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

The beginning of the creative path

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

Idols and teachers

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

Harassment and arrest

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

Release and expulsion abroad

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

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

In emigration

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

In 1991, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Personal life

A short biography of Joseph Brodsky would be incomplete without "love lines". At 22, Brodsky met his first love - Maria (Marianna) Basmanova. In 1967, the couple had a son. They were not married, but they were on friendly terms and corresponded all their lives. In 1990, he married for the first time to Maria Sozzani, an Italian from an ancient family, but half Russian. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born. 4.3 points. Total ratings received: 120.

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

Joseph's early childhood fell on the years of war, blockade, post-war poverty and passed without a father. In 1942, after the blockade winter, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph left for evacuation to Cherepovets, returned to Leningrad in 1944

Brodsky's aesthetic views were formed in Leningrad in the 1940-1950s. Neoclassical architecture, badly damaged during the bombing, endless vistas of Petersburg outskirts, water, multiple reflections - the motives associated with these impressions of his childhood and youth are invariably present in his work.

In 1955, at less than sixteen years of age, having finished seven grades and starting the eighth, Brodsky dropped out of school and entered the Arsenal plant as an apprentice milling machine operator. This decision was associated with both problems at school and Brodsky's desire to financially support the family.

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

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

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

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

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

In his own words, Brodsky began writing poetry at the age of eighteen, but there are several poems dating from 1956-1957. One of the decisive impulses was the acquaintance with the poetry of Boris Slutsky. "Pilgrims", "Monument to Pushkin", "Christmas Romance" are the most famous of Brodsky's early poems. Many of them are characterized by a pronounced musicality. Tsvetaeva and Baratynsky, and a few years later - Mandelstam, had, according to Brodsky himself, a decisive influence on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outwardly, Brodsky's life during these years was developing relatively calmly, but the KGB did not leave its "old client" behind. This was also facilitated by the fact that “the poet is becoming extremely popular with foreign journalists, Slavic scholars who come to Russia. He is interviewed, he is invited to Western universities (naturally, the authorities do not give permission to leave), etc. "

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

In 1971 Brodsky was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

On May 10, 1972, Brodsky was summoned to the OVIR and faced with a choice: immediate emigration or "hot days", which metaphor in the mouth of the KGB meant interrogations, prisons and mental hospitals. By that time, he had already twice - in the winter of 1964 - had to be "examined" in psychiatric hospitals, which, in his words, was worse than prison and exile. Brodsky decides to leave. Choosing emigration, Brodsky tried to postpone the day of departure, but the authorities wanted to get rid of the objectionable poet as quickly as possible. On June 4, 1972, Brodsky, deprived of Soviet citizenship, flew from Leningrad along the route prescribed for Jewish emigration: to Vienna.

Two days later, upon arrival in Vienna, Brodsky went to meet U. Auden, who lives in Austria.

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

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

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

New books of poems in Russian were published in 1977 - these are "The End of a Beautiful Epoch", which included poems from 1964-1971, and "Part of Speech", which included works written in 1972-1976. The reason for this division was not external events (emigration) - the understanding of exile as a fateful factor was alien to Brodsky's work - but the fact that, in his opinion, in 1971/72, qualitative changes were taking place in his work. At this turning point were written "Still Life", "To One Tyrant", "Odysseus of Telemacu", "Song of Innocence, or Experience", "Letters to a Roman Friend", "Bobo's Funeral". In the poem "1972", begun in Russia and finished outside of it, Brodsky gives the following formula: "Everything that I did, did not create radium / fame in the era of cinema and radio, / but for the sake of native speech, literature ...". The title of the collection - "Part of Speech" - is explained by the same message, lapidarily formulated in his Nobel lecture: "someone who, but a poet always knows<…>that not the language is his instrument, but he is the means of the language ”.

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

“For a private person and for this particular life, he has preferred any public role, for a person who has gone in preference to this rather far - and in particular from his homeland, for it is better to be the last failure in democracy than a martyr or the ruler of thoughts in despotism, - - to be suddenly on this podium is a great awkwardness and test "Brodsky poet aesthetic creativity

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

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

And if you don't expect thanks for the speed of light,

then the general, perhaps, non-being armor

appreciates attempts to transform it into a sieve

and thank me for the hole.

On Saturday evening, January 27, 1996, in New York, Brodsky was preparing to go to South Hadley and collected manuscripts and books in a portfolio to take with him the next day. The spring semester began on Monday. Having wished his wife good night, Brodsky said that he needed more work, and went up to his office. In the morning, his wife found him on the floor in his office. Brodsky was fully dressed. On the desk next to the 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 service was held at the GraceChurch in Brooklyn Heights, near Brodsky's home. The next day, a temporary burial took place: the body in a coffin covered with metal was placed in a crypt at the Trinity Church Cemetery, on the banks of the Hudson, where it was kept until June 21, 1997. The proposal of the Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation GV Starovoitova sent by telegram to bury the poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky Island was rejected - "this would mean solving the question of returning to his homeland for Brodsky."

In his widely cited memoirs on Brodsky's last will and funeral, poet and translator Ilya Kutik says:

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

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

Poems

Don't leave the room

Don't leave the room, don't make a mistake.

Why do you need the Sun if you smoke Shipka?

Everything behind the door is meaningless, especially the exclamation of happiness.

Just go to the restroom and return immediately.

Oh, don't leave the room, don't call the motor.

Because the space is made from a hallway

and ends with a counter. And if the live comes in

sweetheart, opening your mouth, drive out without undressing.

Don't leave the room; consider that you blew.

What is more interesting in the world of a wall and a chair?

Why leave where you return in the evening

the same as you were, all the more mutilated?

Oh, don't leave the room. Dance catching the bossa nova

in a coat on a naked body, in shoes on bare feet.

The hallway smells of cabbage and ski ointment.

You have written many letters; one more will be superfluous.

Don't leave the room. Oh, let it be just a room

guess what you look like. And generally incognito

ergo sum, as the substance in the heart has noticed.

Don't leave the room! On the street, tea, not France.

Do not be an idiot! Be what others were not.

Don't leave the room! That is, give free rein to the furniture,

blend your face with wallpaper. Lock up and barricade yourself

closet from chronos, space, eros, race, virus.

goodbye

forget

and do not blame me.

Burn the letters

like a bridge.

May it be courageous

your path,

let him be straight

Let it be in the darkness

to burn for you

star tinsel,

let there be hope

warm palms

by your fire.

Let there be blizzards

snow, rain

and the furious roar of fire,

may you have good luck ahead

more than mine.

May it be mighty and beautiful

thundering in your chest.

I'm happy for those

which is with you,

The 1987 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, the poet of Russian culture, now, by the will of fate, belongs to American civilization.

Robert Sylvester wrote about Brodsky: “Unlike the poets of the older generation, who matured at a time when a high poetic culture flourished in Russia, Brodsky, born in 1940, grew up during a period when Russian poetry was in a state of chronic decline, and as a result had to make my own way. "

Sylvester's statement is quite fair, because what existed on the pages of the press was presented as poetry, but it was absolute nonsense, it’s a shame to talk about it, and I don’t want to remember it.

literary outlook Brodsky poet

“The value of our generation lies in the fact that, being in no way prepared by anything, we have laid these very, if you will, roads,” Brodsky writes. "We acted not only at our own peril and risk, it goes without saying, but just purely by intuition. And what is great is that human intuition leads precisely to those results that are not so strikingly different from what the previous culture produced, therefore, before us are the chains of times that have not yet broken up, and this is wonderful. "

The poet of Russian culture now belongs to American civilization. But the matter is not limited to civilization. In Brodsky's case, emigration is not just a geographic concept. The poet writes in two languages. Thus, in the poet's work, two heterogeneous cultures converged and fancifully intertwined, and their "convergence", a unique case to a certain extent, is somewhat reminiscent of the creative fate of V. Nabokov.

In his book-essay "Less than one", written in English, according to the Americans themselves, plastically and flawlessly, Brodsky introduces the American reader to the world of Russian poetry. In his own Russian poems, the poet soars over the American landscape:

The northwest wind lifts him over

gray, lilac, crimson, scarlet

the Connecticut Valley. He already

does not see the tasty promenade

chickens in a dilapidated yard

farm, gopher on the border.

