In Memoriam: Joseph Brodsky

from Askold Melnyczuk’s contribution:

Once, at a friend’s apartment, a laureate lay on the floor. At first all I could see was his arm, which had become a cigarette stand. From out of a cloud, his voice, urgent and nasal, rose in complaint. The poet was bemoaning a bad review of his new book. I was shocked—not that he’d gotten a negative notice, but that he cared. This was already some years after he’d copped a Nobel Prize. . . .

The young rebel who told the Russian judge he wrote for God didn’t have much to learn about courage except how to hang onto it. With age, his notorious insouciance developed into an almost metaphysical hatred of bullies. It was Brodsky who wrote the coda to Mandelstam’s poem on Stalin, and whose life showed that in the war between truth and power there is no contest—if you’re willing to take the long view. His life played out, with high drama, the tension between the individual and the collective, the one and the many—and it wasn’t always easy pegging which he was. An indecorous formalist, he was an elitist who believed poetry should be sold in supermarkets; a democrat who chose his companions from the inner circles of art, freely excluding centuries and entire cultures from the ranks of the civilized. In short, Brodsky was the many in the one—a paradox Whitman would have understood.