 |
Специальные ежемесячные бизнес-журналы для руководителей крупных предприятий России и СНГ
|
 |
Окна из алюминия в Севастополе — это новые возможности при остеклении больших площадей и сложных форм. Читайте отзывы. Так же рекомендуем завод Горницу.
Страницы сайта поэта Иосифа Бродского (1940-1996)
Источник: http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/joseph_brodsky
Куцые биографии, некрологи
(местами - интересно)
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - Josip Aleksandrovich Brodsky - Iosif Brodskii Russian-born poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.
After moving to the United States Brodsky wrote his poems in Russian and his
prose works in English. As a poet Brodsky was largely traditional and classical.
He dealt with moral, religious and historical themes, and often used mythological allusions.
"The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence--or, as my beloved
Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease
to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and
in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man,
but because it is more capable of mutation." (from Nobel Lecture, 1987)
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father was a
photographer, but the family lived mostly on his mother's income. Brodsky studied
at schools in Leningrad to the age of 15. He then dropped out of school and first
went to work at the Arsenal defense plant. Between 1956 and 1962, he had some thirteen different jobs.
In the essay 'Less Than One' Brodsky tells that he began to despise Lenin already
when he was in the first grade - "not so much because of his political philosophy
or practice, about which at the age of seven I knew very little, but because
of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall,
postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages
of his life." Everyone in his class knew that he was a Jew, but "seven-year-old boys don't
make good anti-Semites," he later said. From the library of his uncle, who was a member
of the Party, Brodsky found an illustrated, pre-revolutionary edition of Man and Woman,
his first taste of the forbidden fruit. At the age of fourteen Brodsky applied for
admission to a submarine academy, but because he was a Jew, he did not get in.
After Nikita Khrushchev speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956, in which he
unmasked the cult of personality and condemned the Stalinist encesses, a period
of "thaw" occurred in the Soviet Union. Although Khrushchev soon tried to close
dissident voices, new ideas managed to emerge in literature and other cultural
fields. Brodsky started to write poetry from the late 1950s, earning a reputation
as a free thinking writer. He taught himself Polish so that he could read poetry
that had never been translated into Russian. Brodsky also demonstrated considerable
talent in rendering Russian translations of Donne and Marvell, and he read such
Western authors as Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner through Polish translations.
In the 1960s, he also translated 'Yellow Submarine' by The Beatles into Russian.
As a young man, Brodsky worked at many occupations, including a milling machine operator,
stoker, and geologist-prospector. His output as a freelance poet and self-taught translator
did not gain the approval of the authorities, although he never directly criticized the government.
His poetry appeared in samizdat (clandestine circulation) editions but was widely read.
Brodsky's reputation made him a target for the secret police and he was convicted as a 'social parasite'.
When the judge asked, "And who recognized that you are a poet? Who listed you among poets?" the
poet replied according to Frida Vigdorova, a journalist, "No one. (Dispassionately.) Who listed
me a member of the human race?" Brodsky was sent to a mental institution, where he was wrapped
in cold, wet sheets, a "cure" familiar from Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik.
Among those, who rose to Brodsky's defense and called the trial illegal, was the composer Dmitri
Shostakovich. Brodsky spent some time in Kresty, the most famous prison in the Soviet Union.
In the official record he was characterized to be 'less than one'. It became the title for
Brodsky's collection of essays, which was published in 1986. Brodsky was sentenced to five
years of hard labour, but the sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by such prominent
cultural figures as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the poet Anna Akhmatova,
the anti-Stalinist icon, who was his close friend. They first met in 1961 at her dacha in Komarovo.
During Brodsky's time in prison a collection of his poems, STIKHOTVORENIYA I POEMY,
was issued in 1965 by an American publisher. In 1972 Brodsky was forced to exile from
the USSR. He never saw his parents, and he was separated from his his four-year-old son,
Andrei, whose mother was the artist Marianna Basmanova. His love poems, dedicated to her,
Brodsky collected in NOVYJE STANSY K AVGUSTE (1983).
With his suitcase, made in China, Brodsky first went to Vienna, where he was helped by the poet
W. H. Auden, and finally he emigrated to the United States. There he worked as a visiting
professor at several universities, including the University of Michigan, Queen College,
City University of New York, Columbia University, New York University, Smith College,
Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College. In 1977 he became a U.S.
citizen and in 1991-92 he was America's Poet Laureate. He was a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, but resigned in protest over the honorary membership of the
Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko in 1987 - he considered Evtushenko a party yes-man.
Brodsky died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996, in New York. He was married to
Maria Sozzani, he also had a son with Maria Basmanova. Brodsky's parents were not
allowed to travel to the West to see him and they died in Leningrad.
In his essays about his parents in Less Than One (1986) the author explained:
''I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom:
the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this.
I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under 'a foreign
code of conscience,' I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements.
This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better
escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian.''
Like several dissident Russian poets, Brodsky intended his verse for recital rather
than for silent reading. Existential problems are dealt in such poems as 'Isaak i
Avraam' (1963), which was based on the Old Testament story, and 'Gorbunov i Gorchakov'
(1965-68), in which Brodsky fills a madhouse conversation of two patients with references
to literature and history. Later works reflected the poet's idea of the coming of a
post-Christian era, during which the antagonism between good and evil is replaced by moral
ambiguity. Other favorite themes were loss, suffering, exile, and old age. In his new home
country Brodsky did not feel complete secure - disturbing visions penetrated into his mind
even in peaceful Cape Cod: "in formal opposition, near and far, / lined up like print in a
book about to close, / armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows / and cities all went
dark as caviar." (from Lullaby of Cape Cod, 1975) He also recognized in the work of Robert
Frost tones darker than his image as the "folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer"
would suggest.
"Still, if sins are forgiven,
that is, if souls break even
with flesh elsewhere, this joint,
too, must be enjoyed
as afterlife's sweet parlor
where, in the clouded squalor,
saints and the ain'ts take five,
where I was first to arrive."
(from 'Cafe Trieste: San Franciso', to L.G.)
As an essayist Brodsky started in the 1970s, writing first in Russian, but
he soon switched to English. Brodsky became a regular contributor to the New
York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The Times Literary Supplement.
He wrote mostly about literature, evaluating Auden as 'the greatest mind of
the twentieth century' and Osip Mandelshtam 'a poet of and for civilization.'.
Language was for him a vehicle of civilization, superior to history, living
longer than any state. Poems are a vehicle to restructure time - poets should keep
language alive ''in the light of conscience and culture.'' Brodsky finished in his
lifetime two collections of essays. Less Than One explored the works of Marina Tsvetayeva,
Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Auden, Derek Walcott, C.P. Cavafy, and Eugenio Montale.
On Grief and Reason (1995) includes tributes to his favorite poets Frost, Hardy, and Rainer
Maria Rilke. In one essay Brodsky notes that after the Great Patriotic War theatres showed
Hollywood films - war booty from Germany - and that Tarzan films influenced the dissolving
of the Stalin cult more than Nikita Khrushchev's speeches.
1 2 3 4 5 pearl bunin camus canetti carducci camilocela churchill
web domain hosting
http://www.cheapwebdomainhosting.com/01234ydx.htm
Joseph Brodsk
Joseph Brodsky Biography
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987
y was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen.
Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice
of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile
in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years
in exile at hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967,
but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator
and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the
Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages.
Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973),
and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with
a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated
in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag;
and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
published Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country.
After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been
Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens
College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England.
He currently is Five College Professor of Literature OnlineCreditReport Health
OnlinePharmacies HealthInsurance Diet at Mount Holyoke
College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at
Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's award for his works of "genius".
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr.
Brodsky's essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's
Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania,
and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1987, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation],
Stockholm, 1988
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later
published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information
is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this
document, always state the source as shown above.
Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1987
http://www.geocities.com/nobel123za/Joseph-Brodsky.html
Joseph Brodsky
Encyclop?dia Britannica Article
Page 1 of 1
born May 24, 1940, Leningrad [now Saint Petersburg], Russia, U.S.S.R.
died Jan. 28, 1996, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Joseph Brodsky.
Peter Skingley-Reuters/Copyright Archive Photos
original Russian name Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky Russian-born American
poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.
Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry
while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation
in the Leningrad literary scene, but his independent spirit and his irregular
work record led to his being charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet
authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labour.
The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested it.
Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States,
becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet-in-residence intermittently
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1972 to 1980 and was a visiting professor
at other schools. He served as poet laureate of the United States in 1991–92.
Brodsky's poetry addresses personal themes and treats in a powerful, meditative
fashion the universal concerns of life, death, and the meaning of existence.
His earlier works, written in Russian, include Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (1965;
“Verses and Poems”) and Ostanovka v pustyne (1970; “A Halt in the Wasteland”);
these and other works were translated by George L. Kline in Selected Poems (1973),
which includes the notable “Elegy for John Donne.” His major works, in Russian and English,
include the poetry collections A Part of Speech (1980), History of the Twentieth Century (1986),
and To Urania (1988) and the essays in Less Than One (1986).
Additional Reading
Critical studies on Brodsky include Valentina Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky:
A Poet for Our Time (1989); Lev Loseff (Lev Losev) and Valentina Polukhina (eds.),
Brodsky's Poetics and Aesthetics (1990), which includes a translation of his Nobel
Prize speech; and David M. Bethea, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (1994).
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9016576/Joseph-Brodsky
Publish, be read, and get paid. Start writing poems instantly!
www.blogit.com/
Free Poetry Contests
Dozens of poetry contests-inc. free entry and new ones by email daily!
www.firstwriter.com
Online Library Biography
70,000+ Books and Journal Articles Save hours on your research papers
www.questia.com
Joseph Brodsky (1940 - 1996)
Enlarge Picture
View Joseph Brodsky:
Poems
Quotes
Biography
Books
BRODSKY, Joseph (1940-96), Russian-born poet and Nobel laureate,
born in Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad). Deeply influenced
by Russian and English literature, he began writing poetry in his late
teens and became a protege of Anna Akhmatova. He was denounced
in the Soviet press in 1963. Arrested and tried as a "parasite"
by the Soviet government in 1964, he was sentenced to five years
in a labor camp but was released after less than two years because of international protests.
Exp..
BRODSKY, Joseph (1940-96), Russian-born poet and Nobel laureate, born
in Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad). Deeply influenced
by Russian and English literature, he began writing poetry in his late teens
and became a protege of Anna Akhmatova. He was denounced in the Soviet press
in 1963. Arrested and tried as a "parasite" by the Soviet government in 1964,
he was sentenced to five years in a labor camp but was released after less
than two years because of international protests.
Expelled from the USSR in 1972, Brodsky settled in the U.S. and became a U.S.
citizen in 1977. Writing in both Russian and English, his books of poetry include
A Part of Speech (1980) and To Urania (1988); Watermark (1992) is a book of prose
(a long essay on Venice). He has published two plays, Democracy! and Marbles.
Less Than One (1986), a collection of essays, won a National Book Critics Circle
award for criticism and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award.
His poetry has been published in twelve languages. In 1987 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in literature. He was chosen by the Library of Congress
to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1992. Joseph Brodsky was
Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, and resided in New York.
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/joseph_brodsky/biography
Joseph Brodsky Quotes
Back to Poet Page"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."
"After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well.
So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life."
"Bad literature is a form of treason."
"Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."
"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment.
Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."
"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."
"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."
"I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement,
that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that
he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside."
"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."
"It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system
of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union.
I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot."
"Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse."
"Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play
it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book.
Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose."
"Man is what he reads."
"No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home.
No matter how you lived there-well or poorly."
"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."
"Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?"
"Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony,
but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.""
"The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed."
"The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie."
"This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising."
"Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except
perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets."
"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence."
"Who included me among the ranks of the human race?"
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/joseph_brodsky/quotesJoseph Brodsky 1940-1996
original Russian name IOSIP ALEKSANDROVICH BRODSKY (b. May 24, 1940,
Leningrad [now Saint Petersburg Russia, U.S.S.R.--d. Jan. 28, 1996, New York, N.Y., U.S.),
Russian-born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.
Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a
wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the Leningrad litprominent
Soviet rape sex stories brutal sex forced sex rape story young rape storie illegal
rape page how to rape young girls lesbian rape torture sex forced oral rape fantasy
real rape Slave stories about date rape stories sex brutal rape female stories of
rape sex rape lesbi sex slave waitress rape fantasy storyliterary figures protested it.
Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States,
becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977. He
was a poet-in-residence intermittently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
from 1972 to 1980 and was a visiting professor at other schools. He served as poet
laureate of the United States in 1991-92.
Brodsky's poetry addresses personal themes and treats in a powerful, meditative
fashion the universal concerns of life, death, and the meaning of existence.
His earlier works, written in Russian, include Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (1965;
"Verses and Poems") and Ostanovka v pustyne (1970; "A Halt in the Wasteland");
these and other works were translated by George L. Kline in Selected Poems (1973),
which includesthe notable "Elegy for John Donne." His major works, in Russian and English,
include the poetry collections A Part of Speech (1980), History of the Twentieth Century (1986),
and To Urania (1988) and the essays in Less Than One (1986).
Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996
Bosnia Tune
Joseph Brorape sex stories brutal sex forced sex rape story young rape
storie illegal rape page how to rape young girls lesbian rape torture sex
forced oral rape fantasy real rape Slave stories about date rape stories sex
brutal rape female stories of rape sex rape lesbi sex slave waitress rape fantasy storydsky (1940-1996),
American poet of the Russian-Jewish origin,
Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1987.
As you pour yourself a scotch,
crush a roach, or check your watch,
as your hand adjusts your tie,
people die.
In the towns with funny names,
hit by bullets, cought in flames,
by and l arge not knowing why,
people die.
In small places you don't know
of, yet big for having no
chance to scream or say good-bye,
people die.
People die as you elect
new apostles of neglect,
self-restraint, etc. - whereby
people die.
Too far off to practice love
for thy neighbor/brother Slav,
where your cherubds dread to fly,
people die.
While the statuon, history
for its fuel tends to buy
those who die.
As you watch the athletes score,
check your latest statement, or
sing your child a lullaby,
people die.
Timee, whose sharp blood-thirsty quill
parts the killed from those who kill,
will pronounce the latter tribe
as your tribe.
http://www.geocities.com/themetrand/brodsky2/
Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996
Biography
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen.
Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation.
From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exrape sex stories brutal sex
forced sex rape story young rape storie illegal rape page how to rape young girls
lesbian rape torture sex forced oral rape fantasy real rape Slave stories about date
rape stories sex brutal rape female stories of rape sex rape lesbi sex slave waitress
rape fantasy storyile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced
to five years in exile at hard labor for "social
parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967,
but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator
and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets,
and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into
at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky : Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books
in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L.Kline
and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated
in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and
an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published
Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country.
After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been
Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College,
Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He functioned
as Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was
awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979,
he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's
award for his works of "genius".
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr.Brodsky's
essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania,
and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
He received the Nobel Prize in 1987.
Joseph Brodsky died in 1996.
http://www.geocities.com/themetrand/brodsky3/Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996
Joseph Brodsky was a great part of speech
by Jeffrey Gantz
I was never introduced to Joseph Brodsky, and my one memory of the Nobel Prize winner, who died last week of heart failure, at the age of 55, is a little offbeat. It was a few years ago, in Sanders Theatre, at a Poets Theatre evening celebrating the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova: Brodsky with his eyes barely open, not reading, not even reciting, but invoking, as if in a vatic trance, her spirit. It was inexorable; it was incessant; and at the arrival of intermission, I heard a woman's voice behind me opining, "Slishkom mnogo Brodskogo" -- "Too much Brodsky."
