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Joseph Brodsky
Birth name: Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky
Date of birth: May 24, 1940(1940-05-24)
Place of birth: Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR
Date of death: January 28, 1996(1996-01-28) (55 years old)
Place of death: New York, USA
Citizenship: THE USSR
USA
Occupation: poet, essayist, playwright, translator
Creative years: 1956-1996
Language of works: Russian/English
Prizes: Nobel Prize in Literature (1987)
MacArthur Fellowship (1981)
Poet Laureate of the USA (1991)
Awards:
Signature: Signature
Works on the site Lib.ru
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad — January 28, 1996, New York) 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.
He has a reputation as one of the greatest Russian poets of the XX century.
Content
1 Biography 1.1 Childhood and youth 1.2 Early poems, influences 1.3 Persecution, trial and exile 1.4 In exile 1.4.1 Departure 1.4.2 Life line 1.4.3 Poet and essayist 1.4.4 Playwright, translator , writer ...
1.4.5 English language poet 1.4.6 Return
2 Death and burial 3 Family 4 Addresses in St. Petersburg 4.1 In Komarovo
5 Editions 5.1 In English
6 Memory 7 See also 8 Notes 9 Literature 10 References
Biography
Childhood and youth
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 siege winter, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph went to Cherepovets for evacuation, and 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. 289 on Narva Avenue, where he continued his studies in the 7th grade.
Muruzi House, view from Liteyny Prospekt.
In the middle, a memorial plaque to Brodsky is visible.
The poet's apartment is located on the side of Pestel Street.
In 1955, the family received a "one and a half rooms" in the Muruzi House[1].
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 St. Petersburg 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 was allowed to return to Leningrad[2][3].
At the same time, he read a lot, but chaotically — primarily poetry, philosophical and religious literature, and began to study English and Polish.
Personal card of I. A. Brodsky in the personnel department of Arsenal
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.[source not specified 832 days]
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.
Chess was later arrested for illegal weapons possession, the KGB informed about this plan, and on the other his friend, Alexander Umansky, and his "anti Soviet" a manuscript that chess and Brodsky tried to pass by chance encountered the American.
On January 29, 1961 Brodsky was detained by the KGB, but two days later was released[4][5][6].
In August 1961, in Komarov, Yevgeny Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova.
After Akhmatova's death in 1966, Joseph became one of the"Akhmatova orphans".
In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Y. Mandelstam, and in 1963, at Akhmatova's, he met Lidia Chukovskaya.
In 1962, Brodsky met a young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova.
The first poems dedicated to "M. B."
- "I hugged these shoulders and looked...", "No longing, no love, no sadness...", "A Riddle to an angel" are dated the same year.
On October 8, 1967, Marina Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky had a son, Andrey Basmanov.
In early 1968, Marina Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky broke up.
From the poems addressed to "M. B.", Brodsky compiled the collection "New Stanzas for August", 1983.
Early poems, 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 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, for example, 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 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.[source not specified 438 days]
Persecution, trial and exile
On November 29, 1963, an article" Near Literary Drone "appeared in the newspaper Vecherniy Leningrad, signed by Lerner, Medvedev and Ionin.
In the article, Brodsky was branded for a "parasitic lifestyle".
Of the poetic quotations attributed by the authors to Brodsky, two are 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 are 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 slander, the subsequent arrest, trial and sentence, his thoughts were occupied at that time by the break with Marina 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.
On February 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 near death (this did not prevent him from remaining a heavy smoker at the same time).
In many ways, this is why "Hello, my aging!" at the age of 33 and "What can I say about life?
What turned out to be a long " in 40 — with his diagnosis, the poet was really not sure that he would live to see this birthday.
Two sessions of the trial of Brodsky (judge of the Dzerzhinsk court Savelyeva E. A.) were reviewed by Frida Vigdorova and made up the content of the "White Book" distributed in samizdat.
Judge: What is your work experience?
