The heroes of Solomon Volkov can give volume, depth to any, even the flattest era. Volkov talked with Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Richter, Brodsky, the list of his interlocutors is endless. Many books came out of dialogues with them - not one went unnoticed. Last autumn there was a three-episode TV movie - his conversations with Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This autumn, at the very beginning of the Moscow International Book Fair, a new book of Volkov's dialogues arrived in time - with Vladimir Spivakov.

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- Solomon Moiseevich, after all, why do you prefer "dialogues" to all genres?

Solomon Volkov: It all started when I realized that interviews are good for me. Once Andrei Voznesensky was resting on the Riga seashore, and I did an interview with him for the local newspaper. And then I saw that the poet reproduced it in his book practically unchanged, did not change a word. It was like confirmation from the master. I realized that I can do it.

Why dialogues? At the heart of everything, of course, is curiosity for a person. I have an innate admiration for outstanding creative personalities. I found in Alexander Benois: he wrote about Diaghilev (with whom I do not compare myself in any way, just a similar type of thinking). Diaghilev might not be interested in the novel of some writer, but he could sit for hours at his lecture: the author of the novel is interesting to him as a person. I have a very similar feeling here.

After all, to this day I am very, very carefully preparing for conversations with my interlocutors. People cannot re-invent their biography every time, they repeat themselves, they put on, as Anna Andreevna Akhmatova said, an already finished record. I often know in advance what they will answer me - and I still ask, because you can always catch some new twist, a new shade ...

There were many bright, great personalities in the second half of the twentieth century. How did you choose your interlocutors among them? Why - with Shostakovich? Or - precisely with Brodsky?

Solomon Volkov: Extensive dialogues, which were later published as books, were, of course, not made in one day. And often not in one year. We worked with Brodsky for 16 years. He traveled around the world, he was torn apart, it was not easy to find time, we met when he appeared in New York ... So it was with the great Russian-American violinist Nathan Milstein - his memoir book, resulting from our conversations, was made for 10 years. By the way, this is the only one of my works of this kind that did not appear in Russia. Although I wrote all the books in Russian. And he spoke to everyone only in Russian - and with George Balanchine, and, of course, with Shostakovich, and with Brodsky.

What am I getting at? In such lengthy works, it only seems that it is you who chooses your interlocutor. Here, as in marriage: you think that you choose your wife, but in fact it was your wife who chose you. And you enter into a long-term relationship...

Well, to be honest, aren't all these critics curious, they don't want to know who taught Akhmadulina to drink? And who else to ask about this, if not Yevtushenko?

Your most long-term ones, apparently, are with Spivakov - after all, you have been friends since school days. But with your other heroes, you didn’t limit yourself to purely businesslike, formal relations, did you?

Solomon Volkov: Spivakov is still a unique case. Yes, people sometimes ask me, were you friends with Shostakovich, but with Brodsky? I always answer: no, not friends. I helped them shape their already established plan. More often than not, I myself didn’t suspect anything, and they already knew why they needed me.

With Spivakov, we have a real friendship, which is 55 years old. This friendship began back in the ten-year music school at the Leningrad Conservatory, where I arrived at the age of 13. After I left for America, there were long-term breaks in our communication, but sooner or later everything resumed. We spent hundreds of hours talking without thinking about the book. Well, what a book - when we're just friends.

Spivakov's wife, Sati, was the first to talk about the book - this is her idea. A couple of years ago, after some kind of meeting, she suddenly told me: Volodya will have his 70th birthday, it would be nice to make a book - not glossy nonsense, but a serious, frank conversation. At first I was taken aback, and then I thought: of course, this is interesting. Despite the years of communication, Spivakov remained a "mystery man" for me too. No, he is not arrogant at all, but his soul is full of doors that are tightly closed to strangers. The paradox is that he had to "penetrate" into his soul just in a very public way. We did not sit alone with him, everything was recorded under the "jupiters" on tape for a television movie, which, supposedly, will be shown in September by the Kultura channel. It took place in Colmar, in the south of France, where Spivakov has a festival every summer. There was an element of exhilarating exhibitionism in it: speaking frankly in front of a film crew. Nevertheless, Spivakov, it seems to me, spoke about things that are sacred to him ...

For example, he very touchingly tells in the book about his first love - how hard he was going through when she went to the conductor Rozhdestvensky. Did Sati's revelations embarrass her husband? She did not regret that she made this mess?

Solomon Volkov: You know, maybe I'll reveal a secret, but I'll tell you quite frankly: that's what we talked about at her insistence. I knew the whole story, of course. But in the fact that he decided to speak so frankly, some very important romantic and tragic string of Spivakov was revealed to me. Thank you Sati for this.

Your dialogues are always intellectual, aesthetic, but at the same time you do not bashfully avoid questions about the personal lives of your characters. Do you think one contradicts the other?

Solomon Volkov: Joseph Brodsky once remarked remarkably on this score. My wife and I often talk at home with quotes from Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov. Marianna, my wife, released 10 photo albums in America, in particular, a huge photo album about Brodsky and two cinematic books with stories from Dovlatov. One of his stories was just about Spivakov.

About how Vladimir Teodorovich first came on tour to America, and in front of Carnegie Hall he was met by people with banners: "Get out of America, KGB agent." Was everything really like that, or is it the usual fiction for Dovlatov?

Solomon Volkov: When this album was being prepared, Sergey asked us to tell funny stories about this or that character. Marianna and I dumped piles of different plots on him, having no idea what and how Dovlatov uses. And then polished miniatures appeared from this, immediately sticking to the characters. They still remember the story of what Brodsky said about Yevtushenko when he was in the hospital. "If Yevtushenko is against collective farms, then I am for" ...

- Yes, but you still evaded the answer. What did Brodsky say about those who are curious about both the personal and the secret?

Solomon Volkov: One of Brodsky's sayings: "There are only two interesting things in the world that are worth talking about - these are metaphysics and gossip." I agree with him. It is necessary to talk about the deepest - or about everyday life. Benois also noted that Diaghilev was terribly interested in who had what kind of relationship, who was with whom and how. There is nothing to say about Dovlatov - he was just worried about it in the first place. But Brodsky was also not indifferent to such everyday details.

- It seems that you were most reproached for these "everyday details" after the film with Yevgeny Yevtushenko?

Solomon Volkov: I was surprised - when Channel One showed Anna Nelson's film "Solomon Volkov. Dialogues with Yevtushenko", Yevtushenko was attacked with some kind of frenzy. But also on me: why did I ask: who taught Bella Akhmadulina to drink? I even rushed. Well, to be honest, aren't all these critics curious, they don't want to know who taught Akhmadulina to drink? And I will not hide, it is interesting. And who else to ask about this, if not Yevtushenko?

I don't ask my interlocutors about things that don't interest me. And they answer such questions - because they see that there is no "malicious intent" behind this, I'm not trying to get "fried" out of them, it's just important for me, as a person, to know and understand this.

Speaking of drinking. Once you admitted to an interviewer that you could easily "persuade" a bottle of cognac with your wife Marianna ...

Solomon Volkov: Exactly. My liver has collapsed twice. The wife was stronger. Indeed, I drank seriously, and the liver collapsed, and I took a break for a year. Then he resumed, and it seems to be nothing. But she collapsed again. And then I got really scared. But ... he did not completely refuse cognac.

Yevtushenko, by the way, was drinking in front of the camera in that TV movie, but you refused. Does alcohol interfere with your communication with great interlocutors? Or is it still "without half a liter" you can't figure it out with the greats?

Solomon Volkov: It started for me with Shostakovich. When I showed up, he invariably offered to start with a drink. I invariably refused, believing that it interfered ... Brodsky and I drank wine during conversations, but not regularly. But never with the rest. Neither with Milstein, nor with Balanchine, nor with Spivakov now, when we were working. I took a shot or two for courage before the interview, but he was sober as a glass. Who cares, but cognac helps me, clears the nasopharynx - it's easier to talk.

If Shostakovich started everything, let's go back to him. "Evidence", your first book, published in the 70s, is Dmitry Dmitrievich's memoirs, compiled from his stories to you. There has been a lot of controversy around the book. And Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin, talking to me, once said: “The main thing is that it did not harm Shostakovich, it helped to change the attitude towards the composer in the West, which means that the book is needed and important” ...

Solomon Volkov:… And I absolutely agree with him. If you look, our "dialogues" didn't hurt any of my heroes. Brodsky, by the way, agreed to talk largely thanks to Shostakovich's memoirs. And not only Brodsky. Nathan Milstein called: let's do something like a book with Shostakovich.

Not one of my books was without controversy and attacks - neither the book of dialogues, nor the "History of the Culture of St. Petersburg", nor the two-volume book on the history of Russian culture (from the reign of the Romanovs to the end of the 20th century), nor "Shostakovich and Stalin". At first I was upset, then I stopped. The same social group of people both in the USA and in Russia categorically does not like what I do. Well, as they say, I'm not a chervonets to please everyone.

When Shostakovich passed away, the traditional Western view of him was reflected in obituaries consisting of clichés: Shostakovich was a faithful son of the Communist Party. Like, if a person has five Stalin Prizes, then he definitely must be a Stalinist henchman. Now - only a madman would say so. Everyone understands that Shostakovich is an absolutely independent person who, despite some forced compromises, has retained both honor and dignity. Now even my opponents, in essence, repeat what was first expressed by Shostakovich in this memoir book.

All your interlocutors - Shostakovich, Brodsky, Balanchine, Spivakov - certainly touch on a common theme: the artist and power. Is this topic relevant at all times?

Solomon Volkov: Certainly. But it also reflects my interests. I do not often enter into polemics with interlocutors, but it happens. Yevtushenko wrote me words of gratitude for one such case - when Brodsky began to scold him, and I tried to object ... But that's not the point. Still, the overall structure and content of the dialogue is influenced by your personal preferences. This topic has fascinated me since childhood.

That is, peers played "Cossack-robbers" or collected stamps, and you thought about the problems of the "artist and the authorities"? You had a fun childhood.

Solomon Volkov: Yes, in childhood they often collect postage stamps, soldiers and the like. My first personal collection in 1953 (I was nine years old) was photographs of Stalin. During his lifetime, only standard retouched portraits of indeterminate age were published, where he looks radiantly into the distance. This was strictly monitored under Stalin, as under the Romanovs: what images of the leader, leader, monarch can be published, and which cannot.

