Returning the Ticket: Joseph Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?

Returning the Ticket: Joseph Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?Author(s): Andrew ReynoldsSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 307-332Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3649986 .

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Returning the Ticket: Joseph Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?

Andrew Reynolds

Home was Russia. No longer Russia. Perhaps no decision he made in the later part of his life was as startling (to many), as emblematic of who he was, as his refusal, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire and in the face of countless worshipful solicitations, to go back even for the briefest visit.

And so he lived most of his adult life elsewhere: here. And Russia, the source of everything that was most subtle and audacious and fertile and doc- trinaire about his mind and gifts, became the great elsewhere to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.

-Susan Sontag, 'Joseph Brodsky"

HH cTpaHbI, HII IorOCTa He xoqy BbI6UpaTb. Ha BacimJbeBCKHi OCTPOB 51 npuAy yMI4paTb.

-Joseph Brodsky, "Ni strany, ni pogosta," 1962

Then said the veiled shadow: 'Thou hast felt What 'tis to die and live again before Thy fated hour. That thou hadst power to do so Is thy own safety; thou hast dated on Thy doom.'

-John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

Much, perhaps too much, has been read into Joseph Brodsky's failure to return to Russia, to Petersburg, after he was forced into exile in 1972. For Russia's other recent Nobel Prize winner and her now partly acknowl-

edged legislator, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, this decision not only betrays a dismissive attitude toward Russia but also is symptomatic of Brodsky's failure as a Russian writer. Solzhenitsyn implies that Brodsky felt threatened that his return would expose his "essential estrangement" (sushchnostnaia otchuzhdennost') from the Russian literary tradition, that is, his "being alien to its worldview, to its spiritual and intellectual essence-to the tradition of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii-and alien to Anna Akhmatova as well, in spite of his extensive personal contact with her. And the internal spirit of Rus- sian history seemed even more remote and alien to him." It is hard to de- cide which is more depressing here, the ugliness of the language or the (deliberate?) gracelessness of the analysis. Presumably for Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky's poetry is not a profound enough contemplation of death to

I would like to thank Diane Koenker, David Cooper, the two anonymous readers for Slavic Review, and especially David Bethea for their valuable suggestions for this article.

1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Dnevnik pisatelia: Iz 'Literaturnoi kollektsii'; Iosif Brod- skii-izbrannye stikhi," Novyi mir, 1999, no. 12:199.

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compete with the creator of Ivan Il'ich, his investigation of "accursed questions" too lukewarm to satisfy a Dostoevskian, and his poetics of memory, time, and Logos or his revitalization of the Petersburg theme insuffi- ciently Acmeist. The misreadings and distortions in Solzhenitsyn's willfully obtuse analysis of Brodsky's life and art have been commented on by many critics, and it is clear to all but the most biased reader that while there may be many possible reasons for Brodsky's decision not to return (some of which may be guessed at simply by reading Solzhenitsyn's article), Brod- sky had no need to overcome any alienation from the Russian literary tradition, to return to its embraces, as he clearly never left it.2 On the con-

trary, Brodsky's writing and his international success played a major role in helping to heal the rift between the two Russian literatures (emigre and

nonemigre), as well as reestablishing the metropolitan literature's links with "world culture."

Still, as Sontag and others have argued, Brodsky's failure to return does seem strange. It seemed odd to Brodsky himself: "I would like to visit, see a few places, my parents' graves, but something stops me from doing so. I don't know what exactly."3 True, in 1995 perhaps only health problems and changes to Brodsky's summer plans forced the postponement of the visit then being arranged through the good offices of Anatolii Sobchak. Brodsky's health had worsened considerably at this time, and his fear of the vulgarity of any mass adulation that might have greeted his return was not false modesty (which is not to say that he may not also have feared the absence of just such a crowd). He felt he did not have "the

physical or emotional resources"4 for such an enterprise at that time; this is not surprising, given his health and how painful a return to the place of love, above all a return to the "Room and a Half," surely would have been. Yet there may have been some other reasons too.

Commenting on Brodsky's poem "Ni strany, ni pogosta," and in particular its opening lines (quoted as an epigraph above-"Neither country nor churchyard will I choose / I'll come to Vasil'evskii Island to die."), Tat'iana Tolstaia offers the following intriguing opinion: "I think that the reason he didn't want to return to Russia even for a day was so that this in- cautious prophecy would not come to be. A student of-among others-

2. See for example: Willem G. Weststeijn, "Brodsky and Solzenicyn," Russian Literature 47, nos. 3-4 (1 April-15 May 2000): 389-96; Natal'ia Ivanova, "'Menia uprekali vo vsem, okromia pogody . . .' (Aleksandr Isaevich ob Iosife Aleksandroviche)," Znamia, 2000, no. 8:183-91; Lev Losev, "Solzhenitsyn i Brodskii kak sosedi," Zvezda, 2000, no. 5:93-98; Igor' Efimov, "Solzhenitsyn chitaet Brodskogo," in I. A. Gordin and I. A. Murav'eva, eds., Mir osifa Brodskogo: Putevoditel' (St. Peterburg, 2003), 399- 409; and in the same collection, Liudmila Shtern, "Gigant protiv titana, ili 'Izzhazhdannoe okunan'e v khliabi iazyka'," 411- 22. Andrei M. Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny: Interteksty Brodskogo (Moscow, 2001), provides a detailed and sophisticated analysis of how Brodsky revives and revises the Russian poetic tradition.

3. From Brodsky's interview in July 1995 (that is, after Brodsky decided not to visit St. Petersburg) with Dmitrii Radyshevskii, "Nadeius', chto delaiu to, chto On odobriaet," in Valentina Polukhina, ed., IosifBrodskii: Bol'shaia kniga interv'iu, 2d corrected and enlarged ed. (Moscow, 2000), 664.

4. From Brodsky's letter to Anatolii Sobchak, quoted in Liudmila Shtern, Brodskii: Osia, Iosif, Joseph (Moscow, 2001), 248.

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Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?

Akhmatova and [Marina] Tsvetaeva, he knew their poetic superstitious- ness, knew the conversation they had during their one and only meeting. 'How could you write that.... Don't you know that a poet's words always come true?' one of them reproached. 'And how could you write that... ?' the other was amazed. And what they foretold did indeed come to pass."5 Perhaps this is not literally true-as mentioned already, one suspects there were various more mundane reasons for Brodsky's unfulfilled re- union with Petersburg-but some overwhelming fear or taboo does seem to lie behind Brodsky's apparently willful refusal to return. I shall briefly speculate on some possible ways of viewing this refusal, one of which indeed involves on the metaphorical level the superstitious fears Tolstaia mentions; but my main aim in the opening pages of this article will be to

open up the following questions: Did Brodsky return to Petersburg in his

writing as much as one might have expected him to, and how? What is the relation of Brodsky and his writings to the so-called "Petersburg Text" or

"Petersburg Myth" of Russian literature? If Brodsky's Baratynskian definition of himself as the "last poet" is valid, is this partly because the "Peters-

burg Text" has lost its power, or might Brodsky's passing cause its further decline or complete demise?6 And how should we view such a prospect? A second set of questions flows more directly from Tolstaia's hypothesis: Is there actually such a thing as the "fate of the poet," and can we deduce what Brodsky's attitude might have been to the notion? Furthermore, how is one best to understand what many have seen as the various "strannye sblizheniia" (strange coincidences), both in Brodsky's case and in Russian

poetry as a whole, between the lives (and deaths) of Russian poets and the fate of Aleksandr Pushkin? In the main body of the article I shall offer a

reading of Brodsky's last poem, "Avgust" (August), in which, remarkably, many if not all of these questions are addressed in sixteen apparently straightforward lines, lines which most critics believe are simply a depic- tion of small towns in America. This poem, which I shall read as symboliz- ing a return in imagination to Petersburg and the Petersburg text, or more broadly as a final resignation to the kenotic role and tragic fate of the Russian writer, is the last word in what is surely the complete rebuttal of Solzhenitsyn's claim that Brodsky is not part of the Russian tradition- a rebuttal that goes by the name of everything we find in Brodsky's life, work, and death.

Before addressing these issues, however, I should say briefly what is meant by the "Petersburg Text," how my approach to it might differ from those of other scholars, and what Brodsky may have understood by it. The

duality inherent in the myths of the foundation of Petersburg, making it

potentially both heaven and hell and its creator both God-like and the Antichrist, has provided the basis for the subsequent ambivalence felt by the most important Russian writers towards Peter's creation, expressed most powerfully in Pushkin's Mednyi vsadnik (The bronze horseman). The

5. Tatyana Tolstaya, "OnJoseph Brodsky," in Pushkin' Children: Writings on Russia and Russians, trans. Jamey Gambrell (Boston, 2003), 169.

6. On the theme of the "last poet" in Brodsky's work, see for example Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 253, 254.

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"Petersburg Text," a concept introduced and most thoroughly developed by V. N. Toporov, refers to "a collection of works in Russian literature which are incorporated under the concept of the Petersburg Text through their semantic unity-a certain idea of St. Petersburg which they all share."7 Toporov claims that "The inner meaning of Petersburg is in that antithesis and antinomy that cannot be reduced to unity, which death itself makes the basis of new life, and understood as the answer to death and as its expiation, as the achievement of a higher level of spirituality. The inhumanity of Petersburg is organically tied to that type of humanity, esteemed highly in Russia and almost religious, which is the only one that can comprehend inhumanity, always remember it, and with that knowledge and memory build a new spiritual ideal."8 Brodsky himself seems to refer to something very like Toporov's Petersburg Text: his simpler definition is of the "second Petersburg-the one made of verses and of Russian prose."9 Yet if the essence of the Petersburg myth is indeed "the theme of the road to purification through the experience of evil,"10 as Maija Kono- nen glosses the interpretations given by Toporov and others, one wonders how comfortable Brodsky, by any reckoning the most important repre- sentative of the "Petersburg Text" in postwar Russian literature, would feel in being identified with such a phenomenon. As Kees Verheul notes, Brodsky always strove to instill in his compatriots a "mentality" other than that of the cult of "self-denial and self-sacrifice" for some lofty, supraper- sonal cause, because he believed that the latter mindset turned Russians into "ideal victims."" This matters because, as Rolf Hellebust has argued in an important critique of Toporov's work, the "Petersburg Text" in To- porov's mystical model ends up being virtually indistinguishable not only from the "myth of salvation that inspires the whole nineteenth-century canon," but more specifically from the "Dostoevskian cult of holy suffering."'2 Hellebust may overstate his case on occasion; for example, it is somewhat misleading to imply that Toporov "goes so far as to label" this holy suffering "the dominant of Petersburg and its text" (the explicit reference is merely to suffering), but his overall analysis seems correct in its implication that Toporov's "Petersburg Text" is essentially the "Russian

7. Maija Kononen, 'Four Ways of Writing the City": St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry ofJoseph Brodsky (Helsinki, 2003), 17.

