Secondary school at the Russian Embassy in Mongolia
Literary work
"The Artistic World of Joseph Brodsky"
Completed by students of 11 "A" class:
Pastina Daria,
Borovleva, Elizabeth
Tumanova Julia.
Supervisor:
Polyanichko Oleg Viktorovich
Ulaanbaatar
Introduction…………………………………………………………………….….3
Features of creativity……………………………………………………....4
About language and time……………………………………………………………..6
About man and time………………………………………………………….…10
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………......13
List of used literature………………………………………….....14
Introduction
The relevance of this work is due to the fact that works of art, and literature in particular, are an important component of the life of every person. Most of the works of writers, playwrights, and poets have been the subject of many research papers, but the work of Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky has not yet been studied as thoroughly as, say, Pushkin's legacy, and remains largely an inexplicable mystery for other readers...
Therefore, we decided to turn to the artistic world of this remarkable poet, actualizing attention on some facets of his work.
The purpose of the work is to identify the exceptional features of Brodsky's poetics, to consider their relationship with time and man, to establish the strength of the influence of literary creativity on them.
To implement this analysis, the following tasks were set in the work:
Analyze the poetic and prose works of the writer, identify the main points of contact between them;
Describe the main features of the poetic author's word;
Reveal the specifics of ideas about the world through the artistic space of I. Brodsky;
The material of the study was the poetic texts of I. Brodsky, as well as fragments of his essays and interviews, which determined the research methods: method of analysis works of art, analogy method, literary text interpretation method.
Features of creativity
The poetics of I. A. Brodsky is quite difficult for traditional way perception of a literary text, it requires a special way of thinking and constant hard work of the soul and mind. The early lyrics of the poet, more accessible to the general reader, gradually becoming more complex, acquired an increasingly pronounced deep philosophical orientation. Increasingly, Brodsky turns to mythology (mainly Christian and ancient), to the theme of love and loneliness, death and life, being and emptiness - the eternal, root concepts of civilization. In order to truly understand his poems, you need to know a lot, often these texts combine various historical eras, images, figures of culture and science. Even geometric terms acquire a special, linguistic meaning, with the help of images of which the author very accurately expresses feelings, thoughts about the world, about the place of man in it.
And - a synonym for emptiness or death,
progressive decay,
Like two straight lines intersecting at a point
Crossing, forgive.
"In memory of T.B."
Thought in the works of the poet is revealed slowly, unhurriedly, as if the author does not develop it, but follows the thought himself. The idea completely captures the writer, starting a poem, he may not imagine what conclusion he will come to in the end; this is the superiority of language over man: the word turns out to be higher than the human principle, dominates over it. It is no coincidence that Brodsky wrote in his Nobel lecture:
"... Beginning poem, the poet, as a rule, does not know how it will end, and sometimes turns out to be very surprised at what happened, because often it turns out better, than he expected, often his thought goes further than he expected. This and there is a moment when the future of a language interferes with its present. The one who writes the poem writes it primarily because the poem is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, feeling...
This amazing thesis of Joseph Alexandrovich, to one degree or another, becomes a kind of quintessence of all his poetic thought, the poet, in his desire to express his vision as clearly and clearly as possible, to reveal the idea, the thought in its pristine purity uses any artistic methods. To do this, the author uses such vocabulary that is able to most fully reveal the idea of the work: neologisms, vernacular, dialect words, clericalisms, vulgarisms. This traces the special originality of the poet, since, for certain socio-political reasons, Brodsky was not destined to become a successor to the poetic traditions of the past, but he was an innovator, intuitively following them, developing culture and introducing something exclusively of his own into it.
In one of the interviews, the poet said:
“When I left school, when my friends gave up their positions, diplomas, switched to belles-lettres, we acted on intuition, on instinct. We read someone, we generally read a lot, but there was no continuity in what we were doing. There was no feeling that we were continuing some kind of tradition, that we had some kind of educators, fathers. We really were, if not stepchildren, then in some way orphans, and it's wonderful when an orphan sings in the voice of his father. That was, in my opinion, the most amazing thing in our generation.”
About language and time
Joseph Brodsky attached great importance to poetry, because, in his opinion, "these are not" the best words in the best order ", this is the highest form of existence of the language", and the poet is the means of its existence "or, as the great Auden said, he is the one who by whom the language is alive.
A poet's duty is to try to unite
the edge of the gap between soul and body.
And only death to all sewing is the limit.
"My words, I think, will die..."
In "The Artist" lyrical hero, despite obstacles, walls of misunderstanding and cries of "It's ridiculous!", continues to create, to believe in himself. With great difficulty, he created real "art", which turned out to be much more important than even his own life; the cause outlived its creator, who died unrecognized, without glory, but “Judas and Magdalenes remained on earth”, as the greatest contribution to culture and its existence, in need of a human creator who became its necessary element, its successor.
So the poems written by Brodsky are an invaluable contribution to culture, to the development of the language. These are peculiar worlds that live their lives outside of time, capable of changing the human perception of the environment. According to Brodsky, the power of the influence of poetry on a person is infinite. The artistic word of a poet can induce a person to act, to think or feel, to strive to go forward, to spiritual development.
“If art teaches something (and the artist - first of all), then it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it wittingly or unwittingly encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person.
(From the Nobel lecture)
In the poem “Sitting in the Shadow”, people who are not able to think independently resemble “a swarm of bees” in their essence, they lose their individual features, their personality is leveled, they acquire the ability to “make noise with the voice of the majority”. This is the property of the new generation, which is moving forward, trying to break away from the past as soon as possible, and in its life it is not at all eternity, but “searching for constancy”. Such people, striving for business, and not for thought, were necessary for society, but this spiritual emptiness leads to a sad outcome, the “future” of such a world is “black”.
And literature, especially the poetic word, is the most the right way avoid such an outcome and change the situation, by the power of its influence on a person. Therefore, works of art are of such great importance, according to Brodsky, solely in their competence to teach a person to think, and therefore give him the opportunity to act differently than others want.
“Works of art, literature in particular, and a poem in particular, address a person tete-a-tete, entering into direct relations with him, without intermediaries. That is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, are disliked by zealots of the common good, rulers of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they find in the place of the expected consent and unanimity - indifference and disagreement, in the place of determination to act - inattention and disgust.
(From the Nobel lecture)
So, in the poem "Verbs", built on the metaphorical development of the plot, people are likened to verbs, because only an empty and thoughtless action remains of the personality. In the phrase “verbs without nouns. Verbs-simply” the specificity of the impersonal sentence is laid down; in people's lives there is no place for reflection, because reflection, thought, individuality are nouns, thus, impersonal verbs metaphorically replace faceless people.
Another similarity of people with a linguistic unit is that in human life, like a verb, there are three times, but in the end, “with all their three times”, those people “once ascend Golgotha”. Calvary is a symbol of martyrdom and suffering, where someone “knocks, hammering nails into the past, present, future time”, which means that they are hammered into the whole human existence, there is no future for these people, their past and present no longer matter. And “the Earth of hyperbolas lies under them”, there is no movement in this earth, it is static, it is under the weight of “hyperbolas”, but “the sky of metaphors floats” above other people, which means that the work of verbs was not fruitless, it created the possibility of further continuation of life.
In Brodsky's identification of the verb and the person, a great truth is hidden: a person is inseparable from language, and language from a person, these are complementary components of a single whole, monolithic, they are not able to exist separately from each other.
Of the whole person you are left with a part
speech. Part of speech in general. Part of speech.
