Joseph Brodsky / Image courtesy of magictoken
Had Joseph Brodsky not died in 1996, he would have been 70 years old this past Monday. The Russian-speaking Internet is abuzz with opinions about the Nobel laureate’s birthday and what it means for his body of work. Many commentators focus on the tragedy of his untimely death—a death particularly painful to Russian readers because Brodsky is almost universally recognized as a genius who breathed a new kind of life into the Russian language. How ironic, then, that he ultimately became U.S. Poet Laureate! (Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, after which he taught at American universities for over twenty years, beginning with my alma mater, the University of Michigan.)
Brodsky’s friend and fellow poet Anatoly Naiman, writing in Kommersant, argues that “observing—much less celebrating—the 70th birthday of a person who died at 55 is, generally speaking, absurd. That several of his peers who were close to him in his youth are alive confirms without a doubt that he certainly could have been alive now. And that he left us means that it was not written in the book of fate, or written at his birth, or wherever such things are written, that he would reach seventy. For such figures after death another kind of counting takes over in the calendar: the next date is set at 100, then 150, 200.” If there is a bright side to any of this, Naiman continues, it is that Brodsky the person—as opposed to Brodsky the poet—hasn’t yet been forgotten: “Today’s date is simply an occasion to reminisce about him while there are still those who can remember.”
Another Leningrad poet and contemporary of Brodsky’s, Yevgeny Rein, writes in Literaturnaya Gazeta that Brodsky left a gaping hole in literature that has yet to be filled: “And now, fourteen years after his death, in Russian poetry there invariably continues to be felt a certain emptiness. Poetry seems to have persisted, but it has come to look like a stream on whose bed rush a few dozen rivulets. This stream no longer has a main current, so swimming out into deep waters is impossible.”
