If it falls in the empire to be born

Brodsky and colonialism of Russian culture

One of my Ukrainian visasi recently rightly called Brodsky and the attitude towards him "the blind spot of the Russian intelligentsia." True, heals his eyes. We do not see, not because we cannot, but because we do not want to see without taking his eyes. For an attentive look will require a revision of the fact that we love (ourselves and our first of all). And this is unpleasant. And therefore, one hundred thousand words are ready to pile up in order to circumvent, for example, a shameful fact of writing and public reading of a very weak and frankly aggressive-imperial poem.

Yes, only two public readings. Yes, he never printed him and did not include in collections. And yet. Demand with the one who set himself the highest bar has consistently positioned himself over the country-empire and the graveyard and repeatedly declared, “you are your own higher court” is different.

In the first weeks of the war, I spent a lot of time on Ukrainian sites and in public, desperately trying to understand what exactly, with what statements, words and expressions, sometimes completely, innocent, we bring the rage of our interlocutors.

I wanted to figure it out. I wrote in several comments that my great-grandfather was born and raised in Kyiv, apologized in advance that I was writing in Russian and said that I would not be offended if they would send me, but that this conversation was important to me. After all, if I do not see or hear something, this does not mean that this is not. Several people really sent. But there were two or three thoughtful and surprisingly patient interlocutors who believed that this Russian really sincerely wants to understand something for themselves. And I asked questions: “And if I say so ...? And if so ...? " - And in response they explained in detail how it sounds and where exactly the colonialism inaccessible to my ear is hidden, firmly sewn into my culture. And, you know, this science can be mastered. Efforts, tension, labor. As a foreign language. But when you see once, it is impossible to develop this in yourself and in the surrounding texts in Russian.

Brodsky's friend Outstanding Lithuanian poet Thomas Ventslova repeated again in a recent interview:

“It is worth condemning the chauvinist Russian works, including the stupid anti -Ukrainian verses of my beloved and the respected Joseph Brodsky (I told him not to publish them publicly, but he, unfortunately, once read them publicly).”

This attracts this. “Blind spots” are not only compromises themselves, concessions, dubious actions, but also their denial and attempts to close their eyes on them. It is they, like oil spots on the surface of the ocean, merge into one large one - which - and we know this from the ecology, in the end carries not only pollution, but also death.

The exile, the preacher of freedom, the singer of absence and individualism, is partly the victim of the repressive machine of the empire, who consciously chose not to be its victim, Brodsky was not able to abandon not so much from the territorial, linguistic, cultural colonialism. He was so repulsed from the Soviet regime that he deliberately moored to the imperial tradition of its predecessor.

Akhmatova, of course, was a conductor, a living connective link connecting Brodsky with a pre -revolutionary literary tradition.

And this is a separate large topic: for along with the living air of the Silver Age, along with the classics, the continuity of Christian European civilization and with many others that formed the “Akhmatov orphans” and what was so sharply different from the Soviet reality, the canon and propaganda, and the spirit of the empire, which itself became the most important motive of Brodsky’s poetry, but not at all, not at all. Such a unambiguously threatening totalitarian form, as recently read from a Russian-speaking internal perspective perspective.

"I am infected with normal classicism."

But not only them.

Ukrainian poet Oksana Zabuzhko recalls the following episode:

“ Brodsky greeted again, hugged and kissed on all directions, one of his friends pointed to him:“ Oksana Zabuzhko, from Ukraine. ” “We have already met in Harvard last year,” I chose, but the phrase froze on my lips unfinished. Brodsky was again “under voltage”, left -handed and crushing, his face from the sardonic smile is piercing, fine -lipped and predatory, the gaze covered the mocking chill, only this time the place in the stall of his spectators was not intended for me at all:

“I don’t remember you,” he said loudly, with pressure. - Where is Ukraine?

And he froze in anticipation of applause, rustling with a satisfied grin.

