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2024, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) and Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998): ‘a touch of normal classicism’
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004708013_011…
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During his labour confinement in the far North, Joseph Brodsky formulated his poetic credo as 'normal classicism' (see To a Certain Poetess, 1965). This chapter explores the significance of this artistic belief in the Soviet context after Stalin, where the state had an absolute and exclusive monopoly on setting norms for all manifestations of public and even private life, including art. It posits that Brodsky's interpretation of classicism was diametrically opposed to the aesthetics of Socialist Classicism. While Stalin's socialism, as with Italian and German fascisms, had used the label to convey solidity to the monolithic stasis of its utopian political projects, Brodsky saw classicism as a common matrix of 'world culture'-the concept passed onto him by his poetic predecessor and model Osip Mandelstam. The chapter argues that Mandelstam's and later Brodsky's insistence on 'world culture' was a form of aesthetic protest, as it stood in stark contrast with the official programme in Stalinist as well as post-Stalinist Russia-a country that had insulated itself from the rest of the world, severing most of its intellectual and material ties with the West. Conversely, for both Mandelstam and later Brodsky, antiquity became absolutely central as it represented the idea of cultural continuity, the uninterrupted link of times, and the unity of culture. The chapter then proceeds to show that the poets of Brodsky's generation suffered the effects of 'cultural disinheritance'-a feeling of being isolated from the repositories of Western culture, a burden shared by the artists from the Soviet Bloc. To overcome this cultural disinheritance Brodsky and his counterparts taught themselves Polish, as after 1956, censorship restrictions in Poland became significantly less rigid than in Russia. The chapter then conducts comparative close readings of poems by Brodsky and by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), which use themes and tropes from classical antiquity, discovering similarities in their use of classical themes and imagery, including a shared use of Aesopian language and irony. The chapter concludes that, for Brodsky, the Polish poets and, in particular, Herbert, became the gatekeepers not only to Western culture, but also to classical antiquity.
Joseph Brodsky and Modern Russian Culture, 2024
While Joseph Brodsky continues to be seen as one of the most significant Russian poets of the second half of the 20th century, thought of as a figure equal to history itself in the manner of Pushkin or Mandelstam or Pasternak, a number of prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Dmitrii Bykov, have called for reevaluating and denigrating his legacy as a poet and a thinker. This has especially intensified in the wake of Russia's war against Ukraine, which brought attention to Brodsky's alleged stance as an 'imperial poet' and his infamous poem on Ukrainian independence. This chapter investigates such (mis)readings of Brodsky, Bykov's in particular, and challenges them. The issue of Brodsky's Jewishness plays a central role in Bykov's polemic which posits Brodsky as an 'Old Testament' poet and is linked to Bykov's own theological stance on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The chapter argues that Brodsky should be seen not as an imperial poet, but a poet with a deeply held philosophically conservative and traditionalist elitist worldview, which impacted on his understanding of culture, history, identity, and the relationship between poetry and politics. Especially pertinent and little studied in this regard is Brodsky's place in the American intellectual context and his links to the American conservatism of the 1980s and such figures as Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow. The chapter ends with a comparison between Brodsky and Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky who share a similar understanding of time, memory, and culture, and a greatly dissimilar view of the link between poetry and national identity and politics, represented by the figure of Taras Shevchenko.