Brodsky: Approximately…
Judge: We are not interested in "approximately"!
Brodsky: Five years.
Judge: Where did you work?
Brodsky: At the factory.
Judge: How long have you worked at the plant?
Brodsky: A year.
Judge: By whom?
Brodsky: A milling machine operator.
Judge: And 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.
(Without calling).
And who ranked me among the human race?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: To what?
Judge: To be a poet?
Did you try to graduate from a university where they prepare... where they teach ...
Brodsky: I didnot think…
I didnot think it was given by education.
Judge: And what about?
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.
Photo from the courtroom
All the prosecution witnesses began their testimony with the words: "I am not personally acquainted with Brodsky ..." [7], 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 to the Konoshsky 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.
In exile, Brodsky studied English poetry, including the work of Wisten Auden:
I remember sitting in a small hut, looking through a square window the size of a porthole at a wet, swampy road with chickens wandering along it, half believing what I had just read…
I simply refused to believe that back in 1939 an English poet said: "Time ... idolizes language," and the world has remained the same.
- "Bow to the shadow"
In August and September, several of Joseph's poems were published in the Konosh district newspaper "Appeal".
The trial of the poet was 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 transcript of Frida Vigdorova was published in several influential foreign media: "New Leader", "Encounter", "Figaro Litteraire".
At the end of 1964, letters in defense of Brodsky were sent by D. D. Shostakovich, S. Ya.
Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu.P. German.
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.
In October 1965, Brodsky, on the recommendation of Korney Chukovsky and Boris Vakhtin, was accepted into the Group of Translators at the Leningrad Branch of the USSR Writers ' Union[8], which allowed him to avoid further accusations of parasitism.
In 1965, a large selection of Brodsky's poems and a transcript of the trial were published in the almanac"Airways IV" (New York).
In his interviews, Brodsky resisted the image of a fighter against the Soviet government imposed on him — especially by the American intelligentsia.
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""[9].
He made statements like: "I was lucky in every way.
Other people got much more, it was much harder than me."
And even: "...
I think that I deserve all this at all"[10].
In" Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky " by Solomon Volkov, Brodsky stated about the recording of the trial by Frida Vigdorova: "It's not so interesting, Solomon.
Believe me"[11], to which Volkov expresses his indignation:
SV: You are assessing this so calmly now, in hindsight!
And, forgive me, you are trivializing a significant and dramatic event by this.
What for?
IB: No, I'm not making it up!
I'm talking about it the way I really think!
And then I thought the same way.
I refuse to dramatize all this!
In exile
Departure
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[13].
By that time, he had already had to be "examined" in psychiatric hospitals twice - in the winter of 1964, which, according to him, was worse than prison and exile[14] [15].
Brodsky decides to leave[16].
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[17] - of course, typewritten.
Before leaving, he managed to authorize all 4 volumes[18].
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[19].
On June 4, 1972, deprived of Soviet citizenship, Brodsky took off from Leningrad on the route prescribed for Jewish emigration: to Vienna[20].
3 years later, he wrote with the impartiality of a physiologist:
Blowing into 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[21]
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?"[22]
2 days after arriving 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... he undertook to introduce me to literary circles"[22].
Together with Auden, Brodsky takes part in the International Poetry Festival (Poetry International) in London at the end of June.
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 [14].
At the same time in London, Brodsky met Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender and Robert Lowell [18].
Life Line
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 grade 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.
"Taught" in his case needs explanation.
For what he did was not much like what his university colleagues, including poets, did.
First of all, he simply did not know how to "teach".
He had no personal experience in this matter ...
Every year out of twenty four, for at least twelve consecutive weeks, he regularly appeared before a group of young Americans and talked to them about what he loved most in the world about poetry ...
What the course was called was not so important: all his lessons were lessons of slow reading of a poetic text...
- Lev Losev[23]
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.
Here is the testimony of a doctor who visited Brodsky in the first month of Norensk exile:
"There was nothing acutely threatening in his heart at that moment, except for weakly expressed signs of the so called dystrophy of the heart muscle.