- Can't You See? -I made a cheerful (“On a smile, girls, we sing, on a smile”, as the leader of a student vocal ensemble once drove us!) And made two carefree gestures-one in his direction, the other in the opposite: there, to the left of me, Cheslav Milos, with whom we spoke before that. - All there, between Poland and Russia!

Pan Cheslav laughed loudly-thanks to him, much more cordial than that the miserable quasi-narcissistic joke cost, and his laughter supported: the incident was discharged without having time to take shape.

I didn’t get acquainted with Brodsky anymore . ”

Oksana Zabuzhko, "Farewell to the Empire: several strokes to one portrait."

They praised all the answer is intricate.

The transcripts and evidence of how Cheslav Milos, Adam Zagaevsky, Thomas Ventzlova, as well as Derek Walcott and Suzan Zontag - outstanding writers, thinkers, poets, personal close friends and like -minded people of Brodsky - at general performances, festivals, conferences, entered into a rather harsh poleh precisely on the topic of the imperial and precisely on the topic of the imperial and precisely on the theme of the imperial. responsibility of Russian culture.

“ ... The conscience of the writer, for example, the Russian writer, is obliged to somehow react to facts such as , say, the occupation of the Baltic, where I come from. But I'm afraid that in Russian literature there is a certain taboo, and this is a taboo of an empire , ”says the Polish poet Milos in one of the replicas of the Nobel laureate.

Brodsky had an acute public discussion with Milan Kunder on the pages of the book application of The New York Times, for a sharp anti -Soviet position and Kunders, and Milos, and other Eastern European writers inevitably had a Russian great -power shovinism.

It is curious that in the "support group" Brodsky’s position on one of these discussions in Lisbon was in 1988 .... Tatyana is fat.

I believe the comments are unnecessary.

In Milos’s diary there is a record of this clash: “ They do not realize how imperial, or , as Rushdi shouted from the hall, their colonial thinking.”

It turned out that you can be thrown out of the empire, but throwing "imperiality" from yourself is much more difficult. And how the tenacious this hereditary disease turned out to be. The indestructible built -in gene, which, as can be seen from today, is so easily activated, and then chronic disease goes into an active form.

The body is one. In the life of a great artist, like any person, there are no isolated territories.

No man is an island. (No person is an island)

Nothing in man is an island (nothing in a person is an island).

So the double standards and the dubious line of behavior is that it is again customary to call euphemism “personal life”, which is repeatedly justified in the traditional culture of romanticism in the classical image of a “uninterrupted poet”,

The host of his genesis from the ancient “poet-prophet”, or simply genetics (“but it is talented”)-as more than one biography shows, will certainly go beyond the edges of the space of the paper sheet, will continue and cross out something else. No matter how much you close the archives and letters, no matter how much you hide the spindle in the tower, there is always one old woman, about which the sleeping beauty will inject. Just because this “personal” life is not one, but two people. And this is not a mathematically curve, but often a broken line is determined by at least two points, relations between them-and has the property, if not endlessly, it lasts, even if the participants are alive.

Popures of the Nobel lecture of Brodsky, today it will be necessary to admit: sometimes the ethical choice is a poetic mother, and not vice versa.

Alas, now it becomes painfully obvious how the banal Great Russian male chauvinism naturally leads to chauvinism to national linguistic, and then to imperialism, colonialism, and then at all stops-and it suddenly turns out that he was ready to serve as a convenient cultural help for fascism, even at the departure station, the author did not imply this. It is chauvinism that connects all these points into one inclined route and terrifying from today the poet rhymes with monsters in power, from which he himself would recount, and recoiled.

Russian-Post-Soviet intelligent ethical omnivority, the priority of art and science over a person (in fact, one of the options for continuing the traditional attitude to suppress personality value), the reduction of the unconditionality of the concept of self-propelled dignity before belonging to the group, and as the necessary ingredient of this compote is an indispensable cherry or simply frankly frankly frankly The aggressive-intelligent attitude of the vast majority of the male educated intellectual elite towards feminism (about the deep “folk” attitude up to the decriminalization of domestic violence, it is not worth talking here).

