“New glaciation”: Joseph Brodsky and global threats

The article, based on J. Brodsky’s poem “Verses on the Winter Campaign 1980”, deals with the connection between the explicit political judgement expressed in the poem and the implicit logic embedded in the poetic structure of the text, as well as in the poet’s aesthetic program conveyed at the level of the so-called “autometatext”. According to the author of the article, although disputing the war in Afghanistan and the global consequences of the Cold War, Brodsky places the issue of the global threat in the universal context of his tragic metaphysics, where the militarism of modern superpowers turns out to be an anomaly, but ultimately a justified part of the world entropy, confronting which is impossible, and therefore the only possible reaction to what is happening is aesthetic and ethical stoicism. This “short circuit” between the detailed artistic and rather amorphous political imaging makes it possible to investigate the poet’s ideological attitudes. The article analyzes the subjective structure of the poem, its composition, stylistics, intertextual connections, as well as comments some individual elements of the text and the figurative-symbolic structure of the work in the context of Brodsky’s poetics.