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Upon receiving the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987, Joseph Brodsky titled his lecture at the award ceremony “aesthetics, the mother of ethics”. In this presentation, he expressed the opinion that literature is in fact more powerful than other forms of expression with regard to evoking moral and political questions, and he recommended politicians to read and learn from dickens and dostoyevsky rather than from Marx and Hegel or locke and Hume. I was impressed by Brodsky's approach, and kept a cutting with his speech on my refrigerator during the spring following the nominations of that year's Nobel Prizes.
In her new book, Else-Britt Kjellqvist has taken the same quotation from Brodsky as a starting point for an essay that moves from the idea that aesthetics might be socially protective — a notion that seems mistaken, when you consider the many statesmen who have been well educated and even poets or psychiatrists, yet cold-hearted murderers — to the theme of aesthetic dimensions in the line of thought in the articles by Donald Meltzer and by the British psychoanalyst Meira Likierman (1989) and back to a discussion about Brodsky. It is an interesting text that moves in a spiral motion from a personal quotation through the theoretical discussions and back into the quotation, this time from a different perspective.
Writing in this mode, Else-Britt Kjellqvist is a very good writer, who sometimes sets in motion new thoughts in the reader. This happens in some of the essays she has brought together in her book, which includes texts published between 1991 and 2006, all of which in different ways revolve around the theme of creativity.
Some of the pieces, like the text that deals with the aesthetic conflict, are theoretically interesting and firmly anchored either in the individual writers who are the subjects of her discussion or in a chosen psychoanalytic perspective or concept. Other chapters have a looser and more “poetic” character. The latter types of text only rarely su