February 13, 1988
		Page: 10
		Section: LIVING

	South Hadley -- Joseph Brodsky has given me precise directions to his house in
South Hadley, just down the highway from Mount Holyoke. I know what landmarks
to look for, even the slant of the road where I am to look for the stone
gateposts. And yet there is still something startling about the notion of
actually finding him here, the exiled Russian poet, sitting at a table next to
his kitchen window in an old New England farmhouse, preparing to teach Thomas
Hardy in the early afternoon and Alexander Pushkin late in the day.
	"Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace," he has written
in an essay titled "The Condition We Call Exile." Perhaps there is a certain
poetic justice, if not irony, in this spot where he has chosen to settle every
spring. The house, too, is an emigre, moved here from its foundation decades
ago to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir.
	As Brodsky steps outside his back door to greet me, he seems kinder and
gentler than the fierce, brooding hawk of a man who gazes out from the book
jacket of "Less Than One," his prize-winning book of essays published two
years ago. He looks a bit rumpled and distracted, as one might expect from a
man who lives, as his friend, the poet Seamus Heaney describes it, "frugally,
industriously and in a certain amount of solitude."
	He offers coffee and invites me to look around, apologizing for the series of
interruptions that signify a man in considerable demand -- the phone calls in
English and Russian, the arrival of express mail packages. It has been only
three months, after all, since he journeyed to Stockholm to receive the Nobel
Prize.
	Although his friends in Russia, he says, have felt more relaxed recently about
contacting him, the news of the prize has not been publicized in Russia. In
Novy Mir, a Soviet literary almanac that has published some of his poems, the
news was mentioned in a footnote. "It was like some kind of Chernobyl," he
said of the secrecy surrounding his honor.
	Brodsky, I am to discover, possesses a droll, sardonic wit whose sharpest
edges he saves for the bureaucratic tyrants of his native country, from which
he was exiled 16 years ago after serving 18 months in a Siberian labor camp.
	Finally, we settle down at the kitchen table cluttered with papers, a small
typewriter, and a pack of the cigarettes his doctors have forbidden since he
underwent open heart surgery, his second bypass operation, last year.
	Brodsky has rented this house, he says, since 1981, when he first began
alternating his teaching appointments between Columbia University and the
Five-College program in Pioneer Valley. He still spends much of the year in
his West Village apartment in New York, the city he calls "the mother of
interference." Last year, he accepted a permanent appointment as Andrew Mellon
professor of literature at Mount Holyoke, where he teaches a course in Russian
literature and a course in English literature that he calls "The Subject
Matter of Modern Lyric Poetry." He stole the title, he says, from the poet
Elizabeth Bishop: "I thought it sounded dry, and I didn't want to be swamped
with students."
	As we gaze out the window into the snowy woods, it seems natural to talk about
a sense of place and about Robert Frost, one of his favorite poets. "There is
the sort of landscape and a certain diction and tonality here that harks back
to Frost," he says. "Sometimes you are tempted to play the Frost game on
paper. You can fall under his spell," he said. "But not too much. Maybe it's a
matter of temperament. I'm far less steady than he was."
	New England scenes have begun to appear in Brodsky's poetry, etched with as
much authority as those of Leningrad, where he grew up, and Norenskaya, where
he served time. In an elegy for Robert Lowell, he writes of "church-hooded New
England," of planes at Logan that "thunder off from the brown mass of
industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss."
	It would be a mistake, however, to look here for important clues to either the
man or the poetry. He is no longer, as he once described himself, in the
plight of Lot's wife, the exile looking back. And yet one feels that even as
he alights here, the momentum of his exile is still pushing him onward. In a
recent essay, he compared the exiled writer to a man "hurled into outer space
in a capsule . . . and your capsule is language."
	Being grounded, he explains, might be necessary for prose but not for poetry.
The fiction writer, he says, "ought to have a community settled in its ways in
order to comment on it. But poetry is not a comment on the life of society.
Poetry, is essentially the moment in the history of language. Unlike a prose
writer, the poet is like a bird who starts to chirp no matter what branch he
lights on."
	Returning to Frost, he observes of Frost's reputation for angling to win
prizes, "If I were Frost, I would indeed seek all forms of recognition, not so
much to tickle my ego, but create a situation where my work would find a
greater readership."
	Of his own relationship to such recognition, however, he feels differently.
"I'm not a native son," he says. "In the spotlight, I feel a bit
uncomfortable. The accent would be the first reason. I know I may sound
unconvincing. But it is pure and simple animal insecurity. And if I can speak
about myself with sobriety, I have sought a slightly different posture, a
posture of somebody isolated, operating in his own idiosyncratic way, somebody
on the outside instead of in the thick of things." He pauses, then delivers
