Russia has opened its first museum to dissident poet Joseph Brodsky in the remote house where he lived after being sent into internal exile by the Soviet authorities.
The museum -- in the abandoned former farming village of Norinskaya, around 600 kilometres north of Moscow -- commemorates the Nobel-prize winning poet, whose brooding verses clashed with the Soviet ideology and led ultimately to his emigration to the West.
The young poet, then just 23, was sent into exile in 1964 to work at a collective farm after a court convicted him of "parasitism" in an infamous trial that became a symbol of Soviet oppression of the arts.
Brodsky -- who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 -- later reflected that the 18 months he spent there were among the best periods of his life as he wrote prolifically from the rustic abode that he rented from a local family, at a time when electricity was not yet available.
The house had fallen into disrepair as the village emptied, and it took over a decade to realise the dream of turning into a memorial to the poet, said local newspaper editor Lyubov Cheplavina, who initiated its creation.
"Our youth gets really fascinated with Brodsky because of his independent spirit," Cheplavina told AFP. "People remember him."
The traditional century-old log house had to be taken apart and put back together in a project that cost about 4.5 million rubles (USD84,000). Brodsky's friends flew in from as far as Brussels to help reconstruct his room, she said.
"The part where he lived fell down because of rot" she told AFP.
The public museum is free and the village now has one resident -- its security guard, she said, hoping that summer will bring more activity and interest from vacationers in the picturesque region.
Brodsky left the village after a campaign in his defence spearheaded by greats like Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre forced Soviet authorities to end his four-year sentence early.
The poet became widely known after smuggled manuscripts were published in the West, but at home his work was distributed illegally via underground publications, while he was persecuted in defamation campaigns and even put into mental asylums.
He finally left Russia in 1972 under pressure from the KGB to live in the United States.
