"What a biography they write with our Rije!"

On the morning of Sunday, June 4, 1972, outside the main entrance of the international terminal of the Leningrad airport, sitting on an old leather suitcase, a man in his thirties, wearing jeans, a roller skates and a jacket too warm for that age, was waiting. He did not have a passport, but only a Soviet exit visa M

208098 for permanent residence in Israel, valid until June 5, 1972, in the name of Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky, born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and a one-way ticket for an "Aeroflot" plane to Budapest, and then an "Austrian" airline to Vienna, and to leave the USSR forever. The friends, a few of them, who saw him off, avoided saying "goodbye", but said "goodbye" emphatically.

In that trophy leather suitcase, Joseph Brodsky took a typewriter, two bottles of vodka (as much as could be transferred) for the Anglo-American poet Whistan Hugh Auden, a collection of poems by John Donne and a book by Anna Akhmatova with the dedication: "To Joseph Brodsky, whose poems seem magical to me."

After a detailed inspection and disassembly of the typewriter, the customs had no objections, they only tried to scratch the sticker with the picture of Gina Lollobrigida in a negligee.

That trophy leather suitcase was brought to Leningrad by his father, TASS frontline photojournalist Aleksandar Ivanovich Brodsky, who fought in the Finnish War, participated in breaking the siege of Leningrad and in the war with Japan, when he returned from China in 1948, with the rank of 3rd rank navy captain.

Little Josif and his mother Maria Moiseyevna Wolpert, an accountant, survived the difficult winter of 1941–1942. in besieged Leningrad.

When they were evacuated to the vicinity of Arkhangelsk, she took Josif to her sister Roza and her husband Zahar Kelmovich in Cherepovets, where she worked as a translator in a prisoner of war camp. They returned to Leningrad in 1944.

Joseph Brodsky was taught to read by his mother when he was only four years old, but he was a poor student. In his characteristic for the fifth grade, the teachers wrote that "he may be an excellent student, but he doesn't try." For who knows what reasons, he changed five schools and finished only seven grades. The writer Piotr Weil recalled: "In the middle of class in the eighth grade, he got up from his desk - left the school and never came back."

At the age of 15, he worked at the "Arsenal" factory as a metal apprentice on a milling machine. Then he was a stoker in a boiler room, then a sailor at a lighthouse, and with the hope of becoming a doctor, he assisted a surgeon in dissecting corpses in the morgue of a regional hospital, but after a month he gave up his medical career.

In 1954, he tried to enroll in the Higher School of Submarine Navigation in Morski pereulok, as he liked the uniforms and everything related to the navy. As a child, he spent hours looking at the Maritime Museum in Leningrad, where his father brought him because, after demobilization in 1948, he got a job in a photo laboratory there.

From 1957, he participated, as an auxiliary worker, in geological expeditions on the White Sea, in eastern Siberia and northern Yakutia, and in uranium deposits in mosquito flocks in the Far East, from where, after a nervous breakdown in 1961, he returned to Leningrad.

PETROGRAD ECHO OF LENINWORK

In his twenties, Brodsky read a lot, but chaotically: poetry, philosophical and religious literature. He studied English and Polish on his own. He was a regular reader of the Polish intellectual avant-garde weekly "Przekrój" ("Review"), in which essays on new trends in philosophy (existentialist) and art (dramas of the absurd) were published alongside tabloid notes on the divorces of European and Hollywood movie stars and prescriptions for hangover cures.

In his own words, he read Camus and Kafka in Polish and became familiar with "half of modern Western literature". He translated his older contemporaries, the Polish modernists Konstantin Galczynski, Zbigniew Herbert and Česlav Miloš, with whom he became friends.

Brodsky claimed that his aesthetic views were influenced more than reading books by the study of Leningrad, which in his century played a role in Russian literature that Alexandria played in the age of the Hellenes.

From 1955 to 1972, the Brodsky family lived in Dom Muruza, according to philologist Yuri Zobnin, "one of the most honored places on the contemporary literary map of St. Petersburg." In his parents' 40-square-meter apartment, Brodsky fenced off half of the 10-square-meter room for himself - with shelves and books thrown between the arches.

