When “the great leader and teacher” Stalin died, the thirteen-year-old Brodsky was already independent enough to refrain from the hysterical mourning that was widespread in those anxious days. “We school children were called into the auditorium and our class mentor (Zhdanov himself had pinned the Order of Lenin on her—we all knew about that and it was a real big deal) came out on stage,” Brodsky recalled. “She began a funeral oration and suddenly cried out in a wild voice: On your knees! On your knees!’ Pandemonium broke out. Everyone was howling and weeping and it was somehow expected of me to cry too, but—to my shame then; now, I think, to my honor—I couldn’t. When I got home, my mother was also crying. I looked at her with some astonishment, until my father suddenly gave me a wink. Then I realized for sure that there was no particular reason for me to get upset over Stalin’s death.”50
At the age of fifteen Brodsky dropped out of school and went to work as a milling machine operator at the Arsenal defense plant in Leningrad. He had at least thirteen jobs between 1956 and 1962 and traveled around Russia with geological groups. One of his more unusual jobs in that period was assistant in the dissecting room of the morgue of a district hospital, where he cut up corpses, sliced off the tops of their skulls, removed their internal organs, and then sewed them back up.
Brodsky left that job after a very unpleasant scene. That summer many small children in the Leningrad region were dying of toxic dyspepsia. Among them were a pair of Gypsy twins. When their father came to the morgue for the bodies and saw that they had been autopsied, he began, knife in hand, chasing Brodsky around the morgue, trying to kill him.
“I ran from him among the tables with sheet-covered corpses,” Brodsky told me. “Now that’s surrealism that makes Jean Cocteau seem like nothing! Finally, he caught me, grabbed me by my shirt, and I knew that something awful was about to happen. I managed to get hold of a surgical hammer that lay nearby and hit him on the hand. His hands unclenched, he stopped, and started to weep. And I felt very eerie.”51
When Brodsky started writing poetry, his early experiences contributed to the appearance of the themes of loneliness and alienation, their primary source being the tragic and romantic character of Brodsky’s gift. But a highly important role, according to Brodsky himself, was played by the fact that his native city was Leningrad, which Brodsky always chose to call “Piter,” in defiance of its official name, like many of his contemporaries.
Brodsky explained that Petersburg was built on the edge of the state, almost outside it, and thus a writer living there willy-nilly becomes an outsider. As a witness to Brodsky’s first poetry readings in Leningrad put it, “Alienation was the only accessible road to freedom for young Brodsky. That is why separation—from life, from a woman, city, or country—is so often rehearsed in his poems.”52
Brodsky as a rule picked the outskirts of “Piter” to describe in his poetry. A poem from 1962, which Brodsky titled “From the Out-skirts to the Center,” describes the “peninsula of plants, a paradise of workshops, and Arcadia of factories.” Brodsky commented, “At that time no one wrote about that part of the city, about that world. But I was always impressed by the industrial landscape. The vision of newly started construction projects, the sense of open space filled with protruding structures, was close to me. It all gave rise to thoughts of loneliness and dislocation.”53
In the same poem, where Brodsky’s emotions include “sadness from a brick chimney and a dog’s bark,” the poet makes a startling prediction, echoing Akhmatova’s “Prayer” in its tragedy. “Thank God that I am left on this earth without a homeland.” As Akhmatova had predicted the horrible sacrifices to come in her life, Brodsky here either guessed his future or determined it.
According to Brodsky, the centrifugal idea of the poem “From the Outskirts to the Center” can be explained this way: “The outskirts represent not only the end of the familiar world, but the start of the unfamiliar world, which is much larger, huger. The idea of the poem is that in moving to the outskirts, you remove yourself from everything in the world and thereby go out into the big world.”54
This new view of Leningrad contrasts with a more traditional approach expressed in “Stanzas to a City,” also written in 1962, in which the poet thus addressed the city:
Even here there is the persistent theme of escape, which conflicts with Akhmatova’s constant insistence on her inseparability from the city’s fate. Akhmatova nevertheless included Brodsky in the circle of young poets that formed around her and that she dubbed the “magic choir.”