8. V. N. Toporov, "Peterburg i peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury," in "Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul'tury: Peterburg," issue of Trudy po znakovym sistemam 18 (1984): 6. Translation from Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Boston, 1997), xiv. (Also in Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury [St. Peter- burg, 2003], 8.)

9. Joseph Brodsky, "A Guide to a Renamed City," in Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (London, 1987), 93.

10. K6n6nen, "Four Ways of Writing the City," 20. 11. Kees Verheul, Tanets vokrug mira: Vstrechi s Iosifom Brodskim (St. Petersburg,

2002), 178. 12. Rolf Hellebust, "The Real St. Petersburg," Russian Review 62 (October 2003):

497-507, quotations from page 507. Intriguingly, the article's concluding paragraphs backtrack somewhat on its earlier deconstruction of the Petersburg text, appearing more at ease with the notion that the "victim-city" or the city as a "thing of beauty" might somehow redeem suffering.

310




idea" of salvation through suffering, albeit under another name.13 In- deed, I would argue that Toporov's interpretation of the "Petersburg Text" confuses two related but different phenomena: first, the notion that "the end justifies the means" implicit in the creation of Peter's city and the Petrine reforms in general and its various metamorphoses into any form of theodicy (understood in the broadest sense as the ideologies by means of which the ways of various "deities" are justified), which we should perhaps call the "Petersburg idea;" second, the most powerful interrogations of this idea in works of art that indeed form a "Petersburg text" or "Pe-

tersburg texts." These texts do not follow Toporov in seeing any particular virtue in the courageous acceptance (as opposed to the artistic expres- sion) of the tragically irreconcilable.

Here, then, are the key elements of the "Petersburg text" as I believe

Brodsky and many other Russian writers have understood them. First, based on their belief that Pushkin's Mednyi vsadnik is a creation of a parallel Petersburg intended to rival "Peter's creation" (Petra tvorenie), and tak-

ing their cue from the fact that Pushkin himself, as Evgenii Baratynskii prophesied, was destined to be Peter the Great's counterpart in culture, Brodsky and his great predecessors (Fedor Dostoevskii and Osip Mandel'shtam in the first instance) create a Petersburg text whose values counterbalance and transcend those that are fundamental to the city's existence-in other words, the fact that it is built on blood, tears, and bones.14 This is not to say that Brodsky and other writers do not investi-

gate both pro and contra, as Mednyi vsadnik itself teaches them to do, but it is to claim that their most important artistic statements attain the au-

thority of a second, rival, moral government. As enunciated by both Dosto- evskii in his "Pushkin speech" and his Ivan Karamazov, this refusal to be an architect under such conditions, to build one's happiness on another's

suffering, becomes not only a rebellion against all the actual and would- be Peters, Stalins, and Napoleons of this world, but even a refusal to ac-

cept God's world (the returning of the ticket in The Brothers Karamazov).15 Second, these authors accept that for the Russian writer the cost of such

rivalry with the creator of the real Petersburg or its symbolic equivalent (whether that be divine harmony, personal happiness, socialist paradise, or any ideal that requires that someone else play what Vissarion Belinskii termed the role of dissonance) is usually madness, suffering, death-

though perhaps also with the hope of redemption and resurrection. Not

surprisingly, this more personal quest for salvation and willingness to be a

scapegoat can overlap uneasily with the broader soteriological myth that it is meant to challenge. And third, Brodsky in particular must have realized that, if at some level the Petersburg text is synonymous with Russia's

13. Hellebust, "The Real St. Petersburg," 507. 14. E. A. Baratynskii to Pushkin, first half of December (after 7 December) 1825, in

V E. Vatsuro, M. I. Gillel'son, I. B. Mushina, and M. A. Tur'ian, eds., Perepiska A. S. Push- kina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1982), 1:416-17.

15. On what Yury Kublanovsky terms Brodsky's "litigation with the almighty," see "A Yankee in Russian Poetry: An Interview with Yury Kublanovsky," in Valentina Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (New York, 1992), 200-14.

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312 Slavic Review

search for identity, then it is presumably no less implicated in the Russian

poet's search for his own role.16 If this is so, then the question arises: what

happens if one leaves this text behind? Can one ever return to it, and should it be a cause for regret if one cannot? Can one ever escape it?

One may view Brodsky's decision to "return the ticket"-one-way or return-that would have taken both his soul and body to Petersburg in the light of such questions. Although in the earlier period of his exile

Brodsky apparently both hoped and expected that sooner or (more likely) later he would indeed walk the streets of his native city again, as time went on, and particularly after the death of his parents, his attitude

changed. In response to the question in a 1991 interview, "Do you ever in- tend to go back to Russia?" we hear, in the inimitable Brodsky voice, "I don't know, I may, I may not. You can't return to a childhood. You can't

step twice into the same little river. It would be like returning to your first wife, about as rewarding as that. Not that I had a first wife ... (laughs)."17 Yet above and beyond that fear of returning to some sacred space is Brod-

sky's belief that to go back would have suggested-if only to a minute de-

gree, and to Brodsky himself above all--that somehow a certain justice had been done with his triumphant return, and that this in turn would have slighted the suffering of his parents and others he loved, as well as his own suffering. By staying away, in life and in death, Brodsky was mak-

ing perfectly clear that there are some things that cannot be put right; of- fenses that cannot or must not be forgiven, whoever commits them and for whatever reasons. He did not want to return to the scene of love, but also, unlike Raskol'nikov, he resisted the Siren call to return to the scene of the crime-perhaps above all else because this "Calvinist" probably blamed himself for everything that had happened as much if not more than he blamed those who refused to let parents and son meet again.18

So such a "returning of the ticket" illuminates further, I would suggest, what Sontag meant in saying Brodsky's decision was "emblematic of who he was." And perhaps Brodsky was correct not to return, seeing that even after his death the Russian state and many readers of all persuasions still seem eager to exercise unreasonable levels of control over the poet's body and soul, words and views, or else to subject him to ignorant, envious, or malicious criticism. No doubt he was also troubled by the fact that too

many of the old ways and old faces still remained in place, that no satis-

factory coming to terms with the lessons of the past had taken place, still less was there any sense of the need for a more visible, more genuine re-

pentance and justice. Too much had changed, and too little. On another level, however, it is important to realize that to return to

Petersburg in word, in spirit, may also be to return the ticket, to refuse the rules by which others play, because by following Ivan Karamazov and Ma-

16. See Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 3-4.

17. Mike Hammer and Christina Daub, 'Joseph Brodsky: An Interview," in Cynthia L. Haven, ed.,Joseph Brodsky: Conversations (Jackson, Miss., 2002), 155.

18. On Brodsky's self-definition as a type of Calvinist, see for example Elizabeth Elan, "An Interview withJoseph Brodsky," in Haven,Joseph Brodsky: Conversations, 179.




rina Tsvetaeva in refusing to pay such a high price for harmony one is con-

tributing to the rival "Petersburg Texts" outlined above. That such a refusal, however, may paradoxically also be (mis?)read as establishing a parallel between the readiness to suffer for one's art, on the one hand, and

any ends and means philosophy (whether underwritten by man or God), on the other, clearly troubled Brodsky greatly. He was aware that he was indebted to what Akhmatova termed his "ideal" poetic biography not only for some of his fame but also for much of the grief and reason that fueled his poetry. His attempts to downplay the importance of his or any poet's life do not, however, fully disguise his anxiety as to whether the power of the charismatic or kenotic poet is lost when his poetic stance is translated into a society in which the poet's role is very different. Yet Brodsky genuinely wished to-and felt the need to-reinvent himself as a western

poet and was aware that any successful attempt to escape the gravitational pull of Russian culture and Russian poetry's "validation through persecution" could help in freeing both the culture and himself from the obliga- tion of sacrifice.19

Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that the outcome of this struggle was that Brodsky increasingly realized the need to return, symbolically at least, to the Petersburg/Russian tradition (even as his continued physical absence seemed to argue the opposite, his preference of the poet's art over his life): his best intentions and his frequent protests against melodramatic readings of any poetic fate notwithstanding, he seems to have experienced a sense of personal tragedy from the fact that he could not make poetry matter enough in American culture. This sor- row may have been exacerbated by his knowledge that he would not live

long enough to create English-language poems worthy to stand alongside his Russian verses. In my reading of his "last" poem, "August," I will show how the image of Petersburg, and what it represents, can emerge in

strange ways in Brodsky's poetry: it reveals Brodsky's understanding that one does have to step into the Neva twice if one is a Russian writer-and in the certain knowledge that it is now the Styx or some other deadly "Chernaia rechka" (Black creek).20

The Petersburg text's essential connotations of political, moral, and

metaphysical rebellion, a la Tsvetaeva, and an awareness that the cost of such rebellion may be death are manifested subtly yet powerfully in "Au-

gust."21 As argued above, the symbolic return to Petersburg in one's writ-

19. The formulation "validation through persecution" is taken from G. S. Smith, "Russian Poetry: The Lives or the Lines? Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association read at University College London on 17 March 2000," in Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (2000): xl.

20. True, as Leonid Batkin notes, Brodsky is always rewriting his last will and testa- ment. Yet it does seem appropriate to treat "August" as a special case, an ideal last word that hopes that it may not turn out to be so; the important point is that it is clearly intended as a final self-elegy, where Brodsky's poetic past flashes before his and our eyes. Leonid Batkin, Tridtsat' tret'ia bukva: Zametki chitatelia na poliakh stikhov Iosifa Brodskogo (Moscow, 1997), 319.