In that publishing house in the so-called Moorish style, typical of Northern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, the playwright and historian Dmitry Mereshkovsky, one of the founders of Russian symbolism, once lived. There was the Workshop of Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was liquidated by the Bolshevik Cheka in 1921 on the charge of participating in a monarchist conspiracy.

In August 1961, Brodsky met the poet Yevgeny Rein, five years older than himself, one of the members of the literary association "Promka", gathered in the Promkooperacija House of Culture (later Lensoveta Palace of Culture). He will recommend and give Brodsky many books, and teach him that he should not recite his verses when the company sits down to drink with the girls.

MAGICAL POETRY FROM 19.650 WORDS

...

He will also meet Anna Akhmatova, a representative of Acmeism, a Russian poetic direction that poeticized simplicity, objectivity, comprehensibility, accuracy and clarity of language.

Brodsky often went to Anna Akhmatova's dacha in the village of Komarovo near Leningrad, helped her with her daily chores and showed her his poems.

After reading his first poems, Anna Akhmatova said: "You don't even know what you wrote..." She said that he, like her after all, knows all the rhythms of the Russian language.

In 1963, she gave him a collection of her poems with the dedication: "To Joseph Brodsky, whose poems seem magical to me."

He felt that he had to write for his contemporaries and not for his predecessors. Since "the art of poetry requires words", he drew them from Soviet newspapers, from old books and scientific discourse, from criminal and working-class slang.

In the book Joseph Brodsky: literary biography essay, poet and historian Lev Losev states that the incomplete dictionary of Brodsky's poetry consists of 19.650 individual words. Akhmatova's dictionary has a little more than 7000 words. One essayist listed as many as 23 botanical names in the first part of the poem "Summer Eclogue" where some other poet would have said: grass.

The list of phenomena of the living world, words and phrases of street speech seems exhaustive already in his "Long Elegy to John Donne" from 1967:

John Donne is asleep, and all sleeps with him,
table, wall, bed, floor; they fell asleep
pictures and candles; lock latches,
rugs, cabinets and curtains.
Everything is sleeping. The bottle, the glass,
bowl, bread, bread knife, crystal, dishes,
watch, underwear, night vision,
Basamki, and the door where the night enters...

(Translated by Milovan Danojlić)

ABOUT THE JEWISH CEMETERY NEAR LENINGRAD, NO CENSORSHIP

At that time, there were several cafes in Leningrad, in cultural centers where members of the local poetry group, called "Anna Akhmatova's orphans", spoke their verses.

Poetry in the USSR was very important in the 1960s: Yevgeny Yevtushenko filled the stadiums at poetry rallies with the glory of the "last Soviet poet", Robert Rozhdestvensky and Al Ahmadulin. "Non-Soviet poets", among whom Yevtushenko included Brodsky, would say that poetry in the USSR is more important than anywhere else, because - for poetry you go to Siberia.

On February 14, 1960, Josif Brodsky performed publicly for the first time at a poetry tournament in the Palace of Culture, on Stacek Square in Leningrad. He read the poem "Jewish cemetery near Leningrad":

"A crooked fence made of rotten plywood.
Behind the crooked fence they lie next to each other
lawyers, merchants, musicians, revolutionaries.
They sang for themselves.
They were saving for themselves.
They died for others…”

For reading a poem that was not approved by the censorship, Brodsky was criticized at the tournament by the poet Gleb Semenov, who would later be labeled as a snitch by some of the dissidents.

In response, Brodsky read, also unapproved, "Poem under the epigraph", choosing the Latin expression "What is allowed to Jupiter, is not allowed to an ox".

The jury condemned Brodsky's performance. And the KGB also took an interest in that poet, whom the young audience, chanting, invites to recite uncensored verses loudly and with a sprachfeller.

At the meeting of the party organization of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Writers, the poet Vsevolod Azarov reported that the evening was very poorly prepared and that anti-Soviet works were read, with which none of the leaders of the literary association were familiar.

Josif Brodsky then published "Jewish Cemetery" and four more poems in the third, "Leningrad" issue of the samizdat magazine "Sintaxis", which was distributed in Moscow and Leningrad, and became known abroad.

The founder of "Syntax", Alexander Ginzburg, was arrested in July 1960, arrested and sentenced to two years in a labor camp, formally because (much before that) he took an exam for his friend in an evening school, using forged documents.

