Proffer Brodsky is among us. Summary What we learned from the book “Brodsky Among Us”

Ellendea Proffer Tisley

Brodsky is among us

Ellendea Proffer Teasley

Brodsky Among Us

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Photos reproduced with permission of Casa Dana Group, Inc. and the Ardis Archive, University of Michigan

Preface

A few words about context

The world where Karl Proffer and I met Joseph Brodsky is long gone, and only the children of the Cold War truly know it. So Russian readers who don’t know how young Americans perceived that time should probably say a few words about the context of these memoirs.

The Cold War began as World War II came to an end and military and civilian people watched the Soviet Union subjugate border countries. These countries will be called captives or satellites - depending on who is speaking. The United States' response to the forced assimilation of these countries was wars - most extensively in Korea and Vietnam - and bloody interventions in Central and South American countries. The Soviets justified their unacceptable actions by arguing that their vast country required protection from enemies in the form of border areas. America justified its unacceptable actions by arguing that communism leads to tyranny and must be stopped wherever it arises. This is, of course, a very simplified explanation, but it helps to understand why a climate of mutual suspicion developed between the two great nuclear powers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Russia was present in the daily lives of young Americans, and this presence was tinged with a sense of fear. We hid under classroom tables during drills and knew why our parents built bomb shelters. We dreamed of bombings, and in our minds the Soviet Union was the country that suppressed popular movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The leaders of the Soviet Union seemed incomprehensible, and this gave rise to fear that they, under the influence of paranoia, might attack us.

When our generation became adults, it began to worry about America’s gradual involvement in the Vietnam War, where our relatives and brothers would have to fight in order to somehow stop communism. There was a draft, and this forced young people to think about the nature of the unfolding war. We thought about it and came to the conclusion that the price is too high.

Given the threat posed by the Soviet Union, one might assume that Karl and I decided to study Russian in accordance with the venerable tradition of “know thy enemy,” but, oddly enough, that was not what motivated us at all: we took up Russian studies out of interest in one from the world's great literatures. We came to it in different ways, but it responded to us in the same way. This literature, deep, rich and powerful, became a revelation for us after the English and French, which were the only ones we knew. In the nineteenth century, a peasant, largely illiterate country gave birth to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. This Golden Age was followed by the tragic twentieth century for Russia, when war, revolution, civil war and tyranny almost destroyed an entire culture. It's a miracle that it's not complete. It was strong literature, and we were people of strong emotions.

Although Karl Ray Proffer was born in 1938, and I in 1944, and we grew up in different parts of the country, our biographies had one thing in common: there were no signs that our future lives would be devoted to Russian literature.

Carl Ray Proffer's parents did not finish high school and, nevertheless, succeeded. Carl entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intending to become a basketball player or, failing that, a lawyer. In his first year he had to choose a foreign language; Karl looked at the board with the list of languages and for the first time saw the Russian alphabet. He said to himself: “What an interesting alphabet.” He was especially attracted by the letter “zh”, which looked like a butterfly. This beautiful letter prompted him to choose Russian, which, in turn, prompted him to enroll in courses in Russian literature. Until then, Karl had read very little literature of any kind, but now he met with the writers of the Russian Golden Age. A man with an excellent mind, exceptional memory and logical abilities, he probably should have become a lawyer - but he fell in love with Russian literature. This was a surprise to everyone around, and the parents were worried: how much can be achieved in such an unpromising area? He decided to write a dissertation on Gogol.

Ellendea Proffer Tisley

Brodsky is among us

Photos reproduced with permission of Casa Dana Group, Inc. and the Ardis Archive, University of Michigan

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Preface. A few words about context

