Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile.
Terras, Victor
American scholars tend not to heed Albert Thibaudet's cautionary
words recommending a moratorium of a generation to be observed by
academic critics of literature. David Bethea's well-documented,
imaginative, and eloquent study boldly tackles the very substance of a
great living poet's oeuvre at the risk of incurring controversy,
probably not so much on the part of the subject of his study as from
those who may feel that he has been drawn into too close an orbit of
Brodsky's idiosyncratic world view and personality.
Bethea proposes to define Brodsky's creation in terms of
"the metaphysical implications of exile," where exile is
understood in a broad or even a metaphorical sense, and goes about it by
confronting Brodsky's works with those of other exiles (again, in a
broad sere), Russian (Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva,
Khodasevich, Nabokov) as well as Western (Auden, T. S. Eliot). The
result is a bevy of original insights into the creations of both
parties. The confrontation is based on different types of relationships:
outright dialogue, as with John Donne, T. S. Eliot, and Akhmatova;
metaphysical implications of exile, as in the case of Mandelstam and
Tsvetaeva; analogies that point to certain paradigmatic affinities, as
regards Auden; Brodsky's Jewishness as contrasted to
Mandelstam's and Pasternak's; Nabokov's bilingual poetry
and prose as a measure of Brodsky's poetics; the negative mirror
image of Tsvetaeva found in some aspects of Brodsky's poetics. In
some instances Bethea develops his observations as an ingeniously
conceived schema of "triangulation," as when he perceives
Mandelstam's highly idiosyncratic reading of Dante in terms of
Brodsky's reaction to it, or interprets Brodsky's "Verses
on the Death of T. S. Eliot" in relation to Auden's "In
Memory of W. B. Yeats."
The method of confrontation allows Bethea to put in focus the most
salient traits of Brodsky's art: his eschewing of "poetic
language," his antiheroic stance, his ability to express abstract
thoughts in poetic concetti (often in an offhand, even chatty style),
his antilyric and self-deflating tone, the "occasional"
quality of his verse, his skill at combining the physical with the
metaphysical. In particular, Bethea brilliantly demonstrates how even
Brodsky's versification is in line with the antielitist, demotic,
and prosaic form given to his subtle and profound thoughts.
Bethea's discussions of the critical literature deal not only
with Brodsky but also with Donne, Auden, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and
other poets, as well as with literary theories relevant to the exile
syndrome (Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom, and
others), always competently and productively. There are a few points one
may argue. Is Brodsky really "the first and so far the only Russian
poet who can be called truly 'metaphysical' in the Donnean
sense"? What about the eighteenth century, Fedor Glinka,
Sluchevsky, or even Khodasevich? Could it be that Bethea is in thrall to
Brodsky's judgment which has "Donne a greater poet than all
three [Derzhavin, Lomonosov, and Skovoroda] put together"? One also
wonders if Bethea is in agreement with Brodsky's Chaadaevian view
of Russia as the formless "East," whose victims are
"occidentalists" like Mandelstam and Brodsky? Still, all in
all, one is grateful to Bethea for an immensely stimulating and very
carefully crafted study.
Victor Terras Brown University
