Writer Gordin spoke about Brodsky’s departure from the USSR: “The KGB had a complete picture”

– Yakov Arkadevich, is everything known about the last days of Brodsky’s stay in Russia? As a witness and participant in the events, tell us what happened the day before and on the day of farewell.

– I saw Joseph the day before, I came to see what was happening at his house and first to say goodbye. There were a lot of people, people literally crowded. And to be honest, I didn’t like it. I told him that I would leave, and tomorrow we would see each other at the airport. He said: I appreciate your delicacy, and on this we parted.

The next day, Mikhail Milchik went to him in the morning, they went to the airport together. In addition to being a well-known art critic, Mikhail Isaevich is a wonderful photographer – and the famous photographs in front of a taxi and at the airport (where Brodsky is sitting on a brown suitcase) were taken by him. My wife and I (famous translator Natalia Rakhmanova. – I.V.) went straight to the airport and saw Joseph already there. There were quite a lot of mourners: fifteen or twenty people. But there was no pandemonium.

Everyone was in a sad and anxious mood, as, indeed, was his. Because he was leaving with a very anxious feeling, he did not know how his fate would turn out there. And the main thing that tormented him, in the last days before leaving and the first days in the States, was the thought of whether he would be able to write after such a turning point. Moreover, he noted in the first letter that he sent me from there that it was difficult for him to write, the lines did not add up quite organically. Fortunately, the fears turned out to be unfounded.

What exactly happened at the airport?

– Usual procedure. He went, introduced himself to the customs officers, he was asked to wait. There are again photographs of Milchik, where we are sitting on benches, and he either leaves or returns, because something was not ready. There were no historical conversations – it was not up to that. Finally he was called, at some point we were left alone in a kind of vestibule, such a small room. And there I really said to him: “Goodbye,” and the customs officer, who looked at it all with sympathy, corrected: “No, in such cases you need to say: goodbye.” She turned out to be wrong, almost all people close to Brodsky, with the exception, alas, of his parents, saw him one way or another.

– When did you receive the first letter from Joseph Alexandrovich?

– First, he called his parents, and Alexander Ivanovich (the father of the poet. – I.V.) called me. In June, Brodsky flew away, spent some time in Europe, then arrived in the United States, where a position as a poet-professor at the University of Michigan awaited him. And the first direct contact we had with him was in September. Karl Proffer, an influential Slavist who got him a university position, published the almanac “Russian Literature Triquarterly”, where works of our literature were published in Russian and English, which for one reason or another were not published in the USSR (not necessarily dissident). Karl Brodsky knew well, but he, so to speak, who could not swim well, was thrown into deep water and sent to teach. Joseph spoke English, but far from perfect, he was in a panic, as he should have taught a course in Russian poetry of the 18th century. This is a very specific, complex course, and Brodsky was not, as you remember, a philologist. We know what kind of education he had: a very well-read person, but his knowledge was non-systematic. So he asked me – and I sent him the books that were at hand, and a bibliography on the 18th century. Fortunately, then the mail worked very well, and it was possible to send letters and parcels to America and receive letters and parcels from there – there were no problems with this. He immediately replied to me with a long letter and told me very funny how about 15 people signed up for his Russian seminar, and several dozen for the second – in English poetry. That female students come to lectures with babies and feed them there. He wrote: “It looks like a train station, but more interesting.” A little later, he sent me postcards, and intensive correspondence began in the 80s, and before that we mostly called each other.

– Is it possible to assume that among those saying goodbye to the future Nobel laureate was a KGB agent? Did the special services take on board everyone who dared to come to the airport?

– Let’s say they took me on a pencil much earlier, by that time an operational file was opened against me in the KGB – there was no need to see me off. But there were definitely no agents among those who saw them off, since they were well-known to everyone, close people, with varying degrees of closeness to Brodsky, but nonetheless.

But, of course, we were being watched. And they copied everyone who was there. I think the State Security Committee had no shortage of information. They listened to the phone, but they still had to talk on the phone. I don’t think that Brodsky’s apartment was bugged, because with the technology of the time it would have had to be equipped with microphones. But all the people who were seeing them off called in advance, so the KGB had a complete picture of what was happening. They could write a comprehensive book about it better than anyone else.

– Did they somehow try to punish you or your friends for these farewells? That is, were there any direct consequences of this step?