Russian (ANA) chronic anti -Feminism has come to its atavistic logical conclusion today - to the current war for the “belonging” and “territory”, unleashed and fed by the “male state”, built on base instincts and concepts of the gateway.

The estate determines being. As it turned out, the cultural layer here has exactly no mitigating value.

We are not given to predict. But sometimes given. Sometimes this is an obligation. Especially if God guessed wisely and talent. Especially if it fell into the empire.

The first poems of Brodsky were with me when I was 11. I stood summer, everyone was in the country, I got sick and as a consolation my mother took me out of the treasured cache, the translucent blind typewritten leaves: “You will like it.” I really liked it. Changed the worldview. I learned the first poem "Set" right away.

Then others. In my 14-15, my first boy gave me all Ardis collections. One at a time - like beads on a necklace. Then there was America. Many common friends, one circle of parental friends. I rejected a proposal to go to reading or getting to know each other - I thought I didn’t want to be just a young girl, I still have to grow up and grow to the interlocutor. This did not happen. January 28, 1996 - I could not believe that it would never happen. Now I think - providentially.

With all the further professional interest and love, with the life choice of Venice as at home, with numerous books, research and projects related to Brodsky, on which I worked (from a multi-speaking collection of research “Venetian notebooks” with illustrations and detailed commentary to the charity “Ballads about small tugboats” with children's children's children Participation in conferences, collections to large exhibition projects in Europe, in Russia, in America, and so on and so on - as IB himself would say), I always could not reconcile with two completely different texts. In my head, they were adjacent to one negative attribute: both seemed to be called to life by something deeply unworthy of writing them.

In one case, this is a text addressed to an independent country, and in the other - to once (and, most likely, so far), a woman who left him, who had left him.

We are talking about the verses “Dear, I came out ...” (1989) and “On the Independence of Ukraine” (1992). And if at least the rage and resentment of the first, with all his bad monitoring, I could at least somehow understand, then the ability of a single poet and non-conformist to experience such passionate imperial feelings that can generate such a text remained a mystery to me. “I do not find the equivalent in myself” - as my scientific leader once formulated for another reason.

“Darling, I went out ...” was addressed to Marina Basmanova, the main addressee of a significant part of Brodsky’s love lyrics.

“<Marina> was a very subtle person of a large culture. I also, of course, very well understood poetry. - She knew a huge number of poems by heart, knew different poets - she was in this part of the walking encyclopedia. (...) She did amazing, beautiful things, ”recalls in an interview with Yuri Leving Eduard Kochergin.

Of course, she was by no means a passive “muse”-object, as is usually customary to describe in again the “male” literary criticism. The hereditary artist and a bright personality itself, if she did not “make” Brodsky, then in any case, she significantly formed his gaze and views.

I was simply blind.

You, arising, hiding,

Give me an sight.

So leave a trace.

So the worlds are going on.

So, having created them, often

leave to rotate

Having stolen gifts.

“Darling, I went out” - the shameful and desperate exhaust of the lyrical hero, who is not able and does not want to recognize the subjectivity of his beloved in decades and thousands of kilometers.

The one that

“I loved you more than angels and myself

And therefore then now

From you than both of them.

Far, late at night, in the valley, at the very bottom,

In the town, covered with snow on the door handle,

Carrying at night on the sheet

as not said below, at least

I whip the pillow with the mouse "you"

beyond the mountains, which is the end and the edges,

In the dark with your whole body, your features

Like a crazy mirror, repeating "

He now describes this:

“... painted in mascara in a notebook, a little

Singing

I had fun with me; But then she agreed

With chemical engineer

And, judging by the letters, monstrously

I stupid. "

And each time it’s a shame for a monstrously stupid author-because he himself devalues ​​himself, perfectly understanding why it was a randomly contemptuous and patronizing “a little sang” (immediately recalls how Punin, when one of the visitors, was especially aware of Anna Andreyevna as a poet, defiantly casually threw “Anechka, clean up the villager”).