Man is important to the poet not as a biological unit, but as a native speaker, as his successor, as his implementer. Everything ever created by man becomes part of culture, everything ever said or written becomes part of literature.
“Part of Speech” is the achievement of immortality, absolute perfection, reaching universal, cosmic scales. If during life the writer is an instrument for the existence of language, then after death the creator becomes part of it, completely unites with it. To some extent, this is similar to deification.
According to Brodsky, through language the poet merges with time and fixes himself in it, thus moving from the material world to the spiritual world, stopping the process of physical decay. BUT literary creativity- this is the most important factor in the development of literature, its property is the incessant desire to achieve the ideal. This is the main and most important feature of Brodsky's poetic world.
“All creativity begins as an individual desire for self-improvement and, ideally, for holiness”
("About Dostoevsky")
Language, according to Brodsky, is absolutely timeless, and this is an incredible power, amazing ability literature to neutralize the destructive effect of chronos. Thus, it becomes clear that the death of a language is fundamentally impossible, it would also mean the complete end of everything that exists. And, based on the works of art by Brodsky, we come to the conclusion that language has a divine origin, language is God himself, therefore it occupies a dominant position over other existential concepts: over time, over nature, over man.
So comforting is the singer's tongue,
transcending nature itself
their endings without end
by case, by number, by gender
changing
"Dust. Snow. Silence. Very..."
Language is in constant motion, it is not static, it tends to be constantly in dynamics. Thus, the artistic world of Brodsky's poetry reveals to the reader another property of the language - its infinity, its desire for constant, uninterrupted development.
“Every spoken word requires some kind of continuation. You can continue in different ways: logically, phonetically, grammatically, in rhyme. This is how language develops, and if not logic, then phonetics indicates that it requires development. For what is said is never the end, but the edge of the speech, which - due to the existence of Time - is always followed by something. And what follows is always more interesting than what has already been said - but not thanks to Time, but rather in spite of it.
("Prose and Essay")
Literature concentrates in itself all the works ever created, constantly improving, creating something new. And the main instrument of its development is the writer; Joseph Brodsky devoted many works to this topic, thereby making an invaluable contribution to Russian literature. He always loved the Russian language and admired it, it is no coincidence that he wrote his poetic works exclusively in this language. "As long as there is such a language as Russian, poetry is inevitable."
About man and time
Someday, when we're gone,
More precisely - after us, in our place
There will also be something
Which anyone who knew us would be horrified by.
But those who knew us will not be too many.
"Stop in the Desert"
As a result of life, exposing "teeth at every meeting", a person is left with his own, unlike anything, "part of speech". In the lines of Brodsky, saturated with the question of the essence of being, it is said that people worn out by fate, having met with “its wretched measures”, with its “short roads”, over time begin to treat this as a “given”, losing the meaning inherent in life. . Since “we have been taught to treat life as an object of our conclusions”, a judgment is made about how to live correctly by means of a logical conclusion. Even a writer, mastering the art of the word, is unable to comprehend the “art of life”, because he is still a person who is under the power of language, space, time ...
Brodsky generally quite often refers to time. “Days”, “future”, “aging”, other units of time measurement, verbs that create references to the past, present, future - according to Brodsky, they all do not carry a significant value of life. This is just a time frame that should, like the person himself, be filled with specific content, which is the “part of speech” - part of the boundless universe, doomed to remain after.
Butterfly - the heroine of the poem of the same name - lives "only a day", but the Creator rewarded her with extraordinary beauty: "you have pupils, eyelashes on your wings", "you are a landscape, and, taking a magnifying glass, I will find a group of nymphs, a dance, a beach." And this small creature, a butterfly, personifies one day of a person - an insignificant time period, which, by and large, "is nothing for us." "But what is in my hand so similar to you?" - asks the poet. In this world, everything that has flesh cannot exist forever. And the life of a butterfly, and people has its end.
A person does not feel days, because he has “clouds” of such butterflies “behind his back”. But she alone is “closer and more visible” than one day, which in the face of a butterfly seems to acquire the body and meaning of its presence in the fate of a person.
The age will soon end, but I will end sooner.
This, I'm afraid, is not a matter of intuition.
Rather - the influence of non-existence
to being.
Fin de Siecle
Brodsky constantly talks about the power of time over man. Time can erase everything without a trace, and "go and reproach him." Because of this, a person attaches too much importance to time:
… The space is populated.
Friction of time about him freely
intensify as much as you like.
In order for time to continue to flow, it "requires sacrifice, ruins." And these are not some simple unnecessary things, but the most valuable thing that a person has - "feelings, thoughts, plus memories." “Such is the appetite and taste of time,” and man unquestioningly presents such generous gifts that the great time could not completely absorb them. Why does the poet call "new times" sad. But "time moving outward is not worth attention." The main thing is with what and how a person saturates his time intervals.
All this was, was.
All of this blew us away.
All this poured, beat ...
"Poems about accepting the world"
Human life is full of various kinds of difficulties through which he is forced to go in order to learn and choose the true path. Overcoming time, people "learned to fight and learned to bask in the hidden sun." They, living in the same time, go through this stage in almost the same way, since we have not learned to “not repeat ourselves”, and in general, humanity “likes constancy”. And a person can realize this by looking through the eyes of old age.
Buzzing like an insect
time has finally found what it was looking for
a treat in the hard back of my head.
"1972"
"Aging! Hello my aging! - time does not spare anyone, nothing, everything converges, at best, to one. With the advent of the extreme temporary part of life, accompanied by problems with vision, an immobile body, crunching joints, people begin to be afraid, even if there is nothing to be afraid of:
Everything I could lose is lost
clean. But I also reached in outline
everything that was meant to be achieved
And it is precisely because of this “nothing” that fear settles in a person, because “the influence of the coming corpse” is felt. Although a person feels the fear of approaching death, he understands that he will perpetuate his thoughts, feelings, perhaps in the spiritual world of creativity and, like a poet, in “literature”:
“One of the merits of literature lies in the fact that it helps a person to clarify the time of his existence, to distinguish himself in the crowd of both predecessors and his own kind, to avoid tautology, that is, a fate otherwise known under the honorary name of “victims of history”
(From the Nobel lecture)
Brodsky tells us about "the transformation of the body into a naked thing" - emotions are lost by a person in the process of aging. This is when you want to cry. But there's nothing to cry about." The poet endows the lyrical hero in the poem “1972” only with a sense of emptiness, he ceases to feel time.
Therefore, Brodsky informs us main idea about the fact that in any case one should live, act while there is an opportunity, without looking back at time periods: “Beat the drum while you are holding the sticks!”.
Conclusion
The poetic language of Joseph Brodsky is characterized by a variety of semantic nuances, an abundance of metaphors, epithets, comparisons that show the originality of the author's thinking and attitude.
The poet touches upon philosophical questions about time, about man, about the structure of the whole world, but the main, central, root conclusion to which he leads his reader is the idea of the dominant meaning of language over everything else, about its divine origin.
And if everything physical is subject to decay, then language remains a permanent, absolute phenomenon, it is quite capable of overcoming even the destructive effect of time. But language is not able to exist on its own, apart from man, and the writer or poet is the one who is able and must support and develop it. This is the great destiny of Joseph Brodsky as a creator, because literary creativity has an unthinkable power that can change human thinking and support the language in constant development.
His works continue to exist in eternity, saving literature from impoverishment or possible disappearance, and a person from spiritual decay.
