The Case Against Brodsky

Since Nikita Khrushchev put a chill on the "thaw" in Russian letters last year, Soviet artists and writers have slowly, gradually been working back toward the level of relatively free ex pression that reached its high point with Poet Evgeny Evtushenko's mass readings in Mayakovsky Square. Recently, however, intellectuals have once again felt the cold wind of literary conservatism. This time it blew not on a politically outspoken, widely published writer, but rather on one of Russia's many literary "abstainers" -- ostensible amateurs whose works are circulated by hand, thus precluding their being drafted into the government's agitprop machinery, as Evtushenko and others occasionally have been.

Like Boris Pasternak, Poet Joseph Brodsky was such an abstainer. A softspoken, red-haired Jewish youth who lived in Leningrad, he chose not to join a writers' union, refused to serve on editorial boards, earned his living as a stoker, a metalworker, or occasionally as a laborer on geological expeditions. Meanwhile, he wrote poetry for his own enjoyment and that of his friends, among them some of Russia's best-known literary lights.

The Charge. Brodsky's haunting, moody, calculatedly nonpolitical verses were circulated by hand through intel lectual circles, won him a growing reputation. Inevitably, he came to the attention of the druzhinniki, the witch-hunting vigilantes whose jobs include directing traffic, controlling crowds and bringing recalcitrant intellectuals and other "hooligans" to justice.

Since they could not fault Brodsky on the content of his poetry, the druzhinniki invoked that convenient Catch 22 of Soviet law: "parasitism." The case against Brodsky last February charged him with being "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" whose "earnings were casual, which shows that he did not fulfill the most important constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland."

The Trial. Last week a transcript of Brodsky's trial filtered out to the West. Published in Hamburg's responsible weekly Die Zeit, it spoke volumes about the fate of the abstainer in Russia today:

Judge: What is your profession? Brodsky: I write poems, translate. I take it that . . . Judge: Have you steady work? Brodsky: I write poems. Judge: That doesn't interest us. What interests us is with what institution you are connected. Brodsky: None. Judge: And who recognized you as a poet? Brodsky: No one. And who placed me among the human race? Prosecutor: Can one live from the money you earn? And doesn't one need shoes and suits? Brodsky: I have one suit, an old one, but still a suit. I don't need a second one. I have worked. I have written poems . . . Building Communism doesn't only mean standing at a work bench or plowing the earth. There's also spiritual labor. Judge: Forget the big words.

The Sentence. As the proceedings droned on, telegrams and letters arrived from the poet's prestigious friends --Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, Lenin Prizewinning Authors Samuel Marshak, Kornei Chukovsky and many others--protesting the absurdity of the trial. Such public boldness among artists took not only courage but conscience, but their protests were in vain. Brodsky was sentenced to five years of "useful labor." His job: carting manure at a camp near Archangel.

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