‘On the outskirts of the Empire’: Joseph Brodsky and Lithuania

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of Lithuania in Joseph Brodsky’s life and works before and after his exile from Russia in 1972. As a former Soviet republic, Lithuania represented an intermediary space for Brodsky both culturally and geographically, contributing to his realization that it was a ‘rehearsal’ for his actual emigration. However, Brodsky’s notion of Lithuania changes when, after 1972, instead of representing a simulacrum of the ‘abroad,’ the poet sees Lithuania as a ‘home’ from afar. Emigration, in Brodsky’s case, thus became a realization of the myth of exile implicit in his earlier texts about Lithuania.

KEYWORDS:

• Exile
• geography
• language
• architecture
• empire
• literary dialogue

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this article to the memory of Ramūnas Katilius (1935–2014). For their unflagging enthusiasm and generous advice on this article, I would like to thank, first of all, Tomas Venclova and Ramūnas and Elia Katilius, as well as Ina Vapšinskaitė, Pranas Morkus, Audra Misiūnienė, Liudmila Sergeeva, Birutė Vagrienė, Gediminas Zemlickas, Nina Mackevič, Donata Mitaitė, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Jūratė Katilienė, Stanisław Matiukewicz, Natalia Woroszylska, Valentina Polukhina, Dina Odnopozova, Mikhail Milchik, Lina, and Faddei Perlov. This work was partially supported by the Keggi-Berzins Fellowship for Baltic Studies (Yale University), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ramūnas Katilius, whose house on Liejyklos Street in Vilnius is perpetuated in Brodsky’s ‘Lithuanian Divertissement,’ recalls that it was their mutual friend from Moscow, poet and translator Andrei Sergeev, who invited Brodsky to Lithuania (Katilius 2008, 93).

2. Cf. Venclova’s commentary: “I have a lot of what is called intertextual connections with Brodsky (as well as with Milosz), although I hope they are not imitation but a dialogue. Strictly speaking, imitation is possible only when poets write in the same language… Perhaps even more important is the influence of Brodsky’s and Milosz’s ‘life texts’ – that is to say, I have learned a lot from them as regards my worldview and even behavior” (Venclova 2006, 143–144). On Brodsky and Venclova, see, for example: Mitaité 2002, pp. 118–133 (“A Dialogue between Poets”), Pawletko (2005), and Brio (2008).

3. For details on Brodsky’s visits to Lithuania, see Katilius (2008, 2010), Klots and Venclova (2010), Venclova (1997, 1999b, 1999c, 2006, 2010). These accounts and other findings are summarized in Klots (2010). Translations from Brodsky’s texts available only in Russian are mine. For the sake of greater textual evidence, on several occasions I use my own literal translations of texts also available in English.

4. This interview to Algirdas Titus Antanaitis and Liūtas Mockūnas was originally published in Lithuanian under the title ‘Rašytojas yra kalbos įrankis’ [A Writer Is a Servant of Language] in Akiračiai 10 (1976): pp. 15–16. In Tabor Farm, Brodsky also met Valdas Adamkus, Lithuanian president in 1998–2003 and 2004–2009, who participated in the unveiling of the memorial plaque to Brodsky on Liejyklos Street in Vilnius in 2002 (for an account of Adamkus’ speech at the ceremony, see Katilius 2008, 105). On Brodsky’s connections with Lithuanian diaspora, see Katilius (2001).

5. A professor at Berkeley, Milosz arranged for a letter of invitation from the University of California to be sent to Venclova as early as in 1975, which served as the legal pretext for Venclova to finally receive an exit visa two years later. In 1973, Milosz translated Venclova’s poem ‘Winter Dialogue’ from Lithuanian into Polish and published it in the Polish émigré journal Kultura 5 (308): 34–36. On 9 January 1974, in his letter to Brodsky, Venclova wrote: ‘Поклон пану Чеславу, он большой языковед’ [Regards to pan Czeslaw, he is a great linguist] (Joseph Brodsky Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 14, Folder 144). On Milosz and Brodsky, see Grudzińska-Gross (2009); see Milosz’s reminiscences about Liejyklos Street during his years as a student at the Vilnius University, in his book Beginning with My Streets (Milosz 1991, 14–17); see also Milosz’s and Venclova’s ‘A Dialogue about a City’ (in Venclova 1999a, 99–144; authorized translation from the Polish by M. Ostafin).

