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Joseph Brodsky biography, information, personal life
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad, USSR January 28, 1996, New York, USA) was a Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, poet laureate of the United States in 1991-1992.
He wrote poems mainly in Russian, essays - in English.
One of the greatest Russian poets.
Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad in a Jewish family.
His father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903-1984), was a military photojournalist, returned from the war in 1948 and joined the photo 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.
The mother's own sister is an actress of the BDT and the V. F. Komissarzhevskaya Theater, Dora Moiseevna Volpert.
Joseph's early childhood fell on the years of war, the blockade, post war poverty and passed without a father.
In 1942, after the winter of the siege, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph went to Cherepovets for evacuation, they returned to Leningrad in 1944.
In 1947, Joseph went to school No. 203 on Kirochnaya Street, 8.
In 1950, Joseph moved to school No. 196 on Mokhovaya Street, in 1953, Joseph went to the 7th grade at school No. 181 in Solyanoy Lane and stayed in the following year for the second year.
He applied to the naval school, but was not accepted.
He moved to school No. 276 on the Bypass Canal house No. 154, where he continued his studies in the 7th grade.
In 1955, the family received a "one and a half rooms" in the Muruzi House.
Brodsky's aesthetic views were formed in Leningrad in the 1940s and 1950s.
Neoclassical architecture, which was severely damaged during the bombing, the endless prospects of the Leningrad suburbs, water, the multiplicity of reflections — the motives associated with these impressions of his childhood and youth are invariably present in his work.
In 1955, at the age of less than sixteen, after finishing seven grades and starting the eighth, Brodsky left school and entered the Arsenal factory as an apprentice milling machine operator.
This decision was connected both with problems at school and with Brodsky's desire to financially support the family.
He tried unsuccessfully to enter the school of submariners.
At the age of 16, he caught fire with the idea of becoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant dissector in the morgue at the regional hospital, anatomized corpses, but eventually abandoned a medical career.
In addition, for five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, as a sailor at a lighthouse.
Since 1957, he was a worker in the 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 further hiking), 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, and began to study English and Polish.
In 1959, he met Evgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava, Sergey Dovlatov.
On February 14, 1960, the first major public performance took place at the "tournament of poets" in the Gorky Leningrad Palace of Culture with the participation of A. S. Kushner, G. Ya.
Gorbovsky, V. A. Sosnora.
The reading of the poem "The Jewish Cemetery" caused a scandal.
During a trip to Samarkand in December 1960, Brodsky and his friend, former pilot Oleg Shakhmatov, considered a plan to hijack an airplane to fly abroad.
But they did not dare to do this.
Later, Shakhmatov was arrested for illegal possession of weapons and informed 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 give to an American they met by chance.
On January 29, 1961, Brodsky was detained by the KGB, but was released two days later.
In August 1961, in Komarov, Yevgeny Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova.
In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Y. Mandelstam, and in 1963, at Akhmatova's, he met Lidia 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".
In 1962, the twenty two year old Brodsky met a young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova, the daughter of the artist P. I. Basmanov.
Since that time, many of the poet's works have been dedicated to Marianna Basmanova, hidden under the initials "M. B.".
"The 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 poems that are passing but because these poems and the spiritual experience invested in them were the crucible in which his poetic personality was melted."
The first poems with this dedication - "I hugged these shoulders and looked...", "No longing, no love, no sadness...", "A Riddle to an angel" date back to 1962.
The collection of poems by I. Brodsky "New Stanzas for August" (USA, Michigan: Ardis, 1983) is made up of his poems of 1962-1982 dedicated to "M. B.".
The last poem with a dedication to "M. B." is dated 1989.
On October 8, 1967, Marianna Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky had a son, Andrey Osipovich Basmanov.
In 1972-1995, M. P. Basmanova and I. A. Brodsky were in correspondence.
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 pushes 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 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 improvisations.
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 Yevgeny Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Stanislav Krasovitsky.
Later, Brodsky called Auden and Tsvetaeva the greatest poets, followed by Cavafy and Frost, Rilke, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatova closed the personal canon of the poet.
Brodsky's first published poem was "The Ballad of a Small Tugboat", printed in an abridged form in the children's magazine "Koster" (No. 11, 1962).
On November 29, 1963, an article" Near literary Drone "appeared in the newspaper Vecherniy Leningrad, signed by Ya.
Lerner, M. Medvedev and A. Ionin.
