In the poetic topic (from ancient Greek epitaphs to one of the exponents of the elegiac tradition dating back to Thomas Grey), the cemetery becomes not so much a place of rest as a locus that gives a performative meaning to any statement that sounds on the grave or among the graves. In this sense, the cemetery theme and the theme of death are always fraught with declarativeness and are perceived as a kind of artistic or civil Credo: a sign of inheritance or evidence of a break, regardless of the genre in which this sense of the ontological limit is realized. Ultimately, both the author and the reader, with varying degrees of awareness, are included here in the work of the mechanism of (self)identification.
It was in this vein that Brodsky's early poems, one way or another related to the theme of death, were perceived, and that is why many of the most important texts for the reader of that generation later turned out, by the will of the author, outside the canonical corpus of his poetry, being replaced by others that more adequately and consistently represent a single picture. creative evolution and author's identity. J. Kline, who took an active part in the publication of the first two books compiled by Brodsky himself - "Stop in the Desert" (1970) and Selected Poems(1973), writes that already in 1967 the poet compiled a list of 26 early poems that should not be included in the book being prepared. The list was compiled according to the table of contents of the unauthorized volume “Poems and poems” published in the USA in 1965 through the efforts of G. Struve and B. Filippov.
Refusal to publish early artistically imperfect works is a fairly common practice, however, in addition to, for example, “Farewell / forget / and do not judge me too bad”, Brodsky’s list also included such iconic and widely known texts by that time as “Stans”, “Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad ... "," Stanzas to the city ", which are difficult to classify as juvenilia. All three poems are connected with the themes of death and hometown, all three were perceived and continue to be perceived as a poetic declaration of a young poet entering great literature, but due to their “non-canonicity” all three remain on the periphery of the main research plots dedicated to the actual problems of Brodsky’s creative evolution. So, M. Kyonenen analyzes these poems in their correlation with the "Petersburg text" of Russian culture, and Z. Bar-Sella compares the "Jewish cemetery" with B. Slutsky's poem "About the Jews" in a polemical article about the national specifics of Brodsky's work. Meanwhile, “The Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” has a number of features (but, we repeat, not the status) of an initiatory text and could, like “Great Elegy to John Donne” or “Poems for the Death of T.S. Eliot", to determine the vector of development of the poet and the model of perception of his poetry.
Jewish cemetery near Leningrad.
Curved fence made of rotten plywood.
Behind a crooked fence lie side by side
lawyers, merchants, musicians, revolutionaries.
They sang for themselves.
They saved for themselves.
For others, they died.
But first they paid taxes
respected bailiff,
and in this world, hopelessly material,
interpreted the Talmud
remain idealistic.
Maybe you've seen more.
Or maybe they believed blindly.
But they taught children to be tolerant
and became stubborn.
And they did not sow bread.
They never sowed bread.
They just lay down
into the cold earth like grains.
And they fell asleep forever.
And then - they were covered with earth,
lit candles,
and on Memorial Day
hungry old people in high voices,
choking with hunger, they shouted for reassurance.
And they got it.
In the form of the decay of matter.
I don't remember anything.
Forgetting nothing.
Behind a crooked fence made of rotten plywood,
four kilometers from the tram ring .
1958
One of Brodsky's first public performances, held as part of the "poet tournament" at the Leningrad Palace of Culture. Gorky, was accompanied by a scandal. According to the memoirs of V. Krivulin, after reading the "Jewish Cemetery", which sounded like "new, unheard of music" to most of the youth audience, "either David Yakovlevich Dar, subsequently expelled from the Writers' Union, or Gleb Sergeevich Semenov, teacher and mentor of all more or less prominent Leningrad poets - I don’t remember which of them was the first, but both of them take off with a cry: “Remove the hooligan!” Y. Gordin gives a continuation of the episode: “Joseph did not go into his pocket for a verse and, in response to the indignation of his few opponents - the majority of the audience accepted him perfectly - he read verses with the epigraph “What is allowed to Jupiter, it is not allowed to the bull”<…>these verses ended:
foolishly
steal,
pray!
Be lonely
like a finger!
... Like bulls -
whip,
Eternal to the gods
cross.
This was already perceived by the workers of the regional party committee and the regional committee of the Komsomol as an unbearable challenge, and the poor Natalya Iosifovna Grudinina, who “supervised” the tournament from the Writers’ Union, who in a few years will, one might say, risking her head, defend Brodsky, was forced on behalf of the jury to make a speech by Joseph to condemn and declare it as if it had not taken place…” Both Krivulin and Gordin see the causes of the scandal by no means in the provocative pedaling of the Jewish theme (Semenov, and even more so Dar, who left for Israel in 1977, can hardly be suspected of anti-Semitism). Krivulin writes that the hall was divided into those who accepted the "new music" and those who "perceived it as something hostile, hateful, alien." Gordin sees the motives for Semenov's indignation in the fact that "The high poet, who in his long-suffering life has accustomed himself to proud isolation, to silent opposition,<…>he was offended by the frank and, one might say, naive rebellion that Joseph radiated, was indignant at freedom, which seemed undeserved and not provided with talents. The last delusion, however, dissipated very soon.
