Where was Brodsky born. Brodsky, Joseph - short biography

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad, USSR - January 28, 1996, New York, USA; buried in Venice) - Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, 1987 Nobel Prize winner in literature, poet laureate of the USA in 1991-1992. He wrote poetry mainly in Russian, essays in English.

Childhood and youth

Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. Father, the captain of the Soviet Navy, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903-1984), was a military photojournalist, after the war he went to work in the photographic laboratory of the Naval Museum. In 1950 he was demobilized, after that he worked as a photographer and journalist in several Leningrad newspapers. Mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905-1983), worked as an accountant. Mother's own sister is an actress of the BDT and the Theater. V. F. Komissarzhevskaya Dora Moiseevna Volpert.

Joseph's early childhood fell on the years of war, blockade, post-war poverty and passed without a father. In 1942, after the blockade winter, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph left for evacuation to Cherepovets, returned to Leningrad in 1944. In 1947, Joseph went to school number 203 on Kirochnaya street, 8. In 1950 he moved to school number 196 on Mokhovaya street, in 1953 he went to the 7th grade at school number 181 in Solyaniy lane and remained in the next year on the second year. In 1954 he applied to the Second Baltic School (naval school), but was not accepted. I moved to school No. 276 on Obvodny Canal, house No. 154, where I continued my studies in the 7th grade.
In 1955, the family received a "room and a half" at the Muruzi House.

Brodsky's aesthetic views were formed in Leningrad in the 1940s-1950s. Neoclassical architecture, badly damaged during the bombing, endless vistas of the Leningrad suburbs, water, multiple reflections - motives associated with these impressions of his childhood and youth are invariably present in his work.
In 1955, at less than sixteen years of age, having finished seven classes and starting the eighth, Brodsky dropped out of school and entered the Arsenal plant as an apprentice milling machine operator. This decision was associated with both problems at school and Brodsky's desire to financially support the family. I tried unsuccessfully to enter the school for submariners. At the age of 16, he fired up the idea of \u200b\u200bbecoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant dissector in a morgue at a regional hospital, dissected corpses, but in the end gave up a medical career. In addition, for five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor at a lighthouse.

Since 1957 he was a worker on geological expeditions of NIIGA: in 1957 and 1958 - on the White Sea, in 1959 and 1961 - in Eastern Siberia and Northern Yakutia, on the Anabar shield. In the summer of 1961, in the Yakut village of Nelkan, during a period of forced idleness (there were no deer for a further trip), he had a nervous breakdown, and he was allowed to return to Leningrad.

At the same time, he read a lot, but chaotically - primarily poetry, philosophical and religious literature, began to study English and Polish.
In 1959 he met Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava, Sergei Dovlatov.
On February 14, 1960, the first major public performance took place at the "tournament of poets" in the Leningrad Palace of Culture named after Gorky with the participation of A. S. Kushner, G. Ya. Gorbovsky, V. A. Sosnora. Reading the poem "Jewish Cemetery" caused a scandal.

During a trip to Samarkand in December 1960, Brodsky and his friend, a former pilot Oleg Shakhmatov, considered a plan to hijack the plane in order to fly abroad. But they did not dare to do this. Later, Shakhmatov was arrested for illegal possession of weapons and reported to the KGB about this plan, as well as about his other friend, Alexander Umansky, and his "anti-Soviet" manuscript, which Shakhmatov and Brodsky tried to hand over to an American by chance. On January 29, 1961, Brodsky was detained by the KGB, but two days later he was released.
In August 1961 in Komarovo, Evgeny Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova. In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Ya. Mandelstam, and in 1963 at Akhmatova's - with Lydia Chukovskaya. After Akhmatova's death in 1966, with the light hand of D. Bobyshev, four young poets, including Brodsky, were often referred to in memoir literature as “Akhmatov's orphans”.

In 1962, twenty-two years old Brodsky met a young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova, the daughter of the artist P.I.Basmanov. Since that time, Marianne Basmanova, hidden under the initials “M. B. ”, many works of the poet were dedicated. “Poems dedicated to M. B. ", occupy a central place in Brodsky's lyrics, not because they are the best - among them there are masterpieces and there are passable poems, but because these poems and the spiritual experience embedded in them were the crucible in which his poetic personality was melted" ... The first verses with this dedication - "I hugged these shoulders and looked ...", "No longing, no love, no sadness ...", "Riddle to an Angel" date back to 1962. The collection of poems by I. Brodsky "New Stanzas to Augusta" (USA, Michigan: Ardis, 1983) is compiled from his poems of 1962-1982, dedicated to "M. B. ". The last poem with dedication “M. B. " dated 1989.
On October 8, 1967, a son, Andrei Osipovich Basmanov, was born to Marianna Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky. In 1972-1995. M. P. Basmanova and I. A. Brodsky were in correspondence.

Early poetry, influences

According to his own words, Brodsky began writing poetry at the age of eighteen, but there are several poems dated 1956-1957. One of the decisive impulses was the acquaintance with the poetry of Boris Slutsky. "Pilgrims", "Monument to Pushkin", "Christmas Romance" are the most famous of Brodsky's early poems. Many of them are characterized by a pronounced musicality. So, in the poems "From the outskirts to the center" and "I am the son of the suburb, the son of the suburb, the son of the suburb ..." you can see the rhythmic elements of jazz improvisation. Tsvetaeva and Baratynsky, and a few years later - Mandelstam, had, according to Brodsky himself, a decisive influence on him.
Among his contemporaries, he was influenced by Eugene Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Stanislav Krasovitsky.

Later Brodsky called Auden and Tsvetaeva the greatest poets, followed by Cavafy and Frost, closing the personal canon of the poet Rilke, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatov.
The first published poem by Brodsky was "The Ballad of the Little Tug", published in abridged form in the children's magazine "Koster" (No. 11, 1962).

Persecution, trial and exile

It was obvious that the article was a signal for the persecution and, possibly, the arrest of Brodsky. Nevertheless, according to Brodsky, more than defamation, the subsequent arrest, trial and sentence, his thoughts were occupied at that time by the break with Marianna Basmanova. During this period, there is a suicide attempt.

On January 8, 1964, "Evening Leningrad" published a selection of letters from readers demanding to punish the "parasite Brodsky". On January 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism. On February 14, he had his first heart attack in his cell. Since that time, Brodsky constantly suffered from angina pectoris, which always reminded him of a possible imminent death (which, at the same time, did not prevent him from remaining a heavy smoker). Much of this is where "Hello, my aging!" at 33 and “What can you tell me about life? That turned out to be long ”at 40 - with his diagnosis, the poet was really not sure that he would live to see this birthday.

On February 18, 1964, the court ruled to send Brodsky for a compulsory forensic psychiatric examination. Brodsky spent three weeks at Pryazhka (psychiatric hospital No. 2 in Leningrad) and later noted: "... it was the worst time in my life." According to Brodsky's recollection, in a psychiatric hospital, they used a “trick” on him: “In the middle of the night, they woke him up, immersed him in an ice bath, wrapped him in a wet sheet and placed him next to a radiator. The sheet dried out from the heat of the batteries and cut into the body. " The conclusion of the examination read: “There are psychopathic character traits, but able to work. Therefore, administrative measures can be applied ”. After that, the second court session took place.
Two sessions of the Brodsky trial (judge of the Dzerzhinsky court Savelieva E.A.) were supervised by Frida Vigdorova and were widely disseminated in samizdat.

Brodsky's lawyer said in her speech: “None of the witnesses for the prosecution knows Brodsky, he has never read his poetry; witnesses for the prosecution give testimony on the basis of some incomprehensible and unverified documents obtained and express their opinion, making accusatory speeches. "

On March 13, 1964, at the second court session, Brodsky was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment under the Decree on "parasitism" - five years of forced labor in a remote area. He was exiled (convoyed under escort together with criminal prisoners) to the Konosha district of the Arkhangelsk region and settled in the village of Norinskaya. In an interview with Volkov, Brodsky called this time the happiest in his life. In exile, Brodsky studied English poetry, including the works of Whisten Auden.
Along with extensive poetry publications in émigré publications (Air Ways, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, Posev, Grani, etc.), in August and September 1965, two of Brodsky's poems were published in the Konosha regional newspaper Prizyv ...

