Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky, born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky on 24 May 1940 in Leningrad, was a Russian and American poet and essayist whose life crossed the hard borders of Soviet power, exile, and literary fame. He came from a Russian Jewish family, with a line that reached back to the rabbinic family Schorr. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy, and his mother, Maria Volpert Brodskaya, was a professional interpreter whose work often helped support the family. They lived in poverty in communal apartments, and Brodsky later said he felt like a dissident from an early age.

His childhood was marked by the Siege of Leningrad, where he and his parents nearly died of starvation and an aunt died of hunger. The siege left him with lasting health problems. School did not hold him for long. Known as unruly, he left at fifteen, failed to enter the School of Submariners, and worked as a milling machine operator. He later worked in a prison morgue, in hospitals, in a ship’s boiler room, and on geological expeditions. At the same time, he educated himself with force and appetite, learning Polish to translate poets such as Czesław Miłosz and English to translate John Donne. Classical philosophy, religion, mythology, and English and American poetry all fed his mind.

Brodsky began writing his own poems and literary translations in 1955. He circulated work in secret, and some appeared in the underground journal Sintaksis. By 1958, poems such as “The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad” and “Pilgrims” had made him known in literary circles. He later recalled that in 1959, in Yakutsk, he found a book of poems by Evgeny Baratynsky and suddenly understood, or at least became excited about, what he had to do in life. In 1960 he met Anna Akhmatova, one of the leading poets of the silver age, who encouraged him and became his mentor.

The Soviet authorities soon turned on him. In 1963, a Leningrad newspaper denounced his poetry as “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” His papers were seized, he was interrogated, twice placed in a mental institution, and arrested. In 1964 he was tried for social parasitism, with officials treating his odd jobs and his vocation as a poet as a failure to serve society. When the judge asked who had enrolled him in the ranks of poets, Brodsky answered, “No one,” then asked, “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” He was sentenced to five years of hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region.

In 1972, Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, or “strongly advised” to emigrate, and settled in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught at Mount Holyoke College and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. In 1987 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” In 1991 he was appointed United States Poet Laureate.

Brodsky died on 28 January 1996, having become one of the major Russian poets of the modern period and a figure claimed by both Russian and American letters. Critics and scholars have written about his place among Christian poets of the 20th century, while noting the Jewishness he carried as a religious fact. His work was shaped by hunger, exclusion, self-education, discipline, and exile. That pressure gave his sentences their force. His words still speak because they were earned in public danger and private thought, and because they defend the human right to be called a poet by no one’s permission.