Nobel Lecture by Joseph Brodsky

Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent - better yet, the infinite -against the temporary, against the finite.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics - not to mention its aesthetics - are always "yesterday". Language and literature are always "today", and often - particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox - they may even constitute "tomorrow". One of literature's merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology - that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, "victim of history". What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called "cliché".

Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.

On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer (though not necessarily the happier) he is.

It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky's remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold's belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn't like and what doesn't suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature - and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution - is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator's line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of "uncommon visage", in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past - the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.

December 8, 1987

(Extract)

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981 - 1990 (translated by Barry Rubin)

Chapter 2: Short Story

A short story is a genre of emotive prose that belongs to belles-lettres style. The term "emotive" originated by A. Marty in 1908 is used to define "everything that transcends referential". Emotive prose - as well as poetry and drama - concerns itself primarily with the communication of feeling and not with the communication of facts (as the language of science would). It does not mean, however, that a writer of fiction should ignore the factual side of life: he inevitably finds an objectively describable situation to represent his feelings, the carrier which Thomas S. Eliot has called the 'objective correlative', selected to invoke and organise appropriate feelings.

The emotional aspect of fiction can find manifestation in the mere composition of the story line, in the contextual arrangement of prose systems (or types of discourse), in the peculiar pattern of imagery, in specific diction and syntax, and, on the whole, in a wide range of expressive means and stylistic devices.

Looking at the works of fiction from the perspective of their story line, one can distinguish between those that have a clearly discernible plot - a sequence of coherent events, and those that have practically no "external" action.

Stories that heavily depend on the plot can be called suspense stories. They are charged with physical action that does not have to proceed chronologically. Many works of fiction begin in the middle of things (critics say "in medias res") or even at the end, and many show earlier events in flashbacks. Here belong all kinds of action stories - mysteries, for example. Comedies too can gain their effects by the twists and turns of an intricately plotted story line. Plot here is a means to the creation of suspense or the provocation of laughter.

A lot of stories, however, have almost no plot, in that there are no events, no occurrences, and no happenings of any consequence. We find the characters of such stories in a situation and attend not to what they do but to what they feel as a result of the situation. These can be called situation stories and they lead primarily to the revelation of a character's internal state, to the nuances of personality and mood

Apart from this classification, short stories exist in an infinite variety of form and content. And yet they all have a common set of features, which makes it possible to speak about genre and style distinctions of this form of literature.

It seems effective to analyse these features along the following lines: 1) semantic structure (composition), 2) discourse structure (arrangement of prose systems), 3) modes of characterisation (direct and indirect), 4) modes of narration (first- and third person narration), and 6) modes of communicating emotional appeal (imagery, diction and syntax).

A short story displays a collection of distinctive features, which taken together, produce a cumulative effect on the reader by creating a picture of a fictional world before his mind's eye and providing for a strong cognitive impact of a short story.

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