21. The following is a selection (based to a large extent on Kononen's and Jennifer Jean Day's excellent studies) of the Brodskian texts (both pre- and postexile) where Pe-

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314 Slavic Review

ing may be seen as an acceptance of the heroic fate of the Russian writer; my reading of "August" will suggest that it is consciously structured as a "Smert' poeta" (death of the poet) and an "Exegi monumentum" poem- in other words, it is both an elegy for the tradition and its poets and a self-

elegy. The broader question of whether it was Brodsky's last poem by chance or by design-whose? how?-will have to be addressed elsewhere, although some possible avenues for further study shall be indicated.22

ABrycT

MaJIeHbKHe ropoga, rAe BaM He cKa>KyT npaBly. 4a H 3aqeM BaM OHa, Be!b Bce paBHo-Buepa. Bq3bI mLypmaT 3a OKHOM, noJAaKHBaa jiaHimaiTy, H3BeCTHOMy TOJIbKO noe3,ay. rAe-To ryAnT nqejia.

C,eJiaB ce6e Kapbepy H3 nepenyTbA, BIHTI3b caM Tenepb CBeTO4op; nHnoc, BnepeAH-peKa. 1 pa3IHHua MeXKAy 3epKaJIOM, B KOTOpOe BbI rJaHITeCb, H1 TeMH, KTO BaC He HOMHHT, TO)Ke HeBeJIIKa.

3anepTbie B cKapy, CTaBHH yBBTbI cnneTHeio H11JH nIpOCTO JIIOJIoOOM, 'To6 He IOIIaCTb BIIpOCaK.

3aropeJibii noJApOCTOK, Bbi6exaBmuiH B nepeAHIoIo, y Bac oT6HpaeT 6yAymee, CTOa B OAHmX Tpycax.

Io3TOMy aojiro cMepKaeTca. Beqep o6bIiHO OTJIHT B (OpMy BOK3aJIbHOiH HnoimaAI, co CTaTyei H T. n., rge B3rJI1AJ, B KOTOPOM tIHTaeTC <<Byab TbI IpOKJIT>>,

npaMo nponop1IHOHaJIeH OTCYTCTBYIoWeHi Tonne.

aHBapb 1996

(August // Welcome to small towns, where you'll find the truth escapes. / But what use is it to you now, with everything so yesterday. / Elms murmur at the window, nodding agreement with a landscape / familiar only to a train. A bee, droning, flies away. // Having made a career out of the cross-

tersburg plays an important role, whether literally as the location or symbolically: "Stansy," "Stansy gorodu," "Bessmertiia u smerti ne proshu," "Evreiskoe kladbishche okolo Leningrada," "Ostanovka v pustyne," "Shestvie," "Peterburgskii roman," "Otryvok," "Pochti elegiia," "S fevralia po aprel'," "Prachechnyi most," "My vyshli s pochty priamo na kanal," "Ot okrainy k tsentru," and of course various prose works written in English, most notably "Room and a Half," "Less Than One," and "A Guide to a Renamed City." "Razvivaia Pla- tona," "Polden' v komnate," the "Chast' rechi" cycle, and many of the poems addressed to Marina Basmanova may also be considered part of the Petersburg text. On Brodsky and Petersburg, see Kononen, "Four Ways of Writing the City"; Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 256- 84; and Jennifer Jean Day, "Memory as Space: The Created Petersburg of Vladimir Nabokov andJoseph Brodskii," (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2001).

Kononen notes that few works of the 1980s are directly linked with Petersburg, "Ek- loga 4-zimniaia" being an important exception. Nonetheless, typically Petersburg themes are addressed throughout the period 1972-1996, above all through portraits of Italian cities: "Dekabr'vo Florentsii," "Rimskie elegii," "Venetsianskie strofy," "V Italii," "La- guna," and of course Watermark. Kononen, "Four Ways of Writing the City, " 10-11.

22. For more on these matters see Jens Herlth, "Poet i spletni (Ob odnom motive v poslednem stikhotvorenii Brodskogo)," in P. Fast andJ. Madloch, eds., Brodski w analizach i interpretacjach (Katowice, 2000), 93-112, esp. 93-95.




roads, now the knight / finds himself a traffic signal; plus, ahead, a river lies. / And the difference between the mirror you're holding in your sight / and those who don't recall you, is virtually nothing in any wise. // Closed amidst the heat, the shutters are wreathed in slander / or perhaps it's simply ivy, so as not to cause offense. / A bronzed youth, running onto the ve- randa, / deprives you of your future, standing naked but for underpants. // So that's the reason the twilight lingers. Evening's habitually cast / in the guise of a railway square, a statue's form, and all that jazz, / where a gaze in which is read "So damn and blast / you" is directly in proportion to the absent mass. //January 1996)23

There already exist a number of excellent critical readings of this

poem, principally those by G. S. Smith, Leonid Batkin, Petr Vail', Jens Herlth, Andrei Ranchin, and Georgii Levinton.24 But much remains enigmatic. One of the main mysteries of this poem is raised by Vail': Why, when snowed up in New York in January 1996, does Brodsky write of the heat of small towns in August? Vail' notes that Brodsky seems to have been putting his affairs in order at this time, and that precisely in December 1995-

January 1996 Brodsky, in reading almost exclusively Pushkin (whose death in January 1837 seems to inform many apparently innocent references to this month in Russian poetry, especially in the work of Mandel'shtam and

Brodsky) and talking about him frequently, seems to have been complet- ing "some sort of poetic-life parabola, if you like."25 This unusually ex-

plicit (for Brodsky) interest in Pushkin is confirmed by other witnesses, in-

cluding Lev Losev andJames Rice (indeed, the latter seems to have served as the immediate catalyst for Brodsky's renewed interest in Pushkin's

prose).26 It is as if the poet is giving us a clue-after many years of an un-

usually dismissive attitude toward Pushkin- of the Pushkinian framework

23. IosifBrodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. Ia. A. Gordin, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1998-2001) 4: 204. My translation. There are at least two excellent literal versions of this poem: one by G. S. Smith in his article "'Long Growing Dark': Joseph Brodsky's 'August,'" in Stephanie Sandler, ed., Rereading Russian Poetry (New Haven, 1999), 248; and the other by F. D. Reeve, in his review of Brodsky's Collected Poems in English, in Poetry 178, no. 1 (April 2001), 33-34.

24. Smith, "Long Growing Dark," 248-55; Batkin, Tridtsat' tret'ia bukva, 290; Petr Vail', "Poslednee stikhotvorenie Iosifa Brodskogo," in Iakov Gordin, ed., Iosif Brodskii: Tvor- chestvo, lichnost' sud'ba; Itogi trekh konferentsii (St. Petersburg, 1998), 5-7; Herlth, "Poet i spletni"; Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 235-36, 239, 274-75, 283; Georgii Levinton, "Smert' poeta: Iosif Brodskii," in Gordin, IosifBrodskii:Tvorchestvo, lichnost' sud'ba, 190-215, in particular 200, 204; Georgii Levinton, "Tri razgovora: O liubvi, poezii i (anti)gosu- darstvennoi sluzhbe," in Rossiia/Russia (New Series) 1, no. 9 (1998): 245, 246, 276.

25. Vail', "Poslednee stikhotvorenie Iosifa Brodskogo," 5. 26. See Lev Losev, "Vstuplenie," in Lev Losev and Petr Vail', eds., IosifBrodskii: Trudy i

dni (Moscow, 1999), 13-18; and in the same volume, Dzheims Rais (James Rice), "O perepiske s I. Brodskim," 19-20; Iosif Brodskii, "Pis'mo Dzheimsu Raisu," 21-23. See also in the same volume Vail', "Rifma Brodskogo," 5-9, and "Vsled za Pushkinym," 24-28. The critical literature on the theme of "Pushkin and Brodsky" is of course extensive, and it is clear that Pushkin was of far more importance to Brodsky than he was willing or able to admit. See in particular: Valentina Polukhina, "Pushkin and Brodsky: The Art of Self- Deprecation," in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, eds., Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, vol. 1, "Pushkin's Secret": Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin (Amsterdam, 2003), 153-57; and Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, especially 200-380.

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in which he now wishes his own life and art to be read.27 This is done in a

typically understated manner, that is, the focus is Pushkin's more obscure

prose works (such as "The History of the Village of Goriukhino"), and in some crucial respects Brodsky is eager to distinguish himself from Push- kin. True, as Vail"s account of one of their telephone conversations makes clear, he shares Pushkin's disdain for the "chern'" (the mob), his dislike of the crowd's sense that they own the poet, and his belief in the poet's need for a private life. As always, Brodsky is at pains to separate the artist's life from his works.

Indeed, the most significant detail that emerges from the accounts

given by Vail', Losev, and Rice, both for an understanding of "August" and of Brodsky himself, concerns precisely the issue of what the correct rela-

tionship between life and art might be. In response to Vail"s suggestion that the author, by the very act of publishing his work, makes himself public property, Brodsky argues that the artist offers his public not himself, but his works, and then proposes that the entanglement of art with life ex-

plains the mystery of Pushkin's duel and death. In Vail"s retelling of their conversation, Brodsky claimed that it was Pushkin's blurring of the bound- aries between life and literature that led to his tragic end. To Vail"s argument that Pushkin in his last years and months of his life was surely acting in full accord with everything we know about him, Brodsky replied that, although by the mid-1830s Pushkin had indeed changed quite consider-

ably, the story of the duel reveals an "element of tautology, a certain rep- etition of elements of his life which proved to be fatal." Vail' continues, "He was at a parting of the ways, added Brodsky, and there was no traffic

light standing there, so that the path which he chose, while it was chosen

freely, was not chosen completely freely all the same-precisely because the now changed Pushkin acted in the same way as the old Pushkin."28 Both the decision to write a poem about "August" as a last word rather than one on "January" and Brodsky's insistence on the necessity of keep- ing life and art separate therefore appear to be an attempt to deny that

27. Harold Bloom has written of how the "wholly mature strong poet" is peculiarly vulnerable in the last poetic phase, and that "this vulnerability is most evident in poems that quest for a final clarity, that seek to be definite statements, testaments to what is uniquely the strong poet's gift." (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [Oxford, 1973], 139-40). The reasons for Brodsky's dislike of the work of Harold Bloom is a complicated subject, as indeed are Bloom's writings themselves and the question of whether Bloom's writings on influence can be of help in studying Russian literature. Nev- ertheless, a case could certainly be made that Bloom's thesis illuminates Brodsky's practice in at least this poem. On the subject of Bloom and Russian literature, see in particular David M. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, 1998); Sara Pratt (Sarah Pratt), "Garol'd Blum i 'Strakh vliiania,'" Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 20 (1996): 5-16; and my "'The Burden of Memories': Toward a Bloomian Analysis of Influence in Osip Mandelstam's Voronezh Notebooks" (D. Phil. diss., Oxford University, 1996). On Brodsky and Bloom, see for example David M. Bethea,Joseph Brodsky and the Cre- ation of Exile (Princeton, 1994), xi, 10, 122-24, 138-39; John Givens, "The Anxiety of a Dedication: Joseph Brodsky's 'Kvintet/Sextet' and Mark Strand," in 'Joseph Brodsky," ed. Valentina Polukhina, special issue, Russian Literature 37, nos. 2-3 (15 February / 1 April 1995): 203-26.