Both witnesses in their comments are focused more on interpreting the reaction of the listeners, while it is understood that the choice of texts and the very way they are presented fit into the romantic paradigm of the young poet's work, which, in turn, is supported by the facts of his early biography. However, Brodsky’s speech and the pathos of the poem central to the episode not only resemble the romantic challenge of the rebel poet, but also have, apparently, not yet manifested features of Brodsky’s later modernist method of self-representation of the poet - a cultural outsider who consciously chooses and “appropriates” the tradition through appeal to the genre in memoriam. This way of creative self-reflection goes back to the "Great Elegy to John Donne" and finally takes shape in "Poems on the Death of T.S. Eliot." In the “Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” features of a not romantic, but rather a modernist paradigm are already found in the very fact of the unjustified, not personally deserved appropriation of freedom, which Gordin writes about. It can be assumed with a high degree of certainty that the degree of its undeservedness was determined at the turn of the 50s and 60s in relation to the poetry of Slutsky, whose intonations are clearly heard in the early Brodsky. The “Jewish Cemetery” was then perceived as a response to the provocative and polemical poem “About the Jews” known from samizdat:
Jews do not sow bread
Jews trade in shops,
Jews tend to go bald
Jews steal more.
Jews are dashing people
They are bad soldiers.
Ivan is fighting in a trench,
Abram trades in a worker's office.
I've heard it all since childhood
I'll be very old soon
But there's nowhere to go
From shouting: "Jews, Jews!"
never traded,
Never stealing
I carry in me like an infection,
Damn this race.
The bullet passed me
To speak rudely:
“Jews were not killed!
Everyone returned alive!
It is easy to see that the ideas about the similarity of these two poems are largely based on the presence of a direct quotation ( And they did not sow bread. / They never sowed bread.). At the same time, Brodsky is much freer rhythmically (the poem is written in free 4-6-strike accent verse), he lacks the civil polemical pathos inherent in Slutsky, and finally, poets turn to the very topic of death with different goals, and the “Jewish question” itself turns out to be included in different contexts. For Slutsky, national self-identification becomes part of a civic position, for Brodsky it dissolves into the more universal problems of cemetery poetry. As S. Markish wrote, “the poet Iosif Brodsky does not know the Jewish theme, Jewish “material” - this “material” is alien to him. The youthful, almost childish “Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” (1958) does not count: in all respects, this is not yet Brodsky, it is, as it were, Boris Slutsky, who cannot be thrown out of Brodsky’s poetic genealogy; apparently, Brodsky did not escape the charm of the “Jewish Slutsky”, but only for a moment, for a single time. “Isaac and Abraham” (1963) is no more a Jewish work than Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Byron’s Cain, or Akhmatova’s biblical stories: a completely natural and completely legitimate development of the cultural space of European, Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus, we can say that Slutsky's identification model does not fully correspond to Brodsky's "poetic behavior", and at least one more source is found in the poetics of the "Jewish cemetery" - cemetery poetry.
The polygenetic structure of the "Jewish Cemetery" allows us to turn to the concept of "triangular vision", proposed by D. Bethea to describe the interaction of "close" and "far" pretexts in the poetics of the "mature" Brodsky. Bethea devotes a chapter of her monograph to the study of the concept of "exile" in Brodsky's poems as a result of the interaction of Mandelstam and Dante's codes. The resulting text is thus like a double palimpsest. The concept of Bethea seems to be suitable for describing typologically similar phenomena in Brodsky's poetry, which include the "Jewish Cemetery".
The question about the origins of the cemetery theme in the poem under consideration has two answers. The first is connected with a visit to a suburban cemetery where the poet's relatives are buried. The second is recovered from the official cultural context of 1957–58. In 1957, the 150th anniversary of the birth of G.U. Longfellow. The following year, for this event, a hundred and fifty million copies of a postage stamp depicting an American poet were issued and a nearly seven hundred-page volume of "The Chosen One" was published, which included the poem "Jewish Cemetery in Newport" translated by E.L. Linetskaya. The obvious similarity between the titles of Brodsky's and Longfellow's poems indicates the poet's familiarity with this book. In addition, some of Brodsky's friends and acquaintances, in particular G. Shmakov and K. Azadovsky, studied translation with E. Linetskaya.
Longfellow's poem was published in his book Migratory Birds in 1854. Two years earlier, the poet, who had spent the summer in Newport, had visited the graveyard of the oldest synagogue in the country ( Touro Synagogue). In a romantic meditation based on this visit, Longfellow reflects on the fate of Jewish settlers from the Old World, a time in which there is no future for them as they read the world from end to end:
How strange here: Jewish tombs,
And next to the port, ships from distant countries ...
Here - an eternal dream, there - the streets can not sleep,
Here - silence, there - the ocean murmurs.
Full of deep age-old sadness,
Tombstones lie for many thousands of days,
Like ancient heavy tablets,
What Moses threw down in anger.
