“The detail should not fall into dependence on the landscape!” or Brodsky's “On the Talks in Kabul,” Derzhavin, Genre, and Identity

Abstract

Provoked by two exclamation points, a set of unadventurous rhymes, and a verse form based on relatively long lines and a free dol'nik, my colleague Gerald Smith took it upon himself to investigate the meaning and nature of Brodsky's On the Talks in Kabul. This may confirm the opinion of some in our field that those of us interested in verse structure have taken leave of our senses. However, these doubting Slavists are wrong. Professor Smith has led us to a rich and substantive problem that lies at the heart of Brodsky's poetics. More than this, the ramifications of the investigation reach beyond Brodsky to include the role of the genre as a force of literary reality, and even more broadly, the role of the poet as a moral presence in the world. They raise questions of identity, power, and politics. What is a poet? What is a state? What is a human being? And what is the relation among these entities? Smith concludes his comments with a question that sums up the issues and seems to imply its own answer. He suggests that the persona of the poem is not Brodsky at all, but a diplomatic functionary at some distance from the poet's self: Perhaps the text of the poem is best understood as a scathingly ironic representation of the unsayable thoughts that go through the mind or the unconscious of some dimwitted ex-Soviet Russian diplomat as he prepares to face the talks in Kabul? Perhaps. The meaning of the poem depends on a larger literary context that encompasses both the formal details that drew Professor Smith's attention in the first place, and the work's odd mixture of seriousness, projected Orientalism, and vulgarity. And while Harold Bloom might claim that Brodsky would disguise the context, I would adapt Michael Wachtel's statement about the Symbolists to Brodsky, and argue rather that the omnivorous cosmopolitan Brodsky evinced an anxious desire to be influenced.' In On the Talks in Kabul, Brodsky all but forces us to look back to the works of Gavrila Derzhavin, a poet profoundly concerned with issues of empire, power, and moral position, and a poet who also toyed with the identity of his poetic persona and the formal details of the genre of the ode. Brodsky had established his relation to Derzhavin some years earlier with an elegy entitled Na smert' Zhukova (On the Death of Zhukov), which recasts Derzhavin's Snigir'