Notes About Brodsky

NOTES ABOUT BRODSKY

BRODSKY'S PRESENCE acted as a buttress and a point of reference for many of his fellow poets. Here was a man whose work and life always reminded us that despite what is so often said and written today, a hierarchy does exist. This hierarchy is not deducible through syllogisms, nor can it be decided upon by discussion. Rather, we confirm it anew every day by living and writing. It has something in common with the elementary division into beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, kindness and cruelty, freedom and tyranny. Above all, hierarchy signifies respect for that which is elevated, and disdain, rather than contempt, for that which is inferior.

The label "sublime" can be applied to Brodsky's poetry. In his fate as a representative of man there was that loftiness of thought which Pushkin saw in Mickiewicz: "He looked upon life from on high."

In one of his essays Brodsky calls Mandelstam a poet of culture. Brodsky was himself a poet of culture, and most likely that is why he created in harmony with the deepest current of his century, in which man, threatened with extinction, discovered his past as a never-ending labyrinth. Penetrating into the bowels of the labyrinth, we discover that whatever has survived from the past is the result of the principle of differentiation based on hierarchy. Mandelstam in the Gulag, insane and looking for food in a garbage pile, is the reality of tyranny and degradation condemned to extinction. Mandelstam reciting his poetry to a couple of his fellow prisoners is a lofty moment, which endures.

With his poems, Brodsky built a bridge across decades of hackneyed Russian language to the poetry of his predecessors, to Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. He was not a political poet, for he did not want to enter into polemics with an opponent that was hardly worthy of him. Instead, he practiced poetry as a particular type of activity which was not subject to any apparent dimensions of time.

To aim directly at a goal, refusing to be deflected by voices demanding one's attention. This means one is capable of distinguishing what is important, and hewing only to this goal. That is precisely what the great Russian writers were able to do, and they deserve to be envied for that.

Brodsky's life and creative work aim straight at fulfillment like an arrow at its target. Of course, this is a delusion, just as with Pushkin or Dostoevsky. So one must conceive of it differently. Fate aims straight for its target, while he who is ruled by fate is able to decipher its main lines and understand, even if only vaguely, what he has been called to.

A collection of interviews with Brodsky, Reszty nie trzeba [Keep the Change], in Jerzy lllg's translation, is a constant source of wonderment for me.* Just to think how much he had to leave out - what for others was the very essence of the twentieth century: Marxism-Leninism, Sovietism, nationalism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, Surrealism, as well as a dozen or two other isms.

He could have become a dissident, engage, like his friend Tomas Venclova. He could have thought about reforming the state. He could have written avant-garde poems. He could have been a Freudian. He could have paid homage to structuralism. Nothing of the sort.

Life as a moral fable. The poet imprisoned and condemned by the state, then sent into exile by the state, and after his death, the head of that state kneeling beside his coffin. A fairy tale, yet it did happen like that, in our hardly fairy-tale-like century.

He spoke as one who has authority. Most likely in his youth he was unbearable because of that self-assurance, which those around him must have seen as arrogance. That self-assurance was a defense mechanism in his relations with people and masked his inner irresolution when he felt that he had to act that way, and only that way, even though he did not know why. Were it not for that arrogance, he would not have quit school. Afterward, he often regretted this, as he himself admitted. During his trial, someone who was less self-assured than he was could probably not have behaved as he did. He himself did not know how he would behave, nor did the authorities foresee it; rather, they did not anticipate that, without meaning to, they were making him famous.

When he was fourteen years old, he passed the entrance exam to the naval academy and was rejected only because of what was recorded in his identity papers under the heading "nationality." I try to imagine him as a cadet. An officer? Lermontov?

Both he and his Petersburg friends behaved in the way Alekksander Wat had wished for Russian literature: that it would "break with the enemy." They did not want to be either Soviets or anti-Soviets; they wanted to be a-Soviet. Certainly, Brodsky was not a political poet. Nonetheless, he wrote a number of occasional poems (on the funeral of Marshal Zhukov, the war in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, martial law in Poland), and in a speech at the University of Silesia he thanked Poland for her contribution to overturning a great evil, Communism. In response to the news that the Institute and Academy of Art and Literature in New York had voted in Evgeny Evtushenko as a foreign member, he made his protest known by resigning from the institute.

