Quest for Glory and Quest for Word: Case of Bro and Case of Bo
By Asya Pekurovskaya
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Quest for Glory and Quest for Word: Case of Bro and Case of Bo is a 156,000-word mixed genre manuscript that weaves together autobiography, essay, and literary criticism to explore the lives and legacies of two Russian poets, Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, who were part of Anna Akhmatova’s inner circle during her final years (1889–1966).
Quest for Glory and Quest for Word delves into the intricate dynamics between Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, irreconcilable rivals following Akhmatova’s death. Brodsky’s meteoric rise to fame culminated in his emigration to America in 1972 and a Nobel Prize in 1987, though his journey was marred by personal and professional struggles. Conversely, Bobyshev remained in the shadows for much of his life, only to be later recognized for his enduring literary brilliance, praised by critics as “belonging to the masterpieces of world literature.”
Below is a chapter extract from the book.
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Chapter 6. Eidolon, an Idol, and a Double
“Akhmatova ’s death took out a certain silver nail from our poetic community, and it fell apart without this core into four separately pulsating ambitions: not however, separately, but somehow cranked every now and then against each other.” (Bo. HomoText). Needless to say, the expression “against each other” refers primarily to the confrontation between Bo and Bro, involved in the twists and turns of a love triangle. But not only. It seems to me that the confrontation of an internal order is hardly less significant, inviting the question already posed once: How did Akhmatova manage to fashion absolute antagonists from two more or less like-minded people?
Reflecting on HomeText, I lingered on the metaphor of a “taken out silver nail.” My intuition suggested that I associate the gifted rose with the symbolism of the “Rose and Cross”. In esoteric traditions, a rose can symbolize mystery, and a cross can symbolize not only sacrifice, but also unity (balance) between the spiritual and the material. As has already been shown, Anna Akhmatova, the mentor of four poets, carried within herself this unity and this mystery.
“The mystery becomes the most important feature of [Akhmatova’s – A.P.] psychological self-portrait (perhaps continuing the theme set by N. Gumilyov’s poems: “From the serpent’s retreat, / From the city of Kiev/ Not a wife, but a witch I took as a treat…”; element self-identification: “I am not one of those, / Who is charmed by queer mouths/ I am not…, oh, I don’t leak my mystique on the house”; “You don’t want me to smack/ Of what I have become, / [Quirky, evil and crack] – / Famous, dead on my feet, /Enigmatic and beat”; “What is it the final day, planet earth is giving in/ Or the puzzles of my mysteries begin…”71
One of Akhmatova’s widely circulated secrets is the date of her birth. This is the “witchcraft night on Ivan Kupala” and “the feast of the Vladimir Icon of the God’s Mother – the day of the deliverance of Rus’ from Khan Akhmat, from whom Akhmatova so loved to trace her ancestry.” According to A. Naiman, in this way Akhmatova connected her birthday with both a Christian holiday and a pagan one, which is demonic and not at all harmless, since it is correlated with “the intention to penetrate into the areas of action of those mysterious forces, the manifestation of which is described mainly by myths, united by the cults of the moon and water. <…> There was a game here – and not a game. A joke and the nutrient medium of her poetry” (Ibid., p. 579).
The obvious and persistent use of the word “mystery” allowed A. Kushner to note, not without a smile, that when Akhmatova lacked an epithet, she chose the word mysterious. She loved to “place” her thought next to her interlocutor, so that he would appropriate it, accept it and broadcast it as his own. Astute interlocutors noticed this technique. In his memoirs, I. Ivanovsky writes about a certain mystery played out by Akhmatova:
“With conviction and subtle art Akhmatova created her own legend – as if surrounding herself with a strong magnetic field. In her witch’s cauldron, a potion of premonitions, coincidences, personal signs, fatal accidents, secret dates, non-meetings, three-hundred-year-old trifles was constantly boiling” [Ivanovsky, Ibid., p. 615]”.
