Analysis of individual works by I. A. Brodsky. Analysis of the poem by Joseph Brodsky “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast”

Olga Igorevna Glazunova- Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor, works at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University. Author of a number of works on literary criticism and linguistics.

About Joseph Brodsky’s poem “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast”

Much has been written about the poetry of Joseph Brodsky. Perhaps even too much, given the fact that the meaning and problems of his emigration poems still remain a mystery to researchers. The works of Western literary scholars are full of optimism and unshakable faith in the bright myth of the American dream, happily embodied in the fate of the Nobel Prize laureate. However, in Russia such assessments can only resonate with an inexperienced reader, because even with a superficial comparison of the poet’s creative heritage with the interpretations of foreign colleagues, their complete emotional incompatibility becomes obvious.

One could, of course, not pay attention to the “inaccuracies”; this is not the first or last time this happens in our lives, but in relation to Brodsky, such a position seems unacceptable, because the theory of the poet’s prosperous existence in emigration not only does not contribute to the resolution numerous questions that arise from readers regarding his poems, but often becomes the reason for a tragic misunderstanding, and sometimes even a complete denial of his work.

For his fortieth birthday, Brodsky writes the poem “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,” in which he sums up his life and talks about his attitude to the present and future. According to Valentina Polukhina, “this is one of the poet’s most beloved poems ‹…› More often than any other, he read it at festivals and poetry performances” 1 .

I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,

burned out his sentence and nickname with a nail in the barracks,

lived by the sea, played roulette,

dined with God knows who in a tailcoat.

From the heights of the glacier I looked around half the world,

He drowned three times and was cut open twice.

I abandoned the country that nurtured me.

Of those who have forgotten me, a city can be formed.

I wandered in the steppes, remembering the cries of the Hun,

put on himself, which is coming back into fashion,

sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt

and did not drink only dry water.

switched to a whisper. Now I'm forty.

What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long.

It is only with grief that I feel solidarity.

But until my mouth is filled with clay,

“I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,” opens the English language a collection of Brodsky’s poems “To Urania” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1980), as well as the third volumes of his “Collected Works” and “Works of Joseph Brodsky” (St. Petersburg: Pushkin Foundation, 1994). In the collection “To Urania” the poem is given in Brodsky’s translation. In the English version of the article, Valentina Polukhina provides her own translation of the poem, performed jointly with Chris Jones, noting that Brodsky’s translation caused criticism from some English poets 2.

It must be said that not only the translation, but also the poem itself, which the poet undoubtedly considered as a landmark in his work, caused extremely contradictory assessments from critics. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it “exaggeratedly menacing,” explaining his negative perception of the first line as a “childish” “on Gulag scale” term that Brodsky served in prison and exile: they say, if not for 17 months, but more, then it would still be possible dramatize 3. (If we proceed from this argumentation, then Akhmatova probably should not have exaggerated her position in “Requiem”: “I was then with my people, / Where my people, unfortunately, were,” since it did not fall to her lot to serve time either in prison or in a camp.)

V. Polukhina 4 compares Brodsky’s poem with the “Monuments” of Horace, Derzhavin, Pushkin on the grounds that it sums up the results and sets out views on life. It should be noted that Brodsky’s own attitude towards such ideas about his work has always been sharply negative. (Compare the description of your own “monument” in “Elegy” of 1986 or the line from “Roman Elegies”: “I did not erect a stone thing that goes to the clouds for their warning.”) On the other hand, if Brodsky’s poem needed a title, it would be more logical, based on the content, to classify it as a ruin rather than a monument - there is so much bitterness in it and so little satisfaction, narcissism and hope for the future.

The idea of ​​monumentality may arise under the influence of the leisurely measured sound of the first twelve lines of the poem, in which the poet recalls the most important events in his life - events, it must be said, that are far from triumph: imprisonment (“I entered a cage instead of a wild beast”), link (“I burned out my sentence and nickname with a nail in the barracks”), emigration ( “played roulette, / dined with God knows who in a tailcoat. / From the heights of the glacier I looked around half the world”) and your attitude towards her (“ I abandoned the country that nurtured me. /Out of those who have forgotten me, a city can be formed”, “covered the threshing floor with black felt” 5), attempts to forget (“ and didn’t drink only dry water”).

Of all that the poet reports, only a few facts can be classified as neutral: “he lived by the sea,” “he put on something that is coming back into fashion,” and “he sowed rye.” Taking into account the contradiction between the form of the poem and its content, it can be assumed that behind the solemn structure of the first part there is only one thing hidden - the absence of regret, which in itself indicates the onset of a new stage in the author’s life. Maximalism is characteristic of youth; with age, a person accepts life as it is and does not make increased demands on it, so that there is no reason for disappointment.

The poet takes everything that happened in life for granted. This fact is also noted in Valentina Polukhina’s article: “From the very first line of the poem, fate is considered (by Brodsky. - O. G.) as something deserved.” However, the author of the article cannot agree with the poet’s ideas about his fate, noting that Brodsky’s phrase “ I abandoned the country that nurtured me.” is not true, “since in fact it was the country that forced him to emigrate” 6.

There is hardly any reason to doubt the author’s point of view, especially since in emigration Brodsky more than once had to give explanations about his departure; for example, in a 1981 interview with Bella Jezierska, he comments on this event as follows:

B.E.: They say you really didn’t want to leave?

I.B.: I didn’t really want to leave. The fact is that for a long time I had the illusion that, despite everything, I still represented some kind of value... for the state, or something. That it would be more profitable for THEM to leave me, to keep me, than to kick me out. Stupid, of course. I fooled myself with these illusions. As long as I had them, I had no intention of leaving. But on May 10, 1972, I was called to the OVIR and was told that they knew that I had an Israeli call. And that I better leave, otherwise I will have troubles. That's what they said. Three days later, when I went to pick up the documents, everything was ready. I thought that if I didn’t leave now, all that would be left for me would be prison, a mental hospital, exile. But I have already gone through this, all this would not give me anything new in terms of experience. And I left on 7.

Brodsky’s answer to the journalist’s question is absolutely neutral - there is no irritation, no resentment, no accusations in it: he left because at that time he considered it expedient. Of course, his choice was made under the pressure of threats, but the threats, according to Brodsky’s comments, were rather vague.

In the second part of the poem, from a description of biographical events, the poet moves on to a story about creativity:

I let the blued pupil of the convoy into my dreams,

ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts.

Allowed his cords to make all sounds besides howling;

switched to a whisper. Now I'm forty.

Let's look at the first line of the above passage. Dreams are not subject to the will of a person, they develop according to scenarios unknown to him, therefore, it is impossible to allow or prohibit anything in dreams, although attempts are being made to penetrate the area of ​​the unconscious. Recalling A. Akhmatova’s phrase: “Italy is a dream that returns until the end of your days,” Brodsky wrote: “...for all seventeen years I tried to ensure the repetition of this dream, treating my super-ego no less cruelly than my unconscious. Roughly speaking, I returned to this dream rather than the other way around” (“Fondamenta degli incurabili”, 1989). When reproducing a dream on a conscious level, it loses its independence and becomes part of creativity. In addition, one cannot ignore the fact that letting unpleasant memories into your dreams - the barrel of a pistol and the peephole of a prison cell (“the blued pupil of a convoy”) - is contrary to the nature of human consciousness.

If, following Brodsky, we consider “dream” as a metaphorical image that correlates with poetic creativity, “the blued pupil of a convoy” may correspond to self-censorship. However, the reasons for it in this case cannot be explained by the poet’s unconscious desire for linguistic perfection - the negative meaning of the metaphor indicates the coercive nature of control on the part of the author. The phrase following the line in question is also consistent with this interpretation: “ Allowed his cords all sounds besides howling,” that is, “I did not allow myself to howl.” The verb with negation “did not allow” indicates the subject’s conscious suppression of the emerging desire, and the previous line “ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts”(that is, experienced all the hardships of exile to the end), on the one hand, explains why the desire to howl arose, and on the other, indicates its intensity. Under these conditions, the poet probably had to strictly control the manifestation of his feelings so that the “howl” would not be heard. Remembering Mayakovsky’s lines about how he “humbled himself, standing at the throat of his own song,” you involuntarily come to the conclusion that the poet of the revolution and the emigrant poet have quite a bit in common.

Taking into account the above analysis, the following phrase “switched to a whisper” can be explained not so much by a lack of physical strength as by precautionary measures.

In the last, third part of the poem, the poet sums up his life:

What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long.

It is only with grief that I feel solidarity.

But until my mouth is filled with clay,

only gratitude will be heard from it.

It should be noted that the ending of the poem raises the most questions. Valentina Polukhina interprets it very straightforwardly: “He does not curse the past, does not idealize it, but thanks it. Whom? Fate? The Almighty? Life? Or all of them together? There was a lot to thank him for in his anniversary year. At the end of 1978, the poet underwent his first open-heart surgery (“there was a rupture”) and spent the entire 1979 slowly recovering (we will not find a single poem marked this year). In 1980, a third collection of his poems was published in English translation, which received the most flattering reviews, and in the same year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the first time, which he learned about a few weeks before his birthday” 8 .

In the above list, which prescribes what the poet should thank fate for, the absence of one important event is puzzling: in 1980, Brodsky became a US citizen. Of course, the citizenship ceremony could have taken place after his birthday, but by that time the poet must have known that this would happen, and therefore he had every reason to begin to feel gratitude. It is hard to believe that one could simply “forget” about this fact.

Let's turn to the text. Comparing the last two lines of the poem, one cannot help but note their stylistic inconsistency: the reduced conversational style when describing one’s own death (“filling one’s mouth with clay”) implies violence towards the subject and cannot be accompanied by his expression of a feeling of “gratitude.” The dissonance between the first and second parts of a complex sentence is so clearly marked that behind it one can read not even irony, but sarcasm on the part of the poet in relation to his actions.

It is impossible not to note the connection between the above passage and the famous lines from Mandelstam’s poem “January 1, 1924”: “ A little more - they will cut off / A simple song about clay grievances / And their lips will be filled with tin.”“They will pour” - “they will hammer”: lips “filled with tin”, or a mouth “filled with clay” (compare: “clay grievances”) are not associated with natural death, but imply influence from the state. Mandelstam uses a more terrible image than in Brodsky’s poem, but it must be said that the situation in Russia after the revolution cannot be compared with life in America at the end of the 20th century.

However, if Brodsky decided to make such a comparison, he had reasons for it. In an interview with a Moscow News journalist, the poet talks about the peculiarities of American policy in the field of ideology and its implementation in the sphere of education and culture:

I.B.: Today in America there is a growing trend from individualism to collectivism, or rather, to groupism. I am concerned about the aggressiveness of groups: the black association, the white association, parties, communities - all this search for a common denominator. This mass phenomenon is also being introduced into culture.

M.N: How?

I.B.: A significant part of my life passes in universities, and they are now seething with all kinds of movements and groups, especially among teachers, whom God himself ordered to stand aside from this. They become hostage to the phenomenon of political correctness. You shouldn't say certain things, you should be careful not to offend any of the groups. And one morning you wake up, realizing that you are afraid to speak at all. I won’t say that I personally suffered from this - they treat me like an eccentric therefore, every time my statements are treated with condescension (emphasis - O. G.) 9 .

The word “eccentric”, which Brodsky uses when describing the attitude of his American colleagues towards him, also evokes certain associations: Mandelstam was also treated as an eccentric poet, a man out of this world. The images of a loner, a conqueror, Miklouho-Maclay, a fragment of an unknown civilization present in Brodsky’s poems indicate that the poet felt uncomfortable among the ideological tinsel surrounding him.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Konstantin Pleshakov, compiled on the basis of the memoirs of Brodsky’s friends, which describes this aspect of Brodsky’s American life: “The term └political correctness” established itself in America about ten years ago. Many Americans are absolutely furious with him. Indeed, the term is quite ominous. It looks like it was taken from Orwell’s novel └1984.” In essence, political correctness is liberalism taken to the point of absurdity.

The concept of political correctness rests on the interesting premise that some once oppressed groups should now be privileged. Political correctness primarily concerns women and blacks. However, other minorities are not forgotten. The words “negro”, “disabled”, “fat man” are unacceptable in polite society. ‹…›

Political correctness on American campuses takes on wild forms. Ethnic minorities - especially blacks - should be admitted to universities without competition. Students have turned into crystal vases that can be desecrated even with a glance. Many professors accept them only after throwing the office door wide open - cases of blackmail and multimillion-dollar lawsuits for alleged sexual harassment are on everyone's lips. Black students are often given grade inflation to prevent accusations of racial discrimination. It is impossible to call a student “└girl”. Now they are all └young women.” The distance between students and professors is nothing more than a relic of the past. We must address each other by name. You need to rebuke students gently and kindly. ‹…›

The consequences are disappointing. ‹…› Social life both implied segregation and still does. Even the most ardent advocates of political correctness have virtually no black friends. The profession is terrorized. All estimates are, on average, overestimated by one point” 10.

Very sad comments. The state system as such can be resisted. Even her repression shows that she takes her opponents seriously and retaliates against them because she fears the spread of freethinking. It is difficult to fight stupidity: no one will understand or appreciate your efforts, and the very thought of the possibility of a different point of view will cause bewilderment, and if it does not, then it will not go further than a private opinion. The US government treats its citizens with paternal concern, but does not take them too seriously. In the mid-20s, the father of American engineering, Henry Ford, famously said: “You can paint it any color, so long as it’s black.” The fact that the phrase is still alive indicates that the meaning contained in it applies not only to the choice of color when buying a car. Ideological sermons, generously flowing from television screens, plant stereotypes in the heads of citizens that do not imply the possibility of choice.