Even more embarrassing for the verb “entertained”, writing which its author puts himself in a row, but significantly below his lyrical opponent-“chemical engineer”, because in his petty vengeance it is ready to cross out dozens of lines of his own lyrics, making a poetic and existential meaning to the sacrifice of cheap male inflation and the desire to recoup. Having beloved and wounded in his own eyes. Not seeing and not hearing yourself from the side.

“Talent is not transmitted by friction,” Brodsky wrote evilly for another reason.

And the mind is even more lost.

The mind is lost.

And not the heroine.

The poem “On the Independence of Ukraine” of 1992 continues the same “storave” line.

The text, I repeat, was not published by the author and was not included in collections, but was read twice in public. Once in Palo Alto with a warning that now there will be "something risky." But the main and most irremovable - it was written. It makes no sense to comment on it, especially today. In addition to burning shame for the author, he does not give birth to any response.

“As is often the case in literary work, and especially in Brodsky’s poetry, this poem tells readers much more about the author himself, and not about the subject,” said the researcher from Columbia University Olga in his article “Joseph Brodsky's Imperial Consciusness”. Bertelsen.

And further there:

"Ukraine was no doubt for the Brodsky part of the Slavic space that he considered ours." Neither as a geographical place, nor as an independent unit Ukraine never existed on its mental map. In 1987, at a ceremony dedicated to the presentation of the Nobel Prize, Brodsky defined Brodes - a possible place where his ancestors came from - as part of Russia. The Ukrainian city of Brody remained Russian for him until the end of his life. ”

Maybe in their own roots the root of the territorial imperial passion unexpected for the poet and citizen?

Unexpected not only for the reader (Russian -speaking, of course - which is also symptomatic in itself), but for himself in the logic of his own poetics and worldview.

All in the same essay “Farewell to the Empire: several strokes to one portrait” Zabuzhko writes:

“Brodsky’s poem“ On the Independence of Ukraine ”, printed by some Kiev editions from a tape recorder, in its artistic value is unlikely to deserve the inclusion of the author’s selected works in the collections (therefore, probably not published in a lifetime): evil to clicking intonations, a breakdown of the voice in purely propaganda and grinding wrappers, such Such, in unity using the most littered maps of the “colonial set” of Russian literature of the 19th century ( ... ) And this, I recall, is written by a great traveler, the author of all kinds of “diverse” from Lithuanian to Mexican, who, in principle, knew how to get into other cultures very meaningfully and directly, without any journalistic clues , all this is all this вместе создает эффект, с одной стороны крайне неаппетитный, «агитпроповский», соответствующий духу (и «букве») гневного потока ругательств и улюлюканья , которым тогда «на независимость Украины» так иррационально-агрессивно «прорвало» российские масс-медиа , — а с другой стороны, и немного «странный»: не «отстраненный», как надобно для искусства, а именно «странный» сам по себе — в том, что касается его контекста: ведь автор — поэт, искренность чувств которого, даже в этом «архискверном» (как любил выражаться «патрон» его родного города) тексте несомненна, следовательно, читателю остается только развести руками: чего это человека так за живое взяло? Что ему Гекуба?

Сам же когда-то писал: «Империя — страна для дураков», откуда же теперь этот юродивый надрыв, раскоординированное размахивание руками, всхлипы пьяного москаля (поручика Ржевского?) , «слеза из глаза», на которую, как говорят , «нет указа».

Зачем, спросили бы, «стулья ломать»? Зачем вопить? «Кончилась, знать, любовь, коль и была промежду…» Нет, не послышалось. Сомнений нет: перед нами причитания обиженной любви…»

Именно этим «Дорогая, я вышел…» (1989) и «На независимость Украины» (1992) очень похожи. Оба текста растут из одного корня: агрессивная посессивность, ресентимент, риторика «зелен виноград». Не отношение старшего брата, но ярость раздосадованного любовника, которому предпочли другого. Ярость от потери контроля и обладания. Это плохие стихи (в обоих смыслах). В некотором роде — нестихи. В обоих текстах особенно поражает несвойственная автору двумерная топорность взгляда и под стать ему напористость слога. Где тонкая настройка глаза и слова венецианского эссе и стихов, написанных как раз между ними? «Иметь» победило «быть».

