Read Brodsky's Nobel Prize speech. Joseph Brodsky

).
Wow, that was interesting and challenging. The most difficult task was to treat this speech with restraint and impartiality. I remember that I analyzed it piece by piece so that I would not be overwhelmed by a wave of experiences and emotions.
But now I can relax, be fully biased and post my favorite quotes from this speech, marveling at both the thoughts themselves and how vividly and emotionally it was said.

Joseph Brodsky
Nobel lecture

[…] Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.
…No matter, Whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to to live your own, and not imposed or prescribed from the outside, even by the most a noble looking life. […]It would be a shame to waste this is the only chance to repeat someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, tautology...

Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or the indifference expressed by literature towards the state is, according to essentially, the reaction of a constant, better said - infinite, in relation to temporary, limited. At least until the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right interfere in the affairs of the state. Politic system, the form of social structure, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often future), and a person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford forget about it yourself. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by its, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better - but always temporary - outlines.
...Art in general and literature in particular is remarkable in that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality. That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main instrument of which is - should we clarify Marx? - exactly a cliché.
Today it is extremely common to assert that a writer, a poet in particular, must use the language of the street, the language of the crowd, in his works. For all its apparent democracy and tangible practical benefits for the writer, this statement is nonsense and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history. Only if we have decided that it is time for “sapiens” to stop in its development, literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, the people should speak the language of literature.
[…]Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person who experiences it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic spells inherent in any form political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is not guarantee of a masterpiece, as much as the fact that evil, especially political, is always bad stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his the taste, the clearer it is moral choice, the freer he is - although perhaps and no happier.
It is in this applied rather than platonic sense that one should understand Dostoevsky’s remark that “beauty will save the world,” or Matthew Arnold’s statement that “poetry will save us.” The world may not be able to be saved, but an individual can always be saved.
...I am far from the idea of universal teaching of versification and composition; However, the division of people into the intelligentsia and everyone else seems unacceptable to me. In moral terms, this division is similar to the division of society into rich and poor; but, if for the existence of social inequality some purely physical, material
justifications for intellectual inequality are unthinkable. In some ways, and in this sense, equality is guaranteed to us by nature. We are not talking about education, but about the formation of speech, the slightest approach to which is fraught with the invasion of a person’s life by a false choice. The existence of literature implies existence at the level of literature - and not only morally, but also lexically.
...A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but a conversation between a writer and a reader - a conversation, I repeat, extremely private, excluding everyone else, if you like - mutually misanthropic. And at the moment of this conversation, the writer is equal to the reader, as well as vice versa, regardless of whether he is a great writer or not. Equality is equality of consciousness, and it remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, vague or clear, and sooner or later, by the way or
inappropriately, determines the behavior of the individual. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the role of the performer, all the more natural since a novel or poem is a product of the mutual loneliness of writer and reader.

[…]a book is a means of transportation to space of experience at the speed of turning a page. Move it, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose a line on the denominator of this that did not rise previously above the belt, our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular. In whose image and likeness we were not created, there are already five billion of us, and man has no other future than that outlined by art. Otherwise, the past awaits us - first of all, the political one, with all its mass police delights.
In any case, the situation in which art in general and literature in particular is the property (prerogative) of a minority seems to me unhealthy and threatening. I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has visited me more than once - but I have no doubt that, we choose our rulers based on their reading experience, and not Based on their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. To me I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked first of all, not about how he imagines the course foreign policy, A about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. At least already only that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be reliable an antidote to any - known or future - attempts a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more more effective than a particular belief system or philosophical doctrine.
Because there can be no laws that protect us from ourselves, not a single criminal code provides for punishment for crimes against literature.

...Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of a minority: the famous Russian intelligentsia.

…I will only say that - not from experience, alas, but only theoretically - I believe that for
It is more difficult for a person who has read Dickens to shoot something like him in the name of any idea than for a person who has not read Dickens. And I'm talking specifically about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not about literacy, not about education. A literate, educated person may well, after reading this or that political treatise, kill his own kind and even experience the delight of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong, he even wrote poetry; the list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list of what they have read.