the punchline. "Finding myself one day outside Russia," he says, "in some
grotesque way, was a very congenial thing."
	Brodsky says that there was never a single dramatic moment when he realized in
a blaze of clarity that he would become a poet. "It simply happened," he says.
"In some ways, I'm distressed to have turned into a professional writer. I
used to regard it as a byproduct of life, a gentleman's occupation. A picture
I had was to be in the merchant marine, a deckhand, to disembark at a cheap
hotel and write a couple of elegies." And yet, during his trial in Leningrad
on charges of "parasitism," the Soviet judge questioned where the writing of
poetry could be learned, if not in school. "I think that it comes from God,"
he had said.
	For Brodsky, the value of literature lies in its power to evoke uniqueness and
individuality. "This may be a very crass view of the medium," he says, "but
it provides the reader with the sense of his own uniqueness. Poetry offers a
higher plane of regard. It is a terrific accelerator of one's mental
operations. To use the modern lingo, it expands your consciousness. And in
that sense, it saves."
	In that spirit, he teaches the work of his favorite poets, requiring his
students to memorize up to 2,000 lines of poetry a semester. He tells them, he
says, "Let's commit this stuff to our brains, to our bloodstream."
	Poetry, he believes, offers an antidote to the illusions created by politics
as well as popular culture. "Every society," he says, "has in its articulation
a positive slant, a positive tenor all the time. The way the politicians talk,
the way commercial people talk. The language gets tilted, and literature tries
to restore the balance, to convey the idea that life is a double-edged sword.
	"When you've been fed all this positive stuff, and then you encounter trouble
that exceeds your expectations, you are prone to get hysterical or to say that
someone deceived you. You look around for a culprit. What a poet tries to do
is tell you that the wolf is never too far. It may be inside already. It may
be that you are the wolf yourself."
	It was literature, he says, that turned his own life around. "I was a normal
Soviet boy," he says. 'I could have become a man of the system. But something
turned me upside down, 'Notes from the Underground.' I realized what I am.
That I am bad."
	That notion of human nature as fundamentally flawed, he says, has been omitted
from the modern world. And paradoxically, he says, it is the belief in
humanity's fundamental goodness that has led to the tyranny of the state. "We
are victims of the enlightenment," he says. "We are all Rousseau-ists, who
believe that man is good, and that the institutions have spoiled him. Hence we
have to improve the institutions, which results in the ideal state -- the
police state."
	Technology, too, he says, enforces a certain uniformity. "In one way or
another," he says, "the species is becoming a victim of technology. The nation
falls under the spell of the TV screen. Eventually, the diversity of opinion
is going to shrink to the number of networks." As for the aesthetics of
technology, he observes, "Everything is done in an opaque block of color and
texture," he says. "The dashboard of the car looks like the VCR, and the VCR
looks like the Uzi machine gun. Perhaps a Japanese firm like Sony could
combine into one unit a machine gun, a camera, a VCR, and a car. A fusion."
	Although he is reluctant to talk about Gorbachev -- "My imagination fails to
get absorbed by political figures," he says -- he feels that Americans reacted
naively to the Soviet leader's recent visit here. "You put anybody on the TV
screen, and you will get a following," he says. "You wouldn't want to live
under that man. But to watch him on TV is all right. You feel that you are in
control, that you can switch him on and off."
	Brodsky says that what he feared most in coming to the United States was a
certain American naivete about human nature. "What I feared most of all in my
first years here was that it would turn me into a simpleton. It's a good thing
I arrived here not at the age of 18 but at 32. I'm not saying one should
concentrate on one's dark nature. But with good intentions, you can do a lot
of harm. For instance, by loving someone you can wreck someone's life as
substantially as by hating. You love that person, and you are convinced of
your noble motives, and you impose yourself on that person. You reduce that
person's options and confine that person to yourself. It should cross your
mind that maybe there is somebody better than myself for that person. That is
why the epithet `love is blind.' Love should not be blind, it should be very
keen."
	Later that afternoon, the exile walks across the Mount Holyoke campus from one
class to another, crossing continents and centuries, teaching first the
majestic fatalism of Thomas Hardy and then the wild resolve of Pushkin. He
translates Pushkin line by line, as his friend, the poet Derek Walcott,
described in a poem he dedicated to Brodsky: "Under your exile's tongue, crisp
under heel, the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves." As Brodsky walks
wearily back across the snow, bundled up in his flapped Russian fur hat, I
feel startled again by the unlikely scenario of the exile who has landed here,
an exotic bird alighting on the tundra, an unexpected gift of grace.
	On Monday night, in behalf of the Poets' Theater, Brodsky will join his fellow
lyric poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney onstage at the American Repertory
Theater for a reading of his poetry. Wallace Shawn will read a portion of
Brodsky's play, "Marbles."