Взгляды оказались важнее взгляда. И тут кончается искусство. Мизогиния и имперскость оказались сводными сестрами.

Причины же удивительной страстности в одном случае — более чем на поверхности, во втором же — куда глубже, но и то, и другое потребует десятилетий огромной целительной (психо?)аналитической работы целой культуры, которая пока об этом не подозревает и продолжает кичиться собой под разговоры о «бабах», насилие, крики, стоны, взрывы и гром канонад, настаивая на собственной невинности.

« Мы можем извлечь урок на обломках империи, где литература заменяла жизнь, где литература была единственной достойной человека формой жизни: литература никогда не бывает невинной, даже если очень хочет таковой быть (особенно, если хочет!)» — пишет в заключение своего очерка Забужко.

И, да, все написанное, в том числе и мной, пишущей сейчас эти строчки об этом поэте, теперь тоже неотделимо от этих кадров.

Два стихотворения Бродского не случайно соседствовали в моей голове.

Они не просто похожи. По сути же, это один и тот же текст.

«На независимость Марины/Украины»

Let it be so.

Читатель сам может провести мысленный эксперимент: сложить два стихотворения в одно, вложить их друг в друга, чередуя практически через строчку — многое станет очевидно само собой.

« * …А что до слезы из глаза * — нет на нее указа, ждать до другого раза »**.

Здесь бы и читателю заплакать и пожалеть, уловив у поэта пронзительную ноту отчаянной искренности… Но стихотворение кончается так:

* « * С Богом, орлы, казаки, гетманы, вертухаи!

Только когда придет и вам помирать, бугаи, будете вы хрипеть, царапая край матраса, строчки из Александра, а не брехню Тараса * » * .

И это звучит как проклятие с того света самому себе — страшным эпиграфом к сегодняшней войне.

А написавший эти строки поэт нобелевский лауреат Иосиф Бродский, не заставший этой войны, и сочинивший и опубликовавший, помимо этих стихов, тысячи других куда более значительных и замечательных строк, именно поэтому теперь навсегда подписался ими как титрами под кадрами бомбежек Киева и Харькова, под репортажами из подвалов, под фотографиями тел на улицах Бучи, под руинами Ирпеня и Бородянки, под свидетельствами о массовых изнасилованиях, под медицинскими бюллетенями оторванных ног и рук краматорского вокзала, под некрологами завалов, под надписью «Дети» у разбомбленного Мариупольского театра, подписью под табличками с могил во дворах и на детских площадках, под воронками Херсона, под вереницами опрокинутых лиц беженцев, тащащих перепуганных насмерть котов и собак в переносках, под репортажем о сгоревших заживо лошадях в конюшне под Изюмом, под списком жертв торгового центра в Кременчуге, под фотографией пасхальной жертвы, трёхмесячной одесситки Киры и её мамы, под списком никогда не проснувшихся отдыхающих в пансионате у моря, под лицами десятков тысяч ещё не названных и даже не найденных.

И, да, все написанное, в том числе и мной, пишущей сейчас эти строчки об этом поэте, теперь тоже неотделимо от этих кадров.

«Глаз ищет безопасности. (…) Этим объясняется тяга глаза к красоте, как и само ее существование. Ибо красота утешает, поскольку она безопасна. Она не грозит убить, не причиняет боли. (…) Когда глазу не удается найти красоту (она же утешение), он приказывает телу ее создать, а если и это не удается, приучает его считать уродливое замечательным » («Набережная неисцелимых»).

Взгляд предшествует взглядам. Нельзя привыкать к уродству, считать его нормой и тем более приучать себя считать его красотой. Невозможно обманываться дальше. Трезвый широкий взгляд без «слепых пятен» нужен прежде всего нам самим.