Today is Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky’s 85th birthday. What better way to celebrate than by celebrating the books that have celebrated him.One is by my humble self, the book by Ellendea Proffer, who with her husband, the late Carl Proffer, brought the future Nobel poet to America. There’s lots more. Go here.
Oh, there’s another good way to celebrate, perhaps the best: return to his books, essay, and lectures. See more here. Thanks to Vladimir Maksakov for compiling a list. You can see the rest of his list here. (What? It’s in Russian, you complain? C’mon. It’s the 21st century. Google Translate is a thing. And you probably have an automatic translate button in the upper righthand corner of your Mac.)
Three of the booksrecommended by Vladimir Maksamov – from Russia with love:
A biographical novel and memoirs written on principle and forced from an artistic point of view – Brodsky asked to close access to his diaries, letters and family documents for 50 years. It is all the more interesting to get into the space on the edge of fiction, where Losev reconstructs the main biographical myth of the poet. And this seems a convincing move, because such a biography in many ways continues poetry. Friendship with the hero of the book – and the fact that the author himself was a good poet – adds color to this largely unique text.
Memories of Brodsky in the USA. From Joseph to Joseph, teaching, cultural bilingualism, finding a new poetic voice – and all this against the backdrop of Brodsky’s everyday life. It’s hard not to see in this an objectified metaphor: everyday life was still poeticized, and Brodsky, fortunately for world culture, very successfully fit into the new realities for himself. The book is read with nostalgia: the USA of those years was much more hospitable than today.
Translation: Svetlana Silakova Published by Academic Studies Press, 2023; “New Literary Review”, 2024
Conversations of the first and in many ways the main translator of Brodsky into English. Meetings with Brodsky and the KGB, episodes of an almost spy story, the deepest level of work with texts – all this against the backdrop of a huge love for Russia. But in addition, these conversations are also an attempt to talk about the possibility of dialogue and the willingness to come to the aid of a person who found himself in exile. It seems that both the Soviet and American sides in the realities of the Cold War knew how to value culture much more than we think.
READ ABOUT THE REST OF THE VLADIMIR MAKSAKOV’S SELECTIONS HERE
And light a candle for the poet’s birthday. A good 85th to you, Joseph, wherever you are.
The funeral of Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhinwas held today at a private cemetery on the outskirts of St Petersburg, his home town. He died when his business jet crashed last week. It’s been two months since he staged an aborted mutiny against Russian military commanders. At that time, his troops briefly took control of the southern city of Rostov and advanced towards Moscow. Vladimir Putin did not attend the services today.
He was buried without military honors, according to Meduza, noting that instead, a few “cryptic” lines from Joseph Brodsky were placed beside his grave.
“The farewell to Yevgeny Viktorovich took place in a closed format. Those who wish to say goodbye may visit Porokhovskoye cemetery,” the press service said in its first post on Telegram in two months, ending days of speculation over how the warlord would be laid to rest.
“Pro-Russian media also published images of Prigozhin’s headstone at the Porokhovskoye cemetery. Prigozhin’s name is written on the headstone, alongside a poem by the St Petersburg-born Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky.”
I wondered which poem was it was, and was not surprised to learn it is “Nature Morte.” As I guessed, it’s the last three stanzas. In George L. Kline‘s translation:
Mary now speaks to Christ: ‘Are you my son? – or God? You are nailed to the cross. Where lies my homeward road?
‘Can I pass through my gate not having understood: Are you dead? – or alive? Are you my son? – or God?’
Christ speaks to her in turn: ‘Whether dead or alive, woman, it’s all the same – son or God, I am thine.’
The publication of a book usually invites correspondence, and the emails arrived in my inbox before this book was published. One of the more interesting was from a notable Irish philosopher, William Desmond; his titles are many: David Cook Chair in Philosophy, Villanova University; Thomas A.F. Kelly Visiting Chair in Philosophy, Maynooth University, Ireland; and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Institute of Philosophy, in Leuven, Belgium.
