Brodsky on his balcony at Muruzi House (date unknown) / Image courtesy of brodskymuseum.com
If Joseph Brodsky were still alive, he would have turned
seventy-five on Sunday, May 24th, so the web has been awash with Brodskiana. Everybody
and his brother, it seems, have got something to say about the man. Me too: I
wanted to post something in his honor on the jubilant day itself, but at the
time—unfortunately yet quite appropriately—I was hard at work on my Brodsky
contribution to a new volume entitled American Writers in Exile. (To learn how he fits into that category, read my essay
when the book comes out.)
First off, in the biggest news, it looks as though the
Brodsky apartment museum in Saint Petersburg is finally opening after years of fundraising,
bureaucratic hoop-jumping, negotiations, and logistical troubles (including a battle
against 32 types of mold). This is the space that Brodsky wrote about in his
essay “In a Room and a Half,” located in the Muruzi House at the intersection
of Liteyny Prospect and Pestel Street, where he lived with his parents for
almost two decades. Tatyana Voltskaya notes that the famous room and
a half was open last month, fittingly, for a day and a half: several hours for journalists
on May 22, plus a full day for the birthday festivities on May 24. Now it’s closed again, with plans to reopen for good after renovations wrap up sometime
this winter. The museum doesn’t have much of a web presence yet, especially in
English, but when the apartment finally opens and stays open, it should
obviously land at the top of the must-do list for all Brodsky enthusiasts. I
certainly plan to visit the next time I’m in Petersburg.
Back in April, another domicile-museum opened in the
village of Norinskaya (or Norenskaya), in the Arkhangelsk region, where Brodsky served out his
internal exile in 1964 and 1965 for “social parasitism”—that is, freeloading (тунеядство). During his time there,
he wrote and translated poems, published occasionally in the local paper («Призыв»), and worked on a collective
farm. Ironically, Brodsky later called it one of the happiest times of his
life. The museum is situated inside a peasant house formerly owned by the
Pesterev family, with whom Brodsky stayed during his sentence. According to
Lenta.ru, the exhibit includes “things that Brodsky used: a chair, a table, a
couch, a kerosene lamp, a tank for developing photographs, and the plywood
cover from a package sent to Brodsky by his father in Leningrad, which was
found during the restoration of the house.”
Interestingly, both new museums have met with
opposition from a certain hyperpatriotic element in the Russian crowd, despite the poet’s
growing popularity of late. (Just last month, in fact, Alexander Genis and
Solomon Volkov were discussing Brodsky’s transformation from “esoteric” to
“popular” poet in Russia.) In Norinskaya, a group of locals balked at the
five-million ruble price tag and filed a suit demanding that the museum be
closed and the regional governor be punished for supporting it:
[Brodsky] was exiled to our region
for social parasitism. But instead of thanking the leadership of the USSR for
his early release, he emigrated to the U.S., took a passport there under the
name ‘Joseph Brodsky’ [spelled Джозеф Бродски, as opposed to Иосиф Бродский], and began
to slander the Soviet people.
The suit also asks for a hundred thousand rubles in
compensation for the “moral harm” the plaintiffs experienced. This whole
episode reminds me of an article I posted about a few years ago, when another Norinskaya
resident and loyal communist said the following:
And just who is Brodsky? A
parasite, a freeloader! … How could they have given him the Lenin Prize, that
lazy good-for-nothing?! … He was a smart bastard. But Russia is a fool! Gave
him a prize… America, America! He’s a leech, and they put up a fucking plaque
for him!
The two gentlemen quoted above are indeed different people,
but they’re clearly kindred spirits.