Everything is alien here: and the signs of signs,
And a strange interweaving of names:
Alvvarez Joseph and Ribeira Jacob -
A mixture of countries, and destinies, and times.
"God created death, the end of earthly worries, -
Praise be to him!” - the mourner spoke
And he added, prostrating before God:
“He blessed us with eternal life!”
Silent in the dark synagogue disputes,
David's psalms are no longer heard
And the old rabbi doesn't read Torah
In the language of the prophets of old.
They huddled in the stinking streets,
In the gloomy ghetto, on the day of life,
And learned the alphabet of patience -
How to live in sorrow, how to die in fire.
And each to the last breath
Unsatisfied hunger in the heart carried,
And his food was only the bread of exile,
Drinking was only the bitterness of caustic tears.
"Anathema!" - sounded over the meadows,
Rushed through the cities, from edge to edge.
Trampled by Christian feet
The persecuted Mordechai lay in the dust.
Filled with humility and pride
They wandered where fate led,
And they were unsteady, like the sands of the desert,
And hard as a granite rock.
Visions of the prophets, majestic,
Accompanied the wanderers on the way,
Whispering that the gleam of faded glory
They will be able to find again in the future.
And, looking back, they read the whole world,
Like your Talmud, from the end to the beginning of days,
And life became a tale of sadness,
A place of suffering and death.
But the waters do not flow to their sources.
Earth, unable to suppress a groan,
Gives birth in pain to new peoples,
And she can't revive dead nations .
In addition to the themes traditional for the genre of cemetery elegy, Longfellow's poem also contains specific New England motifs and images dating back to Puritan ideology, associated with the opposition of America - the country of the New Testament, "City on the Hill" ( The City upon a Hill), the new Promised Land ( The New Promised Land) and the Old World - the land of the Old Testament. In this context, the fate of the Jewish people acquires a generalized symbolic meaning.
Brodsky transfers the symbolism of the New English cemetery elegy to Russian soil, taking American historiosophy as an ontologically deeper version of the development of the general theme than that of Slutsky. His lawyers, merchants, musicians, revolutionaries find solace "in the form of the disintegration of matter," just as Longfellow's "rivers do not flow to their sources." In Slutsky, doom is manifested in the fact that “everything is nowhere to go / From the cry: “Jews, Jews!””, Brodsky, referring to the theme of death, gives this doom a metaphysical dimension.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the search for a metaphysical dimension of life determined the vector of the young poet's evolution. The method of poetic self-identification found in the "Jewish Cemetery" through the theme of one's own death will for some time become Brodsky's leading one. A few years later, these searches will lead him to the discovery of Donne and a little later - Auden, in which he will find more reliable allies than the American romantic and the Russian civil lyricist, and the poem about the Jewish cemetery near Leningrad will cease to be representative of the new style and new identity. However, the model of creating an auto-representative text, tested in this poem, turns out to be in demand in Brodsky's further work.
Notes
1. The canonical corpus of Brodsky's poems written in Russian is based on six collections published by the American publishing house Ardis from 1970 to 1996. All of them, in corrected form with comments by L. Losev, were republished in the two-volume series "The New Poet's Library" ( Brodsky I. Poems and poems: [in 2 volumes] / Intro. Art., comp., prepared. text and notes. L.V. Losev. SPb., 2011). In addition to the "Ardis" collections, they managed to print 36 poems that the author did not include in the collections, a number of unfinished texts, translations into Russian, poems for children and comic poems. Auto-translations, poems written in English, and translations approved by the author amounted to Collected Poems in English(N.Y., 2000).
2. Kline J.L. History of two books // Joseph Brodsky: Works and days / Comp. L. Losev and P. Weil. M., 1998. S. 219.
3. Only in 1992, when compiling the first edition of the "Works of Joseph Brodsky", the poet agreed to the publication of 12 poems from this list. As J. Kline writes, “it seems that this time the editors also had to convince Brodsky to include these early poems in the collected works, and one of the arguments was that V. Maramzin and M. Kheifets were subjected to severe reprisals for samizdat publications of these, along with with others, poems "( kline. pp. 219–220). Let us add that some of these poems appeared in 1960 in the third issue of "Syntax" by A. Ginsberg, who was soon also arrested and convicted.
4. Kononen M.“For Ways of Writing the City”: St. Petersburg–Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky. Helsinki, 2003, pp. 45–56.
Cavanagh C. Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition. Princeton, 1995. P. 3-28).