The authors of the article branded Brodsky for a "parasitic lifestyle".
Of the poetic quotations attributed by the authors to Brodsky, two were taken from Bobyshev's poems, and the third, from Brodsky's poem "The Procession", represented the endings of six lines from which the first halves were cut off.
The poem "Love the homeland of friends through the passage..." was distorted by the authors of the feuilleton as follows: the first line "Love the homeland of friends through the passage" and the last "Pity the foreign homeland through the passage" were combined into one "I love the foreign homeland".
It was obvious that the article was a signal for the persecution and, possibly, the arrest of Brodsky.
Nevertheless, according to Brodsky, more than the slander, 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, Vecherniy Leningrad published a selection of readers ' letters demanding that the "parasite Brodsky" be punished.
odsky was arrested and sent into exile as a 23 year old boy, and returned as a 25 year old established poet.
He was given less than 7 years to stay in his homeland.
Maturity has come, the time of belonging to one or another circle has passed.
In March 1966, Anna Akhmatova died.
Even earlier, the "magic choir" of young poets that surrounded her began to disintegrate.
Brodsky's position in the official Soviet culture during these years can be compared with the position of Akhmatova in the 1920s and 1930s or Mandelstam in the period preceding his first arrest.
At the end of 1965, Brodsky handed over the manuscript of his book "Winter Mail (Poems 1962-1965)" to the Leningrad branch of the publishing house "Soviet Writer".
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 to cancel this idea in principle."
In 1966-67, 4 poems of the poet appeared in the Soviet press (not counting publications in children's magazines), after that there was a period of public silence.
From the reader's point of view, translations remained the only area of poetic activity available to Brodsky.
"There is no such poet in the USSR," the Soviet Embassy in London said 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, which resulted in poems that were later included in books published in the United States: "Stop in the Desert", "The End of the Beautiful Era" and "New Stanzas for August".
In 1965-68, work was underway on the poem "Gorbunov and Gorchakov" — a work to which Brodsky himself attached very great importance.
In addition to infrequent public speeches and reading at the apartments of friends, Brodsky's poems were widely distributed in samizdat (with numerous inevitable distortions — there was no copying technology in those years).
Maybe they got a wider audience thanks to the songs written by Alexander Mirzayan and Yevgeny Klyachkin.
Outwardly, Brodsky's life was relatively calm during these years, 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 being interviewed, he was invited in Western universities (of course, that consent authorities do not give), etc.".
In addition to translation, to which he took very seriously, Brodsky worked the other is available to the writer, is excluded from the system, ways: as a freelance reviewer in the magazine "Aurora" random "trash" on the studios, and even starred (in the role of Secretary of the party Committee) in the movie "Train to a distant August".
Outside 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, "A Stop in the Desert" was published in New York — the first book by Brodsky, compiled under his supervision.
Poems and preparatory materials for the book were secretly exported from Russia or, as in the case of the poem "Gorbunov and Gorchakov", were 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, according to him, was worse than prison and exile.
Brodsky decides to leave.
Having learned about this, Vladimir Maramzin suggested that he collect everything written for the preparation of a Samizdat collection of 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.
Having chosen emigration, Brodsky tried to delay the day of departure, but the authorities wanted to get rid of the unwanted poet as soon as possible.
On June 4, 1972, deprived of Soviet citizenship, Brodsky took off from Leningrad on the route prescribed for Jewish emigration: to Vienna.
3 years later, he wrote:
Blowing a hollow pipe, what is your fakir,
I walked through a line of janissaries in green,
feeling the cold of their evil axes with their eggs,
as when entering the water.
And here, 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 events with considerable ease:
The plane landed in Vienna, and Karl Proffer met me there… he asked, " Well, Joseph, where would you like to go?"
I said, "Oh, my God, I have no idea"... and then he asked: "How would you like to work at the University of Michigan?".
Two days after his arrival in Vienna, Brodsky goes to get acquainted with U., who lives in Austria.
I'll get dressed.
"He treated me with extraordinary concern, immediately took me under his care... undertook to introduce me to literary circles."
Together with Auden, Brodsky takes part in the International Poetry Festival (Poetry International) in London at the end of June.
Brodsky had been familiar with Oden's work since his exile and called him, along with Akhmatova, a poet who had a decisive "ethical influence"on him.
At the same time in London, Brodsky met Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
In July 1972, Brodsky moved to the United States and accepted the post of "guest poet" (poet in residence) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he taught, intermittently, until 1980.
