because I think the 70 years have done something. I don't believe in the reforms. I'll tell you very simply why. Because I think what the 70 years of this system have done, I'm afraid. They have a debilitating effect upon the population's will in general. It's almost what you have... you can speak of a genetic backslide in a sense, that is, people don't, they have no will to work. In fact, when they talk about the period of stagnation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, well, in general, the majority of the population was quite happy with that, because it was placing on them no demands.

ROBERT MACNEIL: You say Sakharov's on the inside and you're on the outside. Somebody living in winter all the time he get s a little bit of a thaw and it's wonderful.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Yeah, he's grateful for that.

ROBERT MACNEIL: But somebody living in Florida, where there's total sunshine, anything less than total sunshine is intolerable.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: True.

ROBERT MACNEIL: How has living in this total sunshine here, spiritually speaking, if that's the word, this spiritual Florida that you've been living in now since 1970, how has that affected you, do you think?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: What I'm going to say may sound somewhat peculiar to you, but I don't think my notions of what's right and what's wrong and what should be done and shouldn't be done have altered that much. In that respect, I think all my life I lived in some sort of mental state of sunshine... that is, well, I don't know... maybe it's my... maybe it's simply my temperament or whatever it is... I was always to a certain extent charged by others, by their friends, by their acquaintances with some absolutist notions. Well, I don't think, I somehow believe in either or, rather than in gradual, in gradual improvements. While that system can be improved, the longer it's intact, no matter what's happening, no matter what kinds of reforms or changes, no matter what kind of personalities are going to occupy the top or even middle strata, it's going to have an effect, it's going to ruin people's lives, it's going to influence people's lives in the wrong way.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Unless there's a total change you mean.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Unless it's total change and even the total change... well, here's the rub, you see, I'm not so sure the total change is going to be such a blessing. Well, Russia is in a peculiar, it's sort of a hungry elephant, if you will, an elephant who experiences anger and who thinks what is it to do, where to go. Well, there are three options such an animal would have had... first going to the past, return to the past, well, because there is some sort of security of the past, et cetera, et cetera, but the past is not a physical reality. It is only a notion of your mind... or stay in the present, stay where you are, the status quo, but the longer you stay... well, first of all, it's the present that makes you feel hungry where everything is eaten around. Well, the longer you hesitate, the longer you stay in the same place, well, the deeper your feet sink into the bog, yeah, so therefore take a step further, but take a step forward... but the point is that there is no guarantee that there are green pastures ahead. That's the reason it hesitates. The more it hesitates, the hungrier it gets and the more it's mired.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Soltenitsyn, another person, Soviet Citizen, ex-Soviet citizen living in this country, is, despises this spiritual Florida, the United States, at least to the extent saying it is decadent and unserious. Do you share those feelings?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: I do not.

ROBERT MACNEIL: You do not?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: Not at all.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Do you... do you... what do you think that it has done to you... to come back to my question... what has it done to you living in that?

JOSEPH BRODSKY: I was left alone. That's the, that's the greatest thing a society can do to an individual, to leave him alone, and in fact, I knew something about the states prior to my arrival here and in order to live in a different country, you have to love something there, you have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the history of the country, the language perhaps, literature. I happen to love the latter two. Well, but you ought to have some sentiment. You also have to in my case, there is something else. I simply loved all my life, loved is too strong a word, but I had a tremendous sentiment partly conditioned, of course by the reality of where I grew up, for the spirit of individualism, for the idea of your being on your own in a big way. So in a sense, in a sense, when I came here, this is what happened, this is what I found in a sense. Well, in that respect, in fact, to say what I have found is again to put my case a bit too strong or dramatically. In a sense, I or I would say people of my generation, people like me, I'm not alone, well, we were in a sense more Americans, more American than Americans themselves. We're individualists from the very threshold. That's why this country meant so much for us, yeah. It sounded to us as a place on the earth where the idea of the of individualism has been physically incarnated in a sense. So in that sense, the country where I arrived to in 1972 was the biggest, wasn't exactly a surprise or a shock or that much of a comfort. It was the normal place to be at.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Joseph Brodsky, thank you for joining us.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: You're welcome.

A Poet Remembered: Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996

by Benjamin Stolz and Michael Makin

from ii: The Journal of the International Institute, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1997)

Benjamin Stolz and Michael Makin are faculty members in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

On July 9, 1972, Joseph Brodsky came to Ann Arbor to take up a teaching position at the University of Michigan. He had been deported from the USSR barely a month earlier. This past November, members of the University faculty as well as visiting speakers gathered in Ann Arbor for a Commemorative Conference in his honor. The conference organizers had invited the poet, and he agreed to attend. Joseph Brodsky, however, died at his home in Brooklyn, New York, on January 28, 1996.

Joseph Brodsky was an exceptional man. He dropped out of high school at age 15, and the first degree he received was an honorary doctorate. He was promoted to a tenured professorship at the University without being formally nominated; and after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, he became the first foreign-born citizen to be appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, serving in 1991 and 1992. In this capacity he followed in the footsteps of an American poet whom he revered -- Robert Frost, who taught at Michigan some five decades earlier.

Brodsky arrived in Ann Arbor in 1972 -- at 32, already a highly esteemed Russian poet, though one officially blacklisted by the Brezhnev regime -- to become poet-in-residence at the University. How did he manage to land in Ann Arbor so soon after being forced to leave his native country? What brought him here to the University?

