Brodsky’s Nobel lecture - post 1/4
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far – far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny – for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.
This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address ‘urbi et orbi’, as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.
The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that – for stylistic reasons, in the first place – one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn’t have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.
These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me – more often perhaps than the case should be – to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists – and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one – if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one’s conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far – far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny – for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.
This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address ‘urbi et orbi’, as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.
The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that – for stylistic reasons, in the first place – one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn’t have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.
These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me – more often perhaps than the case should be – to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists – and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one – if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one’s conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel
Brodsky’s Nobel lecture - post 2/4
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations.
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations.
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel
Brodsky’s Nobel lecture - post 3/4
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent – better yet, the infinite – against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics – not to mention its aesthetics – are always “yesterday”. Language and literature are always “today”, and often – particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox – they may even constitute “tomorrow”. One of literature’s merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology – that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, “victim of history”. What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliché”.
#josephbrodsky #nobel
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent – better yet, the infinite – against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics – not to mention its aesthetics – are always “yesterday”. Language and literature are always “today”, and often – particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox – they may even constitute “tomorrow”. One of literature’s merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology – that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, “victim of history”. What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliché”.
#josephbrodsky #nobel
Brodsky’s Nobel lecture - post 4/4
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
🖋️
“There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.”
#josephbrodsky #nobel