"He said I was doing everything properly but not to drive on the highway at such a high speed. "We were supposed to get a $10 fine, but after looking at my papers, they let us off," Brodsky wrote to a Russian friend on the other side of the Atlantic.
Beside him, the University of Michigan professor and publisher Carl Proffer, who had brought the redheaded writer to Ann Arbor and was now teaching him to drive. At the wheel, the young Russian poet whose English was barely comprehensible. He began his career in America on much the same footing.Ī few months after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, a policeman stopped a car that had been racing down a Michigan highway. His parents particularly prized the drawings of Pushkin, and pored over Pushkin albums-which also must have made an impression on the future poet who had been compared to Pushkin for his restless daemon and poetic equilibristics.The Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky was something of an enfant terrible in his native Leningrad.
SEVEN STROPHES BRODSKY HOW TO
But surely a less-observed aspect of the liaison is this: she fostered the poet as artist.īasmanova lit the fire, but the kindling had been prepared by others. His father was a photographer, and Brodsky learned early how to compose an image in a viewfinder, to develop a “camera eye.” His own photographs show the influence of the father on the son. Moreover, the classical architectural lines of his hometown, the former and future Petersburg, imprinted themselves on his aesthetics almost from birth and found expression in almost everything he wrote. Brodsky certainly would have known of Pushkin’s similar habit of illustrating what he wrote.
SEVEN STROPHES BRODSKY SERIES
Their love, suffering, and final separation forged a poetic identity for the young poet, who would go on to face trial, internal exile, forced labor, psychiatric prisons, and eventually exile.įor decades after the liaison ended, Brodsky immortalized Marina Basmanova in a series of poems eventually published as New Stanzas to Augusta. And what did she give him? A son. In 1962, the high-voltage poet met a dark-haired artist, a woman of silences. He was almost twenty-two, she was nearly two years older. It was not only a surprise, it was a wonder – letters, notes, photos, manuscripts, but perhaps most surprising of all, five self-portraits, a landscape, a still life, drawings in ink and chalk, and inevitably doodles.īrodsky illustrated almost everything he wrote, often with self-portr aits in the margin, or cats, which Y uri Leving of Dalhousie Univ ersity, in an unpublished manuscript, Joseph Brodsky the Artist, called “acts as a metonymic self-representa tion of the exiled writer, easing the pathos of the message and translating it into a comic register.” When I spoke to John W ronoski of Lame Duck Books about the collection, the man who is an expert on modern European literature and who has appraised many Brodsky archives said it was “totally exciting”- the letters alone, he said, would be “jewels in any collection.” Hoover had just acquired an important collection of Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky papers, which had been gathered by his close friend, Diana Myers, the wife of one of the poet’s translators, Alan Myers. Last fall, Lora Soroka, archivist extraordinaire at the Hoover Institution’s Library & Archives, told me to come quick, quick, quick to the Hoover Pavilion.
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