[Review of Brodsky
Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia,
by Sanna Turoma (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). This piece first appeared in Studies in Travel Writing.]
For
some, exile is imprisonment, for others a liberation. The Russian
poet Joseph Brodsky had both experiences, having been in the first
instance sent into restrictive internal exile, with hard labour, and
in the second released from the USSR altogether and thereby rendered
free to travel the world. After the question of whether leaving the
homeland was chosen (James Joyce) or forced (Ovid, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn), the principal factor in how a writer copes with exile
is language. There are degrees of exile, and one of the determining
factors—as anyone who has lived in a ‘foreign’ culture knows—is
whether you can easily have a conversation with the native speaker:
exile to a place which speaks your own language is much less of a
displacement than to be lost in the babble of an alien tongue. Exiled
writers may stick to their own language as a means of clinging to
their own culture and customs (Solzhenitsyn) and go on writing in it
and developing it beyond the confines of everyday use (Joyce), or
they could develop a fluency in the language of their place of exile
and start writing in it as well as in their own (Samuel Beckett).
Once
Joseph Brodsky had turned himself into what some reviewers were able
to refer to as an American poet—by translating his Russian work
into English and beginning to write directly in what can, at best, be
called an idiosyncratic version of English—he effectively
neutralised his expulsion from his homeland. Yet isn’t being a poet
itself a kind of exile? When Rimbaud said Je
est un autre,
he was referring to his poetic persona. When we write or read out our
poetry, as distinct from our prose (even prose fiction), we are
ventriloquizing an alien voice, even if it is enacting a version of
ourselves. That is why it is quite wrong to think of poetry as the
most personal of the literary modes. Even when at his most
reflective, Brodsky looked outward, as if from a peak in Darien.
In
1964 he was sent into internal exile in the Archangelsk region,
sentenced to forced labour for his ‘social parasitism’. While
there, he spent his evenings reading English and American poetry from
an anthology he had taken with him. The sentence was commuted in
1965, but the parasitism continued to irritate the authorities until
1972, when he was expelled from the USSR. Put on a plane, he was
completely unaware of where he was being sent. Only after landing in
Vienna did he find out. One logical eventual destination might have
been Israel; but the logic of his cultural interests—and the past
trajectory of his master, W.H. Auden—led him to the United States,
where he lived for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He
died in New York in 1996, aged only 55, but was buried in Venice.
There
is a restlessness in Brodsky’s work that has something to do with
the ambition to make major works. Even in his celebrated ‘Elegy for
John Donne’ of 1963, which begins in the stillness of the inanimate
objects around the poet’s death bed, Brodsky cannot resist drawing
his focus back to take in the whole house, then the snow-filled
streets around it, then the whole cityscape of London, then the
island itself—all shrouded in silence—and, beyond it, the
immensity of Donne’s importance and the consequentiality of his
loss: ‘there are no more sounds in all the world’. By thus
claiming universal significance on Donne’s behalf—especially when
one considers that Brodsky had read virtually no Donne at the time of
writing, apart from ‘No man is an island’, which he thought was
from a poem—Brodsky incidentally does the same for his own
reputation. A good deal of ambitious purpose is on show in the
geographical mobility of his work, easily contrasted with the
trivial, touristic postcard-poems that have become such a common
feature of recent verse.
The
date of his forced emigration from the USSR looms large, as a
psychological border-crossing, in all the narratives of Brodsky’s
life except his own: for he always played down the extent of the
change, referring to the move to the USA as a spatial continuity. Yet
in order to make this case, he had to downplay the clear fact that he
had yearned for escape from the country of his birth to an extreme
extent. This is evidenced by the fact that he and a friend planned to
hijack a plane out of there, and they even bought tickets for the
flight before Brodsky got moral cold feet.
Sanna
Turoma says Brodsky was ‘not a travel
writer,
but he was a traveling
writer’
(p.6). He did not set out accurately to record what he saw on his
journeys for the sake of readers who did not know the places or
peoples he was visiting. Instead, he allowed travel to set off
whatever reflections occurred to him. No objective observer, he used
the world he observed to make him think.
And he was, of course, a poet. There is an argument—and it is worth
according at least some respectful attention—that a poem can never
be about a ‘real’ place. The transformative properties of
verse—or, at least, those of verse that is intensively wrought and
therefore manifestly not designed to do the job of prose—may leave
behind the reporting function, the mimesis, of prosaic realism.
Whereas the conventional travel writer may be attempting a reliable
record of journeys taken, the poet will use those journeys as mere
starting points.