The mystery of Akhmatova’s personality, multiplied by her power of persuasion hidden not only in biographical myth-making, but also in her poetry, could not help but be deposited in the hearts of the poets she formed. But could they (I limit my question to two characters of my story) succumb to this sorcery in equal measure? It turned out not. It turned out that Bro was seduced by the external side of Akhmatova’s personality, and Bo seemed to resist this temptation, perhaps without even noticing it.
While Bro tasted the potions of the “witch’s cauldron” (Épatage, grandeur, the cult of prestige and fame, and finally the erection of the AAA institution, described in detail by A.K. Zholkovsky), Bo cultivated in Akhmatova… no, not what the creators of her cult readily accepted. Bo, I believe, was struck by Akhmatova’s talent for living passionately no matter what. I suspect that having noticed an unconventional connoisseur in Bo, Akhmatova made special efforts to instill in him what Bro was blind to: modesty, tolerance, building his creative path beyond prestige and fame.
Is this why, with the departure of Akhmatova, Bo selected for his further development such a mentor as Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Bro – Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). As a preamble, I propose a hypothesis explaining their choice.
Two decades before the publication of “Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge” (1910), which Bo chanced upon during his school years, Rilke’s fairy tale-entitled “The Conqueror of the Dragon” (1902) appeared in print. Russian publishers provided the publication with a quote from Marina Tsvetaeva’s letter, in which Rilke’s personality was described in just one word. He was a stranger, and Rilke himself cultivated the stranger in himself. “Who are you anyway, Reiner? Not a German, although – the whole Germany! Not a Czech, although he was born in the Czech Republic (NB! in a country that didn’t exist yet – that’s appropriate!), not an Austrian, because Austria was, and you will be! Well, isn’t it wonderful? You have no homeland!” Tsvetaeva wrote to him.
My personal acquaintance with Rilke began with reading that fairy tale about the Dragon who threatened the inhabitants of the kingdom, forcing the king to offer the hand of a beautiful princess as a reward for killing the beast. Young daredevils responded to the call and died one after another. And when “the best son in almost every family had already fallen,” and the Dragon was still raging, the King “forbade his subjects to continue the fight.”
But the fight continued. It was already conducted by strangers. One day there was a rumor that one young man managed to escape from the hands of the Dragon. Having set out in search of this dared one, the princess came across an exhausted horseman riding without a helmet and mittens. As she realized that the rider had killed the Dragon, the princess rushed to the palace in the hope that the knight would come for his reward. And when the majestic preparations for the wedding were done, it remained to find out about the author’s decision. How will the author end this wonderful tale? The reader waits impatiently, and Rilke writes one short paragraph:
“But the groom was already far, far away, and above him there was a sky full of larks. If someone had reminded him of the reward for his feat, he might have laughed and turned back: he simply forgot about it.”
This was the plot that might, I thought, determine Bo’s choice. But I was wrong. Bo’s choice fell on a much more poignant plot. At the age of thirty plus, Bo wrote in his memoirs, he was invited to the literary association of Zvezda magazine and made an acquaintance with the head of the poetry department, Nikolai Leopoldovich Brown.
“In editorial policy, he was ultra-if not more careful, and in general it was as if he still heard the party cry of Zhdanov, which rang out a quarter of a century ago, but at the infrequent meetings of the circle he was surprisingly not formal. Suddenly I read Khodasevich, so much so that I remembered his voice for the rest of my life:
‘Step over, leap over, jump over,
Move on whatever you want…’
He immediately arranged for me to read.” (Bobyshev,Autoportrait in Faces, pp. 11–112).
And then a miracle occurred:
As he was impressed by Bo’s poems, Mr. Brown “pulled out a bunch of manuscripts from his editorial pile and offered to look at them. New translations of Rilke! I clung to them, asked permission to keep them until tomorrow, and at night I copied them into my notebook: they were translations by Sergei Vladimirovich Petrov from Chasoslov (“the Book by Hours”) and The New Poems. I had never heard about him [the translator – A.P.] before, especially of his original poetry, but as a translator he deserved tears of gratitude and exclamations of delight, if only for this stanza:
“In life there’s kindness and verve.
It has golden alleys and routes.
Let’s follow them next and with fervor.
