Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia

SEVEN—Ruin as Transition to Timelessness in Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry

SEVEN Ruin as Transition to Timelessness in Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry t Born in 1940, Joseph Brodsky lived in Leningrad through the first winter of the Blockade, but was, of course, too young to remember anything about it. After a year in evacuation, his mother took him back to the city in 1943. Growing up in the ruins of postwar Leningrad, he could not fail to be affected by the urban landscape (see fig. 21). In his literary biography of the poet, Lev Losev attributes a defining role in Brodsky’s spiritual development to the spectacle of Leningrad’s ruined imperial neoclassicism, which served as the background for his childhood.1 Brodsky himself subsequently acknowledged that his notion of history drew much of its inspiration from the “facades and porticos” of the city.2 According to Losev, the ruins encouraged in the boy a consciousness of living “after our era,” in the aftermath of irreversible destruction at the hands of new barbarians, while also fostering a mythical and naïve view of the motherland as an empire “built on principles of harmonious proportions.”3 Most enduringly, Brodsky’s precocious sensitivity to ruins predetermined his life-long infatuation with the elegy, the literary genre best equipped to give voice to the feeling of loss and to enable an intimate, if vicarious dialogue with the past. Brodsky addressed the meaning of ruins as early as 1961, in his “Contemporary Song.” The poem begins with a matter-of-fact statement about the arresting power of ruins, conveyed in an emphatically prosaic tone: “A man comes to ruins again and again, / he was here the day before yesterday and yesterday / he’ll come again tomorrow, / he is attracted by ruins.”4 The poem hesitates between conveying a story of a specific individual or an account of the human condition, between documentalism and existentialism , as it were. The initial designation of the ruin-gazer chelovek 184 Architecture of Oblivion Figure 21. A.I. Brodskii, Joseph by the Sculpture Neva at the Base of the Rostral Column (1955). Reproduced by permission of the Central State Archive of Cinema, Photographic and Phonographic Documents in St. Petersburg. Ruin as Transition to Timelessness in Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry 185 (man) is deliberately ambiguous, which is amplified by the vagueness of his addressee: He says: Progressively, progressively you get used to many things, a great many, you get used to choosing from a pile of crushed debris your alarm clocks and the burnt spines of albums, you get used, to coming here daily, you get used to the fact that ruins exist, you’ll live with this thought. Poking among ruins, one collects odd surviving objects—albums and clocks—but also, it seems, a means of rekindling one’s feelings and reawakening to the future (“Man comes to ruins again, / every time, when he wants to love again, / when he again sets the alarm clock”). The poem insists on the seeming ordinariness of the ruin (“It begins sometimes to seem that this is normal”). In fact, familiarity with ruins facilitates conversation with unknown children, as if one had acquired a certain existential wisdom and authority in the frequentation of rubble. Yet in a prose insert, the poem also conveys the utter horror one must feel when facing the ruination of one’s home or the maiming of one’s body. The alternation between prose and unrhymed poetry reprises and inverts the paradox of a ruin at once commonplace and exceptional, familiar yet acutely painful. The prose fragment speaks of the unfathomable and incomprehensible shock of the ruin, while the verse segments depict its ordinariness. It is as if poetic discourse were in truck with the everyday, acknowledging from the outset its inability to convey the sublime violence intrinsic in the experience of ruin. This ubiquity of ruins stands in relationship to modern times, a relationship the title of “Contemporary Song” asks us to explore. Ruins exist in an environment of rapid construction and reconstruction. “The profusion of cities fills us all with optimism,” the speaker in the poem proclaims, where the “us” refers to people who have been preserved from direct contact with catastrophic ruination. In contrast, ruin victims roundly condemn the keeping of mementos from the past: “In our days,—so they say,—it is useless to keep photographs.” Modernity, so to say, has created unique conditions of vulnerability to the threat of destruction, as well as...