However, it would be surprising if they were absent, given the lifestyle that he had in this forestry enterprise...
Imagine a large field after cutting down the taiga forest, on which huge stone boulders are scattered among numerous stumps...
Some of these boulders exceed the size of a person's height.
The job is to roll such boulders with a partner on steel sheets and move them to the road...
Three or five years of such exile - and hardly anyone has heard of the poet today... because his genes were prescribed, unfortunately, to have early atherosclerosis of the heart vessels .
And medicine learned to deal with this, at least partially, only thirty years later"[24] [25]
Brodsky's parents applied twelve times to be allowed to see their son[26], 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[18].
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.
Brodsky with his wife Maria, nee Sozzani.
Photo by M. Baryshnikov
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 Hedley, 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"[27].
In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat, Russian on his mother's side.
In 1993, their daughter Anna was born[26].
Poet and essayist
Brodsky's poems and their translations have been published outside the USSR since 1964, when the poet's name became widely known thanks to the transcript of the trial of Frida Vigdorova.
Russian Russian emigration Since his arrival in the West, his poetry has regularly appeared on the pages of publications of the Russian emigration - in the Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement, Continent, Echo, the New American, in the Russian language Russian Literature Triquarterly, published by Karl Proffer.
Translations of Brodsky's poems are published almost more often than in the Russian language press, primarily in magazines in the USA and England[18], and in 1973 a book of translations was published.
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"[28], which included works written in 1972-1976.
The reason for this division was not external events (emigration) - the motives of exile were alien to the work of Brodsky, a poet and essayist[29] - but the fact that, in his opinion, qualitative changes were taking place in his work in 1971/72[26].
"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 1987 Nobel lecture: "who is who, and the poet always knows... that language is not his tool, but he is the means of language"[30].
In the 70s and 80s, 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, composed of poems addressed to M. B. - Marina Basmanova.
Years later, Brodsky said about this book: "This is the main business of my life... it seems to me 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..." [14].
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 are written in English (at the moment, Russian translations of all English language essays and most of the others are published ugikh prose works of Brodsky).
His prose, at least to no less extent than his poetry, made Brodsky's name widely known to the world outside the USSR [31].
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[32].
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")[33].
Forty seven year old Brodsky began his Nobel speech written in Russian, in which he formulated his 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"[30]
In the 90s, books of new poems by Brodsky were published: "Notes of a Fern" in Sweden, "Cappadocia" and " In the vicinity of Atlantis "in St. Petersburg and, finally, published after the poet's death and became the final collection, including both new works and poems that appeared in three previous books:" Landscape with a flood " in the publishing house Ardis.
The undoubted success of Brodsky's poetry both among critics and literary critics (we can, first of all, mention the collection of works by L. Losev, V. Polukhina, V. Kulle, E. Kelebay, Yu. Lotman...), and among readers, probably has more exceptions than would be required to confirm the rule.
The reduced emotionality, musical atonality and metaphysical complexity especially of the" late " Brodsky repels some artists from him as well.
In particular, we can mention the negative work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn[34], 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 on Brodsky [35] after the beginning: "I am not going to repeat here the common platitudes that Brodsky is "cold", "monotonous"," inhuman"...", - further does exactly this: "There are surprisingly few living texts in the huge corpus of Brodsky's works ...
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 by the poet 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.[36]
Playwright, translator, writer ...
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'm sure he saw the exile as a great opportunity to become not only Russian, but the world poet ...
I remember Brodsky said, laughing, somewhere in 1976-77: "Sometimes it is weird to think that I can write whatever I want, and it will print"[37].
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, V. Uflyand, V. Gandelsman, A. Naiman, R. Wilber, Ch.
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[18].
"In addition, he tried to help so many people" - including letters of recommendation - "that recently there has been a certain devaluation of his recommendations"[38].
Relative financial well being (at least by the standards of emigration) gave Brodsky the opportunity to provide more material assistance.
