World Culture

In the midst of all the recent blogtalk of "nuking Europe", the "disease" of European culture, and so on, I found it salutory to re-read Joseph Brodsky's Nobel Lecture of 1987. Years ago, I used to visit Joseph at 44 Morton Street, New York, and worked with him on translations of his poems, and also on versions of Tsvetayeva. He was the first person to read and actually praise my Mandelstam translations, back in the early 1970s. I liked and admired him immensely, and for me he was a guide and mentor through the Dantesque pathways and circles of Russian literature.

I want to quote two paragraphs from the lecture here, as I think they have a bearing on the situation of Europe, Russia and the United States today, in the new global situation we all face:

Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change the subject. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. "How can one write music after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp - and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. "And how can you eat lunch?" the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.

That generation - the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself - that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty - indeed, a terrifyingly wasted - place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

The people Brodsky is talking about here - the generation who fought and resisted the oppression of the Soviet state, often silently and inwardly, though also with great bravery, like Brodsky himself, like Bukovsky, Galanskov, Ginzburg, Chernikhov and others, in acts of public defiance - are the people I believe we in the West need to learn from now, when the very foundations of our culture and civilization are being challenged and threatened by forces that are the heirs and successors to the great tyrannies of the 20th century.

I hope to post more about this kind of resistance in future on this blog. To many - even most - Westerners, it's still an unknown quantity.