1987 : Joseph Brodsky

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1987 : Joseph Brodsky

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“for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”

Born

:

May 24, 1940

Place of birth

:

Leningrad, Soviet Union

Died

:

January 28, 1996

Place of death

:

New York City, New York, US

Occupation

:

Poet, Essayist

Nationality

:

Russian

Notable award(s)

:

Nobel Prize in Literature 1987

Biography:

Brodsky was born into a poor Russian Jewish family in Leningrad. It must interrupt his studies at the age of 16 years and lives of various small businesses. He learns only Polish and mostly English then self learns to human sciences and history, literature, philosophy and mythology. He soon joined the literary circles of the Soviet Union and frequent among other Yevgeny Rein and Anna Akhmatova. Impressed by the strength of its first texts, it prompts him to continue on this path. While its popularity is growing in the USSR, he was arrested and sentenced in 1964 for “social parasitism” in five years’ hard labor in the Arkhangelsk region. Released a year later, he returned to Leningrad but unable to publish his works. Constantly monitored, it is expelled from the USSR in June 1972. After a brief stay in Vienna where he is greeted by W. H. Auden, he moved to the United States where, as Nabokov, he writes articles in English, regrouped later in his book Far from Byzantium. Brodsky then began writing poems in the language of Shakespeare translated from Russian and some of his compositions, arriving to find the same rhythm and verbal acrobatics of the original versions. It publishes its work in the meantime the largest U.S. literary journals. Having gained American citizenship in 1977, he taught at the University of Michigan and became a figure in intellectual circles in New York statute that allows him to give lectures around the world. In his speech receipt of the Nobel in 1987, the author mentions names like 4 to influence its work: Akhmatova, Auden, Marina Tsvetayeva and Robert Frost. His work has a lot to tradition peterbourgeoise of acmeistes but perhaps even more so in poetry and especially the English metaphysical poets to whom he borrows the metaphysical concern, the preciousness of the form and versification learned. Found in some of its stanzas convoluted tribute to Elizabethan poetry to which it borrows Games releases and discharges against then-finals or internal rhyme. His poetry is accordingly provided very reflection on language and reconciled daily inspiration and vision absolute epic. In 1990, he married Maria Sozzani it will be a girl. Joseph Brodsky died in New York on January 28 1996 after a heart attack. He is buried on Isola di San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice. Joseph Brodsky particularly loved Italy and found the Italian translation of his poems excellent, the latter using the same system rhymes than poetry Russian. Among his collections of poems, there Procession (1962), Collins (1962), Isaac and Abraham (1962), Elegy to John Donne (1963), Gortchakov and Gorbounov (1965-1968), the part of speech (1977) , New Stances (1983), Urania (1987). It is also the author of plays such as The Marble (1984) and Democracy (1990). He also signed a few essays as Far from Byzantium (1988) and a history of the twentieth century (1986).

Works:

Works in Russian:

  • Stikhotvoreniia i poemy – Washington, D.C. : Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1965

  • Ostanovka v pustyne – New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1970. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1989

  • Chast’ rechi: Stikhotvoreniia 1972-76 – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1977

  • Konets prekrasnoi epokhi : stikhotvoreniia 1964-71 – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1977

  • V Anglii – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1977

  • Rimskie elegii – New York: Russica, 1982

  • Novye stansy k Avguste : stikhi k M.B., 1962-1982 – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1983

  • Mramor – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984

  • Uraniia : novaia kniga stikhov – Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984

  • Nazidanie : stikhi 1962-1989 – Leningrad : Smart, 1990

  • Chast’ rechi : Izbrannye stikhi 1962-1989. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990

  • Osennii krik iastreba : Stikhotvoreniia 1962-1989 – Leningrad: KTP LO IMA Press, 1990

  • Primechaniia paporotnika – Bromma, Sweden : Hylaea, 1990

  • Ballada o malen’kom buksire – Leningrad: Detskaia literatura, 1991

  • Kholmy : Bol’shie stikhotvoreniia i poemy – St. Petersburg: LP VTPO “Kinotsentr,” 1991

  • Stikhotvoreniia – Tallinn : Eesti Raamat, 1991

  • Naberezhnaia neistselimykh : Trinadtsat’ essei – Moscow: Slovo, 1992

  • Rozhdestvenskie stikhi – Moscow : Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1992. Rev. – ed. 1996

  • Sochineniia – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 1992-1995. 4 vol.