TRIPLE VICTIM

photo: rob croes / anefo /
Dutch National Archives cc by-sa 3.0 / wikimedia.org

Brodsky used to say that a poet's biography says nothing about his poetry, which is probably true, but it certainly illuminates the time in which the poet lived.

In the book Joseph Brodsky, literary biography essay Leva Loseva shows how Joseph Brodsky in the 1960s, in the period of his greatest emotional vulnerability, became a victim of a multiple set of circumstances: the change in the ideological policy of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, the police zeal of the Leningrad authorities and the reactionary members of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Writers, as well as the intrigues of a petty fraudster, activist of the paramilitia "people's squads" Yakov Lerner.

The liberal period of the "thaw" of Khrushchev's rule reached its peak when Alexander Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" was published in the November issue of the magazine "Novi Mir" from 1962.

Party functionaries and writers who grew up in the Stalin era, however, felt that this was not about criticizing "individual shortcomings", but that the humanity of the entire Soviet project was being called into question, so they began campaigns to discipline the non-Soviet intelligentsia and disaffected youth.

As Lev Losev writes, the increasingly capricious and extravagant Nikita Khrushchev, embittered by the failure of economic reforms and the Cuban adventure on November 29, 1962, vented his anger on the artistic intelligentsia, swearing obscenely and stamping his feet at the exhibition of new art in Manez in Moscow. Then, at a special meeting on December 17, 1962, he shouted at young writers and artists and, as Losev writes, "with his characteristic inconsistency, toasted Solzhenitsyn, and during the break, he democratically gave the writers a place in the row in front of the urinal."

In April 1963, the suppression of the literary rebellion continued at the meeting of the board of directors of the Writers' Union of the USSR. Then, at the June plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Leonid Fyodorovich Ilyichev, secretary of the Central Committee for Ideology, spoke in his report about "young, politically immature, but very arrogant and immensely praised" writers, as well as the fact that "among the youth there are still lazy people, moral cripples, cowards" who "with a nod from abroad try to replace the principle of ideological and popular art with the bird jargon of the idle and semi-educated people".

PARASITISM (parasitism)

At the beginning of his report, Secretary Ilyichev sternly warned: "Our life and its laws do not give us the right to choose: if I want - I work; if I want - I slack off."

Historian Vladimir Kozlov explains that in the mid-sixties, before and after the removal of Khrushchev, the search was made for the most effective measures to influence dissenters, while respecting the rules of the game of socialist legality. This led to a broad and arbitrary interpretation of the legal provisions punishing parasitism (tuniadstvo).

According to the Soviet laws of the time, the right to employment was defined as both a right and an obligation. The Bolshevik program principle "he who does not work should not eat" was an instrument of class confrontation with both capitalists and idlers, kulaks and class enemies, both in the time of Lenin and in the time of Stalin.

In the first year of implementation of Khrushchev's decree on parasitism from May 4, 1961, about 240.000 people were brought before the courts, of which nine percent were due to "unearned income" from renting out apartments and dachas, 20 percent were tailors, shoemakers, carpenters and other private individuals, and 40 percent were those who lived on "odd earnings."

In the article "Parasitism in the USSR (1961-1991): Legal Theory and Social Practice", Tatjana Lastovska points out that the very stretchable accusations of parasitism, in line with the left-right movement of the ideological pendulum, incriminated private entrepreneurship, dubious incomes, alcoholism, prostitution, the gray economy, deviations from the party line and fees that intellectuals received for their works published abroad.

There were, for example, attempts to accuse the historian and publicist Roy Medvedev of parasitism, who lived from royalties for books published abroad, then the philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, and the writer Vladimir Voynovich was excluded from the Union of Writers under that clause.

photo: rob croes / anefo / wikimedia.org

LERNER AND THE PEOPLE'S DEVICES

At that time, members of the so-called "people's squads" with red armbands helped the police in maintaining public order. Exposing ideological opponents, strictly speaking, was not within the competence of the police and "people's squads", but catching parasites was.