Since that moment, Brodsky, who graduated from the incomplete 8th grades of secondary school in the USSR, has been leading the life of a university teacher, holding professorial positions in a total of six American and British universities, including Columbia and New York, for the next 24 years.
Russian Russian literature history, Russian and world poetry, the theory of verse, lectured and read poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Italy.
Over the years, his health steadily deteriorated, and Brodsky, whose first heart attack occurred during the prison days of 1964, suffered 4 heart attacks in 1976, 1985 and 1994.
Brodsky's parents applied twelve times to be allowed to see their son, congressmen and prominent cultural figures of the United States addressed the same request to the USSR government, but even after Brodsky underwent open heart surgery in 1978 and needed care, his parents were denied an exit visa.
They never saw their son again.
Brodsky's mother died in 1983, and his father died a little more than a year later.
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 my father: Australia" (1989), the essay "One and a half Rooms" (1985) are dedicated to parents.
In 1977, Brodsky took American citizenship, in 1980 he finally moved from Ann Arbor to New York, and later divided his time between New York and South Hadley, a university town in Massachusetts, where from 1982 until the end of his life he taught in the spring semesters in the consortium of "five colleges".
In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat, Russian on his mother's side.
In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.
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.
Translations of Brodsky's poems are published almost more often than in the Russian language press, primarily in magazines in the USA and England, and in 1973 a book of selected translations appeared.
But new books of poems in Russian are published only in 1977.
These are "The End of the Beautiful Era", 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, qualitative changes were taking place in his work in 1971/72.
"Still Life", "To One tyrant", "Odyssey to Telemachus", "The Song of Innocence, aka Experience", "Letters to a Roman friend", "Bobo's Funeral"are written on this fracture.
In the poem "1972", begun in Russia and completed abroad, Brodsky gives the following formula: "Everything that I did, I did not do for the sake of fame in the era of cinema and radio, / but for the sake of my native speech, literature...".
The title of the collection - "Part of Speech" - is explained by the same premise, lapidarly formulated in his Nobel lecture: "who is who, and the poet always knows that language is not 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 poems included in earlier collections.
An exception is the book "New Stanzas for August"published in 1983[23], composed of poems addressed to M. B. — Marina Basmanova.
Years later, Brodsky said about this book: "This is the main thing of my life, I think it turns out that as a result, "New Stanzas for August" can be read as a separate work.
Unfortunately, I didnot write The Divine Comedy.
And, apparently, I will never write it again.
And here it turned out to be a kind of poetic book with its own plot...".
"New Stanzas for August" became the only book of Brodsky's poetry in Russian, compiled by the author himself.
Since 1972, Brodsky has been actively turning to essay studies, which he does not leave until the end of his life.
Three books of his essays are published in the USA: "Less Than One" (Less than one) in 1986, "Watermark" (Embankment of the Incurable) in 1992 and "On Grief and Reason" (About grief and reason) in 1995.
Most of the essays included in these collections were written in English.
His prose, at least to no less extent than his poetry, made Brodsky's name widely known to the world outside the USSR.
The collection "Less Than One" was recognized by the American National Council of Literary Critics as the best literary critical book of the USA for 1986.
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 MacArthur Scholarship in 1981.
The next big book of poems — "Urania" - was published in 1987.
In the same year, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to him "for a comprehensive work imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity" ("for an all embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity").
Forty seven year old Brodsky began his Nobel speech written in Russian, in which he formulated a personal and poetic credo, with the words:
"For a private person who has preferred this privacy to any public role all his life, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference — and in particular from his homeland, because it is better to be the last loser in democracy than a martyr or the ruler of thoughts in despotism — to suddenly appear on this podium is a great embarrassment and a test."
In the 1990s, four books of new poems by Brodsky were published: "Notes of a Fern", "Cappadocia", "In the vicinity of Atlantis" and the final collection "Landscape with a Flood"published in Ardis after the poet's death.
The undoubted success of Brodsky's poetry, both among critics and literary critics, and among readers, probably has more exceptions than would be required to confirm the rule.
The reduced emotionality, musical and metaphysical complexity especially of the" late " Brodsky repels some artists from him as well.
In particular, we can name the negative work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose reproaches to the poet's work are largely ideological in nature.
