Joseph Brodsky the War Poet

Abstract

The way Brodsky, who survived the early months of the Leningrad Siege in infancy, wrote about war, emphasized his refusal to recycle the clichés of official culture, in which themes of wartime sacrifice and Soviet victory occupied a central role. Brodsky’s autobiographical prose recalls the ways in which the Second World War and its aftermath shaped his childhood sense of patriotism and also made him aware of the world beyond the Soviet Union. In his poetry, however, that war appears only occasionally. Taken together, the poems considered in this chapter represent wars dating back to the era of classical antiquity all the way through to conflicts that took place during the poet’s lifetime, including the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. Brodsky writes about wars that can be identified as historical events or part of mythological narratives, as well as wars which remain unspecified in terms of time and place. Yet these apparently disparate poems have features in common: human combatants lack agency or even animacy, while inanimate objects are personified, are able to act, and to feel. The speaker’s perspective as an observer of conflict rather than a participant in it creates a sense of detachment or estrangement. This apparently non-committal stance does not mean, however, that the poems ignore the brutality of war, and the ethical compromises made by those who engage in it. While it would be inappropriate to claim Brodsky as a ‘war poet’, the recurrence of war in his poetry invites us to explore the place it occupied in his reflections on human existence. This chapter explores Brodsky’s distinctive engagement with literary representations of war by classical and Russian authors, in poems which show an awareness of cultural tradition, even as they refuse to succumb to convention.