What Joseph Brodsky did not advise to do. Why not give unsolicited advice. Reflections on good intentions. Death and burial

Anna Akhmatova's idea of ​​the poet's success was extraordinary. When she learned about the trial of Brodsky, about the insulting accusation of parasitism and the sentence of -5 years in prison, she exclaimed: "What a biography they are doing to a young man!" In the distorted world of the Soviet Looking-Glass, well-being aroused suspicion among the ignorant, contempt among those who knew. After leaving school at the age of 15, Brodsky came to the factory, was a milling machine operator. Crosses adjoined the plant - the famous St. Petersburg prison, in which "brodsky under investigation" was later imprisoned. Prison, deportation, "paternal punishment for educational purposes" ... What could Brodsky answer the state? "Why don't you work honestly?" - "I work. I write poetry."

Brodsky is not autobiographical in his writings. Facts and events build up on the basis in which, in an incomprehensible way, his individuality, his soul lives whole and independently. He "disengages" from the system that broke the majority. He does not fight, he leaves, "not condescending" to a humiliating crush. Leaving the state, he plunges into culture. Language is his bread, air, water. Russian language - and Peter:

755


I would like to live, Fortunatus, in a city where the river protruded from under the bridge, as if from a sleeve - hand and that it fell into the bay, spreading its fingers, like Chopin, who did not show his fist to anyone ...

Brodsky is the second Russian poet who saw in St. Petersburg not a river, but a river, a delta. The first was Akhmatova.

Brodsky is surprisingly free with poetic meters, he loves to break sentences, ironically and unexpectedly emphasizing words * as if they do not carry the main semantic load:

Afternoon in the room. That peace, When in reality, as in a dream, moving your hand, nothing will change.

But it is rhythmic through and through, its rhythm is dry and clear, like a metronome. Brodsky is unceremonious with space, but all his poems are organization and filling with the meaning of time, this is horror and pleasure, and the excitement of war, and wise humility before what cannot be mastered and what cannot be surrendered:

"I don't care- where, makes sense- when".

There was a time when "where" had the edge of novelty or the edge of nostalgia:

No country, no churchyard I don't want to choose, I'll come to Vasilyevsky Island to die.

But the succession of space, its plane, vainly striving for the vertical, is overcome by the volume of time.

Brodsky is a poet not so much of emotions as of thoughts. From his poems, the feeling of a sleepless, unstoppable thought


whether. He really lives not where, but when. And although in his poems Ancient Rome appears no less frequently than Soviet Leningrad or America, Brodsky's "when" is always modern, momentary. He goes into the past to find the present one more time. So, in the "Letters to a Roman Friend", subtitled "From Martial", the Black Sea roars, connecting the exiled Ovid Nason and the exile Brodsky somewhere in eternity, with which all poets are betrothed, like Venetian doges - with the Adriatic:

It's windy today, and the waves are overflowing. Autumn soon. Everything will change in the area. The change of these colors is more touching, Postumus, than the change of a friend's dress.

A man who has lived in two gigantic empires smiles at the Roman in agreement:

If you happen to be born in an empire, It is better to live in a remote province by the sea.

There is dead matter in space. She lives in time

Thursday. Today the chair was out of work. He didn't move. Not one step. Nobody sat on it today, moved it, put on a jacket.

The chair strains its entire silhouette. Warm; the clock shows six. Everything looks as if it is not there, when it really is!

A separate topic is Brodsky and Christianity. It cannot be touched casually, superficially. The intense, very personal experience of the poet of biblical and gospel stories is striking.


jets: the sacrifice of Abraham, the Candlemas, but it is especially persistently repeated - Bethlehem, Christmas:

At Christmas, everyone is a little wise. Near the bakery - slush and crush. Because of a can of Turkish halva They lay siege to the counter...

Rich wise men brought miraculous gifts to a baby sleeping in a manger. Poor St. Petersburg magicians bring random gifts to their babies. What common?

... you look into the sky - and you see: a star.