American linguist, political scientist and dissident Noam Chomsky, known in Russia as the author of generative grammar, constantly criticizes American democracy in both domestic and foreign policy in his works and speeches. Chomsky's greatest indignation is caused by the attitude of US government and ideological structures towards its own population. Noting the fact that the common sense of Americans is revealed exclusively in sports or in the discussion of TV series and practically does not work in serious issues related, for example, to the government system, domestic or foreign policy of the United States, Chomsky writes: “... I think that the concentration of people's attention on topics such as sports has a very definite meaning. The system is set up in such a way that there is virtually nothing that people can do (at least without some degree of organization that is far beyond what exists in the present) to influence real world events. They can live in a world of illusions, which is what they actually do. I am sure that they are using their common sense and intellectual abilities, but in an area that does not matter and which probably thrives because it does not matter, as an alternative to serious problems that people have no control over and in which they cannot change anything due to the fact that the authorities are deceiving them” 11.

This state of affairs infuriated Brodsky, and this could not but lead to a response from his colleagues and students. According to eyewitnesses, “Brodsky’s harshness generally caused criticism.” He did not consider it necessary to hide his opinion and did not try to soften it in his comments. Many people thought that Brodsky was rude. “The students either loved him or hated him.” It must be said that Brodsky, in turn, also experienced strong emotions. He was horrified by the terrible ignorance of young people. One day it turned out that no one in the class had read Ovid. └My God,” Brodsky sighed, “how you’ve been deceived!” 12 “Joe Ellis believes that Brodsky was disliked in the academic world for another reason: └He created what they study.” 13

In his English-language prose, Brodsky also did not hide his sarcasm towards excessive American simplicity. For example, in the essay “Mourning and Reason” (1994), comparing European and American perceptions of the surrounding world, Brodsky quotes from an article by the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden, whom he considered “the greatest mind of the twentieth century”: “W. X. Auden, in his short essay on Frost, says something like this: └ ... when a European wants to meet nature, he leaves his cottage or small inn, filled either with friends or household members, and rushes out for an evening walk. If he comes across a tree, that tree is familiar to him from the history he has witnessed. Below him sat this or that king, inventing this or that law - something like that. The tree stands there, rustling, so to speak, with allusions. ‹…› When an American leaves the house and encounters a tree, this is a meeting of equals. Man and tree collide in their primordial power, free of connotations: neither has a past, and whose future is greater - the grandmother said in two. In essence, this is the meeting of the epidermis with the cortex."

One could, of course, not notice what is happening around, concentrate on creativity and sit all these years behind seven castles as a sort of “Michigan hermit”, observing the universe from the heights of the Nobel Prize, or, for example, rummaging in the outskirts of one’s own “I” and release something very indecent that would immediately attract the attention of the American public and provide the author with a comfortable existence in a foreign land. Moreover, the more physiology there is in this indecency, the better: the absence of connotations makes the American man in the street insensitive, so he definitely has to hit.

And the eccentric Brodsky searched, worried, suffered. And he translated poetry to give the American reader the opportunity to get acquainted with Russian poetry in good quality; and promoted his own poetry, which he (the reader) had no or did not want to have an idea about; and taught, although, apparently, there was no particular pleasure in it; and wrote speeches in English for American youth, and essays; and gave a farewell speech to university graduates. And, I must say, his efforts did not go unnoticed. Ann Lonsbury writes: “The most remarkable result of Brodsky’s concern for his audience was the enormous, ongoing and truly successful (at least in part) project of printing and distributing cheap volumes of American poetry to Americans who would otherwise probably would not have been able to meet her (the American Poetry and Literacy Project continues today. It is headed by a certain Andrew Carroll, who in 1998 traveled around the country in a truck, distributing free poetry anthologies)” 14.

Did the poet feel gratitude to the country that gave him the opportunity to live and work? Certainly. In an interview, he spoke about this more than once: “The fifteen years that I spent in the USA were extraordinary for me, because everyone left me alone. I led the kind of life that, I believe, a poet should lead - not yielding to public temptations, living in solitude. Perhaps exile is the natural condition of the poet’s existence, in contrast to the novelist, who must be within the structures of the society he describes” 15.

But at the same time, we must not forget that peace is the ultimate dream of an ordinary person; for a poet, if he is a real poet, peace is destructive. Brodsky had concerns about this immediately after leaving. In response to a question from David Montenegro in 1987, the poet says this:

D.M.: When you first came to the United States in 1972, you said that you were overcome by fear: that your work was in danger of a kind of paralysis, because you would have to live outside the sphere of your native language. But in fact, you wrote a lot. How has living here affected your poetry?

I.B.: ‹…› I believe that the fear expressed in 1972 reflected the fear of losing one’s self and self-respect as a writer. I think that I really wasn’t sure - and I’m not very sure today - that I wouldn’t become stupid, because life here requires much less effort from me, it’s not such a sophisticated daily test as in Russia. And indeed, eventually some of my instincts seemed to dull. But, on the other hand, when you feel fear, you try to sharpen your mind. Perhaps this balances it out. You end up neurotic, but this would have happened anyway. Only faster, although one cannot be completely sure of this 16.

Please note that Brodsky's answer about the causes of fear does not correspond to the question asked. David Montenegro expresses concerns about life outside of language, Brodsky focuses on life without effort, which ultimately leads to a dulling of the instinct of perception. The result of a serene existence, according to the poet, can be depersonalization and loss of self-esteem.

On the other hand, one cannot ignore the duality of the situation in which Brodsky found himself in exile. In American society, where peace is natural state, equally desirable and possible, the poet’s fears about a happy stay in it simply could not be perceived. A person for whom the blows of fate, “sophisticated everyday trials” are concepts far from reality, is not able to imagine that such a life can cause “nostalgia” in someone who has happily parted with it. Satisfaction and gratitude are not only natural, but also the only possible, from the point of view of others, reaction to the change in the poet’s fate. On the other hand, those who at one time expelled the poet from the Soviet Union, and did not rot him in prison or psychiatric hospital, also probably counted on their share of gratitude. Who knows, perhaps such expectations explain the sarcasm present in the last lines of the poem. Assuring readers that only gratitude will “give” from his mouth until he is beaten with clay, Brodsky uses a verb indicating an action, not a state, thereby avoiding talk about what feelings he will have at the same time. test".

The results that the poet comes to are very disappointing: “What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long. / Only with grief do I feel solidarity.” Life seems “long” to a person only if nothing in it pleases him anymore. In the author’s translation of the poem into English, the poet expresses his feelings much more harshly: “What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparency. / Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit” 17 (“What can I say about life? That it is long and cannot bear clarity. Broken eggs make me sad, and an omelette makes me vomit”). Agree, the content of the poem is very far from blissful monumentality.

Brodsky's poem, which begins with the following lines, is dated nineteen eighty-seven - the year he received the Nobel Prize: “The more black eyes, the more bridges of the nose, / and then the knock on the door is just a stone’s throw away. / You are now your own smoking destroyer / and the blue horizon, and in the storms there is peace.” The image of a lonely warship, accustomed to storms, confronting the hostility of the surrounding elements, is far from a triumph; it is difficult to relate to the prosperous life of the Nobel laureate. The ending of the poem also leads to sad reflections: “The Baltic pet prefers Morse! / For a saved soul, it’s more natural to be happy! / And from my lips in response to the winter in the face / through the minefields, an apple flies.” If there is “winter in the face,” then there must be spring, summer, and autumn “in the face,” otherwise the use of the adjective loses its meaning. What is hidden behind the desperately bravura tone of the 1987 poem and the elegiac measured sound of the 1980 poem? Satisfaction? Peace? Or irritation?

The basis of the collection “To Urania” was composed of poems written by Brodsky from the late seventies until 1987, when the collection was published. If Brodsky's work in exile (1972–1996) is conditionally divided into three parts, this stage can be designated as a period of maturity. Hence the special interest in what was created at that time. Let us dwell on some facts that testify to the attitude of the poet himself to his work.

On the copy of “Urania” 18, donated by the author to Evgeniy Rein, notes were made in Brodsky’s hand - on the back of the cover at the top it is written in red ink: “Listen: the burry engine / sings about internal combustion, / and not about where it rolled out, / about the exercise of dying - / this is the content of └Urania.”

Below this is a large drawing of a cat - Brodsky's totem, writing something in an open notebook. Clutched in his left paw is either a fountain pen or a smoking cigarette. The cat is striped, its shining eyes are drawn especially carefully, behind the cat is the flag of the United States. So that there is no doubt that this is an American cat, “stars and stripes” is written above it, and arrows point to the eyes and striped back and tail. On the back of the cat there is his name - Mississippi (by the way, Brodsky's real cat, this very Mississippi, is dozing right there at the far end of the table, having eaten to his fill with sweet Korean chicken with us). In the center of the page is written large: I. B.” 19 .

The cat in the Russian consciousness is traditionally associated with independent behavior, and the “American” color, indicating his belonging to the United States (by this time Brodsky was a citizen of this country), and the cigarette-pen in his hand-paw allows us to compare this image with the poet himself. What did Brodsky want to say with his drawing? It is possible that the “cat,” despite his affiliation, “walks by himself” against the backdrop of the American flag.

Brodsky’s assessment of his work as an “exercise in dying” predetermines the pessimistic images and “decadent” moods present in his poetry of those years, for which he received and continues to receive from adherents of the life-affirming principle in Russian classical literature.

On the flyleaf of the collection given to Rain by Brodsky’s hand, another appeal to a friend is written: “To Zhenure, who knew in advance / the possibilities of Madame Urania 20.” There is always a price to pay for ignorance. Brodsky's poetry of the emigration period is a reflection of the bitter experience of a person who was unable to adapt, to remake himself taking into account the needs of the new system and the new worldview. The leitmotif of “aging”, which arose immediately after leaving in the poem “1972”, ended with the themes of “glaciation”, “death”, “non-existence”, the transformation of a living person into the likeness of a statue in the lyrics of the eighties.

1 Polukhina V. “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...”. In: How Brodsky's poem works. M.: NLO, 2002, p. 133.

2 See: Polukhina V. “I, Instead of a Wild Beast...” in Joseph Brodsky: the art of a poem, ed. By L. Loseff and V. Polukhina. NY, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999, p. 69. The article refers to a review by Christopher Reid (Reid Christopher, “Great American Disaster,” London Review of Books, vol. 10, (8 December 1988) no. 22, p. 17–18), dedicated to the third edition of the collected works Joseph Brodsky in English, and an article by Craig Raine. “A Reputation Subject to Inflation,” The Financial Times Weekend (16 and 17 November 1996), p. XIX).

3 A. Solzhenitsyn. Joseph Brodsky - selected poems // New world, 1999, No. 12, p. 182.

4 Compare: “Being an integral part of him (Brodsky. - O. G.) creativity, this poem continues the tradition of monumental poems of Horace, Derzhavin and Pushkin” (“Organically of a piece with the rest of his work, this poem follows in the footsteps of Horace, Derzhavin and Pushkin as a poem- monumentum”) (Polukhina V. “I, Instead of a Wild Beast...” in Joseph Brodsky: the art of a poem, ed. by L. Loseff and V. Polukhina. NY, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999, p. 71 ). Here and further, if the translation of V. Polukhina’s article into Russian does not correspond to the original, quotes from the English edition are given.

5 In the English version of the poem, this line reads as follows: “...planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables.” When the author translated the poem into English, the meaning of the first line was changed, which began to sound like “I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages.” (“For the lack of wild beasts, I challenged the iron cages.” Here and further during reproduction in the footnote of the English version - translation O. G.) (Brodsky J. That Urania. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1980, p. 3).

6 Compare: “From the very first line of the poem fate is seen as just”; “when, in actual fact, it was the country that drove him into exile” (Polukhina V. “I, instead of a Wild Beast...” in Joseph Brodsky: the art of a poem, edited by L. Loseff and V. Polukhina .NY, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999, p. 74).

7 If you want to understand the poet... (interview with I. Brodsky to B. Yezerskaya). In the book: B. Ezerskaya. Masters. Michigan, Hermitage, 1982, p. 107.

8 Polukhina V. “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...”. In: How Brodsky's poem works. M.: NLO, 2002, p. 136.

A collection of Brodsky's poems in Russian, published in 1987 by the American publishing house Ardis.

9 Dmitry Radyshevsky. Interview with Joseph Brodsky for MN // Moscow News, No. 50, July 23–30, 1995.

10 Pleshakov K. Brodsky in Mount Holyoke // Friendship of Peoples, 2001, No. 3, p. 182–183.

1 1 The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky, ed. by James Peck. Pantheon books. New York, 1987, p. 33: “I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that’s far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that’s in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.”

1 2 Pleshakov K. Brodsky in Mount Holyoke // Friendship of Peoples, 2001, No. 3, p. 179.

13 Ibid., p. 183.

1 4 Lonsbury E. Civil service: Joseph Brodsky as an American poet laureate / UFO, 2002, No. 4 (56), p. 207.

1 5 The poet’s ideal interlocutor is not a person, but an angel (interview with I. Brodsky, J. Buttaf (J-l “L’Expresso”, December 6, 1987)). On Sat. Joseph Brodsky. Big book of interviews. M.: Zakharov, 2000, p. 278.

1 6 The poet idolizes only language (interview with I. Brodsky D. Montenegro (journal “Partisan Review”, 1987, No. 4)). On Sat. Joseph Brodsky. Big book of interviews. M.: Zakharov, 2000, p. 263.

1 7 Brodsky J. To Urania. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1980, p. 3.

1 8 A collection of Brodsky’s poems in Russian, published in 1987 by the American publishing house Ardis.

1 9 Rein E. B. I’m bored without Dovlatov. New scenes from the life of Moscow bohemia. St. Petersburg: Limbus-Press, 1997, p. 190.

2 0 Urania is the muse of loss in the poetry of I. Brodsky.