Life really isn’t so crude.”
The lines that became my spell for years to come, the master’s balanced and healing response to Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet!”
This was the prelude. Rilke came into Bo’s life thanks to his brilliant translator. Soon Sergei Vladimirovich himself [Petrov – A.P.] showed up, having heard about his ardent admirer. Still deprived of his rights, this seemingly unremarkable know-it-all and verbal virtuoso lived somewhere near Novgorod, and came to St. Petersburg only on literary matters, which, however, were not going well for him. Rilke’s perfections continued to amaze only trusted visitors of Zvezda, but not readers. Meanwhile Petrov had already translated the entire “Book of Hours,” and how! “He is in rags, and his horse is in rubies!” – he proudly repeated a line from it which resembled his own self-portrait. <…>
“I needed Rilke most of all and, probably, others, “dragging in the dark desert,” did too, for he quenched, in this case, via Sergei Vladimirovich’s translations. He also translated from other languages – a few [pieces] from the great French and, considering him being an expert in Scandinavian languages, a lot from the medieval skalds. There he gave himself free rein: he played, masterfully joggled with words like with dumbbells, and, perhaps, even mystified – one couldn’t check. But the skalds did not quench the thirst, and did not help his artistic talent to break through. <…>
Nevertheless, Petrov managed to get a whole book of translations into print, but not of poetry, but of prose. It was a charming historical tale “Fru Maria Grubbe” about a simple and pure soul in difficult circumstances. Its author, Jens Peter Jacobsen, was fondly mentioned in Rilke’s notes, and this Danish “Fru” was indeed seen as a sister to his female characters in Malta Laurids Brigge. Most likely, Petrov’s competitors disappeared on their own accord due to the unimaginable complexity of translation. <…> Sergei Vladimirovich, firstly, managed to adequately read this text, and then find lexical analogues in the Russian language, not in the 16th century though, but two centuries later, <…> and the result was a masterpiece!”72
Affinity to Rilke must have been a necessary condition for choosing a mentor. But was it sufficient? I have no doubt that Rilke’s parting letter to an unknown author, which probably inspired this author to a radical revision of not only his authorial position, but also his entire life, also did not escape Bo’s attention. Which of the successful authors would have enough tact and generosity of spirit to complete this task without affecting the recipient’s pride? Let me give you an incomplete quote:
“You ask the question whether your poems are good. <…> You send them to magazines. You compare them with other people’s poems, and you are worried that other editors are returning your verses back to you. So (since you allowed me to give you advice), I ask you to leave all this. You are looking for external success, and this is exactly what you should not do now. No one can give you advice or help; nobody. There is only one remedy: go deep into yourself. Explore the reason that prompts you to write, find out whether it originates in the most cherished recess of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if you were not allowed to write. And above all, ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night: should I write? Look within yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is in the affirmative, if you have the right to answer this important question simply and strongly: “I must,” then you must create your whole life anew, according to the law of this necessity. Your life – even in its smallest and most indifferent minute – should become a cherished testimony and sign of this creative will…And if the answer is in the affirmative, if you have the right to answer this important question simply and strongly: “I must,” then you must create your whole life anew, according to the law of this necessity; Your life – even in its smallest and most indifferent minute – should become a cherished testimony and sign of this creative will…”
At the end of the letter, Rilke does not forget to return to his paramount thesis:
“And if from this turning to yourself, from this immersion in your own world, poems are born, then it will not even occur to you to ask anyone whether these are good poems. You will no longer want magazines to be interested in your work: you will see in them your blood treasure, your voice and a facet of your life. A work of art is good when it is created out of inner necessity…
With all your devotion and sympathy, Rainer Maria Rilke.
Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy), April 5, 1903.”
And further, already in the postscript, Rilke reminds of his own mentor, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and his two books, which became reference books for him: “I wanted to ask if you read them”?
