Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia by Sanna Turoma (review)

This is a book about Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky’s travels after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and died in New York after a heart attack in 1996. He retains prominent status among people who appreciate Russian and classic world literature.

The author, Sanna Turoma, is a senior researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki), Academy of Finland, and the book is based on her doctoral dissertation.

Due to Brodsky’s profoundly nonconformist stance, he was persecuted in the Soviet Union, sentenced to a term of internal exile, and later “strongly advised” to emigrate. After settling in the United States and pursuing various academic and nonacademic jobs, he had the opportunity to travel around the world. These travels were reflected in his poems and Sanna Turoma has written a book focused on Brodsky’s writing about four locations: Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Venice. For comparison, in the second chapter of the book, Turoma adds a perspective on Brodsky’s pre-emigration period poems and essays about his native Leningrad.

The author defines the scope of the book: “The book aims at setting Brodsky in a dialogue with leading representatives of postcolonial and postmodern theories in order to recontextualize the scholarly investigation of his travel poetry and prose” (P. 5). In short, Turoma looks at how places are contextualized and interpreted depending on their cultural and social meaning for Brodsky. She is interested in how Brodsky linked different locations with specific cultural, religious, or historical meanings and how the description of a visited place was structured by the poet’s self-identification and self-perception, by his cultural background and origin. Brodsky’s self-positioning was determined by different markers; he carried with him the burden of being an emigrant from the Soviet Union who never really adapted to the West. In his travels outside of Europe Brodsky also encountered cultures that were non-European or non-Christian, factors that also changed his self-positioning. Brodsky’s personality and biography are so intensively reflected in his poems that in reading this book I came to realize that the monograph could be seen as a psychoanalytical treatise through travel writing.

Certainly the book reveals much about Brodsky’s ideas and attitudes through his poetry. By looking at the travel poetry, the author suggests that travel writing as such has its roots in colonialism, in the epoch when educated noblemen traveled outside of Europe and described the countries they visited as the Other, from the perspective of Orientalism (P. 56). Brodsky, who grew up in Leningrad, exposed similar attitudes. His writings from that period reflect his strong nostalgia for empire combined with the Soviet kitchen dissident, typical of piterskie intellectuals (P. 69). This imperial nostalgia was apparently also the reason why Brodsky was always hostile to contemporary art and architecture (P. 58). In his later years Brodsky published several poems and essays idealizing Leningrad/St. Petersburg’s “magnificent” past (P. 76), even comparing it to the British Empire. In the last pages of the chapter about Leningrad, Turoma introduces another aspect of Brodsky’s philosophy: constant attempts to define Russian national identity, rooted in the imperial past as expressed in the architecture of the “old Petersburg.” These few pages help to explain why Russian émigrés have often failed to adapt in the West. Notwithstanding their anti-Soviet stance, they have nevertheless identified themselves with the culture of a country with a great history and grand influence on the world. Turoma here finds traces of postcolonial nostalgia and self-identification with a great empire that has ceased to exist.

According to Turoma, Brodsky viewed other countries through the eyes of the piterskii intellectual who never felt comfortable in, and never fully accepted, other cultures. “From Brodsky’s metropolitan Soviet viewpoint” (P. 86), Mexico, with its exotica, underdeveloped economy, poverty, and legacy of a native empire gone...