Bibliography
The poem "In Memory of T.B." I. Brodsky, 1968
The poem "My words, I think, will die ..." I. Brodsky, 1963
The poem "Twilight. Snow. Silence. Very ... "I. Brodsky, 1966
The poem "Stop in the desert" I. Brodsky, 1966
The poem "Butterfly" I. Brodsky, 1972
Poem "Fin de Siecle" I. Brodsky, 1989
The poem "Poems about accepting the world" I. Brodsky, 1958
The poem "1972" I. Brodsky, 1972
The poem "... and at the word" future "from the Russian language" I. Brodsky, 1975
The poem "Dedicated to Yalta" I. Brodsky, 1969
Nobel lecture I. Brodsky, 1987
Essay "About Dostoevsky" I. Brodsky, 1980
Interview with I. Brodsky
"Prose and Essay" by I. Brodsky
The future poet was born in Leningrad, which he prefers to call Petersburg. In his essay “Less Than One,” Brodsky devotes many pages to describing post-siege Leningrad. From these porticos and façades, both classical and eclectic and modernist, he learned the history of culture much better than later from books. But, Brodsky does not hide, life was going on on the stage of the beautiful city-museum, crushing people with its centralization, militarization. Obedience was considered the main virtue of citizens, including schoolchildren. The school gave Brodsky the first importunately mediocre lessons in ideology. At the age of 15, the future poet leaves school and is further engaged in self-education. He believed that narrow specialization should begin from the 8th grade, since young man a sharp mind and an excellent memory, but he has to devote time to studying disciplines that he will never need again.
Brodsky thoroughly learned two foreign languages - English and Polish, and subsequently translated from them. He studies philosophy, including religious and metaphysical, of course, illegally. Of course, he is engaged in literature, both official and unofficial.
Brodsky refers himself to the generation of 1956, but not to the “children of the 20th Congress”, but to those young people whose consciousness was changed under the influence of the suppression of the “Budapest Autumn” by the police forces. Many thinking people stopped believing Soviet propaganda. This was the first impetus for the emergence of dissident sentiment. Some went into legal opposition, others, like Brodsky, much more sharply denied the existing order of things.
Since that time, Brodsky's texts have been dominated by global categories. He begins to write at the age of 16 and is formed as a poet among poets who begin their work in the journal "Syntax" (1958). Brodsky reads his poems among friends and acquaintances. The talent of the poet was appreciated by Akhmatova, the way to the house of which was opened to the young poet by his senior comrade Yevgeny Rein.
Despite unofficial recognition, Brodsky did not expect official publication in the USSR. From the age of 16 he has been under the supervision of the KGB. He was arrested four times and in 1964, on trumped-up charges, was subjected to a psychiatric examination, and then, on charges of parasitism, received 5 years of exile. Due to public protest (Akhmatova, Shostakovich), the exile was reduced to one and a half years. In exile, he was in 1964-1965 in the village of Norenskaya, Arkhangelsk region, where he was supposed to be engaged in forced labor. The authorities miscalculated, as they awarded Brodsky with the halo of a martyr for intellectual freedom. From now on, everything that came out from under his pen attracted wide public interest. In 1965, the collection Poems and Poems was published in the USA, and in 1970 the second collection, Stop in the Desert. The total amount written by Brodsky in 1956 - 1972 amounted to 4 volumes of typescript.
Brodsky was persecuted, although it cannot be said that political themes occupied a prominent place in his works. His poetry is of an intellectual and philosophical nature, however, his interpretation of eternal themes differed sharply from that adopted in the literature of socialist realism, since Brodsky declared himself as an existentialist poet, reviving the traditions of modernism, artificially cut off during the period of totalitarianism, and peculiarly crossing them with traditions pre-postmodern classics. Brodsky, as it were, synthesized on the modernist platform the discovery of various artistic systems of the past, so that his artistic orientation is often defined as neomodernism.
“The theme of existential despair broke through in the poetry of the young Brodsky,” writes Viktor Erofeev, “capturing along the way the themes of parting, separation and loss.” In this poetry, a certain timelessness, detachment was palpable, there was no historical optimism inherent in the work of the sixties. On the contrary, it is very pessimistic, dramatic and tragic notes appear, sometimes softened by irony. But even this tragedy appears not openly, not forcedly, but as if from a subtext, as if against the will of the author, who is by no means inclined to demonstrate his spiritual wounds, is very restrained in expressing poetic feelings and prefers an impassive tone. In this regard, Brodsky was greatly influenced by Anglo-American poetry and, above all, by T. S. Eliot. Brodsky noted the influence exerted on him by the English language itself, by its nature colder, neutral, aloof, expressing rational rather than emotional language, in which the features of the English national character were manifested. Brodsky introduces into the Russian literary language, which in the sense of expressing the emotional and rational, occupies an intermediate position, elements of anglicization - restraint, detachment. He often constructs his texts according to the syntactic models of not Russian, but English. All this taken together gave the Russian language a new quality. Brodsky expanded the possibilities of poetic creativity due to an even deeper subtext than Akhmatova's, virtuoso use of details. Brodsky, as a modernist, recalled the polysemantic nature of the poetic word, which for him turns out to be a point of intersection of many meanings.
Brodsky focused on the prose of poetic speech. In the second half of the century, the poetry of the leading Western literatures switched to vers libre. The dispassionately detached style was very closely merged with personality traits, it was not an artificial inoculation for Brodsky and contributed to the identification of the features of his worldview. Brodsky is primarily a poet of thought. The rational principle in his personality and poetry dominates the emotional one. It is no coincidence that most of Brodsky's works are reflections on being and non-being, about space and time, about culture and civilization. Increased attention to eternal themes reflected the desire to break out of the limited circle of cultural life in which the ordinary Soviet person was closed. Brodsky has significant ancient and biblical cultural layers. Brodsky emphasizes not merging with his time, but demarcation. “I erected a different monument to myself / Back to the shameful century.”
Brodsky's works are distinguished by the obligatory connection between the individual and the universal. The timeless, existential, eternal emerges through the concrete forms of time. Brodsky's intonation cannot be confused with anyone else's. In it, established skepticism, irony, melancholy appear as habitual melancholy. Brodsky hides his mental anguish, he is restrainedly imperturbable, proudly contemptuous and even mocking. Sometimes this is served by a gayer tone, which plays the role of a mask: "The Greek principle of the mask is now back in use."
The works of the first period reflected the non-conformism of a person who is ready to defend his "I" to the end, looking for a life purpose on the paths of existentialism, a peculiarly understood stoicism. According to existentialism, the main definition of being is its openness, openness to transcendence. Transcendence - going beyond, in the philosophy of existentialism, transcending is understood as going beyond the limits of one's "I" into the sphere of pure spirit. This exit is considered to be salutary, because, coming into the world, a person becomes a victim of objectification and begins to realize his life is meaningless. As a factor that allows you to escape from the world of objectification, where necessity prevails, existence through transcending is considered.
In an effort to spiritually free himself from the clutches of totalitarianism, Brodsky is more and more imbued with an existentialist worldview. To the question of a journalist what influenced the formation of his character: “When I was 22 or 23 years old, I had the feeling that something else had moved into me and that I was not interested in the environment ... at best, as a springboard ...” Illustration tendencies towards greater autonomy. “Sooner or later, there comes a moment when the earth’s gravity ceases to act on you.” The inner life of the poet, in which transcendence predominates, obscured outer life. Physically being in the earthly world, Brodsky spent most of his time in the realm of pure spirit. Persecuted by the authorities, Brodsky as a poet and personality is gradually turning into a self-sufficient closed system. Alienation from the world, as the researcher Lurie showed, was for Brodsky the only option for gaining spiritual freedom. “Our inner world is exaggerated, and the outer world, accordingly, is reduced,” - his neighbor in a psychiatric hospital conveys to the authorities the words of the autobiographical hero in the poem “Goryunov and Gorchakov”.
