Heteroglossia of a Castaway: On the Exilic Performative of Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry and Prose

Abstract

Russian poet-expatriate, Nobel Prize Laureate, Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature, a Poet Laureate, Joseph Brodsky was fifty-five years old when he died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996 in New York. “A kind of cultural martyr, arrested by the KGB, sent to prison, and later forced into exile,” Brodsky and his life can be seen in the rupture of the imposed transfer: “from a poet of the resistance he turns into a poet of the establishment in the United States” (Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle”, 253). His “poetic fate,” however, exemplifies the story of mutations, the narrative of separations, and the state of solitude, from which the figure of Joseph Brodsky — “a Russian poet, an English essayist, and an American citizen”¹ — emerges.