She was right, in a way -- too much Brodsky, not enough Akhmatova. Yet if you're a great poet, it can never be too much. And Brodsky was a great poet. America saw him at his most comfortable and well-cared-for, probably at his happiest, but never at his poetic best. The search for meaning -- and for a home -- galvanized his first three Russian volumes: A Halt in the Desert, The End of a Beautiful Era, and A Part of Speech; once he arrived in the US and achieved celebrity status, he became a public figure cut off from his sources of inspiration.
But those first three! Much of A Halt in the Desert was translated by George Kline in Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1973; now regrettably out of print) -- including the monumental "Great Elegy for John Donne":
John Donne has sunk in sleep . . . All things beside
are sleeping too: walls, bed and floor -- all sleep.
The table, pictures, carpets, hooks and bolts,
clothes-closets, cupboards, candles, curtains -- all
now sleep: the washbowl, bottle, tumbler, bread,
breadknife and china, crystal, pots and pans,
bed-sheets and nightlamp, chests of drawers, a clock,
a mirror, stairway, doors . . .
Here he's invoking the voluminosity of things in an attempt to fill the void left by the poet's sleep/death. This search for solids -- what Czeslaw Milosz called "man against space and time" -- persists into the next two books, as Brodsky struggles against the two-dimensionality of his own aesthetic. Many of these poems are translated in A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), which has as much to offer as any collection this side of Eliot's Four Quartets. No one should be without it.
Brodsky was writing on the run: A Part of Speech leaves Russia, glances back nostalgically at Imperial Rome and the Greece of Homer, touches down at Ann Arbor, goes on to Venice, Mexico, Chelsea (in London), Cape Cod, Munich, Florence, England, Venice again. Its jacket displays the lion of St. Mark over an old map of the Venetian lagoon, and indeed floating, cosmopolitan Venice is an apt metaphor for the poet's own rootless denationalized state. "Countries get snared in maps, never shake free/of their net of latitudes," he tells us, and so the jacket itself becomes a metaphor, an anticipation of the Yalta peninsula's melting away from life and "returning to the boundaries/of which our maps incessantly remind us."
But this book's defining metaphor is embodied -- literally -- in its innocent-looking title. For Brodsky, to be human is to be a part of speech; he's looking for the language we're part of. So we get plotted against a paradigmatic/vertical axis (the Word as God) but also against a syntagmatic/horizontal one (since a part of speech cannot function in isolation). The vertical continuum is explicit in "December 24, 1971" ("both a newborn and Spirit that's Holy/in your self you discover"), implicit in "A Christmas Ballad," "1 January 1965," "Anno Domini," "A second Christmas by the shore," and "Nunc Dimittis." Yet sometimes we're disconnected: in "The Thames at Chelsea" the "colorless, vile chirp" of a busy signal is "clearer than God's own voice."
Along the horizontal axis, too, loneliness is pandemic. Brodsky remembers his birthplace as a region where "Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack./A glance is accustomed to no glance back"; later he identifies solitude as "the essence of all things." Many poems haunt the provinces, the periphery, where "The dreams you dream are not of girls half nude/but of your name on an arriving letter"; they seem suspended, all windows and seashores and evenings (there are 10 evenings for every dawn in this book). "San Pietro," the final poem, takes us back to Venice, in twilight, in fog. The poet kicks a tin can and waits for it to hit sand -- or water. At the end he's still waiting.
A Part of Speech runs riot with kaleidoscopic color and surreal energy: silence staring at a parrot; the universe and a Venetian pension sailing side by side into Christmas. "Lullaby of Cape Cod" begins with cicadas falling "silent over some empty lawn" and the tinkle of Ray Charles's piano from the radio of a patrol car; it ends with a school of cod coming one by one to the door and asking for a drink. Still, not even the "queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness" can buckle Brodrape sex stories brutal sex forced sex rape story young rape storie illegal rape page how to rape young girls lesbian rape torture sex forced oral rape fantasy real rape Slave stories about date rape stories sex brutal rape female stories of rape sex rape lesbi sex slave waitress rape fantasy storysky:
"When it's Christmas," he tells us, "we're all of us magi." And with this book he brings us a priceless gift.
hits inspector - free web counter
http://www.geocities.com/themetrand/brodsky4/
Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996
On July 9, 1972, Joseph Brodsky came to Ann Arbor to take up a teaching position at the University of Michigan. He had been deported from the USSR barely a month earlier. This past November, members of the University faculty as well as visiting speakers gathered in Ann Arbor for a Commemorative Conference in his honor. The conference organizers had invited the poet, himself, and he agreed to attend. Joseph Brodsky, however, died at his home in Brooklyn, New York, on January 28, 1996. The conference took place on November 7-9, under the collaborative sponsorship of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Special Collections Library of the Graduate Library, and with funding from several University sources and leadership grant from Irwin T. Holtzman. Concurrent with the conference was an exhibition of materials about Brodsky's life and work from the private collection of Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman, at the Special Collections Library.
Joseph Brodsky was an exceptional man, one with strong connections to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. He dropped out of high school at age 15, and the first degree he received was an honorary doctorate. He was promoted to a tenured professorship at the University without being formally nominated; and after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, he became the first foreign-born citizen to be appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, serving from 1991 to 1992. In this capacity he followed in the footsteps of an American poet whom he revered — Robert Frost, who had taught at Michigan some five decades earlier.
Brodsky arrived in An n Arbor in 1972 — at thirty-two, already a highly esteemed Russian poet, though one officially blacklisted by the Brezhnev regime — to become poet-in-residence at the U-M. How did he manage to land in Ann Arbor so soon after being forced to leave his native country? What brought him to the University?
The crucial link between Brodsky and the U-M was the late Carl R. Proffer, professor of Russian Literature. Proffer and his wife Ellendea were co-founders of Ardis Press, which had published a number of Brodsky's works. He happened to be in Leningrad visiting Brodsky in May, 1972, when the poet received notification from the authorities that he was being issued an exit visa for emigration to Israel. After responding that he was not interested in leaving his native land and culture, Brodsky was warned that the coming winter would be very cold — a threat that was not lost on a man who had been convicted of quot;social parasitism" for living on his poetry and had served a stretch in exile working on a collective farm in the Russian far north. He decided to discuss the matter with his American friend, and Proffer, in his optimistic way, told Brodsky that he could come and teach in Ann Arbor. Brodsky accepted the idea, and Proffer contacted Benjamin Stolz, who at the time chaired the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. After receiving authorization to hire Brodsky, Stolz obtained an immigration visa personally approved by William Rogers, Secretary of State, and flew to Chicago to get a federal work permit.
Brodsky began teaching for the first time in his life in September, 1972 — a daunting assignment for anyone, but especially for a young man who had dropped out of high school at fifteen, even if he was accustomed to declaiming his poetry to large groups of admirers. He asked Stolz how he should teach his courses, one of which was a course in Russian titled "Russian Poetry" and other, in English, titled "World Poetry." Stolz replied, "Joseph, they're your courses, teach them the way you want to, you're the expert, " — a piece of advice that Brodsky didn't need but never forgot. Brodsky was an inspiring and unorthodox teacher, who combined significant demands on his students — he insisted that a person who was serious about poetry must know at least 1,000 lines by heart — with a sense of the absurd. He was known, upon listening intently to a long theoretical exposition from a graduate student, to respond with a concise "meow." His presence at the University offered the chance, in the words of a former student, to experience the dynamics of the poet's perspective and his relationship to language.
Brodsky remained on the Slavic Department staff until 1981, though he frequently visited at other colleges and universities during the 1970s. During this time, he rose from lecturer to tenured professor ( the latter rank was bestowed upon him by Billy Fry, without the bother of a formal recommendation or review, following Brodsky's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). In 1981 he left the U-M and began to split his time between New York City and Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts.
During his time at the University, Brodsky gave a number of poetry readings to large audiences. In March, 1984, he returned to take part in a panel discussion featuring emigre Russian writers and artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, who gathered to honor Carl Proffer, by that time fatally ill. He gave another poetry reading here in December, 1988, when he received an honorary doctorate and delivered the commencement address (published in his volume of essays On Grief and Reason as "At the Stadium.") His last poetry reading in Ann Arbor was in October, 1992, when he attended the Slavic Department's fortieth anniversary reunion.
Brodsky's Poetry
During the second half of this century, Joseph Brodsky was the most remarkable poet in a culture rich with poetic talent and achievement. But perhaps he was even more remarkable for transcending that very culture at a time when it had, largely through both accident and design of totalitarianism, become more introverted than ever before. While most of Brodsky's generation devoted itself to the meticulous archaeology of recovering the literature that thrived first before and then in defiance of Stalinism, Brodsky combined that project with an international eclecticism which was part of a sophisticated literary world view long before he found himself beyond the boundaries of his motherland. His poetry precisely articulated the point of view of the educated Homo sovieticus, whose savage irony was the last bastion against despair, while equally brilliantly presenting the totally original discoveries in language, imagery and wit of a master-poet. Manipulating the classical language, forms of Russian verse, and their multiple connotations, Brodsky mixed high and low registers to create a stylistic dissonance which was all the more powerful when contained within familiar verse forms. His penchant for the witty aphorism and for the radical deflation of cultural cliche has given Russian language many memorable lines.
Brodsky's poetic oeuvre is large and extraordinarily diverse — indeed, he was a poet of staggering energy. Abroad he applied that energy to the creation of an even greater literary self (one critic has called him an "intellectual conquistador"). In America he became a brilliant essayist, often writing separate and markedly different versions of the same essay in Russian and English. And quite unlike most all of his contemporaries in Russian literature (wherever they might reside), he was constantly delighting in new literary territories, well beyond the boundaries of his native language and culture. He even wrote original and often very successful poetry in the language of his host country, and many of his auto-translations convey superbly the unique flavor of his Russian verse.
Although for many years his poetry could reach Russia only by underground and illegal means, his influence was such that it has been said that no one could write in a style or genre approaching his manner or on his favorite topics without being derivative. In particular, his restatement of the myth and idea of his native city, St. Petersburg, has had enormous power, and has locrape sex stories brutal sex forced sex rape story young rape storie illegal rape page how to rape young girls lesbian rape torture sex forced oral rape fantasy real rape Slave stories about date rape stories sex brutal rape female stories of rape sex rape lesbi sex slave waitress rape fantasy storyated Brodsky unambiguously among that city's literary greats, from Pushkin to Mandelstam.
http://www.geocities.com/themetrand/brodsky5/
Joseph Brodsky (1940 - 1996)
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992.
Brodsky was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg to a family of a Jewish photographer. In the early childhood he survived the Siege of Leningrad. When he was fifteen, after the eighth grade, Brodsky left school. He worked at a wide variety of jobs, including a hospital, a morgue, a factory, a ship boiler room, and a geological expedition.
Brodsky taught himself English and Polish, acquired deep interest in classical philosophy, religion, mythology, English and American poetry and began writing poetry in 1958. He had no degree in the liberal arts. Later in life he admitted that he picked up books from anywhere he could find them, including even garbage dumps. The young Brodsky was encouraged and influenced by the poet Anna Akhmatova who called some of his verses "enchanting".
In 1963 he was charged with social parasitism by the Soviet authorities. A famous excerpt from the transcript of his trial (smuggled to the West):
Judge: "Who has decided that you're a poet? Who has ranked you as a poet? Have you studied poetry at an institution? Have you prepared for a university course where you're taught to write poetry?"
Brodsky: "I don't think poetry comes from an education."
Judge: "Well then, where does it come from?"
Brodsky: "I think that it comes from God."
For his parasitism Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labor in internal exile and served 18 months in Archangelsk region. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested.
As the 1960s Khrushchev Thaw period ended, only four of his poems were published in the Soviet Union. Most of his work has appeared only in the West. On June 4, 1972 Brodsky was exiled and became a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He achieved major successes in his career as an English language poet.
Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York City and was buried at Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy.
\
http://www.ztonews.com/brodsky4/Joseph Brodsky
(1940 - 1996)
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's award for his works of "genius".
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr. Brodsky's essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark. ..
http://ztonews.skynetask.com/Brodsky3/
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs working in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around.
I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad." He studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and, after his exile, moved to America, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. There, according to his fellow poet Seamus Heaney, he lived "frugally, industriously, and in a certain amount of solitude."
Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973.
In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught for fifteen years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American culture, "as ubiquitous," in Brodsky's words, "as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves." Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment.
http://www.ztonews.com/Brodsky2/
Joseph Brodsky biography
Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born Iosip Aleksandrovich brodsky, in Leningrad, Russia. His father was a photographer.
Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky, in Leningrad, Russia. His father was a photographer. He left school when he was 15 and began writing poetry. In 1964 he was sentenced to five years in prison for "social parasitism." He was put in Kresty, a famous Soviet prison, before his sentence was commuted. He was exiled from the U.S.S.R. in 1972, and he went to the United States, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1977. In the U.S. he worked as a visiting professor at several colleges and universities. He also became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Partisan Review and The Times Literary Supplement.
Brodsky first wrote his poetry in Russian, but he later switched to English. His first collection, Bolshaja Elegua Dzonu Donnu, was published when he was 23 years old. He was named poet laureate of the United States in 1991.
Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York in 1996.
CHRONOLOGY
1940 He was born in Leningrad, Russia. (May 24)
1963 Bolshaja Elegija Dzonu Donnu
1964 He was sentenced to five years of hard labor by the Soviet authorities for "social parasitism."
1965 Stikhotvoreniya I Poemy (Short and long poems)
1970 Ostanocka V Pustyne (A Halt in the Wilderness)
1972 He was exiled from the Soviet Union.; He became a poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
1973 Debut, Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems
1977 Tshast Retshi, V Anglii, Konets Prekrasnok Epohi (The End of a Lovely Era); He became a United States citizen.
1979 A Part of Speech; He was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1981 He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant.
1983 Novyje Stansy K Avguste
1984 Mramor (Marbles)
1986 History of the Twentieth Century, Less Than One
1987 Uraniia (To Urania); He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.; He resigned his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1991 He was poet laureate of the United States.
1992 Sochineniia, Watermark
1995 On Grief and Reason
1996 He died in New York, New York. (January 26)
http://writer.eshire.net/brodsky/
Иосиф Александрович Бродский
Родился 24 мая 1940 г. в Ленинграде. Отец, Александр Иванович Бродский (1903-1984),
был профессиональным фотографом, во время войны – военным корреспондентом
на Ленинградском фронте, после войны служил на флоте (капитан 3-го ранга);
мать, Мария Моисеевна Вольперт (1905-1983), во время войны – переводчик,
после войны работала бухгалтером.
1955 – Бродский, не закончив школу (ушел из 8 класса), поступает работать
на военный завод фрезеровщиком, занимается самообразованием.
Задумав стать хирургом, начинает работать помощником прозектора в морге госпиталя тюрьмы «Кресты».
1956 – начинает писать стихи.
Работает фрезеровщиком, техником-геофизиком (география – Якутия, Тянь-Шань,
Казахстан, Беломорское побережье), санитаром, кочегаром, фотографом,
при этом постоянно пишет стихи и занимается поэтическими переводами.
1961 – знакомство Бродского с Анной Ахматовой, оказавшей на него значительное влияние.
