1. Bethea, David, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton, 1994), 93 Google Scholar.

2. Brodsky, Joseph, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York, 1986), 195 Google Scholar.

3. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coleridge, H. N., 2 vols. (New York, 1835), 2:137 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

4. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 196 Google Scholar.

5. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 46, 124, 248Google Scholar.

6. There are, of course, numerous shades of similarity and difference between Brodsky's verse and that of his Silver Age predecessors. A full examination of them lies beyond the scope of this article, but the following generalization may be ventured here: in Brodsky's own terms he practiced “good acoustics” in his attempt to be a “cupola for his predecessors,” so that echoes can be discerned that do not drown out his own voice. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 132 Google Scholar. Also one may say generally that Brodsky seems more dazzled by Tsvetaeva and less willing or able to echo her than Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova, whose acmeist practice he extends into a bona fide post-acmeism. In any case, this article will be concerned with how Brodsky positions himself as a Silver Age successor rather than with interrogating that tactical positioning.

7. Brodsky, Joseph, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. Komarov, G. F., 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1997-2001), 4:69 Google Scholar.

8. Shaw, W. David, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore, 1994), 214 Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., chap. 1.

10. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 125 Google Scholar.

11. Wachtel, Michael, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. This empty present Brodsky may well have borrowed from Evgenii Baratynskii, whose 1834 poem “Zapustenie” depicts a similarly desiccated sense of present time—the emptiness named in its title. Yet where Brodsky's desolate present persists to the end of the poem, Baratynskii's does not; and that is the vital difference, the fulcrum Brodsky leverages against lyricism.

13. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 50 Google Scholar.

14. Ibid. Brodsky himself most explicitly de-idealizes his elegiac subject in a poem not treated here, “Pamiati Gennadiia Shmakova,” where he refuses to call his interlocutor a “cherub” or a “seraphim“; although he admits that, now dead, Shmakov is a “transgressor of three-dimensional space“: “Ne skazat’ ‘kheruvim, serafim,’ / no—trekhmernykh prostranstv narushitel'.” Brodsky, , Sochineniia, 4:59 Google Scholar.

15. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 123 Google Scholar.

16. This is from part 8 of “Kolybel'naia Treskovogo Mysa,” written in 1975-76. Brodsky, , Sochineniia, 3:87 Google Scholar.

17. Willem G. Weststeijn in his article on this poem notes this reversal, and it leads him to make a claim superficially similar to mine: “The word net denies the first simile, which is probably based on an association the speaker has when he thinks of the ‘ y o u ‘ and replaces it with another simile (based on another association). At the same time, net can be read as a denial of the statement that 1.1 contains: the thought of the ‘you' does not disappear at all. In fact, the entire poem, being dedicated to the memory of the 'you,’ testifies to that.” Weststeijn, , “The Thought of You Is Going Away … ,” in [Losev], Lev Loseff and Polukhina, Valentina, eds., Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (New York, 1999), 180-81Google Scholar. Weststeijn's claim, however, is epistemological (that the thought of the elegized does not disappear) where mine will be ontological (that the elegized herself does not cease to be).

18. It is in book 4, chapter 11 of the Metaphysics that Aristotle famously links time to motion, for it is motion, he says, that allows human beings to perceive “before” and “after,“ in odier words, to “enumerate” change. (Time, as Aristotle formulates it in chapter 12, is the number of motion.) Aristotle's formulation stands in sharp contrast to the speculative mythological and metaphysical accounts given by Plato and Plotinus, of human time as a kind of “fallen” or otherwise devalued eternity. Aristotle attempts rather to base his account of time on the physical world, and his analysis necessarily involves psychology (at issue is always the perception of time). This dual approach—physical and psychological— paves the way for philosophical treatments of temporality for roughly the next 2400 years, since the Platonic (cosmogonic) version of time has hardly withstood serious philosophical scrutiny. Instead, thinkers from St. Augustine (who articulated a coherent psychology of temporal experience) to Immanuel Kant (who enshrined the subjectivity of time as the a priori form of sensible intuition) to Edmund Husserl (who gave an exhaustive phenomenological account of the experience of the present/presence) have preferred to track the relationship between human perception and empirical change, that is, precisely the relationship Aristotle isolated as crucial. As late as the 1960s Martin Heidegger was still carrying out his protracted debate with (and revision of) Aristotle's account of time; and, in another philosophical tradition altogether, analytic philosophers and others sensitive to the claims of the natural sciences, most notably the camp of so-called detensers, continue to foreground their own attempts to account for the human perception of motion and change. The latter group of philosophers has in effect followed physics and attempted to work out a theory that is compatible with Einsteinian relativity (itself an account of the link between motion and time). As recently as 1996 Australian philosopher Huw Price devoted a monograph to analyzing the asymmetry of time (the fact that temporal motion, or change, seems to happen in only one “direction“).

