Anathema to the Soviet government, poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was hounded by the authorities for “parasitism,” sentenced to a stint in a remote northern village, and finally forced to leave the country in 1972. Once in the U.S., conversely, he was hounded by the adoring press, sentenced to a teaching stint in Ann Arbor, and finally forced to leave the country to pick up his Nobel Prize in 1987. Now that he’s dead, Russia, as usual, has realized its loss and wants a piece of J-Bro, too. And, soon enough, it should be getting one.

If all goes according to the plan, it will take the form of a bronze monument to be erected in a square across from the American Embassy in Moscow. You can read into the placement what you will (and rightfully so), but the peculiar placement was chosen only after the original idea to put the project in St. Petersburg, the poet’s birthplace, fell through. (St. Petersburg’s one existing monument to Brodsky is, if anything, a kind of insult: it’s a bronze suitcase – the Russian synecdoche for emigration – with his name on it).

The new monument would be a freestanding bas-relief of Brodsky against a backdrop of faceless silhouettes; the idea being that Brodsky is a distinguished somebody among the indistinguishable shadows of the many. Viewers will be able to walk between the sculpted figures in the square, to give the composition a sense of immediacy.

Currently, the biggest problem facing the project’s architect Sergey Skuratov and sculptor Gregory Frangulyan is a lack of funds. Though Moscow's chief architect Alexander Kuzmin granted them the use of the square, the capital’s wallet remains otherwise closed. Frangulyan already paid out of pocket to cast the composition’s figures in bronze. At this point, the artwork is largely finished. Only the granite foundation and actual set-up remain to be financed. Still, that’s a pretty big “only” we’re talking about, considering the crippling financial crisis. The project may yet turn out what Brodsky himself termed, in his “Elegy,” a “monument cast in molten / 
lengthy bad dreams.”

Photos by Alexei Smirnov, courtesy of snob.ru; Photo of Brodsky courtesy of blogs.warwick.ac.uk