Neighbor almost crushed hope of Brodsky museum
Russian poet lived in communal building that current resident refused to abandon
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Until he fled the Soviet Union in 1972, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky lived in a drab communal apartment in St. Petersburg, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with three other families.
Whatever the “despicable aspects of this mode of existence,” as Brodsky described it, his home life served his art well, inspiring some of his most intense poetry and other writings. In a well-known 1985 essay, he said communal living “has perhaps its redeeming side” because it “bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions about human nature.”
Communal living may have been good for his poetry. But it was not so good when the attempts to turn his home into a museum started.
Russia loves to lionize its literary giants, but even the mighty Russian state could not open a museum in a shared apartment with other residents still ensconced in it.
After years of effort, though, a nonprofit foundation managed to get the other tenants out. All except one.
The last holdout was Nina Fyodorova, 81, who had lived in her room her whole life. She was relentless in refusing to leave at any price, saying: “You cannot uproot an old tree!”
But a rare grassroots project in a country where the government aims to control all spheres of public life succeeded where the Kremlin could not: The privately backed Joseph Brodsky Museum opened in the poet’s old living quarters in December.
“The state usually tries to capture the memory about such important figures as Brodsky,” said Yulia Senina, a researcher at the museum, which has become a top attraction in St. Petersburg, Russia’s cultural capital. “We are an exception.”
Brodsky died in the New York City borough of Brooklyn in 1996 at 55, but many lifelong friends in his native city survived him, and, against the odds, they dreamed of opening a museum in a space so influential to his art.
Two of those friends, Mikhail Milchik and Yakov Gordin, solicited help from Russian corporations and started buying rooms in the communal apartment shortly after Brodsky’s death.
By a decade ago, Milchik’s foundation had all the rooms in the shared apartment but Fyodorova’s. It couldn’t open the museum without acquiring it, and that final piece of the puzzle proved the hardest to fit.
Even though her room hadn’t been Brodsky’s, she was a partowner of the communal spaces the museum needed to operate. And Fyodorova, understandably, was not eager to have crowds of visitors from all over the world stomping through her kitchen as she cooked dinner or arguing about rhyme by her bath as she washed her hair.
Whenever anyone did try to sneak a peak, Fyodorova would roar: “Visitors are not allowed!”
Brodsky’s friends, some local government authorities and private benefactors made numerous attempts to cajole Fyodorova to sell, but she remained adamantly in place.
Stuck in this communal quandary, Milchik and Gordin experimented with different solutions. They put up webcams in Brodsky’s room to let people experience the space online. That wasn’t fulfilling enough.
In 2015, they persuaded Fyodorova to let them open Brodsky’s room for a day to celebrate what would have been his 75th birthday. The line to get in stretched around the block.
The situation remained stuck until 2017, when Maksim Levchenko, a local real estate tycoon, got involved. First, he tried to charm Fyodorova. He even took out her garbage.
Fyodorova was steadfast, but she suggested another solution. An adjacent apartment went up for sale, she said, and it would be possible to connect the two and thus let people enter Brodsky’s space without intruding on Fyodorova’s privacy.
Levchenko bought it for $500,000, and the musuem was finally possible.