Spread out in the air, lonely

all he sees is a ridge of sloping

hills and silver rivers,

curling like a living blade,

steel in jagged rifts,

beaded towns

New England.

This flight of a lonely strong hawk, heading south, to the Rio Grande, on the verge of winter, was traced, it would seem, by the American eye, but the final line of the poem embarrasses: the children, seeing the first snow, "shout in English:" Winter, winter ! "What language should she shout in the United States, if not English? The last line evokes the tightness of the American world, instills the suspicion that it was not without mystifying mimicry, which was finally destroyed deliberately and for sure.

In the scenery of the American sky, a black language hole suddenly appears, no less terrible than the autumn cry of a bird, whose image, already loaded with the weight of a heterogeneous meaning, in view of that hole acquires a new, fourth dimension, where the hawk rushes:

All higher. Into the ionosphere.

To an astronomically objective hell

birds without oxygen,

where instead of millet there are grains of distant

stars. What is the height for the two-legged,

then for birds it is vice versa.

Not in the cerebellum, but in the sacs of the lungs

he guesses: not to be saved.

And here is a poem from Brodsky's book "Parts of Speech" (1977). It is written in the familiar form of a fragment, which makes us remember that he belongs to Akhmatova's school:

and with the word "future" from the Russian language

mice run out and the whole crowd

gnaw off a tidbit

memory that your cheese is full of holes.

After how many winters it makes no difference that

or who stands in the corner by the window behind the curtain,

and in the brain is heard not an unearthly "before",

but her rustling. The life that

as a gift, do not look into the mouth,

bares her teeth at every meeting.

Of the whole person, you are left with a part

speech. Part in general. Part of speech.

Brodsky's poem begins with a lowercase letter after an edging. At the word "future", at a whim of associations, other words appear from the language with their inherent trails of moods, emotions, feelings. They, like mice, bite into memory, and then it turns out that the memory has become full of holes, that much has already been forgotten. The word entails another word, not only in meaning, many associations arise by consonance: coming - mice - curtain - rustling. This sound theme is followed by another one: Life - reveals - in every one. Then the third develops: an encounter - a person - a part - speeches - a part - speeches - a part - speeches. This is not just an instrumentation on three themes of hissing consonants, these are mouse words that run out and scurry at the very word "coming".

Brodsky's work is metaphysical, it is a microcosm where God and the devil coexist, faith and atheism, chastity and cynicism. His poetry is extremely voluminous and - at the same time - versatile. It is no coincidence that one of his best collections is named after the muse of astronomy - Urania. Referring to Urania, Brodsky writes:

By day and by the light of blind smokers,

see: she hid nothing

and looking at the globe, you look at the back of your head.

There they are, those forests full of blueberries,

rivers where beluga is caught by hand,

or - the city in whose phone book

that is, to the southeast, the mountains turn brown,

horses roam in sedge, chewed;

and the space turns blue, like linen with lace.

“… Often, when I compose a poem and try to catch a rhyme, instead of Russian, English comes out, but these are the costs that this production has always high. And what rhyme these costs take is no longer important,” Brodsky says about the “technology” of his work. “What interests me most is the process, not its consequences.” “When I write poetry in English, it’s more like a game, chess, if you like, such a folding of cubes. Although I often catch myself that the processes are psychological, emotionally -acoustic are identical. "

Windy. Damp, dark. And it's windy.

Midnight throws foliage and branches on

roof. We can say with confidence:

here and I will end my days, losing

hair, teeth, verbs, suffixes,

scooping with a cap that a Suzdal helmet,

a wave from the ocean to narrow

fragile fish, albeit raw.

Brodsky, like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, is a very literary poet, he has many allusions to his predecessors. In the above excerpt from the poem "1972" there is an allusion to "The Lay of Igor's Campaign", at the end paraphrased by Heine; another poem begins: "Out of nowhere with love, the eleventh Martyr." - This is "Notes of a Madman" by Gogol. Khlebnikov suddenly appears:

Classical ballet! The art of better days!

When your grog hissed and kissed both,

and the reckless drivers raced, and bobeobi sang,

and if there was an enemy, then he was - Marshal Ney.

Brodsky's poetic world, in fact, turns out to be a square whose sides are: despair, love, common sense and irony.

Brodsky was originally an intelligent poet, that is, a poet who found the proportion of time in the poetic economy of eternity. That is why he quickly overcame the "childhood illness" of a certain part of contemporary Moscow-Leningrad poetry, the so-called "sixties", the main pathos of which is determined. however, Brodsky paid a fleeting tribute to this pathos, at least in early, very banal verses about the monument:

Let's put up a monument

at the end of a long city street.

At the foot of the pedestal - I guarantee -

every morning will appear

Such verses about the monument ensured the poet's reputation as a troublemaker, and Brodsky in the late 1950s clearly appreciated this reputation. But the theme of existential despair broke through much stronger and more self-willed in the poetry of young Brodsky, capturing the themes of parting along the way, mixing with the theme of the absurdity of life and looking out of all the cracks of death:

Death is all machines

it is a prison and a garden.

Death is all men

their ties are hanging.

Death is glass in the bath

in churches, in houses - in a row!

Death is all that is with us -

for they will not see.

Such violent "pessimism" in combination with "fronda" was fraught with a public scandal.

Love is a powerful engine of Brodsky's poetry. Ordinary love is intertwined with despair and anxiety. A love tragedy can turn into a farce, set forth by a lively iambic:

Petrov was married to her sister,

but he loved his sister-in-law; in that

confessing to her, he the year before last,

having gone on vacation, he drowned in the Dniester.

("Tea Party")

Farce decomposes love - especially when it is weak - into its component, fraught with naturalism, elements:

After passing all her exams, she

invited a friend to her house on Saturday;

it was evening and it was tightly corked

there was a bottle of red wine.

Irony in Brodsky's poetry is directly linked to common sense. Brodsky does not speak directly about the main thing, but always evasively, in roundabouts.

He comes in from one side and the other, looking for more and more opportunities to get through to the idea, to the interlocutor.

The structure of Brodsky's poem is, in principle, open. The artistic expediency of each episode is visible, and the composition is often based on symmetry, so that the masses of poetry are relatively easy to see. You can even identify the following pattern: in short poems, formal restrictions are often weakened, and in long ones they increase.

In short texts Brodsky sometimes goes so far as to completely destroy the form. So in the poem "Sonnet" (1962), where not a single rule for constructing this solid stanza form is observed, with the exception of one: it contains 14 verses:

We live by the bay again

and the clouds float above us,

and modern Vesuvius rumbles,

and dust settles down the alleys,

and the glass of the alleyways rattles.

Someday ashes will fall asleep on us.

So I wish in this poor hour

Take a tram to the outskirts

enter your house,

and if after hundreds of years

a detachment will come to dig our city,

then I would like to be found

forever in your arms

covered with new ash.

In 1965 Brodsky formulates his credo, which remained in force until the end of his life. In his poem "To a Poetess" he wrote:

I am infected with normal classicism.

And you, my friend, are infected with sarcasm.

Brodsky discovers three types of poetry:

One singer prepares a report.

The other produces a muffled murmur.

And the third one knows that he himself is only a mouthpiece.

And he picks off all the flowers of kinship.

Brodsky's poetics serves to overcome the fear of death and the fear of life.

Brodsky went to the limit in fusing all the stylistic layers of the language. He connects the highest with the lowest. The beginning of the poem "Bust of Tiberius":

I greet you two thousand years

later. You were married to a whore too.

One of the most characteristic features of Brodsky's poetic speech is long complex syntactic constructions that flow over the boundaries of lines and stanzas, sometimes really evoking associations with the steel tracks of a tank that irresistibly rolls over the reader. In "Poems about the Winter Campaign of 1980" a tank appears and literally - clad in armor of tropes, with endless syntactic hyphenations floats out from the horizon of the stanza and falls on the reader:

Mechanical elephant lifting up its trunk

terrified at the black mouse

mines in the snow, spews up to the throat

a lump that has come up, possessed by thought,

like Mohammed, to move a mountain.

Tank - elephant, gun - trunk, mine - mouse. From these two rows of themes, an image grows. For Brodsky, images often appear at the intersection of completely unexpectedly juxtaposed themes.

