Joseph Brodsky was one of those poets who can write confessionally and make it sound as if they were describing an entire social phenomenon, Keith Gessen writes. Brodsky was born on this day in 1940.
Brodsky experienced all the struggles of his generation on his own hide, as the Russians say. His exile was no exception. Photographed, in 1980, by Irving Penn.In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend.
This was not cool. Bobyshev and Brodsky were close friends. They often appeared, in alphabetical order, at public readings around Leningrad. Bobyshev was twenty-seven and recently separated from his wife; Brodsky was twenty-three and intermittently employed. Along with two other promising young poets, they’d been dubbed “the magical chorus” by their friend and mentor Anna Akhmatova, who believed that they represented a rejuvenation of the Russian poetic tradition after the years of darkness under Stalin. When Akhmatova was asked which of the young poets she most admired, she named just two: Bobyshev and Brodsky. The young Soviets felt the sixties even more deeply than their American and French counterparts, for, while the Depression and the Occupation were bad, Stalinism was worse. After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso. In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time. The libido had been liberated, but where was it supposed to go? People lived with their parents. Their parents, in turn, lived with other parents, in what were known as communal apartments. “We never had a room of our own to lure our girls into, nor did our girls have rooms,” Brodsky later wrote from his American exile. He had half a room, separated from his parents’ room by bookshelves and some curtains. “Our love affairs were mostly walking and talking affairs; it would make an astronomical sum if we were charged for mileage.” The woman with whom Brodsky had been walking and talking for two years, the woman who broke up the magical chorus, was Marina Basmanova, a young painter. Contemporaries describe her as enchantingly silent and beautiful. Brodsky dedicated some of the Russian language’s most powerful love poetry to her. “I was only that which / you touched with your palm,” he wrote, “over which, in the deaf, raven-black / night, you bent your head. . . . / I was practically blind. / You, appearing, then hiding, / taught me to see.” Almost unanimously, people in their circle condemned Bobyshev. Not because of the affair—who didn’t have affairs?—but because, as soon as Bobyshev began to pursue Basmanova, Brodsky began to be pursued by the authorities. In November, 1963, an article appeared in the local paper insulting Brodsky, his trousers, his red hair, his literary pretensions, and his poems, although of the seven quotations offered as examples of Brodsky’s poetry, three were by Bobyshev. Everyone recognized this sort of article as a prelude to an arrest, and Brodsky’s friends insisted that he go to Moscow to wait things out. They further insisted that he check himself into a mental hospital, in case a determination of some form of psychosis could help him plead his case. Brodsky met the New Year in the hospital, then begged to be released. Upon getting out, he learned that Bobyshev and Basmanova had been together on New Year’s at a friend’s dacha. Brodsky borrowed twelve rubles for train fare and raced up to Leningrad. He confronted Bobyshev. He confronted Basmanova. Before he could get much further, he was thrown in jail. The subsequent trial launched the Soviet human-rights movement, turned Brodsky into a world-famous figure, and resulted in his eventual exile from the U.S.S.R. Brodsky was born in May, 1940, a year before the German invasion. His mother worked as an accountant; his father was a photographer and worked for the Navy Museum in Leningrad when Brodsky was young. They were doting parents and much beloved by Iosif Brodsky, who was their only child. Leningrad suffered terribly during the war—it was blockaded for more than two years by the Germans, deprived of food and heat. An aunt starved to death. In the immediate postwar years, even as Stalin mobilized the country for the Cold War, the damage was plain to see. “We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around,” Brodsky wrote. “You cannot cover a ruin with a page of.” He was an uninspired student, held back in the seventh grade. When his parents started having financial trouble—his father lost his Navy job during Stalin’s late-life campaign against the Jews—Iosif, fifteen, dropped out and went to work in a factory. In a loyal, scrupulous, and authoritative biography, “Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life” , Brodsky’s old friend Lev Loseff puts a great deal of emphasis on his subject’s decision to drop out of school, arguing that it prevented Brodsky from being ruined by overschooling. Brodsky thought so, too. “Afterward I often regretted that move, especially when I saw my former classmates getting on so well inside the system,” he wrote. “And yet I knew something that they didn’t. In fact, I was getting on too, but in the opposite direction, going somewhat further.” The direction he was going could be called, variously, underground, or samizdat, or freedom, or the West. He was restless. He left the factory job after six months. Over the next seven years, until his arrest, he worked at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue; he also hung