Song about freedom
In the summer of 1990, Soviet television planned a program called "Bravo-90". It was the fifth year of perestroika, and the attitude of the authorities towards writers who emigrated or were expelled from the USSR changed radically. Bravo 90 was evidence of this new attitude. The invitation was received by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Vladimir Maksimov - and Brodsky. Solzhenitsyn refused, as did Brodsky, who still could not decide whether or not to visit his homeland. However, he had nothing against participating in the program one way or another. The first collections of his poems had already been published in the Soviet Union by this time, but real “rehabilitation” had not yet taken place, and he did not participate in the television program. Joseph and I agreed that I would film it and go to Moscow with this recording. In the film, he tells the Soviet public why he visits Sweden so often and reads several poems.
My wife was also invited to sing songs based on poems by Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. When she told Joseph about this, he suddenly said, “Wait, I have something for you,” and went to get the briefcase that he had in the car. With the words: “You can set this to music,” he gave her the author’s typescript of the poem “Song of Freedom,” written in 1965 and dedicated to Bulat Okudzhava.
The poem has the form of a ballad and was quite suitable for such a genre metamorphosis. Nevertheless, the gesture was highly unexpected, given Joseph’s negative attitude towards the genre as such - poetry set to music. Although the initiative was his own, Elena, not without trepidation, performed her composition for Joseph a few weeks later. “Sounds good to me,” came his comment. In January 1991, the song was first heard on Soviet television, at the same time my film about Joseph was shown.
“Song of Freedom” was not published anywhere, but my wife and I thought that it was included in the so-called Maramzin collection. In fact, the typescript that Joseph took out of his briefcase at our house was the only copy, the original, unknown even to his Leningrad friends. Thus, in the TV show “Bravo-90”, not only the musical version, but also the poem as such was made public for the first time. Paradoxically, Brodsky's poem began to spread in a genre that he did not like - as a song. After the death of Brodsky and Okudzhava, we published it in Zvezda (1997, No. 7) as a tribute to both poets.
Today would have been the 76th birthday of Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky, an outstanding Russian poet and Nobel Prize laureate in literature.
“In a real tragedy, it is not the hero who dies, it is the choir who dies,” Joseph Brodsky said in his Nobel speech in 1987.
In 1991, the USSR died.
Brodsky died five years after the death of the “choir”.
In the social structure of the USSR, Brodsky was an antisocial type. He was a free-thinking man - free in an unfree country. Brodsky did not want to adapt and be a cog in the mechanism of the Soviet state. He did not want to fit into the usual Soviet environment, he fell out of the Soviet standard, he was a stranger among his own. When Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism, Anna Andreevna spoke out in Joseph’s defense. When Brodsky was sent into exile, Akhmatova said: “What a biography they are making for our redhead!”
The desire for complete independence was the main character trait of Brodsky. Not everyone craves freedom. Brodsky craved freedom because it was necessary for creativity.
In August 1961, Evgeniy Rein introduced Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova, who lived at her dacha (or, as she put it, in a “booth”) in the village of Komarovo.
Brodsky always spoke with respect about the minutes spent near Akhmatova.
Akhmatova is credited with saying that there was the era of Pushkin and, probably, someday there will be an era of Brodsky.
When Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism, Anna Andreevna spoke out in Joseph’s defense. When Brodsky was sent into exile, Akhmatova said: “What a biography they are making for our redhead!”
On March 13, 1964, Brodsky was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment under the decree on “parasitism” - five years of forced labor in a remote area.
In September 1965, the new Secretary General Brezhnev released the poet.
Brodsky was considered a genius abroad. In our country, the KGB considered the poet a mediocrity and a parasite: “I don’t know who I am. I know I'm not the most wonderful person. I know what I have done in this life, who I have harmed. Well, of course I forgive myself. But ultimately, I can’t forgive myself for this.”
On June 4, 1972, Brodsky, deprived of Soviet citizenship, flew from Leningrad along the route prescribed for Jewish emigration to Vienna, paying $500. The poet left his homeland forever, taking away a typewriter, two bottles of vodka for Wisten Auden and a collection of poems by John Donne.
