Language More Important Than God
(By Alexander Ageyev, Vremya MN, № 26, July 5-11, 2002)
Zakharov Publishers has made history by issuing "The Big Book of Brodsky Interviews" compiled by Valentina Polukhina. The tome numbers nearly 700 pages, all of them filled with the great poet's views on himself, poetry, his contemporaries, his times, God, and language. A lot of the pieces have not been published before, so the reader can expect an intellectual feast.
But I would not advise reading this book right through, page by page. Brodsky's interviewers ask the same questions over and over, and he is compelled to repeat himself accordingly, since his views did not alter significantly over the years. On the other hand, making a mental note of the repetitions, one could construct a scale of interconnected values, which Brodsky espoused both in life and work.
Uppermost in this set of values is of course language: To Brodsky, language is not a tool, nor a means of expressing certain content. It is the human being, particularly the poet, that is the tool of language. "Language is an independent magnitude, an independent phenomenon that lives and develops, in a way, like Nature herself. And eventually it reaches maturity. While a poet or prose-writer merely chances to be there to pick up the fruits falling on the ground and arrange them in a certain order. Indeed, what is poetry? Poetry is essentially a higher form of linguistic activity. If there is anything that distinguishes us from dumb beasts, it must be our ability to articulate, to use language. It follows from this that poetry is really not an area of literature, nor a form of art, entertainment or leisure, but the ultimate goal of humanity as a biological species. People who engage in poetry are the most biologically perfect specimens of the human race... Language is more important than God, more important than Nature, more important than anything else..."
In Brodsky's universe, this notion explains virtually everything, even his relationship with the authorities. Brodsky never saw himself as a dissident in the popular sense of me word; it was just that they talked different languages, the poet and the powers than be. "If a poet is making progress, sooner of later there will come a point when the powers that be will find offensive not the content of his poetry, but its idiom and style... Language tends to clash with the system and the language idiom used by that system. That is say, the Russian language cannot abide the language used by the Establishment."
This suggests, among other things, that Brodsky was a fairly strict rationalist not given to sentiment in his relations with humanity and the world, and that he did not rely on God. Hence, too, Brodksy's classic individualism, now thoroughly uncool. He loves to repeat that he and the friends of his youth were more American than present-day Americans; the notion of individualism, the individual's personal self-standing, which, as he imagined in his younger years, had become reality on American, soil, was always a determining idea with him.
To live with this set of values, a person needs a good deal of courage, not just to face everyday situations (confirmed individualists are resented everywhere, in America as much as in Russia), but also to bring ideas to a logical conclusion without shying away from the results that may be highly distressing m terms of the outlook for humanity and the individual. This courage Brodsky possessed in full measure and painstakingly tried to graft onto Russian poetry. He said a truly remarkable thing about the latter in one of his last interviews: "The overabundance of feminine and dactylic inflectional endings is the chief feature of Russian poetry in the 20 century, of its Soviet period. Now what is behind this? First and foremost, not a rational approach to the material or actual events, but a kind of wailing or emotional response. That is self-lamentation. Or put more crudely, whining, if you like." Whining and self-lamentation are definitely something Brodsky's poetry has none of. There is not a trace of posturing or anger in his judgement of himself and his contemporary colleagues (quite a few of whom are discussed in the book on numerous occasions, and I do not envy Yevtushenko, for instance, or Voznesensky). Because Brodsky judges from the vantage point of language, which (remember?) is "more important than God..."