6. While in ‘Lithuanian Divertissement’ Venclova’s name appears only in the dedication, in ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ it became part of the title. See Venclova’s articles devoted, respectively, to these texts (Venclova 1999b, 1999c). Brodsky’s poem about Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), ‘Otkrytka iz goroda K.’ [Postcard from the Town K.] (1968), is also dedicated to Venclova and, moreover, appears to be ‘clearly linked with conversations which took place in Lithuania’ (Venclova 1999c, 122). See Venclova’s analysis of this poem (Venclova 2005, 96–120), as well as his own poem ‘Naujas atvirukas iš K. miesto’ [A New Postcard from the City of K.] (2000) written in response to Brodsky’s years later. On Brodsky in Königsberg and the ‘Königsberg text’ of Russian literature, see also Shcheblykin (2008).

7. They also figure in Brodsky’s and Venclova’s transatlantic correspondence. In a postcard to Venclova sent from New England on 4 December 1973, Brodsky writes: ‘не помню, писал ли тебе, что нанес визит в Нантакет, откуда эта открыточка… Сегодня впервые сам провел самолет по 200хсотмильному треугольнику. Лавры Дариуса и Гиренаса не дают покоя, скажешь. Да; но и точка зрения ангела тоже’ [I forget if I have already written to you that I visited Nantucket, which is where this postcard is from.… Today, for the first time on my own, I navigated a plane around a two-hundred-mile triangle. The laurels of Darius and Girenas don’t give me a moment of peace, you would say? Yes; but the point of view of an angel also] (Tomas Venclova Papers, F-95, Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, Vilnius).

8. The magazine in question is Nauka i zhizn’ [Science and Life] 7 (1966): pp. 74–77, where Valentin Khromov, a Moscow poet whom Brodsky knew personally, published an article about palindromes titled “Begushchii nazad” [Running backwards].

9. Cf. Brodsky’s poem ‘The Fifth Anniversary: 4 June 1977’ written two years later on the occasion of his fifth year abroad: ‘Скрипи мое перо, мой коготок, мой посох. / Не подгоняй сих строк:… // Зане не знаю я, в какую землю лягу. / Скрипи, скрипи, перо! Переводи бумагу’ [Scratch on, my clawlike pen, my pilgrim staff, my salvage! / Don’t rush our shuffling words:… // I don’t know anymore what earth will nurse my carcass. / Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us] (Brodskii 1998, III, 150; Brodsky 2000, 244).

10. In his autobiographical essay ‘In a Room and a Half,’ Brodsky writes: ‘They [his parents. – Y.K.] never told me much about their childhood, about the families they were from, about their parents or grandparents. I know only that one of my grandparents (on my mother’s side) was a Singer sewing machine salesman in the Baltic provinces of the empire (Lithuania, Latvia, Poland) and that the other (on my father’s side) was a print-shop owner in St. Petersburg’ (Brodsky 1986, 482). Based on Venclova’s recollections, Brodsky’s parents ‘mentioned two places – Baisogala and Rokiškis. According to their words, Joseph’s grandmother, the mother of Maria Moiseevna, was born in Baisogala, not far from Šiauliai; for a long time there also lived Joseph’s aunt, who, by the way, knew Lithuanian. His grandfather was born in Rokiškis’ (Venclova 2010, 31).

11. Discussing Brodsky’s ‘Liejyklos’ in the vast context of the ‘infinitive writing’ in Russian poetry and outlining a range of morphological topoi that such texts have in common, Zholkovskii points out one particularly important, albeit hypothetical, source of Brodsky’s poem: The famous novel Radetzky March (1932; Russian translation in 1939) by the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939). Not only did Brodsky share his first name with Roth, but Roth also gave the same name to his protagonist, who was born in Brody (now Ukraine), where the events of the novel take place and where, in the beginning of World War I, the protagonist died. The protagonist’s grandfather, also Joseph, was killed in 1859 when he was trying to save the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph (!) by covering him with his body. Zholkovskii concludes that the ‘plot’ of Brodsky’s ‘Liejyklos’ could have been set around the same time and place as described in Roth’s novel (p. 462).

