Give me another life, and I’ll be singing in Caffè Rafaella. Or simply sitting there. Or standing there, as furniture in the corner, in case that life is a bit less generous than the former.Give me another life, and I’ll be singing in Caffè Rafaella. Or simply sitting there. Or standing there, as furniture in the corner, in case that life is a bit less generous than the former.
To those who love the poetry of Brodsky,
or else want to encounter his life and work, are cordially invited to a remembrance evening of Joseph Brodsky at the Open Russia Club.There will be a screening of the movie “Walking with Brodsky” by Yelena Yakovich, filmed 1993 in Venice, where Bodsky and his friend Eugene Rein travelled for that purpose.
We welcome Ms Yakovich from Moscow to introduce her movie and answer any questions. Arriving from Italy, our guest Anna Maria Brodsky will read her own verses, in part dedicated to her father. His friends from England will also convene, sharing their memories of the poet. Dr. Natalya Rulyeva and Prof. Valentina Poluchina, researchers of his oeuvre and lifetime, will address your curiosity.
[ More about the movie – on Russia Beyond The Headlines ]
Not only the poems of Brodsky,
also his person, even his appearance are long since legendary and full of contradictions. What was Brodski like? Witty and cheerful, spiteful and proud, haughty aesthete and a man easily hurt, a generous friend and dangerous enemy. An out-and-outer to the measure of Tsvetaeva to whom “Christ is not enough, Freud is not enough, Marx is not enough, nor is Existentialism or Buddha.”
A Jew to Russians and Russian to Americans,
emigrant to all others, Brodsky lived in the US as unpretentiously independent as in Soviet Russia, with the basement flat door open to everyone, phone ringing like it was just invented yesterday. The solicitous can find everything in Brodsky – patriotism and nationalism, cynicism, and the main thing – many answers to matters of life and death.