Submitting to the element of language, or (because this was the same thing for him) to the voice of the Muse, he asserted that a poet must want to please not his contemporaries but his predecessors. The predecessors whose names he mentioned were Lomonosov, Kantemir, Derzhavin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova. His kingdom of Russian poetry endured above and outside of history, in accordance with his conviction that language has its own greatness and selects its own people to serve it.

He was capable of idolizing others. He used to say that he would be satisfied if he were called Auden's epigone. He did not rule out those who wrote in "free verse" but he paid particular homage to metrical poets: Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke. He understood poetry to be a dialogue across the ages, and so he conversed with Horace and Ovid (in Russian translations). As he said, he liked Ovid more, because of his images, even though he was less interesting rhythmically, adhering to the traditional hexameter. Horace, on the other hand, with the immense metrical variety of his stanzas, invited Brodsky to compete with him.

It would be a mistake to imagine Brodsky as a bohemian poet, although if we define bohemia as a milieu on the margins of society and the state, he belonged to it in his youth in Leningrad. He was competent in various trades, and they were by no means mere fictions, useful only as proof of employment. He often "plowed like an ox." He spoke with gratitude of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, because it offered employment to "the laziest man under the sun," who did not know English. He treated his obligations as a teacher seriously and it seems his students profited greatly. He made them memorize thousands of lines of poetry in their own language; no other professor would have dared to be so old-fashioned. If a student said something exceptionally stupid in class (for example, from the repertoire of American political naiveté), Brodsky would throw him out of the classroom.

His autodidacts’ passion allowed him to master English passively while he was still in Russia; afterward, he quite rapidly acquired the ability to use the language freely in speech and writing. His astonishing deftness in the essays he composed in English and in his rhymed translations of his own poems could only have been the result of truly titanic labor.

He considered Polish poetry the most interesting of contemporary European poetries. In Leningrad it reached him only as fragments, but important ones: from Norwid to Garczynski. His translations include some of my poems, too. "When, already an exile, he translated my "Elegy for N.N.," it occurred to me that that poem expressed his view of lyric poetry as preserved autobiography, even if only one-tenth preserved. He understood poets' escaping into prose as the result of pressure from the remaining nine-tenths. He read my Treatise on Poetry in Russian, in Natalia Gorbanevskaia's splendid translation. It was published in America in 1982 as Poeticheskii traktat by the Ann Arbor publishing house Ardis, which specializes in Russian books.

He had a very strong feeling that he was a part of an estate which was called "Russian language." Since in his opinion poetry is the highest achievement of language, he was conscious of his responsibility. If one were to draw an analogy with the Polish estate, our attachment to Krasicki, Trembecki, Mickiewicz would be understandable. Young Poland, however, is a blank spot (with the exception of Boleslaw Lesmian) in comparison with what was happening in Russia at that time, and only the poets of the Skamander group can rival the generation of the Russian Acmeists.

Is there anyone among them to whom one could become as attached as to Mandelstam or Akhmatova? For me, that poet was Jarosfaw Iwaszkiewicz, but the revolution in versification caused the immediate dissipation of that canon.

He used to tell his students that they probably were not terribly familiar with the Decalogue, but it was possible to learn, since there were only seventeen: the Ten Commandments and the seven cardinal sins-taken together, the foundation of our civilization. His Muse, the spirit of language, was, he said, Christian, which explains the Old and New Testament themes in his poetry.

Generosity was one of his traits. His friends always felt showered with gifts. He was ready to help at any moment, to organize, to manage things. But above all, to praise. His generosity is most apparent in his conversation with Volkov about Akhmatova. What praise of her greatness, her wisdom, her kindness, and the magnificence of her heart! For him, the greatness of a poet was inseparable from the poet's greatness as a human being. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I am unaware of a single instance when he praised a poet while admitting at the same time that he was just average as a human being. It was enough, for example, that Robert Frost was great in his poetry to justify not inquiring into his biography. This was consistent with his conviction that aesthetics precedes ethics and is even its source.

The most profound thing he said about Akhmatova, and perhaps the most profound words ever spoken about the so-called creative process in general, is the assertion that she suffered greatly while writing her Requiem. Her pain at the imprisonment of her son was genuine, but in writing about it she sensed falsehood precisely because she had to shape her emotions into form. And form makes use of an emotional situation for its own purposes, parasitizing it, as it were.

