CITIZEN OF A LANGUAGE
Author:
Date: Sunday, October 25, 1987
Page: A6
Section: EDITORIAL PAGE
The Nobel Prize for Literature, in honoring the poet Joseph Brodsky,
honored an ancient literary tradition. In the manner of Virgil, Dante and
Joyce, Brodsky has bestowed his gifts on the Russian language from afar, in
exile. So common is the literal experience of exile among poets that
Baudelaire took it as an allegory for the poetic condition.
This year, the often obtuse Nobel jury appears to have showered
recognition not merely on a Russian writer who has had but four of his poems
published legally in the Soviet Union, and not solely on a survivor of "Gulag
University," but on a figure who incarnates the poetic way.
"I feel bitter as I leave Russia," Brodsky wrote of his expulsion from his
homeland, in an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev. "I belong to the Russian
culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can
influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and
inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language."
This is a statement devoid of grandiloquence; it is simply a recognition of
the truth. Brodsky, like every other genuine poet, lives in his language. No
commissar, no fuhrer can banish him from there.
If the Nobel award to Brodsky represents a slap in the face to the
bootlickers of the Soviet literary establishment, so be it. Their
respectability was bought with a shameful silence. In service to an ephemeral
state, they kept quiet about the disappearance of entire libraries. They
pretended to forget all the poets and storytellers who were shot in the head
or forced to confess to the crime of literature.
Brodsky himself was convicted of being a "social parasite" and sent to
Siberia as a young man. The judge who sentenced him asked Brodsky who had
authorized him to be a poet. Responding with the impertinence proper to a
scion of a poetic line that traces back to Francois Villon, Brodsky told the
judge that nobody had authorized him to be a human being.
BERGER;10/23 NIGRO ;10/26,09:19 EBRODSKY
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