Joseph Brodsky

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Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Template:Lang-ru) was a poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992).

In the Soviet Union

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Young Joseph Brodsky

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Brodsky, late 1960s

Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad, the son of a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy. In the early childhood he survived the Siege of Leningrad. When he was fifteen, Brodsky left school and tried to enter the School of Submariners (школа подводников) without success. He went on to work as a milling machine operator (фрезеровщик) at a plant. Later, having in mind to become a physician, he worked at a morgue at the Kresty prison. Subsequently, he changed a variety of jobs at a hospital, a ship boiler room, and geological expeditions.

At the same time, Brodsky engaged in a program of self-education. He learned English and Polish, acquired deep interest in classical philosophy, religion, mythology, English and American poetry. Later in life he admitted that he picked up books from anywhere he could find them, including even garbage dumps.

Brodsky began writing his own poetry and produce literary translations around 1957. His writings were apolitical. The young Brodsky was encouraged and influenced by the poet Anna Akhmatova who called some of his verses "enchanting." He had no degree in the liberal arts.

In 1963 he was arrested and in 1964 charged with parasitism ("тунеядство") by the Soviet authorities. A famous excerpt from the transcript of his trial made by journalist Frida Vigdorova and smuggled to the West:

Judge: And what is your profession in general?

Brodsky: Poet translator.

Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?

Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?

Judge: Did you study this?

Brodsky: This?

Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?

Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.

Judge: How then?

Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.^[1]

For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years of internal exile with obligatory engagement in physical work and served 18 months in Archangelsk region. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet and foreign literary figures, such as Evgeny Evtushenko and Jean Paul Sartre, protested.

In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev came to power. As the Khrushchev Thaw period ended, only four of Brodsky's poems were published in the Soviet Union. He refused to publish his writings censored and most of his work has appeared only in the West or in samizdat.

In the United States

On June 4 1972 Brodsky was exiled from the USSR and became a U.S. citizen in 1980. His first teaching position in the United States was at the University of Michigan (U-M). He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the U-M, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He was a Five-College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College.

He achieved major successes in his career as an English language poet and essayist. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award.

In 1986, his collection of essays Less Than One won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism. In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, being the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. At an interview in Stockholm airport, to a question: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?", he responded: "I am Jewish".^[2]

In 1991, Brodsky became Poet Laureate of the United States. His inauguration address was printed in Poetry Review.

Grave of Brodsky in San Michele

Brodsky died of a heart attack in his New York City apartment on January 28, 1996 and was buried at Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy.

Poets who influenced Brodsky included Osip Mandelstam, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Stephen Spender.

Ideas

A recurring theme in Brodsky's writing is the relationship between the poet and society. In particular, Brodsky emphasized the power of literature to positively impact its audience and to develop the language and culture in which it is situated. He suggested that the Western literary tradition was in part responsible for the world having overcome the catastrophes of the twentieth century, such as Nazism, Communism and the World Wars. During his term as the Poet Laureate, Brodsky promoted the idea of bringing the Anglo-American poetic heritage to a wider American audience by distributing free poetry anthologies to the public through a government-sponsored program. This proposal was met with limited enthusiasm in Washington.

Quotes

• Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
• Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Bibliography

File:Bookcover Brodsky Trudy i dni.jpg Works and Days in Russian

File:Bookcover Brodsky Collected Poems in English.jpg Collected Poems in English

Poetry (English)

• A Part of Speech (1977)
• To Urania (1984)
• So Forth (1996)
• Collected Poems in English (2000)
• Nativity Poems (2001)

Essays (English)

• Less Than One (1986)
• Watermark (1992)
• On Grief and Reason (1996)

Plays (English)

• Marbles (1986)

References

In Russian

• Труды и Дни (Works and Days, 1998) Edited by Pyotr Veil and Lev Losev (Online)
• Строфы века. Антология русской поэзии (Verses of the Century, 1995) Edited by Evgeny Evtushenko

Footnotes

• ^ Remembering Joseph Brodsky by Cissie Dore Hill at Hoover Institution Archives
• ^ Works and Days. A Jew or a Hellene? chapter by Simon Markish

Joseph Brodsky

External links

• Literary Encyclopedia
• biographical information about Brodsky
• Short Biography
• Some prose and essays by Brodsky in Russian
• 21 English poems by Brodsky
• Review of Brodsky 's Törnfallet
• Last published interview
• Joseph Brodsky – Biography at Nobelprize.org
• Photogallery