How the Film Industry Made a ‘Water-City’ a Key Image of Joseph Brodsky’s Identity Myth: Saint-Petersburg—New York—Venice

Polina Pavlikova

1The understanding of any artist may start from his/her personal geography. In the case of Joseph Brodsky’s story, the landscape picture changes several times. Such cities as Saint-Petersburg, New York, and Venice replaced each other or alternated with each other repeatedly during his entire life.¹ The presence of these cities in Joseph Brodsky’s personal narrative is also reflected in his literary works. By examples of his poems and essays, we plan to examine how the symbol of the “water-city” once appeared in Joseph Brodsky’s writing and was used later by the film industry to construct the identity myth around his outstanding personality.

2The image of Saint-Petersburg appears in a great amount of Joseph Brodsky’s poems. It is difficult to overestimate the influence that the place of birth had on the writer. For example, here is how the author describes the special ambience of the city that raised him and made him a poet in the poem “A Part of Speech” (“Часть речи”, 1975–1976), (Brodsky and Kjellberg 101–15):

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland
by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on
in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice
that ripples between them like hair still moist,
if it ripples at all.

3Due to political reasons Joseph Brodsky had to abandon Saint-Petersburg, however, the image of his city has been richly developing in his poetic and prosaic texts. After earning money in the USA, Joseph Brodsky fulfilled his childhood dream and went to Venice for the first time. After that journey, he has been coming back to Venice every Christmas, and the essay Watermark became an artistic result of this experience. According to Joseph Brodsky’s will, the writer was buried in Venice at the cemetery of San Michele Island. He found his last resting place among the graves of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, the famous cultural figures who also had to face emigration from the Russian Empire, as Joseph Brodsky from the Soviet Union.

4Metaphorically Joseph Brodsky has returned to his hometown Saint-Petersburg that is compared to Venice and also called ‘The Venice of the North’ for their visual similarity due to the network of water canals, islands, and bridges. In the poem “Stanzas” (Стансы, 1962), (Brodsky, Kneller), Joseph Brodsky wrote:

I don’t wish to decide on
the churchyard, the state.
On Vasilevski Island,
for my death, I will wait.

5Saint-Petersburg was Joseph Brodsky’s homeland, and in poetic and personal notes, he expressed the desire to return one day and even be buried there. However, after the Soviet government had been declining for more than ten years the requests of the writer to invite his parents to the USA and even to attend their funerals, he abandoned any idea of returning to Saint-Petersburg in any way and with any status. In the 1990s a new Russian government invited Joseph Brodsky, who was already worldwide famous and got the Nobel Prize, to visit his homeland, but he never accepted this proposition.

6I assume that taking these specific biographical details into consideration is important to understand the creator, his literary texts, and, of course, how an image of him, or more accurately, an identity myth about him was constructed. Moreover, it might be interesting to understand the essence of this myth and why a city based close to water became a key image in the storytelling about this writer.

7Both in prose and poetry, Joseph Brodsky used the symbol of water quite often. For example, in the essay Watermark which is dedicated to his frequent trips to Venice, water becomes a measure of time and an equivalent of God. Joseph Brodsky described it like this: “I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. […] If the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it” (Brodsky, Watermark 42).

8In his poems, a ‘water-city’ is often a place out of nowhere: shores and embankments are regularly mentioned, but they are unidentified locations. For example, in his English written poem “A Song” (Brodsky, Kjellberg 347–48), Joseph Brodsky describes a dream of his lyric hero to meet his lover again, “somewhere on an unknown shore.” In the poem “With a View of the Sea” (“С видом на море”, 1969), the author declares the desire of his lyric hero to go to a sea in a case of trouble. Joseph Brodsky explains that we can try to win some time from our life: if we go to the sea in late autumn, that means not in a season time, we can fool the time and add in some way supplementary days to our lives. In the poem, it is distinguished as an escape and compared with a break from a prison. Actually, something like that Joseph Brodsky might have experienced when he went every winter to the cold and free from visitors Venice. He described his usual nonseasonal trips in the essay Watermark.

9Sometimes Joseph Brodsky addresses to antiquity, and it even seems like he is giving a precise location, however, considering the whole body of his poetic texts, we can assume that the names of some destinations could mean much more than what they really represent. In the poem “Letters to a Roman Friend” (“Письма римскому другу”, 1972), (Brodsky, Kjellberg 58–60), Joseph Brodsky states:

If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire
let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore.