The theme of summing up arose in Brodsky’s work long before his death, which may be due to his inheritance of the Acmeist desire to understand his life in the context of the historical era with which the poet’s fate was connected. Indicative in this sense is his poem “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...”, which belongs to the third, emigrant period of Brodsky’s work and is largely of a final nature. It was created on the day of the author’s 40th birthday, May 24, 1980 (i.e., like the poems discussed above, it was written for a certain date, a time milestone - a frequent case with Brodsky), and incorporated a number of significant things both for this period, and for the poet’s entire work of motives. The lyrical hero of the poem is a man whose fate is both extraordinary and typical for the 20th century. It included poverty (“I put on something that is becoming fashionable again,” that is, it was so unfashionable that it again found itself in the field of attention of dandies), hard physical labor (“sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt”), wanderings ( “I wandered around in the steppes,” “from the heights of the glacier I looked over half the world”), trials (“I drowned three times, I was cut to pieces twice”), imprisonment (“I burned out my sentence and nickname with a nail in the barracks”), exile (“ate the bread of exile, without leaving crusts"). The poet’s hero is an individualist, which is emphasized by the repeatedly repeated pronoun “I”, and his loneliness (“A city can be formed from those who have forgotten me”), and a detached position in relation to the world, behind which one can discern the traditional conflict between the Poet and the crowd (“he’s having lunch, God knows with whom in a tailcoat”, “From the height of a glacier I looked around half the world”, etc.).

Despite the apparent simplicity of this poem, each of its images has several deep subtexts that lead not only to the biography of the author, but also to general cultural layers of meaning. Thus, the first line (“I entered a cage instead of a wild beast”), hinting at the real story of the poet’s imprisonment, makes us remember long tradition transport especially dangerous prisoners in a cage. This subtext refers to the most important theme for Brodsky, “The Poet and the Empire,” revealing the nature of the author’s conflict with the state. The third line (“lived by the sea, played roulette”) is equally multifaceted. Brodsky’s passion for the sea, and for water in general, is known: he always tried to settle closer to the water element, and was enchanted by Venice. The sea, a common image in poetry, especially romantic poetry, has become one of the most important for Brodsky’s work. The image of roulette is adjacent to the theme of fate, playing with fate, including the deadly game (“Russian roulette”); Let us also remember that F. M. Dostoevsky was an avid roulette player. The next line also refers to the work of this writer (“he dined with God knows who in a tailcoat”). A tailcoat is a sign of respectability and solidity: the poet, due to his position, actually had to be in the company of significant people more than once. However, the mention of the devil perhaps hints at those dialogue-struggles with his dark double that Ivan Karamazov had to conduct in the novel The Brothers Karamazov.

The line “From the height of the glacier I looked over half the world” sets the poet’s position above the world, traditional for romanticism, and the word “glacier” is essential here. It echoes the general emotional restraint of Brodsky’s late lyrics, in which the element of experience is constrained by the rigid logic of reflection. If water– a symbol of life, time, elements (cf. “lived by the sea”), then glacier(an image that does not necessarily need to be taken literally) is a frozen stream of water, whose movement is almost invisible to the eye. The “water” theme is continued with the line “and he only drank dry water.” The oxymoron “dry water” means something impossible, and therefore the expression itself can be understood as “drank everything that can be drunk.” At the same time, the word “drink” in Russian has a very rich semantic field: it includes life, And wine, And fate, And grief and much more. Each of these meanings adds its own subtext to the poem, but one of the most important among them is the idea of ​​how much befell Brodsky’s hero. Another cross-cutting image of the poem, which forms a very important semantic pair with the previous one, is the image of bread. The hero "sowed grain and covered the threshing floor with black felt." The image of the sower goes back to the Gospel parable of the sower (Matthew 13:4), reflected, in particular, in the poem by A. S. Pushkin “The desert sower of freedom...”. The sower is a prophet bearing grains of truth, although not all of these grains bear fruit: it all depends on what soil they fall on. Threshing floor (threshing floor) is a flooring for threshing grain: thereby the motif of the harvest arises. This motif finds its completion in the image of the “bread of exile”: together with the line “Abandoned the country that fed me,” this image is an allusion to the textbook poem by A. A. Akhmatova “I am not with those who abandoned the earth...”. But if Akhmatova spoke about the impossibility of leaving native land“to be torn to pieces by the enemies,” then, judging by the fate of Brodsky’s lyrical hero, it was he who turned out to be not only superfluous in his native country, but hostile to it.

The motif of restraint finds its completion in the lines “Allowed his ligaments to make all sounds besides the howl; / switched to a whisper.” The poetry of “whisper” for Brodsky is the opposite of the tradition of poetry of “scream”, “spiritual breakdown” - a tradition coming from romance through the lyrics of Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Vysotsky, as well as his contemporaries - the so-called “loud” or “variety” poets (Voznesensky , Yevtushenko). “Whisper” goes back to the romantic-symbolist ideal of “silent speech” as an expression of the “inexpressible”; however, for Brodsky, “whisper” is devoid of the semantics of a certain “mysterious, mystical language” opposed to the profane “earthly language” and is rather associated with the stoic position of accepting the world, as well as the “non-publicity” of the author’s poetic speech, emotionally restrained, sometimes even rationally cold and not seeking to influence the general public, although it is intended to be read aloud. One of the poet’s favorite thoughts, repeated throughout his life, is that there are things that cannot be spoken about directly and loudly.

Restraint is also noticeable in the poet’s lyrical hero’s assessment of the life he lived: “it turned out to be long.” No complaints about the fate that befell him, no curses on fate: only an admission that fate was bitter (“Only with grief do I feel solidarity”). The final thought of the poem, at first glance, does not follow from the above:

“But until my mouth is filled with clay, / only gratitude will come out of it.” These lines make us recall the quatrains of the Acmeist poet, who, according to Brodsky himself, played a special role in his creative development - Osip Mandelstam:

Depriving me of the seas, run-up and flight

And giving the foot the support of the violent earth,

What have you achieved? Brilliant calculation:

You couldn't take away the moving lips.

Both poems talk about forced lack of freedom, both metonymy speech organs appear in the lyrical hero: in Mandelstam - lips, at Brodsky's - ligaments And mouth. These images emphasize the poetic talent of the hero of the poem, and in Brodsky it is the creative gift that becomes, if not a source, then at least a means of accepting the world and agreeing with life. Consequently, it is creativity for the poet that justifies the tragedy of human existence and resists death and suffering. However, something else is also important: in Brodsky’s poem there is no thought about personal immortality, about the posthumous justification of all suffering, Pushkin’s “no, I will not die” is absent, as well as the opposite - the denial of immortality. Brodsky seems to be stopping on this side of the line that separates life from what comes after it. Remains open question about the meaning of the hardships and trials that befell the poet in this life. Here you can refer to the opinion of another poet, Lev Losev: “I think that Brodsky’s philosophy, by definition, is a philosophy of questions, not answers.” Restraint towards any final answers is especially characteristic of the poet’s late lyrics, as is clearly demonstrated by the poem under consideration.

The form of the poem is also typical for this period of Brodsky's work. First of all, his long lines attract attention - Brodsky’s “signature technique”. The poem is written in different icons (4–5 icons) tonic verse, imitating leisurely, colloquial speech (its leisureliness is conveyed both by enumerative intonation and by the length of the lines themselves). The feeling of a relaxed, calm statement is also created through colloquial words and even jargon: “klikukha”, “the devil knows with whom”, “lounging around”, “again”, “eating”. These words also work to create the image of the lyrical hero of the poem: a typical intellectual of the new generation, the late 1950s - early 1960s, whose rudeness of speech simultaneously serves as a sign of his democracy, and as a trace of his former challenge to the system, which did not allow such expressions, and peculiar protective mask, which protects against “loud”, sublime phrases. However, many critics did not accept such techniques from the late Brodsky; they considered their use to be a consequence of the author’s isolation from his native linguistic environment

What is the mastery of this poem? We will try to show that his originality lies in the very choice of vocabulary, in Brodsky’s inherent convergence of low and high styles, in his characteristic combination of humility and pride, irony and sorrow. Being an organic part of the poet’s entire work, this masterpiece of Brodsky is a kind of monument poem. It expresses in the most aphoristic form life credo poet, and his style is dictated by the fact that this poem is final in many respects. It is final, first of all, in biographical terms (all the facts listed in the poem took place in life, there is nothing invented or “romantic” here). It depicts a self-portrait of Brodsky, a man and a poet at the same time, because in Brodsky’s case there was an absolute merging of personality and fate. Having written it on the day of his fortieth birthday, the poet sorts things out with his fate, recalling all the main events of his life: arrests and prisons (“in a cage”, “burned out”<…>nickname with a nail in a barracks"), exile to the North, work on a state farm in Norenskaya ("sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt"). This is the years 1963–1965, when Brodsky wrote, in the opinion of many, several beautiful poems. And even earlier, during the years of his poetic formation (1959–1962), he participated in geological expeditions and tourist trips, traveling most of one-sixth of the world: from the Baltic swamps to the Siberian taiga, from the north of Yakutia to the Tien Shan mountains, where he really drowned, wandered on foot across the tundra and “lounged around in the steppes, remembering the cries of the Hun.” Forced departure from the country in 1972 is indicated as a voluntary decision (“I left the country that fed me”), and life in the free world as a test (“I ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts”) and a persistent memory of the world of unfreedom (“I let the blued pupil of the convoy into your dreams"). Having listed the “necessary percentage of misfortunes” (I: 90) that befell him, the poet, however, does not complain (“Allowed his cords to make all sounds besides the howl”), does not blame anyone, on the contrary, he blames himself (“Abandoned the country who fed me"). He does not curse the past, does not idealize it, but thanks it. Whom? Fate? The Almighty? Life? Or all of them together? There was a lot to thank him for in his anniversary year. At the end of 1978, the poet underwent his first open-heart surgery (“there was a rupture”) and spent the entire 1979 slowly recovering (we will not find a single poem marked this year). In 1980, a third collection of his poems was published in English translation, which received the most flattering reviews, and in the same year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the first time, which he learned about a few weeks before his birthday.

The poem is conclusive both in terms of theme and vocabulary. It contains all the main motifs of Brodsky’s work or their variants: unfreedom, homeland, exile, life, illness, death, time, poetic gift, God and man, poet and society. It also contains one of the main themes of Brodsky’s poetry - the theme of grief (“Only with grief do I feel solidarity”). Declared very early (in “Pilgrims”, 1958), this theme persistently resounds throughout the poet’s entire work (“The song, no matter how loud it rings, is muffled than a cry of grief”, I: 311; “grief is stronger than valor”, I : 313; “And you shudder from time to time from grief,” I: 129; “When so much is behind / everything, especially grief,” II: 160). The line about solidarity with grief could be taken as the key line in the text, if in the poem, written while still in exile, we did not hear a plea for detachment from the grief that has befallen:

God, hear the prayer: let me fly above grief
higher than my love, higher than moaning, screaming (I: 310).

It is precisely the reluctance to be crushed by the “load”<…>grief" (II: 361), considering oneself a victim of any misfortune links this theme with the theme of courage and stoicism, which over time pushes the theme of grief aside. Another theme - the theme of “courage to be,” according to Tillich, seems to be the main one for the analyzed poem. Brodsky early came to the conclusion that in the 20th century neither despair, nor pain, nor grief are “not a violation of the rules” (II: 210), but the norm. And in this poem, the desire to “understand that the essence is in your destiny” (I: 79) turns the lyrical “I” into an observer who distantly comments on his life and tries to evaluate what happened to him.

There is, however, some ambivalence in this assessment. On the one hand, the desire to avoid self-dramatization forces the poet to give preference to self-deprecating descriptions of his actions (“there was a massacre,” “lounged around in the steppes,” “ate the bread of exile”). The deliberately emphasized personal ordinariness and even insignificance are reminiscent of Pushkin’s famous lines: “And among the insignificant children of the world, / perhaps he is the most insignificant of all.” On the other hand, there is sanity, balance, almost philosophical calm: I’ll tell you what happened to me, but all this is not very important, the essence of life is not this, the essence of it is in your attitude to what happened - in stoicism and humility. There really is no condemnation or melodrama in the intonation of this poem, but a critical reader cannot help but notice in the position of self-detachment a certain element of pride: the poet not only accepts everything that happened to him, but also takes upon himself even what others have imposed on him . This gesture of a proud soul is noticeable already in the very beginning: “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,” and I was not put in a cage like a wild beast, because they considered it dangerous. And in this initial phrase the acceptance of fate as fair is stated. The reluctance to consider himself a victim (a dangerous animal is not a victim) forces Brodsky to abandon the traditional metaphor of unfreedom - “a bird in a cage” - and the traditional symbol of the poet as a bird. An equally complex psychological gesture can be discerned in the phrase: “[I] abandoned the country that nurtured me,” rather than the country that expelled me. Behind this simple grammatical transformation of a passive into an active one can see a considerable effort of will, dictated by the ethics of self-condemnation and humility. It is noteworthy that all three negations are endowed with the semantics of the statement: “I didn’t drink only dry water,” that is, I drank everything; “he ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts,” that is, he ate everything, as they eat in prison or in a camp; “until my mouth is filled with clay,” that is, while I’m alive. The line “Of those who have forgotten me can be made up of a city” is also ambiguous: the emphasis on “city” emphasizes the confidence that thousands of people knew it, and the emphasis on “of those who have forgotten me” expresses the tragedy of oblivion and complete renunciation of human love. And yet, it was not pride that allowed the poet to rise above grief, but work on himself and his gift. “In essence, the life of a writer in a certain sense becomes a product of his work. The work begins to determine the character of life. The fact that someone is praised, expelled or ignored is due to his work, and not to what preceded this work. The independence of his personality and the inability of Brodsky’s poetic style to fit into the then existing context made him dangerous and alien.

Brodsky always remained “the freest man” in the most unfree country. And when he was captured and imprisoned like a wild animal in a cage, the poet’s real alienation from himself began: “in those days it was, as they say, self-defense, self-defense, when you are grabbed, taken to a cell, etc., you disconnect from yourself. And this principle of self-detachment is an extremely dangerous thing, because it very quickly turns into a state of instinct.<…>you look at your life, at your experience, with one eye - and tweet.” The more often society imposed on him the role of a poet, dissident or prophet, “whose opinion should be listened to,” the stronger the tendency toward detachment and self-deprecation was felt in his poems. It is this psychological gesture of self-detachment that determines the intonation of this poem.

