months before Paris was liberated. Increasingly
in post-World War II France and elsewhere in
the Allied countries, Anouilh’sAntigonewas
revered as a singular affirmation of the ideals
to which the eponymous heroine gave her life.
In Sophocles as well in the slightly altered
Anouilh version, the new government is run by
Creon who becomes king of Thebes after the
sons of Oedipus, the reigning elder Eteocles
and his rebel brother Polyneices, kill each other
in a duel. Carrying out the letter of the law in a
most matter-of-fact way, Creon proclaims that
Eteocles will have a state funeral, but Polyneices
will have none, his body left to rot in the open
air, the feast of preying birds. Unlike her mild
and compliant sister, Ismene, Antigone holds
her family loyalty and her religious beliefs
above Creon’s state edict, and so she attempts
to bury her brother, and for this treason, she is
buried alive in a cave. Before she can be rescued,
she takes her own life. Creon is left to ponder the
ways in which laws may conflict with religious
precepts, and Antigone is remembered as the
heroic individual who remained true to her fam-
ily and traditional values despite the imposing
threat of an immoral state law.
Joseph Brodsky was highly schooled in
classical literature, not in the formal sense of
classroom study but in the personal sense of self-
directed reading of Roman and Greek classics,
translated into his native Russian. He used classi-
cal models to outline and convey the messages in
his essays and poetry. Indeed, in his essay ‘‘Letter
to Horace,’’ Brodsky admits that poets write to
their predecessors: ‘‘when one writes verse, one’s
most immediate audience is not one’s own con-
temporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s prede-
cessors. Those who gave one a language, those
who gave one forms.’’ In other words, classical
texts were Brodsky’s template, and his use of this
body of literature is both explicit and implicit in
‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus.’’
The plausible psychological connections
between Brodsky’s own experience in 1972 and
that year’s composition of this epistolary poem
are easy to draw. Invited by the Soviet govern-
ment (meaningexiledby it), Brodsky left once
and for all his native country, his parents, rela-
tives, his natural son, and his friends. He knew
he would not be able to return. The distances
across space and time to separate him from his
birthplace were vast, as he must have imagined
them in 1972. That year, he envisioned an Odys-
seus on the inhospitable rocky island of Aeaea,
suddenly without his crew and subject to an
unknown, mysterious ruler. The poet’s personal
situation must have invited the mythic hero to
take on these new particulars: an Odysseus old
and forgetful, strangely incompetent, under-
mined by self-doubt and regret, a man who sud-
denly finds himself with idle time to reflect on all
the time he has been away from his son and how
that son has grown up in the absence of his
father’s companionship and beyond the shadow
of his father’s power and reputation. It is easy to
read this poem as a mirror, reflecting what is
likely to have been Brodsky’s sense of his situa-
tion, his sense of failed self-determinism, at the
time of its composition. But as always with
myth, there is more.
For Brodsky, the ancient literature served as
a reliable and self-defining context. According to
Zara M. Torlone’s analysis, Brodsky ‘‘stood at
the end of a brilliant tradition and yet said some-
thing new both in form and content....[his] per-
sistent pursuit of classical themes reflects his
desire to ‘inhabit’ literature that came before
him in a way that connects the past and the
present.’’ In other words, the use of the classical
model is a psychological and cultural bridging
device, something that affirms a larger context
for both the poet and his work, a time-and-space
continuum from which Brodsky and all other
learned individuals cannot be exiled. Language
and culture provide a constant home. Given this
context, then, and beyond the poem’s psycho-
logical significance, ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’
examines how the passage of time affects a per-
son’s assessment of events and how the reality of
war robs it of any idealized glory.
Torlone explains that ‘‘Brodsky uses Odys-
seus’ oblivion about the outcome of the war to
create a text replete with subtle but powerful
political overtones.’’ So unlike Homer’s cunning
Odysseus, who was steadfast in his commitment
to return home and successful in reaching there,
the Odysseus created by Brodsky solemnly con-
siders how many soldiers never return home. The
poet may have thought of the 20 million Russians
who never returned from World War II; he may
have thought about the tens of millions lost in the
Stalinist gulag. But his contemporary American
readers may have pondered what the poem sug-
gests about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. These
readers and succeeding ones may have pondered
the number of soldiers killed whose bodies never
reached home and the missing in action and neverOdysseus to Telemachus