Causework

The poet's authority in the age of utopia

ANDREW KAHN

 

Clare Cavanagh

LYRIC POETRY AND MODERN POLITICS

Russia, Poland, and the West; 344pp. Yale University Press.

* 

Irena Grudzinska Gross

CZESLA W MILOSZ AND JOSEPH BRODSKY Fellowship of poets

362pp. Yale University Press. £30 (US $40). 9780300149379

* 

Sanna Turoma

BRODSKY ABROAD

Empire, tourism, nostalgia 296pp. University of Wisconsin Press.

Paperback, $29.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £26.95.

978 0 299 23634 2
*

Andrey Khrzhanovsky

A ROOM AND A HALF

Various cinemas. DVD

 

What becomes of lyric poets who put their "service to the muse", as Pushkin called it, to the service of their nation? Can political poetry couched in lyric form ever be truly transnational? Can poets even in exile ever escape the mental map of their native land? These are the questions addressed by three new books and, less directly, represented in Andrey Khrzhanovsky's film about Joseph Brodsky, A Room and a Half. All make serious attempts to consider the relation of the art of poetry to the lives of poets. Clare Cavanagh and Irena Grudzinska Gross substantiate the view, criticized elsewhere, that in twentieth century Soviet Russia and Poland the impact of lyric poetry has been national because these cultures in their different ways bestowed a special authority on poets - sometimes to their great personal cost. Recent micro-histories of the literary politics, institutions and aesthetic ideology of Soviet-era culture have shown that even while orchestrating pervasive control over the general population, the state apparatus subjected writers to particularly close scrutiny, often at the level of the Politburo and Party leader himself. Poets such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak, who initially welcomed a revolutionary utopia, or those who kept their own counsel such as Anna Akhmatova, learnt by the end of the 1920s that their standing with the regime, and their chances of survival, fluctuated on a text-by-text and sometimes line-by-line basis as the "Revolution from Above" ordained style and content. The impact on their creative psychology was immense.

Of course, this plight does not automatically confer distinction (and Cavanagh acknowledges the challenge to glib equations that Geoffrey Hill poses in his essay "Language, Suffering and Silence"). However, the poets assembled in Lyric Poetry and Modem Politics combined exceptional talent with outstanding charisma. Under the pressure of circumstance and compelled by conviction the Russians Alexander Blok, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, and the Poles Wislawa Szymborska, Stanislaw Baranczak, Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz attuned their lyric voices to a civic message. Armed with a mastery of both Russian and Polish scholarship and a bracing style of argument, Cavanagh's important and enthralling book illuminates the creative biographies and works of writers who from about 1917 to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc experienced, documented, tested, challenged and sometimes survived the confrontation with the State - or perished when speaking up for themselves and others.

Of the three authors reviewed here, Cavannagh is the most sophisticated commentator on the uses of biography and also the most subtle reader of lyric. Her point of departure is the concept of "life-creation" (zhiznetvorchestvo), the conflation of art in life and life in art observed pervasively in Russian modernism. In chapters on Blok, Akhmatova and Mayakovsky, she explores how poets accustomed to self-portrayal on an intimate scale acquired a different sense of purpose and adjusted their artistic means. A systematic comparison of Blok and W. B. Yeats shows how each, in response to an analogous set of personal and national concerns, wrote poems and projected lives that mirrored one another. Each was gripped by the force of history in their own countries, mesmerized by the occult, enraptured by mystical embodiments of female wisdom. Whereas Yeats moved beyond his symbolic masks to advance socially, father a family and become bard to a national revival in Ireland, the childless Blok thrilled to the end of imperial Russia, his own death invested with symbolic meanings.

Two of the most moving case studies, both familiar and both refreshed in Cavanagh's treatment, come in the chapters on Akhmatova and Milosz. Both became highly admired public figures and emblems of opposition despite their misgivings about political art. Akhmatova owed her early renown to short love lyrics of understated drama. Yet this most private of poets was fated to respond in the Poem Without a Hero to the historical cataclysm that swept away the values and institutions of the Silver Age, and then in Requiem to tell the nearly untellable about the impact of the Stalinist Terror on the lives of her fellow Leningraders. While queuing outside Butyrka prison with other mothers attempting to deliver parcels to children bound for the camps, Akhmatova was approached by a woman who asked her whether she could describe "this". The result was a poem of great formal intricacy and completeness, a definitive statement of lamentation at the end of which elegy for others becomes self-elegy, turning the poet, Niobe-like, into a monument of grief. Personal and national grief coalesced. Poem Without a Hero has proven far harder to crack than Requiem. Teeming with allusion, mystification and game-playing, it creates a world of distorting mirrors in which life and art collide, identities and masks are skewed; a bravura modernist performance whose openness thwarts single interpretations, it remains a more private vision of an epoch remembered in highly personal symbolic terms. Different forms, as Cavanagh shows, convey the tension between answering the vocation of the bard and preserving intact the intimate, mysterious self that is a source of lyric poetry. Akhmatova's solution to the public/private dilemma proved to be unavailable to Mayakovski, a titan of revolutionary rhetoric who was ultimately trapped by the political script he made for himself. Mayakovski equated his personal feeling with the state of the nation. Like Whitman, the great model of t democratic poet as man of the nation a bard, he cast himself as the force for change. As long as Mayakovsky spoke the Revolution and the Revolution spoke Mayakovsky the colossal egotism of his poetry found a truly national scale. The organic bond between his utopian enthusiasm and the Revolution was sundered as the country departs from his ideal (and proletarian write] groups marginalized him). Lenin never liked Mayakovsky, and the next generation leaders expected a spokesman rather than prophet. The betrayal of the Socialist utopia led to his suicide, an act that was itself wide regarded as a betrayal. In a fascinating chapter, Cavanagh shows how Mayakovsky’s biographer, the Polish poet and critic Wiktor Woroszylski, long gripped by his youthful commitment to Mayakovsky as an insurrectionary ideal, sidestepped the question of his suicide by compiling his massive biography out of a collage of quotations. Eventually as his own disillusion with Soviet rule increased, his resistance to the truth of Maykovsky's tragedy ebbed away.