The poet's trial became one of the factors that led to the emergence of the human rights movement in the USSR and to increased attention abroad to the human rights situation in the USSR. The record of the trial, made by Frida Vigdorova, was published in influential foreign publications: New Leader, Encounter, Figaro Litteraire, and was read on the BBC. With the active participation of Akhmatova, a public campaign was conducted in defense of Brodsky. The central figures in it were Frida Vigdorova and Lydia Chukovskaya. For a year and a half, they tirelessly wrote letters in defense of Brodsky to all party and judicial authorities and involved people who had influence in the Soviet system in the case of Brodsky's defense. Letters in defense of Brodsky were signed by D. D. Shostakovich, S. Ya. Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu. P. German and others. After a year and a half, in September 1965, under pressure from the Soviet and world community (in particular, after an appeal to the Soviet government by Jean-Paul Sartre and a number of other foreign writers), the term of exile was reduced to actually served, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. According to Y. Gordin: “The troubles of the luminaries of Soviet culture did not have any impact on the authorities. Decisive was the warning from “friend of the USSR” Jean-Paul Sartre that the Soviet delegation at the European Forum of Writers could find itself in a difficult situation because of the “Brodsky case”.

In October 1965, on the recommendation of Korney Chukovsky and Boris Vakhtin, Brodsky was admitted to the Group of Translators at the Leningrad branch of the USSR Writers' Union, which made it possible to avoid further charges of parasitism.
Brodsky opposed the image of a fighter against Soviet power imposed on him, especially by the Western media. A. Volgina wrote that Brodsky "did not like to talk in interviews about the hardships he suffered in Soviet psychiatric hospitals and prisons, persistently moving away from the image of a" victim of the regime "to the image of a" self-made man. " In particular, he argued: “I was lucky in all respects. Other people got much more, it was much harder than me. " And even: "... I think I deserve it all."

Recent years at home

Brodsky was arrested and sent into exile as a 23-year-old youth, and returned as a 25-year-old established poet. He was given less than 7 years to stay at home. Maturity has come, the time has passed for belonging to this or that circle. Anna Akhmatova died in March 1966. Even earlier, the “magic chorus” of young poets around her began to disintegrate. Brodsky's position in official Soviet culture during these years can be compared with that of Akhmatova in the 1920s and 1930s or Mandelstam in the period preceding his first arrest.
At the end of 1965 Brodsky handed over to the Leningrad branch of the publishing house "Soviet Writer" the manuscript of his book "Winter Mail (poems 1962-1965)". A year later, after many months of ordeal and despite numerous positive internal reviews, the manuscript was returned by the publisher. “The fate of the book was not decided in the publishing house. At some point, the regional committee and the KGB decided, in principle, to cross out this idea. "

In 1966-1967, 4 poems of the poet appeared in the Soviet press (not counting publications in children's magazines), after which a period of public silence began. From the reader's point of view, the only area of \u200b\u200bpoetic activity available to Brodsky is translation. "Such a poet does not exist in the USSR," the Soviet embassy in London declared in 1968 in response to an invitation sent to Brodsky to take part in the international poetry festival Poetry International.

Meanwhile, these were years filled with intense poetic work, the result of which were poems that were later included in the books published in the USA: "Stop in the Desert", "End of a Beautiful Era" and "New Stanzas for Augustus". In 1965-1968, work was underway on the poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov, a work to which Brodsky himself attached great importance. In addition to infrequent public appearances and reading in the apartments of friends, Brodsky's poems were widely dispersed in samizdat (with numerous inevitable distortions - there was no copying technique in those years). Perhaps they got a wider audience thanks to songs written by Alexander Mirzayan and Yevgeny Klyachkin.

Outwardly, Brodsky's life during these years was relatively calm, but the KGB did not leave its "old client" with attention. This was facilitated by the fact that “the poet is becoming extremely popular with foreign journalists, Slavic scholars who come to Russia. He is interviewed, he is invited to Western universities (of course, the authorities do not give permission to leave), and so on. " In addition to translations - work on which he took very seriously - Brodsky earned money in other ways available to a writer excluded from the "system": as a freelance reviewer in the "Aurora" magazine, random "hacks" at film studios, even starred (as secretary of the city party ) in the film "Train to distant August".

Outside the borders of the USSR, Brodsky's poems continue to appear both in Russian and in translations, primarily in English, Polish and Italian. In 1967, an unauthorized collection of translations “Joseph Brodsky. Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems / Tr. by Nicholas Bethell. " In 1970, "Stop in the Desert", Brodsky's first book, compiled under his supervision, was published in New York. Poems and preparatory materials for the book were secretly exported from Russia or, as in the case of the poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov, sent to the West by diplomatic mail.
In 1971 Brodsky was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

In emigration

On May 10, 1972, Brodsky was summoned to the OVIR and faced with a choice: immediate emigration or "hot days", which metaphor in the mouth of the KGB could mean interrogations, prisons and mental hospitals. By that time, he had already twice - in the winter of 1964 - had to lie on "examination" in psychiatric hospitals, which, in his words, was more terrible than prison and exile. Brodsky decides to leave. Upon learning of this, Vladimir Maramzin invited him to collect everything written for the preparation of a samizdat collected works. The result was the first and until 1992 the only collection of works by Joseph Brodsky - of course, typewritten. Before leaving, he managed to authorize all 4 volumes. Choosing emigration, Brodsky tried to postpone the day of departure, but the authorities wanted to get rid of the objectionable poet as quickly as possible. On June 4, 1972, Brodsky, deprived of his Soviet citizenship, flew out of Leningrad along the route prescribed for Jewish emigration: to Vienna.

Two days later, upon arrival in Vienna, Brodsky went to meet U. Auden, who lives in Austria. "He treated me with extraordinary sympathy, immediately took me under his wing ... undertook to introduce me to literary circles." Together with Auden Brodsky at the end of June he takes part in the Poetry International in London. Brodsky was familiar with the work of Auden from the time of his exile and called him, along with Akhmatova, a poet who had a decisive "ethical influence" on him. It was then in London that Brodsky met Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

Life line

In July 1972, Brodsky moved to the United States and accepted the post of "poet-in-residence" at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he teaches, intermittently, until 1980. From that moment he completed incomplete 8 classes in the USSR High School Brodsky leads the life of a university teacher, serving over the next 24 years in professorship in a total of six American and British universities, including Columbia and New York. He taught the history of Russian literature, Russian and world poetry, the theory of poetry, gave lectures and read poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Italy.

Over the years, his health condition has steadily deteriorated, and Brodsky, whose first heart attack occurred in prison days in 1964, suffered 4 heart attacks in 1976, 1985 and 1994.
Brodsky's parents filed an application twelve times with a request to allow them to see their son, congressmen and prominent cultural figures of the United States made the same request to the government of the USSR, but even after Brodsky underwent open-heart surgery in 1978 and needed care, his parents an exit visa was refused. They never saw their son again. Brodsky's mother died in 1983, a little over a year later, his father died. Both times Brodsky was not allowed to come to the funeral. The book "Part of Speech" (1977), the poems "The thought of you is removed like a demoted servant ..." (1985), "In memory of the father: Australia" (1989), essay "One and a half rooms" (1985) are dedicated to the parents.

In 1977, Brodsky takes American citizenship, in 1980 he finally moves from Ann Arbor to New York, later divides his time between New York and South Hadley, a university town in Massachusetts, where from 1982 until the end of his life he taught spring semesters at the Five Colleges Consortium. In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat, Russian on the maternal side. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.