The crucial link between Brodsky and the University was the late Carl R. Proffer, professor of Russian Literature. Proffer and his wife Ellendea were co-founders of Ardis Press, which had published a number of Brodsky's books. He happened to be in Leningrad visiting Brodsky in May, 1972, when the poet received notification from the authorities that he was being issued an exit visa for emigration to Israel. After responding that h was not interested in leaving his native land and culture, Brodsky was warned that the coming winter would be very cold -- a threat that was not lost on a man who had been convicted to "social parasitism" for living independently on his poetry and had served a stretch in exile working on a collective farm in the Russian far north. He decided to discuss the matter with his American friend, and Proffer, in his optimistic way, told Brodsky that he could come and teach in Ann Arbor. Brodsky accepted the idea, and Proffer contacted Benjamin Stolz, who at that time chaired Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University. After receiving authorization to hire Brodsky, Stolz obtained an immigration visa personally approved by Secretary of State William Rogers and flew to Chicago to get a federal work permit.

Brodsky began teaching for the first time in his life in September, 1972 -- a daunting assignment for anyone, but especially for a young man who had dropped out of high school at fifteen, even if he was accustomed to declaiming his poetry to large groups of admirers. He asked Stolz how he should teach his courses, one of which was a course in Russian titled "Russian Poetry" and another, in English, titled "World Poetry." Stolz replied, "Joseph, they're your courses, teach them the way you want to, you're the expert" -- a piece of advice that Brodsky did not need but never forgot. Brodsky was an inspiring and unorthodox teacher, who combined significant demands of his students -- he insisted that a person who was serious about poetry must know at least 1,000 lines by heart -- with a sense of the absurd. He was known, upon listening intently to a long theoretical exposition from a graduate student, to respond with a concise "meow." His presence at the university offered the chance, in the words of a former student, "to experience the dynamics of the poet's perspective and his relationship to language."

Brodsky remained on the Slavic department staff until 1981, though he frequently visited at other colleges and universities during the 1970s. During this time, he rose from lecturer to tenured professor (the latter rank was bestowed upon him by LS&A Dean Billy Frye, without the bother of a formal recommendation or review, following Brodsky's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). In 1981 he left the University and began to split his time between New York City and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

During his time at the University, Brodsky gave a number of poetry readings to large audiences. In March, 1984, he returned to take part in a panel discussion featuring emigre Russian writers and artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, who gathered to honor Carl Proffer, by that time fatally ill. He gave another poetry reading here in December, 1988, when he received an honorary doctorate and delivered the commencement address (published in his volume of essays On Grief and Reason as "At the Stadium.") His last poetry reading in Ann Arbor was in October, 1992, when he attended the Slavic Department's fortieth anniversary reunion. The Commemorative Conference in honor of Joseph Brodsky took place on November 7-9, under the collaborative sponsorship of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Special Collections Library of the Graduate Library, and with funding from several University sources and a leadership grant from Irwin T. Holtzman. Concurrent with the conference was an exhibition of materials about Brodsky's life and work from the private collection of Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman, at the Special Collections Library.

Brodsky's poetry

During the second half of this century, Joseph Brodsky was the most remarkable poet in Russia, a culture rich with poetic talent and achievement. But perhaps he was even more remarkable for transcending that very culture at a time when it had, largely through both accident and design of totalitarianism, become more introverted than ever before. While most of Brodsky's generation devoted itself to the meticulous archaeology of recovering the literature that thrived first before and then in defiance of Stalinism, Brodsky combined that project with an international eclecticism which was part of a sophisticated literary world view long before he found himself beyond the boundaries of his motherland. His poetry precisely articulated the point of view of the educated homo sovieticus, whose savage irony was the last bastion against despair, while equally brilliantly presenting original discoveries in language, imagery and wit of a master poet. Manipulating the classical forms of Russian verse, and their multiple connotations, Brodsky mixed high and low registers to create a stylistic dissonance which was all the more powerful when contained within familiar verse forms. His penchant for the witty aphorism and for the radical deflation of cultural cliches has given the Russian language many memorable lines.

Brodsky's poetic oeuvre is large and extraordinarily diverse -- indeed, he was a poet of staggering energy. Abroad he applied that energy to the creation of an even greater literary self (one critic has called him an "intellectual conquistador"). In the U.S. he became a brilliant essayist, often writing separate and markedly different versions of the same essay in Russian and English. And quite unlike almost all of his contemporaries in Russian literature (wherever they might reside), he was constantly delighting in new literary territories, well beyond the boundaries of his native language and culture. He even wrote original and often very successful poetry in the language of his host country, and many of his autotranslations convey superbly the unique flavor of his Russian verse. Although for many years his poetry could reach Russia only by underground and illegal means, his influence was such that it has been said that no one could write in a style or genre approaching his manner or on his favorite topics without being derivative. In particular, his restatement of the myth and idea of his native city, St. Petersburg, has had enormous power, and has located Brodsky unambiguously among that city's literary greats, from Pushkin to Mandelstam.

The Late Joseph B.

Joseph Brodsky had been living in New York for almost twenty years when he died on January 28 in his Brooklyn apartment. Celebrated almost unanimously as Russia's finest living poet, Brodsky still managed to occasionally rankle his peers. His bluntness, love of form, and flights of pessimism about human nature caused some of his colleagues, both American and Russian, to allege formalism, and even worse, misanthropy. Those who knew Brodsky, however, remember a man with a wicked sense of humour, a love of conversation, and a sterling bullshit detector. We asked three New Yorkers to share a reminiscence or a story. Törnfallet, composed in English, will appear in So Forth, a collection of poems forthcoming from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

After Perestroika, the amount of poems and letters Brodsky received from Russia increased exponentially. On several occasions, he asked me to help him wade through the correspondence and write replies. He conscienciously read the reams of poetry sent to him and always tried to find something promising, hoping to offer a few kind words to the author. Often this was not easy.

Once he received several handwritten poems from a young man who had recently emigrated to Israel from Russia. The poems were poor. As usual in such a case, I wrote a standard reply and, expressing gratitude in Brodsky's name, signed the letter.

About a month later, when I came to Brodsky's apartment for another "letter night," Joseph, with a wry smile, told me that a letter had arrived for me. Indeed, the envelope had my name on it. Inside, in familiar handwriting, the young poet had printed "STICK THIS UP YOUR ASS!" in large letters. Joseph watched my reaction; I shrugged. At that moment, I think we shared the same thought: this was the young man's finest line.

