A Poet's Second Exile

One of the passengers in the planeloads of Soviet Jews who disembarked at Vienna airport last week was a bewildered young man of 32 who declared: "They have simply kicked me out of my country, using the Jewish issue as an excuse." The reluctant expatriate was Joseph Brodsky, who is widely regarded in Russia and the West as one of the U.S.S.R.'s finest poets.

Brodsky's expulsion was puzzling.The Soviets have sometimes "invited" Jews and non-Jews whom they regard as troublemakers to leave Russia. But Brodsky--who is Jewish--is not an active dissident, a Zionist or a political poet. Last month he was simply summoned by the Soviet secret police and told that he must leave Russia or "things would become worse." It was a threat that could not be ignored. He was forced to leave behind his elderly parents and his young son, who is in the custody of the child's mother. His departure seemed to fulfill the prophecy he made in a 1965 poem, alluding to Karl Marx's famous phrase:

Adieu to the prophet who said:

"Forsooth, you've nothing to lose but your

chains." In truth there's also your conscience--no

trivial thing.

His expulsion appeared to be the culmination of an inexplicable secret-police vendetta against him that has been going on for over a decade. In 1964, he was the victim of a trumped-up trial in Leningrad. He was accused of writing poetry--adjudged "gibberish" by the court--instead of engaging in "honest work." He was also attacked in the press for allegedly "nurturing a plan" to steal a plane and fly abroad. Sentenced to five years at hard labor in the Soviet far north, Brodsky became a cause celebre in Russia and the West. Released after 18 months, he was still unable to find Soviet publishers for his lyrics, which the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who died in 1966, described as "magical." In a poem written in exile Brodsky said:

I sailed with honor, but my frail craft wounded its side on a jagged reef.

In Vienna last week, Brodsky was invited by Poet W.H. Auden to visit his country house outside the city. Auden had only recently praised Brodsky as "a poet of the first order, of whom his country should be proud." Next fall Brodsky will be poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan, and a collection of his verse will be published in English translation by Penguin Books.

The prospects cheered Brodsky. Drinking Coca-Cola in a Vienna cafe, the sturdy, red-haired young poet grinned while cracking a pun in English: "I'm neither a refugee, nor a refu-Jew." He added: "I'm not bitter or angry about what happened to me. I see it as a test of my ability to endure."

Most of the scientists, writers and artists who have been told to leave by the Soviets have--unlike Brodsky --been militant dissidents. The Soviets evidently reasoned that it was less trouble to force them out than to risk the embarrassment of arrests and trials. One of the most recent exiles is Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, 47, a renowned mathematical logician, and a former leader of the dissident movement in Russia. The son of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin and a Jewish mother, the mathematician was pressured to leave after serving terms in a Stalinist concentration camp and, later, in prison lunatic asylums. He is now in Rome and hopes to come to the U.S. to teach.

Acid Holes. Another expatriate in Rome, Painter Yuri Titov, 44, last week was desperately trying to save some of the 62 pictures he took out of Russia last month. Titov and his wife --both members of a group called the "Democratic Movement"--had departed Moscow only after "it became ab--olutely impossible for us to live there any longer," and had insisted on taking the pictures with them. After the paintings had cleared Soviet customs in Moscow and been put aboard an Aeroflot plane, acid was surreptitiously poured on the painted surfaces of the Christ figures, Crucifixions and icons that are Titov's specialty. Shortly thereafter, the pictures developed huge holes, and the colors merged into blobs of paint. Titov, who was once committed to a Soviet mental institution for his religious beliefs, commented sadly: "The Soviet authorities tried to make sure that no one outside the Soviet Union would ever see my paintings."

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