Russian literature. A short introduction

where ‘Sarah/Leander walked click-click to the scaffold’ (sonnet no. 2). That is, she is an artistic vision of a kind far less substantial than a sculpture. Yet at the same time, the cycle insists on her actual, physical existence, as someone who is the object of a desire deserving consummation, so that ‘Scotland becomes our mattress’ (sonnet no. 8). And to mark his distance still further, Brodsky continually, and, from the point of view of conventional literary piety, impertinently, quotes from Pushkin’s love poems in order to undermine their emotional rhetoric, most particularly through glaring lexical dislocations that are utterly contrary to the spirit of Pushkin’s harmonious combinations of disparate poetic styles. A case in point is the wry parody, in the sixth sonnet, of Pushkin’s ‘I loved you’ (translated here by Peter France):

I loved you. And my love (or maybe

it’s only pain) still stabs me through the brain.

The whole thing’s shattered into smithereens.

I tried to shoot myself – using a gun

isn’t so simple. And the temples: which one,

the right or left? Reflection, not the shakes,

kept me from acting. Jesus! what a mess!

I loved you with such strength, such hopelessness

may God send you in others – not a chance!

He may be capable of many things,

but – with Parmenides – won’t reinspire

the fire in the blood, the bones’ crunching collapse,

swelling the lead in fillings with desire

to touch – ‘your hips’, I must delete – your lips.

Apart from the two direct quotations from Pushkin (italicized here – for the full text of the original poem, see Chapter 6), the poem’s parodistic relationship to its original is established by the use, in line 12 of the Russian, of the archaic article sei – ‘yonder fire’ would be correct in terms of register. But the original is used as a mere backing canvas for purely Brodskian (and twentieth-century) rhetorical embroidery. This