Poet and essayist

Brodsky's poems and their translations have been published outside the USSR since 1964, when his name became widely known thanks to the publication of the recording of the poet's trial. Since his arrival in the West, his poetry has regularly appeared on the pages of publications of the Russian emigration. Almost more often than in the Russian-language press, translations of Brodsky's poems are published, primarily in magazines in the USA and England, and in 1973 a book of selected translations appeared. But new books of poems in Russian came out only in 1977 - this is "The End of a Beautiful Epoch", which included poems from 1964-1971, and "Part of Speech", which included works written in 1972-1976. The reason for this division was not external events (emigration) - the understanding of exile as a fateful factor was alien to Brodsky's work - but the fact that, in his opinion, in 1971/1972, qualitative changes were taking place in his work. At this turning point were written "Still Life", "To One Tyrant", "Odysseus of Telemacu", "Song of Innocence, or Experience", "Letters to a Roman Friend", "Bobo's Funeral". In the poem "1972", begun in Russia and finished outside of it, Brodsky gives the following formula: "Everything that I did, I did not for the sake of me / fame in the era of cinema and radio, / but for the sake of native speech, literature ...". The title of the collection - "Part of Speech" - is explained by the same message, lapidarily formulated in his Nobel Lecture: "someone who, but a poet always knows<…> that not language is his instrument, but he is the means of language. "

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brodsky, as a rule, did not include in his new books the poems that were included in earlier collections. An exception is the book "New Stanzas for August", published in 1983, composed of poems addressed to M. B. - Marina Basmanova. Years later, Brodsky spoke about this book: “This is the main work of my life<…> it seems to me that as a result, "New Stanzas for Augusta" can be read as a separate work. Unfortunately, I have not written The Divine Comedy. And, apparently, I will never write it. And then it turned out to be a kind of poetry book with its own plot ... ". "New Stanzas to Augusta" became the only book of Brodsky's poetry in Russian, compiled by the author himself.

Since 1972, Brodsky has actively turned to essay, which he does not leave until the end of his life. Three books of his essays are published in the United States: "Less Than One" in 1986, "Watermark" (Embankment of the Incurable) in 1992 and "On Grief and Reason" in 1995. Most of the essays, included in these collections, was written in English. His prose, at least not less than his poetry, made Brodsky's name widely known to the world outside the USSR. Less Than One was named the best literary criticism book in the USA for 1986 by the American National Council of Literary Critics. By this time, Brodsky was the owner of half a dozen titles of a member of literary academies and an honorary doctor of various universities, was the winner of the 1981 MacArthur scholarship.

The next big book of poetry - "Urania" - was published in 1987. In the same year, Brodsky became a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, which was awarded to him "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity".
In the 1990s, four books of new poems by Brodsky were published: Notes of a Fern, Cappadocia, In the Environs of Atlantis, and published in Ardis after the poet's death and which became the final collection, Landscape with Flooding.

The undoubted success of Brodsky's poetry, both among critics and literary critics and among readers, has probably more exceptions than would be required to confirm the rule. The lowered emotionality, musical and metaphysical complexity - especially of the "late" Brodsky - repel some artists as well. In particular, one can name the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose reproaches to the poet's work are largely of an ideological nature. A critic from another camp echoes him almost literally: Dmitry Bykov in his essay about Brodsky after the conception: “I am not going to re-sing the commonplace banalities here that Brodsky is“ cold ”,“ monotonous ”,“ inhuman ”...”, - further does just that: “In the huge corpus of Brodsky's works, there are surprisingly few living texts ... It is unlikely that today's reader will effortlessly finish reading The Procession, Farewell, Mademoiselle Veronica or Letter in a Bottle - although, undoubtedly, he cannot fail to appreciate Part speeches "," Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart "or" A Conversation with a Celestial ": the best texts of the still living, not yet petrified Brodsky, the cry of a living soul feeling its ossification, icing, dying."

Playwright, translator, writer

Two published plays belong to Brodsky: "Marble", 1982 and "Democracy", 1990-1992. He also owns translations of plays by the English playwright Tom Stoppard "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and the Irishman Brendan Bean's "Talking about the Rope." Brodsky left a significant legacy as a translator of world poetry into Russian. Among the authors he translated, one can name, in particular, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Wilber, Euripides (from Medea), Constantinos Cavafy, Constant Ildefons Galczynski, Cheslav Milos, Thomas Venclov. Brodsky turned to English translations much less often. First of all, these are, of course, auto-translations, as well as translations from Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Wislava Szymborska and a number of others.

Susan Sontag, an American writer and close friend of Brodsky, says: “I'm sure he saw his exile as the greatest opportunity to become not only a Russian, but a world poet ... I remember Brodsky laughingly said sometime in 1976-1977: "Sometimes I find it so strange to think that I can write whatever I want and it will be printed." Brodsky took full advantage of this opportunity. Since 1972, he has plunged headlong into social and literary life. In addition to the three aforementioned books of essays, the number of articles, prefaces, letters to the editorial office, reviews of various collections written by him exceeds a hundred, not counting numerous oral presentations at the evenings of Russian and English-speaking poets, participation in discussions and forums, magazine interviews. In the list of authors, on whose work he gives feedback, the names of I. Lisnyanskaya, E. Rein, A. Kushner, D. Novikov, B. Akhmadulina, L. Losev, Yu. Kublanovsky, Yu. Aleshkovsky, Vl. Ufland, V. Gandelsman, A. Nyman, R. Derieva, R. Wilber, C. Milos, M. Strand, D. Walcott and others. The world's largest newspapers publish his appeals in defense of the persecuted writers: S. Rushdie, N. Gorbanevskaya, V. Maramzin, T. Ventslov, K. Azadovsky. "In addition, he tried to help so many people" - including by letters of recommendation - "that recently there has been a kind of devaluation of his recommendations."
Relative financial well-being (at least by the standards of emigration) gave Brodsky the opportunity to provide more material assistance.

The Library of Congress elects Brodsky as Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992. In this honorable, but traditionally nominal capacity, he developed an active work in the promotion of poetry. His ideas led to the creation of the American Poetry and Literacy Project, which has distributed over a million free poetry books since 1993 to schools, hotels, supermarkets, train stations, and more. According to William Wadsworth, director of the American Academy of Poets from 1989 to 2001, Brodsky's inaugural speech as Poet Laureate "transformed America's view of the role of poetry in its culture." Shortly before his death, Brodsky was carried away by the idea of \u200b\u200bfounding the Russian Academy in Rome. In the fall of 1995, he turned to the mayor of Rome with a proposal to create an academy where artists, writers and scientists from Russia could study and work. This idea was realized after the death of the poet. In 2000, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Scholarship Foundation sent the first Russian poet-scholar to Rome, and in 2003 the first artist.

English-speaking poet

1973 saw the publication of the first authorized book of translations of Brodsky's poetry into English - "Selected poems", translated by George Cline and with a foreword by Auden. A second collection in English, A Part of Speech, comes out in 1980; the third, "To Urania" (To Urania), - in 1988. In 1996, "So Forth" (etc.) was released - the 4th collection of poems in English, prepared by Brodsky. The last two books include both translations and auto-translations from Russian and poems written in English. Over the years Brodsky trusted less and less the translations of his poems into English to other translators; at the same time, he increasingly wrote poetry in English, although, in his own words, he did not consider himself a bilingual poet and argued that "for me, when I write poetry in English, it is more of a game ...". Losev writes: “Linguistically and culturally, Brodsky was Russian, and as for self-identification, in his mature years he reduced it to a lapidary formula, which he repeatedly used:“ I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen. ”

In the five hundred-page collection of Brodsky's English-language poetry, published after the author's death, there are no translations made without his participation. But if his essays evoked mostly positive critical responses, the attitude towards him as a poet in the English-speaking world was far from unambiguous. According to Valentina Polukhina, "The paradox of Brodsky's perception in England lies in the fact that with the growth of Brodsky's reputation as an essayist, the attacks on Brodsky's poet and translator of his own poems intensified." The range of assessments was very wide, from extremely negative to laudatory, and, probably, a critical bias prevailed. Brodsky's roles in English-language poetry, the translation of his poetry into English, and the relationship between the Russian and English languages \u200b\u200bin his work are, in particular, devoted to Daniel Weissbort's essay-memoirs "From Russian with love".

