Иосиф Бродский: опыт литературной биографии

by Lev Losev, Лев Лосев

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), one of Russia’s great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Russia, Biography Memoir

Hardcover

First published June 23, 1999

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in college, the reading of secondary material about an author was discouraged in favor of the close reading of the primary sources. In other words, it was considered cheating to read about an author--you were supposed to get in there with the bear and wrestle it yourself. You were supposed to have a good grasp of the history of the period, yourself. And then line by line, you unpacked the work. It was the ultimate mind-sharpener, that was for sure.

But now I am not in college anymore, and having read a fair amount of Brodsky (in English, and my favorite, going back and forth from the barely-understood Russian to an excellent translation) and knowing the most famous of the poets he was responding to, and the history of the USSR to a certain extent, I gave in to the temptation to learn more solid facts about the life that created the work.

Lev Losev was a friend of Brodsky's, a fellow poet and later, editor as well. He gives us so many missing pieces in this work--a true literary biography, it doesn't merely trace the events in Brodsky's life, but the poetic concerns and how they developed and changed. There was much surprising information here--what was the real story of his early life, his imprisonment in mental hospitals which marked him far more than imprisonment or exile, the exile in the Far North (he actually loved it up there, having space of his own for the first time in his life, the freedom to read, close enough that people could visit him from Leningrad.)

Finally, I was delighted to learn some--not nearly enough, but that's the romantic in me--about Brodsky's one great love, the MB to whom so many of my favorite Brodsky poems were addressed. Marina Basmanova, an artist who periodically dumped him (in other writings she is characterized as being 'stolen away' by another poet, as if she were a vase)--but here emerges as someone with a will and preferences of her own. There were facts about when things occurred, when she left, how he felt, when they returned, the birth of their child, but I could have used so much more about this relationship.

I finally understand the importance of Auden in his work. Not only was Auden one of the signatories of letters to get Brodsky out of exile in the Far North, but Brodsky stayed with Auden for six weeks after being expelled from the USSR. (One of the best parts of the book--Auden's drinking schedule, which began with a martini at 7:30 a.m.) But Auden was a great influence on the writing. Brodsky's reading of Anglo-American poets while in the Far North was tremendously influential, especially Auden, and Robert Frost.

The book helped me weigh the effects of events of his life on his poetry, for instance understanding that while Brodsky was undergoing this mockery of a trial in 1963 for 'parasitism' he was more worried about losing Basmanova. His eventual exile from the USSR in 1972 he believed was not a watershed it would appear--he saw "here" and "there" as just a matter of space, that the conditions held true on both sides of the curtain. (though "there" is certainly a profound echo in his poetry.)

There are insights into so many of his poems which made me read this alongside the poems, considerably slowing the reading but making it far more useful.

The picture that emerges most forcefully is that of a demanding, self-assured boy who dropped out of school at 15 because he could not conform, could not pretend, did not want what others wanted. A true poet. He took scores of odd jobs, factory work, work on surveying crews, so in fact, he was much less guilty of "parasitism" (the charge at his trial) than were many of the apparatchiks of the Writer's Union.

The book is extremely informative of the pressures on Brodsky, characterizing his chance to rehabilitate himself after his exile to the Far North--released by public and especially Western political pressure--and take up the attitude of the poets who were always moving up to the line of rebellion but never coming out in direct conflict with the authorities. These poets are characterized as "Aesopian," speaking in codes, using folk tales and oblique language, a venerable response to authoritarianism and a tack taken by people like Yevtushenko, Voznesensky and Akhmadulina.

"But Brodsky insisted on absolute creative autonomy; he could not writes poetry while thinking about how a censor might read it. What for another artist might mean a daring and amusing game was for Brodsky the loss of his own inner freedom. The Aesopian strategy (slavish by definition) was morally unacceptable to him."

The person who emerges from these pages is an iconoclast, someone unable to fudge or pretend, whose one faith is in the freedom of the individual, to think for himself, to refuse conformity, to be the one against the many--very much like Tsvetaeva in this way.

