Biography Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was born in Leningrad in 1940. Lacking direction in the rigid school system, he quit school around age fifteen, he then took menial jobs in Leningrad, traveled around Russia with geological expeditions. Within those early years he taught himself English and Polish, translating into Russian the works of John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, and Czeslaw Milosz, a modern Polish poet. He also started writing poems and appeared at public readings around Leningrad. As Brodsky’s close friend and a perceptive scholar Leo Loseff suggested in retrospect, Brodsky’s early experiences became the primary source of his recurring themes of loneliness and alienation as well as exile and loss — literal and metaphorical (Loseff 2010: 46). In 1961, Brodsky was introduced to Anna Akhmatova who became his mentor for a few years before she died in 1966.

In 1964, Soviet authorities persecuted Joseph Brodsky for “malicious parasitism,” brought him to trial and accused for not having a regular job. Here is an excerpt from the notes that journalist Frida Vigdorova secretly took during the trial: “The trial judge asked “Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” — “No one,” Brodsky replied, “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” …The judge called Brodsky “a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers” who failed to fulfill his “constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland.” Under police escort, Brodsky was sent to a psychiatric hospital to determine his sanity. His philosophical poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov reflects his personal asylum experience. Forensic psychiatrists found Brodsky sane, and he went back to court. The trial court found him guilty stating that the series of odd jobs and role as a poet and translator were “not a sufficient contribution to the society.” For his “social parasitism” Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labor. After written protests of prominent literary figures the sentence was commuted and he was exiled to a remote village Norenskaya, in Archangelsk region, three hundred and fifty miles from Leningrad.

Brodsky returned to Leningrad in December 1965 and continued to write poetry. Many of his works were translated into German, French, and English and published abroad or circulated in the USSR in secret samizdat until 1987. In 1967, four poems by Brodsky were published in Leningrad anthologies. His first collection Verses and Poems was published by Inter-Language Literary Associates in Washington in 1965, Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems was published in London in 1967 by Longmans Green, and A Stop in the Desert was issued in 1970 by Chekhov Publishing in New York. Persecuted for his poetry and his Jewish heritage, he was denied permission to travel. In 1972, officials broke into his apartment, took his papers, then the authorities declared him a non-person suggested he emigrate to Israel.

After stopping in Vienna, Brodsky went on to the United States, where he settled in Ann Arbor. With the help of poet Auden and Proffer he became a poet in residence at the University of Michigan for a year. Afterward, he took up a series of academic positions: a Visiting Professor at Queens College (1973–74), Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University. He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature and Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1977 he became an American citizen.

In the US, he continued to write poetry, often writing in Russian and translating his own work into English. In 1980, he started publishing his first self-translations. In 1986, his collection of essays Less Than One won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism and he was given an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford University. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in Russia when he was a young poet with exceptional promise, and his later phase in America. In his later career, he has been admired for his ability to use complex rhythm and meter and extensive wordplay to address such timeless concerns as man and nature, love and death, the anguish, the fragility of human achievements and attachments, the preciousness of the privileged moment. Brodsky was generally praised for writing in both English and Russian, for his vast knowledge of Western poetic traditions, and his mastery of numerous verse forms, which he drew from classical themes.

As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, American poet Robert Frost and German writer Rainer Maria Rilke. As a mature poet he admired poetry of of American poet of British origin W. H. Auden who became Brodsky’s friend and mentor.

In 1987, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1991, he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He died of a heart attack in 1996 in New York.

Sources

Lev Loseff. Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life; Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (co-edited with Valentina Polukhina). Translated by Jane Ann Miller. Yale University Press, 2010.

Bethea, David. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, Princeton University Press, 1994.

Berlina, Alexandra. Brodsky Translating Brodsky. Bloomsbury, 2014.