How did Bro solve the question of his future mentor? By his own admission, he searched among the poets for “the greatest mind of the twentieth century,” a mind that “would have no equals.”73 As we see, being ready to take a victor ludorum as a model, he found one in the person of Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). And here it is no longer significant to what extent Auden satisfied this criterion. It is important that Bro directed his attention to the achievements that received recognition, and, judging by subsequent steps, Bro set his sights not only on repeating Auden’s achievements, but also on surpassing them.
Bro must have noticed that Auden gained recognition by the age of thirty, and by the age of forty he consolidated it, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the baroque eclogue “The Age of Anxiety” (1948). At the same age, Bro’s choice fell on Auden. Following in the footsteps of his chosen mentor, Bro multiplied his awards and prizes, culminating his ascent with the Nobel Prize. But first, he secured his choice in a somewhat unusual manner:
“You know, the thing is, sometimes I think that I am him [Auden – A.P.]. Of course, this should not be said or written, otherwise I would be driven away and locked up from everywhere. Everything he writes, that is, almost everything I have had the opportunity to read, and I have tried to read everything written by him, is extremely dear to me; it is dear to me as if it were written by me. Of course, it is not written by me, I am aware of that, but I believe that if, in general, I have developed as an individual—and so on and so forth—then he played far from an insignificant role in it. He is a man of extraordinary intellect, he always thought gracefully and unpredictably. If you compare him to someone in music, it would be Haydn.”74
This avowal was addressed to a Swedish friend, who added the following clarification:
“The spiritual kinship with Auden led to such a close identification that sometimes it is really difficult to establish boundaries between quotes from Auden and Brodsky’s original text. Brodsky knew Auden by heart, and in some cases, Auden’s formulas entered his own works almost literally, consciously or unconsciously. Over the years, Brodsky began to resemble Auden externally as well: always in a jacket and tie, but the jacket was wrinkled and the tie hung crookedly—a careless, if not elegant, style perfectly suitable for an elderly university professor” (Brodsky/Yangfeld, same source).
As we can see, we are talking about emotional fixation, known in psychoanalysis under the name of identification.
“Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. This behavior has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine.”75
Fixation to Auden was both a matter of luck and a conscious choice. Bro was lucky in that he met Auden at the beginning of his career, and the conscious choice was all that was suitable for creating a legend about himself. Bro gained a seat at the University of Michigan, where Auden had once taught, and soon was awarded, like Auden, the honorary status of Poet Laureate. Following in the footsteps of Auden, Bro began to spend part of the year in Europe, although not in Ischia, like Auden, but in Venice, and began to cherish the dream of an impeccable command of the English language. Although this dream turned out to be beyond his capabilities, he still managed to adopt a number of poetic forms from Auden: ballad, ode, eclogue, elegy, limerick.
By the age of thirty, Auden had gained a reputation as a healer of society’s ills. His poem “The First of September, 1939” received instant distribution, and became a cult favorite. I quote the relevant lines in my translation.
“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low, dishonest decade:
Weaves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night”,76
Bro responds to this poem, probably interpreting it as a manifestation of misanthropy:
“Thingamabobs and people
Encircle us, and our peepers
Are left with tormenting marks.
I’d rather live in the dark.
I sit on a bench, in vanity,
In a park. Looking by and by
At a family walking by.
I loathe humanity.”
It is January. The winter terms
My calendar is confirmed.
When I loathe the dark at last
Words will from my mouth blast.
My blood is cold as a frost.
Cooler than river frozen
All the way to its crest.
People are what I detest.”
However, Bro’s reputation as a like-minded and loyal student of Auden did not suffer from this:
“The thing is, in my opinion, Joseph had some yearning for the brotherhood of poets, and the circle of Auden and Spender seemed like such a brotherhood to him. He identified himself with them and often said that he felt like them, a part of them, and saw no difference between himself and them,” speculates Valentina Polukhina in a conversation with Isaiah Berlin.
Let me remind you that Brodsky was introduced to Auden as the greatest Russian poet even when he had not even formed as a poet. And in the year that was left for Auden before his death, he popularized this title, feeding the poetic establishment of England and America with more and more new details of the legend from the depths of his own imagination.
