Chopin on a terrace in Procida, played by Peter Hicks, while Carmine Pinto speaks to a thousand people, many listening on the terraces, of exiles from the Risorgimento. Ernesto Ferrero, moved during the Lectio “Giuseppe Galasso”, in the support of Elsa Morante and the film Il postino. Neruda, the exile par excellence, and the memory of poets and writers linked to the island of Arturo. The sixteenth edition of Incontri Mediterranei entitled «Esili», organized with tenacity by Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, continues, until Saturday 1 October, with unpublished shows, such as “Confinamenti” by Alessandro Vanoli. Alongside the university proposals there will be concerts and shows in magical places on the island. An important edition because it will inaugurate the year of Procida Italian Capital of Culture 2022. «Esili», organized by Aion and the University of Naples L’Orientale, under the patronage of the Municipality of Procida, the Embassy of Chile in Italy and of the Committee for the Napoleonic Bicentenary, today, Wednesday 29 September 2021, at 3.00 pm, foresees at the Chapel of Purity, the intervention of the writer and historian Roberto Coaloa entitled: «Exile to follow inner imperatives and personal inspiration. The poet outside the empire: the Nobel Iosif Brodskij and the sea ».
Edward Said suggested that the modern age, often considered a spiritually orphaned and alienated age, was dominated by displacement and estrangement. Modern Western culture is largely the work of “foreigners”, exiles, emigrants or refugees, who have transformed a condition of loss into one of the richest and most significant cultural motifs of our time. The phenomenon of exile has been known since ancient times and, as far as the specific field of Russian culture is concerned, the exiled intellectuals of the nineteenth century, such as the romantics and liberals of the Decembrists or Aleksandr Herzen and his circle, had an intercultural and transactional vision similar to the exiles of the Soviet era, they probably suffered from the same frustrations and miseries. However, a difference between the so-called “first” and “second” waves of exiles exists, and consists in the size of the phenomenon, in the speed and severity of the political and cultural upheavals that have wrested many people from their roots, their land, to their past. The master of our literary studies George Steiner observed that much of the literature of the twentieth century was “extraterritorial”, a reading from exile, although not always about exile.
Now, dealing with «Images of Exile», in Procida, we propose the case of the poet Brodskij, author of a lyric tale right on this island dear to writers, from Alphonse de Lamartine to Elsa Morante. Poetry built in small scenes, almost cinematic, which convey all the suggestion and amazement of the becoming of the sunset in the Mediterranean.
Born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940, Iosif Brodskij is the son of Marija Moiseevna Vol’pert, who during the Second World War worked as an interpreter from the German for prisoners of war, then as a clerk and accountant, and by Aleksandr Ivanovič Brodskij, an officer of navy who achieved the highest rank a Jew could aspire to (major, equivalent to a lieutenant captain in the Italian Navy), but was later discharged and worked as a photographer.
When he was accused of “social parasitism,” in February-March 1964, and subjected to a trial that seemed to have as its object the literature itself, rather than the individual Brodsky, it was because, as the prosecutor suggests, he lived as a foreigner. with respect to the crowd: he had done various odd and occasional jobs, giving the impression of scarce seriousness and coherence, and his verse did not belong to the prevailing language of the empire.
The empire is the Soviet one, which did not forgive him for being a Poet. His original sin against the system consisted in playing a score and an instrument foreign to the state orchestra, in following inner imperatives and personal whims on the themes of ethics and beauty. Brodsky was a wandering Russian pilgrim: “I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen.”
In Italy, as Roberto Calasso recalled, the exile Brodsky was seized by “a real vertigo”, he seemed to find people, landscapes, things that had always been intimately his and had accompanied him during the dark years of persecution, a homeland only dreamed it suddenly became alive and true.
For the poet, for example, Venice was an obsession, because, as he recounts in Foundations of the incurable, the image of the Italian city was already dear to him in childhood and youth. In Venice he found a kind of paradise suitable for writing. In Russia he would have been locked up in an asylum, as happened to many of his artist friends, not aligned with the schemes of his comrades, such as Mihail Chemiakin.
The poet, however, would not allow us to ascribe him among those who have lived an experience of tragic exile. His conception of exile is not affected by the Russian literary myth of the exiled writer, since in his personal experience the exile represented not only a loss, but also the conquest of what meant most to him, the freedom to be alone with time, with eternity, and its impact on poetic discourse.