--Aleksandr Sumerkin

I made a short film about Joseph Brodsky about three years ago. I was deliriously happy. After a final shoot at The Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York, we parted warmly and even made a photo of the two of us. I ran into him a year later--he was introducing poet Aleksandr Kushner at the Oscar club. I smiled at him as I would at an old friend and said hello first-- even though I am much older. He barely nodded. "He doesn't remember me," I thought-- "he knows all those poems by heart so he probably can't remember faces." I walked up to him a minute later: "Iosif Aleksandrovich, you probably don't remember me, I made a film about you last year." "I remember you," he replied, coldly. "So what?"

I walked away, scratching my head. "Really," I thought, "so what?"

--Aaron Kanevsky

By sheer coincidence I live in an apartment on New York's Morton Street, located directly above JB's place and owned by his close friend. Joseph's cat Mississippi lives here, exiled upstairs for familial/allergic reasons. The place consists of a bedroom, a dining room, and an alcove with a bay window and a desk, where JB often wrote in his friend's absence.

It was about two weeks after JB's death; I went to sleep, leaving the cat in the dining room.

The following morning I woke up and followed a trail of white feathers to the alcove. A white pigeon sat on the desk, cooing.

I let the bird out, thinking it must have flown in through the chimney, as all the doors and the windows were closed. Indeed, I found a few white feathers near the fireplace.

The previous evening I had been reading a young poet's manuscript; before going to bed, I left it open on the desk. Later that morning, I noticed that the pigeon had left dirty footprints all over its white pages and even festooned it with a dropping.

Of course the theory that the pigeon flew in through the chimney is more probable than supposing that it materialized out of thin air. However, there is another storey between the fireplace and the roof, the chimney is very narrow, and nothing of the kind had ever happened since the house was built.

To those who doubt my story I should say that I am definitely not inclined to mythologize. A smart and sober friend of JB, having heard my story, declared: "We know nothing." I can't think of any other words I could say with such certainty.

--HH

Original at www.moscowchannel.com/brodsky.html

Joseph Brodsky answers Argotist's questions

Shortly before his recent death, the Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky spoke briefly to The Argotist about poetry, memory and exile...

A.: You comment on the value of "estrangement"to developing first an individual perspective and second a writer's perspective. Is the one a necessary prerequisite of the other and how much are you using Shklovsky's concept of "estrangement", if at all?

J. B.: The former is surely necessary for the latter, and the other way round I am afraid is also. Hence the answer to your Shklovsky question.

"Appearances are all there is" (Less Than One). David Hockney has said "all art is surface" and that surface is "the first reality". Are you talking about the same thing and what depths are negated by privileging surface?

There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomenae.

In Less Than One you deny the hegemony of the "linear process", yet immediately follow this with a (linear) paradigm -- "A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic." Again, shortly after arguing that narrative, like memory, should be non-linear (ie digressive), you assert that history is cyclic (a linear image). Would you comment firstly on the nature of these contradictions and secondly on the problematic of linearity in your writing?

Cyclic is not linear! See your laundry machine or dishwasher. I don't believe I have "the problematic of linearity" in my writing. But having said that I must admit that stanzaic composition indeed possesses the kind of morphology similar to that of crystals growing.

"Selected Essays" is, it seems to me, self-consciously aphoristic: self-conscious in poetic rather than prosaic decision making (eg "The more indebted the artist, the richer he is."). Can you expand?

1) Do you expect a writer to be unaware of what he is doing?

2) One gets aphoristic for reasons of economy.

How completely do oppressive political regimes destroy individualism? I am thinking that individualism may find alternative modes of expression, that it is not something which can be cultured or suppressed but is an innate predisposition. Similarly, in a "free" society, expressions of "individualism" are often no more than a reclothed lumpen consciousness.

Innate disposition is subject to the outward mental diet. The latter can be reduced, thus conditioning the former. So you may find yourself disliking,say, Mao instead of Wittgenstein. In a free society you can do both; in a free society you have a better chance to define your true enemy, which is the vulgarity of the human heart.

You glibly put Sholokov's Nobel Prize (65) down to "a huge shipbuilding order placed in Sweden" (Less Than One). How credible do you find the "All Literature Is Politics" argument?

It's bullshit.

Post-war poetry in the USSR and the USA has vast stylistic/ thematic differences. First, are you now looking to become part of the American tradition and second, how (critically) constrained do you feel in relation to American culture?

I have no such inspiration. Nor do I aspire to the contrary. As for the American culture, some of it I find revolting, some awe-inspiring. Its diversity rules out a possibility of total approach.

In the Preface to "A Part of Speech" you mention reworking translations of your work to bring them closer to the original in terms of content rather than form. Has this forced choice, emphasising content over form, caused you to rethink your attitude to language in any way?

No it hasn't. You can sacrifice this or that aspect of a poem while translating but not in the process of composition.

How is poetry best read -- aloud to an audience or silently to oneself?

Both, but not one without the other.

Although memory fails to adequately reconstruct the past (In "A Room and A Half") has poetry allowed any successful reconstruction?

No. Nothing can do this. That's what time's passage is all about.

When Publius says, "Home!...where you won't be back ever." (Marbles), is this Joseph Brodsky speaking to us directly or is it facile to draw comparisons between an author and his characters?

No, it's not facile, and yes, it's my own attitude.

Your work draws on many other literary sources making for more or less esoteric writing. What is your attitude towards the accessibility of your work?

I couldn't care less about this sort of thing, although I am finding your remark highly surprising. If my stuff strikes you as being esoteric then something is really off with the City of Liverpool.

Original is at http://geocities.datacellar.net/SoHo/Den/3776/arg13.html.

Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1987

Swedish Academy

The Permanent Secretary

October 1987

Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky's Nobel prize

This year's Nobel Prize winner in Literature was born in Leningrad and lives in New York. Aged only 47 he is one of the youngest ever to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. A sign of the luminous intensity of his writing is that he has already been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Brodsky is chiefly a poet and essayist. He belongs to the classical Russian tradition with predecessors such as Pushkin and the Nobel Prizewinner Pasternak. At the same time he is a masterly renewer of poetical language and poetical forms of expression, inspired by Osip Mandelstam and Anna Achmatova among others.

Another of Brodsky's sources of inspiration is English poetry from the metaphysicist John Donne to W. H. Auden, he who wanted to be a lesser, atlantic Goethe. That language is the stuff that empires are made of is a vital thought with Brodsky as well.

For Brodsky, poetry is a divine gift. The religious dimension that one meets in his work is of a nature that adheres to no creed. Metaphysical and ethical questions are paramount.

The east-west background -- literary, geographical, linguistic -- has greatly influenced Brodsky's writing. It has given it an unusual wealth of themes and manifold perspectives. Together with the writer's profound insight into the literature of earlier epochs it has also conjured up a grand historical vision.

The change of environment and language after Brodsky had left the Soviet in 1972 naturally involved a severe nervous strain for the poet. In the poem 1972 in the collection A Part of Speech (1980) he depicts how he will gradually lose hair, teeth, consonants, verbs, and endings. Nevertheless he is now engaged on a prolific poetical work in Russian. Parallel with that he takes an active part in the translation of his works into English and sometimes writes directly in this language to great effect History of the Twentieth Century (1986) is a series of poems in a tone of raillery and parody, written with a quite amazing mastery of the English idiom.

All literature really is about what time does to people, Brodsky has said, thus indicating a main theme in his writing. Parting, becoming deformed, growing old, dying are the work of time. Poetry helps us, gives us basically the only possibility of withstanding the pressure of existence.

Poetry's role in the world is another central theme. It may apply to totalitarian societies, in which the poet can become the mouthpiece for those who apparently are silent, or to open societies in which his voice threatens to be drowned in the flood of information. In the brilliant collection of essays Less Than One (1980) Brodsky feels his way in towards the core of the problem from various directions. The poet is a word craftsman, a master of language. Poetry is the highest form of language. Brodsky sees it also as the highest form of life. The poet becomes an instrument with a questioning sound.

The Swedish Academy's citation aims at the great breadth in time and space which characterizes Joseph Brodsky's writing and at both the intellectual and sensitive side of this rich and intensely vital work.

Remembering a poet: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass

PBS Online NewsHour: Brodsky

Transcript

January 29, 1996

Joseph Brodsky emigrated to the United States after being expelled from his native Russia in 1972. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. His books of poetry include "A Part of Speech" (1977) and "To Urania" (1988), both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

JIM LEHRER: Joseph Brodsky appeared on the NewsHour in 1988, and talked about the thing he liked most about America; its spirit of individualism.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: (November 10, 1988) In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the--well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature. I happen to love the latter two, but you ought to have some sentiment. You also have to, to--in my case, well, there is something else. I simply loved all my life, loved is the stronger word, but I had a tremendous sentiment, partly conditioned of course by the reality of which--of where I grew up--for the spirit of individualism, for the idea of your being on your own in a big way. Well, so in a sense, in a sense when I came here, this is what happened, this is what I found.

JIM LEHRER: Now two eminent poets on Brodsky and poetry in America today. Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He's a Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages at the University of California at Berkeley. Robert Hass is the current poet laureate of the United States and a professor of English at Berkeley. Gentlemen, welcome to both of you. Mr. Milosz, how would you characterize Joseph Brodsky's poetry?

CZESLAW MILOSZ, Nobel Prize Winning Poet: (San Francisco) He was a very great poet and great successor of very great period of Russian poetry in the beginning of the 20th century. And he was my very close friend.

JIM LEHRER: Why does the word "great" apply to him?

MR. MILOSZ: Already since his beginnings and his trial in Russia the aura of greatness surrounded him. It's very difficult to define what it is.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, for those watching, listening now who have not read anything by Joseph Brodsky and this is the first time they're coming to his--he is coming to their attention, what would be your No. 1 recommendation as to what they should read to get the essence of this man as a poet?

ROBERT HASS, Poet Laureate: (San Francisco) I'd say to begin with, the first of his two books that were published in this country, Jim, a book called A Part of Speech. I guess the thing that should be said about Brodsky for us readers in English is that we're reading him in translation. He's a--he's a poet of immense verbal brilliance, lots of pyrotechnics, and when people try to bring that into English, what you often get is almost pyrotechnics, and almost brilliance, so partly you read his poetry in English as an act of faith, but I think the poems in the book A Part of Speech conveys the--his passion and his irony and a kind of a ferocious intelligence that will give people a sense of what he's like. His great work in English is the essays.

JIM LEHRER: The essays.

MR. HASS: And a book of his essays I think might be another place to get the quality of his mind and energy.

JIM LEHRER: In addition to the--reading the poetry.

MR. HASS: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. When you use the term "pyrotechnic," are you referring to his uses of words,--

MR. HASS: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: --the way he arranges them, or his ideas?

MR. HASS: Both. All three.

JIM LEHRER: All three.

MR. HASS: But mostly, mostly the, the--he puns a lot. He plays a lot with language. He surprises with rhyme. There isn't much like him in American poetry right now.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Mr. Milosz, what was it about Joseph Brodsky that the Soviet authorities didn't like, that causes them to put him in, in--to try him and then put him in prison and then eventually to exile him?

MR. MILOSZ: You know, his attitude towards the world was sort of detachment and he really didn't acknowledge the existence of those authorities. He went his own way, and that was extremely irritating.