“I am sure that almost everyone who was there had a dossier in the relevant institution. And in the dossier they made participation in the wires. Joseph even had a joke: “Each Monsieur has his own dossier.” But they didn’t immediately react to such things, they say, you saw off – we call you, warn you, and so on. Although everything was recorded and something was done in the process of accumulation, there were no direct repressions.

– The problem for everyone leaving the country was the restriction on the weight of luggage – they had to take only the most valuable.

– For Brodsky, this was not a problem – he was not going to carry much. The suitcase that we see in the pictures, the typewriter and the bag, that’s all, as far as I remember. He literally took a few changes of clothes, but he could not take the manuscripts with him – they would not have been let through. The papers he needed were then forwarded in other ways.

– And what happened to the personal archive?

The archive is here. Until the death of his parents, until the departure of Alexander Ivanovich on April 29, 1984, Brodsky’s papers were in the apartment. No one came there, no one searched. As soon as Joseph left, he ceased to interest him as a political figure for power. After the death of Alexander Ivanovich, I took, according to our agreement with him, the entire archive to myself. And only in 1990, having received the consent of Brodsky, he transferred it to the manuscript department of the Public Library.

“So he was only an annoyance while he was here?”

– After the poet returned from exile, there was a big problem: what to do with him? Brodsky behaved independently, he had a large correspondence with foreign countries, he did not hide his connections. This was very annoying: some well-known foreign writer would come and ask not for the secretary of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, but for Brodsky. And there were a lot of them – Italians, French, Americans, and not only writers, but also interns and graduate students. They lived in the dormitory of our university on Shkiperka, and Joseph maintained relations with many of them.

To seize and imprison him again meant to make a new scandal. Of course, they could arrange a car accident or something like that – the range of these guys was wide. But somehow it was necessary to get rid of it.

Did Brodsky himself want to leave?

– No. For him, the language environment was of great importance. He believed that not language is the tool of the poet, but the poet is the tool of language. And he insisted that he was a tool of the Russian language, that he was a Russian poet, and the break with the environment frightened him. 99.9% of his poems are in Russian, written in English – so, pampering.

Therefore, he hoped to follow the path of Vysotsky, who married Marina Vladi and got the opportunity to visit Paris, Moscow and wherever he wanted. For Brodsky, they thought over the option of a fictitious marriage with a foreigner. Because of this, the KGB was in such a hurry: he could get married, and there was no reason to prevent this. And in this case, he would have remained a Soviet citizen, and if he had behaved calmly (and even when he left, he did not arrange special political actions), there would be nothing to deprive him of his citizenship, as happened with Galich and Solzhenitsyn. And he was rolling back and forth.

To prevent this, they tried – quite gently – to oust him from the Soviet Union. But in any case, Brodsky was not going to leave forever.

He wanted to see the world, to have the right of a normal person to move around the world. For a typical Soviet person, it was considered the norm when he intended to visit Bulgaria, to hear in response: “Have you already traveled all over Russia. Go even to Altai!” Brodsky was arranged differently – like Pushkin, who suffered from the fact that he had not seen Europe. For Joseph, it was not a matter of freedom – he was quite free in his homeland. Moreover, his houses had good prospects – Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky arranged so that for the series “Literary Monuments” Brodsky had to translate a whole volume of English metaphysical poets. He had an interesting and “monetary” job. There was no “domestic catastrophe” that caused the departure.

– To you, as a close friend, when did you first admit that you are striving, if not to move, then at least to go abroad?

– The idea that it would be nice to travel around the world was born very early. Before the trial in 1964, he was arrested twice, and for the first time his diary was seized, where he noted: “It would be nice to cross the red line.” Because of this, he dreamed of becoming a sailor and tried to enter the naval school, seeing before him the example of his father, a captain of the third rank, who traveled the whole world in the status of a war correspondent.

The idea of ​​a fictitious marriage arose, most likely, in the village, when this monstrous story was done to him. Monstrous, I do not mean physically – people have had worse fates. But the trial of Brodsky, which I attended, the feuilletons published in the Soviet press, were extremely humiliating. In October 1964, I visited him in Norinskaya, where he expected to stay for at least five years – that’s how much he was sentenced to. I am sure that he persistently already thought then that he needed to somehow change his fate.