In the Shadow of Time

Essay reviewed: “Flight from Byzantium” by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky disdained prose, considering it an inferior genre, and he also disdained the concept of space, preferring the abstract idea of time. So it is doubly ironic that, by the time the Russo-American poet and Nobel laureate died in 1996, he had completed two essay anthologies, plus a long standalone piece — and that the best essays were concerned with places. Brodsky reportedly claimed he did it for money — poetry is too niche, and prose has always paid better. Maybe; self-preservation was also part of it. To adapt an adage, you may not be interested in space, but space is always interested in you. It took a great interest in Brodsky, making him one of its many victims, and writing about space was for Brodsky a defense tactic as much as a source of income. Nor can you take a man who referred to dust as the “suntan of epochs” literally: whether the topic was a Soviet communal apartment or the canals of his beloved Venice, Brodsky wrote about time even when he seemed to write about space. Though known primarily as a poet, Brodsky was really a thinker who philosophized in verse. Great poets can be intellectual lightweights; Brodsky was more of an ancient savant surveying the world with Olympian detachment. Keenly aware of mortality, certainly of his own, he felt the tragic finiteness of man in the face of the infinity of time, and in his prose he attempted to grapple with the relentless ticking of the clock.

It was years ago that I first read “Flight from Byzantium,” Brodsky’s essay about Istanbul. I enjoyed it but, the Turkish city being then no less remote for me than Aladdin’s cave or Golconda, retained little. Recently I had occasion to rediscover the text. Istanbul had become a lot more legible over the years and, having decided to see it with my own eyes, I returned to the text to see what the waters of the Bosphorus had revealed to Brodsky. The result was a disappointment. The essay didn’t strike me as terribly interesting, and I worked my way through it with impatience. Had Brodsky nothing new to say to me? I decided to come back to the text, though not until after my trip. With a place like Istanbul, you have to let your senses do their job — reading others’ impressions in situ will only cloud your own. The same applies to writing — it is best to internalize the place before you sit down to write about it. “Flight from Byzantium” had to wait until Brodsky was in Greece, by which point he had isolated the city in his mind “like some virus under a microscope.” And so, having isolated Istanbul in my own mind as best as I could — and as best as one can after a one-week stay — I reread Brodsky’s piece only when Istanbul had become a memory. What I now found was a text both fascinating and maddeningly problematic.

“Flight from Byzantium” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1985. It is unapologetically non-PC, and there is no chance such a text would be published today, least of all by The New Yorker. It might not have even been published in 1990 — parts of it, like Brodsky’s description of the Sacred Relics at the Topkapi Palace, are irreverent, and prospective publishers might have had second thoughts in the wake of the Rushdie business. But that says less about Brodsky’s essay than it does about the modern West. As for the essay, it is some fifty pages in length and contains forty-six short sections. Originally written in Russian, the essay was translated into English by Brodsky with the help of one Alan Myers, who was unable to rescue the text from Brodsky’s idiosyncratic — and very Russian — idiom. The Russian title of the essay — “The Voyage to Istanbul” (“Puteshestvie v Stambul”) — is much more neutral than the Yeats-inspired English one. But, in light of what Brodsky has to say about Istanbul, the English title works better.

Anyone who flees a place did not particularly like it there; Brodsky positively hated it. His Istanbul has no redeeming qualities. The facades and interiors of Istanbul are of a “grubby gray-brown color.” Its fabled mosques are an exercise in tastelessness, so many “enormous toads in frozen stone, squatting on the earth, unable to stir.” Brodsky likens their domes to saucepan lids and cast-iron kettles, and while acknowledging that the minarets engage with the sky, he compares them to ground-to-air batteries. The streets are “crooked, filthy, dreadfully cobbled, and piled up with refuse, which is constantly rummaged through by ravenous local cats.” The architecture is “dated” — not “old” or “ancient,” Brodsky insists, but “dated.” The city’s future is as unappealing as its present; Brodsky envisions nothing but earthquakes and maybe street riots. Dust is everywhere, assailing your eyes and caking your loafers, and the place is an Oriental inferno bereft of verdant oases: “The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.”