10This poem and especially these lines can remind us of the details about Joseph Brodsky’s biography. At the age of twenty-four, he was persecuted by the government for his strange poetry and anti-Soviet lifestyle. He was sentenced by court to do hard labor and to serve eighteen months on a farm in the village in the north of Western Russia. So, Joseph Brodsky had to live by the seashore alone and mostly read, translated, and created literary texts for more than a year. Lately he considered this lonely time as the happiest of his life. Considering this biographical context, we might rethink the meaning of the poetic phrase “If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire/ let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore.” Caesar’s Empire from the poem metaphorically replaces the Empire of the Soviet Union, and the lyrical hero who fated to live during this historical time represents the author himself.

11Another idea that Joseph Brodsky transmits in his poetry is that fate is a bizarre combination of geography and time. For example, in the poem “Strophes” (“Строфы”, 1978; Brodsky, Kjellberg 150–57), the lyric hero expresses this idea like that: “And geography blended/ with time equals destiny”.

12As we can see, in this particular poem and in many other Joseph Brodsky’s texts, an image of the place has an important role, however, it is quite blurred. The reader cannot really understand what city the author describes, although often an essential characteristic of a place is that it is close to water. ‘Water-city’ is a very strong image in Joseph Brodsky’s poetry, but its outlines are so vague that we might recognize in it both Saint-Petersburg and Venice. Even though all these places have their own recognizable style, they can be considered as “palimpsest-cities”² in Joseph Brodsky’s texts and in the representation of Joseph Brodsky’s life. Or to be more accurate, in the representational image and narrative that was created partly by the author himself and partly by the film industry.³

13The impossibility of returning home in a literal sense was replaced by the acquisition of a ‘water-city,’ an image that keeps elements of all author’s beloved lands. Filmmakers, who created an image of the famous writer in the movies about him, established a certain environment, a backdrop that replaced the space of his real homeland. The relation to water, or the visual image of ‘water-city,’ can help filmmakers build a context around the personality of the writer and at the same time build a connection between different places that were more or less Joseph Brodsky’s homes: Saint-Petersburg where his childhood and youth was, Venice, the city of his dreams, and New-York, a place where he worked and died.

14There are three types of movies about Joseph Brodsky:

1. Documentaries about him.
2. Documentaries about him and with him that look like interviews, reportages or even dialogues as in the movie The Walks with Joseph Brodsky (“Прогулки с Бродским”, 1993-2000) where he and his friend, a poet Yevgeny Rein, are walking around Venice, reading their poems aloud, and talking about language, Russia, past, and future.
3. There are also narrative or fictional films where filmmakers create a story about Joseph Brodsky’s life and, instead of the real Joseph Brodsky, we see an actor. Most of these biopics ,however, some of them are imaginary and are not connected with the reality of Joseph Brodsky’s life at all.

16One of these movies is Room and a Half by a Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky (Андрей Хржановский). In a fragile way its plot balances between fiction and reality. Room and a Half is the official English title, although the name is longer in the original version and could be translated as “Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland” (“Полторы комнаты, или Сентиментальное путешествие на родину”, 2009). The first part of the title is taken with a slight difference from the title of Joseph Brodsky’s English essay “In a Room and a Half” where the author autobiographically describes his childhood in a small flat, or to be more precise, in a room and a half of the other room. This description does not make any sense for an English speaker, and actually for a speaker of any language who is not aware of the lifestyle in the Soviet Union, and especially Leningrad. The point is that Joseph Brodsky and his family used to live in a communal apartment, or ‘komunalka’ in Russian slang language. They were actually lucky to get exactly “a room and a half” at the famous Muruzi house where, for instance, poets and representatives of the school of the Russian symbolism as Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius had also lived.

17The interesting fact is that the essay dedicated to a childhood, “In a Room and a Half”, was written deliberately in English and never had an author’s self-translation into his mother tongue. It was Joseph Brodsky’s strong position, because he did not want to write about his parents in a language in which they heard refusals to meet their son. Here is one of the places in the essay describing the language choice:

I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under “a foreign code of conscience,” I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. […] Besides, even if I had written all this in Russian, these words wouldn’t see the light of day under the Russian sky. Who would read them then? A handful of émigrés […] They know this story only too well. […] May English then house my dead. In Russian I am prepared to read, write verses or letters. For Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky, though, English offers a better semblance of afterlife… (Brodsky, Less than One 460–61).

