In 1964,
when Joseph Brodsky was 24, he was brought to trial for “social parasitism.” In
the view of the state, the young poet was a freeloader. His employment history
was spotty at best: he was out of work for six months after losing his first
factory job, and then for another four months after returning from a geological
expedition. (Being a writer didn’t count as a job, and certainly not if you’d
hardly published anything.) In response to the charge, Brodsky leveled a
straightforward defense: he’d been thinking about stuff, and writing. But there
was a new order to build, and if you weren’t actively contributing to society
you were screwing it up.
Over the
course of the trial he stated his case repeatedly, insistently, with a
guilelessness that annoyed the officials:
BRODSKY: I
did work during the intervals. I did just what I am doing now. I wrote poems.
JUDGE:
That is, you wrote your so-called poems? What was the purpose of your changing
your place of work so often?
BRODSKY: I
began working when I was fifteen. I found it all interesting. I changed work
because I wanted to learn as much as possible about life and about people.
JUDGE: How
were you useful to the motherland?
BRODSKY: I
wrote poems. That’s my work. I’m convinced … I believe that what I’ve written
will be of use to people not only now, but also to future generations.
A VOICE
FROM THE PUBLIC: Listen to that! What an imagination!
ANOTHER
VOICE: He’s a poet. He has to think like that.
JUDGE:
That is, you think that your so-called poems are of use to people?
BRODSKY:
Why do you say my poems are “so-called” poems?
JUDGE: We
refer to your poems as “so-called” because we have no other impression of them.
Brodsky
and the judge were (to put it mildly) talking past one another: Brodsky felt
his calling had a value beyond political expediency, while the judge was tasked
with reminding him that the state needn’t subsidize his hobby if he wasn’t
going to say anything useful. But the incommensurability of these points of
view runs much deeper than this one case.
Soviet
children were taught that the revolution wasn’t just a historical event but a dream
they were destined to bring to life. “We were born that fairy tale might become
reality,” they recited, “To conquer the vastness of space, / Reason gave us
steel wings for arms, / And in the place of a heart they gave us a fiery
motor.” Brodsky recounted how his childhood rebellion against this messaging
became a feature of his character: he despised with an almost atavistic hatred
the political slogans and reproduced images of Lenin that adorned his school
walls. From then on, he was suspicious of anything that struck him as redundant
or shallowly popular. This was, he wrote in his memoiristic essay “Less Than
One,” “my first lesson in switching off, my first attempt at estrangement”:
The
planks, the governmental iron of railings, the inevitable khaki of the military
uniform in every passing crowd on every street in every city, the eternal
photographs of steel foundries in every morning paper and the continuous
Tchaikovsky on the radio—these things would drive you crazy unless you learned
to switch yourself off.
For
Brodsky and his friends, “books became the first and only reality, whereas
reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance.” They preferred to
“read rather than to act.” Brodsky casts this as a natural tendency, as if
acting were something like eating cilantro for those not predisposed to it,
always leaving the sensation of having just had one’s mouth washed out with
soap.
Still,
inaction is a kind of action, as Brodsky was well aware. Why would a thinking
person—or really anyone sensitive to injustice or falsehood—decide to switch
off? The machine won’t stop; there is no sleep mode. Corruption is fed by
deceit and disaffection. Don’t we have a responsibility to stay on, awake,
woke?
The word
“intelligentsia” came into English by way of Russian, where it had been loaned
in turn from some unspecified European language—a trajectory that roughly maps
onto the development of the class itself. The defining members of the Russian
intelligentsia, as Isaiah Berlin outlined in “A Remarkable Decade,” were a
group of writers who came on the scene in the 1840s, including Alexander
Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Panaev and Vissarion Belinsky.
These men loved philosophy and literature as much as they hated the autocratic
system that kept the Russian populace miserable and enslaved. They consumed
ideas from Europe like drugs—from Rousseau and Voltaire to
Counter-Enlightenment figures like Joseph de Maistre to Hegel and the German
Romantics—and then argued about them with furious intensity. But what
distinguished these Russian intellectuals from the Europeans they modeled
themselves after was less their zeal or originality than their earnestness.
They believed they were “united by something more than mere interest in ideas;
they conceived of themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular
priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something
like a gospel.”
These
so-called “superfluous men” became the prototype of the intellectual that we
know today: well read, urbane, politically engaged. They insisted that there
was no escape from society for the writer, and that being a writer came with
certain obligations: what they said mattered, whether in fiction or prose,
among friends or in public. If previously the intellectual was oppositional by
bad luck or circumstance, they made it part of the job description.
The fall
of my senior year I took a small seminar taught by an Eastern European poet
with a priestly air accentuated by the long, thoughtful pauses that preceded
his pronouncements. One of the poems we were assigned was Brodsky’s “Autumn in
Norenskaia.” After his trial, Brodsky was sentenced to five years of labor in
the remote northern town of Norenskaia. He came to sort of enjoy his
punishment; after all, it gave him plenty of time to write. Composed in 1965,
“Autumn in Norenskaia” captures a brief moment at the end of the workday. “We
return from the field,” the poem begins, set against a backdrop of exhaustion
and decay. Horses in the street look like “inflated casks / of ribs trapped
between shafts,” while peasant women “scissor their way home, / like cutting
along a dull hem.” The first half of the poem is filled with straight lines.
The image of the women trudging in rows intersects with the plow marks fanning
out over the field behind them. Then, all of a sudden, the grid-like
composition Brodsky has so carefully constructed cracks and shatters: “The wind
breaks / a chain of crows into shrieking links.” He takes stock of the pieces:
These
visions are the final sign
of an
inner life that seizes
any
specter to which it feels kin
till the
specter scares off for good
at the
church bell of a creaking axle,
at the
metal rattle of the world as it
lies
reversed in a rut of water,
at a
starling soaring into cloud.
