Christmas at the "Dacha"

Moscow Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 (undated photo) / Image courtesy of liveinmsk.ru

This Christmas, in place of my usual translation of a nativity poem by a Russian poet, I’m posting an excerpt from an article by Yelena Aizenshtein (Neva, #1, 2012). In this passage, she comments on a lesser-known Christmas poem by Joseph Brodsky, written on the eve of his famous trial and internal exile to the village of Norenskaya for “social parasitism” (тунеядство). I considered simply translating the poem that Aizenshtein describes, but I think her commentary sheds necessary light on parts of the text that could otherwise remain murky. Here is what she has to say:

In 1964, Brodsky spent the New Year holiday in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow: there had been a “war council” at the Ardovs on December 27, 1963, with the participation of Akhmatova. It was decided that he could avoid arrest if he got treatment with the help of some psychiatrists they knew at the Kashchenko Mental Hospital and then received a certificate of his “mental instability.” On January 8, 1964, the day after Orthodox Christmas, the newspaper Evening Leningrad published a selection of indignant “readers’ letters” demanding harsh punishment for the “social parasite Brodsky.” That January, Brodsky wrote the poem “New Year’s at the Kanatchikovo Dacha.”* He paints his lines in gloomy tones. The poet sees the absence of traditional Christmas images as omens of an unlucky year and its coming calamities:

No magi, no donkey,

no star, no blizzard

to save the child from death—

they disperse like circles

at the strike of an oar.

The poem is structured on the model of a lullaby for oneself, sung from the sixth ward—this is the Chekhovian “Ward No. 6,” and it is a terrible billet, “a land where insulin is king,” where Brodsky ended up “in clouds of bed sheets,” instead of in the sky of free thought. The poet sees himself as a Christmas goose devoured by the power of the state. The lullaby helps the speaker of the poem not to fear his fate: “Sleep, Christmas goose. / Fall quickly asleep.” Another image that stands in for the speaker is a cricket singing from behind the baseboard (was Brodsky thinking of Pushkin’s nickname?), whose song corresponds to the song of a large violin bow, somehow contrary to the violence of the institute:

The song sung by a cricket

here in the red baseboard

is like the song of a great bow,

since sounds always grow,

like the glint of your pupil

through the great institute.

The Christmas motif is made invisible in the USSR, like a “double winter” that has lasted two thousand years: only the blizzard and the winter landscape remind us of Christmas. The author cunningly structures the text as not quite “normal,” as unwell: the theme of fear is made urgently relevant, with white as an analogue for the hospital, lifelessness, death, unfreedom. But the poem contains the author’s ruefully ironic view on what is happening: “the night turns white with a key / split fifty-fifty with the head doctor.” It concludes with a tercet in which the rhyme words are ‘hospitals’, ‘eye-sockets’, and ‘birds’ [bol'nitsy, glaznitsy, ptitsy], images of the author’s existence in the psychiatric hospital, and his sense of dread at the endured moment:

bodies’ terror – of hospitals,

clouds’ terror – of eye-sockets,

insects’ terror – of birds.

[Translation mine]

*     *     *

I’m sure some will find the content of this post a tad gloomy for the holiday season, but if Brodsky’s experience is any indicator, Christmas is not always sugarplums dancing in our heads. Anyway, I find some solace in the mere fact of his turning that experience into art—and going on to write his nativity poems for decades to come.

Merry Christmas?

__________________

* “Kanatchikovo Dacha” is a well-known nickname for the Kashchenko Mental Hospital, whose official name is actually Moscow Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No. 1. Until 1994, the hospital was named for Pyotr Kashchenko (1858-1920), a noted Russian psychiatrist, and since then has been named for Nikolai Alekseyev (1852-1893), the Moscow city leader who founded the hospital in 1894. The hospital is located in the Kanatchikovo district of Moscow.

In This House Lived a Poet

Plaque on the corner of Pestel Street and Liteyny Prospekt in St. Petersburg

Today is Brodsky’s birthday. If the Nobel laureate were still around, he would have been seventy-two. In his native Saint Petersburg—formerly Leningrad, or in the poet’s lexicon simply “Peter”—Russians are celebrating Brodsky Week, whose goal it is to raise money to open a long-awaited museum in the apartment where Brodsky lived with his parents. According to Russia’s official national paper, the program for the week is “pleasantly unofficious,” including walking tours, a play, and screenings of a documentary about the poet.