28. Vail', "Vsled za Pushkinym," 25.



Brodsky ' "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text ?

Pushkin's ultimate significance is his fusion of life and art and to exorcize the fatidic consequences of the imitation of Pushkin. Vail' elsewhere argues that the lines in "August" about the traffic lights and crossroads are a purely lexical echo of Brodsky's words from their telephone conversation, but there is surely more to it than that.29

Still, why August? Is it simply that to write about 'January" would have seemed immodest, or would have tempted fate when the aim was to cheat it?30 Most scholars rightly see Brodsky's title as alluding to Boris Paster- nak's poem of the same name (from the final chapter of Doctor Zhivago, "Stikhotvoreniia Doktora Zhivago" [The poems of Dr. Zhivago]);31 and Vail' has pointed out some important ways in which the title of Brodsky's poem and its contents allude to Brodsky's personal life (to his parents, to Marina Basmanova).32 It is certainly true that some of the symbols in the poem (the train and the mirror, for example) raise again the thorny issue of the influence of Pasternak on Brodsky;33 but if Pasternak's poem is an important subtext here, it is primarily so as an example of how not to write a death of the poet poem. True, the mask of Zhivago dilutes the autobio- graphical melodrama somewhat, the sense of the "zrelishchnoe ponima- nie biografii" (understanding of biography as spectacle) that Pasternak himself had so criticized in Vladimir Maiakovskii's self-fashioning; but if Brodsky's "August" is a response to Pasternak's poem, then its answer is that one should not use so explicitly the lofty terminology of "life- creation" in talking about one's poetry.34 Moreover, the apparent com- placency of Pasternak's faith surely would have troubled Brodsky-if Pasternak is not aware of the problematic echoes of the anniversary of Hiroshima (though admittedly 6 August is "old style") in his references to the festival of "Vtoroi Spas" and the theme of the Transfiguration ("Vdrug kto-to vspomnil, chto segodnia / Shestoe avgusta po staromu, / Preo- brazhenie Gospodne"; Suddenly someone remembered that today / Sixth

29. Vail', "Poslednee stikhotvorenie Iosifa Brodskogo," 6. 30. On Mandel'shtam's poem "Kuda mne det'sia v etom ianvare? ..." as a crucial text

in Mandel'shtam's "imitation of Pushkin," see my article "Smert' avtora ili smert' poeta? (In- tertekstual'nost' v stikhotvorenii 'Kuda mne det'sia v etom ianvare? ...')" in O. G. Lasun- skii, G. A. Levinton, O. E. Makarova, P. M. Nerler, V G. Perel'muter, M. V Sokolova, and Iu. L. Freidin, eds., "Otdai menya, Voronezh . . .": Tret'i mezhdunarodnye Mandel'shtamovskie chteniia; Sbornik statei (Voronezh, 1994), 200-14.

31. Boris Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. A. Voznesenskii, D. S. Likhachev, D. F. Mamleev, and E. B. Pasternak (Moscow, 1989-1992), 3:525. On the back- ground to this poem, see Lazar' Fleishman, "Avtobiograficheskoe i 'Avgust' Pasternaka," in Stat'i o Pasternake (Bremen, 1977), 103-12, and Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Lit- erary Biography, vol. 2, 1928-1960 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 277-86.

32. Vail', "Poslednee stikhotvorenie Iosifa Brodskogo," 5-7. 33. On Pasternak and Brodsky, see for example Bethea,Joseph Brodsky and the Creation

of Exile, 140-73. 34. Pasternak, Okrannaia gramota, in Sobranie sochinenii, 4:228-29. On Man-

del'shtam's and Pasternak's very different views on the role of the poet in the early thirties, see for example my article "'Komu ne nadoeli lyubov' i krov': The Uses of Intertextuality in Mandelstam's 'Za gremuchuiu doblest' griadushchikh vekov,"' in Robin Aizlewood and Diana Myers, eds., Stoletie Mandel'shtama: Materialy simpoziuma (Tenafly, N.J., 1994), 136- 54. On zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation), see Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994).

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of August, old style, / Was our Lord's Transfiguration) Brodsky certainly would have been:

O6bIKHOBeHHO CBeT 6e3 nnaMeHI

14CXOAHT B 3TOT aeHb C OIaBopa, II OCeHb, ACHaA KaK 3HaMeHbe, K ce6e npHKOBbIBaeT B3opbI.

(This day a flameless radiant light / Is said to issue from Mount Tabor, / And autumn, like a portent bright, / Commands enraptured observation.)35

Brodsky may well have known that Pasternak's choice of date in this poem was no accident, for it looks back to 6 August 1903, the day the young Pasternak fell from a horse and broke his thigh, an event that proved to be a blessing in disguise. As Lazar' Fleishman notes, Pasternak's "August" "is evidence of the deep psychological and mythological context in which he saw the sudden change experienced at this point in his life."36

Furthermore, for Brodsky the imitations of Christ, Pushkin, and indeed Mandel'shtam (as well as the echoes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust) present in these lines might have seemed presumptuous, and we know of Brodsky's somewhat ungenerous view of Pasternak's personal qualities.37 Pasternak's poem might have seemed to him too "auto-

biographical" in its treatment of the "last love," and too melodramatic in the claims uttered by Pasternak's "... own prophetic voice of yore, / Intact, untainted by corruption":

"Ilpowaii, Ja3ypb Ilpeo6paKeHcKas 14 30JIOTO BTOpOro Cnaca, CMarqHI nocIie/Hei JIacKOi KCeHCKOOK MHe ropeqb pOKOBoro qaca.

IlpomaiTe, robI G6e3BpeMeHUmHbI. IlpOCTTMCA, 6e3AHe yHIKeHmH BpocaIomaa BbI3OB CeHLmIHHa! 5i-nojie TBoero cpaxceHbI.

npomafi, pa3max KpbJIa pacnIpaBJleHHb,i , noJIeTa BOJIbHoe ynopCTBo, 14 o6pa3 MHpa, B CJIOBe aBJeiHHbmi, H TBopieCTBO, H 1yAOTBOpCTBO".

('Farewell, Transfiguration's azure / And gold of Savior's Day the second, / Let gentle female hands caress / Me as the bitter ending beckons. // 'Farewell to those uncounted years. / We fain must say goodbye, o woman, / Who braved indignity's abyss! / My heart was witness to your striving. //

35. Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:525. Translation by Christopher Barnes, from Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, 2:277.

36. Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 13.

37. See for example the interview with Adam Michnik, "Samyi derzkii vyzov vlasti- ne interesovat'sia eiu," (originally published in Polish) in Polukhina, IosifBrodskii: Bol'shaia kniga interv'iu, 652-53.

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Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text ?

'Farewell, o span of outstretched wing, / Free flight forever soaring on- wards, / World's image manifest in speech, / And artistry, the work of wonders!')38

While Brodsky's title surely signals that his is a "death of the poet" poem, albeit one very different from Pasternak's, the title "August" for both poets has a broader significance. Especially for Brodsky, with his personal connections to Akhmatova and his sense of being a "second Osia," "August" is August 1921, the month of the deaths of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilev, and therefore also associated in Brodsky's mind with

Osip Mandel'shtam's poem in memory of them, "Kontsert na vokzale" (Concert at the railway station). There is of course a third August death, maybe the most painful of all for both Pasternak and Brodsky: Marina Tsvetaeva's. Brodsky found Tsvetaeva the most difficult poet to compete with, but the more likely reason why her only presence in Brodsky's poem seems to be in its title, as opposed to the direct or indirect allusions it contains to most of the other members of Russia's dead poets' society, is that he would have shared Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's view that Tsvetaeva's was the most terrible of all fates (and certainly not one he wanted to repeat).39

The title of Brodsky's poem should also remind us of Innokentii An- nenskii's two poems with the title "August," in particular the poem that be-

gins "Eshche goriat luchi pod svodami dorog" (The lights still burn under the vaults of the roads).40 Brodsky's allusions to Annenskii here and elsewhere underline his own poetic genealogy and his links with the Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk subcategories of the Petersburg text. More important still, the general sense that Annenskii somehow haunts this poem-the titles alone of his various "trefoils" and of their constituent poems seem to provide the raw material for Brodsky's poem: "twilight," "transience," "August," "doom," "damnation, " mourning," "longing," "station," "train," "statue," "crowd" and many others-is an important guide for the reader. Yet the allusions to Annenskii are more of a means to an end, for if there is a "dominant" subtext in Brodsky's "August," it is almost certainly Man-

38. Boris Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:526. Translation by Christopher Barnes, from Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, 2:278.

39. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (Har- mondsworth, England, 1976), 526. Brodsky's witty answer to the badly worded question as to whether he wanted to return to Russia from exile, "to follow the example of Solzheni- tsyn and Tsvetaeva" need not exclude, and perhaps betrays, a deeper fear (and acceptance?) of an analogous fate: "zhelania posledovat' primeru Tsvetaevoi tochno net" (I certainly have no desire to follow Tsvetaeva's example). From answers given to an audience in Manhattan in April 1995, published in Ogonek, No. 21, May 1995, reprinted in Polukhina, Iosif Brodskii: Bol'shaia kniga interv'iu, 659.

40. Herlth claims that this "August" of Annenskii seems to be a more direct influence on Brodsky's poem, but does not specify on what grounds. Brodsky may have been struck by the apparent allusion to Annenskii's "August" in the penultimate line of Mandel'shtam's "Kontsert na vokzale": "Kogda zhe ty?" in Annenskii, "Kuda zhe ty?" in Mandel'shtam, making Annenskii's poem a point of origin for Mandel'shtam's necrology for Russian poets. Herlth, "Poet i spletni," 99. Innokentii Annenskii, "Avgust" (1. "Khrizantema." 2. "Elek- tricheskii svet v allee"), and "Avgust" ("Eshche goriat luchi pod svodami dorog"), in Stikhotvoreniia i tragedii, ed. A. V Fedorov (Leningrad, 1990), 61-62, 92.

