May 01, 2006

The Poet of Time

In 1972, when Soviet authorities expelled Joseph Brodsky from Russia, they could not have imagined that this red-haired man, whom they accused of being a “sponger” and “parasite,” would, 15 years later, receive the Nobel Prize for literature, with the Swedish Academy proclaiming that his poetry was “a divine gift.”

Joseph Brodsky, an only child, was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad. His family was Jewish and descended from the bourgeoisie, which often made it difficult for his parents to find work. The poet’s father, Alexander Brodsky, was mainly a professional photographer. During the Second World War, he served in the navy and as a reporter on the frontlines of the Leningrad blockade. Brodsky’s mother, Maria Volpert, worked as a bookkeeper and interpreter.

The family lived in a communal apartment in the city center, in the famous Muruzi House, a Moorish-style building on Liteyny Prospect. The Brodskys had one room in the apartment, and they fenced off about 10 meters of it for their son, where he could study and work in his own separate world. Brodsky used to call their room “a room and a half” and said that those 10 meters — the “half” that belonged to him — were “the best ten meters I ever knew.”

In 1955, Brodsky left school after the seventh grade, deciding he had learned all that he could there. He took a series of jobs while self-educating himself through serious reading.

In fact, Brodsky had at least 13 different jobs from 1955 to 1972, working as a geophysicist, stocker, photographer, lathe operator and translator, among other things. At one point, he even decided to become a surgeon and spent a month dissecting corpses. Later in life, Brodsky confessed that he had dabbled in so many professions because he was constantly looking for a job that would give him more time to write poetry.

At 16, Brodsky discovered his love for writing poetry — the one occupation he never left. Soon his poems, typed or copied by hand, began to be distributed from one person to another within intellectual circles. Early on, his work was characterized by its maturity, individuality, openness, lyrical sharpness and sophistication.

Yakov Gordin, a friend of Brodsky’s, described the poet at that time as “the most free person” of the many creative people he knew. “First he was a very emotional poet, but later he became more of a philosopher,” said Gordin, now chief editor of St. Petersburg’s Zvezda magazine publishing house. “All his poetry had this grandiose general conception – to understand the tragic nature of life and show the way out of this tragic nature.”

Denis Akhapkin, a Russian philologist and expert on Brodsky who teaches at St. Petersburg State University, said one of the most attractive aspects of Brodsky’s poetry was that “he wasn’t afraid to combine what was not possible to combine. Some Russian and foreign literature experts criticized Brodsky for combining low and high style, and in this way breaking canons of language,” Akhapkin said. “But that was exactly Brodsky’s peculiarity — that which allowed him to create bright images and new rhymes. Many said his poems were complicated, but if a reader finds the key to Brodsky’s way of thinking and writing, they do not seem as complicated anymore.”

By the early 1960s, Brodsky had joined a group of young poets (including Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman and Dmitry Bobyshev) who called themselves “The Petersburg Circle” and who challenged literary convention. Anna Akhmatova was an early admirer of Brodsky’s work.

Inevitably, Brodsky’s individualism brought him to the attention of the Leningrad KGB.

“Despite the fact that Brodsky never wrote any direct political poems against the Soviet authorities,” wrote the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the independence of form and content in his poetry, added to the independence of his personal behavior, irritated his ideological supervisors.”

On November 29, 1963, the newspaper Vecherny Leningrad published a letter titled, “A Near-Literary Drone,” which was signed by three of the newspaper’s reporters. It denounced Brodsky as an untalented “parasite” and demanded that the city be protected from Brodsky: “Obviously we need to stop nursing this near-literary drone. Such people as Brodsky should not live in Leningrad.”

It was not Brodsky’s first run-in with the authorities. He had been giving public readings for a few years and had been arrested in 1961 and again in 1962. But authorities could not find sufficient grounds for prosecution.

This time, to avoid an impending arrest, Brodsky heeded the urging of friends and fled to Moscow. But he was forced to return to Leningrad when he found out that his girlfriend, Marina Basmanova, had cheated on him with one of his friends.

In December 1963, the Secretariat of the Writer’s Union unanimously recommended that Brodsky be arrested as a “social parasite.” The Soviet law on parasitism had first appeared in the late 1950s, with the intention of prosecuting people who were not productively employed in regular paid work, or who were “working for appearances only.” As such, it offered authorities a gaping legal loophole with which to criminalize “undesirable” or “political” activities. All someone in power had to do was see that the undesirable was let go from one position and then stymied in attempts to get a new job elsewhere.