At the same time, as Polukhina testifies, Auden
“was not interested in Russian poetry or Russia. Not at all. And not France. Only Germany. He had some knowledge of Italy, but mainly Germany. ‘Yes, yes, I know that I am German,’ he told me. ‘Yes, I am Fritz. What can you do? That’s what I am, German.'”
Meanwhile, the formula “the greatest poet,” picked up by Auden, introduced an additional nuance to the concept of identification. Now the identification was mutual. The greatest poet Auden was connected with Brodsky by what Freud called
“а common quality shared with а person who is not an object of the sexual instinct. The more important this common quality is, the more successful may this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the beginning of a new tie” (Freud, The Group Psychology, p. 137).
This new quality, which cemented the mutual identification between Bro and Auden, was religion, which both acquired after moving to the United States. And if Auden, by the time he emigrated to America, had lost the religion acquired in childhood, Bro, born into a family of atheists, gained and lost Christianity by inspiration (and here Bro again follows Auden as a model):
“You know, it’s impossible to represent Christ in art. <…> You can see him at birth, or after he’s dead. Perhaps, after the Resurrection, but show Him healing the sick or blessing people because they have faith, and the interest shifts to those people. You can use a model but when you are through, all you’ve got is a model” (Auden, TT, p. 3).
But did Bro remember Auden’s reasoning, having adopted Auden’s model of Christianity?
“What is your attitude towards Christianity? You also have Christmas poems, right?” Bengdt Jangfeldt asked Bro in 1987.
Bro: “Who knows? [Laughs.] It’s difficult for me to talk about it. You know, I had an idea at one point when I was twenty-four or twenty-five years old—I tried to follow it, which was to write a poem for every Christmas. And for a while, I kept to that, but then circumstances, I don’t know, got in the way… But I still try to do it. And overall, that’s my relationship with Christianity… [Laughs]… if you will. I have seven or eight Christmas poems…”
- Ja.: “What about the cross in one of the photographs taken right after your departure?”
Bro: “That was in 1972. At that time, I was more, so to speak, systematic about it. Then that passed.”77
Accordingly, in 1982, the scales tipped towards atheism again:
“You mentioned divine intervention. To what extent is it a metaphor for you?” Sven Birkerts inquired.
Bro: “To a large extent.”78
However, it didn’t take three years before Bro became a Christian again:
Bro: “Every Christmas, I try to write a poem to congratulate the Man who died for us.”
Vitaly Amursky: “Nevertheless, it seems to me that the theme of Christianity—in the traditional sense—is not clearly and prominently marked in your poetry… Or am I mistaken?”
Bro: “I think you’re mistaken.”79
What could have happened during those years? I dare to speculate that there were no storms or tempests. Bro simply learned that in the year of his birth (1940), his idol Auden emigrated to America and, rejoining the Anglican community, made a vow to write a poem every year for Christmas. It all began with the composition “A Christmas Oratorio” dedicated to Daniel Kallman, although Auden himself, as attested by his student Alan Ansen, makes a slightly different reference:
“’A Christmas Oratorio’ was written before ‘Sea and Mirror.’ It’s the only direct reference to a biblical theme that I ever tried. My mother had just died, and I wanted to write something for her. I hesitated before deciding on the order in which these two things should go” (Auden, TT, p. 3).80
But the statement “Bro simply learned that in the year of his birth…” also requires clarification. A year after his conversation with Vitaly Amursky (October 15, 1991), Bro gives an interview to Peter Weil, a host on Radio Svoboda. Naturally, the topic of the Christmas poems is raised again, and as far as I know, it veered towards the creation of a legend:
“I’ll tell you how it all started,” Bro told Weil. “I think I wrote the first Christmas poem in Komarovo. I was living in a dacha, I don’t remember whose, I think it belonged to Academician Berg. And there, from a Polish magazine, I believe it was ‘Pshikruya,’ I cut out a picture for myself. It was ‘The Adoration of the Magi,’ I don’t remember the author. I glued it above the stove and looked at it quite often in the evenings. By the way, that picture burned, and the stove burned, and the dacha itself. But back then, I looked and looked and decided to write a poem with that same subject. So, it all started not from religious feelings, not from Pasternak or Eliot, but specifically from that picture.”81
I must admit, I would hardly venture to assert which of these versions should be trusted if I hadn’t received, via email, a recording of Natalya Sharymova’s conversation with Vladimir Solovyov, which I partially reproduce:
“You know, Volodya, it seems I made an interesting discovery in Brodsky studies. And it seems that there isn’t a single word about what I found in either Russian or English… So, imagine, Robert Frost, starting from 1929 until his death, published a small congratulatory booklet for Christmas that was sent to friends, colleagues, fans, and sponsors. This project began at the initiative of employees at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, the publishing house that published Frost’s books. Someone from the management called Joseph Blumenthal, the owner of Spiral Press, a typographic company with an excellent reputation. For this first booklet, Blumenthal chose, it seems, on his own, without informing Frost, the poem ‘Christmas Trees,’ written in 1920. The print run was 250 copies. Robert Frost saw this greeting somewhere and asked the typographer, with whom he later became friends, to send him a few booklets. That’s how their collaboration began… The last greeting was printed in 1962 and sent out about a month before the poet’s death. The print run was 16,555 copies.”
