Nobel prize-winning poet Josef Brodsky and ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov were good friends. Really good friends. Brodsky hated calling Baryshnikov ‘Mikhail’ or ‘Misha’ so he called him ‘Mysh’: mouse! He called himself Josef the Cat, adding in a little miaow afterwards This is how the pair always referred to each each.
They met in 1974 in New York where the twenty-year-old Russian dancer was making waves, and the thirty-four-year-old Brodsky was the most famous living Russian poet.
Brodsky died seventeen years ago and was buried in the city he loved, Venice. On 7 June, Baryshnikov will be present at a meeting of the Brodsky Foundation which wants to realise a dream of the poet: to establish a Russian Academy in Rome.… [continue reading]