Brodsky's poems, in their totality, represent a hymn to the endless possibilities of the Russian language, everything is written in his glory:

Listen, squad, enemies and brethren!

Everything I did, I didn’t do it for me

glory in the era of cinema and radio,

but for the sake of native speech, literature.

For what joy-priesthood

(it was said to the doctor: let him heal himself),

having lost the cup at the feast of the Fatherland,

now I am standing in an unfamiliar area.

It is faith in language that introduces Brodsky into classical aesthetics, preserves his existential right to be a poet who does not feel the absurdity of his position, to suspect a serious and unsolved meaning behind culture and, which is also important, to restrain the whims of a wayward lyrical self, otherwise it is within the emotional square - hurls in all directions: from love madness to ironic confession, from the assertion of his genius to the assertion of his own insignificance.

As a true creator, he himself summed up his work. Generally speaking, Brodsky is not just a poet. In my opinion, Russian poetry lacked a philosopher so that he looked around the whole picture and at the same time could tell about what he saw. Brodsky told. I do not know whether this is good or bad, but he managed to convey all the pain of our time, the fear of Nothing, hidden in the ordinary, metaphysical longing "and so on." And it depends only on us whether his word will be able to break through to us in our micro-universes in order to bring the light of revelation there.

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Introduction

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky is an outstanding Russian (as he himself always claimed) poet, essayist, playwright. He was the youngest of the Nobel laureates. Already at the age of twenty, he recognized himself as an instrument of his native language and submitted to this mission. The result is nine books of poetry and a play in Russian and a book of essays in English, not counting many periodicals. All this was published in the West, mainly in the USA, where Joseph Brodsky has been living since 1972.

True poets, and not just mercenaries and recruits from poetry, most of all love those of their poems that they have not yet completed.

It was not easy to get the poet to list his favorite poems from everything he wrote. Some of his old poems and poems, Joseph Brodsky did not want to republish. He also treated the mass publication of his poems in Russia with sufficient caution and restraint.

Brodsky was far ahead of his time in depth of thought. The number of problems he raises in his works is enormous. He viewed human society in the dynamics of its cultural development under the prism of the universal, spiritual. It was culture that he considered the only hope for survival, for the salvation of society. But most of all Brodsky was interested in language as a form of cultural existence. Language, according to Brodsky, is a thread stretched from the past into the future, connecting space and time.

1. The creative path of Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. He, almost the most "non-Soviet" subject of the USSR, was named Joseph in honor of Stalin. From an early age in Brodsky's life, much is symbolic. Childhood was spent in a small apartment in the same "St. Petersburg" house where DS lived before the revolution. Merezhkovsky and Z.N. Gippius and where did they emigrate from. Alfred Nobel once studied at the school that Brodsky attended: in 1986 Brodsky will become a Nobel laureate. He reluctantly recalled his childhood: “An ordinary childhood. I don't think childhood experiences play an important role in further development. "

In adolescence, his independence and obstinacy were manifested. In 1955, without completing his studies, Brodsky went to work at a military plant as a milling machine operator, choosing for himself self-education, mainly reading. Having wished to become a surgeon, he goes to work as an assistant dissector in the morgue of the hospital at the Leningrad prison "Kresty", where he helps to dissect corpses. For several years, he tried more than a dozen professions: geophysical technician, orderly, stoker, photographer, etc. Looking for work that can be combined with creativity. I first tried writing poetry at the age of 16. I was prompted to write the impression of reading the collection of Boris Slutsky. The first poem was published when Brodsky was seventeen years old, in 1957: Farewell, / forget / and do not blame me. / And burn the letters / like a bridge. / May it be courageous / your way, / may it be straightforward / and simple ...

At the turn of the 1950-1960s, he studied foreign languages ​​(English and Polish), attends lectures at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University. In 1959, he got acquainted with a collection of poems by E.A. Baratynsky, after which he finally strengthened his desire to become a poet: "I had nothing to read, and when I found this book and read it, then I understood everything what to do ...".

Brodsky's readers' impressions of this period are haphazard, but fruitful for the development of a poetic voice. Brodsky's first poems, according to his own vocation, arose "out of nothingness": "We came to literature, God knows where, practically only from the fact of our existence, from the depths" (Brodsky's conversation with J. Glad). The restoration of cultural continuity for Brodsky's generation meant, first of all, an appeal to the Russian poetry of the Silver Age. However, here Brodsky stands alone. By his own admission, he did not “understand” Pasternak until he was 24 years old, until that time he had not read Mandelstam, he almost did not know (before he met personally) Akhmatova's lyrics. For Brodsky, from the first independent steps in literature to the end of his life, the work of M. Tsvetaeva had an unconditional value. Brodsky identifies himself more with the poets of the early 19th century. In Stansy the city (1962) correlates his fate with the fate of Lermontov. But here, too, a characteristic feature of the poet is affected: the fear of being like someone else, dissolving his individuality in other people's meanings. Brodsky demonstratively prefers the lyrics of E. Baratynsky, K. Batyushkov and P. Vyazemsky to Pushkin's traditions. In the 1961 poem Procession, Pushkin's motifs are presented deliberately aloof, detached, and placed by the author in an alien context, they begin to sound frankly ironic.

Brodsky's creative preferences were due not only to a desire to avoid banality. The aristocratic balance of the "enlightened" Pushkin's muse was less close to Brodsky than the tradition of Russian philosophical poetry. Brodsky perceived a meditative intonation, a penchant for the poetics of reflection, and the dramatic nature of thought. Gradually, he goes further into the past of poetry, actively absorbing the heritage of the 18th century - Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Dmitriev. Mastering the pre-Pushkin layers of Russian literature allows him to see the vast areas of poetic language. Brodsky realized the need to synthesize continuity and identify new expressive possibilities of Russian classical poetry.

2. Cosmogony of I. Brodsky

In the early 1960s, he began working as a professional translator under an agreement with a number of publishing houses. At the same time he got acquainted with the poetry of the English metaphysical poet John Donne, to whom he dedicated the Great Elegy to John Donne (1963). Brodsky's translations from Donne are often inaccurate and not very successful. But Brodsky's original work became a unique experience of introducing the Russian word to the experience of the baroque European poetry of the "metaphysical school", which was hitherto alien to him. Brodsky's lyrics absorb the basic principles of "metaphysical" thinking: rejection of the cult of experiences of the lyric "I" in poetry, "dryish" courageous intellectuality, dramatic and personal situation of a lyrical monologue, often with a tense sense of the interlocutor, colloquial tone, use of "unpoetic" vocabulary ( vernacular, vulgarisms, scientific, technical concepts), the construction of the text as a series of evidence in favor of a statement. Brodsky inherits from Donne and other metaphysical poets and the “visiting card” of the school - the so-called. "Concetti" (from Italian - "concept") is a special kind of metaphor that brings together concepts and images that are far from each other, which, at first glance, have nothing in common with each other. And the poets of the English Baroque in the 17th century, and Brodsky in the 20th century. used such metaphors to restore broken ties in a world that seems to them to have tragically disintegrated. Such metaphors are at the heart of most of Brodsky's works.

Metaphysical flights and metaphorical delights in Brodsky coexisted with a fear of high words, a feeling of often tastelessness in them. Hence his desire to balance the poetic with the prosaic, “understate” high images, or, as the poet himself put it, “focus on a“ downward metaphor. ”It is indicative, as Brodsky describes his first religious experiences related to reading the Bible:“ at the age of 24, x or 23, I don’t remember exactly, I read the Old and New Testaments for the first time. And this made, perhaps, the strongest impression in my life. That is, the metaphysical horizons of Judaism and Christianity made a rather strong impression. I had to get it in those years - I first read Bhagavad-gita, Mahabharata, and only after that I fell into the hands of the Bible. Of course, I realized that the metaphysical horizons offered by Christianity are less significant than those offered by Hinduism. But I did my a choice towards the ideals of Christianity, if you like ... I would, I must say, more often use the expression Judeo-Christianity, because one is inconceivable without the other. or those parameters that determine my, if not necessarily intellectual, then at least some kind of mental activity. "

From now on, almost every year, the poet created poems about Christmas on the eve or on the very day of the holiday. His "Christmas Poems" took shape in a certain cycle, the work on which went on for more than a quarter of a century.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Brodsky's social circle was very wide, but he was closest to converging with the same young poets, students of the Technological Institute E. Rein, A. Nyman and D. Bobyshev. Rein introduced Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova, whom she bestowed with friendship and predicted a brilliant poetic future for him. She forever remained a moral standard for Brodsky (poems of the 1960s are dedicated to her. Morning mail for A.A. Akhmatova from Sestroretsk, The roosters will crow and clamor ..., Sretenye, 1972, For the centenary of Anna Akhmatova, 1989 and the essay Muse weeping, 1982).