Then Sharymova offers her guess. Bro could have seen this booklet even before his emigration since Frost could have sent it to Russia following his meetings with Akhmatova, Chukovsky, and Yevtushenko in Moscow and Leningrad.82 To me, this seems unlikely, although Sharymova may be right in assuming that becoming part of the American literary establishment, Bro could have learned about this tradition. And in this regard, another one of her recollections is interesting.
“Once in New York, someone asked Bro if he had attended Robert Frost’s 1962 performance at the Pushkin House.
‘No,” Iosif replied, “I was in prison at that time.” Brodsky certainly wasn’t in prison, but, according to Vladimir Uflyand’s memories, Brodsky did listen to Frost’s performance together with Uflyand.
How do we explain this amnesia?
It is impossible to believe that Brodsky could forget about his meeting with Frost in Leningrad, especially since Ludmila Sergeeva [the wife of the translator of Auden and Frost, Andrei Sergeev – A.P.], learned the details of Frost’s conversation with Akhmatova from him.83 But could he have avoided the topic, fearing questions about Frost’s performance? After all, in 1962, he hardly knew anything about Frost. Someone might argue with me, pointing to sources that testify otherwise.
“When did you first hear about Frost?” Volkov asked Bro.
“It’s a funny story,” Bro replied, recounting his acquaintance with the manuscript translations of Andrei Sergeev and, in particular, with Frost’s poem “A Hundred Collars.” According to his version, he mistook this poem for an apocryphal work by some Moscow genius and was convinced of it. However, when he “read the poem in the original in 1962, he understood that it was, of course, Robert Frost” (Solomon Volkov, p. 94).
But how reliable is this story?
Andrei Sergeev’s translation of Frost’s poem “A Hundred Collars,” possibly timed to coincide with Frost’s upcoming visit to the USSR, dates back to 1962.84I may be told that Frost’s English original could have been offered to Brodsky by Sergeev himself. But their acquaintance dates only 1964. Nevertheless, Brodsky’s “funny story” received factual confirmation in a number of apocrypha, finding completion in Nila Friedberg’s book.85
But Bro’s epic with Frost does not end there.
The recording of Brodsky’s saga about Frost (Chapter 20 of his dialogues with Volkov) is presented in the form of a spontaneous conversation, although it took Volkov no less than three years of his life (from 1979 to 1982) and resulted in 17 pages of text. But even in this situation, Bro failed to present a coherent narrative. I’ll start with a topic still related to the “funny story”:
S.V.: Did working in the northern Russian village make it easier to understand Frost’s poetry as a farmer’s poet?
J.B.: In general, I lived in the Soviet Union for three years under the sign of Frost to a large degree. First Sergeev’s translations, then getting to know him, then Frost’s book in Russian. Then they put me in prison” (Volkov, p. 97).