That’s one way to put it. John Freely, the author of Istanbul: The Imperial City, put it differently when he wrote about the city in the 1990s: “Despite the rapidly increasing urbanization of the Bosphorus shores . . . the hills and valleys along the waterway are still well-wooded, especially with cypresses, umbrella-pines, plane-trees, horse-chestnuts, terebinths and Judas-trees. The magenta to pink blossoms of the Judas-trees in spring, mingled with the mauve flowers of the ubiquitous wisteria and the red and white candles of the chestnuts, make the Bosphorus surpassingly beautiful at that season — painfully so in late April and early May, when nightingales serenade one another nocturnally in bowers along the strait, their songs echoing in our dreams.” No songs echoed in Brodsky’s Istanbul dreams, and the last dream he had in his hotel was a nightmare in which a monstrous rat ripped apart three cats in a dark corner of the Department of Philology of Leningrad University.

Brodsky does begin the essay with a disclaimer about the subjective nature of observation. He says that any observation has more to do with the psychological constitution of the observer than with the reality at hand (very true), and though he allows that some semblance of objectivity is possible if one possesses a complete self-awareness at the moment of observation, Brodsky does not believe he is capable of it himself. Even if he were, it wouldn’t have been of much help in Istanbul, because, in his own words, “I did not aspire to it.” That was Brodsky’s choice. Nevertheless, you don’t need much self-awareness to see that facial hair is not the only kind of flora that exists in Istanbul; anyone who takes the ferry up the Bosphorus towards the village of Arnavutköy, seven or so kilometers north of the center, will be rewarded with views of verdant undulating hills on both sides of the strait. Brodsky is right: one’s eyes see what the beholder is predisposed to see, and Brodsky, by his own admission, did not care to see anything he might actually like. (He didn’t always know what he was looking at, either — in section 41, the reader learns that “the Galata Bridge is not the first to be built over the Bosporus, as your guidebook would claim; the first one was built by Darius.” What guidebook did he use? The Galata Bridge spans the Golden Horn and not the Bosphorus.)

But why did Brodsky go to Istanbul in the first place? He offers a number of reasons for the voyage, tongue-in-cheek. His favorite poet, a figure most of his readers won’t have read (Cavafy), lived there; Brodsky wanted to be addressed as “effendi”; he longed to hear the “overseas creak of a Turkish mattress” (a line from a poem he had written back in the Soviet Union). Then he gets serious and offers his “chief” reason. Istanbul was the Second Rome, a matter that is significant for Brodsky because he “spent thirty-two years in what is known as the Third Rome, about a year and a half in the First,” and he needed the Second for his collection. As far as his sojourn in the First Rome is concerned, I am happy to take Brodsky at his word. But the bit about the Third Rome is false. Brodsky was born in Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, and spent most of his Soviet life in that city. The Third Rome, of course, is Moscow, and Russian ideologues who traditionally promoted the idea of the Third Rome were never very fond of Saint Petersburg, which they regarded as a Western excrescence on the Russian body. Brodsky, of all people, would have known. A case of veracity having been sacrificed to style? It doesn’t matter; what matters is that the “chief” reason Brodsky advances for his trip to Istanbul is not much of a reason, and nothing good can come of it. And so nothing did.

But, as I have mentioned, Brodsky cannot be taken literally. The idea of Brodsky as a tourist is preposterous, and sightseeing was antithetical to his being, even if he sometimes engaged in it. His Istanbul essay is not really about Istanbul qua Turkish metropolis. Brodsky rejects the city on aesthetic and philosophical grounds; he rejects the two civilizations of which Istanbul is a palimpsest. “There are,” he writes, “places where history is inescapable, like a highway accident — places where geography provokes history,” and Istanbul is one of them. For Brodsky, Istanbul is a city where space (geography) assails time (history), and Brodsky had a visceral reaction to it. Perhaps it was inevitable. Freud once said that anatomy was fate; in Brodsky’s case, fate was geography. He was not yet twenty-five when the Soviet state, the largest in the world by territory, decided it did not have enough space for the young poet, first putting him on trial for “social parasitism” and eventually booting him out of the country. Brodsky was on intimate terms with the linear principle, a concept he introduces early on in “Flight from Byzantium.” At its simplest, the linear principle is a one-way ticket from the point of origin. The ancient Greeks were unfamiliar with the linear principle; their civilization was characterized by symmetry and the idea of the closed circle — one always returned to the origin. The closed circle was conducive to polytheism, in which every activity falls under the jurisdiction of a certain deity who can visit men whenever the mood strikes him. This is only possible, Brodsky says, “in settled conditions: when the god knows your address.” Polytheism came naturally to the ancient Greeks because they lived on islands and were confined to a sedentary lifestyle. It is no coincidence that the tradition of democracy began in the polytheistic societies of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome — democratic institutions are easier to conceive when you have a multitude of gods looking after human affairs.