He knew Kline long before I began corresponding with the unassuming Bryn Mawr scholar: “George Kline was a very good friend of mine over decades from the early 80s, and intellectual companion in relation to my own interests in Russian thought,” he wrote. It is something I note in the introduction to my book: for many of us, George Kline is remembered as the translator of the 1973 Selected Poems – but after his death in 2014, the tributes discussed his his role as a philosopher, with an emphasis on Russian philosophy and religion, and mentioned his Brodsky translations only in passing.
“George’s areas of excellence in philosophy primarily concerned the study of Hegel, works in Russian philosophy and culture, and research in process philosophy, especially Whitehead.” The words are from Desmond’s preface to George L. Kline On Hegel, a posthumous collection of 15 essays “covering forty-five years of work by one of America’s most prominent Hegel scholars,” according to Amazon. The book was published by Gegensatz Press in 2015. “Though this book deals primarily with the first area of study, there are contributions in which the overlap between Hegel and Russian thought, as well as between Hegel and process philosophy, is evident. I knew of his work in all of these areas,” Desmond wrote. Also from his preface: “As a human being, George was a generous, attentive, and engaged person. I was struck by his willingness and ability always to ‘stay in touch,’ even when one did not directly meet him over a long period. If there was something professorial about him on occasion, those who knew him came to appreciate very quickly that there was much more to him, not least a deep, warm, and wise humanity. As a scholar, he excelled in many different spheres of expertise … As a human being, his generosity extended into his academic work, and in my experience, and no doubt in the experience of many more people, he was munificently gracious with the time and the care he offered in support of other scholars.”
According to the volume’s editor Eric v.d. Luft, “Kline was a Socratic ‘midwife’ in the best sense of that term.” He added, “His influence remains subtle but far-reaching, and has met with almost universal respect.”
An excerpt from Luft’s essay:
“Being George Kline’s student was one of the highlights of my life. In a sense, I ‘knew’ him even before I met him. When I was a junior at Bowdoin in 1972-1973, I needed advice about how to choose a graduate school. Professor of Religion William D. Geoghegan spoke with me at length about this problem and – as always – gave me excellent advice. He said that I should not choose a school based on its reputation, its size, or its prestige. Rather, I should pick a professor whose student I would want to be, regardless of whether this person taught at a great, a good, a mediocre, or even a bad school. Going to a great school but suffering under a poor advisor, mentor, or dissertation director would not help me. Geoghegan therefore urged me to delve into the recent journal literature, read as many articles in my chosen field as I could find, and decide which of these authors would be most compatible with my interests. During this conversation he showed me a copy of Christensen’s Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion – which he thought was hideously overpriced – waved it around and slammed it on the huge table in his office among his hundreds of other books – all of which I was sure he had read – and declared: ‘There is only one good article in this whole book, and George Kline wrote it. I think you should consider studying with him.’ He also suggested Louis Dupré, so I applied only to Yale, where Dupré was, and to Bryn Mawr, where Kline was. Yale rejected me and Bryn Mawr accepted me, so my destiny was determined. … With this book, I hope in some small way to honor the memory of Professor Kline and to give something back in return for all he did for me.”
“Kline was the most gracious of gentlemen. He always kept an open mind, did not seek disciples, did not care whether people agreed with him as long as they could cogently defend their own positions, and never, for example, held it against me that I had no interest whatsoever in Soviet studies. He could never say no to any request or favor that any of his friends or colleagues might ask – and this graciousness often got him into trouble with overextension and overcommitment, but he worked like a beaver and thereby produced a prodigious amount of work, both for himself and on behalf of others. As the director of both my master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation, he devoted much more than the expected time, energy, and involvement to these projects. He and I would spend hours and hours together in his office – sometimes entire afternoons – poring over nuances of meaning that those on the outside might have dismissed as pedantic, but for us were the keys to proper interpretation. We both firmly believed that no one could approach the core of any philosopher’s thought, or grasp it accurately, without studying the text in the original language, and that, accordingly, no translation, even if done with painstaking precision, could ever serve as more than an introduction to any philosophy which had first been expressed in another culture, another set of words, another mode of discourse.”
