Joseph Brodsky

Iosif Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 into a Jewish family and survived the wartime siege as a small child. He left school at fifteen and worked at a series of jobs — in a factory, a morgue, on geological expeditions — while teaching himself Polish and English in order to read poets in the original and to translate them. By his early twenties he was known in Leningrad’s unofficial literary world, and Anna Akhmatova became his mentor and champion.

In 1964 he was tried for ‘social parasitism’, on the grounds that writing poetry was not real work; a transcript of the trial circulated widely in samizdat and abroad. Sentenced to five years’ hard labour, he spent eighteen months in the northern village of Norenskaya before protests secured his release. In 1972 the authorities forced him to emigrate. With the help of W. H. Auden he settled in the United States, teaching at the University of Michigan and later at Mount Holyoke College. His poetry, formally strict and metaphysically searching, draws on the classical and English Metaphysical traditions to meditate on time, empire, exile and the endurance of language. Increasingly he wrote prose in English, and essays such as those in Less Than One (1986) won him a second readership.

A United States citizen since 1977, Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in 1987 and in 1991 was named Poet Laureate of the United States, using the post to argue for putting poetry into ordinary American lives. Never permitted to see his parents again, he did not return to Russia after the Soviet collapse. He died of a heart attack at his home in Brooklyn in 1996 and is buried in Venice, a city he wrote about in Watermark.