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del'shtam's "Kontsert na vokzale."41 At the Mandelstam Centenary Con- ference in London in 1991, Brodsky participated in an energetic discussion concerning the identity of the "dear shade" in Mandel'shtam's poem. It is striking that for Brodsky (as for most participants) this "milaia ten'" referred to Annenskii alone.42 It is of course highly significant that An- nenskii died from a heart attack on the steps of Tsarskoe Selo railway station in St. Petersburg;43 but in fact Mandel'shtam's poem is an elegy to practically all the important Russian poets, albeit one commemorating Blok and Gumilev in the first instance. It takes as its starting point the Feb- ruary 1921 Pushkin celebrations in Petrograd, this being the primary meaning of the "funeral feast for the dear shade," as Robert P. Hughes has pointed out;44 and, as revealed in a number of excellent readings by Omry Ronen, Gregory Freidin, and Boris Gasparov, the poem is a requiem for a generation or even an entire age. In Gasparov's words, the poem "marks the departure of the 'spirit of music,' evidently symbolized by Blok's death. Pavlovsk station is a symbol of music's exit from the 'iron world': the St. Petersburg-Pavlovsk railroad line, the first in Russia, was built in 1837, the year of Pushkin's death."45 The implied parallel between the end of one age in 1921 and the possible extinction of poetry with the death of the "last poet" hinted at in Brodsky's poem is therefore highly significant, both in personal and cultural terms.

To turn to Brodsky's poem itself: in the opening lines the threatening nature of this truth-the knowledge of one's impending death-is clear enough. The importance of the theme of small towns in Brodsky's poetry has been noted, as have the self-quotations here (from "Kellomiaki" in particular). This town (these interchangeable, indistinguishable towns) may indeed have small-town attitudes, although if, as G. S. Smith suggests, one cannot easily place the town geographically, it may be best to view the

41. This may be one of those rare (?) instances where a poet is indeed indebted to critics. See for example Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'shtam (Jerusalem, 1983); Gre- gory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley, 1987), 187-94; Boris Gasparov, "The 'Golden Age' and Its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism," in Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Pa- perno, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992), 1-16; Boris Gasparov, "Tridtsatye gody-zheleznyi vek (k analizu mo- tivov stoletnego vozvrashcheniia u Mandel'shtama," in Gasparov, Hughes, and Paperno, Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, 150-79 (translated as "The Iron Age of the 1930s: The Centennial Return in Mandelstam" byJohn Henriksen, in Sandler, Rereading Russian Poetry, 78-103); B. M. Gasparov, "Eshche raz o funktsii podteksta v poeticheskom tekste ('Kontsert na vokzale')," in B. M. Gasparov, Literaturnye leitmotivy: Ocherki russkoi literatury XXveka (Moscow, 1994), 162-86.

42. See M. Pavlov, "Brodskii v Londone, iiul' 1991," in Osip Mandel'shtam, Sokhrani moiu rech' vol. 3, comp. 0. Lekmanov, P. Nerler, M. Sokolova, and I. Freidin (Moscow, 2000), ch. 2:34, 36, for a transcription of this discussion.

43. It is obviously significant for Brodsky and his poem that not only are Akhmatova and Pasternak (like Annenskii) major Russian poets with heart problems, "serdechniki," but also for both of them (on the evidence provided here) "August" seems to be the most terrible month.

44. Robert P. Hughes, "Pushkin in Petrograd, February 1921," in Gasparov, Hughes, and Paperno, Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, 211.

45. Gasparov, "The Iron Age of the 1930s," 80.

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location as "Anytown";46 but whether or not it is also definitely South

Hadley or Amherst or somewhere else is less important than the fact that elsewhere Brodsky states that small towns reveal the most important truth there is-about one's insignificance.47 For example, in Peresechennaia mestnost' (Broken country) Brodsky recalls renting his first home in Ann Arbor-one larger than necessary, in the (vain) hope that his parents would be allowed to join him-and, evidently still thinking of his parents, describes the everyday life of his neighbor (and one incident in particular when he observed her standing alone and staring at her garage door for five minutes or more) in terms that seem highly relevant to "August": "And I liked this, because this is the real truth about life. When no one needs you and you stand, not aware of anything, and look at the white

garage door. Now that's truth. Everyone tries to prove to us that we are the center of existence, that someone is thinking about us, that we are in some film or other in the leading role. Nothing of the sort. ... In the provinces . . . you are simply on your own in the purest form possible. Truly, alone on the earth, and that's remarkable, because that's the truth."48

How is one to square these and similar remarks with the first two lines of "August"? The overriding sense of the poem's opening seems to be that the only truth, or the only one that matters, is that the speaker (referring to himself as "You," but perhaps implying that the pronoun also refers to his readers' blissful-though temporary-ignorance of the truth) is soon to be dead. Another possibility might be that not only foreign capitals or

large towns can mirror Petersburg, so that in talking of provincial towns

Brodsky may have some other larger cities in mind in which small-minded attitudes, rather than good small-town values, are in evidence, and where truth and justice hardly coexist in a single line, let alone a single word. More likely, however, is that Brodsky is simply stating that on this occasion the doctors and friends in New York would tell (are telling) him the truth about his condition, a truth that seems synonymous with the lesson of one's insignificance.49 The apparent advantage of small towns at this mo-

46. Smith, "Long Growing Dark," 250 and 336n4, suggests reasons why these towns may not necessarily be in the United States. The closed shutters and "railway square" seem more suggestive of southern Europe: this deliberate blurring perhaps betrays another of the poem's fears-not only when or how but where the poet will die. Perhaps even more to the point, and following Pushkin's constant question to himself in this matter as well as in the former, Brodsky wonders where will he be laid to rest. One may recall Nabokov's observation that, "in common with Pushkin, I am fascinated by fatidic dates"-clearly Brod- sky is too. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York, 1990), 75.

47. Lev Losev, quoted in Smith, "Long Growing Dark," 336n4, argues for this being a New England town, more precisely, Amherst; other readers are convinced that Brodsky had in mind some specific traffic lights in South Hadley.

48. Joseph Brodsky, Peresechennaia mestnost': Puteshestviia s kommentariiami, ed. and af- terword, Petr Vail' (Moscow, 1995), 156-57.

49. Shtern's account of her conversations with Brodsky at the end of December 1995 and on 19 January 1996 reveals his doctors' insistence that their patient undergo surgery as soon as possible, certainly before the start of the semester at the end of January, and Brodsky's fear both of undergoing medical treatment and of not undergoing it. When asked during the phone call on 19 January why he had not gone for the operation, Brod- sky replied: "I'm frightened. I know that this is my only chance.... If I can manage to last

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ment, or at least for this one line, is that if one does not want to accept this truth, people here are too polite to tell the truth to his face (or simply do not know it), and his doctors leave him in peace. The poem begins, therefore, with an apparent denial of what the rest of the poem will be about, indeed, precisely what Brodsky believed all poetry was-a preparation for death.50 In this light, the escape-in imagination or fact-to South Hadley might have acquired for Brodsky the symbolic status of Pushkin's longing for the countryside (and perhaps death too): "Pora, moi drug, pora!" (It's time, my friend, it's time!).51 As Sumerkin notes, Brodsky had planned that on Sunday, 28 January 1996 he would leave for "his College in South Hadley-the Spring Semester was about to start, and he was hoping to repeat his trick of the previous year-to hide himself away from his doctors and illnesses in peaceful Massachusetts."52

Against this paradoxical backdrop of a physically banal yet symbolically tragic landscape, the rest of this stanza may seem incongruous.53 If it were not for the first two lines, it could depict a lazy summer's day in the (Chekhovian?) provinces where nothing much happens-a place visited only by the train. The elms and the bee could form part of a happy pas- toral scene, the bee reminiscent of Mandel'shtam's bees and perhaps also of Pushkin's beetle from Evgenii Onegin. But while the bee presumably bears its traditional meaning of poetic labor here, it is worth recalling that humming insects represent the noise of time in Brodsky's work, and that the poem "Sidia v teni" (Sitting in the shade) compares the threatening younger generation to bees.54 Moreover, Brodsky frequently follows the Russian apocalyptic tradition in comparing life to a train hurtling out of control, and heading one-way only, the journey that can be completed in a moment, so that perhaps we have his "Petersburg-Pavlovsk" version of Venedikt Erofeev's journey from Moscow to Petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line) here. Death is always present in Arcadia too.

But as we move on, the metaliterary and elegiac nature of this work, the fact that it is both elegy and self-elegy, both a tombeau or a "death of the poet" poem and an Exegi monumentum all rolled into one, becomes increasingly apparent.55 The suspicion arises that the problem of being yes-

out until the end of the semester ... I'll go in the Spring.... But I'm so frightened." Shtern, Brodskii: Osia, Iosif Joseph, 265.

50. "Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying." Brodsky, "The Child of Civilization," in Brodsky, Less Than One, 123.

51. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, 17 vols. (1937- 59, repr., Moscow, 1994; hereafter PSS), 3.1:330.

52. Aleksandr Sumerkin, "Iosif Brodskii (24 maia 1940-28 ianvaria 1996)," supple- ment to Russkaia mysl' no. 4126 (16-22 May 1996), iv. Quoted in Shtern, Brodskii: Osia, losif, Joseph, 267.

53. As so often in Brodsky's work, the coexistence here of high tragedy and lowly sur- roundings recalls W. H. Auden, most notably his "Musee des Beaux Arts" (1938).