It's not quite the rich biography I hope someone is writing, like that about Tsvetaeva by Viktoria Schweitzer or Akhmatova in Anna of all the Russias by Elaine Feinstein--but offers a new level of insight into the writing of this consummate poet.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The impression one is left with of Brodsky, after closing Lev Loseff’s studious, restrained, carefully sympathetic biography, is one of a man who continues the direct poetic genealogy from Derzhavin and Pushkin through to Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Blok, and Mayakovsky, on into the latter half of the twentieth century. Brodsky’s affinity with the Great Poets of Russia’s Past is evidenced within his work by his dedication to form, rhyme, meter, an obedience to classical structures harking back all the way to Homer, Propertius, and Horace. “Hellenistic” would be another appropriate term that lingers about the man and his work, the classical world carried from one generation to the next, contextualized by a modern eye but not vulgarized. Homer and Ovid, as well as Pushkin, are ever-present shades in Mandelstam’s works; similarly in Brodsky the elegies of Propertius and Horatian odes mingle with elements of Acmeism and Futurism. In the West, however, it is as much for his essays as for his poems (which it is emphasized again and again are especially susceptible to translational degradation) that Brodsky is known. That is another feature he has in common with Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva- their body of work encompassed all regions of the written word, their effective modes of expression were boundless.

Brodsky’s case is especially striking when one comes to find that his learning was largely autodidactic. Born under the siege of Leningrad in 1940, his earliest impressions were of a city in disarray- bullet-pocked walls, streets emptied of people, wasted factory quarters, danger and poverty. As an adult he would reminisce on the impression this gave him of Leningrad as a stage-set. Still, the architectural beauty and mysteries of the city on the Neva were to inform his aesthetics throughout his life. The winged lions that occupy the covers of many of his books were first seen here and found echoes in his beloved Venice; the image of the Gorgon that recurs occasionally throughout his work was a wrought-iron simulacrum on a bridge over the Fontanka; he was ever drawn to cities that grew near bodies of water. He left school when he was fifteen, as early as was legally possible, and worked something like thirty different jobs in six years while getting down to the business of writing poetry, learning English and Polish on his own to be able to read foreign literary journals. Polish and English literature were the early influences on his work, and he came to many of Russia’s twentieth century poets relatively late in his development. When he first made a pilgrimage with a friend to Akhmatova’s dacha outside Moscow he was barely acquainted with her work. Tsvetaeva was his great obsession, her lyrical quality and metaphysical bent more in tune with his ripening world-view.

At readings, he was an atypically hot-headed, overly-confident young writer, performing with exaggeration and flair, to the point of annoying and even provoking the older, established generation of Leningrad writers into believing he had no respect for their poetic tradition (and the secret police into believing they could be witnessing the germination of a bona fide dissident). The impressions and enemies he made at this early stage were to have a consequence later on when his credentials as a poet were put up before a kangaroo court. Literary jealousies and rivalries could have striking real-world consequences in a society where all literature was either approved by the State as providing a function or was considered a crime. Brodsky’s youthful rebellions, rather tame when placed aside the cultural upheavals occurring concurrently in the West, soon had him arrested on charges of parasitism, a new law invoked to clean the streets of pimps and petty criminals, the unemployable and the discontented. Despite support from Akhmatova (who early on was enthusiastically encouraging of Brodsky’s works, and was attracted to the man himself because of similarities she saw in appearance and demeanor to her old friend Osip Mandelstam), and testimony from other literary figures, at age 24 Brodsky found himself subject to that oh-so-Russian form of punishment for thought-crimes, internal exile.

