Banished for the sake of truth...

Don’t respond to “Hey, boy!”, be deaf and dumb.
Even if you know the language, don't speak it.
Try not to stand out in profile, full face - sometimes
I just don't wash my face. And when I saw
They cut the dog's throat without wincing. Smoking, extinguish
A cigarette in spittle. As for things, wear
Gray, earth-colored. Especially underwear,
To reduce the temptation to bury you in it.

Joseph Brodsky. "Edification"

Forty years ago in Leningrad, as Akhmatova put it, they “made a biography” of Joseph Brodsky - in other words, he was condemned as a “parasite” and sent to indulge in physical labor in the North, to the village of Norenskaya.

The biography turned out great. So much has been written about the Poet that, it would seem, there is nothing left to add. Memories of him were left by those who communicated with him both in Leningrad and in New York - and by those whom he himself probably would not have remembered.

Our life is saturated with his poetry - even where she does not suspect it... Almost everyone can remember this. In sheets of blind typescript from Samizdat, or with a guitar, performed by Evgeny Klyachkin and Alexander Mirzayan.

Between the lines - and immediately between people - a spark jumps. This energy is capable, for example, of igniting a spark of trust between you and a Chechen militant with a green armband. Or, on the contrary: to pacify and bewitch a brood of drunken aggressive punks, like rabbits, like banderlogs in front of a boa constrictor. However, everyone could probably remember something similar.

This personal attitude is like “My Pushkin” by Marina Tsvetaeva. The attitude is not always enthusiastic. Such, undoubtedly, a great poet as David Samoilov, who came to him from the doorstep of Brodsky, not only drove him away - he simply sent him: “He sends me with his poems - as a reader - to @#%. So I have every right to send him to @#%!"

What to do with them? - poets...

However, the Soviet government, as usual, translated “stylistic differences” (in the words of Andrei Sinyavsky) into a different discourse. “Scoop” generally hated him fiercely and instinctively, as can be seen from the recording of Brodsky’s trial made by Frida Vigdorova. This bacchanalia is also an example of the personal attitude of the masses guarding their facelessness. It’s not even about politics here - let’s remember the poet’s remark, known from the words of Sergei Dovlatov: “...He’s so Soviet!” - “For mercy, he’s anti-Soviet!” – “Soviet, anti-Soviet - what’s the difference...”

Brodsky's pathos - individuality, personal view - to the point of disappearing from the general field of view. The excerpt from “Edification” included in the epigraph is an undoubted polemic with the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. You can remember other lines from there, you can even buy and believe.

But personalities attract each other. And today we can say about the people who were nearby. Each of them is worthy of a separate article.

Brodsky's poems, which were circulating in the lists, were published in the samizdat magazine "Syntax" by Alexander Ilyich Ginzburg - and for this he "received" his first term - two years. He was the informal leader of a company of poetic, artistic, bohemian youth - and who knows what he would have become without such close attention of the Soviet Government? Formally, Alik was convicted under a criminal article - out of the kindness of his heart, he passed the exam for someone else. But the KGB sought permission for this “amalgam” from the Central Committee of the CPSU, and there, in a letter preserved in the archives, the true motives are indicated. Upon his release, Alik did not calm down and did not improve - he drew up a “White Book on the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel”, and received five years of strict regime. Having been released from this walk, he became the manager of the Solzhenitsyn Foundation, and received ten years of special treatment. So they turned him into a human rights activist and journalist. instill a “(anti)Soviet” ( “what’s the difference!” But they couldn’t ) style - spider-like seriousness was alien to him. When he tried to address himself by his first name and patronymic - “Alexander Ilyich” - Alik invariably responded: "Ilyich! Ilyich!"