By 1963, his work became more famous, Brodsky's poems began to circulate actively in manuscripts. Despite the lack of significant publications, Brodsky had a scandalous for that time and fame of the poet "samizdat".

On November 29, 1963, in the newspaper Vecherny Leningrad, signed by A. Ionin, J. Lerner, M. Medvedev, a letter was published against Brodsky. The Near Literary Drone. He was arrested in 1964.

After the first closed trial, the poet was placed in a forensic mental hospital, where he spent three weeks, but was declared mentally healthy and able to work. The second, open, trial in the case of Brodsky, accused of parasitism, took place on March 13, 1964. The court's decision was deportation for 5 years with mandatory involvement in physical labor.

He served his exile in the village of Norinsk, Arkhangelsk Region. There was enough free time here, and it is completely filled with creativity. Here he created the most significant works of the pre-emigrant period: One Poetess, Two Hours in a Tank, New Stanzas to Augusta, Northern Mail, Letter in a Bottle, etc.

Brodsky was released early. Instead of five, he spent a year and a half in exile and then received permission to return to Leningrad. "What a biography they make for our redhead!" - exclaimed A. Akhmatova in the midst of the campaign against Brodsky, anticipating what service his persecutors would render him, endowing him with a martyr's halo.

In 1965, amid a wave of indignation at the persecution of the poet, Brodsky's first book, Poems and Poems, was published in New York.

In his work of these years, experimentation on the basis of the classical tradition gives more and more interesting results. So, in 1966 experiments with syllabic verse of the 18th century. clothed in a dense manner of writing Imitation of the satyrs composed by Kantemir. Brodsky transforms the syllabo-tonic system of versification, classic for Russian poetry, from two sides: not only through an appeal to the past experience of two hundred years ago, but also through ultra-modern exercises in technique at the junction of white verse and rhythmic prose - for example, Stop in the Desert (1966), which later gave the name to the collection of poetry, published in 1972 in the United States.

The main genre in Brodsky's work is the easily recognizable long elegy, a kind of semi-poem - aphoristic, melancholic, ironically reflexive, with brittle syntax, striving to renew a stable language. Brodsky can also update the language, like the futurist poets, through experiments with stanza and "typesetting graphics" (ie, playing with the "appearance" of the printed text and the associations caused by it). So, in the 1967 poem Fountain, due to the special stanza and the distribution of words over the space of the page, the printed text resembles a multi-tiered park fountain in outlines.

In the pre-emigrant period of Brodsky's work, the tragic irony is invariably set off by a generous perception of the world and emotional openness. In the future, the proportions between these principles will change significantly. Emotional openness will go away, its place will be taken by the willingness to stoically accept the tragedy of being.

In 1972 Brodsky left the USSR. He leaves on an Israeli visa, but settles in the United States, where until the end of his days he teaches Russian literature at various universities. From now on, Brodsky, in his own words, is doomed to a "fictitious situation" - a poetic existence in a foreign language environment, where a narrow circle of Russian-speaking readers is balanced by international recognition.

Leaving his homeland, Brodsky wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee: “Dear Leonid Ilyich, leaving Russia not of my own free will, as you may know, I decide to ask you, the right to which gives me a firm awareness that everything that I have done in 15 years of literary work serves and will still serve only to the glory of Russian culture, to nothing else. I want to ask you to give me the opportunity to preserve my existence, my presence in the literary process. At least as a translator - in the capacity in which I have acted so far ”. However, his request remained unanswered.

Even Brodsky's parents were not allowed to go to their son at the request of doctors (Brodsky, as a heart, needed special care). They did not allow him to come to Leningrad for the funerals of his mother (1983) and father (1985). This was largely due to his late reluctance to visit his hometown in the 1990s.

In the United States, Brodsky began to write in English. His English-language creativity was expressed, first of all, in the essay genre (collections Less than one, 1986, On grief and reason, 1995). Basically, Brodsky's essays consisted of articles written by order as prefaces to editions of works by Russian and Western classics (A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, W. Oden, K. Kavafis, etc.). On his own initiative, as he admitted, he wrote only 2 or 3 articles. In 1980 Brodsky received US citizenship.

"The poet's biography - in the cut of his language." This postulate of Brodsky determines the evolution of his lyrics. By the mid-1970s, Brodsky's lyrics were enriched with complex syntactic constructions, constant so-called. "Enzhambemanami" (ie transfer of thought, continuation of a phrase to the next line or stanza, mismatch of the boundaries of the sentence and the line). Contemporaries testified to the poet's unchanging desire to read his poems aloud, even when the situation was not conducive to it. The poet has almost no simple sentences. Infinite complex sentences imply an infinite development of thought, its test for truth. Brodsky the poet takes nothing for granted. Each statement clarifies and "judges" itself. Hence the innumerable "but", "although", "therefore", "not so much ... how much" in his poetic language.

The experience of the "mature" Brodsky is an experience of deep experience of the tragedy of existence. Brodsky often violates grammar, resorts to shifted, incorrect speech, conveying tragedy not only in the subject of the image, but above all in the language.

The abandoned Fatherland is gradually being raised in Brodsky's poetic consciousness into a grandiose surreal image of the empire. This image is broader than the real Soviet Union. It is becoming a global symbol of the decline of world culture. Giving a clear account of the meaninglessness of life (Mexican Romancero, 1976), Brodsky's lyric hero, like the ancient Stoics, tries to find support in the higher principles of the universe that are indifferent to man. Such a higher principle, in general, substituting itself for God, appears in Brodsky's poetry Time. “All my poems, more or less, are about the same thing: about Time,” the poet said in an interview. But at the same time, in his poetic universe there is another universal category that is able to curb Time, to conquer it. It's Language, Word (Fifth Anniversary, 1978). The process of poetry becomes the only way to overcome Time, and hence death, a form of victory over death. Lines extend life: ... I don't know what kind of land I will lie in. / Creak, creak pen! Translate the paper (Fifth Anniversary, 1977). For Brodsky, "a poet is an instrument of language." It is not the poet who uses the language, but the language expresses itself through the poet, who can only correctly tune his ear. But at the same time, this instrument is salutary and free to the end.

Left alone with Language and Time, Brodsky's lyric hero loses all emotional ties with the world of things, as if he leaves his body and rises to an almost airless height (Osenniy kryk hastreb, 1975). From here, however, he continues with clarity and indifference to distinguish the details of the world left below.

The verbosity of Brodsky, his inconceivable lengths are due to the desire to curb Time with the Language.

In 1978 Brodsky became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts, from which he, however, resigned in protest against the election of Yevgeny Yevtushenko as an honorary member of the Academy.

In December 1987, he became a writer-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature - “for all-encompassing authorship, full of clarity of thought and poetic depth,” as stated in an official decision of the Nobel Committee.

The Nobel Prize brought financial independence and new troubles. Brodsky devotes a lot of time to settling numerous immigrants from Russia in America.

Since the late 1980s, Brodsky's work has gradually returned to his homeland, but he himself invariably rejects offers, even for a while, to come to Russia. At the same time, in exile, he actively supports and promotes Russian culture. In 1995 Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.

3. Literary views of Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky poet metaphysical lyrics

Joseph Brodsky is often called "the last real innovator", "poet of a new dimension" or "poet of a new vision".

All "definitions" of Brodsky the poet contain the word "new". And this, I think, is not accidental.

He is a poet, thinker, striking with unconventional thoughts. Any cultured person follows the channel developed by mankind, and his pride lies in the fact that he repeats the latest achievements of culture. Brodsky, on the contrary, avoids reading what tens of generations before him tried to understand.

