Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia

6. Staging Cultural Differences: Venice

In a book-length essay on Venice titled Against Venice (Contre Venise) and published some years after Brodsky’s Watermark, the French writer and philosopher Régis Debray attacks Venice as an icon of Western cultural values promoted by a narrow privileged elite, while he also writes against the touristic Venice, the “culture boutique” of popular consciousness—not that the two are entirely unrelated.1 Rather than being directed against the city itself, Debray’s polemic is directed against the canonized perception of it: “Constructed more by writers than masons, more by painters than architects, more of words than of bricks,” he writes, Venice epitomizes the “well-established rule . . . that discourse about things becomes an integral part of the things themselves.”2 The fact that one cannot “improvise before the palimpsest of polychrome marbles” annoys Debray, and for him the veduta leave two choices: “recitation or graffiti.” Instead of Venice, he urges his reader to go somewhere “still unsullied by a metaphor, through which Musset, D’Annunzio and Henri de Régnier have had the good grace never to have passed” (Against Venice, 31). But despite his polemic stance against the discourse on Venice, Debray is nostalgic toward a Eurocentric past, disclosed in his anticipation of Venice being a “mirror of a future that is plausible,” of “the insular Europe of tomorrow reduced to its most picturesque . . . a Europe oblivious to outer space research, to the planet and to its century” (ibid., 44). Unlike Debray’s quest, Brodsky’s in Watermark is a quest not for the popular or common perception of Venice, but for private meanings.3 Brodsky’s essay is an intimate account of the author’s “Venice sickness,” something 152 6 Staging Cultural Differences Venice Debray claims he has never suffered from—“the way homesick patriots say they suffer from ‘France sickness’” (ibid., 3). The private meanings Brodsky invests in Venice, however, point to collective significances. From the vantage point of a Parisian intellectual, Debray challenges the significance of the “textbook town” he “learned to venerate in class,” whereas Brodsky, from his vantage point of a Soviet emigrant, does not challenge but preserves the meanings Venice had for him and for the Leningrad aesthetic practices, with which he affiliated, and for the Petersburg cultural mythologies that he rearticulated in many instances.4 In Watermark Brodsky affectionately preserves the cultural significance of Venice for those formations, which, in his understanding, carried on the Russian cultural heritage through the Soviet years. Watermark is an apotheosis of the city’s genius loci and an appeal for the preservation of the last outpost of European civilization (as understood by Brodsky). The writing of Brodsky’s essay on Venice was initiated by a request from the Venice Water Authority—Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the local authority fighting the ecological crisis threatening the environment of the Veneto region and the foundations of Venice.5 It is reasonable to assume that the officials of Venezia Nuova turned to Brodsky, who was known to visit the city regularly and who had established a circle of friends there, in the hope that his Nobel fame and authority would attract international attention to the preservation of Venice. Among Brodsky’s recollections of his frequent trips there are passages in Watermark that reflect this initial motivation for the writing of the essay: I think it was Hazlitt who said that the only thing that could beat this city of water could be a city built in the air. That was a Calvinoesque idea, and who knows, as an upshot of space travel, that may yet come to pass. As it is, apart from the moon landing, this century may be best remembered by leaving this place intact, just by letting it be. I, for one, would advise even against gentle interference. . . . Yet I would argue that the idea of turning Venice into a museum is as absurd as the urge to revitalize it with new blood. For one thing, what passes for new blood is always in the end plain old urine. And secondly, this city doesn’t qualify to be a museum, being itself a work of art, the greatest masterpiece our species produced. You don’t revive a painting, let alone a statue. You leave them alone, you guard them against vandals whose hordes may include yourself. (W, 115–16)6 Staging Cultural Differences: Venice 153 This passage is typical of Brodsky’s idiosyncratic prose...