54. Brodsky, "Sidia v teni," Sochineniia, 3:255-61. 55. "Tombeau" here refers to Lawrence Lipking's extension of Stephane Mallarme's

term, as developed in his The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, 1981). Many of the most stimulating recent studies of English and American elegies con- centrate on elegies for poets, both those in which the dead or dying poet is the precursor poet or the author of the elegy himself. See for example Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourn- ing: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago, 1994) and the same author's Yeats and

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terday's man is also (if not primarily) a literary issue, and that "vchera"

may also echo Mandel'shtam's meditation on yesterday's poetry and liter-

ary priority in the essay "Slovo i kul'tura" (The word and culture).56 This second stanza, not surprisingly, has received most attention. The words at first glance suggest irony and self-criticism: that the once proud tradition of Pushkin's "Prorok" (The prophet), the poet's transformation at the

parting of the ways (pereput'e) has come to this-a career, a foreign land, a landscape with traffic lights.57 But it is unlikely that Brodsky (at this of all moments) is simply being ironic at his own or Russian poetry's expense, or that he really believes that the "crossroads" of Pushkin's poem "Prorok," the lyric that in Vladislav Khodasevich's view decided the entire future- heroic, kenotic-path of Russian poetry, has enabled him to craft not the

expected "fate of the poet," but a western-style "career."58 It seems just as

likely that the ironies which are not (just) ironies are barbs aimed at those western critics who do not understand the Russian experience and who therefore misread Brodsky's achievement and accuse him of exploiting his suffering-though of course they do also reveal Brodsky's fears as to whether the two paths are essentially incompatible or not, and the neces-

sity to choose if they are.59 In other words, everything here contains apparently conflicting

meanings simultaneously-recall how in Mandel'shtam's rendering the

poetic word has meanings sticking out on all sides-and it is the task of the poem, and the reader, to see if there is a way of reconciling them.60 Both Losev and Valentina Polukhina, among our very best readers of

Brodsky, see no problem in reading a positive meaning into these lines: the knight is the poet, and the traffic signal is a metaphor for the poet's transformation into a star, since both "svetofor" and "zvezda" are "light carriers" (the former being literally a "light carrier," with a probable allu-

the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven, 1990). In the Russian literary tradition, the sub-genre of the "Smert' poeta"' poem would seem to correspond to the tombeau, and the "Pamiatnik" or "Exegi monumentum" could be seen as akin to the sum- ming up process termed "harmonium" by Lipking, although what he usually means by this is the epic that crowns a life's work (the Aeneid, Divine Comedy, Faust, etc.).

56. Osip Mandel'shtam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. P. M. Nerler and S. S. Averin- tsev (Moscow, 1990), 2:169-70.

57. Herlth also points out the clash of high and low styles and poetic meanings in the second stanza, though my interpretation of these details differs somewhat from his (and from Ranchin's). Herlth, "Poet i spletni," 100; Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 235-36, 239.

58. Vladislav Khodasevich, "Pushkin," in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Mos- cow, 1996-97), 1:489-90. Brodsky's lines allude to Khodasevich's "Pamiatnik," a poem written on 28 January 1928 that describes the poet's wish that his monument be placed at a crossroads. Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. John Malmstad and Robert Hughes, 5 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1983-90), 1:211. For perhaps the most controversial accusa- tions of careerism on Brodsky's part (and far more besides), see Craig Raine's "A reputation subject to inflation," Financial Times, 16 November 1996, books sec., 19.

59. Raine especially seems guilty of various misunderstanding both of individual words and poems and of what being a Russian poet actually entails.

60. Osip Mandel'shtam, "Razgovor o Dante," in Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. P. Nerler and A. T. Nikitaev (Moscow, 1993), 3:226. For a thought- provoking study of Mandel'shtam's poetics, see Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Mandel'shtam's Po- etics: A Challenge to Postmodernism (Toronto, 2000).

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sion to "Lucifer").61 So, despite the late twentieth-century setting, the poet remains a knight and a light, an affirming flame in the darkness, and he is still a form of moral guidance for his society. Moreover, armed with such wisdom, he should be able to proceed with care-presumably not confusing art and life, and avoiding the temptation to fuse them and thereby die in these fateful "Pushkin days." Yet the concluding lines in this stanza, with their echoes of another sui generis "Pamiatnik" poem, Brod- sky's fortieth-birthday poem "Ia vkhodil vmesto dikogo zveria v kletku" (I have entered, in lieu of a wild beast, a cage) and Khodasevich's "Pered zerkalom" (Before the mirror), in which the mirror reveals that loneliness is the truth, that, to rephrase Conrad, we live as we die-alone-seem to betray the poet's fear that this is not a middle-of-life poem but the final self-elegy.62

So far, so bad, as it were; but the third stanza both shows the problem and the solution, in the spirit of Brodsky's favorite words from Robert Frost: "the best way out is always through."63 The important point here is that the presence of the closed shutters and the anaphora on "za" (pre- pared for by the "zachem" and "za oknom"), together with the implication that the "zerkalo" may offer a vision of a great beyond ("za"),64 are meant to bring to mind Pushkin's masterly simile describing the death of Lenskii in Evgenii Onegin, the death that came to symbolize Pushkin's own:

ToMy Ha3aA OIHO MrHOBeHbe B ceM ceMepe 6HJGocb BAoxHoBeHbe, Bpaxaa, HaaeKaa i JIno60Bb

HIrpajia )KI3Hb, KineJia KpOBb:

Tenepb, KaK B aoMe onycTeJIOM, Bce B HeM H TIXO H TeMHO; 3aMOJIKJmo HaBcerAa OHO. 3aKpbITbI CTaBHH, OKHa MeJIOM 3a6eJIeHbI. Xo3IiiKH HeT. A rAe, 6or BecTb. IlponaJI H cJIeq.

61. Polukhina's and Losev's readings (from private communications with Smith and quoted by him in "Long Growing Dark," 338n19) view the knight, crossroads, river, and star as symbolic of the heroic destiny and posthumous fame of the true Russian poet. The river here is presumably the river of time from Derzhavin's last poem, "Reka vremen v svoem stremlen'i," as well as being the Neva and Lethe. Ranchin's argument that the "Lu- cifer" connection is an allusion to "Prorok" is not fully convincing; Lucifer's presence here is more likely a broader allusion to the theme of the fallen angel, and in particular to Bloom's reading of Milton's Satan as the paradigm of the strong but belated poet. Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 235-36. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 19-45. But see also Levinton, "Tri

razgovora," 246. 62. Brodskii, Sochineniia, 3:191. On this poem as a "Pamiatnik," see Valentina

Polukhina's "Exegi monumentum Iosifa Brodskogo," Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999, no. 4:63-72. Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:161-62.

63. Robert Frost, "A Servant to Servants," in Robert Frost, Early Poems, ed. Robert Faggen (Harmondsworth, England, 1988), 87.

64. Pushkin seems to associate death with the phonetics and semantics of "za" (perhaps naturally, given its literal meaning of "beyond"). His August 1836 self-elegy "Kogda za gorodom, zadumchiv, ia brozhu" (When, pensive, I wander outside the city) (Pushkin, PSS, 3.1:422) is one of the hidden subtexts of Brodsky's poem and a key link in the inter- textual chain leading back to Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

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Brodsky s "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text ?

(A moment earlier, inspiration / had filled this heart, and detestation / and hope and passion; life had glowed / and blood had bubbled as it flowed; / but now the mansion is forsaken; / shutters are up, and all is pale / and still within, behind the veil / of chalk the window-panes have taken. / The lady of the house has fled. / Where to, God knows. The trail is dead.)65

We shall return to this subtext momentarily. As Herlth notes, the references in this stanza to "ivy" and "gossip/slander" allude to the deaths and the posthumous fates of Russian poets, in particular to Pushkin and Maia- kovskii.66 Certain words in Brodsky's poem, especially some of those in

rhyming position ("v odnikh trusakh," "tolpe," and especially "vybezhav- shii v peredniuiu" and "spletneiu," all the more so as the shift to dactylic rhyme draws our attention to the latter two words) alert us to the work that perhaps is capable more than any other of establishing multiple per- spectives on the theme of the "death of the poet," Pasternak's "Smert' poeta," and especially the lines:

)bIji eHb, 6e3BpeAHbIi AeHb, 6e3BpeaHei AecATKa npeiKHHX AHei TBOHX.

ToJmilnJHCb, BbICTpOaCb B nepeAHei, KaK BbICTpeJI BbICTpO.JI 6bI I4X.

TbI cna:i, IIocTJIaB IocTeJIb Ha cnJIeTHe, CnaJi H, OTTpeneTaB, 6biJI THX, -

KpacnBbIi, ABaJu aTHIAByxjieTHHH. KaK npeAcKa3aJi TBOH TeTpanTHX.

TbI cnaJI, npHiKaB K inoAymie weKy, Cnaji,- co Bcex Hor, co Bcex -ioabIr Bpe3aacb BHOBb H BHOBb C HaCKOKy B pa3pRa npeAaHHi MOJIOAbIX. TbI B HHIX Bpe3aJIC5 TeM 3aMeTHeH, {TO HX OAHHIM HpbDKKOM OCTIHr. TBOii BbICTpeJ 6bIJI nOAo6eH 3THe B npeAropbH TpycoB H TpycHX.

(It was a day, a harmless one, / More harmless than many that led / To it.

They crowded in the hall, / Lining up as for a firing squad. // You slept, with slander for a bed, / Slept, easy after all your action, / A handsome

22-year-old, / As your Tetraptych foretold. // You slept, the pillow under

your head: / Slept, and at speed cutting through sleep, / Faster, faster, you took your place / Forever in the constellation / Of youthful legends. With one leap / You made it, were there in a trice. / Your shot, like an Etna, erupted / Among the foothills of cowardice.)67

65. Pushkin, PSS, 6:130-31. Translation from Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. CharlesJohnson (Harmondsworth, England, 1979), 170.

66. Herlth, "Poet i spletni," esp. 101-10. 67. Pasternak, Sobranie sochineniia, 1:390-91. Translation by Peter France, Poets of

Modern Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), 92-93. As B. M. Gasparov notes, "the death of the poet" becomes the "most powerful myth-creating motif in the post-Revolutionary epoch." Pasternak's poem is central to Levinton's extremely valuable exploration of the theme of the death of the poet in Brodsky's work (and in the wider poetic tradition). Gasparov, "The 'Golden Age' and Its Role," 13. Levinton, "Smert' poeta: Iosif Brodskii."

