English as Sanctuary: Nabokov's and Brodsky's Autobiographical Writings

Abstract

A writer's biography is in his of language, Joseph Brodsky wrote in Less than his first English essay (Less than One, 3).1 By that he meant, most likely, that there is no real need for a writer's biography since it already exists in that writer's very language which, twisting along the same paths as the artist's life, reflects and records the most vital developments of his or her being. Ironically, as Brodsky was writing that essay in 1976, his own biography was beginning to be paralleled in the twists of not one language but two: Joseph Brodsky was rapidly becoming a bilingual writer. Literary is one of the most fascinating developments of literature in exile, and it has been drawing increasing critical attention in recent years. While Samuel Beckett still remains the most critically wellcharted territory in this respect, there are now a number of works discussing not only other bilingual writers but also whole cultural traditions of bilingualism.2 Regardless of how we define it, literary bilingualism is, of course, not a totally modern phenomenon. Quite a few Western European writers of previous centuries, including Thomas More and John Milton, chose to writer certain works in Latin rather than their native tongues. Likewise, in Russian literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now and then comes across works (like PNtr C~aadaev's famous Philosophical Letters [1829]) written in French. Brodsky himself alluded to this fact recently when he stated in a 1990 interview that