Slavic Review, 2022
This article zooms in on what can be call`ed the laboratory of the notion of Soviet literature: the debates of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in which the programmatic debate at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) was prepared, articulated, and further elaborated. Mikhail Lifshits, one of the most prominent art, literary, and cultural critics at the time, decades later described that period as a "zazor," a crevice 1 in and from which great things evolved. 2 A vibrant moment when RAPP, the formerly most powerful party organization of "Proletarian writers" (Rossiiskaia assosiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei, 1925-32), was just dissolved and the Writers' Union as the only remaining state organization just founded. Nothing was finalized yet, but the future course of action was set. 3 Objectives and dogmas ("Soviet literature," "socialist realism") were worked out and implemented in institutions and organizations for the first time, yet these years also saw Soviet internationalism and the announced "socialism in one country," that is, the (multi) national isolation of the Soviet Union, still keeping each other in balance. From its foundation in 1933 until the end of the decade, the journal Literaturnyi kritik was the preeminent organ of the literary-critical debate and served as THE platform for questions of aesthetic theory. Translations of parts of G. W. F. Hegel's Aesthetics as well as essays on Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson formed a central a part of the publication program, as did the critical reception of modernist tendencies in western literatures. In this context, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway figured 1. With this image, Lifshits takes up and modifies the metaphor of the interval (promezhutok) as coined by Iurii Tynianov for literary history in a broader theoretical and historical context. 2. Looking back, Lifshits spoke of a "great passage from the old class-determined world to the still unknown world of human society of the future," Mikhail Lifshits, "Otritsanie otritsaniia," Sputnik 12 (1976): 57. In another statement he wrote: "Between the crash of the old dogmata of abstract Marxism that still had survived from pre-October days and the confirmation of one single dogmatic model a wonderful period of time opened up." Lifshits, V mire ėstetiki: Stat΄i 1969-1981gg. (Moscow, 1985), 255. 3. Writing this lapidary sentence, I am not sure whether it must have a cynical undertone: Does not "finalized" connote also the fact that 90% of the voices/authors I am referring to would fall victim to the Stalinist repressions (most of them in 1937)?
2021
This conference aims to explore how classic works of “foreign” literature were experienced by different groups of readers in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1980s. For many Soviet citizens, regardless of their social status and political views, fictional worlds from bygone centuries and alien cultures formed an alternative reality that allowed them to escape the difficulties of everyday life. Translating, editing, and illustrating classics helped those intellectuals and artists who did not toe the party line to survive, both physically and morally. By attempting to use the concept of world literature for propagandist aims the state unwittingly created a zone of intellectual autonomy that it could not penetrate. Papers interrogate ideological positions and interpretative models, regardless of whether they aim to address institutional or individual aspects of literary reception. Keynote Lecturer: Brian James Baer, Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. The conference is organised by Dr Emily Finer (University of St Andrews) and Petr Budrin (University of Oxford).
Russian Literature, 2002
The Independent Turn in Soviet-Era Russian Poetry: How Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman and Evgeny Rein Became the 'Avvakumites' of Leningrad
Euxeinos. Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region, 8, 2018
In the period after Stalin's death and the breakdown of the monolithic dogma of Socialist realism, the most exciting cultural practices were associated with three cults: the cults of youth, individualism and westernness. In the following period of Stagnation (zastoi) and Brezhnev's less liberal political doctrine, the process of cultural disintegration was even intensified. Avtorskaia pesnia (literally “author’s song”) responded ideally to the zeitgeist. It was not only close to individualism, youth culture and student population, but also to the process of cultural disintegration. Avtorskaia pesnia is sometimes called the poetry of wild youth. Emerging as a temporary autonomous zone (cf. Hakim Bey), as part of the so-called apartment culture or the institution of communal art, it is related to the phenomenon of magnitizdat. It directly influenced the development of Russian rock music - it is argued that this is one of the reasons why text dominates over music in Russian rock - and poetry in general. In the period of late Soviet socialism it was probably the most attractive and the most widespread form of cultural production and consumption. In this paper, I will analyze avtorskaia pesnia as a deterritorializing milieu (A. Yurchak) par excellence. In order to address the question of whether Soviet culture was homogeneous or heterogeneous during the Brezhnev era, I will also do a close reading of the poetry of two prominent Russian bards, B. Okudzhava and V. Vysotskii, paying special attention to one of the most authoritative Soviet cultural myths and ideologems, that of “motherland” (rodina).