  • Vspominaia Akhmatovu / Joseph Brodsky, Solomon Volkov – Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1992

  • Forma vremeni : stikhotvoreniia, esse, p’esy – Minsk: Eridan, 1992. 2 vol

  • Kappadokiia – St. Petersburg, 1993

  • Persian Arrow/Persidskaia strela / with etchings by Edik Steinberg – Verona: Edizione d’Arte Gibralfaro & ECM, 1994

  • Peresechennaia mestnost ‘: Puteshestviia s kommentariiami – Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1995

  • V okrestnostiakh Atlantidy : Novye stikhotvoreniia – St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1995

  • Peizazh s navodneniem / compiled by Aleksandr Sumerkin – Dana Point, Cal.: Ardis, 1996

  • Brodskii o Tsvetaevoi – Moscow : Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1997

  • Pis’mo Goratsiiu – Moscow: Nash dom, 1998

  • Sochineniia – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond. 1998- . 8 vol.

  • Gorbunov i Gorchakov – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 1999

  • Predstavlenie : novoe literaturnoe obozrenie – Moscow, 1999

  • Ostanovka v pustyne – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Chast’ rechi – St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Konets prekrasnoi epokhi – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Novye stansy k Avguste – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Uraniia – St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Peizazh s navodneniem – St. Petersburg : Pushkinskii fond, 2000

  • Bol’shaia kniga interv’iu – Moscow : Zakharov, 2000.

  • Novaia Odisseia : Pamiati Iosifa Brodskogo – Moscow: Staroe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001

  • Peremena imperii : Stikhotvoreniia 1960-1996 – Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2001

  • Vtoroi vek posle nashei ery : dramaturgija Iosifa Brodskogo – St. Petersburg : Zvezda, 2001

Works in English (including translations into English):

  • Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems / selected, translated, and introduced by Nicholas William Bethell – London : Longman, 1967

  • Velka elegie – Paris : Edice Svedectvi, 1968

  • Poems – Ann Arbor, Mich. : Ardis, 1972

  • Selected Poems / translated from the Russian by George L. Kline. New York: Harper & Row, 1973

  • Poems and Translations – Keele: University of Keele, 1977

  • A Part of Speech – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980

  • Verses on the Winter Campaign 1980 / translation by Alan Meyers – London : Anvil Press, 1981

  • Less Than One: Selected Essays – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986

  • To Urania : Selected Poems, 1965-1985 – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988

  • Marbles : a Play in Three Acts / translated by Alan Myers with Joseph Brodsky – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989

  • Watermark – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992

  • On Grief and Reason: Essays – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995

  • So Forth : Poems – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996

  • Discovery – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999

  • Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999 / edited by Ann Kjellberg – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000

  • Nativity Poems / translated by Melissa Green … – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001

Litteratur (a selection):

  • Bethea, David M., Joseph Brodsky and the creation of exile – Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1994

  • Lemkhin, Mikhail, Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad : fragments – New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

  • MacFadyen, David, Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque – Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 1998

  • Rigsbee, David, Styles of ruin : Joseph Brodsky and the postmodernist elegy – Westport, Conn. : Greenwood, 1999

  • Joseph Brodsky : the art of a poem / edited by Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina – Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1999

  • MacFadyen, David, Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet muse – Montreal : McGill-Queen, 2000

  • Joseph Brodsky : conversations / edited by Cynthia L. Haven – Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2003

Awards:

1987: Nobel Prize in Literature.

Poetry:

Seven Strophes

I was but what you’d brushwith your palm, what your leaningbrow would hunch to in evening’sraven-black hush.

I was but what your gazein that dark could distinguish:a dim shape to begin with,later – features, a face.

