“The aesthetic credo of the poet Joseph Brodsky. I. Brodsky, Nobel speech

Brodsky's famous speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony. recitations by Pavel Besedin

“Dear members of the Swedish Academy, Your Majesties, ladies and gentlemen,
I was born and raised on the other side of the Baltic, almost on its
opposite the gray rustling page. Sometimes on clear days, especially
in the fall, standing on a beach somewhere in Kellomäki and extending your finger to the northwest
over a sheet of water, my friend said: “Do you see the blue strip of land? This
Sweden.
Still, I like to think, ladies and gentlemen, that we breathed
the same air, ate the same fish, got wet under the same - at times
radioactive - rain, swam in the same sea, and we were bored with the same pine needles.
Depending on the wind, the clouds’ that I saw in the window, you have already seen, and
vice versa. I like to think that we had something in common before we
met in this room.
And as for this hall, I think just a few hours ago he
was empty and would be empty again a few hours later. Our presence in it
mine in particular is completely random in terms of the walls. In general, from the point
view of space, any presence in it is accidental if it does not have
an unchanging - and usually inanimate - feature of the landscape:
say, moraines, hilltops, river bends. And it is precisely the appearance of something or
someone unpredictable inside the space, quite accustomed to their
content, creates the feeling of an event.
Therefore, while expressing my gratitude to you for your decision to award me the Nobel
Literature Prize, I, in essence, thank you for recognizing my
the work of features of immutability similar to glacial debris, say, in a vast
landscape of literature.
I am fully aware that this comparison may seem risky
because of the coldness, uselessness, long-term or quick
erosion. But if these fragments contain at least one vein of animated ore - on
what I immodestly hope is that perhaps the comparison is enough
careful.
And since we are talking about caution, I would like to add that in
in the foreseeable past, poetry audiences rarely numbered more than one
percent of the population. That is why the poets of antiquity or the Renaissance gravitated towards
courtyards, centers of power; that's why poets these days end up in universities,
knowledge centers. Your academy seems to be a cross between both: and if in the future
- where we are not there, this percentage will remain, to a large extent
to a certain extent this will happen thanks to your efforts. In case such
the vision of the future seems gloomy to you, I hope that the thought of
population explosion will cheer you up somewhat. And a quarter of that
percent would mean an army of readers, even today.
So my gratitude to you, ladies and gentlemen, is not entirely
selfish. I am grateful to you for those whom your decisions encourage and will
encourage you to read poetry, today and tomorrow. I'm not so sure man
will triumph, as my great American compatriot once said,
standing, I believe, in this very hall; but I'm absolutely convinced that
it is more difficult to triumph over a person who reads poetry than over someone who does not
is reading.
Of course, it's a damn roundabout way from St. Petersburg to Stockholm,
but for a person of my profession the idea that a straight line is the shortest
the distance between two points has long lost its attractiveness.
Therefore, I am pleased to know that geography also has its own higher
justice. Thank you.

<...>If art teaches something (and artists primarily), it is precisely the particulars of human existence.<...>It, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, and separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Much can be shared: bread, bed, shelter - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, literature in particular and a poem in particular, addresses a person tet-a-tet, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries.

The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression.<...>Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is, first of all, to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life<...> It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on a tautology.<...>Created to give us an idea not so much of our origins as of what “sapiens” are capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, turns into a flight from the common denominator<...>towards a non-general facial expression, towards a personality, towards a particular one.<...>

I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be fewer

grief.<...>If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine.<...>

No criminal code provides punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not the persecution of authors, not censorship restrictions, etc., not the burning of books. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. For this crime a person pays with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history. (From the Nobel lecture given by I. A. Brodsky in 1987 in the USA).

Stages of work

1. We read the text carefully. We formulate the problem(s) posed in the text.

The presented text belongs to the journalistic style. Typically, such texts pose not one, but several problems. To identify the issues raised, you need to carefully read each paragraph and ask a question about it.

