Book Description

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most prominent contemporary American poets, is also among the finest living poets in the Russian language. Nevertheless, his poetry and the crucial bilingual dimension of his poetic world are still insufficiently understood by Western audiences. David Bethea's book responds by addressing several issues: How did the Russian-born Brodsky arrive at his present status as international man of letters and American poet laureate? What sort of implied reader is necessary to understand this poet, who is both steeped in the Russian tradition from Skovoroda to Tsvetaeva and yet capable of speaking in the ("anglicized russophone") cadences of Donne, Auden, and Lowell? Has Brodsky been created by this experience, or has he fashioned this self as a necessary precondition for writing poetry in the first place? Bethea suggests that the key to Brodsky, perhaps the last of the great Russian poets in the "bardic" mode, is in his relation to other, or the Other. Brodsky's master trope turns out to be what Bethea terms "triangular vision", the tendency to mediate a prior model (Dante) with a closer model (Mandelstam) in the creation of a palimpsest-like text in which the poet is implicated as a triangulated hybrid of these earlier incarnations. In separate chapters and through a series of carefully contextualized readings, Brodsky is compared and contrasted to his favorite models: Donne, Auden, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva. A final chapter analyzes Brodsky's fundamental differences with Nabokov, the only Russian exile of Brodsky's stature to rival him as a bilingual phenomenon. Various critical paradigms, including Said's "Orientalism", Kristeva's "foreigner" and"semiotic"/"symbolic" orders, Bloom's "anxiety to influence", Gilman's "Jewish self-hatred", Tomashevsky's "biographical legend", and Lipking's "the life of the poet" are used throughout the study as foils to Brodsky's thinking. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, the work of a distinguished Slavist and critic, will be of interest to all those who value poetry and who see its practice and study as legitimate interlocutors in postmodern discourse.