Being final, this poem focuses not only on the main themes, but also on the deep foundations of its poetics. Moreover, the poet seems to emphasize them, abandoning for a time the most outwardly striking features of his style - enjambment, compound rhymes, twisted syntax. Here he practices what he theorizes about in prose: “...in a poem one should reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. It must be written in such a way that if someone covers it with a magic tablecloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black: nouns, adverbs and verbs will remain there. When this tablecloth small size"Your best friends are nouns." Indeed, only five adjectives are woven into the fabric of the text ( wild, black, blued, dry, long) and two participles ( forgotten And remembering). The main vocabulary is devoted to nouns (39%), verbs occupy about a third of the vocabulary (28%). Pronouns (15%), with the exception of “whom” and “everyone”, are directly related to the 1st person (l - 5 times, own - 3 times, me - 2 times, self - 1 time, your, yours, for me - 2 times). The text contains only two adverbs (again and now) and three numerals.

The skill with which Brodsky controls vocabulary and grammar lies in the very distribution of parts of speech in the text. Nouns dominate the rhymes, accounting for 98% of their total number. In the rhyme position there is only one adjective, which rhymes with the noun (long/clay), and one verb, which also rhymes with the name (half the world/fed). “Three notes about rhyme. First of all, the poet wants to ensure that his statement is imprinted in memory. Among other things, rhyme is an amazing mnemonic device; a successful rhyme will certainly be remembered. Even more interestingly, rhyme usually reveals dependencies in language. It brings together previously irreducible things.” And in this poem, rhymes, as often in Brodsky, enrich each other with meaning based on similar or contrasting semantics: “cage/roulette”, “in the barracks/in a tailcoat”, “gunna/threshing floor”, “fashion/water”, “convoy/ howling”, “solidarity/gratitude”. They enter into a complex semantic and sound roll call with each other: in a cage or under escort, we are all capable of howling. The latter is indicated by the choice of the preposition “besides” instead of “except” (“besides” means that there was a howl and other sounds). The Hun, in the cold, endless steppe, uttered not only screams, but also howls, as if echoing with a wild beast. Only a person who entered a cage instead of a wild animal, lived in a barracks, covered a threshing floor and let the pupil of a convoy into his dreams, and then predicted a Nobel Prize for himself (for how else can we interpret “dined with God knows who in a tailcoat”), is able to rhyme “ in the barracks" with "in a tailcoat". It seems that the poet’s fate changed like fashion, but, like water, it retained its essence. The hidden meanings of the rhymes are also indicated by their sound design: the rhyme “howl/convoy” is surrounded by three more stressed “o”s, which perform an echo effect, and the stressed “u” in “gunna/threshing floor” is echoed in the unstressed “u” in the rhyme “modu/vodu” " The appearance of a short participle in the position of rhyme - “raporot” - is also very significant. You can rip a bag, clothes, a thing, but not a person. This is what they say about animals in fairy tales - they rip open the belly, for example, of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Hinting at two serious surgical interventions, the poet chooses the devoid of pathos, deliberately self-deprecating trope of “ripping” not only in order to avoid melodrama, but also in order to once again remind himself and the reader about the constant vector of a person’s fate, about what makes time is with us, transforming our body into a thing, and ourselves into a part of speech, into a number, into a sign in general. Brodsky lived with this “thought of death - frequent, painful, material” (III: 165) all his life. According to Olga Sedakova, “Brodsky’s most liberating beginning is the experience of death. Some early and very strong experience of death, mortality, frailty." The rhyme “rasporot/city” seems to combine physical pain with emotional pain: phonetically, “rasporot” correlates with “crucified,” and word-formatively, with “flogged.” The poet reconciles this pain with the grammar itself: the choice of the non-normative connective “there was a ripping” instead of “there was a ripping” with the meaning of repetition, as in “wondered, sewed”, denotes a habitual action that has happened more than once and can still happen. The rhyme “korok/forty” is colored by the sacred semantics of the number itself: for forty days the soul is still here, and then it passes on to another world. Under Brodsky’s pen, the rhyme “long/clay” also becomes a trope: “clay” as the fundamental principle of life (the material of the Creator) is presented in the text as the final substance of death. The semantic connections between rhymes that arise in this way, following the phonetic ones, claim to be a type of metaphor, which thickens the entire right edge of the poetic fabric of the poem.

The right part of the poem, loaded with the semantics of names, is balanced by the special semantic weight of the left part. If nouns dominate in the rhyme position, then verbs are placed at the beginning of the phrase/line: “entered, burned out, lived, dined, drowned, abandoned, wandered around, put on, sowed, drank, let in, ate, allowed, crossed, said, distributed” . It is the verbs that compose the plot outline of the poem, naming the most important events in the poet’s life. This distribution of action on the left side and name on the right makes the left side of the poem no less significant than the right. Grammar interferes with the semantics of the left verb part, giving it additional weight. In the long list of verbs beginning 16 of the 20 lines, there is a curious alternation of imperfective and perfective forms. After the first five verbs of the imperfect form, indicating the repetition of what happened to the poet - “entered, burned out, lived, dined, drowned” - a verb of the perfect form appears, the verb of the only fateful action - “left the country...”. It is noteworthy that this phrase not only begins, but also ends with a perfective verb, as if emphasizing the equality and balance of semantic load between the beginning and the end and all other phrases: “he abandoned the country that nurtured me.” In the middle of this phrase, an equally interesting semantic inversion is possible: the country nurtured me, but I abandoned this country. Such a semantically and grammatically balanced phrase sums up the first third of the poem. Then again follows a series of verbs of the imperfect form: “lounged around, sowed, covered, drank,” interrupted by a verb of the perfect form - “let the blued pupil of the convoy into his dreams.” Like the previous two verbs of the perfect form - “threw” and “fed”, the verb “let in” signals something final and irrevocable, which can no longer be gotten rid of even in a dream, right according to Pascal: “Nothing that happened disappears.” In the last part of the poem, this alternation of verb types is repeated, but in a changed rhythm: three imperfective verbs - “stole, allowed, leaving” and three perfect ones - “passed, said, turned out”, another imperfective verb - “I feel” is replaced by the verb perfect form - “beaten”, and the poem ends with an imperfect form verb - “will be distributed”. By building a hierarchy of his actions, the poet makes extensive use of the internal connections of the language itself, sometimes testing their strength. Thus, the semantization of the connective “byval” leads to a contradiction between the passive “rasporot” and the active “byval”. The accumulation of verbs at the extreme left of the poem, as well as their penetration into the center and even into the rhyme position, indicates that the verb defended its rights, despite the fact that Brodsky sought to make the name the central grammatical category of his poetry. “And this is natural,” Olga Sedakova notes in an article about Brodsky, “verbal semantics, linking a statement with a person, time, and the nature of an action, speaks of a consciousness that is well coordinated in reality.”

As in the case of rhymes loaded with semantics, many verbs incorporate cultural reminiscences: “burned out” as an act of writing with fire refers to Pushkin’s “Prophet” (“With the verb, burn the hearts of people”); in “lived by the sea,” the Russian ear again hears Pushkin: “An old man lived with an old woman / by the very blue sea,” “played roulette” refers us to the theme of gamblers, fatalists and testers of fate in Pushkin and Dostoevsky; “sowed rye,” in addition to biblical symbols, refers to Nekrasov (“Sow the reasonable, the good, the eternal”) and Khodasevich’s “The Path of the Grain,” not to mention Leo Tolstoy, who himself plowed and sowed, literalizing the archetypal metaphor. Like rhymes initial verbs drawn into a kind of sound trick - the entire left side of the text is riddled with hissing and whistling sounds: burned, lived, three times, From the forgotten, rye, ate, went into a whisper, What to say about life. The sound repetition in “switched to a whisper” is especially significant: since the vocal cords are not involved in whispering, we get another oxymoron - the voiceless poet speaks.

Douglas Dunn proposed an interesting criterion for assessing the aesthetic quality of a poem. If a poet has only the right side of the poem semantically loaded, he is already a good poet. If the beginning takes on semantic weight, this is a very talented poet. And if the middle of the poem sags under the weight of meaning, he is a genius. Let's see what the middle of this text is filled with. At first glance, it contained verbs with less dramatic semantics than the verbs on the far left: played, knows, looked around, visited, can be composed, covered, leaving, turned out to be, feel, scored and distributed. We have already talked about the functions of the verbs “played” and “was”. The book verb “looked around” attracts attention. It appears in Brodsky only once more, and also in a poem from 1980: “Who knows, isn’t it / God looked at his work on the eighth day and after” (III: 14). A somewhat blasphemous parallel, possible only in the context of the poet’s own poems: “it seems to me that / my Last Judgment is taking place, the judgment of my heart” (I: 135). Considering that “glacier” is a metaphor for eternity, the line “From the height of the glacier I looked around half the world” is more about an archetypal height than a spatial one, although by his 40th birthday Brodsky had literally looked at half the world. Now he looks around his life and judges himself first of all, and not the world, as if remembering his youthful decision: “create yourself and create your life / with all the power of your misfortune” (I: 127). The world is forgiven by the poet, as evidenced by the last two verbs - scored And sound out:

Until my mouth was filled with clay,
only gratitude will be heard from it.

These two verbs carry almost the main meaning of the poem, for they read Brodsky’s ethical credo: accepting all the trials of life with gratitude. Life took place, because everything rests on its fundamental principles - fire, water, ice, rye, clay. The fact that the final line of this poem can be taken as the poet’s ethical credo is evidenced by the fate of the word “gratitude” and words of the same root in Brodsky’s other poems. The poem “Procession” opens to them: “It’s high time to give thanks for everything, / for everything that cannot be given” (I: 95); it is addressed to specific people: “with all my heart I thank you / those saved by you” (I: 351); “you, you hear, every line / thanks for not dying” (I: 353). Gratitude sounds like a spell: “Let it [the poetic chant] sound in the hour of death / as gratitude of the lips and eyes / to what makes us / sometimes look into the distance” (I: 414). Over the years, the feeling of gratitude becomes part of the poet’s stoicism ethics: “Up there, / hear one thing: I thank you for / you took away everything that in my lifetime / I owned.<…>Thank you... / Or rather, the last grain of my mind / thanks for not allowing me to cleave / to those tabernacles, buildings and dictionary” (II: 212); “the larynx... of that... thanks fate” (II: 338). The line “until my mouth is filled with clay,” that is, until I die, establishes connections with several poets at once. It reminds us of Heine’s stanza about death as clogging of the mouth, deprivation of the word, from the cycle “To Lazarus”:

So we ask greedily
A whole century, still silent
They won’t stuff our mouths with earth...
Is this the answer, is it complete?

It can be read as another roll call with Mandelstam: “Yes, I’m lying in the ground, moving my lips, / And what I say, every schoolchild will memorize,” and after the last line: “As long as the last slave alive on earth” - and with “ Monument" to Pushkin. It certainly refers us to Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero”:

And with me is my “Seventh”
Half dead and dumb
Her mouth is closed and open,
Like the mouth of a tragic mask,
But it's covered in black paint
And filled with dry earth.

Considering that Brodsky repeatedly said that it was Akhmatova who set him on the right path, it was from her that he learned humility and the ability to forgive both individuals and the state, this reference cannot be overestimated. But perhaps the most audible echo comes from two Tsvetaeva poems: “Yaroslavna’s Lament” (“Shut your mouth with turf and clay”) and “Tombstone,” which combines the motifs of gratitude and a speaking mouth:

Dying fish
Thank you with all my might
<…>
Until your mouth is dry -
Save - gods! God bless you!

It can be assumed that it is precisely for the sake of the last two lines that Brodsky’s entire poem was written, “to reflect on one’s fate” (I: 123) and once again to thank “fate<…>Cyrillic sign" (II: 422). He always refused to separate ethics from aesthetics. For him, a poet is a derivative of poetry, of language, like gratitude from a gift, that is, a person who gives good.

In the middle of the text there is also one of the two participles - “remembering”, which forms an antonym to “forgetting”: what people can easily forget, the steppes and nature in general remember: “The forest and meadow will remember. / Will remember everything around” (I: 413). This antithesis of oblivion and memory is supported by the contrast of sleep and vigil (“I let the blued pupil of the convoy into my dreams”), as well as the most voluminous opposition - the opposition of life and death (“I drowned,” “I was cut to pieces,” “until my mouth was filled with clay.” ). Existential antinomies correspond to spatial oppositions: a cell and half the world, the heights of a glacier and flat steppes, the country of birth fenced off from the world and the open space of exile beyond its borders. These oppositions organize the multidimensionality of the space of the poem (closed - open, bottom - top, north - south, inside - outside), in which the lyrical “I” lives, being placed in the middle of the text 10 times out of 13. The volume of pre-textual space is hinted at as intertextual connections , and autocitation. Almost all the words of this poem carry with them the semantics and metaphors of Brodsky’s other poems.

Thus, the words located in the central part of the poem are illuminated with the deep light of their vocabulary predecessors. "Wild beast" has its equivalent in "hunted beast" (II: 8) and in "wild beast" (II: 230), "stinking beast" (II: 48), as well as simply in "beast" (II: 290 ) and “beasts” (II: 383). The unpretentious epithets “black” and “dry” also acquire additional semantics in the context of their inherent metaphors in other poems. The epithet “black” - one of the poet’s most favorite epithets, preserving all its traditional symbolism - stands out for its highest frequency of use (120 cases in total). Black in Brodsky’s poetry can be water (I: 26), glass (I: 80), branches (I: 93), the horse of the Apocalypse (I: 192–193, 347), “huge, black, wet Leningrad” (II: 175), “black cities” (1: 241), “black glory” (I: 312), “black wound” (I: 400), “wedding in black” as a metaphor for death (II: 82), “black lattice prisons" (II: 304), "black nowhere" (II: 321), and finally, poetry itself as a "scattering / of black on a sheet" (II: 458). In this context, the innocent “black felt covering of the threshing floor” takes on a sinister connotation against the background of the nearby metaphor “the blued pupil of the convoy,” which is read simultaneously as a metaphor for the replacement of the guard’s weapon (the blued barrel of a gun), and the black all-seeing eye of the convoy, a kind of devil in uniform. The raven bird, as a harbinger of death, evokes Mandelstam’s Voronezh and his lines: “My age, my beast, who can / Look into your pupils” (“Age”). The oxymoron “dry water” as a synonym for something that does not exist in nature fits into a long series of epithets and predicates from the previous verses: “fountain<…>dry" (II: 149), "reason is dry" (II: 252), "dry foam" (II: 439), "dry excess" (III: 9), "Dry, condensed form of light - / snow" ( III: 13).