But when he died, all the newspapers were filled with a huge number of pictures that no one could ever see before. Stalin with Maxim Gorky, with artists of the Moscow Art Theater, in a variety of situations. And I began to collect these photographs. It seems like a child, but behind this subconscious curiosity was already hidden: how does politics in the person of Stalin interact with culture in the person of the characters with whom he is captured in the picture? To my great regret, this first collection of mine was once borrowed from me by a friend and healed, did not return. It was a terrible disappointment for me then ... But all my books are really devoted to this topic, both in the genre of dialogues and in the genre of cultural history.

The reaction of the people closest to me: why did you get involved in this matter? Who needs Stalin, what other cultural policy of Stalin, he had one policy - to cut! This point of view seems to me to be very wrong.

It is as if you are teasing many interlocutors by refusing to talk about Stalin with the clichés generally accepted today. Someone even clarified whether you are a Stalinist for an hour?

Solomon Volkov: Tanya Beck said this - as a joke. Although, of course, she voiced what sometimes worries my interlocutors ... But can you imagine what kind of Stalinist I am?

Do you believe that the time will come when a sober analysis and an attempt at a truly objective look at this important historical figure of the 20th century will prevail over emotions and momentary conjunctures?

Solomon Volkov: One can only dream of this. There is a particular problem here. There is such a word in English - "definitive". This is such a tone that really allows from all sides, with all the possible completeness of the available facts, to present a certain plot.

For example, is there such a definitive biography of Pushkin or Dostoevsky in Russian culture that could be considered as fundamental, covering problems from all sides, as objectively as possible? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. There are good books, each of which deviates in some direction and each of which lacks a huge amount of some facts.
Here is an American Albert Frank published a five-volume biography of Dostoevsky in English. There is nothing similar in Russian.

Why this has developed in the West and why it has not yet developed in Russia is a separate issue. Russia has gone through such complex turbulences that it has not yet been established, as in America, such a conveyor for the production of biographies on an academic, university basis. And this is one of the reasons why, to the greatest regret, there is no definitive biography of any political figure: neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor Nicholas II. Each time, instead of a definitive biography, we have yet another polemical work that falls into one or the other extreme.

The most remarkable work in Russia about Stalin is the biography of Dmitry Volkogonov, who, given his merits and rank, was admitted to the most secret archives, which no one looked into after him. But Volkogonov's work, for all its value, is due to the current conjuncture of the perestroika period, when everything was written in a certain way, it was the political order of the era.

In my quite modest book "Shostakovich and Stalin" I tried to comment on the views expressed by Shostakovich in his memoirs on Stalin, taking into account the documents that had already appeared, which were previously classified. The reaction of the people closest to me: why did you get involved in this matter? Who needs Stalin, what other cultural policy of Stalin, he had one policy - to cut! This point of view seems to me very erroneous. Until such a multi-volume academic biography is prepared, all historical assessments will continue to be dictated only by current political whirlwinds. And we should at least try to resist it.

The fact that I have devoted a lot of time to the study of Stalin's cultural policy and I intend to continue this topic does not mean that I am even in the slightest degree a supporter of Stalin. I am aware of what a monstrous figure he was. But I want to understand what motivated this man, and not just: a villain, an executioner, we will spit and grind. This is an anti-historical approach, it will always interfere with a sober conversation about the future.

Here in Germany they decided to take on the commented scientific publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf. A team of scholars is preparing extensive, carefully crafted commentaries on this notorious book. I have at home a 13-volume collected works of Stalin, published during his lifetime. I would not spare the money if these 13 volumes were now reprinted with the most detailed and thorough commentary based on documents. No one would even think of taking on such a job. And this is the first thing that needs to be done to prepare an objective, as far as possible, biography of Stalin. Although there is little hope for this.

By the way, it seems to me curious to look into history: from what moment, who and why began to assure that there is no difference between the names of Stalin and Hitler? To look for answers to such questions today is simply the height of indecency: to look advanced and intelligent, it is enough to repeat one or two common clichés without hesitation. The conjuncture is this: it is harmful to think too much.

Solomon Volkov: At that moment, when they begin to say or write that Stalin is Hitler, I immediately put such a book aside. Here it is immediately clear that it is important for a person not to understand something, but to attach a political label. Surprisingly, it seems to me that the best two-volume biography of Stalin is written by the American historian Robert Tucker. The works of the English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore are curious. In Russia, either indiscriminate denunciation, or no less indiscriminate apologetics - alas, against this background, the work of Western historians favorably differ in the degree of objectivity and balance.

With Stalin, there are no clear answers to very many important questions, starting with collectivization, industrialization and ending with the "doctors' case." I am interested in cultural policy. It seems impossible to many that one person could have so much control over everything. And he can be compared, perhaps, only with Nicholas the First: he personally followed the work and behavior of several thousand creators of contemporary culture. This is something phenomenal, such micromanagement, micromanagement of culture, which was carried out under Nikolai and under Stalin, never happened. And both worked, interestingly, for 18, sometimes 20 hours a day - this was noted by contemporaries. That is, these are people of monstrous working capacity, memory, simply incredible physiological qualities. Let me emphasize again: I am not talking about this for panegyric purposes. I'm just stating a fact.

I can’t resist, I’ll ask - not about Stalin, but about Khrushchev. Not so long ago, a message flashed: an American citizen, the great-granddaughter of Khrushchev, who gave up Crimea, argues on CNN that "Russia will choke on Crimea." I'm not talking about political assessments of who is right and who is wrong - everyone is free to have their own opinion. But in this situation, some irony of fate squared. Nikita Sergeevich demonstrated bad taste and low style, knocking his shoe on America, his great-granddaughter is already knocking his shoe on Russia from America. Yesterday the great-grandfather was mistaken - it will not turn out tomorrow that the great-granddaughter is also mistaken? Maybe in such a piquant case it is more decent to at least keep silent?

Solomon Volkov: As a cultural historian, I fundamentally do not consider myself entitled to interfere in assessments and reasoning about current events and problems. I try to keep this position. When even the problems of almost a century ago, connected with Stalin, cause such a storm of passions, as if it is happening right before our eyes, can we talk about what drives people now? I can only state that such a split, which I can observe now in the Russian intellectual environment, I, perhaps, have not seen in my entire life. It depresses me - but that's all I can say about it.

In fact, let's change the record. Let's return to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. There was a TV movie - and the book of your dialogues with it is also supposed?

Solomon Volkov: Yes, of course, it’s just that her hands don’t reach her. But I think it will be an interesting book. In addition to what was included in the film, the book will be mostly my individual work.

There was one obvious oddity in this film. Evgeny Alexandrovich diligently, emphatically avoids any mention of Voznesensky. Although the history of their relationship is no less interesting than the relationship between Yevtushenko and Brodsky. Why so?

Solomon Volkov: During the conversation, it was not so obvious. I realized this later. I think that Yevtushenko did one fantastic thing with this work, namely, he tried to break the chain. There are such stable connections in perception: Tolstoy - Dostoevsky, Shostakovich - Prokofiev. In the same way, there was a couple: Voznesensky - Yevtushenko. In hindsight, I'm always amazed at how much smarter my character is than me. I did not understand this when I spoke with Yevtushenko. With this conversation, instead of the link "Voznesensky - Yevtushenko", he creates a new link: "Yevtushenko - Brodsky". Here we must pay tribute to the mind of Evgeny Alexandrovich.

I love him very much as a poet. Many are surprised: what right do I have to love and work on a book with Yevtushenko if I love Brodsky and made a book with him? They try to drive me all the time so that I march only under the banner of Brodsky. Well, isn't that stupid? My friend Grisha Bruskin, a New York artist, said well: the truth of the apple tree does not negate the truth of the cypress. So, after our conversation, I incredibly admire the fantastic vitality that Yevtushenko possesses, his great mind and talent. Remember how Stalin was asked about Konstantin Simonov's romance with actress Serova - what to do? He said: we will envy. That's how it is here.

- Bundles with bundles, and Voznesensky cannot be deleted from Russian poetry. Have you talked to him once?

Solomon Volkov: We had a very good relationship with him. We met more than once in Moscow and in Riga, and in New York. Once he came to visit me: he urgently needed to print a response to some unfriendly article about him. So I still have a historic typewriter at home, on which Voznesensky typed with his own hand.

I highly appreciate Andrei Voznesensky as a poet, he is now undeservedly in the shadows. I am consoled by the fact that there is no such creative person who would not plunge into the shadow for a while. We forget now that Pushkin was not always considered the sun of Russian poetry, and he went into the shadows. By the way, which is also forgotten, largely thanks to the efforts of Stalin, Pushkin's anniversaries began to be celebrated with inhuman splendor. Stalin made obligatory two poets: Pushkin and Mayakovsky. And Alexander Blok in my youth was an indispensable poet for young people. But not now. For a while, Blok went into the shadows, but, of course, he will return. The same with Voznesensky.

Both Yevtushenko and Voznesensky had a special relationship with Brodsky. This is a separate triangle or polygon, which you need to think about separately. And in it, too, one should not go to extremes, becoming a rabid supporter of one person or direction. It is necessary to try to comprehend the very complex relationships of these outstanding personalities.

In Pushkin you found three artist's missions: an impostor, a holy fool, a chronicler. If we are talking about the sixties - who among them was more: impostors, holy fools or chroniclers?

Solomon Volkov: It seems that the definition of "imposter" sounds insulting. But Pushkin, if you look closely, in "Boris Godunov" treats the impostor with sympathy. Pushkin there divides himself into these three hypostases, three, relatively speaking, masks. He himself felt himself both a chronicler, and a holy fool, and an impostor. There are amazing memories of Count Vladimir Sollogub, he quotes Pushkin's wonderful words: "I am a public man, and this is much worse than a public woman." When a person speaks out about the current political problem, goes to the podium, takes some post - he is already, at least a little, but an impostor. Maybe a little, but an impostor. The same Yevtushenko or Voznesensky traveled the world, gave interviews, dined, as Brodsky wrote, the devil knows with whom in a tailcoat. So, there was something of the impostors in them. But, of course, they are chroniclers of the era of the 60s.

As for the holy fools - to the least extent, by the way, this is characteristic of Voznesensky. He was very rational, incredibly clear-headed. Yevtushenko loves to appear in incredible jackets, caps and ties. This is a little from the holy fool - but it is both peculiar and even touching. Voznesensky had this to a lesser extent.

