Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse by David s> MacFadyen (review)

I24 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 on readerreception also yield valuable insightsinto the workingsof the novel and Nabokov's aesthetics, with the familiar Nabokovian stance of total authorialcontrolset againstthe notion of the empowered reader. It isBlackwell'smain thesis,the allimportanceof Zina and her contribution to the novel we are reading, that remainsshadowy. The lengthy introduction of the character and build-up to the final manifestation leads to nothing tangible,with attention deflectedin the penultimate chapterto a discourseon Platonic and Romantic love. Such criticismmay sound damning. It isn't. For Blackwell's whole point is that Zina is intentionally merely a shadowy presence. The female editorial hand is not even as visible as Ada's in Nabokov's later development of this compositional idea. Zina's inner world remainslargelya secretto Fyodor, since love (Dolinin's suggestionthis,which regrettablyBlackwelltucksinto a footnote, n. 50, p. I93) preservesa person's inner mystery and renders him/her opaque, not transparent.Zina's importance , and the importance and integrity of Blackwell'sreading, is the empty spaceshecreates,beyond thelineofthepage, forotherreaders'understanding. The privileging of Zina as ideal reader is, as he states in his concluding paragraph,the 'figure'spowerasan imageoftransitionto higherconsciousness generally,to a lesslimited stateof existence' (p. i68). School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies JANE GRAYSON University College London MacFadyen, David. Joseph Brodskyand the SovietMuse. McGill-Queen's UniversityPress,Montreal, Kingston, London and Ithaca, 2000. 209 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?35.50. A pendant to David MacFadyen's JosephBrodskyand the Baroque,which appeared from the same press in i999, this book also deals with the initial stage of Brodsky's writing, that is, up to his arrest and internal exile in I963-64. The author has had access to the Brodskyarchive in the National Library,St Petersburg,and also conducted interviewswith some of the friends of Brodsky'syouth. In his eight short chapters he addresses an enormous number of topics and authors, all of them familiar points of reference in existing statements about and studies of the cultural circumstances of Brodsky's intellectual and creative formation:jazz, Anglo-American prose fiction, Frost, Slutsky,Bagritsky,Galczyfiski,poetry for children, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Byron, and finally Derzhavin. The only substantialexception to the familiarlitany is a passage (pp. I76-8I) concerning two poems: 'Traktory na rassvete', which Brodskypublished in the local newspaper in exile, and 'Narod', which he evidently thought would serve as the 'locomotive' that would pull his proposed collection of I965 past the Soviet gatekeepers and into print. Otherwise, notwithstandingthe coy referencesto privileged sources, there is nothing that takes our understandingof these topics substantiallybeyond what has already been said by others. In particular, to judge from the fragmentsthat are cited here, the contemporariesof Brodskyinterviewedby MacFadyen have added very little to what they have already said to other REVIEWS I25 interlocutorsand/or publishedin theirvariouswritingsabout the poet -and all this in addition to the poet's own copious dicta. Even worse, MacFadyen appears to have swallowed these contemporaries' frequently asserted but unsustainable conviction that their generation of Russians was better read than any other, and he parrotsyet again their provincial legends about their expert knowledgeofjazz and other forbiddenfruit.As for scholars,theirwork is as a rule simply ignored or not acknowledged. To takejust one example: MacFadyen abruptlyassertsthat 'Xolmy has also been assessedin terms of its debtto the balladicgenre'(p. 158).Bywhom, when, andwhere, isone entitled to ask?Nothing is discussedhere with the penetration and detail it deserves. Instead,the successivetopics areperemptorilyidentified,superficiallyassessed with the aid of elementary secondary sources that do duty for authentic knowledgeof the originalmaterial,and straitjacketedinto conceptual schemes that are never properlyestablished.The most egregious example of the latter is 'the Soviet Muse'. This phrase appearsin the book's title and is picked up and dropped at severalpoints in the course of the text; the readeris given no real idea about what it is meant to mean, beyond something vague about masculinity that the author apparently thinks will take on substance if he repeatsit often enough. The text of this book reads throughout like a first draft produced by an enthusiastic but ill-trained graduate student full of mistranslations, ungrounded assertions, arbitrary associations, premature generalizations, invertedlogic, and awkwardlypretentiousformulations.There are occasional descentsinto simplenonsense, such as the sentence 'Pasternak,having spoken...

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