Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
educating himself through his love of reading.
Already a prominent poet in his late teens, he
befriended Anna
AKHMATOVA
and became recog-
nized as one of the leaders of a revitalized group
of Leningrad poets. He supported himself by
working at a variety of odd jobs, which earned
him an arrest in 1964 on a charge of “para-
sitism,” Soviet legal jargon for someone who
lacked officially approved gainful employment.
Although Brodsky was a recognized poet, he
was not a member of the official Soviet Writers'
Union. Sentenced to five years of hard labor in
the Far North, he was released after 18 months
following protests from Soviet and Western writ-
ers. In 1972 he was stripped of his Soviet citi-
zenship and eventually settled in New York City,
where he began a second career as a prominent
poet, publishing in both English and Russian.
For the next two decades, he taught literature at
several universities, publishing frequently and
receiving important awards for his work. In
1977 he was granted U.S. citizenship, and in
1981 he was awarded one of the coveted Mac-
Arthur Foundation “genius” awards. In 1987,
he became the second-youngest recipient of the
Nobel Prize for literature. In 1991-92 he held
the position of poet laureate of the United
States. Among his more prominent poetry vol-
umes are
Selected Poems
(1973),
A Part of Speech
(1980),
History of the Twentieth-Century
(1986),
and
To Urania
(1988). An autobiographical col-
lection of essays,
Less Than One
(1986), received
a National Book Critics Circle Award, while
another,
On Grief and Reason,
was published in
1995. Despite his international prominence and
Nobel Prize, Brodsky's work began to be pub-
lished in his homeland only in the late 1980s,
during
GORBACHEV
's period of glasnost (open-
ness) and then more fully in the 1990s after the
Soviet Union dissolved.
man
has become one of the iconic symbols of the
city of St. Petersburg. The statue was commis-
sioned by
CATHERINE II
the Great, who wanted to
make an explicit connection between her reign
and Peter's. After consultations with her philo-
sophe correspondents, Diderot and Voltaire, she
chose the French sculptor Etienne Falconet to
build the statue. In 1782 a towering sculpture
was unveiled showing Peter in control of an
unpredictable mount representing Russia, while
his free hand points forward. On the granite base
of the sculpture are two inscriptions, one in Rus-
sian and one in Latin, that state simply “To Peter
I from Catherine II.” While impressive, the sculp-
ture gained much in symbolism from the poem
“The Bronze Horseman,” written by Pushkin in
1833. In the poem, the protagonist loses his
fiancée and his sanity in the great flood that rav-
aged St. Petersburg in 1824. In his mind he is
chased through the empty streets of the city by
the imposing sculpture of Peter the Great. To
Pushkin, the sculpture symbolized the oppres-
sive autocratic state as well as the destructive
potential of St. Petersburg, a city that appears as
unnatural and bureaucratic in many works of
19th-century Russian literature. The statue sits
on the former Senate Square, which in another
twist of symbolism was the site of the abortive
DECEMBRIST
uprising of 1825 and was renamed
Decembrists' Square one century later.
Budennyi, Semyon Mikhailovich
(1889-1973)
field marshal
Budennyi was a legendary Soviet military hero
of the civil war, known for his cavalry skills and
his distinctive handlebar mustache. He was born
in the southern province of Rostov, joined the
czarist army in 1903, and saw action during the
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
of 1904-5. During World
War I he served with distinction as a noncom-
missioned cavalry officer and was decorated four
times. He joined the
BOLSHEVIKS
in 1918 and
during the civil war made a brilliant career,
becoming the commander of the First Cavalry
Bronze Horseman
(Myodnyi Vsadnik)
A bronze equestrian statue of
PETER I
the Great
that assumed great symbolism as a result of a
poem by Alexander
PUSHKIN
, the
Bronze Horse-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search