I submit that Bro’s final admission that in Russia he did not read Frost in the original puts the final point on the motives that prompted him to compose his “funny story.”With motives in mind, I propose to read Bro’s praise of Frost’s fiction. What attracts him to Frost, a farmer’s poet by reputation, is that Frost’s farmers are none other but “masks” (Volkov, p. 210). True, “the masks,” which were given credit to Frost, turn out to be an unforgivable sin when it comes to the fictional “masks” of Ezra Pound.86
Contradictory judgments, truisms and repetitions accompany Brodsky even when there seems to be no grain of personal gain in addressing them. “Frost is a poet of horror and fear. He is not a tragic or dramatic poet,” Brodsky asserts on page 98 of Volkov’s interview, after which, on the same page, he insists: Frost’s dialogue is “a tragedy in the Greek sense, almost a ballet.”
Contradictions and truisms haunt Bro even when it comes to his idol Auden. The conversation about Auden took up 32 pages in Volkov’s book and five years of his life. However, his simplest question: “Was Auden’s conversation similar to his prose, i.e., simple, logical, witty”? baffles Bro. “It is impossible to speak English illogically” (Volkov, p. 126), he replies and then offers a lengthy yarn about the peculiarities of the English language, with Auden’s name never mentioned.
But the memoirist is not ready to give up.
“Was Auden’s conversation similar to his prose, i.e., simple, logical, witty”? An answer is received that exhausts the topic: “It is illogically impossible to speak English” (Volkov, p. 126). What follows is Brough’s lengthy discussion about the peculiarities of the English language, during which Auden’s name is in danger of being completely forgotten.
But the memoirist isn’t ready to give up.
“What were your conversations with Auden like?” he inquired in the hope of forcing Bro to give a detailed answer.Well? In the course of the lengthy and evasive response Bro fails to avoid the trap. Having reported that Auden did not recognize dialogue, preferring monologues that were delivered quickly and incomprehensibly, Bro makes his fatal disclosure: “The most bitter pill of my life was that during the time that I knew Auden, my English was useless” (Volkov, p. 126). Of course, the word “useless” was just a euphemism. Bro did not know English and could not engage Auden in a conversation. And even if we assume that during a year of living in America this obstacle could be eliminated, which is unlikely, Auden could no longer testify to this.
Then what could Bro’s understanding of Auden’s poetry be like? Volkov still hoped to derive at least some benefit for posterity from the interview with Bro. But alas! “He [Auden – A.P.] achieved neutrality of sound and neutrality of voice. Neutrality comes at a high price. It does not appear when the poet is objective, dry and detached. It manifests itself when the poet connects with time. Because time is neutral. The being of life is neutral’” (Volkov, p. 142),” stated Bro.
What was meant by this pompous statement, no one will ever know. Rising to “spherical heights,” to use his own expression, he lost all contact with the real world. At the same time, upon returning to earth, he was capable of quite artless statements.
It is quite possible that Volkov’s expectations were somewhat too high. He probably wanted to hear something about the poetic line, rhyme, strong and weak ictic, linguistic liberties, tropes, etc. But Bro understood poetry as a kind of Grande Bouffe, that is, a gourmand (narcotic?) absorption: “you absorb it into yourself, and you absorb it into yourself, and you absorb it into yourself until it begins to take up more space in you, than yourself.” This kind of “absorption” beyond words was not limited to Auden. For example, Stephen Spender, whom he did not even consider “a great poet,” admired him “not so much for his poetry as for his imperial appearance.”
“I remember my reaction: I almost lost consciousness. I was overwhelmed. Few things made such an impression on me. Perhaps it’s like seeing the planet from the air. I immediately understood why the English language is an imperial language” (Solomon Volkov, p. 136).
(Note: All poetry translations in the above article are by the author (Asya Pekurovskaya) unless indicated otherwise.)
Footnotes:
- Mikhailova, T. Snegireva. “The Secret of Anna Akhmatova: Word and Image.” (Ekaterinburg: Ural Federal Institute, 2021), p. 579. The authors meticulously examine “the place of the word secret in Anna Akhmatova’s thesaurus as a word with high nominative density,” while noting that “the two peak points of use of these words” occurred in the years 1914 and 1959 (p. 215).