JIM LEHRER: And that's why--that was the only thing? I mean, he was not--he wasn't a--what you'd call a dissident poet, was he, in the--in what we normally refer to as people who are writing poetry against the state and all of that?

MR. MILOSZ: Not at all. He considered it below his dignity to quarrel with the state. He simply considered that the state is something ruled by low kind of individuals.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Mr. Hass, I read somewhere today that in describing where Joseph Brodsky came from, of course, which was Russia, they described it as the land of the poets. Are we a land of poets?

MR. HASS: Oh, I think we are. You know, one of the things that Joseph said about his years in Russia reading American poetry was that American poetry was for him a long lecture on autonomy, on freedom, and when he came here, he brought with him a passion for English language poetry, and he was one of the people who's made this country a sort of dazzling center of poetry in the world during the last twenty or thirty years.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Milosz, do you see the United States as a dazzling place for poetry?

MR. MILOSZ: Yes. I must say that Joe Brodsky was very happy being in America, and I consider that America is better for poets than, for instance, Western Europe.

JIM LEHRER: Now, why is that? Because I say--the common thing here is that we are not a poetic people, that we are very pragmatic and we read our stories but we don't read our poetry, but you don't see it that way.

MR. MILOSZ: Well, judging by interest in poetry on the campuses, we would say that this is not quite true.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, I read today also that Brodsky said "that poetry is the only insurance we've got against the vulgarity of the human heart." And, in fact, I mentioned that in the News Summary at the beginning of the program. Is that a basic truth for you poets?

MR. HASS: Oh, I think it's a basic truth. You know, Yates, a great Irish poet whom Joseph loved, said it another way, he said, "We have filled our hearts with fantasy and our hearts grow brutal on the fair." One of the great things about poetry is that besides being an enchanter, it's a disenchanter, and a truth-teller, and Brodsky more than any other poet was one of those who managed to disenchant us out of the stupidity of our fantasies, and create more durable ones.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Would you agree with that, Mr. Milosz, that his poetry had that ability?

MR. MILOSZ: Yes. Yes. I consider that, that through his poetry one can apply the epithet sublime.

JIM LEHRER: Sublime.

MR. MILOSZ: Yeah. It's a very high praise, but undoubtedly his poetry is, is such. The trouble is, you see, and even I wonder his poetry is written in Russian, and it is in a way, its strength is linguistic, how it goes through translations, that's, that's another thing, not always go through translations.

JIM LEHRER: Sure. That was a point that Mr. Hass made a minute ago. Mr. Hass, you have a book of Joseph Brodsky's poetry there in your hand. Why don't--why don't you read a little bit. Tell us what it is, and give us--set it up, if it requires anything, and then read it, and we will say good night to you listening to Joseph Brodsky.

MR. HASS: Yes. Well, if Joseph was sublime, he was also amazingly clear and tough-minded, and here's a poem that--part of a poem sequence called "A Part of Speech" that might be a place to end:

"...Life, that no one dares

to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth,

bares its teeth in a grin at each

encounter. What gets left of a man amounts

to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech."

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, Mr. Milosz, thank you very much for being with us tonight.

MR. HASS: Thanks, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here.

Peter Vail. Poets of the Empires' Outskirts

(A Conversation with J. Brodsky about Derek Walcott)

When Derek Walcott became the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature for 1992, Joseph Brodsky was quoted in all the papers' announcements: "This is the best poet among those writing in English." What is important is not that one Nobel Prize Laureate praised another, but the similarities between these names and these literary figures, the fact that Brodsky said his words some ten years earlier, that he wrote about him an essay in the book "Less than One", that they are friends and, finally, that their poetic destinies resemble each other.

Both are splinters of an empire. Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad, is living in New York, an émigré from the USSR, a citizen of the USA, a Russian poet, an American poet-laureate, an English-language essayist. Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, a British colony which is an island of the archipelago of Lesser Antillian Islands in the Caribbean Sea, spent his youth in Trinidad, is living in the USA and is a professor of Boston University.

As soon as his island received independence, Walcott was one of the first to exchange his status from being a subject of the British Empire, on which the sun never sets, to being a citizen of St. Lucia, which is twenty five miles long.

It is amazing, but this island, whose size on the globe is that of a safety-pin jab, home to a hundred and fifty thousands residents, produced already a second Nobel Prize Laureate, becoming the absolute world champion in the number of Swedish Prizes per population. The first was the economist Arthur Louis, and if we take into account the fact that the prosperity of this island depends on a single industry -- export of bananas -- a prize in economics seems ironic. However, the poetic nature of the Caribbean Islands was never doubted. Alexo Carpenter called these places "magical reality", and Andre Breton described them as "surrealist" (maybe this in part could explain the prize given to Louis?). Walcott's friend from youth was V. S. Naipol -- one of the most brilliant English-language prose writers of our time, who was born in Trinidad to a family of émigrés from India. In Derek Walcott's own veins British, Dutch and Black blood mingle, both his grandmothers came from families of slaves. His first language was the Creole dialect. English, in which Walcott reached virtuosity, he studied in his youth as a foreign language. How can we not add here that the Russian Jew Brodsky amazes many Americans and English people with the depth of his understanding of the English poetic language. Thus when Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most logical thing seemed to speak about him to Joseph Brodsky, who himself was awarded the Nobel Prize five years earlier.

-- You have a rather good habit, instead of making friends with Nobel Prize Laureates, you make friends who become Nobel Prize Laureates.

-- I am indeed extremely happy. Happy that it is actually Derek who's received it.

-- How did you get to know each other?