He wanted to be useful. He came up with the idea of distributing throughout America millions of copies of an anthology of American poetry by placing it in hotels and motels alongside the Bible. He managed to found a Russian Academy in Rome, modeled after the American Academy in that city. He was conscious of Russian literature's ties with Italy (Gogol's Dead Souls was written in Rome; the Eternal City is always present in his own poems and in Mandelstam's poetry; he wrote about Venice, which he adored). He had no intention of returning to Russia. It is appropriate, then, that his grave will be in Venice, like Stravinsky's and Diaghilev’s.

I would like to extract some pedagogical profit from thinking about Brodsky. Do we have an appreciation of our language such as he had for Russian? That it is the Russians' greatest treasure, right after the icon? Do not I myself rebel against the shushing and hissing sounds of Polish, and even worse, those omnipresent prze and przy syllables, pronounced "psheh" and "pshih"? And yet Polish is my fatherland, my home, and my glass coffin. Whatever I have accomplished in it-only that will save me.

And do we, as he did, honor our predecessors? Or do we only sneer and bite? And why is it that in the home of literature, whose strength was always poetry, there is suddenly no niche for great poets? Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Norwid are there-but where are the representatives of our century? Will Gombrowicz, Schulz, Witkacy replace the pretty pleiad of the Skamander poets?

A comparative study of Brodsky's poetry and Polish poetry would have to begin with the various laws governing the two languages. What about a comparison of Lesmian's Russian poetry, of his Pesni premudroi Vasilissy [Songs of Vasilissa the Wise Woman], with his Polish poetry? But their past is different, their themes are, too, as is the cultural background after 1918.

How far can a poem depart from its original mnemonic function? For Brodsky, phonetics and semantics were inseparable. This is an obvious matter for a Russian, for whom a poem, if it does not insinuate itself into one's memory, is not a poem at all. Despite the Polish language's different laws, one could still memorize the poems of Skamander, and this is true also of Galczynski's verse.

A departure from metrical norms and from rhymes seems to coincide in time with a vast revolution in the life of societies in the twentieth century, which has something in common with an explosion of quantity. If, as happens to an exaggerated degree in Poland, one were to take France as a model of artistic currents, Paul Valery, the last poet writing metrical verse, stands on the border beyond which the decline of the meaning of poetry begins, until it disappears entirely from the literary marketplace. Perhaps something similar, in different circumstances, is taking place in other countries. The scattering of the phrase into words and fragments of sentences testifies to the fact that poetry's centuries-old coexistence with the verse of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid has come to an end. It was they who defined meters for poets of various languages. Someone might like to ponder the strange parallels between changes in school and in literature: the revolution in versification coincides in time with high school curricula which no longer include Latin.

Brodsky loved the English language, perhaps because in the face of the revolution in versification English seems to have preserved a greater muscularity, so to speak. For various reasons, which it would be possible to enumerate, the end of the rhymed verse of the Victorian era was the occasion for a new modulation of the phrase, and because rhyme in English did not have the same significance that it had in Italian, for example (Shakespearean iambic pentameter was "blank"), its disappearance was not a glaring departure from the practice of earlier poets. Nevertheless, one is taken aback not only by Brodsky's evaluation of Frost as probably the greatest American poet of the twentieth century but also by his praise of Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), who is known as a name from a bygone era. Walt Whitman's utter lack of influence, in Brodsky's poems and his essays, is also curious.

As is well known, the only elegy on the death of T. S. Eliot in 1965 was written in Russian, by Brodsky. Eliot was already in literary purgatory at the time, which is the usual reaction to a period of peak fame. But in Russia he had only just been discovered. Later, as Brodsky admits, he was disenchanted with Four Quartets. In general, he considered the whole current of modernism (in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of that term) as unhealthy for the art of poetry.

He spoke of the politics of his century, employing concepts dating from antiquity: imperium, tyrant, slave. In relation to art, however, he was by no means a democrat. In the first place, he believed that poetry in every society known to history is of interest to little more than one percent of the population. Second, one cannot speak of equality among poets, with the exception of the few who are the very best, to whom it is inappropriate to apply the labels" greater" or "lesser." As egalitarian as could be in his instincts, an opponent of any division into the intelligentsia and the people, in relation to art he was as aristocratic as Nabokov and Gombrowicz.