Brodsky did not return to Vasilyevsky. "Where" was irrelevant. He returned on time, to our "when". Because "as an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or lover," as he said in a Nobel lecture. In it, he called those whose "sum I seem to myself - but always less than any of them taken separately." These are five names. Three belong to Russian poets: Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova. With the lines of Akhmatova, who blessed Brodsky for high luck, I want to finish the essay:

Gold rusts and steel decays, Marble crumbles. Everything is ready for death. The strongest on earth - sadness. And more durable - the royal word.

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Who want to be a millionaire? 10/21/17. Questions / answers.

Program "Who wants to be a millionaire?"

Questions and answers.

Dmitry Ulyanov and Alexander Rappoport

Fireproof Amount: 200,000 rubles.

1. 500 rubles

What is a person who does nothing called?

A. festive

b. idle

C. jubilee

D. solemn

2. 1000 rubles

What do they say about a person with bad intentions: "Holds ...?"

A. mouth shut

b. stone in the bosom

C. gunpowder dry

D. nose in tobacco

3. 2000 rubles

What do they say about the breakdown of a device?

A. ran

B. crawled

C. suffered

D. flew

4. 3000 rubles

How does the name of the song of the beat quartet "Secret" - "Vagabond Blues ..." end?

D. dogs

In which former republic of the USSR, the currency is not the euro?

5. 5000 rubles

C. Kazakhstan

D. Estonia

6. 10 000 rubles

What play did Lope de Vega write?

A. "Tutor of Rhetoric"

b. "Dance teacher"

C. "Vocal teacher"

D. "Physical education teacher"

7. 15 000 rubles

How did the students call the professor in the film “Operation Y and Other Adventures of Shurik”?

A. burdock

B. Hogweed

D. Thistle

8. 25 000 rubles

Who has a monument erected in front of the Theater of the Russian Army in Moscow?

A. Kutuzov

C. Suvorov

9. 50 000 rubles

What was the name of the gunboat that fought alongside the Varyag cruiser against the Japanese squadron?

A. "Japanese"

b. "Korean"

C. "Chinese"

D. "Russian"

10. 100 000 rubles

What did Joseph Brodsky not advise to do in one of the poems?

A. open window

B. put the kettle on

C. leave the room

11. 200 000 rubles

What did the centurion constantly wear as a symbol of his power?

A. Turtle shell bracelet

B. wide black belt

C. vine stick

D. lance with flag

12. 400 000 rubles

In which city in 1960 did the USSR national team become the European football champion?

A. in Paris

B. in Madrid

D. in London

Winning - 200,000 rubles.

Vitaly Eliseev and Sergey Puskepalis

Fireproof Amount: 200 000 rubles

1. 500 rubles

How to finish the proverb: "The spool is small ..."?

A. yes remote

B. yes strong

C. yes dear

D. yes smelly

2. 1000 rubles

What did Matthias Rust plant near the Kremlin?

B. spot on cap

C. airplane

D. potatoes

3. 2000 rubles

What is the name of George Danelia's film?

A. Winter Biathlon

b. "Autumn marathon"

C. Spring Triathlon

D. "Summer Regatta"

4. 3000 rubles

Which of these is not a confectionery?

A. meringues

b. manti

C. chak-chak

D. gozinaki

5. 5000 rubles

What is the most disrespectful nickname given to police officers?

B. patricians

C. pharaohs

6. 10 000 rubles

Who doesn't have horns?

A. at the ocelot

B. in deer

C. giraffe

D. goitered gazelle

7. 15 000 rubles

What Moscow building is higher than a hundred meters?

A. Ivan the Great Bell Tower

B. monument to Peter I

C. Troitskaya Tower of the Kremlin

D. Cathedral of Christ the Savior

8. 25 000 rubles

Which country has never won the European Football Championship?

b. Belgium

D. Portugal

9. 50 000 rubles

What name did Veniamin Kaverin come up with for the sailboat, and not Jules Verne?

A. Forward

B. "Duncan"

C. "Holy Mary"

D. Pilgrim

10. 100 000 rubles

What is the fort mentioned in the old expression "walking the fert"?

A. army rank

B. the old name of the queen

C. letter of the alphabet

D. last name of the mayor

11. 200 000 rubles

What is the surname of the Russian general in the James Bond film A View to a Kill?

b. Gogol

C. Dostoevsky

Winning - 0 rubles.