Even after Khrushchev's speech, Yakov Lerner, an associate of the Leningrad Institute of Technology who led one of the more active "people's squads" in 1963, realized that dragging drunkards to prison to sober up hooligans would not advance his career, but that exposing the "foreign element", the ideological corrupter of youth in the midst of an all-Union ideological campaign, could.

Lerner first wrote a letter, with flattering praise, thanking Khrushchev for the fact that there is and cannot be anti-Semitism in the Soviet country, then, reporting on his volunteer activities, he complained about the Jewish nationalists who persecute him as a Jew because he has a Russian wife, the granddaughter of an Orthodox priest.

Then he specially went to Moscow and scared the management of the publishing house "Hudožestvena literatura", causing them to stop cooperation with the "anti-Soviet", Jew Josif Brodski, two of whose translations were published by this house in the fall of 1962 in an anthology of Cuban poetry, and in 1963 two more of his translations were included in the collection of Yugoslav poets.

After that, Lerner, as the "competent" head of the "people's detachments" in the Dzerzhinski district, called Brodski and asked him to come for an interview on October 21, 1963. The resident of the Dzerzhinski district, Josip Brodski, responded, because the members of those people's detachments had all kinds of credentials (public assistant investigators, etc.), although they sometimes acted like bandits against whom criminal proceedings were initiated.

After a fifteen-minute meeting, Lerner found out that Brodsky did not have a permanent job and decided to "bring him under the decree" for parasitism.

ОКОЛОЛЕТАРТАРУНЫ ТРУТЕНЬ

On November 29, 1963, the newspaper “Vecherny Leningrad” published an article entitled “Okololiteraturny truten'”, signed by Yakov Lerner and two of the newspaper's collaborators, Medvedev and Jonin.

The title of the article sounded threatening: трутень, "drone" was a synonym for "parasite".

"He continues to lead a parasitic lifestyle. A healthy twenty-six-year-old (!) guy has not been engaged in socially useful work for about four years", it was written in the final part of the article, as an elaboration of material from the conclusions of the Central Committee plenum on parasites, who write formalistic and decadent verses, humiliating themselves in front of the West.

Four times they repeated the phrase from the article of the Moscow newspaper "Izvestia": "Idle people climb Parnassus". Brodsky was called a "dwarf, who confidently climbs Parnassus", and "by any, even the dirtiest, path."

THE UNION OF LENINGRAD WRITERS CORRECTS THE PROSECUTOR

On December 12, 1963, the prosecutor of the Dzerzhinsk region demanded that Brodski be brought before the public court of the Union of Writers.

Public courts, as quasi-legal bodies, were actually public meetings at the place of work or residence of the "defendant", which were usually limited to the ritual defamation of violators of public peace, but sometimes resulted in the decision to entrust the case to a real court.

Since the matter concerned a poet, the Leningrad Union of Writers could not remain on the sidelines, although Brodsky was not formally associated with this organization. Its manager at the time, Alexander A. Prokofiev (1900–1971), a journalist and poet of some talent, himself once the subject of official criticism, was primarily a convinced "party soldier" who, as Losev writes, participated in organizing the condemnation of Boris Pasternak at a meeting of Leningrad writers on October 30, 1958. Someone spread the rumor that Joseph Brodsky was the author of an offensive epigram with a play on the surname Prokofiev, although he didn't write any epigrams, and he wasn't interested in Prokofiev either.

Prokofiev was a man of quarrelsome character, somewhat similar to Khrushchev's.

And the Board of the Leningrad Union of Writers, writes Lev Losev, was composed mainly of followers of the authoritarian Prokofiev, the most untalented writers who could be found in Leningrad. And they decided to "categorically agree with the prosecutor's opinion on bringing Josif Brodski to the public court".

Such gatherings were most often followed by the expulsion of "drones" from Komsomol or associations, but Brodsky was not in either of those two.

But he could have been convicted of "parasitism", so the Writers' Committee, on December 25, 1963, "taking into account the anti-Soviet statements of Brodsky and some of his associates", asked the prosecutor to initiate criminal proceedings against Brodsky and his friends before a regular court, which the prosecutor had not proposed until then.

Lev Losev believes that the Leningrad organization of writers, which suffered huge losses during the years of the 'Great Terror', out of fear went further than the prosecution in its investigative zeal.

HERE IN THE SIXTH GRADE...