On July 9, 1972, Brodsky moved to the United States and accepted the post of “guest poet” at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a salary of 12 thousand dollars (which was a lot at that time). There he taught intermittently until 1980.
Having completed incomplete 8 grades of high school in the USSR, Brodsky in the USA leads the life of a university teacher, holding professorships at six American and British universities over the next 24 years.
In America, Brodsky met many of his compatriots. Poets and writers from the USSR came to him. Among them were Bella Akhmadulina and Boris Messerer. On May 28, 2015, I was at the Anna Akhmatova Museum at a meeting with Boris Messerer, who shared his memories of Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky said about himself: “I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an American citizen.” Brodsky took his expulsion hard and decided to take revenge - to take revenge on the Soviet authorities for expulsion from the country. Receiving the Nobel Prize was his dream. The Nobel was awarded in 1987.
What is the secret of Brodsky’s creativity? What helped Brodsky become the youngest poet to receive an honorary diploma and a gold medal for the Nobel Prize in Literature from the hands of the King of Sweden?
Would Joseph Brodsky have received the Nobel Prize if he had remained in the USSR?
In his Nobel speech, Brodsky said:
“There are, as we know, three methods of knowledge: analytical, intuitive and the method used by the biblical prophets - through revelation. The difference between poetry and other forms of literature is that it uses all three at once (gravitating mainly to the second and third), because all three are given in language, and sometimes with the help of one word, one rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has gone before I haven’t been - and further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished.
A person writing a poem writes it first of all because versification is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as he becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.
Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is, first of all, to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life.” Brodsky admitted: “Two things justify the existence of man on earth: love and creativity."
In 1990, Joseph Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian Russian aristocrat on her mother’s side, born in 1969.
Brodsky met Maria Sozzane in Paris in December 1989 at his lecture. A year later they were sailing together on a gondola along the Grand Canal of Venice and the poet was happy. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born. “The century will end soon, but I will end first,” prophesied fifty-year-old Brodsky. On his fiftieth birthday, Brodsky, according to his friends, was completely depressed and walked around with a “stony face.”
Death, according to Brodsky, is absolute destruction, hopeless horror.
“We are all sentenced to the same thing - death. I will die, writing these lines, and you, reading them, will die. No one should interfere with each other doing their job. The conditions of existence are too difficult to complicate them further,” Brodsky wrote.
Brodsky called his work as “exercises in dying.” On January 28, 1996, Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky died in his home in New York.
The main cause of Brodsky's death was called by his attending physician the poet's habit of smoking a lot. Joseph almost never let go of the cigarette. It is very difficult to find a photograph of Brodsky without a cigarette. Joseph inherited a heart disease from his father. Attacks of angina pectoris haunted the poet all his life, and with them thoughts of death.
Brodsky suffered 4 heart attacks, but did not quit smoking. He smoked 3-4 packs a day, and even tore off the filter for strength. Doctors forbade the poet to smoke, because smoking is a slow suicide.
Brodsky only drank dry water. Every day 4 cups of strong coffee plus 20-30 cigarettes without filter. Naturally, this affected my heart.
Whether Brodsky's death was natural or not is now anyone's guess. There was no autopsy.
Why? The epitaph at Brodsky’s burial reads: “With death, not everything ends” (from the elegy of Propertius Letum non omnia finit).
He speaks quite harshly about his fellow writers there, so to speak. About Yevtushenko, Voznesensky... But I very much agree with a lot. And here's another interesting thing:
"There are three more poets - of varying quality, but, in my opinion, good. And if they were given the opportunity to work normally, that would be wonderful, it would be interesting, but I’m afraid that, as people say, too late. These three, I learned a lot from them. They were three years older than me. I met all of them in 1960 - to my sorrow, to my joy. In general, we became friends, then it all fell apart - and fell apart in a rather bad way in each individual case. It completely fell apart. Anna Andreevna called us “the magic choir.” But then she died - and the dome collapsed. And the magical choir ceased to exist, breaking into separate voices. These are Evgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman and Dmitry Bobyshev. There were four of us. But now they... Rain makes a living by writing articles in some magazines, writing popular science scripts, in general, little by little he is turning into a monster. This is a man who is already broken in some way. Your personal circumstances, personal. In general, he no longer knows in which world he lives - in the one where he thinks of himself as a poet, or in the one where he writes all these crafts, day laborers. Naiman is a translator. He was not a very independent figure at all, and yet there was something about him, some sharpness, some subtlety. But translations and all these very things - they ruined him a little. Because he no longer remembers where is his and where is someone else’s. Words for him are simply - as, indeed, for all translators, sooner or later - bricks. Not an independent value. This, however, is for me too. And Bobyshev, about whom I know a little less. This is quite a talented person, with a very high sense of language and the concept of what he does in language. This was his main advantage, and he began to endlessly exploit this advantage. He did not look for new funds. And it’s not that “I wasn’t looking for new means” - if there was some kind of audience, there would be some kind of competition, you know? It’s funny to talk about poetry, but it’s there too. Then... maybe something would have worked out. And so, I think, in general, they are all more or less going off the rails. Or they switch to others, or I don’t know anymore."