18This quotation gives a clear understanding of what the family and the idea of returning to home used to be for the writer. This context might help us to comprehend why a movie such as “Room and a Half” appeared, and how an image of ‘water-city’ helps filmmakers to create Joseph Brodsky’s mythical visual portrait. The movie Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland describes the return of the writer to Saint-Petersburg that actually never happened. In the film, the main hero, Joseph Brodsky, is telling how he secretly planned to come back to Russia with Mikhail Baryshnikov, the famous Russian ballet dancer and his friend. They wanted to go incognito from Helsinki to Saint-Petersburg by boat. For some reason, Joseph Brodsky is travelling alone, but the spectator does not understand yet why.

19In the movie, there is a scene where the director shows visually how the memories of his hero are emerging from sea and then are covered by the waves. Joseph Brodsky is walking around the boat and watching his own childhood memories from the boat windows that turn out to be the windows to his past. Throughout the entire movie, the hero is recollecting touching moments from his previous life while continuing his way to Saint-Petersburg. Sentences and whole passages from various Joseph Brodsky’s works are used in the film. For instance, a quotation from the essay “Less Than One”: “Once upon a time there was a little boy. […] And there was a city. The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. […] Along the river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully elaborated façades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint of a giant mollusk called civilization. Which ceased to exist” (Brodsky, Less Than One 32). At the same time, on a screen, we see how a small boy is crossing the ice of the frozen river Neva by foot and thinking about the fish under the ice. He suddenly gets news that his family might have to move soon due to new laws against the Jews. The boy is imagining how their things such as, for example, a piano, will exist somewhere else from their home, and he sees it flying in the sky. Snow is falling, the spectator and his hero are again surrounded by the element of water. The boy is only half-understanding what is going on in the reality of adults, so his childhood imagination saves him from the traumatic moments.

20The spectator also sees some memories from the writer’s youth. Young Joseph Brodsky jokes: “If reincarnation exists, I would like to be born in Venice. Anyone. Even a cat.” That again reminds us about the Saint-Petersburg–Venice connection in the author’s fate. At the end of the movie, Joseph Brodsky and his parents are unsuccessfully trying to see each other. His mother is in hospital: the doctor tells her to relax and imagine that she is on a seashore. Finally, the boat of Joseph Brodsky reaches the destination: he is stepping out on a shore and finding himself in a modern tourist city of our days. This strong image built on a paradox is tragicomic and provokes an awkward feeling. On the one hand, it looks so impossible for the hero to be there, however, he could come back to Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg. Joseph Brodsky enters home, the flat looks quite empty, but his parents are there. It seems like he is becoming a child again. They are talking about school, and then about the Nobel prize. Suddenly Joseph Brodsky asks his parents how they died. In their turn, they ask him about his own death. The hero is surprised: he didn’t realize that all this trip, all this travelling he did while being a ghost. Only death allowed him to meet his parents again.

21To conclude, the element of water plays a major role in the movie Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland. Water appears in various forms and becomes an essential accompanying motive: from the lonely travelling by boat to home to the embankment on which the hero descends. The image of the frozen Neva that the small hero is crossing by foot remains one of the most memorable; the moment when Joseph Brodsky’s mother is trying to rest in hospital by imagining herself on a seashore is one of the most touching… As we could see, water-cities are much more than decorations. They were significant both for the literary texts and life of the writer: his biographical and artistic narrative, the system of its images, his philosophy, all of these relate to water. In a way, Joseph Brodsky did not even let filmmakers choose another “set” or a connecting thread.

22As Roland Barthes showed in his article “Paris Not Flooded” (“Paris n’a pas été inondé”), dramatic circumstances can sometimes consolidate rather than separate. The water changed the landscape for the Parisians, they felt “Festivity far more than […] catastrophe,” (Barthes 31); “…people had the pleasure of seeing shapes modified but still ‘natural,’ their minds could remain fixed on the effect without regressing in anguish toward the obscurity of causes” (Barthes 31). In Brodsky’s poetry, water also has no monosemantic connotations: it is associated with such topics as love, emigration, death and unites ambivalent and often conflicting images.