To the question: "What is your poetic hierarchy?" Brodsky replied in an interview with John Glad: “Well, first of all, we are talking about values, although not only about values. The fact is that every writer constantly changes his assessments throughout his life. say, one is below, and one is above ... In general, it seems to me that a writer, at least I, builds this scale for the following reasons: one or another author, one or another idea is more important to him than another the author or another idea - simply because this author absorbs the previous ones. "

"Ultimately, every writer strives for the same thing: to overtake or retain lost or current time."

Language, according to Brodsky, is anatomy, the highest creative value, language is primary.

Brodsky's work explores the conflict between two philosophical categories: space and time.

“I am most of all,” writes Brodsky, “interested and always interested,” is time and the effect it has on a person, how it changes it, how it sharpens, that is, this is such a practical time in its duration. anything, what happens to a person during life, what time does to a person, how it transforms him ... in fact, literature is not about life, and life itself is not about life, but about two categories, more or less about two: space and about time ... time for me is a much more interesting category than space. "

The poet does not like space, because it spreads in breadth, that is, it leads to nowhere. Time loves, because it ultimately ends with eternity, passes into it. Hence the conflict between these categories, which takes the form of a confrontation between white and black.

"The dictate of language is what is colloquially called the dictate of the muse, in fact it is not the muse that dictates to you, but the language that exists at a certain level against your will," Brodsky said in an interview; he repeated this thought in his Nobel Prize speech.

What is the ontological value of an artistic word in the modern world, which confronts the individual with a choice: "to live his own, and not imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life" or "to spend this only chance to repeat someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on tautology "?

The word as resistance to any kind of despotism, as the future of culture, realized in its present.

"The poet makes a speech far away ..." - Brodsky embodied these words of Tsvetaeva in his poetic experience, as well as in the life that threw him to a distant shore.

Conclusion

On May 24, 1980, on the day of his fortieth birthday, Brodsky wrote a poem that summed up not only his own life in previous years, but to a certain extent the search for Russian poetry in the field of language, poetic form, cultural and historical context, artistic and ethical freedom. Here is not only the fate of Brodsky, but, in general, the fate of the Russian poet in general.

I entered a cage instead of a wild beast,

burned his term and klikuhu with a nail in the barracks,

lived by the sea, played roulette,

the devil knows who dined with in a tailcoat.

From the height of the glacier, I looked around half the world,

he sank three times, he was ripped twice.

I left the country that nurtured me.

From those who have forgotten me, you can make a city.

I loitered in the steppes, remembering the cries of the Hun,

put on what is back in fashion,

sowed rye, covered the threshing floor with black roofing paper,

and did not drink only dry water.

I let the blued pupil of the convoy into my dreams,

ate the bread of exile without leaving a crust,

let his ligaments all sounds except howling;

switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.

What can you tell me about life? Which turned out to be long.

Only with grief do I feel solidarity.

But until my mouth was taken with clay,

from it only gratitude will be distributed.

Brodsky considers the poet's only duty to society to "write well." In fact, not only in front of society, but also in front of world culture. The poet's task is to find his place in the culture and correspond to it. Which, I think, Brodsky did with success.

The loss of connection with the living, changing Russian language cannot pass without leaving a trace; it is a payment for fate, which, through suffering, torment and fanaticism of the poet, gives him the right to feel fully himself an instrument of language at the moment when the language is not in the usual state of being, but in a position of elusive value, when the autumn cry of a hawk becomes painful shrillness.

Surveying the work of Joseph Brodsky, one involuntarily comes to the conclusion: this is a poet of a new vision. A poet like no other in the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

1. Brodsky I. Selected Poems. // M., "Panorama", 1994.

2. Brodsky I. Part of speech. Selected Poems. // M., "Fiction", 1990.

3. Brodsky I. Letters to a Roman friend. // Leningrad, "Ex-libris", 1991.

4. Gordin Y. "The Brodsky case: the story of one massacre." // f. "Neva", 1989, No. 2.

5. Yakimchuk N. "I worked, I wrote poetry." The case of Joseph Brodsky. // f. "Youth", 1989, no.

6.Baevsky V.S. History of Russian poetry. 1730-1980 M .: New school, 1996.

7. Barannikov A.V., Kalganova T.A., Rybchenkova L.M. Russian literature of the twentieth century. Reader class 11. - M .: Education, 1993.

8. Prischepa V.P., Prischepa V.A. Literature of the Russian Diaspora. Tutorial. - Abakan, 1994.

9.Materials from the sitehttp: //www.ed.vseved.ru/ From the "Nobel Lecture" by Joseph Brodsky

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The life and work of Joseph Brodsky

Introduction

As you know, in Western countries it was not considered reprehensible to live in other states. This is one of the differences between our country and the Western states. Representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia could get abroad through the procedure of expulsion. Russian emigrants of the Soviet period are traditionally divided into three groups: the first wave - those who had to leave the country immediately after or during the Civil War; the second wave, which includes people who fled to the West or remained there during the Second World War; and the third wave - emigrants who left the country in the 60-70s and later.

The subject of my research is the representative of the third wave of emigration - Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky. I personally consider Brodsky an outstanding person, thinker and genius of fine literature. In literature, Joseph Alexandrovich is often placed on a par with Pushkin and Lermontov, calling him the third great Russian poet. This is the relevance of this topic. We have the opportunity to contemplate the work of such a person, being practically his contemporaries.

So, in my essay, I will try to highlight the biography of Joseph Alexandrovich, and also consider his creative path.

To prepare my work, I used directly the works of Joseph Alexandrovich, his compositions, as well as the book by Lev Vladimirovich Losev “Joseph Brodsky. The experience of literary biography ". This book contains all the comprehensive information about the life and work of Brodsky. Also used were: a collection of interviews with the poet - all interviews given by Joseph Alexandrovich are collected here; The work of Solomon Moiseevich Volkov, which is quite popular in Russia, "Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky" is a kind of book of conversations, conversations between a journalist and a poet; the work of Yakov Arkadievich Gordin, a writer, "The Knight and Death, or Life as a Plan: On the Fate of Joseph Brodsky". it contains interviews with Brodsky, with Gordin himself, his stories about their communication with the poet.

1. Biography of I.A. Brodsky

Joseph Alexandrovich was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. He was born into a Jewish family, his father Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky is a military photojournalist, his mother Maria Moiseevna Volpert is an accountant. The childhood of the future poet fell on the war, his father at that time served in Japan, Joseph and his mother were evacuated to Cherepovets. From childhood, from school age, as the poet said in various interviews, he had already experienced pressure from others about his nationality, but he never renounced the fact that he was a Jew.

Brodsky's behavior has always been distinguished by courage, complete disregard for the existing canons. In his essay “Less than one”, he writes “We went to school, and no matter how it stuffed us with lofty nonsense, suffering and poverty were before our eyes” - from a young age Brodsky criticized and denounced Soviet reality, for which, in fact, he paid. He dropped out of school, did not even receive a basic education. He worked at the Arsenal plant as a milling machine operator, went on geological expeditions to Asia, got the idea of ​​becoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant pathologist in a morgue, tried to enter a naval school, but he was not accepted. At the same time, he read a lot - primarily poetry, philosophical and religious literature, as well as ancient authors, began to study English and Polish.

I believe Brodsky's paradox lies in the fact that, being a person even without a basic school education, he reached tremendous heights in his activities. Throughout his years in exile, he held professorships in a total of six American and British universities, including Columbia and New York. Brodsky taught the history of Russian literature, Russian and world poetry, the theory of poetry, gave lectures and read poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Italy.

The Dzerzhinsky District Court heard Brodsky's case on 18 February. THEM. Metter describes his impressions of this event in the following way: “It was amazing for me that this young man, whom only now I had the opportunity to see and observe in detail, and even in extreme circumstances cruelly for him, radiated some peace of aloofness - [judge ] Savelyeva could neither offend him, nor infuriate him, he was not afraid of her every minute rude shouts. His face sometimes expressed confusion because they could not understand him in any way, and he, in turn, also could not comprehend this strange woman, her unmotivated malice; he is unable to explain to her even the simplest, in his opinion, concepts. "

The interrogation, which was conducted by Judge Savelyeva, was openly aimed at immediately confirming Brodsky's accusation of parasitism.

“Judge: What are you doing?

Brodsky: I write poetry. I am translating. I guess…

Judge: No "I suppose." Stand well! Don't lean against the walls! Look at the court! Answer the court properly! Do you have a regular job?

