St Petersburg

On the ideological level, at least one parallel exists between Brodsky’s Petersburg mythos and Balanchine’s work. The imperial theme is important for both. In Balanchine the line is clearly drawn in several of his major ballets, primarily those to music of Tchaikovsky. Identifying Petersburg with the empire was typical of Russian poets as early as the eighteenth century. Two of them—Antioch Kantemir and Gavriil Derzhavin—were particularly dear to Brodsky, for whom the concept of empire became central. In that sense Brodsky, like Mandelstam, can be called a “state-thinking” Russian poet.

The metaphor of empire is attractive to Brodsky because, paradoxically, in the closed imperial hierarchy he imagines, the poet holds a central position along with the emperor. The poet is in opposition to the tyrant, but in the organized space of the empire, they inevitably clash only to be reunited by the imperial course of events.

In Anno Domini, written in 1968 and dedicated to Marianna Basmanova, Brodsky re-created a mythological Roman Empire and with two or three strokes makes the governor general, fallen into disfavor, somehow reminiscent of the Leningrad Party boss Tolstikov, who was teetering on the brink of removal over differences with the Kremlin. He immediately introduces an autobiographical theme that links the fates of the poet and the tyrant: “… him the Emperor does not want to see, nor me—my son and Cynthia.” According to Brodsky, “the idea of an artistic bohemia can be really achieved only in a centralized state, since it appears as a mirror reflection of that centralization.”86

Peter the Great, according to Brodsky, played the role of the first Russian cosmopolite against the background of the “wild sets” of his new capital. One of Peter’s main achievements was his decision to found the capital by the sea—not for a military or economic purpose but for the metaphysical concept of freedom, which comes from the sea when “movement is not limited by the earth.” The literature created in Petersburg is marked by “the awareness that it is all being written from the edge of the earth. And if we can speak of some general concept, or tonality, or tuning fork of Petersburg culture, it would be alienation.”87

These ideas and others about the Petersburg mythos were imparted to Western audiences in Brodsky’s lectures, poetry readings (he gave over sixty in his first eighteen months in America), and especially the series of essays dedicated to his native city (“Less Than One: A Guide to a Renamed City”; “In a Room and a Half”) and its writers: Dostoyevsky (“The Power of the Elements”), Mandelstam (“The Child of Civilization”), and Akhmatova (“The Keening Muse”). The essays were collected in Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Award for criticism.

Very soon quotations from Brodsky’s Petersburg essays began appearing in Western meditations on Leningrad next to quotations from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. The intellectual elite had apparently absorbed the latest vision of the Petersburg mythos as presented by Brodsky and the image of contemporary Leningrad tied to that vision. Typical is Hortense Calisher’s casual comparison of Leningrad to a “decoratively bleeding heart.”88 The Russian and foreign branches of Petersburg modernism finally came together in the minds of Western intellectuals; this was due to Brodsky, who became the link between Mandelstam and Akhmatova on one side and Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine on the other. In the person of Brodsky, the West recognized the contemporary vitality of the Petersburg tradition.

A significant sign of this recognition was the not-unexpected Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his poetry and essays. In his Nobel lecture Brodsky emphasized the successional nature of his work, its ties with the past; he spoke of that in many interviews. But Brodsky told me that the strongest emotional experience connected with professional recognition was the news, arriving while he was still in Leningrad, that the British publisher was preparing a collection of his poems with a preface by W. H. Auden. Everything else, he said, was in a sense an “anticlimax.” He added, “Of course, it’s a pity that my mother and father did not live to see the Nobel Prize.”89

Despite the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev had been head of the Soviet Union for two years by then and perestroika and glasnost had become state slogans, Soviet officialdom greeted the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky with suspicion and hostility. A special secret memorandum prepared by the KGB for the Soviet leadership stated that the prize “is a provocative political act by reactionary circles in the West, intended to halt the growing sympathy of public opinion in the world for our country’s peace-loving foreign policy.”90