Thinking about him constantly since his death, I try to name the lesson he bequeathed to us. How did a man who did not complete his high school education, who never studied at a university, become an authority recognized by the luminaries of humanistic knowledge? He was intelligent, and not everyone is granted that gift. But there was also something else that was decisive. The Leningrad milieu of his generation, those a-Soviet young poets and translators, devoured books. Their obsessive drive to read everything they could find in libraries and used bookstores is stunning; they also learned Polish, as Brodsky did, in order to read Western literature that was available to them only in that language. The lesson supplied by his life history is an optimistic one, because it points to the triumph of consciousness over being. But it also cautions us to consider whether among the young generation of Polish writers there exist groups with a similar drive for self-education.

"I permitted myself everything except complaints." This saying of Brodsky's ought to be pondered by every young person who despairs and is thinking about suicide. He accepted imprisonment philosophically, without anger; he considered shoveling manure on a Soviet state farm a positive experience; expelled from Russia, he decided to act as if nothing had changed; he equated the N 00bel Prize with the capricious turns of fate he had experienced previously. The wise men of antiquity recommended such behavior, but there are not many people who can behave like that in practice.

Czeslaw Milosz: "To Begin Where I Am"

* Reszty nie trzeba: Rozmowy z Josifem Brodskim, selected and edited by Jerzy lllg (Kaatowice: Ksiaznica, 1993).

GHI CHÚ VỀ BRODSKY      

 

SỰ HIỆN DIỆN CỦA BRODSKY đóng vai trò như một chỗ dựa và điểm tham chiếu cho nhiều nhà thơ đồng nghiệp của ông. Đây là một người đàn ông mà công việc và cuộc sống luôn nhắc nhở chúng ta rằng bất chấp những gì thường được nói và viết ngày nay, một hệ thống phân cấp thực sự tồn tại. Hệ thống phân cấp này không thể suy ra thông qua phép suy luận, cũng không thể quyết định thông qua thảo luận. Thay vào đó, chúng ta xác nhận lại nó mỗi ngày bằng cách sống và viết. Nó có điểm chung với sự phân chia cơ bản thành cái đẹp và cái xấu, sự thật và sự dối trá, lòng tốt và sự tàn ác, tự do và sự chuyên chế. Trên hết, hệ thống phân cấp biểu thị sự tôn trọng đối với những gì cao quý, và sự khinh miệt, thay vì sự khinh miệt, đối với những gì thấp kém.

Nhãn "siêu phàm" có thể được áp dụng cho thơ của Brodsky. Trong số phận của ông như một đại diện của con người có sự cao cả trong tư tưởng mà Pushkin đã thấy ở Mickiewicz: "Ông nhìn cuộc sống từ trên cao".

Trong một trong những bài luận của mình, Brodsky gọi Mandelstam là một nhà thơ của văn hóa. Bản thân Brodsky cũng là một nhà thơ của văn hóa, và rất có thể đó là lý do tại sao ông sáng tác theo dòng chảy sâu nhất của thế kỷ của mình, trong đó con người, bị đe dọa tuyệt chủng, đã khám phá ra quá khứ của mình như một mê cung bất tận. Khi thâm nhập vào tận cùng của mê cung, chúng ta phát hiện ra rằng bất cứ điều gì còn sót lại từ quá khứ đều là kết quả của nguyên tắc phân biệt dựa trên thứ bậc. Mandelstam trong Gulag, điên loạn và tìm kiếm thức ăn trong đống rác, là hiện thực của sự chuyên chế và sự suy thoái bị kết án tuyệt chủng. Mandelstam đọc thơ của mình cho một vài người bạn tù của mình là một khoảnh khắc cao cả, tồn tại mãi mãi.

 

Với những bài thơ của mình, Brodsky đã xây dựng một cây cầu bắc qua nhiều thập kỷ tiếng Nga sáo rỗng đến thơ ca của những người tiền nhiệm của ông, đến Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. Ông không phải là một nhà thơ chính trị, vì ông không muốn tham gia vào các cuộc tranh luận với một đối thủ hầu như không xứng đáng với ông. Thay vào đó, ông thực hành thơ ca như một loại hoạt động đặc biệt không chịu bất kỳ chiều kích thời gian rõ ràng nào. Nhắm thẳng vào một mục tiêu, từ chối bị đánh lạc hướng bởi những giọng nói đòi hỏi sự chú ý của một người. Điều này có nghĩa là người ta có khả năng phân biệt điều gì là quan trọng và chỉ tập trung vào mục tiêu này.