Almost verbatim, he is echoed by a critic from another camp: Dmitry Bykov in his essay about Brodsky after the beginning: "I am not going to repeat here the common platitudes that Brodsky is "cold", "monotonous"," inhuman"...", - further does exactly this: "In the huge corpus of Brodsky's works, there are strikingly few living texts…
It is unlikely that today's reader will finish reading "The Procession", "Goodbye, Mademoiselle Veronica" or "A Letter in a Bottle" without effort although, undoubtedly, he will not be able to appreciate "Part of the Speech", "Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart" or "Conversation with a Celestial": the best texts of the still living, not yet petrified Brodsky, the cry of a living soul feeling its ossification, glaciation, dying."
The last book, compiled during the poet's lifetime, ends with the following lines:
And if you donot expect for the speed of light, thank you,
that is, maybe, the armor of non existence
he appreciates the attempts to turn it into a sieve
and he will thank me for the hole.
Brodsky wrote two published plays: "Marble", 1982 and "Democracy", 1990-92.
He also owns translations of the plays of the English playwright Tom Stoppard "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" and the Irishman Brendan Behan "Talking about a Rope".
Brodsky left a significant legacy as a translator of world poetry into Russian.
Among the authors translated by him, one can name, in particular, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Wilber, Euripides (from Medea), Konstantinos Cavafy, Constanta Ildefons Galchinsky, Czeslaw Milos, Thomas Wenzlov.
Much less often Brodsky turned to translations into English.
First of all, these are, of course, self translations, as well as translations from Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Vislava Shimborskaya and a number of others.
Susan Sontag, an American writer and a close friend of Brodsky, says: "I am sure that he considered his exile as the greatest opportunity to become not only a Russian, but a world poet…
I remember how Brodsky said, laughing, somewhere in 1976-77: "Sometimes it's so strange for me to think that I can write anything I want, and it will be printed."
Brodsky took full advantage of this opportunity.
Since 1972, he has been plunging headlong into public and literary life.
In addition to the three above mentioned books of essays, the number of articles written by him, prefaces, letters to the editorial office, reviews of various collections exceeds one hundred, not counting numerous oral speeches at evenings of creativity of Russian and English speaking poets, participation in discussions and forums, magazine interviews.
The list of authors whose work he reviews includes the names of I. Lisnyanskaya, E. Rein, A. Kushner, D. Novikov, B. Akhmadulina, L. Losev, Yu.
Kublanovsky, Yu.
Aleshkovsky, Vl.
Uflyand, V. Gandelsman, A. Naiman, R. Derieva, R. Wilber, C. Milos, M. Strand, D. Walcott and others.
The largest newspapers in the world publish his appeals in defense of the persecuted writers: S. Rushdi, N. Gorbanevskaya, V. Maramzin, T. Venclov, K. Azadovsky.
"In addition, he tried to help so many people" - including letters of recommendation — " that recently there has been a certain devaluation of his recommendations."
The Library of Congress elects Brodsky Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992.
In this honorary, but traditionally nominal capacity, he developed an active activity to promote poetry.
His ideas led to the creation of the American Poetry and Literature Project (American Project: Poetry and Literacy), during which since 1993 more than a million free poetry collections have been distributed in schools, hotels, supermarkets, train stations, etc.
According to William Wadsworth, who served as director of the American Academy of Poets from 1989 to 2001, Brodsky's inaugural speech as Poet Laureate "caused the transformation of America's view of the role of poetry in its culture."
Shortly before his death, Brodsky was carried away by the idea of founding a Russian Academy in Rome.
In the autumn of 1995, he approached 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 implemented after the poet's death.
In 2000, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Scholarship Fund sent the first Russian poet scholarship holder to Rome, and in 2003 — the first artist.
In 1973, the first authorized book of translations of Brodsky's poetry into English was published - "Selected poems" (Selected Poems) in translations by George Klein and with a foreword by Auden.
The second collection in English, "A Part of Speech" (Part of speech), released in 1980; the third, "To Urania" (To Urania) in 1988.
In 1996 he released "So Forth" (cetera) — 4 first collection of poems in English, prepared Brodsky.
The last two books include both translations and self translations from Russian, as well as poems written in English.
Over the years, Brodsky trusted less and less translations of his poems into English to other translators; at the same time, he increasingly composed poems in English, although, according to his own words, he did not consider himself a bilingual poet and claimed that "for me, when I write poems in English, it is more like a game...".
Losev writes: "In linguistic and cultural terms, 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, released 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 is that with the growth of Brodsky's reputation as an essayist, attacks on Brodsky as a poet and translator of his own poems became tougher."