The most frequent and most voluminous concept, “life” (384 times), undergoes the most varied transformations in tropes in Brodsky’s poems. It can also be personified: “How strange it is to discover on the clock / your whole life with unclenched hands” (I: 110); and embodied: “Life is a form of time” (I: 361). These two extreme transformations of life can be combined: “Life, / which, / like a gift, is not looked into the mouth, / bares its teeth at every meeting” (II: 415), or reduced to speech: “Life is only a conversation in front of the face / silence<…>Speech of twilight with a blurred end" (II: 127); “all life is like an unsteady honest phrase” (II: 324). “Life” incorporates classical allusions: “Into the gloomy forest of the middle / of life - on a winter night, echoing Dante’s step” (I: 309) and modern semantics: “Life is a takeaway product: / torso, penis, forehead. / And geography mixed / with time is fate” (II: 457). The motif of a protracted life - “My life has protracted” (III: 13, 15) - varies in “What can I say about life? Which turned out to be long." Brodsky’s “life” is often interpreted in religious and philosophical terms: “Tell me, soul, what life looked like” (I: 355). Being so central conceptually, the word "life" finds itself at the center of the poem.

All three metonymies “ligaments, sounds, mouth” in Brodsky’s poetry often act as a metonymy for song (I: 303, 307, 325), poetry and speech in general, “dictated by the mouth” (II: 330).

That is why “mouth”, “this wound of Thomas” (II: 325), is often accompanied by the verbs “opens your mouth” (I: 131), “open your mouth” (II: 270), “open your mouth” (I: 401), participle “gaping mouth” (I: 341). The word "ligaments" ("It develops the ligaments", II: 364) is a kind of metonymy of the metonymy of voice and throat: "the throat sings of age" (II: 290), as well as a synonym for sound. The “sound” itself in this poem, as in others written before 1980, can mean intonation, melody, even the genre of the poem: “and urban elegies have a new sound” (I: 109); “No, the Muse will not complain / if the melody is ordinary, / a sound indifferent to taste / comes from an elegant lyre” (I: 253). “Sound” is sometimes the only thing that connects the poet with life: “Here, buried alive, / I wander through the stubble at dusk, /<…>without memory, with one sound” (I: 386). “Sound” is spiritualized and conceptualized: “from<…>love / sound for meaning” (II: 329); “The orphanage / of sound, Thomas, is speech” (II: 330), “rushing upward, / sound throws off the ballast” (II: 451). There is complete self-identification with “sound” in the 1978 poem: “I was rather sound” (II: 450). It is no coincidence that this particular line is the most phonetically organized: “Allowed all sounds to my ligaments...” Other alliterations are less noticeable: “cage” - “klikuhu”, “Abandoned the country that fed me”, “blue pupil”, “switched to a whisper” "

The placement of tropes that replace the poet and poetry in the middle of the poem next to the personal pronouns “I”, “me”, “me” gives the center of the text the same semantic elasticity and ambiguity that is endowed with its right and left parts. The metonymies of “mouth” and “pupil” appear for the first time in the 1964 poem “To the Northern Edge,” written shortly after arriving in exile in the North: “Northern edge, cover.<…>/ And leave only the pupil<…>/ Hide and cover my mouth!” (I: 327). "Pupil" rhymes with "top" in another poem from 1964 (I: 336), with the same semantics as the "convoy pupil" metaphor. “Pupil,” like “mouth,” is included in the main vocabulary of Brodsky’s poetry: “and, blinding the pupil on the Fontanka, / I split myself into a hundred” (I: 257).

A variant of the metaphor “bread of exile” is found in the 1964 poem, written on March 25 in the Arkhangelsk transit prison, “Compressing the ration of exile” (I: 319). Both options (“ate the bread of exile”) incorporate the phraseology “bitter bread of exile” and are read as “greedily ate bitter things” in prison, in exile, in exile. The repetition of the motif of exile goes through several stages: from the prophetic “bread of the exile cup” (I: 152) through the experience: “After all, everyone who was in exile yearned” (I: 334) to the defamiliarized one: “by war or the exile of the singer / proving the authenticity of the era” ( I: 372) and universal: “hints dully, centuries later, at / the reason for the exile” (II: 383). The last quote from the 1976 poem "December in Florence" contains allusions to Dante. Less direct references to Dante are also present in “I Entered<…>”, both to the metaphor “bread of exile” and to “abandoned the country that fed me.”

You will give up everything you want
They strived tenderly; this plague to us
The fastest is to apply the bow of exile.

You will know how sad the lips are
Alien piece, how difficult it is in a foreign land
Go down and up the steps.

So, the maximum load of all parts and all formal structures of the poem described above with meaning undoubtedly makes it a masterpiece. The poem is thus conclusive in one more way: all of its main vocabulary consists of words that are found in poems written before 1980. In addition to the verbs included in the poet's active vocabulary, nouns are of great interest. Many of them not only appear with great regularity in poems written before 1980, but are also part of Brodsky’s conceptual metaphors. With almost the same intensity as “life” and “sound”, the sea is also conceptualized: “and the sea is all wrinkles and faces” (II: 264); “The sea, madam, is someone’s speech” (I: 369). Brodsky really lived by the sea “in a damp / city, freezing by the sea” (III: 17) and in the North and South, in the Crimea with the Tomashevskys (“I am writing from the sea”, I: 420; “If you happen to be born in the Empire, / it’s better to live in a remote province by the sea”, II: 285), but he does not “domesticate” the sea, but “develops” it into a concept, brings it, like water in general, closer to the main themes of his poetry - the themes of space and time. If behind the word “city,” a character in many of Brodsky’s poems, Leningrad, London, Venice, and Rome can be hidden, then the metonymy “country” usually replaces Russia: from the prophetic words of the early poems: “At every outskirts of this country, / on every step, at every wall, / in the near future, brunette or blond, / my spirit will appear, one in two faces” (I: 190) - to the sarcastic: “Country, era - spit and rub” (II: 43); and after emigration, accompanied by the epithet “big”. “Only the thought of myself and big country/ you are thrown in the night from wall to wall” (II: 364); “I was born in a big country” (II: 447). Even such non-poetic lexemes as “eat” (I: 361), “howl” (“I would weave my voice into the general animal howl,” II: 394, and also I: 237, 250, 265, 280), “screams "("screams of seagulls", I: 101, and "cry of despair", 292), "threshing floor" (I: 344, 442, II: 17), "convoy" (1:344, 11:191, 325), have their own doublets. Close in semantics to the metaphor “there was a rip” is found in the poem “Letter in a Bottle”: “I swam honestly, but I hit a reef, / and it tore my side right through” (I: 363) and in “New Stanzas for Augusta”: “ Only the heart will suddenly beat, finding / that I’ve been screwed somewhere” (II: 387). In other cases, we find almost complete lexical and semantic coincidence of individual words and expressions of this poem with the vocabulary of previous texts: “from a wild beast” (II: 230), “a cage for a lion family” (II: 56), “a nightingale escaped from a cage and flew away” (II: 426), “the judges / extend the sentence” (II: 290), “and her son is in the barracks” (II: 181), “it’s better to live<…>by the sea" (II: 265), "the devil knows what" (II: 177), "the devil knows where" (II: 424), "looks from a height / boundless" (I: 444), "and we began to drown" (II: 388), “I abandoned the North and fled to the South” (II: 228), “the pavement that fed us” (II: 351), “comes into fashion over the years” (II: 328), “disgustingly , drink to madness" (I: 123), "and the heart is pounding! / Descends to a whisper” (I: 190), “let’s switch to a whisper” (II: 53), “bark forty times on her birthday” (II: 444), “What can I say about her?” (I: 57), “the road turned out to be too long” (II: 301), “I feel guilty” (II: 265).

One of the most important features of Brodsky's poetics is the impudence in the use of vocabulary, which manifests itself in a discriminated vocabulary. According to Y. Gordin, “once again in Russian culture, in the Russian language, the poet combined a lot. He simply implemented the same principle that both Pushkin and Pasternak used - the introduction of new layers at a new level." The poem brings together layers of vocabulary that are far apart from each other - the camp dictionary ( barracks, convoy), prison slang ( clique), pathos ( gratitude and solidarity), common expressions ( wandered around, again, ate), dialects (the feminine gender in the word “tolya” is non-normative) and high style ( looked at, nursed). In it, Brodsky continues his great work - by assimilating and appropriating the “other” speech, he melts down and clears the entire “connection” of slag (after all, this is the language the country spoke). Finding himself to be dependent on history, as well as not considering himself indebted to society, but “using the language of society, creating in its language, especially creating well, the poet seems to take a step towards society.” The poet, whose lot was truly Pushkin's task - to open the doors of poetry to all aspects of the living Russian language, including obscenities and prison slang, including the whole "sovyaz", finds himself expelled from the living language. This fact often drove him crazy and plunged him into despair deeper than “homesickness,” as those who never left their homeland understand it. But even finding himself outside the physical boundaries of his native language and Russian culture, Brodsky continued to serve “native speech, literature” (II: 292), and honored the democracy of language.

In conclusion, it should be noted that this poem is not the only one written by Brodsky on his birthday. The first poem, “Robin” (I: 322), is dated May 24, 1964, when Brodsky was already convicted and exiled to the North. Identifying himself with a small songbird, a robin, Brodsky, using traditional poetic vocabulary, states the fact of captivity without any effect or strain. The second, entitled with the date and place of writing “24.5.65, KPZ” (I: 423), marks an important milestone in his life - his twenty-fifth birthday. Like the poem for the 40th anniversary, it is characterized by a lexical scale - from prison vocabulary ( camera, top, duty officer, barbed wire, sentry) mixed with slang ( garbage- policeman) and obscenities ( huyarit), diluted colloquial dictionary ( slurps, spits, looms, toilet) to pathos ( Phoebus And Apollo). In this sense, it serves as a prototype for the 1980 poem. The same derogatory self-portrait (“And I seem to myself like a trash can, / where fate rakes up the garbage, / where every garbage is spit”; “Barbed Wire Lyre”) and the sublime conclusion (“And the sentry against the sky / completely resembles Phoebus. / Where he wandered you, Apollo!”), as in the poem “I entered<…>».

It is noteworthy that in all three poems for his birthday, Brodsky deviates from the classical tradition, in which it is customary to refer to the place and time of birth and give his name. Suffice it to recall the tenth elegy from Ovid's Tristia, the first autobiography in verse. For Brodsky, life begins with arrest and imprisonment (“a term” is what time in prison turns into), and instead of a name we are offered the slang “klikukha” (what a name turns into in captivity). The word “klikukha”, being formed from “nickname”, phonetically refers us to the verb “klikukha”, i.e. “to prophesy”, which immediately refers us to Pushkin’s “Prophet”. Brodsky has something more important in common with both Ovid and Pushkin - faith in his gift, in the power of the poetic word:

Listen, squad, enemies and brothers!
Everything that I did, I did not do for the sake of
fame in the era of cinema and radio,
but for the sake of native speech, literature.
(II: 292)

We read about this from Ovid: “Only my gift is inseparable from me, and with it I am comforted, / In this Caesar has no rights over me” (“ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: / Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil” ( Tr. Ill, vii. 47–48). And Brodsky believed that “exile does not impair the quality of the writing.” Pushkin’s “Monument” is about this: “And I will be glorious , as long as in the sublunary world / at least one piit will live.”

The fate and creativity of Ovid, Dante, Pushkin, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova are the cultural background of this poem. But first of all, the fate of the poet himself, no less than the enormous cultural background of the poem, brings it closer to the genre of the monument. Moreover, these two aspects are closely intertwined. Thus, the line “sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt”, with all its autobiographical nature, takes the poem beyond a purely biographical plane, making it popular through the common people. This generally strange detail for the poet - the rye was sowed and the wings of the threshing floor - recalls the lines of Akhmatova: “I was then with my people, / Where my people, unfortunately, were.” In such poems, the presence of the personal pronoun “I” is overcome by an incredible surge of spirit and transfers the entire poem into the category of “biography of a generation.” Unlike other classic poems of the “monument” genre, Brodsky does not list his great deeds, but, on the contrary, emphasizes that he shared the fate of millions of other fellow citizens. He thanks fate for the authenticity of this life, even in the version of “term” and “cliqué”, because violence against fate (prison, exile, exile) has no power over it. At the same time, he is aware that at critical moments of his life he controlled his own destiny and he has no one to complain about. And this sobriety, as well as the desire to avoid melodrama, and the humility acquired in the fight against pride, as well as the Christian ability to forgive, are manifested in this poem in ethical restraint, such a characteristic stylistic feature of all of Brodsky’s poetry. The last poet of high style writes a kind of memorial poem for his birthday: in the two-thousand-year confrontation “poet and emperor” (in the Soviet version: “poet and tyrant”) the poet wins as the voice of language - in other words, the “empire” of language wins. Thus, thanks to the coincidence of the biographical and poetic plans, Brodsky conceptualizes his life, building his legend. This legend is gaining more and more credibility.

Notes:

See: Polukhina V. A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 72, 126, 209.

Echo. 1978. No. 3. P. 26–41. Rec.: Sergeev M. Periodicals // Russian Thought. 1978. December 21. No. 3235.S. 10.

Interview with Joseph Brodsky by Sven Birkerts // Star. 1997. No. 1. P. 90.

Brodsky I. Big book of interviews. P. 19.

Ariev A. On the other side of love // ​​Russian Courier. 1993. No. 1. P. 10.

“To nie wzi^lo z powietrza.” About Josifie Brodskim z Zoflq. Ratajczakow^ rozmawia Jerzy Illg // Reszty nie trzeba. Rozmowy z Josifem Brodskim. Zebral i opracowal Jerzy Illg. Katowice, 1993. S. 20.