			TSUSHIMA SCREEN

	The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes
	masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize
	in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer
	days than other months. Therefore, it's more cruel
	than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound
	to wrap up our saling round
	the globe with habitual naval grace,
	moving your cot to the fireplace
	where our dreadnought is going under
	in great smoke. Only fire can grasp this winter!
	Golden unharnessed stallions in the chimney
	dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,
	and the dark room fills with plaintive chirring
	of a naked grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.

		(c) Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc.

		(c) Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company
		Boston Globe

___
			Citizen Of A Language

		Date: Sunday, October 25, 1987
		Page: A6
		Section: Editorial Page
	The Nobel Prize for Literature, in honoring the poet Joseph Brodsky, honored
an ancient literary tradition. In the manner of Virgil, Dante and Joyce,
Brodsky has bestowed his gifts on the Russian language from afar, in exile. So
common is the literal experience of exile among poets that Baudelaire took it
as an allegory for the poetic condition.
	This year, the often obtuse Nobel jury appears to have showered recognition
not merely on a Russian writer who has had but four of his poems published
legally in the Soviet Union, and not solely on a survivor of "Gulag
University," but on a figure who incarnates the poetic way.
	"I feel bitter as I leave Russia," Brodsky wrote of his expulsion from his
homeland, in an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev. "I belong to the Russian
culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can
influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and
inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language."
	This is a statement devoid of grandiloquence; it is simply a recognition of
the truth. Brodsky, like every other genuine poet, lives in his language. No
commissar, no fuhrer can banish him from there.
	If the Nobel award to Brodsky represents a slap in the face to the bootlickers
of the Soviet literary establishment, so be it. Their respectability was
bought with a shameful silence. In service to an ephemeral state, they kept
quiet about the disappearance of entire libraries. They pretended to forget
all the poets and storytellers who were shot in the head or forced to confess
to the crime of literature.
	Brodsky himself was convicted of being a "social parasite" and sent to Siberia
as a young man. The judge who sentenced him asked Brodsky who had authorized
him to be a poet. Responding with the impertinence proper to a scion of a
poetic line that traces back to Francois Villon, Brodsky told the judge that
nobody had authorized him to be a human being.