The Cold War began as World War II was coming to an end and military and civilian people watched as the Soviet Union subjugated border countries. These countries will be called captives or satellites - depending on who is speaking. The United States' response to the forced assimilation of these countries was wars - most extensively in Korea and Vietnam - and bloody interventions in Central and South American countries. The Soviets justified their unacceptable actions by arguing that their vast country required protection from enemies in the form of border areas. America justified its unacceptable actions by arguing that communism leads to tyranny and must be stopped wherever it arises. This is, of course, a very simplified explanation, but it helps to understand why a climate of mutual suspicion developed between the two great nuclear powers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Carl Ray Proffer's parents did not finish high school and, nevertheless, succeeded. Carl entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intending to become a basketball player or, failing that, a lawyer. In his first year he had to choose a foreign language; Karl looked at the board with the list of languages and for the first time saw the Russian alphabet. He said to himself: “What an interesting alphabet.” He was especially attracted by the letter “z”, which looked like a butterfly. This beautiful letter prompted him to choose Russian, which, in turn, prompted him to enroll in courses in Russian literature. Until then, Karl had read very little literature of any kind, but now he met with the writers of the Russian Golden Age. A man with an excellent mind, exceptional memory and logical abilities, he probably should have become a lawyer - but he fell in love with Russian literature. This was a surprise to everyone around, and the parents were worried: how much can be achieved in such an unpromising area? He decided to write a dissertation on Gogol.

In 1962, Karl visited the Soviet Union for the first time, and the trip was not particularly pleasant: the few Russians with whom he was allowed to communicate were, for the most part, the kind who looked after foreigners. However, he was able to travel around the country and work extensively on Gogol. At his young age, he was already an excellent teacher, translator and researcher. His main themes - and those that influenced him the most - were Pushkin, Gogol and Nabokov.

Unlike Karl, I grew up in a reading family, although no one in it was particularly interested in foreign languages. My first Russian acquaintance was Dostoevsky - I read “Crime and Punishment” at the age of thirteen. I was aware that I did not fully understand the novel, but I felt its power. At the age of fifteen, a mathematics teacher who had learned Russian in the army gave me a collection of Mayakovsky’s poems in English translation; “The Spine Flute” made a particularly strong impression on me. (Of course, I could not imagine that I would ever meet Lilya Brik, to whom the poem was dedicated.)

I majored in French and Russian in college and went on to graduate school at Indiana University. In the first year of my master's degree, I read The Master and Margarita and immediately realized that I would focus my work on this novel.

I met Karl Proffer in the same year, 1966, at his infamous lecture on “Lolita” (quotes of a sexual nature shocked the emigrant ladies and caused excitement among graduate students). He had recently become a professor at Indiana University and was writing his second book, Keys to Lolita. In two years, we managed to fall in love with each other, separate from our partners and get married.

In January 1969, we went on a scientific exchange to Moscow. Along the way we stopped in New York and had several important meetings in Manhattan bars. In the first, Gleb Struve, a famous émigré literary critic, met us and announced that we should abandon the trip because the previous year the Soviets had brought tanks into Czechoslovakia: in his opinion, even visiting the Soviet Union would be immoral. But nothing could change our decision. We were tired of the bitterness of the Cold War, we wanted to see the Soviet Union and draw our own conclusions. We could not be proud of our country, where there was such a difficult struggle for the civil rights of African Americans and it was considered possible to bomb civilians in Cambodia and Vietnam. This cast doubt on our positions in the Cold War. We wanted to learn more about the Soviet Union.

On our own we certainly would not have gained access to the circle of the Soviet intelligentsia. Karl was only thirty-one years old, and Russian literary scholars at that time knew nothing about him. And I was twenty-five—a graduate student writing a dissertation on Bulgakov. We had one trump card, but a wonderful one - a letter of recommendation received in the second bar in Manhattan, from the literary critic Clarence Brown to Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, the famous diarist and widow of Osip Mandelstam. It was she who called Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, and I was able to question her. And thanks to this, in turn, we were able to meet many other people from the literary world.

After several meetings with Nadezhda Yakovlevna alone, we were invited to a soiree in her small apartment. She invited interesting people to her place, including Lev Kopelev and Raya Orlova, devout communists in the past who became dissidents after Khrushchev’s report at the 20th Congress. These energetic, generous people became our close friends, despite the fact that, when they first came to us at the Armenia Hotel, they unceremoniously took away all our English books, saying that they needed them more than we did...

