May 23, 2011 Issue

Keith Gessen, in his excellent “The Gift,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, says of Joseph Brodsky’s internal exile in the northern village of Norinskaya, “On the whole, this was more Yaddo than Gulag.” It’s a witty line, and I smiled when I read it, but does it do justice to the reality of Brodsky’s situation? It’s true that Brodsky didn’t have to endure the horrors of the Siberian prison camps. Nevertheless, his life in Norinskaya was far from easy. He spent his days shoveling manure. David Remnick, in his profile of Brodsky, titled “Perfect Pitch” (The New Yorker, February 12, 1996; included in Remnick’s 1996 collection The Devil Problem), describes the poet “sitting in his shack, smoking, his back aching from the pitchfork, dung on his boots, the reek of the bog still on his clothes.” As far as I know, artists in residence at Yaddo don’t have to shovel shit. It’s true that, according to Remnick, Brodsky enjoyed his eighteen months in internal exile. He says, “He enjoyed pulling on his boots and working on a collective farm, enjoyed shoveling manure. Knowing that everyone else across Russia was shoveling shit, too, he felt a sense of nation, of kinship.” But just because Brodsky made the best of a hard situation doesn’t entitle us, some forty-six years later, to minimize it. It seems to me that Remnick, in his piece, strikes the proper note of respect when he says, “He refused the role of celebrity-martyr and did his work, but in those moments when he was called on by fate to step forward – in the courtroom, in exile – he did so with perfect pitch.”