Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life

Almost as soon as he began writing poetry, Joseph Brodsky lived in two worlds at once: Russian and English languages, the East and the West. Even after he emigrated to the United States in 1972, where he would eventually become Poet Laureate after winning the Nobel Prize, Brodsky always kept one foot in Russia, though he never went back.

Until the end of his life, the poet spoke with a thick Russian accent and usually wrote in Russian, though he translated much of his work into English. Brodsky never abandoned his love for Russian literature despite his growing familiarity with his beloved Anglophone poets, from John Donne and Robert Frost, both of whom he began reading in English while still in Russia, as well as his friends and fellow Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.

Brodsky is also one of the most polarizing poets to appear in English in recent decades. In the West, he gained a reputation primarily for his lush, lyrical essays, which appeared regularly in The New York Review of Books and other venues and were eventually collected in several books. Brodsky's essays evince a poetic insight coupled with a mastery of language that is at once dizzying and enamoring. His high-profile coterie of fellow poets and translators seemed further proof that Brodsky's staggering reputation was warranted.

Yet Brodsky's poetry in English translation - the majority of which is written and translated in strict meter and rhyme - is often mawkishly formal. While much of the imagery and metaphor is crystal clear and sometimes shockingly insightful - as when, in "Plato Elaborated," Brodsky writes of a river poking from beneath a bridge like a hand from a sleeve - many of Brodsky's rhymes seem anachronistic and sing-song in this age of informalism.

Brodsky was keenly aware of his linguistic double life, but had an unshakeable faith in the power of language: "When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian - you get an almost psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything." But that permeating clarity is not always evident in his poetry in English.

Brodsky's life, of course, is perhaps more famous than his writing. Charged with parasitism in 1964 and put on trial, during which the judge belittled his poetry as he valiantly defended the high motives of his art, Brodsky was an international sensation from the time he was 25. Sartre intervened with a formal letter to the Soviets, and the young poet - whom almost no one, even in Russia, had read - became a cause célebre. Eventually, he was "given the opportunity" to emigrate, which he did in 1972, first visiting one of his idols, W.H. Auden, in Vienna before settling in the United States. He would never see his parents again, though they applied several times for tourist visas to visit Brodsky in United States.

In the ensuing decades before his sudden death in 1996 after several heart attacks - in his elegy for Brodsky, Seamus Heaney writes of the poet's love for cigarettes, which he smoked as if "courting cancer" - Brodsky would establish himself as an internationally-known writer, poet and exile. It is both Brodsky's life and work that his friend Lev Loseff sought to record in his literary biography of the poet, first published in Russian in 2006. He has succeeded admirably.

All biographers, even the most dispassionate, have a relationship with their subject that soaks through their text; wading too deep toward admiration or disdain can muddle a biographer's approach. Yet it is Loseff's familiarity with Brodsky as a friend, contemporary and fellow poet that makes this book so enjoyable; Loseff is not immune to gossip and the settling of scores as he narrates events in Brodsky's life that also concerned him.

Throughout A Literary Life, Brodsky's life and work keep close company, and Loseff uses each to reflect the other, for as he writes, "between Brodsky in life and Brodsky in verse there is very little difference." By using Brodsky's poetry to illuminate his life and vice versa, Loseff creates a narrative of Brodsky's adventurous existence that is both critical and conspiratorial. The poet's story is the stuff of which legends are born.

This familiarity is of use to Loseff when describing the bureaucratic struggles Brodsky faced in Russia by directly quoting from his trial transcripts, and of his later struggles to get a book past the censors. But Loseff's insight into his subject is most evident in his comments about Brodsky's states of mind and his poetry.

"It would be wrong to say that Brodsky did not care whether he was published. Like many genuine poets (as opposed to vain dilettantes), he was of two minds about publication," Loseff writes.

Later, when analyzing the long poem "Gorbunov and Gorchakov," Loseff proposes an alternative reading that goes against most critics' interpretations: "Contrary to what some critics have claimed, the doubling of the lyric voice is not a representation of split personality, nor of hallucinatory 'voices in my head.' It is the personification of the two hemispheres of the human brain."

Structurally, A Literary Life is center-weighted, with a great deal of essential critical commentary stuffed into the middle pages, waylaying the biographical narrative Loseff tries to juggle with literary criticism. Perhaps this is necessary, given that the center of the book tackles several long poems by Brodsky and many of his books, which were published in fits and starts, partly because he was publishing in more than one country and language from the mid-60s, when he began to be translated into English in the United States. But a better balance could have been struck.

These qualms aside, Loseff has written the definitive work on Josef Brodsky in any language and above all has created an engaging narrative of the poet's life while approaching his work with sharp critical acumen. A more complete biography may emerge in coming years, but this book will remain indispensable.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com