Đó chính xác là những gì các nhà văn Nga vĩ đại có thể làm được, và họ xứng đáng được ghen tị vì điều đó.

Cuộc đời và tác phẩm sáng tạo của Brodsky hướng thẳng đến sự hoàn thành như một mũi tên nhắm vào mục tiêu của nó. Tất nhiên, đây là một ảo tưởng, giống như với Pushkin hay Dostoevsky. Vì vậy, người ta phải quan niệm về nó theo cách khác. Số phận nhắm thẳng đến mục tiêu của nó, trong khi người bị số phận chi phối có thể giải mã những đường nét chính của nó và hiểu, dù chỉ mơ hồ, những gì anh ta được kêu gọi.

Một bộ sưu tập các cuộc phỏng vấn với Brodsky, Reszty nie trzeba [Giữ sự thay đổi], theo bản dịch của Jerzy lllg, là nguồn cảm hứng bất tận cho tôi.* Chỉ cần nghĩ đến việc anh ta đã phải bỏ qua bao nhiêu - những gì đối với những người khác là bản chất của thế kỷ XX: Chủ nghĩa Marx-Lenin, Chủ nghĩa Xô Viết, chủ nghĩa dân tộc, Chủ nghĩa Nietzsche, Chủ nghĩa Freud, Chủ nghĩa Siêu thực, cũng như hàng chục hoặc hai chủ nghĩa khác.

Anh ta có thể trở thành một người bất đồng chính kiến, tham gia, giống như người bạn Tomas Venclova của anh ta. Anh ta có thể nghĩ đến việc cải cách nhà nước. Anh ta có thể viết những bài thơ tiên phong. Anh ta có thể là một người theo chủ nghĩa Freud. Anh ta có thể tỏ lòng tôn kính với chủ nghĩa cấu trúc. Không có gì như vậy.

Cuộc sống như một câu chuyện ngụ ngôn đạo đức. Nhà thơ bị nhà nước giam giữ và lên án, sau đó bị nhà nước lưu đày, và sau khi ông qua đời, người đứng đầu nhà nước đó quỳ bên quan tài của ông. Một câu chuyện cổ tích, nhưng nó đã xảy ra như vậy, trong thế kỷ không giống như truyện cổ tích của chúng ta.

Ông ấy nói như một người có thẩm quyền. Rất có thể khi còn trẻ, ông ấy không thể chịu đựng được vì sự tự tin đó, mà những người xung quanh ông ấy hẳn đã coi là sự kiêu ngạo. Sự tự tin đó là một cơ chế phòng thủ trong mối quan hệ của ông ấy với mọi người và che giấu sự do dự bên trong của ông ấy khi ông ấy cảm thấy mình phải hành động theo cách đó, và chỉ theo cách đó, mặc dù ông ấy không biết tại sao. Nếu không vì sự kiêu ngạo đó, ông ấy đã không bỏ học. Sau đó, ông ấy thường hối hận về điều này, như chính ông ấy đã thừa nhận. Trong phiên tòa xét xử ông ấy, một người kém tự tin hơn ông ấy có lẽ không thể cư xử như ông ấy đã làm. Bản thân ông ấy không biết mình sẽ cư xử như thế nào, và chính quyền cũng không lường trước được điều đó; đúng hơn, họ không lường trước được rằng, vô tình, họ đang khiến ông ấy trở nên nổi tiếng.

When he was fourteen years old, he passed the entrance exam to the naval academy and was rejected only because of what was  recorded in his identity papers under the heading "nationality." I try to imagine him as a cadet. An officer? Lermontov?

Both he and his Petersburg friends behaved in the way Alekksander Wat had wished for Russian literature: that it would "break with the enemy." They did not want to be either Soviets or anti-Soviets; they wanted to be a-Soviet. Certainly, Brodsky was not a political poet. Nonetheless, he wrote a number of occasional poems (on the funeral of Marshal Zhukov, the war in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, martial law in Poland), and in a speech at the University of Silesia he thanked Poland for her contribution to overturning a great evil, Communism. In response to the news that the Institute and Academy of Art and Literature in New York had voted in Evgeny Evtushenko as a foreign member, he made his protest known by resigning from the institute.

