Despite the fact that, as one critic has put it, Marina Cvetaeva is
Brodskij's immediate predecessor in Russian poetry
(Lev
Loseff, psychic exile
(195) as the essential shared element of their poetics, while the two
poets' metaphysical profiles are diametrically opposite: Cvetaeva's
poetics is expansionist, Brodskij's reductionist. This difference,
Bethea suggests, is largely a result of gender difference—and
the heavily gendered poems he chooses to juxtapose would seem to
support his hypothesis.
In this paper, I propose to go beyond the symbolic dichotomies
Bethea traces between Cvetaeva's cave/womb
and
Brodskij's shameful erection
in search of an
understanding of the more fundamental poetic issues at stake in
Brodskij's dialogue with Cvetaeva. Specifically, I will discuss two
poems on the theme of aging—Brodskij's
I will inquire in closing to what extent these differences between the two poems stem from differences in the personality, epoch, culture, and/or gender of the two poets, and how Brodskij's strong affinity with Cvetaeva, differences notwithstanding, might suggest a new, more refined theory of poetic influence. Such a theory would consider the importance of gender (a factor that is ignored in Bloom's pioneering work on the subject), without making gender a matter of primary concern. At the same time, this new theory would recognize the possibility of intergender influence (in contrast to Gilbert and Gubar's feminist corrective to Bloom, which addresses the affinities only between women poets) and attempt to unravel some of its complexity.