Brodsky Abroad. Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia

Exiled by the authorities from the Soviet Union in 1972 and awarded the Nobel Prize 15 years later, Joseph Brodsky largely continued the great tradition of the poet-in-exile. However, the years spent away from his homeland did not make him a recluse. Although he never returned to his beloved Leningrad, he was able to travel freely around the world and write about it. The focus of the author's monograph is an analysis of Brodsky's poems and essays about Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. In an effort to challenge the established views of Brodsky as the leading émigré poet and heir to European modernism, Sanna Turoma immerses the studied materials in the unusual context of a contemporary travelogue. The author sees in Brodsky's travel notes his reaction not only to his exile but also to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape that originally shaped these texts. In his Latin American poems, Brodsky resorts to the genre of ironic elegy, thereby rejecting the postcolonial realities of Mexico. In the essay about Istanbul, the poet engages in a contradictory debate about Orientalism, relying on the familiar notion of Russia as a place where East meets West. And Venice, the quintessential tourist city, becomes a place for Brodsky to reconsider his lyrical essence. Turoma outlines a previously unexamined trajectory of the poet's evolution from a solitary dissident to a renowned writer and offers a new perspective on the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic underpinnings of his poetic imagination. Sanna Turoma is a research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki (Finland).