1962 – в детском журнале "Костёр" появляется первая публикация Бродского –
стихотворение "Баллада о маленьком буксире".
1963 – в газете «Вечерний Ленинград» за подписью А.Ионина, Я.Лернера,
М.Медведева опубликован пасквиль на Бродского «Окололитературный трутень».
В конце статьи содержался прямой призыв к органам оградить Ленинград и ленинградцев
от опасного трутня. Оставаться в Ленинграде Бродскому становится опасно; во избежание
ареста друзья в декабре 1963 г. увозят поэта в Москву.
1964 – вскоре после возвращения Иосифа Бродского в Ленинград его арестовывают на улице.
После первого закрытого судебного разбирательства в районном суде поэт помещен в судебную
психбольницу («психушку»), «где три недели подвергался издевательским экспериментам,
но был признан психически здоровым и трудоспособным» (Л.Штерн). Вскоре состоялся второй суд,
на котором Бродский официально обвинен в тунеядстве. Суд приговаривает его к пятилетней ссылке.
Ссылку поэт отбывает в Коношском районе Архангельской области, в деревне Норинской.
1965 – под давлением мировой общественности, решением Верховного суда РСФСР срок
высылки сокращен до фактически отбытого (1 год, 5 месяцев). В этом же году в
Нью-Йорке выходит первая книга Иосифа Бродского на русском языке «Стихотворения и поэмы».
В период ссылки им написаны такие известные стихотворения, как «Одной поэтессе»,
«Два часа в резервуаре», «Новые стансы к Августе», «Северная почта», «Письмо в бутылке»,
«Брожу в редеющем лесу…», «Тебе, когда мой голос отзвучит...», «Орфей и Артемида»,
«Гвоздика», «Пророчество», «24.5.65 КПЗ», «В канаве гусь, как стереотруба...»,
«В деревне бог живет не по углам...», «Чаша со змейкой», «В деревне, затерявшейся в лесах...»,
«Северный край, укрой…», «Дни бегут надо мной…», «С грустью и с нежностью» и другие.
Вернувшись в Ленинград, Бродский пытается активно включиться в литературный процесс.
Он упорно и напряженно учится на образцах, анализирует удачи и неудачи других поэтов,
осваивает новые ритмы и строфику, чрезвычайно продуктивно работает творчески,
пишет оригинальные стихи, переводит, читает стихи и переводы на литературных вечерах в Москве,
Паланге, Ялте, Гурзуфе. При попытках публикации стихов Бродский сталкивается с жестким давлением цензуры.
1972 – он эмигрирует не по собственной воле. С этого времени он живет в США,
где занимается преподавательской деятельностью. Здесь в этом же году выходит
его сборник русских стихотворений и поэм «Остановка в пустыне» – первый самостоятельный сборник Иосифа Бродского.
1973 - выходит том избранных стихотворений Иосифа Бродского, переведенных на английский язык профессором Джорджем Клайном.
1975 – к 200-летию США написано программное стихотворение «Колыбельная Трескового мыса» (с посвящением А.Б. – сыну Андрею).
1977 – Бродский написана рецензию «География зла» на книгу А.И.Солженицына «Архипелаг Гулаг».
В этом же году в издательстве «Ardis» в Анн-Арборе публикуются два важнейших сборника
стихотворений Иосифа Бродского «Конец прекрасной эпохи. Стихотворения 1964-71 /
Сост. В.Марамзин и Л.Лосев» и «Часть речи. Стихотворения 1972-76 / Сост. В.Марамзин и Л.Лосев».
1978 – после путешествия в Бразилию Бродским написано эссе «После путешествия, или Посвящается позвоночнику».
1980 – к сорокалетию Бродского его друзьями издан альманах «Часть речи», в который вошли,
в частности, стихи Бродского, посвященные М.Басмановой: «Ты, гитарообразная вещь со спутанной
паутиной / струн...», его эссе «Ленинград», написанное по-английски и переведенное на русский
яызык Л.Лосевым, интервью Бродского Соломону Волкову под названием «Нью-Йорк: душа поэта».
В этом же году Бродский получает американское гражданство.
1981 – Бродский переносит операцию на сердце (шунтирование)
(Бродский перенес первую операцию на сердце в декабре 1978 года; вторую - в декабре 1985 года. - Прим. В.Полухиной).
1983 – в издательстве «Ardis» в Анн-Арборе опубликована книга лирики Иосифа Бродского
«Новые стансы к Августе. Стихи к М.Б. 1962-82».
1984 – в том же издательстве опубликована пьеса Бродского «Мрамор».
1986 – его английская книга «Less then one» («Меньше чем единица») признана лучшей
литературно-критической книгой года в Америке.
В Америке Бродского беспокоят постоянные проблемы с сердцем. К маю 1987 г. поэт
переносит три сердечных приступа.
1987 – Иосиф Бродский становится Нобелевским лауреатом по литературе
(вслед за Буниным и Пастернаком он становится третьим русским поэтом,
получившим Нобелевскую премию): «за всеохватное авторство, исполненное
ясности мысли и поэтической глубины». (Бродский – один из самых молодых
лауреатов Нобелевской премии за все годы ее присуждения).
1989 – перед выпускниками Дартмутского колледжа Бродский произносит речь
«Похвала скуке», вошедшую в книгу избранных эссе «О скорби и разуме» (1995).
Бродского принимают почетным членом в Американскую Академию искусств,
из которой он выходит в знак протеста против приема в нее Евгения Евтушенко.
1990 – Бродский читает в Британской Академии первую ежегодную лекцию
«Times Literary Supplement», легшую в основу опубликованного эссе «Altra Ego».
1991 – в университете Лейдена прочел Хёйзинговскую лекцию «Профиль Клио».
В этом же году написал эссе «Коллекционный экземпляр».
В этом же году в Париже Иосиф Бродский знакомится с итальянской аристократкой
Марией Соззани (Maria Sozzani-Brodsky; отец - итальянец, мать - русская) и женится на ней.
В 1993 г. у супругов рождается дочь Анна Александра Мария («Анна – это в честь Анны Андреевны Ахматовой,
Александра – в честь моего отца, Мария – в честь моей матери и в честь моей жены, которую тоже зовут Мария». – И.Бродский).
В 1991 г. Бродский становится профессором литературы в колледже Маунт Холлиок в городке Саут-Хедли,
штат Массачусетс (Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College).
С мая 1991 г. по май 1992 г. назначен Поэтом-Лауреатом Библиотеки Конгресса США,
что требует его почти постоянного присутствия в Вашингтоне. 2 октября 1991 г. в Библиотеке
Конгресса Бродский прочел лекцию «Нескромное предложение», вошедшую в книгу избранных эссе.
Лето 1991 г. проводит в Англии, выступая с авторскими вечерами и участвуя в научных конференциях.
9 сентября 1993 г. на Гётеборгской книжной ярмарке Иосиф Бродский и американский поэт Дерек Уолкотт проводят беседу «Власть поэзии».
Осень 1993 г. Бродский провел с семьей в Искии (остров в Тирренском море, недалеко от Неаполя).
1994 – написано эссе «Дань Марку Аврелию» и «О скорби и разуме», второе дало заглавие
сборнику его английских эссе (1995). Осенью 1994 г. читает студентам колледжа Маунт-Холиок
в рамках курса «Темы современной лирической поэзии» лекцию «С любовью к неодушевленному.
Четыре стихотворения Томаса Гарди».
1995 – к пятидесятипятилетию поэта в Санкт-Петербурге журнал «Звезда» организовывает и
проводит международную научную конференцию, посвященную творчеству Иосифа Бродского.
Тогда же подписан указ А.Собчака о присвоении Иосифу Бродскому звания почетного гражданина
Санкт-Петербурга. На приглашение приехать в Санкт-Петербург Бродский отвечает отказом.
9 апреля 1995 г. Бродский проводит последний авторский вечер для русских эмигрантов
в Морз Аудиториуме Бостонского университета.
28 января 1996 – Иосиф Бродский умер.
Литературные произведения
"...и при слове "грядущее" из русского языка..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"В деревне Бог живет не по углам..." 6 июня 1965
"Закричат и захлопочут петухи…" 24 июня 1962
"Когда подойдет к изголовью..." 11 июля 1962
"Коньяк в графине - цвета янтаря..." Осень 1967
"Меня упрекали во всем, окромя погоды..." 1994
"Ниоткуда с любовью, надцатого мартобря..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"Около океана, при свете свечи; вокруг..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"Осенний вечер в скромном городке..." 1972
"С точки зрения воздуха, край земли..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"Сумев отгородиться от людей..." 1966
"Теперь, зная многое о моей..." 1984
"Тихотворение мое, мое немое..." (Часть речи) 1975
"Только пепел знает, что значит сгореть дотла..." 1986
"Узнаю этот ветер, налетающий на траву..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"Я был только тем, чего..." 1981
"Я всегда твердил, что судьба - игра..." 1971
"Я входил вместо дикого зверя в клетку..." 24 мая 1980
"Я не то что схожу с ума, но устал за лето..." (Часть речи) 1975-76
"Я обнял эти плечи и взглянул..." 2 февраля 1962
«Пришла зима, и все, кто мог лететь...» 1964-65
«Теперь все чаще чувствую усталость…» 11 декабря 1960
24 декабря 1971 года. Январь 1972
25.XII.1993 1993
Aere Perennius. 1995
Einem altem Architekten in Rom. Ноябрь-декабрь 1964
А.Фролов (Из "Школьной антологии") 1969
Август. январь 1996
Бегство в Египет. 25 декабря 1988
Большая элегия Джону Донну. 7 марта 1963
В Италии. 1985
В озерном краю. 1972
В тени Данте. 1977
Вертумн. Декабрь 1990
Второе Рождество на берегу. Январь 1971
Горбунов и Горчаков. 1965-68
Два часа в резервуаре. 8 сентября 1965
Двадцать сонетов к Марии Стюарт. 1974
Зимним вечером в Ялте. Январь 1969
Из Парменида. 1987
Исаак и Авраам. 1963
Июльское интермеццо. 1961
К Урании. 1982
Колыбельная Трескового Мыса. 1975
Конец прекрасной эпохи. Декабрь 1969
Меньше единицы. 1976
На смерть друга. 1973
На смерть Жукова. 1974
На смерть Роберта Фроста. 30 января 1963
На смерть Т.С.Элиота. 12 января 1965
На столетие Анны Ахматовой. Июль 1989
Нобелевская лекция. 1987
Новая Англия. 1993
Новая жизнь. 1988
Новые стансы к Августе. 1964
Новый год на Канатчиковой даче. Январь 1964
Ночной полет. 1962
Об одном стихотворении. 1980
Одной поэтессе. Август-сентябрь 1965
Одному тирану. Январь 1972
Осенний крик ястреба. 1975
Остановка в пустыни. 1966
От окраины к центру. 1962
Отрывок. («Назо к смерти не готов...») 1964-65
Памяти Геннадия Шмакова. 21 августа 1989
Пейзаж с наводнением. 1993
Пенье без музыки. 1970
Пилигримы. 1958
Письмо в бутылке. Ноябрь 1964
Подсвечник. 1968
Полторы комнаты. 1985
Поэт и проза. 1979
Примечания папоротника. 1989
Прощайте, мадемуазель Вероника. Июнь 1967
Разговор с небожителем. Март-апрель 1970
Речь о пролитом молоке. 14 января 1967
Рождественская звезда. 24 декабря 1987
Рождественский романс. 28 декабря 1961
Рождество 1963 ("Волхвы пришли.
Младенец крепко спал...") январь 1964
Рождество 1963 года ("Спаситель родился...") 1963-64
Рыбы зимой.
С грустью и нежностью. 16 июня 1964
Сретенье. Март 1972
Стансы городу. 2 июня 1962
Стихи под эпиграфом. 1958
Т.Зимина (Из "Школьной антологии") 1966
Тритон (Моллюск) 1994
Шведская музыка. 1978
Шесть лет спустя. 1968
Элегия ("Подруга милая, кабак все тот же...") 1968
Я как Улисс. 1961
http://sodin-mail.com/homepages/~natalia/nobel_russians/brodsky/joseph.htmJoseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - Josip Aleksandrovich Brodsky - Iosif Brodskii
Russian-born poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. After moving to the United States Brodsky wrote his poems in Russian and his prose works in English. As a poet Brodsky was largely traditional and classical. He dealt with moral, religious and historical themes, and often used mythological allusions.
"The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence--or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation." (from Nobel Lecture, 1987)
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father was a photographer, but the family lived mostly on his mother's income. Brodsky studied at schools in Leningrad to the age of 15. He then dropped out of school and first went to work at the Arsenal defense plant. Between 1956 and 1962, he had some thirteen different jobs.
In the essay 'Less Than One' Brodsky tells that he began to despise Lenin already when he was in the first grade - "not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which at the age of seven I knew very little, but because of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life." Everyone in his class knew that he was a Jew, but "seven-year-old boys don't make good anti-Semites," he later said. From the library of his uncle, who was a member of the Party, Brodsky found an illustrated, pre-revolutionary edition of Man and Woman, his first taste of the forbidden fruit. At the age of fourteen Brodsky applied for admission to a submarine academy, but because he was a Jew, he did not get in.
After Nikita Khrushchev speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956, in which he unmasked the cult of personality and condemned the Stalinist encesses, a period of "thaw" occurred in the Soviet Union. Although Khrushchev soon tried to close dissident voices, new ideas managed to emerge in literature and other cultural fields. Brodsky started to write poetry from the late 1950s, earning a reputation as a free thinking writer. He taught himself Polish so that he could read poetry that had never been translated into Russian. Brodsky also demonstrated considerable talent in rendering Russian translations of Donne and Marvell, and he read such Western authors as Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner through Polish translations. In the 1960s, he also translated 'Yellow Submarine' by The Beatles into Russian.
As a young man, Brodsky worked at many occupations, including a milling machine operator, stoker, and geologist-prospector. His output as a freelance poet and self-taught translator did not gain the approval of the authorities, although he never directly criticized the government. His poetry appeared in samizdat (clandestine circulation) editions but was widely read. Brodsky's reputation made him a target for the secret police and he was convicted as a 'social parasite'. When the judge asked, "And who recognized that you are a poet? Who listed you among poets?" the poet replied according to Frida Vigdorova, a journalist, "No one. (Dispassionately.) Who listed me a member of the human race?" Brodsky was sent to a mental institution, where he was wrapped in cold, wet sheets, a "cure" familiar from Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik.
Among those, who rose to Brodsky's defense and called the trial illegal, was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Brodsky spent some time in Kresty, the most famous prison in the Soviet Union. In the official record he was characterized to be 'less than one'. It became the title for Brodsky's collection of essays, which was published in 1986. Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labour, but the sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by such prominent cultural figures as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the poet Anna Akhmatova, the anti- Stalinist icon, who was his close friend. They first met in 1961 at her dacha in Komarovo.
During Brodsky's time in prison a collection of his poems, STIKHOTVORENIYA I POEMY, was issued in 1965 by an American publisher. In 1972 Brodsky was forced to exile from the USSR. He never saw his parents, and he was separated from his his four-year-old son, Andrei, whose mother was the artist Marianna Basmanova. His love poems, dedicated to her, Brodsky collected in NOVYJE STANSY K AVGUSTE (1983).
