Joseph Brodsky, perhaps the most interesting of contemporary Russian poets, is a moralist and an ironist concerned with the false values men live by in an age which has thrown away the past, and with it the past's spiritual heritage. His work shows a persistent need for contact with poets outside the Russian tradition: Norwid, Eliot, Auden, Cavafy, Horace, and, above all, John Donne, are names that come to mind in a reading of his Ostanovka v pustyne (Halt in the Wilderness). He is, indeed, the first Russian poet I know of who has brought the English Metaphysicals into his poetic workshop, to learn from them and to grow under the influence of his kinship with them. At the same time his poetry has deep roots in the Russian tradition too…. Unlike the older generation, who were nurtured at a time when a great poetic culture was flourishing in Russia, Brodsky, who was born in 1940, grew up at a time when Russian poetry was in a state of chronic decline; as a result, he had to find his way largely on his own. His development has been exceptionally interesting. He began as a dropout from high school, and some of his earliest poems belong to Soviet underground literature of the late 1950s. He has retained the outsider's point of view, but he has given it much wider implications as he has grown. His work constitutes an outsider's critique, but it is a critique of the human condition rather than of political or social organization. Its polemical thrust is aimed at keeping possibilities open for the human psyche, whose need to reestablish spiritual bearings in the twentieth century is proof of the inadequacy of our official doctrines. (pp. 303-04)

[There are] two key images that run through his work. The first is rodina, birthland. It occurs without adjective or pronoun modifiers that would circumscribe its meaning, and this keeps open its potential for accumulating a weight of meaning that is something like "what one is born to" in every sense. In traditional Russian usage, rodina is a strongly positive image of one's native land, or even native region or city. Through overuse in patriotic slogans it has become a kind of icon. Brodsky never mocks nor rejects rodina, but he does use irony to chip away at its false, official halo…. For Brodsky rodina has a religious meaning in addition to its concrete meaning of "native land." In its spiritual sense rodina is the place where the last illusions and falsehoods are stripped away: where a man, or a people, stand naked before the Word of God. In connection with the theme of rodina, Brodsky has made extensive use of the Christian motif of Rozhdestvo (Nativity), a word which has the same root as rodina. It is, of course, the Christmas holiday, as celebrated in Moscow…. The themes of rodina and Rozhdestvo are always accompanied by pain, but it has to be understood that this is a salutary pain, which affirms more strongly than anything else in Brodsky's poetry the reality of the divine, or sacred, order of life. Rodina is the setting in space, and Rozhdestvo the setting in time, of that central experience in which man most truly faces God—or feels his distance from Him.

The second key image that one needs to keep a bearing on in reading Brodsky is razluka, separation: the separation of lovers, but also separation in a wider sense, from others, from self, from God. It prefigures the final separation, which is death. Just as Brodsky uses the Christian motif of the Nativity in connection with rodina, so in connection with razluka he uses the Crucifixion. Here, too, there is always pain, but it is the pain of devastating loss; if there is anything salutary to it, it is only to be found in the paradox that separation for eternity constitutes a kind of faith in eternity. (pp. 304-06)

Brodsky's work continues the lyric tradition that has been associated since the eighteenth century with his native city of Leningrad, but its relation to the tradition is not quite what might be expected and has become much more complex as his art has developed. When he began to write in 1958 at the age of eighteen, it was stylistically outside the tradition altogether. The earliest poems were short fables and allegories like "Khudozhnik," a statement of the artist's need to go his own way and his determination to believe in himself…. Brodsky, to his credit, did not try to hide this youthful pessimism, expressed in the images of martyrdom that appear in a great many of these early poems…. The short, brilliant "Stikhi pod epigrafom," written in a style that recalls Tsvetaeva, transforms the martyrdom image into something positive by asserting the basic validity in this life of the religious ideas of suffering and immortality. (pp. 306-07)

Around 1960 Brodsky began to work with traditional meters, especially the iamb and the anapest…. Continuing these experiments over the next ten years, Brodsky has developed the iambic pentameter into a line that bears his own individual signature…. Out of these experiments grew the verse of two of his long poems, "Isaac and Abraham" and "Elegy for John Donne" (both 1963). What makes this verse-line so remarkable is that it achieves nearly the maximum possible density of stressed syllables…. This saturated line is difficult to sustain, because it requires the use of predominantly one- and two-syllable words. Yet Brodsky manages to do it, and in his hands it becomes a powerful rhythmic device that creates an iambic music with a sense of maximum fullness in the line.

At the other end of the spectrum are his experiments with mobile intonational breaks that lead to a very high frequency of enjambments, and his development of the long sentence with complex syntax, which spills over from line to line and even from one stanza to the next. (pp. 307-09)

Since 1960 Brodsky has done interesting work in the anapest too, using enjambment and a variable line length. A striking example is "Fontan" (1967)…. (p. 311)

One way of looking at these innovations is that through them Brodsky has aimed at developing a style that would be independent of Pushkin, or at least stand apart from the most typical features of Pushkin's verse. Since 1962 he has looked primarily outside the native lyric tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for his inspiration…. He learned from Norwid (see "Sadovnik v vatnike") how to broach a subject indirectly, giving expression to his wit and playfulness and at the same time allowing the subject to take on whatever serious implications it may. This dates from 1964 and is a turning point in his work.