Sati Casanova and Andrey Grigoriev-Apollonov

Fireproof Amount: 400,000 rubles.

1. 500 rubles

What, according to the well-known phraseological unit, can cause rabies?

A. fat

2. 1000 rubles

What is the name of the railway line that branches off the main track?

C. branch

3, the website says. 2000 rubles

What do those invited to the buffet most often do without?

A. no snacks

b. no chairs

C. without plugs

d. no shoes

4. 3000 rubles

What is not meant to be flown?

A. helicopter

B. quadcopter

C. hang glider

D. omnibus

5. 5000 rubles

Who were the girlfriends from the poem "Tamara and I" by Agnia Barto?

A. flower girls

B. cooks

C. nurses

D. swimmers

6. 10 000 rubles

Who competes in the White Rook Tournament?

A. shipbuilders

b. young chess players

C. yachtsmen

D. ice sculpture masters

7. 15 000 rubles

What is the programmer's slang for obscure characters resulting from an encoding failure?

A. gorillas

B. peacocks

C. cockroach

D. krakozyabry

8. 25 000 rubles

What is the name of the main assembly of the vacuum cleaner?

A. compressor

b. carburetor

C. transfer box

D. combustion chamber

9. 50 000 rubles

Which of the following marine life is a fish?

A. spiny lobster

B. squid

C. cuttlefish

D. sea ​​Horse

10. 100 000 rubles

What was located in the middle of Lubyanka Square before the installation of a monument to Dzerzhinsky there?

A. the fountain

B. monument to General Skobelev

C. flower bed

d. church

11. 200 000 rubles

What was different about the First Symphony Ensemble, created in Moscow in 1922

A. the musicians played while standing

B. played without notes

C. there was no conductor

D. the musicians were self-taught

Winning - 0 rubles.

The New Year is not the kind of holiday to boldly give up on signs and superstitions and do everything according to your desire and discretion.

New Year is a holiday surrounded by many signs and superstitions. Of course, one can be skeptical about these warnings, but Luck is a capricious and fickle lady, so why not try to celebrate the New Year 2017, according to popular beliefs that have existed for more than one hundred years?

It is difficult to say how true these signs are. After all, if they have come such a long way and have survived to this day, then there is definitely some truth in them.

Yes, and there are things that are better to accept not with the mind, but with the heart, no matter how strange it may seem.

Here is what popular beliefs advise against doing on both December 31 and January 1:
You can not meet the New Year with debts or empty pockets.

It is impossible on the eve of the New Year and immediately after its onset to work (wash, wash, clean up).

You can not take out the trash on New Year's Eve.

You can not celebrate the New Year in an untidy apartment.

You can not sew on buttons on New Year's Eve.

It is impossible to throw away old clothes and shoes before the New Year.

You can not swear and shout on New Year's Eve.

You can not celebrate the New Year alone.

It is impossible for the New Year's table to be empty.

Do not cut your fingers while cooking.

It is impossible to have only women at the table.

You can't beat the dishes.

You can't break anything.

You can't pin your own pins.

You can not cut your hair and nails on New Year's Eve.

You can not wash your hair on New Year's Eve.

You can not celebrate the New Year in old clothes.

You can't wear black.

You can't donate books.

It is impossible not to spend the old year.

You can’t be the first to let a woman into your house in the New Year.

You can not sing songs loudly at the table.


You can't swear.

It is impossible not to make a wish under the chimes.

You can not make wishes that begin with "not ...".

You can't tell someone about your wish.

It is impossible to throw out the Christmas tree immediately after the New Year.

Do not extinguish New Year's candles and throw away unburned ones.

You can not regret the passing year.

It is impossible not to kiss loved ones.

It is impossible not to give gifts.

You can’t cry and be sad to the sound of chimes.

And the most important thing - can't miss the new year!

Adhere to these tips or not, decide for yourself. Perhaps from the entire list you will choose something suitable for yourself, and this will help you be a little happier in the New Year. Choosing the right decision comes with experience, and experience is usually born only after the wrong choice.

Perhaps the New Year's holiday would not be so fabulous and mysterious for us if we did not associate our illusory hopes with it. And when they stop believing in miracles, miracles simply die.