Gradually, Brodsky began to personify the outside world (under the influence of exile) as the image of the desert. The desert in Brodsky's works is a metaphor for an empty, meaningless life, which the poet equates with spiritual non-existence. This is the life of the mass people of a totalitarian society, which in a thinking person causes inescapable loneliness. It is no coincidence that Brodsky's desert landscape is completely without people. Beginning with the poem "Isaac and Abraham", the desert landscape also turns out to be barren. “Hills, hills, you can’t count them, measure them ...” Such is Brodsky’s reaction to the gradual curtailment of the thaw. Brodsky shows that walking in the desert falls into the sand, stands still and may even die.
“Without a compass, paving the way, // I use the altimeter of pride” - “Winter Mail”. The lyrical hero is a traveler across a vast area without any landmarks, where a person, in order not to destroy himself as a person, must obey exclusively reason and moral feelings. Traveling through space serves as a metaphor for the life path - the path of a person through time. "Edification" (1987) - the path of life is likened to climbing the mountain paths and steeps of Asia. This is a very difficult path, but the main thing is that even if you reach the top, it is important that you do not get dizzy.
Through the entire "Edification" runs the motive of distrust of the world, where a sleeping person can be hacked to death, and hungry and undressed thrown out into the cold. All these are options for reprisals against a person who has chosen his own path in life. In such a world, you can fully rely only on yourself. But this and real opportunity survive and succeed. Hence the cult of individualism characteristic of Brodsky. Brodsky seeks to deprive this concept of a negative halo and use individuality as a counterbalance to "ohlos" - the collective, the basis of mass society. Sometimes Brodsky even sees the future as an empire of the masses. "The future is black, // but from people, and not // because it // seems black to me." Such a future is programmed for the disappearance of individuality. Brodsky characterizes his work as "the aria of the minority." "The idea of the existential uniqueness of each is replaced by the idea of personal autonomy." Brodsky's individualism can be regarded as a synonym for the principle of personality as the supreme value of society. This principle, Brodsky shows in his essay "Journey to Istanbul", is alien to the tradition of the East, which was also adopted in the USSR. Convinced of how cruelly the authorities and the masses crack down on those who differ from them, Brodsky portrays himself in New Stanzas for Augusta as a man whose soul is pierced through and through. In the poem "A Conversation with a Celestial", Brodsky compares existence in a totalitarian society with the daily endless Golgotha. This, of course, is about moral Golgotha. The lyrical hero is likened to a martyr. Life itself is, first of all, pain, and a person is a “pain tester”.
Brodsky depicts the consequences of his traumatized by all the norms regulating the existence of a totalitarian state and exposed in the period of the post-thaw twenty years. “The detachment from oneself began ... At that time it was something like self-defence.” Brodsky comes to self-detachment as a kind of anesthesia. From here, in Brodsky's work, detachment and self-detachment appear: "I want to fence myself off from myself." The poet begins to look at his suffering, like a certain researcher, from the outside. This is a look first at oneself in the mirror, and together, moving away from oneself to the side, the poet also moves away from the source of pain. Over time, this self-detachment becomes a familiar literary feature of Brodsky. "Mexican Divertissement": "So while you look at yourself - from nowhere."
Sometimes Brodsky looks at himself from a very high and very distant point of view, for example, with the eyes of an angel ("Conversation ..."). This is an ideal, extremely objective point of view. Brodsky's self-removal is not enough. Between himself and life he places the phenomenon of death. The tragedy of the finiteness of being in the perception of Brodsky overshadows all the dramas he experiences. To endure the break with his beloved, parting with his homeland, he is helped by the consciousness that separation from the world awaits everyone. The greater horror overrides the lesser, to some extent neutralizes it and helps to endure it. Death, as an integral component of being, occupies a significant place in Brodsky's works. For early period his work is characterized by the epithet "black". Brodsky endows death with a prosaic aspect. Time itself, according to Brodsky, was created by death. "Man is the end of himself and goes into time." Through the prism of finiteness, mortality, the poet evaluates the very phenomenon of life. "Life is only a conversation in the face of silence." An ordinary landscape at Brodsky's hand can develop into his philosophical reflections, in which the component of death will also be presented. The poet emphasizes that the soul, exhausted by experiences, seems to become thinner. The perception of life as a movement towards death imposes a shade of melancholy and some detachment from everyday life on Brodsky's poems. Brodsky seeks to look beyond the edge and suggest what awaits us after death. At first, the poet still admits the possibility of the existence of life beyond the grave. "Letter in a Bottle" (1965): "When on my modest ship ... I will go to the great maybe." He also has purely symbolic ideas about life as a dream within a dream, and death as a resurrection in another kingdom. Gradually, Brodsky begins to rationalize and interpret well-known religious and philosophical concepts.
"In memory of T. B.": "You were the first to go to that country ... where everyone - wise men, idiots - all look the same." Consequently, both recognition and meeting beyond the grave are impossible. The description of the afterlife of countless doubles cannot but make one shudder.
Hell and heaven are not interpreted by Brodsky in the traditional way. Hell is the totality of those torments and hardships that can befall a person in life itself. The image of paradise evolves over time towards an increasingly critical perception of the religious model eternal life. Initially, this is a biblical idyll: "Abraham and Isaac" - an ideal landscape is recreated in which the heroes appear to God in the form of a heavenly bush.
“The Cape Lullaby” is a supercritical assessment of paradise as a place of impotence and a dead end, because in paradise, as it is presented in the main mythologies, there is no development and creativity, and if a poet cannot be creative, then what kind of paradise is this for him? This main defect of the heavenly utopia devalues it in the eyes of the poet, reveals its inferiority. Nyman characterizes Brodsky as "a poet without paradise."
Brodsky gives his own ideal model of being, which, in his opinion, is better than paradise. The most important features are infinity, spirituality, perfection, creative activity as the main form of life, and an unbounded aspiration to the sky. This other world exists in the mind of the poet and is more important for him than the earthly world. Figurative designations are metaphors for a star, “that country”, “there”. The poet feels like a citizen of "that country". In the poem "Sonnet" (1962), the lyrical hero lives simultaneously in the real and the ideal. The real world is characterized by prison metaphors, and the ideal world is the world of sweetly sublime dreams. There, in a higher dimension, the soul of the lyrical hero strives:
And I'm delirious again
from interrogation to interrogation along the corridor
to that far country where there is no more
no January, no February, no March.
The hero goes beyond the boundaries of his "I" into the sphere of pure spirit. Striving for another world, when creative imagination merges with transcendence, figuratively recreates the "Great Elegy to John Donne". If we recall the words of Brodsky that a literary dedication is also a self-portrait of the writer, then it should be recognized that the description of the transcendental flight of the soul of John Donne simultaneously depicts the transcendental flight of the soul of the author of the work:
You were a bird and saw your people
everywhere, all, flew up over the slope of the roof.
You have seen all the seas, all the distant land.
And you have matured Hell - in yourself, and after - in reality.
You also saw clearly bright Paradise
in the saddest - of all passions - frame.
You saw: life, it is like your island.
And you met with this Ocean:
on all sides only darkness, only darkness and howling.
You circled God and rushed back.