In a later chapter entitled "Counterrevolution in Poetic Language: Poland's generation of '68", Cavanagh aims jibes at literary theory, especially Deconstruction. Her argument that the rebel students of 1968 were the shock troops of Tel Quel, though not historically convincing (Richard Wolin's recent book The Wind From the East treats the true cluster of causes), nevertheless acts as a rhetorical foil to the powerful case she makes showing how lyric poems opened the eyes of individuals to the anti-individualistic and anonymous values of the State. Together with some reservations about New Historicism, her criticisms make a secondary argument about the value of lyric poetry in sensitizing perception to detail and specificity, and in sharpening our sense of individual agency and responsibility (a sense that cannot easily be explained away with reference to systems like the literary field or code).

The expense of spirit brought about by compromises with power, compromise lyric talent, has different measures. Both Szymborska and Milosz tried to persuade themselves to believe in a utopian future at the end of the Second World War. Szymboska joined the Party, and Milosz embarked c a diplomatic career that he ended in Washington in 1951. The accounts of both Cavanagh and Gross convey how these decisions continued decades later to influence reaction home among unforgiving, often nation segments of their readership (as well as the happier story of Milosz's remarkable impact on American poetry). In his ABC, Milosz described his own life story as astonishing but likened that of Joseph Brodsky to a morality tale: "he was tossing manure with a pitchfork on a state farm near Arkhangelsk, then, just a few years later, he collected all sorts of honors, including the Nobel Prize". Drawing on personal papers and her own memories, Gross's double portrait in Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky is at its best when describing the inextricable connection between creative personality and a sense of exile. She reproduces at length a remarkable letter from Milosz written to Brodsky shortly after his arrival in the United States, offering consolation with an unvarnished and unglamorous view of the difficulties of adjustment. If life simply replayed myths then a young poet steeped in Dante, Ovid, Byron and Pushkin might have felt confident about his eventual destiny, but Milosz understood the huge anxiety about survival, both practical and intellectual, that Brodsky experienced. Brodsky had suffered his first heart attack at the age of twenty-five, and while his nervousness (mentioned by his friend Tomas Venclova in a foreword to Gross's book) disappears from the portrait offered in Khrzhanovsky's film, A Room and a Half, it animates his writings about travel and landscapes discussed by Sanna Turoma in Brodsky Abroad.

Khrzhanovsky's biopic has the post-Soviet Brodsky recalling his younger self. The film is worth seeing for the excellence of the acting, and for its ingenious splicing of documentary footage of Brodsky himself and the actors impersonating him. As a portrait, it is at its best when it stays close to its main source, Brodsky's wonderful essay "In a Room and a Half' (1985), whose title refers to the sum total of space allocated to Brodsky and his parents in their communal flat in Leningrad. Brodsky's double portrait of his family and city is a masterpiece of filial tribute and, quite surprisingly, sociological analysis as it recounts the impact of all sorts of restrictions (physical, verbal, sexual) on the yearning of an adolescent to be free and self-determining. The film conveys these feelings in its scenes from the 1960s where poetry and the Beatles vie for hearts. As for the Muse, Brodsky was a lover of cats as well as women, and Khrzhanovsky, a celebrated animator, diverts the question of inspiration into a series of cartoonish intercuts featuring a feline alter ago purring with poetic energy.