See Christopher Reid's review of Brodsky's third English collection, That Urania: Great American Disaster. London Review of Books. Vol. 10. No. 22. 1988. 8 December. pp. 17–18, and Craig Raine's article: A Reputation Subject to Inflation. Financial Times Weekends. 1998. November 16/17. P. XIX.

On this topic, see the chapter “Poetry as a system of conflicts” in the book: Etkind E.G. Matter of verse. Paris: Institut D'etudes Slaves, 1978. P. 84-184.

According to the poet Elena Fanailova from Voronezh, in her generation (30-40-year-old provincial intellectuals) “every fourth line of this poem is dissected into quotes that have become proverbs: “I dined with the devil knows who in a tailcoat,” “from those who forgot me you can make a city “,” “I put it on myself, which is becoming fashionable again,” “I didn’t drink only dry water”” (From a letter to the author of the article dated April 8, 1997).

In a telephone conversation in the late 70s, in response to my question whether it was true that he cleansed his poems of metaphors, Brodsky replied: “Not only from metaphors, but from all tropes in general.”

On the interaction of grammar and semantics of tropes, see: Polukhina V., Pyarli Y. Brodsky’s Dictionary of Tropes. Tartu, 1995.

This trope of Brodsky evokes Mayakovsky’s famous propaganda (“Don’t drink raw water. / Drink only boiled water”) and contains a certain warning, a hint of mortal danger, of another, inverted world - the world of the dead. According to Professor L. Zubova, the expression “dry water” as a paradox of language is associated both with the polysemy of the word “damp” and with the opposition of “living” and “dead” water in fairy tales. The link to “dry water” can be “dry alcohol” and “dry wine”.

All information about the frequency of Brodsky’s dictionary is taken from the “Concordance of Brodsky’s Poetic Language” in 2 volumes, compiled by prof. McGill University (McGill, Canada) by Tatiana Patera (unpublished).

I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to her for providing me with the complete manuscript of the Concordance.

Sergei Maksudov (A. Babenyshev) in his memoirs about his meetings with Brodsky writes: “From the stories I remember his horror at the locked and deformed space of the psychiatric hospital, the horror of powerlessness in the face of the arbitrariness of doctors and orderlies. It was calmer in prison, only the monotonous notes on the walls of your predecessors created a gloomy historical perspective. Brodsky also scratched his initials somewhere in the corner above the bunk” (Memoirs // New Literary Review. 2000. No. 45. P. 204).

See, for example, the statements of Anatoly Naiman: “The poems of 1962, when he was 22 years old, are wonderful poems. I think that by 1965, in general, he had written everything. If he had disappeared then, died or something else, stopped writing, we would still have Brodsky” (Naiman A. A clot of linguistic energy // Polukhina V. Brodsky through the eyes of contemporaries: Collection of interviews. St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 1997. P. 47).

Friend of Brodsky G.I. Ginzburg-Voskov, to whom the 1961 poem “In a Letter to the South” (I: 84–85) is dedicated, went with Brodsky to the Tien Shan mountains, told me how Brodsky actually drowned, even twice in one summer in his presence , once crossing a mountain river, the second - trying to pass under a rock that was in the water. Both times this youthful heroism could not have been shown (From telephone conversation, March 1997).

This dominant intonation of the poem contrasts with the tone of the poems of Brodsky's two great predecessors, Ovid and Pushkin, who otherwise served as archetypes of exile for him. Wed. from Ovid: “Why do you visit the exile again in the years of misfortune” (“dure, quid ad miseros veniebas exulis annos”). - Ovid. Sorrowful elegies. Letters from Pontus. Per. S. Shervinsky (M.: Nauka, 1978. P. 51, III, XIII). Pushkin also complains about fate in the poem “A gift in vain, a gift fortuitous...”, dated his birthday: May 26, 1828 (Pushkin A.S. Collected Works: In 10 volumes. M., 1974. T. 2. S. 139; see also stanza XLIV of the 6th chapter of “Eugene Onegin”).

At the end of April - at the beginning of May, after one of his poetry seminars at the University of Michigan, which I attended that year, Brodsky remarked casually: “It smells like a Nobel Prize.”

According to Fazil Iskander, “grief was the main theme of his poetry” (Evening in memory of I. Brodsky // Attic. 1996. No. 1. P. 70). It is curious that the noun “grief” appears in Brodsky’s dictionary 26 times, the adjective “sorrowful” - 8 times, and the verb “grief” also 8 times. See: “Concordance of Brodsky’s Poetry,” compiled by Tatiana Patera.

They are pushing back, but not crowding out, as evidenced by the title of the latest English collection of essays, “On Grief and Reason” (NY: FSG, 1995) - “On Grief and Reason.” Over the years, Brodsky's archetypal personification of grief becomes a symbol of time itself. Olga Sedakova believes that Brodsky taught us a lesson in stoicism: “We can say that in general Brodsky’s statement is an “instruction on courage”: about what is required to endure the unbearable with dignity. Behind his detached tone one can hear an unresolved and insurmountable grief, a “howl” that he does not allow himself” (Sedakova O.<Воля к форме>// New Literary Review. 2000. No. 45. P. 235).

The difference in grammatical gender played perhaps not the least role in this replacement: the bird is feminine, the beast is masculine. The metaphor of the beast refers us to Mandelstam’s poems: “My age, my beast, who will be able to look into your pupils / And with his blood glue / the vertebrae of two centuries?” (Mandelshtam O. Works: In 2 vols. M.: Khudozh. Lit., 1990. T. 1.S. 145–146) and hints at high mission poet. Let us remember that in Brodsky’s poetic philosophy, the poet is the voice of language, and therefore the voice of his time.

“Nursed” is a word from the vocabulary of Soviet officialdom, the language of defamation of “parasites” and “drones”. This “nursing” was reproached, for example, by Pasternak and others, which is parodied by D.A. Prigov: “The country ruined a whole chicken on me.”

Brodsky I. “I belong to Russian culture”: Interview with Dusan Velichkovic // Brodsky I. Big book of interviews / Comp. V. Polukhina. M.: Zakharov, 2000. P. 441.

Vladimir Uflyand speaks about this: “...he is one of the freest people.<…>In such unfree times, when practically no one managed to maintain internal independence, he preserved it” (Polukhina V. Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries. P. 146).

From a conversation between Amanda Aizpuriete and Joseph Brodsky (I. Brodsky. The Big Book of Interviews. P. 477).

Brodsky J. Less Than One. London: Penguin, 1986. pp. 314–315.

“Three remarks about rhyme. First of all, the poet strives to ensure that what he says is remembered. Rhyme, among other things, is a wonderful mnemonic device; it gives your statement an air of inevitability. The most interesting thing is that rhyme reveals dependencies within the language. It connects previously unconnected objects” (From Brodsky’s speech in the discussion. - Poets" Round Table: A Common Language // PN Review. 1988. Vol. 15. No. 4. P. 43 (original text - in English . language).

Wed. from Akhmatova in “Requiem”: “I will be like the Streltsy wives, / Howling under the Kremlin windows” (Akhmatova A. Works. Munich: Inter-Language Literary Associates. 1967. T. 1. P. 363).

The ambiguity of the word “besides” in this context can also mean an absolute ban on howling as unmasculine behavior. Polysemy reveals what Brodsky does not want to let into consciousness.

Professor Lev Losev tells me that from childhood he remembers a song about a bandit who “wears tailcoats, lives in a barracks and loves fights when he’s angry.” Perhaps Brodsky also remembered her. However, there could be a biographical fact behind this line: Veronica Schiltz told Losev that in the 70s Brodsky was invited to a film festival, where he had to appear in a tailcoat. The syntactic ambiguity of the phrase “he dined with God knows who in a tailcoat” allows for the interpretation that there could be both a lyrical subject and a companion in a tailcoat. This uncertainty is explicated by the words “the devil knows who.” It is possible that here there is a motif of the double, so characteristic of Brodsky: for Brodsky’s “I” the tailcoat is markedly alien clothing, a kind of pseudo-“I”. See the author’s work “Metamorphoses of the “I” in the poetry of postmodernism: doubles in Brodsky’s poetic world.” - Modernism and postmodernism in Russian literature and culture. Helsinki: Slavica Helsingiensa, 1996. Vol. 16. P. 391–407.

On the conceptual function of reification in Brodsky's tropes, see the work of the author of this article, “Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time” (CUP, 1989), “Similarity in Disparity” in: Brodsky's Poetics and Aesthetics / Ed. by L. Loseff and V. Polukhina. Macmillan Press, 1992, and work: Polukhina V., Pyarli Y. Dictionary of Brodsky's tropes.

Sedakova O. Rare independence // Polukhina V. Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries. P. 222.

Brodsky, who knew all Russian rhymes by heart, quite deliberately repeats here Khlebnikov’s well-known rhyme from the poem “Moscow Rattlemug”: “City / Rasporot.” See his “Creations” (M.: Sov. writer, 1986. P. 122). With even greater probability, according to Denis Akhapkin, this rhyme can go back to “The Rainy Trefoil” by I. Annensky, since we are talking about St. Petersburg / Leningrad: “Here is a gray cover and a rut, - / It’s not all about hanging idle, / and with clanging into the asphalt city / A cold net lashed out...” (Annensky I. Poems and Tragedies. L.: Sov. writer (Big series “Bib-ki of the poet”), 1990. P. 109). I thank Denis Akhapkin for carefully reading the English version of this article.

And indeed, at the end of 1985, Brodsky underwent another heart operation.

For the first time, the function of verb forms in this poem was drawn to the attention of Prof. Gerald Smith in his lecture “Brodsky as Self-Translator: The 40lh Birthday Poem” (1987 or 1988). I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to prof. Smith for sending me notes of his lecture.

Pascal V. Pensees. Bibliotheque de Clunes. 1948. II. P. 825.

From comments by Douglas Dunn at his poetry evening at Keele University, February 28, 1997.

When asked by a journalist what faith he adheres to, Brodsky replied that “he would call himself a Calvinist. In the sense that you are your own judge and you judge yourself more harshly than the Almighty. You will not show yourself mercy and forgiveness. You are your own last, often quite terrible judgment” (From Brodsky’s interview with Dmitry Radyshevsky // Brodsky I. Big book of interviews. P. 668). Brodsky also called Tsvetaeva a Calvinist, whose echo is heard in this line: “Scanning the area with an eagle” (“Poem of the End”): “A Calvinist is<…>a person who constantly creates a certain variant on himself Last Judgment- as if in the absence (or without waiting) of the Almighty” (Brodsky about Tsvetaeva. M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 1997. P. 24).

Correlating “glacier” with “burned out”, we get the primary antithesis - ice and fire as a kind of parallel to the coldness of the position and the hotness of the poet’s temperament.

Gratitude as a cross-cutting motif sounds in unfinished passages of unpublished early poems: “The day of the song of thanks has come” - “I thank the great Creator... I thank you for my brave father... I thank my own mother.” Materials from the archive of the author of this article. This motif is present in the XII “Roman Elegy” (III: 48) and “On the Centenary of Anna Akhmatova” (III: 178). Submitted by Concordance. T. Patera, the word forms “gratitude” are found in Brodsky 28 times, and “thank you” - 19.

Heine G. Poems. Poems. Prose. M.: Artist. lit., 1971. pp. 330–331.

Mandelstam O. Works: In 2 vols. T. 1. P. 308–309.

Akhmatova A. Works. Munich: Inter-Language Literary Associates. 1968. T. 2. P. 124

In Helsinki in the fall of 1995, in response to questions from the audience, Brodsky said: “The main lesson that I took from meeting Akhmatova as a person and as a poet is the lesson of restraint - restraint in relation to everything that happens to you - as pleasant , and unpleasant. I learned this lesson, I think, for the rest of my life. In this sense, I am truly her student. In all the others I would not say this; but in this respect - and it is decisive - I am a completely worthy student of hers” (I. Brodsky. Big book of interviews. P. 670). See also: Brodsky about Akhmatova: Dialogues with Volkov. M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1992: and interview with the English writer and translator Akhmatova D.M. Thomas (D.M. Thomas) with Brodsky (Brodsky I. Big book of interviews. P. 173–177).

But it is very easy to underestimate, as Craig Raine clearly did not understand the meaning of the final lines, noting sarcastically: “It is no use pointing out that funerals after death rarely force the undertaker to stuff the deceased’s throat with clay - of any kind. Melodrama is the creation of Brodsky himself" (“it is no use pointing out that burial after death rarely involves the undertaker in the task of cramming clay (of whatever complexion) down the throat of the deceased. The melodrama is entirely of Brodsky"s making" ) (Rain C. A Reputation Subject to Inflation // Financial Times. 1996. 16/17 November. P. XIX).

Tsvetaeva M. Poems and poems. N.Y.: Russica, 1982. T. 2. P. 91.

Right there. T. 3. P. 184. See: Akhapkin D. The cycle “Tombstone” by Marina Tsvetaeva in the Russian poetic context // Marina Tsvetaeva’s Borisoglebe: 6th Tsvetaeva international scientific-thematic conference (October 9-11, 1998): Collection. reports. M., 1999. pp. 255–263.

In unpublished poems we will find another comparison of the lyrical “I” with a wild beast: “where in the twilight, hunted like a beast, / I.” In total, Brodsky has 15 animals and little animals living in his poems. See "Concordance" by T. Pater. In addition to the already quoted Mandelstam, the image of a wild beast is repeatedly found in Ovid in the 8th of the “Sorrowful Elegies”, book V: “Even if a beast of prey could cry for me?” (“nostra, quibus possint inlacidumque ferae”). - Ovid. Sorrowful elegies. Letters from Pontus. P. 78.

This reading is indicated by the metonymy “we will cross with blued steel / cut crystal of Bohemia” from the unfinished poem “For the Sava, Drava and Morava,” written, in all likelihood, on the occasion of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops in 1968.

Wed. from Mandelstam: “I sing when the throat is cheese, the soul is dry” (O. Mandelstam. Works: In 2 vols. T. 1. P. 239).

Replacing the adjective of time “long” with the adjective of space “long” fits into Brodsky’s interpretation of time as space. Following the archetypal model of Pushkin, the age of the Russian poet is shorter than 40 years.

The high frequency of sleep we discovered (1: 71, 78, 98, 179, 365, 401, 417, 419, 427, 428, 441, 445; I: 7, 62, 65, 77, 97, 102–104, 121, 123–125, 138, 161, 204, 238, 246, 298, 301, 307, 309–310, 320, 326, 330, 359, 385, 420, 432, 426, 447, 454; 111:10, 12, 15) is confirmed by the data of T. Patera: in total the verb “sleep” occurs 147 times, 2 times “slept” and “asleep” and 158 times “sleep” and 2 times “drowsy”. The theme of sleep deserves a separate study in the light of the poet’s own statements: “The food of all / dreams is the past” (from unpublished).

This metaphor can also be interpreted as a nod to Stephen Spender, who wrote one of the most laudatory reviews of his first English collection of poems, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1973), Bread of Affliction. - New Statesman 1973. 14 December. P. 915–916): “Brodsky is one of those who tasted extremely bitter bread, and in his poetry you can feel how he chews it. He looks at things from a distinctly Christian point of view, like a man who has greedily swallowed the bread and bitterness of holy communion...” (“Brodsky is someone who has tasted extremely bitter bread and his poetry has the air of being ground out between his teeth. He sees things from a point of view which is ultimately that of Christians who have devoured bread and gall as the sacraments of the Mass...").

Brodsky’s humorous approach to the most serious topics, including exile, should not be overlooked: “I’m so used to you, candle of exile, / you illuminate the corners of consciousness” (from unpublished).

Dante Alighieri. Divine Comedy / Trans. M. Lozinsky. M., 1967. P. 448. Paradise, Song 17: 55–60. Another common vocabulary with Dante’s great poem is also indicative, but not with “Paradise”, but with “Hell”; Wed in Dante: “wild forest” (I: 5), “I entered there” (I: 10), “I turned back, surveying the path” (I: 26), “At the sight of the beast” (I: 43), “Look how this beast oppressed me” (I: 88), “And you will hear cries of frenzy” (I: 115), “Like a beast when it seems to him” (II: 48), “No one has fled faster from grief” (II : 109), “I saved you from the beast” (II: 119), “wild murmur” (III: 25), “And it’s like the depths of the sea howling” (V: 29), “And those in the rain howl like bitches” ( VI: 19), “So the beast collapsed” (VII: 15), “with an eternal cry” (VII: 27), “What I offer I give thanks to the Creator” (VIII: 60), “Through the black air” (IX: 6) , “Both the beast and the shepherd flee from him” (IX: 72), “The sound of your speeches” (X: 28), “It seemed that Hell looked with contempt” (X: 33), “Even though they were expelled” (X: 49) etc. are especially often repeated: beast, cry, howl, city, dream, black, life, lived, looked around, expelled. Such a dense lexical field of references to Dante gives the theme of the poet’s exile a universal character.

I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Professor Tatiana Patera, compiler of the “Concordance of Brodsky’s Poetry,” who confirmed my observations of the frequency of repetition of the vocabulary of this poem in other texts by Brodsky. According to her data, only ten words: klikuhu, half the world, gunna, solidarity, roulette, burned out, dined, razporot, loitered and scored, i.e. less than 10% of the significant vocabulary of this text, are unique to this poem. All frequency dictionary data in the article are given according to its “Concordance”.

Gordin Y. The tragedy of the worldview // Polukhina V. Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries. P. 66.

See Brodsky’s own statements on this topic in an interview with the editor of America magazine (May 1992, No. 426, pp. 35–36). Included in the collection of selected interviews with Brodsky (I. Brodsky. The Big Book of Interviews. P. 616).

In a letter to Ya. Gordin dated June 15, 1965, the author writes: “I spent my birthday in prison: I received seven days for being three days late from Leningrad.” Quote according to Maramzin’s samizdat four-volume book (T. 2. P. 494).

On the theme of exile in Ovid and Brodsky, see: Ichin K. Brodsky and Ovid // New Literary Review. 1996. No. 19. pp. 227–249.

“Dante left Florence and because of this he wrote the Divine Comedy.” Ovid wrote “Sorrowful Elegies”, “Letters from Pontus” and completed “Fasti” in Sarmatia, far from Rome, but this is the best of what was written at that time in Rome itself. And the greatest Russian poet of this century (in my opinion) Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the best things, living outside of Russia for almost 20 years...” (“Dante left Florence, and because of that we have “The Divine Comedy.” Ovid wrote “Tristia,” “ Ex Ponto" and completed "Fasti" in Sarmatia - far from Rome but the work better than anything they were writing in Rome at the time. And the best Russian poet of this century (in my opinion), Marina Tsvetaeva, wrote her finest poems while living for almost twenty years outside Russia..." (Brodsky J. To be continued // PENewsletter. 1980. No. 43 (May). P. 10).

Pushkin A. S. Collected works: In 10 volumes. T. 2. P. 385.

One more subtext can be suggested - “Song about the Captain” (music by Dunaevsky, lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach) from the film “Children of Captain Grant”:

There lived a brave captain
he traveled to many countries,
and more than once he plowed the ocean.
He drowned fifteen times
died among sharks,
but he never even blinked an eye.
Both in trouble and in battle
He sang his song everywhere:
“Captain, captain, smile!
After all, a smile is the flag of a ship.
Captain, captain, pull yourself up!
Only the brave conquer the seas.

This song is prompted to remember not only by the theme of courage, but also by the presence of the verb “drowned” in the poem, as well as the fact that in his own translation into English Brodsky rearranged the words in the phrase “thrice drowned, twice there was a cut” (as “Twice have drowen, trice let knives like my nitty-gritty"), which had no rhythmic or semantic need. I take this opportunity to thank Professor Daniel Weissbort, who drew my attention to this fact of deviation from the original. By the way, Brodsky identified himself with the captain back in 1965 in a “rhyme” quoted by Andrei Sergeev: “I am the captain, whose / frigate, having condemned the foolishness / of the sea, wandered into the stream” (Sergeev A. About Brodsky // Banner. 1997. N9 4. P. 141.

Akhmatova A. Works. T.I.S. 361.

This position of Brodsky was well defined by Olga Sedakova: “The imperative of the “private individual,” which he declared, was the central - civil, ethical, aesthetic, and, ultimately, state - task of the time. This “particularity” of personal existence took on a monumental scale in Brodsky” (Sedakova O.<Воля к форме>// New Literary Review. 2000. No. 45. P. 233).

I would like to thank Elena Fanailova for the valuable comments she made by sending me her E-Mails during my work on the analysis of this poem. My special thanks to Olga Sedakova, Professor Lyudmila Zubova and Professor Tatyana Patera, who critically read the original version of this article.

POETRY I.A. BRODSKY. FEATURES OF THE POET'S ARTISTIC WORLD

A person who is ... dependent on language, I believe, is called a poet.

I.A. Brodsky

What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long. It is only with grief that I feel solidarity. But until my mouth is filled with clay, only gratitude will be heard from it.

I. A. Brodsky

In the work of every poet there is a poem in which his worldview is especially fully expressed. Such a poem in the work of I.A. Brodsky is “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...” written on the poet’s 40th birthday. It became one of his favorites and in many ways the final result for his work. He read it more often than any other at festivals and poetry performances; it was included in anthologies and accompanies magazine interviews with the poet and memories of him.

I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,

burned out his sentence and nickname with a nail in the barracks,

lived by the sea, played roulette,

dined with God knows who in a tailcoat.

From the heights of the glacier I looked around half the world,

He drowned three times and was cut open twice.

I abandoned the country that nurtured me.

Of those who have forgotten me, a city can be formed.

I wandered in the steppes, remembering the cries of the Hun,

put on something that is coming into fashion again,

sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt

and did not drink only dry water.

I let the blued pupil of the convoy into my dreams,

ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts.

Allowed his cords to make all sounds besides howling;

switched to a whisper. Now I'm forty.

What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long.

It is only with grief that I feel solidarity.

But until my mouth is filled with clay,

only gratitude will be heard from it.

Analysis of the poem “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...”.

1. Literary scholars call this poem a “monument poem”; they say that it is final in biographical terms (all the facts listed in it took place in life, there is nothing invented or “romantic”). What facts of life are talked about in the poem? What is the position of the lyrical hero of the poem in relation to life?

The poet, as it were, sorts out his relationship with his fate, recalling all the main events of his life: arrests and prisons (“in a cage,” “burned out... his nickname with a nail in a barracks”), exile to the North, work on the Norensky state farm (“sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black felt"). These were the years when I.A. Brodsky, according to many researchers, has already written several beautiful poems. And even earlier, in the years of his poetic formation, he participated in geological expeditions and hiking trips, traveling throughout most of one-sixth of the world: from the Baltic swamps to the Siberian taiga, from the north of Yakutia to the Tien Shan Mountains, where he actually drowned and wandered on foot across the tundra and “lounged around in the steppes, remembering the cries of the Hun.” The forced departure from the country in 1972 is presented as a voluntary decision, and life in the free world as a test (“I ate the bread of exile without leaving a crust”). Having listed the “necessary percentage of misfortunes” that befell him, the poet, however, does not complain (“I allowed my ligaments all sounds besides howling”), does not blame anyone, on the contrary, he blames himself (“I abandoned the country that fed me.” ).

He does not curse the past, does not idealize it, but thanks it. Whom? Fate? The Almighty? Life? Or all of them together? There was a lot to thank him for in his anniversary year. At the end of 1978, the poet underwent his first open-heart surgery (“there was a rupture”) and spent the entire 1979 slowly recovering (we will not find a single poem marked this year).

In 1980, a third collection of his poems was published in English translation, which received the most flattering reviews, and in the same year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the first time, which he learned about a few weeks before his birthday.

This poem is also conclusive in terms of theme and vocabulary. It contains all the main motives of I.A.’s creativity. Brodsky or their variants: unfreedom, homeland, exile, life, illness, death, time, poetic gift, God and man, poet and society. One of the central themes of I.A.’s poetry also sounds in it. Brodsky - the theme of grief (“Only with grief do I feel solidarity”).

Another theme - the theme of “courage to be” - seems to be the main one for the analyzed poem.

I.A. Brodsky early came to the conclusion that in the 20th century neither despair, nor pain, nor grief are “not a violation of the rules,” but the norm. And in this poem, the desire to “understand that the essence is in your destiny” turns the lyrical “I” into an observer who distantly comments on his life and tries to evaluate what happened to him.

There is, however, some ambiguity in this assessment. On the one hand, the desire to avoid self-dramatization forces the poet to give preference to self-deprecating descriptions of his actions (“there was a massacre,” “lounged around in the steppes,” “ate the bread of exile”). The deliberately emphasized personal ordinariness and even insignificance are reminiscent of the famous lines of A.S. Pushkin: “And among the insignificant children of the world, / perhaps he is the most insignificant of all.” On the other hand, there is sanity, balance, almost philosophical calm: I’ll tell you what happened to me, but all this is not very important, the essence of life is not this, the essence of it is in your attitude to what happened - in stoicism and humility. There is indeed no condemnation or melodrama in the intonation of this poem, but a critical reader

cannot help but notice in the position of self-detachment a certain element of pride: the poet not only accepts everything that happened to him, but also takes upon himself even what others have imposed on him. This gesture of a proud soul is visible already in the very beginning: “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,” and not “I was put in a cage like a wild beast because they considered it dangerous.” And this initial phrase declares a willingness to accept fate as it is. The reluctance to consider himself a victim (a dangerous animal is not a victim) forces I.A. Brodsky abandon the traditional metaphor of unfreedom - “a bird in a cage” - and the traditional symbol of the poet as a bird. An equally complex psychological gesture can be discerned in the phrase: “I abandoned the country that nurtured me,” and not the country that “expelled me.” Behind this simple grammatical transformation of a passive into an active one can see a considerable effort of will, dictated by the ethics of self-condemnation and humility. It is noteworthy that all three negations are endowed with the semantics of the statement: “I didn’t drink only dry water,” i.e. I drank everything; “ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts,” i.e. I ate everything, as they eat in prison or in a camp; “until your mouth is filled with clay,” i.e. while alive. The line “Of those who have forgotten me can be made up of a city” is also ambiguous: the emphasis on “city” emphasizes the confidence that thousands of people knew it, and the emphasis on “of those who have forgotten me” expresses the tragedy of oblivion and complete renunciation of human love. And yet, it was not pride that allowed the poet to rise above grief, but work on himself and his gift.)

2. Being final, this poem focuses not only the main themes, but also the deep foundations of I.A.’s poetics. Brodsky. How the poem confirms the poet’s idea that “... in a poem the number of adjectives should be reduced to a minimum. It must be written in such a way that if someone covers it with a magic tablecloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black: nouns will remain there!”

What are the features of rhyme in the poem by I.A. Brodsky? There are only five adjectives in the poem ( wild, black, blued, dry, long) and two participles (those who have forgotten and those who remember), the main vocabulary is given to nouns. There is only one adjective in the rhyme position (long) and one verb rhymed with a noun (fed/half the world). Rhymes I.A. Brodsky mutually enrich each other with meaning based on similar or contrasting semantics: “a cage - a roulette”, “in a barracks - in a tailcoat”, etc. Only a person who entered a cage instead of a wild animal, lived in a barracks, covered a threshing floor and let the pupil of a convoy into his dreams, and then predicted a Nobel Prize for himself (for how else to interpret “dined with God knows who in a tailcoat”), is able to rhyme “in barracks" and "in a tailcoat". The hidden meanings of the rhymes are also indicated by their sound design: the rhyme “howl/convoy” is surrounded by three more stressed “o”s, which perform an echo effect, and the stressed “u” in “gunna/threshing floor” is echoed in the unstressed “u” in the rhyme “modu/vodu” " The appearance of the short participle “rasporot” as a rhyme is also significant. You can rip a bag, clothes, a thing, but not a person. Hinting at two serious surgical interventions, the poet chooses the pathos-free, deliberately self-deprecating trope of “dissection” to remind himself and the reader about the constant vector of human destiny, about what time does to us, transforming our body into a thing, and ourselves into a part speech, into numbers, into signs in general. With this thought about the death of I.A. Brodsky lived all his life. The rhyme “razorot/city” seems to combine physical pain with emotional pain.

The rhyme “korok/forty” is connected with the sacred semantics of the number: the soul is still here for 40 days, and then it passes on to another world. Under the pen of I.A. Brodsky’s rhyme “long/clay” also becomes a trope: clay as the fundamental principle of life (the material of the Creator) is presented in the text as the final substance of death.)

3. What is the role of verbs in a poem?

The verbs are located on the left side of the poem, and it is they who compose the plot outline, naming the most important events in the poet’s life. Verbs of the perfect and imperfect form are used - “entered”, “burned out”, “lived”, “dined”, “drowned”, they indicate the repetition of what is happening to the poet. Then the perfective verb “threw” appears, indicating a single fateful action. It is noteworthy that this phrase not only begins, but also ends with a perfective verb, as if emphasizing the equality and balance of semantic load between the beginning and the end and all other phrases: “he abandoned the country that nurtured me.” This is followed by a series of imperfective verbs, interrupted by the verb “let in,” signaling that the action is final and irrevocable, its consequences cannot be gotten rid of even in a dream.)

4. It is known that reminiscences and allusions are one of the characteristic features of I.A.’s poetry. Brodsky. Examples of their use in this poem: the verb “burned out” as an act of writing with fire refers to Pushkin’s “Prophet” (“With the verb, burn the hearts of people”); in “lived by the sea” one can also hear Pushkin’s motifs: “There lived an old man with an old woman / by the very blue sea”; “played roulette” refers us to the theme of players, fatalists A.S. Pushkin and F.M. Dostoevsky; “sowed rye,” in addition to the biblical prophets, refers to N.A. Nekrasov (“Sow the reasonable, the good, the eternal”). The line “until my mouth is filled with clay”, i.e. “until I die”, establishes connections with several poets: it can be read as a roll call with O.E. Mandelstam: “Yes, I am lying in the ground, moving my lips, / And what I say, every schoolchild will memorize,” and after the last line: “As long as the last slave on earth is alive” - and with “Monument” by A.S. Pushkin. Of course, the line “until my mouth was filled with clay” refers us to “Poem without a Hero” by A.A. Akhmatova: “...like the mouth of a tragic mask, / But it is smeared with black paint / And filled with dry earth.” Considering that I.A. Brodsky repeatedly said that it was A.A. Akhmatova set him on the right path, it was from her that he learned humility and the ability to forgive both individuals and the state, this reference cannot be overestimated. You can also hear Tsvetaev’s “Lament of Yaroslavna” (“Shut your mouth with turf and clay”) and “Tombstone” (“Before your mouth is dry - / Gods save! God save!”) can also be heard here.

This poem is not the only one written by I.A. Brodsky on his birthday. Poem written on May 24, 1964 "Robin", as well as a poem entitled "24.5.65, bullpen" with the date and place of writing.

ROBIN

You will fly out, little robin, from three raspberry fields, remembering in captivity how at dusk a fleecy lupine field invades the peas. Through the closed willow mustache there! - where, freezing for a moment, countless drops of dew run down the pods from the collision.

The raspberry bush will perk up, but the guess is left as a guarantee that perhaps the hunter setting the snare is crunching the dead wood carelessly. In reality, only a ribbon of path twists and turns white in the darkness. Neither murmuring nor shooting is heard, neither Sagittarius nor Aquarius is visible.

Only night, under an inverted wing, runs through the overturned bushes, persistent, like the memory of the past - silent, but still living.

May 1964

It is noteworthy that in all three poems by I.A. Brodsky departs from the classical tradition, in which it is customary to refer to the place and time of birth and give his name. At I.A. Brodsky’s life begins with arrest and imprisonment, and instead of a name we are offered the slang “click” (what a name turns into in prison). At the same time, this word phonetically refers us to the verb “cry”, i.e. “to prophesy”, and it, in turn, to the “Prophet” A.S. Pushkin. Faith in the prophetic gift, through the power of the poetic word, makes I.A. Brodsky with A.S. Pushkin.

During the years of poetic formation I.A. Brodsky wrote a poem "Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...". People close to the poet believed that this was the reason for the beginning of the persecution, although there were no political motives in his poems (including this one).

Jewish cemetery near Leningrad.

A crooked fence made of rotten plywood.

Behind a crooked fence they lie side by side

lawyers, traders, musicians, revolutionaries.

They sang for themselves.

They saved for themselves.

For others they died.

But first they paid taxes,

respected the bailiff

and in this world, hopelessly material,

interpreted the Talmud,

remaining idealists.

Maybe we saw more.

Or perhaps they believed blindly.

But they taught the children to be tolerant

and became persistent.

And they did not sow grain.

They never sowed grain.

They just went to bed themselves

into the cold earth like grains.

And they fell asleep forever.

And then they were covered with earth,

lit candles,

and on Memorial Day

suffocating from the cold,

shouted for calm.

And they found it.

In the form of matter decay.

Not remembering anything.

Without forgetting anything.

Behind a crooked fence made of rotten plywood,

four kilometers from the tram ring.

What do you think the authorities might not like about this poem?

By the mid-60s, in the works of I.A. Brodsky, changes are taking place. A different poetics is emerging: reflections appear that are not alien to irony and self-irony, the tonality of the word changes, poetic speech approaches everyday speech in terms of vocabulary and syntax. The romantic mood gives way to the tragedy of life.

All these changes are due to the fact that from the spring of 1964 to the autumn of 1965 the poet was in exile.

WINTER EVENING IN YALTA

A dry Levantine face hidden with pockmarks in sideburns. When he looks for a cigarette in the pack, the dim ring on the nameless one suddenly refracts two hundred watts, and my lens cannot stand the flash: I squint; and then he says, swallowing smoke as he does so, “guilty.”

January in Crimea. Winter comes to the Black Sea coast as if for fun. The snow is unable to hold onto the blades and tips of the agave. Restaurants are empty. Dirty ichthyosaurs smoke in the roadstead. And the aroma of rotten leaves can be heard. “Should I pour you this abomination?” "Pour it in."

So - smile, twilight, decanter. In the distance, the barman, clasping his hands, circles like a young dolphin around a anchovy-filled felucca. Window square. In pots - wallflower. Snowflakes rushing past... Stop, just a moment! You are not as beautiful as you are unique.

January 1969

Let us pay attention to the transfers in this poem by I.A. Brodsky, which create the illusion of colloquial speech, the use of isolated circumstances and definitions, and the reminiscence of the last lines.

While two books of poems by I.A. were published in the USA. Brodsky, only four poems were published in the USSR. This is one of the reasons for the forced emigration of the poet, who never returned to his homeland, although he dreamed of it.

STANCES

E.V.. A.D.

I don’t want to choose either a country or a graveyard. On Vasilyevsky Island I'm coming to die. I won’t find your dark blue façade in the dark; I’ll fall between the faded lines onto the asphalt.

And my soul, tirelessly hastening into the darkness, will flash over the bridges in the Petrograd smoke, and the April drizzle, snow at the back of my head, and I will hear a voice:

Goodbye, my friend.

And I will see two lives far across the river, pressing my cheek to the indifferent fatherland,

Like girls-sisters
from unlived years,
running out onto the island,
they wave after the boy.

From the creativity of the 70s, let's get acquainted with the poem "To the death of Zhukov."

TO THE DEATH OF ZHUKOV

I see columns of frozen grandchildren, a coffin on a carriage, horses' croup. The wind here does not bring me the sounds of Russian military wailing trumpets. I see a corpse dressed in regalia: the fiery Zhukov is leaving for death.

A warrior before whom many walls fell, even though the sword was as blunt as the enemy’s, the brilliance of his maneuver was reminiscent of Hannibal among the Volga steppes. He ended his days deafly, in disgrace, like Belisarius or Pompey.

How much soldier's blood he shed in a foreign land! Well, were you grieving? Did he remember them, dying in a civilian white bed? Complete failure. What will he answer when he meets them in the hellish region? "I fought."

Zhukov will no longer apply his right hand to a just cause in battle. Sleep! Russian history has enough pages for those who, in infantry formation, boldly entered foreign capitals, but returned in fear to their own.

Marshal! The greedy Lethe will swallow up these words and your ashes. Still, accept them - a pathetic contribution to the one who saved the homeland, speaking out loud. Beat, drum, and, military flute, whistle loudly in the manner of a bullfinch.

The poems entitled “To Death...” occupy a special and extremely important place in the heritage of I.A. Brodsky. The theme of crossing borders, state and other, is one of the main ones in his work. Moreover, it seems that death itself, and not the one who died, occupies him more. The insignificance of the deceased (“In Memory of N.N.”, “On the Death of a Friend”) emphasizes the significance of death itself.

Analyzing the poem by M.I. Tsvetaeva “New Year’s Eve”, I.A. Brodsky wrote: “Every poem “To Death...” serves for the author not only as a means of expressing his feelings in connection with loss, but also as a reason for more general reasoning about the phenomenon of death as such. Mourning the loss... the author often mourns... himself, for tragic intonation is always autobiographical.”

“On the Death of Zhukov”, both thematically and stylistically, stands out from the general range of poems of this kind. It is about the death of a person, I.A. Brodsky is not close. In 1974, when Zhukov died and when the poem was written, the poet was already living in exile and could not see the funeral. The poem begins with the word “I see,” repeated anaphorically in the first stanza.

Mikhail Lotman, in an article about the poem “On the Death of Zhukov,” writes: “The present absence of the author is by no means the only discrepancy in the text. It is completely riddled with inconsistencies and inconsistencies, starting with syntactic and stylistic ones and ending with the fact that, despite the fact that there are much more names and surnames than is usually the case with I. Brodsky, the character whose absent presence plays... an extremely important role in semantic structure of the text turns out to be unnamed at all. We are talking about Suvorov."

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Matyukhina N.V.,

teacher of Russian language

and literature.

ANALYSIS OF JOSEPH BRODSKY'S POEM

“I ENTERED A CAGE INSTEAD OF A WILD BEAST”

I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,

burned out his sentence and nickname with a nail in the barracks,

lived by the sea, played roulette.

dined with God knows who in a tailcoat.

From the heights of the glacier I looked around half the world,

He drowned three times and was cut open twice.

I abandoned the country that nurtured me.

Of those who have forgotten me, a city can be formed.

I wandered in the steppes remembering the cries of the Hun,

put on something that is coming into fashion again,

sowed rye, covered only the threshing floor with black

and did not drink only dry water.

I let the blued pupil of the convoy into my dreams,

ate the bread of exile, leaving no crusts.

Allowed his cords to make all sounds besides howling;

He switched to a whisper. Now I'm forty.

What can I tell you about life? Which turned out to be long.

It is only with grief that I feel solidarity.

only gratitude will be heard from it.

Concluding his Nobel speech, Joseph Brodsky described versification as a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as one becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet."

The fate of the Russian poet became the theme of the poem “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,” written by the poet on his fortieth birthday, May 24, 1980. The main idea of ​​the work is the tragic fate of the poet. Brodsky metaphorically transforms the memories of his own life, intertwining it with the destinies of other word artists.

The very first line states the motive of lack of freedom. “I entered a cage instead of a wild beast...” The association is obvious: a wild animal, like a creator, needs freedom - but there are always forces that want to take away this freedom. The word cell receives an expanded meaning in the text: prison, cell, prison, unfreedom in general. The second stanza includes the fates of many, many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia who became victims of Stalin’s repressions: instead of a name they had “clicks”, instead of life - “sentence”.

In the poem there is an associative connection between the image of the lyrical hero and the image of F.M. Dostoevsky: it was in the life of this writer that roulette and the whole range of experiences associated with it played a big role. At the same time, roulette is a kind of challenge to fate, a game of chance, an attempt to win is usually unsuccessful. “The devil knows who’s in a tailcoat” is a representative of the world of the “well-fed” with whom the lyrical hero is forced to communicate.

The time of this poem is forty years of life and at the same time all eternity. The space of the work is very large: “From the height of the glacier I looked around half the world.” The fate of the creator is tragic, so the theme of death arises in the poem: “I drowned three times, I was cut to pieces twice.”

The poem reflects the multifaceted and complex life experience of the hero: “lounged in the steppes”, “sowed rye”... Particularly interesting is the oxymoron “dry water”, which means that the hero drank everything because he was in a variety of life situations.

Further, the motive of lack of freedom intensifies: the hero dreams of “the blued pupil of a convoy.” This is a reflection of the conflict between the true creator and the authorities, which not only seeks to constantly monitor the hero, but to deprive him of his freedom. In this regard, the fate of the lyrical hero is only part of the long-suffering and tragic fate Russian poet.

The associative connection between the fate of the lyrical hero and the fates of other Russian poets is obvious: Mandelstam (motive of lack of freedom), Akhmatova (conflict with the authorities), Tsvetaeva (motive of emigration, exile). Thus, Brodsky’s work is included in the integral literary process.

The lyrical hero “did not allow himself to howl.” Why? The fact is that a person howls when he feels mortal melancholy or extreme despair. This means that Brodsky’s hero did not despair and retained his thirst for existence. Brodsky goes on to say that he “switched to a whisper.” This is a manifestation of the wisdom that comes with age: a whisper is heard better because one listens more attentively. In addition, this reflects the life position of Brodsky himself: non-participation in political and active public life. Brodsky professed this philosophy, trying to penetrate deeper into higher categories existence, to understand the meaning of life (“Letters to a Roman Friend”).

Life seems long to the hero, because time flies quickly only in happy life. This is confirmed in the text: “Only with grief do I feel solidarity.” But the lyrical hero accepts life as it is:

But until my mouth is filled with clay,

Only gratitude will be heard from it.