The I as the Eye: on the Poetics of Ruins in I. Brodsky's Essay Homage to Marcus Aurelius

The main aim of this article is to offer a possible interpretation of meanings attached to ruins as image and metaphor in Brodsky's essay writings, or, to be more precise, in Homage to Marcus Aurelius (1994), an essay that sets its narrative world in the ruined world that surrounds the narrator, elicits an ambivalent sense of time, and provokes complex thoughts of history as an eternal cycle and dialectic process. I will expand the well-established thesis according to which Brodsky's writing is structured on an image of time as irretrievability and irreclaimability, which, in his writings, reverberates and re-creates an experience of continuous failure to discipline the memory, thus making any return impossible. Moreover, my aim is to show that the approach to Brodsky's essays from the perspective of an analysis of ruins can offer us much more: for example, it can offer valuable insights into his understanding of the agency of the authorial modernist voice in literature. Where, in a work of art, is the writer's voice located? What does it mean to see and to write, and what does it mean to read? What role, in this process, is assigned to tradition, "eternal values", and cultural heritage?