- Person
- Joseph Brodsky
- Lived
- 1940–1996
- Field
- Poetry and essays
- From
- Russian-American
The story
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 into a Jewish family that lived in poverty in communal apartments. He left school at fifteen, worked in factories, hospitals and on geological expeditions, and by the late 1950s was known in the city's literary circles for poems that circulated privately. In 1960 he met Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the Silver Age, who encouraged his writing and became his mentor. His poems were not political, but his independent way of life drew the attention of the authorities.
In 1963 a Leningrad newspaper attacked his poetry as 'pornographic and anti-Soviet'. His papers were confiscated, he was interrogated, twice placed in a psychiatric hospital and then arrested. In 1964 he was put on trial for 'social parasitism'. The court found that his odd jobs and his work as a poet were not a sufficient contribution to society, and officials mocked him as a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers.
Brodsky answered with calm conviction. When the judge demanded to know who had recognised him as a poet and enrolled him in the ranks of poets, he replied that no one had, and asked in turn who had enrolled him in the ranks of the human race. Asked whether he had studied poetry, he said he did not think poetry came from education. Pressed on where it did come from, he answered that he thought it came from God.
He was sentenced to five years of hard labour and served 18 months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region, about 350 miles from Leningrad. He rented a small cottage without plumbing, chopped wood and hauled manure, and at night read anthologies of English and American poetry, especially W. H. Auden and Robert Frost. His friend and biographer Lev Loseff later judged those months in the north among the best of Brodsky's life.
A secret transcript of the trial was smuggled to the West, and Brodsky became a cause célèbre and a symbol of artistic resistance in a totalitarian society. While he was in exile his poems were published in the United States, and writers abroad campaigned for his release. Protests by Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean-Paul Sartre and others led to his sentence being commuted in 1965.
The courtroom exchange is still quoted as a plain statement that the right to create does not depend on official permission, and the young poet who made it went on to win the Nobel Prize.
Why it matters
Brodsky's calm defence of poetry exposed Soviet persecution of writers and inspired supporters of free expression around the world.
About Joseph Brodsky
Leningrad-born poet tried as a “social parasite” and exiled by the Soviet Union, who became a Nobel laureate in 1987 and Poet Laureate of the United States.
More about Joseph Brodsky
- Joseph Brodsky taught poetry for 15 years at Mount HolyokeJoseph Brodsky, who never finished school, became a professor of literature and taught at Mount Holyoke College for fifteen years.
- Joseph Brodsky wanted poetry in every American hotelAs US Poet Laureate from 1991, Joseph Brodsky urged that cheap poetry anthologies be placed in hotels, airports, hospitals and supermarkets.
- Joseph Brodsky co-founded a poetry literacy projectIn 1993 Joseph Brodsky and Andrew Carroll founded the American Poetry & Literacy Project to make poetry a central part of American life.
Sources
- Joseph Brodsky Wikipedia
- Joseph Brodsky Jewish Virtual Library
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.