The range of assessments was very wide, from extremely negative to laudatory, and probably a critical bias prevailed.
The role of Brodsky in English language poetry, the translation of his poetry into English, the relationship between Russian and English in his work are devoted, in particular, to the essay memoirs of Daniel Weissbort "From Russian with love".
The perestroika in the USSR and the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky coincided with it broke the dam of silence at home, and soon the publication of Brodsky's poems and essays flooded in.
The first (in addition to several poems that leaked to the press in the 1960s) selection of Brodsky's poems appeared in the December book "New World" for 1987.
Up to this point, 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 according to the 1964 trial.
In 1992, a 4 volume collection of works began to be published in Russia.
In 1995 u 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, honoring, and the attention of the press, which would inevitably accompany his visit.
My health also did not allow it.
One of the last arguments was: "The best part of me is already there — my poems."
General view of Brodsky's grave at the San Michele Cemetery, Venice, 2004.
People leave pebbles, letters, poems, pencils, photos, 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 Propertius lat.
Letum non omnia finit — Not everything ends with death.
On the Saturday evening of January 27, 1996, in New York, Brodsky was preparing to go to South Hadley and collected manuscripts and books in a briefcase to take with him the next day.
The spring semester started on Monday.
After wishing his wife good night, Brodsky said that he still needed to work, and went up to his office.
In the morning, his wife found him on the floor in the office.
Brodsky was fully dressed.
On the desk next to the glasses 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 Episcopal Parish Church in Brooklyn Heights, not far from Brodsky's house.
The next day, a temporary burial took place: the body was placed in a coffin covered with metal in a crypt in the cemetery at the Church of St. Nicholas.
Trinity Church Cemetery, on the banks of the Hudson River, where it was stored until June 21, 1997.
The proposal sent by telegram by the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation G. V. Starovoitova to bury the poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky Island was rejected — " this would mean deciding for Brodsky the question of returning to his homeland."
The memorial service was held on March 8 in Manhattan at the St. Nicholas Episcopal Cathedral.
St. John the Theologian.
There were no speeches.
The poems were read by Czeslaw Milos, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lev Losev, Anthony Hecht, Mark Strand, Rosanna Warren, Evgeny Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Thomas Venclova, Anatoly Naiman, Yakov Gordin, Maria Sozzani Brodskaya and others.
There was music by Haydn, Mozart, Purcell.
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 a place for himself in a small chapel in the New York cemetery next to Broadway (this was his last will).
After that, he made a fairly detailed will.
A list was also compiled of people to whom letters were sent, in which Brodsky asked the recipient of the letter to subscribe 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 as a poet.
Most of the statements made by Kutik are not confirmed by other sources.
At the same time, E. Shellberg, M. Vorobyov, L. Losev, V. Polukhin, T. Ventslov, who knew Brodsky closely, made refutations.
In particular, Shellberg and Vorobyova stated: "We want to assure you that the article about Joseph Brodsky, published under the name of Ilya Kutik on the 16th page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta on January 28, 1998, is 95 percent fiction."
Losev expressed his sharp disagreement with Kutik's story, who testified, among other things, that Brodsky did not leave instructions regarding his funeral; did not buy a place in the cemetery, etc.
According to the testimonies of Losev and Polukhina, Ilya Kutik was not present at the funeral of Brodsky described by him.
The decision on the final resting place of the poet took more than a year.
According to Brodsky's widow Maria: "The idea of a funeral in Venice was expressed by one of his friends.
This is the city that, apart from St. Petersburg, Joseph loved most of all.
Besides, speaking selfishly, Italy is my country, so it was better that my husband was 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 Schilz and Benedetta Craveri agreed with the authorities of Venice about a place in the ancient cemetery on the island of San Michele.
The desire to be buried in San Michele is found in Brodsky's humorous message of 1974 to Andrey Sergeev:
Although an insensitive body
it is equal to rotting everywhere,
devoid of native clay,
it is in the alluvium of the valley
lombard rot is not averse.
Later
your continent and the worms are the same.
Stravinsky sleeps on San Michele…
On June 21, 1997, the body of Joseph Brodsky was reburied at the San Michele Cemetery in Venice.
Russian graves were originally 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 by a modest wooden cross with the name Joseph Brodsky.
A few years later, a tombstone monument by the artist Vladimir Radunsky was installed on the grave.
Joseph Brodsky aphorisms, quotes, sayings >>>
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