19. Losev, Lev, Iosif Brodskii: Opyt literaturnoi biografii (Moscow, 2006), 176 Google Scholar. Losev dien ventures a generalization with which I agree: “Neither Kierkegaard nor Dostoevskii nor Shestov nor Camus taught Brodsky to be an existentialist, but they helped realize those intuitions that were his own from the start: a sense of loneliness and desolation in the world, of the absurdity of existence in the face of death, a passionate individualism, a feeling of guilt and responsibility.” Ibid.

20. Ibid., 174. The reference to Sartre's participation in Brodsky's fate is an allusion to the letter Sartre sent to Anastas Mikoian (then chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) in 1965 on Brodsky's behalf. See Losev, Iosif Brodskii, 124-26. The only other direct claim Losev makes about Brodsky's relationship to Sartre's thought is that “in the well-known argument about humanism, which was conducted by Sartre (more of a philosopher than a writer) and Camus (more of a writer than a philosopher), Brodsky was on the side of Camus.” Ibid., 176-77.

21. Ibid., 174. For general discussions of existentialism in Brodsky besides Losev's, see, for example, Ranchin, Andrei, Napiru Mnemoziny: Interteksty Iosifa Brodskogo (Moscow, 2001), 146-74Google Scholar; Kreps, Mikhail, Opoezii Iosifa Brodskogo (Ann Arbor, 1984), 196–202, 246-54Google Scholar; Valentina Polukhina,/asegb/i Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (New York, 1989), chap. 6.

22. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 188-89Google Scholar. Brodsky is discussing Tsvetaeva here and laments the lack of evidence of “a thorough knowledge of Lev Shestov's works,” implying a clear intellectual kinship between the poet and the philosopher.

23. Adorno, Theodor W., “Lyric Poetry and Society,” in O'Connor, Brian, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford, 2000), 214 Google Scholar. I have substituted only the words philosophical and philosophy for the words social and society. Adorno adds that “knowledge has compelling authority only when it rediscovers itself in pure and utter submission to the matter [i.e., the poem] at hand.” Ibid.

24. This claim appears in Sartre's writings through a line of influence stretching back from Edmund Husserl and Franz Brentano to Immanuel Kant.

25. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, 1956), 173 Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 174.

27. On the subject-object split as a philosophical fallacy, Martin Heidegger (an important source for Sartre's thinking) is particularly succinct: “the concepts ‘subject’ and 'object’ as they are nowadays employed are ontologically indefinite and hence are inadequate, especially for defining the being that we ourselves are, the being that is meant by soul or subject. We point the question about the being of time in the wrong direction from the beginning if we base it on the alternative as to whether time belongs to the subject or object.” Heidegger, Martin, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Hofstadter, Albert (Bloomington, 1982), 255 Google Scholar.

28. Weststeijn, , “The Thought of You …,” 187 Google Scholar; Kreps, , Opoezii Iosifa Brodskogo, 23 Google Scholar.

29. Sartre, , Being and Nothingness, 171-72Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 166.

31. Ibid., 694.

32. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 49 Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., 103. Emphasis added.

34. Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 90 Google Scholar.

35. Scodel, Joshua, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, 1991), 2 Google Scholar.

36. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 50 Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., 196; the full passage is quoted above. In a sense Brodsky's conventional elegy to his parents is in prose, and in English—namely, the essay “In a Room and a Half.“ Brodsky, , Less Than One, 447–501 Google Scholar. The essay is so replete with genre conventions (ritual naming, remembering as resisting the flow of time, formal motifs of home and preservation, even perhaps the work of mourning) that it could profitably be analyzed as a 45- stanza prose poem in the elegy genre. The essay also corroborates many of the details of the two poems (his father loved to travel, though he could never leave the Soviet Union; phone conversations with him played an important role in Brodsky's life; his mother's domesticity is emphasized, in particular the act of doing the dishes; both parents are characterized as grumblers, complainers). Knowing these things does not, however, throw any light on the poems themselves; they remain stubbornly unconventional elegies.