12. In his foreword to Venclova’s Winter Dialogue, Brodsky adds: “sentiments or circumstances in Venclova’s poems may be recognizable, but the manner of their expression is not, if only for the simple reason that the poet’s language is Lithuanian. The logic of the images in his work differs from that in Slavic poetry, and even Slavic speakers who can discern his meters could never imagine their sound (p. xv).

13. ‘To be an exiled writer,’ Brodsky writes in his essay ‘The Condition We Call Exile,’ ‘is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule… And your capsule is your language’ (Brodsky 1995, 32).

14. In 1988, when travel restrictions between the United States and the former Soviet Union were lifted, Brodsky admitted that he would rather visit Lithuania than his native Leningrad (Brodskii 2005, 352, 354). And in 1990, when Lithuania regained independence, Brodsky wrote his play Democracy!, which, according to Venclova, is largely modeled on Lithuania (Venclova 1999c, 144).

15. Not knowing Lithuanian, Brodsky translated this poem from a word-for-word translation by Ramūnas Misiūnas, whom he met in September, 1976, at the meeting of Santara-Šviesa in Tabor Farm. The translation was first published in the Russian émigré journal Kontinent 9 (1976): pp. 5–6. In spring, 1977, Brodsky translated another poem by Venclova, ‘Vienuoliktoji giesmė’ [The Eleventh Canto], from a word-for-word translation by the author.

16. Cf. Venclova’s letter to Brodsky on 27 April 1974: ‘сейчас я сижу в Клайпеде, в холле гостиницы, где некогда были беседы зимой’ [I am now sitting in Klaipeda, in the lobby of the hotel, where winter dialogues once took place] (Joseph Brodsky Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 15, Folder 414). However, since Brodsky, as far as is known, had never stayed in Klaipeda and could only pass it on his way from Vilnius to Palanga, the topography of Venclova’s letter is conventional and may refer to the entire region of Zhemaitija, which includes Palanga, where the poets did meet more than once.

17. Moreover, even their choice of these poets’ texts sometimes coincided (e.g. ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ by Auden and ‘Ithaca’ by Cavafy).

18. Although, as Venclova explains in his letter to Brodsky on 25 September 1972, apart from the title, his poem has little to do with Auden’s: “Сочинил стихи под украденным у W.H. [Одена] названием – ‘Щит Ахиллеса’ (он тоже украл у Гомера, так что ничего; суть же стихов общего с ними не имеет, да и щита нет)” [I composed a poem under a title stolen from W.H. [Auden] – ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (he also stole his from Homer, so it’s all right; as for the poem’s essence, it has nothing to do with either of them, especially that the shield is not there] (Joseph Brodsky Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 15, Folder 414). In addition to those already mentioned, Venclova’s poems related or dedicated to Brodsky include: “Nors šulinys bedugnis ir staigus…” [Although the well is bottomless and steep] (1973), “Pestelio gatvė” [Pestel Street] (1988), “Kartaginoje po daugelio metų” [In Carthage Many Years Later] (1995), “Viduržiemio kvintos ir septimos. Kas užrašys…” [The fifths and sevenths of January. How to preserve…] (1996), “Mes deginom šią lempą vakarais…” [We burned this lamp in the evenings…] (1997), “San Michele” (1997), “Naujas atvirukas iš K. miesto” [A New Postcard from the City of K.] (2000).

19. Venclova adds: “The theme of Ovid’s – just as the theme of Pushkin’s exile – is easily projected on to [Brodsky’s] own biography. In ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ Brodsky takes on both roles, Ovid and Pushkin. He takes the form of an apparition – not in the same way, it is true to say, as the ghost of Ovid in [Pushkin’s] Kishinev cycle, not from a temporal, but a spatial distance, from the New World (which is almost identified with the kingdom of the dead). If Ovid in the Kishinev poems remains a ‘desert neighbor’ and a silent partner of the dialogue, Brodsky (like Pushkin) speaks in the first person, leaving silence to the addressee. All the same, the theme of the ‘two exiles’ is retained. The addressee of the poem is also described as an exile in his own country, the mirror double of the author – perhaps that very author in the past” (p. 132).