All parents have done what they tell their children not to do. That's how they knew they shouldn't do it. (D Moore).
How I love giving advice. You are not?

Overcoming the desire to give unsolicited advice is not so easy. From an adviser's point of view:

1. I do this with good intentions;

2. I try to be good;

4. It seems to me that my experience can prevent a big mistake;
———-
There will always be Eskimos who work out instructions for the inhabitants of the Congo on how to behave in the most terrible heat. (E. Lets)
———-
5. It is my moral duty to intervene.

So people who give advice are good people. They sincerely want to help others avoid trouble. And they can't keep silent.

This is a common manifestation of human psychology: "you can see it from the side." Often really visible.

Advisors fall into several categories:

1. Advice is given by a person who has never done IT, but has an opinion and knows everything in the world. We pass over the advice of such a person, thanking him.
———-
Everyone is not averse to giving advice, not knowing how to help themselves. (S. Brant)
———-

2. Advice is given by a person wise in experience and life, who sincerely believes that his instructions have healing power.
———-
I hate advice - everything but my own. (D. Nicholson)
———-

3. People who have lived their lives, experience, think and do not give advice to anyone because they know that no one wants them. They respond only to requests for advice. They can really change a person's life for the better.
———-
A person who is smart enough to give good advice is usually smart enough not to give advice. (Eden Fillpots)
———-

4. People who, to the detriment of their lives, serve God, other people, believing that this is their destiny.
———-
People who did not listen to advice cannot be helped ... (B. Franklin)
———-

However, the problem is that under the rays of someone else's wisdom, most people feel awkward and stupid. Yes, and the perseverance of the mentor often seems bad manners, manipulation. "Listen, if I was interested in your opinion, I would ask."
———-
Advice is like castor oil: quite easy to give, but damn unpleasant to take. (B. Shaw)
———-
People do not accept anything with such disgust as advice. (D. Addison)
———-

Giving a man unsolicited advice is like questioning his ability to decide and act on his own. That is why they perceive intervention so painfully: it is very important for them to realize that they can always and in everything cope on their own. (John Gray)

The more respect we show to each other, the more we will be respected and more likely to listen to advice. And perhaps ask for them yourself. And we will not feel unimportant that no one wants to communicate with us. We tried so hard..

———-
I like to give advice and really don’t like it when they give it to me. (S. Bernard)
———-


Biography

Childhood and youth

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. In 1947, Joseph went to school number 203 on Kirochnaya street, 8. In 1950, Joseph moved to school number 196 on Mokhovaya street, in 1953, Joseph went to the 7th grade to school number 181 in Solyany lane, and remained in the subsequent year for the second year. Applied to the Naval College but was not accepted. He moved to school number 289 on Narvsky Prospekt, where he continued his studies in the 7th grade.

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

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

Personal card of I. A. Brodsky in the personnel department of Arsenal

In 1962, Brodsky met the young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova. The first verses with the dedication "M. B." - “I hugged these shoulders and looked ...”, “No longing, no love, no sadness ...”, “The riddle of an angel” date back to the same year. On October 8, 1967, Marina Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky had a son, Andrei Basmanov. In early 1968, Marina Basmanova and Joseph Brodsky broke up. From the poems addressed to "M.B.", Brodsky compiled the collection "New Stanzas for August", 1983.

Early poems, influences

In his own words, Brodsky began writing poetry at the age of eighteen, but there are several poems dated -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 pronounced musicality, for example, in the poems “From the outskirts to the center” and “I am the son of the suburbs, the son of the suburbs, the son of the suburbs ...” you can see the rhythmic elements of jazz improvisations. Tsvetaeva and Baratynsky, and a few years later - Mandelstam, had, according to Brodsky himself, a decisive influence on him.

Of his contemporaries, he was influenced by Yevgeny Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Stanislav Krasovitsky.

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

Persecution, trial and exile

I remember sitting in a small hut, looking through a square, porthole-sized window at a wet, swampy road with chickens roaming along it, half believing what I had just read ... I simply refused to believe that back in 1939 English the poet said: "Time ... idolizes the language," and the world remained the same.

- "Bow to the Shadow"

In August and September, several of Joseph's poems were published in the Konosha district newspaper Call.