Then it was very pleasant to read that he considers himself a Russian poet and even a Soviet one... " And, in general, in a number of cases, much in the work of people who live in the Soviet Union, in Russia, was not inspired divine invasion- not by divine intervention - but by the idea of resistance, you know? This must always be remembered. And in some ways you can even be grateful for that." By the way, I also read this idea from Elena Schwartz. She said that after the collapse of the Union and the destruction of the system, poets became uninterested in writing because the prohibitions disappeared.
More about Czechoslovakia: "They behaved like schoolchildren. It's kind of boyish. The fact is that the principles that they defended... for some reason, you see, it seemed to them that they had found new ways to defend these principles. And these principles - so that they do not become empty words and do not hang in the air - if we are to defend them, if we are talking about the fact that we defend these principles, unfortunately, blood must be shed for them. Otherwise, you will simply face one form of slavery or another. If you have already started talking about the fact that you want freedom, that you deserve this freedom, and so on, and so on - if you have already reached the level that freedom has been taken away from you, that you do not want to be a slave - then here you need to , in general... There are no new ways to fight slave owners other than with weapons. They are completely wrong to believe that they have come up with a new method. "
And this is also about abroad, so to speak.: “Unfortunately, I am in a rather difficult position, because I understand that you cannot have an answer to this question. Because when you look around, it is no longer clear what you are living for. Especially here. It is not clear .One gets the impression that in the name of shopping "Oh, you understand? That life happens in the name of shopping "a. The only thing that remains is to try to be as least involved here's all of this. IN shopping and... You know, if I had grown up here, I don’t know what I would have turned into. I just do not know. I don't understand... It's a very strange feeling. I don’t understand at all why all this. Something good (but this is our, totalitarian Russian thought) - something good can only be as a reward, and not as an a priori something, you understand?”
There is a lot of other interesting stuff there - about art in general, a little about music, about literature in general. I advise you to read it.
Movement in defense of Brodsky and international fame
The decisive behavior of the three defense witnesses at the trial, the excited interest of the city intelligentsia in the trial and solidarity with the defendant came as a surprise to the organizers of the trial. After the first hearing on February 18, “when everyone left the courtroom, we saw a huge number of people, especially young people, in the corridors and on the stairs.” Judge Savelyeva was surprised: “So many people!” I didn’t think so many people would gather!” The party functionaries who planned the show trial and their KGB consultants, accustomed since Stalin’s times to the fact that intimidated people obediently or at least silently accepted the intimidating actions of the regime, did not take into account that in the ten post-Stalin years a generation had grown up that was not traumatized by the experience mass terror, that young people will act in solidarity with those of the older generation of intellectuals who, despite this experience, managed to maintain personal dignity, that together they will fight for freedom of thought and self-expression. Not caring about maintaining legal decency, deliberately planning their exemplary punitive event as symbolic, the organizers of the trial did not take into account the fact that then the response to it would be as a symbolic act of arbitrariness. In response to the judge’s surprised exclamation regarding the large crowd, the crowd responded: “It’s not every day that a poet is judged!”