The text contains 4 paragraphs and, accordingly, 4 question-problems:

a) What helps a person to realize that he is an individual?

b) What is the meaning of human individual existence?

c) What is the importance of reading books in solving problems of society?

d) What does neglect of books lead to?

Thus, the main problem is the role of literature in human life and society.

2 . We comment on (explain) the main problem we formulated.

To identify aspects of the problem, you need to determine (name) the topic of each paragraph and note the facts (if any) that the author refers to.

a) about the role of art, in particular literature, in a person’s acquisition of “his” face;

b) about the human right to individuality (the starting point is a quote from Baratynsky);

c) about the necessity and obligation of a moral approach to solving problems of society;

d) about the exceptional role of books in human life and society.

a) art helps a person gain experience and awareness of his individuality;

b) a person is not a “social animal”, but an individual, his task is to live “his own” life;

c) literature is a system of moral insurance for society;

d) “not reading” books is a crime against oneself and society.

4 . Express your own opinion regarding the stated problems and the position of the author. Give reasons for your opinion.

5 . Write a draft of the essay, edit it, rewrite it into a clean copy, check your literacy.

Joseph Brodsky during the Nobel ceremony.
Stockholm. 1987 Photo from the site www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/194/

…If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness, turning him from a social animal into a person. Much can be shared: bread, bed, beliefs, lover, but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a not always attractive, but human face.

The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression...

...Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by it, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, but always temporary outlines.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always “today” and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even “tomorrow”. One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology...

…Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person experiencing it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic incantations characteristic of any form of political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece, but that evil, especially political evil, is always a poor stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his taste, the clearer his moral choice, the freer he is - although, perhaps, not happier...

...In the history of our species, in the history of “sapiens,” the book is an anthropological phenomenon, essentially analogous to the invention of the wheel. Having arisen in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins, but of what this “sapien” is capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose on this denominator a feature that has not previously risen above the waist, on our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards the numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular...

...I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has crossed my mind more than once - but I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine...

...A person begins to compose a poem for various reasons: in order to win the heart of his beloved, in order to express his attitude towards the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state, in order to capture the state of mind in which he is currently in, in order to leave - as he thinks in this minute - a trace on the ground. He resorts to this form - to a poem - for reasons, most likely, unconsciously mimetic: a black vertical clot of words in the middle of a white sheet of paper, apparently, reminds a person of his own position in the world, of the proportion of space to his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what comes from his pen on his audience, however large or small it may be, the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the feeling of entering into direct contact with the language, or more precisely, the feeling of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been expressed, written, implemented in it...

...When starting a poem, the poet, as a rule, does not know how it will end, and sometimes he is very surprised by what happens, because it often turns out better than he expected, often his thought goes further than he expected. This is the moment when the future of language interferes with its present. There are, as we know, three methods of knowledge: analytical, intuitive and the method used by the biblical prophets - through revelation. The difference between poetry and other forms of literature is that it uses all three at once (gravitating mainly to the second and third), because all three are given in language; and sometimes, with the help of one word, one rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has been before - and further, perhaps, than he himself would like. A person writing a poem writes it first of all because a poem is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as one becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.

Nobel lecture

I
For a private person who has preferred this particularity all his life to some public role, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference - and in particular from his homeland, for it is better to be the last loser in a democracy than a martyr or ruler of thoughts in a despotism - to suddenly find himself on this podium there is great awkwardness and testing. This feeling is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me, but by the memory of those whom this honor passed by, who could not address, as they say, “urbi et orbi” from this rostrum and whose general silence seems to be seeking and not finds a way out in you.

The only thing that can reconcile you with such a situation is the simple consideration that - for reasons primarily stylistic - a writer cannot speak for a writer, especially a poet for a poet; that if Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Winston Auden were on this podium, they would involuntarily speak for themselves, and perhaps they would also experience some awkwardness. These shadows constantly confuse me, and they still confuse me today. In any case, they do not encourage me to be eloquent. In my best moments, I seem to myself like the sum of them - but always less than any of them separately. For it is impossible to be better than them on paper; It is impossible to be better than them in life, and it is their lives, no matter how tragic and bitter they are, that make me often - apparently more often than I should - regret the passage of time.