The trial of the poet became one of the factors that led to the emergence of the human rights movement in the USSR and to increased attention abroad to the human rights situation in the USSR. The transcript of Frida Vigdorova was published in several influential foreign media: New Leader, Encounter, Figaro Litteraire. At the end of 1964, letters in defense of Brodsky were sent by D. D. Shostakovich, S. Ya. Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu. P. German. After a year and a half, in September 1965, under pressure from the Soviet and world community (in particular, after an appeal to the Soviet government by Jean-Paul Sartre and a number of other foreign writers), the term of exile was reduced to actually served.

Brodsky, who refused to dramatize the events of his life, recalled the subsequent events with considerable ease:

"The plane landed in Vienna and Karl Proffer met me there ... he said: "Well, Joseph, where would you like to go?" I said: "Oh my God, I have no idea" ... and then he said: " How do you feel about working at the University of Michigan?"

2 days later, upon arrival in Vienna, Brodsky goes to meet W. Oden, who lives in Austria. "He treated me with extraordinary sympathy, immediately took me under his wing ... undertook to introduce me into literary circles." Together with Auden, Brodsky takes part in the Poetry International in London at the end of June. Brodsky was familiar with Auden's work from the time of his exile and called him, along with Akhmatova, a poet who had a decisive "ethical influence" on him. Then in London, Brodsky met Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender and Robert Lowell.

life line

In July 1972, Brodsky moved to the USA and accepted the post of "invited poet" (poet-in-residence) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he taught, intermittently, until 1980. From that moment, he completed incomplete 8 classes in the USSR High school Brodsky leads the life of a university teacher, over the next 24 years holding 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 verse, lectured and read poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden, Italy.

"Taught" in his case needs some explanation. For what he did was little like what his university colleagues, including poets, did. First of all, he simply did not know how to "teach". He had no personal experience in this matter ... Every year out of twenty-four, for at least twelve weeks in a row, he regularly appeared before a group of young Americans and talked to them about what he himself loved most in the world - about poetry ... The name of the course was not so important: all his lessons were lessons of slow reading of a poetic text...

Over the years, his health steadily deteriorated, and Brodsky, whose first heart attack occurred during his prison days in 1964, suffered 4 heart attacks in 1976, 1985 and 1994. Here is the testimony of a doctor who visited Brodsky in the first month of the Noren exile:

“There was nothing acutely threatening at that moment in his heart, except for mild signs of the so-called dystrophy of the heart muscle. However, it would be surprising if they were absent given the lifestyle that he had in this timber industry enterprise ... Imagine a large field after cutting taiga forest, on which huge stone boulders are scattered among numerous stumps ... Some of these boulders exceed the size of a person. The job is to roll such boulders with a partner onto steel sheets and move them to the road ... Three to five years such a reference - and hardly anyone has heard of the poet today ... because his genes, unfortunately, were prescribed to have early atherosclerosis of the heart vessels. And medicine learned to deal with this, at least partially, only thirty years later "

Brodsky's parents filed twelve times with a request to be allowed to see their son, the same request was made to the USSR government by US congressmen and prominent cultural figures, but even after Brodsky underwent open-heart surgery in 1978 and needed care, his parents was denied an exit visa. They never saw their son again. Brodsky's mother died in 1983, and his father died a little over a year later. Both times Brodsky was not allowed to come to the funeral. The book "Part of Speech" (1977), the poems "The thought of you is removed like a demoted servant ..." (1985), "In memory of the father: Australia" (1989), the essay "A room and a half" (1985) are dedicated to parents.

In 1977, Brodsky took American citizenship, in 1980 he finally moved from Ann Arbor to New York, and later divided his time between New York and South Hadley, a university town in Massachusetts, where from 1982 until the end of his life he taught spring semesters at the "five colleges" consortium. In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat who was Russian on her mother's side. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.