38. O'Connor, , ed., Adorno Reader, 211 Google Scholar.

39. Kundera, Milan, The Art of the Novel, rev. ed. (New York, 2000), 137-38Google Scholar. Kundera senses profound danger in lyricism: “Revolution has no desire to be examined or analyzed; it only desires that the people merge with it. For that reason, revolutions are lyrical and in need of lyricism.” Ibid. See also Kundera, , “Die Weltliteratur,” The New Yorker (8 January 2007): 33–34 Google Scholar, where he marshals Witold Gombrowicz's well-known attack on poetry to his cause, refers derisively to “seduction by the lyrical,” and posits the novel as the great antidote to the lyrical impulse.

40. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 261, 262Google Scholar.

41. Brodsky, Joseph, “Introduction,” in Kis, Danilo, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Mikic-Mitchell, Duska (New York, 1980), xvi Google Scholar.

42. Kaufman, Robert, “Adorno's Social Lyric and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in Huhn, Tom, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 363 Google Scholar.

43. Lotman, M. Iu., “On the Death of Zhukov,” in [Losev], Loseff and Polukhina, , eds., Joseph Brodsky, 55, 56Google Scholar.

44. Polukhina, , Joseph Brodsky, 226-27Google Scholar. In the second quote, Polukhina is referring to an assessment made by Losev.

45. Semenov, Vadim, Iosif Brodskii v severnoi ssylke: Poetika avtobiografizma (Tartu, 2004), 138 Google Scholar.

46. Kreps, , O poezii Iosifa Brodskogo, 28, 29 Google Scholar.

47. Losev, A. (pseud, of Lev Losev), “Iosif Brodskii: Posviashchaetsia logike,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, 1978, no. 127: 130 Google Scholar.

48. Adorno, , “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 215 Google Scholar.

49. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 205, 180Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., 188.

51. Ibid., 211.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 255.

54. Ibid., 235. Emphasis in die original.

55. Here one thinks especially of the early poem “Razgovor s nebozhitelem” and Brodsky's general pronouncement that “any art is directed to the ear of the Almighty,“ by which he means, as he explains, that “a poem, if it's not a prayer, then it's at least put in motion by the same mechanism as prayer.” Volkov, Solomon, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey through the Twentieth Century, trans. Schwartz, Marian (New York, 1998), 92 Google Scholar.

56. Polukhina., , Joseph Brodsky, 229 Google Scholar.

57. Kublanovskii, Iurii, “Poeziia novogo izmereniia,” Novyi mir, 1991, no. 2: 243 Google Scholar.

58. Potts, Abbie FindlayCf., The Elegiac Mode: PoeticForm in Wordsworth and Other Elegists (Ithaca, 1967), 60, 62Google Scholar.

59. The idea put forward here, that Brodsky uses a pure intentionality in place of a more traditional psychological ego, parallels Sartre's description of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York, 1957), esp. 36-54.

60. On “consolatory aesthetic closure,” see Scodel, , English Poetic Epitaph, 109 Google Scholar.

61. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 49 Google Scholar. The essay is titled “The Keening Muse,” a telling detail in itself. Brodsky's muse could hardly be described as “keening.“

62. Ibid., 263-64.

63. Losev, Lev, “Chekhovskii lirizm u Brodskogo,” in [Losev], Lev Loseff, ed., Poetika Brodskogo: Sbornik statei (Tenafly, N.J., 1986), 187 Google Scholar.

64. I am aware that this definition is not unlike Bakhtin's definition of the novel (a case he builds pardy based on a reductive definition of poetry). The definition I am proposing here could be called, in Bakhtin's terms, the novelization of die lyric.

65. Though it lies beyond the scope of this article, I would argue that Brodsky adopts different models of time as various individual poems (or types of poems) call for it. This would then require that philosophers other than Sartre be used to aid in poetic exegesis.

66. Compare Mikhail Kreps's idea of the “ladder of meaning” in Brodsky's poetry. Kreps describes a similar but less rigorous movement from idea to idea within Brodsky's poems. Kreps, , O poezii Iosifa Brodskogo, 53–54 Google Scholar.

67. Brodsky, , Less Than One, 265 Google Scholar.

68. Nussbaum, Martha C., Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York, 1990), 3 Google Scholar.

69. Shallcross, Bożena, Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (Evanston, 2002), 124-25Google Scholar.