With his suitcase, made in China, Brodsky first went to Vienna, where he was helped by the poet W. H. Auden, and finally he emigrated to the United States. There he worked as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Michigan, Queen College, City University of New York, Columbia University, New York University, Smith College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College. In 1977 he became a U.S. citizen and in 1991-92 he was America's Poet Laureate. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but resigned in protest over the honorary membership of the Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko in 1987 - he considered Evtushenko a party yes-man.
Brodsky died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996, in New York. He was married to Maria Sozzani, he also had a son with Maria Basmanova. Brodsky's parents were not allowed to travel to the West to see him and they died in Leningrad. In his essays about his parents in Less Than One (1986) the author explained: ''I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under 'a foreign code of conscience,' I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian.''
Like several dissident Russian poets, Brodsky intended his verse for recital rather than for silent reading. Existential problems are dealt in such poems as 'Isaak i Avraam' (1963), which was based on the Old Testament story, and 'Gorbunov i Gorchakov' (1965-68), in which Brodsky fills a madhouse conversation of two patients with references to literature and history. Later works reflected the poet's idea of the coming of a post-Christian era, during which the antagonism between good and evil is replaced by moral ambiguity. Other favorite themes were loss, suffering, exile, and old age. In his new home country Brodsky did not feel complete secure - disturbing visions penetrated into his mind even in peaceful Cape Cod: "in formal opposition, near and far, / lined up like print in a book about to close, / armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows / and cities all went dark as caviar." (from Lullaby of Cape Cod, 1975) He also recognized in the work of Robert Frost tones darker than his image as the "folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer" would suggest.
"Still, if sins are forgiven,
that is, if souls break even
with flesh elsewhere, this joint,
too, must be enjoyed
as afterlife's sweet parlor
where, in the clouded squalor,
saints and the ain'ts take five,
where I was first to arrive."
(from 'Cafe Trieste: San Franciso', to L.G.)
As an essayist Brodsky started in the 1970s, writing first in Russian, but he soon switched to English. Brodsky became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. He wrote mostly about literature, evaluating Auden as 'the greatest mind of the twentieth century' and Osip Mandelshtam 'a poet of and for civilization.'. Language was for him a vehicle of civilization, superior to history, living longer than any state. Poems are a vehicle to restructure time - poets should keep language alive ''in the light of conscience and culture.'' Brodsky finished in his lifetime two collections of essays. Less Than One explored the works of Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Auden, Derek Walcott, C.P. Cavafy, and Eugenio Montale. On Grief and Reason (1995) includes tributes to his favorite poets Frost, Hardy, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In one essay Brodsky notes that after the Great Patriotic War theatres showed Hollywood films - war booty from Germany - and that Tarzan films influenced the dissolving of the Stalin cult more than Nikita Khrushchev's speeches.
For further reading: Joseph Brodsky: Conversations by Joseph Brodsky, et al (2003); The Poet As Traveler: Joseph Brodsky in Mexico and Rome by Alice J. Speh (2003); Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky by Bozena Madra-Shallcross (2002); Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse by David MacFadyen ( 2000); Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy by David Rigsbee (1999); Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque by David Ward Macfadyen (1999); Conversations With Joseph Brodsky by Solomon Volkov (1998); Joseph Brodsky and the Creating of Exile by David M. Bethea (1994); Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries by Valentina Polukhina (1992); Joseph Brodsky by Valentina Polukhina (1989) - Note: In his collection of essays, On Grief and Reason (1995), Brodsky found from his exile and from his relationship to Leningrad similarities with Ovidius's Rome, Dante's Firenze, and Joyce's Dublin. The text was written in 1987. - When receiving his Nobel Award, Brodsky named Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetajeva, Robert Frost, Anna Ahmatova, and W.H. Auden as the better qualified poets, who should stand at the ceremonies.
Selected bibliography:
BOLSHAJA ELEGIJA DZONU DONNU, 1963
STIKHOTVORENIYA I POEMY, 1965 - Short and Long Poems
OSTANOCKA V PUSTYNE, 1970 - A Halt in the Wilderness, 1973
Debut, 1973
Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems, 1973
TSHAST RETSHI, 1977
V ANGLII, 1977 - In England
KONETS PREKRASNOK EPOHI, 1977 - The End of a Lovely Era
A Part of Speech, 1979
A Part of Speech, 1980
NOVYJE STANSY K AVGUSTE, 1983
MRAMOR, 1984 - Marbles
History of the Twentieth Century, 1986
Less than One, 1986 - suom. Katastorofeja ilmassa ja Ei oikeastaan ihminen - film Hrustaljov, autoni!, 1998, dir. by Aleksei German, based on Brodsky's short story. According to some sources, the original idea for the film came from the Finnish director Pekka Lehto, who met Brodsky in Finland in 1988
URANIIA, 1987 - To Urania
SOCHINENIIA, 1992-95 (4 vols.)
Watermark, 1992
On Grief and Reason, 1995 - Kerailijan kappale
Collected Poems in English, 2000 (edited by Ann Kjellberg)
Nativity Poems, 2001
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brodsky.htmJoseph Brodsky
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987
Biography
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's award for his works of "genius".
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr. Brodsky's essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1987, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1988
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1987
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-bio.html
Josif Alexandrovic Brodskij (Brodskii 1940-1996)
AUTORI A-Z
A B C D E F G
H I J K L M N
O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z
OPERE A-Z
A B C D E F G
H I J K L M N
O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z
n America sul comodino degli alberghi, si trova una copia della Bibbia. Da qualche anno, in quelli piu importanti, anche un libro di Josif Brodskji, un uomo convinto che la poesia come le automobili, puo portare lontano, perche e uno straordinario acceleratore mentale, e il poeta e l’animale piu sano, l’unico che riesca a fondere il mondo razionale con il mondo intuitivo.
Josif Brodskji nasce a S. Pietroburgo il 24 maggio del 1940. Il padre Alexandr era ufficiale della Marina sovietica con la passione per la fotografia. Una passione che divento un mestiere-ripiego, quando, a causa dell’origine ebraica, sopraggiunse il prepensionamento, perche l’antisemitismo stava diventando dottrina di stato. La madre Maria Volpert, durante la guerra lavoro come traduttrice nei campi di lavoro per prigionieri tedeschi, e fini per fare la contabile.
S. Pietroburgo e quel quotidiano fatto di diversita consapevole, coltivata dalla sua famiglia, in un Paese in cui la regola era essere uguali, daranno il ritmo al suo destino. Una citta sospesa, lontana, affollata d’odori, ricordi, densa di personaggi letterari, e mai dimenticata, ritrovata in Venezia, in una sorta di trasposizione fisica e letteraria, di cui ci lascera la descrizione in Fondamenta degli incurabili, attraverso un inimitabile gioco di specchi.
E quella citta, insieme con una capacita di raccogliere tutto quello che si sospendeva sulla retina, ad averlo reso grande. Sia la fotografia sia la poesia colgono frammenti di vissuto, ma se la prima coglie l’attimo, la superficie, la seconda guarda all’eterno. Incoraggiato dalla madre, aveva abbandonato la scuola a quindici anni, incomincio a studiare da autodidatta e a comporre le prime poesie.
L’apprezzamento dell’Achmatova e l’eco delle sue letture — in molti accorrevano per ascoltare la sua indimenticabile voce nasale, capace di sollevare le parole e farle danzare — lo rendono inviso al Potere Sovietico. Accusato di fannullaggine sociale, processato, nel 1972 fu costretto a emigrare negli Stati Uniti, dove divento cittadino americano nel 1977. Li insegno in diverse universita, svolgendo contemporaneamente una vasta attivita di pubblicista e poeta. Nel 1991-1992 fu nominato Poet Laureate degli Stati Uniti. La prima persona che volle incontrare, una volta arrivato in Occidente, fu Auden, l’unico che a suo parere, potesse sedersi sull’Enciclopedia Britannica. Della sua condizione d’esule moderno, sospeso nel tempo, nello spazio, ci resta il discorso d’accettazione al premio Nobel per la Letteratura, ricevuto nel 1987, pubblicato in Dall’esilio.
Il problema su cui ruota l’impianto della sua vasta e coerente opera e riuscire a far accettare, non solo percepire, la cultura, e nello specifico la poesia come vettore per la comprensione della realta.
Ma soprattutto chiarire, in modo definitivo, che l’estetica e la madre dell’etica. Che uno sguardo incapace di riconoscere la simmetria delle cose e anche incapace di essere giusto. L’amore per Austen, Frost, Achmatova, Cvetaeva (l’unica con cui avesse deciso di non competere per il suo tono tragico inarrivabile), la capacita di rimettersi in discussione attraverso le parole e la loro plasticita rendono la sua attivita un’opera d’arte pienamente compiuta. La possibilita di scrivere in russo, poesie, e in inglese, saggi, anche se scrisse in inglese un’elegia dal titolo Lowell per rendere omaggio alla memoria del poeta, e di mantenere intatta anche nella traduzione italiana il sottile estetismo della sua mente, lo rendono ineguagliabile. Una parola modulare la sua, come se le due lingue che usava non facessero altro che intersecarsi e comprendersi, quasi a lenire quella lontananza che l’esilio aveva tracciato in maniera definitiva.
Un uomo che riconosceva come unica divinita la lingua. Tutto il resto, corpo compreso, una trappola, capace di una fissita innaturale, una corazza per la parola, parola che in lui risuonava come un’onda.
Morto il 28 gennaio del 1996 a Brooklyn ha trovato finalmente riposo a Venezia.
Raccolte tradotte in italiano:
Fermata nel deserto, a cura di G. Buttafava, Milano, Mondadori, 1979
Poesie 1972- 1985, a cura di G. Buttafava, Milano, Adelphi, 1986,
Fuga da Bisanzio, trad. G. Forti, Milano, Adelphi, 1987
Il canto del pendolo, trad. G. Forti, Milano, Adelphi, 1987
Dall’esilio, Milano, Adelphi, 1988
Fondamenta degli incurabili, trad. G. Forti, Consorzio Venezia Nuova, 1989, e Adelphi, 1991
Marmi, trad. Fausto Malcovati, Milano, Adelphi, 1995
Poesie italiane, a cura di S. Vitale, Milano, Adelphi, 1996
Dolore e ragione, trad. G. Forti, Milano, Adelphi, 1998
Discovery, una poesia per bambini, con illustrazioni di V. Radunskij, testo italiano di A. Molesini, Milano, Mondadori, 1988
A cura della Redazione Virtuale
12 luglio 2001
© Copyright 2001 italialibri.net, Milano - Vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, senza consenso di italialibri.net
http://www.italialibri.net/autori/brodskijj.html
SOVIET EMIGRE GETS NOBEL IN LITERATURE
Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, October 23, 1987
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Joseph Brodsky, sentenced to hard labor in 1964 for being a "social parasite" and expelled from the Soviet Union 8 eight years later, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday.
Speaking by telephone from London, where he was staying at the home of a friend, the pianist Alfred Brendel, Brodsky described himself as "delighted, bewildered, pleased. Basically, pleased."
"I'm quite convinced that it won't affect me as a writer. If it will, so much for me as a writer." And if it should have a favorable effect? "Well, for that, I think you can cross your fingers and your toes!"
The poet, who is now a US citizen, heard the news at a Chinese restaurant while lunching with the author John le Carre.
The Nobel panel's selection of Brodsky, 47, for the prize in literature, which carries an award of $340,000, was widely hailed by both poets and literary scholars.
Seamus Heaney, himself rumored to have been a candidate for this year's prize, had nothing but praise for his fellow poet.
"I was just delighted, exultant really, at the news. I have met many poets, but there's a kind of pure poetic energy in him. You always feel that he's like a tuned instrument that is ready to play, you know? He's both enormously intellectually vibrant and musically in tune. The result is, of course, that he lets fly at times in prose as well as sings in poetry.
"I think it's a very coherent sensibility. It's been tested by circumstance, it's very much at ease with its own singing gift, if you like. The thing that I value especially about Brodsky is that he never stops to think 'why,' he just proceeds. He has done all his thinking. He has done all his preparation."
Richard Howard, the poet and translator and a past president of PEN America, said yesterday: "It is, of course, a solace that an intransigent
vision of poetic freedom be acknowledged in the realm of public life, but that the honor should go to a poet of such spirited accomplishments is more than comforting, it is enlivening -- for literature and for us all. . . . It's very gratifying."
Clarence Brown, professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, called Brodsky's selection "great news. Well, I don't know that he has any rivals as the greatest living Russian poet. But now he's going through a very interesting period of transition, turning into an American poet.
"It's a great thing for all of Russian literature in emigration."
Brown noted that the award may have political ramifications.
"It's hard to predict what the official reaction will be. But under the new 'openness' of Gorbachev, I think that the most important thing, from their point of view, is if they were to react favorably toward it as a great tribute to Russian poetry. Period. That would be a great signal about the difference between his Nobel Prize and that awarded to Pasternak. Soviet authorities refused to let Boris Pasternak, the poet and author of "Dr. Zhivago," accept the 1958 Nobel. I think Gorbachev has a great opportunity to show the difference of his government from the Stalinist regimes of earlier times."
Stanford University's Edward Brown, the author of "Russian Literature Since the Revolution," echoed this view.
"This is a guess, and it's hard to make predictions, but the Soviet response will be very, very positive. They will try to make him come back for at least a visit. This is another blow to the Soviet literary establishment. If it has anything left at all, this will undermine it almost completely.
Because it's the Soviet literary establishment that persecuted him, threw him out. It's precisely that establishment Gorbachev is fighting, and more successfully in literature than anywhere else."
Brodsky at first refused to speculate on such an invitation. "My imagination doesn't travel in that direction." Then he added that his selection "won't hurt glasnost, I hope. And if they are polite people they may issue an invitation."
As for replying to such an offer: "I am a polite person. I don't know if I'd respond favorably, but I'd like to see several people over there."
Edward Brown, who called the selection "an honor for Russian literature" and Brodsky "a great poet" and "an unusual talent," said: "It's hard to
put him in any tradition, because he's so original. He's an original spirit. He's a little different from modern poetry in general because his form tends to be rather conventional. His lines are metered. He rhymes. The whole idea of metered, measured lines and rhymed stanzas is very strong with him, which is not particularly modern. That's why general statements that are made about him usually fall down, when you think about it.
"He certainly is in the great tradition of Russian poetry. He sort of belongs to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, but he mostly belongs to
himself."
Born May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, Brodsky has described himself as "part Jew, part Russian, part Christian . . . in short, a bad Jew." He left school at 15, taking a series of jobs that included work in a mill, a morgue, a ship's boiler-room and as a laborer on a geological expedition. He taught
himself to read Polish and English and began writing poetry.
Sentenced to five years' work on a collective farm in northern Russia, he was released after 18 months because of protests from the West. His criticism of the Soviet regime resulted in his expulsion in 1972. Neither his parents (both now deceased) nor his son was allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Brodsky has never married.
In an open letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Brodsky wrote: ''Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe I will return. Poets always return in the flesh, or on paper. I want to believe that both are possible."
"I feel bitter as I leave Russia. I belong to the Russian culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language."
Works published in English include "Verse and Poems" (1965); "Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems" (1967); "A Stop in the Desert" (1970); "Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems" (1973); "The End of a Lovely Era" (1977); "A Part of Speech" (1980); and "Less Than One" (1986), essays, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Scheduled to be published next year is "Urania: A New Book of Poems."
Last spring, he resigned from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to protest its awarding an honorary membership to the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom Brodsky denounced as "a weather vane. He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved."