After psychological treatment (read: torture) in an asylum to determine sanity and fitness for trial, after arrest and that infamous ride in a thronging, filthy, sweltering eastbound railroad car known so well by the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Evgenia Ginzburg, four years in provincial Russia, splitting wood and sowing fields by day, nights translating Donne by candlelight, a Russian-English dictionary splayed open on a makeshift desk in a one-room hut without electricity or running water. Poems were produced; he did not shy away from back-breaking labor; the country folk of the Arkhangelsk region grew fond of him; he traced contrails in the sky back to Leningrad while furrowing fields; friends brought books; Auden was discovered. Meanwhile, his trial and exile had gained fame in the West, Berryman wrote a Dream Song about him, and his name was becoming associated with the human rights crisis in the Soviet Union. A letter from Sartre (whose works Brodsky had no great affection for) to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet may have had a great influence on the State’s decision to end his exile early. A famous imprisoned poet was bad PR for a regime trying to sell itself as the egalitarian hope for humanity. The sensationalism surrounding his trial and the trickling drip-drip of human rights demanded after the post-Stalinist thaw all worked to a revocation of his exile, and he returned to Leningrad a celebrity, somewhat of a martyr and a hero to the cause of individual expression under a monolithic, collectivized State.

Despite his celebrity, he still was not a sanctioned poet, and therefore found himself in a similar position as before his exile from Leningrad, eking out a living from what translations, song transcriptions, and odd jobs came his way from the Writer’s Union. The State still wanted nothing to do with his poetry; he could not be published; the KGB trailed him. Brodsky would not bend to take part in the practice of using “Aesopian language”; that is, compose works in a coded, fabled language that could slip by the censors and find publication while covertly expressing what were considered subversive or "useless" ideas. Therefore, if he was to stay in the Soviet Union (and he expressed no real interest in attempting to leave) his future as a published poet perhaps was doomed. However, the State acted as an agent of fate. In the large Jewish migration of the 60’s and 70’s from the Soviet Union to Israel, some invitations to the newly founded state on the Sea of Galilee came unbidden. Some were fabricated by the Supreme Soviet to do away with unsavory characters the State simply no longer wished to deal with. Brodsky was called in to his local visa and registration office and given two options: accept a deportation to Israel, or stay in the Soviet Union and face “big trouble” from the KGB. In 1972, given barely enough time to say goodbye to friends and family, Brodsky found himself on a plane to Israel via Vienna.

He never made it to Israel. In Vienna he was awed and overwhelmed by the abundance in the storefronts; through literary contacts one of his first acts in the West was a pilgrimage to rural Germany to meet his idol WH Auden who was summering there. Weeks were spent with the constantly sauced, sometimes brilliantly lucid, other times gibbering, Greatest Living Poet in the English Language (the catalog of Auden's daily regimen of alcohol consumption is truly astounding). Auden’s “In Memory of WB Yeats” had been a revelatory moment for Brodsky while in exile; in many ways his poetic language and music was founded and defined by the discovery of those stanzas. Brodsky’s English was not good enough to hold up much of a conversation with the aged, drunken Auden, but the two got along swimmingly and Auden ended up writing a preface for one of Brodsky’s earliest published books. As Brodsky moved West, it seemed his fortunes became the mirror image of his hardships in the Russia he left forever behind him. Publication, acclaim, fame, a MacArthur genius grant, teaching jobs in prestigious universities, extensive travels, winters in Venice, the Nobel Prize.

Loseff’s biography never drifts too far from Brodsky’s art; as the man saw his life and his writing as one infrangible entity, Loseff treats the passing years and the forms they produced as such. As his life is told chronologically, the works that sprung from his experiences are traced in tandem, not only in relation to the development of the man, but in relation to the development of his poetic consciousness and the historical consciousness of Russian poetry as a whole. This book is in itself a great lesson in Russian poetics, the rhythms of the Russian tongue, the problems with translation from Russian to English (there is a lovely chapter that catalogs the varying shades of meaning in equivalent Russian and English terms), and that particularly Russian problem of the spirit’s pull between West and East, liberalism and collectivism, Hellenism and Communism. The book ends with a long exploration of the idea of absence in Brodsky’s poetry, his aesthetic idea that absence, emptiness, is the true form of things, the essence of the individual in the face of infinity, the eternal Platonic ideals and their transient, physical forms. Brodsky’s “Letters to a Roman Friend” ends with just such an image, a world of sensations waiting to be experienced, devoid of the human "I" that has passed on, but vibrating, waiting for the next eye to open itself to the richness of the world:

Dark green laurels on the verge of trembling.
Doors ajar. The windowpane is dusty.
Idle chairs and the abandoned sofa.
Linen blinded by the sun of noonday.