Return

Perestroika in the USSR and the concurrent awarding of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky broke the dam of silence at home, and soon the publication of Brodsky's poems and essays flooded. The first (in addition to several poems that leaked to print in the 1960s), a selection of Brodsky's poems appeared in the December 1987 book of Novy Mir. Until this moment, the poet's work was known in his homeland to a very limited circle of readers thanks to the lists of poems distributed in samizdat. In 1989 Brodsky was rehabilitated in the 1964 trial.

In 1992, a 4-volume collection of works began to appear in Russia.
In 1995 Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.
Invitations to return to their homeland followed. Brodsky postponed his arrival: he was embarrassed by the publicity of such an event, the celebration, the attention of the press, which would inevitably accompany his visit. Health did not allow either. One of the last arguments was: "The best part of me is already there - my poetry."

Death and burial

On Saturday evening, January 27, 1996, Brodsky was preparing to go to South Hadley in New York and collected manuscripts and books in a portfolio to take with him the next day. The spring semester began on Monday. Having wished his wife good night, Brodsky said that he needed more work, and went up to his office. In the morning, his wife found him on the floor in his office. Brodsky was fully dressed. On the desk next to the spectacles lay an open book - a bilingual edition of Greek epigrams. The heart, according to doctors, stopped suddenly - a heart attack, the poet died on the night of January 28, 1996.

On February 1, 1996, a funeral service was held at the Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights, not far from Brodsky's home. The next day, a temporary burial took place: the body, in a coffin covered with metal, was placed in a crypt in the cemetery at the Trinity Church Cemetery, on the banks of the Hudson, where it was kept until June 21, 1997. The proposal of the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation GV Starovoitova sent by telegram to bury the poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky Island was rejected - "this would mean solving the question of returning home for Brodsky." A memorial service was held on March 8 in Manhattan at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There were no speeches. Poems were read by Cheslav Milos, Derek Walcott, Sheimus Heaney, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lev Losev, Anthony Hecht, Mark Strand, Rosanna Warren, Eugene Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Thomas Venclova, Anatoly Nyman, Yakov Gordin, Maria Sozzani-Brodskaya and others. The music of Haydn, Mozart, Purcell sounded. In 1973, in the same cathedral, Brodsky was one of the organizers of the memorial service in memory of Whisten Auden.

It took more than a year to resolve the issue of the poet's final resting place. According to Brodsky's widow Maria: “One of his friends expressed the idea of \u200b\u200ba funeral in Venice. This is the city that, apart from St. Petersburg, Joseph loved most. Besides, selfishly speaking, Italy is my country, so it was better for my husband to be buried there. It was easier to bury him in Venice than in other cities, for example, in my hometown of Compignano near Lucca. Venice is closer to Russia and is a more accessible city. " Veronica Schiltz and Benedetta Craveri agreed with the Venice authorities on a place in the old cemetery on the island of San Michele.

On June 21, 1997, the body of Joseph Brodsky was reburied at the San Michele cemetery in Venice. Initially, it was planned to bury the poet's body in the Russian half of the cemetery between the graves of Stravinsky and Diaghilev, but this turned out to be impossible, since Brodsky was not Orthodox. The Catholic clergy also refused burial. As a result, they decided to bury the body in the Protestant part of the cemetery. The resting place was marked with a modest wooden cross named Joseph Brodsky. A few years later, a tombstone by the artist Vladimir Radunsky was installed on the grave.

When talking about the great poets of the 20th century, one cannot fail to mention the work of Joseph Brodsky. He is a very significant figure in the world of poetry. Brodsky has a difficult biography - persecution, misunderstanding, trial and exile. This prompted the author to leave for the United States, where he received public recognition.

Dissident poet Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. The boy's father worked as a war photographer, and his mother was an accountant. When in 1950 there was a "purge" of Jews in the ranks of officers, my father went to work as a photojournalist for a newspaper.

Joseph's childhood coincided with the war, the blockade of Leningrad, and famine. The family survived, as did hundreds of thousands of people. In 1942, his mother took Joseph and was evacuated to Cherepovets. They returned to Leningrad after the war.

Brodsky dropped out of school, barely reaching the 8th grade. He wanted to help his family financially, so he went to work at the factory as a milling assistant. Then Joseph wanted to become a guide - it didn't work out. At one time he was eager to become a doctor and even went to work in a morgue, but soon changed his mind. For several years, Joseph Brodsky changed many professions: all this time he drunkenly read poetry, philosophical treatises, studied foreign languages \u200b\u200band even was going to hijack a plane with his friends in order to escape from the Soviet Union. True, the matter did not go beyond the intentions.

Literature

Brodsky said that he began writing poetry at the age of 18, although there are several poems written at the age of 16-17. In the early period of creativity, he wrote "Christmas Romance", "Monument to Pushkin", "From the outskirts to the center" and other poems. Later, poetry had a strong influence on the author's style, and they became the personal canon of the young man.

Brodsky met Akhmatova in 1961. She never doubted the talent of the young poet and supported the work of Joseph, believing in success. Brodsky himself was not particularly impressed by Anna Andreevna's poems, but the scale of the personality of the Soviet poetess admired.

The first work that alerted the Power of the Soviets was dated 1958. The poem was called The Pilgrims. Then he wrote "Loneliness". There Brodsky tried to rethink what was happening to him and how to get out of the current situation, when newspapers and magazines closed the doors to the poet.

In January 1964, the same “Vecherny Leningrad” published letters from “outraged citizens” demanding punishment for the poet, and on February 13, the writer was arrested for parasitism. The next day, in his cell, he suffered a heart attack. Brodsky's thoughts of that period are clearly guessed in the poems "Hello, my aging" and "What can I say about life?"

The persecution that began laid a heavy burden on the poet. The situation was aggravated due to the breakdown of relations with her beloved Marina Basmanova. As a result, Brodsky made an attempt to die, but unsuccessfully.

The persecution continued until May 1972, when Brodsky was given a choice - a psychiatric hospital or emigration. Joseph Alexandrovich had already been to a mental hospital, and, as he said, it was much more terrible than a prison. Brodsky chose emigration. In 1977, the poet became an American citizen.

Before leaving his native country, the poet tried to stay in Russia. He sent a letter to himself with a request to be allowed to live in the country at least as a translator. But the future Nobel laureate was never heard.

Joseph Brodsky took part in the International Poetry Festival in London. Then he taught the history of Russian literature and poetry at Michigan, Columbia and New York universities. In parallel, he wrote essays in English and translated poetry into English. In 1986 Brodsky's collection Less than One was published, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the period 1985-1989, the poet wrote "In Memory of the Father", "Performance" and the essay "One and a half rooms". In these verses and prose - all the pain of a person who was not allowed to spend his parents' last journey.

When perestroika began in the USSR, the poetry of Joseph Alexandrovich was actively printed in literary magazines and newspapers. In 1990, the poet's books began to be published in the Soviet Union. Brodsky received invitations from his homeland more than once, but he constantly hesitated with this visit - he did not want the attention of the press and publicity. The difficulty of returning was reflected in the poems Ithaca, Letter to the Oasis and others.

Personal life

The first big love of Joseph Brodsky was the artist Marina Basmanova, whom he met in 1962. They met for a long time, then lived together. In 1968, Marina and Joseph had a son, Andrei, but with the birth of a child, relations worsened. They parted the same year.

In 1990, he met Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat with Russian maternal roots. In the same year Brodsky married her, and three years later their daughter Anna was born. Unfortunately, Joseph Brodsky was not destined to see how his daughter was growing up.

The poet is known as a famous smoker. Despite four heart surgeries, he never quit smoking. Doctors strongly advised Brodsky to quit the addiction, to which he replied: "Life is wonderful precisely because there are no guarantees, no and never."

Joseph Brodsky also adored cats. He argued that these creatures did not have a single ugly movement. In many photos, the creator is shot with a cat in his arms.

With the support of the writer, the Russian Samovar restaurant was opened in New York. The establishment was co-owned by Roman Kaplan and. Joseph Brodsky invested part of the Nobel Prize money in this project. The restaurant has become a landmark of the "Russian" New York.

