In this article I read Joseph Brodsky’s travel essay Flight from Byzantium against Edward Said’s Orientalism, which, as I argue, was the point of departure for Brodsky’s essay. Brodsky’s ironic detachment from what he sees and experiences on his journey is juxtaposed with his polemical engagement with the tradition of Russian and Western accounts of the Orient as well as with debates about Russia’s place on the Orient – Occident axis. His appropriation of the Orientalist myth brings forth his own identity construction on what emerges as an imaginative “contact zone” of two metropolitan cultures, Eastern and Western. Aware of the fact that Russia challenges the East – West dichotomy, the author of Brodsky’s essay uses the liminality of his own Russian identity to validate his opinions about both East and West and to invalidate the critique of this dichotomy as expressed by Said and others.
