Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia

Notes

Introduction 1. Joseph Brodsky in Joseph Brodsky: A Maddening Space, directed by Lawrence Ritkethly, produced by Public Broadcasting Service and Channel 4. 2. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 307. “Penelope of a city” is a quotation from Brodsky’s Watermark (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 3. Brodsky’s use of a group of modernist cosmopolitans as his “reference set,” to quote a term Patrick Colm Hogan has conjured in his discussion of canonical literature and its use in the identity-construction of such postcolonial writers as Derek Walcott, is illustrated at the beginning of the essay “To Please a Shadow.” There the author, reflecting on his motivations to write in English, rejects the model set by such bilingual literary modernists as Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett, who resorted to “a language other than [their] mother tongue” out of “necessity,” “burning ambition,” and “for the sake of greater estrangement.” His own goal, the author asserts, is to “find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I considered the greatest mind of the twentiethcentury : Wystan Hugh Auden” (LTO, 357). While rejecting these canonical modernists ’ motifs as a model for his own adoption of the English language, he inadvertently foregrounds their importance as a point of cultural reference for his identity construction , not to say anything of the affectionate affiliation with Auden, the modernist and cosmopolitan model for Brodsky’s self-fashioning. For Hogan’s discussion of Walcott, see Patrick Colm Hogan, Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 157–96. 4. Dean MacCannel points to the link between tourism and postmodernity when he states in the introduction to the 1989 edition of The Tourist (1976), his now classic 229 Notes study on tourism, that much of the phenomenon examined by him as “the process by which modernity, modernization, modern culture was establishing its empire on a global basis” has since then been ascribed not to modernity but to postmodernity. MacCannel rejects the proclamations of “dead subjects, dead epochs, dead values” voiced by the major critics of the postmodern: for him they present “unrealized mourning” and “expressions of an anticreative ethos, nostalgia for the bourgeois or Cartesian subject, and a Eurocentric past—the very institutions and concepts which the critics seek to deconstruct.” Nevertheless, MacCannel wonders whether his tourist “was really an early postmodern figure, alienated but seeking fulfilment in his own alienation —nomadic, placeless, a kind of subjectivity without spirit, a ‘dead subject.’” See Dean MacCannel, The Tourist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xv–xviii. 5. I will introduce the names of Brodsky’s poems and essays in the language of the original with the English or Russian translation in parentheses. After this first reference I will only use the English titles. 6. “After a Journey” (included in Grief and Reason) and “Flight from Byzantium” (included in Less Than One) were written originally in Russian but co-translated into English by Brodsky and Aleksandr Sumerkin, and Brodsky and Alan Myers, respectively . The other three essays Brodsky wrote in English. The Leningrad essay, included in Less Than One, appeared originally in Vogue (September 1979), titled “Leningrad: A City of Mystery”; it was translated into Russian by Lev Loseff and published in the journal Chast’ rechi (no. 1, 1980). “A Place as Good as Any,” included in Grief and Reason, was translated into Russian by Elena Kasatkina, and the first Russian publication was in a special issue of Zvezda (no. 1, 1997) dedicated to Brodsky. Watermark was first published in a limited Italian edition titled Fondamenta incurabili, which is also the title of the Russian version, “Naberezhnaia neistselimykh,” translated by Grigorii Dashevskii. 7. The term transculturation originates in ethnography, more precisely in the work of Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz. Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the term captures the meanings relevant to my discussion: according to Pratt the term is used to describe “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.” See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 8. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to TravelWriting,ed.HulmeandYoungs(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,2002), 1–13. The elusiveness of the genre is indicated by the variety of terms used in reference to travel writing. In English there are, among others, the terms literature of travel, travel literature, travel genre, travelogue...