<...>If art teaches something (and artists primarily), it is precisely the particulars of human existence.<...>It, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, and separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Much can be shared: bread, bed, shelter - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, literature in particular and a poem in particular, addresses a person tet-a-tet, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries.

The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression.<...>Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is, first of all, to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life<...> It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on a tautology.<...>Created to give us an idea not so much of our origins as of what “sapiens” are capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, turns into a flight from the common denominator<...>towards a non-general facial expression, towards a personality, towards a particular one.<...>

I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be fewer

grief.<...>If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine.<...>

No criminal code provides punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not the persecution of authors, not censorship restrictions, etc., not the burning of books. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. For this crime a person pays with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history. (From the Nobel lecture given by I. A. Brodsky in 1987 in the USA).

Stages of work

1. We read the text carefully. We formulate the problem(s) posed in the text.

The presented text belongs to the journalistic style. Typically, such texts pose not one, but several problems. To identify the issues raised, you need to carefully read each paragraph and ask a question about it.

The text contains 4 paragraphs and, accordingly, 4 question-problems:

a) What helps a person to realize that he is an individual?

b) What is the meaning of human individual existence?

c) What is the importance of reading books in solving problems of society?

d) What does neglect of books lead to?

Thus, the main problem is the role of literature in human life and society.

2 . We comment on (explain) the main problem we formulated.

To identify aspects of the problem, you need to determine (name) the topic of each paragraph and note the facts (if any) that the author refers to.

a) about the role of art, in particular literature, in a person’s acquisition of “his” face;

b) about the human right to individuality (the starting point is a quote from Baratynsky);

c) about the necessity and obligation of a moral approach to solving problems of society;

d) about the exceptional role of books in human life and society.

a) art helps a person gain experience and awareness of his individuality;

b) a person is not a “social animal”, but an individual, his task is to live “his own” life;

c) literature is a system of moral insurance for society;

d) “not reading” books is a crime against oneself and society.

4 . Express your own opinion regarding the stated problems and the position of the author. Give reasons for your opinion.

5 . Write a draft of the essay, edit it, rewrite it into a clean copy, check your literacy.

Russian language

5 - 9 grades

Read the text carefully, write an essay according to the given compositional scheme (problem, comment, author's position, reasoned agreement or disagreement with the author’s position).
If art teaches something (and artists primarily), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. ..It, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a personality. Much can be shared: bread, bed, belief - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, literature in particular and a poem in particular, addresses a person te^te-"a-te^te, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries.
The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” In purchase-
It is this non-general expression that apparently constitutes the meaning of individual existence; Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is, first of all, to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even in the most noble-looking way. ..It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on tautology
giyu. ..Arose in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins as of what “sapiens” are capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, turns into a flight from the common denominator towards a non-common facial expression, towards the personality,
aside in particular. ..
I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine. ..
No criminal code provides punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not the persecution of authors, not censorship restrictions, etc., not the burning of books. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. For this crime a person pays with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history.
(From the Nobel lecture,
read by I. A. Brodsky in 1987 in the USA).

Joseph Brodsky during the Nobel ceremony.
Stockholm. 1987 Photo from the site www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/194/

…If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness, turning him from a social animal into a person. Much can be shared: bread, bed, beliefs, lover, but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a not always attractive, but human face.

...Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by it, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, but always temporary outlines.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always “today” and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even “tomorrow”. One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology...

...Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person experiencing it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic incantations characteristic of any form of political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece as that evil, especially political evil, is always a poor stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his taste, the clearer his moral choice, the freer he is - although, perhaps, not happier...

...In the history of our species, in the history of “sapiens,” the book is an anthropological phenomenon, essentially analogous to the invention of the wheel. Having arisen in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins, but of what this “sapien” is capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose on this denominator a feature that has not previously risen above the waist, on our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards the numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular...

...I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has crossed my mind more than once - but I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine...