At that time, Brodsky had already gone to Moscow and welcomed the new year of 1964 in Kanachik's dacha, in the Moscow psychiatric hospital "Kashchenko".

Namely, his friends arranged for him to be examined in a psychiatric hospital, in the hope that a diagnosis of a mental disorder would save the poet from a worse fate.

Exhausted by the nervous tension of the last months, Brodsky feared that he would really lose his mind "here in the Sixth Ward... in the white realm of hidden faces." After only a few days, he demanded his friends to get him out of the psychiatric hospital, where they put him, with difficulty.

Nevertheless, the desired certificate was apparently obtained, since Akhmatova wrote to the poet Alexei A. Surkov, who was a prominent figure in the nomenclature, from 1953 to 1959 the president of the Union of Soviet Writers, known for his role in the persecution of Boris Pasternak:

"I hasten to inform you that Josif Brodsky was discharged from Kanachik's dacha with a diagnosis of schizoid psychopathy and that the psychiatrist who examined him a month ago claims that his health has deteriorated significantly as a result of the persecution the patient suffered in Leningrad." Immediately after leaving the hospital, on January 2, 1964, Brodsky learned that the woman of his life, the silent painter Marina Basmanova with the face of the Mona Lisa without a smile, was simultaneously dating his friend, the poet and chemical engineer Dmitry Bobyshev.

He rushed to Leningrad to explain himself.

A few days later he tried to cut the veins.

Friends and acquaintances perceived the persecution of Brodski and the upcoming reprisal as a terrible event of socio-political importance. For Brodsky at that moment, the tragedy was the loss of the woman to whom he dedicated many verses, and everything else was just absurd circumstances that made this tragedy worse.

Both in the psychiatric hospital and in the following weeks before his arrest, when he was rushing between Moscow, Leningrad and Tarusa (a city in the Kaluga region where dissidents gathered - from Ginzburg to Okudzhava), he continued to work on the lyrical cycle "Songs of Happy Winter". The title was not ironic - the cycle is imbued with memories of a happy period of love, the winter of 1962/63, writes Lav Losev in the book Joseph Brodsky: literary biography essay.

When he returned from another trip to Moscow, on February 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested on the street, at night, near his home. His parents did not know where he disappeared for 24 hours.

On February 14, he suffered a heart attack in the Dzerzhinsky police department of the Leningrad region. An ambulance has arrived. They gave him an injection. But the conditions of detention have not changed.

The deputy head of the police department of the Dzerzhinsky district, a young intelligent officer Anatoliy Alekseev - a college colleague of the poet Leonid Vinogradov, a friend of Joseph Brodsky by the way - in the evening, when most of the employees had gone home, brought the prisoner into his office, gave him tea and sandwiches and said: "Unfortunately, this is all I can do for you."

To the writer Israel Moiseyevich Meter, who begged him to help Brodsky, Alekseyev said that the case was hopeless: "Vasily Sergeyevich issued an order, the court will approve it - and that's the end of the game."

Vasily Sergeevich Tolstikov was then the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee.

A "ON THE ROAD","LITTLE”…

The defense's request that Brodski be officially psychiatrically examined between the first and second court hearings was approved, but instead of being released from custody and being granted an outpatient examination, as the defense requested, he remained imprisoned for three weeks "at Prjažka", in the Psychiatric Hospital No. 2 on the banks of the Prjažka River, and for the first three days he was in the ward for violent offenders.

There, they immediately began to "treat" him with the so-called "hardware": they woke him up in the middle of the night, immersed him in a cold bath, wrapped him in wet sheets and placed him next to the radiator. As they dried, the sheets cut into his body. Brodsky described the torment he endured "on Pryažka" as the most difficult moment in his Soviet life.

Why was it necessary to subject Brodsky to medieval torture? They did not try to get any information from him. They did not require repentance or admission of wrongdoing.

According to Lev Losev, either they really considered him mentally ill and wanted to cure him with their methods in order to make him fit for trial and condemnation, or it was the sadism of the medical staff, as the world later learned from the stories of dissidents exposed to Soviet psychiatric terror.