Many doubt that Brodsky’s famous “room and a half” will open to the public anytime in the near future. The delay is owing to negotiations with a neighbor who occupies an adjoining apartment. The New Yorker’s Book Bench reported last year that a sale was imminent, but they were obviously mistaken. In the ensuing months, the neighbor’s asking price for the space rose to seventeen million rubles (over $530,000), but she recently agreed to bring it down to twelve million (just shy of $380,000) – still more than the city is willing to pay.

Now, according to Fontanka.ru, project organizers hope that the United States government will pitch in the money needed to close the deal. After all, Brodsky lived in the U.S. for over two decades, and he was the American poet laureate back in the early 1990s. In my own view, a museum jointly funded by the U.S. and Russia would be a fitting tribute to a writer who straddled two cultures and two languages. As Brodsky put it himself, he was a “Russian poet, an English essayist, and of course, an American citizen.”

In the meantime, visitors to Saint Petersburg can drop by the Anna Akhmatova Museum to view Brodsky’s desk and other items from his study, not to mention his postcard collection. As it so happens, I’ll pass through the city in about two weeks on my way to Petrozavodsk, so I might just stop in!

Akhmatova & Brodsky via Venclova

Tomas Venclova (photo by Algimantas Aleksandravicius, 1998) / Image courtesy of fototapeta.art.pl

In a recent interview on Radio Svoboda, billed as a "conversation not so much about poetry as about politics," Lithuanian poet and Yale professor Tomas Venclova nevertheless made several literary connections that are worth stopping on. Venclova was a close friend of Joseph Brodsky, and on several occasions he also sat and talked with Anna Akhmatova. These titans of twentieth-century Russian poetry both came up in Venclova's conversation with interviewer Mikhail Sokolov (as did Pasternak). According to Venclova, here is what the two writers had to say about poetry and politics:

• “Joseph Brodsky told me that poets should not become involved in the dissident movement. Not because it is bad; being a dissident is good and necessary. And not even because it is dangerous, but because it takes up too much time and keeps you from writing poems.”   (Иосиф Бродский мне говорил, что диссидентством поэту заниматься не надо. Не потому, что это плохо – это хорошо и необходимо быть диссидентом. И даже не потому, что это опасно, а потому что это занимает много времени и мешает писать стихи.)

• “Akhmatova taught us to have a contemptuous relation to the powers that be. This was clear to anyone who talked to her, and he or she would also learn to have a contemptuous, perhaps even arrogant relation to all of it. But Akhmatova once said — I remember one political comment she made in a conversation we had: ‘The younger generation, like Brodsky who is now coming up (she also mentioned Rein, Bobyshev, Naiman — you know the group — Gorbanevskaya), they understand a lot, but they will never understand what filth and blood all of it grew from, what filth and blood my generation passed through. They will not understand this. Now the times are tamer.’ ”   (Ахматова учила такому презрительному отношению к властям. Это было ясно каждому, кто с ней общался, и человек тоже учился этому презрительному, может быть даже высокомерному отношению ко всему этому. Но было совершенно очевидно, что это нечто чудовищное, к чему примиряться ни в коем случае не надо. Но Ахматова сказала однажды, я помню одно ее такое политическое высказывание в разговоре: "Молодое поколение, вот растет Бродский (она упомянула еще Рейна, Бобышева, Неймана, вот эту группу, Горбаневскую), они многое понимают, но они никогда не поймут, из какой грязи и крови это выросло, какую грязь и кровь прошло мое поколение. Этого они не поймут. Сейчас времена более вегетарианские".)

[translations mine]

Bella: Woman of the 'Sixties

Bella Akhmadulina / Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

This past Monday, Russia suffered the loss of Bella Akhmadulina, another voice from that hugely influential generation of poets who emerged in the 1960s and quickly achieved celebrity status in the Soviet Union. Alongside Yevgeny Evtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Andrei Voznesensky (who also died this year), Akhmadulina became, according to poet and Radio Svoboda correspondent Elena Fanailova, a “feminine symbol of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’,” appearing on stage, in popular films, and in print.

One should not forget that many poets in the Soviet Union, even major ones like Joseph Brodsky, did not have the luxury of seeing their work appear on the printed page. In fact, Akhmadulina was not always in the good graces of the authorities either: her second collection, Chills (Озноб), could only be released in tamizdat—“over there”—by a Frankfurt publisher run by Russian émigrés. And after she contributed a poem to Vasily Aksyonov’s unsanctioned almanac Metropol in 1979, Soviet officials evidently “branded her a prostitute and drug addict” in retaliation. That’s quite a fall for someone who just a decade before had helped to fill stadiums with crowds hungry for poetry.