On February 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested on a Leningrad street. As he recounted later to Efim Etkind: “It was a very cold night. . . I was walking along the street. Three people surrounded me. They asked what my name was, and like an idiot, I replied that ‘I was the same.’ They suggested that I go somewhere with them. They had to talk to me. I refused – I was on my way to see a friend. A fight broke out . . . They drove the car up to me and twisted my hands behind my back.”

His first hearing was absurd, worthy of Kafka. Frida Vigdorova, a journalist who was sympathetic to Brodsky, made a shorthand record of Judge Savelyova’s hectoring of Brodsky:

Judge: What is your work?

Brodsky: I write poems. I translate. I suppose...?

Judge: There will be no “I suppose.” Stand up straight! Don’t lean on the wall. Look at the judge. Answer the judge properly! (To Frida Vigdorova: Stop writing this minute! Or I will have you taken from the hall.) Do you have full-time work?

Brodsky: I thought that it was full-time work.

Judge: Answer precisely!

Brodsky: I wrote poems. I thought that they would be published. I suppose...

Judge: We are not interested in “I suppose.” Answer: why were you not working?

Brodsky: I worked. I wrote poems.

Judge: We are not interested in that. We are interested in what institution you were connected with.

Brodsky: I had agreements with a publishing house.

Judge: Did your contracts allow you enough to feed yourself? List them off, with dates and amounts.

Brodsky: I don’t exactly remember. My lawyer has all the contracts.

Judge: I am asking you.

Brodsky: In Moscow, two books with my translations were published (lists them off).

Judge: Your work experience?

Brodsky: More or less...

Judge: We are not interested in “more or less.”

Brodsky: Five years.

Judge: Where did you work?

Brodsky: In a factory. On geological expeditions....

Judge: And in general, what is your specialty?

Brodsky: Poet. Poet-translator.

Judge: And who designated you are a poet? Who put you in the ranks of the poets?

Brodsky: No one. (Unbidden.) Who put me in the ranks of mankind?

Judge: Did you study for this?

Brodsky: For what?

Judge: To become a poet. Did you never try to finish college...

Brodsky: I didn’t think that it was a matter of education.

Judge: Of what, then?

Brodsky: I thought that... (confused) it came from God....

Brodsky was taken to a psychiatric hospital. For three weeks, he suffered through humiliating experiments but, in the end, was declared mentally healthy and able to work.

At his second hearing, Brodsky was charged with the crime of parasitism or sponging (tuneyadstvo). Vigdorova was on hand again to record a transcript [a full transcript of both trials is available, in Russian, on the Russian Life website]:

Judge: What have you done that is useful to the homeland?

Brodsky: I wrote poems. That was my work. I was convinced... I believe, that what I wrote serves not just the present generation, but future generations as well....

Judge: So you think that your “so-called” poems are valuable to people?

Brodsky: Why do you say the poems are “so-called”?

Judge: We call your poems “so-called,” because we don’t have any other way of understanding them.

Sorokin: You said that you have a highly developed inquisitiveness. So why did you not want to serve in the Soviet Army?

Brodsky: I will not answer such questions.

Judge: Answer!

Brodsky: I was exempted from military service. It is not that I “did not want,” but that I was exempted. These are different things. I was exempted twice. The first time because my father was sick, and the second time because of my own sickness.

Sorokin: Can you survive on the money they pay you?

Brodsky: I can. Sitting in jail, I daily sign off to the fact that they are spending 40 kopeks a day on me. But I earn more than 40 kopeks a day.

Sorokin: But you have to buy shoes and clothing.

Brodsky: I have one suit – it is old, but it is something. And I don’t need another.

Lawyer: Have specialists evaluated your poems?

Brodsky: Yes. [Korney] Chukovsky and [Samuil] Marshak said very good things about my translations. Better than I deserve....

Judge: It would be better, Brodsky, to explain to the court why, when you were between jobs you did not work?

Brodsky: I worked. I wrote poems.

Judge: But that did not hinder you from working.

Brodsky: But I was working. I wrote poems.

Judge: But there are people who work in factories and write poems. What kept you from doing that?

Brodsky: Well, you know, people are all different... in their hair color, in the expressions on their faces.

Judge: You were not the first to discover this. Everyone knows this. You would be better off explaining how one should assess your contribution to our great march toward communism?

Brodsky: The building of communism is not only about working at a lathe or plowing up the fields. It also involves intellectual work, which...

Judge: Don’t give us your high-flown phrases! It would be better to answer how you plan to organize your working life in future.