Death

He suffered from angina pectoris even before emigration. The poet's health was unstable. In 1978, he underwent heart surgery, an American clinic sent an official letter to the USSR with a request to allow Joseph's parents to leave to take care of their son. The parents themselves filed a petition 12 times, but each time they were refused. From 1964 to 1994, Brodsky suffered 4 heart attacks, he never saw his parents again. The writer's mother died in 1983, and a year later his father was gone. The Soviet authorities refused his request to come to the funeral. The death of his parents crippled the poet's health.

On January 27, 1996, in the evening, Joseph Brodsky folded his portfolio, wished his wife good night and went up to the office - he had to work before the spring semester. On the morning of January 28, 1996, the wife found her husband without any signs of life. Doctors ascertained death from a heart attack.

Two weeks before his death, the poet bought himself a place in a cemetery in New York, near Broadway. There he was buried, fulfilling the last will of the dissident poet, who loved his homeland to his last breath.

In June 1997, the body of Joseph Brodsky was reburied in Venice at the San Michele cemetery.

In 2005, the first monument to the poet was unveiled in St. Petersburg.

Bibliography

1965 - "Poems and Poems"
1982 - Roman Elegies
1984 - Marble
1987 - Urania
1988 - Stop in the Desert
1990 - Fern Notes
1991 - "Poems"
1993 - Cappadocia. Poems"
1995 - “In the vicinity of Atlantis. New poems "
1992-1995 - The Works of Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky's biography is closely connected with Leningrad, where the future poet was born on May 24, 1940. The image of post-war Leningrad remained in the memory of the poet and influenced his work. Adult life for the writer began immediately after the end of the 7th grade. He tried a lot of different professions: a doctor, a sailor, a worker, a geologist, but he was really interested in only one thing - literary creativity.

The beginning of the creative path

According to his own statement, he wrote his first work at the age of 18 (although research biographers have found earlier poems written by the poet at the age of 14-15). The first publication was published in 1962.

Idols and teachers

Brodsky read and studied a lot. He considered M. Tsvetaeva, A. Akhmatova to be his idols and real literary geniuses (an interesting fact: a personal meeting of young Brodsky and Akhmatova took place in 1961, Anna Akhmatova really liked the young poet, and she took him "under her wing"), Frost, B. Pasternak, O. Mandelstam, Cavafy, W. Auden. He was also influenced by his contemporaries (with whom he was personally acquainted), such as B. Slutsky, Ev. Rein, S. Davlatov, B. Okudzhava and others.

Harassment and arrest

The poet was arrested for the first time in 1960, but was released very quickly, and in 1963 he was truly persecuted for his dissident statements. In 1964, he was arrested for parasitism, and in the same year, having suffered a heart attack, he was sent for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital. After several court hearings, Brodsky was found guilty and sent to a forced settlement in the Arkhangelsk region.

Release and expulsion abroad

Many art workers of that time (and not only the USSR) stood up for Brodsky's defense: A. Akhmatova, D. Shostakovich, S. Marshak, K. Chukovsky, K. Paustovsky, A. Tvardovsky, Y. Herman, Jean-Paul Sartre. As a result of a massive "attack" on the authorities, Brodsky was returned to Leningrad, but he was not allowed to publish. For several years, only 4 poems were published (although Brodsky was printed a lot abroad).

In 1972 Brodsky was “offered” to leave, and he was forced to agree. On June 4, 1972, he was deprived of his Soviet citizenship and left for Vienna.

In emigration

Since 1972, Brodsky worked at the University of Michigan, wrote and published extensively, made close acquaintances with such cultural figures as Stephen Spender, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell. In 1979 he became an American citizen and began teaching at other educational institutions. In total, his teaching experience was over 24 years.

In 1991, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Personal life

A short biography of Joseph Brodsky would be incomplete without "love lines". At 22, Brodsky met his first love - Maria (Marianna) Basmanova. In 1967, the couple had a son. They were not married, but they were on friendly terms and corresponded all their lives. In 1990, he married for the first time to Maria Sozzani, an Italian from an ancient family, but half Russian. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born. 4.3 points. Total ratings received: 110.

He was a photojournalist for an army newspaper, graduated from the war with the rank of captain of the third rank and then worked in the photo department of the Naval Museum, mother Maria Volpert worked as an accountant.

In 1955, after finishing seven grades and starting the eighth, Joseph Brodsky dropped out of school and entered the Arsenal plant as a milling apprentice.

This decision was associated with both problems at school and Brodsky's desire to financially support the family. I tried unsuccessfully to enter the school for submariners. At the age of 16, he decided to become a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant dissector in a morgue at a regional hospital, dissected corpses, but in the end gave up his medical career.

After that, in geological parties. From 1956 to 1963, he changed 13 jobs, where he had a total of two years and eight months.

Since 1957, Brodsky began to write poetry, spoke with their reading in public. In the 1960s, he began to engage in translations.

The poet's talent was appreciated by the famous Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova. Brodsky, rejected by official circles, gained fame in literary circles, among the intellectual underground, but he never belonged to any group, was not associated with dissidence.

Until 1972, only 11 of his poems were published in the USSR in the third issue of the Moscow samizdat hectographed magazine "Syntaxis" and in local Leningrad newspapers, as well as translation works under his own name or under a pseudonym.

On February 12, 1964, the poet was arrested in Leningrad on charges of parasitism. On March 13, a trial was held over Brodsky. Anna Akhmatova, writer Samuil Marshak, composer Dmitry Shostakovich, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stood up for the poet. Brodsky was sentenced to a five-year exile in the Arkhangelsk region "with the obligatory involvement in physical labor."

Returning from exile, he lived in Leningrad. The poet continued to work, but as before his poems could not appear in official publications. Livelihoods were provided by transfers, supported by friends and acquaintances. Basically, from the works of this period, Brodsky himself compiled a unique lyric book "New Stanzas in August. Poems to MB" addressed to one addressee.

In May 1972, the poet was summoned to the OVIR with an ultimatum proposal to emigrate to Israel, and Brodsky decided to go abroad. In June, he went to Vienna, in July - to the United States.

His first position was as a lecturer at the University of Michigan. He then moved to New York and taught at Columbia University, the colleges of New York and New England.

The poet published his works - the cycle "Songs of a Happy Winter", collections "Stop in the Desert" (1967), "End of a Beautiful Epoch" and "Part of Speech" (both - 1972), "Urania" (1987), poems "Guest", "Petersburg Novel", "Procession", "Zofya", "Hills", "Isaac and Abraham", "Gorchakov and Gorbunov" and others. He created essays, stories, plays, translations.

He is in exile. During his lifetime Brodsky published five books of poetry in English. The first, Elegy to John Donne, published in 1967 in England, was composed of poems before 1964 without the knowledge and participation of the poet. His first English book, Selected Poems (1973), translated by George Cline, reproduced two-thirds of the contents of Desert Stop.

Later, A Part of Speech ("Part of Speech", 1980), To Urania ("To Urania", 1988), So Forth ("So on", 1996) were published. The first collection of his prose in English was Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), recognized as the best literary criticism book of the year in the United States. In 1995, a book of essays, On Grief and Reason, was published.

Brodsky was published in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, participated in conferences, symposia, traveled a lot around the world, which was reflected in his work - in the works "The Rotterdam Diary", "Lithuanian Nocturne", "Laguna" (1973) , "Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart", "Thames at Chelsea" (1974), "Cape Cod Lullaby", "Mexican Divertissement" (1975), "December in Florence" (1976), "Fifth Anniversary", "San Pietro "," In England "(1977).

In 1978, Brodsky became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts, from which he left in protest against the election of an honorary member of the Academy of Evgeny Yevtushenko.

In December 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-encompassing work imbued with clarity of thought and passion of poetry."

In 1991-1992 Brodsky received the title of Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress.

Since the late 1980s, Brodsky's work has gradually returned to his homeland, but he himself invariably rejected offers to even come to Russia for a while. At the same time in exile, he actively supported and promoted Russian culture.

