Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy by David Rigsbee (review)

Abstract

154 SEER, 79, I, 2001 tradition and innovation in Russian literature and evaluates the novel's prescriptionfor social ills frorm both aesthetic and ethical angles (as indicated in the title). Henrietta Mondry's essay, 'The Russian LiteraryPress, 1993-98: Critics Reach Reconciliation With their Audience', is an exploration of some of the most significantissuesaddressedin contemporaryRussianjournals, including ideologies of patriotismand nationalismand anti-Semitism;and the trendsin their reception. Mondry's decision to investigate the contemporary literary press is perhaps ironic, given that the readership of thesejournals has now dropped to an unprecedented low. She notes that 'market forces' have in effect'dismantledthe concept of the literarycanon' and alsotracksthewaning of ideological battlesin criticalfora(p. 123). Individually, the essays are interesting, but together they fail to form a cohesive whole. The introductionservesas a lukewarmeffortto bind together the four pieces of work contained in the volume, but no synergetic effect is achieved. In Swift's essay, he notes that P'etsukh'believes that the Russian reader will sample, out of curiosity, the new offerings in pornography, adventure tales and mysteriesbut will ultimatelyfind them unsatisfyingand return to literature of substance the classics and contemporary Russian literature'(p. 65). Indeed, this unifyingtheme appearsto surfacein severalof the pieces contained in this volume, identifyingan anxiety of sortsabout the future of 'serious' Russian literature given the proliferation of mass culture combined with changing tastes. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ELIZABETHSKOMP tniversityCollege London Rigsbee, David. Styles of Ruin. joseph Brodskyand the Postmodernist Elegy. Contributions to the Study of World Literature,93. Greenwood Press, Westport,CT, i999. xx + I7I pp. Index. ?43.95. IN this reworked I996 University of Virginia doctoral dissertation, David Rigsbee, Professor of English at Mount Olive College in North Carolina, searchesforcommon threadsamong the elegiesJoseph Brodskiiwrote in both the USSR and the West. In so doing, he argues that the elegy 'standsas the most sadlyfittingtwentieth-centurygenre' thanksto the abilityof a poet such as Brodskiito 'shiftto the cosmologicalequivalentof language' (p. I50). Rigsbee pays particularattention to four pre-emigrationtexts: 'The Great Elegy forJohn Donne', 'Verseson the Death of T. S. Eliot', 'Almostan Elegy' and 'The Burialof Bobo' (pp. I9-62,passim). He does so despite the existence of authoritative commentaries by David Bethea, Mikhail Kreps, David NMacFadyen, Valentina Polukhinaand others and despite his own contention that the poet's elegiac dimension 'had seemed to arrivetoutcourt with the fact of his exile to the Westin 1972' (P. 4). These poems are all of a piece, being for the most part heavily stressed iambic pentameters (and little differentin George Kline's translations),while thelaterelegies arestylisticallyand formallydistinct.Nouns fallatthe rhyming position in the Russian originals of these poems in overwhelming numbers REVIEWS 155 and occur relentlesslyline by line in the poem to Donne (i963). Moreover, that text and the one to Eliot (i 965) both deal lesswith wintrydeath than with the revival that naturallyfollows hibernation. The latter looks ahead to new life from its very firstlines: 'On umer v ianvare, v nachale goda . .. Neuspevala pokazat'prirodaEmu svoikhkrasotkordebalet. . .' The Anglo-Saxon view of winter, less benign than that of many Russian authors, for example, Pushkin and Bunin, leads Rigsbee to derive unwarranted interpretations from the Kline translations.Thus, in anotherline fromthat elegy, puddleshave turned to ice, a reversible process ('Na perekrestkakhzamerzali luzhi ...'). Kline here has the poetic 'stiffened',which Rigsbee perversely connects with the English colloquialism for a corpse (p. 43). These poets obviously suffered physical demise but they survive through their texts and through their successors' glorification. The same holds true for Brodskii's poem on the centenary of Anna Akhmatova, which, curiously, goes unmentioned in this book. In briefer discussions Rigsbee considers various emigre poems, many of whose Englishtranslationsinvolvedcollaboration andeven modificationon the part of the poet himself. Unfortunately, Rigsbee allows himself to be distractedby blemishes in translationand lines that simply do not carrytheir music over into English (for example, p. 92), to say nothing of his failure to alert the reader to quotations from Mandel'shtam, Brodskii'solder Russian poet-in-exile. The key poems here are '1972', 'On the Death of Zhukov', the much-discussed 'Butterfly', 'Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots', 'Lullaby of Cape Cod', 'To a Friend: In Memoriam', 'The Thames at Chelsea', 'December in Florence' and 'York:In...