Diligent research but little heart in Brodsky biography

“What a biography they’re creating for our redhead,’’ exclaimed Anna Akhmatova, Brodsky’s mentor and the great Pieta-figure in the Soviet gallery of artistic oppression. An unknown when taken up by this towering poet, he was immediately treated by her as an equal. “[Joseph], you and I know every rhyme in the Russian language,’’ she told him, but it wasn’t style that made the relationship — theirs were very different — but soul. Lev Loseff tells us that she would frequently repeat Brodsky’s insistence that poetry above all lay in “the magnitude of the idea.’’

He was very different from what might be called the established dissidents of the time — Evtushenko, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina — subtle, carefully sardonic, measuredly Aesopian so as to barely dodge the regime’s hammer and find a wavering measure of protection in its more moderate elements.

Brodsky was all unaccommodating magnitude, a hard-charging poetic bull who — after the government released him from exile, embarrassed by the outcry abroad even among its Communist friends — refused various suggestions for just a touch of accommodation. (The KGB offered to get his poems published if he would inform on foreign contacts.) The solution, finally, was to ship him West. There, his star soared: teaching posts, honorary doctorates, a MacArthur award, and finally the Nobel Prize.

His poetry had been evolving from its early harshly denunciatory style; though, as Loseff notes, even his most political writing was never rhetorical, but lyrical and specific. In exile, though, his poetry broadened out and deepened; estranged and refined at the same time. No longer battling the universe, the universe begins to battle through him. Here from one of his late Nativity poems:

“There was one far-off/ heavy sigh from the mule. Or the ox./ The star looked in across the threshold./ The only one of them who could/ know the meaning of that look/ was the infant. But He did not speak.’’