gramilano

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.

The day after Bary­sh­nikov will be present at the inaug­ur­a­tion of a show of his pho­to­graphs at Gal­leria Corsini, and then he’s off to Spo­leto to pre­pare for Robert Wilson’s The Old Woman with Willem Dafoe.

Bene­detta Craveri of La Repub­blica talked to him about his great friend.

When did he dis­cover the poems of Brodsky?

In 1964, when I went to St Peters­burg, in those days Len­in­grad, to study at the Vag­an­ova Academy, a fel­low stu­dent gave them to me in secret, some­thing severely pro­hib­ited by the authorities.

Why pro­hib­ited? Here’s Wikipedia:

In 1963, Brodsky’s poetry was denounced by a Len­in­grad news­pa­per as “por­no­graphic and anti-Soviet.” His papers were con­fis­cated, he was inter­rog­ated, twice put in a men­tal insti­tu­tion and then arres­ted. He was charged with social para­sit­ism by the Soviet author­it­ies in a trial in 1964, find­ing that his series of odd jobs and role as a poet were not a suf­fi­cient con­tri­bu­tion to society.

They called him “a pseudo-poet in vel­veteen trousers” who failed to ful­fill his “con­sti­tu­tional duty to work hon­estly for the good of the moth­er­land.” The trial judge asked “Who has recog­nized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” — “No one,” Brod­sky replied, “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” Brod­sky was not yet 24.

For his “para­sit­ism” Brod­sky was sen­tenced to five years hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in the vil­lage of Norenskaya, in the Arc­tic Archangelsk region, three hun­dred and fifty miles from Leningrad.

So what did fel­low artists and intel­lec­tu­als think of his conviction?

He was seen as someone fear­less, a man of intel­li­gence, a genius. But the sen­tence caused fear, bit­ter­ness and disgust.

says Bary­sh­nikov.

In 1972 Brod­sky was expelled from the Soviet Union, so settled in Amer­ica with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters.

The gov­ern­ment ous­ted Joseph from Rus­sia, con­vinced that once abroad he would lose con­tact with his lan­guage, and, con­sequently, with his read­ers… For me it was easier. The lan­guage I used for my art was dance.

 

And so the two Rus­sian exiles met in New York at a private din­ner with, among oth­ers, Rostrop­ovich, Galina Vish­nevskaya, and Sal­vador Dalí.

We didn’t have the chance to speak, but we left together and, hyp­not­ised, I accom­pan­ied him to Mor­ton Street in the West Vil­lage where he lived. We star­ted to see each other often, and talked for hours on the phone.

More than for Rus­sia, we had a nos­tal­gia for St Peters­burg… Dur­ing our walks he would stop now and then and ask me if this or that reminded me of St Petersburg.

He was proud and happy to be an Amer­ican. His cit­izen­ship gave him a struc­ture to his life, and legit­im­ized his rela­tion­ship with the author­it­ies; some­thing unthink­able in Rus­sia where the gov­ern­ment cer­tainly didn’t imbue a sense of secur­ity. At his funeral they played When Johnny Comes March­ing Home, a mil­it­ary march from the Civil War, which Josef adored.

And the pro­ject to found a Rus­sian Academy in Rome?

 

Josef was a guest at the Amer­ican Academy in Rome many times… Italy rep­res­en­ted for him an essen­tial exper­i­ence to encounter poetry, archi­tec­ture, art and wished that other artists could have the same oppor­tun­it­ies that he’d had.

So now Bary­sh­nikov comes to help Brod­sky ful­fil his dream.

I truly adored him. I admired him, uncon­sciously I tried to imit­ate him, I was jeal­ous of his suc­cess with women and, like a little brother, I was always aware of his author­ity. With the passing of the years it boiled down to a little phrase that he used now and then, also dur­ing our last tele­phone call the day before he died, “Yes, good boy Mysh.”

Sev­en­teen years later Bary­sh­nikov is being a good boy, help­ing his poet friend help future artists. That’s what friends are for.

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