...A person begins to compose a poem for various reasons: to win the heart of his beloved, to express his attitude towards the reality around him, be it a landscape or a state, to capture state of mind, in which he is currently located, in order to leave - as he thinks at this moment - a mark on the earth. He resorts to this form - to a poem - for reasons, most likely, unconsciously mimetic: a black vertical clot of words in the middle of a white sheet of paper, apparently, reminds a person of his own position in the world, of the proportion of space to his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up his pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what comes from his pen on his audience, however large or small it may be, the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the feeling of entering into direct contact with the language, or more precisely, the feeling of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been expressed, written, implemented in it...

...When starting a poem, the poet, as a rule, does not know how it will end, and sometimes he is very surprised by what happens, because it often turns out better than he expected, often his thought goes further than he expected. This is the moment when the future of language interferes with its present. There are, as we know, three methods of knowledge: analytical, intuitive and the method used by the biblical prophets - through revelation. The difference between poetry and other forms of literature is that it uses all three at once (gravitating mainly to the second and third), because all three are given in language; and sometimes, with the help of one word, one rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has been before - and further, perhaps, than he himself would like. A person writing a poem writes it first of all because a poem is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as one becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.

Joseph Brodsky

Nobel lecture

For a private person who has preferred this particularity all his life to some kind of public role, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference - and in particular from his homeland, for it is better to be the last loser in a democracy than a martyr or the ruler of thoughts in a despotism - to suddenly appear on this podium is a great embarrassment and test.

This feeling is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me, but by the memory of those whom this honor passed by, who could not address, as they say, “urbi et orbi” from this rostrum and whose general silence seems to be seeking and not finds a way out in you.

The only thing that can reconcile you with such a situation is the simple consideration that - for reasons primarily stylistic - a writer cannot speak for a writer, especially a poet for a poet; that if Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Winston Auden were on this podium, they would involuntarily speak for themselves, and perhaps they would also experience some awkwardness.

These shadows constantly confuse me, and they still confuse me today. In any case, they do not encourage me to be eloquent. In my best moments I seem to myself as if they were the sum of them - but always less than any of them separately. For it is impossible to be better than them on paper; It is impossible to be better than them in life, and it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic and bitter they are, that make me often - apparently more often than I should - regret the passage of time. If that light exists - and deny them the opportunity eternal life I am no better able than to forget about their existence in this - if that light exists, then I hope they will forgive me the quality of what I am about to expound: after all, the dignity of our profession is not measured by behavior on the podium.

I named only five - those whose work and whose destinies are dear to me, if only because, without them, I would be worth little as a person and as a writer: in any case, I would not be standing here today. They, these shadows, are better: light sources - lamps? stars? - there were, of course, more than five, and any of them could condemn you to absolute muteness. Their number is great in the life of any conscious writer; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which, by the will of fate, I belong. It also doesn’t make matters any easier to think about contemporaries and fellow writers in both of these cultures, about poets and prose writers whose talents I value above my own and who, if they were on this podium, would have long since gotten down to business, because they have more, what to tell the world than I have.

Therefore, I will allow myself a series of comments - perhaps discordant, confusing and likely to puzzle you with their incoherence. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts and my profession itself will, I hope, protect me, at least partly, from accusations of chaos. A person in my profession rarely pretends to think systematically; at worst, he lays claim to the system. But this, as a rule, is borrowed from his environment, from the social structure, from studying philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the randomness of the means he uses to achieve one or another - even if constant - goal than the creative process itself, the process of writing. Poems, according to Akhmatova, really grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more noble.

If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Many things can be shared: bread, a bed, beliefs, a lover - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of the expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.

The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression, for we are already, as it were, genetically prepared for this non-community. Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to live his own life, and not an imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life. For each of us has only one, and we know well how it all ends. It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - all the more insulting because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose instigation a person is ready to agree to this tautology, will not lie in the grave with him and will not say thank you.

Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this . The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by it, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better - but always temporary - outlines.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always "today" and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even "tomorrow". One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology, that is, the fate otherwise known under the honorable name “victim of history.” What is remarkable about art in general and literature in particular, is that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality. That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main instrument of which is—should we clarify Marx? - just a cliché.