The destiny of language in the condition of exile (approaches to the problem)

Finding himself in exile, Brodsky was not aiming for reproaching of his homeland, nor justifying and exalting of himself. He saw in this event a certain sacred meaning. «Decisions of this sort,- as he said,- are made in spheres enough high, almost seraphic ones» [2, p. 63]. However, it relieved the poet from neither homesickness, nor despair and fear of the unknown. Since Brodsky is, above all, a poet, he is profound concerned about his dwelling in another country and so immersing in another language environment. «I do not think that it can destroy the consciousness, but it can impede its work. Even not the presence of the different language environment, but the absence of the old one. In order to write in any language well, you need to hear it - in pubs, in trams, in a grocery store. I have not invented yet how to fight with it. However, I hope the language travels together with the person. And I hope I will deliver the Russian language to that place wherever I arrive myself. All, in the end, is in God's hands» [2, p.71 ].

In that way Brodsky saw the fate of the language in 1972, at the very beginning of his forced wandering. There was still no large-scale and also deep understanding of the inseparable correlation between exile and language, which will come later and will be most clearly expressed in his speech «The condition we call exile» at the Wheatland Conference in Vienna in 1987. Therein Brodsky talks about what the exile teaches and how the poet should perceive its lessons.

First of all, the exile teaches us humility, and moreover - it is the ultimate lesson of this virtue. This refers to the linguistic humility because of the inevitable language barrier (at least at first). A person begins to feel himself «a grain of sand in the desert» and finds a special mode of measuring his creative powers - human infinity, not the works of fellow writers. Just out of human infinity the poet should speak, or else write. «...Exile,- insists Brodsky,- is a metaphysical condition. At least, it has a very strong, very clear metaphysical dimension...» [3]. Awareness of the metaphysics of his situation and the metaphysics of exile as such for the writer is a matter of great importance. This condition is not just awareness of the loss of the native ground under your feet, not just awareness of the loss of native streets and your native city. This is also the lifetime experience of the distracting from the sensual world in general, the experience of self-separation from oneself-empirical, the type of selfestrangement. It is a sort of exercise in dying and death, which for the poet, as the keeper and parent of the sacred word, is no less significant than for the philosopher. Continuing this Platonic association, one can say that exile, as metaphysical condition, acts as a midwife of a poetic thought.

Brodsky sees the fertile power of exile in an unprecedented and even lightning acceleration of professional escape into isolation, into the absolute perspective, namely, into that particular mode of existence where a poet is left alone with the language. Being in ordinary circumstances, the poet would have to strive for this necessary mode of existence for lifelong. However, making all possible efforts, there is no guarantee that he will finally be there. While exile brings him to the desired point in one night.

For clearing of such an extraordinary event Brodsky resorts to the help of the following metaphor: «...to be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man, hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will never bother to retrieve you). And your capsule is your language. <...> For one in our profession, the condition we call exile is, first of all, a linguistic event: an exiled writer is thrust, or retreats, into his mother tongue. From being his, so to speak, sword, it turns into his shield, into his capsule. What started as a private intimate affair with the language, in exile becomes fate - even before it becomes an obsession or a duty» [3].

Long-term reflections on the language and the language itself in its poetic mode determined the poet's estranged view of the wold around, society, his contemporaries and predecessors, and, finally, on himself as the executor of the main task of literature - to give to the person the true scale of what is happening without taking up a teacher's position. And the true scale of the happening can be given only through a really artistic work, through a really artistic word. And it became possible owing to the exile and more precisely - to that condition of exile, in which the poet, by the will of fate, ends up and in which he is capable to stay. Bad literature testifies to treachery both in relation to the mother tongue and in relation to the motherland and compatriots as to that special cultural space where your language lives and forms naturally.

