Joseph Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, what was then Leningrad, in 1940. He writes in the first, title essay of his book, about his generation in postwar Soviet Russia, how they were “somewhat spared” the full experience of what their country had become: a “drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.”
“We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn’t look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. … The empty windows gaped at us like skulls’ orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy. … The amount of goods was very limited…. we didn’t develop a taste for possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ugly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to things themselves….”
I can’t help comparing the cultural environment in which Brodsky came of age to that of the generation currently in their teens and twenties. When those young people in Leningrad were trying to survive the privations at every level of their being, they didn’t have the option of comforting themselves with marijuana or escaping to the metaverse. Their daily life didn’t include such diversions as shopping at the mall for the current fashions in jeans or phones. What they did have was books:
“If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and conversations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to become a vicious circle, but we didn’t want to break it.
“In its ethics, this generation was among the most bookish in the history of Russia, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a preference for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our real Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but soon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of effort. So we thought, and I think we were right.”
-Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One
This passage gives me a clue as to a question I’ve had about Brodsky: How, born a Jew and growing up under atheist Communism, did he come to be a “Christian poet”? Not only does he say (quoted in a previous post about him) that he tries to be a Christian, but Wikipedia tells us:
Daniel Murphy, in his seminal text Christianity and Modern European Literature, includes Brodsky among the most influential Christian poets of the 20th century, along with T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova (Brodsky’s mentor for a time), and W. H. Auden (who sponsored Brodsky’s cause in the United States). Irene Steckler was the first to categorically state that Brodsky was “unquestionably a Christian poet”.
What the writer tells us about this education he and his friends got for themselves shows the power of the vicarious experience that can be had from reading good stories. The best books helped them to endure the “nonsense or nuisance” of totalitarian society, and at the same time gave them a broad, universal understanding of Reality. What a blessed bookishness; as Brodsky says, Thank God for that.
Earlier this year I was prompted to think about who were my favorite audiobook narrators. It was soon revealed how very many I have! I was glad the request was for the narrators who I find truly add to the reading experience, and not the ones to avoid, because that would not be as pleasant an activity as I was engaged in, perusing through the titles I have listened to.
Mike Fraser in The Timeless Way of Building.
The lettuces that had bolted I chopped up and gave to my worms. Out there I set up a board by way of a chopping block just for this purpose. I probably have four times as many worms as I started with last fall, because the man who gave me my starter batch moved far away and couldn’t take his worm farm; he gave them all to me! He consolidated all three or four of his bins into one new one, before bringing it to my house, so I fear that they are overcrowded, and I plan to modify my set-up so that they have more room. But they seem to be doing well on the diet I provide.
Brussels sprouts. There was cold tea as well, pretty fancy stuff that had just arrived today.
A lovely thing happened on this gardening day: I received in the mail this book The Fragrance of God, by Vigen Guroian (2006). I noticed it online when I was buying the new edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. The Fragrance book seems to be on the same theme as the author’s previous book, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. I couldn’t help leafing through it right away, though I was too busy to give it proper attention. Just now I did take time to glean one quote with which to end my mostly garden post. I am reveling in my own heart’s portion of Paradise tonight.
Gladsome Lights 