“And I swore to myself that if I ever managed to get myself out of my empire, I would first come to Venice, I would rent a room on the ground floor of a building, so that the waves raised by the passing hulls would come crashing into my window, I would have written a couple of elegies by putting out cigarettes on the damp bricks of the floor, I would have coughed and drank; and when I found myself short of money, instead of taking a train I would have bought myself a small second-hand Browning and, not being able to die in Venice of natural causes, I would have blown my brains out ».
(Iosif Brodskij, Foundations of the Incurables, Adelphi 1991. Translation by Gilberto Forti).
In 1972, however, after his expulsion from the Soviet empire, Brodsky settled in the country of “foreigners” par excellence, the United States. He wrote that he would rather experience a total failure in democracy than be a martyr or “la crème de la crème” (in French in the text) in a tyranny.
From the United States, however, he immediately succeeded, celebrating his first Christmas outside the empire in Venice, to visit Italy, spending long periods on its islands.
And this, for us Italians, is a story to be told, completely new.
The poet was very familiar with the islands of the Gulf of Naples. In Ischia, in June 1983 for two weeks, he was a guest of his friend Fausto Malcovati and in 1993 he wrote the verses of Ischia in October in Russian. In Capri, in 1990, he was awarded the Capri Prize. In Procida? Why did he visit the island? Where did he live? It was 1994 when he wrote the poem Procida. The year of the magnificent film The postman, starring Massimo Troisi, who died in his sleep just a few hours after filming ended. It was June 4, 1994. Will the Russian poet have met the Chilean poet Neruda played by Philippe Noiret? Did he observe the unforgettable gaze of the Neapolitan actor in the locations of Marina Corricella (the fishermen’s village), Marina Chiaiolella, Chiaia, Carbogno?
It is desirable that the Municipality of Procida pay homage to the Russian poet, perhaps in 2022, to celebrate the title of Italian Capital of Culture. Just as in the past he has paid homage to other poets and writers. Today the name of Neruda is associated with the island, although the Chilean poet has never set foot there. Procida is full of plaques, which recall, for example, Lamartine or the poet Alberto Mario Moriconi. We read, along the characteristic Via Giovanni da Procida: «The Poet Alberto Mario Moriconi lived in this house in the summer for several years and here in August 1969 he composed almost entirely one of his masterpieces, the” Debate on ‘ [Sic] love ”, in which he also sang his love for Procida. The Municipality placed on May 30, 2009 ».
The research on “Italian” Brodsky continues. Unpublished and fun, for example, is the “Turin” Brodskij.
In 1988, the poet, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, guest of honor at the first Book Fair, learned that his compatriot Tselkov was present at Ezio Gribaudo’s house (we remember Oleg Tselkov, who died just this year, the July 11, 2021), left off all official commitments to go to the Turin artist’s house. Gribaudo: «And so we improvised a dinner attended by Roberto Calasso and his wife Fleur Jaeggy. Before leaving late at night, Brodsky drew a cat on my little gold book. ‘
This image of a happy Brodsky in Italy contrasts with that of an “unpleasant” intellectual, reluctant to interviews, which has spread in recent times, after the success of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Brodsky in exile, therefore, did not find the second-hand Browning, but a sweet decadence, next to a woman to love (on September 1, 1990, he married Maria Sozzani in the Stockholm City Hall and, in 1993, the couple’s daughter was born, Anna). Above all, as an exile, he experienced literary glory with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, awarded to him for “an all-encompassing writing, characterized by clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He died in New York on January 28, 1996. Now, twenty-five years after the poet’s death, the writer is preparing an extensive essay, which investigates in particular the theme of Italy, the sea, and water. In Venice, therefore, we will drink a vodka and put out cigarettes on the floors of the Grand Hotel Palazzo dei Dogi or the Danieli … In Procida, at dusk, coming down from Terra Murata, with the last and magical lights of the evening, we will declaim Brodskij’s poetry dedicated to the island of Procida, written in Russian in 1994:
Procida
Lost Bay; no more than twenty sailboats.
Nets, relatives of the sheets, hung out to dry.
Sunset. The old men watch the game in the bar.
Cala Azzurra tries to turn blue.
A seagull claws the horizon first
that it congeals. After eight it is deserted
the seaside. Blue breaks into the border
beyond which a star catches fire.
The text is taken from Italian Poems (Adelphi, 1996), in the Italian translation from Russian by Giovanni Buttafava.