A polytheistic worldview does not work well in a nomadic society, where your address keeps on changing all the time. If polytheism is conducive to democracy, monotheism goes hand-in-hand with absolute rule. Nomadism is the linear principle in action; Christianity, when it came about, involved not a return to the origin, but a detailed projection into the future. It therefore embodied the linear principle — and Brodsky thus glibly equates Christianity with empire. When Ancient Rome drifted away from democracy towards absolute rule, it began to look for a spot that had no tradition of democracy. Constantine’s move to Byzantium, a place that had no memory of the senate, was only natural. This is one of the central ideas in the essay, and it is crucial to understanding Brodsky’s main argument. Byzantium did not become East with the arrival of the Turks; it was East long before Mehmed the Conqueror showed up. When Constantine took the Christian cross to Byzantium, he did not Christianize the place; instead, Christianity was forced to adapt itself to the climate of the new, Second Rome. Where the West promotes individualism and the idea of a moral absolute, the East represents the tradition of obedience and hierarchy; it is inherently anti-individualistic. In Isfahan or Baghdad, Brodsky writes, Socrates would not have been permitted to make speeches in an open court, as in Ancient Greece; they would have simply impaled him. Byzantium was a lot closer to Isfahan or Baghdad than Rome or Athens, if only in spirit.

Brodsky quotes from a text written by the 11th-century Byzantine historian Michael Psellus, who recounts how the Emperor Basil II had his illegitimate stepbrother castrated to avoid dynastic complications. The unfortunate stepbrother, also named Basil, accepted his fate with docile submission. Pointing out that the episode is presented as something routine, Brodsky notes that the reign of Basil II took place between 976 and 1025. “If this was A.D.,” he asks, “what, then, of B.C.?” When Constantine acted on his dream — “In this sign, conquer” — he knew what he was doing: in Rome, the Church was the bride of Christ; in Constantinople, it became the bride of the state. Politically, the move was a success, but Christianity’s millennium-long victory in Constantinople was ultimately a Pyrrhic one. The West is time; the East, space. Brodsky sees this in the aesthetics of East and West. Calligraphy, the Eastern principle of ornamentation, is spatial and is symbolized by the carpet; the Western unit of ornamentation is “the notch, the tally, recording the passage of days.” As the awareness of time is an individualistic experience, Constantine’s move from West to East was a move from freedom to the carpet. And in the end, the carpet won, and the East reasserted itself. When the Turks seized Constantinople, the Second Rome became the seat of the Caliphate in no time; the addition of four minarets was all that was needed to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

All this is thought-provoking but full of holes. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that pre-biblical men (your ancient Greeks and Romans) had an ahistorical view of history, since their metaphysics contained no end and no sense of resolution. It was Christianity that made things finite and gave history (and not geography) its meaning. One could, of course, split hairs and argue that infiniteness corresponds to the idea of the closed circle and finiteness is linear. But the Roman Empire was pagan, and it reached its zenith before Christianity became a force to reckon with. What made Rome expand if not the linear principle? True, there was much that was “Oriental” about Byzantium. The Byzantine Emperor was conflated with God, and his subjects prostrated themselves on the ground in greeting — a custom known as proskynesis. Eunuchs, too, were a feature of the Byzantine court long before the arrival of the Ottomans. The history of Byzantine rulers reads like a depressing study of mutilation; the losers in the endless power struggles constantly had their eyes gouged out and sometimes their noses sliced off (judging by the number of people with bandaged noses that I saw in central Istanbul, nose jobs are still very much a local specialty — only now people travel there to fix them). On the surface of it, the Turks had to invent very little when they took over.

