his Nobel Prize speech where he lists the poets who
conditioned and molded his talent. These poets
were his own ‘‘beloved Greeks’’: Mandelshtam,
Tsvetaeva, Frost, Akhmatova, and Auden. They
were his ‘‘best audience’’ that he was eager to
impress. Brodsky’s persistent pursuit of classical
themes reflects his desire to ‘‘inhabit’’ literature
that came before him in a way that connects the
past and the present.
Thus Brodsky’s allusions to antiquity play a
crucial role in appreciating Brodsky’s poetics and
imagination. However, his ‘‘routine classicism,’’
like many of the innovations that Brodsky has
brought into the realm of Russian poetry, is a
striking departure in the Russian treatment of
classical themes. Brodsky’s classical metaphors
do not ‘‘speak for themselves,’’ but as David
Bethea observes, they ‘‘have coalesced into a
kind of ‘system,’ but one whose verbal layering
and retrieval, whose archaeology if you will, is
consistently non-rational, paradoxicalist, frag-
mentary (both in image and method), and defiant
of any explanation from origins.’’ Brodsky senses
very clearly the untrodden paths in the interpre-
tations of the classics, and these are the paths he is
most eager to take. In his analysis of Brodsky’s
classical allusions, Kees Verheul writes:
In some cases the classical paraphernalia have a
merely ‘‘decorative’’ function, helping to estab-
lish a particular neo-classical quality. But when
it really belongs to the essential aspects of the
poetic structure, the classical background has a
direct bearing on the presentation of the theme;
it may be used either to give it a certain univer-
sality or put it in a special historical perspective.
Michael Kreps offers a fairly circumstantial
but insightful observation that ‘‘as a result of
Brodsky’s poetic reinterpretation there is a
‘making contemporary’ of myth, its appropria-
tion by modern culture; the reader, through the
myth, hears the poet’s narrative about time and
about himself.’’ As much as Brodsky is ‘‘a mod-
ern descendant of classicism,’’ he is one of its
most unconventional interpreters.
This article will focus on three of Brodsky’s
most ‘‘classical’’ poems that deal with the many
dimensions of classical myth: ‘‘Odysseus to Tele-
machus,’’ ‘‘Dido and Aeneas,’’ and ‘‘To Lyco-
medes on Scyros.’’ In all the works discussed,
the classical allusion appears familiar only prima
facie and results in an accumulation of striking
subtextual images depicting the situation of the
poet himself. Furthermore, classical myth in
Brodsky acquires new, unexpected colors, and
the familiar figures of antiquity become the reflec-
tions of modern man and his meditation on
homeland, fame, duty, and love.Odysseus to Telemachus
The epistolary genre of this poem presents Odys-
seus in an un-Homeric manner. The Odysseus of
this poem is significantly different from the
Homeric hero obsessed with the idea of nostos
(homecoming)—and perpetually conniving and
plotting against people and gods who try to
detain him or offer a false nostos. Brodsky’s
Odysseus is a weary traveler and an indifferent
man who surprisingly looks back at Greek mili-
tary glory without remembering who won the
war and what part he himself played in the con-
quest of Troy. The poem deals with the subject
that is central to Brodsky’s poetics in general:
‘‘What interests me most of all, has always inter-
ested me, on this earth...is time and theeffect
that it has on man, how it changes him, grinds
away at him....’’ Homer’s poem is certainly
concerned with the same idea, but the Homeric
treatment of the hero’s journey depicts a fierce,
not fatigued, Odysseus. In Homer the twenty
years that passed between Odysseus’ departure
from Ithaka and his voyage home have hardly
altered his desire for coming home. The time
away from his kingdom only intensifies his
desire to return and reclaim his legacy as a
king, husband, and father. But Brodsky’s Odys-
seus has seemingly succumbed to the Sirens’
song or tasted the sweet flowers of Lotus. He
states thrice that he does not remember the past
or who won the war, and that he has lost his way
in space and time. The most poignant moment of
this disorientation is Odysseus’ inability to
remember the age of his own son. The idea of
time loses its relevance to Odysseus in this poem.
The indifference to the passage of time is played
out in the poem on several levels. The phrase
‘‘waste time’’ in the first part of the poem has in
Russian a double meaning: not only to lose time
but also to lose the awareness of it. Another
interesting detail is that Brodsky uses the word
‘‘rastianut’’ (to stretch) in relation to space
although in Russian it is used in relation to
time. However, in Odysseus’ wanderings the
space becomes as stretched out as the time, and
the characteristics of time become applied to
space in the unusual sense of the metaphor.
The dizzying effect of this metaphor is the dis-
orientation of Odysseus in whose mind time and
space become one just as the sea and the horizonOdysseus to Telemachus