SOVIET EMIGRE GETS NOBEL IN LITERATURE

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 23, 1987
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Speaking by telephone from London, where he was staying at the home of a friend, the pianist Alfred Brendel, Brodsky described himself as "delighted, bewildered, pleased. Basically, pleased."

"I'm quite convinced that it won't affect me as a writer. If it will, so much for me as a writer." And if it should have a favorable effect? "Well, for that, I think you can cross your fingers and your toes!"

The poet, who is now a US citizen, heard the news at a Chinese restaurant while lunching with the author John le Carre.

The Nobel panel's selection of Brodsky, 47, for the prize in literature, which carries an award of $340,000, was widely hailed by both poets and literary scholars.

Seamus Heaney, himself rumored to have been a candidate for this year's prize, had nothing but praise for his fellow poet.

"I was just delighted, exultant really, at the news. I have met many poets, but there's a kind of pure poetic energy in him. You always feel that he's like a tuned instrument that is ready to play, you know? He's both enormously intellectually vibrant and musically in tune. The result is, of course, that he lets fly at times in prose as well as sings in poetry.

"I think it's a very coherent sensibility. It's been tested by circumstance, it's very much at ease with its own singing gift, if you like. The thing that I value especially about Brodsky is that he never stops to think 'why,' he just proceeds. He has done all his thinking. He has done all his preparation."

Richard Howard, the poet and translator and a past president of PEN America, said yesterday: "It is, of course, a solace that an intransigent
vision of poetic freedom be acknowledged in the realm of public life, but that the honor should go to a poet of such spirited accomplishments is more than comforting, it is enlivening -- for literature and for us all. . . . It's very gratifying."

Clarence Brown, professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, called Brodsky's selection "great news. Well, I don't know that he has any rivals as the greatest living Russian poet. But now he's going through a very interesting period of transition, turning into an American poet.

"It's a great thing for all of Russian literature in emigration."

Brown noted that the award may have political ramifications.

"It's hard to predict what the official reaction will be. But under the new 'openness' of Gorbachev, I think that the most important thing, from their point of view, is if they were to react favorably toward it as a great tribute to Russian poetry. Period. That would be a great signal about the difference between his Nobel Prize and that awarded to Pasternak. Soviet authorities refused to let Boris Pasternak, the poet and author of "Dr. Zhivago," accept the 1958 Nobel. I think Gorbachev has a great opportunity to show the difference of his government from the Stalinist regimes of earlier times."

Stanford University's Edward Brown, the author of "Russian Literature Since the Revolution," echoed this view.

"This is a guess, and it's hard to make predictions, but the Soviet response will be very, very positive. They will try to make him come back for at least a visit. This is another blow to the Soviet literary establishment. If it has anything left at all, this will undermine it almost completely.
Because it's the Soviet literary establishment that persecuted him, threw him out. It's precisely that establishment Gorbachev is fighting, and more successfully in literature than anywhere else."

Brodsky at first refused to speculate on such an invitation. "My imagination doesn't travel in that direction." Then he added that his selection "won't hurt glasnost, I hope. And if they are polite people they may issue an invitation."

As for replying to such an offer: "I am a polite person. I don't know if I'd respond favorably, but I'd like to see several people over there."

Edward Brown, who called the selection "an honor for Russian literature" and Brodsky "a great poet" and "an unusual talent," said: "It's hard to
put him in any tradition, because he's so original. He's an original spirit. He's a little different from modern poetry in general because his form tends to be rather conventional. His lines are metered. He rhymes. The whole idea of metered, measured lines and rhymed stanzas is very strong with him, which is not particularly modern. That's why general statements that are made about him usually fall down, when you think about it.

"He certainly is in the great tradition of Russian poetry. He sort of belongs to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, but he mostly belongs to
himself."

Born May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, Brodsky has described himself as "part Jew, part Russian, part Christian . . . in short, a bad Jew." He left school at 15, taking a series of jobs that included work in a mill, a morgue, a ship's boiler-room and as a laborer on a geological expedition. He taught
himself to read Polish and English and began writing poetry.

Sentenced to five years' work on a collective farm in northern Russia, he was released after 18 months because of protests from the West. His criticism of the Soviet regime resulted in his expulsion in 1972. Neither his parents (both now deceased) nor his son was allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Brodsky has never married.

In an open letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Brodsky wrote: ''Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe I will return. Poets always return in the flesh, or on paper. I want to believe that both are possible."

"I feel bitter as I leave Russia. 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."

Works published in English include "Verse and Poems" (1965); "Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems" (1967); "A Stop in the Desert" (1970); "Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems" (1973); "The End of a Lovely Era" (1977); "A Part of Speech" (1980); and "Less Than One" (1986), essays, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Scheduled to be published next year is "Urania: A New Book of Poems."

Last spring, he resigned from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to protest its awarding an honorary membership to the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom Brodsky denounced as "a weather vane. He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved."

Brodsky, who lives in New York City, holds appointments at Columbia University's Russian Institute, New York University's Institute for the Humanities and as Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke
College. In 1981, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of its "genius" grants.

Still obviously elated, Brodsky dismissed an interviewer's apology for troubling him at the end of a long day. "Thank you, very much. I'm terribly pleased, because I like the town -- Boston, that is."

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