Lev Losev writes:
Several times I participated in raising money for the assistance of old friends in need, sometimes even those for whom Joseph should not have had any sympathy, and when I asked him, he hurriedly began to write a check, without even letting me finish [39].
Russian Russian Samovar restaurant owner Roman Kaplan, who knew Brodsky since the Russian times, is one of the cultural centers of Russian emigration in New York:
In 1987, Joseph received the Nobel Prize ...
I have known Brodsky for a long time and turned to him for help.
Joseph and Misha Baryshnikov decided to help me.
They contributed money, and I gave them some share of this restaurant ...
Alas, I did not pay dividends, but I solemnly celebrated his birthday every year[40]
The Library of Congress elects Brodsky as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-92.
In this honorary, but traditionally nominal capacity, he developed an active activity for the promotion of 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.[41]
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 a transformation of America's view of the role of poetry in its culture"[37].
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[42].
English language poet
In 1973, the first book of Brodsky's poetry in English (not counting the disavowed Elegy to John Donne, 1967) was published in New York - "Selected poems" (Selected Poems) in translations by George Klein and with a foreword by Auden.
The second collection in English, "Part of Speech", was published in 1980; the third, "To Urania" (To Urania), was published in 1988.
These collections mainly followed the content of the corresponding Russian language books of the poet.
In 1996, So Forth was published - the 4th collection of poems in English, prepared by Brodsky.
The last two books include both translations and self translations from Russian, as well as poems written in English.
Over the years, Brodsky less and less trusted translations of his Russian - language poems into English to other translators; at the same time, he increasingly composes 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 rather a game..."
[26].
Russian Russian in linguistic and cultural terms, 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"
- Lev Losev
"In the five hundred page volume of Brodsky's English language poetry[43] there are no translations made without his participation ...
But if his essayism caused mostly positive critical responses, the attitude towards him as a poet in the English speaking world was far from unambiguous"[26].
Valentina Polukhina, professor at the University of Kiel (England), writes: "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"[44].
The range of assessments was very wide, from extremely negative to laudatory, and probably a sweet and sour bias prevailed.
Daniel Weisbort, an English poet and translator of Brodsky's poems, answered the question about how he evaluates his English poems in this way :
In my opinion, they are very helpless, even outrageous, in the sense that he introduces rhymes that are not taken seriously in a serious context.
He tried to expand the boundaries of the use of female rhyme in English poetry, but as a result, his works began to sound like W. S. Gilbert or Ogden Nash.
But gradually he got better and better, he really began to expand the possibilities of English prosody, which in itself is an extraordinary achievement for one person.
I donot know who else could have achieved this.
Nabokov could not[45]
Return
The perestroika in the USSR and the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky, which coincided with it, broke the dam of silence at home, and soon the publication of Brodsky's poems and essays flooded in [46].
The first (except for a few poems that leaked to the press in the 60s) selection of Brodsky's poems appeared in the December book of the 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, and, to a certain extent, songs on his poems written by Alexander Mirzayan.
In 1989, Brodsky was rehabilitated according to the 1964 process[18].
In 1992, the 4 volume collection of works (comp. G. Komarov) began to be published.
In 1995, Brodsky was awarded the title of honorary citizen of St. Petersburg[18].
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[18].
My health also did not allow it.
One of the last arguments was: "The best part of me is already there — my poems"[47].
Death and burial
General view of the grave in Venice, San Michele Island, 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 tomorrow.
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.
The proposal sent by telegram by the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation G. V. Starovoitova to bury the great poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilyevsky Island was rejected by the family — Brodsky did not want to return to his homeland, besides Brodsky did not like his youthful poem with the lines "I will come to Vasilyevsky Island to die...".
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 of people was also compiled 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 [48].
On January 31, 1996, the poet's funeral was held in New York.
The funeral service was held at the Episcopal Parish Church in Brooklyn Heights.
The wake was held in r