The trial of Brodsky was “made public” by Frida Vigdorova, a journalist from Literaturnaya Gazeta. She - a Soviet journalist - first of all actively helped people, Frida Abramovna was seriously and terminally ill, and this entry is one of her last good deeds. However, with this she essentially laid down the canon of “trial records” as a genre of samizdat text. The transcript, accurate, but nonetheless written in Russian, took on an almost artistic meaning. It was 1964. And the next step on this path is the already mentioned “White Book on the Sinyavsky and Daniel case.” This is 1966, after Vigdorova’s death. Two years later, the publication of the Chronicle of Current Events began. Few people know that another key text - Konstantin Paustovsky’s speech at the discussion of Vladimir Dudintsev’s story “Not by Bread Alone” on October 22, 1956 - was recorded and published in Samizdat by the same Frida Vigdorova.

And at the same time as Brodsky, another “parasite” was convicted in Moscow - Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik. Also “for the word”, for absurdist plays. Also with accusations of “pornography”. For example, the words from the play “Is Uncle Jack a Conformist” served as such, the hero of which, in turn, also read out the play: “Act one: Tsirlin rapes Tsipelzon!” - Everything about!" - “Act two: Tsipelzon rapes Tsirlin!” - Everything about!" - “Act three: Tsirlin and Tsipelzon rape each other!” - Everything about!" - "Act four: Ivan Ivanovich's ass moves to new working-class neighborhoods." - for the latter he was accused of slandering the working class. Amalrik, returning from an “unwanted trip to Siberia” (as he titled his memoir about exile), began to explore the absurd Soviet reality and became perhaps the first political scientist of Samizdat, writing the article “Will the Soviet Union Exist until 1984?”, and coined the word “dissident” "and was awarded no more than the coveted trip to Magadan for six years...

But Brodsky remained a Poet.

Or a bullet to the temple, as if to the place of an error - with a finger,

Or pull from here across the sea with the new Christ,

And how not to mix it up with drunken eyes, stunned by the frost,

A steam locomotive with a ship, you still won’t burn with shame.

Like a boat on water, it will not leave a mark on the rails.

Locomotive wheel.

In the early 1960s, he was planning to flee the USSR across the southern border, hijacking a plane, but changed his mind (traces of this are visible in the poem “Night Flight”), and eventually went to the North. And hardly anyone will believe that “being determines consciousness” after reading, say, “Two Hours in a Tank” - poems written on a collective farm in the Arkhangelsk province. He was released in 1965, thanks to the intercession of Marshak, Akhmatova, Shostakovich... and, indirectly, thanks to Vigdorova, who made this process public.

This region is motionless. Introducing the volume of gross

You'll shake your head stunned at cast iron and lead,

You will remember the former government on bayonets and Cossack whips.

But the eagles land like a magnet on the iron mixture.

Even wicker chairs stay here

Nuts and bolts.

It was difficult to live with such an understanding of “time and place.” The “surrounding reality” itself seemed to understand its incompatibility with poetry, and in 1972 Joseph Brodsky was forced to leave the USSR.

His poems continued to exist. On April 1, 1974, during a search in Leningrad, three copies of his introductory article to Brodsky’s samizdat collection of poems were confiscated from Mikhail Kheifetz. On April 22, Kheifetz was arrested, charged under Article 70 (“anti-Soviet agitation”), and in September sentenced to four years in maximum security camps and two years in exile. This is for the preface to an unpublished book! - The Soviet government still highly valued poetry. However, a letter in defense of Solzhenitsyn was also confiscated from Heifetz, and they were looking for (but did not find!) Amalrik’s article. These are the intersections...

Boris Strugatsky was also interrogated regarding the same “Case No. 15” - KGB investigator Ryabchuk even asked him for an autograph on a book that had been prepared in advance. They were interrogated about their acquaintance with that same ill-fated preface, and it was these interrogations that Boris Natanovich described in Sergei Vititsky’s book “The Search for Destiny.”

This article mentions Ginzburg and Heifetz - the same people as in the text from a month ago, dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's exile. It is probably no coincidence that these two pronounced individualists' circles of communication - real, "textual", historical - overlapped.

In 1987, Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

At the end of the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky - two Nobel laureates, two bright individuals, two very different people represented Russian culture to the peoples of planet Earth.

