Joseph Brodsky is a legend of the XX century. Eight years of education and the career of a university professor, exile to the North and the Nobel Prize in Literature, love for his native Leningrad and emigration, trial for parasitism and the discovery of new opportunities for his native language in a foreign land – all these are milestones in the life of the great poet.Truly, a genius is first reduced to the average, made an outcast, and then his legacy is studied."... All attempts to resurrect the past are like trying to comprehend the meaning of life," Brodsky believed. This book is a story by Joseph Brodsky's cousin, Mikhail Kelmovich, an attempt to trace the poet's fate through his family, which had an amazing atmosphere of unity and mutual assistance. Everything was common and for everyone, parents, close relatives - family hearth, family memory, native "one and a half rooms" in Leningrad.These memories will help the reader to enter into a dialogue with the poet through touching his family and roots.