Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

12. Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland

189 twelve Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland Irena Grudzińska-Gross The description of the relationship between a poet and a country—Joseph Brodsky and Poland—is a risky undertaking. Brodsky is not a typical poet, nor is he a typical representative of Russian culture: in fact, there was nothing typical about him at all, as he himself somewhat ironically wrote: My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, But at least no chorus can ever sing it back.1 Yet he lived in a specific historical moment, and his relationship to Poland was part of a longer political and cultural history of Polono-Russian influences. So it is legitimate to ask if the ‘‘Polish connection’’ was important for Brodsky. Perhaps it was only an effort to find a way to the outside from under the totalitarian pressure, or perhaps only part of his personal history of Polish friendships. His readings and translations, should they be the object of literary studies of influences and indebtedness? Is there a detectable influence of Polish literature in the work of Brodsky? And, if not, should his Polish interests be dismissed? Irena Grudzińska-Gross 190 Brodsky’s unique (and uniquely successful) effort to master English and become an English-language writer and poet makes a study of his relationship to Polish very relevant. I see in it the first step in the reaching out to another culture that was characteristic of his work. Other great Russian poets also had a need to stretch into a different culture: Boris Pasternak was fascinated by Georgia, and Osip Mandelshtam by Armenia. Brodsky’s curiosity about and absorption and playful adaptation of Polish was perhaps a tryout for his later entrance into the sphere of the English language. This would be reason enough to give it attention. The Generation Born in 1940, Brodsky belonged to a generation that came of age in the period of the invisible, slow bleeding away of communist ideology. He was thirteen when Stalin died, sixteen when the ‘‘Thaw,’’ ‘‘Polish October,’’ and the Hungarian revolt shook the ‘‘socialist bloc.’’ Poland was then located firmly within the Soviet Empire; there was even a rhymed saying: ‘‘the chicken is not a bird, and Poland is not abroad’’ (‘‘Kuritsa ne ptitsa, Pol’sha ne zagranitsa’’). But culturally, artistically, and intellectually, Poland was (relatively) open to the West. And the Russian intelligentsia and their Polish friends used that opening as much as they were able. This situation was captured, as everything else that is important, in a contemporary Russian anecdote. It starts with a question: What is different in the ways a Swede, a Pole, and a Russian engage in group sex? In Sweden, group sex is when a Swede has sex simultaneously with several people. In Poland, group sex is when a Pole tells a group of his friends how he witnessed group sex in Sweden. And in Russia, group sex is when a Russian tells how he was in a group of people in Poland listening to that Pole describing to a group of his friends his group sex experience in Sweden. The anecdote, of course, speaks about the indirect route Russians had to take to what Osip Mandelshtam (and Brodsky after him) called ‘‘world culture .’’ And not only Russians: I am speaking here about a generation of intelligentsia from many of the then Soviet republics, born around the time of World War II. Tomas Venclova, the Lithuanian poet, and later Brodsky’s friend, read, as did many of his friends, almost all of Western literature in Polish: Proust, Kafka, Musil, and even Thomas Mann because these books were not accessible in Lithuania in any other language. We bought them sometimes on the black market, sometimes in stores; on the black market we were able to get even Gombrowicz or Mi™osz. . . . These friends of mine, some of them beginning writers, some simply intelligent people, learned Polish very early on to know what is happening in the world. I know that it sounds strange, but even Trybuna Ludu [the organ of the Polish Communist Party] was useful—one could Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland 191 learn more about the world by reading it than from Pravda or Lithuanian Tiesa which also means ‘‘truth’’ [like Pravda]. Not to mention Życie Warszawy , Przekrój and especially Twórczość . . . that one could...