Brodsky: I would like to write poetry and translate. But if that contradicts some accepted social norms, I’ll take a regular job and nonetheless continue writing poems.

Assessor Tyagly: Everyone works in our society. How could you spend so long doing nothing?

Brodsky: You don’t consider my work to be labor. I wrote poems; I consider this labor.

The court sentenced Brodsky to five years of exile with compulsory physical labor. He was sent to the village of Norinskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region’s Konoshsky district. “In Norinskaya I first lived with a kind dairymaid,” Brodsky wrote. “Then I rented a room in the wooden house of an old peasant. [The room was four or five paces long and only had enough space for a sofa and a desk.] What little money that I made went for the payment of the room. Sometimes, I lent the money to the owner, who would stop by and ask for three rubles for vodka.”

Gordin recalls that Norinskaya was 30 kilometers from a railway station and surrounded by swampy, northern forests. Brodsky performed all kinds of physical work. “The village residents treated him well,” Gordin said, “though they could never imagine that this polite and calm ‘sponger’ would take their village, along with himself, into the history of world literature.”

Once, recalled Brodsky’s host, Taisia, when the village brigade leader sent Brodsky out to chop poles for a fence, everyone quickly saw that the young man had no idea what he was doing and that he quickly tired. After that, the brigade leader only asked Brodsky to do easy jobs. Thus he was usually seen shoveling corn with old women or leading calves to graze.

“When he grazed calves,” Taisia said, “he would often get into the wild raspberry bushes and would not leave there until he had eaten his fill of raspberries. By that time, the calves would have scattered in different directions. Then he would run after them.”

Oddly enough, while Leningrad authorities had refused to recognize Brodsky as a poet, the local Konoshsky district newspaper published Brodsky’s poem, Osenneye (Fall). He was paid two rubles and some change.

Скрип тел≈ег тем сильн≈ей,

Чем б≈ольше вокр≈уг тен≈ей,

Сильн≈ей, чем д≈альше он≈и

От кол≈ючей стерн≈и...

The squeak of the cart is louder,

As the shadows grow longer,

Stronger, the farther

From the stubble field thorns...

Brodsky’s friends, Yevgeny Rein and Anatoly Naiman, visited him in Norinskaya. They brought a letter from Akhmatova and took pictures of Brodsky. Marina Basmanova (Brodsky had reconciled with her) also visited him in exile. In 1967, Basmanova gave birth to Brodsky’s son Andrei. However, in the birth certificate she indicated that Andrei’s patronymic was Osipovich and not Josefovich, apparently to protect the boy. Brodsky protested but could do nothing about it.

Years later, when the author and translator Michael Scammel interviewed Brodsky about the influence of the trial and exile on his work, Brodsky reflected that he had spent “the two best years of my life in the village.” Despite a lot of physical work, exile gave Brodsky plenty of time to write. Similarly, a century before, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote many of his best pieces during his two years of exile at Mikhailovskoye.

While at Norinskaya, Brodsky wrote such poems as Odnoy poetesse (To One Poetess), Dva Chasa v Reservuare (Two Hours in the Reservoir), Pismo v butylke (A Letter In A Bottle) and others. He also became better acquainted with the works of the 17th century British poet John Donne, who had a great influence on Brodsky’s later work.

Little did Brodsky know, but while he was closeted away in exile, Western publication and domestic samizdat circulation of Vigdorova’s trial transcript had mobilized Soviet and foreign intellectuals to lobby for his early release. In 1965, under increasing pressure, the Higher Court of the Russian Republic shortened Brodsky’s term of exile from five years to 18 months. Akhmatova reportedly said, “What a biography they have created for our redhead. You’d think he had hired them.” That same year, Brodsky’s first book of poetry, Stikhotvoreniya i Poemy (Lyrics and Longer Poems) was published in Russian in the U.S. (without his involvement).

After his return from exile, Brodsky concentrated on learning more about poetry, learning new rhythms and strophes. He finally chose for his chief genre an easily recognizable elegy. It was, wrote reviewer Alexander Krivomazov, a half-poem of its own kind, full of aphorisms, sad, ironically reflexive, with broken language and syntax that served to imbue novelty.

Gordin said that most of Brodsky’s poems were rather complicated and deep. “He also had those light love poems,” Gordin said. “But most of his poetry was full of drama, emotional density, and depth.”