- He wore neckerchiefs.

Solomon Volkov: Yes, this handkerchief always confused me. I also really disliked his favorite word "outfit". But ... in general, when I take a volume of any of these poets, whether it be Brodsky, Yevtushenko or Voznesensky, I cannot tear myself away. It draws you in like a funnel, and its truth at the moment when I read it seems to me sovereign and prevailing.

Your interlocutors were celestials - but they posed with pleasure in front of the cameras. So what, it would seem, Svyatoslav Richter is a "thing in itself", and he, you once wrote, was no stranger ...

Solomon Volkov: We met under funny circumstances. After a very long break in Moscow, Shostakovich's Nose was resumed at the Boris Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theatre. They were then at the Sokol metro station, in a former cinema. Dirty room, basement. The first ten performances I walked like a bayonet. Svyatoslav Teofilovich was also at all these performances. And the foyer is very small, it was impossible to miss each other. The first time we met - I immediately recognized him, but he had no idea about me. At the second performance, he already drew attention to me. On the third, he smiled at me. And on the fourth - came up in the intermission in the foyer. And we began to discuss the performance. He wanted to speak, his impressions overwhelmed him. He was a terribly passionate person. And he loved being photographed, he posed. But the press preferred not to touch the private life of the stars of that time. So no one saw these pictures, the official photo appeared once a year in Ogonyok. I remember this one - he sits, leaning on his elbows, thoughtful, a laureate medal on his jacket. He considered himself a handsome, interesting man, with good reason, of course ... Richter liked it, but not only him. For example, the same Brodsky - the impression is that he is above all vain things, a celestial being. And look what an incredible number of photographs are left - where Brodsky poses, looks into the camera, takes on a facial expression. If the celestials did not care about worldly glory, they would not have posed.

Once you visited Anna Akhmatova, talked with her. It's obvious that you didn't call her "reputation builder" for nothing. From her came the label with which she awarded young poets in the early 60s: "variety artists." On the Internet, it is not difficult to find a certain Brodsky hate list, ten of the most vicious statements about a variety of literary brothers. From the replicas of Anna Andreevna, if desired, you can make the same thing ...

Solomon Volkov: Undoubtedly.

- To what extent are artists biased, to what extent do their momentary assessments have enduring significance?

Solomon Volkov: Why are correspondence and diaries my favorite reading? Because when you read the correspondence of great people and their diaries, you begin to understand more deeply why a person said this or that. This is not always due to their aesthetic principles, 80-90 percent behind this is their personal connections, clashes, likes and dislikes. At first, Tolstoy and Turgenev were not liked as people, and only then as writers. The duel was scheduled - can you imagine Turgenev would have shot Tolstoy, or Tolstoy Turgenev?

- Mandelstam challenged Khlebnikov to a duel, Blok - Bely ...

Solomon Volkov: Or look at the complicated relationship between Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova. You can’t call it friendship under any circumstances, how many undercurrents there were on one side and on the other, how they both expressed these underwater emotions of theirs ... Of course, with Akhmatova, a lot depended on her personal attitude. Even in my presence, she often spoke very unkindly about almost all the sixties. They were not physically close to her. She, of course, was pleased with the popularity, she was a period insanely popular poet. And then, due to a number of difficult reasons, in the pre-war and post-war years, it all went under water. And suddenly these sixties with their stadium audiences. There was in all this, among other things, and an element of jealousy, no doubt.

- Another bright historical figure of the twentieth century with whom you intersected - Jacqueline Kennedy ...

Solomon Volkov: Crossed, and only Voznesensky was just her close friend.

She even called you once to find out what kind of poet Sergei Yesenin is and is it true that he is no less popular than Voznesensky?

Solomon Volkov: Yes, it was, it was Voznesensky who worried her. I had a purely professional relationship with her, as she was an influential editor at Double Day in the last years of her life.

She was interested in my book of dialogues with Balanchine, who was one of her favorites - she and John F. Kennedy invited both Balanchine and Stravinsky to the White House. Balanchine was crazy about her, called her an empress, like Catherine, such a patroness of the arts. She was, of course, Francophile, being French in her distant roots. She knew French culture well. But she was also an incredible, sincere Russophile. This is the most amazing thing for the wife of the President of the United States. And it's incredibly touching.

So, she was interested in my book, and she called me. I will never forget this either: the bell rang, and the woman introduced herself as Jacqueline Onassis. I just hung up. After a while, the call was repeated, and the same soft, cat's voice said: you know, Jacqueline Onassis really speaks to you, here's my phone number, if you want, call back. Then I already believed ... She wanted to buy the rights to the book, publish it in paperback, which she did. We met several times on editorial business. She was a great editor. If she took on a book, she would definitely make a bestseller out of it. She had what the Americans call a magic touch. And she always knew how to choose the most suitable cover.

And then Jacqueline began to call me with such questions. She also rediscovered Nina Berberova. She began to publish it in English translations. And just as with Yesenin, in connection with Berberova she was interested in whether her husband Khodasevich was really such a wonderful poet?

In general, this whole Kennedy myth arose largely thanks to her efforts. The role of women in creating the posthumous myth about their great spouses is incredibly great. The same vivid example of the fact that a woman can do a lot for the fate of her husband's legacy is Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova. It also happens vice versa, a stupid widow digs in the creative heritage of her husband - I also know this.

Brodsky assured in your dialogues that he envied the fate of Archilochus, from whose poems only rat tails remained. There is some coquetry in this, but ... Is it true that life is getting smaller, only rat tails are left - and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find great interlocutors for future dialogues?

Solomon Volkov: Eternal instinctive desire to say "Heroes - not you, there were times when everything was bigger." Probably, it seems to any elderly person that the idols of his youth were the largest and greatest. But each generation finds its idols, and it is very difficult for us to understand how history will put them in their places.

For me, my favorite time in Russia is pre-revolutionary, conventionally referred to as the Silver Age. The picture of culture was many times more complex than what exists in our current understanding of this era. Such figures as Leonid Andreev, the poet Wanderer or the writer Anatoly Kamensky enjoyed incredible popularity. These were incredibly popular people, everyone knew about them, the mass press tracked them every day: where did they go, to which restaurant, where they were seen, with whom. Then the press was already beginning to indulge the mass reader, who was interested in all these details. These people were real masters, but now few people remember and read them. The same Fyodor Sologub.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend about the libretto of "Ivan Susanin" of the Soviet era: the hero could no longer save the tsar, now he was saving Moscow. A friend asked who wrote this libretto. I say: Sergey Gorodetsky. Her: who is who? Even such an amazing poet as the young Gorodetsky was forgotten. Accents change a lot. And it is extremely difficult to predict which of the contemporary figures of Russian and world culture will be remembered in 20-30 years, and even more so in half a century or a century. I'm not going to make predictions. Don't know. And nobody knows.

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Solomon Volkov - musicologist, culturologist. In 1979 he published a book of memoirs by Dmitry Shostakovich "Evidence", recorded by him on the basis of personal conversations with the composer. Author of the books "Passion for Tchaikovsky. Conversations with George Balanchine", "History of St. Petersburg Culture", "Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky", "Shostakovich and Stalin: Artist and Tsar". In émigré publications, Volkov is called the "Russian Eckermann" (recalling the author of the famous "Conversations with Goethe"). In 1988, in England, according to Volkov's book, the film "Evidence" (Testimony) was filmed with Ben Kingsley in the role of Shostakovich.

The other day Volkov's new book - "Dialogues with Spivakov" - was published by Elena Shubina of the AST publishing house.

Dialogues with Brodsky is a unique book for Russian literary culture. Volkov himself writes in the author's preface about the exotic nature of this genre for Russia, the importance of which, however, is obvious. The only direct analogue known to the author of these pages - recordings of extensive conversations with Pasternak - is the brilliant work of Alexander Konstantinovich Gladkov. But, as we shall see, it is fundamentally different from the Dialogues.

In the preface to Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe" - an inevitable parallel, emphasized by Volkov in the title - V.F. Asmus wrote: “Works, diaries, correspondence remain from major masters. The memories of contemporaries also remain: friends, enemies and just acquaintances ... But it rarely happens that in these materials and records a trace of lively conversations and dialogues, disputes and teachings is preserved for a long time. Of all the manifestations of a major personality that create its significance for contemporaries and descendants, word, speech, conversation- the most ephemeral and transient. Events, thoughts, but rarely dialogues get into the diaries. The most brilliant speeches are forgotten, the most witty sayings are irretrievably lost ... In everything they hear, they (memoirists. - Ya.G.) will produce, perhaps imperceptibly for the interlocutor himself, selection, exclusion, permutation and - most importantly - reinterpretation material.<<…>> What survived the conversations of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Byron, Oscar Wilde? Meanwhile, contemporaries agree that in the life of these artists, conversation was one of the most important forms of existence of their genius. 1
Eckermann Johann Peter. Conversations with Goethe. M.-L. S. 7.

In Russian culture there is also the phenomenon of Chaadaev, self-expression, whose work for many years after the catastrophe caused by the publication of one of the Philosophical Letters, took place precisely in the form of a public conversation. The fate of Pushkin's conversations confirms the thought of Asmus - all attempts to retroactively reconstruct his brilliant oral improvisations did not give any noticeable result.

But the essence of the problem was understood not only by theorists, but also by practitioners. Paul Gsell, who published the book Conversations of Anatole France, wrote: “The superiority of great men is not always shown in their most processed works. Almost more often it is recognized in the direct and free play of their thought. What they do not even think of putting their name under, what they create with an intense impulse of thought, long ripened, falling involuntarily, of course - these are often the best works of their genius. 2
Gsell Paul.

Conversations of Anatole France. Pg.-M., 1923. S. 10.

But no matter how high the value of the book “Conversations with Goethe” is, Asmus himself admits: “And yet“ Conversations ”recreates before the reader the image of just Ackerman's Goethe. After all, interpretation ... remains interpretation all the same.

“Dialogues with Brodsky” is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different nature. The presence of a tape recorder eliminates the factor of even unintentional interpretation. Before the reader Volkovsky Brodsky, but Brodsky as such. Responsibility for everything said is on him.

