POETRY and POLITICS in the CRUCIBLE of HISTORY: Joseph Brodsky, James H. Billington, and the End of the Soviet Union John Van Oudenaren March 2021 O CCASIONAL PAPER # 311 The Kennan Institute is a division of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Through its programs of residential scholarships, meetings, and publications, the Institute encourages scholarship on the successor states to the Soviet Union, embracing a broad range of fields in the social sciences and humanities. The Kennan Institute is supported by contributions from foundations, corporations, individuals, and the United States Government. Kennan Institute Occasional Papers Occasional Papers are submitted by Kennan Institute scholars and visiting speakers. The Kennan Institute makes Occasional Papers available to all those interested. Occasional Papers published since 1999 are available on the Institute’s website, www.wilsoncenter.org/kennan. 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Louis Susman, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom; Senior Advisor, Perella Weinberg Partners January 28, 2021 marked the 25th anniversary daily newspapers; little magazines such as The of the passing of Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet, Kenyon Review; and such unusual venues as the American essayist and teacher, winner of the Princeton University Library Chronicle and the Nobel Prize for Literature, and poet laureate Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. Most—although of the United States. In 1991, while serving as by no means all—of these writings were col- the poet laureate at the Library of Congress, lected in a series of books that appeared be- Brodsky witnessed from afar the collapse of tween 1973 and 2000, several of which were communism and the unexpected breakup of reissued in 2020 to mark what would have the Soviet Union. Brodsky’s interactions in been Brodsky’s 80th birthday. this period with Librarian of Congress James Apart from a few poems that appeared H. Billington, a historian of Russian culture in samizdat when he was in his early 20s, who regarded Brodsky as the embodiment of Brodsky’s writings were not published in continuity between pre- and post-communist Russia until the late 1980s. Individual poems Russian culture, offer insight into how both began appearing in Soviet newspapers and men viewed developments during this crucial magazines in 1987. A book of selected poems period. The dialogue between the two about was published in 1990. In the post-Soviet Russia took place against the backdrop of period, a seven-volume, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodsky’s ambitious efforts to make poetry Brodskogo, began publication in 1992, in St. widely known to the American public in Petersburg, under the auspices of the Pushkin order, as he put it, to slow “the spread of our Fund. Russian scholars have produced an cultural malaise to the next generation.” extensive scholarly literature on Brodsky, The published and archival records from including the landmark literary biography this period tell a story of the enduring contri- published in 2006 by his friend and fellow butions both men made to the United States poet Lev Loseff.1 Those of Brodsky’s papers and to Russia, but also of unfulfilled hopes: that survive from the Soviet era are accessible of Billington’s for a democratic, westward- to scholars in the National Library of Russia, oriented Russia that had rediscovered the best complementing his American papers at the in its own cultural and religious traditions, Beinecke Library at Yale. A small museum and of Brodsky’s for an America enlightened dedicated to the poet, located in the famous by encounters with its own poetic traditions. “room and a half” where he lived with his parents in St. Petersburg, opened in early 2021, following efforts going back to the early JOSEPH BRODSKY 2000s to establish such a museum.2 In the years since his death, Brodsky’s In what can only be seen as a backhanded writings have attained canonical status in tribute to Brodsky, Russian nationalist authors both his adopted and his native countries. In under the influence of Vladimir Putin’s cul- 2012, when the U.S. Postal Service issued its tural policies have engaged in crude attempts Twentieth-Century Poets series of commem- to redefine the poet’s legacy. One such author orative stamps, Brodsky was one of just 10 claims, for example, that Brodsky never criti- American poets honored, along with Elizabeth cized the Soviet Union while in exile, that his Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, reluctance to visit Russia after 1991 was based and William Carlos Williams. During the 23 purely on personal motives and had no politi- years he spent in the U.S., Brodsky’s poetry cal component, that his parents named him and prose appeared in a staggering array of after Joseph Stalin, and that he was secretly a publications, including The New York Review practicing Russian Orthodox believer whose of Books and The New Yorker; the nation’s major Jewish mother arranged to have him bap- 2 / POETRY AND POLITICS IN THE CRUCIBLE OF HISTORY: JOSEPH BRODSKY, JAMES H. BILLINGTON, AND THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION tized during the siege of Leningrad.3 During job in a factory that produced cannons for the his years in the United States, this author Russian military, in part to help support his claims, Brodsky hid his religion because his family. (His father, a photographer and jour- “American surrounding consisted of non-be- nalist who was not discharged from the navy lievers who probably convinced him that pro- and did not return to Leningrad until 1948, found faith is not fashionable and irrelevant.”4 worked for two years in the photography lab Serious readers presumably do not take such of the Naval Museum. Dismissed from his job fantastic assertions seriously, but the mere in 1950 for being a Jew, he had trouble finding fact that they are made attests to the ongoing work owing to the prevailing anti-Semitism struggle in Russia to define Brodsky’s legacy.5 of the day.9) Brodsky went on to a series of The particulars of Brodsky’s larger-than- jobs as a laborer, mill operator, mortuary as- life biography are well known, from his own sistant, and crew member on geological expe- autobiographical essays and the reminiscences ditions to Siberia and the Russian North. He of colleagues and friends from around the published his first poems at the age of 18, and world. They nonetheless are worth recalling, quickly came to be regarded as the most tal- if only to emphasize the sheer amount of life ented Russian poet of his generation. that he managed to pack into his 55 years, the In the 1960s, while still in his early 20s, he last several of which were marked by severe became, as Billington expressed it in a posthu- health problems.6 mous tribute, “the favored protégé of the great He was born in Leningrad on May 24, lady of St. Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova.”10 1940, a little more than a year before the Akhmatova in turn introduced Brodsky to German invasion. He lived through the ter- Nadezhda Mandelstam, the all-but-forgotten rible siege of 1941-44. At one point he and widow of the great poet Osip Mandelstam who his mother were evacuated from Leningrad had perished in the gulag in 1938. Brodsky and spent a year in the provincial city of met Mandelstam for the first time in the win- Cherepovets. Brodsky’s father was in the navy ter of 1962, when he went with friends to see and saw action on the Black Sea front as well the churches in the city of Pskov, where she as service in China after the war. Brodsky was eking out a living as an English teacher developed an early loathing for communism, in a local pedagogical institute.