-- This was in 1976 or 1977. There was such a wonderful American poet, Robert Lowell. We became friends, so to say. One day we sat and leisurely discussed who is worth what in poetry in English. And he suddenly showed me a poem by Derek Walcott, this was the long poem "Starappled Kingdom." This made a quite strong impression on me. Yet on the other hand I thought: well, a wonderful poem, so what? Everyone writes wonderful poems. After some time Lowell died and me and Derek met for the first time at his funeral. And it appeared that we both have the same publisher, Roger Straus (of the New York publishing house "Farrar, Straus and Giroux," -- P.V.). Now he has published books of twenty Nobel Prize Laureates, if we add Derek. So in the publishing house I took Walcott's works and then I understood that that poem was not, as they say, a coincidental creative success, it was not an exception. I especially liked the long, book length, autobiographical work in verse "Another Life."

You know, in literature there exist, especially in a certain stage, such fundamental (in a certain period) works. We have Blok's "Revenge", or later Pasternak's "Lieutenant Shmidt", or some other works. These found in poetry what could be seen as a new climate. "Another Life" is such a new territory. Not to mention the fact that the territory described in this poem is literally new, both in the psychological and in the geographical sense. And the methods of description are somewhat specific. later, in 1978 or 1979, both of us, Walcott and I, found ourselves to be members of the jury of the journal "International Literature Today", which is published in Oklahoma and awards a prize once in two years. Eugenio Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and others were awarded this prize. The jury consisted of thirty people, each of whom proposes his or her candidate. I proposed Milosh, and Walcott proposed Naipol, who is almost his countryman. By the way, I heard rumours that in Stockholm their positions were also head-to-head, and Walcott won. They are rather good friends.

-- A Nobel Prize will not be given so soon again to the Caribbean region, and Naipol, although he is two years younger than Walcott, still is already sixty.

-- But this is not important. In Oklahoma the final stage is based on the Olympic principle, and the contest was between Milosh and Naipol. Milosh won, and I understood that Walcott gave up his candidate for mine. I asked him why he did so, and he answered -- and this shows what kind of a poet Walcott is, -- he said, "you see, I gave up my candidate absolutely not for the reason you may imagine. The matter is not Eastern Europe, Nazism, The Holocaust and so on. What happened and happens today in our archipelago is by no means less than the catastrophes of the Poles or the Jews, especially in the moral sense. The criterion, said Walcott, is totally different: I like it when behind what I read -- in poetry or in prose -- I hear a certain rumble. The rumble of the Spheres, one may say. And in Naipol I don't feel it, while in Milosh I do." From then on -- not from that sentence, but from the Oklahoma period in general -- we became great friends.

-- Do you use exactly this word? The word "friend" in Russian is stronger than this word in English.

-- You know, he is a person of incredible warmth. That is, radiance glows from him. Moreover, this is not any kind of extrasensorial thing, these are simply, in fact, waves of warmth, right? When I am with him, I am always inside this field. In fact it is as if he was too much warmed by the sun -- considering where he comes from.

-- I was once in the company of Walcott and other people and I remember well that there was always laughter around him.

-- This is true. He is a person with a fantastic sense of humour. Moreover, he is very much alive, there is always something new on his mind. And altogether I never remember that he would have to rest, be ill -- heavens forbid! -- be bored, rot. For the last twenty years he is the closest person to me among English speakers. We were together in the most varied situations in this hemisphere, and also in the other one.

-- In all the articles accompanying the conferment of the Nobel Prize your words are quoted: "the best poet of the English language"...

-- I do indeed think so. And they are bound to quote me because I wrote about him, and a lot. Not that I am proud of it... Although yes, I am proud that it is I. I am proud and even may boast of it.

-- In the book "Less than One" in the article about Walcott, "The Sound of the Tide", you write that Walcott is outside literary schools. So in what is expressed his, as you put it, "fundamental" significance? What are the "new territories" you mention?

-- In this small article I paraphrase Mandelshtam: "This is already the fourth century that I (...) dash against Russian poetry." Walcott was dashing against English poetry in a similar way and now has finally dashed against it totally. How is he remarkable? It is in the classical manner which does not constitute an alternative to modernism but rather absorbs modernism. Walcott writes in meter, is exceedingly varied in rhymes. I think that there is no person who rhymes in English better than Walcott. Moreover, he is very colourful. And in fact colour is spiritual information. When we talk about animals, mimicry is more important than adaptability, right? This means something. There is a rather long history behind all that -- at least evolution, and this is not a small thing, it is in fact longer than history. Walcott is an "Adam" poet, that is he came from a world in which not everything has yet been given a meaning and a name. That world was inhabited not so long ago. Not yet totally colonised by Westerners. By whites. There the majority uses concepts which, to a certain degree, are still not completely based on experience and consciousness.

-- We have witnessed something similar with the Latin American novel, which is closer to the myth than refined Europe or North America.

-- Derek by race is black. It is true that he has a mix of many elements. Yet when you are born as a subject of the British empire and you are coloured, you find yourself in a quite remarkable situation. If your vocation is culture, then your choice is very limited. Either to be submerged in nostalgia for some non-existing roots, because there is no tradition whatsoever except oral tradition, or to go out in search of asylum in the culture of your masters. The first is comfortable, because there is nothing there, no terminology, only sentimentality.

-- And also you are the first there. When I was young I regretted not being born to one of the tiny northern nations: by the age of thirty, one may have a collection of works published and everything flows as a matter of course.

-- In any case you find yourself only momentary support. The audience and so on. And you do not have to think, it is more important that you feel.

-- In the other case you describe, the comptetition is totally different, of course.

-- Everything is more complicated. You find yourself inside the history of a culture which has to be absorbed, with which to struggle and so on. A huge world in which much has been formulated. That alone can crush you. Not to mention that you get constant reproaches from your countrymen, that you sold yourself out, as we say, to the Bolsheviks.

-- That is, in that case, to the Big White People.

-- Big White People, yes. A big culture. But such is the power and the intensity of Walcott's talent, such as Naipol's, that they, coming from nowhere, not just absorbed the English culture. Their desire to find themselves a place and find a world order was such that instead of finding themselves asylum in the English culture they drilled through it and came out the other side, even more strangers than they were.