Brodsky: I thought it was a permanent job.

Judge: Answer exactly!

Brodsky: I wrote poetry! I thought they would be printed. I guess…

Judge: We are not interested in "I suppose." Tell me why you didn't work?

Brodsky: I worked. I wrote poetry.

Judge: We are not interested in this ... "

The judge asks Brodsky questions about his short-term work at the plant and in geological expeditions, literary earnings. She refused to recognize Brodsky's literary work as the work of Brodsky himself as a writer.

“Judge: In general, what is your specialty?

Brodsky: Poet. Poet-translator.

Judge: And who admitted that you are a poet? Who ranked you among the poets?

Brodsky: Nobody. And who ranked me among the human race?

Judge: Have you studied this?

Brodsky: To what?

Judge: To be a poet? We did not try to graduate from a university where they prepare ... where they teach ...

Brodsky: I did not think that this is given by education.

Judge: And what then?

Brodsky: I think this is from God ... "

This was the first hearing. The second was set for March 13th. As a result, Brodsky was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment under the 1961 decree - “to evict from the mountains. Leningrad to a specially designated area for a period of 5 years with the obligatory involvement in work at the place of settlement. "

During the seven years between his return from exile in 1965 and his departure abroad in 1972, Brodsky had a strange status in Soviet society. He remained in the field of view of the KGB, although direct persecution ceased. The scandalous story with the trial and arrest of Brodsky led to a coup in the Leningrad Writers' Union, a new government was chosen, generally liberal, which treated Brodsky favorably. They could not make him a member of the Writers' Union, since he was almost never published, but under the Union there was a kind of "professional group" that united diverse literary day laborers - semi-journalists, songwriters, authors of pop sketches and circus reprises, etc. Brodsky was added there, immediately upon his return to Leningrad. Thus, he received a stamp in his passport, a letter of protection from charges of parasitism. He continued, as before his arrest, to translate, write children's poems, which were sometimes published in the magazines "Koster" and "Iskorka", tried other occupations - for example, the literary processing of dubbing of foreign films at the Lenfilm film studio. Occasionally he was paid to read poetry in private, collecting tribute from the audience. Sometimes he mend holes in a meager budget, selling reproduction albums to second-hand booksellers in beautiful foreign editions. They were brought as a gift by foreign friends.

May 1972 Brodsky was summoned to the department of visas and registration of the Leningrad police (OVIR).

“I knew that OVIR didn't call citizens just like that, and I even wondered if some foreign relative had left me an inheritance. I said that I would be released quite late, at seven in the evening, and they: please, we can also at seven, we will wait. The colonel received me at the OVIR and kindly asked what I was hearing. It's all right, I answer. He says: you have received an invitation to Israel. Yes, I say, I got it; not only to Israel, but also to Italy, England, Czechoslovakia. Why don't you take advantage of the invitation to Israel, the colonel asks. Maybe you thought that we would not let you in? Well, I thought I’m answering, but that’s not the main thing. And what? the colonel asks. I don't know what I would do there, I answer. And then the tone of the conversation changes. From the courteous policeman "you" he goes to "you". I'll tell you what, Brodsky. You will now fill out this form, write an application, and we will make a decision. What if I refuse? - I ask. Colonel on this: then hot days will come for you. I have been in prison three times. Twice in a psychiatric hospital and everything that could be learned in these universities, I mastered in full. Okay, I say. Where are these papers? It was Friday night. On Monday, the call again: I ask you to come in and return your passport. Then the trade began - when the departure. I didn't want to go right away. And they are for this: you do not already have a passport. " Brodsky was too attached - to his parents, son, friends, hometown, he valued his native language environment too much to leave irrevocably. The Leningrad KGB, however, had its own views of the old client. The opportunity presented itself to get rid of the unpredictable poet once and for all. Brodsky was not allowed to really get together or say goodbye. On June 4, 1972, ten days after his 32nd birthday, Brodsky flew from Leningrad to Vienna. Leaving the country, as it seemed and it turned out, forever, going to the Pulkovo airport, Brodsky wrote a letter to the General Secretary of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev:

“Dear Leonid Ilyich, leaving Russia not of my own free will, which you may be aware of, I decide to turn to you with a request, the right to which is given to me by the firm awareness that everything that I have done in 15 years of literary work, serves and will still serve only to the glory of Russian culture, nothing else. I want to ask you to give me the opportunity to preserve my existence, my presence in the literary process. At least as a translator - in the capacity in which I have acted so far. I dare to think that my job was a good job, and I could continue to be useful. After all, it was practiced a hundred years ago. I belong to Russian culture, I recognize myself as a part of it, a component, and no change of place can affect the final result. Language is an older and more inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language, and as for the state, then, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives, and not oaths from the rostrum. I am bitter to leave Russia. I was born here, grew up, lived, and everything that I have in my soul, I owe her. All the bad things that fell to my lot were more than covered by the good ones, and I never felt offended by the Fatherland. I don’t feel it now. For, ceasing to be a citizen of the USSR, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return; poets always return: in the flesh or on paper. I want to believe in both. People came out of the age when the strong was right. There are too many weak people in the world for that. The only rightness is kindness. From evil, from anger, from hatred - even if they are called righteous - no one wins. We are all sentenced to the same thing: death. I will die, writing these lines, you will die, reading them. Our affairs will remain, but they will also be destroyed. Therefore, no one should interfere with each other in doing his work. The conditions of existence are too difficult to be complicated. I hope you will understand me correctly, you will understand what I am asking about. I ask you to give me the opportunity to continue to exist in Russian literature, on Russian soil. I think that I am not guilty of anything before my Motherland. On the contrary, I think I am largely right. I do not know what your answer to my request will be, whether it will take place at all. It is a pity that I did not write to you earlier, and now there is no time left. But I will tell you that in any case, even if my people do not need my body, my soul will still be useful to them ”.

So, Brodsky ended up in Vienna, afterwards, in London. He arrived in the United States on July 9, 1972. From the very beginning of his American life, an accelerated pace was set. On July 21, he flew to Western Massachusetts to see his American translator George Cline to work with him on a book of selected poetry. Thanks to newspapers and especially television, which notified the country of the arrival of the Russian poet-exiled, countless invitations were poured on Brodsky. Kline says that from the summer of 1972 to the spring of 1973, he spoke with Brodsky as his translator at American universities and colleges about thirty times.

“What I personally like is that here I was left alone with myself and with what I can do. And for this I am infinitely grateful to the circumstances and the country itself. I have always been attracted to her by the spirit of individual responsibility and the principle of private initiative. You hear here all the time: I'll try and see what happens. In general, in order to live in a foreign country, you have to love something very much about it: the spirit of laws or business opportunities, or literature, or history. I especially love two things: American poetry and the spirit of [American] laws. My generation, a group of people that I was close to when I was twenty, we were all individualists. And our ideal in this sense was the United States: precisely because of the spirit of individualism. So when some of us got here, we felt like we got home: we turned out to be more American than the locals. "

Here, in the USA, Brodsky began to prepare two collections of poems, these are "Part of Speech" and "The End of a Beautiful Era". He treated the former with particular trepidation, as a result he was dedicated to the Motherland, to his parents. There were few critical reviews of Brodsky's new books. Brodsky, as a poet in his own language, had earlier become the property of philology than criticism. Literary dissertations, articles and reports were made about him.

In America, Brodsky lived in three cities: Ann Arbor, New York, and South Headley. He has taught at the University of Michigan and Massachusetts. But teaching, as Lev Losev writes, it was difficult to call it: “Brodsky was self-taught and, in essence, did not have the slightest idea about pedagogy, especially Anglo-American. Therefore, he offered his American students what he could - read with him the poems of his favorite poets. In university catalogs his courses could be called "Russian poetry of the twentieth century" or "Comparative poetry", or "Roman poets", but the same thing always happened in the class - a poem was read and commented in great detail. "

Once in the North American continent, Brodsky began to travel a lot. He lived for a long time in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Venice, Rome. He did not like purposeful tourist acquaintance with the sights, but he had the ability to settle in new cities - he knew hidden masterpieces of architecture and just cozy corners in them, restaurants away from tourist paths in side streets, where only the local public goes, read the local press, enthusiastically discussed city gossip. It is especially known how much Brodsky loved Venice. Of course, this love was because Venice involuntarily reminded him of his hometown of Petersburg. Brodsky was very close to bridges, canals, water. The first time he arrived in Venice was when it was winter. The frozen river, the white cover did not leave him indifferent, and he was now forever connected with this city. Here he met a woman with whom he contacted by marriage, and was buried here.