But no matter how good his poetry was, Brodsky could not get published in the Soviet Union. All of his attempts were met by cruel censorship, and Brodsky would not accept any editing of his work, especially by a censor. Thus, tamizdat (illegal publication abroad) was his only option. In 1970, a second collection of his work, A Halt in the Desert (Ostanovka v Pustyne) was published in the U.S. In 1967, the first English translation of his poems, Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems (Nicholas Bethell, translator) appeared in the U.K.

Meanwhile, Soviet special services were preparing for Brodsky’s expulsion, which took place on June 4, 1972. Early that morning, as Brodsky was packing his belongings before going to Pulkovo airport, he wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev.

“Leonid Ilych, leaving the country not of my own free will… I want to ask you for an opportunity to keep my existence, my presence in the literary process, at least as an interpreter…,” Brodsky wrote. “I belong to Russian culture, and I consider myself a part of it, and no change of my location can influence the final result. Language is a more ancient thing than a State. I belong to the Russian language. As for the State, I think the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not his vows from a rostrum, but that he writes in the language of his people, of those with whom he lives.

“It is bitter for me to leave Russia. I was born here, I grew up here, and all I have in my soul I owe to my country… Losing the status of a Soviet citizen, I don’t stop being a Russian poet. I believe that I’ll come back; poets always return; in flesh and on paper.”

Emigration was hard for Brodsky, Gordin said. “On the one hand, he always dreamed of having a chance to travel to other countries and see the world. On the other hand, he never wanted to leave his homeland forever.” (A paradox of Brodsky’s forced emigration was that, in order to send Brodsky abroad, Soviet authorities had to write a positive report on him. Soviet rules required it for anyone traveling abroad.)

Brodsky landed in Vienna, where he was met by Carl Proffer, a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Proffer asked Brodsky what he was going to do. Brodsky replied that he “had no idea.” So Proffer suggested that Brodsky become “a poet in residence” at Michigan. Brodsky later had other offers from Great Britain and France, but the American offer was the first and so he agreed.

“I thought, if I have to change my life, then it should be 100 percent,” Brodsky later wrote about his decision to move to the U.S. instead of staying in Europe.

Brodsky was shocked by the number and variety of goods in the shops in Vienna: “In Russia, the goods exhibited in shop windows were separated by gaps: one pair of shoes stood a meter apart from the next, and so on… When you walk along a street here, you are surprised by the number of goods in the shop windows. Then I was shocked not by Russians’ deprivation from freedom, but from the real material part of life. I instantly thought about our women, who would be lost seeing such a variety of clothes.”

And there was another poignant observation about his time in Europe: “When I took a ship from Great Britain to Holland, I saw a group of children going on an excursion. What a joy that would be for our children, I thought, but this joy was stolen from them forever. Generations grew up and died without seeing anything.”

He also visited Venice and immediately fell in love with the city — its canals surely reminding him of Leningrad.

In the U.S., Brodsky for the first time had a chance to realize the full potential of his creative, professional and publishing activities. He eventually became an essayist in English, wrote poems in English (never very well received) and even served as U.S. Poet Laureate.

From September 1972 to 1980, Brodsky taught courses on Russian poetry and literature in the Slavic Department at the University of Michigan. At first he rented a very large house on Marlboro Street, in hopes that the Soviet government would let his parents join him in the U.S. But this was not to be. And neither was Brodsky allowed to return to Leningrad for his mother’s or father’s funerals (in 1985 & 1986). This engendered a bitterness that left Brodsky unwilling to visit the city in the 1990s, when he was more than a desired visitor.

In 1974 Brodsky wrote a very sensitive poem, Nad Vostochnoy Rekoy (Above the East River). It was one of his rare poems about New York City, which made a great impression on him when he was a guest professor at Queen’s College, renting a room on the Upper East Side, at the corner of 90th and York. From 1978-1985, Brodsky taught at Columbia University. He was often asked why, as a result, he didn’t write more poems about New York. “I feel New York so much to be my own city,” he replied, “that it doesn’t even occur to me to write about it. I’d say New York is my orchard, where I can go out in slippers and a nightgown.”

In New York, Brodsky lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. It was stuffed to the gills with books, postcards and photographs — a “hermit dwelling” someone observed, but one ideally suited for his work. Above the fireplace were two framed pictures: a portrait of Anna Akhmatova and a picture of Brodsky and his son Andrei.

In 1989, Brodsky began teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. He was given a duplex. It was a place away from crowded New York where the poet could find the peace he needed to create. He considered it his most natural environment. On the house today hangs a plaque that quotes a professor’s words from Brodsky’s funeral: “Here the words came to him, and he brought them back to eternity, pronounced by his voice.”

