13 Oct 2011 08:42:18
These essays, collected and published in 1986, won the National Book Critics' award for criticism; and a year later he became the then youngest ever Nobel literary laureate. One hesitates to say that this collection actually won him that prize; but it certainly didn't hurt.
So, if there's an essential essay collection (actually, I think there are plenty), it's this one. Brodsky's prose zips along, even when you are reading about Mandelstam or Tsvetaeva or those other names which in this country are, I suspect, vague abstractions rather than representatives of well-known bodies of work. Brodsky seems to write as if conscious that he is addressing an audience which needs to be brought up to speed from a standing start, yet without insulting their intelligence. Exhibit A in this book would be his piece on Auden's most celebrated poem, and I'll let Seamus Heaney do the talking here: "There will be no greater paean to poetry as the breath and finer spirit of all human knowledge than Brodsky's line-by-line commentary on 'September 1, 1939', if commentary is a word applicable to writing so exultant, so grateful and so bracingly ex cathedra." (I have some reservations about Auden, and that poem, and wonder whether it isn't confused or self-contradictory; Brodsky is man enough to face up to these questions.)
His evocations of life in Soviet Russia should be compulsory reading. He evokes not so much horrors as the quotidian, grinding strictures: the shared bathroom arrangements among families (you could tell who was in the toilet from the volume of their farts; and what they'd had for dinner), and what it's like when it gets to -25 degrees in St Petersburg, and the glass is still dropping.