Poet and essayist

Brodsky's poems and their translations have been published outside the USSR since 1964, when the poet's name became widely known thanks to the court transcript of Frida Vigdorova. Since his arrival in the West, his poetry has regularly appeared on the pages of publications of the Russian emigration - in the Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement, Continent, Echo, New American, in the Russian-language Russian Literature Triquarterly, published by Karl Proffer. Almost more often than in the Russian-language press, translations of Brodsky's poems are published, primarily in magazines in the USA and England, and in 1973 a book of translations was also published. But new books of poetry in Russian were published only in 1977 - these are "The End of a Beautiful Era", which included poems from 1964-1971, and "Part of Speech", which included works written in 1972-1976. The reason for this division was not external events (emigration) - the motives of exile were alien to the work of Brodsky, a poet and essayist - but the fact that, in his opinion, qualitative changes were taking place in his work in 1971/72. On this turning point, "Still Life", "To a Tyrant", "Odysseus to Telemachus", "Song of Innocence, she is experience", "Letters to a Roman friend", "Bobo's Funeral" were written. In the poem "1972", begun in Russia and completed abroad, Brodsky gives the following formula: "Everything that I did, I did not for my sake / fame in the era of cinema and radio, / but for the sake of native speech, literature ... ". The name of the collection - "Part of Speech" - is explained by the same message, succinctly formulated in his Nobel lecture in 1987: "someone, but a poet always knows ... that not language is his tool, but he is a means of language" .

In the 70s and 80s, Brodsky, as a rule, did not include in his new books of poems included in earlier collections. An exception is the book New Stanzas for Augusta, published in 1983, composed of poems addressed to M.B. - Marina Basmanova. Years later, Brodsky spoke of this book: “This is the main work of my life ... it seems to me that, as a result,“ New Stanzas for Augusta ”can be read as a separate work. Unfortunately, I did not write the Divine Comedy. And, apparently , I will never write it again. And then it turned out to be a kind of poetic book with its own plot ... ".

Since 1972, Brodsky has been actively turning to essays, which he does not leave until the end of his life. Three books of his essays are published in the USA: Less Than One in 1986, Watermark in 1992 and On Grief and Reason in 1995. Most of the essays included in these collections were written in English (at the moment, Russian translations of all English-language essays and most of Brodsky's other prose works have been published). His prose, at least no less than his poetry, made the name of Brodsky widely known to the world outside the USSR. Less Than One was named the best US literary critic of 1986 by the National Council of Literary Critics. By this time, Brodsky was the owner of half a dozen titles of a member of literary academies and an honorary doctorate from various universities, was the winner of the MacArthur scholarship in 1981.

The next big book of poems - "Urania" - is 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". The forty-seven-year-old Brodsky began his Nobel speech, written in Russian, in which he formulated his personal and poetic creed, with the words:

For a private person who has preferred this whole life to any public role, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference - and in particular from his homeland, for it is better to be the last loser in a democracy than a martyr or ruler of thoughts in a despotism - - to suddenly appear on this podium is a great awkwardness and test"

In the 90s, books of new poems by Brodsky were published: "Notes of a fern" in Sweden, "Cappadocia" and "In the vicinity of Atlantis" in St. Petersburg and, finally, published after the death of the poet and which became the final collection, including both new works and poems that appeared in three previous books: "Landscape with Flood" by Ardis Publishers. The undoubted success of Brodsky's poetry both among critics and literary critics (one can, first of all, mention the collection of works by L. Losev, V. Polukhina, V. Kulle, E. Celebai, Yu. Lotman ...), and among readers, probably has , more exceptions than would be required to confirm the rule. Reduced emotionality, musical atonality and metaphysical complexity - especially of the "late" Brodsky - repel some artists from him. In particular, we can mention the negative work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose reproaches to the poet's work are largely ideological in nature. Almost verbatim, a critic from another camp echoes him: Dmitry Bykov, in his essay on Brodsky after the beginning: "I'm not going to rehash here the commonplace platitudes that Brodsky is "cold", "monotonous", "inhuman"...", - further does just that: "In the huge corpus of Brodsky's works, there are strikingly few living texts ... It is unlikely that today's reader will effortlessly finish The Procession, Farewell, Mademoiselle Veronika" or "Letter in a Bottle" - although, undoubtedly, he will not be able to not to appreciate "Part of Speech", "Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart" or "A Conversation with a Celestial": the best texts of the still alive, not yet petrified Brodsky, the cry of a living soul, feeling its ossification, glaciation, dying.

