ABSTRACT

In keeping with Timothy Brennan's call to make visible the philosophical traditions informing theoretical, political, and literary affiliations in the twentieth century, this chapter tells the story of an 'encounter' between a communist author (Platonov), an emigre poet and literary critic (Brodsky). It discusses the right-wing philosopher (Heidegger), and of violence to which 'writers from the other Europe' was subjected upon their admission into the modernist canon. Joseph Brodsky's lesson begins simply enough: one cannot cheat one's way into modernism by hoping that a formal reproduction of deformed Soviet reality can "produce a sufficiently surrealistic or absurdist effect" within a work of art. Brodsky's artist is very much in a "conversation" with the world around him, cast in the same "unprecedented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide whose net result is a drastic reduction of human potential," including his own.