If that light exists - and I am no more able to deny them the possibility of eternal life than to forget about their existence in this one - if that light exists, then, I hope, they will forgive me the quality of what I am about to expound: in the end After all, the dignity of our profession is not measured by behavior on the podium. I named only five - those whose work and whose destinies are dear to me, if only because, without them, I would be worth little as a person and as a writer: in any case, I would not be standing here today. Are they, these shadows, better: light sources - lamps? stars? - there were, of course, more than five, and any of them could doom you to absolute muteness. Their number is great in the life of any conscious writer; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which, by the will of fate, I belong. It also doesn’t make matters any easier to think about contemporaries and fellow writers in both of these cultures, about poets and prose writers, whose talents I value above my own and who, if they were on this podium, would have long since gotten down to business, because they have more, what to tell the world than I have.

Therefore, I will allow myself a number of comments - perhaps discordant, confusing and likely to puzzle you with their incoherence. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts and my profession itself will, I hope, protect me, at least partly, from accusations of chaos. A person in my profession rarely pretends to think systematically; at worst, he lays claim to the system. But this, as a rule, is borrowed from his environment, from the social structure, from studying philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the randomness of the means he uses to achieve one or another - even if constant - goal than the creative process itself, the process of writing. Poems, according to Akhmatova, really grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more noble.

II
If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Many things can be shared: bread, a bed, beliefs, a lover - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.

The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression, for we are already, as it were, genetically prepared for this non-community. Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to live his own life, and not an imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life. For each of us has only one, and we know well how it all ends. It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - all the more insulting because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose instigation a person is ready to agree to this tautology, will not lie in the grave with him and will not say thank you.

Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by its, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better - but always temporary - outlines.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always “today” and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even “tomorrow”. One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology, that is, the fate otherwise known under the honorable name “victim of history.” What is remarkable about art in general and literature in particular, is that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality. That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main instrument of which is - should we clarify Marx? - exactly a cliché.

Today it is extremely common to assert that a writer, a poet in particular, must use the language of the street, the language of the crowd, in his works. For all its apparent democracy and tangible practical benefits for the writer, this statement is nonsense and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history. Only if we have decided that it is time for “sapiens” to stop in its development, literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, the people should speak the language of literature. Every new aesthetic reality clarifies the ethical reality for a person. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; the concept of “good” and “bad” are primarily aesthetic concepts that precede the categories of “good” and “evil.” In ethics it is not “everything is permitted” because in aesthetics it is not “everything is permitted” because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. A foolish baby, crying, rejecting a stranger or, conversely, reaching out to him, rejects him or reaches out to him, instinctively making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person who experiences it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic incantations characteristic of any form of political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece, but that evil, especially political evil, is always a poor stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his taste, the clearer his moral choice, the freer he is - although, perhaps, not happier.

It is in this applied rather than platonic sense that one should understand Dostoevsky’s remark that “beauty will save the world,” or Matthew Arnold’s statement that “poetry will save us.” The world may not be able to be saved, but an individual can always be saved. The aesthetic sense in a person develops very rapidly, because, even without being fully aware of what he is and what he really needs, a person, as a rule, instinctively knows what he does not like and what does not suit him. In an anthropological sense, I repeat, man is an aesthetic being before he is an ethical one. Art, therefore, and literature in particular, is not a by-product of species development, but exactly the opposite. If what distinguishes us from other representatives of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature, and in particular poetry, being the highest form of literature, represents, roughly speaking, our species goal.