When Brodsky was given the opportunity to address, as that is called, to urbi et orbi, he already speaks not only for himself, but also for his great teachers and predecessors. He mentions five names - Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Wystan Auden [1, p. 44]. Their lives and deaths were different, but each of them can rightly be called an exiled. Marina Tsvetaeva holds a special place among the others because of her deep sense of exile as a necessary existential state of the poet, which is expressed since the 1920s in almost all of her works. Thus, in «The Poem of the End» she calls poets Jews («V sem khristianneyshem iz mirov / Poety - zhidy!»), and in the poem «Homesickness...» proclaims a special status of the poetic language as the language in which outcasts express themselves and which anyway nobody can understand («Ne obol'shchus' i yazykom / Rodnym, yego prizyvom mlechnym. / Mne bezrazlichno - na kakom / Neponimayemoy byt' vstrechnym!»). In connection with the mentioned poets, it is possible to remember also Dante as a great poet-exiled. During his staying in Florence, Brodsky literally found himself in the mode of Dante, expelled from this city and experienced Dante's fate as his own one («December in Florence»).

Life experience of the poet-exiled, his long-term wanderings in the language universe, the native and the different others, show that the language reveals itself through various images. It is and the shield of the poet, and the preserving him capsule, and the mechanism of lightning acceleration of the thought and at the same time - that inexorable force, that dictator, who has unlimited power over the poet. Moving forward through variety of language spheres and elements, the poet fixes language life: shows how things are there. In order to most closely reflect one or another state of the language, the poetD fs soul must fall into that state, be in this state and capture it, perhaps against the personal will, but by the language's will. The language is despotic; it prescribes what and how to speak. And the poet's craft is to allow the language to speak on its own. As Brodsky said in his Nobel speech, «what in the vernacular is named the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; the poet is «the means of the existence of language»; the poet falls into dependence on language as others fall into dependence on alcohol or drugs [1, pp. 52, 54].

Now it is possible to distinguish, at least, four modes of exile of the poet: initial exile, the birth into the material world as payment for original sin; real belonging to the Jewish, to the nation-exiled (or conscious identification with the Jews); exile from the motherland, or socio-political exile; exile as natural and at the same time - metaphysical condition of the poet. Being experienced by one person, these conditions strengthen each other. The poet-Jew by ethnic origin always feels more acutely the fatal homelessness and detachment. Therefore, the desire to find home in the language, in the poetic work is stronger. That poet actually has to build the home by the own language means. Building such home, the poet builds the own spiritual world, the rhythm of the soul, and so for the first time moves to the world and to himself as to the newfound sacred being. The world finds sense, starts being perceived as the only native Home through movement to it by means of language.

Since the exile is realized, cultivated and comprehended by the poet as the natural condition, so the poet acts as the language's servant, as that special point in being where the language finally finds itself in the sound, in the word, in the speech. The poet and the language finally overtake, comprehend and interpenetrate each other. As Brodsky says, the poet is reduced to pen's rustle on the paper, to wedges and ringlets of the letters, to commas and full stops. In the end, only a part of the speech remains from the poet.

The poet-exiled passes the way from the condition of groundlessness, from the being, lost its meaning, to the being-fulfilled, found its meaning. And this way lies through the language, as the necessary purgatory and the only salvation. The ill-fate, a blind trick of fate, through free existential choice, through acceptance of the exile as a punishment and at the same time - as Divine gift transfigures into the destiny, foresight and foreknowledge [5], both for the poet, and for the language. The destiny of the poet becomes the destiny of the language, and vice versa.

References

1. Brodskij I. A. (2003) Lica neobshhim vyrazhen'em. Nobelevskaja lekcija [Nobel lecture], Sochinenija Iosifa Brodskogo, v 7 tt., t. 6, Sankt-Peterburg, Pushkinskij fond, pp. 44-54.

2. Brodskij I. A. (2001) Pisatel' - odinokij puteshestvennik [A writer is a lonely traveller], Sochinenija Iosifa Brodskogo, v 7 tt., t. 7, Sankt-Peterburg, Pushkinskij fond, pp. 62-71.

3. Brodsky J. (1988) The Condition we call exile, The New YorkReview of Books, January 21, 1988, vol. 34,.№ 21&22, pp. 1-6, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/ 1988/01/21/the-condition-we-call-exile/

4. Patterson D. (1993) From Exile to Affirmation: The Poetry of Joseph Brodsky, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 17, is. 2, article12, https:// newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1330&context=sttcl

5. Vezhbickaja A. (2011) Sud'ba i predopredelenie [Fate and Destiny], Vezhbickaja A. Semanticheskie universalii i bazisnye koncepty, Moskva, Jazyki slavjanskih kul'tur, pp. 424-497.

Размещено на Allbest.ru