become inseparable. The expression ‘‘rastianut’
vremia’’ in Russian is also used in the meaning of
‘‘wasting time,’’ and here the transferred meta-
phor is again effectively employed. Not only
time but also space is wasted since Odysseus in
his wanderings strays from the path homeward
and encounters places and people opposed to his
homecoming. Odysseus’ Homeric predecessor
does not suffer from the same loss of orientation
and memory. In fact, Odysseus, even during his
prolonged dalliances (Calypso’s island for exam-
ple), maintains an acute understanding of the
passage of time and its inability to mitigate his
longing for home.
L. Zubova asserts that the dejected hero
Brodsky depicts is ‘‘more a deflation of the liter-
ary Odysseus than an aggrandizement of his
own.’’ Any hint of the heroic is deliberately elim-
inated from the poem. Brodsky uses Odysseus’
oblivion about the outcome of the war to create
a text replete with subtle but powerful political
overtones. The poet obliquely recalls the devas-
tation of the Second World War in which twenty
million Russians never returned home. Odys-
seus’ dismissive utterance ‘‘only the Greeks can
leave so many corpses so far from home’’ is a
bitter commentary directed against the Soviet
state machine that sacrificed its own citizenry
to ensure victory. His almost cynical statement
is kin to the words with which Homer’s Odysseus
addresses his nurse after slaughtering the suitors
in his house. The mature Odysseus of the
Homeric poem refuses to gloat over the slain
suitors for there must be no glory in killing
anyone:
It is not proper to rejoice over the slain men.
(22.412)
Similarly, the Odysseus of Brodsky’s poem
refuses to recall his heroic halcyon days with any
wistfulness. The message is the same: there is no
glory in any kind of war. Many critics have
viewed the Odyssey as a response to the heroic
code in theIliad.The idea of glory undergoes a
transformation from the lofty ideals of military
excellence to mundane notions of simple human
happiness, for the hero’s only concern is to
return home to his wife. However, the Odysseus
of Brodsky is denied even that fundamental
desire. In fact, he is completely devoid of any
kind of the passion and longing that was such a
central element of the Homeric character. Brod-
sky’s ‘‘all islands resemble each other’’ evokes the
failure of Odysseus to recognize his final and
most desired destination after the Phaiakians
deliver him, sleeping, to Ithaka in Book 17.
However, unlike Homer’s Odysseus, he is not
in the state of despair, panic, or even fear but
accepts this disorientation and confusion as a
part of his separation from what he once loved
but now has lost. This apathy with which Brod-
sky endows his Odysseus surfaces in two other
poems. One is Brodsky’s ‘‘July Intermezzo’’ writ-
ten in 1961 (You will return home. So what.. .):
How nice that there is nobody to blame
How nice that you have no ties to anyone
How nice that nobody is obliged to love you
Until death.
Another is his 1962 poem ‘‘From the Out-
skirts to the Center’’:
How easy I feel now
Since I haven’t parted with anyone.
Thank God that I have been deprived of my
fatherland.
In both of the poems, the bitterness of sep-
aration and exile is mixed with relief that there
are no unbreakable attachments keeping him
anywhere. The homeland is viewed as a burden
rather than a desired destination.
The letter of Odysseus to his son should be
viewed from another perspective which further
reveals the nature of Brodsky’s interest in the
figure of Odysseus: the problematic effects of
the passage of time following the end of a
lengthy war. The hero is subjected to the adverse
forces of time and violence, the reflection of
which can be found in Brodsky’s ‘‘A New Life’’
(1988): ‘‘Imagine the war is over, peace rules....
And if anybody asks a question, ‘Who are you?’
answer, ‘Who am I? / I am Nobody.’ As Odys-
seus replied to Polyphemus’’ (III: 167, 168–69).
In his response to Polyphemus, the withholding
of his identity by Odysseus was an act of self-
preservation. In his letter to Telemachus, Odys-
seus wants to diminish himself to the state of
‘‘nobody’’ because the war is over and he has
lost his heroic identity, and the twenty years
that have passed while away from his family
have reduced him to a ‘‘nobody’’ as a human
being. The Russian subtext is also palpable
here. The survival of the individual in the total-
itarian regime is conditioned by the reduction of
his own individuality to nothing. The evolution
of the loss of his self-identity is complete only
when there is no such identity left. Polyphemus,
the maneating monster, is comparable then to
the state-machine that makes people pretendOdysseus to Telemachus