A classical mask in defiance of totalitarian censorship

What is it about?

This chapter explores the significance of this artistic belief in the Soviet context after Stalin, where the state had an absolute and exclusive monopoly on setting norms for all manifestations of public and even private life, including art. It posits that Brodsky’s interpretation of classicism was diametrically opposed to the aesthetics of Socialist Classicism. While Stalin’s socialism, as with Italian and German fascisms, had used the label to convey solidity to the monolithic stasis of its utopian political projects, Brodsky saw classicism as a common matrix of ‘world culture’ – the concept passed on to him by his poetic predecessor and model Osip Mandelstam. The chapter argues that Mandelstam’s and later Brodsky’s insistence on ‘world culture’ was a form of aesthetic protest, as it stood in stark contrast with the official programme in Stalinist as well as post-Stalinist Russia – a country that had insulated itself from the rest of the world, severing most of its intellectual and material ties with the West. Conversely, for both Mandelstam and later Brodsky, antiquity became absolutely central as it represented the idea of cultural continuity, the uninterrupted link of times, and the unity of culture. The chapter then proceeds to show that the poets of Brodsky’s generation suffered the effects of ‘cultural disinheritance’ – a feeling of being isolated from the repositories of Western culture, a burden shared by the artists from the Soviet Bloc. To overcome this cultural disinheritance Brodsky and his counterparts taught themselves Polish, as after 1956, censorship restrictions in Poland became significantly less rigid than in Russia. The chapter then conducts comparative close readings of poems by Brodsky and by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998), which use themes and tropes from classical antiquity, discovering similarities in their use of classical themes and imagery, including a shared use of Aesopian language and irony. The chapter concludes that, for Brodsky, the Polish poets and, in particular, Herbert, became the gatekeepers not only to Western culture, but also to classical antiquity.

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Photo by Gian Luca Pilia on Unsplash

Photo by Gian Luca Pilia on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The theorizing of the role of poetry in creating new zones of freedom during Soviet-style totalitarianism sheds new light on the power of art as resistance under dictatorship, increasingly valued in response to the current global shrinking of democratic space.

Perspectives