At the same time, Volkov by no means limits himself to the function of turning the tape recorder on and off. He skillfully directs the conversation without affecting the nature of what was said by the interlocutor. His task is to determine the range of strategic topics, and within each topic he assigns himself the role of an intellectual provocateur. In addition - and this is important! - unlike Eckermann and Gsell, Volkov tries to obtain purely biographical information.

However, the main thing is not the task that Volkov sets for himself - it is understandable - but the task solved by Brodsky.

Despite the huge number of interviews of the poet and his public lectures, Brodsky as a person remained quite closed, because all this did not constitute a system that explained fate.

It is known that in recent years Brodsky was extremely painful and irritated at the very possibility of studying his, so to speak, non-literary biography, fearing - not without reason - that interest in his poetry was replaced by interest in the personal aspects of life and poems would seem just a flat version. autobiography. And the fact that in the last years of his life he spent hours - under a tape recorder - talking about himself enthusiastically and, it would seem, very frankly, seems to contradict a sharply expressed antibiographical position.

But this is a false contradiction. Brodsky did not commit random acts. When Akhmatova said that the authorities were doing a biography of the "redhead", she was only partly right. Brodsky took the most direct and fully conscious part in the "doing" of his biography, despite all his youthful impulsiveness and seeming unsystematic behavior. And in this respect, as in many others, he is extremely similar to Pushkin.

Most of his contemporaries, as you know, Pushkin was perceived as a romantic poet, whose behavior is determined solely by the impulses of poetic nature. But the clever Sobolevsky, who knew Pushkin closely, wrote to Shevyrev in 1852, refuting this common view: “Pushkin is as clever as he is practical; he is a practical man, and a great practical one.”

We are not talking about the demonstrative life-creation of the Byronic type or the Silver Age model. It is about a conscious strategy, about a conscious choice of fate, and not just a lifestyle.

In 1833, at a critical moment in his life, Pushkin began to keep a diary, the purpose of which was - not least - to explain the style of behavior he had chosen after the 26th year and the reasons for changing this style. Pushkin explained himself to his descendants, realizing that his actions would be interpreted and reinterpreted. He offered a guide.

There is reason to believe that the tape-recorded dialogues with Volkov, which - as Brodsky was well aware - were ultimately intended for publication, served the same function. Brodsky offered his own version of spiritual and everyday biography in the most important and giving rise to free interpretation moments.

In the "Dialogues" there are extremely significant slips of the tongue on this subject. “Every era, every culture has its own version of the past,” says Brodsky. Behind this is: each of us has our own version of our own past. And here, returning to the notes of A.K. Gladkov, it must be said that Pasternak clearly did not pursue such a goal. It was a completely free conversation on intellectual topics that took place in the terrible days of the World War in the Russian outback. In Pasternak's monologues there is no systemic aspiration of Brodsky, no awareness of the programmatic nature of what was said, no sense of the summing up. And there was no tape recorder - which is psychologically extremely important.

"Dialogues" cannot be taken as an absolute source for Brodsky's biography. Despite the fact that they contain a huge amount of factual material, they are also a frank challenge to future researchers, because Volkov's interlocutor least of all dreams of becoming an uncomplaining "docent's property". He reproduces the past as a literary text, cutting off the superfluous - in his opinion - revealing not the letter, but the spirit of events, and when there is a need for this, and constructing situations. This is not a deception - this is creativity, myth-making. Before us - to a large extent - an autobiographical myth. But the value of the "Dialogues" does not decrease from this, but increases. Finding out certain everyday circumstances, in the end, is within the power of diligent and professional researchers. It is impossible to reconstruct the idea of ​​events, the point of view of the hero himself without his help.

In the "Dialogues" is revealed self-image, self-perception Brodsky.

Dialogues, relatively speaking, consist of two layers. One is purely intellectual, cultural, philosophical, if you like. These are conversations about Tsvetaeva, Auden, Frost. These are the most important fragments of Brodsky's spiritual biography, which are not subject to critical commentary. Only sometimes, when it comes to real history, Brodsky's judgments need to be corrected, as he resolutely offers his own idea of ​​events instead of the events themselves.

This is, for example, a conversation about Peter I. “In the minds of Peter the Great, there were two directions - the North and the West. No more. The East did not interest him. He was not even particularly interested in the South ... "

But in the geopolitical concept of Peter the South-East played no less a role than the North-West. Soon after the Poltava victory, he undertook a rather risky Prut campaign against Turkey, which almost ended in disaster. Immediately after the end of the twenty-year Northern War, Peter begins the Persian campaign, preparing a breakthrough towards India - to the East (which, in fact, began the Caucasian War). Etc.

This is, however, a rather rare case. When it came to objective, external reality - in any of its guises, if it does not directly concern his life - Brodsky is quite correct in handling facts.

The situation changes when we get into the second layer of the "Dialogues", relatively speaking, autobiographical.

Here, the future biographers of the poet will have to work hard to explain to posterity, for example, why Brodsky tells about a year and a half of his northern exile as a desert hermitage, as a space inhabited only by residents of the village of Norenskoye, without mentioning numerous guests.

But perhaps the most expressive example of the artistic construction of the event was the description of the 1964 trial. This whole situation is fundamentally important, because it demonstrates not only Brodsky's attitude to this outwardly most dramatic moment of his life, but also explains the existential setting of the mature Brodsky in relation to the events of external life. Answering Volkov's questions about the course of the trial, he claims that Frida Vigdorova, who kept in the record the malicious absurdity that took place there, was taken out of the hall early and therefore her record is fundamentally incomplete. Vigdorova, however, was present in the courtroom for the entire five hours, and although at some point—quite distant from the beginning—the judge forbade her to take notes, Vigdorova, with the help of a few more witnesses, restored the proceedings to the very end. Brodsky could remember all this. But the fact is that he was categorically opposed to the events of November 1963-March 1964 being considered as decisive in his fate. And he was absolutely right. By this time, the scale of his talent was already obvious, and regardless of whether persecution, trial, exile would appear in his life or not, he would still remain in Russian and world culture. Brodsky was aware of this, and his approach to what happened explains a lot in his mature worldview. “I refuse to dramatize all this!” he replies sharply to Volkov. To which Volkov’s perfectly accurate remark follows: “I understand, this is part of your aesthetics.” Here is the key. The presentation of events as they really looked, in retrospect, would have smacked of melodrama. But Brodsky in the nineties sharply raises the level of the idea of ​​drama compared to the sixties, and what then seemed like high drama turns out to be much lower than this level. The true drama is transferred to other spheres.

Brodsky's perception of a particular picture of the court was transformed along with his aesthetic and philosophical attitudes, along with his style in its not just literary, but existential terms. And the past must correspond to this new style even factually.

The Dialogues do not so much inform - although they contain a huge amount of specific biographical material - as they provoke guesses of a completely different kind. Talking about the origin of the idea of ​​the book “New Stanzas for August”, Brodsky suddenly says: “Unfortunately, I did not write the Divine Comedy. And, apparently, I will never write again. This is followed by an exchange of remarks about the epic nature of Brodsky's late poetry and the absence of a "monumental novel in verse" in its composition. Brodsky ironically recalls "Procession" and as an example of a monumental form - "Gorbunov and Gorchakov", a thing that seems to him an extremely serious work. “As for the Divina Comedy… well, I don’t know, but apparently not – I won’t write it anymore. If I lived in Russia, at home, then…” And then Volkov’s word “exile” pops up – a hint that it was in exile that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, and Dante’s shadow hovers over the finale of the Dialogues. There is some kind of reticence in all this ... "The greatness of the idea" - a variant of Pushkin's famous statement about the plan of the "Divine Comedy" - was the young Brodsky's favorite phrase, which Akhmatova repeatedly reminded him of in her letters. And he tried to write his "Comedy Divina". In the five years - from 1963 to 1968 - Brodsky made an attempt that can be compared in the grandeur of the idea and the complexity of deciphering only with the prophetic poems of William Blake, whom Brodsky carefully read in the sixties. (Blake's one-volume - the English original - was in his library.)

It was a cycle of "great poems" - "Great Elegy to John Donne", "Isaac and Abraham", "The Hundred Years' War", "Winter has come ...", "Gorbunov and Gorchakov". This is a single grandiose epic space, united by a common metric, through images-symbols - birds, stars, snow, sea - by common structural techniques and, most importantly, by a common religious and philosophical foundation. Like Blake, this is a heretical epic. But the Divine Comedy was also born in the context of sectarian heretical utopias. Heaven and Hell are present in Brodsky's epic. In the unpublished "Hundred Years War" there is a stunning description of the underworld, where "Roots are stars, worms are clouds", "where Tartarus howls terribly" and from where an ominous angel breaks out - a bird of discord 3
Considerations about the five "great poems" as a single epic space were expressed by the author of this preface in 1995 (Russian Literature XXXVII, North-Holland) and read by I. Brodsky - there were no objections.

Such is the background of the conversation about the unwritten Divine Comedy, such is the deep theme of many of the book's dialogues.

Monologues and dialogues about Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Auden, Frost are perhaps more autobiographical than an ironic account of one's own life. And not a single researcher of Brodsky's life and work can henceforth do without this book.

Yakov Gordin

Instead of an introduction

The initial impetus for the book "Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky" were lectures given by the poet at Columbia University (New York) in the fall of 1978. He then commented on his favorite poets for American students: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden.

Separate chapters were published during Brodsky's lifetime. It was assumed that the final section of the book would be devoted to the impressions of the poet's new meeting with Russia, with his native St. Petersburg. Did not work out…

The genre of "conversation" is special. Having taken root in the West for a relatively long time, it has not yet taken root in Russia. Lidia Chukovskaya's classic book about Anna Akhmatova, for all its documentary nature, is still primarily Chukovskaya's diary.

The Russian reader is not accustomed to "conversations" with his poets. There are many reasons for that. One of them is the late professionalization of literature in Russia. The poet was listened to, but he was not respected.

Eckermann published his famous "Conversations with Goethe" in 1836; the next year, Pushkin's obituary, which said that the poet "died in the middle of his great career," angered the Russian Minister of Education: "Forgive me, why such an honor? Was Pushkin a military leader, a military leader, a minister, a statesman? Writing poems does not mean yet to go through a great field.

The situation began to change towards the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of a mass market for poetry. But it was too late - the revolution had come; with her, all and all conversations took refuge in a deaf underground. And although the sound recording already existed, there were no tape-recorded conversations either with Pasternak, or with Zabolotsky, or with Akhmatova.

