"What a biography they write with our Rije!"

(This is the second part of the feuilleton. The first part find here)

April 1964. Joseph Brodsky was sent to Arkhangelsk region to serve his sentence.

Journalists in the West described it by mentioning "GULAG" and "Arctic labor camps", conveying the image of eternal ice and chains.

...

In his autobiographical novel Mladost, the South African Nobel laureate Joseph Kutzi writes that "accused of parasitism, a Russian named Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp on the Arkhangelsk Peninsula (sic!) in the northern ice... he saws logs, tries to warm his frozen fingers, stuffs rags into his bushy boots, lives on fish heads and cabbage soup (...) while his peer, a poet like him, in his warm London room, drinks coffee and snacking on nuts and raisins…”

The sentence "Sibbir' is also Russian land" in the "Brodsky case" has a slightly different dramaturgy. From the Arkhangelsk transit prison, convicted Josip Brodski was sent to the Konoška district in the southwest of the Arkhangelsk region in mid-April. Konosha is a railway junction about a hundred kilometers north of Cherepovec, where Josif was evacuated from besieged Leningrad as a child, which can be reached in one day. The climate in those regions does not differ much from that of Leningrad.

He found accommodation in the village of Norenska, where there were thirty-six log cabins, but only fourteen were inhabited.

Mostly old people and small children lived there, and all the youth who had even a little vitality and energy left that hopelessly poor place.

"OPEN THE GATE, I BROUGHT YOU A PARASITE! "

In what was then Norinska, there was a post office and a store; four decades later (2005), a Kommersant reporter noted that a van came to Norensk (e replaced i) once a week instead of a store, and the post office burned down.

In 2005, four summer residents and seven locals lived in the village - including eighty-year-old Maria Ždanova, a retired postman. Only she remembered when Rusakov, the director of "Danilovski", came to Taisija Pesterjeva's house: "Open the gate, I brought you a parasite!"

Joseph stayed with her for only three days: March was cold, and Taisia's stove was out of order, so Joseph moved to a log cabin across the street, also at the Pester family, but their names were Konstantin Borisovich and Afanasiya Mihailovna, Nastya's grandmother...

"Once the working day was over, I closed the post office, came home and started to feed the cattle - when that, Joseph! Bled, breathless: 'Maria Ivanovna, please, I have to go to the post office urgently!'

Okay, I put the bins down, got the keys.

Him: 'Faster, faster!'

I didn't ask what happened. We ran over. Joseph called 911 in Konosha.

When we started talking, he started to explain to me: 'Konstantin Borisovich has been drinking for several days. My friends brought me mosquito repellent, and he decided to use it to cure the hangover in my absence. I came back and he was rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth.'

Everything ended well, an ambulance arrived. Joseph saved him with that call. And he saved himself: he was banished, after all, they would have thought he had poisoned his master…”

Zhdanova remembered that uchastkovyj, the district police officer who controls convicts, rarely came to Norenska, so Josif went to Konosha on foot twice a week to report to the militia, since there was no transport.

"Once he came home late from work, he had to go to the militia, and it was terrible to come back at night. That's why Konstantin Borisovich gave him the address of his nephew in Konosha, so that Joseph could spend the night there. We talked to her later, it seems that she was unhappy - not because of Joseph, but because of her uncle: 'Izba is full of mine, and he still sends me prisoners.' But it's okay, she let him in. And then they sent him a bicycle from Leningrad, and it was easier," Taisija Zhdanova told the Kommersant reporter.

HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE VILLAGE

Historian and demographer Alexander Babenishev (pseudonym Sergey Maksudov), who was sent by his colleagues to Norenska to bring the exile a typewriter, books and food, describes the house at the very end of the village where Brodsky lived. "It was a square-shaped wooden log cabin, the kind that have been built all over Russia since time immemorial, from logs 3,5-4 meters long, i.e. a total area of ​​12-15 square meters. A small window, one of those that used to be sealed with mica, was also typical for northern places. There was no furniture in the urban sense of the word. To the left of the window, a wooden table with a kerosene lamp, a typewriter and a baroque fountain pen - which, as we said Yosif proudly, it was a gift from Akhmatova - it was nailed to the wall. Above the table was a small album with reproductions of Giotto. A folding bed with a straw mattress - it was all simple furniture (...) Of course, there was no gas, running water, heated toilet - all those wonderful inventions of the 20th century, there was not even a toilet in the form of a toilet birds in the yard, which they invented shy city dwellers. But there were four walls, a roof and a door, by closing which a person could shut himself off from the whole world, think, compose, be alone..." Maksudov writes. Relatives, friends and acquaintances visited Brodsky at least ten times during the year and a half of his exile.

Nevertheless, Brodsky was deeply affected by the restriction of freedom of movement, especially due to the separation from Marina Basmanova. She came to visit him briefly in Norenska, but her stay there ended with difficult scenes. When she was about to leave, the poet Dmitry Bobyshev suddenly appeared and the two left together, leaving Brodsky to suffer from separation and jealousy.

"A. BUROV, TRACTOR DRIVER, ME TOO... "

The exile Brodski in Norenska collected stones from the fields, hauled wood, spread manure on the field with shovels. He would gladly go into the forest to pick raspberries and not come back until he was full, and the women would gossip about him because they shoveled the manure themselves... He took care of the calves. The shepherds rejected him: he would walk past them whistling...

He earned extra money as a photographer at a craft service plant in Konosha, where clients did not complain about his work. But above all, Brodski was an agricultural worker at the Danilovski state farm.

