JOSEPH BRODSKY
Less Than One
SELECTED ESSAYS
FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX New York
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the John and Catherine MacAtlhur Foundation for its five years of generous support.
In memory of my mother and my father In memory of Carl Ray Proffer
Contents
Less Than One I 3
The Keening Muse I 34
Pendulum's Song I 53
A Guide to a Renamed City I 69
In the Shadow of Dante I 95
On Tyranny I 113
TheChild of Civilization I 123
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary I 145
The Powerof the Elements I 157
The Soundof the Tide I 164
A Poet and Prose I 176
Footnote to a Poem I 195
Catastrophes in the Air I 268
On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden I 304
To Please a Shadow I 357
A Commencement Address I 384
Flight from Byzantium I 393
InaRoomandaHalf I 447
And the heart doesn't die when one thinks itshould.
Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N."
Less Than One
Less Than One
i
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketbalclass="underline" one's palms keep sliding off.
I remember rather little of my life and what I do remember is of small consequence. Most of the thoughts I now recall as having been interesting to me owe their significance to the time when they occurred. If any do not, they have no doubt been expressed much better by someone else. A writer's biography is in his twists of language. I remember, for instance, that when I was about ten or eleven it occurred to me that Marx's dictum that "existence conditions consciousness" was true only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement; thereafter, consciousness is on its own and can both condition and ignore existence. At that age, this was surely a discovery—but one hardly worth recording, and surely it had been better stated by others. And does it really matter who first cracked the mental cuneiform of which "existence conditions consciousness" is a perfect example?
So I am writing all this not in order to set the record straight (there is no such record, and even if there is, it is an insignificant one and thus not yet distorted), but mostly for the usual reason why a writer writes—to give or to get a boost from the language, this time from a foreign one. The little I remember becomes even more diminished by being recollected in English.
For the beginning I had better trust my birth certificate, which states that I was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, Russia, much as I abhor this name for the city which long ago the ordinary people nicknamed simply "Peter"—from Petersburg. There is an old two-liner:
The sides of people
Are rubbed by Old Peter.
In the national experience, the city is definitely Leningrad; in the growing vulgarity of its content, it becomes Leningrad more and more. Besides, as a word, "Leningrad" to a Russian ear already sounds as neutral as the word "construction" or "sausage." And yet I'd rather call it "Peter," for I remember this city at a time when it didn't look like "Leningrad"—right after the war. Gray, pale-green facades with bullet and shrapnel cavities; endless, empty streets, with few passersby and light traffic; almost a starved look with, as a result, more definite and, if you wish, nobler features. A lean, hard face with the abstract glitter of its river reflected in the eyes of its hollow windows. A survivor cannot be named after Lenin.
Those magnificent pockmarked facades behind which— among old pianos, worn-out rugs, dusty paintings in heavy bronze frames, leftovers of furniture (chairs least of aU) consumed by the iron stoves during the siege—a faint life was beginning to glimmer. And I remember, as I passed these facades on my way to school, being completely absorbed in imagining what was going on in those rooms with the old, billowy wallpaper. I must say that from these facades and porticoes—classical, modern, eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic animals or people—from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the balconies, from the torsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned more about the history of our world than I subsequently have from any book. Greece, Rome, Egypt— all of them were there, and all were chipped by artillery shells during the bombardments. And from the gray, reflecting river flowing do^ to the Baltic, with an occasional tugboat in the midst of it struggling against the current, I have learned more about infinity and stoicism than from mathematics and Zeno.
All that had very little to do with Lenin, whom, I suppose, I began to despise even when I was in the first grade—not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which at the age of seven I lrnew very little, but because of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life. There was baby Lenin, looking like a cherub in his blond curls. Then Lenin in his twenties and thirties, bald and uptight, with that meaningless expression on his face which could be mistaken for anything, preferably a sense of purpose. This face in some way haunts every Russian and suggests some sort of standard for human appearance because it is utterly lacking in character. (Perhaps because there is nothing specific in that face it suggests many possibilities.) Then there was an oldish Lenin, balder, with his wedge-like beard, in his three-piece dark suit, sometimes smiling, but most often addressing the "masses" from the top of an ^mored car or from the podium of some party congress, with a hand outstretched in the air.
There were also variants: Lenin in his worker's cap, with a carnation pinned to his lapel; in a vest, sitting in his study, writing or reading; on a lakeside stump, scribbling his April Theses, or some other nonsense, al fresco. Ultimately, Lenin in a paramilitary jacket on a garden bench next to Stalin, who was the only one to surpass Lenin in the ubiquitous- ness of his printed images. But Stalin was then alive, while Lenin was dead and, if only because of that, "good" because he belonged to the past—i.e., was sponsored by both history and nature. Whereas Stalin was sponsored only by nature, or the other way around.
I think that coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson in switching off, my first attempt at estrangement. There were more to follow; in fact, the rest of my life can be viewed as a nonstop avoidance of its most importunate aspects. I must say, I went quite far in that direction; perhaps too far. Anything that bore a suggestion of repetitive- ness became compromised and subject to removal. That included phrases, trees, certain types of people, sometimes even physical pain; it affected many of my relationships. In a way, I am grateful to Lenin. Whatever there was in plenitude I immediately regarded as some sort of propaganda. This attitude, I think, made for an awful acceleration through the thicket of events, with an accompanying superficiality.