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Reading Brodsky's poem in the light of Pasternak's reminds us how the traditional symbols of poetic immortality-namely the laurel and the "talk" about him that is (among other things) the poet's reputation, the continued existence of his word-were transformed in Russian poetry, above all by Pushkin's death and Mikhail Lermontov's "Smert' poeta," into the "crown of thorns" and slanderous accounts of the poet's life, work, and death. Prophetically, all these meanings are present in the ambiguous "slukh" ("rumor," "fame") in Pushkin's "Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi" (I raised to myself a monument unfashioned by hands; hereafter referred to as "Pamiatnik") and, more broadly, are implied by the poem's covert but undeniable ambivalence toward both present and future fame.68

At the same time, by alluding to Pasternak's poem, Brodsky also recalls his earlier transformation of these themes of slander and posthumous tri- umph found in one of his most important earlier statements on the fate of the poet, "Otkazom ot skorbnogo perechnia-zhest." (Refusing to cat- alogue all of one's woes . ..) The allusion to Pasternak's poem is linked here with Brodsky's fear of the return of the "kalendarnoi rifme" ("calendar's rhyme") (that is, of a January death making a rhyming pair with Pushkin's death in January) mentioned in his "Stikhi o smerti T. S. Eliota" (Verses on the death ofT. S. Eliot) -"ne miagche na spletne sebe posteli / chem mne-na listve kalendarnoi" (your bed, built on gossip, is surely as hard / as mine on the calendar's margin), which concludes with the as- tonishing lines:

FrJymIeHoiK pbI6oI BcnIJIbIBaa Co AHa, KOMya, KaK npH3paK no Tpe6aM, KaK TeJIO, HcTJieBsmee npeecKe pAsHa, KaK TeHb MOM, B3anyCKH C He6OM, IIOBCIOy HaqHeT BO3BeWaTb o60 MHe Te6e, KaK 3aipaBCKHH MeCCHA, H KOpHHTCa 6yAeT Ha KaA)KoH CTeHe B TOM aOMe, MqbA Kpbima--PoccHIa.

(A stunned fish that surfaces from the stream's depths / a wandering ghost at interments, / a body that rots in its clean winding sheets: / my shade, vying with the bright heavens, / will everywhere loudly proclaim to your ears / that I am a full-fledged messiah, / whose body will writhe in your sight on each wall / of that house whose high roof is called "Russia.")69

Starkly contrasting with the above 1967 portrayal of the bard, Brodsky's choice in "August" of the image of the closed shutters, and the ironic references to "updated" laurels and quarrels, is telling. Lermontov, in prais- ing Pushkin in "Smert' poeta," used the same worn-out images (extin- guished flame, faded flower) as Lenskii would have done in an elegy, as parodied by Pushkin himself in his first attempt to describe Lenskii's death. This, of course, is followed by the simile of the deserted house,

68. M. I. Lermontov, "Smert' poeta," in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow, 1961-62), 1:412-14; Pushkin, "Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi," PSS 3.1:424.

69. Brodskii, Sochineniia, 2:193-94. Translation fromJoseph Brodsky,Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems, trans. George L. Kline (New York, 1973), 66.



Brodsky s "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text ?

which Vladimir Nabokov called "Pushkin's own contribution, a sample as it were of what he can do."70

Brodsky prefers Pushkin's example here, not Lenskii's, Lermontov's, or Pasternak's; but his attitude to the themes of the "death of the poet" and to his "monument" are in deadly earnest. As in Pushkin's "Pamiatnik," humility and pride go hand in hand. Indeed, there are many hidden points of reference to Pushkin's "last word" (itself an "August" poem by date of composition) in "August." The contrast between statue and poet and between poet and crowd in the last stanza reproduces the opposition of "crown" and "fool" in Pushkin's last stanza, as perhaps does the self- deprecating, jokey rhyme "i. t. p." Pushkin's "kleveta," "khvala," "venets," and "glupets" (slander, praise, crown/garland, fool) all have their "ironic" doubles-the ivy, the gossip, the danger of making a fool of oneself ("popast' vprosak"). Finally, if one wishes to seek a disguised monument in this "Pamiatnik" poem, then the "svetofor" could symbolize one of the multiple meanings contained in Pushkin's formulation "Aleksandriiskii stolp"-the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Foros.71

The next two lines (11-12) are both the most enigmatic and the most important in the poem. Scholars seem to agree that the young man is a threat to the narrator-the poet, presumably-but have ignored the most important reason why. Vail' suggests, correctly, that there is a reference here to Pushkin's "Vnov' ia posetil" (Once again I visited), though the theme is also present in other works by Pushkin, and the greater sexual explicitness here betrays a Yeatsian irritability, with a glance back at Brodsky's own "Avgustovskie liubovniki" ("Lovers in August"), that this is no country for old men when the young are "larking" around.72 In sup- port of Vail"s reading one may cite Brodsky's lines, "Teper' vsiudu an- tenny, podrostki, pni / vmesto derev'ev" (Now everywhere there are an- tennae, punks, stumps / instead of trees),73 especially as Ranchin, having expertly analyzed in Na piru Mnemoziny the ways in which Brodsky frequently rewrites Pushkin's 'Vnov' ia posetil" to symbolize the threat of the future generations-in particular of the demographic explosion as a threat to mankind and culture-has recently noted how Brodsky punned here on the word "podrost," meaning the shoots of young trees.74

G. S. Smith has provided an excellent reconstruction of whatever nar- rative may be present in the poem, but presumably if there is a plot of sorts here, it might also involve surprising this youth inflagrante with the Muse

70. Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, abridged ed., 2 vols. (Princeton, 1990), vol. 2, part 2:52-53. See also John Fennell, "Pushkin," in John Fennell, ed., Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers (London, 1973), 43-44.

71. On the possible meanings of "Aleksandriiskii stolp," see in particular Oleg Proskurin, Poeziia Pushkina, iii Podvizhnyi palimpsest (Moscow, 1999), 275-300, esp. 275-82; and Ranchin's analysis of the monument theme in Brodsky's work, Na piru Mnemoziny, 204-22, in particular note 4, 217-18.

72. Vail', "Poslednee stikhotvorenie Iosifa Brodskogo," 6. 73. Brodsky, "Fin de Siecle," in Sochineniia, 4:73. 74. Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, esp. 35-36; A. M. Ranchin, "Tri zametki o polisemii

v poezii Iosifa Brodskogo," in "Etiudy o Brodskom," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 56 (2002): 203.

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or whoever embodies her at this juncture. Not only is this sunburned (brazen, bronzed) youth naked but for his underpants, but the phrase "stoia," while of course only having the literal meaning of a person stand-

ing there, does seem to be a punning allusion as well. Brodsky's variations on Pushkin's sculptural myth indicate an awareness that Pushkin himself sometimes puns on erections when writing of statues and monuments; indeed, one suspects that the first stanza of Pushkin's "Pamiatnik" is not

completely innocent of this double meaning either. Brodsky certainly plays with such symbolism in his "Aere perennius," a merciless, difficult, less successful attempt at a self-elegy written shortly before "August" in which his pen plows furrows (i.e. verses) that outlast any immortality promised by religion and his creation is more powerful than the crowd's

procreation. Despite the opposition suggested here between pen and pe- nis, the language he uses to describe the former is also phallic in nature.75

Some might argue that it is hard to read this youth's sexual potency metapoetically as a Bloomian representation of a threat from poets of the

younger generation, precisely because Brodsky's generous tributes to

many of them seem to indicate that he did not view them as a threat. In actual fact, in contrast to Pushkin, who apparently welcomes the prospect of poetic and biological succession, Brodsky is clearly troubled by both sets of heirs. Strong poets need poetic progeny, of course, as this is the main way in which their immortality is guaranteed, but there is always a

danger that they will in turn establish a new line of succession, one that

bypasses the anxious precursor poet. Thus Brodsky has ulterior motives both in wishing that a strong line of kenotic poets continue and in being the last in that line. In other words, his concern that any future generations at their song not have to worry about the dangers that hurt him into

great poetry is somewhat disingenuous. For all that, it is not the up-and- coming poetic generation that is the main problem here.

The danger is of a different order, one that all Russian poets have to face, for the words "zagorelyi podrostok" appear to be a reworking of Akhmatova's "smuglyi otrok," her famous evocation of the young Pushkin:

CMyrJIbbIi OTpOK 6po,HJI no aJIJIeiM, Y 03epHbIX rpyCTHJI 6eperoB, H CTOJIeTIIe MbI JIeJIeeM EJie CJIbImiHbI meejecT maroB.

14Iribi cOceH rycTO I KOJIKO YCTIJIaLOT HI3KHe IIHH . . . 3,ecb JIeKiaJia ero TpeyroJIKa 14 pacTpenaHHbil TOM I HapHH.

(A swarthy young boy lolled down pathways / By himself at the edge of the lake. / For a hundred long years we have cherished / The slight rustle his far footsteps make. // The thick, prickly fir-needles pile up / Above the low

75. Brodskii, Sochineniia, 4:202. On this poem, see Anatolii Naiman, "'Aere perennius': Zametki dlia pamiatnika," Novyi mir, 1997, no. 9:193-97; and in the same volume, Nikolai Slavianskii, "Tverdaia veshch'," 197-203; and Naiman's brief reply, "Replika vsled'," 203.

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stumps of each tree ... / Here's the three-cornered hat and a dog-eared / Volume of verse by Parny.)76

Moreover, the rushing out of this youth into the hall (with its echoes of

"vperedi" in stanza 2, and hence of priority-always a Brodskian concern) seems a symbolic reenactment of the moment when Pushkin emasculated all past and future Russian writers-the reading of 'Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele" (Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo) before Gavriil Derzha- vin.77 There is no point now in writing a primus est version of Horace's Ode, as Pushkin himself realized; but rewriting and reliving the poetic past in one's own way is still the path to glory.

The references to Pushkin and to the death of the poet in these lines therefore help explain the genuine mystery noted by Smith: "To what

causality does this therefore (poetomu) refer? If we relate it to the context of the immediately preceding sentence, the result is at first glance a non

sequitur: there is no good reason why the action of the sunburned ado- lescent should have this effect."78 The answer that we are now able to give is that, first, the necessity of following in Pushkin's footsteps indeed places one in the shadow of the valley of death throughout one's "career"-and

living with such a burden is likely to make life seem a long twilight indeed. (One should also not forget the natural desire to prolong the twilight, just as most people writing in January would prefer to postpone the inevitable to "August.") At the same time, if one accepts one's Pushkinian destiny, one can prepare not only for death, but for an immortality- or at least a

long afterlife-far grander than that granted to the state or time, both of whom will end up worshipping one's words.

