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PARTISAN REVIEW
write a few circumstantial poems - on the death of Marshal Zhukov, on
the martial law in Poland, on the Berlin Wall, on the war in Afghanistan.
Receiving his honorary degree at the University of Silesia, Brodsky
thanked Poland for its contribution in abolishing a great evil, Commu–
nism. Learning that the Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters in New
York made Yevtushenko a foreign member, he resigned from that insti–
tution as a sign of protest.
Brodsky considered Polish poetry to be the most interesting among
contemporary poetry written on the European continent.
In
Russia he
translated several poems from Polish, including a number of mine. Vice
versa, the first country where his poetry was printed, when he was still in
Russia, was not Russia but Poland where he was promoted by excellent
translators: Witold W oroszylski, Stanislaw Baranczak, and Katarzyna
Krzyzewska. His two visits in Poland attracted enthusiastic crowds.
Generosity was an essential trait of Brodsky's nature. His friends al–
ways felt richly rewarded. He was at every moment ready to help, to
arrange things, and to encourage. His generosity is best visible in his con–
versation with Solomon Volkov on Akhmatova. He extolls her greatness,
her wisdom, goodness, and magnanimity. For him the greatness of a poet
was sufficient not to inquire about his or her shortcomings as a human
being. As Robert Frost, to him, was a major figure in American poetry,
Brodsky did not pay attention to Frost's biography.
It
was in harmony
with his view that esthetics precedes ethics.
The deepest thing he said about Akhmatova, and probably the deep–
est thing said about the creative process by anyone, was his remark on her
internal turmoil when she was writing "Requiem." Her pain because of
the imprisonment of her son was real enough, yet in telling of it she re–
proached herself of falsity, precisely because of the transfer of those
feelings into form. She was aware of a certain autonomy of form which
uses an emotional situation for its own purpose; we may even say form
becomes its parasite.
Submitting to the elemental force of the language, or to the voice of
the Muse - and for Brodsky it was the same - he believed that a poet
should try to please not his contemporaries or his descendants but his
predecessors. Those predecessors whose names he listed were: Lo–
monosov, Kantemir, Baratynski, Viaziemski, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam,
Akhmatova, Pasternak, Zabolotzski. He was humble when speaking of