Nevertheless, such a view of Byzantium is unnuanced and reductive. Brodsky downplays the Greekness of the Byzantines and notes that the Rome Constantine brought with him to Byzantium was Christian Rome and not Ancient Rome. But the cultural border between Rome and Constantinople was not watertight. Rome was greatly influenced by Greek culture and did not lack for philhellenes; Byzantium was essentially a Greek civilization. In his classic, if outdated, history of the Byzantine state, George Ostrogorsky writes: “Roman law always remained the basis of its legal system and legal outlook, and Greek thought of its intellectual life. Greek learning and philosophy, Greek historians and poets, were the models of the most devout Byzantines. The Church itself incorporated into its teaching much of the thought of the pagan philosophers and used their intellectual equipment in articulating Christian doctrine” (History of the Byzantine State, 1969). John Freely notes that Justinian’s reign produced the “final renaissance of classical culture” and that it was a Greek revival, albeit a Christian rather than a pagan one. Freely tosses out names: Procopius (historian), Tribonian (jurist), Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus (scientists), Agathias Scholasticus and Paul the Silentiary (poets). All this is missing in Brodsky’s narrative. With one hand, he says, the Byzantines interpreted sacred texts, built cathedrals, and composed tracts; with the other, they were castrating bastards. True enough, though the West of that time also used two hands, and the (West Christian) Crusaders mercilessly sacked Byzantium in 1204, an act of barbarity from which Constantinople would never recover. Well, let’s not engage in whataboutism. But to claim, as Brodsky does, that “the democratic state is in fact the historical triumph of idolatry over Christianity”? The US was not founded by pagans, while one of the most barbaric regimes of the 20th century despised Christian ethics and drew inspiration from Nordic mythology (Albert Speer’s designs for a future Nazi Berlin were clearly influenced by neoclassicist ideas). Brodsky himself tacitly acknowledges there was more to Byzantium than castrated eunuchs. Describing the displacement of Byzantine Christianity north to Russia, he writes that the exported faith jettisoned “not only togas and statues but also Justinian’s Civic Code.” So there was a Justinian, after all, and he did have a Civic Code.

We now get to the heart of the matter. Brodsky writes that “[b]y the ninth century, Christianity would be more than ready to flee to the north.” We will set aside the questionable historicity of the assertion. Brodsky’s point is that, just as Rome spread to the West, Byzantium spread to Rus’ and contaminated it. Russia is Byzantium’s heir. From Byzantium it received not only Orthodox Christianity but also “the Christian-Turkish system of statecraft” — Oriental despotism, anti-individualism, the primacy of the state. Space instead of time. The carpet, in a word. Brodsky sees virtually no difference between an Ottoman sultan and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, between the Great Divan and the Politburo. There is a reason why the Dardanelles and the domes of Constantinople (Tsargrad, as many in imperial Russia called it, meaning “the City of the Tsars”) were the stuff of wet dreams for statesmen and ideologues in tsarist Russia — they hankered after the cradle of their civilization. It is therefore logical that, whereas Europe was once threatened by the Ottoman Empire, it is now threatened by its northern child: “Isn’t my native realm an Ottoman Empire now — in extent, in military might, in its threat to the Western World? Aren’t we now by the walls of Vienna? And is not its threat the greater in that it proceeds from the Easternized . . . Christianity?” (Less than ten years after these lines were written, Russia lost not only the Eastern Bloc but also all of its Soviet republics; forty years on, Brodsky’s native realm is at the gates of Kiev, where Vladimir — another Vladimir — the Great baptized Kievan Rus’.) Brodsky ends the section with this rhetorical flourish: “[W]hat do we discern in that falsetto of Konstantin Leontiev, the falsetto that pierced the air precisely in Istanbul, where he served in the Czarist embassy . . . ?” Whatever it is that we discern in Leontiev’s falsetto, it did not pierce the air in Istanbul, if we do want to be precise — the Russian philosopher was a diplomat in Adrianople (now Edirne), not Constantinople. But that doesn’t change the gist of Brodsky’s message. Even Berdyaev wrote that Leontiev was, in some ways, a Turk. The lineage is clear, and Brodsky confidently lays the sins of his native realm at Istanbul’s door.

For what he says in “Flight from Byzantium,” much can also be laid at Brodsky’s door. But there is one charge that does not easily stick. It is the charge of Orientalism. In the end, the essay concerns itself less with the dichotomy of East and West than with the question of where the former begins and the latter ends. Brodsky confesses that he always assumed he was a European and the inhabitants of Istanbul were Asians. The second assumption is not in question, but he is no longer so sure about the first one. When Brodsky talks about the people of Istanbul, he fears he is talking about himself. “Who knows? Perhaps my attitude toward people has in its own right a whiff of the East about it, too. When it comes down to it, where am I from? Still, at a certain age a man gets tired of his own kind.” No need to trouble the ghost of Edward Said, then. His being a man with a “whiff of the East” about him gives Brodsky carte blanche to say things a Westerner would be afraid to say. He can talk freely about the Eastern threat without worrying about political correctness precisely because, when it comes down to it, he is from the East, and he has “outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle.” And what he does tell the West is that it is threatened by its own complacency. Brodsky interprets the Great Schism as Rome’s break with Constantinople — Byzantium was so foreign to Western Christians that a divorce was ineluctable. But by divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity banished it from its consciousness, reducing Byzantium to nonexistence. This had a serious unintended effect: the West had lost its ability to identify and diagnose evil. Evil was simply not a part of its experience, collective memory, and genetic code. Confronted by such phenomena as Islamic terrorism or communist tyrannies, the West does not know how to react to them, and the greatest threat facing the West is thus internal.