As the ripples spread in the waters of public opinion, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Brodsky, the author of such and such poems, turned into an archetypal Poet, judged by the “stupid rabble.” Initially, Brodsky’s defense was organized by people who knew him personally, loved him, and were worried about his fate: Akhmatova and friends closer to Brodsky in age M. V. Ardov, B. B. Bakhtin, Ya. A. Gordin, I. M. Efimov, B.I. Ivanov, A.G. Naiman, E.B. Rein and others, as well as those senior acquaintances among Leningrad writers and philologists who appreciated his talent, primarily those who spoke at the trial of Grudinin and Etkind. Following them, an ever-increasing number of people in Moscow and Leningrad began to become involved in the cause of defending not so much Brodsky as such, but the Poet and the principles of justice. In contrast to the official one, a truly public campaign began. The central figures in it were two women of heroic character - Akhmatova’s devoted friend, writer Lidiya Korneevna Chukovskaya (1907–1996) and Chukovskaya’s close friend, journalist Frida Abramovna Vigdorova (1915–1965). It was they who tirelessly wrote letters in defense of Brodsky to all party and judicial authorities and brought into the case of Brodsky’s defense people who were influential in the Soviet system - composer D. D. Shostakovich and writers S. Ya. Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu. P. German, even the cautious K. A. Fedin and the very official, but ready to help out of respect for Akhmatova A. A. Surkov. Even in the Central Committee of the party they found a hidden but valuable ally - the head of the literature sector I. S. Chernoutsan (1918–1990).
The recording of Brodsky's trial, made by Vigdorova, despite the judge's threats, became a document of enormous significance not only in the fate of Brodsky, but also in the modern political history of Russia. Within a few months, it spread through samizdat, ended up abroad and began to be quoted in the Western press. If before this the name of Brodsky in the West was almost unknown to anyone, then by the end of 1964, especially after “Figaro Litteraire” in France and “Encounter” in England, complete translations of Vigdor’s recording were published. The romantic story of a poet being massacred by evil, stupid bureaucrats, already completely cleared of the details of meager Soviet life and local politics, shocked the imagination of the Western intelligentsia. For those who knew the price of totalitarianism, the trial of Brodsky was yet another confirmation, after the persecution of Pasternak, that freedom of speech in Soviet Russia under Khrushchev was as impossible as under Stalin, and for many people of left-wing convictions, it was the final collapse of trust in the Soviet version of socialism. The French poet Charles Dobrzynski (b. 1929) published an entire poem, “An Open Letter to a Soviet Judge,” in the communist magazine Action poetique in October 1964. This angry philippic (“While the satellites fly to the planets, / In Leningrad they pronounce a sentence on the poet!”, etc.) ended like this:
And in the name of poetry, and in the name of justice,
Without which socialism remains a dead letter,
I challenge you, comrade judge!
The greatest American poet John Berryman (1914–1978) wrote in his poem “The Translator”:
Many poets have worked so hard for
such a small fee
but they were not tried for it [...],
like this young man
who just wanted to walk
along the canals,
talking about poetry and doing it.
In England, a radio dramatization of Brodsky's trial was broadcast on a BBC program.
Sometimes they say that Brodsky owes his worldwide fame not to his poems, but to his process. This is true in the sense that his instant fame in the age of mass media gave him access to a worldwide audience. However, other Russian writers were in a similar position, both before and after Brodsky, but, with the exception of Solzhenitsyn, only Brodsky’s work turned out to be commensurate with the opportunity that opened up. Akhmatova understood the significance of what happened in 1964 for the future fate of her young friend before anyone else: “What a biography, however, they are making for our redhead!” Akhmatova’s joke is based on a common quote from Ilya Selvinsky’s “Notes of a Poet”: “In a distant corner they were beating someone with concentration. / I turned pale: it turns out that this is how it should be - / They are making a biography of the poet Yesenin.”
The young man with his head in the clouds from Berryman's poem appeared in other literary works. Brodsky was a transparent prototype of Gleb Golovanov, an eccentric poet innocently accused of parasitism, one of the main characters in Georgy Berezko’s novel “Extraordinary Muscovites.” The censors, apparently, did not expect a dirty trick from the respectable Soviet prose writer, and the novel appeared in the Moscow magazine in 1967 (No. 6 and 7) and was published as a separate book in the same year. In 1981, Felix Rosiner’s novel “Someone Finkelmeier” was published in London, where the story of the main character also transparently reflected the plot of the Brodsky case. As in the notes of I.M. Metter quoted above (“...his face sometimes expressed confusion because they could not understand him, and he, in turn, was also unable to understand this strange woman, her motiveless malice; he did not able to explain to her even the simplest, in his opinion, concepts"), in these literary, as well as journalistic and oral texts, the image of a poet not of this world was replicated.