And the conclusion given by the psychiatrists from "Pryažka" was most likely objective, writes Losev, but in those circumstances it was catastrophic because they said that Brodsky "shows psychopathic character traits, but does not suffer from mental illnesses and, when it comes to his neuropsychiatric health, he is capable of work..."

WHO CLASSIFIED YOU AMONG THE POETS?

...

On February 18, 1964, Josif Brodsky was brought to the courtroom on Vostanija Street in Leningrad for the final hearing. He was accused of tinkering, parasitism, on some 16 counts: "wrote improper and decadent songs, which he distributed among the youth of Leningrad and Moscow with the help of his friends"; "organized literary evenings where he tried to confront the Soviet reality as a poet", "avoided socially useful work and led an anti-social parasitic lifestyle"... The Kafkaesque course of the trial of the poet Brodsky echoed throughout the world thanks to the writing of the journalist and writer Frida Abramovna Vigdorova (1915-1965).

Judge of the Dzerzhinsk Court in Leningrad Ekaterina Savelyeva Aleksandrovna:

- Explain to the court why you did not work during breaks (between jobs, first. L. L.) and lead a parasitic lifestyle?

Accused Josif Anatolovich Brodsky:

- I worked during breaks. I did what I do now: I wrote poetry.

- So, you wrote your so-called poetry? And what is useful in that you changed jobs often?

- I started working when I was fifteen years old. I was interested in everything. I changed jobs because I wanted to know as much as possible about life, about people.

- And what did you do that was useful for the homeland?

- I wrote poetry. That's my job. I am convinced... I believe that what I have written will be of use to people, not only now, but also for future generations.

- So you think that your so-called poetry is useful to people?

- And why do you talk about songs as "so-called"?

- We call your songs "so-called" because we have no other concept about them. And what is your specialty anyway?

- A poet. Poet-translator.

- And who recognized that you are a poet? Who included you among the poets?

- No one. (Without provocation.) And who included me among the human race?

- And did you study for this?

- What?

- To be a poet. Have you not tried to graduate from a university where they prepare… where they teach…

- I didn't think it was possible through education.

– And how?

- I think it is... (confused) from God...

All three defense witnesses were members of the Union of Writers: the poet Natalia Grudinina (born 1918), who was awarded a medal for the defense of Leningrad, and after the war translated Edgar Allan Poe, and two professors of philology from the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, famous translators from European languages ​​EG Etkind (1918–1999) and VG Admoni (1909–1993). They tried to prove to the court that writing and translating poetry is really difficult work, which requires special talent and professional knowledge, and that Brodsky performed this work skillfully and talentedly.

The court, however, concluded that the defense witnesses "tried to present Brodsky himself in front of the court as an unrecognized genius, and the vulgarity and lack of ideas in his songs as the work of a talented author", that "such behavior testifies to their lack of ideological vigilance and party integrity". It was forwarded to the Writers' Union with the instruction: "Inform the court about the measures taken."

Apart from Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Voyevodin, the storyteller and journalist of the "Vechernyi Leningrad" newspaper, who was sent by the Union of Writers, the other five defense witnesses - the head of the Defense House Smirnov, the janitor of the Hermitage Logunov, the pipe-layer Denisov, the pensioner Nikolayev and the teacher of Marxism-Leninism Romashova - had no connection with literary work and did not know Brodsky.

According to the logic of party screenwriters, personal acquaintance can be the basis of personal antipathy, and Soviet workers give an objective assessment of the accused's public personality...

After a five-hour trial, Josif Brodsky was given the highest prescribed sentence for parasitism - five years of "administrative relocation" (to Siberia).

Philologist Nina Đakonova remembers how Frida straightened up to her full height of 150 centimeters at the court order "Take away her notes" and quietly replied: "Try it!"

Then, "immediately after the hearing, she came to our house and stood crying on the stairs, unable to go up to our floor and call."

Frida died of cancer in 1965, before Joseph Brodsky returned from Siberia.

Ana Akhmatova was the first to understand the significance of what happened in 1964: "What a biography they are writing with our Ridje!", she said, quoting a verse from "Notes of a Poet" by Ilya Selvinsky: "In a far corner, someone was being beaten in a concentrated manner. I turned pale: it turned out that it was supposed to be like that. They are writing a biography of the poet Yesenin."

To be continued in the next issue