CZESLAW MILOSZ
Brodsky's life and writing tended towards accomplishment, as an ar–
row tends towards the aim. Yet, evidently, that was an illusion, just as in
the case of Pushkin or Dostoevsky. We must therefore formulate it differ–
ently - that fate tends straight to the aim, while the one who is ruled by
fate knows how to read its main lines and to comprehend, be it dimly,
that to which one is called.
Think only of how much Brodsky had to leave aside those trends
which for many people made the every essence of the twentieth century:
Marxism, Leninism, Sovietism, Nietzscheanism, Nationalism, Freudian–
ism, Surrealism, and a dozen other "isms." He could have committed
himself as a dissident, as did his friend Tomas Venclova. He could have
thought about reforming the state. He could have written vanguard po–
ems. He could have made Freudian analyses in his essays, or structuralist
ones. Nothing of all that.
A life like a moral parable. A poet imprisoned and sentenced by the
state, then expelled by the state, and after his death the chief of the state
kneeling at his coffin. And that fairy-tale happened in a century unfavor–
able to fairy tales.
It
would be incorrect to imagine Brodsky as a bohemian poet. When
he was fourteen, he passed an entrance examination to the Naval Acad–
emy and was not admitted because of the rubric "nationality." I try to
imagine him as a cadet. An officer? Lermontov?
He toiled at various jobs when in Russia, and his academic position
in America was not a sinecure. He dared to be old-fashioned as a teacher
and forced his students to learn by heart hundreds of lines of verse. If a
student said in class something Brodsky considered too stupid, he would
order the student to get out.
His mastery of English was the result of a truly titanic labor. How was
it possible for a man without finishing high school, without university
studies, to become an authority recognized by scholars trained in the hu–
manities? The answer is his hard work, but not that alone. He and his
colleagues in Leningrad - young poets and translators - were voracious
readers, explorers of libraries and secondhand bookshops. They learned
Polish in order to read forbidden Western literature in Polish translation.
How many young people in the age of television dedicate so much time
to self-education?
He and his friends did not want to be pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet. They
wanted to be a-Soviet. Certainly he was not a political poet, yet he did
