Milosz

Milosz

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 Nobel 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).