Brodsky, who lives in New York City, holds appointments at Columbia University's Russian Institute, New York University's Institute for the Humanities and as Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke
College. In 1981, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of its "genius" grants.
Still obviously elated, Brodsky dismissed an interviewer's apology for troubling him at the end of a long day. "Thank you, very much. I'm terribly pleased, because I like the town -- Boston, that is."http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/nobel/1987/1987f.html
CITIZEN OF A LANGUAGE
Author: Date: Sunday, October 25, 1987
Page: A6
Section: EDITORIAL PAGE
The Nobel Prize for Literature, in honoring the poet Joseph Brodsky,
honored an ancient literary tradition. In the manner of Virgil,
Dante and Joyce, Brodsky has bestowed his gifts on the Russian language from afar,
in exile. So common is the literal experience of exile among poets
that Baudelaire took it as an allegory for the poetic condition.
This year, the often obtuse Nobel jury appears to have showered recognition
not merely on a Russian writer who has had but four of his poems published
legally in the Soviet Union, and not solely on a survivor of "Gulag University,"
but on a figure who incarnates the poetic way.
"I feel bitter as I leave Russia," Brodsky wrote of his expulsion from his homeland,
in an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev. "I belong to the Russian culture.
I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final
consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language."
This is a statement devoid of grandiloquence; it is simply a recognition of the truth.
Brodsky, like every other genuine poet, lives in his language. No commissar,
no fuhrer can banish him from there.
If the Nobel award to Brodsky represents a slap in the face to the bootlickers
of the Soviet literary establishment, so be it. Their respectability was bought
with a shameful silence. In service to an ephemeral state, they kept quiet about
the disappearance of entire libraries. They pretended to forget all the poets
and storytellers who were shot in the head or forced to confess to the crime of literature.
Brodsky himself was convicted of being a "social parasite" and sent to Siberia
as a young man. The judge who sentenced him asked Brodsky who had authorized him
to be a poet. Responding with the impertinence proper to a
scion of a poetic line that traces back to Francois Villon, Brodsky told
the judge that nobody had authorized him to be a human being.
http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/nobel/1987/1987e.html
NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING POET JOSEPH BRODSKY DIES
MOSCOW (AP) -- Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky,
a Russian exile who became poet laureate of the United States,
died in his sleep Sunday in New York, Russian television said. He was 55.
Brodsky wrote both in his native Russian and in English.
In addition to poetry, he wrote plays, essays and criticism.
He once said American poetry had helped him survive years
of persecution in the Soviet Union and "made me an American
long before I arrived on these shores."
Brodsky, who was Jewish, was constantly in conflict with
the Soviet authorities. In 1964, he was sentenced
to five years of hard labor in an Arctic Circle region.
Brodsky's sentence was commuted in 1965, but the persecution continued.
Soviet authorities refused to grant him visas to attend several international
poetry forums and, in 1972, forced him into exile. He settled in the United States,
and became an American citizen in 1980. The United States made him its poet laureate in 1991.
In 1987, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/ap.html
1. The Russian Academy in Rome Fund in Honor of Joseph Brodsky
In the fall of 1995, Joseph Brodsky embarked on his last great public enterprise:
to fund an Academy in Rome where Russian scholars and artists could resume a venerable
tradition of Russian study in Italy. Shortly before his death on January 28, 1996,
he submitted a proposal to Francesco Ruttelli, the mayor of Rome, who expressed his
enthusiasm for the project. The search for a building is already under way. To honor
Brodsky's memory, his friends have established a Russian Academy in Rome for collecting
the resources necessary to bring his vision to life. Inquiries and donations may
be addressed to the Russian Academy in Rome Fund, c/o Townsend and Valente,
489 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017-6105.
-------------------------------
2. BRODSKY'S LAST COLLECTIONS. "...three new books Brodsky completed shortly
before his death, in which he was fortunately able to make his own final
collections of his last work in Russian and English. They are:
On Grief and Reason
essays in English since the publication of his first essay collection,
Less Than One -- published in January by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Peizazh s navodneniem
poems in Russian since the publication of Uraniia -- to be published this spring by Ardis
So Forth
poems in English since To Urania -- to be published in June by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Individual orders can be placed with Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1 800 788 6262)
and Ardis (1 800 877 7133) for these books and for Brodsky backlist in paperback
(in English: Watermark (essay), Marbles (play), To Urania, Less Than One,
A Part of Speech (poems); in Russian: Uraniia, Novye stansi k Avguste,
Chast' Rechi, Konets prekrasnoi epokhi, Ostanovka v pustyne, and Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (all poems)).
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/oldindex.html
Monday January 29 1:04 AM EST
NOBEL POET JOSEPH BRODSKY DIES IN NEW YORK
NEW YORK (Reuter) - Soviet emigre Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning poet once sentenced
to hard labor in the frozen tundra, died of a heart ailment in the United States, where he had lived in exile for over 20 years.
Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel laureate in literature, died at his New York home Sunday with his wife
and child by his side, said Roger Straus, his publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was 55.
Brodsky shot to prominence at the age of 23 when he received a five-year sentence for hard labor
in the frozen Archangelsk region of the Soviet Union for writing poetry without academic qualifications.
International pressure helped get him home to Leningrad in November 1965 after serving
18 months -- and also helped widen his fame.
``He is a mass cult figure. For many of his generation he is a god,'' said Duffield White,
professor of Russian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. White once recalled being mobbed
at a Moscow concert when word got out he knew Brodsky.
British poet Anthony Hecht, who worked on Brodsky's translations, told Reuters the Nobel Prize-winner's work
is ``at once personal and social, reflecting his detestation of tyranny.''
Radicalized in part by his government's armed suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution
and determined to go his own way, Brodsky, who left school at 15 to work as a laborer,
rejected a state that claimed to have all the answers:
``Isn't that a sign/ of our arrival in a wholly new/ but doleful world? In fact, a proven truth,/
to be precise, is not a truth at all -- it's just a sum of proofs. But now/ what's
said is 'I agree,' not 'I believe,''' he wrote.
Brodsky's works challenged the bleakness of Soviet life with linguistic brilliance
and were circulated widely underground, finally prompting Soviet authorities to expel him in 1972.
Fifteen years later, and by then a U.S. citizen, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His editor at the The New Yorker magazine, Alice Quinn, said Brodsky was ``a majestic
writer, with an absolutely fantastic reputation...He was a very compelling
and warm person, complex and extremely endearing.''
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/reuters.htmlУМЕР ИОСИФ БРОДСКИЙ.
3АВЕРШИЛАСЬ ЭПОХА
Константин КЕДРОВ
01/30/96 Смерть Иосифа Бродского на 56-м году жизни никак не назовешь естественным природным событием.
Гигантская репрессивная машина КГБ в свое время исправно потрудилась над тем, чтобы свести поэта в могилу.
В молодости Иосифа Бродского арестовали и судили по обвинению в тунеядстве. Несмотря на заступничество самых
видных деятелей культуры приговор был суровым и беспощадным. Ссылка и принудительные работы.
Будущего лауреата Нобелевской премии заставили крыть коровник. Позднее под давлением мирового общественного
мнения Иосифа Бродского все же выпустили из ссылки, но при этом выслали из страны.
Поэт никогда не говорил, что скучает по России, но все стихи его написанные в изгнании пронизаны неизменной грустью.
Не случайно он вспоминает судьбу Овидия, высланного из Римской империи.
Всемирное признание, слава, Нобелевская премия не могли заглушить постоянную сердечную боль. Три инфаркта и тяжелейшая
операция были закономерным следствием той несправедливости, которая совершилась.
Бродский жил сначала в Италии, потом в США ( Бродский в 1972 году ни дня не жил в Италии:
4 июня он из Ленинграда вылетел в Вену; 18 июня из Вены он вместе с Оденом прилетел в Лондон на Международный
поэтический фестиваль; 26 июня получил приглашение от декана Мичиганского университета занять место "поэта в присутствии";
из Лондона он полетел прямо в США: 9 июля прилетел в Детройт; 29 сентября - первое публичное выступление в Мичиганском университете. -
Прим. В.Полухиной). После августа 91-го года его много раз спрашивали не хочет ли он посетить Россию
и каждый раз в ответах поэта была слышна непреходящая боль от обиды, которую он тщетно пытался скрыть за вежливым и благородным отказом.
Значение поэзии Иосифа Броского, конечно же, не исчерпывается Нобелевской премией. Она есть яркое доказательство,
что никакой самый жестокий тоталитарный режим не может подавить дух.
Пушкин любил сравнивать свою ссылку в Молдавию со ссылкой Овидия в эти же края, потому что по праву считал себя
преемником лучших традиций античной поэзии. Бродский обращался к этой теме по той же причине.
Носитель высокой культуры Древнего Рима Овидий среди скифов и варваров - это, увы, слишком часто повторяемая модель.
Бродскому вручали Нобелевскую премию не за судьбу, а за изящную поэтическую словесность; но все прекрасно понимали,
что значит быть творцом высокой поэзии, побывав в застенках советской гэбухи. В Европе это эстетика - в России подвиг.
Во второй половине ХХ века Иосиф Бродский - самый яркий и самый талантливый продолжатель пушкинских традиций русской поэзии.
Вслед за Овидием и Пушкиным, он просвещает варварскую власть не столько политическими стихами, сколько изяществом
и красотой стиля. Удивительно, что тупая коммунистическая власть это поняла мгновенно, и сразу почувствовала
в Бродском своего классового врага. Не случайно и Нобелевская речь поэта вся посвящена языку и стилю.
Не случайно один из лучших его сборников называется "Части речи".
Бродский не жил в России, где слово стало свободным, но и в несвободной России и в свободной Америке
он обладал самою высшей свободой - свободой слога.
Бродский стал известен миру в начале брежневского застоя. Страна по-настоящему узнала
о своем поэте лишь после отмены пресловутой шестой статьи Конституции о руководящей роли партии.
Его жизнь оборвалась через два дня после вступления России в Совет Европы. Завершилась целая
эпоха в жизни страны - эпоха Иосифа Бродского, ставшего всемирным поэтом.
* * *
Я входил вместо дикого зверя в клетку,
выжигал свой срок и кликуху гвоздем в бараке,
жил у моря, играл в рулетку,
обедал черт знает с кем во фраке.
С высоты ледника я озирал полмира,
трижды тонул, дважды бывал распорот.
Бросил страну, что меня вскормила.
Из забывших меня можно составить город.
Я слонялся в степях, помнящих вопли гунна,
надевал на себя что сызнова входит в моду,
сеял рожь, покрывал черной только гумна
и не пил только сухую воду.
Я впустил в свои сны вороненый зрачок конвоя,
жрал хлеб изгнанья, не оставляя корок.
Позволял своим связкам все звуки, помимо воя;
перешел на шепот. Теперь мне сорок.
Что сказать мне о жизни? Что оказалась длинной.
Только с горем я чувству солидарность.
Но пока с горем рот не забили глиной,
из него раздаваться будет лишь благодарность.
24 мая 1980 г.
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/izvest1.html
ИОСИФ БРОДСКИЙ:
ЖИТЬ ПРОСТО: НАДО ТОЛЬКО ПОНИМАТЬ, ЧТО ЕСТЬ ЛЮДИ, КОТОРЫЕ ЛУЧШЕ.
ЭТО ОЧЕНЬ ОБЛЕГЧАЕТ ЖИЗНЬ
Евгения АЛЬБАЦ
01/30/96
В понедельник он должен был начать свой ежевесенний курс лекций по сравнительному литературоведению
в знаменитом гуманитарном колледже Маунт Холлиок, в штате Массачусетс, в Новой Англии.
Он умер накануне. В своем доме в Нью-Йорке. Умер во сне - так, говорят, умирают праведники.
Но, думаю - нет, не думаю - знаю: при слове "праведник" Бродский бы скривился -
для него был мучителен дурной тон, и замахал бы руками - какой к черту праведник!
Он был гений - в стихах, в лекциях, в беседах. Прагматичная Америка признала это,
когда в 1981 году суперпрестижный Фонд Маккартура дал ему "премию гения" - а как,
собственно, еще можно при жизни достойно признать гениальность поэта?
Говорить с ним было счастье, хотя и счастьем трудным - он оперировал тысячелетиями
и культурой веков и стран, но даже чувство собственной очевидности неполноценности
этого счастья не уменьшало. Он умел слушать: спорил, если не соглашался, но не возил
носом по столу, даже если вы несли ересь. Он был нормальным - никогда не вставал
на котурны, замечательным, веселым человеком. Хорошо, с любовью, пил водку.
К женщинам относился как к чуду природы, и своего восхищения божьим искусством не скрывал,
что для пуританской Новой Англии, в которой борьба за равенство полов загнала
сексуальность в подполье, было афронтом. Но ему прощали - гений.
Страшно много курил - только когда его больное сердце совсем уже его припирало,
бросал - курил втихаря. Курил даже в аудитории, хотя в общественных местах Америки это строжайше запрещено.
Но он нарушал это правило не оттого, что не признавал законов, напротив,
считал законы величайшим достижением человеческого сознания, необходимостью,
только и способной сдерживать несовершенную натуру человека, не унижая при том
в человеке человека; нарушал потому, что ему было трудно говорить без сигареты.
А говорить - это думать. А думать в рамках он не мог.
Пожалуй, главное в Бродском - так я это поняла и увидела - это совершенно естественное
и абсолютное чувство собственной свободы. "Свобода,- как-то сказал он,-
это когда ты можешь идти в любом направлении". Он и Америку любил за простор и страсть к перемещению.
"В Европе,- говорил,- ехать 12 часов не останавливаясь нельзя - там все напружено прошлым".
В Европе ему было тесно - она для него была слишком скученная, как клетка.
Но Италию обожал - за это самое прошлое. А, может быть, потому, что там нашел себе жену -
красивую, истонченно-бледную русскую княжну. Она родила ему девочку, Анну Марию,
которой сейчас два с половиной года. Мне кажется, что если Бродский кому-то и принадлежит,
так вот этой своей девочке.
Вообще, он был человеком Вселенной, и просто так случилось, что жил и умер на Земле.
Советская власть пыталась посадить его в клетку - отсюда все его диссидентство.
Он сопротивлялся не потому, что был борцом или политиком - просто жить в клетке
для него было противоестественным, невозможным - он таким родился.
В конце февраля ему должны были делать еще одну операцию на открытом сердце -
две он уже пережил. Собирались еще осенью, но он все откладывал.
Может быть потому, что боялся умереть не дома. Может быть потому,
что знал, что шансов и с операцией, и без нее немного. А он знал.
Может быть, потому, что не хотел умереть, обвитый проводами и привязанный
ими к разным умным машинам, помогающим дышать и качать кровь. Он умер во сне. Во сне люди летают.
Мы говорили с ни несколько раз. Однажды, еще в доме, который он снимал
в богемном нью-йоркском квартале Гринвич Виллидж, просидели несколько
часов перед магнитофоном. Но потом пленка, пройдя через границы и таможни,
странным образом стала шуметь, и у меня ушли многие месяцы, чтобы хотя бы часть
ее расшифровать. Слава Богу, мне хватило тогда ума не полагаться на магнитофон,
но параллельно записывать все в блокнот. Из этих бесед и сложилось это интервью -
не интервью, а некая мозаика размышлений Иосифа Бродского о себе, о России, об Отечестве.