The space of the poem is the space of culture, spirituality. And here, through the centuries, one poet hears another poet, in whose torment he recognizes his own. Brings together one and the other mourning the mortal lot of man. If, according to Donn, earthly life- hell, then Brodsky likens it to the terrible judgment already underway, which people manage to oversleep. The motive of deep sleep, which covers literally everything on earth, is a cross-cutting one. It is no coincidence that even the living in the author's description do not differ from the dead. Both good and evil sleep, and God fell asleep - everything sleeps, and snow falls over the earth, covering the earth as if with a white shroud. The only being who, according to Brodsky, does not sleep at this time is the poet (John Donne), whose goal is to create an ideal world, more beautiful than anything ever imagined. As long as poetry is being written on earth, Brodsky emphasizes, life is not destined to end.
The feeling of being at a great height, in the world of pure spirit, gives a great lift to the lyrical hero, this is the sweetest form of detachment that Brodsky resorts to in life and work. The other world is the reality of his consciousness. Nowhere does he write that, perhaps, he will fall into it after death. Over time, a non-illusory view of things is affirmed in the verses (“The Funeral of the Gods”, “The Song of Innocence, she is experience”). In the latter case, Brodsky uses the form of a chorus, giving the word to "innocent" and "experienced" mass people, that is, optimists and pessimists. The serene view of the first on the future, according to Brodsky, borders on idiocy, the view of others - on nihilism and death of the spirit. The consumer attitude to the world makes them both related.
1: "The nightingale will sing to us in the green thicket, // we will not think about death more often, // than the crows in the sight of garden scarecrows."
2: “Emptiness is more likely and worse than hell, // we don’t know who to tell, don’t.”
Both points of view, according to Brodsky, are abnormal. The irony prevails towards those who have not tried to create anything that would outlive them.
A person who leaves behind not a void, but a cultural heritage - this problem appears in the poems on the death of Thomas Stearns Eliot. The poem begins as a mournful requiem and ends with a solemn apotheosis to a man who has done so much for two cultures. Two homelands are depicted by Brodsky in the form of tombstones petrified by grief, which stand on the sides of the grave.
You went to others, but we
call the kingdom of darkness
According to Brodsky, Eliot went into the world of culture, which continues to exist even after his physical death. The poet's soul avoids corruption.
Brodsky "trying on" his own death. This experience gives rise to the understanding that death can be overcome by the symbolic immortality of the spirit. Immortality for Brodsky is the justification of life. If you stayed, then you created something very important and valuable. The means of achieving immortality is poetry. “A strange metamorphosis takes place ... and only a part of a person remains - a part of speech.” “We will go with you separately” (address to verses). In his poems, Brodsky put all the best he possessed:
You are better and kinder. you are harder
my body. You are easier
my bitter thoughts - which is also
will give you a lot of strength, power.
It turns out that any person lays the foundations of his immortality on earth, if he lives a full-fledged creative life, he prepares his own immortality in some form. The categories of life and death for Brodsky, as well as for Tsvetaeva, are deprived of their traditional meaning: this various forms immortality.
Right, the thicker the scattering
black on the sheet
the more indifferent
to the past, to the void
in future. their neighborhood,
little other good
only speeds up the run
on pen paper.
Brodsky considers the creation of temporary, transient - timeless values to be the most important. The mature Brodsky has the psychology of the son of eternity. He looks at himself including from the future. The future is also a mirror that does not lie. For Brodsky, looking at himself from the distant future is fundamentally important. “In those days I lived in the country of dentists” (about the first period of emigration). We are talking about today, but the form of the past tense is used, as if for the poet it is the past. "They (the angels) enjoy the drama of the life of dolls, which we actually were in our time."
Such a view allows you to soberly evaluate not only yourself, but also modern world and your age. The poet's vigilance is demonstrated by the anti-totalitarian poems of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They show in the lyrical hero a man who was ahead of his time and who has the courage to make his opinions public. These are the texts of the so-called "Roman cycle" - "Anno Domini", "Post aetatem nostram", "Letters to a Roman friend", in which, by bringing together the orders that prevailed in Rome with those that prevail in the Soviet Union, Brodsky exposes the imperial character USSR policy. Rome is a metaphor for the USSR, rooted in the idea of Russia as the third Rome. Brodsky recognizes himself as a Roman, that is, not least, a Stoic and a patrician of the spirit. A kind of diptych is formed by the poems "Anno Domini" and "Post aetatem nostram". (“Our era” and “After our era.”) Allegorical indication: Brodsky wants to say that the Soviet Union returned to pre-Christian times and discarded the values created by humanity under the influence of Christianity.
The most important feature of these texts is their duality, when modern life emerges through the image of imperial Rome. The meaning of history is in the essence of structures, and not in the decorum, Brodsky emphasizes. He writes on behalf of an ancient Roman poet of the Silver Latin era and recreates the celebration of Christmas in one of the provinces. Separate pictures are written out as if by a painter. The work, which in fact does not criticize anything, is imbued with a terrible longing for the glassy-empty eyes of the mob and the obsequious eyes of the elite groveling before the governor.
Brodsky is much more critical in Post aetatem nostram, where he describes imperial rituals symbolizing subservience and readiness for betrayal. Equally ironic is the enthusiasm of the masses, joyfully welcoming their despot. There is a lot of melancholy in this work. Brodsky refutes the myth of moving forward and uses the metaphor of a trireme stuck in a ditch. The motif of life stopped in its movement appears, which develops in other texts (“The End of a Beautiful Era”), where Brodsky already refuses the Roman entourage. The vices of the system are presented visually, in generalized allegorical images, the poet gives a group portrait of moral monsters and freaks and allegorically depicts the Soviet Union as a country of fools.
In 1972, Brodsky completed Letters to a Roman Friend. This is a spiritual survival program for those who are not damaged in mind and have retained a sound mind and feeling. human dignity. Brodsky uses the literary mask of the ancient Roman poet Martial, who became famous for his satirical causticity and the polished laconicism of his epigrams. Martial had a conflict with the authorities, and in his old age he returned to the outback, choosing the lifestyle of a private person who prefers obscurity to humiliation. The mask of a middle-aged, wise man, chosen by the 32-year-old Brodsky, is one of the means of self-distance. In fact, Brodsky's ethical and philosophical observations, accumulated over his lifetime, are cast here in the form of maxims and remarks. The author uses the epistolary form, which makes it possible to fasten diverse material into a single whole. A sober-skeptical view of things does not negate a grateful attitude towards what makes life beautiful. The love look of the hero is turned to the sea, mountains, trees, the book of Pliny the Elder. Understanding the highest value of life permeates the entire work.
Brodsky indulges in ironic philosophizing, asking his friends whom he addresses on behalf of Martial. It is felt that he is not very worried about what is happening in the capital, since he knows what tyrants and their obsequious minions are. In fact, the hero of the poem is most concerned about the question of death on the verge of death. Initially, these arguments arise in the story of a visit to a cemetery. The hero is trying to imagine what will happen in the world after he dies? Everything will remain in its place, mountains, sea and trees, and even a book. Brodsky reveals the tragic background of human existence, regardless of where a person lives and who he is. The feeling of universal solidarity, based on the awareness of the common tragedy under which a person exists, should, according to the poet, contribute to progress on earth. Until such unity has occurred, the poet teaches how to live in conditions of lack of freedom.
Along with the image of a Stoic Roman, the image of a Greek also appears. Initially, this is Theseus (“To Lycomedes on Skyros”), who entered the fight with the Minotaur. Further - the image of a Greek who, living in the Roman Empire, does not want to be either a fool or a stoic. There is an escape motive.