You can have different attitudes towards books about famous people: someone does not read them out of principle, believing that this can destroy all the magic (well, really, what difference does it make that Nabokov was an arrogant snob, and Nekrasov flogged his servants until they lost pulse, the main thing is that they remain in people’s memory not because of this), someone, on the contrary, wants to know everything about the idol, from the details of a child’s biography to the location of objects on the desk at the time of death. I gravitate more toward the former, believing that creativity comes first, and I can say with complete confidence that truly talented people are allowed more. A priori. Simply because of talent. But in recent years there has been a flurry of quite good... I don’t even know what to call it, in the case of Pavel Basinsky - these are studies, in the case of Mrs. Tisley - memoirs, and so on, in general, works dedicated to poets and writers. This year has already seen the release of “Lion in the Shadow of Lion” about L.N. Tolstoy and his children, “The Life of a Man in the Wind” about my beloved Daniil Kharms through the prism of his circle, so, one might say, the once controversial “Antiakhmatova” published played a role the role of a catalyst in the dissemination of highly specialized literature among the population.

There are many books about Brodsky: writing about the elitist poet began quite actively after his death. Someone was settling scores in this way, since during his lifetime Brodsky offended many; it is even easier to name those Soviet writers about whom he never said anything bad than those about whom he did. Someone saw in him a Nobel laureate and a great poet, who was kicked out of the country, thus depriving his parents and children, and therefore the stoically surviving creator needs to be exalted. So, the book “Brodsky Among Us” written last year by Ellendey Proffer Tisley is a look at Joseph Brodsky as a person, with all his pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages. The book is quite honest and quite personal, because Ellendea was the person who got Brodsky an American visa, a place at the university so that he could live on something, woke up at night from his calls and, probably, more of what she could do for to do it, was his American publisher, the person who paved the way for the St. Petersburg Jew, convicted of parasitism, into world literature.

As in many other cases - thanks to the Korpus publishing house, “Brodsky Among Us” was translated and published quite quickly, the original of 2014 appeared with us in April 2015 (fresh, guys, come!), plus, the book has inserts with color photos (some of them previously unknown to the public, taken from a personal archive) and illustrations, so that much of what is written in the text also becomes visual: here Brodsky is sitting on a suitcase (literally and figuratively), here he is joyful and excited in front of ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Literature, now in the 90s with his young wife and daughter Anna. You can see what those same editions of Brodsky or Nabokov from the American publishing house Ardis looked like; in general, the photo here is a separate conversation.

As for the text of the book, I would say this: it is very personal and touching. For Ellendea, Brodsky is like a capricious, wayward child whom you love no matter what, although he has given you 100 reasons to hate himself. She manages, without talking about it openly and without calling a spade a spade, to quite fully show how difficult it was with Him and at the same time how difficult it was for him, including with himself (several times the author emphasizes that Brodsky often misspoke in conversation with people, feeling that he is behaving rudely).

In general, “Brodsky Among Us” speaks very well about the content under the cover: this is a book not about Brodsky the poet and not about Brodsky the essayist, this is a book about a person, about the Brodsky who appeared before people, and before different people. On the part of Yevtushenko and Akhmadulina, with whom there was open enmity (at least on the part of our hero), he was alone, on the part of his best friend Mikhail Baryshnikov (by the way, I didn’t know about the close friendship before reading it, so in some ways this is a small discovery) - another, but for Karl and Ellendey - the third. And, nevertheless, the narrator quite skillfully combines all this into a fairly complete image, albeit not a very pleasant one, but at least a personality, without saying a single negative word about the person being described. Here, perhaps, a quote would be in place: “Joseph Brodsky was the best of people and the worst. He was not a model of justice and tolerance. He could be so sweet that after a day you begin to miss him; he could be so arrogant and nasty, that he wanted the sewer to open under him and take him away. He was a person."