О себе
Я ничего не придумываю, так было, наш последний разговор начался с этой его строчки,
написанной давно, еще в России: "Ни страны, ни погоста."?
Он сказал: "И сейчас так... мы привыкли отождествлять себя с местом, где живем -
это неправильно. Где вы живете, определяется частотой возвращения в одну точку -
не более того, все остальное - фиктивные понятия. Для меня такое место уже много лет -
эта улица в Гринвич Виллидж. В этом смысле я американец. Но есть и в других странах -
например, в Италии, места, куда я люблю и хочу возвращаться. Потому - "ни страны, ни погоста".
О возвращении
"Время от времени меня подмывает сесть на самолет и приехать в Россию.
Но мне хватает здравого смысла остановиться. Куда мне возвращаться?
Ведь это теперь уже другое государство, чем то, в котором я родился.
Я по-прежнему думаю об этой стране в категориях Союза, не России,
с этой страной меня связывает только прошлое. Прошлое, которое дало мне абсолютно все,
дало понимание жизни. Россия - это совершенно поразительная экзистенциальная лаборатория,
в которой человек сведен до минимума, и потому ты видишь, чего он стоит.
Но возвратиться в прошлое нельзя и не нужно. У человека только одна жизнь,
и когда справедливость торжествует на тридцать или сорок лет позже, чем хотелось бы, -
человек уже не может этим воспользоваться. Поздно. К сожалению, поздно.
Я не хочу видеть, во что превратился тот город Ленинград, где я родился,
не хочу видеть вывески на английском, не хочу возвращаться в страну,
в которой я жил и которой больше нет. Знаете, когда тебя выкидывают из страны - это одно,
с этим приходится смириться, но когда твое Отечество перестает существовать - это сводит с ума".
О постсоветской России
"Не надо строить иллюзий: у человека и общества не так много вариантов для выживания.
Один вариант мы испытали на своей шкуре - "рай для всех", который обернулся убийством многих.
Другой - тоже не малина. Но наблюдая за тем, что происходит в России,
видишь колоссальную пошлость человеческого сердца. Мне казалось, что самым замечательным
продуктом советской системы было то, что все мы - или многие - ощущали себя жертвами
страшной катастрофы, и отсюда было если не братство, то чувство сострадания, жалости друг к другу.
И я надеялся, что при всех этих переменах это чувство сострадания сохранится, выживет.
Что наш чудовищный опыт, наше страшное прошлое объединит людей - ну хотя бы интеллигенцию.
Но этого не произошло. От этого мне хочется реветь. Нет, конечно, слава Богу, что тот бред кончился,
но на новый поворот уйдут десятилетия и десятки жизней, которых никто и не помянет.
Я всегда вспоминаю старика, которого встретил на одной из пересылок.
Я тогда совершенно отчетливо понял, что он так и сгинет где-нибудь в лагере или в "столыпине".
И никто его не вспомнит. Вот этого я простить не могу. К человеку нельзя относится как к массе,
человек не терпит обобщения - этого у нас пока все еще не поймут".
О власти
"К сожалению, к власти всегда приходят не самые лучшие люди. Чехам невероятно повезло с Гавелом.
Нам тоже бы не помешало иметь у власти человека с пониманием таких вещей, как честь и достоинство,
с ощущением своей вины и своего стыда. Гавелу стыдно, а Валенсе или Ельцину нет. В принципе,
к власти должны приходить люди, которые не боятся быть проклятыми,
то есть люди, которые любят других больше, чем себя и себя во власти.
Которые способны жалеть других. Но такие люди чаще всего государственными деятелями не становятся.
А Ельцин - что Ельцин? Он плоть от плоти той системы".
О литературе
"Людей переделывать бесполезно. Но можно и нужно бороться с дурновкусием, внушать им сомнения
по поводу самих себя - в этом и есть задача искусства и литературы".
О жизни
"Жить просто: надо только понимать, что есть люди, которые лучше тебя. Это очень облегчает жизнь".
МАССАЧУСЕТС, США. http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/izvest2.html
VOICE OF AMERICA, 01/28/1996
DATE=1/28/96
TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT
NUMBER=5-32298
TITLE=JOSEPH BRODSKY OBITUARY
BYLINE=NANCY BEARDSLEY
DATELINE=WASHINGTON
CONTENT=
VOICED AT:
INTRO: RUSSIAN EMIGRE POET JOSEPH BRODSKY DIED TODAY (SUNDAY) AT
HIS HOME IN NEW YORK. HE WAS 55 YEARS OLD (BORN 5/24/40).
MISTER BRODSKY WAS THE AUTHOR OF PROSE AND POETRY IN BOTH RUSSIAN
AND ENGLISH. IN 1986, HE WON AMERICA'S PRESTIGIOUS NATIONAL BOOK
CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS TITLED "LESS THAN
ONE." A YEAR LATER, HE WAS AWARDED THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR
LITERATURE. AND IN 1991, HE WAS NAMED AMERICA'S FIFTH POET
LAUREATE, AN HONOR THAT BROUGHT HIM TO WASHINGTON FOR A ONE YEAR
TERM AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. VOA'S NANCY BEARDSLEY HAS MORE
ON THE RUSSIAN POET AMERICA CAME TO CLAIM AS ITS OWN:
TEXT: IN 1972, THE YEAR HE EMIGRATED TO THE UNITED STATES,
JOSEPH BRODSKY WROTE A POEM TITLED "ODYSSEUS TO TELEMACHUS." IT
WAS A FATHER'S FAREWELL TO A SON--A POEM ABOUT WANDERING AND
SEPARATION THAT BEGAN WITH THESE LINES:
/// VOICE READING OF BRODSKY TEXT ///
"MY DEAR TELEMACHUS,
THE TROJAN WAR IS OVER NOW; I DON'T RECALL WHO WON IT.
THE GREEKS, NO DOUBT, FOR ONLY THEY WOULD LEAVE SO MANY
DEAD SO FAR FROM THEIR OWN HOMELAND. BUT STILL, MY
HOMEWARD WAY HAS PROVED TOO LONG. WHILE WE WERE WASTING
TIME THERE, OLD POSEIDON, IT ALMOST SEEMS, STRETCHED AND
EXTENDED SPACE. I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM OR WHAT THIS
PLACE CAN BE."
/// END BRODSKY TEXT ///
WITH HIS DEPARTURE FOR THE UNITED STATES, JOSEPH BRODSKY'S OWN
WAR WITH SOVIET AUTHORITIES CAME TO AN END. IT WAS A WAR THAT
BEGAN IN THE POET'S EARLY YEARS IN WHAT WAS THEN THE SOVIET CITY
OF LENINGRAD. HE WAS A RESTLESS AND REBELLIOUS YOUTH WHO DROPPED
OUT OF SCHOOL AT THE AGE OF 15. A FEW YEARS LATER HE BEGAN
WRITING POETRY. (BEGIN OPT) HE RECALLED THOSE FIRST POEMS IN A
1987 INTERVIEW:
/// 1ST BRODSKY ACT. ///
THAT WAS REALLY NOTHING SERIOUS. IT WAS SIMPLY THE
CREATIVE URGE OF YOUTH. AND I WAS DOING ALL SORTS OF
THINGS. I WENT THROUGH ALL SORTS OF JOBS. I WAS A
DRIFTER, I WOULD SAY. THEN GRADUALLY TOWARDS THE AGE OF
21 OR 22, I BEGAN TO NOTICE THAT WHAT I THOUGHT OF AS MY
SIDE SHOW WAS BECOMING MORE AND MORE FREQUENT. THAT IS I
WAS WRITING POEMS IN QUITE A SUSTAINED FASHION." (END
OPT)
// END 1ST BRODSKY ACT. //
CLASSICAL IN STYLE AND INTROSPECTIVE IN TONE, JOSEPH BRODSKY'S
POEMS WERE NOT EXPLICITLY POLITICAL. BUT OFFICIALS BRANDED THEM
ANTI-SOVIET AND PORNOGRAPHIC. TRIED FOR BEING A "SOCIAL
PARASITE" IN 1964, HE SERVED A YEAR AND A HALF TERM OF HARD LABOR
AT A COLLECTIVE FARM. WHILE HIS EMIGRATION A FEW YEARS LATER
FINALLY GAINED HIM THE FREEDOM TO WRITE, IT CUT HIM OFF FROM BOTH
HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE AND HIS NATIVE CITY, WHICH HAD PROVIDED RICH
VISUAL INSPIRATION FOR HIS POETRY. BUT JOSEPH BRODSKY TRIED TO
VIEW EMIGRATION AS A CONTINUATION, NOT A BREAK, WITH THE PAST:
// 2ND BRODSKY ACT. //
EVERY COUNTRY IS A CONTINUATION OF SPACE, AND EVERY DAY,
EVERY YEAR IS A CONTINUATION OF TIME IN A SENSE, OF THE
TIME THAT YOU'VE GOT IN THIS LIFE. WHEN I LEFT RUSSIA
ON JUNE 4, 1972, I TOLD MYSELF, JOSEPH, ACT AS THOUGH
NOTHING HAPPENED, TRY TO RUN YOUR OWN SHOW IF YOU CAN,
AND FOR SOME TIME I JUST PLAYED THAT ROLE, THAT IS I
KEPT THAT MASK TIGHT TO MY FACE. LO AND BEHOLD, ONE DAY
I REMEMBER IN MICHIGAN, I REALIZED THAT IT'S ABSOLUTELY
NATURAL WHAT I WAS DOING.
// END 2ND BRODSKY ACT. //
JOSEPH BRODSKY WENT ON TO BECOME A PROMINENT FIGURE IN AMERICAN
LITERARY CIRCLES, AS WELL AS ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES. HE TAUGHT
POETRY AT SEVERAL AMERICAN SCHOOLS, INCLUDING THE UNIVERSITY OF
MICHIGAN, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE. THOUGH
HE CONTINUED TO WRITE MAINLY IN RUSSIAN, HE ALSO COMPOSED POEMS
IN ENGLISH, A LANGUAGE HE SAID HE LOVED FOR ITS CLARITY:
// 3RD BRODSKY ACT. //
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT ENGLISH IS THAT IN COMPARISON TO OTHER
LANGUAGES, RUSSIAN, GERMAN, WHICH I KNOW VERY LITTLE,
FRENCH, IN ALL THOSE LANGUAGES WHAT MATTERS IS THE
COMBINATION. (END OPT) TO COMPARE ENGLISH AND OTHER
LANGUAGES IS LIKE COMPARING TENNIS AND CHESS. IN CHESS
WHAT MATTERS IS THE COMBINATION. THE COMBINATION CAN BE
BEAUTIFUL, WHEREAS IN TENNIS THE BALL FLIES IMMEDIATELY
BACK INTO YOUR FACE. IN ENGLISH, YOU CAN'T WRITE SIMPLY
OUT OF THE BEAUTY OF YOUR CADENCES; IN ENGLISH YOU ARE
BOUND TO MAKE SENSE."
// END 3RD BRODSKY ACT. //
THE POET OF LENINGRAD ALSO FOUND NEW SETTINGS FOR HIS WORK. HE
DEVELOPED A SPECIAL AFFECTION FOR AMERICA'S EASTERN SEACOAST, ITS
PACIFIC NORTHWEST, AND EUROPEAN CITIES LIKE VENICE, AMSTERDAM AND
LONDON. HIS POETRY NOT ONLY CELEBRATED THE VISUAL POWER OF
PLACES AROUND THE WORLD, BUT ADDRESSED ITSELF TO INTERNATIONAL
EVENTS LIKE THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, THE BERLIN WALL AND STRIFE IN
NORTHERN IRELAND. A POEM ABOUT POLAND CALLED "A MARTIAL LAW
CAROL" BEGAN WITH THESE LINES:
// 4TH BRODSKY ACT. //
ONE MORE CHRISTMAS ENDS SOAKING STRIPES AND STARS ALL MY
POLISH FRIENDS ARE BEHIND STEEL BARS, LOCKED LIKE ZEROES
IN SOME GRAPH SHEET OF WRATH: AS A DISCIPLINE SLAVERY
BEATS MATH. NATIONS LEARN THE RULES LIKE A NAUGHTY BOY
AS THE TYRANT DROOLS MANACLES IN JOONE PEN STROKE APIECE
MINUS EDITS PLUS HELPING THE POLICE TO SUBTRACT A CLASS.
// END 4TH BRODSKY ACT //
JOSEPH BRODSKY SAID SUCH POEMS WERE INSPIRED BY THE ABSURDITIES
AND INCONGRUITIES HE FOUND IN MODERN HISTORY. HIS POETRY IN TURN
OFFERED HOPE AND INSPIRATION TO THE VICTIMS OF HISTORY'S CRUEL
INJUSTICES:
(BEGIN OPT) // 5TH BRODSKY ACT. //
I REMEMBER FOR INSTANCE WHAT PROMPTED MY WRITING A POEM
ABOUT AFGHANISTAN. I SAW ON TELEVISION TANKS SOMEWHERE
IN AFGHANISTAN ON A PLATEAU WHICH HASN'T SEEN ANYTHING
MECHANICAL UNTIL THAT DAY. IT WAS A VIOLATION ON THE
ELEMENTAL LEVEL, NOT TO MENTION THE POLITICAL INTEGRITY
OF THE COUNTRY. (END OPT) THAT LITTLE POEM ABOUT EVENTS
IN POLAND--IT WAS SIMPLY BECAUSE A COUPLE OF MY FRIENDS
WERE BEHIND BARS, AND I JUST WANTED TO GIVE THEM SOME
SORT OF COMFORT. AND SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY TRANSPIRED
SUBSEQUENTLY. I WAS IN LONDON WHEN I RECEIVED NEWS OF
THE NOBEL PRIZE, AND THAT EVENING I WAS IN THE STUDIO OF
THE BBC. THE TELEPHONE RANG, AND IT TURNED OUT THAT ONE
OF MY OLD FRIENDS WAS IN LONDON. HE CONGRATULATED ME ON
THIS AND THAT, AND 'BY THE WAY,' HE SAID, 'THANK YOU
VERY MUCH FOR THAT POEM, "MARTIAL LAW CAROL". WE WERE
SITTING IN THE CELL AND SOMEBODY SLIPPED UNDER OUR DOOR
A CLIPPING FROM THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS WITH YOUR
POEM IN IT DEDICATED TO US.' WELL, THAT WAS FAR MORE
MOVING THAN THE DECISION OF STOCKHOLM (WINNING THE NOBEL
PRIZE) FOR ME."
// END 5TH BRODSKY ACT. // (END OPT)
WHILE JOSEPH BRODSKY WAS OFTEN DESCRIBED AS A POET IN EXILE, HE
VIEWED HIMSELF MERELY AS A POET LIVING ABROAD. WHETHER IN RUSSIA
OR THE WEST, HE SAID HE ALWAYS FELT A GAP BETWEEN THE WORK HE WAS
DOING AND THE DAILY LIFE TAKING PLACE AROUND HIM. ABROAD IS
EVERYWHERE FOR THE POET, HE EXPLAINED; IT IS THE POET'S ETERNAL
PREDICAMENT TO FEEL HE IS AMONG STRANGERS.