There
was a lot of intra-Soviet travel in Brodsky’s early verse, much of
his reporting of it influenced by his reading of Ernest Hemingway,
John Dos Passos and T.S. Eliot. Clearly, within his own mind, he was
already lighting out for the territories and going West. It seems he
already wanted to be an American writer. Valentina Polukhina has
pointed out that ‘the image of a man in exile’ appeared in his
verse ‘long before his exile’ (p.38). Displacement preoccupied him
from the start. This is, in part, a matter of Modernist association
with the solitary (male) individual who is never at home; partly a
sense of himself as a Jew, ever the outsider, nomadic in intelligence
even when not so in person.
In
line with Modernist tradition he regarded exile as ‘a metaphysical
condition’ (p.21), not a political one. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he was
happy to have escaped the USSR and thereby gave himself the luxury of
ostentatiously ignoring the situation there. For Ovid, exile was a
terrible cultural deprivation. Solzhenitsyn was like a baby torn from
his mother’s breast. But, as I have said, for Brodsky enforced
exile opened up a wealth of voluntary opportunities. As Turoma puts
it: ‘The freedom to travel and to exploit non-native territories
for literary purposes was granted to Brodsky by the coercion of
exile, and it is the experience of exile and tourism—two major
forms of displacement, often perceived as conflicting human
conditions—that creates the crux of much of Brodsky’s post-1972
writing’ (p.10).
Although
he lived in New York City for many years, he wrote hardly anything
about it. Yet he was very much an urban writer, in both his verse and
his prose. Turoma concentrates a large part of her study on Brodsky’s
essays on Istanbul (‘Flight from Byzantium,’ 1985) and Venice
(Watermark,
1992), triangulating his exilic consciousness between those cities
and his birthplace, Leningrad, rather than with anywhere in the
United States. Each of the three cities is a liminal site, perched on
the edge of a culture and looking away from it while yet deriving
power from its very marginality.
Comparisons
can be made between the re-namings (St. Petersburg, Petrograd,
Leningrad, St. Petersburg; Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul), the
topographical situation in such close contact with water and
waterways (the Neva and the Gulf of Finland; the Bosporus and the
Golden Horn; the Grand Canal, the lagoon and the Adriatic). They are
cities in which the permanence of art is set up as if in defiance of
the manifest impermanence of water; and yet, as any artist or
architect who sought to create permanence out of such a location was
aware, the restlessness of the seascape would ultimately prevail.
Brodsky certainly knew this, acutely aware of the ephemerality of his
assaults on eternity.
From
a Western viewpoint, the USSR was eastern even at its westernmost and
most Western point, Leningrad; yet to a native of that city,
Leningrad was more Western, more European, more modern, than Moscow.
Brodsky’s version of the USSR was a challenge to Edward Said’s
Occident/Orient dichotomy, or complicated it at least. He was a fully
signed-up Westerniser, by contrast with Slavophiles like
Solzhenitsyn. When he wrote about Istanbul he seemed wholeheartedly
to subscribe to Orientalist mythologies of the sort identified by
Said. Although he knew the whole of the USSR was oriental to western
Europeans, with whom he identified culturally, he still saw Turkey as
more oriental than the distant outposts of Soviet-influenced
Mongolia. For
all that he was an exiled dissident, he subscribed to the values of
‘Leningradian Eurocentrism’ (p.143) when responding to voices in
the east of the USSR asserting their cultural validity. Turoma
attributes this awkward position to ‘a nostalgic attitude towards
Russia’s and Europe’s common cultural heritage of imperial myths’
(p.228).
Turoma
is good at associating Brodsky’s Venice within a context of Russian
literary representations going back to Pushkin, as well as English
ones going back to Shakespeare—and in her reading of Brodsky she
rightly associates Pushkin’s ethnic marginality with Othello’s.
But, although he anchored his work in European traditions, in the end
he felt more at home in the history-light archipelago of American
universities. It is no coincidence that one can sometimes hear, in
his work in English, something of the tone of Vladimir Nabokov. Even
so, Brodsky never stopped seeing the world in European terms. Indeed,
in effect, Europe was
his world because it had Europe’s cultural history. The New World
was just that—new—so
in Rio de Janeiro he dismissed his host city, and by implication all
of Brazil, as being without history. He was loftily dismissive of the
post-colonial leftism he encountered in Mexico. He seems not to have
had the same problem, or not to have had it to the same extent, with
the places he visited or lived in in the USA. Above all, he regarded
movement and displacement as a condition of human existence. I am
reminded of Zbigniew Herbert’s notion of ‘a true journey’
being one ‘from which you do not return’—the universal instance
being the journey of life itself.