I am far from the idea of ​​universal teaching of versification and composition; However, the division of people into the intelligentsia and everyone else seems unacceptable to me. In moral terms, this division is similar to the division of society into rich and poor; but, if some purely physical, material justifications are still conceivable for the existence of social inequality, they are unthinkable for intellectual inequality. In some ways, and in this sense, equality is guaranteed to us by nature. We are not talking about education, but about the formation of speech, the slightest approach to which is fraught with the invasion of a person’s life by a false choice. The existence of literature implies existence at the level of literature - and not only morally, but also lexically. If a musical work still leaves a person the opportunity to choose between the passive role of a listener and an active performer, a work of literature - art, as Montale puts it, hopelessly semantic - condemns him to the role of only a performer.

It seems to me that a person should act in this role more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that this role, as a result of the population explosion and the associated ever-increasing atomization of society, that is, with the ever-increasing isolation of the individual, is becoming increasingly inevitable. I don't think I know more about life than anyone my age, but I think a book is more reliable as a companion than a friend or a lover. A novel or poem is not a monologue, but a conversation between a writer and a reader - a conversation, I repeat, extremely private, excluding everyone else, if you like - mutually misanthropic. And at the moment of this conversation, the writer is equal to the reader, as well as vice versa, regardless of whether he is a great writer or not. Equality is the equality of consciousness, and it remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of a memory, vague or clear, and sooner or later, by the way or inappropriately, determines the behavior of the individual. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the role of the performer, all the more natural since a novel or poem is a product of the mutual loneliness of writer and reader.

In the history of our species, in the history of “sapiens,” the book is an anthropological phenomenon, essentially analogous to the invention of the wheel. Having arisen in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins, but of what this “sapien” is capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose on this denominator a feature that has not previously risen above the waist, on our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards the numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular. In whose image and likeness we were not created, there are already five billion of us, and man has no other future than that outlined by art. Otherwise, the past awaits us - first of all, the political one, with all its mass police delights.

In any case, the situation in which art in general and literature in particular is the property (prerogative) of a minority seems to me unhealthy and threatening. I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has crossed my mind many times - but I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence.

As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine. Because there can be no laws that protect us from ourselves, not a single criminal code provides for punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not censorship restrictions, etc., not committing books to the fire. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. A person pays for this crime with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history. Living in the country in which I live, I would be the first to believe that there is some proportion between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance; What keeps me from doing this, however, is the history of the country in which I was born and raised. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of a minority: the famous Russian intelligentsia.

I don’t want to expand on this topic, I don’t want to darken this evening with thoughts about tens of millions of human lives, ruined by millions - because what happened in Russia in the first half of the 20th century happened before the introduction of automatic small arms - in the name of the triumph of political doctrine , the inconsistency of which lies in the fact that it requires human sacrifices for its implementation. I will only say that - not from experience, alas, but only theoretically - I believe that for a person who has read Dickens, it is more difficult to shoot something like that in himself in the name of any idea than for a person who has not read Dickens. And I'm talking specifically about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not about literacy, not about education. A literate, educated person may well, after reading this or that political treatise, kill his own kind and even experience the delight of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong, he even wrote poetry; the list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list of what they have read.

However, before turning to poetry, I would like to add that it would be reasonable to view the Russian experience as a warning, if only because the social structure of the West is still generally similar to what existed in Russia before 1917. (This, by the way, explains the popularity of the Russian psychological novel of the 19th century in the West and the comparative failure of modern Russian prose. The social relations that developed in Russia in the 20th century seem, apparently, to the reader no less outlandish than the names of the characters, preventing him from identifying himself with them.) There were no fewer political parties alone, for example, on the eve of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia than there are today in the USA or Great Britain. In other words, a dispassionate person might notice that in a certain sense the 19th century in the West is still ongoing. In Russia it ended; and if I say that it ended in tragedy, then this is primarily because of the number of human casualties that the ensuing social and chronological change entailed. In a real tragedy, it is not the hero who dies - the choir dies.

