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Video: Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani: 30 years of difference and 5 happiest years in the life of a poet
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
His friends and family are stubbornly silent about his private life. Maria Sozzani is ready to discuss the work of her husband Joseph Brodsky, but she never supports a conversation about his personal life and about their family. Only one thing is known: Joseph Brodsky was very happy for the last five years of his life.
Emigration
On June 4, 1972, the plane carried Joseph Brodsky to Vienna. He was stripped of his citizenship and forced to leave his homeland. In Vienna, Karl Proffer was already waiting for him, who immediately announced an invitation to work from the University of Michigan.
Brodsky was not at all inclined to pretend to be a victim. He spent some time in Europe, became acquainted with Western writers, and traveled to the United States to begin work as a guest poet. Talented, recognized by the world community, without even having a complete secondary education, he became one of the university's favorite lecturers. And then he began to lecture in Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden, England, USA, Italy.
He did not study pedagogy and did not know any methods. But he entered the audience and began his unchanging dialogue about poetry, its meaning in life. As a result, a lecture, seminar, forum or just a meeting turned into an exciting poetic performance.
True, the manner of teaching often shocked his colleagues, but they had to come to terms with the quirks of the genius. He could smoke during lectures and drink coffee. Soon, this no longer surprised anyone, it was even strange to imagine Brodsky without a cigarette.
His fame grew. It was already possible to talk not about what he did and what he wrote about as a citizen of the Soviet Union, but about how much he managed to change his citizenship.
Loneliness
The poet, who, shortly before emigration, suffered a difficult break with his beloved, and then found himself simply thrown out of his country, found his consolation in creativity and teaching.
In 1976 he suffered his first heart attack, and in 1978 he underwent heart surgery. For Joseph Brodsky, postoperative care and the care of loved ones were needed. But his parents were denied the right to see their son again and again. He was not allowed to feel the warmth of his parents' hands. Brodsky's father and mother died without seeing their son.
There was a long and tragic love story in his life with Marina Basmanova. In this relationship, he seemed to incinerate himself. He could not forgive his beloved either her betrayal or his own long loneliness. READ MORE …
Celebrating his fiftieth birthday in May 1990, Joseph Brodsky says: “God decided otherwise: I am destined to die single. A writer is a lonely traveler. But this prophecy did not come true.
He was quite lonely and always emphasized that loneliness allows you to create sharper and more productively. Perhaps that is why he did not have any serious relationships with women for a long time. But then a beautiful Italian woman with Russian roots appeared in his life.
Maria Sozzani
They first met at the Sorbonne in January 1990. The Italian Maria Sozzani flew to the lecture of the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate. A charming beauty who studies the history of Russian literature. Her mother comes from a Russian noble family, her father works in a high position in the Pirelli company.
It is unlikely that the poet then singled out Mary from the crowd, too many people attended his lectures. But soon he received a letter from her from Italy. And for several months, postal letters became a connecting thread between the great poet and the young Italian student.
In the summer, Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani set off together to Sweden. It was in Sweden that Brodsky was very often. On September 1, 1990, in the Stockholm City Hall, the marriage of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, who was almost 30 years younger than the poet, was concluded. His friend, Slavic philologist and translator Bengdt Yangfeldt and his wife helped arrange the wedding for the great poet.
A family
The poet's marriage came as a surprise to both his friends and admirers of his talent. The decision about the wedding was very hasty. But Brodsky, as always, had nothing to do with the opinions of others. For the first time in many years, he was finally, unconditionally happy. Many friends of the poet will say later that the life of Joseph Brodsky in marriage with Maria turned out to be happier than all the previous 50 years.
He treated his wife very tenderly, almost like a father. If you look at the photographs of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, it is impossible not to notice some kind of inner peaceful glow of both.
On Christmas Day 1993, on December 25, a poem will appear, and many will wonder for a long time who is hiding behind the initials of the dedication. MB - this is how Brodsky always signed poems dedicated to Marina Basmanova. But MB is now the initials of his wife, Maria Brodskaya.
The poems dedicated to Marina were full of tragedy, the expectation of something inevitable and terrible. And here is a clear, open hope, the expectation of a miracle. And the miracle really happened, however, a little earlier.
In the same year, 1993, baby Anna was born to Joseph and Mary. The family communicated in English, but Maria tried to teach her daughter Russian so that she could subsequently read the works of her great father in the original.
He loved his Nyusha immensely, spending every free minute with her. But on January 28, 1996, the poet's heart stopped. He went up to his office to work, in the morning his wife found him dead … And Nyusha will dictate letters to her mother for a long time and ask her to tie them to a ball that will fly to her father.
Today, the matured Anna Alexandra Maria Sozzani gets acquainted with the work of her father and admits that for her this is communication with the closest person.
Maria transported her husband's body to Venice. And she herself returned from America to her homeland, to Italy.
Joseph Brodsky transferred his entire archive until 1972 to the Russian National Library, and shortly before his death left an order to close access to personal records for exactly 50 years after his death. The literary heritage is open to study and research. The great poet wanted to be judged by creativity, and not by stories about his private life.
Joseph Brodsky met the one with whom he was happy, already in adulthood. Maybe late love is the lot of all geniuses. Here is the singer of the Russian land Mikhail Prishvin experienced deep feelings already at the end of his life.
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