Submitting to the element of language, or (because this was the same thing for him) to the voice of the Muse, he asserted that a poet must want to please not his contemporaries but his predecessors. The predecessors whose names he mentioned were Lomonosov, Kantemir, Derzhavin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova. His kingdom of Russian poetry endured above and outside of history, in accordance with his conviction that language has its own greatness and selects its own people to serve it.

He was capable of idolizing others. He used to say that he would be satisfied if he were called Auden's epigone. He did not rule out those who wrote in "free verse" but he paid particular homage to metrical poets: Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke. He understood poetry to be a dialogue across the ages, and so he conversed with Horace and Ovid (in Russian translations). As he said, he liked Ovid more, because of his images, even though he was less interesting rhythmically, adhering to the traditional hexameter. Horace, on the other hand, with the immense metrical variety of his stanzas, invited Brodsky to compete with him.

It would be a mistake to imagine Brodsky as a bohemian poet, although if we define bohemia as a milieu on the margins of society and the state, he belonged to it in his youth in Leningrad. He was competent in various trades, and they were by no means mere fictions, useful only as proof of employment. He often "plowed like an ox." He spoke with gratitude of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, because it offered employment to "the laziest man under the sun," who did not know English. He treated his obligations as a teacher seriously and it seems his students profited greatly. He made them memorize thousands of lines of poetry in their own language; no other professor would have dared to be so old-fashioned. If a student said something exceptionally stupid in class (for example, from the repertoire of American political naiveté), Brodsky would throw him out of the classroom.

His autodidacts’ passion allowed him to master English passively while he was still in Russia; afterward, he quite rapidly acquired the ability to use the language freely in speech and writing. His astonishing deftness in the essays he composed in English and in his rhymed translations of his own poems could only have been the result of truly titanic labor.

He considered Polish poetry the most interesting of contemporary European poetries. In Leningrad it reached him only as fragments, but important ones: from Norwid to Garczynski. His translations include some of my poems, too. "When, already an exile, he translated my "Elegy for N.N.," it occurred to me that that poem expressed his view of lyric poetry as preserved autobiography, even if only one-tenth preserved. He understood poets' escaping into prose as the result of pressure from the remaining nine-tenths. He read my Treatise on Poetry in Russian, in Natalia Gorbanevskaia's splendid translation. It was published in America in 1982 as Poeticheskii traktat by the Ann Arbor publishing house Ardis, which specializes in Russian books.

He had a very strong feeling that he was a part of an estate which was called "Russian language." Since in his opinion poetry is the highest achievement of language, he was conscious of his responsibility. If one were to draw an analogy with the Polish estate, our attachment to Krasicki, Trembecki, Mickiewicz would be understandable. Young Poland, however, is a blank spot (with the exception of Boleslaw Lesmian) in comparison with what was happening in Russia at that time, and only the poets of the Skamander group can rival the generation of the Russian Acmeists.

Is there anyone among them to whom one could become as attached as to Mandelstam or Akhmatova? For me, that poet was Jarosfaw Iwaszkiewicz, but the revolution in versification caused the immediate dissipation of that canon.

He used to tell his students that they probably were not terribly familiar with the Decalogue, but it was possible to learn, since there were only seventeen: the Ten Commandments and the seven cardinal sins-taken together, the foundation of our civilization. His Muse, the spirit of language, was, he said, Christian, which explains the Old and New Testament themes in his poetry.

Generosity was one of his traits. His friends always felt showered with gifts. He was ready to help at any moment, to organize, to manage things. But above all, to praise. His generosity is most apparent in his conversation with Volkov about Akhmatova. What praise of her greatness, her wisdom, her kindness, and the magnificence of her heart! For him, the greatness of a poet was inseparable from the poet's greatness as a human being. Perhaps I

am mistaken, but I am unaware of a single instance when he praised a poet while admitting at the same time that he was just average as a human being. It was enough, for example, that Robert Frost was great in his poetry to justify not inquiring into his biography. This was consistent with his conviction that aesthetics precedes ethics and is even its source.

The most profound thing he said about Akhmatova, and perhaps the most profound words ever spoken about the so-called creative process in general, is the assertion that she suffered greatly while writing her Requiem. Her pain at the imprisonment of her son was genuine, but in writing about it she sensed falsehood precisely because she had to shape her emotions into form. And form makes use of an emotional situation for its own purposes, parasitizing it, as it were.

