A child of the siege
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940, into a Russian Jewish family. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a photographer who served in the Soviet Navy; his mother, Maria Volpert, worked as an interpreter and often kept the family afloat. The family traced its descent to a long line of rabbis. Little more than a year after his birth, German armies encircled the city, and during the Siege of Leningrad the infant Brodsky and his parents nearly starved to death; an aunt died of hunger. He suffered health problems linked to the siege for the rest of his life.
After the war the Brodskys lived, like most Leningrad families, in a communal apartment, in their case a “room and a half” as he later called it in a celebrated essay. They were poor and, as Jews, pushed to the margins of Soviet society. Brodsky remembered antisemitic teachers and said he felt like a dissident from childhood; he wrote that he began to despise Lenin in the first grade, not for his politics but for his omnipresent images.
The self-taught poet
An unruly pupil, Brodsky left school at fifteen. He tried and failed to enter a school for submariners, then worked as a milling-machine operator, in the morgue of Leningrad’s Kresty prison, in hospitals, in a ship’s boiler room and on geological expeditions across the Soviet north. All the while he educated himself, reading voraciously and teaching himself Polish and English so he could translate poets such as Czesław Miłosz and John Donne.
He began writing poetry in the late 1950s, circulating it in typescript; some appeared in the underground journal Sintaksis. By 1958 poems such as “The Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad” and “Pilgrims” had made him known in the city’s literary circles. In 1960 he met Anna Akhmatova, the great poet of Russia’s Silver Age, who became his mentor and saw in him the heir to the tradition she and Osip Mandelstam had embodied. In 1962 he met the painter Marina Basmanova, the “M.B.” to whom he dedicated love poems for more than two decades.
On trial for being a poet
In 1963 a Leningrad newspaper denounced his poems as “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” His papers were seized, he was interrogated, twice confined to psychiatric hospitals and then arrested. In 1964 he was tried for “social parasitism” on the grounds that writing poetry and taking odd jobs was not real work. The judge demanded to know who had recognised him as a poet and enrolled him in the ranks of poets. “No one” Brodsky answered. “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” Asked where he had learned his craft, he told the court that he thought it came from God.
He was sentenced to five years of hard labour in internal exile and sent to the village of Norenskaya in the Arkhangelsk region of the far north. There he chopped wood, hauled manure and read W. H. Auden and Robert Frost by night; he later counted the eighteen months he spent there among the best of his life. A secret transcript of the trial, taken down by the journalist Frida Vigdorova, was smuggled to the West and made him a cause célèbre. After protests by Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Jean-Paul Sartre and others, his sentence was commuted in 1965. “What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend!” Akhmatova laughed.
Expelled
Back in Leningrad, Brodsky wrote prolifically, but only four of his poems were published in the Soviet Union; his books appeared abroad. In 1967 Marina Basmanova bore him a son, Andrei, who was registered under her surname to shield him from his father’s troubles. Persecuted for his poetry and his Jewish background, he was refused permission to travel. While the authorities considered expelling him, they consulted the psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, notorious for diagnosing dissidents as mentally ill, who without examining him pronounced him “not a valuable person at all” who “may be let go.” In 1971 Brodsky was twice invited to emigrate to Israel and declined. In 1972, after being summoned and told he should go, he was stripped of his papers and on June 4 put on a plane to Vienna. He never returned to Russia and never saw Basmanova again.
In Vienna he was met by Carl Proffer, the American scholar who ran the Russian-language publishing house Ardis, and by W. H. Auden, who helped him on his way to the United States. Brodsky later said that he had not wanted to go to Israel and had no idea, when the plane took off, where he would end up. His parents applied repeatedly for permission to visit him and were refused; both died in the early 1980s without seeing their son again.
An American life
Brodsky became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and went on to teach at Queens College, Smith, Columbia and Cambridge, and for many years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He became a U.S. citizen in 1977, the Soviet Union having left him stateless. In 1979 he underwent open-heart surgery, the first of several heart operations. In 1980 he settled in Greenwich Village, and the following year he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.
He wrote poetry in Russian and, increasingly, prose and some poems in English, working with translators including Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and his friend Derek Walcott, and translating himself. His collections A Part of Speech (1980) and To Urania (1988) brought his work to English-speaking readers, while his essay collection Less Than One won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. Watermark (1992), a meditation on Venice, recorded his love affair with the city he returned to some twenty times.
Nobel laureate and Poet Laureate
In 1987, at forty-seven, Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” Asked whether he was an American or a Russian, he replied: “I’m Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen.” The prize coincided with the first legal publication of his poems in the Soviet Union since his exile, as the Gorbachev thaw began.
In 1991 he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Puzzled that poetry drew such small audiences in America compared with Russia, he proposed that inexpensive anthologies of the best American poets be placed in hotels, airports, hospitals and supermarkets. In 1993 he co-founded the American Poetry & Literacy Project, which went on to give away many thousands of free poetry books.
Faith, Jewishness and exile
Brodsky’s Jewish origins shaped his life in the Soviet Union, where his heritage, as much as his poetry, marked him out for suspicion and persecution. His spiritual identity was more complicated. Soon after his exile he said that he was related to the Old Testament “perhaps by ancestry, and certainly the spirit of justice” but considered himself a Christian, “not a good one but I try to be.” Over many years he wrote Christmas poems, later gathered as Nativity Poems, and critics have counted him among the major Christian poets of the century, while friends such as the poet Viktor Krivulin insisted that he always experienced his Jewishness as something religious.
Exile itself became one of his great subjects. He wrote of memory, distance, time and loss, of the home he could not return to and the language he carried with him. Although invited back after the fall of the Soviet Union, he never went. Not all of his work has aged easily: an unpublished poem he recited in the early 1990s, “On the Independence of Ukraine” has been criticised for its contemptuous tone and was seized on by Russian state media after 2014.
Late happiness and early death
In 1990 Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, a young woman of Russian and Italian descent whom he had met while teaching in France; their daughter Anna was born in 1993. After the collapse of the Soviet Union his son Andrei was able to visit him in New York, and the two built a relationship in the poet’s last years.
His heart, weakened by years of illness, finally failed. Joseph Brodsky died of a heart attack at his home in Brooklyn Heights on January 28, 1996, at the age of fifty-five. He was buried in Venice, on the cemetery island of San Michele, near Igor Stravinsky and Ezra Pound.
Legacy
Brodsky is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Russian language in the twentieth century and has become, in the words of one Moscow scholar, a “canonized classic” in his own homeland, the subject of more memoirs and conferences than any other modern Russian writer. In 1997 a plaque was placed on his former home in St Petersburg, the city that had tried him as a parasite.
For readers in the West he was also a superb essayist in his adopted English and a fierce champion of poetry as the highest form of human speech, which he called humanity’s “anthropological, genetic goal.” The poor Jewish boy from a Leningrad communal flat, put on trial for being a poet, ended his life as a Nobel laureate and the official poet of his new country.
Sources & further reading
Joseph Brodsky, Wikipedia · Joseph Brodsky, Jewish Virtual Library · Joseph Brodsky, Poets.org (Academy of American Poets) · The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987, NobelPrize.org · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.