Joseph Brodsky celebrated his last anniversary in New York: how it was

On the 80th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Brodsky, Radio Liberty published a video made by journalist and photographer Natasha Sharymova on May 24, 1990 at Brodsky's apartment on Moreton Street in New York. 30 years ago, friends of the poet gathered to celebrate his 50th birthday. This was the last anniversary of the great poet. He did not live up to 60. Joseph Brodsky died in 1996 at the age of 55.

Further - a story on behalf of Natasha Sharymova.

30 years ago I came to 44 Moreton Street, congratulated Joseph, whom I had known since St. Petersburg, and gave him photographs. Then Yuz Aleshkovsky came up to me and said angrily: "Why are you without a camera?" I began to make excuses: a private party, they say. Yuz took me by the elbow and led me to Brodsky.

- Why not? Purred Brodsky.

Who do we see at the party? Firstly, Susan Sontag is the ruler of doom. Unfortunately, her friend Ann Leibovitz didn’t get on the video: she was sitting in the kindergarten, like Lev Losev and the physicist Mikhail Gurvich, and there it was dark and dark. Secondly, prominent poets: Mark Strand and Derek Walcott, who solemnly congratulated Joseph.

Roger Straus from Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing house had a lot of fun, tried to clink glasses with everyone in Russian, and plastic glasses ...

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Among ours were Yuri Afanasyev, Yuz and Irina Aleshkovsky, Alik and Anna Batchan, Vika and Misha Belomlinsky, Inna Bliznetsova and her husband Roman, Masha Vorobyova, Anna Galberstadt, Mikhail Gurvich, Sergei and Lena Dovlatovy, Igor and Marina Efretsky, Ilya Za Roman and Larisa Kaplan, Lev and Nina Losev, Norik (bartender from “Samovar”), Yuri Orlov, Lena and Iosif Ostashevsky with children Lyuba and Yevgeny, Alina Panova, Lev Polyakov, Alik Rabinovich, Sasha Sumerkin, Marina Tyomkina with her husband Michel Gerard , Elena Chernyshova, Marina Schweitzer, Lyudmila Stern.

As Ilya Zaretsky, who organized this anniversary together with Alina Panova, told me, “Joseph gave us two checkbooks and said:“ Full speed ahead! ”. There is no control either in terms of plans or money ... "

The food was brought from the "Russian Samovar". The cake must have been ordered from a French pastry shop on Bleecker Street. The champagne and vodka were cold.

The evening was a success. The VHS camera film has been preserved. Suddenly in my virtual life appeared a video literator and psycho-geographer Dmitry Stepanov.

We discussed the animation of my visual works, but Brodsky intervened in our business ... Media experiments faded into the background, and amateur photography of Joseph’s birthday began to turn into an artistic statement.

It seems to me that it turned out to be a “mirage in a cube”. One author is Natasha Sharymova 1990, the other is Natasha Sharymova 2020, and the third is the drifting gaze of Dmitry Stepanov, born in 1990.

The video was prepared and edited by Dmitry Stepanov. A few words from him

The filmmaker Guy Debord, who either invented or stole the term "psychogeography" from his comrades, has an essay film "On the passage of several people through a rather short moment in time."
My work on the Brodsky 50 project has become a kind of psycho-geographical drift into the past. Natasha Sharymova and I seemed to have gone through a rather brief moment of time ourselves - a good deal, 30 years!

The main experience from work is the feeling of almost tactile contact (in the era of self-isolation and the emerging new world order of social distance) with the main players in the intellectual field of the second half of the XNUMXth century.

During the day I edited the faces of the guests, and at night, in my sleep, I made my way through their crowd myself - from our time to the end of a beautiful era. The departed are gone. And last year I saw Brodsky's living friends, Marina Temkina and Michel Gerard, at the Arsenal Center for Contemporary Art (Nizhny Novgorod), where they came to give lectures. Of course, by a completely random coincidence.

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I am extremely pleased to meet new people. For example, with Alina Panova, who made costumes for Hollywood films of amazing beauty. I studied politics with Anne Shelberg. Derek Walcott amazed me with his laugh. Susan Sontag, which I had only read before, spoke to me.

In addition to time travel, there were also travels to the utopian space “44 Moreton Street”. Here is a brick wall, against which a lot of famous photographs with Joseph Brodsky were taken. Here is a black rotary telephone: was it tapped? By whom? Here is a room empty due to the move, which has become an impromptu studio for Natasha's filming.

These are all add-ons. And the basis is communicative situations that grow around the politics of memory, the preservation of cultural heritage and the eternal confrontation of macro- and microhistories.