He wanted to be useful. He came up with the idea of distributing throughout America millions of copies of an anthology of American poetry by placing it in hotels and motels alongside the Bible. He managed to found a Russian Academy in Rome, modeled after the American Academy in that city. He was conscious of Russian literature's ties with Italy (Gogol's Dead Souls was written in Rome; the Eternal City is always present in his own poems and in Mandelstam's poetry; he wrote about Venice, which he adored). He had no intention of returning to Russia. It is appropriate, then, that his grave will be in Venice, like Stravinsky's and Diaghilev’s.

I would like to extract some pedagogical profit from thinking about Brodsky. Do we have an appreciation of our language such as he had for Russian? That it is the Russians' greatest treasure, right after the icon? Do not I myself rebel against the shushing and hissing sounds of Polish, and even worse, those omnipresent prze and przy syllables, pronounced "psheh" and "pshih"? And yet Polish is my fatherland, my home, and my glass coffin. Whatever I have accomplished in it-only that will save me.

And do we, as he did, honor our predecessors? Or do we only sneer and bite? And why is it that in the home of literature, whose strength was always poetry, there is suddenly no niche for great poets? Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Norwid are there-but where are the representatives of our century? Will Gombrowicz, Schulz, Witkacy replace the pretty pleiad of the Skamander poets?

Một nghiên cứu so sánh thơ của Brodsky và thơ Ba Lan sẽ phải bắt đầu với các quy luật khác nhau chi phối hai ngôn ngữ. Còn việc so sánh thơ Nga của Lesmian, thơ Pesni premudroi Vasilissy [Những bài ca của Vasilissa the Wise Woman], với thơ Ba Lan của ông thì sao? Nhưng quá khứ của chúng khác nhau, chủ đề của chúng cũng khác nhau, cũng như bối cảnh văn hóa sau năm 1918.

Một bài thơ có thể đi chệch khỏi chức năng ghi nhớ ban đầu của nó đến mức nào? Đối với Brodsky, ngữ âm và ngữ nghĩa là không thể tách rời. Đây là vấn đề hiển nhiên đối với một người Nga, đối với họ, một bài thơ, nếu nó không len lỏi vào trí nhớ của một người, thì không phải là một bài thơ. Bất chấp các quy luật khác nhau của ngôn ngữ Ba Lan, người ta vẫn có thể ghi nhớ các bài thơ của Skamander, và điều này cũng đúng với thơ của Galczynski.

Việc rời xa các chuẩn mực về vần điệu và vần điệu dường như trùng hợp với thời gian với một cuộc cách mạng lớn trong cuộc sống của các xã hội trong thế kỷ XX, có điểm chung là sự bùng nổ về số lượng. Nếu, như đã xảy ra ở Ba Lan, người ta lấy nước Pháp làm hình mẫu cho các trào lưu nghệ thuật, Paul Valery, nhà thơ cuối cùng viết thơ vần, đứng trên ranh giới mà ý nghĩa của thơ bắt đầu suy tàn, cho đến khi nó biến mất hoàn toàn khỏi thị trường văn học. Có lẽ điều gì đó tương tự, trong những hoàn cảnh khác nhau, đang diễn ra ở các quốc gia khác. Sự phân tán của cụm từ thành các từ và các đoạn câu chứng tỏ sự thật rằng sự cùng tồn tại hàng thế kỷ của thơ ca với thơ của Horace, Virgil và Ovid đã chấm dứt. Chính họ là những người đã định nghĩa vần điệu cho các nhà thơ của nhiều ngôn ngữ khác nhau. Một số người có thể muốn suy ngẫm về sự tương đồng kỳ lạ giữa những thay đổi trong trường học và trong văn học: cuộc cách mạng trong thơ ca trùng hợp với chương trình giảng dạy ở trường trung học không còn bao gồm tiếng Latin.