RUSSIAN EMIGRE POET JOSEPH BRODSKY, WHO DIED AT THE AGE OF 55 IN
NEW YORK. (SIGNED)
NEB/NB/LWM28-Jan-96 7:11 PM EST (0011 UTC)
NNNN
Source: Voice of America
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/voa_obit.html
НЕВОЗВРАЩЕНЕЦ
На смерть Иосифа Бродского
Юлия Горячева
In memoriаm
РАННИМ УТРОМ 28 января в своей нью-йоркской квартире во сне скончался поэт, лауреат Нобелевской премии 1987 года Иосиф Бродский. Буквально за несколько дней до его смерти (предполагаемая причина - острая сердечная недостаточность; в сравнительно небольшой отрезок времени Бродский перенес несколько инфарктов и две операции на открытом сердце) на книжных полках США появился последний сборник его англоязычных эссе "О печали и ее истоках", изданный "Ferrer Strаuss & Giro". В то же время Бродский косвенным образом метафорически вошел "в каждый американский дом": именно по его инициативе в бытность его писателем-лауреатом (одна из престижнейших национальных литературных премий, получение которой в определенной степени возлагает на лауреата обязанности "третейского судьи" в литературной жизни страны; получена Бродским в 1983 году) была осуществлена публикация специального, карманного издания антологии классической американской поэзии, бесплатно распространяемого наряду с Библией в большинстве американских отелей. В рамках этой же программы было осуществлено и другое новшество для американской публики. На средства федерального правительства США массовым тиражом были изданы специальные плакаты - "Жемчужина американской поэзии", помещаемые в салонах автобусов и в вагонах метро. Иосиф Бродский, вынужденно выехавший в июне 1972 года в рамках дозволенного властями выезда евреев в Израиль, в течение многих лет занимался преподаванием, в частности, курса англо-американской литературы в Анн Арборе (Мичиган), затем в Маунт Холиок колледж (Массачусетс), не исключено, что именно в этом штате будет похоронен великий поэт. По крайней мере, по словам близких, вдова поэта, Мария, несмотря на настойчиво-любезные предложения мэра Санкт-Петербурга Анатолия Собчака о предоставлении права воздания поэту "похоронных почестей" его родному городу, склоняется к одному из альтернативных вариантов.
У Бродского осталось двое прямых наследников: 27-летний петербургский рок-поэт Андрей Басманов и двухгодовалая дочь Алла-Александра (О литературной деятельности сына мне ничего не известно, но дочь зовут - и это точно - Анна Мария Александра. - Прим. разработчика сайта).
Нью-Йорк
Григорий Заславский, Игорь Зотов
"БУДУЩЕЕ всегда настает, когда кто-нибудь умирает. Особенно человек. Тем более - если бог". Теперь это будущее наступило - умер Бродский. Поэт, который как бы нечаянно, как бы играя, создал целую поэтическую школу и породил сонмы учеников и подражателей. В нем не было классической гармонии (как и в его веке), но была классическая ясность. Он не был и "нашим всем", но был, пожалуй, "половиной всего". Когда в 1972-м он покинул Россию, нам казалось по неизбывной российской привычке, что он еще не пересек точку возврата, что он вернется. А Бродский не вернулся. Сделав то, что не умеем сделать мы. Он раздражал свободой, раздражал невозвратом. Привычные более к пророкам, мы не прощали простой свободы. Почти все не прощали, кроме самых близких к нему людей. Кто-то встречался с ним, ездил к нему, переезжая не в Америку, а в какую-то потустороннюю Шамбалу, потом возвращались, рассказывали - как он там в Америке, что покупает себе из еды, как гуляет по Венеции, что плохо себя чувствует, что много дней провел за последний год в больнице. Все это слушая, мы продолжали не верить. Ест? Гуляет? Сердце?
Казалось, что у него бесконечно много времени, позволявшего ему говорить длинно. Этим искусством он обладал, как никто другой. Он и писал - сочинял и переписывал свои стихи на двух языках. А время-то оказалось конечным.
В 1992 году "НГ" пригласила Иосифа Александровича на свой праздник. Бродский отказался. Сказал - боится, что не выдержит сердце.
Последней его книгой, вышедшей на родине, стал сборник "Пересеченная местность" (издательство "Независимая газета"). Книга эта сразу заняла первые места в списке интеллектуальных бестселлеров. Манифест скитальца, манифест человека мира. И - одинокого человека. Он и тут раздражал - одиночеством. Потому и не пришел умирать на Васильевский остров, что "землю, в которую придется лечь, тем более - одному, можно не целовать". И совершенно неважно, где положат его тело: на Тресковом мысу, в плоской Голландии или во Флоренции. Умер Иосиф Бродский. Гениальный русский поэт. Ситуация уникальная - за два века впервые - русская литература осталась без живого классика. Место на парнасской вершине свободно. Кажется, надолго.
Лев Лосев
В ПОСЛЕДНИЕ недели жизни Иосиф был весел. За многие годы он привык к своей смертельной болезни, и его настроение зависело не столько от того, что говорили ему врачи, сколько от того, что выходило из-под его пера. А в эти недели декабря и января он много писал. Видно, особенность гения в том, что он постоянно превосходит самого себя. В последних стихах поразительное ощущение жизни, самой ткани человеческого существования.
Я глубоко убежден, что на Бродском закончилась русская поэзия, какой мы ее знали от XVIII века. Когда мы с ним говорили в последний раз, с неделю назад, он сказал, что читает прозу Пушкина. Я думаю, что Бродский был последним в России человеком, который мог понимать Пушкина, как брат брата.
Иосиф писал когда-то: "Я любил не многих, но очень сильно". В число этих немногих входят: Петербург, русский язык, русская литература. Не любил, презирал он пошлость, в России - имперскую пошлость с ее злобой и кровью. В том же последнем разговоре он возмущался политиканскими рассуждениями о Чечне. "Что случилось с простыми вещами? - говорил он. - Большой не должен бить маленького, сильный обижать слабого".
Его любимой формой обращения к собеседнику было - солнышко. Но это он сам был солнышком, а мы все светились только отражением его света. Жизнь потемнела - солнышко русской поэзии закатилось.
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/ng-koi8.html
From
Organization
Date
Newsgroups
Message-ID [email protected] (Douglas Clark)
Guest of Bath University Computing Services, UK
Mon, 29 Jan 1996 21:19:38 GMT
rec.arts.books
Joseph Brodsky: Poet against an empire by W.L.Webb Joseph Brodsky, who has died aged 55, was as gifted with words and the power of metaphor as any poet among his contemporaries, but the emergence of his gift at a particular time and place --- he was born in Leningrad almost on the eve of the German invasion --- brought him other endowments. He became the heir to the great tradition of modernism in Russian poetry, rooted in the moment early in the century when, Andrei Sinyavsky believes, this was the finest poetry in the world. Anna Akhmatova in her passionate old age herself annointed him, saying she had heard nothing like his poems since Osip Mandelstam. Nadezhda Mandelstam, characteristically, was more sceptical. Akhmatova, she wrote in her memoir of her martyred husband, Akhmatova's great contemporary, might have overestimated the young Brodsky as a poet because `she was terribly anxious that the thread of the tradition she represented should not be broken, and imagining she was again surrounded by poets, she thought she could detect a ferment in the air like that of those early years.' Still, Mrs Mandelstam went on, `He is ... a remarkable young man who will come to a bad end, I fear' --- which points to yet another still more equivocal, endowment which came with that blessing of Akhmatova's. In one of his penetrating essays on Mandelstam, Brodsky talks about the older poet's `growing identification,' in the twenties, `with the archetypal predicament of `a poet versus an empire.'' This was also the predicament of the young Pushkin; and, before he was 24, of Joseph Brodsky too. His career up to that point had not been of the kind that won gold stars or opinions in official Soviet society. For a start, he had been born a Jew (`100 per cent Jew, with a tremendous reservoir of guilt'), the son of a naval officer who had been dismissed when he reached the most senior rank then permitted to Jews; this was in 1949, the year which saw the arrest and execution of the entire Leningrad party leadership. The son dismissed himself from school at the age of 15, read voraciously in the margins of various temporary jobs (one of them as a mortuary assistant at coroners' autopsies), and began writing at the age of 18, a crucial member of that generation and milieu he describes so warmly in one of the autobiographical essays in his prose collection, Less Than One: `Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn't, as it might seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their own personal destinies.' He was taken up by Akhmatova on the strength of early poems --- very different from hers --- circulated in `samizdat' and by his early twenties, reading at clandestine poets' gatherings, he had become the darling of a milieu where the natural Russian passion for poetry was again being pressure- cooked by censorship and repression. And this in spite of the picture Mrs Mandelstam gives of him at work: `I have heard Brodsky read his verse. An active part in the process is played by his nose. I have never known anything like it before in all my life: his nostrils expand and contract and do all kinds of funny things, giving a nasal twang to each vowel and consonant. It is like a wind orchestra.' The quality of the writing spoke for itself just as unmistakably, however, in poems like The Great Elegy for John Donne, which dreams a sleeping 17th century London, a sleeping island, with the poet asleep under the dome of St Paul's, and his poems sleeping too: The verses sleep. The stern iambi sleep The trochees sleep like guards, to left, to right and in them sleeps a glimpse of Lethe's brook, and something else beside it sleeping --- fame.' Another glimpse of the young Brodsky shows him, when the ink was barely dry, reading this poem aloud `con amore' to his friend Anatoly Naiman in a railway station booking hall, to the horror of the stolid ranks of Soviet citizens queueing for tickets. Inevitably this irregular patronage and fame, unauthorised by membership of the Writers' Union, unauthenticated even by a university degree, meant that he was soon taken up by critics of a different sort. In the days following the fall from grace of Krushchev and his erratic de-Stalinising, the thought police of one kind and another, literary and administrative, reacted with predictable resentment to Brodsky's far from subdued display of talent and obduracy. There were several nasty preliminary harassments. In November 1963 he was attacked in the Leningrad press (a piece entitled A Semi-literate Parasite), and on a bitter night shortly before Christmas he was surrounded by three men, wrestled into the back of a car and eventually held in the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital in Moscow until January 5. As soon as he returned to Leningrad he was arrested and finally brought to court on February 14, 1964 charged with social parasitism: since he wasn't a poet licensed by the Writers' Union or any other recognised authority, being a poet couldn't be held to be his gainful occupation, and by failing to take up any other, he was effectively a parasite or vagrant: QED. By then, however, civil courage among writers and those who cared for literature and freedom, had advanced to the point that a full note of the trial was taken by a woman journalist, and soon got out to the West. It included the famous exchange with the uncomprehending or wilful judge that inscribed Brodsky's name, willy nilly, in the roll of poet-heroes: Judge: `What is your occupation?' Brodsky: `I am a poet.' Judge: `Who recognised you as a poet? Who gave you the authority to call yourself a poet?' Brodsky: `No one. Who gave me the authority to enter the human race?' Judge: `Have you studied for it?' Brodsky: `For what?' Judge: `To become a poet. Why didn't you take further education at school where they prepare you, where you can learn?' Brodsky: `I didn't think poetry was a matter of learning.' Judge: `What is it then?' Brodsky: `I think it is ... [with evident embarassment] ... a gift from God.' After a further three weeks among the actually mad and `officially mad' in a psychiatric clinic (to which experience we owe the mordant Beckett-like cantos of Gorbunov and Gorchakov) he was sentenced to exile with five years hard labour on a remote state farm in Archangel province, but after less than two years, following as much pressure from Russian and foreign writers as could be brought to bear on that system. he was released in November 1965, to return to Leningrad, in poor health but for the time being at least, in peace. The years that followed he spent partly learning Polish in order to be able to translate Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, and English so that he could learn deeply from and translate Donne and Andrew Marvell (his poem The Butterfly is an extraordinary reincarnation and translation of the spirit of English metaphysical poetry). He also needed English to be able properly to read Auden, another hero among the older generation of living poets, who during the early years of his coming exile would be important to him in a new literary universe as Akhmatova had been in his native realm. He was no longer crudely persecuted, though when an invitation was sent to read at the Festival of two Worlds in Spoleto in 1969, the Union of Soviet Writers replied on his behalf, `There is no such poet in Soviet Russia.' Compared with the severity with which Sinyavsky and other writers were treated in the late sixties, Brodsky said, he had got off lightly: `Only two years. By Soviet standards it's positively homeopathic.' But in 1972 he again was obliged to lead the way in exile --- this time out of the Soviet Union altogether, to be followed in short order by Galich, Solzenitsyn, Zinoviev, Maksimov, Voinovich, Nekrasov and Vladimov. Two days after Brodsky arrived unwillingly in Vienna, all his manuscripts confiscated and impounded in the airport customs store in Moscow, he was in Auden's house in Kirchstetten. He was already in Auden's debt not least for helping to focus a notion that would be central to his own aesthetic with those lines about how Time `Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives'. Now the old poet consoled him and `looked after my affairs with the diligence of a good mother hen,' offering, to Brodsky's embarrassment, to translate him, and, more immediately invaluable, fixing a grant from the Academy of American Poets that would tide him over until he arrived at the first of his several American teaching jobs, at the University of Michigan. Exile and separation from the language Brodsky identified with the deepest spring of the poet's and the nation's soul did not, as the party police may have hoped, silence his troublesome tongue or weaken his spirit. He had understood and declared himself to be an exile in his own land long before he was made to leave it, so he was not now `beheaded' by physical severance. In any case, passionately though he was attached to the resonant music of his mother speech, his devotion to language was a kind of religious devotion, transcending the sounds and structures of any one tongue. As he put it in his acceptance speech when he was made Nobel laureate in 1987, it's not that language is the poet's instrument, but that he is its vessel. If language was something like his god, separation made Mnemosyne Josef Brodsky's muse and consoling mate in his bereavement. Most literature is an art of memory, and all exiles are also sentenced to be memorialists, but the intensity of the gaze with which he conjured Leningrad's streets and buildings out of its Baltic marshland mists in poem after poem, and page after page of his prose, has more than a touch of the magus about it. In corners of cities everywhere, his sensitised eye found pieces of `Peter', as its natives were not to be dissuaded from knowing it: a gesture, a mood, a pediment, the limb of a statue, `I, too, once lived in a city whose cornices used to court/clouds with statues...' he writes in a poem for his Italian publisher. And passionately as he loves Venice, in his last prose work, Watermark, one often senses behind its celebrations of his love, the presence of that other, Northern dreamworld floating not in the Adriatic but the Baltic. He repeats in Watermark the notion --- `water is the image of time' --- most memorably deployed in a Petersburg essay in Less Than One, the earlier prose collection which may prove to be the book by which he is best remembered by readers without Russian. `Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam', wrote this son of a sailor-turned-photographer, this wideawake revenant scanning the quays of the Neva, `it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river.' Like his abiding preoccupation with time itself, it reminds you of his master Mandelstam, whose Journey to Armenia, for example, another visit recollected in short `takes', is as full of metaphors that make your hair stand on end. And like Mandelstam too, with all his power of memory Brodsky is eminently a poet of his present time, and a `renewer of language', as one of his best critics puts it, wrestling stoically with the bleak existential themes of the late twentieth century, but also getting to grips with the second, Anglo-American culture history has required him to take on. (He wrote his first poem in English, an Elegy on the death of Auden in 1975). `Growing old! Good day, my old age!' The poet and his poetry had been fighting the battle with Time and death at least since the age of 32. Time equals cold. Each body, sooner or later, falls prey to the telescope. With the years, it moves away from the luminary, grows colder. But the gift of the Word grants a stay of execution