Pontus drones past a black fence of pine trees.
Someone’s boat braves gusts out by the promontory.
On the garden bench a book of Pliny rustles.
Thrushes chirp within the hairdo of the cypresses.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is a referential art; it has its being in culture and context. The point is not obscure cultural references or literary allusions but the language itself, passed from generation to generation and yet always spoken in an entirely new way.

This beacon of a book is more of a survey of Brodsky's work than a traditional biography. Fascinated, my mind in these darkened times began to ponder degrees of similitude with the other poet Robert Zimmerman. Aside from Nobel accolades, there's a similar trajectory of dropping out of institutional instruction, the controversies of celebrity, a dalliance with Christianity, a stunning neo-classical verve.

Those interested in the details within should plumb the muscles of Geoff's stellar review.

[Pavel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iosif Brodskii became Nobel Prize winner and MacArthur Genius Award winner and winner of dozens of other titles and awards as Joseph Brodsky In USSR he was trialed, persecuted and finally desterrared, although he never was anti-soviet or dissident, he just never paid any attention to auhtorirties in his poems, as simple as that. His books never were officialy published at home. But his carrier on the West became one of the most successfull between russian emigree writers, even compared to Nabokov or Joseph Conrad(although they left Russian-speaking world in their teen days and Brodsky was exiled as a grown-up man). Partly because Brodsky turned out to be very talanted as a language-learner and in a few years became totaly fluent in English and wrote a lot of poems in English (sometimes those are author's translations like the poem below, sometimes poems written in English and then translated to russian)

I said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destory the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow's my squat company.

My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my sholders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

This book is literature bio, story of his poetic talent concieving, evolving, and blossoming. Acts of his personal and social life, political stuff are on the side track of this book, although Losev carefully tells us how Oden and other great English-speaking writrs influenced Brodsky, he doesn't have an ambition to tell us full story of the trial against Brodsky and to describe his main Muse, Marina Basmanova in a more detailed way.
Thus for my tastes this book is not full, detailed for a biography. Usually when I end up reading whole book ABOUT someone (not by someone), espec. in ZHZL series I prefer to have more detail coverage of his or her life.