In 1995, Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.

Marked by the rise in the intensity of the poet's creativity - he wrote and translated more than a hundred poems, a play, about ten large essays.

Collections of Brodsky's works began to be published in Russia, the first of them - "Edification" "Autumn cry of a hawk" and "Poems" were published in 1990.

The poet's health condition was constantly deteriorating. Back in 1976, he suffered a massive heart attack. In December 1978, Brodsky underwent the first heart operation, in December 1985 - the second, which was preceded by two more heart attacks. Doctors talked about a third operation, and later on a heart transplant, frankly warning that in these cases there is a high risk of death.

On the night of January 28, 1996, Joseph Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York. On February 1, he was temporarily buried in a marble wall in the Trinity Church cemetery on 153rd Street in Manhattan. A few months later, according to the poet's last will, his ashes were buried in the cemetery of the island of San Michele in Venice.

Brodsky's last collection, Landscape with Floods, came out in 1996 after his death.

The poet was married to Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat (on the maternal side of Russian descent). In 1993, a daughter, Anna, was born in the family.

In St. Petersburg, he has a son, Andrei Basmanov (born in 1967).

Brodsky's widow Maria heads the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Scholarship Foundation, created in 1996 to provide Russian writers, composers, architects and artists with an opportunity to intern and work in Rome.

In the village of Norinskaya, Konosha District, Arkhangelsk Region, where the poet served his exile, the world's first museum of Joseph Brodsky was opened.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the poet's birth, in May 2015, the Memorial Museum-Apartment of Joseph Brodsky, a branch of the State Literary and Memorial Museum of Anna Akhmatova in the Fountain House, will open in St. Petersburg.

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad, USSR - January 28, 1996, New York, USA) - Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, 1987 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, USA poet laureate in 1991 -1992 years.

He wrote poetry mainly in Russian, essays in English. One of the greatest Russian poets.

Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad into a Jewish family. Father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903-1984), was a military photojournalist, returned from the war in 1948 and went to work in the photographic laboratory of the Naval Museum. In 1950 he was demobilized, after that he worked as a photographer and journalist in several Leningrad newspapers. Mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905-1983), worked as an accountant. Mother's own sister is an actress of the BDT and the Theater. V. F. Komissarzhevskaya Dora Moiseevna Volpert.

Joseph's early childhood fell on the years of war, blockade, post-war poverty and passed without a father. In 1942, after the blockade winter, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph left for evacuation to Cherepovets, returned to Leningrad in 1944. In 1947, Joseph went to school number 203 on Kirochnaya street, 8. In 1950, Joseph moved to school number 196 on Mokhovaya street, in 1953, Joseph went to the 7th grade at school number 181 in Solyaniy lane and stayed the following year in the second year. Applied to the naval school, but was not accepted. I moved to school No. 276 on Obvodny Canal, house No. 154, where I continued my studies in the 7th grade.

In 1955, the family received a "room and a half" at the Muruzi House.

In 1955, at less than sixteen years of age, having finished seven classes and starting the eighth, Brodsky dropped out of school and entered the Arsenal plant as an apprentice milling machine operator. This decision was associated with both problems at school and Brodsky's desire to financially support the family. I tried unsuccessfully to enter the school for submariners. At the age of 16, he fired up the idea of \u200b\u200bbecoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant dissector in a morgue at a regional hospital, dissected corpses, but in the end gave up a medical career. In addition, for five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor at a lighthouse.

Since 1957 he was a worker on geological expeditions of NIIGA: in 1957 and 1958 - on the White Sea, in 1959 and 1961 - in Eastern Siberia and Northern Yakutia, on the Anabar shield. In the summer of 1961, in the Yakut village of Nelkan, during a period of forced idleness (there were no reindeer for a further campaign), he had a nervous breakdown, and he was allowed to return to Leningrad.

At the same time, he read a lot, but chaotically - primarily poetry, philosophical and religious literature, began to study English and Polish.

In 1959 he met Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava, Sergei Dovlatov.

On February 14, 1960, the first major public performance took place at the "tournament of poets" in the Leningrad Palace of Culture named after Gorky with the participation of A. S. Kushner, G. Ya. Gorbovsky, V. A. Sosnora. The reading of the poem "Jewish Cemetery" caused a scandal.

In August 1961 in Komarovo, Evgeny Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova. In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Ya. Mandelstam, and in 1963 at Akhmatova's - with Lydia Chukovskaya. After Akhmatova's death in 1966, with the light hand of D. Bobyshev, four young poets, including Brodsky, were often referred to in memoir literature as “Akhmatova's orphans”.

On October 8, 1967, a son, Andrei Osipovich Basmanov, was born to Marianna Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky. In 1972-1995. M. P. Basmanova and I. A. Brodsky were in correspondence.

Among his contemporaries, he was influenced by Eugene Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Stanislav Krasovitsky.

Later Brodsky called Auden and Tsvetaeva the greatest poets, followed by Cavafy and Frost, closing the personal canon of the poet Rilke, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatov.

On January 8, 1964, "Evening Leningrad" published a selection of letters from readers demanding to punish the "parasite Brodsky". On January 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism. On February 14, he had his first heart attack in his cell. Since that time, Brodsky constantly suffered from angina pectoris, which always reminded him of a possible imminent death (which, at the same time, did not prevent him from remaining a heavy smoker). Much of this is where "Hello, my aging!" at 33 and “What can you tell me about life? What turned out to be long ”at 40 - with his diagnosis, the poet was really not sure that he would live to see this birthday.

Two sessions of the Brodsky trial (judge of the Dzerzhinsky court Savelieva E.A.) were supervised by Frida Vigdorova and were widely disseminated in samizdat.

Judge: What is your seniority?
Brodsky: About…
Judge: We are not interested in "about"!
Brodsky: Five years.
Judge: Where did you work?
Brodsky: At the factory. In geological parties ...
Judge: How long have you worked in the factory?
Brodsky: Year.
Judge: By whom?
Brodsky: Milling cutter.
Judge: In general, what is your specialty?
Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator.
Judge: And who admitted that you are a poet? Who ranked you among the poets?
Brodsky: Nobody. (No call). And who ranked me among the human race?
Judge: Have you studied this?
Brodsky: What?
Judge: To be a poet? We did not try to graduate from a university where they prepare ... where they teach ...
Brodsky: I didn't think ... I didn't think that it comes from education.
Judge: And what then?
Brodsky: I think it's ... (confused) from God ...
Judge: Do you have any petitions to the court?
Brodsky: I would like to know: why was I arrested?
Judge: This is a question, not a petition.
Brodsky: Then I have no petition.

All the prosecution witnesses began their testimony with the words: "I personally do not know Brodsky ...", echoing the wording of the times of Pasternak's persecution: "I have not read Pasternak's novel, but I condemn it! .."

On March 13, 1964, at the second court session, Brodsky was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment under the decree on "parasitism" - five years of forced labor in a remote area. He was exiled (convoyed under escort together with criminal prisoners) to the Konosha district of the Arkhangelsk region and settled in the village of Norenskaya. In an interview with Volkov, Brodsky called this time the happiest in his life.

Along with extensive poetry publications in émigré publications (Air Ways, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, Posev, Grani, etc.), in August and September 1965, two of Brodsky's poems were published in the Konosha regional newspaper Prizyv ...

For a year and a half, they tirelessly wrote letters in defense of Brodsky to all party and court instances and involved people who were influential in the Soviet system to defend Brodsky. Letters in defense of Brodsky were signed by D. D. Shostakovich, S. Ya. Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu. P. German and others. After a year and a half, in September 1965, under pressure from the Soviet and world community (in particular, after an appeal to the Soviet government by Jean-Paul Sartre and a number of other foreign writers), the term of exile was reduced to actually served, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. According to Y. Gordin: “The troubles of the luminaries of Soviet culture did not have any impact on the authorities. Decisive was the warning from “friend of the USSR” Jean-Paul Sartre that the Soviet delegation at the European Forum of Writers could find itself in a difficult situation because of the “Brodsky case”.

