St Petersburg

Brodsky’s expulsion deprived him of communication with his devoted readers in Leningrad, whose attention, understanding, and support had made his readings so memorable. He would gradually raise his guttural voice to something like singing and, shamanlike, bring his audience under his spell.

Soviet authorities counted on such separations to have a traumatic effect. Exile had ended the creative life of more than one Russian writer. For Brodsky the event was an unhealing wound. But his tormentors had underestimated his strength of character and cosmopolitan turn of mind. The acmeist ideology, “longing for world culture,” which Brodsky had learned through Akhmatova, also eased his transplantation. In addition, Brodsky was not long without Russian companionship in the West.

As the result of the Soviet policy to push potential troublemakers out of the country, a significant number of new émigrés from Leningrad had gathered in America (primarily in New York); many had been acquaintances or friends of Brodsky’s from his youth. Among them were the poets Lev Loseff, Dmitri Bobyshev, and Konstantin Kuzminsky, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, the cultural critics Boris Paramonov and Gennady Smakov, and the artists Mihail Chemiakin and Igor Tulipanov.

The Party’s ideological strategists were sure that all these creative personalities would—after some initial interest in them—soon sink to the bottom, never to return. They based this strategy on the fact that the old Russian émigrés had never managed to develop a successful political dialogue and even less so a union with liberal Western intellectuals. To make sure that it would not happen this time either, Soviet propagandists denounced the new émigrés, many of whom were Jewish, for fascistic leanings.

To the horde of unfinished-off fascist lackeys and criminals come petty little people reaching for their toady’s hunk of meat, “at long last” having reached the West, people who just recently had declared their loyalty to the ideals of pure art and creative freedom, who had bombastically bleated about their love for their Homeland…. And now works like “Pushkin and Brodsky” are being scribbled about these “newest” arrivals, works that elicit nothing but revulsion. Those who are capable of treachery become traitors. They made their choice and took the path of betrayal. They have been turned, not to put it too harshly, into ideological jesters.83

The effect of this propaganda barrage was negligible, however. Soviet Communism had lost its attractiveness, and Western intellectuals no longer had anything against contacts with Soviet nonconformists. The authorities had to resort to crude pressure, which sometimes (more frequently in Europe than in the United Stated) had the desired effect. For instance, the Spoleto Festival withdrew its invitation to Brodsky (whom Soviet propaganda now called “sponger off Western secret services”) after the Soviet ambassador to Italy threatened to rescind the promised performances of the Perm Ballet.84

Despite these minor setbacks, Brodsky’s intellect and erudition quickly made him a member of the American creative elite, so that he had every reason as early as 1976 to write in a poem addressed to his fellow Leningrad émigré and new friend, Mikhail Baryshnikov,

And as for where in space and time one’s toe end touches, well, earth is hard all over; try the States.

A noted American liberal intellectual once confessed to Brodsky that he had made Soviet nonconformity acceptable to her and to people like her. This acceptability extended to the latest incarnation of the Petersburg mythos, which Brodsky had brought with him from Leningrad.

Culturally, Brodsky became an heir to the three great representatives of the old Petersburg modernism in America—Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Brodsky was once called a “skeptical classicist,” and in that sense his aesthetics are close to that of this great troika. Like them, Brodsky constantly used classical models and mythogeny, transforming and breaking them, subjecting them to ironic reworking and philosophical commentary. Brodsky’s aesthetic, like theirs, was formed in great part by the Petersburg landscape, “so classicist that it becomes tantamount to a person’s mental state. It’s a kind of rhythm, completely conscious.”85

While attesting ironically, “I am infected with normal classicism,” Brodsky subjected it to every possible test of modernism and existential Russian philosophy (his favorite thinkers are Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov). In this he was also following Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Brodsky is a constant experimenter, complicating the shape of his lines, extending or shortening their length, often using complicated or archaic linguistic constructions, introducing exotic rhymes and refined puns. Brodsky deploys these devices with the ease of his Russian predecessors.