Joseph Brodsky an exile by choice

"Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go," Joseph Brodsky wrote in 1986.

St Petersburg's intellectual and political world have been quick to claim Brodsky as their own after his demise early this year, but Brodsky had many homes.

At the time of his death he owned precisely two, one in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn and the other in Hadley, Massachusetts near Mount Holyoke College were he taught for 15 years. He divided his time equally between the two.

News of his death on January 30, 1996 of a heart attack in New York City was written of in his former home of St Petersburg as the passing of the city's favourite son, born, raised in and exiled from the cradle of Russian literature.

The city's Mayor's Office even suggested his body be buried here in his renamed hometown.

To those who knew him in the US, such a return from exile would have caused Brodsky to stir in his coffin even before it was lowered into the earth -- not because of any grudge he bore the thuggish politics of exile, but because by the time of his death, the terms of exile had been effaced by his work.

The apology of a state burial was therefore not required; the dispute from Brodsky's point of view had been forgotten and the conditions of his migration had become a personal choice.

Around the time of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's whistle-stop return to Russia, Brodsky was asked more than once if he too planned such a reunion with his homeland.

His answer when I put the question to him in March of 1995 was "why on earth would I want to do that?" He explained candidly that he thought Solzhenitsyn a fool.

Glancing around the study of his Hadley home explained much of what he left unsaid; it was a room geared specifically for work, an enormous wooden table in the middle, the walls covered with shelves of books, a minority of which were in Russian.

Two posters hung on the far end, one announcing a reading by Irish poet and close Brodsky friend Seamus Heaney and the other of Caribbean poet Derrik Walcott.

These, in other words, were his present colleagues, an expatriate milieu in America, and if Joseph's younger years were spent in the company of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam in Leningrad, then he came to maturity in an international society of eternal drifters.

It was to this development as an artist that he was responsible. In his collection of essays "On Grief and Reason" published a month before his death, Brodsky described the condition of writers in exile as "essentially a premonition of your own book-form fate, of being lost on the shelf among those with whom all you have in common is the first letter of your surname."

Though it is doubtful that "Brodsky" will ever be relegated to just another selection among the "Bs," his words suggest a return from exile would have hurt his work.

His exile afforded him, as he put it, the unique position of observing a sort of posthumous fame while he still lived.

At the same time it was the clarity of this relationship in which he stood to his work, the peek at post-death shelf-life, that was the force driving his artistic growth.

Post-death attempts to re-claim or re-interpret the exiled Brodsky as a "St Petersburg soul" are attempts therefore to discard a large part of his growth and existence as a poet.

As he wrote in 1986, "the condition we call exile...accelerates tremendously one's otherwise professional flight -- or drift -- into isolation...into the condition which one is left with is oneself and one's language with nobody or nothing in between."

Brodsky's native language never became the barrier it did for Solzhenitsyn. Brodsky learned his English reading T S Eliot and Robert Frost.

It is ultimately these voices that influenced Brodsky's own style, his formalist attention to meter, form and rhyme, and it is ultimately among these voices that he will be remembered, as an artist beyond the lines drawn on the map by politics, subject only to the traditions of poetry.