In Brodsky Abroad, the author travels, but the discourses of postmodernism and postcolonial theory do much of the talking. Here biography, circumstance and context matter only marginally. The bias towards theory (the discourses of the "exilic" and tourism) sharpens Turoma's argument, but robs it of a dimension of complexity. Affiliating Brodsky with a gallery of anonymous cosmopolitan travelers underestimates the strong counterpoint of autobiography in his prose (rather more than his poetry). Reducing his verbal mannerisms to a mere reflex of the genre, combining the associative patter of Sterne with the meta-textual ploys of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, misses the fact that Brodsky's prose generally makes a feature of false starts and self-consciousness. He liked reticence. Yet like the Calvino of Invisible Cities - highly popular at the time - some of the most textured and impressionistic writing such as Watermark, Brodsky's long essay on Venice, hovers between the inner landscapes superimposed by memory on new vistas and the sheer disorientation of travel. The physical resemblance between the waterways of Venice and St Petersburg, and the relation of sky and building elicits memories of the Leningrad he never revisited, collapsing past and present. Brodsky focalized the interchange of impressions through photographic and cinematic techniques, media whose influence Turoma rightly notes.

As an exiled son of the Soviet empire and adopted son of the American empire, Brodsky was obsessed with the political, physical and metaphysical limits of empire. Whether the Occidental-Oriental division examined by Turoma correlates to a pattern of appreciation and denigration driven by "Euro-imperial" values should occasion debate. Brodsky's passion for Venice and St Petersburg was inseparable from the classical as an aesthetic benchmark. The absence of classical antiquity conditions his coolness to Rio de Janeiro and his sense of being overwhelmed in Istanbul. This reaction has been cast as a belated, Orientalist fantasy of the white male traveler hankering for domination. Just where - and indeed whether - Brodsky crosses the line from purely aesthetic prejudice to xenophobia or Islamophobia remains hard to tell. When seen from the perspective

of postcolonial ideology, matters of taste will always seem to reflect underlying cultural suppositions and power structures. Turoma's attention is understandably drawn to Brodsky’s provocative and politically incorrect "The Flight from Byzantium" (1985), an essay in forty-five sometimes discontinuous sections that meditates on the connections between history and geography, and while elegizing classical antiquity controversially discusses the "dusty catastrophe of Asia". Her analysis is welcome, but does not tell the whole or only story. That Brodsky loved the Roman, and that he even at times wrote as though he were a Roman, is obviously true. But many of his classicizing poems cast beauty in terms of decay and apocalyptic decline, and find tyranny and fascism lurking behind well-regimented beauty. By the same token, sometimes his travel experiences look less loaded with meaning and more innocent. "After a Journey", an account of his trip to Brazil for a conference in 1978, describes a series of mishaps more belittling to the poet than aggrandizing. Keen to explore Rio, Brodsky has his pocket picked. With no cash and stuck at the conference, he finds the view from the balcony circumscribes his horizons. The postcolonial script associates the motif of the balcony with the "master of all he surveys" trope. But in this case the poet is hardly master of anything and the passage affords the reader a chance to take a snapshot of a comically worried subject who, as it happens, was photographed on the balcony by his father annually in childhood (a ritual that features in the film A Room and a Half). Travel has hardly taken the boy out of the man.

More biographical emphasis might have unlocked the complications of "Flight from Byzantium". Gross's discussion provides a complementary perspective. What Turoma analyses as the theme of Russian cultural superiority also looks like the defensive reflex of a figure caught between a demanding émigré community and a vociferously liberal New York intellectual scene that repeatedly put him on the spot.  Russophilia and Soviet phobia cohabit uneasily. At times, the pressure to defend the legacy of Russian culture, rather than the State, sparked a Dostoevskian reflex to goad liberals (among them, some of his best American friends) by sounding staunchly pro-American in defiance of their criticisms of his adopted land.

Just how much the Cold War rivalry galvanized young minds in the 1980s may now seem a distant memory. Milosz and Brodsky were omnipresent authorities on the writers of Russia and Central Europe (a term Brodsky disliked, as Gross reminds us) who had disappeared into the totalitarian pulping machine. Literature seemed a live wire to political change, a means of liberation with the decline of the Soviet Union, and cause for scholarly devotion. The phenomenon described in Cavanagh's book played out over decades. She sees a gruesome irony in the fact that while Roland Barthes was proclaiming the Death of the Author, real-life authors were suffering and dying in the Eastern Bloc. Yet forcing the dichotomy is problematic because Barthes wished to liberate criticism from the dead hand of biographical positivism. Many recent Polish poets - Szymmborska, Baranczak, Herbert in particular have used a rhetoric of irony and ambiguity similar to techniques of Deconstruction, and in the aftermath of perestroika Russian intellectuals flocked to French theory.

If the case for teaching literature rests partly on its moral gravitas and social message, and frankly Romantic acceptance of genius, the time might be ripe to ponder the decline of literary prestige as a point on which East and West have converged since the end of the Cold War. I recall how in 1991, a Moscow conference marking the centennial of Mandelstam attracted many hundreds of poetry lovers as well as academics. When a young speaker misremembered a line from one of his lesser-known poems, virtually the entire auditorium erupted into a spontaneous correction. Nowadays there is no problem finding an edition of Mandelstam's works, and thankfully the death of the author looks a purely private matter. But a pool of acolytes, drawn from both the intelligentsia and the wider public, scarcely exists. The fervor and commitment of a mass of people dedicated to poetry and moved to action by its structures and messages of intellectual freedom now seem historically unique.