The book of Asya Pekurovskaya, The ‘Unpredictable’ Brodsky, is scarce in the sense in which Pascal understood this word, alluding to the connection between the scarce and the beautiful. It is scarce in Russian culture, in which no provision is made as far as negative connotations for Brodsky (as a classic). And this constitutes disparity with English or American sources full of critical reviews about his prose and poetry. Moreover, it was precisely these reviews that annoyed Brodsky all life long as they created a dissonance with a friendly chorus of praise from his compatriots and Slavic scholars.
What was Brodsky denigrated for? For poor and old-fashioned English, for a pretentious and non-modern way of argumentation, for a manner of writing that would be utterly indecent and impossible for a native speaker.
In several chapters, Pekurovskaya examines this criticism in detail, placing it in line with the task that she formulates. She introduces herself ‘a demystifier (demythologizer)’ and for a number of the dominant myths about Brodsky, she holds responsible not just a poet himself but also those whom she dubs the Brodsky’s ‘managers in the market for symbolic goods’. She calls some by name, most notably ‘Lev Loseff’, ‘Solomon Volkov’, friends of her youth, but most of names can be inferred, especially those names which most clearly endowed the image and work of Brodsky with an aura of greatness. Quite recognizable for us are also those who recapitulate already existing myths. With a few exceptions, those are almost all Slavistics and Russian philology that deals with the 20-th century. It is easier and safer to travel along the existing trails than to rub along the virgin road.
Naturally, the work of ‘the demythologizer‘ meets the expected resistance.
Their resistance, in the case of Pekurovskaya, takes a shape of a simple discrediting scheme: it identifies her personal motives as insult. Most notable of this scheme, at least, is Valery Popov, who, as an old friend, builds his argument in a simple way. Asya Pekurovskaya, who had an unchallenged status of a sharp spieler and the first beauty of the uncensored Leningrad literary circle, turned into the likeness of an old woman from Pushkin’s fairy tale about a goldfish. She is not satisfied with the fact that her attention was sought after and that the most famous poets and writers of the 60-70s feared her witty remarks. Now, she wants to defeat them intellectually. Therefore, they say, just as she had not a grain of appreciation for her husband Dovlatov, whom she looked with undisguised irony; she was equally heedful of the glory of her other fan Brodsky. So, when the opportunity presented itself, she tried to avenge the glory that fell to them.
I will not dispute this compulsion to demythologize. Lke all other urges, it is quite workable. But all the versions aiming at motivation change almost nothing in what turns the text around. And the text of Pekurovskaya deserves reflection. In its original sense, the entire monograph concurs with an early review of Brodsky by Nabokov, who read the poem “Gorbunov and Gorchakov,” at the request of Karl Proffer, and reproached the author for pleonasms and the lack of verbal discipline. Nabokov had to pay dearly for that criticism: in the framework of Brodsky’s strategy, critical judgments about him were outlawed. All reviews were destined to fall into one of two folders: the folder for ‘slaves’ and that for ‘enemies’. No friend, temporary companion, or the one he favored, was exempt from getting into a ‘slave’ folder. Yet anyone who attempted to distance oneself (not to mention, to criticize or think independently) was branded as immortal enemy.
It is of no consequence, when did Brodsky clearly understood that reputation is more important than subject-matter, as reputation is the material from which the future is sewn, and which preserves (and properly interprets) what is written. At that time he began to climb the moving ladder of reputation as if it were an escalator: with various speeds, but in a single direction: ‘up’.
When Akhmatova realized that all attempts to counteract this movement only play into his hands, commensurate with the snowball principle (“what biography they create for our red–haired one”), she did it already within the frame of the myth Brodsky himself devised: a genius who appears from nowhere and manifests himself despite all attempts to stop him. Pekurovskaya is loading the frenzied ambition that Brodsky showed from his young age with a number of negative connotations. Yet, Brodsky realization that reputation is above all, is evidence of not only his vigilance, but also of changes in the priorities of world culture prompting philology its proper place: the text is an egg, and what text breeds is a chicken. The text is important in the context of acoustics, which the poet, who understands this, adds by using life-building techniques.
Pekurovskaya shows how Brodsky compiles and constructs his message (and himself, as a message). Since the text is an egg for him, he selects those poetic styles that proved triumphant in other cultures (not being very original here), reasonably expecting that Russian audience, unfamiliar with these styles, will react in a similar way. And in order to hide or shade the emphasis he made, of placing the passionate construction of his reputation in the first place, he produces the myth of the primacy of language, which in its quite romantic version turns out to be ahead of ethics and psychology.
What comes to Brodsky’ rescue then, is hindered by something else, i.e., by his poor knowledge of the language of the originals. One of Brodsky’s favorite ideas (language is older than the time, and the time worships the language) was taken not from Heidegger, whom he hardly ever read, but from the incorrectly translated Auden. Incidentally. the line that seduced Brodsky, Auden later removed from the final version of his text as banal.
