Our Notes & References

First edition of the first book of “the most popular Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century” (Shubinskii, our translation here and elsewhere). A landmark edition that brought him fame in the West.

Unable to publish almost any of his works in the USSR, Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) was well known in samizdat circles as one of the most prominent poets of the time; his works were collected and reproduced by admirers of his poetry since 1962. When his notorious trial for “social parasitism” began in February 1964, the compilation of his typewritten works was sent to Moscow to Aleksandr Ginzburg, the creator of the samizdat magazine Syntaksis, and then by Ginzburg abroad to reach Boris Filippov, the emigré writer and director of the Inter-Language Literary Associates publishing house, and Gleb Struve, professor of Russian literature at the University of California at Berkeley, who in 1963 first published Akhmatova’s Requiem.

In March 1964, Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labour. His trial gained international attention and members of both the Russian and international intelligentsia, including Anna Akhmatova and Jean-Paul Sartre, appealed for his liberation. He returned to his native Leningrad in September 1965 to discover that this first collection of his poetry had been published in the US about half a year earlier. Brodsky was disappointed with the collection because its editors included his “juvenilia” works and overlooked many mistakes.

It was however “the first book that, as Akhmatova put it, “made” Brodsky’s biography, causing the greatest resonance in the literary circles of the Russian emigration. The history of this book, published without the author’s knowledge and consent, shows how the tamizdat industry […] worked in the first half of the 1960s” (Klots). The collection’s preface by Struve (under the pseudonym Georgii Stukov) opens with an excerpt from the trial, “the first human rights document of Samizdat, a model for subsequent documentary materials on political processes” (Zubarev), recorded by Frida Vigdorova. The edition unites five poems and sixty verses from 1957-62 (including the 22 early poems that Brodsky did not publish in his later collections) and from 1964, including some written between different hearings in the trial (“S grustiu i nezhnostiu”) and two written already in exile (“Kolesnik umer”, “Zagadka angelu”).

In 1972, Brodsky was forced to leave Russia and moved to the US; in 1987, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and is now considered the most important Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century.

Bibliography

Okhlopkov Debiuty 34; Losev, Lev, Iosif Brodskii. Opyt literaturnoi biografii. ZhZL, Moskva, Molodaia gvardiia, 2006; Shubinskii, Valerii, “Proshchaniie s normoi”, Polka academy, 2020; Zubarev D. I., “Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodskii”. Mezhdunarodnyi memorial; Klots, Iakov, “Kak izdavali pervuiu knigu Iosifa Brodskogo”, Colta, 2015.