Meanwhile, in the West, the genre of dialogue is flourishing. Its ancestor, "Conversations with Goethe", still stands apart. Another peak is five books of conversations with Stravinsky, published by Robert Kraft in relatively recent years; this brilliant series has markedly influenced our cultural tastes.

The aesthetics of the genre also crystallized. Here one can name Brecht's Refugee Talks and some plays by Beckett and Ionesco. The success of Louis Malle's Dinner with André, which was entirely built on a conversation between two real people, showed that this technique is also interesting to a relatively wide public.

The attentive reader will notice that each conversation with Brodsky was also built as a kind of play - with an outset, pitfalls of conflicts, a climax and a finale.

Solomon Volkov

Chapter 1
Childhood and youth in Leningrad: summer 1981 - winter 1992

Volkov: You were born in May 1940, that is, a little over a year before Hitler's army attacked Russia. Do you remember the blockade of Leningrad that began in September 1941?

Brodsky: I remember one scene quite well. My mother drags me on a sled through the streets littered with snow. Evening, spotlights roam the sky. Mother drags me past an empty bakery. This is near the Transfiguration Cathedral, not far from our house. This is what childhood is.

Volkov: Do you remember what the adults said about the blockade? As far as I understand, the people of Leningrad tried to avoid this topic. On the one hand, it was hard to discuss all these incredible torments. On the other hand, this was not encouraged by the authorities. That is, the blockade was a semi-forbidden topic.

Brodsky: I didn't have that feeling. I remember how my mother used to say which of my acquaintances died how, who and how were found in the apartments - already dead. When my father returned from the front, his mother often spoke to him about this. Discussed who was where in the blockade.

Volkov: Did they talk about cannibalism in besieged Leningrad? This topic was perhaps the most terrible and taboo; they were afraid to talk about it - but, on the other hand, it was difficult to get around it ...

Brodsky: Yes, they also talked about cannibalism. Fine. And my father recalled breaking the blockade at the beginning of 1943 - after all, he participated in it. And the blockade was completely lifted a year later.

Volkov: You were evacuated from Leningrad, weren't you?

Brodsky: For a short term, less than a year, in Cherepovets.

Volkov: Do you remember the return from evacuation to Leningrad?

Brodsky: I remember very well. One of the most terrible childhood memories is connected with the return from Cherepovets. At the railway station, the crowd besieged the train. When it was already moving, some old disabled man hobbled behind the train, still trying to get into the car. And from there they poured boiling water over it. Such is the scene from the play "The Great Migration of Nations".

Volkov: Do you remember your emotions about Victory Day in 1945?

Brodsky: My mother and I went to watch the fireworks. We stood in a huge crowd on the banks of the Neva at the Liteiny Bridge. But I don't remember my emotions. Well, what are the emotions? I was only five years old, after all.

Volkov: In what district of Leningrad were you born?

Brodsky: It seems to be on the Petrograd side. And he grew up mainly on Ryleeva Street. During the war my father was in the army. Mother, by the way, was also in the army - an interpreter in a camp for German prisoners of war. And at the end of the war we left for Cherepovets.

Volkov: And then returned to the same place?

Brodsky: Yes, in the same room. At first we found it sealed. There were all sorts of squabbles, a war with the authorities, the detective. Then we got the room back. In fact, we had two rooms. One is with the mother on Ryleev Street, and the other is with the father on Gaza Avenue, at the corner of this avenue and the Obvodny Canal. And, in fact, I spent my childhood between these two points.

Volkov: In your poems, almost from the very beginning, there is a very unconventional view of St. Petersburg. Does it have something to do with the geography of your childhood?

Brodsky: What do you have in mind?

Volkov: Already in your early poems, Petersburg is not a museum, but a city of workers' outskirts.

Brodsky: Where did you find this?

Volkov: Yes, at least, for example, your poem "From the outskirts to the center", written when you were a little over twenty. You describe Leningrad there as "a peninsula of factories, a paradise of workshops and an arcadia of factories."

Brodsky: Yes, this is Malaya Okhta! Indeed, I have a poem that describes industrial Leningrad! It's amazing, but I completely forgot about it! You know, I'm not in a position to talk about my own poems because I don't remember them very well.

Volkov: This poem was, perhaps, revolutionary for its time. Because it rediscovered officially, as it were, non-existent - at least in poetry - side of Leningrad. By the way, how did you prefer to call this city - Leningrad, Petersburg?

Brodsky: Probably Peter. And for me, St. Petersburg is both palaces and canals. But, of course, my childhood predisposed me to a sharp perception of the industrial landscape. I remember the feeling of this huge space, open, filled with some not very significant, but still protruding structures ...

Volkov: Pipes…

Brodsky: Yes, pipes, all these new buildings that are just beginning, the spectacle of the Okhta chemical plant. All this poetics of the new time...

Volkov: We can just say that this is rather against the poetics of the new, that is, Soviet, time. Because the backyards of St. Petersburg then simply ceased to portray. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky did it once...

"My version of the past..."

Dialogues with Brodsky is a unique book for Russian literary culture. Volkov himself writes in the author's preface about the exotic nature of this genre for Russia, the importance of which, however, is obvious. The only direct analogue known to the author of these pages - recordings of extensive conversations with Pasternak - is the brilliant work of Alexander Konstantinovich Gladkov. But, as we shall see, it is fundamentally different from the Dialogues.

In the preface to Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe" - an inevitable parallel, emphasized by Volkov in the title - V.F. Asmus wrote: “Works, diaries, correspondence remain from major masters. The memories of contemporaries also remain: friends, enemies and just acquaintances ... But it rarely happens that in these materials and records a trace of lively conversations and dialogues, disputes and teachings is preserved for a long time. Of all the manifestations of a major personality that create its significance for contemporaries and descendants, word, speech, conversation- the most ephemeral and transient. Events, thoughts, but rarely dialogues get into the diaries. The most brilliant speeches are forgotten, the most witty sayings are irretrievably lost ... In everything they hear, they (memoirists. - Ya.G.) will produce, perhaps imperceptibly for the interlocutor himself, selection, exclusion, permutation and - most importantly - reinterpretation material.<<…>> What survived the conversations of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Byron, Oscar Wilde? Meanwhile, contemporaries agree that in the life of these artists, conversation was one of the most important forms of existence of their genius. In Russian culture there is also the phenomenon of Chaadaev, self-expression, whose work for many years after the catastrophe caused by the publication of one of the Philosophical Letters, took place precisely in the form of a public conversation. The fate of Pushkin's conversations confirms the thought of Asmus - all attempts to retroactively reconstruct his brilliant oral improvisations did not give any noticeable result.

But the essence of the problem was understood not only by theorists, but also by practitioners. Paul Gsell, who published the book Conversations of Anatole France, wrote: “The superiority of great men is not always shown in their most processed works. Almost more often it is recognized in the direct and free play of their thought. What they do not even think of putting their name under, what they create with an intense impulse of thought, long ripened, falling involuntarily, of course - these are often the best works of their genius.

But no matter how high the value of the book “Conversations with Goethe” is, Asmus himself admits: “And yet“ Conversations ”recreates before the reader the image of just Ackerman's Goethe. After all, interpretation ... remains interpretation all the same.

“Dialogues with Brodsky” is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different nature. The presence of a tape recorder eliminates the factor of even unintentional interpretation. Before the reader Volkovsky Brodsky, but Brodsky as such. Responsibility for everything said is on him.

At the same time, Volkov by no means limits himself to the function of turning the tape recorder on and off. He skillfully directs the conversation without affecting the nature of what was said by the interlocutor. His task is to determine the range of strategic topics, and within each topic he assigns himself the role of an intellectual provocateur. In addition - and this is important! - unlike Eckermann and Gsell, Volkov tries to obtain purely biographical information.

However, the main thing is not the task that Volkov sets for himself - it is understandable - but the task solved by Brodsky.

Despite the huge number of interviews of the poet and his public lectures, Brodsky as a person remained quite closed, because all this did not constitute a system that explained fate.

It is known that in recent years Brodsky was extremely painful and irritated at the very possibility of studying his, so to speak, non-literary biography, fearing - not without reason - that interest in his poetry was replaced by interest in the personal aspects of life and poems would seem just a flat version. autobiography. And the fact that in the last years of his life he spent hours - under a tape recorder - talking about himself enthusiastically and, it would seem, very frankly, seems to contradict a sharply expressed antibiographical position.

But this is a false contradiction. Brodsky did not commit random acts. When Akhmatova said that the authorities were doing a biography of the "redhead", she was only partly right. Brodsky took the most direct and fully conscious part in the "doing" of his biography, despite all his youthful impulsiveness and seeming unsystematic behavior. And in this respect, as in many others, he is extremely similar to Pushkin.

Most of his contemporaries, as you know, Pushkin was perceived as a romantic poet, whose behavior is determined solely by the impulses of poetic nature. But the clever Sobolevsky, who knew Pushkin closely, wrote to Shevyrev in 1852, refuting this common view: “Pushkin is as clever as he is practical; he is a practical man, and a great practical one.”

We are not talking about the demonstrative life-creation of the Byronic type or the Silver Age model. It is about a conscious strategy, about a conscious choice of fate, and not just a lifestyle.

In 1833, at a critical moment in his life, Pushkin began to keep a diary, the purpose of which was - not least - to explain the style of behavior he had chosen after the 26th year and the reasons for changing this style. Pushkin explained himself to his descendants, realizing that his actions would be interpreted and reinterpreted. He offered a guide.

There is reason to believe that the tape-recorded dialogues with Volkov, which - as Brodsky was well aware - were ultimately intended for publication, served the same function. Brodsky offered his own version of spiritual and everyday biography in the most important and giving rise to free interpretation moments.

In the "Dialogues" there are extremely significant slips of the tongue on this subject. “Every era, every culture has its own version of the past,” says Brodsky. Behind this is: each of us has our own version of our own past. And here, returning to the notes of A.K. Gladkov, it must be said that Pasternak clearly did not pursue such a goal. It was a completely free conversation on intellectual topics that took place in the terrible days of the World War in the Russian outback. In Pasternak's monologues there is no systemic aspiration of Brodsky, no awareness of the programmatic nature of what was said, no sense of the summing up. And there was no tape recorder - which is psychologically extremely important.

