The Brodskyan World

Joseph Brodsky, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, is a private poet, intensely apolitical. He also writes of prisons, psychiatric prisons, his native land. But it shall be wrong to categorise him as a Russian ‘poet-in-exile’ in the nature of Alxander Solzhenitsyn, expressing anger against a repressive political order. His private world, very often, cracks open......a meditative suffering builds up.

It is difficult to understand Brodsky, so much he exists in himself. There is an unmistakable element of an ‘anguish unaccountable’. This anguish drifts in everywhere. There is no faith that it shall part from him or his poetry

            ‘as though, from lurching to the left,
            life will swing right’.

Brodsky, however, is not primarily a poet of gloom. He can be reduced to be one. But he is essentially a writer of solitude, not necessarily his own, but of things as they stand. The figure of solitude is given so much of the Brodskyan loneliness that it approximately approaches a formidable gloom.

Brodsky need not be a solitary person. In fact, many of his poems are addressed, with feminine vigour, to M.B. But he realises himself, his existence, his end:

            ‘All things are distant. What is near is dim’.

There is, at times, a desperate urge to stay united: ‘Never, never forget........

            But, as he writes:
            ‘Our farewell’s the more final’.

Brodsky is preoccupied with death, and his best poem is, perhaps, the Elegy For John Donne. It is a beautiful poem, softly empty.

“Night everywhere,
night in all things.......

Again,

            “the poet’s fame sleeps soundly at its side
            All trials, all sufferings, are sunk in sleep
            And vices sleep. Good lies in Evil’s arms”.

There is, as he believes, a kind of death-in-life: “I think that a man’s soul, while it still lives, takes on the features of mortality”.

In poetry, however, Brodsky sees, or rather finds, a mode of endurance, thus, the poet’s world dies with his death - “each grave is the limit of the earth” - but the world which his poetry has created lives on. This theme is found in Elegy For John Donne and is repeated in Verses on the death of T.S.Eliot. Life - implying death or solitude - is one and life’s creations - implying deathlessness - is another. Brodsky hoped to separate the two.

Brodsky derived his lonely symbols of objects from his concern, almost obsession, with death, solitude and salvation. But the thread would have been very thin if he had nothing positive to support him. This he found in things, objects which “do not move or stand” but is a “space beyond which there can be nothing”.

Brodsky is not so much a poet of nature, of people, but of things. Of people he says

            “Something the mind abhors
            Shows in each face and form”.

But of things,

            “Things are more pleasant their
            outsides are neither good
            nor evil. And their insides
            reveal neither good nor bad”.

Things, as Brodsky understands, is not nature. It can include, nature, like trees. But it can mean a chair, a table, a streetcar .... always, deserted.

There is an overgrowth of things in Brodsky’s poems. When he embraces ‘these shoulders’, he beholds the ‘room’, the ‘huge bulb’, the dark ‘stove’ the ‘worn furniture’.......Everything is hollow.......”the dust of their own insides”. But energy is there all the same - “time’s very flesh and blood”.

There is obviously an intimate conversation between him and ‘things’. But, again, the unity, if at all we visualise it, is illusory. The link, as Brodsky probably perceives it, is unilateral and cannot be bilateral.

These elements combine to make Brodsky almost a mute poet, musing on the vast silence of words. There is a disgust for words

‘nothing is more tormenting than men’s language’.
Even words can be like things:
‘Silence is the presence
of farewells in our greetings as we touch.
Indeed the future of our words is silence’.

His philosophy spills out :

‘life is but talk hurdled in the face of silence’.

Brodsky’s poems are like a slow photographic movement, show­ing life in all its stillness. They achieve a death-like-silence, a quiet solitude, a broken individual identity. There is an intense flight, almost a suffering - but not really so - as the lens moves across the ‘things’. We are in a home with our ‘things’. But it is a different kind of home.