-- They did not level themselves with a powerful tradition, but only hardened themselves and strengthened even more their uniqueness. That is, before this uniqueness was given to them, simply by virtue of their origins -- Caribbean influence, African, Indian -- and later it became real individualism. Yet Walcott and Naipol write in English exactly because of the same Big White People.

-- These are already not the same people. And that world is already not the same. Thanks to such people as Walcott and Naipol, by the way. And Derek received a classical English education. A classical colonial English education.

-- By the way, this St. Lucia is an amazing place. The gross state product per head is ten times less than in the States, yet literacy is ninety percent, a high percent in universal terms.

-- Derek studied in the University of the West Indies, later he was hanging around in England, there were many different paths. Yet his zone, his sphere became poetry.

-- An utterly individualist activity. But Walcott is also a playwright.

-- He was occupied in writing poetic dramas, because a) he was interested in the theatre and b) in order to give work for many talented people amongst his countrymen. In his plays there is much music, calypso, whatever. Such a temperament. And also the passions there are absolutely Shakespearean.

-- It seems to me that Derek Walcott is a plenipotentiary representative of a certain Pleiad, characteristic of our time. First of all, he answers in the best possible way to your lines: "If you happen to be born in an empire, it is best to live in a remote province near the sea." Here is Walcott, here is Naipol, who are both from the Caribbean Islands. The previous year it was Nadine Gordimer from South Africa who received the Nobel Prize. In South Africa there is also Kotzie, whom you yourself called more than once one of the best English language prose writers. There is Salman Rushdie. In Stockholm, it is rumoured, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney is discussed as a candidate. All this is prose and poetry in English, and all of them are not English people, not Americans, all are outsiders. What is happening?

-- What is happening is what Yates mentioned before: "The centre cannot hold." And it indeed cannot hold any more.

-- An empire shines in its ruins?

-- Not so much the ruins as the outskirts. And the outskirts are wonderful in that it is maybe the end of the empire, but is also the beginning of the world. The rest of the world. So here in the outskirts of the empire, somewhere in the Caribbean Islands, a person appears, who starts to read Shakespeare. Shakespeare and all the rest. He does not see legions, but he sees waves and palm trees, and coconuts on the beach, like helmets of a dead landing soldier.

-- Walcott writes thus: "The sea is our history." And in another place: "My people appeared like the sea, without a name, without horizons." And we, by the way, also have, in a north-western corner of another empire, another sea, which also has a fundamental significance, if we judge by your poem:

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshes, by

Zinc-grey waves, that always came running in twos

And hence all the rhymes, hence that faded voice,

Curling among them, like wet hair.¹

If the outskirts of an empire of which the centre no longer "holds", an empire which is collapsing, like ours, or that has already collapsed, like the British empire, if all that is so productive, shouldn't we wait for surprises from the Russian outskirts?

-- Let's hope something of this kind will happen. Although our outskirts are not distant from each other geographically, they constitute some continental whole. This is why such a feeling of being alienated from the centre does not exist. And this is, in my opinion, a very important feeling. And English speaking people should thank geography for the fact that these islands exist. Yet still in the Russian case, too, something of this kind could happen, we should not dismiss it.

-- It seems to me that the youth of this culture, which -- together with its traditionality -- a person from the outskirts of the empire carries, is linked with an explicable courage, not to say impertinence. Here, for example, is Walcott who ventured into an epic: his 32 pages "Omeros" is a transferring of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into Caribbean manner. An epic in our time -- is it not anachronistic?

-- I don't know. It is not for the writer. It is not for the reader.

-- Why is it that a contemporary epic does not, or almost does not, exist?

-- This is because nobody has guts. Because we are more and more drawn towards the smaller forms: it is all natural. People haven't got time -- neither the writer nor the reader. And of course in attempting an epic there is an instant of impudence. Yet "Omeros" is a remarkable poem, at places it is of a fantastic nature. But the real epic of Walcott is "Another Life".

-- And a traditional question: to what extent is Derek Walcott acquainted with Russian literature?

-- He knows Pasternak and Mandelshtam perfectly well, in English translations, and depends on them internally very much. To a certain extent he himself as a poet is placed between them. Walcott is a poet of texture, of detail, and this makes him close to Pasternak. And on the other hand -- the despairing tenor of Mandelshtam... I remember that time in Oklahoma where we sat, chatting and drinking. The thing was that every member of the jury was given a bottle of "Ballantine" whisky, every day, and Derek at that time already didn't drink and gave it to me. And I entertained him by translating from memory, line by line, various poems by Mandelshtam. I remember what a strong impression this line made on him: "In the rustling of hundred rouble notes by the lemon Neva/ Never, never did a gypsy woman dance for me." Derek was simply beyond himself with enthusiasm. And later he composed a poem, dedicated to my humble person, where he makes use of these lines. He also helped me more than once in translating my own poems with me.

-- I think that what attracts Walcott to the poems of Mandelshtam and to your poems is their classicist nature. It is not for nothing that he himself is so drawn towards antiquity and he likes so much to compare his archipelago to the Greek archipelago.

-- This is true, he has a notably strong tendency to think about his archipelago, the West Indies, as resembling Greece. He turns every page, like a wave, backwards.

From the book: "Iosif Brodskii: trudy i dni" ("Joseph Brodsky: Labours and Days"), edited by Lev Loseff and Peter Vail (Moscow, 1998).

Translated from the Russian by Anat Vernitski, 1998. Reproduced with permission. (-- S. W.)

¹ A poem from the 1976 cycle "A Part of Speech"; here is the author's auto-translation from the book "A Part of Speech", 1980:

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland

by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on

in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice

that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling---lastly, the seagull's metal cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. Only sounds needs echo and dreads its lack. A glance is accustomed to no glance back.