Pekurovskaya shows in detail how Brodsky encourages Auden to work for his reputation. Auden was the first stop in the emigration desert, where Brodsky found his English-speaking Derzhavin, who recognized the new Pushkin in him in a rather peculiar way. Auden, whom Brodsky not only honored, but whom he also tried to imitate with such a scrupulousness which Auden could hardly reproduce himself. At the time of his acquaintance with Brodsky, Auden did not read a single poem by Brodsky and was not very interested in Russia. But Brodsky was introduced to him with a roar of praise from his Soviet acquaintances, and he acclaimed Brodsky as a persecuted poet, a victim of communist tyranny. “Brodsky’s poems are almost as perfect as Voznesensky’s,” he attested believing that Voznesensky was the best Soviet poet.
Pekurovskaya runs the Brodsky poetic image through the cane line of all possible critique. Brodsky gathers his image piece by piece, then splashes it by the live water of his giant ambition, and such a strategy turns out to be working. At one point, Brodsky opts to write a poem for every Christmas, as Frost did. As he barely got acquainted with Auden’s poetry, Brodsky helps himself to his themes so that at times his poems got turned into subscripts, almost indistinguishable from the original. And to conceal traces of borrowing, he adopted a potent technique: the first and last lines came as his own creation.
Hand in glove with his suppression of traces of borrowing works his desire to silence the reasons for his takeoff. And Brodsky diligently distances himself from the forces that brought him to the top: from the glory of the dissident poet-the–fighter–for–freedom and from everything that could spoil the image of the bard that descended from the cloud and fluff of English feathers. And for the miracle of his success, Brodsky assigns a place in line with pure aesthetics, while protecting this and other myths with Jesuit thoroughness. This way they guard their proximity to the sacred gods in the hope that with God’s help everything that is hidden will be turned into sacred and secret.
One of the most momentous qualities that Brodsky the genius fosters in himself, is, according to Pekurovskaya, the notion of unpredictability. In the business of retaining the charm of unpredictability, Brodsky is thorough to the smallest detail: he is steadily late for all the parties and comes when everyone is already despaired to wait, and almost always accompanied by a new companion no one expected to see. And just as expectedly, he leaves first, when the fun is in full swing, because he is not from this world, not privy of routine action and entertainment. He is a messenger of divine purpose and vision. True, this does not prevent him from routinely correcting his biography. So, when he is urged to interpret Marina Basmanova as his Beatrice, he removes all the early initiations to other women, and dedicates all his poetry to her. One poet, one beauty, one Muse.
Pekurovskaya is meticulous in observing how ethics, in the form of a set of criteria capable of discrediting one or another side of Brodsky’s strategy, is progressively relegated to a position subordinate to aesthetics. The unpredictable genius is above the rules, and he deliberately violates the norms if they impede his filling the sail with the wind of his desire for recognition. Brodsky willingly promotes those who raised a voice in the choir of his guardian angels. And these stories are clearly contrasted with the stories of how he puts the spokes in the wheels to everyone who lays claim to a share of his fame. Such are not only anecdotal stories with Yevtushenko and Vassily Aksenov, whose American careers suffered from Brodsky tireless interferences and not only seemingly absurd way of staking out one or another second-degree poet, whom Brodsky declared to be the master and chief poet of the era, wishing to eliminate those who could be really dangerous to him.
It is also an attempt to prevent the emergence of such interpretations of his biography that would challenge his image of an unpredictable, spontaneous genius, indifferent to earthly interests and rational pragmatism. This is also the myth about staying in the Moscow mental hospital not for obtaining a certificate for the Leningrad court (that motif was carefully concealed ), but as a price for fearlessness, which identifies him with Ovid. This is, in addition, his irresistible desire to emigrate turning into a story about the forced expulsion to Israel, based on an invitation he initiated. Most likely with the idea of implementing the strategy resembling that of Yevtushenko, who managed to sit on two chairs, Brodsky wrote letters to Soviet leaders, trying to earn the right not only to leave, but also to return back home as a poet with a status of “beyond the barriers.”
Admiration for the empire as the natural element of force, makes Brodsky to evaluate the Soviet power in contradictory terms and defend the imperial complexes that both the Russian classics and many Soviet citizens shared with Brodsky. He was at times a retrograde, as when he wrote the poems “On the Independence of Ukraine,” not so much following his convictions, but rather because he was looking for arguments to justify his preferences, which, in turn, poured water on the mill of his strategy: his search for means of confirming his poetic mission. As he viewed the pragmatism of promoting himself as a repay, he was suspicious of any pragmatic movement, if it did not completely coincide with his understanding of his own ascending trajectory.
Therefore, Brodsky assures us that the poet should not be an object of observation. Rather, a poet should conquer the audience, abducting its will, as the abductors the Sabine women, in some sense, simplifying, flattening and crushing the audience with his divine tank. Therefore, he leaves a strange, at a first glance, will that requested to postpone writing his biography by friends and publishing his letters for as long as 70 years. He prefers that his image hardened like gypsum, like the once soft mass was turning, in divine fingers, into stone, monument, marble. After all, he had every reason to doubt that even the people closest to him, who had freed themselves from his dictates after his death, would not gradually destroy that myth which he created in the course of time with their participation. As after the tank, everything was supposed to become a shadow of his image, structurally flat, but still his.