Brodsky opposed the image of a fighter against Soviet power imposed on him, especially by the Western media. A. Volgina wrote that Brodsky "did not like to talk in interviews about the hardships he suffered in Soviet psychiatric hospitals and prisons, persistently moving away from the image of a" victim of the regime "to the image of a" self-made man. " In particular, he stated: “I was lucky in all respects. Other people got much more, it was much harder than me. " And even: "... I think I deserve it all."

At the end of 1965 Brodsky handed over to the Leningrad branch of the publishing house "Soviet Writer" the manuscript of his book "Winter Mail (poems 1962-1965)". A year later, after months of ordeal and despite numerous positive internal reviews, the manuscript was returned by the publisher. “The fate of the book was not decided in the publishing house. At some point, the regional committee and the KGB decided, in principle, to cross out this idea. " In 1966-67, 4 poems of the poet appeared in the Soviet press (not counting publications in children's magazines), after which a period of public silence began. From the reader's point of view, the only area of \u200b\u200bpoetic activity available to Brodsky is translation. "Such a poet does not exist in the USSR," the Soviet embassy in London declared in 1968 in response to an invitation sent to Brodsky to take part in the international poetry festival Poetry International.

Meanwhile, these were years filled with intense poetic work, the result of which were poems that were later included in the books published in the USA: "Stop in the Desert", "End of a Beautiful Era" and "New Stanzas for Augustus". In 1965-68, work was underway on the poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov, a work to which Brodsky himself attached great importance. In addition to infrequent public appearances and reading in the apartments of friends, Brodsky's poems were widely dispersed in samizdat (with numerous inevitable distortions - there was no copying technique in those years). Maybe they got a wider audience thanks to songs written by Alexander Mirzayan and Yevgeny Klyachkin.

Outwardly, Brodsky's life during these years developed relatively calmly, but the KGB did not leave its "old client" behind. This was also facilitated by the fact that “the poet is becoming extremely popular with foreign journalists, Slavic scholars who come to Russia. He is interviewed, he is invited to Western universities (naturally, the authorities do not give permission to leave), etc. " In addition to translations - work on which he took very seriously - Brodsky earned money in other ways available to a writer excluded from the "system": as a freelance reviewer in the magazine "Aurora", random "hacks" at film studios, even starred (as secretary of the city party committee ) in the film "A train to distant August".

Outside the borders of the USSR, Brodsky's poems continue to appear both in Russian and in translations, primarily in English, Polish and Italian. In 1967, an unauthorized collection of translations “Joseph Brodsky. Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems / Tr. by Nicholas Bethell. " In 1970, "Stop in the Desert" was published in New York - Brodsky's first book, compiled under his supervision. Poems and preparatory materials for the book were secretly taken out of Russia or, as in the case of the poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov, sent to the west by diplomatic mail.

On May 10, 1972, Brodsky was summoned to the OVIR and faced with a choice: immediate emigration or "hot days", which metaphor in the mouth of the KGB meant interrogations, prisons and mental hospitals. By that time, he had already twice - in the winter of 1964 - had to be "examined" in psychiatric hospitals, which, in his words, was worse than prison and exile. Brodsky decides to leave. Learning about this, Vladimir Maramzin invited him to collect everything written for the preparation of a samizdat collected works. The result was the first and until 1992 the only collection of works by Joseph Brodsky - of course, typewritten. Before leaving, he managed to authorize all 4 volumes. Choosing emigration, Brodsky tried to postpone the day of departure, but the authorities wanted to get rid of the objectionable poet as quickly as possible. On June 4, 1972, Brodsky, deprived of his Soviet citizenship, flew from Leningrad along the route prescribed for Jewish emigration: to Vienna. After 3 years, he wrote:

Blowing in a hollow tune that your fakir,
I walked through a line of janissaries in green,
feeling the cold of their evil axes with eggs,
as when entering the water. And so, with salty
the taste of this water in your mouth
I crossed the line ...

Brodsky, who refused to dramatize the events of his life, recalled the subsequent with fair ease:

The plane landed in Vienna, and there Karl Proffer met me ... he asked: "Well, Joseph, where would you like to go?" I said, "Oh my God, I have no idea" ... and then he asked: "How do you feel about working at the University of Michigan?"

In July 1972 Brodsky moved to the United States and accepted the post of "poet-in-residence" at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he teaches, intermittently, until 1980. Since then, he has completed incomplete 8 classes in the USSR High School Brodsky leads the life of a university teacher, serving over the next 24 years in professorships in a total of six American and British universities, including Columbia and New York. He taught the history of Russian literature, Russian and world poetry, the theory of poetry, gave lectures and read poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Italy.

Over the years, his health condition has steadily deteriorated, and Brodsky, whose first heart attack occurred in prison days in 1964, suffered 4 heart attacks in 1976, 1985 and 1994.

Brodsky's parents filed an application twelve times with a request to allow them to see their son, congressmen and prominent cultural figures of the United States made the same request to the government of the USSR, but even after Brodsky underwent open-heart surgery in 1978 and needed care, his parents an exit visa was denied. They never saw their son again. Brodsky's mother died in 1983, a little over a year later, his father died. Both times Brodsky was not allowed to come to the funeral. The book "Part of Speech" (1977), the poems "The thought of you disappears like a demoted servant ..." (1985), "In memory of the father: Australia" (1989), essay "One and a half rooms" (1985) are dedicated to the parents.

Brodsky's poems and their translations have been published outside the USSR since 1964, when his name became widely known thanks to the publication of the recording of the poet's trial. Since his arrival in the West, his poetry has regularly appeared on the pages of publications of the Russian emigration. Almost more often than in the Russian-language press, translations of Brodsky's poems are published, primarily in magazines in the USA and England, and in 1973 a book of selected translations appeared. But new books of poems in Russian came out only in 1977 - this is "The End of a Beautiful Epoch", which included poems from 1964-1971, and "Part of Speech", which included works written in 1972-1976. The reason for this division was not external events (emigration) - the understanding of exile as a fateful factor was alien to Brodsky's work - but the fact that, in his opinion, in 1971/72, qualitative changes were taking place in his work. At this turning point were written "Still Life", "To One Tyrant", "Odysseus of Telemacu", "Song of Innocence, it is Experience", "Letters to a Roman Friend", "Bobo's Funeral". In the poem "1972", begun in Russia and finished outside of it, Brodsky gives the following formula: "Everything that I did, I did not for the sake of me / fame in the era of cinema and radio, / but for the sake of native speech, literature ...". The title of the collection - "Part of Speech" - is explained by the same message, formulated in a lapidary manner in his Nobel lecture: "someone who, but a poet, always knows that not language is his instrument, but he is the means of language."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brodsky, as a rule, did not include in his new books the poems that were included in earlier collections. An exception is the book "New Stanzas for August", published in 1983, composed of poems addressed to MB - Marina Basmanova. Years later Brodsky said about this book: “This is the main work of my life, it seems to me that in the end, New Stanzas to Augusta can be read as a separate work. Unfortunately, I did not write The Divine Comedy. And, apparently, I will never write it. And then it turned out to be a kind of poetic book with its own plot ... ". "New Stanzas to Augusta" became the only book of Brodsky's poetry in Russian, compiled by the author himself.

The next big book of poetry - "Urania" - was published in 1987. In the same year, Brodsky became a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to him "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". His Nobel speech, written in Russian, in which he formulated his personal and poetic credo, the forty-seven-year-old Brodsky began with the words:

“For a private person and this whole life, this whole life preferred any public role, for a person who has gone in preference to this rather far - and in particular from the homeland, for it is better to be the last failure in democracy than a martyr or ruler of thoughts in despotism - to be all of a sudden there is a great awkwardness and a test on this podium. "

In the 1990s, four books of new poems by Brodsky were published: Notes of a Fern, Cappadocia, In the Environs of Atlantis, and published in Ardis after the poet's death and which became the final collection, Landscape with Flooding.