To appreciate fully Brodsky's point here it is essential to recognize that the references to train, railway station square, and statue allude first and foremost to the phenomenon he described on various occasions, namely, "In front of the Finland station, one of five railroad terminals through which a traveler may enter or leave this city, on the very bank of the Neva River, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city presently bears. In fact, every station in Leningrad has a monument to this man, either a full-scale statue in front of or a massive bust inside the building."79

76. Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, ed. V M. Zhirmunskii (Leningrad, 1977), 26-27. Translation by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks in Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology with Verse Translations, ed. and introduction, Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks (Alva, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, 1966), 257. The reference to the statue in Brodsky's final stanza may also allude to the tradition of poems on statues in the works of Pushkin, Annenskii, Akhmatova and others (and particularly on statues of or connected with Pushkin), or indeed to the whole Pavlovsk-Tsarskoe Selo cultural tradition. On such themes, see: Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury, esp. 223-33; Lev Losev and Barry Scherr, eds., A Sense of Place: Tsarskoe Selo and Its Poets; Papers from the 1989 Dartmouth Con- ference Dedicated to the Centennial of Anna Akhmatova (Columbus, Ohio, 1993); and Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004), 175-98. On Akhmatova's poem, see Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 183-88, and R. D. Timenchik, "Akhmatova i Pushkin (Razbor stikhotvoreniia 'Smuglyi otrok brodil po alleiam .. .')," in Pushkinskii sbornik, vol. 1 (Riga, 1968), 124-31.

77. Pushkin, "Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele," PSS, 1:60-64. 78. Smith, "Long Growing Dark," 255. 79. Brodsky, "Less Than One," Less Than One, 32.

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The dismissive "etc." presumably refers to the paraphernalia of the Soviet state, rather than to anything more specific. Brodsky leaves deliberately vague whose gaze it is here-statue? youth? some third person?-just as, too, the shift from "vy" to "ty" allows greater freedom for interpretation of the poem as a whole and reveals the difficulty of making too many as-

sumptions about what it means (what if, for example, the "vy" arrogantly relegates us all to the crowd instead of-or as well as-referring to the

"narrator/poet"?).80 The most likely answer, however, is that the statue serves both as a reference to the state, to the statues of Lenin and the Bronze Horseman, which damn the poet, and to the poet, who, Evgenii- like, damns the state and whose own monuments-both those built by hand and the one that is nerukotvornyi-will outlast those of his foes.81 The absent crowd perhaps indicates that Brodsky shares Pushkin's concealed ironies concerning the value and permanence of the love of the fickle crowd that the sober Pushkin foresees in his "Pamiatnik" poem. Yet the state of damnation is what allows the poet to enter the only crowd that matters-the souls of poets dead and gone to Elysium, as indicated by the fact that this is the main connotation of the word "tolpa" in the poems by Anton Del'vig, Pushkin, and Mandel'shtam that most inform this stanza ("Elizium poetov" [Elysium of poets], "Chem chashche prazdnuet litsei" [The more often the lyceum celebrates], "Kontsert na vokzale"). The "choice" of the word "prokliat" here is particularly inspired, with its pun on "poete maudit" (on both of its possible meanings, the poet-outcast both damned and damning, hated and feared by his rulers, and the poet deprived of his status as prophet); it probably also refers to the curse on

Petersburg and on those writers who have to create their own Petersburg; and it signals and confirms the link with Del'vig's poem "Elizium poetov" (which contains multiple repetitions of the word).82

So the threat from the monument is also the guarantee of immortal-

ity, just as was enacted symbolically in the previous stanza in the apparently dangerous encounter with the evergreen, ever-young Pushkin: the solution is the complete imitation of Pushkin, of Evgenii, even unto death. Of course, other, less hopeful readings are possible of these lines. For Ranchin, the scene here is of a future space and time without people. It

80. For a thought-provoking analysis of the use of the "you" form in Brodsky's work, see E. A. Kozitskaia-Fleishman, "'Ia byl kak vse': O nekotorykh funktsiiakh liricheskogo 'ty' v poezii I. Brodskogo," in V. P. Polukhina, I. V Fomenko, and A. G. Stepanov, eds., Poetika Iosifa Brodskogo: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Tver', 2003), 107-27.

81. The words "Bud' ty prokliat" seem to refer to the threat both to and from the poet in a variation on Evgeny's challenge to Peter, "Uzho tebe!" (Just you wait!) in The Bronze Horseman; more broadly, as G. S. Smith notes, this situation reflects Pushkin's "sculptural myth" and its various reincarnations in Russian literature. Above all, of course, it reminds us that a poem that started with small towns may in fact be about the city whose very being, and thus the literary tradition it created as well, was placed under a curse (which may or may not be a blessing in disguise for Russian culture) from the outset. Smith, "Long Growing Dark," 254. See also Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 275.

82. A. A. Del'vig, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. B. V Tomashevskii (Leningrad, 1959), 96-97. On this poem as a key subtext of Mandel'shtam's "Kontsert na vokzale," see Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'shtam, xvii.



Brodsky s "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?

is not Evgenii speaking, but a statue: "For there are simply no people around. For there is no place for them in the advancing dark future."83 And it is true that the poem as a whole suggests the insignificance of so

many of the petty truths and lies of this world when viewed sub specie aeter- nitatis. But the quantity and the importance of the poems on the theme of the destiny of the poet alluded to in "August" suggest that the consola- tions of literature are not spurned: the poem places Brodsky where he

belongs-in a long and illustrious line of Russian poets, and, in an echo of the "Next, please" theme of "Chem chashche prazdnuet litsei," as one of Pushkin's successors in more ways than one:

4I MHEITC$I, oqepe^b 3a MHOH, 30BeT MeH5I MOH AeJIbBHF MMHbIH,

ToBapHil IOHOCTIH KHIBOH, ToBapiu I-OHOCTH yHbIJoiH, ToBapim nIeceH MOJIOAbIX, rEIpOB HI qHCTbIX noMbIiiJeeHHH, TyAa, B ToJIny TeHei pOAHbIX HaBeK OT HaC yTeKiIIHH reHHiH.

(And I think that it is my turn, / My dear Del'vig calls me, / Comrade of my lively youth, / Comrade of my melancholy youth, / Comrade of young songs / Of feasts and pure intentions, / Thither, to the crowd of beloved shades, / The genius who has fled from us for ever.)84

Naturally enough, the man in Brodsky does not want to die, but it seems as if the awareness reached at the end of "August" is that achieved by Pasternak's Hamlet in the first "Zhivago" poem-it would be better if the

cup could pass one by, but Brodsky suspects that it is someone else's or

something else's will that matters here.85 The plot of the second Petersburg requires sacrifices no less than Peter's original, the not-so-subtle difference being here that the poet chooses to sacrifice himself and not others. For Brodsky, to return to Petersburg, literally or symbolically, is to accept death-the "final closing link" in the chain of an artist's achievements86- and this is what he does in this last poem, in fulfillment of the sacred duty of the Russian poet to be part of the "bloody repast."87

Try as Brodsky might in the west, it would never have been possible (or desirable, ifJohn Hollander is correct that a poetry of real power de-

pends upon a police state) to make people here live-let alone die-for

poetry.88 Hence, perhaps, Brodsky's wry, disguised acknowledgment at the end of his creative path of where his true home lies. Having said that, it is

83. Ranchin, Na piru Mnemoziny, 275. 84. Pushkin, PSS, 3:278. Translation from Donald Rayfield, ed. and trans., The Gar-

nett Book of Russian Verse (London, 2000), 103. 85. Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:511. 86. Mandel'shtam, "Skriabin i khristianstvo," Sobranie sochinenii, 1:201. 87. "The poet Vladislav Khodasevich called this relationship between kenotic poet

and benighted, tormenting folk at the foot of the cross krovavaia pishcha-a bloody repast." Bethea, Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, 11.

88. "When the sword avers the pen to be mightier, let us beware, for that will only oc- cur in a police state."John Hollander, The Work of Poetry (New York, 1997), 62.

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Slavic Review

clear that Brodsky has earned a place among the immortals irrespective of whether he is viewed as purely a Russian poet or not, and the last thing one would wish to imply is that this freest of men was any kind of victim. Even when writing his letter to Brezhnev in 1972-amazingly, exhilarat-

ingly, infuriatingly for some-Brodsky knew who was whose contempo- rary: "I, who write these lines, will die, you, who read them, will die too.

Only our deeds will remain, but even they will suffer destruction."89 The

poem's title thus contains both mockery of the ruler who sent a new Ovid into exile and a further claim to true immortality. Brodsky protests too much in this letter, with the subtext of Derzhavin's last poem on how

everything is destroyed by the river of time overcoming the Horatian "Ex-

egi monumentum" subtext-not that the prize-winning author to whom it was addressed is likely to have spotted the allusions. We do not really care now about Augustus, let alone Tiberius, but Vergil and Horace- that's another matter entirely. Brodsky is a tsar, an honorary noble Ro- man, and as such is in the most august company and place; although, if, as Pushkin told us, the poet-tsar has to live-and die?-alone, perhaps Solzhenitsyn is right on this score (the poet's essential loneliness) at least.

Brodsky's final opposition of poet and crowd (poetomu ... tolpe) in the last stanza suggests he knows, however much he may regret it, that the kenotic tradition of Russian literature will continue even in the postmod- ern age, that, unfortunately, there will be some poetic heirs to be his second self after he is gone, to receive this ambiguous Pushkinian bequest. The two sides of this legacy-poetic immortality made certain by death- are expressed by one final pun: it is not so much this most latinate poet's sense of form and proportion that is played on here ("directly propor- tional"), as the name of the poet whose most famous lines would be in- scribed on Brodsky's grave on a small island in Venice: Letum non omnia

finit. As Brodsky wrote in his "Letter to Horace": "As for Propertius, I think I'll look him up for myself. I believe it should be relatively easy to spot him: he must feel comfortable among the manes in whose existence he believed so much in reality."90

89. Translation from Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes, 259. (Letter originally published by Iakov Gordin in Neva, no. 2 (1989), 165-66.)

90. As J. M. Coetzee notes, in the essay entitled "Letter to Horace," "Brodsky plays with the conceit that Horace hasjust completed a spell on earth in the guise of Auden, and that Horace, Auden, and Brodsky himself are thus the same poetic temperament, if not the same person, reborn in successive Pythagorean metamorphoses. His prose attains new and complex, bittersweet tones as he meditates on the death of the poet, on the extinction of the man himself and his survival in the echo of the poetic meters he has served." Brod- sky frequently refers to his hero-worship of the lives and works of his favorite poets, most notably in the Nobel prize speech, in ways that suggest that he genuinely believed that one can be a reincarnation of a precursor poet. The view is not, of course, an uncommon one; but to think that one might in some way be a reincarnation of Pushkin or Mandel'shtam leads to far more than literary anxiety, as Brodsky well knew. J. M. Coetzee, "Speaking for Language," New York Review of Books 43, no. 2 (2January 1996): 31.

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Returning the Ticket: Joseph Brodsky's "August" and the End of the Petersburg Text?

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