It’s a
high moment in a poem that is otherwise bitter and mundane. Even in a world
that “lies reversed in a rut of water,” the inner life finds itself reflected
in passing visions: the flight of birds, the light sparking in strangers’ eyes.
What struck me most, living in my own reversed world, is that for Brodsky these
visions did not offer hope the world would change, only that, whether or not it
changed, something of that life would endure.
I had been
raised in the multicultural, bubblegum Nineties. Like many other children of
the upper-middle class, I watched Captain Planet, went to cross-cultural
friendship camps and joined social-justice youth groups. Our generation was
told that difference was only skin deep, that in America you could accomplish
anything with enough hard work, that we could be the change we wanted to see.
Like good campers, we marched to protest the invasion of Iraq, wrote letters
against NAFTA and for human rights, voted for Obama, went vegetarian. At a
certain point it occurred to us there was no evidence any of this was working.
The market crashed; the gap between rich and poor yawned into an abyss.
Congress was paralyzed, and racism, far from diminishing in Obama’s presidency,
seemed to become more visible and virulent. What is to be done? we wondered.
All the progressive values we had been taught, when knocked, sounded hollow. So
our protests got smaller, cheekier and more digital. We made nihilistic jokes,
followed meme accounts, started therapy. We talked about TV.
All of
this is to say that Brodsky’s strategy of switching off made a perverse kind of
sense to me, even as it brushed up against my inculcated optimism. And yet, I
thought: Shouldn’t I fight that impulse?
“If a poet
has any obligation to society,” Brodsky said, “it is to write well. Being in
the minority, he has no other choice.” The Soviet trial judge is not the only
one who has taken this attitude to indicate a lack of social conscience. The
novelist and critic Keith Gessen, in a 2008 article for the New York Times Book
Review, faulted Brodsky’s generation of intellectuals and those who followed
for being “powerless to stop Putin from terrorizing the country, not because
they feared him, but because after the destruction of the Soviet Union they
retreated into ‘private life,’ which is what they wanted all along.” Gessen is
a great fan of Brodsky the poet, but wishes he would be more of a critic. In a
New Yorker essay from 2011, he condemned Brodsky for allowing himself to become
a “propagandist for poetry.” Gessen searched Brodsky’s oeuvre in vain for an
example that might undercut the unapologetic aestheticism that had “hardened
into dogma.” Not unlike the judge, Gessen seemed to demand of Brodsky, How were
you useful to the motherland? How could someone of Brodsky’s intelligence
actually believe that aesthetics governs ethics and not the other way around?
Every generation
of intellectuals finds a way of coming to terms with the limits of their
agency. Brodsky’s chose poetry; mine and Gessen’s took the train downtown. It’s
not a strict binary, of course: these two tendencies can coexist in the same
individual and express themselves in different ways. But we might consider that
switching off, for Brodsky, was a way of performing his social responsibility,
not shirking it. In Brodsky’s view, politics was one level of human existence,
but it was a low rung. The business of poetry, he thought, is to “indicate
something more … the size of the whole ladder.” He held that “art is not a
better, but an alternative existence … not an attempt to escape reality but the
opposite, an attempt to animate it.” What compels a poet to write is less “a
concern for one’s perishable flesh” than “the urge to spare certain things of
one’s world—of one’s personal civilization—one’s own non-semantic continuum.”
I think this was
his answer to Gessen’s challenge. When there is scarce room for political
maneuvering, when the prevailing cultural values are sucked of all
significance, making art that rejects tired tropes and social themes may not be
simply an expression of personal freedom, the luxury of the secure and
uninvested. It can model independent thought and attentiveness, preserving not
just the integrity of the self but also that of the culture one sees being
degraded before one’s eyes.
This is not art
for art’s sake; it needn’t be quietist or resigned. We can believe in the power
of art and defend it vigorously without indulging in fantasies of its social
utility. In times like these, we need critics. But we also need poets, who can
transmute experience into art and sniff out platitudes. Those who search for
possibilities in foregone conclusions and hearts in fiery motors.
Later in his
life, after immigrating to the United States, Brodsky was invited to give a
speech to a class of graduating seniors at an East Coast liberal arts college.
Unsurprisingly, he avoided the inspirational pabulum that normally stuffs
commencement speeches, opting instead for a commentary on the practice of “turning
the other cheek” as a means of combating social evil. The speech does not give
clear directives—it barely qualifies as advice—but it does complicate Gessen’s
picture of the late Brodsky as a mere “propagandist for poetry.”
Brodsky gives an
account of the standard interpretation of the lines of scripture that inspired
this doctrine of passive resistance and then goes on to mention the ending,
which is less commonly quoted. The idea is not just to turn the cheek to the
person who strikes you—you are also supposed to give him your coat:
No matter how
evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although
incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes
root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why
you’ve been hit on your right cheek in the first place.) At best, therefore,
what one can get from turning the other cheek to one’s enemy is the
satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. “Look,” the
other cheek says, “what you are hitting is just flesh. It’s not me. You can’t
crush my soul.”
The moral
stakes of this struggle are high precisely because they are personal. The
objective isn’t to appeal to your bully’s sense of compassion or pride or guilt
(for these are all easy to suppress), but to “expose his senses and faculties
to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise: the way every form of mass
production does,” and emerge with your spirit intact.
This
lecture reveals another dimension of Brodsky’s ethics of refusal. Switching off
is not about wallowing in silence or withdrawing into blissful ignorance; it is
about making sure that the static doesn’t deafen you to music.
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