Some time ago, the Brodsky Estate presented
St. Petersburg’s Anna Akhmatova Museum with the poet’s belongings from his South Hadley home, including his desk, bookcase, Underwood typewriter, notebooks, keys, hat, postcards, pills, etc. There are also pictures of his parents, and of Brodsky himself, including a series of annual birthday pictures taken on the balcony of the family’s Muruzi house apartment. There is even the famous leather suitcase with which Brodsky left Leningrad in June 1972 (photo, page 45).

Brodsky’s room is in temporary residence at the Akhmatova Museum, awaiting the opening of a Brodsky Museum in Muruzi House (Liteyny prospect 24/27). Alfa Bank sponsored the purchase of half of the historic apartment, but the other half, where the Brodskys actually lived, belongs to people who refuse to sell. They realize how valuable the historic space is, Gordin said, and are demanding an inordinately high price – one that neither city authorities nor private sponsors have been willing to pay.

“In fact, we can restore Brodsky’s room 95 percent,” Gordin said. “Because we not only have his belongings but also pictures of how things were located in his room after he left the country, even the photos of his bookshelves.” Gordin said that, after taking Brodsky to the airport, he and Mikhail Milchik went to Brodsky’s apartment to photograph his room (photo, page 45).

“Even at that time, it was clear to us that this was a great man leaving the Soviet Union,” Gordin said. “And we thought we needed to save that history for the future.”

On his 40th birthday, Brodsky wrote a poem that summarized his life to that point.

Я вход≈ил вм≈есто д≈икого зв≈еря в кл≈етку,

Выжиг≈ал свой срок и клик≈уху в бар≈аке,

Жил у м≈оря, игр≈ал в рул≈етку,

Об≈едал чёрт зн≈ает с кем во фр≈аке.

С высот≈ы ледник≈а я озир≈ал полм≈ира,

Тр≈ижды тон≈ул, дв≈ажды быв≈ал расп≈орот.

Бр≈осил стран≈у, что мен≈я вскорм≈ила.

Из заб≈ывших мен≈я м≈ожно сост≈авить г≈ород.

Я слон≈ялся в степ≈ях, п≈омнящих в≈опли г≈унна,

Надев≈ал на себ≈я что с≈ызнова вх≈одит в м≈оду,

Се≈ял рожь, покрыв≈ал чёрной т≈олью гумн≈а

И не пил т≈олько сух≈ую в≈оду.

Я впуст≈ил в сво≈и сны ворон≈еный зрач≈ок конв≈оя,

Жрал хлеб изгн≈анья, не оставл≈яя к≈орок.

Позвол≈ял сво≈им св≈язкам все зв≈уки, пом≈имо в≈оя;

Перешёл на ш≈епот. Теп≈ерь мне с≈орок.

Что сказ≈ать мне о ж≈изни? Что оказ≈алась дл≈инной.

Т≈олько с г≈орем я ч≈увствую солид≈арность.

Но пок≈а мне рот не заб≈или гл≈иной,

Из него раздав≈аться б≈удет лишь благод≈арность.

24 мая 1980

I, not a wild beast, entered a cage,

Burned my term and nickname in a barrack wall,

Lived by the sea, played roulette,

Eaten with God knows who in a coat and tails.

From atop a glacier I beheld half a world,

Thrice was drowned, twice ripped apart.

I quit the country that nurtured me.

A city could be made of all who have forgotten me.

I bandied about steppes that still recall the Huns’ wailing

Dressed in whatever was coming back into style,

Planted rye, covered a barn with black tar paper

And drank everything but dry water.

I let the burnished gaze of the warder into my dreams,

Gnawed the bread of exile, leaving no crusts.

I allowed my chords to voice every sound, but for howls;

I switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.

What shall I say about my life? That it has turned out to be long.

Only with grief do I feel solidarity.

But until they fill my mouth with clay,

It will resound only with gratitude.

May 24, 1980

In his fortieth year, Brodsky received American citizenship. The Detroit judge, before whom Brodsky and some 70 others swore their oath of allegiance, offered memorable words that Brodsky later recalled: “The judge said: ‘By swearing [this oath] you do not renounce the ties that connect you with your former Motherland. You don’t belong to it politically, but the U.S. will become richer if you retain your cultural and emotional ties.’ I was very moved by those words then. I feel moved even now when remember them.”

In 1981, Brodsky had heart surgery. He had suffered with heart problems for many years. By 1987, he had had three heart attacks. Doctors forbid him from smoking, but he refused to quit.