In 1972, Brodsky was summoned to the OVIR and there it was announced to him that he would either leave for the west or be sent to the east. Brodsky was perceived as the informal leader of forbidden literature. All documents for departure were issued in three days, which means that the action was planned in advance. (Like other opposition authors, Brodsky was expelled.)
In the first article published abroad (“Look Back Without Anger”), Brodsky, in his own words, refuses to smear the gates of his homeland with tar. He says that he not only experienced a lot of bad things in his country, but also a lot of good things: love, friendship, discoveries in the field of art. He has a negative attitude towards the regime, not the fatherland. Brodsky compares the position of an unofficial, independently thinking artist in the USSR and in the West and comes to the conclusion that they are both trying to break through the wall. In the USSR, the wall responds in such a way that it endangers the life of the artist. Here, in the West, Brodsky shows, the wall does not react at all, which has a very painful effect on the psyche of the creator. "I'll tell you the truth, I don't know which is worse." Brodsky again needs to win over an audience that is alien and not very interested in poetry. To write well, Brodsky emphasized, one must know the language in which one writes perfectly. In emigration, the replenishment of the language element stops, a person who breaks away from the country runs the risk of becoming old-fashioned.
In the future, other emigrants who came from Russia began to play the role of the street near Brodsky. "Earlier in St. Petersburg, I would not have let half of them on the threshold." Now he began to communicate with visitors only in order to capture the peculiarities of their language.
For a writer, according to Brodsky, only one form of patriotism is possible - his attitude to the language. The creator of bad literature in this sense is a traitor, and a real poet is a patriot. Brodsky's article ends with the assertion that by changing one place for another, a person changes one type of tragedy for another.
Abroad, at the invitation of Karl Proffer, Brodsky settled in Ann Arbor, improved in English language and works as a poet at the University of Michigan. Only the richest universities in the world could afford to maintain this position (“no country is stupid enough not to grow its own cultural elite, and some US universities have such a position”). The poet meets with students once a week and communicates with them in a very free manner. He reads to them his poems, old or new, poems of other poets whom the students do not know enough, lectures on literature, Russian or American, or just chats. Usually very significant figures are invited to such a position, allowing the student's personality to grow. Russian remains the main language for Brodsky, but over time he improved his English so much that he was able to write in English. He became a Russian-American author. In English, prose, essays, and articles predominate. He saves Russian for poetry. This is now the main means of self-identification, and now the Russian language in the English-speaking community plays the role of a means of removing Brodsky.
The first years were the most painful. Brodsky of these years resembles a plant that has taken root in the ground, and it was torn out and transplanted to another soil, and it is not clear whether it will take root. Outwardly, the prosperous course of the poet's life contrasts sharply with the state of emotional and psychological coma, which Brodsky recreated for the first time in world literature. Metaphorically speaking, the poet feels as if he is dead. In the poem "1972": "This is not the mind, but only blood." The poet likens himself to the shadow that remains of a person. Emigration brought with it not only freedom, but also the breaking of all habitual ties. Everything that was dear to a person was taken away from him. Brodsky had a feeling of hanging in the void, and this shock was so exorbitant that it led to a temporary paralysis of the soul. The closest thing to what happened to Brodsky was Lurie, who said that the poetry of the emigrant Brodsky was the notes of a man who committed suicide. Skoropanova believes that it is more correct to talk about the murder. "Severe pain, having killed on this one, the world continues on the next one." The poet is stunned, killed, does not feel anything, this is the highest degree of suffering, when a person suffers so much that he loses the ability to express it emotionally. Self-alienation, the use of metaphors with the meaning of immobility, deadness, when Brodsky looks at himself from the side and only fixes movements in space. Often he writes about himself in the third person, as in the poem "Laguna": "A guest carrying grappa in his pocket is absolutely nobody, a man, like everyone else, who has lost his memory, his homeland ..." Overwork from nervous shock. Brodsky separates his own body from the soul and makes it an independent character: "The body in a cloak settles in areas where Love, Hope, Faith have no future." This is not the same person who was in his youth, this is a poet who has suffered and continues to painfully realize himself. It is no coincidence that in one of the poems the lyrical hero looks in the mirror and sees the clothes, but not the face.
Brodsky often uses the metaphor of ruins, ruins, debris. The temple of his soul is compared with ruins, fragments. Suffering is compared either with concussion during a bombardment, or with radiation sickness. Sometimes Brodsky likens his face to a ruin. Everyone who knew him noted that Brodsky grew old very quickly. From here comes the great place of gray in Brodsky's work of the 1970s. The gray color has an anti-aesthetic status. In addition, the motif of cold, glaciation penetrates Brodsky's works, as if he is always cold. The motif of cold is organically intertwined with the motif of loneliness, which has an exceptional place in Brodsky's emigrant work: in the collections Part of Speech (1975-76), Autumn Cry of the Hawk (1976-83), To Urania (1984-87), "Life in diffused light" (1985-86). Wherever the lyrical hero is shown, he is always alone. There is no one to share "a slice of a cut off poem" with. If in Russia there was a response to his poems (Limonov recalls how in Kharkov students learned Brodsky by heart overnight so that they would not find texts), then abroad - total alienation. Brodsky also has a “top secret” thought about death, about suicide, his moral and psychological state was so difficult. Barbizon Terrace describes the poet's visit to a small American town. He checks into a hotel, unpacks his things, and suddenly, suddenly exhausted, looks for a chandelier hook with his eyes. Emptiness becomes the adequate of that psychological vacuum in which the poet feels himself. The image of the desert undergoes such a transformation in later works. "My speech is addressed ... to that void, whose edges are the edges of a vast desert." Emptiness is also a metaphor for life in the USA. The poet does not idealize this life at all and depicts the USA as an empire of impersonal masks. Of course, the Americans do not lead the same empty life as the Soviet people, they are more prosperous, but even there "behind today is a motionless tomorrow." Changes are brought only by the change of seasons. About how he exists in this vacuum, in this soulless environment, Brodsky told in many poems, including "Quintet" (1977):
Now imagine absolute emptiness.
A place without time. Actually air. That
both on the other side and on the third side. Simply Mecca
air. Oxygen, hydrogen. And in it
small twitches day by day
lonely eyelid.
As a result of his experiences, Brodsky developed a nervous tic, which he writes about quite detachedly, although this is a physical reaction of the body to the pain of the soul. Brodsky expresses the experiences of the soul by indirect means. One can speak of the dignity with which Brodsky endures his pain. However, in some texts, as in "From Nowhere with Love", the pain breaks out, and the hero screams, as it were, with a scream.
Real relief does not bring Brodsky and a change of place. He has visited several dozen countries of the world and creates, as it were, portraits of many large cities and countries. In their totality, they form the image of a modern urban civilization, increasingly unifying and cosmopolitan (the same airports, hotels) and yet carrying with it alienation. Brodsky remarks: "The world merges into a long street where others live." Characteristic of Brodsky's work of this type is the almost complete absence of human figures in them, if it appears, then the lyrical hero himself. The image of the inanimate prevails: houses, asphalt, barges. The living, if it appears, often in the image of Brodsky does not differ from the dead. It's also bad that people essentially do not differ from each other. Their individuality is not developed or killed. Perhaps for this reason, the lack of communication is very strong.
“In a lonely room, a white (dark-skinned) simply nude crumples a sheet.”