The hero of the collectively constructed myth was very far from the real Joseph Brodsky, who by the age of twenty-three had already seen, experienced and thought through a lot. The point was not that Brodsky “did not understand” what was happening to him, but that he deeply understood the cruel absurdity of what was happening, from the point of view of common sense, and at the same time the inevitability of his conflict with the state, despite the fact that that he, as his defenders insisted, did not write any anti-state poetry. His country's government was based on ideology and was thus closer to Plato's totalitarian utopia than to Hobbes's pragmatic Leviathan. There is a well-known passage in the Tenth Book of Plato’s Republic that poets, as madmen disturbing the social order, should be expelled from the ideal state: “[The poet] awakens, nourishes and strengthens the worst side of the soul and destroys its rational principle;<...>he introduces a bad political system into the soul of each individual individual, indulging the unreasonable beginning of the soul...” In 1976, Brodsky will write “Developing Plato,” a poem in which he recalls how the crowd, “raging around, shouted, / poking at me with their strained index fingers : "Not ours!"". Among Vigdorova’s recordings there are also recordings of conversations in the courtroom during a break: “Writers! Get them all out!.. Intellectuals! They have imposed themselves on our necks!.. I will also start an interlinear book and begin to translate poetry!..”
Brodsky was deeply grateful to Frida Vigdorova for her heroic efforts to save him. A photograph of Vigdorova hung above his desk for many years, first in Russia, then in America. A year after the trial, Vigdorova died of cancer. The untimely death of a wonderful woman who saved the real Brodsky made the legend about the conventionally poetic Brodsky, for whom she seemed to sacrifice her life, even more dramatic.
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Joseph Brodsky is a Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright and translator. Considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
He wrote poetry mainly in Russian, essays in English. In 1987, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In this article we will tell you the features of the great poet, whose life was full of all kinds of adventures.
So, in front of you short biography of Joseph Brodsky ().
Biography of Brodsky
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in. His father, Alexander Ivanovich, was a military photojournalist.
After the war, he worked as a reporter and photographer for various publishing houses. Mother, Maria Moiseevna, was an accountant.
Childhood and youth
In the early years of his biography, Joseph Brodsky experienced all the horrors of the siege of Leningrad, during which hundreds of thousands of people died. Their family, like many others, suffered from hunger, cold and other nightmares of war.
In the post-war years, the Brodsky family continued to experience financial difficulties, and therefore Joseph dropped out of school and began working at a factory as a milling machine operator.
Joseph Brodsky in his youthSoon he wanted to become a doctor. To do this, he even got a job in a morgue, but soon the medical career ceased to interest him.
Then Brodsky had to change many professions.
During this period of his biography, he studied continuously, reading in huge quantities. In particular, he really liked poetry and philosophy.
There was even an episode in his life when he, together with like-minded people, wanted to hijack a plane in order to leave the country. However, the idea remained unrealized.
Creative biography of Brodsky
According to Joseph Brodsky himself, he wrote the first poems in his biography at the age of 16.
When Joseph turned 21, he was lucky enough to meet Anna Akhmatova (see), who at that time was experiencing serious harassment from the authorities and many colleagues.
In 1958, Brodsky wrote the poems “Pilgrims” and “Loneliness”, as a result of which he also came under pressure from the authorities. Many publishing houses refused to print his works.
In the winter of 1960, Joseph Brodsky took part in the “Tournament of Poets.” He read his famous poem “The Jewish Cemetery,” which immediately caused a strong reaction in society. He heard a lot of unfair criticism and sarcastic accusations addressed to him.
Every day the situation became more and more tense. As a result, in 1964, the newspaper “Evening Leningrad” published letters from “dissatisfied citizens” who condemned the poet’s work.
A month later, Joseph Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism.
Arrest
The day after he was arrested, Joseph Alexandrovich had a heart attack. He felt very painfully about everything that was happening around him.