Brodsky’s real reason for going to Istanbul now becomes clear. In a way, it was a homecoming. He could not return to his hometown (the Soviets wouldn’t have let him and, in any case, Brodsky did not believe that one could cross the same river twice), but Istanbul was open. In that Turkish city, he could recapture the sense of the linear principle without any consequences. Strange as it may sound, in Istanbul Brodsky could feel at home — by the water, at the edge of an empire, in a city subjected to the “transference of the capital to the extreme rim of the Empire.” The spirit of the place in Saint Petersburg is a kindred spirit of the one in Istanbul. If Constantine, the founder of Constantinople, is mentioned often throughout the essay, it is because he is a mirror image of Peter the Great; only the two moved in opposite directions. Both Saint Petersburg and Istanbul lie on a civilizational fault line. Saint Petersburg, Russia’s most European city, is an enduring symbol of Peter’s spectacular success and equally spectacular failure to make his land European, and of that land’s ongoing identity crisis. Like Saint Petersburg, Istanbul is also a civilizational mongrel; it is neither of Europe nor of Asia. A stroll on Istiklal Street, with its magnificent 19th-century facades on both sides, will leave you in no doubt you are in Europe, as you indeed are, geographically and perhaps even culturally. But, in the Fatih district just across the Golden Horn, the landscape is very different. Europe is impossible to make out in the warren of streets surrounding the Fatih Mosque, and we haven’t even crossed the Bosphorus yet. You don’t need to make spatial exertions to understand that, either: reading some of Orhan Pamuk’s essays will be quite enough to measure the distance between Cihangir — Pamuk’s smart and very European neighborhood — and Asian Istanbul yawning on the other side of the Bosphorus. Brodsky measured the distance, got his fill of nostalgia, and fled.

Following his flight from Istanbul, Brodsky went to Sounion in Greece. There he saw the Temple of Poseidon. The temple had dominated the skyline for more than two thousand years, reaching towards the sky, exposed to the ravages of time. Brodsky’s relief is palpable: “An idea of order? The principle of symmetry? Sense of rhythm? Idolatry?” It so happened that I, too, went to Greece after my stay in Istanbul, though the only thing I could be said to have fled was the exorbitant prices of Istanbul Airport. Nevertheless, I must admit I also felt relieved to be in Greece. It felt good to be in a place where cars made an effort to stop for you and where you didn’t have to take off your shoes every time you went inside a church. Gazing at the floodlit Parthenon — originally a pagan temple, then a church, then a mosque, and now a museum — from a rooftop terrace at night, the domes of Istanbul’s mosques became a mnemonic postcard, and I wondered if I had seen them at all. Brodsky was surely right about one thing: the place whose memory was now evanescing amid the hills of Attica was a different civilization.

Yet I also thought of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” It is a poem Brodsky knew all too well — the title of his essay is a play on it as much as its refutation. In Yeats’s poem, Byzantium is a place where an old man escapes the movement of the clock, the shackles of time, and the absoluteness of mortality. In the “holy city of Byzantium,” he enters the “artifice of eternity” and is rescued from the linear principle. In that timeless place, he hears the song “of what is past, or passing, or to come.” That was not the song Brodsky heard. When he crossed the Bosphorus to the Asian aside to drink tea and watch the strait, he only saw aircraft carriers from the Third Rome pass through the Second on their way to the First — the linear principle at work. Yet Brodsky knew he was in a city of time. He notes that the “dusted-bottle-green” color of the Bosphorus is “the color of time itself” — it is all too familiar to him, a native of the Baltics. The Bosphorus is time, Brodsky admits. All the more lamentable that he observed its waters with his eyes wide shut.