In general, “Brodsky Among Us” seems to me to be a rather successful near-literary book, which in 200 pages easily and naturally paints a portrait of one of the most brilliant poets of the 20th century, outlines the historical and cultural situation of the second half of the last century related to literature within the USSR and Russian literature outside the union. No, honestly, how bitter it is to realize that the books of Russian writers were better known somewhere overseas in the homeland of the “damned capitalists”, that ideology completely absorbed art and created so many difficulties, some of which have not yet been resolved (already in the 2000s, it would seem, when everything was available, I was faced with the problem of finding a printed edition of Vladimir Uflyand’s poems, but even at that time it was impossible to get them, it was published in the same “Ardis” by Karl and Ellendea Proffer, in the 90s already in perestroika In Russia it had very small circulations. In the end, I received the desired collection, but several years later, looking at the circulation, there was no limit to amazement - 600 copies).

I will advise, why not, another thing is that I will repeat once again that the book is not about the creative path and not about creativity in general, it practically does not touch upon it (except that you can once again be convinced that all the love poems related to Marina Basmanova, mother son Joseph Brodsky, even many years after their separation and his move to America), but there are literary sources for this, and there are quite a few of them. Well, this is a rather “warm” and “lively” work, without any scandals, intrigues of investigations, which leaves behind a pleasant aftertaste and topics for thought.

Photos reproduced with permission of Casa Dana Group, Inc. and the Ardis Archive, University of Michigan

© 2014 by Ellendea Proffer Teasley

© V. Golyshev, translation into Russian, 2015

© A. Bondarenko, artistic design, layout, 2015

© AST Publishing House LLC, 2015

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Preface. A few words about context

In the nineteenth century, a peasant, largely illiterate country gave birth to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. This Golden Age was followed by the tragic twentieth century for Russia, when war, revolution, civil war and tyranny almost destroyed an entire culture. It's a miracle that it's not complete. It was strong literature, and we were people of strong emotions.

Carl Ray Proffer's parents did not finish high school and, nevertheless, succeeded. Carl entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intending to become a basketball player or, failing that, a lawyer. In his first year he had to choose a foreign language; Karl looked at the board with the list of languages and for the first time saw the Russian alphabet. He said to himself: “What an interesting alphabet.” He was especially attracted by the letter “z”, which looked like a butterfly. This beautiful letter prompted him to choose Russian, which, in turn, prompted him to enroll in courses in Russian literature. Until then, Karl had read very little literature of any kind, but now he met with the writers of the Russian Golden Age. A man with an excellent mind, exceptional memory and logical abilities, he probably should have become a lawyer - but he fell in love with Russian literature. This was a surprise to everyone around, and the parents were worried: how much can be achieved in such an unpromising area? He decided to write a dissertation on Gogol.

In subsequent years (we came to Russia approximately once a year until 1980), the Kopelevs - as well as Inna Varlamova, Konstantin Rudnitsky and many others - arranged for us to meet with almost everyone we would think of meeting - from the famous literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to the dissident worker Anatoly Marchenko. We received a crash course in current and past Russian literature—a course that no American university could teach at the time: there were virtually no contemporary writers on our reading lists and very little was available in translation.

These numerous meetings also enlightened us regarding the true history of Russia and the Soviet Union - thanks to the stories of living witnesses of different ages.

Most ordinary people did not seem to be bothered by the regime; they lived their daily lives, happy that apartments and amenities were subsidized and bread was cheap. It didn’t matter to them that they couldn’t travel, watch some films, or read banned books. They complained only when they themselves or their children encountered a system where it is impossible to achieve something if there are no connections.

The Russians who let us into their lives instinctively felt that something could be done with these two young Americans - and they enlightened us. They spared no time with us - they talked about their lives, their past, their expectations and showed how things look from their point of view. Now I understand how important this encounter with a certain type of culture was in our mentality. We were young, energetic and took the idea of liberation to heart. And most importantly, thought and action were closely connected for us. In general, we acted rather instinctively. It was great luck for us to meet people from the Moscow and Leningrad literary world, but we returned after a six-month stay in the Union with a heavy feeling. Russia is a country in chains; this wasn't news, but experiencing it in person was a lot different than reading about it. We were furious at the kind of lives smart people were forced to lead, and I think the idea for Ardis came from that anger.

