CZESLAW MILOSZ
Notes on Joseph Brodsky
The presence of Brodsky for many among his poet-colleagues was a
mainstay and as if a point of reference. Here was a man who by his
oeuvre
and by his life reminded us, against what today is so often proclaimed and
written, that hierarchy exists. That hierarchy cannot be contrived by syl–
logisms and established in a discourse. Rather, by living and writing, we
affirm it every day anew. It has something to do with the elementary
di–
vision into beauty and ugliness, truth and falsity, goodness and cruelty,
liberty and tyranny. But, first of all,
hierarchy
means respect for that which
is elevated and unconcern, rather than scorn, for that which is base.
Brodsky's poetry can be placed in the category of the sublime, but in
his personal fate, it is possible to detect a loftiness of thought, the same
that Pushkin saw in Mickiewicz: "He looked at life from above."
In one of his essays Brodsky called Mandelstam a poet of culture. He
himself was a poet of culture, and thanks to that he could write in har–
mony with the deepest current of his century in which mankind,
threatened with extinction, discovered its past as an unending labyrinth.
Penetrating that labyrinth, we learn that whatever survived from the past
has been due to the principle of hierarchical distinction. Insane Mandel–
starn in a
gulag
ransacking garbage for food belongs to the reality of
tyranny and baseness that was sentenced to disappear. Mandelstam, recit–
ing his poems to a few co-prisoners, is a high moment that persists.
With his poems, Brodsky built a bridge to the poetry of his prede–
cessors, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tzvetaeva, over the span of
decades during which the Russian language was turned into pulp. He was
not a political poet, for he did not want to enter into polemics with an
adversary undeserving of engagement. Instead, he practiced poetry as a
peculiar kind of action which is not subject to short-range standards of
time.
To go straight to the goal, not letting oneself be swayed by any voices
calling for one's attention. That is, knowing how to recognize what is
important and clinging only to it. That was precisely the strong side of
the great Russian writers of the past.