III
Although for a person whose native language is Russian, talking about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would now like to change the topic. The disadvantage of talking about the obvious is that it corrupts the mind with its ease, with its easily acquired sense of rightness. This is their temptation, similar in nature to the temptation of a social reformer who creates evil. Awareness of this temptation and repulsion from it are to a certain extent responsible for the fate of many of my contemporaries, not to mention my fellow writers, responsible for the literature that arose from under their pens. This literature was not an escape from history, nor a suppression of memory, as it might seem from the outside. "How can you compose music after Auschwitz?" - asks Adorno, and a person familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question, replacing it with the name of the camp - repeat it, perhaps, with even greater right, since the number of people who perished in Stalin’s camps far exceeds the number of those who perished in German. “How can you eat lunch after Auschwitz?” - the American poet Mark Strand once remarked on this. The generation to which I belong, in any case, turned out to be capable of composing this music.

This generation - the generation born precisely when the Auschwitz crematoria were operating at full capacity, when Stalin was at the zenith of God-like, absolute, nature itself, seemingly sanctioned power, came into the world, apparently, to continue what theoretically should was to take a break in these crematoria and in the unmarked mass graves of the Stalinist archipelago. The fact that not everything was interrupted, at least in Russia, is in no small measure the merit of my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than of the fact that I am standing here today. And the fact that I stand here today is a recognition of the services of this generation to culture; Remembering Mandelstam, I would add - before world culture. Looking back, I can say that we started on empty - or rather, on a place that was frightening in its emptiness, and that more intuitively than consciously, we sought precisely to recreate the effect of the continuity of culture, to restore its forms and tropes, to fill its few surviving and often completely compromised forms by our own, new or modern content that seemed so to us.

There was probably another path - the path of further deformation, the poetics of fragments and ruins, minimalism, stopped breathing. If we abandoned it, it was not at all because it seemed to us to be a way of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of ​​​​preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture known to us, equivalent in our minds to the forms of human dignity. We abandoned it because the choice was not really ours, but the choice of culture - and this choice was, again, aesthetic, not moral. Of course, it is more natural for a person to talk about himself not as an instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and preserver. But if today I assert the opposite, it is not because there is a certain charm in paraphrasing at the end of the 20th century Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling or Novalis, but because someone, a poet, always knows that what is in common parlance called the voice of the Muse, is actually the dictate of language; that it is not language that is its instrument, but it is language’s means to continue its existence. Language - even if we imagine it as some kind of animate being (which would only be fair) - is not capable of ethical choice.

A person begins to compose a poem for various reasons: in order to win the heart of his beloved, in order to express his attitude towards the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state, in order to capture the state of mind in which he is currently in, in order to leave - how he thinks at this moment. a minute - a trace on the ground. He resorts to this form - to a poem - for reasons, most likely, unconsciously mimetic: a black vertical clot of words in the middle of a white sheet of paper, apparently, reminds a person of his own position in the world, of the proportion of space to his body. But regardless of the considerations for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what comes from his pen on his audience, however large or small it may be, the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the feeling of entering into a direct contact with the language, or more precisely, the feeling of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been expressed, written, implemented in it.

This dependence is absolute, despotic, but it also liberates. For, being always older than the writer, language still has colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential - that is, by all the time lying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative composition of the nation speaking it, although this too, but by the quality of the poem composed in it. It is enough to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity, it is enough to recall Dante. What is created today in Russian or English, for example, guarantees the existence of these languages ​​for the next millennium. The poet, I repeat, is the means of existence of language. Or, as the great Auden said, he is the one by whom language lives. I, who wrote these lines, will no longer exist, you, who read them, will no longer exist, but the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain, not only because language is more durable than man, but also because it is better adapted to mutation.

The person writing the poem, however, does not write it because he expects posthumous fame, although he often hopes that the poem will outlive him, even if not for long. A person writing a poem writes it because his tongue tells him or simply dictates the next line. When starting a poem, the poet, as a rule, does not know how it will end, and sometimes he is very surprised by what happens, because it often turns out better than he expected, often his thought goes further than he expected. This is the moment when the future of language interferes with its present. There are, as we know, three methods of knowledge: analytical, intuitive and the method used by the biblical prophets - through revelation. The difference between poetry and other forms of literature is that it uses all three at once (gravitating mainly to the second and third), because all three are given in language; and sometimes, with the help of one word, one rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has been before - and further, perhaps, than he himself would like. A person writing a poem writes it first of all because a poem is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as one becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.