The undoubted success of Brodsky's poetry, both among critics and literary critics and among readers, has probably more exceptions than would be required to confirm the rule. Decreased emotionality, musical and metaphysical complexity - especially of the "late" Brodsky - repels some artists from him. In particular, one can name the negative work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose reproaches to the poet's work are largely of an ideological nature. Almost literally he is echoed by a critic from another camp: Dmitry Bykov in his essay about Brodsky after the conception: “I am not going to re-sing the commonplace platitudes here that Brodsky is“ cold ”,“ monotonous ”,“ inhuman ”..." does just that: “In the huge corpus of Brodsky's works, there are surprisingly few living texts ... It is unlikely that today's reader will effortlessly finish reading The Procession, Farewell, Mademoiselle Veronica or Letter in a Bottle - although, undoubtedly, he cannot fail to appreciate Part speeches "," Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart "or" A Conversation with a Celestial ": the best texts of the still living, not yet petrified Brodsky, the cry of a living soul feeling its ossification, icing, dying."

The last book, compiled during the poet's life, ends with the following lines:

And if you don't expect thanks for the speed of light,
then common, maybe non-being armor
appreciates attempts to transform it into a sieve
and will thank me for the hole.

Two published plays belong to Brodsky: "Marble", 1982 and "Democracy", 1990-92. He also translated the plays of the English playwright Tom Stoppard "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" and the Irishman Brendan Bean "Talking about the rope". Brodsky left a significant legacy as a translator of world poetry into Russian. Among the authors he translated, one can name, in particular, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Wilber, Euripides (from Medea), Constantinos Cavafy, Constant Ildefons Galczynski, Cheslav Milos, Thomas Venclov. Brodsky turned to English translations much less often. First of all, these are, of course, auto-translations, as well as translations from Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Wislava Szymborska and a number of others.

Susan Sontag, an American writer and close friend of Brodsky, says: “I'm sure he saw his exile as the greatest opportunity to become not only a Russian, but a world poet ... I remember Brodsky laughingly said somewhere in 1976-77: “Sometimes it is so strange for me to think that I can write whatever I want, and it will be printed.” Brodsky took full advantage of this opportunity. Starting in 1972, he plunged headlong into social and literary life. In addition to the three above-mentioned books, essays , the number of articles, prefaces, letters to the editor, reviews of various collections written by him exceeds a hundred, not counting numerous oral presentations at the evenings of Russian and English-speaking poets, participation in discussions and forums, magazine interviews. gives a review, the names of I. Lisnyanskaya, E. Rein, A. Kushner, D. Novikov, B. Akhmadulina, L. Losev, Y. Kublanovsky, Y. Aleshkovsky, V. Uflyand, V. Gandelsman, A. Naiman, R. Derie howl, R. Wilber, C. Milos, M. Strand, D. Walcott and others. The world's largest newspapers publish his appeals in defense of the persecuted writers: S. Rushdie, N. Gorbanevskaya, V. Maramzin, T. Ventslov, K. Azadovsky. "In addition, he tried to help so many people" - including by letters of recommendation - "that recently there has been a kind of devaluation of his recommendations."

The Library of Congress elects Brodsky as Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992. In this honorable, but traditionally nominal capacity, he developed an active work to promote poetry. His ideas led to the creation of the American Poetry and Literacy Project, which has distributed over a million free poetry books since 1993 to schools, hotels, supermarkets, train stations, and more. According to William Wadsworth, director of the American Academy of Poets from 1989 to 2001, Brodsky's inaugural speech as Poet Laureate "transformed America's view of the role of poetry in its culture." Not long before his death, Brodsky was carried away by the idea of \u200b\u200bfounding the Russian Academy in Rome. In the fall of 1995, he turned to the mayor of Rome with a proposal to create an academy where artists, writers and scientists from Russia could study and work. This idea was realized after the death of the poet. In 2000, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Scholarship Foundation sent the first Russian poet-scholar to Rome, and in 2003 the first artist.

1973 saw the publication of the first authorized book of translations of Brodsky's poetry into English - "Selected poems", translated by George Cline and with a foreword by Auden. A second collection in English, A Part of Speech, comes out in 1980; the third, "To Urania" (To Urania), - in 1988. In 1996, "So Forth" (etc.) was released - the 4th collection of poems in English, prepared by Brodsky. The last two books include both translations and auto-translations from Russian and poems written in English. Over the years Brodsky trusted less and less the translations of his poems into English to other translators; at the same time he was increasingly writing poetry in English, although, in his own words, he did not consider himself a bilingual poet and argued that "for me, when I write poetry in English, it is more of a game ...". Losev writes: “Linguistically and culturally, Brodsky was Russian, and as for self-identification, in his mature years he reduced it to a lapidary formula, which he repeatedly used:“ I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen. ”

In 1992, a 4-volume collection of works began to appear in Russia.

In 1995 Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.

Invitations to return to their homeland followed. Brodsky postponed his arrival: he was embarrassed by the publicity of such an event, the celebration, the attention of the press, which would inevitably accompany his visit. Health did not allow either. One of the last arguments was: "The best part of me is already there - my poetry."

General view of Brodsky's grave at the San Michele cemetery, Venice, 2004. People leave pebbles, letters, poems, pencils, photographs, Camel cigarettes (Brodsky smoked a lot) and whiskey. On the back of the monument there is an inscription in Latin, - this is a line from the elegy of the Lat. Letum non omnia finit - Death does not end.

On Saturday evening, January 27, 1996, in New York, Brodsky was getting ready to go to South Hadley and collected manuscripts and books in his portfolio to take with him the next day. The spring semester began on Monday. Having wished his wife good night, Brodsky said that he needed more work, and went up to his office. In the morning, his wife found him on the floor in his office. Brodsky was fully dressed. On the desk next to the spectacles lay an open book - a bilingual edition of Greek epigrams. The heart, according to doctors, stopped suddenly - a heart attack, the poet died on the night of January 28, 1996.

On February 1, a funeral service was held at the Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights, near Brodsky's home. The next day, a temporary burial took place: the body in a coffin covered with metal was placed in a crypt in the cemetery at the Trinity Church Cemetery, on the banks of the Hudson, where it was kept until June 21, 1997. The proposal of the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation GV Starovoitova sent by telegram to bury the poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky Island was rejected - "this would mean solving the question of returning home for Brodsky." The memorial service took place on March 8 in Manhattan at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There were no speeches. Poems were read by Cheslav Milos, Derek Walcott, Sheimus Heaney, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lev Losev, Anthony Hecht, Mark Strand, Rosanna Warren, Eugene Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Thomas Venclova, Anatoly Nyman, Yakov Gordin, Maria Sozzani-Brodskaya and others. The music of Haydn, Mozart, Purcell sounded. In 1973, in the same cathedral, Brodsky was one of the organizers of the memorial service in memory of Whisten Auden.

Two weeks before his death, Brodsky bought himself a place in a small chapel in a New York cemetery next to Broadway (this was his last will). After that, he drew up a fairly detailed will. A list of people to whom letters were sent was also compiled in which Brodsky asked the recipient of the letter to sign that until 2020 the recipient would not talk about Brodsky as a person and would not discuss his private life; it was not forbidden to talk about Brodsky the poet.

Most of the statements made by Kutik are not supported by other sources. At the same time, E. Schellberg, M. Vorobyov, L. Losev, V. Polukhina, T. Ventslova, who knew Brodsky closely, came out with refutations. In particular, Schellberg and Vorobyova said: "We want to assure that the article about Joseph Brodsky, published under the name of Ilya Kutik on the 16th page of the" Nezavisimaya Gazeta "dated January 28, 1998, is 95 percent fiction." Losev expressed his sharp disagreement with Kutik's story, testifying, among other things, that Brodsky did not leave instructions regarding his funeral; did not buy a place in the cemetery, etc. According to the testimony of Losev and Polukhina, Ilya Kutik was not present at the funeral of Brodsky described by him.

Though the unfeeling body
to decay equally everywhere,
devoid of native clay,
it is in the alluvium of the valley
Lombard is not averse to rot. Ponezh
your continent and the worms are the same.
Stravinsky sleeps on San Michele ...