The inspirituality, inanimateness of the Western world is revealed as its defining feature. The concept of emptiness is of fundamental importance in Brodsky's works. “Probably, after death, emptiness” (before) - and now emptiness has become an analogue of intravital death. The poet correlates his life with the eternal categories of being. The flow of time, which has no beginning and end, was, is and will be. Modernity is only a condensation of time into objects of the material world. It turns out that every person, living in modern times, exists in eternity, but not everyone has the psychology of a son of eternity. "Centaurs": in every person there are two hypostases, material and spiritual, present and future, life and death. According to Brodsky, the categories of eternity should be decisive for a person. Brodsky compares a man to the sun, which, even if it goes out, will send its rays to other corners of the universe for millions of years.
In his own way, Brodsky refracts the position of the philosophy of Heidegger, the founder of existentialism, which greatly influenced world philosophy and literature. According to Heidegger's philosophy, the focus on the future gives the person a true existence, while the preponderance of the present leads to the fact that the world of things outweighs the consciousness of man's finiteness. "Nothing on earth is longer than life after us." Brodsky wants a person to imagine his existence in the world process, to act not as a puppet of his time.
In Heidegger, Brodsky took the idea of language as the house of being, which speaks to us through poets, being the historical horizon of understanding. Poetry owns intuitive and transcendental ways of cognition. According to Brodsky, the poet's dependence on language is absolute and at the same time liberating. “Language has an enormous centrifugal potential. The poet is the means of the existence of language. The irony for the indifference shown by poetry to the state, often to politics, is the indifference of the future, which is always poetry, to the past. "The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention aesthetics, are always yesterday." Through language, the poet creates a category of beauty that "does not bite, it is a cast of self-preservation from the human instinct." Brodsky devotes his life to the creation of more perfect forms of being, primarily spiritual being, so that the historical process is not disturbed and the human psyche is not masturbated.
Of everything that Brodsky owned, only talent, the ability to create beauty, was not taken away from him. And abroad, in a foreign place, in front of him is the same sheet of paper. “This white, empty sheet of paper is filled with lines. Emptiness is conquered by creativity.” Here is Brodsky's formula for fighting emptiness. Genuine being is pushing non-being, rushing into eternity. Creativity was the only thread connecting Brodsky with reality, and it was creativity, as we learn in the poem " New life"(1988, after the presentation Nobel Prize), helps him avoid disaster. Brodsky, however, evaluates himself and what he has done quite critically. Apparently, his creativity did not have such power to wipe out all evil from the face of the earth. Brodsky's judgment on himself is much stricter than anyone else's judgment. Maybe the author himself is disappointed with the very texts that we like. This is inevitable for a thinking person who makes high demands on himself. In an article dedicated to Dostoevsky, Brodsky notes that all creativity begins as a desire for self-improvement, ideally for holiness. But at a certain stage, the artist of the word notices that his pen has achieved greater success than his soul. And then he sets the task of minimizing the gap between creativity and personality. Thus, the problem of moral self-improvement comes to the fore. "What are you working on now?" - "I'm working on myself".
Over the years, Brodsky is more clearly aware of the socio-historical significance of the work to which he devoted himself. “In the history of our species, the book is an anthropological phenomenon... The book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement becomes ... an escape from the common denominator ... towards the individual, towards the particular. Hence Brodsky's attitude to literature as the highest goal of our species, for it stimulates the transformation of man from a social animal into a personality. And the writer contrasts the dominance of the faceless mass with the “apotheosis of particles” of free individuals, carriers of the fullness of human potentialities. The tragedy of the individual in the era of the mass totalitarian system is expressed with great force. The role of culture and art as a stimulus for self-development, self-creation, self-improvement is revealed.
Five books of Brodsky's poems have been translated into English, and books of essays have been published. Researchers note that the circle of readers abroad is not very wide, but among its readers there are very large and significant figures of world culture. Indeed, over time, Brodsky begins to be perceived as the most important Russian poet of the second half of the century.
For the last 17 years, Brodsky has been living in New York, in Greenwich Village, and every spring he teaches a course in literature. The poet married and named his daughter Anna-Marina in honor of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. Brodsky responded positively to the events of the collapse of totalitarianism in the USSR and said that for the first time he was not ashamed of his former homeland. At the same time, the farce of perestroika forced him to create a postmodern ironic text based on the materials of the Soviet press Perestroika.
Brodsky became the main figure in the poetry of the third emigrant wave.
It must be said that among the representatives of the Russian diaspora, Brodsky did not overshadow all the talented poets. These are Naum Korzhavin, Yuri Tuganovsky, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Dmitry Bobyshev, Lev Losev. Among them, as well as among the poets of the metropolis, there are realists, modernists, postmodernists. In their work, the archetype of the house, as the archetype of the abandoned homeland, occupies the largest place. For example, Naum Korzhavin's book is called Letter to Moscow. The poet admits that he writes not for a Western reader, not for a foreign one. He thinks and feels in his former homeland, and everything that he creates during the years of emigration, he perceives as a letter to the Russian reader, he hopes that his texts will be needed for something, help to survive and take shape.
Tuganovsky calls his cycle of poems "Dedicated to the Motherland." Tuganovsky was a deeply religious man, he was in contact with Solzhenitsyn and adopted from him the soil ideology. He sees the future of Russia in soil terms. Whatever it is, Tuganovsky wishes Russia happiness.
Bakhyt Kenzheev ("Autumn in America") shows that any immigrant writer is very lonely. Kenzheev lived in Canada in seclusion. He emphasizes the alienation of the people of the world, proves that it is insurmountable, and calls himself in connection with this "brother of world sorrow." In one of his poems, he depicts himself as a man sitting in a tavern, looking at the ocean, whose only companion is silence. It would seem that such a separation from the homeland, such loneliness - and life should seem meaningless, but this does not happen. This coldness, this emptiness, he tries to warm with his breath through poetry. He is sure that through creativity he builds up a layer of culture, erects a kind of moral barrier that will not allow the new Cain to kill the new Abel. The literature of the Russian diaspora as a whole is characterized by historical and cultural motifs. If a native home far away, which house is close? For many emigrants, Russian culture has become such a home. Many appeal to her. Sometimes this leads to the deconstruction of the cultural intertext. This happened in Dmitry Bobyshev's "Russian Tertsina". He says that Blok managed to see how the Russian people "gone" (revolution, civil war), but then the people again fell into slavery. “Will we see him in spiritual power?” Even if many in the USSR are deceived by propaganda, Bobyshev shows, there are righteous people in Russia (a reference to Solzhenitsyn and the proverb “A village cannot stand without a righteous man”). Calling himself a native son of Russia, Bobyshev is trying to tell the truth about the twentieth century.
The poet Lev Losev comprehends his time through the classics. He appeals to Pushkin. "Song of the Prophetic Oleg" - a new version history, where Russia is the birthplace of not only Russians, but also the Khazars, and Tatars, and all the others, who became Russified with the passage of time. Continuing Pushkin, the poet, whose lyrical hero is the Khazar, says that prophetic Oleg although he is going to burn villages and fields, but maybe it wouldn’t be worth it? In the work “Mayakovsky”, Losev partially quotes in his own way the poem “The Story of the Caster Kozyrev”. The notion that every person in the USSR has a separate apartment is refuted. An apartment "in which you can freely make love" is the dream of a Soviet person. Only after this is realized will it be possible to say that the Soviet country is "a suitable place to live." With the help of the classics, Losev debunks myths.