As his body began to shut down, Brodsky’s literary career reached new heights. In 1981, he received a MacArthur “genius grant.” In 1986, his book of literary essays in English, Less Than One, was acknowledged in Britain as “the best prose in English.” In the U.S. it received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1987, Brodsky received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Looking back, in 1987, Brodsky wrote, “These 15 years that I have spent in the U.S. were exceptional for me because everyone left me alone. I led the life that I believe a poet should lead – not yielding to public temptations and living in solitude. Maybe exile is a natural condition for a poet’s existence…”

In December 1987, Brodsky was awarded his most prestigious honor: the Nobel Prize for literature “for full authorship, performing clear thought and poetic depth.” Upon awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy noted: “For Brodsky, poetry is a divine gift. The religious dimension that one meets in his work is of a nature that adheres to no creed. Metaphysical and ethical questions are paramount... The East-West background — literary, geographical, linguistic — has greatly influenced Brodsky’s writing. It has given it an unusual wealth of themes and manifold perspectives. Together with the writer’s profound insight into the literature of earlier epochs, it has also conjured up a grand historical vision.”

In his long Nobel Lecture, Brodsky spoke of the moral purpose of literature. But in his short acceptance speech, he spoke of how far he had come in his 25 years of exile: “It’s one hell of a way to get from St. Petersburg to Stockholm; but then, for a man of my occupation, the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points lost its attraction a long time ago. So it pleases me to find out that geography in its own turn is also capable of poetic justice.”

Brodsky became the fourth Russian to win the Nobel Prize for literature (Ivan Bunin received it in 1933, while in exile; Boris Pasternak was awarded it in 1958, but was forced by the Soviet State to decline the honor; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received it in 1970, but declined to travel to Stockholm, for fear he would not be allowed to return – in any event, he was forcibly exiled in 1974, and stripped of his citizenship).

At 47, Brodsky was one of the youngest laureates ever to receive the honor.

“All literature really is about what time does to people,” Brodsky once said, indicating a main theme in his writing. “Parting, becoming deformed, growing old, dying are the work of time. Poetry helps us, gives us basically the only possibility of withstanding the pressure of existence.”

After receiving the Nobel Prize, Brodsky used his personal influence and resources to help numerous Russian immigrants in America. Most were writers, scientists or even just acquaintances. He wrote recommendation letters, made phone calls or visited the people who could help.

While in Paris in 1991, Brodsky met the Italian aristocrat, Maria Sozzani. Her father was Italian and her mother was Russian. In 1993, they were married and soon had a daughter, Anna Alexandra Maria (Anna after Anna Akhmatova; Alexandra in honor of Brodsky’s father; Maria in honor of Brodsky’s mother).

From May 1991 through May of 1992, Brodsky served as U.S. Poet Laureate. It is quite ironic that he served in this honorary role at the very time that the Soviet Union – the state that had rejected him – was dumped onto the ash heap of history.

In 1995, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak signed a decree awarding Brodsky the title “Honorable Citizen of St. Petersburg.” In March of 1995, Brodsky met with Sobchak in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Sobchak urged Brodsky to visit St. Petersburg and seemed in fact to have convinced Brodsky to come. But then, on April 8, Brodsky sent Sobchak a letter:

“Besides some specific conditions that prevent me from making a voyage at the suggested time, I feel restrained from the trip for some subjective reasons. In fact, I’m afraid of the thought of becoming an object of positive feelings on a mass scale… If God allows it, I will show up in my native city; I think, it’s inevitable. But I believe it is better to do it as a private visit, without making too much noise.”

Brodsky did not live to make his “private visit” to St. Petersburg, the city he was sure, as a young man, that he would die in:

Ни стр≈аны, ни пог≈оста

Не хоч≈у выбир≈ать

На Вас≈ильевский ≈остров

Я прид≈у умир≈ать.

No other country or churchyard

Will I choose

To Vasilyevsky Island

I will come to die.

The poet died of a heart attack in New York on January 28, 1996, at the age of 55. He was buried in Venice.

“By his life and literary work,” Krivomazov wrote in his obituary essay on Brodsky, “Joseph Brodsky overturned many accepted ‘truths,’ as well as many political, philosophical and artistic misconceptions of his time. Russian readers who understand the unfair burden of official oppression that Soviet Russia exacted on the brightest poetic star of that era, feel great sadness and a penetrating sense of bitterness.” RL

May 01, 2006

The Poet of Time

See Also

Brodsky's Significance

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