Slavonic and East European Review 98.1, 2020
This article focuses on the formation of an imperial and colonial consciousness in Joseph Brodsky, one of the most outstanding Russian poets. Conceptually, this study should be placed at the intersection of postcolonial studies, social history and cultural history. More specifically, through the lens of Brodsky’s individual history and the political and cultural landscape of the last century in Soviet space, it explores his convictions and mental cultural geographies, and offers explanations of Brodsky’s attitudes towards the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian/Soviet empires and his anti-Ukrainian stance. This paper argues that the term ideological “evolution” is not applicable in Brodsky’s case, and illustrates that his philosophy or worldview was rather stiff and inflexible. Brodsky was very much a product of Russian literature and its two-century imperial literary tradition, and less influenced by the Soviet system which he largely despised and ignored. This tradition helped shape Brodsky’s subconscious mental map of Russia and its language, the geographical borders of which were rather rigid.
2021
The article presents the study of the short film Apocrypha by Andrei Zvyagintsev. The text is aimed at the interpretation of the movie in the context of the problem of memory, which is emphasised in the selected work in the explicit and implicit visual associations with the figure and poetry of Iosif Brodsky. The recognition of these characteristic elements in the structure of Zvyagintsev’s film has the influence on the perception of its meaning, leading the culturally aware recipient towards discovering its broad interpretative potential in view of the Russian literary tradition. The study is conducted using the comparative method of analysis. The core theory which constitutes the methodological foundation of the study is Astrid Erll’s concept of cultural memory expounded as intertextuality, i.e. the continuous building up of layers of texts, which are mediated, as well as her idea of transcultural memory, defined in the first instance as a process of fluctuation between the indivi...
2018
Iosif Brodskij's 1 relationship with English had started long before his emigration to the United States in 1972, after the expulsion from the Soviet Union with a charge of social parasitism. An attraction for his second language that can be traced back to his youth in Leningrad, when he, as all the young people of his generation, searched for new models of individualism, watching the «trophy films» the regime had allowed and avidly reading Western literature, mostly in the books that foreign students brought illigally to the URSS. In winter 1964, during his first exile in Norenskaya, Brodsky recounted having had an «epiphany» reading a poem by Wystan Auden: he thought he found the deep bond between language, individual consciousness and poetry. The famous English poet was thus to become the addressee of Brodsky's work, his «invisible reader», as explained in the autobiographical essay «To Please a Shadow». Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, still clear had to be kept the divide in his work: poetry in Russian and prose in English. In 1991, the nomination as Poet Laureate of the United States, marked a turning point in Brodsky's work-unquestionably a way to avoid the endless corrections he made to the translations of his poems, but not only. This paper aims to outline the steps that led one of the most representative Russian poet to leave his mother tongue and fully adopt English, both for prose and poetry, to stand to us as a new author, «Joseph Brodsky».
The new generation of Russian poets apeared in the 1960s consisted of those who oriented towards public recognition – even, at times, at the price of a certain degree of confrontation with the regime. The mass publics’ recognition of the poets giving evening performances in Moscow’s Polytechnical Museum testifies to the fact that it had fallen to them to express that complex of ideas and emotions that were on the brink of penetrating the consciousness of an audience that was hungry for such poetry. These feelings and ideas existed already, but they needed an outlet – it was simply necessary to give them a well defined form. The ‘stadium poetry’ of the 1960s was not the poetry of private revelations and personal quests. It was the articulation of a certain popular stereotypes that already existed in the minds of readers and listeners. In essence, this was a social poetry. Social poetry, which addressed the problems of Soviet society, had by definition no need of any ‘donations’ from foreign cultures. Moreover, such donations might have raised the risk of a loss of contact between the poet and his readership: a blood transfusion from a blood group other than the patient’s is likely to end badly. A poetry so powerfully shaped this sort of local context could even seek legitimation of its experience by aligning itself with the experience of foreign poetries, but that legitimation would come about not on the level of a dialogue of poetics, but rather on the level of ‘group photographs’ with the foreign poets. The second culture chose to exist outside printed publications and did not attempt to accommodate itself to the requirements of Soviet literature. This ‘unofficial’ poetry, as distinct from ‘liberal Soviet poetry’, was extremely open to foreign influences.
Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2002
When did Gorky finally awaken to the harsh realities of Stalinist Russia? This biography offers no definitive answer, nor does it try to prove whether Gorky died of natural causes or was yet another victim of Stalin's murderous campaigns. However, Yedlin does show that by his last years Gorky was a depressed and isolated figure kept under virtual house arrest by his state-appointed secretary. Reflecting on Gorky's desperate final years, one is tempted to see him as a foolish dupe of Stalin's, who was hoodwinked into endorsing programs that he never really understood. However, this study of Gorky's long political engagement allows us to see strong connections between the fearless opponent of tsarism and the proponent of Stalin. Gorky held to certain core beliefs that did not change. He was convinced that Russia's backwardness, its "Asiatic nature," was due to the slothful nature of the Russian peasantry. He believed in the redemptive power of labor. Most important, he was a passionate advocate of culture and education as the path to Russia's golden future. These beliefs made him stand up against currents of the Bolshevik revolution which he saw as a quixotic gamble that placed artists and treasured artifacts in danger. But these same principles led him to welcome steps to uproot the Russian peasantry and put alleged criminals to work in forced labor camps. It is not too hard to understand how Gorky might have seen Stalin, who recanonized the Russian classics and expanded the educational system, as a proponent of positive cultural change. In Yedin's final chapter, entitled "Gorky: For and Against," she makes no attempt to draw final lessons from the author's life. On the contrary, she underscores'Gorky's fundamental contradictions that make it unusually difficult to make final judgments. While we can hope for the release of more archival records to explain Gorky's last years, it is unlikely that he will ever emerge as someone who easily fits into preconceived notions of villain or hero.
The anthology included texts on the diagnosis of the experience of modernity in the second half of the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe. Translations of languages: Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian, German, and little-known texts by Polish authors were placed in the volume. The materials have been selected so as to show the different dimensions of formation of modernity in this particular region, and also pay attention to various aspects of the formation of the identity of the hero of Central Europe, both in its individual and collective variant – the entity entangled not only in the dilemmas of personality, but also absorbed by the political and historical tensions; collection creates a coherent whole. In volume Community of Questions were published fragments known in Polish language only in an age in which they were created, and they are worth recalling. They include, for example, texts showing the transformation of feminine consciousness, represented among others by the works of Maria Krzymuska-Iwanowska and Konstancja Morawska. The anthology constitutes a response to the lack of publications about Central and Eastern European variety of modernism, in which source texts created in the second half of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century play a major role. Anthology is divided into four parts. In the first part, entitled Diagnosis of Modernity were published mainly theoretical and journalistic texts, designed to outline specifics of historical and social changes in Central Wspolnota pytan.Antologia.indd 401
Bakhtiniana, 2024
All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0
2021
This compendium of works on paper documents the rich collections of Eastern European modernism held by the Columbia and Cornell University Libraries. In depth and range it constitutes one of the great research resources for the study of modern art and culture, only rivaled perhaps by a similar compendium documenting the East Slavic titles at the New York Public Library (NYPL) and Columbia University Library. Moreover, the various entries attest to the acute bibliographical scholarship that informed the selection, analyses, and scope of these two University Libraries' collections, each mutually reinforcing. Although the comparative strength lies within the Czech holdings, the breadth of genres, topics, and categories is striking, and communally reflects the rich engagement of modernist creators in the full array of the literary and especially in the visual arts, inclusive of architecture, theater, poetry, and advertising, and, unique in its expansiveness, in the study of sexuality. The entries presented in this volume thus constitute far more than an aggregation of individual itemswhether of visual and literary, "biotic" and sexual, or industrial and instructional invention. Rather, they point to and creatively engage the most essentialand most overlookedaspect of the modernist enterprise generally: the priority of a visual "poetics" manifested through the design of book covers, broadsides, and illustrated avant-garde booklets of decisively modern subjects and interests. This was frequently communicated through the most progressive visual styles and employed a "new typography." Indeed, it was the very centrality of "works on paper" that fundamentally determined the nature, course, and impact of modern culture generally, and