Joseph Brodsky. No Monument This Year?

Muruzi House at 24, Liteiny Avenue where Brodky lived with his parents (1949-1972)

1987 Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky, would have turned 75 on May 24, this year. The monument  to a great Russian poet, as well as the memorial museum, are still planned on being opened right at this address: 24, Liteiny in St. Petersburg, where Brodsky lived for as long as 23 years.

The blind firewall in the backyard of the residential building is considered as the proper background for the future monument.

Joseph Brodsky was not officially recognized as a poet back at times of the Soviet rule. After years of considerable pressure from the authorities, without a single chance to get his poetry published, he was eventually "strongly advised" to leave the country.

“What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend!”, once said Anna Ahmatova, “It’s as if he’d hired them to do it on purpose...”

Brodsky's whimsical biography is not yet over though. Life itself inspires it to be going on.

Nina Fedorova, who's now retired, the daughter of one of the former Brodsky's neighbours from next door, still refuses to move out of her room in the apartment. Therefore the city authorities claim not being capable of establishing the museum.

Mikhail Milchik, chairman of the Brodsky's Museum Foundation, regrets there will be no museum and no monument to Brodsky open this year due to complications with the resettlement of the apartment residents and other bureaucratic issues.

By Dima Sharov