After our first trips to the USSR, we realized that most people in the West had no idea about the diversity and richness of the literature that was being created in Soviet Russia, and Karl thought about publishing a magazine dedicated to writers of the Silver Age, often ignored by our researchers, and new writers who deserve translation. In the fall of 1969, he gathered a small group of our friends at Indiana University (almost all of whom later became employees of the Russian Literature Triquarterly) and showed them the approximate contents of the first issue of the magazine devoted to Russian literature. We were all fascinated by this idea, but no one believed in its implementation - who would finance the magazine? Who will buy? Neither of us was involved in publishing; we knew nothing about it. We assumed that we would take up the project in the distant future, if at all.

In fact, Ardis started working in the spring of 1971: Karl got bored and decided that he needed a hobby - maybe printing poetry on a hand press. He approached one of the many commercial printers in Ann Arbor (he was now teaching at the University of Michigan) and was advised to rent an IBM typesetting machine. Having seen what this machine was good for - including for typing in Cyrillic - he took the next obvious step: we ourselves would type the magazine and print it in Ann Arbor, where printing services for circulations of less than a thousand were very cheap.

We thought for a long time about the name of this, perhaps very ephemeral, enterprise, and the name that came to us was born as a result of our Moscow trip in 1969.

In 1969, Karl and I were given a room in the former Armenia Hotel. I won’t go into detail about the many strange adventures in this hotel, which had never before accepted foreigners, but I will only say that it was an ideal setting for some Nabokov story.

After a few months, we desperately wanted to read something new in English. The newspapers at the embassy were a week old, and the library apparently stopped stocking Robert Penn Warren. One day, after months of lack of books, a package arrived to us by diplomatic mail. Nabokov asked Playboy magazine to send Karl the layout of Ada so that he would respond in the letters column when the magazine published an excerpt from the new novel. This in itself was amazing, but what we would read in a charming old-fashioned issue of “Armenia” is an as yet unpublished novel by Nabokov - this could not have appeared to us in our wildest fantasies. Although our marriage was extremely happy, Ada instantly created a split in the family: both wanted to read it without delay. He, of course, was an expert on Nabokov, but I was an avid reader, and it seemed to me that I had to take this into account. We began to steal each other's books in the most vile way: the phone would ring, Karl would unwisely put down the novel to answer the phone, I would immediately grab the book and run to the bathroom to read the next chapter. We devoured the novel, memorized some parts almost by heart, and after that “Ada” took a special place in our memory, associated with this hotel, with this winter and a desperate thirst to read something fresh in English and something to balance the pressure of the Russian world being studied. Something that will remind us that we come from the English language, although - paradoxically - the novel was written by a Russian emigrant.

That winter we had no idea how our lives would be intertwined with Russia, how its sufferings and its achievements would touch us, how our lives would change after meeting its people, both wonderful and terrible. Along with internally free intellectuals, we met soulless bureaucrats, charming informants, sadly compromised characters. We had a desire to help, but we did not yet know how.

When the time came in 1971 to give a name to the publishing house, which still existed only in our heads, Karl and I thought about Nabokov’s “Hell”, the action of which takes place in a mythical country with features of both Russia and America, in the Ardis estate, which seemed to have migrated here from Jane Austen through Leo Tolstoy and transformed by Nabokov’s love for the Russian estates of his childhood.

Karl believed in the absolute value of insight - it came to him when, from a basketball player who accidentally took up Russian, he turned almost overnight into an intellectual who devoted himself to serious research. In search of a suitable emblem for the publishing house, I looked through all my books on Russian art and settled on Favorsky’s engraving with a carriage. Pushkin said that translators are the post horses of enlightenment - that’s the stagecoach.