20. I owe this last observation to Denis Akhapkin. See his article (Akhapkin 2003) on Brodsky’s early poem “Glagoly” [Verbs] (1960), in which, as Valentina Polukhina has also observed, “Soviet citizens are replaced by a part of speech” (Polukhina 1989, 8). According to Venclova’s statistics, out of a total of 1386 words in “Lithuanian Nocturne,” 595 (42.9%) are nouns and only 141 (10.2%) are verbs (Venclova 1999c, 131). This data invites yet another interpretation of the phrase perepravit’ glagol, namely – “to turn verbs into nouns.”

21. The notion of the New World as the world of the dead has a long tradition in Russian and East European culture. For example, Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment allegorically refers to Svidrigailov’s suicide as ‘going to America’ (Dostoevsky 1976, 522–223), whereby the topos of crossing the Atlantic is raised to the level of myth.

22. Jadwiga Szymak-Reiferowa has pointed out another implicit reference to Tsvetaeva in Brodsky’s ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’: The image of the Lithuanian aviators Darius and Girenas can be traced back to Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight on 20–21 May 1927 and, by extension, to Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poema vozdukha’ [Poem of the Air], written during the ‘Lindbergh days’ the same year (Szymak-Reiferowa 1998, 198–99; Venclova 2005, 69).

23. In his essay on Tsvetaeva’s ‘Novogodnee’ written in 1980, i.e. while Brodsky still worked on ‘Lithuanian Nocturne,’ he explains the use of the rhyme rai – krai not only in Tsvetaeva’s text but also in his own poetic epistle to Venclova: ‘poetic paradise is, rather, a peak [krai], and a bard’s soul is not so much perfected as left in a continual state of motion’ (Brodsky 1986, 203). Toward the end of the essay, Brodsky adds: ‘A poet is someone for whom every word is not the end but the beginning of a thought; someone who, having uttered rai (“paradise”) or tot svet (“next world”), must mentally take the subsequent step of finding a rhyme for it. Thus krai (“edge/realm”) and otsvet (“reflection”) emerge, and the existence of those whose life has ended is thus prolonged (p. 265). In ’Lithuanian Nocturne,‘ this idea is echoed by the comparison of a human life with a sentence: ’that’s whence, too, one’s whole life’s honest, hesitant sentence: / a comma-bound affair] (Brodsky 2000, 217) – a motif that is widespread elsewhere in Brodsky’s works. Cf., for example, his poem ‘December in Florence’ (1976): ‘A man gets reduced to pen’s rustle on paper, to / wedges, ringlets of letters, and also, due / to the slippery surface, to commas and full stops’ (p. 131).

24. This apartment, where Brodsky stayed more than once, is referenced directly elsewhere in his poem: “Cobweb-shaded, the mikes / of the secret police in a bard’s quarters pick / up the mattress’s sighs, and the dripping saliva / of the national anthem: The tune that dislikes / using words” (Brodsky 2000, 217). Venclova, who lived there from the end of 1970 through 1973, specifies: “Beneath the attic, on the second floor of the building, there was some sort of establishment, officially linked with the radio. We suspected (without particular grounds and not entirely seriously), that it was the eavesdropping center of the Vilnius KGB, and that everything which happened in the attic was automatically recorded” (Venclova 1999c, 146; see also; Woroszylski 1993). Arguably, apart from “Lithuanian Nocturne,” Venclova’s attic in Vilnius also figures in Brodsky’s “Lullaby of Cape Cod”: “Countries get snared in maps, never shake free / of their net of latitudes. Don’t ask who’s there / if you think the door is creaking. Never believe / the person who might reply and claim he’s there] (Brodsky 2000, 128).

25. Incidentally, Brodsky was born under the sign of Gemini (on 24 May 1940).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Keggi-Berzins Fellowship for Baltic Studies (Yale University), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).

Notes on contributors

Yasha Klots

Yasha Klots received his Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University in 2011 and an M.A. from Boston College in 2005. Before joining Georgia Tech, he taught at Yale and at Williams College. His research fields are Russian poetry, émigré literature and culture, literary translation, Gulag narratives, and urbanism.