and, if not immortality, an afterlife, warmed by the spirit's aspiration: ...to God's least creature is given voice for speech, or for song --- a sign that it has found a way to bind together and stretch life's limits, whether an hour or day. The way in which the Word most signally defeats Time (and other tyrannies, however), is by `remembering': `And there was a city', he wrote in the title piece of Less Than One, recalling his route to school along the Neva. `The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. With an immense grey river that hung over its distant bottom like the immense grey sky over that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully elaborated facades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint of a giant mollusc called civilisation. Which ceased to exist.' ...typed from `The Guardian, Monday, January 29, 1996. written by W.L.Webb. Douglas Clark 69 Hillcrest Drive, Bath, Avon, BA2 1HD, UK Voice: +44 1225 427104 Email: [email protected] Benjamin Press: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/webbobit.htmlFrom: Boris VELIKSON [[email protected]] Subject: INFO-RUSS: Smert' Brodskogo To: [email protected] Date: Mon, 29 Jan 96 16:15:32 "WET This is INFO-RUSS broadcast (1150+ subscribers). Home page, information, and archives: http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/inforuss.html To post, or to subscribe/unsubscribe, mail to [email protected] INFO-RUSS is not responsible for the information supplied by its users or/and for their views. Navsegda rasstaemsya s toboj, druzhok. Narisuj na bumage prostoj kruzhok. Eto budu ya: nichego vnutri. Posmotri na nego, a potom sotri. Umer Brodskij. V XX veke russkaja literatura ne byla bedna talantami. Umiral odin, ostavalis' drugie. Ne tri, tak dva, ne dva, tak odin. A vot mezhdu odnim i nulem - raznica nalichiya i otsutstviya. Sejchas - ne ostalos' nikogo. Brodskij uzhe umiral odin raz. I v svoem sobstvennom soznanii, i v soznanii ostavshihsya. Kogda v 72 godu ego vyperli, on ne mog predstavit' sebe svoego sushchestvovaniya vne goroda. Ego stihi posle etogo - stihi s togo sveta. (Ya ne hochu citirovat' dlya teh, kto ne chital: ne dlya etogo stihi pishutsya). V Leningrade zhe ostavshiesya poety "andergraunda" stali bodro sporit', kto iz nih pervyj piit Peterburga. Ibo uezzhavshie ne proyavlyalis' bol'she nikogda, a stalo byt', perestavali sushchestvovat'. Zhal', neplohie poety prinimali v etom uchastie, no chitat' ih bol'she ne hochetsya. Brodskij - dovol'no redkij, hotya ne unikal'nyj, primer lozhnoj slavy togo zhe urovnya, kotorogo dolzhna byla by byt' istinnaya. Drugoj hrestomatijnyj primer - Pushkin: kakoj zhe russkij ne znaet Pushkina? Tol'ko chitat' vot ego dlya etogo ne obyazatel'no. Brodskij - poet velikij, no kamernyj. Ne mogut ego lyubit' vse, ya ne pro narod, no dazhe pro iskrenne chitayushchuyu publiku. Ya imeyu pravo ob etom govorit': kogda ya govoril komu-nibud', chto Brodskij, kak mne kazhetsya, - poet urovnya Mandel'shtama, vo vtoroj polovine 60h godov eto vosprinimalos' kak eres' i preuvelichenie, granichivshee s neprilichiem. Byli metry, i byl mal'chishka Brodskij, nu, "Piligrimy" tam, "Vasil'evskij ostrov", no kakie-to paradniki; poet, konechno, soslali, svolochi, no v obshchem - protezhe Ahmatovoj, i ne nado preuvelichivat', i voobshche u vseh, s kem vlast' ploho oboshlas', poyavlyaetsya preuvelichennaya izvestnost'. Potom byl eshche period, kogda Brodskij byl poetom gorodskogo masshtaba: v Leningrade - "velikij", v stolice - predmet i primer piterskogo snobizma. Ya ochen' horosho pomnyu eto vremya, i kogda posle Nobelevskoj premii vdrug poyavilas' vsenarodnaya slava, dlya menya eto bylo koshchunstvo i licemerie. Ne dolzhno byt' slavy posle premii. Ne smotrite Nobelevskomu komitetu v zuby, chitajte sami. Za granicej zhe delo obstoyalo tak, kak vsegda obstoit. V Brown University Brodskogo ne izuchali, potomu chto on eshche ne umer. Izuchat' nado umershih, o nih mnenie ustoyalos'. (Poetomu izuchali "Cement" Gladkova, prichem v perevode). V U. of Connecticut Brodskogo prohodili. Izvestnejshaya rusistka harbinskogo prois\cydot hozhdeniya Irene Kirk sprashivala u studentov-oluhov: pochemu Brodskij napisal "Na Vasil'evskij Ostrov ya vernus' umirat"? Oluhi ne znali. Mrs Kirk otvechala: potomu chto na Vasil'evskom Ostrove nahoditsya Universitet, t.e., stalo byt', eto vrode kak residential area vozle kampusa, tam-to i zhivut intelligentnye lyudi. Brodskij byl umen. Eto redkoe kachestvo u poeta. Kak-to poluchaetsya, chto obychno umenie rassuzhdat' meshaet neposredstvennomu proyavleniyu talanta, kak budto talant prohodit potokom ne cherez golovu, a pryamo na bumagu iz vozduha. Etim radikal'no otlichaetsya rannij - doot`ezdnyj - Brodskij ot posleot`ezdnogo. Do - on ne rassuzhdal, a perenosil na bumagu potok, s kotorym ne vsegda i spravlyalsya. Ya ochen' lyublyu eti stihi, v nih est' svezhest' i napor, kotorye on poteryal posle. Brodskij - razlyubil ih. On byl protiv ih perepechatki, i na vopros, neuzheli on ne lyubit dazhe "Shestvie", otvetil "Osobenno "Shestvie"". Eti stihi mnogim hotelos' polozhit' na muzyku, i inogda eto dazhe poluchalos', u Klyachkina i Mirzayana, hotya tut zhe oni zhe portili muzykoj drugie ego veshchi. Posle ot`ezda Brodskij stal intellektualen i sovershenen. U nego ischezli sluchajnye slova, i kazhdaya fraza stala mysl'yu. (Moya fraza zvuchit ironichno, i ona i byla by ironiej v otnoshenii kogo-nibud' drugogo. Brodskij nastol'ko talantliv, chto i v etoj ipostasi pisal genial'nye stihi - tol'ko drugie). Interesno bylo slushat', chto on govorit; pro kakogo eshche poeta vy eto mozhete skazat'? I Brodskij nikogda ne vysluzhivalsya, ni v kakoj ierarhii. Eto tozhe bol'shaya redkost' v Rossii. Mozhet byt', emu prosto povezlo. Predydushchim nado bylo vrat', chtoby poprostu vyzhit'. Ili, inogda, oni i vpravdu zaputyvalis' - eto proishodilo gorazdo chashche, chem sejchas hochetsya dumat', vziraya na sovetskij stroj s nashej chechenskoj vysoty. A potom - te, kto byli protiv, stali sozdavat' antiierarhii, i vpolne iskrenne vysluzhivat'sya v nih. Brodskij uehal nikem, a potom byl odin. Emu ne prishlos' imet' dela ni s kakoj iz etih ierarhij, i edinstvennoe, v chem on mog by raskaivat'sya - eto chto srazu posle vysylki napisal pis'mo Brezhnevu, gde prosilsya nazad. Nu tak ved' ne znal on, chto tak silen, chto sostoitsya i vne gnezda. Nebol'shoj eto greh. No ya ne dumayu, chto emu prosto povezlo. Brodskij obladal redkim v russkoj tradicii chuvstvom ironii. V Rossii est' smeh, satira, chernyj yumor; ironiya - eto chuvstvo mery, kogda tebya ne zanosit, i ty smeesh'sya lish' nad tem, chto lozhno. Dlya etogo nado obladat' etim chuvstvom lozhnogo. Brodskij im bezuslovno obladal, a kto eshche - srazu v golovu ne prihodit. Tochnee, est', konechno, no kak i intellektual'nost', eto svojstvo redko sochetaetsya s tvorcheskoj genial'nost'yu: tvorchestvo sintetichno, a ironiya analitichna, i vrode, im nechego delat' vmeste. An vot poluchilos'. Tak chto dumayu ya, chto protivno bylo by emu igrat' rol'. No vse-taki horosho, chto ne poprosili. Russkaya poeziya posle Brodskogo nahoditsya v strannom vide. On radikal'no izmenil sredstva vyrazheniya. Pisat' tak, kak do nego, uzhe nel'zya, no rezul'tat etogo obogashcheniya sovsem ne ocheviden: slishkom mnogo tekstov kazhutsya podrazhaniyami. Avos' utryasetsya - ili, avos', poyavitsya kto-to, komu nezachem budet pol'zovat'sya sredstvami Brodskogo. No eto lish' avos'. Konchilas' epoha Brodskogo. Ne dlya mnogih ona - epoha Brodskogo, no poprobujte podumat', kto ot nee ostanetsya cherez N let. Brodskij-to ostanetsya. Novaya epoha ne budet epohoj kakogo-libo poeta. Poka chto pohozhe, chto ona budet epohoj massovoj slepoty. B.VELKSON http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/info-rus.htmlSeven Strophes I was but what you'd brush with your palm, what your leaning brow would hunch to in evening's raven-black hush. I was but what your gaze in that dark could distinguish: a dim shape to begin with, later - features, a face. It was you, on my right, on my left, with your heated sighs, who molded my helix whispering at my side. It was you by that black window's trembling tulle pattern who laid in my raw cavern a voice calling you back. I was practically blind. You, appearing, then hiding, gave me my sight and heightened it. Thus some leave behind a trace. Thus they make worlds. Thus, having done so, at random wastefully they abandon their work to its whirls. Thus, prey to speeds of light, heat, cold, or darkness, a sphere in space without markers spins and spins. 1981, translated by Paul Graves. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/seven_strophes.html Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey. Best are the dales and rivers removed by force, as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie," yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours. Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures, alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail! Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches, and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail. Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller. Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells. Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror, slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels. Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure. Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed. Look: what's been left behind is about as meager as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade. 1983, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/seaward.html As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter, immobile, by a leaf-coated pond a statue stands white like a blight of winter. After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins and outs of centuries, pestered heather. That's what coming full circle means - when your countenance starts to resemble weather, when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free to cloud your folds, to bare the navel. Future at last! That is, bleached debris of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never." Hence the routine of a goddess, nee alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on the heart of color and the temperature of the knee. That's what it looks like inside a virgin. 1983, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/galatea_encore.htmlTsushima Screen The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer days than the other months; therefore, it's more cruel than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound to wrap up our sailing round the globe with habitual naval grace, moving your cot to the fireplace where our dreadnought is going under in great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter! Golder unharnessed stallions in the chimney dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish, and the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring of a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers. 1978, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/tsushima_screen.html ... восходящее желтое солнце следит косыми глазами за мачтами голой рощи, идущей на всех парах к цусиме крещенских морозов. февраль короче прочих месяцев и оттого лютее. кругосветное плавание, дорогая, лучше кончить, руку согнув в локте и вместе с дредноутом догорая в недрах камина. забудь цусиму! только огонь понимает зиму. золотистые лошади без уздечек масть в дымоходе меняют на масть воронью. и в потемках стрекочет огромный черный кузнечик которого не накрыть ладонью. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/voshodyaschee_zheltoe_solntse.html Dutch Mistress A hotel in whose ledgers departures are more prominent than arrivals. With wet Koh-i-noors the October rain strokes what's left of the naked brain. In this country laid flat for the sake of rivers, beer smells of Germany and the seaguls are in the air like a page's soiled corners. Morning enters the premises with a coroner's punctuality, puts its ear to the ribs of a cold radiator, detects sub-zero: the afterlife has to start somewhere. Correspondingly, the angelic curls grow more blond, the skin gains its distant, lordly white, while the bedding already coils desperately in the basement laundry. 1981http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/dutch_mistress.htmlA Polar Explorer All the huskies are eaten. There is no space left in the diary, And the beads of quick words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek. Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin: what's been reached is the highest possible latitude! And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene. 1977, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/polar_explorer.html полярный исследователь все собаки сьедены. в дневнике не осталось чистой страницы. и бисер слов покрывает фото супруги, к ее щеке мушку дат сомнительных приколов. дальше -- снимок сестры. он не щадит сестру: рейь идет о достигнутой широте! и гангрена, чернея, взбирается по бедру, как чулок девицы из варьете. 22 июля 1978 г. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/polyarny_issledovatel.htmlMay 24, 1980 I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages, carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters, lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis, dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles. From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty. Quit the country the bore and nursed me. Those who forgot me would make a city. I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles, worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter, planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables, guzzled everything save dry water. I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty. Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl; switched to a whisper. Now I am forty. What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence. Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit. Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx, only gratitude will be gushing from it. 1980, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/may_24_1980.html North Baltic To K.H. When a blizzard powders the harbor, when the creaking pine leaves in the air an imprint deeper than a sled's steel runner, what degree of blueness can be gained by an eye? What sign language can sprout from a chary manner? Falling out of sight, the outside world makes a face its hostage: pale, plain, snowbound. thus a mollusc stays phosphorescent at the ocean's floor and thus silence absorbs all speeds of sound. Thus a match is enough to set a stove aglow; thus a grandfather clock, a heartbeat's brother, having stopped this side of the sea, still tick-tocks to show time at the other. 1975, translated by the author.http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/north_baltic.html шведская музыка к.х. когда снег заметает море и скрип сосны оставляет в воздухе след глубже, чем санный полоз, до какой синевы могут дойти глаза? до какой тишины может упасть безучастный голос? пропадая без вести из виду, мир вовне сводит счеты с лицом, как с заложником мамелюка. ...так моллюск фосфоресцирует на океанском дне, так молчанье в себя вбирает всю скорость звука, так довольно спички, чтобы разжечь плиту, так стенные часы, сердцебиению вторя, остановившись по эту, продолжают идти по ту сторону моря. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/shvedskaya_musyka.htmlElegy About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle, to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings from a subtle lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade - wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state bad blood. Now the place is abuzz with trading in your ankles's remanants, bronzes of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises, rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason, laundered banners with imprints of the many who since have risen. All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn architectural style. And the hearts's distinction from a pitch-black cavern isn't that great; not great enough to fear that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere. At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often, set out on foot to a monument cast in molten lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief," or "in going under." 1985, translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/elegy.html Folk Tune It's not that the Muse feels like clamming up, it's more like high time for the lad's last nap. And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best drives a steamroller across his chest. And the words won't rise either like that rod or like logs to rejoin their old grove's sweet rot, and, like eggs in the frying pan, the face spills its eyes all over the pillowcase. Are you warm tonight under those six veils in that basin of yours whose strung bottom wails; where like fish that gasp at the foreign blue my raw lip was catching what then was you? I would have hare's ears sewn to my bald head, in thick woods for your sake I'd gulp drops of lead, and from black gnarled snags in the oil-smooth pond I'd bob up to your face as some Tirpitz won't. But it's not on the cards or the waiter's tray, and it pains to say where one's hair turns gray. There are more blue veins than the blood to swell their dried web, let alone some remote brain cell. We are parting for good, my friend, that's that. Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad. This will be me: no insides in thrall. Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl. Translated by the author. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/folktune.html
Деград
Бесплатные psd шаблоны сайтов.
Карта сайта: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
|