It was you, on my right,on my left, with your heatedsighs, who molded my helix,whispering at my side.

It was you by that blackwindow’s trembling tulle patternwho laid in my raw caverna voice calling you back.

I was practically blind.You, appearing, then hiding,gave me my sight and heightenedit. Thus some leave behind

a trace. Thus they make worlds.Thus, having done so, at randomwastefully they abandontheir work to its whirls.

Thus, prey to speedsof light, heat, cold, or darkness,a sphere in space without markersspins and spins.

Presentation Speech:

Presentation Speech by Professor Sture Allen, of the Swedish Academy, December 10, 1987

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

A characteristic feature of the Nobel prizewinner Joseph Brodsky is a magnificent joy of discovery. He sees connections, words them pithily, sees new connections. Not seldom they are contradictory and ambiguous, often caught in a flash like this: “Memory, I think, is a substitute for the tail we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements …”.

In the remarkable writings to which the Swedish Academy has drawn attention this year, poetry as the highest manifestation of life is a theme throughout. It is developed with a poetic brilliance combined with both intellectual beauty and linguistic mastery.

Brodsky is nowadays an American citizen but he was born and grew up in Leningrad, or Peter as he calls the city after its old name of Petersburg. It is a setting in which Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoyevsky worked, and it is a setting whose architecture and ornaments – even in the war-damaged state of the 1940s and 1950s – relate an essential part of the history of our world.

The poet belongs to the classical Russian tradition with names such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and the Nobel prizewinner Boris Pasternak. At the same time he is a virtuoso renewer of the poetical means of expression. Inspiration comes also from the West, especially the English-language poetry from the metaphysician John Donne to Robert Frost and Wystan Auden.

Latterly Brodsky has begun also to write in English. For him Russian and English are two attitudes to the world. Having both languages at one’s disposal is like sitting on the top of an existential hill with a view over two slopes, over humanity’s two tendencies of development, he has declared. The east-west background has given him an unusual thematic richness and a multitude of perspectives. Together with the writer’s thorough insight into the culture of former epochs it has also conjured up a grand historical vision.

Brodsky has experienced what it means to live. “Life … / bares its teeth in a grin at each / encounter.” Through all hardships – trial, internal banishment, exile – he has retained his integrity and his faith in literature and language. There are criteria for human behaviour, he says, which come not from society but from literature.

The poet plays a key part as examiner, tester and questioner. Poetry becomes the decisive counterweight against time, the principle of deformation. The poet also becomes the spokesman in the totalitarian society’s apparent silence and the open society’s stupefying flood of information.

Although Brodsky has defined his standpoint distinctly, political disputes are not prominent in him. The problem is raised to a more general level: man’s duty is to live his own life, not a life determined by the categories and norms of others. “Freedom / is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name …”

What could be more natural for a writer than to wrestle with the phenomenon of language? This struggle with his own tool is very intense in Brodsky’s case. It marks his view of poetry and the poet: “Reading [Dostoyevsky] simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness”. The ultimate power, he maintains, is “the omnivorousness of his language which eventually comes to a point where it cannot be satisfied with God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity, salvation … and then it takes on itself.”

Brodsky’s view of language also characterizes his view of states and societies: “For empires are held together by neither political nor military forces but by languages. – Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; and it’s language that does the job, not legions.”

Language of course provides material for metaphors in poetry: “Late evening in Lithuania. / People drift home from mass, hiding the commas / of candles in parentheses of hands”.

For Brodsky poetry stands out as a divine gift. The religious dimension that undeniably is to be found in his writings adheres, however, to no particular creed. Metaphysical and ethical questions are paramount, not doctrines.

Style and mood alternate in this richly orchestrated poetry. Here is the profound cultural analysis in the essays side by side with the rollicking ironies in the poem History of the Twentieth Century. Yet, for Joseph Brodsky poetry, even in its mirthful moments, is deadly earnest.

