about the museum
The museum consists of two main parts: a memorial apartment, where the Brodsky family lived from 1955 to 1972, and an exhibition space next to it. The second part of the museum was designed by the Moscow-based architect and artist, Alexander Brodsky, not a relative, but a namesake of the poet.
Maxim Levchenko, the director of "A Room and a Half" the Joseph Brodsky Museum:
"Alexander's special talent lies in his ability to see, fix, and preserve the memory of a place in its nostalgic state of dilapidation. He knows how to extract genuine beauty from objects without having to add anything. The museum turned out to be authentic and real because of this."
In this "new" part of the museum, only original items remain: stoves, mouldings, bricks, and shingles, previously hidden behind plastered walls, real doors from the late 19th century. This space has turned out to be quite cozy, allowing visitors to feel at home. Here, they can enjoy a cup of coffee, borrow a book from the library, and read it while sitting in an armchair next to a fireplace.
This section tells the story of the poet's era, the tastes and attitudes of the 1960s generation, and how they relate to Brodsky's poetry. Following the logic of the organization of the museum's layout, visitors move along a route from general to specific, from the era to the poet, eventually arriving at the memorial section, the Room and a Half itself.
The core concept of "A Room and a Half" is to preserve its authentic emptiness.
“The rest—their flesh, their clothes, the telephone, the key, our possessions, the furniture—is gone, and never to be found, as if our room and a half had been hit by a bomb. Not by a neutron bomb, which at least leaves the furniture intact, but by a time bomb, which splinters even one’s memory. The building still stands, but the place is wiped out clean, and new tenants, no, troops, move in to occupy it: that’s what a time bomb is all about. For this is a time war.”Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, 1985
The decoration of the Room and a Half has been partially lost. Some furniture has been lost, and new wallpaper has been pasted over the old wallpaper from Brodsky's time. New parquet has been laid over the floor, which was previously forbidden to walk on in socks, as it was considered "a bad omen" (according to Brodsky's mother) — a sign of death in the house. During the restoration process, all these later additions were carefully removed to reveal the original state of the room. This resulted in an emotional emptiness that is much stronger than a recreated atmosphere from a communal apartment, which is similar to the feeling of ruins that tell a story about time. This theme is important in Joseph Brodsky's poetry and prose.
The history of the museum
The idea to create the Joseph Brodsky Museum at the memorial Room and a Half appeared in 1999. At that time, Brodsky's friends Mikhail Isaevich Milchik and Yakov Arkadyevich Gordin founded the Joseph Brodsky Museum Foundation and started working on buying out the rooms in the communal apartment of the Muruzi house where the poet's family had lived.
During the first five years of operation, the Joseph Brodsky Museum Foundation managed to purchase four of the five rooms in the apartment (the owner of the last one refused to sell the room where he had lived since birth). At this point, it seemed that the work on creating the museum had come to a standstill.
In 2015, on the anniversary of Joseph Brodsky's birth, the museum was able to open its doors for one day. Along with the Museum Foundation, our friends from the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House participated in the celebration, whose collections contain the personal belongings of the poet.
Since 2017, a Russian entrepreneur, Maxim Levchenko, has joined the project. Initially, an information portal brodsky.online was created, providing information about the life and works of Joseph Brodsky, and in 2018, the apartment next to the museum was purchased. This unexpected development made it possible to separate the residential and non-residential parts of the communal apartment, significantly expanding the museum's area. In 2020, after extensive work on restoring and preserving the memorial Room and a Half the unification of two apartments, and renovating the "new" space, "A Room and a Half" the Joseph Brodsky Museum opened its doors.
At present, we have several objectives to accomplish. The museum is in contact with associates of the poet and is engaged in fund-raising efforts. Research and exhibition activities are ongoing, with the museum organizing exhibitions dedicated to Joseph Brodsky's life and work, as well as hosting lectures, conferences, and meetings.
All of this is just beginning!
Yours faithfully, The team of "A Room and a Half" the Joseph Brodsky Museum
Our team