The last book compiled by the poet ends with the following lines:

And if you don't expect thanks for the speed of light,
something common, maybe non-existence armor
appreciates attempts to turn her into a sieve
and thank me for the hole.

Playwright, translator, writer...

Relative financial well-being (at least by the standards of emigration) gave Brodsky the opportunity to provide more material assistance. Lev Losev writes:

Several times I participated in raising money to help needy old acquaintances, sometimes even those for whom Joseph should not have sympathy, and when I asked him, he began to hastily draw a check, without even letting me finish.

The Library of Congress elects Brodsky Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-92. In this honorary, but traditionally nominal capacity, he developed an active work in the promotion of poetry. His ideas led to the creation of the American Poetry and Literacy Project (American Project: Poetry and Literacy), during which since 1993 more than a million free poetry books have been distributed in schools, hotels, supermarkets, train stations and so on. According to William Wadsworth, director of the American Academy of Poets from 1989 to 2001, Brodsky's inaugural speech as Poet Laureate "caused a transformation in America's view of the role of poetry in its culture." Shortly before his death, Brodsky was carried away by the idea of ​​founding the Russian Academy in Rome. In the autumn of 1995, he approached the mayor of Rome with a proposal to create an academy where artists, writers and scientists from Russia could study and work. This idea was realized after the death of the poet. In 2000, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Scholarship Fund sent the first Russian poet-grant holder to Rome, and in 2003, the first artist.

English-speaking poet

In 1973, the first (not counting Elegy to John Donne, 1967, disavowed by him) book of Brodsky's poetry in English, "Selected poems" (Selected Poems), translated by George Kline and with a preface by Auden, was published in New York. The second collection in English, "Part of Speech", is published in 1980; the third, "To Urania" (To Urania), - in 1988. These collections, in content, basically followed the corresponding Russian-language books of the poet. In 1996, So Forth was released - the 4th collection of poems in English, prepared by Brodsky. The last two books include both translations and auto-translations from Russian, as well as poems written in English. Over the years, Brodsky increasingly trusted translations of his Russian-language poems into English to other translators; at the same time, he increasingly composes poetry in English, although in his own words he did not consider himself a bilingual poet and claimed that "for me, when I write poetry in English, it's more like a game ...".

"Linguistically and culturally, Brodsky was Russian, and as for self-identification, in his mature years he reduced it to a lapidary formula, which he repeatedly used: "I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen"

Lev Losev

"In the five hundred-page volume of Brodsky's English-language poetry, there are no translations made without his participation ... But if his essays evoked mostly positive critical responses, the attitude towards him as a poet in the English-speaking world was far from unambiguous" . Valentina Polukhina, professor at the University of Kiel (England), writes: "The paradox of Brodsky's perception in England lies in the fact that with the growth of Brodsky's reputation as an essayist, attacks on Brodsky the poet and translator of his own poems became more severe" . The range of assessments was very wide, from extremely negative to laudatory, and probably sweet and sour bias prevailed. Daniel Weisbort, an English poet and translator of Brodsky's poems, answered the question of how he evaluates his English poetry:

In my opinion, they are quite helpless, even outrageous, in the sense that he introduces rhymes that are not taken seriously in a serious context. He tried to expand the boundaries of the use of female rhyme in English poetry, but as a result, his works began to sound like W. S. Gilbert or Ogden Nash. But gradually he got better and better, and he really began to expand the possibilities of English prosody, which in itself is an extraordinary achievement for one person. I don't know who else could have done it. Nabokov could not

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Death and burial

General view of a grave in Venice, San Michele Island, 2004. People leave stones, letters, poems, pencils, photographs, Camel cigarettes (Brodsky smoked a lot) and whiskey. On the back of the monument there is an inscription in Latin - this is a line from the elegy Propertius lat. Letum non omnia finit - Not everything ends with death..

The proposal sent by telegram from the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation G. V. Starovoitova to bury the great poet in St. Petersburg on Vasilyevsky Island was rejected by the family - Brodsky did not want to return to his homeland, besides Brodsky did not like his youthful poem with the lines "I will come to Vasilyevsky Island to die ..." .