During this period of his biography, he wrote the poems “What can I say about life?” and “Hello, My Aging,” in which he shared his emotions with readers.
Free again
Once free, Brodsky continued to hear endless criticism directed at him. At the same time, he broke up with his beloved girlfriend Marina Basmanova, after which his mental state noticeably worsened.
All this led Brodsky to attempt suicide, which fortunately ended in failure.
In 1970, another poem, “Don’t Leave the Room,” came from his pen. It talked about what place a person plays in the political system of the USSR.
Meanwhile, the persecution continued, and in 1972 Brodsky had to make a choice: go to a psychiatric hospital or leave the Soviet Union.
According to the poet, he had once been treated in a mental hospital, where his stay turned out to be much worse than in prison.
As a result, Joseph Brodsky decided to emigrate to, where in 1977 he was granted citizenship.
While abroad, he taught Russian literature at American universities and was also engaged in translation activities. For example, Brodsky translated poetry into English.
In 1987, a significant event occurred in Brodsky’s biography. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
When Brodsky came to power in the USSR, Brodsky’s works began to be published in various magazines, and books with his work began to appear on the shelves of Soviet stores.
Later he was invited to visit the Soviet Union, but the poet was in no hurry to go home.
In many ways, he did not want to be in the spotlight and communicate with the press. His emotional experiences associated with returning to his homeland were reflected in the poems “Letter to the Oasis” and “Ithaca.”
Personal life
In 1962, Joseph Brodsky met Marina Basmanova, with whom he immediately fell in love. As a result, they began to cohabit, and in 1968 their boy Andrei was born.
It seemed that the child would only strengthen their relationship, but everything turned out quite the opposite. The couple separated that same year.
In 1990, Brodsky met Maria Sozzani. She was an intelligent girl with Russian roots on her mother's side. The poet began to court her and soon they got married. In this marriage they had a girl, Anna.
Brodsky with his wife Maria Sozzani and son
An interesting fact is that all his life Joseph Brodsky was a heavy smoker, as a result of which he had serious health problems.
He had to undergo 4 heart surgeries, but he was never able to quit his bad habit. When the doctors once again encouraged him to quit smoking, he uttered the following phrase: “Life is wonderful precisely because there are no guarantees, none ever.”
In many photographs, Joseph Brodsky can be seen with various people, whom he simply adored. In his opinion, these animals did not have a single ugly movement.
It is also worth noting that Joseph Brodsky was friends with, who was also a disgraced Soviet writer and lived in exile.
Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Vysotsky
Even more interesting is that the great Russian treated Brodsky with respect, and even tenderness. Here it is appropriate to quote Mikhail Shemyakin, Vysotsky’s closest friend (see):
“In New York, Volodya (Vysotsky) met Brodsky, who gave him a collection of his poems with a dedication: “To the great Russian poet Vladimir Vysotsky.” It should be noted that Volodya had a strong complex due to the fact that recognized Soviet poets treated his poems condescendingly, declaring that it was bad taste to rhyme “sticking out” and “screaming.” Volodya did not let go of the book given by Brodsky for a week: “Mish, look again, Joseph called me a great poet!”
Shortly before his death, Brodsky and his partners opened the Russian Samovar restaurant. Soon the institution became one of the cultural centers of Russian emigration in.
Death
Brodsky had heart problems even before leaving the USSR. At the age of 38, he underwent his first heart surgery in the United States.
At the same time, the American hospital sent an official letter to the Soviet Union with a request to allow the poet’s parents to come to care for their son. The parents themselves tried more than 10 times to get permission to leave for America, but this did not give any results.
During the biography period 1964-1994. Joseph Brodsky suffered 4 heart attacks. On the eve of his death, he was working as usual in his office, which was located on the second floor of the house.
When his wife decided to go see him in the morning, she found him already dead, lying on the floor.
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky died on January 28, 1996 at the age of 55. The cause of death was the fifth heart attack. He never got to see his parents.
An interesting fact is that a couple of weeks before his death, Brodsky acquired a place for himself in a cemetery not far from Broadway. He was buried there.
However, six months later Brodsky’s body was reburied in the San Michele cemetery. Joseph loved Venice most of all during his lifetime, not counting St. Petersburg.
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