- Next comes a story about meeting the great translator and his tragic fate, which ends with a short message: “Rilke’s Book of Hours” (1899), in its entirety, in his translations, was published only in 1998, 10 years after the death of Sergei Vladimirovich – isn’t it too bitter and belated?”
- Brodsky, J. Less than One. Selected Essays. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), p. 357.
- Jangfeldt, Language is God. Notes on Joseph Brodsky. Anna Nesterova. trans. (Moscow: Publishing house Corpus, 2011), 20. Further references to these notes will be given in brackets followed by the names (Brodsky/Jangfeld) and page number.
- Sigmund Freud. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Die Zukunft einer Illusion. Fischer Verlag, 1921. В: Sigmund Freud. Civilization, Society and Religion. Group Psychology, Analysis of the Ego. and Other Works (England, Middlesex: Penguin Books, LTD., 1983), p. 134. Further references to this text will be given in parentheses with the author’s name (Freud), chapter title (Group Psychology) and page number.
The English Auden. Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Edward Mendelson ed. (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 245. The address at 421 52nd Street (East) is the address where Auden lived from December of 1945 to July 1946. The poem was written in the bar “Dizzy Club” (the address is indicated at the prompt of Gleb Shulpyakov in his translation of Ansen’s book The Table Talk (Journal Hall “New Youth” (Moscow: 2000, No 4 (43). By a strange coincidence, Brodsky became a co-owner of the restaurant on 52nd street.
- Sven Birkerts. Paris Review, No. 83, 1982. Translation by Irina Komarova.
- Vitaly Amursky. Continent, No. 62, 1990.
- Gleb Shulpyakov offers a lengthy and interesting interpretation of the “Christmas Oratorio” and, in particular, points out that the poet’s mother, “Constance Rosalie Auden died on August 21, 1941, two years after her son moved to the American continent.”
- Conversation between Joseph Brodsky and Peter Weil // Brodsky I. Christmas poems. Christmas: starting point. Conversation between Joseph Brodsky and Peter Weil. Ed. 2nd, supplemented. M., 1996, p. 62. The story told by Bro to Peter Weil was enriched with a riveting detail: from a newspaper clipping, the picture “Adoration of the Magi”, pasted above the stove, was transformed into a Rembrandt canvas exhibited in the Hermitage, and the hastily stitched story itself became part of the myth about Bro, a connoisseur of painting (Diana Vinĸovetskaya. Units time // Zvezda. 2008. No. 3, p. 82).
- Frost’s visit to Russia was recorded in great detail by Steward L. Udall, US Secretary of the Interior, in “Robert Frost’s Last Adventure” (New York Times June 11, 1972); and F.D. Reeve, poet and translator, Robert Frost in Russia (1964 and 2001). There was no talk of any Christmas booklets. As for Frost’s return to the States, it was overshadowed by his failed account of an hour and a half conversation with Khrushchev on the eve of the Cuban crisis and his state of health (Frost died in January 1963).
- 82. Lyudmila Sergeeva “About Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: Memories with Comments.” (Moscow: journal Znamia, 2015, Number 7).
- Foreign Literature, Moscow, 1962, pp. 32-39.
- Nila Friedberg. English Rhymes in Russian Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky. (Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter, GmbH & Co., 2011. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs. Walter de Gruyter, GmbH & Co., Berlin, Boston, 2011), p. 232. With the same trust she took Evgeny Rein’s saga about Brodsky’s ability to memorize a Likhachev’s impromptu translation from one casual listening.
- “To my shame, I could never get through the Cantos,” notes Volkov. “And you don’t have to wade through them. You don’t even need to touch them with your hands. . . . In fact, this is a fictitious reality,” Brodsky reassures him (Volkov, Ibid).
About the Author
Asya Pekurovskaya was born in Leningrad, Russia, and after marrying a storyteller and earning a Master’s degree in literature from Leningrad University, she emigrated to America. She completed a doctoral program in literature at Stanford University and has also participated in a post-doctoral seminar in philosophy at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