12. On the significance of Slutsky for Brodsky, see, for example: Macfadyen D. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Museum. Montreal etc., 2000, pp. 58–75; Losev L. Joseph Brodsky: An Experience in Literary Biography. pp. 61–64; Gorelik P., Eliseev N. Boris Slutsky and Joseph Brodsky // Star. 2009. No. 9. S. 177–184. The versification aspect of the problem is presented in the work: Friedberg N. Rule-Makers and Rule-Breakers: Joseph Brodsky and Boris Slutsky as Reformers of Russian Rhythm // The Russian Review. 2009 Vol. 68. No. 4. P. 641–661. In a report read at the Literature and War symposium in 1985, Brodsky characterizes Slutsky as a poet who "almost single-handedly changed the sound of post-war Russian poetry<…>. The feeling of tragedy in his poems often moved, against his will, from the concrete and historical to the existential - the ultimate source of all tragedies. This poet really spoke the language of the twentieth century<…>. His intonation is harsh, tragic and impassive - the way in which a survivor calmly talks, if he wants, about how and in what he survived ”(translated by V. Kulle). ( Brodsky J
17. Longfellow G. Favorites. M.: State publishing house of fiction, 1958. S. 273–274.
The poem about the "Jewish cemetery near Leningrad" probably for the first time unfolds the existential-ontological plan of Brodsky's work. It is characteristic that already this first turn has as its concept the ultimate antinomy of the metaphysical principles of spirit and flesh, being and “nothing”, life and death. The "ultimacy" of human existence itself is marked by "Jewishness"; it symbolizes not the national, but the universally human - the defenselessness and abandonment of mankind in the world (it is no coincidence that the people, the greatest victim of European history, was chosen as a symbol). Narrative dispassion turns out to be imaginary: it’s just that the magnitude of existential suffering is exorbitant, absolute in comparison with any “private” emotions. This absolute value of suffering is one of the future invariants of Brodsky's poetry. The generations that lay down “in the cold earth like grains” “remained idealists” - we are talking about the gospel parable, rethought in the spirit of Bazarov’s arguments about burdock, because “in a hopelessly material world” one can find only “disintegration of matter”. The spiritual meaning of the human lot is reduced to a materialized antinomy, to the impossibility for the nihilist empiricist to ultimately acquire this meaning. Resting against the “disintegration of matter,” like Bazarov in his famous “burdock,” Brodsky, faithful to the principles of total analyticism, thinks the question through to the end. The result - a cemetery "behind a crooked fence of rotten plywood, / four kilometers from the tram ring."
Empirical accuracy is merciless, behind the desacralized things of the world there is only non-existence, death, semantic emptiness. Such a nihilistic consciousness has no choice: if it is consistent and longs to find the meaning of existence at all costs, it will either have to admit defeat, or go into non-existence and emptiness to create meaning from nothing (literally). Let us note the alienating objectification of the high sorrowful order of the romantic soul, thirsting for the spiritual and material unity of the world and unable to look at the world except in the aspect of meaning:
“And on the day of Remembrance, hungry old people in high voices, choking from the cold, shouted for calm. And they got it. In the form of disintegration of matter. (I, 21)
This objectified "cry of the soul" demonstrates the courage and uncompromising nature of the "Poet of Thought", bringing the eternal metaphysical collisions to the logical and existential limit, resting against the boundaries of reason - and remaining within these boundaries for the time being, not resorting to transcendence. The poem contains a bare conceptual scheme, it is the extreme degree of bareness of which - “bare essence” - that emphasizes the inexpressibility of the content plan (existential feeling of a person) with the means at its disposal. Naturally, not the scheme itself, but the subjective factors of its implementation help to feel the power of this inexpressibility. The plot gravitates toward parable-like universalism; the generality and allegorical nature of the “narrative about the Jews” frankly “tells” about the immediacy (“here” and “now”) of the existential feeling of the subject of the poem. This subject is deprived of the possibility of individualization in this rigid conceptual form and is “manifested” through the narrative-allegory, the antinomies of matter and spirit, the universalism of thought and the immediacy of the existential. Thus, the ascent from a pure concept through a narrative-allegory with the utmost severity of antinomies to the human content of the poem shows a deep productive discrepancy: signifier - signified; a form gravitating towards conceptual dismemberment - the entirety of human existence. The plot acts as a mediator as the pressure of the content plan builds up. Nevertheless, Brodsky continues to insist in the field of form, first of all, on the development of the concept and the poem as an expanded concept.
(« Poetry of Joseph Brodsky 1957 - 1965: An Experience of Conceptual Description", 1997)
Brodsky was born and grew up during a period in Soviet history when anti-Semitism became almost official government policy and simultaneously revived and spread among the urban population. In particular, distrust, harassment in the service was felt by Jews like Father Brodsky - officers, engineers, middle-level managers, university professors, and journalists. The knowledge that he belongs to those whose opportunities in life are noticeably limited compared to the surrounding majority was imbibed by Joseph with his mother's milk and from an early age was reinforced by the everyday anti-Semitism common among his peers. “At school, being ‘Jewish’ meant being constantly on the defensive. They called me "Jew". I climbed with my fists. I reacted rather painfully to such jokes, perceiving them as a personal insult. They hurt me because I am a Jew. Now I do not find anything offensive in this, but the understanding of this came later. However, from the totality of Brodsky's autobiographical statements in verse, prose, and in responses to interviewers, it turns out that in his adult life he suffered relatively little from anti-Semitism. This is partly because, having left school at fifteen, Brodsky never aspired to a career in which he could stumble upon ordinary slingshots - restrictions for Jews in entering higher educational institutions and in promotion. To an even greater extent, this is due to an early developed sense of personal independence: already in his youth he made it a rule not to stoop to the point of conflict with the state regime and social order, held together by a primitive ideology, in which anti-Semitism was only one of many components. The official Soviet ideology theoretically defined nationality (more precisely, ethnicity) within the framework of the liberal tradition - a common language, culture, territory - though omitting such an important factor as self-identification. However, the real national policy of the government, as well as the prejudices of a significant part of the population, was based on the ancient myth of "blood and soil." Hence the cruel Stalinist policy of partly bloody extermination, partly uprooting, depriving the native "soil" of entire peoples - Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, etc. period of persecution of Jews in 1948-1953.