"A. Burov, a tractor driver, and I, an agricultural worker named Brodsky, were sowing winter crops - six hectares..."

Aleksandar Kuzmić Bulov, a tractor driver and driver, neither then nor 40 years later, did not particularly like his "partner-trailer driver" Josif - not because he slightly changed his surname in the song, but because he still remembers that there was a plot of ten hectares on the Danilov State Farm.

"And according to him, it turned out to be six. So, they credited me with half of my salary..."

Bulov describes him as a lazy guy: "By the time he walked three kilometers from Norenska to work, he would be late; then, if the seeder got stuck in the field, Joseph was of no use. And he constantly called for a smoke break. He would freeze, just so he wouldn't sweat. He would turn over the sacks, somehow fill the seeder with grain, and nothing more..."

Joseph received fifteen rubles a month on the kolkhoz - "why more if he doesn't work?" - and Aleksandar Bulov was getting around two hundred at that time.

Still, he felt sorry for that guy: "He would come to work with three gingerbread men - and that was all the food. I took Joseph home with me and fed him. We didn't drink, no. When he was sent to our district, state security came: me and my landlady were warned from the beginning not to mess with him. And I didn't... (...) Well, they sent him here, he served his time as best he could... that's it (otsidel, how my... all) …”

And when Joseph left, in the kolkhoz they "crossed themselves and praised God for removing him from the earth... Dusty Mozart!" sums up tractor driver Aleksandar Kuzmić, who believes that he should have been sent abroad immediately, where he belongs with his soul closed, and not there first...

Bulov heard about the "songs about himself" from a friend from the militia who supervised exiles "on the subject of the regime" ("in connection with the regime").

He did not read the poem, nor did he deal with it, he believes that the Nobel Prize should not have been given to him and he suspects that politics is involved.

"It is almost professional to suspect Aleksandar Kuzmich", writes the Kommersant reporter, mentioning that a few years later he left the state farm in Konosh and worked for the KGB as a driver for eleven years.

EXILE, BUT HOW DID HE RISE?!

Taisija Zhdanova recalled that Brodsky once said: "The time will come, the world will talk about me."

"I thought: 'He's just an exile, and how immodest he is', but I didn't say anything. Later, when I found out about the Nobel Prize, I thought: 'An exile, but how he has risen!'"

Historian Maksudov records that the elderly peasants of the 1960s, members of the last generation that grew up in the old peasant environment before collectivization, welcomed the exiled settler, a cultured, sober (by local standards) boy from Leningrad, warmly and respectfully. They addressed him by the name and patronymic Josif Aleksandrovich.

Perhaps they are the words of the anthemic song "The People" written in Siberia:

"My people, who did not bow their heads,
My people, who have preserved the habits of the grass:
At the hour of death, clutching the grain in his hands…”

Anna Akhmatova later wrote: "He recited the "Hymn to the People" to me. Either I don't understand anything, or this is as brilliant as poetry. And in terms of the moral path, this is what Dostoevsky is talking about in To the dead house: not a shadow of malice or arrogance, which Fyodor Mikhailovich orders us to fear."

AS IF HE WAS ON THE VERGE OF SUICIDE

At that time, letters in defense of Brodsky were signed by leading figures of Soviet culture: Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Konstantin Paustovsky, Alexander Tvardovsky, Yuri German, and others.

In September 1965, under pressure from the Soviet and world public, especially after the appeal of Jean-Paul Sartre and a number of other foreign writers, the Soviet authorities sought a way to release him.

A Moscow commission suggests that he be rehabilitated. However, the Leningrad KGB, the prosecutor's office and the CPSU committee did not want to admit their own guilt or the mistake of their henchmen and claimed that there was no basis for rehabilitation because Brodsky was justifiably recognized as a parasite; rehabilitation, again, could cause an undesirable reaction from the public, which considers the court's decisions correct. And if Brodsky is released prematurely - then he should live outside the city of Leningrad.

Moscow put pressure on the Leningrad secretary of the KP Tolstikov and suggested that it be announced that the measures taken had yielded results, because Brodsky had improved ("showed positive").

On October 13, 1964, State Farm Director Danilovski wrote a report: "Brodski JA has a good attitude towards work, no violations of work discipline were observed. Due to his conscientious attitude towards work, he was granted a ten-day vacation to visit his parents..."

The Leningrad City Court, however, rejected the appeal of the Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR on January 5, 1965, with the request that Brodsky be released early.

Eight months later, on September 4, 1965, the Supreme Court of the USSR reduced Brodsky's sentence to the time he actually served.

On September 11, 1965, Akhmatova wrote in her diary: "Josif was released by the decision of the Supreme Court. This is a great and bright joy. I saw him a few hours before this news. He was terrible - he looked as if he was on the verge of suicide. He was saved in my opinion by (interpreter and defense witness) Admoni, who met him on the train when this madman was returning from me."

The Supreme Court judgment was initially mistakenly sent to Leningrad instead of Arkhangelsk Oblast, while Brodsky was in Leningrad on parole. He found out that his Marina was in Moscow and on September 11 he desperately tried to go to her. That would be a serious breach of the conditions of leave. Agents of the Leningrad KGB followed him. If he were arrested, the term of his exile would be extended. His friend, the writer Igor Markovich Yefimov, assessed the situation more soberly than Brodsky. He had to trick his friend into not taking this crazy step.

Brodsky was officially released only on September 23, 1965, and after 18 months of exile, he returned to Leningrad.

To be continued