about, smoking cigarettes and reading books. He travelled around the Soviet Union, taking part in “geological” expeditions, helping the rapidly industrializing Soviet government comb the vast country for mineral wealth and oil. At night, the geologists would gather around the campfire and play songs on their guitars—often poetry set to music—and read their own poems. Upon reading a book of poems on the “geological” theme, in 1958, Brodsky decided that he could do better himself. One of his earliest poems, “Pilgrims,” was soon a campfire hit. The whole country was going crazy for poetry; it had become central to the atmosphere of Khrushchev’s Thaw. In 1959, as part of a return of sorts to the Bolshevik past, a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky was unveiled in central Moscow, and soon young people began to gather around it to read their own poetry. In the early sixties, a group of poets started a series of well-attended readings at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, catercorner from the headquarters of the K.G.B. There is a film of one of these evenings, and, though it’s just a poetry reading , and though the poems of these semi-official poets weren’t especially good, the atmosphere is electric. A crowd had gathered and before it stood a young man talking about his feelings: this was new. The venues in Leningrad were more humble, but Brodsky and his closest poet-friends—Bobyshev, Anatoly Naiman, and Evgeny Rein, the “magical chorus”—took advantage of them whenever they could. Bobyshev in his memoir recalls Brodsky dragging him to the edge of town so Brodsky could read some poems to a group of students. Bobyshev left early. As for the poetry itself, Loseff argues convincingly that the early work—before Brodsky’s arrest—is uneven, sometimes derivative. But from the start Brodsky was one of those poets who can write confessionally and make it sound as if they were describing an entire social phenomenon. The poems are romantic, sarcastic, and effortlessly contemporary. There is an Eliot-like elongation of the poetic line, and a sense of surprise when the rhyme and meter are maintained; there is also the clear influence of the English Metaphysical poets, who laced their love poetry with philosophical speculations—in Brodsky’s case, always relating to time and space. Searching for English-language equivalents, Robert Hass wrote that Brodsky sounded “like Robert Lowell when Lowell is sounding like Byron.” As a cultural figure in Russia, though, Brodsky was more akin to Allen Ginsberg . For Ginsberg and his friends, freedom lay in breaking the bounds of traditional prosody; for Brodsky and his friends, freedom came from reëstablishing a tradition that Stalin had tried to annihilate. Brodsky was able to find surprising ways of doing this, seemingly with no effort, and always remaining cool and nonchalant. His early poems describe the narrator walking home from the train station; the narrator touring his old Leningrad haunts; the narrator watching a married couple argue, wondering whether he himself will always be alone. That last one, incidentally, is called “Dear D. B.,” that is to say, Dmitry Bobyshev, who was in an unhappy marriage at the time. Loseff describes the first time he heard Brodsky read. It was 1961. Some time before, a friend had given him a sheaf of Brodsky’s poems, but the type was faint , and Loseff didn’t like the look of the lines, which, especially in Brodsky’s early poetry, stretched on and on. “I managed to get out of reading them somehow,” Loseff recalls. But now a group of friends had gathered in the communal apartment where Loseff and his wife lived, and there was no getting away from Brodsky. He started reading his long ballad “Hills,” and Loseff was amazed: “I realized that here at last were the poems I had always dreamed of, without even knowing it. . . . It was as if a door had opened into a wide-open space that we hadn’t known about or heard of. We simply had no idea that Russian poetry, that the Russian language, that Russian consciousness, could contain these spaces.” Many people felt this way when they first encountered Brodsky’s poems. One friend who got hauled in for a talk with the K.G.B. around this time recalls telling his interrogator that, of all the people he knew, Brodsky was the likeliest to win the Nobel Prize. It was a period of tremendous generational energy and hope; someone had to embody it. It was important that Brodsky’s poems were contemporary and local. It was also important that, in their debt to Anglo-American modernism, they connected the small group of Leningrad poets and readers to the great world. And most important of all was that, in their creative fealty to an old-fashioned formal tradition, they connected this generation to the great poets of the Russian past; Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s widow, declared Brodsky a second Mandelstam. Then, in October, 1962, Khrushchev was confronted by President Kennedy over a shipment of missiles sent by the Soviets to Cuba. After a tense standoff, the Soviets withdrew in humiliation, and Khrushchev lashed out at home. Just a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, he lambasted a group of young artists at an exhibit in Moscow, calling them “faggots.” The Thaw was finished. A year later, Brodsky was charged with “freeloading” on the back of the great Soviet people.
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