Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad into a Jewish family. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky, was a military photojournalist who returned from the war in 1948 and started working in the photo laboratory of the Naval Museum. In 1950, he was demobilized and subsequently worked as a photographer and journalist for several Leningrad newspapers. His mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905–1983), worked as an accountant. His maternal aunt was Dora Moiseevna Volpert, an actress at the Bolshoi Drama Theater and the Komissarzhevskaya Theater.

Joseph’s early childhood coincided with the war years, the blockade, post-war poverty, and was spent without his father. In 1942, after the blockade winter, Maria Moiseevna took Joseph to evacuation in Cherepovets; they returned to Leningrad in 1944. In 1947, Joseph started school No. 203 on Kirochnaya Street, 8. In 1950, he transferred to school No. 196 on Mokhovaya Street; in 1953, he entered the 7th grade at school No. 181 in Solyany Lane and repeated the year the following year. He applied to a naval school but was not accepted. He then transferred to school No. 276 on Obvodny Canal, house No. 154, where he continued his studies in the 7th grade.

In 1955, the family received “one and a half rooms” in the Muruzis House.

Brodsky’s aesthetic views were shaped in Leningrad during the 1940s and 1950s. Neoclassical architecture, heavily damaged during bombings, the endless perspectives of Leningrad’s outskirts, water, and the multiplicity of reflections — motifs connected with these childhood and youth impressions are consistently present in his work.

In 1955, just shy of sixteen, having finished seven grades and starting the eighth, Brodsky dropped out of school and became an apprentice milling machine operator at the Arsenal factory. This decision was related both to problems at school and Brodsky’s desire to financially support his family. He unsuccessfully tried to enter a submarine school. At 16, he became passionate about becoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant prosector in the morgue of a regional hospital, dissecting corpses, but ultimately gave up on a medical career. Additionally, for five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room and as a sailor at a lighthouse.

From 1957, he worked as a laborer in geological expeditions of NIIGA: in 1957 and 1958 on the White Sea, in 1959 and 1961 in Eastern Siberia and Northern Yakutia, on the Anabar Shield. In the summer of 1961, in the Yakut village of Nelkan, during a period of forced idleness (there were no reindeer for the next stage of the expedition), he suffered a nervous breakdown and was allowed to return to Leningrad.

At the same time, he read a lot but chaotically — primarily poetry, philosophical and religious literature, and began studying English and Polish.

In 1959, he met Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Nayman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava, and Sergey Dovlatov.

During a trip to Samarkand in December 1960, Brodsky and his friend, former pilot Oleg Shakhmatov, considered a plan to hijack a plane to flee abroad. However, they did not dare to carry it out. Later, Shakhmatov was arrested for illegal possession of weapons and informed the KGB about this plan, as well as about another friend, Alexander Umansky, and his “anti-Soviet” manuscript that Shakhmatov and Brodsky tried to hand over to a randomly met American. On January 29, 1961, Brodsky was detained by the KGB but was released two days later.

In August 1961, in Komarovo, Yevgeny Rein introduced Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova. In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Ya. Mandelstam, and in 1963, at Akhmatova’s, he met Lidia Chukovskaya. After Akhmatova’s death in 1966, thanks to Bobyshev, four young poets, including Brodsky, were often referred to in memoir literature as “Akhmatova’s orphans.”

Joseph Brodsky lived in a communal apartment on Liteyny Prospect until 1972, when he left the USSR forever. 

Joseph himself described his apartment in the essay “One and a Half Rooms”: “My half was connected to their room by two large arches, almost reaching the ceiling, which I constantly tried to fill with various combinations of bookshelves and suitcases to separate myself from my parents, to gain some degree of privacy. One can only speak of some degree, since the height and width of those two arches plus the Saracen outlines of their upper edges excluded any thoughts of complete success. Except, of course, the possibility of bricking them up or boarding them over, which was illegal, as it would have amounted to owning two rooms instead of one and a half, which we were entitled to by order. Besides fairly frequent inspections by our house manager, neighbors, no matter how friendly our relations with them were, would report us immediately. A compromise had to be invented, and that is what I focused on starting at fifteen. I tried all sorts of mind-boggling contraptions and at one point even considered building a four-meter-high aquarium with a door in the middle that would connect my half with their room. Needless to say, such an architectural feat was beyond me. So the solution was to increase the number of bookshelves on my side, add and thicken drapery folds on my parents’ side. Needless to say, they disliked both the solution and the very premise of the matter. The number of friends and girlfriends, however, did not grow as fast as the number of books; moreover, the latter remained with me. We had two wardrobes with full-length mirrors on the doors, unremarkable except for their height, which solved half the problem. On their sides and above them, I made shelves, leaving a narrow passage through which my parents could squeeze into my half and back. My father disliked the construction especially because at the far end of my half he had fenced off a dark corner where he developed and printed photographs, which brought in a significant part of our livelihood. There was a door at that end of my half. When my father was not working in the dark corner, I would enter and exit through it, saying to my parents, ‘So as not to disturb you,’ but in reality to avoid their observation and the need to introduce my guests to them and vice versa. To obscure the purpose of these visits, I kept an electric record player, and gradually my parents developed a hatred for J.S. Bach. Later, when both the number of books and the need for privacy dramatically increased, I further partitioned my half by rearranging those two wardrobes so that they separated my bed and desk from the dark corner. Between them, I squeezed in a third wardrobe, which was idle in the corridor. I tore off its back wall, leaving the door intact. As a result, a guest had to enter my Lebensraum bypassing two doors and one curtain. The first door led to the corridor; then you found yourself in my father’s corner and pushed aside the curtain; then you had to open the door of the former wardrobe. I piled all our suitcases on the wardrobes. There were many; yet they did not reach the ceiling. The overall result resembled a barricade; behind it, however, Gavroche felt safe, and a certain Marina could reveal not only her bust.”

The idea of creating a museum here came from the poet’s friends Mikhail Milchik and Yakov Gordin in 1999, but it took a long time to realize the plan: “One and a Half Rooms” only opened in 2020. The museum consists of two parts — the memorial communal apartment, in one of the rooms of which the Brodskys lived, and an exhibition space. Moving through the museum, the visitor first immerses themselves in Brodsky’s era, then discovers the poet’s world, learning about his life before and after emigration.

Sources: 

https://kudago.com/spb/place/muzej-poltoryi-komnatyi/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бродский,_Иосиф_Александрович

https://brodskiy.su/biografiya/

https://ru.diez.md/2020/12/28/foto-poltory-komnaty-v-dome-muruzi-na-liteynom-prospekte-otkryli-muzey-iosifa-brodskogo/