Linguistically and culturally, Brodsky was Russian, and as for self-identification, in his mature years he reduced it to a lapidary formula, which he repeatedly used: “I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen.” By temperament, he was an extreme individualist, by ethical convictions a personalist, he was repelled by any associations on a racial or ethnic basis. Brodsky told me how one day after his arrest in the winter of 1964 he was summoned for interrogation by investigator Sh., a Jew by nationality. Either in the role of a “good cop”, or on his own initiative, he began to persuade the “parasite” to repent, promise to improve, etc. “Think about your parents,” Sh. said, “because our parents are not them parents". Brodsky recalled this episode with disgust. Zionism did not interest him, and he was indifferent to Israel as a state. Although formally, like all Jews who left the Soviet Union in the seventies, he emigrated to Israel, in fact he did not even consider settling in Israel as a possible option for himself. Brodsky highly valued the culture of the nation to which he joined - the legal consciousness of Americans, American literature, music, cinema - but he felt no less comfortable in England, in the countries of Northern Europe and in Italy, where he lived and worked for a long time, where he He had numerous friendships, and at the end of his life, family ties. In other words, culturally, Brodsky was the direct heir of the cosmopolitan, Western-oriented Russian intelligentsia. The Jewish element proper was present in Brodsky's cultural outlook to the extent that it enters Western civilization, that is, as the Old Testament assimilated by the Christian West. It is characteristic that in the lengthy religious and philosophical meditation, the poem "Isaac and Abraham" (1964), although it contains allegorical allusions to the tragic fate of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and the Holocaust, the main plot, the sacrifice of Abraham, is obviously interpreted through the prism of interpretations of this biblical episode in the writings of the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard and the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who departed from Judaism.
Shimon Markish, Brodsky’s long-time comrade and literary critic, who dealt with the problem of Jewish identity within Russian culture, wrote about his friend: “I dare to believe that there was no Jewish facet at all in this unique poetic personality. The poet Iosif Brodsky does not know the Jewish theme, the Jewish "material" - this "material" is alien to him.
Unlike his predecessors in Russian poetry, such as Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, who were assimilated Jews in the first or second generation, Brodsky’s great-grandfather, after many years of service in the tsarist army, received the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, started his own business, a watch workshop in Moscow , and, in essence, moved away from the Jewish environment. Brodsky's father received only a minimal Jewish religious education as a child. Almost the entire life of the poet's parents, except for early childhood, fell on Soviet times. During this period, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, and religious communal life was destroyed even earlier during the Soviet anti-religious campaign. If some provincial Jewish families to some extent tried to preserve the traditional way of life, then in Moscow and Leningrad the life of the vast majority of citizens of Jewish origin was no different from the life of their non-Jewish fellow citizens within the same social group. Neither Judaism, nor Jewish folklore, nor the everyday way of Jewish life was familiar to Brodsky from childhood. He did not know Hebrew and only occasionally could hear individual Yiddishisms in the conversations of relatives, the stock of which he wittily used in the poem "Two Hours in the Tank" (1965) as a parody of the "German" language.
With the exception of "Isaac and Abraham", a poem that is only partly related to Jewish issues, Brodsky's vast poetic heritage contains only two poems on Jewish themes. The first, “A Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad...” (1958), was written by the young Brodsky as a clear imitation of the poem “About the Jews” (“The Jews do not sow bread ...”) by the older generation poet Boris Slutsky, popular in samizdat. Brodsky himself never included The Jewish Cemetery... in his collections. The second, “Leiklos” (the name of a street in the former Jewish ghetto in Vilnius), is part of the Lithuanian Divertissement cycle (1971) and is a fantasy on the theme of an alternative fate: Brodsky in it, as it were, substitutes himself in the place of some Vilna ancestor.