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

Although the insensible body
decay everywhere,
devoid of native clay,
it is in the alluvium of the valley
Lombard rot is not averse. Ponezhe
their continent and worms are the same.
Stravinsky sleeps on San Michele...

A family

  • Father - Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (-).
  • Mother - Maria Moiseevna Volpert (-).
  • Daughter - Anastasia Iosifovna Kuznetsova, daughter of ballerina Maria Kuznetsova
  • Son - Andrey Osipovich Basmanov, born, from Marianna Basmanova.
  • Wife - Maria Sozzani, b. (marriage from 1991 to 1996 - until the death of Brodsky).
  • Daughter - Anna Alexandra Maria Brodskaya, born in 1993 (from marriage to Maria Sozzani).
  • Granddaughters - Daria Andreevna Basmanova (graduate of the Academy of Arts, 2011); Praskovya (born 1989) and Pelageya (born 1997) Basmanovs.

Addresses in St. Petersburg

  • 1955-1972 - apartment house of A. D. Muruzi - Liteiny prospect, house 24, apt. 28. The municipality of St. Petersburg plans to buy out the rooms where the poet lived and open a museum there. Exhibits of the future museum can be temporarily seen in the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House.
  • 1962-1972 - Benois house - Glinka street, house 15. Marianna Basmanova's apartment.
  • 1962-1972 - Marata street, house 60. Workshop of the artist Marianna Basmanova.

To Komarovo

  • August 7, 1961 - in the "Budka", in Komarovo, E. B. Rein introduces Brodsky to A. A. Akhmatova.
  • At the beginning of October 1961 - went to Akhmatova in Komarovo together with S. Schultz.
  • June 24, 1962 - on Akhmatova's birthday, he wrote two poems "A. A. Akhmatova ”(“ The roosters will crow and clap ... ”) from where she took the epigraph“ You write about us obliquely ”for the poem“ The Last Rose ”, as well as“ Behind churches, gardens, theaters ... ”and a letter. Published in: About Anna Akhmatova: Poems, essays, memoirs, letters, ed. M. M. Kralin (L.: Lenizdat, 1990. - S. 39-97). In the same year he dedicated other poems to Akhmatova. Morning mail for Akhmatova from the city of Sestroretsk (“In the bushes of immortal Finland ...”).
  • Autumn and winter 1962-1963 - Brodsky lives in Komarov, at the dacha of the famous biologist R. L. Berg, where he works on the cycle “Songs of a Happy Winter”. Close contact with Akhmatova. Acquaintance with Academician V. M. Zhirmunsky.
  • October 5, 1963 - in Komarov, "Here I am again accepting the parade ...".
  • May 14, 1965 - visits Akhmatova in Komarov.

For two days he sat across from me on that chair on which you are now sitting ... All the same, our troubles are not in vain - where has it been seen, where has it been heard, so that a criminal is released from exile for a few days to stay in his native city? .. Inseparable from his former lady. Very good looking. Here you can fall in love! Slender, ruddy, skin like that of a five-year-old girl ... But, of course, he will not survive this winter in exile. Heartbreak is no joke.

  • March 5, 1966 - death of A. A. Akhmatova. Brodsky and Mikhail Ardov searched for a long time for a place for Akhmatova's grave, first at the cemetery in Pavlovsk at the request of Irina Punina, then in Komarov on their own initiative.

She just taught us a lot. Humility, for example. I think ... that in many ways it is to her that I owe my best human qualities. If not for her, it would have taken longer for them to develop, if they had appeared at all.

Editions

In English

  • "Selected poems". New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
  • "Part of Speech". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.
  • "Less Than One: Selected Essays". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
  • "To Urania". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.
  • "Watermark". New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992.
  • "On Grief and Reason: Essays". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995.
  • "So Forth: Poems". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.
  • "Collected Poems in English". New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

Memory

Memorial plaque on Muruzi's house in St. Petersburg, where the poet lived

  • In 1998, the "Pushkin Fund" published a book of poems by L. Losev "Afterword", the first part of which consists of poems related to the memory of Brodsky.
  • In 2004, Brodsky's close friend and Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott wrote the poem "The Prodigal" in which Brodsky is mentioned many times.
  • In November 2005, in the courtyard of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University, under the project