Less Than One

"Brodsky lived through the first part of the siege as a baby, in a one-room flat on the Liteiny, right in the centre of town. He brilliantly describes the atmosphere of the postwar city: the bombed-out buildings – ‘haggard and hollow-eyed’ – and the feeling of emptiness, of crowding ghosts. He’s good, as well, on how pinched and harsh life continued to be well after the war. One of his earliest memories is of being given a white bread roll – not a common black one – for the first time. It was such an event that he ate it standing on a table, surrounded by admiring adults. Yes, he was expelled in 1972, and went to the States. Earlier he had been arrested and exiled to a collective farm near Archangel. It wasn’t especially harsh and he was only there for eighteen months. His mentor Anna Akhmatova joked that he’d arranged it on purpose, so as to boost his CV."