Here we must also mention Brodsky's nostalgic sympathy for the bygone world of Central European culture. It manifested itself in his love for the Polish language and Polish poetry, for novels from the Austro-Hungarian life of Robert Musil and Josef Roth, even for the Hollywood sentimental melodrama Mayerling about the double suicide of Archduke Rudolph and his beloved, Baroness Maria Vechera. The southern outpost of this vanished civilization was, "in the depths of the wild Adriatic", Trieste, at one time the residence of another Austrian archduke - Maximilian, to whom Brodsky dedicated two poems of the "Mexican Divertissement". Northeast - described by Josef Roth in the "March of Radetzky" Galician town of Brody on the border of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. The motif of this ancestral homeland is only implicit in several of Brodsky's poems ("Hills", "Eclogue 5th (summer)", "On the Independence of Ukraine"), and only once did he say it out loud, in an interview with a Polish journalist: "[Poland - ] is a country for which - although it may be silly to say so - I have feelings, perhaps even stronger than for Russia. This may be connected ... I don’t know, obviously something subconscious, because, after all, my ancestors, they are all from there - they are Brody - hence the surname ... ”From this confused statement it becomes clear that he felt the etymology his name: "Joseph of Brod."
Brodsky's awareness of himself as a Jew was connected not with external pressure, but, no matter how politically incorrect it may sound, with anthropological features. In one of the most frank discussions on the subject, an interview given to an old friend, the famous Polish journalist Adam Michnik, just a year before his death, Brodsky says: “One should be very careful about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is, in fact, a form of racism. We are all racists to some degree. Some faces we don't like. Some kind of beauty." Further to the question “Were you brought up as a Jew or as a Russian?” he does not answer, but instead speaks of physical (anthropological) identification: “When I was asked about my nationality, I, of course, answered that I was Jewish. But this happened very rarely. You don’t even need to ask me, I don’t pronounce “r” ”. Sharing the widespread opinion that, due to hereditary characteristics, many Russian-speaking Jews pronounce the uvular "r" instead of the Russian palatal "r", as well as the fact that many of them have an aquiline profile, Brodsky, as a bearer of these signs, feels himself a Jew (though due to the general "reducing" tendency in his metaphor, he turns "eagle" features into "crow" ones: for example, in the poem "Afterword to the fable"). However, against all conceivable orthodoxies, he claims that his Jewishness includes something more substantial. With a directness rare even for him, he speaks about this in the same interview: “I am a Jew. One hundred percent. You can't be more Jewish than me. Dad, mom - not the slightest doubt. Without any admixture. But I think not only because I am a Jew. I know that there is a certain absolutism in my views. As for religion, if I had formulated the concept of the Highest Being for myself, I would have said that God is violence. Namely, this is the God of the Old Testament. I feel it quite strongly. I feel it, without any evidence of it.
K. S. Sokolov Vladimir
In the poetic topic (from ancient Greek epitaphs to one of the elegiac traditions dating back to T. Gray), the cemetery becomes not so much a place of rest as a locus that gives a performative meaning to any statement that sounds on the grave or among the graves. It is not surprising that the theme of the cemetery and the theme of death are fraught with declarativeness and are perceived as an artistic or civil credo: a sign of inheritance or evidence of a break, regardless of the genre in which the sense of the ontological limit is realized. As a result, both the author and the reader, with varying degrees of awareness, are included in the work of the mechanism of (self)identification.
It was in this vein that Brodsky's early poems, one way or another connected with the theme of death, were perceived, and that is why many of the most important texts for the reader of that generation turned out to be outside the canonical corpus of his poetry by the will of the author. They were replaced by others that more adequately and consistently present a picture of the poet's creative evolution and author's identity. J. Kline, who took an active part in the publication of the first two books compiled by Brodsky “Stop in the Desert” (1970) and “Selected Poems” (1973), writes that already in 1967 the poet compiled a list of 26 early poems, which should not be included in the forthcoming book. The list was compiled according to the table of contents of the unauthorized volume of Poems and Poems, published through the efforts of G. Struve and B. Filippov in 1965 in the USA.
Refusal to publish early immature works is a fairly common practice, however, in addition to, for example, “Farewell / forget / and do not judge me too hard ...”, Brodsky’s list included such well-known texts by that time as “Stans”, “Jewish cemetery near Leningrad…”, “Stances to the city”. They are difficult to classify as juvenilia. All three poems are connected with the themes of death and the native city, all three were perceived and continue to be perceived as a poetic declaration of a young poet who is included in great literature, but due to their “non-canonicity” they remain on the periphery of the main research plots devoted to the problems of Brodsky’s creative evolution. So, M. Kyonenen analyzes these poems in their correlation with the "Petersburg text" of Russian culture, and Z. Bar-Sella compares the "Jewish cemetery" with B. Slutsky's poem "About the Jews" in a polemical article about the national specifics of Brodsky's work. Meanwhile, “The Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” has a number of features (but not the status) of an initiatory text and could, like “Great Elegy to John Donne” or “Poems for the Death of T. S. Eliot”, determine the vector of the poet’s development and the model of perception his poetry:
Jewish cemetery near Leningrad.
Curved fence made of rotten plywood.
Behind a crooked fence lie side by side
lawyers, merchants, musicians, revolutionaries.
They sang for themselves.
They saved for themselves.
For others, they died.
But first they paid taxes
respected bailiff,
and in this world, hopelessly material,
interpreted the Talmud
remain idealistic.