"Dialogues" cannot be taken as an absolute source for Brodsky's biography. Despite the fact that they contain a huge amount of factual material, they are also a frank challenge to future researchers, because Volkov's interlocutor least of all dreams of becoming an uncomplaining "docent's property". He reproduces the past as a literary text, cutting off the superfluous - in his opinion - revealing not the letter, but the spirit of events, and when there is a need for this, and constructing situations. This is not a deception - this is creativity, myth-making. Before us - to a large extent - an autobiographical myth. But the value of the "Dialogues" does not decrease from this, but increases. Finding out certain everyday circumstances, in the end, is within the power of diligent and professional researchers. It is impossible to reconstruct the idea of ​​events, the point of view of the hero himself without his help.

In the "Dialogues" is revealed self-image, self-perception Brodsky.

Dialogues, relatively speaking, consist of two layers. One is purely intellectual, cultural, philosophical, if you like. These are conversations about Tsvetaeva, Auden, Frost. These are the most important fragments of Brodsky's spiritual biography, which are not subject to critical commentary. Only sometimes, when it comes to real history, Brodsky's judgments need to be corrected, as he resolutely offers his own idea of ​​events instead of the events themselves.

This is, for example, a conversation about Peter I. “In the minds of Peter the Great, there were two directions - the North and the West. No more. The East did not interest him. He was not even particularly interested in the South ... "

But in the geopolitical concept of Peter the South-East played no less a role than the North-West. Soon after the Poltava victory, he undertook a rather risky Prut campaign against Turkey, which almost ended in disaster. Immediately after the end of the twenty-year Northern War, Peter begins the Persian campaign, preparing a breakthrough towards India - to the East (which, in fact, began the Caucasian War). Etc.

This is, however, a rather rare case. When it came to objective, external reality - in any of its guises, if it does not directly concern his life - Brodsky is quite correct in handling facts.

The situation changes when we get into the second layer of the "Dialogues", relatively speaking, autobiographical.

Here, the future biographers of the poet will have to work hard to explain to posterity, for example, why Brodsky tells about a year and a half of his northern exile as a desert hermitage, as a space inhabited only by residents of the village of Norenskoye, without mentioning numerous guests.

But perhaps the most expressive example of the artistic construction of the event was the description of the 1964 trial. This whole situation is fundamentally important, because it demonstrates not only Brodsky's attitude to this outwardly most dramatic moment of his life, but also explains the existential setting of the mature Brodsky in relation to the events of external life. Answering Volkov's questions about the course of the trial, he claims that Frida Vigdorova, who kept in the record the malicious absurdity that took place there, was taken out of the hall early and therefore her record is fundamentally incomplete. Vigdorova, however, was present in the courtroom for the entire five hours, and although at some point—quite distant from the beginning—the judge forbade her to take notes, Vigdorova, with the help of a few more witnesses, restored the proceedings to the very end. Brodsky could remember all this. But the fact is that he was categorically opposed to the events of November 1963-March 1964 being considered as decisive in his fate. And he was absolutely right. By this time, the scale of his talent was already obvious, and regardless of whether persecution, trial, exile would appear in his life or not, he would still remain in Russian and world culture. Brodsky was aware of this, and his approach to what happened explains a lot in his mature worldview. “I refuse to dramatize all this!” he replies sharply to Volkov. To which Volkov’s perfectly accurate remark follows: “I understand, this is part of your aesthetics.” Here is the key. The presentation of events as they really looked, in retrospect, would have smacked of melodrama. But Brodsky in the nineties sharply raises the level of the idea of ​​drama compared to the sixties, and what then seemed like high drama turns out to be much lower than this level. The true drama is transferred to other spheres.

Brodsky's perception of a particular picture of the court was transformed along with his aesthetic and philosophical attitudes, along with his style in its not just literary, but existential terms. And the past must correspond to this new style even factually.

The Dialogues do not so much inform - although they contain a huge amount of specific biographical material - as they provoke guesses of a completely different kind. Talking about the origin of the idea of ​​the book “New Stanzas for August”, Brodsky suddenly says: “Unfortunately, I did not write the Divine Comedy. And, apparently, I will never write again. This is followed by an exchange of remarks about the epic nature of Brodsky's late poetry and the absence of a "monumental novel in verse" in its composition. Brodsky ironically recalls "Procession" and as an example of a monumental form - "Gorbunov and Gorchakov", a thing that seems to him an extremely serious work. “As for the Divina Comedy… well, I don’t know, but apparently not – I won’t write it anymore. If I lived in Russia, at home, then…” And then Volkov’s word “exile” pops up – a hint that it was in exile that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, and Dante’s shadow hovers over the finale of the Dialogues. There is some kind of reticence in all this ... "The greatness of the idea" - a variant of Pushkin's famous statement about the plan of the "Divine Comedy" - was the young Brodsky's favorite phrase, which Akhmatova repeatedly reminded him of in her letters. And he tried to write his "Comedy Divina". In the five years - from 1963 to 1968 - Brodsky made an attempt that can be compared in the grandeur of the idea and the complexity of deciphering only with the prophetic poems of William Blake, whom Brodsky carefully read in the sixties. (Blake's one-volume - the English original - was in his library.)

It was a cycle of "great poems" - "Great Elegy to John Donne", "Isaac and Abraham", "The Hundred Years' War", "Winter has come ...", "Gorbunov and Gorchakov". This is a single grandiose epic space, united by a common metric, through images-symbols - birds, stars, snow, sea - by common structural techniques and, most importantly, by a common religious and philosophical foundation. Like Blake, this is a heretical epic. But the Divine Comedy was also born in the context of sectarian heretical utopias. Heaven and Hell are present in Brodsky's epic. In the unpublished “Hundred Years War” there is a stunning description of the underworld, where “Roots are stars, worms are clouds”, “where Tartarus howls terribly” and from where an ominous angel breaks out - a bird of discord.

Such is the background of the conversation about the unwritten Divine Comedy, such is the deep theme of many of the book's dialogues.

Monologues and dialogues about Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Auden, Frost are perhaps more autobiographical than an ironic account of one's own life. And not a single researcher of Brodsky's life and work can henceforth do without this book.

Instead of an introduction

The initial impetus for the book "Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky" were lectures given by the poet at Columbia University (New York) in the fall of 1978. He then commented on his favorite poets for American students: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden.

Separate chapters were published during Brodsky's lifetime. It was assumed that the final section of the book would be devoted to the impressions of the poet's new meeting with Russia, with his native St. Petersburg. Did not work out…

The genre of "conversation" is special. Having taken root in the West for a relatively long time, it has not yet taken root in Russia. Lidia Chukovskaya's classic book about Anna Akhmatova, for all its documentary nature, is still primarily Chukovskaya's diary.

The Russian reader is not accustomed to "conversations" with his poets. There are many reasons for that. One of them is the late professionalization of literature in Russia. The poet was listened to, but he was not respected.

Eckermann published his famous "Conversations with Goethe" in 1836; the next year, Pushkin's obituary, which said that the poet "died in the middle of his great career," angered the Russian Minister of Education: "Forgive me, why such an honor? Was Pushkin a military leader, a military leader, a minister, a statesman? Writing poems does not mean yet to go through a great field.

The situation began to change towards the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of a mass market for poetry. But it was too late - the revolution had come; with her, all and all conversations took refuge in a deaf underground. And although the sound recording already existed, there were no tape-recorded conversations either with Pasternak, or with Zabolotsky, or with Akhmatova.

Meanwhile, in the West, the genre of dialogue is flourishing. Its ancestor, "Conversations with Goethe", still stands apart. Another peak is five books of conversations with Stravinsky, published by Robert Kraft in relatively recent years; this brilliant series has markedly influenced our cultural tastes.

The aesthetics of the genre also crystallized. Here one can name Brecht's Refugee Talks and some plays by Beckett and Ionesco. The success of Louis Malle's Dinner with André, which was entirely built on a conversation between two real people, showed that this technique is also interesting to a relatively wide public.

The attentive reader will notice that each conversation with Brodsky was also built as a kind of play - with an outset, pitfalls of conflicts, a climax and a finale.

Solomon Volkov

Chapter 1
Childhood and youth in Leningrad: summer 1981 - winter 1992

Volkov: You were born in May 1940, that is, a little over a year before Hitler's army attacked Russia. Do you remember the blockade of Leningrad that began in September 1941?

Brodsky: I remember one scene quite well. My mother drags me on a sled through the streets littered with snow. Evening, spotlights roam the sky. Mother drags me past an empty bakery. This is near the Transfiguration Cathedral, not far from our house. This is what childhood is.

Volkov: Do you remember what the adults said about the blockade? As far as I understand, the people of Leningrad tried to avoid this topic. On the one hand, it was hard to discuss all these incredible torments. On the other hand, this was not encouraged by the authorities. That is, the blockade was a semi-forbidden topic.

Brodsky: I didn't have that feeling. I remember how my mother used to say which of my acquaintances died how, who and how were found in the apartments - already dead. When my father returned from the front, his mother often spoke to him about this. Discussed who was where in the blockade.

Volkov: Did they talk about cannibalism in besieged Leningrad? This topic was perhaps the most terrible and taboo; they were afraid to talk about it - but, on the other hand, it was difficult to get around it ...

Brodsky: Yes, they also talked about cannibalism. Fine. And my father recalled breaking the blockade at the beginning of 1943 - after all, he participated in it. And the blockade was completely lifted a year later.

Volkov: You were evacuated from Leningrad, weren't you?

Brodsky: For a short term, less than a year, in Cherepovets.

Volkov: Do you remember the return from evacuation to Leningrad?

Brodsky: I remember very well. One of the most terrible childhood memories is connected with the return from Cherepovets. At the railway station, the crowd besieged the train. When it was already moving, some old disabled man hobbled behind the train, still trying to get into the car. And from there they poured boiling water over it. Such is the scene from the play "The Great Migration of Nations".

Volkov: Do you remember your emotions about Victory Day in 1945?

Brodsky: My mother and I went to watch the fireworks. We stood in a huge crowd on the banks of the Neva at the Liteiny Bridge. But I don't remember my emotions. Well, what are the emotions? I was only five years old, after all.

Volkov: In what district of Leningrad were you born?

Brodsky: It seems to be on the Petrograd side. And he grew up mainly on Ryleeva Street. During the war my father was in the army. Mother, by the way, was also in the army - an interpreter in a camp for German prisoners of war. And at the end of the war we left for Cherepovets.