Three months later—an incredibly short period of time—we had a thousand copies of Russian Literature Triquarterly, paid for with money borrowed from Karl's father, and stored in the garage of our small house. As soon as the magazine was printed, we reprinted Mandelstam’s rare book and published in Russian the final, 1935, version of Bulgakov’s play “Zoyka’s Apartment,” which was given to me in Moscow. In subsequent years, books were published in every way better, but the charm of those early years is incomparable. When it was time to send out the magazine, friends came and helped seal them in envelopes; everyone was sitting on the floor in the living room, eating pizza. It was difficult to convey this reality to our Russian listeners; they imagined everything differently. They believed that we would get rich by publishing Russian literature; it was difficult for them to understand that most translators work for free. “Ardis” would not have lasted a year if not for the cooperation of Slavists and amateurs who were engaged in this business only out of love. We were a small publishing house, but the largest publishing house of Russian literature outside of Russia, and our influence was much greater than one might assume judging by our circulation. In America we focused on libraries and college graduates, in Russia on unknown readers who passed books from hand to hand and even printed copies - especially Nabokov.

I must say a word of gratitude to the Americans for supporting our publishing house, which is little known in Russia. Despite the primitive design and printing of our first books, reviewers from major newspapers and magazines quickly understood what we were trying to do and gave us more reviews than we could have hoped for. They knew that financially this was a crazy undertaking, and they helped as best they could. In 1989 I was given a MacArthur grant, and it supported us for a long time. Over time, Carl became very good at communicating directly with librarians—one flyer was called “Syllogism for Librarians”—and this was vital because sales of the hardcover books paid for the paperback editions. Sometimes we felt that the librarians were also trying to help Ardis.

When the Russian authorities found out that we had become publishers, it made our life difficult. We were followed, our acquaintances were interrogated by the secret police, even keeping our books for readers was dangerous. We warned everyone who dealt with us that the authorities were keeping an eye on us, although this was already clear to any Russian. The atmosphere of restrictions and intimidation forced us, on the contrary, to behave defiantly. We were afraid for our friends, but not so much for ourselves. Apparently, indignation outweighed fear.

We knew our authors, since we met almost everyone alive, but we did not know our readers outside of Moscow and Leningrad and, probably, would never have met them if not for the Moscow book fairs.

The only fair that Karl and I attended together was in 1977 - and it was a memorable event. It started badly: the censors wanted to take away all our books. Luckily, I hid the Russian Lolita in the cupboard, which they didn’t bother to search. We had to fight so that at least part of the books would be returned to us... It was known about the book famine in Russia, but the extent of it could not be imagined until you see how people stand in line for two hours or more just to go to the stand where, Rumor has it that some interesting books are on display. People from all over the Soviet Union came to these fairs, and some of them did not look like bookworms at all - they were the most interesting visitors. Intellectuals pushed their way to Nabokov's books and tried to read the entire novel while standing; workers and peasants didn’t care about Nabokov; they went straight to Yesenin’s biography, where there were many photographs, including one, never reproduced in the Soviet Union, of Yesenin after suicide. The biography of the national poet was in English, but everyone recognized his face on the cover. I can’t explain why their reaction touched me so much. Maybe they knew who understood them.

Our friendship with the Russians often led to dramatic events - some are described in these memoirs. “Ardis” became an essential part of the Soviet literary world: major writers who were tired of their books being crippled by censorship began to publish here. Ardis became a way station for emigrant writers who left the Union in the 1970s, when Jews began to be released - and those who could “prove” that they were Jews.

In 1973, we moved from a small town house to an old country club with a huge basement. Now we had space for offices, for storing books, and for many Russian guests, who sometimes lived with us for months.

Despite all our efforts to remain a purely literary publishing house, and not a political one, we soon began to be attacked in the Soviet press. We printed half the books in Russian, and half in English, for a total of about four hundred titles. Because of the English translations, the authorities did not dare to ban us, because we translated Soviet writers whom they valued, and because of this they defined us as a “complex phenomenon,” that is, they had to monitor us, but not interfere.

For ten years we faced the usual problems of foreigners in the Soviet Union, but Karl's entry was officially banned only in 1979 because of the Metropol. I went to Moscow in 1980, but in 1981 I was also refused. A group of famous and young writers compiled this almanac to show the absurdity of censorship, and we published it. The collection was not intended to be political, but in the Soviet situation it turned out to be just that. The authorities were offended by the fact that people like Aksenov and Voznesensky, literary stars, were participating in it. Almost everyone involved in the collection was punished in one way or another. Even after Gorbachev, until the early 1990s, every time I had difficulties with border guards at the airport upon entry.