The 75th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Brodsky is celebrated modestly in Russia. On the one hand, this great Russian poet glorified our country throughout the world, on the other hand, with all the strength of his soul he hated the Soviet state, in which many today are again looking for support. Why literature should not speak the “language of the people” and how good books protect against propaganda - these reflections from the poet’s Nobel speech are always relevant, but especially today.

If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person.

Many things can be shared: bread, a bed, beliefs, a lover - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they find indifference and discord in the place of expected agreement and unanimity, and inattention and disgust in the place of determination to action.

In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.

...The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression, for we are already, as it were, genetically prepared for this non-community. Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to live his own life, and not an imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life.

For each of us has only one, and we know well how it all ends. It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - all the more insulting because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose instigation a person is ready to agree to this tautology, will not lie in the grave with him and will not say thank you.

...Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited.

At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state.

A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by its, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better - but always temporary - outlines.

…The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always “today” and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even “tomorrow”.

One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology, that is, the fate otherwise known under the honorary name of “victim of history.”

...Today it is extremely common to assert that a writer, a poet in particular, must use the language of the street, the language of the crowd, in his works. For all its apparent democracy and tangible practical benefits for the writer, this statement is nonsense and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history.

Only if we have decided that it is time for “sapiens” to stop in its development, literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, the people should speak the language of literature.

Every new aesthetic reality clarifies the ethical reality for a person. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; the concepts of “good” and “bad” are primarily aesthetic concepts that precede the categories of “good” and “evil.” In ethics it is not “everything is permitted” because in aesthetics it is not “everything is permitted” because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. A foolish baby, crying, rejecting a stranger or, conversely, reaching out to him, rejects him or reaches out to him, instinctively making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

...Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person experiencing it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic incantations characteristic of any form of political demagoguery.

The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece, but that evil, especially political evil, is always a poor stylist.

The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his taste, the clearer his moral choice, the freer he is - although, perhaps, not happier.

...In the history of our species, in the history of “sapiens,” the book is an anthropological phenomenon, essentially analogous to the invention of the wheel. Having arisen in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins, but of what this “sapien” is capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose on this denominator a feature that has not previously risen above the waist, on our heart, our consciousness, our imagination.

Flight is a flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards the numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular. In whose image and likeness we were not created, there are already five billion of us, and man has no other future than that outlined by art. Otherwise, the past awaits us - first of all, the political one, with all its mass police delights.

In any case, the situation in which art in general and literature in particular is the property (prerogative) of a minority seems to me unhealthy and threatening.

I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has crossed my mind many times - but I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth.

I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence.

As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine.

Because there can be no laws that protect us from ourselves, not a single criminal code provides for punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not censorship restrictions, etc., not committing books to the fire.

There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. A person pays for this crime with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history.

Living in the country in which I live, I would be the first to believe that there is some proportion between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance; What keeps me from doing this, however, is the history of the country in which I was born and raised. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of a minority: the famous Russian intelligentsia.

I don’t want to expand on this topic, I don’t want to darken this evening with thoughts about tens of millions of human lives, ruined by millions - because what happened in Russia in the first half of the 20th century happened before the introduction of automatic small arms - in the name of the triumph of political doctrine , the inconsistency of which lies in the fact that it requires human sacrifices for its implementation. I will only say that - not from experience, alas, but only theoretically - I believe that for a person who has read Dickens, it is more difficult to shoot something like that in himself in the name of any idea than for a person who has not read Dickens.

And I'm talking specifically about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not about literacy, not about education. A literate, educated person may well, after reading this or that political treatise, kill his own kind and even experience the delight of conviction.

Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong, he even wrote poetry; the list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list of what they have read.