Most likely, Asya Pekurovskaya did what scared Brodsky by its merciless perspective. Painstakingly, with academic (and Jesuit) diligence, she records how Brodsky, along with the managers who promoted Brodsky’s capital on the market of symbolic goods, confuses his tongue-tied though for divine revelation; presents casuistry as an alternative to arguments, tries to conceal, behind the covetable obscurity, his unwillingness (or inability) to be distinct when it was not desirable to be exact. She reads, sedulously and attentively both his Nobel speech, highly skeptically received by Anglo-Saxon critics, and his analysis of Frost’s poem, presented to students according to his own pattern of constructing a complex utterance in poems and essays.
Pekurovskaya is so consistent, reasoned and tenacious in her criticism of Brodsky, that sometimes it seems: what if this is not critique, but an apophatic theology? She examines both the components of Brodsky’s poetics and the methods of his aggressive positioning, cites the originals of the texts of those poets, which Brodsky’s most famous poems cloned. She analyzes his essays, transcripts of seminars with his students, showing how casuistry comes to the rescue whenever Brodsky is forced to either prove his point, or convince them of his boundless spontaneity, unpredictability, erudition. And it seems that the next question, which the critic is about to ask, will be: is he a parody?
But Pekurovskaya does not ask this question. She leaves a conclusion for the readers to consider. And yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the critic, as it were, is stringing the next denial on the inertia of his reasoning: Brodsky is not smart, not original, not grateful, not noble, vindictive, arrogant, very often tongue-tied, verbose, redundant, full of self-duplications (of wrongly understood senses and borrowed intonations). His reputation in English-speaking countries is far from being the same as his reputation with his native Russian-speaking audience, which eulogizes him as the last great poet of the century. And what follows from this?
It makes it difficult to formulate many issues, should we rely on aesthetic categories so dear to Brodsky. Virtually all Russian poetry remains exclusively Russian, because when translated into foreign languages, it turns out to be in the shadow of the originals that influenced it, and very often this influence is decisive. But the value of those poets who turns out to be small in the eyes of a foreign reader who is familiar with their work in translation, in the Russian, domestic case turns into a completely different matter.
Suppose we agree with Pekurovskaya and say that Brodsky seems to have translated the vernacular of a number of English poets of the second half of the 20s century into Russian, and adopted the ideas and intonations of the original. But isn’t it true that he himself became the indisputable original for Russian readers? Thе vernacular he translated had led to the appearance of a long-awaited lyrical hero with the vocabulary of the post-war Soviet era, with a large number of words and interpretations that did not exist in Russian poetic language. That very street that started talking, thus the person is no longer “the-man-of- the-Moscow-Garment Factory age” (chelovek of the Moskvoshvej epoch”), but the man of the “Red Triangle” or the “Bolshevik” factories. And yet it was a reaction to the tired and complacent Soviet mentality on behalf the the bragging westerner who makes mistakes in English, although sees the surrounding Soviet life through the reflected light of the windows of imaginary Western European shops, so to say, new from cleaning. Yes, tongue-tied, yes, pathetic, because he had to convince himself and those around him of being right vis a vis in the confrontation with powerful socialist realism. Yes, he went on, sprinkling from excitement, multiplied by arrogance, his saliva of inspiration, and keeping up the pitch of the post-war generation, awakened and disappointed by the vain hopes of a thaw. Only one image of sexual freedom (with the inevitably concоmitant sexist connotations): all these “krasavitse jubku zadrav” (“lifting the skirt of a beauty”), “там конец перспективы”) “there’s the end of the panorama”, “где надо – гладко, где надо – шерсть” (“where it’s needed it’s smooth or fir–like” – are the passwords by which Brodsky can be recognized in Russian as an enfant terrible of not only Soviet, but also uncensored poetry.
But the most important thing lies elsewhere. Not being able to accurately measure the aesthetic value of poetry, including that of Brodsky, one can appreciate how his texts were read and are being read in the country he left. Of course, without the reputation of a poet disgraced and unrecognized by the Soviet authorities, who received, in lieu of it, the Nobel price and world fame, this could not have happened. However, poetry is a patented way of psychological and cultural positioning.
Let’s assume the aesthetic potential, which Brodsky emphasizes, cannot be appreciated without the academically merciless reading of sources, but the appreciation of a cultural product, being a form of positioning one’s own significance (one’s ability to appreciate the text) is none other than an undisputed advantage of the insular Russian provinciality. After all, this rather widespread method of symbolic modeling of oneself with the help of social and psychological experience, which in this case presents Brodsky’s poems, continues to work. The reader of Russian poems doesn’t care much whether the text that inspired it is translated from English to Russian as long as its Russian equivalent justifies his looking down on those who did not provide such an opportunity for him. And space, time, and empire come handy to his rescue)
This is, in a sense, the price of the word.