David Remnick: Putin and the exile
In 1987, Joseph Brodsky, the singular Russian poet of his generation, delivered a lecture in Vienna entitled “The Condition We Call ‘Exile.’ ” He began with a gesture of humility. Brodsky had been forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1972, but it was his good fortune to reside in the Russian language no less than he did in his apartment on Morton Street. Working for the dictionary, he called it. He got academic jobs, won prizes, made new friends. Cruel fate, soft berth. So when he began his talk in Vienna it was with an overture to the “uncountable” exiles: the Turks in Germany, the Mexicans in Southern California, and the Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia searching for menial work; the Vietnamese boat people, “bobbing on high seas or already settled somewhere in the Australian outback.”