Volkov: And then returned to the same place?

Brodsky: Yes, in the same room. At first we found it sealed. There were all sorts of squabbles, a war with the authorities, the detective. Then we got the room back. In fact, we had two rooms. One is with the mother on Ryleev Street, and the other is with the father on Gaza Avenue, at the corner of this avenue and the Obvodny Canal. And, in fact, I spent my childhood between these two points.

Volkov: In your poems, almost from the very beginning, there is a very unconventional view of St. Petersburg. Does it have something to do with the geography of your childhood?

Brodsky: What do you have in mind?

Volkov: Already in your early poems, Petersburg is not a museum, but a city of workers' outskirts.

Brodsky: Where did you find this?

Volkov: Yes, at least, for example, your poem "From the outskirts to the center", written when you were a little over twenty. You describe Leningrad there as "a peninsula of factories, a paradise of workshops and an arcadia of factories."

Brodsky: Yes, this is Malaya Okhta! Indeed, I have a poem that describes industrial Leningrad! It's amazing, but I completely forgot about it! You know, I'm not in a position to talk about my own poems because I don't remember them very well.

Volkov: This poem was, perhaps, revolutionary for its time. Because it rediscovered officially, as it were, non-existent - at least in poetry - side of Leningrad. By the way, how did you prefer to call this city - Leningrad, Petersburg?

Brodsky: Probably Peter. And for me, St. Petersburg is both palaces and canals. But, of course, my childhood predisposed me to a sharp perception of the industrial landscape. I remember the feeling of this huge space, open, filled with some not very significant, but still protruding structures ...

Volkov: Pipes…

Brodsky: Yes, pipes, all these new buildings that are just beginning, the spectacle of the Okhta chemical plant. All this poetics of the new time...

Volkov: We can just say that this is rather against the poetics of the new, that is, Soviet, time. Because the backyards of St. Petersburg then simply ceased to portray. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky did it once...

Brodsky: Yes, art nouveau!

Volkov: And then this tradition was practically interrupted. Leningrad - both in the visual arts and in poetry - has become a very conditional place. And the one who reads your poem immediately remembers the real city, the real landscape - its colors, smells.

Brodsky: You know, in this poem, as far as I remember now, so many things overlapped that it's hard for me to talk about it. It cannot be expressed in one word or one phrase. In fact, these are poems about the fifties in Leningrad, about the time in which our youth fell. There is even, literally, a response to the appearance of tight trousers.

Volkov: "...Near your ever-wide trousers"?

Brodsky A: Yes, absolutely right. That is, it is, as it were, an attempt to preserve the aesthetics of the fifties. A lot is mixed here, including modern cinema - or what we then imagined as modern cinema.

Volkov: This poem is perceived as a polemic with Pushkin's "... I visited again ...".

Brodsky: No, it's more of a paraphrase. But from the very first line, everything seems to be called into question, right? I've always stuck out of the industrial landscape. In Leningrad, this is, as it were, the antithesis of the center. No one really wrote about this world, about this part of the city, about the outskirts at that time.

Volkov: Neither you nor I have seen Peter for many years. And for me personally, Peter - these are the verses ...

Brodsky: This is very touching of you, but these poems evoke completely different associations for me.

Volkov: What kind?

Brodsky: First of all, memories of the dormitory of the Leningrad University, where I "shepherded" the girl at that time. This was Malaya Okhta. I used to walk there all the time, and it's far, by the way. And in general, the main thing in this poem is music, that is, the tendency to such a metaphysical decision: is there anything important, central in what you see? And now I remember the end of this poem - there is one thought there ... Come on, it doesn’t matter ...

Volkov: Do you mean the line “Thank God that I remained on earth without a homeland”?

Brodsky: Well, yes…

Volkov: These words turned out to be prophetic. How did they jump out of you then, in 1962?

Brodsky: Well, it's the thought of being alone... detachment. Indeed, in that Leningrad topography, this is still a very strong divorce, a colossal difference between the center and the outskirts. And suddenly I realized that the outskirts is the beginning of the world, and not its end. This is the end of the familiar world, but this is the beginning of an unusual world, which, of course, is much larger, bigger, right? And the idea was basically this: going to the outskirts, you move away from everything in the world and go out into the real world.

Volkov: In this I feel some repulsion from the traditional decorative Petersburg.

Brodsky A: I understand what you mean. Well, firstly, in St. Petersburg, all this decorativeness is somewhat insane. And that's what makes her interesting. And secondly, the outskirts are all the more to my liking because they give a feeling of spaciousness. It seems to me that in Petersburg the strongest childhood or youthful impressions are connected with this extraordinary sky and with some idea of ​​infinity. When this prospect opens up, it drives you crazy. It seems that something absolutely wonderful is happening on the other side.

Volkov: The same story with the prospects of St. Petersburg avenues - it seems that at the end of this long street ...

Brodsky: Yes! And although you know everyone who lives there, and everything is known to you in advance, all the same, when you look, you can’t do anything about this feeling. And this impression is especially strong when you look, say, from the Trubetskoy bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress towards New Holland downstream and to the other side. There are all these taps, all this hell.

Volkov: The country of Alexander Blok ...

Brodsky: Yes, this is what Blok was crazy about. After all, he was crazy about St. Petersburg sunsets, right? And he predicted this and that, the fifth or tenth. In fact, the main thing is not in the color of the sunset, but in the perspective, in the feeling of infinity, right? Infinity and, in general, some kind of uncertainty. And Blok, in my opinion, with all his apocalyptic visions, tried to domesticate all this. I do not want to say anything bad about Blok, but this is, in general, a banal solution to the St. Petersburg phenomenon. Banal interpretation of space.

Volkov: This love for the outskirts is connected, perhaps, with your position as an outsider in Soviet society? After all, you did not follow the beaten path of an intellectual: after school - a university, then a decent service, etc. Why did it happen? Why did you leave school without finishing?

Brodsky A: It kind of happened by itself.

Volkov Q: Where was your school?

Brodsky: Oh, there were so many!

Volkov: Did you change them?

Brodsky A: Yes, like gloves.

Volkov: And why?

Brodsky: Partly because I lived with my father, then with my mother. More with mother, of course. Now I am already confused in all these numbers, but at first I studied at school, if I am not mistaken, number 203, the former "Petershule". Before the revolution, it was a German school. And among the pupils there were many quite remarkable people. But in our time it was an ordinary Soviet school. After the fourth grade, for some reason, it turned out that I had to leave there - some kind of seraphic redistribution associated with the fact that I turned out to belong to another microdistrict. And I moved to the 196th school on Mokhovaya. Something happened there again, I don't remember what, and after three classes I had to move to school No. 181. I studied there for a year, it was the seventh grade. Unfortunately, I stayed for the second year. And, having stayed for the second year, it was somehow salty for me to go to the same school. Therefore, I asked my parents to transfer me to a school at my father's place of residence, on Obvodny Canal. Here, wonderful times came for me, because there was a completely different contingent in this school - really the working class, the children of workers.

Volkov: Did you feel among your own?

Brodsky: Yes, the feeling was completely different. Because I'm sick and tired of this semi-intelligent punks. Not that I had any class feelings then, but in this new school, everything was simple. And after the seventh grade, I tried to enter the Second Baltic School, where submariners were trained. It's because my dad was in the Navy and I, like any kid, was extremely into all these things - you know?

Volkov: Shoulder straps, tunic, daggers?

Brodsky: Exactly! In general, I have rather wonderful feelings towards the navy. I don’t know where they came from, but here is childhood, and father, and hometown. There's nothing you can do about it! As I remember the Naval Museum, St. Andrew's flag - a blue cross on a white cloth ... There is no better flag in the world at all! That's exactly what I'm saying now! But unfortunately, nothing came of my attempt.

Volkov: What got in the way?

Brodsky: Nationality, the fifth point. I passed the exams and passed the medical board. But when it turned out that I was a Jew—I don’t know why it took them so long to find out—they double-checked me. And it seems that it was crap with the eyes, astigmatism of the left eye. Though I don't think that would interfere with anything. Given who they took there ... In general, I got burned in this case, well, it doesn’t matter. As a result, I returned to school on Mokhovaya and studied there for a year, but by that time I was rather sick of it all.

Volkov: Is the situation generally disgusting? Or peers? Or did any of the teachers especially annoy you?

Brodsky: Yes, there was a wonderful teacher there - I think he taught the Stalinist Constitution. He came to school from the army, army, former. That is, the mug is a complete caricature. Well, as the Soviets are portrayed in the West: a hat, a jacket, everything is square and double-breasted. He really hated me. And the thing is that at school he was the secretary of the party organization. And ruined my life a lot. And so it ended - I went to work as a milling machine operator at the Arsenal plant, mailbox 671. I was then fifteen or twenty years old.

Volkov: Dropping out of school is a rather radical decision for a Leningrad Jewish youth. How did your parents react to it?

Brodsky: Well, firstly, they saw that I still didn’t get any sense. Second, I really wanted to work. And the family simply did not have towers. The father either worked or did not work.

Volkov: Why?

Brodsky: It was such a vague time. Gutalin just hit the oak. Under Gutalin, dad was expelled from the army, because a Zhdanov decree was issued prohibiting Jews above a certain rank from being in political work, and my father was already a captain of the third rank, that is, a major.

Volkov: And who is Gutalin?

Brodsky: Gutalin is Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, aka Dzhugashvili. After all, in Leningrad all the shoemakers were Aisors.

Volkov: This is the first time I hear such a nickname.

Brodsky: And where have you lived all your life, Solomon? In which country?

Volkov: When Stalin died, I lived in Riga.

Brodsky: Then it's clear. In Riga, of course, they didn't say that.

Volkov: By the way, was it possible to work at the age of fifteen? Was it allowed?

Brodsky: In a way, it was illegal. But you have to understand, it was 1955, there was no question of any kind of legality. And I was a healthy guy.

Considerations about the five "great poems" as a single epic space were expressed by the author of this preface in 1995 (Russian Literature XXXVII, North-Holland) and read by I. Brodsky - there were no objections.