Karl never visited Russia again - in 1982 he was diagnosed with cancer. At the National Institutes of Health, where Karl underwent intensive chemotherapy, he wrote a book, “Widows of Russia,” about women we know who saved literary documents for Russian culture.

A new memoir about Brodsky was written by Ellendea Proffer Tisley, an American Slavic literary scholar who, together with her husband Karl Proffer, founded the Ardis publishing house. In the 1970s–1980s, Ardis was considered the main publishing house of Russian-language literature that could not be published in the USSR. This is a small but very informative book: Brodsky was such a close friend of the Proffer family (they met in Leningrad before his emigration) that Ellendey with rare calm talks about his arrogance, intolerance to many phenomena and dishonesty with women - just as they talk about shortcomings of close relatives. At the same time, she does not hide the fact that she adores Brodsky both as a poet and as a person. With his book, Proffer fights the mythologization of his image, which has only been growing in the less than 20 years since his death: “Joseph Brodsky was the best of people and the worst. He was not a model of justice and tolerance. He could be so sweet that after a day you begin to miss him; He could be so arrogant and disgusting that he wanted the sewer to open under him and carry him away. He was a personality."

12 memories of Brodsky from his American publishers

Nadezhda Mandelstam

For the first time, young Slavists Karl and Ellendya Proffer learned about the new Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky from Nadezhda Mandelstam. The writer and widow of the great poet received them in 1969 in her Moscow apartment on Bolshaya Cheryomushkinskaya and strongly advised them to meet Joseph in Leningrad. This was not part of the Americans’ plans, but out of respect for the Mandelsts they agreed.

Meeting at Muruzi's house

A few days later, the publishers, on the recommendation of Nadezhda Yakovlevna, were accepted by 29-year-old Brodsky, who had already experienced exile for parasitism. This happened in Muruzi’s house on Liteiny - Gippius and Merezhkovsky once lived there, and now Brodsky’s Leningrad address has become his museum-apartment. Brodsky seemed to the guests to be an interesting, but complex and overly narcissistic person; The first impression on both sides did not go beyond restrained interest. “Joseph talks as if you are either a cultured person or a dark peasant. The canon of Western classics is beyond doubt, and only knowledge of it separates you from the ignorant masses. Joseph is firmly convinced that there is good taste and there is bad taste, although he cannot clearly define these categories.”

Parting words to Akhmatova

The fact that in his youth Brodsky was part of the circle of the so-called “Akhmatov’s orphans” helped him later in emigration. Akhmatova, back in the early 60s, spoke about Brodsky in Oxford, where she came for a doctorate, his name was remembered, and Brodsky emigrated no longer as an unknown Soviet intellectual, but as Akhmatova’s favorite. He himself, according to Proffer’s memoirs, often remembered Akhmatova, but “speaked about her as if he fully realized her significance only after her death.”

Letter to Brezhnev

In 1970, Brodsky wrote and was ready to send a letter to Brezhnev petitioning for the abolition of the death sentence for the participants in the “airplane case,” in which he compared the Soviet regime with the Tsarist and Nazi regimes and wrote that the people had “suffered enough.” Friends dissuaded him from doing this. “I still remember how, when reading this letter, I froze with horror: Joseph was really going to send him - and would have been arrested. I also thought that Joseph had a distorted idea of how much poets mean to people at the very top.” After this incident, it became finally clear to the Proffers that Brodsky had to be taken away from the USSR.

The Proffers and their children celebrated New Year 1971 in Leningrad. On that visit, they met for the first and last time with Marina Basmanova, the poet’s muse and the mother of his son, with whom Brodsky had already painfully broken up by that time. Subsequently, according to Ellendey, Brodsky will still devote all his love poems to Marina - even despite dozens of novels. “She was a tall, attractive brunette, silent, but she looked very pretty when she laughed, and she laughed because when she came up, Joseph taught me how to pronounce the word “bastard” correctly.

