Cynthia L.

Haven

No Other Place,
No Other Time
Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets. By Irena
Grudzińska Gross. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
362 pp. $40.00, hardcover.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, vol. 2. By

Valentina Polukhina. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008.
604 pp. $29.95, paperback.

When the disheveled, nervous, and unknown poet walked to the

podium, time seemed to stop.
“It was an astonishing and, at the same time, almost tragic perfor-
mance. That is, there were tragic dimensions to it — a young poet,
virtually alone on stage,” recalled Daniel Weissbort, who had also
attended London’s Poetry International Festival in June 1972.
Joseph Brodsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union only a
few days earlier, and W. H. Auden had taken him under his broad,
protective wing, shielding him from journalists as best he could.
Weissbort recalled that the younger poet was “alone in the world, with
nothing but his poems, nothing but the Russian language, of which
he was already a ‘master,’ or as he would have preferred to say, ‘a ser-
vant’ ” (Polukhina 542).
Then the poet poured out his poems in the hypnotic incantation
that was to become his trademark: an archaic sound — a lament from
a lost civilization, an ancient prayer, or simply a metronomic wail.
And then it was over.
“When he ended, the audience was as stunned as the poet on
stage was now silent — inaccessible, emptied, a kind of simulacrum of
himself. It was as if the air had been drained of sound. And the appro-
priate response would have been that, a soundlessness, in which you
would hear only your own breathing, be aware only of your own
physicality, your isolated self,” says Weissbort, who later became one
of Brodsky’s translators. “To say we were impressed is putting it far
too mildly. We were moved, emotionally, even physically” (543).
Brodsky’s Western debut is among a number of stunning recol-
lections in Valentina Polukhina’s Brodsky Through the Eyes of His
Contemporaries, vol. 2. But every story depends on where you begin it.
Irena Grudzińska Gross describes a different baptism for the long
exile of the Russian poet in her Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky:
Fellowship of Poets. Brodsky received a letter of advice from a col-
league in July 1972: “Everything depends on the man and on his
internal health,” Czesław Miłosz had written. “What else can I say?
The first months of exile are hard. They shouldn’t be taken as a mea-
sure of what is to come. With time you will see that perspective
changes” (2).
The letter dispensing such sage equanimity was a far cry from
Miłosz’s own desperate loneliness after his Paris defection in 1951. No
mention of the drinking binges and bouts of severe depression.
Surprising, perhaps, given the first sentence of his post-defection dec-
laration, “Nie” [No]: “What I’m going to tell now could well be called
a story of a suicide”(55.) The decades had infused him with what
Gross calls “a Californian serenity”(232).
Brodsky returned Miłosz’s support startlingly early, six short
years later. By then he had eclipsed the reclusive Polish maestro in
celebrity. Brodsky successfully put Miłosz’s name forward for the
Neustadt Prize, a harbinger of the Nobel.
“I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czesław Miłosz is
one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest,” Brodsky
had famously claimed. “Even if one strips his poems of the stylistic
magnificence of his native Polish . . . and reduces them to the naked
subject matter, we still find ourselves confronting a severe and relent-
less mind of such intensity that the only parallel one is able to think
of is that of the biblical characters — most likely Job”(81-82).
 Gross writes that Brodsky’s presentation — four densely packed
paragraphs — “witnesses to an incredibly quick acclimatization of the
immigrant poet” and “his place and influence within the poetic
establishment”(81).
The turnabout in roles makes a further point: the two future
Nobel laureates were opposite nodes in a reconfigured literary force-
field, operating on a frequency inaudible to most Western ears.
Significantly, Gross’s book was published three years ago as Miłosz i
Brodski. Pole magnetyczne [Miłosz and Brodsky. Magnetic Fields] — a
more evocative title for Eastern European readers attuned to the
poets’ lives and thinking. In Polukhina’s book, Sontag summarizes
Brodsky’s impact on the West this way: “He landed among us like a
missile from another empire, whose payload was not only his genius,
but his native literature’s exalted, exacting sense of the poet’s
authority”(328).

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