St Petersburg

Conversations with Akhmatova tended to take place on two planes, the everyday and the transcendent. Brodsky formulated it accurately: “Of course we talked about literature, of course we gossiped, drank vodka, listened to Mozart, and laughed at the government.”77 And yet because of the power of Akhmatova’s mind and her special place as witness to history and preserver of the Petersburg mythos, according to Brodsky, “there was always a field around her that permitted no access to scoundrels. And belonging to that field, to that circle, determined the character, behavior, and attitude toward life for many—almost all—of its inhabitants.”78

After Akhmatova’s death the moral atmosphere of Leningrad changed substantially: the figure that had connected eras was gone, the person against whom people checked their behavior and whose judgments they awaited and feared. This depressed the already grim city even further. The Leningrad Party hacks of the period were more reactionary and vengeful than their Moscow counterparts. This condition manifested constantly, in important decisions and in trifles.

When the local authorities banned a Western film that was allowed in Moscow and someone spoke up about it, he might get the smug response, “Leningrad, comrades, does not need to repeat Moscow’s mistakes!” The director of the Leningrad Philharmonic was fired because the performance by a Western ensemble of one of Bach’s church cantatas accidentally fell on Russian Orthodox Easter, a holiday that the Party was trying to eradicate from the popular consciousness.

The Leningrad artist Gavriil Glikman recalled that once, during the regime of Vassily Tolstikov, one of the most unpredictable and stupid Leningrad bosses, Shostakovich said to him sadly, “I think that you should hide your works carefully. Dig a hole, line it with concrete, and put your canvases in there. Who knows, today Tolstikov is in a good mood, but tomorrow they might all be destroyed.” (It is said that when Tolstikov received a delegation of American congressmen and one asked about the city’s mortality figures, Tolstikov replied confidently, “There is no mortality in Leningrad.”)

Upon Brodsky’s return from exile, Party officials tried to influence him with the usual carrot and stick. They gave him the opportunity to publish a few poems. At the same time that people were being arrested for keeping typewritten copies of the trial transcript, they offered to publish a collection of his works. However, the authorities made it a condition for publication that Brodsky agree to collaborate with the secret police as an informer. In a confrontational meeting with the KGB officials, Brodsky said, echoing an old remark of Shklovsky’s, “This conversation is absurd, because we’re not talking as equals. Behind you is an enormous system, and behind me is half a room, my typewriter, and nothing else.”79 The planned collection of Brodsky’s poems was canceled.

This game continued until May 1972, when Brodsky was called in to the visa department of the local police and told to leave for the West immediately. When Brodsky asked, “And if I refuse?” the police colonel replied with an unambiguous threat, “Then, Brodsky, in the very near future you will have a very hot time.”80

Trying to forestall the inevitable, Brodsky appealed directly to Leonid Brezhnev in a letter asking for repeal of his deportation. “It is bitter for me to leave Russia. I was born, grew up, and lived here, and I owe everything I am to it. Everything bad that was my lot is more than compensated by the good, and I never felt injured by the Homeland. I do not feel that way now. For though I cease being a citizen of the USSR, I do not cease being a Russian poet. I know that I will return; poets always return: in the flesh or on paper. I want to believe that it will be both.”81

Brodsky did not receive a response. If Brezhnev read the poet’s letter, its tone must have seemed strange and unusual. “We are all condemned to the same thing: death. I, who am writing these lines, will die, and you, who are reading them, will die, too. Our work will be left, but even that will not last forever. That is why no one should interfere with another in doing his work.”82 Free of philosophical ruminations, Sartre’s letter in defense of Brodsky demonstrates a greater understanding of how a Soviet apparatchik’s brain functions. Brodsky was in Austria by June; he later came to the United States and eventually settled in New York City.

His elderly parents were left behind in Leningrad, and Brodsky never saw them again. The Soviet authorities would not allow them to visit their son in America. When they died, the authorities vengefully kept Brodsky from attending their funeral in Leningrad. He also left behind his four-year-old son, Andrei, whose mother was the artist Marianna Basmanova, to whom Brodsky had dedicated his 1983 collection New Stanzas to Augusta—eighty love poems written over the course of twenty years.