Rapid emigration

Brodsky hated everything Soviet and dreamed of leaving the USSR. The main way he saw was a fictitious marriage with a foreigner, but organizing it was not so easy. Unexpectedly, while the country was preparing for Nixon’s visit in 1972, Brodsky’s apartment received a call from the OVIR - the poet was invited to a conversation. The result was stunning: Brodsky was offered to leave immediately, within 10 days, otherwise a “hot time” would come for him. The destination was Israel, but Brodsky only wanted to go to the United States, which he perceived as an “anti-Soviet union.” American friends began to puzzle over how to organize it in their country.

A few days later, the plane with Brodsky on board landed in Vienna, from where he was supposed to go to Israel. He will never return to Russia again. Brodsky did not immediately realize what had happened to him. “I got into a taxi with him; On the way, he nervously repeated the same phrase: “Strange, no feelings, nothing...” - a little like Gogol’s madman. The abundance of signs, he said, makes you turn your head; he was surprised by the abundance of car brands,” Karl Proffer recalled how he met Brodsky at the Vienna airport.

Brodsky did not understand how much effort it took for his friends, who call the US immigration service “the most disgusting organization of all,” to get him, who did not even have a visa, the opportunity to come and start working in America. This was only possible with the active participation of the press. Brodsky flew to the New World and stayed at the Proffer house in Ann Arbor, a city where he would live for many years. “I went downstairs and saw a confused poet. Cupping his head in his hands, he said, “This is all surreal.”

One hundred percent Westerner

Brodsky was an implacable enemy of communism and a 100% supporter of everything Western. His beliefs often became a source of controversy with the moderate left-wing Proffers and other university intellectuals who, for example, protested the Vietnam War. Brodsky's position rather resembled that of an extreme republican. But he was more interested in culture, which for Brodsky was concentrated almost exclusively in Europe. “As for Asia, with the exception of a few centuries-old literary figures, it seemed to him a monotonous mass of fatalism. Every time he spoke about the number of people exterminated under Stalin, he believed that the Soviet people took first place in the Olympics of suffering; China did not exist. The Asian mentality was hostile to the Westerner.”

Hostility and arrogance

Brodsky was openly hostile to the extremely popular Western poets in the USSR - Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina and others, which did not prevent him from turning to the almost omnipotent Yevtushenko for help if he needed to help someone he knew emigrate from the USSR. Brodsky also showed disdain for many other writers, without even realizing it: for example, he once left a devastating review of a new novel by Aksenov, who considered him his friend. The novel was able to be published only a few years later, and Aksenov called Brodsky and “told him something like this: sit on your throne, decorate your poems with references to antiquity, but leave us alone. You don’t have to love us, but don’t harm us, don’t pretend to be our friend.”

Nobel Prize

Proffer recalls that Brodsky was always very self-confident and, while still living in Leningrad, said that he would receive the Nobel Prize. However, she considers this self-confidence an organic feature of his talent, that is, a positive feature - without it, Brodsky might not have become Brodsky. After a decade and a half of living abroad, worldwide recognition and the death of his parents behind the Iron Curtain, Brodsky received a prize and danced with the Swedish queen. “I have never seen a happier Joseph. He was very animated, embarrassed, but, as always, at the height of the situation... Lively, friendly, with his facial expression and smile, he seemed to be asking: can you believe this?”

Marriage

“He sounded confused when he told me about it. I can’t believe it, I don’t know what I did, he said. I asked him what happened. “I got married... It’s just... The girl is just so beautiful.” Brodsky's only wife, Italian aristocrat of Russian origin Maria Sozzani, was his student. They got married in 1990, when Brodsky turned 50 and the USSR was already collapsing. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.

In the 90s, Brodsky, who had a weak heart, underwent several operations and grew old before his eyes, but never quit smoking. Proffer recalls about one of their last meetings: “He complained about his health, and I said: you’ve been living for a long time now. This tone was normal for us, but it was hard for Maria to hear it, and, looking at her face, I regretted my words.” A few weeks later, on January 28, 1996, Brodsky died in his office. He never came to Russia, where by that time his collected works had already been published, but was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele.

Publishing house Corpus, Moscow, 2015, translation by V. Golyshev