Maybe you've seen more.
Or maybe they believed blindly.
But they taught children to be tolerant
and became stubborn.
And they did not sow bread.
They never sowed bread.
They just lay down
into the cold earth like grains.
And they fell asleep forever.
And then - they were covered with earth,
lit candles,
and on Memorial Day
choking with hunger, they shouted for reassurance.
And they got it.
In the form of the decay of matter.
I don't remember anything.
Forgetting nothing.
Behind a crooked fence made of rotten plywood,
four kilometers from the tram ring.
One of Brodsky's first public performances, held as part of the "poet tournament" at the Leningrad Palace of Culture. Gorky, was accompanied by a scandal. According to the memoirs of V. Krivulin, after reading the "Jewish Cemetery", which sounded like "new, unheard of music" to most of the youth audience, "either David Yakovlevich Dar, subsequently expelled from the Writers' Union, or Gleb Sergeevich Semenov, teacher and mentor of all more or less prominent Leningrad poets - I don’t remember which of them was the first, but both of them take off with a cry: “Get the hooligan away!” Y. Gordin gives a continuation of the episode: “Joseph did not go into his pocket for a verse and, in response to the indignation of his few opponents - the majority of the audience accepted him perfectly - he read verses with the epigraph “What is allowed to Jupiter, it is not allowed to the bull”:
And these verses ended:
foolishly
Be lonely
like a finger!
... Like bulls -
Eternal to the gods
This was already perceived by the workers of the regional party committee and the regional committee of the Komsomol as an unbearable challenge, and the poor Natalya Iosifovna Grudinina, who “supervised” the tournament from the Writers’ Union, who in a few years will, one might say, risking her head, defend Brodsky, was forced on behalf of the jury to make a speech by Joseph condemn and declare it as if it had not taken place…” Both Krivulin and Gordin see the causes of the scandal not in the provocative pedaling of the Jewish theme (G. Semenov, and even more so D. Dara, who left for Israel in 1977, can hardly be suspected of anti-Semitism) . Krivulin writes that the hall was divided into those who accepted the "new music" and those who "perceived it as something hostile, hateful, alien." Gordin sees the motives for Semenov’s indignation in the fact that “the lofty poet, who in his long-suffering life accustomed himself to proud isolation, to silent opposition ... was offended by the frank and, one might say, naive rebellion that Joseph radiated, was indignant at freedom, which seemed undeserved and unsecured talents. The last delusion, however, dissipated very soon.
Both witnesses in their comments focus primarily on interpreting the reaction of listeners, while it is understood that the choice of texts and the very way they are presented fit into the romantic paradigm of the young poet's work, which, in turn, is supported by the facts of his early biography. However, Brodsky’s speech and the pathos of the central poem in it not only resemble the romantic challenge of the rebel poet, but also apparently have the features of Brodsky’s later modernist method of self-representation of the poet-outsider, who chooses and “appropriates” tradition through an appeal to the genre. in memoriam. This mode of creative self-reflection goes back to The Great Elegy for John Donne and is finally shaped in T. S. Eliot's Death Poems.
In the “Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” features of a not romantic, but rather a modernist paradigm are already found in the very fact of the unjustified, not personally deserved appropriation of freedom, which Gordin writes about. It can be assumed with a high degree of certainty that the degree of its undeservedness was determined at the turn of the 50s and 60s. regarding the poetry of Slutsky, whose intonations are clearly heard in the early Brodsky. The “Jewish Cemetery” was perceived as a response to the provocative and polemical poem “About the Jews” known from samizdat:
Jews do not sow bread
Jews trade in shops,
Jews tend to go bald
Jews steal more.
Jews are dashing people,
They are bad soldiers.
Ivan is fighting in a trench,
Abram trades in a worker's office.
I've heard it all since childhood
I'll be very old soon
But there's nowhere to go
From shouting: "Jews, Jews!"
never traded,
Never stealing
I carry in me like an infection,
Damn this race.
The bullet passed me
To speak rudely:
“Jews were not killed!
It is easy to see that the ideas about the similarity of these two poems are largely based on the presence of a direct quote: “And they did not sow bread. / They never sowed bread. At the same time, Brodsky is much freer rhythmically (the poem is written in free 4-6-strike accent verse), he lacks the civic polemical pathos inherent in Slutsky. Finally, the very theme of death is addressed by poets for different purposes, and the “Jewish question” itself turns out to be included in different contexts. For Slutsky, national self-identification becomes part of a civic position, for Brodsky it dissolves into the more universal problems of cemetery poetry. As S. Markish wrote: “The poet Iosif Brodsky does not know the Jewish theme, the Jewish “material” - this “material” is alien to him. The youthful, almost childish “Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad…” (1958) does not count: in all respects, this is not yet Brodsky, it is, as it were, Boris Slutsky, who cannot be thrown out of Brodsky’s poetic genealogy; apparently, Brodsky did not escape the charm of the “Jewish Slutsky”, but only for a moment, for a single time. “Isaac and Abraham” (1963) is no more Jewish than Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Byron’s Cain, or Akhmatova’s biblical stories: a completely natural and completely legitimate development of the cultural space of European, Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus, it can be said that Slutsky's identification model does not fully correspond to Brodsky's "poetic behavior", and at least one more source is found in the poetics of the "Jewish Cemetery" - cemetery poetry.
