Intertextual Subtexts of Joseph Brodsky’s Elegy “You Will Return to Your Homeland. Well...”

Abstract

The article offers an interpretation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem, rarely used for analysis, “You will return to your homeland. Well...” (1961). If traditionally Brodsky’s elegy in the intertextual aspect is considered as a “dialogue-repulsion” (A. Nesterov) with A. Vertinsky’s romance “Without Women”, then the work reveals other pretexts that at first glance seem alien to Brodsky’s love lyrics — these are texts of patriotic themes by S. Yesenin and M. Tsvetaeva. It is shown that Brodsky’s motive of homecoming is emphatically focused on “The Homecoming” and “The Soviet Russia” by S. Yesenin, in 1924, upon his return from America, formulated a sincere poetic confession in the extreme loneliness he experienced in his homeland (“My poetry is no longer needed here, / And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either ...”). The prevailing idea of the dissimilarity of the poetry of Brodsky and Yesenin is questioned. The reference text of M. Tsvetaeva is the poem “The Homesickness. A long time ago...” (1934), as shown in the article, which served as an obvious prototype for “You will return to your homeland. Well...” The compositional structure of Tsvetaeva’s pretext with the dominant strategy of “affirmation through negation” determined the poetic organization of Brodsky’s elegy. It is argued that over time, the dialogic interaction of texts was accompanied by emotional and semantic recoding, the non-textual meanings in Brodsky’s poems grew.