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VICTOR ERLICH
ture, love and death, the ineluctability of anguish, the fragility of human
achievements and attachments, the preciousness of the privileged moment!
the "unrepeatable." The tenor of this poetry is not so much apolitical as
anti political, which in a bleakly politicized society was bound to be construed
as an act of defiance. Brodsky's besetting sin was not "dissent" in the proper
sense of the word, but
a
total, and on the whole quietly undemonstrative,
estrangement from the Soviet ethos. The only explicit reference in
Selected
Poems
to the official shibboleths is the almost casually polemical "farewell" to
Karl Marx. ("A Letter in a Bottle," 1965):
Adieu to the prophet who said: Forsooth.
You have nothing to lose but your chains. In truth
There
is
conscience as well: .
. .
if
it comes to that.
When Brodsky pauses meditatively and seeks to locate himself and his
generation in the stream of history, his terms of reference prove singularly
"untimely." One of his best known poems "A Halt in the Desert" (1966) is
built around the clash between traditional faith as represented by the disman–
tled Greek Orthodox Church in Leningrad, and soulless modernity
epitomized by the bleak and unwieldy new concert hall built in its place. As
the speaker contemplates, rather unhappily, this transition, he inquires:
. . .
from which are we
now more remote: the world of ancient Greece
or [Russian] Orthodoxy? Which
is
closer now?
What lies ahead? Does a new epoch wait
for us? and if it does, what duty do we owe?
What sacrifices must we make for it?
The consequences of this idiosyncratic stance are part of the record. Even
though by the mid-sixties Brodsky was viewed by some of the best Leningrad
critics and poets, including Anna Akhmatova, as a budding master, he re–
mained until his abrupt departure from Russia a literary "unperson": only
four of his poems have been published in the Soviet Union. Moreover, in
February 1964 he was arraigned on charges of "social parasitism" and sen–
tenced to five years' hard labor in the Arkhangelsk region of the Soviet far
north. (He was actually allowed to return to Leningrad after twenty months in
exile.) Though some of the most effective poems in this volume were written
during that harrowing period, the author's personal ordeal receives a re–
markably reticent, indeed, an almost oblique treatment:
. . .
a fate which doesn't ask for blood
but wounds me with a blunteaneedle .