Dialogues with Brodsky is a unique book for Russian literary culture. Volkov himself writes in the author's preface about the exotic nature of this genre for Russia, the importance of which, however, is obvious. The only direct analogue known to the author of these pages - recordings of extensive conversations with Pasternak - is the brilliant work of Alexander Konstantinovich Gladkov. But, as we shall see, it is fundamentally different from the Dialogues.

In the preface to Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe" - an inevitable parallel, emphasized by Volkov in the title - V.F. Asmus wrote: “Works, diaries, correspondence remain from major masters. The memories of contemporaries also remain: friends, enemies and just acquaintances ... But it rarely happens that in these materials and records a trace of lively conversations and dialogues, disputes and teachings is preserved for a long time. Of all the manifestations of a major personality that create its significance for contemporaries and descendants, word, speech, conversation- the most ephemeral and transient. Events, thoughts, but rarely dialogues get into the diaries. The most brilliant speeches are forgotten, the most witty sayings are irretrievably lost ... In everything they hear, they (memoirists. - Ya.G.) will produce, perhaps imperceptibly for the interlocutor himself, selection, exclusion, permutation and - most importantly - reinterpretation material.<<…>> What survived the conversations of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Byron, Oscar Wilde? Meanwhile, contemporaries agree that in the life of these artists, conversation was one of the most important forms of existence of their genius. In Russian culture there is also the phenomenon of Chaadaev, self-expression, whose work for many years after the catastrophe caused by the publication of one of the Philosophical Letters, took place precisely in the form of a public conversation. The fate of Pushkin's conversations confirms the thought of Asmus - all attempts to retroactively reconstruct his brilliant oral improvisations did not give any noticeable result.

But the essence of the problem was understood not only by theorists, but also by practitioners. Paul Gsell, who published the book Conversations of Anatole France, wrote: “The superiority of great men is not always shown in their most processed works. Almost more often it is recognized in the direct and free play of their thought. What they do not even think of putting their name under, what they create with an intense impulse of thought, long ripened, falling involuntarily, of course - these are often the best works of their genius.

But no matter how high the value of the book “Conversations with Goethe” is, Asmus himself admits: “And yet“ Conversations ”recreates before the reader the image of just Ackerman's Goethe. After all, interpretation ... remains interpretation all the same.

“Dialogues with Brodsky” is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different nature. The presence of a tape recorder eliminates the factor of even unintentional interpretation. Before the reader Volkovsky Brodsky, but Brodsky as such. Responsibility for everything said is on him.

At the same time, Volkov by no means limits himself to the function of turning the tape recorder on and off. He skillfully directs the conversation without affecting the nature of what was said by the interlocutor. His task is to determine the range of strategic topics, and within each topic he assigns himself the role of an intellectual provocateur. In addition - and this is important! - unlike Eckermann and Gsell, Volkov tries to obtain purely biographical information.

However, the main thing is not the task that Volkov sets for himself - it is understandable - but the task solved by Brodsky.

Despite the huge number of interviews of the poet and his public lectures, Brodsky as a person remained quite closed, because all this did not constitute a system that explained fate.

It is known that in recent years Brodsky was extremely painful and irritated at the very possibility of studying his, so to speak, non-literary biography, fearing - not without reason - that interest in his poetry was replaced by interest in the personal aspects of life and poems would seem just a flat version. autobiography. And the fact that in the last years of his life he spent hours - under a tape recorder - talking about himself enthusiastically and, it would seem, very frankly, seems to contradict a sharply expressed antibiographical position.

But this is a false contradiction. Brodsky did not commit random acts. When Akhmatova said that the authorities were doing a biography of the "redhead", she was only partly right. Brodsky took the most direct and fully conscious part in the "doing" of his biography, despite all his youthful impulsiveness and seeming unsystematic behavior. And in this respect, as in many others, he is extremely similar to Pushkin.

Most of his contemporaries, as you know, Pushkin was perceived as a romantic poet, whose behavior is determined solely by the impulses of poetic nature. But the clever Sobolevsky, who knew Pushkin closely, wrote to Shevyrev in 1852, refuting this common view: “Pushkin is as clever as he is practical; he is a practical man, and a great practical one.”

We are not talking about the demonstrative life-creation of the Byronic type or the Silver Age model. It is about a conscious strategy, about a conscious choice of fate, and not just a lifestyle.

In 1833, at a critical moment in his life, Pushkin began to keep a diary, the purpose of which was - not least - to explain the style of behavior he had chosen after the 26th year and the reasons for changing this style. Pushkin explained himself to his descendants, realizing that his actions would be interpreted and reinterpreted. He offered a guide.

There is reason to believe that the tape-recorded dialogues with Volkov, which - as Brodsky was well aware - were ultimately intended for publication, served the same function. Brodsky offered his own version of spiritual and everyday biography in the most important and giving rise to free interpretation moments.

In the "Dialogues" there are extremely significant slips of the tongue on this subject. “Every era, every culture has its own version of the past,” says Brodsky. Behind this is: each of us has our own version of our own past. And here, returning to the notes of A.K. Gladkov, it must be said that Pasternak clearly did not pursue such a goal. It was a completely free conversation on intellectual topics that took place in the terrible days of the World War in the Russian outback. In Pasternak's monologues there is no systemic aspiration of Brodsky, no awareness of the programmatic nature of what was said, no sense of the summing up. And there was no tape recorder - which is psychologically extremely important.

"Dialogues" cannot be taken as an absolute source for Brodsky's biography. Despite the fact that they contain a huge amount of factual material, they are also a frank challenge to future researchers, because Volkov's interlocutor least of all dreams of becoming an uncomplaining "docent's property". He reproduces the past as a literary text, cutting off the superfluous - in his opinion - revealing not the letter, but the spirit of events, and when there is a need for this, and constructing situations. This is not a deception - this is creativity, myth-making. Before us - to a large extent - an autobiographical myth. But the value of the "Dialogues" does not decrease from this, but increases. Finding out certain everyday circumstances, in the end, is within the power of diligent and professional researchers. It is impossible to reconstruct the idea of ​​events, the point of view of the hero himself without his help.

In the "Dialogues" is revealed self-image, self-perception Brodsky.

Dialogues, relatively speaking, consist of two layers. One is purely intellectual, cultural, philosophical, if you like. These are conversations about Tsvetaeva, Auden, Frost. These are the most important fragments of Brodsky's spiritual biography, which are not subject to critical commentary. Only sometimes, when it comes to real history, Brodsky's judgments need to be corrected, as he resolutely offers his own idea of ​​events instead of the events themselves.

Dialogues and Conversations

In the introductory article and in the preface to this book, Yakov Gordin and Solomon Volkov remind us of a very important thing. Namely, the genre of CONVERSATION with a great master is an exotic thing for Russian culture. Not letters, not memoirs, not reflections, but a conversation - a live and direct process. Known Ackerman, of course. But, as Yakov Gordin points out, Goethe there is Eckermann's Goethe.

Volkov and Brodsky

It is no coincidence that the book is called "Dialogues". I will express the general opinion by saying that Solomon Volkov appears in the records of these conversations as a brilliant interlocutor, a deeply and versatilely educated person who has his own opinion. Sometimes Brodsky and Volkov argue, find or do not find a common language, listen or not to each other (more often, of course, Joseph Alexandrovich does not listen). It is no coincidence that Volkov emphasized in the preface that each dialogue (and there are 12 of them in the book) is built according to the laws of the play: there is a smooth start to the conversation, conflict (disputes, disagreements) and a denouement.

Brodsky the mythologist

Yakov Gordin quite rightly calls not to perceive the book as "an absolute source for Brodsky's biography." Brodsky here, for all his dislike for violating personal space, still talks a lot about himself. But this information serves, first of all, to create one's own biography. More precisely, a kind of myth about himself. Approximately as it was with Pushkin, who perfectly understood that the history of his life can be mythologised.

Brodsky and unconsciousness

Very, very often, Brodsky refers to his bad memory. He does not remember dates, many names. Or deliberately forgets? Always citing Anna Andreevna Akhmatova as an example: she, they say, always remembered everything perfectly - even the events of many years ago.

It seems that in this "amnesia" there is a large share of the myth-making power that Brodsky manifests in relation to himself. He seems to want to show that he is completely indifferent to himself, to some moments of his life.

Metaphysics and Brodsky

Very soon, after reading the book, it becomes clear that for Brodsky the concept of "metaphysical" is the most important thing in life and art. This word appears on almost every page of the Dialogues. Metaphysics of events, metaphysics of creativity, metaphysical poets.
Brodsky: You know, if I were Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, I would not be angry at that satirical poem. But after the Ode, if I were Stalin, I would immediately slaughter Mandelstam. Because I would understand that he entered me, moved in. And this is the most terrible, stunning.

Brodsky and others

It is always interesting how brilliant masters evaluate the work of other people. Like many geniuses, Brodsky is harsh, sometimes unfair (for example, to Tyutchev), capricious and very selective. He considers the figures of Tsvetaeva, Pasternak (and not all of them), Auden, Frost, Mandelstam to be brilliant. He likes Zabolotsky, Batyushkov, Faulkner, Nabokov the prose writer (not a poet!!), Thomas Mann, John Donne, Cavafy. He strongly dislikes Solzhenitsyn ... And in general he is very selective.

Volkov: If we talk about anguish, then it is really absent from artists who are considered to be all-encompassing - from Pushkin or Mozart, for example ...
Brodsky: Mozart has no anguish, because he is above the anguish. While in Beethoven or Chopin everything rests on him.
Volkov: Of course, in Mozart we can find reflections of the supra-individual, which Beethoven, and even more so Chopin, do not have. But both Beethoven and Chopin are such grandiose figures...
Brodsky: Maybe. But rather - to the side, along the plane, and not up.

And here's the genius:

"So it always happens that society appoints one poet as the main one, as chief. This happens - especially in an authoritarian society - due to this idiotic parallelism: the poet is the king. And poetry offers much more than one ruler of thoughts. By choosing one, society "dooms himself to this or that variant of autocracy. That is, he refuses a democratic principle of its kind. And therefore he has no right to blame everything on the sovereign or the first secretary afterward. It is to blame for it, that it reads selectively. If only Vyazemsky and Baratynsky knew better "Perhaps, you see, Nikolasha would not be so obsessed with. For indifference to culture, society primarily pays with civil liberties. The narrowing of the cultural horizon is the mother of the narrowing of the political horizon. Nothing paves the way for tyranny like cultural self-castration. When they then start to cut off heads - it even makes sense."