Treatment in a psychiatric hospital

According to the court decision dated February 18, 1964, Joseph Brodsky was taken to City Psychiatric Hospital No. 2 on Pryazhka. Forced forensic psychiatric examination was a common method used by the Soviet authorities to suppress those they deemed undesirable. Many figures from science and culture protested against the persecution of the young poet; they composed a letter to the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU, Tolstikov, in defense of Joseph Brodsky.

"February 19-20, 1964

Leningrad. Smolny. Regional Committee. To Comrade Tolstikov

Dear Vasily Sergeyevich!

We are writing to you deeply concerned that a young talented Leningrad poet is being subjected to unjust and illegal persecution. We are people of various professions who know and highly value Brodsky’s work, particularly his published poetic translations of Spanish and Polish authors. We know that he is considered a very gifted poet by the luminaries of our literature: Chukovsky, Marshak, Akhmatova. Therefore, we were especially shocked to learn that on February 18, at the Dzerzhinsky District Court, Brodsky was charged with parasitism, after which he was forcibly sent under escort to a psychiatric hospital. He is twenty-three years old, a nervously fragile young man, and staying in a psychiatric hospital threatens him with irreparable harm. The persecution of Brodsky is, in our memory, the first recurrence in many years of the notorious methods of arbitrariness. It is bitter to realize that this is happening in your glorious city. We earnestly ask for your decisive intervention. Delay is extremely dangerous.

Members of the Writers' Union: Lidia Chukovskaya, Raisa Orlova, Lev Kopelev, Alexander Ivich, Candidate of Philological Sciences Vyacheslav Ivanov, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Ivan Rozansky, Candidate of Geological Sciences Natalia Kind, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Mikhail Polivanov."

This petition was granted to a greater extent than expected. Instead of being released from custody and undergoing outpatient examination, as the defense requested, Brodsky was locked up for three weeks “on Pryazhka,” that is, in Psychiatric Hospital No. 2 on the embankment of the Pryazhka River, spending the first three days in a ward for the violent. There, they immediately began to “treat” him. In 1987, when asked which moment in his Soviet life was the hardest, Brodsky unhesitatingly named the torment he endured on Pryazhka. “They gave me terrible tranquilizer injections. Deep at night, they woke me, plunged me into an ice bath, wrapped me in a wet sheet, and placed me next to a radiator. The heat from the radiator dried the sheet, which then stuck to my body,” the poet recalled as “the worst time in my life.”

The doctors identified “psychopathic traits” in Brodsky but declared him sane and capable of work. The poet himself said that what drove him mad in the hospital was the “distortion of proportions”: “either the windows were slightly smaller than usual, or the ceilings too low, or the beds too large.” It is unclear why Brodsky was subjected to medieval torture. After all, the punitive authorities did not seek any information from him and, apparently, did not require repentance or admission of his errors (except for the episode with Investigator Sh., mentioned above in the first chapter, but that may have been on his own initiative). Only one of two possibilities remains — either they truly considered him mentally ill and wanted to cure him by their methods to make him fit for trial and condemnation, or there was sadism on the part of the medical staff, which the world later learned about from dissidents subjected to Soviet psychiatric terror. In Leningrad, there were no doctors favorably disposed toward Brodsky, and the psychiatrists at Pryazhka gave a conclusion that was probably objective but, under the circumstances, fatal: “...displays psychopathic character traits but does not suffer from a mental illness and, according to his neuro-psychic health condition, is capable of work.”

Sources:

https://biography.wikireading.ru/62823

https://www.fontanka.ru/2020/09/04/69454967/

https://vpitergo.ru/psihiatricheskie-bolnitsy-peterburga-i-ih-izvestnye-patsienty/