Thus, we can make sure how difficult and thorny was Brodsky's life. Persecution of the authorities, betrayal of a beloved woman, lack of earnings, exile. But all this did not knock the poet down. It is possible that it was thanks to all these events that so many beautiful poems by Joseph Alexandrovich were born.

2. The creative path of the poet

There is no doubt that Brodsky was a very talented person, unconventional, especially for that era, from here he was very receptive. His work was greatly influenced by the place where he was born and raised. Brodsky's poetics was imbued with St. Petersburg dampness, melancholy, architecture badly damaged during the bombing, endless prospects of St. Petersburg outskirts, water, a multiplicity of reflections - all this is continuously present in his work, especially in the early period, which, in my opinion, was the most fruitful for poet. And as proof, I want to cite a poem called "From the outskirts to the center":

So I visited again

this locality of love, the peninsula of factories,

the paradise of workshops and the arcade of factories,

river steamer paradise,

I whispered again:

here I am again in infant chests.

So I again ran Malaya Okhta through a thousand arches.

Before me the river

sprawled under the coal smoke,

behind a tram

thundered on the bridge unharmed,

and brick fences

the gloom suddenly brightened.

Good afternoon, here we are, poor youth.

The jazz of the suburbs welcomes us

you hear the trumpets of the outskirts,

golden dixieland

beautiful, adorable in black caps,

not soul or flesh -

someone's shadow over the native gramophone,

as if your dress was suddenly thrown up by the saxophone.

In a bright red scarf

and in a cloak in the doorways, in the front

you stand in sight

on the bridge near the irretrievable years,

holding an unfinished glass of lemonade to my face,

and the expensive pipe of the plant roars behind.

Good afternoon. Well, we have a meeting.

How incorporeal you are:

near a new sunset

drives firing canvases into the distance.

How poor you are. So many years

but they rushed in vain.

Good afternoon, my youth. My God, how beautiful you are.

Over the frozen hills

the greyhounds rush silently,

among the red swamps

train beeps appear,

on an empty highway

disappearing in the smoke of light forests,

taxis take off, and the aspens look up into the skies.

This is our winter.

A modern lantern looks with a deathly eye,

burning before me

dazzling thousands of windows.

I raise my cry

so that he does not collide with houses:

this is our winter, everything cannot come back.

Is it to death, no,

we will not find it, we will not find it.

From birth to light

we go somewhere every day,

like someone in the distance

plays well in new buildings.

We all scatter. Only death alone gathers us.

So there are no partings.

There is a huge meeting.

So someone suddenly

hugs the shoulders in the dark,

and full of darkness

and full of darkness and peace,

we all stand together over the cold, glittering river.

How easy it is for us to breathe

because like a plant

in someone else's life

we become light and shadow

or more -

because we lose everything

running away forever, we become death and paradise.

Here I go again

in the same bright paradise - from a stop to the left,

runs before me

closing with palms, new Eve,

bright red adam

in the distance appears in the arches,

the Neva wind is ringing mournfully in the hanging harps.

How fast life is

in the black and white paradise of new buildings.

The serpent is entwined

and the sky is silent heroic,

ice mountain

glistens motionless by the fountain,

the morning snow winds and the cars fly relentlessly.

Is it really not me

lit by three lanterns,

so many years in the dark

ran through the fragments of wastelands,

and the radiance of heaven

was it swirling at the crane?

Am I not? Something here has changed forever.

Someone new reigns

nameless, beautiful, omnipotent,

burns over the fatherland,

the dark blue light spills,

and in the eyes of the greyhounds

lanterns rustle - flower by flower,

someone always walks near new houses alone.

So there are no partings.

So, in vain we asked for forgiveness

at their dead.

So there is no return for winter.

One thing remains:

walk on the ground without anxiety.

It is impossible to be left behind. Overtaking is only possible.

Where we are in a hurry

this hell or heavenly place,

or simply darkness,

darkness, it's all unknown

dear country,

a constant subject of chant,

isn't she love? No, it has no name.

This is eternal life:

amazing bridge, unceasing word,

sailing a barge,

revitalization of love, killing of the past,

steamer lights

and the radiance of shop windows, the ringing of distant trams,

the splash of cold water near your ever-wide trousers.

Congratulations to myself

with this early find, with you,

congratulations to myself

with a surprisingly bitter fate,

with this eternal river,

with this sky in beautiful aspen trees,

with descriptions of losses behind the silent crowd of shops.

Not a resident of these places,

not a dead man, but some kind of mediator,

completely alone

you shout about yourself at the end:

did not recognize anyone

mistaken, forgot, deceived,

thank God it's winter. It means that I have not returned anywhere.

Thank God, a stranger.

I don't blame anyone here.

Learn nothing.

I'm going, in a hurry, overtaking.

How easy it is for me now

because he did not part with anyone.

Thank God that I am left without a homeland on earth.

Congratulations to myself!

How many years I'll live, I don't need anything.

How many years will I live

how many will I give for a glass of lemonade.

How many times will I return -

but I will not return - as if I lock the house,

how much will I give for sadness from a brick pipe and a dog's barking.

At the moment when Brodsky was arrested, the real tragedy for him was the loss of a woman, whom he considered his wife, and everything else was just absurd circumstances that aggravated this tragedy. And the winter of this period for him passed under the sign of a love conflict, and not a struggle with the regime. During this time, he continued to work on the lyric cycle Songs of a Happy Winter. The name was not ironic - the cycle is imbued with memories of a happy period of love, the winter of 1962/63:

Songs of a happy winter

take it as a keepsake

to remember on the go

sounds of their deafness:

terrain, where, like a mouse,

you strive to run fast,

whatever the name is,

in their rhymes settled down.

<………>

So it’s spring.

That's what blood is tight

Vienna: just cut

the sea will rush into the gap.

According to the verdict, Brodsky was exiled to the place of settlement in the Konosha district of the Arkhangelsk region, the village of Norenskaya. Life in exile was not terrible. Of course, exile was not an everyday idyll, there was homesickness, sometimes a feeling of complete abandonment tormented, but Brodsky remembered it differently: “One of the best periods in my life. There have been no worse, but better - perhaps not. " Impressions of rural life resulted in such poems as "To the Northern Territory" "In the village God does not live in the corners ...", "Into a muddy road."

In the village, God does not live in the corners,

As scoffers think, but everywhere.

He sanctifies the roof and utensils

And honestly divides the door in half.

He is in abundance in the village. In cast iron

He cooks lentils on Saturdays

Dances sleepily on the fire

Winks at me like an eyewitness.

He sets up hedges. Gives out

Devi? tsu for the forester. And as a joke

Arranges eternal undershoot

A patrolman shooting a duck.

The opportunity to observe all this,

Listening to the autumn whistle,

The only, in general, grace,

Available in the village to an atheist.

In exile, Brodsky thought over the foundations of poetic art. He outlined them in a letter to Yakov Gordin dated June 13, 1965. There are two main points. The first concerns the psychology of creativity, the second, which Brodsky calls "practical," - the principles of constructing a separate poetic text, a poem. Psychologically, the author must follow only his intuition, be absolutely independent of the rules, norms, and regards to authorities. “Look at yourself not in comparison with the others, but in isolation. Isolate and allow yourself whatever you want. If you are embittered, then do not hide it, let it be rude; if cheerful - too, even if it is trite. Remember that your life is your life. Nobody's - even the highest - the rules are not your law. These are not your rules. At best, they are similar to yours. Be independent. Independence is the best quality in all languages. Let it lead you to defeat (stupid word) - it will only be your defeat. You yourself will settle the score; and then you have to settle scores FIG knows with whom. The most important thing in poetry is composition. Not a plot, but a composition. It is necessary to build a composition. Let's say here's an example: poems about a tree. You begin to describe everything that you see, from the ground itself, rising in the description to the top of the tree. Here you are, please, and greatness. You need to get used to seeing the picture as a whole ... There are no particulars without the whole. Particulars should be thought of last. On the rhyme - in the last, about the metaphor - in the last. The meter is somehow present at the very beginning, against the will - well, thanks for that. Composition, not plot. Connect the stanzas not with logic, but with the movement of your soul - let it be clear to you alone. "

Brodsky went into exile as one poet, and returned as another. The change did not happen overnight, but very quickly. The poems of the first exiled year, 1964, are mostly written in the same poetic manner as the poems of 1962-1963. Therefore, both of them so organically merged in the book "New Stanzas to Augusta". In exile Brodsky worked a lot, read a lot. He discovered Anglo-American poetry. There were no translations of these poems into Russian, his friends brought books to him, so he began to study English.