of the Eastern European avant-garde in particular. It is arguable that advanced visual artists and their apologists, and especially the European avant-gardists from the Estonian northeast to the Balkan lands in the southwest, produced as many texts as paintings, as many theoretical tracts as sculptures, and even more essays and illustrated articles than architecture. In hundreds of broadsides, manifestos, novellas, and periodicalsmany of them documented in this compendiumthe makers and advocates of a new culture proved to be as adept with the pen as they were original with the brush, the chisel, or v the straightedge. And this was true whether creating original works or illustrating the products of others. All were inspired to embrace the word as a visual medium. Of course, painters and sculptors and other practitioners of the visual arts had often written to explain or to justify what they sought to achieve with the customary tools of their craft. From the Italian Renaissance through the nineteenth century, visual artists had expressed themselves eloquently in words, often to explain their intentions or to persuade potential patrons of their talents. But never before the first half of the twentieth centurythe focus of the present compendiumdid artists seize upon the written word with such prolixity, passion, and purpose. It was as if the modernists aspired to make the word potently visible or, conversely, to empower the visual to be "read" as if a text. This convergence of communicationa type of conjunction of image and text, or at least an interdependence of one with the otheris powerfully demonstrated in a plurality of the items documented in this volume. This compendium rightly adduces the originality and variability of the works on paper produced by modern artists, poets, advertisers, and their advocates in a host of disciplines from aeronautics (No. 389) and "biotics" (No. 398) to Surrealist performances and social revolution. Although differing in their emphases and departing from one another in the methods of application, the major protagonists in the advanced cultural movements represented here sought, in Karel Teige's memorable words, to constitute a humanistic poetics for a modern era, which is "...to pose a new problem for poetry and redefine its mission: poetry for the five senses, poetry for all the senses." Teige, whose manifold creativity is well documented in this book's Czech section, advocated a potent coincidence of the visual and the poetic through which to fashion a "new people, who will create the new society." The Czech's belief system, which was widely embraced throughout Eastern Europe just as it was frequently imitated to the West, was advanced under the rubric of "Poetism." Poetics was both the objective and the modus operandi of many of those authors, artists, and publishers of the works contained in this volume. It served all progressive formations as an aesthetic, social and political motor force, one that was singularly versatile and could be expressed in a medley of visual languages with what was assumed to be a universal resonance. Although it was inflected differently in each of this volume's geographic sections, and despite functioning under different names, the poetics of Eastern Europe asserted an authority that garnered support from artists across nationalities, backgrounds, and personal characteristics. For vi Ljubomir Micić (No. 1009) [Figure 1, below] and his "Zenitist" confederates in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade, "poetry is the most liberated art and where our greatest hopes lie." Likewise, for Lajos Kassák, the great Hungarian impresario and modernist artist well represented in the entries below, an authentic modernism must give rise to a poetics as much visual as textual. Similar views were emphatically advanced in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and in the Balticsall of which have examples to be noted in the following entries. What united these disparate stylistic expressions was a universal affirmation of poetics as uniquely modern transcendence of traditional aesthetic categories and practices in a heroic endeavor "not to decorate life but to organize it" along new, more humane principles (to quote a Hungarian contemporary of Kassák, Ernő Kállai, who likely borrowed the phrase from his Russian modernist collaborators Ilya Ehrenburg and Lazar El Lissitzky).
Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, 2020
Slavic and East European Journal. Vol. 50, No. 1 (2006). Pp. 204-212, 2006
Of course, I am no soothsayer, and the answer to my outrageous title is probably dependent more on what happens outside the university than anything that could take place inside its hallowed walls. For all I know, the ongoing transformation in the function of education in American society may render humanistic education utterly obsolete in the coming decades, which would certainly have a "chilling effect" on the study of Russian Literature (Scholes; Drucker). But I do not intend to rehearse the familiar territory of The University in Ruins here (Readings; also see Guillory). What I am concerned with is our very own little comer of the university, the Slavic Department, and my own sub-discipline within it, the study of Russian Literature. What is its outlook for the coming hundred or so years, given favorable, or at least not saltstrewn, institutional soil to grow in? 2 I offer to you that the future does not look so bright.