The polygenetic structure of the "Jewish Cemetery" allows us to turn to the concept of "triangular vision", proposed by D. Bethea to describe the interaction of "close" and "far" pretexts in the poetics of the "mature" Brodsky. Bethea devotes a chapter of her monograph to the study of the concept of "exile" in Brodsky's poems as a result of the interaction of Mandelstam and Dante's codes. The resulting text is thus like a double palimpsest. Bethea's concept seems to make it possible to include the "Jewish cemetery" in this typological series.
The question of the origins of the cemetery theme in Brodsky's poem has two answers. The first is connected with a visit to a suburban cemetery where the poet's relatives are buried. The second is recovered from the official cultural context of 1957–1958. In 1957, the USSR celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of HW Longfellow. The following year, a postage stamp depicting an American poet was issued for this event, and an almost seven hundred-page volume of "The Chosen One" was published, which included the poem "Jewish Cemetery in Newport" translated by E. L. Linetskaya. The similarity of the titles of Brodsky's and Longfellow's poems indicates the poet's familiarity with this book. In addition, some of Brodsky's friends and acquaintances, in particular G. Shmakov and K. Azadovsky, studied translation with Linetskaya.
Longfellow's poem was published in his book Migratory Birds in 1854. Two years earlier, the poet, who was spending his summer in Newport, had visited the graveyard of the country's oldest synagogue, the Touro Synagogue. In a romantic meditation based on this visit, Longfellow reflects on the fate of Jewish settlers from the Old World, a time in which there is no future for them as they read the world from end to end:
How strange here: Jewish tombs,
And next to the port, ships from distant countries ...
Here - an eternal dream, there - the streets can not sleep,
Here - silence, there - the ocean murmurs.
Full of deep age-old sadness,
Tombstones lie for many thousands of days,
Like ancient heavy tablets,
What Moses threw down in anger.
Everything is alien here: and the signs of signs,
And a strange interweaving of names:
Alvvarez Joseph and Ribeira Jacob -
A mixture of countries, and destinies, and times.
"God created death, the end of earthly worries, -
Praise be to him!” - the mourner spoke
And he added, prostrating before God:
“He blessed us with eternal life!”
Silent in the dark synagogue disputes,
David's psalms are no longer heard
And the old rabbi doesn't read Torah
In the language of the prophets of old.
They huddled in the stinking streets,
In the gloomy ghetto, on the day of life,
And learned the alphabet of patience -
How to live in sorrow, how to die in fire.
And each to the last breath
Unsatisfied hunger in the heart carried,
And his food was only the bread of exile,
Drinking was only the bitterness of caustic tears.
"Anathema!" - sounded over the meadows,
Rushed through the cities, from edge to edge.
Trampled by Christian feet
The persecuted Mordechai lay in the dust.
Filled with humility and pride
They wandered where fate led,
And they were unsteady, like the sands of the desert,
And hard as a granite rock.
Visions of the prophets, majestic,
Accompanied the wanderers on the way,
Whispering that the gleam of faded glory
They will be able to find again in the future.
And, looking back, they read the whole world,
Like your Talmud, from the end to the beginning of days,
And life became a tale of sadness,
A place of suffering and death.
But the waters do not flow to their sources.
Earth, unable to suppress a groan,
Gives birth in pain to new peoples,
And she will not revive dead nations.
In addition to the themes traditional for the genre of the cemetery elegy, Longfellow's poem also contains specific New England motifs and images, dating back to Puritan ideology, associated with the opposition of America - the country of the New Testament, "The City upon a Hill", the new Promised Land (The New Promised Land), the Old World - the land of the Old Testament. In this context, the fate of the Jewish people acquires a generalized symbolic meaning.
Brodsky transfers the symbolism of the New English cemetery elegy to Russian soil, taking American historiosophy as an ontologically deeper version of the development of the general theme than that of Slutsky. His lawyers, merchants, musicians, revolutionaries find solace "in the form of the disintegration of matter," just as Longfellow's "rivers do not flow to their sources." For Slutsky, doom is manifested in the fact that "everything is nowhere to go / From the cry:" Jews, Jews! ". Brodsky, referring to the theme of death, gives this doom a metaphysical dimension.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the search for a metaphysical dimension of life determined the vector of the young poet's evolution. The method of poetic self-identification found in the "Jewish Cemetery" through the theme of one's own death will for some time become the leading one for Brodsky. A few years later, these searches will lead him to the discovery of Donne and a little later, Auden, in whom he will find reliable and loyal allies, and the poem about the Jewish cemetery near Leningrad will no longer be representative of the new style and new identity. However, the model of creating an auto-representative text tested in it will be in demand in Brodsky's future work.