[Ushan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940 in Leningrad, an only child in a family of white-collar workers. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, his father went to the front; after the first winter in the Siege of Leningrad, his mother was evacuated to a village in Vologda Province with her son; after the siege was lifted, they came back to Leningrad. Young Joseph was a bad student; he got F's, including an F in English (did the schoolteacher later explode from the shame, having given an F to one of the finest essayists in the language?); at age 15 he dropped out of high school and became a blue-collar worker: he worked in factories, in geological expeditions, at the morgue; because of heart disease, he was not drafted into the military. Brodsky was eagerly educating himself; he learned English and Polish, and wrote poetry; he met Anna Akhmatova and Boris Slutsky; he fell in love with M.B. (the book reveals her full name), who gave birth to his son (the yellow press of St. Petersburg says that the son showed no literary talents, and works as a trolleybus fare collector), but later preferred Dmitry Bobyshev to him. He attracted the attention of one Yakov Lerner, a custodian of Leningrad Institute of Technology and an activist of Voluntary People's Militia, who was later twice convicted of fraud. In order to improve his career prospects, Lerner launched a smear campaign against Brodsky, which culminated in the well-known trial for parasitism in the spring of 1964, where Brodsky was sentenced to five years of exile in rural Archangel Province. Frida Vigdorova took notes of the trial; the transcript was widely distributed in the samizdat and in the West. Already in our time, Lerner started spreading a fake transcript of the trial, which portrays Brodsky as an anti-Soviet Jewish nationalist, which completely contradicts Vigdorova's transcript. The exile was not difficult for Brodsky: he lived in one of the empty houses in the half-abandoned village, did hard physical labor during the day and wrote brilliant poetry at night. Both Soviet writers and Jean-Paul Sartre petitioned for Brodsky's release; after a year and a half of exile he was released, but his conviction was not overturned. In 1972 the authorities hinted to Brodsky that he should better emigrate lest he gets into trouble. So he did; in Austria he met Slavic scholar Carl Proffer and Wystan Hugh Auden. Brodsky spent the rest of his life in the United States with occasional visits to Italy: he wrote poetry and essays in Russian and English, taught poetry at the University of Michigan, translated into Russian and English from other languages, including "The Dialogue of Pessimism" from the Akkadian (presumably, via a word-for-word translation; I greatly prefer his translation to Professor Igor Diakonov's Russian translation), helped and wrote letters of recommendation for other emigre writers: Aleshkovsky, Dovlatov, Limonov. He was opposed to the Soviet Union's politics, but for his time he was quite moderate; he sometimes said strange things, for example, that more people died in Stalin's camps than in Hitler's. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Brodsky fantasized about organizing international brigades, like the ones in Spain in the 1930s, which would be financed by some Texas millionaire; he certainly did not know that a man who would become famous 5 1/2 years after Brodsky's death was doing just that: his name was Osama bin Laden. In 1987 Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature; in 1990 he married an Italian aristocrat of part-Russian descent; they had a daughter; in 1996 he died of a heart attack. Galina Starovoytova offered to bury him on Vasilievsky Island, matching his famous poem, but the family wanted something easier to reach, so Brodsky was buried at a Protestant cemetery in Venice.

Unfortunately, it is out of my competence to explain Brodsky's poetic achievements. If I had read a biography of Einstein, in the review I would mention special relativity, general relativity, the photoelectric effect, the EPR paradox, since I know what they all are and why they are significant. However, I know Russian poetry much worse than physics.

[Simon Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very insightful and enjoyable literary biography

[Mythili · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940. The only son of a Jewish news photographer and a bookkeeper, Joseph grew up in the midst of the second World War – an event that would shape his life’s work. “If anyone profited from the war,” he writes, “it was us: its children. Apart from having survived it, we were richly provided with stuff to romanticize or to fantasize about." A middling student, Joseph dropped out of school by age 15 and began his informal education in poetry. After he was rejected from submarine training school, he held jobs as a machinist, morgue assistant, bath house stoker, lighthouse keeper and porter. But his string of part-time jobs did not sit well with the KGB, and in 1962, he was arrested.

Though he was held for only two days, it was just the start of his troubles with the Soviet government; he would soon be found guilty of ‘parisitism’ for moving from job to job. Exiled from Leningrad, he spent 18 months in rural Norenskaya, reading, writing, and working the land. It was, again, just a taste of a larger exile to come: In 1972, Soviet officials put him on a plane to Vienna. Though he would flourish in the west as a poet, essayist and intellectual, Brodsky would never again return to his homeland – or see his parents. Author Lev Loseff counts himself a close friend of Brodsky’s of more than thirty years and his account of Brodsky’s life brims with the respect and enthusiasm of a friend and fellow lover of literature; “I cannot comment on Joseph’s life and work dispassionately, not only because I loved him, but also because I thought him a genius,” he writes. Yet Loseff does employ a measure of restraint in capturing Brodsky’s individualism, originality, whimsicality, and eccentricity – illuminating the man behind the work without forgetting to put Brodsky’s literary legacy first.

[Tom]

Not crazy about B's poetry, but love his essays. But his life -- a relatively short one, at that --was certainly a turbulent one

[Albert]

Уникальная книга! Серия "ЖЗЛ" - уникальное издательство!

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

losev my best buddy my pal