Nobel%20Prize-winning%20dissident%20poet%20Joseph%20Brodsky%5C%27s%20flat%20opens%20as%20museum%20in%20Russia

Russia on Friday opened the doors of a new museum dedicated to Nobel Prize-winning dissident poet Joseph Brodsky in the communal flat where he spent his youth. The poet, who was defamed by Soviet authorities and ultimately emigrated to the West, spent his teens and 20s in the flat shared by several families in the centre of Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second city, which was then called Leningrad. ‘Joseph has left a moving essay called ‘A room-and-a-half’ about this flat where he lived with his parents between 1955 and 1972,’ said Nina Popova, one of the museum’s organisers, who also runs a museum dedicated to poet Anna Akhmatova. The new museum, which will open to the public on Sunday, occupies most of the rooms in the former communal flat, a form of shared housing that was ubiquitous in the city’s centre in the Soviet era. Four families shared a single kitchen and bathroom in the apartment. The Brodsky family occupied two rooms, though

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