The works of emigrants built up that cultural layer, without which a genuine renewal of life is impossible. They came to the domestic reader in the 1990s.
Along with the existential forms of modernism, avant-gardism is also being developed.
Joseph Brodsky was called the last classic of the 20th century - and was accused of soullessness and mechanicalness of verse, a genius who absorbed the best traditions of Russian poetry - and a poet devoid of national roots. But even the most zealous opponents of Joseph Brodsky did not deny one thing - his talent and his role in the development of albeit alien, but still significant trends in literature.
The very fate of Brodsky, the fifth Russian writer - Nobel laureate(1987), like a cast from the fate of a whole generation of people in the 1950s and 1970s. Coming from an intelligent Leningrad family, he left school at the end of eight classes, changed more than 10 professions: he worked at a factory, participated in geological exploration expeditions. Already being known in the circles of poetry lovers, on a false charge of parasitism in February 1964, the poet was arrested, and after a shameful trial, he was sentenced to exile in a remote northern village for 5 years with involvement in physical labor. The link lasted only a year and a half, and, admittedly, this time became a milestone for the entire work of the poet: the Arkhangelsk frosts seemed to penetrate his poems. Once romantic and impetuous, they have become much more restrained, often even rational. Experience, pain were hidden in the armor of irony or rather whimsical reasoning: the poet's poems more and more often demanded not sympathy, empathy, but co-reflection, aroused thought rather than emotion.
This process of "cooling down" of the lyrics intensified when Brodsky was forced to emigrate to America in the summer of 1972. Later, in 1975, he compared the fate of the poet with the fate of a hawk that rose so high above the Connecticut valley that it was no longer able to return to the ground (Autumn Cry of the Hawk, 1975).
A hawk is a proud, lonely, bird of prey, at the same time soaring high above the ground, thanks to its sharp eyesight, seeing what is inaccessible, for example, to human vision - and unable to live without land ... This is an unusual and difficult to understand poem, only once again clear showed on what irreconcilable contradictions the poetic world of I. Brodsky rests. After all, perhaps his most important mystery is that almost every reader from the poet’s significant legacy can find something that turns out to be truly close to himself, as well as something that will cause him a sharp rejection. One can find Brodsky a patriot - and a cosmopolitan, an optimist and a gloomy pessimist, even a cynic, Brodsky - a metaphysical, religious poet - and an atheist poet... The point here is not at all the artist's unscrupulousness, not his lack of an established point of view. Just the views of the poet are quite clear and have changed insignificantly over the decades.
Brodsky always avoided, and especially over the years, not only overly straightforward outpourings of his feelings and beliefs, veiling them in a whimsical poetic form, in an intricate interweaving of metaphors and syntax. No less, he avoided edification, ultimate truths and never confused frankness with the notorious "open-hearted", perfectly understanding the poet's responsibility for every word spoken. He demanded the same from his reader, knowing that true understanding is hard spiritual work and requires from a person the exertion of all his mental and spiritual powers. Many of Brodsky's things are difficult to perceive, they are difficult to read "in one gulp", "excitedly": behind every word, even a punctuation mark, there is a thought that needs to be heard, felt, experienced.
The most important thing in Brodsky's poetry is his surprise at life, its ordinary miracle, preserved by the author both in Arkhangelsk exile and in exile. Gratitude is born from the feeling that life exists contrary to the laws of the universe rather than in accordance with them. The fascination with the miracle of the emergence of life was also manifested in the special attitude of the poet to the Christmas holiday. From poems of different years, a whole cycle of works is built dedicated to one topic that is especially important for the poet - the theme of Christmas, sometimes directly revealed on the material of the gospel story (see, for example, "Christmas 1963", "Christmas Star"), sometimes only associated with it by deep semantic connections. An example of the latter is the poem "January 1, 1965".
The researchers noted the richness of domestic and world artistic experience and traditions mastered by Brodsky, which included ancient mythology and literature (the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc.), Russian classicism and realism, poetry of the "Silver Age" (from Kantemir and Derzhavin, Pushkin, Vyazemsky and Baratynsky to Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak and Khlebnikov), Western metaphysical poetry of the 17th-20th centuries (from John Donne to Thomas S. Eliot) and others. cosmic mood, at the same time not contradicting the concreteness and earthiness of the image. However, this applies already to the features of the artistic world of I. Brodsky, the stylistic characteristic of his poetic work.
As for the originality of his poetics and style, those who wrote about Brodsky noted the “syntheticity” of poetic thinking, the “universality” of poetic philosophy, the author’s very artistic position (M. Krepe), “universalism” and a kind of “proteism”, the ability to assimilate the most different poetic styles and traditions (A. Ranchin). Associated with this is the extraordinary lexical richness, the stylistic diversity of Brodsky's vocabulary, as mentioned by many researchers, "the variety of colloquial speech and at the level of syntax" (V. Polukhina), tropes from a variety of previously rarely mastered areas, including geography, geometry , chemistry, physics, biology, etc. (M. Krepe).
Attention is drawn to the richest possibilities of rhythm realized in Brodsky's poetry (syllabo-tonic, dolnik, in his own words, "intonational verse"), the virtuosity of his rhyme and especially strophic. Researchers noted in him an extraordinary “variety of strophic forms”, “the discovery of completely new forms” (B. Sherr). Indeed, such forms of strophic organization as three-line, sextine, seventh, octave, decima, etc., are presented in his work in many varieties.
There is no doubt the role that Brodsky played in the final removal of any language restrictions and prohibitions, in the poetic development of the wealth of folk-colloquial, book-literary, philosophical, natural-science, everyday speech, in expanding creativity, enrichment and development of the language of modern Russian poetry, in revealing the possibilities of Russian verse that have not yet been exhausted.
The work of I. Brodsky, a number of its facets, problems and features, received deep coverage in research work here and abroad. Suffice it to mention the names of D. Bethea, M. Kreps, L. Losev, V. Polukhina, B. Sherr, K. Proffer, J. Smith, M. Gasparov, A. Nyman, A. Ranchin, M. Eisenberg, P. Weill and A. Genis and many others who wrote about the poet.
Nevertheless, it cannot be said that what I. A. Brodsky created over the forty years of his writing activity has been exhaustively characterized in the works of scientists and critics. What has been done in Broadway studies, with all the achievements, can so far be assessed only as the first approximation and approaches to a comprehensive scientific study of the phenomenon of his personality and creativity in the context of the development of domestic and world poetry.
Need to download an essay? Click and save - "The originality of Brodsky's poetics and style. And the finished essay appeared in the bookmarks.I. The innovative nature of Brodsky's poetry (the poet's poems are similar to symphonic works due to their rich and balanced composition, the main idea is not expressed directly, but always evasively and in a hint, the poet is looking for new ways of expressing the word and appealing to the reader).
II. Character traits poetics of I. Brodsky.
1. Large texts (break the notions familiar to our time and return us to the 18th century).
2. Increased arrays of words, which are divided into verses.
3. A subtle sense of form (the poet strives for the artistic integrity of each episode, the composition of most of his works is symmetrical).
4. The use of all stylistic layers of the language (a combination of elevated and mundane).
5. Long and complex syntactic constructions (exaggerate a line or stanza).
6. The emergence of images at the crossroads of unexpected comparisons, comparisons.
7. Attention to the sound instrumentation of poetry.
III. The embodiment of new poetic thinking in the works of Brodsky (its essence is the recognition of the self-sufficient value of poetry, such an understanding of poetic work originates from the romantics and Pushkin, this is a truly new word in modern literature).