In Donne's verse Brodsky discovered a poetry of this world, which contains, at the same time, angels and luminous objects, set in a form of discourse that is dramatic, richly metaphorical, and intellectually complex, in which no line of separation stands between the sacred and the profane. Brodsky has incorporated all this into his own style. Donne's influence can be felt in particular ways, as when he borrows an image or a conceit, or writes in a Donne genre. "Otkazom" (1967) and "Strofy" (1968) are valedictions modeled on Donne, but his presentation of the theme of razluka is very much his own. Just as important is the general influence felt in Brodsky's habit of ratiocination through metaphor, and in his syntax, especially his Donnelike manner of steering an argument through twists and turns by using subordinating conjunctions and other hypotactic connectors to create a series of continually changing logical relationships: ibo, raz, to-est', vprochem, khot', posemu, kol', and so on.

Brodsky's themes—or what is really a densely interwoven complex of themes—appeared early in his work. His subsequent stylistic development has been a growth in the means for taking up their various strands, and thus a widening of their implications. An important stage in that growth was his discovery of T. S. Eliot, in whose "spirit unappeased and peregrine" he perhaps recognized a tie of kinship. One very interesting strand in his work is the "imperial" theme, the theme of the state as empire. Eliot's use of the persona in Journey of the Magi and Gerontion lies behind Brodsky's recent treatment of that theme. in "Anno Domini" (1968) the speaker is a poet in exile…. The exiled poet meditates on the lives of the bureaucrats who serve the imperial will, far from the Metropolis at the center of the empire: men long ago compelled to compromise whatever standards of truth and loyalty to spiritual values they may once have known. They are left with an empty legacy, their lives devoid of meaning, eking out their days in trepidation in a remote corner of the empire. It is a moral and political theme; there is an air of blasphemy brooding over these images of a secular order that has gone wrong. Brodsky can at times convey a sense of disgust that reminds us of Swift. At other times the language recalls the summations of Gerontion, in which the irony works more quietly but has a devastating effect….

  —we are not the judges of the fatherland. The sword of judgment shall sink deep in our own disgrace—
...
  the holy nimbus is replaced by the halo of the lie,
    and the immaculate conception—by gossip.
                                           (pp. 312-13)

The search for alternatives to Pushkin led Brodsky, within the Russian tradition, to the eighteenth century. He was drawn there by the work of particular poets like Derzhavin and Kantemir, and by the spirit of an age that believed in universal values but kept a skeptical eye on man and the world. He likes the remoteness and occasional obtuseness of its language, the heavy way it has of making a light point, and vice versa. He has used this to enrich the tonal range of his own poetic language. If Brodsky's early poems are in monotones, his later verse maintains a balance between light and serious, using puns of different kinds and making the most of the possibilities for ambiguity: double meanings abound…. But it is clear from the opening lines that ["Poslanie k stikham" ("Epistle to His Verses") is] a sophisticated treatment of the theme of "writing for the desk drawer" (almost none of Brodsky's work has been published in the Soviet Union), and shows how Brodsky's poetry always contains the potential for commentary on contemporary themes. And this makes it very much a twentieth-century text. (pp. 314-15)

["Almost an Elegy"] gives a good insight into the nature of Brodsky's religious themes. Brodsky sees life as a gift from God. His early interest in yoga reflected an innate contemplative or mystical bent. Now it is his poetry that has become for him a mode of contemplative activity, though it is not only that. He deals with Old Testament motifs from the point of view of one who is on native ground; he identifies easily and naturally with an Isaac or a Jacob. So far, Brodsky's perception of what it is like to know God personally is rooted in an earth-centered, Old Testament outlook rather than in a Christian experience. The "Elegy for John Donne," despite the fact that its subject is replete with possibilities for meditation on Christian themes, nevertheless resolves the problem of death in terms of an eternal rest on the earth under the old dispensation. However, since the early 1960s, New Testament motifs occur in his verse with increasing frequency, especially the Nativity and the Crucifixion. It is natural that he should be drawn to the Christian mysteries of the birth and death of God, for in them there is both the pathos of mortality and a sign of victory over death. (p. 319)

"Almost an Elegy" is a poem about the memory of a miracle as seen after a fall from grace: the poet looks back on a time of former brightness from a perspective of encroaching darkness. The seasonal metaphor for this passage from brightness to darkness is the coming of fall. The next poem, "Verses in April," was written some six months later at the opposite point in the seasonal cycle. It is a poem about a time when brightness (spring) is arriving, and darkness (winter) is passing into memory…. (pp. 319-20)

"Verses in April" is a poem about the memory, not of miracle, but of evil, in a season when evil seems to be receding. Pominanie can be used to mean both the church prayers for one who has died, and the ritual feast celebrated by the mourners. In either case, pominanie zla means "laying evil to rest (now that it is dead)." This is one way of bringing about the ridding of evil. Brodsky chooses a different way. He defines his poetry as a "scapegoat for bearing away wrongs." This also is a ridding of evil, but in doing so it sets those evils down. Just as the memory of a miracle cannot be forgotten (for it is the greatest loneliness), so the memory of evil cannot be forgotten either. This is the motivation for the naming of Mnemosyne in the poem's final line: Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, is the goddess of Memory.

The idea that the poem is a scapegoat provides a key to the meaning of the image of the desert, or wilderness (pustynia), in the title Ostanotka v pustyne. After Aaron has laid down his own sins and the sins of the people on the scapegoat, the goat is led into the wilderness…. (p. 323)

"Verses in April," like "Almost an Elegy," is a poem in which there is no "music," nor can there be in unruly spring when the Muses crowd and shove, quarreling among themselves. The need to admit wrongs in order to be rid of them is perhaps an unpleasant subject in a season when poems are supposed to be cheerful, and Brodsky wittily lays the blame on the Muses, who are squabbling instead of singing. But of course there is music here: the music of wit and seriousness together, a music something like that "tough reasonableness" beneath the lyric grace which Eliot so prized in Andrew Marvell and the other Metaphysicals. (pp. 324-25)