Dear Mr. Brodsky,

It has been my privilege and pleasure to introduce you to the audience in my native tongue. The gist of what I have said is contained, as it were, in a line from one of your recent poems: “Let me tell you: you are okay”. In fact, you yourself belong to the history of the Twentieth Century alluded to. On behalf of the Swedish Academy I congratulate you on your remarkable achievements. May I ask you to step forward to receive, from the hands of His Majesty the King, the Nobel Prize for Literature 1987.

Nobel Lecture:

December 8, 1987

IFor someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far – far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the creme de la creme in tyranny – for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address ‘urbi et orbi’, as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that – for stylistic reasons, in the first place – one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn’t have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me – more often perhaps than the case should be – to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists – and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one – if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one’s conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, both as a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I wouldn’t be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades – better still, sources of light: lamps? stars? – more, of course, than just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by thoughts about contemporaries and fellow writers in both cultures, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of remarks here – disjointed, perhaps stumbling, and perhaps even perplexing in their randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system – but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal – however permanent it may be – than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova’s words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honorable.IIIf art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations.It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, characterized her as possessing an “uncommon visage”. It’s in acquiring this “uncommon visage” that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one’s task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one’s own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on a tautology – regrettable all the more because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with him or give him so much as a thank-you.Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent – better yet, the infinite – against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.The philosophy of the state, its ethics – not to mention its aesthetics – are always “yesterday”. Language and literature are always “today”, and often – particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox – they may even constitute “tomorrow”. One of literature’s merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology – that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, “victim of history”. What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliche”.Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found “ahead of progress”, ahead of history, whose main instrument is – should we not, once more, improve upon Marx – precisely the cliche.Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man’s ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of “good” and “bad” are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of “good” and “evil”. If in ethics not “all is permitted”, it is precisely because not “all is permitted” in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer – though not necessarily the happier – he is.It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky’s remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold’s belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn’t like and what doesn’t suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse composition; nevertheless, the subdivision of society into intelligentsia and “all the rest” seems to me unacceptable. In moral terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for intellectual inequality these are inconceivable. Equality in this respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I am speaking not of education, but of the education in speech, the slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice into one’s life. The existence of literature prefigures existence on literature’s plane of regard – and not only in the moral sense, but lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the possibility of choosing between the passive role of listener and the active one of performer, a work of literature – of the art which is, to use Montale’s phrase, hopelessly semantic – dooms him to the role of performer only.In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of society (i.e., the ever-increasing isolation of the individual), this role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don’t suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. It’s precisely this that I have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader.In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator’s line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of “uncommon visage”, in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past – the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority appears to me unhealthy and dangerous. I am not appealing for the replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has visited me frequently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt – whether familiar or yet to be invented – toward a total mass solution to the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine.Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature – the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books – we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I live in, I would be the first prepared to believe that there is a set dependency between a person’s material well-being and his literary ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of that country in which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority: of the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.I have no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed by other millions, since what occurred in Russia in the first half of the Twentieth Century occurred before the introduction of automatic weapons – in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose unsoundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I’ll just say that I believe – not empirically, alas, but only theoretically – that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it would make sense to regard the Russian experience as a warning, if for no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is, on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This, by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West of the Nineteenth-Century Russian psychological novel, and the relative lack of success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged in Russia in the Twentieth Century presumably seem no less exotic to the reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate observer might remark that in a certain sense the Nineteenth Century is still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the size of the human toll taken in course of that social – or chronological – change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.IlIAlthough for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change the subject. What’s wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. “How can one write music after Auschwitz?” inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp – and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin’s camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. “And how can you eat lunch?” the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.That generation – the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself – that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin’s archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty – indeed, a terrifyingly wasted – place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture’s continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of minimalism, of choked breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in reality the choice wasn’t ours, but, in fact, culture’s own – and this choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it’s not because toward the close of the Twentieth Century there is a certain charm in paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; that it’s not that the language happens to be his instrument, but that he is language’s means toward the continuation of its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form – the poem – most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from beneath that pen on his audience – however great or small it may be – the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language or, more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential – that is, by all time Iying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is determined by that, too), as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language’s means for existence – or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.

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