‘So Much for Glasnost,’ Nobel Winner Remarks : Soviets Not Told of His Prize, Brodsky Says

Soviet-American poet Joseph Brodsky said Thursday that news of his being chosen to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 22 has not yet been announced to the Soviet people through the major media.

“So much for glasnost (public openness),” Brodsky told reporters, and pointed out that “the award has been given to me for literature, not for my political acumen.”

Although Brodsky stayed clear of open political dissent in the Soviet Union, he was nevertheless judged a “social parasite” in 1964 and sentenced to hard labor at a Siberian camp. In 1972 he was forced to emigrate.

Sponsored unofficially by the late poet W. H. Auden, Brodsky settled in the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1977.

He continues to write “only in Russian,” Brodsky said Thursday, and often translates his writing from Russian to English. Asked whether he therefore considers himself a Russian poet, he replied, “A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.”

Still, he added, “I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.”

But he turned serious in discussing the significance of the prize.

“It’s a matter of luck,” he said. “And I’m very pleased that I am so lucky.”

He said that while he is “quite proud” of receiving the prize, “I am rather proud not for myself but for what I would call my team, the generation of writers to which I would belong. It simply means to me that we are coming of age, that we are to be reckoned with.”

Brodsky blamed “resentment and confusion”--and “I would not exclude entirely anti-Semitic feelings”--for the news blackout on his award in the Soviet Union. But he said friends there have learned of it from foreign broadcasts and are “quite elated.”

He declined to discuss the details of the Dec. 10 acceptance speech he will make in Stockholm but said he would “not rule out making utterances on political matters.” The award and its surrounding publicity, he said, gives him “some license” to engage in political discussion.

He then touched briefly on political matters by describing as ridiculous a recent speech by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“He has a great way to go in terms of telling the truth,” he said.

Brodsky said he will use the $340,000 prize money to buy a car and, “if I have enough,” an apartment in New York.

He said he has been embarrassed by the acclaim heaped on him since the award was announced, and added, “This is the first time in 47 years of my life when I am paid so much attention to.”