		(c) Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company
		Boston Globe

___
			Nobel Poet Joseph Brodsky Dies In New York

				Monday January 29 1:04 AM EST

	Brodsky, New York (Reuter) -- Soviet emigre Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel
Prize-winning poet once sentenced to hard labor in the frozen tundra,
died of a heart ailment in the United States, where he had lived in
exile for over 20 years.
	Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel laureate in literature, died at his New York
home Sunday with his wife and child by his side, said Roger Straus,
his publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was 55.
	Brodsky shot to prominence at the age of 23 when he received a
five-year sentence for hard labor in the frozen Archangelsk region of
the Soviet Union for writing poetry without academic qualifications.
	International pressure helped get him home to Leningrad in November
1965 after serving 18 months -- and also helped widen his fame.
	"He is a mass cult figure. For many of his generation he is a god,"
said Duffield White, professor of Russian at Wesleyan University in
Connecticut. White once recalled being mobbed at a Moscow concert when
word got out he knew Brodsky.
	British poet Anthony Hecht, who worked on Brodsky's translations, told
Reuters the Nobel Prize-winner's work is "at once personal and
social, reflecting his detestation of tyranny."
	Radicalized in part by his government's armed suppression of the 1956
Hungarian revolution and determined to go his own way, Brodsky, who
left school at 15 to work as a laborer, rejected a state that claimed
to have all the answers:
	"Isn't that a sign/ of our arrival in a wholly new/ but doleful
world? In fact, a proven truth,/ to be precise, is not a truth at all
-- it's just a sum of proofs. But now/ what's said is `I agree,' not
`I believe,'" he wrote.
	Brodsky's works challenged the bleakness of Soviet life with
linguistic brilliance and were circulated widely underground, finally
prompting Soviet authorities to expel him in 1972.
	Fifteen years later, and by then a U.S. citizen, Brodsky won the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
	His editor at the The New Yorker magazine, Alice Quinn, said Brodsky
was "a majestic writer, with an absolutely fantastic reputation... He
was a very compelling and warm person, complex and extremely
endearing."

___
			PBS Newshour Interview with Joseph Brodsky

		November 10, 1988

		Transcript

	ROBERT MACNEIL: Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born in
Leningrad in 1940. At the age of 15, he dropped out of school and took
a variety of odd jobs while he began writing poetry. In 1964, the
Soviet Government labeled him a militant parasite and sent him to an
arctic labor camp for 18 months. Seven years later he was deported
from the Soviet Union and came to the United States, where he now
lives in New York City. Last year, he won the Nobel Prize for
literature for poetry and essays. His most recent collection of poetry
titled "To Urania" was published earlier this year by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux. Mr. Brodsky, you are an American citizen now. What do you
think of the democratic or the exercise in democracy that we have just
been through?
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: You want the truth?
	ROBERT MACNEIL: The truth.
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well, a travesty.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: How?
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well, it was simply because neither man in my view was
adequate simply as individual... well, that is... how should I put it?
I guess I should think about what I'm saying. I lost my heart... that
is not lost my heart... I lost interest in the Governor of
Massachusetts when he dropped Jackson. That wasn't a Democrat for me.
And I never developed a sentiment for Mr. Bush because I haven't heard
from him any sort of coherent or anything interesting, anything... or
any sort of attractive, even grammatical sentence.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: How would you rate the new President of your old
country, Mikhail Gorbachev, in these terms.
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Terribly talkative, terribly talkative,
terribly eloquent. Well, he has another weakness of course. He doesn't
know where to stop. Well, in fact, there is ... there is a term now
existing in the Soviet Union about the man, himself, that he prattles
the Perestroika down.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: "Prattles the Perestroika down?"
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Yeah. To prattle it down, that is... well, there are
too many words... that is he's a bad rhetorician, he's a bad orator.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: You've appeared far more indifferent, even disdainful
of the so-called reforms in the Soviet Union have there and here. How
do you explain that?
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Well I don't think the reforms... well, I'm not
exactly disdainful. I'm pleased that changes do occur, so that I don't
harbor that much of a hope for these changes, that is, they are
improvements in comparison to what I'm used to. Well, I can speak only
about my feelings with any degree of expertise, the things that I
know, so I never thought we'll see the dark print, though they do see
the light of day now and this is obviously an improvement. But the
point is. the point is that the... all these attempts are in my view
attempts to regalvanize a doomed concept.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: Not redeemable?
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: In my view, it isn't.
	ROBERT MACNEIL: Are you as an exile from your former country, are you
in any way imprisoned by the need to dislike what you were, what you
escaped from, what you were exiled from? Are you locked into a need to
disparage what happens there because of it?
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: Good question. I am not.
	JOSEPH BRODSKY: No I think I'm not. I'm simply disdainful though
that... h