*****

It would be cheesy to reduce an article about a poet to a sum of commonplaces, quotes and references, without saying anything new.

In 1999, one of Joseph Brodsky’s poems was published on one and a half hundred pages ( Brodsky I.A. Representation / Artist and photographer O. Smirnov. - M.: New Literary Review, 1999 ). A year before his death, the poet allowed photojournalist Oleg Smirnov, who, it seems, photographed in all post-Soviet wars, to design “Performance.” It turned out - one photo per line. Photos - from Afghanistan to the first Chechnya. And not only - in the photo of the “peaceful” seventies we see Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz with her family at the 101st kilometer, in Karabanov, Vladimir province ( Evening enters in the Present, / The house is in the middle of nowhere, / The tablecloth argues with the curtain / In the sense of external decoration ).

These photographs miraculously “lay down” on the text written in 1987. In the poems themselves, which at first were read as postmodern hooliganism, over time an almost prophetic meaning began to emerge. Here:

Swan enters with reflection

In a round mirror in which

A platoon of birches is squatting,

The first violin makes faces

- who is this? General (and then Colonel) Lebed, who led combat vehicles to the White House under “Swan Lake” in August 1991? Or - a decade later:

Burlaks in Severomorsk

They pull the cruiser with a whip,

Emaciated from radiation.

- is it really “Kursk”?

Meanwhile, a non-fictional connection with reality can be traced even in these most seemingly absurd poems. Few people noticed the dedication - “To Mikhail Nikolaev” - they don’t pay attention to such little things at all. Although, it would seem, what a wonderful ironic vignette could be created during the days of floods in Yakutia and the struggle for the governor’s seat there (Did you watch Dersu Uzala? / I didn’t tell you everything! / Since he’s a chichmek, he believes in Buddha! / Will you be a bitch? I'll be a bitch! ) Meanwhile, there is no genius insight in the dedication, only the coincidence of a simple Russian first and last name.

It is believed that Mikhail Ivanovich Nikolaev was born in 1926. In fact, he never found out his real name, nor his birthday. He remembered his parents vaguely - what could have imprinted the consciousness of a child taken from his parents during their arrest at the turn of the thirties? He was named Misha Nikolaev in an orphanage for children of “enemies of the people.” At the beginning of the war he did backbreaking work, then he volunteered to go to the front. In 1950, he was arrested in Sverdlovsk for protesting against the Soviet electoral system, and spent three years in camps. In 1955, he was arrested again for protesting against the execution of prisoners in Sverdlovsk. After his release, he organized an underground group of workers like him “to fight for justice.” When the group was discovered, he tried to escape from the USSR in the Batumi region. Arrested, sentence - death penalty, commuted to ten years in the camps. Mordovia, Dubravlag. In 1978, together with his wife Victoria, Schweitzer left the USSR, settled in the States, and worked as a janitor at a university.

And in 1985 he published a book of memoirs “The Orphanage” ( Nikolaev M. Orphanage. Together with Victoria Schweitzer. - New York: Russica, 1985. - 128 pp. ) - the first and only part of the planned trilogy. To recreate the atmosphere of the times, the author intersperses short autobiographical stories with quotes from Soviet newspapers and TASS reports.

This book fell into the hands of Joseph Brodsky, and in 1987 “Performance” was born. Its ending is

"... You are now alone in the world.

Do you remember the song that used to happen

Was I humming in the dark?

It's a cat. This is a mouse.

This is a camp. This is a tower.

It's time to quietly

Kills mom and dad."

- the beginning of the biography of the person to whom the poem is dedicated. Its structure - narrative sonnets interspersed with quatrains of quotes - repeats Nikolaev's memoirs.

*****

The semantic somersaults in “Performance” force us to be more careful about the lines of “Edification” included in the epigraph. After all, the ending turns the whole poem upside down:

When you involuntarily shudder,

Feeling how small you are, remember:

Remember: a space that seems to have nothing

No need, really needs it

View from the outside. In the criterion of emptiness.

And only you can serve this service.