Abstract

This article traces the development of Joseph Brodsky’s literary and social stance, which took shape in the mid-1960s and was articulated in such manifesto-like texts as the poems “The People” (1964) and “To a Female Poet” (1965), as well as in a statement to the Secretariat of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union of the RSFSR (1968). The ‘third’ path proclaimed by Brodsky, which stood in opposition to both official servility and non-conformist rebellion against the state, led to clashes not only with the official institutions of Soviet literature but also with the currents opposed to them. An analysis of some of Brodsky’s texts from the second half of the 1960s (“A Message to the Poems”, a statement from 1968), together with facts from his literary biography introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time, allows us to reconstruct the immediate literary and social contexts of his work at that time and their significance in shaping Brodsky’s unique socio-cultural position within the Soviet literary field of the late 1960s.