Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

There is much that remains to be written about Joseph Brodsky. His
verses, crowded with signposts to the realm of high ideas and high
culture, demand an intellectual response. Yet Brodsky’s voice is
earnestly, unpretentiously simple. So often his poems are built of a mix
of the most mundane thoughts and objects. Or of words alone, from which
ideas and interpretations slide like water off a duck’s back along
with the real-world referents themselves. MacFayden’s book is a bit
like this as well. It aims to offer a reassessment of Brodsky’s entire
corpus by paralleling its evolution with that of baroque aesthetics.
This currently fashionable category has been expanded by critics from
its original 17th-century dimensions to become something universal and
recurrent. For MacFadyen, the baroque is a social phenomenon
encompassing not only Brodsky, but an entire post-Soviet culture
(post-Stalinist would be a better term, judging from the author’s
examples).

In Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque, the substance of this
phenomenon—including such eternal oppositions as order/disorder,
body/soul, form/content—is so loosely defined that the coherence of
the author’s argument is forever fleeting over the horizon. Beyond the
horizon as well is the deeper understanding of figures ranging from
Donne to Kierkegaard for which the reader feels the need in order to
appreciate fully what MacFadyen is doing. However, his subtle and
ambitious reading of Brodsky cannot be ignored. Particularly convincing
is his focus on the cosmogonical potential of Brodsky’s language.
While much summing up of the poet’s career in the five years since his
death has concentrated on the political drama of his biography (trial,
exile, emigration, Nobel Prize) and its supposed reflection in his work,
MacFayden makes a strong case for seeing Brodsky’s existential journey
as directed, even scripted, by the protean force of his words
themselves.