Conversation of Joseph Brodsky with Adam Mikhnik

MIKHNIK: Let's talk about Russia, about your threefold experience of Russian "intelligent", Russian poet and Russian Jew.

BRODSKY: I do not consider myself a "Russian intelligent". This term was born in the 19th century and died in the beginning of the 20th. After 1917, one couldn't be serious when talking about "Russian intelligentsia". A cute beard, pince-nez, passion for (Russian) people?? Long conversations about Russia's fate at the suburban dacha??? Neither me nor my colleagues have never considered ourselves as "intelligentsia", at least for the reason that we have never discussed Russia, its fate or its people among ourselves. We were more interested in Faulkner and Beckett. What would happen to Russia?? What would its fate be?? What is its purpose?? To myself, all that ended with Chaadayev and his definition of Russia as a failure in the history of mankind.

M: I have always valued high "Russian intelligent" in you. It's interesting that you don't like this definition.

B: Somebody can call me that, but I think different of myself. I have always tried to define myself in clear terms: am I courageous or cowardly, greedy or generous, honest with women or not.

M: There is no riot against the power in your works. You have never been a dissident.

B: Adam, you are wrong. It just means that I have never fallen so low as to cry "Down with the Soviets!"

M: Were you an exception in your circle of friends, in that sense?

B: My colleagues were the same. At best, power was a theme for anecdotes and jokes. But to be serious about it?? It was clear that it was evil. If only my generation had any illusions, they were gone after 1956. Everything became clear then. I was 16. The 20th century cannot teach us. In the 19th c., there was an idea of people, the idea of justice that could be reached. In the 20th, the idea of people as a bearer of truth is just infantile. Russia has a history that nobody can comprehend. When we are talking about the cruelties of a ruling power we do not say the whole truth. It is not only that thousands were killed but also that lives of the millions were altered. Whole generations were brought up in the total unjustice. The very thought of initiative was rooted out, the instinct of activity has disappeared, it was castrated. I think, the same thing happened to Russian people as to Russian intelligentsia in the last century: the feeling of a complete impotence.

M: Isaac Berlin noticed once that there is a tradition of Maupassant in European literature -- literature as a storytelling. And Russian literary tradition is a fulfilment of a certain mission. When I am listening to you, I see that you say one thing and write something very different.

B: The main enemy of humanity is not communism, socialism or capitalism, but the vulgarity of a human heart, of a human mind. For example, Marx's vulgar imagination, and vulgar imagination of his Russian successors.

M: When did you meet with antisemitism?

B: At school. A class book has your name in it, last name, date of birth, and nationality. I am Jewish, one hundred percent. One cannot be Jewish more than I am. My father, my mother, no doubt about them. Without any foreign blood. But I think, I am Jewish not only for that reason. I know that there is a true absolutism in my views. And. speaking of religion, when forming the idea of a Supreme Being for myself, I would say that G-d is a violence. Isn't the G-d from the Old Testament the same?

M: What do the words "All poets are Jews" by Tsvetaeva mean (to you)?

B: That one can't be jealous for their position. They are aliens to people around them.

M: Tell me, should Poles be afraid of Russia?

B: I think that Russia is finished as a superpower. And, as a state that can put a pressure on its neighbors, it has no future. And, for a long time, it won't be having this future. Russian territory will shrink. I think, you can leave the game table. Everything is finished.

Warsaw.

TSUSHIMA SCREEN

Citizen Of A Language

Nobel Poet Joseph Brodsky Dies In New York

Monday January 29 1:04 AM EST

PBS Newshour Interview with Joseph Brodsky

A Poet Remembered: Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996

Benjamin Stolz and Michael Makin are faculty members in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

The Late Joseph B.

Original at www.moscowchannel.com/brodsky.html

Joseph Brodsky answers Argotist's questions

Original is at http://geocities.datacellar.net/SoHo/Den/3776/arg13.html.

Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1987

October 1987

Joseph Brodsky

Remembering a poet: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass

January 29, 1996

Peter Vail. Poets of the Empires' Outskirts

From the book: "Iosif Brodskii: trudy i dni" ("Joseph Brodsky: Labours and Days"), edited by Lev Loseff and Peter Vail (Moscow, 1998).

Translated from the Russian by Anat Vernitski, 1998. Reproduced with permission. (-- S. W.)

¹ A poem from the 1976 cycle "A Part of Speech"; here is the author's auto-translation from the book "A Part of Speech", 1980:

Conversation of Joseph Brodsky with Adam Mikhnik

<1995>

Adopted from: Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw, February 1995

Translated and submitted by Dmitry Gorelikov

TSUSHIMA SCREEN

Citizen Of A Language

Nobel Poet Joseph Brodsky Dies In New York

Monday January 29 1:04 AM EST

PBS Newshour Interview with Joseph Brodsky

A Poet Remembered: Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996

Benjamin Stolz and Michael Makin are faculty members in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

The Late Joseph B.

Original at www.moscowchannel.com/brodsky.html

Joseph Brodsky answers Argotist's questions

Original is at http://geocities.datacellar.net/SoHo/Den/3776/arg13.html.

Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1987

October 1987

Joseph Brodsky

Remembering a poet: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass

January 29, 1996

Peter Vail. Poets of the Empires' Outskirts

From the book: "Iosif Brodskii: trudy i dni" ("Joseph Brodsky: Labours and Days"), edited by Lev Loseff and Peter Vail (Moscow, 1998).

Translated from the Russian by Anat Vernitski, 1998. Reproduced with permission. (-- S. W.)

1 A poem from the 1976 cycle "A Part of Speech"; here is the author's auto-translation from the book "A Part of Speech", 1980:

Conversation of Joseph Brodsky with Adam Mikhnik

<1995>

Adopted from: Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw, February 1995

Translated and submitted by Dmitry Gorelikov

¹ A poem from the 1976 cycle "A Part of Speech"; here is the author's auto-translation from the book "A Part of Speech", 1980: