Brodsky’s Bilingualism: Practice and Prehistory

Jon Kyst, University of Copenhagen

Abstract

The dissertation examines the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky in his poetry, essays and interviews, searching for answers to the question “Why did Brodsky become a bilingual writer?”

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940, became world famous after his 1964 trial and emigrated to the US in 1972. Here, Brodsky wrote an increasing number of poems as well as essays in English, translated his own Russian verse into English and assisted native English speaking translators in their efforts to translate his poems. Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and died in New York City in 1996, just a few weeks before his last collection of poems was published, containing only poems originally written in English, and self-translations from Brodsky’s Russian originals.

First, a prologue presents the reception of Brodsky’s English poetry and prose in the light of the negative criticism brought forward by Craig Raine and disputed by Valentina Polukhina.

The introduction presents the dissertation’s structure, its aims and obstacles, and provides an introduction to earlier published studies of Brodsky’s oeuvre. Here, archive findings of texts written by Brodsky in English prior to his emigration are also presented.

Part I, entitled “Synchronicity: Approaches to Brodsky as a Bilingual Writer”, aims at defining the distinctive features of Brodsky’s bilingualism. After an analysis of Brodsky’s own treatise on the topic, his famous essay on W. H. Auden, Part I examines possible sociolinguistic approaches alongside a discussion of the applicability of Elizabeth Beaujour’s findings and approaches in her monograph on First Wave Russian emigrant writers. After a comparison with Nabokov’s and Beckett’s bilingualism and an analysis of Brodsky’s self-translation practice, applying previous Brodsky-scholarship by Akhapkin, Loseff and Scherr, as well as translation theory by Jakobson and Benjamin, Part I concludes that Brodsky’s bilingualism is of such an idiosyncratic and thus creative nature that applying sociolinguistic approaches, or the neurolinguistic approach to which Beaujour subscribes, becomes impossible. Part I then turns to Harold Bloom’s concept of “anxiety of influence”, and to Peter Sacks’ “The English Elegy”, concluding that Brodsky’s bilingualism is closely related to the practice of writing elegies.

Part II, entitled “Diachronicity: 1963”, examines Brodsky’s very first elegy from January 1963 “On the Death of Robert Frost”, identifying the poem as rooted in the Russian tradition of writing poems “On the Death of”, and having no allusion or imitation to Frost, but instead to Akhmatova and the Tsarskoe Selo tradition in Russian poetry. Viewing this replacement of Frost by Akhmatova and, through her, Annensky and Pushkin, as the kind of substitution which, in Peter Sacks’ anthropological and psychoanalytical approach, lies at the root of elegiac writing, Part II then examines the poem’s context in regard to Brodsky’s relationship to Akhmatova, and Frost’s visit to Moscow and Leningrad in August-September 1962; Part II maps the chronology of Brodsky’s study of English before and after his internal exile in 1964–1965, and relates Brodsky’s elegy to Frost to his elegies to Donne (also 1963) and to T. S. Eliot (1965).

In an epilogue, the dissertation discusses the history of negative criticism of Brodsky’s Russian and English poetry in the light of what has been presented and discussed in the study.

The dissertation’s overall claim is that Brodsky’s bilingualism, whether viewed synchronically as a practice (Part I), or diachronically as a development within Russian literary history (Part II), is so closely interwoven with Brodsky’s highly idiosyncratic poetics that it cannot be isolated as “bilingualism” in the conventional sociolinguistic sense: the only way to assess it fairly and without prejudice is to regard it as an aesthetic and literary mode, a choice made within the Russian tradition of poetics, and specifically of elegiacs, rather than as a manifestation of language or linguistic behaviour that could be understood in purely linguistic terms.