Refubium, 2009
In the present thesis I will set to investigate Brodsky’s translating methods with the idea of trying to assign them a place within both English literature as well as the practice of poetical translation into the English language. Because of the paucity of research dedicated to Brodsky’s self-translation so far, as well as the tendency, which has persisted for over a decade following Brodsky’s untimely death in 1996 in the few existing articles and scholarly works on the subject to trade in opinions, I felt the need for a change of the critical approach in the field of Brodsky’s self-translations. For the first time in the history of this field, I will dedicate some of these translations a detailed textual analysis with the aim of establishing on concrete examples Brodsky’s exact translational procedures and to try to make their assessment within practices of English poetry translation. My inquiry has been immensely enriched by the fact that the new availability of research materials of the Brodsky Estate at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale in the year 2005, which had been previously inaccessible to the researches, coincided with my research there for present PhD project. In the light of Brodsky’s insistence on form in poetic translation a thorough theoretical background in verse theory seemed to be indispensable for my investigation. Because the idea of the mimetic translation has long been considered outdated in the English literary circles, the choice of a theorist naturally led me back home to Russia. There, partly because of the different trends in the Russian poetry, the metrical studies of the formal school flourished in the twentieth century. Victor Zhirmunsky’s Verse Theory seemed to provide the needed theoretical background in terms of both metrical theory as well as the theory of formal translation of poetry, due to its comparative quality. Basing my detailed analysis of the previously undiscovered translating materials, I will try to demonstrate that the introduction of ‘un-English’ elements was not the only consequence of Brodsky’s reworkings of translations of his poems done by other co-translators, as has so far been claimed by his critics. I will attempt to show that despite the fact that Brodsky based his self-translating practices on compositional principles, which are partly alien in the context of the English poetic tradition – Brodsky introduced in his self-translations elements of Russian rhythm as well as feminine rhymes, almost irreconcilable in English with serious poetry – his self-translating experiments are far from being failures. Due to the fact that Brodsky achieves in his translation versions alliterations, assonances and consonance functioning in their own right in English as well as due to his reinvention of metaphors, similes and puns in his English self-translations, they fall into the category of authentic and independent texts of English verse. The bond between the form and content in them is as inseparable as it is in Brodsky’s Russian originals. To the same effect contribute Brodsky’s rhymes the poet comes up with in his self-translations. These rhymes, representing demonstrably the main mechanism of his verse composition, are often more exact than those proposed by his co- translators, display metaphysical wit and often work as independent puns in English. As I will also try to show on the basis of my minute textual analysis of various translation versions, there was another important consequence of Brodsky’s reworkings of the translations, namely that they became considerably more faithful to the originals in terms of their content conveying more faithfully the shades of various meanings (metaphorical vs. literal), tonalities as well as various registers of speech. Moreover, as an author and translator in one person Brodsky disposed of the unique freedom in undertaking changes of his own original metaphors, images, similes and puns. All these properties of Brodsky’s involvement in his self-translations contributed to the emergence of independent artefacts in English, despite the presence in them of some foreignising characteristics. The existence of such a phenomenon, if proven, will require a new evaluation in terms of its position within the autochthonous literature. I will also try to demonstrate that one of the driving motives behind Brodsky’s self-translations was the existence of a ‘bigger plan’. Brodsky’s special attitude towards the English language culminated in his ambition to show the still extant potential of formal poetic devices such as strict metre and rhyme for the development of verse in English. Thus, rather than allow his work to be translated by the native English speakers into something that would sound like glossed-over English verse, Brodsky chose the uphill path of translating his work himself (thus exposing himself to the harsh attacks of native-speaking critics).
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