Brodsky yêu thích tiếng Anh, có lẽ vì trước cuộc cách mạng trong thơ ca, tiếng Anh dường như vẫn giữ được sức mạnh lớn hơn, có thể nói như vậy. Vì nhiều lý do khác nhau, có thể liệt kê được, sự kết thúc của thơ vần thời Victoria là dịp để có một sự điều chỉnh mới cho cụm từ này, và vì vần trong tiếng Anh không có cùng ý nghĩa như trong tiếng Ý, ví dụ (thơ iambic pentameter của Shakespeare là "trống"), nên sự biến mất của nó không phải là sự thay đổi rõ rệt so với thực hành của các nhà thơ trước đó. Tuy nhiên, người ta không chỉ ngạc nhiên trước đánh giá của Brodsky về Frost có lẽ là nhà thơ Mỹ vĩ đại nhất của thế kỷ XX mà còn bởi lời khen ngợi của ông dành cho Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), người được biết đến như một cái tên từ một thời đại đã qua. Sự thiếu ảnh hưởng hoàn toàn của Walt Whitman, trong các bài thơ và tiểu luận của Brodsky, cũng rất đáng chú ý.

Như đã biết, bài điếu văn duy nhất về cái chết của T. S. Eliot vào năm 1965 được Brodsky viết bằng tiếng Nga. Eliot đã ở trong địa ngục văn chương vào thời điểm đó, đây là phản ứng thường thấy đối với một giai đoạn đỉnh cao của danh tiếng. Nhưng ở Nga, ông mới chỉ được phát hiện. Sau đó, như Brodsky thừa nhận, ông đã vỡ mộng với Four Quartets. Nhìn chung, ông coi toàn bộ trào lưu hiện đại (theo nghĩa Anglo-Saxon của thuật ngữ đó) là không lành mạnh đối với nghệ thuật thơ ca.

Ông đã nói về chính trị của thế kỷ mình, sử dụng các khái niệm có từ thời cổ đại: đế chế, bạo chúa, nô lệ. Tuy nhiên, liên quan đến nghệ thuật, ông không phải là một người theo chủ nghĩa dân chủ. Trước hết, ông tin rằng thơ ca trong mọi xã hội được biết đến trong lịch sử chỉ thu hút được hơn một phần trăm dân số. Thứ hai, người ta không thể nói về sự bình đẳng giữa các nhà thơ, ngoại trừ một số ít những người giỏi nhất, những người không phù hợp để áp dụng các nhãn "lớn hơn" hoặc "kém hơn". Mặc dù bản năng của ông có thể bình đẳng, là người phản đối bất kỳ sự chia rẽ nào giữa giới trí thức và nhân dân, nhưng liên quan đến nghệ thuật, ông lại mang tính quý tộc như Nabokov và Gombrowicz.

Nghĩ về ông liên tục kể từ khi ông mất, tôi cố gắng nêu tên bài học mà ông để lại cho chúng ta. Làm thế nào một người đàn ông không hoàn thành chương trình phổ thông, chưa từng học đại học, lại trở thành một người có thẩm quyền được các nhà khoa học nhân văn công nhận? Ông thông minh, và không phải ai cũng được ban tặng món quà đó. Nhưng cũng có một điều khác mang tính quyết định. Môi trường Leningrad của thế hệ ông, những nhà thơ và dịch giả trẻ phi Xô Viết, đã đọc ngấu nghiến sách. Động lực ám ảnh của họ là đọc mọi thứ họ có thể tìm thấy trong thư viện và các hiệu sách cũ thật đáng kinh ngạc; họ cũng học tiếng Ba Lan, giống như Brodsky đã làm, để đọc văn học phương Tây mà họ chỉ có thể tìm thấy bằng ngôn ngữ đó. Bài học mà tiểu sử cuộc đời ông cung cấp là một bài học lạc quan, vì nó chỉ ra sự chiến thắng của ý thức trước bản thể. Nhưng nó cũng cảnh báo chúng ta hãy cân nhắc xem trong thế hệ nhà văn trẻ Ba Lan có tồn tại những nhóm có động lực tự giáo dục tương tự hay không.

"Tôi cho phép mình làm mọi thứ trừ những lời than phiền." Câu nói này của Brodsky nên được mọi người trẻ tuổi tuyệt vọng và đang nghĩ đến việc tự tử suy ngẫm. Ông chấp nhận bị giam cầm một cách triết lý, không tức giận; ông coi việc xúc phân ở một trang trại nhà nước của Liên Xô là một trải nghiệm tích cực; bị trục xuất khỏi Nga, ông quyết định hành động như thể không có gì thay đổi; ông so sánh Giải thưởng N 00bel với những bước ngoặt thất thường của số phận mà ông đã trải qua trước đây. Những người thông thái thời cổ đại khuyến khích hành vi như vậy, nhưng không có nhiều người có thể hành xử như vậy trong thực tế.

 

 

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