BOOKS
BRODSKY
LESS THAN ONE. SELECTED ESSAYS. By Joseph Brodsky.
Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. $25.00.
Joseph Brodsky's
Less Than One
is a stunning book - the
most impressive collection of essays I have read in a long time. No
doubt, I am taken with it partly because it corresponds to my idea of
the literary mind at its best- by which I mean not simply a subtle
mind attentive to literature but one that filters a wide range of ideas
through a literary sensibility and through a centralized way of per–
ceiving things. It is the opposite of the kind of academicism that juggles
other people's ideas and categories and rehearses theories as though
they had nothing to do with the objects they presumably were meant
to consider.
What are these essays about? They are about everything–
though always dealing with, or speculating about, everything in
terms of some literary or polemical or personal experience. Even in
the essays about Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Auden as
well as those about tyranny, Byzantium, or his early life in Russia,
Brodsky ruminates about the West, the East, the idea of civilization,
cultural identities, power, old and new imperialisms, democracy,
language, literary history, time, space, war, peace, and other large
themes . But always the poetic concerns show through . He thinks
usually in metaphors, perhaps too much, maybe not ; he freely asso–
ciates, perhaps too much ; he is frequently elegiac about the figures
he admires, again maybe too much for my own tendency to under–
state. He is bold and slashing in his observations and judgements–
like a street fighter endowed with a mind. There are shortcomings,
but they are minor.
The literary pieces sparkle, especially those about the Russian
poets and novelists. And they have the added quality of never being
too far from politics . I cannot judge his belief that Akhmatova and
Mandelstam are two of the greatest, if not the greatest, modern poets,
or that Tsvetaeva and Platonov are among the outstanding modern
prose writers. But his discussion of them has the plausibility which is
all
that first-rate criticism can offer: it is highly technical and formal
yet without the unhistorical and pedantic qualities of either the tex–
tualists or the new crop of literary theorists. But what is even more