Attempts to establish a joint life with his beloved woman continued for two more years after the exile. They lived together, sometimes separately. In October 1967, a son, Andrei, was born to Marina and Joseph, but soon after that, at the beginning of 1968, they completely separated. This event can be traced in Brodsky's poems.

Goodbye - not a sound.

The gramophone behind the wall.

In this world, parting

Only a different prototype.

For apart, not near

It is not enough to close the eyelids

Until death: and after

We don't lie together.

During the same period, Brodsky tried to arrange his publication in Moscow magazines. However, the verb "tried" is too loud for that. In order to achieve printing, it was necessary to show some diplomacy, which Brodsky was unable to do. When he was brought to the writer Rybakov, who could help with publications, he so angered Rybakov with his arrogance that thirty years later he indignantly recalled in his memoirs about meeting with "a bad man who wanted to endlessly read his obscure poems." When V.P. Aksenov, in order to introduce Brodsky to the editorial board of Yunost, brought him with him to the meeting of the editorial board, “Joseph at this editorial board, having heard that Soviet nightmare in which the writers of Yunost lived, simply fainted.<…>He said that he was present at the witches' sabbath. But in fact it was the maximum possible liberalism at that time. "

At the end of 1965 or at the very beginning of 1966 Brodsky handed over the manuscript of the book of poetry to the Leningrad branch of the publishing house "Soviet Writer". He intended to call the book "Winter Mail" and it was composed of poems from 1962-1965. The manuscript was discussed, but ... The "but" is followed by a listing of the unacceptable in Brodsky's verses - the biblical theme ("Isaac and Abraham"), the mention of God, angels, seraphim. The participants in the meeting explain why the book should be published after all: in order to stop "all kinds of conversations", "to destroy the legends that have arisen around his name." Reviews of the reviewers, poet V.A. Rozhdestvensky and critic V.N. Alfonsov, dated October and November. Both reviewers strongly support the publication of the book. If this could be expected from V.N. Alfonsov, the opinion of the poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky (1895-1977), who even writes about Isaac and Abraham that this poem is “interesting in design, meaningful and light in color,” is unexpected. But the manuscript, despite a rather positive attitude towards it, was given back to Brodsky. A couple of years later, he was summoned to the Leningrad KGB department and offered a deal: he would inform them about the foreigners he met, and they would use their influence to get Brodsky's collection of poems published. After that Brodsky finally gave up on the idea of ​​publishing a book in his homeland.

His first real book, Stopping in the Desert, was published in New York in 1970. This is a big book - it contains seventy poems, the poems "Isaac and Abraham" and "Gorbunov and Gorchakov", four more translations from John Donne at the end. Brodsky gave the main part of the manuscript to the American professor and translator of his poems George Kline in Leningrad in June 1968. It was a dangerous undertaking both for the American smuggling out the manuscript, and even more so for Brodsky. After the recent trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the very phrase "transfer of manuscripts to the West" sounded like "espionage" or "betrayal of the motherland."

A few years after the release of "Parts of Speech" and "... of the Epoch", the collection "Urania" appears. Here Brodsky's work becomes more metaphysical, it is a microcosm where God and the devil coexist, faith and atheism, chastity and cynicism. His poetry is extremely voluminous and diverse. Referring to Urania, Brodsky writes:

By day and by the light of blind smokers,

see: she hid nothing

and looking at the globe, you look at the back of your head.

There they are, those forests full of blueberries,

rivers where beluga is caught by hand,

or - the city in whose phone book

that is, to the southeast, the mountains turn brown,

horses roam in sedge, chewed;

and the space turns blue, like linen with lace.

“Often, when I compose a poem and try to catch the rhyme, instead of Russian, English comes out, but these are the costs that this production has always high. And what kind of rhyme these costs take is already indifferent "- this is what Brodsky says about the" technology "of his work. “What interests me most is the process, not its consequences. When I write poetry in English, it's more of a game, chess, if you like, such a folding of cubes. Although I often catch myself on the fact that psychological, emotional and acoustic processes are identical. "

About the Nobel Prize.Brodsky always believed that he could be awarded this highly prestigious award. He had an athletic, competitive streak in his character - from a young age his direct reaction to other people's poems was: I can do it better. He was pragmatic or ironic about the various prizes and awards that fell on him after 1972, without attaching great importance to them. But the Nobel Prize had a special aura for him, as for all Russians. The work of the Nobel Committee is kept secret, but according to rumors, Brodsky was nominated already in 1980, when Czeslaw Milosz became a laureate. And now there is information about the 1987 Nobel Prize, which included Brodsky. When awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee laconically formulates what the main merit of the laureate is. Brodsky's diploma read: "For an all-encompassing literary activity, distinguished by clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky did not cause such controversy and controversy as some other decisions of the Nobel Committee. By 1987, he was already a familiar and, for most, a likable figure in the intellectual circles of Europe and America. His memoir prose was found intelligent and touching. His poems in translations evoked respect and sometimes admiration, and everyone in the West knew about his poetic glory in his homeland. When the decision of the Nobel Committee was read to journalists and the public, the applause, according to the testimony of the veterans, was especially loud and long. Brodsky in his very first interview said about the prize: "It was received by Russian literature, and it was received by a citizen of America."

Conclusion

There is a very wide range of opinions when assessing the work of Joseph Brodsky. His poetics is paradoxical. Its distinguishing feature is the combination of experimentation and tradition. In many ways, the development of his work went contrary to the main trends operating in both Russian and European poetry, but it is already clear that this path does not lead to a dead end, and the combination of non-canonical vocabulary with intense metaphorism and complex metric-stanzaical construction finds more and more new adherents. As I said earlier, in the introduction, Brodsky is an outstanding poet, familiar to the whole world. But a complete and deep understanding of Brodsky's poetry is still ahead.

Not only poetics is paradoxical for Brodsky, but also fate. Leaving Russia in 1972, he did not know if he would ever be able to see his homeland again. After Gorbachev came to power, Brodsky was increasingly asked if he wanted to return home. Brodsky told one interviewer: “First: you can't step into the same river twice. Second: since I now have this halo, I am afraid that I would become the subject of various hopes and positive feelings. And being the object of positive feelings is much more difficult than being the object of hatred. Several times I was going to come to Russia incognito, but sometimes I don't have time, sometimes I don't have enough health, sometimes some urgent tasks need to be solved. Besides, going back doesn't make sense anymore. Everyone I would like to see is either dead or married. "

Joseph Alexandrovich died on January 27, 1996. It was originally planned to bury Brodsky in South Headley. But this plan had to be rejected for various reasons. A telegram came from Russia from State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova with a proposal to transport the poet's body to St. Petersburg and bury it on Vasilievsky Island, but this would mean resolving the issue of returning to his homeland for Brodsky. Moreover, a grave in St. Petersburg would be difficult for a family to access. Yes, and Brodsky did not like, perhaps just because of his popularity, his youthful poem with the lines “I don’t want to choose either a country or a churchyard, I’ll come to die on Vasilievsky Island…”. An agreement was made with the authorities of Venice for a place in the ancient cemetery of San Michele. On a modest marble tombstone, the words from the elegy of the Propertius are carved: Letum pop omnia finit, which means "death does not end."

List of sources and literature used

poet brodsky literature creative

1.Volkov S. Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky. M., 2006.

2.Gordin Y. Knight and death, or Life as a plan: On the fate of Joseph Brodsky. M., 2010.

.Joseph Brodsky: Big Book of Interviews. Ed. I. Zakharova, V. Polukhina. M., 2000.

.Losev L. Joseph Brodsky: The Experience of a Literary Biography. M., 2006.

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