St Petersburg

Damage control went into effect. Nowadays, of course, Soviet ideologists could not act as crudely as they had done during the anti-Brodsky campaign of 1964, when the editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya gazeta announced in New York, “Brodsky is what we call scum, simply ordinary scum.” In 1987 a foreign ministry spokesman was more diplomatic, muttering that “the tastes of the Nobel Prize committee are somewhat strange sometimes.” For internal consumption, however, Moscow decided that the most effective policy would be silence.

The Leningrad intelligentsia received the news of Brodsky’s Nobel Prize with rejoicing. It was recognition and vindication of the “parasite” and “scum” Brodsky and of all of the Petersburg literature that had been stifled from Blok and Gumilyov to Mandelstam and Akhmatova. In Brodsky the international community was honoring the other Petersburg geniuses who had never been so honored.

The prize was a reason for spiritual self-rehabilitation. The intelligentsia had not been able to protect Brodsky from persecution by the authorities either in 1964 or in 1972, and ever since his expulsion to the West, it had felt like a group without a leader and under constant siege. Any excuse to persecute Leningrad intellectuals was seized upon, such as the continuing underground dissemination of Brodsky’s poems. In 1974 Vladimir Maramzin, a satiric writer like Zoshchenko, was arrested for compiling a samizdat collection of Brodsky’s works. Mikhail Kheifetz, who wrote the introduction to the collection, was sentenced to four years in the camps and two years in exile; the sentence read, “Kheifetz’s intentions to undermine and weaken Soviet power is proven by all his actions.”

Brodsky’s trial, with its symbolic overtones, had been enough to put the poet into the mythological ranks of the martyrs of the Petersburg pantheon: Blok-Gumilyov-Mandelstam-Akhmatova. His expulsion to the West completed the process, for in those years the émigrés vanished completely, both physically and spiritually. From those who remained, there could be no talk of return; even public mention of the exile’s name was forbidden.

For Leningrad poetry lovers Brodsky was dead, and the news that sometimes reached them from America was like news from “the other side.” His poetry was perceived as a contemporary classic. The situation was similar to the growth of Gumilyov’s fame after his execution by firing squad in 1921. A contemporary Petrograder commented then, “Whenever the state clashes with a poet, I feel so sorry for the poor state. What’s the worst the state can do to a poet? Kill him! But you can’t kill poetry, it is immortal, and the poor state suffers defeat every time.”91

The youth of Leningrad, seeking new paths, came into contact with the Petersburg mythos through Brodsky’s poetry, whose thought, style, vocabulary, diction, and technique spoke to them. Brodsky is a philosophical poet; his work is founded on Kierkegaard, the existentialists, and early-twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers. This foundation, as well as Brodsky’s complex dialogue with the Judaeo-Christian ethic, attracted the sympathy and interest of new readers of underground literature in Leningrad and throughout the USSR. Many sought in his poems the key to the “secret garden” of the old Petersburg culture, vanished, some thought, forever.

For the elite, one unexpected impression created by the new poems and essays that reached them from the West through clandestine channels was their “westernization.” Even when he lived in Russia, Brodsky had exhibited a lively interest in the English metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert and in Robert Frost and W. H. Auden. He also translated Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In the West Brodsky immersed himself further in modern English-language poetry.

Every new Western-influenced work by Brodsky that reached Leningrad was consumed and debated. Readers were fascinated to learn that Brodsky wrote poetry in Russian with a pen and essays in English on a typewriter. The cosmopolitan streak had grown quite weak by then, the result of decades of enforced isolation from any suspicious outside influences. The former “window into Europe” was slammed shut so firmly that Leningraders began calling the once-sparkling capital “a great city with a regional fate.” Brodsky’s work helped the Leningrad intelligentsia pry open a crack in the window.